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.
Re: the concept of filing a bogus flight plan for a cargo plane to Kazakhstan in order to allow mh370 to switch identity and flight code:
I asked myself a few comments earlier which airport with runways long and strong enough to allow the start of a huge Russian cargo plane like the An-124 might be prone to “overlook” the non-start of such a plane. And keep quiet about it -depending on who the perps might be.
Well, there is a very suitable one I had completely overlooked so far:
Yangon International Airport in Myanmar.
Apparently – according to a wiki article about Russian/Burmese relationships – Russia is the only foreign power with whom the government of Myanmar still has really strong ties and has been backed on several occasions. Russia also opposed sanctions against Myanmar. I wasn’t aware of that. But that would make Yangon airport a strong candidate as the starting point for a bogus flight plan. The perps could’ve filed a flight plan for a Russian cargo plane from Yangon to Almaty. This plane would never start but mh370 could join the route of this flightplan over the Bay of Bengal easily and assume the flight code and identity of this cargo plane – and then fly unmolested to it’s destination in Kazakhstan. And nobody would notice anything as long as nothing comes out of Myanmar. And it never does. It’s pretty opaque. They don’t have to be in on the hijack plan btw. They just have to be tightlipped about the schedule of some cargo planes of a Russian airline. They might not even connect it with the disappearance of mh370 later on. Especially if everybody believes the plane flew south.
Look at Yangon’s location. It seems extremely suitable for such a scam.
And I checked: Russian An-124’s and other Russian cargo planes have been there in the past.
The beauty of a bogus flight plan from Yangon, Myanmar to Kazakhstan is that the route would go directly over the Bay of Bengal without crossing into other foreign airspace. So, nobody else would notice that this “cargo plane” never flew the complete route of the flightplan.
As long as nobody from Yangon says anything I can’t see what could go wrong with this plan. Why shouldn’t mh370 be able to cross completely unmolested and without raising any suspicions into Kazakhstan?
What happens there is a different question…
@Niels
I’m referring to the Data-3 ground connections set up by the IFE (items 11 and 12 on page 55). Item 5 refers to another Data-3 connection set up by the IFE and shows that the “User Data” (aka the ‘payload’) sent by the IFE normally includes the FlightID.
Items 9 and 10 are the start and completion of the Log-On protocol. That protocol serves to set up the SATCOM link, no payload is transmitted in that process. As explained by GuardedDon, the FlightID is only used within the “payload” for the benefit of the addressee of the payload, and has no function within the setting up or maintaining the SATCOM link.
@Victor: thank you for your careful assessment of the fuel feasibility of various northern routes.
Does the analysis which rules out Kuqa Qiuci not also rule out the place (s21) to which officials moved the search on April 2?
@Brock: I don’t know. I’d have to reconstruct the paths and see. I moved on from those paths many months ago as they never made sense to me.
@littlefoot: To follow up on your thoughts, the cruise speed for the AN-124 is listed as 430 knots, which at FL350 and ISA temperature, is about 0.746 knots. The slow speed required by the reconstructed path to Almaty would look similar to typical speeds flown by an AN-124.
Littlefoot – if you look at Almaty airport on satellite view it’s a bit like Perth in that one end of it is way out in the bush. In Perth they used to park the chartered Afghanistan bound Antonov’s down there to keep them out of sight. RAAF now have Globemasters.
I think at airports you stop hearing planes, and noone was really looking for it at that point, certainly not there.
I have always felt that MH370 flown through the Malacca Straights then to the SIO as a unacceptable scenario… However if a decoy aircraft was involved which could possibly spoof the data at about 99% success then maybe it was involved with the “reboots” as it joined the spoofing when they powered on the spoofer device.. I am thinking they did not quite sync up the spoof exactly so we are getting some data mismatches. I also think the decoy was involved in producing data at the concept of the “FMT” as it might have circled out of RADAR range until it met up with MH370 .. of which then MH370 tailed this decoy when they headed north (or in any direction) together. Just throwing out some ideas.
just continuing my thought on how MH370 crossed over the land mass into the Bay of Bengal… So the smallest amount of Thai airspace would seem to be at Thap Sakae when flying from IGARI and once through that MH370 is into Myanmar then continues onward toward Alamty or some military airstrip nearby.
