Here’s a link to the report broadcast today on Australian 60 Minutes about the search for MH370. Part 1:
Part 2:
Discussion after the jump…
The main thrust of the piece is that an independent air-crash expert, Larry Vance, has looked at photographs of the Réunion flaperon and decided that their relatively intact state, and the lack of debris from inside the aircraft, means that the plane must not have impacted the water at high speed, as would be expected if the plane ran out of fuel as a “ghost ship” and spiralled into the water. He interprets the jagged trailing edge of the flaperon as evidence that it was deployed at the moment of impact and was worn away when it struck the water.
I find it discomfiting when people say that the mystery of MH370 is not mystery at all–that they are absolutely confident they know the answer. Vance undercuts his credibility, I feel, by taking this stance. There is indeed a strong argument to be made that the plane must have been under conscious control to the very end; to me the most compelling is simply that the plane has not been found in the current seabed search zone. However it is less clear that someone attempted a ditching. What the show does not mention is that debris from inside the aircraft has indeed been found, suggesting that the fuselage could not have survived the impact and sunk to the bottom of the ocean intact. Indeed, the program doesn’t mention the other debris at all, with the exception of the Pemba flap, which is the other relatively intact large piece. The fact that most of the debris found so far is rather small is to me indicative of a higher-energy impact. But I have no strong opinion one way or the other; I feel that proper experts must look at the debris close up to determine what forces caused it to come apart.
The program cites the recently revealed flight-sim data from Zaharie’s computer as further evidence that the plane was deliberately piloted to fuel exhaustion and beyond. For the first time, the program showed on screen pages from the confidential Malaysian report. The producers of the show reached out to me as they were putting the program together, and asked me to comment on some of the data they had accumulated. Here are the pages of the document that they showed on-screen:
It’s worth noting that these pages offer a summary of the recovered flight-sim data which are described in greater detail and accuracy elsewhere in the confidential Malaysian documents. Here is a table showing a subset of what the documents contain:
Note that the numbering systems for the two data tables do not match. (Please do not ask me to explain this.) I suggest that for the purposes of discussion, the point saved at Kuala Lumpur International Airport be called point 1; the three points recorded as the flight-sim moved up the Malacca Strait to the Andaman Islands be called 2, 3, and 4; and the points over the southern Indian Ocean with fuel at zero be called points 5 and 6.
In order to understand the fuel load numbers in the second table, I made some calculations based on the fuel loads in a real 777-200ER. I don’t know how closely these match those in the flight simulator Zaharie was using. If anyone can shed light I’d be happy to hear it.
Worth noting, I think, is that the fuel difference between point 4 and point 5 is enough for more than 10 hours of flight under normal cruise conditions. The difference between these points is 3,400 nautical miles, for an average groundspeed of less than 340 knots. This is peculiar. Perhaps the flight-sim fuel burn rate is very inaccurate; perhaps the simulated route between the points was not a great circle, as shown in the second page of the report above, but indirect; perhaps Zaharie was fascinated by the idea of flying slowly; or perhaps points 5 & 6 come from a different simulated flight than 1 through 4. Readers’ thoughts welcome.
Also note that neither the locations nor the headings of points 1-4 lie exactly on a straight line from 1 to 4, which suggest perhaps that the route was hand-flown.
@ROB. 13.75 minutes APU time instead of 3.75 mins? Where do you get that from? Ref, please.
The ATSB states in its Report of 3 December 2015:
With two engines out the attitude of the airplane would have been much more nose-down (or the airplane would be decelerating, which has the same effect on the fuel level), the fuel in the tank would have moved forward where was not available to the APU. Probably the only fuel available was that contained in the fuel line, which would have allowed the APU to run a few minutes only.
@Gysbreght
Thank you for explaining it again. I knew you had posted previously, but I could remember the details.
