Hot on the heels of a reported possible MH370 piece in South Australia, news reaches us that Blaine Alan Gibson has found three pieces of suspected MH370 debris in Madagascar. This article says, in part:
Three new fragments which could have come from Malaysia Airlines Flight 270 were discovered on the morning of Monday, June 6, on the Island of Nosy Boraha, in the northeast of Madagascar…
These fragments were found by Blaine Alan Gibson, an American businessman, while he was accompanied by a from the France 2 TV show “Complément d’enquête.” They were on a long, almost deserted beach near the village of Sahasifotra, where tons of waste arrive every day from the Indian Ocean.
One piece in particular, 77 cm wide by 50 cm, apparently made by composite materials, strongly resembles another fragment which Gibson found in February on the coast of Mozambique.
” These two fragments are very very similar: the same paint color, the diameter of the attachment holes is identical. and on the back the texture is the same. I believe that it is a piece from MH370,” Blaine Alan Gibson told our colleagues. Two other parts were also found, a smaller panel with the inscription “FB” as well as another plastic part which could be the frame of an economy class seat’s video screen.
UPDATE 6/9/16: Here’s a screengrab of a YouTube video showing a Malaysia Airlines 777 economy class seatback (thanks to reader @sk999). The coat hook in particular looks like a good match for the third piece.
Here’s an even better shot, via @BBCwestcott. Note the color of the fabric around the “COAT HOOK” button:
This is why we can’t have nice things.
I’d like to expand on Jeff’s suicide possibility. If, as Ed postulates, Zaharie is the speaker and therefore in the cockpit for the final 2 calls, I think this leads to several options. ACARS had been disabled and the transponder will be turned off 2 minutes after the last call.
1. A despondent Zaharie pilots a plane into the middle of the SIO.
2. A revengeful Zaharie plots to kill all on board in retaliation for some action. Being a Muslim, this could include Uighur deportations.
3. A politically minded Zaharie holds the passengers hostage. He negotiates for the release of his political leader who was jailed on questionable charges that same day. He eventually runs out of fuel and crash lands at sea. There is no rescue attempt.
In 1, 2 or 3 Zaharie leaves something describing the reason for his actions that could compromise leadership in Malaysia. That “note” is discovered and concealed by the Malaysians. China agrees to keep the whole thing under wraps in exchange for Malaysia’s support of China in the South China Sea. China is desperate for support in the South China Sea and will sacrifice Chinese citizens if it means Malaysia’s support.
Like any puzzle, the problem is to figure out what pieces are missing.
June 2, 2016 Forbes
Malaysia tries to avoid rocking boats because the claimant most likely to splash disputed water on it is China. China happens to be Malaysia’s chief economic partner and one with a record of withdrawing economic support elsewhere when friends turn hostile.
But Malaysia says little about its claims compared to ever-vociferous neighbors such as China, Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines.
“Malaysia has been more hesitant to push back forcefully against China, partially because the Philippines and Vietnam have been a useful buffer, soaking up so much of China’s bullying over the last few years, and partially because the ruling elite in Kuala Lumpur have been convinced that they have a ‘special relationship’ with Beijing,” says Gregory Poling, Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative director with the U.S. think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But increasingly parts of the government in Malaysia have been disabused of that notion as China has increased its incursions into Malaysian waters.”
One problem I see with any attempt to embarrass the Malaysian government: if that was one’s goal, one would communicate the material to a third party not under the influence of the Malaysian government.
If you want to embarrass a politician, you don’t communicate with that politician, you communicate to the press.
Likewise, if the perp was holding hostages, he had to have planned for the possibility that the other party to the negotiation would bury everything under the rug and make him the bad guy. For any of these tactics to work, a third party had to be involved as a neutral.
Since none appear to have been involved, it seems to me any “leverage” act like a hijacking for ransom or any “whistleblowing” act lacks support.
That’s because you are an American living in the USA.
I live in Europe and can see when RT pushes an agenda just as much as when CNN pushes an agenda.
