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.
@Gysbreght
I am trying to do the error analysis analytically. Indeed it seems the approx.is working with only few percent error. I’m looking at dz(t)/dt=f(t,z) and the error in dz/dt (By ignoring changes in x en y). However it is by special circumstances that this can be done (specific pos and velocity of sat after 1940, and a/c moving with a certain minimum southerly component). I’m working on a short document on this. I managed to solve for z(t) with only input the a/c pos at 1940 and get realistic values for v_lat and lat(t). Typical end points in the low thirties. However further error analysis is needed while the solution has an exponential nature as dz/dt depends on z, so errors can possibly “explode”.
All of this under the assumption that the published Inmarsat data is as measured/received, that the AES was functioning normally, and that the connecting AES was located in 9M-MRO
Regards,
Niels
@ Kevil:
Sorry if my question was too brief. I meant to ask what is the source for your statement that the 3rd row in the block contains the speed of the target in knots?
@Kevil
Maybe we can calculate average speed over the interval travelled? It shows exact times which seem to correlate with specific locations on the map. If it is significantly higher than 530 knots for 10-15 minutes then you could have found something there! Anyone knows the wind conditions?
@ Niels,
Interesting, I’m awaiting your document. Did you define x, y, z, and t somewhere? I can guess t, but not x, y and z.
@Gysbreght
Sorry if my question was too brief. I meant to ask what is the source for your statement that the 3rd row in the block contains the speed of the target in knots?
Good question. I think the 3rd row matches the target speed (if you have a look at target values from KL to IGARI and on the back route). On the tags (marked A2157 = transponder code of MH370) to the right side, they appear to be formatted as 00350-0473 which would be altitude and speed and matches with ADSB.
@Niels
Anyone knows the wind conditions?
That’s a good idea. The forecast winds at the last civil radar point and last air defence radar point were below 20 kt.
StevanG:
“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”.
And were unable to find a way to use VHF, HF or satellite phone/messaging to send a distress signal? Not talking about answering the two calls.
@Gysbreght
I took the usual ECEF x,y,z def
Factual Information para. 1.7.1 on page 36 gives the condition as “a temperature of -40oC and wind from the north-east at 15 kt. or less at 35,000 ft.”
@Brock
I’m not sure I was clear enough in my posting about timing maldives sighting. What I intended to say is that Curtin team was probably focused on time window related to 0019 “last received transmission” While the maldives event was hours later.
In terms of a healthy suspicion towards “published” inmarsat data I’m with you. We have been chewing almost a year on a summary of the data, for which there is not even a responsible author or organization mentioned.
It is not ok.
@Brock, @Niels
adding to your comment Niels about the Curtin event timing: if that acoustic event was the only one in the N or S Indian Ocean that day and these events are not common, it would seem more significant. I wonder if the Curtin researchers have the capability to detect all the events in that region (and I assume the wouldn’t be able to detect events in the SCS for example). With the usual “absence of evidence” caveat, the fact? that they haven’t detected such an acoustic event in the current search region at around 00:19 UTC seems important. The “Curtin event” at 00:25 UTC (5:25 Maldives time=MVT) is before sunrise in the Maldives at 6:15 MVT, so as Brock pointed out there is no association with the sightings. Could Dr Duncan please clarify time window etc..
Jeff, Sk999, Littlefoot and Nihonmama:
FI report, p52 (p. 70 of pdf) says that SATCOM provided SMS/e-mail service to the cabin via Panasonic 3000i IFE equipment (Cabin Packet Data Interface, Data-3). It appears that the voice service was available only from the cockpit via MCDUs. P55 says that Data-3 interface was re-established at 18:27:03. Also, FI says that both of the calls reached the cockpit (“have resulted in a chime and visual annunciation”).
Thus, it was possible to send sms or e-mail from the cabin, and it was possible to make a call from the cockpit.
Nihonmama,
As previously stated in my response to Cheryl. I did not intend to belittle either of their skills or detections in the audio.
Neither was I belittling Mr Barbers apparent significant contribution in the JFK audio case.
However, his discovery in that audio was with respect to CONTENT and TIMELINE and how that discovery was contrary to the official narrative.
