The unsettling oddness was there from the first moment, on March 8, when Malaysia Airlines announced that a plane from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing, Flight 370, had disappeared over the South China Sea in the middle of the night. There had been no bad weather, no distress call, no wreckage, no eyewitness accounts of a fireball in the sky—just a plane that said good-bye to one air-traffic controller and, two minutes later, failed to say hello to the next. And the crash, if it was a crash, got stranger from there.
My yearlong detour to Planet MH370 began two days later, when I got an email from an editor at Slate asking if I’d write about the incident. I’m a private pilot and science writer, and I wrote about the last big mysterious crash, of Air France 447 in 2009. My story ran on the 12th. The following morning, I was invited to go on CNN. Soon, I was on-air up to six times a day as part of its nonstop MH370 coverage.
There was no intro course on how to be a cable-news expert. The Town Car would show up to take me to the studio, I’d sign in with reception, a guest-greeter would take me to makeup, I’d hang out in the greenroom, the sound guy would rig me with a mike and an earpiece, a producer would lead me onto the set, I’d plug in and sit in the seat, a producer would tell me what camera to look at during the introduction, we’d come back from break, the anchor would read the introduction to the story and then ask me a question or maybe two, I’d answer, then we’d go to break, I would unplug, wipe off my makeup, and take the car 43 blocks back uptown. Then a couple of hours later, I’d do it again. I was spending 18 hours a day doing six minutes of talking.
As time went by, CNN winnowed its expert pool down to a dozen or so regulars who earned the on-air title “CNN aviation analysts”: airline pilots, ex-government honchos, aviation lawyers, and me. We were paid by the week, with the length of our contracts dependent on how long the story seemed likely to play out. The first couple were seven-day, the next few were 14-day, and the last one was a month. We’d appear solo, or in pairs, or in larger groups for panel discussions—whatever it took to vary the rhythm of perpetual chatter.1
I soon realized the germ of every TV-news segment is: “Officials say X.” The validity of the story derives from the authority of the source. The expert, such as myself, is on hand to add dimension or clarity. Truth flowed one way: from the official source, through the anchor, past the expert, and onward into the great sea of viewerdom.
What made MH370 challenging to cover was, first, that the event was unprecedented and technically complex and, second, that the officials were remarkably untrustworthy. For instance, the search started over the South China Sea, naturally enough, but soon after, Malaysia opened up a new search area in the Andaman Sea, 400 miles away. Why? Rumors swirled that military radar had seen the plane pull a 180. The Malaysian government explicitly denied it, but after a week of letting other countries search the South China Sea, the officials admitted that they’d known about the U-turn from day one.
Of course, nothing turned up in the Andaman Sea, either. But in London, scientists for a British company called Inmarsat that provides telecommunications between ships and aircraft realized its database contained records of transmissions between MH370 and one of its satellites for the seven hours after the plane’s main communication system shut down. Seven hours! Maybe it wasn’t a crash after all—if it were, it would have been the slowest in history.
These electronic “handshakes” or “pings” contained no actual information, but by analyzing the delay between the transmission and reception of the signal— called the burst timing offset, or BTO—Inmarsat could tell how far the plane had been from the satellite and thereby plot an arc along which the plane must have been at the moment of the final ping.Fig. 3 That arc stretched some 6,000 miles, but if the plane was traveling at normal airliner speeds, it would most likely have wound up around the ends of the arc—either in Kazakhstan and China in the north or the Indian Ocean in the south. My money was on Central Asia. But CNN quoted unnamed U.S.-government sources saying that the plane had probably gone south, so that became the dominant view.
Other views were circulating, too, however.Fig. 5 A Canadian pilot named Chris Goodfellow went viral with his theory that MH370 suffered a fire that knocked out its communications gear and diverted from its planned route in order to attempt an emergency landing. Keith Ledgerwood, another pilot, proposed that hijackers had taken the plane and avoided detection by ducking into the radar shadow of another airliner. Amateur investigators pored over satellite images, insisting that wisps of cloud or patches of shrubbery were the lost plane. Courtney Love, posting on her Facebook time line a picture of the shimmering blue sea, wrote: “I’m no expert but up close this does look like a plane and an oil slick.”
Then: breaking news! On March 24, the Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak, announced that a new kind of mathematical analysis proved that the plane had in fact gone south. This new math involved another aspect of the handshakes called the burst frequency offset, or BFO, a measure of changes in the signal’s wavelength, which is partly determined by the relative motion of the airplane and the satellite. That the whole southern arc lay over the Indian Ocean meant that all the passengers and crew would certainly be dead by now. This was the first time in history that the families of missing passengers had been asked to accept that their loved ones were dead because a secret math equation said so. Fig. 7 Not all took it well. In Beijing, outraged next-of-kin marched to the Malaysian Embassy, where they hurled water bottles and faced down paramilitary soldiers in riot gear.
Guided by Inmarsat’s calculations, Australia, which was coordinating the investigation, moved the search area 685 miles to the northeast, to a 123,000-square-mile patch of ocean west of Perth. Ships and planes found much debris on the surface, provoking a frenzy of BREAKING NEWS banners, but all turned out to be junk. Adding to the drama was a ticking clock. The plane’s two black boxes had an ultrasonic sound beacon that sent out acoustic signals through the water. (Confusingly, these also were referred to as “pings,” though of a completely different nature. These new pings suddenly became the important ones.) If searchers could spot plane debris, they’d be able to figure out where the plane had most likely gone down, then trawl with underwater microphones to listen for the pings. The problem was that the pingers had a battery life of only 30 days.
