Some new information about suspected MH370 debris found in Africa:
1) Last month I wrote about a photograph taken of the “Rolls Royce” fragment three months before it was discovered by Neels Kruger and turned over to the authorities. This double discovery struck me as such a remarkable coincidence that I reached out to the man who took the photograph, Schalk Lückhoff, a 73-year-old retired doctor who lives about an hour away from the discovery site. I was fortunate enough to catch Dr Lückhoff just before he left on a monthlong photo safari to Kruger National Park. At the start of the interview I was under the impression that Neels Kruger found the piece the second time at Mossel Bay, 10 km from the Klein Brak River, but as Dr Lückhoff makes clear, this is not the case; Kruger also found the piece at at the mouth of Klein Brak river, about 250 m from where Lückhoff had photographed it. (Klein Brak is within the Mossel Bay municipality, hence the confusion.) Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.
SL: I belong to a local photographic club… and I was on my way to photograph fast-flowing water as the lagoon was emptying into the sea, and this was early morning, in fact I saw on my picture the exact time I took it was twenty minutes past seven on the 23rd of December. And I was the first one on the beach and I walked toward the river, and there was this clean piece of beach where no one had walked and I saw this object lying in the middle of it, and I just thought, well, it was probably just an old notice board or something, so I just took a picture in passing and I went on because I was in a hurry to get to the river, you see. And then when I came back later in the day it was gone, but by then there has been a high tide as well and I now, in retrospect I thought that this high tide pushed it into the river, the lagoon, or there’s also lots of holidaymakers that time of year, somebody might have picked it up and carried it into the lagoon, I don’t know… And then what happend was I never paid attention to this because I didn’t recognize it for what it was, as I say I was more interested in the pictures I was going to take, and the result was that about three months later there was a news thingy with the piece that Neels Kruger picked up [specifically, an article by Eugene Gunning in the Afrikaans-language Netwerk 24], and looking at this I thought, ‘This looks very familiar,’ and I went through, went back and looked through my pictures, and I found it there full of barnacles. And that’s the story.
JW: So then you reached out to Eugene Gunning?
SL: Yes, in fact I didn’t know who to contact because I immediately realized this might be important puzzle, or a piece in the puzzle, you see, so I contacted Eugene and he put me on to Neels, and very interesting chat about it, and he put me onto the Australian, what’s it, Transport Safety…
JW: ATSB.
SL: And I contacted them and sent them one of my pictures and they took it from there. They said to me that this was rather important, because it actually puts the date of actually three months earlier, because Neels only found it three months after I did. And what puzzled them was why there were no any marine life on this one, and of course I could explain that, because there’s a whole host of seabirds that nests on the banks of that river every night, I’m sure they must have picked it clean.
JW: Interesting!
SL: What’s your interest in this?
JW: I’ve been covering this for two years now, and of course for a long time we wondered why aren’t there any pieces of this mysterious plane, and then they started to turn up, and like the Australians I wondered, how come it’s so clean? Because there was one that washed up on Reunion Island that had all kinds of barnacles on it. Some people had speculated that some kind of creature might have picked it clean, but when your photograph came out, that was just very powerful evidence that that must have been exactly what happened.
SL: Yes.
JW: How do you think it wound up — you found it at this place, Klein Brak, and then it wound up in I guess, Mossel Bay is 15 km way or something?
SL: Yes, Mossel bay is about 10 km further on. You know, originally I said to Joe in Australia, I said to him that I was, when I walked past there the next day, this thing wasn’t there anymore, and I just gathered that it went back into the sea. And then when Neels picked this thing up, I said, “But it’s highly impossible that anything like that washing back into the sea, with the wind and all the sea currents and stuff around that area, would wash up in exactly the same spot three months later. What are the chances of that? It’s literally zero.” So my deduction was that this thing was washed up in the lagoon and the sandbanks in this lagoon changes all the time, and so does the dunes around there, from the prevailing southeasterly wind in summer, which blows everything up the river, you know, if it floats it will obviously move up into the lagoon, and that’s what I thought. It’s the most logical thing that it could have been in the same area three months later.
JW: So how do you reconcile the seemingly impossible thing? You would expect that the wind would blow it up into the lagoon, but instead it somehow seems to have washed back out into the sea, and gotten—I don’t know, how does it wind up where Neels found it?
