Can Ocean Conditions Explain the Lack of Biofouling on MH370 Debris?

RG Gyre

Almost immediately upon Blaine Alan Gibson’s discovery of the “No Step” debris fragment in Mozambique, questions were raised about the relative scarcity of marine life growing on it. These questions were redoubled after two more finds came to light, one from South Africa and the other from Mozambique, which both looked surprisingly pristine for objects that had been in the water for two years. I explored the issue in a post on this site entitled “Bioforensic Analysis of Suspected MH370 Debris.”

This weekend IG member Richard Godfrey addressed the question in a post on Duncan Steel’s website. “One possible explanation for this obvious difference between the flaperon and the other items,” he wrote, “might be linked to the differing routes taken by the floating debris.”

As a point of reference, I’ve reproduced the current chart from that post (above). Though in reality the currents are not nearly as deterministic as depicted–there is a randomness to the motion of floating objects that causes them to spread out, like a drop of ink in a bucket of water–it does accurately portray the overall movement of things. The black bar represents the area where Godfrey thinks the plane most likely impacted the water, northeast of the current seabed search zone. He points out that to get to the locations where they were found on the coast of Africa, the pieces would have to have either passed around the northern end or the southern end of  Madagascar.

In the image below I’ve sketched out what these paths might look like, more or less. The pink oval represents the central gyre seen in the current map above. The yellow line is a hypothetical path proposed by Godfrey that the flaperon might have taken on route to Réunion. The orange line is a hypothetical path that the capsized boat which washed up on Mayotte may have taken during its eight-month drift from northwestern Australia in 2013-2014. I suggest this is a plausible example of a “north route.” The purple line is an even more hypothetical proposal for a “south route” that I just sketched out freehand after watching some drift simulations.

North & South Routes

In the first part of his post, Godfrey tackles the question of whether the African debris might have traveled through water too cold to allow the growth of Lepas anatifera, the species of goose barnacle found on the Réunion flaperon:

If floating debris took a path passing slightly further south of Madagascar then it could remain in colder waters (especially between July and October) below 30S, under which circumstance barnacle attachment and growth is contra-indicated. Thus it might be that the three items found on the coast of Africa reached their destinations via such more-southerly routes… The Paindane item (‘676EB’) discovered at around 24S may well show some evidence of marine life, even though it most probably arrived via the southern route past Madagascar, mainly occupying cooler waters… The Mossel Bay find (‘Rolls Royce’) might not be expected to show evidence of marine life because it was discovered at around 34S and may well have spent most of its ocean transport time in the cooler waters below 30S.

To evaluate this idea, I consulted the newly published paper “Endorsing Darwin – Global biogeography of the epipelagic goose barnacles Lepas spp. (Cirripedia, Lepadomorpha) proves cryptic speciation” by Philipp H. Schiffer and Hans-Georg Herbig of Cologne University in Germany (preprint available here). According to this source, Lepas anatifera can be found in waters where the temperature is greater than 15 degrees Celsius. South of this line a sister species, Lepas australis, is found:

anatifera v australis distribution

To get a sense of where this transition zone occurs, I traced it out on Google Earth and superimposed a surface-temperature chart lifted from Godfrey’s post along with the previously described drift routes.

The southern boundary of anatifera’s range is the red line that passes through the seabed search rectangle:

SIO temp w routes

As is quite readily apparent, all the routes lie entirely within anatifera’s range. Note also that the southern boundary lies well south of the gyre, meaning that anything that drifts beyond it is going to be swept eastward. It’s entirely possible that a piece of debris might have neared Africa and then been swept south into cold water that killed the anatifera, but after that the piece would have been carried back towards Australia. In order to move back west it would have to have first drifted north back into anatifera habitat, where it would have had approximately a year to get re-colonized. Remember, Lepas reach sexual maturity in 60 days and achieve full size in six months to one year. So these pieces should have been carrying a load of biofouling similar to the Réunion flaperons even if their initial population was killed off by the cold.

Godfrey also raises another possibility: that the African pieces are clean because they passed through ocean regions too low in nutrients to permit the growth of marine organisms. To check this idea, I consulted with a NASA website that archives world-wide chlorophyll concentrations, which can be read as a proxy for ecosystem nutrient level. Here I’ve overlayed the same set of drift routes over a nutrient map for March 2014, when the water is near its warmest:

Mar nutrient map

And here are the nutrient levels in September, when the water is near its coldest:

Sept nutrient map

Broadly speaking, there is an area of relatively low nutrient levels in the middle of the SIO that grows and shrinks with the seasons, being biggest when the water is warmer. In the warmer latitudes transient high-nutrient patches can be  found, but they are transient in time and space. The southern end of anatifera’s range experiences consistently higher levels of nutrients, as does the ocean between Madagascar and the African mainland.

