Martin 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 —
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 5: People on the Plane
And that’s all there is for now.
@Cheryl
Yep. I have a good feeling about Shah, and cannot imagine him intentionally harming anyone. That is why the SIO route makes absolutely no sense to me apart from the fact that my own analytics support it if the BFO values are taken at face value. I have not seen any explanation for why the airplane was piloted to or ended up in that direction.
So, I looked for alternatives that fit the “unobservables” of no debris and no radar sightings. As I posted earlier, perhaps not very eloquently, if something does not feel good, it is probably not good. That has been my lifelong experience, and I am hanging with it.
Cheryl, I find it strange that she does not seem to have been interviewed by the investigation, don’t you? She could surely contribute a great deal to an understanding of Zaharie’s state of mind-perhaps she can even clear up the rumor of the last phone-call Zaharie was meant to have received. On her social media, she seems to be reaching out around the MH370 issue. I really hope that some keen investigative journalist finally takes an interest, and simply interviews her to find out what she wants to share. Every stone has to be turned — and perhaps Zaharie will, as you believe, be exonerated of all guilt, as a result of a thorough criminal investigation. But not because he knows how to cook, fix things, and make balloon animals–(attractive though this is in a man!) Myself, I don’t believe anything until I have proof.
Dennis W: one means that I have suggested for reconciling the SIO as the terminus with an intentional diversion by whomever is that the turn south and perhaps the reinitializing of the SDU at 18:25 are perhaps indicative of intervening events aboard the aircraft that foiled the overall plot that began with the diversion at IGARI. You are correct: very few scenarios involving deliberately flying the aircraft to the SIO make all that much sense from a conceptual perspective.
Cheryl: perhaps the reason that Captain Zaharie’s wife has not been properly interviewed in the course of an investigation is that in reality there is no proper investigation. The burning question then is, why?
In terms of the investigation and any idea as to where it is at at present, one would need to go way back to Hisammuddin’s interview in the Four Corners piece: “All will come out in the future, I can assure you. There is nothing to hide.”
Dennis W: You are correct, of course, in stating that the lack of any surface debris does not support the conclusion of the SIO as the terminus. I guess where we differ is that I perceive enough other evidence to support the SIO, while attributing any singular focus on the lack of any surface debris to human hubris. Namely, perhaps we are not all that aware of the wilder corners of our planetary home as we would sometimes like to think. Regardless, I am with you: my gut, too, remains nagged by the lack of any recovered surface debris. Holding these conflicting perspectives together as loosely as possible is key when conceptualizing the larger frame, I would think. Meanwhile, all pet theories serve a purpose: they provide opportunities to surface new information when they are examined and deconstructed once again. They also provide points of resonance with the actual facts for any potential witness who may actually be in the know.
Lucy Barnes,
I assume the “she” you are referring to is Tim Pardi, not Mrs. Shah. Do we know that she hasn’t been interviewed and it is not being divulged just as everything else is being kept close to the vest? But if she hasn’t, agreed, a keen investigative reporter should run with it. Certainly there should be a file on her in that bunker in Malaysia wouldn’t you say?????
As far as the SID phone card call, I don’t read much into that. As I said, folks don’t have billed accounts all the time and pay as they go in such countries. Could have been anybody, a friend, relative, her, etc.
He is not exonerated yet, and certainly not because he can cook and fix things, it is his inner persona and seemingly love of life and putting his family first that I believe that type of psyche would not take human life in vain just as Dennis W. is stating.
Captain Zaharie, Tim Pardi, Anwar Ibrahim, etc. all want a better country and a better democratic state of affairs. Can we blame them? It does not seem all that abnormal to me. I don’t think they are radical or malevolent, they are just folks who want a better life and out of the age old ruling regime.
@Rand
One BIG problem with your logic (which I would otherwise find most sensible). No debris. An unforeseen intervention, resulting in an unwanted SIO terminus with no debris would appear to be at great odds.
@Cheryl
Classifying Zaharie as ‘stable’ is quite a stretch. His social media posts (over 430 of them in a 4 month span) suggest anything but a truly stable individual.