SL: In retrospect I doubt whether it washed back into the sea. It was just my original impression, because it wasn’t there after the next high tide. I didn’t go up along, I had no reason to walk up the riverside at the time, and this thing was lying right at the river’s mouth, on the east of the side of the river, just at the mouth where the sea washed it up. During the course of the day, it was midsummer, it was our holiday season and that whole area there are hundreds of holidaymakers bathing in the sun and sitting there, kids playing in the river and the lagoon and so on, so it’s not impossible that anyone might have picked it up and even carried it up higher into the river, I don’t know. I can only speculate. But all I can say is, I think the chances that it washed out to sea and then came back three months later is impossible. So the only chance is that this thing somehow, either by human hand or by wind and water and what have you, ended up in the deeper part of the lagoon, and probably floated around there until it beached where Neels eventually found it. But who knows, you can only speculate on it.
JW: I quickly glanced at a map the other day. Where Neels found it wasn’t near the lagoon was it?
SL: It was on the bank, in fact it was exactly, we had to pinpoint it on Google and we measured it, it’s about 250 meters north of where I saw it the first time. And it was actually lying next to some washed up logs there on the edge of the sand. But now if you look at your Google Maps, it looks different from what it looks like now, or what it looked like in December, because that river, as the tide goes in and out, the sandbanks alters all the time. So you can’t—I’ve got a picture of exactly what things were like at that time in December. All I know is that there were lots of holidaymakers in that area every day. This thing might have drifted up in the river with the next high tide, and perhaps helped by the wind which blows upriver, and it might have beached somewhere and got covered in sand by kids playing or whatever and when the beach changed again, we’ve recently had a fair amount of rain in January and February, and often that river comes down and brings lots of logs and all sorts of stuff down. It might have washed open again. As I say, one can only speculate.
JW: I misunderstood, I thought he found it 10 km away.
SL: No, no, no, no! Actually, he gave me the spot on Google Maps and also the, he told me where to look, there’s a big log that’s lying there on the riverbank which has been lying there for more than a year now, since the last big flood we had, and he picked it up just next to that. I actually walked the distance the other day to go and pinpoint the area.
JW: So people were saying Mossel Bay but they really meant Klein Brak.
SL: Yes, it’s all in Klein Brak, in fact where he found it is about 250 meters from where I saw it.
JW: Did you only take the one picture at the time?
SL: You know what happened is, at the time I actually took two pictures, and some time in January my picture library became so big that I started removing some duplicates, and in fact I now realize that the other one was removed at that time. But what I did was, I had two and I just left the better one. You couldn’t really choose between them because they were taken at the same time and with the same camera.
JW: Same angle and everything?
SL: So this was the better picture… It’s such a coincidence, if I didn’t pick up that newspaper article, I wouldn’t even have known that I had the picture.
2) It occurred to me that the Lückhoff photograph would provide an important data-point for reverse-drift models, so I reached out to the GEOMAR institute in Germany, whose work I’ve described previously. I asked “Is your team looking at updating its findings in light of this new data, which provide a much narrower time window for the arrival of this debris?” I received the reply, “Such an endeavour will require a significant amount of time and effort in terms of the coordination and analysis. Given the lack of response from the Australian search authorities, and the still large uncertainty concerning the beaching of the debris, we do not intend on refining our analysis further at this stage.”
3) In another amazing coincidence, it turns out that Hong Kong-based aviation journalist Florence de Changy, who has made many important contributions toward solving the mystery of MH370, has a son who went to university in Canada with a young man whose brother found the most recent piece of debris in Mozambique. He wrote to Florence:
The piece was found right by a lodge called Cristina’s Lodge located on the Macaneta Peninsula on Sunday, 22nd of May, 2016. The piece was roughly 1 x 1.5 meters and about 15 cm thick. It did not have any metal on it and had the honeycomb inside. Hence, it was not very heavy and could be easily carried by one person. It did not look necessarily old and seemed as though it had only been on the beach for less than a week. The first time we found it (22/05/2016) it was at the high water line and it was fully exposed. It was found when it was low tide. We initially left the piece there but when we came back on the 28th of May, it was pushed a little higher up the beach by the ocean. It was not very noticeable and my mother found it when she was looking for drift wood along the beach. I got into contact with BBC on Thursday, 26nd of May, and they put me into contact with the Australian Transport Safety Board. I gave the piece to Eng. Jeremias Fr. Chito, a Technical Administrator at the Civil Aviation Center in Maputo, Mozambique.
