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.
For those of you engaged in recent talk about increasingly obscure and detailed aspects of an elaborate and nefarious scheme of misdirection, please explain how a spokesman from the White House announced *less than a week* after the disappearance that they had the plane going down in the SIO. Keep in mind this is US intelligence from the Pentagon. If there was even a chance of this trickery, do you not think that same US intelligence would explore those avenues?
If a few pilots, engineers, and aviation aficionados are having this conversation right now on this public forum, do you not think that the top intelligence experts in the world would have also had his conversation? Not only would they have had the conversation, but they would also have been privy to a whole host of additional classified information and resources that we could only dream of having access to.
I know I’m coming off as a buzz killington, but please at least recognize that despite this being a fun and exciting exercise in assuming the role of Sherlock Holmes, it is not only futile, but also a bit foolish with a hint of delusions of grandeur.
@Jay, that’s an argument from authority:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, those of us who have been “around the block” a few times, know that if you want something done properly, sometimes you have to do it yourself i.e. authority is no guarantee of rationality or exhaustive investigation or infallibility etc etc. Kudos to Jeff Wise for following his nose, and not following the crowd, for that is often the way of lemmings over the cliff.
@Jay,
As I said before, we should appreciate your thoughts re: groupthink. But that’s true for all faction here.
And why exactly is it a sign of delusional grandeur to explore an alternative scenario, which might turn out to be less complicated and less risky than we originally thought. And that simplifying process might be far from over.
As to various secret services: they have been fooled by more complicated plots. 9/11is one of them. If someone had proposed such a scenario in advance,he would have been declared totally nuts. A lot of things have to happen for the first time. And then the experts react and start looking for telltale intelligence. But not before it ever happened. Besides, they might look into alternative scenarios as we speak. We wouldn’t be privvy to their inquiries.
So, why don’t we try Victor’s approach and treat it as a hypothesis, which has to be rigorously tested. If there is a technically impossibility, that point has to be thrown out. But gut feeling and common sense has nothing to do with scientific thinking. Occam’s Razor is often misused when there are no hard arguments. Actually some people’s razor would tell them that the Northern route scenario just needs two deceptions – spoofed data for pointing into the wrong direction and a flight code switch in order to minimize the risk of detection. Those two deceptions seem to become less and less dificult the more they are simplfied. And the rest is just an ordinary hijack as they have happened many times before.
@Jay, I think you’ve missed one of the main lessons of this whole episode, which is that the authorities are not infallible and all seeing. The reason I called my book “The Plane That Wasn’t There” is that time an again the authorities kept telling us that the plane was in a certain area, and then it turned out it wasn’t. First the Malaysians said that the plane had gone missing over the South China Sea, when they already knew that it hadn’t; then the Australians said that the plane had been as good as found off the coast of Western Australia, when the acoustic pings’ frequency was off by an impossible amount. And then the Australians declare that they are so certain that the wreckage lies within the SIO “priority search area” that the more they look and don’t find it, the greather their confidence becomes! Meanwhile, evidence mounts that the plane didn’t go south: check out this story about a recent of flotsam and jetsam in Tasmania: http://dailym.ai/1x3DQAr.
@Jeff,
Great points. The authorties have been wrong so many times in this case that many people think it might even be deliberate.
And maybe it’s also a delution to believe oneself above getting deceived and never contemplate that possibility.
@Jeff
I have not missed this lesson–I’m fully aware of the infallible nature of authorities, ESPECIALLY that of Malaysia. But how can you compare Malaysia to the US. This is not me being some overly dedicate patriot, this is me being a realist. The US simply have the most capabilities when it comes to this sort of thing out of any country in the world. And keep in mind this information which came from the US was before the Inmarsat data was fully sorted thru.
I also disagree with your claim that there is mounting evidence that the plane didn’t fly south. I’m not convinced it’s evidence for anything in particular that there isn’t wreckage on the coast of Tasmania. I’ve seen numerous reports explaining that debris could have drifted under Australia and out to the Pacific, or down into Antarctica. I’d even contend that the fact we’ve heard nothing otherwise is evidence against the plane flying north.
Tasmanian shoreline cleanup
The (UK) Daily Mail is certainly not regarded as a paragon of probing and incisive journalism. In fact, the opposite with a reputation for typical tabloid salacious trivia.
