A hundred days have passed since MH370 went missing — and while air and sea search operations have been put on hold, hope springs eternal. Today, the BBC is reporting that Inmarsat remains confident that its analysis of the satellite data will lead to the plane, saying that the authorities never searched the area of highest probability because they were distracted by the underwater acoustic pings that turned out not to have come from MH370’s black boxes. Once a new search gets underway, it will explore an area that conforms much better to the likely speed and heading of the missing plane:
By modelling a flight with a constant speed and a constant heading consistent with the plane being flown by autopilot – the team found one flight path that lined up with all its data. “We can identify a path that matches exactly with all those frequency measurements and with the timing measurements and lands on the final arc at a particular location, which then gives us a sort of a hotspot area on the final arc where we believe the most likely area is,” said Mr Ashton.
Unfortunately, it will be several months before such a search of this new area can get underway, since the survey of the ocean floor will be required to figure out how deep it is and what kind of underwater technology should be used. Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Australian organization leading the search described a more complex and ambiguous state of affairs, telling the AFP that experts were still struggling to narrow down the highest-probability search area, taking into consideration not just the satellite data but also “aircraft performance data [and] a range of other information.”
What other information? Your guess is as good as mine. As I wrote last week in Slate, Inmarsat has by now leaked enough clues about MH370’s electronic Inmarsat “handshakes” that outsiders can now understand why, mathematically, the plane must have gone south. Yet we have not the slightest hint of what sequence of events might have taken it there. We don’t even know how it could have navigated southward. An airliner like the 777 doesn’t just wing off in random directions like a paper airplane; its Flight Management System would have been following a series of waypoints or a compass heading. Yet its range of possible courses doesn’t seem to match up with any particular heading or waypoint. (The last search area matched up with a flight route that tracked waypoints between the Cocos Islands and Australia, which is likely one of the reasons it seemed so appealing to authorities, but as we now know, that came up empty.)
MH370 looks to be a unique case not just in aviation history. No machine this big, no group of human beings this large, vanished so completely and so mysteriously since the advent of modern technology. What’s more, MH370 didn’t just disappear once, but three times.
The first disappearance, of course, was when it vanished from air traffic controllers’ screens in the early morning hours of March 8, apparently after someone turned off its transponder and automatic status-reporting equipment, and took a hard left turn. Based on the speed and precision of its navigation, the plane almost certainly was under human control.
The second disappearance occurred about an hour later, as the plane slipped beyond the range of military radar. Minutes later, some kind of unknown event caused the plane to transmit a mysterious triple burst of electronic signals to the Inmarsat satellite. At around the same time, the plane took another radical course change, pivoting from a northwest heading toward mainland Asia to a southwestern course that would take it over western Indonesia and out into the open ocean. Based on the slim evidence of subsequent Inmarsat pings, the plane seems to have flown in a simple straight line, so it may not have been under human control at that point.
Then it disappeared a third and final time, this time leaving not a single clue.
What has made the case so difficult to understand isn’t just the scarcity of information concerning its fate, but the superabundance of false clues. In the months that followed the disappearance, I had a front row seat to the flood of bad data as I covered the story for Slate and CNN. Day by day, new developments would come in from sources all around the world, and the challenge was to figure out which would turn out to be erroneous. What to make of reports that the plane had climbed to 45,000 feet after its initial turn, then precipitously dived (faster, it turned out, than the laws of physics would allow)? How excited should we be about the debris that satellites had spotted floating in the southern Indian Ocean (yet never was to be seen again)? How soon before searchers tracked down the sounds coming from the black box acoustic pingers (which turned out not to have come from the black boxes at all)?
The fog of misinformation was made worse by the Malaysian and Australian authorities. Faced with an ever-rising chorus of demands that they explain the search operation, they dragged their heels in releasing basic information, left simple questions unanswered, were slow to correct mistakes, and left huge gaps in the data that they did ultimately release.