Godfrey writes:

Although it appears likely that the floating debris from MH370 was carried westwards towards Africa by the Indian Ocean South Equatorial Current through warm waters (i.e. where barnacle attachment and growth is feasible), these waters have relatively low concentrations of chlorophyll in the maps above, and therefore limited amounts of phytoplankton, and this militates against substantial barnacle growth.

The problem with this analysis is that the piece of debris which spent the greatest amount of time in the center of the Indian Ocean, with its low nutrient levels, is the flaperon, which has the greatest accumulation of Lepas, including some which have reached full size. The clean pieces, by contrast, have spent considerable time in the nutrient-rich waters near Madagascar.

Finally, I’d like to address an addendum to Godfrey’s piece by Don Thompson, who writes:

An alternative reason for the Réunion and Rodrigues items being barnacle-encrusted but not the other three might be as follows. The lepas (goose barnacle) colonisation may be a feature of proximity to coastlines inhabited by lepas colonies. Therefore, debris ‘dropped’ into a mid-ocean region (i.e. the crash site) might be expected to be ‘clean’ of lepas barnacles until free-swimming barnacle nauplii, released from reproducing coastal colonies, are encountered.

Again, Thompson has the situation reversed. Lepas are pelagic creatures which are adapted to rafting on the open ocean. Buoys placed far out to sea become heavily settled by them.

UPDATE 4-7-16: There seems to be some confusion about the lifestyle of the Lepas. Unlike some other genera of goose barnacle which can be found living in intertidal zones of the seashore (such as Pollicipes, a delicacy in Spain), those of the genus Lepas are obligate rafters, highly adapted to life floating free in the open ocean. Here’s an excerpt from Barnacles: Structure, function, development and evolution:

Lepas citation

 

429 thoughts on “Can Ocean Conditions Explain the Lack of Biofouling on MH370 Debris?”

  1. @MH

    No lagoons in my path models.

    I am not at all surprised by the flow of events. They simply support my long held position – that is the plane terminated well to the North of the current search area. That conclusion is supported by the ISAT data, the debris recovered thus far, and plausibility constraints. While I have taken a CI “fly-by” off of my list, a flight path in that general direction is still the best bet, IMO.

  2. @ Dennis: You’ll like this one:

    According to the testimony of 6 Swiss Citizens making a cruise between Perth and Singapore via Jakarta, the following evidences were spotted on March 12 while approaching the Sunda Strait:
    1430LT – latitude 6°, longitude 105°, speed 17,7 knots:
    life jacket, food trays, papers, pieces of polystyrene, wallets,
    1500LT:
    a huge white piece of 6 meters long to 2,5 meters wide with other debris,”

    http://www.baaa-acro.com/2014/archives/mas-777-missing-over-the-gulf-of-thailand-with-239-people-on-board/

    Actually not far from the 7th arc, assuming a westerly current flow…

  3. @Sara, There’s no word limit that I’m aware of but if you try to include more than one URL I have to approve it by hand, which can take a while as I don’t continuously monitor the site.

  4. I find the arguments being put forth falls into two broad categories, with the odd outliers like Jeff’s, mine and Trond’s being the odd exceptions.

    Category A consist of those who vouch for active piloting until FMT, before auto piloting took over until terminus at SIO. This cohort insists that there was an emergency aboard that triggered the whole tragedy. Such assumptions range from electrical fires to malfunctioning equipment.

    Category B consist those who claim that this was an active piloting from start till terminus at SIO . Unlike A, this group pins the blame on the pilot with either suicide or murder – suicide prominent motives

    Let’s examine both categories dispassionately by posing the respective groupies some questions :

    Category A

    1. If an active pilot was present until FMT, why didn’t he flag other crafts via visual contact in an area teeming with aircraft. After all he is vastly experienced and could have elicited attention by flying oddly, tailing close etc etc

    If an active pilot experiencing difficulties was indeed in command, how come he avoided all airports straddling his pathway from KT, Kb and Kuantan to Langkawi

    If the aircraft was afire, belching smoke what not, how come no other pilot flying in the vicinity reported spotting it while an emotionally distraught woman contemplating her personal predicament could spot it from a yacht deck roughly 35k below the flight path!! ( not that I take this claim seriously)

    For category B, the flooring Qs would suffice for now:

    Why would a suicidal pilot off and on his transponder at precisely the weirdest moments. Why would a suicidal guy bother telegraphing his whereabouts with the log on or even his hijack of the craft for that matter.

    Additionally even if he was motivated by politics, I am sure he would be aware of the wider perception of his act in Muslim Malaysia and the repercussions that would wreck on his party. Whichever way one looks at it, category B’s motive would still be designated a suicide by Muslims and this will evoke automatic ostracisation . Imagine being rightly tarred a murderer as well. What benefit would all that do to his party’s cause? I am sure a smart man like him would have assessed the post-act scenario pretty well beforehand.

    So in a nutshell, the more one analyses the standpoints of A and B, the more absurd and unconvincing they appear. Finally I would disagree with the attestation that opinions being peddled as facts emanates from one party only. Rather I see it as a question of nuance in that one side is more subtle and cunning in spinning facts from conjecture while the other is more overt and abrasive in doing so. And off course in this exercise of the pot calling the kettle black, the less appealing side will stand out like s sore thumb.

    Finally a perplexing observation springs to mind when one reads the exchanges going on here. How come almost everyone takes at face value the rants of a emotionally distraught woman who claims she saw a plane on fire while dismissively brushing aside the observations of a kiwi guy out for a smoke on the deck of an oil rig? Gender discrimination and confirmation bias at work, I wonder….

  5. @Wazir – You said “Why would a suicidal pilot off and on his transponder at precisely the weirdest moments.” The Transponder was turned off around 17:20 and was never turned on again. If it had been turned on, we would know exactly where MH370 was all the time the Transponder was on.

    My gut feeling is Kate Tee saw MH370 but the problem is the timing is off. Her GPS track crosses many of the proposed MH370 tracks but not when she was close enough to see the a/c.

  6. @Wazir Roslan and @Lauren H – miss Lauren beat me to the punch on two of three questions…Kate Tee saw 4 a/c that late night …1 was the low slow and all aglow…3 others at altitude ( ? FL 350 )2 were northerly bound, and one was heading south..her curiosity was peaked by the south bound bus…” wonder where they’re going ” now, i was very ” emotionally distraught ” when my New York Mets lost….my beloved Dolphins didn”t boogie last year….but…I did not cease to function as a human being…and i’ve gotta cut miss Kate some slack….read and re-read her many early interviews, fresh and sincere, her tone seemed to change a few months later, when who, god only knows, was helping her ” orchestrate ” her views. now as far as the oil rigger, he was some 350nm away…you’re in Houston and a plane is landing in San Antonio ( or at 35,000′ )that’s 30 horizons….with the Hubble you couldn’t see it….read those facts with a little more care. G.

  7. @ Dr.Bobby – i know its only 200 miles between Houston and you, but everything is bigger in TEXAS….G.C.

  8. It seems the debris found so far can’t be used with the ocean current models to confirm or disprove any IO crash location. I am closer in feeling it didn’t crash in the IO.

  9. @Dennis,

    “My own analytics require a late FMT to support more Northern routes. I have the plane at around 8N at 19:40.”

    In order to start a track at 8N and 19:40 you somehow have to account for the time and distance prior to that. When analysing the Inmarsat data there is no indication that the track prior to 19:40 was other than straight from at least 19:00, and probably before that. So how did you get to 8N?

    Also, how do you account for the speed variations [and maybe heading changes too] to hit each of the ping rings after 19:40.

  10. @Brian

    My assumption is a loiter NW of Bandeh Aceh, which I believe was the first on a list of preferred landing zones. When that did not work out the low and slow flight down the coast of Sumatra was undertaken with Cocos, CI, and Bandung on the list in that order.

    Yes, speed and heading changes are required, but nothing too severe.

    I am using a variation of the Exner “that’s the way pilots like to fly airplanes theme” i.e. pilots prefer to land on runways rather than in the water.

  11. Lauren,

    “My gut feeling is Kate Tee saw MH370 but the problem is the timing is off. Her GPS track crosses many of the proposed MH370 tracks but not when she was close enough to see the a/c.”

