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.
Jeff: Ms. Foo, CoS of the DAP in Malaysia, would like to invite you to contact Lam Choong Wah, Researcher at refsa.org, regarding the upcoming MH370 Forum that REFSA is hosting.
choongwah@refsa.org
@Matty, they didn’t say it was a seismic activity for sure. They said, it could’ve been one amongst other things. They also said – and that’s the intriguing morsel- there’s a 10-25 % chance, that it IS related to the plane crash. That’s why they are still working on it. And that troubles me. Why are they still pursuing this if the sound came from the wrong area? Though it’s encouraging to know, that they don’t have complete tunnel vision..,
I think the searchers individually are a lot more open minded than the official narrative suggests. When they discarded the audio pings there was that US Navy guy who took pleasure in saying it. He went early, that looked deliberate.
@Matty and @Littlefoot: Again, I believe the correct translation of what the people at Curtin and/or the CTBTO are saying is: “We detected an acoustic event south of India that has a low probability of being associated with MH370. We have yet to detect any other discrete event, yet most likely would have, had there in fact been one.” This is the only sort of translation (other than scientists being over careful to avoid any projection of anything other that that grounded in evidence). Note how they even went as far to state that if they had recorded an event, it would not necessarily have been from the impact of an aircraft. In short, they translated their statement as to not having recorded any associated event from as many avenues as possible.
The people at Curtin and likewise the CTBTO don’t know where the aircraft is; they only know what they did not ‘hear’, and it is this that they are trying to state without getting embroiled in controversy. Perhaps they cannot winnow out the chaff and locate a proper signal; perhaps they did not hear anything because there was nothing to detect. I truly hope that it can all be chalked up to yet more pollution in our oceans.
The press are pretty useless these days. A Paris Hilton side boob moment is much more important than digging around. The people I tipped off about the Curtin splash ignored it for weeks, unless Curtin had the shutters up. When they did announce, there they were in the middle of the pack. Curtin made sure the press had nothing to run with.
Littlefoot – do you have any reference to the absence of noise from Air France 447? I’m guessing the Atlantic is a lot noisier than the Indian Ocean?
@Rand, beg go differ re: interpretation of what the scientists said. It differs a bit btw in every news outlet. In one they said they’d give it a much higher probability if it was in the ping arc area. If had all the marks they’d look for in a crash recording. On the other hand no other sound recording in the correct area doesn’t mean there was nothing. The Air France crash generated no recordings either.
You’re right though, the last thing they want is a public controversy.
@Matty, I remember distinctly that the Air France crash was mentioned in that context as not having generated a sound recording. I’ll try to find the source. I think, Duncan Steel mentioned it, when they discussed the sonic boom weeks ago, before there was an official confirmation from Curtin.
Got it
http://www.click2houston.com/news/Did-ocean-device-capture-Flight-MH370-s-end/26224290
As I get it, you need a bit of peace and quiet out there to pick up a long range event which is why Curtin have on the past heard ice sheets breaking away in Antarctica. It’s a quiet area down there relatively. Getting something from way out near India might indicate that conditions were pretty conducive. The North Atlantic has all that Panama canal traffic and busy shipping lanes to deal with. A rough sea will also generate plenty of noise.
But the Curtin deal is not so much what they didn’t hear, it’s what they did hear.
@Matty, thanks for the link.
Agreed, the deal is about what they heard.
Thanks, Rand. I just sent her an email.
A while back a bunch of the aviation analysts on CNN wanted to push the network to lease a 777 and run some possible routes. The problem, as I see it, is that until Malaysia and Inmarsat release all the relevant information, we wouldn’t have enough data to compare against; and if they did release all that info, we most likely wouldn’t need to run the comparison flights.
Jeff – A useful angle might be to ask Inmarsat, in front of a camera, if they would be interested in gaining some real data if CNN went to the trouble of leasing an MAS 777? If they said no they would need a pretty good reason. That aside, MAS should be offering one.
If you went ahead and did it, what would Inmarsat do with the data? Shred it? If you used an MAS 777 there data would be generated automatically, then it exists.
I think that CNN has actually had a lot of success in pressuring Malaysia to release info — I credit Richard Quest for getting the PM to promise on camera to release the preliminary report. And for working with Inmarsat to release the “raw data.” Of course public pressure helped a lot, too. Despite those few successes, I’m just not terribly optimistic that they’re going to switch gears and start being helpful.
