Transponder question

reply to post by pheonix358


I don't care how difficult you try to make it to "turn off," with a little planning, it can be defeated in flight and be as good as turned off. At most, it would take involving one person in the ground crew.

reply to post by pheonix358

If Rolls Royce can track engine information in close to real time then it stands to reason we should be able to track the whole bloody airframe.

Except Rolls apparently doesn't.

Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said on Thursday that the reports were not true. He said the last transmission from the aircraft was at 01:07 a.m. on March 8, indicating that everything was normal. The plane took off from Kuala Lumpur at 12:41 a.m. (1641 GMT on March 7).

"Rolls-Royce concurs with the statement made on Thursday, 13 March, by Malaysia's Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein regarding engine health monitoring data received from the aircraft," said a spokeswoman for the company.

www.reuters.com...

The monitoring system has limitations.
www.rolls-royce.com...

reply to post by VinMan


Yeah, not so much here, but motorcycles and bicycles have been used for mass bombings in other countries.

reply to post by JHumm

That's not a bad idea actually.
Something like that might actually be feasible. Something like this incident might get things moving in that direction.

Phage
reply to post by pheonix358

 

If Rolls Royce can track engine information in close to real time then it stands to reason we should be able to track the whole bloody airframe.

Except Rolls apparently doesn't.

Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said on Thursday that the reports were not true. He said the last transmission from the aircraft was at 01:07 a.m. on March 8, indicating that everything was normal. The plane took off from Kuala Lumpur at 12:41 a.m. (1641 GMT on March 7).

"Rolls-Royce concurs with the statement made on Thursday, 13 March, by Malaysia's Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein regarding engine health monitoring data received from the aircraft," said a spokeswoman for the company.

www.reuters.com...

The monitoring system has limitations.
www.rolls-royce.com...

So should RR be able to find these engines with the system that monitor's the other systems ....that's a lot of systems they talk about in that link you put up ... LOL

reply to post by Phage




Thanks, it was just a thought I had after reading all these posts about this plane and the fact that we have the means to do it but it just isn't done . Just seems kind of logical to have a way to track down something with so many lives onboard .

reply to post by JHumm


If whomever did this did a little planning, and it looks like he did, all it takes to defeat a signal is to clip the antenna or cut the power. It could be done either in the plane or with a device implanted while on the ground. Trivial really.

Even better though, once everyone relied on 24 hour tracking, what you would really want to do is to spoof the location. Just broadcast you were on course when you weren't.

Probably the best system to track commercial planes, and the toughest to defeat, is radar. But even radar has some coverage issues that can be exploited.

reply to post by JHumm

I saw an aviation expert explain this on tv last night. He said that this is in case of a fire on the plane. That makes me wonder why they can't have it turn off automatically through sensors when there is a fire, thus bypassing the pilot. Seems simple enough to me.

soulwaxer

Since unplanned hijackings already don't occur, 24 hour tracking wouldn't accomplish anything new that couldn't be defeated by educated and smart hijackers. And the top echelons of terror organizations are populated with very smart and well-educated people.

reply to post by soulwaxer


Sensors don't always work. They fail both ways in fact -- false positives and false negatives.

reply to post by BayesLike




You make it sound like nobody should do anything to try to protect things because it would just be pointless because no matter what we do there is a way to defeat it ....do you have security on your WiFi? Well if you do you should just to ahead and turn it off because if a hacker wants it bad enough he will get in . But we shouldn't try to install something to help us find a passenger jet because the bad guys will just disable it anyway .

And who said anything about 24 hour tracking ?

JHumm
So should RR be able to find these engines with the system that monitor's the other systems ....that's a lot of systems they talk about in that link you put up ... LOL

What they are probably monitoring in the engines is vibration and maybe some other information. We've known how to monitor engines, especially turbines, for imminent failure for many decades. It's really common for power plants. Vibration patterns begin to differ from original recordings with wear. When the pattern drifts too much, it's time to do some maintenance no matter how good it may look when you tear it down. Not everything shows up on the surfaces.

reply to post by JHumm


Why would I want security on my WiFi? To keep someone else from using it? Id rather be able to detect the use and then decide what to do than to think I was protected by some silly password. Did WiFi security keep anyone from having NSA monitor their activity?

