Sense and Nonsense in MH370 Coverage

137 thoughts on “Sense and Nonsense in MH370 Coverage”

1. It’s been explained to me a few times that the Indonesian Archipelago is actually very diverse. It was colonized by the Dutch/Portuguese etc and emerged as a nation eventually but mainly as a Javanese run mafia with plenty of unhappy campers. They have never had great control of Aceh. The provincial govt may more closely aligned to some mideast influences than Jakarta. And the radar?

2. Matty

   And the RADAR.

   I read, some time back in this saga, that the peace agreement for Aceh included demilitarising the region, except for the RADAR sites at Sabang/Pulau We and Lhokseumawe.

   There is also significant petrochemical industry exploitation in the Lhokseumawe area.

   The teams at both RADAR sites had active sites on Blogger but either lost interest or, possibly, ‘encouraged’ to cease their online activity. My research hasn’t turned up anything to suggest that either site has ceased to be operational. However, I’m following some suggestions that Mlsia & TNI-AU share data in the Str of Malacca area.

   :Don

3. A bit late in the day, but I should comment about the scenarios which involve the northern path. I am quite familiar with Indian civil and military aviation and can point out that 1) Car Nicobar may be a large base but it has very limited radar capability and it may well have been non-functional at the time MH 370 disappeared.
   2) However, any flight over the Indian mainland would almost certainly have been picked up by civil and military radar-the path would pass fairly close to Kolkata (Calcutta) which has flights throughout the night. There are some other major air bases like Kalaikunda in that area, besides others towards the north. One could understand one air base having a malfunctioning radar, but not simultaneous failures at several civil and military airports.

4. There are various theories involving MH 370 being shot down or crashing relatively close to Malaysia. But in all these cases surely some identifiable debris would have shown up somewhere in the vicinity by now. We may conclude that either it is somewhere in the remote vastness or the SIO or is concealed somewhere on the ground.

5. @all

   Quote from Jeff’s article above.

   Begin cut-paste//

   Unfortunately, in the milieu of mainstream media, and even more so amid the rabble of click-bait hungry aggregators, it’s emotion, not reasoning, that earns the most upvotes. The worst-case scenario is that by the time the ocean-bed search winds up in May, no wreckage will have been found, and conjunction with lack of surface debris (which according to ATSB analysis should have washed up on the shores of Indonesia months ago) or any other evidence of a southward path, the public will discount the official analysis entirely, along with the painstaking research and analysis that independent investigators have been working hard on over the last nine months. The unrooted madness of M. Dugain and his ilk will prevail.

   Hopefully we’ll find some new hard data before then.

   End cut-paste//

   Or it may turn out that the assumption of a fixed (heading and 35,000′ altitude) AP mode will go down as one of the worst assumptions in the history of human analytics.

   I hesitated to make this post, but it had to be done.

6. @Jeff: re: “unrooted madness” of Dugain’s “data-less” theory:

   In your post, you aptly lay out the key evidence (to which I’d add evidence of obfuscation/deception):

   1. Handshakes (1a=BTO, 1b=BFO)
   2. Absence of debris (2a=surface, 2b=sub-sea)
   3. Absence of radar data

   I’ve split the evidence into subcategories to aid the discussion.

   Comment I: Item 1 is incompatible with both 2a and 3. If sub-sea wreckage were found, then 1 and 2b would both be incompatible with 2a and 3. You’ve also argued that 1a and 1b are close to being incompatible with each OTHER. Bottom line: EVERY theory MUST reject at LEAST one item on that list.

   Comment II: the fact that most of the items on this lists are of the “absence of evidence” variety highlights the difference between mathematical PRECISION and informational VALUE, my favourite illustration of which is a joke:

   A farmer and a mathematician are driving through dairy pastures. The farmer says, “Hey, you’re a math nut, right? So tell me: how many cows are in the two fields on either side of us? The mathematician quickly responds: “1,003”. Stunned, the farmer says, “Wow – how’d you do that so quickly?” “Well,” says the mathematician, “on this side, there’s 3; on that side, there’s about a thousand.”

   Scientists tend to overvalue 1 because it is precise numerical data, and undervalue 2 and 3 because they’re not. This is a mistake. A cop would look at things differently. Which brings me to…

   Comment III: I feel an analogy coming on.