@ROB,
I understood what you have been saying. My question may have been badly put, but it was simply this: the fuel doesn’t run out without there being ample warning signs for the crew. We have been over this extensively with Dennis W a while ago 😉 Couldn’t the pilot as soon as there would be warning signs have extended the flaps in anticipation of a planned ditch after a gliding stretch as long as there was still power? Or would the flaps not stay in their extended position once the power was gone for good? Or would extended flaps, as I suspect, seriously affect the plane’s gliding ability and thus seriously shorten the plane’s potential gliding reach?
@Get Rijn, as tempting as the Dordrecht Hole hypothesis is when one looks at the allegedly by Shah simulated track, I can’t see how the pilot could’ve reached the spot even if he crossed the 7th arc more to the Northeast. We have to assume that the plane run out of fuel by the time it reached the 7th arc – no matter where exactly that might’ve been. And the Dordrecht Hole looks unreachable to me no matter where exactly the plane reached the 7th arc. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t tried, of course.
@ROB @others
Only the logon to the IFE was not established at 0:19~.
That’s why they concluded the APU ran out of fuel at that time and the plane crashed shortly after.
I always wondered if there could be another reason for that failing IFE logon and I still do. Was it switched off after FMT? Circuit braker pulled? Any other reason?
I was told here the switching off of the IFE would have no effect on a logon request and anwser. Is this 100% positive?
Any other reason possible besides the APU running out of fuel?
@Ge Rijn
The ATSB says the IFE can be switched off at the overhead panel.
At least some passengers or crew were likely conscious after the first reboot. No messages were sent via the IFE, however.
But then you have to explain why the final handshake happenend in the first place. And to assume that the APU never started, otherwise you could expect another handshake.
@Littlefoot
That ~1 degree latitude would be easily overcome with a glide from ~32S to ~33S but those 4 degrees longitude from ~97E to ~101E would still be too far I agree.
Only reachable when the plane was still under power at the 7th arc.
But if it comes out definetely those flaps were extended I think we must assume a powered flight till the end and thus also to the Dordrecht Hole would still be a possibility IMO.
@Nederland
At 18:25 there was also a log on request although including the IFE log on.
The plane flew on after that request.
This log on is still unexplained but IMO it at least proves a log on request can occure during flight with the plane flying on under power.
So why not after the 0:19 log on request?
If the IFE was disabled could this be the reason why this log on to the IFE failed? And the plane just flew on after the 7th arc like it did after 18:25?
@Owen:
Here’s a quote from a Boeing spokesman in FlightGlobal magazine, 01-DEC-2006…
‘…Aside from the safety and security aspects of having such a system (Boeing Honeywell Remote Uninterruptible Autopilot), Boeing sees it as a preventative measure: “Once the automatic control system provided by the present invention is initiated, no one on board the air vehicle is capable controlling the flight to the air vehicle, such that it would be useless for anyone to threaten violence in order to gain control the air vehicle.”…
Food for thought.
@Ge Rijn, reasons for the failure to complete the log-on besides the APU running out of fuel?
a) the plane crashed before the log-on could be completed.
b) the SDU got disconnected again – by whatever means – before the log-on could be completed. Without SDU no log-on.
c) any other ideas?
We have discussed the second option in connection with Northern landing scenarios, because it’s highly unlikely in a landing scenario that the pilot cut it so fine that the plane ran out of fuel immediately after touch-down, or that the plane glided to the airport after having run out of fuel. But the last BFOs and the log-on request needed an adequate explanation. We therefore discussed if the pilot simulated a fuel-out scenario by disconnecting the SDU, then reconnecting it in order to trigger the log-on request, and then finally disconnecting it again in order to complete the illusion of a plane which had run out of fuel. Theoretically it’s absolutely possible to do that, and such an activity could’ve produced the observed BFOs in a Northern landing scenario. Victor even observed that one BFO would be compatible with a stationary plane in a Northern scenario. Now, of course the same could theoretically have happened in a SIO scenario: the pilot only simulated a fuel-out scenario while in reality he still had a bit more left and he flew the rest of his journey in complete dark mode – much like the stretch over the Malaysian peninsula and up the Strait before the SDU came back to life. But while it wasn’t unreasonable to assume that our sophisticated perps of all Northern spoofing scenarios understood the pings and the BFOs well enough for conceiving such a final deception, it’s highly unlikely that a pilot who took the plane into the SIO had the same kind of in-debth understanding of what kind of sat data would be created when the plane ran out of fuel and how to fake them. Therefore I would assume that if the plane really kept flying for a while after it had crossed the 7th arc it must’ve been gliding without fuel.
