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.
spencer: “To ostensibly throw Mr. Hamid under the bus with misleading and uncorroborated conjecture, that is completely unsubstantiated, is really poor form.”
Whereas to ostensibly throw Mr. Shah under the bus with misleading and uncorroborated conjecture, that is completely unsubstantiated, is completely ok.
Please promise me not to work as a judge or in a similar position, as you apply your own(!) rules in a completely biased and arbitrary manner.
@jeffwise,
Just curious – has anyone contacted you offline to defend Brodskii, Chustrak, or Deineka?
Someone must have known Brodskii’s whereabouts during his 20s – wouldn’t you expect them to speak up? Once your theory went viral, it must have found its way to Irkutsk. It would be the talk the town. Lawyers may gag the immediate family, but his broader social network must run to hundreds (thousands?) of people. But not a peep about what he was up to in his 20s. If the two Ukrainians were just a couple of average blokes, you’d expect someone to chime in to say, “nah, you’ve got it all wrong.” But I have not found one word to that effect online.
Has anyone contacted you privately?
@Hudson: I am not sure they would automatically be aware.
Or do we know what’s going on in the Russian or Chinese blogosphere ?
@Gysbreght
The error could become a bit larger at later times, when sat moves south. Nevertheless, your approximation is very interesting and, at least for me, triggered some new ideas. Much appreciated!
An important step would be to show that the k1 is numerically mainly depending on a/c lat and not on lon (For the case we are considering)
Regards,
Niels
@Greg Long,
Prior to February, I totally see your point. But Jeff’s piece was picked up by Russia Today (RT): http://rt.com/op-edge/235275-mh370-putin-kidnap-kazakhstan/.
And if anyone is defending these guys in the Russian or Chinese blogosphere, I’d love to hear it.
Matty – ATSB is not some special interest group, they are the conduit for expert advice to the Aus government. Dolan is a civil servant, he would not be making statements if his government had not decided on its policy for the tri-partite meeting next week. So on that basis the Australians will be proposing to continue the search, if the budget split can be agreed. And maybe it won’t – certainly if agreement was not achieved, no-one would accuse the Australians of not putting their efforts into the search to date.
As to whether they are just searching the margins now, the search has not touched the area North of the surface 7th arc across two-thirds of the search area width. The search organisation is dominated by the need to search long arcs and to move methodically, not jump around what might be the highest priority areas, so it all has to be complete before conclusions are reached.
That’s indeed an interesting question that hadn’t occurred to me. Yap’s Calculator shows that k1 increases by 0.7 Hz when the longitude is reduced from the example condition of 93.7° by 22.5° to 71.2°.
@Gysbreght
At 1941 the sat velocity is small (in all directions), so aircraft position does not influence bfo (k1) much. Would be interesting to do a similar calculation at 0011 and a/c pos S40. Could you for example compare E70 with E110 and v_lat 500 knots South?
@Gysbreght
Correction: ….and v_lat = 0 and 500 knots south
(As to test if both k1 and k2 are independent of lon)
Spencer,
Matty is right Spencer. An opinion of who spoke last on the recording is just that, an opinion of who spoke last. And whoever spoke last is not incriminating and in no way have I “thrown anyone under any bus” here or elsewhere. I never stated I believe Fariq Hamid was guilty of ANYTHING other than speaking last so let’s get that crystal clear. And as this report so indicates, if it’s not more obfuscation, that Zaharie Shah spoke last and that does not incriminate him either of anything more than speaking last. The one who “spoke last” by all means is not necessarily the culprit, perpetrator, or anything else other than the last person to have communicated.
I don’t know but I feel if someone solves why the last line is so curt and why the sdu is powered off then on again an hour or so later, are big clues to the whole mess.
Jeff,
A question for you. I thought the “boomerang” comment was intriguing and so coincidental with both downed Malaysian flights. In the case of MH370, how did the operatives or agents get into place so quickly days after the sanctions? Are they “on call” so to speak and ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice regardless of where they are traveling? So if your theory is right then there really does not even have to be a long-range, pre-planned motive, it would have been done in quick retaliation to show the capabilities of the power.
