Occam’s Razor is Overrated

conspiracy theoryMartin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), is plagued by conspiracy theorists. According to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, since the disappearance of MH370, “conspiracy theorists have been busy trying to solve the mystery themselves. Many have contacted Dolan.”

“You’ve got this big mystery and everyone wants to know the answer and everyone wants to help,” the SMH quotes Dolan as saying. “It’s unhelpful, for the sake of the families more than anything else, in the sense that it has the potential to undermine confidence in what we are doing.”

I feel somewhat guilty for being one of those peanut-gallery denizens who have tormented him. Along with my fellow obsessives in the Independent Group, I’ve been straining my brain for the last eight months trying to make sense of the strangest aviation mystery in history. Yes, I’d like to be helpful; yes, I’d like to know the answers. And yes, I may have unwittingly undermined confidence in what the ATSB was doing, for instance by publicly saying that I thought they were looking in the wrong place. (Though, to be fair, they were in fact looking in the wrong place.)

Nevertheless, I must take issue with one aspect of the article’s characterization of my subculture: the use of the term “conspiracy theorist.” Now, look: I get it. My wife says that I remind her of the Kevin Costner character in “JFK.” I ruminate about the intracacies of a famous case and try to piece them together in a new way that makes more sense. I’m obsessed.

There’s a big difference, however, between true grassy-knoll conspiracy theorists (or 9/11Truthers, or the-moon-landing-was-faked believers) and MH370 obsessives like me. It’s this: there is no default, mainstream narrative about the missing Malaysian airliner. There is no story that officials and all reasonable people agree makes sense.

This isn’t the result of laziness or incompetence. It’s just that the data is so strange.

A lot of people don’t get that. Ever since the mystery began, certain voices have been invoking the principle of Occam’s razor, saying that when we try to formulate a most likely scenario for what happened to the plane, we should choose the answer that is simplest. People who are making this argument are usually in favor of the argument that the plane suffered a massive mechanical failure and then flew off into the ocean as a ghost ship, or that the pilot locked his co-pilot out of the cockpit and committed suicide. However, as I’ve argued over the course of several earlier posts, neither theory matches what we know about the flight.

Instead, I’ve argued that an accumulation of evidence suggests that MH370 was commandeered by hijackers who had a very sophisticated understanding of airline procedure, air traffic control, avionics systems, military radar surveillance, and satellite communications. In other words, what happened on the night of March 7/8 of this year was a intentional act. And when it comes to human schemes, Occam’s razor goes out the window. Instead of simplicity, we should expect complexity, not to mention red herrings and any other form of subterfuge.

Whenever I hear Occam’s razor invoked, I inevitably find myself thinking of something that Sarah Bajc said on CNN. Bajc’s partner, Philip Wood, is one of the missing passengers, and she has been very open minded in considering alternative explanations to what happened that night. “There are 40 crazy stories that you could tell about MH370,” she told the anchor. “And one of them is going to turn out to be true.”

I’ve come to think of this as the Bajc Postulate, which I think should replace Occam’s Razor in situations like this. It goes like this: “When trying to unravel human deception, don’t expect simplicity.”

Remember Operation Mincemeat? In 1943, a fisherman found the body of a British officer floating in the sea off the Spanish coast. The authorities turned the corpse over to German intelligence, who discovered that it carried a number of secret documents, including one indicating that the expected Allied assault from North Africa would target Sardinia, not Sicily, as widely expected. The authenticity of the documents was vouched for by every detail of the body, its clothes, and the accompanying possessions, which included several love letters, a photo of a fiancee, a bill from an exclusive tailor, and a theater ticket stub. Either this man and his belongings had all been elaborately and meticulously forged, or he really was who he seemed to be: Occam’s Razor. Hitler himself was utterly convinced. And yet, of course, the whole thing was a ruse, an elaborate deception cooked up with painstaking care by British intelligence. Hitler shifted three divisions to Sardinia, the invasion landed at Sicily, and the war was that much closer to being over.

I think it’s distinctly possible that MH370 represents a deception crafted at the same level of complexity.

In my mind, the crux is what happened at 18:25. Until that moment, the plane had been on radio silence for nearly an hour. After following a zig-zag path along national airspace boundaries, it had reached the limit of military radar coverage and had disappeared. But then, mysteriously, the satcom system reconnected to the Inmarsat satellite overhead. For it to do this, the hijackers would have had to either climbed into the electronics bay or carried out a complex procedure in the cockpit that few people outside of Boeing itself would now how to accomplish. All this, to no evident purpose: no attempt was subsequently used to communicate via the system.

Other things were odd about the 18:25 logon. The frequencies that the system transmitted over the next few minutes were inexplicable to the scientists at Inmarsat. Though the electronics of the system are perfectly understood by the equipment’s manufacturers, they cannot explain how the frequencies were produced. Investigative efforts within the IG suggest that there was another mysterious aspect to the satcom’s behavior post-18:25: when a pair of incoming calls was received at 18:41, the system was unable to pass the calls through. We’re not sure why, but the most likely cause is that errors in the system’s configuration prevented it from aiming the satellite dish correctly.

By 19:41, the satcom system seemed to settle down and transmit at stable frequencies. If taken at face value, these frequencies indicated unambiguously that the plane was flying south. Yet the ATSB has never able to completely make sense of these values. As I wrote last week, it has proven frustratingly difficult to make the two distinct halves of the Inmarsat data—the timing and the frequency data—match up in a way that makes sense.

Regardless of these difficulties, most reasonable people share the conviction that, regardless of what particular track the plane happened to fly, it definitely flew south into the most remote reaches of the southern Indian Ocean. I’ve examined the data myself, and come away convinced that, indeed, the frequency data unequivocally supports this conclusion. But no one knows why anyone would do this. One popular notion is that the hijackers had a destination in mind, but something went wrong, they became incapacitated, and the plane flew on autopilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed. This scenario is certainly possible, but as I recently pointed out, a new speed-analysis technique suggests the plane was under deliberate control until the very end.

So if they weren’t incapacitated, why were these very motivated, very sophisticated hijackers flying a perfectly good jet off into the middle of the ocean? As I see it, there are two possibilities:

  • The hijackers were very sophisticated, but for some unknown reason chose to fly the plane off into the middle of the ocean, or
  • They were very, very, very sophisticated, and not only survived, but managed to cover their tracks in a way that has fooled absolutely everybody — and turning on the SDU was an essential part of their plan. This explains why there has been no debris found, why there was no radar track over the southern Indian Ocean, and why Inmarsat has been baffled by the BFO values.

This kind of thinking would have been considered outlandish a few months ago, but the more time goes by without any trace of the plane turning up, the more reasonable it is starting to seem. No less an industry eminence than Emirates CEO Tim Clark, whose airline operates the largest 777 fleet in the world, recently told Der Spiegel: “We have not seen a single thing that suggests categorically that this aircraft is where they say it is, apart from this so-called electronic satellite ‘handshake,’ which I question as well.”

To accomplish a disappearing act, the hijackers would have had to have pulled off a plan that the authorities not only couldn’t anticipate beforehand, few could wrap their heads around it afterward. A plan so devious, it would literally be —

Inconceivable

What could such a plan have been? Frankly, there’s no way we can be sure. Until the plane is located, and the black boxes are found, all we can do is speculate. But some speculation runs in accordance with the facts, and some runs counter to it. Over the last few months, I’ve pieced together a narrative that I think matches well the facts we do know, explains some otherwise baffling conundrums, and basically ties together a means, a perpetrator, and a destination. (Which, paranthetically, is something that no one else, official or amateur, has yet attempted.)

In the past, I’ve invited others to share their “conspiracy theories,” and I tip my hat to the very, very few (two) who’ve had the courage to take me up on my offer. For the most part, their efforts were met with skepticism, but polite skepticism, and that reaction has emboldened me to press forward with my own big reveal. I hope that some people will find it thought-provoking, perhaps even convincing. I expect that a great many will find it, yes, inconceivable, perhaps even outrageous or even offensive. Remember, it is speculation, not a statement of fact; but if we don’t risk trotting out our speculations eventually then we will never get any closer to figuring out the truth.

If you care to dive down my rabbit hole, click below:

The Spoof, Part 1: Why (A Speculative Scenario)

The Spoof, Part 2: How (A Speculative Scenario)

The Spoof, Part 3: Where (Not a Speculative Scenario)

The Spoof, Part 4: Motive

The Spoof, Part 5: People on the Plane

The Spoof, Part 6: MH17

And that’s all there is for now.

450 thoughts on “Occam’s Razor is Overrated”

  1. You have missed something from your very interesting rambling.What were they doing with the SDU whilst it was switched off? Modifying it? In what way could it be altered? If the plane didn’t go North or South it probably ended at Bedax. But if that’s the case then how can we explain the continuing pings?

  2. No conspiracy theories here.

    A question came up about which flight path constitutes a “best fit” and whether overfitting the data to get zero residuals is OK or bad.

    First, the best fit is always the one that minimizes the rms of the residuals. That is the “maximum likelihood” solution.

    Second, in general the rms of the residuals will always be less than the formal 1-sigma error. If nobs is the number of observations and npar is the number of parameters of the fit, then (if I remember this right) rms = 1-sigma * sqrt((nobs-npar)/nobs). Thus, if you have as many free parameters as there are observations, the rms will be 0.

    There is nothing wrong with such a fit. However, people have not been asking the right question. The right question to ask is “what are the 1-sigma errors on the parameters that go into the fit and what are their correlations?” The answer to this question does not depend on the quality of the fit at all!

    Let us take an example. My “magnetic track” flight path has two free parameters: velocity and initial heading. (I start from IGOGU at 18:39 and kept those fixed). There are only 4 BTO measurements, since the one at 24:11 requires changing the velocity. The BTO values carry most of the weight. In fact, let us assume I ignore the BFOs. If the intrinsic error in the BTOs is 20 microsec, I will get an rms residual of 18 microsec for the best fit. Now I have actually undercounted the number of free parameters, because there is always the “ntrials effect” – how many different autopilot modes did I try first. My current best fit has an rms residual of 14 microseconds. Unexpected? Not at all.

    The 1-sigma errors in the parameters are 0.3 degrees in the heading and 3 km/s in the velocity, and the correlation coefficient is 0.93. The 1-sigma error in the final latitude is 0.2 degrees.

    Of course, all the above presumes that my values for the true errors are correct and that a magnetic track flight path is the correct model in the first place I don’t pretend that it is. The fit to the BFOs is not entirely satisfactory. I can certainly come up with a flight path that matches the BTO and BFO values simultaneously, but I’ll be darned if I can figure out how the plane came to fly that track.

