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.
@nihonmama @cheryl
About the supposed cell call to Shah.
How would anyone know that the call came from a woman? Who would know that? That was the original newsflash reference.
Who overheard the call, to the point of hearing a woman’s voice, or hearing him speak in a way that implied he was speaking with a woman? Where did the call happen- by the gate or before he left to board the plane? Or were his calls being recorded by the government? The mysterious call from a pre paid cell, as it was painted,wreaks. This supposed call report has always seemed to me like just another piece of flotsam in the sea of bogus anti-factoid memes.
And excuse me, I just do not understand why it would be a secret if some of the passengers sent texts that were received by someone? On the Twitter link just posted there are conflicting reports on the same thread, yes and no answers being given to the question of were texts sent… why would that be a secret? Are the passengers loved ones/friends under such duress that they can not even publicly reveal those simple facts?
@Gila:
“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?”
A great question. Let me address it in two parts:
In Asianinsurancereview dot com (23 Jul 2014)
Kazakhstan: Eurasia may have to pay over US$3 mln for MH17
“Kazakhstan-based Eurasia Insurance Company may have to make a claim payout exceeding US$3 million for the crash of Malaysia Airlines (MAS) MH17 plane. Eurasia is also a member of the reinsurance pool for the MAS MH370 passenger plane which went missing on 8 March this year in the Indian Ocean.”
Now, don’t get hung up on Kazakhstan – because what Eurasia had to pay out is chump change. Pay attention to REINSURANCE POOL.
Next — and there’s a LOT in this Twitter thread (https://twitter.com/nihonmama/status/497479370538491904) — which flows from the NYT piece by Keith Bradsher. I’ll just note (again) that Bradsher tends to take angles no one else does. And he (NYT’s Hong Kong bureau chief) also appears to have some great sources in Asia – including in Malaysia. The CAPS below are mine:
“Airlines have many insurance policies. But the main one is an “all risk” policy that covers most crash-related expenses, including what is usually the biggest: paying for settlements with passengers’ next of kin.
MALAYSIA AIRLINES’ BROADER POLICY HAS A HIGH CAP BY INDUSTRY STANDARDS — $2.25 BILLION FOR EACH CRASH — because the carrier operates big Airbus A380s, each configured for 494 passengers, and it wanted ample coverage.
BUT THE POLICY IS UNUSUAL IN THAT IT DOES NOT HAVE A SEPARATE SUBLIMIT FOR SEARCH-AND-RESCUE COSTS — IT IS LIMITED ONLY BY THE OVERALL $2.25 BILLION CAP FOR THE POLICY, THREE PEOPLE WITH KNOWLEDGE OF THE POLICY SAID. IT IS UNCLEAR WHY THE CLAUSE WAS OMITTED, THEY SAID.
The absence of a sublimit for search-and-rescue costs means that Malaysia Airlines could seek reimbursement for tens of millions — and potentially hundreds of millions — of dollars in search costs if the Malaysian and Australian governments decide to bill the airline for even part of their considerable expenses in looking for Flight 370, which vanished on March 8.
An Australian delegation has been sent to Malaysia to broach the question of sharing costs for the Flight 370 investigation and seeking insurance reimbursement, said people with knowledge of the visit and the insurance policy, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
By tradition, governments do not seek reimbursement from an airline for search-and-rescue costs. As a result, the airlines do not typically need to ask their insurers to cover these costs; the insurers cover only so-called commercial costs, though their contracts do allow governments to seek reimbursement.
In the case of Flight 370, the Australian government is paying 8 million Australian dollars, or $7.5 million, to commercial contractors for a survey of the floor of the Indian Ocean, and has set aside another 60 million Australian dollars to hire a contractor to tow deep-sea submersibles across 60,000 square kilometers of the ocean floor to look for the missing plane.
Australian officials, Malaysian officials and the lead underwriter of the broad liability policy, Allianz of Germany, all declined to comment, as did the broker who negotiated the insurance policy on Malaysia Airlines’ behalf, the London-based Willis Group Holdings.”
Now, setting aside the fact that MAS had previously buried an entire plane — “contaminated beyond cleaning with mercury and other chemicals that may have been precursors for the manufacture of nerve gas” — in the ground at KLIA — and that shipment of chemicals (per Bradsher to me) was headed to Iran — what else jumps out at you?
Follow the money.
@Gila, Cheryl:
“How would anyone know that the call came from a woman? Who would know that?”
