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.
@Gang
While Hooka Piping over the SDU, why not just pull the main circuit breaker and or,the CB’s for the SDU? Then reset? Redundancy & battery power would power the a/c enough to choose another flight path & into Auto-p. BUT…..let’s ask ourselves, how busy was this guy? Time motion study of the flight from IGARI to last radar sig., would be fascinating.
To my mind the fact that the satcom was brought online, but not used (though the satphone appears to have been functional, based on its response to the two incoming calls), indicates that whoever was in control of the plane did not want to communicate.
@jeffwise
To me, bringing up the satcom suggests an intent to keep an open channel during the long suicide leg after the initial return and retreat from Malaysian airspace. Of course, the pilot would have the option of picking up or not picking up, based on the caller ID. Certainly, incoming calls from ATC would be of no interest to him at this stage of the game.
Jeff: thanks for following up on my query re the antenna jack.
The plane(777-200) has a triple redundancy system in the PFC see section 1.2 it explains this well .seems this plane is capable of a lot ,on its own…
http://wenku.baidu.com/view/2d95ed8ccc22bcd126ff0c87.html
@Matty – the Zen monk comment made me realize that an intentional restart of the SDU necessarily meant the reason for shutting it down no longer existed. So thanks for that!
@Luigi – the problem with the ransome theory is that the bargaining chip has a shelf life. Let’s assume two possible bargaining positions – 1) keeping the passengers alive, or 2) not damaging property, such as the Petronas towers.
#2 has a flaw in that once the target is declared, it becomes much more difficult to reach as presumably jets will scramble, or at the very least an evacuation occurs.
#1 has the flaw that the plane has only a finite amount of fuel, and once that’s reached, as others have pointed out, the bargaining position of the hijacker disappears. Worse, though, is that there is a point of no return. The bargaining power doesn’t go away when the fuel is exhausted. It goes away when the plane can no longer reach a suitable runway.
The only plausible ransome situation I can think of is one where the plane is not yet known to authorities – a threat to take some yet unnamed plane at some future date. That, however, would likely have led to a very visible security uptick, which clearly we did not see here.
My thought on the SDU hack scenario is that one may have intended only to feed it spoofed coordinates and speed, having no interest in BTOs or BFOs. Those coordinates would have caused the SDU to do its normal compensation of frequency, leading to BFOs that might be similar to what we have. They would not be perfect unless the plane’s actual movement was also factored in. In other words, if the plane is moving towards the satellite at 500 knots, and it wants the satellite to think its moving away at 500 knots, it needs to tell the SDU that it’s actually moving away at 1000 knots or so to create the right frequency. Those extra calculations aren’t inherently difficult if that’s the goal, and especially considering that the ultimately plotted course is due south anyway. It’s telling that Inmarsat specifically disclaimed spoofing, suggesting that it’s at least considered possible.
If spoofing is possible, I bet it’s probably been tried in a “lab” somewhere and perfected.
It would be interesting to see, based on estimated fuel at the time of the so-called “reboot”, where could the plane have gone if the spoofing began at that moment?
If the reboot was part of the process to hook up a spoofing device, then at that moment the plan could have turned in any direction, but it could have only flown so far.
Anybody want to attempt to draw those rings?
JS – Inmarsat certainly did acknowledge that spoofing was possible but claim it totally improbable – somewhere near Pluto I think he said. I don’t see why as the BFO numbers are pretty hit and miss to begin with, which is inherent with doppler. The way I understand it you need only throw a spanner in. And as I think Arthur pointed out mathematically speaking, 2 of the 7 data points don’t even line up. It’s fundamentally shaky and the media have been led away from that little fact. Strange because they thrive on ambiguity ordinarily but we have a monumentally lazy media these days.
@rand
My guess is that all Zaharie was looking for was some personal, private assurances from Hishamuddin before landing the plane and giving himself up, either in Penang or on one of the planned Indian Ocean abort sites on his simulator. He fully anticipated that he would at least be going to jail, like his hero Anwar. Still, in that best case he would have the bully pulpit of the trial and retain plenty of leverage that way. At the same time, Zaharie must have realized the whole thing would more than likely end very badly, as indeed it did. Hijacking a plane is inherently a desperate act, and nobody goes into it expecting a bed of roses.
