The unsettling oddness was there from the first moment, on March 8, when Malaysia Airlines announced that a plane from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing, Flight 370, had disappeared over the South China Sea in the middle of the night. There had been no bad weather, no distress call, no wreckage, no eyewitness accounts of a fireball in the sky—just a plane that said good-bye to one air-traffic controller and, two minutes later, failed to say hello to the next. And the crash, if it was a crash, got stranger from there.
My yearlong detour to Planet MH370 began two days later, when I got an email from an editor at Slate asking if I’d write about the incident. I’m a private pilot and science writer, and I wrote about the last big mysterious crash, of Air France 447 in 2009. My story ran on the 12th. The following morning, I was invited to go on CNN. Soon, I was on-air up to six times a day as part of its nonstop MH370 coverage.
There was no intro course on how to be a cable-news expert. The Town Car would show up to take me to the studio, I’d sign in with reception, a guest-greeter would take me to makeup, I’d hang out in the greenroom, the sound guy would rig me with a mike and an earpiece, a producer would lead me onto the set, I’d plug in and sit in the seat, a producer would tell me what camera to look at during the introduction, we’d come back from break, the anchor would read the introduction to the story and then ask me a question or maybe two, I’d answer, then we’d go to break, I would unplug, wipe off my makeup, and take the car 43 blocks back uptown. Then a couple of hours later, I’d do it again. I was spending 18 hours a day doing six minutes of talking.
As time went by, CNN winnowed its expert pool down to a dozen or so regulars who earned the on-air title “CNN aviation analysts”: airline pilots, ex-government honchos, aviation lawyers, and me. We were paid by the week, with the length of our contracts dependent on how long the story seemed likely to play out. The first couple were seven-day, the next few were 14-day, and the last one was a month. We’d appear solo, or in pairs, or in larger groups for panel discussions—whatever it took to vary the rhythm of perpetual chatter.1
I soon realized the germ of every TV-news segment is: “Officials say X.” The validity of the story derives from the authority of the source. The expert, such as myself, is on hand to add dimension or clarity. Truth flowed one way: from the official source, through the anchor, past the expert, and onward into the great sea of viewerdom.
What made MH370 challenging to cover was, first, that the event was unprecedented and technically complex and, second, that the officials were remarkably untrustworthy. For instance, the search started over the South China Sea, naturally enough, but soon after, Malaysia opened up a new search area in the Andaman Sea, 400 miles away. Why? Rumors swirled that military radar had seen the plane pull a 180. The Malaysian government explicitly denied it, but after a week of letting other countries search the South China Sea, the officials admitted that they’d known about the U-turn from day one.
Of course, nothing turned up in the Andaman Sea, either. But in London, scientists for a British company called Inmarsat that provides telecommunications between ships and aircraft realized its database contained records of transmissions between MH370 and one of its satellites for the seven hours after the plane’s main communication system shut down. Seven hours! Maybe it wasn’t a crash after all—if it were, it would have been the slowest in history.
These electronic “handshakes” or “pings” contained no actual information, but by analyzing the delay between the transmission and reception of the signal— called the burst timing offset, or BTO—Inmarsat could tell how far the plane had been from the satellite and thereby plot an arc along which the plane must have been at the moment of the final ping.Fig. 3 That arc stretched some 6,000 miles, but if the plane was traveling at normal airliner speeds, it would most likely have wound up around the ends of the arc—either in Kazakhstan and China in the north or the Indian Ocean in the south. My money was on Central Asia. But CNN quoted unnamed U.S.-government sources saying that the plane had probably gone south, so that became the dominant view.
Other views were circulating, too, however.Fig. 5 A Canadian pilot named Chris Goodfellow went viral with his theory that MH370 suffered a fire that knocked out its communications gear and diverted from its planned route in order to attempt an emergency landing. Keith Ledgerwood, another pilot, proposed that hijackers had taken the plane and avoided detection by ducking into the radar shadow of another airliner. Amateur investigators pored over satellite images, insisting that wisps of cloud or patches of shrubbery were the lost plane. Courtney Love, posting on her Facebook time line a picture of the shimmering blue sea, wrote: “I’m no expert but up close this does look like a plane and an oil slick.”
Then: breaking news! On March 24, the Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak, announced that a new kind of mathematical analysis proved that the plane had in fact gone south. This new math involved another aspect of the handshakes called the burst frequency offset, or BFO, a measure of changes in the signal’s wavelength, which is partly determined by the relative motion of the airplane and the satellite. That the whole southern arc lay over the Indian Ocean meant that all the passengers and crew would certainly be dead by now. This was the first time in history that the families of missing passengers had been asked to accept that their loved ones were dead because a secret math equation said so. Fig. 7 Not all took it well. In Beijing, outraged next-of-kin marched to the Malaysian Embassy, where they hurled water bottles and faced down paramilitary soldiers in riot gear.
Guided by Inmarsat’s calculations, Australia, which was coordinating the investigation, moved the search area 685 miles to the northeast, to a 123,000-square-mile patch of ocean west of Perth. Ships and planes found much debris on the surface, provoking a frenzy of BREAKING NEWS banners, but all turned out to be junk. Adding to the drama was a ticking clock. The plane’s two black boxes had an ultrasonic sound beacon that sent out acoustic signals through the water. (Confusingly, these also were referred to as “pings,” though of a completely different nature. These new pings suddenly became the important ones.) If searchers could spot plane debris, they’d be able to figure out where the plane had most likely gone down, then trawl with underwater microphones to listen for the pings. The problem was that the pingers had a battery life of only 30 days.
On April 4, with only a few days’ pinger life remaining, an Australian ship lowered a special microphone called a towed pinger locator into the water.Fig. 8 Miraculously, the ship detected four pings. Search officials were jubilant, as was the CNN greenroom. Everyone was ready for an upbeat ending.
The only Debbie Downer was me. I pointed out that the pings were at the wrong frequency and too far apart to have been generated by stationary black boxes. For the next two weeks, I was the odd man out on Don Lemon’s six-guest panel blocks, gleefully savaged on-air by my co-experts.
The Australians lowered an underwater robotFig. 9 to scan the seabed for the source of the pings. There was nothing. Of course, by the rules of TV news, the game wasn’t over until an official said so. But things were stretching thin. One night, an underwater-search veteran taking part in a Don Lemon panel agreed with me that the so-called acoustic-ping detections had to be false. Backstage after the show, he and another aviation analyst nearly came to blows. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! I’ve done extensive research!” the analyst shouted. “There’s nothing else those pings could be!”
