UPDATED 1/29/16: Here’s an image from Victor Iannello showing how EY440 diverted from its normal flight path about two minutes after takeoff on January 7, when it was still climbing and at an altitude of 5000 feet:
Just to clear up any potential confusion, it seems most likely that this incident does not have anything to do with MH370, but it’s very interesting in its own right. What is the dynamic at work here? Is it part of a trend? If so, does it potentially represent a system-wide vulnerability?
Here’s another image from Victor showing the plane’s continued path over Malay Peninsula. He writes: “I re-examined the FlightAware ADS-B data and noticed that there is a gap starting at BIBAN and ending at Kota Bharu. The FlightRadar24 coverage looks more comprehensive than the FlightAware data, especially in the South China Sea (SCS). I have re-plotted the flight path such that each underlying FlightAware data point is shown, and estimated the path in the SCS from the FlightRadar24 video. The path does indeed seem to follow airways across the SCS. (It would be helpful to have the underlying FR24 data.) The route seems to be ANHOA-L637-BIBAN-L637-BITOD-M765-IGARI-M765-Kota Bharu-B219-Penang-G468-GUNIP-HOLD-Langkawi-B579-Phuket.”
ORIGINAL POST:
The case of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is an incredible strange one, as we all know. But what only the true obsessives know is that orbiting around the giant mystery is an Oort Cloud of lesser enigmas. I’d like to briefly diverge from this blog’s main line of inquiry to cast a glance at some of these issues.
My first installment concerns Etihad Airways Flight 440, which took off on January 7 for Ho Chi Minh City bound for Abu Dhabi. Scheduled to depart at 20:10 UTC, it actually left 13 minutes early. Then, instead of flying along its normal route, to the northwest, it flew almost due south, crossed waypoint IGARI, then flew along the Thai/Malaysia border to the Malacca Straits, where it flew in circles for an hour before finally heading off in the direction of Abu Dhabi. By this point, however, the plane no longer had the fuel to reach Abu Dhabi, so it stopped to refuel in Bombay and reached its destination many hours late, leaving some passengers irate. (Special thanks to reader @Sajid UK for bringing this to our collective attention via the comment section.)
This is all very strange, but what makes it interesting to the MH370 crowd is the fact that a portion of its bizarre route was an exact match with that taken by the Malaysian 777 when it initially took a runner. Had EY440 been taking part in some kind of experiment to recreate MH370’s route, perhaps to get a better understanding of the Inmarsat data or the radar data?
We may never know. Katie Connell, who heads up Etihad’s media relations for North America, was very friendly when I called her and asked her what had happened. She said she’d check with her colleagues at the head office in Abu Dhabi. “It was simply a scheduling decision by ops that was later adjusted,” she wrote me in a text earlier today. I wrote back, asking if her contacts had been able to explain why the plane had flown south instead of northwest, and why it had flown a holding pattern over the Malacca Strait. She answered: “No; I did not get into that level of detail. I go with what my folks said.”
So there you have it. Make of it what you will.
UPDATE: I should have pointed out that this topic has been discussed for quite a while in the comments section of “Free the Flaperon!” and “A Couple of MH370 Things.” One of the ideas mooted there was that the flight crew inadvertently entered the wrong route into the Flight Management System, somehow overlooked the fact that they were heading in the wrong direction (scary!) and then circled for an hour until they could get the proper flight plane figured out, filed and cleared. This would be embarrassing enough to the airline that they would prefer to call it a “scheduling decision that was later adjusted.”
UPDATE #2, 27 Jan 2016: I’ve received a clarification from Etihad via Katie Connell, who writes: “The standard route flown by Flight EY440 from Ho Chi Minh City to Abu Dhabi on January 7, 2016 was automatically amended by the Flight Planning System which calculated and filed an alternative route as the most favorable, due to high winds. Shortly after takeoff, a new route was re-plotted which required Flight EY440 to fly through Thai airspace. While awaiting the overflight clearances the aircraft went into a holding pattern which resulted in the aircraft needing to refuel in Mumbai prior to continuing its journey to Abu Dhabi.”
So it sounds like the problem was not a human mis-entry, but a faulty flight-plan solution by a computer, which then had to be fixed while in transit. Software bug? Non-optimal algorithm? It will be worth keeping an eye out for more incidents like this one. Here’s one that took place in December involving a Malaysia Airlines flight from Auckland to Kuala Lumpur.
UPDATE #3: Victor Iannello has directed my attention to a Wired article suggesting that hackers have disrupted flight plans in the past and could do so again.
Here’s a chart showing the path the flight took as it circled over the Malacca Strait, created by reader Oleksandr:
@victor
We do not know the reason for the 18:25 login, but a power cycle at 00:19 seems very likely.
RetiredF4,
Could the crew consider later activation of ELT if situation at IGARI was deemed to be more or less under control?
Dennis,
“We do not know the reason for the 18:25 login, but a power cycle at 00:19 seems very likely.”