The DM article quotes an ABC report and cleanup organiser Matt Dell.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-19/volunteers-collect-rubbish-from-as-far-away-as-madagascar/6333508b.
The ABC report and comments attributed to Matt Dell makes no connection or reference to MH370. Why does Richard Shears, the author of the Daily Mail article make that connection?
TEx
@Dr.Ulich
Thank you Bobby. I found all of them.
I thin we should try to zoom out and consider if we would accept the data sources in our normal practice as scientist. I have a problem with the main source we all seem to be using (including IG): the Satellite data logs (your ref 1).
– It is second hand data
– It is a “readable summary” of the data
– It has no cover page showing the resonsible authors
So how do we know it is a correct summary of the raw data, and who can we hold responsible if it is not? Correct also means that no relevant data is left out.
I think it is important for the scientists among us to have a discussion about what is acceptable data from a point of view of normal scientific practice. It is essential because if we don’t solve this we end up in different “religious” camps discussing about what we “believe” is correct. In the end it does not help anyone.
I will go through all the documents to see if the combination may help us, but I already noticed that the Inmarsat paper is refering to the same data log file (your ref. 1).
Regards,
Niels.
@Examinator,
That’s an interesting point re: Daily Mail. It would make sense to find out who made the connection with mh370.
But it is interesting nonetheless if there wasn’t found anything of interest.
That the Daily Mail is a tabloid doesn’t necessarily mean they got it wrong. But it should be checked, no question.
So missile fragments were found in in the wreckage of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17… I honestly think that, with this new evidence of a surface-to-air BUK rocket involved in the MH17 crash, it is very plausible that Russia was involved.
@Neils: I think it is proper to question the accuracy and completeness of the satellite logs, because as you say, all of the analysts rely on the same data set.
However, I am even more concerned about the accuracy and completeness of the radar data. We have never seen the raw data, and the reason for the disappearance at 18:22 has never been explained (to my knowledge).
@Oleksandr: Yes, there are many ways to connect the dots between 18:28 and 19:41. I would group my landing at Banda Aceh scenario into the general category of “loitering patterns”, which also includes circling and excursions rather than a single turn to the south.
Jeff recently commented that I have not talked much recently about my landing at BA scenario. The reason is that GO Phoenix is searching in the area of 94.24E that this scenario predicted was the crash site of the plane. So either the plane is found there and the landing becomes one of the scenarios that is offered as an explanation, or the plane is not found there and we investigate other theories as more likely. I’m not sure there is much more worth saying at this point.
Jay – The US govt stating the plane was in the SIO was linked to the absence of northern radar data at the time. What other data they have we don’t know but what I’ve found hard to fathom is that they have said absolutely nothing since, shown not one bit of concern – publicly. The fact that they were commenting on a “plane crash” was indicative of a national security implication, yet no apparent interest as to how that thing got there. And not just them either. If this was a real hot potato it would have been move aside Inmarsat/ATSB/Malaysia, and the bigger players would have moved in. I interpret the indifference as them knowing what happened and it’s a long way from benign. Obama does not want to tangle with Putin, that much is clear. Sometimes I think they view MH370 as the one that got away.
disregard DM “reputation” and look closer to what is published, while that doesn’t mean there was 100% no debris after ditching it still puts probability way on that side
@PeterNorton:
Thanks much for that particular quote from Ruben Santamarta — from an article I hadn’t seen:
“I discovered a backdoor that allowed me to gain privileged access to the Satellite Data Unit, the most important piece of SATCOM (Satellite communications) equipment on aircraft,” said Ruben Santamarta, principal security consultant for IOActive. “These vulnerabilities allowed unauthenticated users to hack into the SATCOM equipment when it is accessible through WiFi or In-Flight entertainment networks.”
On US intelligence and MH370:
NPR interview yesterday with Ted Bridis, investigative editor at the Associated Press:
“Almost immediately after Malaysian Airlines 370 went down, we asked the Pentagon’s spy satellite agency about the request for assistance that they might have received either internationally or from within the U.S. government. And a year later, we are still waiting for anything. Zero pages have been produced.”
http://t.co/02EyOtWDTQ
re @Jay
“Keep in mind this is US intelligence from the Pentagon. If there was even a chance of this trickery, do you not think that same US intelligence would explore those avenues?”
Well, the answer to that question depends on if it were in US interests TO explore.
