The "swarm of submarine drones" being "eight autonomous submarines called HUGINs, each six metres long, weighing 1,800kg, and containing a titanium sphere to protect the sensitive electronics therein from the pressure of the ocean’s depths."
In prior cruises in the Atlantic, the firm has, according to Josh Broussard, its technical director, managed to scan 890 square kilometres a day using six autonomous submarines. With eight, Mr Broussard thinks that the new mission will be able to manage 1,200 a day—enough to have covered the original search area in just 100 days.
Seems up to the job, and while 8 may not be a swarm of bees, I think for deep sea subs it works as a term.
A swarm is a swarm - for any biomimetic aggregation. (1) Sure, you may have a specific term for a sepecific type of swarm, but swarm is an umbrella term that covers all aggregations.
Working in this field, I can say that applying common terminology is not as superficial an act as it may seem. There are similarities in the rulesets governing the dynamics of animal collectives irrespective of the working environment, so usong common terms accross disciplines of study helps avoid confusion and also helps identify points of leverage. For example, engineers building biomimetic swarms of seagliders may benefit from studying V-formations of geese, even though you don't often see sealife swimming in a V-formation.
A swarm requires more than one entity whose behavior is directly affected by the behavior of another entity. One of the most fascinating interdisciplinary aspects of swarms, IMO, is the fact that all swarms can be described by Radial Distribution Functions (2), which is also how states of matter can be characterized - in terms of density and lattice structure (and even polarity in extended versions). More amazingly is that, similar to the way matter in different states yields different physical behavior (e.g. between gas, liquid, solid), it's looking more and more like swarms do the same. They may even have predictable state transition points.
"Drone" comes from worker bees, so "swarm" is at least consistent. But I found drone misleading here - I thought they'd be airborne. What's the scope of "drone"?
More importantly, worker bees aren't called drones.
Drones are males - they don't actually do any work, living exclusively to have sex with a queen in spring. Once mating season is over, they are evicted from the hive to die - they are unable to fend for themselves. I believe it'd be rare to find drones as part of a swarm of bees in the normal case of a swarm.
Worker bees are females. I've never heard them called anything other than a worker bee.
First, I do not think we have textbook definition of "drone" as such words change meaning based on what technologies are actually available, but quite a lot of technical terms come from or are inspired by science fiction. While I did not read lots of science fiction and most of that was not in English, I think "drone" for a long time used to mean something like "mobile robot capable of autonomously performing a series of tasks", mostly in contexts of mining, cargo transportation and reconnaissance.
Airborne association with drones is quite a recent thing with rise of "military drones" (mostly recon) and subsequently manufacturers of RC multirotors using a word distancing their products from RC toys. RC multirotors are drones only in the sense that they maintain altitude and orientation autonomously.
In the first world, it's also common with motorcycles, which are one of the most inexpensive forms of private powered transportation.
The shared traits among motorcycles and an AUV include a more adventurous risk profile, affinity for mechanical devices, and less ubiquitous uptake than alternative forms of transportation.
Or even just an expectation that the product is going to require some DIY maintenance, and mutual support from other users. With, for instance, 3D printers, this works in inverse proportion to the expense of the purchase... if you buy a cheap one, you are joining a community - you don't expect it to be perfect, but tinkering and optimizing is likely part of the attraction in the first place. If you buy an expensive one, it's most likely because of a straightforward business need and you're going to rely on the manufacturer for support like any other product.
> This means access to support 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The HUGIN family also provides upgrades, advice, training and participation in our AUV user conference where ideas and experience are shared.
So they do mean something concrete by it, even if the language is flowery and over-affectionate.
I have one and I've personally gotten more than five friends to buy. So far the feedback has been positive. I know nothing about the company and receive zero commission or guidance.
It would be so cool to build one of these things with a collision detection system and a nuclear reactor so that it could crawl the entire ocean. Imagine what it might find. You could potentially become quite wealthy on treasure hunting expeditions alone I would imagine.
You wouldn't need nuclear. It could surface for solar/wave generation as needed. That wouldn't necessarily slow it down because the reduced cost would allow you to have more of them operating simultaneously.
Either way, though, the advance of technology may mean that it is the last such mystery. As the oceans are watched with ever closer scrutiny, from space and the depths, it is increasingly difficult for anything to get lost in the first place.
Have things changed this much since 2014? What would happen if the exact same scenario happened again (airliner switches off all transponders and veers off course into an ocean) in 2018?
They haven't changed much yet, but the Iridium Next constellation has hosted ADS-B payloads (as well as AIS). Sometime in 2018 these will be available globally, and make it much harder for either ships or planes to be lost outside the range of land-based receivers.
That wouldn't help intentionally or accidentally disabled transceivers as was (probably) the case for MH370. That would require space based radar... which was once but is no longer a DoD project. It'll happen eventually.
