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.
Cheryl – The “get Shah” crew are almost vindictive. I’m totally open minded but the simulator? Is it still a case of an unnamed source? There were rumours of remote IO airstrips – and where you find those outside of the Maldives I don’t know. Now it’s way points down to the SIO! If there was some official disclosure re the simulator I missed it. Spencer?
MuOne – if they are contrails it becomes irresistible. I hope it doesn’t go the way of Georesonance.
@Matty
I don’t recall an OFFICIAL statement from the FBI regarding their findings (or lack thereof).
My recollection is that a preliminary retrieval produced nothing much of interest, accept that some files had been scrubbed ‘clean’. A few weeks later, I remember hearing that those deleted files were able to be recovered and produced the now infamous SIO landing strips, waypoints etc…
Again, I know of no OFFICIAL statement by the FBI on the matter. Maybe this pilot has access that I do not and is privy to whatever findings were made by the bureau? This seems unlikely, IMO, so I am not sure how it is that he is presenting this as fact.
Cheers (thanks for the post)…and I’m really not vindictive (I don’t even know another soul in the ‘get Shah’ group. Lone wolf here).
@All,
1. The 18:55 UTC medium-wave thermal IR images are consistent with a cold, attenuating, high-altitude contrail that emits weakly and attenuates the stronger emission from the warmer ocean below. The weather at the FMT location was clear at that time. I have not looked for high-altitude humidity data, but the temperatures were somewhat higher than standard. SK999, the engine exhaust adds water vapor to that present locally, and if the combined humidity reaches the saturation point droplets of water will form and then freeze, making the usual ice particles that make up most of the long-lasting high-altitude contrails. The engine exhaust also contains small particles of soot that enhance droplet formation through nucleation. Anyone who looks at the sky frequently has seen many persistent contrails day and night (Oleksandr, do you ever go outside and look at contrails?) Contrails are not always formed, but when the conditions are right, they do and can last for hours, drifting in the wind and slowly broadening and thinning.
2. The Mannstein et al. paper referenced by M Pat above has a lot of useful factoids for contrails:
a. They have a lower brightness temperature in the thermal infrared than the earth/sea below.
b. After ~20 minutes their typical width is ~1 km.
c. See their Figure 2 for a typical thermal infrared image showing contrails as seen from space. It looks a lot like my Page 4 image.
3. The 18:55 FMT image has been spatially band-pass filtered to remove the slowly varying background. Features with dimensions larger than 4 pixels were removed. This allows low-contrast, high-spatial-frequency features superimposed on a variable background to be discerned. This image has 375 m pixels, and the contrail appears to be only ~2 pixels wide (~750 m). Oleksandr, the faint dark line extending all the way across the image and passing through the “hook” appears to be an artifact in the imaging sensor. You will note other lines, both lighter and darker, parallel to it. I suspect that direction is actually along rows in the detector array. The source of the image is given in the title on page 4. Suomi NPP is the satellite, VIIRS is the instrument, and Band I4 is medium-wave IR (3.74 microns).
4. The wind drift of the FMT contrails is essentially negligible, since the wind there was 0-3 knots at that time. There could be 1-2 NM shifts at most.
5. The visible light images after sunrise show a dark signature consistent with the shadow of the contrail on the top of the cloud deck below. The sun angle produces a westward offset in the contrail shadow relative to the actual contrail location. We have not attempted to correct for the shadow offset because we have no information on the cloud top altitude.
6. The visible wavelength color images taken after sunrise have wider contrail features because (1) the camera pixels are larger (~1 km), and (2) the cloud tops are not flat at a constant altitude. The latter effect transforms cloud altitude variations into an uneven feature when seen from the satellite. The clouds tops are what create variable width and also variable contrast in the shadow image (i.e., they do look “ghostly”).
7. The wind drift of the SIO contrails is measurable because the winds were 20-50 knots from the west. Thus the contrail is displaced eastward by 20-50 NM per hour of time difference between the contrail creation time and the image capture time. I am presently computing the wind drift corrections for the multiple southern contrail segments. It will be interesting to see the wind-corrected track.
8. The shadow is west of the contrail, but the contrail moves eastward with time because of the westerly wind. These two effects are in opposite directions, and the observed contrail shadow wind-drifted about an hour later may not be too far from the actual aircraft track, depending on how far the aircraft was above the clouds.
9. We have at least 3 images of the upper part of the SIO contrail taken 30 minutes apart. We should be able to see the drift in apparent location and compare with the wind calculations. The image on Page 8 was taken at 01:00 UTC, and MH370 passed this region about 1.6 hours earlier.
10. The plane’s exhaust heat is probably not significant in the formation of contrails in clear air. However, if the plane were passing through a cloud, then perhaps it might cause some clearing. I don’t think this is the mechanism seen in the southernmost contrail images, but I can’t rule it out as a possibility. The planes exhaust heat is actually not even bright (much less brilliant) in the thermal infrared because the optical thickness of the exhaust plume is quite low. So the exhaust gas may be hot but that alone won’t produce a significant or lasting IR signature.