  3. Conspiracy Theory was a term applied to the post Kennedy assassination – to any theory that this was not a lone gunman.
    Secret services highjacked term and turned it into a term of derision.
    I encourage you to use the term “secret service operation” instead. There are many pieces of evidence that point to MH370 being such an operation. The fact that all countries have set the information classification level at Top secret. The fact that USA has not declassified STSS or K11 data. Numerous “leaks” from secret service personnel. We could not let the cargo get to Beijing. Only Mossad has the skill, technology and organizational ability to pull this off.

  4. Erratum:

    I wrote “If the intrinsic error in the BTOs is 20 microsec ..” That should have been 26 microsec.

  5. @jeffwise: I am not a big fan of the spoof theory because it implies a level of sophistication that I think is not reasonable for the perps to have. (Yes, I could be wrong.) However, if you want to pursue the spoof scenario, I think it is more likely that there was a second plane, or even a drone, with a second SATCOM system that flew south while MH370 flew to who knows where. The ID of the second SATCOM system could have been programmed with the ID of 9M-MRO. What is more attractive about this scheme is that the level of technical sophistication is much less as there was no need to hack into an SDU or the flight computers with specialized hardware or software. Also, if it was a drone that flew south, there was no need for a suicidal pilot. The fact that the Fixed Frequency Bias of around 150 Hz was the same for the two SDUs would imply that there was some cross calibration between the two SDUs performed pre-flight. Also, the failure of the satellite calls at 18:40 and 23:14 could have been due the lack of a high gain antenna on the drone or plane.

  6. @jeffwise: Allow me further elaborate in case there is confusion about MH370 and the drone. I am assuming that the military radar, civilian radar, and SATCOM communications before 18:22 were all due to MH370. At 18:25, the SATCOM in the drone, flying close to MH370, was energized. (The SATCOM to MH370 was previously powered down around 17:21.) The drone took a turn to the south just before 18:40 and MH370 continued on to its destination fully cloaked.

  7. @VictorI

    Victor I raised the spoof possibility early on in Duncan’s blog, so I have been through it in some detail. A static spoofer would not be difficult to construct if it were located “inside” the closest ping ring so that only added variable delays were needed for BTO.

    Having said that, I have grown a bit cold on the spoofer explanation. Given that even Inmarsat showed some surprise at the potential use of their data, it seems very unlikely that a third party would have figured it out apriori. Like you, I could be wrong, but the spoof scenario seems less likely to me today than it did some time ago.

    Also the need to pre calibrate BFO offsets seems like quite a stretch.

  8. I have succumbed to the temptation and need to comment – –

    @sk999:How do you suppose that a B777 can follow a magnetic track ? Doing so under normal circumstances would be unlikely and unnecessary, especially if the flight passed through regions of significant change in magnetic declination. In such a flight the track would be significantly curved, unnecessarily so, and hence be wasteful of time and fuel.

    The B777 can fly with modes including LNAV, HDG Hold, TRK Hold. These are mutually exclusive. The manuals say the heading reference is suppled by the ADIRS, but the display can be either in True or Mag. The Magnetic reference though is derived by computation, and as far as I can tell is used only to present the display with the correct reference.

  9. “He who exercises no forethought but makes light of his opponents is sure to be captured by them.”

    ~Sun Tzu, The Art Of War

  10. @Dennis W: I agree with your conclusion. I find it unlikely that perps would understand the BFO better than Inmarsat.

    However, if you want to pursue the idea of a ground-based SATCOM (which I think is unlikely), I don’t think you don’t need to be within the smallest ping arc. The SDU is syncing to a pulse train, and the periodicity of that train means you can arbitrarily add or subtract timing.

  11. “I can certainly come up with a flight path that matches the BTO and BFO values simultaneously, but I’ll be darned if I can figure out how the plane came to fly that track.”

    I’m nowhere near an expert in the aviation field, but I’m very curious about this statement. Is there someplace I can see a visual map of the flight path that’s based on the actual BTO & BFO values? I’d love to see that; thanks so much! =)

  12. Victor:

    You can only add delay (hince need to be inside the smallest ring), not reduce it, assuming a simple digital controlled phase delay is inserted in the antenna cable to accomplish the task. Much harder to do it in the FPGA.

  13. @Jeff,
    >People who are making this argument are usually in favor of the argument that the plane suffered a massive mechanical failure and then flew off into the ocean as a ghost ship, or that the pilot locked his co-pilot out of the cockpit and committed suicide

    Perhaps you would care to demonstrate why you feel the latter half of this statement has validity (the pilot portion).

    It has NOT been proven in the slightest that the EE bay HAD to be entered. If you don’t care for the idea of the SDU from the cockpit, that is your prerogative. However, in defense of Occam’s razor, having multiple human beings in any scenario doubtless raises the threshold of plausibility exponentially for myriad reasons (some well illustrated by Rand).

    We don’t need to know WHY Zaharie repowered AES. He had his reasons, and if we are unsatisfied with the vagueness of the rationale ascribed to the 18:25 event, so be it. It’s immaterial in the end, I’m afraid.

