MH370 – Analyzing The Techs

At 0240 hours local time on last Saturday, Malaysia Airlines flight number MH370 was reported to have lost contact with all ground control tower as well going missing from radars. The flight was expected to arrive in Beijing at 0630 hours, but it never did.

Currently, various neighbouring countries are still conducting the search operation to find the missing Boeing 777, or at least what’s left of what is dubbed the safest aircraft ever built to date. The collaboration involves Malaysia, Japan, Vietnam, Singapore, US, China, Thailand and Philippines. The mentioned nations are bringing various specialized search and rescue assets to assist in finding the wreckage of MH370. Here, we will try to uncover and give light to what really happened during the moments; which some people might get confused or frustrated when it comes to the technology used such as radar positioning, ‘black box’ emergency beacon and various advanced technologies involved.

The Radar
Some people might ask the question, the Vietnam officials declared that the flight has crashed and they have the crash site position from their last radar data yet, why did we not deploy a team to recover them?

The plane “lost all contact and radar signal one minute before it entered Vietnam’s air traffic control,”

– Lt Gen Vo Van Tuan, deputy chief of staff of the Vietnamese army

Now, it may sound as simple and straight forward to just go to the last known position but the reality is, flight MH370 was travelling at around 500 knots which translates roughly around 926 km/h. Note that the flight was also travelling at a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, to give perspective, around 10.6 KM above ground.
As of now, nobody knows what exactly happened to the aircraft which makes it harder to predict it’s crash trajectory since they can’t establish contact with the pilots during the final moments.

Here is the replay video of the online radar data:

On the map it sure looks like a small blip or area but in reality, the possible crash site might be located some tens of kilometres away from MH370’s last known location. As you can see here is the search operation’s plan for the search area before they widen their search area this morning.

Even with the help of various assets from various countries, sweeping kilometers of open sea is not an easy task. Especially when the object is not floating and visible from aerial view.
This morning, they have analyzed the radar data into it’s most highest resolution, combining with data from military radar, they found that the craft attempted to make a ‘Air Turnback’. Air Turnback is a term used by aviation related as a maneuver  made by the pilot in an attempt to land to it’s origin take off airport at the first sign of trouble which deemed unsafe to continue flying. It’s something like a u-turn for planes.
This even adds more complications and to why the search area was widen this morning.

The Black Box (Flight Data Recorder)
Now some might get too excited and frustrated to why isn’t the crash site determined by the signal emitted by the Black Box? Let’s take a look into the technology behind the Black Box.

A black box is the crucial instrument when it comes to aircraft accident investigations as it provides recorded data of the cockpit voice, air speed, altitude and a very long list of other flight data before and during the crash.

All Black Box are equipped with an Underwater Locator Beacon which will be activated as soon as water comes into contact with the beacon. It could transmit up to 14000 feet in depth(4.2 kilometers). As to it’s popular name, the box is not actually black but painted in bright orange for easy visual searching. A Black Box could withstand fires up to 1,110 degrees Celsius for an hour, 260 degrees Celsius for 10 hours. It caries a minimum of 25 hours of flight data.

“Under good conditions, the signal can be detected from several hundred miles away”

“If the boxes are trapped inside the wreckage, the sound may not travel far. If the boxes are at the bottom of an underwater trench, that also hinders the signal, which can also weaken over time.”

– John Goglia, a former member of the US National Transportation Safety Board.

Coming back to the Underwater Locator Beacon; the signal of the Black Box’s beacon strength and effective range depends on various factor such as how deep it sank or was it still in the aircraft.
The signal that the device transmits are in sonar form which sends “pingers” for 30 days every 1 second. If the box was still in the wreckage, this could mean the signal could have been weakened thus, making the sonar signal to travel for a shorter time and distance.

Looking back at a famous crash, the Air France crash took investigators 3 days to find the wreckage and 2 years later to find the Black Box.

The Passports and Biometrics
Today, our Malaysian government officials has confirmed that two of the passengers are using a fake passport. The actual passport owners has contacted the authorities and confirmed that they are not on board the flight MH370 and told that reports of the stolen passports has been filed in Thailand earlier before the incident. Two stolen passport origins are Austria and Italy. Before we take an in-depth look at these two passport, let’s take a look at one of the world’s most secure passport; the Malaysian passport.

In 1998, Malaysia was the first country in the world to issue a biometric passport.

Malaysian passport, the biometric passport was deemed one of the most secure passport in the world and said to be highly expensive in the black market because of it’s difficulty to counterfeit or obtain illegally. It is equipped with the latest biometric chip. In 1998, Malaysia was the first country in the world to issue a biometric passport after a local security expert company, IRIS developed the technology. Thumbprint data was later added in December 2002 which uses similar technology to MyKad.

The biometric chip contains a photograph and the bearer’s two thumbprint. RFID in the passport was used to connect the biometric chip’s data to the airport’s fingerprint scanner and facial recognition technology. In 2006, IRIS announced that the biometric chip has yet to successfully cloned by hackers. In addition, the data is also stored in local government’s database so any tampering of the data will immediately alert the authorities. In 2010, Malaysia started issuing ICAO compliant e-passports which is valid for only five or two years. As of now, various countries has adopted our biometric passport technology such as in the US and UK international airports.

Getting back to the stolen passports,  both the Italy and Austria passport are pretty much similar since they are both issued on EU Passports standards. Both passports are equipped with biometric chips which contains their picture and fingerprint. The data is then compared from the physical scan to the ones in the chip. Unlike Malaysian passport, our data is cross matched to the local data servers and the chip at the same time. The case is still under investigation by the Malaysian based FBI and interpol.

Whatever the outcome may be, we here at Nasi Lemak Tech are sending our prayers to the friends, families and victims involved in the MH370 incident. With many nations working together with various advanced military grade technologies, I’m sure we will find something very soon. 

Sources:
Radar shows ‘air turnback’
Black Box informations
Air France black box recovered 2 years later
Black box beacon explaination
Biometric passport
Malaysian development on biometric passports

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