It has now been almost exactly a month since flight MH370 went missing. We still haven’t found any debris, but over the last couple of days we have heard some “pings” that might be from the black boxes aboard the missing plane. On Sunday, Chinese media outlets reported that its Haixun 01 patrol ship heard pings for around 90 seconds. Then, on Monday morning, Australia reported that Ocean Shield — a huge ship that’s towing a pinger locator — had detected an underwater pinger twice: first for 2 hours and 20 minutes, and then later for 13 minutes. In all three cases, the pings were on the 37.5kHz frequency used by airplane black boxes (the flight data recorder, FDR, and the cockpit voice recorder, CVR). To read more about black box pingers, read our story about airplane tracking technology (or the lack of it).
The search area continues to move north, which means the weather conditions are now actually quite favorable for finding debris from flight MH370. Unfortunately, though, the pings detected by the Chinese ship came from “four and a half kilometers” (2.8 miles) straight down — and suffice it to say, performing a salvage/recovery mission some 15,000 feet underwater is rather difficult.
Post Credit = http://www.extremetech.com
Wallpaper
