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.
@Matty:
“I remarked at the time that if true, it pointed straight to the Maldives?”
Indeed.
And recall journalist Alberto Riva, 03.18.14:
“But the fire plus emergency diversion theory, as compelling as it is and similar to other known incidents, leaves one question unanswered. If the pilots tried for a landing at Langkawi and missed because they became incapacitated, the autopilot would have kept them flying straight and level on the last compass heading. (Which would have taken MH370 more or less over Kuda Huvadhoo, by the way.)
So, either someone was entering those waypoints in the flight management computers, or the computers had been programmed earlier to send the plane there. The former option is not consistent with an unconscious or dead crew. The latter makes no sense for a crew in a dire emergency, looking for the closest place to land — unless one wants to believe the improbable and now-debunked scenario that hackers were steering the plane.”
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sf4ubu
‘Metao’ on Reddit (Do the pings stopping suggest they were from MH370? 04.14)
“Apparently hoops were jumped through to access Diego Garcia’s data, but they’ve been doing seismic measurements, so the data is a mess and unusable.
A combination of first hand and reliable second hand information. It’s difficult for me to elaborate further, unfortunately, for both identity and employment reasons.
As I said some of this i know firsthand and some is second. As far as I know the second hand information is legit, but has not been well publicised (but as far as I know it’s no secret). A journalist should call CMST, do a little leg work, and write an article. You know, do some journalism instead of regurgitating press releases and interviewing professional press consultants (aka people that didn’t cut it doing real work).”
Nihonmama
Posted November 6, 2014 at 10:07 PM
(Where is the Debris?)
“Now, another nugget pops up – from @petrossian, who, for some time, has been tweeting very quietly (and very cryptically) about his own expedition to learn more about MH370. His tweets also suggest that he (formerly) worked in intelligence.
From June:
“They saw a low flying jet too 60 nm n of Peros Banhos flying south. No fire but blinking pos lights.’Very loud’
Peros Banhos, NEAREST TO THE MALDIVES, is an atoll in the (now uninhabited) Chagos Archipelago, which also includes Diego Garcia.
Thanks much to Lucy Barnes for flagging this tweet.”
Hedley (re Curtin):
“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.”
Nihonmama
Posted November 22, 2014 at 12:23 AM
(The Mystery of Indonesian Radar)
“Finally Matty, your comment — “but the custodians of that equipment are quick to say that this does not exclude an event. But is this the only sensible thing to say under the circumstances?” — is important. Thank you for bringing it up.
In this Sept 5 article (Nature – URL omitted), it says the Curtin researchers recovered additional data that suggested — based on the location (midway between the Horn of Africa and India) — and “low amplitude tail”, that the event was geological, not from the crash of MH370. But in re-reading that piece, it appears that their finding (at least as reported) is not unequivocal.
In addition, please note the location of their ‘new estimate’ on that map – it’s in a strait line, directly west of Sumatra, Indonesia.”
Littlefoot – I’d be interested to see what Dr Duncan thought about it if he was bothered enough to remark one way or the other. It was a long range detection and they would only need to be marginally out with a bearing to shift the event quite some way? Then you have the seabed repercussions.
Nihonmama/Littlefoot – If we were to rule out the Curtin boom then we have basically no acoustic evidence of a crash at all. Which means no evidence of a crash apart from those pings. I said ages ago that if not for those the search area would be north of the Maldives.
On one level it’s a no-brainer. On the morning it goes missing some folks in a IO Island see a bloody big plane out of the blue, hours before it’s known to be missing, last seen heading their way. They haven’t seen anything like it before or since. The timing and fuel range is about right, but computer says no.
@Matty, when the plane was last seen on radar it wasn’t heading straight towards the Maldives. It was heading towards the Andamans. To end up near the Maldives it would require another turn.
Littlefoot – But not a very big one.
The key here is that these testimonies were rolling in before the thing was reported as missing. And it even had a big red stripe down the side. In any other instance they would have been regarded as solid evidence and followed up on but this time they went in the bin. You could argue that eyewitness testimony can be fraught but these seem to be good quality, and no-one will guarantee the signal data.
No, not a 180° again. But wouldn’t it be equally or even more logical to conclude that it continued into the direction it was heading when last seen?
The one thing that doesn’t make sense is a Southern turn. Without the sat data everybody would regard such an idea as patently absurd.
