This is happening late at night and will bear further discussion in the morning, but I wanted to get something up online quickly to explain the basic gist of the situation. A little over an hour ago, at 9.30pm EDT here in the US, the Australian government announced that it was abandoning the current search area and moving to a new one 11oo km to the northeast. The reason, they said, is:
The search area for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has been updated after a new credible lead was provided to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA)… The new information is based on continuing analysis of radar data between the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca before radar contact was lost. It indicated that the aircraft was travelling faster than previously estimated, resulting in increased fuel usage and reducing the possible distance the aircraft travelled south into the Indian Ocean.
This explanation really doesn’t make any sense. I want to quickly explain why, and give some context of where all this is happening geographically.
First, here’s a very crude chart I’ve made on Google Earth showing the old search area and the new search area (very roughly estimated). You’ll recall that earlier this week Inmarsat released an analysis of its “ping” data that plotted different routes the aircraft might have taken. The upshot was that if the plane was flying at 450 knots, it would have wound up at a spot on the 8.11am ping arc marked “450.” If it had flown at 400 knots, it would have wound up around the spot marked “400.” (click to enlarge)
As you can see, it appears that the old search area assumed a flying speed of a bit more than 450 knots, and the new search area assumes a flying speed of a bit more than 400 knots, with prevailing currents causing debris to drift to the southeast.
The shifting of the search area to the northeast would seem to stand at odds with the assertion of the press release, which implies that new radar analysis finds the plane was flying faster then originally estimated. In fact, it was flying slower than originally estimated.
At any rate, the abandoning of the old search area, after such significant assets had been lavished upon it, raises the question of why they were so confident about it that speed estimate in the first place. And then raises the obvious sequela: Why are they so confident in this one?
BTW, here’s that graphic from the Inmarsat, showing the 450 and 400 knot plots:
@Luigi Warren, you offered a two phased scenario, which I liked. The pilot abducted the plane in order to negotiate something, and when he was rebuked, he turned the plane South, to crash it into the Indian Ocean. But, if, what Rand said about mobile sat phones not working in a plane, is true, we have to ask ourselves, how he would’ve established communication. Cellphone would’ve been highly unreliable, and he couldn’t use sat phones in business class without reestablishing some sort of communication with the plane.
My question: if mobile sat phones really don’t work in a flying plane, how do the sat phones in business class work? Are they connected to the ACARS system? Rand posed the same question. And wouldn’t a sat phone call be traceable? By Inmarsat? Which satellite would’ve been used?
So, the viability of that scenario hinges on the question, how contact could’ve been established.
Wow, look, what I found:
There are satphones, which seem to work on a plane with an UNPRESSURIZED cabin!
http://www.satworx.com/iridium9505a.php
One huge assumption is that over a period of seven hours nobody – pilot, crew or passenger – communicated with anyone outside the aircraft via radio or sat phone or smoke signal.
Really? I find this improbable.
Only the deranged pilot or ghost flight scenarios mesh with remaining incommunicado for the duration of the flight, while these scenarios don’t really jibe all that well with remaining aloft for hours.
Incidentally, I’ve noticed that the primary advocates of the cockpit fire/ghost flight scenario are largely pilots. I wish somebody would interview a couple of convicted hijackers and learn how they would have behaved in the cockpit of MH 370…
Nice find on the sat phone. That would be a good way for a rogue pilot or hijacker to contact authorities after ducking out from radar coverage. If that’s what happened, it would give that individual a tremendous amount of leverage for a few hours, albeit with no good end game. If there was an attempt to communicate with Malaysian government officials, obviously that information has been kept tightly compartmented and secret — which would not be surprising. Presumably, the NSA has had metadata or audio for a while, which might have been the early “indication” to the US that the plane ended in the drink. In any case, at this point, it’s unlikely we will ever know — it will turn into another unsolved mystery, like MH653:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysian_Airline_System_Flight_653
The issue of the co-pilot turning on his (plain, old-fashioned) cellphone is a separate one. I think the story is probably true. Hishammuddin’s non-denial denial seemed lawerly and evasive even by his standards. Now that we sorta/kinda “know” that the plane flew low overland for a long distance, it would seem likely that at least some phones on the plane were reacquired by ground antenna, so it would seem Hishammuddin hasn’t been forthcoming about that line of inquiry. Then again, what has Hishammuddin been forthcoming about? Did he break the story about the radar coverage, or the plane flying on for hours, or Zaharie being a passionate supporter of Anwar Ibrahim? A big part of his job here is damage control. He’s being groomed for the top slot, and will no doubt be well rewarded for his services.
@Rand, Littlefoot, Luigi
I would agree that the possibility of a cell phone “ping”, or connection, can lead to insights about potential goings on of the flight. But it also seems to me that it is putting the cart before the horse a little bit. Once there is a “where” you can get a “how”. This would lead to a “who”. From there a “why”.
For what it’s worth, the latest leak from the investigation:
http://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/missing-malaysia-airlines-plane-mh370-thrown-around-like-fighter-jet-in-bid-to-avoid-radar-source-claims/story-fnizu68q-1226883092654
Looking back, many and perhaps most of the leaks which have been reported in legitimate press outlets have held up pretty well, so I’d take this seriously.
@Luigi, thanks for posting that link! I just wanted to do it, too.
The original publisher of the ‘fighter jet’ tidbit is apparently the Sunday Times, hardly a tabloid. If that turns out to be true, you can bury the disaster theory once and for all.
They also mentioned, that the plane flew at very high speed at low altitudes over the Malaysian peninsula. That is most certainly true. I’ve made my own calculations a while ago, and I came to the conclusion, that the plane must’ve flown not impossibly fast, as some poster claimed,but very fast at top speed,considering all the maneuvers, it supposedly executed. Now, if it flew that fast at low altitudes, small wonder, it burned a lot of fuel.
Now, I understand Inmarsat’s statement: ‘The plane flew faster, than we originally thought’. They probably were talking about ‘air speed’, and not ‘over the ground speed’. The airplane’s speed over the ground was known all the time, since it was known, when the plane arrived at certain way points. But if it was flown on high speed at low altitudes, the air speed was much faster than in thin air at a higher altitude.
