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Lost: Malaysia Airlines—Flight MH-370

Zoffre said:
That satellite picture of the debris is dated 16th March, but they're only now going out looking for it. Strange. They seemed to be quicker off the mark with the other potential debris spotted just after the plane went missing. I suppose it's the distances involved, as this current search area is further away from land, but you'd think one of the many ships traversing the area would have reported it, especially as it seems to be near a shipping lane (they asked that passing Norwegian ship to take a look) so why the delay...:?:
Click to expand...
The area is well off the beaten track for merchant shipping. The only ships in that region would be going to Australia (possibly NZ) from Europe or maybe southern Africa.

But there are no trading countries south of Oz - it's empty ocean all the way to Antarctica. I'm surprised they found something as mundane as a car transporter there! You're probably more likely to find round-the-world racing yachts, taking advantage of the Roaring Forties.

Shipping lanes, no! Certainly not in the way northern Europe or other places has them, with streams of ships barely miles apart. The Southern Ocean is a wild and lonely place.
 
rynner2 said:
Shipping lanes, no! Certainly not in the way northern Europe or other places has them, with streams of ships barely miles apart. The Southern Ocean is a wild and lonely place.
Click to expand...
Ah, right, I stand corrected. Like most land-lubbers I assumed that all the oceans were constantly teeming with traffic :D
 
seems to push further towards something going wrong on board and the plane just cruising until it ran out of fuel
Click to expand...

But this doesn't explain the changes to the flight plan, the climb to 45,000 feet and down again or the lack of any distress call.

Baffling.
 
Analysis
Phil Mercer, BBC News, Perth

For another day the search for flight MH370 is again focused on some of the most remote waters on Earth. The aerial operation is run from the Pearce airbase north of Perth, where three Australian P-3 Orion reconnaissance planes are scouring distant parts of the southern Indian Ocean.

Their sorties are staggered to make the best use of daylight hours, and they are joined by a civilian Bombardier Global Express and a sophisticated American surveillance aircraft.

The challenge they face is immense. The weather so far out into the ocean can be harsh and unpredictable, while churning seas make it hard to see any floating objects.

Yet there is a determination here to get the job done no matter how long it takes, although so far there has been no sign of the debris that could yield vital clues in the hunt for the missing Malaysia airlines jet.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26677056

I fear this story is losing traction. There seems to be less 'new' news, just a rehash of what we've heard before, plus discussion of various theories, sane and insane.

Even if the debris seen by satellite came from the plane, it really is a needle in a haystack job to locate it again in such a huge, wild ocean. Somebody, sometime, will have to call off what must be a very expensive search.

Then what? I mentioned before the lack of any input from the psychic community - perhaps we should cross a few palms with silver and see what comes up!
 
There have been comparable vanishings in the past - the Waratah, for instance. OK, no radar back then, but it was on a well used shipping lane and was sighted shortly before it vanished without trace, as the cliche goes.

The Bojo's of the world like to pretend its all become visible and networked like central London or downtown New York - actually the world is large and unforgiving and mostly empty and it's really quite remarkable how good we are at finding small things (relatively) that go astray.

Once the flight, for whatever reason, headed out into the Southern Ocean (if it did) it was going into the real, untamed world.

We still have no real facts beyond the pilots last communiction, though.
 
Channel 5, 2100 -2200:

The Disappearance of Flight 370
 
Flight MH370: The allure of the conspiracy theory
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... yyan_l_vhs
10:28 20 March 2014 by Rob Brotherton

We are prone to see intent rather than accident in the unexplained. Cue conspiracy theories when a plane goes missing, says a psychology researcher

When a lack of conclusive information leaves a factual vacuum after a headline-grabbing event, conspiracy theorists rush to fill it. In the case of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, their take ranges from relatively plausible (perhaps the plane was hijacked, or destroyed by a bomb) to nonsensical (it was abducted by aliens or made invisible using advanced technology).

While we wait for answers, I, along with colleagues Chris French and Christopher Thresher-Andrews at Goldsmiths, University of London, wanted to see how many people were jumping to the conclusion that foul play was involved.

