As readers of this blog or my Kindle Single (or, now, New York magazine) know, I’m intrigued by the possibility that MH370 might have been hijacked and flown north to the Yubileyniy Aerodrome within the Baikonur Cosmodrome. If so, it would have come to rest on the specially-milled concrete at approximately an hour and a half before sunrise on Sunday, March 8. And then what? If it stayed where it was, it would have been easy to spot by land-imaging satellites overhead. To avoid detection, it would have to have either refueled and taken off again, or found some kind of shelter.
As it happens, the Kazakh steppe is a terrible place to hide a 210-foot long, 60-foot-high airplane. The flat, desert plain is sparsely populated and almost featureless, so that anything large and unusual is apt to stand out. There is no natural canopy of trees to shelter under. Though there are large buildings at the cosmodrome where space vehicles are serviced, there are no large structures near Yubileyniy.
After I began developing my “Spoof” hypthesis I spent days scouring first Google Earth, then free commercial satellite imagery looking for any hint that a plane could have been stashed in the vicinity. The pickings were slim. The Yubileyniy complex was built in the ‘80s as the landing site for the Buran space plane, and after the program was cancelled in 1989 it has largely sat disused. Occasionally the runway is used by planes carrying inbound VIPs and cosmonauts, but otherwise nothing has really happened there in decades. An overview of the area is depicted above.
The dark, fishhook-shaped line is the rail line connecting the airstrip to the rest of the Baikonur complex. Alongside it is a road from which a series of driveways lead off to the north. One of them leads to an isolated six-story building that stands surrounded by debris, berms, and trenches. I came to think of the area as Yubileyniy North. Here’s what it looked like in 2006 (click on images to enlarge):
As you can see, the area is desert, where vehicle tracks persist for many years. The six-story building casts a dark, short shadow to the northwest — the sun is nearly overhead. The road from the airstrip comes up from the bottom of the frame and curves to the right. Here and there rectangular patches of debris suggest where buildings once stood. Essentially, it’s a ruin. Here’s the same area, six years later:
Not much has changed. The sun is lower in the sky, so the six-story building’s shadow is longer. But nothing seems to have changed at all. The entire area of Yubileyniy is like this—the place seems have been left to slowly crumble in the desert sun for decades. There’s nowhere to stash a 777. On the other hand, the most recent imagery viewable here in Google Earth comes from 2012. Perhaps something has happened since then? I didn’t know anything about what kind of imagery is available from commercial sources, but I set out to learn. Before long I came upon a company called Terraserver, which lets you view high-resolution satellite imagery for free. I used it to scope around the general area of the Yubileyniy complex, and here’s what I found in an image of Yubileyniy North from October 31, 2013:
Suddenly, things are happening. A number of trucks are lined up in the parking lot in the upper-right part of the image. The six-story building is being disassembled. And what looks like a large rectangle of dirt has been bulldozed to the left of the building. The image resolution is so good that you can make out what I take to be the stripes left by the bulldozer blade as it worked back and forth horizontally. At the northern end of the rectangle is a berm which casts a shadow to the north. At the far northeastern corner lies what appears to be a trench with a well-defined corner on the upper right, with treadmarks leading out of it toward the southeast. I’m not sure what this dirt rectangle represents — are they building a pile of dirt, or a hole? — but what really gets my attention is the size of the thing. To give you a sense of scale, I’ve superimposed an equivalently proportioned 777 silhouette onto the image:
This struck me as interesting, to say the least. Naturally, I wondered what happened next. Fortunately, Terraserver had one more image that I could browse for free. This next one was taken on April 26, 2014:
Holy cow. All traces of both the building and the dirt rectangle have been erased. Various debris piles have been swept away, too. At first I thought that maybe the image had been digitally scrubbed, but if you look closely you can easily make out individual pieces of junk in between the cleared areas. So my interpretation is that the site was actually cleared and swept up.
So here’s the situation: nothing happens at Yubileyniy for decades; then, four months before MH370 disappears, the Russians start building a 777-sized something-or-other a mile and a half from a giant disused airstrip. Then, a month after the plane disappears, the area looks like it’s been erased.