That is a weird comparison. You can swap it, and it still will be true: We do not know the reason for the 00:19 login, but a power cycle at 18:25 seems very likely.
DennisW<
You wrote: "2) the ATSB is in denial relative to the dive at the 7th arc".
4000 fpm is hardly a dive. Normal descent is 2900 fpm at M.84, and 4000+ fpm may have been only briefly achieved.
Dennis,
You considered variable groundspeed to fit BFO – individual speed at each time stamp. How does this affect ground distance? What kind of interpolation of the groundspeed did you apply and why?
@Oleksandr,
The usefulness of our back-and-forth discussions of interpretation of satellite data has run out. Continuation seems to be a waste of time and also a waste of space on Jeff’s blog. Some of your responses indicate a continuing misunderstanding on your part of what I have done and written in spite of several attempts at explanation.
Here are my (final) responses to your last post.
You are incorrect; all points in my FMT climb are below the horizon as seen from Butterworth, so the aircraft would not reappear on radar during or after the climb.
Victor can speak for himself with respect to the necessity for 3 turns to fit the FMT BFOs (an example is his proposed jog to the right of N571).
You are incorrect when you say that frequent updates of the AES frequency compensation calculation “would cause large variation of BFOs”. The opposite is true.
For the last time, I assume the AES generally (with one important exception) calculates the frequency compensation term at whatever time a transmission is to be made (i.e. on demand) using the most recently updated navigation data.
I am done on this subject with you.
@Oleksandr
you said:
“That is a weird comparison. You can swap it, and it still will be true: We do not know the reason for the 00:19 login, but a power cycle at 18:25 seems very likely.”
You can swap it, but it would be silly since the plane ran out fuel around 00:19 which infers a loss of generator power and transition to the RAT. The SDU is designed to a withstand a bus power swap, but not a RAT deployment. An SDU power cycle event at 00:19 is very likely, a power cycling event at 18:25 is not readily explained.
It would be like postulating a scenario where someone gets locked in a bathroom or gets locked out of the cockpit.
@Oleksandr
You made me look at my spreadsheet, and I noticed I left out a second entry for 00:10 using a 3 degree per second turn with 0.25sec update rate. I added it in to fit the narrative. All other values left unchanged.
The ground speed used was either the ground speed at the beginning or end of the interval, whichever was a better fit. I can’t recall which speed was used for which particular segment between rings. Does it matter? You can use whatever speed you want to make the BTO come out. There is nothing to say the speed was fixed on a diverted flight.
@Oleksandr
youmasked ” Could the crew consider later activation of ELT if situation at IGARI was deemed to be more or less under control?”
Yes, but that would Imho be incompatible with an imidiate turn back and deviation from the flightplan.
The combination of both, the loss of all means of comunication and identification, and the imidiate turnback indicates a major emergency with the need for an emergency landing at the next suitable airfield. Activating the ELT as only means available to comunicate position and further routing seems the normal thing to do . Especially during an emergency you want to have priority over other traffic, which is only achievable if ATC knows about your position and about your trouble.
On the other hand, if you want to hide and sneak through without being noticed, you would accept to nearly run into somebody and to violate established procedures.
Bobby,
I said the updates less frequent than 7 seconds may cause large BFOs, when discussing your assumptions. In the last comment you missed the word “less” and on the basis of this you concluded that I am wrong. That does not look good.
Anyway, as you wish, I will not further discuss your model. You asked for my comments, and I gave them to you.
Just interesting discussion on ADIRU failure:
http://www.pprune.org/tech-log/415136-777-adiru-failure.html
There are also discussions of ADIRU initialization procedure, but I did not find if it is possible in the air. What will be assumed initial groundspeed?
@Lauren
I checked it again, and got about the same answer. I have no explanation for the difference other than how the rings are projected onto the earth. I used an online tool which generates rings given a center point and an arc radius. Not sure how Brian generated his rings, but he is a careful guy.
@Oleksandr
“Your assessment is absolutely wrong. Please explain how you derived 1:1000000?”
you are clutching at straws again, it’s a totally random number (and I’m sure you know it) but let’s throw in some more random numbers to get to that number, let’s say 1:100 chance for turn around exactly at handover point, 1:100 chance to fly exactly along thai border and 1:100 chance to fly regular waypoint route through Malacca Strait to imitate regular civilian flight and then right around indonesian airspace.
100x100x100 and you get a million.
@DrBobbyUlich
“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.”
1. we don’t know if he/they succeded, maybe their goal was to land somewhere but they failed for some reason
2. 3. 4. see 1.
5. Who knows what was the situation in the plane after a ditch.
6. That’s true, but see 1. again.
@StevanG,
The idea of my #5 was that someone onboard the aircraft not participating in a hijacking could manually activate the ELT in flight so as to alert authorities of distress. Of course, there might not have been the opportunity.