On April 4, with only a few days’ pinger life remaining, an Australian ship lowered a special microphone called a towed pinger locator into the water.Fig. 8 Miraculously, the ship detected four pings. Search officials were jubilant, as was the CNN greenroom. Everyone was ready for an upbeat ending.
The only Debbie Downer was me. I pointed out that the pings were at the wrong frequency and too far apart to have been generated by stationary black boxes. For the next two weeks, I was the odd man out on Don Lemon’s six-guest panel blocks, gleefully savaged on-air by my co-experts.
The Australians lowered an underwater robotFig. 9 to scan the seabed for the source of the pings. There was nothing. Of course, by the rules of TV news, the game wasn’t over until an official said so. But things were stretching thin. One night, an underwater-search veteran taking part in a Don Lemon panel agreed with me that the so-called acoustic-ping detections had to be false. Backstage after the show, he and another aviation analyst nearly came to blows. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! I’ve done extensive research!” the analyst shouted. “There’s nothing else those pings could be!”
Soon after, the story ended the way most news stories do: We just stopped talking about it. A month later, long after the caravan had moved on, a U.S. Navy officer said publicly that the pings had not come from MH370. The saga fizzled out with as much satisfying closure as the final episode of Lost.
Once the surface search was called off, it was the rabble’s turn. In late March, New Zealand–based space scientist Duncan Steel began posting a series of essays on Inmarsat orbital mechanics on his website.Fig. 10 The comments section quickly grew into a busy forum in which technically sophisticated MH370 obsessives answered one another’s questions and pitched ideas. The open platform attracted a varied crew, from the mostly intelligent and often helpful to the deranged and abusive. Eventually, Steel declared that he was sick of all the insults and shut down his comments section. The party migrated over to my blog, jeffwise.net.
Meanwhile, a core of engineers and scientists had split off via group email and included me. We called ourselves the Independent Group,11 or IG. If you found yourself wondering how a satellite with geosynchronous orbit responds to a shortage of hydrazine, all you had to do was ask.12 The IG’s first big break came in late May, when the Malaysians finally released the raw Inmarsat data. By combining the data with other reliable information, we were able to put together a time line of the plane’s final hours: Forty minutes after the plane took off from Kuala Lumpur, MH370 went electronically dark. For about an hour after that, the plane was tracked on radar following a zigzag course and traveling fast. Then it disappeared from military radar. Three minutes later, the communications system logged back onto the satellite. This was a major revelation. It hadn’t stayed connected, as we’d always assumed. This event corresponded with the first satellite ping. Over the course of the next six hours, the plane generated six more handshakes as it moved away from the satellite.
The final handshake wasn’t completed. This led to speculation that MH370 had run out of fuel and lost power, causing the plane to lose its connection to the satellite. An emergency power system would have come on, providing enough electricity for the satcom to start reconnecting before the plane crashed. Where exactly it would have gone down down was still unknown—the speed of the plane, its direction, and how fast it was climbing were all sources of uncertainty.
The MH370 obsessives continued attacking the problem. Since I was the proprietor of the major web forum, it fell on me to protect the fragile cocoon of civility that nurtured the conversation. A single troll could easily derail everything. The worst offenders were the ones who seemed intelligent but soon revealed themselves as Believers. They’d seized on a few pieces of faulty data and convinced themselves that they’d discovered the truth. One was sure the plane had been hit by lightning and then floated in the South China Sea, transmitting to the satellite on battery power. When I kicked him out, he came back under aliases. I wound up banning anyone who used the word “lightning.”
By October, officials from the Australian Transport Safety Board had begun an ambitiously scaled scan of the ocean bottom, and, in a surprising turn, it would include the area suspected by the IG.13 For those who’d been a part of the months-long effort, it was a thrilling denouement. The authorities, perhaps only coincidentally, had landed on the same conclusion as had a bunch of randos from the internet. Now everyone was in agreement about where to look.
While jubilation rang through the email threads, I nursed a guilty secret: I wasn’t really in agreement. For one, I was bothered by the lack of plane debris. And then there was the data. To fit both the BTO and BFO data well, the plane would need to have flown slowly, likely in a curving path. But the more plausible autopilot settings and known performance constraints would have kept the plane flying faster and more nearly straight south. I began to suspect that the problem was with the BFO numbers—that they hadn’t been generated in the way we believed.14 If that were the case, perhaps the flight had gone north after all.
For a long time, I resisted even considering the possibility that someone might have tampered with the data. That would require an almost inconceivably sophisticated hijack operation, one so complicated and technically demanding that it would almost certainly need state-level backing. This was true conspiracy-theory material.
And yet, once I started looking for evidence, I found it. One of the commenters on my blog had learned that the compartment on 777s called the electronics-and-equipment bay, or E/E bay, can be accessed via a hatch in the front of the first-class cabin.15 If perpetrators got in there, a long shot, they would have access to equipment that could be used to change the BFO value of its satellite transmissions. They could even take over the flight controls.16
I realized that I already had a clue that hijackers had been in the E/E bay. Remember the satcom system disconnected and then rebooted three minutes after the plane left military radar behind. I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how a person could physically turn the satcom off and on. The only way, apart from turning off half the entire electrical system, would be to go into the E/E bay and pull three particular circuit breakers. It is a maneuver that only a sophisticated operator would know how to execute, and the only reason I could think for wanting to do this was so that Inmarsat would find the records and misinterpret them. They turned on the satcom in order to provide a false trail of bread crumbs leading away from the plane’s true route.
It’s not possible to spoof the BFO data on just any plane. The plane must be of a certain make and model, 17equipped with a certain make and model of satellite-communications equipment,18 and flying a certain kind of route19 in a region covered by a certain kind of Inmarsat satellite.20 If you put all the conditions together, it seemed unlikely that any aircraft would satisfy them. Yet MH370 did.
