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.
So the revelation in the ny times article today is the Malaysian military radar data i is useless/ unreliable . Because it wasn’t calibrated for atmospheric conditions…..so for all these months the talk was of a pilot flying mh370 plane erratically ( wrong)!there guessing now it was on auto pilot to terminus .was this a simple way to take away scrutiny of Malaysian officials i guess the idea of the plane dropping from sky so fast could of been real! just the calibrations were wrong wrong remember that data that showed the rapid decent thought to be impossible…
Rand – I think the only way to get the investigators attention would be to demonstrate that their rationale is questionable, and for the media to go with it. All along Inmarsat has provided the bare figleaf of credibility for the search to be viable but the rings are maybe a lot more tenuous than the media really knows at the moment. We need some geeks.
Yo, some geek journalists to go after this with some tenacity. I am actually hoping that DSteel et al land a consulting contract on the search and begin feeding their findings to whomever.
Tdm: it’s not that Malaysian radar is generally unreliable or otherwise sucks, its more that MOST radar systems are highly unreliable in terms of providing flight level/altitude estimation unless they are specifically and repeatedly calibrated to local atmospheric conditions. Likewise, INFORMATION disseminated by the media or even official government sources is NOT the same as DATA. The primary radar data indicated all sorts of things; the information developed from this data has been translated, deleted and distorted into various forms by any number of intermediaries and disseminators.
A more accurate, depth structure statement concerning primary radar would be: “After a thorough review, it was concluded that Malaysia primary radar did not provide accurate, verifiable and consistent data as to the flight level of MH370. Most primary radar systems in general do not provide accurate measures of aircraft flight levels, as to obtain such data requires careful and frequent re-calbriation of instrumentation in response to ever changing atmospheric conditions.”
…that said, indications of Malaysia being unable to supply additional information on the flight and the impeachment of whatever information it did supply does allow them to ground themselves in incompetency and provide the government with an out.
One would think that if they were being perceived as incompetent they would pursue rectifying this perception by being more forthcoming regarding the diligence and integrity of their air defense systems and processes. They have choices in terms of their messaging, and such choices can be considered at least somewhat indicative of their general strategy. In short, perhaps they are quite actively pursuing a brand message of see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing, know nothing, while the truth of their level of ‘awareness’ of what happened is quite different.
Rand – if we can’t experiment with BFO numbers it would be interesting to see some playing around with the SCL’s. I wonder what they are worth? Would be a good story? For effect you would get some little punk to do it.
Another story from Goodfellow, seems he doesn’t trust the Malaysians.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/malaysia/10901856/Flight-MH370-What-are-they-hiding.html
Sounds believable –
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/mh370-latest-wife-of-pilot-zaharie-ahmad-shah-breaks-silence-to-confirm-he-spoke-final-words-from-cockpit-9559657.html
All this plotting of the plane’s track is based on frequency shifts right? This is measured in Hertz. Cycles per second. Let’s throw this idea out there just for fun. Suppose there was some unknown influence on that acting much like a rheostat or dimmer switch. Solar activity. EM field disturbance. Whatever… What would that do to divining the planes final location?
Primary and military Radar is in the same building !these small facts sure are hard to overlook..to me anyhow.
http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/the-plane-truth-malaysia-airlines-boss-hugh-dunleavy-on-what-really-happened-the-night-flight-mh370-went-missing-9556444.html
“I only heard about this through the news,” Dunleavy says, for the first time letting anger inflect his voice — a hybrid English-German-Canadian accent thanks to a string of airline career moves. “I’m thinking, really? You couldn’t have told us that directly? Malaysia’s air traffic control and military radar are in the same freakin’ building. The military saw an aircraft turn and did nothing.
“They didn’t know it was MH370, their radar just identifies flying objects, yet a plane had gone down and the information about something in the sky turning around didn’t get released by the authorities until after a week. Why? I don’t know. I really wish I did.
Something else Dunleavy states a “plane had gone down” how he new it went down as opposed to was missing is there a diffrence?
http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2014/06/26/sot-flight370-new-search-area.cnn.html
Get back to square one has been a familiar refrain but this is not what most people meant.
Just watched the Australian search team press confrence on CNN officially stating that a new 6000 sq km search area has been designated down where they originally searched extensively for debris, and it will involve a three month ocean floor mapping and a one year ocean bottom search.
