You’ve doubtless heard the news of a Malaysian jet that disappeared not long after departure. It’s a Boeing 777, of which I’m rather fond, since the company for which I work (well, one of them) has equipment on board, and I was a part of the team that vetted it.
Unfortunately, there are seven billion people on this planet with roughly six billion axes to grind, and some of them get a lot of attention, through airplay or the internet. I generally ignore them — everybody is somebody else’s weirdo, and I don’t have time to chase them all down. But I came across an execrably stupid analysis that I just couldn’t pass by.
A web site I refuse to name so they don’t get “mad hits” posted “six important facts you’re not being told” about Flight 370. Written by someone who refers to himself as The Health Ranger. Sigh.
Actually, I shouldn’t knock him for that. My nicknames are not much better. “Antlers,” for instance.
Anyway, he manages to get pretty much everything wrong, and then leaps to the conclusion that there is entirely new, mysterious and powerful force is at work on our planet which can pluck airplanes out of the sky.” [emphasis in original.] Conspiracy theories are fun, aren’t they?
But as it happens, I have a degree in engineering, 25+ years of experience in aviation, and I do emergency response work in my Copious Free Time[tm], so let’s break this down.
“Fact #1: All Boeing 777 commercial jets are equipped with black box recorders that can survive any on-board explosion”
This is misleading at best. The black box recorders (which aren’t black, actually. Most of them are bright orange, so they’re easier to spot) are pretty damn tough. They take a lot of abuse in all kinds of crashes. But the issue with the missing aircraft did not necessarily originate from inside. There are all kinds of things that can damage the recorder, sometimes substantially. But we can afford to let this one go, since it’s nearly irrelevant to the rest of the piece.
“Fact #2: All black box recorders transmit locator signals for at least 30 days after falling into the ocean“
It’s true that many units do sent out a beacon, but “ocean” here is a problem. The author makes some bold claims about the fact that they can’t find the box means that it’s gone or (I love this) has “been obliterated by some powerful force beyond the worst fears of aircraft design engineers.” I know the worst fears of design engineers — the black box isn’t one of them.
He ignores two relevant facts here. The first is that the recorder isn’t going to keep a beacon going for thirty days (ocean or not) with pixie dust or unicorn farts. It needs a battery, and those store limited energy. The pings from the beacon are relatively low in power, and presume that the search area is fairly small. The beacon will be hard to detect and track when a large sector of the ocean is being searched…they’d consider themselves lucky if they found it first.
The second is that radio signals don’t travel well through good electrical conductors such as salt water. This is why submarines generally have to surface (or nearly surface) to get an antenna in the air first. It’s true that subs can communicate with Very Low Frequency (VLF) or Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) waves. But building the transmitters is bloody hard, because these are remarkably long wavelengths. The top end of VLF, for example is 30 kHz, which gives a wavelength of about 10 kilometers (six miles)! There’s no way something the size of a flight data recorder can manage that. So they use a more reasonable frequency, but if it’s more than 50 feet below the surface, it won’t be heard unless you’re right on top of it…which requires that you find it in the first place. Chicken, meet egg.
“Fact #3: Many parts of destroyed aircraft are naturally bouyant and will float in water“
We’ll disregard the spelling error here. It is true that many parts are naturally buoyant and will float, and he even points out that the seat bottoms can be used for flotation — but not well. They are just buoyant enough to help a human remain afloat. And we’re already fairly buoyant ourselves.
What he’s missing here is that the buoyant parts are attached to a lot of very distinctly non-buoyant parts. They’ll sink when everything else does, for the most part. There will be a few things on the surface at the point of impact, but not a lot…more on this in a moment.
“Fact #4: If a missile destroyed Flight 370, the missile would have left a radar signature“
Health Ranger talks here about the radar signature that missiles and their associated explosions present. I think he could stand to read up on the subject; there is an entire industry dedicated to stealth planes, missiles, boats, bobbleheads, what have you, and they are good at it. But his assessment presumes that a radar was pointed in the right direction at the right time…and there probably wasn’t one, because there is no radar tracking over the ocean.
This is a common misconception. We have GPS devices in nearly everything now. I have four in my house as I write. It’s hard for us to imagine not being able to find things, but the simple truth is that once the aircraft is more than 150 miles from shore, it’s out of range. I spent part of my career in aviation working with weather radar, and even the airborne units (with 30,000 feet of altitude to help get around Earth’s curvature) can only manage 300 miles, and that’s only for large storm systems.
Having said that, I don’t think this flight went down silently. I’ve read that it had ACARS, which transmits maintenance data to ground crews. This is NOT a real-time system, but it does send packets via satellite or what have you periodically. So there may be a clue in the ACARS data, if someone has it. (There are real-time systems available, but Boeing says it wasn’t installed on this aircraft.)
“Fact #5: The location of the aircraft when it vanished is not a mystery“
He needs to define “vanished.” We certainly know where it was when contact was lost — DUH! But that doesn’t tell us where it was when it crashed, or landed, or otherwise met its fate. That plane had enough fuel to remain airborne for hours — it could have gone well over 1000 miles before actually crashing. In fact, news reports tonight state there is some reason to think it actually crossed to the other side of India.
Long story short, we still have no idea where it crashed (if it did. Could easily have made a number of landing sites in poorly covered areas).
“Fact #6: If Flight 370 was hijacked, it would not have vanished from radar“
Complete load of horsepucky here. As stated above, more than 150 miles out, they fall off the screen. If it were hijacked and the hijackers understood it, they could actually have gotten closer to radar and still not be seen, by dropping below Earth’s curvature. (Mind you, this has other issues. Jets close enough to shoot with pistols tend to get attention in other ways.)
Sorry, but this is just not how it works.
This is the money shot:
If we never find the debris, it means some entirely new, mysterious and powerful force is at work on our planet which can pluck airplanes out of the sky without leaving behind even a shred of evidence.
Holy crap. He even says this immediately after admitting that they most likely haven’t found debris because it’s outside the search zone. (The one thing he says that makes sense.) But then, he says things like “inescapable conclusion,” too.
This all seems to stem from the belief that the debris field would be “massive.” But scale matters here. Yes, a 777 is big. It won’t fit in your garage (unless it has more than ten thousand square feet). But our planet is big…many orders of magnitude bigger than the jet. As in 5,508,532,127,000,000 square feet. Most of which is ocean. Get the picture?
The truth is, it’s very hard to spot things in the water unless you’re pretty much right over them. The search area is too large to expect to find anything quickly, if there is anything to find.