@ Niels,
For me the important finding is that BFO is lat/lon oriented rather than radial/tangential. I’m far less interested in the ultimate mathematical precision of track reconstruction.
@Cheryl, If the “boomerang” remarks really were a signal, then yes, the operatives on board the plane would have to have been pre-positioned, ready to respond to American countermoves. For various reasons, I think that the planning for this caper started in the middle of 2013. The participation of Brodsky is problematic in this scenario, because he cut short a 10-day diving trip in order to board MH370, so his “pre-positioning” only had wiggle room of a few days.
@Gysbreght
I understand. But the point is to show that bfo = k1 + k2 * v_lat is a reasonable approx. for other times (sat moving south) and a wide range of positions as well as velocities. If it is this would be an important result! Let me know if you can help, otherwise I can use my own residual doppler calculator to do it, but this one has not been independently checked.
@ Niels:
Sorry, but I don’t see the point of that exercise. For path reconstruction purposes you can use the values of k1 and k2 produced by Yap’s calculator or equivalent. The main differences between the data-based and the A/P-constrained paths occur between 18:40 and 22:41, and headings are between 165° and 195°. I don’t expect errors large enough to invalidate the principle to develop within those ranges. But if want to prove me wrong, you’re welcome.
The A/P-constrained bunch will not abandon their pet theories but will always argue that the BFO’s are inaccurate. We’ll just have to wait until the wreckage is found.
Peter,
a few comments/answers.
Re: “No terrorist group has claimed responsibility and investigators could not find anything pointing to psychological/suicidal problems … there are no concrete leads at all that suggest a nefarious act. There has been silence for over a year now. For me, this is why it somehow feels like a mechanical issue. I don’t know if you can relate to that?”
I consider this as consistent with a “technical failure” scenario rather than as a primary reason. A primary reason is the impossibility to explain “AP+FMT” scenario (IG’s version) with the preceding sequence of ‘events’ in any logical way. A failed emergency landing attempt is, in contrast, consistent. Moreover, the constant thrust model I am working on, appears to be consistent with the original ATSB’s high priority area and Kate’s (the sailoress) observation. Coincidence? Thus I was looking for a non-catastrophic event, that would be consistent will all the known ‘fact’.
Re: “Dinner (1c).” I can say that a famous Dutch airline did not bother to wake me up at around 3 am offerring some noodles. So MAS serving dinner at that time is a usual sort of things, at least in Asia. But again, I do not consider this version seriously, just another interesting coincidence.
Re: “Even if the pilot has lost all means of communications, he would still be forced to land at the nearest possible runway”.
They flew exactly over the nearest runway (Sultan Ismail airport). However, do you think it is possible to land such a big aircraft on the runway of 2,400 m length, oriented parallel to the shore, with appr. 35 tons of fuel onboard, without nose landing gear, keeping in mind that emergency services likely were off duty at that time? Compared to this, QF32 was in much better conditions.
Re:
“Your scenario requires a fire that is simultaneously
– big enough to destroyed all means of communications
– small enough to keep the plane airborne for 7 hours
– big enough to incapacitate the crew
”
I am not saying that fire destroyed all means of communications, but rather ‘shrapnel’ caused by a tire burst just under EE-Bay. Yes, the fire itself would be small enough, and isolated. The nose landing gear has only 2 tires. What could cause incapacitation is the lack of oxygen, smog, possibly CO, or combination of those. In other words: no inferno.
Re:
“The MOT report said so:
“The tracking by the Military continued as the radar return was observed to be heading towards waypoint MEKAR, a waypoint on Airways N571 when it disappeared abruptly at 1822:12 UTC [0222:12 MYT],10 nautical miles (Nm) after waypoint MEKAR.” (page 3)
“The primary target (military radar) appeared to track west-northwest direction joining RNAV Route N571 at waypoint VAMPI then to 10Nm north MEKAR”. (page 7)
Yes, MH370 passed by VAMPI and MEKAR, both belong to N571. Is it sufficient to say that it was following N571?
