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.
Saved me doing it!
Exploring the terror tangent a bit further, even as a layman, if I was going to do away with a 777 I would be aiming at complete electronic blackout, and cutting the power to the satcom link should be no different to cutting power to anything else??? Leaving it on is either very amateurish or deliberate – as a counter measure. Even a school kid knows you must sever from the satellite to be truly invisible. Certainly something a pilot would know. What if the ping cluster was the link being overtaken by a plug in device. You would need to cover your tracks because suspicion would fall pretty quick.
There is a fair bit riding on that link.
@Littlefoot The three ping cluster is metaphorically a distress single or an indicator of distress. The system rebooted – this is the ‘distress signal’. Why would the system reboot? The system rebooted and then aircraft initiated its ghost flight south. Nothing with regards to the ‘dsitress signal’ has been discounted at DSteel.com; rather, it has been confirmed, taking it down from the generalization of ‘indications of distress’ to the specifics of the aircraft rebooting the satcom system. This in turn meshes well within the overall sequence of events and the timeline. Namely:
The aircraft was intentionally diverted near IGARI.
The diversion to an alternative destination was interrupted at or near Penang.
There was an event that proved disequilibrium and precipitated the aircraft descending to a different flight level at c. 18:10.
The aircraft returned to equilibrium as indicated by its return to a ‘visible’ higher flight level.
The aircraft ‘disappeared’ from Butterworth radar screens at 18:22.
The aircraft transitioned from human piloted flight to non-human piloted flight c. 18:25 as indicated by the three ping cluster.
The difference between Airbus and Boeing fly-by-wire systems: the Airbus has a descent limiter wherein the rate of descent is limited by the fly by wire system. It is impossible for a human pilot to put the aircraft into a steep dive. The Boeing system enables full manual control of the aircraft without any such limiter to enable drastic evasive maneuvers. A Boeing 777 has previously experienced a near midair collision where it was indicated that evasive maneuvers beyond the beyond the limits inherent to the Airbus system were the only means of avoiding the collision. In other words, instance Boeing seems to have won this particular philosophical debate.
Incidentally, fly by wire systems are not synonymous with auto pilot systems. We can view fly by wire systems as being able to control pitch and yaw at a continuous level, thereby maintaining relatively stable flight. This is how the FBW systems visibly impacts the behavior of the control surfaces of the aircraft. FBW systems likewise interface with human pilots who are not in direct control but rather digital control of the control surfaces. The Airbus FBW system limits the level of digital control of the control surfaces by way of its autonomous logic board; the Boeing system has no such autonomous logic board.
As for the radio silence, while I would agree that it could be indicative of a larger terror plot that has everyone scared stiff and working furiously behind the scenes, I think it more likely that the source of the general pall of silence is elsewhere and more proximate. Malaysian is a sovereign nation and that enjoys full authority under international conventions for the investigation of the flight. They have displayed obfuscation, under-reporting and have generally not been forthcoming or perhaps even not pursuing their domestic criminal investigation. It is they who are driving the silence, as they are most likely somewhat or even fully aware of ‘how’ the aircraft transitioned from a flight navigated by way of human input to one navigated without. You can choose a distant perpetrator for the diversion or a proximate perpetrator; you can likewise choose between distant and proximate for the causation of the transition. We need only ask: what is the probability of each? Thus far, the multiplication across the elements of my probability tree yields a proximate event with one of the pilots being responsible for the diversion and the Malaysians perhaps but not necessarily responsible for compromising the flight deck and disabling the pilot(s) prior to 18:25. Likewise, the ‘silence’ raises the probability that the Malaysians are least somewhat aware of how the aircraft transitioned post-diversion to a flight trajectory without human input, as they are responsible for the pall of silence.
The whistle blower that will break the silence and reveal what he witnessed is to be found in the organizational hierarchy of the Tentera Udara Diraja Malaysia – the Royal Malaysian Air Force, which is responsible for the defense of Malaysian air space.
@Matty Given the general approach of redundancy and isolation inherent to commercial aircraft onboard systems, my guess would be that the antennae and transmitter on the satcom system remains powered, regardless of whether the flight deck-accessible buses for ACARS have been ripped out or the Classic Aero system otherwise disabled. There would be no conceivable reason to manually cut power to the transmitter, and thus did the system remain powered and connectivity continuous regardless of the lack of data (or voice) input.
Rand – why would the system reboot.
Precisely. I felt they glossed over this little detail at the time as if it was no big deal – I ended up with the impression that they reboot ordinarily. Technically it could have been disconnected prior to as it’s only the absence of a ping that would indicate it wasn’t operating? So after the reboot what was it exactly that was pinging away? Some alternate device? In any case it looks as if the people in the cockpit knew it was operating?
Rand – I’ve been under the impression that anything and everything can be shut down for safety reasons? Fire etc.
I wonder if the investigators interpret the ping cluster as evidence of someone interfering with the satcom link?? As it left the straits? Interesting timing. I now fear more than ever that something is amiss with the link.
Matty If power to the transmitter was interrupted and then restored, it would make sense for it to reboot. We can then ask, what range of causes are there for the interruption of power going to the transmitter? This loss of power could be specific or it could be more generalized (multiple systems). Perhaps a loss of power could be associated with the loss of flight equilibrium and the descent to a lower flight level, as indicated by the radar trace?
I, too, wondered whether power could be manually cut to all systems in the interest of safety (fire supression). Perhaps the transmitter bus is not on or below the flight deck. Regardless, I believe it safe to assume that whomever diverted the aircraft simply thought that disabling the Classic Aero system would be enough to sever all satcoms (it basically did). Likewise, I think it would be reasonable to assume that whomever was piloting the aircraft was not aware of the continuity of handshake signals being transmitted/received nor how they could later be used (in the Inmarsat analysis). Perhaps the pilot intended to cloak the aircraft, while he never had any intention of making it fly off to its demise in the southern Indian Ocean. He succeeded to a large degree – and then his as of yet unknown plot for diversion was foiled.
I want to see our working hypothesis impeached; thus far, I only see it supported. Wait until the author (Don Thompson) releases his report on Malaysian primary radar: there are but perhaps 100 people that need be interviewed to garner a glimpse of the truth. I believe it’s merely a matter of time…
Jeff: Don Thompson may reach out to you with his analysis of Malaysian radar systems. It would make for a great guest post and perhaps worthy of discussion in a CNN guest appearance. I can do nothing in this regard save for reach out to you, but I will be forwarding the report to the Malaysians.
If the link was disabled by someone I’d speculate it was at about the same time as the the acars, or immediately following. So why did it boot up as it left the straits? Was it a corrupted link from that point? Hard not being able to picture this stuff.
My error – make that sometime after 17.07
@Rand and Matty, you express, what I hesitated to put down: could the reboot have happened because someone interfered with the sytem around that time? One cannot ignore, that the triple ping happened shortly after the plane was out of primary radar reach. From then on only the pings gave hints of the plane’s whereabouts. Or did they?
It still sounds pretty wild to me. Even if you can spoof pings (as Inmarsat mentioned),it’s not that easy to spoof something like this convincingly. It has to fit with other data. Could the respone time simply be delayed? Then the ping rings would be off. I’d really like to hear an expert about the possibility to tamper with the satcom unit through the satcom terminal in the cockpit. I think, it’s very important to be sure about the ping rings not being skewed in any way.
If someone tampered with it, he would have to know, that there would be pings. In the BBC documentary an Inmarsat engineer said, they started to use the pings as a means to locate a plane, when they investigated Air France 447. They decided then to save the response times of all pings, since it could be useful if they would have to locate a missing plane again in the future. The use of the BFO charts was new in the mh 370 investigation but the use of the ping response time was apparently not new.