@DenisW – Using SkyVector.com, a leg from IGARI to SANOB is shown as 473 NM @ 268° – if you agree that SANOB is past the 18:28 arc, MH370 did not need to fly due west (268° being close enough for this measurement) to reach the arc in the the approximately one hour from about 17:23 (time near IGARI but having completed the diversion) to 18:28. IF Penang (WMKP) is inserted to this route, the distance is 506.6 NM – still reachable in this time period.
Dennis,
Re: “You can swap it, but it would be silly since the plane ran out fuel around 00:19 which infers a loss of generator power and transition to the RAT. The SDU is designed to a withstand a bus power swap, but not a RAT deployment.”
RAT does not power SDU. But APU can power it. In case the plane entirely ran out of fuel, SDU would not restart using RAT generator. And behaviour of APU depends on its mode. If APU was “on”, no power interruption would occur, which would be expected in case of piloted gliding. In other words there would not be 00:19 logon. And if APU was off, the next question would be who switched it off after 18:25, or, alternatively, why APU did not power buses prior to 18:25? And why was it still off after the flameout of the first engine if someone was controlling the aircraft?
So, reasons for power up 00:19 are not that simple as some may think.
Dennis, Lauren H,
My estimation of the minimum ground distance from IGARI to 18:27:03 ping ring is 834 km (450 nm). For the normal cruise speed of 905 kph locations from approximately 3N to 9N at this ping ring are achievable. For the maximum speed of 950 kph, the locations from approximately 3N to 10N are within the reach. Furthermore, the distance between IGARI and NILAM is 841 km according to my estimations.
So my question to Dennis is still valid: without radar data, you can assume any location from 2 to 10N at 18:27:03 arc. So how do you derive the location 18:25 and 19:41 without radar data?
@all: One must be careful about what they find on the internet, but at the same time the internet is a powerful research tool. From what I have gathered, the events that occurred after last contact could not have happened by chance, the aircraft was intentionally disappeared.
I admire the time and effort many of you spend combing every detail that has been released publicly, but there are a few things that I would like to clear up before getting carried away with the technicalities.
1. Why south and not north?
2. Many are struggling to find a motive. Please correct me if I am wrong and have missed something, but it seems the 20 odd Freescale Semiconductor employees would be a rather good motive to me. There was a lot of knowledge on board that flight.
On that topic, can anyone shed some light on what has become of the semiconductor patent, with four of five patent holders onboard now missing?
3. Is it even remotely possible to manipulate BFO figures? I find it interesting that the two Ukrainians that are proving very difficult to find any information about, were seated rather close to the satellite data unit, easily accessible from the cabin.
If it is possible, that opens a whole new kettle of ballgame.
Although the circuit breaker for the SDU is on the P110 left power management panel in the MEC, accessible from the cabin, so would it not be easier to pop it out rather than falsify the system?
Or would pulling that breaker also lose inertial reference and AIMS data?
4. The flaperon. There seems to be a lot of “evidence” (this is only from what I have seen here on JW) stacking up against this case. The inconsistencies regarding barnacle growth and drift rates make it seem almost impossible for it to end up where it did, in the state it was in. I also find interesting, it was mentioned somewhere that MRO and MRD came down the assembly line together, and have the same inspector stamps on the flaperons which were installed on these aircraft.
Is there even the slightest possibility that this flaperon on RI was staged using an item from MRD. From what I understand MRD was well guarded after it crashed. It seems rather coincidental, and I don’t think there is such a thing as a coincidence. Also interesting is the damage it sustained. The trailing edge is very damaged, but how did it came off clean from the rear spar of the wing? There is some pretty big gear on the leading edge hinge and actuator points.
5. What happens to SDU status when aircraft power is switched from generators to APU or ground power?
I am assuming the interruption is minor enough for the SDU to continue to function normally (logged on) during the switch. If this is not the case, then there is a lot more to look at.
I apologise for my ignorance, but the only way to clear this in my own head is to ask for the help of others. I am still not sure what what to make of this whole case, other than that it appears to be intentional. I appreciate any comments/input.
Dennis,
One more thing in addition to the previous two comments.
You said “Does it matter? You can use whatever speed you want to make the BTO come out.”
Of course it does matter. 700 or 900 kph make 200 km distance difference over 1 hour time interval. You fit BFO by adjusting speed; respectively ground distance also changes. You fit ground distance, but adjusting speed, and then BFO changes.
You may argue that instantaneous speed is not important, but the average over a segment. In such a case you need to make an assumption, how the speed changed. If it was a rapid change, why would PIC did change it several times? If it was a gradual change, then how would AP be programmed? In either way, what is a reason to change ground speed?
“In such a case you need to make an assumption, how the speed changed. ”
by increasing or decreasing throttle? Come on we really can’t know what exactly happened on the plane, but some shenanigans sure were taking part.
Obviously a striking coincidence, yet isn’t the air route B219 along
BITOD-M765-IGARI-M765-Kota Bharu-B219-Penang
a major flight corridor, which MH370 followed, precisely because so many other aircraft use that path, for a vast variety of reasons ?