Minor MH370 Mysteries, #1: The Case of the Wayward Etihad A330 — UPDATED

571 thoughts on “Minor MH370 Mysteries, #1: The Case of the Wayward Etihad A330 — UPDATED”

1. Paul,

   This had been discussed many times.
   WMKC (Kota Bharu) was not suitable for emergency landing because:

   – Its runway is too short for B777 with 30+ tons of kerosene;
   – Orientation of its runway is not favorable;
   – No emergency service was on standby at that hour.

   In case of a substantially damaged aircraft, a landing attempt could turn into an inferno disaster.

   When you consider WMKK (KLIA), there is a danger of onground collision; orientation of runways is also not favourable.

   In either case the crew could opt for burning/dumping fuel, which explains NW turn at Penang.

2. I know KB not feasible.I was responding to the post above. And I was asking for adequate aerodrome listing from LKP. If it was defined 2 yrs ago, kindly point me to the link.

3. @Oleksandr

   “I strongly disagree with StevanG on the “obvious intention” to fly along FIRs etc: chances are 50/50 in my opinion. This can hardly be called “obvious”.”

   there is the best flight path to get from IGARI to around Indonesia undetected, it’s one in a million and it has been taken by someone very experienced who had very good knowledge about that zone, borders etc.

   you can believe it’s a coincidence all you want but I think that would be clutching at straws

4. The point is that the “equipment failure” scenario makes no sense.

   If the apparent problem was “as simple as just loss of communications” the airplane would not have turned back but would have continued according to the filed flight plan, maintaining the assigned Flight Level and Mach. If there was serious structural or systems damage it could not have continued flying 7 hours after IGARI, and fly past Kota Bharu and Penang without making an attempt to land.

   Incidentally, F.I. estimates the fuel at IGARI as 41,500 kg. Added to the zero fuel weight of 174,000 kg the airplane weight was 215,000 kg and the legally required landing field length at at that weight was 1800 m. The Advisory Normal Configuration Flap 30 Autobrake Max landing distance at ISA+10, no wind was 1220 m and the length of the Kota Bharu runway is 2400 m.

5. OT; scientology devils, enjoy your fear;
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSGou75z4zs&list=PLzrRkSuSpF2NNf-A8BdcA64sQ4sMsD4dJ&index=9

6. @Gysbreght

   Absolutely. Loss of communication or any other mechanical/electrical failure is simply not supported by the equipment redundancies, flight to fuel exhaustion, flight path prior to FMT, or the actions of the PIC. Likewise suicide (and murder by extension) is remote since it could have been done in so many other ways more quickly and conveniently than flying to fuel exhaustion. A diversion for unknown reasons is the only action that withstands even modest scrutiny.

   A diversion to the current search area precludes any conclusion but a water landing under the worst imaginable conditions. How anyone can postulate a path to the current search area or near to it is simply beyond my comprehension. It makes no sense under any conceivable modifying circumstances.

   The IG, DrB, Dr. Cole, and others do not seem the least bit troubled by this monstrous conceptual problem. They have nothing to offer but lame statements to the effect that they have heard all the alternative scenarios, and don’t like any of them (and oh, by the way, stop talking about them because we have heard it all before). Of course, that does not stop them from publishing tweaked SIO scenarios on a regular basis. Never is there any attempt to patch the gaping hole in their proposals.

   All we hear is “we don’t require a motive or causality, therefore we are not going to consider it”. Well it has been my lifelong experience that things happen for a reason.

7. @RetiredF4,

   Since you believe this “makes a big difference”, I invite you to solve for the aircraft location assuming the aircraft was piloted by (a) the assigned flight crew not involved in hijacking, and (b) a “rogue pilot” (who is apparently nameless since none of the passengers had the ability). Kindly tell us how the terminal locations differ.

   You said “the interpretation of the BFO relies heavily on constant speed and altitude profiles with no vertical maneuvering.” In my BFO solution there is vertical maneuvering – three times. I therefore beg to differ.

   I am unsure what you meant by “Further action again does not support the simple failure scenario with a loss of all comms.” What is the “further action”? Let me take a stab at it. If you mean, why would the aircraft fly into the SIO until fuel exhaustion if the only problem were loss of comms? Obviously that would not happen. A landing would certainly be attempted beforehand. But suppose the first problem noticed was just a loss of comms. If I were the pilot, while I am returning to the mainland, I would take a look to see if there might be some way to at least restore voice communications. Maybe that means going into the MEC. I know that the radios and radar gear are mounted in racks in close proximity. If I can only get a radio working, I can eliminate the chance of a collision on approach or on the runway. Time (and Penang) goes by and I think I have a shot at making something work. I turn the power back on to several equipment items (including the SDU) and turn back to Penang. But things don’t go as planned, and I am forced to turn around again in an attempt to reach a closer airfield before my time runs out. The curious part is that the oxygen bottle (which was serviced just before this flight) is located very near the radios/radars in the MEC. Maybe there is a connection, or maybe not.

   What I am suggesting is that we should be open to more than just a single-point failure explanation. Perhaps a cascading sequence of events took place – one near IGARI and one at FMT.

8. @Victor,

   You said “Acoustic pings heard in the SIO near 20S latitude” were false data promoted by the Chinese. I do not agree with that conclusion. I was very active at that stage of the search, modeling the acoustic pinger data. The acoustic pings were heard on at least five occasions by ships, air-dropped sonobuoys deployed from aircraft, surface ships, and probably by submarine. These signals were all real, sometimes strong, but always nonstationary. The likely source was acoustic tags deployed on drifting fishing nets and designed to expedite their retrieval. This explains their ubiquity, occasional loudness at or near the surface, transient nature (as they drifted), and their wrong frequency. In this case, the Chinese were detecting these acoustic tags just like everybody else. Thus I don’t think this is deliberate misinformation by the Chinese, just a demonstration of ineptitude in which there were multi-national participants.