@Gene, the cell phone discussion is not so important, since we don’t even know, if the copilot or someone else switched on his cellphone or not, but the sat phone discussion could be important. For me, it’s interesting to know, that it’s indeed possible to establish ground contact with a special mobile sat phone, but that it’s not possible for regular innocent passengers since it only works in an unpressurized cabin.
In the early days many posters wondered, if there wasn’t even one passenger with a sat phone, who could’ve made a call. Thanks to Rand (and google), we now know, that this was not possible with ordinary sat phones, but we also know now, that it wasn’t impossible alltogether under certain conditions with a special type of sat phone. And that could be important for certain scenarios.
@Gene, just for the record: that was not a contradiction, but a clarification for myself. I promissed, not to contradict you for 3 weeks.
So, if you want to come up with a great crackpot theory about the plane being in Shangri La, I will have to support it, even, if they find the wreckage in their search area during those three weeks. 🙂
@Littlefoot – Crackpot theory? You mean like it being caught in your dog’s fur? Or maybe Putin has stolen it as a means of distracting the world media’s attention from the fact he is going to give himself the Ukraine as an Easter gift?…. Shangri La sounds nice though.
@Gene, Putin having stolen it, just to divert our attention from Ukraine isn’t a crackpot theory. I wouldn’t put anything past Putin. My dog is absolutely innocent, though. Only helicopters get tangled in his fur.
Shangri La…if only…
@littlefoot
Not sure where you’re getting the idea that the Iridium phone only works in an unpressurized cabin. In any case, I believe those sat phones are pretty uncommon, so the chances are that no passenger had one. But a sat phone would be a way for the pilot/hijacker to reach the authorities to issue a diatribe or attempt a negotiation without giving away the plane’s location and inviting a fighter escort. Perhaps that call could also be done through the plane’s own communication system — I’m not sure — but if not, the sat phone offers a solution.
If the pilot/hijacker did try to reach Malaysian authorities, who would they call? Keep in mind, this would be happening in the early hours of the morning, and time would be of the essence. You’d want to reach the top people fast, through their aides or on a direct line if possible. Maybe the PM, or perhaps his younger and more dynamic cousin, Defense Minister Hishammmudin Hussein. Hishammudin was Capt. Zaharie’s ultimate boss (as Acting Transport Minister since 2013), and had been active in the campaign to marginalize and discredit Zaharie’s hero, Anwar Ibrahim, so he might have been a logical point of contact if Zaharie is the perp. I certainly wouldn’t assume that Hishammuddin is a disinterested party in this matter, passionately searching for the truth. I mean, maybe he is, but I wouldn’t count on it.
Incidentally, I just looked it up and Hishammuddin’s father was the PM at the time of the still-unexplained Malaysia Airlines Flight 653 hijacking in 1977. According to the CNN article below (see last para), MH653 was the deadliest hijacking on record up to that time.
http://web.archive.org/web/20041223015303/http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9611/25/comoros.crash/index.html
Too bad they never got to the bottom of it. I wonder if this one will be different.
Remember the crate with many coloured straps on it? Remember the stern confirmation that MH 370 was indeed carrying crates bound for China? Mmmm – that was three thousand kilometres ago and presumably it’s still bobbing around down there, not to mention the various other bits of rubbish that grabbed the publics attention, from the orange round one to the greenish rectangular one. But seriously the robot should go under this week and it would take another few weeks I’m guessing. If nothing turns up get ready for conspiracy overdrive. Heat on Inmarsat, who knows what, where is the wreckage……It will be on.
It’s Monday morning, and I’m grumpy; please excuse me.
1. I don’t know how much we should put into the latest piece regarding the aircraft being “thrown around like a fighter.” This is originating from someone with a visual orientation prone to excitement who has placed themselves in the aircraft along with the victims (i.e., not professional/mature). The analogy with the behavior of a fighter aircraft would also not have originated from someone in the military most likely and even more likely not someone in the Malaysian air services (pilot or radar operator). Airliners don’t behave like fighter aircraft, no matter fast or low they are flying. Finally, the 777’s fly-by-wire systems are to such a level of sophistication that auto pilot is not required to keep it on a reasonably stable flight path.
It is likely that the “source close to the investigation” merely constructed a visual depiction of what was already reported/rumored regarding the flight path over Malaysia. The guys at the Sunday Times in turn selected for a quote when the story is dying and they were pressured for a headline. All very normal stuff in journalistic circles.
2. The Iridium sat phone can communicate while in motion (not all can) yet it requires an external antenna or clear line of sight to operate. The context of the reference to unpressurized aircraft is that only aircraft with large windows (and thus a clear line of sight to the bird) can use the phone without an external antenna. Pressurized airliners don’t have large windows. And Luigi is correct: radio or onboard sat comms could have still been operable and not revealed the the real-time location of the aircraft.
The only out is that a pilot intending to go rougue could have pre-tested a sat phone from the cockpit on another aircraft where perhaps there is enough vertical visual to provided for sat phone handset connectivity.
3. @Littlefoot A Spitz has both hair and fur (a dual coat for cold climates; think sled dog). The heli would have gotten tangled up in the dog’s hair rather than its fur. Knowing the type of coat of the dog is what provided a visual on the location of the heli. BTW, I also visualized a dog basket out on a terrace or even wooden porch leading down to a terrace and that the heli may have been found in the basket.
4. @Gene I do realize that first answering “where” would provide answers as to how and why. But in this instance, it is clear that a purely location-oriented search could lead to no conclusions whatsoever, as with each day the odds that the aircraft will never be located increase (i.e., we have no debris, the batteries on the pinger locators are kaput, etc.) I believe the answers to this mystery are in more subjective domains where the validity tests of physical science do not apply. Furthermore, I find the implications surrounding the subjective domains of the process associated with this incident even more interesting than the incident itself.
