One of the many baffling aspects of the MH370 disappearance is the absence of radar data after the plane left Malaysian primary coverage at 18:22 UTC. If, as is generally presumed, the plane took a sharp left turn shortly afterward and flew into the southern ocean, it should have remained visible to Indonesian radar for more than an hour. Yet Indonesian military officials insist that nothing appeared on their radar screens.
This is an issue that has gotten less attention than it deserves, and for understandable reasons. Indonesia is a developing country, and a sprawling one at that. With a land area the size of Western Europe, it spans the same east-to-west distance as the continental United States. So one might reasonably assume that the country lacks the ability to comprehensively monitor its airspace. Why shouldn’t MH370 have passed through without a trace?
In fact, though, Indonesia has quite a capable air defense radar system, and one which it utilizes quite aggressively. In the last month alone, its air force has intercepted three civilian planes which wandered into the national airspace without first getting the proper permission.
The westernmost part of the country is covered by the Indonesian Air Force’s Radar Unit 231 at Lhokseumawe in Aceh, Northern Sumatera. The unit is equipped with a Thomson-CSF TRS-2215 radar, the type pictured above. The system, Indonesian military officials say, is capable of detecting aircraft up to 240 nautical miles away.
It demonstrated its capability last year, when the unit detected a Dornier 328 twin turboprop entering Indonesian airspace from the west. The plane was ordered to land at Sultan Iskandar Muda airport in Banda Aceh. It turned out to be a US Air Force Special Operations plane carrying five crewmembers; the pilot claimed he had been running low on fuel and didn’t realize that his paperwork to enter the country had expired. After being impounded for a few days the plane and its crew were allowed to leave.
Based on its specs alone, Radar Unit 231 (so much easier to spell than Lhokseumawe!) should easily have been able to detect MH370. The radar track released by the Australian Transport Safety Board (ATSB) in June shows that the plane came within 60 nautical miles of the installation before it disappeared from Malaysian and/or Thai military radar. Afterwards, according to the consensus view, the plane’s track should have stayed within the radar’s viewing range as it headed west, made a turn to the south, and proceeded into the southern Indian Ocean. (See map after the jump)
So how could the Indonesians have seen nothing?
For insight, I turned to someone with long experience with military radar systems. Steve Pearson is a former RAF navigator who later worked as an avionics and mission systems engineer for the Royal Air Force Warfare Center. Today he works as an engineer for the defence consulting firm Qinetiq.
First, I asked Pearson if a 777 would make a big, clearly visible radar target.
“Yes, it should do,” Pearson said, “because it’s got lots of corner effects on it, if it was flying in a straight line across a radar screen I can’t think why it shouldn’t show up. I can’t think of anything that would prevent it. “
Of course, he added, there is always the human factor to consider. “There’s humans in the loop, isn’t there?” he said. “You’ve got a human operator looking at a display, quite easy for people to miss things. We’re all humans. We make errors.”
Especially in the middle of the night. It’s likely significant that, of all the interceptions that I mentioned at the top of this piece, all took place in the middle of the day. It’s not hard to imagine a sleepy radar operator, in the middle of the night, expecting nothing to happen, overlooking the passage of a blip.
Was Indonesia’s failure to detect MH370 related to its peculiar flight path? After its initial diversion, MH370 passed mostly along the boundaries between Flight Information Regions, or FIRs. These are aerial territories under the jurisdiction of different air traffic controllers. When the plane disappeared from secondary radar near IGARI, it was on the boundary between Singapore and Ho Chi Minh FIRs. It did a 180, then flew along the border between the Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok FIR. After crossing the Malayan peninsula, it stayed close to the boundary between Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta FIRs.
“That’s quite clever,” Pearson says, “because if you fly down the FIR boundary, the controller on each side might assume the other was controlling you. Usually, a civilian air traffic controller would call his counterpart to check. Military, not so much. They might think, ‘Oh, that must be the other country’s aircraft, it’s not my problem, I won’t worry about it.’ And the other country thinks, ‘Oh that’s their problem, I won’t worry about it.’”