@Matty, the reports from the Maldives came in about two weeks after the plane was declared missing. Because no one had asked the Maldivians before. And at first they never said anything about blue stripes. In the original reports they mentioned only red stripes on a white plane. So the later testimonies might have been influenced by th knowledge of how mh370 looked like.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t doubt that the islanders have seen a very big unusual plane. But they described it as white with red stripes. But mh370 had red and blue stripes. And it wasn’t completely white. Mh370 had a silver grey bottom, which would have been very visible for the islanders. So the descriptions don’t match exactly.
Littlefoot – “so the descriptions don’t match exactly”
They rarely do when you compile such testimonies. We did this experiment as Psychology students years ago. Colours and details always get crossed, colours especially. There are always a handful of details that stick at most. As I understand these people were on the phone to the cops and each others before the disappearance really hit the wires. Of all mornings???
@Matty, I’m not dismissing altogether that the witnesses saw something which might be important and connected with mh370. You are right: the color descriptions from witnesses rarely match completely with reality. But I am not sure how reliable this otherwise interesting article of yours is. I read the original report some time ago from a local Maldive newspaper which was written two weeks after mh370 vanished and it sounded a little different: There were no stripes mentioned, and as far as I recall the witnesses only went to the police after they heard from a missing plane, not on the day itself. That sounds believable. Why should they go to the police because of a noisy lowly flying plane? Even if it is unusual you don’t go to the police because of it. There are no reports at all that the plane was obviously in trouble.
It’s definitely worth looking into the reports of the Kudahuvadhooans. But one has to compare later articles with the first reports about that incident. And the blue stripes were definitely added later.
Correction of my comment above:
In the original report were red stripes on a white plane mentioned but definitely no blue stripes. They must have been added later.
Since BFO and BTO define groundspeed and direction at constant altitude, it is not necessary to specify how the airplane was steered. Wind is only relevant if specific AP modes are postulated and the AP settings are assumed to be left unchanged during 5.5 hours. In view of the smooth progression of BTO and BFO between 18:40 and 00:11 it is reasonable to assume that no large changes of altitude, speed or direction occurred in that period. Therefore intermediate values can be interpolated. I used a curve fit for the BTO and linear interpolation between logged values of BFO.
Sorry, but you got it all wrong. Radial or tangential velocity components have no particular significance for the BFO because of the Doppler compensation applied in the AES. At any time and location the BFO is only sensitive to the north-south component of groundspeed.
The ping ring at a certain time defines the longitude for a given latitude. That latitude is obtained from the north-south component of groundspeed defined by the BFO.
Unless specified otherwise, all of my statements assume level flight at the times of BFO logging. Without that assumption the BFO can mean anything. I don’t know the other “additional assumption” you are referring to.
If the BTO is constant the aircraft is moving along a ping ring. If the satellite is at its geostationary position the BFO is unsensitive to airplane speed because that is fully compensated by the AES. The BFO is not constant because the satellite is moving.
Littlefoot – You beat me to a punch; I thought i was going to be the one to use the term Kudahuvadhooans. But, there were multiple witnesses and police took sworn statements and I reckon they would have made a few inquiries about planes matching that description as well. As the quoted copper says “if it wasn’t MH370 what was it.” They haven’t wheeled out any alternative explanation as some might have. By the sound of the article they interviewed the six who provided statements plus numerous others over three days, and that one Islander formed the impression that the plane was in trouble – most likely due to the altitude? It’s an expanded version of the original report and I wonder why it took so long? Reads well to me.
@littlefoot, It’s truly depressing that these eyewitness claims are getting trotted out again. The malleability of memory, and the unreliability of eye witnesses, has been well established; in the unlikely event that these islanders did see a low-flying plane, it could not have been MH370, because a) all the Inmarsat data would have to have been spoofed, and b) MH370 could not have reached the Maldives flying at low altitude; the fuel burn would have been to great.
Gysbreght,
“Since BFO and BTO define groundspeed and direction at constant altitude”.
No, they don’t. If you assume groundspeed, they define direction. If you assume direction, they define groundspeed. But not both at a time.
“Radial or tangential velocity components have no particular significance for the BFO because of the Doppler compensation applied in the AES”
What is to do with AES compensation? I would suggest you some reading on Doppler effect.
“The ping ring at a certain time defines the longitude for a given latitude. That latitude is obtained from the north-south component of groundspeed defined by the BFO”.