Found the article on FlightGlobal website!
https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/diagrams-boeing-patents-anti-terrorism-auto-land-system-for-hijacked-210869/
Quite a bit of detail about what the system can do.
@ventrus45, @Boris T
Has anybody read this article regarding
Boeing-Honeywell Uninterruptible Autopilot?
http://www.abeldanger.net/2014/07/churchills-red-switch-grandsons-and_4080.html
Any comments on its veracity would be appreciated.
Cheers Tom L
@Ge Rijn
The ATSB acknowledged in their report in December 2015 for the first time:
“The fact that the expected IFE system transmission was not received could be due to:
• the IFE system being selected off from the cockpit overhead panel at some point after the 18:25 logon”
etc. (p. 10)
In any hijacking/suicide scenario, it is reasonable to assume that the hijacker was interested in shutting down communication from the cabin.
The lack of any handshake after 0:19 could simply mean the engines kept on running until the plane ditched and the APU therefore never started.
The handshake/reboot at 0:19 itself could be explained similarly to the first reboot.
That would mean the aircraft had a significantly higher range than assumed.
@Jeff, would it be possible to split the Forum into a fact-based and a wildly-speculative part?
It has long been a problem for followers to separate the gems from the crap, but currently even more so.
@littlefoot
Fine, I’ll have another go at answering your question in an hour or so. Have to make a trip to Sainsburys. Mundane things sometime take precedence:)
@Littlefoot
As I understood it a log-on request to the IFE was made but not anwsered in that 0:19 log-on sequence.
If the IFE was switched of or disabled otherwise would it have been able to anwser that log-on request?
If not, could that mean it was a complete SDU log-on sequence only without the IFE anwsering and the plane flying on after the 7th arc? The last message from the plane was a ‘log-on acknowledement’ at 0:19.37.
So then the last message was a ‘responding’ message from the plane.
At 01:15 the next log-on request was expected but that never came.
I try to argue why the plane should have had a power failure and APU start to trigger that 0:19 log-on request while this wasn’t neseccary with the log-on request at 18:25.
About that log-on request at 18:25 we concluded here some time ago it must have been triggered by human intervention. So you can assume someone on the plane knew how to perform this.
And if someone could do it at 18:25 I see no reason why someone could not pull the same trick at 0:19 but then with a disabled IFE.
Thoughts and arguments are welcome offcourse.
@Ge Rijn, I don’t think it can be technically excluded that the last set of sat data could’ve been triggered by human intervention from the cockpit rather than fuel-outage and subsequent APU activity. We discussed it after all at length in the context of Northern landing scenarios. I just don’t know if it’s very likely in a SIO scenario, since the timing of the last pings is roughly consistent with the time when fuel outage would be expected anyway. Therefore it would be my favorite hypothesis.
In order to assume that this set of sat data was triggered by a deliberate action from someone in the cockpit rather than by fuel outage we would need to come up with a good reason for such an action.
@littlefoot, A deliberate SDU reboot for the purpose of confusing investigators after the fact makes sense in a northern scenario, because such a scenario presumes that the perpetrators understood how the SDU works and how the Inmarsat data would be interpreted. If the plane went south, it’s very unlikely that the perpetrator even knew what an SDU was. Therefore whatever caused the 0:19 re-logon must have been “innocent” in nature, that is to say it was not carried out deliberately.
Looks like the glide/ditch vs uncontrolled ditch/ high impact debate will not cease:
PUTRAJAYA: There is no proof to back a claim that Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was deliberately crashed into the sea, said Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai.
