PakledHostage

Yes, please do. I wasn't the one speculating. I merely attempted to provide additional background for some of the misconceptions in this thread. I have no doubt that the flaperon that was found on Reunion is wreckage from MH370 and that it will contain trace evidence that will shed at least some light, however small, on what happened. We just need to wait for the experts to complete their analysis.

B787_300 did. That part of my response was directed at him/her. And as you don't appear to have read the rest of my post (or my earlier post in this thread) in any detail, I'll save my breath saying anything else. You wouldn't ever expect to loose a whole engine and pylon off the wing of a 747 either, yet it has happened more than once and not always with catastrophic consequences. Aircraft do occasionally suffer in flight failures and it doesn't always make the news when it happens. It does quite often result in some form of airworthiness directive being issued against the type, however, so you'd have a good chance of being able to find evidence of a flaperon design problem in the list if ADs issued against the 777 if there was a problem. You won't find it though because there isn't one.

Not quite. The 'zz' number in a Boeing aircraft type's dash number is the customer code. It designates the airline that the airframe was originally delivered to. In very general terms, the 'x' number is the aircraft type while the 'y' denotes some variant, but the variations aren't limited to just fuselage length. For example, the 747-400 is an entirely different type design (with its own FAA type certificate) from the 747 classics. As far as the FAA is concerned, the 747-400 is more different from a 747-300 than a 767 is from a 757. (The 757 and 767 share the same type certificate). Boeing doesn't really care if an operator moves a part from one aircraft to another. The operator may ask Boeing for confirmation that a part can be swapped from one airframe to another if it isn't clear from the existing approved documentation, but Boeing isn't required to keep a list of what is on a given aircraft. All they can tell you is what was on it when they delivered it to the customer that first took delivery. As I described in my post earlier in this thread, wing parts like flaps, slats, spoilers and ailerons each have their own part number and serial number pressed into a data plate that is permanently afixed to those parts. This is because those types of parts can and do get swapped around from one aircraft to another over the lifetime of the airframe. Their composite sub components may get water in them, causing delamination due to freeze/thaw cycles. They may be damaged by lightning strikes. They may even get damaged due to bird strikes, tire failures, collisions with ground vehicles, etc. In the event, you don't want to have to ground the entire aircraft for a week while you fix what is an otherwise removable part. Instead, you find a way to swap it out (whether by leasing or buying a replacement part, by robbing a serviceable part off an aircraft that is in heavy maintenance or by using one of your own spares) and fix the damaged part in the back shops while the aircraft keeps earning revenue. The operating airline is then responsible for keeping a record of what S/N is on its aircraft and the maintenance history of that part, along with the back to birth records of where the part came from. That would require a conspiracy. You don't just walk up to a 777 with a flaperon under your arm and swap it out. You need all sorts of specialized tools and equipment to do a job like that. It will take the effort of multiple people. And as they say, the only way two people can keep a secret is if one of them is dead... D-checks are planned maintenance and would not ever be required because you lost a flaperon. The aircraft would certainly be grounded for a series of conditional inspections that may also spill over to the rest of the world-wide fleet of that type design if the loss was deemed to be due to a design fault, but you don't go performing invasive inspections of everything on the aircraft just because you lost a part off the wing.

I suspect that you haven't read a lot of airline's annual reports? Airlines might make on the order of 2% in a record profit year. And if you add up all the industry's profits and losses since the time of the Wright brothers, the airline industry has basically only broken even. They've been doing better in the last few years, it is true, but it isn't a business to get into if you want to make "stupid amounts of money".

Might be worth a try... My camera allows me to shoot in both RAW and JPEG simultaneously so I leave both options turned on all the time. Shooting in RAW won't solve problems caused by a bad sensor, focus or lens - garbage in garbage out - but it would get around a bad onboard JPEG compression algorithm and give you the flexibility to experiment with white balance, etc in your image processing software.

I stumbled on this video a moment ago and thought I'd share it:

I dialed shpaget's recommend settings into my exposure wheel app and I get an exposure value of just over 13, while your settings yeild an EV of roughly 10. That suggests that you might be overexposing a fair bit. One the other hand, you mentioned that your camera seems to be struggling in the low light? The two situations seem to be at opposite ends of the spectrum? Maybe the problem is that your JPEG settings are set to a low quality (high compression) setting? Or maybe your camera's quoted ISO or appeture settings aren't accurate?

I was just thinking about that one in light of all the mentions of Frozen... Up is definitely one of my favorite animated films.

While we're on the topic of movies that are so bad that they're good, has anyone here seen "Return of the Killer Tomatoes"? I haven't seen it in many years but I remember laughing pretty hard. Interestingly, it had George Clooney in it. B-movies must be his thing? He was in another space-themed B-movie recently.

Parts like the flaperon in question certainly are rotable parts. Rotables are tracked and you'd be able to pull up the maintenance history for the lifetime of the part. They may not even stay on the same aircraft for the entire lifetime of the airframe. Rotables have data plates that include the serial number and part number. The data plate is usually made of stainless steel or titanium (depending on where it is being mounted because you don't want to cause galvanic corrosion). The part number and serial number text is pressed into the metal so it can be read, pretty much no matter what. On a flap or a slat, the data plate would typically be mounted on the ends, although it wasn't visible in the one photo that I saw of the flaperon that was found. It looks to me like the flap's other end was damaged. Hopefully the data plate hasn't gone missing, but that might explain why it is taking so long to get a definitive ID on the part having come from MH370. If the data plate has gone missing, they'd have to disassemble the flap and read off the part numbers off of the individual bits that it is made from. There are small variations in many parts on commercial transport aircraft from one airframe to the next. They might be able to figure out what series the flaperon is and compare that part's series to the series of the flaperon that is known to have been on MH370. There may also be unique repairs on the flaperon that was known to be on MH370, and they could then identify it that way... Kind of like dental records.

I fully agree. And don't forget that this flaperon will itself contain trace evidence. Whether that is the types of organisms growing on it, the nature of the damage (i.e. were the flaps likely extended when it hit the water?), maybe even the degree of salt water corrosion. We will learn something about the crash by examining the recovered part.

Nope. Maybe just post the images to imgur?

Magnemoe is from Finland, IIRC. Maybe cut him/her some slack? We're an international community using English as a lingua franca. Those of us who speak English fluently should be glad we don't have the same challenge of using a second or third language to participate in this forum.

Then why not Canada? We have a lower population density than Kazakhstan, live in igloos and don't have any allies in the international community to help us stand up for ourselves... Heck, we'll probably even say "sorry" when you come 'round to pick up your lump of platinum.

Oh give me a break! You mean this Kazakstan: Its is as if you think that they're so backwards there that they'd pick up a space rock and think to themselves "the gods must be crazy!"

If your wired quote is accurate, then it sounds like the problem may run deeper than just some unfortunate engineering decisions. An organizational culture of arrogance and complacency has killed more than a few highly skilled people who were among the best in the world at what they did...

Human factors is a complicated thing. What may seem obvious to someone judging from the comfort of their armchair may not be so obvious to people in the heat of the moment. As an example, the gear lever on commercial transport aircraft, even in this day and age of glass cockpits, are mandated to have a tire shaped knob on the end. The allowable profiles are right in the FARs. Clearly there have been problems where highly trained but fallible people have grabbed or failed to grab the landing gear retract lever at some critical time.

Does it? Following the extremely high speed crash of Turkish Airlines flight 981, full and unbroken wine bottles were found among the wreckage. Shape certainly mattets a bit but I'm inclined to believe that luck plays a dominant role in cases where something survives against the odds.

It might satisfy one's dreams of emulating Smaug, however...

No, I don't think we missed it... It is just a little vague. I think you need to be more explicit. I don't think "Do some magic. Profit." is what 55delta had in mind in his/her OP. Edit: Ninja'd by Camcha.

That's a straw man argument. Some people with impressive credentials may indeed make the types of claims you mention but those things haven't been demonstrated. Jeremy Howard, on the other hand, demonstrates examples in his TED talk video of the types of advances he's speaking about. But you've already said that you won't watch his talk or others like it so I wouldn't expect you to know that.

And to be clear, Voyager275's question was about sentience, not sapience. Sentience is not the same thing as (nor does it even require) consciousness.

Your loss... Jeremy Howard isn't some crackpot. Among other things, he's a Distinguished Research Scientist at the University of San Francisco, Data Science Faculty Member at Singularity University and Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Enlitic. The title of his TED talk video may be a bit sensationalist, but he almost certainly knows more than anyone here about the state of the art in AI.

But you also need to consider the recent advances that have been achieved with deep learning algorithms (software) and neurosynaptic processors (hardware). Perhaps the problem isn't a lack of processing power so much as the lack of an appropriate architecture? IBM's SyNAPSE chip has 1 million neurons, 256 million synapses, is the size of a postage stamp and runs on 70 mW. And that's only the beginning of what is very likely to be a new paradigm in computing.

Only peripherally related in so far as they used a large explosion to modify a shipping lane, but the story of the Ripple Rock explosion may be interesting to some here: Ripple Rock was and underwater ridge located in Seymour Narrows, between Vancouver Island and the British Columbia mainland. It was blown up in 1958 to remove the hazard it posed to shipping. They used 1300 tonnes of explosives placed inside the rock ridge via tunnels from nearby islands. According to the Wikipedia article, the explosion was of "interest to nuclear weapons scientists at the United Kingdom's Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, which sent a delegation to Canada and set up various monitoring instruments to record data from the explosion."