Flight 370 The Missing Links Documentary

Video Statistics and Information

Video

Captions Word Cloud

Captions

flight mh370 ended in a southern Indian Ocean as every hour goes by the search area gets bigger and bigger when flight 370 went off-grid on March the 8th 2014 it became an international mystery it's just not acceptable for an aircraft full of passengers to vanish the world can't tolerate that how can a state-of-the-art plane and 239 passengers and crew simply disappear the Malaysian 370 could be the 21st century maricella nothing was ruled out over the mysterious loss of a Malaysian airliner it challenges everything you know about modern aviation technology and exposes disturbing gaps in communication and security is how we think outside the box to help us manage this kind of situation we've gathered some of the world's leading experts in air travel to explore 10 vital missing links surrounding the disappearance of flight 370 we've got so much smart technology we've got our mobile phones we've got GPS we can find anything anywhere in the world we've actually lost a plane will this terrifying incident change our travel through the skies forever Kuala lumper International Airport it's one of the biggest and busiest airports in Asia like many other aviation hubs around the world hundreds of flights take off from here every day on March the 7th 2014 a few hours before its scheduled departure 227 passengers are checking into Malaysia flight 370 flying overnight they're due to arrive in Beijing at 6:30 a.m. the passengers first have to go through standard airport security while their identification documents are checked and our luggage screened the Boeing triple7 is being prepared for departure reporting in to work the 12 crew members of flight 370 a headed for the plane they too have to clear security what flight 370 has flagged up yes in dirt more needs to be done in terms of looking up the the flight crew themselves this security footage shows both captain zaharie Ahmed Shah and his copilot phoric Abdul Hameed going through a scanner before getting on the plane the easiest way to go through security and harm evasion to throw the call nobody checks the pool in many countries the only thorough background check pilots submit to is when signing up with an airline but before a flight they simply get waved through the scanner it appeared to show the captain going through the scanner and then the security officer stepped forward and literally a pat him on the chest and then send him through so there is a gap there if there is a bad apple among the pilots you have the risk of someone who is going to make use of the loopholes to disappear from the sky while the flight crew makes its way to the plane the passengers go through ground security with their passports two passengers about to get on flight 370 a traveling on stolen passports but they don't get picked up to fight the background checks weren't properly done with regards to the people getting onboard this plane is a serious concern for me they are later identified is Iranian asylum seekers but how did they manage to slip through the passport control without getting detected Interpol has a database with details of more than 14 million stolen or missing passports all contributing States to Interpol and there's about 160 of those have access to the database but unfortunately it's not a compulsory issue that countries have to interrogate that database in fact most countries including Malaysia don't use it regularly to screen passengers this alarming gap may raise the pressure to change international passport protocols I think we'll find that Interpol's database will now be used a lot more frequently but the cost and access means has to be easy passports cleared like passengers everywhere those traveling on flight 370 proceed to security checkpoints for screening they're checked for explosives weapons and dangerous materials we get our bikes checked we get checked going through scanners but actually does this indicate that there is a loop portal since 9/11 luggage and body scans have become mandatory in airports all around the world but the process is not as comprehensive as we think I'll carry-on bags don't always get enough attention so stand in line for an hour you think this is very high security but if you look at the actual screening it takes probably between 12 to 15 seconds now there is a person sitting in front of the baggage check machine and they see an image every eight seconds I don't know anybody who can really check what is in the luggage in eight seconds we have weaknesses in there because there's certain fundamental functions we just haven't yet got the equipment to do like finding explosives in carry-on luggage you can have a little bit closer bin there but it might look like a chunk of salami or a big chunk of cheese more than a decade after 9/11 security protocols seems strict but there are still fundamental weaknesses across the aviation world especially when it comes to technology and how it is used we'd like to see aviation security technology being advanced to the point where human error can be removed from the decision-making process the point where we're not reliant on the decision of a single person conducting body searches or scanning cargo or hold baggage catching security threats before they reach the aircraft is the most effective way to ensure safety new technologies are being developed to address gaps in identifying who is traveling what they are carrying and the state of mind of passengers and crew innovative detection methods are being implemented in airports around the