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.
MH370 passengers’ background: http://nydn.us/1gDqHEd
@Peter Norton:
“MH370 passengers’ background: http://nydn.us/1gDqHEd”
is that the smoking gun?
StevanG:
“just imagine in your head what would you do as a pilot if you wanted to reach the first world country (Australia) unchallenged while exposing weakness of malaysian military/government…”.
Sorry, this is so shallow that there is no room to dive.
Firstly, the unchallenged flight to Australia, if succeeded, would expose the weakness of the Australian military/government, particularly Jindalee. Secondly, this version is inconsistent with so many ‘facts’, that I even will not bother to list them here. If you have more or less comprehensive scenario, please share it.
A hijacking scenario, which went wrong at some point, is indeed valid. But can you show that it is more probable than a “technical failure”? If yes, please do it.
@Peter Norton
The smoking gun is the australian man that left the ring at home ?
@ myron: no sorry, this is something else: a list of all passengers and background information for most of them. It made me think of how Jeff Wise looked at the background of the 2 Ukrainian passengers in his e-book. Maybe there are more noteworthy passengers, who knows …
I will post about the “smoking gun” later on (I feel honoured, that you remember :^).
I am not quite sure where to put it though, as some of the MH370 discussion has continued in the 2 Germanwings threads …
@Olkesandr:
I have written a detailed reply to answer your comments, but somehow the posting doesn’t go through.
I didn’t work yesterday, so I have waited for 24 hours, but it has not appeared since. I reposted it now, even removing all the hyperlinks, but it still doesn’t work. It’s a bit frustrating, I don’t know, what to do.
🙁
The most important point seems to be the first one (2+3 would only reduce the precision, and 4 only affects a relatively limited search zone).
Are you in fact suggesting that if we knew the location of the plane once after 18:40, then BFO values would let you calculate the direction and the speed, and thus the final location ?
This appears significant to me, because it is not unrealistic to assume, that MH370 was caught on one of the multiple radar stations past 18:40, meaning that one of the militaries could have the key to find MH370 in their hands. We have seen in the past that they are absolutely not forthcoming with anything, so it would not be beyond imagination.
@Peter Norton, Sorry your comment got lost, I just looked and didn’t find anything in the queue. Another WordPress mystery.
Jeff
@ Gysbreght :
That’s precisely what I would have wanted to say.
However, one part bothers me:
There are 2 moving objects, the satellite and the plane. Their relative motion can be expressed as the addition of 2 displacement vectors: The displacement vector from the plane to any fixed point (e.g. the satellite’s erroneously assumed geostationary location) and the displacement vector from that fixed point to the satellite. If you take away the first vector (because you compensate for it), then all you are left with is the movement of the satellite (relative to a fixed point, not relative to the plane).
So if the frequency error generated by the airplane movement was fully compensated relative to a fixed earth-referenced position of the satellite, then all you would be left with is the uncompensated frequency error due to the satellite movement itself. But the latter would only tell you what you already know, namely the satellite movements.
If the Honeywell SDU could compensate the emitted frequency completely (100%) for the airplane movement relative to the satellite’s assumed geostationary location (or relative to any fixed point in space for that matter), we wouldn’t know anything at all about the airplane movement. The airplane movements would be completely opaque. Like something happening behind a closed door. We would not even have the slightest clue as to whether the plane went north or south. At least not from the frequency values 100% compensated for airplane motion.
So either Honeywell SDU’s compensation is not 100% (i.e. there is a residual, uncompensated for airplane movement) or my line of thought is wrong. But I don’t see, where I went wrong …
@Peter Norton – I await any bits from the smoking gun
Give out hints please !!!
Except for the last bit, that is essentially correct. You could calculate the direction and the speed up to 00:11. After 00:11 things become more uncertain – the right engine quits due to its fuel tank being empty, followed by the left engine a few minutes (3 ?) later at 00:15:50, then the autopilot disconnects. With both engines out a piloted plane could still have glided 100+ nm in any direction.
I suggest you read the ATSB Report AE-2014-054 of 26 June 2014, Appendix G: Explanatory notes on BTO and BFO analysis; BFO Analysis.
Is this what China wanted from the MH370 search? i.e. The mapping of previously uncharted parts of the Indian Ocean? (Assuming they are the hijackers).
WA Premier Colin Barnett: ‘Loss of MH370 good for science’
http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/wa-premier-colin-barnett-loss-of-mh370-good-for-science-20150401-1md2qq.html
West Australian Premier Colin Barnett says the disappearance of MH370 has proven a good thing for marine science in the state…
“And while that is a great human tragedy there will be some good come out of it and the knowledge of the deep sea, and the seabed conditions will probably exceed anywhere in the world because of the scientific effort that is searching for an aircraft but providing all sorts of other information,” Mr Barnett said.
The search has uncovered previously unknown large ridges and deep trenches and other geographical features.
“For example, previously unknown volcanoes have been discovered,” Mr Barnett said.
“Fresh water lakes and fresh water waterfalls have been discovered, features of the marine bed that many did not believe was likely to exist.”
The search for the missing plane has resulted in a survey of an area of the Indian Ocean that was until recently largely uncharted, prompting claims there were better maps of Mars than that part of Earth.
“And that knowledge largely collected by the Malaysian Government will become available,” Mr Barnett said….
