Beijing-bound MAS plane carrying 239 people missing as of 20 mins ago.

UKGuy1805
reply to post by sy.gunson

 

So - if the ACARS was not working how/why would it send just a couple of bits of engine data? how could it have been stopped?

ACARS was still working.

You're not getting it.

ACARS is like a pre-paid cell phone able to send text messages only.

If you have no credit on your phone then you can't send texts, but that does not stop the phone exchanging a handshake signal every hour with the nearest cell tower.

Rolls Royce did not monitor engines in flight, just at take off and in descent to land.

UKGuy1805
Let me get this right - the EMS data that was sent by ACARS - was on just for a couple of data returns? - It was on just for take off and a short climb? - It was on the full time but just not reaching Boeing? - It was recieved somwere else other than Boeing but just a couple of times? very strange...

It had nothing to do with Boeing, it was only enabled for the engine leasing arrangement with Rolls Royce.

reply to post by sy.gunson

Exactly!

Malaysia Airlines Managers Could Have Had Better Data at Their Fingertips (Harvard Business Review-March 20th)

The data that eventually showed that Flight 370 continued for hours after voice transmissions ended came from satellite pings, most notably provided by Inmarsat. But more precise data could have come more directly from the plane’s Rolls-Royce Trent 800 jet engines...

So why didn’t engine data help in the search? Because the airline had the option, but declined, to pay about $10 per flight for real-time access to it.

Pre-paid phone analogy

earthling42
reply to post by sy.gunson

 

Thanks for your reply

The last picture shows it flying over VAMPI heading towards MEKAR.

Correction you are indeed right.

The Malaysians said it flew IGARI - VAMPI - GIVAL. As you note I got it wrong but the key point here is that they said if flew north from VAMPI to GIVAL and that never happened.

Malacca contact

The whole notion of a flight through the Straights are debunked here:

Malacca debunked

At 17:01 MH370 had reached its cruising altitude at fl350 and contacted radar control to identify itself and report their altitude which was confirmed by radar control.

The fact that at 17:07 they again contacted radar control to report their flightlevel at fl350 seems strange to me.

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It is fairly simple, they wanted to interrupt the controller and get the controller's attention to get further instructions for hand off.

They could not have made a left turn at 17:15, clearly as you mentioned the were flying towards IGARI and heading north east 040 towards BITOT after that.

All in all, it is speculation of course, but something had happened which made them turn and head back towards KL.

Agreed and i would add something which did not seem serious enough at first and then grew worse to overwhelm them.

If it was a suicide like MSM likes to spin it, i can imagine that if 238 lives do not count, there is nothing holding the pilot back from doing a 9/11 in KL. He could easily have done this as there was no interception dispite an unidentified aircraft flying towards and over Malaysia which was not responding.

If there was a suicide motive then it would have included some resentment and therefore as you correctly note there was every opportunity to perform a 9/11 on the Petronus Towers, but they did not.

There is an airfield at Penang and also at Langkawi, it might be that the plan was to land the plane at Langkawi and thus eliminating the risk of crashing on a highly populated area while trying to land a crippled plane.

There is no evidence that it ever turned west, but turning back to the engineering base at Kuala Lumpur may well have been what they were trying.

A little edit.

According to the last picture, the path is also not in a normal flight corridor but after VAMPI it seems they were.

What you are looking at in those pictures are from a military tracking radar without civil SSR interrogation of the transponder.

The aircraft believed to have been tracked in this image was EMR343.

The satellite pings do not indicate MH370 turned west:

reply to post by roadgravel


So you are saying the aircraft flew low over the Maldives an hour after fuel was exhausted and more than an hour after the last satellite ping ?

...Bearing in mind that a Boeing 777's maximum permitted speed below 10,000ft is 250 knots and maximum possible speed is 280knots with about ten times the fuel consumption at 35,000ft.

If it flew across the Indian Ocean at low altitude it would not make it half way to Sri Lanka.

charlyv

sy.gunson
reply to post by charlyv

 

Just a speculation CharlyV but perhaps it was already located by P-3 survey before Ocean Shield reached the site?