Sorry, I don’t know what this means. Yes, ping ring at a certain time defines two longitudes for a given latitude, then what? For a spherical Earth, Duncan has provided detailed description how ping rings can be derived. For WGS’84 ellipsoid it’s a bit more complex. Ping rings are not derived from BFOs.
“Unless specified otherwise, all of my statements assume level flight at the times of BFO logging. Without that assumption the BFO can mean anything. I don’t know the other “additional assumption” you are referring to.”.
The second assumption you are using implicitly is either ground speed or heading. Assume you know the exact location of the airplane at 19:41 as an example. Can you draw the trajectory between 19:41 and 20:11?
@Oleksandr:
You’r wrong and you are not listening. I’m done.
@Oleksandr:
A few months ago Yap Fook Fah put together an excellent spreadsheet that calculates the BFO for given time, location, speed and direction, altitude and V/S. If you are familiar with MS EXCEL i suggest you use it to verify everything I wrote about the relation between BFO and groundspeed. Perhaps that would help you to correct your mis-perceptions.
It is (or was) available here:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6gvsOWO81hTcGUxUDM1RGVfeGs/edit?usp=sharing
Gysbreght,
Back in June 2014, a number of individuals were working in parallel using residual minimization approach, including Yap, Sk999, and myself. We had minor discrepancies in our results, but mostly these differences were due to different input assumptions. The weighting coefficients, Earth radius, light speed, coordinates of the geostationary satellite, WGS’84 parameters, assumed altitude, assumptions with regard to wind impact, wind/air temperature data itself, interpolations, etc. – all the things contributed to these discrepancies.
See some of these discussions, for example, here:
duncansteel.com/archives/826
(add www in front).
If I remember correctly, you had life-time problems with your BTO/BFO models, and a number of people tried to help you to fix these. I am trying to help you to understand your errors, but apparently I am not good enough for this task. If you still insist that “latitude is obtained from the north-south component of groundspeed defined by the BFO”, I have no other comment, except the one already provided by Duncan:
duncansteel.com/archives/899/comment-page-1#comment-8780
(add www in front).
@Oleksandr:
So how about Yap’s calculator?
@Gysbreght: I hesitate to enter the fray, but I THINK I may be able to explain why folks are balking at your assertion that BFO’s force a precise impact point, given a single known place/time:
It is critical to note that the exercise Yap (et al) are performing is a reverse-engineering of a path from a set of data. If the BFO data were perfectly accurate, then you would be correct: the BFO (together with the one known location) would indeed force a precise impact point.
Unfortunetely, the BFO values are known to be quite IMprecise. As a result, Yap (et al)’s reverse-engineering only gives us the middle of a DISTRIBUTION of possible paths.
Does that help?
@Brock”Does that help?”
No, not really. Yap’s Calculator is not about “reverse-engineering of a path from a set of data”. It calculates BTO & BFO for any time, location and speed that is entered.
I never said that “the BFO data were perfectly accurate”. My position is that the logged values of BTO and BFO are the best estimates of the actual values, and therefore the path(s) that can be constructed from those values is the best estimate of the actual path. My understanding of the Inmarsat paper in the Journal of Navigation is that they essentially share that view. Of course they add a caveat about possible measurement errors, but not about the method as such.
Gysbreght,
>My understanding of the Inmarsat paper in the Journal of Navigation is that they
>essentially share that view.
No. They use a model of a fixed true track and fixed speed for later parts of the track, and their BFO residuals are not zero, so they are not fitting speed and course at each point to meet the BFO and BTO. In the paper they publish the path of that class (180deg/829kph) that best fits the BFO and BTO, by some selection criteria that are not detailed.
@ Richard Cole:
OK, I concede your point that the Inmarsat engineers propose a nearly constant true track of 180 +/- 1 degree after 20:41, i.e. after the airplane is clear of the ITCZ.
Does it matter for the dispute I’m having with Oleksandr?
The FI document pointed out that the right engine burned fuel at a rate that is 1.5T higher (but we have interpreted to mean 1.5% higher) than that of the left engine. Initially, the left main fuel tank carried 24,900 kg of fuel and the right main tank had 24,800 kg of fuel. While the B-777 has a crossfeed system between these two tanks, Page 12.20.5 of the Operations Manual states, “The crossfeed valves are closed during normal operations.” In addition, Page 2 of 4 of Bulletin TBC-55R2 includes this Note: Even with an actual fuel imbalance of 16,000 lbs / 7300 kgs, airplane handling and/or lateral trim will not be significantly affected.” These two facts lead me to suggest that even if a pilot was conscious at 00:19, the crossfeed valves would have remained closed during the entire flight.