OK – that’s the third week in a row that ATSB have simply stated that over 50% of the priority are has been searched – as I half suspected they might. Is that media management? It should be around 2/3 done.
Peter,
I would also suggest you reading ATSB June report (“MH370 – Definition of Underwater Search Areas”), particularly section “BFO Analysis”, formula (2), which explains BFO in detail. You can download it from atsb website.
The frequency compensation for the airplane movement is performed relative to the satellite’s assumed geostationary location (compensation is 100% in your terms, for horizontal velocity only), but not relative to the moving satellite. As a result, the sum of the respective terms in Eq. (2) is not zero. It would be exactly zero, if the satellite was not moving. The terms associated with the satellite movement exist independently.
@ Myron: I will post it, but please don’t expect too much to avoid being disappointed. People might simply blame my findings on gross incompetence of Malaysia Airlines. I am afraid there is more. TBC…
That means, if it turns out that MH370 was captured by any radar station past 18:40, that would have made the difference between finding the plane and not finding it, so the country will have completely obstructed the search and should be held accountable. Problem is lack of provableness/confirmability.
@Peter Norton – I shall wait…
However in IMHO (FWIW) if it flew westward it must have been seen on some other country’s radar… but it wasn’t so I bet there is much more to it !
Even if it flew southward following the path that IG has calculated: Does anyone really think that no part of the flight after 18:22 was detected by radar ?
See: http://jeffwise.net/2014/11/18/mh370-and-the-mystery-of-indonesian-radar
@Peter : try without word C-h-r-i-s-t-m-a-s (God knows why it’s forbidden but it worked for me before)
@Oleksandr :
“Firstly, the unchallenged flight to Australia, if succeeded, would expose the weakness of the Australian military/government, particularly Jindalee. Secondly, this version is inconsistent with so many ‘facts’, that I even will not bother to list them here. If you have more or less comprehensive scenario, please share it.”
Xmas Island isn’t actively defended zone and even if spotted australian fighters would have a long way to go to intercept it from australian mainland so that IMO wouldn’t be tried at all (not to mention fuel range of those).
Secondly, it’s inconsistent with what facts exactly?
• For Indonesian radar read Jeff’s article quoted above.
• For Australian radar click here: http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-2012-01.html
scroll down to: “Figures 24 and 25. Wide area and regional maps of Australia’s strategic air defence environment in the Indian Ocean region. Blue contours denote combat radius envelopes centred on airfields, red contours denote JORN coverage for the three radar systems at Laverton, WA, Alice Springs, NT and Longreach, QLD (C. Kopp).”
Apart from JORN, you see the strategic importance of the Cocos Islands.
Now, factor in this:
“Secret spy station on Cocos Islands” j.mp/1bPDwMh
Brock McEwen has always questioned, whether Australia had secret information that made them confident in their determinations of the SIO search zones. This would explain, why.
Cocos Islands is very very small with permanent population of few hundred people that all know each other, tough chance they are running anything “secret” there. And even if they had a listening post(which they possibly have although it’s anything but secret) how would that help if the plane had its comms turned off anyway?
StevanG,
Ok, so you meant Dennis’ Xmas Island hypothesis, not the mainland. How does this correlate with yours “…what would you do as a pilot if you wanted to reach the first world country (Australia [Xmas Island]) unchallenged”? I believe the easiest way would be to buy a ticket to Xmas Island as a tourist, and get lost there.
About inconsistencies. Let’s start from AES. Why was it switched off, how, and why did it return back at 18:25 according to your version?
If I recall correctly, both Cocos Island and Xmas Island have radars, and on top of it their coverage overlapped with Jindalee. It would be impossible to land there unnoticed, unless these radars were off. Thus, if Xmas Island was really intended destination, then this would be in case if a group of hijackers took passengers as hostages. You can continue this line if you wish.
Peter,
Re yours “That means, if it turns out that MH370 was captured by any radar station past 18:40, that would have made the difference between finding the plane and not finding it”.
I think you misunderstood Gysbreght. It is valid only under several assumptions:
1. AP hypothesis.
2. FMT time between 18:22 and 18:40.
3. Constant AP settings (altitude, heading and ground/air speed).
If you ‘break’ anything of the above, the knowledge of the location at 18:40 will not help much.
@Oleksandr
1. look under Ethiopian Airlines Flight 702 on wiki, that ethiopian copilot could also buy a ticket to Switzerland, and look at the timeline..it happened only 2 weeks before MH370, now I don’t say it’s connected but the probability certainly exists and pilots are known to retalk rumors between themselves, maybe something clicked in Zaharie’s head to try similar
2. AES could be switched on/off for various reasons, maybe he wanted to retrieve communications after clearing malaysian airspace?
3. yupp both of those islands have radars but they don’t have means of intercepting the plane and even if they did everything they could do is follow it to the airport where it would land anyway
the captain wouldn’t want to land there unnoticed IMO he would want to be very noticed and spread his political message through international media(it’s all speculation though but I think it sounds a lot more reasonable than a suicide after fuel exhaustion)
Have you read the article at all ?
“monitoring facility – known locally as “the house with no windows””
The article seems solid and The Sydney Morning Herald is a generally reliable source.
Besides, you are not focusing on what I deem important here.
“Secret spy station on Cocos Islands” is not what I said.