I imagine everyone who comes up with a new theory, even a complicated one, must experience one particularly delicious moment, like a perfect chord change, when disorder gives way to order. This was that moment for me. Once I threw out the troublesome BFO data, all the inexplicable coincidences and mismatched data went away. The answer became wonderfully simple. The plane must have gone north.
Using the BTO data set alone, I was able to chart the plane’s speed and general path, which happened to fall along national borders.Fig. 21 Flying along borders, a military navigator told me, is a good way to avoid being spotted on radar. A Russian intelligence plane nearly collided with a Swedish airliner while doing it over the Baltic Sea in December. If I was right, it would have wound up in Kazakhstan, just as search officials recognized early on.
There aren’t a lot of places to land a plane as big as the 777, but, as luck would have it, I found one: a place just past the last handshake ring called Baikonur Cosmodrome.Fig. 22 Baikonur is leased from Kazakhstan by Russia. A long runway there called Yubileyniy was built for a Russian version of the Space Shuttle. If the final Inmarsat ping rang at the start of MH370’s descent, it would have set up nicely for an approach to Yubileyniy’s runway 24.
Whether the plane went to Baikonur or elsewhere in Kazakhstan, my suspicion fell on Russia. With technically advanced satellite, avionics, and aircraft-manufacturing industries, Russia was a paranoid fantasist’s dream.24 (The Russians, or at least Russian-backed militia, were also suspected in the downing of Malaysia Flight 17 in July.) Why, exactly, would Putin want to steal a Malaysian passenger plane? I had no idea. Maybe he wanted to demonstrate to the United States, which had imposed the first punitive sanctions on Russia the day before, that he could hurt the West and its allies anywhere in the world. Maybe what he was really after were the secrets of one of the plane’s passengers.25 Maybe there was something strategically crucial in the hold. Or maybe he wanted the plane to show up unexpectedly somewhere someday, packed with explosives. There’s no way to know. That’s the thing about MH370 theory-making: It’s hard to come up with a plausible motive for an act that has no apparent beneficiaries.
As it happened, there were three ethnically Russian men aboard MH370, two of them Ukrainian-passport holders from Odessa.26 Could any of these men, I wondered, be special forces or covert operatives? As I looked at the few pictures available on the internet, they definitely struck me as the sort who might battle Liam Neeson in midair.
About the two Ukrainians, almost nothing was available online.Fig. 27 I was able to find out a great deal about the Russian,Fig. 28 who was sitting in first class about 15 feet from the E/E-bay hatch.Fig. 29 He ran a lumber company in Irkutsk, and his hobby was technical diving under the ice of Lake Baikal.30 I hired Russian speakers from Columbia University to make calls to Odessa and Irkutsk, then hired researchers on the ground.
The more I discovered, the more coherent the story seemed to me.32 I found a peculiar euphoria in thinking about my theory, which I thought about all the time. One of the diagnostic questions used to determine whether you’re an alcoholic is whether your drinking has interfered with your work. By that measure, I definitely had a problem. Once the CNN checks stopped coming, I entered a long period of intense activity that earned me not a cent. Instead, I was forking out my own money for translators and researchers and satellite photos. And yet I was happy.
Still, it occurred to me that, for all the passion I had for my theory, I might be the only person in the world who felt this way. Neurobiologist Robert A. Burton points out in his book On Being Certain that the sensation of being sure about one’s beliefs is an emotional response separate from the processing of those beliefs. It’s something that the brain does subconsciously to protect itself from wasting unnecessary processing power on problems for which you’ve already found a solution that’s good enough. “ ‘That’s right’ is a feeling you get so that you can move on,” Burton told me. It’s a kind of subconscious laziness. Just as it’s harder to go for a run than to plop onto the sofa, it’s harder to reexamine one’s assumptions than it is to embrace certainty. At one end of the spectrum of skeptics are scientists, who by disposition or training resist the easy path; at the other end are conspiracy theorists, who’ll leap effortlessly into the sweet bosom of certainty. So where did that put me?
Propounding some new detail of my scenario to my wife over dinner one night, I noticed a certain glassiness in her expression. “You don’t seem entirely convinced,” I suggested.
She shrugged.
“Okay,” I said. “What do you think is the percentage chance that I’m right?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Five percent?”33
Springtime came to the southern ocean, and search vessels began their methodical cruise along the area jointly identified by the IG and the ATSB, dragging behind it a sonar rig that imaged the seabed in photographic detail. Within the IG, spirits were high. The discovery of the plane would be the triumphant final act of a remarkable underdog story.
By December, when the ships had still not found a thing, I felt it was finally time to go public. In six sequentially linked pages that readers could only get to by clicking through—to avoid anyone reading the part where I suggest Putin masterminded the hijack without first hearing how I got there—I laid out my argument. I called it “The Spoof.”
I got a respectful hearing but no converts among the IG. A few sites wrote summaries of my post. The International Business Times headlined its story “MH370: Russia’s Grand Plan to Provoke World War III, Says Independent Investigator” and linked directly to the Putin part. Somehow, the airing of my theory helped quell my obsession. My gut still tells me I’m right, but my brain knows better than to trust my gut.
