“Unfortunately, the acoustics generated by the impact of MH370 on the ocean surface would not propagate along the “deep sound channel” (DSC) the way an underwater acoustic event does, so the impact likely was not detected by CTBTO sensors.” - suggests this is unlikely, although not detailed explanation
Don't the 777s have 2 engines?
I confess I don't understand this. The families know how their loved ones died, when, and sort of where (in the ocean). How does knowing the precise location help any?
Ooh, I can answer that. All of it, unless forced to disclose by political factors. There is no upside to the military to releasing anything, ever.
HN is a geekfest, and I'm a geek too. I could not, and still cannot, comprehend how resistant to the "helpfulness instinct" a military man is. I, by my very nature, cannot resist helping people whereever i can, and offering whatever information I might judge useful whenever I can. The military [1] is the exact opposite of that. It's hard to get your head around.
I have zero doubt that one or more militaries in the area, especially Singapore, know exactly where MH370 went, or at least what direction it eventually took off in. Every radar in the world is recording 24/7. They have no incentive whatsoever to divulge what they undoubtably know. We'll find out in a few decades, probably.
[1] and many large corporations.
There were so many cranks producing ideas where MH370 went, they could have just used one of those as a front by "backing" a theory that happens to be nearby the point where they have to search, gently nudging the search closer to where it really is and score tons of points for being first in a huge international search effort.
Here's a list of DoD press releases: https://dod.defense.gov/News/Releases/
It lists around 500 just in the last year. I don't quite see how "Navy to Christen Guided-Missile Destroyer Frank E. Petersen Jr." would fall under "forced disclosure due to political factors".
I know it's fun to daydream of that perfect organisation constantly updating its "threat actor assessments" and how your speech was really what made the difference in going to Force Protection Condition Medium.
But seriously: the DoD has dozens of press staffers and the phone numbers of people that could pass on a tip under the radar. They have ongoing as well as incident-specific efforts to coordinate with civilian efforts. They regularly pass along environmental measurement data collected from ships, airplanes, and satellites to support research, weather forecasting, or disaster preparedness.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Sosus_ma...
Seismic is rough. Even large earthquake events are localized with large error because of constant noise - seismic event arrivals are hard to pinpoint precisely in time. On top of that, once we have arrival times from a bunch of seismometers(microphones) localization is an inversion problem, dependent on velocity models for a rather heterogeneous earth which further reduces location precision. Even worse, I doubt a crashing jet produces a large magnitude (loud) seismic event, so picking out its arrival in noisy mic data is even harder than it can be for shallow earthquakes.
I'd guess a radius on the order of thousands of miles at best, but it's all contingent on how loud the event was and how noisy the mics that picked it up are.
1k mile radius is 3.14 million square miles. The oceans are 140 million square miles.