Re: “It appears the person in the cockpit selected a waypoint close to Penang, followed by VAMPI, MEKAR and then possibly one more for the turn south into the Indian Ocean. That would be at least 4 waypoints.
No, there are no other waypoints close to Penang: N571 does not approach it. The first WP was VAMPI. The last MEKAR. Btw, an interesting thing:
– “Lido image”: slight turn CCW, which was interpreted as the indication MH370 followed N571;
– “ATSB June report”: a straight line, no turns;
– “Factual information” (p7 = p25 of pdf): a minor turn, but CW at VAMPI!
How come? It seems they still cannot merge data properly.
Re: “How else would the plane end up there ? Autopilot neither makes turns on its own nor selects waypoints on its own. ”
Exactly. Note, that the path up to Penang appears to be curved in all the figures: some interpreted this effect as wrong radar data; some – as several WPs entered; my version – flight in a manual mode.
To be continued…
@Gysbreght
No worries!
(The purpose was not to show the approx.is wrong)
I have learned by experience that complex problems are only solved by looking from many different angles, by perpersistence and by multidisciplinary team work.
Would be good if we could somehow enhance the latter one. Only emailing/posting messages on the long term is not very effective..
Peter,
Re: “The plane is capable of dumping 1 ton (1000 kg) per minute or 60 tons per hour. So it would take about one hour to dump the excess fuel for a safe landing”.
Excellent. This might be another missing piece of the puzzle. It would take not 1 hour, but roughly 40 minutes when the aircraft was at Penang. Just right to get to Maimun Saleh if the intent was to start dumping fuel once the aircraft reached Penang. Using the analogy with QF32: 30 minutes to assess damages; 40 minutes to dump the fuel – an intent that was never realized for some reason yet to be found…
Re: “AES log on at 18:25, i.e. 3 MINUTES after disappearance from primary radar”
You said there have been a couple of theories. For instance “Perpetrator waited until he was out of radar reach…”
– Why would a hypothetical perpetrator need to wait “until he was out of radar reach”? In other words, what difference does it make if AES or left AC bus is powered within the radar coverage or not? What would change if AES was powered 5 minutes earlier, for example?
– MH370 was supposed to be captured by Sabang TRS2215D and Lhokseumawe TRS2215R radars if these were working. They would have to know the radar coverage of Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and India, including the information what radars were functional. International cover-up?
(KH = Kuda Huvadhoo, Maldives)
@PM: re: Curtin boom event timing: yes, you are right.
Not sure where our little thread veered over to a 6-hour UTC->local conversion – the internets tell me 5 hours for KH, as you compute. Looks like this is the final nail in the coffin for “1 westbound plane sighted THEN crashed”.
But the only thing I hate doing more than miscomputing a time is letting a spectacular coincidence go uninvestigated. Even if a direct flight from KL @16:41UTC to KH @1:15UTC is fuel-infeasible (absent refueling…), a mass sighting of a (still-unaccounted for) plane at the point of land NEAREST this (one and only March 8 plane-sized) acoustic event requires an unbiased investigator to take an intense interest in BOTH. To refuse to consider these two leads – whether directly, indirectly, or not at all related to each other – is to stick one’s head in the signal data sand.
@Brock
To relate Maldives sighting to a possible crash of this a/c near Maldives one should look for acoustic events in a different time window.
It was noticed long time ago that the Maldives sighting does not correlate with the 0019 utc Inmarsat reported final transmission.
Do you know which time window has been analyzed by the Curtin team?
