UPDATED: See end for description of possible northern route
On Saturday, March 15, Malaysian authorities released an analysis of satellite data that dramatically narrowed the possibilities for where missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 had gone after it disappeared from radar on March 8. Over the course of the following week, Inmarsat released further information that not only showed where the plane went, but also indicated how it got there. The results are shown on this chart. We still don’t know if the plane headed north or south, but if it went north, it made landfall near the western India-Bangladesh border and proceeded along the Himalayas to Central Asia. If it went south, it passed over western Indonesia and out over the southern Indian Ocean.
How are we able to determine this? The procedure requires a bit of explanation. Inmarsat is a communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit over the Indian ocean. That means it remains in the same place in the sky, like it’s sitting on top of an invisible pole. Because it’s so high up, it has a straight line-of-sight to virtually the entire eastern hemisphere. That’s great for radio communications: if you can see it, you can send it a message, and it can send that message along to anyone else in the eastern hemisphere, or to a base station that can then relay it to anywhere in the whole world.
Every hour, Inmarsat sends out a short electronic message to subscribers that says, “Hey, are you out there?” The message contains no information as such; the satellite just wants to find out if that particular subscriber is out there in case it wants to talk. Kind of like picking up your telephone just to see if there’s a dial tone. On the morning of Saturday, March 8, MH370 replied seven times to these pings, saying, in effect, “Yup, I’m here.” The line was open for the plane to communicate with the outside world. But the system that generates the messages themselves, called ACARS, had been shut off. So nothing else was communicated between the satellite and the plane.
All the same, those pings tell us something important about MH370: they allow us to narrow down its location. Because light travels at a certain speed, and electronics take a certain amount of time to generate a signal, there’s always a length of time between the satellite’s “Hey!” and the airplane’s “Yo!” The further away the plane is, the longer it takes to say “Yo!,” because it has to wait for the signal from the satellite to travel that extra distance.
Imagine you and I are in a darkened room. You have no idea where I am, except you know that I’m holding one end of a taut, 20-foot rope, and you’re holding the other. Therefore I must be 20 feet away. You don’t know where I am, exactly, but you know that I must like somewhere along a circle that’s 20 feet in radius, with you at the center:
Now, it happens that in this room there are walls and pieces of furniture, so you’re able to rule out certain spots based on that, so instead of a whole circle, you have pieces of circle, or arcs.
MH370 was in an analogous situation. When Inmarsat pinged it at 8.11am, the amount of time it took the plane to reply allow us to calculate its distance from the satellite, just as if it was holding a taut piece of string. Instead of furniture, factors such as speed and fuel capacity provide other limitations of where it could be, so its range of possible locations is also not a circle but a series of arcs:
Note that these arcs do not represent the path that the plane took, but the range of possible locations at 8.11am. That particular ping tells us nothing at all about how the plane got to wherever it happened to be. So at this point all we know is where it started (it disappeared from Malaysian military radar at 2.15am at a spot between the Malay Peninsula and the Andaman Islands) and where it ended up. It could have taken any of a zillion routes to get from its start point to to its final recorded location somewhere on that last arc.
Remember, however, that Inmarsat received six earlier pings as well, and from them we can narrow down the range of possibilities dramatically. The first was received at 2.11am, just before MH370 disappeared from Malaysian military. Its length indicates that the plane must have been somewhere on the green circle at that moment:
Of course, thanks to radar we happen to know in this case pretty much where the plane really was at this time — around the area of the pink dot.
