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.
@Jeff
A strange qualification. I think looking for condensation or evaporation trails in the visible spectrum, which most of us do by bare eye on a daily basis is something completely different than doing spectral analysis or whatever they called it through 3k of water.
Doing trail hunting from space means access to the right high resolution data and smart ways to find the needle in the haystack. IMO there is nothing unscientifically about it.
@Michael Molinaro
@Dr. Bobby Ulich
@Nihonmama
Some clarification on the position of UAE343 (EK343):
It is only according strictly to the limited annotations on the Lido radar image that MH370 would have been approx. 14 nm behind EK343 at 18:22 UTC.
A more detailed analysis of the image was undertaken by several people, including the IG (Don Thompson, I believe).
The plot prepared using that analysis, along with the IG path model, indicates that MH370 would have been approx. 34 nm ahead of EK343 between 18:13 UTC and 18:40 UTC, and as close as 18 nm at an angle of about 45 degrees to port at 18:42 UTC.
Any additional meandering of MH370 (per the recent contrail analysis) would make the separation even smaller.
Regardless, at the closest range indicated by the IG model (18:42 UTC), at cruise altitude on a clear night, I personally think it highly unlikely that EK343 would not have made visual contact (certainly if the plane were “glowing” or engulfed in flame or billowing smoke or such).
In fact, given the proximity, I think that *any* path models should take the relative position of EK343 into account, both in terms of physical position and visual range. We’re not talking about people on the ground seeing things at cruise altitude; we’re talking about pilots seeing something at the same altitude more or less right in front of them. (And yes, I am aware of the night time blind spot… but it was also at an angle both at 18:22 UTC and at 18:42 UTC if indeed it went south).
Re: con/distrail analysis:
@Victor, @jeffwise: thank you for the strength of your latest analysis/comments.
@Bobby, @Michael: this seems to me more like a CAMPAIGN to justify the upcoming move to E84 than it does a genuine scientific inquiry.
Much like the recent flurry of breathlessly optimistic hydro-acoustic analysis, I am sorry to say that I find this work to be many days late, and many dollars short.
I would have supported a shift to E83 back in August – when Bobby first proposed it, on the strength of analysis which actually made sense. But now that the search has invested several months in a performance limit which ruled it out, both inside and outside (?) analysts are now rummaging around for a rationale that will SELL. Reminds me of Dubya’s WMD campaign, quite frankly.
And this upcoming move will be far from the first which has been predicated on provably bogus non-science. They’ve ALL been. The pattern has become so obvious, even a dummy like me was able to predict the September shift south well before it took place. This search is quite clearly on a long-term SCHEDULE.
This “enthusiast” certainly appreciates new research and analysis being brought to the table – but certainly does NOT appreciate being sold a bill of goods.
ESPECIALLY if they try to move the search west in May, we “enthusiasts” are going to hold search leaders ACCOUNTABLE for their 14-month litany of BS. Enough is enough.
@contrail discussion
1) The structures show a special curvature untypical for civilan flights. Also the climb and attained altitude need explanation. So the question, can the IR- Features represent the trace of a military fighter plane on its ascent way to intercept MH370?
2) Alternatively the question of a decoy plane. Could the features represent the start of such a second plane that produced the INMARSAT data. Would e.g. a drone be able to produce such a trace and also the “distrail” in the visible images part?
Evidence search leaders are trying to slink west yet again:
1) Per last night’s weekly ops update (emphasis mine): “The Search Strategy Working Group continues its analysis of the satellite communication system messages AND AIRCRAFT PERFORMANCE. This ongoing effort may result in refinements to the search area along the seventh arc”. Why even mention the performance limit unless that’s what they’re (STILL trying to get away with) changing?
2) As was well publicized, the search area is EXPANDING. This suggests the performance limit will move SOUTH, thus extending the feasible zone WEST.
(Savvy observers will deem this move to have been foreshadowed by the Oct.8 ATSB report’s curious construction/portrayal of the then-official performance limit. To many of us, it looked like an error inserted deliberately, with intent (perhaps) to ensure E83 was MISSED during the ’14/’15 search season.)
To be clear: I’m not criticizing the specific direction or quantum of any search zone expansion. What I object to is this drawn out series of MAJOR shifts in BASIC search parameters, when the data driving them has been constant since mid-March.
Those interested in finding out exactly what actually happened to the plane are far better served by getting to the bottom of this bizarre conduct of search leaders than by getting to the bottom of the SIO.
Victor – I’m not pointing the finger anywhere, and certainly not at an astute toiler like Bobby but I have my own uneducated suspicions that in particular, the turn as depicted was the work of an artist.
@ Dr. Bobby Ulich, kprostyakov, srp 1984
My high school aged son told me today he is surprised that more grownups don’t know more about science. Having stopped after Biology, Physiology and Astronomy, and never taken physics, chemistry, climatology, etc., I am a prime example of his shock at adult ignorance. I am struggling to understand the numerous comments being presented by people who clearly are experts in comparison with my own mere BA in political science and JD at law school.
Many of the comments pertaining to the Final Major Turn image referred to heat left by the jet, but I thought the contrail images, whether photographed in light, or detected by infrared, were detecting ice crystals, meaning detecting cold areas in the area where either water vapor from the chemical process that leads to engine exhaust froze, or a reduction in pressure and temperature across wing vortices in humid conditions froze ice crystals in the air. Is the FMT image you detected, in your opinion, ice in the air? Does heat (Eg above amhient temperature) play any role in contrail detection, or is it all ice?