Jeff – I think that if the data was generated, if it existed, Angus Houston would do his block, and Sarah Bajc would come after them, along with the rest of the worlds media, if they didn’t cooperate. There is no way – in my view – that the Malaysians would handle the pressure of not availing. They are the paying customer here. Inmarsat just provide the service. If the flight went ahead you force some hands.
It would also be such a highly anticipated media event. I think just offering it to MAS and JACC would generate an international flurry. It would be the kind of manoeuvre to make any computer modeler squirm.
@Matty, that’s exactly, why the Malaysians probably won’t allow a test flight any time soon. They want this to go away, and a big media echo is the last thing they want. Not to mention, that such a test flight might uncover unpleasant things.
The media coverage is getting smaller and smaller, and that’s probably what they want, though I wish the passengers’ families luck in their quest to genererating new interest.
The Malaysians will fold like a cheap card table as soon as the intl media turned it on them. Australia are spending 90 mil on this search. Houston is entitled to it, families are entitled to it. Hishamuddin might gulp a bit but politically he would have absolutely no choice – in my view.
The media have dropped off alright, mainly because it has run dry, but MH 370 is still a biggie, it just needs some more oxygen. It would be a big media event.
The media have dropped off alright but MH370 is still a big story, it just needs some more oxygen. A re-enacted flight would be a major media event. I wonder if you could do the Indian Ocean leg without ACARS to simulate it properly?
Worth remembering too the Chinese are increasingly shitty about the whole thing. If they thought it a good idea to do a test run it would very likely happen.
The journo’s more or less ran out of stories but MH370 isn’t spent – not by a long way. It would all be back on. The thing is still missing.
Okaaay. My missing posts showed up…….I better stay off here for a while, HA
@Matt, littlefoot & Jeff
Peddle the idea to the Malaysians & if they’re not receptive, then to the Chinese, THAT would draw then off center.
Point of clarification: from what I have read, the CTBTO arrays detect seismic events, while the Curtin U. equipment is designed to monitor marine life vocalizations. Mr. Prior at the CTBTO has been referencing whether they had detected the impact of the aircraft on the seabed. Would not Curtin U be using a wholly different detection technology capable of hearing the impact of the aircraft as it hit the water? Perhaps Curtin will yet prove able to isolate an acoustic event, as the work involved would not doubt be little different than scanning millions of satellite images.
Matty, can you give me a ruling on this?
@Rand, while I can’t speak for Matty, you named the problem, of course. Like Inmarsat’s equippment and software wasn’t designed with rogue airliners in mind, Curtin U’s. biggest tracking objects are whales, not planes.
Matty may correct me, but I think, they said not having heard anything besides this hydrophonic boom or oomph. But they mentioned the possibility of retrieving more scattered hydrophones for refinement of their analysis.
Straight from the horses mouth….
http://news.curtin.edu.au/media-releases/curtin-“researchers-search-acoustic-evidence-mh370/
The signal, which was picked up by underwater sound recorders off Rottnest Island just after 1:30 am UTC on the 8th March, could have resulted from Flight MH370 crashing into the Indian Ocean but could also have originated from a natural event, such as a small earth tremor.
However, there are large uncertainties in the estimate and it appears it is not compatible with the satellite ‘handshake’ data transmitted from the aircraft, which is currently considered the most reliable source of information.”
http://news.curtin.edu.au/media-releases/curtin-researchers-search-acoustic-evidence-mh370/
A MUST READ.
http://news.curtin.edu.au/media-releases/curtin-researchers-search-acoustic-evidence-mh370/
Could Inmarsat data be holding back real possible evidence of a impact .i ..think if there’s no inmarsat tracking putting mh 370 on a known air .this other impact area would be the likeliest area to search ..
*mh 370 On a known air route.
Data from curtin was collaborated with cbto data .stong evidence….
http://news.curtin.edu.au/media-releases/curtin-researchers-search-acoustic-evidence-mh370/
“Dr Alec Duncan, Senior Research Fellow and part of Curtin’s Centre for Marine Science and Technology team, explained that a passive acoustic observatory 40 kilometres west of Rottnest Island that forms part of the Commonwealth-funded Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) had provided the potential lead.