Back in his days as a military navigator, Pearson would take advantage of this dynamic to slip through airspace where he wasn’t supposed to be. “When we used to go to other parts of the world, which I won’t mention on the phone, you could fly down FIR boundaries, and each side thought you were in the other one’s control. You could fly right down the boundary and no one would talk to you. It’s something we didn’t do very often, I must admit, but it’s something you can do.”
If MH370 was being steered in such a way as to escape detection, the plan worked. Both Malaysian and Thai military radars apparently picked up the plane, but no human noticed until the radar recordings were inspected in the aftermath, by which point the plane was long gone.
“If it’s flying along the boundary very precisely, that points to someone knowing exactly what they were doing, doesn’t it?” says Pearson. “It wasn’t random.”
The confounding thing is that the Indonesians say that nothing turned up in their recordings. This is seems hard to comprehend. Some observers have speculated that the Indonesians are lying. Others suspect that the plane didn’t pass thorugh the Malacca Strait at all. It remains possible, Pearson says, that the the plane was picked up by the radar unit, but that the recording device either failed or was turned off at the time. But, he says, “it all seems a bit coincidental, doesn’t it?”
At the end of the day, Pearson suspects that if the Indonesians say they have no radar data, it’s because they don’t.
“It’s probably not a cover-up,” he says. “They probably just haven’t got it.”
ArcGIS has online a map of FIR boundaries. If someone was trying to fly MH370 along them, s/he missed pretty badly.
The SOCOM Dornier 328 was reported to be flying from Maldives to Singapore across the Indian Ocean, that’s close to the limit of its range. A cover of forced diversion due to irregularities is condusive to the US and the Indonesians, there was no air intercept.
The recently reported intercepts all took place out to the east of Java where most eyes, in this region, are looking. These reports are all good PR for TNI-AU but they actually show, beyond the two SATRAD units along the north coast, how unprepared TNI-AU is to protect the oil & gas assets along that coast.
The Indonesian TNI-AU’s nearest intercept capable aircraft are 450nm away at Pekanbaru and, concerning MH370, I haven’t seen any confirmation that they are night capable. Rather the opposite, Pekanbaru hosts a squadron of ex US-ANG early spec F-16s given free that have been undergoing upgrades to the latest spec with the first aircraft being delivered back in July this year. Chasing an aircraft flying away from them at approximately 470kts from a start point 450nm away would be a challenge.
Potentially, it is easier for the Indonesians to admit they did not detect anything that appeared to be a B777 rather than admit they detected it but could do nothing about it.
While it appears that MH370 flew to the westerly extremity of the KL FIR, the earlier leg depicted by the ‘Beijing Lido’ image shows a track directly across restricted airspace west of Penang Island, over Palau Perak. That is a military air manoeuvres area & it might also be expected for detection of such a path to ring alarm bells if the TUDM were watching using the Western Hill RADAR site. Again, it would be embarrassing to admit sighting MH370 in an area where no civil aircraft should have travelled & taken no action as a result.
:Don
You aren’t going to save any money by switching off a recording unit, so they either record or they don’t as a matter of policy? Radar says no, SDU says yes.
JS:
Carrying over…
It’s 4 degrees NORTH latitude.
And note the comments to this update on Tomnod/DG’s FB page back in March: http://t.co/mH1omCKfTC People going off about scaling issue, lack of location data and other.
There were two areas in SIO that had many ‘tags’ – 280 and 298. But the area west of Sumatra had 288 tags. Not a dramatic difference. So why wouldn’t the authorities have considered searching the area off Sumatra as well?
As mentioned at end of last thread, Tomnod/DG hid the locations users were searching once they moved the images to the “new” system. Apparently they also didn’t want users to share their finds (or theories) with each other either. Which, BTW, is the antithesis of crowdsourcing. So the users found an api to circumvent Digiglobe and talk to each other. 😉
Today I asked co-founders of Tomnod why the coordinates were not be made available to their users. No response.