We asked over 400 people to rank six possible scenarios for the jet's disappearance – three accidental, three conspiratorial – from most to least plausible. The most popular scenario involved no conspiracy: half of those surveyed rated an accidental crash as most likely. However, just under one-fifth believed a hijacking to be the most plausible scenario, the second most popular choice.

A non-conspiratorial crash due to pilot error came third, preferred by 14 per cent. A more outlandish idea – that the disappearance was secretly orchestrated by the Chinese, Malaysian or US government – was rated most likely by a little under 7 per cent. Finally, just over 5 per cent ranked a spontaneous explosion as the most credible explanation, and a similar number rated a terrorist bombing as most likely.

Conspiratorial mindset

Most revealingly, our preliminary analysis shows a relationship between endorsement of the conspiratorial explanations and acceptance of conspiracy theories in general. We also asked the group whether they believe, for example, that the government permits or perpetrates acts of terrorism on its own soil; that world events are manipulated by a small, secret cabal; and that evidence of alien contact is being concealed from the public.

Those who agreed that conspiracies like these are commonplace were more likely to see the disappearance of MH370 as a conspiracy too. Those who think conspiracy theories are bogus tended to assume the disappearance was an accident.

Of course this is not to say that the conspiracists are wrong. The point is that nobody has enough information to say with any certainty. We asked people to speculate, and they based their guesses on their world view. This fits with research showing that people who tend to believe conspiracy theories are more likely to buy into a theory that the researchers just made up, and will even entertain logically inconsistent theories.

This is not the first time that a missing aeroplane has given rise to conspiracy theories. In 1937, Amelia Earhart vanished while attempting to fly around the world. No trace of her, navigator Fred Noonan or their aircraft was ever found.

As with flight MH370, there are various potential explanations. It appears most likely that Earhart's plane ran out of fuel and crashed at sea. However, some have suggested that they were shot down on a secret mission to spy on the Japanese in the Pacific, or even that the two faked their disappearance in order to assume new identities. And just as with our study, a survey of 900 Londoners found that people who entertained conspiracy theories in general were more likely to accept such reasons for Earhart's disappearance.

The question remains: why do conspiracy theories around events like this have such intuitive appeal for so many?

Momentous events

Psychologists suggest that part of the reason so many think this way is because we are all biased towards seeing ambiguous events as the product of someone's intentions rather than a mere accident. Moreover, when something has momentous consequences we are again more likely to see it as the result of something equally momentous, like a conspiracy. This is perhaps why the most successful conspiracy theories concern historic, often shocking events – the shooting of JFK, Princess Diana's death, and 9/11.

A 2010 study by Anna Ebel-Lam and colleagues at Queen's University, Ontario, Canada, demonstrated this reasoning in the context of a plane crash. The researchers made up a story in which there was an explosion in the plane's cargo hold. The pilot struggled to maintain control and make an emergency landing, but the plane crashed, killing everyone on board. People who read this story tended to assume that the explosion was the result of a terrorist plot or endemic malpractice.

However, another group heard a different ending to the story. Most details – the explosion, the pilot's struggle to control the damaged plane – remained the same; the only difference was that the pilot successfully landed the aircraft. This group was more likely to blame the explosion on a more mundane cause, such as an electrical malfunction.

It's no surprise that conspiracy theories about MH370 have spread so quickly. Conspiracy theorising appears to be an unavoidable feature of how our minds sometimes work.

Rob Brotherton is a lecturer in psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and writes about the psychology of conspiracy theories at ConspiracyPsychology.com
Click to expand...
 
rynner2 said:
Channel 5, 2100 -2200:

The Disappearance of Flight 370
Click to expand...
This is worth viewing - if anyone knows how to replay Channel 5 stuff.

It's not just a rehash of the news reports you've seen already - there's new stuff here, and new 'talking heads' with ideas you may not have heard before.