The resulting uncertainty created a playground for amateur theorizers of every stripe, from earnest to wackadoodle. MH370 was a supermarket of facts to pick and choose from as one’s pet theory required. And the Internet gave everyone a chance to go viral in an instant. One of the more intriguing scenarios was put forward by Keith Ledgerwood, who posited that the plane had flown north and evaded radar by shadowing a Singapore Airlines flight. (The flight path turned out not to match the Inmarsat data.) Another that got a lot of play was the theory by Christian Goodfellow that the plane’s initial turn had been made because the flight crew was trying to get the burning airplane to an emergency landing in Langkawi, Malaysia. (Burning planes don’t fly for eight hours.)
Vehement passion was, alas, all too common as theories multiplied. I and everyone else who was publicly associated with MH370 was bombarded by emails, tweets, and blog comments offering evidence that solved the mystery once and for all. I soon formed a Pavlovian aversion to the name Tomnod, a crowdsourcing website that parceled out satellite images for the public to pore over. It was remarkable how many clouds, whitecaps, and forest canopies people could mistake for a 777 fuselage, and then proselytize for with deranged fervor. It always baffled me how people could get so attached to their ideas about an incident in which they had no personal stakes.
In time, though, the number of theories circulating has dwindled. With Ledgerwood’s and Goodfellow’s theories debunked, no one has been able to come up with a replacement that fits with what eventually emerged as the canonical set of credible facts. To be sure, there’s still a vast army of believers, waving their Tomnod printouts and furiously typing half-literate emails about ACARS data buses. But each is a lone voice shouting into a sea of skepticism.
Even the small cadre of independent experts who have come together to decipher Inmarsat’s data seem to be at loggerheads. Each has made a tentative stab at interpreting the “raw data” released by the satellite company, but the unanswered questions remain so numerous that the group can’t form a consensus about the plane’s fate. The officials looking for the plane don’t seem to be doing much better; recent reporting by the Wall Street Journal goes even further than the AFP report I cited earlier in portraying a team riven by fundamental differences of opinion as to where it should look.
A hundred days, and counting…
This post was adapted from an earlier version published on Slate.com.
Inmarsat says that it analyzed data from several other March 8th flights that communicated with its 3-F1 satellite, and that data confirmed that MH370 flew south. Why has that data not been made publicly available?
There’s so much that they could share that could give a clearer picture as to what we know about MH370’s fate. Even the way they’ve presented the information they have released has been confounding.
Jeff,
It’s disturbing, given the circumstances, that Inmarsat is “leaking” information.
Could Inmarsat be pressured by legal means to cough everything up?
Following on from Rand’s comment at the end of the last post’s discussion — indeed, I think the really burning question at this point is: what happened at 18:25? I find it highly interesting that the “triple event” took place mere minutes after the plane was lost to Malaysian primary radar surveillance. The timing was as tight as for the initial deviation from its planned flight to Beijing. To me that might indicate an intentional act rather than an accident. (Emphasize “might.”) But why turn south? What’s the motive? And, as I describe in today’s post, there’s then the issue of how exactly the plane navigated to the south. One idea that was mooted long ago and which might bear further inquiry is that the plane headed for waypoint RUNUT and then just kept going. Crazy idea: what if whoever was flying the plane intended to head west or north, but typed in the wrong waypoint identifier? I spent way too much of the morning trying to find a list of ICAO identifiers, to see if any were within a letter of RUNUT, but so far have come up empty.
(BTW, this is what the road to wackadoodle feels like, when you realize you’ve blown the morning on a one-in-a-thousand idea)
@Jeff, thanks for the new post.
You sum up perfectly, why this case is so baffling. Small wonder it spawns our ‘whackadoodle’ theories. But besides the fate of crew and passengers, this is exactly the reason, why we are so fascinated by it. It feels like a puzzle, where some pieces seem to fit, while others don’t even seem to belong to the same puzzle, yet they are there. It actually feels like three puzzles thrown together, and before we can solve it, we have to find out to which of the three puzzles each piece belongs.
