Malaysia Airlines 777 missing

Regarding the automated ACARS maintenance messages, does anyone know if those are carried by VHF line of sight, HF, or SATCOM? If the latter, I would be surprised if Boeing/engine manufacturer (GE/RR)/Malaysian Airlines wasn't sitting on a pile of time-stamped data like AF447.
 
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JEP said:
Does this suck...? yes. Do I feel sorry for those effected...? yes.

That said....If you hate the media and wish they die in the fire, why continue to contribute....?

They are taking photos and reporting a story......
Others are taking those same photos and posting them on various forums....

I dont see a big difference.....

That said I agree with a few posts above, them minute this happened they should have been rounded up and escorted to a private area of teh airport away from all of the press....
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Derg said:
How often do you lose jets off the scope and if so, when do you start getting suspicious about the situation?

Damn it's nice having ATC guys on the site. And no I'm not kissing your ass for a shortcut to the oceanic entry point right now! :)
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Lose them for more than a minute, pretty rare .

For us they turn blue after 5 consecutive missed sweeps (25 seconds) then orange estimated position based on flight plan until they come back.

Every time they go orange in an unexpected area, I'm usually murmuring.

"Ok... Come back now please"

Then you make a call to them, the times the crew isn't listening for 2-3 calls is chilling at times.

I mean it happens often enough, failed transponders, someone bumps it off
 
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mshunter said:
Actually, no, I never have. What's that story. I forgot, I have to spell out every last bit of info here, lest I want to get snarky little comments like this.

In todays day and age, with all of our modern technology, airplanes don't just disappear.
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Come on man, she hid in an attic from the Vietcong.
 
canadian_atc said:
Lose them for more than a minute, pretty rare .

For us they turn blue after 5 consecutive missed sweeps (25 seconds) then orange estimated position based on flight plan until they come back.
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I lost a RADAR target on a fighter type once. Kind of explained the PLT on guard the last 8 or 10 seconds.
 
HF might be slower, but not as slow as you'd think. Not a lot of data in an acars text message, so it is not usually noticeably slower than VHF. It is really transparent, I don't pay attention to what its using normally, but sometimes I'll just glance down and see SAT or HF, etc.. It shifts on its own, sometimes it chooses SAT over CONUS, not sure why.
 
Derg said:
How often do you lose jets off the scope and if so, when do you start getting suspicious about the situation?

Damn it's nice having ATC guys on the site. And no I'm not kissing your ass for a shortcut to the oceanic entry point right now! :)
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They show ZZZ in the data tag here (terminal environment) and it sits in the exact spot where the computer lost them. Had a certain B767 Z out and go NORDO, a few weeks back, while on base to final in triple visual approaches. Thankfully, I saw his primary only target and he went back to the last assigned frequency who turned him to join the localizer before he conflicted with traffic on adjacent finals. His transponder/ data tag didn't reacquire until he was at the FAF.

It rarely happens that we lose an aircraft on radar or even lose their data tag on fusion, but it does happen.
 
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