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.
@Oleksandr:
“The subsequent typical miscommunication between incompetent managers in MAS (and not only) has resulted in this inconsistency.”
Is this a fact or your assumption? Based on what? And how do you know it’s TRUE?
“Even if you know the exact cause of this mess, how would it help in finding MH370?”
The REASON/motivation for MAS to REMOVE information about an on-board communication system that relies on the SATCOM (which, ICYMI, presents its own mystery in the case of MH370) is HIGHLY relevant.
Why do (good) investigators pay very close attention to what happens in the *environment* AFTER a crime occurs? Did someone’s routine behaviour CHANGE after the crime? Has a suspect left the area? Did they suddenly get rid of personal belongings? Did they wipe information on their computer? Has information been removed from a website after the fact? Have company documents gone missing? Did a person working for the company under suspicion suddenly die? Are witnesses cooperating or are they scared? A smart, competent, effective investigator would NEVER, EVER ASSUME that they know the answers to those questions — they would ask: WHY?
@Niels,
It seems that the “red oval” for the 00:00 image somehow got displaced. The intended feature is just to the right and slightly lower in that image. That linear feature is the same one more correctly marked in the other two images. I would say it is consistent with the other two images. In other words, the feature is not changing noticeably in length or location during the ~1 hour time interval shown here.
More on this insurance and clever, contrived use of funds later.
Note the date is August 2014.
http://english.astroawani.com/mh370-news/mh370-no-claims-filed-malaysia-search-plane-42514
@Dr. Ulich
Bobby, I found and downloaded the sat images myself now. The time-stamp seems to be Moscow time, so UTC+4 hours. However, we should be sure if it was like that on 8 march 2014.
I’ll recheck the 04:00 image with your latest direction.
@Dr. Ulich
Bobby, the 04:00 (00:00 UTC?) image has very low contrast because close to sunrise at the location of interest, also the jpeg has limited resolution. So very difficult to see any features.
I’m unpacking the .7z file hoping at better resolutions. It contains large files with extension .L15 (?); Can you please ask Kyrill what he is using?
@Dr. Ulich
Moscow timezone has recently changed:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Time
Better to check with the sat operators.
Also I noticed I had to retrieve the 080314 images from a map 0503 or 0603. Has to be checked as well.
I think you are using the right images but better to be 100% sure.
Bobby,
Thank you for your detailed comments.
You said “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.”
Why do you think the straight line, which is fuzzy at MEKAR (it is not “extending all the way across the image”) getting clearer westward is an artifact in the imaging sensor, while the ‘hook’ is contrail? This line is quite unique. At least because of its orientation coinciding with the heading of MH370. That is why I hoped to take a look at the extended images you said you have. If it terminates at Nicobar Islands, it is definitely not an artifact of sensor/processing. If it extends across the image – it is an artifact.
With regard to hypoxia, this version can hardly fit FI and timeline:
18:25 – somebody had sufficiently clear mind to repair/switch on AES;
18:28 – it became possible to make a call from the cockpit or send ‘SOS’ from the cabin;
18:40 – nobody picked the call;
The same time (18:25-18:55) somebody was piloting the aircraft at cruising altitudes, performed a series of maneuvers (if the ‘hook’ is the contrail of MH370), and entered a new path to the middle of nowhere into the AP. This does not sound convincing.
Nihonmama,
Yes, it was my assumption. I think the “REASON/motivation for MAS to REMOVE information about an on-board communication” was trivial. I don’t think it will provide some new leads. I am not saying that this inconsistency should not be investigated (who knows what can pop up), but I think it is of lower importance because the passengers still could send a distress signal after 18:28. But they have not.
ATSB said repeatedly that they were “cautiously optimistic” that they would find it. I’d say it translates to we believe we know where the plane is.
Gysbreght:
Posted April 12, 2015 at 7:04 AM
“Few crimes are perfect.
Suppose the perpetrator successfully negotiated a path through the ITCZ, went to the toilet, and was unable to get back into the cockpit?”
What about:
Suppose the perpetrator waited till 18:20 to make sure nobody else was alive onboard, set up AP, went out to switch on AES because he/she needed communication, but then was unable to get back into the cockpit?