@Luigi I, of course, don’t know whether the pilot for the diversion was one of the assigned pilots or a passenger/cabin crew member, but given the timing of the execution for the diversion, the indication is that it was indeed at the hands of someone with knowledge of the flight path, the timing of the hand-off from KL to HCM ATC, etc., we probably should (as we have) develop a motive for the assigned pilot(s).
The aircraft was, in fact, headed back to Malaysia in Phase I of the flight trajectory, and Zaharie foreseeing his incarceration is a perfectly plausible motive for diverting the aircraft. As you have so stated, whomever would likewise have had a back up plan. Yet I still find the aircraft being intentionally flown to the SIO under any circumstances rather unlikely, as, in fact, the aircraft flew to point of fuel exhaustion. Perhaps Australia was the intended destination for plan B (there is precedent for this).
Clearly, the SDU is as easily activated from the flight deck as it is deactivated. Yet no communications were forthcoming once it was re-activated at 18:25. Perhaps there was a secondary pilot attempting to ‘figure it out’ whom failed in the attempt to reestablish contact with the ground. Perhaps activating the SDU was merely meant to MONITOR any attempts to contact the aircraft. Perhaps the SDU was activated with the intent of communicating with the ground, if necessary; as JS and Matty have pointed out, the reason for deactivating the SDU at IGARI no longer served. Perhaps the process of communicating a distress signal to the ground was interrupted (i.e., a gun to the head or hypoxia).
The only other out is whether the system was activated for other purposes, whether they be spoofing – or other!
Regardless, it still appears that Plan A (diverting the aircraft by whomever to wherever) was interrupted and that the termination of the flight in the SIO was not the intended destination, either for the diversion OR post-interruption of Plan A. Suicide? OK, but this really is less likely, as again, the flight terminated at the point of fuel exhaustion. I don’t buy hiding the aircraft in a location where it will never be found; this could have been BETTER accomplished with a shorter flight over the Indian Ocean (i.e., less opportunity for airborne detection). Whatever the intent of the pilot(s) in Phase II (after the diversion was foiled), the aircraft at some juncture lost human input and managed to fly itself to the terminus – if it, in fact, proves that it did fly to the SIO, which still remains open to question!
It’s mind boggling, really. And in my experience, the greatest mysteries are formed of secrets lodged in the neural networks incapsulated in the craniums of people, rather than in, say, the binary environments of aircraft systems housed in a fuselage. My guess is that there is a puzzle-solving secret buried deep somewhere, and that this secret is shared by at least two people….yes, it’s a conspiracy. One hopes that at least one of them is alive, and that they will one day share their tale.
If they hadn’t turned the SDU back on the plane would have essentially vanished and the suspected trajectory/destination of the plane would have been west, and suspicion would have fallen on Iran/Pakistan right away. So it’s an interesting set up where the sat data was effectively handed to them by the person who is effectively suspected of doing away with the plane. From we are at least they didn’t seem interested in sending a distress signal.
In the case of no SDU, the disappearance of the plane while blacking out electronically, while heading west, would almost certainly have been associated with the Curtin oomph. So we can attribute the SIO search to the pilot – whoever it was – but do we trust him?
@rand
I don’t find it that mind-boggling, really. A reasonable, self-consistent theory of the case including motive can be assembled by combining the official narrative, leaks from the criminal investigation, and independent reporting. The details are sparse, of course, and many will probably never be known or revealed. The most important missing piece of the puzzle is what prompted the abort/re-diversion after the return to Malaysia, since the plane was apparently not challenged and no communication with the pilot has been acknowledged.
Under the circumstances, it’s likely that the only communication the hijacker-pilot would have been interested in would be one-on-one with the highest political authority and would have been sought on a private channel. If it occurred, it would now be crucial to the survival of the current political order to suppress it, and probably quite feasible to do so. Note that such communication need not have been two-way — a simple failure to respond might have been enough to prompt the abort and the subsequent suicide turn.