Dr. Ulich, you earlier corrected your April 18 comment in Reddit at your Jeff Wise post, correcting long to medum “UTC long-/ medium wave thermal IR images are consistent with a cold, attenuating, high-altitude contrail that emits weakly but attenuates the stronger emission from the warmer ocean below.
The differences between long wave and medium wave seemed crucial to Simon R. Proud srp1984 as he reviewed your FMT image in a Reddit post. (As I understand it, he has been a visiting post-doc at MIT’s Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climates, based at EAPS (Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences) from November 2013. His home institute is the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. ) He wrote that medium wave IR image are less sensitive to the upper atmosphere and more sensitive to lower atmosphere (and surface) effects, emphasizing “They are not well suited for contrail analysis.” He argued that “The I5 (long wave) band should be used instead. It is perfect for this type of thing.” Then he described his results, stating that “The LWIR images from VIIRS (I5) do not show the same ‘signal’ that you have found in the I4 band.”
I assume that means the contrail wasn’t there using the long wave band that Simon R. Proud asserts should show the feature more clearly.
Srp 1984 (Simon Proud) concluded: The MWIR band that you use is better suited to analyzing surface artifacts. Indeed, in this case I strongly believe that you are looking at something on the surface.
Dr Ulich, from your writing stating “A climb from 35,000 to ~39,000 feet occurred during the second turn at ~18:25-18:28 and A 1500 FPM climb underway at 18:25 and at 18:27 satisfies the BFO data then, I presume you would not immediately concede that the turn depicted was made at or near the ocean’s surface.
Knowing nothing of these matters, I became quite confused when I read Kirill Prostyakov’s post quoting from Int. J. Remote Sensing, 1999, vol.20,no.8,1641±1660 Operational detection of contrails from NOAA-AVHRR-data HERMANN MANNSTEIN, RICHARD MEYER and PETER WENDLING. It led my untrained mind to think that medium range had seemed better to the experts publishing in that journal. The quote that confused me referred to channel 4, not band 4, and I wouldn’t know the difference. It read:
“Passive remote sensing methods can be used to recognize ice clouds, mainly by their low brightness temperatures in the thermal infrared. Due to smaller crystal sizes, especially young contrails (Gayet et al. 1996) tend to show higher transmissivity in the AVHRR-channel 4 (10.3± 11.3 mm) than in channel 5 (11.5± 12.5 mm) compared to natural cirrus (Betancor-Gothe and Grassl 1993). This often causes contrails to appear brighter on channel 4 ± channel 5 temperature difference images. Unfortunately, this feature of anthropogenic ice clouds slowly changes as the cloud ages.”
Arriving at my main question regarding the FMT, do you believe srp1984 had a valid point, when he argued that his failure to detect the image with LWIR from VIIRS (I5) indicated the FMT image is really a surface or low atmosphere signal from something else, not a jet contrail. (I’d hate to find out the image was ship exhaust from a cruise liner . . . .)
A second question re the FMT and Simon Proud’s analysis arises from his statement regarding using an Appleman chart:
“The biggest problem, however, is that you have not considered the meteorological circumstances. The GFS analysis shows that in the area near IGARI the temperature at FL320 was -31C and was -42C at FL360. The relative humidity at FL320 was 17% and 21% at FL360. According to the Appleman chart this means that it was impossible to have any contrails at these altitudes: At FL320 even with 100% relative humity contrails would not form. At FL360 you would need just under 100% RH for contrail formation: Far above what was actually present. Therefore, assuming the GFS model is right* whatever it is you were looking at in the VIIRS images it was not, and physically could not be, a contrail. . . . *I’ve never seen it be wrong by the magnitude required here. This is supported by sounding observations from nearby that are very close to the GFS values.”
I can’t begin to comprehend Simon Proud’s choice of IGARI or of FL320 and FL360 for his emphasis. As far as the waypoint, IGARI is on the other (East) side of Malaysia, far from where the turn image is obtained, which is practically at the western extreme of Indonesia, near SANOB and IGEBO. And as far as elevation temperature, if the BFO/BTO indications properly led to your analysis that for MH370 “A climb from 35,000 to ~39,000 feet occurred” I assume the temperature, pressure and humidity from FL 35 to FL 39 at SANOB is what is pertinent to your presumption that a contrail formed as shown.
I don’t know where to find the temperature for the evening at 39,000 feet at SANOB and IGEBO, and don’t know how to convert a FL into a pressure level to use the APpleman chart. But I wondered if you are pursuing this to see how the particulars of the area where you believe the turn is imaged correspond to Appleman’s time tested 1953 chart.
A third question. Were the green and blue contrails heading straight away from the FMT really long wave IR, or were they Medium wave IR mislabeled inadvertently? (Mr. Proud did not address them in his Reddit post, but I wondered if you have discussed them with him.)
Finally, as I instantly decided your SIO photos were distrails, dissipation /disturbance of clouds, rather than contrails, I did not know, if this proves true, whether distrails would withstand Simon R. Proud’s critique of the SIO images.
Feel free to delay /take any time you like to reply. I’d rather you do your own work, which is fascinating, than be bogged down responding to internet posts from non experts. But if you do find time to elaborate, I’m sure you will explain wonderfully as always.
Jeff, completely disagree.