5. What we know is that the aircraft was diverted from its intended flight path and that within FIVE DAYS the White House and the pentagon were stating unequivocally that the aircraft was in the southern Indian Ocean. Not the NTSB, not the UK AAIB, not Inmarsat, but the White House and the Pentagon supplied this information (according to the Wiki record). My hypothesis is that Inmarsat did not inform the White House, it was rather the other way around; there is no other explanation for the timeliness of the revelations, and that’s just for starters. Five days: the Indians were still looking in the Amdaman Sea at that point.
6. The US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand are now on point on the search; this particular alliance is tight – as in classified-information-tight.
7. Somebody (Matty or Luigi?) previously mentioned that subs breaking their cover and deviating from their mission could signify that terrorism is suspected. Given the players involved and assets being dedicated, this does seem to transcend your average easter egg hunt; they are not simply looking for a downed aircraft to provide comfort to the victims.
###
My bottom line: a 777 cannot disappear in 2014. MH 370 is a 777 and did not disappear in 2014. This translates into “The US has proprietary information regarding the present location and most likely the means by which MH 370 ended up at this location. This information is not being shared with the general public inclusive of the present international team now dedicated to the search for remains of the aircraft.”
Air Marshall Angus Houston need not even know why, the what and the how behind the search parameters. Think of a radiologist reading an x-ray (purely objective information) of a patient. It matters not whether the x-ray is from a living or a dead person; he reads it, records his diagnosis, the diagnosis is transcribed and printed on letterhead, and the information is sent to the primary care physician. Read the JACC website; the information presented therein is analogous to the transcription of such a diagnosis, it is strictly limited to physical dimensions, as it should be. This does not, however, mean that other dimensions of information do not exist.
And thus do the questions as to why and how become increasingly more imperative than questions as to where, as the latter fades off into ‘nowhere’. This is the Real Story, and it is not gaining any real attention in the mainstream media as far as I can ascertain.
Matty has nailed it, I believe: it will indeed be ‘on,’ and quite soon I would think.
So they found an oil slick. Shouldn’t be fuel because the plane would have been empty or close to empty. That leaves hydraulic fluid and engine oil. Now after thirty some days and a cyclone how can there still be oil from the plane in close proximity to where it is suspected of having gone in?
@Rand
Your comments on the comms options are helpful. I find myself increasingly persuaded that Capt. Zaharie was responsible. It took me a week or two to come around to that view — he just seemed like too nice a guy. The seizure of the plane right as it left Malaysian airspace seems especially telling in this regard — how would a hijacker know about that? Zaharie’s home simulator, the shut off of the transponders, the complex maneuvers, the difficulty of a hijacker gaining access to the flight deck, and the absence of any credible link to organized terrorist groups 5 weeks out all point towards the pilot being responsible. A strong potential political motive has emerged and has been definitively confirmed by the Ibrahim interview. There is also some reporting, not as well substantiated, indicating that Zaharie had recently become estranged from his family and was “not himself” in the run-up to this incident. It all adds up, and nothing else does as far as I can see.
If Zaharie was able to sneak the plane out of Malaysian radar coverage with 6-7 hours fuel still in the tank, then that would have put him in a virtually unprecedented situation. Not only could he take down the plane and the passengers (including 150 Chinese nationals), but he could turn the plane into a missile and launch a suicide attack, coming out of nowhere, anywhere within a radius of thousands of miles. That’s a lot of bargaining power. Question is, did he try to use of it?
Sub deployed this afternoon here in Perth at the rate of 40km2 a day.
At last we get to the bottom of those pings.
CNN video of Defense & Transport Minister Hishammuddin not answering a question about when military radar tracking of MH370 was communicated to civilian authorities:
http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2014/04/14/cnni-robertson-no-answers.cnn.html
@Luigi OK, I think you are on to something. Of course, the diversion at the point of the break in comms with KL and prior to any “good morning Vietnam” points to an experienced pilot on the flight deck knowing the precise moment to divert the aircraft. This decreases the probability significantly that a passenger-hijacker was responsible. Also, it further exculpates the first officer: he was not all that experienced in a 777, and we can assume that he was not all that experienced on this particular route. Achieving cruising altitude also provides an opportunity for ingress or egress from the cockpit for a coffee or potty break (i.e., the flight deck door is unlocked for a moment).
So, the captain drove the diversion with or without (most likely without) the complicity of the first officer or a member of the cabin crew.
As for motive, you have likewise provided it.
If we assume that the captain: 1. weaponized the aircraft, what was the intended target? 2. meant for the captain and the passengers to be a bargaining chip, with whom did he communicate his terms?
Scenario: the rogue pilot diverted the aircraft west and intended to shake first KL ATC and then Malaysian military primary radar. The pilot selected for a flight in the dead of night on a Sat/Sun, the most likely time for everyone to be asleep at the wheel, yoke or policy dashboard. The pilot used discrete waypoints (e.g., VAMPI, etc.) to initially mask the flight path of the aircraft by way of simply tracing the waypoints.
From here:
1. the captain intended to weaponize the aircraft and, after reducing the probability of detection, intended to fly the plane first west and then along base legs that would return it to KL. Question: what was the intended target?
OR
2. the captain intended to bargain with the aircraft and the passengers for political gain and communicated his demands to someone on the ground. Question: with whom did he communicate?
What would be the immediate reaction of the Malaysians (government and military units) be to either event? Would discrete forms of obfuscation be the general tone of the interaction? How would the military and/or government respond to a rogue commercial airliner? How would they respond today given that such events as they evolved in their airspace/FIR?
From here:
1. The Malaysians did nothing and thus the bungling, confusion, misstatements and whining and finger pointing (highest probability). The US later informed them (on day four) what actually transpired in terms of the flight path of the aircraft.
2. The Malaysians did something – such as intercept the aircraft and deny it return access to Malaysia. Whatever they did (the secondary event) then sent it south on a terminal flight to the southern Indian Ocean by whatever means of causation.
In sum, the aircraft was weaponized or politicized for reasons internal to the Malaysian domain and a secondary event outside of the pilot’s control sent it south into the Indian Ocean, which was thus not the intended destination following the diversion.