The more I hear, the more I’m inclined to believe that the Digiglobe/Tomnod ‘crowdsearch’ was a PR stunt.And perhaps an element in the misdirection. Users were not supposed to be able to LOCATE possible debris from MH370.
“Someone forgot to draw those paths so that MH370 didn’t cross Indonesian airspace or territory, or skirted Indonesian radar – I forgot what the story ultimately was a few weeks ago ;). These have it going pretty much right over radar at Bandeh Aceh.”
http://www.duncansteel.com/archives/743#comment-3310
What ever happened to ‘GlobusMax’?
I like the article here Jeff and agree with Mr. Pearson that they probably just don’t have it.
Lesson learned in all of this as far as radar operators go? Expect the unexpected, question every blip, keep plenty of hot coffee on hand at night, no turning off of equipment, and stay on your toes and expect something strange to enter your airspace at any given moment, stay focused, adopt a 911 mentality. “People asleep at the wheel or switch at that hour of the night” or something to that affect as Mary Schiavo said early on in this.
Maybe it wasn’t flying along the FIR’s to escape detection nefariously in so much that they had no means of communication and to avoid a confrontation or a shoot down they alluded each airspace so as not to be contacted by either? Again, shades of what Mary Schiavo said, “what appears to be terrorism is really heroism?” Maybe it was a safety measure of sorts? Or….if it was nefarious the sophisticated hijackers or whoever was in control succeeded in alluding the airspaces.
I’d still like to know if RMAF saw MH370 in real time radar or after the fact of the crossing of the peninsula. And what did MH88 hear exactly at 17:30, the supposed time of contact when they were into the IGARI turn and did that have any bearing on why the flight was left alone to cross?
Just for clarity, the last point of radar contact was 18:22 UTC at these coordinates near the MEKAR waypoint.
From Duncan Steel .com
(1) The final radar detection of MH370 was at 18:22 UTC on 2014/03/07, at which time the aircraft was located near the aviation waypoint MEKAR, about 200 nautical miles from Butterworth on a bearing of 295 degrees from the military radar there. I have adopted a geographical location of latitude 6.50 degrees North, longitude 96.5 degrees East for that final radar-detected point
Hi Jeff, no need to post this (as I am sure you meant to say last year), just wanted to point out that the order to land the Wolfhound was in 2013, not earlier this year.
Actually, this year, a plane with the same reg # was seen in Subang airfield. I think it is a regular, and non-nefarious visitor to Malaysian/Indonesian airfields.
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2013/05/21/us-transport-aircraft-forced-down-aceh.html
@Nihonmama – thanks!
@Jeff, once again, great article and great job stirring the pot on long-unanswered questions.
One question I’ve either missed the answer to, or it was never answered: has Indonesia ever stated that there was no sign of MH370 on recordings, or just in general?
If they said there was no sign on any recordings, that is at least an unambiguous statement and probably more useful than a simple “we have nothing” statement.
If indeed Indonesia can say their recordings hold nothing, then we have a radar account that specifically contradicts an SIO route. That, along with the absence of debris and a heretofore unsuccessful underwater search, would be huge.
On the other hand, the likelihood that they simply fell asleep or forgot to start the tape seems high. But it’d be great to clarify.
@GuardedDon, Not all the recent intercepts were in the eastern part of the country. The Singapore plane was forced to land in Pontianak, West Kalimantan, to the north of Java.
You make a good point about the distance that Pekanbaru-based jets would have to fly to catch an interloper near Aceh. Yet somehow they’ve done it in the past; here is an Indonesian-language press account of a civilian plane that was intercepted by F-16s after it appeared on Lhokseumawe radar: http://goo.gl/rQrv2X.
Maybe they happened to be on a training mission in the area and got lucky.
@JS, thanks for the kind words. As the language that the Indonesians used, the Jakarta post paraphrased it as “did not detect the missing MH370 in the area where the Malaysian military suggested as being the plane’s last detected position around Penang waters.” So if you wanted to be really legalistic you could ask, “Well, did you detect it to the west of that area, or to the southwest of Aceh, or anywhere else for that matter?”
I think the word “detected” would apply both to real-time observation and recordings viewed after the fact.
Thanks, @lucy barnes and @Ken S, for spotting those errors. I’ve fixed them.
@JS, re what did Indonesia say, here’s an excerpt from a March 19 article in the Jakarta Post:
“Defense Minister Purnomo Yusgiantoro has asserted that the military radar placed in Sabang, Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam — Indonesia’s westernmost point — did not detect missing flight MH370 or any other foreign aircraft crossing Indonesian airspace.
‘I have received a report about it. The air defense radar system in Sabang is very sophisticated and it did not detect any aircraft,’ he said in Jakarta on Wednesday, as quoted by Antara news agency.
The minister said the military radar owned by the Defense Ministry was more sensitive than civilian radars so that there was no reason to doubt its accuracy.”
FWIW, I think Don (if I understand him correctly) has put his finger on the motivation for this kind of statement from Indonesia. Take the opportunity to puff, rather than admitting a shortcoming or three.
But if anyone thinks of stopping or altering the SIO search on account of such statements from Indonesia, hopefully it would open some diplomatic channels to keep the search on the right track, or has already.
What has heavier importance the missed Indonesian radar or the details of the tracing of the unanswered MAS Airlines ground to satphone call circa 18:39? I think the call tracing does at this point and apparently verifies location and the turn south given that the humans could have missed the radar detection or the equipment failed for some reason.
“When asked about the possibility some of the military radars could have been inactive at the time MH370 flew over Indonesia, Agus said, ‘don’t trust rumors so easily.'”
http://bit.ly/1qoEN3m
@jeffwise – that sound even worse. Worse, because not only did they not detect the flyby, but when phrased like that it appears to also contradict Malaysia’s reporting. Then again, has Malaysia ever actually claimed to have detected it on their own radar?
Is there any chance the Indonesia drift comments, made so publicly, are part of a shaming on Indonesia for either 1) missing the plane, or 2) lying about it? The drift warnings could easily have been done in private. But ultimately it seems somebody here has to be lying about something.
Ben Sandilands (@planetalking) — 06.23.14
“It has been suggested to me that JORN was only looking at things in Indonesia. I suspect that had there been a timely signal that an airliner was heading south into the Indian Ocean contrary to filed flight plan, some very interesting things might have happened.”
http://bit.ly/1uOXfSq
If “suggested” means (“I was told”), why would JORN have been looking at (read: pointed at) Indonesia?
@Bruce,
I see three ways to interpret Indonesia’s defense minister’s statement:
1. He is telling the truth, the radar was on and they didn’t detect anything.
2. As per 1., but he was only referring to the southbound leg, which was by then already publicly postulated.
3. He is clearly “massaging” the truth, as there were numerous planes in the Malacca Strait, which the radars would have had to have seen/recorded if they were on and the operators paid attention.
If 3. is true, then there is no new info. We have the radar track through the Strait and the Indos didn’t see anything or didn’t want to have seen anything => radars off, operator asleep, or, as per Don’s they saw, but were unable to respond and left it.
If 2. is true, then MH370 had to have passed the radar surveillance boundary on the outside of its range. Which in turn would put it further west on the southbound leg, or in other words, the southbound turn at a later time. This seems to violate the BFO evidence for the southward track earlier.
If 1. is true, then MH370 never entered the Malacca Strait and the post turn back radar track is either a figment of someone’s imagination, or not that of MH370.
Malaysia has changed their story numerous of times, not looking good for their credibility nor capability.
Indonesia made few statements, the one cited by Bruce, sounding rather adamant. They said it once for the record, then left it be and watch the Malaysians knit themselves into knots, no more input required. Indonesia not stirring the pot anymore for diplomatic reasons.
Who looks more suspicious, who do you believe?