On balance, I find CNN more of a propaganda toll than RT.
(And I am by no means a fan of Putin and/or Russia)
My take:
When the plane is on the ground and not moving, and you have 90° crosswind, then the windvane is normal to the plane’s centerline.
When the plane starts moving, the windvane would slowly begin to gradually start pointing more towards the centerline.
The intermediate positions show, however, that the angle (between windvane and the fuselage centerline) depends on the ratio of crosswind to airspeed. For the angle to reach 0°, the airspeed would have to be infinite, and since that is impossible the windvane angle never totally reaches 0° if you have any crosswind.
Other pilots have interpreted the repetition of the flight level as a way to gently remind ATC that they still have not been granted permission to ascend to their intended cruising altitude.
A second explanation was that the crew wanted to trigger the hand-off:
Aside from the feasibility question (it’s certainly not easy to hack into INMARSAT servers):
• maybe the data is not even stored on computers connected to the web, which would require a physical break-in
• you would not only have to change the data itself, but ALSO all the backups of the data (including OFFLINE backups!)* AND also the log files (to remove any trace of the data modification).
* and how do you want to know how many backups there are, and where they are all located ?
@Rob @others
To come back on the ‘flaperon’-pieces I ask your opinion (and others who want to look at it)on the following:
I printed both panels on the same scale.
The big ‘Blain Gibson’ panel on the front lying on the beach and the ‘Mozambique’ panel on the front standing in the sand (from the dropbox serie Jeff linked previously).
First thing that is clearly visible are the footprints in the sand on both pictures in almost exactly the same spot that confirm to me seizes of both panels are about the same.
Next thing (and that comes to my point) is the Blain G. panel shows one row of fastener or rivet holes on its left side and no visible remnants of holes on its right side. Here it looks like a rather clean break line.
The Mozambique piece shows a row of 6 fastener holes and beside it the remnants of another row of fastener holes.
The single row on the B.G. panel would correspond with the flange that would be attached there (it’s attached with only a single row). So this one then would be one of the outer panels of the three from either the left wing or the right wing (inboard or outboard one).
The Mozambique panel though has two rows of fasteners beside eachother. This is used only on the middle spants of that overall panel (as far as I can see from an upper wing picture). The left side of this panel is badly damaged in contrast to the right side of the other panel.
So to speak; it does not fit he other panel here if this panel is a middle panel of the three.
This leaves only two options imo:
Or the Mozambique panel is a middle panel from the other wing or also an outer panel from the other wing.
This would imply we have two same panels here but each one from another wing.
I suspect it’s a bit mindboggling (to me at least), nonetheless hope you or someone else wants to double check.
@Greg Long. I have thought perhaps the backend databases were modified with the various path segments :
– flight back over My from IGARI
– flight path up the Mallacca Straights
– flight to the SIO.
I suspect the reboot(s) were a database transaction to resync these external data paths with the master record on mh370. So data and time stamps are stripped from source paths but resync with the mh370 official made up story.
@ Mh, I don’t know but I don’t think that Inmarsat does not “sync” their data with flying airplanes.
I think Inmarsat center just (accumulatively) stores the data incoming data from their satellites. I can’t see the need for any syncing or retroactive modification of the data, that has already been received and stored.
correction:
@ Mh, I don’t know but I don’t think Inmarsat “syncs” their data with flying airplanes.
I think Inmarsat center just (accumulatively) stores the incoming data they receive from their satellites. I can’t see the need for any syncing or retroactive modification of the data, that has already been received and stored.
Yes @Greg Long. I think the data was built up from a series of stored flights from any number of airlines. For example a flight segment from Middle East to Perth would have been the source data segment but this stream would need to be broken at the imaginary FMT as start of appending to MH370’s supposedly final segment to the SIO then this data stream would be truncated at the point of last partial ping. Because of the merge of various data is the reason we can’t find mh370 in the SIO.
@Ge Rijn
Personally, I think both panels most likely came from the right hand wing. The Mozambique panel could be the outboard panel, and Blaine’s Madagascar panel could be the centre one.
