Steve Fossett

yeah he's certainly not evading but the big question is "why didn't his elt
go off ?"
what scenarios fit this ... he experienced a health problem and got the
plane down ?
doesn't seem like an experienced pilot like him would forget to set it off
by hand after a forced landing ....
Do they sometimes fail to go off on impact ?



"Matt Whiting" wrote in message
...
Thomas Borchert wrote:
Newps,

That's a bad analogy, we're not looking for one airplane in a sea of
other planes. Remove all the planes in the picture except one. Now try
and find the one plane.


Hey, "we" can't even find Osama when "we" have 6 years to try (in a
similar landscape, I might add).

True, but I don't think Fossett is trying to not be found. :-)

Matt

On Mon, 10 Sep 2007 15:27:35 +0900, "donzaemon" wrote:

yeah he's certainly not evading but the big question is "why didn't his elt
go off ?"
what scenarios fit this ... he experienced a health problem and got the
plane down ?
doesn't seem like an experienced pilot like him would forget to set it off
by hand after a forced landing ....
Do they sometimes fail to go off on impact ?

As someone else posted, severe crashes can sever the ELT antenna. Sadly, it's
the scenario that best fits the apparent lack of signals from either his ELT or
his wrist-mounted PLB.

Ron Wanttaja

Donzaemon,

Do they sometimes fail to go off on impact ?


More often than sometimes, it seems. If they are not 406-Mhz-units,
that doesn't help either.

--
Thomas Borchert (EDDH)

donzaemon wrote:
yeah he's certainly not evading but the big question is "why didn't his
elt go off ?"
what scenarios fit this ... he experienced a health problem and got the
plane down ?
doesn't seem like an experienced pilot like him would forget to set it
off by hand after a forced landing ....
Do they sometimes fail to go off on impact ?

Yes, they do fail sometimes to go off on impact.

Matt

On Sun, 09 Sep 2007 19:52:30 +0200, Martin wrote:

On Sun, 09 Sep 2007 10:20:40 -0600, Newps wrote:


No, you just have to understand the realities of the process.

That's a bad analogy, we're not looking for one airplane in a sea of
other planes. Remove all the planes in the picture except one. Now try
and find the one plane.

and use software to compare old images with new ones to identify changes.

You'd have to have before and after photos with matching positions and view
angles of the satellites/aircraft or the photos you're comparing will be taken
from two different angles. You'd have to have the "before" photo taken at about
the same time of day and the same time of year, since the shapes of all the
shadows will be different, otherwise.

Finding a "before" picture might be a bit challenging. After all, it's
desert...how often is someone going to shoot a high-resolution picture of it?
The older the "before" picture is, the more natural changes will have occurred
and the more false positives. You'll have to hope no bushes have died off since
the previous photos were taken, that no new ones have grown, that the wind
hasn't pushed any dunes around, that no four-wheel-drive enthusiasts have cut
new tire tracks, etc. etc. etc. Having to chase down ~50,000 false positives
might slow things down a bit.

I'm a space (spacy?) guy, not a computer sciences type, but it seems to me that
the processing capability needed will be stretching the current technology.
Let's assume you've got a ground resolution of 3 feet. That's ~1760 pixels per
linear mile, 176,000 pixels per single row, or about 30 gigapixels total. Give
it a lousy 256-bit color, and that's about a 7.6 terabit image. Excuse me, TWO
7.6 terabit images, since we'll be comparing them.

Sure, the US Government might have the capability...but they'd be comparing
photos taken with same camera, taken just days or weeks apart, from the same
orbit, at the same time of day, etc. In any case, they are not likely to let a
set of civilians waltz in and borrow their computers.

Ron Wanttaja

Ron,

Finding a "before" picture might be a bit challenging. After all, it's
desert...how often is someone going to shoot a high-resolution picture of it?


Well, FWIW, it's a part of desert that (I was told) contains one of the largest
ammo storage facilities in the world. So it might just be photographed a little
bit more often. That said, I still think you're absolutely right about the
chances of finding it.

--
Thomas Borchert (EDDH)

On Sun, 09 Sep 2007 21:09:53 +0200, Thomas Borchert
wrote:

Ron,

Finding a "before" picture might be a bit challenging. After all, it's
desert...how often is someone going to shoot a high-resolution picture of it?


Well, FWIW, it's a part of desert that (I was told) contains one of the largest
ammo storage facilities in the world. So it might just be photographed a little
bit more often.

Yeah, but do you think those who DO have the pictures of the ammo facilities are
gonna offer them up? :-)

Ron Wanttaja

Ron,

Yeah, but do you think those who DO have the pictures of the ammo facilities are
gonna offer them up? :-)


True. It's at Hawthorne, BTW. Even the Google Earth pix aren't bad.

--
Thomas Borchert (EDDH)

"Martin" == Martin writes:

Martin and use software to compare old images with new ones to
Martin identify changes.

I guessing you're not a programmer.

Our $40G/year intelligence expenditure mistakenly identified WMD in
Iraq. Does anybody remember Colin Powell insisting before the
UN--with photgraphic evidence--that WMD's were there?
--
"Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere!"
--President Bush, joking about his administration's failure to find
WMDs in Iraq as he narrated a comic slideshow during the Radio & TV
Correspondents' Association dinner, March 25, 2004

Bob,

Our $40G/year intelligence expenditure mistakenly identified WMD in
Iraq.


Not really. They wanted to see WMDs, because the politicians wanted
them to see them - and so they did. The government paid, and got what
it paid for.

--
Thomas Borchert (EDDH)