That is right. Who would know?
If true, I can suggest one group that would — the intel services of Malaysia (and other).
Of course, another possibility is that the phone-call-to-Shah story was planted — which would make perfect sense if the goal was to paint him as the perpetrator.
“why it would be a secret if some of the passengers sent texts that were received by someone? On the Twitter link just posted there are conflicting reports on the same thread, yes and no answers being given to the question of were texts sent… why would that be a secret?
Because if no phone calls or texts were sent from pax (or crew) before 370 departed, that would logically imply that someone had blocked those mobile phones. And who would have the ability (and motive) to do that?
“Are the passengers loved ones/friends under such duress that they can not even publicly reveal those simple facts?”
I’ll leave you with the comment from ‘John’ the MH370 NoK (and pilot) who last communicated with me about three weeks ago:
“no one knows what we going through, every week i hear family member has committed suicide, families are been pressured”
https://twitter.com/dfatcrazy/status/581663854570004480
@nihonmama san
So. Willis leaps forth as the risk management firm responsible for negotiating the humongous US $2,500,000,000.00 all-risk open ended virtually no liability policy, described in the NY TImes article as mysteriously lacking a common clause that routinely limits payout for search and rescue. How timely and intuitive, literally insuring coverage to minutely explore all up and down and around the most uncharted oil, mineral, and marine life territories on earth in the search for the missing passengers and those black boxes of Flight 370.
About the government’s right to the insurance claim to pay for the underwater exploration/mapping project, they have rights to those funds. They own the airline. The question is, do they play well with others? Who will own the maps?
Also, if I’m reading this right, the government actually funds or has funded Willis Malaysia through an economic development arm of its sovereign wealth fund. How cozy.
http://www.willis.com.my/aboutus/origin.html
An interesting question I haven’t seen explored is how MAS’ ongoing reorganization will affect how much its owner, Kazanah (an arm of the Malaysian government) will have to pay out.
@Nihonmama
“How would anyone know that the call came from a woman? Who would know that?”
From what I recall, after inspection of Shah’s phone records, they determined that the person talking to Shah was using a burner phone with a specific SIM #. They are able to track these SIM #s from where they were purchased, and after further investigation, it was determined that a female purchased that specific burner phone just a day or 2 prior, and it was also determined that she gave a fake name
^Just to add something, the reason why they were able to track down this info is because Malaysia has tight restrictions and keeps records of who buys these phones/SIM #s, because their use has been often implicated in illegal activity.
@Gila san:
“So. Willis leaps forth as the risk management firm responsible for negotiating the humongous US $2,500,000,000.00 all-risk open ended virtually no liability policy, described in the NY TImes article as mysteriously lacking a common clause that routinely limits payout for search and rescue. How timely and intuitive, literally insuring coverage to minutely explore all up and down and around the most uncharted oil, mineral, and marine life territories on earth in the search for the missing passengers and those black boxes of Flight 370.”
You got it. All day long.
“Who will own the maps?”
That’s THE multi-billion question. And I’ll speculate that a deal’s aready been done (involving those maps) that includes the funders of this expedition (read: insurers) AND the owners of the companies whose ships are currently searching the SIO. And I specifically mean FUGRO. You know why?
WSJ (01.29.15)
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Equipment Problems Slow Hunt for Plane
“lead contractor, an OIL AND GAS firm WITH LITTLE EXPERIENCE IN SEARCHING FOR DEEP-SEA WRECKAGE…
‘The world-wide deep-water industry is simply wondering how the contract could have been awarded the way that it has been,’ Michael Williamson, president of Seattle-based sonar firm Williamson & Associates, wrote in a Sept. 15 letter to the Australian government that was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Fugro is ill-equipped and is likely to fail, the letter claimed.”
MACLEAN’S (03.04.15)
Inside the search for Flight MH370
“All attention is focused on making sure GO Phoenix and the three other Fugro ships aren’t busy churning out a bunch of false negatives. “This is the fundamental part of business,” says Rob McCallum, a partner at Seattle-based Williamson & Associates, a deep-sea search firm that was outbid by Fugro on the current $50-million search contract. ‘The most important thing we can do is tell you where it’s definitely not. You have to be able to say, with your hand on your heart, ‘We’ve searched this area and what you’re looking for isn’t there.’