VictorI:
Very nice overlay of air routes onto the Suomi image.
What routes do planes take on their way past the Northern end of Sumatra? Last year I watched a few flights in this area on flighradar24, and at the time seemed to recall that coverage did not extend very far over the Andaman Sea. This year the coverage is much improved. Today I spent part of the day watching planes on flightradar24 to see where they went. Here are a few observations.
Most of the planes have origins or destinations at either Kuala Lumpur or Singapore.
1. Planes come and go in waves. At 13:00 UT, there was a wave bound for the Middle East. There was also an incoming set of planes. At 16:00 UT, another wave passed by bound for Europe. There were very few inbounds at this time. At 18:00 UT, there was another small wave that passed by for Europe. Again, essentially no inbounds.
2. Once beyond the Strait of Malacca, planes confined themselves to a few airways. P628 (GIVAL-DUKUN-MAPSO) was popular for European flights. N571 (VAMPI-MEKAR-NILAM-IGOGU) was favored by Middle Eastern flights. P574 (which goes over the NW tip of Sumatra) was preferred by flights with more Southerly destinations. However, these rules were not abolute.
3. Planes would occassionaly take short-cuts. For example, while planes would normally intersect N571 at VAMPI, some would take a direct line to MEKAR, cutting out two turns. Others followed the airway more closely.
The Suomi image shows numerous streaks in a NW-SE direction, which one is tempted to associate with contrails. However, certain details don’t line up.
a. The typical ground track of a plane through the area is about 295 degrees (depending in details of the particular flight path) while the streaks tend to have tracks closer to 320-330 degrees.
b. The streaks are distributed more or less uniformly over the image. However, planes stay close to airways around here, and the only two airways that pass through the image area are N571 and P574. The path deviations, when they occurred, were not enough to fill in the area.
The only way that I can see that the streaks are related to aircraft is if most originated on the track further East (P628) and drifted West. The wind speeds were not high in the area that night, so the drifts would have taken hours.
At this point, my opinion (not that anyone should care) is that it is dubious that the contrails of MH370 have been detected.
@sk999:
This tweet (and convo) may interest:
@simon_rp84: “Example of why VIIRS I4 is bad for contrail detection. This is far from air routes, yet cirrus looks like contrail.”
https://twitter.com/simon_rp84/status/590174374617022464
Spencer,
Your personal attacks on me here are rude, unprofessional, hurtful, and uncalled for. I am not convoluting anything. Giving a professional, linguistic opinion is not distorting facts. I’ve conceded ok it’s Captain Shah, the official report says it is, so let it be him speaking last.
I don’t have a “personal agenda,” I am open, very open to Jeff’s theory, Victor’s theory, the hypoxia theory, a hijacking theory, and a pilot sabotage/suicide theory. Any way we shake all the facts, they or some can be applied to all 4 official things on the table I think.
You seem to have the myopic viewpoint that Captain Shah was the sole perpetrator period. That is not being open minded.
I gained a lot of respect on Duncan Steel’s blog, worked hard to compile a lot of facts to make things easier for the IG and the bloggers, brought things to the table along with others, and have always had the grieving families at heart.
@Cheryl
It’s not an attack. It’s laughable that you claim to be open to a Zaharie culpable scenario. You take every opportunity to spin any would be incriminating information into something other than what it is, including the ATC transmission.
Your interest is in defending Zaharie, period. That’s what you do, time and again. Remember ‘OUR’ pilots?
If you had the grieving families at heart, you would take a long, cold, hard, unflinching stare at ‘your’ pilot and help to bring the focus squarely upon him (where it deserves to be).
Instead, what we hear time and again from you is always in the same refrain as this gem of yours:
I don’t read much into that call to Captain Shah at all from the beginning. I don’t think it was anyone listening to his call contents, the call itself was traced to a place I think in KL and the card was purchased in a woman’s name. Means nothing. As I have stated before, a lot of people in those countries pay as they go as far as cell phones go, not all I would imagine have billed accounts like we do. Could have been anyone or even not a true fact. I think Mr. Asuad Khan, his brother in-law, stated that Captain Shah’s What’s Ap was active until about 7:45PM or thereabout that evening of the flight. I think phone card places and internet cafes are a dime a dozen in some foreign countries.
