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.
1. “does someone care to explain just exactly what precluded the phone from actually ringing? What precisely allowed for the A/C systems to respond, yet prevented the actual ringing of the phone?”
–> More importantly: If contact with the a/c was established (ringing or not), wouldn’t that also show up as timestamps in a sat log, with associated BTO and BFO values? Has this data been used by analysts here? If not, why not? If yes, where are the 2 additional ping rings stemming from the satphone calls? Do they line up with the known Inmarsat ping rings?
2. If we (mentally) remove all the text labels in Orion’s image dropbox.com/s/h6zh42cp1cr5gdz/Go_Phoenix_SAS_af447.png , it’s surprising how much the pieces resemble the other rocks(?) on the seafloor in the upper half of the picture. Easier to miss than I thought. Also surprising: notice how small the pieces labelled “engine #1” and “engine #2” actually are. I am saying this, because a couple of users wrote that given the 70cm resolution, maybe only the engines will show up on the sonar image. But if we only have 2 tiny white spots similar to “engine #1” and “engine #2” in the image above, they will be very easy to miss, especially if they fell in between a group of rocks like in the upper/right corner of the image.
3. As untrustworthy as H2O comes across, he has a point, when he says, that initially all fingers pointed to the SCS. So even if he/they had unconfirmed reports (probably not in real time, but only hours if not days after the event) of an unknown radar blip crossing the Malayan Peninsula, that would not make the continuing search in the SCS “criminal”, as someone here put it. Quite to the contrary, it would have been criminal to abandon the SCS search, until such point, when it was 100% established, that MH370 did not crash in the SCS. As far as I know, even by today we have not reached this point 100%, and certainly not back in the first days, when numerous aspects pointed to the SCS:
– multiple eyewitnesses
– last known position
– oil slicks found on the water
– multiple sightings of possible debris via satellite images
– … (I think H20 cited more points in the ITV, which I seem to have forgotten)
So would you call of the SCS search only to find out that 200+ pax were drowning in the SCS, and you could probably have prevented their deaths if you had not directed all search assets to chase what later would turn out to be, for example, the radar blip of a private plane having forgotten to turn on its transponder, a military jet as part of the naval military exercises, a balloon, or any other explanation for an unknown radar blip, possibly 1 or 2 days prior and now long gone ? Surely not.
They could have opened a second branch of investigation additional to and simultaneously to the SCS search. But to call off the SCS search while you could reasonably expect people floating somewhere there, wouldn’t have been a good call … and even grossly negligent.
(And even if they would have called off the SCS search, what should they have done instead? Nothing? Or search anywhere “west of Malaysia” … which is a pretty huge area. Remember that the search zone analysis based on the Inmarsat ping rings was not done until 9 days later. On the other hand, the SCS search around the LKP was – at that point – quite possibly a realistic place to look for (and still is BTW according to some here…)).
Gysbreght,
You commented, “Well of course they don’t have that knowledge.”
They’ve had 365 days, and counting, to get their asses in gear. The Malaysian team should include people capable of rounding out their knowledge for a particular investigation. I’m not confident they are suceedng. They have called in experts from all over but Malaysia is in the lead, they have retained responsibility to pull it all together. Have we a name for a lead investigator no? We have the name of a retired bureaucrat who was recalled to head the committee for the institution of the implementation of the international independent investigation team. The ICAO Regional Office, at the end of January, described high level political interference in the all aspects of the process in Malaysia.
Regarding your question related to 1.9.5.4: the Flight ID is not relevant to the GES Log On, the Flight ID is not relevant to the virtual circuit setup, the Flight ID is only relevant within an ACARS message and, so, only of interest to the corresponding software application receiving that ACARS message in the MAS Ops Control Centre. The author’s explanation is imprecise and inadequate which is contrary to the expectation for a “Factual Information” document. The particular section of the document, 1.9.5.4 confuses causes and effects: a description of the FMC preflight procedure & how that procedure is evidenced by the datalink events would be more appropriate.
Perhaps, this to explain the datalink operations:
The AES executes a Log-On to the GES, the AES identifies itself by means of the aircraft ICAO 24bit address;
The AES signals to the avionics Data Comms Mgmt Function (DCMF) and IFE comms handler that the SATCOM datalink is ready;
DCMF issues a request to the AES to establish an AMSS virtual circuit connection to the ground ACARS Processor; this is completed & DCMF forwards an ACARS Media Advisory msg to the ACARS processor indicating the aircraft is online via SATCOM/AMSS. This ACARS Media Advisory includes the FlightID, as defined in the Flight Management Computing Function, and the Aircraft Registration;
IFE issues a request to establish an AMSS virtual circuit connection to the SMS/eMail message processor; this is completed & the IFE issues a message indicating it is ready for service.
So, if the process had been explained more precisely it should be evident that the FlightID is maintained by the FMCF.
One might consider this is pedantic hair splitting. However, I’d expect to learn that the FlightID is purely in the FMC domain and detail of how it is modified can be sought from the FMS resources.
We (the IG, and others) called for the Complete SU Log to be published without redaction in March, April & May 2014: the goal was to understand what was or wasn’t operating as per expectations. We still haven’t seen the Complete SU Log but this ACARS Traffic Log now shows the payload carried by the AMSS network from the AES via the GES to the ground systems.
My knowledge? A professional career that spans telecoms, aerospace and IT services. The aerospace tenure included periods working alongside Boeing including exposure to flight deck environments. I understand ‘systems’ and I’m able to ask appropriate questions to round out my understanding.
:Don
@Brock,
For some reason I also imagined you with a beard. You should really analyse your comments. Why do they create this mental picture? 😉
But seriously, thanks for having the guts to do such an appeareance.
And since you seem to have established such good contact with Dr. Duncan, could you ask him something?
What is his opinion about the absence of a recorded accustic event which originated from the designated search areas (if we exclude the much debated LANL event from the discussion for the moment)?
I said earlier, the absence of a recorded sound doesn’t prove that no plane crashed in that area. The AirAsia and AirFrance crashes also didn’t create recordable accustics. But Matty argued correctly that those crashes weren’t high impact. However, the simulations of a B777 crash caused by an empty fuel tank suggested a high impact crash as the most likely scenario. Shouldn’t that have produced a recordable sound event? And what could be the most likely reasons for this absence?
And a Thank You to ALSM as well 🙂
Greg Long:
The 2 phone call attempts did result in records in the SU Log. However, phone calls use a different type of channel (C Channel. The C Channel data produce BFO observations, but no BTO observations. These C Channel observations are used in our analysis. The C Channel data have a different BFO Bias (146 Hz) compared to the R channel (150 Hz) and T channel (154 Hz).
Gysbreght,
1. Section 2, Paragraph 3(10) at page 2-5 of the MCS 4200/7200 manual reads as follows: “The AES supplies the GES with its flight identification number at log-on, if the owner/operator of the AES desires to use the aircraft flight identification as the address for ground originated calls…..”
2. From the Interim Report released a few days ago and from the Inmarsat datalog released in late May, we can see that flight information was intended to be relayed to the GES each time the AES on MH370 requested to be logged on. (see for eg the mid flight log-ons at 1825 UTC and 0019 UTC where the SU for the Log on Request was accompanied by an ISU for “Log on Flight Information”).
3. The ORT or Owners Requirements Table is stored in the SDU and according to the manual “the table does not lose its contents because of loss of primary power”.
4. Flight identification/information is not stored in the ORT as it changes with each flight. This is confirmed in Appendix C of the manual which sets out the information stored in the ORT, paragraph (ix) of which reads as follows: ” Use and Value of Flight Identification- N/A – This item is not considered part of the MCS ORT since the value is dynamic and is obtained from the CFDS/CMC/OMS or SCDU…”.
5. According to the Interim Report, the AIMS would supply the AES/SDU with the flight information/flight identification.
6. Given the flight information was available during the initial powering up but then became no longer available by the time of the mid flight log-ons the first at 1825 UTC, it would point to a break in the ARINC 429 datalink between the AIMS and the AES/SDU, some time prior to 1825 UTC.
Sincerely, Alex Siew
Alex Siew,
Your reply is very interesting, not because it offers any useful information but it is another example of your propensity for fabrication and false reasoning, characteristics you have persisted since 24th March 2014.
1) SDU & Flight ID: while the SDU may be configured to send Flight ID as part of its Log-On that isn’t how it is configured in AMSS use. The Inmarsat AMSS specification shows that the Log On Request Signalling Unit (packet), Type 10, does not define any data fields for Flight ID. Inmarsat exploits the aircraft ICAO ID to form the ITU E.164 compliant ‘address’ for ground originated calls (rather than “use the aircraft flight identification as the address for ground originated calls”). The Inmarsat AMSS specification is the definitive source for the operation of the SDU as an AMSS AES.
2) You state “we can see that flight information was intended to the relayed to the GES…”. False reasoning. You have misconstrued the protocol and infer that intention. As above the AMSS Type 10, Log On Request SU, does not define fields for Flight ID.
3) ORT is irrelevant to this matter. The ORT stores persistent configuration information.
4) Ah yes, the misleading statement: offer a snippet of information that is factual but irrelevant.
5) As I have set out, the AES is not supplied with the 4 digit Flight ID. The Flight ID is not relevant to the AES Log On. It is only relevant to communications at the ACARS level.
6) And finally your false reasoning: nothing indicates that the FlightID “became no longer available” and nothing indicates a break in the ARINC 429 Datalink between AIMS and the SDU. To the contrary: that the IFE made its logical connection, at 18:27:03, to an AMSS destination shows that AIMS functions remained involved.
:Don
@ GuardedDon. You wrote on March 10, 2015 at 3:05 PM:
“Another ad-hoc route was entered in the FMS and 9M-MRO followed this route back across the Malaysian peninsula, out across the Straits of Malacca and on.”
Is that a fact or an hypothesis? The ATSB June report says on page 37: “In-flight, the flight-planned route can be changed by the crew selecting a different lateral navigation mode or maintaining LNAV and changing the route entered in the FMS”.
You wrote on March 10, 2015 at 7:36 PM:
“The particular section of the document, 1.9.5.4 confuses causes and effects: a description of the FMC preflight procedure & how that procedure is evidenced by the datalink events would be more appropriate.”
The report conveys the intirely Factual Information that some of the AES Log-On requests contained the FlightID and others did not. It also says in 1.9.4.1 that the Flight Information (FI) MH0370 and Aircraft Number (AN) 9M-MRO were keyed in by the crew at 1556:08 UTC.
The B777 FCOM Normal Procedures, Preflight Procedure – First Officer NP.20.11 says:
ROUTE line select key – Push
Enter:
• flight number
• route.
ACTIVATE line select key – Push
EXEC key – Push
The point is that FlightID and route are separate entities. The routes are stored in the FMS database. A route is selected by entering departure and destination airports, and is then entered in the active flight plan. The same route can be flown with different FlightID’s, and a certain FlightID can be assigned to one route on one day, and to another route the next day. For example, figure 30 in the ATSB’s June report shows a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Amsterdam as MH021 on 07 March 2014. In June, 2014 MH021 designated a flight from Paris CDG to Kuala Lumpur.
Coming back to my posting from yesterday; and trying to be more specific in my questions. Maybe Don would you be able to help?
AIMS is providing navigational data (position, velocity) to AES. What if this information provided to the AES is not correct. It will affect frequency compensation, which aims at keeping the BFO within certain limits (few hundred hertz). To my understanding this is needed because of the narrow channel frequency spacing (I find values ranging from 2.5, 5 to 15 kHz).
– Could the BFO going out of limits be the cause of the link lost period (falling somewhere between 17:07 and 18:25)?
The ATSB stated:
18 augustus update ATSB report, p. 22
“The 1825 and 0019 SATCOM handshakes were log-on requests initiated by the aircraft. A log-on request in the middle of a flight is not common and can occur for only a few reasons. These include a power interruption to the aircraft satellite data unit (SDU), a software failure, loss of critical systems providing input to the SDU or a loss of the link due to aircraft attitude. An analysis was performed which determined that the characteristics and timing of the logon requests were best matched as resulting from power interruption to the SDU.”
– Are there any additional details known that led to this preliminary conclusion?
In addition to these questions: Assuming that the AES was trying to connect to the GES but did not manage because it was talking/listening at the wrong frequency, what would it subsequently do? A repeated log-on attempt try to re-establish the link until it managed so? So what do the communication protocols indicate it would do?
Thanks!
Niels.
Gysbreght,
You asked, “Is that a fact or an hypothesis?” It’s the latter on the basis of information divulged by the ‘authorities’ to date.
My concern is the description presented in 1.9.5.3 & .4: points of detail those sections attempt to convey are incorrect.
I have no particular issue with 1.9.4.1 except that the ACARS Traffic Log timestamps are adrift by approx 17 seconds.
I agree with your summary of the pre-flight activities but suggest that IRU alignment is also involved in the preflight procedure.
:Don
Niels,
1) AIMS & nav data ‘wrong’: too many options to speculate.
2) “characteristics and timing of the logon requests were best matched as resulting from power interruption to the SDU”: I don’t have any information concerning how the power interruption conclusion was made.
3) “listening [..] wrong frequency, what would it subsequently do?” The P/smc channels (system management channel) are defined in the network’s System Table. An AES maintains a copy of the System Table and any updates are made automatically ‘over-the-air’ from the network. Not enough information to answer your ‘what-ifs’, sorry.
:Don
@ GuardedDon:
Could you please comment on the Factual Information that the FlightID was missing in the AES Log-On requests at 18:25 and 00:19?
Gysbreght
Gysbreght,
I already have commented in response to Mr Siew’s post.
The AMSS specification for SU type 0x10, R-ch Log On Request [to the GES], does not specify a Flight ID data field. I do not expect to see a Flight ID in the AES Log-On Request to the GES.
See http://i.imgur.com/NHB6B61.png
Subsequent to an AES Log-On with the GES I expect to see ACARS traffic carrying a Flight ID.
I believe one ACARS packet was sent from the IFE system after 18:25:35 (not recorded in the Factual Information).
There was no ACARS traffic after 00:19:38
:Don
Thanks, Don.
I understand and try to be very specific then. Anyone else who can help, or suggestions where to find this info, welcome!
Regarding 1:
Is there a specified window for the BFO. So what is the max. allowed BFO not to lose connectivity to the GES?
regarding 3:
What should the AES do according to communication protocol if it is active but failed to reach the GES during flight (irrespective of cause). For example: Will it resend data? Will it start a repeated log-on sequence until connection is re-established?
Niels.
Updated composite flightpath with radar overlays and timestamps from the new MOT report:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yvqf0lkbfsdwyjs/mh370-composite.pdf?dl=0
orion:
Nice composite flightpath with radar overlays. It is essentially identical to the IG analysis derived from the Lido Hotel photos many months ago. Note the similarity of the Orion turn points to the IG analysis.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/t00kqm5hghg4nt0/2015-03-11.jpg?dl=0
GuardedDon:
Thank you for your explanations and patience.
Gysbreght
is this flight path from 17:30 to 17:48 radar confirmed or it’s just an assumption? I can’t see why would he stray in thai airspace if evading it would take him just some odd 20-30 miles more
also why would FMT have to be a sharp turn? Couldn’t it be a mild curve around Indonesia from 18:25 onwards?
https://www.dropbox.com/s/kvlokaqpb5g6ugz/End_Point_Compare.pdf?dl=0
@ALSM (or SidB, RichardG, DuncanS): your Skype call (into which the CBC reporter eavesdropped) was fascinating – great to see the question “is there any way to make the fuel last out to s40?” being pondered.
I heard one snippet of an answer that suggested to me that an aggressive PDA assumption ALONE doesn’t get us there.
But if ALL key assumptions (PDA, FMT, intangibles) are relaxed, what does the answer become?
More importantly: has the data DRIVING the IG’s answer to this question changed in the last 12 months (i.e. if the IG were running the show from the get go, what western terminus of the search zone would it have set back in March 2014?
Thanks.
Brock: Nothing has changed much since June 17th, 3 weeks after the log was released.
StevanG, I’ve now updated the link above to v2.1 and turned on the ‘Events’ layer in the drawing.
The 18:40 positions are now shown on the FMTs, and include the approx BFO suggested direction. I believe this direction is influencing the sharpness of the turns, but somebody please correct me if I’m wrong.
Mike, Thanks- I was trying to book-end the ‘spread’ of FMT options with both the Early and Late FMTs as examples.
@littlefoot:
1. (& @M Pat) your mental images must have been conjured by my tin hat’s chinstrap.
2. VERY good observations re: most likely “narrative management” value of the April 14 CNN story. While many WERE arguing DG in mid April – and many to this day use this bogus telco ping to wrongly IMPLICATE the pilots – your counterpoints are strong (and happen to support my published speculation). Perhaps “turned west” was the goal – agreed.
3. Re: HA01: That was one of the first things I asked Dr. Duncan: if sensors at SW tip of Oz could hear an impact-level seismic event twice as far away, why didn’t they hear anything on the 7th arc? His response: sound propagates very differently depending on ocean depth, sound source (surface vs. bottom), and even sea bottom slope (think amphitheatre vs. open air). They were thus HOPING – not expecting – HA01 to have detected the SIO impact the signal data predicts.
While I personally considered this to be a cautious response, I nonetheless accept that lack of HA01 detection does not by itself disprove the SIO theory. The “smoking gun” is, to me, a) zero corroborating physical evidence of ANY sort, and b) multiple and persistent attempts by US operatives to weasel the NOTION of corroborating evidence into public perceptions.
Before anyone races with patriotic rage to their keyboard: I can envision MANY scenarios by which the US is actively managing public perception, yet was NOT involved in MH370’s disappearance. The SIO “theory”, IMO, is as likely to be covering up ignorance as guilt. I just think we keep seeing evidence that the clock is being deliberately run out. For example: in the next few weeks/months, I predict officials will pretend to “discover” a promising zone WEST of where they’ve searched to date. Many of us have since August been begging for a search sufficiently clockwise of the ATSB’s current priority zone to accommodate a plausible RANGE of FMT, PDA, and intangibles. If they spend several months searching less plausible zones, and then “discover” this reasoning, that dog won’t hunt.
This is why I remain deeply suspicious of the LANL study – which (before it was debunked) gave us not only yet more “corroborating physical evidence”, but also a brand new rationale for moving the search west – one that would distract us from officials’ mischaracterization of their own performance limit (Concern #7), and refusal to search there in October – or heck, in March 2014, when the NTSB drew two lines leading precisely there (Concerns 1a, 1b, and 2).
That is why I’ve asked ALSM to help us discover what we can of the LANL study’s provenance (key dates, distribution, etc.). The July 3 online pdf NOW shows up as dated July 3 in date-filtered Google searches, but it didn’t back in late February: my date-filtered searches (hoping to find online DISCUSSION of this now-key paper) turned up nothing at all – not even the paper itself.
Brock – I haven’t yet seen the video as the link was playing up when I tried but I also pictured with a beard, so what is going on here?
Guarded Don – I think the redacted logs situation is a good news story waiting to happen and that the Malaysians won’t handle some good old media pressure. We saw Liam Bartlett – Channel 9 Perth – make a song and dance over the MAS towelette and not least because of the standoff attitude the authorities were exhibiting. Not allowing a photo of the original etc….suspicions being aired. He sounds to have a nose for this atm. The whole specter of redacted logs is strange and needs to be painted as such, it is only finding people in the media who are not too intellectually lazy to do it. I thinks it feeds right into where he was intending to go with it? I can kick it off if there is interest in doing so.
@Brock
This is not meant as a personal attack or anything, and may be a bit off topic, but it’s painfully obvious that you don’t have too much experience with the scientific method and reading/analyzing scientific literature. The way in which you speak of the LANL study is proof of this. What are you talking about when you claim that the LANL study was debunked? It was never debunked. There is nothing to debunk. You seem to completely ignore the fact that the paper concludes that it’s very unlikely any of their data has any relation to MH370. And then the nonsense about the date it was posted. You’re delusional if you think some nefarious group of people slapped a fake date on the paper. This does not happen with peer-reviewed scientific literature. Your paranoia is a bit overboard on this front, I’m sorry to say.
Orion:
Nice update. Check the “Early FMT time”.
Jay: It bit blunt, but 100% accurate.
Brock: LANL is doing an excellent job helping us find the plane. Their work is top notch. The date was correct and their conclusion was, as Jay notes, the opposite of what you infer. Time to reboot your thinking on LANL.
Here’s a better link for the CBC Report that aired 2015-03-09.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVCn4yreOIc
quote:
Jay: “This is not meant as a personal attack or anything […] you don’t have too much experience […] nonsense […] you’re delusional […] your paranoia is overboard”
I often had cases, where a date-filtered google search yielded 0 results (althogh I had entered the correct time period), but a normal search (i.e. without time restriction) came up with the missing result. Seems to be a shortcoming in their software. If there’s something you can’t find via date-filtered search, try normal search, often it’s there …
Greg Long:
As I said, it is a bit off topic and not something I wish to harp on, but was indeed something that I felt strongly enough about to say. May have been a bit blunt and possibly more personal than I had hoped, but which of my words exactly do you disagree with?
Anyway, I do also believe that in light of Mr. Hardy’s analysis, the search may very well shift more SW if nothing turns up in the current search area. The IG persuaded the search to shift once, so I do not doubt it can happen again, especially considering Mr. Hardy’s convincing and thorough results.
So much of this mystery is public perception. There are so many conflicting stories and questionable claims which wind up being refuted, it’s no wonder why so many people think something real shady is going on. What Malaysia and the ATSB ought to do is hold a presser with the goal of answering as many of these heavily talked about claims/topics/questions as they can. These would include clearing up claims of alleged phone calls, various sightings, etc. I believe it would do a great deal for their public image, and most importantly it would potentially help the families who I’m sure have heard so many conflicting stories they don’t know what to believe anymore.
@Jay, ALSM: for as many times as you state falsehoods, I will correct the public record:
The LANL study…
– to my knowledge, was never mentioned online until ALSM started promoting it 3 weeks ago
– had apparently never hit Dr. Alec Duncan’s radar screen until I linked him to it
Dr. Duncan (to whose views on this subject I defer) concluded the following:
– the LANL event’s bearing relative to HA01 was 190 (from Antartica) nowhere near LANL’s calculated 246.9 (from 7th arc)
– the acoustic signature was consistent with a plain vanilla ice-cracking event (which he DEMONSTRATED by including graphs of a similar event occurring just one hour later)
ALSM: if you want anyone to give the LANL study any credibility at all, first please refute Dr. Duncan’s analysis. If you succeed, I’ll retract and apologize.
Jay: as I told you the LAST time you constructed the very same paper tiger (you are beginning to try my patience), my issue is not that the July 3 LANL study had an insufficiently cautious conclusion. It is that ALSM and others would have us believe the July 3 paper – together with two others (one published online, one not) – amount to enough evidence of an s40 impact that we should pay attention to it. ALSM does NOT dismiss the LANL coordinate like you, LANL, and I do, Jay – the LANL coordinate is now a prominent punch pin in the many graphs ALSM is now disseminating to the public. If we accept Dr. Duncan’s analysis, this is spectacularly UNscientific, and spectacularly COUNTER-productive.
As is lobbing evidence-free vitriol my way. Anyone who can’t produce a shred of evidence that this “peer-reviewed scientific literature” was reviewed by ANYONE (let alone a peer) back when it was purportedly published should think twice before attempting to publicly shame someone who seeks merely to VERIFY the authenticity of its actual online publication date.
Concerning role of GPS in producing aircraft navigation data
Coming back to my posting of two days ago. I’ve been looking more in detail to the role of GPS in aircraft navigation and will summarize my findings. Any specialists: feel free to correct if necessary!
While the role of GPS is becoming increasingly prominent in aircraft navigation, in a Boeing 777 it is not the main source for positional and velocity data. The main source is the ADIRU (Air Data Inertial Reference Unit) as part of the air data inertial reference unit system. As the mechanical sensors (accelerometers and gyrsocopes) will result in positional data with errors increasing in time (order of 1 nm/hour), the GPS is used for regular “update”” of the actual position, so to increase the long term accuracy. As I understand it the ADIRU and GPS data is combined in the FMC (at least that’s how Boeing is explaining it for the 747, google on “boeing aero polar navigation”.
So when GPS data not available in flight this might be disturbing but should normally not lead to major system or pilot failure.
If GPS data is wrong (google on “GPS spoofing” and you will be surprised), I’m not sure what will happen. Most likely it will result in an increased navigational inaccuracy but not in major system failure. While awareness of GPS spoofing possibility is important for the aeronautic community I consider it as a more “academic” topic which needs to be addressed by system designers, but I don’t consider it relevant in the case of MH370.
Failure of the ADIRU is another story. It can lead to serious problems, as was the case in 2005 on flight MH124, see reference below.
The original reason I was looking into this was related to the possibility of feeding wrong navigation data to the AES resulting in loss of connectivity. This is a topic which is still on the table for me. However, if there has been a problem with the navigation data fed to the AES, it would more likely be indicative for a major system failure rather than a GPS malfunction only.
Main source and analysis of the MH124 incident:
http://www.atsb.gov.au/media/24550/aair200503722_001.pdf
@CA: I’ve not yet been able to look into the details of the ADS-B system, so hard for me to enter in the discussion about the zero altitude readings at this moment.
Niels.
@Alex
Thanks a lot for the references!
I have been looking for items 1 and 4 but could not yet find them. Do you have them and would you be willing to share them?
Regards,
Niels.
@Niels, Alex has been banned. I let him leave a message up the other day but that was a one-off. Alex is an unusual case — he apparently has considerable technical understanding, but he devotes himself to a kind of high-level trolling.
@Matty/Perth
Regarding redacted data, i.e the unreleased data fields from the Inmarsat SU Log. The ‘Factual Information’ does partially resolve that issue, only partially.
The payload, or content, of SUs logged by Inmarsat has now been exposed via the ACARS Traffic Log (Factual Information Appendix 1.9A). But only the SUs concerned with carrying those ACARS messages.
One remaining ACARS message is described (sect 1.9.5.3, item 2) as the IFE system’s ‘beginning of flight’ message. That ACARS message is consistent with the SU Log (it comprises 10 T-channel SUs, 72 chars max). The content isn’t disclosed.
The technical parameters redacted from the Inmarsat log, including payload for datalink management SUs, remain unpublished. Useful information remains in that redacted data. For example, refer to the image I posted above: note the data field describing ‘Satellite ID (previous)’. That’s very relevant to the 18:25 question.
Bottom line for me: the ‘Factual Information’ doesn’t convey consistent depth of research across the many disciplines involved nor does analysis across those disciplines appear thorough. So much information is presented in a narrative rather than factual, data driven, form.
@Don,
“So much information is presented in a narrative rather than factual, data driven, form”
That’s a huge problem, since a narrative can only be constructed by making assumptions. If it isn’t sufficiently explained how the investigators arrived at those underlying assumptions, the readers of the report simply have to trust the investigators. And that is difficult…
Niels:
Your description of how GPS data is assimilated is basically correct. The NAV computers (multiple, redundant) on the aircraft use Kalman Filters (a mathematical algorithm) with inputs from GPS, multiple airdata units, magnetometers, INS gyros, accelerometers…in short, many “orthogonal sensors”. The Kalman filter automatically zeros out long term drift in the integrated INS positions when GPS data is available, but “flywheels” on the INS and other data sources when it is not available. The same is true if any other source is lost. The Kalman filter makes graceful degradation “automatic”. You can lose multiple sensors and the Kalman Filter will still provide accurate, but degraded position and velocity info until the last minimum sensor set is available. Even in smaller private planes, ADAHRS has become common. See for example http://www.dynonavionics.com/index.html . This is why the system is so robust.
@littlefoot
“If it isn’t sufficiently explained how the investigators arrived at those underlying assumptions ….”
Exactly.
A broad comment on RADAR: no position data accompanies the information attributed to civil radar sources in the ‘Factual Information’ document. At the very least there should be locations defined for the RADAR heads and a tabulated report for the time, range & bearing (or derived lat-long, but I’d prefer the ‘raw’ range & bearing) for the target sightings.
And, still, no information is presented from military RADAR sources in the Straits of Malacca area.
So, is the fundamental question for the veracity of their work or for their competence? They, being Malaysia.
:Don
@Airlandseaman ~
Regret that you are being unfairly blamed for “promoting” the LANL study. Nearly 3 weeks ago I asked you a simple question, you replied with a simple acronym “LANL” then I located the study and shared it online. I am very grateful for your continuing contributions to finding 9M-MRO. Thank you!
~LG~
Lisa Grace: TNX!
Brock McEwen:
You seem to be very confused about almost everything to do with LANL. I started talking with them months, not weeks ago. They are are a group of dedicated scientists who happen to have access to acoustic data in the SIO, and the skills to know how to use it. They worked out some possible signals, but discounted the likelihood that they were from MH370. You obviously don’t get that.
Meanwhile, independent of the acoustic analysis, LANL developed their own version of a path model using the Inmarsat and radar data, like many others have done. Their model does not make use of the BFO data. It relies on the BTO data only for the path derivation.
There is no connection between the two analyses. They are separate and independent analysis. They have never publicized their work. They are not hiding anything, but they were not interested in any publicity. It was not funded research. It was not sanctioned by any government. It was a few guys sitting around the table, like the IG, like you and me, wondering what the hell happened to 370. And they did what the rest of did. They used the skills and data they had available to them, on their own time, to come up with a possible path. The acoustic analysis had nothing to do with the path and end point they found. They only used radar and Inmarsat data for that derivation. Of course, they did the acoustic analysis in the hope of finding some correlation. But they concluded the acoustic analysis, while interesting, had too many issues to be trusted as a confirmation of their path model. So, the LANL end point rests 100% on their interpretation of the Inmarsat and Radar data, just like the analysis done by Bobby, GlobusMax, Hardy, ATSB, IG, etc.
Bobby, Sid and I are all working together with LANL now (with input from Duncan) to see if there is any way to further refine the analysis of all available acoustic data with the goal of helping to narrow down the most likely search area. All of us believe the plane went down close to the 7th arc, IVO 37-41 degrees south. Each of us have reasons to believe it is where we have estimated it to be. But all these estimates to date are based primarily on Inmarsat and Radar data. The hope is that, with further work, the acoustic data may provide some additional, independent guidance as to where in the 37-41 degree range the aircraft is most likely to be found.
@Orion:
If you’re still doing eyewitnesses, here’s an article I hadn’t seen before. [Note: this comes via Noel O’Gara on Twitter, who, interestingly, wrote a book about a (police) cover-up related to a series of murders in the UK].
“..they saw a white plane ‘crossing and circling’ around the waters between the Malay peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
Then, the group claimed to have observed a smoke coming from the right rear end of the plane after it circled for the second time and tilted on its left.
It was then, continued Hendra, when the aircraft started to fly lower before vanishing from their sight.
‘We suspect the plane crashed into the sea’, said Hendra.”
http://t.co/7KuhFSLn3L
Note that this article is dated 03.18.14. Kate Tee’s account of her sighting was first published in the Phuket Gazettte on 06.02.14
From the Antara News piece:
“At 11 a.m. local time on Sunday, the fishermen saw a white plane crossing and circling.”
Timing doesn’t seem to fit to me. Maybe they saw a search plane circling and then descending for a better look at something?
http://www.antaranews.com/en/news/93245/fishermen-saw-plane-crash-around-malacca-straits
@PhilD:
Right. Antara quotes 11:00 am, but Kicker Daily (one I posted) doesn’t mention time.
So the time (IF it was 11 am) doesn’t square. But I posted this for another reason: the fisherman reported seeing smoke coming from the plane. So did Kate Tee. But her report was two plus months later.
@ALSM:
Here is my statement: “The LANL study, to my knowledge, was never mentioned online until ALSM started promoting it 3 weeks ago”
Here is your refutation: “I started talking with them months, not weeks ago”.
How does your statement rebut mine in any way, shape or form?
Here is my statement (emphasis added): “my issue is NOT that the July 3 LANL study had an insufficiently cautious conclusion…”
Here is your refutation: “They worked out some possible signals, but discounted the likelihood that they were from MH370. You obviously don’t get that.”
To be clear: we ALL – you (per your comment above), me, Jay, LANL (in their conclusion) agree the July 3 LANL acoustic study should have essentially zero weight. To claim I don’t “get” that is absurd.
What I object to is the use of this study BEYOND what its own caveats suggest. In your e-mail to me, you most definitely hinted that the two analyses cross-corroborated each other. This was wrong. I don’t seek any public apology for this treatment of me (as a non-expert, I am predisposed to trust an expert like you on such matters) – just more information (see remaining unanswered eight questions).