Soon after, the story ended the way most news stories do: We just stopped talking about it. A month later, long after the caravan had moved on, a U.S. Navy officer said publicly that the pings had not come from MH370. The saga fizzled out with as much satisfying closure as the final episode of Lost.
Once the surface search was called off, it was the rabble’s turn. In late March, New Zealand–based space scientist Duncan Steel began posting a series of essays on Inmarsat orbital mechanics on his website.Fig. 10 The comments section quickly grew into a busy forum in which technically sophisticated MH370 obsessives answered one another’s questions and pitched ideas. The open platform attracted a varied crew, from the mostly intelligent and often helpful to the deranged and abusive. Eventually, Steel declared that he was sick of all the insults and shut down his comments section. The party migrated over to my blog, jeffwise.net.
Meanwhile, a core of engineers and scientists had split off via group email and included me. We called ourselves the Independent Group,11 or IG. If you found yourself wondering how a satellite with geosynchronous orbit responds to a shortage of hydrazine, all you had to do was ask.12 The IG’s first big break came in late May, when the Malaysians finally released the raw Inmarsat data. By combining the data with other reliable information, we were able to put together a time line of the plane’s final hours: Forty minutes after the plane took off from Kuala Lumpur, MH370 went electronically dark. For about an hour after that, the plane was tracked on radar following a zigzag course and traveling fast. Then it disappeared from military radar. Three minutes later, the communications system logged back onto the satellite. This was a major revelation. It hadn’t stayed connected, as we’d always assumed. This event corresponded with the first satellite ping. Over the course of the next six hours, the plane generated six more handshakes as it moved away from the satellite.
The final handshake wasn’t completed. This led to speculation that MH370 had run out of fuel and lost power, causing the plane to lose its connection to the satellite. An emergency power system would have come on, providing enough electricity for the satcom to start reconnecting before the plane crashed. Where exactly it would have gone down down was still unknown—the speed of the plane, its direction, and how fast it was climbing were all sources of uncertainty.
The MH370 obsessives continued attacking the problem. Since I was the proprietor of the major web forum, it fell on me to protect the fragile cocoon of civility that nurtured the conversation. A single troll could easily derail everything. The worst offenders were the ones who seemed intelligent but soon revealed themselves as Believers. They’d seized on a few pieces of faulty data and convinced themselves that they’d discovered the truth. One was sure the plane had been hit by lightning and then floated in the South China Sea, transmitting to the satellite on battery power. When I kicked him out, he came back under aliases. I wound up banning anyone who used the word “lightning.”
By October, officials from the Australian Transport Safety Board had begun an ambitiously scaled scan of the ocean bottom, and, in a surprising turn, it would include the area suspected by the IG.13 For those who’d been a part of the months-long effort, it was a thrilling denouement. The authorities, perhaps only coincidentally, had landed on the same conclusion as had a bunch of randos from the internet. Now everyone was in agreement about where to look.
While jubilation rang through the email threads, I nursed a guilty secret: I wasn’t really in agreement. For one, I was bothered by the lack of plane debris. And then there was the data. To fit both the BTO and BFO data well, the plane would need to have flown slowly, likely in a curving path. But the more plausible autopilot settings and known performance constraints would have kept the plane flying faster and more nearly straight south. I began to suspect that the problem was with the BFO numbers—that they hadn’t been generated in the way we believed.14 If that were the case, perhaps the flight had gone north after all.
For a long time, I resisted even considering the possibility that someone might have tampered with the data. That would require an almost inconceivably sophisticated hijack operation, one so complicated and technically demanding that it would almost certainly need state-level backing. This was true conspiracy-theory material.
And yet, once I started looking for evidence, I found it. One of the commenters on my blog had learned that the compartment on 777s called the electronics-and-equipment bay, or E/E bay, can be accessed via a hatch in the front of the first-class cabin.15 If perpetrators got in there, a long shot, they would have access to equipment that could be used to change the BFO value of its satellite transmissions. They could even take over the flight controls.16
I realized that I already had a clue that hijackers had been in the E/E bay. Remember the satcom system disconnected and then rebooted three minutes after the plane left military radar behind. I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how a person could physically turn the satcom off and on. The only way, apart from turning off half the entire electrical system, would be to go into the E/E bay and pull three particular circuit breakers. It is a maneuver that only a sophisticated operator would know how to execute, and the only reason I could think for wanting to do this was so that Inmarsat would find the records and misinterpret them. They turned on the satcom in order to provide a false trail of bread crumbs leading away from the plane’s true route.
It’s not possible to spoof the BFO data on just any plane. The plane must be of a certain make and model, 17equipped with a certain make and model of satellite-communications equipment,18 and flying a certain kind of route19 in a region covered by a certain kind of Inmarsat satellite.20 If you put all the conditions together, it seemed unlikely that any aircraft would satisfy them. Yet MH370 did.
I imagine everyone who comes up with a new theory, even a complicated one, must experience one particularly delicious moment, like a perfect chord change, when disorder gives way to order. This was that moment for me. Once I threw out the troublesome BFO data, all the inexplicable coincidences and mismatched data went away. The answer became wonderfully simple. The plane must have gone north.
Using the BTO data set alone, I was able to chart the plane’s speed and general path, which happened to fall along national borders.Fig. 21 Flying along borders, a military navigator told me, is a good way to avoid being spotted on radar. A Russian intelligence plane nearly collided with a Swedish airliner while doing it over the Baltic Sea in December. If I was right, it would have wound up in Kazakhstan, just as search officials recognized early on.
There aren’t a lot of places to land a plane as big as the 777, but, as luck would have it, I found one: a place just past the last handshake ring called Baikonur Cosmodrome.Fig. 22 Baikonur is leased from Kazakhstan by Russia. A long runway there called Yubileyniy was built for a Russian version of the Space Shuttle. If the final Inmarsat ping rang at the start of MH370’s descent, it would have set up nicely for an approach to Yubileyniy’s runway 24.