The irony is that in one of his posts he rails against the very notion of stability, here: “Don’t waste your life on the mundane lifestyle. When is it enough?”
As context is everything, he was calling on Malaysians to rises up against BN/UMNO.
cheers
Rand,
I have no idea if they have interviewed Mrs. Shah directly. I would hope so by now since her husband is a prime suspect. I understand the respect for the grieving in the beginning but by now I would hope she has been thoroughly investigated, and that too probably not divulged just like everything else.
Nor have we heard from the fiancee of Fariq Hamid who I think is a captain or officer with Air Asia. Has she even been allowed to fly after this? Look at the difference (and it’s cultural) between spouses or partners, look at Sara Bajc, independent, outspoken, determined, eloquent in the face of disaster, intelligent and strong. But yet we have not heard the side of the partners of Captain Zaharie and Fariq Hamid. Captain Shah’s sister has even been on Asian tv so it’s not that Asian women cannot speak publicly. So what is it, perhaps they are being told not to speak???
Spencer,
Stable is not a stretch at all. He maintained a pilot job for what 20 or 25 years with the same airline, that to me is stability. He provided a home and constant family life, more stability. He is/was reliable and a responsible person, and that is stability to me.
I think what you are getting at in his posts reflect their need for change and democracy. Maybe they just want more, want what the western world has in freedom and democracy. Can we blame them? But taking down a planeload of innocent Chinese to do it? That to me is the stretch.
Spencer: I hear you; I assume that our posts crossed.
Cheryl: and what if Captain Zaharie never had any intention of murdering the passengers of the aircraft by flying it to the SIO? Could you somehow reconcile (a rhetorical question) the premise of his political sentiments with having commandeered the aircraft at IGARI?
I would suggest that, given the amount of time that passed and the precedent of prior obfuscating behavior on the part of the authorities, it is not that the facts of the investigation have not been divulged; this is the overly simplified catch-all that makes all the more potentially embarrassing elements go away. Rather, perhaps there aren’t any signs of a vigorous investigation because none is deemed warranted or advantageous.
Most likely, there isn’t any larger, multi-lateral conspiracy to conceal the facts of the loss of MH370. Perhaps a little more likely is that the Malaysian authorities do not want what is known in the subjective domains re the flight revealed. Thus is would be advantageous to them to remain focused on hammering away at the messaging re the search for debris, as they have consistently done so.
A quote for you that could be considered traitorous to my gender but that could shed a little light on things, nonetheless: “Every man can be considered publicly a husband and privately a libertine.”
Henry Miller
“Every man can be considered publicly a husband and privately a libertine.”
But is being a libertine tantamount to being a hijacker?
Nihonmama: no, it does not. I was rather referring specifically to the fingernail psychological profile that was being developed here on Captain Zaharie. In my work as a investigative journalist, PI on murder prosecutions, and in my present incarnations of headhunter and therapist, Miller’s rubric has served me well, and then when testing for veracity in men and women alike. My larger point is that all of us incorporate elements of Shadow, and that is here, in the process of bringing it into awareness, where one can often find Truth, whether within ourselves or in another.
“Where you stumble, there is your treasure.”
Joseph Campbell
Addenda: no, it IS not. And I was referring rather metaphorically to the fingernail profiling of Captain Zaharie, rather than ‘specifically.’
@Cheryl
Yes…I think he wanted this (freedom and democracy) in the worst way, and I can certainly empathize and sympathize with his rabid sentiment (for this is what it seemingly had become, let there be no dispute otherwise).
His donning of the “Democracy is Dead” t-shirt evidences this quite well.
Anyways, It is my personal opinion that he had been stewing and planning an action like this since the 2013 election aftermath. Confluent events in his life, culminating in the Anwar appellate ruling that very morning, pushed him over the edge (I dare not use the word amok, oops).
It just ALL adds up. I mean, lets remember, we have a 777 that has vanished. This doesn’t just happen by accident, or by highly sophisticated terrorists/states for no meaningful purpose. Game over.
