By Victor Iannello
Don’t be fooled by claims of the red tape causing the delay in the determination of the provenance of the flaperon.
Boeing and the NTSB were parties to the investigation when the flaperon was first brought to Toulouse. It is very unlikely that the Spanish subcontractor ADS-SAU did not immediately turn over all documentation when requested by Boeing. The investigators had to know soon after the start of the investigation what the provenance of the part is, whether or not that determination was made public.
I have said before and continue to believe that there was an attempt to delay the release of the results of the investigation in parallel with planting a seed of doubt regarding the provenance of the part. Just look at the series of events this week. First the claim that Spanish vacation schedules have delayed the identification of the part. Then the claim that the identification was not possible. This was followed by the claim that the flaperon was certainly from MH370.
The pattern of leaking contradictory or false information to the media from off-the-record sources continued in full force this week. I believe this is a story in its own right that should be getting a lot of attention. Perhaps when enough journalists are made to look foolish by reporting contradicting statements, their “reputation instincts” will kick in and compel them to dig deeper.
We who are following this incident should demand that more facts be fully disclosed. Technical reports should be released so that we are not parsing statements from a judge-prosecutor to understand the true meaning of what was written. And journalists should not blindly report statements without attribution.
Why are the French being so French?
They might be a member of a defense alliance and even share data on terrorism but they aren’t fully trusted because they have some duplicitous positions and dealings. They were out of the loop early with MH370, and if there were defense/security implications with the disappearance now would be a good time to hold the cards cleverly to manufacture a stake for themselves?
From this armchair: flutter is going to leave a variety of stress signatures under the electron microscope. The ditch will involve a primary one with with other traumas present. As others have already stated this will be known information and probably weeks ago. Does sitting on it gives you leverage?
As far as I know, the only publicly-available simulations of MH370 with any realistic claim to accuracy were done by Dave Whittington and posted on Vimeo over a year ago.
I have missed (or forget!) critiques of his simulations (beyond Dave’s own comments, e.g., certain wind conditions not taken into account), so I would be grateful if Don or Mike or any of our other curators are in a position to say where his simulations go wrong in a way which affects the final descent, if they do. Or, if there are better simulations we can actually look at.
Bruce: I posted an editted short video many months ago. IG members have had access to around 45 minutes of raw video since last November. I have not made all of it public out of consideration for NOK. But the short clip and narration is typical of what the whole 4 hours gave us.
http://tinyurl.com/oboepvg
Bruce: Here is a transcription of one test.
http://tinyurl.com/q2qpxnb
You will note that the *indicated* air speed exceeds 500kts at the end (true airspeed much higher).
Hopefully the French are getting on with the job. This first part is an official communique and the second part may be of interest (or not):
From www(dot)ambafrance-uk(dot)org , the Embassy of France in London:
“President meets families of passengers on flight MH370
Malaysia Airlines/flight MH370 – Communiqué issued by the Presidency of the Republic
Paris, 4 September 2015
The French President had a meeting with the families of the four French passengers who were on board Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared on 8 March 2014.
The Head of State expressed the nation’s support in the painful ordeal of the victims’ families, who remain uncertain about the exact circumstances of the disappearance.
Following confirmation that the wing fragment discovered in Réunion on 29 July 2015 belongs to flight MH370, he took stock, with the families, of the searches conducted.
He assured them of the state services’ active support of judicial procedures under way both in France and abroad to enable full light to be shed on the air disaster.
The efforts of our diplomacy will continue, to ensure that the mobilization and cooperation of all those involved enable progress in the investigation to be guaranteed as quickly as possible./.
Published on 07/09/2015 “
See also the facebook page of MH370-France where more details of this visit are described:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/MH370-France/1395393954016540?locale=fr_FR)
…”Il nous a promis de donner au juge Gaudino tous les moyens de poursuivre son enquête notamment par une action auprès des autorités malaisiennes, mais aussi ainsi qu’ auprès des sociétés Inmarsat et Rolls Royce via les autorités britanniques, ainsi qu’une aide des services secrets français dans l’enquête anti terroriste”…
I suggest that Google’s translation is nowhere near accurate enough. However, it is suggested that judge Gaudino is acting with the Malaysian authorities. Inmarsat, Rolls Royce and the French secret services are also mentioned.
“Sadly, the flaperon is of no help to us in narrowing down the search area”. It is amazing how many online/media/govt mouthpieces are saying this sentence, almost verbatim. Well, hang on, now.
Every drift analysis I’ve seen (and I’ve now seen six them from six sets of experts) that does not add an additional factor for wind tells us that Réunion from the current priority search zone is in feasible.