“Secret spy station on Cocos Islands” is what I said.
I give you one more:
http://j.mp/1Gi0hnm
The plane’s comms were not completely turned off. Remember the part where the AES sent ~hourly signals ?
See j.mp/1bPDwMh :
If Australia can use the Cocos Island facility to intercept signals from as far away as Indonesia, why shouldn’it be able to intercept signals from a plane flying close by ?
Not only is there reason to suspect the listening post to have intercepted the ~hourly Inmarsat handshakes, there is even a precedent showing that it can and has intercepted satphone calls:
In other words, satphone use could have been detected.
Remember that MH370 was called twice via satphone ?
And all the other communication (handshakes) passed over (the same) satellite, during all these hours. Lots of occasions for signal interception.
And I believe there is a radar station too. So there lots of ways MH370 could have been detected.
The Cocos Islands are part of “Australia’s strategic air defence environment in the Indian Ocean region”.
Again, please look at Figures 24 and 25.
@Jeff Wise: thank you for letting me know. What shall I do? Just repost it and keep fingers crossed? Or can you relax the spam filter a little bit? (Regular contributors don’t post commercial/spam URLs anyway).
@Oleksandr: You will get my replies to your technical failure scenario. I have the text (which was apparently swallowed by WordPress) still saved on my computer. I am not sure though what I should do to make it appear in the forum here. Suggestions welcome.
@Gysbreght + Oleksandr:
thank you for your comments.
I read the suggested literature.
Appendix G provides many interesting details (particularly about the GES receive chain), but nothing unexpected to me regarding the key points.
There are 2 headscratchers for me:
(if my phrasing is awkward, please try to make sense of it, as you see that my command of both English and technical terms are not quite solid)
(1)
I would concur with you, Gysbreght, if you say that BFO values allow the determination of the flight path until the last reliable ping (00:19; or 00:11 if the log-on ping at 00:19 is deemed unreliable) through a complex calculation that requires (a) 1 known location when BFO is logged and (b) the BTO values (i.e. how do you get with x aircraft velocity towards/from satellite to the next ping ring). The accuracy of the flight path calculation suffers from any aircraft altitude changes and the imprecision of the logged BTO/BFO values.
However if you don’t mean that, and instead what you rather mean is:
BFO values alone (without BTO values) allow the calculation of the aircraft’s direction and speed
… then I would NOT concur/understand, as from my understanding the BFO value only tells us the aircraft motion towards/away from the satellite in a 1-dimensional space but does not inform us about the aircraft motion in a 2D let alone 3D space (e.g. aircraft moves away from the satellite at 400 mp/h, but depending on the heading it could fly as fast as 500 mp/h groundspeed). Therefore for every given BFO value, there is an infinite amount of combinations of {heading, speed} resulting in that BFO value, which means that the BFO values alone, tell us neither aircraft groundspeed nor aircraft heading, because it could be any combination of those. It’s only all the other factors (most importantly BTO) that allow picking the right combination.
I really hope, I am right here, because if not, that would mean I have been sitting in the wrong train for a whole year.
(2)
“It would be exactly zero, if the satellite was not moving.”
That’s what I feared, because then I can’t make sense of it.
We have 2 moving objects, so 2 “motions”, i.e. 2 displacement vectors:
– the displacement vector from the plane to any fixed point (e.g. the satellite’s erroneously assumed geostationary location) and
– the displacement vector from that fixed point to the satellite
If you want to know, how fast the 2 objects are moving away from each other, you just summate the 2 vectors.
But if you take away the plane’s displacement vector (because you fully compensate for it, as you agree), then all you are left with is the satellite’s own movement (relative to a fixed point, not relative to the plane). But that’s what we already know, it’s the plane’s motion we want to know.
Can you see, what I mean ?
To give you a (completely unrelated) example: Let’s say you are driving southbound in your car and there is a severe thunderstorm supposed to be coming your way from the north. You call a friend who lives in a town a few miles away, closer to the storm, and you ask her to count the seconds between the lightning strike and the thunder. Then, a few minutes later, you ask her to repeat, so as to know if the storm is getting closer. If she tells you the truth, you know (very approximately, it’s a bad example) how fast the storm is approaching, and given that you have a satnav (GPS) in your car, and thus know your own movement, you can deduce whether (and how fast) the storm is catching up with you or whether you leaving it behind. Now let’s say – for argument’s sake – the person lies to you (I know, the example is becoming miserable) and always tells you the thunder is “10 seconds away”, regardless of what she truly counted (i.e. she fully compensates for storm’s actual motion except for a fixed bias), then you have no idea of the storm’s true movement. To you, the storm appears stationary, when it is not.
That’s why I said “The airplane movements would be completely opaque. Like something happening behind a closed door.”
Going back to the equation:
BFO = ΔFup + ΔFdown + δf comp + δf sat + δf AFC + δf bias
ΔFup and δf comp are the only components affecteded by aircraft movement, so let’s discard the rest for this discussion. My error of reasoning must lie somewhere here.
X = satellite’s erroneously assumed geostationary location
“ΔFup is the Doppler on the signal passing from the aircraft (A) to the satellite (S)” created by the combined speed of which A and S are approaching each other, which can be split into the displacement (per second) of A->X and S->X.
“δf comp is the frequency compensation applied by the aircraft” for the motion A->X.