He said the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which is leading the underwater search for MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean, came out with a theory that the plane was in an “uncontrolled ditch”.
“This will negate the ‘controlled ditch’ theory published recently,” he said, referring to reports quoting an air crash investigator that MH370 was deliberately crashed into the sea.
This was based on the erosion on the edges of recovered wing parts.
The reports suggested that the flaperon could only be extended by a pilot in full control of his plane.
On the home flight simulator owned by MH370 pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, Liow said the flight path to the southern Indian Ocean recovered from the simulator was just one of thousand routes found on it.
“There is no evidence to prove that Captain Zaharie piloted the plane to that area. The simulator was used by the pilot for trial and error in many areas. There are thousands of simulations to many destinations.
“Yes, there is simulation showing it flew to many parts of the world and it (southern Indian Ocean) is one of many. We cannot base on that to confirm,” he told reporters after attending the Ministry of Transport monthly assembly here today.
Flight MH370, carrying 239 passengers and crew, disappeared from radar shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing on March 8, 2014.
The plane has not been found despite a massive search operation in the southern Indian Ocean where it was believed to have ended its flight after diverting from its original route.
On July 22, Malaysia, China and Australia agreed to suspend, but not terminate the search for flight MH370 upon completion of the priority 120,000 square kilometre search area, which may be wrapped up between October and December.
On the flaperon found at La Reunion Island in July last year, Liow said French authorities insisted they wanted to hold on to it for court evidence.
“At the same time, French authorities are still conducting investigations and further verification of the flaperon pending some documentation and information from several authorities, including Boeing,” he added.
“The French authorities exercise their rights to hold on to the flaperon, but we want it to be returned to Malaysia,” he said, adding there was no timeline set for the French authorities to return the flaperon.
http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2016/08/04/liow-no-proof-mh370-deliberately-crashed-into-sea/
Just a passing note, I guess the link below is one of the few flights that survived unretracted landing gear issues albeit on land:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapag-Lloyd_Flight_3378
@Jeff, in principle I absolutely agree. In a Northern scenario such adecptive action made sense. In a SIO scenario it’s a different story.
That said, I think we should make the allowance that in a preconceived and fine-tuned SIO scenario the pilot might’ve known much more than we would normally expect from a pilot – even if he was a captain.
Correction: the word “adecptive” doesn’t exist. I wanted to say ” deceptive”
🙂
@Jeff, when I was talking about a deliberate action coming from the cockpit, I wasn’t talking about a deliberate deceptive action but just about the possibility of a willful action executed for some reason – and this action happened to trigger the last set of set data.
While Captain Chester Sully Sullenberger is rightly acclaimed for the “miracle on the Hudson” I think Captain Pearson would have equally been acclaimed for his glide abilities in the Gimli Glider incident:
is kind of power failure. With the 767, this is usually achieved through the automated deployment of a ram air turbine, a hydraulic pump (and on some airplanes a generator) driven by a small turbine, which is driven by a propeller that rotates because of the forward motion of the aircraft in the manner of a windmill.[7] As the Gimli pilots were to experience on their landing approach, a decrease in this forward speed means a decrease in the power available to control the aircraft.
Landing at Gimli Edit
In line with their planned diversion to Winnipeg, the pilots were already descending through 35,000 feet (11,000 m)[3] when the second engine shut down. They immediately searched their emergency checklist for the section on flying the aircraft with both engines out, only to find that no such section existed.[4] Captain Pearson was an experienced glider pilot, so he was familiar with flying techniques almost never used in commercial flight. To have the maximum range and therefore the largest choice of possible landing sites, he needed to fly the 767 at the optimal glide speed. Making his best guess as to this speed for the 767, he flew the aircraft at 220 knots (410 km/h; 250 mph). First Officer Maurice Quintal began to calculate whether they could reach Winnipeg. He used the altitude from one of the mechanical backup instruments, while the distance travelled was supplied by the air traffic controllers in Winnipeg, measuring the distance the aircraft’s echo moved on their radar screens. In 10 nautical miles (19 km; 12 mi) the aircraft lost 5,000 feet (1,500 m), giving a glide ratio of approximately 12:1………….