Last month, the Malaysian government declared that the aircraft is considered to have crashed and all those aboard are presumed dead. Malaysia’s transport minister told a local television station that a key factor in the decision was the fact that the search mission for the aircraft failed to achieve its objective. Meanwhile, new theories are still being hatched. One, by French writer Marc Dugain, states that the plane was shot down by the U.S. because it was headed toward the military bases on the islands of Diego Garcia as a flying bomb.34
The search failed to deliver the airplane, but it has accomplished some other things: It occupied several thousand hours of worldwide airtime; it filled my wallet and then drained it; it torpedoed the idea that the application of rationality to plane disasters would inevitably yield ever-safer air travel. And it left behind a faint, lingering itch in the back of my mind, which I believe will quite likely never go away.
*This article appears in the February 23, 2015 issue of New York Magazine.
@Jeff Wise: I have a hard time believing at the core of such a highly sophisticated plan there would be an (unmet) make-or-break condition requiring that BFOs must be logged while BTOs must not. How could one be so sure (and wrong) about that ? Why would someone believe that the more trivial time offsets are not logged, when he already knows the less trivial frequency offsets are logged ?
At any rate, I agree with you that if BTO tampering is on the table, then the plane could be anywhere.
But Jeff, are you saying that you have previously been discounting BTO spoofing mainly due to lack of physical access to the SDU in-flight ?
And given Gerry Soejatman’s information that you have in-flight physical access, are there any factors making BTO-spoofing more difficult than BFO-spoofing ?
I am wondering: How in the world is it that after describing in no uncertain terms how easy it is to access the SDU (“The SDU […] can you access these boxes from the cabin? OF COURSE! […]breaking into the overhead panels and fiddle with the satcom control boxes […]you don’t need to open up cabin ceilings […]Anyone who thinks this set up is secure from manipulation needs to have his/her head checked!”), Gerry nevertheless maintains that “whilst the BTO are not doubted whatsoever, the BFO […] can be forged.” ??
that’s exactly what I wanted my previous posts to say
The former keeps searchers stuck in the SIO forever.
The latter would trigger a frantic search all over the world.
Which would the perpetrators prefer ?
But it’s true: the gain of spoofing BFO is miserable compared to the gain of spoofing BTO. That’s why absent any really good reason (infeasibility…but why? ignorance… highly unlikely IMO), if you spoof, you would either spoof both or BTO only.
Peter Norton – the issue of spoofing essentially boils down to who took it. If a disgruntled/unbalanced crew member then you could maybe almost rule it out? If it’s state sponsored event then you would rule it right in. When it comes down to just what happened on the plane ALSM says most honourably – I prefer not to speculate. Spencer is standing there with a noose. What happened though is key to the whereabouts.
Spoofing fantastical?? I study politics a lot more than satellite communications and it just so happens we have some rogue states out there with impressive technological prowess. The one that has gone under the radar is Iran. They don’t just have close military/political cooperation with Russia, they have crossed the Sunni/Shia divide to train, equip, and coordinate terror groups all over the world. A BTO spoof allows it to fly there without those pesky radar issues, then onto Russia if need be. There are plenty of groups under their wing who would want the plane, there were people on it that would come in handy to Iran, particularly if there was military hardware/technology on it that would otherwise have ended up in Beijing.
Apologies for posting this link yet again but there are a lot of new folk on this thread.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aK4daf8MD.Bw
An Iranian destination explains why they cut back across Malaysia only to disappear. It could also explain some sightings in the Maldives, itself a haven for Islamism, in particular laundering. That countries finance laws seem designed for that purpose.
Iran and Russia have the common goal of eliminating Israel, which is probably the only country that went of full alert when the plane went missing. They suspected Iran immediately, stolen passports cost a heap, and asylum is an Iranian guise for moving it’s operatives around the world. They also have extravagant underground facilities.
Spoofing fantastical?? It might come down to world view and it’s as dangerous now as it was in 1962. In the loungerooms people have written off finding the plane. The msm are waiting for the current search initiative to run out before they take creative license with it, then our best crunchers will have a job to get heard. Unless it shows up – but it sounds like they already shifted focus to the next search phase, something that may not even occur?
For what it’s worth, I completely agree with MuOne. The REAL unknown here–the wild-card if you will, is not the BTO/BFO data, but is instead the latter part of the radar data info (up until around 18:22). This is the information that should be the most suspect, and it surprises me that this is not agreed upon by more people. The BTO/BFO data has been some of the most heavily scrutinized and independently verified data I have ever witnessed. However, all of these analyses are based upon starting point data which have not been as heavily scrutinized, at least not by multiple, independent sources. Ponder for a moment–are we to fully trust radar information coming from Malaysia? I’m not suggesting deviousness, I’m suggesting laziness and incompetence. In my opinion, everything from the turn at Igari up until the FMT should not be so widely accepted as fact. As MuOne mentioned, THIS could be the real spoof (whether purposefully or not).
As an amendment to my previous post–This line of thinking really only applies once the search area is fully covered. Many people also seem to forget that the search is ongoing, and this plane can be found in the SIO tomorrow. Once the search area is fully combed over, then ulterior lines of thinking should come into play. And it’s my suggestion that the very first thing to question is the data starting from the turn at Igari, possibly even before the turn.
There’s no way this was a suicide mission to the SIO. What are the chances that Mike Mckay saw what he saw that night given these incidents were unrelated? What are the chances that they were indeed related? Occam’s Razor tells us that more than likely they were related, if Mckay is indeed telling the truth–which there is no reason not to believe.
One question I have not seen answered, and I apologize if it has been–but what effect would overheating have on the production of BTO/BFO values. Could either direct overheating or Carbon Monoxide infiltration have any effect on the signal data being produced by the SatComm terminal on the plane?
Matty – Perth, the problem with a hijack by Iran or Russia is the plane load of Chinese passengers. My geopolitical understanding is that both countries are generally cooperative with China. Or at least they would not seek to antagonize China.