Excerpt from the New York Times (03.17.15)
“U.N. Orders Review of 1961 Crash That Killed Dag Hammarskjold”:
The plane had flown deep into the African night on a mission for peace. Finally, it drew near its destination in the copper mining region of what is now northern Zambia. The crew radioed for permission to descend. Then there was nothing.
On the night of Sept. 17 to 18, 1961, the plane, a Transair Sweden DC-6B named Albertina, was carrying Dag Hammarskjold, the secretary general of the United Nations, and 15 other people. Mr. Hammarskjold was on his way to meet with Moise Tshombe, the leader of a bloody secession movement in Katanga, a province of the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo with vast deposits of strategic minerals, including uranium and cobalt.
But the four-engined plane crashed minutes after the last radio contact, in a stretch of bushland eight miles from the airport at Ndola, in what was then the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia.
The crash turned a hinge in the tortured narrative of modern Africa, poised between rule by outside powers and independence. But its cause has never been established.
Now, the United Nations has agreed to reopen the Pandora’s box of fragmentary evidence, speculation, obfuscation and wild conspiracy theories surrounding the crash to order a review by an independent panel of three experts.
Some of the panel’s most sensational testimony may come from two American intelligence officers who were working hundreds of miles apart at listening posts in the Mediterranean. Both claim to have heard evidence that the plane was shot down, and one of them maintains that Americans were somehow implicated.”
doubt and believes
@Jay
Basically you want to say (1) that we should replace doubt by belief and (2) that we should believe politicians and (3) that we should particularly believe in US politicians in power.
Now you are free to believe whatever you want. Some people believe in fairy tales as well. But Science cannot do that.
The driving force to fuel science is the 5-letter word DOUBT. Doubt is, has always been and will always be the basic foundation of all science and therefore of all the benefits derived thereof. It would be nice, if there was a way, to overcome doubt, by order of a government, especially the order to believe the “good” guys. This would be ridiculous. It would mean that the government controls the people, not the people controlling the government.
For science it would make the difference between hard science and common sense. Science does not allow for believes but needs doubt and the transformation of doubt into formal logic, which is the only way to find the ease to overcome doubt.
The brainstorming here on this blog is a scientifically warranted very open discussion of all different aspects of doubt by a grass roots crowd and there is not the least need to take care for the special political “correctness” you are demanding.
You say you are speaking in the interest of the next of kin, but it comes out, that you are married to one specific scenario that is, from scientific considerations, the most exotic ever happened A/C deviation, most likely capture, in the history of mankind. The SIO scenario was one of the wildest freak theories i ever heard about. To justify such an exotic scenario you must have very very very good reason and hard evidence and very freaky events in a very freaky chain of events. Spreading a rumor, that particularly the US government is the ‘good guy’ that knows better than all of us (because it has surveillance of everything, even my chancellors private mobile phone), is not enough to make a case. I tell you, i love the american people and i love the american politics, but trust and belief is not what it is about. Its about checks and balances. Those politics work only, if people make and control them and the politicians in power. And if the US government indeed withholds important evidence from the public since more than a year as you try to insinuate, that could help the people worldwide and the next of kin to understand this mystery, it would be truly shameful, infidel and appalling.
But i made up my mind now after one year. I dont think they (US) hold any credible additional evidence, that supports the freak scenario. Otherwise they would have found a way to leak some imagery, as was immediately the case in the ukraine events.
leads in a criminal investigation, harbinger group
@peter norton
I think there are some lawyers contributing and i would like to ask them, what counsel would they give the prosecution here, when there is only one direct lead being found, that connects a credible target aboard 9M MRO with one of the major players in the event.
Peter Norton hinted to the information that INMARSAT is owned to 28% by the Harbinger Group (Bush et al.) through one of its hedge fonds. This player seems to be connected to Freescale Semiconductors, which is owned to a substantial part by the Carlyle Group (Bush et al.). 20 top engineers of Freescale were aboard the flight.
What should a prosecutor think, when one player seemingly directs the search into the ‘abyss of nowhere’, while he is somehow connected to some high value target aboard the flight?
Notice: The views opinions expressed in this post are solely mine and do not express the views of the IG or any other group.