JHumm
reply to post by BayesLike

Open systems that are easily monitored are much better protected than trying to lock anyone or anything out. For example, free speech in fact is probably the best form of protection available in the US. We can easily see who is for what and how heavily. Once freedom of speech is suppressed, those who have a need to do something will no longer do it in a way that is easy to detect. They get clever. You lose information and cause more (serious) problems by trying to hamper freedom.

So, no, it's better to not track the planes from the planes. We can already find them if they go down. If we want to monitor movement better, it needs to be external -- like better radar coverage or optical coverage from orbit. Not silly transponders.

BayesLike

JHumm
So should RR be able to find these engines with the system that monitor's the other systems ....that's a lot of systems they talk about in that link you put up ... LOL

What they are probably monitoring in the engines is vibration and maybe some other information. We've known how to monitor engines, especially turbines, for imminent failure for many decades. It's really common for power plants. Vibration patterns begin to differ from original recordings with wear. When the pattern drifts too much, it's time to do some maintenance no matter how good it may look when you tear it down. Not everything shows up on the surfaces.

The question was , do they know where the engine is when they are monitoring it, not what they are monitoring .

BayesLike

JHumm
reply to post by BayesLike

Open systems that are easily monitored are much better protected than trying to lock anyone or anything out. For example, free speech in fact is probably the best form of protection available in the US. We can easily see who is for what and how heavily. Once freedom of speech is suppressed, those who have a need to do something will no longer do it in a way that is easy to detect. They get clever. You lose information and cause more (serious) problems by trying to hamper freedom.

So, no, it's better to not track the planes from the planes. We can already find them if they go down. If we want to monitor movement better, it needs to be external -- like better radar coverage or optical coverage from orbit. Not silly transponders.

Really ? And how is that working out now ? But if there was something on that plane that made it able to be found we would not be looking for it 9 days later from orbit .

JHumm

The question was , do they know where the engine is when they are monitoring it, not what they are monitoring .

There would be no need for RR to know where the engine was located. It should be on the plane. RR would be better off getting periodic summaries of 3D vibration patterns, peak velocity, engine temperature and other environmentals. GPS data would simply eat bandwidth with useless information for engine diagnostics.

OTOH, if someone who knows which satellites detected the uplink pings (probably known and recorded) the search area should be able to be narrowed down somewhat. They would need wide area, whole earth, coverage which would mean buying some bandwidth on something like the Iridium system.

JHumm
Really ? And how is that working out now ? But if there was something on that plane that made it able to be found we would not be looking for it 9 days later from orbit .

It's working out as well as it would if someone had defeated a dedicated tracking system built into the planes. Again, we aren't talking about a casual hijacking, if hijacking is what it was. There's a small chance it was accidental but since the transponder turned off at the handoff between ATC of two countries, I have always believed this was intentional. It's too small fo a time slice and would have had to have been an extremely low probability event to have been an accident.

Speaking of which. The focus is still on water landings. It should probably be first and foremost on beaches or lightly populated islands. I'd bet the next time we see this plane it's headed to the US command HQ in Afghanistan or some other command post that seems more vulnerable in that region. And I'd bet the transponder is ON then and spoofing a real flight which might have been delayed in any number of ways. Would we shoot it down if the flight deviates a little from plan? THAT would be a tough call and we might only have minutes to decide when it diverts from the "usual" flight path.

JHumm
Why is the transponder able to be turned off by the pilot ?
Would it not make since to have it so it cannot be turned off or tampered with in any way ?

I'm not aware that it was indeed turned off by hand. Perhaps it might be wise to consider the possibility that it was jammed or turned off by secret or advanced military technology operated remotely from another location.

One thing that has been overlooked in relation to this event is that when the phones rang after it went missing the NSA would sure as hell know where the plane was, as spying on phone calls is what the NSA does. So why have they not told anyone where the phone was located when it rang??? The fact that they not released this information, inmy view, implicates the US whatever has happened to this aircraft.

reply to post by JHumm


Simple answer, fire. Fire on a plane is ridiculously dangerous. There are cases when something has shorted and cutting the power, either through the off switch or circuit breaker stops the fire danger.