Nice work, Luigi. Yours is the only hypothesis that makes sense from what I can garner. Anybody see any holes in this?
I suppose that we will soon read of plans to expand the size of the cockpit aboard commercial airliners to include a potty and coffee machine – and a smoke break room, of course.
Errata last post: paragraph 4, “If we assume that the captain…” was to have been deleted.
If we take a step back and look at a pictographic representation of the flight path, it indeed looks like there may been intent to return to Malaysian airspace via the Straights of Malacca and that at GIVAL or VAMPI things started to go sidewise (causation?) in Phase I of the diversion, giving way to Phase II and the terminal flight path to the Southern Indian Ocean.
I poached the below article in a tweet by Ari Schulman; check out the illustration, one of many available regarding the flight path:
http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/uk-satellite-operator-says-it-only-gave-data-on-mh370s-last-position
From a holistic perspective, from start to finish it doesn’t look like an intended flight path perhaps because it wasn’t an intended flight path. Rather, the flight path meshes with an intended diversion and a return to Malaysian airspace (or Singapore, Luigi?), and then some intervening occurrence at VAMPI or GIVAL.
Luigi again: the captain went on a chicken run after GIVAL or or VAMPI and then killed himself at IGREX behind the locked door of the flight deck after it was clear that his plans in Malaysia were foiled, thus the ghost flight to the Southern Indian Ocean.
Meanwhile, everyone has been chasing potentials in Xinjiang or elsewhere along the northern arc, given the paucity of destinations in the Indian Ocean. According to the Jeff Wise Squadron, it was Malaysia all along.
@Rand, you must really be grumpy Mondays! But I don’t like it either, especially since I have a dentist’s appointment.
Thanks for the clarification re : sat phones. I got the idea about the unpressurized cabin, because it was explicitly mentioned in my net search.Not big windows, but unpressurized cabin, but ok., I believe your expertise. The need to have no pressure didn’t sound logical, but I’m not well versed with sat phones.
The main point is, though, the perpetrator(s) might well have had means of communication. And, I guess, they wouldn’t have to try it out themselves in a 777 cabin. There might be expertise out there, if an iridium sat phone would work.
As to the fighter plane analogy, I thought myself, that it was a pretty sensational way to put it, but there’s nevertheless valuable info in that piece. There has been rumor all along, that the plane climbed to a great height, only to go down pretty quickly very low afterwards. I don’t believe in a ‘fighter jet’behavior, because there are physical limits to a passenger airliner, but it’s still a pretty unusual maneuver, which isn’t easily explained with an emergency. And the part of the plane flying on top speed at a very low altitude must be true. I made calculations myself, and the plane must’ve been fast indeed, to reach all those way points at the given times, after it turned around and flew West. Combine that with low altitude, and the plane had an very fast airspeed. Inmarsat kind of corroborated that with their statement, that the plane flew faster than they initially thought. So, the langugae of that anonymous source was pretty sensational, but that doesn’t make it not credible.
I agree with you on the importance of possible motives, if it really was a criminal act. That’s why I think, all calculations and reverse ingeneering can only get you so far without considering the motives behind human actions, if you want to predict the plane’s possible routes. The math simply gives you a framework,and tells you, what was probably physically and technically impossible. A sudden dive from 45000 ft to 5000ft might be such a thing. It has gone probably a bit smoother.
I liked Luige Warren’s scenario from the beginning. My earlier ideas went into the same direction, because from my arm chair view as a criminal psychologist, who has worked with terrorists in her student days, the pilot seems to fit a certain profile to the t. That he might’ve been a nice and concerned guy doesn’t contradict that at all. Again, the caveat, it’s an armchair diagnosis. What Luigi’s ideas add, is a more plausible motive than just pilot suicide. It adds a higher politically motivated purpose to his actions. But it’s only viable, if he was able to establish technically reliable ground communication. This discussion is important. An iridium sat phone might’ve been an option, or the plane’s own communication systems. Someone needs to establish, if it really could’ve been used without giving the plane’s position away. IF (a big if, of course) the perpetrator(s) had been trying to bargain with the Malaysian government, it might indeed explain the bumbling secrecy of the Malaysian authorities. They sure behaved from the beginning of this investigation like they have something to hide.
The oil slick claim doesn’t sound logical, because they work with the hyothesis, that the plane ran out of fuel. There shouldn’t be a big oil slick in the first place, and it should’ve moved away by now anyway.
The fighter plane description to me means the plane was taken outside of it’s intended function and no more. Heavy lift planes aren’t meant to do much but lift and cruise, and all pretty gently.
The oil slick might have come from the kitchen of the Chinese vessel?
@Rand, who is the Jeff Wise Squadroon??
As to possible motives: It would make sense, that Malaysia was an intended target all along, and something went wrong.
Even, if it might’ve been demonstrated, that the Northern path was possible as far as math is concerned, I still don’t think, that’s what happened. It just doesn’t seem plausible, that no one, who was in charge or a decision maker at The Big Search, hasn’t checked and done similar calculations, because that would be one of the first and most important questions to the guys at Inmarsat: ‘How are you able to distinguish between the two arcs?’ It simply makes sense to conclude, that there has been additional, non public information available.
As to the missing debris field and no ELT signals: A deep sea crash can explain that better than a land crash. I will try to find the source of the information again, which explained, that a plane running out of fuel and not guided by human actions like gliding maneuvers, just nose dives eventually and can reach incredible speed, depending on how high it was cruising. It would go down like a missile and dive deep very fast, without giving the ELT beacons much chance to spring into action above the ocean’s surface. The plane would then break up without producing a big debris field.
And Rand, concerning my dog: In German, we call it (literally translated) ‘over wool’ and ‘under wool’, and the Heli was definitely tangled in his cotton woolly underfur beneath his tail. That way, it wasn’t visible. I must know, because I had to perform the removing operation, which was aided by the fact, that ths time of the year he starts to shed his under fur. That was probably the reason, why this normally very ticklish dog wasn’t bothered at all by the heli. But you’re right, he does look like a small sledge dog. If he weren’t black, a Samoyede is the closest match. Nansen tried to reach the North Pole with them.