@Nihonmama: The work of Ruben Santamarta is instructive in that he was able to discover these vulnerabilities only by reverse-engineering the firmware images for the SATCOM devices. I was particularly interested to see how he found backdoor entry methods which gave the user undocumented capabilities. For instance, Ruben describes how it is possible to enter the backdoor of Cobham’s Aviator 700D SATCOM from the cockpit CDU by use of a backdoor PIN. See 16:36 from the following video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeKswEamOl4
If a similar backdoor exists for the Honeywell MCS-6000, it may be possible to write to the specific location in non-volatile memory that stores the inclination parameter (3 bits) in the System Table, thereby overwriting the value of zero that had been previously broadcast by the GES. As I have described previously, if appropriately chosen, this would produce a BFO signature of a southern path when the plane actually flew north. The simplicity of this hack is that the value needs only to be written once. There are no dynamic updates required for any parameter and therefore no need for an in-line processor generating and writing values in real-time.
If this method was followed, the change in value would have been made between 18:28 and 18:40 as the BFO at 18:28 is indicative of a plane traveling at an azimuth of about 297 deg and the BFO at 18:40 is indicative of a southern path. So the AES would have completed its log-on with the value of broadcast inclination of zero, and this value was overwritten soon after.
I’d like to be clear that I have no evidence that such a backdoor exists for the MCS-6000. I only wish to show that if the MCS-6000 has security vulnerabilities similar to other SATCOMs, this possibility exists and should not be dismissed.
@cosmic – I see the linkage but I can’t see the MO?
@CosmicAcademy,
Great comments!
As to the can of worms connected with the Freescale ingeneers: so far I’ve always been very dismissive of the idea that the hijack of a big plane and the possible sacrifice of many innocent lives could be explained with these passengers being aboard mh370.
I’m ready to be more open about that idea – even if it is still hard to believe how potential perps who must’ve spent some time to set such an elaborate plot in motion, could’ve reacted to something as unpredictable as passengers and/or cargo on one specific flight.
Unless plans for such a hijack had been in place for some time – in order to be used when it was really worthwhile for whatever reason.
@myron
I am talking maybe about next generation high-tech weapon proliferation.
@CosmicAcademy:
“What should a prosecutor think, when one player seemingly directs the search into the ‘abyss of nowhere’, while he is somehow connected to some high value target aboard the flight?”
The answer is in your very incisive question.
And a smart prosecutor would also:
1. Get a very savvy investigator with the requisite (cultural) experience and skills to maneuver around Asia (specifically: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) down to that part of the world ASAP for extended recon. The answers are on the ground.
AND
Be talking to every (US) national security reporter (and if possible, their sources) they could find.
@Victor:
Thanks much for your extended comment. Got you.
@Littlefoot:
“it is still hard to believe how potential perps who must’ve spent some time to set such an elaborate plot in motion, could’ve reacted to something as unpredictable as passengers and/or cargo on one specific flight.”
Not unpredictable.
All that would be needed (and I’ve mentioned this previously) would be to have MAS INSIDERS involved. Specifically:
– Person(s) in MAS flight ops – OPS “builds” the flights and would have data from the reservations side about pax and cargo on MH370.
– Person(s) on the ramp. Preferably in a supervisory capacity who would have overseen the unloading of the INBOUND flight that was turned for MH370, as well as the loading of MH370.
@Nihonmama,
yes, of course I suspect that there were probably MAS insider at work, who could’ve provided info about passenger and cargo. Maybe they might even have helped to set up a hack or spoof. But I was more thinking along the lines that it must’ve taken some time and research to come up with the kind of plan we’re talking about. And now it’s burnt. Whatever we are told by the official investigation, there will be a change of perception. 9/11 wasn’t repeatable in that form and so won’t be mh370.That’s why I think potential perps must’ve waited for a worthwhile occasion.
@Littlefoot:
“I think potential perps must’ve waited for a worthwhile occasion.”
Or, as some in the mafia have been known to say, “make your luck.”
It’s funny. Exactly one year ago today, someone on Twitter (a very smart retired lawyer – @hpyrancher) asked me:
“Have you wondered why this plane and this route?”
And I responded:
“That plane, from that airport, at that time, with those pax (or cargo). PLANNED”
The most powerful strategic advantage one can have is to be underestimated.
Nihonmama
Posted December 1, 2014 at 7:15 PM
“He who exercises no forethought but makes light of his opponents is sure to be captured by them.”
