
What the nine debris finds may tell us about the MH370 end point - wglb
http://www.duncansteel.com/archives/2652
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alimw
I'm no expert on ocean current modelling but it seems to me you should
multiply the probabilities from each find, not add them up.

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zeristor
I posted this about the MH370 search strategy a week ago, after reading a book
on Bayes statistics [0]

[0] -
[https://www.atsb.gov.au/media/5733804/Bayesian_Methods_MH370...](https://www.atsb.gov.au/media/5733804/Bayesian_Methods_MH370_Search_3Dec2015.pdf)

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Mendenhall
I keep thinking they need to put a black box on the top of these planes that
auto ejects at the first sign of crashing and can float etc.

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rbf
Or just continously upload the data to the internet, should be quite feasible
these days with satellites everywhere.

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lb1lf
>Or just continously upload the data to the internet, should be quite feasible
these days with satellites everywhere.

That would probably be a bit too much for existing satellite communication
systems; while most flights wouldn't need to transmit such a signal most of
the time (If a plane went missing over, say, the Midwest, we'd find it!),
frequent transmissions from every flight over sea, for instance would probably
overload today's networks - meaning you'd need to launch new satellites to
provide this service, meaning it would be outrageously expensive, meaning it
wouldn't happen.

However, if we relax the requirement to, say, once every five minutes or so,
at least you'll have a much better idea of where something went down than
'Probably somewhere in the southern hemisphere.'

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nikanj
A quick googling tells me there are about 10000-15000 planes in the air around
the world. GPS coordinates take less than 100 bytes, but let's give some
headroom for plane ID, timestamp, etc.

That would mean about 1.5 megabytes per minute, globally. I think the global
satellite network is easily up to the task.

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lb1lf
The raw data rate is pretty low, but keep in mind that there's all sorts of
signaling traffic going on just to establish a connection, depending on
protocol requiring multiple transmit/receive cycles - which in turn means
waiting. Again depending on protocol, you may also have to handle collisions
(more than one transmission in the same channel at the same time) etc - while
still maintaining service for the network's regular customers.

Multiple short transmissions are more taxing than a few long ones.

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dmix
It would be interesting if this crash location was an accidental side effect
of a pilot/hijackerhijacker. Making it crash in the most remote location,
following a very hard to follow path fully out of sight of modern tech.

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tremon
This is explored in another article, the "controlled ditch" scenario:
[http://www.duncansteel.com/archives/2601](http://www.duncansteel.com/archives/2601)

It is a possible scenario, although I have yet to see a reason for anyone to
do this (as the article shows, it would require quite deliberate planning).

