Missing Air Asia QZ8501 - What are we Still to Learn?

Aren't there GPS or RFID on the plane? Radio frequencies will find them too easy with out batteries.

I can't believe, we still lost something when we got these already

The range of RFID is only a few meters (unless you are in Hollywood).

Aircraft GPS is simply a receiver. It does not broadcast data. There is a separate transponder for that, but you need to be near or over land for that to be received. Generally used by airports to manage traffic patterns upon approach, departure, and orbits.

Aircraft telemetry is not monitored during flight between airports with the exception of TCAS, which is used for aircraft-to-aircraft collision avoidance.

People get excited and upset about that because the news makes a big deal out of. It really is an infrequent event. More people get lost on terrestrial treks on land and sea than in the air, but it sells news, so people overreact.

What are we still to learn?

Well, if we haven't yet learned not to fly anywhere near Malaysia, that's one thing we might still learn.

One missing airliner is a mystery. Two missing airliners is a conspiracy.

They may have found the crash site. Two oil slicks and debris on the Java Sea are the likely spot that the aircraft went down, presumably due to bad weather.

We will know more in the next few days and weeks when they analyze the oil and find/recover the black boxes.

Dear Mr.Don from Oz

It appears to me - an identical problem which is known as BERMUDA TRIANGLE where ship and flight was missing and still it is mystery in spite of advanced science-knowledge-technology. Still I do not understand ow it happens.

DHAYANANDHAN.S

I suspect that the loss of QZ8501 was more a "1 in a million" hit to the electronics that seriously impacted on the flying characteristics of the unfortunate plane. No 'Bermuda Triangle' here I feel .... just the weather conditions experienced around the equator in this seasonal period.

Having had experience with aircraft and knowing just how many systems were involved in getting people I knew to and back, I was never surprised. Of course we had AWACK's to watch over them.

I suppose the ability to track every aircraft everywhere in any conditions will someday be possible.

Whatever the reason for the plane to drop out of the sky, for sure it should not have to take more than a few mins to locate the main body of the aircraft.. The hire car company knows exactly where I am, someone please explain to me why it is not possible to know where aircraft are all the time?

Welcome to CR4.

Simply put, the aircraft does not tell the world where it is at every instant of its flight.

Radars track aircraft mostly in the proximity of airports, but there are longer range radars that help coordinate aircraft as the approach or leave area where a lot of aircraft traffic exists.

The thing with radar is that it has lower limits for altitude and once a plane descends below a critical point the aircraft is no longer tracked.

The other issue is that the further away from the radar antenna the worse the return signal gets and it becomes harder to get an exact position. Aircraft move almost 10 tomes faster than a car, too.

So, once off the radar the aircraft can go quite a distance from the last point of contact before it crashes. This is why the search areas are so vast. Then the undersea currents make the whole problem worse.

Your rental car has a GPS system that determines the car's current position and that data is retransmitted periodically, probably via a cell connection, to some central office where the data is logged and time stamped. That much easier to do with a car than an aircraft where transponding to some network is much more complex.

Then there is the return on value for tracking every aircraft on the planet. Losing an aircraft is an extremely rare event, so spending billions of dollars to set up a world wide network and then certify every aircraft with transponders is simply not cost effective. People complain about airfare costs as it is.

I understand that loosing an aircraft is very unlikely, but surely it would be quite straight forward for a device to be on-board which transmits some packets of data via a radio link or sat-phone the moment any of a pre-defined in-flight events occured? If it kept transmitting until the very end gps position, flight data etc, then finding the plane might be a bit easier. Any-more planes go missing maybe they will have no choice but to upgrade.

Not at all.

I have worked on commercial and military avionics for decades now and unless you have been down that engineering road you have no idea of the complexity and cost to get any new LRU certified for flight. Particularly one that transmits data over a radio link.

GNSS - global navigation satellite systems are being touted as the "new GPS" and considerable development work is going into GNSS. Maybe there is something to still learn and/or suggest in combining GNSS with multiple distress and/or operational guidance systems for a whole range of stuff .... including the world's flying fleet.

There is ongoing discussion about driverless cars, trains, safe guns etc, so maybe there will be a future world where precise GNSS dictates what does work and how in certain 3D environments. For example, a handgun may not work unless in an handgun approved for use area like a rifle range. I guess banks, street ATMS, homes, taxis would be 'exclusion zones'. Yes, there would be 'pre-GNSS' guns etc, but then this can be countered by stopping the manufacture of rounds that are used in such 'pree-GNSS' weapons. The new ammo could be slightly larger or hexagon-shaped etc.

