Five weeks into the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, more than $30 million has been spent scouring great swatches of the southern Indian Ocean. Yet searchers have still not found a single piece of physical evidence such as wreckage or human remains. Last week, Australian authorities said they were confident that a series of acoustic pings detected 1,000 miles northwest of Perth had come from the aircraft’s black boxes, and that wreckage would soon be found. But repeated searches by a robotic submarine have so far failed to find the source of the pings, which experts say could have come from marine animals or even from the searching ships themselves. Prime Minister Tony Abbott admitted that if wreckage wasn’t located within a week or two “we stop, we regroup, we reconsider.”
There remains only one publically available piece of evidence linking the plane to the southern Indian Ocean: a report issued by the Malaysian government on March 25 that described a new analysis carried out by the U.K.-based satellite operator Inmarsat. The report said that Inmarsat had developed an “innovative technique” to establish that the plane had most likely taken a southerly heading after vanishing. Yet independent experts who have analyzed the report say that it is riddled with inconsistencies and that the data it presents to justify its conclusion appears to have been fudged.
Some background: For the first few days after MH370 disappeared, no one had any idea what might have happened to the plane after it left Malaysian radar coverage around 2:30 a.m., local time, on March 8, 2014. Then, a week later, Inmarsat reported that its engineers had noticed that in the hours after the plane’s disappearance, the plane had continued to exchange data-less electronic handshakes, or “pings,” with a geostationary satellite over the Indian Ocean. In all, a total of eight pings were exchanged.
Each ping conveyed only a tiny amount of data: the time it was received, the distance the airplane was from the satellite at that instant, and the relative velocity between the airplane and the satellite. Taken together, these tiny pieces of information made it possible to narrow down the range of possible routes that the plane might have taken. If the plane was presumed to have traveled to the south at a steady 450 knots, for instance, then Inmarsat could trace a curving route that wound up deep in the Indian Ocean southwest of Perth, Australia. Accordingly, ships and planes began to scour that part of the ocean, and when satellite imagery revealed a scattering of debris in the area, the Australian prime minister declared in front of parliament that it represented “new and credible information” about the fate of the airplane.
The problem with this kind of analysis is that, taken by themselves, the ping data are ambiguous. Given a presumed starting point, any reconstructed route could have headed off in either direction. A plane following the speed and heading to arrive at the southern search area could have also headed to the north and wound up in Kazakhstan. Why, then, were investigators scouring the south and not the north?
The March 25 report stated that Inmarsat had used a new kind of mathematical analysis to rule out a northern route. Without being very precise in its description, it implied that the analysis might have depended on a small but telling wobble of the Inmarsat satellite’s orbit. Accompanying the written report was an appendix, called Annex I, that consisted of three diagrams, the second of which was titled “MH370 measured data against predicted tracks” and appeared to sum up the case against the northern route in one compelling image. (See the chart at the top of the post.) One line on the graph showed the predicted Doppler shift for a plane traveling along a northern route; another line showed the predicted Doppler shift for a plane flying along a southern route. A third line, showing the actual data received by Inmarsat, matched the southern route almost perfectly, and looked markedly different from the northern route. Case closed.
The report did not explicitly enumerate the three data points for each ping, but around the world, enthusiasts from a variety of disciplines threw themselves into reverse-engineering that original data out of the charts and diagrams in the report. With this information in hand, they believed, it would be possible to construct any number of possible routes and check the assertion that the plane must have flown to the south.
Unfortunately, it soon became clear that Inmarsat had presented its data in a way that made this goal impossible: “There simply isn’t enough information in the report to reconstruct the original data,” says Scott Morgan, the former commander of the US Air Force Rescue Coordination Center. “We don’t know what their assumptions are going into this.”