As to the cluster of three pings around 18:25, I’m not so sure if they really indicate something fundamental at that exact time. If the system was simply rebooting (though the questkon remains, why it was rebooting at that critical junction), it doesn’t indicate a turn, and the plane could very well have turned South quite a bit later. Victor Ianello and Henrik Rydberg floated these thoughts.
But it’probably certain, that something fundamentally game changing must’ve happened to the plane between 18:25 and 19:41 UTC, and this mysterious something made the plane disappear for good, making off into it’s final Southern direction.
Perhaps another psychotic episode between 18:25 and 19:41 UTC. The first being the Igari way point, which was firm commitment. At Igari, he was all in. IF there wasn’t an emergency & he landed the a/c anywhere other than the planned destination, he’d have been in the Malaysian justice system for the rest of his life. I’m not a physiologist, but the physiology of it all is as mind boggling as the math.
@Jeff,
I thought some more about your idea, that the tripple ping around 18:25 was (maybe deliberately) on a tight schedule and happened just after the Malaysians lost the plane from their radar screen for good.You should consider this as well:
A short time before the plane went out of radar reach, it had been lost for a FOURTH time (actually the 3rd time, and then again for the final and 4th time): While all the other altitude changes are quite speculative, the one over Malacca Strait was for real, because the plane went deep enough to be lost from primary radar for a while, and it made only a very short appearance before it vanished for good.And then the reboot happened. And sometime after the reboot it made a 180° turnaround into it’s probably final Southern direction.
Since the plane kept flying for several hours after that, it’s hard to believe that this altitude dip was due to serious damage. So what’s behind that sequence of events?
I can’t help feeling, that whoever piloted the plane tried to shake off someone; maybe not in the literal sense (though that’s possible, too), but by anticipating, that it might’ve been detected by primary radar. And it was last ‘seen’ moving into a Northwestern direction towards the Andamans. Now, imagine, there were no pings and Inmarsat data. Wouldn’t everybody assume, the plane continued on it’s flight path towards the Andamans? Nobody, simply nobody would look for the plane in the Southern Indian Ocean. I think, whoever piloted the plane had no idea, that there was still low level communication going on between the plane’s engines and Inmarsat’s satellite. He probably thought he had disabled all functions for locating the plane. Even if he was aware, there was a possibility to tell, that the plane kept flying for several hours, he probably thought, nobody would be able to tell the direction, once the plane was out of primary radar reach.
Could it be possible, that the pilot showed off a Northwestern flight path in order to fool the search teams into believing, that’s where he went? I know, it sounds crazy, since the Southern direction is so hard to explain in the first place. But I agree with you that this sequence of events has something of the deliberateness and timing we encountered already at the first diversion around IGARI. That the plane appeared again on a radar screen after it’s dip for a short time, could’ve been unplanned and a miscalculation of Malaysia’s exact primary radar reach.
If there is something to my thoughts, I have to assume, that the pilot made a deliberate effort to evade Indonesian primary radar as well, either by flying lowly over the tip of Sumatra or by continuing a bit longer on it’s Northwestern path and making the final turn over the open sea and not over Indonesian airspace. According to Victor Ianello and Henrik Rydberg Inmarsat’s data allow a later turn.
Now, Matty has pointed out many times, that the Indonesians might not have been watching. And if they really spotted the plane, they probably wouldn’t have done a thing. But that’s not the point. If the pilot wanted to fool people into thinking he went towards the Andamans, while in reality he went into the opposite direction, he wouldn’t risk a potential giveaway of his direction by flying in cruising height over Indonesian airspace. So the Indonesians might really tell the truth with their statement, that they never had the plane on their radar screens.
These thoughts are not entirely my own. Very early after the plane went missing, someone at reddit pointed out, that the plane initially didn’t try to evade Malaysian radar at all but practically danced around their very nose by crosssing the peninsula and tracking up Malacca Strait. And then – poof – it was gone. After a 180° turnaround outside of primary radar reach.