So if the frequency is 100% compensated for the motion A->X, the only motion left uncompensated for is the motion S->X, which … has nothing to do with the aircraft. It’s the satellite’s own daily reoccurring motion pattern.
That’s why I said:
I know I am wrong, but am unable to find out where and why.
Hope someone can lend me a helping hand.
Thank you.
correction:
“created by the combined speed of which A and S are approaching each other”
=
“created by the combined speed at which A and S are approaching each other”
@Peter Norton,
As I explained earlier, BFO defines the north-south component of groundspeed. To obtain the east-west component you need the BTO’s.
BFO, BTO, time and location define groundspeed and direction in level flight at each point.
@Oleksander: Constructing the path from BFO and BTO is like following a trail of breadcrumbs. Autopilot use and winds are irrelevant.
As to sitting in the wrong train: Yes, apparently!
@Peter Norton
Glad I’m not the only one who can’t get the head around to understand the residual uncorrected components of the BFO.
Beginning at the point that speed of the aircraft has been compensated for by the AIS there must be other components generating the BFO than the obvious satellite movement. Speed I assume in this case means the closure or opening rate to the assumed stationary satellite position of the aircraft in a planar motion, extending from a position directly below the assumed fixed position of the satellite at sea level. The heigt of the assumed fixed satellite position being the “y” axis, the aircraft moving on the horizontal “x” axis.
It is stated, that the aircraft AIS system does not correct for vertical speed, therefore my reference to the planar motion of the aircraft.
Asuming my model with the planar motion is correct, 3 vertical components would be unacounted for, the obvious one being the aircraft generated by climbing and descending, showing as vertical speed in the cockpit. Another one would be caused by the curvature of the earth, which the aircraft will follow while maintaining a steady flight level, which will show in the BFO like decending when flying away from the satellite or like climbing when flying to the satellite. Last uncorrected error would be the fact, that flying a specified flightlevel is not identical to flying a steady altitude above SL. Flight level is pressure altitude based on standard atmosphere. How deviations from standard atmosphere would influence the BFO data I can only guess, it would create at least some noise.
@Gysbreght
You say BFO defines north south component of groundspeed, BTO the east west component. Is that applicable in a general way or is that only applicable for the case of MH370 and why?
Even if my understanding as posted above would be correct I still cannot see how the routing can be limited to the few on the table without assuming other variables like FL, Speed and track to be constant.
@Gysbreght
In our childhoud it was a nice game to follow a trail of bread crumbs. Difference is these bread crumbs had been real laid out as a 2 dimensional trail and were visible there, here we assume that the breadcrumbs must be lying in a predetermind direction (southbound) from the last one, within a fixed space (speed) between them and on a 2 dimensional planar (constant level). We see them only when we have placed them ourselves by using these asumptions. Make that a three dimensional trail.
@Gysbreght and @Peter Norton, There are two aspects of the frequency-correction algorithm that create a useful signal in the BFO. The first is the error in the assumed position of the satellite. This is greatest when the plane is closer to the subsatellite point, when the satellite is far from the equator (around 19:40) and when the plane is traveling tangentially to the satellite; this component depends on (and provides information about) the plane’s heading. The second aspect that creates a signal is the speed of the satellite. This is largest when the satellite is moving most quickly (as it is when the position error is smallest, that is to say, when the satellite is right over the equator) and when the plane’s z-coordinate (distance from the equatorial plane, similar to latitude) is large. The former factor was large at the beginning of the post-radar flight; the latter factor was dominant at the end, 0:11 and 0:19. In between, both aspects are important. So you can see why it’s a complicated business to try to derive a route using BFO values.
Jeff
@RetiredF4
You wrote: “@Gysbreght: You say BFO defines north south component of groundspeed, BTO the east west component.”
I said that BFO, time and location defines north south component of groundspeed. Together with the BTO trend that defines the east west component. BFO refers to a speed, BTO refers to locations. Rate-of-change of location is speed. If the BTO had remained constant over several pings, the airplane must have travelled along the same arc during that period, at speeds defined by the BFO’s.
It is generally applicable to the SATCOM equipment onboard MH370 and a sub-satellite point that changes predominantly in latitude and very little in longitude. In principle it does not matter whether the earth is an ellipsoid or a sphere or flat as a pancake, or even if the satellite and the airplane are on the same flat two-dimensional plane. Only the complexities of the mathematics are different.
The point of the breadcrumb analogy is that it does not matter how the trail was created – on foot, by bike, or by airplane, i.e. the A/P mode is irrelevant.
While BFO is very sensitive to the V/S of the airplane, the effect of altitude on the arcs, speeds and tracks is quite small. Speed and track can be calculated from BFO and BTO as described, they don’t have to be constant. However, based on the smooth progression of BTO and BFO versus time between 18:40 and 00:11 it is reasonable to assume that there were no large changes of altitude, speed or track in that period.
@Jeff Wise:
You mention several valid points, but also others where I’m not sure that they are valid and relevant. The point I’m making is that at any given time and location there is only one speed and track that satisfies the BFO, BTO and BTO-trend.
@Gysbreght, You wrote “The point I’m making is that at any given time and location there is only one speed and track that satisfies the BFO, BTO and BTO-trend.” No! If this were the case then finding MH370 would be trivial. There are many solutions for any given set of BFO and BTO values, particularly when you take into account the wide error bar on the BFO values. I have confirmed this directly with Inmarsat.