Another expert who tried to understand Inmarsat’s report was Mike Exner, CEO of the remote sensing company Radiometrics Inc. He mathematically processed the “Burst Frequency Offset” values on Page 2 of Annex 1 and was able to derive figures for relative velocity between the aircraft and the satellite. He found, however, that no matter how he tried, he could not get his values to match those implied by the possible routes shown on Page 3 of the annex. “They look like cartoons to me,” says Exner.
Even more significantly, I haven’t found anybody who has independently analyzed the Inmarsat report and has been able to figure out what kind of northern route could yield the values shown on Page 2 of the annex. According to the March 25 report, Inmarsat teased out the small differences predicted to exist between the Doppler shift values between the northern and southern routes. This difference, presumably caused by the slight wobble in the satellite’s orbit that I mentioned above, should be tiny—according to Exner’s analysis, no more than a few percent of the total velocity value. And yet Page 2 of the annex shows a radically different set of values between the northern and southern routes. “Neither the northern or southern predicted routes make any sense,” says Exner.
Given the discrepancies and inaccuracies, it has proven impossible for independent observers to validate Inmarsat’s assertion that it can rule out a northern route for the airplane. “It’s really impossible to reproduce what the Inmarsat folks claim,” says Hans Kruse, a professor of telecommunications systems at Ohio University.
This is not to say that Inmarsat’s conclusions are necessarily incorrect. (In the past I have made the case that the northern route might be possible, but I’m not trying to beat that drum here.) Its engineers are widely regarded as top-drawer, paragons of meticulousness in an industry that is obsessive about attention to detail. But their work has been presented to the public by authorities whose inconsistency and lack of transparency have time and again undermined public confidence. It’s worrying that the report appears to have been composed in such a way as to make it impossible for anyone to independently assess its validity—especially given that its ostensible purpose was to explain to the world Inmarsat’s momentous conclusions. What frustrated, grieving family members need from the authorities is clarity and trustworthiness, not a smokescreen.
Inmarsat has not replied to my request for a clarification of their methods. This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that in recent days experts had “recalibrated data” in part by using “arcane new calculations reflecting changes in the operating temperatures of an Inmarsat satellite as well as the communications equipment aboard the Boeing when the two systems exchanged so-called digital handshakes.” But again, not enough information has been provided for the public to assess the validity of these methods.
It would be nice if Inmarsat would throw open its spreadsheets and help resolve the issue right now, but that could be too much to expect. Inmarsat may be bound by confidentiality agreements with its customers, not to mention U.S. laws that restrict the release of information about sensitive technologies. The Malaysian authorities, however, can release what they want to—and they seem to be shifting their stance toward openness. After long resisting pressure to release the air traffic control transcript, they eventually relented. Now acting transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein says that if and when the black boxes are found, their data will be released to the public.
With the search for surface debris winding down, the mystery of MH370 is looking more impenetrable by the moment. If the effort to find the plane using an underwater robot comes up empty, then there should be a long and sustained call for the Malaysian authorities to reveal their data and explain exactly how they came to their conclusions.
Because at that point, it will be all we’ve got.
This is a cross-posting of an article that was published on Slate.com on April 18, 2014. You can read the original here.
@littlefoot
Well, there you go then!
As I said, too Star Treky to be true.
What has happened to fact and background checking in the news media ? Has it gone totally out the window ?
Jeff ,why should they not go look at georenosance tip in the Bay of Bengal ? Your explanation on cnn (below)makes no sense.This ain’t some crackpot theory based on no scientific evidence .
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1404/29/ebo.01.html
BURNETT: But you all agree they should go check this out? Look, if they have a location.
WISE: I don’t think they should look at it. There are hundreds — if you went chasing after every person who was a thousand percent convinced.
BURNETT: This isn’t every person. This isn’t a random civilian looking at the digital globe suddenly.
WISE: It kind of is. It’s just a website. We don’t know who these people are.
BURNETT: No, it is a company. I mean, they came on CNN. It’s a company that does this. But that’s what they do.
