It appears that a Malaysian airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing has crashed with 227 passengers plus crew on board. This is terribly tragic and saddening. But I'm also confused by news reports which are stating that the airline has no idea where the plane is and that they lost contact 2 hours into the flight. The fact that they don't know where it is seems crazy, since planes are tracked on radar and with radio beacon system called ADS-B. According to wikipedia "Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) is a cooperative surveillance technology for tracking aircraft. The aircraft determines its own position via GNSS and periodically broadcasts this via a radio frequency.". So how can they not no where the plane crashed?
The second thing that's not making sense is the 2 hours before they lost contact. According to flightaware.com, which monitors plane locations using ADS-B, the last reported position for the plane was braodcast at 12:02 pm EST, less than 20 minutes after it took off, at Lat 4.9, Long 102.6. (http://flightaware.com/live/flight/MAS370/history/20140307/1635Z/WMKK/ZBAA/tracklog) This would put it just a hundred of so miles from Kuala Lumpur and near a Large Lake called Hulu Terengganu. So either the location beacon failed before communications, the news reports are wrong, flightaware.com is wrong, or the airline is not telling the truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment