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.
@Matty, Whyle I still see Putin and his role in this in a different light than you do – and as I said before, I’m certainly not defending his politics – I agree with your last remark.
If there is a connection it is a very ugly one. And with so little known it’s probably prudent from journos and politicians alike to leave it alone for the time being. I read remarks from relatives who got very upset, when someone even mentioned MH 370. They are certainly not in a frame of mind to contemplate something of this magnitude.
@JS, I would exclude any motifs involving getting spare parts in order to fake a crash site for MH 370. That would never fly, as crash investigators would be able to see through this pretty quickly. You can’t just pluck out spare parts from one plane crash, dump it somewhere in order to fake another plane crash, even if it is the same sort of plane. There are a million ways to tell the difference, trust me in this.
But this new tragedy might be a message form someone to – I don’t know, whom. But it might be a demonstration of sorts.
Some mh 370 news and it’s ugly ,this is not ok!
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1559197/chinese-relatives-mh370-passengers-allege-police-detained-them-and-two
“Chinese relatives of MH370 passengers allege police detained them and two others were beaten
Families members say Malaysia Airlines has refused repeated requests for them to see official video footage of passengers boarding flight that disappeared on March 8”
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1559197/chinese-relatives-mh370-passengers-allege-police-detained-them-and-two
Strangest thing
Malaysia Hired a Russian pr firm after mh 370′ ” vanished”
http://www.ibtimes.com/malaysia-airlines-hired-putin-pr-agency-after-mh370-disappearance-1635740
@Tdm, Ketchum isn’t a Russian PR agency.It started out from Pittsburg and operates world wide. It worked for the Kreml from 2006 on; and someone complained that Putin never follows their advice 😉 I think they have to say that, lol! Putin’s image is so bad atm that it really isn’t a ringing endorsement of their work for him.
So that might really be no more than a curious coincidence, since this firm has many customers all over the world. Would be interresting to know what advice they gave in the case of MH 370…
“John Dunlop of Stanford’s Hoover Institution wrote in “The Moscow Bombings” that there is strong evidence to suggest that Putin was in on the plot to bomb two apartment buildings in Moscow in September 1999, in which 300 Russian citizens were killed and several hundred others were wounded. He says the bombings were blamed on Chechen rebels as a pretext to invade Chechnya.”
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/07/25/opinion/motyl-putin-is-evil/index.html?hpt=hp_c4
Putin likes to read Stalin, his human side is a stage act facilitated by accommodating foreign heads of state. Beyond this there is nothing other than farcical action man shots and propaganda. Journalists who have tried to write about his wife have ended up leaving the country, and as someone who is familiar with an Infantry environment the ones who end up with esteemed standing have a little bit of something extra, something that officers can spot. He thrived in the KGB during the cold war. I think he’s an amoral narcissistic sociopath who engages with people for preconceived benefit alone.
@littlefoot – generally, yes, you’re right, but not every part can be differentiated, but nearly all can be identified as aviation materials.
We’re not talking about large quantities here. Remember it only took a hint of a ping to send the search to the wrong place last time. A single seat cushion would keep search teams very busy.
There have already been claims of missing material from the 17 wreckage.
@Matty
RE:Vlad
Touche’
So it’s all happened before?
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/07/23/opinion/kramer-russia-ukraine-shoot-down/index.html?iid=article_sidebar
And what might Vlad have had his hands into at the time of these deliberate and apparently sponsored crimes? Modus operandi?
@Matty & Crew
I don’t think that this was a direct affect to shoot down an airliner but, rather a completely avoidable accident brought on by a drunken Vlad inspired A-hole.
With that said; MAS is the most incredibly unfortunate and sad airline in history.
The “accidental” shoot-down of mh 17 is unsolved !at the movement !you have the Dutch ready to go to scene but the Ukraine gov has blocked there access .it appears neither side rebel or Ukraine wants a accident investigation team on site .
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/world/europe/efforts-to-secure-malaysia-airlines-crash-site-stall-in-eastern-ukraine.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSum&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1
Russians are shelling from their side of the border so I wouldn’t be too keen myself, anything could happen over there.
Meanwhile if you had been trying to follow MH370 you could be forgiven for thinking the investigators had all gone home but they won’t have. Exactly where it’s at we can only guess.
Do the BUK systems have some sort receiver akin to those of ATC? I am having trouble seeing how, or why, a SAM system would bother with air traffic control information. I thought IFF and my guess would be that the two systems aren’t compatible.
Anyway, if we want to go all conspiratorial how about… MH17 was MH370? Yes. MH370 was used for whatever nefarious purpose by whomever. Then Putin is paid off to blow it out of the sky over a war zone both destroying and hiding the evidence. Too much?… More like rednecks with heavy weaponry supported by a maniac trying to achieve a 21st century czarist twisted vision on the reformation of the former Soviet republic.