11. Other contrails and even turns are seen in the IR images some distance away from the MH370 FMT area, particularly near the Indonesian coastline. Some are on known aviation routes, and some are not. The IR signatures are identical to those we attribute to MH370.
12. The scale of the IR images can be obtained from the outlines of Indonesia and Weh Island. I have larger images that include Nicobar and all of Malaysia. The raw images are about 80 megapixels and 142 MB each. The scale of the visible images is given in some cases by the icons with coordinates inserted. All images are rectilinear with latitude up and longitude to the right.
13. I find it quite noteworthy that the 3rd turn contrail passes within ~1-2 NM of waypoint IGEBO. In addition, the radar track shows it passed through MEKAR. That’s not proof that the plane was on autopilot until fuel exhaustion, but there are other clues as well. The fits to the satellite data indicate very steady speed and direction.
14. Erratic turns at FMT may indicate irrational thinking (due to hypoxia) or even a novice pilot. The flight attendants had training in how to use the autopilot in emergency situations. It’s not clear who was controlling the aircraft after 18:22.
15. I welcome independent investigation and confirmation. Now you know where and when and how to look.
16. Cheryl, Kate Tee described a trail of black smoke behind the aircraft she saw. I don’t think it was a contrail, and I don’t think the plane she saw was MH370.
17. Sunny Coaster, you are correct that extrapolating the southernmost (wind-corrected and sun-angle corrected) contrail to the seventh arc may be the best we can do for a search point. With no corrections, the intersection is about 84.0E. It is possible that the net sun/wind corrections move the track estimate further SW a bit. The computer route I showed does not use any constraint from the SIO contrails. It just passes through IGEBO and maintains an amazingly steady Mach 0.840. That’s all. It is not tied to any of the contrails in the FMT zone or in the SIO. The fact that it comes very close to the SIO contrail means that particular route is a preferred one in satisfying the BTO data and in maintaining a constant Mach number (as in Long Range Cruise mode with a stepped altitude). Nearby solutions, such as one aligned with the southernmost tip of the contrail track are also allowed with acceptably steady speed.
18. Kirill and I will eventually get back to the acoustic and seismic analysis. A first look was promising, but there are too many faint noise events to be sure which ones may be related to an impact event. We have developed some detection methods that don’t depend on human judgment to avoid confirmation bias. The expected seismic signals are fairly weak, and it is too soon to say if this will produce a reliable impact event prediction.
Continuing from where I left off from my post on April 16 at 10:07 AM:
At 19:41 the BFO = 111, so for level flight we have:
111 = 148.845 + 0.09275*Vlat + 0.00157*Vlon, or:
Vlat = -408 – 0.017*Vlon kt (north positive)
That equation defines an arc of locations at time 19:41 + t.
Another arc of locations is defined by the BTO at 19:41 + t.
The location of the airplane at 19:41 + t is then at the intersection of those two arcs.
In this way a path can be constructed from the location at a particular time, and subsequent BFO’s and BFO’s, for as long as the altitude can be assumed to remain constant.
Bobby and Kirill,
Your explanations above are clear, and sound very convincing.
I think it would add enormously to the credibility of your work at this stage if you could obtain peer acceptance from a group/organisation which has a track record in identifying contrails from satellite images. Have you thought of asking Mannstein, Meyer, Wendling, or their successors at Institut fur Physik der Atmosphare to peer review your work?
@Dr. Ulich
Bobby,
Impressive contrail analysis. I have a question about the visible spectrum images. Why is the 00:00 utc contrail this much rotated? Are you sure there is really a contrail there?
The lines in 00:30 and 01:00 utc images are more clear. Are you sure these are contrails and not distrails? Potentially very important in relation to altitude.
Niels.
Gysbreght,
“At 19:41 the BFO = 111, so for level flight we have:
111 = 148.845 + 0.09275*Vlat + 0.00157*Vlon, or:
Vlat = -408 – 0.017*Vlon kt (north positive)
“.
Yes. I did not check the values you gave, but in principle yes.
“That equation defines an arc of locations at time 19:41 + t.”
No. Reasons: (1) the both coefficients are variable; they are valid for 19:41 only; (2) the relationship defines only dependence of Vlat = Vlat (Vlon); thus you have to consider ODE, which links location and velocity; (3) you don’t know continuous BFO = BFO(t). You can interpolate BFO between 19:41 and 20:41. Or, alternatively, you can make an assumption with regard to the flight mode.
In other words, what you described is called 1-st order upwind integration, which de-facto was done by ATSB in June.
“Another arc of locations is defined by the BTO at 19:41 + t.”
Yes, for discrete times.
“In this way a path can be constructed from the location at a particular time, and subsequent BFO’s and BFO’s, for as long as the altitude can be assumed to remain constant.”.
Yes and No. Yes, the path can be constructed, but implicitly you already made an assumption how BFO changes with the time in addition to the constant altitude assumption.
Gysbreght,
In addition to the previous. Just imagine that BFO at 20:11 is available, and it is equal to 160 Hz. Will it affect location and velocity at 20:00 according to your algorithm?