The identification of contrails faces stiff challenges, not least :
– evidence that atmospheric conditions were actually suitable for contrail formation at prognosed altitudes
– evidence that suitable features are visible at expected IR wavelengths
– ground truthing presence of contrails for other aircraft in the area at suitable altitudes
– justifying the choice of a particular feature as a contrail when other similar features might exist
However this effort is a potentially valuable non-3F1 and non-radar cross check of aircraft track, and even if it proves fruitless it helps to close out an avenue of investigation that I feel was not very thoroughly probed last March (in the public domain at least).
Geo-resonance is a complete hoax as 5 minutes with any of their filed patents will tell you, and is something else entirely.
I personally think searching sat images of the aircraft track for signs of contrails has more justification than searching sat images of Baikonur for signs of a buried aircraft, but maybe that’s just me.
@Niels,
The 1 hour shift was because the satellite data was not kept the same as Moscow time. It may have been to a difference in daylight savings time usage.
The FMT contrail image has been processed using 2-D Fourier transforms to do spatial-frequency filtering. This allows narrow features to be kept and the slowly varying background to be removed. This is necessary to see low-contrast features.
For a physics-based proof that MH370 contrails can be detected at 3.7 microns, read this:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzOIIFNlx2aUQ3liMzZGcUF0UmM/view?usp=sharing
Any notion that you cannot see contrails at 3.7 microns is not based on science. I have done a detailed radiometric analysis, as shown in the paper above.
The FMT contrail is an ice cloud. It is not a detection of hot exhaust gases. The ice contrail is created because the engine exhaust contains water vapor which increases the local humidity and also seeds the air with small soot particles. That starts water condensation that freezes and then grows over time using the naturally occurring water vapor.
The idea that medium-wave IR is insensitive to effects in the upper atmosphere is nonsense.
At least part of the FMT contrail is visible in the longer wavelength bands, but not as clearly as in I4. Several image processing steps are necessary to discern this rather faint feature. Quick looks at raw images will not show very much.
The 3.7 micron FMT image shows numerous natural cirrus cloud features as well as one very unnaturally shaped feature. It comprises two ~25 NM long and very straight lines and a circular arc. It is very narrow, has negative contrast, and perfectly aligns with several nearby aviation waypoints. This feature cannot possibly be caused by natural cirrus or by some ocean bottom topography.
The statement that has been made that contrails could not possibly form here has at least two flaws.
First, the assumed altitude of MH370 was underestimated. It was probably considerably higher – at FL380/FL400. There are several lines of reasoning for this. The speeds during the radar track and the computer fits to the satellite BTO/BFO data indicate a very steady Mach 0.84, which is exactly the standard B777 speed with the Trent engines. As fuel is burned off, the plane can fly higher and maintain the Mach 0.84 with less drag in the Long Range Cruise Mode. Step climbs are normal, and typically are 4,000 feet. Since MH370 was at FL350, and since there is no reliable evidence that it ever descended (and the continuous high speed indicates it did not descend), one would expect a climb near 18:30 (based on weight) to FL390. But now MH370 is heading west, not east, so the usual practice is to use even altitudes. So perhaps MH370 climbed 3,000 feet (maybe not all at once) from FL350 to FL380 or 5,000 feet to FL400. The contrail appears at a location indicating it began a time later than 18:28. Other maneuvers must have occurred between 18:25 and 18:28 (based on BTO/BFO analyses). They do not show up as part of the contrail, perhaps simply because they occurred at a low enough altitude (before the climb) that the contrail did not form there. Likewise, the other aircraft in this particular area at that time would have been at lower altitudes, and they may not have produced contrails for that same reason.
Higher altitude means lower temperature and higher relative humidity (i.e., more conducive to contrail formation).
The second flaw in any absolute statement that contrails could not form is the assumption that one has perfectly accurate meteorological information along the MH370 path at the correct altitudes. That cannot be true for several reasons. First, the instruments themselves are imperfect. Second, the meteorological data are taken at different locations and at a different time, so they cannot accurately tell us what atmospheric conditions MH370 encountered. We can certainly use the best available nearby meteorological data, since it is all we have, but declaring the certainty or the impossibility of contrail production is at best a guess based on assuming nearby conditions were identical. Meteorological data collected near IGARI is not very useful at IGEBO. They are far apart, about 500 NM!
The southern tracks we found were using 3 visible light/NIR bands that we stacked into a RGB image. They appear quite different from the FMT contrail. They may be distrails. If so, they will be difficult to detect using thermal IR. I have looked for motion of these features with respect to the (evolving) clouds in an attempt to see if there is any extra eastward motion that could be caused by the rising sun, as expected if they were contrail shadows. So far my results are inconclusive on this point. If anyone has reliable and accurate information on the cloud top altitudes all along the aircraft track I would be interested in receiving it. There are about three segments of varying lengths that align among themselves into a very slightly curved arc. Taken separately, one could argue that they all might be naturally occurring cloud features. Taken together, their alignment and position angle, including the expected wind drift shift of ~ 5 degrees clockwise, is consistent with the route which fits the Inmarsat data and passes through IGEBO. I do not think this is a coincidence or an example of confirmation bias, but the only way anyone will know for sure if the path MH370 flew was consistent with the southern distrails we have proposed is to locate the aircraft.
I wish to respond to the quote by Simon Proud: “Therefore the signatures in the MWIR channel probably do not correspond to aircraft. The only way they could correspond is if many aircraft were flying outside their air routes and were not visible to radar. This is very unlikely.”