I would have thought that each panel would have the same number of fastenings along it’s short edges.
I have been able to determine the length of the Blaine panel by comparing it to the pen conveniently laid alongside for scale. It works out at 80cm. So these are definitely the flaperon panels.
@Greg Long
“When the plane is on the ground and not moving, and you have 90° crosswind, then the windvane is normal to the plane’s centerline.”
? You meant to say 90° to the centerline?
“When the plane starts moving, the windvane would slowly begin to gradually start pointing more towards the centerline.
The intermediate positions show, however, that the angle (between windvane and the fuselage centerline) depends on the ratio of crosswind to airspeed. For the angle to reach 0°, the airspeed would have to be infinite, and since that is impossible the windvane angle never totally reaches 0° if you have any crosswind.”
Greg, we are talking about an aircraft in the air (flying), not on the ground (rolling). A trimmed aircraft without any yaw input like assymetric thrust or rudder input flies directly into the relative wind, thus a vane is alligned with the fuselage, no slip present. The simplest design of a slip indicator is a piece of string like in the referenced F14 Tomcat combat aircraft (on ground, zero speed, no wind)
http://www.multiengineairplane.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/yaw-string-F14.jpg
MH, I didn’t understand your last post, but my guess is that Inmarsat center stores the incoming sat data in realtime when it is received. There would not be any later modification or resyncing of the already received data with flying airplanes, so nothing (no SDU reboot, etc.) could be done onboard MH370 to change any of the data (retroactively) that Inmarsat had already received up until that point.
I’d imagine it a bit like an FDR:
Data flows into it and is stored there permanently.
You cannot modify (or change) any data that’s already in there.
It’s a one-way process.
At least that’s my understanding.
yes
Yes, obviously.
But my thought experiment required a not-moving plane (and then a very slowly accelerating plane), which is obviously only possible on the ground.
Yes, but is the vane perfectly aligned with the fuselage centerline (0°) or is only close (e.g. 0.5°) ? You wouldn’t see the difference with the naked eye, but it could make a difference when you plot a path to the SIO stretching hundreds of kilometers.
Given that the cruising speed of a commercial airliner (and all the more so of an F4) is much higher than any possible crosswind, the angle could be close to 0° but actually >0° ?
Or are you saying that the angle is always 0°, no matter what the ratio of the plane’s airspeed to crosswind is ?
@Jeff: thanks for re-clarifying why you don’t think my efforts to force full transparency out of search leadership is worthwhile. It greatly strengthens my confidence that I am doing the right thing.
Because my beliefs oppose yours diametrically on several key fronts:
You seem to feel trust in the ISAT pdf’s BTO values is made necessary by the dearth of other evidence. I do not.
You seem to feel we have yet to come across an evidence-based reason to question our faith in the ISAT pdf’s BTO values. I do not.
You seem to feel the chances that “something happened that cannot be admitted” is too disconnected from “how the world works” even to justify EXPLORING this possibility, by banding together and doing our best to hold search leaders to proper account. I do not.
You seem to think that, even if something did happen that cannot be admitted, the chances our combined efforts could possibly pry this truth loose are too remote to justify the effort. I do not.
In fact, even if you turn out to be right on each of the last two – and you may well be: you are a very, very smart guy – I would remain as committed as ever to my efforts to audit search leadership:
– even if multinational complicity in a cover-up is “not how the world works” yet, it damn well WILL be eventually, if we ever stop holding our leaders accountable.
– even if – especially if – demanding accountability of our leaders no longer stands a chance of producing accountability, then I damn well want history to record that I tried my very best, anyway.
@AM2 – thanks much for the hydrophone reference – and the support.
@ Brock: amen! every single word you said there is as if spoken directly from my heart.
@Greg Long
“Aside from the feasibility question (it’s certainly not easy to hack into INMARSAT servers)”
Agreed. Presumably they have a database distributed over various servers in different locations. Whether offline backup is used these days and if so how and when this is done would need some inside knowledge or a good guess. I am not suggesting ISAT is complicit in this BTW.
