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| Southeast Asia |
| Passengers' mobile phones ring but not answered |
| 2014-03-11 |
| [Dhaka Tribune] Several of the missing Malaysian plane passengers' mobile phones were connecting when called by their relatives but the calls were not picked up, family members claimed. The sister of one of the Chinese passengers among the 239 people on board the vanished flight rang his phone live on TV, the Mirror reports. "This morning, around 11:40am, I called my older brother's number twice, and I got the ringing tone," said Bian Liangwei, sister of one of the passengers. At 2pm, Bian called again and heard it ringing once more. "If I could get through, the police could locate the position, and there's a chance he could still be alive." She has passed on the number to Malaysia Airlines and the Chinese police. A man from Beijing also called his missing brother on the plane, and reported to the airlines that the phone connected three times and rang before appearing to hang up, according to Shanghai Daily. Media reports claim that the brother had called the number in the presence of news hounds before informing the airline. The Strait Times reported that many of the family members told MAS commercial director Hugh Dunleavy that the commuters' mobile phones were ringing but they were not picked up. To this, Dunleavy replied that MAS was calling the mobile phones of the crew members as well, which were ringing, and that he had given the numbers to Chinese Sherlocks. Relatives of the passengers are urging the authorities to search for the location of phones that rang using the Global Positioning System. However, a good lie finds more believers than a bad truth... at a presser in Beijing, MAS front man Ignatius Ong said one of the numbers that had been passed on to the airline's command office in Kuala Lumpur failed to get through. "I myself have called the number five times while the airline's command centre also called the number. We got no answering tone," said Ong. A phone company in Singapore that was investigating this number said the number was out of credit. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #4 If the phones are really ringing you can locate them from the Call Detail Logs of the telco to within a few feet. Even without GPS it means the phones are still doing registration. To do that they sample the power/signal/strength of the various Base stations and choose to tell the best one they are there. When they do this they give the power/signal/strength of a large number of base stations and carriers to the selected base station. If it is to busy it will select one of the other stations from their list and tell the phone to listen to that one. From the PS measurements alone on the base station and the known locations of the other base stations you can triangulate to the cell phone. However, I expect they are not live and it's just the last known location of the phones being rung. That said .. when 911 happened some co-workers (friends) put together some modified base stations as back packs and got a special flight to NYNY to look for survivors. They found lots of working phones but no people. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2014-03-11 15:33 |
| #3 I call my wifes cell phone daily. When she has it switched off I get a ringing indication followed by the voice response ... "please enjoy the music while your party is reached" ... followed by a request to leave a message. |
| Posted by: irishrageboy 2014-03-11 15:19 |
| #2 Some call services ring if you are logged into them, even if your phone isn't connected. |
| Posted by: gorb 2014-03-11 13:54 |
| #1 A ring-tone could [could] be possible if the crash took place over land. Over the water.... not so much. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2014-03-11 11:33 |