    Timing was just perfect for the section of the path from 19:41 I proposed earlier. Altitude was also matching. But heading was a problem. My recents tests show that FPA+ATT gives similar results as CTS model, but this does not help to solve heading problem either. Perhaps MH370 entered holding pattern somewhere near NILAM.

  12. George Connelly,

    “…read and re-read her many early interviews, fresh and sincere, her tone seemed to change a few months later, when who, god only knows, was helping her ” orchestrate ” her views.”

    We know who was helping her to orchestrate her views, don’t we?

  13. Dennis: “I am using a variation of the Exner “that’s the way pilots like to fly airplanes theme” i.e. pilots prefer to land on runways rather than in the water.”

    What? Not my words or theme. Never said that. Where did you get that idea?

  14. Dennis: What I have said and believe is that pilots always use the autopilot to fly the airplane under normal conditions, especially at high altitudes.

  15. @ALSM

    I know, Mike. I too believe the autopilot was used, but it can be used in other than a constant speed and heading mode. It would make little sense for a pilot to be actively controlling the aircraft, I agree.

  16. @Brian Anderson
    “When analysing the Inmarsat data there is no indication that the track prior to 19:40 was other than straight from at least 19:00, and probably before that.”

    I really have difficulty to understand this statement. What ISat data was there between 1841 and 1940 from which you can conclude this?

  17. @DennisW, No, the autopilot cannot be used in other than a constant speed mode. (to be clear, any given ECON setting will result in changes in speed, but nothing like what you’d need to make your curving, slow routes work)

  18. @Oleksandr – The Malaysian government?

    I want to come out with a point of view, and as I’ve had a few drinks i’m gonna do it!

    It is about a lot of the evidence pointing to Z, but a lot of people, especially his family want to paint him as a saint. He was the one with the opportunity, the one with a political grudge, and the one with marital problems…before it was announced that he had a perfect marriage.

    It just makes me think of how, many years ago, my elder brother would go out of his way to antagonise all the other family members, and it would make his day if he had upset someone [although i’m sure he would have matured into a nice adult]. Anyway, the point I am getting to, is that the day he tragically died in a road accident, age 21. In the eyes of the family,he became almost saint-like, a martyr. That’s why I don’t trust the comments from Z’s family, who even if his marriage was in trouble, would go out of their way to defend him, and wouldn’t want any stigma, or blood on their hands. They make him out to be the perfect father, but who in this life is perfect. Not me, nor most people I know.

  19. @ALSM, Brian Anderson

    I agree about the use of autopilot, but settings can be changed of course. So I really don’t see the problem in (a few) changes in heading and/or speed. It happened before 1840, so why not after?

  20. @jeffwise

    Some of the calculation procedures (including mine) can produce curved paths. However because of the few pings that we have we don’t know if the curvature is real or an artefact from the calculation procedure followed (smooth interpolation of BTO/BFO data in my case). So a sequence of straight segments may turn out as a curved path in the calculations.

  21. @Cheryl: outstanding.

    @ALSM: you wrote: “the August 2015 Maldives debris was carefully checked out by authorities at thew time and it was determined that the large piece made from honeycomb was not from MH370, or any other Boeing aircraft. It had certain markings and lettering that allowed investigators to rule it out.”

    To which piece:

    1) Large grey/white object against backdrop of blue & white beach towel (~4 photo angles)
    2) Small brown/black object held in a hand (~2 photo angles)
    3) Other (please specify)

    …and to which authorities:

    A) Malaysian
    B) Australian
    C) Other (please specify)

    …do you refer? I’d like to track down the official statement ruling out Item 2 – and the name of the person who issued it.

    Because that’s the piece whose honeycomb structure, colour, and depth looks very similar to that of the Rodrigues debris.

    And because that piece never really got a chance at full public scrutiny – what with the flaperon drowning out all other MH370-related breaking news at the time…

  22. @Niels, As the DSTG paper spells out, while it’s possible to draw a path that matches the BTO values by linking together multiple straight-line paths that approximate a curve, it is incredibly unlikely that such a combination would just happen to match the ping-ring distances that were obtained from the Inmarsat data. Remember, only an incredibly sophisticated hijacker–one with state-level resources–would have been in a position to even know about ping rings, and even then they wouldn’t know when these ping rings would be generated, since they were triggered by incoming calls.

    This is a widely misunderstood point, but an important one: it is practically impossible for the plane to have followed a curved path after disappearing from radar, in just the same sense that it is practically impossible for a person to walk up to a combination lock, twist the dial, and unlock it without knowing the combination.