Based on the photos’ metadata, they were taken at location S25 51 48.51, E32 44 38.25 (-25.863475, 32.743958) on 5/28,2016 at around 1:07 pm. Here’s one photo; the full set of 13 in high resolution can be found in this Dropbox folder.
@Oleksandr:
Thanks for providing the text you have been referring to. The errors, contradictions, untidy terminology and confused presentation in that text explain to some extent the misunderstandings you have been suffering from.
If I were you I would throw the book into the dustbin and try to find a better one.
@ Mikeroo – you may not know how close you are coming to hitting the nail dead square on the head concerning you’re 1:19pm post re: leaving a testimony, his legacy if you will, on the CVR….it would allow the “world” opinion to reflect on this deed in a quite different attitude. If it happened like such we could understand to a degree the state of mind he was in….it’s the not knowing that’s that’s the real killer here..(forgive the pun…not in the least intended)…the 2nd point about a symbolic “destination”, a clue, with some kind of personal importance, or better word, significance, i brought up some months back, is there for us to discover….I have a somewhat personal location ( lat. lon. coords.) with a fairly unique, non-scientific , agenda, which i hesitate revealing, because of the potential for ridicule at this time…Jeff you might advise me how to present this “theory” without banishment….I don’t want to violate protocol….but having followed this since hour one, it’s not something off the top of my head, it is out of my mind…( ooops ) G.
@ Jeff Wise:
You are very welcome, and thank you for kindly accepting both my praise and my second-guessing (instead of switching into attack mode, which unfortunately is the usual reflex of lots of people).
Didn’t you also invoke a multinational conspiracy by way of suggesting at one point that “debris was planted ineptly” in multiple nations, or am I misconstruing your stance here:
http://jeffwise.net/2016/04/14/mh370-debris-was-planted-ineptly
?
I agree with your statement above (insofar as I can imagine begrudgingly reaching the same conclusion after a few months of moderating a blog like yours, an experience I have never had).
But where I still feel that you contradict yourself a little bit is this part of the abovementioned link:
You (quite rightly) say, that “it’s a fatal trap to restrict the discussion to acceptable explanations” and to “forbid to discuss some scenarios”.
However, with all due respect, you did exactly that, when you forbade the discussion of certain scenarios, namely:
– lightning strike
– radio contact between MH370 and MH88
– GeoResonance
– Diego Garcia
– Christmas/Cocos Islands
– and various other theories
In forbidding these topics, you “restricted the discussion to acceptable explanations”, which you yourself criticized as a “fatal trap”.
I am not a proponent of any of the abovementioned theories, but I agree with you that forbidding the discussion of certain scenarios is indeed a fatal trap.
That’s precisely why I find it so bewildering that you did … exactly that.
I don’t know who you did or didn’t ban, but you did say that you would ban anyone for further discussing any of the abovementioned topics, which is exactly my point.
(For example you threatened to ban the IMO valuable contributor DennisW for discussing his Christmas Island theory, which effectively ended the discussion. The same holds true for the other topics I mentioned above. I could back up my claims with your exact quotes, but I think you don’t dispute them anyway.)
***
Please don’t take my remarks as an expression of bad faith on my behalf, but rather a word of encouragement to live up to your own goals and principles (which, I agree, are not always easy to implement as you rightfully explained above).
@JS
You said:
“Without more information, it’s too early to say that nobody wanted to steal 9M-MRO. There are better explanations for its disappearance, for now, but we just don’t know yet.”
While that is certainly true, the assumption that people (even criminals) behave logically is a good starting. Why would anyone steal a commercial flight when there are so many easier ways to get an equivalent aircraft or whatever may have been on 9M-MRO? I suppose if MH370 was smuggling a nuclear weapon or some other very difficult to obtain commodity that it might make sense.
Likewise the suicide scenario. There is no evidence whatever to suggest that either pilot was suicidal, and the fact that the plane was flown to fuel exhaustion speaks volumes against it.
Statistically, a mechanical failure (especially since the aircraft continued to fly for as long as it did) is also off the table.