  14. Jeff,

    Wow, quite a bit of great writing here. I know you had thought north early on originally I think and even questioned flipping the early southern arc northward if I am not mistaken, which I thought was brilliant at that time. Prior to the understanding and interpretations of the Inmarsat data, north made the most logical sense to me simply because human life was cycling there, humans were living and money was flowing, unlike the vast nothingness of the Indian Ocean, where who the heck controlling the aircraft would want to fly into oblivion there? Early on north made a lot of sense, logical sense with a coherent crew of some kind.
    But I would question that wouldn’t Inmarsat be one step ahead of this kind of game by these over sophisticated perps? Shouldn’t they (Inmarsat) have anti-spoofing or call it what you will systems securely in place to guard against spoofing? And who better than Inmarsat to interpret their own data?
    And are you saying this was Brodski? He was the deep water diving instructor and the other 2 Ukrainians were of the same age, all 3 in their early to mid forties, I noticed that early on when MAS released the passenger manifest. But doesn’t Brodski have a grieving wife and two children as well? I hate even stating his name here as he may be an innocent victim, but that is who came to mind in your description of the quick-eyed man with scuba diving gear so I would assume he had quite some athletic prowess. Did he or whoever went to the EE bay, go in armed or his precision timing enabled him to allude the stewardesses and go in unarmed?
    I think Jeff in your scenario you are saying all was well then up to 17:21ish when all the comms started going off. I still think all was not so well prior based on the evidence of the audio recording. I still think 2 pilots, one methodical, one on his first unsupervised flight, on a red-eye tired or not, are missing the flight name way too many times and that still bothers me, and that was well before 17:21.
    Me being more of the KISS principle hypothesis, I am open to your scenario a bit though. It’s either some type of hijacking or some bizarre series of mechanical events. I still don’t see the culpability on Captain Zaharie Shah or FO Fariq Hamid at all.
    Interestingly enough, that Saturday evening on March 8, as the story was all over CNN, I specifically remember eating in a place in NJ where I usually do on weekends. It is in a very nice area with a very respectable clientele and everyone was glued to the tv and CNN. One guy came in and I still to this day hear his exact words on what he felt happened, “someone got paid to deliver something somewhere.”

  15. Occam’s Razor Is Indeed Overrated: “There’s a big difference, however, between true grassy-knoll conspiracy theorists (or 9/11Truthers)… and MH370 obsessives like me. It’s this: there is no default, mainstream narrative about the missing Malaysian airliner. There is no story that officials and all “reasonable people” agree makes sense.”

    That’s true. All there is, is a concerted effort at the highest levels of government, of misdirection, insisting upon searching thousands of miles away from where multiple witnesses came forward to say they had seen the plane.

    Come to think of it, the Warren Commission itself was the primary tool for misdirection, insisting amidst ample evidence to the contrary, that Oswald was the lone gunman.

    THE 2003 CONFESSION:
    James Earl Files (born January 24, 1942) former Central Intelligence Agency/Mafia hit man, after suddenly being outed by the FBI for his role in the assassination, (one of a three man team hired for the JFK hit), acknowledges he was the grassy knoll shooter in Dealey Plaza on the morning of the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. The lead on James Files came from FBI Agent Zack Shelton (now retired) who served 28 years with the FBI. He has an impeccable record and spent much of his career on organized crime task forces of Chicago and Kansas City. He is the man who gave the information on James Files to private investigator Joe West. Zack Shelton had reason to believe that James Files knew something specific about the Kennedy assassination, based on a remark that James Files had made to an FBI informant. Joe West subsequently located James Files in Stateville penitentiary and eventually struck up a friendship of sorts. Because several attempts had already been made on File’s life, he wanted it made abundantly clear that he had never volunteered to give information on his role in the assassination. The tip to Joe West, who was working on a lawsuit to exhume JFK’s body, came from Agent Shelton. West was working to prove that Kennedy was hit from the front, and by multiple gunmen. It was his belief that a new and independent autopsy would prove that the first autopsy represented a fraud which had been perpetrated on the American public. After several meetings with Files, West joined a long line of people who suffered suspicious deaths. With his death, the exhumation suit also died. Files confessed to being the gunman on the grassy knoll. He provided West’s successor with tangible proof.

    Files’ confession was filmed and made part of “The Men Who Killed Kennedy”, an expanding video documentary series by Nigel Turner which originally aired in 1988 in England with two one-hour segments about the John F. Kennedy assassination.

    The United States corporation, Arts & Entertainment Company, purchased the rights to the original two segments.
    Three one-hour segments were added in 1991.
    A sixth segment was added in 1995.
    Finally, three additional hourly segments were added by the History Channel in November 2003.

    The ninth segment was entitled “The Guilty Men”.
    That segment was completely withdrawn by the History Channel, after A&E was threatened with legal action.

    It didn’t match the government’s “official story”.

    Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA operative.
    He was also, he realized, shortly before he was murdered, “a government patsy”

    One major result of the Kennedy assassination was the “Firearms Control Act of 1968,” which was the first major legislation regarding governmental control of citizens firearms since the 1930s, where private ownership of automatic weapons had to be licensed by the federal government.

    NewsMax aired the new documentary “I Killed JFK”, in November of 2014. The film contains never before seen interviews of James Files, retired FBI agents and others in positions of power whose testimony was deliberately withheld from the Warren Commission.

    http://youtu.be/hF1kH4TxmW0

  16. @airlandseaman: If you have a periodic signal train, why can’t the phase be advanced or retarded arbitrarily using only delay elements? A delay of 350 deg looks the same as an advance of 10 deg. It is only the phase that matters, not the actual time delay.

  17. Outlandish as this will sound, it really shouldn’t given certain truths. The plane may not have gone down, but gone up. A craft a mile wide, as has been reported often, and seen by thousands in Phoenix, may have simply – abducted it.