————
https://www.inmarsatgov.com/contracts/contract-vehicles/
ContractVehicles
As a U.S. owned and operated business, Inmarsat Government is proud to be a trusted, value-added partner of the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and many other federal, state, local and public organizations.
———–
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304626304579507443629283118
Satellite communications company Inmarsat plans to offer basic tracking services free of charge to airlines, its chairman said, in the strongest sign yet of the aerospace industry’s intentions to enhance monitoring abilities for commercial jets after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines ..
————
Every company has it’s reasons for”helping” .
The company I was referring to was GeoResonance, not Inmarsat. GeoResonance has been touted as a well-known and respected company but it seems to be little more than a web site.
C’m on guys, most of us bought the Georesonance story for a while, and thought, even if it sounded a bit outlandish or sci-fi, it might be at least worth looking into it. Let’s own up!
But you’re right, Arthur, the big media oulets look terrible in this instance. They brought the story into circulation in the first place and lent it some credibility, apparently without any background checks. Not only can’t the guys from GeoResonance do what they claim, but apparently they are fraudsters as well. That’s a double whammy. Credit to those, who didn’t buy it in the first place. Basically the net geeks (alas, not us 😉 ) shot it down and did the dirty work the journos didn’t do.
The other possibility is that GR’s technology actually works, but merely captured a plane in the air. Just as folks looking at Tomnod found real planes flying over jungles, GR may have spotted a plane en route to Sri Lanka, for example.
Fancy technology seems to be just as capable at finding false positives as humans are.
Still, the solution to the GR question is the same as the solution to the Inmarsat problem: peer review. Show us the data, or bring us a plane.
http://bdnews24.com/bangladesh/2014/04/30/navy-scouring-bay-of-bengal-again-for-mh370-after-georesonance-claim
Two ships – BNS Bangabandhu and BNS Anusandhan – began scouring the sea from Tuesday night, Navy Director (Intelligence) Commodore Rashid Ali told bdnews24.com on Wednesday.
Geophysical survey company GeoResonance on Monday said it had spotted pieces of wreckage in the Bay of Bengal and that it should be investigated as potential debris from the Malaysian plane.
But the present search coordinators have dismissed the claim.
http://bdnews24.com/bangladesh/2014/04/30/navy-scouring-bay-of-bengal-again-for-mh370-after-georesonance-claim
Wow, great tip, thanks. Just tweeted that out. (If you’re on Twitter I’ll give you credit!)
How could there still be wreckage after all those weeks? But ok, if they’re looking, it can’t be said afterwards, it hasn’t been checked out.
@JS, fancy technology can come up with false positives, and faulty or unproven technology can find something by chance or because it works partly. In this case I would be very surprised, though. Because I do trust Inmarsat’s ping ring calculations, which really have to be kept seperate from their BFO charts.
According to CNN, the Bangladesh Navy have sent a couple of ships to have a look. Can’t hurt if only to rule it out. The sad reality is it could be anywhere and you won’t know if you don’t look.
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/30/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/
@littlefoot
One of the ships being deployed to look at Bay of Bengal is an old British hydrography survey ship . So they should have the technoligy to survey underwater.
http://www.brahmand.com/news/Bangladesh-Navy-commissions-new-survey-ship/4537/1/14.html
@TDM sorry I hadn’t seen your comment re the Bangladesh ships. This is great news. It may very well prove to be wrong but if it was my family on that plane I would be so relieved that this is being checked because it means that at least someone is not prepared to put all their eggs in one basket.
@ Littlefoot –
I didn’t mean to suggest that the northern route was ruled out because it was threatening for them. I think they just thought it implausible by comparison, and that was the green light for Inmarsat. Perfect opportunity to throw up some numbers to fit the situation. Golden publicity. In other words – we know it went south, now we just have to find something in these numbers to point that way. Where there’s a will there’s a way. There was I believe a weight of opinion pointing to the southern route well before Inmarsat hit the keyboards.