His discovery had nothing to do with voice recognition and/or ID-ing the person making the utterances.
The above goes to his credentials towards expertise to do just such a thing, ID-ing a person on the basis of a voice recording. This was the inference from day dot in JEF’s “press releases”.
My intention here was to set that record straight. Mr. Barber’s and JEF’s public statements are statements of opinion. There was no report, backing up their statement with a scientific vettable analysis.
Cheers,
Will
@Niels: sorry to have misread your point (which was clear from context – I just need to read more slowly).
Good question. I’ll ask – and if Curtin restricted their search to “signal data-compliant times”, I’ll politely suggest they cast a wider net.
@MuOne:
“Mr. Barber’s and JEF’s public statements are statements of opinion. There was no report, backing up their statement with a scientific vettable analysis.”
That is correct.
I was told this evening (by an expert) that there is a process for CVR transcription and voice recognition. “All CVR participants must concur on what was said & who said it. If not, the utterance cannot be attibuted to an individual.”
So I asked: “Would the process for CVR transcription and voice recognition take Barber’s (or another person’s) analysis into consideration?”
The expert responded: “In my opinion, no. This kind of analysis is typically performed under very strict rules and conditions. It uses technical reps, and others who have knowledge of crew… But if he (Barber) can convince the investigating authorities that they’re wrong, maybe they’ll consider. In my opinion, they’d have to put together some form of technical report to submit. Along the lines of a technical research paper, detailing steps, etc.”
Per this expert, the other (major) issue is that whoever seeks to present an opinion challenging the ‘official’ view (re ATC recordings or other) would also have to demonstrate a familiarity with the tech crew, MAS ops, ATC, etc. to be credible.
Now whether Fiorentino and Barber can jump all of these hurdles simply to prove that the last speaker was who they opine it is — the FO Fariq — I don’t know. Frankly, from where I sit, who was last on comms is less interesting than whether that fact is connected to the why/how MH370 disappeared. But I haven’t seen anyone make THAT argument in a remotely credible way yet — and more information would certainly be needed if they wanted to attempt it.
@Kevil
I’ve done a average speed calculation between 17:30:37 and 17:51:44 assuming straight line: 181 nm in 21:07 so that means 514 knots. So the 694 knots reading can hardly be true.
However, as it was flying below 480 knots in the first part of the interval it should have flown significantly above 500 knots in the second half of the interval. But close to 600 knots seems a bit high based on the “measurement” (but is not impossible if it flew slower at intermediate times it was not measured, or it was not following a straight line)
Looking at the numbers in the report I would guess it is written 584 knots at 17:47:01 and 609 knots at 17:51:44. But better not to guess, and ask for the numbers.
It definitely needs an explanation / clarification by the JIT.
Niels.
@Nihonmama,
Thanks for the clarifications re: who spoke the last recorded words.
Personally I’m not inclined to believe Steve Barber more than the Malaysians, who had people at their disposal who knew the captain and the copilot.
However I’m confounded by the mystery surrounding those last words. First they have been quoted wrongly. Then, there seems to be enough text to make a definite identification not an impossible feat. Shouldn’t this be one of the easier nuts to crack in connection with mh370? But after more than a year we’re still discussing who spoke.
Maybe the fact that we are still discussing it is the noteworthy thing here.
For what it’s worth:I don’think that having spoken those last lines is highly incriminating in itself. It merely places that person in the cockpit for sure shortly before all communication stopped.
@Kevil
Second measurement:
41 nm between 17:47:02 and 17:51:44
means 523 knots. Which fits to the previous “measurement” I just posted.
However an error of +- 40 knots or so cannot be excluded (41+-3nm)
Don, Mike,
If you read this, perhaps you could give some comments.
With regard to the two calls FI states “…have resulted in a chime and visual annunciation…”. FI also confirms “Data-2” and “Data-3” interfaces were re-established.
I can find only 4 explanations:
1. The crew and passengers were incapacitated already by 18:28, not by 18:40.
2. Inmarsat received respective notifications, but the hardware (Panasonic 3000i IFE and MCDUs) actually did not work properly.