Whether the plane went to Baikonur or elsewhere in Kazakhstan, my suspicion fell on Russia. With technically advanced satellite, avionics, and aircraft-manufacturing industries, Russia was a paranoid fantasist’s dream.24 (The Russians, or at least Russian-backed militia, were also suspected in the downing of Malaysia Flight 17 in July.) Why, exactly, would Putin want to steal a Malaysian passenger plane? I had no idea. Maybe he wanted to demonstrate to the United States, which had imposed the first punitive sanctions on Russia the day before, that he could hurt the West and its allies anywhere in the world. Maybe what he was really after were the secrets of one of the plane’s passengers.25 Maybe there was something strategically crucial in the hold. Or maybe he wanted the plane to show up unexpectedly somewhere someday, packed with explosives. There’s no way to know. That’s the thing about MH370 theory-making: It’s hard to come up with a plausible motive for an act that has no apparent beneficiaries.
As it happened, there were three ethnically Russian men aboard MH370, two of them Ukrainian-passport holders from Odessa.26 Could any of these men, I wondered, be special forces or covert operatives? As I looked at the few pictures available on the internet, they definitely struck me as the sort who might battle Liam Neeson in midair.
About the two Ukrainians, almost nothing was available online.Fig. 27 I was able to find out a great deal about the Russian,Fig. 28 who was sitting in first class about 15 feet from the E/E-bay hatch.Fig. 29 He ran a lumber company in Irkutsk, and his hobby was technical diving under the ice of Lake Baikal.30 I hired Russian speakers from Columbia University to make calls to Odessa and Irkutsk, then hired researchers on the ground.
The more I discovered, the more coherent the story seemed to me.32 I found a peculiar euphoria in thinking about my theory, which I thought about all the time. One of the diagnostic questions used to determine whether you’re an alcoholic is whether your drinking has interfered with your work. By that measure, I definitely had a problem. Once the CNN checks stopped coming, I entered a long period of intense activity that earned me not a cent. Instead, I was forking out my own money for translators and researchers and satellite photos. And yet I was happy.
Still, it occurred to me that, for all the passion I had for my theory, I might be the only person in the world who felt this way. Neurobiologist Robert A. Burton points out in his book On Being Certain that the sensation of being sure about one’s beliefs is an emotional response separate from the processing of those beliefs. It’s something that the brain does subconsciously to protect itself from wasting unnecessary processing power on problems for which you’ve already found a solution that’s good enough. “ ‘That’s right’ is a feeling you get so that you can move on,” Burton told me. It’s a kind of subconscious laziness. Just as it’s harder to go for a run than to plop onto the sofa, it’s harder to reexamine one’s assumptions than it is to embrace certainty. At one end of the spectrum of skeptics are scientists, who by disposition or training resist the easy path; at the other end are conspiracy theorists, who’ll leap effortlessly into the sweet bosom of certainty. So where did that put me?
Propounding some new detail of my scenario to my wife over dinner one night, I noticed a certain glassiness in her expression. “You don’t seem entirely convinced,” I suggested.
She shrugged.
“Okay,” I said. “What do you think is the percentage chance that I’m right?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Five percent?”33
Springtime came to the southern ocean, and search vessels began their methodical cruise along the area jointly identified by the IG and the ATSB, dragging behind it a sonar rig that imaged the seabed in photographic detail. Within the IG, spirits were high. The discovery of the plane would be the triumphant final act of a remarkable underdog story.
By December, when the ships had still not found a thing, I felt it was finally time to go public. In six sequentially linked pages that readers could only get to by clicking through—to avoid anyone reading the part where I suggest Putin masterminded the hijack without first hearing how I got there—I laid out my argument. I called it “The Spoof.”
I got a respectful hearing but no converts among the IG. A few sites wrote summaries of my post. The International Business Times headlined its story “MH370: Russia’s Grand Plan to Provoke World War III, Says Independent Investigator” and linked directly to the Putin part. Somehow, the airing of my theory helped quell my obsession. My gut still tells me I’m right, but my brain knows better than to trust my gut.
Last month, the Malaysian government declared that the aircraft is considered to have crashed and all those aboard are presumed dead. Malaysia’s transport minister told a local television station that a key factor in the decision was the fact that the search mission for the aircraft failed to achieve its objective. Meanwhile, new theories are still being hatched. One, by French writer Marc Dugain, states that the plane was shot down by the U.S. because it was headed toward the military bases on the islands of Diego Garcia as a flying bomb.34
The search failed to deliver the airplane, but it has accomplished some other things: It occupied several thousand hours of worldwide airtime; it filled my wallet and then drained it; it torpedoed the idea that the application of rationality to plane disasters would inevitably yield ever-safer air travel. And it left behind a faint, lingering itch in the back of my mind, which I believe will quite likely never go away.
*This article appears in the February 23, 2015 issue of New York Magazine.
Germanwings Airbus 320 has just crashed in the Southern France. Also midair.
@ Brock: Thanks. Ok, I got “Obama”. But for your coordinates I didn’t get anything related (“MAAXY, daily, COLIN”).
Peter,
My version of the technical failure is as follows:
1). ~17:22 some event. I have 3 speculative versions:
– 1a. A tire fire and burst in the nose landing gear bay.
– 1b. Right wind mechanics failure triggered by turn at IGARI towards BITOD (this wing was badly damaged in Shanghai, and then repaired).
– 1c. Overload of the electrical system that has caused fire. Dinner is prepared at approximately this time after take off, which could be a trigger.
The main problem with mechanical failure is why all the communication means went down simultaneously. (1a) can provide an explanation. The nose landing gear compartment is located just under EE-Bay, meaning that this event could knock AES as well as emergency VHF: the coaxial cable is apparently routed somewhere near EE-Bay. The same time a piece of rubber could punch the fuselage and damage wiring just behind the cockpit, including coaxial cables to other VHF and HF antennas (appear to be routed along the upper centerline of the fuselage). Such an event would also cause the lost of cabin pressure.
2). The crew decided to return back to Malaysia, possibly to KLIA. However, they would have to fly over mountains. The trajectory “as it was” has several advantages:
– It is the shortest to the shore;
– They would not need to fly over mountains;
– They would pass by Sultan Ismail airport WMKC (in case of the worsening of the situation);
– They would pass by Penang airport;
– They would pass by Batterworth, which would hopefully launch interceptors, so they could be able to establish visual contact.
3. By the time the aircraft reached Penang (~18:00), the crew made assessment of the damages. They likely concluded it was not possible to land with ~35 tons of kerosene, without communication means, especially if the nose landing gear was damaged. They needed to burn fuel first, or attempt landing in such a place, where they would end up in water, and where the approach would preferably be over water, such as Maimun Saleh or Car Nikobar.