They are confident that the plane was on autopilot, following a single great circle route, through all the seven ping ring arcs, until it ran out of fuel.
They will release a printed report on how this conclusion was reached. There was no mention of why they are so sure the plane went south.
Boeing has said that if the plane ran out of fuel on autoplot it would stall and dive into the ocean. So here you have the aircraft hitting a brick wall at a few hundred miles per hour, breaking into thousands of pieces and making a big boom easily picked up by hydrophone.
Something wrong with this picture, don’t you think?
Rand,
Dunleavy says, in Tdm’s link, that there were five other planes on the radar beside 370, and their alttudes would be known from transponder data. So why can’t they do a post-calibration of the radar data for 370 using that reference?
And this recent reanalysis of the Malaysian radar data is the third. Remember the second one, giving the altitude data ? It was done by ‘a group of radar experts’.
Crank up the frustration.
Back to the very spot where there very conspicuously was no wreckage – with half the worlds satellites looking. In a place where a non-destructive belly entry is a total impossibility. Where empty fuel tanks would keep wing sections buoyant.
I have never been more doubtful that this plane is where they think it is. Under control as it left the straits, then the SCL breaks it’s eighty minute silence and boots up. Why? If the interview with Shah’s wife is legit then it’s almost certain he was flying when it turned back. If he headed down there consciously(in the full sense), he knew he was connected to a satellite. Two reasons I can see for that: he wanted them to know where he went or he has interfered with the SCL – and it could be anywhere – like somewhere near the Curtin oomph.
I’m trying to get the pilots off the hook at the same time and fire is about the only thing I can think of, but it doesn’t gel with the near on eight hours in the air. It was under control for an ample period to get under ten thousand if they depressurized. If the cockpit door(ballistic) was shut then no chance of a struggle.
@ Matty, Rand , Tdm, Littlefoot
If flown to terminus during auto-p, where is the debris? 3-400 seat cushions, the debris field alone would have signaled us along with other debris. That dog don’t hunt…
Does any one REALLY believe that an a/c this size would have hit the sea doing 2-300 mph w/o a debris field??…Here’s Whack-a-Doodle for ya…..after using his co-p’s cell phone to make last contact, on the same latitude as Penang, used the auto-p to fly from the straights, then southbound on full auto-p, then Sully it in, drop the landing gear & sink her.
G’day Chris – a belly down there has been mentioned at intervals but seas of around 6-12 metres are the norm, so the plane cartwheeling destructively on contact with the water is very likely.
My angle would be that if he was conscious he knew he was connected to a satellite and would be trackable to a degree. What bothers me is a whole new orthodoxy seems to have arisen from a set of numbers that have a lot of holes. To my knowledge at least there is no military application ever been developed that uses such methods to monitor aircraft outside of radar range, remembering that no transmissions are totally secure these days. If they could they would. Have they?? Anyone??
Howdy Matty,
Has there been any concise weather reports from the supposed area for that day?
One would really hope that the science being applied holds true but, he did have an awful lot of time on his hands after the straights. If he thought things through during his planning stage, no telling what kind of technical mischief he was up to knowing the confusion it would cause…..perhaps for decades.
Victor I. (a member of DSteel et al.) tweeted the following link re the 18:25 satcom reboot. http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/mh370-inquiry-puzzles-over-initial-satcom-message-400804/
I tweeted in reply: “would not an electrical failure at 18:25 reconcile an intended diversion at IGARI with ‘hypoxia’ to terminus?”
The piece below, also tweeted by Victor, describes the trouble inherent to any hypothesis grounded in hypoxia. The writer’s suspicion that ‘something else’ may have occurred is implied, although just as with most, he will not cross into the realm of it being due to deliberate human intervention of some form.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2014/06/27/mh370-the-media-favourite-is-hypoxia/
Me thinks there are others out there now getting around to the idea that there was a secondary event that transitioned the flight from one with human input to one without.
From its position, say, near Penang to its position at 18:25: this could perhaps be considered the initial period of the transition, hallmarked by whatever event destabilized the flight deck.
Jeff, Ari Schulman and others tweeted the link below to yesterday’s ATSB report. Victor points out that, while the report has the satellite-data driven flight path initiating at 19:41 UTC, there is no analysis regarding what occurred between 18:22 and 19:41.
Perhaps 18:25 to 19:41 provides a frame for when hypoxia actually set in on the flight deck, which would then be the second phase of the transition, hallmarked by the permanent disabling of the flight deck.
http://www.jacc.gov.au/media/releases/2014/june/mr052_MH370_Definition_of_Sea_Floor_Wide_Area_Search.pdf
Now, to read the report…
Well another review moving search around to me this all stinks to high heaven .i can’t look past the usa military mistaking those underwater pings and Australia stating mh370 was found .this is all very odd behavior analyzation of those pings was done and found to be a manmade acoustic signal .so were they tricked ?what did they really hear ?these are questions no one asks .
.anyhow theres a nice map in this link showing how vast this “new” area to map is (damn expensive to).
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/mh370-search-missing-malaysian-jet-hunt-moves-to-new-area-after-analysis-reveals-new-clues-to-planes-final-destination-9563879.html
“MH370 search: Missing Malaysian jet hunt moves to new area as analysis reveals plane was ‘highly likely’ on autopilot”
The june-17
STATEMENT FROM AN INDEPENDENT MH370 INVESTIGATION TEAM
http://www.duncansteel.com
Rand,
The lastest developments in this fiasco have put me at a loss for words.
Can you give us a good summary of where we are at?
Tdm – No idea what it was doing precisely that morning but it’s the roaring 40’s for a reason I guess.
They are yet to actually deny that the pilot had short Indian Ocean runways inputted then deleted from his simulator. Saying it’s unofficial is not the same as saying it’s untrue and the world’s media still running it everywhere. That basically means Maldives, the direction where the Curtin boom was detected. But the computer says no.
One for a pilot: If you did tear off to some remote place in a plane, would you need to input everything into the flight system yourself, or could the tech savvy plug in a laptop for the same effect. From the simulator, to the laptop, to the cockpit computer? If it’s yes, what would that do to the ping responses? and would the sat link on the laptop be in any way active?
Damn, a post I thought I had made here has gone AWOL. This is thus a test.
Victor I. (a member of DSteel et al.) tweeted the following link re the 18:25 satcom reboot.
http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/mh370-inquiry-puzzles-over-initial-satcom-message-400804/
I tweeted in reply: “would not an electrical failure at 18:25 reconcile an intended diversion at IGARI with ‘hypoxia’ to terminus?”
The piece below, also tweeted by Victor, describes the trouble inherent to any hypothesis grounded in hypoxia. The writer’s suspicion that ‘something else’ may have occurred is implied, although just as with most, he will not cross into the realm of it being due to deliberate human intervention of some form.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2014/06/27/mh370-the-media-favourite-is-hypoxia/
Me thinks there are others out there now getting around to the idea that there was a secondary event that transitioned the flight from one with human input to one without.
From its position, say, near Penang to its position at 18:25: this could perhaps be considered the initial period of the transition, hallmarked by whatever event destabilized the flight deck.
Jeff, Ari Schulman and others tweeted the link below to yesterday’s ATSB report. Victor points out that, while the report has the satellite-data driven flight path initiating at 19:41 UTC, there is no analysis regarding what occurred between 18:22 and 19:41.
Perhaps 18:25 to 19:41 provides a frame for when hypoxia actually set in on the flight deck, which would then be the second phase of the transition, hallmarked by the permanent disabling of the flight deck.
http://www.jacc.gov.au/media/releases/2014/june/mr052_MH370_Definition_of_Sea_Floor_Wide_Area_Search.pdf
Now, to read the report…
Headline today! The fact the mh 370 was pinging in a straight line leads investigators to conclude the crew and passengers were succumbed to hypoxia and plane was on auto piliot . Ok then based on what new data ?well there’s none sigh. it really did take the investigators this long to issue this theory. ….or shifting focus again ignoring curtain observation. Which the ctbto had to admit occurred after denying there was an event that was heard.
Matty any info down under on curtain u and if search team will look at the 10 % chance it was a impact from mh 370?
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/malaysia-airlines-mh370-passengers-likely-suffocated-investigators-say-1.2689422
There is plenty of politics attached to the search, and it looks like a few bucks each way. The hypoxia bit I think is intended to calm everybody down and make the search look more credible. It’s really just a possibility that masks some less palatable ones but it would involve some other event – yes.