What had happened in the meantime? To find out, I had to shell out cash from my own pocket to buy imagery from the main commercial satellite imagery provider, Digital Globe, via one of its resellers—in this case, a company called Apollo Mapping. The cash drain was painful, but at this point I was very far down the rabbit hole. Here’s what Yubileyniy North looked like on December 17, 2013:
The sun is low on the snow-dusted steppe; it’s almost winter. In a month and a half, workers have removed all but the bottom-most floors of the six-story building. You can make out the shadow of a crane projecting to the north from the middle of the remaining structure. A handful of trucks can still be seen in the parking lot. The dirt pile has been extended a few yards to the north; the berm at that end now overlies the what we saw as the sharp corner of the trench in the October image. Beyond the berm lies either a dark strip that could either be a long trench or just a shadow; to my eye the line of brightness at its northern edge implies the lip of a trench, but who knows. Work is clearly continuing. The next image, in black and white, is from three weeks later, January 9, 2014:
Now winter is in full effect. Snow blankets the entire region, and cold has descended: in the four days before this picture was taken, the temperature fluctuated between -15F and +14F. The disruption of the snow cover shows that work is very much underway. The building seems to be down to its last story. Trucks can be seen in the parking lot. I’m not sure what to make of the northern end of the rectangle; two dark strips are visible, perhaps one of them is a trench and the other is the shadow of a berm. Unforunately the resolution is not very good because the image was taken at a fairly low angle. The fact that work is continuing under such harsh conditions suggests a sense of urgency, to my mind; or perhaps these are simply hardy mofos. By the time the next image is taken, nearly two months have passed.
In this black-and-white image, the building has been completely dismantled and the dirt rectangle bulldozed flat. No berm remains at the northern end. Horizontal bulldozer tracks are still visible. The dark dirt is framed with a lighter border, suggesting perhaps a snowy slope. No trucks are visible, suggesting that the work crew has moved on. A color image taken four days later looks almost identical:
This image was taken two days before MH370 disappeared, on March 6. The next one was taken eight days after, on March 16:
When I first saw this picture, my heart leapt. The two scenes, taken just before and after the disappearance, looked so different that I was certain that something significant had occurred in the interim. Perhaps what was a rectangular depression in the March 6 image has now been filled in with sand (along with maybe, oh, who knows, a plane?).
I began pricing out tickets to Kazakhstan and searching the internet for advice on detecting large buried things with metal detectors. I located a Russian from St. Petersburg who’d made a gonzo two-day bike trek across the steppe to reach the Yubileyniy strip and sought his advice on how to get to the area without permission; he told me that he’d camped out at the airstrip overnight without anybody noticing him but then had tried to visit a busier part of the cosmodrome and gotten arrested. After he told them he was just scouting around because he was a huge fan of the Buran project, they let him go. I figured that if I was more careful I had a good chance of making it in and back.
But then I looked more closely, and examined the weather records. It just so happened that during this time interval spring fell on Baikonur like a hammer. On March 6, the temperature had only just peeked above freezing, by the 16th the daily highs had been in the 40s for the better part of a week. The thaw has completely changed the color palette. Everything that was covered in snow, and hence lighter colored, is now sodden and hence darker colored. White plains of snow are now damp brown sand. The darker earth of the rectangle is now drier and lighter-colored. After staring at these images for many hours I concluded that the most likely interpretation is that nothing has changed except for a temperature change.
And so we wind up back at our April 26 image:
By now the desert has returned to its normal dried-out state. The cluttered jumble seen over the winter has been replaced by almost featureless swatches of tan. A vehicle track overlies the northernmost part of the dirt rectangle, its borders now smudged and indeterminate.
I showed some of these images to construction experts and satellite imagery professionals, and received very little encouragement. Most likely, they told me, the work being performed was site remediation: a building was torn down, and construction debris thrown in a trench and covered up. As successive trenches are dug and filled in, a rectangular shape is formed. Simple as that.
And yet: the entire cosmodrome is littered with decades of abandoned equipment and derelict buildings, evincing a constitutional lack of interest in the concept of remediation. There is no commercial or residential activity for miles of Yubileyniy. Why, after decades, did the Russians suddenly need to clear this one lonely spot, in the heart of a frigid winter, finishing just before MH370 disappeared? And why is it that the greater part of the dirt rectangle was already laid out in the Oct 31 image, before the building was substantially demolished?
I don’t know. I tried to reach out to people who might know, but had no luck, and eventually I had to turn my attention to projects that might earn me some money. But I’d love to find out. If any readers have any special insight, I’d love to hear it.
UPDATE 4/3/2106: Since I wrote the above, Google Earth has added a new high-quality image of the site, taken October, 12, 2014. It gives a different impression from the last image–it doesn’t look any longer like the dirt was swept flat, like someone trying to cover their tracks.