4. The pilots switched on AP, and tried to repair AES, or AES wiring. They succeeded by 18:25, however the satellite phone still did not work.
5. The situation began worsening. For example due to smog, or they ran out of emergency oxygen, or they started loosing control over the aircraft. So, the crew decided to attempt landing ASAP.
6. After several unsuccessful attempts everybody finally became incapacitated, or the crew lost control over the aircraft. This happened approximately when Kate (the sailoress) saw the aircraft (19:25). Orange glare she saw could be an effect of open window shields + external light + mist + reflection from wet surfaces (due to condensate). She also thinks she saw smog, which would be consistent with burning rubber. All these ‘symptoms’ indicate onboard emergency.
7. After the aircraft became unmanned, it flew into the IO more likely in the TO/GA mode than in AP mode. As long as the stability was controlled by other systems, the aircraft did not crash until it ran out of fuel.
Note that I do not discard other version (e.g. hijacking, spoofing), but I do not see inconsistencies in this technical version.
@Greg Long,
I got one message from Brock’s captures: waypoint names Maryland 😉
spencer,
The arguments you provided support hijacking version. But how do they invalidate technical failure version?
Low probability does not invalidate a scenario yet. What were chances for B777 to disappear like this? This is an extremely low probability event, but nevertheless it happened.
You say: “The probable re-powering of the AES at 18:25. This has all the hallmarks of someone purposely bringing back on the left ac bus”.
This is equally applicable to various scenarios, including technical failure.
You say “obfuscation and misinformation as perpetrated by the the Malaysian govt.”. How does this invalidate mechanical failure scenario?
@Olexandr,
No single point rules out mechanical failure. But if you take all of them together the probability of mechanical failure seems really, really low. At some point it’s worth asking if it makes sense to pursue this line of inquiry any longer. Experts for aviation security have tested all sorts of failure and disaster scenarios with a simulator and no one was able to hold the plane as long in the air as mh370 after th diversion.
But then again – since we all have branched out – it doesn’t hurt if someone still invests brain power in that scenario.
RetiredF4
Re: “To fly over the mountains at Fl350 does not pose a problem”.
Why do you think it flew at FL350? Radar data show the opposite, btw. FL350 is a hypothesis suggested by IG (cruise altitude) to make it compatible with the AP hypothesis. It is not supported by any data.
littlefoot,
The thing is that the probability of any scenario is extremely low. Yours “At some point it’s worth asking if it makes sense to pursue this line of inquiry any longer” is equally applicable to any other scenario. You are welcome to show that some other scenario has a higher probability, but first you would need to introduce some measure of this probability (mangousteen and gut feeling are not counted).
@Oleksandr:
Yours to Spencer:
“You say ‘obfuscation and misinformation as perpetrated by the the Malaysian govt’. How does this invalidate mechanical failure scenario?”
Obfuscation and the dissemination of misinformation do not, by themselves, invalidate a mechanical failure. But there are additional questions one should ask if they believe that a mechanical failure scenario is a possibility.
1. In totality, have the authorities communicated and interacted with the MH370 families transparently and in a manner that suggests they BELIEVE MH370 vanished because of a mechanical failure?
[They have not.]
2. IF MH370 disappeared as a result of a mechanical/catastrophic failure, does the BEHAVIOUR of the authorities (Malaysia and the ATSB) to date, suggest that they BELIEVE this?
[It does not.]
3. If Malaysia and the ATSB BELIEVE that the cause was mechanical and not deliberate, why would it be in their interests (read: what MOTIVE) to obfuscate and misinform?
[Because they have obfuscated.]
4. If Boeing, Rolls Royce, Inmarsat and the NTSB BELIEVE that MH370 vanished because of a mechanical/catastrophic failure, why would it be in their interests to remain silent in the face of such obfuscation by those in charge of the investigation and search?
[Because they have remained silent.]
The final question is not wether it was mechanical, suicide or unlawfull intervention, but the probable final destination of MH370. according the known BTO data two general directions are possible, the south and the north. My point is, that the BFO and BTO data may also alllow a northern destination.
As the southern destination has been investigated officially and millions of dollars had been spent without finding any trace until now I think it is legible to further evaluate a possible northern destination. I made the point why such a northern route would be a possibbility and how the first part until 1840 could fit such a plan.
Question is, should we continue from there? The northern path plan involves unlawfull interference by a group or even a state, and a deep and detailed discussion about the possible actors and the possible plan might be dirty work, accuse a variety of states or organisations with no prove at all. Or should the discussion be limited to the interested people via email?
As I stated in my post from 03/21, I have no intention of making a fool out of myself in public.
RetiredF4: If the plane traveled north, the BFO data cannot be explained in a realistic way by flying a vertical speed profile along the route that produces a BFO signature for a southern path. The Rate of Descent (RoD) would have to be greater than 1,000 fpm, which would put the plane at sea level within an hour. The prospect of timing descents to match anticipated ping times is also a bit far-fetched.
If the plane flew north, it is more likely that we are not properly interpreting the BFO data, either because of malfunction of the AES or by corruption of the data.
@victorI
Please explain, why the mentioned descent rate has to exist over more than the one second which is reflected by the BFO value? Why could it not climb between the individual pings?
We would not see a mirror south path with autopilot, fixed altitude, fixed track and fixed speed. We would see an aircraft maneuvering for best threat avoidance routing flown by a capable pilot and preplanned by well informed people.
ATC Transcripts
@all
i would really be very curious to read what experienced psychologists would say about such athe weird dialogue, as was cited by peter norton above. From first impression i would miss a certain perception of a serious situation on the side of the MAS operator. The MAS person appears to me unconcerned and frivolous, trying to let the ATC person down, which seems to be responsible and anxious about the situation.
Nihonmama,
There is already confusion about Germanwings Airbus 320, which crashed today’s morning in France. First they said there was a distress signal, then there was not. First rescue saw a moving survivor, then they said “no survivors”. What would you expect from Malaysia? Mess and lack of coordination in both cases… On top of it add the issue of an apparent gap in Malaysian air defense and political issues. Doesn’t all this answer yours #1-3?
With regard to Boeing and Rolls Royce, the answer is cruel: “technical failure” version is not in their best business interest. B777 is considered as one of the safest aircrafts ever made. At least it was.
