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.
1. Jeff: I submitted a post (re Indonesia) last night and (again) don’t see it here. I’d hate to think there was censorship occurring here…
2. Luigi: My information (and I have long tentacles into Asia) tells me that story about Capt Shah using MH370 to negotiate with the Malaysian govt (for Anwar’s release) – and then ditching the plane when that failed, is part of a disinfo campaign. Would you be the same Luigi Warren mentioned in this Newsweek article?
http://t.co/ulHcSdiQG7
Seems there is still a pretty rigid cognitive barrier out there whenever the idea of data spoofing/terrorism comes up. The analysts faces would screw up at the mention but we are overdue for a significant event. 9-11 was years of planning, they went as far as training the pilots from scratch, and if this was a sophisticated/sinister misappropriation then some well conceived electronic counter-measures represents a much smaller as well as discreet investment. A couple of tech geeks would need about a week and some cheap and available bits and pieces to plan it. Access to a cockpit is the only real obstacle. And I know I wouldn’t attempt to divert a plane without a smoke screen. The SDU is a sitting duck.
@Nihonmama
I am indeed. Your sources in Asia don’t know what they’re talking about.
Matty – I completely agree. The hardest part is the cabling.*
The thing about the current predicted path – if you were going to spoof a path, this one is both the easiest to spoof and the hardest to detect. Nobody would spoof an approach path to an airport, because radar would quickly prove the satellite data was erroneous. A spoofed path to the SIO, though, could almost never be ruled in or out until the plane is found. We’re all here because there is no corrobating data showing the plane ANYWHERE.
Meanwhile, the easiest path to spoof would be a straight line, constant speed. You’d probably want a path that could be derived from a single formula, with time as the only input. You wouldn’t want a path with 100 waypoints. You’d also want to make sure the plane is clear of any corraborating witnesses like radar. So the SDU goes off until you’re clear, then you turn it on and feed it a steady stream of path data leading into the SIO and wait for the satellite to ping it.
*While spoofing the signal between the FMS and the SDU might be simple from the cockpit, and while it would cause altered BFOs, altering the BTOs is another story. The BTOs are caused by processing times and speed of light times. They can only be altered upward, and then only by accessing the SDU itself, located in the roof of the plane, and further by hacking into the SDU hardware. I don’t see that happening. However, I’m not convinced they are accurate to begin with.
JS – Putting myself in the pilot’s shoes, you would want it all pretty streamlined, ideally I would want a plug in laptop that would take over the SDU. There are plenty of bugs around that provide remote access to computers, I’ve had one here!! What’s possible now is scary. I read with fascination that when the Iranian reactors were cyber attacked the workers screens went blank, some message appeared, AC-DC’s Thunderstruck came blaring out, and the centrifuges spun out of control wrecking most of them.
Where there is a USB point?
Yep, agreed. It is a bit older, and the connectors are probably better rated than your average phone charger plug-and-pray connector, but the deal is the same.
No matter what, though, you can’t make a shorter BTO unless you have a time machine and can see the ping coming before it’s sent. So if the pings are truly the timing measurements they say they are, even if spoofed they would represent the absolute farthest the plane could be at each ping time.
In other words, if the spoofed BTO is 11000us, the real one can be no greater than that, only smaller, because the spoofed BTO must be longer than the real BTO. Does that sound right?
I’m currently flailing away under the impression that the spoofed BTO’s need to be longer(delayed) in order for the plane to go west – under the satellite while giving the impression that it went to the SIO?
I’m not sure I’m following, but assuming the interpretation of the BTOs is valid, then the path of the plane must be inside if the existing ping rings. The real BTO must be smaller, and the “spoof” added time to it to yield the observed BTO.
That doesn’t restrict it much, though. It allows a 300 degree heading across India, I think. It probably allows it to track another flight in the area.
Is that what you’re getting at?
Inmarsat said early on that the ping times got progressively longer therefore the plane was most likely moving away from the satellite at all times after it left the straits. If it was moving towards the satellite(west) the ping times would contract for a period I’m assuming? This is the bit you need to mask by delaying the response, am I right here?