9. @DrB

   you said:

   “Since you believe this “makes a big difference”, I invite you to solve for the aircraft location assuming the aircraft was piloted by (a) the assigned flight crew not involved in hijacking, and (b) a “rogue pilot” (who is apparently nameless since none of the passengers had the ability). Kindly tell us how the terminal locations differ.”

   You are joking, right? I can get just about any terminal location on the 7th arc South of 10S by a careful selection of speeds and headings, and I don’t need altitude changes to do it. Do you honestly believe that everyone else is stupid, and incapable of making these calculations?

   Your scenario contains nothing but a sequence of “supposes”. A much simpler explanation is that the aircraft was taken for purposes unknown. There is absolutely no set of circumstances that would lead a prudent man to conclude that the aircraft arrived at 38S or beyond on the 7th arc.

   If there was an emergency, and the crew was responding to it in a professional manner while following established protocols, there is no way the plane would have ended up in the far SIO. It would never have been flown past Penang.

10. @Bruce Lamon,

    Thank you for your kind words. I am a scientist, and I am trying to be objective. My goal is to be of assistance, if possible, in locating the aircraft. My goal is not to get everyone to agree with me.

    I try to separate my opinions (almost everybody has one) from provable facts. Unfortunately, not everyone writes this way.

    I am also human, and I make mistakes. I also admit them.

11. Just to dot the T’s and cross the I’s, is there any procedure for restarting an engine at altitude that would require a climb? I’m guessing you would not be able to climb to 41 on one engine, but I’d like to rule out the possibility that the pilot climbed to 41k, then put the plane in a dive to restart an engine.

    Can we rule in or out a series of altitude changes designed to disrupt a terrorist event? If so, perhaps we are looking at several of these attempts on the way back to Malaysia, between 17:05 and 18:40, followed by a destructive event around 18:40.

12. @Dr. BobbyUlich
    As you might know, I have no qualification to comment on BFO and BTO, but others have and if I got it not completly wrong than it is their position that it makes a difference wether the aircraft was maneuvering or flying on constant course, altitude and speed until fuel exhaustion.

    But I can comment how an aircrew has to and will respond in emergency situations. Your described scenarios and assumptions how the crew could have behaved “if such and such had happened” is, i beg your pardon for my harsh words, close to fiction. It lacks the technical, procedural,and psychological background on how trained aircrews would behave in such a situation.

    I’m not going into the hamster wheel to explain the details of the multiple comm equipments, others have done that before. Or the reasonability, that an emergency killed all comms and emissions, the crew and the passengers, and then flew on for another six hours on autopilot.

    But assumed that all coms were lost and I as apilot would like to get a call out, I would not handle anything in the EEbay (pilots are not trained to operate anything in there. If they go down there then with clear instructions from ground maintenance. Instead I would just use one of the two available portable emergency radios and contact anybody on the emergency frequency.

13. Procedures for what to do in the event of communications failure are defined in various aviation documents.

    Here’s the one for Malaysia
    aip.dca.gov.my/aip%20pdf/ENR/ENR%201/ENR%201.6/Enr1_6.pdf

    Here’s the one for Vietnam
    beta6.caa.gov.vn/Uploads/files/Tieu%20Chuan ATB/vars2/VARs%20PART%2010.pdf

    There are lots of variants, depending on conditions at the time, but for the conditions pertaining to MH370, the procedures are largely the same in either country – basically, just keep following the flight plan.

14. @RetiredF4,

    Your comment on “two available portable emergency radios” caught my attention. I have not heard this discussed before. Can you please direct me to any documentation on their range and provisions for their carriage aboard B777’s?

15. @SK999

    Excellent post. Nice catch.

16. @DennisW,

    Your third paragraph makes my case about some people being unable to separate opinions from fact.

17. @DrB

    Fighting back are we? Bobby, you need to re-evaluate your position from the get-go. How did you get to your scenario, altruistic as you would have us believe it is.

    The simple truth is you got caught up in the IG rhetoric of “we don’t need a motive”, we can solve this with pure analytical horsepower. For you, it was like tossing a beach ball to Joe DiMaggio. You had all the skill and know how to generate the mother of all spreadsheets.

    Now you find yourself trying to defend (with bizarre conjectures prior to the FMT) using a set of assumptions that is indefensible – fixed AP flight dynamics. It is not working, and you are not fooling anyone with a brain.

    My advice is to give it up. Your SIO hypothesis is simply untenable. You have no plausible causality to support your assumptions.

18. @Susie @Victor sorry for my focus on the Chinese but I lived there too long and saw how they operate. Thanks for the article on the military response games in Thailand 3 weeks before mh370. China might have deliberately taken over the plane electronically to send the west a message. When things got out of their control they flew the plane to the SIO to destroy the evidence. Maybe the other governments got the message. If they could keep everyone looking in the wrong place for several weeks the surface debris would have dispersed until it washed up. Far fetched but a remote hijack explains a lot.

19. @Oleksandr,

    Thank you for your questions and comments. I shall address them one at a time.

    You said “Why would the crew perform 3 turns as per your paper? . . . Why not 5 turns?”

    The answer is simple. The FMT BFO data requires 3 turns for consistency. You don’t need more and you can’t do it with less. Ask Victor.