@Littlefoot WE are the Jeff Wise Squadron, Jeff’s own little geek squad. Yesterday, Jeff referenced such groups (e.g., PPRuNe.com in a broadcast on CNN ( ( didn’t see the broadcast but read about Jeff’s comments in a piece on CNN.com.
Roger that on your dog. What is the german name?
As for the issue of pressurization, mostly only unpressurized aircraft have windows large enough to enable a satellite link without an external antenna, thus the reference in the Iridium website that was a bit garbled in its presentation. I could be wrong, as I don’t really have any expertise with satellite phones and modems, I have rather only used them working in Tibet.
A rogue pilot could have used the aircraft’s transmitter or the satellite phone without immediately disclosing his location. I think had he communicated with the Malaysians, we can assume that he would have identified himself as the pilot of MH 370. We could then build assumptions as to the response by the Malaysians and perhaps assume that his communication with the authorities was an initial catalyst for him to make a run for it and eventually give up the goose and terminate both himself and the ‘mission.’
As for the oil slick, it is indicative of hydraulic fluids rising to the surface up from the depths and drifting 5km away. They may be able to use this as a further indicator or the location of the airframe, if they can pick up the trail. Perhaps the Woods Hole or BP people who have experience working in the Gulf in the wake of the Deep Horizon disaster can assist with analyzing the ocean thermocline data in this regard.
I don’t know what an airframe in a steep vertical dive does upon impact with water, but I have read that it is little different than impacting with concrete. Perhaps the Air Alaska crash in the channel islands could inform this aspect of things; I recall seeing a reference to this somewhere, too.
Jeff’s Squadron, with Luigi on point and everyone else contributing, put some reason into this mess of data, information and speculation. We done good.
I wish Hal was here…
Something else: I was at a party yesterday, which was attended by many physicists and mathematicians, and we discussed the mystery plane.When I mentioned the curious fact, that, according to initial reports, 5 people had checked in their luggage already, but decided last minute, not to take the trip after all (their luggage got subsequently removed,so no bombs in there), someone remarked, that this was an unusually high last minute drop out rate. That someone purchases a ticket, and it turns out last minute, that he can’t take the flight, is normal. That’s, why all airlines overbook. That someone decides not to fly, after having checked in the luggage, is less normal, but it happens. That 5 people check in their luggage without taking the trip, is highly unlikely, unless they were a group (family/friends?), and one member could’t fly for some reason (illness?), and they decided to stay together. Does anyone know, if this curious incident has been elaborated anywhere?
I guess, it was classified as ‘not suspicious’, but it still seems to be a strange coincidence. Those people sure had guardian angels.
What’s kicking around in my mind is this: no matter, if these drop outs are relevant or not, the ‘rogue captain’ theory doesn’t exclude, that he had some helpers, maybe one or more persons in the plane, and a ground crew.No reason to believe, he was the only one, who had hatched this plan, if there was more to it than just the suicide angle. This would explain the ongoing lip tightness about the criminal investigation. The lack of ‘ground chatter’, as Mary Schiavo calls it, doesn’t totally exclude this possibility. It only means, that the perpetrators had so far a clean sheet, were not associated with known suspects, and communicated as much as possible the old fashioned oral way.
@Rand, I like the idea of a ‘Jeff Wise squadron’ 🙂
Yes, it would be nice, if some more people with all sorts of expertise would rejoin for a larger brain pool. The public interest seems to be somewhat in decline, though I’m as mystified and thus interested as ever.
Your explanation re: oil slick makes sense. It could rise to the surface with delay.
What happens with a plabe out of fuel in a steep missile crash into water was somewhere explained by experts. I have to find the source again.Unfortunately I didn’t mark everything I read. But they claimed, it might explain the lack of wide spread debris and the missing ELT signals.
The dog’s German name for it’s race is ‘Deutscher Spitz’. They used to be very common in Germany, but not now. They come in many sizes. Charly is on the smaller side. They’re an old race of watchdogs with excellent hearing and very aware of strangers. The Pommeranian was created from this race, but Charly isn’t a Pommeranian.
@Littlefoot I sent the following synopsis out to a few friends to garner their views as per your desire to see more of ‘the crowd’ included in this.
Abstract:
There are two phases to the incident: Phase I involves the intentional diversion of the aircraft by the captain; Phase II is interference with the diversion and its intent and the eventual terminal ‘ghost flight’ of the aircraft to its present resting place in the Southern Indian Ocean. The intent of the diversion was to return the aircraft to Malaysian airspace, where it would be used as a weapon or as a ‘deranged’ political bargaining chip. Phase II began with the captain committing suicide upon aborting his intended mission, thus the ghost flight south. Inmarsat did not inform the search. Rather, US intelligence agencies informed the search utilizing the Inmarsat data set together with other data, most likely primary (military) data garnered from one or more other sources, most likely to include Malaysian sources.
Sequence of events and the grosser justifications for the working assumptions:
1. The captain commandeered the aircraft at the point where there was handoff of control from the KL FIR to the Vietnam FIR. He knew the route and the timing of the handoff as opposed to the First Officer who had only flown on a 777 half a dozen times; we can likewise assume that a passenger-hijacker would not be so savvy with regards to the timing of the diversion. We can also assume upon gaining cruising altitude that there was an opportunity for egress from the flight deck (on the part of the First Officer) for a potty or coffee break, thus providing the captain with the opportunity to lock himself within the cockpit.
2. The intent was to divert the aircraft and either 1. weaponize it for an attack on KL or another target; or 2. politicize it with the aircraft and its passengers as ‘hostages.’ The behavior of the Malaysians (bungling or obfuscation or both) supports this scenario. The intent was NOT to fly the aircraft either north or south; it merely ended up on a southern flight path.
3. The aircraft navigated the known commercial navigational waypoints IGARI, VAMPI and IGREX in order to ‘mask’ the diversion and avoid being noticed by Malaysian FIR ATC or primary radar. From here, the intent was to assume a flight path that would take it back down the straights of Malacca to either (above) 1. enter KL airspace with a weaponized aircraft; or 2. enter Malaysian airspace in general and establish contact with the Malaysian authorities to initiate a negotiation (a quid pro quo for the safe return of the aircraft and the passengers).