Littlefoot I think you answered your question re why anyone would tamper once again with the satcom system c. 18:25. It had already been deactivated much earlier in the course of the flight, so what would be the point of tampering with it? Perhaps someone was attempting to reactivate the disabled system? Perhaps the aircraft was attempting to reboot the satcom link after a general power failure or surge? Regardless, I doubt very much that the satcom system, previously been disabled was then later tampered with in the interest of avoiding the production of the ping data. Whomever cloaked the aircraft by disabling the transponder, ACARS/Classic Aero and radio communications wanted it to ‘disappear’ in real time. They very likely would not have been aware of the Inmarsat algorithm. Perhaps they would not even have really cared.
Littlefoot – the fact that there was precedence for ping bounce tracking set some years ago gives opportunity to work around it. That was the window to bring real tracking, and they missed it. I think it would be a formality to program a link with a progressive delay built into the response, and pilots would be aware that they will be routinely pinged by the satellite – just keep flying. We don’t know at the moment what the doppler numbers would look like for a westerly track that runs under the satellite to my knowledge, but we can say that whole BFO approach is tenuous to begin with.
Any case, extremely bothersome that the one cockpit apparatus the search is based on has very likely been handled, and I reckon they were aware it was working. Pings went from less than ten minutes apart to 80, then 3 in a couple of minutes. Human hands?
When it came to the BFO comparison the southern track was just a better fit, and two of the pings didn’t tally very well at all. Two out of seven. With modeled BFO values that will have error built in. In a heads-tails split it gave enough of a clue while revealing it’s limitations at the same time.
@Rand, the transponder was switched off, the satcom was still working, hence the pings. MAS also tried to call the cockpit twice (thelast time around 18:40, 15 minutes after the three pings). It is agreed, that the satphone was still working, but nobody answered. So, it’s absolutely possible that someone tampered with the satcom unit.
I’m not saying at all, that it really happened, but it was probably possible. And that is very disturbing, since a correctly functioning satcom unit is absolutely necessary for correct ping rings.
At duncansteel.com they speculated btw, that the three pings might’ve been triggered by someome switching the system on and off.
Problem is, that it’s still not fully understood, what makes thd plane initiate the pings. Because they are different from the routine handshakes initiated by the ground station via the satellite.
Littlefoot I don’t see where it was claimed that the flight deck sat phone rang and went unanswered. From my understanding, the handshake pings are indeed initiated by the satellite, yet there is a difference between the data, text and voice systems being booted up and connected to the satcoms transceiver. This is how I understand it, anyway. As for the aircraft initiating the handshake pings, this would either be by a human or by the system. Given that there was not (as far as we know) any human-initated voice calls or text messages to the operations center, then only the aircraft could have initiated the connectivity. This initiation of activity would have been little different from the handshakes from the satellite, if it was in fact the case that the aircraft initiated the pings after self-rebooting the transceiver.
Jeff: could you please email me directly? I need to put you in touch with Don Thompson.
I suppose you could also tweet him your address in code, just as I suppose that I could locate on your blog! Regardless, I have informed Don that I would track down your email address, so it would be great if you could email me and I will in turn then share your address with Don.
@Rand, look up the newly published ‘raw data’ from Inmarsat. There were two attempted calls to the flight deck over satcom. One was around 18:40, if I remember correctly. And the general consensus is that the satcom unit was working but nobody picked up.
And the plane definitely initiated pings, too. They were the non scheduled ones.
Actually the triple ping event was initiated by the plane.
It is still not completely understood when and why the plane initiated pings. That’s, why it is so important to understand the resulting BFO charts better.
The call to the flight deck around 18:40 was important, since the resulting BFO data lead to the conclusion, that the plane was alread on the move southward, according to Duncan Steel, Victor Ianello et al. Thus, the so called ‘Andaman Excursion’ is out atm.