    What this means is that if the plane went into the SIO, it must have flown over the designated search area and then beyond it. People like Richard Godfrey or Dennis W who think that the plane took a curving path further to the north have failed to understand the DSTG’s work.

  23. @jeffwise:

    “@DennisW, No, the autopilot cannot be used in other than a constant speed mode. (to be clear, any given ECON setting will result in changes in speed, but nothing like what you’d need to make your curving, slow routes work)”

    As I understand it, once in cruise (or above c. 400ft on takeoff) the autopilot will fly the route programmed into the FMC, providing that route has been activated and the MCP altitude selector has been set (manually only?) to/below/above the lowest/highest point of that route.

    So, in theory, if there were a set of legs / waypoints programmed into the FMC (either geographical, or custom: lat/long pairs) with speeds and altitudes associated to each waypoint, the aircraft could have flown any route (speed/altitude/direction) from top of climb. Including (possibly?) descending to c. 150ft and the corresponding lowest safe speed for the remaining weight at the penultimate waypoint.

    If the perp(s) also had an idea of the prevailing wind in the area of the last waypoint, they might even think it neat to align the last two waypoints to be parallel to the swell.

    In that scanario, neither a pilot nor such a big splash from altitude needed when fuel runs out?

    Just a thought.

  24. @Jeff

    The autopilot settings can be changed “on the fly” to anything you want. I did not mean to imply that the autopilot was left alone from the FMT to fuel exhaustion. All you have to do is reach up and spin a few knobs. It does not require you to grab the yoke and “fly” the aircraft. You know full well that my flight path includes heading and speed changes both of which can be easily input by changing AP settings.

  25. @jeffwise

    Jeff, I’m not sure if I get all that you write. IMO there is not much “hocus pocus” needed to fly two or three constant track segments, end up far north, and produce the BTO/BFO data that we have in hand.
    Of course there is one big coincidence then: the same data would have been produced by a straight track at normal cruising speed (ending say S33/34)

  26. @all

    My strong conviction is that the perpetrator(s) had absolutely no idea that the AES continued to respond to the satellite. I regard it as the only “happy accident” in this whole incident.

    The fact that modeled flight paths usually have speed and heading changes (if the modeler choses speed and heading changes) at the ping rings is a simple artifact of how the analytics are actually performed. It would be quite simple to go back and create a smooth equivalent curve with changes at other times. It is simply a mathematical convenience to implement them at the ping rings since you are sitting there anyway with your Matlab program (or whatever you might be using). It never occurred to me that people would fixate on this artifact of the analytics. It truly does fall into the “don’t care” category.

  27. Surfboards fragments in the Maldives – I’m not quite in a position to say total rubbish but I’m only just stopping short. I’ve owned many and honeycomb is a very unusual material. A board may break clean in half in extreme conditions but not disintegrate so someone would need to degrade it further then discard it. If it had “STATIC” written on it with a bland font then almost certainly wasn’t a board. Yachts I’m not qualified but it’s still unusual. Planes common.

    In the bin it goes, unless it got the forensic going over and I completely missed it.

  28. @Niels,

    I agree, there is no Inmarsat data between 18:40 and 19:40. On the other hand it is possible to determine the line-of-sight distance from the satellite at each ping time, and then test some relationships. A 3rd order polynomial has a very close fit to all points from 19:41, and it would seem, to possible times before that, but the point at 18:41 does not fit precisely. That suggests to me that the track, from say 19:00 at least was a continuous smooth function with no significant changes in direction and speed.

    It’s from that polynomial that one can derive the time of closest approach to the satellite too, at about 19:52.

  29. @Lauren

    If what you say regarding Kate’s observation holds,she must have been an incredibly lucky woman. Switched on flightradar and flight aware at around the time the transponder was switched on and watched the screen for two hours or so. Guess what? the area was teeming with aircraft as it was three years ago. Guess Kate must have incredible eyesight to have spotted some object aglow from 35k below while grizzled vet pilots or sharp eyed young ones missed the whole show from way higher up and closer by while an active pilot didn’t leverage on his reservoir of flight hours to signal distress.

    @George Connelly
    “cut her some slack” of course some of us will have to lest our pet theory goes down the drain. And yes, we must not cut the same slack for the Kiwi cos he shouldn’t have seen what he did and put it down in writing too,for after all,any plane would maintain its course even if a projectile explodes close by.