Cheers,
Will
JS – on the money. The western most tip of Indonesia, the entrance to the straits, is an obvious place for a radar facility and to have it manned. This is what the Indons are saying it seems, and that it’s a pretty new one. Been years since I saw one but I imagine they involve audible prompts??? And that they are user friendly, like the 777 itself. And that recording would be standard, and inexpensive with todays technology?
The Wolfhound episode predating MH370 is telling, and fair to conclude that if the data was caught and it revealed nothing then there was no plane cutting through there – period. As it stands the search seems to be stating that the Indons missed the ball, something they reject. If it was Singapore saying they saw nothing would it be believed?
@Jeff,
Apologies: my point, badly made, is for TNI-AU’s air defence focus on Java and to the eastern territories of the Indonesian archipelago the rather than west, over Sumatra.
The Antara article you have referred describes, with some detail, an aircraft identified by RADAR at the country’s FIR boundary followed by a very straightforward daylight intercept with that approaching aircraft, over the Barisan Mountains (the spine of Sumatra), by a couple of 20yr old Block 15 spec F-16s within 35min normal flying time of their base at Pekanbaru.
While the article mentions SATRAD 231 at Lhokseumawe, 233 at Sabang & 234 at Sibolga, the description fits radials & range related from Lhok’.
In summary: a feasible daylight intercept considering the F-16 range & visual capability. A good story to big up TNI-AU’s capability.
I still contend that a night-time target detection of an aircraft tracking away could/would not be met with the same reaction. So, deny any RADAR sighting of the target & avoid any consequent questions.
Which comes, full circle, back to the ‘Beijing Lido’ image. Thailand does not risk anything by revealing a target sighting from their two RTADS-III sites: their ‘patch’ wasn’t threatened by what they saw.
:Don
Don – I can see the thinking but it sounds a bit North Korean – to me. Not much stays secret in Indonesia. If it was seen, there would be talk – imo.
@GuardedDon, I think you may well be right that Indonesia lacked the ability to intercept MH370, even if it had detected it. And I think its fair to say that Indonesia feels sensitive about how it is perceived by the international defence community, especially in the wake of the East Timor nastiness. Several of the interceptions that have been reported in recent years have the flavor of acts motivated more by spite than by sincere desire to protect its airspace; the SOCOM landing in particular seems odd, as does the Pakistani 737 that was forced down while carrying UN peacekeepers home from East Timor. And the circle of rifleman all pointing their weapons inward at the poor elderly Swiss man after his tiny plane was forced down from over the Barisan Mountains was pretty laughable. (If they’d all opened fire at once it would have been carnage).
So maybe the damned radar wasn’t even turned on, and all their noises are just to save face. What’s clear is that they didn’t see a plane where they should have been able to.
BTW, regarding the danger area over the Malacca Strait, here’s a good reference:
http://aip.dca.gov.my/aip%20pdf/ENR/ENR%205/ENR%205.1/Prohibited,%20Restricted%20And%20Dangerous%20Areas.pdf
The two areas in question, and their active times, are on page ENR 1.5 – 19.
I’ll concede that at this stage of the flight, MH370 was decidedly not hugging the edge of the airspace. On the other hand, at this point it was also flying directly away from the nearest air force base and so would unlikely to be perceived as a threat, or as a target that could realistically be intercepted within Malaysian airspace. I still see evidence that the skirting-FIR-boundaries strategies was employed early in the diversion, from the turn at IGARI to Penang, when the importance of not raising an alarm would have been greatest.
I would have a slightly different interpretation than the plane was skirting FIRs. Rather, it appears the plane stayed within the Malaysian FIR until the turn south put it within the Jakarta FIR and on a path inward towards the Sumatra radar station at Lhokseumawe, Aceh. There is also a Sumatra radar station at Sabang, Aceh, but the flight path within the Jakarta FIR was tangential and probably not perceived as a threat at this station.
So one theory would be that the plane deliberately took a course knowing that radar operators and/or military personnel in Malaysia and at Lhokseumawe would not elevate the detection to a level that would elicit a military response. How would this be known a priori?