In principle, an entreaty from the pilot-hijacker need not have issued from the cockpit at all, but could have been delivered by a compatriot on the ground, e.g., the woman with the fraudulently-obtained cellphone Zaharie spoke with just before take-off. The entreaty could even have been delivered before the flight using a variation of the untraceable cellphone gambit, if you think about it. That would be a very risky option given that the recipient might end up sleeping through the whole thing. Who knows? Maybe that’s what happened — nobody in the chain of command had the nerve to disturb Hishammuddin in the middle of the night to tell him about the missing jet, there’s no call back, plane flies halfway to the South Pole, runs out of fuel and goes into the water, end of story bar the requisite cover-up.
As I understand the situation, it would be relatively straightforward to spoof the BFO values by intercepting the position and velocity information coming out of the Internal Reference System in the E/E bay, which in the 777 is freely accessible via a hatch in the forward part fo the first class cabin. This information is fed via cable to the Satellite Data Unit, which is located about 100 feet further aft, next to the antenna above the rear door, and not accessible in flight. The BTO values are dependent on computations carried out within the SDU, so would be significantly more difficult to tamper with. So it’s quite possible that BFO values were spoofed but not BTO values, in which case the ping rings would still be valid.
@jeffwise – IF the BTOs are a valid distance estimator in the first place, and IF the hacked up system has the same round trip properties.
In any case, if only the ping rings are valid, we’d be back to the whole north-south arcs, and not constrained to the straight due south flight.
Yes, that’s what I’m thinking. Based on emails and discussions with members of the Independent Group, it seems that the current consensus is much as it was a few weeks ago: that there is too much uncertainty inherent in the BFO numbers, and in the factors underlying them, to deduce much about the plane’s location other than the fact that it went south.
Of course, in the rather outlandish event that the BFO values were spoofed, the presumption would be that the plane went north. But I think it’s still far too early to early to be proposing that seriously.
Everything points to a Malaysian coverup they even stated rubbish about the cargo of mangosteens( a fruit) that was not in season ..
http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/igp-kills-suspicion-over-mh370-mangosteens-says-fruits-not-from-muar
———
http://www.malaysiafruit.com/mangosteen/mangosteen.php
Jeff:
What happened to the last comment I submitted for posting?
Hmm, I don’t know. When did you submit it? I didn’t see anything on this end.
I would have thought merely tampering with the BFO’s gave prime opportunity to do the same with the BTO’s as a delay in the response is all you are after. More complex viruses can do some weird stuff, most of them just progressively slow you down. Going through a laptop would slow it down, using an older one especially so, particularly if it was filling up with data from the FMS. Very simple programming wise also if you set out to do that. Like a timed test on a computer. Beep – next question. Slowing a computer down is easy, built in delays are easy.
@Matty – the problem with that is that the signal has to go through the laptop, get delayed, and then sent back out through the SDU. I’m not sure that a ping goes anywhere beyond the SDU, so to do that trick, you’d need to actually hack into the SDU, rather than simply get between it and the FMS.
A BFO spoof, on the other hand, is merely a hack between the FMS and the SDU. In that situation, the laptop is giving the SDU bad location/speed information, and it’s merely a substitute for the information normally coming from the FMS. The BFO itself isn’t being hacked, but since the SDU compensates for the location and speed, it is altered by a spoofed FMS signal.
That is a much simpler job to do, since with the right cable, pretty much any signal can be intercepted, recorded, reverse engineered, and then spoofed. The term “hacking” itself came from mechanically reproducing an audible signal normally generated by a pay telephone for each coin deposited. This is presuming, of course, that communications between the FMS and the SDU are not heavily encrypted.
Importantly, it may never have been the intention to change either the BTO or the BFO, but merely feed the SDU with bad location information in case ACARS or something kicked on. But in any case, a hack that affects the BTO would appear to be a “deeper” hack, if you will, than a hack that affects only the BFO. But a spoofed BFO may have been collateral to the goal of tricking the SDU.