Thing is buoys drift and aircraft move relative to the buoys so perhaps they need a better definition?

If that happened, we certainly did not get informed about it and it would be considered located, at least in coordinates. It could have been the Australian fleet, as they have a lot of the P3C's that were replaced by the P8's. We don't know. One thing is for sure though, once a P3 puts a pattern like I described in the water, the target is usually located before or shortly after the last buoy is deployed. They do not have to be on-station long.

Additionally, if that were the case, it would have marked datum, and that GPS coordinate would be fixed. It would not matter how much the buoys drifted after they had that point, especially since this is not a moving target. A fix like this qualifies the deployment of a deep submersible , which is another thing we have not heard about. Like I said, the lack of information is deafening. What we hear from the media sounds more like a WWII exercise.

Agreed, but then I think if you continue that analogy they may have also had some sort of imprecise OTHR radar track too which they have not told us about. OTHR has poor detail resolution.


...By the way just out of personal interest back in the 1970s I flew with a Kiwi P-3 pilot who said RNZAF operated the P-3B, is that still the case that they remain P-3B or have they been upgraded?

Is P-3B a designation for the airframe or the avionics suite?

I gather since I flew with that guy they did have an avionics upgrade in the 1990s.

reply to post by sy.gunson


Do you have a good link about this information?

reply to post by earthling42


Just following the press releases from day one.

Wikipedia ACARS

CharlyV, I wondered if you might like to interpret the following info from your sonar experience?







In particular why are strong returns picked up in directions where previous sonar tracks have faded?

Is there some sort of terrain reflection?

Update from the search in Southern Indian Ocean:

P-3 Orion detects possible signal

SEARCH crews have detected a new signal from the depths of the Indian Ocean, thought to be from Flight MH370.
Former Defence chief Angus Houston, heading the Joint Agency Coordination Centre in Perth, confirmed an aircraft has detected a possible signal in the vicinity of Ocean Shield in search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.
It is understood it was detected by a RAAF P3 Orion plane in the search zone.
The signal will be further analysed but it is potentially from a man-made source.
“The acoustic data will require further analysis overnight,” Houston said.
It brings the number of signals that have been detected so far to five.

sy.gunson
ACARS was still working.

Not according to this source, which says ACARS was NOT still working, and it was another system called "Classic Aero" that was involved in the subsequent handshakes:

MH37 0: Britain finds itself at centre of blame game over crucial delays

MH370’s ACARS system was switched off at 1.21am on March 8, two minutes after the pilots’ last verbal communication with the ground. It is this deliberate act that has convinced investigators the pilots were on some form of suicide mission.

But Classic Aero also has a second terminal that operates independently of ACARS and cannot be switched off while the aircraft still has power.

Once every hour the system sends out a “ping” to satellites operated by Inmarsat. The pings play no part in ACARS, and merely serve to synchronise timing information and keep the connection to the satellite network alive.

I don't recall seeing much mention of this "Classic Aero" in other media reports, so I think it's been missed by some people.

While it's true there was an available subscription, which Malaysian Airlines didn't pay the $10 per flight to get, the lack of that subscription doesn't account for why Rolls Royce would stop getting engine data, which the ACARS going off would explain.

For those who may be interested, it has been revealed today, in an AAIB report, that a Malaysian Airlines flight had an emergency landing in Heathrow back in 2012, with serious electrical faults and engine issues. The CVR continued to record after landing and subsequently all relevant information needed on it wiped.

I am sharing this because this may shed some clues in relation to this current incident with MH370, in particular the area of aircraft maintenance, previous sabotage and the recent issue of fire in the avionics workshop of MAS.

MAS Jumbo had to return to Heathrow

The Boeing 747 had to return to the west London airport after significant vibration was noted on one of the engines shortly after departure for Kuala Lumpur, said the report by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB).

During the approach to land back at Heathrow, all three autopilots disengaged, the cockpit displays and lights flickered and a series of fault messages were displayed.

There was a subsequent loss of power to some systems but the captain, with 340 passengers and 22 crew aboard, managed to make a safe landing at 11.20pm on August 17 2012.