Yes, that’s exactly right. Doing that also resolves that nagging coincidence problem in which the satellite is at its northernmost almost exactly when the plane is at its closest. But it’s that coincidence that makes me think the BTOs are bogus altogether.
And just to recap that coincidence, the correlation between the satellite’s z (northern) position and the 7 “ping ring” BTOs is .99984 by my calculation.
The correlation between the 17 BTOs and the plane’s known runway locations is .00000000001.
So it’s very hard for me to believe that this is merely coincidence, but rather that the BTOs are very heavily influenced by the satellite’s position, for some unknown reason. For example, the recorded BTO may be omitting the satellite-plane delay altogether, and logging only the ground-satellite delays.
I’m actually a politics/news/science nerd with a psych background but if this(Inmarsat) is still being fed to us 4.5 months later while it all goes so quiet then something is up. One thing for sure – the frailty of the SDU and the data would be understood in the defence-intel communities and they are the one’s who are so deathly quiet. They got stumped by ISIS because most of those maniacs running around over there were cleanskins, and there they were, out of nowhere. The game is always moving I guess.
Agree 100%.
Yes, BTO times get shorter when the plane is moving toward the satellite. I don’t think that the BTO times were tampered with, though, since that would require physical access to the SDU.
Nihonmama,
Not sure why you’re having problems posting. I’m not seeing anything at this end. Keep trying and if it doesn’t work, email me directly.
Luigi:
“Your sources in Asia don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Good to know. I’ll be sure to apprise my sources of that fact – as well as Australia’s Four Corners – whose documentary “Lost: MH370”, points up some inconsistencies in other media’s reporting, including that Capt. Zaharie (characterized in numerous reports as a “fanatic”) did not even attend at Anwar Ibrahim’s trial.
https://twitter.com/nihonmama/status/468962086614466560
Updated link -“Lost: MH370”:
http://t.co/ia2vUwiSeh
@Nihonmama
The tabloid characterization of Zaharie as a political “fanatic” may be just that — tabloid talk. But that Zaharie was a man of strong (liberal, pro-democratic, secularist) political views, contemptuous of the corruption of the ruling clique, and an ardent supporter of the popular opposition leader Anwar, who was condemned to five years imprisonment on trumped-up charges just hours before MH370 took off, are all easily publicly verifiable. Anwar himself affirmed Zaharie’s “passion for justice,” which I think is also evident from Zaharie’s web postings — as is his unusual technical savvy. The Daily Mail’s claim that Zaharie might have attended the trial was quickly discounted and has not figured in our discussion here.
That Zaharie would have been in by far the best position to execute the diversion in all its complex aspects (compared to other crew members or hijackers in the passenger cabin) should be obvious to all observers. Numerous other details have emerged in news reports that tend to support the theory of Zaharie as the perpetrator. Yes, some of this reporting might be erroneous, he could be a victim of official disinformation, and it should be noted that Zaharie’s family and friends have disputed certain of these stories and generally proclaimed his innocence. Nonetheless, taken together I find them rather persuasive. This reporting includes the following claims: Zaharie practiced Indian Ocean landings on his home simulator, he was increasingly alienated from his family in recent months, he displayed an uncharacteristic martial bearing and manner before leaving for the airport, he had a contact with an individual with a cellphone recently obtained using a false identity shortly before take-off, he was obsessive/withdrawn and in “no state to fly” in the period leading up to the flight, and he had cleared his diary of social and work commitments before the flight. No smoking guns there, but a lot that is consistent with the idea that what we have here is a senior pilot going postal on the national airline.
Now, if there were other credible explanations for what happened to MH370 seriously in play, all of this stuff about Zaharie would simply be interesting and suggestive. However, right now I am not seeing other credible explanations — only incredible ones and (to my mind) idle speculation about some unknown hijackers spoofing ping rings and burst offsets so they can hide the plane for some sinister but undefined purpose. Initially, once it became apparent that this incident likely involved air piracy, I rated a jihadist hijacking/kamikaze attack scenario as quite plausible. After it became apparent that the plane flew on for hours and might have flown under the radar to Western China or Kazahkstan, I thought it reasonable that this might be a hostage-taking by (say) Uhgur separatists. As far as I can see, none of those scenarios or anything similar make much sense or has explanatory power given the totality of the evidence now before us. But, feel free to present your own arguments if you have a compelling scenario to offer for our analysis — that’s what we’re all here for, right?