Means nothing? LOL. We should all just forget about it and move right along. You have countless posts in this same vein, downplaying, discarding and diminishing anything suggestive of Z’s guilt..and you claim to harbor no ‘personal agenda’?
Why be ‘open-minded’ when there is nothing to be open-minded about? The scenarios you apparently take seriously are beyond far-fetched…they’re patently absurd, IMO.
I’m beyond convinced Zaharie killed 238 innocent people, and I’m willing to risk anything and everything on this.
Not that you care, but you would have earned my respect if you had chosen to be candid and admitted to very much having an agenda…
So how about shining that big spotlight on Zaharie? No one else seems to think this would be a worthwhile endeavor either, so it appears you are in good and populated company.
@Dr. Ulich
Bobby,Please have a look at the following image:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/17kdn2187qs134b/0430_selection_enh6b%20-%20Copy.jpg
I have drawn a line to the east/south of the possible feature.
The left segment is related to the feature you have indicated before. There seems (at least) to be a resolution problem there at the moment.
The middle section I’m not sure about
The right hand section in fact IMO is the most clear.
A warning is needed: Honestly speaking it is hard not to start seeing distrails/contrails where they might not be. Also I noticed it quite easy to enhance a certain feature selectively by playing with the image processing tools available (I’m using Corel PhotoPaint)
In addition:I am an amateur concerning image processing.
So, I will look for an expert in image processing at my institution who hopefully doesn’t suffer from “distrail vision”
@All, overall I don’t know for sure if these features are distrails/contrails. Neither we know for sure if these are related to MH370. Nevertheless I agree with Bobby, Kyrill and others that these satellite images could contain a wealth of information, so definitely important to put much effort here.
@spencer, @luigi, @mrm9-mro, @orwhatevereverelseyoumightcallyourselfelsewhere,
You: “It’s not an attack”
Me: LOL, that’s preposterous!
In fact, you seem to invest a lot of energy in ad hominem attacks. It contributes nothing here. It’s all noise.
Cheers,
Will
The location of the ITCZ, for example?
@spencer, You write, “I’m beyond convinced Zaharie killed 238 innocent people, and I’m willing to risk anything and everything on this.” Certainty in the face of ambiguous information may be regarded as a virtue in the world at large, but it is a crippling handicap here, where we are trying to use the scientific method to make sense of a complex and technically sophisticated event. Listening to others, and having the courage to change one’s mind based on what you hear, can be difficult, but it is crucial –without it all we have is a bunch of people snarling at one another. If you have evidence implicated Zaharie Shah, then you are welcome to lay it out, but no more ad hominem attacks.
MuOne–He’s also “tailskid” on airliners.net. Does the same act there too.
@Spencer–
As almost everyone else is saying, you need to calm down. To announce to a bunch of strangers over the internet that you you’re “beyond convinced that Shah did it and willing to risk anything on this” repeatedly is just strange. The fact that you have multiple usernames across multiple forums and spend a majority of your day preaching this is just straight up sad. We all understand your viewpoint. You’re coming off as a crazed maniac who needs people to understand his logic and agree with him. IF you had some social awareness, you’d recognize that people are just becoming annoyed by this. It’s really not very complicated to understand that although some theories have more merit than others, we really just do not have enough information to confirm one theory over another at this point. How does it benefit you at all to continually announce your viewpoint and why you believe it over and over again? There are many people who believe the same as you do, but are able to keep it to themselves.
You are truly acting in-line with the attitudes of those involved with the Salem Witch Trials. This is why the justice system has changed over the years, and one cannot be implicated by just whatever seems to make the most sense at the time backed by weak circumstantial evidence. And yes, I believe most likely Shah was responsible, but certainly have not cemented that as a definite.
@Bobby, mostly – the “hook” in your images is fascinating, but there’s one concern I haven’t really seen discussed.
Is this turn consistent with a B777’s performance at an altitude suitable for contrails?
It seems a little sharp for a 35,000 foot turn. Now that I think about it, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a contrail with more than a slight bend in it.
