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.
More of a curious exercise to see which crew member(s) had the most apparent ‘free-time’ prior to the flight. The First Officer wins the prize.
Naturally there are several potential explanations. Does anyone know what the FO did with the time not counted as ‘hours’?
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/25ytbeqz65w9yqb/AADlA3agA_CMNG-zINHBgHCpa?dl=0
The Russian worked in the lumber industry in Siberia?
Would that be the same Siberia where North Koreans used to work cutting trees to earn some foreign currency for their nation? North Korea is not exactly know for being able to resist the urge to kidnap foreigners. Makes me wonder if they could use a plane, and some people.. and if they’d be able to sneak one in. Hiding a plane there would be easy; it’s not like people could tell anyone even if they weren’t scared of getting executed.
Anyone know what the radar coverage in the area is like? Japan, and South Korea are pretty lit up.. but what about the Chinese side approach?
Matty it wouldn’t be a “mystery blip”, it would be lit up as a Christmas tree and they would sure interrogate it at the minimum.
radar evasion
@StevanG
Stevan, i feel its a bit premature to discuss this subject, before we have a sound idea of what was done to the AES. As it stay, there seems to be no way, private perpetrators could have had the sophistication to do anything about the electronics inflight. Maybe only a major power would have the logistics to do that. Then radar evasion would be a different discussion. When Israel destroyed the Syrian nuclear facilities, there was a narrative, that several thouand radar blips were on the screens of the Syrian defence, and in another moment none at all.
The radar discussion needs to adress the evasion subject anyway, for both, north and south routes, because when you mention the “christmas tree” on the screens: why was this christmas tree not observed by indonesia, DG, Oz and a considerable naval fleet northwest of indonesia that steered back home from a naval exercise?
There seem to be radar evading techniques, we dont understand by now.
@Benaiahu,
Thanks for posting that graph with the info of the crew’s free time. And another myth – that the captain was grounded for some time before his last flight – goes out through the window.
If we can trust those data the question arises why the first officer had so much more free time than the rest of the crew.
Maybe, because he was learning to fly a B777? Does that count as free time?
@CA
Israel used electronic jamming on syrian very old radars, India China and even Pakistan have much better air defence especially electronic capabilities.
DG was over horizon to see MH370 (as well as Oz which probably didn’t have JORN directed at full power), same is valid for the fleet and Indonesia emphasized they didn’t see the plane in their airspace which means 12nm from the coast, anything further they probably saw it but don’t want to disclose that
StevanG – If…… the plane went north, then it wold be a chance to be intercepted and we don’t know it wasn’t. Hypothetically if it was an unresponsive 777 with Malaysia on it, and it had fighter planes alongside, I reckon even the Chinese would be reluctant to fire away. You might take in where it was headed, factor in that there was very likely Chinese nationals on it, and monitor the thing as long as you could? If….something like that ever occurred I don’t think they would disclose it.
Benaiahu Posted March 9, 2015 at 12:25 AM
Hi Benaiahu ~
I don’t know how Fariq spent his leisure hours, but I was told he originates from a somewhat wealthy family so perhaps he doesn’t need to work as many hours relative to the other crew members.
~LG~
I just learnt that the Chinese delegate is in Geneva chairing the Human Rights Commission where he has just sunk three resolutions in two days that would have put a light on their own abuses. Climate talks no different – whether a believer or not – they really do take the cake. But they are sitting on a social powder keg and they care a lot about PR with their citizens.
Benaiahu – I have read Fariq was very regular at the Mosque and had memorized chunks of it, but who knows.
” If…… the plane went north, then it wold be a chance to be intercepted and we don’t know it wasn’t. Hypothetically if it was an unresponsive 777 with Malaysia on it, and it had fighter planes alongside, I reckon even the Chinese would be reluctant to fire away. You might take in where it was headed, factor in that there was very likely Chinese nationals on it, and monitor the thing as long as you could? If….something like that ever occurred I don’t think they would disclose it.”
if it was unresponsive they wouldn’t shoot it down unless it started descending in a heavily populated urban area or military zone
but they would sure take note and inform nearby countries
@airlandseaman: I just viewed a video clip of a portion of your interview with CBC for “The National”, in which you describe the ATSB’s decision to spend two months searching up at s21 as “based on acoustic data”.