On Friday, March 21, an Inmarsat spokesman told me that “the ping timings got longer,” meaning that the distance between MH370 and the satellite grew increasingly bigger, and never smaller. That means that at no point during its subsequent travels did MH370 travel any closer to Inmarsat. So from the 2.11am ping data alone, we can rule out every spot within the green arc:
MH370 never traveled anywhere in the shaded area. (Of if it did, didn’t stay there for long; by the end of the hour it had to be outside.) We also know that it never was further away from the satellite than it was at 8.11am, so we can exclude everything east of that, as well. Finally, we can rule out some chunks close to its starting point for other reasons:
So just from the 2.11am and the 8.11am pings, we know that MH370’s route of flight must lie within either of these two broad swaths — one lying to the north, and the other to the south. Bear in mind, the reasoning that we’ve just gone through doesn’t tell us anything about whether the plane went to the north or two the south. Because of the symmetry of a circle, the possible paths are mirror images of one another. However, we’ve vastly reduced the range of flight routes that MH370 could have taken. For instance, a popular theory circulating on the internet posits that MH370 tucked in close behind a Singapore Airlines flight, “SIA68,” in order to hide in its radar shadow:
This new Inmarsat data rules out that possibility. It also rules out the idea that MH370 flew south through the middle of the Indian Ocean to avoid military radar. If the flight went south, it would have had to have gone through Indonesian radar coverage.
Interestingly, on March 19, the website Antara News reported that “Indonesian Defense Minister Purnomo Yusgiantoro said the Indonesian military radar placed in the country’s western-most city of Sabang did not detect an airplane flying over Indonesian territory.”
On March 22, 2014, CNN reported that China, India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Laos, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan have told investigators that “based on preliminary information, their nations had no radar sightings of missing jetliner.”
So far, we haven’t talked about what we can deduce from the remaining five Inmarsat pings, the ones received at 3.11, 4.11, 5.11, 6.11, and 7.11. It should be possible, based on the presumed speed of the plane and the distance between the successive arcs, to make some reasoned guesses about how the plane traveled from one to the other. I haven’t seen the data yet—I’m working on it—but earlier this week the Washington Post published a map that showed what appeared to be the results of just such analysis as applied to the southern route, carried out by the NTSB:
This appears to be why the nations assisting the investigation have poured so many assets into searching that particular stretch of southern ocean. If MH370 took the southern route, it would have had nowhere to land, so it must have crashed and its debris must still be floating somewhere in this area.
Of course, the information we glean from Inmarsat data about MH370’s flight route is, by itself, symmetrical around an axis that runs from the spot on the ground underneath Inmarsat to the point where the aircraft was last observed. So assuming that the NTSB’s interpretation of the southern route was only based on factors of speed and arc spacing, it should be applicable in mirror form to the northern route as well. I’m working on that right now.
UPDATED 3-23-14: Okay, I feel a little slow on the uptake on this one, but it turns out that if you flip the NTSB’s guesstimated southern route, you come up with a northern route that looks pretty much like this one published in the Daily Mail (I know, I know):
Basically, you make landfall in the vicinity of Bangladesh, skirt along the border between India and Nepal, then cut across northeastern Pakistan and Afghanistan before winding up in Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan. This may be why Malaysia recently asked Kazakhstan if it could set up a search center there.
Kazakhstan would not be a bad place to try to hide an airplane. It is larger than Western Europe with a population of just 17.7 million. Its expansive, sparsely populated steppe and desert terrain make it perfectly suited as a touchdown spot for Soyuz space capsules. The country gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 but its communist-era ruler, Nursultan Nazarbayev, remains in power. He is a close ally of Putin, and two days after MH370 disappeared told the Russian premier “that he understands the logic of Russia’s actions in Ukraine,” according to Reuters.
@airlandsea : “Please push your Inmarsat contacts for information on Inmarsat 4-F1 pings. Did they see pings via I4-F1 or not? Have they looked? From the sketchy info available, it certainly looks like the gear on MH370 was compatible. MH370 was in the antenna coverage area of this satellite, and the flight path to Beijing was more consistent with the I4-F1 coverage area, so why haven’t they said anything about this? If I4-F1 ping derived circles could be produced and combined with the I3-F4 data, the path ambiguity could be resolved. ”
That must certainly be how Inmarsat is convinced of the Southern track, so strongly convinced to tell the Malaysains and allow them to put their PM out front w/ the Southern track conviction. (I was incorrect initially in thinking of Rolls and engine-performance-data).
Can someone explain no ELT? … or, if it was functional and transmitting as it should, how it wasn’t picked up?