We have to remember that in the early days, Malaysia tried to misdirect the investigation towards the South China Sea even though it had radar data in its possession showing the plane doubled-back across the Malay peninsula. To me, this has always been a big smoking gun that there is something important that Malaysia is hiding.
The lack of corroborating radar data from Indonesia also is very suspicious. In fact, Indonesia seems to be making statements similar to what Malaysia did in the days just after the disappearance, before the US embarrassed them into admitting the plane flew back over the Malay peninsula and the radar data was belatedly coughed up.
Unfortunately, without either a leak from an intelligence agency, a witness, or a whistleblower, we are left to speculating among ourselves with no proof of what really occurred.
@jeffwise: I missed something. What’s your theory as to why the RMAF wasn’t scrambled when MH370 flew towards Butterworth AFB?
@VictorI, because it was flying along the Malaysia/Thai border, neither saw it as being in their jurisdiction (at one point the Thais explicitly said, “it was never in our territory,” which is not strictly true). By the time it was well and truly in Malaysian airspace it was only 40 nm from Butterworth, or 5 minutes’ flying time at 500 knots. Not enough time to react, even if it was quickly identified as a threat, which it seems not to have been, at least according to official statements after the fact.
@jeffwise: My guess would be that an unidentified object approaching an AFB at 500 knots would be considered a threat whether or not its path skirted an FIR boundary for part of its flight. I would be interested to know what Mr. Pearson’s thoughts would be for this particular case and geography.
I had thought the PRIMARY correlation of MH370’s purported westbound leg was to commonly flown flight paths (M765, B219, N571, etc.). If so, this invites two possible interpretations:
1) MH370 flew along these routes, in order to blend in with the crowd
2) MH370 did NOT travel along those routes – but OTHER aircraft DID, generating the only primary radar data handy enough to fake a believable westward journey on short notice.
Matty, JS:
“The Wolfhound episode predating MH370 is telling”
You better believe it.
As mentioned here previously, what leapt off the page immediately when I saw that article back in March was the story. It didn’t make any sense. So the question (in my mind) was: what were the Spec Ops guys on that plane really doing?
If you get word of a plot, what do you need to do before you can thwart it? You must do the recon.
Consider that a Wolfhound happening to run out of fuel (over Banda Aceh, of all places) was a TEST of the radar system.
Sidebar: a April report that Agus Dwikarna, a Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) operative who according to the UN, escorted Ayman al-Zawahiri on a tour of Aceh province in 2002, had disappeared.
http://bit.ly/1p1xfCz
Victor:
“the plane deliberately took a course knowing that radar operators and/or military personnel in Malaysia and at Lhokseumawe would not elevate the detection to a level that would elicit a military response. How would this be known a priori?”
Because the perpetrators cased the hood.
They had information about how things ‘work’ based on experience (and/or homework). As a military navigator, Pearson did exactly the same: he used information (previously acquired) “to slip through airspace where he wasn’t supposed to be.”
Capt. A Ranganathan in The Hindu
(Disturbing scenarios on MH370, March 18, 2014):
“3. Climb to 29,500 feet.
The VFR altitude used by military aircraft in RVSM airspace. Or, an aircraft with communication failure !!
This will not alert the military radar if they are awake at that time to monitor!
4. Flight along an airway from VAMPI to IGREX.
A very clever ploy so as not to alert the AF radars who will not react much to a blip going along an airway.
5. After IGREX.
The flight will definitely not move in a northern path as the AF radars are too alert in that area. The southern route is a sure bet and here is the reason that will make you all sit up.
The Car Nicobar radar was destroyed in 2004 during the tsunami and I heard that they have not replaced it with a modern radar and have only a mobile radar that is not manned during night! Even if they do have the radar on, Carnic is just a helicopter base! How are they going to catch an aircraft travelling at 0.85M?”