@Oleksandr:
Comments superfluous.
Bobby:
“Oleksandr, do you ever go outside and look at contrails?”
Indeed. But I’ve never seen contrails existing for 1 hour or even 20 minutes. Have you?
“the engine exhaust adds water vapor to that present locally, and if the combined humidity reaches the saturation point droplets of water will form and then freeze, making the usual ice particles that make up most of the long-lasting high-altitude contrails”.
These ice particles are subjected to sublimation, which depends on the saturated vapor pressure. They do not stay as ice particles forever. This is in addition to the turbulent diffusion, which disperses them.
“Oleksandr, the faint dark line extending all the way across the image and passing through the “hook” appears to be an artifact in the imaging sensor.”
This is interesting. So, there was another aircraft nearby just before 18:55?
” The source of the image is given in the title on page 4. Suomi NPP is the satellite, VIIRS is the instrument, and Band I4 is medium-wave IR (3.74 microns).”
What I mean is it possible to download these images from somewhere? Are images taken for the same area at other time (before or after) available?
“We have at least 3 images of the upper part of the SIO contrail taken 30 minutes apart. We should be able to see the drift in apparent location and compare with the wind calculations.”
This is precisely a reason to think that the feature you highlighted is not contrail, but rather some clouds-related effect.
“I have larger images that include Nicobar and all of Malaysia. The raw images are about 80 megapixels and 142 MB each”.
Could you share those, or crop 50% larger of the area you shown in your report?
“Erratic turns at FMT may indicate irrational thinking (due to hypoxia) or even a novice pilot. The flight attendants had training in how to use the autopilot in emergency situations. It’s not clear who was controlling the aircraft after 18:22.”
According to FI it appears that all the data interfaces except ACARS were restored by 18:28, and 18:40 call reached the cockpit. This is in addition to the question, why they could not ‘dive’ to the altitudes, where the crew would be able to open valves. Thus hypoxia version to explain “erratic turns” is very unlikely.
We have been data-starved since the beginning of this incident. The contrail analysis that Bobby and Kirill have presented could supply us with some additional data that could make a tremendous difference in our ability to predict the end point of the flight into the SIO. It deserves a lot of attention.
As part of this critical review, the validity of the analysis needs to be tested. As sk999 has stated, if there is sufficient S/N ratio to discern the path of MH370, there should be evidence of other contrails north of Sumatra from other known flights. If the result of this test is positive, that would significantly raise the confidence in this analysis.
When Bobby first published this work, I looked at the portion of his path in the time interval between the last radar point at 18:22:17 and the ping at 18:28:15 and fit his path to a series of straight tracks and constant turning-rate curves on a second-by-second basis. I then used this path to calculate the predicted BTO and BFO at each second and compared the data to the measured data.
What I found is that the path that Bobby has proposed matches the BTO at 18:25:27, but does not match the BTO at later times within acceptable limits. I won’t go into a lot of technical details, but the BTO v. time curve must reduce in slope to almost zero as the BTO values at 18:25 and 18:27 are nearly identical. This would indicate that the plane was traveling in a more tangential direction relative to the satellite than Bobby has proposed.
I have transmitted the details of this analysis to Bobby. The result does not necessarily invalidate his conclusions, but it does call into question the particular path that Bobby has chosen to connect the radar data with the first contrail data. I suspect that other paths are possible that connect the radar data and the contrail data, but not the specific path he has presented.
I have communicated my findings to Bobby, and we have had discussion via email. Bobby can speak for himself, but I do believe he now agrees that the particular path north of Sumatra in the indicated time interval is not correct.
Victor
Here’s another nice paper describing contrail formation:
http://www.aero-net.info/fileadmin/aeronet_files/links/documents/DLR/Schumann_Contrails.pdf
Contrails can form even in conditions of zero humidity if it is cold enough, but they do not persist. Persistence requires that the air be “ice-saturated”. Figure 5 of the linked paper (although quite busy) gives the relative humidty of liquid for which the air is ice saturated as a function of temperature. (Reference 44 is a JGR paper that gives a nicer version of this figure – it’s Fig. 12 in that paper.)
At 18:30, in the vicinity of the FMT, the air is ice-saturated above about 40,000 feet, so if MH370 flew at high alitude, it could leave a persistent contrail. At 22:00 and later, near longitude 86 degrees, there is a band of high humidity around -31 to -32 deg latitude between roughly 30,000 and 35,000 feet, but outside those altitudes and northward or southward at all altitudes the air is bone dry. So the plane would have to have dropped in altitude to reach this air. Whether it matches up with the feature in the Electro-L images requires more work.
RE: Contrails – when I first read Dr.Bobby’s document, it seemed it could help identify the path… however as I asked him on Twitter if there were any contrails at IGARI heading back over Malaysia.. but still waiting reconfirmation as initially none.
An interesting article
“Based on those little signals what I’m arguing is that if you have calculated something why not send a real plane on the assumed calculated flight path to check you are right, which would allow us to come closer to the truth. To my knowledge there is no proven theory to work out a distance or position using Inmarsat signals.”