It is commonly understood by all careful observers of the search that such a statement merely feeds the false narrative put out by search officials and Inmarsat in late May / June that the acoustic pings LURED the search up to s21. The TRUTH is that:
– the search MOVED to s21 for no good reason (signal data COUNTER-indicated that site), and
– the search STAYED there for 2 months for no good reason (acoustic data COUNTER-indicated FDR as source)
I’m sure you and I share a common goal of maximizing the truth-value of any information reaching mass audiences. How can you and I best work together to clarify the record – perhaps a joint statement attesting to the above two bullet points?
Thanks in advance for your time and attention.
Brock:
I can’t really argue with any of that. It was a ridiculous waste of time. We know that. We knew that at the time. But I am trying to work with ATSB now to find the plane. I don’t have my own fleet of ships. I think you will find the full interview tonight at 9PM ET will say that they wasted 4 months, but perhaps without being so blunt. I don’t remember how I worded it. BTW…did you catch 16X9 on Saturday?
Last night on 9NEWS (local NBC) at 5pm and again today at 6am:
http://www.9news.com/story/news/2015/03/08/independent-group-still-searching-for-mh370/24620857/?fb_ref=Default
@ALSM: thanks for your reply. I’m beginning to understand the IG: you agree with me that the official story is full of holes, but you want to maintain good relations with them – ostensibly because this will help find the plane faster.
But doesn’t this stance require blind faith that those holes are 100% UNRELATED to the plane’s fate? If – IF – the holes are there because the search has been MANIPULATED – either to make sure the plane is NOT found, or that it is found according to an approved schedule (e.g. AFTER the FDR has rotted away) – THEN isn’t the IG’s diplomacy/patience counter-productive?
I ask this because I personally place the probability of the IF statement being true at materially north of zero – and growing. I’m not demanding others join me in assigning non-zero probability (though I think my report’s documented concerns do more than enough to bring an unbiased observer to that conclusion) – just trying to help you understand where I’M coming from.
Finally: to portray “keep searching” vs. “investigate the investigators” as an either/or proposition sets up a false dichotomy. We can – and should – do both at the same time. (Note this is a relaxation of something I posted in December, recommending we stop searching. Hoping this olive branch can induce stronger public support from the IG that we investigate the investigators.)
Brock:
I do not believe for 1 second that ATSB, or the Satellite Working Group are not doing everything possible to find the plane. Malaysia…that’s a different question. But these guys and gals down under, on the ships and back at their computers (doing what the IG is doing), are doing their best. They have made some mistakes. OK. They have made a few really dumb mistakes. But they are dealing with a level of chaos and confusion that would result in anyone of good faith making so mistakes that in retrospect look utterly stupid. I forgive them and move on. That said, H2O should be fired instantly for his idiotic remarks today, if not for all the incompetent nonsense that transpired before today.
The Daily Beast article today is very well done. There are a few minor tech errors, but the main thrust of this article is really on target.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/feature2/2015/phone/flight-370-did-not-disappear.html#top
@ALSM:
Where we agree 100%: any deliberate undermining/obfuscation of the search would have NOTHING to do with the rank and file searchers and analysts – heroes in my book, as I’ve often stated (often, because my call for accountability is often grossly mischaracterized as an ATTACK on those heroes).
Where we disagree: You say that responsibility for search undermining/obfuscation rests 100% with Malaysian leaders, and 0% with Oz/US/UK leaders; I say that, when the truth finally outs, we will learn that BOTH groups bear some responsibility.
For example: did H20 put a gun to US officials’ heads, and FORCE them to “confirm” to CNN on April 14 that the co-pilot’s phone pinged a Telco (an event now generally considered to be mutually incompatible with the primary radar track)? This “official confirmation” not only would have misdirected resources within the criminal investigation, but also significantly muddied the waters re: determination of appropriate performance limits, thereby delaying the search.
Any MH370 ‘analysis’ that inculpates Malaysia but OMITS mention of the FPDA is either incomplete — or in disingenuous — because the FPDA, by virtue of it’s very existence, is part of this story.
“a two-star Australian Air Vice-Marshal commands the peninsula-wide Integrated Area Defence System (IADS) from the Malaysian air base at Butterworth”
http://t.co/aCHrKQnvg6
@Brock,
What are your thought re: the alledged connection of the co-pilot’s phone with Penang Tower?
This thing has really disturbed me right from the beginning, because it’s one of the few facts which can actually be checked easily. A simple yes/no answer is possible.