It happens by the person being most capable by a long shot to making it happen, and he executed said plan flawlessly, IMO.
And btw, he didn’t particularly care for the ‘migrant’ Chinese one iota..but I’ll refrain from bringing some of his more racist views to the forum.
@Rand
Yeah, posts were crossed. Sorry.
So is there much in the public domain of Zaharie making threats suggesting crashing or disappearing an aircraft ?
@Myron,
Nah, he forgot to mention publicly what he was musing privately. I mean, that just could possibly have put a wrench into things. Right?
Rand:
Love Joseph Campbell.
And on shadow:
“When viewed in the full light of our awareness, our shadow exposes the duality and the truth of both our human self and our divine self.”
The (late) great Debbie Ford.
Nihonmama,
Exactly and well said. And on Tim Pardi’s page she says, “we are all Captain Zaharie, and we are not terrorists.” That suggests to me they desperately want out of what they are trapped in but would not go to ruthless measures to achieve it and are benevolent folk.
Rand,
I’m not sure the IGARI/BITOD diversion has anything to do with the political views. I do think there is a rigorous investigation underway, we and the world are just not privy to it yet. I get what Spencer is saying too, it seems to all fit nicely, but what appears to be could be something else, appearances are deceiving.
Until they (official investigative team) give up some more puzzle pieces we know the Inmarsat stuff, the tweaked stuff, some scanty radar stuff, the voice recording stuff, and diddly squat after that.
SAT is repowered at 18:25 because by that point Zaharie knows he’s made it through the gauntlet unchallenged.
He never had to access the EE bay. That’s just nonsense. Shutting down the left bus at 17:21 accomplishes going as dark as possible as he skirts FIR’s and flies through Malaysia.
He either wasn’t fully clued into the INMARSAT via SAT capabilities, OR, he didn’t give a bleep. Either way, the re=powering at this point in the fight makes perfect sense.
The real question is NOT why it was re-powered, but why it was de-powered? But then, this is fairly obvious as well.
Once he’s well on his way out of the straight and near the Sumantran tip, he’s scott free. Power on and off to the abyss.
He knows we will conclude it was him (obviously). He doesn’t care. HE cares only about putting the screws to Najib and H, and the entrenched establishment.
Cheryl: what evidence is there that a rigorous investigation is underway, while we simply have not been made privy to its findings? And the name of the specific investigating authority?
Covering institutional and personal malfeasance at this point would provide motive enough for cloaking/side-lining an investigation into ATC-MAS and ATC-RMAF communications, as well as the possibility of a hijacking (to include commandeering by Captain Zaharie).
My point re a reconciliation of your two, seemingly disparate premises is that there is a means of doing so. Namely, there is a possibility that a politically motivated Captain Zaharie diverted the aircraft at IGARI, while he never had any intention of flying into the wilderness of the SIO. Alternatively, there is Luigi’s (RIP) hypothesis that a well-intentioned yet psychotically inspired hijacking was foiled, with the flight to the SIO representative of a ‘chicken run’ to nowheresville ending in a desperate ditching of the aircraft. I rather framed this, and then only to illustrate the inherent level of insanity required to validate it, as one last Flight of Dreams with the music turned up, the first-class bar and the duty free cart open, and the Stones playing at full volume over the PA system. I mean, what does one do for five hours on a dead run to the point of fuel exhaustion? Regardless, I would imagine that Luigi is correct in speculating that involvement of Captain Zaharie would most likely have involved a significant psychotic break where the balloon animals would have begun walking and talking. And then this is from someone who has spent considerable time developing a speculative frame where it was our good Captain harboring the intent to return the aircraft to Malaysia with perhaps good intentions yet very poor reasoning.
It feels (and increasingly so) like the drumbeat to convict Capt. Zaharie here — based on characterizations of ‘political’ views that meet no definition of extreme — and without a plane — is some kind of campaign. It went away for a while, but now it’s returned with a vengeance.
Why?