Luigi – a lot of the stuff circulated about Zaharie was straight out fabricated, and a lot of it by the English press. “Famiy” photo’s were not even his family. “That’s not even us” they said, and “we are not separated.” One of the main perpetrators is a journalist my eldest brother knows pretty well and he has some good tales from Afghanistan, like occupying the room nest door and being stuck in their accommodation. David(Brother) is staring at the the same rocky hill twiddling his thumbs whole this other fellow is penning stories that the British SAS have retaken half of Afghanistan. Only those close to Zaharie will know and they aren’t singing. People who choose not to be named don’t count.
Luigi, I think you’ve taken a little extra liberty with some of the “evidence.” The totality of the evidence amounts to almost nothing.
The reports about the pilot’s behavior, if believable, is more consistent with someone having an affair than someone about to fly off with a 777 and 239 innocents. Some of isn’t totally believable, either.
The burner phone story? Ok, let’s see. He buys it under a false identity. So how did the authorities trace it back to him? 1) He used his credit card, or 2) someone with knowledge gave him up. Neither is consistent with a terrorist operation, are they?
The “social calendar?” The story sounds ominous, but in reality, how many people actually keep social calendars in a form that could be discovered later? Do you have a social calendar? Did the original report actually state that he had cleared his, or merely that it was empty? Again, it would not be irrational for someone in even a minor marital struggle to reduce the number of calendar’d events. Of course, it’s also easy to be biased about his social schedule, since he abruptly stopped attending any events after March 8th. But that’s the effect, not the cause. So of course, by now, his calendar is empty. Even if this story holds up, why would a determined individual leave such a red flag?
As for the “idle speculation” about spoofing, that’s a bit harsh, since the theme is merely that it was possible to do, and it is not inconsistent with the known events. At the moment, there is not a shred of evidence that the BTO values published can be used to determine distance. The values accompanying actual known positions do not correlate with those known positions, and no better-correlating examples have been presented. The ATSB chose to use for their example 17 BTO numbers that don’t demonstrate their point. Clearly, they don’t have better data, or they don’t want to share it. So the speculation arises when it becomes apparent that the evidence is weak.
On the spoofing of BFO/BTO values, I think you’re missing the point. The main point was that the SDU had been rebooted intentionally, according to press reports. That suggested a purpose, yet no further use of the SDU has been identified. That, in turn, leads to speculation that the SDU was turned on only to do what it actually did – login every hour. If that was indeed its purpose, then the logical conclusion is that somebody wanted us to know the plane was still flying, but nobody on it wants to talk.
If we get all the way down to that last sentence, I don’t think it’s idle speculation to suggest that somebody also wanted us to think the plane was in the SIO, the easiest path to spoof and the worst possible place to try to locate a plane, or even prove that it crashed.
In any case, I’m not suggesting that the BFOs or BTOs were spoofed directly but rather that the SDU could easily have been given bad location data, indirectly causing bad BFO and BTO data.
There was a whirlpool of fiction around Zaharie that makes it hard to “know” anything, compounded further by the Malaysian stance. I’ve been waving the terror flag but if I’m right I have the plane in the water in the area of the Curtin oomph, for whatever reason.
Indian Ocean landings – there are none down there. The way the investigation has tightened up is conspicuous.
The press will play the game to a degree(most of them), but when they sensed the shambles coming from the Malaysian govt it became a free for all.
Interesting definitions of “what makes sense” have emerged here since March 8 and it comes down to the individual. Taking 239 people down to the roaring forties made better sense to one school of thought, but not all. Unless he had completely lost his mind.