They admit to the likelihood that the SCL got messed with – what the entire search is based on. They seem a lot less prepared to speculate on that bit.
Tdm – Curtin Uni have only indicated that they are still investigating. Privately I’d say that the search team are well aware that there may be issues with the SCL but the media will go nuts if anyone says it. Families will be in hell, MAS will twist all over again – just as it subsides.
Unless I have overlooked something, I believe that putting any emphasis on the plane being on auto-pilot. This is how commercial aircraft such as the B777 generally navigate and aviate, flying from one waypoint to the next. If the Flight Management System is exhausted of waypoints, it seems that an aircraft simply continues to follow the general heading associated with the last two waypoints on a great circle path. Many writers ranging from those of the NYT to the Christian Science Monitor project the conclusion that the aircraft was on auto-pilot as indicating “something.” The CSM piece that I read concluded that the indication of auto-pilot guided flight ruled out suicide. I really don’t get it, but then perhaps it can be chalked up to MH370 being but one story that they cover in a busy day in a digitally driven world.
It’s not auto-pilot or manual navigation/aviation that is the issue. Rather, it’s human input versus no human input. This is the crux of it, and I see very few analysts or journalists engaging this dynamic.
The Inmarsat data set may be falsely projecting a long linear ghost flight to the southern Indian Ocean, but this is, in fact, congruent with other, more subjective elements of the mix (e.g., there is no precedent for a suicidal pilot to continue flying for 7+ hours before taking the plunge). For the moment, I believe it suffices to state that we can be reasonably comfortable that the flight was not under human navigation at some point after the cluster of three pings at 18:25.
Interestingly, we have two times established during what could have been a transition from a flight with human input to one without: 18:25 – the three ping cluster, indicating a system reboot); and 2. 19:47 – the ATSB’s “beginning point” for that segment of the flight that ended in the southern Indian Ocean. Now, check the elapsed time between 18:25 and 19:47: 1 hour and 22 minutes. If we take this as estimate of the amount of time that elapsed and stipulate that it was roughly one hour, we can likewise say that this congruent with the estimate (1 hour) of the amount of emergency oxygen supplied to the crew on the flight deck.
Thus, we could say that perhaps emergency oxygen was engaged on the flight deck at c. 18:25 and that it was exhausted at c. 19:47.
This is not woo-woo, this is not reaching. If the flight was intentionally diverted at IGARI and continued with human input to the Straights of Malacca, it MUST have experienced a series of events and causation that sent it on a ghost flight south. The prevailing wisdom is hypoxia to terminus; let’s roll with information supplied by those perhaps better informed than we are and accept hypoxia at the terminus.
JACC STATEMENT(that you will never hear)
Any funny business in the cockpit most likely can be extended to include the SCL, which we are relying on absolutely, but we are pressing on as the alternative to that is surrender – and we can’t do that – yet.
@Gang
We all agree that the flight was under human control to IGARI. We all agree that the flight was under human control up to the straights.
Then a another turn, into auto-p? We’re missing something along the way. The lack of physical evidence is the most confounding. A 777 blasting into the ocean w/239 souls, weighing more than 400,000 pounds and nothing? We should be awash with flotsam and jetsam and have the search area pinpointed to a 4 mile search area. He LANDED this plane, he practiced for the less hull occurrence possible. While everyone tries to discount this possibility. Ask yourself…..where is the debris?
Somewhere sometime they may find a piece of plane sitting on some beach, but the plane itself I wouldn’t put money on it. The crash strip is 90 km wide. That’s confidence, but I don’t have much confidence in their confidence. What a horrible set up for the folks. And they know the SCL was off, why turn it back on at all unless you had something up the sleeve? There was a secondary event alright except it might have been electronic.
@ Chris butler
The lack of debris is a good one to ask as the new search area was searched by air day 21 -26 .
Some one else made a point I think is relevant .Does Australia have the ability to refuel flights * in mid air .as I recall it was 2-3 hours out then small time searching area before returning .ask yourself why not use every resource to find mh 370 ..
*
http://www.ausairpower.net/APAA/APA-2005-02.pdf
Getting there slowly –
http://www.juneesoutherncross.com.au/story/2385235/mh370-power-outage-linked-to-possible-hijacking-attempt/?cs=12
Politics politics, they just can’t help it.