“Soon after the aircraft disappeared, scientists at CTBTO analysed data from their underwater listening stations south-west of Cape Leeuwin and in the northern Indian Ocean. They did not turn up anything of interest,” Dr Duncan said.
“But when the MH370 search area was moved to the southern Indian Ocean, scientists from Curtin’s Centre for Marine Science and Technology decided to recover the IMOS acoustic recorders located west of Rottnest Island.
“Data from one of the IMOS recorders showed a clear acoustic signal at a time that was reasonably consistent with other information relating to the disappearance of MH370.
“The crash of a large aircraft in the ocean would be a high energy event and expected to generate intense underwater sounds.”
Dr Duncan said the signal could also have been due to natural causes – such as a small earth tremor – but the timing made it of interest in the search for MH370.
“It has since been matched with a signal picked up by CTBTO’s station south-west of CapeLeeuwin.”
@Tdm
The tip of the polygon is in the playing field & ping arc data. Hope the CTBTO & Curtain U can collaborate on this.
Chris ,Did you catch the Addmision in press release ctbto first denied there was an event .south-west of CapeLeeuwin…
No….I didn’t
I’m confused as to why.
It’s just Good they both acknowledge A event actually took place and are on the same page now ! a big thank you has to go to curtain university for applying pressure to the ctbto to revisit there recordings for that area ,south-west of CapeLeeuwin.
@anyone
Do you think the Malay’s are holding back, to paranoid at the thought of Shah being responsible. I mean….how do you cover a suicide? Whomever underwrites the insurance for MAS is wringing their hands.
Curtin(CMST) is a training facility mainly. It’s there to provide graduates with skills in marine acoustics among other things. As far as I know it’s not whale chasing specifically, it’s quite general.
That doesn’t mean they aren’t out there doing research in various stuff, they will be. Seismic sensors are embedded in the ground to my knowledge while anything in the water is a listening device.
Chris – The Malaysians are stuck in groundhog day, they just want it to be over, and if there is no plane at the end of it then it underlines just how onerous and intractable their situation was to the whole world. Also saves them on a number of other fronts. If they were serious the test flights would have happened by now.
Jeff – maybe just let them(CNN)know that by chartering that plane and racking up the numbers they would be rocking the boat.
Inmarsat shifting blame?
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/aviation/mh370-search-yet-to-target-most-likely-crash-site-inmarsat-says/story-e6frg95x-1226957342529
Interesting. Are there ructions with them and JACC?
Looks like Inmarsat are chasing credit for finding the plane but it is taking too long. They wanted it wrapped up well before this. What started out as a publicity bonanza has soured of late. The search looks pretty desperate and they are getting tarred with it.
Rand & Arthur, I’ve missed reading ur posts! Am missing Gene as well. Thanks to everyone for the info, ideas, & links. I read them all, as Matty is right, the media interest islow. A long time ago I read a piece Jeff wrote & I was impressed with his critical thinking & a natural intuition to see thru a diversion, while most people like me still didn’t know what was happening. So with this crime, n I think it is because someone may still be diverting facts, I don’t think he will just let it go. Even if all he can do n the end is call them out publicly. N none of us want to let it go either r we wouldn’t be here! 😉
All: thanks for the clarification regarding Curtin and the CTBTO. I now recall previous posts regarding their being a recorded event in the general vicinity of whichever search zone – good news. Question: do their location estimates corroborate the ‘hot spot’ now being advanced by Inmarsat, or is it in the ‘old’ search zone associated with the acoustic pings that were detected and pursued?
As for the previous search zone that was determined by the location of the acoustic pings, Jeff was rather persistent in arguing that they could just as likely not have been from the voice and/or data recorders. And so it proved that they were not. I believe that we can chalk their emphasis up to bureaucratic momentum, as pursuing acoustic pings is, in fact, SOP for locating the remains of a downed aircraft in the ocean. At worst, the JACC at one point queried Inmarsat or the NTSB or the AAIB regarding their confidence in the analysis associated with the Class Aero ping data and the answer was, “Well, we can’t be certain, of course, this sort of thing has never been attempted before…” And so the search proceeded along traditional lines.
Again, the acoustic pings thought to be associated with the loss of AF447 determined the search for the aircraft for nearly two years before scientific consultancy Metron was brought into the search. They discounted the acoustic ping data and, voila, the remains of the aircraft were located within a week. Confirmation bias: it can be a killer, and it is this that remains inherent to any search based upon Inmarsat’s analysis. Regardless, it’s the best that anyone has to go on at present and Jeff is now on board, so with a bit of luck a protracted and diligent search will yield results.