@Oleksandr:
“But I’ve never seen contrails existing for 1 hour or even 20 minutes. Have you?”
I live near two airports and often see contrails that take quite a long time to dissipate. It’s quite amazing, actually.
Dr Bobby, Kirill, + everyone interested in the unresolved matter of the seismic/acoustic data. Apart from the Dampier Reef hydrophone data which is yet to be collected and analyzed, are there any other stations which collected data from the morning of 3/8, which you do not have access to–and would like to have access to? Perhaps someone here could pull some strings.
Spencer –Zaharie, along with Fariq, are still firmly on my short list of possible perpetrators of this mass murder. I believe both pilots were under great stress at work and in their personal lives, and crucial details about where that stress came from are being suppressed and ignored by the investigation, MAS, and MSM. So you are not alone in some of your views–I just don’t feel it is a positive use of time to demand that people agree with me. I find the sneering, bullying tone that some people take towards each other distressing — for it is through courteously examining differing theories that an ‘aha!’ moment will come.
Nihonmama,
“I live near two airports and often see contrails that take quite a long time to dissipate”.
How long is “quite long”?
P.S. Sorry, I missed your question re satellite phone feature. My understanding of FI is that this service was not provided to the cabin, only to the cockpit, despite it was advertised by MAS. However, it was possible to send ‘SOS’ from the cabin by the means of sms or e-mail starting from 18:28. I am still waiting for comments from Don whether positive identification of the successful re-establishment of the data links is possible while the hardware was not actually working properly.
@All
As I explained last week I’m working on a “bfo only” analysis (triggered by the discussion between Gysbreght and Oleksandr).
I estimate that the error in the expression I use for v_z by neglecting certain x, y related terms is likely less than 10% for most of the interval 19:41 – 00:11 which makes the method potentially useful.
Note that this does not automatically imply that the error in lat(t) is less than 10% at all times, because of the exponential form of the solution. This aspect I’m addressing next.
As the error analysis is really complex I need more time to write it out. Nevertheless a preview of the (very raw) “version 0.1” of the doc to stimulate further discussion and possibly for some first feedback/suggestions for improvements by those interested in this approach.
I find most realistic lat speed profiles for starting positions arouns N1 degree at 1941 utc. The integration gives a 00:11 lat position around S32.
Niels.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9rcnqct8j8f16tu/lat%28t%29_BFO.pdf
@Oleksandr:
“How long is ‘quite long’?”
I’ve never timed them, but I’d wager that several I’ve seen have been visible for at least 30 minutes. The only reason I can say that is because I’m not far from the beach and when we’re out there and see them, myself or someone else has commented on how long the remnants of the contrails are visible.
“P.S. Sorry, I missed your question re satellite phone feature. My understanding of FI is that this service was not provided to the cabin, only to the cockpit, despite it was advertised by MAS.”
No worries. Thanks for circling back.
So the question we should ask is why there’s an apparent INCONSISTENCY between the (SAT phone) features MAS was advertising on its website AT THE TIME MH370 VANISHED, and what now appears in the ‘factual” report.
@Lucy
It gets a little aggravating when people with clear cut agendas (Cheryl) attempt to convolute and discredit what little FACT we have. 3 sources, including the official report, have said Z made the final transmission. Z’s own wife was one of these confirmations. Not good enough.
Yet the defend Z at any cost cabal (to the detriment of the NOK, which makes it, uh hum, reprehensible) cavalierly calls into question anything appearing incriminating. Whatever.
On your short list? Sorry, but there is simply no other PLAUSIBLE scenario, given what is known. Fariq? Give me a break (not trying to be snide or bullying, it’s just preposterous).
I appreciate your support.
@Bobby
Your comment on hypoxia or a novice pilot being a potential cause for the ‘erratic’ flight path is interesting? Why the speculation at this juncture? Just curious.
Are these images Russian?
Climate research satellites can sniff heat to a pretty subtle degree from space, and the issue is detecting heat. Is there a clean heat track at that altitude an hour and a half later?
There are some temp satellite guru’s at UAH by the name of Roy Spencer/John Christy. Be curious to know their impressions.
@All,
A number of people have posed questions to me today, and I will address them all here.
@Niels,
The contrail is rotated considerably west of south for two reasons. First, the track is a great circle with a bearing of about 192 degrees in the SIO. In addition, the wind is from the west strongly at ~45 knots. That rotates the contrails by another 5 degrees clockwise. The net bearing seen by the satellite is roughly 197 degrees.
You asked an excellent question regarding distrails. To see a picture of a typical “dissipation trail” or distrail go to:
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/coolimg/distrail/
It does look a lot like the MH370 SIO images, does it not?