Again, I’m not saying, someone in the cockpit must’ve tampered with the satcom unit. I’m interested to know if in theory it’s possible. I would be glad if someone knowledgeable says ‘No’, because then we can trust the ping ring calculations. Because afternoon, what I’ve read, I’m not so sure any longer. Arthur T btw, started to doubt them some time ago, exactly for the reason, that the satclm unit could’ve been skewed.
Littlefoot: Yes, I acknowledge the attempted calls to the flight deck. From what I can garner, however, the sat phone interface on the flight deck is integrated with the satellite communication component of the ACARS system. When the busses/fuses were supposedly pulled, the Classic Aero system was rendered inoperative and thus, too, was the flight deck sat phone and text link. The transceiver and antennae remained powered, however. No?
As for the handshakes initiated by the aircraft, it seems that they were caused by the aircraft rebooting the satcom link/transceiver or otherwise autonomously generated. Regardless, if there wasn’t a catastrophic failure at IGARI, then all sat phones located anywhere on the aircraft were rendered inoperative intentionally, either by way of pulling the ACARS buses or by some other means. Also, it is assumed that whomever pulled the buses was in control of the aircraft over the course of the initial period of the flight. The same person(s) who disabled the system would be unlikely to initiate a sat phone call or otherwise attempt to reestablish voice coms, if even to be able to receive a call.
As for the Inmarsat data set, my initial take back at the beginning was that confirmation bias was to be reckoned with and could lead to the search being misdirected. My initial take was that the aircraft had flown elsewhere, detected by one or more primary radar systems and intercepted. Back then, I had assumed that the Inmarsat analysis was misleading as it was built upon bad data provided by either antiquated measuring devices or interpreted by human noggins desperate to find the aircraft. I literally found it difficult to believe that so much faith had been put into this matrix of devices, data and analysis, all of it biased by a frantic desire to locate the aircraft. I am generally with Matty here: I question the stability of the satellites components themselves more than I do the data. And as for the analysis, well, it would be worthless if it were derived from data provided by buggy gear.
@Rand, I think the general agreement at the moment is, that the sat phones were operative. Whoever was in the cockpit just didn’t pick up the phone, when MAS called the flight deck, but could’ve if he wanted to. The transponder and the ACARS messaging system were not operative at all times after IGARI.
I have to do more research on this. I have to separate all the differnt communication channels and what could’ve still been working and what was turned off or broken.
I simple want to known if the satcom unit sitting on the plane could’ve been manipulated from within the cockpit.
Next week I’m with my husband at the annual String Theory Conference in Princeton. A lot of whackadoodle but top notch physicists from all over the world will be there. They’re theoretical physicists, but a lot of them are curious and technically well versed and they would know whom to ask. I also know still a lot of other clever people in Princeton from the time we lived there. Since they’ve organized a few parties for us, I will try to get out of them as much as possible.
@Matty, if you look at the map from Curtin U., which shows the most likely area, where the boom happened (the thick or wide part of the area is, where something like a plane might’ve crashed most likely, if that is, what happened), what do you think? What land or island is in that area or nearest to that area. I’m asking, because I want to evaluate if the plane could’ve reasonably crashed there, if there should really be something wrong with the ping rings.
I’m just doing thought experiments, that’s all.
Littlefoot – going back into that article you found it specifically mentions that once remote control of satcom terminals is gained it enables a whole lot of stuff including …wait for it…falsification of location data! These links can also be removed and swapped plane to plane. If they did a number in the cockpit it might have been as simple as pulling out a laptop with prepared program on it and plugging it in somewhere that allows it to work in. The pings run through that, all progressively delayed. Would explain the 80 minute gap.
@Matty But aren’t the ping rings not location data per se? Is it not that measurements associated with the handshake pings established some rudimentary location data?
I reckon they all must know that there might be issues with the rings but they can’t even contemplate a search without assuming that the satcom is fine. That crash zone is just south of the Maldives from what I can gather. The alleged sighting there was on the southern most Island.