Jeff, Very interesting post and great blog. I am reminded me of an early hypothesis from Keith Legderwood that MH370 “disappeared” from primary radar because it flew very close to SQ68.( Details at http://keithledgerwood.com/post/80154688823/questions-answers-follow-up-1-how-did-malaysian.)
Of course, the BOF data eventually refuted the idea that MH370 continue to fly NW in the shadow of SQ68. But there again if it turned south why it was not detected by Indonesia’s radar? And why is there still no debris?
Maybe the evidence for a southern path should be reexamined.
@Nihonmama: Yes, I understood the perps had planned this in advance. I’d like to know whether Mr. Pearson or anybody else in the know believes that an unidentified plane flying from Kota Bharu to Penang at 500 knots would be likely intercepted by jets stationed at Butterworth, understanding that part of that path is along the FIR boundary. Likewise, an identified plane flying towards Lhokseumawe radar site in Indonesia. The answers to those specific questions would help in determining likely complicity. If the answer is no, then perhaps Malaysia and Indonesia simply covered up their defense deficiencies after the fact. If the answer is yes, the chances are higher that the military was instructed to ignore the plane that night.
Hi,
I’m wondering if there is a possibility that the a/c took a sufficient wide turn west around Aceh not to be detected (by Indonesia) or at least not to be considered as a threat.
In my opinion we just don’t know when the turn south occurred. The BFO from 18:40 phone call is not convincing to me. One could for example think of the case that the a/c was descending before the turn south, in order to avoid the heavy traffic when crossing the NW/SE routes. So, I would like to know if flight time would allow such a path (roughly touching the Nicobar Islands) when we calculate back from 37/38S, assuming a level and straight flight at about 480 – 490 knots south, from let’s say 19:30 till 00:11 UTC.
Des Ross: “Dont mess with the IAF!”
https://twitter.com/PAIN_NET1/status/530240572573765632
@Nihonmama
I guess you do not mean the Indian Air Force. Because I remember back in March someone from IAF more or less admitting they were sleeping that night in Andaman area.
@Niels, if you allow for the possibility of a rapid descent (4,000 fpm, if I recall my calculation) at 18:40, it certainly is possible that the plane was traveling north and later turned south, although the end point would likely be further north than 38S.
@Brock, yes–flight paths and/or waypoints. I think it might have been Warren Platts who first concluded that:
“the apparent flight path of the a/c from 16:41 until 18:29 is wholly consistent with an a/c following a waypoint path, namely: KUA PIBOS VKR IGARI VENLI VKB VPG VAMPI MEKAR NILAM SANOB. Most of the track follows the named routes R208 M765 B219 N571 and P627.”
Hey Niels:
You are correct. Des Ross was referring to the Indonesian Air Force.
Speaking of turns, here is another curiosity from the SATCOM transmissions just after the last radar contact.
During the time span 18:25:27 to 18:28:15, just after the AES is thought to have been powered back on, there are 7 R-channel BTO values total. The last five are relatively consistent – 12560 down to 12480 microseconds. The first value, generated by the Logon Request, is way off, but we are told in the ATSB report that a fixed offset of 4600 microseconds can be applied, resulting in a value of 12520 microseconds and seemingly consistent with the other values. (The second value is unreliable and not considered here.)
Nevertheless there is a problem. If the aircraft were heading WNW at 500 knots, the course last seen on the radar track, the BTO would be changing rapidly. Over the nearly 3 minute time span, the BTO should decrease by 137 microseconds. There is evidence of a downward progression in the last 5 BTO values, but the first “corrected” value should at least 100 microseconds bigger. Including a turn during this period (as is done by Ulich) and thus altering the direction of travel does not help much. Perhaps the fixed offset is not well determined or has a fair amount of jitter from one logon to the next.
In any case, it raises the question of how reliable the BTO at 00:19, which comes from another Logon Request, actually is, particularly since this BTO determines the position of the 7th arc and the search zone.
I have not seen any analysis that incorporates all the BTOs from this time series in a consistent fashion.