    You said “You assumed update frequency of 1 second in your paper if my preliminary understanding is correct, whilst it is supposed to be 8 times more frequent for the ground speed.”

    Let me explain the three processes happening here. I understand the navigational data going to the AES is updated frequently (at > 1 Hz) but at different rates. That does not tell us how often the frequency compensation algorithm in the AES is run. In my model I assume that it is run once immediately preceeding each transmission using whatever the latest navigation parameters happen to be. My integrating path computer model has a step size of 1 second, but again that is asynchronous with the AES computation schedule. I also assume that the latency of the navigation data is essentially zero. The largest latency in fact is only about 1/3 second, so the introduced errors are very small. If anyone has access to detailed AES software documentation, I would certainly like to know how often the frequency compensation calculations are actually done. My request to ATSB for this information was met with a response from their lawyer saying I should submit a FOIA request.

    You said “How could they lose 5 independent communication channels without a severe damage?”

    Since these items are located nearby, physical damage to rack wiring or an electrical short in a rack could affect multiple equipment items simultaneously.

    I understand how the electrical power generating systems on this aircraft can automatically switch over. I am not saying there was a problem with any of the generators themselves. I am suggesting there might have been a problem in the electrical power delivered to the comms equipment items. Let’s face it. There only seem to be only two choices. They either lost power or they were manually turned off. Antenna damage does not appear to be a viable alternative. My understanding is that there are not individual circuit breakers for these equipment items in the cockpit, just at the bus level. There are also lower-level circuit breakers in the MEC. I assume there are breakers built into each equipment item, and there may be additional circuit breakers at an intermediate level between the main (left) bus and the equipment items. If anyone has a power diagram showing the comms gear, it would be interesting to see where the mid-level circuit breakers are. That would give some insight into whether there is a single location where a problem could cause loss of power to all the comms gear. It does not necessarily need to be a single circuit breaker (although that would indeed make the case). The physical routing of power wiring might have multiple cables adjacent to one another such that several power lines could be affected simultaneously.

    You said “The smog could not cause the lost (sic) of all the 5 communication channels at a time.”

    I agree. I never said it could. I said toxic fumes could impair the flight crew. If the fumes were generated by an electrical fire or battery fire, the fire could affect onboard systems and the resulting fumes could affect the flight crew.

    You said “–You can’t rely on the accuracy of the last radar contact to deduct a turn near NILAM, or even to use it as a supporting observation.”

    I disagree with your statement, but in any case I don’t use the radar track position to support the fact that a turn occurred within a few minutes after the last radar contact. The proof of the turn is in the subsequent satellite data.

    You said “They had at least 4 minutes of concious state according to your timing – sufficient to make a call via SATCOM. But no, they opted to maneuver, enter waypoints, and climb up. Why would they do it?”

    I don’t know why they did not call then (18:27 to 18:31, other than to say they either chose not to, or didn’t realize they could, or chose to do other things first and then lost the opportunity.

    You said “Therefore, it is obvious the climb would cause re-appearance, or you need respective LOS distance increase to “compensate” increase in altitude. At a glance, the trajectory you suggested does not seem to satisfy absence of re-appearance condition.”

    There are at least three or four potential reasons why the radar track stopped at 18:22, but here you have only addressed one of them. Yes, if the plane were rapidly descending then to a sufficiently low altitude, the radar contact would be lost below the horizon. However, there is also a limit to the maximum detection range for all radar systems, even for targets above the horizon. This limit is set by the radar equation. It is possible the aircraft return signal fell below the receiver detection threshold. Contact would then be lost no matter what the altitude was. The third reason is potential blockage by an intervening landmass or building at that bearing as seen from the radar site. Since we don’t have BFO data at 18:22:12, we can’t know from the radar data alone if the aircraft was descending then or turning to produce a lower radar cross-section or simply reaching the maximum detection range of the radar. My FMT path includes a climb from FL360 to FL410 ending at ~18:27:21, or five minutes after the last radar contact. During that time, the aircraft increased its distance from Butterworth by about 33 NM. That means that all climbs less than about 9,000 feet would continue to be below the horizon if 9M-MRO went below the radar horizon at 18:22 as you have suggested. Since my fitted FMT climb is 5,000 feet, the aircraft would not reappear on the radar. Therefore, as you put it, my climb does “satisfy the absence of re-appearance condition.” In other words, it would not reappear on the radar after the climb.

    You said ”The altitude estimates are as reliable as longitude and latitude. But it is true that altitude is a way less accurate, especially at large distances. So don’t mix reliability and accuracy.”

    You are correct. Regarding the altitude estimates from the radar observations near IGARI, I believe that what is missing is the size of their uncertainty (i.e., the error bars). For that matter, I have never seen error bars presented for the latitudes and longitudes either. You are correct that this is better described as accuracy than reliability. I would guess that the error bars in the range direction might be about 1-2 NM, and the cross-range errors (both horizontally and vertically) would be at least several times larger (since they are angles rather than round-trip time). In other words the error bars for altitude could be up to say 20,000 feet. With such a large uncertainty, differences seen over short time scales are not meaningful (hence I called the altitude data “unreliable”, but inaccurate is a better term to use).

20. @DennisW,

    Thank you for making my point – again.

21. @sk999 – interesting radar map coverage. Shows that mh370 could not have gone undetected unless flying over water under the horizons of several radars.

22. Gysbreght,

    Re: “Incidentally, F.I. estimates the fuel at IGARI as 41,500 kg. Added to the zero fuel weight of 174,000 kg the airplane weight was 215,000 kg and the legally required landing field length at at that weight was 1800 m. The Advisory Normal Configuration Flap 30 Autobrake Max landing distance at ISA+10, no wind was 1220 m and the length of the Kota Bharu runway is 2400 m.”