The AAIB, which classed the incident as "serious" in its report today, said the CVR continued to run for some time after the aircraft landed "and as a result all relevant CVR recordings were lost".

The AAIB said: "The investigation determined that the operator's procedures for the preservation of flight recording was not sufficiently robust to ensure that recordings would be preserved in a timely manner following an incident or accident."

The report said that Malaysia Airlines had "expressed willingness to address this issue" and updated its procedures.

The AAIB said there had been a series of failures within the aircraft's electrical system.

The report listed action taken by Boeing after the incident.

I believe that most of the conspiracies running here about MH370 being hijacked might now be leaking in MSM.

A news report now says that a Russian Secret Service Person has informed Daily Star, that tre flight was hijacked, and landed in Afganistan.

source

"According to the Daily Star, the source said all the passengers were alive and had been divided into seven groups and were living in mud huts with almost no food.

The report added that 20 passengers who were Asian 'specialists' have been smuggled into a bunker in Pakistan, the report added."

Arbitrageur

sy.gunson
ACARS was still working.

Not according to this source, which says ACARS was NOT still working, and it was another system called "Classic Aero" that was involved in the subsequent handshakes:

MH37 0: Britain finds itself at centre of blame game over crucial delays

MH370’s ACARS system was switched off at 1.21am on March 8, two minutes after the pilots’ last verbal communication with the ground. It is this deliberate act that has convinced investigators the pilots were on some form of suicide mission.

But Classic Aero also has a second terminal that operates independently of ACARS and cannot be switched off while the aircraft still has power.

Once every hour the system sends out a “ping” to satellites operated by Inmarsat. The pings play no part in ACARS, and merely serve to synchronise timing information and keep the connection to the satellite network alive.

I don't recall seeing much mention of this "Classic Aero" in other media reports, so I think it's been missed by some people.

While it's true there was an available subscription, which Malaysian Airlines didn't pay the $10 per flight to get, the lack of that subscription doesn't account for why Rolls Royce would stop getting engine data, which the ACARS going off would explain.

The ping you refer to is a syncronising time check system to ensure ACARS is still online, just in the same way that when your cell phone sends a syncronising time check to a cell tower, you are not consciously aware of that signal and nor is that signal any part of your cell phone text messages, none the less that signal could not be sent unless your cell phone was working.

Classic Aero is an ACARS based system

The FANS-1/A system that was originally developed by Boeing, and later adopted by Airbus, is primarily used in oceanic routes by widebodied long haul aircraft. It was originally deployed in the South Pacific in the late 1990s and was later extended to the North Atlantic. FANS-1/A is an ACARS based service and, given its oceanic use, mainly uses satellite communications provided by the Inmarsat Data-2 (Classic Aero) service.

O ther examples

INMARSAT services

and this

Classic Aero

Q: What were the greatest challenges in those early years of developing and deploying the “Classic Aero” Services?

A: It’s important to remember that there were a couple of key trial programmes that went into securing the initial approvals. ‘Prodat’ – one of the very first aviation satcom trials – and Inmarsat’s Data-1 were among the early services that provided a relevant basis for the development of subsequent offerings. Data-1 was the ACARS (Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System) Data Link precursor service that became the Inmarsat ‘Classic’ Aero voice and Data-2 service, which has been in use for the last twenty years by thousands of aircraft around the world. So it was a process involving not just the main iterations but all the trial and pre-operational services that went into them.

Q: And now you are actively promoting ‘Classic Aero Services’ as well as integrating and leveraging new technologies such as SwiftBroadband. Tell me a little more about that in terms of the relative advantages and challenges of such offerings.