Is Zaharie-did-it being re-upped as a counter to Jeff’s spoof scenario? Or is it some kind of visceral, (but as yet unacknowledged) reaction to the fact that the ongoing search in the SIO (yes we’ve been told that it will take at least a year to complete, unless 370 is found sooner) hasn’t turned up so much as a life vest yet?
If everyone who chimed in on this board agreed that Zaharie was the perpetrator, what would the get be? There must be one, surely. Because it feels too much (and intuition never lies) like there’s more to be gained from ‘convicting’ him than just winning the argument.
Here’s an idea (and I’ve harbored it from the beginning): what if 370 was hijacked by ISIS? Remember, I floated this before – in the context of the convo with my pilot family member — the same one who flagged the vulnerable E/E hatch early on. The taking of an aircraft that can hold a whole hell of a lot of something — and if there’s cash or gold in the cargo hold, now you’ve got a twofer.
That plane, that airport, that specific group of passengers (including, one might argue, all kinds of little red herrings) — it all feels too neat. Which suggests incredible planning. And the possibility of a spoof.
Meanwhile, in other news tonight, John Fiorentino (who’s in exile with Luigi, who’s been reincarnated as Spencer), tweeted the following:
“ATSB has advised me that its #MH370 flight simulations DO NOT support the IG’s “near vertical spiral dive” end of flight scenario.”
The emperor is still trying to find his toga, but the plebes are already piling into the Coliseum. And I fear there won’t be enough wine.
Matty, where are you?
And thanks Cheryl.
Hallo Jeff Wise,
what a wild universe we are living in …
Man still is a beast seems to me. So your story is perfectly realistic. Only two remarks:
The former Soviet Union had a long history of “knowledge burglary” because their industry was never up to standard. For instance they rejected to develop semiconductors in the sixties for political reasons! They had to steal nearly everything and that was one of the reasons of this extremely inflated KGB agency which employed more than 2 million people. This old network still exists and they are doing what they were “educated” for (its not only the NSA doing industry espionage in europe). On the top of the russian aögenda is the next generation microchip … This has tremendous strategic value. To have this technology or not means to live or to die! They were excluded from the deal between china and US about this technology what was to be transferred with flight MH370 in persona of 20 top engineers of the manufacturer of these new chips. Since the russians have a long history to to use abducted manpower in their GULAG (e.g. in the development of nuclear weapons see Sacharows story and the german scientists after WW II), it makes a much stronger motif for them to capture 9M MRO with all this urgently desired technology aboard. Also airline hijackings are routine operations what the GRU is trained for and did very often in the sixties and seventies. Right after annexation of the Crime territory they are prepared to go to war. That was the trouble of every politician in the last eight months. In this critical Situation some local fanatics like strelkov tried to trigger the bomb (e.g. shot down MH17) which could have led to military consequences. Well WW III didnt happen, but the capture of MH370 fits to this overall picture on the background of the industrial and social backwardness of the modern russian feudal society with cszar Putin at the helm … I cannot help that this sounds funny, but its just realistic painting …
My second remark concerns the INMARSAT data after 1825 logon:
Since the logon is as yet unexplained the whole set of data after that logon is not ready for use. They may represent anything, until we defintely know the reason for the shutdown of the SDU. They also look spoofy because a wildly moving plane suddenly on the logon turns and moves in one clean direction to nowhere. And by coincidence when you ask the “Cui bono”-question any perpetrator would be amazed to see the whole world looking in a plce where it never possibly can be found. The perfect disappearance. Therefore i would support any research into spoofing ideas. But it is hardly realistic, that a technique that was not developped by the time of the hijacking could have been used in the spoofing. Most of the tracing technique over BFO and BTO was developed by INMARSAT and the IG after MArch 7 2014. Also it would be very complicate to do that , and to know beforehand some time (maybe years), that you wil use this technique one day to deceive the company INMARSAT.