Littlefoot = I just read you link from the last post and I think it’s a bit jaw dropping. Worth reading then consider – there were Iranians on board, it was initially bound for China, and the Indian Ocean oomph puts it en-route to Iran – just going with our terrorism angle from over the page. The story intrigues even more when you consider in Malaysia like Indonesia, ISIS gains in Iraq are being cheered on social media. The younger pilot is in the ISIS mould actually, young, educated, facebook generation.
Are they scared of test flights because that data is inherently difficult to replicate and it would open a can of worms? As one Singapore expert said – the fact they are using this data says how desperate they are. If a research paper was presented in such a way it would be laughed at, is this why normal scientific rigour has not been applied?
I’m still open to the plane taking it’s time with the ping responses. The rings sort of assume that the replies just bounce off a mirror faithfully. In other words it might have gone anywhere except west.
I mean east
Littlefoots link to save heading back for it –
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aK4daf8MD.Bw
I agree Littlefoot, if it was a terror act it didn’t come off. At least that’s a clear motive.
@Rodney Small – this what I wrote on Jeff’s previous posting, “I reckon if this was a post 9/11 environment Inmarsat would have been required to hand over data, models, algorithms, and anything else and then told to sod off, we’ll call you. But here they are. Talk about over exposure.”
Exactly what is happening here I don’t know but I’m over it.
Littlefoot – I read 3 ISIS operatives have been arrested in Malaysia, one a naval officer. What’s caught them all off guard here is that it been social media oriented. Only last week the idea that they could have been swarming all through Iraq was nonsense but boy are they as dangerous as they are audacious. Check this out if you have the stomach – http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/inside-the-jihad-clanking-of-the-swords.php
@Matty, thanks for re-posting the link.
While my thoughts so far have gone into an entirely different direction, this article from Bloomberg news got me thinking. It’s indeed a bit jaw dropping.
@ littlefoot. Matty & Rand
“Then poof”
Any thoughts that he was communicating via sat., phone? Compadre on the ground, or Maylay officials trying to talk a madman down.
Certainly there was a breakdown of some sort, or change of plans @ 18:25 and 19:41 UTC, be it mental or otherwise. This is a whodoneit that will last decades. I will leave it to the experts, as my wife is convinced that I’m obsessed.
Chris ” wackadoodle” Butler over & out.
Chris ,the satcom On mh370 is a sat phone by Inmarsat it was operational( according to Inmarsat) and Malaysia airlines tried tTo make contact or claim to have phoned the plane twice to no avail.
Littlefoot –
Mary Schiavo says there was no chatter: I think in the past these groups allowed us to monitor/track their evolution. ISIS has been comparatively spontaneous as it has been international. The speed of it got them wrongfooted. Chatter might be very last decade? Look at the slick multimedia they produce while in the field killing people. The are young, educated, professional, media savvy, reckless, bold, ruthless.
Rand – when are those drones coming?
@Tdm, Rand, Littlefoot, Matty.
SOMETHING – went wrong terribly @ the straights.
@Jeff Yes: last radar contact at 18:22, then the initiation of the three pings initiated by the aircraft beginning at 18:25, supplemented by the aircraft going off radar briefly in the minutes before 18:22. We, of course, can only guess at what precipitated these observed ‘behavioral changes’, while there their existence alone remains quite significant. Most importantly, they generally support the hypothesis of a secondary event post diversion at IGARI that resulted in the aircraft engaging a terminal flight trajectory.
I really appreciate Jeff’s framing of the flight path as series of discrete disappearing acts. This is a great way to conceptualize what transpired, and it leads one to ask HOW the aircraft managed to ‘disappear’ on each occasion. If it was not a matter of a mechanical failure at IGARI, then there was human intervention of some form at critical junctures. And if there was human intervention, then there is a possibility that there is someone on this rock that knows just a little bit more about what happened.
@Matty I believe drones are moving into position now. They will need targets, so you can give the process another day or two. The big fireworks should begin on Saturday, once the forward air controllers are in place and the carrier Bush has ruffled its petticoats and settled in.