   Suppose you’re a juror in a case that hinges on whether a woman walked down a particular street at a particular time. We have 3 bits of evidence:

   1) 7 GPS “pings” from her cell phone indicating she DID walk down that street,
   2) Multiple & massive efforts to find physical evidence placing the woman at the scene came up EMPTY
   3) Several independent security cams along the road designed to catch such movement report NOTHING

   As a juror, surely 3) alone would cause you to question the validity of 1). You would be forced to assess the CREDIBILITY of each piece of data – weighing the probability of mass perjury/incompetence among security firms against the probability of buggy/faked GPS pings. (This assessment would surely be swayed if the GPS data were supplied by a friend of another prime suspect in the case…but I digress.)

   To me, Jeff, you set up the analysis perfectly – but then fail to follow it to its logical conclusion:

   You argue YOUR theory is consistent with everything but 1b (which is OK because it was deviously faked by the perps) and 3 (which is OK because continental Asian radar is buggy).

   Like it or not, the DG/Maldives scenarios of “Dugain and his ilk” are among the few theories TRULY consistent with 2a, 2b, and 3. Yes, they conflict with 1a and 1b – but that is OK, because BOTH were either buggy, or deviously faked by the perps.

   If compared dispassionately, we see two theories which each resolve the evidenciary paradox with a hand-wavy appeal to mistrust in the competence/morality of a foreign superpower.

   Jeff, logic says you are of Dugain’s ilk. I hope you consider retracting the insults you’ve hurled his way, because you don’t deserve them.

   I think ALL our assessments boil down to an abiding (mis)trust in a particular PROVIDER of evidence. This is a weakness we should ALL work to overcome. We should force each provider of evidence – even those we “trust” – to DEMONSTRATE their credibility, via full disclosure.

   Comment IV: Dugain is not necessarily portraying the US as villains. I was conversing recently with a friend who a) clearly HATES Dugain & all he stands for, yet b) believes the EXACT SAME theory he is espousing – that the US interdicted a flight suspected of being hijacked for terrorist purposes. It bothers me to see smart people SO receptive to a smear campaign with a heat:light ratio this high.

7. Brock: “It bothers me to see smart people SO receptive to a smear campaign with a heat:light ratio this high.”

   Who is smearing whom via what campaign and which smart yet overly receptive people are you referring to? I only see Dugain as having benn widely well received, but then I haven’t been checking for updates the last couple days. Has criticism of his piece moved beyond the blogosphere and into the mainstream press?

8. I think we can agree that any theory that builds upon (or chooses to neglect) the few data points we have requires a healthy bit of speculation to connect the dots. That is the root of the heated debate that occurs here.

   To me, the lack of radar data that Brock cites says more about the credibility of countries that may be in possession of this data than any indication of the plane’s path.

   It amazes me that at this point, we still do not have better data for the path of the plane around Sumatra. There should be an outcry for additional surveillance data acquired between 18:22 and 19:41 because the data in the public domain is sparse and inconsistent.

   As anybody that has been paying attention knows, the radar data released by Malaysia shows the plane moving up the Malacca Strait and towards the Andaman Sea. If valid, the plane should have been detected by Indonesia during this time as there are radar installations in Sumatra in close proximity, yet Indonesia insists no plane was seen.

   The Malacca Strait is a heavily-used sea route, as most surface cargo shipped from the Far East to Europe would pass this way. This puts high strategic importance on this route, and would suggest the route is under heavy surveillance by land, sea, air, and space assets of many countries. Yet somehow, after a commercial flight disappeared from civil radar and doubled-back and was detected in real-time by military radar in Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore, there is no trace of the plane after 18:22. I find this part of the narrative difficult to believe.

   Most of us are not associated with a news organization and therefore we don’t have the regional presence, contacts, and resources to perform serious investigative reporting on this part of that incident. Perhaps the most constructive thing we can do is to drastically increase the public awareness of this issue with the expectation that serious investigative journalism (which has been woefully lacking) looks into this obvious inconsistency in the official story.

   I think the need for more data that is probably in possession of one or more stakeholders is one thing we can all agree on.

9. Brock: re Dugain, who is smearing whom and which smart people are being so overly receptive?

   Great logical analysis in that last one, by the way.

10. @Rand: I was referring to the treatment M Dugain is receiving on this site, for having the temerity to trust a different subset of the contradictory data. Thanks for complimenting my logic, which argues his theory is as data-supported as those of, say…

    @Victor: you have every right to mistrust the ability/morality of the data suppliers of your choosing. I choose to mistrust those who I’ve proven have lied to us since taking over the search in mid-March.