@CosmicAcadamy, re transcript
I read Peter’s quote and the report several times. My (non-psychologist) take is that of a MAS ops person that is inexperienced, junior, out of his/her depth, star struck/cornered by being called by ATC, maybe lazy.
Some one that is blindly following SOP, without grasping the seriousness of the situation. The SOP possibly badly inadequate, e.g. Phone is ringing = all good, movement/positioning message down loading = all good, position roughly half way up Vietnam, i.e. planned flight plan = all good, etc.
It appears to be the reaction of some one (MAS ops) doing their job to the letter (of SOP), being questioned by authority (ATC) and covering their proverbial.
Cheers
Will
RetiredF4,
No, or more exactly this is extremely unlikely. If the aircraft was maneuvering on purpose, the probability for BFO to form a trend line would be extremely low.
Also you say “As the southern destination has been investigated officially and millions of dollars had been spent without finding any trace until now I think it is legible to further evaluate a possible northern destination”.
The southern arc is huge. How much of it has been searched? The fact that the aircraft is not found in the place, formally pointed by IG (with ridiculous accuracy – this is what I argued with ALSM months ago), indicates nothing but a wrong hypothesis: either AP, or FMT, or end-of-flight, or all of them. As a matter of fact, the northern section of the southern arc was not searched at all.
@Oleksandr
What trendline are you talking about? There is none except the general heading is north / northwest to a position on the final arc within the max range of the aircraft. No other restrictions.
We have 6 more dots which have to fullfill the BFO value and end at the last BTO arc in the north. You think there are none or you think they are not similar in speed, altitude verical speed and groundspeed? I agree, they are not similar, they might be be random. As the straight path to the south is one path of a multitude of possible pathes too. But the model to the north is not restricted by flying autopilot like the path in the south, as the assumption is that a pilot was flying this north route.
Think over it, we talk about 6 seconds out of 21.600 seconds!
If we are in doubt that we can create a low threat route to the north which would fullfill the known BTO and BFO values, then lets prove it. Let us start with the next ping.
Nihonmama,
In addition to the previous. Just published by BBC with regard to Germanwings 4U 9525 flight:
“The plane did not send out a distress signal, officials said. Earlier reports of a distress call, quoting the French interior ministry, referred to a message from controllers on the ground.”
(bbc.com/news/world-europe-32030270)
It seems it’s time for Jeff to open a new thread “Why airplanes in emergency do not send a distress signal?”
This thread seems to have moved onto Northward routes to parts unknown, but here is a bit more detail of progress of the current search in the SIO, including latitude and longitude. This uses data from the people at Vesseltracker.com.
I show the areas already covered plus the last track of each of the three sidescan ships. To date the ships in the South have covered an area 30km outside the 7th arc and 20km inside; in the far North it remains less than 30km outside and only 8km inside. The pale blue areas show what is needed to complete the same width as in the South. The stated goal is 60,000sq.km. for this phase and given the length of the search zone is 1000km the final covered width must thus be around 60km, on average.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/t8r881bzk2oiyq5/Search-status-24-3-15.pdf?dl=0
@ “It seems it’s time for Jeff to open a new thread “Why airplanes in emergency do not send a distress signal?””
I don’t understand why there is not a red “MAYDAY BUTTON” somewhere in the cockpit, which the crew would just have tu push in case of a mayday (instead of radioing a mayday to ATC via voice message) ??? This would take only a fraction of a second and could be made part of standard operating procedures.
According to the principle “aviate – navigate – communicate”, the crew has obviously more important things to deal with than to talk to someone on the ground. But a quick push on a button would neither take any time nor distract.
I am asking, because a mayday is very helpful for everybody on the ground, for so many reasons: knowledge of position where plane became uncontrollable is important for search radius; in some cases (such as MH370) the investigation would benefit from knowing whether the crash was an accident, hijacking or CFIT (without mayday) …
I am not a pilot, so if there is such a button in the cockpit already, then please apologize. But the question then is, why wasn’t it used in all those recent crashes ?
RetiredF4,
“What trendline are you talking about?”.
You can find a plenty of nice plots at Duncan’s blog (duncansteel.com). BFOs are function of the time t (because of the Inmarsat satellite), aircraft location and velocity:
BFO = BFO (t, lon, lat, alt, u, v, w).
All samples of BFO since 18:40 are found to fall on approximately straight line. If you drive a car from your office to your home, what is the probability to find you moving in the same direction with the same speed in 7 arbitrary samples?
You say: “But the model to the north is not restricted by flying autopilot like the path in the south…”.
The path to the south is not restricted by AP either. I am not sure where you took this from.
Yours “we talk about 6 seconds out of 21.600 seconds”.
Not really. There are clusters of BTO & BFO values.
Yours: “Let us start with the next ping”. Well, it would be good to finish with 18:25 & 18:40 first. What are you suggesting: take 300 deg heading? Why not 310 or 290?
Just to be fair: I had the idea you posted long time ago (you can find it somewhere at Duncan’s blog). Moreover, knowing all the radars location, it is possible to formulate the optimization problem mathematically. But there is a “trend line”, which makes it to be a likely useless exercise.
@All
This is a very interesting article posted today in the Int’l Bus Times-UK Edition
“Malaysia Airlines MH370:
Aviation expert wants Australia to prove plane is in Indian Ocean”
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/malaysia-airlines-mh370-aviation-expert-wants-australia-prove-plane-indian-ocean-1493391
“I am afraid you misunderstood this thing. There are infinite number of solutions that fit BFO 18:40; these two are just two examples. The 3rd example, btw, was suggested much earlier by Victor (Aceh landing). If you now consider possibility of different ground speed, you may get virtually any combination of the heading and descent/ascent rate (subject to the aircraft performance). But this needs some hypothesis: what was a goal?”
I think the flight path up to the entering of IO was perfect if you wanted to reach Christmas Island unchallenged from indonesian military and it also fits the fuel quantity well, what happened later is a mystery to me.
“I am afraid you misunderstood this thing. There are infinite number of solutions that fit BFO 18:40; these two are just two examples. The 3rd example, btw, was suggested much earlier by Victor (Aceh landing). If you now consider possibility of different ground speed, you may get virtually any combination of the heading and descent/ascent rate (subject to the aircraft performance). But this needs some hypothesis: what was a goal?”
I think the flight path up to the entering of IO was perfect if you wanted to reach Xmas Island unchallenged from indonesian military and it also fits the fuel quantity well, what happened later is a mystery to me.
