The Triple-Disappearing Airplane

Photo by Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters, via Slate.com
Photo by Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters, via Slate.com

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.

552 thoughts on “The Triple-Disappearing Airplane”

  1. The question is of course, why was this corridor deemed safe at all? The Ukrainian official answer was, that they thought it was safe enough to fly over rebel territory if the planes were only flying high enough. And there emerged an interesting tidbit. Apparently it was requested to have the plane flying at 35000 feet, but that request was denied and it was assigned for some reason to the lower altitude of 33000 (32000?) feet, which is just barely above the limit, where it was deemed unsafe for commercial airliners.
    Another interesting question: It was pointed out in German media that other airliners were also flying not too far from MH17 at the time. Lufthansa hadn’t diverted it’s fleet either for example. Maybe someone can check at these flight monitoring sites what other airliner were not too far away from MH17. If there were other planes not too far away at the time of the shootdown the coincidence of the rebels downing of all planes still flying over their territory,a 777 from MAS becomes even more mindboggling.

  2. My second attempt…

    Hi littlefoot:

    “why the plane’s captain choose a route within the corridor, which differed from the previous days.”

    1.”Minutes before the crash caused by a missile strike, the AI pilots had also heard the controller give the Malaysian aircraft MH17 what is called ‘a direct routing'”.

    http://t.co/JhPykXfYcR

    2. “All flights, including MH17, were being escorted by Ukrainian military jets [SU 27] over E Ukraine”

    http://t.co/XFfNClUrfk

  3. Littlefoot:

    I have tried twice to post a reply. Are you on Twitter? Let’s see if you get this.

  4. @Nihonmama, no I’m not on twitter, but if you have trouble communicating, we can look for your messages and links on twitter.
    I was victim of these posting failures some time ago as well. I suddenly couldn’t post anything. I even believed for a time, that Jeff had me banned from his blog for some reason only known to him. It was around the time, when I told the story of my helicopter abducting spitzdog. I thought, maybe Jeff didn’t like it, lol!I know now, that Jeff certainly didn’t lock me out. Since I have 2 email adresses,I simply started to use the other one and I haven’t had problems since then.

  6. Hi Littlefoot:

    Thanks for your reply. Have never seen such glitchiness on a blog. Just tried to reply an third time. Maybe there’s a problem with posts containing URL’s.

    If you can, go to Twitter and see these posts today:

    Air India pilots heard UKR ATC give MH17 a direct routing.

    and

    David Cenciotti: UKR SU 27’s have been following ALL commercial airliners

  7. Are you using the same email address that you registered with? If so the posts should go up automatically. As it is I’m having to approve all your comments by hand, which is why it sometimes takes a while.

  8. @Nihonmama, those two articles you linked, are very interesting. I also read in a German newspaper that two commercial airliners were less than 25 km away from MH17.

  9. Jeff:

    Using same email I always have – it pops in automatically. Nothing posted, now I see that the three did. Sorry for the redundancy.

    Littlefoot:

    Thanks, thought you’d appreciate. Yes, there were others around (and close) that info surfacing.

  10. I can’t think of a good reason for Ukrainian jets to escort civilian aircraft and I really doubt that bit, but Vladamir is an expert at this stuff.

    The Indian dreamliner being 90 seconds behind might be crucial because it would have been on the same radar and should also have been targeted if they were in firing mode. Why not? Why was one an Antonov and not the other.

  11. They must have been aware there were other planes on the screen. How did they establish this was an Antonov?

    It’s with dread that I put forward that Putin might have singled one out(MH17)for the purpose of blaming Ukraine and using it as an excuse to Invade, except the Ukrainians beat him to the punch and he couldn’t regain control of it. Damn social media.

  12. Abbott put the boots in straight away over here and a lot followed suit and the court of public opinion was swift in it’s judgement. Those taped calls were all over the world within a couple of hours so pointing the finger was futile.

    A trained crew could not have made this error and my guess is you just wouldn’t deploy a BUK without a proper crew without expecting disaster. Why MAS? Because there isn’t a whole lot they can do about it. Going back over Abbott’s comments he seemed to make a point of imlying criminality rather than accident and he did it first up. He was happy to jump in, no benefit of any doubt.

