Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Left: The Malaysian lawyer and activist Grace Subathirai Nathan, whose mother was on board MH370. Right: Blaine Gibson, an American who has mounted a search for debris from the airplane. (William Langewiesche)

William Langewiesche has a story in The Atlantic that summarizes what we know about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which isn't much. He also relates some theories about what happened, all of which he dismisses, except for one, which is pretty grizzly.

The most interesting part is about Blaine Gibson, who had no connection with the flight or the investigation, but took it upon himself to go searching for bits of wreckage washing up on Indian Ocean beaches. Surprisingly he found a bunch. Well, several pieces anyway.

William has nothing good to say about the government of Malaysia, unless you consider, corrupt, incompetent, morons as 'good'.

Via Posthip Scott

Torpedos

Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo

Defence Blog tells us that Lockheed-Martin, the Pentagon's number one weapons supplier,

. . . was awarded $16,8 million cost-plus-incentive-fee contract in support of the Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo efforts.

I like the "cost-plus-incentive-fee" bit. How fast can we pour money down the drain?

But it does get me thinking about torpedos. The Wikipedia article about the Mark 48 tells us:

The swashplate piston engine is fueled by Otto fuel II, a monopropellant which combusts to drive the engine.

Swashplate engines are kind of cool, they are compact, roughly the shape of a Wankel rotary engine like you can find in the Mazda sports car, but Otto fuel II, that's something else. Being a monopropellant means you don't need an oxidizer. Near as I can tell it's based on nitrogylcerine but they have done things to it to make it stable. It gets sprayed into the combustion chamber and ignited with a spark where the resulting explosion drives the piston. It's nasty stuff, you don't want to get any on you and the exhaust fumes are deadly poison. In a torpedo the exhaust gets pumped into the ocean where it is seriously diluted, so it probably doesn't kill too many fish. Probably.

Now I am reminded of the Russian nuclear powered torpedo. Putin announced it a couple of years ago but I haven't heard much about it since then.

Can Russia's Doomsday Weapon Be Stopped? Status-6/Poseidon
Covert Cabal[The video has an advertisement that runs for one minute starting from the one minute mark.]

Poseidon is big - over five feet in diameter and 80 feet long - which makes it like 35 times the volume of the Mark 48 and likely 35 times the mass.

Now I am reminded of the search for the missing flight 370 airliner in the Indian Ocean.

INDIAN OCEAN (April 14, 2014) Operators aboard the Australian navy vessel ADF Ocean Shield move U.S. Navy's Bluefin-21 into position for deployment. Using side scan sonar, Bluefin will descend to a depth of between 4,000 and 4,500 meters, approximately 35 meters above the ocean floor to spend up to 16 hours at this depth collecting data. Joint Task Force 658 is supporting Operation Southern Indian Ocean, searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Peter D. Blair/Released)

They were using a torpedo to look for the wreck. They didn't find it, but then the torpedo they were using wasn't nuclear powered, so it had limited range and endurance. But if we had a nuclear powered torpedo, we could set it to searching and it could search the entire ocean. It might take a while, but then we would know what is down there.

There have been nuclear powered submarines cruising the oceans for decades and they probably have been accumulating a great deal of data about the ocean floor, but maybe not. Submarines only go down to about a thousand feet and most of the world's oceans are much deeper than that, so deep that the submarines can't 'see' the bottom.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Two Ilyushin Il-76 aircraft from Chinese Air Force on the tarmac in Perth, Australia, on March 22, 2014. (Xinhua/Lui Siu Wai)

Chinese aircrews flying Russian built aircraft out of Australia to search for an American built Boeing 777 airliner being flown by a Malaysian crew.

Still Looking for that Missing Airliner

INDIAN OCEAN (April 14, 2014) Operators aboard the Australian navy vessel ADF Ocean Shield move U.S. Navy's Bluefin-21 into position for deployment. Using side scan sonar, Bluefin will descend to a depth of between 4,000 and 4,500 meters, approximately 35 meters above the ocean floor to spend up to 16 hours at this depth collecting data. Joint Task Force 658 is supporting Operation Southern Indian Ocean, searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Peter D. Blair/Released)

4,500 meters is almost 3 miles deep. That won't get you to the very deepest part of the ocean, which is more like 7 miles, but it's pretty darn deep, and still deeper than most conventional submarines.

Bluefin is now owned by Batelle, a not-for-profit research outfit headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, where I lived when I was in Junior High School. There is a similar outfit in San Antonio, Texas, which is just down the road from Austin, called the Southwest Research Institute. They are called non-profits now, but when I first ran into them they were called not-for-profit. I took this to mean that they could make money from what they were doing, but it was all plowed back into their organization or research, not distributed to stock holders, because there aren't any stock holders.

Ocean Shield

April 9, 2014. Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion flies past Australian Defense vessel Ocean Shield on a mission to drop sonar buoys to assist in the acoustic search of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean. The ship searching for the missing Malaysian jet has detected two more underwater signals that may be emanating from the aircraft's black boxes. (Photo by Australian Defense Force)

Ship builders are building some funny looking ships these days. This one was originally ordered by a Norwegian company that is in the offshore oil and gas business. Before it was launched it was sold to the Australian Navy. The visor over the bow is a helipad.