Jeff Wise

With every passing day, the odds go down that searchers will find the wreckage of MH370 on the Indian Ocean seabed. (Indeed, many independent researchers suspect that the game is essentially over.) If nothing comes up before the search’s scheduled wrap date this June, then the entire case will hang on a single piece of physical evidence: the flaperon that washed up in Reunion Island last July and is now being held by French judicial authorities at a facility near Toulouse, France.

The good news is that the flaperon could provide a wealth of information. I’ve seen photographs of the serial numbers located inside the plane, and I’m convinced that, despite my previously expressed reservations, they do indeed prove that the piece came from MH370. And experts have told me that the sea life found growing on it offers a number of different clues about the airplane’s fate.

The bad news is that the French authorities have apparently made little effort to follow up.

As I’ve described earlier, the predominant form of life growing on the flaperon is an accumulation of goose barnacles of the genus Lepas. In all the world, the number of marine biologists who study these animals is tiny; those who have carried out peer-reviewed research specifically on animals of the genus Lepas could fit in an elevator. Each has contributed something unique to the field; each has a unique body of experience with which to inform the investigation of this important Lepas population. Yet the French authorities have reached out to none of them. (I have been informed that they have contacted two French marine biologists, one of whom is unknown to me and the other of which is an expert in crustaceans of the southern ocean; Lepas belong within this much broader category of animal.)

That’s a shame, because only by tapping the world’s leading experts in this little-understood species can we hope to wrest the most information from this solitary piece of evicence. Here’s what we could learn:

• Hans-Georg Herbig and Philipp Schiffer in Germany of the University of Cologne have carried out genetic analysis of the world’s Lepas species to understand their geographic distribution. By examining the animals on the flaperon up close they could determine the mix of species growing on it, they could derive a sense of were the flaperon has drifted. The image above shows Dr. Schiffer’s best guess of the identities of some barnacles in one small section, based on photographic imagery alone.
• Knowing the species of the barnacles, and measuring their exact size, would allow scientists to gauge their age, and hence the amount of time that the flaperon has been in the water. Such an analysis has been performed forensically before: Cynthia Venn, a professor of environmental science at Bloomsburg University, helped Italian researchers identify the how long a corpse had been floating in the Adriatic Sea, as described in their paper “Evaluation of the floating time of a corpse found in a marine environment using the barnacle Lepas anatifera.”
• By measuring the ratio of oxygen isotopes in the animals’ shells, scientists could determine the temperature of the water through which they traveled as they grew. “All one needs in an appropriate shell, a fine dental bit in a handheld Dermel drill, a calculator and  access to a mass spectrometer,” says legendary marine biologist Bill Newman, who helped pioneer the technique at the Scripps Instition of Oceanography in La Jolla. In the past, this technique has been used to track the passage of barnacle-encrusted sea turtles and whales. But again, it would require access to the flaperon barnacles.

Why haven’t the authorities been more proactive in seeking help from the world’s small band of Lepas experts? One possible answer is that they’re befuddled. As I’ve described earlier, photographic analysis of the barnacles’ size seems to suggest that they are only about four to six months old. This is hard to reconcile with a presumed crash date 16 months before the flaperon’s discovery. Something weird might be going on—which would not be that surprising, given that the case of MH370 has been tinged with weirdness from day one.

After nearly two years of frustration, the key to the entire mystery may well lie in this single two-meter long wing fragment. But if the authorities don’t examine it—and publish their findings—we’ll never know.

PS: In my aforementioned piece about the barnacle distribution on the Reunion flaperon, I argued that the piece must have been completely submerged for months—an impossibility without human intervention. However, it’s been pointed out to me that barnacles sometimes grow on surfaces that are only intermittently awash. A very vivid example of this is a section of SpaceX rocket that was found floating off the coast of Great Britain last November. The piece (pictured below) had spent 14 months floating across the Atlantic with its top surface apparently above the waterline, yet sufficiently awash to support a healthy population of Lepas.

A section of rocket casing found floating in the Atlantic after 14 months.

While this suggests that the Reunion flaperon could have accumulated its load of Lepas while floating free, it also provides another example of how thickly covered by large barnacles a piece can be after more than a year in the ocean.

click to enlarge

As I’ve discussed in earlier posts, by its own calculations the ATSB has already searched most of the high-probability areas of the Indian Ocean seabed in its quest to find the wreckage of MH370. The only remaining area of relatively high probability that has not been searched is a stretch along the inside the 7th arc.