@Victor, thanks.
The An-124s can go faster but they usually don’t – depending on their cargo – and they burn a holy amoumt of fuel.
I’m so fascinated with the An-124s because the airlines who offer charter transports with them, target customers with unusual needs for large, heavy or tricky cargo all over the world. They fly unusual routes often at night and have irregular schedules. And while time is money for the airlines it happens often enough that flight plans are overthrown on short notice because there are unforseen problems with tricky cargo. All that – besides their size – makes them ideal “cover” candidates for mh370.
And a financially troubled airline just might be bribed or simply payed for the special customer service of not flying on short notice on a certain night.
@ littlefoot
Perhaps it’s worth recalling what the Kazakh Civil Aviation Committee was saying via detailed statement to Reuters in March 2014:
“Kazakhstan said on Monday it had not detected any “unsanctioned use” of its air space by any planes on March 8.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/17/malaysia-airlines-kazakhstan-idUSL6N0ME23E20140317
&
“”Even if all on-board equipment is switched off, it is impossible to fly through in a silent mode,” said the statement signed by the committee’s deputy head Serik Mukhtybayev. “There are also military bodies monitoring the country’s air space.”
Malaysia Airlines planes had made nine regular flights to and from Europe over Kazakhstan’s territory on March 8, Mukhtybayev said.
“Even hypothetically thinking, before reaching Kazakhstan’s territory this plane would have had to fly over other countries along its route, where the flight zone is also closely monitored, so we would have received information from these countries,” he added.”
http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/03/17/malaysia-airlines-kazakhstan-idINDEEA2G09020140317
@Victor: thanks for responding. Agree 100% those search decisions made no sense.
Should such nonsense compel us to “move on”, or “move in”?
I ask only because I consider searching in fuel-infeasible zones for several months to be suspicious.
Since your analysis concludes that M=0.664 (>380 KTAS?) is too SLOW for 370’s fuel to last the required 6 hours, I would not have thought it controversial to state the obvious corollary: that 323 KTAS paths (as required to proceed directly through the arcs to s21, per the “decompression scenario”, as published in an IG report you undersigned) are likewise fuel-infeasible.
I don’t mean to badger you, Victor; I’m just trying to solve a mystery.
@Matty, are you saying they’ve hidden A-124s near Perth Airport in the bush??
@Victor: thanks for responding. Agree 100% those search decisions made no sense. Should such nonsense compel us to “move on”, or “move in”?
You well know that I am trying to help solve this mystery by auditing official search decisions which don’t add up. Your publication of analysis PROVING s21 was fuel infeasible (s21 requires 323KTAS: much SLOWER than your “too slow” M=0.664 = >380KTAS) had me daring to dream you (and perhaps even others in the IG) were prepared to join me in “moving in”. Alas, it seems I must wait a bit longer.
(Please disregard my 8:01pm; did not realize it had been sent. Superseded by 8:17pm. Apologies.)
@Brock: I was trying to find an airport that would allow there to be a reasonable amount of fuel left in the tank. The trip to the SIO assumes the plane flew to fuel exhaustion. Those are two different scenarios. I only have fuel flow rates for LRC and holding speeds. I don’t know how quickly the fuel flow increases below the holding speed. It may very well be that the S21 search location can be reached on the fuel that was available.
I applaud your efforts to solve this mystery, but please do not use my analysis as justification that the S21 search zone was never feasible based on fuel calculations I performed. As I said before, I do not know whether or not that zone was allowed based on fuel considerations, and I have moved on from that search zone.
Littlefoot – they used to park them right down the southern end where noone could see them – obscured by bush. Often they were full of ammo. You would have no idea they were there unless you got on a service road and went for a drive. Terminals at the other end.
@Victor: thanks for clarifying. What would it take to incent you to professionally analyze the fuel feasibility of s21 for me?
@VictorI
Your northern route map is very intriguing.