Peter,
I think your mistake is that you need to consider radial velocity component, which affects BFO. Strictly speaking tangential components also cause relativistic effect similar to Doppler shift, but it is negligibly small compared to the effect of radial component. Thus, instead of two 3D vectors, you need to consider four 3D vectors:
1. Displacement of the aircraft ra;
2. Displacement of the satellite rs;
3. The velocity of the aircraft va;
4. The velocity of the satellite vs.
The displacement of the aircraft with respect to the moving satellite will be ra-rs. The relative velocity will be va-vs. The radial component (scalar) is defined as the projection of the relative velocity on the relative direction:
vr = (va-vs, ra-rs)/sqrt((ra-rs,ra-rs)),
where (.,.) is the vector dot product. Note that
(va-vs, ra-rs) = (va,ra)+(vs,rs)-(vs,ra)-(va,rs).
If I correctly understood your contemplations, you are forgetting about the last two terms, which make the difference. Also, it seems you mixed up displacement and velocity (both are 3D vectors). Note that it can be shown that the rotation of the Earth does not affect the radial component.
Gysbreght,
Re “Constructing the path from BFO and BTO is like following a trail of breadcrumbs. Autopilot use and winds are irrelevant.”
No. AP, winds, etc. are very relevant. You don’t know what was in between the known time stamps. Moreover, even if you knew the set of (BTO, BFO) each 1 second, it is still impossible to derive velocity in a unique way. The set of (BTO, BFO) gives the possibility to derive only the radial velocity component; it does not allow you to define the velocity components in the tangential plane in 3D space. Two other conditions implicitly follow from the ground speed assumption and constant altitude assumption.
Re: “As I explained earlier, BFO defines the north-south component of groundspeed. To obtain the east-west component you need the BTO’s”
No. BTO defines ping ring, which is the intersection of the ping spere with the Earth surface. BFO defines radial component of the velocity at these rings. Both are irrelevant to N,S,E,W.
@Jeff Wise:
You replied: “No! If this were the case then finding MH370 would be trivial.”
I believe I made it plain that finding MHH370 is not trivial because, firstly, we don’t know the airplane location at 18:40, 19:41, etc. and secondly, we don’t know who or what controlled the airplane after fuel exhaustion, we only know it was not the autopilot.
I’m also well aware that the logged BTO and BFO values are subject to measurement errors. My impression is that for various reasons these errors have been exaggerated. The Ornstein-Uhlenbeck advocates picked some error distributions out of the blue to play their Monte Carlo games, the autopilot slaves wanted to discredit data that don’t fit their pet theories, and Inmarsat’s legal counsel obviously wanted to avoid any liability. In short, in opposition to Dr. Ulich’s ideas about “noise power”, I believe the tracks that follow the bread crumbs are more likely than any path that is based on arbitrary assumptions.
StevanG,
With regard to your points:
1. The pilot of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 702 did not make an attempt to hide. Moreover, Malaysia is comparatively rich country, and it is hardly comparable with Ethiopia.
2. It is not a click of button to switch on/of AES unnoticed. You said “maybe he wanted to retrieve communications after clearing malaysian airspace?”. On contrary, if the pilot wanted to attract attention, (particularly international media) as per your next suggestion, or had political demands, such a step does not make any sense. If Malaysian military launched interceptors, that would really attracted attention; the Malay government would have a hard choice: either to shut down the airplane, or agree with demands. In addition, if the pilot planned to use the satellite communication again, why didn’t he do it? And why didn’t passengers/crew reported about the event when the satellite link was restored?
3. “yupp both of those islands have radars but they don’t have means of intercepting the plane and even if they did everything they could do is follow it to the airport where it would land anyway”
If they don’t have means of the intercepting airplane in the air, they would arrest the crew upon landing. What would happen in case of the successful landing at Xmas island? I think the answer is clear: the passengers would be sent to the destination (China) ASAP, while the crew would be detained and charged with hijacking, kidnapping, crossing border illegally, etc.
You said: “the captain wouldn’t want to land there unnoticed IMO he would want to be very noticed and spread his political message through international media”.
If he wanted to attract attention, he would not attempt to hide when flying over Malaysia. Would Malay government risk shutting down the airplane with international passengers, most of whom were Chinese? To achieve the purpose of your scenario, a more logical way would be just opposite to what you suggested: to make as much noise as possible when flying over Malaysia, and then land somewhere unnoticed.
Jeff,
You are making it sound more complex than it needs to be. Calculating the predicted BFO values for any particular track is simple maths. The first issue is selecting a track model, that is a start point (on a particular early arc), track type (e.g. constant true course, changing) and speed evolution (if any). Fitting the track to the BTO values gives one possible track for each start point, with only a small track error allowed by the BTO errors. Using a set of start points gives a set of possible tracks each with a cumulative error between the predicted and measured BFO values.
The expected error on the measured BFO values is known in detail only to the Investigation, based on earlier flights of that particular aircraft and others but it is a standard statistical task to select which tracks have significant errors and can be excluded from consideration.
The major choice is the track model and particularly how complex it needs to be, or indeed should be. As we know, the BFO is sensitive to rate of climb/descent but it seems a reasonable first assumption that the altitude was constant up to loss of power, only the 19:41UT BFO measurement stands out as not fitting a simple track model. Speed evolution during the flight does not change the end points of the non-excluded tracks but change of course during the flight does, so including this or not is a key decision.