So, if it didn’t happen, the Malaysians told a deliberate lie But it was nonetheless speedily endorsed “officially” by the US and spread through mainstream media, although the official source remained conveniently anonymous. Subsequently it was simply never mentioned again and remained like many other iffy assertions in public limbo.
I have a few questions: Why is the alledged phone call not compatible with info extracted from the available radar tracks? Or is it simply not compatible with the notion that the plane – contrary to early information – never changed it’s altitude drastically? I’m sure it has been discussed here, why the phone connection probably never happened but I might’ve missed it.
If we can be reasonably sure that it never happened, the question arises: what was the purpose of such a bold lie? Was it simply diffuse obfuscation? Or was it an attempt to silence all radar track doubters who still believed there was no proof that the plane ever turned around in the first place?
@LPB – The data in 1.6.3.7 (3) says the right engine consumes 1.5T/hour more than the left engine. The Glossary at the end says T=Tonne. Many of the previous calculations (VictorI, Dr. Ulich, etc.) have agreed that the TOTAL burn rate for both engines, from 17:07 to 00:16 was around 6.13T/hour. If the 1.5T value is correct it would mean the left engine burned 2.3T/Hr while the right engine burned 3.8T/Hr. Either I have made a math/understanding error, or all speeds and altitudes need to be re-evaluated.
@Victor – You said, “I approximate this with LRC speeds (adjusted by temperature) and a 6% effect of wind on the ground speed, i.e., a tailwind of 100 knots increases the ground speed by 6 knots.” I had wondered about the effects of crosswinds on the track but I think Headwinds and Tailwinds have a much high than a 6% effect.
On past occasions, you have been very helpful in correcting my errors so please try to see where I go wrong on this:
If I understood the Tables on page PI21.5 correctly, the effect of a 100 KTS Tailwind is not a percentage but a fixed distance independent of air speed.
Let’s say you use a constant LRC of 450 KTAS for a ground distance of 1200 NM with no wind. Excluding climb and descent, etc., that trip would take 2h40m. Now, if we add a 100 Knot Tailwind, the table equates that to a distance of 991 NM. A 991 NM trip at 450 KTAS would take about 2h12.13m but in actuality you really traveled 1200 NM in 2h12.3m giving you a 545 Knot ground speed. Similarly, a 100 Knot Headwind would give you an average ground speed of 344 Knots. Is this correct? If it is, it would mean a 100 Knot Headwind could slow you down by 106 Knots and I’m not sure if that makes sense.
@jeffwise – How about the transponder was turned back on at 18:25 but had been reprogrammed to give a different flight number? (Flight numbers for each aircraft should change all of the time.) I still believe that the a/c is in the SIO, but if it flew north with the transponder reporting that this plane was a different flight # (such as UAE 343), the radar watchers up north could say, “I thought that flight already passed us?” and then “ but I guess not because there it is.”
StevanG – I wouldn’t “bet” on much with China. That western region is a long way from Europe. Do they really have a nurtured chummyness with the stans? Elsewhere borders work by cooperation. I’m not certain about this bit, but I’m told they have an over the horizon set up of sorts because of the terrain, but at those latitudes it has it’s seasonal issues and it’s overall capability is a guarded thing. If it was one of those detections then it has a classification.
All in the hypothetical realm.
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2015/03/10/09/19/malaysia-airlines-handwipes-could-be-first-clue-to-mh370
Wow Matty that could be the beginning, huh?
But…
That’s a really shiny package for something that’s been adrift for a year. No physical damage, fine, but no fading?
We also have a contradiction within the article – the voiceover says it’s unopened, while the article says its unwrapped. That is not insignificant as one would expect unwrapping to occur later in the flight.
@Lauren H: If the plane truly flew in LRC mode, the ground speed would be the vector addition of the plane relative to the air and the air relative to the ground. For a given airspeed, a crosswind or a headwind would slow the groundspeed and a tailwind would increase the speed.
In ECON mode, a cost is assigned to both fuel burn and “time burn”. LRC is roughly equivalent to ECON mode in still air with Cost Index (CI) = 180 for the B777. So in ECON mode, a headwind will cause the airspeed to speed up as result of the cost of time. I have read that for a particular choice of CI, a tailwind of 100 knots causes a groundspeed increase of 6 knots. Hence, I am approximating ECON mode by reducing the effect of the wind on groundspeed down to 6%. Of course, as the headwind causes the ECON mode to increase airspeed, the maximum Mach number Mmo cannot be exceeded, so the effect of a headwind is more pronounced as the airspeed approaches Mmo.