Wow. I’ve always wondered if the “triple ping” hadn’t corresponded to the perps plugging in some kind of electronic nav/spoofing/radar evading equipment that would explain why the plane didn’t show up on radar. If they were incredibly smart bastards they would have realized that the world would spend the next few months obsessing over the Inmarsat data, and if they were able to fake their location (which is to say, changed where the plane thought it was) that would have totally effed up the Doppler pre-correction without affecting the ping rings. So who knows, maybe it could have gone north after all!
Such tomfoolery might also explain why everyone (apparently, it would seem, including Inmarsat) has had such a hard time coming up with a solid understanding of the BFO.
@Jeff, thanks for not ridiculing Matty and me. It sounds so wild, but I really do think, it’s at least worth investigating if it’s even possible.
IF there’s something to it, though, I don’t think the plane went North (sorry, Jeff).
I would put my search money on the area of the sonic boom, which – yes, Matty, I wanted you to say it -does indeed include the Maldives. Where a lowly flying commercial airliner was witnessed at the right time by several people. Normally pretty strong reasons to search this area – if there weren’t the darn ping arcs.
And it would of course pose the immediate question, why the plane ended up there, after someone took all the trouble stealing and hiding the plane.The Maldives were Chris Goodfellow’s choice location for a ghost plane, which was struck by disaster.
I have a few ideas, though. But it’s no good talking about them, since the whole thing might be a wild goose chase anyway.
But the sonic boom at the right time, together with Matty’s argument, that there should have been another boom picked up at the right location if the plane really went down into the Southern Indian Ocean (Matty argued that there isn’t all that much obfuscating background noise in that part of the ocean), has gotten too strong to ignore for me.
First thing is to find out if it can be done.
@Rand, the handshakes only allow the calculation, how far the plane is away from the satellite (if they are genuine I feel compelled to add now). That’s why the last ping ring could’ve had the plane in Pakistan, Tibet or in the Southern Indian Ocean. Other data, like the most likely speed of the plane, fuel consumption, the weather, the BFO charts are used for caluculating the most likely route. But the pings (with the infamous BFOs it’s a different story) never gave any info about the location of the plane.
You should read all of Jeff’s earlier articles about all this. He explained it quite well. 😉
@Matty, that sentence of falsifying location data really got me, too, in that article.
I always wondered about that 80 minutes of silence (no handshakes).
If this can be pulled off, it might even be possible, that during this gap the plane landed somewhere, before it was sent as a bhost plane into the direction, where later the sonic boom because of the crash came from.
But I’m really getting ahead of myself..all this might sound very silly after a bit of investigation. But I really want to know more now.
Littlefoot – exactly how you falsify the location data and what kind is irrelevant I think atm. The point is the malware is out there and so is the intent.
Jeff – you wouldn’t need to be “incredibly smart bastards” to know that the ping timings data is kept since AF447. I admit I didn’t know that but I have never done the research legwork for a hijack. A track straight under the satellite would be pretty conspicuous numbers wise.
Littlefoot – messing around with simulators and plugged in laptops might be the kind of thing the FBI might do and they have gone to ground. I hope they didn’t crash it lol.
@Matty, I don’t think it’s irrelevant. The article I linked, talks about other kinds of location falsification IMO. I doesn’t talk about planes with switched off transponders and pings plus BFO charts. Especially the BFO charts are a kink here. While a potential perp might’ve anticipated the ongoing pings, I can’t say the same about the BFO data. He couldn’t very well know Inmarsat’s correction algorithm, because their computers assume the satellite to be stationary. In order to be taken at face value, a set of spoofed data has to fit reasonably well together.
@ Littlefoot said,
“@Matty and Tdm, cyber attacks have been discussed and rejected from day 1. Most experts don’t think it’s possible. It has been discussed a long time before mh370. And the Boeings all have manual overrides. You can’t cyberjack those planes against the crew.”