You are left with few options other than a politically motivated diversion that went wrong for some reason.
Once you reason down to the last explanation you realize that the current search area in the SIO is not, and never was, an intelligent place to search.
@ DennisW – Don’t be so sure that ” a politically motivated diversion “, as you put it, went wrong…..it might very well went exactly according to plan….whatever that plan was ( or is…? ) …..G.
@George
Good point. That has to be entertained as a possibility.
Material is deposited on beaches where the waves are constructive I. E the swash is stronger than the backwash. In these areas beaches tend to build up and debris iso deposited on the sand or pebble surface
A basic constructive beach scenario has the swash directiom striking the beach at 90 degrees and the backwash also receeding at 90 degrees.
If however there is any format of longshore drift occurring the swash will.still be at 90 degrees but the backwash will be at an angle say of 45 degrees. This has the net result of shifting some.material.along the beach with every wave motion despite the wave direction appearing to hit the beach square on.
Beaches don’t form where wave patterns are destructive by definition. Long beaches with constructive wave patterns may be particularly hit by the effects of longshore drift and so debris populations be minimised in these areas.
When Longshore drift patterns hit coves or hooks that’s where the debris collects as the drift is halted by the variation in the coastline.
@DennisW, “why would anyone…” is exactly the question.
@Greg Long,
A while ago, Jeff shut down a conversation I was having (mostly with myself, it turned out) concerning the validity of BTOs. My theory was that the values may have been counted from an incorrect time slot boundary as a limitation of the logging program. It didn’t make sense that ISAT had to calculate the constant 495,679us that it claimed had been subtracted when the values were logged. How would they subtract a constant and then not know what it was?
Anyway just like the Christmas Island theory, I never got the impression that Jeff shut these down because they were off limits permanently, or that they were not “acceptable explanations,” but because the current evidence did not support the theories and no further information was expected to change that. In other words, they were dead horses or maybe horses in comas.
A landing gear on Diego Garcia, an ISAT whistleblower programmer, a suitcase washing up on CI, a piece of aluminum melted by lightning, etc – any of these would probably re-open the topic.
Jeff seems to have a pretty good balance going – proof being that we’re all still here after 2 years, which is an Internet eternity.
@Gysbreght
“Let’s suppose the airplane is flying due south in still air at 500 kts, when it suddenly encounters a 50 kts crosswind from due west. That crosswind will place the airplane at a sideslip angle of 5.7°. The directional stability (weathercock tendency) then produces a yawing moment that, without opposing control inputs, turns the airplane into wind until the sideslip angle and the yawing moment are again zero.”
Do you have a reference for that? As you operate with decimal slip angle figures I guess you can explain, how those numbers figure.
I had to correct for crosswind on each flight, because no function on my aircraft was providing true track navigation. The 5.7° looks as a good number for the necessary correction into the wind, but cant imagine that the aircraft is doing it on its own.
I never expierienced any noticable sideslip effect into the wind like in your case, but a drift from desired track, and I never heard of such an effect. So either I was ignorant to such a behaviour or it is more an academic exercise.
@DennisW said, “Likewise the suicide scenario. There is no evidence whatever to suggest that either pilot was suicidal, and the fact that the plane was flown to fuel exhaustion speaks volumes against it.”
We agree that there seems to be no evidence that ZS was suicidal. We also agree that a diversion by ZS in many ways is the simplest of scenarios. (I am not dismissing other possibilities, but other scenarios in my judgment add complexity.)
Miles O’Brien had steadfastly claimed that a simulated flight to the SIO was found on ZS’s computer based on his sources. This was reported by several other reporters in June 2014. If Miles and the others are right, would your analysis change?
Here is an exchange with Miles on Twitter a year ago.
https://twitter.com/Calvin1114/status/627255006509404160
@Gysbreght.”…. and the airplane on a heading slightly less than 185.7°.” I think the heading would be 174.3, the wind being from the west.
Also, I think in her second example, in which she developed her question she went on to ask whether speed would need to be increased to get there in the hour. Yes is the answer to that. The speeds were to me selected for simplicity, not to trap anyone.
@Victor
You have to ask yourself why a simulated flight to the SIO would be necessary? There is no “destination” there.
In any case, as Godfrey’s latest post on Steel’s site suggests, a terminus in the current search area is very very unlikely.