(In the image above, the area that had been searched prior to the release of the ATSB’s December 3 report is outlined in black.)

Yet this is not where the search is currently underway. According to ship-tracking conducted by Mike Chillit, Fugro Discovery has spent the weeks since the ATSB issued its report searching an area 40 nautical miles beyond the 7th arc, in the pale blue “low probability” area of the ATSB’s heat map.

It’s hard to understand why.

UPDATE 12-22-2015: I was delighted to learn that Richard Cole is back on the case, paralleling Mike Chillit’s work by collecting and collating ship-movement data in order to understand what areas have already been searched. Richard has given me permission to reproduce one of his charts, which shows the situation much more clearly than my amateur effort above. I’ve outlined the area already searched in light blue. One thing I notice looking at this is that the unsearched high-probability area near 87.5 N 37.5 S hasn’t even been bathymetrically scanned yet! Click to enlarge:

It’s the holiday season, and I’d like to express my gratitude for the community of fellow obsessives who have helped turn over every conceivable stone in an attempt to solve the mystery of MH370 (and a few other aviation tragedies along the way). Audible has given me ten copies of the audiobook edition of “The Plane That Wasn’t There: Why We Haven’t Found MH370” and I’d like to pass them on to readers of this blog. I’ll send a redemption code to the first ten people who ask for one in the comment section. (If you’ve already read the Kindle Single, you can pass along the code to someone else as a present.)

UPDATE 12-17-15: They’re all gone. Thanks, everybody.

UPDATE 12-18-15: Okay, starting now, I’ll give a copy of the audiobook edition of “Fatal Descent: Andreas Lubitz and the Crash of Germanwings Flight 9525” to the first ten commenters who ask for it.

UPDATE 12-18-15: Once again they’re all gone. Happy holidays!

At a press conference earlier this month, Australian officials released a new report updating the scientific rationale for their continuing search of the southern Indian Ocean, which is expected to wrap up no later than June, 2016 after the expenditure of an estimated $130 million. “We have a high level of confidence that we are searching in the right area,” declared Assistant Minister for Defence Darren Chester.

As a result of this new analysis, the width of the area to be searched has expanded: from 20 nautical miles inside the 7th arc and 30 nm outside, to 40 nm inside the arc and 40 nm outside.

The key piece of data deployed to justify this reassessment was the newly announced finding that that the satellite data unit (SDU) requires only 120 seconds from fuel exhaustion to first log-on attempt, rather than the 220 seconds cited in earlier reports.

Assuming that the plane was operating as a “ghost ship” without a conscious pilot at the controls, its final moments played out like this:

• 00:11:00 Transmission from SDU to [ground station]. Hourly ping as previously described.
• 00:17:30 Approximate APU start time. APU requires approximately 60 seconds to provide electrical power.
• 00:18:30 Approximate time of SDU power restoration. SDU required approximately 60 seconds after power application to begin transmitting a log-on request.
• 00:19:29 SDU initiated log-on request. SDU began log-on process to satellite system.
• 00:19:37 Log-on request complete. SDU successfully logged onto satellite system.
• 00:21:06 Expected IFE [Inflight Entertainment System] set up of first ground connection. IFE set up request did not occur.

Here’s a nice visualization, from page 11 of the report:

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What does the fact that a piece of MH370 washed up on Reunion Island tell us about the plane’s likely impact point? For the last few months independent researcher Brock McEwen has been hounding the ocean drift modelers of the world in an effort to shed light on that question. After carefully analyzing the results of nine drift models–CSIRO, UWA, GEMS, Deltares, GEOMAR, ICMAT, Adrift, IPRC, and OM–Brock, a trained statistician, concludes that taken together they suggest:

• Without implausibly strong wind effects debris could not have reached Reunion Island from the current search area.
• Before debris could have reached Reunion Island, other pieces should have washed up in Western Australia and on other shorelines in the Indian Ocean.

These points undermine the claim put forward in the most recent ATSB report that “the location of the recovered debris is consistent with drift modelling predictions of objects starting in the areas identified as possibly containing MH370.”

The entire report can be found here.

I hope that officials investigating the crash, whether they be in Australia, Malaysia, France, or elsewhere, take heed of Brock’s significant contribution. The evidence has long been mounting that the authorities are looking for the plane in the wrong place.

The ATSB has just issued a lengthy and detailed new report explaining its latest thinking regarding the underwater search for MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean, available here. For the most part the media are reporting that its basic point is that the current search area is the right one. While that’s true, there are some more interesting points buried within in it, and within its companion volume from Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG) which explores the logic in further depth.