However, McCallum isn’t convinced that’s what’s happened off the coast of Australia. He says Fugro, the oil and gas survey firm that landed the biggest search contract, lacks experience in looking for man-made objects in the deep ocean and is therefore at risk of missing subtle clues. ‘The company that got the job has never done this sort of work before’, McCallum says, adding that Fugro’s ships are also too small to handle the unforgiving seas in the search area, leading to excessive downtime.”
So, an inquiring mind would ask: how did FUGRO win the contract for a massive underwater search for MH370 in the SIO if they’ve NEVER DONE THAT KIND OF WORK BEFORE?
“if I’m reading this right, the government actually funds or has funded Willis Malaysia through an economic development arm of its sovereign wealth fund. How cozy.”
Isn’t it? Like a pig in a blanket.
And thank you for digging into Willis a bit more — I just haven’t had the time.
But can I tell you something?
There’s a person on LinkedIn with multiple profiles. One says: Senior Vice President (Investments) at Khazanah Nasional Berhad. Another: General Manager at Willis Malaysia.
All in the family.
From something I wrote back in Feb:
“Here’s an interesting comment from someone I’ll call a Malaysia ‘observer’:
‘the paper trail went cold (sovereign states can hide a lot), some offshore [paperwork] got legalized editors got nervous.’
Perhaps Story and Saul will consider looking into PMB and Khazanah Nasional Berhad, the sovereign fund that owns PMB and MAS. Someone should. The families of those who vanished on MH370 are in real need of some leverage. Or a leak.”
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1skkpci
Note on satellite inclinations:
The inclination of the orbit of 3-F1 is attributed to the fact that it is an old satellite that no longer has enough fuel to maintain station. The inclination a year ago was 1.7 degrees; it is now nearly 2.5 degrees. However, a look through the Celestrak database shows some interesting oddities. The 4-F series of satellites are all newer, so one would expect them to still be stationed on the equator, but in fact that is not the case – the inclinations range from 2.4 to 3.0 degrees, even exceeding that of 3-F1. Why? Possibly it is by design – several satellites occupy the same longitudinal “slot”, so by tilting the orbits slightly it keeps them from colliding with each other.
Satellite 3-F3 is over the Pacific Ocean, and it is the satellite that MH370 was utilizing up until 15:15:57 UT, when a handover occurred to 3-F1. The inclination of 3-F3 is currently 1.9 degrees. I have not checked the phasing of its orbit relative to 3-F1, but would guess it is significantly different. I do not know how the SATCOM picks which satellite to use or why MH370 chose to switch. Kuala Lumpur is barely within the coverage area of 3-F3, but coverage would have improved as the flight proceeded toward Beijing.
Gila,
I don’t read much into that call to Captain Shah at all from the beginning. I don’t think it was anyone listening to his call contents, the call itself was traced to a place I think in KL and the card was purchased in a woman’s name. Means nothing. As I have stated before, a lot of people in those countries pay as they go as far as cell phones go, not all I would imagine have billed accounts like we do. Could have been anyone or even not a true fact. I think Mr. Asuad Khan, his brother in-law, stated that Captain Shah’s What’s Ap was active until about 7:45PM or thereabout that evening of the flight. I think phone card places and internet cafes are a dime a dozen in some foreign countries.
Lucy – we are forced to trust the Malaysian police chief mainly because no-one seems to care either way. I reckon the Malaysians would have happily washed their hands of this investigation if there was serious interest coming in from elsewhere. Never looked right, and just how exhaustive any voice analysis has been we don’t know – as usual.
Richard Cole – “ATSB is not a small interest group”
– “Dolan is a civil servant”
Correct on both. Dolan also rather tactfully used the words “if funds permit” and that is consistent with not knowing where it’s headed – in this neck of the woods anyway. The govt here have sent very clear signals that they don’t intend to be drawn into any long term trawling of the SIO. Months ago Deputy PM Truss said “clearly we can’t keep searching at this intensity indefinitely”. By “down to the margins” I meant that the current block search is all but exhausted and the politicians were all but told the plane was there so their confidence in a result will be slumping.
If they pull the pin it could be the biggest moment of illumination we have had in a year. How much do the spectating nations care about this? We could be about to find out. The way I see it minimal care factor might suggest this isn’t the mystery we think it is.
To continue a search you only need a funding agreement, to wind it up would require a delicate joint statement – and a meeting. We will see.