I read recently in one of the articles Jeff penned about a northern route, he made this comment:
” 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.”
There is an alternate path over the Bay of Bengal, that fits well Jeff’s description, especially the “flown slowly, curving path”.
The IG Interim Report (map) in July observed the plane was flying very slow at 160 kts (195 miles ÷ 73 min) over the Andaman Sea:
http://031c074.netsolhost.com/WordPress/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Interim-Report-Figure-1b.jpg
What if that very slow speed (along with a very low altitude) was the constant speed MH370 maintained for the duration of a flight only over the Bay of Bengal?
Assuming it followed only flight paths to waypoints, it could have flown in sort of a circle type pattern following this route:
> Starting on P628 in the vicinity of IGREX.
> North-Northwest on P628 & W111 to VATLA.
> North on W111 to DOPID.
> Southeast on P646 until fuel exhaustion.
With much higher fuel consumption, how far on P646 do you think it could have possibly flown before both engines flamed out?
Would the 135 degree turn-back to the southeast have much of an impact on the location of the 6th & 7th arcs?
At this speed and altitude, debris could have possibly been non-existent.
Oh those Russians:
http://www.watoday.com.au/world/russia-was-ready-for-a-nuclear-state-of-alert-over-crimea-putin-20150315-1lzuer.html
Here’s a conundrum: if we accept this article is correct (as seems reasonable) the the inmarsat comms was enabled and possibily manipulated with the intention of making people believe the flight went south, and we believe that offcials were negligient or inept to the point of willfuness of supporting a SIO route, then surely we must believe that the hijackers had influence over the officials. Right?
In other words whoever wanted us to believe the flight went south are probably also those who were promoting that theory in defiance of contradictory evidence.
I think its a given that the Russians lack influence over Australia, US and Malaysian authorities, so i think they’re off the hook.
@Brad, I think you took a wrong turn halfway through. If officials supported an SIO route out of negligence or ineptitude, that’s saying they didn’t do so as a result of a nefarious plot.
At any rate, as I’ve often emphasized, supporting the SIO route doesn’t imply incompetence. The Inmarsat data clearly indicates that the plane went south. I merely presented my theory as an alternative.
@Brock: Your offer to “professionally incent me” is generous but I would not accept that. By email I will provide you with some suggestions on how you might proceed.
@Bob Det: I don’t think it is possible to find a slow, curved, northern path that fits the BTO and BFO.
Also, the IG never proposed that the plane flew at 160 kts over the Andaman Sea. Rather, the calculation was meant to show that inconsistencies in the path (slow speed and BFO at 18:40) suggested the plane turned sooner and likely terminated further south than where they were proposing at the time.
@VictorI:
I don’t know if you have investigated this scenario based on what we’ve discussed before; but I find your analysis very intriguing; and for sure the most likely scenario.
Taking into account the fact that the 7th arc BFO analysis includes indeniably a steep descent, I can’t help but thinking about one article I read but can’t find anymore.
The article claimed to have discovered the crash site in a mountain range and contained several heat maps (by infrared or other method), indicating that something emitted heat right there. The timing seemed to sustain the evidence.
However, I don’t remember which country it was, or what the source was.
I know the article was written in a foreign language, and it was linked through with direct translation.
Does anyone have the links for this article at a handstretch?
@LGHamiltonUSA: it might be a link in your tweets list as I follow your twitter account.
For the record; I am not trying to speculate. I am just curious if this could be matched to a northern flight path.
For clarification:
I find the most likely scenario of the northern flight paths very intriguing.
I don’t find it the most likely scenario of what happened.
@JJ: You are referring to the work of Dr.Kang. The site he mentions in the Beshtash Valley (42.2603N,72.3967E)falls short of the 7th arc by about 124 nm.
@Gysbreght
Thanks a lot for your explanation about flightID!
Niels.
Consequences of ignoring primary radar data:
Although I agree with the choice for current priority search zone for HR sonar scan, it is necessary to discuss the underlying assumptions in case extension of the search zone is needed. Personally I feel most uncomfortable with the location of turn south (FMT) in those analysis where it is found by extrapolation of primary radar data.