Here are my bullet points—I invite readers to add their own, or to correct or elaborate upon my points.

— One of the most jaw-dropping revelations in this report is that after 18:01:49 there was just a single radar return point. Note only does this contradict data shown to passenger family members soon after the disappearance (see Victor’s note below, and the image above), it also raises questions about the reliability of that piece of radar data. Since it was detected at the far limits of the radar equipment, it is relatively inaccurate, and as a stand-alone piece of data it is much more likely to be anomalous.

— The report reiterates that the only way to deliberately depower the SDU is by pulling circuit breakers in the E/E or isolating the left AC bus from the cockpit, but offers no explanation of why this might have happened prior to 18:25.

— It turns out that the time to recycle SDU is not 2.5 min but only 60 seconds. This is particularly important when it comes to laying out an end-of-flight scenario that presumes fuel exhaustion.

— The report says that after fuel exhaustion ditching not possible, with or without a conscious pilot. There has been a great deal of debate about the possibility of ditching in this forum, and I hope (but doubt) that the report will lay the issue to rest.

—At last, we know the cost index for the initial portion of the flight: it was set at 52. Of course there is no reason to assume that the later portion of the flight was conducted at this setting but it helps us calibrate likely flight modes.

— Overall point: With these two documents, the Australian authorities have shed a commendable quantity of light onto the subject of how they have determined the likely flight paths that MH370 took after it disappeared. It is heartening to note that they have greatly shrunk the length along the 7th arc along which the plane might plausibly lie: by my reckoning, from about 630 nm to 380 nm. And the “fried egg” of maximum probability is smaller still, only about 150 nm long. However, I find it baffling that, given the incredible level of effort poured into figuring out how the plane might have traveled prior to fuel exhaustion, there seems to have been basically zero time spent figuring out how the plane would likely have traveled after the fuel ran out. Frankly, I was expecting a lot of analysis along the lines of Brock McEwen’s work on this topic. As it is, it seems that instead of examining flight modes they took a guesstimate from accident-investigation experts and added a fudge factor. The result is that, while this latest analysis shrinks the search’s target area on one dimension, it makes it fatter on the other. In current southern search area, they’ve looked about 18nm inside, 30nm outside 7th arc. According to the new report, they should expand the search box to a width of 80 nm, symmetric around the 7th arc. This is not progress, and I think the ATSB can do much better (and hopefully will in a future report.)

Some additional points from Victor Iannello

Before I could post the above thoughts, Victor emailed me some observations of his own, which I include here unedited:

“There are some very strange results reported starting on page 17. Here are some comments related to that and the BFO bias:
1. As the attached graphic illustrates, if we are to believe that primary radar data exists every 10 seconds up to 18:02 and then only a single capture at 18:22, the slide presented to the NOK on Mar 21 at the LIDO hotel is false or includes data not used in the report.
2. There is a statement that the ground speed observed by the radar prior to 18:02 is relatively high and implies the aircraft would be at low altitude. While this would be allowed from Ma number and available thrust considerations, the indicated air speed would be extremely high, the airframe would be stressed, and the fuel efficiency would be incredibly wasteful. This is not consistent with the fuel calculations after 18:22.
3. The groundspeeds they calculate from the radar data have tremendous variability, even after the Kalman filter is applied. I estimate the peaks to be about 550 kn (!) We need the raw radar data to see what the hell they are doing.
4. The bias term was observed to be time-varying and modeled with a SD of 25 Hz. But there is also a statement that “Substantial effort was made to characterise this structured bias. It was found to have a geographic dependency but it has not been possible to determine a quantitative function to compensate for this change in bias.” This implies the drift might not be a simple OCXO drift issue. In fact, perhaps it is the correction term that has a geographic dependency rather than the oscillator drift.

Overall, I am not sure their work adds much value over the deterministic approach that the IG and others has followed. The PDFs and assumptions on heading/speed changes of previous flights are practically irrelevant.”

He later added:

“Their approach of randomly spaced turns, accelerations/decelerations, and climb/descents will always favor straighter, more constant speed paths that fit the BTO data. Since commercial flights are relatively straight to conserve fuel, it predicts those flights relatively well. If MH370 flew relatively straight, it should work there, too. But there are no guarantees the flight was near straight. For instance, if the flight flew south, a circle “loiter” above Sumatra would be ranked low, as would a curved path that followed the coast of Sumatra. There is bias in their model that is not acknowledged. Also, fuel calculations are only indirectly included by limiting the range of speeds. The model seems overly complicated for the value of what is produced. It seems developed more to impress than to enlighten.”