No, this was not possible and your story has a weak spot there, but it wasnt eiter necessary. Because if you are able to produce a valid logon with valid device ID and send a drone circling around the seven ping rings or maybe even doing all way to the SIO, you need not to worry then about spoofing BFO but can leave that to INMARSAT. For this solution you just need to know that INMARSAT is working on a new tracing technique. And you can bet, that the GRU knows what a high tech company like INMARSAT is working on. Such a company is one of the main russian targets.
So sorry for the IG. All this effort to find something in the SIO for nothing?
No, it was very valuable because without IG the investigation would be over by now. Its the merit of the IG to be able to say definetely where the plane must be, if the data are valid. And if its not been found, you can definetely say that wise scenario of Jef Wise has something to it …
CosmicAcademy: God, I love reading your stuff, simply for the cadence of it. It reminds me of a likewise lovable character in Donna Tartt’s novel, The Gold Finch. Welcome!
It seems to me that data without context is just a bunch of numbers …. The initial dataset from Malaysia/immersat had a graphic line going straight through Indonesia. With Indonesia’s saying the flight didn’t pass through their airspace the context is now gone. However Duncan Steel had a very well fitted northern route that hit the ping arcs right on with that dataset.
@Myron: It seems that Duncan will always be noted for his earlier and later disavowed claim that the BTO and BFO data sets both support a northern path.
Cosmic,
Both the drone spoofer and the static spoofer suffer from the same weakness. That is the prior knowledge required for implementation.
Your comment regarding Inmarsat itself being possibly compromised adds a new dimension I had not considered, however. Good one! It would be interesting for Inmarsat to do an internal audit of the personnel who might have been privy to what they were working on.
For those of you that are intrigued by the possibility of a spoof of the SATCOM, I submit to you a scenario that was first postulated by somebody on Duncan’s site. It will take some time to find the comment, but I want to be clear that the genesis of the idea was not mine so it doesn’t appear as though I am taking credit for somebody else’s thoughts.
There actually is a complementary path that is the mirror image, relative to the meridian of the 64.5 deg subsatellite position, to the path ending in the SIO. This complementary path has EXACTLY the same BTO and BFO values as the path to the SIO. This means that a plane flying this route, to the west of the satellite, would not be distinguishable from a plane flying to the SIO if one is looking only at BTOs and BFOs.
To carry out this spoof, you’d need another plane (the imposter), program the SDU with 9M-MRO’s ID before the flight, keep the SATCOM powered down, and at 18:25 power up the imposter’s SDU. It would require time/position coordination (not very hard to do) and some cross-calibration of the SDUs to get the FFBs correct. The cross-calibration could be accomplished without having the units physically close by using accurate references when both are calibrated.
I rejected this theory previously because of the necessity of the matching FFBs. However, I had not considered at that time the possibility of cross-calibration before the flight, which only occurred to me in the past week.
Here is one imposter path that I think would satisfy the BFO and BTO:
http://skyvector.com/?ll=-11.24737220760445,36.26953125294142&chart=304&zoom=13&plan=G.6.792,33.099:G.6.373889679,33.97596424:G.-1.488359639,35.42408187:G.-9.300932104,36.31920959:G.-17.11461891,37.23463621:G.-24.93028059,38.18961295:G.-29.2300043,38.7399634:G.-36.65899764,39.74961641:G.-37.49952986,39.86963088
@Victor
Yeah, funny how that works. I once made a remark in a General Employee Meeting (GEM), that I was reminded of frequently for the next 20 years. Of course, what was actually said underwent significant morphing over time as well.
what was the reason Duncan Steel disavowed his northern route? Initially seemed correct.
@Myron: The northern routes were permissible when it was thought the BFO was a simple superposition of uplink and downlink Doppler shifts. In fact, the BFO reflects the residuals after the AES(the SATCOM in the plane) and the GES (the receiver at Perth)have applied corrective frequency offsets. There is also a bias of about 150 Hz. A correct understanding of the BFO values rules out northern routes (unless, of course, the values have been altered or spoofed).
@CosmicAcademy:
“They also look spoofy because a wildly moving plane suddenly on the logon turns and moves in one clean direction to nowhere.