Clearly, the track model can be made as complex as desired, but since a simple straight course and unchanging altitude gives a good match to the data (apart from the 19:41UT point and given the statistical errors) this has to be the first choice for the Investigation. The designated Northern search area is, presumably, the set of destinations on the 00:19:29UT arc that are not excluded by their individual errors.
Richard Cole wrote: “The first issue is selecting a track model, that is a start point (on a particular early arc), track type (e.g. constant true course, changing) and speed evolution (if any).”
If you have a start point on a particular arc, you can just follow the bread crumbs (BFO & BFO) from there. It is not necessary (I think it is wrong) to impose an arbitrary track type and speed evolution, but almost everybody does that.
@Oleksandr
1. Indeed, but money was not the issue here. The thing is that Malaysia is practically a dictatorship with the same people ruling last 50 years or so. Some people there don’t like it.
2. I know it isn’t just click of a button. Who knows what happened there and why, you could make up basically any theory about AES switch on/off.
3. I agree they(he) would get arrested, but that would sure attract media attention anyway. And I don’t have any doubts that malaysian government/military would rather shoot the plane over Malaysia then let the Captain speak about situation there.
@Peter
It is helpful to read the vector analysis by Henrik Rydberg
bitmath.org/mh370/mh370-path.pdf
In particular eq. 1 and eq. 6
While the first term indicates a position to the south at later times, the second term is still important. It moves the possible a/c positions as far north as (close to) Xmas Island along 7th arc if we allow an arbitrary track locally in time.
Regards,
Niels.
Gysbreght,
I could argue the principle of not ignoring noise in fitting such data, but we have been here before so I won’t (I was tempted). If you are simultaneously fitting speed and course to meet the BTO and BFO data then the conclusion remains as other BFO analysis methods, Northern half of the search area, course around 180deg. The 00:11UT BFO point always wants to be North.
I’ve convinced myself that with no pilot inputs after loss of power, the crash site will be inside the 7th arc. The next search period will be key.
Gysbreght,
You said: “It is not necessary (I think it is wrong) to impose an arbitrary track type and speed evolution, but almost everybody does that”.
That is true, however, there are 2 problems:
– It is only possible to derive radial velocity component of the aircraft in 3D space from given BTO & BFO data. There 2 unknown components in the tangential plane to ping-spheres. You need 2 additional assumptions. Whatever you want. For instance, ATSB originally used constant altitude and constant speed, without any hypothesis about flight mode.
– You need to fill in gaps between samples. You can apply interpolation, or you can make some assumption, which has physical meaning. You can also do nothing, and then you will get piece-wise trajectory.
Just imagine: BTOs = const, BFOs = const, assume satellite geostationary. This would mean that the aircraft is moving along a ping ring, but you can’t guess about its speed and exact whereabouts at all.
At last, more journalism:
The tiny Indian Ocean island of Kuda Huvadhoo is the sleepy fishing community that the world forgot. Some of its villagers believe an aircraft they saw on the morning of March 8 last year could hold the key to modern aviation’s most confounding mystery — the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
Some of the locals on the 60ha of sand and coral in the Maldives chain do not understand why, after more than a year, investigators involved in the search for the Boeing 777 have not come to hear first-hand about the large, low-flying passenger jet they insist they saw that fateful morning.
They wonder why the year-long search has not ventured here to listen to accounts from witnesses who were surprised by the unidentified aircraft. Two told The Weekend Australian they could see distinctive red and blue markings — similar to the striping on the missing plane which was heading west towards the Maldives when last spotted on radar after departing Kuala Lumpur.
Their suspicions are no match for the highly sophisticated calculations based on satellite connections with MH370, which have put its likely crash zone along an arc about 1800km southwest of Perth.
Intriguingly, however, acoustics scientists are not ruling out the possibility that a distinctive high-energy noise they measured about the time of the presumed crash might have come from the aircraft hitting the ocean or imploding at depth in an area near the Maldives.
A speck on the atoll of Dhaalu in the Maldives chain, the island receives few visits from outsiders. Wealthy tourists, some of whom arrive by private jet at the airport near the country’s capital, Male, and then take a sea plane about 180km south to the pampered luxury of a resort costing more than $2000 a night, sometimes charter a small boat to briefly look at the modest lives here.
But, for most of the time, the area is left alone. The villagers’ days revolve around fundamental needs — their food (the fish and occasional lobster pulled from the turquoise waters), Islamic prayer five times a day, family, work and friends.
An interesting event on Kuda Huvadhoo is a small twin-prop sea plane swooping nearby. An unusual event is seeing the contrails of a large jet at high altitude — they seldom cross the southern atoll. A remarkable event, something the locals relate to us with the intensity of people who fear they are doubted, is watching a large passenger jet, like a Boeing 777, flying low about the time MH370 would have been close to running out of fuel.
“I watched this very large plane bank slightly and I saw its colours — the red and blue lines — below the windows, then I heard the loud noise,’’ says Abdu Rasheed Ibrahim, 47, a court official and the island’s keenest hobby fisherman, as he speaks of what he saw from the beach that morning. “It was unusual, very unusual. It was big and it was flying low. It was a holiday (Saturday) and most people had gone to bed after praying.”