Anyway, back to the management and finding of planes, all aircraft could be 'pinged' on a regular basis by the engine manufacturers or the bankers that might own the planes, just to track where their assets are, as part of the next generation of commercial GNSS.

How do you control a knife with GNSS?

So, I walk up to a GNSS protected ATM and some thug pulls a knife and my concealed carry license is now essentially null and void.

I guess we wouldn't want the thug to get hurt on the job would we?

Anyway, getting back to the topic, do you have any idea of just how many commercial flights there are each day? Imagine tracking 100,000 flights every day and the logistics to do that.

Who's going to pay for that?

Don't ask me, please. In three weeks I am going wheels up and I really don't want to pay any more for airfare than I already do to be stuffed into a tiny seat surrounded by supersized people.

I could suggest a disappearing knife ... the political correct could make it compulsory.

While I understand your point about the cost to get attachments to planes certified etc but more is spent just changing the plane seats to be lighter and narrower. http://qz.com/177043/airline-seats-are-now-1-5-inches-narrower-than-they-used-to-be/ You may be paying more for your smaller seat in a few weeks anyway as the airlines want more passengers squeezed into coach while enjoying BOTH the lower fuel costs and forgetting to remove the past higher fuel cost charges.

As for the data with so much tracking, services like Webtrak are already doing it and holding material for some 2 weeks. It could be a relatively easy exercise to expand the coverage.

I not trying to downplay the importance of life, but I just can't see why anyone would rationally endorse the huge cost of tracking (and it would be HUGE) just in case we actually lost an aircraft in the sea.

Note, we never lost a passenger jet on land and I am only aware of one aircraft we have lost at sea that has yet to be found.

Even knowing the location instantly would not have saved lives in that case nor in the case of the recent air crash.

So why do it? It won't likely save lives as they are already dead upon impact.

The reason people are all tied up in knots about this is because it makes HUGE headlines in the news. Why? Because it is so stinking rare that it just grabs the attention of the public and the media is like a junkie on meth, they just keep injecting more and more stories into the public vein until people are over saturated with the stories.

Now the perception is that this is a BIG problem and we (being engineers) just love to get our brains wrapped around BIG problems. It's what we do.

However, it is an illusion. It is not a BIG problem at all, just another little problem that has a BIG price tag to solve it.

Plane tracking is seen as a fuel saving measure, and with some 30% of operating costs being fuel, then flight tracking and hence flight track optimisation could well are truly justify the costs of knowing where the fleet is at any time. See this US Energy Information Administration website. The data flow in real time could also include the burn rate.

With a 'look ahead' capability of the overseeing software, I could see advice also being issued to the flight deck crew to speed up or slow down, to align with landing destination resources, so holding patterns (and fuel waste) could be substantially reduced or arrival times are targeted to be earlier (with a slight extra fuel burn), to again avoid holding pattern delays with wasted fuel consumption.

In such scenarios, airline companies may think it very cost effective to know 24/7 where their fleet is (over land or sea).

And in land based transport systems, GPS fleet management (and knowing where that fleet is 24/7), can result in lower insurance premiums and fuel consumed. An electrical contractor nearby with a fleet of 50 service vehicles installed GPS tracking, fuel rate monitoring and included personal duress alarms, and this dropped their annual insurance premiums $7,000 and saved $5,000 per month in fuel costs. The savings paid for the capital cost, installation and 24/7 tracking management in the first year and the contractor continues to enjoy the bottom line benefits. Well actually, the Christmas Parties are now really worth attending, paid for from the GPS investment.

I read that all airliners over oceans transmit coordinate information to ATC every 45mins and at waypoints, in any case. Would it not be really easy to change the system to transmit ever 30 seconds for example in the event of a problem?

Regardless of how rare it is that we are searching for a lost plane, how much do they spend searching? And how much would the cost per flight increase if an updated transponder was to be legislated which allowed for the above?

Airline Tracking And Tamperproof Distress Reporting On ICAO Agenda

John Croft

Aviation Daily

An ICAO working group is recommending that new aircraft delivered after 2020 come equipped with a tracking data broadcast system that sends regular position updates to airline operators.

FULL ARTICLE

Thank GADss for that!!

Maybe it is more to do with Anti-Terrorism than anything else.. Perhaps they got a head's up.. Who knows where the Malaysian airlines plane went...