Dear IG members,
I’m keen to highlight the locations of search ships on either side of “update blackouts” – times at which AIS position updates were less than typical (required?).
Does the IG’s new AIS license grant access to detailed (UTC, LAT, LONG) historical (since inception of “towfish search”) raw data?
If so: might you be so kind as to send it to me? I promise to deliver in return a set of ellipses representing the POTENTIAL ground covered by each ship during its blackout.
If not: would you be so kind as to refer me to your AIS provider, so I can request this data directly from them?
Many thanks in advance.
I’m certain that Mr Chillit reads the contributions here.
He has just redone his math and declared that the 7th arc is incorrectly positioned, by something like 700Km.
Come on Mr Chillit, get a grip. So all the scientists and mathematicians who have done the calculations over the past year, and have agreed with the position within a few Km have been wrong?
Show us your math. The calculation is not that difficult. The formula for deriving the round trip delay based on the BTO has been published. The satellite positions have been published. The BTO bias is easily verified using actual positions of the aircraft on the ground and from ADSB records. It takes a little spherical geometry to determine the radius from the sub satellite position and there are on-line calculators available to convert that into a “ping” ring to load into GE.
You have been down this track before Mr Chillit. Why again? You have already published a link to the most accurate .kmz files that are available for the “ping” rings.
Trying to persuade people that you have the only correct position will result in your credibility sinking to a new low. Just stick to plotting the ship’s positions.
This tweet from former pilot and air crash investigator Grant Brophy (“Symptoms of Groupthink”) seems especially appropriate right now:
https://twitter.com/airsafetyman/status/589500912323825666
@Oleksandr,
People suffering from hypoxia display apparently irrational decision-making, and they are unaware of their impairment. In my opinion, this could explain multiple turns in a short time span. Their actions may never make sense to a rational mind.
Nihonmama – Re groupthink – The “illusion of unanimity” is present here I’ve thought a few times. There is only one way to mount a search like this and this is with conviction. Take it away and the funding can dissipate, but I’ve sensed that there is a wider range of confidence levels inside JACC/ATSB than is projected. A couple of months back Houston volunteers the words – the plane may never be found. He’s been doing his job but maybe was never fully on board with the message. He flew helicopters in search and rescue and knows what an expansive sea looks like. Any little problem with those numbers?
Kudos to everyone diving into the contrail images, been getting the folks into aged care and not really up with it but stalked at the same time by the “Oh those Russians” factor.” There was the doctored satellite photo’s of the “missile” streaking towards MH17 allegedly fired by a Ukrainian plane, so my mind has casually wandered into that territory. If someone could shut the door on the hoax angle for me? It would tie the search to the SIO in effect.
@Niels,
Kirill has corrected this 1 hour time shift yesterday. From his Twitter post:
”
drive.google.com/file/d/0BxdehEzeWd32OGpYcmk3NGpUZUU/view?usp=sharing
Updated images 21-Apr-15 (fix 1hr time zone offset for Electro-L images, add MetopB pass and FY2D/2E (GEO) ”
The correct UTCs for the three images on Page 7 are 01:00, 01:30, and 02:00. We are rechecking the time of the image on Page 8.
@JS,
You have asked two great questions. The reason you normally don’t see any contrails bending that sharply is because those aircraft are following aviation routes that are designed to get them to their destinations as directly as possible with minimal deviations. Only an unplanned diversion would cause such dramatic course changes, and this is the case for MH370.
The “hook” follows a fairly circular arc about 36 NM in diameter. At the aircraft ground speed of about 496 knots, this corresponds to a turning rate of only 0.43 degrees per second. The B777 is capable of turns up to 1.5 deg/sec. So this is actually a very gentle turn, taking roughly 5 minutes to complete about 120 degrees.
Previous MH370 turns, made near 17:22, are made at ~ 1 deg/sec or higher.
If you look very closely at the final turn contrail, you will note that it does not follow a perfect circle. Possibly the very slight wind (<3 knots) drifting the contrail distorted the arc during the roughly 20 minutes elapsed time before the picture was taken, or possibly the turn is more complex. Note the straight portion on the left side above the middle. One can create the same shape by conducting two turns. The first one (moving right to left near the top) is a major turn of about 100 degrees at a turning rate of about 0.52 deg/sec away from the path to SAMAK. After that initial turn, continue straight for a minute or so toward POVUS, and finally make a slight left turn of about 20 degrees, again at about 0.52 deg/sec, toward IGEBO. You will note that the 2 or possibly 3 straight sections of this contrail head directly to nearby waypoints.