When he went home with his catch, a barracuda tied to his bicycle’s handlebars, Abdu spoke to other villagers about the strange, large aircraft. Some saw it. Others only heard it. They say they were talking about it hours before they knew MH370 had gone missing. Later that morning, at an extra-curricular class at school, Humaam Dhonmamk, 16, talked excitedly to Abdu’s daughter, Aisath Zeeniya, about seeing it — he also described the distinctive blue and red striping. It flew over as he took his clothes from the outside line.
“I saw the blue and red on a bit of the side,’’ Humaam says. “I heard the loud noise of it after it went over. I told the police this too.”
The Australia-led search has been focused for the past year on a lengthy arc in the southern Indian Ocean, more than 5000km away, as a result of complex calculations of probable weather conditions, fuel exhaustion, distances, time of impact and other variables.
All of this has been primarily driven by a handful of “electronic handshakes”, or pings, that were transmitted between a satellite and MH370 as it flew for hours, undetected by radar and in radio silence after departing Kuala Lumpur and deviating from its intended Beijing-bound flight path with a series of unexplained turns.
There were no mayday transmissions from Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah or first officer Fariq Abdul Hamid. No frantic mobile telephone attempts. No claims of responsibility by hijackers.
Unofficial theories are led by the one thought most plausible, mass murder-suicide by one of the crew, possibly the captain, determined to ensure the aircraft crashed where its secrets would lie undiscovered. Another theory suggests a sudden cockpit fire could have knocked out communications and overcome the crew, and that the aircraft had been on autopilot until it fell from the sky.
Amid mounting concern over the costs of the search and the lack of a single fragment of wreckage, there is still a “high degree of confidence” that the official investigation is looking in the right part of the planet. Sophisticated modelling supports the proposition which hinges on the satellite’s data — but if this data is wrong or defective, the search zone co-ordinates will be too.
Prior to the extensive modelling that produced the search zone, the last “sighting” of MH370, according to military radar, had it on a westerly heading — a flight path towards the Maldives. Its seemingly purposeful turn west was a radical deviation from the heading north it should have taken to its scheduled destination, Beijing. Although no radar shows it altering course radically again to the south, where the search is now concentrated in the bleakness of the southern Indian Ocean, analysis of the “pings” suggests this is where MH370 had headed.
It is why the Australian Transport Safety Bureau oversees a massive operation in a vast area some 1800km southwest of Perth, with about half of the priority area being combed so far.
The technology and logistics matter little, however, to the villagers of Kuda Huvadhoo, the capital of an atoll lacking radar in a country with outdated and severely limited defence and air traffic equipment. Several people we spoke to believe they saw MH370 about 6.30am (9.30am in Malaysia) that day.
Zuhuriyya Ali, 49, who watched it from her home’s courtyard, still “feels strange when thinking about the people on it”. “I consider it a lot,’’ she says. “I am concerned there is a connection to the Malaysia plane.”
Ahmed Shiyaam, 34, an IT manager at the local medical clinic who was riding with his daughter, Uyoon, 6, along one of the island’s sandy paths that morning, stopped and looked up on March 8 last year — they had never seen such a large plane fly so low.
“I’m very sure of what I saw on a very clear and bright day, and what I saw was not normal — the plane was very big, and low. I did not know until later that other people saw it too. I don’t know if it’s the Malaysia plane.”
Ahmed Ibrahim, 40, who saw it from his garden, also described it to us in confident detail.
“This was not a normal sight — the plane was different,’’ he says. “It was very big, very noisy, flying low. Later that afternoon on the beach I was told the news about the missing plane. I think this is the same flight.”
Back on the exact spot where he was standing on March 8 last year when he saw the aircraft, Abdu Rasheed Ibrahim says: “First, I saw the plane flying towards me over water. When it was over my head I saw it starting to turn away. At first glance, I did not know it was a missing plane. I didn’t know that a plane was missing. I went straight home and told my wife about it. I told my family, ‘I saw this strange plane’. This is the biggest plane I have ever seen from this island. My family says, ‘It might be the Malaysian plane’. I have seen pictures of the missing plane — I believe that I saw that plane. At the time it was lost, I strongly felt those people who were searching should come here.”
The Weekend Australian spent three days interviewing locals, all of whom described the incident in a similar way. Six of the key witnesses we spoke to were interviewed last year by police at the direction of authorities in Male, and each signed statements of their versions. A senior source familiar with the police probe confirmed the witness accounts were regarded as truthful and consistent. The office of the new President in Male declined to comment; his immediate predecessor is languishing in a nearby prison.
“These people were not seeking attention and they did not go to the police about it, the police went to them after hearing about this,’’ the source says. “They are not dishonest and they have no motive to lie. They all told the police it was big, low and noisy. If it was not the missing plane, then which plane was it? We do not see planes close and low to Kuda Huvadhoo. Nobody knows what has really happened.”
There were other reasons the people of Kuda Huvadhoo were not taken seriously. The Maldives National Defence Force, responsible for guarding the security and sovereignty of the low-lying country, issued a statement in March last year ruling out any such aircraft movement over its air space. The locals were surprised and felt humiliated. Several of those we spoke to in Kuda Huvadhoo were scornful, accusing their defence chiefs of seeking to save face and not wanting to admit to their people or the world that the limitations of Maldives radar and other equipment could not detect such flights.