“Well, you need to add wind”, we’re told. But if wind can blow a near-fully submerged flaperon hundreds of miles ahead of the current, surely it would have pushed the thousands of smaller, floatier pieces even faster around the SIO horn. If CSIRO is correct, then all these pieces that actually WOULD catch wind should be slammed up into Madagascar, by now.
“Maybe the plane ditched intact”, we’re told. Now things are starting to get really ridiculous: a plane in the process of losing 19,000’/minute (four minutes after burning its last drop of fuel) manages – despite having lost a flaperon – to ditch serenely in ocean swells (conservatively estimated at 3m along the entire length of the priority search area)…?
The priority search area is at this point an absurd choice to look for this plane.
@Brock
My only disagreement is with “at this point”. It was a non-starter from the get-go.
@Brock
“The priority search area is at this point an absurd choice to look for this plane.”
Yes, agreed, but where else to look, or perhaps halt the search until more info is available? Perhaps search instead a curve on the 7th arc from Indonesia southwards… but how wide? And how expensive would that be? And did Erik van Sebille do a backflip?
Sorry… only questions, no good ideas ATM.
@Brock, I don’t completely understand your last comment. Could you check it, please, concerning the 6 drift studies you mention? Are they saying the SIO is feasible or unfeasible if wind isn’t a factor?
If the flap drifted mostly submerged, wind WOULD be a factor btw, although not as big a factor as with a piece of debris floating above the surface. It depends on the strength and if the wind kept blowing from a constant direction a prolongued time or not. Wind can influence the surface currents if strong and constant enough.
GEOMAR has ruled out the current search area but they announced that they want to refine their model by adding wind as a factor. It will be interesting to see if they will take the submerged drift modus of the flap into consideration.
The confirmation that the flaperon belongs to MH370 suggests that the plane and all (or most) of its passengers have perished in the SIO.
That in turn has initiated the French investigation, but changed it from one of ‘missing’ passengers to that of ‘dead’ passengers. Whereas other countries have focused on finding the full wreckage of the plane to begin a formal judicial investigation, the French appear willing to start a judicial investigation, based on this piece of wreckage alone.
They will be interviewing the main parties to the search, but also making use of the French Intelligence services (according to http://www.facebook.com/pages/MH370-France)
The fact that multiple independent investigations are being pursued means many different experts and professionals will hold each other accountable in a sort of ‘peer review’ process that will yield well tested results and conclusions.
@Victor
begin quote//
@Oleksandr: The fracture analysis would potentially show different failure mechanisms. For instance, if the flaperon was dragging on or impacted the water, you might see evidence of high bending moments, producing high tensile forces on one surface (leading to elongation and failure) and high compressive forces on another (leading to buckling). Fluttering would produce alternating stresses, which would produce elongation and buckling in a different way.
end quote//
I made similar comments earlier, and Flizter jumper all over me saying that the composition of the flaperon would prohibit such conclusions i.e. that the breakage would be incapable of differentiating between elongation and compression. I did not argue with him. I am not a material scientist.
However, your unchallenged statement reinforces my inclination to change my login to “Dennis no_love W). I guess it matters what group you belong to.
The following post is meant to poke at (albeit with good intentions) our earstwhile host, Jeff Wise.
In the PBS/Nova program “Why Planes Vanish”, Jeff says the following:
“People have flown their planes into the ground to kill themselves. Nobody’s ever done it by flying until it runs out of fuel.”
As it turns out, someone actually did that. In October 1999, Chris Phatswe, a pilot for Air Botswana, stole an ATR-42 aircraft and flew it for 2 hours until it ran out of fuel. He finally plowed it into the remaining ATR-42 aircraft of the airline, effectively crippling it. In the process, Phatswe met his demise. I guess you could say he “went Postal”.
Not quite the situation of MH370, but still, all sorts of stuff happens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Air_Botswana_incident
@littlefoot: “infeasible”. I’ll supplement and enhance the drift study, and republish.
@AM2: I have every respect for Dr. van Sebille – he seems to me to be both expert in and loyal to his profession. If esteemed colleagues in Australia have been given official say on this flaperon’s drift mode, it doesn’t surprise me that he would gracefully defer.
But such deferral in no way validates the wind assumption CSIRO used to sail its virtual flaperon around the SIO significantly faster than the currents in which it was embedded (compare 1.5% dots to 0.0% dots in its latest sensitivity tests). To truly validate it, I think we need empirical tests.
We should drop a tethered drifter, an untethered drifter, and an exact replica of the damaged flaperon into the open sea – in representative current AND winds. We can then calibrate CSIRO’s wind assumption to the downwind drift of each. (Why do I feel like I’m channeling Marcia Clark, here (“If it goes hard leeward, skeptics must reword!”)?)