Using an average fuel burn rate of 3213 kg/hr (24,900 kg from 16:30 to 00:15) for the left engine, the right engine’s burn rate would have been 3261 kg/hr (or 3213 + 1.5%). If so, flameout of the right engine would have occurred at 00:06 or about 9 minutes earlier than the left engine.
Many of the models show a reduction in speed and/or altitude from 22:41 to 00:11UTC and this imbalance could have contributed to these changes.
Gysbreght:
I’m not sure what comments you expect to hear from me with regard to Yap’s calculator. V2 is one of the earliest versions; later Yap made quite many improvements; a long while ago he shared his V15 version, but then I did not keep tracking on the evolution of his model.
Click “BFO Analysis” Tab. See how column ‘AO’ is calculated. Then see how column ‘AN’ is calculated. Do you notice that column ‘AN’ is the projection of the velocity on the “Line of sight” unit vector? The “Range rate” is nothing but the radial velocity component in 3D space.
Now switch back to “BTO and BFO Calculator” Tab. Do you notice that columns F, G, H are inputs, not outputs? According to your statement above, columns J (BTO) and P (BFO) are sufficient to derive columns C (latitude), D(longitude), F (ground speed) and G (course). How can you estimate 4 unknowns from 2 equations?
Also, where did you get it from that the “latitude is obtained from the north-south component of groundspeed defined by the BFO”?
————
Brock:
no the issue is not in the accuracy.
————
Richard,
Fixed true track and fixed speed assumptions give 2 additional equations, the necessity of which is questioned by Gysbreght.
No, that’s not what I said. In the input/output sheet tabbed “BTO and BFO Calculator” the inputs in columns B through H, and the Fixed Offset in cell O22 define the “Calculated BFO” in column P. If you vary the input Groundspeed and Course in columns F and G, you will find that the “Calculated BFO” in column P varies linearly with col F * COS(col G), i.e. with the latitudinal component of groundspeed, and that it is not affected by the longitudinal component. So it is easy to find the latitudinal component of groundspeed that corresponds to the logged BFO.
Once you have grasped that, we can begin to explain how the longitudinal component is related to the trend of BTO’s.
I agree, as usual, with Matty: the Curtin acoustic event and the Kuda Huvadhoo witnesses – whether directly related to each other or not – rank near the top of my list of under-explored potential evidence.
Brock – Maldives – at least someone agrees. The way I see it if you were going to spoof data you would do both sets, or if BTO’s are corrupted the plane could be anywhere, and if testimony is that easily disregarded then courtrooms are a waste of taxpayers money. But a lot of people are guarding their credibility with MH370. I’m in a small group that had the signal data in the bin day one on gut feeling, and so far it’s turning out.
Gysbreght,
Nonsense.
Ask Yap, why he used so complex expressions, if he could simply write “P = k * F * COS(G)”, where k is some constant. You may have observed some particular dependency for a given time stamp, or location, or heading, or combination of those. Particularly in the proximity to the equator, where 180 deg heading is tangential to ping rings.
You said “Since BFO and BTO define groundspeed and direction at constant altitude, it is not necessary to specify how the airplane was steered”.
Doesn’t this statement imply that BTO (J) and BFO (P) columns are sufficient to define ground speed (F) and heading (G)?
You said “The ping ring at a certain time defines the longitude for a given latitude. That latitude is obtained from the north-south component of groundspeed defined by the BFO”.
Knowing ground speed (F) and heading (G), it is easy to derive velocity components, and hence latitude (C) according to your statement. Longitude (D) is derived from (C) and BTO (J), again according to what you said.
Schematically, according to these your statements, the process of computations may look like:
1a. Compute F = F (J, P);
1b. Compute G = G (J, P);
2a. Compute C = C (F, G);
2b. Compute D = D (C, J);
As a result F, G, C, D are defined from J and P. Where my understanding of what you said is wrong?
My advice: just read some stuff on the Doppler effect + take ATSB report + use 3D vector math, and you are done.
With all due respect, it seems to be difficult to get through to you. I have every confidence in Yap’s expressions. I’m pointing out the result of those expressions. That result did not surprise me, because I had derived it analytically in the paper that was so nicely brushed aside by The Great Space Scientist Dr. Duncan Steel in the post you linked to. Why don’t you experiment with Yap’s Calculator to verify my statement?