  13. @Matty, it could as well have been the other way round, and some faction on the Ukrainian side had the bright idea, that the shootdown of a comercial airliner, which could be traced back to the pro-Russian rebels might help their cause immensely, especially with the Western European and US governments. So far, Putin and the rebels are not profitting from this at all. As I said earlier, that one shouldn’t make the mistake to reflexively always blame everything on Putin, even if it is tempting. The other side has plenty of bad guys, too. We should wait until we know more (if that is even possible).
    But the thought, that MH17 was singled out because of the ongoing storyline around MH370 has entered my mind, too. But as much as I search my brain, I can’t find a compelling reason. Just to create havoc and confuse everybody? Because the shooters were drunk and said ‘Hey, this airline sounds familiar; wouldn’t it be fun to take down another MAS 777’? As it is, the shootdown of another MAS 777 raises more doubts and makes it less of a clear cut story. I can’t see an advantage in singling out MH17 for any faction right now.
    My train of thoughts atm goes more into another whacky direction: If this was more than a tragic coicidence or someone’s sick idea of having some fun, maybe there was a technical reason, which made MAS17 more of a target for the rebels than the other airliners. You asked the right question: The other nearby planes might be crucial. Why weren’t they considered to be a threat? Maybe because they could identify themselves through the BUK system’s secondary radar and MH17 could not for some reason?
    Good, that the black/orange boxes were finally given up by the rebels.

  14. Rand – according Nihomama’s link the AI787 was asked to radio MH17 after it’s transponder went disappeared from the screen. Putin has had a large number of troops on the border for months now and he is dying to move them. If it was meant to be some kind of trigger it has backfired.

  15. @Matty, Putin might be ruthless, but he isn’t dumb. He knows better that hatching a plan to take down a civilian airliner full of Western European passengers. If he really wants to invade the Ukraine, it isn’t the right moment now.
    As to MH17: The timeline of the transponder messages would be interesting. At what time exactly disappeared MH17 from Ukrainian screens? When was the rocket fired? US intelligence should know the time. How long would it take the rocket to reach the plane? This way one could establish if the transponder stopped working before or after the plane was hit by the rocket. If it stopped after the plane was hit by the rocket (as it should) then my theory that the plane’s transponder did’t identify the plane correctly to the guys, who operated the BUK-sytem, is probably wrong. The black boxes should give some answers to those questions as well.

  16. I am with Mary schiavo putting a no fly zone below 32000 thousand feet but allowing flights at 33,000 feet is pure stupidity and makes no sense .would you be comfortable with this arrangement .
    where is mh 370 ?

  19. Littlefoot – I think Putin is a despot looking for a stage and he has been creeping up for years, but he doesn’t have forever. If you are talking Western Europe these days you are really just talking Germany-UK, and Putin hates them all. It’s European incursion, politically/economically into his former USSR that has him rattled. In his cold war brain it’s survival. I still feel that if you deployed these systems without the right people you should expect some patchy results, something they would have been aware of.

  20. “One of the officials said that until the Malaysia Airlines plane was hit, most if not all the aircraft targeted had been flying at low altitude.
    Officials said the US did not know that the separatists were in possession or control of SA-11 missile systems until after the Malaysia Airlines plane was struck.”

    Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/rebels-likely-downed-mh17-by-mistake-say-us-officials-20140723-zvw2d.html#ixzz38G751PHf

    It was probably new to the battlefield and wasn’t there for very long. If the Russians specifically wanted to avoid hitting an airliner it seems to me they could have. It was a commercial route.

  21. Can I put it this way: If you hand that sort of gear over to a bunch of clowns you have to be either prepared for a mishap or intent on one. I don’t think this involves clowns.

  23. @Matty, if any other commercial airliner but a MAS 777 had been downed, I would be perfectly content with the analysis, that pro-Russian rebels had downed the plane by mistake and that Putin is to blame insofar as Russia supplied the weapons (and the operators) in the first place. And maybe that is the correct explanation after all. But because of this mindboggling coincidence I contemplate other possibilities. All I’m saying is, one should look into the chain of events very carefully and not automatically blame Putin for everything.
    I agree with many things you say about Putin. But he is intelligent and calculating. He simply wouldn’t advise the rebels to down a commercial airliner on purpose. And as you said yourself: Russia might’ve supplied the operators with the weapons or at least trained the rebels.
    The Ukraine and possibly the US via their spy satellites have known for a while, that the rebels had this BUK-system. That’s agreed upon here in Europe. The Antonovs they had downed a couple of days before were flying quite high, and there was open talk, that it was only a matter of time until they hit a passenger plane. The Ukraine lost one of their own BUK-systems to the rebels. So they knew that the rebels had at least one.
    Putin doesn’t generally hate Germany btw. He is best friends with our former chancellor Schröder (who rightfully got much flak for this bias). They even give each other birthday bashes. When he was still in power the relationships with Germany used to be quite good. It cooled down quite a bit under Merkel, but we still hear a lot about Putin and his motifs and his character.Germany has a lot of business relationships with Russia, which might get frozen in for a while now.