Images on the blog of the radar unit at Lhokseumawe suggests the site has a tree-cluttered horizon on at least one side. The elevation of an aircraft at 35000ft and a range of only 120nm is less than 2 degrees, so a completely clear horizon would be needed. The mission of this radar site must be to look at targets coming from the East and NE (i.e. Malaysia) but not to the NW and certainly not the West, so to suggest an effective tracking radius well to the West of the Medan is an exaggeration.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/b3qapjgiuce241x/Ind_radar.jpg?dl=0
The radar at Sabang might be a better candidate for tracking the MH370 Southern turn but Indonesia needs a lot of radar stations, as the map suggests, so gaps would not be a surprise.
JS:
Updated coordinates for that image west of Sumatra:
LAT: 9.295054 LONG: 103.537153
After Digiglobe Tomnod CHANGED the map numbers (and hid locations from users), MJ (@drewrat81) used an api to find the above.
He says: “this image is a perfect scale match for how big the plane should look on the tomnod”
Check this out:
https://twitter.com/nihonmama/status/535198691402190848
One would assume that the vast majority of aircraft overflying Indonesia (or just about any other country) at any one time are entitled to be there, so how would one identify the rare “rogue” aircraft? Do they have working transponders, such that the information sent by the transponder is correlated against some list of authorized aircraft? Or are they seen in primary but not secondary radar? MH370 presumably was in the latter category when hugging the coast of Indonesia. How were all the other aircraft intercepted by the Air Force identified?
@Nihonmama: re: Wolfhound: yes, you “must do the recon” in order to thwart a crime. But when we catch someone casing a joint, “thwart” is not the first verb that leaps to mind…
Brock:
Ah, our assumptions may differ. IMHO, the joint was cased BEFORE the arrival of said Wolfhound.
What’s the verb in place of thwart that you’re thinking of (but not saying)?
And I understand if you don’t want to say it out loud…
@Nihonmama: if you are making any assumptions at all, then our assumptions differ.
ANYONE could be the culprit. My list of suspects is topped by states I can prove lied to us – that’s all.
Brock:
State (actors) are not ruled out.
I think they (ATSB & official investigative team) need to release the details of the satphone unanswered call that as far as I know are still unbeknownst to all of us. It is that which is determining the point of turn south earlier than originally thought. One article I read says that call was “traced.” If the call originated from Kuala Lumpur at MAS ground, assuming they are in the same building at KLIA or thereabout, then is there a way for a cell tower to track the distance to the object called (MH370)? Were they calling the satphone number on a land line or another phone line and can the tracing of that call determine location of number called, which would be somewhere exiting the Malacca Strait and rounding the northern tip of Indonesia according to Jeff’s wonderful map up above?
sk999,
Interesting post. Would there be nuances of differences in the BTO’s/BFO’s in the two separate Logon Requests, being that the 18:25 one supposedly wasn’t engine related that we know of and the 00:19 one was engine related? Unless of course the 18:25 one was engine related (in Victor’s landing scenario) and what Kate Tee saw was a black contrail from the RAT deploying?
Cheryl: Re “…is there a way for a cell tower to track the distance to the object called (MH370)?…”, there is no cell tower involved with any of the satellite phone calls.
I think there were two satellite phone calls but I do not know of any tracing or tracking capabilities… however a while ago it was mentioned the co-pilot’s cell phone registered itself on a cell tower.. now if there was any specifics like when it connected, and where this tower is located, then maybe there is a correlation to which flight paths MH370 took. if the satellite locations could be determined then it can also show which path MH370 likely took.
Airlandseaman,
Thanks. How did they trace it then and can they come up with location of object called at the time of the call just from the detail in the log? If that is the case too bad they (MAS) did not keep trying to call, then there may have been location information at every point of call.
The article I was reading that quotes Mr. Truss as saying the research of the details of the sat phone call helped position the aircraft and what direction it was traveling in. So to me that signifies there must be some type of GPS information within the detail of that unanswered call.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/28/mh370-satellite-phone-call-revealed-as-australia-gives-update-on-search