    That is if they had “breaks”. If they were unable to control an engine like QA32, or if something was wrong with landing gear(s), or if the fuselage/wings suffered of some structural damage, such a landing attempt could be deemed too risky by the pilots. One can imagine, after a preliminary assessment of damages, which btw took them nearly the same time as in the case of QA32, they could realize that they were unable to land safely at WMKC.

23. StevanG,

    Re “there is the best flight path to get from IGARI to around Indonesia undetected, it’s one in a million and it has been taken by someone very experienced who had very good knowledge about that zone, borders etc.”

    Your assessment is absolutely wrong. Please explain how you derived 1:1000000?

    My assessment is nearly 1:2 because apart from a few aspects there double explanations for each observation. Some aspects, however, always conflict with assumptions regardless theory. Your CI theory has a way more coincidences and gaps than many other theories, including technical failure and BFO spoofing.

24. Paul,

    OK, I misunderstood your previous question.

    The alternative aerodrome would likely be either Penang or Langkawi. If I recall correctly, Don mentioned that one them had emergency on standby, but I already forgot which one. I should admit that a formal list was not discussed as far as I know.

    Either way we need to keep in mind that the captain was a very experienced pilot and could opt for some aerodrome based on his own assessment of the situation.

25. SK999 and Gysbreght,

    Hold on a second…………..if it states to just continue on the regular filed flight plan in case of a loss of all communications, how do they (PIC) know the root cause of the loss of communications and if it was wiring related (i.e. smoke present) and serious and the “intended destination airport” on this regular flight plan would not be the best choice nor the closest? Which leads me to believe perhaps they (PIC) had an inkling of what (or yes, who (perps) was causing it?

    In a document I think Lou Villa provided several months ago possibly about radars, in it I could have sworn it stated what airport to go to in case of loss of comms?

26. Dennis,

    You said:

    “I don’t have any BFO discrepancies that I am aware of.”

    Can you please share your latest comparison of BFOs? Perhaps my memory got fuzzy, but I recall you had discrepancy of 10-20 Hz or even more, and explained them by vertical motion.

    You said:
    “I don’t rely on any radar data. In fact, I ignore it. We have been over that before.”

    That is weird, because you ignore different things at different stages – that is what I wrote.

    If you don’t rely on radar data and don’t rely on spreadsheets, how did you derive the location at 19:41? How did you conclude about the turn south at all? I know how StevanG came to this conclusion without need in any data, but you?

    Your recent suggestion that the aircraft flew westward from IGARI is wrong. I pointed this to you already 3 times. But you keep on saying this. Based on what? How do you explain lower than expected ground speed in such a case? According to you they flew close to a Thai military airbase and Thai did not respond. Then why do you keep on blaming Malaysian air defence instead of Thai?

    I already requested you several times: could you please put the whole updated story from ‘a’ to ‘z’ in a consistent manner, so we can discuss it without guessing what was based on what?

27. Regarding these ECON routes. Had MH17 not gone the ECON route over that troubled area they would have been alive today. Cost saving measures don’t always increase the bottom line figures. Had they spent a little more money on fuel and a little longer route, MAS may have only had one tragedy not two. I still think the maintenance logs of 9M-MRO MH370 of what was done, what wasn’t done would be interesting (if they exist remember the avionics shop fire).

    We either have some series of failures or we have Jeff’s scenario played out. The hatch of the EEBay and the hatch of the AES roof unit, it still is intriguing who is seated near each.

28. @Dr.BobbyUlich
    You said: Your comment on “two available portable emergency radios” caught my attention. I have not heard this discussed before. Can you please direct me to any documentation on their range and provisions for their carriage aboard B777’s?

    Ishould have said 2 accessible, one of them portable.
    It is in the FI report section 1.6.6

    Not sure if that is the correct subtype, but you might get an idea what to do with it.
    http://www.elta.fr/uploads/files/704c2ef6167eb87861605ab92ba134493db74539.pdf

29. Trip – China is on a huge roll and ready to play very hard with the Uighurs who will have networked with the Malaysian Islamist networks well and truly by now. A China based, Mandarin speaking career defense/foreign affairs writer I know, said to me that basically are preparing to kill them if things get out of hand. Then we will see some media management. He has also been approached by Japanese Naval brass who are telling him that they need to get it on with China sooner rather than later because another decade and it might have gotten away from them – that is their assessment anyway.

    With the US closing in on oil/gas independence China is now the big energy hungry economy in the world, and they need military muscle to guarantee the transport of oil in the SCS – that they intend to source from Iran!! – and they are going hell for leather to close the technology gap by any way they can. Elements of their rather dodgy stealth fighter were stolen I read. In summary, they are up to all sorts of things atm. I lean towards China also if there was serious skulduggery involved with the disappearance. It’s a country preparing to kick the US out of the Asia-pacific, or try to, and they are absolutely serious about it.

30. @Dr.BobbyUlich

    Detailed information on the ELT System used in 9-MRO

    http://www.elta.fr/uploads/files/4f53d53641fd164b742149114314cb30c980c262.pdf

    Using it would transmit identification and gps location.

31. Bobby,

    I am looking through your section 3.4.3 related to my earlier interpretation of abnormal BFOs. I noticed that you got quite a few things wrong.

    – You wrote that I assumed that “no turn or climb was underway”. The former is true, and hence it provides a possible path forward using the same concept. That is what I am thinking about. But the latter is not true. Perhaps you meant that I assumed constant RoC during 7-8 s?