    The way I see it ,as I guess some others do ,is that for any assumption relating to the BFOs to hold true, you need to rewire that assumption’s configuration beyond breaking point or as they would say in flight parlance, push the craft to beyond the limits of its flight envelope, in order to preserve a cherished illusion garbed as fact.

    An aside – No fan of Z but I seriously doubt the Malaysian government would be interested in protecting his reputation for his family’s sake or for that matter any family’s especially when the nations reputation is at stake.

  30. @Matty

    While I am not a surfer myself, I do know that honeycomb based surfboards are very prevalent in Cali. Can’t speak to the ROW (rest of the world).

    I do agree that it seems unlikely that one would turn up in the Maldives, or even Australia for that matter.

  31. @Wazir – This is the second time you say that the transponder was turned on. It wasn’t. The transponder was on at takeoff and shut off around 17:20. It was never turned on again.

    Are you thinking about the AES that re-booted around 18:25?

  32. @ Matty re surfboard fragments. I never believed it was surfboard, not after I saw the red lettering IC on it. As mentioned by Brock awhile back the wording could come from pitot-staTIC warning on Boeings.

    There are certain people who jump to conclusions and try to rule out things and spread disinfo on twitter, it was brought up today just how that happens, very interesting posts today. A certain someone said that the debris was sent to Malaysia and determined not to be from the plane…but ahem….it was said to day that that certain debris from the Gili Lankanfushi resort never left the island, instead it was destroyed!! WTH this just ticks me off when we have so many ready to spread disinfo and people just gulp it up.
    That’s my rant about that debris, now all we have are pictures and hopefully those pictures will be analyzed by investigators because I do believe it was NOT a surfboard either like some would like us to believe.
    The internet has become like a free-for-all never-ending trail of lies and deceipt. Freedom of speech is good, but no fact checking is done, anything goes these days.

  33. @Lauren

    While I resonate with the question you posed, I am more annoyed by Wazir’s use of the term “pet theory”. When someone invokes this description I immediately think that they have nothing worthwhile to say. Just because someone has a theory it is immediately categorized as a “pet theory”, and discarded on that basis. Basically Wazir has nothing useful to say.

  34. When the search ends in June the uncontrolled flight theory can go into the trash bin.

  35. @ir1907

    That is a cruel. Think of all the DSTG’ers, and the little DSST’ers (not to mention the mrs. DSTG’ers) who will not be getting Springer royalties.

  36. @lauren
    I said “around the time the transponder was turned on” meaning while it was still on until 1720.

    You were right, the second reboot purportedly at SIO refers to AES not the transponder. My mistake on that one

  37. The debris in the maldives was destroyed at Vabbinfaru. It was not a surfboard, but all we have left is pictures to sort that out and compare to the other debris found in mozambique and Mauritis. Hopefully it can be determined from pics to be from a plane.

  38. Guess its not my day to type, so I should stop now. The debris was found on Vabbinfaru but destroyed somewhere else. The point is that I never thought it was a surfboard, it seemed thicker than any surfboard I’ve ever used. But since it was destroyed it can’t be examined again, we only have the pictures to go by now. I hope its not just dismissed again.

  39. Thanks to Julie @nihonmama for posting this info today on Twitter about the Maldives debris that was dismissed and sorry I couldn’t get it right typing it out. But she did all the research and deserves the credit for pointing all of this out.

    My mistake, some days its better to get some sleep instead of pounding the keyboard all night.

  40. I can update the forum on the Vabbinfaru, Maldives debris – and hopefully bring a little clarity to what has been a long and (deliberately?) confusing day:

    Key point: there were TWO pieces of interest found last May in Vabbinfaru, Maldives. To keep them straight, let’s name them:

    “BIG V”: grey/white panel, roughly half the size of a beach towel. Need to reconcile Mike Exner’s claim that it has been “ruled out” by authorities to that of retired Boeing engineer Ken Goodwin, who today tweeted that it looked to him like a “trailing edge flap”. Latest reporting has it in a Maldives garbage dump – never once physically examined by authorities. MUCH more famous of the two.

    “LITTLE V”: brown/black honeycomb chunk, 5-7 inches long. Need to establish significance of its resemblance to honeycomb structure/colour of recently discovered Rodrigues piece. Latest reporting has it in Malaysian custody. Pictured from two different angles in the two insets of the picture heading the thread immediately below this one (for comparison to Rodrigues = underlay).

