The Wall Street Journal reports that two months after pausing its search for the missing Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777-200ER, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) is ready to reboot its search. The ATSB is poised to select among bids from the world's most-advanced deep-water specialists, including offshore oil-and-gas companies, maritime research institutions and treasure hunters eager to use their technologies and experience to solve the Flight 370 riddle -and potentially raise their own profiles in the process. The ATSB is expected to choose one or more of the bidders over the next several weeks before relaunching the search with $56 million in funding in late August.
With no hard evidence of where the plane went down, the search will test the recovery industry's abilities like nothing before. In June, Australian authorities shifted the search zone for a third time -by about 600 miles to the southwest -after reanalyzing satellite transmissions. Even then, they said it was impossible to know whether the fresh search area would prove correct.
STORY: http://online.wsj.com/articles/worlds-deep-sea-explorers-angle-to-solve-the-mystery-of-the-missing-malaysian-airliner-1406833389
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Tuesday August 05 2014, @11:53AM
Really, they are "rebooting" and not "restarting" from a paused search.?
(Score: 1) by sjwt on Tuesday August 05 2014, @11:59AM
so wrong..
A reboot is where major plot points and characters change, for example if all of a sudden its revealed that the president was on the plain, or the plain didn't go down in the ocean but rather over the desert. A restart would be nothing much changes but it happens again.. This is more like a renewal, Season 2 if you will.
(Score: 3, Funny) by sudo rm -rf on Tuesday August 05 2014, @12:30PM
I'm okay with this, so long as they don't make a prequel :)
On a more serious note, there are not many things as effective as making a competition out of a problem to get it solved. The rewards are prestige and fame, the main pillars of today's companies.
Honestly, I wish to see this riddle solved.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by skater on Tuesday August 05 2014, @01:10PM
To a point, healthy competition can be good. Unfortunately, I work in an environment where it has sometimes gone too far - not directly affecting me, fortunately, but it can affect the quality of the work our company does, and I'm in a QA management position. Every group is trying to "be the first" to start, the first to finish, etc., all for bragging rights ONLY, and those managers put an inordinate amount of pressure on the lower level managers to perform or BE FIRED! When that kind of pressure (we call it the "horse race") is applied, shortcuts start happening - not that I blame the lower level people, of course - and things start getting ugly.
Part of my job is to figure out how to combat that and get back to the healthy competition stage. It's not going to be easy.
(Score: 1) by sudo rm -rf on Tuesday August 05 2014, @01:49PM
I agree with you, gamification should not get overhand, especially when losing brings repercussions in real life. The situation in your company sounds like it is only a game played by the upper level managers, with the lower level people being some kind of pawns in a chess game.
"The workers are complaining about tough deadlines!" -- "Then let them work longer!" is obviously not a solution I would prefer...
(Score: 2) by joshuajon on Tuesday August 05 2014, @07:18PM
How about the Crowdsourced search for Malaysia Airlines MH370 [tomnod.com]? Prestige and fame await - time to start clicking :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 05 2014, @07:53PM
so wrong..
A reboot is where major plot points and characters change, for example if all of a sudden its revealed that the president was on the plane, or the plane didn't go down in the ocean but rather over the desert. A restart would be nothing much changes but it happens again.. This is more like a renewal, Season 2 if you will.
FTFY
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday August 05 2014, @12:22PM
Just ask Putin, everyone has agreed he shot down the other Malaysian Airlines plane. Just kidding. Sorta. Maybe the .ru really has it in for Malaysia, real bad. Could happen, although I have no idea why.
WRT stats I'm having problems finding search result stats. All I know for certain is a much larger target in a known area, the Titanic, took decades to find. Without more stats I can't figure out if this is a waste of time / pork barrel project or if there is a realistic expectation of finding parts of the plane.