    – You wrote that we know the aircraft was travelling close to 500 knots after FMT. That is indeed false. We don’t know that.

    – On the basis of the above statement you concluded that the aircraft must have travelled at 500 knots at 18:25 and slightly slower at 00:19. While the former might be true, the latter is false. It would travel ~1.4 times slower than before the flameout of the first engine.

    – You wrote that assuming no vertical acceleration at 18:25 my hypothesis result in 220 knots, thus it is incompatible with the previous known and next assumed speed of 500 knots. That is absolutely WRONG! Firstly you confuse vertical acceleration with RoC. I don’t believe you don’t understand the difference. Secondly, if you assume no heading change and zero RoC, then it is true. But if you assume the turn from NILAM to IDKUT combined with the descent, then no change in the ground speed is required. Have you read the full paper (you cited only a year-old discussion)?

    I have to say that the major idea of my paper was not the absence of compensation term, but that both the abnormal BFOs are caused by a systematic software/hardware behaviour, possibly lack of compensation. That is because the sequences of logs 18:25 and 00:19 are identical, and they have the same features.

    However, I admit, there are two major problems with that approach:
    1. Why would AES proceed without data?
    2. Why would the first BFO value in each the sequence be correct? And if it is also corrupted in a systematic way, then how?

32. Nothing new, but still a good read in the Australian newspaper;

    A few months from now, as the weather in the southern Indian Ocean gets colder and the seas rougher, it will come time for the hunters to head home for good.

    For the last time the mariners of the three Dutch Fugro survey group vessels and the technicians and scientists on board will haul up the two sonar imaging “towfish” and a torpedo-like autonomous machine that can be programmed to search the sea floor on its own.

    And — unless, of course, it’s found in the next few months — that will mark the end of the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, a little more than two years after it went missing, sparking an aviation mystery all the more addictive for its tantalising clues and lack of firm conclusions.

    The Australian, Malaysian and Chinese governments are abso­lute: once the 120,000sq km target search zone has been covered — 85,000sq km have been searched so far — that’s it. The secrets of MH370 and its 239 passengers and crew will never be known.

    Few would question the determination and skill of the searchers in trying to find MH370 in often difficult conditions. There have been setbacks, including medical emergencies, and technical problems, such as when a towfish ­recently crashed into an underwater mud volcano; it was recovered last week using a marine robot that freed it and plucked it from a depth of 2550m.

    What critics of the search strategy say would be the real tragedy, though, is if all this effort and taxpayer money — $60 million from Australia, $80m from Malaysia and $20m from China — were for naught because they were looking in the wrong area.

    Even worse would be if the decision on where to search were based not on the evidence and the likeliest scenario of what happened on board the Boeing 777 but rather on what would cause the least embarrassment to Malaysia.

    In recent weeks, Australian Transport Safety Bureau chief commissioner Martin Dolan and the minister responsible, outgoing Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss, have worked hard to craft a narrative to discourage the public from reaching such a conclusion.

    Their interventions through letters to the editor, “correcting the record” statements on the ATSB website and a radio interview have been mainly aimed at Byron Bailey, a former RAAF fighter pilot and airline captain.

    GRAPHIC: MH370

    In the pages of The Australian, Bailey has raised serious questions about why the ATSB has worked on the assumption the pilots were “unresponsive” at the end of the flight, rather than Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah being at its controls right to the end.

    Many pilots and other aviation experts believe the evidence points to Zaharie having hijacked his own aircraft on the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. Bailey has written that an Australian official told him the FBI had come to this conclusion.

    FBI Supervisory Special Agent Joshua Campbell told The Australian: “We are assisting our Malaysian partners with their investigation, but unfortunately I cannot comment further as this remains an ongoing investigation.”

    Apart from Bailey, British airline captain Simon Hardy and US former airline captain and air crash investigator John Cox have said the rogue pilot theory was the most credible.

    Cox has observed that, after breaking radio contact and turning off the radar transponder, MH370 turned around and flew carefully along the waypoints marking the border of the airspace sectors between Malaysia and Thailand, a possible attempt to avoid detection by letting each country think the aircraft was the responsibility of the other.

    “The most likely theory, in my opinion, is that MH370 was an intentional act by the captain,” Cox has told The Australian.

    Truss and Dolan have a different set of views. On the one hand, they have said they believe the loss of MH370 involved “human intervention”.

    “In regards to the reason that MH370 turned off course, the ATSB has always held the view ­expressed by the Deputy Prime Minister that it is difficult to conceive any scenario that does not include some element of human intervention,” Dolan told The Australian last week.

    On the other hand, they have said that the last stage of the flight involved no human intervention, and based the search plan on a scenario consistent with the ­pilots having fallen unconscious through lack of oxygen, known as hypoxia.

    Last month, on ABC radio, Dolan was asked by reporter Sarah Dingle: “So is it worthwhile, then, changing the search parameters to consider whether the pilot deliberately took MH370 down?”

    He replied: “We have certainly considered that as a possibility; all the evidence we have at the ­moment says that that is very ­unlikely.”

    There are, of course, scenarios whereby Zaharie could have been flying the aircraft in the first phase of the flight and not at the end.

    For example, pilots have the ability to depressurise the aircraft, and Zaharie could have done so once he had set the autopilot on the last leg south, sending himself and those under his charge into unconsciousness and death after the limited supply of emergency oxygen ran out, while maintaining a high altitude.

    Observers think the remarks by Truss and Dolan regarding “human intervention” show they believe the likeliest theory is Zaharie hijacked the aircraft — but won’t spell it out because it would upset the Malaysians.