Or, in another alternative, merely disconnecting the SDU from the FMS and using it for some other communication purpose would have had the effect of defeating its Doppler compensation, no spoofing involved. If that happened, subtract out the expected compensation and basically find the plane due north by approximately the distance to the SIO search area.
My initial thinking on elongated BTO’s were by accident or inadvertently. On the subject of hacking I guess t pays to remember that the cockpit crew would have pretty good access to the computer itself and access to it’s setup? They have to be able to override anything, is that right? They may be pretty familiar with the system. Manipulate the system might be a better word than hack?? Pilots out there?
Jeff:
Posted that (tweet) here late morning yesterday (07.08) I think, but no worries.
Here it is again
https://twitter.com/nihonmama/status/471958750547292160, plus another bit:
“Inmarsat never questioned whether the pings were originating from MH370; each aircraft communication system generates a unique ping identified with that particular aircraft, so why would they? The Comsat (Communication Satellite) link was where Inmarsat said it was…but that does not mean the plane itself was. Comsat links are small devices. Two such units might easily be interchanged. Alternatively, any programmable device can be reprogrammed or cloned to mimic the hand-shaking device found on MH370. Such a device could easily be loaded onto a “private jet” and flown along the flight path that investigators believe MH370 traveled. No one – certainly not Inmarsat – could ever tell whether the plane that left those signals behind was MH370 or another aircraft.”
I feel like we’re ignoring the possibility that he (briefly) landed the plane in Banda Aceh. This would explain several of the inconsistencies in this investigation. Namely, the increasingly awkward gap between the 18:22 and 19:41, the reboot, and the switch to the final phase of the flight. What if the plane was on the ground and stationary?
Nihonmama –
Just expanding that a little…because that’s what we do well here….maybe the plane that headed south was a turbo-prop drone? Would explain the conundrums over speed-alt. Disappearing to the SIO, winking to a satellite with a bodged up link.
Lots of countries have em these days. Long range, cheap. I suppose between now and this thing being done we will cover everything.
And you wouldn’t hear it hit the water, and there would be negligible wreckage. In 2014 there is only one way to nick a jet and that is properly. What is that familiar refrain – 777’s don’t just disappear. It would make it a state backed number I guess.
Well, I guess if a state-backed jacking of the plane and spoofing the BTO data proves true, we are all in for one heck of a surprise when the aircraft reveals itself with a ‘florish’ wherever. Yet I still believe that a foiled diversion/hijacking is more likely, and that the aircraft ended up in the drink, somewhere. It was headed out over open water…
Let’s see if someone picks up on the SDU modulation angle and runs with it.
@rand
Practising Indian Ocean aborts and turning on the satcom for the long haul south strongly suggests that Zaharie would have been receptive to a call from the right person. That person would probably have to be either Hishammuddin or Nijab. Since this was going down in the middle of the night and Nijab looks likes he has trouble staying awake even in the daytime, Hishammuddin is the better candidate. If there really were no calls to the flight deck, then either he slept through the whole thing or he decided to call Zaharie’s bluff. I guess it just doesn’t seem strange to me that Zaharie would go with the suicide option under those circumstances.
You’ve got it right, but uncompensated aircraft tx would have had much larger doppler shift unless the plane were flying more or less tangentially to the satellite the whole time — which we know it didn’t do, because ping arcs kept getting bigger.
Jeff – are you referring to the drone/decoy scenario? If it was me I’d use the same kind of link. Find one on ebay with a bit of luck.
No, I’m talking about disconnecting the cable that feeds position/velocity information from the plane’s Inertial Reference System back to the SDU and plugging in a laptop or some other device that would feed it false information, so the SDU would generate a misleading frequency precompensation.
I suppose I’d see the technical challenges as surmountable whatever they were. All it needs is planning.
Jeff, without the BTOs, the observer would have no way to know to validate that the BFOs were not the result of under- or over-compensation, right?