  18. @jeffwise; I am reconsidering my drone scenario. The cost and complexity of a drone that flies at Mach 0.83 is high and probably not easy to obtain. I still think, however, that spoof scenario requires an unrealistic level of sophistication on the part of the perps, and an understanding of the BFO and uplink Doppler residual that Inmarsat was struggling to reach in the aftermath of the incident.

  19. To who believe the perpetrators lack the sophistication to know X or to do X: could you please tell us more about them? Because if you know what knowledge and/or skills they lack, that would suggest you have some inside information the rest of us are not privy to.

  20. Cheryl,

    YOUR pilots (your words) , one really, Zaharie, seem to be getting a reprieve from scrutiny to a degree what with the continued positing of plurality (they this, they that etc…).

    This plurality has become the accepted vernacular now on this thread, WITHOUT a shred of evidence supporting this notion. It’s quite incredible how quick you are to point the finger at anyone and anything other than YOUR pilots. Sigh

    Biases and agendas run deep. Throw the dead Ukrainian SCUBA diver under the bus. What a farce.

  21. Cheryl,

    Just in case I’m not being clear, these are your words as well, are they not?

    “”I like it because it reduces culpability on the part of Captain Zaharie”.

    Sigh.

  22. Spencer,

    Hold on there just a minute my pal Spencer!

    I’ve been steadfast in my beliefs to now that some mechanical failure or failures happened, but I have kept an open mind. Any investigator (let alone we amateurs) in this should keep an open mind and not just a myopic view of our own opinions.

    In no way here have I thrown Brodski “under the bus” or deemed him culpable. I questioned Jeff if his description was him, that’s about it. You need to read my posts more thoroughly because I have not pointed a finger at ANYONE on that flight EVER, I have leaned towards some mechanical failure provoking a deliberate IGARI/BITOD turn and have stayed with that, KISS theory, keep it simple, stupid, with hypoxia being the culprit. I am open to Jeff’s theory, Victor’s gold and landing theory, etc. I’ve blamed mechanical/hypoxia, NOT individuals both here and on Duncan’s blog.

    You believe Captain Zaharie is guilty, I don’t, both are acceptable at this point because no one knows. There is nothing in my post above that incriminates Mr. Brodski in the least, I have even stated he may be an innocent victim. But Jeff is an aviation expert, scientist, and writer and I respect his scenario here and it’s worthy of being considered.

    Quick to point the finger at anyone other than “my pilots?” Sorry Spencer I am reluctant to change usually, and I have kept with the hypoxia idea throughout. Who have I pointed a finger at or what? All I have ever said is I have kept an open mind. There is not one person on or off of that passenger manifest that I have blamed other than mechanical/hypoxia, and they did not have a ticket.

    Ok so I’ve termed them “my pilots.” I see them as innocents until proven guilty and Jeff’s theory of an intruder in the EEbay supports something I have felt all along, that the pilots were “Angels Unaware.” (Title taken from a book written by Dale Evans).

    Someone reading your post would think I was quick to blame anyone and anything other than the pilots and that is not the case. I am very guarded and cognizant of what I write. If it turns out the pilots are guilty then so be it and I am wrong, but they are still innocent until proven guilty as is Mr. Brodski.

  23. Cheryl,

    I won’t comment further other than to say the following: You claim to have an ‘open mind’, YET, these are your words, verbatim: “”I like it because it reduces culpability on the part of Captain Zaharie”.

    You can try to explain this away in whatever manner you so choose, but the FACT remains…the bias is stunningly self-evident.

    Cheers

  24. @nihonmama: I cannot speak for others, but here is what I said: “I am not a big fan of the spoof theory because it implies a level of sophistication that I think is not reasonable for the perps to have. (Yes, I could be wrong.)”

    So, a reasonable person reading this would understand that I am stating an opinion having used the words “I think” and “I could be wrong.” That implies that I don’t “know what knowledge and/or skills they lack.”

    I also have no “inside information the rest of us are not privy to.” However, I have analyzed the satellite data in detail and I believe that entitles me to state my opinion here about the technical complexity of matters related to the data, especially if I clearly denote that my opinions are exactly that. (There are others here that are equally capable of rendering their own technical opinions on this matter having also analyzed the data.)

    The BTO data suggests a route generally south or a route towards the north-northwest. It is the BFO data that allows one to determine which was actually flown. If you recall, Inmarsat accepted both routes as valid, and only later, after more thorough and complex analyses, decided that the BFO supported only the southern route.

    In Jeff’s scenario, the BFO data is manipulated but the BTO data is not. That means one of the two routes suggested by the BTO data leads right back to the actual plane path. For this scenario to work, you would have to believe that:

    1. The perps had a better understanding of Doppler effects and the communications equipment than Inmarsat had in the aftermath of the accident.
    2. The perps had assumed that eventually Inmarsat would understand the BFO data to the level where they would reject the northern paths.
    3. The perps had incorrectly assumed that there were no other clues that the satellite data might provide that could help determine the plane’s actual position, despite their high level of sophistication.

    I believe that (1) is not likely since the satellite and the onboard SATCOM are specifically designed for the Inmarsat network. Inmarsat should be the experts.

    I believe that (2) is not likely because the clues left behind (the BFO data values) are too obtuse to assume somebody will correctly interpret them. Indeed, Inmarsat struggled for many days.

    I believe that (3) is not likely because if they were smart enough to understand the BFO data, they would also understand the possibility of BTO data.