world many of them rely on biometric science or 3d facial recognition and there are new systems designed to prevent any hazardous substance or explosive from making it onto the plane technology could be improved in old baggage screening or cabin baggage screening were a sophisticated algorithm within the x-ray machine itself has the ability to detect the presence of an explosive device and automatically contain that while there is no evidence linking crew members to the disappearance of flight 370 it raises questions about the need to evaluate them regularly there are new techniques that focus on physiological and psychological indicators the system there verifies your identity which is look at your eye movement can also see if you're drunk if you have a problem and if you're anxious we need to find out that at least the pilot the copilot and the purser are not under duress before they enter the cockpit on the plane with the Haverhill screening nervousness or sweating or whatever might indicate that that person has something bad in mind but much of this blue sky technology is still in the future and for many air authorities around the world it's simply a question of cost versus risk there's a sharing of technology is required what we need to do is to get these advances in technology out of the developed world and into the developing world with security and safety checks complete flight 370's approved for takeoff at 12:40 a.m. the Boeing triple7 leaves the tarmac of Kuala lumper Airport for the very last time on its way to Beijing flight 370 will cross the airspace of neighboring Vietnam there are protocols for the handover of a flight from one country's air traffic control to the next one as he leaves one zone the pilot will be given information about the radio frequency for the next zone he will call ahead and let the next though know where he is and that he is about to enter that zone but often during a handover there can be a radio silence for a few moments this is known in aviation as a black spot malaysian air traffic control gives flight 370 instructions for the next fly zone over vietnam they were going to call Ho Chi Minh City and they were given a designated frequency upon which to do so but as far as we understand that calls never made exposing the next missing link as the final words from the flight deck echo into the ether one hour into flight 370's journey it prepares to transfer from Malaysian to Vietnamese airspace Malaysian air traffic control advises the pilots to check in with Vietnam and then signs off should have been a process whereby they say their good nights to Malaysian air traffic control and virtually in the next breath I'll say good morning to Vietnam the instruction was given it was acknowledged good night Malaysian 370 row and then silence this incomplete air traffic control handover is the next missing link in the chain with radio comms suspended air traffic control must rely on radar but missed hand overs are not necessarily unusual maybe in the middle of a conversation about the next navigational turn or something like that and you think oh I miss I forgot to check it it happens obviously it's not supposed to but it does happen but this so-called black hole between international air traffic controls provides a perfect opportunity for those with sinister intentions if you're planning for the airplane to disappear then that might well be the place where you would start it we've got five minutes grace perhaps before real the seediest investigation starts to take place more whirring two minutes after flight 370's last words the planes vital radar tracking device its transponder stops working with 20,000 flights in the air at any one time transponders are the primary way air traffic control keeps track of them the transponder is a device on the aircraft that sits there passively but the moment it receives certain radar waves from a ground-based radar it wakes up the radar will transmit a question that basically says who are you it then sends a digital message back saying I'm me I'm here and depending upon the complexity of the system on the airplane it may well give more information about the aircraft its altitude and its position high above the South China Sea there is radio silence from the aircraft and no blip from the transponder on the screens Vietnamese air traffic control is expecting the plane scheduled arrival in their space but from 1:21 a.m. on they can't see or hear flight 370 for an airplane to disappear off of the radar screens and not be in communication is a very very very difficult thing for air traffic control to live with blind without the transponder air traffic control doesn't know that the triple 7 is going way off course heading west in completely the opposite direction the rate of incidence of aircraft disappearing is really very low but it has happened before with devastating consequences in 9/11 when hijackers took control the first thing they did was to make the aircraft go silent they turned off the transponder and they cut off all radio transmissions nobody knew exactly where the airplanes were the tragedy sparked a global change in protocol when they started to realize what had happened one of one of the steps at out point is is to contact the security services if I was flying over London airspace and you know how many frequency changes you go through in a very short period of time if you miss one if nothing else happens in 20 minutes you'll have two fighters on your wing is another dramatic shake-up of the air traffic control system urgently needed perhaps it's time to replace a human handover with an