Two weeks ago, after months of mounting public pressure, Inmarsat and the Malaysian government finally released the raw satellite data that had been received from the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Most of the data dump proved unrevealing. But tucked away amid 47 pages of detailed communications logs and explanatory notes was a two-sentence description of the plane’s electronics system that turned out to be a doozy. Combined with previously released data, publicly available information, and a little vector mathematics, it has proved sufficient to lift the veil on Inmarsat’s calculations and reveal the ultimate fate of the plane.
The story goes back to March 25, when Malaysian authorities announced that an analysis of the data had determined that the plane must have wound up in the southern Indian Ocean. An explanatory document released at the time purported to back up that claim with charts and numbers, but as I’ve written earlier, it in fact was so obtuse that it didn’t really clarify anything at all. The message’s subtext was basically: Trust us, we know what we’re doing. But the subsequent behavior of the search officials—who, among other things, promised that they’d located the plane underwater but then came up empty-handed—left little room for confidence. Many, including me, wondered whether the authorities were hiding something, or else trying to conceal how little they knew.
The impenetrability of the report didn’t stop an impromptu squad of amateur sleuths from trying to crack open its secrets. Experts with backgrounds in satellite communications, space science, and avionics banded together on the Internet to swap insights and exchange theories. For two months, they beavered away at the problem. The idea was that if they could reverse-engineer the original data out of the tables and diagrams that Inmarsat had released, they could undertake their own analysis of what happened to the plane and offer alternate suggestions about its fate.
A way to understand the nature of the Inmarsat data is to imagine that your drunken brother-in-law has stolen your motorboat and is careening around on a pond in a thick fog. You’re standing on the shore and want to know where he is. You have a foghorn, and let’s just imagine that every time you blast it, he immediately blasts his foghorn in reply.
The sound of his foghorn tells you two things. First, knowing the speed of sound and your brother-in-law’s reaction time, you can work out how far away he is by how long it takes you to hear his blast. You won’t know his exact location, but you’ll know the radius of an arc that he’s positioned on. In the case of the Inmarsat data, this would correspond to the so-called ping rings, the final one being the famous Northern and Southern Arcs where the plane is presumed to have wound up.
The second clue you can glean from your brother-in-law’s foghorn is the frequency of the sound, which will tell whether he’s going away from or coming toward you. This is thanks to the Doppler effect, the same phenomenon that makes a train whistle sound higher-pitched when it’s coming toward you and then suddenly lower once it zooms past. If you know the original frequency of your brother-in-law’s foghorn, the difference between that and the pitch of the sound you receive will let you determine his speed—not his total velocity, mind you, but the extent to which he’s moving closer or further away. In the case of MH370, the equivalent data is called burst frequency offset, or BFO.
Essentially, if we derive the distances from the timing offset, and the instantaneous speeds from the frequency offset, we have two solid sets of clues as to how the plane was moving. Unfortunately, when authorities released their report on March 25, they didn’t include any BFO or ping timing numbers, but only a chart from which a crude approximation of the BFO numbers could be gleaned and a chart showing a possible track from which distance values could be estimated.
In the weeks that followed, the Malaysian authorities released further information that allowed for better estimations of the ping rings. But the BFO data remained hopelessly obscure. Without it, independent experts struggled to understand why Inmarsat claimed that the plane could not have gone north. Some even suggested that Inmarsat engineers might have made a basic math error and flubbed their whole analysis. The headline of one much-discussed Atlantic article summed up the skeptics’ perspective: “Why the Official Explanation of MH370’s Demise Doesn’t Hold Up.”
For their part, the authorities clung fast to the hope that their detective work would be vindicated once a search of the ocean bottom revealed the airliner’s wreckage. When it didn’t, their credibility was at a nadir. Public pressure was mounting, especially from the impassioned and increasingly well-organized family members of the missing passengers. At last, on May 27, Inmarsat and the Malaysian authorities released the raw satellite data. With great anticipation, the scattered legion of experts opened the document and set to work. Their excitement quickly faded. Most of the document consists of a mass of logged data that shed no light on the fate of the plane. The timing-offset numbers were similar to the values that had already been deduced. And while the burst frequency numbers were finally revealed, it proved impossible to turn them into velocity values without an accompanying explanation of the equipment used to create and relay the signals. “In fact,” says Mike Exner, one of the leading independent experts trying to make sense of the Inmarsat data, “it has become more difficult to understand the BFO values, not less.”