11. @Brock: I thought that a call for more data from all the countries that are likely to have surveillance assets around Sumatra would be non-controversial. Perhaps I was wrong. Yes, I believe Malaysia has practiced a pattern of deception. But I also believe other countries, including the US, for the reasons I cited, likely have surveillance data that has not been released.

12. ABN397 – Welcome aboard – On ace value i agree with you, but as we saw with Malaysia(no response) and Thailand(no response) and Indonesia(nothing at all), making firm conclusions can be dangerous. A question for you – in Indian civil air space would every plane have a transponder on any given night? If not and you didn’t respond how would you know if MH370 passed your way? Some pilots interviewed claim that a lot of the radars you mention are there simply to ensure that commercial planes do not stray from their flight paths, and that as long as they stick to an altitude, speed, heading etc noone bats an eyelid at 3.00am in a lot of places.

13. The attractiveness of the southern path and the early exclusion of the northern path path gave India a free pass radar wise, but a transparent audit of that night could still cause embarrassment.

14. Victor – investigating what happened/didn’t happen with Indon radar that night would have to be done very quietly. There is only one journalist here I can name(Greg Sheridan – The Australian) that could get somewhere with it. He has done some excellent bits on regional terror(posted here) and has maybe the best Indon contacts of any defence/foreign affairs writer anywhere.

    He did this a week after MH370 went missing, how accurate was it?

    Greg Sheridan – Don’t say you weren’t warned:

    “AT the beginning of the year 2001, no one could predict or imagine what was coming with the 9/11 attacks and everything that followed. American intelligence got some information, but no one really trusted that information.

    “We could be in the same situation right now. Who can say what will happen after Syria? I fear we are in a pre-9/11 situation.”

    This is a devastating wake-up call because it comes from a man, let’s call him Ali, who is one of the most senior figures associated with Indonesia’s security policies.

    I met him a couple of weeks ago, early one evening, in the acrid, smoke-filled cigar bar of one of Jakarta’s five-star hotels. His judgment, which he supports with dense data and close reasoning, is informed by decades of critical experience. It is a judgment made long before a Malaysia Airlines flight disappeared over the South China Sea on Saturday, in an incident which may or may not be terrorism.

    Ali asked that I not use his name. His dire judgment is shared by another key Asian intelligence figure. Ajit Doval is a former director of the Indian government’s Intelligence Bureau. He has spent a lifetime in counter-terrorism. If the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party wins India’s forthcoming election, as is widely expected, Doval is favoured to become national security adviser.

    I don’t know if Ali and Doval have ever met.

    Here is Doval’s net assessment. It is eerily similar to Ali’s: “We have to brace ourselves for living in a world which is much more insecure than it was in 2001.”

    Talking to both Ali and Doval gives a kind of stereoscopic depth of view to the re-emerging terror threat. They share key concerns: what is happening in Syria, what will soon happen in Afghanistan, the growing popularity of al-Qa’ida ideology in North Africa and the Middle East and the deep strategic planning of jihadist networks.

    Let’s start with Ali: “We are very worried because of this latest situation in Syria. Not only that there might be another 9/11 or Bali bombing, but the contribution it’s making to the progress of radical jihad thinking.

    “Our analysis is that Syria is more dangerous than Afghanistan was (as a training ground) because they’ve got much more head-to-head battle. In Afghanistan, their efforts against the Russian troops were often from far away, with shells or missiles.

    “Now, in Syria, day by day, they experience head-to-head battle directly. This experience makes them much more able to adapt to war’s realities.”

    By this, Ali means the Syrian alumni, like the Afghan alumni, will carry out terror internationally and will bring home the ability to kill easily; to function under extreme stress; specific expertise in bombs and weapons; and the organisational capability to put complex plots together.

    A recent study by the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict concluded that the Syrian campaign had “captured the imagination of Indonesians in a way no foreign war has before”, partly because of its Sunni versus Shia nature. Indonesia is overwhelmingly Sunni.

    Ali is brutally honest about the limits of official knowledge: “We have no idea how many Indonesians are involved in Syria. Several thousand had jobs there before the conflict.

    “But we have 17,000 islands, and wide-open sea borders. It’s very difficult for us to monitor our people’s movements. It’s a much easier process now for young Indonesians to get radicalised on social media and to take the step of going to Syria. Previously, recruits had to meet the key people, or spiritual leaders, of jihad groups. Now they don’t have to (in order to fight abroad).”

    He is also quite blunt about the small but growing minority of Indonesians who support jihad: “There is a large pool of people who are extremists. But the work of the authorities since the Bali bombings has reduced the extremists’ capabilities. The worry is that people coming back from Syria will increase those capabilities again.”