FYI:
Below is an update to my post —
[January 28, 2015 at 2:17 PM
Airliner Stalls, Crashes After Trying to Climb Over Thunderstorm]
— concerning ‘John’, the airline pilot and MH370 next of kin.
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sku639
@all:
As a layman (but a very curious, and now mildly-obsessed one), I’ve been digging into potential flight paths for the northern route. Before I go into the rabbit hole too much further, could any of the experts in the house confirm or clarify my current understanding that:
1. With the transponder disabled, the only ground radar system that could detect the aircraft is a PSR
2. The maximum range of PSRs is ~200 nautical miles
3. The maximum range is only line-of-sight (i.e., a “dome” over the location of the system)
4. Some small-to-medium airports in less-developed nations might rely on SSRs alone
I’d be so grateful for y’all’s help (and would be happy to share the sources that have been pointing me to the those notions). Hoping I might come up with something interesting to contribute.
GlobusMax: Dr. Duncan looked at the LANL analysis essentially at my request. He concluded it was coming from 190 degrees (Antarctica), not 247 degrees as LANL claims. He went on to show how INDISTINGUISHABLE it was from the rest of the events HA01 recorded in those hours, and even explained WHY the acoustic signature of an ice-cracking event would look just like this. I consider this is a pretty thorough debunking.
@littlefoot: If it was just an innocent commercial fly-by, why hasn’t a single person on board come forward to say, “you know those multiple Maldives eyewitness accounts? Yeah, that was just us.”?
Oleksandr – CTBTO are in no way connected to the Australian Defence Force. Nadda. The ADF will have oversight with their activities whatsoever.
Brock/Littlefoot/Nihonmama – when we were going over the Curtin boom last year I said a few time that it could be the only tangible evidence of a crash that we had. I put it to some I know who is familiar with Sub ops – if it went in the SIO, and they recorded an event at about that time, that would have to be it wouldn’t it? He said almost certainly. I can attest that Curtin is independent of the Australian govt. Can we say the same about LANL/US govt? Could they be propping up the narrative? What an odd foray for LANL? OR do they do this stuff often?
The day the world was looking for a missing plane, Russia was busy annexing Crimea…
That would be quite the diversion
Oleksandr – CTBTO are in no way connected to the Australian Defence Force. Nadda. The ADF will have no oversight with their activities whatsoever.
Brock/Littlefoot/Nihonmama – when we were going over the Curtin boom last year I said a few times that it could be the only tangible evidence of a crash that we had, but swept aside – computer says no. I put it to some I know who is familiar with Sub ops – if it went in the SIO, and they recorded an event at about that time, that would have to be it wouldn’t it? He said almost certainly. I can attest that Curtin is independent of the Australian govt. Can we say the same about LANL/US govt? Could they be propping up the narrative? I have often thought there was another game going on. What an odd foray for LANL? OR do they do this stuff often?
https://cmst.curtin.edu.au/local/docs/media_news/duncan_sound_clue_in_hunt_for_MH370_jun14.pdf
A note from the charming and helpful Dr Duncan “We succeeded in recovering the recorder off Scott Reef and have finished analysing the data from around the time MH370 disappeared. I’ve attached a brief report on this FYI. Recovery of the recorder off Dampier had to be abandoned due to bad weather – we’ll have another go in a few months but due to the local oceanography and some nearby seismic surveys it is unlikely it will have anything useful.”
Sept –“No, the Dampier logger is still out there – currently planning to have another go at retrieving it in May”
Another point is that a sound can be blocked by oceanfloor topography — and can then bounce off another feature and echo back to then be picked up by listening devices. Which then also makes the precise timing of an event hard to pinpoint too.
Perhaps the Dampier log will have picked up something to clarify this issue.
file:///var/folders/89/qndf4gkx7nz1jy3k47zqwxgw0000gn/T/com.apple.mail.drag/Scott%20Reef%20IMOS%20logger%20data%20analysis%20for%202014_03_08_Release.pdf
Plane goes missing; world looks for plane. Meanwhile, Russia annexes Crimea.
@Matty: yes, it does seem to me that the US government is beginning to flail on this file.
@GuardedDon
Thanks for following up.