Gene – my argument has been that if you give this kind of gear to rednecks this is what you should expect. If you were worried about this sort of outcome you could plan it out of the equation. It’s an incredible “error”.
The benefit of mh 17 redirection and apparent shoot down at the moment is the new ukraine gov .there is serious talk at the highest levels the usa will now engage in supplying ” hi tech ” weapons to combat the resistance. Happenstance or a lucky break for new us backed ukraine goverment …
Been a while….but we have news.
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/05/world/asia/australia-malaysia-airlines-mh370/index.html?hpt=hp_c3
Thanks, Matty! Looks like they’re pressing forward as planned.
Well I don’t see anything in that cockpit video to suggest that interfering with the SDU would have been a huge challenge.
@Matty, what are you talking about?
Littlefoot – I mean the video on the twitter feed. The crew have complete oversight of the AIMS -aircraft info mngt system – from two different terminals one in the cockpit, and one below it – where all of the actual computers are sitting in a rack. ACARS etc, it’s all sitting there. There would be more complex hacking going on in bedrooms.
By appearance it might even allow for substitution of modules altogether. How could anyone be confident that the SDU that sprung into life from 18.25 ish was the real one?
@Matty, I can’t see the twitter feed on my tab for some reason, but I’ve seen videos like that, too. And I completely agree with you. It should be possible to manipulate the plane from the avionics bay below the cockpit alone. Including a manipulation of the pings…
Found it for you Littlefoot –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S-Cggs1jOo&app=desktop
Five months later is there a temptation to look at MH370 through a slightly different lens? A lot has happened.
Holy crap. I didn’t realize that there’s a PMAT just sitting down there!
Matty, as to your next question, yes, I’m seeing MH370 through a very different lens.
@Matty, that’s the same video, I’ve seen as well, but thanks anyway.And it may be an eye opener for all who haven’t seen it yet.
@Jeff, is there a possibility for getting a new thread or post from you in order to discuss ‘views through different lenses’ ? Victor Ianello has also said, he might like to discuss speculative scenarios on your blog, since solely crunching the numbers, while important for cross checking theories, isn’t going to answer, what exactly happened to the plane – and why.
The spontaneity of the ISIS expansion had them wrong-footed for a while. From here at least it looked like Obama’s domestic narrative of “out of Iraq” got in the way but he couldn’t ignore for any longer the group that has made Al Qaeda irrelevant.
Westernized ISIS recruits all seem to have the ‘impulse’ gene. They don’t need to be radicalized, just sufficiently disconnected and away they go to the new Islamic state leaving shocked families in their wake. When you get there burn the passport. If you get there. Subtract our little satellite wobble and the tenuous math that rides on it and the search zone would have been in the area of the Curtin oomph. That’s one angle anyway.
Here’s an interesting article about Ruben Santamarta, the guy who wrote the report on satcom security for IOActive, where he states that spoofing data is possible. He doesn’t talk specifically about ping rings in this report, of course 😉
This article is about an upcoming talk of the guy.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/04/us-cybersecurity-hackers-airplanes-idUSKBNOG40WQ20140804
@Matty, a poster called Jean mentioned ‘the video’ on Jeff’s blog and asked about opinions. So it was good, that you posted the link again.
The general opinion of those who did the BTO/BFO calculations seems to be, that spoofing the pings is too complicated. I would like to know the opinion of an accomplished hacker…
The link doesn’t seem to work…
I try again:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/04/us-cybersecurity-hackers-airplanes-idUSKBNOG4OWQ20140804
If it still doesn’t work, just google’Ruben Santamarta Reuters hackers airplanes’, and it should pop up.
Have no idea, why the link doesn’t work…
But googling works and has the article on top of the lkst.
Very, very interesting. Yet another way to potentially take over an airplane — this time without even having to be aboard.
Harris spokesman Jim Burke said the company had reviewed Santamarta’s paper. “We concluded that the risk of compromise is very small,” he said.
Iridium spokesman Diane Hockenberry said, “We have determined that the risk to Iridium subscribers is minimal, but we are taking precautionary measures to safeguard our users.”
The above is damage control. And remember Santamarta is a consultant in a private firm, he isn’t the Iranian secret service. Or China. If he can find a gap, a funded endeavour could have already gone through it.
What I would like to ask him is how hard would it be from the cockpit, or better still by climbing down below it. I had always envisaged device substitution with the BTO/BFO. My rudimentary grasp of computers has said to me all along that dragging out the ping response times would be the easy bit? The BFO side of it is inherently flaky.
Civil and military are two totally different realms a lot of the time as well. No telling what is out there. And the investigators have either given up or they have tightened up. Has anything ever gone so quiet?
Yes, it’s damage control, Matty! And the quoted companies don’t deny exactly that those security gaps exist, even if they play down the risk.