First, it is a certainty that MH370 was flying outside its air route. It is also a certainty that it flew outside the range of shore-based radars. If you are referring to space-based radars, then that data, if any exists, has not been made public. If it does exist, it must not track 9M-MRO in the FMT region. Otherwise the search would have been done very differently.
No one to my knowledge has ever suggested that all the FMT image features are contrails. 99.99% of the features in the uncropped image are water vapor clouds, cirrus clouds, and land masses. Only one feature looks like a contrail to me and Kirill. It is unique in this image. You will never find a cloud or ocean sediment trail that looks like that.
Furthermore, how can anyone categorically state that contrail formation is impossible when they are using meteorological data from 500 NM away and at an altitude 4,000-8,000 feet too low?
@Bobby, Please provide reference images of known aircraft contrails as detected by the same satellite sensors you are discussing here.
Bobby,
Frankly speaking I think you opted for somewhat ‘unscientific’ approach to support your hypothesis. You use the same arguments to support you theory and discard other theories. For instance about the line, which crosses the ‘hook’ (277-278 deg heading). One of your arguments [April 22, 2015 at 4:10 AM] is: “striations do not match any N571 leg bearing”. Why would they match? On the other hand you say: “First, it is a certainty that MH370 was flying outside its air route. It is also a certainty that it flew outside the range of shore-based radars” [April 23, 2015 at 5:37 AM]. In my understanding you use it to justify the ‘hook’. You say these lines of 277 deg are numerous, but where? You said the line, which crosses the ‘hook’ is faint, but is as apparent on the left hand side as the ‘hook’.
The relative humidity extracted from GDAS at different altitudes at the point of dissaperence from radars is:
Altitude(km), Relative humidity(percents);
10.0, 14.4;
10.5, 18.4;
11.0, 22.4;
11.5, 25.3;
12.0, 28.3;
12.5, 33.1;
13.0, 52.4;
13.5, 71.7;
14.0, 90.9;
If my script and GDAS are correct, the contrail formation is possible at higher flight levels, as you suggested. It might be a reason why you can’t see UAE343. Based on the web provided by DL, UAE343 was ahead of MH370. In addition, if UAE343 was behind, the pilots of UAE343 would see MH370 on their radar. However, if MH370 climbed to a higher altitude, it would re-appear on the Thai military radars. In addition, who would climb higher to make a turn? In case of hypoxia one would certainly try to bring the aircraft down, instead of repairing AES and flying at 14 km altitude.
Also, I think you should put aside the visible wavelength snapshots, at least for a while. These do not present any evidence at all. Distrail, shadow, devil’s marks – anyone is free to use his/her imagination to find whatever he/she wants to see in these images.
Nevertheless I appreciate your work and I think the most important discovery is that IR images 18:55 might be able to provide some new information.
@Oleksandr, 13.5 km is 44,290 feet. I don’t think anyone is suggesting that MH370 was flying at that altitude at 18:22.
I wrote a response to Dr Ulich’s comments that is available here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1UihJN4R2DTc09CeUFNdWxTUkE/view
Apologies if this double-posts. Didn’t seem to work the first time I hit ‘comment’.
My thanks to both Simon R. Proud and Bobby Ulich for their thoughtful, detailed further statements. Its a lot to digest for a non-expert re these fields, and I am off to work now, but will dive in further to strive to understand more of what you both posted as time allows. Fascinating studies of various areas of scientific inquiry seem to arise SO often out of the MH370 hunt. I feel like I am obtaining a graduate degree just trying to understand the posts, and also feel much the better for it.
@Phil:
“I think that *any* path models should take the relative position of EK343 into account, both in terms of physical position and visual range. We’re not talking about people on the ground seeing things at cruise altitude; we’re talking about pilots seeing something at the same altitude more or less right in front of them.”
Right with you.
@srp1984:
Thanks for your response and this interesting tidbit. We learn something new every day.
“last year I was employed as a consultant to help locate #MH370 using satellite data.”
Jeff,
Bobby suggested FL380/FL400, so I included some numbers up to 14 km altitude. I haven’t done georeferencing of his image yet to derive a closer location to the ‘hook’ in question.
Generally I think it is not really appropriate to compare IR satellite images with GeoResonanse. In contrast to visible spectrum, IR can potentially be useful to estimate temperature anomalies, like in the paper cited by M Pat. It is probably an important finding that NPP satellite was just above the supposed location of MH370:
ssec.wisc.edu/datacenter/npp/
(add www in front).
But it requires a lot more analysis. For example, if the temperature differences can be derived, these would provide clear indication what features are contrails, and what are not. This would not answer whether it was MH370 or not, but this would still provide valuable information. Bobby’s separation of contrails, image processing effects (or defects), and clouds-related effects does not really convince me. But the existence of satellite images that may shed some light on the whereabouts of the plane at ~19:00 is exciting.
I’ve just discovered something odd.
EK343 landed in Dubai at 04:19 GST, that is 00:19 UTC, the time of the final partial handshake.
EK343 took off in Kuala Lumpur at 01:29 MYT, that ist 17:19 UTC.
At 17:19 UTC MH370 acknowledged with “Good night Malaysia ThreeSeven Zero”. This was the last recorded radio transmission from MH370.
I calculated the time differences with the tool on timeanddate.com
Emirates 343:
http://de.flightaware.com/live/flight/UAE343/history/20140307/1710Z/WMKK/OM
Bobby, srp1984,
Just a thought, which might turn to be nonsense. What if the ‘hook’ discovered by Bobby and Kirill is not a contrail, but smog generated by temporarily intensified fire onboard (tire rubber, for example)? I guess carbon particles can cause similar effect as ice crystals in IR part of the spectrum, right?