Worth a look.
 
rynner2 said:
rynner2 said:
Channel 5, 2100 -2200:

The Disappearance of Flight 370
Click to expand...
This is worth viewing - if anyone knows how to replay Channel 5 stuff.

It's not just a rehash of the news reports you've seen already - there's new stuff here, and new 'talking heads' with ideas you may not have heard before.

Worth a look.
Click to expand...

It was a sober and informative piece of television journalism. I was unusually impressed. I had expected the worst.
 
I didn't watch because I feared just that.

Note to self - stop being so pessimistic.

Anyone care to share any particular ideas from the program?
 
According to
http://www.channel5.com/shows/the-disap ... flight-370

"Sorry, this episode is not currently available to watch on Demand 5."

A pity.

On a lighter note, World Wide Words has this:

Speculation around the missing Malaysian aircraft became bizarre, Phil Fisher read in the Huffington Post of 18 March: “US aviation experts have said it is wildly unlikely a passenger could have reprogrammed the computer, despite speculation that the plane could have been ‘hacked’ by a British former Home Office official.” :D


Back in the real world, ships and planes are searching the Southern Ocean again, with no results so far...

But...

MH370 Malaysia plane: Australia vows indefinite search

Australia has vowed the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane will go on indefinitely, despite no sightings yet of wreckage in the Indian Ocean.
Deputy PM Warren Truss said the operation would go on until "further searching would be futile - and that day is not in sight".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26691013
 
MH370 Malaysia plane: How maths helped find an earlier crash

Statisticians helped locate an Air France plane in 2011 which was missing for two years. Could mathematical techniques inspired by an 18th Century Presbyterian minister be used to locate the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370?

In June 2009, Air France flight 447 went missing flying from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to Paris, France.
Debris from the Airbus A330 was found floating on the surface of the Atlantic five days later, but the mystery of why the plane crashed could only be answered by finding the black box and the cockpit voice recorder.

You may think that having found the debris it would be easy to find the rest of the plane, but it's not that simple - after a number of days, the material would have moved with the ocean current.
Software does exist that can simulate how the debris has travelled from the initial impact. It is used regularly by the US coast guard.
But in this case, because this area near the equator is known for unpredictable currents - particularly at that time of year - it was no help.
American, Brazilian and French ships, planes and submarines all searched for the plane, but they couldn't find it.

At this point France's aviation accident investigation authority, BEA, made a call to a group of statisticians in the US who had expertise in finding objects lost at sea.
Senior analyst Colleen Keller flew to France to help.
"The French BEA had already done a wonderful job of coming up with different theories for why the aircraft might have crashed," she says.
They also had lots of data about historical crashes and the results of the searches that had already been carried out.

To turn all this information into numbers and probability, Keller and her team from Metron Inc in Virginia, relied on Bayesian statistics named after a British Presbyterian minister called Thomas Bayes.
This type of thinking allows you to assess various scenarios at once - even contradictory ones. The probability of each being true is brought together to give you the most likely solution. And if you find new information, you can revise your model easily.

Keller and her colleagues went through all the available information and assessed the uncertainties of each piece of data - applying Bayesian principles of probability to work out the most likely location of the plane.
The team split up the search area into a grid, and applied to each cell a figure representing the probability that the plane would be found there.

To calculate these figures, they first looked at the theories about what caused the plane to crash. For instance, they assessed the likeliness of various mechanical failures, and came up with a probability for each scenario.
They then assessed historical data from previous crashes, noting, for example, that planes were usually found very close to where they were last known to have been.
Finally, Keller and her team lowered the probability of the plane being found in locations that had already been searched.

"There are two components to Bayesian maths which make it unique. It allows you to consider all the data you have including the uncertainties which is very important because nothing is certain," says Keller.
"And to combine it all - it even allows you to combine views that contradict each other.
"For instance with the Malaysian search, you have that arc to the north and the arc to the south. It's either one or the other but it can't have gone both ways, but [Bayes] allows you to preserve all your theories and weight them."