~Sun Tzu, The Art Of War
first few weeks after disappearance – in the media…
“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” (not mine)
Spoofing – so that technical chasm keeps getting narrower and we don’t even have a budget or the time to fix on it with a team. I was almost perturbed by the continued suggestion that it was virtually impossible. Time may tell.
Freescale also had some links with some Israeli firms working on new generation weapons guidance – so I read. That’s gold for Iran/Russia.
Russia are spending innocent lives everyday and no peace movement? Just a country in a alarming level of nationalist fervour. For an Islamist govt non-muslims are expendable. They are going to hell anyway. The govts of Russia and Iran have a toxic symbiosis – both want conflict, have common enemies, and both have a timeframe.
Looking back a few pages, I thought this suggestion from AM
“Jeff,
Have you ever tried to investigate about any flight cancellations or delays in & about the South-East Asia routes at the midnight of 7th March (early morning 8th March)? If there was any then it is plausible that hijackers having high-tech skills have used a fake flight id to flew to their destination.” was a very good one and also Jeff’s reply that a cargo or charter flight could have been used.
Would this mean that the real MH370 could have followed the other plane’s planned route for a while and slipped off wherever while the new MH370 flew to the SIO by some means and no BTO/BFO spoofing would be needed? Sorry, I don’t know whether this is technically possible. If so please suggest how this idea might be researched.
Jay – If MH370 was a real live one for military intelligence I don’t think the Malaysian investigators would be allowed anywhere near those boxes but as it stands they will have custody – is that right? They are reluctant in every step so far and seem to loathe responsibility, while the US govt goes hands off. It all has a civilian look to it yet alarm bells went off everywhere and still are in some quarters, so I start looking for reasons for the bigger players to be so relaxed.
@Matty “Freescale also had some links with some Israeli firms working on new generation weapons guidance – so I read. That’s gold for Iran/Russia.”
Russia has its own scientists for weapon guidance and if Iran can pull all this then we are in trouble 😀
@Matty:
one really mad local conspiracist blames Freescale and Rotchild and I dont know who other for KINETIS “secret weapon” as the cause of disappearance (ROFL; it can control may be tamagochi, nothing more)
http://cz.farnell.com/freescale-semiconductor/mkl03z32caf4r/mcu-32bit-cortex-m0-48mhz-wlcsp/dp/2433441
(farnell can deliver it next day onto your table for couple of beers)
It’s not clear to me how the different arcs (based on satellite “pings”) were derived.
This document gives BTO values in microseconds but the values are so small that it isn’t enough time for a signal to even reach the ground directly under a satellite let alone make a round trip. For example, 14000-microseconds equates to only 4200km.
http://www.dca.gov.my/mainpage/MH370%20Data%20Communication%20Logs.pdf
I like to make some comments to the phase from turnaround at IGARI until military radar contact was lost at time 18:22 in the vicinity of MEKAR.
We tend to agree, that the ATC handover to Vietnam ATC was the ideal time to initiate the action. Saying good night to one station followed by an unssuccessfull checkin with the next station has happened before and is not immidiately followed by alert measures from either involved party. Nobody feels responsible in this “no radio contact” phase. Switching off the position reporting systems was a further step to prolong the next phase, which I like to call the “uncertainity phase”. Not only radio contact was lost, but also secondary radar contact, and primary radar was not routinly monitored. Therefore the involved two ATC stations did not know where MH370 was and where it went, or if sombody knew he saw no need to communicate this knowledge. They probably had their ideas about the cause, some problem with the electric system would be most probable. Initially Malaysia ATC would assume that the flight continued in the planned direction and one had to look there to the whereabouts. Would they have flown into this direction they would have been detected pretty soon on some primary radar, and maybe some interceptor would have been launched to investigate the situation if doubts on the intentions of MH370 would arise or airborne identification and assistance should be necessary.
All this initial “uncertainity phase” was doing for MH370 was buying time for the next move. We tend to see this part already as the disappearance phase, but the routing back to Penang tells us otherwise. This routing was deliberate in two ways. It would bring them into the intended direction – which tells us it was not to the north-east- and not the south-east, and it would buy again time if detection by Malaysian ATC or military occurred which was to be likely and had to be planned for.