———-
Littlefoot ,did you read the air worthiness directive link I posted specific too the Boeing 777-200 ER and security exploitation it is very clear on what are vulnerability and the ramifications .open networks come to mind…
“This potential exploitation of security vulnerabilities may result in intentional or unintentional destruction, disruption, degradation, or exploitation of data and systems critical to the safety and maintenance of the airplane.”
I would like it put to Chris McLaughlin – do you guarantee that the SCL has not been compromised by whoever was in the cockpit? He can’t safely say yes and wouldn’t. The press would go nuts, but that’s where we are in reality. If the west track got traction my guess is they would open up their own laptop hit some buttons and say – computer says no.
What he should say is that doppler won’t take you 360 degrees of the compass with any reliability. In the case of MH370 it gave a slightly opaque indication it went south with glaring issues present. If two of the seven data points don’t line up you either don’t understand what you are measuring, there are unseen factors at work, or your model is crap, or combinations of the above. My point – applying normal math/stats rigour means it gets thrown out but in this case it sufficed. They will never want to take the media down that road but if at the end of the day they are well wrong the blowback will be savage becasue they didn’t share. They have behaved like businessmen.
Inmarsat has not shown the validation data ,have they ?I recall reading imh370 pings matched well with the only flight 643 cocoas to perth wonder how good a match .could it be so similar there not releasing it .?
I don’t think they would have anticipated that there was going to be a doppler study and I don’t know how you would falsify something that is inherently flaky either. The fact it’s never been done sort of tells us something.
2 out of 7, what if it was 3 out of 7? Something small could have tipped it into that region, then the wince would become a groan. Serious validity issues here that have been disregarded by Inmarsat’s barrackers.
The Maldives folk were told that they didn’t see a 777, they saw a twin engined prop. Who knows what they saw but that bit is odd. I wonder what thy say now?
Curious thing about the Maldives is that there are very big chunks of ocean between these islands. They could easily break into countries if they weren’t careful. Not just remote but spread out big time. It would be an attractive area to dispose of a plane if you had what you wanted from it and needed a lift. Or even run out of fuel.
Victor Iannello is working on the numbers for a scenario in which the plane landed at Banda Aceh, unloaded pax, and took off again — which has going for it a) the fact that the plane was pretty close to this big airstrip, which is closed at night and off in a fairly remote area b) it would explain how a plane could achieve such a low average speed as the authorities seem to think it did
Jeff – in that case it could have a full tanks too. A thing about Aceh, and particularly before the tsunami, it was an extremist hotbed with very vocal elements wanting to break away from Indonesia into an Islamic state. The waves shut them right up. These guys are glued to their computers watching the ISIS advance cheering. A thing about Indonesia, the army still runs it, and the beheadings in christian villages went unchecked. All of the illegal boats that lobbed in Australia the last few years(economic refugees) were loaded in broad daylight in Javanese towns, often with army/police oversight or escort.
Also, Indonesia’s anti terror police unit – Taskforce 88 – is funded by Australia. It’s the only reason they have one. And about that radar that didn’t seem to be working?
Jeff – Victor is right I reckon to be thinking the flight is not well understood. Whether it was passengers of fuel related, if a stop off fits the numbers, or close enough it will be a showstopper. So much bending of circumstance to fit the data when the SCL might not be what we think. What is hard to plan for is bad guys getting access to the cockpit, and having a flight engineer right there?? Still chills me to contemplate what might have happened on that plane. And the speed of the plane is very odd.
http://www.ipe.net.au/h_increase_threat_160314.html
Worried yet?
What the tourism brochure don’t say about the Maldives –
Islam overly impacts Maldivean law. The traditional Islamic law code of sharia, known in Dhivehi as sariatu, forms the Maldives’ basic code of law, as interpreted to conform to local Maldivian conditions by the president, the attorney general, the Ministry of Home Affairs, and the Majlis.