    Ali has two other very specific concerns. One is that there is a large number of Indonesian jihadists completing their sentences and coming out of jail. Nearly 30 such people have re-offended. There is no evidence, Ali says, that more than a handful have been deradicalised. Instead they come out tougher and more determined than ever, often having made new recruits inside.

    The other worry is the continuing strength of Jemaah Islamiah, though JI itself is not now conducting violent operations.

    “JI is still one of the most dangerous organisations,” Ali says. “They look like they’re sleeping, but they are building their capability for future action. Their vision of a caliphate for Southeast Asia has never gone away.”

    And then, finally, Ali expects Afghanistan to go bad when the Western forces leave and to start generating anew its own jihadi training establishments.

    This is also uppermost in the mind of Doval, who I interview in a conference room at the Australia India Institute at Melbourne University.

    First, though, Doval runs through the list of al-Qa’ida supporting groups in North Africa and the Middle East. It’s daunting. Tens of thousands of young men have pledged themselves to al-Qa’ida’s ideals. The organisation’s central leadership has been hurt but it has mushroomed beyond the wildest dreams of Osama bin Laden into something like a semi-global campaigning force.

    “The West sees all these groups as individual problems,” Doval says. “But ideologically they are all unified. They all seek to become franchises of al-Qa’ida.

    “Al-Qa’ida doesn’t have to seek them out. Quite the reverse. Sometimes it rejects them.

    “But this acceptance by all these groups of al-Qa’ida as the ideological hub is extremely important. Al-Qa’ida doesn’t have a local agenda, it only has a local geography. Its agenda is global.”

    Doval is especially gloomy about Afghanistan when Western forces leave. “If Pakistan does not support extremist groups it will lose its leverage over Afghanistan, which leverage it believes it needs for strategic depth,” he says.

    “So if the Pakistanis want influence in Afghanistan, they will believe that they need to maintain influence with the extremists. But you can’t help the extremists be strong in Afghanistan and keep them weak in Pakistan.

    “If the West cannot keep a credible presence in Afghanistan after the troop drawdown, Afghanistan will have no choice but to rely on Pakistan. Pakistan will try to use this for its own purposes. Pakistan’s own internal situation could become much more critical.”

    The conventional analysis is that al-Qa’ida and the Taliban suffered grievous setbacks because of the post-9/11, US-led invasion of Afghanistan. The Taliban lost control of the Afghan government and dozens of al-Qa’ida leaders, eventually including Osama bin Laden, were killed.

    But Doval suggests another way of looking at it: “In 2001, the Taliban was asking for talks (with the US) and saying they had nothing to do with al-Qa’ida. The West at that time thought there was no use in talks and they must crush the Taliban. Now the situation is reversed, the Taliban believe they are the victors and people are asking for talks with them.

    “In 2001, al-Qa’ida had bases in Pakistan supported by the ISI (Pakistani intelligence), but it did not have terrorist groups in Pakistan attacking the Pakistani state. Now in Pakistan there is the emergence of many groups which target the Pakistani state and all identify themselves with the cause of al-Qa’ida, even those influenced by the ISI.

    “The ISI is hopeful that in the drawdown of Western troops it can leverage its goodwill to stop terrorism in Pakistan. I think the reverse is likely to be the case with the Taliban taking a measure of control.”

    Doval, like Ali, credits the counter-terrorism efforts of the US and other nations with great successes. But too little attention, they suggest, has been paid to the way the terrorists have adapted.

    Let’s give an Australian dimension to what Ali and Doval describe. About 25 Australians trained with jihadists in Afghanistan. All those who came back became a security concern. At any time now there are 50-odd Australians fighting in Syria and many more giving other aid there.

    Doval says: “We thought the antidote (to global terrorism) was cutting off their finances, and the people’s support, but it turns out the antidote was really denying them sanctuaries. They have had sanctuaries in Pakistan in the past. Now if they get a Taliban-influenced government in Afghanistan they could get sanctuaries in Afghanistan again and the situation could be very serious.”

    He also thinks the talk of splits and differences within the Taliban is overblown. None of the Taliban groups, he notes, ever voices criticism of the overall Taliban leader, Mullah Omar.

    In Doval’s view, there is a jihadi sanctuary in parts of Syria; pro-al-Qa’ida groups control substantial slabs of territory in North Africa; sanctuaries could easily re-emerge in Afghanistan; and the future of the Pakistani state in the face of jihadi challenge is an open question. It’s a crook cocktail.