@Matty
Interesting, and it would certainly be helpful to identify phony stories, bad journalism, or official disinformation, where and if it exists. But let’s get down to cases — specifically, which of the items I listed do you have reason to believe are bogus? Misreported or exaggerated stories float around people who are actually guilty, as well as the innocent — their mere existence is not a license to brush aside all reporting that doesn’t fit one’s favorite theory. Recall that we would not know about Zaharie’s ardent and verifiable support for the opposition and contempt for the ruling clique if it had not been for the Daily Mail’s tabloid journalism. Hishammuddin didn’t volunteer that info, and the broadsheets wouldn’t touch it, yet months into this thing it’s been the only real “break” we have had in the area of a plausible motive for the diversion. Now, if the other “leads” regarding Zaharie are planted disinfo, I’m all for figuring that out — but you actually need to build the case for that based on reason and evidence. As things stand, my sense is that Hishammuddin & Co are more interested in keeping the lid on Zaharie’s involvement than falsely implicating him, for reasons that seem to me obvious, but I’m open to reasonable arguments on that point. Since the Zaharie theory makes sense and none of the other theories floating around make sense, figuring out whether he is being stitched up should be a productive line of inquiry for anyone interested in resolving this mystery.
A while back I remarked that Zaharie’s political activities are not totally unlike my own so the leap towards some grandstanding protest is big. His associations there were open and public and not underground. He attended meetings in person – so do I. He was opposed to a lot of stuff – so am I. He was a member of a political organization – so am I, and lots of people I know. None of us break the law.
Political life in Malaysia is different to here I know(Rand) but he’s no Che Guevara. He’s an educated privileged professional with a squeaky record and taking a plane is so hands off reckless. Going to jail for a cause is one thing, going totally criminal is something a bit different. Is it worth remembering that the London tube bombers played cricket on the weekends and had ordinary lives. The night before they sat down to dinner with their families.
I don’t believe anything we’ve heard so far even remotely suggests the pilot became radical. Activist, maybe. Radical, no.
The Curtin boom lies along a “land avoidance” path – southwest over Malaysia near its narrowest point, northwest out of the Strait, southwest again avoiding India. You would need one of the Duncanites to run a calculation to see if a disconnected, non-compensating SDU could generate the observed BFOs on that path.
Whether it could reach that location, or beyond it is another issue. It seems like the plane would be short on fuel, but then again we don’t have a handle on exactly what the plane was carrying.
@Matty
I read the dismissive articles that came out after the original Daily Mail report on the Anwar angle, rising to Zaharie’s defense. At the time I bought the reasoning — Zaharie’s not a radical, he’s not an Islamist, the Anwar trial outcome was expected, etc. But as other apparently viable theories started to look less and less tenable, I revisited the question, and came to conclusion that the arguments were actually very weak. Not every burning political question revolves around Islamism, while the actions of the Malaysian ruling clique were reprehensible and provocative, and enough to rouse a man like Zaharie to deep anger. The Anwar angle provides a plausible motive for an apparently motiveless crime which Zaharie is uniquely well-qualified to have carried out.
Suppose you were a police detective investigating an apparently motiveless shooting in a suburban home. There’s no sign of forced entry, but you know the victim’s husband was home at the time and owned the gun used in the killing. You talk to his friends and they all say he’s a nice guy, wouldn’t hurt a fly. Then you discover that his wife was having an affair. Then you discover that the superficially contented couple had a massive row about the affair earlier that very same day. Would you then say to yourself:
“Millions of people cheat, and hardly any of them end up being killed by their significant other. Therefore, I shouldn’t read much into this. Besides, it’s possible that an intruder did it and somehow covered their tracks. Yep, I think I’ll run with that as my working hypothesis from now on.”
Not if you actually wanted to solve the case, you wouldn’t.
Luigi:
Just to be abundantly clear, I’m not here to present a compelling scenario for analysis (by you or other) on this blog, although I certainly have one in mind – and it has nothing to do with this plane flying on fire for almost eight hours, or hypoxia. Further, that I am not presenting a scenario here does not make your ‘argument’ about Zaharie more valid. There have been reams of innuendo floated into the ether about Zaharie, but there’s a world of difference between innuendo masquerading as fact and evidence. And at this point, there is insufficient ‘evidence’ to support even the flimsiest circumstantial case against Zaharie, much less a direct one.
I have tweeted extensively about MH370 since the day it disappeared. And if one looks carefully at all of the information out there, it (increasingly) points not only to an intentional diversion, but a possible terrorist (or related) act. If that turns out to be the case (assuming we can get to the truth – because the red-herrings are currently fighting for the spotlight), it does not logically follow that Capt Zaharie would be the only suspect.