I ask you, what are the chances that a cirrus cloud feature or a sea sediment trail (as has been proposed by others) would be so narrow and so linear and also point directly at several nearby aviation waypoints? This is no coincidence. It is a roadsign saying "I went thataway".
@Bobby,
I can’t disagree that the shape is distinctive, and if your analysis is correct, reasonable for a B777. It’s also too unusual to be coincidental.
That said, the lack of portions on either end of the hook bother me. I could see it being the reverse – the plane looped clockwise, for example. I’ve also looked at the alignment for both Banda and Maimun and neither fit with this hook.
Nevertheless, it hits the waypoint head on. It’s certainly worth looking deeper into.
Dr Ulich:
Are there any traces of UAE343 in your IR imaging of the FMT? As I recall, UAE343 passed through this area roughly 34 nm behind MH370.
@Niels,
The correct time for the image on Page 8 of my Addendum #4 is 01:30 UTC.
Local sunrise at 33S 87E on 8 April 2014 was at 00:29 UTC. Thus the sun was up for one hour when that image was captured.
At 39S 84E the sun rose on that day at 00:45 UTC. At 7N 96E the sun rose at 23:31 UTC on 7 March 2014.
@Michael Molinaro,
I have not been able to identify other contrails on N571. Other flights departing from KLIA would still be heavy and limited in altitude because they had not burned off appreciable fuel. I suspect they would still be at FL350 or below (do you know what altitude it was at near this location?). Since MH370 may not have created a contrail until is climbed above FL350, that could explain why no other contrails on N571 are readily seen. I’m not sure what altitudes incoming flights would be at. At some point they would have to descend for landing at KLIA.
In addition, if UA343 was 34 minutes behind MH370, and since this image was taken ~ 25 minutes after MH370 reached the beginning of the contrail, UA343 was still about 9 minutes SE of the contrail start. At 18:55 UAE343 would be roughly 30% of the way into the image from the right-hand edge.
@JS,
You are making a valid point. One cannot tell from this contrail image in which direction the path was flown.
I’ll take a look at BTO/BFO matching for a clockwise loop. At first glance, it does not look promising, though, because of the greater distance to be flown.
@Niels,
Sorry, but I had the month set incorrectly for the sunrise times (April instead of March). The correct times are:
Local sunrise at 7N 96E was at 23:46 UTC on 3/7.
At 33S 87E it rose at 00:06 UTC on 3/8
At 39S 84E it rose at 00:14 UTC on 3/8.
@Oleksandr, Victor I, Dr. Ulich: Regarding the described transverse line in the IR image of the FMT area near SANOB, although my untrained (mere attorney)eye doesn’t see that line anywhere near as well as I see the turn, the line Victor described as aligning with the portion of N571 between VAMPI and MEKAR, and coming close to SANOB sounds to me like it could likely be a contrail of UAE34. I looked up the description of the two planes’ paths at http://www.randengineering.ca/mh370.html and now wonder how close the two planes would have been if, as in the image, MH370 performed an earlier set of turns that diminished its lead in front of UAE34, and then turned into its general path as shown in the image? The many theories folks had a year ago about MH370 shadowing UAE34 are now being displaced in my mind by pictures of approaches at angles, and I wondered what elevation differences there were between the two planes at the time of the proposed FMT Dr. ULich believes his imaging work depicted, and what effect any elevation differences may have had on the ability of the IR process employed to depict/detect contrails left by the two planes.
Thank You, Dr. Ulich for your prompt reply. I was too busy typing in my message posting window to see it, and the messages crossed.