Oh dear ! Mr Chillit is still at it. He now wants to give ATSB and IG a complete set of BFO data and challenge them to figure out where it [MH370] landed. “They can’t do it”, he says, “Witches brew, biggest aviation sham in history”.
Oh come on Mr Chillit. The complete BFO [and BTO] data was released way back in May last year. What do you think ATSB and IG and many other people have been using since then to calculate likely flight paths.
I wonder what you have been smoking all this time. Delusional. Sad really.
StevanG – Back when they were trawling for those underwater pings we saw how calm and hospitable the sea was at those latitudes in March. A largely intact belly north of the current search could explain the absence of debris and a clear acoustic signature on the CTBTO/Curtin hydraphones. I was just half way through writing that AP was a cornerstone of the analysis but there are a number of cornerstones really that aren’t quite set in concrete.
@Oleksandr:
“What would you expect from Malaysia? Mess and lack of coordination in both cases…”
I would expect Malaysia to respond in a way that is consistent with their cultural context. Now whether that response would (objectively) be considered efficacious given the circumstances is another question entirely.
“On top of it add the issue of an apparent gap in Malaysian air defense…”
Tweet (mine) from 03.12.14: “military personnel…WATCHED (CAPS mine) the plane fly across the peninsula and disappear in the northern approach to the Strait of Malacca”
So I’ll say it (yet) again: IF there was a ‘gap’ in Malaysia’s air defense on the night MH370 flew westward over peninsular Malaysia, why NOT question the role of the FPDA (it does exist) http://t.co/aCHrKQnvg6 in either missing MH370 — or participating in the decision to let it pass? THIS question is not only relevant to the analysis, it’s THE elephant in the room.
As Ron Black writes on his (G+) blog:
“It’s very important to understand what happened in the first hours of the flight when MH370 was still near Malaysia. This is probably the critical time that determined the fate of this flight.
Who was making the decisions at this time?
Surprisingly it was not the Malaysian Air Force or the Malaysian Defense minister. It was probably the headquarters of the Integrated Air (now Area) Defence System (IADS) for Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore, a Five Power Defence Arrangement (FPDA) organization. The FPDA is a kind of very loose mutual defense treaty between Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia and the UK. Interestingly, in the 43 years of FPDA existence the IADS commander was always an Australian officer.”
And that person would have been COMD Integrated Area Defence System (IADS), Air Vice Marshal (AVM) Warren James Ludwig (an Australian) who was BASED IN MALAYSIA (at Butterworth Air Base) from 2010 to June, 2014.
Where was Air Vice Marshal Ludwig on the night of Mar 7, 2014? Was he made aware of MH370 (and if not, why not?) and what instructions/orders did he give (or not) as MH370 flew past Butterworth and headed into the northern Malacca Strait?
“…and political issues.”
Which, if germane to the disappearance of MH370, could be specific to Malaysia — or geopolitical in nature.
“Doesn’t all this answer yours #1-3?”
No.
“With regard to Boeing and Rolls Royce, the answer is cruel: “technical failure” version is not in their best business interest”
Would it be in either Boeing’s or Rolls Royce’s long-term business interests (read: pecuniary and reputational) to be parties to a cover-up of a technical failure related to the disappearance of MH370, such that if/when uncovered, would subject one or both companies to an avalanche of lawsuits (or better – an international class action lawsuit) based on product liability, negligence and fraud (the remedy for the latter being treble damages)?
@Flitzer_Flyer:
As a long-time Twitter user, I am fascinated by your knowledge of who’s tweeting what there (in this case, Mike Chillit), given that you’ve said you don’t have a Twitter account.
@ Oleksandr
On Duncans blog those lines are straight, because the IG was only looking for straight lines, assuming that no human pilot was at the controls and the autopilot was flying constant track or to a preprogrammed final destination. This assumption leads to the straight tracks, they are not god given. There are at least thousands of different tracks to the south possible.
I simplified my statement concerning the BFO data for easier understanding of my point. You are right, we are talking about clusters, for example the BFO cluster from 23:14:01,196 lasts until 23:15:01,886 contains 27 BFO values from 216 to 220 within 1.0169 seconds. And what is the point of that more detailed information?
Even if you had 100 seconds BFO information within 21.600 seconds the odds do not improve.
The individual BFO gives away just the information for the exact time of those data. The bits in between the individual clusters are constructed from the automated steady flight profile which is an assumed profile, but not a proven one.
As I mentioned before, seing someone in a bar in the morning and in the evening and drinking a beer does not prove that he is a drinker and stayed there all day.
But I think it is better we refrain from our individual discussion, as it distracts from my true intention. I do not discredit the present interpretation for a south path, I only want to initiate a rethinking on the possibilities of a northern path. If you see it being a useless exercise, that is your fair choice. I would feel better if somebody comes up with a proof that a north path is not possible, or even better they find MH370 in the present search area soon.
@RetiredF4 & Oleksandr,
Flying a northern route that matches the observed BFOs is not realistically possible, no matter the pre-planning involved. A major reason for this is that the times of the BFO measurements after 18:25 were unknown and unpredictable because the two phone calls from the ground to the plane at 18:40 and 23:15 reset the communication link timers to times that were not predictable. So we are not dealing with just flying a descent rate at exact times known beforehand. The actual times of BFO measurements were, in fact, unknowable. This rules out all northern routes being consistent with the BFO data because, as previously pointed out, it would be impossible to continuously fly the descent rates needed to match the measured BFO data over an extended period.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
@Bob Det:
Thank you for posting that IBTimes piece.
Military aviation technology expert Andre Milne “on behalf of the victims’ families, is calling for additional answers by the Australian government to help fill in the gaps and prove its “seventh arc” theory that the Boeing 777, which had 239 passengers on board, is located in the Indian Ocean. He states the theory lacks “corroborative evidence”
Milne has since complained to Interpol to investigate what he claims to be a “clear violation of the protocols of Chicago Convention Section 25 International Civil Aviation Organ (ICAO) of the United Nations.
He wrote: ‘My investigative action suggests that a now documented pattern of corruption by unknown officials exists that is resulting in the premeditated fabrication of artificial claims and artificial evidence is being facilitated in an effort to create a cover up and or a diversion from the factual truth related to MH370.