    I believe that if the perps wanted to hide where they were going, rather than going through the unnecessarily complex and dangerous procedure of spoofing the SATCOM, they would have just kept it powered down and avoided any evidence at all rather than create false data that could analyzed in a way not consistent with the perps’ plan.

    After all, we would still be searching in either the South China Sea or in the Andaman Sea if we didn’t have the satellite data which indicated the plane flew on for many hours.

  25. Spencer,

    Exactly my words. I have always felt this was something “done to them” either by an uncontrollable force (fire/lack of oxygen) or by a person or persons.

    What it comes down to are mechanical/hijacking/pilot suicide or sabotage are all still all on the official table and no matter how we shake it up all could still apply to the data and the quirkiness of the flight. I lean towards the first one with a possibility of the second, you lean towards the third. No one is right, no one is wrong. But I agree with Jeff, certain scenarios should be explored deeper.

  26. @Jeff: One question, two criticisms, and a final compliment:

    Question (seeking strictly signal data expertise, i.e. ignoring motive/opportunity for a moment): is Yubileyniy the lone BTO-indicated “diamond”, or just one of thousands of runways that become similarly feasible upon discarding the BFO?

    Criticism 1: your path avoids Indian and Chinese airspace in much the same way a foreign jet “avoids US airspace” by overflying the US states bordering Canada. Throw “location of Indian and Chinese nuclear warheads” onto the huge pile of topics about which I know nothing, but it would not surprise me if a military expert savaged your “close to a border, therefore SEP*” assumption (* Military experts are notoriously fond of Douglas Adams). Skirting the land borders of nuclear powers is NOT like skirting airspace jurisdictions over remote oceans. At ALL.

    Criticism 2: If BFO data can be elegantly and effectively doctored in real-time, surely BOTH elements of the signal data could be doctored if the perps had, say, 2+ months to massage them prior to public release. Diego Garcia is WAY more accessible than your location (Occam still has its uses), Inmarsat’s flagship client is the US government, and I predict your “Part IV” motive will fit any superpower like a glove. (I will not argue the relative propensity of nations to commit heinous acts with a patriot, because only one of us will be governed by reason.)

    Compliment: your research is broad and deep, your analysis keen, your writing brilliant, and your efforts hugely appreciated. This scenario will create a stir – and will surely help put pressure on the JIT to better defend what they’ve already invested in the SIO. Thank you very much for your tireless and ongoing efforts.

  27. @Brock: For what it’s worth, if I neglect the BFO data and assume the plane is flying according to the LRC speeds, the predicted path ends very close to the Almaty International Airport in Kazakhstan.

  28. Victor:

    I answered your last response in the previous thread. Hope you saw it.

    As regards this (which I think sums up your position):

    “if the perps wanted to hide where they were going, rather than going through the unnecessarily complex and dangerous procedure of spoofing the SATCOM…”

    One might reasonably argue that if complexity and danger were the primary concern here, the perps would not have attempted the hijacking of a commercial airliner. Moreover, if the SATCOM was spoofed, how do we know (from the perps’ POV) that that strategem was ‘unnecessary’?

    “…they would have just kept it powered down and avoided any evidence at all rather than create false data that could analyzed in a way not consistent with the perps’ plan.”

    How do we know that leaving a trail of false data (that would be analyzed) was NOT part of their plan? What we have currently is a ball of confusion, crowd-sourced number crunching on a global scale and eight months later, the plane hasn’t been found (yet). All of this has happened and it’s NOT consistent with the perp’s plan? If so, that should give all of us a reason to pause — not underestimate.

    Brock:

    I asked a question in response to yours at the end of the previous thread. Did you see it?

    Jeff: Thank you for your imagination.

  29. Lots of interesting information being posted here. However all seem to be following the official line. What I would like to see is somebody try & identify how the data could be faked.The SDU was switched off yet the pilot/s must have been aware this would have got alarm bells ringing & the plane could still be tracked by military radar. So the only logical conclusion I can see is that the SDU was switched off for a purpose other than to make the plane disappeared.If that’s the case then what modifications could be done? Also is it a possibility that nothing was actually turned off & actually the signals in fact jammed? I’m thinking of the Elt’s that apparently didn’t trigger. So if we assume this to be the case then it is unlikely that the S.D.U was ever turned back on in the 1st place. I am adamant the plane crashed west of Banda Aceh & have proved it in every way I can. Debris would according to a drift analysis model would wash further out to sea as opposed to towards land.Take a look at the images here:https://plus.google.com/117087125068396306388/posts/QiE2DjpuVxA I must hasten to add these are nothing like images you have seen before & have been backed by a satellite imagery specialist. They quite clearly show a plane that match the size & shape of MH370.However the stumbling block is the continuation of the Inmarsat pings.

  30. Michael:

    If you think all of the comments here are following the ‘official line’, you’re clearly not reading carefully.

  31. “All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”

    ~Sun Tzu, The Art of War

  32. Well, it appears that Jeff’s lengthy and detailed article has brought all sorts of new folks and perspectives to the table. Ahem.

    I am happy that I got my two cents in when I did, as the timing would seems to have been appropriate. Sure, things might be a bit sloppy at present in terms of cognitive discipline in the forum, but to those now experiencing feelings of derision or even dismay, relax, equilibirum will soon be restored. Exploring more speculative angles is but a cycle, and it serves a purpose: someone here has by now stumbled upon one or more elements of Truth, and perhaps someone reading here will soon step forward and better inform the search for answers as to what happened on March 8/9.