That’s what I thought; the GES antenna would be tightly focused on the Inmarsat satellite. What I was getting at was… is there any way anyone can think of that the signal chain could be overridden. For example, say the onboard antenna is reprogrammed during the dark phase of the flight to point at a relay satellite several degrees east of Inmarsat; that satellite transmits to the GES and picks off the return signal somehow… a sophisticated man-in-the-middle attack. BTO and BFO graphs very similar to those presented can be produced in this scenario, which is why i’m asking.
@Matty, Littlefoot, @Brock:
“I can attest that Curtin is independent of the Australian govt. Can we say the same about LANL/US govt?” <— NO. NO. NO. From experience. NO.
"Could they be propping up the narrative?"
<– YES. WITH EASE.
"I have often thought there was another game going on." <— AND SOME HERE AGREED.
What an odd foray for LANL? <– IT'S PAR.
@Oleksandr
Please double check your correction to my post as to the weight of a 777.
http://www.boeing.com/boeing/commercial/777family/pf/pf_lrproduct.page
Chris Butler,
Weight for 777-200ER w RR power is 160t empty weight and 224t max zero fuel weight. MH370 wasn’t fully loaded.
[Boeing 777 Characteristics for Airport Planning]
HTH resolve your point with Oleksander
TEx
@TEx
Yes it does help.
Thanks
@Signal Hill,
1. Yes.
2. More like 60 nm according to the FAA: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/asr-11/
Maybe some military radars have a greater range
3. Yes.
4. Even in the US, such airports (class D and E airspace) wouldn’t have their own radar but would depend on the radar coverage of larger facilities.
@Matty said, “Can we say the same about LANL/US govt? Could they be propping up the narrative? I have often thought there was another game going on. What an odd foray for LANL? OR do they do this stuff often?”
If the LANL work is propaganda, I’d say they are the worst propagandists ever. Their work has been kept quiet and was quietly shared with the IG as part of a technical exchange. It is only receiving some exposure now because Mike E. has publicly talked about their results, prompting the more general release of their analyses.
Of course some will claim that their coy demeanor only proves what smart propagandists they are…
Chris Butler & The Examinator,
The figure of 174,000 kg is coming from Jeff’s summary:
jeffwise.net/2014/09/29/mh370-what-we-know-now/
It appears the link you included, points to B777 300ER and 200LR instead of B777 200ER.
From Wiki (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777) the empty weight of B777 200ER is 138,100 kg. Note B777 300ER is ~30 tons heavier. There could be a minor variation due to the type of the engines installed. I believe Jeff’s estimation is sufficiently accurate in this case.
@VictorI
Would it be possible to combine the landing at Banda Aceh with:
– BTO/BFO before the landing at Banda Aceh (you’ve already proven a fit under certain circumstances);
– Spoofing the BTO/BFO starting from departure there;
– Remaining fuel of the aircraft
– Sighting of Kate Tee;
– Sighting of Maldives residents;
– Location mentioned by Brock as to where the sound originated from: 2.1N, 69.3E; taking into account the speed of sinking?
I’m no expert, but I wonder if we would get a sort of time matches on those.
Brock,
Re: “The TIME of the Curtin U event has LIKEWISE been triangulated”.
When the information first appeared, it was certainly not triangulated. Pls. check ATSB June report. It could possibly be triangulated later if/when other data became available. I would appreciate if you provide a link to other records similar to Curtin’s if you have.
The LANL has not been officially involved in the search for 370. Some scientists at LANL published a report on July 3, 2014, (“Seismic and hydroacoustic analysis relevant to MH370”), but that report did not address the Inmarsat data or any path models. Following that report, a small group of concerned and curious employees at LANL, on their own time, quietly developed their own path analysis and shared it with the IG. It is not an official US government or official LANL effort. The scientists involved are all experts, donating time like the IG members, to help find 370, and for no other purpose. Accusations that they are somehow involved in “… propping up the narrative…” are slanderous and extremely offensive, and should be immediately retracted.
Jeff: I appreciate the desire to keep the blog open to many diverse opinions, but this kind of slanderous sewage is extremely offensive and should not be allowed to go on. I feel very embarrassed to have dragged the LANL group into this ridiculous conversation. They never asked for any public exposure and don’t deserve this disrespectful BS.
Lucy,
“Another point is that a sound can be blocked by oceanfloor topography — and can then bounce off another feature and echo back to then be picked up by listening devices”
Yes. In general, 3D acoustic of the ocean is a very complex thing. There is possibility for the generation of a seismic wave on the bed impact; there is diffraction; the sound can be trapped and travel along a trench; sound speed is different in the top near-surface layer and cold near-bed layer; etc.