Although I have made this suggestion, I think its very unlikely. However, ensuring data integrity is a major challenge these days for businesses and governments.
On 2nd thought…
Both BFOs values from 00:19 are perfectly plausible — compared to the expected trend of ~255Hz, the values are ~70-260Hz too low, most obviously-and-easily accounted for, by steep descents, of ~4444fpm & ~11111fpm, according to my MS Excel model. Those values, even mere moments apart, are consistent with user-posted summaries of simulations, at about 6min after second-engine flameout, at about 20K feet, when the plane begins to plummet from the sky. Such a timing would be more consistent with the original estimate, of 3:40 for APU + SDU bootup, but there is no a priori reason to exclude the BFOs, unless one a priori desires to avoid a “high-speed end-of-flight crash in progress” scenario. According to the sims, the plane rams into the ground w/in 2min after descent rates reach 4000-12000fpm… completely consistent with the absence of expected IFE comm traffic a minute and a half after the logons.
And so, if you accept both BFOs from 00:19, one must then accept both BFOs from 18:25. At that time, the plane was rapidly approaching NILAM, on a heading of ~296deg (to get the first BFO of 141Hz)… a boost up +130Hz would require a steep climb, of ~5555fpm (according to my MS Excel model). BUT, a steep climb, coinciding with a waypoint, is perfectly plausible given the waypoints-nav mode of the a/c, and would naturally & obviously imply a “FLCH” flight-level-change up a couple of 2000′ steps. Might be hard to explain an increase in altitude of +(2-4)000 feet, when one might desire to see acting pilots trying to descend out of the emergency situation, but NILAM+FLCH up two or four thousand feet fits the data qualitatively well. If all one knew, was that some a/c reached NILAM on N571 NW towards India, and FLCH’d up several thousand feet, about 100min into a flight, when fuel usage warranted a higher optimum altitude (according to FCOM “Optimum Altitude” charts & tables), one would have no cause to arch eyebrows yet.
On second thought, “anomalous” BFOs aren’t so anomalous. The coincidence, of major vertical maneuvers, at beginning & ending of SatCom data, has very natural explanations, especially if SatCom bootup, perhaps due to “reverse shedding” of SDU when one/both IDGs were switched back on near MEKAR, was part of a pilot’s waypoints plan.
==========================================
Tangentially, I find that MS Excel models are improved, by first fitting the Inmarsat JoN satellite data (xyz, vxvyvz) with (4,6)th order polynomials (respectively) — note, using overwhelming numerical precision, at least 6 decimal places — and then using the “SERIESSUM(time,6,-1,{k6,k5,k4,k3,k2,k1,k0})” functions of clock-time. Plot the data, add a trendline, format the trendline to have 6+ decimals and no commas, and then copy-paste from the chart equation to the formula bar.
==========================================
The Inmarsat JoN article puts the aircraft very near waypoint ISBIX at 19:41. ANOKO-BEDAX-ISBIX explains the FMT “u-turn” around the northern tip of Indonesia using waypoints. And, if you fit the ghost-flight BTOs with a rough 2nd-order polynomial, and then overplot estimated BTOs to ANOKO around 18:36, BEDAX around 18:50, ISBIX around 19:30, you observe that those estimated BTOs agree well with the ghost-flight trendline.
“IMT” @ Igari
Kota Bharu
Penang
VAMPI
MEKAR
NILAM
ANOKO
BEDAX
ISBIX
would be a natural string of 8 waypoints to enter, to “buy time” of about an hour and a half, to let the plane fly itself towards legitimate landing sites, w/ large runways w/o large numbers of people or planes, whilst the pilots followed SOP and tried to troubleshoot problems & address issues aboard the craft.
Don’t know how to reconcile that w/ a FLCH @ NILAM, although perhaps the plane was losing altitude after MEKAR, so literally dropping off of radar, and the pilots regained control and increased altitude, or something vaguely like that.