Dr Ulich, I’ve felt sure a brilliant mind is addressing the many MH370 problems ever since I saw your posts in Rodney Thompson’s site back on May 23, 2014. http://iheartmatlab.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/analysis-of-suspected-mh370-pings.html The work on the LANL/other acoustic sources and contrails is truly exciting (and I hope hot on the trail of the true incidents). Thank you for linking up with so many impressive enthusiasts who are merging many fields of study attempting to solve the problems posed. I hope to hear soon that plans are being made to expand the search area to your recommendations. Question: Would that require a new bathymetric survey first? Is your area outside of what was surveyed?
@Matty:
There’s just so much wrong. So much…
But the answer to MH370 is in following the money. Believe it.
As for MH17, that satellite photo of the “missile” streaking towards MH17 was (quickly) debunked as a hoax. But that doesn’t shut the door. Because there are other gaping holes that have been ignored — or suppressed.
For example, these two videos — one of which was deleted by the BBC and the other — taken one month before the downing of MH17 occurred. http://t.co/LJmE0ORyUf
@Michael Molinaro:
Thanks for referencing the MH370 and UA343 path overlay on Rand Engineering, which is the good work of @Keysersquishy (Twitter).
Re:
“The many theories folks had a year ago about MH370 shadowing UAE34 are now being displaced in my mind by pictures of approaches at angles…”
It’s interesting to note (again) that while MH370 was ahead of UA343 for a period of time, at 18:22 it was 14 nautical miles directly BEHIND UAE343.
And three minutes AFTER that, the unexplained SATCOM log-on request was initiated.
So if contrails, whose?
@All,
Here is a link to all the satellite images Kirill has posted (including the correct times):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxdehEzeWd32OGpYcmk3NGpUZUU/view
Here is a link to a table listing all the wavelength information for the satellite data:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EecxutfI9YK6WHB70JiWlfLbuJJX6CotW9BycX77pew/edit?usp=sharing …
@Michael Molinaro,
Thank you for your kind words.
Yes, a new bathymetric survey will need to be done before being sidescanned at all new areas further down the 7th arc. The area near my predicted location has not been surveyed yet.
I may have misunderstood the relative location of UAE343. If it was within +/-10 minutes of MH370, its complete path across my image on page 4 would have be viewed by the satellite at 18:55. I don’t see any evidence of a straight-through contrail along N571. Perhaps it was not high enough to generate a contrail in this area.
@sk999,
@Oleksandr,
The numerous “striations” that appear in the FMT image have a bearing of ~277 degrees. N571 changes from ~288 degrees at MEKAR to ~296 degrees, so the striations do not match any N571 leg bearing. I believe these striations, which appear virtually everywhere in the large, uncropped image, are due to uncorrected fixed-pattern noise in the sensor arrays. They are not contrails, sea sediment, clouds, etc. Many “rows” of these striations are visible, but they do not align with any aviation route.
The meandering streaks near 330 degrees bearing appear to be due to gradients in the natural cirrus clouds present that night that are somewhat easier to discern when viewing the raw image before it is spatially bandpass filtered to eliminate the slowly varying background.
@Alex Siew,
Here is a link to a larger image that includes IGARI:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzOIIFNlx2aUN0JUbTRwYm1wbVU/view?usp=sharing
This is the same Suomi NPP I4 channel at 18:55 as the FMT image, and it is processed similarly.
@Niels,
I looked at your image. Its resolution has been degraded, probably by the file being saved as a JPEG. That compressed format reduces fidelity. In addition, several of the features you are looking at are not the ones that I think may be a MH370 distrail.
Here is a link to a full-resolution 01:30 UTC Electro-L image assembled as an RGB .TIF file using the B1, B2, and B3 channels as the RGB stack layers:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzOIIFNlx2aUSTVJQ3B1WDhDOVE/view?usp=sharing
You need to view this image using a program like ImageJ (freeware) that can display image stacks.
Dr. Ulich
Thanks Bobby, for sharing the file. Most of the files in the Electro-L database are stored as JPEG. There seems to be bigger raw data files (stored in .7z compressed files) but I cannot recognise the format after unpacking. Maybe Kyrill would know this?
Would be nice to know as I downloaded everything from “0400” to “0730”. It even covers Maldives and DG. But that’s for future work.