@Chris As for the Malaysians, for certain they are not fully engaging a rigorous criminal investigation, as far as we know. As for this being the result of a suicide, there isn’t any historic precedent for a pilot commandeering an aircraft for 7 hours only to fly it into the sea at the point of fuel exhaustion. Maybe whomever was after one last party with accoutrement from the galley and a bevy of flight attendants, but this, of course, is ridiculous. The aircraft more than likely arrived at its present resting place quite by accident. The question then: what event or series of events sent the aircraft on its terminal trajectory to its present resting place in the southern Indian Ocean?
As for Hishammuddin, his twitter account is occupied with references to the World Cup, Fathers’ Day and Michael Schumacher emerging out of his coma. To be frank, there are many of us here whom appear to be more occupied with the search than he is. Yes, MH370 is a problem for which he has no stomach; he simply was not built for the task of governance and leadership. He came into his role rather by way of croneyism at its worst. He wants us to view him as he feels; what he does not realize that he is rather being sized up by his behavior.
Rand – the CMST acoustic data has the plane 1000’s of miles outside the ballpark, south of India, or even well past that heading towards the Arabian sea. If it was MH370 it was making a run for Iran/Pakistan like the good General McInerney said, and the rings are all wrong. But it’s at the right moment and nothing else shows up.
https://cmst.curtin.edu.au/local/docs/media_news/MH370%20media%20release%202014.pdf
Mind you the audacity ISIS are showing in Iraq would be consistent with a jet stealing maneouvre. The younger pilot at least would fit the western facebook jihadi profile. He just didn’t calculate his fuel too well!
Seriously though, of late I’m a bit worried about this search. If the US was bending over backwards to get to the plane Inmarsat would not be holding court like this. In the wreckage search it was one plane and a handfull of guys to look after the TPL and Bluefin. You could hardly say they threw the kitchen sink relative to their capacity. Subtract Abbott and I wonder if there would be anything going on at all at this point. Sometimes General McInerney’s claim the search is a figleaf actually make sense. They don’t look intensely interested remembering that terrorism is still on the table – they say.
@Matty Yet posts above refer to detections different from that of the ‘south of India’ detection. If the above references were prior to the south of India conclusion, then never mind, I have simply boggled myself.
Re ISIS, I find it humorous that British references are to ISIL (L for levant). As for the US response, I believe that we will soon see a test of the drone/airstrike/special forces matrix that Obama has deeply invested in as a response alternative to large deployments. It’s going to be ugly, but the transnational nature of the thing and the perceived imminent threat posed by ISIS will not be ignored, as America is not quite ready for a more isolationist stance. This day is coming, as the US will soon be too preoccupied with chaos at home, but this day has yet to dawn.
As for MH370, sure, terrorism is still on the table, but really? I would deeply discount this conclusion.
And something else wrong with this picture – the criminal investigation has gone dead quiet. FBI, MI-6 and all the rest, it just went dead, which doesn’t mean it stopped, probably the opposite.
I’m not ready to put my house on it that’s for sure, but this search always looked strange, never more so than now. The fact that Inmarsat are still calling it 3.5 months later has me suspicious. It’s an odd picture – to me, something about it not right, and don’t the families know it.
Staying out of Syria was smart but letting it infect Iraq would not be.
I would agree: something is indeed not right, and it could very well be that a there are others besides the Malaysians that are driving the criminal investigation and thus does it remain under wraps. This would explain the Malaysians not pursuing things in earnest, as it is out of their hands. I will yet cling, however, that events and the process are more intrinsic to Malaysia and that they are simply protected by international treaty in the maintenance of their sovereignty. Regardless, the silence is indeed deafening.
The silence may indicate the investigation has indeed headed down the terrorism road as it isn’t leaking at all. That’s a big change from the early days. Either the Malaysians have tightened right up or they are out of the picture. They did confess to being out of their depth a while back.
@Rand
An 6-7 hour accident? It was “Flown” from Igari to the M-straights, then out to sea. How could it be an accident?
I think he lost his nerve about a political & glorious ending & headed out to sea & be mysterious about it all.