My “poor man’s” ECON model is the best I can do right now without more detailed knowledge of the ECON algorithm, but the effect of wind on the groundspeed should be at least approximately correct.
@Lauren H, the possible role of the transponder should be explored when we discuss the problem of radar evasion on a Northern route.
Your idea crossed my mind, too. But it would probably only work during the night of the flight itself and maybe the plane could slip through unmolested. But the controllers would remember when the news of the plane’s disappearence were discussed everywhere. And in the early days of the investigation the Northern route was still very much on the table. It was also a stroke of luck for potential perps that the Malaysian controllers didn’t ring all alarm bells immediately and didn’t alert controllers of other countries.
If a transponder spoof or a midair swap with another plane – as aviation expert Ian Black told uk.news.yahoo.com on March 18 last year – is supposed to work it should give mh370 a totally convincing and legit reason to be on the northern route.
Ian Black desribes the scenario of a midair transponder code swap with another plane (maybe a cargo charter flight) – which probably would’ve filed a legit flight plan to Kazakhstan. But he doesn’t offer any thoughts on what would then happen with the second plane which now has the identity of mh370 or – more likely – goes into dark mode. We would be firmly in a two-planes scenario and would’ve to come up with a convincing explanation of what happened to that other plane.
Correction: I didn’t paraphrase Ian Black’s desription of a midair transponder swap totally accurately. The tidbit about a filed flight plan to Kazakhstan by a cargo plane was my fancyful addition.
JS – not hard to see why JACC didn’t get too excited, but zero public liaison.
@Matty and JS, the article says the picture of the unopened towelette isn’t the original. So we can’t judge if has “aged” correctly.
However I can’t imagine that this will be of any consequence. It could’ve gotten (or placed) there in a million ways. But I’m sure they will look carefully into this.
@Matty – agreed. I’m gonna go on a limb here:
1) MAS has regular service to Perth or somewhere near WA
2) towelettes are one of those items people hoard from airplanes, like ketchup packets from fast food restaurants.
3) towelettes are one of those items people bring to a place without facilities, like a beach.
4) the person missing the towelette is either unaware, or by now in hiding.
Now, if another hundred show up I’ll have egg on my face. But that packet looks like it’s been there a few days.
Littlefoot thanks, I missed that part. That could change things, or not.
So someone borrowed one from MAS to do the segment?
@Matty:
What interesting TIMING.
An unwrapped moist towelette with the MAS logo is found on a beach in Western Australia — in JULY — and it’s just now being reported? And the JACC is refusing to release a photograph of the original.
And this by the Oceanography expert and Professor Charitha Pattiaratchi (@2:16):
“If you actually told me that somebody found something in Indonesia, I would say no way, because the currents and things will not cross the equator.”
Did ATSB talk to Prof. Pattiaratchi before they asked Indonesia (back in October) to be on the lookout for debris from MH370?
In 8 minutes:
http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/ID/2524043705/
RE FactualInformation 1.6.3.7 (3) “Right engine consumes average 1.5T more fuel per/hour compared to left engine”
Appendix 1.6B Engine Health Monitoring – Decoded Data for Take-off and Climb Reports shows in the Climb report right engine fuel flow being 1.3% higher than left engine at same thrust (EPR L/R 1.342; WF (lb/hr) L: 15583 R:15786).
Anyone who follows ALSM’s last link will learn why I’m not quitting my day job to become a media darling any time soon…
Although I deeply regret the CBC’s decision to fall short of any overt call for search leaders to be held accountable, perhaps my BIGGEST regret was their cutting out my soliloquy on the high level of decorum and debate Duncan and Jeff (and others) have managed to foster. While achieving consensus online might be like tying up Jello with twine, there is something about this experiment in crowdsourced intelligence that resonates with me.
Just wanted everyone to know I stressed that point in the interview. Thanks again to everyone here – ESPECIALLY those with whom I’ve been able to disagree amicably.
@littlefoot: see “Concern #4” (pp 9 & 10) of my report for answers to your questions:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-r3yuaF2p72ZkNWN1U5bklEbTA/view?usp=sharing
The Malaysian government has denied this (very likely bogus) cell phone story from the beginning, and ever since, so – on this topic, at least – they seem to have far more credibility than do the US officials who “confirmed” it.
