The mysterious saga of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 got even stranger this week when a family member of one of the missing passengers appeared on Chinese television to show that her brother's phone was still ringing.
"This morning, around 11:40 a.m., I called my older brother's number twice, and I got the ringing tone," Bian Liangwei said. She then dialed the number and watched as the phone rang multiple times before disconnecting.
See also: 36 Hours Later: What We Know About Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
Other family members tried it, too. According to a reporter with China.org.cn, a group of 19 families signed a joint statement delivered to Malaysia Airlines asking for an explanation. Why could they get through to their family members’ phones but not hear anything? Why did the calls hang up? Most importantly, does this mean the passengers are still alive?
Unfortunately, the ringing phones don't mean much of anything at all.
When you place a call, hit the send button, and your phone starts to ring, it "doesn’t mean it is ringing on the phone of the person you are calling," says wireless analyst Jeff Kagan.
"What it means is the network is at work, trying to locate the party you are calling," he says. "It rings once, twice, three times, and if it finds the phone, it delivers the call. If it doesn’t find the phone, then the call is disconnected."
"Family members over there are hearing the [ring] tone and they are hoping, but this is not a sign of anything. This is just how the networks work," Kagan says.
That ringing sound to which we're so accustomed is actually a psychological trick, meant to keep us on the line while the network works to locate the other phone.
"The ringing sound is generated by the originating carrier's switch while the network sets up the call," a CTIA-The Wireless Association spokesperson tells Mashable. "This keeps callers from abandoning the call when they hear no sound. The ringing sound has nothing to do with the actual 'ringing' of the called party's device."
Still, an official with Malaysia Airlines told reporters he, too, had experienced the eerie ringtone.
"If I could get through, the police could locate the position, and there is a chance he could still be alive,” one woman is quoted as saying, hopeful that the phones could be used to perhaps find the missing passengers.
But tracking a phone's location is more complicated than it seems.
"It depends on the phone. It depends if it has GPS. It depends if the GPS is on. And it depends if the cell site that they’re on has GPS, too," Kagan says. "If everything is working right, yes, the network can tell where that phone is — within a very small area," he says.
Though he cautions that, in order for that to work, everything has to be working properly. So, if that phone is on the ocean floor, it would be nearly impossible to track.
These calls were never answered because they likely were never were delivered. That's a tough pill for the families who are short on information on their loved ones' fate, nearly five days since they boarded the flight to Beijing.
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