"Every block of sea floor that the HUGINs map will be examined by three sets of human eyes."
They could publish the data and crowdsource the review process. Also perhaps some machine learning techniques could be applied to indentify most interesting segments to review.
It took nearly 2 years to find and recover the flight recorders. Once they were analyzed, the results were shocking: the pilots flew a perfectly good aircraft into the ocean after a relatively minor technical fault. It had a major impact on pilot training and procedures across the globe.
That's why they'll keep searching for MH370. Beyond closure for the families, there's a chance that there was something in that crash that we all need to know.
Note that with AF447 we had a very good idea where it had sunk (from finding debris 36 hours after it was presumed crashed), and it still took two years to find the wreck.
MH370 is orders of magnitude harder to find, and AF447 was a huge effort.
Does life insurance pay for incidents like this where there is no body / proof of death? Just read that NYT piece about the Everest climbers from India who died, and who's families could not collect because there was no body.
It was almost certainly boarded and hijacked in mid flight by commandos who flew the plane to khazakstan where it was used to fake the shoot down of MH17.
Ok maybe almost certain is a bit strong but the aircraft maneuvered after losing contact along a path towards the open ocean pretty similar to one the captain had practiced on his flight simulator less than a month before. Not sure how an overheating battery pack would do that. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/07/mh370-pilot-fle...
Blaine Gibson[1] did find a lot of wreckage on the coast of Africa and complains that the investigation didn’t consider how close it could have come to Africa [2], which would have been associated with an entirely other flight path after going offline, and I don’t remember what was the bureau’s answer about that.
Probably not as many as you may think - first, consider the sheer scale of the Indian ocean. Second, open-ocean sailing only became commonplace in the last 200 years. Before then, if you were going from say Spice Islands to Zanzibar, you would hug the mainland Asian coast line as long as possible, except for "short" jumps across the Arabian sea and bay of bengal.
It is so disingenuous to say fugro only used 1 auv in the original search so this search will be better. Most of the scanning was done with towfish rated to 6000m using sidescan from three vessels rather than auv's. The article makes it sound like the original search was done with one auv that couldn't get to 6000m.
According to amateur debris-finder Blaine Alan Gibson they are looking (mostly) in the wrong area. Somewhere near Diego Garcia should also be investigated, based for example on eyewitnesses in Kuda Huvadhoo in the Maldives. I subscribe to his open mindset; go where the evidence points and don't lock on to any theories based on scant such: http://thehuntformh370.info/content/blaines-independent-inve...
So much scientifically important data. I hope this is overlap with previous surveys for a comparison. Or that they drop some sensor packs or markers for historical comparison later.
I've actually been thinking about this, and, on a small scale, it should be possibly with almost no budget (i. e. retrofitting an RC model with solar power, an arduino, GPS/WIFI/Cellular). Some thoughts:
- Submarines aren't great because solar is your best source for power, and you don't want to divide each day to "work" and "rest" because you need to recharge on the surface.
- Electric propulsion will also require some rather substantial solar setup.
For these reasons, I think either "passive" sensors just following the currents, or sailing vessels, are better candidates at first.
There's also the "glider" concept, where you fill/empty a ballast tank and achieve forward momentum by changing depth while having an aerodynamically-shaped hull. I'm wondering if these could also drag a turbine for electric power, but I fear that idea is coming dangerously close to breaking the laws of thermodynamics.
- Satellite internet is, unfortunately, too expensive for anything beyond short status codes / coordinates / commands. It's something like 10 cents for every 80bytes. You'd need to navigate to coastal waters and pick up cellular/wifi signals to transmit the payloads.
My private conspiracy theory (which I don't believe in really): One of the USA Inteligence services knows exactly where the plan splashed down (either due underwater acoustic monitoring ala K-129 submarine, or through satellite monitoring) They can't reveal that information, because that would hint at their capabilities and methods, so they let the information 'slip' to an underwater search company. They 'boldly' go searching and in due course stumble upon the plane. They know their cost is bounded because of the tip-off, and they really do search, just maybe select a pattern which will be more 'lucky' then other possible patterns could be.
> Seabed Constructor is the most advanced civilian survey vessel on the planet today. If its array of technology cannot find MH370, then it is likely that nothing will
That sentence seemed gushing and overstated. Presumably a large metal plane isn't really going anywhere and if these 8 underwater drones don't find it then if people keep trying they will in the future.
How credible are the conspiracy theories on this? I recall reading about more than one instance where authorities did not cooperate or even misled or otherwise actively impeded investigations.
I wasn't following the investigation too closely, but the conspiracy theories I saw weren't too convincing:
Mostly, they highlighted instances of authorities either correcting previous mistakes, or withholding information slightly longer than necessary.
Yet it's quite obvious how these two errors are related: If you're eagerly accused of the former, you'll tend to indulge in the latter.