@VictorI, @DennisW raises a really good point: if one were to simulate a flight to the SIO, what would one be simulating? You’d just be flying in the dark over featureless ocean. There would be nothing to test out. Sitting in front of a simulator screen watching a plane fly on a simulated course in the dark for six hours would be extremely boring. Once in a while you’d see a fuel gauge indicator tick down–it would be like watching paint dry.
@Crobbie, Wonderful contribution, thank you.
Correction….to the west!
@jeffwise and @DennisW: You are not answering my question. You are giving reasons why you believe there was not a simulated flight to the SIO on the computer. I am hypothesizing that there was based on several reports in the media in June 2014, including what Miles reported.
Richard’s drift analysis suggests a terminus on the 7th arc around 29S-30S. This is still part of the SIO even though it is north of the current search zone.
@ JS: thank you for sharing your point of view
Your theory and especially your last sentence appear logical to me.
ok, so how did the story end ?
What’s the explanation / conclusion ?
“Because the current evidence did not support the theories…”
… therefore they were declared as “unacceptable topics”,
discussion of which would lead to banishment.
q.e.d.
The crux of the matter is:
Since the evidence is insufficient (to prove what happened), NOBODY knows with certainty which interpretation of the evidence is correct.
(Otherwise we would have found the plane.)
On top of that, the authenticity of the evidence is in question.
Against this backdrop, I agree with Jeff that “it’s a fatal trap to restrict the discussion to acceptable explanations”. Therefore, the discussion should not be restricted to acceptable explanations.
No theories should be discarded (because this is inherently subjective and thus error-prone). We cannot afford that luxury. The case is complicated enough that thousands of people all over the world are still searching for clues more than 2 years on. If on top of that we restrict our minds by imposing artificial and subjective barriers, we will never solve the case.
@Victor
I have no good answer to your query or I would have provided it despite the fact that it is based on unpublished hearsay. There has been no formal report of what was found on Z’s computer. You are asking me to respond to a hypothetical. I have no problem with that, but I also do not have an answer.
@Greg Long, I think that all your points are completely valid. I guess the simplest way to state my position is that it’s purely a judgement call. In practice, you just have to lop off the limb at some point, and I can’t really say that at various points I haven’t been too lenient or too aggressive. In most of the scenarios you list, it wasn’t the topic per se that I felt I had to take action against, but the proponent; for instance, Alex Sieu, who proposed the lightning strike, actually seemed quite mentally ill, and GeoResonance is a con game. The radio contact between MH370 and MH88 got under my skin because it just didn’t make any sense on its face, though you might not realize it if you didn’t know how aircraft communication works: if someone gets on a frequency and mumbles, you have no way of knowing who they are. So in shutting that down I was just doing a public service.
Christmas/Cocos Islands is an interesting case. Basically Dennis W had a very elaborate theory about someone trying to fly to Christmas Island, but not flying in the right direction, and then running out of fuel. I don’t specifically remember threatening to ban him but if I did it was because he was going on too much about it. Obviously since then he’s been one of the pillars of this discussion. For a while he was saying he’d disavowed his theory and a few of us got excited about that, but then it started to become clear that the ghost-ship scenario was coming off the table, and reverse drift models were making northerly parts of the arc look more reasonable, and he was back in the saddle. And I’m happy for him!
We all have our theories, and everyone else things our theories are implausible. The key thing is to be able to see the weaknesses in our own theories and the good (if any) in others’.
After I started writing this, you posted in response to JS, and wrote in part: “No theories should be discarded (because this is inherently subjective and thus error-prone).” I absolutely disagree. My goal here is to sift through the evidence and sort the good from the bad. And some is bad! This crew has accumulated quite a bit of collective expertise over the last years and while we can’t tell you what happened, we can tell you what didn’t. This is the only way forward. We’re trying to find the gold nugget at the bottom of the pan, and if we accept every pebble as equally likely to be valuable.
You’re entitled to disagree, but I just want you to understand the philosophy of how I’ve been running this blog.
@DennisW: Fair enough. Part of the problem is that Malaysia has never officially released the results of the criminal investigation, so we are left with rumors.
@Victorl, Dennis. A speculative answer would be that he wanted to plot a course or waypoints to set up the last few hours flying so that he need not be there.