There are several reasons to be careful to accept the radar data as fact. So I agree with earlier statements made on this blog that it would be preferable to ignore the much debated military radar data.
First of all, I’m trying to see what are the consequences of ignoring all radar data after the turn back, basically by combining the last know position (IGARI @17:22) with the 18:25 ping ring, and assuming a 520 knots max. speed.
For the BTO/BFO analysis it has consequences for the possible positions for the FMT. They are indicated by the pink area (see link) with corners ABCD.
A: early turn, north limit
B: late turn, north limit
C: early turn, south limit
D: late turn, south limit
Early turn: 1825
Late turn: 1840
(Later turns are possible but would better fit with an approach for landing at one of the Nicobar/Andaman islands: one of the more complicated scenarios)
It would be important to see how it affects the 6th arc crossing limits at both sides, initially by assuming AP flight (@near constant track and speed). As a possible extension of search zone to the S/W is dominating the discussions, I will focus myself on flight paths which originate from point B.
Note that the area in the illustration is only indicative, as I don’t have means to accurately plot the ping rings.
Link for the illustration:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qapaj2aybfi17uh/FMT_Area.jpg
The pink area could be reduced if one accepts the data up to 17:52 (which comes from both civilian and military radar), based on recent information in the interim report. A similar procedure can be followed resulting in smaller circles centered close to Penang Island on the map.
Niels.
Niels,
Thank you for bringing this issue up. I have also been pondering recently where we would be without the Lido image, in particular.
It is the only apparent link between the turnaround flight path and the start of the satellite data modeling. It is also the only piece which indicates flying by waypoints and also multiple turns- two cornerstones of the hijacking theory.
If one accepts the turnaround and the corroborated radar data back towards Penang, but dismisses the Lido track, then wouldn’t there be other feasible paths which match both the BTO and BFO? The assumption would have to be made that it flew over Indonesia and they didn’t see it- but given the current flightpath consensus, that may not be a stretch.
This concept would tend to support the mechanical failure and turnaround- except the ‘high and fast’ suggestion would still be problematic to this theory.
@orion, IMO a more fatal blow to the mechanical failure scenario would be the fact that the plane went dark approx 1 minute after “Good Night Malaysia 370,” and just six seconds after IGARI. That would have to be one increeeeedibly fortuitiously timed accident, not to mention incredibly quick-acting, and astonishingly selective in the systems in knocked out.
Then again, it’s hard to put 100% confidence in anything one pulls from “Factual Info” given how riddled with errors it appears to be.
If we start to look seriously at a possible route to Almaty – or an airfield near Almaty (I haven’t discovered one so far) – the proximity to the Beshtash Valley is striking indeed.
But if the smoke plume emanating from that location on March 8 last year is in any way connected to the mystery of mh370 I personally would consider a crash at that location highly unlikely. The Beshtash Valley is a popular summer hiking destination and something would’ve been found for sure by now -unless some authority would’ve blocked the whole area for quite a while. And that couldn’t have been kept totally under wraps.
@Jeff
I do agree with that assertion. Also, the AES logon is just as fortuitously timed- if not more so. It goes without saying that these two coincidences are what make the spoof theory so palatable.
At this point, I still trust the validity of the Lido radar, but it is an interesting thought experiment nonetheless.
Also – as Victor has pointed out – the Beshtash Valley falls somewhat short of the 7th arc. The plane would have had to turn around in order to end up there…
@Brad:
“In other words whoever wanted us to believe the flight went south are probably also those who were promoting that theory in defiance of contradictory evidence.
I think its a given that the Russians lack influence over Australia, US and Malaysian authorities, so i think they’re off the hook.”
An observation on power dynamic and geopolitics all in one go.
@Jeff, orion
The timing of events indeed makes it look like the diversion was planned. However it all doesn’t add up.
I don’t think the spoofing makes much sense. It is too complicated and risky. Someone trying to cover the destination would never switch the AES back on.