    Doval and Ali are among the best-informed and best-credentialled people assessing global terrorism. Their separate assessments are similar, shocking and deeply troubling. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

15. Brock,

    I’m surprised that you think 2) and 3) are ‘evidence’ in the same way that 1) is.

    As a juror I would note :

    3) We simply don’t know if other radar systems detected MH370 or not.

    To extend your analogy, the police have asked the shop keepers on the street to contact them if they noticed any trace of her passing on their CCTV, but so far nothing has been forthcoming. The police don’t know if any security guards were watching the screens or even if the cameras were operational. It is also not clear if any recordings from that time are available, or whether they were wiped on a routine cycle in the days before the request for data was made. The shop keepers are very tight lipped about the performance of their cameras and will do nothing to undermine their deterrence value. The police unfortunately have very limited jurisdiction over them to force further disclosure.

    2) The search has not ‘come up empty’, it got off to a very slow start and has a very long way to go.

    Clearly the weightings attached to the various pieces of ‘evidence’ will vary markedly from person to person depending on their experiences and world view, but honestly, if GO Phoenix finds aircraft wreckage on the sea floor tomorrow, would you sit with head in hands crying ’No! That can’t be MH370! It flatly contradicts the lack of radar evidence!” ?

    For me it doesn’t enter the equation one way or the other at present.

16. Brock: I guess mine was a rhetorical question. Regardless, I can assure you that I am not an agent of any ‘smear campaign,’ and that I am rather simply calling it like I see it. Beyond this, it is really a matter of our hopefully attracting the attention of more ‘common sense oriented’ investigative journalists.

    As for JIT, yes, keep going after them. It would help to learn more about JIT’s composition, etc.

17. @M Pat

    While the tone of your post is certainly in a spirit that leaves little to quarrel with, it implicitly ignores some very important “artifacts”.

    1) The ATSB, IG, and most recently Captain Hardy all approximately agree where the final resting place is located. That is no surprise to me. I came up with a similar spot myself a while back. However, underlying all these agreements is the assumption of an AP mode appropriate for “normal” operation of this aircraft. There is no justification given for this assumption beyond that. Personally, I find this very very troubling.

    2) Statements alluding to the refinement of BFO data are equalling troubling. The closer you look at the variables affecting BFO, the less precise it becomes as a predictive tool. There will be no refinement, only an increase in the error bounds associated with this data.

    I truly hope MH370 is found tomorrow. I would be joyous, but I have serious doubts that it will happen.

18. @M Pat: if subsea debris is found at the current search epicentre, its location will be flatly contradicted by a) the radar reports, and b) the SURFACE debris search. {I might also throw in c) the drift MODELLING, which, if reverse-engineered from [Sumatra, 123 days] pretty much RULES OUT wreckage at s38.} The JIT has lied itself into a bigger corner than I think most people yet realize.

    @Rand: I do not accuse you of “smearing”: merely of insulting a point of view (Dugain’s) before coming to appreciate its logical legitimacy.

19. Dennis:

    re your first assertion above”… underlying all these agreements is the assumption of an AP mode appropriate for “normal” operation of this aircraft. There is no justification given for this assumption beyond that….”, the “AP mode” assumed is in fact very likely, based on interviews with many B777 line pilots and a B777 simulator training pilot. It is not a guess. It is the most likely way anyone flying the aircraft would have done so, according to trained 777 pilots.

    Re the second assertion:
    “The closer you look at the variables affecting BFO, the less precise it becomes as a predictive tool. There will be no refinement, only an increase in the error bounds associated with this data.”
    This statement shows a total lack of understanding about the evolution of the BFO analysis. The fact is that refinements to the BFO bias values has significantly reduced the channel type and channel unit dependent errors, and thus reduced the overall uncertainty in path errors.

    It is baseless assertions such as these two that tend to confuse many followers of this blog. If you believe either of these assertions, then please produce new analysis or new evidence to back up the statements. The existing record clearly does not support either statement.

20. This just in:

    An AirAsia flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore has lost contact with air traffic control shortly after asking for an unusual route.