Re: where/whether to search: I’d recommend halting the search – not only to conduct drift trials in particular (how can we support the current search zone until we do our best to confirm that it is actually a PLAUSIBLE source of the Réunion debris?), but also to force the search leadership to turn out its pockets in general. The members of the JIT should step out of the shadows, and be held to account for every statement and decision they’ve ever made.
At which point, the “investigation” may well pick up a considerable amount of steam.
@Brock
Thanks for your reply. Yes I respect Dr van Sebille too and that’s why I thought his statement rather odd. Yet another oddity in this whole episode, sigh. I’m still (maybe too optimistically) hoping the involvement of France will make a drastic difference but otherwise am sceptical of nearly every aspect. So I haven’t even accepted yet that the flaperon did drift there or if it did drift, there may be some unusual circumstance whereby it could have fallen off the aircraft well before the crash.
true airspeed much higher
Is it? At sealevel?
AM2,
“…but where else to look”?
So far I would risk to suggest 99 to 102E.
@sk999, I take your point in the spirit in which it was intended… indeed, I think it illustrates the very point I was trying to make. Phatswe was a man in distress who carried out a very public, emotional, poorly planned outburst. Running out of gas was not his goal–it’s not clear if he had a cohesive goal at all–but it did bring the escapade to an end. MH370, in contrast, exhibits none of the signs of a public suicide.
@AM2, It’s very interesting to contrast the response to the flaperon discovery of the Malaysian and French governments. Malaysia’s response was, in effect: “Like we told you, the plane crashed in the SIO, everyone’s dead, let’s move on.” France’s response is: “We are going to do everything in our power to find out what happened and who’s responsible.” Night and day.
I think it’s important to recognize and appreciate the difference between these approaches. Many of the voices in the MH370 have sided quite vociferously with the Malaysian point of view, saying, “we know what happened, and if you disagree you are crazy/stupid/technically incompetent.” I personally feel that there are many scenarios that could conceivably fit the data, and it if we really want to solve this mystery we should acknowledge the potential validity of all of them. (While just as importantly not wasting our time on many that do not fit the data, such as Diego Garcia, Maldives, GeoResonance, etc.)
@Jeff, while I agree with most of your comment, I beg to differ in one point:
I think we should keep an open mind for scenarios which don’t fit all the data as well as long as they have some merit in the plausibility department. Georesonace very obviously doesn’t meet that standard.
@Brock – FYI, a sea anchor should not pull a drifter underwater, except perhaps in a case of a high speed current along with winds in the opposite direction. I do not know exactly what their test drifter sea anchors looked like but they they typically resemble a parachute at the end of a long rope. Perhaps the parachute in the photo in David Griffin’s Sept. 4, 2015, paper is a drifter’s drogue? They would catch the sub-surface current and pull the drifter with the current with little wind effects. Without a sea anchor, the drifter would be driven mostly in the direction of the wind and waves.
Gysbreght
Posted September 8, 2015 at 3:52 AM
TAS = CAS ~ IAS at sealevel, but what I was trying to communicate is that the instrument does not display speeds over 500 kts indicated. Thus, the TAS was probably much higher than the instrument reading at impact. IOW, anything over 500 kts (600 or 700 or 1000 kts) will be displayed as 500 kts.
@Lauren H
There are images of drifter sea anchors at
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/dac/gdp_information.php
and links within. The term used for the design is “holey-sock”.
@Gysbreght
Hate to derail the present conversation, but I do want to get an observation out there before I am off for a couple of weeks. Turns out that related to heading errors everyone, you, Victor, and Dr. Cole, was right but me.
With the correct matrix it is very clear that heading errors at a heading near 180 degrees propagate in the E-W direction. That is pretty obvious just thinking about it. What makes the BFO error small near the current search area at the 180 degree heading is the fact that the vector between the aircraft and the satellite has a small E-W component. At other longitudes this would not be the case.
Richard was quite right when he made the observation that errors in one the components of BFO do not cancel as they would if it were an error effecting the all the components of the calculation. I think Victor was intimating the same notion when he attributed the disagreement to semantics. My only contribution here is noticing a mistake I made in the velocity transformation matrix which I will fix when I get back from my trip.
In the meantime, I am hopeful the BEA will publish some forensics on the flaperon. Perhaps they will keep a cloak over that under the pretense that it is evidence in a criminal investigation. I hope not, but one would think that something would have been released by now.
@airlandseaman:
Thanks for that explanation and apologies for missing your point.