So there are basically three possibilities accompanying the BFO values:
1) No compensation – the link to the FMS is broken and the BFOs are undercompensated, reflecting both satellite and plane movement
2) Correct compensation – the link is working, and the BFOs represent only the satellite movement
3) Bad compensation – the BFOs are the result of an erroneous location and speed input, and represent the sum of the satellite, plane, and erroneous compensation
The only way to discern one from the other is with accurate BTOs to constrain the path.
I’m actually thinking that it is perhaps more likely that the #1 above occurred – the SDU was disconnected and repurposed, and that it wasn’t fed any location information, rather than being fed falsified information. The net effect is still roughly the same – misleading BFOs – but a “repurposed but unhacked SDU” is simpler, and consistent with the intentional reboot.
On the other hand, the idea of a non-pilot regaining control of the flight deck and rebooting to try to communicate also seems plausible.
BFO’s – It’s not like we are forging fingerprints, reliably known numbers don’t even exist. It would be a bigger technical challenge to mimic the numbers than it would be to scramble them or put out misleading ones. Any interference with these systems could give changes to both BTO/BFO.
@Matty – That makes me wonder – is the ping held up at all if the SDU no longer has any input from the FMS? At that point, it would have only two options – respond to the ping on a guestimated frequency, or wait for FMS data to get the correct frequency.
So I wonder – if the FMS isn’t feeding it, could the BTO delay be affected after all, by the internal workings of the SDU trying to figure out which frequency to use?
Way back when we first started throwing it around I suggested that if the SDU didn’t have anything to transmit – what does it do when the satellite beeps? Wait for data, go into error, was it trying to do it’s job. Was it racking up errors looking for info that wasn’t coming through. Something crudely akin the the printer on the PC waiting for that job that doesn’t arrive. An instruction with no data.
Before 18.25 SDU says plane was heading towards satellite. After it goes back on SDU says plane was going away from satellite. Interpreted as a turn, but was it?
Measuring signal bounce is done in incredibly small increments – SDU has to be functioning perfectly to give reliable indications. I theorized earlier that if you went out and studied this data you would see all sorts of steps and skew factors coming and going. But it’s never been done to my knowledge. The authorities need a figleaf of credibility to press on with and Inmarsat was it.
Hudson:
“I feel like we’re ignoring the possibility that he (briefly) landed the plane in Banda Aceh.”
*Waving at you* – some of us aren’t:
https://twitter.com/nihonmama/status/481122436880941056
https://twitter.com/RadiantPhysics/status/481159055646670848
@Luigi I find the logic of what you have put forth quite valid, yet I still have difficulty in reconciling a suicide with: 1. precedent (pilot suicides are in all cases rather immediate); 2. if the aircraft was originally diverted for political reasons intrinsic to Malaysia, the perpetrator would want his motive known and disseminated; and 3. the aircraft is indicated to have flown to the point of fuel exhaustion, which in turn indicates flight without human input.
From a holistic view, if we wanted to select for suicide then perhaps it is more probable that the Inmarsat data and its analysis may be in error.
Yes, whomever may have reactivated the SDU to enable contact with the ground. But would not the pilot have initiated a call to the ground for the purpose of negotiation, as you have so speculated? Perhaps this was the intent – and the pilot was interrupted in the process? The fact remains that the satcom logs, as Jeff has so stated, do not record any calls initiated or received by the aircraft, other than the two failed attempts by MAS ops. I am unsure whether the pilot would forego making a sat phone call over a period of hours, if he had so enabled himself to make or receive a call and had remained conscious.
Meanwhile, I believe we can safely exclude the SIO as the intended destination at the point of diversion. If one accepts the range data/fuel load and its analysis, the aircraft most likely flew to the point of fuel exhaustion without a human pilot. Even if the destination for the diversion was not Malaysia, we still must reconcile an intended diversion with a termination of the flight at the point of fuel exhaustion, which again most likely transpired without a human pilot. Therefore, all points to the relative probability of some form of intervention post-diversion transitioning the flight from it having a pilot to being devoid of a pilot.