@ Lee Schlenger, I think, Jeff’s post here showed, that the plane can’t have scooted around Indonesian airspace, because the plane then would’ve crossed the green line into the grey circle, which he rouled out because of the info, he extracted from the ping handshakes.That leaves us with the possibility, that the Indonesian statement is false for some reason, maybe because they aren’t telling the truth, or because the plane was flying so low, that it couldn’t be detected.
That the plane apparently didn’t scoot around Indonesian airspace, is another blow to the theory, that the plane was navigated intentionally into the remote Souther Indian Ocean. Of course it’s still a distinct possibility, but, if true, one could argue, they wouldn’t have risked the invasion of Indonesian airspace. But if the disaster scenario is true, they couldn’t have cared less, or probably were beyond caring anyway. That the Indonesians didn’t pick up on it, or don’t admit to it, is just another wrinkle in this convoluted story.
@Littlefoot Actually Jeff said here that his inmarsat contact said that the pings never got closer. Jeff says “MH370 never traveled anywhere in the shaded area. (Of if it did, didn’t stay there for long; by the end of the hour it had to be outside.) ” My thought about scooting around Indonesia is that it could have been done quickly enough to be back outside the shaded area by the next ping (which happen hourly at 11 minutes after). But I dont believe thats what happened. I think the plane did fly over or close to indonesia and they missed it or are lying (as I tweeted to Jeff and posted on here some days ago). not sure indonesia would ever share their data
@Littlefoot :
News did come out on Weds 3/19 eve that some government had quietly anonymously shared some radar-data with Malay investigators. That government must have been Indonesia.
I hear conviction and finality in the Malay PM’s statement this morning. I’m asking how he could be so convinced, unless searchers had made a definitive determination that some wreckage spotted in those S.I. Ocean waters belonged to MH370. If he’s been told… why did he not add that?
I’m going to pose a scenario : I’ll assume Indonesia did indeed see MH370 on its radar, didn’t know Malaysia Airlines had lost a plane, tried to communicate w/ it, sent fighters up to investigate, got no response (from an incapacitated crew), and fired upon it. It struggled on, but of course went down. Indonesians kept quiet. Could no one have noticed? Then, when it became clear Malay-Air was missing a passenger jet, realized that’s what they shot down. Quietly discussed it at the highest levels with Malay govt. Malay PM now stating “hopelessly lost,” but there’s no wreckage positively identified yet. Does he know something he’s not saying?…
Off-the-wall?…
Thanks Jeff, for providing a space for some of the most thoughtful coverage of this case. I am hopeful that a better explanation of the inmarsat data, and the analysis that was applied to it will be reported. It is sad, but given all the “facts” that have changed as this story has progressed, I think it is fair that checks “the math” that lhas lead to the conclusion that they know where it is. Also, ever since they released the 2:11 ping, the part of my brain that loves conspiracy theories has wanted someone to rule out KLM 386. I’ve always that it was a more plausible candidate for Keith Ledgerwood’s theory than SQ68. It was just off the coast of Bhubaneshwar at 2:11 and the green line runs right though it. Sorry, having my tinfoil hat on for 2 weeks has evidently given me hat head 😉 Thanks again to everyone for the intelligent conversation here.
18-MAR-14
Many of you are still going off course!
Look at recent Boeing/FAA TechAlert regarding 777 fuselage failure (19-inch crack) at Antenna Mount, discovered last Fall. “Boeing says Malaysia jet not subject to FAA inspection order” Literally True, but Tragically Misleading http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/12/us-malaysia-airplane-faa-idUSBREA2B1YN20140312
>> True – The FAA action only applies to US 777’s (because FAA is only relevant to US aircraft)
>> But Misleading – this predictable fuselage failure problem IS RELEVANT to all 777’s, not just US 777’s
One failure leads to entire failure sequence.
1. Mechanical failure at Antenna Mount, on top of aircraft …per Boeing/FAA TechAlert
2. Rapid loss of pressure, with aircraft failure propagation, explains the entire mystery.
3. Crew and passengers go into panic.
4. Last action of co-pilot was to turn aircraft back.
5. Top of fuselage rips back, causing aircraft to naturally climb in altitude, due to ‘drag’ on top
6. Significant communications links are lost due to loss of antennas on top of aircraft.
7.Throughout this process, passengers and crew loose consciousness and die.