For a spectacular picture of a distrail taken from the ground, go to:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2014/04/08/a-once-in-a-lifetime-sky-sundog-in-a-distrail/
I don’t know how to tell whether these SIO optical signatures are definitely contrail shadows or distrails, unless someone has access to some information on cloud top altitude in the SIO that morning (I do not). For 9M-MRO to reach that location, its altitude would have to be at least FL390 (and possibly as high as FL410). If the cloud tops reached at least to FL390, then I would suppose it is more likely that we are seeing distrails. That notion helps explain the lack of a continuous dark feature. It instead appears in some areas, then disappears, then reappears again. A variable cloud height with latitude could be the explanation for the variable contrast of the dark line.
The weather was clear at the FMT, so the contrails seen there are ice contrails, not distrails.
@ sk999,
Perhaps the reason the contrails only appear in the satellite images after the last radar location is that a climb was made shortly after 18:22 that brought 9M-MRO high enough for a contrail to form. The aircraft was at 35,000 feet when it diverted, and it was due near 18:25 to perform a step climb to approximately 39,000 feet or even to 41,000 feet. If the aircraft reached the vicinity of 40S on the 7th arc, the post-FMT path must have been at least as high as 39,000 feet or the fuel would have been exhausted well before 00:16. The “spottiness” of the FMT contrail from 18:22 to 18:28 (very approximately when it appears to become continuous), would be explained by a climb during this period. It remains to be seen whether a climb during this period is absolutely required to match the BFO data.
@Oleksandr,
Just Google “contrail lifetime” and you will find that ice contrails have a median lifetime of 2-3 hours. Occasionally the lifetime is 40 hours (during which time the ice cloud spreads as much as 100 km in width.
As a professional radio and optical astronomer, I have spent more hours than anyone you know looking carefully at the sky since 1971. I can tell you from personal experience that contrail lifetimes are highly variable ranging from no formation at all to many hours.
I don’t understand how you can infer “another nearby aircraft” contrail from “an artifact in the imaging sensor.” There are a very few additional contrails visible in the full image that were created by other aircraft.
If you want to look at some of the satellite images, you will need to make a request to Kirill Prostyakov, who has done a lot of work identifying useful data and downloading it.
You cannot tell from the apparent image feature drift with time whether a contrail over the cloud is drifting with wind and time or whether a distrail in the cloud is simply drifting with the cloud. The satellite imager will see the same drift, except for a very slight effect due to the sun’s elevation angle increasing during the morning.
In my opinion hypoxia is a viable explanation for the strange maneuvers at the FMT. Please consider that hypoxia could occur even without depressurization of the aircraft. Suppose you are the captain, and toxic smoke from a tire fire or a battery fire filled the flight deck and cabin. Do you immediately drop down to low altitude? Perhaps not, as that could feed the fire more oxygen and maybe put it out of control. Maybe you stay at high altitude and try to put the fire out (for instance, by turning off non-essential electrical equipment and possibly even entering the equipment bay with a fire extinguisher). At 17:22 you are too far from the nearest airport to reach it and land before the passengers’ oxygen generators are exhausted. Maybe you decide everyone’s best chance is to attempt to extinguish or limit the fire first before descending. Because of the smoke, you put the passengers on the oxygen masks, and you don yours as well. The smoke continues, and the fire is not put out. There is sufficient oxygen in the cabin, but you cannot breathe it because of the toxic fumes. First the passengers’ oxygen runs out. Then, yours is running low. Maybe the hose supplying oxygen from the tank in the equipment bay is damaged, and you have to find an emergency medical oxygen bottle. Eventually, about an hour later, your oxygen supply starts to run out. You make plans to attempt a landing. You turn equipment back on about 18:22. Maybe you think the nose wheel tires are useless. You try to figure out where to go. You don’t understand why it is taking so long to find the right airport, even after several attempts. Something is very wrong . . . .
@Victor,
Victor and I have been discussing the vexing problem of fitting all the BTO and BFO data from 18:25 to 18:28, when the FMT maneuvers began. In my contrail report, I showed one portion of the FMT path that I felt was accurate because the contrail is visible continuously with no gaps. That portion is shown in red in the figure on page 5, and it represents the path certainly after 18:28 and perhaps even later than that. I also showed, as a dashed line, a “Noisy Estimate” of the connecting path from the last radar contract to the start of the continuous contrail near 18:28. Victor is correct in his assessment that this portion of the path does not match all the BTO and BFO data between 18:25 and 18:28. Therefore it is not an accurate reflection of the true path of MH370 during this period of time.
As Victor states, a path more tangential to the handshake arcs is required to provide a small slope in a plot of BTO versus time (another possibility is that the aircraft speed dropped precipitously, but that does not seem likely for several other reasons).
I have done a more refined analysis of the image shown on Page 4, and a somewhat longer continuous contrail is visible, starting prior to 18:28. If you look at the image on Page 4, starting at the last arrow marker on the right, there appears to be a clear turning down of the track to a southerly direction. In addition, if you follow this feature down to the diagonal line (which is an artifact of the image downloading/processing), you can see another arc just tangent to the upper edge of the line and turning about 180 degrees back up to a more or less northerly direction. I’ll try to provide an enhanced image of this. This north-south portion of the path will provide a nearly ”tangential” segment. Some modeling is needed to see if the aircraft would be on that N-S segment at the appropriate times to satisfy the BTO and BFO data. I expect Victor and I will continue our assessment of this possibility.