So, that means either China hijacked the plane, or China worked cooperatively in the hijack with one of these rogues states .
Occam’s razor would say that China hijacked the plane alone, because that’s the closest rogue state. (Assuming it can fly straight into China without radar detection?)
The only group mad enough to antagonize China are Islamic terrorists. But this seems too sophisticated for them.
If it was a planned hijack would there be any way to know just what the composition of the passenger list was going to be? Being a midnight horror to Beijing means there was going to be Chinese on it, but the cargo comes first maybe? Another point is that the Chinese govt doesn’t really care about it’s people, unless they are getting bolshy about something? The focus there is keeping the lid on, and they live in fear of social unrest. The SIO search was a great bit of PR for them back home. Dictatorships with loads of political prisoners are not normally protective as well. Unless it was a Chinese plane, they wouldn’t do that.
Michael R – “The only group mad enough to antagonize China are Islamic terrorists. But this seems too sophisticated for them.
The Iranian govt fits both bills. They have expanding and ambitious defence industries that includes cutting edge technology. They also happen to the seat of Shia Islam in the world and are run by a revolutionary theocracy. Their foreign policy – and this is where it gets scary – is right out of the Shiite endtime theology where they must start WW3 by attacking Israel and ushering in the Islamic messiah, hence the nuclear programme. This is why Netanyahu is dirty on Obama, he thinks the US is far too relaxed about it. You could say the west is sleep walking with this bit but we are all habituated by now to sharing the world with crazies. They are also the biggest sponsors of terrorism in the world today.
Matty – Perth, that’s all true about Iran, but I still doubt they would antagonize China in the process of whatever mischief they’re up to.
When I spoke of “mad” Islamic terrorists, I was thinking more of the small scale lunatics. Iran is more of a calculating actor (end-times eschatology aside).
But I still suspect China is the hijacker. They are the closest rogue state. They would have the local knowledge to pull it off better than others.
The key question is: who in their right minds would antagonize China by taking 150 Chinese passengers? Answer: nobody. Conclusion: China took the plane themselves.
@Oleksandr, Not sure about your other points, but:
2) No, the official investigators say that all the satcom communications were via Inmarsat-3F1.
4) True. That would require, presumably, insider access.
@Peter, I address this a bit in the book — BFOs are required for keeping the system working properly, while BTOs are not.
I disagree that the gains of spoofing the BFO are “miserable.” If you want to create a false trail of breadcrumbs, then a spoofed BFO is perfect, as it indicates that the plane went south without providing any degree of specificity. The BTO is symmetrical, which is to say it doesn’t tell you which direction the plane went. Also, it gives a relatively precise indication of where the plane went, which is not good if you want the plane to be lost forever.
You are correct however that Gerry’s information has definitely made me rethink the difficulty of spoofing the BTO, were one to wish to do so.
Michael R – looks like we disagree, which is not a big deal here, but “the mischief they are up to” (Iran) is actually WW3. They are the only UN member nation to have the stated aim of destroying another member nation, and in the war they envisage the Chinese all get killed anyway by the return of the Mahdi.
I’m curious though – what would the Chinese govt be up to with the plane?
@Michael R,
I have suspected the Chinese or rather Chinese organized crime as well for a while, but dropped it for a very simple reason: mh370 was already on it’s way to China. Why have the plane turn around, risk radar detection by several countries, fuel shortage and all sorts of complications, when the plane could’ve simply gone dark for a short while over SCS, have the BFOs tampered with so that it looks like the plane flew to the SIO. The pilot-suicide theory would have looked very believable then. The plane could’ve simply continued travelling North by flying over the ocean just out of reach for Vietnamese radar.
A Chinese connection only pans out if Chinese dissidents like the Uigurs were involved. They certainly wouldn’t care for all the Chinese passengers. And even a destination somewhere closr to Almaty would make sense since there is a fairly large Uigur population in East Kazakhstan. The question is if they could’be been sophisticated enough to execute BFO spoofs and what might’ve been their motive, since the hijack of mh370 was not an outright terror act.
@MuOne, Jay
I fully agree that the military radar data should be treated with care, as it is a single source and the source probably did/does not allow an independent check of raw data (the interim report is not fully clear on that). I’ve been thinking a bit about possible consequences (see my posting a few days earlier, I give again the link to the illustration:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qapaj2aybfi17uh/FMT_Area.jpg
However I’m not sure if all path analysis depends strongly on point/time of FMT. Some start by assuming an free position somewhere on 19:41 arc and then look for an optimal fit for later arc crossings. Of course the 19:41 position should be “backward compatible” with the possible 18:25 – 18:40 positions.
It is on my to-do list to check this for some of the well known paths (IG, Inmarsat, Ulich, Hardy). I’m afraid I will be slow 🙁 struggling to balance my time well in this period.
Regards,
Niels.
Re: spoofing the BTOs:
I agree with Peter Norton: it is very likely that the highly sophisticated perps of our spoofing scenarios probably knew that Inmarsat started logging BTOs since 2013. But that is not a lot of time to come up with a credible and practical way to spoof the BTOs. BFO spoof attempts however were tried as early as 2011. So I guess that perps who could spoof BFOs simply thought that this is creating sufficient obfuscation. And the BTO distortion is limited by several parameters like frequency of handshakes, fuel supply and speed of the plane. To make a credible fit for all this and the BFOs might be difficult. Also – as Jeff pointed out as well – a scenario where the plane could be everywhere would not work so well for the perps, simply because investigators then also would look everywhere, maybe also at the right places. And then you can as well just go completely dark and leave no electronic trail at all behind.