@Rand , Jeff, Matty, Tdm & company,
Posting is getting strange again..
“SOMETHING – went wrong terribly @ the straights.”
Not my post…Anyone else experiencing this?
Anyway….I’ll beg out & leave it to the very capable gang of Gulliver’s. Look forward to following.
@Chris That’s strange. Perhaps somebody is ghost posting with your ID. Jeff should be able to tell by the email addresses provided.
Strange indeed. The email address is the same as for this post. A mystery on top of a mystery! If you post something really bonkers we’ll assume it’s your Doppelganger.
Must be the doppler-ganger effect!! Sorry. I’ll go now.
@Chris, no, nothing strange happening at my end. Maybe, someone has access to your computer? If you haven’t locked out properly, this someone could comment under your name.
Anyway, the statement of your ghostwriter that something went terribly wrong over the sfraights, isn’t strange or outrageous. But this ghostwriter’s earlier statement, that we need to let go, might be a subtle hint, no?
😉
Don’t worry Chris – if we see anything really whackadoodled we’ll know it’s the doppler man.
Littlefoot I am in love w ur 4th disappearance post! That is brilliant. Thanks for the new update Jeff! I don’t think any of us thought it would still be so confusing 100 days later. Matty I can’t believe how much info u got so fast on the terrorists, took me awhile to read it all & that was my 1st theory n all this. Someone should be paying you. Chris, I think Rand & I thought someone hijacked Jeff’s blog awhile back, but it was just a weirdo link at the bottom! Lol so, WE are wackadoodles to! Thanks for labeling us Jeff! I was wondering if anyone remembers that shortly after the 1st tower lost contact with the plane, wasn’t it said that another plane briefly had radio contact they thought with the co-pilot? Or am I mistaken? Was that followed up on?
Barring anymore intrusions into the life of a boring middle class Texan….Go figure..Thanks for checking Jeff
@Tdm
I think he went loaded for bear & took his own sat., phone handset. In post 9-11 & Snowden atmosphere, are such communications picked as easily as cell phones, monitored? As for the lack of cell phone pings, the perp could have set up a smoke screen very early in the flight, forbidding any cell traffic. Pax normally conform to the captains wishes.
The 18:25 and 19:41 UTC junction is a head scratcher. Plan A literally went South, or the total collapse of a devious mind.
Chris – at times this site really slows down, almost stops, I wonder if someone hasn’t had a go at it? Alternately Chris if your wife is any good with computers she might be having some fun?
I’m going to stick my neck out now and say the Curtin oomph ‘IS’ the plane, and the rings are wrong. Likely cause – botched terror plot of some kind. I’ll take solid acoustic evidence over the Marco Polo BS and I have no confidence in the search and the investigators have gone to ground.
Terror far fetched? We uncover a plot every month. Marcus Ashcroft I think it was, the first head of Dept of Homeland Security made an interesting comment at the beginning. He said “sooner or later we are going to make a mistake or they are going to get lucky. It keeps me awake at night.”
In the history of aviation we have total of about 2-3 pilot suicides. Heaps of hijacks though and we are due for something big – timing is right here.
@Rhett, thanks for mentioning my ‘4times vanishing act’ theory. I’ve had it in mind for quite a while. Nobody seems to discuss the altitude change at the end of the plane’s ‘observed’ journey over Malacca Strait. That’s strange, because it’s the only altitude change, that’s backed up by facts (the interrupted primary radar tracking and the alledged cellphone connection to Penang tower). It seems to be immensely important to me, because it was so close to the 4th and final vanishing act of the plane. If there were no ping rings and Inmarsat, everybody would’ve assumed, the plane went down right there or within a near distance. Since we know it didn’t, why on earth did the plane take this dip? Since planes don’t dip randomly (except due to mechanical issues) there must’ve been a purpose behind this maneuver.
@Littlefoot The dip below radar does indeed indicate a change in behavior of the aircraft (or the radar system). Is there anything out there regarding official comment on the momentary loss of the radar trace? Don Thompson will soon send me a full analysis of primary radar in the region; perhaps he will touch upon this aspect. I will query him now and then update here, later.