Chris McLaughlin from Inmarsat, which owns and operates a global satellite network, told The Telegraph: “It does appear there was a power failure on those two occasions … it is another little mystery. We cannot explain it. We don’t know why. We just know it did it.”
It does not appear there was a power failure???? Give me a f—-n break.
Big typo on my part on last sentence – delete “not”
I agree with Chris. If the plane went south it was under pilot control to the end. He wanted to make the plane disappear. He flew it as far as he could, got it as light as possible and made a soft landing with little or no debris. The passengers were alive, oblivious to what was going on, while the pilot sat in the cockpit next to a dead copilot wondering if he had made a big mistake. The fact that the three other pilots on a suicide missions did it quick is statistically insignificant.
But Matty says the ocean in that area is always rough.
And Curtin University says they heard something hit the water much further north, and no sound in the south Indian ocean.
And all the Inmarsat conclusions comes from the application on an ad hoc witches brew of an algorithm cooked up by looking at the data from seven other flights in the area. They have five usable data points from Flight 370. Any statistician worth is salt would laugh them out of the room.
And the radar data analysis? We have three, from ‘experts’, with three different altitude estimations.
Let’s be honest guys. We don’t know a damn thing about the fate of Flight 370.
It’s a scandal and a fiasco.
The lack of a debis field has always troubled me. Can anyone locate a cogent analysis of this aspect of the mix? I find the possibility of a soft landing with suicide as the intent highly unlikely. In my eyes, the most obvious conclusion is that they have been searching for debris in the wrong locations, with confirmation bias inherent to the Inmarsat analysis the most obvious driver in finding zilch.
It is a fact that a small number of data points and their analysis by a number of diligent quants, all wrapped up in a glossy presentation, are now driving the search. Meanwhile, we have six (!) primary radar stations reporting very little and a criminal investigation apparently going nowhere. It seems obvious to me that a better understanding of the flight up until 18:25 would be the most productive ‘place’ to find more direction for the search, while the people that are responsible for such are largely silent.
The power interuption: this the fulcrum, and I hope someone is filling out a chart somewhere to include all potentials of causation in this regard.
I love the way McLaughlin just skipped around the implications of the reboot. “It is another little mystery – we cannot explain it.” Not bloody trying too hard either. Lets tape that box shut, move on people.
Arthur – Scandal and a fiasco is apt.
Perhaps you are right, Marty. If further analysis were to indicate the search zone of the independent group or another location, bureaucratic momentum would perhaps inhibit any changes to the search parameters at this point. Such is the foundational stuff of scandals and fiascos alike.
In general, and unless there is intel to which we are not privvy, it appears that a limited, flatland perspective born of scientism has now taken hold of the search. The relegating the reboot to a mystery and the lack of any analysis of 18:22 – 19:41 is indicative of such. The search is grounded in the seeming glory of the numbers of the Inmarsat data set and it’s x-y axises. These are but two dimensions, while other messier, human dimensions are being left out of the mix.
The odds are indeed significant that the aircraft will never be found. Sad, and something of which the Malaysians are probably quite well aware.
There is some denial in the air now. If someone in the msm decided to get out there with the possibility of SCL manipulation I think you would find that the general public would be prepared to join those dots. Then you would have the court of public opinion going one way and the search another way. Currently if we don’t trust that the pilot did not mess with the SCL then we don’t have a search. That is the only basis on which we can proceed. Strange.
Guys the ” indipendent experts “Duncan steel et al have looked at the data supplied to them and reached there conclusion .there towing the authorities line .curiosity has me wondering were they paid for this analysis ?
Why o why would the ctbto deny then admit they did hear the curtain university event ? I have found an answer !
http://io9.com/researchers-may-have-heard-flight-mh370-crash-into-th-1585877886
“”Data from one of the [Rottnest] recorders showed a clear acoustic signal at a time that was reasonably consistent with other information relating to the disappearance of MH370,” Dr Duncan said.
“The crash of a large aircraft in the ocean would be a high energy event and expected to generate intense underwater sounds.”
“We sent the data to search authorities and I got a phone call at 3am in the morning so they were definitely interested in it.”
Dr Duncan said the timing of the signal (consistent with the disappearance of the aircraft), the fact that it was a long-distance event and the north-west direction of the frequency were the three factors that gave researchers hope the noise may have been caused by MH370.