Because if you are able to produce a valid logon with valid device ID and send a drone circling around the seven ping rings or maybe even doing all way to the SIO, you need not to worry then about spoofing BFO but can leave that to INMARSAT.For this solution you just need to know that INMARSAT is working on a new tracing technique. And you can bet, that the GRU knows what a high tech company like INMARSAT is working on. Such a company is one of the main russian targets.”
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU.
And the scenario you’ve just described would be the ultimate spoof.
Nihonmama
Posted December 2, 2014 at 12:12 PM
“Inmarsat swears that it is absolutely certain that they have the right device ID for the terminal. If it turns out they are wrong there are going to be some very very embarrassed people in the UK.”
https://twitter.com/nihonmama/status/450300448591728640
@Nihonmama
Inmarsat shows up frequently on the list of easily compromised critical communication systems. You can Goggle that result. Security experts point out the lack of encryption or even hashed login credentials. What these security sniffers have never alluded to, however, is the likelihood of a spoof. Therein lies my disconnect. That would either be six sigma brilliant, or an inside job prior to the MH370 event.
this scenario is bothering me, so if we take the spoof flight, SDU reboot, and turn near IGOGU together, it might be possible the route south is of the spoof flight over africa while MH370 continued towards the Maldives maybe onwards to iran or somolai?
@Victor:
The African mirror image path is academically interesting. I thought about the symmetry of the general math problem at the start, and recognized that there was potentially N-S symmetry and E-W symmetry. Of course, I was not thinking about spoofing or the effect of the orbit inclination at the time. I was just thinking about the overall symmetry of the general modelling problem. The KL starting point ruled out the African path, so I never thought about the western half again until you pointed it out in the context of spoofing. And soon we came to appreciate the implications of the I3F1 orbit inclination, pointing to the south-eastern quadrant. So we have been focused mainly on the SIO for the last 6 months. Then along comes Jeff to stir the pot!
If we set aside spoofing for the moment…it is 100% certain MH370 did not fly the African route, or any route west of the satellite. Hopefully we don’t need to debate that math. But we can’t set aside the north-east quadrant with the same level of absolute certainty. The effect of the I3F1 orbit inclination on the observations is clearly understood now, and the case for the SIO is compelling. I believe the current search area is the highest priority area to search. But I suspect that there are northern paths within the fuel range that match the BTO/BFO data. Those paths will undoubtedly require a much more complex and unlikely set of assumptions for speed and heading changes, but I submit that those assumptions and resulting paths are quite likely compared to any of the spoofing scenarios. If we are not going to dismiss the spoofing scenarios out of hand, why dismiss the northern route scenarios just because the required path is very odd?
Jeff’s novelette has inspired a lot of discussion. Even if the spoofing concepts are far-fetched, or completely nuts, you can’t dismiss all of the geopolitical intrigue as pure fantasy. Jeff has opened some minds with his story, and that is a good thing. There is no doubt clandestine activities going on all around us all the time. And maybe there is a story even more bazar than Jeff’s that will someday explain the disappearance of MH370. But if there is such a story, I believe it is more likely based on a clandestine northern route plan gone badly, not a story based on spoofing. So I challenge all the modelers to reconsider the possibility of a northern path with the same freedom of thought allowed for the spoofing scenarios. See if you can find a “twisted route” to the north that matches the data. If there are some credible paths, then I think Jeff may be able to build his geopolitical story on a stronger technical foundation.
@DennisW:
“What these security sniffers have never alluded to, however, is the likelihood of a spoof.”
Doesn’t mean they weren’t aware of that possibility. Security sniffers don’t usually tell ALL that they know. The likelihood of a spoof is what an enterprising security sniffer might take to Inmarsat and say: “You got a problem. Here’s my public take. But if you want the more terrifying, mission-critical bit, I’ll need to be retained.”
“Therein lies my disconnect. That would either be six sigma brilliant, or an inside job prior to the MH370 event.”
But see – why are you disconnected? Please don’t be. Let me extend the hypothetical.