Faked BTOs make sense only in one of Brock’s scenarios: the plane crashed or was shot down over SCS and someone wanted to cover this up by inventing a whole set of faked satellite data, probably with Inmarsat’s aid and complicity.
@littlefoot, good points. But if the plane went dark, continued on straight into China, and faked the BFO left-turn towards SIO, that wouldn’t work because the plane should appear on Malaysian military radar.
Perhaps the left-turn was to make it look like MH370 was going away from China, so China wouldn’t be suspected. But then maybe it flew into China over Burma. I’m thinking a state-level hijack, not a crime gang or Uighurs.
We now know that SATCOM could be turned off(and there are two ways), people knowing how to spoof BFO/BTO data would sure know that too. So why would they leave the false trail? What would it change if there was no satellite data at all except Australia&Malaysia wouldn’t spend $100M on the search in SIO?!
@Matty-Perth, yes I’ve heard that some in Iran have an end-times belief that the Mahdi will only return in a time of chaos and war, and hence they want to foment that. But their focus is probably Israel, wanting to nuke them. I don’t see them upsetting China until they’ve nuked Israel first. (That’s assuming the crazies are in control of Iran).
Why would the Chinese govt want the plane? We can only speculate e.g. a distraction for their Russian friends who just invaded Ukraine; snooping around the seas under the guise of searching; testing our technology capabilities; something about the Freescale workers on board; increasing the market share of their airlines; giving their military hawks something to laugh about; fomenting chaos (as in The Art Of War)… It’s all guesswork.
@PeterN: Googling for Marine Animal MH370 ping
gives:
https://www.google.ca/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=-cYKVYWaDIqN8QfZ8YGwDQ&gws_rd=ssl#q=mh370+marine+animal+ping
and there were a few articles hitting on the topic.
As they say “Follow the money” or what was so valuable in the cargo to have this aircraft disappear? there could be a number of players involved… it was suggested gold from the ukraine, which was wanted by russia but on its way to china, china pushed really hard for the insurance claim on the aircraft to be processed, a kazakhstan company had insurance on the aircraft… so putting out some things that seem to tie together from what I was reading over the past while.
Can we be sure the plane didn’t refuel? Can we be sure the final handshake indicates a crash? If the plane refueled and flew south, it might have made it to South America. No spoofing necessary. The final handshake might just indicate that somebody ‘pulled the plug’ at about the time the initial fuel load would have been exhausted.
@DL, Interesting idea. Victor’s Banda Aceh scenario (which he hasn’t talked about in a while) would allow more fuel to be put aboard. But a no-spoof scenario would also be one in which the perps most likely didn’t understand that the AES was sending signals that would ultimately allow it to be tracked.
@Niels,
I’ve looked at your dropbox map. What you point out is worth thinking about. The doubling back of mh370 to Penang does neither in a Northern route nor in a Southern route scenario make any sense. Why would potential perps who took so much trouble to go dark and turn around in a blind spot maximize the risk of radar detection by flying over the broadest part of the peninsula and then go up the Strait? It’s time and fuel wasting (if fuel was a concern for them) and not necessary since they simply could’ve flown over the slimmest part of the peninsula. And it would line up with the eyewitness reports from Kota Bharu and other reports from the Thai border. And the Indonesians might have simply told the truth when they said they never saw the plane! Since there were some radar tracks in the Strait the Malaysians might’ve simply assumed that the plane must’ve been heading back to Penang. Since they didn’t want to be regarded as totally lazy they made up the radar track showing the plane crossing back. That would explain a lot of puzzling things like obfuscation attempts, the insecurity of the first days about the plane having turned back 180 degrees.And it might explain the creation of the rumor about the copilot’s phone having connected with Penang Tower. Brock and me discussed this. It helped to validate the radar track over the peninsula.But if it never happened, this validation is imploded.
The question remains of course who made the tracks over the Strait, if we stick to the idea that they were genuine and created the idea of a 180 degree turn in the first place.
the interesting thing is that if debris from SIO misses(or already miised) australian coast there is a chance that ocean currents could bring it all over the Pacific to the coast of let’s say Chile, now that would spark some discussion
Jeff, Peter,
Spoofing of the both BTO & BFO can really reach its goal to divert attention for incredibly long time. The plane could be anywhere within the performance range.
Keeping SDU off would have result in a large search operation: the primary suspects, I think, would likely be Afghanistan, Somali, Malaysia, China.
Spoofing BTO alone would likely reach its target as well. Moreover, if BFO is not used, this could implicitly point on some country, like Afghanistan, and it would take a long while to search. There is however, a danger for BFOs to be incompatible with BTOs.
Sorry, but spoofing BFO only does not make much sense to me. Firstly, it is potentially dangerous: should BFO be unused, instead of a huge area to search in comparison with “SDU off”, there is only a narrow strip along the last arc. With the current rate of the search, it will probably take 5 to 10 years to search the whole possible crash area in the SIO. This is short compared to 100-200 years to search the whole IO. Secondly, spoofing of the BFO only provides indication that the aircraft was airborne (otherwise BTO would remain constant) till the last drop of fuel, which is already an essential piece of information.
Jeff, with regard to the satellite, I meant that instead of
aircraft Inmarsat-3F1 GES
there could be
aircraft Some satellite Spoofing GES Spoofing device Inmarsat-3F1 GES
The signal still goes through Inmarsat-3F1. The question is whether such a complexity is needed or not.
Correction to my earlier post: a tirnarou with heading to Penang wouldn’t have the plane flying over the widest part of the peninsula. But a less steep turn over IGARI eith a more Northern direction would make more sense for Northern route and Southern route scenarios alike.
Jeff,
It appears your web ‘swallows’ some symbols, or sequence of symbols. Testing:
(greater than)
(sequence of the above).