Extrapolation of the energy dissipation observed between 8 and 12 minutes after 1st flameout at Mach between 0.5 and 0.6 would result in 700 kt TAS. Since the drag is likely to increase as Mach approaches and possibly exceeds M=1, I would expect the speed at impact to be much less than 700 kt. Do you have no observations of IAS between 0:12 and 0:13 ?
The “Parquet de Paris” is in charge of the criminal investigation conducted in France. The purpose of that investigation is to establish whether a crime has been committed, to identify the suspects, to bring charges against them and to collect evidence in support of those charges. The BEA is not involved in that investigation. They may or may be not consulted or informed by the Parquet, but if there is a report it will come from the judiciary and not from the BEA.
@Richard Cole – Thank you for that link. While my description of how the Holey-Sock looks was way off, it appears my description of its operation was reasonable. It one of their links, a report gave a wind driven speed of 0.7 cm/sec with a 10 m/sec wind while attached to the drogue and 8.6 cm/sec at the same wind speed but after detachment of the drogue.
brock mcewen and AM2 if you were to place two flaperons, duplicated to appropriate specs…in a “to be determined” spot 20 meters apart….in 17 months they wouldn’t be anywhere in the same neighborhood…nowhere, remotely close….heck of a ‘real world’ idea though….maybe 20,000 flaperons might average up the probability of destination occurence…then you’ve got hazard to navigation problems…recovery after 17 months ( useless after that time frame ) basically just floating trash….with GPS tracking devices, maybe a strobe light for collision avoidance, bounty or reward for turning in cloned flaps, etc., etc., etc., etc., maybe just throw 1 million rubber ducks into the ocean somewhere………….( would the cost justify the means….? ? hell yes…)…( put it in the budget…! !)
@George: yes, good point – field trials would need to control for non-linear effects. Perhaps a series of several trials, each of short duration (say, 4 hours), with the three items brought back to a common starting point after each trial. It would only take a couple of weeks to generate several dozen trials, whose results we could average.
@Lauren: thanks for those leeway stats. On the surface (no pun intended), they seem to justify my concern: 0.86% of wind-speed for untethered, and 0.07% for tethered.
This compares to the 1.50% CSIRO uses to argue plausibility of [priority zone to Réunion in 16.7 months].
@ Brock – i dont know…..by my own personal calculations, it would 32,567,432 separate flaperons ( give or take a thousand or two ) to have just two of them, just two, arrive at that final destination….( beach at la reunion, or anywhere, together…) P.S: ( i have entirely too much spare time on my hands….as evident…)
Gysbreght:
All the available observations are in the transcription spreadsheet. If I had the opertunity to repeat the tests, I would use multiple camera angles and control the tests much better. Anyway, the exact number is not all that important. The salient point is that the speed, even before impact, would be over the limit where fluutter (or similar) damage could occur.
@littlefoot & Jeff
I agree with Jeff’s comment. I explored the Maldives scenario with ABC Media Watch via several emails and came to the firm conclusion that MH370 was never there; I don’t think its worth revisiting this. As for DG, I don’t see any evidence at all or plausible motive … it has huge defence capability… so that was never on my “table” of possible scenarios. Terrorist attack aimed for ME is still a possible though.
@Brock & Dennis W
Lets wait for the forensics on the flaperon before pushing for drifting trials. There was a strong hint earlier that the barnacle analysis would reveal something of the flaperon’s journey.
@AM2, what do you mean by ME could’ve been aimed at by terrorists? What’s ME and who could’ve been the terrorists? Do you think it could have been a terror attack and something went wrong?
Hi All,
Sorry to change the subject slightly, but as you propably read in one of my earlier posts, I had an ‘about face’ in my thinking as to this Reunion Flaperon due to the evidentual damage to it.
To explain why, I have written a document that you can access on this link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1sqrehcpjbej2qv/Flaperon%20Damage%20Analysis.docx?dl=0
I think you will find that it helps explain why the French said it was “twisted”, and I hope you will find it enlightening.
Off topic, but BA2276
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/09/british-airways-plane-catches-fire-at-las-vegas-airport
Gavin – in the event of a ditch we get a lot less debris overall and debris of a certain kind as well, and the one bit we have is exactly the sort of item to detach in a ditch. Helps solve a riddle? How lucky are we to have it??
Gavin – in the event of a ditch we get a lot less debris overall and debris of a certain kind as well. The one bit we have is exactly the sort of item to detach in a ditch. Helps solve a riddle? How lucky are we to have it??