Around this time, Malaysian authorities agreed that the aircraft’s “pings” — like breadcrumbs being left in a trail — meant MH370 should have crashed somewhere along one of two potential arcs. The arcs are in opposite hemispheres, but the most probable extended in the Indian Ocean west of Perth where vessels and aircraft are engaged in a search across a massive haystack for an infinitesimally small needle.
Another wildcard is the little-known work of Alec Duncan and fellow scientists from Curtin University’s Centre for Marine Science and Technology, whose monitoring of sensitive underwater acoustics equipment, known as hydrophones, identified “a clear acoustic signal at a time that was reasonably consistent with other information relating to the disappearance of MH370”.
The scientists knew the crash of a large aircraft in the ocean would be a “high energy event and expected to generate intense underwater sounds” — either from the impact with the ocean or a subsequent implosion of sinking wreckage. In their initial location estimates, Dr Duncan placed the noise’s source in the ocean relatively close to the Maldives and Kuda Huvadhoo. However, he cautions it could have been a geological event. The official ATSB search team for MH370 carefully considered the acoustics data.
After months of further analysis, Dr Duncan told The Weekend Australian this week: “Unfortunately the reality is that there are so many ifs, buts and maybes involved in all this that it would be more correct to say that our team has identified an approximate possible location for the origin of a noise that is probably of geological origin, but cannot be completely ruled out as being connected with the loss of MH370.”
Dr Duncan explained that two key factors “make us reluctant to completely rule out the possibility that these signals are related to MH370”.
One is “the calculated time of the acoustic event, shortly after the final “partial handshake” between the satellite and the aircraft”, the other is that if the sound was generated by the implosion of some part of the aircraft as it sank … (and) at a depth of about 1000m then the resulting sound would propagate effectively in the deep sound channel and could conceivably be detected at ranges of thousands of kilometres”.
However, like the island of Kuda Huvadhoo, “the calculated position is completely inconsistent with the satellite handshake data that is the basis of the current search area”.
If the satellite handshake data ever “proved to be seriously flawed”, says Dr Duncan, further acoustics analysis should be done. And if this eventuates, the people of a tiny island in the Maldives might be asked again about the large passenger jet they insist they saw on the morning of March 8 last year.
Nine weeks ago, Malaysia’s civil aviation chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, described the loss of MH370 as an accident: “We have concluded that the aircraft exhausted its fuel over a defined area of the southern Indian Ocean and that the aircraft is located on the sea floor close to that defined area. This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites. It is also an area with adverse sea conditions with known depths of more than 6000m.”
@Matty – Perth, are you the author of this? And where did it appear? Also, if MH370 had been spotted on 0630 on 8 March over the Maldives, would the aircraft have had enough fuel to have reached the coast of India?
I’m just curious because I don’t think the plane wound up in the water, contrary to the consensus view.
Nate – this story appeared in the Australian press today. If they saw MH370 then I’d say it could have refueled there or just loitered for whatever reason. All guesswork.
Nate – the author is Hedley Thomas(The Australian), who has a name for digging when others might head for the bar.
@Matty:
You’re truly a gem. Sounds like Hedley is too. Just tweeted this out.
The Maldive islanders who say they can help find MH370
BY Hedley Thomas
The Australian
April 04, 2015 12:00AM
More soon.
A blessed Passover and Easter to all.
Nihonmama – It’s an odd set up isn’t it? Those Maldivians are credible witnesses by the sound of it, but computer says no. The plane they saw was almost certainly under human control and somewhere it wasn’t meant to be. I’ve opined a few times that there are number of remote strips there where you may be able to stop and go. Or offload something then dispose. It comes back to that often quoted line about the remote SIO airstrips in the simulator. I remarked at the time that if true, it pointed straight to the Maldives? Where else? Personally I doubt anything without a proper source.
@Matty,
I’ve laid it out some weeks ago:
The noisy striped plane at Kudahuvadhoo CANNOT have caused the Curtin boom . Please look up the times and locations. Since the islanders can’t have seen the plane earlier than 06:16 local time (sunrise on March 8, 2014) the noisy plane simply couldn’t have made it in time to the location of the Curtin boom.
If you throw out the sat data completely, the noisy plane could have been mh370 – but then the Curtin boom had nothing to do with mh370. Or the Curtin boom was really caused by mh370 – but then the noisy plane definitely wasn’t mh370.
I have discussed this extensively with Brock a few weeks ago.
I really wish people would stop to mix up the two observations.
And I do take the islanders’report seriously. But their observation and Alex Duncan’s boom aren’t caused by the same object.
Littlefoot – I thought the boom location wasn’t exactly exact, and more general? I’m not that flipped on the boom either way, what struck me as really odd was that it took a year for someone to go out and talk to those people. When I started stumbling into the spoofing speculation I envisaged the plane heading west because that’s where it was headed, they went to a lot of trouble to reach the IO and the turn looked like an electronic artifact.
@Matty, the location of the boom is precise enough to be sure that there is no way the plane from Kudahuvadhoo could’ve made it in time – especially since it was flying low and slow.
But I’m not saying at all that we shouldn’t think about the witnesses’ reports – I’m just saying we should stop connecting the Curtin boom and the Maldives sighting.