automated system an automatic hand would actually be beneficial but wherever you introduce automation you introduce the potential risk of a risk it's a toss-up between technology giving us some certainty and the human factors giving us much greater control in our perception but also a failure point but the transponder is not the only system that keeps the planes in contact with the ground there's a second the aircraft communication addressing and reporting system or a car's aircraft can automatically send back data about their performance to their manufacturers such as engine performance fuel consumption perhaps even the speed of the aircraft but crucially on flight 370 this satellite messaging system stopped transmitting at about the same time as the plane deviated off course and the transponder stopped working it's within that ten maybe fifteen minutes of the outside that we really need to understand precisely what was going on in the carpets and the time the fact that both the transponder and the ACARS messaging system shut down raises a crucial question the transponder became inoperative how did it come inoperative it does appear that at some point part of the ACARS system was disabled that could have been either through intentional disabling or through some sort of very specific system failure the person best position to disable the system is the pilot if the pilot needs to turn off the transponder it's quite easy for him to do it's located down here on the central console and it's just a case of go to a single switch and turn that off another way to do that or for example to turn the ACARS off is to come up here to these circuit breakers and then you just pull the circuit breakers that apply and everything stops working there are legitimate reasons why a pilot would turn a transponder off I've had to turn a transponder off in flight once in my case it was because I had an electrical failure I can't imagine a situation where you would turn a transponder off and not tell air-traffic control that that's what you were doing whether accidental or deliberate should pilots have the option to switch it off without consent from the ground we have to recognize the captain of an airplane is and must be in full control of everything on the aircraft including having to turn off all electrical systems other than the ones he absolutely needs for flight control in order to cope with for example fires the idea that you could be overridden from the ground I find actually quite terrified how can the ground make the decisions you make in the air striking a balance between your tana me of the pilots and the importance of accurate tracking will remain a challenge a human hand isn't the only possible cause behind the tracking systems failure a mechanical fault could just as easily shut down the electrics perhaps explaining why the flight couldn't be tracked and the crew was unable to make a distress call the Boeing triple7 has been flying for 20 years and has one of the best safety records of any commercial aircraft the triple sevens a very safe aircraft there are over a thousand of them in service and their accident rate is particularly low but mechanical failure isn't unknown in 2008 frozen fuel caused a triple 7 to crash-land at London's Heathrow but a more likely scenario for a mechanical failure on board flight 370 is a cockpit fire like the one on Egypt air 667 a short circuit in the electrics ignited the oxygen line into the cockpit within 30 seconds the fire had burned a suitcase sized hole the fuselage if a mechanical fault is to blame it could explain why flight 370 unexpectedly turned west any sort of smoke fire anything like that your first move is the land as soon as possible if something similar happened to flight 370 that explains the term aviate navigate communicate it's not desperately surprising vert they didn't manage to get out an emergency message because had it been some sort of bad cockpit fire you're talking twenty to thirty seconds it's not a lot of time but there is no attempted landing flight 370 flies on in the wrong direction heading out to sea however on board tracking and comms were disabled one vital communication link kept going the pings or handshakes from the satellite antenna pings or an automated response from the aircraft saying yes I'm still here crucially the pings keep transmitting for six hours after the plane has veered off course this development will prove vital in the search for flight 370 while those pings don't give us any data in themselves of where it may have been located we know through those pings that the aircraft was in flight for a number of hours beyond when it lost contact we now know the plane flew towards the wilds of the roaring 40s some of the most inhospitable seas in the southern Indian Ocean but was man or machine in control if the pilots stopped flying the airplane the autopilot will normally carry on and it will keep carrying on until it's landed the aircraft at its destination all the aircraft has run out of fuel or something else has gone wrong like a ghost plane was autopilot taking flight 370 to its final resting place leaving the world to wonder where it had gone flight 370 is flying off course and into the vast wilderness of the Indian Ocean a mystery that has exposed a chain of missing links in aviation safety on the ground the world is just waking up to the breaking news there is a missing plane relatives and friends in Beijing have gone to meet the arrival of flight 370 but it never turns up late others come from there the flight mh370 at last hunting with super inside in control and 240 running