8. Aircraft naturally stalls at limiting altitude, and spirals downward.
9. Erratic flight path would be result of mechanical and electrical failure propagation.
10. Good airframe design causes 777 to fly itself, as best it can, until fuel runs out.
11. MH370 is likely in deep ocean, SE of Sri Lanka
It may never be found.
Charles – Aerospace Systems Engineering Consultant
@GWiz
The plane flew on for 5-6 more hours after passing over indonesia. Thats not struggling on. Flight would have had to be up at 35,000 ft or so to reach southwest of Perth. Too much fuel is used at lower altitude. Australia official keeps saying 37,000 ft – maybe thats a standard altitude but the plane started at 35000. Did australia pick something up on the long range radar after all to allow him to speak knowlegdeable of altitude?
I hadnt heard some govts shared info with Malay other than the unnamed radar alluded to last week. Maybe this was indonesia and not australia – that makes sense. Indonesia says publicly they didnt see it – since they dont want to say – we say it but did nothing. but privately they told malaysia that the plane flew across indonesia. that would make perfect sense. And since indonesia is close to malaysia it wouldnt 100% rule out the northern route (inmarsat just did that) but if indonesia saw it – they had a good idea that it was along the south route – and this is what had been said – a strong idea. Good call – very possible indonesia was the mystery radar not australia.
@Gene and @airlandseaman, thanks for the additional info.
CNN has video of Malaysia PM stating that “never-before-used analysis” of inmarsat data shows MH370 flew along the southern corridor.
Not new satellite data, but rather new analysis. Sure would like to see the error bars on that analysis.
News coming out of Malaysia has been all over the map, but I don’t think he’d be saying this unless they were 100% certain. CNN also mentions debris sightings by searchers, so possibly that pushed their confidence over threshold.
I was an early adopter of the human-intention theory, but the clincher for me was Mary Schiavo (CNN aviation contributor) reporting that there has been nearly complete silence from ground sources. No chatter, no one calling to say they know something. After 911 they were flooded with calls. The 2-3 ground reports we do have are consistent with equipment failure.
@ JJinjupiter, you are right. It was an intelligent and knowleadgeable discussion. And there is no harm to admit, that many of us have been wrong, especially, since many things, which have been presented as facts, have been withdrawn after a couple of days You can only work with the info you are given. But, while a botched highjacking or abduction by pilot, with subsequent suicide, is still possible, I’m leaning now towards a highly improbable disastrous chain of events, which led to the loss of the plain. Chris Goodfellow didn’t get it completely right, but he probably deserves praise, because he spotted, that the plane headed towards Lankawi Airport, maybe in an attempt to land there. They didn’t make it for whatever reason, kept navigating for a while, until they made their final turn South, which brought the plane eventually far into the Souther Indian ocean. Sad and highly improbable story, but even improbable stories happen every day. I’m sure, we will hear more about it in the coming days.
@GWiz – After catastrophic failure, shoot-down is my second-favorite hypothesis. Any small east-asian country will be disinclined to admit it has accidentally killed 150 Chinese citizens.
@Hal
CNN had someone from inmarsat on by phone chatting live with Chad Myers. The new analysis was using dopler shift to determine directionality. Dopler of course is used all the time, just never been done with inmarsat data in this way
Essentially inmarsat satellite became a large radar gun in the sky. they analyzed the time it took to send ping to plane vs time it took for response. very clever
@Lee – To understand what you’ve said, I think I need an answer to the following question. The inmarsat bird is not geostationary but rather hovers in a fixed location wrt the universe while the earth passes under it. Correct? If so then that gives them more data to work with, earth movement being a third variable in the equation. Maybe earth curvature adds a variable as well since the southern route takes place all below the equator whereas the northern would’ve taken them over the fattest part of the earth.