Just to give an example, if the location of the airplane at 19:41:03 Z is 0°N 93.726°E, then the BFO at that time and location is approximately given by: BFO=151.4+0.0927*Vya (Hz), where Vya= A/C groundspeed * COS (Course) in knots.
@ Oleksandr:
P.S.
The coefficients in the relation BFO=151.4+0.0927*Vya result from Yap’s “complex expressions” and are not constant but vary with time and location.
Along with the “idea” BFO/BTO “might be corrupted”, I suggest after IGARI MH370 might have flown Eastward possibly to a military airbase in Sarawak or as far as Guam..
I’m going to jump into the fray as well and say that I usually agree with Matty because I think some of the rest of us are overthinking this.
At this point, most of the original termination estimates have been searched. Most of the eyewitness accounts, on the other hand, have NOT been followed up on, as far as I can tell.
But there’s no plane.
So EITHER 1) the BTO and/or BFO data is wrong, or 2) nobody has figured out how to interpret it, despite man-years of trying, or 3) the search that can supposedly spot a beer can somehow can’t spot a keg.
Despite all the technical discussions but so far, nobody has offered any ideas on why the search has failed so extravagantly, except “keep trying” or its variant “trust us.” Not so much as a theory has emerged from anyone other than a layman. I just don’t get it.
@Matty:
“I’m in a small group that had the signal data in the bin day one on gut feeling, and so far it’s turning out.”
You know you’re not alone in this regard. So I’ll simply repeat here what I’ve said elsewhere: when all’s said and done, the other MH370 story (and it warrants telling) will be the witnesses accounts that were made light of early on and not followed up in a systematic way — as one would reasonably expect when a crime has likely occurred. It might have had a meaningful impact on a search which thus far, has proven fruitless. The whole thing’s a travesty, actually.
JS
>Despite all the technical discussions but so far, nobody has offered any ideas on
>why the search has failed so extravagantly, except “keep trying” or its variant “trust us.”
>Not so much as a theory has emerged from anyone other than a layman. I just don’t get it.
Perhaps you are not reading all the posts so here is a potential reason.
i) The simple autopilot model for the aircraft’s track was not correct for whatever reason, so the Southern proposed destinations are invalid. This is the area that has been searched most intensively so far. The BFO data indicates the Northern part of the arc (and search area) is more probable. All of the final position predictions based on BFO analysis could only come with a large margin for statistical errors.
ii) The simulator results and signal analysis indicates the aircraft will turn after loss of power and crash inside the 7th arc. In the northern 2/3rds of the search area the search to date has been to the line of the surface 7th arc only, not inside it, so this area is untouched.
The search area was selected by the Investigation to cover a number of potential fates for the aircraft (though of course not all of them, a long glide was not included). They chose to prioritise the order of the search as follows (roughly):
1. On the arc (the aircraft was going down fast)
2. Outside the arc (the aircraft was originally going South)
3. The remainder of the Southern, AP mode dictated area, inside and outside the arc (fair enough, it is narrow)
4. The remainder (mostly inside the arc).
Until all the total search area is covered a conclusion just cannot be drawn.
JS/Nihonmama – The Maldivian witnesses are the only ones that have caught my attention and for a number of reasons I think they are interesting. Firstly Hedley Thomas is an award winning operator, and had he ventured out that way and been assailed by KudaHudavoohans who claimed to have seen a plane at 6.15am also, but an unremarkable one, he would have packed his bags and got back on another plane. That apparently did not occur in three days of mingling with a small Island population. They strike me as good witnesses but once again standing back, the specter of MH370 intrigue is a polarizing phenomena. It’s customary to weed out bad witnesses in legal process and some of these Islanders may have jumped on the wagon, but a cluster of sane people in one spot were waving their arms that morning because of something very unusual. I’m satisfied they saw a plane at least – one guy said he could make out the doors in the morning light. I’d be curious to know if it had the wheels down but too late to ask. I think the closest airstrip is called Maamingili at 1800 metres.
Basically I agree with your calculation, but I note that the EHM Climb report at 1652:21 UTC showed the fuel flow of the right engine to be 1.3 % higher than the left engine.
A rough performance estimate shows that with one engine out the airplane would decelerate at approximately 0.3 kt TAS per second, or about 90 knots in 5 minutes.