Regards,
Niels
@cheryl, @jeff
Regarding Brodsky’s spontaneous departure from the dive trip: I ran a couple of searches for flights between Bali and Irkutsk on various web sites. And while all flights required at least one connection, and most two, I didn’t see one that suggested Kuala Lumpur as an intermediate stop. Hong Kong, yes, Bangkok, yes, Guangzhou and Beijing, yes, even Seoul. But none (that I saw) originated or transferred in Kuala Lumpur. It makes one wonder why he chose that airport…
Peter,
With regard to your idea that “Shah or Hamid shut down the all communication right after handover and steered the plane to the SIO for whatever troubled reason”, there are also quite many things that do not make sense. Some of them:
– Why the crash did not occur immediately, similar to GermanWings, in the middle of the Gulf of Thailand?
– Why the plane was steered to the SIO? If a purpose was just to disappear, it would be much easier to fly to the mid of the South China Sea and crash somewhere west of Shuangzi Reefs, for example, where the depth exceeds 4 km.
– Why AES went down and then came back?
– Why nobody made a satellite call when AES came back? It appears to be possible from the business class.
– Why such a complex maneuvering was necessary? A person, who wants to commit suicide, would not bother if he is tracked by radars or not.
– It appears that the aircraft was flown manually from IGARI to Penang. If it is the case, why would a troubled person steer the aircraft for 30 minutes manually?
– Why nobody was able to find a way to enter the cockpit during 6 hours?
I would be interested to know your explanations.
@Brock, @Niels
Yes, it would be very interesting to know whether the Curtin researchers looked for that type of acoustic event in the whole time period after MH370 disappeared from radar. If not then this might be worthwhile post May if nothing turns up by then, but no doubt a huge amount of work to check it out.
Agreed that the various “sightings” should be properly investigated, merely to try and rule out those scenarios (and without getting anyone into trouble). Perhaps private investigators have already done this…does anyone know? Seems that we have more than enough theories as to what happened already and the only constructive thing we can do at the moment is to try and rule out those supported by any evidence.
Does anybody here know if the stability system of B777 attempts to maintain zero sideslip angle in TOGA and AT modes?
@Brock,
I might’ve made the computing mistake re:Kudahuvadhoo time conversation, although I’m not quite sure if I copied the mistake somewhere. Sorry in any case.
This is kind of ironic, since I’ve argued fervently for some time now that the Kudahuvadhoo plane simply cannot have generated the Curtin Boom. Turns out now it wasn’t even close…
But I’m even more mad now at the droves of irresponsible journos (the guy who wrote the article linked by Matty included) who continue to this day to link the two events – having apparently done no math whatsoever before perpetuating this myth.
@Niels: due to a profound absence of…
– any of the physical evidence it predicts
– internal logic to the path it indicates
– honesty/openness among its owners/custodians
…I am reasonably confident the signal data is either wrong, or faked.
Good grief: even if the plane is found precisely where they’re searching, it will beg harder questions than it answers (if intact, how? If fragmented, where is the floating debris?). And many of us seem to have chosen deliberately to have forgotten the shadowy nature of this data’s appearance onto the scene in March – and the several additional weeks it took to fork over to the public in any kind of detail.
Like the IG, I’ve always viewed the signal data as a trail of breadcrumbs leading straight to this mystery’s solution. But where the IG (and other trusting souls) saw a path to the plane in its data, I (and other skeptics) saw a path to the PERPS in its deceit.
Blind trust in this data has now cost us 400 days. It is time for a change.
@Scott, I recall looking into this issue way back when, and I believe that in March 2014 Denpasar – Kuala Lumpur – Beijing – Irkutsk was an available routing, but that subsequently one of the legs was dropped.
Unfortunately it’s not that easy to go back and find what flights were available historically. If anyone has any ideas I’d love to hear them.
UPDATE — via LG Hamilton, here’s a link to the MAS timetable current March 2014: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s460/sh/7fbcba16-1ee9-4570-8457-bb11b9e9bd66/a973219ef3a4177c33f1cacdb6f54431
I figure that most likely Brodsky must have come in on MH852, leaving Denpasar at 1915, arriving 2210.