@Matty
I think you might be right, as her shrugs are no longer convincing. Can’t turn my back during World Cup….I went ahead & got another address anyway.
@Rhette & Group
Interesting
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-mh370-copilots-phone-was-on-and-made-contact-with-network-tower-30-minutes-after-plane-turned-around-9262025.html
@Rand, the altitude dip over the Strait is the only offially acknowledged one. The Malaysian authorities definitely blamed an altitude dip for the loss of the plane on their screen. I highly doubt that their radar system had holes at that location, since a short time later the plane reappeared, having apparently gained enough altitude, and their radar could pick it up again.
A map showing all the radar coverage would be great.
Littlefoot – That would fit with the narrative of a plane under control with a secure cockpit. You wonder why he came back up so soon? Maybe he had somewhere to go and you are out of fuel pretty fast at that height, and he thought he had done enough dodging. All planned?
My impression atm is that CIA-MI6 etc know that it crashed and aren’t currently too fazed where exactly because they have a pretty good idea what happened. It seems the searchers have been left to muddle through. The other game is moving in other directions.
@Matty
Yeah…..when I last posted, I got the Wirrly-gig for a solid 2 mins. And I think you solved the mystery, as her shrugs aren’t very convincing. Not fair to take advantage while enjoying the World Cup. I created another email account anyway.
@Rhette
I saw a CNN/youtube vid not long ago about the co-pilot phone., also a piece by the Independent.
Is this the real Chris Butler?
@Matty, I was asking myself the same question: Why indeed did he come out of this dip so quickly?
It depents on why the pilot dipped the plane. There are several possibilities:
Maybe, it was like you said, and he had done enough dodging and evading, wanted to save fuel and was almost out of Malaysia’s primary radar anyway.
Maybe, he simply made a mistake and came up too early because he underestimated Malaysia’s radar coverage. Or maybe, he wanted to shove the Northwest direction of the plane into everybody’s face, before going off into another direction ‘under cover’.
We can’t discount mechanical failure completely, of course. But it seems very unlikely since the plane came up pretty quickly again and continued flying for several hours.
Did he prepare to land and couldn’t or changed his mind? Very unlikely since he was flying into the wrong direction and should’ve started doing that way earlier, if disaster had struck the plane early on.
And then there is of course that really dark subject of what happened to the passengers, if the plane got highjacked by one of the crew or an outsider. As far as we know, only the copilot’s cellphone tried to connect with Penang tower. Why did nobody else try to make a call, when they were flying so lowly? If the captain was the perp, he could’ve used his authority and prohibit all phone calls. Or he (or another highjacker) could indeed have taken out the passengers and the rest of the crew by depressurizing the plane for a while at a higher altitude, and using an oxygen mask himself as long as the supply lasted. That would eventually lead to the necessity to re-pressurize the cabin again. A short dip to a breathable altitude could accomplish that, and the perp could continue his journey without an oxygen mask.
Those are the explanations for the short dip of the plane I can think of. Maybe someone else has other or better ideas. But again, this behavior of the plane seems to be very important IMO, since it came at a critical juncture and seems to indicate, that the person in the cockpit knew what he was doing.
Lol, Chris Butler!
I guess that was the real one (and I think, I solved the mystery 😉 ). Someone took advantage of his account while he was watching soccer.
As a German, I completely understand 🙂
CNN online headline is a piece on Duncan Steel, Mike Exner et al.’s statement re their predicted location for the remains of the aircraft, posted on duncansteel.com a couple of days ago.
Wackadoodle doplerganger doo rah doo rah dey…
And this someone was female and giving him a very hard time for more than two minutes, when he posted a comment. 😉
Good luck with the new account!
I loved that the CNN story put Steel et al above Inmarsat.
BTW, here’s a comment I just put on Duncan Steel’s site, now awaiting moderation:
“One of the major problems facing any southern route is the question: how did the plane navigate along the path to its final fix at 0:11?