@littlefoot – I’m inclined to disbelieve the GR story altogether, honestly, but there could potentially be explanations for what they think they saw.
As for Inmarsat, the ping distances sound like solid science to me, except I see some problems there as well.
Forgive me for being repetitive, but there are three gaps in the pings >60 min. This doesn’t fit with the claim that a login/logout communication will occur after 60 minutes idle time. Nor does it fit with the claims of ground-initiated messages to the plane as there are no pings corresponding to those events.
It’s possible that they omitted certain pings, but if so, why?
One other question about the text message – would the sender on the ground realize that the aircraft was still in touch with a satellite? If so, I would expect repeated attempts to contact the plane, not just one or two.
@JS, the pings weren’t that regular.That’s an urban myth. If you haven’t been here regularly, you might not know. It’s also not quite certain, what triggers them. It can be just a check up, it can be a sharp turn, it can be a signal of engine trouble. We don’t know for certain. There are periods of several pings in a row. And then there is this lengthy period without a ping, and finally the mournful half ping. Inmarsat never explained the irregularities.There’s plenty of room for speculation there, but the basic calculation of the plane’s distance to the Satellite with the resulting range of the ping ring is sound. And the range of the last ping ring is nowhere near the Bay of Bengal. If we trust Inmarsat in this core issue,and so far there hasn’t been a reason not to, the plane simply can’t be in the BoB.
I drank the Koolaid on the GeoResonance news, but with a lack of anything else new and of significance what else is there to do? Irony would dictate that the Bangladeshi’s actually find something!
@Matty, Your video of the IndoPak gate closing ceremonies was hilarious 🙂
My favorite crazy theory still can’t be debunked! It is Legerwood with a twist. According to Duncan Steel, flight 370 was 1852 nautical miles from Inmarsat’s satellite at 20:40 UTC. At that moment, KLM flight 836 was in the Bay of Bengal, approximately 1864 nautical miles from the Inmarsat satellite (I don’t know where to find the satellites precise location at that moment, so I used 1.29S, 64.46E) heading NW at 320 degrees and traveling approximately 485kts. I’m sure that the margin of error on Inmarsats calculation (not to mention mine) mean that it is very possible that MH370 was shadowing KLM836. Anyone with the technical expertise want to indulge me and figure out what KLM’s “doppler burst” would have looked like at that moment?
@ JJinjuniper –
Having spent a bit of time in cockpits I know that pilots are aware via their own radar of what is around, or at least they bloody should. They would know if something was unusually close, until it got absorbed by their own signature. Unless these civil aircraft radars point forward only?? Somebody??
@Matty
Not true. My dad is ex airforce, ex-commercial 747 pilot, current FAA inspector. He has spent his adult life in cockpits and he confirms, once the transponder is turned off, turn off your lights and you could easily shadow a plane and it would never know you were their. Military jets practice intercepting commercial planes all the time and they are never the wiser. He thinks most reasonably skilled commercial pilots could pull this off, no problem.
More succintly, commercial airliners don’t have active radar, they are dependent on the info other plans are transmitting, and mh370 wasn’t transmitting a thing.
@ JJinjupiter –
Gotya. I’ve sat next to pilots while they responded to some local traffic issues but I was asssuming it was real radar.
I think the authorities are scared of the thought of a northern route. There are all sorts of security implications, and also for the aviation industry. If 370 did actually do a piggyback then all planes would need to have active radar and soon.
I don’t mean to step on any toes here or otherwise impeach any ‘crazy theory’, as all can and perhaps should be considered given the present, rather insane set of circumstances. And so we allow that whomever’s navy to go out on a naturopathic mission to seek the remains of MH370 as if it were Noah’s Ark. The fact that the Bangladeshi navy has responded to a request to go have a look, most likely at the behest of the Malaysians, is informative. Simply put, there is a subtle difference in locating the aircraft and engaging in an SAR mission, while the northern arc and its potential crash sites can largely take care of themselves.