@Ed
In that scenario, what are the chances the repeated altitude call was a radio check after donning the oxygen mask?
That would ensure the following “good night” was heard loud and clear- affording even more time for the diversion to go unnoticed.
Thanks, @JS
@David
All possibilities are open. The reality is, none of us has a clue what happened. All we can do is try to piece together the few facts we have as best we can.
There are no bad guys here.
@DennisW
I suppose that if I planned to fly a plane to the middle of the SIO…and I liked to simulate flights…then I would surely simulate that one…my last one.
If no other reason than to watch the fuel gauge tick down.
No problem, Jeff, and thanks for being a great host.
@Greg – the question was never actually answered, but I had no evidence to show that the BTO logging was flawed, even if it wasn’t fully explained.
My suspicion is that the reports that discussed the derivation of the 495,679 lost something in the translation but were otherwise accurate.
Jeff, I’m thankful beyond words for your explanation!
It’s a really a heartfelt issue for me since I have been following your blog (and the discussion here) for so long and the insight into your thinking is of great service to me and I would imagine to a lot of other readers as well. Maybe you should sticky your posting somewhere for others to find/read ?
My ideal world would not have any discussions shut down, but the fact that you state that you don’t discard any topics per se but sometimes feel obliged to do so by way of how posters behave, comes as a bit of relief to me. I’m a supporter of freedom of speech and auto-regulation by the community here, but if you think or have experienced that this would descend into chaos, I understand your feel the need for intervention. I guess there must be some limits (alien abduction?). I think I have to warm up to that reality, hoping that you are a wise decision-maker on – as I understand it – a case-by-case basis.
I think I won’t pursue this topic any further after this post, because I don’t want to detract from the other issues at hand … and because I don’t want to get banned 😀 😀
But as a final remark, I would like to say that while I am very sympathetic to your above explanation, I am a little less so to the other parts of your explanation (below), and I will explain, why:
Then why on Earth did you say “If the MH370 investigation has taught us anything, is that restricting the discussion to acceptable explanations is a fatal trap.” ???
And why did you criticize Duncan Steel for “forbidden to discuss [certain] scenarios” if you now say that you are in favour of exactly that (forbidding to discuss certain scenarios). ??
That seems utterly contradictory to me.
But you are applying your own subjective assessment in deciding what to discard.
And subjective assessment is by definition error-prone.
There is no objective, scientific way to do so.
(Especially if the evidence, the science should be based upon, is itself in question.)
Here is a good explanation for why closing the investigation off to alternative theories is a recipe for disaster:
http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=display_arch&article_id=1922&issue_id=102009
To that you might say:
But what if in 30 years the plane is found and one of the pebbles (=theories) you had discarded/banned turns out to be exactly the right one !?
Ironically you bring up a good example here in DennisW’s Christmas Island theory, which you banned from discussion (I can search the posting if you want), but then – if I understand correctly – this once wrongfully discarded/banned theory later got “back in the saddle”.
In criminal law, you would say it was a wrongful conviction:
If Jeff loosens the reins, I’m going to have to revisit the alien abduction angle!
On a different note, I wonder what the chances are that a private expedition(s) will be made to find the plane after the official search ends.
Crowdfunding? Would there be a reward? How accurate was the last known location of the Titanic compared with what is known about MH370?
This is the Titanic of the 21st century … with perhaps even more intrigue and more at stake.
@Victor: 29-30S is certainly a compromise between drift and signal data – but to me, this is because it explains both equally POORLY.
To force fuel exhaustion by 00:17 that far NE, Richard had to introduce the following complexities:
#1 Loitering/looping/descent near Sumatra
#2 Non-detection of #1 by primary radar designed to detect precisely such irregularities
#3 Despite #2, search leaders ASSUMING #1, to rationalize a rush up to s21 to “find” the FDR (and then the Perth Abyssal Plain survey)
#4 Then reversing itself on #1, to rationalize a 20 month “search” at s37-s40: a zone incompatible with LLD
#5 Then (someday soon) re-reversing itself on #1, to validate a fifth major search shift back up to s29
– and he still hasn’t resolved the Oz debris paradox; the UWA work suggests s30 is still way too far south for debris to avoid Oz shores
I appreciate the effort – I really do. But to me, it feels like ripping up a $100 bill, giving half to each of two claimants, and declaring the dispute settled.