    I am not claiming that either Ken Goodwin’s assessment of BIG V or the obvious similarities LITTLE V shares with the Rodrigues debris proves anything. At all. All I am saying is that we now have TWO pieces found on a Maldives beach 14.75 months after MH370 took off, both of which seem to be promising leads.

    I feel we need to engage the press on LITTLE V in particular, because we have no official ruling on this piece specifically. The Rodrigues honeycomb structure alone cries out for an official response.

    Almost everyone by now will have seen BIG V – and I only get one link per post – so here’s the high-rez original image of “LITTLE V” (from two different angles):

    https://www.facebook.com/modrindo/posts/10152875175911503

    Final thought: both Mike’s and Ken’s news on “BIG V” broke just today – the day after I raised the question about LITTLE V, in light of the Rodrigues find. What are the odds?

  41. Many Thanks Brock for clarifying this. I will just sit back and read now. Thanks again

  42. Ed,

    “The Malaysian government?”

    Funny joke. Of course not. IG did. You can read the whole story at her blog.

  43. Jeff,

    Re: “No, the autopilot cannot be used in other than a constant speed mode. (to be clear, any given ECON setting will result in changes in speed, but nothing like what you’d need to make your curving, slow routes work)”

    In my understanding LNAV can be disabled, so that only VNAV remains active. There is a plenty of combinations that can produce curved trajectories in such a case. Also what about ATT hold mode?

    Re: “As the DSTG paper spells out, while it’s possible to draw a path that matches the BTO values by linking together multiple straight-line paths that approximate a curve, it is incredibly unlikely that such a combination would just happen to match the ping-ring distances that were obtained from the Inmarsat data.”

    It has been already shown that curved trajectories, which satisfy BTO/BFO under relatively primitive flight-mode assumptions, do exist. I am sure many more exist. Yes, it is extremely unlikely. Likewise it is extremely unlikely that BTO/BFO data fits a constant heading path, but as we know it does.

  44. @Jeff. Curved flight not credible?? I would say just the opposite applies. If the a/c is flying on auto after route discontinuity a curved track (constant magnetic heading) is exactly what we expect to see.

    What we do NOT expect to see is a straight track (rhumb line or great circle) because that would require either that a/c is heading has been switched from NORM to true, or that it has been routed to a waypoint or coordinate somewhere near the South Pole. Neither of which, prima facie, appears plausible.

  45. @Jeffwise

    And yet a curve is what happens. No sharp turns, no unsteady left and right, and no straight line towards the search area. As for a combination lock, Richard Feynman sees differently. So maybe some skilled and trained pilot did a curve.

  46. @Paul: I think you and Jeff are both correct. Jeff is referring to EXTREMELY curved paths, with a turn radius an order of magnitude tighter than the slightly drifting curves you rightly describe as realistic.

    If you look at, for example, the bizarre preliminary report issued in the spring of 2014, while the search was still being conducted at 21°S, you can see how warped the paths need to be to access impact points that far north. Next to that, all your curves are in the “straight” family.

  47. The community is back in discussing different autopilot modes as the only way to fly from A to B in our case from FMT to its final resting place for the uptenth time.

    The aircraft could have flown on a straight or curved path with some random minor heading and altitude deviations due to outside environmental influencies without human input and without autopilot or autothrottle systems being active.

    The Autopilot and Autothrottle system are gadgets to navigate with precision from A to B to C and so on, but not needed to keep the aircraft flying. Due to its stability it will not crash, as long as the Fly By Wire Control System is functioning properly and the initial state, at which the uncommanded flightphase began, was a stable one (speed, bank pitch) or the deviation was in a region, where the built in natural and artificial stability could return the aircraft to a stable flight state.

    A good reference for understanding the FBW system of the 777.

    http://www.davi.ws/avionics/TheAvionicsHandbook_Cap_11.pdf

    The autopilot routing assumes some preset NAV Mode intentionally set up and thus implies that the human pilot had an intention to end at the final resting place, or that a pilot was actively using the autopilot to generate another path than the autopilot nav modes would allow. Both these two options limit the motive and the end of flight game, pointing to pilot suicide for whatever reason and the possible ditching scenario.

    The possibility that somewhere around the FMT a real ghost flight began without pilot or autopilot input due to mission completed or mission failed without using Autothrottle or Autothrust offers a wider variety of routing and altitude like a random curved path to a more northern resting place and clarifying the endgame, a crash soon after fuel exhaustion.

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