4. At VAMPI or IGREX the captain decided to abort the mission due to whatever causation and most likely at IGREX killed himself. Thus the intended diversion (Phase I) morphed into a ghost flight to the Southern Indian Ocean (Phase II).
5. US intelligence assets informed the search with Inmarsat as the disseminator of the information so as not to involve or reveal the processes of US intelligence assets. The White House and the Pentagon announced the likely resting place as the Southern Indian Ocean five days into the search, while India was still searching for wreckage near the Andaman and Niccobar Islands. We can assume that US intelligence assets thus established the flight path of the aircraft 96 hours into its ‘disappearance’ and already had the Inmarsat ping Doppler analysis at the ready (we can assume that it had been developed years earlier as a prophylaxis against the potential for the weaponization of a commercial airliner). The US government is Inmarsat’s largest customer (20% of revenue) and the assumption is that US intelligence assets have on-demand access to global, unsecured satellite communications provided by Inmarsat; thus had they developed the ping Doppler analysis methodology prior to the diversion and disappearance of the aircraft.
Summary:
The diverted flight was never intended for points north or south along the arc produced by the Inmarsat data analysis; its destination was Malaysia. Regardless of the intent, he potential for the aircraft’s weaponization and the success of its diversion from the intended flight path put it immediately within the jurisdiction of processes developed by US intelligence assets in the event of such an occurrence. US authorities (inclusive of the White House), have deemed that these processes must remain undisclosed to 1. not disclose the nature of US monitoring of global satellite communications; and 2. provide an opportunity to ‘plug the hole’ in commercial aviation security before another party becomes aware of the same potential. Inmarsat was directed to front the analysis of the data at the behest of US intelligence, while Australia’s Air Marshal Angus Houston (retired) was directed to engage the search for the remains of the aircraft after having been supplied with the search parameters by people more senior in the chain of command.
@Rand, you certainly presented a viable scenario. But one thing needs to be explained better. Why didn’t the pilot crash the plane immediately, after his negotiations came to nothing? Why send it on a ghost flight? That was the iniatial argument against pilot suicide, and it is still valid. Did he want to hurt the Malaysian government as much as still possible? If so, he succeeded to a certain degree. Didn’t he want to go down as a failure and a mass murderer to boot? Or couldn’t he simply face death at crunch time and just became inertial, letting the plane run out of fuel? Or wasn’t he even in command anymore, and someone else sent it out of harms way? (the last scenario not very likely, but cannot be exclude).
All possible explanations, but the ghost flight needs to be adressed.
@Littlefoot You are correct, this is a weakness in the scenario. I would only offer that he killed himself by other means or there was some other causation (e.g., the first officer reentered the cockpit and both were incapacitated in the ensuing struggle). Either way – or by some other causal element – I go for a pilotless aircraft from IGREX down to the southern Indian ocean as a result of the intended diversion being aborted/interrupted.
I’m going to diverge here – if hydraulic oil leaked out from any depth would it be dispersed by the time it reached the surface? The only motivation I can come to for taking the plane is to stash the thing. Also the co-pilot apparently not a suspect but don’t forget it was his first unsupervised run in a 777. This may have been his very first opportunity to get hold of a long range wide bodied jet? The climb to 45,000 feet looks malicious. It would be premeditated mass murder if it is. I can see a young radicalized muslim doing that coldly, I struggle to see a suicidal/disaffected 53 year old pilot doing it. As usual we don’t know enough.
I would agree that any number of scenarios are possible. With various bits of information out there, any number of theories can be constructed and plausibly supported by that information. It all comes down to the perspective you are coming at things from and the context you are seeing them in. The problem we have here in the public domain is that there is limited physical evidence and a plethora of circumstantial evidence. I ask how many wrongful convictions have there been based on circumstantial evidence?
All that being said, there are a number of people going quiet on this for no apparent reason.
@Littlefoot – Spitz = Giant Pomeranian? Scary.
@Jeff – How are you making out with your analysis and testing of the Inmarasat data and the conclusions derived from it?
@Gene, I’d never thought, that my dog Charly and the qualitiy of his coat would make it into a blog discussion about a missng air plane, lol!
He’s not exactly like a giant Pomeranian, as his weight is only 5 1/2 kilos, but he’s more natural looking with long but pretty uncomplicated fur, which has the nice tendency to be self cleaning and tangle free, except at times of underwool shedding and entangled rc devices.
My mentioning of Shangri La yesterday made me re read the beginning of ‘Lost Horizon’, and it’s frankly eery. it begins with the abduction of an airplane by a rogue, but skilled pilot, who first takes the plane to unusually high altitudes, only to take it down rapidly to an imrovised landing strip, where the plane gets refuelled by Pakistanies. Then, he takes it to Tibet, near areas, where our plane could’ve gone, if it headed North. Then it crashes softly, with hardly any fuel left. And it is told from the view point of the abducted passengers, who speculate about the motive behind their abduction. Very chilling…
@Matty. I would think hydraulic fluid emerging from a deep depth would become quite chilled to the point that it could reach the surface without having been overly dispersed. Even diving to 40m the decrease in water temperature is quite palpable.
As for the claim of a climb to 45,000 feet, I have read this could have been the product of a radar anomaly. Also, we could argue that it is unlikely that a marginally trained hijacker would attempt such a maneuver, while we also know that this is the limit in terms of the performance envelope of the aircraft (i.e., it could very well have stalled had it reached that altitude). At any rate, we don’t know if the aircraft in fact climbed to 45,000 feet. Just as with the Inmarsat data set, reconciling the reported gain in altitude (e.g., it was intended to incapacitate the passengers) with other facts has led to routes with possible inherent confirmation bias.
OK, so let’s include the first officer and say that he yet remains a suspect. I simply recorded a motive (Luigi) for the first officer and extrapolated our discussion from there. There is otherwise there is a paucity of motive and saying a 53-year old is not a fit for the profile of an islamofascist is likewise a confirmation bias trap. Our reconciling scenario has the intended destination of Malaysia, and it had nothing to do with the dominant paradigm of terrorism and islamic fundamentalism.