Except, Luigi, the vast majority of plane crashes are caused by pilot error, mechanical failure, shootdown, or terrorism. So while your example may make some sense in a domestic environment, it’s pretty far down the list in the aviation world.
When you get into politics you are joining a system with rules and Zaharie wasn’t doing anything unusual. Zaharie was working within those rules with no serious profile to speak of, so to go from there to nicking a 777 is pretty out there. Also that action would not have got the consent of his fellows, something he would have been acutely conscious of. A freelancer maybe more likely to go for something like that but he was operating within an organization
It’s been claimed that the younger pilot had just got engaged so was not radicalized or a suspect. But just yesterday I read that since ISIS declared a state in Syria/Iraq a while back middle class muslims from Australia and beyond are heading off and taking their wife and kids with them. It’s truly amazing what’s going on atm. Parking the forklift and going off to Jihad. It’s all new.
@JS
True, the domestic crime example I used is a simpler case, but historically and recently most hijackings have been conducted by individuals for personal, idiosyncratic motives.
http://www.wired.com/2014/03/malaysian-airlines-flight-370-possibly-hijacked/
It’s not that it’s a simpler example, it’s that it’s the wrong setup. You are suggesting that most hijackings are this or that. But this isn’t a hijacking yet, and the things that happened on this flight are mostly NOT hijackings.
Most “diversions” are not hijackings. Most long autopilot runs are not hijackings. Most crashes are not hijackings.
I don’t really know what to call it. It can only be a hijacking if something else happened after the initial diversion – a recovery, a pilot suicide, hypoxia or asphyxia, etc.
http://groundreport.com/an-alternative-scenario-about-what-happened-to-malaysian-flight-370/
@Jocet – this theory is based on “erratic moves.” The only two turns that have been corroborated by radar follow navigational routes and were anything but erratic.
@JS
I realize that the article was an old one referring to what was believed to be erratic behavior that apparently now, never even happened. I have just been of the belief, since day one, that some sort of “new” form of terrorism was involved, be it an EMP or computer hacking. To me, the article was less about explaining the erratic moves, but more about electronic failures. Could an EMP fry all communications equipment, including cell phones, and keep the plane in flight?
Hey jeff your screening comments ? I. Had a comment that I issued made sure to see duplicate message but it’ never posted ,is this some censorship out of your control?anyhow —- electronics failure of aims software could lead to annunciated cabin depressurization …..
http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgAD.nsf/0/20cc4a700f904b8b8625756900616d82/$FILE/2009-02-05.pdf
@JS
I don’t follow. Of course it’s a hijacking. We’ve known that for months. The operative questions are Who did it? and Why?
The ATSB/SSWG report contains an unpublished before radar track. Analyzing this track leads to some very surprising scenarios
about MH370 fate:
https://plus.google.com/102683253990040028382/posts/4tuHgUvXdW3
For example there is a possible explanation for the SATCOM turn off and later restart.
@Luigi – we don’t know that at all, and even if we assume it’s a hijacking, we don’t know that the pilot did it. Even if we assume that he was flying, we don’t know that he was in control and not under duress.
Tell me, how do we know that this wasn’t a repeat of the Helios incident, in which the initial turn and shut down was the result of a mechanical or fire issue, and after an hour somebody managed to enter the cockpit and start flipping switches back on?
I actually agree that it fits a hijacking, but we don’t know that and we don’t know who is involved. But there is certainly precedent for alternate theories. There is no precedent for a senior pilot hijacking his own flight, is there?
Jocet – this bit I find interesting:
“Solid-state devices that are pulsed will respond one of three ways, they will turn themselves off, try to reboot or die.”
It does seem possible that something went haywire on MH370. For whatever motive.
If I am reading the new independent report correctly, the authors are suggesting that the plane may have “loitered” for while near Malaysia during the interval bounded by the retreat from Malaysian airspace and satcom reboot and the final turn that put it on a course out of all radar contact and headed toward the South Pole. Very interesting…
Luigi – that might be basis of the – landed in Aceh – theory. Just another question mark to us punters. We never did hear how that worked out re the data(Ianello)? Someone was doing the numbers on that?