@Matty,
I for one don’t doubt that the Kudahuvadhooans (sorry to have beaten you with that new word 😉 ) have seen a big noisy and unusual plane around 06:15 in the morning on March 8, 2014. As far as that goes, they are good and reliable witnesses. And their observation needed to be listened to and checked for that reason.
@Brock,
We have the Curtin Boom. And we have the plane spotting of the Kudahuvadhooans. Both are worth to be checked out in the context of the mh370 mystery. But do you agree with me that those observations can’t be BOTH caused by the plane we call mh370? The time frame and the approximate location of the Curtin event simply don’t allow it. A couple of questions for you:
Do you believe nevertheless that both observations are connected to the disappearance of mh370? If so, which observation was caused by mh370? The Curtin Boom (a crashing mh370) or the observation of a big lowly flying plane by the Kudahuvadhooans?
And if we assume that the Kudahuvadhooans have spoken the truth (as I do), but what they saw was NOT mh370 but a big plane with superficial similarity to mh370, would you still think their observation is somehow connected to the mystery of mh370?
As always my questions are meant to be respectful because I care for your opinion.
But I’m really concerned about this wide spread but IMO false notion, that mh370 somehow managed to fly lowly and slowly to Kudahuvadhoo in order to be spotted conveniently and conspicuously just at sunrise by the islanders – only to magically rise and be transported just in time to the area where the Curtin event originated. And after performing this final stunt it crashed for good and caused the boom. That theory is simply not possible. And if one wants to connect one or both observations with mh370, a very different scenario has to be constructed.
*A reminder to all who contend that the time frame isn’t that critical because the Kudahuvadhooans might’ve seen the plane earlier than the generally reported 06:15 local time – which might still allow a timely flight to the Curtin Boom area: No, that’s not possible – simply because sunrise on March 8, 2014 was at 06:16 local time!
Gysbreght-You said: “Basically I agree with your calculation, but I note that the EHM Climb report at 1652:21 UTC showed the fuel flow of the right engine to be 1.3 % higher than the left engine.”
Agreed, but the 1641:58 (at take-off) report had it at 1.9% higher. The main point is this could be an indication that the RH Engine flamed out earlier than the expected time used in many of the models. I do not know if this would influence any of the the projected impact locations, though.
JS – Noone wants to guarantee the data but they still want a blank cheque to search the SIO, and some even want to extinguish alternate lines of investigation. But if the satcom unit hadn’t mysteriously rebooted at 18.25 and the flight path veered off the page the search area would be somewhere around the Maldives. Not very comforting.
Littlefoot – I reckon the data is more likely corrupted than spoofed, and if it was spoofed you would start with the BTO’s and either scenario puts the plane anywhere. Anyway I have a new description for BFO’s – belly fluff output. Stick that next to Kudahudavhooan.
@Matty, At no point was MH370 headed toward the Maldives (except for momentarily as it was turning at Penang). To justify a Maldives scenario you have to scrap every piece of information we have about MH370. You might as well say that the whole thing was a hoax, that there was no such thing as MH370 and the media made it all up.
@All,
Does anyone have a BTO/BFO model that completely parameterizes all the terms as functions of time? What I mean is, are the satellite position and velocity continuous functions in between the major BTO/BFO data events? Ditto for the EAFC, including the eclipse effect. I am looking for a generalized version of Yap’s V2 model that has the same inputs but is continuous in time instead of only working at the selected discrete times Yap chose to include.
@Jeff,
The fascination with the Maldive sightings is understandable. Before we had the radar tracks up the Strait and the ping rings it matched up very well with Chris Goodfellow’s “simple” theory of a plane in trouble, which had been turned around by a semi-conscious crew at IGARI and then flew by itself on a straight course until it ran out of fuel. That scenario would match fairly well with the sightings at Kudahuvadhoo. And when the reports of the islanders hit the news Chris Goodfellow immediately piped up and amended his theory of a planned landing at Lankawi accordingly.
But in such a scenario the radar tracks up the Strait and towards the Andamans don’t make any sense. And the whole lot of the satellite data must be false for some reason. We would’ve to construct a scenario of a multi national cover-up in order to hide the crash of a disaster stricken runaway plane near the Maldives. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me – also that theory has the problem of the missing debris as much as any SIO crash theory.