On the other hand, there seems to be no logical explanation for the turn into SIO, so a contradiction with BTO/BFO data.
So IMO behind a plan (if there was one) there should be a motive for the a/c being steered away from land, combined with an intent to keep tracking the flight through SATCOM after radar contact is lost, while accepting that the a/c then could eventually be found. That doesn’t sound very probable either.
NIels.
“On the other hand, there seems to be no logical explanation for the turn into SIO, so a contradiction with BTO/BFO data.”
there is no guarantee the plane went to SIO or if it went that it was by intention
yes it is let’s say 99% there but there is still 1% that it is way northern and BFO/BTO fit the straight path and constant altitude only as a coincidence
I take my earlier comment back, that Yangon might’ve been a good starting airport for a cargoplane’s bogus flightplan into Kazakhstan. That might have some ideological appeal because of the inscrutiny and opaqueness of the current regime. But it doesn’t supply a straight flightroute to Kazakh destinations which could’ve been taken up seamlessly by mh370 after having escaped Malaysian and Thai radarcoverage.
There might be simpler solutions, closer to home…
@ALSM-your Feb 24, 11:03AM post hits the nail on the head. FWIW, I’m in 100% agreement with your hypothesis. MH370 is in the SIO near the 7th Arc. My concern is that if you believe, as I do, that one of southwesterly projections on your Map is close to the final position, many of these locations are literally outside the ATSB search box.
&VictorI – Thank you for your tailwind explanation. Just to make sure I understand the effect of a 100 Knot tailwind on an a/c that was traveling at 450 Knots without wind, rather than use the tailwind to generate a 545 Knot ground speed, in the ECON mode, the throttle would be reduced to a point where the ground speed was around 477 Knots (450Kts +6%)? Basically use the tailwind to arrive just a little bit early and save fuel?
BTW, as Gysbreght pointed out, from the Factual Information document, the instantaneous fuel burn rates (totaled and converted by me) were 21mt/hr at takeoff* and 15.5mt/hr at 16:52.* These high rates support calculations by you and Dr. Ulich that show an average burn rate of around 12.7mt/hr from takeoff to the last ACARS message.
*The times given on the ACARS Traffic Log in Appendix 1.9A do not match the times listed in the Decoded Data in Appendix 1.6B
@Brock – I think we all agree that we were not given correct information regarding the reason for moving the underwater acoustic search to S21 but that doesn’t mean that everyone else is trying to deceive the peanut gallery with misleading information. Imagine if you will that the source of the underwater acoustic pings were man made. They could have been a locator beacon for a fishing net or perhaps a locator for Hamish the Turtle. Next imagine these underwater acoustic pings were detected by a submarine that didn’t want its location to become public. Therefore, it notified the ATSB of the S21 location and the ATSB had to make up a reason for the move.
Exhibit 4 of your paper already stated that the route shown is fuel-feasible so why ask for a re-confirmation? I enjoy reading your technical contributions in this forum as well as your paper, but I think your constant accusations of others trying to mislead the investigation are a detraction.
CosmicAcademy – Your notation of the air supply blows away the theory that the pilot lost oxygen about one hour after 17:21. However, 22 minutes of air for the pax could explain why there were no frantic cell phone attempts. Even at 35,000 feet the passengers would become hypoxic in a few minutes and might not have enough time to get their oxygen masks.
Some dumb questions:
If the Flight ID was not being transmitted, how did Inmarsat know the handshakes were from MH370?
Let’s say someone on the flight deck was conscious at 18:22. Do any of the a/c’s instruments indicate that it was no longer being tracked by radar? If so, that could be an argument in support of starting the FMT soon after 18:22.
I think I understand the the concept of the BTO & BFO and accept Richard Cole’s explanation of why P-Channel (and T-Channel?) values are offset from the R-Channel but if the BTO values are the round-trip time for a signal from the GES to the AES and back to the GES, how is the round-trip time measured for signals that were initiated by the AES at 18:25:27.421 and 00:19:29.416?
Does anyone else wonder why they guys from Freescale Semiconductor shipped a 6 kg package rather than just put it in with their luggage?