dangerously low on fuel at 8:11 a.m. local time the stricken plane sends its last automatic satellite handshake signal or ping it's more than 7 hours since the transponder was deactivated and six hours since Malaysian air traffic control last heard the copilot's voice for a large aircraft to go untracked for such a prolonged period of time that is quite unique it's incredible that when we've got so much smart technology we've got our mobile phones we've got GPS we can find anything anywhere in the world we've actually lost a plane with all those souls on board so how do you find a missing plane the first method is by tracking from the ground using radar a key missing link our alliance on technology with limitations radars been in existence since the the Second World War really radar relies on there being a ground station nearby and runs out within a couple hundred miles of the coast flight 370 vanishes from air traffic control radar screens as its transponder is deactivated less than an hour into its flight and just two minutes after the copilot has said good night the military who use primary radar that doesn't rely on a transponder are still able to track the plane but after 90 minutes they to lose sight looking at primary radar it has limitations it perhaps as a range of a hundred 120 miles at the sort of level the airplane was at so it's of limited value Malaysian military radar plotted an unidentified object later assumed to be flight 370 at a point south of Phuket time military radar logs also confirmed the plane turned west the thing that as scuppered us is there is the lack of ground stations so we we have coverage a few hundred miles out from the shore but actually in general we're not covering large areas of see where this aircraft seems to have gone so as flight 370 drops off all radar is anyone watching and if so who there are more than 1,000 satellites orbiting the Earth the military and commercial companies have spent trillions on satellite technology imaging satellites are able to focus down from hundreds of kilometers to see objects just half a metre in length surely the missing aircraft must have been spotted the vast majority of imagery satellites are in low-earth orbit only a few hundred kilometers up and they're moving very fast so taking an image from a satellite of something on the surface of the earth is like driving a car down the street looking through a pair of binoculars and trying to read all the house numbers as you go by leading nations like China Russia and the u.s. may have been unwilling to come forward with any covert satellite data as it would reveal their military capabilities one interesting question is at what phase in the search were some of these military and national capabilities brought to bear on the problem if satellite capabilities are tasked to help search for flight 370 that may mean those capabilities are not available for other high-priority not security taskings such as keeping tabs on North Korea or other potential bad actors Malaysia has asked other countries to share potentially sensitive radar and satellite data the u.s. military does have some satellites that are dedicated towards missile warning but those satellites work off of heat signatures and an aircraft in flight is not generating the heat signature there had been a large explosion then these satellites would have likely picked it up but US officials have said that the systems did not discover anything that would signify anything like a large explosion which lead to the mystery of what might have happened the military may be helping behind the scenes more than we know but the issue of national security is always going to leave gaps in the intelligence that is handed over with few hard facts to go on the Malaysians now desperately need information and cooperation from their neighbors and the international community we had the early part of the investigation a lot of information conflicting information and changing search areas that really led to quite a bit of waste of time search efforts on the ground are hindered by lack of information there's no effective dialogue between countries and aviation authorities making it hard to get an overview of what is happening it was crisis upon crisis upon crisis no management of that crisis pieces of information about the whereabouts of the aircraft of the early stages perhaps should have been filtered up to a a much higher level a much higher authority there was one piece of information revealed by British satellite company Inmarsat satellite data from the aircraft pings but this was ignored perhaps until it was too late with the loss of this plane what we found is that the countries haven't coordinated and the time has been lost there are protocols in place for international disasters but the circumstances of the disappearance of flight 370 are unique for a search effort in international waters the nation affected can invoke the charter on space and major disasters to task countries like the US and China to help members will retask one or more of their satellites to collect imagery over the specified area and provide it to the country that invoke the charter however the Charter does not stipulate exactly how that helper assistance will come and it's up to the countries really to do a lot of the legwork there's probably more we can do in the cooperation between different organizations and countries that have different capabilities particularly satellite imaging satellite communications the protocols are there but the nations involved and a way to communicate faster and more efficiently it looks like the unsolved