@JJ: If you allow for the possibility of spoofing of the BFO and BTO, that is the same as essentially throwing out the satellite data. As refueling would be allowed, the plane could be anywhere on the planet. Without any satellite data to guide us, we are in the realm of complete speculation and have to rely on disparate witness sightings and other inconclusive data to guide us. There are so many possibilities that I won’t even venture to speculate.
@ALL
While I do understand the touchdown @ the bottom being confusing with the drift & topography.
Still finding it hard to understand, if the acoustical equip can hear ice cracking. Why would it not hear 138,100 kg hitting the water at nearly the speed of sound? If in the SIO, points to a much softer ditching.
@VictorI:
In your post in this blog considering this scenario (http://jeffwise.net/mh370-scenario-with-a-landing-at-banda-aceh-by-victor-iannello-august-23-2014/), you mention a landing at 18:46 UTC and take-off at 19:06 UTC.
Considering that some kind of cargo is unloaded, this time seems somewhat short for a refuel.
What if there was no refuel? The range would be much smaller because of the fuel burnt for takeoff. How far would it be? Would it be possible to reach the 7th arc?
Also, in this scenario, the heading would be south in a straight line towards 34S, 94E (in your post).
That looks to me like ‘ditching’ in a straight line.
Considering how the SIO was determined and the parties involved, seems to me we will find it there; but without ‘cargo’.
Moreover the fact that speculations will start about what happened when it’s actually found there. You can’t prove in any way that it would have landed somewhere before the ditching, I suppose.
Jeff, thank you! More to follow….
CTobserver said, “Shortly after this plane disappeared, I was with a small group in Nebraska & crossed paths with a CBS reporter who shared with us that one of his contacts revealed that a large shipment of gold was aboard this aircraft.”
Can you please provide more details? Who was the reporter? Why was this not reported as news? Have you been in contact with the reporter since this time?
There have been rumors about gold in the hold of MH370 for a long time, but no evidence to date has surfaced, and so these rumors are easily dismissed.
@JJ: Yes, more fuel would be burned for the climb after the takeoff than during cruise. But this has to be balanced against the reduced fuel consumption during the descent and the near zero fuel consumption while on the ground. I believe the net fuel consumption is actually less than if the plane had been cruising the entire time, although the distance traveled would be less. And yes, the 7th arc would be reached.
The probability of a stop at Banda Aceh is reduced the further south the plane is found. If it is found further south than 37S, it is not probable that the plane landed. If found around 34S, it becomes very possible.
The “problem” with this scenario is that to date no witnesses have come forth observing a landing at Banda Aceh. Not to mention the problem with all end points in the SIO and the lack of debris. On the plus side, unloading valuable cargo followed by a ditch provides a reason for the disappearance. Also, the final waypoint of the South Pole, producing a due South track, is appealing due to its simplicity and effectiveness.
Read your NYMag piece and have been reading this blog — utterly fascinating. As compelling as the sequence of events related to the US announcing sanctions (the “boomerang” comment you mentioned being uttered prior to both MH370 and MH17), to me what’s *more* compelling is the date of the imprisonment (on an overturned sodomy acquittal) of popular Islamic Malay politician Anwar Ibrahim:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/07/us-malaysia-anwar-idUSBREA260HM20140307
To my mind, the primary flaw in your (otherwise brilliantly researched) theory is — as you’ve duly noted numerous times — motive. I just don’t see Russia “retaliating” against the US by downing Malaysian passenger jets. But what if Malaysian Islamic hijackers wanted to protest Ibrahim’s imprisonment by, say, crashing a passenger jet into the Petronas Towers? This would fit with other aspects of the theory, such as the fact that it seems unequivocal that the plane was commandeered, and the fact that the plane’s initial U-turn was more or less back toward KL (actually, they seem to have flown over the Malay/Thai border, and would have needed to hang a left when they reached the Andaman Sea, but this fits too given the FIR strategy you speak of). And, most importantly: Ibrahim’s acquittal was overturned, and his sentencing was announced, on 7 March 2014.
The problem with this theory of course, is that since the Petronas Towers are still there, where is the plane? You have to buy that the most remote, least forgiving expanse of ocean on Planet Earth hasn’t given up its secret yet. I dunno. As unlikely as this may be, I still see it as LESS unlikely than this being a Putin-driven thing (not that any reasonable person would put anything past him at this point).