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
Maybe the feat of both captains may have served as inspiration for some.
@all,
May I recommend to re-read Jeff’s article from 03/27/2014 plus comments from first page?
Link below:
http://www.jeffwise.net/2014/03/27/why-did-australia-change-the-search-area/comment-page-1/
Interestingly the discussion is still or again somewhat relevant. While I made way too many comments – as I remember welI was in bed with a bad flue and beginning pneumonia, though, and had nothing etter to do 😉 – some dialog is interesting. We discussed for example the possibility of getting lost in the Diamantina Trench, and if it even makes sense to assume distinct destinations in a fuel-outage scenario.
@Wazir Roslan,
Thank you for the Gimli Glider story – which has btw no connection to the Lord-of-the-Rings saga. But it became nevertheless one of my favorite aviation adventures.
There is a “Mayday” episode on YouTube which covers that story. It’s so satisfying because it ends well.
Ok, enough and I’m off for today.
@littlefoot
Thanks and nice to have you back. Just thought that Captain Shah may have known of the Gimli Glider when he was in flight school back then. But more pertinently the description itself is replete with references to what may happen to flaps during fuel exhaustion. Thought that might be relevant here too.
@Littlefoot
The flaps would only have been extended on the approach, as with a normal landing. the increased drag of extended flaps has to be compensated for by increasing engine thrust, otherwise the plane slows and the sink rate increases, neither of which are desirable during an unpowered glide. Once the flaps are extended, they will stay that way if hydraulic pressure is lost, for example, if the APU fails.
Does that help?
@All
Re the IFE logon question. As others have pointed out, there are a number of possible reasons why the IFE logon was not transmitted at 00:19 plus 90saes. I think the reason was due to the Seat Power/IFE switch being set to off, and kept that way, shortly after the first 18:25 logon sequence.
Regarding the Emirates crash, which the airline operations people are already suggesting was caused by radical wind conditions and an attempted fly around. Such a difference in approach and transparency and, of course, desire for cooperation. From today’s WSJ:
“Aviation authorities in the United Arab Emirates, where Dubai is located, said they would lead up an investigation into the accident alongside representatives of the U.S., where the plane was manufactured, and the U.K., where its engines were built.
“Boeing and Rolls-Royce, the engine-maker, would also act as advisers in the investigation, the U.A.E.’s General Civil Aviation Authority said in a statement.
“Work was under way to recover the plane’s flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, which would be sent to a lab in nearby Abu Dhabi for analysis, it said, adding that the wreckage would be moved to a secure location. A preliminary report is expected within a month.”
@Jeff Kudos to you for writing about a subject that many do not want to discuss.
I am fed up of reading many people say “Captain Zaharie was a nice man with a lovely family. He helped such and such and was a kind hearted man” The majority of those who say this do not personally know him and have never met him. It astounds me how many people can draw conclusions about the type of person who commits suicide.
My aunt was married with 3 children, had a successful career and never appeared to have a care in the world. Always a smile on her face and never said a bad word about anyone or anything. When she wasn’t at work she spent her time feeding the homeless and raising money to pay for those daily hot meals.
5 years ago she got the children ready for school, dropped them at school and then headed for her shift at the hospital. On the way she stopped the car on a bridge which went over a busy motorway, she turned the engine off, locked the car and jumped off the bridge to meet her death.
None of her family would have believed that my aunty was capable of committing suicide and taking the lifes of other motorists that was travelling on the motorway that morning.
None of know know what the Captain was state of mind was, and I would be very surprised if any of his family did. Just because we may appear content, charitable, helpful and compassionate to those less fortunate does not mean that on the inside we feel the same.
I fully believe that only we personally know how we feel.
Is Captain Zaharie capable? Of course he was. Each and everyone of us is capable of taking our life if we really wanted to.
To add to the ”Zaharies mental state” discussion.
Take a look at this picture.