@Matty, Bear in mind that the ATSB has repeatedly emphasized its confidence that the plane is within the current search area — so much so that the more time that goes by without them finding it, the more confident they become, because there’s less area remaining to be searched. In the unlikely event that they turn out to be wrong and nothing is found, what are they going to say? That it will definitely be in the next 10,000 sq km? The next 50,000? The next million?
@Nihonmama, while I don’t disagree with you for raising the question of “why FUGRO,” is there actually anyone else equipped for that depth? It seems like an experimental job no matter who gets the work.
@Peter et al,
Wasn’t there s comment early on that MH370 was behaving like a fighter jet? Perhaps the simplest answer is just that – the radar belongs to a supersonic jet, instead of, or in addition to, MH370.
Would the military reveal a radar plot if a military jet was in it?
Maybe. Probably not if it was their own jet. Possibly if they knew it was someone else’s or were unaware it was their own. And they’d probably reveal it if they had mistakenly believed it was only a civilian jet.
So the publicized radar trail easily fits the following or any combination of the following:
1. There were multiple unidentified civilian aircraft.
2. There was a single unidentified military aircraft.
3. There was a military plane belonging to Country A detected by radar belonging to Country B, and Country A is unable or unwilling to convince Country B to redact it or does not wish to alert Country B to the existence of the military jet
It’s quite possible that everybody in that area suspects everybody else, but without proof it’s easiest for all of them to label the radar as MH370. There’s no need to openly blame your neighbor for flying supersonic jets in the vicinity of MH370 – just put the crazy graph out there and let everybody wonder who knows what about the elephant in the room. Any decent military intelligence agency would have already detected any speed issues by now.
@JS:
“It seems like an experimental job no matter who gets the work.”
So would that be the reason to award a contract to a company that “lacks experience in looking for man-made objects in the deep ocean”?
@Gila:
Fortune (05.01.14)
The big money surprise about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
“From a financial perspective, some of the parties facing the most risk would be better off if the plane is never found.”
http://for.tn/1FN3V56
Jeff – About a week and a half ago ALSM posted that the search was 76% done and they were making good headway at that time. ATSB have simply repeated that it’s over 60% done but it will be well into the 80’s by now and all going well could be run and won in 3-4 weeks?
Even as a skeptic I thought this was worth a roll but to mount this kind of search they had to convince govts that they were reasonably confident of where it was – doing that all over again will be a lot more difficult 2nd time around. I always thought it would spell trouble if that box was empty and securing an elongated funding deal should not require a big round-table. It could have been negotiated along the way so I don’t think it bodes too well. Could be a three way press conference coming up, and that will be crushing for a lot of people. If they were looking at another season of towing then Truss didn’t have to make those comments at all. I believe he was sending a signal there but we will see.
It would also be a simple matter to raise the money to keep going if the hat went around? It could come down to the diminishing probability of finding it that scares govts away. Also the Germanwings box was on it’s own and under a few feet of dirt – have they written off getting the MH370 boxes?
MH370 search zone likely to be expanded
“The Malaysian, Australian and Chinese governments appear to have agreed to expand the search zone for the missing flight MH370 by 60,000 sq km, according to an email sent to the next-of-kin of passengers and crew who were on board the flight.”
http://bit.ly/1Ha0f1e
But there’s more…
Australia could pull out of MH370 search
http://t.co/gYen1HlHoC
Nihonmama – I’d say that looks pretty encouraging over all. Australia are unlikely to pull out if the others want to press on and are still sharing the cost. The reluctance to comment might be standard fare? Notifying the NOK first up would be good manners? Another 12 months of limbo?
%Matty
Funny this topic has come up just now. I just re read an article published on Feb 24 published in theweek, online UK. This interview seems to have been in response to the National Geo documentary.
In part, this is what Mr. Dolan is quoted as saying:
“I don’t wake up every day thinking ‘this will be the day’ but I do wake up every day hoping this will be it, and expecting that sometime between now and May that will be the day,” he said.
“It’s been both baffling and from our point of view unprecedented – not only the mystery of it, but also the scale of what we’re doing to find the aircraft. As we keep on pointing out, we don’t have a certainty, only a confidence that we’ll find the missing aircraft.”
So he hopes, like everybody else. And he has ‘ a confidence.’ Isn’t that the same as saying ‘I trust’ or really, really want to believe this is right?
I just don’t hear him or anyone else even remotely saying they are ‘confident.’