Any concern that 1.1.1 says “with a total of 239 persons on board (227 passengers and 12 crew)” but the manifest on page 574 of 585 says “TTL PASSENGER 228?” Who is the missing passenger? The highjacker?
Some random thoughts and answers to some posted questions:
I still believe that the track was along FIR borders as suggested by Steve Pearson and then one or two turns to the south that went around and away from Indonesian land so if they were being watched by Indonesian radar, they would not be perceived as being hostile. Also, wasn’t the flight traveling near its top speed? This would make it visible to radar for the shortest time possible.
My only other challenge to the S37-S40 end points is many of the models assume FL350 after the FMT. If the intent was to fly as far away as possible, I would think they would have chosen a higher altitude than FL350. At an average weight of 200 tons from the diversion to fuel exhaustion (~220T @17:07 and ~180T @00:15), the optimum LRC altitude is FL390. If it flew at FL390, wouldn’t it have flown even further south and closer to the NTSB and LANL projections?
(BTW, I have just returned from my first air travel in many years going from Copenhagen to JFK on a B-787 Dreamliner. It was powered by RR Trent 1000 Engines that looked huge. This plane had a screen on the back of each seat where you could watch a simulated view of the plane or view some instruments from the Flight Deck. Shortly after takeoff, the pilot said that our cruising altitude would be at 38,000 feet. However, about 7 hours later, when an announcement was made that the cabin should prepare for the descent, we were over Massachusetts at an altitude of 40,000 feet. I don’t know if we were at another altitude during the cruise. We continued at 40,000 feet until we were within about 150 – 200 miles of of the airport and then started the descent. The B-777 Performance Manual has a similar descent rate.)
The passenger on MH370 who gave his watch to his wife also gave her his wedding ring “in case something happens.” Sounds a bit odd unless he was more concerned about his assignment at his destination and/or doesn’t fly often.
In May, 2014, I imported a kml file of handshake rings into Google Maps and then plotted various flight paths and the estimated final location from a variety of sources. Unfortunately, I did not note the source, but I recorded that based on the “NTSB original Map,” MH370 crossed the 6th Arc near to 40.32S 82.5E. That would put their point on the 7th Arc much further to the southwest than the current search area.
I believe that Captain Simon Hardy’s analysis did not include wind effects, which would need to be evaluated in order to make his projection more precise.
I just can’t see any scenario in which it would make sense to redact (or spoof) just [b]1[/b] of the 2 data sets (BTO,BFO).
The above should read:
“… just 1 of the 2 data sets (BTO,BFO)”.
It’s my pleasure, littlefoot, keep them coming 🙂 I’d be interested to read more on that angle, as I deem the fake ID scenarios you excelled in analyzing more probable than the BTO/BFO spoofing scenario for being less sophisticated and also because the data spoofing requires the same perpetrators who so meticulously planned this event to rely on something very uncertain and in some ways unprecedented (namely the treatment the Inmarsat data received). Still, Jeff’s hypothesis is brilliant for magically connecting all the dots — if true it would be the perfect heist.
And a word of support: don’t get discouraged, Brock, you are asking all the right, tree-shaking questions.
True, especially if the noise is quieter than expected (B777 instead of AN124). The reverse would be more attention-grabbing.
Maybe they had a rendezvous flight, the cargo plane kept its flight ID with MH370 piggybacking in its radar shadow thus uneventfully crossing borders and both planes would land at the same airport or – better – part ways once they are well within the destination country’s territory, so that the cargo plane reaches its scheduled destination without raising suspicion while MH370 lands at a military airport (if state sponsored hijacking), at a remote, abandoned place (like one Jeff’s satellite images) or perhaps at a regular airport (if that doesn’t require too many people to bribe/threaten, even in early morning hours before sunrise).
One problem is: what are the radar images? Just a red herring? It couldn’t be the cargo plane because (A) for this scenario to work, the cargo plane keeps its transponder intentionally switched on and (B) there are more appropriate routes such as “Yangon/Myanmar to Kazakhstan [because] the route would go directly over the Bay of Bengal without crossing into other foreign airspace” (littlefoot). It could have been MH370 before turning north after the last primary radar fix at 18:22, but there is not a single northern path fitting the BFO data, or have I missed one ?