Apologies, but I really don’t see any reason to give any further consideration to an intended northern destination upon diversion at IGARI. Between ‘barriers to entry’ (numerous primary radar systems), motivational requirements, ground support requirements, etc., inductive reasoning leads us to the conclusion that an intended northern route can be excluded. The idea that the aircraft could have been intentionally flown north is driven by a western bias formed by the invalid conclusion that ‘terrorism’ is a product of Islam and therefore any Islamic country or people within range of the aircraft could have been a destination. Rubbish. Islam is the only thing that has been hijacked in such a process, rather than any aircraft.
It’s as clear as rain to me: only a mechanical failure provides for a northern route. With a bit of undisclosed intelligence/primary radar information, the southern route could easily be confirmed. Without such supplementary information, the northern route could be discounted for reasons previously stated. Most importantly perhaps, even leaving the door to the northern route open, one could count on someone eventually discovering the remains of the aircraft. Think of all the resources available: people on foot, people in stolen Mercedes, the crowdsourcing of satellite images, intelligence assets, local police departments – none of these resources has produced any indication that the aircraft traveled to, landed in or crashed in the north. This could easily have been previewed in anybody’s noodle weeks ago: “if the aircraft flew north, we will eventually hear about it. Let’s engage an SAR in the south. If we continue barking about the northern arc, nobody is going to commit treasure and the gear we need to any SAR mission in the south.”
In short, I now really don’t see what all the huff is about in throwing out the northern arc. They didn’t. There’s simply no reason or even a possibility of engaging an international SAR operation in Xinjiang; better to have the passive resources pursue the search and throw millions of dollars of active resources elsewhere.
If the plane was intentionally diverted and it did not fly north, it had to have an intended destination somewhere. If the southern Indian Ocean is not a reasonable intended destination, and you throw out suicide for the very reason that there isn’t any historic precedent for a suicidal pilot flying off to nowhere for seven hours to experience fuel lines running dry and engines sputtering out, then the intended destination was elsewhere. The intended destination has a name, and it can inform the present location of the aircraft, even if the two are not the same, which I have argued they are not.
What was the intended destination for the diversion at IGARI? Begin with this question, as this will eventually lead to the location of the aircraft.
As Jeff has stated, this is either about the various authorities not sharing what they know, or it is about these same suits not knowing what they should know. Either way, we will have been duped, had, taken to the cleaners. We have sacrificed tiny fragments of freedom, willingly blinded ourselves in our acceptance of yawning man-made chasms of social inequality – and even taken off our shoes – all in the interest of safe, dependable, global air transport. An aircraft just disappeared; how would you feel and what would you say if it happened again? And a third time? There are very real things on the table here.
The dominant, paradigmatic global economic-political structure cannot tolerate a disappeared aircraft, because you will eventually not tolerate such things. This poses a threat to the matrix of power, while Fear and its modulation and control is largely how it is maintained. If you believe this is a stretch, simply consider what this event means for the ruling party in Malaysia and why they are pissing themselves with incompetence and obfuscation in the interest of protecting themselves politically and financially. From here, we can simply extrapolate from Malaysia into the global economic-political matrix at large to to see this very same, subtle threat. Look into your own experience: why are you coming here to Jeff’s website, on a daily basis and to the point of distraction? And if it happens again?
The search for MH370 should involve an open and transparent process, full stop. Yet, it does not. There are very well reasoned arguments why all has not been made public, only they are not ours, as they do not serve our interests or those of the next-of-kin. Rather, these arguments serve the interests of others.