Scroll to find “Missing Plane Deliberately Flown to Antarctica” Feb 25
http://www.theweek.co.uk/flight-mh370/57641/mh370-black-box-battery-dead-before-flight-took-off
I’ve also re-visted the January 29 ‘accident’ declaration, listened to the video through links JS posted in February.
I think the search is over in May and I bet Mr. Dolan et al does, too. It was funded to a certain level and degree to meet a need that seems to no longer exists for them. Reading through the weasel words I hear that Azharridin’s statements regarding search are all past tense. It also seems that there is a firewall that shields Malayasia from having to search beyond this commitment, taking refuge in the ‘missing’ and ‘accident’ clause definitions. Would it be that the ‘official search’ has been terminated already, in the sense that no extension has been made to extend beyond the initial agreement that would have been completed if not for tech issues and weather?
I suppose that there might be some more of the enormous insurance monies made available to search/map outside the currently defined parameters for yet unknown motivations. Humanitarians they are not.
http://www.newstalkflorida.com/malaysia-says-mh370-crash-deemed-accident/
@Matty:
“Notifying the NOK first up would be good manners?”
Yes — and a definite step up from the NoK having to learn (from CNN) that 370 was being declared an ‘accident’.
“Another 12 months of limbo?”
Why not? $2.25 BILLION can go a long way.
Better stock up on that wine.
A@nihonmama
Oh yea!
I’ve had that Fortune article opened for 6 hours meaning to post it, pondering the continued search, and I see you called it. I simply don’t trust something though.
Look at this, too, left field right now, but this is what the whistle blowers would have to endure:
The Official Secrets Act
http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/sacked-airman-testifying-in-mh370-suit-bound-by-osa-armed-forces-chief-insi
More than a few oil and gas explorers can trawl, haul some kind of sonar at those depths. And at least 2 other firms that specialize in these activities were considered for the job- Williamson & Associates is one.
This is an eye opening article about the search:
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/search-for-mh370/
Nihonmama – it almost looks like Truss got rolled by the Chinese here. I was assuming all along that the Malaysians would step off if they got a chance and the Australians made plenty of noise about doing the same, but the search is good cheap PR for the Chinese govt back home, and Australia couldn’t sit out by themselves without getting some heat. It didn’t quite go the way they wanted.
Just a crazy question that’s been nagging me ever since the ‘discovery’ of those amazing Inmarsat logs. Can these logs be faked or manipulated? Or even fed to the satellite externally? Of course there is also the very simple possibility that they are totally misinterpreted by the experts.
The entire search is based uniquely on those logs. All other possibilities, including the ones supported by eyewitness reports, have been discarded, most never investigated. Now that the search is almost over in the ‘highest probability area’, and a plan is being devised to search the lower probability areas, one wonders what would happen when all search efforts are exhausted? What will run out first, search funding or areas to search?
Do I understand this correctly:
1. Australia and Malaysia are funding the search. China is not.
2. Australia and Malaysia hinted at calling the search off, but China insists that it continue.
Why is China not funding the search but insists that it continues? Surely they would be the most likely to contribute funds, given that two-thirds of the passengers were Chinese?
This might be explained by (a) China not having any emotional commitment because in fact they hijacked the plane, hence they won’t contribute funds, but (b) they nonetheless want the search to continue in order to map the Indian Ocean (which was the reason they hijacked the plane and spoofed the southern data trail).
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-16/ministers-signal-expanded-search-for-missing-mh370/6398678
“Australia and Malaysia would continue to share the costs of the expensive search”.
Further to an earlier discussion, it has been found that the relation between BFO and airplane speed at a particular time and location can be expressed in an equation of the form:
BFO = k1 +k2*Vlat + k3*Vlon +k4*Vvert
where Vlat, Vlon and Vvert are the latitudinal, longitudinal and vertical components of airplane velocity, and coefficients k1, k2, k3 and k4 vary with time and airplane location.
For example, at the particular conditions of time: 19:41:00 Z; location: 0°N 93.726°E; altitude 10.7 km, according to Yap’s BTO & BFO Calculator the coefficients are: k1 = 148.845 Hz; k2 = 0.09275 Hz/kt; k3 = 0.00157 Hz/kt; k4 = 2.34073 Hz/kt.
Apparently the BFO at a particular time and location is most sensitive to vertical speed, and least sensitive to longitudinal speed.
@All,
Did you know that MH370 contrails can be seen at night from space?
Did you know that MH370 actually made 3 “final turns” within 15 minutes?