    While Dolan denies it, critics such as Bailey suspect that, for the same reason, the ATSB has chosen a theory on which to base the search that does not require them to publicly support the rogue pilot scenario.

    There’s a pattern to governments denying their nationals, as commercial airline pilots, deliberately killed their ­passengers.

    In 1997, SilkAir Flight 185 crashed into a mangrove swamp in Indonesia with 104 deaths. Crash investigators determined that the aircraft’s loss was due to a deliberate act by the captain, Tsu Way Ming, who had been ­demoted and disciplined by the airline and had large gambling debts.

    The Indonesian government has not accepted the findings.

    Two years later, EgyptAir Flight 990 went down over the ­Atlantic en route from the US to Cairo, killing 217.

    The US National Transportation Safety Board concluded that, after the captain left the cockpit, first officer Gameel al-Batouti ­deliberately crashed the aircraft into the ocean while repeatedly chanting “I rely on God” in Arabic.

    The Egyptian Air Agency disputed the rogue pilot theory and put the crash down to mechanical failure of the elevator control system, a scenario the NTSB said could not explain the crash.

    If Zaharie did deliberately take the passengers and crew of MH370 to their deaths, it would be particularly awkward for the Malaysian government because it could have been an act of political protest.

    Zaharie was a supporter and distant relative of Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, and is thought to have attended a court hearing the day before the flight when Anwar’s acquittal on sodomy charges was overturned in what is widely seen as a politically motivated trial.

    Under international law, Kuala Lumpur is responsible for the ­investigation because the aircraft was Malaysian-registered.

    The Malaysian agency responsible has released two interim ­reports thus far that state known facts, but it has yet to offer any ­conclusions on what caused the loss of MH370.

    Dolan has repeatedly said it was up to the Malaysians to establish what happened on MH370, and claims the ATSB has come to no such conclusion.

    But a review of the reports published by the ATSB that outline how it came to its search strategy show it did make a call, choosing among alternative scenarios the one that would mean it would not have to say Zaharie hijacked the plane.

    The debate is fundamental to whether the search was destined to be a waste of time and effort from the start. The different scen­arios produce different indicators of where to look.

    Bailey follows through the logic of what Zaharie seemed to be trying to achieve throughout the flight: for MH370 to disappear forever in deep and remote waters, giving no clues of where it would be found.

    A controlled ditching under power, Bailey and Hardy’s theory goes, would see the aircraft land on water mostly in one piece, ­although the flaperons, if lowered, might break off, consistent with one being found washed up on the French Island of La Reunion.

    However, the aircraft might have sustained enough damage to sink it quickly, as happened when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961, out of fuel after being ­hijacked, ditched off the Comoro Islands in 1996.

    There are also examples of ­aircraft ditching on water in one piece, famously including the US Airways Flight 1549, which captain Chesley Burnett “Sully” Sullenberger landed intact on the Hudson River in New York after bird strikes took out the engines.

    By contrast, an uncontrolled crash would leave large amounts of wreckage, baggage and cabin items floating for months, the ­argument goes.

    If Zaharie was at the controls at the end, MH370 would have flown much farther than the ATSB theory of an uncontrolled crash would indicate, whether he did so under power before the engines flamed out or afterwards in a ­controlled glide.

    In its search strategy reports, the ATSB said if, as it chooses to assume, the engines flamed out with the pilots unresponsive then the aircraft would have spiralled down quickly, hitting the ocean most likely within 10 nautical miles — 20 nautical miles, at most — of the flame-out point.

    But a controlled glide with the pilot at the helm could have taken it 100 nautical miles, the report says.

    The search is exploring a band 21 nautical miles to the west and 40 nautical miles to the east of the arc that the aircraft is thought to have travelled based on automatic satel­lite communication data — the seven electronic “handshakes” that tracked its path to the southern Indian Ocean.

    Asked if this meant the area the aircraft would have landed in during a controlled glide was not being searched, an ATSB spokesman said: “Correct.”

    The reports show the ATSB considered three “general classes of accidents” for the all-important “end of flight” sequence.

    First was an “in-flight upset” in which the flight runs normally with regular radio communications until “an unexpected upset event such as a stall due to icing, thunderstorm, system failure etc”.

    That scenario was easy to rule out. The flight had been far from normal. The radar transponder was turned off not long into the flight, radio contact was broken and the aircraft flew back over ­Malaysia before a turn south.

    The second scenario was “a glide event” involving “normal en route manoeuvring of the aircraft”, fuel exhaustion and engine failure and a “pilot controlled glide”.

    The third scenario was that of “an unresponsive crew/hypoxia event” generally categorised by aircraft decompression leading to loss of oxygen and the aircrew passing out, no pilot intervention, and loss of control when the aircraft ran out of fuel, leading to a rapid crash.

    Had it gone with the “pilot-controlled glide” event, the ATSB would have had to say that it thought MH370 was hijacked by Zaharie. Instead, it went with the “unresponsive crew/hypoxia event” — despite clear evidence that the first part of the flight since it turned off course ­involved very deliberate flying.

    Truss and Dolan, having said they believed there was “human intervention” early in the flight, have constructed a narrative to try to justify why the ATSB made the call it did: that there was no human intervention at the end.

    The ATSB has noted that the long final leg charted by the satellite handshakes from off the coast of Malaysia to the southern Indian Ocean showed no pilot “inputs” — that is, no indication a pilot was manually flying the aircraft but, rather, it was on autopilot.