3. The whole AES was spoofed, including “Data-2” and “Data-3” interfaces.
4. The crew and passengers were kept “under a gun” during 18:25-18:41, and thus were unable to send sms, e-mail, or pick up the call.
I would be interested to know your comments about possibilities (2) and (3).
@Niels
It definitely needs an explanation / clarification by the JIT.
I sent an inquiry about the speed around 600 knots to MH370SafetyInvestigation. I’ll see what the answer.
@Kevil
It’s hard to read the data on Figure 1.1F so the below values might not be exact but assuming that all the speeds are Knots, the 0467 at 17:07:08 is consistent with the 278.4 CAS (473TAS) at an altitude of 34,998 feet given in the ACARS report at 17:06:43.
Using wind speeds of around 15 Knots at 17:41 & 17:51, as others have pointed out, the 0594 & 0607 speeds appear to be higher than the maximum speed of a B777-200ER. That might indicate that these returns ARE NOT MH370. If so, the plot thickens.
Jeff, please delete this if a duplicate post- I’m apparently experiencing an issue with the site.
@ Kevil, Neils, Lauren H
A couple of weeks ago, I was curious to see if the radar/speed info matched up with the Lido trace, and ran a rough spreadsheet to calcluate the speed of each segment of the flightpath:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/v0bih2l8ksw9ztc/speeds.xlsx?dl=0
The data in the spreadsheet is a correlation of the Times given in Sections 1.1.3a-b, and an approximation of the distances illustrated in Figures 1.1E-F. Unfortunately, the resolution is so crappy in those Figures, that I wasn’t able to discern the text boxes with any confidence.
So, in order to measure the distances of the segments, I overlaid the Figures onto a composite flightpath and scaled to match the terrain and navigational routes shown. I then imported the composite into Google Earth to draw and measure the distance of each segment.
To my untrained eye, average speed of around 530 kts seemed to be fairly consistent from Turn-Back to the end of the Lido Trace, with larger deviations when the sample time/distance were smallest- i.e. at the Kota Bharu gap and the segments approaching Penang.
There’s currently no compensation for wind, but a more advanced model could surely be developed and studied against the performance envelope of a 777. This is all above my pay-grade, but I strongly believe that this type of ‘micro’ analysis could yield more accurate modeling of the Southern flight paths.
Jeff, please delete this if a duplicate post- I’m apparently experiencing an issue with the site.
@ Kevil, Neils, Lauren H
A couple of weeks ago, I was curious to see if the radar/speed info matched up with the Lido trace, and ran a rough spreadsheet to calcluate the speed of each segment of the flightpath:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/v0bih2l8ksw9ztc/speeds.xlsx?dl=0
The data in the spreadsheet is a correlation of the Times given in Sections 1.1.3a-b, and an approximation of the distances illustrated in Figures 1.1E-F. Unfortunately, the resolution is so crappy in those Figures, that I wasn’t able to discern the text boxes with any confidence.
So, in order to measure the distances of the segments, I overlaid the Figures onto a composite flightpath and scaled to match the terrain and navigational routes shown. I then imported the composite into Google Earth to draw and measure the distance of each segment.
To my untrained eye, average speed of around 530 kts seemed to be fairly consistent from Turn-Back to the end of the Lido Trace, with larger deviations when the sample time/distance were smallest- i.e. at the Kota Bharu gap and the segments approaching Penang.
There’s currently no compensation for wind, but a more advanced model could surely be developed and studied against the performance envelope of a 777. This is all above my pay-grade, but I strongly believe that this type of ‘micro’ analysis could yield more accurate modeling of the Southern flight paths.
Most of us have something like this in our files, but for anyone interested, here’s a link to a Google Earth .kmz which includes a composite flightpath and traced radar segments:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/rjz9eae91aqxmyc/mh370-share.kmz?dl=0
#Orion
Appreciate your Excel table very much. I just think it is hard to find the value of the Time-End and distance flown. Maybe it could help to add to the table the primary route data (KL to IGARI)from Figure 1.1F for comparison.
@Oleksandr
Ok- I’ll take the bait.
By my count, there are (at least) 4 scenarios ‘still on the table’- if the Factual Information is remotely factual.