A factor contributing to Inmarsat’s new search area might be that it would be consistent with a flight that tracked to the Cocos Island navigation waypoint that then continued on the same bearing (about 179 degrees).
This is appealing, in that there are very few waypoints in that part of the ocean.
If one were to look for a waypoint consistent with Steel et al’s analysis, the only likely candidate would be RUNUT, which would imply a slightly higher airspeed, around 490-495 ktas. This would imply a final location at 0:11 of around 38°30′ S 85° E, around 150 nm southwest of Steel et al.”
@Group
Firstly…glad to bring a little hilarity aboard & my Thanks to Mr. Wise as well.
Interesting that Shah was from Penang. A fly by in your face while using his 1st officers cell? I agree with littlefoot’s “dark subject of what happened to the passengers” scenario. BTW..This was Fariq’s first flight as a fully qualified Boeing 777 first officer, following the completion of his supervised transition to that type of aircraft. Too much for him to live for to have pulled this off, IMO.
I just watched the BBC feature (I downloaded it from youtube), and discovered something, which really flabbergasted me:
Around min. 6 it was stated, that IGARI was NOT planned in the original flight plan, but added as a more direct route to Beijing about 1 minute into the flight! This seems to be extremely relevant, because the feature stresses around min. 13, that IGARI is in a primary radar blindspot. There’s no primary radar coverage at all. It’s uniquely suited for this disappearance act not only because of the handover to Vietnam, but also because no one can spot the plane on primary radar! That would enforce the notion, that this was a deliberate act even more – but if this was a last minute change, the perpetrator couldn’t plan ahead on this! Unless he had an accomplice somewhere at ground controll! That’s a bit hard to swallow. Was he just lucky and his plan would’ve worked also with another route to Beijing? What was this originally planned route? As far as I know, this thing hasn’t been discussed amongst those, who believe in a deliberate act. Flr the disaster theorists it doesn’t matter, of course.
@Chris, as to your Doppelgängerin at home, in domestic crimes and misdemeanors always look to the next of kin, lol! Don’t be cross with your wife. Her remarks were good and subtle.
As to my ‘dark’ scenario: I don’t want to say outright, that it happened this way. But the fact shouldn’t be ignored, that as far as we know, no other cellphone has tried to connect with Penang tower, at a time, when it was possible and when even the last passenger must’ve realized, that something was terribly wrong. This has to be explained somehow.
WOW. Could be highly significant — certainly sounds odd to my non-commercial-pilot ears to be adding waypoints while on initial climbout. A question to ask would be, how unique is IGARI in being a primary radar blindspot? If everything that far at sea is out of radar coverage (e.g. BITOD) then it might not be a big deal.
Sorry littlefoot, I’m a bit ignorant of radar systems, but it seems peculiar to hand over a plane to ATC w/o primary radar cover. This go on all the time?
Yeah…I think what ever route he took, the perp would have done it anyway, this one just worked out BETTER.
@Littlefoot
Lol…naw, we’ve been together going on 40 years now. Met & married her in Athens Greece in 1975 & she still pulls her pranks. Opa!
@Jeff, yes, I couldn’t quite believe, what I heard, but they even had the audiotrack to prove it.
We should try to find out, what route was originally planned.
Another thing: Further into the program, we’re told, that after much squirming and being confronted with the ongoing pings, the Malaysians came clean with their primary radar data, that showed the turn of mh370 a bit beyond IGARI. But if there was no primary radar coverage, how could they know this? The Malaysians cited the SI nature of their radar data as the reason for their reluctance. So, apparently their primary radar coverage reaches deaper than they had so far officially acknowledged. This is a good explanation for their feet dragging. And it raises the question what else they might seen on their primary radar screens, which hasn’t been publicly acknowledged.
@ littlefoot wrote”
“We can’t discount mechanical failure completely, of course. But it seems very unlikely since the plane came up pretty quickly again and continued flying for several hours.”