@DL
To add to your interesting thought/finding, Dubai is also exactly 180° opposite the Chinese debris field (as published by Simon Gunson, viz 45°17’60.00″S, 85°17’60.00″E), about the Inmarsat-3 F1 ‘location’ at sea level. (Sorry, I haven’t explained that very well.)
@Oleksandr,
The striations I mentioned are at ~277 degrees bearing, and there are also some running on a perpendicular bearing. There are many of these striations visible in the clear areas. They appear to be just lines which have some pixels that are both brighter and darker than others along their lengths. I don’t discern a definite average contrast. In my opinion, stated previously, these are due to residual fixed-pattern noise in the sensor array. There is obviously no reason they should align with any particular airway except by coincidence. The striations are faint, as is the “hook.” I don’t believe there is any connection between their causes.
@sk999,
You said:
“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. ”
What meteorological data led you to that conclusion?
Do you have any explanation why your conclusion and Simon Proud’s are different?
I think it’s reasonable to ask Dr. Ulich to test the contrail hypothesis on a known route. Find us a single contrail from space and let’s go from there.
However, by the same coin, it’s reasonable to ask that the same be done with BTO data from a known flight. That hasn’t been done either. (Oh yes, I know we’ve been told otherwise, but show me either 1) the data or 2) the plane we found in the SIO using that method before I believe it was done.)
@Matty – An article in the SMH the other day indicated that it was back to the drawing board with the data. As in, maybe we misinterpreted it, not maybe we’re off by a few feet. Well then.
At last Mr Chillit shows his “ping” radius calculations based on the published BTO numbers. Cool. Others have been doing this for almost a year now. He needs to catch up some more. The BTO at 0019:29 is not what he used, so he has the arc radius wrong at that point. It was amended by Inmarsat, and quite rightly so, to 18400 usec. This is not an “averaged” value.
Interestingly, a few days ago he said the 7th arc [the arc at 0019:29 UTC] was 600 Km or more inside the ATSB position. Now he says it could be anywhere. How can it be inside any of the earlier arcs?
Others have done the calculation more precisely using the ellipsoid WSG84 model of the earth, rather than a commonly published radius at the equator. Others have taken into account the known “jitter” on the BTO values.
I think Inmarsat knows pretty well where the Perth GES is, and also the position of the satellite, so I would prefer their calculation for the GES to satellite distance rather than Mr Chillit’s.
Come on Mike, stick to the ship’s tracks please and stop showing your ignorance.
Bobby Ulich,
I documented my source previously (OK, can’t remember where), but here it is again.
ftp://arlftp.arlhq.noaa.gov/pub/archives/gdas1/
Files are gdas1.mar14.w1 and gdas1.mar14.w2. I had to write a C program to read them and extract the info.
My comment “… above about 40,000 feet …” was carefully couched. The files tabulate data at various pressure levels (presumably the same ones that aircraft use). I figure that 200 mbar corresponds to an altitude of ~39000 feet, and 150 mbar corresponds to an altitude of 44000 feet. If I am reading the files correctly, I find that at 200 mbar, the RH is 42%. No persistent contrails. At 150 mbar, the RH is 87%. Likely persistent contrails. I presume that these RH values refer to liquid H2O. RH wrt ice is higher. I did a rough interpolation to arrive at 40000 feet as the transition point. YMMV.
I have also said previously that I am no expert in contrails or reading the data files, and I could have it all wrong.
I do not speak for Simon Proud and do not understand what conclusions you think are different between the two of us.
JS – I just saw the expanded search map at the ATSB site and it looks like a double or nothing bet. It appears they have been systematically following up leads from the initial survey with no luck and the new area was covered as I understand? Can we conclude nothing really jumped out? If it started out cautiously optimistic would it now be downgraded to hopeful? Also a few snarky little remarks about Kazakhstan – Diego Garcia – anything West of Sumatra – etc being impossible, but nothing about zero debris being impossible. How do the two stack up for impossibility? They talk a clear game about the data but it gets a it funny when they talk debris.
Regarding contrail analysis I was going to invoke the “why now” card as I would have thought it was thoroughly looked at in the beginning and it turns out that it was.
sk999,
The gdas data is at quite low spatial resolution (1×1 degree grid, I think) so that will have a bit of an effect when comparing data (GFS is a 0.5×0.5 grid, some others – subscription only, unfortunately – at 0.125×0.125.
Averaging my data to the GDAS grid shows similar results to yours – on the finer grid the RH and geopotential height are both lower.
Also, nice work extracting values from the GDAS data – not the easiest thing to work with!
srp1984, Bobby, sk999,
Both sk999 and I use GDAS1. It is just impossible to provide a proper reference each time when we mention it.
As I noticed a long time ago, GDAS 0.5×0.5 deg resolution is also available from ARL, but by another strange coincidence the data on the day of disappearance of MH370 is missing.
(arlftp.arlhq.noaa.gov/pub/archives/gdas0p5/)
Extracting data is easy – ARL provides Fortran script that works with both GDAS1 and GDAS0.5. I am using linear interpolation in 3D space and time (I needed continuous input to feed into my “constant thrust” model). I assumed geopotential height to be the same as geometrical height as the difference seems to be subtle.
What did you mean by “Averaging my data to the GDAS grid”? Interpolation or averaging?