In no particular order they are: The Super-Sophisticated Spoof, The Overly Complex SIO Murder/Suicide, The Thwarted Hijacking Gone Wrong, and the Mother of all Mechanical Failures.
In my opinion, narrowing it down from there requires a gradual interpretation of tea leaves, essentially giving weight to one set of facts, while lessening the pull of others. Input on all of these scenarios- such as your detailed exploration of a Mechanical Failure event- is tremendously valuable by pushing each of these scenarios forward into more definable search areas.
As to your questions, for the SIO Murder/Suicide theory to hold water, IMO it must be within the framework of a dual-premise:
An experienced 777 pilot went to extreme lengths to attempt to hide all evidence of his crime- and that the AES login was an unknown, unintended, or deemed a non-critical consequence of a different intended action.
That basic premise alone, I believe, answers most of your questions to Peter:
– Why the crash did not occur immediately, similar to GermanWings, in the middle of the Gulf of Thailand?
REPLY: Extreme lengths to hide all evidence of the crime and completely obfuscate blame.
– 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.
REPLY: Farthest away from known direction/location increases time for SAR to locate wreckage before sinking or being widely dispersed. (It seems to have worked.)
– Why AES went down and then came back?
REPLY: Critical thought went into this question- as it was the genesis for Mike’s reply in Guest Post:Why Did MH370 Log Back on with Inmarsat. The thought is that the Left AC Bus was a quick, broad stroke to knock out “Function X”, and as an unknown or unintended result, the AES went offline also. After the threat passed, “Function X” or a different “Function Y” may have been needed, and the Left Bus powered back up.
As discussed, apparently ‘Function X’ could be anything from shutting down IFE and passenger communications, disabling oxygen supply, disabling door lock override, all of those together, or something else related to ‘going dark.’ Anyone, please chime in to correct, clarify, or add to that list. Thus ‘Function Y’ could be as simple to unlock the door to use restroom, grab a cyanide pill from a coat pocket, or perhaps something related to navigating the later part of the flight.
It is also a remote possibility that the perpetrator was aware of the handshake, but at least not the BFO side. Perhaps it was pre-determined, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the BTO alone would not be enough to narrow a feasible search. In fact where would we be without the BFO today? With a radar trace pointing to the Mid East, I’m sure the SIO would be very far down the list of places to search.
– Why nobody made a satellite call when AES came back? It appears to be possible from the business class.
REPLY: Apparently, still unknown if they were available on that flight, but if so, my assumption would be that nobody was able to at that point in time.
– 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.
REPLY: Not sure why one would take it to such extreme lengths to hide it, but I also can’t imagine why someone would do such a horrific act to begin with. Maybe it was because they were motivated, and skilled enough to do it, so they did it that way. If the intent was to leave Radar footprints in a different direction, then I would imagine that the Late FMT turn scenarios are the most likely- as turning later would help to ensure the turn wouldn’t show up on Radar.
– 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?
REPLY: Not a pilot, but I would best equate it with navigating a stolen car through town, then setting cruise control once on the highway.
– Why nobody was able to find a way to enter the cockpit during 6 hours?
REPLY: Total speculation would be that the cockpits are near impenetrable these days, or the threat may have been addressed very early in the flight.
@ Kevil,
Definitely something on the to-do list as time permits.
@Oleksandr
“And were unable to find a way to use VHF, HF or satellite phone/messaging to send a distress signal? Not talking about answering the two calls.”
VHF turned off, problem with sat equipment?
A question for the technical experts here:
Take the phone call possibility, or lack thereof, way back to before the reboot of the sdu, to when the passengers entered the plane at KLIA. It was Philip Wood’s normal practiced routine to call Sara from his seat on every flight prior to departure, yet on MH370 this was not done. What is a mobile blocker and how does that work and could something like that have been in place here? What time did Captain Shah supposedly receive that phone call from the person who used the SID phone card, was he on the plane at the time of the call in the cockpit or still in the airport or elsewhere? I think Ethan Hunt was investigating something to this end about Philip’s no call, but I have not read anything further on it. But it seems that there were no calls from the get go from anyone once they boarded that plane, let alone any calls or messages after the sdu reboot where one of the assumptions is they are incapacitated by that point. If Philip could not make a call once on board, how could the co-pilot make a call during flight, IF and that is a huge IF there, in fact he ever actually truly did?