mystery of flight 370 might bring countries into agreement for a standardized approach and perhaps an overarching truly global body sort of may start to evolve and we do need while the world searched the South China Seas for flight 370 in London the techies at Inmarsat decided to track the plane by taking a closer look at the data from the satellite pings or handshake signals system kept doing his automatic pinging of the home network there was a signal coming from the ground station that said to the aircraft essentially are you there and the aircraft replied with a yes I'm here and that was occurring on about an hourly basis on a pre-scheduled time and frequency but satellite pings to and from aircraft are not intended to locate planes despite the lack of data however back in London the team take on the challenge programmers use the eight pings the plane did send to track down its possible flight path analysis isolates two possible corridors the plane could have used one stretching north between Thailand and Kazakhstan and the other south between Indonesia and the southern Indian Ocean we have used the difference in speed at which the signal has come from the aircraft to the fixed point the satellite in space is called Doppler effect and if you can imagine a train whistle getting louder as it comes towards you and getting more faint as it goes away from you we're looking at those signals and deciding where the aircraft was on a particular route and a path the team went one step further designing some complex algorithms to analyze past data of Malaysia Airlines triple7 fight paths to Beijing by doing this they were able to work out the most likely routes the plane could have taken the South Corridor allowed them to make a very good guess at where the aircraft may have gone they then tested that against six other aircraft flying that same day and it worked when they applied that model to case of flight 370 they were able to quite convincingly show that it must have gone the southern route the search area has been narrowed to a 160 kilometers or in the Indian Ocean west of Perth the Malaysian Prime Minister breaks the news according to this new data flight mh370 ended in a southern Indian Ocean investigators now know the most likely spot the plane went down and the multinational search and rescue operation is underway there's this uncertainty as to what happened and we don't we can't stand that we need to we need to know what happened so that we can avoid it in the future but there is a vital piece of evidence they still need to find the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder the black boxes those two units should survive a considerable impact and they can certainly survive being submerged in water and if investigators do find the black boxes curiously they could prove to be the most challenging missing link of them as the week's pass with no answers of what happened to Malaysian flight 370 the grief and anger of the relatives grows finally investigators are able to isolate an area where the aircraft may have ditched it covers 254 thousand square kilometres deep into the southern Indian Ocean but there is one crucial part of the plane they need to find it's another missing link the black box flight recorder once we've identified a wreckage field we have to find black boxes lead to recording devices and the question is what can that tell us there are two parts to the black box both situated at the rear of the aircraft a cockpit voice recorder records a voice and sound from four microphones on the flight deck the flight data record have a records data from different sensors around the aircraft on something like a Boeing triple7 that be up to 1500 parameters recorded so be recording speed altitude cabins be pressurized a whole host of parameters black boxes are fitted with an underwater locator beacon which is activated when it hits saltwater it emits a ping and it emits a regular little heartbeat signal just to say I'm here and so what the searchers have to do is find that signal and it has quite a short range not more than a few miles flight 370 has exposed a weakness in the design of the black box the weakness is that they can be difficult to find particularly if there's a crash at sea and that's one of the things that we've seen with mh370 at the moment the underwater locator beacon the battery is only required to last for 30 days there are changes afoot where it will it needs to last 90 days and that's slowly coming in another vital floor to the black box means even if discovered the voice recorder won't reveal what happened in the cockpit when the aircraft changed course one drawback on the voice recorder is it only has a two hour duration and that isn't sufficient we may have missed that event which caused a problem and that data is then overwritten as time is running out the hunt for flight 370 continues it becomes the largest ever multinational air sea search involving 26 countries I think the Australian Navy commander made the best comment on that when when somebody asked me if it was like looking for a needle in a haystack and he said he said we're still looking for a haystack let alone the needle yeah as hope fades four long weeks after flight 370 disappears news breaks the Chinese and Australian search boats detect signals that might be coming from the black box British Australian and US teams are using sonar and listening devices to try and capture pings emitted by the device the search intensifies 1600 kilometres northwest of Perth but finding and retrieving the black box from the mountainous seabed will be the toughest task yet