The second benefit is that the Bayesian approach is very flexible, Keller says. It allows you to update your body of knowledge at any time. If something new comes up, you factor it in and update the probability map.
In the case of the Air France plane, they could be sure that the plane had come down within a 40-mile radius of the last location pinged out by its on-board computer system.

Yet this area was so huge that the investigators were struggling to know where to look.
The probability map Keller provided gave, by contrast, a much tighter area to search.
A team went out there, hoping that finally the mystery would be solved. But those hopes were dashed. There was no sign of the plane.
It seemed the statisticians could not help after all.

Some months later, though, Air France got back in touch and asked Keller to make one last attempt to analyse the data.

This time, she and her colleagues decided they were not happy with one of their initial assumptions.
The historical data showed that after a crash, the black box will be emitting a signal in 90% of cases.
In the immediate aftermath of the crash, search teams had spent a lot of time sweeping the areas close to the last known location, listening for the ping of the black box or voice recorder.

They had heard nothing. So Keller and her team had decided there was a very low probability the plane would be found there.
But what if neither the black box nor the voice recorder were sending a signal?

The Metron statisticians now adapted their model to this possible scenario and came up with a new area of highest probability.
A team returned to the scene to look - and this time they found the plane.
The mystery of the crash was solved. The black box and voice recorder data appear to show that the pilots were given faulty speed readings, responded inappropriately, and lost control of the plane.

"It still was a minor miracle that we found it," says Keller.
"It was lucky that the wreckage was on the bottom of the ocean floor, on a very sandy area. There were some areas down there that looked like the Himalayas - in terms of mountains, crags, and valleys."
If the plane had been in one of those areas, she says, "it could have been undetected forever".

Keller says she is not sure Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 will be found.
"It's a big world out there. And I know people are saying - how could you possibly hide or not find a Boeing 777?
"[But] it's very likely if we don't get any breakthroughs, it's at the bottom of the Indian Ocean and we will never find it, sadly."

Even finding debris might not mean finding the bulk of the plane.
"If we found wreckage at this point, it would tell us it was in one body of water rather than the other," Keller says. "But it's so long since the plane would have crashed that I don't think the wreckage is going to be very helpful."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26680633

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference
 
Breaking News:

China checking new 'debris' images

China is investigating new images of debris in the southern Indian Ocean, potentially from missing flight MH370, Malaysian officials say.

More to follow.
 
Malaysia plane search: China checks new 'debris' images

China is investigating new satellite images of debris in the southern Indian Ocean, potentially from missing flight MH370, Malaysian officials say.
Malaysia's acting transport minister read out the news as he was handed it during at his daily briefing, saying one element of debris was 22.5m by 13m.
He said the Chinese government would give more details on Saturday.

...

Malaysia's Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein broke off the question and answer segment of his briefing in Kuala Lumpur to say: "The news that I just received is that the Chinese ambassador received satellite image of floating objects in the southern corridor and they will be sending ships to verify."
He added: "Beijing is expected to make an announcement in a few hours."

...

The search in the Indian Ocean is being led by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (Amsa).
It despatched six planes to the area on Saturday, to search an area roughly the size of Denmark. Additional vessels supplied by China, Japan and the United Kingdom are due to join them in the search.
The first plane returned with no success in finding debris.

Before being handed the note at his briefing, Mr Hussein said that all means were being pursued to narrow the search corridor and that planes intended to search 10,500 sq nautical miles on Saturday.

But he said the conditions were "very challenging", with strong currents and rough seas, and a tropical cyclone warning that could affect ships involved in the search.

Mr Hussein also said investigations of the plane's cargo manifest did "not show any link to anything that may have contribut[ed] to the plane's disappearance".

...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26697048

Any plane debris that might be in the Southern Ocean is at least moving closer to Australia. But it may not help find the crash site, even if it's not sunk by a cyclone.
 
That aircraft will never be found.

I say that because I'm always wrong, and I'm lending my personal jinx to the effort-it's all I can do.

This story has pierced me like a thorn, the world seems to have gone crazy of late, and I wonder what's going to be next?

Life used to be so dull....you don't know what you have until its gone, I guess.

