Whitey Grandad

This seems to be the crucial question. If the co-pilot (apparently) was the last to have contact with ATC then surely he must have known that this was programmed in? I presume it's possible that data was being exchanged automatically with the ground at this stage before it was later disabled.

I readily admit that my days of designing avionics and working in satellite comms lie many years in the past but the basic explanation concerning handshake pings with no next-level data seems plausible to me. What I do find unsettling is the assumption that some people seem to have that somebody must know something more than they are admitting or that some government is operating a cover-up. It's a symptom of the modern world that everybody expects instant information about everything but sometimes the simple explanation is that nobody knows anything.

Er... what does that statement say, exactly?

The last time I was in a box there it came with parking in the Northumberland Park School right behind the ground, but that was a good few years ago.

Not for me at my age but I can't see the problem with designated areas for those who want it.

It might have been when a customer found a fur ball in a cat burger that she had sold. Or was that cat burgler, I may have misread it?

No it didn't have to have a GPS fix. The ping is only the start of the message exchange and that is all that was received. It means that the only part of the system that was working was at the very basic level. It's all explained in the link I gave earlier: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/03/18/why-mh370-could-still-talk-to-satellites-after-its-other-comms-went-dark/ A ping is just to check that the receiver is there, that's all the information that the reply contains. Each receiver has a unique identifier.

I think it's not so much the age of the aircraft as the cost of using the ACARS service. The figures I read were $10 per flight but Malysian weren't prepared to pay it.

The GPS satellites are separate to the ACARS Inmarsat ones.

More about the pings here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/03/18/why-mh370-could-still-talk-to-satellites-after-its-other-comms-went-dark/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/03/19/heres-whats-odd-about-that-map-of-mh370s-final-satellite-ping/ http://www.straitstimes.com/breaking-news/se-asia/story/missing-mh370-how-satellites-communicate-plane-malaysia-airlines

I always thought that they were with their values written down over the length of their contract.

Yup, simply this.

As I understand it these were very basic pings, once per hour and just enough to keep alive the connection and nothing more, no information contained in the response because the maintenance reporting system was disabled. It's the time response to the request that gives the investigators a very approximate distance to the aircraft from the satellite and hence the arcs of possible positions.

That's the best advice I've read so far. The only problem is that you'd need a bloody big pension fund to buy all that stuff.

7th May 2015 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_United_Kingdom_general_election

And for a good reason, as I'm sure you know, it's originally based on a Saints shirt: http://www.atleticofans.com/club-history/

Does it come in red and white stripes? (No smutty jokes please)

I have used this chap: http://www.irepairuk.net He lives in Redbridge

That's a poor swap.

I'm sure there must be some extras for the military but if all you're doing is listening to the transmissions there's no way of knowing who's doing it. It used to be that the military had access to a more accurate signal that was not subject to selective dithering but Clinton freed up a lot of the codes.

GPS is one-way.

The problem is that for some annuities you need to live for 30 years to get your money back. The drop in annuity rates is complicated but Brown'ms attack on dividends didn't help.

If it can't be proved then presumably the life insurance will be paid out, if there is any.

DG is 12,003 ft apparently. I think the reference is to runways of at least 1000ft. This flight simulator story is already on this Wikipedia reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Garcia

This is getting like 'The Comic Strip Presents' with Al Pacino as Arthur Scargill.