    Transport officials said the aircraft, flight number QZ 8501, lost contact with the Jakarta air traffic control tower at 6.17 a.m local time (11.17pm GMT).

    http://www.itv.com/news/update/2014-12-28/air-asia-flight-loses-contact-after-asking-for-unusual-route/

21. What Brock said. All of it.

    And another plane has just gone missing:

    Air Asia flight QZ 8501, traveling from Indonesia to Singapore

    http://t.co/4ZqCzIoKXE

22. It’s an Airbus A320-200 with the registration number PK-AXC.

    Confirmatory statement viewable on AirAsia Facebook page:

    http://www.facebook.com/notes/airasia/news-update-airasia-indonesia-flight-qz8501/10152667738358742

23. PK-AKC is a busy aircraft. Immediately previous hop today was from Kuala Lumpur to Surabaya:

    http://www.flightradar24.com/data/airplanes/pk-axc/

24. @airlandseaman

    Your answer to my path objection speaks to my point exactly. You just don’t “get it”. This is not a most likely scenario. It is a diverted aircraft. Of course, your choice is the way the aircraft is normally flown. I’ve been on 777’s flown like that many dozens of times myself, but that would not lead me to pick that model in this case.

    Relative to BFO, you are trying to refine a random walk. It is analogous to improving the encoding of GPS selective availability. Lots of people tried their filtering skills on that one as well with absolutely no success.

    Then we have with your model:

    1) No debris

    2) No radar sighting

    3) No motive/intent

25. air asia, where copilot of mh370s future wife flew

26. To Matty-Perth
    If an aircraft flying over India did not have a transponder, it would still be likely to be picked up by primary radar at one of the numerous civil and military airports. It is true that they may not be very alert unless they are close to Pakistan.
    Also, Ajit Doval is indeed the National Security Adviser in the new government. He took up this position at the end of May 2014.

27. Holy crap they lost another one! QZ8501 from AirAsia based in Malaysia.

    Hearts go out to the families back on terra firma. Just terrible.

28. Airlandseaman – You say – “the “AP mode” assumed is in fact very likely, based on interviews with many B777 line pilots and a B777 simulator training pilot. It is not a guess. It is the most likely way anyone flying the aircraft would have done so, according to trained 777 pilots.

    More specifically – “it is not a guess.” It’s not far off though? Interesting that in this case “most likely” will do because I suppose any useful analysis depends on it. The 18.25 reboot is most likely a power restoration yet you are happy to keep introducing doubt about that bit? It’s seemed to me that the crunchers are careful to defend the viability of the whole analysis. A double standard?

29. ABN397 – If it went across India transponderless I guess it would still show up but I wonder how frequent this is/isn’t in general. If there was an unmarked blip on the system somewhere just cruising down an established route, what would they say down at ATSB? Satellite says no? Indian radar was taken off the table very early. And if there was more than one?

    Also, the combat radius of an intercepting aircraft might be defining. They can’t go far without airborne support – so hawkish surveillance is almost pointless without intercept capability? There goes most of mainland Australia.

30. QZ8501: OK, so now watch how the collective spin begins to work the fact that another aircraft operated by MAS and it’s affiliates has ‘gone missing.’ Until confirmed otherwise, there must be something larger at work, and if you don’t agree, then you must be ‘one of them’.

    What else could you be if you don’t agree then something less than Green?

    It’s uncanny, it’s unprecedented, it is truly outrageous that a single org could lose three aircraft in the space of ten months. Yet to conclude anything otherwise at this point is nothing less than mere collective conflationary madness, the pathology of the mob.

    The aircraft is ‘missing’ because it ran into a lightning storm of all things and somehow managed to screw itself. It is not ‘missing’ in any larger sense, It’s more that English is a rather inadequate human language and it does not quite have enough subtlety to adequately frame the difference between the two incidents. Perhaps German could better get it right; I don’t know, I don’t speak German.

    Alex Siew is going to have a field day with this one; truly time for him to shine. As for anyone else, welcome to an opportunity to resolve your very own hue of Green madness – see you on the other side.

    And yes, I am as Green as you are!

31. Rand – I thought Airasia was owned by a guy called Fernando? The Richard Branson of Asia? I don’t think there will be a stink – unless there is no wreckage. Not from me anyway.

32. Matty: Whoops, moving too fast, attempting to return to family and friends… I was in error; it’s Malaysia based Air Asia. The rest of my post still stands.

33. Brock: Ok, so WHO is directing the smear campaign? I would argue that there isn’t one, while you have rather semantically insinuated that there is, whether intentionally or not. Again, who are the smart people being taken for a ride, and by whom? Noam Chomsky would not allow you to escape, and neither will I on this one.

    Dugain’s logic may be valid, but that does not mean that his conclusion is true. I would say that it has a very low probability of being true, and that he is rather a sensationalist frame capitalizing on the larger news cycle and playing to rather foolish subjective elements within all of us at our expense and to his gain. He deserves to be trashed, rather than entertained.