@Brock. Thanks for all your hard work. I didn’t succeed in finding out the magnitude of the effect detected due to the Swissair crash near Halifax – did you? Earthquaketrack (detailing those 1.5 mag and higher) shows an earthquake in the Carlsberg Ridge area 7 Mar 2014 07:40 UTC, 4.9 mag.. I guess its fairly likely that the detection by Curtin Uni researchers was just from an aftershock. The fact that they didn’t detect anything generated in the current search area in the timeframe given by the ISAT data seems very relevant and almost a reason for abandoning the current search in order to reassess, especially with the atrocious conditions out there.
If this is a category c) event (Jeff’s list) then it may be totally intractable unless we get a whistle-blower 🙁 Right now we need full raw radar data etc. and full debris analysis from Malaysia and France.
@Greg Long – my mutterings really about typical DBA maintenance operations for extracting and rejoining SB records … Essentially I think they reconstructed mh370 flight path in a new DB after a few DBA transactions.
@JS
So if we have active piloting and we know Zaharie placed the last 2 calls, does that leave suicide as the only viable option? I still think he could have been trying to make a political statement and it was thwarted by either Malaysia or China, or both. It wouldn’t require a third party intermediary.
@Jeffwise
I have sent Gysbreght a long reply to his post of June 12, 2016 at 2:34 AM, but it is not getting through. Is there a “limit” to post size – length ? Do I have to break it into sections ?
@Gysbreght
(sorry for the delay in reply – different time zones – life issues draging me away from computer – etc)
You asked at Post June 12, 2016 at 2:34 AM
“Can you think of a reason that the recorded BTO’s of this flight would be flawed, and not that of the other flights that INMARSAT and DSTG
have independently examined ?”
Gysbreght, my worry is that the BTO’s are not as “solid” as most people seem to think.
In the ATSB report: MH370 – Definition of Underwater Search Areas (June 2014)
Page 31 Figure 30 ( MH021 07 March 2014 ), and page 32 ( MH009 07 March 2014) Figure 31, clearly state that analysis produced “cross track
errors” of 145 nm (270 km) and 200 nm 370 km) respectively.
Everyone seems to have “conviently forgotten” this.
We can not “discount” the “significance” of these results.
To me, they say, there is a “problem” with the “recorded BTO’s”.
“Sometimes” they line up with “actual” aircraft flight track data, and “sometimes” they do not.
The problem is, “why” the “sometimes” ?
There has been no explanation of this.
We need an answer to this problem.
Again, in the ATSB updated report: MH370 – Definition of Underwater Search Areas (December 2015)
The last to flights of 9M-MRO from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on 6th March, and the return flight, Beijing to Kuala Lumpur on 7th March are
modelled on page 4, in Figures 2 and 3 respectively.
Again, the “cross track errors” are substantial.
Clearly there is “a problem” with the recorded BTO’s.
Now, at the bottom of page 20 of the December 2015 update is this little “gem”:
Burst timing offset (BTO)
The communications corresponding to the burst timing offsets (BTO) used to determine the location arcs were transmitted on 2 communications
channels; the R1200 and the R600 channels.
The R1200 log-on acknowledgement BTO measurements that occurred at 18:25:34 and 00:19:37 were initially ignored due to an anomaly in the
values.
Instead, the R600 BTOs at 18:25:27 and at 00:19:29 were used to create the 1st and 7th arcs.
Because the R1200 BTO measurements were assessed as having a lower standard deviation, identifying the cause of the anomaly, in order to
possibly correct it, would improve the accuracy of the model.
An analysis of similar transmissions from the previous flight was conducted which identified a variable offset coefficient with a factor of
approximately 7820 µs (i.e. N*7820).
The manufacturers of the SDU and the ground station equipment were unable to determine a specific reason for the offset, however they did
note that the reference clock used for the time slots was 128 Hz, which equates to 7812.5 µs.
Note the last sentence. Read it again.