It's also important to consider that the Indonesian authorities were simply overburdened by such an investigation, were likely to make all sorts of mistakes under stress, and had to content with competing interests that were impossible to satisfy.
Then, this investigation happened to involve dozens of authorities and companies from different countries, making errors in communications, distrust, and cultural clashes much more likely than, say, a US-made aircraft crashing in Colorado.
The debris that was discovered in Australia and Africa seems to, roughly, validate the initial search efforts. While there may be competing theories pointing to slightly different areas of the Indian Ocean to be searched, there's nothing supporting the "real" conspiracy theories that the plane was diverted to Riad and will be used to start WW III.
Oh, right, by conspiracy theories I meant something involving foul play closer to it being ditched in the ocean, not those theories that claim it was diverted to somewhere in Asia.
By contradictions I meant the stuff like this [1]. Malaysia got slammed internationally by governments all over the world for their misleading and contradictory statements. It was hard for everyone to explain the particulars away as the being overburdened and stressed. If it had been, I imagine other governments would have been more understanding of that and not slammed them so hard.
One particular incident that left me flabbergasted -- but which perhaps could be explained (though not excused) by miscommunication -- was this one, where I seem to recall (though I can't find the exact article) that they confirmed the flaperon found belonged to the plane before even the French -- who were the ones doing the analysis -- came to such a conclusion [2]:
> On Wednesday, Najib Razak, the Malaysian prime minister, said the flaperon that washed up on the French territory in the Indian Ocean, since transported to France for analysis, was from the doomed flight. But his assertion has not been backed up by the other authorities involved in the investigation, and the dissonant stances have infuriated many relatives of those on board the plane, who have waited more than 500 days for concrete clues into the fates of their loved ones.
> Transport minister Liow Tiong Lai says more possible MH370 debris has been sent to France for analysis.
“Why the hell do you have one confirm and one not?” Sara Weeks, the sister of New Zealander Paul Weeks, who was on board, told Associated Press. “Why not wait and get everybody on the same page so the families don’t need to go through this turmoil?”
> The claims and counter-claims continued on Thursday when Liow said a team on the French territory of Réunion had collected more apparent plane debris. The claim was contradicted by French officials, who said no new material in the search for MH370 had been turned over to French authorities.
How in the world they could jump to conclusions before the people actually doing the investigations certainly beats me. I could see it as being a miscommunication, but this was not a one-off incident, and that got harder and harder for the international community swallow the more times it occurred. I recall getting pretty convinced that they were covering up something, though I couldn't go farther and speculate on what exactly that might have been. (When I heard about the misdetected pings I thought perhaps they should have been looking into the Asia possibility too, but only because they had already poured so much effort into other dead end that this seemed worth a shot, not because it seemed otherwise particularly plausible. I dismissed that idea pretty quickly after they found parts from the plane.)
> How in the world they could jump to conclusions before the people actually doing the investigations certainly beats me. I could see it as being a miscommunication, but this was not a one-off incident.
It is probably just human nature. Many people will continue to think and do what they did before, even after having the error of their ways explained to them. While you might expect a person in a position of responsibility to act more responsibly, it also seems possible that such a person might consider himself to be more competent than average, which would exacerbate the Dunning-Kruger effect - in this case, thinking his hunch about the debris is as good as a conclusion by crash investigators.
A false report of more debris being found might be a misunderstanding of the original find being reported through different channels at different times. An impulsive person, eager to say something, might not consider that possibility before making an announcement.
FYI disabling javascript when loading the page disables the paywall. (It actually loads the whole page, then removes the article when it figures out you've reached your article limit)
That is likely false. If it for any reason nose dived into the ocean at high speed then there may be no witnesses and most of the material would have either vaporized or been shredded into fine particles.
> "It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds."
> "In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic."
Slightly off topic, but here's my favorite conspiracy theory about MH370: It landed Kazakhstan. Interestingly enough, this conspiracy theory was informative on how satellite pings actually work (whether or not you believe the theory is a different matter)
It astounds me that they wouldn't already have used the best equipment on the market? I mean, it's the most prominent underwater search of recent decades, funded by three sovereign states.
My gut feeling is that some people in power do not want this plane found.
As a sibling comment alludes, everyone underestimates how astoundingly vast Earth's oceans are.
I did too, until I looked out the window on my first daytime flight over the sea. A seemingly endless stretch of unbroken blue. It was probably the next best thing to being in space and made me appreciate just how much water there is!
Everyone also grossly underestimates how much it costs per-day to operate a large offshore services vessel in the open ocean, in terms of salaries/benefits, fuel, insurance, cost of the ship as a whole relative to whatever sort of financing paid for it, inmarsat services, food, etc. There's a reason why submarine cable laying and repair is so expensive...