    “The available information about the southerly flight of the aircraft indicates it is less likely that there were human control ­inputs during the latter stages of the aircraft’s flight,” Dolan told The Australian by email.

    “That is the basis for current search priorities.”

    However, as several pilots have pointed out, flying on autopilot is how most of a normal flight is ­always flown; the pilots normally hand fly an aircraft only on takeoff and initial ascent, and on final approach and landing.

    The fact the aircraft was on autopilot for the last leg is no ­indicator on its own that the pilot or pilots were “unresponsive”; ­Zaharie could have been perfectly alive and conscious during this leg, letting the autopilot do the work while waiting until he chose his preferred time for a final ditch under power or controlled glide.

    As Cox told The Australian: “Once the Flight Management Computer (autopilot) was programmed and executed, no further pilot action would have been required … there is no evidence, ­either way, to conclude or exclude pilot action.”

    An extraordinary element in the report is that the ATSB sought to justify excluding the controlled glide theory because, if it were true, it would dictate a bigger search area and, by implication, multiply the cost of the search.

    “Allowing for the fact that a maximum glide distance of 100+ NM would result in an ­impractically large search area, the search team considered that it was reasonable to assume that there were no control inputs following the flame out of the second ­engine,” the report says.

    If MH370 is not found in coming months, relatives of the victims will call for it to be continued.

    So will aviation experts who say it is too risky to leave the riddle unanswered. “Aviation does not do well with mysteries. MH370 ­remains a mystery,” Cox says.

33. Ed – I like this bit:

    FBI Supervisory Special Agent Joshua Campbell told The Australian: “We are assisting our Malaysian partners with their investigation, but unfortunately I cannot comment further as this remains an ongoing investigation.”

    Two years later I wonder what this investigation looks like? Damn odd to me that it hasn’t leaked at all, so whose investigation really? If the passengers were cleared in the first week(yeah right) what the hell are they up to still.

    I just read a very interesting piece on the Obama administration in the UK press – “he doesn’t strategize, he sermonizes” and that’s coming from Jimmy Carter’s former security advisor. Obama has carefully stepped around Putin, would he do the same for China? Is there a dimension there?

34. @DrBobbyUlich
    “The acoustic pings were heard on at least five occasions”

    These are clues. MH370 is between them. The flaperon is a clue, but not from MH370.

    I base it on nothing, but I am serious.
    If MH370 isn’t there, then I have no clue anymore.

35. @Matty
    thanks for any new clues; “leading from behind, and, by example” is not weak at all, it just works; just found also great article “The Consequentialist”

36. I am sure they all know it, but what about people in downtown?
    https://www.rt.com/news/332736-anissa-naouai-grills-zakharova/

37. @Oleksandr

    All of my analytics and musings are summarized here. Yes, spreadsheets and diagrams are included.

    Lots of different topics, but you can scroll down to CI revisited to see the last time I woke on a flight path.

    http://tmex1.blogspot.com

38. @RetiredF4,

    Thank you for providing the link to the ELT document. If I understand it correctly, a pilot could manually turn the beacon on using the cockpit switch panel. Thus he could send his position and indicate distress. I’m not certain of this, but I think he should be able to do this with or without power to the ELT by using its internal batteries. The obvious question is, if there was an equipment malfunction aboard the aircraft, and if normal communications were compromised, why wasn’t the ELT activated?

39. @Trond,

    One additional bit of information is that none of the recorded acoustic pings were at the aircraft beacon frequency. It is not clear if the Chinese recorded any of their detections. No recordings have surfaced from them to my knowledge. Their hand-held detector is rather broadband so it does not strongly discriminate against nearby frequencies.

40. Dennis,

    Thanks, but can you point out the right section? After spending 25 minutes I got lost between Napoleon’s pictures and sections from the future (one is dated Nov 20, 2016)?

    Also, at a glance it is extremely weird that now you use variable speed to fit BFO, from 700 to 900 kph. Sorry, this assumption is not more convincing than Bobby’s 3-turn snake. I found one table where you used constant speed, but it is incomplete. Also, what about 23:15 BFO?

    With regard to the turn south, I still can’t understand where it comes from.

41. @Oleksandr

    I posted a second time after I provided the link, but it never went through for some reason. I provided an email address, so maybe that is why it was rejected.

    In any case I mentioned the turn West at IGARI was based on the simple notion that distance is the product of speed and time. The 18:25 ring is about 465 nautical miles from IGARI, and the plane had about an hour to get there. That would require flying straight West at 465 knots which is near normal cruise speed. Any deviation from a straight West path would require a slightly higher speed, of course.

    I never said anything about Malay or Thai military or about FIR’s. You are confusing me with someone else in that regard.

    Relative to the CI flight path, I have always said I was looking for feasibility. Trying to determine an exact flight path from the ISAT data is a fool’s errand. My path is accurate and feasible. Could it be done in a cleaner fashion using constant speed? Sure. Am I going to do that? No. It serves no useful purpose other than perhaps to make you happy which I don’t care about.

    I did spend some time trying to construct a waypoint path in response to Jeff’s challenge. I was unable to do so, and finally decided I was not going to make Jeff happy either.

    I’ll see if this post goes through before posting an email address. Maybe I have been banned.

42. @Olkesandr

    One more time. I sometimes disappear for a few days, but rest assured I never ignore sincere emails.

    I mentioned in the post that did not go through that comments are turned off in the linked blog since I want to dilute attention focussed here.

    tmex1114@gmail.com

43. @Oleksandr,

    I offer the following responses to your last post:

    You said that with respect to your AES theory involving “abnormal BFOs” : “1. Why would AES proceed without data? 2. Why would the first BFO value in each the sequence be correct? And if it is also corrupted in a systematic way, then how?”