There is some precedent for staying out over water to deal with mechanical issues, I believe. Alaska Air comes to mind. Maybe not 200 miles out, though, but then again nobody seems to sure of what their radar was doing.
Loitering doesn’t really fit well with a hijacking, though. Even outside of ground radar, there’s no reason for a hijacker to think that the military was unaware of the plane’s approximate location (in hindsight, we know otherwise, I think.) So loitering leaves the mission vulnerable. It is more consistent with an attempted emergency landing, but then why the change of plans?
A little off-topic, but is it even possible for a plane to go 6 hours without resistance from 239 passengers? Flight 93 had a fraction of that.
Even in the event of a mechanical issue, you’d think there’d be concern eventually that the pilot was out of commission. If they were all incapacitated, doesn’t that imply only smoke or depressurization, and really nothing else?
Loitering extends the window of controlled flight to some degree? But the possibility of a loiter period is another case of everything bending around Inmarsat. Why did it loiter? In order to fit the rings of course.
That’s exactly right, Matty. In order to achieve a best fit to both the BTO and the BFO data, and not coincidentally to reach the area that the authorities plan to search, the plane would have had to either a) loitered or meandered in some fashion, or b) not flown in a straight line, as the presumed ghost plane/hypoxia scenario would require. So Victor Iannello and others have been looking for flight plans that would include some kind of loitering interval.
So, plane goes dark between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace, heads back to the homeland coming in really low, is not challenged but nonetheless skedaddles, pilot turns on satcom but ignores incoming calls from ATC, loiters a while in the neighborhood of Malaysia, scoots up north avoiding Indonesia then west over the Indian Ocean and finally points the plane at the South Pole. Still looks like anger-denial-acceptance to me.
But could this be going on with 239 conscious passengers on board?
JS – Luigi
The cockpit door these days is a ballistic door and designed to withstand attempts to crash it. It does look a bit like anger denial acceptance to me(assuming it’s a protest) except we don’t really know it loitered at all. It’s an assumption traced back to the Inmarsat data that relies on an apparatus that falls well short of experimental rigor and we are measuring millionths of seconds here.
@JS
We don’t know if the passengers were conscious or even alive at this point. They could have been “put down” by a controlled depressurization earlier. However, if they were consciousness, there’s not much they could do about the situation but wait on developments in the cockpit. Evidently the plane came down low enough during the return to Malaysia for the co-pilot’s cellphone to re-attach to a cellular network. If there was enough reception for anyone to get out a call it is doubtful that it would have affected the “mission” in progress materially. Still, it seems that either there wasn’t enough connectivity (someone who received even a dropped call would have probably talked by now), or the passengers were no longer in any condition to place calls. If the pilot had an external antenna or had figured a way to the leverage the aircraft itself to boost reception, then the Malaysia overflight might have afforded an opportunity to place a call to someone in political authority from a personal cellphone. If he did not receive an immediately satisfactory response, turning on the satcom as the plane pulled out of cell tower contact would buy time before the “mission” reached a point of no return. Alternatively, an entreaty could have been delivered by VoIP (for example) only after the satcom reboot, but that leaves us with the questions, what was supposed to happen after the plane returned to Malaysia, and what prompted the pullback? If there was entreaty before the pullback and it did not get through or was ignored or rebuffed the retreat becomes quite understandable.
My guess — just a guess, based on my read on Zaharie’s personality, the re-booting of the satcom, and the (suspected) loitering of the plane — is that the passengers were still alive at this point, and that Zaharie had not given up hope on a peaceful outcome to his protest mission. If so, he was disappointed.
If there was deliberate tampering of the SDU etc, they may have needed an elongated window to execute that before flying off the radar, and so the loiter?
In other words were they waiting for the reboot?
Basically they were dawdling before the reboot? Was someone tapping away busily in front of a laptop leading up to that? Then it comes on and they are off to wherever. As we keep saying, something happened there.
FYI – the two Iranians: There are a lot of 19-35 y/o Iranians floating around looking for Asylum atm. A lot of them have turned up here and they are very often of a criminal or military background. Iran has this unusual law where their citizens cannot be forcibly repatriated and all returns have to be negotiated? Seems a good way to insert people to foreign shores. At the time the stolen passport factor was glossed over pretty quick.