Also, I have to note that GDAS sometimes is inaccurate.
@DL:
Thank you for this post.
“I’ve just discovered something odd.
EK343 landed in Dubai at 04:19 GST, that is 00:19 UTC, the time of the final partial handshake.
EK343 took off in Kuala Lumpur at 01:29 MYT, that ist 17:19 UTC.
At 17:19 UTC MH370 acknowledged with “Good night Malaysia ThreeSeven Zero”. This was the last recorded radio transmission from MH370.”
So, 10 minutes BEFORE EK343 took off from KL, MH370 sent its last radio transmission. And EK343 landed in Dubai at the SAME TIME as MH370’s final ping/handshake.
In response to my comment on pg 21 of this thread (citing @keysersquishy’s graphic) —
“at 18:22 it was 14 nautical miles directly BEHIND UAE343.
And three minutes AFTER that, the unexplained SATCOM log-on request was initiated.” —
@Phil wrote:
“Some clarification on the position of UAE343 (EK343):
It is only according strictly to the limited annotations on the Lido radar image that MH370 would have been approx. 14 nm behind EK343 at 18:22 UTC.
A more detailed analysis of the image was undertaken by several people, including the IG (Don Thompson, I believe).
The plot prepared using that analysis, along with the IG path model, indicates that MH370 would have been approx. 34 nm ahead of EK343 between 18:13 UTC and 18:40 UTC, and as close as 18 nm at an angle of about 45 degrees to port at 18:42 UTC.
Any additional meandering of MH370 (per the recent contrail analysis) would make the separation even smaller.”
So — IF you believe that the ‘Lido’ image is NOT A FAKE and the subsequent analysis of that image is accurate, then it also seems reasonable to think that the big hole in the Lido image (which, if I’m not mistaken, encompasses the period in which MH370 was in very close proximity to EK343) is not a coincidence.
Let’s recall:
sinux
Posted December 4, 2014 at 2:36 AM
(pg. 3 — Occam’s Razor is Overrated)
“Now, we ‘know’ that the plane went south because the BFO was calculated for a theoretical satellite position (0;64.5E if I recall correctly).
That theoretical position is stored in the SDU somewhere.
What would happen if somebody changed it say to 10N;64.5E.
The real satellite stays in the line of sight, but the algo computing the BFO is fooled, and produces values who seem to indicate a turn south…
To achieve that, you’d probably need to … reboot the SDU (as the coordinates are most likely kept in RAM).
This way no need of special equipment that would look suspicious when boarding.”
And then we have security researcher Chris Roberts (@Sidragon1), who recently said that UA’s onboard systems could be hacked:
“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.”
Roberts tells us that he could view this info, but does not (for obvious reasons) say what else he could have done.
Per Sinux, was the unexplained SATCOM log-on request from MH370 at 18:25 (whether it was in front of, behind or to the port side of EK343 at 18:22) a reboot needed to effectuate a spoof (read: a masking MH370’s actual location)?
Could someone on MH370 have gained similar access to MH370’s systems from a box under one of the seats (per Roberts), a SAT phone in business class (a feature MAS advertised as being available on ALL of its 777’s before MH370 vanished), or via the (wireless) in-flight entertainment system http://t.co/HUKjFhPy0b — and (again), could access to any of these (or some combination thereof) have enabled a hack of the SDU?
@DL thank you for the planefinder link. Very nice for the purpose. Plenty of planes around Perth in the early morning of 8 March.
@Dr. Ulich
I found someone to help me make .pbm files from the .l15 “raw” electro-l data. However it will take a few days. May I ask you a favour, could you help me to get access to a high resolution tiff/pbm/bmp of the wider area of Perth from the “0400” (01:00 utc) image?Especially to the north the clouddeck is thin and evaporating in the morning sun. I’ll check on correlation between cloud features and known flight paths.
Best,
Niels.
Niels,
Kirill is the one to get sat images (if he has time). His handle on twitter is @kprostyakov. Just send him a direct message. If you are not on Twitter, ask Jeff Wise for my email address and email me a note. I’ll pass it on to Kirill.
Nihonmama – Re hacking:
Technically I can’t go step for step with a satellite expert but that doesn’t prevent me from seeing what some of them are falling into. There was plenty of talk about “defining search areas” but also plenty of indulgent “X marks the spot” prognosticating and some white knuckles and late nights too I’m sure as the side scanner passed over these hotspots. There were people out there ready to spring forward triumphantly when their otherwise unchallenged smartness was validated. In other words – ego. But they had to press on blocking out all the time that something funny might happened. Instead of accommodating the possibility they defensively swarm out to extinguish it.
But corporations employ hackers because apparently scientists can’t be trusted with everything, and hackers and scientists think very differently. Need proof? Ruben Santa Marta nonchalantly bombs the in flight entertainment system with txt messages and finds himself in the SDU – imagine their shock. Engineers build a mighty skyscraper, a hacker is the mouse that slips in some vent and ends up on the top floor.
In the report “A Radiometric Model of Infrared Contrail Signatures”, Bobby Ulich wrote, “The medium-wave IR optical depth of the contrail is approximately twice the visible optical depth, whereas the 10 micron optical depth is approximately equal to the visible optical depth.” No reference is given for this assertion, and I have found nothing in the literature to support it after extensive search. Further, from the description of the equations in the report, it seems that “optical depth” is presumed to be due purely to absorption. In fact, scattering is also important, which makes the radiative transfer calculations more complicated. The literature on absorption vs. scattering for ice crystals in clouds is rather opaque for someone like me coming in from the outside; much of it is obsessed with determining ice crystal sizes and geometry.