    Good questions. In my theory the NAV data is never missing, and the first BFO is “correct” in the sense that it is calculated in the described fashion and agrees with expectations. The second BFO is unexpected, not because there is no frequency compensation at all, but because it re-uses the same calculated value from the first BFO. My AES theory satisfactorily answers your questions.

    You said ” – You wrote that I assumed that “no turn or climb was underway”. The former is true, and hence it provides a possible path forward using the same concept. That is what I am thinking about. But the latter is not true. Perhaps you meant that I assumed constant RoC during 7-8 s?”

    You are correct. I meant to say that no vertical acceleration was occurring (i.e., that ROC was constant).

    You said “ But if you assume the turn from NILAM to IDKUT combined with the descent, then no change in the ground speed is required. Have you read the full paper (you cited only a year-old discussion)?”

    The cited reference is the only one I have seen. If there is a more recent reference, would you please provide a link.

    You said “– You wrote that we know the aircraft was travelling close to 500 knots after FMT. That is indeed false. We don’t know that.”

    Here is what I wrote: “We know that 9M-MRO was travelling at about 500 knots during the radar track. We also know that it was traveling at close to that speed after the FMT in order the reach the 6th handshake arc in the SIO.” My intent, perhaps not stated explicitly enough, was to say that the average speed from the FMT to the 6th arc was close to 500 knots. I suppose we could argue about what “close” means, but I would say within +/-10% or so. I am not aware of any route that matches all the BTO and BFO data and also has an average speed from 18:40 to 00:11 that is significantly below 450 knots. Can you provide a counter-example?

    You said: “– On the basis of the above statement you concluded that the aircraft must have travelled at 500 knots at 18:25 and slightly slower at 00:19. While the former might be true, the latter is false. It would travel ~1.4 times slower than before the flameout of the first engine.”

    Here is one statement I made: “Since the air speed is not known or fit at 00:19 (after fuel exhaustion), the aircraft location at handshake time #7 is fixed exactly on the 7th arc.” This statement says the air speed is not known at 00:19, and seems clear enough. A second statement I made was “Thus we would expect to see similar speeds near 18:25 and perhaps only slightly slower speeds at 00:19 after fuel exhaustion.” I think this is the one that created your confusion. What I meant here is that in order to reach the 7th arc at 00:19, the average speed from the 6th arc to the 7th arc is not greatly reduced compared to the previous legs. Again, I don’t know what the speed was at exactly 00:19, but the average speed from 00:11 to 00:19 must still have been fairly high to match the BTO data.

44. @RetiredF4 and Dr Bobby. Regarding ELT inside the cabin. When I asked my commercial pilot buddies about this their view was that (since they amount to a Mayday call) they would not be deployed by cabin crew on their own initiative without explicit instruction from captain or copilot. Perhaps the pilots among you can offer your own perspectives?

45. @DrBobbyUlich

    The ping frequencies can’t be tracked to anything. The plane is even too deep to send signals up. Those pings were put there to guide the searchers to the plane.

    Diffuse as I am, I am serious. That place needs to be combed, and checked for even just beneath the sand.

46. @Paul Smithson,

    One ELT can be activated from the cockpit using the Remote Control Switch Panel. At least one of them can also be manually activated using the switch on the unit itself. This unit may be accessible from the cabin.

47. @Trond,

    You are correct that the data recorder beacons, once resting on the sea floor, should not be detectable near the sea surface in water that deep. That is another reason why the detected pings could not have been from the aircraft debris field.

48. Did anyone ever find out more about Oleg Chustrak? I always wonder about the photo of him with the Burj behind him, and if that could have been the target.

49. @All,

    What are the major “holes” in the MH370 causality scenarios? Here is my list:

    SCENARIO #1 – HIJACKING WITH AT LEAST ONE ONBOARD PERPETRATOR

    1. There is no clear motive.

    2. There is no clear benefit.

    3. There is no claim of responsibility.

    4. Why fly over 2/3 airports?

    5. Why wasn’t the ELT manually activated (thank you, RetiredF4, for this one)?

    6. There is no historical precedent for flying out to sea until fuel exhaustion.

    SCENARIO #2 – AIRCRAFT MALFUNCTIONS

    1. Why was there no descent and landing attempt?

    2. There is no historical precedent for total loss of communications without loss of flight controls (to my knowledge).

    3. Why was no satellite phone call or radio call made at ~18:27?

    4. Why wasn’t the ELT manually activated?

    5. There is no historical precedent for flying out to sea until fuel exhaustion (but there are precedents for continued flight with an unresponsive flight crew).

    SUBSET SCENARIO #3 – PILOTED GLIDE AT FUEL EXHAUSTION

    1. There is an inconsistency with the 00:19 BFOs indicating a very rapid descent.

    2. There is a possible inconsistency with the lack of expected SDU transmissions shortly after 00:19 (which is perhaps explainable by APU fuel exhaustion).

    I’ll be surprised if this doesn’t generate some vigorous debate. Counter-examples and suggested additions are welcomed.

50. @DrUlich

    I’ve seen “waterfall” plots of the acoustic pings near S20. I think these signals were real. As I understood they were recorded at great depth.
    Concerning the freq.: according to the original patent the ULB’s use relaxation oscillators. There can be several causes for the frequency to be off.
    I’m still intruiged by these signals and currently looking into max. detection range based on acoustic/noise analysis.

    I just don’t understand why combing less then 1000 km2 when having such a clue, and spend combing 120.000 km2 elsewhere.

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