If the data themselves proved disappointing, two brief sentences in an accompanying page-and-a-half-long explanatory note turned out to be a sleeper. It read: “Inmarsat Classic Aero mobile terminals are designed to correct for aircraft Doppler effect on their transmit signals. The terminal type used on MH370 assumes a stationary satellite at a fixed orbital position.”
From the perspective of independent analysis, this assertion was a bombshell. What it means is that, contrary to general expectation, the plane’s electronics system knew where it was and where it was headed the whole time that it was missing. (Some independent experts, notably Henrik Rydberg, Yap Fah, and Victor Iannello, had previously proposed that this might be the case.) Because it used this information to pre-correct its transmission frequency, the Doppler shift cannot be used to figure out the plane’s instantaneous velocity. But by way of consolation, it’s now possible to figure out pretty much exactly where the plane went.
Imagine that your brother-in-law is still out on the foggy lake, but this time he has a GPS unit with him, so he knows how fast he’s going and where he is. Let’s imagine he also has a special high-tech foghorn that lets him precisely adjust its pitch up and down. By knowing where you are in relation to his position, he can calculate the exact frequency to blow his horn at so that no matter where he is or how fast he’s going, by the time it reaches your ears its been shifted to the exact same frequency. You know he’s out, zooming around willy-nilly, but all you ever hear is the same F sharp.
If that were all there was to it, then the story would end there. You would never be able to pinpoint your brother-in-law’s location, and Inmarsat would never be able to locate MH370. But there’s a wrinkle. Your brother-in-law thinks that you’re standing still in a certain position, but in fact you’re a short distance away from that spot, and you’re moving. As a result, what you hear isn’t exactly F sharp.
In the case of MH370, the satellite communication equipment was programmed to assume that the Inmarsat satellite in question was orbiting over a fixed position at the equator. But in fact its orbit has a slight wobble. During the hours the plane was missing, the satellite was above the equator, moving first north, and then south with increasing speed.
This error in calculating the satellite’s position means that the plane’s electronics failed to correctly compensate for its own velocity. When the plane first disappeared from radar, the angular distance between where the satellite was and where the plane thought it was amounted to about 3 degrees, enough to generate a velocity error of 20 miles per hour.
As the hours passed and the plane got farther away from the satellite, this effect became less pronounced. At the same time, however, a second source of error was growing: The satellite was accelerating on its path toward the Southern Hemisphere. This would cause it to receive an unexpectedly higher frequency from a plane flying south of the equator, and an unexpectedly lower frequency from a plane flying north of the equator. What’s more, this effect would become more pronounced the further the plane was from the equator. A plane traveling north at 450 knots would be traveling away from the satellite at 16 knots more than expected by the end of its flight. For one traveling south at 450 knots, the error would be in the other direction, to the tune of 18 knots.
Understanding all this, we can at last make sense of the mysterious BFO chart from March 25. Just after the plane disappeared from radar, the plane’s position error would have made a northbound plane’s transmission frequency too high, then after a few hours the satellite velocity error would have made it increasingly too low. Conversely, in the early hours after its disappearance position error would have made a southbound plane’s frequency too low, but then satellite velocity error would have gradually made it get higher.
Because the satellite’s velocity error becomes so dominant toward the end of the flight, and because that error varies strongly with the latitude at which the plane happened to be, the BFO value basically tells you where along the final “ping arc” the plane was when it neared the end of its flight. And this, we can assume, is why the authorities have been searching the particular stretch of ocean they’re looking at now.
For those like me, who thought it possible, even likely, that the plane might have gone north, this comes as bad news. It seemed to me that there were lots of potential motives perpetrators might have for taking a plane north; what’s more, if the plane went north, one could entertain hope that the passengers might still be alive. At the time I first made that suggestion I was roundly criticized by those who preferred the theory that the plane’s change of course was a result of mechanical mishap. The fact is that none of us had enough information to prove our case, but we were making good-faith efforts to make sense of limited data. Indeed, even now the flight path that we’re left with is difficult to make sense of, since it jibes with neither a deliberate action nor a mechanical failure. Perhaps, as some have suggested, the disappearance took part in two phases: first, a deliberate diversion of the plane to a westerly course, and then, at around 18:25 GMT, an accident or act of violence that sent it heading south as a ghost ship.