@Hal ; @ Litlefoot : Chris Goodfellow may have been right, M Schiavo may have been right, but the absence of any ‘claim of responsibility’ does not indicate that those hypothesizing foul-play of some sort were not right either. Could have been hijacking/commandeering gone bad, damaged inoperable flight-controls, all flight crew and/or hijacker wounded/incapacitated. With FDR and CVR a mile or more at the ocean floor, we may never know.
What needs to be pushed for, is upload and storage of FDR and CVR data every hour or couple of hours on all flights. If we can back-up our ‘puters via Carbonite?…
Had this 777 and Malay Airlines had that, May-Air would have known, at least with a couple hours delay, what had happened and where their plane had ended up. If the ditching was survivable, S & R could have been enroute.
There’s a lot of confusion here apparently – Inmarsat satellites are all geostationary. They “wobble” very slightly from the nominal position due to secondary effects, and this may perhaps allow Doppler to be used, but it’s nor clear how.
@Hal
pretty sure inmarsat is geostationary above the center of the circle that would be formed by completing the arcs – north and south arc were equi-distant I thought. I think we need to see all 7 pings and for them to show their work (or someone to analyze and show). Im guessing is analysis of the multiple pings and dopler shift on response that did it. Just one ping would just show whether the flight was moving closer or further from the center. I suppose they could just plain be wrong, made a bad assumption, but seems like this data and ideas have been checked and rechecked before announcing.
Just curious, why was the first ping received by the Inmarsat satellite at 2:11 a.m. instead of 1:11 a.m.? The plane took off at 12:40 a.m. and had already reached cruising altitude at 1:07 a.m. (according to the last ACARS transmission). This doesn’t make sense to me.
@ GWiz, I don’t believe, an Indonesian shoot down scenario is viable, since in that case the plane wouldn’t have continued to it’s final resting place in the Southern Indian Ocean. But you are right, while I think, a disaster is the likeliest event right now, it still could be a botched highjacking attempt. Absence of claims make it less likely, but doesn’t disprove it. And there is still a remote possibility, that it was abduction plus suicide, and the perpetrator wanted to disguise the suicide. There are many valid reasons to disguise a suicide. I might write about it later, but for now I lean towards the disaster theory. The big question for me is, why there was all this misinformation circling around for too long?
@ Littlefoot :
As no debris has been positively identified, we don’t know MH370’s final resting place. We have the PM’s statement, his conviction, but no wreckage from anywhere south of Indonesia identified as being from 370.
We also have no explanation for no ELT…
@ GWiz, You’re right, we don’t know the final location of the plane just yet, but apparently all data extracted so far point to the Southern Indian Ocean, roughly, where they’re searching right now. That’s not just the PM’s conviction.
As to the ELT: Just google ‘ELT malfunction’, and you will find quite a few explanations, why this device hasn’t gone off. Could be just another coincidence in a chain of coincidences…
Does anyone know, btw, if this thing can be disabled manually by someone in the know, who doesn’t want the plane to be found too soon?
The pilot committed suicide. Case closed. Why no ELT? Because he disabled all tracking devices. Not hard for him to do. Or else he flew into the himilayas to make it impossible to find.
Just curious, why is the first ping received by the Inmarsat satellite at 2:11 a.m. instead of 1:11 a.m.? The plane took off at 12:40 a.m. and had already reached cruising altitude sometime prior to the last ACARS transmission at 1:07 a.m. Why is the first satellite transmission a full hour and a half after takeoff?
@ Littlefoot / @mudpie
Come on, guys. Pilot could not have disabled ELT, and he obviously did not disable whatever it is on the aircraft which returned pings to Inmarsat’s satellite.
Imnarsat’s 8:11 ping-arc shows approx where MH370 should have been on Mar 9th.
Know what?. . No confirmed wreckage debris from MH370. No ELT. So you can postulate that MH370 LANDED on Christmas Island (go ahead, check the coordinates and measure the runway)(refueled, removed that whatever-it-is which returned pings to the Inmarsat satellite, and took off again.
With no ELT, and no confirmed crash debris, disprove that.