Inmarsat blew off security sniffer. Or,
security sniffer was retained, came in and did a bang up job. But it was all for naught. Because of said MOLE inside Inmarsat, who would have reported security sniffer’s recommendations back to his/her Paymaster. And Paymaster would simply have made the adjustments to bypass security sniffer’s fix.
Sound far-fetched? Not remotely. Because that’s how it works ‘out there’. Remind me to tell you my (true) Japan fish story sometime. You may not believe that one either.
We live in a WORLD filled with Six Sigma brilliant. And most bank robberies (and jewel heists) are inside jobs. So why NOT Inmarsat?
If Russia has anything to do with the disappearance of MH370, it wouldn’t even move my eyelid. Because they are brilliant, brilliant, enterprising people. Genuises in math and science too. And that’s not even a secret. Never mind the Hermitage. Or the Winter Palace. Or the architecture. Or that jaw-dropping subway system in Moscow.
It can’t be said enough: underestimate your enemy at your peril.
Do I need to start quoting Sun Tzu again?
@CosmicAcademy:
“They were excluded from the deal between china and US about this technology what was to be transferred with flight MH370 in persona of 20 top engineers of the manufacturer of these new chips.”
And here’s where it get’s really interesting. The likely reason that those (Freescale) engineers might be interesting is not the red-herring people have been chasing:
https://twitter.com/nihonmama/status/451429474026803201
@airlandseaman: I should add, at this point, I still don’t think spoofing of the SATCOM is likely. It would mean that the perpetrators had high confidence that Inmarsat would be able to (incorrectly) reconstruct the path based on the BTO and BFO values.
If spoofing did occur, either by tampering with the SATCOM on MH370, or a second ground-based SATCOM, or by a second airborne SATCOM, likely both the BTO and BFO data sets are invalid. In that case, we have to throw out all of the SATCOM data, and we are left with essentially no concrete evidence after 18:22 UTC.
CosmicAcademy: you nailed it; massively parallel congnitive behavioral therapy would be good for all nazi’s; just a dream; sorry for OT
what heading would MH370 be going if it didn’t turn at about 18:22 UTC might give some clues of where it might be…
@VictorI, I agree with everything you say except that tampering with the SATCOM aboard MH370 would have resulted in faulty BTO values. I think that due to the inaccessibility of the SDU in the roof of the plane it would be very difficult to alter the BTO value.
@jeffwise: Yes, that is a good point.
@airlandseaman
To me a northerly route that fits the BTO/BFO seems difficult, unless you apply ad hoc ROC’s. For a close to level flight the D = 39 Hz at 00:11 is dominated by the term containing the satellite velocity projected onto aircraft unit vector (Henrik eq. 6). It kind of nails the aircraft unit vector in the southerly direction.
There was a Fuel Burn table posted on PPRuNE a while back that showed the total flight time and fuel consumed by a B777-200ER with RR Trident engines during separate trips of 600, 1200, & 2000nm at FL100, FL200, FL300 & FL400. The all up weight at the start of each distance was 200.0 Tonnes. I copied this table and pasted it here previously.
I converted the fuel used and elapsed times to get average speeds and burn rates. I plotted these and found the lines for each elevation were close to being parallel. That meant there should be a single equation to estimate fuel burned. The simplified equation below is within ±0.2mt/hr to the values in the table. Obviously, it is not valid for all speeds and Flight Levels but could be used to see how close a proposed route is to MH370’s average of 6.1mt/hr (43,800kg from 17:07 to 00:16).
BR=KTAS/41-1.5*FL/100
Where:
BR= Burn Rate in mt/hr
KTAS=Knots True Air Speed
FL=Flight Level (Altitude in feet/100) so 35,000 feet=350
Example 499KTAS at FL410 is = 6mt/hr
Note: The above equation is -1+2 (so not even close) to the values is the Delta manual that were taken over a “couple of minutes” and therefore not very accurate. For example, the Delta manual gives a BR of 6.2mt/hr at 482KTAS at FL240 and 6.4mt/hr at a slower 473KTAS and higher FL360.