@ airlandseaman
Either Irving or his editor made a real dog’s breakfast of the MH370 timeline in the Daily Beast article you linked.
JS – MAS use Perth Intl and they will dispense many thousands of those a day and Cervantes is a tourist spot just north of Perth with an ancient petrified forest sitting there. But would it have been worth following up as a possible lead back in July? If it was MH370 related maybe a proper survey of those beaches?
@Jeff @LaurenH
Again in FactualInformation …. as raised earlier.
1.6.3.9 is a very big “outlier” from expected behaviour – yet no one is talking about it. Curious?
As I know nothing about aircraft – just applying some Kepner Tregoe thinking and asking Why?
It kind of changes the whole complextion if its significant.
LPB wrote:
“1.6.3.9 is a very big “outlier” from expected behaviour – yet no one is talking about it. Curious?”
Why is that? To me it simply means that no abnormalities were present while ACARS was available. No message could be sent after ACARS was ‘disabled’.
@Gysbreght & LPB, The missing piece of information is the frequency with which this information was normally transmitted. If it was supposed to be sent every half hour, which would seem reasonable, then its absence at 17.03 might be a clue that something fishy was afoot. But the way this section is worded is ambiguous. It’s odd/annoying that they raise the issue but leave it hanging…
Another issue highlighted in FactualInformation is the missing Flight ID when the SATCOM link was re-established.
1.9.5.1 SATCOM System Description (pdf p66)
[quote]5. AIMS Cabinet is one of two Airplane Information Management System cabinets, which
route numerous information to and from the SDU, including ACARS data, Navigational
data, AES ID and Flight ID.[/quote]
1.9.5.3 SATCOM Ground Station Logs of the Event – Summary (pdf p71)
[quote]4. When the SATCOM link was re-established at the above times, no Flight ID was present.
5. During each of the two in-flight Log-Ons at 18:25 UTC and 00:19 UTC, the GES recorded
abnormal frequency offsets for the burst transmissions from the SATCOM.[/quote]
There is more discussion in 1.9.5.4 SATCOM Ground Station Logs – Key Observations in Chronological
Order (pdf p72).
In the “Notes for Signalling Unit Log” released on 29-05-2014 there is no “Field Heading” for “Flight ID”. Is it part of the payload? Do the transmission items 1 – 4 in paragraph 1.9.5.4 carry a payload?
@Brock,
I recapitulated your argument re: cellphone connection.
While I wouldn’t rule out a connection with absolute certainty I agree that it is highly unlikely, especially since that story could’ve been documented and verified by the phone company immediately.
One thing is certain, though: Some faction must’ve been lying deliberately. It is indeed troubling that CNN spread the story about an anonymous US official source supporting the claim.The big questian is why. Personally I don’t see it as a deflection from the Diego Garcia narrative or an attempt to implicate the pilots. On the contrary, a co-pilot who’s trying to use his cellphone knowing full well that the chances to complete a call are slim to none is hardly in the middle of abducting his plane. A lowly flying plane can indicate anything, from a mechanical problem to a hijacker’s evasion attempt. At the time when this tidbit was spread I took it as an absolute confirmation of the fact that the plane had indeed turned around and flown over Penang, thus quelling all speculations about the radar tracks being bogus or showing another plane.
Re: Jeff’s thought that something “fishy was afoot” as early as 17:02:
This hack-in-the-box by Hugo Teso made some waves 2013:
http://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities-and-threats-/airplane-takeover-demonstrated-via-android-app/d/d-id/1109503?
I’ve read other articles covering this story and all highlighted the possibility of targeting the ACARS messages.
The danger of a hack was played down by the aviation industry. They pointed out that Hugo Teso performed it in an artificial enviroment, and the hack wouldn’t work in real life.
If the plane was really abducted by hijackers who targeted and exploited IT weaknesses there’s no reason to believe that the ‘fishy stuff’ only started shortly before the plane went dark and turned around.
Btw: How realistic is the idea that hijackers used cellphone jamming devices? The private investigator Ethan Hunt seemed to hint at that possibility in his Telegraph interview. He claimed not even one passenger sent a text message or phoned before the doors of the plane were closed. If that’s true it’s very strange indeed. Normally passengers call or or text these days until the very last moments before take-off.