Kirill Prostyakov has posted on Twitter a revised acoustic analysis of a possible MH370 impact event utilizing 18 seismic stations. His estimated position is 40.165S and 83.795E (and right on the 7th arc). I don’t have his estimated impact time yet, but all stations are within 10 seconds of expected arrival time. Here is a link to his post:
https://twitter.com/kprostyakov/status/577586783489253377
Here is a link to a revised map I made showing his new result compared to other predictions:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzOIIFNlx2aUUTlpODBDa0dyNVU/view
His point is about 13 NM away from mine. Perhaps this is a coincidence or perhaps not.
Prostyakov’s acoustic results need independent confirmation, and I have previously asked LANL to do this. If not them, surely another siesmic expert will provide an independent assessment of the likelihood this result is due to a real noise event. It looks pretty easy in some of the data records to find noise bursts that line up close to a pre-selected time of arrival. This can lead to confirmation bias – the result matches the assumptions made in selecting the events to be processed.
Looking at the 18 seismic data records, I would say that perhaps five of them look solid; they are clearly the strongest events in the short data record presented. Without having say, 30 minutes of records to peruse, it’s difficult for me to say how “unique” his selected events really are. However, even five solid signals can demonstrate, in principle, that they were most likely caused by a single event at a specific time and location.
The take-away from this is that the 18 seismic stations analyzed by Prostyakov are apparently confirming the location and time estimated by LANL from the 3-element Cape Leeuwin hydrophone array. I have begun to analyze that particular data set to see if the 00:52:00 UTC event can be demonstrated to be unrelated to the Antarctic ice fall event some 6 seconds later. This particular issue has been a point of apparent disagreement between the Curtin report and the LANL report.
@Lauren: re: “we were not given correct information regarding the reason for moving the underwater acoustic search to S21 but that doesn’t mean that everyone else is trying to deceive the peanut gallery with misleading information”:
I’ll do you one better: it doesn’t mean that ANYONE is trying to deceive the peanut gallery. I never SUSPECT such conduct unless circumstances warrant – and even if they DO, I should first seek clarifying information – not lob incendiary accusations. Since I have yet to see any unambiguous evidence of deliberate misinformation in this forum, I have never made any direct accusation (which I invite you to confirm for yourself).
So we agree, I think, on proper treatment of PEOPLE. Where we differ, it seems, is on how best to treat INFORMATION of dubious provenance. I for one feel that, with 239 human beings presumed dead, there is NO room whatsoever for the presumption of “innocent error”. While you have every right to demand I respect the ARGUER, I’m afraid you’ll just have to put up with me treating dubious ARGUMENTS the way a pit bull treats a shifty postal worker.
For example: even though I assign your “siren submarine” theory a probability of zero (pretty sure they moved the search to s21 PRIOR to STARTING any acoustic search) – and disagree strenuously with Victor on the relative importance of proving the fuel infeasibility of the “highest probability” path published in the Preliminary Report (which moved DIRECTLY through the arcs at a dubious 323KTAS) – I don’t suspect either of you of anything worse than doing your level best to help prioritize our collective efforts.
@Peter: Thanks much.
Peter Norton – People get quickly habituated to noises of the workplace. People say it could not have dropped into Banda Aceh because someone would have heard it, ditto Maldives, and elsewhere up north. That is not a factor. If it was a disused airstrip then fine, otherwise noone will bat an eyelid. I can remember stopping through RAAF Amberley in Queensland in the 90’s when some F-111’s, a genuine 2000mph hotrod, were putting on some dazzling stuff, low, wings back, right over the runway, coming in at speed, leaving conspicuous trails visible for miles then spearing vertically up and disappearing from view within moments as they fell past the perpendicular on the way up. The noise was penetrating. We were soldiers on our way to the Torres Strait Islands to do survival training so it was all good entertainment. To the people who worked there it was just another day, noone batted an eyelid. They didn’t even look up, they were more concerned with the footy results and who got sweet with who.