I still think that there is the possibility, that “clocking issues”, in the software of the AEs-SDU, or the GES equipment, or BOTH, may
result in “pushing the recorded “BTO bin” to the right”, ie, I think it introduces an “additional – unpredictable – time delay” into the
system, resulting in a longer time in the processing chain, before hitting the “record BTO point”.
Thus, a bigger BTO number is “recorded” than the “actual” BTO of the “signal in free space”.
Consequently, the “bias” that eveyone has accepted as “stable” is (in my opinion) “not stable” at all.
That is why I think we should be looking at modelling 20us “step reductions” in the BTO’s, both individually and collectively, to see if we
can get a more sensible and consistent model that lines up with the BFO’s.
Perhaps I will rephrase what I am thinking.
Up to this point, everyone has taken the BTO’s as gospel, and have struggled with “the rubbery BFO’s”.
But, “IF” the BTO’s are not gospel, that is hardly surprising.
So, let’s assume the BTO’s are “too big”, and run the models again, with incremental 20us reductions, first one reduction, then two, then
three, etc.
Moreover, since my proposed “additional – unpredictable – time delay” is “unpredictable”, you would have to model every combination of delay
at each ping time. Say you used five steps on the last five pings, that would give you a 5 x 5 = 25 combinations to model.
Thus, I think it is time for “the number crunchers” of this forum, to set to work, and either prove this idea has legs, or not.
Specifically, if the “number crunchers” could “tweak” their models and produce a set of these 25 arcs (ie, the 5 arcs for each 20us
reduction) for each ping time, we might be one step closer, to someone hitting the light-bulb moment, that generates the goal of “it all
fits now” !
What do you think Gysbreght ?
@Trip,
I am not ruling anything out, but suggesting that any hijacking, whether the intent was to send a message or to obtain something, would have logically involved a party outside of Malaysia’s influence.
If the goal was to make a political statement, it wasn’t successful. The way to make it successful is to involve outsiders. In the US, the outsiders are the press (theoretically). Globally, outsiders are either the local press or foreign press if the local press is not independent.
If no independent press was involved, I highly doubt a political statement was the goal, because it would have been clear at the outset that the statement would never be heard.
So, while you are correct, a third party isn’t required, without one it doesn’t make any sense.
I believe the cross-track errors you refer to must be attributed to the limited accuracy of the BFO data. They do not by themselves reflect on the accuracy of the BTO data.
RetiredF4,
Re “Greg, we are talking about an aircraft in the air (flying), not on the ground (rolling). A trimmed aircraft without any yaw input like assymetric thrust or rudder input flies directly into the relative wind, thus a vane is alligned with the fuselage, no slip present.”
Gysbreght has created another Achilles paradox, and you got trapped in it.
Imagine you are starting at point A(0E, 0N), where wind is zero. You are moving toward point B(0E, 1S), where WE cross-wind is 50 knots. According to you and Gysbreght, the relative lateral air velocity is always zero during cruise. Hence lateral drag force is zero. Hence moment is zero, meaning no rotation. Hence the aircraft does not need to compensate force and moment, and its respective control surfaces remain neutral. Hence the aircraft maintains its direction, and arrives to the point B, where cross-wind of 50 knots does not induce any drag. How could this be possible?
@Greg Long
On ground the wind cannot provoke an reaction on the airframe, as the friction of the tires wirh the ground resist the aerodynamic forces of the wind, just like it is in your car. or house. Therfore the example is not useable.
@all
Allow me to,explain it a last time with the hot air balloon. On the ground the wind acts on the hull and blows it out of the vertical position above the passenger basket, which is fixed to the ground. You release the basket from the ground and the basket and hull straighten out. The ballon basically becomes embedded in the airmass, has picked up the same speed as the airmass and thus the passengers do not feel any windblast at all.
Same happens with the aircraft. Once the wheels leave the ground the friction of the tires with the ground is gone and the aircraft becomes part of the air mass. In reference to the airmass (forget the ground for a moment) the aircraft moves only with its own speed vector (heading and true airspeed) within this air mass, no slip present at all, yaw string exactly centered. In reference to the ground the vector of the aircraft is the sum of aircraft and wind movement (track and groundspeed). But the string does not know anythjng about the ground, it only can detect slip within the surrounding air.