For all this and more, including why 9M-MRO is outside the ATSB’s search area, just click on this:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzOIIFNlx2aUWEtvSjBVS2JWX0E/view?usp=sharing
@Dr. Ulich
Quite remarkable research. If confirmed, sure the breakthrough. I wondered all the time whether such infrared imagery indeed exists. I feel this and much better imagery should be in possession of NSA. Why did the public not get access to this crucial information.
The implications for the chain of events seem to be overwhelming. Once and for all a suicide pattern can be ruled out. Looks like desperate trials to land against odds.
Bobby,
It looks interesting, but what is the evidence that these curves are contrails? I think contrails could be reshaped and dislocated due to wind. I would also expect the ‘older’ ends of the curves to be blurred due to the diffusion, but I do not see this effect in the images.
Do you have temperature images derived from the IR snapshots?
Gysbreght,
Yes. The general equation for BFO can be formulated in such a form.
I trust AoA is also maintained at a constant value by the stability system in TOGA or AT mode, correct?
Do you also know if the thrust is automatically adjusted in TOGA mode upon reaching certain altitude? In my understanding the maximum thrust is applied initially in TOGA, and TOGA remains in effect until any other input is made.
@Cosmic:
“much better imagery should be in possession of NSA. Why did the public not get access to this crucial information.”
If a “US SATELLITE [was] the unspoken source that sparked search for MH370” but Dr. Bobby and Kirill Prostyakov’s latest re those contrails is correct — and the plane is OUTSIDE of the current ATSB priority zone, isn’t that…interesting.
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sjc6so
If you finally see the light, an apology would not be misplaced.
TO/GA is an AFDS pitch mode, selected by pushing the TOGA switches on the thrustlevers. The corresponding A/T mode is THR REF.
TO/GA acquires and maintains takeoff speed reference after liftoff, or go-around speed reference after initial go-around rotation.
THR REF sets thrust to the reference thrust limit displayed on EICAS.
AoA is a function of weight and speed, but is perhaps constant for go-around speed reference.
The reference thrust limit will depend on altitude, Mach and temperature, probably flat-rated to ISA+10°C or +15°C.
CruxAustralis – without extra data I’m absolutely sure – this time – that this will be the last roll of the dice. There are millions of Km2 down there with limited money, and yes the data can be faked – some people are investigating how hard or probable that is right now.
Michael R – If the CHinese cared for people they wouldn’t jail them for meditating or praying, but they are neurotic about social order, as well as their image in the People’s Republic, and the search makes them all look like care bears. My two cents: Malaysia did what they were told, Australians got sidelined. Still don’t think it’s going to matter. A year to run.
Dr. Ulich,
Amazing stuff there regarding the contrails. Your findings seem to support my early KISS (keep it simple, stupid) theory of some kind of on board emergency, get back across Malaysia and head to the nearest airports. I thought they attempted landings and could not for whatever reason. I questioned landing gear/tire issue long ago or maybe part of the “Mother of All Mechanical Malfunction” problem that was going on as one poster so aptly named it here recently. Your work has been remarkable. Again the words of Mary Schiavo early on, “what appears to be terrorism is really heroism.”
Didn’t Kate Tee see a contrail as well? I forget whether or not a contrail is depicted in the drawing that was done for her by the artist. Or did she see a black contrail and some questioned the RAT having deployed and an engine restart?
Matty / Crux Australis,
If MH370 9M-MRO had it’s own unique identifier number with x number of digits that communicated with IOR F-3 Indian Ocean Region Satellite, wouldn’t Inmarsat have something in place to guard against industrial espionage or theft of that identifier number?
@Dr. Bobby Ulich:
As said to you and Kiril earlier today on Twitter, this latest contrail analysis is very interesting stuff — and I’m hoping it yields fruit because the families really need something to break.
BUT — there’s a former air traffic controller on Twitter (who’s also asked some great questions about the MH370 radar “story”) and he’s not buying the contrail analysis:
https://twitter.com/Paul_playwright/status/588847218297188352
I hoping you all will engage with him — the more clarity, the better.
@Nihonmama,
Wind in final turns area at altitude was only 0-3 knots. Image taken 20 minutes after last turn. Expect long-term stability under those conditions, especially at night.