To be sure, then, the solution of the Inmarsat data mystery leaves plenty of questions to be answered. If the plane did go into the ocean, why hasn’t any debris been found? If it tracked south over Indonesia, why wasn’t it picked up on radar? And if the final BFO value should give such a clear indication of where the plane wound up, why have the authorities shifted the search area multiple times—and why are experts within the search, as reported yesterday by the Wall Street Journal, continuing to debate the significance of factors like airspeed and fuel burn?
For me, though, the most perplexing question is why the authorities released the Inmarsat information the way they did. For nearly three months now, the public, and in particular the passengers’ families, have struggled to understand why the authorities were so adamant that the plane had gone south. Instead of simply explaining the facts, which as I describe here seem to be pretty straightforward, they obfuscated, delayed, and bluffed. When they finally did reveal the truth, they tucked it away inside a ream of data so as to make its revelation as difficult as possible.
At any rate, the end effect is the same: We the public finally understand the official stance on the fate of the plane. But Inmarsat and the Malaysian authorities could have gotten us to this point without seeming mean-spirited and obstructionist.
This is a cross-posting of an article that was published on Slate.com on June 9, 2014. You can read the original here.
If you’d like to take a look at the calculations that led me to my conclusions, I’ve uploaded the Apple Numbers file to a public Dropbox folder. The satellite ephemera is from Duncan Steel (Duncansteel.com).
I’d also like to thank, again, Mike Exner, Victor Iannello, Duncan Steel, Richard Godrey, and Tim Farrar for their patience and generosity in helping me understand all this stuff.
fYI-the reason authorities were so certain the underwater pings from black boxes were mh370 was this gem…
http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/2014/considerations-on-defining-the-search-area-mh370.aspx
“Air Routes
There is only one published north-south air route in the south-eastern Indian Ocean. Air route M641 connects Cocos Island to Perth and has four waypoints. The air route crosses the area where the four acoustic signals were detected.”
ATdm
Real interesting read…Thanks
Once the known components that contribute to the BFO are resolved, the remainder can be used to “estimate” the speed and direction of the aircraft.
That’s what bothers me. Nothing about this guy is predictable. This is why I mentioned the flying in circles thing.
@Tdm-
And there was Inmarsat right in the middle of the tent bending that model to the limit. Are they getting any sort of payment?? Just a query?? Might explain the refusal to fully disclose.
When they moved the search they said that the plane may not have traveled anywhere as fast or as far as thought. Now they are heading south again. On what basis? Tea leaves?
@Chris –
Just looking again at the Malacca straits, those Indon radars had to switched off to see nothing. I think it would be easier to say that than to maintain ignorance wouldn’t it?
Also gives me another clue – Did the pilot have a thing for exploiting the ambiguity of borders? He doubles back on arriving at an air space border(Vietnam), heads back and down the Malay-Thai border, heads into the strait and does it again going NW. Having crossed back over peninsular Malaysia gives him the opportunity of running up the Burmese side of the Thai border into Bangladesh etc. That at least follows a pattern. If the last location was correct he was headed to Australia. I also hear it was largely done at 29,500 because this is another border, a vertical one. A sort of monitoring demarcation line. Is that correct anyone as I haven’t yet sorted out that bit from the mess? The border rationale also fits the northern arc. Taken to the extreme, if you ran down the Chinese side of the India border you will get shot down. If you took the Indian side they would be a lot more tentative.
If I had to bet I’d say the Indons are lying, and remember it took the Malays a week to break cover and it was their bloody plane. If not their plane, did they intend to break cover at all? Burmese radar will be a joke/nonexistent, same Bangladesh, Tibet etc. This is the 3rd world in the early hours of the morning, not Europe of North America. If the Indons lied it only really needs India to do the same, and they would. India/China border radar is hampered by the Himalayas also. If you are India do you shoot at a commercial plane skirting a border area at a consistent altitude?
Sorry to revisit all this stuff, just putting it all through the “border theory.”
Although the signal was sporadic, the aircraft was later again picked up by Thai radar swinging north and disappearing over the Andaman Sea, Air Marshal Monthon added.
(This potentially sets up for a border run inside Burma – current wisdom says it did a 180!)
The Thai air force did not check its records because the aircraft was not in “Thai airspace and it was not a threat to Thailand”, Air Marshal Monthon said, denying it had been “withholding information”.
(This is very SE Asia.)
Apologies for a record 4th consecutive posting but maybe worth noting that the current search paradigm essentially assumes that the Indons are lying. Something they go along with. Diplomacy?? You wonder what’s been said in private – the politics of this could be very entertaining.
What the hell – five!!
A zagging nth route fits the BFO data? Is that still correct? Littlefoot??