Hi,
I would like to ask to the Satcom specialists:
Can SatCom connection be lost if freq. compensation is not working properly; how how much freq. shift (uplink / downlink) is allowed?
I’m thinking about GPS data misfeed / damaged connection,
assuming it is the GPS data which is used for the freq. comp.
In fact GPS can be spoofed but after some first thought experiments I tend to conclude that this is not likely to have happened. For example I have tried to calculate BFO in the case GPS produced lat. has the wrong sign. Looks like the observed pattern in BFO is difficult to produce by manipulation in combination with a Northern flight.
The fact that there are near straight paths at reasonable cruising speeds that fit the BFO/BTO indicates to me that GPS spoof is very unlikely (however theoretically not impossible)
Niels.
Electronic attack of GPS data
@Niels
I feel, this is quite a serious analysis of yours. And even as you stated back in october, that the ZERO values in the two last lines of ADSB-data from FR24 have been caused due to the system how FR24 works, i am a bit nervous to miss an important point here, because when i put your arguments and the list supplied by ALSM before Coppernickus on reddit, he insisted, that he had done the transformation right and that he did not find any ZERO values for the altitude data except the last two lines during the critical iniation of the deviation. We had lengthy discussions and i could not convince him. He seems very skilled to me and i think in the light of your analysis this issue might be seen in a new light. Because tampering with GPS might also explain these strange RR altitude data (if cfd).
.
.
In a blind trial, you probably wouldn’t find anything 🙂
Gysbrecht,
‘Factual Information’, sat comms, etc.
I would call into question whether the author of sect 1.9.5 was actually competent to write the material.
The Flight ID originates in the Flight Mgmt Computer, it’s associated with the route & is a four digit number (the systems ‘know’ they’re MH). The Flight ID, along with the Aircraft Regn, is used as an identifer within the ACARS messages. That data is ‘inside’ the ACARS messages, i.e., in the payload which was not released until this report (in the form of the ACARS Traffic Log). The Inmarsat logs would not have a column headed ‘Flight ID’. The SDU nor Inmarsat have any concept of that information, it’s just a sequence of bits & octets that they exchange.
I believe this discussion of the Flight ID shows that the MH0370 service route was cleared from the FMS. Another ad-hoc route was entered in the FMS and 9M-MRO followed this route back across the Malaysian peninsula, out across the Straits of Malacca and on.
Another ‘Keystone Cops’ characteristic of the document concerns the timestamp shown for the messages in the ACARS Traffic Log (Appendix 1.9A). The displayed timestamps show an error of about 17 seconds. That’s readily explained (and can be verified by competent people) by understanding that the system running that Traffic Log application is interpreting a time value based on its incorrect clock. I have referenced that error to the events recorded in the Inmarsat SU Log: sometime ago I’d collated all those individual SUs listed in theInmarsat Log into the 18 or so discrete messages they represent. Also note, if you’re digging into the ACARS Traffic Log, it shows times relating to operations between the MAS ops client system and the ACARS processor in “SITA-land”, not directly to operations at the GES or AES.
A concern is the many, apparently superficial, errors in this “Factual Information” document. It’s only with sufficient knowledge of the integration across the systems that the significance (or not) of these small errors & pieces of information becomes understood and actionable.
I don’t get the confidence that the investigation, i.e., Malaysia, has that knowledge.
:Don
@Brock Something’s wrong…
In my head you have a beard!
Very nice job on CBC, brave of you to go for it.
Can’t imagine what those poor kids have been through. No better reason to keep digging…
@GuardedDon,
Thanks for your reply. You write:
“I would call into question whether the author of sect 1.9.5 was actually competent to write the material.”
and at the end:
“I don’t get the confidence that the investigation, i.e., Malaysia, has that knowledge.”
Well of course they don’t have that knowledge. Nor do better equipped agencies like the NTSB, AAIB, ATSB or BEA have all that knowledge in house when they conduct an investigation into an accident. They have to build most of their knowledge from the information they request and receive from outside parties such as the operator, airplane and equipment manufacturers, etc. Where do you get your knowledge?
“The Flight ID originates in the Flight Mgmt Computer”. That may be so, but if the SDU receives it via the AIMS would that be incorrectly stated in the Factual Information report? When the pilot enters the Flight ID in the FMC and selects the active flight plan, would that be a single or two actions? If the active flight plan is cancelled and an ad-hoc rout is entered in the FMS, does that automatically erase the Flight ID?
