Malaysian Airlines Disaster

If the plane went down rapidly, there is a very good chance that mobiles would still ring, at least for a short while after, even if the phones were all dust.

Its a bit technical, but bear with me. When your phone is doing nothing, it will occasionally do a 'cell scan'. You might have heard this happening if your phone is on a desk close to your desk phone and it does it while you're on your landline, that crackling buzzing it randomly does is it interfering with the sensitive amp in your desk phone. They do this when you first switch them on, when you go to make a call (or send a text), when the signal is lost, and at intervals in between. Basically, your phone calls out to all masts, "hi masts, who can hear me?". Then all the masts in range reply. Then there is a brief exchange between the masts and the phone, while they work out between themselves which mast can best serve the phone at that time. This is called 'handshaking'. Once the phone and the masts have reach agreement, the mast will record that it is serving that phone, and the phone will record that it is being served by that mast. The mast will also record that it believes the phone to be in range and listening.

It gets slightly more complicated. Masts don't only serve phones, they also serve other masts. If I phone someone who is 2 thousand miles away, my nearest mast will rely the message via whatever medium is available (it could go by air, cable or fibre). The more hops that have to be made while routing it, the longer it will take. Its not quite like the internet, which keeps fixed routing details, its similar but being more dynamic means its slower to establish the best routing.

All this means that if my phone is suddenly destroyed, ie not simply lost signal (and possibly got a cell scan out before it went off completely), then the last the infrastructure knew was that the phone was online and listening. That means that if someone calls that phone, the infrastructure will go through the motions of attempting to connect the call, and if there are lots of steps in the route, it could take long enough (several seconds) to start ringing before the infrastructure realises it is getting no signal back from the recipient's phone. Hence their phone could ring, as far as the caller is concerned, even if the receiving phone is dust.

 

Definitely yes. I hadn't realised it was that long. I thought we were talking a few hours max.

 

Remember Dim? He would have loved this!!!

Anyway, if it was hijacked they knew enough about tracking and data transmission systems that they would not have overlooked mobile phone signals. At cruising height it's not an issue as the phones rely on the aircraft to keep them in range if it has that facility (not all do). As it's easy to triangulate a phone at ground level, if they were ringing they were being allowed to ring for a reason. If they were ringing this line of inquiry has been exhausted.

So I am having a "Dim" moment - I suspect that certain services know a lot more than we are hearing and I suspect that they are worried.

 

Breaking news....'wreckage' been spotted 1500 miles off the coast of Perth Austrailia...

 

Except they seem to have lost it again......

 

still searching for that piece of wreckage,

 

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2014/03/mh370-electrical-fire/

An interesting theory - and a nice non-scary one, unless you've got a flight booked!

 

It should have been a simple case of taking its planned route, last known speed and location, and then calculating a range along an approximate line that it could have reached in the time between last contact and realising it was gone. The fact that it isn't there, and that it is believed to have changed course, is most alarming to me. This suggests that the plane was nicked. It sounds daft, the idea of an entire plane being stolen, but its not entirely unprecedented. I remember a case in the news when I was a teenager when an entire Russian battleship was stolen by the crew, and bolted for someone else's territorial waters before could be sunk without starting a war.

If I was nicking a plane, I'd change course while the course change was detectable, then dive below radar before changing course again and bolting for some empty patch of land where it could be landed and hidden. Its slightly worrying because as someone else mentioned (either on here or elsewhere on t'web, it could be used later in a terrorist attack. An idea occurred to me while pondering this. If someone was to bring an unidentified military aircraft to someone else's airspace, it would be shot down pretty quickly. If its a passenger jet, it will get lots of warnings and a fighter escort before drastic action is taken, by which time it could be close to its target. It could get closer still if it was to occupy the flight path of another flight that is actually expected, but say 5 minutes ahead of it, so that the first radar blips as it approaches are just accepted as the expected flight. So there we are, that's my conspiracy theory. Aviation experts will probably (hopefully) have a gazillion reasons why that wouldn't work.

 

Wouldn't they use it for a surprise attack if that was so? That would be more productive (from their point of view) than just kidnapping the passengers. If the actual plane is the reason for the hijacking then one fears horribly for them. It could seem preferable if the plane had just crashed into the ocean, although where there's life, there's hope, I guess.