And if we contemplate a voluntary abduction with a course towards the Maldives, well, then maybe the radar tracks up the Strait would be somewhat plausible as an exercise of evading Indonesian radar. But then the very slow flight towards the Maldives and the conspicuous sighting over Kudahuvadhoo wouldn’t make any sense at all for supposedly clever perps, who might even have covered their tracks with false sat data?
As to the third idea that has taken hold somehow in many minds – that the plane was voluntarily or involuntarily on it’s way to Diego Garcia and was shot down by the US in order to avert a falsely or correctly presumed attack, thus causing the Curtin boom: That MIGHT explain the scenario of a multi-national cover-up with or without Inmarsat being in on it – even if it is quite a stretch. Civil airliners have been shot down before. Normally the offending nation owned up to it, got some flak – end of story. If there was a terror act in the making then there would have been even less reasons for an elaborate cover-up.
And this Diego Garcia shoot-down scenario doesn’t fit at all with the Kudahuvadhoo sighting, as I showed in my earlier comments.
What looks superficially like a very compelling possibility for a plausible narrative because of the somewhat close locations (Kudahuvadhoo – Curtin Boom location – Diego Garcia), fails to line up to an even remotely sound scenario upon closer inspection. Even if we are willing to throw out the satellite data alltogether.
This is an interesting site, http://mh370forum.com.
Are you involved Jeff?
@jeffwise: here is a comprehensive listing of all data items which conflict with a Maldives scenario:
1. Inmarsat signal data, post 18:25
Given that the Inmarsat data’s indicated path ALREADY conflicts with the indications of a massive surface debris search, all radar reports, and all seismic reports, scrapping it is, to me, a straightforward and simple swing of Occam’s Razor.
I’m not saying MH370 went to Maldives. But there are enough potential motives/scenarios:
– BROUGHT to DG (spy games crap)
– drifted there (post-turn-back hypoxia); MISTAKEN as threat, shot down
– terrorist attack (on DG, or Will & Kate); IDENTIFIED as threat, shot down
…to make the Curtin acoustic event – and the only MASS eyewitness account, whether related to Curtin or not – worth a much deeper dive.
I’m disappointed the (otherwise excellent) report Matty cited included no actual time/position/heading/speed estimates. I wish these islanders’ best estimates of each could be collected and published in detail. They seem plenty keen to talk.
Did Dugain’s work include any such hard numbers? I’ve failed to find any online.
@littlefoot: I’d be careful about putting a hard floor at “sunrise” for these eyewitness accounts:
– jets are easily spotted in the sky a few minutes before dawn (and after sunset)
– the higher in the sky you are, the sooner dawn hits; at 10km, (unobstructed) sunrise occurs 13min sooner.
– per Rand’s research, sighting times varied greatly; we must credibility-weight the raw eyewitness data.
@Brock,
I’m aware that a plane might be visible before sunrise if it high in the sky. But that’s nonsense if it is supposed to explain the witness accounts, which stressed how low and slow the plane was. If it was high they couldn’t have given a detailed description about stripes and colors. They probably wouldn’t even have noticed a plane 10km high in the sky.
Also sunrise in these locations is very quick without a prolonged dawn. I highly doubt that they could’ve seen the lowly flying plane so well much earlier than around sunrise. Rand is correct that the reported sighting times vary. But the Kudahuvadhooans needed to see the plane EARLIER than the reported 06:15 – not later – if it is supposed to have reached the location of the Curtin boom in time. And they simply can’t have seen a lowly flying plane much before sunrise and seen all the details they describe in their reports. Rand’s varying sighting times make it even more unlikely that the Curtin Boom is connected to the plane.
I’m really willing to contemplate all kinds of scenarios. But it has to be more detailed than just “war games gone wrong”. I think I brought up quite a few specific reasons why those scenarios don’t make a lot of sense to me. Please convince me otherwise with better reasons why I might be wrong. A plane only visible before sunset because it is flying 10km high in the sky despite many witness reports that it was flying so low and slow that they could see doors, windows amd red stripes isn’t good enough.
And all the scenarios you touch upon don’t include a sufficient reason to embark upon a multi-national complicated cover up.