“That data is ‘inside’ the ACARS messages” – So is the Factual Information incorrect in 1.9.5.4 when it explicitly states that no Flight ID is sent to the GES at 1250:19 (the first SATCOM activity recorded at the GES), but a valid Flight ID is sent in the normal Log On Renewal at 1555:57? Perhaps the pilot had entered, or selected and executed the Flight ID between those times? But were these events transmissions of ACARS messages?
Gysbreght
@Brock, @Littlefoot:
I’m now of the mind that two of the three phone stories related to MH370 were likely planted: the ‘mysterious” phone call to Capt. Shah before the plane took off AND the cell-phone to Penang tower. Why?
The call to Shah fits in the bucket with other information put out early by the media that was later stated (by Shah’s family) to be untrue. Namely:
Shah was a fanatic who attended the trial of Anwar not long before flight MH370. FALSE — he didn’t attend the trial.
Shah’s wife left him before flight MH370 and therefore he was despondent. FALSE — she went to stay with relatives as is the custom when the husband/father is away.
[See the 4Corners documentary for more on these misreported stories.]
Then, we get a story about a mysterious cell phone call to Shah from a woman (or someone who pretended to be a woman) using a phone with a fake SIM card ID. And then that story quietly went away. What happened to it?
My thought now is that Ethan Hunt’s interview in the Guardian was a very shrewd move. Here’s why:
1. The crowd-sourcing effort to hire private investigators only raised a little more than $100K. If the families involved aren’t out of money yet, they’re about to be. So Hunt has let the world know that the families’ private investigative effort needs additional funding.
2. Everyone has been asking the same question for months: why weren’t there any calls from the pax or crew on MH370? IF what Hunt says is true (read: nobody sent a message from MH370 BEFORE the doors closed), then he’s just answered that question. That’s a BIG find from an investigative standpoint. Moreover, we might surmise that the authorities in Malaysia (and elsewhere) are likely not happy about Hunt’s disclosure — because it means that whatever happened to MH370 started before it left KLIA. In essence, Hunt employed the same ruse he described using to flush out that missing $25K in China. And if he’s correct, now Malaysia’s been put on notice. So what else do Hunt and the private investigators know — and how will they use that information for leverage going forward?
The best way to surface the truth is to understand who gains the most from lying. Again, I’m not removing the Capt from the suspects list, but it’s quite interesting to note the barrage of stories that were put out early to ‘paint’ him? Who benefited from THAT?
At least one person has attempted to argue to me that Nathan Hunt looks ‘dubious’. Is he making a fortune (or any money) from helping the families get to the bottom of this story. By the looks of it, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Far from it. Perhaps the problem is that his efforts are occurring in a part of the world where it’s not customary to go out of your way to help people you’re not related to — or don’t know well. Let’s be clear that in Asia, that mindset is not limited to Malaysia and China. But Sarah Bajc said “she and the committee have ‘put many controls in place regarding Ethan’s involvement. To the best of my knowledge, he has always behaved in an honest and upstanding way.'” Given this, I’d submit that Hunt has far less to gain from manufacturing a lie about no calls from MH370 than the entities that appear to be working overtime to implicate Capt Shah in the disappearance of this plane.
And doesn’t this speak volumes:
MH370 investigators have interviewed FEWER people than the private investigators hired by Sarah Bajc and the other families.
http://t.co/F9LklzUNKw
Factual Information – radar returns
A couple of observations:
– the mid air turn around is now shown as a dotted wide arc connecting solid lines (fig 1.1B).
– The previously published high resolution track (including the “too” sharp corner) has been ommitted completely. Why?
– The post “going dark” radar track is stiched together from many separate un-identified returns. There are actually no reported returns in the report of the turn back itself.
– The Malacca straight track has a huge hole in it (between mark 8 and 9 in Fig 1.1B)
– The first of the two track portions in Fig 1.1E shows a right turn at the end and the respective exit end entry tangents do not match. To connect the two, the a/c must have executed a turn, increasing the distance flown. What effect on required speed does this have, is it still consistent with performance characteristics?
– Fig 1.1F shows three clusters of disconnected radar returns north of the two track portions of Fig 1.1E. Is there any significance to this?
– Given the many “appears”-“drops” of radar returns, is it possible to re-construct/determine actual altitude based on assumptions that all returns were from the same a/c and the drops were caused by LOS obstructions from Kota Baru?
Cheers
Will