Saturday, March 22, 2014

Use satellites instead of search planes

It seemed to be quite costly to send planes to search debris of MH 370 in the southern edge of the Indian Ocean. 

It takes four hours for a plane to fly from Australia to the search area. The plane can search for two hours and have to fly back. Total of 10 hours of flying time for 2 hours of search.
About 40 planes from various countries are being used for this search. 

Here is an alternative approach. Use a commercial satellite to take images of the search area and an imaging software to identify the debris. Each image has its geo-location that is tagged. If some debris are located, the satellite imaging could focus on the location and even keep track of its movements.

The planes can be sent to the search area after that.

It does not matter that a few million images have to be searched with this method. It must be less costly and more cost effective than sending search planes.

I wonder why this approach was not being followed?

1 comment:

Lye Khuen Way said...

Sir , a simple answer is that nobody want to divulge their eye-in-the-sky capabilities ! Notice the USA had been quite quiet on this ?

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