I think I’ve flayed all of the meat off of this particular dead horse. Apologies, I keep waiting for our working hypothesis to be successfully challenged and tossed in the bin. We have been conservative and simple and logical, and yet it has withstood all tests thus far, in my view. Sure, something entirely different may have occurred, inclusive of some mortal failure at IGARI or a hijacking with the intended destination of Pakistan et al. But then all of these scenarios appear to have their various problems.
@JS You have highlighted something quite interesting in terms of the SDU no longer being provided inertial/location information from the FMS. Perhaps it is this simple. Can you go further in terms of what the implications would be for the data set and its analysis?
Rand & Luigi – I think once you have diverted a 777 your effective bargaining power would be limited to getting a decent size tv in your cell. In other words you would need somewhere to go. Once they got him on the ground they would have thrown the book and if it was you or I behind the stick you would expect that, so he would need to have completely lost his mind. If that’s the case then applying logic gets pointless and it falls one of two ways:
1. A pilot lost his mind
2. Terror plot of some kind
And there is good precedent for both.
And reading the news today I see that ISIS have taken custody of a heap of radioactive material from a University in Mosul. Realistic or otherwise the 1st image that went through my head was an empty 777 spudding in somewhere sending a dirty cloud far and wide.
If I had to bet now I’d say this jet didn’t turn at all, it kept going west and hit the water for some reason. With all we know about the SDU at this point we know that it would be inadmissible in a court if one tried to establish the plane went north-south-anywhere. We are guided by an ongoing absence of a plane mainly.
@Matty I agree with you on your last comment that the aircraft could very well be anywhere and that the data set as it is quite weak, most especially given the fact that the SDU was deactivated until 18:25. JS’s pointed assertions in this regard are indication enough.
As for the motive of a highjack, I would have to disagree with you. It is perfectly reasonable and even sensible to assume that the ‘jacking was internal to Malaysia. The likelihood that one of the pilots was the perpetrator while not conclusive is considerable, given the qualities of the diversion. As for the state of mind of the perpetrator, a perfectly sane mind could see the utility in jacking the aircraft for a return to Malaysia and immediate incarceration as an act of civil disobedience. Scores of people have gone to jail as conscientious objectors in Malaysia, and even senior business leaders are often brought up on charges by those supported (and paid) by competing business interests.
It would amount to a perfect plan: hijack the aircraft and land it again in Penang or KL. With a manifesto lodged somewhere, it would make no difference whether there was a public or closed trial. It would be a Mandela-esque move that would ignite public opinion, a desperate move in desperate circumstances for the benefit of others, while highlighting the incredibly deep level of corruption in Malaysia. The plan could not be foiled, as one could assume that the aircraft would not be brought down violently but rather peacefully to a safe and secure landing in Penang or KL – the intended destinations for the diversion.
Yet this is not what transpired; the execution of the plot was foiled either by an internal or external intervention.
It’s either this or some elaborate plot to take the aircraft elsewhere for some horrific use at a later date. One would then need to assume that it could be done while avoiding detection, whether by way of spoofing the SDU or simply toggling it to off and otherwise making a run for it. I am not saying that this is not possible; I am simply saying that it is less probable.
Examine the general behavior of Malaysia. Sure, perhaps we can chalk it all up to incompetence and fear of the implications associated with what the lack of response on the part of the RMAF would mean for the man at the head of the Ministry of Defense. Or, perhaps that manifesto is yet out there, somewhere, while the hijackers experienced a counter-measure, and it is the discovery of THIS that is the source of the fear and the concomitant behavior. In Asia, people are often in lofty positions of power – and then, suddenly, they can find themselves in prison. Mandela sacrificed 25 years of his life for South Africa, and then rather intentionally. It would seem, then, that in some parts of the world, there is prison cell waiting for just about everyone. Malaysia is just such a place.
If Shah went out to embarrass the govt this way then he would have gone inside for a long time and would have known it for sure. The optics of this kind of manoeuvre might not look too good remembering the plane is full of foreigners, and the Malaysian govt would be in the box seat to paint him as a nutter. I don’t think it would be an effective protest but many aren’t. I think he knew he wasn’t coming home.