Some potential but short contrail segments are also visible leading back to the last radar location. However, this portion of the path is still the most uncertain because of the lack of a (nearly) continuous contrail. Since we don’t know the full path exactly, we don’t know exactly the time required to reach the continuous contrail path, but we can figure out at least the shortest possible path to get there, and that allows us to bound the time required at the low end.
@Myron,
I have briefly looked for contrails near IGARI, but so far I have not been able to find any. That area, all the way to Kota Bharu, is almost completely cloud-covered. I have also inspected the route from Penang to MEKAR, with no likely candidates identified. Clouds are an issue there as well, but perhaps the atmospheric conditions were simply not conducive to contrail formation until an altitude approaching 40,000 feet was reached.
@Spencer,
In my opinion the apparently rather wild maneuvers required to match the BTO and BFO data (and also required to match the continuous contrail path) imply either a somewhat incapacitated pilot or a novice pilot controlling 9M-MRO during the FMT. Since there has been a lot of speculation regarding “why” this whole incident occurred, I thought it would be worthwhile for people to consider the impact of the FMT track on the various theories.
@Matty – Perth,
The Electro-L images are from a Russian satellite.
@Lucy,
Kirill and I have quite a bit of seismic station data (at least 18) to analyze. We put aside the acoustic work to focus on contrails. We do hope to restart the acoustic data analysis soon.
The hydrophone data is much preferred over seismic. I hope it becomes available soon.
@Matty:
“Are these images Russian?”
From a convo with Kiril Prostyakov yesterday. I asked what source for the images. His response:
“I calculated passes for all unclassified sats with cameras or the like and chosen ones that intersect with flight. And then just downloaded from official sites, NASA/NOAA mostly, and a bit of Chinese/Japanese/Russian institutions”
@ Niels:
Thanks for sharing your paper. My understanding of vector algebra and calculus has become a bit rusty, but the results look certainly promising.
Nihonmama,
Yes, there is an inconsistency. But I doubt about the usefulness of asking this; the inconsistency in the turn at VAMPI is more interesting (“Lido image” – CCW turn; ATSB – straight line; FI – CW turn). Just recall the initial mess with regard to the radar data. If it is a result of the inaccurate radar data, what is the accuracy of the last known location of MH370? If it is a result of incompetence, why it could not be fixed until now? Or the whole track is just a fake?
I have taken the image north of Sumatra presented in Bobby’s work and superimposed airways and waypoints to determine if there is a relationship between image patterns and airways. Although there are striations that are parallel to airways, the lateral extent of the parallel tracks in a group appear to be too wide to be associated with a particular airway.
What is needed is for somebody to compare the satellite image with actual flight paths at that time and try to correlate the image features with the paths.
Here’s the image I created:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1e61qh0zejvqiwg/Contrail%20and%20WPs.png?dl=0
Meanwhile, Ghyslain Wattrelos has doubled down. Very compelling video interview.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/malaysia/11454444/MH370-Investigator-with-secret-service-links-helping-French-father.html
@Lucy: I have accumulated only favours PAYABLE – not receivable – with Dr. Duncan, but will ask him about Dampier Reef.
@Bobby: you know how deeply I respected your seminal analysis pointing to E84. But I’m increasingly of the opinion that, even if I suppress my growing skepticism of the whole SIO story, I still think these satellite images are essentially a Rorschach test – we see in them what we WANT to see. I just read a contrail analysis meteorologist Tim Vasquez used to reverse-engineer a path leading to an unsearched corner of the highest probability zone: S46.49, E87.55. This coordinate was promising because the work was published March 24, 2014 – when the “highest probability zone” was the NTSB’s irregular polygon stretching down past S48 (I don’t suppose a journalist has ever bothered to ask the NTSB & ATSB to reconcile their respective fuel analyses…).
And it is getting very hard to suppress my skepticism with the SIO theory – whether extended to E83 or not. Where is the debris? Where is ANY physical evidence that actually supports the signal data? Efforts to produce corroborating physical evidence seem to be reaching ever further afield, and are starting to appear either suspicious, comical, or both.
Finally: the ATSB fuel limit of record explicitly rules E83 out. Wrongly, I pointed out in November, 2014 (Concern #7 in my report) – but if they didn’t correct this glaring error immediately (so the extension could be searched CONCURRENTLY), it will be HIGHLY suspicious if they correct it 6 months later, after wasting precious time and resources searching the improbable outer edges of their E88 theory.
I have felt since April that this search has been deliberately dragged through quicksand. An upcoming decision to extend the search west to E83 (which I predict will coincide with the decision to pack it in for the winter…) would have been welcomed last year – but now seems to me just the next in a series of low-key, low-value actions designed to run out the clock on the general public’s attention span.
If so, I hope it produces the opposite effect – that the general public is galvanized by this abuse of power, and DEMANDS accountability from its leaders.
For a change.