    Meanwhile, it is clear that some of the best technically minded people on the planet have aggregated around the problem of locating the aircraft; if they can’t locate it, I would assume that nobody can. I only wish that the ATSB would invite one or more members of the IG, or the likes of Richard Cole, Gysbreght or Dr. Ullich down to Oz for a sitdown over the search parameters. Finding MH370 is clearly a moonshot, and it is likewise clear, to me at least, that the more big noodles put to processing the problem, the better the chance of bringing the search to fruition.

    Double meanwhile, where indeed is the debris, and then where is it anywhere?

  33. Victor – A couple of days ago I commented that a lot of our experts here seem to have a civilian mindset. Inmarsat will be babes in the woods compared to what the big boys are getting up to. It’s a communication satellite. Nothing new or unique about it, and doppler is well understood and utilized in lots of other ways. Getting system info out of Inmarsat would be do-able also, and I’d be surprised if the Russians and Chinese for example did not already have detailed awareness about this particular satellite – anything that goes up there gets looked at. Picture whole depts dedicated to that.

    Any electronic trace left behind by the plane was always going to get the full forensic treatment by our best and brightest(that includes you). This would have been fully anticipated.

  34. Re sophistication required. I think, not as much as one might think.

    All that is required, is a couple of sets of airplane tracks, freely available on numerous sites online and the corresponding Inmarsat logs, however acquired. that acquisition might be done via a mole at Inmarsat, a disgruntled ex employee taking a few reams of paper or a memory stick on their way out, or someone hacking into Inmarsat’s data base.

    Armed with that data, budding hijackers go to work and model BFOs, and possibly BTOs (after all, BTOs would be present in the stolen logs). They would refine their model until it matches the logs, proving their modelling. That’s a trial and error approach and would not take too much sophistication. Albeit, I would caution against underestimating one’s adversaries’ capabilities.

    This way, they come up with the perfect model, better than Inmarsat’s understanding at the time. With these perfect models, they then explore ways of spoofing the BFO/BTO to a phantom path.

    Victor’s points 1 to 3:

    1. Inmarsat are the experts and should know best.

    Inmarsat specified the devices for their intended purpose. They work fine for that purpose. They have no need to push that system to the limits of its capabilities. Although they still did push the boundaries, when they started logging the BTO.

    But that is what successful businesses do, they find ways to maximise utility of their equipment to gain a competitive edge. It is often that equipment users expand its use beyond what the OEM had in mind, when designing and building the equipment. It would not surprise one little bit, if a (team of) perpetrator(s) applied that same attitude.

    2. Perps expected Inmarsat would eventually understand and reject northern path. Inmarsat took several days.

    Time is immaterial here. Modelling perps have all the time they require. Their plan would not progress to execution stage until they could match the BFO/BTO of the stolen logs with their model predictions from the plane tracks.

    The fanning phenomenon between N and S paths would have been immediately obvious, when looking at the graphs of the BFOs from stolen logs during their model development. In fact the original plan could have been to learn how to spoof for somewhere, but the obvious fanning simplified that task at the end.

    3. Incorrectly assumed no other clues, i.e. BTO.

    I agree with “their level of sophistication should have them also understand the implications of the BTO”. My above scenario implies them knowing of it’s recording. So, if Jeff’s scenario is in the realm of possibilities we would have to accept, that they knew of BTOs and accepted the possibility of giving further clues.

    However, they may have accepted that possibility and part of their plan is the “buying of time”. We are only now, after nine month, coming back to talking about “spoofing”. The early rounds of that talk were dismissed on the basis of the BFO fan, which put all search efforts into the SIO.

    It will take a while yet, before the BFO spoofing is either accepted or rejected and have any influence on the target location of the search effort. Maybe, some perps are now rather stressed and rushing their efforts, because the investigations are again touching on spoofing.

    On the other hand, the perps might be way ahead of all and have found a way to spoof the BTOs as well. For example a purposeful inserted AES response delay would be relatively easy to accomplish by sophisticated perps. If that was done, any path, that brings the plane closer to the sub satellite point would be back on the table.

    Cheers
    Will

  35. Interesting, but way far-fetched. I’m still sticking to my something-supernatural-occured belief. Looking forward to the continuation.

    Remember the military, Indonesian and American radars and satelittes picked up nothing.

  36. MuOne – If Inmarsat have govt/defence contracts then they will always have been a target of the respective intel/spy agencies. A few years back an Australian Defence Minister was having a fling with a Chinese woman – nothing new. Except she was a spy and our spooks had to spring it when they believed she had gotten access to his phone. Happens all the time, especially China, they love using human bait.

  37. Thanks for the kind words, Brock. As to your question, Yubileyniy isn’t the only airport that MH370 could have reached via a path that matches the BTO data, but I wouldn’t say it’s one of thousands, either. If you scan around that part of Kazakhstan in Google Earth, you’ll see that the area is very flat and very thinly inhabited. It’s fairly easy to spot runways, and there aren’t that many that can handle the weight of a 777, especially if it has to take off again. And of those, all the ones I’m aware of are within a few miles of a population center. Yubileyniy is truly in the middle of nowhere.
    Criticism 1: I think most of us assume that national borders are well covered by primary radar, but we really know very little how radar coverage works. I would love to have a map of all the military radar installations in China, India, and the -stans, and an intel report on when/how they’re staffed… then I could start planning my own covert ops.
    Criticism 2: Maybe I didn’t hit this point hard enough, but a bedrock principle of my whole theory is that BFO data can conceivably be spoofed, but BTO data is much more solid.