All Inmarsat satellites are geosynchronous. IOR satellie is located at 64.5 degrees east.
Details on coverage here:
http://www.inmarsat.com/about-us/our-satellites/our-coverage/
The handshake timing provides the slant range from the satellite to the aeronautical mobile earth station (circles on the ground).
Doppler provides some additional information from which *radial* velocity relative to the satellite point can be derived. It provides no information on the tangential velocity component.
Regarding Chris McLaughlin’s characterization of this being new math never before used…that is very oversimplified and misleading. Inmarsat may have never used handshake time delays and this technique for the location of aircraft, but the general method has been in used for decades. It is SOP. Indeed, the basic math is used routinely in many satellite systems, so it is well proven technology, not something new.
Lee – Afraid I’m still not getting it. Light travels at the same speed in all directions. IF all you have is a time delay due to the transmission of the signal, then we still have this circle of equal-delay locations around the satellite’s position. They ruled out half the circle using fuel & speed, but they can’t rule out the northern route that way. And I don’t see how they can rule out the northern route using ONLY delay times. In fact Chris Myers is on CNN right now talking about “doppler shift” but NOTHING he is saying could not also be said about the northern route. His preso is useless I’m afraid.
@GWiz, I don’t think, someone disabled ELT, was just asking, if it’s possible. It was probably just malfunctioning. Has happened before.
I guess, we can talk again, if they really located and fished out some debris, but the British company, which analyzed the ping data is pretty sure about the WHOLE path, the plane took, which ended in the Southern Indian Ocean. No chance to land and refuel it somewhere. They have an article about the British company and their analysis at BBC’s website.
@gwiz, there are certain things that cannot be disabled like FDR. Pilot was probably unaware of satellites being able to ping the plan. According to Les the 777 pilot, he said there were 4 ELT’s and 2 above the cabin so those could easily be accessed.
You can’t just come up with hairbrained scenarious. All the facts indicate the pilot intentionally ditched the plane. There is no other motive other than suicide.
Chad Meyers just gave an informative update. He said he has been on an email chain with Inmarsat insiders which indicated they relied on the Doppler to infer the radial velocity at each circle. That suggests they either tried but could not use the I4 at 142 degrees east due to the configuration, or they did not try. It would be nice to know if they looked into that possibility, but found no usable data.
As explained, it is still a mystery what additional information or assumptions they used to conclude the aircraft went south. Based on LOPs and Doppler alone, you still get two mirror image solutions…one north and one south.
@mudpie, every solution seems hairbrained right now ;), but I agree, pilot suicide cannot be ruled out at all. And I agree, if someone wanted the to get lost, he might not have been aware of the pings and the data, which could be extracted from them, especially, since it hasn’t been done before.
@airlandseaman – Yes Meyers’ presentation was fine until he got to the point where he had to apply all that info to the northern route. At that point it was just hand waving. He said “… and it doesn’t work for the northern route.” But he forgot to say why.
So why did Inmarsat reveal timing/arc data ONLY for the very last 8:11am ping? Why not for all of the pings? Something smells here.
I already estimated its location on 13 March (zs6tw.wordpress.com) based on only the last ping, fuel, etc. Strange, but nobody seems to have bothered about the two Inmarsat footprints! The IOR sat has a hemi beam AND a north eastern beam. If Inmarsat told us which ping was from which beam, we could have calculated the route bearing very very precisely. Or maybe they did release this key critical information and I simply missed it. Keith.
@airlandseaman, they reveal a little more here:
http:/www.bbc.com/news/uk-26720772
If they aren’t bamboozling us on purpose, I’m inclined to take their word for it, even, if they haven’t made the whole calculation transparent.
Hi,
Its actually the COMSAT unit which initiates the ‘pings’ here. The ping interval is a configurable parameter (in whole minuts) on the COMSAT itself. This plane would have had it set for 60 minutes. Because of the time it takes to do the ping, the interval ultimately became 60 minutes and 30 seconds.
Keith.