I would consider your scenarios to be more believable if you were ready to concede that the Curtin Boom and the Kudahuvadhoo sighting can’t have been BOTH caused by mh370. That’s simply outlandish considering time frame and locations – and we haven’t even made fuel calculations which might rule out a slow route to Kudahuvadhoo coupled with a very fast flight to the Curtin Boom area anyway…
Gysbreght,
Yes, you can fit some data with simplified expressions, like you wrote. You wrote BFO=151.4+0.0927*Vya, then you are saying that these coefficients depend on time and location. Indeed they do depend. Then what? You may try some other fittings. Now I am lost what you are trying to achieve.
————–
JS,
“So EITHER 1) the BTO and/or BFO data is wrong, or 2) nobody has figured out how to interpret it, despite man-years of trying, or 3) the search that can supposedly spot a beer can somehow can’t spot a keg.
You missed the simplest thing in you list: assumptions.
————–
Richard Cole,
My “constant thrust” version is still underway, but I am quite convinced that “constant thrust” mode (AT, TOGA, failsafe) conforming BTO and BFO does exists, and it ends up in the area around 27S. I also think that BFO = -2 Hz is a realistic value caused by the turn of the aircraft due to the moment, created by asymmetric thrust after flameout of the first engine. In such a case, the aircraft could end up well inside the 7th ping ring.
————–
Booby,
Back on Feb 17, Benaiahu suggested the following approximations for the satellite position and velocity:
R_x (km) = -1.60527229800967E-12*(T)^5 + 9.17162902048147E-10*(T)^4 + 1.10805191255592E-07*(T)^3 – 0.000114163627976565*(T)^2 + 0.130358828466639*(T) + 18122.8691382455
R_y (km) = -9.56698498200126E-10*(T)^4 + 6.68991672712018E-07*(T)^3 – 0.0000907808504085745*(T)^2 – 0.068205161786766*(T) + 38079.9805575933
R_z (km) =-1.09916437157706E-14*(T)^6 + 1.22719073429888E-11*(T)^5 + 1.26005991618042E-08*(T)^4 – 0.0000122205717848198*(T)^3 – 0.00791807752957273*(T)^2 + 3.83412558954144*(T) + 828.487249135608
V_x (km/h) = -1.60527229800967E-12*(T)^5 + 9.17162902048147E-10*(T)^4 + 1.10805191255592E-07*(T)^3 – 0.000114163627976565*(T)^2 + 0.130358828466639*(T) + 18122.8691382455
V_y (km/h) = -6.96259913061348E-16*(T)^6 + 2.22213732737006E-12*(T)^5 – 1.38289167271898E-09*(T)^4 – 2.7149739781613E-08*(T)^3 + 0.000153297911473779*(T)^2 – 0.0186745056991172*(T) – 3.84894039671643
V_z (km/h) = 4.51811423941723E-16*(T)^6 – 4.54382109886909E-12*(T)^5 + 3.9647671927409E-09*(T)^4 + 2.96205360096854E-06*(T)^3 – 0.00219373707811439*(T)^2 – 0.950355494898756*(T) + 230.047163998822
T= Elapsed Time in minutes (16:30 basis = 0 minutes). For range of flight only.
(jeffwise.net/2015/01/29/guest-post-why-did-mh370-log-back-on-with-inmarsat/comment-page-9/)
Hope this will help.
Bobby, sorry, I misspelled your name…
@littlefoot: As I’ve stated before: I make no claim that the two events (Kudahuvadhoo sightings, acoustic event) were both caused by MH370. I just think – and I’m far from alone, here – that we need to dig deeper into EACH event – to determine whether EITHER was in fact related to his disappearance.
The Curtin event still has a not-insignificant standard deviation associated with it. Until precise time and bearing estimates from the eyewitnesses emerge, I think we are wrong to rule out a possible – I say POSSIBLE – sighting of MH370 circa 00:00 UTC near Kudahuvadhoo, with impact circa 00:25 UTC = 25 minutes later, some 190nmi further west.
Jeff/Littlefoot – The radar tracks up the Strait were necessary to avoid running straight over Indonesia, wherever the thing was headed. The Maldive region is somewhere you might actually get an intact plane so no debris, and the sighting involved a low flying plane, that if MH370, would have been nearly out of fuel assuming it never landed. So we aren’t looking at a spiral crash, but a controlled one. I thought once this thing left the radar we were at the mercy of the signal data and really nothing else? Some of that data didn’t make sense so it was discarded – just like that! If there were people out there ready to stake their retirement funds on that data I’d look at it differently.
If the Maldivian thing held water it would lean towards StevanG’s opinion that the whole thing had gone awry by the end – as often does.