  38. Victor –

    I believe that if the perps wanted to hide where they were going, rather than going through the unnecessarily complex and dangerous procedure of spoofing the SATCOM, they would have just kept it powered down and avoided any evidence at all rather than create false data that could analyzed in a way not consistent with the perps’ plan.

    I’d counter by repeating that if a 777 with a heap of fuel on board flies off radar in blackout, with no distress signal, no beacon activation and no wreckage while heading towards the middle east roughly, then it would be suspected by many to have got there. Not ideal?

  39. MuOne – On the subject of BTO spoofing, JS and I had a swag of speculative posting on it a few months back. The response delay that you mention allows MH370 to fly straight out to the Maldives and refuel, where there happens to be a bunch of people who saw a low flying jet? From there it can fly over sea to Iran-Pakistan etc. Are the IO strips on the simulator real or media mischief? Maldives being so spread out means there are a lot of strips that are deserted most of the week/month. Plenty of islands there are dedicated runways and nothing else.

    If Iran wanted to know about 3F-1 the Russians could help out most likely.

  40. Flitzer_Flyer,

    You ask how a B-777 can fly a magnetic track. I am not a pilot. All I know is what I read in the newspapers – or in this case, the ATSB report, p. 25:

    “Autopilot modes considered include … constant magnetic track …”

    I presume the ATSB has access to people who know what the plane is capable of.

  41. Hello everyone; first of all I want to say thank you to Jeff and the most people who comments. This site is probably the only one who is giving serious and professional theories about what happened to the malasian airliner, and trying to figured out where is the plane now,based on facts and science principles.

    Thank you to all of you….

    Besides that I like to post two main points of this incident:

    1) agree with Jeff, the facts shows us that the incident implies some kind of human activities to hijack the plane.

    2) “CUI BONO”…. I mean who or whose take a consistent benefit with this incident???
    2.1 if this is a new kind of terrorism we don’t know yet the consequences.
    2.2 someone very clever who wants to make his point, about security in aviation.
    2.3 maybe a murder or a suicide.
    2.4…….. (ideas)

    Regards,

    Diego L Senin
    Electronic engineer.
    Private pilot.

  42. Flitzer-Flyer,

    The selected HDG or TRK can by either magnetic or true. Magnetic is the norm, true is the exception and is normally only used in polar regions.

    Runway designators follow the magnetic heading and are subject to change as the magnetic declination changes over time.

  43. Jeff,
    Well done, good on you for putting your theory out there.
    Your scenario is not one I have contemplated, and I find it fascinating.
    I can’t even imagine how much time, effort and thought you have dedicated to finding the truth about MH370, and then to put it all together by creating characters that came to life and made it feel all so real.
    I just want to say, Brilliant Job, but PLEASE don’t leave us in suspense too long for the next part…

  44. @Jeff: here’s a quote from Bobby Ulich’s most recent paper, describing his own BTO-hugging path:

    “The BFO match is excellent, and the RMS residual value is 5.3 +/- 1.6 Hz (which is consistent with the 5 Hz RMS noise figure provided by the ATSB.”

    My read of Dr. Ulich’s (in my view, astute) approach to back-solving a path from noisy data is: your benchmark for a:e error should not be “minimize residual errors”, rather “maximize parsimony/intuitiveness, subject to the CONSTRAINT that residual errors are reasonably unbiased, and of a magnitude consistent with input noise”.

    What is wrong with this approach?

    And what has changed since a month ago, when the IG was making statements like, “we’ve never been more confident (in our signal data interpretations)”?

    (I can’t beLIEVE I’m trying to talk someone OFF the conspiracy ledge. Must be because it’s not MY conspiracy…)

  45. MuOne:

    That whole post. Just YES.

    Matty: Yes. And indeed, let’s keep the Maldives parked on the corner of the chess board.

    Rand: LOOOOL. Ahem.

    It takes all kinds to make a world.

  46. The best precedent for how impatient we should be for the failure to find MH370 is AF447.

    There bodies and debris were recovered within several days. The route, velocity, elevation, bearing and malfunction information were known. Drift modeling was of some assistance in locating the point of impact because floating debris was recovered so quickly.

    But it took two years of searching under less challenging conditions, including going back over areas already searched to find the underwater wreckage.

    Here we have experts disagreeing over the reliability, significance and margin for error in the data that has been released. Only anecdotal information has been released about early stages of the flight. Potentially significant Inmarsat and radar data has been withheld. Floating debris which may have been from MH370 was not retrieved or analyzed. End of flight simulations that the searchers say they have in hand have not been released. And the location some believe is the least unlikely, Bobby Ulich’s, has not been searched.

    I think we tend to over-estimate the extent of our comprehension of the data we do have, our ability to determine its meaning and our understanding of the performance and operational characteristics of an aircraft as complex as the 777. But most of all, I think we tend to underestimate how minute are the fragments of MH370 being sought in relation to the vast and irregular depths being searched.

    So I’m not ready to blame the Secret Society of Super Villains just yet.

  47. @Brock: In my opinion, the appeal of Jeff’s theory is that it offers an explanation as to why no debris has been found in the SIO. I do not agree that there are no suitable reconstructed paths ending in the SIO that match the BTO/BFO data. And as time goes by and no debris is found, it lends credibility that the data was either spoofed or incorrectly interpreted. I am not yet ready to make this leap, for the moment choosing to believe the enormity of the search effort precludes an early find, but I understand why others have made the leap.

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