    The flattening and democratization of information networks is a grand thing, yet there remains inherent pathology. If is not enough to destroy the existing, rather corrupt information hierarchy in the interest of social justice; you must also replace it with a new hierarchal form to ensure that there is enough structure to avoid a slide into chaos in the new era of Live Streaming Data.

    As with amateur hardcore porn, amateur information porn likewise arrives with a pimple on its butt, bad lighting and POV camera shake. There is a lot if crap out there, and one does not necessarily dive into the details in each and every instance to confirm or disprove this or that, simply because those are the intellectual ground rules. Bad porn is bad porn, and empirical knowledge is a great thing; these are perhaps the only two rules that one need carry into the chaos that is the Internet.

    Apologies, Brock, but I did not arrive at some rather hasty conclusion re Dugain. He is rotten – period. Wave no more the putrefying corpse of Dugain’s stillborn nonsense in my face, as you now risk bringing forth my inner Hunter S. Thompson. Indeed, I am but an inch away from getting, really, really snide…

34. Really? Do you have a source on that? I just tried a quick Google search but couldn’t find anything.

35. @all loss of P-channel sync

    someone here made an entry about the above last week as explanation for satcomm loss period. Can someone please explain what exactly has to happen for the above event? Would it need human intervention or could it happen because of tampering with the electronics?

    @Matt – Perth re Greg Sheridan

    This journalist sems to know a lot of asias attitude towards islam. Did he make such an assessment for malaysia too? And is there anything known whether the malaysian islamists have any issues with the british monarchy?

36. Does anyone know here what the rules of engagemant are in britain, if a commercial airliner is identified as a threat? And by what distance would a darkened and deviated plane be identified as a possible threat?

37. CosAca: I don’t know about the UK, but in the US, there is no such animal as waiting for a commercial airliner to be declared a ‘threat.’

    In the US, the Commander of the Northern Command headquartered in Colorado has full authority to order the immediate interception/destruction of an airliner under virtually any circumstances. Presidential authorization need not be sought, as this would involve an inordinate amount of time and the loss of tactical advantage. The Commander can quite literally take a shot at just about anything he pleases.

38. Cosmic,

    Loss of P-ch sync: first, a brief recap on the basics of the satcom datalink. The aircraft transmissions are sync’ed to outbound (ground to air) frames continuously broadcast by the GES on the P-ch. In order to Log-On, the AES uses default P&R channels fixed for the purpose of Log-On. During Log-On, the GES allocates the AES specific P & R channels dependent on AES capabilities.
    The AES must maintain sync with the allocated P-ch signal. If it loses sync with this for more than 10sec it must renew Log-On. If the SDU was powered off it should execute an initial Log-On.
    I would hope that ATSB has been able to differentiate the type of Log-On request at 18:25.
    Why would the AES lose sync? There are 6 components in the signal chain between the SDU and the HGA antenna patch; the HGA needs steering data; there is a ‘blind’ spot at low look angles (from the AES to the satellite) ahead & aft on the a/c longitudinal axes; also, power supply. Any of these factors could be causal but none present an obvious or emphatic reason for loss of P-ch sync prior to the 18:25 Log-On.

    UK QRA: any aircraft that is approaching UK airspace & cannot be indentified will initiate a Quick Reaction Alert. Contacts will be identified by the Air Defence Surveillance (ADS) network exploiting data & voice integration to civil Air Traffic Control systems, the oceanic and area control centres. The distance will depend on ADS detection range & location of the RADAR sites.

    :Don

39. If we are to take the Maldives theories seriously, maybe we should look a little closer at what evidence is available. Here is the best summary of pictures of the fire extinguisher: http://www.maldivesfinest.com/mh370-evidence

40. Re QZ8501, perhaps now we will see how Indonesia’s primary radar system actually functions. It will, of course, be interesting to see if there is any follow up/clarity re MH370 and Indon radar. Perhaps the possibilty that Malaysia never requested Indon radar data re MH 370 will now emerge; let’s see how this plays out.

41. @Rand: that was an empty threat – you are hopelessly polite.

    I retract the word “campaign” – while that’s what it feels like as a recipient, it surely WON’T feel like one as one of its perpetrators.

    And Rand – with respect – you ARE one of its perpetrators. Like others in this community, you have met the light of Dugain’s logic with the heat of derision – and little else. While I’m quite sure few, if any, of you have COORDINATED responses, that doesn’t make their sum total any less damaging to the search for truth.