I typed (less than)(dash)(greater than). You can see the result above.
@Oleksandr: Those symbols have a special meaning in HTML. A “greater than” symbol should be entered here as (ampersand) + (gt) + (semicolon), typed as four characters.
Test:
> (should be a greater than symbol)
< (should be a less than symbol)
Yes, but as I already said no official confirmation by any authority nor anyone claiming to be the source of the pings (as was alleged in the posting earlier) … which is what I had been asking.
<
Victor, thank you. Now I know why sometimes the appearance of a post does not correspond to the intent.
Using this opportunity, I wanted to ask you to remind how did you treat 18:25 and 18:40 BFOs in your original Aceh landing hypothesis?
>
good point
Maybe you are right, but I thought it would follow the same principle as spoofing BFO: A bogus flight path (which must be – at all times – farther away from the satellite than the real flight path, e.g. to SIO instead of Somalia) is calculated in advance, including all abovementioned parameters, and whenever 3F1 asks “are you there?”, the tiny little program verifies “where am I now?” and “where would I be on the bogus flight path now?” and delays the “yes I am here” answer by the calculated amount of µsec. Difficult? Yes, but why would that be any more difficult than calculating the faked BFO data for the bogus flight path ?
I apologize, but I think there is an error in this reasoning. It’s a actually a “scenario where the plane could be anywhere, but where investigators still think they know where the plane went”. In case of data spoofing, we must distinguish between the real data and the faked data. The real data determines where the plane actually went, the fake data is the data the search team deems real. So to them, it would not make any visible difference if they have real of faked data in their hands (if the plan works!). So they would have data which – because it is faked – means that the plane could be everywhere, but which simultaneously – because the search team does not believe it is faked – would NOT mean that the investigators would look everywhere. That’s the very raison d’être for the spoof BTW. There you have the difference between a spoofing scenario and “going completely dark without any trail”. I hope I have explained that in a somewhat comprehensible way (and also hope I made no mistakes).
I apologize again, but I think this is the same error. Whether you spoof BFO only, BTO+BFO or BTO only: in all 3 cases the unsuspecting search team is left with a “relatively precise [AND WRONG!] indication of where the plane went”. In all 3 cases the search team would have satellite data of which at least 1 of the 2 data sets is spoofed, which would make them search in a completely wrong region. So that is neither an argument pro nor contra any of the 3 cases. At least that’s my take.
BTO spoofing gives you a false trail of breadcrumbs, too. (For all we know, this could be exactly the trail we are dealing with here!) Plus it wouldn’t give away any clue as to the plane’s real destination — as opposed to BFO spoofing only, where searchers would KNOW that the real destination is along the 7th arc, and which (few) countries then would come under suspicion. This is why Oleksandr said “the gain of spoofing BFO is miserable compared to the gain of spoofing BTO” (of which you omitted the second half).
But either way, the question of the possible gain is less important than the question of feasibility. Which is why I kept asking if the argument of lack of physical access to the SDU has been your only one against BTO spoofing.
This would be one more argument to spoof BTO rather than BFO.
Maybe I missed it, but I still have not seen any argument for spoofing BFO rather than BTO, except for argument of easier physical access, which Gerry put to rest … is there another ?
@Oleksandr: I used the BFO value at 18:28 with a track of 297 deg. For 18:40, the plane was approaching the airport on a SW course and with a descent to match the BFO.
Peter,
I recall there was a publication of some marine biologist, who admitted they use respective frequencies to trace marine animals, it seems sharks or whales. Unfortunately I do not keep the reference, but the article was pretty convincing, and sufficient to explain why the source of sound could not be triangulated (target was moving).
@Jay, @MuOne:
Its a fact that both US and Russia are cooperating more and more with China and India if you bing/google-it and it was accelerated during previous/this year too because of climate change issues – both US and China agreed finally to act on CO2 and other global warming gases. And this seems to be MOST serious threat today, or, its known few years back, and this affects simply everybody, simply whole life on the planet having borders and geopolitics irrelevant… and even global nuclear war is absolute nonsense today, despite the clashes in media, but nuclear technology black market risks are far more dangerous too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA7tfz3k_9A
@falken how did you come up with your global warming agenda suddenly? And don’t worry this planet has its own self-defense mechanisms, the more CO2 you add to the atmosphere the less impact it has on temperature, e.g. first 50% increase in CO2 will raise the temperature 0.5 degrees, another 50% will raise it for another 0.25 degrees etc. so there a little education for you.
@StevanG: no more wars please 😉
For refuelling you need a different formation, than you would adopt in this case.
Turbulence only affects the wake of an aircraft, see: http://imgur.com/HiHEA5Y.jpg
If the 2 aircraft are vertically stacked, then they should be safe from each other’s turbulence.
They are at risk of collision though, hence me asking if TCAS would be enough to maintain safe distance and avoid a collision ?
Peter I don’t know if TCAS II would display exact difference in altitude between two planes and the pilot would have to hear “Descend, descend” through the whole flight.
If the BTO data and the BFO Data are correct (my gut feeling says they are), why do they ppoint to be to the south exclusively? Each single data point reflects only 1 second out of 3.600 seconds until the next single data point.
Seing a guy sitting in a bar drinking a beer at ten in the morning and at 15 in the afternoon, how come we can conclude that he was sitting there during the hole time and is a drinker?
Doesn’t this data fit for a southern path all the way go back to the assumption, that MH370 flew on autopilot at FL350 with max range mach without further input for hours?
What about lower levels and climbing and descending, about track changes and speed changes which would be common for some aircraft navigating on a threat avoidance path through Myanamar to the north piloted by a pilot with military background?