Food for thought . . .
What follows is a witness account from someone in Langkawi, Malaysia. The witness does not wish to be identified and wants no publicity. I’m able to post this because her account also appears in this book((Ch 17), which was published in Sept/2014
http://t.co/qROe53D5HE
“The night that plane went missing,” Lauren said, “Dale was away. In the night I got up to go to the toilet. It was either about half past two in the morning, or half past four. I’ve never been sure.” She’s looking at Gunung Raya as if she’s looking through a window. “It’s the only plane
I’ve ever seen flying between Mount Raya and the house.” It was a big plane, she said, with a big white light, “going roughly south to north. It went between those two mountains. I thought it must be trying to come round to land at the airport.” It came from the direction of the airport. It disappeared behind a ridge obscuring the rest of Gunung Raya like a buffalo’s back end.
She drew a deep breath. “When I heard about the missing plane, I didn’t know what to do. When Dale’s working I’m out here on my own. I was too scared to tell anyone.” Eventually she spoke about it with her Langkawi landlord. He suggested she take her story to the police. The police had taken her statement. They’d stood on her veranda and seen the view that I was seeing now.
Did her story ice their blood or only mine? Island wide, a plain divided Gunung Mat Cincangr’s Swiss cable cars and Gunung Raya. The airport’s runaway pointed along the plain and towards Lauren’s house. A big plane flying over the road of landslides had not just missed the runway by miles. Its big white light had threaded a flying coffin straight through the eye of a gully’s needle.
If Lauren had seen MH370, it was no crippled craft manned by a man desperately trying to find a safe landing strip. What she described was a pilot hiding from Thai eyes. From Thailand and a porous border bristling with radar units, a plane descends towards Langkawi airport. Then, not
long after it has vanished, from behind Gunung Raya another plane ascends. It leaves the little airport in its wake as it flies away from Thailand and out into the Bay of Bengal. Had the pilot gone on to hide in a Sumatran gully too?”
@Brock,
Re: alledged Malaysian sighting: You said, if it was a harmless charter fly by where the pilot wanted to amuse the passengers, some of the passengers should’ve come forward by now in order to tell “It was just us”.
Maybe that has happened already, I don’t know. Would that be great news? Would the passengers even know which island they were crossing? But your question is a good one nevertheless. Rather than the passengers I would expect the pilot or the crew to come forward since they would know exactly where they were that morning. They might hesitate though, if they were afraid of unpleasant consequences. And when it turned out, that the ping rings were not compatible with the Maldive sighting, there was no reason anymore to come clean.I think there were speculations at the time, which fairly big plane might’ve been around that day. I haven’t followed this story lately at all.
The problem is that this scenario – like most others, of course – doesn’t really add up to a plausible narrative. Only corrupted satellite data combined with Chris Goodfellow’s disaster theory or a highjacking gone bad could place a low and slow flying plane in that area. Neither scenario gives us a good reason why the data should’ve been corrupted. A sophisticated highjacking on the other hand is completely incompatible with a low, slow and witness attracting plane. And all those ocean crash scenarios suffer from the lack of debris. Yes, they haven’t looked there. But shouldn’t something have turned up anyway by now?
It doesn’t make any sense – which is unfortunately the case with most narratives…
@GlobusMax,
I’ve done some more thinking re: taking the workings of a criminal mind into account when testing or refining routes into the SIO.
And I came to the conclusion that it is a very sensible approach, no matter if the satellite data are faked or trustworthy.It doesn’t matter if the plane was really deliberately crashed into a remote area of the SIO – or if the perps faked the data because they want us to believe in the SIO scenario. In both cases the criminal mind might come up with pretty similar routes.
Very interesting.
I went to Google Maps to look at the current sat. photos of Yubileyniy and found several photos that had been taken in May, 2014. These can be seen here:
https://ssl.panoramio.com/photo/107581357
These appear to have been taken by someone on a bicycle trek (the captions are in Cyrillic and I can’t interpret). If this was the site where MH370 had been take, it seems unlikely that a casual biker could make it all the way to the runway let alone take pictures at the facility. Here is another link to this guy’s journal from his trek:
http://deev-ag.livejournal.com/tag/Казахстан.%20Байконур.%20Май%202014г.