@Hal
I get your confusion. I agree. From what Chad showed, it would seem the flight could also be in Kazakhstan or wherever would make the pings right. But Inmarsat claims to have compared to other Malaysian Air flights and maybe some info they havent shared. Who knows, maybe there is definitive radar from australia but its classified, so australia worked with the UK to work with Inmarsat and got them to say what they did. But I doubt that, Inmarsat’s reputation is on this. They will likely have to show their work, maybe even publish in a journal. I have posted a video of the CNN phone interview with Chris McLaughlin of Inmarsat on Youtube http://youtu.be/dv9bRnThNls . McLaughlin said there is no way it went north. McLaughlin was later on Wolf Blitzer’s show and was not as unequivocal.
@Lee_in_MA
@ Lee Schlenger, they really have quite a bit to lose, if they are wrong. Hopefully, they salvage some meaningful debris pretty soon, to end the location discussion once and for all.
The BBC article about the calculations, I gave the link to above, just got updated, with the interesting remark, that the mystery, how the plane got, whereever it ended up, isn’t solved at all. The human intervention theory is very much alive.
@Littlefoot
Absolutely, we don’t know if fire, sudden depressurization, suicide, physical hijack, some sort of cyber etc. Inmarsat only said its to the south not north. I havent read the BBC article. Maybe that will make the math more clear. Will make a good episode on the Science Channel when this is all over. Hope they find debris and then black boxes soon.
Great question. Don’t know.
@mudpie : This is not a piss-fest, okay, just saying…
“You can’t just come up with hairbrained scenarious. All the facts indicate the pilot intentionally ditched the plane. There is no other motive other than suicide. ”
YOU just gave us a ‘hairbrained scenario’ (!)
“Intentionally ditched” ?…. nope, fact don’t get you unequivocally there.
“Suicide” ?… nor there either.
I’m convinced by the Inmarsat data interpretation that 370 went south, not north. I’ll trust their science and discard the northern track.
The Inmarsat ping-arc tells us where their satellite saw MH370 on the morning of Mar 9th. It never shook hands with MH370 again after 8:11. The 8:11-pinc-arc furthest final point, where they now have assets searching, is at the extreme longest point of travel if 370 had the fuel and if 370 regained 35 K plus altitude. If he lingered lower, 12K or so, for longer, at a lower speed, he could not have gotten that far…but he would still be on the 8:11 ping-arc, further up, closer to Indonesia.
Now I’m not saying this happened… I’m saying this still COULD have happened: In the absence of confirmed, identified MH370 crash debris, in the absence of acquired ‘beeps’ from black-boxes, in the absence of ELT :
Christmas Island IS ON the southern 8:11 ping-arc. 370 could have been on the ground there, at 8:11, pilot got out, unscrewed the antenna which kicks the ping back to the Inmarsat satellite, threw it in a lake, and the satellite never got a 9:11 handshake. Aircraft hidden there?… Refueled and took off again ?…
Scenario, yeah. Hairbrained, no. You got confirmed identified debris to disprove that with?… no.
I read the page at:
http:/www.bbc.com/news/uk-26720772
…but it confirms what I have been saying. You simply cannot resolve the N-S ambiguity based on ping time delays or Doppler only. You can only get two symmetrical solutions based on this data. The hidden assumptions appear to come from the analysis of other flights with known (GPS derived) paths. But that analysis can only verify that they have a good math model. It can not by itself prove N-S direction. This is very disturbing. Maybe this is why Chris McLaughlin seemed to hedge his answer to Wolf.
Eureka !! Just watched analysis / commentary by Tom Foreman on CNN. He said Inmarsat took advantage of the FACT that the earth is not perfectly round and you would expect to have slightly different data on the dopler shift for northbound vs. southbound flights. They then took this hypothesis and tested it against other Malaysia Air 777 flights where they new what direction they were heading. they proved their assumption & calculations and then re-analyzed for MH370. The pings fit a southern route. Now, we dont know what flights Inmarsat compared to. Did they use another instance of MH370 going to Beijing. That wouldnt fit the northern arc. They need a flight that would mirror the northern arc in my opinion such as singapore 68. But I think Inmarsat has got to know that and has done due diligence here. I will try to post video to youtube of Tom Foreman segment shortly.