@Gene Over the past weeks, you, Luigi, Matty, Jeff, Littlefoot and me et al. have been processing this thing and engaging in different paths of inquiry. I believe it is now time that we stick our necks out and come up with a workable scenario, which I attempted to summarize. If anything, I am fairly certain that soon you will see members of the mainstream media and policy makers alike begin to venture out from the ‘comforts’ associated with protecting information and sources (as well as reputations) and begin to form working hypotheses that will later be confirmed or denied. My view is that we have done good work here and might as well get a jump on advancing our own.
Rest assured, the authorities are now collating the facts and the data and working on the assumptions, and building scenarios of their own. They need to find this aircraft, just as they need to understand what happened, as the idea of an aircraft ‘disappearing’ does not make them appear as if they are all that in control when this is exactly what they have been selling ‘us’ in an exchange involving our complicity and the freedom inherent to global air travel. Anyway, it’s fun to make an educated guess.
lol, a ‘german pomeranian’ is indeed scary!
@Littlefoot Whoa, the Shangrila narrative is quite spooky, it resonates. And your dog did play a role: this is largely how I got onto the idea of Malaysia (i.e., right under our noses) as the intended destination for the diversion after Luigi repeatedly pointed out to us to look there.
@Rand &Gene:
Here’s a picture of this scary, helicopter-abducting monster:
http://www.deutsche-spitze.de/images/kleinspitz-1.jpg
🙂
Ok, I’m off to my dentist appointment
Regarding “fighter jet” maneuvers, seems to me I’ve seen footage of airliners being tossed around at airshows in pretty scary ways. Wasn’t that how the “Concordski” came to grief? Of course, at airshows, the pilot doesn’t have to worry about the comfort and safety of passengers…
My first thought when there were intimations that the plane “doubled back” was of the Petronas Towers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petronas_Towers
Still, it doesn’t look the flight path took the jet back anywhere close to KL. I would hope and assume that, post-9/11, an obvious target like the Towers would be well defended and a shoot-down plan would go into immediate effect.
The turn south could well represent a ghost flight phase after the pilot aborted a self-conceived protest mission because he lost heart, or couldn’t get through to a decision-maker, or did get through but was rebuffed. Another scenario might be that he decided to “up the ante” by taking a new route that would offer steadily diminishing opportunities for making a safe landfall. Since the plane would be just “lurking” in the darkness from the point of view of political authorities, regardless of its route, that would most likely be a purely psychological stratagem. I wouldn’t assume that the endgame was well thought out beforehand.
I would like to hear from the person with the fake ID that Zaharie reportedly communicated with at the outset of the flight. Might shed some light…
Also, what did Hishammudin know, and when did he know it?
@Rand – I am not sure which way I would go for a final scenario. I have said I like the north, but I recognize it as a preference more than something backed up by facts. At this point with the lack of evidence in the south I still prefer it. Putting that aside and focusing on possibilities in the south I would require the least amount of inconsistencies. I think fire is an easier one to rule out because I would think a burning plane wouldn’t stay aloft for several hours. Next up the chain would be decompression, or any other emergency, because of lack of communication from the aircraft. Specifically decompression wouldn’t allow for multiple turns. That leaves human intervention, but I can’t get past the 239, less the children, possibilities for that. Then again, what about stowaways? At this point I become stuck.
Things that don’t work me:
Inmarsat – We’ve determined where it is, but are not willing to share how even though it is based on common and well known scientific principles.
Ocean pings – Out of tens of thousands of square miles of ocean we just happened to put the locator in exactly where there were pings that could be detected and are consistent with black boxes.
Air Search Conclusion – We can’t find it and therefore it must have sunk. Yes this includes aircraft parts of honeycomb construction, emergency safety devices that , and any matter of buoyant things that may be found on a plane.
Northern Search Conclusion: We easily ruled out the same number of square miles in a week and half to two week period that after a month in the south they are still searching.
@Littlefoot – By the looks of Charly he is pure evil! I suggest an exorcist. I can prove Shangri La real, but will only do so at a price. You mentioned psychologist, have been able to construct a profile from information about various crew and passengers that we know about?
@Matty – Do you know if Australia has something akin to the SOSUS net in the Indian ocean?
@Luigi the aircraft was supposedly detected approximately 400 nautical miles from KL on a direct international approach that would put it there in < 1 hour coming in over the water.
I discounted the probability of an unplanned chicken run and more heavily weighted a intended diversion with an intended destination, given the 'programming' of a certified pilot. Pilots generally take off with an intended destination and the supposed navigation of waypoints indicates there was an intended destination. The pilot needed to maneuver over Malaysia and into open water to get lost to detection and then fly back to KL over the Straights of Malacca between Malaysian and Indonesian airspace in attempt to avoid alerting anyone as to his intended destination.
Malaysia as a destination got lost in the weeds of the Inmarsat data set when it was produced.
@Rand
If I’m understanding you correctly, a satellite call can be made from the flight deck that doesn’t reveal the plane’s location — it looks just like any another sat phone call. Does it work the other way round? Can a regular satellite phone call be placed to the flight deck from the ground? If so, have we heard if that was attempted during the ~7 hours the plane was in flight after loss of radio contact, and what the results were?
Very interesting idea that the plan might have been to achieve invisibility while staying in strike radius of Malaysia.
Put another way, are station-to-station calls between the ground and flight deck possible via satellite comms? And, does the flight deck have its own phone number?
@Gene. I too began preferring the northern route given the navigation of the waypoints. I also considered a shoot down in the Bay of Bengal en route to the north where only India would be in a position to confirm or deny, but this would require heavily weighting fundamental flaws in the duration of the Ping Doppler data. I argued for fundamental errors in the Inmarsat data set in my first post on jeffwise.net which all of you shot down as if it were, err, so much rogue airliner (a tasteless joke).