Has anyone refuted or even commented on this theory by Stuart Yeh (associate professor at the University of Minnesota) as for the possibility of increased ping processing delays leading the analysis into completely wrong trajectory?
http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1018&context=stuart_yeh
@nihonmama
Please scroll a bit to look at the picture of the 3 Musketeers. I haven’t been able to get the image out of my mind-don’t recall ever seeing anything like it. It didn’t get as much play as the more official photo but strikes me as much more interesting and somehow telling… what about the agreement to continue trawling and mapping has made them so boys club party gleeful?
Also, would Just the Facts or What We know threads be a good place to string the assorted untanglings of declarations, press, insurance, etc?
bizarre pic scroll down:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-flight-370-search.html
Victor, Bobby,
I think the line I mentioned earlier, which crosses the ‘hook’, could be traced directly up to MEKAR, where it is getting fuzzy. And the most interesting thing is that the orientation of this line appears to be approximately coinciding with the last known heading of MH370.
Bobby, is it possible to get a bit westward extended snapshot?
@Brock, you wrote “a series of low-key, low-value actions designed to run out the clock on the general public’s attention span.” I think that’s very well put. The Australians said they were absolutely confident that they would find the plane in the search area, and when they didn’t are now absolutely confident that they’ll find it in the expanded search area.
Meanwhile, the idea that the plane might have gone to Russia was singled out for specific disdain:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/aviation/searchers-still-sure-theyll-locate-flight-mh370-debris/story-e6frg95x-1227306822742?sv=dfffe6e5ac48b5c977ce25cf0ae0561
@dr.Bobby: On page 8 of the Contrail Data, I am wondering if that image of the aircraft is actually captured by the satellite or was it inserted bu you for illustrative purposes? The aircraft may not scale to a B777 or have the proper shape like that of a B777…
@Myron,
That aircraft silhouette was just an icon inserted by Kirill to mark some coordinates. It does not represent where we believe the plane went. Sorry for the confusion.
@Brock,again, I wholeheartedly agree with you.
@PeteR: The latency referred to by Matt Esposito, as referenced by Stuart Yeh, is the latency for internet service, and includes many factors totally unrelated to processing latency in the SATCOM unit. The processing delay in the SATCOM should be very small as the SDU needs to sync to the P-channel signal and precisely insert data according to its allocated time slot.
It is hard to believe that Prof. Yeh really believes the processing latency in the SDU is 1200 – 3500 ms (1.2 – 3.5 s!), which are the numbers cited by Mr. Esposito. I am not sure that Prof. Yeh’s paper was meant to be taken seriously.
@Oleksandr: Yes, I see the line you are referring to. In addition to aligning with the portion of N571 between VAMPI and MEKAR, it also comes close to SANOB. Whether that line is a contrail, and whether it can be attributed to MH370, are the relevant questions.
Brock, Dr Bobby et al, Dr Duncan told me via email back in January ’15 that they were planning to have a go at retrieving the Dampier reef log in May. Due to the location, it’s unlikely to add much. But at this point, the more data the merrier, right?
@Oleksandr:
“Yes, there is an inconsistency. But I doubt about the usefulness of asking this”
The SATCOM on MH370 was inexplicably off for almost an hour, we don’t know who was dead or alive or what was happening on the aircraft and then MAS deletes reference to the SAT phones on its 777 fleet AFTER MH370 vanishes. But asking about WHY that information was deleted from the MAS website (the existence of which would conflict with the FI issued AFTER the deletion) is NOT useful?
“If it is a result of the inaccurate radar data, what is the accuracy of the last known location of MH370? If it is a result of incompetence, why it could not be fixed until now? Or the whole track is just a fake?”
It bears repeating — the NYT’s Keith Bradsher told us very clearly what happened:
“Mr. Houston and Mr. Dolan declined to discuss any details about the Malaysian radar readings, nor would they speculate about why the missing plane would have been in controlled flight across the Indian Ocean.
IF the plane did not soar and swoop, but maintained a steadier altitude, its fuel would have lasted longer, letting it fly farther south across the Indian Ocean before its tanks ran dry. SO THE DISMISSAL OF THE RADAR ALTITUDE DATA PROMPTED A CHANGE IN THE FOCUS OF THE SEARCH.” (CAPS mine).”
http://t.co/I0ZLl2FF8f
Gila:
“Also, would Just the Facts or What We know threads be a good place to string the assorted untanglings of declarations, press, insurance”
Maybe. It might get lost though.
“what about the agreement to continue trawling and mapping has made them so boys club party gleeful?”
I don’t know that I’d describe their countenances as “gleeful”, but they do appear happy. The simple (innocent) answer would be that they’re happy because reaching an agreement to extend the search has given the families hope that the MH370 will eventually be found.
The hits just keep on coming.