@jeff:
Are you confident that the pictures dated March 6 and March 16 were taken on those dates? If so, it should be obvious to anyone that NOTHING got buried there between those two dates. Why? Because the PATTERN on the dirt inside and around the rectangle is exactly the same on both dates. Just look at any and all white ‘shapes’ on the March 6 picture (snow covered) and you will find the same ‘shapes’ in dark brown color on the March 16 picture (wet soil). Likewise, look at any and all dark brown ‘shapes’ on the March 6 picture (wet soil) and you will find the same ‘shapes’ in light brown color on the March 16 picture (dry soil). Anyone looking at those two pictures can clearly see that the surface is exactly the same. No digging has taken place. No dirt has been added. No dirt has been removed. If you do not agree with this, please indicate exactly where in the rectangle any digging may have occurred between those two dates and how you explain the fact that the pattern on the surface/dirt looks EXACTLY the same. I’m very fascinated by your research, but if the dates of the pictures are correct, then I can’t fathom why anyone would believe anything has been buried there between those two dates. Please enlighten me!
@globalMax
@littlefoot
As we travel back to the criminal, I will ask again, if the weight of the passengers is removed is it possible to arc below India, to Iran. Or take the northern path and reach Iran and avoid detection
Yes, I noticed that as well. The shots were taken by a man named Alexander Deev, I looked him up and we chatted via email (and Google translate). He spent two days cycling in, nobody bothered him, and then he got arrested when he ventured too close to an active launch facility. By my reckoning he came within a mile of the “dirt rectangle” and no one spotted him, which would suggest that either the plane isn’t buried there or the Russians were so confident they wouldn’t get caught that they took no particular security measures. The former seems more likely, frankly.
@JC, I agree with you. The pattern in the soil is the same. And I would add that, while it’s very easy to look at the March 2/March 6 images and perceive the dirt rectangle as being a hole, I’ve spent a lot of time flipping back and forth between the images and comparing them to mounds and depressions elsewhere in those images, and it seems to me that the dirt rectangle is a mound, not a hole. So my first reaction — that what I was looking at on March 6 is a hole that’s filled in by March 16 — is not correct. On the other, some work does appear to have been done between the 6th and the 16th, most notably the extension of the dirt track to the north of the rectangle all the way to its edge, and the smoothing out of the numerous criss-crossing tracks just to the west. It also seems like some of the debris in the vicinity of the torn-down building has been removed. All in all, it’s very curious, but I don’t think that the plane is buried there. Unfortunately, I seem to have given the impression that my whole theory hangs on the plane being buried under this dirt.
One possibility to keep in mind, if we’re thinking the plane landed, took off, and crashed in the SIO:
The crew did not need to be culpable nor did a hijacking team need to be on board to perform a criminal act. They only needed to be threatened in order to comply.
For example, the crew could have been instructed to fly a particular route, land at a particular place, and fly another route, etc., or else _____. At some point in the second leg, the crew could become incapacitated, leading the plane to the SIO.
An innocent crew would not permit a hijacking for a suicide 9/11-style mission, but might comply with a traditional “go here and nobody gets hurt” hijacking, especially if it included landing instructions. That crew would only need to be convinced that harm would come if they DIDN’T comply. If the crew believed the objective was simply a cargo theft, they’d likely be willing to land, refuel, and takeoff again.
In other words, the crew could be cooperating under duress until the plane was heading south, and then incapacitated by a time- or altitude-triggered device on board. No suicidal crew is required and the witnesses are all sent to the SIO. None of the passengers even need to be hijackers.
I regret the whole LANL thing too. I dug into it because it matches my theory and am responsible for much of the probing here about it. It’s me who has confirmation bias, but I want to understand it. If you read the original paper, they all but trash the chances of the event being MH370. It’s hard for people like me not to note the coincidence of where the point lies. There is no conspiracy. Science cannot be coordinated and ideas traded if everything is a conspiracy or based on speculation. If a conspiracy is suspected, document your proof. I hope they are not discouraged to publish their new analyses as that would be a tragedy to the ongoing discussion, not to mention finding MH370.
@littlefoot:
The math can only focus us so far as based on my knowledge of it. The good and tedious efforts are squeezing every last drop of gleanable knowledge from it into a dauntingly wide probability curve. A little detective work cannot hurt to add to the mix to refine the probability curves.
I ask myself with every theory proposed or data revealed if I would bet my life it proves wrong. If the answer is no, it may have a vanishingly small probability of being right to me, but it’s not zero.
All that to say I agree with you ;).
@ Rob Tanner: No, if you believe the satellite data. If the data is wrong, it can be virtually anywhere. The aluminum could have already have been recycled into the coke can I’m drinking from.