Again, all my compassion to those bereft.
 
krakenten said:
This story has pierced me like a thorn, the world seems to have gone crazy of late, and I wonder what's going to be next?
Click to expand...

I suppose I'm an optimist. Probably because I feel negativity engenders hopelessness, which leads to desperation, selfishness and decay. I get much hope from the fact this one disappearance has been a talking point for a couple of weeks, in a world where people are travelling across the face of the globe in greater numbers than ever. It's the time such individual events are too numerous to be conspicuous we should really fear. Hopelessness is strangely attractive and comforting, for some reason I've never been able to fathom. Hope is harder to sustain, but more rewarding, and the only way to maintain the drive towards progress.
 
rynner2 said:
MH370 Malaysia plane: How maths helped find an earlier crash

Statisticians helped locate an Air France plane in 2011 which was missing for two years. Could mathematical techniques inspired by an 18th Century Presbyterian minister be used to locate the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370?

In June 2009, Air France flight 447 went missing flying from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to Paris, France.
Debris from the Airbus A330 was found floating on the surface of the Atlantic five days later, but the mystery of why the plane crashed could only be answered by finding the black box and the cockpit voice recorder.

You may think that having found the debris it would be easy to find the rest of the plane, but it's not that simple - after a number of days, the material would have moved with the ocean current.
Software does exist that can simulate how the debris has travelled from the initial impact. It is used regularly by the US coast guard.
But in this case, because this area near the equator is known for unpredictable currents - particularly at that time of year - it was no help.
American, Brazilian and French ships, planes and submarines all searched for the plane, but they couldn't find it.

At this point France's aviation accident investigation authority, BEA, made a call to a group of statisticians in the US who had expertise in finding objects lost at sea.
Senior analyst Colleen Keller flew to France to help.
"The French BEA had already done a wonderful job of coming up with different theories for why the aircraft might have crashed," she says.
They also had lots of data about historical crashes and the results of the searches that had already been carried out.

To turn all this information into numbers and probability, Keller and her team from Metron Inc in Virginia, relied on Bayesian statistics named after a British Presbyterian minister called Thomas Bayes.
This type of thinking allows you to assess various scenarios at once - even contradictory ones. The probability of each being true is brought together to give you the most likely solution. And if you find new information, you can revise your model easily.

Keller and her colleagues went through all the available information and assessed the uncertainties of each piece of data - applying Bayesian principles of probability to work out the most likely location of the plane.
The team split up the search area into a grid, and applied to each cell a figure representing the probability that the plane would be found there.

To calculate these figures, they first looked at the theories about what caused the plane to crash. For instance, they assessed the likeliness of various mechanical failures, and came up with a probability for each scenario.
They then assessed historical data from previous crashes, noting, for example, that planes were usually found very close to where they were last known to have been.
Finally, Keller and her team lowered the probability of the plane being found in locations that had already been searched.

"There are two components to Bayesian maths which make it unique. It allows you to consider all the data you have including the uncertainties which is very important because nothing is certain," says Keller.
"And to combine it all - it even allows you to combine views that contradict each other.
"For instance with the Malaysian search, you have that arc to the north and the arc to the south. It's either one or the other but it can't have gone both ways, but [Bayes] allows you to preserve all your theories and weight them."

The second benefit is that the Bayesian approach is very flexible, Keller says. It allows you to update your body of knowledge at any time. If something new comes up, you factor it in and update the probability map.
In the case of the Air France plane, they could be sure that the plane had come down within a 40-mile radius of the last location pinged out by its on-board computer system.

Yet this area was so huge that the investigators were struggling to know where to look.
The probability map Keller provided gave, by contrast, a much tighter area to search.
A team went out there, hoping that finally the mystery would be solved. But those hopes were dashed. There was no sign of the plane.
It seemed the statisticians could not help after all.

Some months later, though, Air France got back in touch and asked Keller to make one last attempt to analyse the data.