Now:
Here is your most recent statement (context added):
“There is no connection between the two analyses (acoustic and signal data-based). They are separate and independent”
My refutation: here is LANL’s latest (LA-UR-14-28179, Oct.21, 2014) conclusion, verbatim:
“We find that the noise event identifier by Stead (LA-UR 14-24972) is the strongest noise
that occurred on the crash arc of Malaysian Flight 370. That event occurs within the
search area suggested by Kunkle et al (LA-UR 14-25015). Few other possible noise
sources are seen on the arc. The 10th strongest cluster is close to the noise level and is the only source within the next search area suggested by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB).
Although the strongest event reconstructs onto the arc, it also reconstructs stronger at several locations well off the arc. That could be due to the lack of coherency at the
hydrophones.”
Observations:
1) By my (admittedly under-educated) read, the first statement in the last paragraph appears misleading: what I believe would have been more accurate is” ‘if one FORCES the assumption that the impact occurred ON the arc, then the Stead=acoustic analysis suggests the Kunkle=BTO-indicated coordinate is the most likely; however, if you RELAX this assumption, the strongest indication of the acoustic data is OFF the arc’.
2) LANL is attempting to cleverly plant the seed that the two studies (Stead=acoustic, Kunkle=BTO) cross-corroborate each other. That is NOT “no connection between the two analyses” – this is an entire paper dedicated to an attempt to ESTABLISH a connection – and clever wording at the end to leave open the possibility that they’ve FOUND one.
OK. I’m done with this Brock. You can believe what you want. I’ll keep working with LANL and others to help refine the best search area.
Mike
@PhilD, @Orion:
Here’s one more (may have mentioned here previously) – this is the eyewitness account of ‘Hasbi’, who reported seeing a burning metal object in the sky west of Aceh Province (Indonesia).
This article is via @h1ppyg1rl on Twitter, who contacted the journalist Murdani Abdullah, who clarified the timing: 02.15am Indonesian time on March 8th.
Google translation:
“When it happened at around 2:15 pm, March 9 in the morning. I just finished closing the shop, and was about to urinate in the back room. It was then that I saw a big fire in the sky, “said Hasbi, who is also the coffee seller.
According to him, he saw the fire mixed with blue color. ‘As iron burn. I’ve never seen a fire that size over the life of me. The fall so fast’ said Hasbi again.”
http://bit.ly/1BzWsXM
MH370 AND JINDALEE (WHISTLEBLOWER)
“the staff in NT OTHR were instruct to report on certain things and ignore certain things”
“I knew who was military because I was raised at Vandenberg Airforce base California. I know who is military or not”
“The personel I lived with in Alice had frequent visitors. BBQs and stuff from American guys who were not military.”
“At Jindalee and Hearts Range. I have been to both installations many times. It is Australian Military but run by civilians.”
“Have been informed it could be out of range because the altitude of the ionosphere changes and has to be higher than normal
However. All data was collected for that day and sent for analysis. They see everything but it is an enormous amount of info.
Because the short wave band is sweeping there can be interference from reflected longer frequencies (up to 7.5Hz)
This creates blind spots which the scientists have to analyse.
Found in November to give drones time to change the black box to the phony one. 32.5 latS 93 long. Cost.187million. What Jet? Clowns.
the plane was within range for several hours – if it was there, they saw it”
http://t.co/kitJCsWZTz
This comes via Twitter — @PAIN_NET (Professional Aviators Investigative Network) in Australia. I’ve mentioned them here before.
Recently, PAIN_NET had to set up their own blog after being informed by Pprune that their highly-trafficked thread on the Pprune site was being closed. The stated reason: “We were getting complaints about stale threads from overseas”. PAIN contributors (current and former pilots in Australia) were very vocal on Pprune about the internal workings of the ATSB and its role in the Pel-Air accident cover-up.
I don’t intend to re-open discussion about the FlightID, but is it MH0370 or MAS370?
1.9.4.1 (page 43): “… at 1556:08 UTC the flight information (FI) MH0370 and Aircraft Number (AN) 9M-MRO were typed in by the crew …”.
1.9.5.3 (page 53): “2. After take-off, the IFE SMS e-mail application sent a normal beginning-of-flight message at 16:42 (containing the correct Airborne Earth Station [AES ID], Flight ID “MAS370”, origin airport “WMKK”, and destination airport “ZBAA”), indicating that the IFE was receiving the valid Flight ID, origin airport and destination airport from AIMS and the ICAO (AES) ID from the Satellite Data Unit (SDU) at this time.”
Appendix 1.9A (page 5 of 13) shows the 16:42 “B777 OFF Report” with both FI MH0370 and “OFF01MAS370”
@Niels, @ALSM, @DrBobbyUlich,
I recall a recent discussion of possible saw tooth bias in the BFO signal by Bobby et al.
It occurred to me that a steady drift in the sensor data integrated position information periodically corrected by accurate GPS data may cause exactly such a saw tooth profile.
If that observation/hypothesis is correct, it would/could be evidence, that the GPS feed was operational.
There may be more useful insights to be gleened from this. But that’s way above my pay-grade.
Cheers
Will