Matty ,here’s the thing that jumps out at me is these waypoints of flight 641 from cocos to perth had to be the validation of inmarsat analysis …so it’s strange the mh370 plane was not there on that route makes me suspect the investigators figured autopilot was engaged .thing is the speed altitude assumptions could be far off especially if plane was compromised .
If the whole BFO thing is rubbery enough for them to jerk the search around like that, it seems they are going on hunches. Bit like us but we admit it. When they say “searchers now believe” they really mean someone had an idea.
Something I lost track of back there – Thai radar has it heading north towards the Andamans, and prior to the plane has been flown rationally. Next thing must have a been a 180 to oblivion?
Matty-
Rubbery is right. the Tdm gem gives it a +- 10km difference with KNOWN alt., & speed. When regarding the sick mind at the yoke, he’s not going to follow ant logical not predictable flight paths. His full intention was that the flight never to be found, he’s a mystery in his own mind. We’ll probably end up mapping the entire Indian Ocean. We knew the Air France flight plan and it took nearly two years to find it. The BTO & BFO data everything we have will have to be run through a new wringer software wise again & again. It’s the long haul on this one, not that I’m a doubting Thomas, the long haul will teach us many things.
@Matty, you were asking me something re:zizagging flight path? Can you be more specific?
In general a zigzag path is quite possible, since the pings are only a moment in time, which allows the calculation, how far the plane was from the satellite at that moment. What the plane did in between is only constrained by speed and fuel consumption, since it has to meet the distance of the next ping ring in time.
@chris, that is also the reason, why whoever piloted the plane, could NOT have flown just in circles. Since you can measure the time of the ping to reach the satellite, you can calculate how far away the plane was from the satellite. Since from 19:40 UTC onwards the plane was moving further and further away from the satellite, it cannot have flown in circles. Those calculations are very robust. They have nothing to do with the BFO charts.Nobody ever doubted the calculation of the ping rings.It was only the postulation of the Southern direction of the plane the internet experts couldn’t understand – until Inmarsat’s clarification was published. This resulted in Jeff’s article here.
I don’t think, anyone is ready to discard Inmarsat’s calculations. They are still trying to refine them, though. And since we still have no idea what exactly happened to the plane, it’s sensible to follow up on every phenomenon like the sonic boom of Curtin University, since it could be important. It was at the right time after all. And even though Inmarsat’s ideas were probably correct in general, so many suppositions went into their calculations that there’s a lot of elasticity as to to the final resting place of mh 370.
@littlefoot
I’m not about to discard anything. The circle thing was brought up by Mattys post about the Malay Thai coast line flight path. What I’m suggesting is that he did his home work in every way. Back tracking , zigzagging, changing altitude, air speed to throw as much supposition as possible into the fuzzy math, to fool the likes of Jeff, yourself, Matty & everyone involved.
@Littlefoot –
I read somewhere recently that a northern BFO fit was just possible with lots of heading changes?
@Chris, I was just addressing your comment from 4:24 PM. And the idea of the plane having flown circles alway crops up now and then. So, my comment was aimed more in general at this idea, no matter who made it.
While my money is also on the captain, at least as to who caused deliberately the first diversion at exactly the spot, where the plane wouldn’t be missed for a while,and turned off the transponder, I don’t think it’s even possible, that he could forsee the
pings and Inmarsat’s subsequent calculations. For all we know, he wasn’t even aware of the plane’s engines pinging away after the transponder was shut off. And there’s one thing he certainly couldn’t have known: That Inmarsat had programmed their computers to assume, that their satellite was stationary, while in reality it was moving.He also couldn’t have known the algorythm, which corrected this intrinsic programming glitch.Nobody outside of Inmarsat knew this. That’s why the legions of Internet experts had so much difficulties with the BFO charts.And without that knowledge he couldn’t plan and play with the Doppler effects. The BFO charts are composite numbers and no one outside of Inmarsat knows, what has gone into them. So while I believe, that whoever piloted the plane was very clever and did the things he did for a reason, it was not because he wanted to throw the search teams off. Contrary to what the Malaysian authorties said in the first weeks after the plane went missing, the pilot didn’t even bother to avoid primary radar of the Malaysians. He was tracked almost immediately after the first diversion until he was last spotted around 18:25 over Strait of Malacca. If his aim was right from start simply to disappear and ditch the plane at a remote place in the Indian Ocean, where in all likelyhood it would never be found, he simply could’ve made a dive before or after the diversion, fly west over the Malaysian peninsula, fly lowly northwestwards over Strait of Malacca, round (still staying low and under everybody’s radar) the tip of Sumatra, head for the open sea, then climb to cruise speed again and fly the plane as far into the wide spaces of the Indian Ocean as fuel consumption permitted. If he had done that, maybe nobody would even have a clue that he turned around at all (and if he just wanted to hide and ditch the plane, that wouldn’t have been strictly necessary. He could’ve turned southwards immediately after a dive under the radar and head towards the Southern Indian Ocean. Instead the plane climbed higher after the diversion and only went under the radar for a very short period at the end of it’s observed flight path. That is, if the altitude changes even happened. There’s still an ongoing discussion about this. Who ever piloted the plane did nothing to hide the path of the plane from primary radar in the initial phase after the diversion. Why thenshould he have taken the trouble to acquire all sorts of remote and impossible to come by info about pings, BFO charts, satellite movements, Inmarsat’s algorythms (which troves of internet experts failed to discover) if he didn’t even try to hide the plane from primary radar?
