Count me among those who feel that this is how it ends: a mystery. The plane is out there somewhere,

It s a semantic discussion to some degree (what does tracking mean?), but headlines the likes of U.N. to Consider Ways to Track Planes Over Seas, and similar phrasings, which have been rampant, cheap bargain travel give people the impression that once a plane hits oceanic airspace, it effectively disappears until making landfall on the other side. This is not the case, at all.
Crews are always in touch with both air traffic control and company personnel on the ground, and both of these entities are following and tracking you. Tranponders aren t used in non-radar areas, but you ve also got HF radio, SATCOM, CPDLC, FMC datalink and so forth. Which equipment you re using to communicate depends where you are and which air traffic control facility you re working cheap bargain travel with.
What happened in the case of flight 370, of course, is that all of this equipment stopped working it was either switched off intentionally, or failed. The plane wasn t being tracked cheap bargain travel because the communications equipment was dead. We can and perhaps should argue whether some sort of fail-safe, cheap bargain travel independently powered locator signal ought to be installed aboard transoceanic aircraft, able to transmit latitude and longitude position, but in normal operations the existing equipment works quite well, and is a lot more sophisticated than people are being led to believe.
The Times story also segued into an annoying and misleading discussion about here we go again why it is that pilots are able to turn a transponder off . The comments of retired pilot Robert Hilb were especially frustrating. To cut and paste from a prior post (which you can read further down this page)
The first one is operational: to avoid cluttering up air traffic control cheap bargain travel radar, the unit is turned off when parked at the gate. We switch it on shortly before taxiing, then switch it off again (actually it’s moved to a standby mode) after docking in. Second, cheap bargain travel in the interest of safety — namely, fire and electrical system protection cheap bargain travel — it’s important to have the ability to isolate cheap bargain travel a piece of equipment, either by a standard switch or, if need be, through a circuit breaker. And third, transponders will occasionally malfunction and transmit erroneous or incomplete data, at which point a crew will “cycle” the device or swap to another unit. Typically at least two transponders are onboard, and you can’t run both simultaneously. Further, cheap bargain travel there are various transponder subfunctions, or “modes” as we call them — mode C, for example, or mode S — responsible for different cheap bargain travel data, and these can be turned off separately.
In any case, with respect to the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, a discussion cheap bargain travel of transponders is only partly relevant in the first place. For air traffic control purposes, transponders only work in areas of ATC radar coverage. Once beyond a certain distance from the coast, the oceans are not monitored by radar, and transponders are not used for tracking. We keep the units turned on because the TCAS anti-collision system is transponder-based, but we rely on SATCOM, ACARS, cheap bargain travel FMS datalink, and other means for position reports and communications. Thus transponders are pertinent to this story only when the missing plane was close to land. Once over the open water, on or off, it didn’t matter anyway.
IT S AMAZING how this story has fallen cheap bargain travel off the table. The big TV networks (this means you CNN) finally faced up to the fact they couldn t keep leading, hour after hour, with a story that wasn t changing. The jet was missing, and it kept on being missing, and here we are in the middle of April and it s still missing.
Count me among those who feel that this is how it ends: a mystery. The plane is out there somewhere, at the bottom cheap bargain travel of the Indian cheap bargain travel Ocean, and in all likelihood we re not going to find it. Even if the wreckage can be pinpointed, dredging up the black boxes from 15,000 feet of seawater would itself be a monumental task. And even with the recorders salvaged cheap bargain travel we might not learn what happened.
My hunch is that a malfunction, rather cheap bargain travel than foul play, brought the plane down. A poorly handled decompression, for example, caused by a structural problem or windscreen failure. Or a catastrophic electrical failure combined with smoke, cheap bargain travel fire or fumes that rendered the crew unconscious. cheap bargain travel Granted that doesn t totally jibe with the evidence, but none of the theories do. Not ruling anything out, including the possibility of a pilot suicide mission. I m somewhat mystified that more hasn t been made of the captain s domestic situation his failing marriage and, according to some, unusual behavior in the days leading up to the plane s disappearance.
This is how it goes sometimes. The archives of aviation accidents, rare as they might be, contain numerous unsolved disasters including aircraft that have never been found or recovered. The fate of Malaysia 370, it looks like, will be added to the list.