Primary motives for creating a cover up are a criminal act occurred during the flight and unfolded in such a way as to have negative impact upon the parties investigating and or associated with the investigative parties or an anomalous act occurred during the flight and unfolded in such a way as to be in conflict with legitimate issues of national security upon the parties investigating and or associated with the investigative parties.'”
Nihonmama: All I am doing is looking at Mr Chillit’s tweets periodically to see where the ships are searching. Don’t need a twitter account to do that. Can’t help noting his other crazy, irrational, deluded statements. Someone really ought to tell him to stop smoking whatever it is.
(@Greg: you’re close – just search near http://opennav.com/waypoint/US/MAAXY.)
(@Bob Det: even though Milne echoes (sort of) much of what I’ve been shouting for months, I’m going to start the bidding at “skeptical”. It’s a combination of “came out of nowhere”, GeoResonance, & how he expresses himself technically in his “Unicorn Aerospace” YouTube clip. But I’ve been wrong before.)
@Richard: THANK YOU!! Coordinates, search zone overlay, accurate arcs, accurate tracks, pinpoint precision – I don’t know what to do with all these orders of magnitude by which you’ve improved upon the competition. Is this the IG’s new account you’re accessing, or your own?
Do your 20 & 30km lines bound the SHIP paths, or their SWATHS (which would extend out a further 1km each direction)? If the former, looks like 50 + 2 = 52km = 28 nmi = either a 99.4% probability the IG’s original hypothesis (MH370 was already in steep dive by 00:19:37) was wrong, or my model still doesn’t yet properly specify it.
But even if I DOUBLE the mean of the crow’s flight distance distribution (originally calibrated to ALSM’s specifications), I still get 93% “searched out”.
@Brock:
This is a separate operation from any IG work. The bounds of the searched areas are the ship paths only.
It makes some sense for the search to finish the area defined by the AP based path modelling first since it is narrower than the data optimisation/BFO defined search area. My personal preference has always been further North based on the BFO data and inside the arc based on more recent modelling from the last two BTO values. This area has barely been touched yet, but this is where we find out if any of our collective ramblings are correct?
@Dr. Bobby Ulrich
Thank you for the answer.
I do not assume that a flight path has been planned to match any in advance known BFO values for spoofing purposes.
A flight path to the north may have been flown under the conditions I described earlier with descents and climbs due to threat avoidance reasons which by chance resulted in those BFO data. wether that is realistic or unrealistic has not beeen tried yet. To assume that the climb has to be existent all the time to fullfill the BFO data of a few seconds within a timeframe of 6 hours is unrealistic.
@Oleksander
I know that the BFO data consist of a cluster of data like at 18:40 and 23:14. The duration of such a cluster is about 1 second with similar BFO data. Thus I see my argument still as a valid one. only few seconds of data are available to construct a route over the final 6 hours.
@All
I do not understand the negative approach to match the data to a possible northern routing, how unrealistic that might look. What do we loose? If it proves finally that such a routing with a possible final destination in the north cannot be contructed than it strengthens the southern path arguments. Nothing is lost, much gained.
At the moment the discussion already ends at the assumed turn south. This early turn to the south might have happened later, such shifting the search zone. for such a later turn only the descent at that point is necessary to match the BBFO, but even that later turn option became a victim of the assumed autopilot cruise constant speed model.
Enough said, I’ll go back to my monitoring corner.
@Cosmic Academy
ATC Transcripts
“i would really be very curious to read what experienced psychologists would say about such a weird dialogue, as was cited by peter norton above. From first impression i would miss a certain perception of a serious situation on the side of the MAS operator. The MAS person appears to me unconcerned and frivolous, trying to let the ATC person down, which seems to be responsible and anxious about the situation.”
As a psychologist with 45 years of experience, my immediate observation was the large power differential in the conversation. KL took the lead, probed and repeatedly questioned with MAS barely answering, perhaps simply inexperienced, unaware, incompetent, or stalling and embarrassed that he didn’t have adequate answers or information.
I have to correct my last post, the duration of the individual cluster of BFO after 1840 is not 1 second, but about about one minute. That improves the odds considerably, but the reconstruction of the flightpath for 6 hours is still done from about 10 minute of factual information.
@Dr. Ulich, CC @RetiredF4:
“because the two phone calls from the ground to the plane at 18:40 and 23:15 reset the communication link timers to times that were not predictable”
yeah – this is EXACTLY what I am asking for… How ping timers resetting works.
I can imagine situations where 1st delay after reset is selected RANDOMLY, ya – if you control several parallel systems, its not good to sync them to coherent rate of transmissions, so 1st is random and subsequent periodic to spread them in time to balance load of target receiver, but this isnt the case, IMHO.
BUT, IF every END(?) of ANY communication resets timer to exactly 60 minutes (at least 4 pings provided exactly such rate) then THE PHONE CALL can serve as sync/notify to plane pilots that they will have subsequent 1hr windows, and the 18:39 UTC phone call is “quite” inline with that (19:41, 20:41, …).
AND, around such 2 unanswered phone calls there was 2 satcom restarts done on 777.
(yet another crazy scenario)
Pilots restarted satcom to mask something and/or notify somebody with access to inmarsat logs, then somebody with access to inmarsat logs detected this and called them to reset the timers. And voila…
I am not aviation expert, I dont know how these systems works exactly, but such “sliding timers reset” is common thing – each web form authentication uses such technique too. SO, how exactly this works???
As always, I might be wrong.
As somebody sed, “we are all trying…”
SOP for MAS/ATC
@all
There was much talk about mere ineptness and laziness on the side of Malaysian ATC and MAS Operators, as well as the military was described as sleeping regularly before their monitors. I always felt rather uncomfortable with those speculations and think this is one of the early spins.
Now in the loss of Germanwings Airbus yesterday we see a perfect example about how SOP works:
The Airbus reached FL38 at 10:45. When it one minute later deviated from its flight plan by a landing like descent of 3000 ft/minute it took the ATC, which had no communication contact with the A/C only exactly one additional minute to declare an emergency and another 6 minutes to have a Mirage 2000 in the air in striking distance to search for the flight, which got lost from the radar and ads-b by that time.
So anybody believes that SOP is so very much different in Asia/Malaysia March 8th 2014? Under command of an australian vice admiral? Who likes fairy tales and who likes answers? For me the MH370 MAS operational contacts look like deliberate lies, to buy time for whatever kind of diversion of the plane. Although i dont understand why Mr. Milner referred to this unbelievable Georesonance company, he was right in his IBTime statement to seek for legal action against criminal intentions in these spin stories, used by different governments.