@ Rand Mayer –
Rand, I think a destination like Iran/Pakistan is more likely than spearing into the Petronas Towers. I would rather have my house on that. And…I wouldn’t be at all surprised in the end if a lot of the so-called solid assumptions surrounding the search turn out to be wrong. There is still no evidence it has crashed, and an impact in the southern ocean should have been detected acoustically but it appears there was no such detection. You wouldn’t nick a plane if you had nowhere to put it. They are called hangars, or anything built for such a purpose. Having actually read the Koran, and knowing that Iran is the only member of the UN with a stated aim of destroying another UN member – Israel – and being aware that the Pakistani army hid Bin Laden, my antenna is still twitching and it will be until they find it. This I believe is what has driven the urgency so far.
I could also add, Al Qaeda have form when it comes to big jets, are known to be trying to source nuclear materials, and that Iran/Pakistan have them. I’m not saying straight out that the plane went north, but if it did then it got through – something that frankly doesn’t really surprise me. That in my mind is why you send out your nuclear subs to find a civilian aircraft, because if you can’t you might have a big problem. I’m sure of one thing at least – they taking it very seriously.
Matty: I knew that I would open a can of worms with the reference to Islam. I would argue, however, that you have illustrated quite clearly what I was attempting to elucidate. I would also disagree that Islamic Republic of Iran has anything to do with Islam other than a pathological misinterpretation of one of the world’s most important spiritual traditions. Not to drift to far off into theology, but it is my view that the House of Abraham (the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions) will one day be united, and it is only the active psychopathology of those who crave power within these traditions whom are to blame for the unspeakable violence which they now engender.
I would discount the Petronas Towers as a target in that this comes more from a paradigmatic frame derived from the experience of 9-11. As for not finding the aircraft on land, it is indeed interesting that there has yet to be any discovery of any physical evidence. I would argue, however, that it is far more likely that it ended up in the drink rather than in a hangar for any number of reasons, with the lack of acoustic data not enough to change this by all that much. If the passengers are one day found alive and eating nice, tender kebabs in reasonable conditions somewhere, I will fly over to Perth, and we can go fishing and celebrate. I truly hope that this comes to pass.
Matty: I would agree that the military response indicates that post-9/11 protocols and assets were engaged in the search, and the jury is to out in the eyes of the yanks, the brits and the aussies and others in this regard. Your observations regarding sub behavior of the course of this thing has made this quite clear. Rather, I am stating that just as the location and the destination for diversion are not necessarily the same, the official response to the d’isappearance’ and what actually transpired are actually quite different.
I think defence intel is a lot about attending to possibilities and I get the impression that judging by the scramble, they had never really contemplated this scenario of a missing plane. Even today in England there are dozens of disused, gated off air bases from WW2. They are sealed strips, with lots of infrastructure sitting idle. When I heard the word Kazakhstan early on I thought Oh shit, because in the former Soviet states it’s the same deal except the strips are much longer, the infrastructure much bigger and the locations themselves are far more isolated. I mean out of the way, no flash mobs with tie-dye shirts and crazy hair, just mean authoritarian govts that shut people away. My money right now is on the water too, but until they find it it’s still an open book. By the time we got that last faint ping that plane could have been down and undercover before the flare even went up, so whenever people say – where could you possibly put a 777 I shake my head.
As for a theological alignment of the warring parties I hope you are right but I’m not optimistic.
Actually, could the mysterious partial ping be attributed to the plane being stored/obscured in a cold war era facility in Krygystan? I mean the odds of it hitting the water at that precise moment are just as wacky when you think of it.
@Matty, the half ping is a strong argument, that the pane went into a body of water. Tdm supplied a while ago this very useful site about satellite tracking of marine animals. Half pings are explicitly mentioned. They may occur, when the animal dives.
@ Littlefoot –
But when a seal dives for a feed it doesn’t explode. Talk about timing. Unless it did a belly, which makes the suicide thing even harder to stick? Still impeccable timing as the plane would be out of power as it hit the water. Maybe they send one out as they lose power?? I keep hearing that a belly is not really feasible unless the water is dead flat?? Or pinging as it ran out of fuel?? Still impeccable timing. It would also make sense to my half-arsed reckoning that the engine might ping-off as it is shut down?? We are left to assume though that the half ping is not previously encountered. So was it something unprecedented, or some Inmarsat quirk.
