
EgyptAir 804 Disappears Over Mediterranean - akshayn
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/world/middleeast/egyptair-plane-disappears-over-mediterranean-airline-says.html
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JumpCrisscross
Starting my 48-hour media blackout around this topic. If I've learned one
thing from trying to follow aviation incidents, it's that almost everything
popularly reported in the hours after the incident is either wrong or lacking
important context.

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riffraff
Reddit's live page on this is a surprisingly good source for up to date infos
on this.

[https://www.reddit.com/live/wy0st0j6out0](https://www.reddit.com/live/wy0st0j6out0)

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yread
AvHerald is always a good source for factual information that doesn't include
rumors and speculations
[http://www.avherald.com/h?article=4987fb09&opt=0](http://www.avherald.com/h?article=4987fb09&opt=0)

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CarolineW
As always - never read the comments.

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hughes
Why is it that we can track boats with satellites but not planes? In fact we
have a complete image[1] of boat activity in the area at the time of
disappearance.

It seems as crazy to me as how we can offer in-flight satellite-based wifi but
not GPS tracking.

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/XYvC5gI.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/XYvC5gI.jpg)

~~~
gchadwick
The article says it disappears from radar. When tracking aeroplanes there are
two kinds of radar primary and secondary. Primary is actual radar, secondary
isn't really radar at all but instead radio transmission of telemetry such as
position, altitude, speed etc. This is equivalent to AIS, the system used to
track boats that produced your image.

So we were tracking the plane but then the plane stopped transmitting tracking
info for some reason (no idea if they even had it on primary radar). Someone
could have turned it off or the plane could have crashed.

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brador
There is no need for a pilot to be able to disable tracking on a commercial
plane.

They should position the tracking hardware outside the plane making it
relatively tamper-proof mid flight.

~~~
tonylemesmer
Unless its on fire? Isn't that always the reason for having all the kill
switches on aircraft?

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aerovistae
Someone on reddit pointed out this happened exactly 804 days after Malaysia
Airlines 370 vanished. Weird coincidence.

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jgrahamc
Please stop.

Oh wait. Flight number is 804: 8 + 0 + 4 = 12

66 people aboard: 6 + 6 = 12

Must mean something!

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tallerholler
12 / 2 = 6

str('66') + str('6') = '666'

it's the devil.