This time, she and her colleagues decided they were not happy with one of their initial assumptions.
The historical data showed that after a crash, the black box will be emitting a signal in 90% of cases.
In the immediate aftermath of the crash, search teams had spent a lot of time sweeping the areas close to the last known location, listening for the ping of the black box or voice recorder.

They had heard nothing. So Keller and her team had decided there was a very low probability the plane would be found there.
But what if neither the black box nor the voice recorder were sending a signal?

The Metron statisticians now adapted their model to this possible scenario and came up with a new area of highest probability.
A team returned to the scene to look - and this time they found the plane.
The mystery of the crash was solved. The black box and voice recorder data appear to show that the pilots were given faulty speed readings, responded inappropriately, and lost control of the plane.

"It still was a minor miracle that we found it," says Keller.
"It was lucky that the wreckage was on the bottom of the ocean floor, on a very sandy area. There were some areas down there that looked like the Himalayas - in terms of mountains, crags, and valleys."
If the plane had been in one of those areas, she says, "it could have been undetected forever".

Keller says she is not sure Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 will be found.
"It's a big world out there. And I know people are saying - how could you possibly hide or not find a Boeing 777?
"[But] it's very likely if we don't get any breakthroughs, it's at the bottom of the Indian Ocean and we will never find it, sadly."

Even finding debris might not mean finding the bulk of the plane.
"If we found wreckage at this point, it would tell us it was in one body of water rather than the other," Keller says. "But it's so long since the plane would have crashed that I don't think the wreckage is going to be very helpful."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26680633

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference
Click to expand...

Interestingly my colleague (Andrew May of http://forteana-blog.blogspot.co.uk) argued that this approach could be used to find bigfoot (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com.../inaugural-issue-of-journal-of-cryptozoology/), so it is not a new idea!
 
Malaysia flight MH370: Indian Ocean search resumes

More planes have joined an increasingly international search of the south Indian Ocean for missing flight MH370.
Eight planes were sent out on Sunday over a wider search area after China released new images of possible debris.
Australia is leading the search and said it was investigating sightings of a wooden pallet and other items.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared on 8 March en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, with 239 people on board.
Malaysian officials believe the plane was deliberately taken off course.

Based on information received from a satellite, the search has been in two distinct corridors - one stretching to the north-west of the last known location in the Malacca Straits and one to the south-west.

However, none of the countries on the northern corridor have reported any radar contact, and two sets of satellite images of possible debris in the south Indian Ocean have concentrated the search there.
The search is being co-ordinated by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (Amsa) from Perth in western Australia.
Eight search planes were involved in the search on Sunday, including four civil aircraft and a US P8 Poseidon.

Two Chinese IL-76 search planes have arrived in Perth but have not yet been deployed. Japan is sending two P3 Orions.
The Australian navy's HMAS Success is the only ship in the area, though others, including from the US, UK and China are on the way.

A key focus on Sunday was the sighting on Saturday of a wooden cargo pallet, along with belts or straps.
Mike Barton, operations coordinator at Amsa, said: "Part of the description was a wooden pallet and a number of other items which were nondescript around it and some belts of some different colours around it as well, strapping belts of different lengths."
He added: "We tried to re-find that yesterday, one of the New Zealand aircraft, and unfortunately they didn't find it. That's the nature of it - you only have to be off by a few hundred metres in a fast-travelling aircraft."
Pallets are used for shipping as well as plane cargo and Mr Barton cautioned the sighting "could be anything".

Amsa released a statement on Sunday's search, detailing the aircraft involved and saying the area would cover about 59,000 sq km (22,800 square miles).
Mr Barton said the sun and haze at a low altitude made the task for searchers tough.
The weather on Sunday was initially cloudy but it was hoped it might clear later.

Earlier, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the sightings of objects were encouraging signs.
"Obviously we have now had a number of very credible leads and there is increasing hope - no more than hope, no more than hope - that we might be on the road to discovering what did happen to this ill-fated aircraft," he said.