ATC would assume that the turn back to Kota Bharu was for the purpose of a later landing, so a detection would not provoke immidiate action. Even the next turn at Kota Bharu to Penang International would be no surprise for ATC or the military, it could be for landing there or explained as a low risk routing to Kuala Lumpur for an aircraft with degraded communication and navigation capabilities. It must be considered being a clever move for MH370, as that routing took them nearly overhead the position of the most threat radar into the blind spot, which masked the next turn to Mekar and again was buying time. If somebody would have monitored the flight, he would have expected the primary radar contact to show up again to the south inbound Kuala Lumpur. The routing served another purpose well, it kept MH370 in friendly Malayan airspace all the time, making it to a low interest target for the Malaysian ATC and Military and to no interest target for the other surrounding nations. The routing to MEKAR serves the same purpose, it posed no threat to Indonasia, Thailand or Vietnam as it was in the area of responsibility of Malaysia ATC until Mekar. It was a clever and thorough planned route.
There had been some questions why MH370 disappeared from primary radar and how that could be explained. See below some screenshots of the radar track, which are not new but may aid in the discussion.
http://ogleearth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/mh370-penang.jpeg
http://i.stack.imgur.com/b5OAp.jpg
The radar track shows the last phase of the known flight path, which i myself call the “disappearance phase”. In my oppinion the actions of MH370 before that final phase served mainly one purpose, to delay and hinder timely actions of ATC and military long enough to maneuver into a position where final disappearance could be granted. For the planners of this flight it was clear, that they could avoid aircraft based detection means like transponder, ADSB and ACARS, but where unable to prevent primary radar contact. To finally disappear from primary radar MH370 had to be maneuvered unhindered into an area, where radar coverage of Malaysia was reduced and other nations had no interest in an detected target due to its track on an official air routing and due to the absence of responsibility for that area in the ATC system, and where the military had no reaction time left to lauch air defence forces. To make it a perfect plan for disappearance MH370 had one final task left, to vanish from the screens of the primary radar and change the direction to the further routing. This plan had to take in account that it had to be done under the eyes of a vigilant controller. The only way to hide from a primary radar for a big unstealthy aircraft is to leave the effective area of the radar beam.
The following picture shows the typical radar coverage (in red colour) of a primary radar. A target at a range of about 220 NM at 40.000 feet is below the radar horizon of a radar station on sea level and does not show on the radar screen. Only over the horizon radars (in green colour) could cover these blind areas below the line of the horizon, but there is none stationed in the discussed region.
http://i.stack.imgur.com/xn6xz.png
To disappear from primary radar MH370 had to drop below the radar horizon by flying out of range or descent below the radar horizon for the given range. A versed person familiar with such numbers would have planned to do both. First reason would be the fore mentioned disappearance from Malayan radar, but also to stay below the radar coverage of other radars ahead of the planned routing. Under this situation an ongoing descent at the 18:27 ping is very likely and would influence the interpretation of the BFO value.
All this effort would have been completely sensless if MH370 would have turned south into the interest area of Indonesia flying at FL 350 as the present south path routings suggest. My take is, that if this turn to the south happened as most experts read from the BFO values, then something unplanned happened and it was not a planned move.
I do not believe it turned south, I have not from the beginning. This known part of the flight path and the actions involved have “professional planning and execution” written all over the script so obvious, that people look away and search for other explanations. If we believe in such a professional planning and execution until Mekar, than there is no sensible explanation for the routing to the south in irder to crash there. On the other hand I do not believe in spoofing of the BFO data, it looks to complicated to achieve it and the knowledge that BFO and BTO monitoring existed and could be used was not generally known. The presence of BTO data have been known since AF447, but were not even on the mindset of the agencies involved in the loss of MH370 until INMARSAT came forward on their own. At least that is the official version afaik.
If those pings had been known by the olanners beforehand, there would have been a plan and a way to disable them. To use them as decoy by spoofing them would have been a sure give away of information on the total flight time, whereas a surpression of those pings would have led to the assumption that the aircraft crashed somewhere in the Andaman sea. The surpression would have worked in favour of a crash wether the data had been known or not, whereas the spoofing to work would have required the data to be known and used in an early state of the disappearance. That leads to my conclusion that the BFO data are not spoofed, although they might be not honest, might be misinterpreted by some wrong value or might be interpreted with the bias that MH370 must have traveled south.