If you accept that there is a template for the search based upon the Inmarsat data yet not completed by it, and that AM Angus Houston is being well directed by this template, then last minute pings and the rest of it are to expected. There IS an imperative to locate the aircraft, they are risking years of carefully developed means and processes of detection and intervention re weaponized airliners. Remember: 9/11; they need to learn exactly what went down in this instance, so that it can’t be perpetrated again. If you think about it, this is exactly how air safety and security has evolved over the years. Remember when we were suddenly required to remove our shoes at the security check? One guy in a pair of Clark’s with a match and a bag of peanuts in economy class…
The lack of a debris field yet bothers me, I have discounted this, as to weight it heavily involves a huge conspiracy to whatever ends that are difficult to justify.
@Luigi As far as I understand, a call can be either placed to or received by the satellite phone on the flight deck, if the Inmarsat Classic Aero system is switched on. Or, the flight deck phone remains on even if the in-seat system has been deactivated. Good question…
Tracing a call would be easy in terms of identifying the phone; it would have an ‘ISP’ of sorts in the Inmarsat network. As for the location of the caller/phone, they would again need to utilize the Ping Doppler methodology only in real time.
Keep at it.
@Littlefoot I eventually discounted there being anyone other than the captain involved as a conspiracy of one is much simpler. Marriage is sometimes tough; pilfering an airliner with more than two people involved is probably the only thing tougher. 😉
Also, to help with an answer to your question re checked bags without accompanying passengers, I have been on a number of flights where the plane was not allowed to push back until the bags were removed. On two separate occasions this has involved a medical emergency where a seated passenger had to deplane (ie, quite literally a last minute decision with checked bags). This is anecdotal however and stuff slips outside of the US. In China, for example, I frequently smell cigarette smoke emanating from the cockpit in the course of a flight.
@Luigi …or, booting up the Classic Aero system, if necessary to utilize the flight deck sat phone, automatically sends an ACARS locator signal to the Inmarsat network??? I have no idea. The radio could also have been used and then more discretely although not as directly. What’s your angle on any comms other than for a negotiation?
@Gene, if you can prove Shangri La real, you should do it for free, as this matches the spirit of that mythical location.
I can understand the fascination and appeal of the Northern route, since it would offer a glimpse of hope for the passengers, since a safe landing would’ve been at least possible. But since we never heard from the passengers or the plane again, it seemed to become more unlikely every day. As you said:what about keeping 200 plus people at an undisclosed location? Also I cannot bring myself to believe, that nobody in charge of the search would’ve questioned or checked Inmarsat’s premises. That leads me to the assumption, they might simply know from a primary radar track, as Chris McLaughlin more or less told us, which direction the plane took. The other alternative, that this is a huge multinational cover up, is of course possible, but it seems to be a very complicated conspiracy, though I share some scepticism about the miraculously discovered pings just days, before the batteries are due to give out. Others might argue, though, that the very fact, that it is quiet now, proves, that the pings could’ve come indeed from the black box. I resigned myself to a very long wait.
As far as I know, there hasn’t been done any psychological profiling of the passengers, just background checks. Of course the crew is probably investigated much more thoroughly, but nothing has been shared with the public, as far as I know. The captain’s flight simulator has been declared harmless. When I said, the captain fits a certain profile to a t, I was looking back at my experiences as a student during a practical term in a high security prison with terrorists, who were second tier members of the RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion). I tried to follow their lives even after they were released from prison many years later. And I tried to find out as much as possible about Ulrike Meinhof, one of the original members of the ‘Baader/Meinhof’ Gang, because she was their unlikeliest member. She was a respected and accomplished left wing journalist, had two small daughters and no money worries at all. She had an outwardly fulfilled, social minded, politically active life, though her marriage was in shambles. Then she made a documentary about Andreas Baader and others, fell for him and the group’s radical ideas, and, just like that, helped him to escape from prison, and went underground with him. Years later, she hanged herself in prison.
Maybe the story of Ulrike Meinhof offers an explanation, why the pilot didn’t just crash the plane, when he realized, that he couldn’t accomplish his goals (for occasional lurkers: we are just walking through absolutely unproven hypothetical scenarios here; there are so many other possibilities). Meinhof’s daughters are haunted to this day by the shadow of their mother, and her deeds. If the captain loved his family, he might’ve wanted to spare them the label of being kids of a mass murderer. Maybe, he thought, if the plane will never be found, nothing can be proven, and the Malaysian authorities will hush it up.Remember, he was probably not aware of the pings and the possibility of narrowing the search area.Even with the ping rings, they haven’t found the plane so far.
To make the northern route viable does not require a multinational cover up. Just the assumptions that some nations were not paying attention or incompetent. India somewhere along the lines admitted that the radar in the Andaman islands wasn’t on. I think I have seen that referenced on CNN and in the Hindustani Times. The other smaller countries quality and effectiveness can easily be questioned. China is the sticky one. That being said the option there would be that China more likely shot it down than missed it. The cover up then would consist of only one country then. Why? Avoid domestic discord, avoid international criticism and scorn, or prevent the Uyghurs getting any sort of press and traction for their cause. At this point, even if the plane landed, I fear it is unlikely that passengers and crew are alive. I also have to recognize that there are some pretty good holes in any scenario involving the north.
@Littlefoot – Evidence of Shangri La. This should buy me a couple of more weeks.
http://www.shangri-la.com/vancouver/shangrila/
A little off topic, but still entertaining.
http://www.arabnews.com/news/555381
@Gene, the Northern route in itself doesn’t imply a cross nation cover up. And if China really shot down a plane with many Chinese citizens, including some accomplished scientists, I could envision an attemp to cover up, though I can’t see other nations helping. And depending on the location of the crash, it might be difficult to keep something like that under wraps.
But I was talking about a multi nation cover up concerning The Big Search: I can’t bring myself to believe, that all parties know, the plane went North, and everybody is searching the Southern areas just as a ruse, with a decoy pinger and an oil slick thrown in for good measure.This hasn’t really been suggested here, but elsewhere.
Be careful to investigate Hotel Shangri La, because you know, how it is: You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave…