Asano: Adaptation can spur innovation; Missing plane presents critical problem

Shintaro "Sam" Asano was named by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011 as one of the 10 most influential inventors of the 20th century who improved our lives. He is a businessman and inven­tor in the field of electronics and mechanical systems who is credited as the in­ventor of the portable fax machine.  Write to him at sasano@gmail.com.


As I stated in last week's installment, the category of problems of importation and adaptation do not require new invention. It requires either importing the available technologies from other field(s) and/or adapting available solutions by searching elsewhere.

As you may have already guessed, the final package of solutions can be a combination of several inventions or practices.

Problem: A Malaysian Airline Flight MH370 Boeing 777 disappeared March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. There were 239 people aboard the plane. As of April 4, fully 27 days after, an intense air and sea search has been covering the remote and desolate part of southern Indian Ocean some 1,000 miles east of Perth, Australia, with little positive results. At least 10 aircraft and 10 ships are involved from the United States, Australia, China, Japan, Malaysia and Indonesia. Yet, we have found nothing that conclusively pinpoints the aircraft had gone down there. None of this ocean debris could be connected to the missing aircraft.

The expenditure of this search, assuming one aircraft per day means at least $50,000 and a well-equipped search ship at a similar amount of expense, tallies up to $1 million a day minimum. Additionally, the ground crew cost and other miscellaneous expenditure would cost another $500,000 a day. Thus the search's direct cost may be around $1.5 million a day. The search so far has cost upward of $35 million, and counting with nothing to show for it.

I am sure the large search party will eventually find some artifacts that would be determined to have been from the flight MH370. But, that doesn't prove the exact point where the aircraft plunged to the ocean, nor what happened to 239 people aboard after that. By the time the search is terminated either due to finding nothing or finding something attributable to the flight to prove it went down into the ocean, it is possible the cost would have risen to $100 million or more.

It is very strange that we cannot know what happened to flight MH370 when we know exactly where the "curiosity" search robot is, and what he is doing on the surface of the moon. So I started to look around for the technologies to possibly help this situation. I have in my car a $100 GPS unit that shows where I am at all times. The instruction book that came with this unit from Walmart stated its accuracy is within 75 feet. Yes, my inexpensive GPS display can locate my car within radius of 75 feet without fail. And it can do so at anywhere on the Earth.

If you want to know how the GPS system works, I suggest you read the well-written description of Global Positioning System at Wikipedia. The system can tell you your position in real-time anywhere in the world including around both the North and South poles.

The main problem of the tragedy of flight MH370 is that the aircraft's real-time location could not be obtained. Either due to shutting down the transponder by the pilot, or some catastrophic equipment failure, the position information was not transmitted.

When I read through some Wikipedia articles about GPS and other related subjects, I found the concept of using a transponder to report an aircraft's location made me quite uncomfortable. A transponder is a silent device that speaks out when asked a question. Otherwise, it sits quietly and does not do any transmission. In that sense, transponders are interactive devices with two-way traffic required. A ground controller asks a flying airliner to respond to his question such as the aircraft's location, and the transponder in the plane responds to the query.

Thus a transponder system saves the amount of traffic greatly compared with systems that transmit data (or broadcast) at all times whether they are needed or not. Transponders are thus a perfect application for the toll collection gate. When a car with the toll transponder passes under the toll collection antenna, it receives a query: "Who are you?" The transponder replies with its ID, and the toll gate system gets the ID to see if this account has enough money in it, and subtracts the toll fare. This way the transponder in the car uses almost no energy, thus no need for a battery as the required energy comes from the toll gate system when queried.

It seems that location data collection for commercial aircraft worldwide has been using transponders, which reply when queried. If for some reason, the people on the flight deck shut off the transponder or it was broken, no locational data would be transmitted back. That was exactly what happened in the case of flight MH370.

For 27 days, nobody quite knew where the huge aircraft went. A couple days ago, the authorities determined the area they had been searching was probably wrong, and moved it northward. And these actions do not involve a few miles here and there. The location change moved 700 miles north. The target range is currently 1,040 miles west of Perth, Australia. Its size is about 200 miles by 500 miles, 100,000 square miles, and equivalent to the state of Colorado. Now, readers, just think: numerous planes and ships looking for floating debris possibly from flight MH370 in that vast area of rough waters. The aircraft takes nine hours to get there and return to the base. They have only a few hours to look for the debris before their fuel is exhausted.

To be continued next week.

Article and photo http://www.seacoastonline.com