@JS.
Thank you for reminding us of the unanswered queries you raised regarding the manner in which BTO is calculated. I had only just re-read your earlier posts on the subject yesterday.
It is interesting to note that:
– all knowledgeable exponents on the subject here appear to be in agreement that BTO is physically deterministic: actual round trip time plus K
– none of those asserting this have seen (or admit to having seen) the algorithm or the code by which BTO is calculated
– it is worth recalling that the “calibration period” is a lousy way in which to validate BTO interpretation. only ~100 microseconds movement in BTO over 30 minutes; +/- 40 microseconds sigma due to noise/jitter; and nearly all delta BTO resulting from LES-satellite distance change rather than satellite-AES distance change
– the results of the “validation experiments” presented in the bayesian book are presented as if BTO error is always zero. they say themselves that the “bias” varied from flight to flight. the results of predictive accuracy of BTO for range during actual flights are not presented at all.
– one can easily imagine that a metric “time received vs time expected” could be affected by a whole bunch of things other than simply “delta round trip propagation time delay”, depending on how each of these is being measured and what assumptions/parameters feed into that calculation
– if BTO is not as physically deterministic as ISAT proponents would have us believe, then there is room for BTO distortion to have occurred if “normal” algorithm inputs were disrupted in some fashion, resulting in misinterpretation of what BTO was representing post-disappearance.
Victor,
“Richard’s drift analysis suggests a terminus on the 7th arc around 29S-30S.”
Do you know somebody, who has a better understanding of what the ATT mode does, and who is able/willing to conduct experiments in a real B777 simulator?
As the risk of being chased by Boeing for violating their copyright, a few citations from FCOM:
1. “the AFDS commands wings level and holds the heading or track established when wings level is established” (4.10.10).
2. “If turning, the AFDS holds the heading reached after rolling wings level” (4.20.6).
3.”If the autopilot is first engaged or the flight director is first turned on in flight, the AFDS holds a bank angle between 5 and 30 degrees and will not roll to wings level. If the bank angle is less than 5 degrees, the AFDS returns to wings level (HDG HOLD or TRK HOLD).” (4.20.6)
4. TRK HOLD and HDG HOLD are inoperative after failure of the inertial reference portion of ADIRU (11.20.4).
My understanding of the above is that in case of ADIRU failure and bank angle <5 deg the AFDS returns to wings level when the AP is turned on; but the AP will not be able to hold heading or track, unless heading is entered on POS INIT page later. Instead AFDS would maintain zero bank angle. If this is the case, my ATT paper explains 29S-30S.
@RetiredF4:
Thank you for replying to my post. The angle of 5.7° is simple geometry of the classic speed triangle of airspeed, windspeed, and groundspeed. For directional stability I suggest you type “directional stability aircraft” in the Google search window. Even Oleksandr’s book got that bit right and calls it “weathercock”.
When you write “I had to correct for crosswind on each flight, …” I think you mean the crab angle. To maintain a sideslip angle you have to maintain rudder and aileron off center in opposite directions and the ball in your turn-and-slip indicator (if you had one) will be off-center.
Another interesting aspect is whether ADIRU software was updated by MAS after its B777 flight 124 incident (9M-MRG) in accordance to directives, and whether software glitch was fixed properly. Anything to do with the fire, which destroyed documentation or so?
@Brock McEwen
-The ‘WA shores paradox’ I tryed to explain this by its shores catharistics and desolation.
I think it might well be some debris landed there somewhere but still isn’t found for those reasons and maybe another reason:
If debris washed up there somewhere it would have been in ~the first half year donn’t you think? In those almost two years following, debris could be easily covered by sand, smashed against rocks and sunk, eroded otherwise.
And if some debris gets found there afterall would it change Godfrey’s latest drift model and coördinates?
Debris found or not found on WA shores won’t matter imo. So there is no paradox with this imo.
-The forced solutions on the fuel exhaustion problem. Imo every scenario based on a ghost flight around/after FMT will need to introduce conflicting and imo unsolvable explanations on the fuel exhaustion.
But if you start to assume a controlled flight (with human input)after FMT there would be also control over the amount of fuel used won’t it? Too much fuel could be dumped somewhere on the way f.i.?
Brock wrote:
“29-30S is certainly a compromise between drift and signal data – but to me, this is because it explains both equally POORLY.”