    Dugain’s perspective is not only legitimate, it is compelling: if MH370 is not on the 7th arc (as SUGGESTED by zero surface debris, zero radar confirmation, and “debris to Sumatra”), then it is somewhere else. Of all the “somewhere elses”, the most likely are those the signal data could have been meant to CONCEAL. This connects the signal data providers to the people responsible for MH370’s fate.

42. Victor: if the US indeed had ‘additional surveillance capabilities’ relevant to MH370, would they perhaps have informed the location analysis and by now revealed their existence to the scrutiny of the same by the IG?

43. @Rand: I would hope that if the US had surveillance data, it would have been released to team doing the path reconstruction, but I don’t know. I doubt the IG is “on their radar”.

    @Brock: As time passes and no debris is found, the probability of a crash in the SIO along the 7th arc is reduced. But in my mind, this is still the highest probability scenario.

    @All: Who here is so certain that MH370 did not crash in the SIO along the 7th arc that he or she recommends stopping the current search efforts? Because at the end of the day, that is the question that the adults in the room have to answer.

44. Brock: the ‘ result’ in my experience re a Dugain was the heat of derision. What, you would like for me to share yet MORE on my process with you here? I think not.

    From a holistic, constructionist frame it makes zero sense and then Dugain’s approach is distasteful. I believe I even threw in a bit of Jungian mythology and how his piece is so obviously formulaic and contrived that it warrants no further examination. Apologies again, but it is so obviously Dugain and his dramatic little made for TV production that is harming the quest for the truth, rather than ‘our’ little ad hoc effort to frame him as nothing more than what he is. The shadow of my hyperbole is what Victor said: blowback. My hope is that you – a very smart individual – don’t buy into Dugain’s heat:light. Ironic, no?

    In the end you won’t buy it.

    And we will laugh about this little epicycle over beers at Matty’s Jeffwise.net reunion in Perth next year.

    Sooo, now, what do you know of JIT?

45. Victor: my point was that, if surveillance data had informed the location analysis, the IG would have found indications of this by now.

46. @Victor

    Let me try to explain how it really is.

    My “friends” were at it this morning. This group falls into two professional categories. Highly experienced math and science geeks who regard even looking at the Inmarsat data as a fool’s errand, and they are right, and another group of highly intelligent non-science professionals who enjoy making fun of techies.

    The science group has been involved in navigation and tracking for several decades – Transit, Loran-C, GPS,… That is what we did for a living. When I discuss MH370 and Inmarsat with them their response is usually either, why would you bother, or where would you like me to find the plane? It takes only a few minutes for them to dismiss the physics out of hand.

    Got a group email from the non-science group this morning suggesting that pictures of a 777 and an A320 be put on milk cartoons to help the scientists in identification. Where is the love?

    As far as alien abduction is concerned or the remote hijacking scenarios, everyone just laughs.

47. 1/2

    Matty, Brock:

    Thanks for that interesting piece from Greg Sheridan.

    Recall back in September I mentioned that (unmarked) Dornier (aka ‘Wolfhound’) with US Spec Ops aboard that ‘ran out of fuel’and was forced to land (by the Indonesian AF) in Banda Aceh. That was May 2013. I also suggested that the Wolfhound might have been casing the joint because we (US and possibly other) had gotten a tip about something coming that involved Banda Aceh.

    What’s interesting (and I’d never mapped it until a few days ago) is that based on a great circle route from the Maldives to Singapore (the Wolfhound flight), they should have been flying way south of Aceh:

    http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=MLE-sin

    So why was that Wolfhound caught flying near the tip of Sumatra?

48. 2/2

    Matty, Brock, all:

    Sidney Jones, a highly-regarded expert in extremism — particularly as it relates to Indonesia — published a report in September: “The Evolution of ISIS in Indonesia”

    You can download it here:
    http://t.co/bkrPmdOrlx

49. @Dennis: Yes, there is uncertainty associated with the satellite data. Perhaps it is even unlikely the plane will be found in the SIO on the 7th arc. But I repeat my question:

    “Who here is so certain that MH370 did not crash in the SIO along the 7th arc that he or she recommends stopping the current search efforts? Because at the end of the day, that is the question that the adults in the room have to answer.”

    No takers yet.

50. @Victorl
    Perhaps we can continue to do SIO search at least because of this? And its also question if some kind of differential comparisons of satellite mapping can show new things on the floor?? Anybody tried?

    http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/exploration.html

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