———–
The dip altitude dip can be explained , it’s protocol in a loss of communications to get out of way of other planes. could there have been a fire in the front cargo bay due to this load of lithium battery’s the Malaysians gov lied about ?this intrigues me more than a suicide plot or terror plot . a colleague of Jeff’s on cnn pointed out if it was the case the lithium being placed under the electric panel in front cargo bay that would be very bad placement of class 9 hazardous cargo.all hell would be breaking loose on the plane if a fire broke out there right under the electronic panel ,perhaps shaw was a good enough piliot to keep plane flying . anything is possible at this point but blaming captain shaw is stretching it.I will wait for more evidence of wrongdoing on his part before I indite him.
@matty
I am with you on the curtain event as the strongest lead of mh 370 resting place.funny as they said this was mabye a 10% chance it was mh 370 .so far Inmarsat has been 100% wrong so let’s just keep on that train and ignore a chance of searching a impact event…
@chris
Sat phones are unsecured lines .
Ok, I checked the original planned flight route: They ALWAYS touch IGARI, when flying from KL to Beijing. In this case, they left out SID and flew directly to IGARI. So the perpetrator had just to shuffle the timing around a bit, not the location. And he would’ve more fuel left.
But… this last minute change of flight plan could be important info nonetheless.
Only the cabin crew would’ve known about this. Is it likely, that a highjacker coming from the passengers, withoug an accomplice in the cockpit would’ve gotten the timing exactly right? The plane must’ve been earlier at IGARI than originally planned. I can’t see how a highjacker, who didn’t know this, could’ve pulled it off. Did the crew inform the passengers? Maybe they told them, that they might arrive in Beiging a little earlier, but they certainly didn’t tell them, when the plans will arrive at IGARI.
So, this info about the last minute flight route change might strengthe the notion, that either the captain or the copilot are responsible for the abduction, if we are actually dealing with one.
Tdm, I understand your reluctance to blame the captain withojt more evidence, but we’re just talking likelihoods atm. For many experts it’s simply inconceivable, that a battery fire, which in itself is quite possible, would leave the plane maneuvrable for that long and able to fly on for hours. It also doesn’t explain the dip in altitude over the Strait, since it was much too short for evading effectively other planes.
@Tdm
That’s why I was hoping that the call was Snowden’ed by some sat Intel service of the friendly persuasion.
That makes two people who saw a burning plane .I realize eyewitness accounts are 100% unreliable .so far inmarsat is100% wrong .inmarsats pr guys are now claiming ocean shield was searching on the way to Inmarsats redefined search area and got a black box ping by chance.they say this has all been a distraction away from where inmarsats analysis really put mh370 location . say what!
http://www.emirates247.com/news/missing-mh370-dead-alive-or-lost-how-to-live-for-100-days-a-wife-s-story-2014-06-18-1.546548
British yachtswoman Katherine Tee added to speculation about the location of a possible crash site by revealing she saw a glowing plane over the Indian Ocean in March.
The 41-year-old said she told Australian authorities of her sighting of a plane with “what appeared to be a tail of black smoke coming from behind it” while she travelled from Kochi in India to Phuket in Thailand.
“There were two other planes passing higher than it — moving the other way — at that time,” she wrote on sailing site Cruisers Forum, a firm for which she also works.
“I recall thinking that if it was a plane on fire that I was seeing, the other aircraft would report it.”
She said she told no one at the time because she and her husband, who was onboard but asleep, had been having difficulties and had not spoken for about a week.
“And most of all, I wasn’t sure of what I saw,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it myself.”
But after confirming her yacht’s position using GPS data in recent days, she said she knew she was in the “right place at the right time” and told authorities.
MH370’s last known position as tracked by military radar was roughly west of Phuket, although the search area has focused on a zone hundreds of kilometres (miles) further south.
In what could be another clue, researchers at Western Australia’s Curtin University revealed Wednesday they had detected a low-frequency underwater sound which could have come from the plane.
A listening station off Rottnest Island, close to the Western Australia coast, picked up the signal at 0130 GMT on March 8.