Effect of wind on southernmost contrail is noticeable in drifting contrail downwind. Check angle of contrail from 31S to 38 S. First, the mere fact that you can see most of a contrail that long says the atmospheric conditions are relatively stable. This is consistent with our everyday experience. One often sees very long and persistent contrails. Second, the direction of the contrail is not parallel to the expected (computer-generated) track. The upper (northernmost) end of the contrail is the oldest portion, and it should be skewed the most downwind compared to the more recent (more southerly) end. Since the wind there was 50/60 knots from the west, the upper end of the contrail should be skewed to the east. That is exactly what we see, and this fact adds credibility to the image feature being a contrail.
The fact that the southern contrail signature is darker than the clouds suggests that what we are seeing is the shadow of the contrail cast upon the cloud deck at a lower altitude than the contrail (which would have been at FL390 or FL410.). That explains the uneven appearance of the contrail shadow image. The upper surface of the cloud deck is not smooth or flat. It has spatial structure that mottles the shadow image.
@Dr. Bobby Ulich:
Thanks much for this response. Even more helpful.
Bravo Prostyakov / Ulich.
There may be issues with uniqueness in identifying candidate contrail tracks among other image features (as there possibly are in aligning the events in the acoustic signal analysis you are also attempting) but is is ABSOLUTELY worth trying, and has the potential to contribute important elements the search. In my opinion the curved final turn track does look very interesting, not sure what else would create such a feature.
There is much scientific precedent in this type of analysis, for example see this paper previously linked by Prostyakov :
http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/imaging/cloudmap/cloudmap/papers/DLR-IPA/Mannstein99.pdf
Note typical contrail width 1km after 20 minutes, should be resolvable on 375m data.
As to engaging on Twitter, the comments by the individual mentioned above and his cohorts were disgraceful (they intimated that he is involved in a cover up and is paid to “troll”) and not remotely in the spirit of scientific collaboration. I would not blame Ulich for ignoring.
Hi Kirill/Bobby,
Firstly, thanks for rescuing this blog site from the endless conspiracy and alien abduction theories (I didn’t realise there were so many aliens in Kazakhstan, the Maldives, etc), and bringing us back to some solid science, albeit no doubt temporarily.
I can think of a whole list of questions stemming from your short report, but I’ll start with the final figure (page 11). I understand completely the reason why the green contrail is skewed relative to the true flight path, but shouldn’t the impact point (ignoring post flame-out turns) simply be the extrapolation of the green contrail onto the 7th arc? By eye, this would give an impact point at about 83.8E to 84.0E, rather than around 85.0E as shown by your “Ulich Route C1”.
Sunny Coaster – actually it might be the first bit of solid science we have had – period.
@Matty – Perth,
Path modelling on basis of BFO/BTO is solid science, whether data is real or spoofed.
Real: it narrows where to look
Spoofed: it proves spoof, if nothing found
Cheers
Will
@M Pat:
“As to engaging on Twitter, the comments by the individual mentioned above and his cohorts were disgraceful (they intimated that he is involved in a cover up and is paid to “troll”) and not remotely in the spirit of scientific collaboration.”
I completely agree. Which is why I had a private conversation with Paul the ATC and asked him to stop and think about his comments — I thought he was overreacting and being grossly unfair to Dr. Ulich. And because (I think) it’s important that EVERYONE watching these convos gains more CLARITY rather than less, I encouraged him to talk with Dr. Bobby and Kiril directly about his questions/concerns. Many people, Paul included, have been viciously attacked on numerous boards, for expressing views that differ from the majority opinion. Of course, that’s not ever an excuse to unfairly accuse someone who’s working hard to find MH370 of trolling, but it explained (to me) why he had such an over-the-top reaction. Paul also apologized to Dr. Ulich last night, but perhaps you missed that part of the conversation.
“I would not blame Ulich for ignoring.”
Dr. Ulich didn’t ignore Paul. He posted a response on Twitter. Actually, and to his great credit, I’ve observed that he (and I’d also include Victor and Bill Holland in this) takes the TIME (on Twitter) to explain complicated concepts – or dispel misconceptions — in a way that people who have valid questions, but who may not have formal scientific training, can understand. Being interested enough to engage people at their level, as opposed to being condescending and dismissive when people have questions, is the essence of communication. And it goes a long way.
Gysbreght,
Thanks for your comments re TO/GA. I was asking about it, because the residual minimization approach yields the thrust of somewhat around 80% of the maximum at respective altitude. In other words thrust varies, but the thrust setting of approximately 80% of the maximum appears to result in the minimum BTO and BFO residuals. Instead of complicating my model, I have simplified it by assuming that the stability system maintains zero slip angle and constant AoA – it seems this approach works.