However, I found one paper where researchers actually went out and measured the contrast of a cirrus cloud as a function of wavelength:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1256/qj.03.151/pdf
Figures 9 and 10 give the brightness temperature as a function of wavelength from an instrument called ARIES on board an aircraft that was looking down at cirrus clouds. Figure 9 corresponds to the thickest cloud; Figure 10 to the thinnest (basically, clear sky). The horizontal axis is “wave number”, which, in this case, is just the inverse of the wavelength in cm. Thus, 10 microns corresponds to a wave number of 1000, while a wavelength of 3.7 microns corresponds to a wave number of 2700.
The contrast between ocean and cloud is best expressed by looking at just the top panels in the two figures and calculating the difference in the values at a fixed wave number between Figs. 9 and 10. A bigger difference means a bigger contrast. To my eye, at least, it seems that the contrast at 10 microns (wave number 1000) is much bigger than the contrast difference at 3.7 microns (wave number 2700).
Based on this one paper, it would seem that 3.7 microns is not a good wavelength to search for contrails.
As always, I could be completely wrong.
Correction to previous post – it’s Figures 8 and 9 (not 9 and 10) that are of relevance. Figure 8 corresponds to section 1 of the flight and Figure 9 corresponds to section 10. Surely I am the only one to be confused …
Mike Chillit’s latest tweets have, for some reason, alerted me to the dangers of speaking authoritatively on a subject before one has sufficient grounding in the facts. Accordingly, I will happily expose my ignorance, and ask the experts to please critique my decidedly non-techie (and likely half-baked) explanation of the conventional wisdom taking us to the SIO:
(Disclaimer: does NOT imply endorsement of conventional wisdom)
1) The key breakthrough pointing us to the southern route was the discovery that a built-in algorithm meant to compensate for plane speed relative to 3F1 wrongly assumed 3F1 was stationary, when in fact it was not. After allowing for this fact, a constant speed and altitude path could be made to fit reasonably well to the observed BFOs if the path went south, but not if it went north.
2) The BTO was wonky at 18:25 because the unit had ostensibly just been powered back up, and was ice-cold. (If the primary radar data is trusted, we have a KNOWN location at 18:22, so the plane couldn’t have been far from that; the “corrected” 18:25 BTO is thus easily reverse-engineered from that.)
3) The signal data was wonky at 00:19 because the plane had run out of fuel, was without power, and may have been spiraling in. Again: if the 00:11 BTO is to be trusted, we “know” how far the plane was from the satellite (and that it was still headed in the same direction it had been for the previous 4 hours) just 8 minutes earlier, and so a “corrected” 00:19 BTO can be likewise reverse-engineered.
How’m I doing?
In addition to quizzing myself on these signal data basics, I’d like to ask a question that’s been bugging me: if the system is supposed to (and DID) ping the plane after each 60 minute period of inactivity, how is the 91 minute gap between 22:40 and 00:11 explained?
Thanks in advance to anyone willing to run this remedial class for me. To the extent these are “asked and answered”, my apologies – I’m trying to get explanation wording down to a level dummies like me can understand.
@Brock
If memory serves me correctly, there was a call from MAS ops to MH370 at 23 something which effectively reset the hourly ‘ping’ (from AES). I guess the calls go through the groundstation?
I’ll go and double check this, but I believe this explains the gap you are referring to.
Do NOT take this as gospel…it is a vague recollection.
@Matty:
Right. we don’t need to be satellite experts to know that something is wrong — just awake and paying attention.
“In other words – ego.” Say no more.
And thanks very much for mentioning Ruben Santamarta (how did I forget to mention him?), who discovered a backdoor to the SDU – or Victor’s comment: “If a similar backdoor exists for the MCS-6000… would produce a BFO signature of a southern path when the plane actually flew north”
https://twitter.com/nihonmama/status/578992531947405312
The BTOs at 18:25:27 and 00:19:37 were not reverse-engineered, the different offset at those times was measured from other data – Ashton et al paper “Each power up sequence starts with a Logon Request message that has been found to have a fixed offset of 4600 μs relative to the LOI message exchange by inspecting historical data for this aircraft terminal.”
Thanks, spencer, Richard.
@Richard: paraphrasing the conventional wisdom in simpler language, to cement my understanding:
‘Raw BTO values at 18:25 & 00:19 included not only the pure transit times used to derive arcs 1 & 7, but also an extra 4600 worth of an “I’m powering back up!” message. These were the only BTO values to include this extra amount because these were the only times post-IGARI the unit powered back up. Inmarsat checked prior flights of this exact same plane to verify 4600 was the correct amount to subtract before turning BTOs into distances.
‘Further corroborating the need for (and value of) this adjustment: after deducting 4600, the resulting 18:25 arc was now the expected 3 minutes’ flight time west of the 18:22 radar fix, and the resulting 00:19 arc was now the expected 8 minutes’ flight time further from 3F1 than its 00:11 counterpart.’
…?
Nihonmama – I was half expecting someone to jerk my chain and say hey smartass – what’s your contribution to finding the plane – as has happened before. But at this point I think we now know the IG area was always going to be covered. Also, we haven’t found the plane – that fait accompli hasn’t manifested.
@DL
Great findings for EK343 timings! Coincidence? I feel this could be a very big point.