UPDATE: 12/4/15

Reader Paul Smithson asked “how much of the newly-defined priority area has already been searched?” In the image below I’ve outlined in black the area already searched (via Richard Cole) on the “fried egg” map. (Click to enlarge) The original 120,000 sq km search area is outlined in red; the new 120,000 sq km search area is outlined in purple. As you can see, almost all of the high-probability area has already been scanned. As more and more is searched, the probability density of the area being scanned will decrease, so that search becomes ever less fruitful. The effort expended between now and the end of the scheduled search will, by my seat-of-the-pants estimate, increase the probability distribution coverage from aroun 85 percent to 90 percent.

Eleven months after AirAsia Flight 8501 crashed under mysterious circumstances south of Borneo, taking with it the lives of 162 passengers and crew, we at last understand what happened: On Tuesday, Indonesia released a report revealing that the plane was doomed by a combination of minor mechanical glitches and pilot error. While this in itself would be grounds for concern, eerie similarities with another crash five years earlier suggest that an underlying vulnerability remains unaddressed in the worldwide air-travel system — one that could eventually have unexpected and far-reaching consequences for the driverless cars currently being developed by some of the world’s richest and most ambitious companies.

Flight QZ8501 took off from Surabaya, on the Indonesian island of Java, at 5:35 a.m. local time on December 28, 2014, bound for Singapore. Ahead lay a band of thunderstorms, some of them towering up to 44,000 feet high. After reaching the assigned cruising altitude of 32,000 feet, the flight crew called air-traffic control and requested a turn to the left to avoid a storm. Given permission, the pilots then asked to climb to 38,000 feet. Controllers denied that request, then soon afterward said the plane could go to 34,000 feet. But something had gone wrong. The pilots did not respond to the new clearance. Instead, without issuing a distress call or signal, the plane abruptly climbed, slowed, and banked into a steep turn. When it disappeared from radar, it was plummeting at a rate of more than 11,000 feet per minute.

For days it seemed as though the plane had simply vanished. Then, on December 30, the first bodies and debris were pulled from the ocean six miles from the plane’s last known location. More wreckage was recovered soon after, and on January 12, the black boxes were recovered from the ocean floor.

Given the proximity of the thunderstorms and the flight crew’s urgent efforts to avoid them, it seemed that weather was likely a major cause of the accident. Indeed, before the black boxes were found, Indonesia’s weather agency issued at 14-page report stating that most likely the plane had been brought down by icing in the thunderstorm cloud tops.

But as Tuesday’s report takes pains to emphasize, it turns out that weather had no direct bearing on what happened. Instead, it focuses on pieces of equipment located in the tail of the aircraft called the Rudder Travel Limiter Units, or RTLU.

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The Buk missile launcher suspected of downing MH17. Source: Bellingcat.

In the aftermath of the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over the Donetsk region of Ukraine last July, two parallel investigations were launched by the Dutch governmment: one a civil inquiry to establish the cause of the incident, the other a criminal inquiry to establish responsibility. The first was completed last month, when the Dutch Safety Board released a report entitled “Crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17.” It concluded that the plane had been struck by a missile fired by a Russian-made Buk surface-to-air missile (SAM) launcher. Responsibility for the deed has yet to be assigned; the Dutch prosecutor’s office is expected to release its findings next year.

Those findings, I think, will surprise many people.

The commonly accepted scenario is that rebels obtained a Buk missile launcher and, believing that they were attacking a Ukrainian military transport, fired upon and destroyed a Malaysia Airlines 777 by mistake. In this telling, no one was truly to blame—it was all a big mistake, the kind of tragic misunderstanding that is all to common in war.

There is ample evidence for this narrative. Russian media reported that on June 29 the rebels had captured a Buk missile launcher. On July 14, a Ukrainian Antonov An-26 military transport plane was shot down over eastern Ukraine while flying at an altitude of 20,000 feet. On July 16, a Ukrainian Sukhoi Su-25 attack jet was shot down while flying at a similar altitude. Then, on July 17, a rebel commander named Igor Girkin boasted on social media that his forces had shot down another Antonov-26 transport plane belonging to the Ukrainian military. Girkin, a colonel in Russian military intelligence declared that “In the vicinity of Torez, we just downed a plane, an AN-26.”