@SignalHill
Thanks for pursuing alternate routes. I believe there are clues yet to be found in the radar.
Regarding #3-
In case it is of use, here is a link to a sample section profile I did for the radar installation at Ko Samui:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/hn45uhb89mhobun/T2.pdf?dl=0
I used the data from Don’s tables on DS and mapped the inverted ‘dome,’ at the time, trying to determine if it could shed more light on altitude during the Lido segment.
@ALSM: re: volunteer sub-group of LANL employees “helping” find MH370:
1. On what date did this volunteer group complete their work?
2. On what date did they share it with search authorities (JIT/JACC/ATSB)?
3. On what date did they share it with the IG? Which members? Did they all sign confidentiality agreements?
4. On what date did they post the hydroacoustic component to the internet for public viewing?
5. Why is it digitally back-dated to July 3, 2014?
5. Why was hydroacoustic expert (& primary USER of HA01) Dr. Alec Duncan never even SHOWN this work?
6. Why did you send it (together with a BFO- and wind-free analysis that until recently would have been rejected by the IG as ridiculously simplistic) to me via direct e-mail last week – on the eve of my taping an interview with a national news network – imploring me not to share it with anyone, and implying that it was confidential information that had materially affected your assessment of the 7th arc’s validity?
7. DOES this research affect your current assessment of the 7th arc’s validity?
8. Did it EVER affect your assessment? If so, over what date period were you materially swayed?
9. If you regret seeing LANL dragged into the spotlight, why did you spearhead their report’s publication & promotion?
10. Who knew the whole case would revolve around the mysterious LANL point?
Orion,
I can be reached at gmail, do drop me a note.
:Don
If Chris Goodfellow had never mentioned Langkawi would an airfield that is closed overnight & is possibly the 3rd or 4th most suitable diversionary airfield get the attention it has? Closed, therefore unstaffed and without emergency services cover.
@jeff:
“All in all, it’s very curious, but I don’t think that the plane is buried there. Unfortunately, I seem to have given the impression that my whole theory hangs on the plane being buried under this dirt.”
Thank you for clarifying. I think it would be beneficial if you more clearly pointed that out in your report. Otherwise, I was impressed with your analysis and I admire your willingness to publish your findings despite the risk of being labeled (smeared) as a conspiracy theorist.
Assuming MH370 landed and refueled at this airport, what equipment on the aircraft would need to be replaced in order for it to no longer be identified as MH370? And how long would it take to replace that equipment? Instead of hiding the plane, would it not be much easier to reprint it and switch out equipment so that it would be identified as a different aircraft and then fly it to some other airport in Russia?
Typo in my prior post: it should say ‘re-paint’ not ‘reprint’.
@GlobusMax, Brock, airlandseaman and others:
By now I’m starting to piece together what the LANL report is all about. When you discuss things in a open forum which only those few know about who have been in private contact, it’s very confusing for the rest of us.
A suggestion for future discussions: It would be nice, if you could explain in a few words what the heck you are talking about, especially if some of you guys think it might possibly be the first hard evidence for a SIO crash along the 7th arc which doesn’t depend on Inmarsat provided data. If that’s so, shouldn’t we all know about it? And if we’re not supposed to know – well, then you shouldn’t discuss it here.
I know it’s tedious to repeat known things endlessly for newcomers but we should make an effort, since it’s not their fault. And in this case it isn’t even a ‘known thing” which could be found by diligent searching.
So, please, guys,if you have those discussions here, make an effort for those of us who don’t have privileged knowledge. We have a brain and can try to understand. 😉
@littlefoot: The LANL report is on the web, it’s public. It received little attention. I mistakenly insinuated “hard evidence” because of my poor understanding. I corrected that back on p. 4 I think. I now dub it “very, very weak potential evidence of an acoustic event subject to apparent differing interpretation by acoustic experts, but coinciding with a hypothetical crash of MH370 along the 7th arc near 0:19 UTC Mar 8.” Is that helpful?
@GlobusMax, thanks. You weren’t the only one who thought it might be hard evidence. And nothing wrong with that anyway. We all have gone down wrong alleys.
By now I have kind of pieced it together. But I tried to find it and couldn’t. My bad. Is it worth to put up a link?
No problem:
http://permalink.lanl.gov/object/tr?what=info:lanl-repo/lareport/LA-UR-14-24972
Reading the conclusions should clear things up quite well.