I see that right now the Russian airline S7 has frequent service between Beijing and Irkutsk, it’s only a 3 hour flight. The flight times currently being offered are not very convenient, however, they leave before MH370 would have arrived, meaning Brodsky would have had to have laid over nearly 24 hours.
@Oleksandr, You wrote: “Why nobody made a satellite call when AES came back? It appears to be possible from the business class.” Wow, great point, that hadn’t even occurred to me — when the AES came back on line, the IFE was functioning, which would suggest that, under any scenario, the passengers were most likely dead. And the flight attendants too — because, according to Don Thompson’s analysis, one of the two calls that came in at 18:40 came into the cabin.
Why did no one make a satellite call when the AES came back?
According to Factual Information, section 1.9.5.1 (p. 67),
3. “CPMU is Cabin Passenger Management Unit, which provides an interface between the Panasonic IFE and the SDU, for any Data-3 SMS/e-mail messages.”
4. “CTU is the Cabin Telecommunications Unit, which provides an interface between the in-seat handsets and the SDU, for cabin telephony calls, were that functions available. In the case of 9M-MRO, the in-seat phones can only be used for seat-to-seat calling.”
So it sounds like the ability to make phone calls via satellite from business class was an advertised feature that didn’t exist on this flight. Nevertheless, was it possible to sent SMS/e-mail messsages?
Yes, it does.
I looked at 22:41:22; 21.1602°S; 94.0884°E; 10.7 km and the error at 500 kt on headings East or West is 0.9 Hz, proportional to velocity.
I wouldn’t read too much into the fact that no passengers in business class sent any messages after the SDU came back. It can mean anything from all of them being dead or incapacitated at that point – or simply that the messaging function had been disabled before the reboot.
Satellite calls weren’t offered on mh370.
The existence of the messaging function might be an additional reason why the AES/SDU was disabled. It was the quickest way to assure that the passengers wouldn’t use it after the turnaround.
@Olexandr,
All the very reasonable questions you pose can be answered in a spoofing scenario, where the perps intended to take the plane North. We asked ourselves all those questions and came to the conclusion that the scenario of a suicidal pilot taking the plane in such a complicated fashion to the SIO doesn’t offer any reasonable answers to those questions.
But we also think that a mechanical failure scenario doesn’t fair any better.
Few crimes are perfect.
Suppose the perpetrator successfully negotiated a path through the ITCZ, went to the toilet, and was unable to get back into the cockpit?
@Olexandr, why didn’t ths passengers try to enter the cabin in a hijacking scenario? There are many possibilities. They did try and didn’t succeed. Or they could’ve been killed early on by deliberate decompression. Or they could’ve been simply told that it wasn’t in their interest to disrupt a safe flight. There are many examples of hijacked planes where the passengers didn’t cause any interruptions whatsoever. That’s actually fhe standard situation. And why should they interfere and endanger their lives if the plane wasn’t going to be used as a weapon about to be crashed into a high profile object?
Littlefoot,
“I wouldn’t read too much into the fact that no passengers in business class sent any messages after the SDU came back.”
What I am trying to emphasize is not a significance of a particular event, but rather the significance of the chain of the events. Together they filter out most of the suggested scenarios; only a few scenarios deserve further investigation.
For instance, you said “all of them being dead or incapacitated at that point”. SDU came back at 18:25; in just 15 minutes everybody were dead and the aircraft was flying in AP mode at cruising altitude; however, during these 15 minutes somebody managed to enter at least two WPs to send the aircraft to SIO, or AP was pre-programmed to SIO well before 18:25 if you assume that IG’s AP+FMT scenario is valid.
Peter suggested a simple ‘suicide’ scenario, and I would like to know what answers he can provide for this set of questions. If he can provide plausible answers (I cannot), the “suicide scenario” should remain on the table. Divide and conquer…
Gysbreght,
“Yes, it does.”
Thank a lot; this is the answer I hoped to hear.