United Airlines bars security researcher from flight after tweet about hacking
(4.19.15) — AP (Washington)
“‘Quite simply put, we can theorise on how to turn the engines off at 35,000ft and not have any of those damn flashing lights go off in the cockpit’
Roberts also told CNN he was able to connect to a box under his seat at least a dozen times to view data from the aircraft’s engines, fuel and flight-management systems.”
http://t.co/TUvi0LAM4k
Doesn’t look good for MAS, or Kazahnah or the Ministry of Finance delivering compensations to the NOK any time soon. According to an Airline Exec who went to Bejing to make his offer folks in February, only 7 Chinese NOK have accepted the interim payment of US $50,000- no mention of Malaysians. I will backtrack to find the specific link.
There are many more articles documenting abuse from MAS and a general unwillingness to accept monies. Private life insurance in China began paying out some time ago, and Malaysia private insurance claims are being processed, too.
After the accident declaration on Jan. 29 which allowed the processing of death certificates, the government authorized MAS to proceed with compensating the NOK. However, in yet another affront to dignity and reason, and in what (I hope) is a violation of international law, MAS is apparently still only offering the ‘interim’ $50,000 payment to ‘assist the families’ while insisting that the victims families ‘provide PROOF of their emotional and financial losses” in order to process their claims to the $175,000 due them under the Treaty of Montreal.
This may be why the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang stated “We hope the Malaysian side honors its promises and fully investigates the incident, settling claims and making peace with the families, especially continuing to make all efforts to find the missing plane and its passengers.”
http://www.ibtimes.com/mh370-compensation-only-interim-payment-offered-families-malaysia-airlines-crash-1837074
@Gila:
Well, here’s the good news: one journo who’s awake:
https://twitter.com/W7VOA/status/588605679255949312
Later.
@Dr. Ulich
Bobby,
Thank you for further clarifications and discussion. I think we should try to “read” the images as much as possible with an open mind, so I’m trying to shake-off bto/bfo biases as much as possible.
IMO some of the main questions for the visible light images are:
A) Are these contrails or distrails?
B) What is the level of the cloud deck?
C) is there really a contrail/distrail in the 00:00 UTC image?
A) en B) relate to flight level
C) relates to the timing of the contrail “production”
At the moment I find C) most essential. It makes the difference if we are looking at a possible “mid-flight print” or a possible “end-of-flight print” (from the 00:00 to 00:19 UTC part of the flight). I know the latter option would imply that the 00:11 and 00:19 BTO values are wrong.
Niels.
In the absence of new information we are regurgitating old stories that have been milked dry months ago:
“The ATSB has worked closely with Australian government agencies with expertise in the analysis of satellite imagery and has fed the results into its assessment of priority search areas.”
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/malaysia-airlines-mh370-australian-scientist-says-missing-aircraft-can-be-found-by-tracking-1470504
October 17, 2014 11:11 BST
Go Phoenix now tracking due West on its way back to the search area, well North of where it stopped scanning. Looks like it is going to start work inside the 7th arc.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/071yjltidrp4zos/SIO-20-Apr-15.pdf?dl=0
@jeffwise: thanks. Your link sent me to non-subscribers purgatory, but your point about never-ending confidence in eventual success is an important one. Exuding an expectation of imminent discovery is consistent with a plan to make us THINK the plane is in the SIO. “I mean, if it weren’t in the SIO, how could they be so confident?”
Sometimes, in my work, I’m asked to replace the word “estimated” with “indicative” when inferring population impacts from sample results. This happens when we are anxious not to be pinned down to the sample results. That’s why I had to chuckle at the latest map from the JACC, which plotted two things:
1) An INDICATIVE 120K km^2 zone area which expands the current 60K km^2 zone equally in all four directions, and
2) A set of POTENTIAL moves in the search area: arrows pointing in ALL FOUR directions.
In other words, this map illuminates nothing at all. (Surprise!)
Victor,
Yes, that line comes close to SANOB. Bobby mentioned that he has extended snapshots, and I hope to hear comments from him. At least it is possible to check where this line terminates.
If both the ‘line’ and ‘hook’ are eventually confirmed to be contrails, that would mean 2 aircrafts in the area in question.
Nihonmama,
Re: “But asking about WHY that information was deleted from the MAS website (the existence of which would conflict with the FI issued AFTER the deletion) is NOT useful?”
I think the explanation is trivial. Phone feature was advertised, but it was ‘replaced’ with a cheaper means of communication: sms and e-mail. The subsequent typical miscommunication between incompetent managers in MAS (and not only) has resulted in this inconsistency.
Even if you know the exact cause of this mess, how would it help in finding MH370?
I think they were mainly expressing confidence in the equipment being used. They are not “absolutely confident that they’ll find it in the expanded search area”. As reported in the IBT on April 16:
@Niels,
(A) in my opinion these are more likely to be distrails. I think it may be possible to distinguish contrail shadow or distrail based on movement w.r.t. cloud features using sequence of images. Shadow should move w.r.t. cloud features, but distrail will not. I’ll take a look.
(B) I do not know cloud top altitude.
(C) The 00:00 image is much less convincing to me than the other two later images. The contrast is very low (the sun is just rising). It may not be a MH370 distrail.
There is a possible inconsistency in some of the time data for these images. Kirill is rechecking to see if they are an hour later than originally indicated.