If its pork barrel, then there's an opportunity for interesting basic science and experimentation aside from making money for the right people. On the other hand, if they really do expect to find it, then fooling around with underwater laser rangefinders and mass spectrometer analysis looking for small traces in seawater of aluminum isotopes and whatever else a jet is made of (composites? Lithium batteries? Human bodies?), although really technologically cool, would just be slowing down the recovery. So its a valid question from a tech perspective.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Thexalon on Tuesday August 05 2014, @02:09PM
"This is your captain speaking. Everyone get out of the plane, I'll shut everything down and start it up again. Then you can get back in, and we'll continue with our flight."
An alternate but related theory of what happened is of course demonstrated by John Cleese, Graham Chapman, and Michael Palin [youtube.com] (pre-Monty Python).
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Tuesday August 05 2014, @02:15PM
Really, why? This won't bring anyone back to life - likely nothing much will be recovered. Why is this worth the money and effort?
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rune of Doom on Tuesday August 05 2014, @03:38PM
Leaving aside conspiracy theories, to prevent it from happening again. If they can find the black boxes, reconstructing what happened goes from "best speculation" to "rational deduction". Whatever wreckage they can find will help too. If this was some sort of remote hijack, or the bizarre outcome of an onboard fire, it will be good to know how it happened and can be prevented. And if it was pilot-suicide or physical hijack, that'll be good to know as well.
(Score: 2) by umafuckitt on Tuesday August 05 2014, @07:32PM
Frankly, the best way to stop this stuff from happening again is to spend the money kitting out air planes so we always know exactly what they're doing and where they are. That way we won't have to go searching for them under these conditions again.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Tork on Tuesday August 05 2014, @04:16PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 4, Interesting) by goodie on Tuesday August 05 2014, @04:26PM
You know that's actually an interesting point I asked myself when the whole AF flight crash happened. The French government seemed to be only remotely interested in finding that thing once the expected batteries of the beacons were out. However people mobilized to get this continued and in the end, private enterprise took over.
Now, to me the interesting bit is how we were able, 2 years later, to get those black boxes out. What it does is the following:
- Prove that they are indeed strong as hell to resist the time, pressure etc. they were subjected to (not sure anybody had tested them in that way...)
- Push the limits of human exploration under water and probably trigger some innovation which benefited private enterprises for future endeavors
- Shuts people's conspiracy theories such as "plane was hit by lightning, that's why it went down"
But the 2 most important reasons are:
- It gave closure to families who did not know what happened, who they could (rightfully) blame and so on
- It allowed people to understand what happened and more specifically to determine liability and fault so that not only the parties could work out the legal details (who pays how much to whom) but also so that training, components (those tubes) and so on could be modified for the future. In the end, it pointed a clear finger toward AF for their slow reaction to updating those speed tubes and the poor reaction from the young co-pilot. Sucks, but the way I see it, airline is the type of business where accidents are some of the biggets opportunities to learn and get better. and I'm fairly certain that this disaster is now included as a scenario in a lot of pilot trainings in simulators.
As far as we know, the same thing could have happened with the MA flight. But until we find it, we won't know. If I had lost someone in that disaster, I would be pretty sad if the authorities gave up because there was only a remote chance they'd find anything.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by darnkitten on Tuesday August 05 2014, @05:31PM
To show that it wasn't hijacked by Muslim terrorists with the intent of loading it with a nuclear weapon in order to deliver an EMP-pulse which would knock out New York and Washington, D.C., ushering in a war that would result in the ascension of the Antichrist, etc., etc. (taken from actual conversation--apparently the scenario has been featured in some apocalyptic/end-times media and publications).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 05 2014, @07:38PM
I mean currents move stuff around and bury it deeper all the time... strange to say the least.
(Score: 2) by scruffybeard on Wednesday August 06 2014, @11:45AM
This is not much different from what happens to cold case police investigations. You search for evidence until you exhaust all logical possibilities. Eventually those investigators need to return to their regular work. The investigation is restarted when you find additional evidence, or when someone is found who has a fresh perspective, and the time and interest to continue the case.