On the page 29 of the Factual Information is the Figure 1.1F – Primary Radar Targets (track), plotted by AAT using EVA & Plotter 01.01-27 (From Take-off). On the upper supposed return red route with multiple gaps are marked four targets (the numbers are hardly to read and couldn’t be correct as the image is blurred) :
P1738
17:30:37:02
0476
P1793
17:30:56:90
0501
P1605
17:41:01:62
0694
P1812
17:51:44:38
0609
3th value (row) e.g. 0476 is the speed of the target in knots. The maximum speed of the Boeing 777-200ER is 512 knots. Even when I add the tail wind speed 15-20 knots the speed of two last targets, 0694 and 0609 knots, is well beyond the maximum speed of the aircraft. That’s why I do not think the supposed return red route with multiple gaps can represent the flight of MH370.
FWIW there is a chance the passengers actually broke into cabin when they realized something was wrong(somewhere around Banda Aceh) and didn’t know what to do later(after knocking pilot(s) out), which might explain why an erratic path suddenly became straight forward towards SIO
@Jeff, and now going back through your Kindle Single, I realize that Brodsky was supposed by his son to be bound for a business meeting in Mongolia, not Irkutsk, though I suppose it is unclear if he was returning home before that meeting or going directly there. I also recall reading here on the blog that the was returning home to celebrate an event with his wife; wondering which, if either, are accurate.
To some extent the two conflicting reports cast doubt on his being an operative; you would expect a tighter cover story from a professional.
And yet….
Assuming he is headed straight to the meeting (and not to his wife), and despite the excellent find of LG Hamilton showing ticketing possibilities from Denpasar to Irkutsk via Kuala Lumpur in 2014, one still might wonder why not a direct flight from Denpasar to Beijing and then onto Ulan Bator (or wherever local service might have needed to take him). It surely would have been more efficient than the Kuala Lumpur diversion, particularly with the day-long layover you’ve described. And certainly someone who owns a wood products company and can take a sport dive holiday in Bali can afford the more expensive and more direct itinerary.
To me all that makes the route he did take less logical from an innocent’s point of view.
Okay, that aside, and if, as a long time reader of your blog but only recent commenter, I may: a couple of words about The Plane That Wasn’t There. I so throughly enjoyed the possibilities it presented that I was compelled to start it on a flight–and couldn’t put it down despite what became a very turbulent, storm-ravaged ride. To people who know me and my generally catastrophic viewpoint, that’s a remarkable thing. I look forward to an updated version with what you’ve learned via your commenters and elsewhere since. And at the risk of insulting your diligence and skill as a researcher and storyteller, whether the spoof proves to be true or not, it would make one heck of a conspiracy/action movie. Oliver Stone should have you on speed dial…
@Kevil, it’s not true that the maximum speed of a 777-200ER is 512 knots.
@Scott, thanks for your kind words! The story that Brodsky’s family members told my researcher is that he had a business trip to Mongolia arranged, but also wanted to be home for International Women’s Day dinner before leaving again. He apparently wasn’t really fond of warm-water diving trips, maybe he wanted to go on a club trip but ten days was too long for his tastes…
@jeffwise, the maximum speed for 777-200ER is mentioned at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777. I understand that there are other factors like flight level, humidity and air temperature.
@jeffwise, do you think the 777-200ER can fly 694 or 609 knots over peninsula?
Cheryl:
Re Barber’s analysis:
“I bet I have studied the recording as much as Barber has. A musician voice expert and a linguist coming to the same conclusion, at different times without conferring, maybe there’s something to it.”
Agree. People who are multi-lingual, or who use an instrument (including voice), develop an ability to hear sounds and nuances that others without that training cannot.
That being said — and this is where some people have gotten hung up — we can’t infer CAUSATION (of MH370’s disappearance) from the last comms alone.
@MuOne:
“The accoustic expert is:
Steve Barber, an Ohio rock drummer. My problem lies more with the “independent investigator” employing Mr Barber’s services.”
Shooting the messenger is a sure way to miss the point. Do we completely dismiss the opinion of the person JEF brought to the table because we have a problem with JEF? Particularly when Steve Barber proved an acoustic analysis done by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the JFK case to be wrong?