@Matty, as far as I know, at duncansteel.com they played around for a while with lots of heading changes and discarded this idea eventually.That’s what I extracted from the comment section of Duncan’s last two posts. It’s worthwhile to plow through them all – and very diffcult, since it’s an ongoing process and they play around with ideas only to change their minds later, which is perfectly ok of course, even if it is confusing. Maybe Jeff cluld ask Victor Ianello and Henrik Rydberg about that. I also want to know, if the two of them still think, an excursion of the plane further northwestwards and closer to the Andaman Islands is still possible. There’s still Chris McLaughlins tv statement and the Reuters article to consider (both telling us, that the plane was over the Andamans). But Duncan Steel said in a comment, that the available data don’t support that idea. I’ve no clue, if that is still the last word on that.
@littlefoot
Why stay on radar? Maybe the water ditch was plan B. Why turn back @ Agari? Why climb to 45K (if not to kill the pax)? Can’t be a emergency, why fly the straights? it’s all apart of the psychosis of the pilot. An insane mind changing his mind. We’ll never know. One thing is certain. Six hours of psychotic piloting under the radar. If he did have in autopilot at any time near the end, it was to have a last meal & pray.
@Chris, agreed. The ditching could’ve been plan B. I should’ve been more specific in my comment. I simply tried to argue, that whoever piloted the plane, didn’t do all the things he did because he wanted to confuse future search teams and Inmarsat. But it is absolutely conceivable, that the captain abducted his own plane for political reasons – because he wanted to negotiate something, or because he wanted to demonstrate something. Then, when his plans didn’t work out for whatever reason (because the authorities refused to negotiate for example), he lost heart, and instead of going to jail and give up, he decided to ditch the plane somewhere remote, where the likelyhood of it being found was small. If he didn’t know about the ongoing pings, this becomes even more likely. He would have to assume, that primary radar last saw the plane on a northwestern course. He would’ve seen no reason why anybody should think, he steered the plane South.
But we have to be careful with assumptions re: altitude changes. They are not confirmed by reliable sources, especially the climb to 45000 ft. Experts say it’s impossible. The Malaysians backtracked later and claimed it was only 39000 ft. We simply don’t know, if it really happened. And the more moderate climb might simply have been done to avoid other commercial planes on that route West over the Malaysian peninsula.The only thing, which is fairly certain, is the short drop in altitude over the Malacca Strait, since the plane was lost from primary radar for a short time, and – if this really happened – the copilot’s cellphone tried to connect with the Penang tower.
The alternative end of the abduction-by-captain scenario is, that some intervention inside the plane (by passengers or the crew) or outside the plane (by fighter jets) forced the plane to turn around and damaged it in the process. That could’ve ended in the ghost flight scenario. We would then have to assume, that the end in a remote corner of the Indian Ocean was simply bad luck.
What we are discussing here, are the 2-phases scenarios:
The plane was diverted deliberately and without being in an emergency situation by someone, who initially did not plan to ditch the plane into the Indian Ocean. Then, around 18:25 something happened inside the plane (that includes a development inside the pilot’s head as well as passenger/crew intervention) or by outside forces, which caused the plane to turn South and fly into oblivion.
@littlefoot
Truly interesting. My first thoughts was a run @ land based target, and as you said, political statement of some kind. One would hope the pax were killed w/o having to live in shear terror that long.