The post was soon after deleted, but not before it was picked up by mainstream Russian media.

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In the immediate aftermath of MH370’s disappearance, California attorney (and noted birther) Orly Taitz filed a FOIA request with the National Security Agency to find out what the organization had about the missing plane in its files. Unsurprisingly, the NSA wouldn’t say; they wouldn’t even confirm that they had a file at all. As grounds, they claimed that “FOIA does not apply to matters that are specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive Order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign relations…”

The NSA’s response presents an interesting logical puzzle. If the NSA doesn’t have any material relating to MH370, then surely it would not violate national defense or foreign relations to say so. So presumably the NSA does have such material. Yet in response to Taitz’s inquiry they specifically emphasize that they might not. While it’s hard to say for sure which is the case, it sure smells like the NSA has something they don’t want to talk about. (“Typically when the government does not have any records, it would respond to FOIA request attesting that there are no records in question,” Taitz writes.) If I had to guess, I’d hazard that it might have to do with the radar and signal-detection capabilities of the US and its allies in the area where MH370 disappeared.

In the spirit of Taitz’s inquiry, I recently submitted my own FOIA request to the FBI to see what would turn up. Two weeks ago, I received a reply. The FBI, too, said it could not turn over material to me, stating:

“The material you requested is located in an investigative file which is exempt from disclosure pursuant to 5 U.S.C. §  552 (b)(7)(A).  5 U.S.C. §  552 (b)(7)(A) exempts from disclosure:

records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes, but only to the extent that the production of such law enforcement records or information… could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings…”

You can see the whole letter I received from them here: Page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4.

Later in the same letter the FBI asserts that “this is a standard notification that is given to all our requesters and should not be taken as an indication that excluded records do, or do not, exist.” So again we run into the same logical conundrum as with Taitz’s NSA reply. If we assume that, in order for its contents to be categorized as non-disclosable, the file had to exist, then I take this to mean that the FBI has an investigation open into the hijacking of MH370. This by itself doesn’t necessarily mean that the plane was taken by third parties rather than the captain; the FBI was involved in the investigation of EgyptAir flight 990, which was ultimately deemed (by the US) a case of pilot suicide. The fact that they are considering enforcement proceedings, however, suggests that they believe that there are entities out there in the world against whom such proceedings could be brought.

Twenty-three minutes after takeoff this past Saturday, shortly after reaching an altitude of 31,000 feet over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, an Airbus A321 flying as Metrojet Flight 9268 abruptly plummeted and crashed, killing all 224 passengers and crew. The suddenness of the loss of communications, the rapidity with which the plane descended, and the size of the area across which the wreckage was scattered indicate that the plane experienced a sudden, catastrophic structural failure at high altitude. But what does that tell us in practical terms?

Given Russian aviation’s rather poor reputation for maintenance, one immediately obvious possibility was that the plane had suffered a severe malfunction. Receiving particular scrutiny was the fact that in 2001 the aircraft’s tail had been repaired after being damaged in a rough landing. This suggested a possible parallel with China Airlines Flight 611, which suffered a catastrophic decompression 20 minutes after taking off from Taipei in 2002. In that case, too, the aircraft’s tail had been fixed after a rough landing years before. When the faulty repair job failed, the airplane was ripped apart with such force that the pilots had no time to make a Mayday call.

Parallels might also be seen with TWA 800, which crashed off the coast of Long Island in 1996. In that case, NTSB investigators concluded that the plane had exploded after faulty wiring caused fumes in a fuel tank to explode, leaving the plane’s pilots no time to radio for help or try to steer the plane to safety.

On Saturday, the New York Times published a story on the Metrojet tragedy that noted that “the fuel tank on one of its planes exploded before departure from the Siberian city of Surgut in 2011, and the ensuing fire killed three people.” That makes it sound like Metrojet planes have a history of exploding fuel tanks, but that’s not really the case: What actually happened in the Surgut incident is that one of the plane’s engines first caught fire, and that fire subsequently caused the fuel tank to explode some minutes later. That is to say, fire preceded explosion, not vice versa. An engine catching fire in flight can be swiftly catastrophic — such an event downed Air France Flight 4590 in 2000 and effectively ended the Concorde’s career — but not swiftly enough to prevent a distress call.

It’s worth noting, too, that in the wake of TWA 800 industry-wide design changes were made to fix the problem, and no similar accidents have occurred in the two decades since.

If mechanical failure did not bring down Metrojet 9268, the other possibility is malice.

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