With a trimmed aircraft in coordinated flight turbulence and windshear can cause momentary uncommanded slip, which is random in time of occurance, duration and strength. You can feel it as a passenger, whereas you cannot feel the crosswind . You can feel noticable slip due to assymetric thrust after engine failure or a structural occurance, and this would be a factor for flight path calculations in the paper of Oleksandr, but not wind in itself.
An aircraft accelerating along the runway with a crosswind during takeoff has a tendency to wheathercock into wind. Without pilot intervention it would turn into wind and leave the runway over the side edge. The pilot has to conteract that tendency, at low speed with the nosewheel steering, and as soon as the rudder becomes effective at about 30 – 40 knots, with the rudder.
When the airplane lifts off and the wheels are no longer in contact with the runway, the pilot allows the rudder to go to the neutral position, the aircraft yaws into wind to zero sideslip, and the airplane continues to track the extended centerline of the runway with zero sideslip, the windvane on its nose aligned with the fuselage centerline, at a crab angle relative to ground.
@Rob
Thanks for answering. I still think they cann’t be from the same wing.
This could be significant for it would suggest the plane hit the water wings level.
Anyway we have to await confirmation and identification by the ATSB.
And since there seem to be only other topics going on now I’ll leave it for the time being.
@Oleksandr
In your example with an increase in wind a drift correction has to be applied to still get from point A to point B, because the airmass and thus the aircraft as well is moving due to wind. Does the wind change anything aerodynamically, disregarding the short period when bank is applied to initiate the drift correction? No, the true airspeed stays the same, fuel consumption /per hour stays the same, the aircraft is still in trim. What does change though after the drift correction was applied is ground speed and thus time enroute and fuel consumption for the specific leg.
If no drift correction is applied the aircraft will not reach Point B.
Simplified devide the wind into the head/tailwind component and the crosswind component. Head- tailwind component decreases or increases the groundspeed and thus changes the flighttime for the respective flight leg, while the crosswind component necessitates a change of the heading of the aircraft to correct for the drift and track from A to B still on the shortest distance over ground.
I recommend you forget all formulas at the moment and start with the basics, for example the AF manual 51-40. The following link provides a download pdf file of the manual on the right upper spot of the page. The effects of wind is detailed starting at page 5-17.
That way military pilots all over the world learned to understand the basics of dead reckoning and the effects of wind.
Sorry,
here is the link.
http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED082051
@ventus, If you post a comment with more than one link it has to be hand-approved. This is a WordPress anti-spam measure.
At any rate, you seem to have gotten tangled up a bit in the BTO question. The cross-track errors you refer to are not a result of uncertainty in the BTO measurements themselves but in the method of analysis used to derive unique tracks.
@Ge Rijn
Thanks.We will have to agree to disagree for the time being. I’m adamant I’m right, and you’re adamant you’re right.
I am more than happy to leave things like that for a while, my head hurts. I am suffering from “investigator’s fatigue” for want of a better term.
BTW I think that angular hole or slot in the underside of the Mozambique panel, close to its further edge, was caused by the flaperon’s outboard PCU arm. Not sure how this could have happened, because in my mind, I had the panels separating before the flaperon, not the other way around.
I’m still working on that one
@Erik Nelson, BFO errors are so large that it is futile to use them for trying to narrow down the path the aircraft flew, or to infer rate of climb or somesuch. All the BFO tell us is that the plane went south.
This was discovered after both independent and official investigators spent long months trying to carry out just the same sort of endeavor you are trying to do now. Like Ventus, you are trying to re-litigate an issue that was already exhaustively examined and settled. You are both on dead-end roads.
@all, All of a sudden people are popping out of the woodwork trying to reanalyse complex issues from scratch. This might be exciting if it seemed like they had significant contributions to make or even properly understood the issues at hand. Instead it feels like we’re suddenly being assaulted by fog machines. Are these new contributors misquided but earnest, or is their intent to twirl us into confusion?
