Missing Malaysian plane: satellite company says it might be able to help

[pnwmom]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/15/world/asia/missing-malaysia-airlines-flight-370.html?hp

SEPANG, Malaysia — As the hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet expanded into the vastness of the Indian Ocean, a satellite communications company confirmed on Friday that it had recorded electronic “keep alive” ping signals from the plane after it disappeared, and said those signals could be analyzed to help estimate its location.

The information from the company, Inmarsat, could prove to be a valuable break in helping narrow the frustrating search for the plane with 239 people aboard that mysteriously disappeared from radar screens a week ago, now hunted by a multinational array of ships and planes that have fanned out for thousands of square miles.

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But a series of electronic pings sent by the aircraft could help the search, which is shifting focus from the relative confines of the Gulf of Thailand and nearby waters to include the Indian Ocean on the other, western side of Malaysia.

Investigators also are looking at the possibility that a shipment of lithium batteries in the airliner’s cargo hold may have caught fire and felled the aircraft. A senior American official who had been briefed on the contents listed on the plane’s cargo manifest said a “significant load” of lithium batteries had been aboard — raising suspicions because of previous cargo-plane crashes attributed to lithium battery shipments, which can overheat and cause intense fires. But that possibility is inconsistent with information that the plane may have kept flying for hours after it vanished.

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[Renew Deal]

1. Can the satellite company tell if the engines were powered down orderly or if they suddenly stopped?

And can they determine altitude?

[pnwmom]

2. It didn't give much specific information. Just this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/15/world/asia/missing-malaysia-airlines-flight-370.html?hp

“It does allow us to determine where the airplane is relative to the satellite,” he said of the signal, which he likened to the “noises you might hear when a cellphone sits next to a radio or a television speaker.” He said: “It does allow us to narrow down the position of the aircraft” — at moment when the signal was sent.

Such equipment automatically checks in to satellites, much as a mobile phone would check in to a network after passing through a mountain tunnel, he said. Because the pings go over a measurable distance at a specific angle to one of the company’s satellites, the information can be used to help calculate the trajectory of an aircraft and narrow down its approximate location — though not necessarily its resting point.


“Communications systems are part of the mandatory requirement for operating any flight, and we are comfortable that it would have been operating accordingly,” Mr. Coiley said.

[customerserviceguy]

3. My theory

is that some fairly sophisticated organization grabbed the plane, probably recruiting the co-pilot, and has built a clandestine disguised airstrip on an unihabited island to land it on. At some point when it's off everybody's radar, they blow up a flight on a way to a targeted city, and substitute this aircraft, fully loaded with explosives and transmitting the removed aircraft's signal, to take it's place. By the time that it's noticed that the blown-up aircraft is gone, this one is able to take out a major target in some city that the plotter determined he was going to get.

Yeah, a little Tom Clancy, but does anything we know about this situation contradict my scenario? Of course, if we find wreckage at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, my theory falls completely apart, but we're not at that point quite yet.