  24. I think it’s fair to assume that Vlad knew intimately that there was some anti-aircraft action going on in Ukraine and the possibility of a commercial plane going down would have crossed his mind, so it’s very odd that he finds himself there now. I doubt he intended to ride his luck on this point, there would have been something firm in place, but what was it? He knew they were running around with a BUK.

  25. I’d say that Putin doesn’t intend to retire in a few years with these territorial issues hanging. The longer he takes to bring Ukraine back in the harder it will be to do so. He used a figleaf to invade Georgia and he doesn’t have forever to manufacture grounds to do the same with Ukraine.

  26. Maybe we should shelf this discussion of MH 17 for a while, until we know more – if we ever will, that is. My gut tells me the loss of another MAS 777 cannot be a coincidence, but my gut has been wrong before. And Matty already spoke about the (in my eyes remote)possibility, that MH 17 had been singled out by the shooters simply because it was another MAS 777. Even if remote and crazy, this is a possibility.
    Maybe we should concentrate on MH 370 again. You guys had a lively and interesting discussion going on here the last few weeks. It seems to have died down under the weight of this new development. And it’s true – if this was not a coincidence it sheds doubt on all theories featuring a lone perpetrator who perished with the rest of the crew and the passengers.
    But until we learn more about MH 17, we should concentrate again on what we have in the case of MH 370 – which isn’t a lot either 😉

  27. @Matty, of course Putin knew about the anti aircraft actions going on! The whole world knew. They were writing prominently every day in European newspapers about it. But Putin cannot creatve a fig leaf for invading the Ukraine by advising the pro-Russian rebels to shoot down a passenger plane! The rebels tried to blame Ukrainian fighter jets in the first days. But that couldn’t be held up and Russia just engaged in this evasive speak, that the Ukraine was responsible insofar as conducting this warin the first place. IMO Putin was caught cold in this and just scrambled to do some damage control.

  28. I can actually picture Vladamir the statesman, riding in to restore order to the people of Ukraine and claiming to be doing the world a service at the same time. By this stage he knows there is going to be no military intervention from the west when it happens.

  29. I wouldn’t put Putin past this, Matty. But he wouldn’t go about this by letting the rebels, he backed so far, shoot down a commercial airliner on purpose!
    Let’s wait and see how this story plays out…

  30. He’s backing the rebels alright, but that’s not official remember. He’s a naked schemer and a dictator. Totally shameless, and if the the Russian media are running sympathetically with his propaganda we should fear. I think it’s mainly aimed at the domestic audience because he knows there will no serious intervention from abroad when the tanks roll. I suspect the world will know a bit more about Vladamir in the next year or two.

  31. The only MH370 link I can come out with atm might include the Malaysian middlemen who are key to the movement of stolen military technology/hardware from the west, to Islamists everywhere. Putin is fighting his own muslim separatism issues.

  33. Yeah, Matty, that was my own link, I remember it now. Good from you to remind us again.You’re right, there might be hidden connections we’re not seeing atm.
    So, just wildly speculating, could the shootdown of MH 17 be a message to someone? I guess my idea of a somehow manipulated or failing transponder of the plane is too outlandish, but an agent provocateur with some knowledge of the BUK-system could’ve probably easily goaded the rebels into shooting at a plane, which they were led to believe was an Antonov transporter.

  34. Speaking of military technology, some incidents a couple of weeks ago caused a smallish stir in Germany and central Europe:
    Over a couple of days and then again a bit later in June there was a phenomenon of failing transponders from commercial airliners and breakdown of secondary radar. It lasted for up to half an hour per plane and hapened over Germany, Switzerland, Hungary as far as I recall. Flight supervision contacted the crews of the planes and guided them per radio, and it was claimed there was never any danger.But of course inquiries were made, and it turned out that Nato had apparently conducted tests of electronic warfare technology in Hungary. When it became known, the public was assured that the tests had been stopped. So, apparently it is possible to disable airplane transponders through electronic signals from the ground or other planes. We were not told if this is a general interruption of all transponders in the vicinity or if it is possible to target the transponder of a specific plane. These reports spawned my first idea about someone having disabled MH17’s transponder with this sort of technology, which might’ve left the plane unable to identify itself through the BUK-system. But then Ukraine flight control should’ve lost the plane from their screens before it was shot down.