And it might have been noted to some that I have deep affection for the F-111.
@VictorI:
Airbus “Getting to Grips with Airplane Performance” explains the wind influence in cruise speed optimization in the following graph:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/03k9t6t709dqjai/Wind.jpg?dl=0
Hi Jeff, you are definitely on to something. I am not sure if you believe in premonitory dreams but on the night when the aircraft disappeared I had a dream where I was standing with my back to the cockpit of a plane. One of the air hostesses, a young Asian woman, walked toward me with pure terror in her eyes but trying to appear calm. I looked around the cabin but everything appeared normal. The flight was stable but a few passengers toward the front of the plane were standing up from their seat a bit puzzled and trying to understand what was going on. Most of the passengers seemed calm. From the windows of the plane I saw high mountains covered with snow. The dream then shifted to a huge building. It looked like a gigantic shed-like building similar to where they store aircrafts. It was cold and outside I could see snow. I knew this is where the plane had been taken. I didn’t actually see the aircraft and I was hiding behind a pillar when I saw and I heard one of 4-5 soldiers standing nearby saying “We better join the search with the others or they may start suspecting us”. I knew that a state had sponsored the hijacking of the aircraft but I had the impression that the soldiers were more like militia types because they seemed a bit unkempt with long beards and a bit dishevelled. I told my family/friends immediately about the dream and we are all in awe at your findings a year later…I never believed that the aircraft was near Australia and I think you are on the right track. I am not sure if it helps in any way but I just wanted to let you know that.
Lauren,
Identity: the AES is identified to the GES using the aircraft ICAO 24bit ID. The image referred below shows the data fields defined for the AES Log On Request – the AES ID is the ICAO 24bit ID. The Flight ID may not be globally unique (yes, I accept there are cases where duplicate ICAO addresses exist but it should be unique).
http://i.imgur.com/NHB6B61.png
Timing for R-ch Log On Acknowledge SU: this timing ‘anomaly’ is evident after a single, very specific event in the Log On sequence & I explain the ‘anomaly’ as an artifact of how the BTO measurement is processed. That event is the transfer of the AES Log On sequence from the P/smc & R/smc (smc = station management channel) channels to the P/d & R/d (d = data) channels just allocated by the GES in the third & fourth SUs in the Log On sequence. The two Acknowledge SUs are the first exchanged on R/d and P/d.
BTO measurements are made relative to the continuously transmitted P ch and I expect that the ID of an SU sequence (ie the Log On sequence ) is involved in the measurement process. In the particular case of Log On, a sequence that the AES initiated on P/smc is completed on P/d while the timing measurement is referenced to the P channel identified at the beginning of the sequence. Without access to Inmarsat’s implementation of the BTO measurement, I can only explain the ‘anomaly’ by a process of ‘reverse engineering’ what is evident in the SU Log and following the logic I understand from the AMSS protocol.
The 6kg package as a checked piece: I have often travelled with commercial merchandise (MiB – merchandise in baggage) & it required customs clearance out & in. This may have been an example of the same.
:Don
@Peter Norton,
Yes, the piggypack scenario… that actually brought me to Jeff’s site back when Keith Ledgerwood came out with his theory. I thought the idea was so creative. And it could indeed solve the whereabouts of the second plane. No need for fake IDs or bogus flight plans. You charter a cargo flight to Kazakhstan, shadow that plane into Kazakhstan, part ways – and you’re done! Unfortunately it doesn’t work with a B777. It’s too difficult to fly that accurately and the radar image might not come out as one blob, there might be two objects visible after all. Though I have a feeling that a tired controller might suspect double vision, lol!
@Lauren H: Your ECON example was not exactly correct. If the ideal speed with no-wind was 450 knots and the tailwind was 100 knots, then the ground speed would be about 456 knots and the air speed would be reduced to 356 knots. Of course, the FMC would not allow the air speed any lower or higher than that constrained by the performance envelope of the aircraft at that pressure altitude and temperature.