@Nihonmama, MuOne, Cheryl and littlefoot
Is <a href="http://www.agnitio-corp.com/" title="voice biometrics" used in the investigation?
It, apparently, is in widespread use in the financial industry to prevent fraud.
Iuzazul,
Who knows if there even is an “investigation” going on. Something like that is what we requested way back on Duncan Steel’s blog, a “professional, technical voice analysis” of the original MH370 recording. That would be up to Malaysia and no one knows if they have done that. I supposed that could be applied to the edited version that we the public listened to and see what that determines.
Orion/Oleksandr,
The FMT was determined not to be later though, to be earlier now by the data set used in a sat phone call per the ATSB. If it was the Murder/Suicide scenario it’s rare that the human mind would contemplate it for some 6 hours as most suicides are done quickly. And to “hide” it in the farthest place, where was his guaranty he could, and I’ll use Matty’s great expression here, “Sully it into the roaring forties of the Indian Ocean” and hide it without breakup upon impact leaving a huge trace? I agree that the Murder/Suicide is definitely on the table along with the other official three scenarios but I put the Mechanical and the Jeff/Victor/Spoof scenarios higher. The no debris is a real puzzling piece, unless it was there originally a week or two before Inmarsat reversed the math and sent everyone to the SIO and it, the debris, migrated to wherever.
@Orion
The average speed of Gap 1-3 is 585,01 knots. The everage speed of Seg 1-4 is 516,24 knots.
It doesn’t make any sense that it is the same aircraft flying route Seg 1-4 with Gap 1-3. The speed difference Seg/Gap is 68,77 knots.
Picture 1.1F, page 29 of the Factual Information.
StevanG,
“VHF turned off, problem with sat equipment?”
A plenty of engineers among the passengers and, if I’m not mistaken, a guy, who had piloting experience, could not figure out how to use VHF or HF..?
Also, according to FI, MCDU, ‘Data-2’ and ‘Data-3’ communication interfaces were re-established by approximately 18:28.
@Oleksandr + Myron:
sorry I couldn’t reply yet (I have quite a hard time ATM) 🙁
I will get back to you as soon as I can.
My fear is that even after the plane is found, half of the questions will remain unanswered, including stuff like this, and I am afraid, that all of us will still be here wondering what exactly happened or questioning the official explanation …
@Peter – Take care!
thank you. just wanted to let you know that I have not forgotten about it
@Kevil:
hats off. What a discovery you made there!! quite surprising that this was not spotted earlier on by someone.
As others said they were reading different numbers, I would like to confirm that I am reading the same numbers as you, Kevil:
17:30:37:02 –> 0476
17:30:56:90 –> 0501
17:41:01:62 –> 0694
17:51:44:38 –> 0609
Some digits are less readable than others, but the leading “6” in the last two numbers is actually very clear.
The value of 694 could also be 684 or 654, but definitely not 604, 614, 624, 634 or 644, which means that in any case we are dealing with an impossible speed!
It’s really a shame that an image with such bad quality and resolution is part of an official report. It’s almost as if they intentionally used bad images so that their data cannot be exploited by us. The radar images on pages 8 and 10 are in fact of equally bad quality …
Anyway, I am convinced that if the object captured by radar was not thought to be MH370, the military would not have provided the image and data, especially not if they were involved in foul play, so my best guess is that one or more radar station in that region are badly calibrated. I would expect them to be capable of carrying out their basic function (detecting aircraft) but unable to reliably determine speed (which might not be real world necessity in that part of the world).
@Littlefoot:
“Thanks for the clarifications re: who spoke the last recorded words.
Personally I’m not inclined to believe Steve Barber more than the Malaysians, who had people at their disposal who knew the captain and the copilot.”
You’re welcome. And to be honest, what we believe is not really germane. What matters is what a CVR transcription and voice recognition process would prove. Barber’s analysis conflicts with the narrative (and Shah’s wife — who apparently said that she believed CaptShah was the last voice on the comms. But again (and also to your point), even if we know who was last on the comms, it still doesn’t prove that the speaker was the perp. Which means that the answer to the last voice question (whoever it was) is of low PROBATIVE value.