Things finally started moving. Gysbreght admitted the existence of later force and moment; Brock admitted compromise between drift and signal data. The last part, though, is still incorrect. Not ideally, but definitely not poorly.
#1 Loitering/looping/descent near Sumatra
CW holding pattern + descent.
#2 Non-detection of #1 by primary radar designed to detect precisely such irregularities
Usual radars are not designed to detect such ‘irregularities’. Too low.
#3 Despite #2, search leaders ASSUMING #1, to rationalize a rush up to s21 to “find” the FDR (and then the Perth Abyssal Plain survey)
This is a question to search leaders, but what other options did they have at that time?
#4 Then reversing itself on #1, to rationalize a 20 month “search” at s37-s40: a zone incompatible with LLD
IG analysis was overly-convincing, so that other possibilities were simply forgotten.
#5 Then (someday soon) re-reversing itself on #1, to validate a fifth major search shift back up to s29
It is better later than never.
– and he still hasn’t resolved the Oz debris paradox; the UWA work suggests s30 is still way too far south for debris to avoid Oz shores
It does resolve indeed. This paradox is a result of poor analysis and misunderstanding of the capabilities and limitations of drift models. A kind of Achilles paradox.
@jeffwise
I’m with you 100% on the simulated flight question. There would be no operational (for want of a better term) advantage in it.
And if Z planned the disappearance in advanced (although not yet proven, I personally think the evidence points that way) I cannot see him risking leaving any trace of evidence such as flight simulations.
He would needed to have destroyed the hard drive, which incidentally we know he didn’t.
Looks like another possible bit has turned up:
https://twitter.com/PeterDoherty7/status/740821648782295042?lang=en-gb
If it’s part of the plane it would change everything in terms of location. Kangaroo Island is near Adelaide.
Susie,
South Australia, right? If I am not mistaken this is another place where UWA’s model results for the origin location included into my ATT report show possible beaching (the other one was the location of the towelette).
The stencil looks wrong when compared to Blaine’s. Also not sure about the hexagons symbol?
@Oleksandr,
yes South Australia, around the Bight.
I’m looking for MAS stencils and Boeing stencils but I don’t think this is either.
@Susie
You just beat me to reporting this 🙂
Channel 7 News also reports that it was found on a very remote area of rocks on the south of Kangaroo Island, South Australia and that it could have been sitting there for a year or so. Looks like similar materials to other debris, with wording “CAUTION NO STEP”.
Although the location of the find probably fits with the current flowing eastward from WA, along the coast, it surely must have been there for a long while if it came from anywhere near the current search area (or SW of that). Even if this is found to be from a 777, I must admit to being cynical about the timing of this find…hmmm.
@Brock McEwen
But I certainly will agree it would create a paradox (with ~30S) if debris gets found around or south from Perth or the south west coast along Augusta eastwards.
@AM2
My apologies! Thank you for the further information, there doesn’t seem to be any online yet.
Are you aware of any other accidents in the locality that it may have come from?
@Susie
Unbelievable.. another case of synchronicity.. 😉
Just finished my last post to Brock McEwen and now reading your news!
Going to look right away offcourse at those pictures..
Well, ain’t that interesting. If you search this blog you will see that this area (Aus bight near Adelaide) and NOT Western Oz is where I predicted debris should be found if it had gone down in the 45S area. Specifically, I stated that if my theory is correct you would expect debris drift to bifurcate – some going towards Southern Oz (and beyond), some entering and going around the SIO gyre.
If this piece is confirmed as a 777 piece I will be interested to hear how commentators reconcile this particular find to a northern terminus 😉
@Susie
Exiting. But the ‘no step’ lettering is not MAS-wise.
I think that allready excludes it from being MH370 debris.
I began to envy UWA’s drift model…
I meant this plot:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/52xajg0z1oxgy9d/mhlc18_overlapped.jpg?dl=0
@Susie
No need to apologize! No, I’m not aware of any recent aviation accidents in the area.
@All
https://au.news.yahoo.com/video/watch/31805893/plane-find-could-be-mh370/#page1
It looks to be about 50-60cm on the longest side.
Link to relevant extract from my original report here
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2r0iym4oa3pl77f/trajectory%20of%20drogued%20drifters.pdf?dl=0