Financial leads
@Niels @Peter Norton @Nihonmama
Since we have at least two major players here with enormous financial struggles, it might be worthwhile to find, how their situation changed from before to after the event.
Harbinger Capital Fund had put billions of dollars into its Broadband activities of the company ‘Lightsquared’ without any revenue by now, because of objections by the FCC. From the contract with Inmarsat plc it was in default of payments of a couple of 60 mio dlrs before the event and is no longer in default now.
The other major player with financial struggles was MAS. Now we dont know, whether someone wanted to hurt MAS, but they sure dont appear to have recovered. Their struggles seem to have worsened.
Then there is this observation of major deals with Inmarsat shares.
Maybe we have more roads to explore here, although i admit, could just be a dead end, because i feel, the kind of money involved here should have two more digits. You wont capture a boarded plane with 250 people to cash 60 mio dlrs. Its more like 3 billion dlrs what you want.
This is a question of the scale you use. I honestly dont think, that a government pulled this off. But the global players of our times do have even better capabilities, because they can have influence with all sides. They can buy everything and every influence they want. And they can buy military commandos from security companies much better equipped and more sophisticated than any government agency has at its disposal. Weapons dealers always side with both parties in a conflict. Its like a rule to survive. Now, if someone took this A/C , this player should be searched among those global players.
@ComicAcademy:
“Since we have at least two major players here with enormous financial struggles” … “Now, if someone took this A/C , this player should be searched among those global players.”
do you in fact mean US and particulary, Russia??
ya, I honestly think, that a governments pulled this off; together… and for good reason.
(no problem to make fool of myself in public)
@all
BTW WTH why are in “MH370 Data Communication Logs Update v2.pdf” document hexadecimal SU Type prefixes of in flight logons (but not only them) “manually rewritten” by typewriter style??? original document contains “data”
OxlO instead of 0x10
search yourself…
@falken
No, i do not believe, that a government did this. I could imagine that a global player in urgent need of cash (lets say some billions) but with very good connections in the MAS hierarchy, the Malaysian government, the US and Russian Governments and with a particular SatComm provider, could be attracted to some dirty business. Just dont let us forget, that we are talking about mass murder, if a capture can be proven. And then we dont have to deal with some pickpockets or the like.
If you look for example into the record of Falcone, the CEO of Harbinger Capital Funds until Dec. 2014, you would say, this person did and might do a lot of illegal things, to save his Fund.
@CosmicCacademy:
sounds interesting, thanks; although this particular case wasn’t yet stated as mass murder, I hope
re Data log update weirdnes, original document is secured for editing, update is obviously open and not resecured, according to doc properties by this ATSB guy:
http://www.zoominfo.com/p/Joe-Hattley/399872061
I can imagine old-style veteran man using letters “O” and “l” to type “zero” and “one” on typewriter, ok; but why are ALL lines edited even inconsistently in fact its curious (and they arent in fact HEX, but 0x prefix lead me to it – may be reporting tool originaly written that way and there can be byte with BCD encoded nibbles, ok)
@CosmicAcademy: sorry for mistyping your nick often, Im too quick sometimes; 🙁
@Olexandr,
When I said a disaster or mechanical failure scenario might be so unlikely that at some point one has to ask if it is still worth pursuing, you said that every scenario has a very low probability. That is true for every single scenario. But not for groups of scenarios.
I only have to evaluate what’s more probable: mechanical failure (possibly combined with human error) vs. criminal act.It’s that simple. Since esteemed aviation experts like Philip Baum failed to come up with any solutions at a simulator which included mechanical failure/ disaster I’d say many if not most experts would agree with me that mechanical failure/disaster is highly unlikely, even if we neglect such ominous hints as the plane going dark at a strategically very convenient spot like IGARI or the comeback of the SDU at a highly critical time.
Note to Brock: in my book the complete falsification of the satellite data counts as a criminal act scenario.
But again, Olexandr: there is no harm in pursuing that line of thought. While highly unlikely compared to a criminal-act scenario, it can’t be completely excluded.
Bobby,
I did not mean pre-planned path, but a coincidental formation of a trend line, which is statistically very unlikely. If you assume, say, the range of BFO of 200 Hz (the interval can be estimated accurately for each time stamp), a random sample falling into 5 Hz interval of the deviation from the trend line would correspond to the probability of 1/40. For 7 random samples you would have the probability of (1/40)^7. Not to say impossible, but very unlikely.
—————
RetiredF4,
There is no “negative approach to match the data to a possible northern routing”. But you need to make a hypothesis first. You have infinite number of possibilities to match BTO and BFO for the northern route if you allow for the variation in altitude, ground speed and heading. Same is applicable to the southern route. In other words, you can make virtually any point on the 7th arc to be the terminal location, subject to fuel constrains and aircraft’s performance. That it why I was asking, why 300 deg, why not 310 or 290?
some more data crunching:
when we focus again on BOTH 0x10 logon requests, then as I saw already somewhere here, next reported BTO/BFO might be complete nonsense
(and it seems to be confirmed at 18:25:34, so 7 seconds after first 0x10 event at 18:25:27 UTC
then there is cca 1’30” silence and then 2′ burst of data with valid BTO/BFO – is this expected and stable behavior of satcom each time after logon / power-on??
second 0x10 logon request at 00:19:29 UTC is also followed by quite nonsense BTO/BFO after 8 seconds and/but this is last thing we have received from 777.
When we consider that such 0x10 logon/restarts of satcom are some kind of notification from 777 to somebody with access to inmarsat logs, then “what-if” 1st restart announces FMT and 2nd restart announces landing, so plane descending in heading of target runway at some speed? (with satcom then again powered off completelly to mask the landing itself)
Can final valid BFO (=182) at 00:19:29 be investigated to extract/expect HEADING of the possible runway?? and then scan/match them all near 7th arc??
@Dr R:
“As a psychologist with 45 years of experience, my immediate observation was the large power differential in the conversation. KL took the lead, probed and repeatedly questioned with MAS barely answering, perhaps simply inexperienced, unaware, incompetent, or stalling and embarrassed that he didn’t have adequate answers or information.”
You are a breath of fresh air. BINGO. POWER DISTANCE. And face-saving (even at the expense of an appropriate response in an emergency situation). Hofstede would thank you.
http://geert-hofstede.com/malaysia.html