Founding on my analysis of the above I have have my own interpretation of the further routing, but at the moment I am reluctant to make a fool out of myself in public as I might have done with this post anyway, I am ready though to dicuss some points of it in private if some of you posting on this blog is interested. My mail should be obtainable by the blog owner, he may give it away on his own discretion.
Franz
StevanG – Russia has scientists as good as any no doubt, what they don’t have is the funding. As pointed out on this blog they are trying to be a superpower with a GDP the size of Italy. They are finding stealth technology to be a huge hill and the oil prices is collapsing. There are a number of boats sailing away from them at present.
@cosmicacademy
I couldn’t find any solid info on the ownership of Harbinger group in Inmarsat. Can you please specify?
Still it interesting. Please have a careful (!) look in the following link and check the top 5 shareholders. Then click to “movers” and see who recently sold. Please look at the development of share price (click summary) and do the math.
http://markets.ft.com/research/Markets/Tearsheets/Business-profile?s=ISAT:LSE
StevanG – Iran is an emerging nuclear power with some foot to the boards, cutting edge weapons/defense industries ongoing. When you don’t spend billions on welfare it’s amazing what can be done. If it’s a sophisticated hijack they are capable. By the time this question plays out(spoofing) I’ll bet now it is within the reach of nerd teams all over the world.
It would be cheaper to pay scientists to come to Iran than hijack them. Also the radar from Diego Garcia(not to mention the countries around) would sure see the MH370 if it went to Iran.
National/cultural stereotypes won’t help find the plane.
my pleasure. As I have not been here from the beginning, I am trying not to bore you. I thought this was common knowledge. Within the universe of spoof theories, that seems like a game changer to me.
It’s in the footnotes of my long posting (page 6).
thank you for lucidly following up on the dots I tried to connect. Just one (in my eyes rather minor) correction: I said Inmarsat was majority-owned by the Harbinger Group. The information (cited in my footnotes) is from 2008.
In 2010, Harbinger sold half of its Inmarsat stake.¹
In 2011, Harbinger exited Inmarsat.²
But I think that doesn’t change a lot, since what matters are the human contacts/relations and hidden power structures. Once a company has been a front company for the CIA³, there is always the question whether this has really changed, regardless of current shareholder percentages. This is where the question mark lingers over Inmarsat.
If you look at it in an isolated manner, it might not look like much. But when you factor in all the other incidents (Fairbairn’s death, the switch to the SIO on the day of his death, the appointment of an US Air Force General as an additional director at Inmarsat, the fire in the avionics shop … an all that within a mere 18 days), it becomes a legitimate area of research/investigation.
—
¹ reut.rs/1EDFOI3
² archive.is/5oSkS
³ see section 7 of my long post
… well, actually it’s all within 9 days (17-26 March)!
It’s 18 days if you count from the day MH370 disappeared (8-26 March).
BTW, I have by accident discovered an abandoned airstrip close to where I live, not far away from the current airport (1000m runway). I guess they relocated the airport to build a longer runway, but I don’t know. The abandoned airstrip has trees and bushes growing all around, so you can’t see it from outside. The ground consists of concrete plates which have long come undone. Looks like a small earthquake hit, but it’s really just the ageing process.
http://www.google.co.uk/images?q=abandoned+airstrip
I’m sure there are numerous abandoned short airstrips. But abandoned runways long enough for a B777 … how many would there be in that part of the world ?
It would at least eliminate the problem of thousands of potential witnesses at a regular airport.
well if you don’t plan to fly it again then you can land it basically on any long stretch of relatively flat surface (some desert, meadow etc.) breaking the wheels along the way
@Spoofing crowd,
We’re talking about two possible scenarios here – that there was a spoof, or that the data is accurate.
Yet there is at least a remote possibility that neither is true and the answer could be in between.
Note that the BTOs always increase. One of the spoof theories requires that the spoofed BTO is longer than the actual travel time, artificially placing the airplane further from the satellite than it really is.
Isn’t it possible that a mechanical or software explanation exists for an ever-increasing time delay?
On a regular computer, we’d call this a memory leak. Unreleased memory piles up and eventually programs run slower due to the unavailability of free memory.
An SDU is obviously a different beast, with an architecture that mostly ensures that real-time functions stay real-time, but can we completely rule out a degradation over time in its ability to respond? We can’t rule out other types of malfunctions, so can we even rule out any influence on the delay?