Also checked the time of the 0400 file. Lookig at sunrise close to the equator I would say it is at about 90 degrees east. Sunrise in Jakarta wa at 22:58 UTC on March 7 2014. It makes 26 degrees east-west difference which is close to 2 hours. So it matches with the correction. I would like to understand the why, as at 7/8 march 2014 Moscow was at UTC+4.
For distrail detection I will soon talk to a specialist in image processing / pattern recognition. I think there should be a mathematical way to detect something alike a distrail, for example using 2D-FT. I think it is much better than just doing it by eye.
Also I think that all of us enhancing contrast, brightnes, edges, etc. should keep an exact log about steps taken in processing the images,as to make the data processing reproducible.
Regards,
Niels.
@Dr. Bobby, All of this discussion about seeing MH370 contrails is rather silly unless you can correlate known flight paths with visible features in similar nighttime IR satellite images. That’s step one.
As it is, it sounds to me like you’re willing yourself to see signal where there is really only noise.
Since we are mainly going over old ground now, it may be worthwhile so see this report on fire hazards due to Li-Ion batteries. This includes a video showing an actual battery-originated fire during a flight, and another training video showing the cabin crew how to deal with such fires.
http://techtalk.pcpitstop.com/2015/04/01/li-ion-batteries-still-cause-for-alarm/?pitcrew-batteryair=
@Jeffwise
Jeff, validating when possible is an important point. The best is to do it for traffic at the same day/time (similar atmospheric conditions)
For the SIO visible images I’m afraid there is not much traffic down there but it is worth looking for.
Are you aware of a possibility to play-back flightradar or alike back to 7/8 March 2014? There might have been a few aircraft heading for Perth going above or through clouds under similar atmospheric conditions as the area that we’re currently focusing at roughly (27 – 35S x 84 – 92E)
Niels.
Simon Proud (@simon_rp84)has posted the result of his analysis in which he concludes that the features attributed by Bobby as contrails are not contrails, for a number of reasons, including:
1) Absence of features in the long wave IR (LWIR) band, which should show a higher response to contrails than the Medium Wave IR (MWIR) band.
2) Incorrect atmospheric conditions for contrail formation.
http://www.reddit.com/r/MH370/comments/32t1hk/mh370_contrails_have_been_identified_and_measured/cqko0ip
I have not offered my opinion about the validity of the contrail data other than to say any proposed path that aligns with the contrail data should match the BTO data and there should be a demonstrated correlation between known flight paths and features attributed to contrails. As such, in the best case, I viewed the contrail analysis as a work in progress.
Simon, who claims particular expertise in this field, is quite certain that the features highlighted by Bobby are not contrails.
Victor
@Neils, I wasn’t speaking specifically of verifying contrails in the area and time of MH370’s disappearance; I meant that it ought to be possible to demonstrate that such contrails are visible ever, anywhere. If we know what they look like in known cases, it would then be possible to compare them to what Dr Bobby Ulich believes he sees in his sat images.
I have done a comparison of the satellite IR image north of Sumatra with seabed features by overlaying the image presented by Bobby in Google Earth. There is a strong correlation between the features in the IR image and seabed features, including the “MH370 Contrail”.
This would suggest that the feature presented as the MH370 contrail is due to a seabed contour.
Here is the graphic with the contrail overlay partially transparent.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lj1sqnwkytnp6f9/Contrails%20in%20GE.jpg?dl=0
@Jeff
For the visible light images and possible contrail/distrail formation, stability and possible amplification, it is very important to match the atmospheric conditions from that particular early morning. So I reiterate my question: are there possibilities known to access old flightradar data or alike? In the past there was the informal url “trick” but it stopped working.
Although there seems to be an issue with the IR images I think we should not give up on the contrail/distrail search in general, and support Kyrill and Bobby in moving this forward. It needs and deserves a strong effort.
Niels.
@Niels, You wrote, “I think we should not give up on the contrail/distrail search in general, and support Kyrill and Bobby in moving this forward. It needs and deserves a strong effort.” I disagree. The case of MH370 has offered up many chimera which we could profitlessly go chasing after. Unless Kyrill, Bobby, or someone else can demonstrate that this phenomenon actually exists, I think it belongs in the GeoResonance file.
@ Niels
http://planefinder.net/
On the right: Playback
Bottom, on the left: set the date