@Oleksander
Oleksander wrote:
“As I noticed a long time ago, GDAS 0.5×0.5 deg resolution is also available from ARL, but by another strange coincidence the data on the day of disappearance of MH370 is missing.
(arlftp.arlhq.noaa.gov/pub/archives/gdas0p5/)”
Please also look at CyndiLhendry (twitter),
https://twitter.com/CyndiLHendry/status/562624358422966273 who noted that not only datas of the 7th were missing on goes.noaa.gov (www infront) , but 6th and 8th were the very same IR-image of the region, copy and space.
Coincidently.
For the mother of all lists of coincidences…
Who wonders?
Michael
On the relation between BTO and Rx
I’m trying to understand the relation between Rx power and ac – sat distance (L). Is it correct that Rx is measered at the GES? Is there someone who knows what is happening at the satellite? There is signal amplification and frequency shift (mixing?). Is this all done by analog electronics? Is there power linearity in this processing chain at the satellite?
Thanks,
Niels.
Niels,
There is a description of the Inmarsat-C service here; 3F3 is the same design as 3F1.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5y500vugqgdumpf/3F3_spec.pdf?dl=0
Niels, I have all the Electro-L/GOMS data. Will upload the 0100 images when I get the chance, hopefully Monday morning.
Michael Helms, that’s a nonsense. The original data for 6th, 7th and 8th March 2014 is available – there’s only a few missing timeslots due to the effects of the sun upon the satellite sensor. This happens every year and is easily predictable. No conspiracy.
Nihonmama – In the case of MH370 crew, who springs to mind in light this story?
http://www.watoday.com.au/national/australian-doctor-tareq-kamleh-appears-in-islamic-state-propaganda-video-20150425-1mt603.html
@Brock:
I don’t think the anomalous BTO values at a log-on require the SDU to be “ice cold”. The BTO associated with the log-on request exchange has a repeatable additional offset of 4600 us. If you look at the log-on at 15:59:55.413 as provided in the Signalling Unit Logs, the BTO value is 19380 us, which after correction is 14780 us. This is consistent with later BTOs while 9M-MRO was parked at KLIA.
Additionally, if you look at the SATCOM logs from the Interim Report on March 8, 2015, you see that prior to the log-on to the IOR I-1 satellite, it was logged-on to the POR I-3 satellite. This means there was no power-up at that time, yet we see the 4600 us offset for the log-on request.
The takeaway is that I believe it is possible that the SATCOM was not powered-up around 18:25. Rather, it is possible that the SATCOM was already powered and warm but not yet logged-on at the time of the 18:25 log-on request.
Also, I would refrain from using the expression “reverse-engineered” when speaking of the 4600 us subtraction applied to the BTO of the log-on request. Rather, it is a correction based on historical data for this SATCOM.
@Richard, Rx power
Thanks, Richard, I’ve downloaded it, very helpful. After first round of reading I would have two main questions:
A) The tabulated values for Rx as we have for several AES transmissions(I’m focusing on channel 4) do they refer to power levels as received at the satellite?
B) It is mentioned that the transponder has variable gain. Specifically at p13 it says: “The telecommandable gain adjustment is provided in each SAW filter chain on a per channel basis.” (For the downlink path). Would you know if the gain adjustment is fixed (per channel) in time, or is it adjusted per transmission depending on incoming power?
@Richard
I should have said under B) “for the return path”
@Niels
I am not an electronic or communications engineer, so these are opinions.
>A) The tabulated values for Rx as we have for several AES transmissions (I’m focusing on channel 4) do they refer to power levels as received at the satellite?
The whole system is a ‘bent-pipe’ where the received L-band signal is not converted to a digital value on-board the spacecraft, just received and retransmitted. Therefore, the strength of the uplink signal is preserved in the C-band downlink, with known calibration of course. On that basis I would expect that the measurement of the receive power is made when the signal is finally received and converted in the GES – the effect of the C-band link would be known and removed. So yes, the power levels refer to reception at the spacecraft, but are measured on ground.
>B) Would you know if the [SAW filter] gain adjustment is fixed (per channel) in time, or is it adjusted per transmission depending on incoming power?
It says the gain is telecommandable which would imply it is set by ground command, presumably to achieve a balance between the channels. However, this is only a suggestion.
@Victor: re: “ice-cold”/”reverse-engineered”/”4600” – Richard Cole beat you to it, but thanks for the extra confirmation. Here’s the text (which I hope to send to Mike Chillit, in the interest of truth), amended for your input:
‘Raw BTO values used to compute arcs 1 (18:25) & 7 (00:19) included not only pure transit times (ground-sat-plane-sat-ground), but also an extra 4600 worth of an “I’m logging back on!” message. These were the only arcs to include this extra amount because these were the only two signal data sets post-IGARI during which the unit was logging back on.
Steps taken to verify 4600 was the correct amount to subtract before turning BTOs into distances:
1) Deducting 4600 from the 16:00 log-on BTO(while still on tarmac) aligns it with later BTOs issued prior to takeoff.
2) Inmarsat says they checked prior flights of this exact same plane, and found the same result.
3) after deducting 4600, the resulting arc 1 was now the expected 3 minutes’ flight time west of the 18:22 radar fix, and the resulting arc 7 was now the expected 8 minutes’ flight time from arc 6.’
Re: SATCOM already powered up: wouldn’t this have dramatic implications for the credibility of BFO readings at 18:27/28?