@rand
From reading the Wikipedia entries on the SilkAir 185 and EgyptAir 990 crashes, it’s not clear that there is any precedent for pilot suicide on a civil airliner, in the narrow sense of a commercial pilot offing himself for personal reasons and taking his passengers with him. There seems to be a real controversy about whether the pilot was actually responsible for the SilkAir crash (a court in Los Angeles found otherwise). In the case of EgyptAir, the motivations of the relief first officer are still in doubt. The character of Egyptian politics and the presence of a large contigent of military officials on the plane raises the possibility he was acting as part of a wider conspiracy.
I concur with your remarks about civil disobedience, but I believe you’re over-thinking the whole “suicide” angle. The model here is an act of civil disobedience which ended in a worst-case, no-exit scenario, rather than a best-case scenario. A worst-case outcome was always on the cards. Plus, it’s not as if this hasn’t turned into a huge black eye for the ruling clique in Malaysia.
I just don’t see how any kind of Flight 93 scenario involving a struggle and passengers or crew regaining access to the flight deck fits with the data — e.g., the turn back from Malaysia, skirting around Sumatra, rebooting the satcom, pointing the plane at the South Pole, all without getting out any distress call by satcom, radio, or cellular phone. Something did lead to the re-diversion after the return and, if we are to believe the official line, that something did not involve the aircraft being challenged in any way. I think the simplest model is that there was entreaty from Zaharie, and that was rebuffed or ignored, and the plane remained under his control. There would be ample motive for Zaharie to use a private channel for any such entreaty. That private entreaty could have been via the satcom — if so it has been actively suppressed from the official record, which is quite possible. However, there are several other ways it might have been effected including but not limited to VoIP, personal satphone, or personal cellular (during the low overflight of Malaysian airspace), boosted with external antenna if necessary. If the latter, there’s no reason we would have heard about it, and the recipient of the entreaty, presumably a senior political official, would hardly be motivated to volunteer the information.
There has to be some reason for MH370’s retreat from Malaysian airspace. One must also wonder if the apparent fecklessness of the Malaysian air defenses reflected more than just incompetence. An airliner headed to China just disappears, then reappears in Malaysian airspace flying at low altitude and at darken ship. Recall, KL is home to one the juiciest potential terror targets in the world — the Petronas Towers. But, nobody challenges the plane. So, one has to wonder if there was a stand-down order that we just haven’t been told about.
Rand I like the thought proccess. i myself see no reason for the captain to fly off to die ,many better ways to protest the leadership in malasia than disappearing .i would venture this disapearance has to do with the cargo ….now the plane was following a pre programed path according to the New York Times .to me it is this programing that holds the key to this mystery .”It is not clear whether the plane’s path was reprogrammed before or after it took off.” There’s the rub who or when was the fms reprogrammed . Now here’s the issue this ” the reprogramming of the fms took place before acars was shut off according to nyt so malasia could have had a damn good idea exactly where mh 370 was going and prevented that…
Or alternately Malaysia went along with new fms programing and destination for mh370 and kept quiet for six hours .wait this was exactly what happened…
@Rand – if the SDU had no location input, the same BFOs would be accomplished by a flight path roughly constant distance from the satellite’s nominal location (not its actual location.)
That path would have to be north of the satellite as well. If I’m not mistaken, the simplest among the candidates is a heading of about 300 degrees. Whether the path curves towards the north or south depends on speed. For the most part, these paths are consistent with Middle East/Europe destinations, but not with the current ping rings, or at least not all of them.
One thing that hasn’t received much attention: a similarly equipped MAS 777 set an endurance record, from Seattle to KL and back. That plane supposedly flew at 47,000 feet, and I believe 560 knots at times. Considering the fact that it set a record, it would appear that not only higher speeds and higher altitudes are possible for the missing plane, but also optimal for endurance.
So just to add to the “anywhere” problem, there may be routes further west of those previously identified, if the BTO/BFO data is off, and the performance estimations are too conservative. Presumably, this pilot knew about the endurance record, and could beat the autopilot as far as distance aloft goes.