“It has since been matched with a signal picked up by CTBTO’s station south-west of Cape Leeuwin,” Dr Duncan said.
“A very careful re-check of data from that station showed a signal, almost buried in the background noise but consistent with what was recorded on the IMOS recorder off Rottnest.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ksfInwSHVwU
The sound that could be related to mh 370.
Curtain university pictures of relevant maps and data pertaining to mh370. https://www.flickr.com/photos/106331196@N07/sets/72157644591711570/
@Tdm & Gang
If he did land with minimal hull occurrence, it may present us with a another set problems. Being….the flight data recorders would still be housed in the a/c. I don’t know of any HOV that has mechanical abilities at depths of 2-4 miles.
And again, wouldn’t we have two acoustic signatures, one top side & one reaching the oceans floor?
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/778992-missing-plane-found-nope-but-malaysia-airlines-flight-mh-370-may-have-suffered-vital-equipment-tampering/
Malaysia could have tracked mh370 by pinging satellite Constantly or intermittently twice in six hours makes it tough to track …and it goes on……
@Chris The lack of a discovery of any debris whatsoever is indeed disturbing. That this was due to a intentional landing with human input in the southern Indian Ocean by a suicidal pilot, however, is a bit a stretch in terms of its probability. I supposed we could have a suicidal pilot with engaging a diabolical plot to make the aircraft ‘disappear’ with a motive that is either sane or insane, but this is the only frame accommodates an intentional belly landing, that would then need to be successful. This further decreases the probability of such an outcome.
I suppose the aircraft’s fly-by-wire system could autonomously have managed a glide path to a soft landing, but then we would need to rule out a one-engine powered spiral descent. In either case, I would say that the aircraft being without human input at the terminus is more than likely, IF it indeed flew into the southern Indian Ocean.
Unfortunately, the most highly probable reason for the lack of a debris field remains that the search has never looked in the correct general location for the aircraft. Either this or the typhoon that followed the alleged date and time of impact scattered the debris of aided in its submergence; a nose-first entry with limited debris is less probable, I would think. Regardless, the lack of a debris is a stumper in a saga with many such mysteries.
It remains incredible to me: how does a 777 manage to disappear? How is there not one shred of evidence regarding the what, how and where of its fate, in any dimension, from whatever channel? As Matty (apologies for referring to you as Marty, McFly!), it is the perfect disappearance of the aircraft that must have the CIA and MI 6 yet still occupied with the thing, and there yet might surface some narrative that fills in all blanks.
The proper way to locate a downed aircraft is to follow the flight path from its last known location to the extent of its fuel range. The Inmarsat data set has established the flight trajectory, and abridged this process by likewise establishing the likely terminus, which is now where all efforts are being expended. It is clear that there is little else to go on at this point. Meanwhile, the flight path remains theoretical, while the establishing of a terminus is indicative of resource constraints; they simply can’t search the entire sea bed below the flight path. As Matty has pointed out, there is all sorts of room for error inherent to the establishment of the search zone, and this aircraft is just as likely forever lost as it is likely that it will one day be found. Somebody, somewhere needs to pull a rabbit out of their butt and better inform the search, as the odds of the aircraft being found are less than appealing.
Come on, where is that seat cushion or, better, a hastily scribbled note in a bottle, washing up on the beaches of Reunion?
I’ve been trying to follow along as a non-expert, but I must have missed something. Can somebody enlighten me as to what the SCL is, and what that abbreviation stands for?
Thank you!
Has anybody given thought to, or have any experience with a small scale nnemp (non nuclear electromagnetic pulse) ? It could solve the mystery of the silent cell phones, and the latest revelation of possible power outage. What equipment on the plane would stay functioning enabling the plane to continue flying for hours?
Georenosance is now asking the Australia radar question (why no sighting of mh370)we all have brought this up before valid point good for them…
http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/557684/20140702/mh370-missing-malaysian-airlines.htm#.U7QjfSe9KK2
@Tdm & gang
What kind of radar are they employing? Early warning, over the horizon, etc.
He was probably flying under the radar, after cutting off all other lines of communications, and news of him possibly sabotaging other electrical systems to avoid radar detection, he either flew under or out of reach of radar detection.