Re: Malaysia Airlines Plane is Missing
The transmitters on the engines cannot be disabled by the pilots during flight from what was explained.
Okay I was watching CNN and they explained how these ping things work. Basically a satellite is sitting over like India. Now I don't know why this is but the satellite basically covers a ring around a certain area so if you been watching TV and they're depicting these arches going south and north from the last known location, that's part of the ring. They're not showing the entire ring because the aircraft wouldn't have able to reach the parts of the ring not being depicted. The satellite sends a signal blindly and when an aircraft reaches that ring it pings back to the satellite. It's not an exact location. It just knows the aircraft passed through the ring at that time. So the aircraft can be anywhere along that ring to which is why by deduction you see the arch go all the way to central Asia and down in the southern part of the Indian Ocean.
That's right, and now we know when the ping stopped the plane may or may not be in the Indian ocean.
The satellite is geostationary, that is why we have fixed rings. If the satellite received multiple pings over time it may still be possible to narrow down the track of the aircraft by comparing the time of the ping and the ring location of each ping, because if we assume economic cruising speed, then different headings will result in different time for the airplane to travel from one "ring" to another. If multiple satellites received the pings then it will be even easier to plot a path. But if the ping is not a regular (e.g. hourly) transmission, just a one-time signal (e.g. an automatic warning message when the engine run out of fuel, etc.), and if it only reached one satellite, then all we know will be the red lines illustrated on the ring chart.