China on Saturday released a satellite image showing an object floating in the southern Indian Ocean near to the area already being searched, some 2,500 km (1,550 miles) south-west of Perth.
The grainy image was released by China's State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense.
The Xinhua state news agency said the latest satellite image was taken at about 04:00 GMT on 18 March and showed objects about 120km "south by west" from the site of possible debris shown in another satellite image from 16 March.

Malaysian Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein put a message on his Twitter account on Sunday urging a "prayer please" for the passengers and crew on flight MH370.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26704075

It's all very Fortean - seeing things in satellite pictures of clouds that might be debris, seeing things in the water that can't be relocated...
 
09.39 Breaking news:

MALAYSIA TRANSPORT MINISTER SAYS RECIEVED NEW SATELLITE IMAGES FROM FRENCH AUTHORITIES SHOWING POTENTIAL DEBRIS IN SOUTHERN CORRIDOR

09.40 A statement has just been released detailing the French sightings.

Australia, China and France have now released satellite images that show potential objects, which may be related to MH370, in the vicinity of the southern corridor. All this information has been forwarded to Australia, as the lead country in the area of concern.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... -live.html
 
New data 'shows possible debris'

On Sunday, a statement published on the Malaysian ministry of transport's Facebook page said: "This morning, Malaysia received new satellite images from the French authorities showing potential objects in the vicinity of the southern corridor.
"Malaysia immediately relayed these images to the Australian rescue co-ordination centre."

An unnamed Malaysian official told the Associated Press that the new satellite image was taken on Friday, and that one of the potential objects was estimated to be about the same size as one spotted by a Chinese satellite that appeared to be 22m (72ft) by 13m (43ft).

The possible debris was located about 930km (575 miles) north of [] the objects reported by China and Australia over the past week, the official added.

A French foreign ministry statement said the objects were about 2,300km from Perth, but did not give a direction or say when the discovery was made.
It also clarified that the French authorities had passed on data in the form of "satellite-generated radar echoes" rather than images. Radar works by sending out radio waves or microwaves and listening for echoes that bounce back.
"France has decided to mobilise complementary satellite means to continue the search in the identified zone," the ministry statement added.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26705073
 
Just heard on the news: nothing significant has been found, according to the Australians.
 
Another day searching...

Malaysia flight MH370: China spots 'suspicious' objects

A Chinese plane hunting for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane has spotted "suspicious" objects, state media say, as more nations joined the search.
Searchers saw two "relatively big" objects with "many white smaller ones scattered within a radius of several kilometres", Xinhua news agency said.
Australia said it had been informed and would try to locate the objects.

Flight MH370 disappeared on 8 March while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, with 239 people on board.

Ten planes were due to scour the southern Indian Ocean area on Monday for possible debris picked up earlier by radar echoes and satellite imagery.
Two Chinese military planes flew out to the search area, around 2,500 km (1,550 miles) south-west of Australian city Perth, on Monday morning, while two Japanese P-3 Orion aircraft were to set off later in the day.
They joined six other planes, including US and Australian military planes, in searching a 68,500 sq km (26,000 sq miles) area in the ocean.

An Australian navy ship is already in the area, while several Chinese ships are also on their way.

The latest objects were spotted by the crew of a Chinese IL-76 plane. The crew had informed the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (Amsa) of the co-ordinates, Xinhua said, as well as China's ice-breaker Xue Long, which was heading to the area.
In a statement, Amsa said it "was advised about the reported objects sighted by a Chinese aircraft.
"The reported objects are within today's search area and attempts will be made to relocate them."

Earlier on Monday, Amsa - which is co-ordinating search efforts - warned that conditions in the search area were expected to deteriorate.
Warren Truss, Australia's acting prime minister while Tony Abbott is abroad, said that a tropical cyclone north of the search area could "stir up less favourable weather" for the search.

...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26678492
 
The questions still remain, was it intentionally flown into the middle of the ocean or was it cruising on autopilot? Hopefully they can find the black box and maybe some answers.
 
UK firm behind Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 breakthrough

The revelation that flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean is based on new analysis by UK investigators and the British satellite firm Inmarsat, Malaysia's prime minister has said.
Najib Razak said relatives of the flight's 239 passengers and crew had been told of the "heartbreaking" news.
Inmarsat used new techniques to find the plane's last position, he said.
The UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch, which probes serious civil aircraft incidents, was also involved.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 went missing after taking off from Kuala Lumpur on 8 March.

The announcement came as the international search effort reached a fifth day of operations in the southern Indian Ocean.

Inmarsat has told the BBC it gave the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) the new data on Sunday - adding it needed to be checked before it was made public.
The firm said its latest calculation involved a large amount of data analysis, focusing on a number of factors including the movements of other aircraft.
It involved an entirely new way of modelling which is why the analysis took some time, the firm added.

A spokeswoman for the AAIB said: "As set out by the Malaysian prime minister, we have been working with the UK company Inmarsat, using satellite data to determine the area on which to focus the search.
"We are not able to comment further on this investigation, which is being led by the Malaysian authorities."

Oceanographer Dr Simon Boxall, from the University of Southampton, told the BBC that Inmarsat had been tracking data, rather than locations.
"The algorithms and the techniques they've applied to try and locate to within a certain area where the last transmission was made is really quite phenomenal - but also quite tragic because it does show this plane was heading to an open area of ocean."

Dr Boxall continued: "They [Inmarsat] started from scratch. They've probably crammed almost a year's worth of research into maybe a couple of weeks so it's not a routine calculation they would ever, ever make.
"So they've been looking at all the signals they have, all the recordings they have, and processing that many times over to try and pinpoint where the plane's signal came from. Technologically it's really quite astounding."
He added that Inmarsat must have run through its calculation a number of times and "wouldn't have released this sort of information without being 100% certain".

Mr Razak told a news conference in Kuala Lumpur that works by the AAIB and Inmarsat had revealed that MH370's last position was in the ocean west of Perth, Australia.
He said: "This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites. It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that - according to this new data - flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean."

Speaking of the families of passengers and crew, he added: "For them, the past few weeks have been heartbreaking. I know this news must be harder still."
Mr Razak said a news conference would be held on Tuesday with further details.

Malaysia Airlines communicated the news to relatives in a text message ahead of Mr Razak's announcement.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26720772
 
McAvennie_ said:
The questions still remain, was it intentionally flown into the middle of the ocean or was it cruising on autopilot? Hopefully they can find the black box and maybe some answers.
Click to expand...
I don't hold out a lot of hope for finding the black boxes, though I'd like to be proved wrong.

First, it's a deep and stormy ocean, so the logistics would be horrendous.

Second, too much time has passed, and all this time any debris has been drifting east on the currents, spreading apart as it does so.

Let's say that today a piece of confirmed MH370 debris is recovered. Then we can work back, and estimate that yesterday that item was (say) 100 NM west of the recovery position. But allowance must be made for the uncertainties of our knowledge of the currents, so the simplest solution for the Previous Position (PP) would be to say that it is somewhere within a circle of (say) 1 NM diameter of the initial estimate.

From PP1 we can then work back to PP2, but PP2 will be somewhere in a circle of radius 2 NM. As we work back from PP2 to PP3 the circle of uncertainty increases again, and again from PP3 to PP4...

As we work back to PP17, the crash site. the circle of uncertainty has become 17 NM. We can tweak our assumptions in various ways. But if the circle of uncertainty is increased then PP17 would be somewhere in an even bigger area of ocean!

If we had several pieces of confirmed debris, however, we could calculate the circles of uncertainty for all the PP17s, making a big Venn diagram, and say the crash site must be in the area covered by all of them, not just some of them. (Although Bayesian statistics might challenge that assumption!)

Other tweaks that might be tried would be to say that lateral errors might be different from errors in the direction of drift, so the PP becomes an oval, not a circle.

In short, it's not going to be easy finding the black boxes. (I wonder why they aren't designed to float free, in the event of an ocean landing, much like an EPIRB. That way we might get the crash site position, and other data, even if we can't recover the main wreckage.)

EDIT: Some crap maths corrected!
 
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