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As someone who doesn't have intuition about these things: what are the chances that an 777 could have crashed and yet many years later very very few of its debr
by ak_111 4y ago
As someone who doesn't have intuition about these things: what are the chances that an 777 could have crashed and yet many years later very very few of its debris showed up or were spotted anywhere in the world (also factoring in intense search efforts around the most likely places where it crashed)?
Is this one of these 1 in a billion chance thing or is it not as crazy as it sounds? Like even if you were intentionally trying not to leave a trace, it is so hard to plan the drift and spread of debris and get so lucky in them not being spotted.
- dan_quixote 4y agoMajor structures of a 777 are aluminum. I wouldn't expect many large, easily identifiable, parts to float (for long).
- quickthrower2 4y agoAluminium floats Edit: was wrong
- bufferoverflow 4y agoNot in water.
- civilized 4y agoThere's not much watching the middle of the southern Indian Ocean, a large fraction of which is literally more than a thousand miles away from any place humans usually inhabit. It's one of the most remote, desolate, hostile regions of the planet. I can see the appeal as a suicide method. You fly out for a while, it's quiet and pleasant, and before long there's no turning back, no possibility of rescue.
- rippercushions 4y agoAnd we also have discovered numerous pieces of MH370 debris, all in the kinds of places in eastern Africa where the simulations said they should end up.
- ak_111 4y agoI don't think the amount of debris found is that great, a tiny piece of wing...
- civilized 4y agoI'm kind of surprised anything was found. Most of the materials the plane is made of are heavier than water and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. A few small floating pieces drifted thousands of miles and happened to wash up in inhabited areas.
- yesenadam 4y ago"As of January of 2021, some 33 pieces of wreckage found on beaches have with varying degrees of certainty been tied to MH370" - TFA
- cdelsolar 4y agothe ocean is sadly like > 10K feet deep and many miles away from any land around where the plane is likely to have hit the water
- dghlsakjg 4y agoNot at all unlikely. That is one of the loneliest pieces of a very large ocean. A lot of the recognizable stuff will sink, and the stuff that floats will spend months being broken down by seawater or having stuff grow on it. Eventually it will wash up on a beach where it will be cleaned up with the literal tons of trash that wash up on any beach these days. Or will not be cleaned up because it is a place where humans don’t go. If you think of a pristine beach its pristine because it gets cleaned up regularly. Any ocean facing beach these days accumulates so much trash. I used to do beach cleanup surveys on windward coasts, and we would regularly find stuff that could have belonged to an airplane (carbon fiber, composite honeycomb, etc.) it was almost never worth investigating since there was almost no way to know how long it had been in that beach and how long it had been floating in the currents before that. This was in the Caribbean, so I mostly assumed that all that stuff was related to drug smuggling planes. The only time we ever got a call back about something we found on the beach is when we found a drift buoy from NOAA. This is the long way of saying that it surprises me not a bit that nothing much was found. It’s more surprising that anything at all was found
- lamontcg 4y agoThe Earth and the Oceans are really, really big. The amount of the plane that we've found feels about right for going down in he middle of the Indian Ocean. The bulk of it is going to be sunk on the seafloor.