A: The baseline is the Classic Aero Service, which was defined by the safety service requirements, i.e. the ability to deliver ACARS Data Link messaging – a highly reliable, mission-critical text-based service not dissimilar to Telex – to aircraft flight decks using systems adopted by the whole of the industry. ACARS Data Link was a key requirement for our data-based services, although alongside that was the voice capability that both the captain and the co-pilot are required to have at any point in the flight. Our original Classic Aero Services were designed to provide those capabilities, which provided the basis on which passenger services could later piggyback, offering various other applications including telephone services. In the case of SwiftBroadband, it’s an IP network service, bringing the internet age to aircraft at long last while also delivering significantly greater flexibility, as well as greater economies.

roadgravel

"Based on new satellite information, we can say with a high degree of certainty that ACARS was disabled just before the aircraft reached the east coast of peninsular Malaysia. Shortly afterwards, near the border between Malaysian and Vietnamese air traffic control, the aircraft's transponder was switched off," Razak says.

Getting that data appears to have been a stroke of luck. ACARS can be sent both via VHF radio and satellite – but Malaysia Airlines had not subscribed to the satellite version from London based provider Inmarsat. Nevertheless, a satellite transmitter on the plane was pinging an Inmarsat satellite with empty data packets. And it is those that have allowed the plane's position to be estimated on two tracks either side of the satellite.

Link

There was no engine data for the duration of the flight.

edit on 4/9/2014 by roadgravel because: (no reason given)

Of course not because the engine leasing agreement did not require transmission of data after take off and climb to altitude.

You are flogging a dead horse

sy.gunson
Classic Aero is an ACARS based system

That link says "Controller–pilot data link communications", not "Classic Aero is an ACARS based system". I think you're confused.

Hmmmmmmm

sy.gunson

UKGuy1805
reply to post by sy.gunson

 

So - if the ACARS was not working how/why would it send just a couple of bits of engine data? how could it have been stopped?

It was not stopped.

It had no paid subscription to use INMARSAT during flight.

It had a subscription to use ACARS for 30 minutes after engine start. Thereafter engines made a handshake connection through ACARS every 30 minutes or so.

There was no Satellite connection between MH370 with the Indian Ocean satellite 64E IOR Tel 873 from 17:07 UTC and 18:25 UTC because MH370 was too far east for coverage by the Indian ocean satellite.

Nobody has yet bothered to investigate if MH370 made a handshake connection with the Pacific INMARSAT 178E POR Tel 872 at 17:37 UTC.

It's like buying a car equipped with OnStar, but not buying the service.

It still works, and the manufacturer can turn it on anytime they want, but you can't use it as advertised.


In my opinion it's why I give weight o the claims that Boeing knew where it landed the day it went missing.

Before you give weight to some theory or other provide some factual basis for the claim. They were unlikely to have any more data than Rolls Royce had which was zip, zilch, nada...

Arbitrageur

sy.gunson
Classic Aero is an ACARS based system

That link says "Controller–pilot data link communications", not "Classic Aero is an ACARS based system". I think you're confused.

Why don't you actually read the link I provided before rushing to refute it?

I already quoted from that link but let me do it again... This time bother to read it:

It was originally deployed in the South Pacific in the late 1990s and was later extended to the North Atlantic. FANS-1/A is an ACARS based service and, given its oceanic use, mainly uses satellite communications provided by the Inmarsat Data-2 (Classic Aero) service.

have you found it yet?
still no plane?

good luck on your quest fellow warriors.

last reliable information I heard was that the plane "has disappeared"...

UnknownEntity
I believe that most of the conspiracies running here about MH370 being hijacked might now be leaking in MSM.

A news report now says that a Russian Secret Service Person has informed Daily Star, that tre flight was hijacked, and landed in Afganistan.

source

"According to the Daily Star, the source said all the passengers were alive and had been divided into seven groups and were living in mud huts with almost no food.

The report added that 20 passengers who were Asian 'specialists' have been smuggled into a bunker in Pakistan, the report added."

You mean the garbage claim that MH370 landed at Kandahar-har-har-har?

Yes the whole world is having a big old chuckle about the tin foil hat crazies at ATS who can invent a conspiracy out of any newspaper article faster than they can fold the same article into a work of Origami.

Tons of mindless speculation is being spawned here with absolutely no relationship to the facts.

Well you let me know how anybody can land a huge jumbo jet anywhere in Kandahar next to the largest multi-national security operation with journalists and observers plus elections going on without anybody knowing about it?