IMO….he excused himself from the cockpit, went to the lav, put a handgun or stun gun together, came back in, took out the flt., eng, then the co-p, if stunned, they were bound & gagged. Hit the Igarie WP, back tracked to fullfill whatever he had in mind. Something goes south with the plan, he drops off radar & resorts to heading out to sea. He could have done that to begin with. Why turn around? It could be as simple as loosing his nerve about plowing into a structure, but again, we’re dealing with psychosis that runs as deep as the Indian Ocean. The turn up the straights. Saying goodbye? Be interesting to know where he use to vacation. Suicides often return to past vestiges trying to relive lost happiness. Indeed, his psychosis may have talked him out of plowing into a past vacation destination, then out to sea with a yet, unsolved mystery
I REALLY do think that the Malays are holding back.
@Littlefoot – The Thai’s are very matter of fact about picking it up heading NW towards the Andamans. How many unidentified wide body jets did we have flying around there that night? I’m uneasy about this sort of stuff – including big acoustic events – beig binned in homage to a handfull of rubbery numbers, but the search disintegrates if they don’t keep that central.
There is a guy called David Starr??……still saying a twisty northern path can fit the data into China somewhere so I was curious if the border scenario I was on about would fit. But as McLaughlin says, it’s not 100% certain anyway, and I think I’m on record somewhere asking for test flights….
If the Thai radar is valid it puts a totally new behavioural complexion on things pilot wise. As it is the Thais say they saw it and the searhers say no you didn’t. The Indon’s say they saw nothing and the searchers say nevermind. WTH??
@Matty, as far as I’m aware, the Thai radar observation never contradicted the official version, but rather confirmed it. The plane had turned around and flown back West after all, and WAS flying towards the Andamans, when last ‘seen’ on Malaysian primary radar. No contradiction there.
As to the Indonesians telling, they haven’t picked it up on their primary radar: While they might simply not telling the truth, there’s are other possibilities. The plane might have flown lowly, under their radar over the tip of Sumatra. Then the Indonesians wouldn’t have spotted it. Another possibility is, that the plane flew further Northwest than previously thought. If it turned South later than around 18:25, it might not have crossed the tip of Sumatra and Indonesian airspace at all. The early assumption was, that the plane turned at the time of the three successive ping clusters between 18:25 and 18:29. Under this assumption it must’ve crossed Indonesian airspace. But it is now believed, that this ping cluster doesn’t indicate a turn at all, but is simply a system reboot. If this is so, there’s no reason to exclude a turn to the South at a later time. Tim Farrar belongs to those, who suggested that possibility. This might solve the ‘Indonesian Radar Conundrum’.
No, as I understand it, heading and speed changes only affect the BFO value at around 18:25, and progressively less after that, to that by the end of the flight the BFO discrepancy essentially correlates with latitude. It’s impossible to make a northern route conform with the BFO data by adding twists and turned.
We always end up talking about ifs. IF, it went under Indon radar we can just about rule out ghost flight. Scary.
@Jeff, were you responding to Matty’s question, if twists and turns might allow a Northern path?
@Matty, of course we’re talking hypotheticals and assumptions in the absence of better knowledge. But I think, it’s important to go through all possibilities.
Littlefoot – Yeah I know, I was only remarking as such. McLaughlin admits there is ambiguity in the data, so it’s odd he hasn’t so far wanted to replicate it, or the Malaysians.
Yes, in part — others have raised the issue too
@Jeff
Have test flights been discussed in any of your inner or other closer circles? Would seem to be the next logical step in narrowing down the data.
@Matty
@littlefoot
Trying to think outside the box here..
We know the radar signature of the aircraft, typical speeds. We know the last secondary Malay blip. Why use a 777? Could we not retrofit another a/c to do the work? Contact Roll’s, research the exact ACARS Classic Arrow systems and try to replicate the data signatures? Work our way backwards to the straights?
@Mattie, Littlefoot, & Chris I just wish we had some info onthe pilots, crew, & passenger’s. According to the families no investigation has been done & that is criminal! Or is it because they already know the truth so they didn’t dig any further? I really believe if we knew more about their backgrounds it would tell us alot.
@Mattie anyway you can check with Sara n see if the group of next of kin pushing for info includes the pilots families also? Maybe who is missing from that group would say something?
@Chris – Inmarsat and MAS are in the box seat regarding replication. They are by far best placed to do it, MAS in particular you would think have an interest in doing so. You would want exactly the same satcom link, all identically configured etc. Stuff that only they know. Half the head scratching with the data was a lack of clarity on what it was. And that’s still the case to a degree.