THE MEDIA really needs a chill pill. And for the love of heaven, would people please stop talking about transponders. National Public Radio host Robert Siegel was on the air yesterday, the latest in a know-nothing chorus complaining about the ability of pilots to turn transponders cheap bargain travel off, clearly possessing little or no idea how the devices actually work.
The first one is operational: to avoid cluttering up air traffic control radar, the unit is turned off when parked at the gate. We switch it on shortly before cheap bargain travel taxiing, then switch it off again (actually it s moved to a standby mode) after docking in. Second, in the interest of safety — namely, fire and electrical system protection — it’s important to have the ability to isolate a piece of equipment, either by a standard switch or, if need be, through cheap bargain travel a circuit breaker. And third, cheap bargain travel transponders will occasionally malfunction and transmit cheap bargain travel erroneous or incomplete data, at which point a crew will cycle the device or swap to another unit. Typically at least two transponders are onboard, and you can’t run both simultaneously. Further, there are various transponder subfunctions, cheap bargain travel or “modes” as we call them — mode C, for example, or mode S — responsible for different data, and these can be turned off separately.
In any case, with respect to the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, a discussion of transponders is only partly relevant in the first place. For air traffic control purposes, transponders only work in areas of ATC radar coverage. Once beyond a certain distance from the coast, the oceans are not monitored by radar, and transponders are not used for tracking. We keep the units turned on because cheap bargain travel the TCAS anti-collision system is transponder-based, but we rely on SATCOM, ACARS, FMS datalink, and other means for position reports and communications. Thus transponders are pertinent to this story only when the missing plane was close to land. Once over the open water, on or off, it didn t matter anyway .
ACCORDING TO Reason.org, a new Reason-Rupe poll finds 35 percent of Americans think a mechanical problem caused Malaysia Airlines flight 370 to crash; 22 percent believe the pilots crashed the plane intentionally; 12 percent feel it was destroyed by terrorists; 9 percent say the plane landed safely and is in hiding; 5 percent believe the disappearance is related to supernatural or alien activity; and 3 percent think it was shot down by a foreign government.
That s slightly more encouraging than I expected, with some 57 percent of people overall hewing to what have been, from the start, the two most credible avenues of possibility: mechanical problem or rogue crew hijacking.
I VE READ AND HEARD some pretty asinine characterizations of airline pilots before, but rarely have I come across anything as absurd, inaccurate, or irresponsible as what was printed on the front page of the March 28-30 weekend international edition of USA Today.
I find it almost inconceivable that after decades of covering commercial aviation, USA Today would fail to understand cheap bargain travel there is always a minimum of two pilots in the cockpit: a captain and a first officer. The latter is known colloquially as the copilot, but they both are fully qualified pilots. They both perform takeoffs and landings, and both are certified to operate the aircraft in all regimes of flight. A first officer is not an apprentice. In fact, owing to the quirks cheap bargain travel of the airline cheap bargain travel seniority system, it is not unheard of for the first officer to be older and more experienced than the captain. More here .
How many times have I been through this? I ve explained it repeatedly in blog postings, articles, and in my book. I have no idea how many people have been listening, but in one fell swoop USA Today has misinformed hundreds of thousands of readers.
I m not sure what disturbs me more: that an accident investigator would say such a nonsensical and untrue thing, or that USA Today didn t have the common sense to vet it. I can t believe that nobody on the editorial staff of a paper that runs so many airlines stories, and that caters to travelers, didn t at least flag this statement for review.
The idea that a first officer on a Boeing 777 wouldn t have the experience or expertise to operate the aircraft on his own is beyond preposterous. Why the investigator cheap bargain travel would assert otherwise, if in fact the quote was interpreted correctly, I have no idea.
The details of the Malaysia Airlines mystery have been subject to enough misinterpretation and general media overboiling as it is. This puts things over the top, into the realm of total and complete nonsense.
The same issue of USA Today, on page 10A, features a letter to the editor by a man from Minnesota cheap bargain travel named Tom O Mara. His topic is the tracking of commercial flights. He asks that we demand that airlines track all their flights from takeoff to landing. Five dollars per passenger, he submits, ought to be invested in a tracking system for commercial flights over the ocean.
The problem here is that commercial flights are tracked over the oceans. cheap bargain travel Air crews must always be in contact with both air traffic control and company dispatchers on the ground.