@ jeffwise:
Path reconstruction uses the values of BTO, BFO and time. To produce a reasonable path at achievable airplane speeds for the given BTO values and timing, the BFOs must lie between fairly narrow limits. The BFO difference between the western and eastern limits of the current search area is only a few Hz. How could the spoofers calculate the transmission frequencies needed to produce the BFOs that lie within those limits, if they were unaware of the BTOs?
@Gysbreght, This is the very topic I address in my blog post “Why MH370 Search Officials Can’t Agree Where to Look.” As you can see in the illustration at the top of the post, flight paths that best fit BTO and BFO data overlap very little with flight paths that reconcile BTO data, airplane performance, and known autopilot modes.
Cosmic academy – Yes yes and yes, but. I agree Inmarsat will have been an obvious spying target for a long time(something I tried to assert before now), and that the Russians will have very detailed technical info of the various satellites that are up there – it all gets looked at closely. They will also be in the business of reaping signals on a large scale and as you say the KGB was enormous, and Putin a KGB man himself. But, any electronic traces left behind by the plane were always going to get the full forensic treatment and it would be easily anticipated that frequency shift would come into the mix. Inmarsat call it ground-breaking, but you can be sure it’s been looked at many times before. That’s the difference between a civilian mindset and a military one.
When you have spent many years and many billions looking into ways to kill each other every stone gets turned over – even crazy ones, like strapping bombs to cats and dropping them out of planes hoping they gravitate to ships below!
Technology theft became very Russian. Their tentacles were everywhere and it was understood too that they were in the US trying to steal software for their very convoluted and large gas pipelines from Siberia. The pumping, and pressure management was something beyond them so they went looking. Reagan cites it as one of his proudest achievements that they were able to pass off softare specifically designed to blow the whole lot up. The explosion was visible from space and it hastened the demise of the USSR. Spoofing unrealistic? Only with a civilian mindset, and Putin does not have one of those.
@Gysbreght
“…a few Hz. How could the spoofers calculate the transmission frequencies needed to produce the BFOs that lie within those limits, if they were unaware of the BTOs?”
Isn’t this “cart before the horse”? All the spoofers needed to do is to alter the BFO to hide the actual path.
All the path reconstructions are after the fact of BTO/BFO. The published BFO cover a broad range of frequencies, not a very narrow band.
The problem to meet a narrow band would only exists, if the spoof’s intent was to place the search exactly where it is now. If that was not the intent, the search is now where it is more or less by co-incidence of the actually spoofed BFOs.
Cheers,
Will
Rand,
As far as an official investigation goes, didn’t Malaysia set up 3 factions, a human or medical group, a technical or mechanical group, and another group I forget what they called it, bringing in international experts? I assume that is ongoing and that is what I meant by evidence of an investigation. That all stopped and they closed the books and files on it all and it all lays dormant? I’d like to think the criminal investigation is ongoing and they are just as stymied as everyone else without a plane. Or too, if it is intrinsic to Malaysia as you think, they know something and are silent about it and don’t need to divulge anything until a plane is found?
Your scenario of Captain Zaharie rocking out to the Stones and the balloon animals walking and talking was too funny and we need some levity here from time to time because this all gets very INTENSE. But I agree, this stable man would have had to have lost his mind completely if he had any responsibility for this.
I’m between two premises right now, that it was either something so elaborate like Jeff’s scenario (and Jeff could turn out to be the “wisest” of all in this), or it’s so simple no one can figure it, something happened, they tried to get back, failed, and ended up in the SIO not by design.
@all
If an entity with the resources of Russia were involved, the “drone” scenario probably makes more sense than a static spoofer. A Russian TU-160 has the range and speed to carry an Inmarsat receiver to the SIO faking a B777, turn it off, and return relatively easily. All that would be needed is minor cooperation with the location of MH360 at the start, and a match of BFO offset before logging in.
Then all the issues of fabricating BFO values disappear. The AES on the Russian aircraft would take care of all that routinely.