With regard to the BFO model I apologize for pushing you too hard, but I am happy that it reached its target. Using your generic form, you can now rewrite the equation in any coordinate system. Note that BFO = k1 +k2*Vlat + k3*Vlon +k4*Vvert = k1 + ({k2,k3,k4},{Vlat,Vlon,Vvert}), where (.,.) is the dot product of two vectors. The vector {Vlat,Vlon,Vvert} specifies components in a local coordinate system. One can use any other coordinate system, such as ECEF, or satellite-centered – only respective transformation of the vector components is required.
Bobby,
Thanks for your answers. The figure on p4 is really interesting, and it would certainly be a proof the ‘hook’ if you could estimate temperature. What is a source of this image? One can notice a straight line crossing the ‘hook’, which is getting clearer at the left side. Is it also contrail?
With regard to the images at p7, I don’t want to discourage you, but I think these are unlikely contrails. It’s hard to believe that a contrail can persist for 1 hour where wind speed is 20 m/s. In addition, there are many visible ‘contrails’ – basically one can find any contrail he/she wants to see…
MuOne – In my mind I guess, solid science means solid data. I’d take contrails over handshakes anytime but we’ll see how it plays out?
One for Spencer – http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/mh370s-fate-captain-shah-carefully-pre-planned-and-brilliantly-executed-the-planes-hijacking/story-fni0cx12-1227308452509?sv=8449517437824260488cf4b5c0cfbd4e
Again the reference to the simulator, this time by someone who appears to be a pilot? If the SIO way points was true then I’d all but concede there is not much mystery left.
I am a novice when it comes to contrails, and the following is based on a miniscule investment of time in learning about them.
Contrails do not always form – atmospheric conditions must be right. In particular, the relative humidity RH (at, say, -50 C air temperature) must be above 60%. Based on some equations in a document I found at sensirion.com, this means that the RH above ice is above 100% – just what we would expect.
If I am reading the GDAS data properly, the RH at waypoint NILAM at the relevant time was at 28% (for FL 340) or 42% (for FL 390) – well below the level needed to make contrails. Later on, at latitude -34 degrees and FL390, the RH is only 15% – no contrails are going to form there either. But then, who knows how accurate the GDAS models are?
One should always test a model. Plenty of other flights were passing up the Strait of Malacca close in time to MH370. One should be able to identify the contrails that they left. Bobby?
But then, I could have it all wrong.
@Matty – Perth,
In my world the contrails are data, as of now at similar solidity as the signal data, both maybe more so than the acoustic data (Lanl, et.al.).
What I find intriguing though is, that we seem to now have three unrelated data sources that would fit the SIO scenario. That should be confidence boosting, in that that scenario is indeed valid.
If one counts the Mar/April 2014 sat images of potential floating debris in SIO as another, there are actually four unrelated data sources.
Re solid science, I don’t think solid data needs to come first. If you look at for example astro- and particle physics, there is a lot of solid science going on, where data is postulated by the models and only later found by targeted searches to validate the models by their ability to predict the existence of that data (black holes, quasars, gravitational lensing, sub atomic particles, etc.).
Cheers,
Will
Matty,
Thanks for the link to that article. Definitely one for our pal Spencer that if true, would give support to his theory. But my take on this article is…………….HOLD ALL HORSES (as far as the article goes, not you Matty)! I see a lot of holes in this article.
Don’t we all know and have learned here more technically than this article reveals, i.e.:
1. There were supposedly no red flags raised from the FBI’s findings last year, and now it caused the shift south in the search????? Really?
2. Even if the co-pilot was locked out and the flight deck door locked, haven’t we learned from the recent Air New Zealand bruhaha, that in a B777 there is a way to access it and open it and get back in?????
3. What about Mike Exner’s simulator findings that suggest a perp in the EEBay finagling with things that perhaps a pilot would not know, supports Jeff’s theory?????
4. What about Asuad Khan stating on the 4 Corners ABC documentary that Captain Shah’s simulator was broken and he doubts he even used it last year???????
About the only thing I concur on with this article is yes, Captain Shah flew back over his home town of Penang. Indeed they perhaps did, and did he bid adieu to his bathroom door he repaired just hours before as he flew over!!!!!! If mentally one is planning murder/suicide why on earth would they care about their bathroom door, it doesn’t fit.