It wouldn’t take much. A 1-millisecond drift per hour would account for the entire variation in BTOs from the time and location of the reboot. A 100us drift per hour would put the plane 300 miles closer to the satellite. Even a 20us drift takes the plane far out of the search area.
@peter Norton @CosmicAcademy
An article on Inmarsat Ownership
FLT 370 – A Little Bit of Prestidigitation
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/03/24/flt-370-a-little-bit-of-prestidigitation/)
How would this technical glitch make the plane turn and disappear ?
Peter,
While “a memory leak”-like reasons are unlikely the cause of this mystery in my opinion, the “mechanical/electrical failure” remains the top candidate in my list.
——-
Citation from Wiki:
“Further, on large jet airliners, during non-autopilot flight, the rudder is mainly used to compensate for side wind components.”
Does anybody know if the rudder is used by the stability sub-system in unmanned AT mode (or engine-failsafe mode), and how? If yes, what is the feedback function specifically for B777?
The odds for a technical failure are already astronomic:
(A) What are the odds for all of that ?
(B) What are the odds for a “a memory leak”-like BTO/BFO data corruption ?
And what are the odds for A+B combined ?
StevanG – noting is as cheap as stealing when you are well behind in a technology race. Technology theft is as Russian as Vodka and exploding submarines. Diego Garcia won’t be scrutinizing Maldivian air traffic, it will be making sure noone gets too close and it’s about 600km away. If someone out there wanted to swoop on a bunch of Freescale engineers South-East Asia is a place to do it.
Greg Long – apologies for the indulgent cultural stereotyping.
JS – In my technically inept way I tried to say the same thing last year. This computer slows down all the time for a hundred reasons and the gear on board had been messed with. Stuff going off then on it’s not hard to imagine a glitch getting in somewhere. The experts will say they are reasonably confident it’s not the case but of course no-one really knows, like many other details with MH370. The data points straight to the SIO but we started out with a question mark beside the data and it’s now a bigger one.
Peter,
As you noted, MH370 case is unique: all pros are compensated by the same number of cons. You may scroll back to find detailed discussions on your items. In brief:
• going dark and off course right after ATC handover – turn at IGARI (towards BITOD) has triggered some event.
• no mayday – VHF radio went down.
• multiple turns – attempts to burn fuel and find a place for emergency landing
• 7 hours of flight – incapacitated crew
• no business class passenger sat phone calls – AES went down (together with VHFs & HF).
• straddling Thai border – attempt to return to KLIA (original intent) or Penang (longest runway).
• following N571 – My opinion did not change: it did not follow N571.
• circumventing Indonesia – why would it go there?
• AES log on at 18:25, i.e. 3 minutes after disappearance from primary radar, etc. – The crew managed to repair AES, but there were more damages.
I have to say that roughly same list exists against hijacking… One of the most critical questions “against” is why MH370 flew via Penang instead of Langkawi (direct trajectory to MEKAR). Technical failure explains this perfectly. There is no sounding explanation on the hijacking side, except nostalgic memories of the Captain. If Don is right with regard to Thai radars, the other possible explanation could be that the hijackers knew that the Butterworth radar was off on March 8, while Thai RTADS-III (Khoh Samui) was on. But how could they know this in advance? And even they knew, what is to do with this specific MH370? Of course, the next level of conspiracy would be that Malay military on purpose switched off Butterworth radars to let MH370 pass by.
About Freescale patents:
I have been looking a bit into this story that Freescale owners would benefit from an accident happening to their inventors, through patent ownership. I have been very skeptical from the beginning, I think it would be normal to consider as a disaster to the company primarely of course on a personal level, but also through the economic damage (company loosing very talented employees with all their expertise).
Now some made the suggestion that Freescale employees on board of MH370 were co-owners of patents. While it is true for US patents that:
“For applications filed before September 16, 2012, the ownership of the patent (or the application for the patent) initially vests in the named inventors of the invention of the patent.”
It is very uncommon for employees not to directly assign the patent rights to the company they are working for.
Of course we have to check how this was organized at Freescale China and Malaysia, but this story seems far fetched IMO.
Note also that Freescale owns hundreds of US patents, so what would a single patent (as it was suggested in some of these stories) matter?
It can not be excluded that there have been IP related conflicts within Freescale, but without any concrete info on this it looks all very speculative.
Niels.