I really believe if we knew more about their backgrounds it would tell us alot.
It’s really gone Rhett. We need to let go.
My last post was “Trying to think outside the box here..”
@Matty & littlefoot
1st..Matty….sorry to see the Aussie defeat @ FIFA. Greeks lost too…bummer.
Anyway…posting is getting weird.
“really believe if we knew more about their backgrounds it would tell us alot.
It’s really gone Rhett. We need to let go”
NOT MY POSTING!!
@Chris, that’s truly weird! When I read this, it didn’t make any sense at all.
Though there’s some hidden wisdom there.
It might come down this, if they don’t find the plane. Foremost the passengers’ families have to let go. Very hard to do.
But not just yet. I feel, there’s a lot left to be investigated beyond Inmarsat’s numbers. We’ve never heard so far about the results of the criminal investigation. And maybe there will be some whistleblower eventually.
@littlefoot
Agreed..a lot to investigate & more importantly,
a lot to learn. One would hope this tragic event will spawn some new systems, technologies regarding a/c & how we track them. Nothing is accomplished quickly when dealing with a/c and the FAA but, who would have seen this madman coming. Always seems to take tragedy to shape hard learned lessons.
@Matty
@littlefoot
Then it’s feasible? Outfit a turboprop, maybe a King Air 200, then send it pinging from the most narrowed area of the 7th arc back to the straights. Speed & alt., wouldn’t be a concern, only matching the ping & draw our angles from there?
Check that last thought, better make it a P3, King Air wouldn’t have the legs for this job
Enough is enough. Everyone is flogging a dead horse.
There seems to be general agreement that the only thing that can be extracted with any confidence from the Inmarsat data ( latest analysis by Duncan and Company not withstanding) is that the plane most likely went south. And that’s it.
It is Jeff’s personal opinion that Inmarsat knows what they are doing. Well, they have changed their analysis at least four times. That is not a sign of diligence. It is a sign of incompetence. A twenty year old data retransmission system is not up to the task of tracking flight paths, nor are the engineers who run it. And the latest revalation that the plane’s transmitter adjusts its frequency to correct for its velocity, which theoretically should make the analysis easier, actually makes things worse because it brings more unknowns into the mathematics.
Littlefoot, I have never questioned the ping ring calculations until now. Does the plane’s transmitter have to wait for flight data from the plane’s flight system before responding to a handshake?
Time for a fresh start.
A collective minute by minute comparison of all the radar data, from all sources, could be very informative. But the Malaysians will not push for it, and the contries involved so suspecious of each other, that it is not to be hoped for.
Someone who might be willing to talk knows what happened to this aircraft. Maybe the $5 million offered by the families for information will do the trick.
@Arthur, nobody questions the ping ring calculations, as far as I’m aware. They are well understood. And they were ‘peer reviewed’ – sort of, since Duncan Steel at al reverse-engineered them. The results were very similar to the data, which were later published by Inmarsat.
Why would you start to question them now? The system reboot, we were talking about is apparently only relevant for the BFO charts.
Arthur T –
Been my thinking for a while but I wasn’t technically savvy to the point of seriously raising it. If the sat pings the plane you get a response, but what if the plane was taking longer and longer to organize one? It would give the appearance of moving away from the satellite. Test flight please!!
Also, the Malacca Straits are not very wide and should be an area of overlapping radar responsibility. The Indons have gone totally missing in this. My understanding is it headed up the guts at 29,500. This talk of evading Indon radar might be rather accommodating to them, but that’s politics South East Asian style.
Ever since Curtin Uni came out and confirmed the Indian Ocean event I’ve been trying to find a way through those rings. They have been described as solid and well understood, but on the assumption the electronics were hehaving themself. Some of the ping intervals are a little hard to follow. It’s not solid until you replicate it. Or at least that’s how science used to work.
@matty – Perth, AutherT, littlefoot, Tdm, rand meyer, rhette & jeff
We’ll be chasing our own tails for years.
From the 7th arc back. Back from there…..to the straights.
We have to work ourselves BACKWARDS out of this. Simulate flights from the last known origin (7th arc) to the last secondary radar blip(straights). Test flights will prove this. The new math, systems analysis learned along the way, peering into another path less known, science less known. Pull out all of the stops….we owe it to the families & the challenge.