Meanwhile, I’m deeply appreciative of the efforts of longtime contributors to settle serious issues like the identification of newly discovered debris. There is a lot of collective brainpower and technical expertise and work here, not to mention earnest collegiality, and I am very grateful.
@Oleksandr, Why are you still talking about this?
Re: discussions of AoA, if along the radar track MH370 was travelling at near-max speed, then its AoA = 0 ? And, if so, then it had no AoA to “shed” to reduce lift as fuel was used up, so could only have reduced speed, such that v(t) ~ sqrt(M(t)) and/or increased altitude ?
Obviously the a/c was flying on both engines all along the radar track, otherwise would have been flying much slower ??
@Oleksandr:
Apparently you’re not learning anything from the discussion here. I suggest you take a few flying lessons. Don’t argue with the instructor like you do here, or you risk being kicked out. Watch the demonstrations and listen to the explanation, if you want to learn anything.
Jeff Wise,
Re: “Why are you still talking about this?”
I am also asking myself “why”?
Time to move on.
@Jeffwise
Jeff, well said.
@Rob
Yes we’ll see what the ATSB has to say about it. If they work as fast as with the previous identified debris that won’t take too long I hope.
The sequence in what seperated first will surely be very interesting info.
I would assume the flaperon seperated first if it was lowered during a ‘ditching’ event and in the process the water forced through the gap between its leading edge and this panels seperated the panel(s).
All still very speculative though.
But if I’m right about the other ‘flaperon’ panel coming from the other wing (and I think I am;-) there might be a reasonable change the other flaperon is still lying (or floating) around somewhere.
We’ll have to wait and see.
Maybe better pictures from all sides of the Blain G. panel can shine some more light on the matter (still not available as far as I can see).
@Oleksandr, до свидания.
I believe the debris will be the most imporant key in changes of solving this mystery after the current seach effort gets canceled.
It will tell as eventualy in which attitude and angle the plane made contact with the water surface, at which speed and the forces involved.
It will tell most probably if there was an explosion inside or outside the plane or a fire (or both).
I believe it will also decisively anwser the question if the plane was under human control or not when it made contact with the water.
The more debris is found the more refined drift studies can be made to pin point a more probable and smaller search area.
I hope the experts will undertake them once again.
Together with the Inmarsat data, the results on the debris (also the bio-fauling) and updated drift studies it might be just enough and just in time to prolong the search effort.
@Oleksandr, please stay.
@jeffwise
This can be a humbling experience. It annoys the heck out of me when someone jumps in here with a presumption, having obviously invested no time reviewing previous subject matter, or they would know how repetitive it was. It seems disrespectful to those devoting vast amounts of their time to this.
I was guilty of that initially and now irritated at myself for doing it again by jumping on the “I know what happened”. If I feel there is any validity then I can try to chase it down on my own time and not clutter threads here.
@all
I saw a quip yesterday where a celebrity had received continually negative tweets from a fan and the response was; tell me again, why you are following me???
This seems
applicable to comments with obvious disdain of Jeff’s administration or the progression of the blog, when not balanced by any positive contribution.
@Greg Long, @Oleksandr, @RetiredF4, @all:
I would put it this way:
The Earth’s orbital speed around the Sun is 108,000 km/h, and the Sun’s orbital speed around the Galaxy is 720,000 km/h, now these orbital speeds have no effects on people or cars on the earth as we have the feet over the earth that is our referentiel. With my car parked somewhere on earth, I will not receive a speeding ticket for driving at a speed of 720,000 km/h around the sun. It’s the same for aircrafts that have their wings in the mass of air that is it’s referentiel, the movements of other referentiels have no effects on it. For an aircraft in flight, we have to consider that the air mass is fix and that the earth below it is moving away from it instead of the contrary, which in fact is the same thing. The referentiel where we are is always the “zero” point of reference. Hope it helps…