  38. Littlefoot – that’s terrifying. The transponder failures would have been an unintended consequence from a very limited experiment so you can imagine what the concentrated capabilities may be. Over such a wide area was that satellite in origin? The movement of nuclear technology to certain groups is a biggie remembering that there are unaccounted nukes in the world with decrepid delivery systems. Do we have a motive?

    Jim – even a ‘smoking hole’ crash produced a lot of wreckage so MH370 is looking like a disappearing trick by comparison.

    And if we thought Putin was about to pull his head in for a while:

    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/mh17/kiev-says-ukrainian-fighter-jets-shot-down-from-russian-territory/story-fno88it0-1226999556161

  39. I’m doubtful about a connection between 17 and 370, but that doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be a connection after the fact. A new opportunity for a connection arose the minute a near-identical plane went down.

    I’m going out on a limb here, but if someone is responsible for 370’s disappearance, and they want to deflect blame, one way to do that would be to “find” pieces of a 777 somewhere else. The easiest way to obtain equivalent pieces is to obtain a similar plane. The easiest way to do that, of course, is to shoot one down over lawless territory and arrange delivery to the SIO.

    As it stands now, likely nobody expects to recover 100% of either plane. Most likely, the missing parts are missing because they have missile damage. But at this point probably nothing should be taken for granted. We’ve already seen enough false positive satellite images and pings. A few floating pieces in the SIO wouldn’t particularly shock me.

  40. JS – I know it’s a tenuous speculation but go back to the morning of March 8th and stack up a few facts that we now know. Two MAS 777’s are gone, one a total mystery, one shot down in what would be an egregious mistake at best. If we had prior knowledge of what was going to transpire would there be suspicion of some broader connivance right away?

  41. @Matty and JS,if a member of a family starts to behave in a very abnormal way and then goes missing without a trace, and a couple of month later another member of that family gets shot under questionable circumstances, every good detective would ask himself if there might be a connection and start to investigate accordingly, even if a connection isn’t immediately visible or plausible.
    But in the case of MH370 and MH17 the authorities declare very quickly that a connection is very unlikely and it has all been a tragic coincidence.
    I do think though, behind closed doors talk might be a little different.

  43. @Matty, IF it is connected, then, yes, it wasn’t an accident, but please, let’s not start again to argue if Putin wanted a commercial airliner shot down on purpose. We have different opinions here.And as you pointed out as well, if there are connections, it might be a little more complicated than Putin did it or a faction from the Ukraine caused it somehow. Especially since we don’t even know who is responsable for the disappearance of MH370 in the first place.
    And we can’t exclude of course that a drunken rebel commander with his hands on the buttons of a BUK-system thought: ‘Cool – a MAS 777 – let’s down it’. Which means it was shot simply because of the notorious fame of MH370.

  44. What ever the reasons, the last week will go down as one of the bleakest for commercial aviation.

  49. @littlefoot – I agree they shut down any talk of a connection way too soon. It reminded me of the time they were congratulating themselves for finding the path of MH370 with a new technique (algebra?)

    My position is that a connection could have occurred at any of three times, or never.

    The first is that the party responsible for one event is responsible for the other, with advanced planning of both events.

    The second is that 370 was a mishap of sorts, and 17 was taken down to interfere with or distract from the 370 investigation. For example – a non-Russian actor wishes to place blame on Russia for 370’s disappearance, and wishes to stage wreckage up near the China/Russia border.

    The third is that 17 was taken down by a new party, but became an opportunity for those involved in 370’s disappearance. For example, a terrorist group may wish to take credit after the fact for both events.

    In other words there could be numerous motives, and not all point at (or away from) Russia.

    But of course, until we have some clues on 370, nobody can say whether they’re connected or not. Unless, of course, somebody has radar they haven’t shared.

  50. JS – I suppose if there is a connection it’s an ugly one and noone wants to run with that ball with so little known at present, and with heaps of relatives still in limbo. If I had to bet though….I say yes.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.