@Matty I believe the official statements regarding any acoustic events are indicative of the scientists concerned stating that they did NOT witness an acoustic event when they should have – had it occurred. They are not explicitly stating as much, so as to avoid contradicting the prevailing wisdom anchoring the search, to which significant treasure has been committed. Thus do they indicate a distant acoustic event (providing evidence as to the robustness of their systems) while not confirming that it was the impact of MH370. This is not good news…
The lack of a record of the response/communications of the Malaysian military; the generalizations associated with Malaysian, Indonesian and Indian radar; the lack of any real pursuit of a criminal investigation; and the lack of MAS offering up an aircraft for simulated flight that would at the very least garner some good PR for the troubled airline all point to one nagging possibility: that there was indeed undisclosed military or political involvement/collusion proximate to the “disappearance” of MH370…and no wild conspiracy theory required. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and this baby is smokin’.
The aircraft was intentionally diverted by whomever at IGARI and was destined for a landing in Malaysia, most likely Penang or KL. The diversion was interrupted and whatever plan for the diversion, foiled. This is the simplest and most highly probable ‘how and why’ as to the aircraft’s ‘disappearance’. It is not necessarily ‘true’, but it remains the most probable.
The reward: I’ll echo Arthur T once again with the hope that it gets funded and somebody steps forward with what they know regarding MH370.
An update on the activities of the opposition in Malaysia: they have a forum sponsored by a think tank that as of ten days ago was scheduled for 17 Jun; they will also soon mount a formal inquiry at Parliament. I had one of the dsteel crew lined up to travel to KL, but was assured by the CoS of the party that their application for a conference visa would most assuredly be denied. May Themis, the Goddess of Justice, help them, as they are encountering stiff opposition to any sort of inquiry and generally being denied any information regarding the flight.
No doubt Curtin Uni have been careful. The media would love to play them off against Inmarsat and cultivate a whole lot of ambiguity – they have stood well back from that edge, but said enough to reveal they are still at it.
The early tip was Curtin heard something(Littlefoot) and I assumed they would jump out with it but MH370 was such a hot news item they kept their head down it appears. Maybe prudent as it was going nuts at the time, but I think they have friends/supporters inside JACC.
The satcom link would be integrated to other systems surely? Systems that were known to have either malfunctioned/been destroyed or been tampered/switched off. What chance the incoming pings were feeding into a system already in a spasm? Or did the pings cause one with chunks of system not operating? They are measuring thousandths of seconds here and less. I can tell you this computer speeds up, slows down, freezes up for a hundred reasons. Are there untested assumptions with the rings??
Or would it be reasonable to assume that Inmarsat have no technical visibility at all as to what was going on with the plane’s systems other then a basic ping response? Only MAS technicians would be in a position to speculate and they seem to have been gagged.
@Rand, thanks for the update on the opposition activities. I really hope they sink their theeth into this and are tenacious. This a Malaysian Mystery IMO (if it wasn’t such a tragic story, this would be a terrific title for a good old fashioned Who Done It novel). It started there and was supposed to end there.
I agree with your interpretation of the Curtin scientists statements. If the sound they recorded wasn’t from mh 370, then why didn’t they hear the real crash? Unfortunately no journo has asked them that question as far as I’m aware of. But that’s the real importantant question: Shouldn’t they’ve heard the real one, if it happened in the designated area? That’s not as streightforward we might think. The crash of the french plane into the Atlantic Ocean wasn’t recorded either, though there were hydrophones placed, which might’ve caught it. An absence of evidence doesn’t necessarily indicate, that there wasn’t any crash in the ping arc area. But I’d like to hear an in-depth discussion of this important question. The very fact, that they’re still pursuing this hydrosonic boom, which happened at the right time and was an isolated event (as expected, if you’re dealing with a plane crash), is troubling.
As to a test flight: A great idea in general, but if mh 370 was compromised in any way – and it probably was at some stage of it’s doomed trip – it might not be possible to replicate the exact same conditions. No reason not to do it, though.
@Matty, agreed, the Curtin scientists should avoid to be drawn into a much publicised argument, at least not now. But I’d love to hear what they really think.
I think, beyond the basic ping responses Inmarsat has had no visibility of the plane’s flight systems. All these channels had been turned off. Rolls Roice had some infos about the engines, though. All this talk about altitude changes has come from that corner.
The Curtin splash is attributed to seismic activity somewhere around the south of India give or take a thousand miles. Could that not be verified? There are a lot of sensors out there since the devastating tsunami of 04. You could do a long list of things that seem strange about this crash. Curtin would be in a position to test that bit but no mention. Hmmm.