If the plane was sufficiently intact to emit a ping, yet partially submerged, should the elt have gone off?
Wait a minute, it’s almost dinner time. Where’s the damn report to the UN, promised for today? I suppose they’ve had to placate the families first, before releasing the report to the general public. Any minute now?
They said a report on thursday, they didn’t say which one….
@Matty, there’s no coincidence involved with the timing of the half ping. It could’ve pinged BECAUSE there was some trouble: submerged engines, engines running out of fuel, falling apart, whatever. The engines can initiate the pings,too. It’s apparently not a one way procedure. The recent school of thought is therefore, that the last half ping really marks the end of the plane’s journey.
@Littlefoot –
I’d be curious to know if such half pings have been recorded before. Over the years plenty of engines have failed, stalled, blown up, been shut down, caught fire etc. And plenty of planes have crashed in all kind of circumstances. Is this our first ever half ping? If it is it could be an Inmarsat oddity.
@Gene I guess I’ll drink that kool-aide with you. It was so much more fun when you had the beer can explaining the Doppler effect to me though! I really got excited n tried it myself, but I had to get the beer cans from my renters husband lol @JeffWise I’ve started calling you only man with a brain at CNN. When your done I have to turn the channel. Thanks for hanging in there and making sense for so many of us.
@Matty, Littlefoot and Rand – What if the half ping was ACARS being toggled on and off?That would be interesting…
@Rhett – Thanks.
Meanwhile on CNN the anchors and analysts are learning live on international TV. That’s kinda interesting… I seem to have missed the concrete evidence ruling out the northern route. Did someone else see it somewhere?
@Gene –
You know I was out on my evening walk having a similar thought. What if the half ping was some attempt to tamper with/suppress it? Other wise why now? They have attributed meaning to something that may have none. Why now? Thousands of engine failures and crashes later.
@Matty – I could see tampering or suppressing as a possibility. In the sense that maybe the handshakes are registering on the display and someone says enough of that and decides to yank the unit out of the rack in the electronics bay. A little surge or a spark when that happens and there we have it.
Looking at the trajectory in the new report, it’s pretty suggestive of a progressive escalation: the plane first heads back to Malaysia, then takes a turn that would put it off the radar but headed in a direction that would offer safe abort options at various Indian Ocean airports, then diverts again on a heading that would make a safe landfall increasingly difficult and ultimately impossible.
I really wonder if this didn’t start off with Zaharie calling up Hashammuddin for a little private chat about the Anwar situation, then the discussion got heated, tempers flared, and things went south – literally.
Anybody have a link to a copy of the report? I’m looking now…
Interesting report from an Indian newspaper about Zaharie’s behavior just before the flight:
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/captain-zaharie-ahmed-shah-missing-malaysian-flight-mh370-pilots/1/349888.html
Seems he wasn’t worried about high airport parking fees on this particular trip.
Luigi, please, put me out of my misery. I am at home and a number of links are blocked. Would you please post a link to the report?
got it, cnn…
Not sure where to find the full report. I’m going off media coverage. The Daily Telegraph has a useful report, with interesting maps of the trajectory:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/malaysia/10801185/Malaysia-Airlines-releases-report-into-MH370.html
Note that there appear to be three phases to the diversion, rather than two. If the aim at the outset was to avoid Malaysian radar, why fly back to Malaysia (where it was in fact tracked on military radar)? After that, it pulls out of Malaysian radar range. That could have been to avoid Indonesian radar preparatory to a suicide leg taking the plane towards the South Pole, but does that really make any sense?
Three phases.
Anger. Denial. Acceptance.