Islam is the state religion of Maldives, and adherence to it is legally required of citizens by a revision of the constitution in 2008: Article 9, Section D states that a non-Muslim may not become a citizen of the Maldives
In his three decades of autocratic rule, President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom worked to change Maldives from a tolerant Islamic country to a hard-line Islamic state. He did this by enacting several measures like the 1994 Protection of Religious Unity Act. This Act restricted the freedom of any religion, except Islam. He also established the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs in 1996, which was converted into a full-fledged Ministry of Islamic Affairs in 2008. In quick succession, the Ministry proceeded to impose more religious restrictions prohibiting music, advertising, and any talk or writing other than on Islam.
The country has already suffered one terrorist attack targeting foreign tourists, and a number of Maldivians have traveled to Pakistan’s tribal areas to receive jihadist training. Moreover, evidence exists that jihadists tried to form a terrorist group in the country in 2007-2008.[77]
The Maldives central bank on Sunday denied having knowledge of funds being raised in the country for terrorist activities abroad, claiming that there is no confirmed suspicious reports of terrorism financing in the Maldives.
The Maldives Monetary Authority’s (MMA) statement comes about a week after the US State Department, in its Country Report on Terrorism 2013, said that the Maldivian authorities were of the view that funds were being raised in the country to support terrorism abroad.
http://www.isn.ethz.ch/Digital-Library/Articles/Detail/?id=163176
A quick search says the place is jumping with Jihadism and social media being implicated, at times encouraged by the govt. 12 airports for 300,000 people because it’s an island chain. These strips would be pretty quiet places 99% of the time once away from the capital and tourist hubs. The govt is crooked, hard line with a corrupt judiciary, and were quick to extinguish the plane sighting. The place is another extremist hotbed.
Maldives a money laundering hub for radical Islam??
http://minivannews.com/politics/funds-raised-in-maldives-to-support-terrorism-abroad-state-department-country-report-on-terrorism-84229
And the govt didn’t know?
Consequently, insurance companies and intermediaries, finance companies, money remittance service providers, foreign exchange businesses, and credit card companies “operate outside the AML/CFT framework.”
@Jeff, Victor is seriously working on such a scenario? Wow!
The Maldives (or the area, where the sonic boom originated for that matter) always seemed to be out not only because of the ping rings but because the plane would have to be very slow to crash there around eight a’clock in the morning. If the plane landed somewhere, all bets are off anyway. We would have a completely different time line, and the perps could’ve messed with the plane, like removing the emergency beacons amongst other things.
One problem with a deliberate flight to the Maldives: why would the plane fly so low over the island where the big noisy plane was seen? The island wasn’t even a small and remote one. Some provincial administration is located there. Why would the plane show itself in such a conspicuos way?
All these scenarios raise many many more questions. One would have to start from scratch with new theories.
I presume, Victor Ianello still has the plane going South?
OK, if there was deliberate action in the cockpit, and a looming likelihood that the SCL got messed with, what now for the final partial handshake??? A USB getting pulled out?? Or plane hitting the water??
There won’t be a lot of air traffic in the Maldives away from the capital. Very little actually so identifying this plane should be easy. Movements would be known? There will be local aircraft that get seen routinely, anything unfamiliar is conspicuous.
‘Anything unfamiliar is conspicuous’. Yes, exactly. That’s why I think it would be foolish to expose the plane to the view of the islanders if you don’t want anybody to know where the plane went.
If the partial handshake was a source of confusion, is it more evidence of interference?
Was it still dark at that time remembering it’s a fair way west.
@Matty, no, it wasn’t dark, when the plane was seen. The witnesses described details like doors and such. The plane was that low.
An interesting article about islamic terrorism and the Maldives:
http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/node/1285
Maldives are 3 hours behind Perth, they say 6.15 am they saw the plane, so it would have been morning, 9.15 Perth time. A bit late for the boom allowing the noise to travel 1 mile/second, assuming the boom was MH370?