Hantu Laut
A lot have been said of this small wonder of technological achievement that supposedly can survey the seabed and look for wreckage of ships and aircraft on the seabed to a depth of 4500 metres.MH370 disappeared on 8 March 2014, with all the boasted technology the West possessed, no wreckage or shred of evidence of the plane's whereabout so far.
The Bluefin Robotics was deployed to search for MH370 in the depth of the southern Indian Ocean, weeks passed by, but no sign of the plane's watery grave, either this piece of technology is a tank full of shitty hot air, or the search was done in the wrong place.
Another serious blow to many of these highly acclaimed but untested aviation technologies are those gadgetry wonders installed on planes that supposedly help to locate any aircraft that crashed at sea in quick time by them transmitting pings and giving the exact location.
One particular pretty useless gadget fitted on most commercial aircraft is the ULB ( Underwater Locator Beacon), which pinger supposed to send ultrasonic pulse giving its position to SAR vessels. The problem with this gadget is, it has very short transmitting range, depending on the type installed, it is detectable from the surface from a measly 1 to 2 kilometres in poor weather conditions to about 17-22 kilometres in very good conditions.
Now you know why they still can't find the wreckage of Air Asia Flight 8501. It was not just bad weather the cause, the aviation industry is caught in a time warp, they have failed to take advantage of new technology available to constantly monitor planes in flight. Not only it is available, it is also very cheap to put in place.
It is people like Boeing and Airbus, the two major manufacturers of commercial airliners that should take the rap for the tedious task of finding a lost aircraft quickly. I suppose it's a matter of both economics and negligence, not very often a plane fall out of the sky or disappeared into thin air, so there was no pressure to change the antiquated technology.
The disappearance of MH370 and the crash of Air Asia QZ8501 may be the biggest game changer for the aviation industry.
I have both free and paid version of Flightadar24. They are not always accurate, but this is were the technology starts and can be perfected for the airline industry to keep their planes under constant watch.