time is against them 28 days on from the Jets disappearance the batteries in the recorders only last for around 30 even if they do find the black box it will never reveal all the details of exactly what happened to flight 370 this case may change that mindset towards one where the industry captures more data for for a longer timeframe in the black box the tragic loss of 239 passengers and crew has exposed the limitations of the technology being used in aviation in a world where we can livestream to smartphones with more storage capacity than the black box is it time for this technology to be applied in I think a near-term priority is going to be figuring out some sort of a solution to be transmitting real-time data from aircraft in flight systems on the ground in fact such technology is not far away and some innovations could be fast tracked as a result of flight 370 Cranfield University a leader in aerospace research is developing a revolutionary information system trigger transmission which utilizes real-time data from an aircraft rather than streaming data from the aircraft all of the time we wait for the aircraft to get into an unusual situation maybe in the middle of an accident and then we choose to start relying information its height its speed its roll its pitch parameters like that to try and understand whether something unusual is happening trigger transmission will send vital real-time data to the manufacturer and will make it easier to locate an aircraft in the event of an incident such as flight 370 but it could be years before it's certified and fitted to passenger aircraft there is already some technology available to airlines who choose to install it which allows live performance feedback newer aircraft engines from companies like rolls-royce and GE do have the capability to automatically send back data about their performance to their manufacturers it's unknown if flight 370 had this in operation had the automatic data reporting been enabled that may have helped narrow the search window for where the flight may have ended up but could aircraft of the future using live data streaming go one step further with a virtual pilot erasing the possibility of any human error the University of Tokyo are developing a smart flight control system using artificial intelligence the main reason of the aircraft crash is the human factors or human errors I think we have to develop a fully automatic control system without pirate operations when the pirate cannot control the aircraft to Tory for example the lack of oxygen or the terrorism the grantstation can controls damaged or uncontrollable aircraft for the safety landing as scientists search for innovative answers solutions may come from technology being developed to meet passenger demand to be as connected in the sky as they are on the ground hyper connectivity in the skies is about to be made a reality with global Express we are in the process of launching three geostationary orbiting satellites which will orbit the Earth at 38,000 kilometers and be able to provide coverage all over the earth it promises to revolutionize air travel and the connected world as we know it it's the benefit of being able to bring your own device onto aircraft whether that's a laptop or a tablet or your smartphone and being able to hook up to a wireless access point which is installed in the aircraft so watching TV connecting to internet having the same speed as you do on the ground I think with flight 370 what we really are seeing is we've got a world now where we've got passenger comfort we've got entertainment systems business appetite and it's throwing a spotlight on the fact that we really are putting all of those issues there head of security and safety while hyper connectivity and live data streaming may help close some of the current technological gaps scientists are already thinking ahead well the sixth generation of satellites won't be out until we're into 2020 but we are already planning that for the cockpit safety services communications with the pilots Communications to the ground their health monitoring of the aircraft are all going to be brought forward to the next level as the world continues to follow the tragic events of flight 370 investigators need to discover the aircraft wreckage and retrieve the black box data to help resolve some key questions but we may never find all the answers what we have learned is that this is not just the story of a missing pane this is also the story of the missing links of aviation technology and communication the traveling public needs to be assured that safety and security are paramount both within the airport and the airline environment without the traveling public there is no industry to to protect airplane technology as sophisticated as it is is still fallible to acts of malice or mistake we've got to find it we've got to find what happened and we've got to learn the lessons to stop this happening again the missing links allowed what should have been a routine flight to become one of the biggest mysteries in aviation history ultimately what it's going to come down to is all this new technology and new improvements what are the costs that are going to be associated with implementing others and who's going to be prepared to embrace those costs whether it's governments Airlines or the passenger you

Info

Channel: breakingbad

Views: 260,792

Rating: 4.4640393 out of 5

Keywords: Discovery Channel (TV Network)

Id: 4-qN1H1NVq4

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 43min 48sec (2628 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 14 2014

Reddit Comments