Duh, CNN: the report can be found here: http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2014/04/world/malaysia-flight-documents/?hpt=hp_t1
A couple of quick observations:
1. KL-ATCC and MAS ops were pretty busy chasing the aircraft.
2. There is no reference of KL-ATCC or MAS ops contacting Malaysian authorities or the military.
3. At 05:20;17 “Captain [name redacted] opined that based on known information, ‘MH370 never left Malaysian airspace.'”
4. It is not clear whether the ‘Captain’ referred to above was a military captain.
3. There is no chronological record of Malaysian military activities.
4. The map includes primary radar contacts at 18:01:49 and 18:22.
5. There are airspeeds posted at what I assume are ping data points, although I have not cross-referenced the times.
Question: how were the airspeed values obtained? I assume they were derived from ping time/location intervals over a distance.
I’m sorry, but this looks pretty bad in terms of its veracity. What I perceive is that the Malaysian authorities are simply playing along with the idea that the aircraft simply ‘disappeared.’ It is a canned response, right down to the one recommendation that they provided, which was but a copy cat of the recommendation provided in the Air France 447 incident. Even the fact that every page is stamped CONFIDENTIAL makes it appear as if they are releasing privileged information. From another perspective, the report is so scant in terms of information that it appears callous, as if somebody didn’t really give a rat’s ass about the incident and was merely compelled to produce ‘something.’ But I would suspect that they care a great deal, so it’s not this.
I would now discount the idea that the Malaysian military did absolutely nothing and has been in the dark as much as anyone else. The authorities are actually making it appear as if there is, at worst, a ‘cover up’ of military incompetence, but in reality the contrast between the reported civilian and military actions are quite telling. Are we to believe not only did the military do nothing, but that neither KL-ATCC nor MAS ops contacted the military authorities? As Ted Baxter used to say, “really?”
I am no longer willing to provide the authorities with the benefit of the doubt. Given the history of their behavior culminating with the embarrassing brevity of this report and the glaring lack of any information concerning the activities of the Malaysian military, I would say that a heck of a lot more has been redacted than that Captain’s name, the first yet still unconfirmed presence of a military officer a full 3.5 hours after the aircraft failed to contact Vietnam ATC.
Luigi: I like your indicating three phases.
Phase I: The aircraft wasn’t necessarily attempting to avoid Malaysian radar, or if it was, the intent was to skirt Thai airspace and thus create some level of ambiguity. Rather, we could say that the aircraft made a direct base leg turn from IGARI to Penang. Perhaps this was the intent, as it is, in fact, how the aircraft behaved.
Phase II: The aircraft, still under human control, was diverted from its intended course by some form of causation, with the result being that it flew away from Malaysian airspace. Perhaps this was (Arthur’s?) chicken run, or perhaps the pilot(s) were dealing with something that caused them to abort whatever it was they intended to do at Penang and fly out over open water. Regardless, the gist of Phase II is that the aircraft was diverted from its intended destination by an as of yet unknown form of causation while it yet remained under human control.
Phase III: at or around 18:27, the aircraft lost human control and initiated a long, pilotless flight to the southern Indian Ocean, terminating at the point of fuel exhaustion.
You are right: I don’t think a suicide leg of the flight makes sense. Perhaps something else happened in Phase II that produced the behavior of the aircraft in Phase III.
Rand,
Could phase 2 simply be a case of a hold pattern to defuel , before a landing attempt was made ?any data in report to indicate a hold pattern?In a recent Malaysian airlines incident they would not let plane land until fuel was exhausted and who would land a 777 er with a full load of fuel.
If you’ve seen the maps, notice that the high and mid probability are separated by a low probability crash area.
Unless this is just a sloppy map, the non-linear probability of the crash site along the arc suggests another variable in the mix. For example, there must be something that supports the high and mid probability ranges, but doesn’t support the region in between them. Is there another distance circle, centered southeast of the ping ring, that intersects the ping ring at two locations?