Fiorentino now says that both Malaysia and the ATSB “have” Barber’s analysis. OK. But will either of those entities find Barber’s ‘analysis’ sufficient to warrant asking for a technical report in support of the analysis — or will they either bounce (or ignore) it? Who knows? I’m personally of the mind that someone without specific training or pedigree can make a constructive contribution to the search for MH370. The ‘crowd’ has surfaced far more in the way of relevant, granular information in this case than the media.
@luzazul:
Yes, biometrics for voice verification are used in the financial industry and other. If the Malaysian authorities or ATSB have voice exemplars for Fariq, it makes sense to think those would be used in a CVR verification process. But whether they’d employ additional voice (biometric) software to do a voice analysis in this case, I don’t know.
@Oleksandr:
“FI report, p52 (p. 70 of pdf) says that SATCOM provided SMS/e-mail service to the cabin via Panasonic 3000i IFE equipment (Cabin Packet Data Interface, Data-3). It appears that the voice service was available only from the cockpit via MCDUs. P55 says that Data-3 interface was re-established at 18:27:03. Also, FI says that both of the calls reached the cockpit (“have resulted in a chime and visual annunciation”).
Thus, it was possible to send sms or e-mail from the cabin, and it was possible to make a call from the cockpit.”
So are you saying that based on that report, SAT calls would NOT have been possible from the business class section on MH370?
If so, that would seem to conflict with the features MAS said were available on its own website.
And you know what I find curious?
The day I shared this sat phone info with Bill Holland on Twitter (05.20.14), that MAS page was up https://twitter.com/HollandBill/status/468968983551807488
But sometime thereafter (I don’t know when), the page describing SAT phones in business class on all MAS 777’s was removed.
So, does that mean that MAS removed the SAT phone feature from all of its 777 fleet post-MH370, making that specifications page moot? Or was the page removed because there’s something in the SAT phone call part of this story that someone would like to hide?
@Cheryl:
“Take the phone call possibility, or lack thereof, way back to before the reboot of the sdu, to when the passengers entered the plane at KLIA. It was Philip Wood’s normal practiced routine to call Sara from his seat on every flight prior to departure, yet on MH370 this was not done. What is a mobile blocker and how does that work and could something like that have been in place here? What time did Captain Shah supposedly receive that phone call from the person who used the SID phone card, was he on the plane at the time of the call in the cockpit or still in the airport or elsewhere? I think Ethan Hunt was investigating something to this end about Philip’s no call, but I have not read anything further on it.”
Well, a big red flag has popped up re Ethan Hunt’s story — specifically regarding no calls being made from MH370 before it left KLIA. Or should I say, the REPORTING of what Ethan Hunt said. It’s all in this thread, but the response from Jon Ronson, the journo who wrote the story, warrants quoting:
“I did no additional research about this – I didn’t have time. Is it false?”
https://twitter.com/nihonmama/status/586686538014035968
AYFKM?
And there was no response from CryForTruth or Sarah Bajc’s twitter accounts. Perhaps they don’t want to confront Ronson publicly – particularly given that Bajc’s on the record saying that she trusts Hunt.
Whatever the case, why would The Guardian let Ronson’s story go to press without this HUGE point being FACT-CHECKED?
Airliners could be vulnerable to in-flight hacking, experts warn
By AFP (in The Telegraph)
12:22AM BST 15 Apr 2015
“Commercial airliners could be hacked in flight by passengers using a plane’s wireless entertainment system to access its flight controls, a US watchdog agency has warned.”
http://t.co/yoClIWWdEY
Posted yesterday in the Missoulian. That’s right- Missoula, Montana.
…The boat, called the GO Phoenix, had 30 crew members.