Another thing I find noteworthy: the fact that Santamarta is talking now specifically about planes. In the original report they figured only marginally.
It’s worth emphasizing that the plane could not have been taken over remotely, since the SDU was turned off and then turned back on — so someone had to have been aboard. Still, I agree that Santamarta could provide some insight into the degree to which it’s possible to patch into the system and take it over.
For the first time – to me anyway – the route the investigators have painted looks artificial. It actually looks like a fix.
@Jeff, yes, that’s an important remark. We can exlude a cyber attac from the ground because of the turned off SDU. An attac had to come from the inside. While cyber attacs from the ground have always been dismissed as highly unlikely if not impossible (which might not be true according to Santamarta), this simple argument against a ground cyber attac hasn’t been stated before as far as I know.
Another thing: even if a plane could get taken over by a cyber attacker from the inside or on the ground, could this last very long? When this scenario was initially discussed I read somewhere that the pilots could always override this. Is that true? If so, a blatant takeover would be in jeopardy as soon as the pilots notice that something is wrong. So, the pilots would still have to get silenced or they need to be in on it. Unless the override can get hacked as well… but I’m really out of my debth here…
What Santamarta did, was an experiment in a controlled environment. It’s not proven, that it would work ‘in the wild’. Also mh 370 didn’t provide wifi connectivity for the passengers, which is necessary for this scenario.
But I think, I discovered another valid reason to turn off the SDU and pull the plug on all other communication channels of a plane. Wouldn’t a captain, who suspected his plane to be unter cyber attack do just that? And then turn the plane around and look for the nearest airport? This might be the action of a future pilot though. Is this even a valid scenario tought to rookie pilots atm?
Littlefoot – the pilot training is extended across the board and in simulators they can do anything really. A cyber attack is essentially a malfunction that requires a course of action. In most cases a pilot won’t know the exact problem, just that he must follow a sequence.
But if he turns the SDU back on while managing a cyber attack we have to figure out why he turned south at the same time. It’s that coincidence that has me suspicious of the SDU.
@Matty, I don’t believe a cyber attack from the ground drove our pilot to turn the SDU off and turn back. As Jeff remarked correctly, someone turned it back on. And the plane had no wifi connectivity.
But if cyber attacks from the ground should really develop into a realistic threat in the future, wouldn’t it be the correct reaction to turn off the SDU?
Roger – I skim read the post…….
I had here or elsewhere pointed out the near-perfect correlation between the later BTO numbers and the satellite’s own movement, suggesting that the BTOs weren’t really distance values but some artifact of the software.
I had also noted that the trip from Jeddah to Johannesburg, regularly served by B777s, happens to fit the ping rings AND the Doppler values, since it is a near-mirror image to the route to the proposed search area. That route is coincidentally served by the airline that owns the ICAO and SDU code 34200217 (though on an A320, not a B77), which is 1 digit off from 9M-MRO’s ID code of 35200217.
Disturbing coincidences aside, I don’t really have a theory, but I’ll pose a question: Is there any reason that the SDU that rebooted had to be a plane in the first place?
In a sophisticated theft, it would be far easier to have a hacked, standby unit on the ground. The onboard operatives merely needed to disable the one in the air before the one on the ground was booted. That would be a bit simpler of a scenario than an airborne hack. It would also allow for scenarios where the plane was destroyed, and someone wanted to make sure we all looked in the wrong place.
Interesting point JS – and the last partial ping could have been the battery fade on a laptop – but they couldn’t have it up there for much longer obviously. It would be much easier, just means there are a few more players. Maybe takes it into the realm of state terror?
BTO’s – All up it’s a pretty dodgy way to go about measuring light speed isn’t it?
I always the felt it was strange the way they put the Iranian thing to bed so quickly. They are the only UN member nation with the stated aim of destroying another UN member – Israel, which is why they have a nuclear programme dug into the mountains, and they are out there all the time looking for technology. But any missile launch will be detected immediately and possibly intercepted, so is a commercial airliner the best way to get a nuke into Israeli airspace? If it took on the visual and electronic ID of another plane it can sail right in? It would be the end of Tel Aviv, and Israel. In the early days the Israeli air buffers were doubled in response to MH370 so it might be indicative months later to know the Mossad posture of late but I can’t find anything. Ahmedinejad thought it was his personal responsibility to start the great war with Israel because the Islamic messiah cannot return until Iran does that, and Rouhani cut from the same cloth In Shiite scripture I’m afraid. There’s my latest state terror angle anyway.
Hello ,
Why is mh 17 as much of a mystery as mh 370.?who analyzed the black box of mh 17 ! Point me to that report .
Sound kind of familiar?
http://www.watoday.com.au/travel/travel-incidents/malaysia-airlines-jet-turns-back-20140824-107s4c.html
But noone turned the SDU off!