A spreadsheat with possible parameters (speed, altitude, vertical speed and track to fit each single ping after last military radar contact and ageneral direction to the north could give options for a northern path.
The southern path didn’t make sense to me from the beginning.
After asking (on the previous page) whether one of the autopilot modes (if used on both planes) could help maintain the formation flight, I was actually about to suggest, that slightly above+aft of the 2nd plane would be the best position to both stay out of wake turbulence and maintain visual contact.
Now that I have been pointed to Keith Ledgerwood’s page (thanks), I see he has been proposing essentially the same ever since May 2014:
The piggyback theory I “piggybacked” onto Littlefoot’s cargo plane scenarios on pages 5-6 called for the 2nd plane to collaborate with MH370, which would obviously make it even more possible to execute than Keith’s theory (stipulating that SQ68 was not in the know), the latter being already intriguing enough all by itself. And while SQ68’s flight path is not BTO compatible, MH370 piggybacking a cargo plane could have chosen any BTO compatible route.
It’s crazy, it seems like every single scenario has an equal amount of pros and cons, almost as if all scenarios were somehow magically balanced, so that none of them is seriously investigated. Going by the number of experts agreeing where the plane is, I guess Airlandseaman is right after all, and they will find the plane down in the SIO during the next couple of months. My fear is just that the last 2 hours stored in the CVR will be nothing but silence, so that we will never know who brought the plane there, and why. And then the official explication will be pilot suicide and I don’t believe in pilot suicide as a matter of principle, since I can’t fathom a pilot, whose whole life was dedicated to safely transport passengers through the skies, would commit mass murder killing all those innocent people he had sworn to protect. There are other ways to put an end to one’s life, even for a pilot. Suicide and murder have completely different psychological motivations and also require very different states of mind (exhaustion vs anger). That’s why I remain highly doubtful even of the rare allegedly confirmed cases of pilot suicide in aviation history.
Victor,
Thanks again.
My thought is that if you ‘replace’ landing with the “landing attempt(s)”, then nothing will change on the math side prior to 19:41. However, this will give you a possibility to consider one or several cycles around the Aceh airport. The same can be said about Maimun Saleh, but different orientation of its runway will require different interpretation of BFOs.
@Jay, Niels,
Thanks for picking up on questioning the radar track. Ever since I came across Ron’s discovery of the “sharp turn” at Igari, I put that latter part of the track in the “questionable” basket.
See
jeffwise .net / 2014 / 10 / 08 / in-search-for-missing-airliner-peanut-gallery-shows-the-way / comment-page-8
MuOne
Posted October 20, 2014 at 4:38 PM
Your graph is very much visualising, what I suggested some time later, re path modelling starting from around 17:22 rather than 18:22.
Victor responded to me at the time (sorry, looked but couldn’t find the relevant posts), that there may be backward compatible paths from there to hit the later ping rings. However, (from memory) he wasn’t inclined to pursue that avenue of exploration, since there was no evidence to suggest that the later radar track was not that of MH370. (Apologies to Victor, if my recollection of that brief exchange is inaccurate).
Cheers,
Will
Stevan – G
The way I see it, had the plane done a major detour, and simply stayed dark heading toward the middle east with a load of fuel, made no distress call, no emergency beacon or debris, it would be assumed by most to have landed there. If the perps were from there then that’s a fair way from ideal. Spoofing only makes sense if they did not intend to crash the thing.
quite fresh thing; last4today from me, I promise (R/D war irrelevant too)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a01Rg2g2Z8
For those who haven’t seen it yet, there is an interesting article on debris washed up on our SW Tasmanian shore. None from MH370 but some from Madagascar and S Africa (of course time-frame for this debris drift is unknown).
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3002130/Ocean-cleaning-operation-casts-doubt-search-MH370-right-place-Volunteers-Tasmania-say-wreckage-washed-area-now.html
However, despite the lack of any debris from MH370 my “vote” would still go to continuing the search in the SIO beyond May if nothing is found before that for the sake of the NoK. Perhaps a few months more after a break for winter. My thanks go to the ATSB, IG and other individuals for their tireless analysis of the data and no doubt these good folks will try to come to some consensus on how far to extend the search area if money allows. How long to go on searching and who pays are difficult questions. Despite nagging doubts over the veracity of the data, its all we have and there is no evidence against it.
Additionally, I don’t see why other scenarios can’t be discussed and researched in parallel with the official search just in case any of the passengers is still alive somewhere and maybe we can highlight further air travel safety issues. IMO someone, somewhere must know what has happened.
… really by coincidence ?
Regarding data integrity
I would like to ask members of the IG which file they use as source data for their BTO/BFO analysis. So how did you obtain the measured BTO and BFO values used in your analysis? Where / when was it retrieved? May I address Mike and Victor with this question?
I would like to ask the same question to dr. Ulich.
Niels.
Niels:
Here is a list of the primary (official) BTO/BFO documents:
1. Satellite data logs issued June 28, 2014:
“MH370 Data Communication Logs”
2. Discussions of BTO and BFO can be found in the ATSB amended report issued on September 2, 2014:
“ae-2014-054_mh370_-_definition_of_underwater_search_areas_18aug2014”
3. Inmarsat Paper which includes some BTO and BFO discussions published October 8, 2014:
“The Search for MH370”
4. Updated data log issued December 23, 2014:
“Upate to Signalling Unit Logs_Dec2014”
5. BTO Noise characteristics issued December 23, 2014:
“MH370 Burst Timing Offset (BTO) Characteristics Dated 23 December 2014”
You can probably find links for download if you Google the titles.