VictorI,
Excellent article here as always. It’s hard to tell if it is the media being as farcical as ever or if the French used it as a ploy to delay and get more information out of the Malaysians? I don’t know. It’s just like when the media early on rolled with the story that Zaharie’s wife left him, only to look like idiots later when it was clarified she routinely stayed at another home when he was flying. Yes I agree the journalists should be thoroughly embarrassed, especially as I believe our Jeff has done more gumshoeing than the whole lot of them put together and can run circles around them.
They need to explain how they did their endoscopic procedure into the flaperon and matched one of the three numbers to a serial number, I am taking “numero de serie” to mean serial number when used in a phrase like that. What are the numbers and what was the number that matched, and matched what MAS records or Boeing records of what was delivered to MAS in 2002?
I don’t know what the answer is but I can see Jeff, Chris Cuomo, and Richard Quest really digging ino this on CNN, that would be excellent. Chris does a phenomenal job, he was great at the MH17 site. Why doesn’t CNN have a bi-weekly hour or so on dissecting the facts of MH370, they could have Jeff, David Soucie, Miles O’Brien, Mary Schiavo, etc.
One question I just wanted to ask technically, remember when the ATSB determined that the logs of the unanswered satphone call determined an earlier FMT south? Would that in any way shorten that leg of the flight (all you Bayesian folks, I can only talk Beyer figures all day), and make the point of impact a little further north of the current search area than anticipated?
@littlefoot
I meant Middle East. Maybe a terrorist attack that was foiled. A refuel would have been necessary if fuel loaded at Kuala Lumpur was correct. Implies sat data incorrect. Just speculation, one of many possibilities IMO (that have been discussed here before). Of course I would prefer a much more innocent explanation but if the radar data is to be believed, then someone was determined to fly westward of Malaysia.
I think you should ask yourself whether your test conditions were realistic and if your simulator was representative of the real airplane in this extreme condition.
Firstly, –
Doesn’t that imply that a pilot would normally trim a “bent” airplane, so that it would be in trim at A/P disengagement? Yet you deliberately applied 1 degree of rudder mistrim to an airplane that probably didn’t need any trim at all.
Secondly, I doubt that your simulator operated correctly, because according to the FCOM the Roll Envelope Bank Angle Protection should have prevented the bank angle from exceeding 35° and should have rolled the airplane back to 30°:
Gysbreght:
It is obvious you don’t have the facts straight. Sorry, out of time to explain it.
@airlandseaman
I also have a question I hope you can remember?
How did you set up the Simulator before the test? Did you have the IDG’s (for those that don’t know – Integrated Drive Generator) Drive switches set to “disconnect”, or were they still connected?
I’m curious as to why it lost power… and of course when you said the airplane was all on it’s own, that was on the presumption that there was no pilot still there?
Great video by the way!
@airlandseaman:
Well, that explains it!
Leo,
on contrary, BA2276 might be relevant.
Citation from CNN:
“…pilots pull a “fire handle” under such circumstances. It deploys fire retardant to the specified area, cuts the hydraulics and electrical systems to the engine and shuts off the air system in the cabin. ”
Does this “fire handle” shuts off the air system in the cabin when an aircraft is in the air?
Bloody hell……
@Gysbreght
I don’t think he is ignoring you. I think he has simply gone to bed. If I’m right (I haven’t checked) I think you’ll find he lives in New York and the time he last posted was 12.15 am! I’d imagine he was dead on his feet, so you and I will both have to wait for a few hours.
You, like me, obviously live in a different time zone, and so I’ve just taken a leaf out of Matty’s book…. started to add my location to my name. (Great idea Matty!)
Frustrating living on this side of the Planet as everyone is posting when I’m asleep – and it takes a lot of catching up when I get up in the morning!
@Gysbreght
I don’t think airlandseaman is ignoring you. He lives in Colorado so he will be sound asleep. If his time zone is the same as New York (I haven’t checked) his last post was 12.15 am!
I like Matty – Perth’s idea (great idea Matty!) and so I thought I’d add my location after my name, but the post I just sent using “Gavin – NZ” just disappeared, so I guess the program recognised me as a new poster and sent it off the Jeff for moderation… so if you get that post Jeff, please just delete it?… and maybe register my Name as Gavin – NZ so that I can post under that name? Cheers.
@airlandseaman:
OK, I overlooked the fact that the pilot must move the PFC Disconnect Switch to restore flight control normal mode following reversion to secondary mode. Please ignore my second point.
Apparently the Las Vegas 777 had GE engines not RR.
“A spokesman for Rolls Royce told Reuters news agency the engine was not made by the company, British Airways uses engines made by either Rolls Royce or General Electric, the agency adds.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34193767