@airlandseaman – Agree with you 100%. Plus it’s been stated more than once in the mainstream media that this area of the Indian Ocean is an area that no other flights traverse.
So … what previous 777 flights could they possibly be comparing this with? Maybe they compared it with the northern route (well traveled area) and got such a bad fit that the southern route looks good by exclusion.
I believe a good math model can discover, and explain, a lot of truth. But the devil is in the details.
@Lee – Aha, I actually said that a few postings back. I said the southern route is all below the equator whereas on the northern route they would fly over the fattest part of the earth. Knew it couldn’t be doppler alone.
Keith: Regarding:
“…This plane would have had it set for 60 minutes. Because of the time it takes to do the ping, the interval ultimately became 60 minutes and 30 seconds.
Keith.”
Let me clarify. The delay is not a delay of 30 seconds on the 1 hour ping period. It is a delay of microseconds between the time of the NOC (Network Operations Center) up-link transmission of a single ping (lasting a few milliseconds) and the round-trip response to that ping received back at the NOC. It all happens in a second or so. The round trip time is roughly (4X 23,000 miles)/speed of light (186,000 miles per second)= .5 seconds + delay in the aircraft radio.
@Hal
Plenty of southbound Malay Air flights – Malaysian Air Flight 125 travels from KL to Perth. Im sure there are other flights to Sydney as well. You could compare flights to Perth vs. Flights to beijing for example to get the math right on northern vs southern hemisphere
@Lee – Ok good point!
@ Lee Schlenger, thank you! Please post the video. I can perfectly understand the wish to know exactly, how something was done. Hopefully some material proof can be salvaged pretty soon…
Here’s a new tidbit. It turns out I3-F1 (IOR satellite) has a significant inclination (+/- 1.66 degrees). Realtime orbit details here:
http://www.satellite-calculations.com/Satellite/170HourListings/170h_listing.php?23839
This means that the spacecraft is not exactly geosynchronous. It moves, relative to the earth, in a figure 8 pattern north and south of the equator +/- 1.66 degrees, once per day. That means the satellite can conceptually be treated as 7 satellites (one per ping), all in slightly different positions at the time of the 7 pings. With enough time precision (remember, GPS clocks are good to parts of a picosecond), and a good Kalman filter (or similar), it should be possible to resolve the N-S ambiguity with fewer (or no?) external constraints and assumptions.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~motionplanning/papers/sbp_papers/integrated3/kleeman_kalman_basics.pdf
The raw data provided by Inmarsat, the Malaysians own communications systems and anyone else should ALL be placed online for anyone to examine. In fact, it should have been so right from the get-go. The Malaysians are their own worst enemy.
If your research is sound, there’s no reason to fear others using the same data to replicate your results…and do further analysis. Only weasels hide data.
Just look around you. Countless government agencies in the U.S. and elsewhere have made their data freely available online. You want economic data? Try the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) or the Department of Labor (DOL). If environmental data is your thing, there are numerous datasets related to pollution, brownfields etc. available online at both the federal (try the EPA) and state levels of government. Need data for a dissertation? The data consortium at the University of Michigan (ICPSR) might be useful. It worked out well for me!
The Malaysian government’s insistence on secrecy is yet another of the countless errors they’ve committed. Their investigation of Flight MH370 will become a case study in how NOT to manage anything.
Looking at the current maps and visual and satellite “debris” sightings, seems to me the plane flew a bit further than the 8:11 am ping. The plane doesn’t have to be on the southern arc. It was on that arc at 8:11a and it did not ping at 9:11a. It could have flown until 9:10a – if it had enough fuel. I know the fuel calculations show it down closer to 8:11am, but maybe they got a bit better than nominal mileage (it would depend on weather conditions) and the plane then glides down not noses down. In short, I think he plane is further south than the search area they showed a few days ago and is to the west of the “debris”. But they need oceanographic analysis to really make that guess. Its hard though since there are storms and various things through there regularly that make it not a constant current.