“So the 10 marine crew were from Crimea, which was interesting because half of them were ethnic Russians and half of them were ethnic Ukrainians, so it was kind of like, ‘If you guys were at home right now, you’d probably be shooting at each other,’ but because we’re all on the same boat, literally and figuratively, they kind of get along,” Paddock recalled. “And then we had 10 Indonesians and 10 guys from North America, and four or five of them were from western Montana, which was pretty cool.”
http://missoulian.com/news/local/missoula-man-recounts-seabed-search-for-missing-malaysia-airlines-flight/article_0eb9b168-bf0c-5f8e-81f9-d1f7c48300f0.html
Nihonmama,
That seems par for the course for journalists today, there is no real good gumshoe investigative reporting anymore. In all those good old film noir movies from the 40’s all the reporters and journalists were doing more digging than the detectives!!! They need to go back to that form. We all do a better job of it here. He’s apparently just writing what Ethan said, but if Sara trusts Ethan it’s worth someone checking into. That was the article I had read too but thanks for the link so others can read it, in my haste I forgot to link it.
If Philip did not call Sara from his seat, I doubt that he got engaged in a chatty conversation and forgot to, I doubt it, from the description of their relationship, Sara would be his priority. Something’s amiss there. Who clarified there were texts sent prior to MH370 taking flight the ATSB or Malaysia? Well what we have is another gray area I guess, like everything else in this case, that needs further clarification and sleuthing.
I have read and read everything on all these threads since the beginning, along with Duncan Steel’s most phenomenal blog,and many other related sources of investigation, speculation and news. It’s all getting blurry now, especially with the onslaught of re-visiting issues addressed quite extensively in the past. Is there a way to search these various threads?
I’ve been wondering about one of Nihonmama’s posts from a few months ago, relating to the insurer of the airline? Isn’t the insurance company owned by someone in one of the Stans who is also related by marriage, I believe, to a key Malaysian political figure?
Just for the record- My first and lasting impression since first hearing the ‘it went south’ declaration was ‘it sure did’ in the sense that it seemed more than obvious after the first couple of days in the traditional sense of the idiom’s meaning,if anything has ever ‘gone south’, this unfortunate event sure had, right from the start.
I am so sorry for the surviving families and friends of passengers and crew.
Nihonmama,
Did some of the families the Voice of 370 at CryForTruth say they actually received text messages or calls prior to MH370’s takeoff from the family members on the plane? I am not clear on that part. Could both stories be true, could different sections of the plane have been affected by something differently, i.e. signal in one area not in another?
If the Malaysian Chief of police quite blatantly lies about the fact that Couillibaly and Boumedienne were in Malaysia, as proven by the Washington Post, why is it that journalists the world over just accept his word that the MH370 criminal investigation has uncovered no leads?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/wife-of-paris-attacker-now-frances-most-wanted-woman/2015/02/02/b03c6950-a7da-11e4-a162-121d06ca77f1_story.html
At what point is a news organization going to make a serious commitment to an in-depth re-examination of MH370? Does no one care that we are relying on the word of the Malaysian Chief of Police, who is a proven liar, and is endangering international security by denying the prevalence of terrorist activities in Malaysia?
@Cheryl:
“Something’s amiss there. Who clarified there were texts sent prior to MH370 taking flight the ATSB or Malaysia? Did some of the families the Voice of 370 at CryForTruth say they actually received text messages or calls prior to MH370’s takeoff from the family members on the plane?”
Yes, there’s something amiss and yes CryForTruth said exactly that — their tweet is embedded in the one I posted previously:
“yes there were definitely tmsg sent from on broad MH370 prior & even slightly after take off”
https://twitter.com/cryfortruth/status/586659300363255809
” there is no real good gumshoe investigative reporting anymore.”
An understatement of epic proportion. And it’s beyond pathetic. I often wonder how some of these people get (or keep) their jobs. Why bother to get the facts right when most people won’t know the difference and you can make coin off of it? I’ve begun compiling a list of all the MH370 stories (and the journos who wrote them) that are full of inaccuracies — or half truths. When all’s said and done, I suspect that list will be longer that the stream of (official) lies told about this missing plane.
@Cheryl:
“Could both stories be true, could different sections of the plane have been affected by something differently, i.e. signal in one area not in another?”
If that were the case and I were Jon Ronson, I would have offered that clarification in a hurry. Instead, he gave a spin answer. AFTER saying he didn’t have time to check the story further. Not a good look.