From SeanMunger’s blog:
The sound of history: the fascinating story of the audio reconstruction of the JFK assassination.
“The controversy was finally solved by a random guy off the street: a rock musician named Steve Barber, 24 years old, from Shelby, Ohio. While all of this controversy about the motorcycle tape was going on, the soft-core porn magazine Gallery put out an issue in 1979 which included a thin disposable phonograph record of excerpts of the motorcycle tape. Barber was a hi-fi enthusiast, and when he listened to the cheap record in 1980, he thought he heard the voice of another officer saying something on the radio channel that could only have been said after the assassination. Barber wrote a letter to the National Academy of Sciences pointing this out. A new study was done on the motorcycle tape, and it was conclusively proved that Barber was right. So was the Dallas police officer who thought the motorcycle tape was recorded after the assassination, not during it–and that the stuck microphone was not even in Dealey Plaza at all, but somewhere else nearby. The HSCA’s acoustic “evidence” of a fourth shot turned out to be a chimera.
Thus, it turned out that the elaborate and expensive audio reconstruction of the assassination in August 1978 was all for nothing. There were no gunshots on the motorcycle tape. It was something else entirely, most likely just crackles on the tape itself. Sometimes the sound of history can be misleading.”
There is a broad disclaimer in John Fiorentino’s release. If people think Barber’s analysis is not credible, they are also free to bring analysts to the table.
@Matty:
“do we have a solid instance where Shah’s wife quotably takes ownership of the voice?”
Not that I’m aware of.
“The fact that people who knew him well did not agree is proof of that. Question: did the so called experts agree that Shah was behind the mic or did it hang on something; like Mrs Shah’s testimony? The ability to discern a voice is not totally down to time spent together.”
Right. And the wife’s belief that it was her husband would be insufficient proof from an evidentiary standpoint, without additional audio analysis.
@Littlefoot:
“Satellite calls weren’t offered on mh370.”
Really?
As mentioned here previously, the (now- deleted) MAS webpage states that every business class seat in its 777-200 fleet comes equipped with a satellite phone.
http://t.co/427fMjI5uB
@ Kevin
694 knots? That would be supersonic speed.
Interesting.
Where does this data come from? From a Boeing 777 or a different plane from 17:41:01:62 on? Did the spoof begin already at that time and was a faster plane involved?
Speed of sound at different altitudes: http://www.fighter-planes.com/jetmach1.htm
Kevil is correct. According to the FAA Type Certification Data Sheet No. T00001SE_rev_36 the maximum approved operating speeds for Model 777-2H6 Serial No. 28420 are Vmo/Mmo 330 KIAS/.87M . Within those limitations the maximum TAS occurs at altitude 30477 ft and is 511.7 kTAS at ISA temperature.
The airplane can exceed the operating limitation for example in a dive, but it would be illegal to do that intentionally..
@DL
694 knots? That would be supersonic speed.
Interesting. Where does this data come from?
Data comes from the Factual Information, page 29, picture 1.1F Right click my first comment above, 4 targets data, posted April 12, 2015 at 10:10 AM and you will see the picture of supposed MH370 back route over peninsula with 0694 & 0609 knots.
Kevil,
The numbers in these plots are illegible; I am afraid that you incorrectly read some of them. For instance P1793. You read the time stamp as “17:30:56” while it should be “17:38:56”. See for comparison, Figure 1.1B, p.25 of the PDF.
The thing, which is a real puzzle, is a minor turn at VAMPI (this is to the question whether MH370 followed N571 or not). Why do the “Lido Hotel” image, ATSB report, and FI report show different things? This minor turn has a lot of implications.
Source?
@Gysbreght
Source?
You can have a look at the original picture 1.1F on page 29 of the Factual Information. Download it from here
If you zoom the original picture from the Factual Information, use High Pass filter on value in knots in Photoshop and compare the first digit with another digit 6 and 5 you will notice the first digit match the number 6 (694 knots).