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02846/captain-malaysia_2846914b.jpg
I see the face of a man with severe depression. The smile and the position of head is not normal.
There is a clear ”sneakiness” to his posture.
@All
Liow Tong Lai has just stated that there is no evidence Shah deliberately crashed the plane. “The ATSB’s stance is that the plane was unpiloted when it crashed” or words to that effect.
“And they are unanimous in that” is what he wanted to add. Clearly, the Malaysian authorities are putting pressure on the ATSB, to tow the line. In this situation, is there any hope the truth will come out? Doesn’t seem like it to me. The Malaysians are maintaining their iron grip. Nevertheless, the World will read between the lines.
@ir1907 – we need the context of why his posture and smirk before associating to a supposed plan to make mh370 disappear.
@ROB
That is something of a surprise. So back to square one in a sense.
Well, for my own concern, I will take the guess that this will remain a mistery for many years. Not to point in any one specific direction, but it feels like that it will be hard to eventually get to the bottom of this. And the cat will be in the box.
The hope will be that something unexpected will surface somewhere.
Thanks for all the sharing, and good luck and god bless.
I have a request :
I need the route (all waypoints) of MH370 on 21st February 2014 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Additionally a list of all Malaysian Airlines flights departured from Kuala Lumpur on that day.
“The ATSB’s stance is that the plane was unpiloted when it crashed”
Mine as well.
For those who likes to read into people’s mind and psyche do it to the western neocon politicians. You know the powerhungry, mad, warmongerers who thinks they are better than everbody else, and will lie, steal, cheat and condition you to have their will imposed.
I believe the flight ended with an inverted, near-vertical, VNE+ suicide dive in the clean configuration, with the flaperon & flap pieces having their trailing edges ripped up and eventually detaching from the wing because of FLUTTER, leaving the inexplicably pristine leading edge we’ve all seen. I believe the speed of impact has generally limited the ensuing debris to “smithereen” size, making it indistinguishable from anything else washing ashore, thereby putting to bed the “where’s the debris?” question. It was, after all, 10 full days before even the first aircraft reached the current search area, which we now know to be wrong.
I believe the engines would have detached during a controlled ditching, damaging the flaperon far more than the one we all know, and therefore invalidating that theory. Under this theory, one is also suggesting that Zaharie chose a slow, awful death from drowning rather than an instantaneous death, which I can’t process from a psychological perspective.
The fact that the only two identifiable items found have BOTH been CONTROL SURFACES isn’t a coincidence, as they are always the most likely surfaces to detach from an subsonic airframe during a supersonic dive.
Having flight-modeled the entire Boeing line for X-plane in the early-2000s, I would urge everyone to ignore the fuel data from the sim outputs. We expended tremendous energy nailing range & fuel flow in our sim planes and MS flight sim – using LUTs alone – cannot accurately model fuel consumption over long distances using natural-log decay, as X-Plane does and the way one must in a plane that gets hundreds of thousands of pounds lighter as it flies.
I believe a new search should be conducted where the final sim path (which I found in Google Earth to be about 168 true) intersects the 7th arc. The site is quite close to the Diamantina trench which, I have to guess, would have been his final objective.
“Liow Tong Lai has just stated that there is no evidence Shah deliberately crashed the plane. “The ATSB’s stance is that the plane was unpiloted when it crashed” or words to that effect. ”
Liow Tong Lai is correct. There is no evidence that Shah deliberately crashed the plane. On the other hand, there is evidence that he didn’t.
The ATSB stance that the airplane was unpiloted when it crashed is a matter of convenience, because otherwise the search area would be so large as to render a search impracticable.
Larry Vance didn’t say that “Shah deliberately crashed the plane”. He believes that someone was at the controls when it crashed, that is all.
Lots of confusion in many people’s minds.
@Gysbreght
“Lots of confusion in many people’ minds” You are right on that, at least.
The question is: Vance is saying controlled ditch proved by the water erosion damage on the recovered flap, but 2 things potentially “wrong” with his argument: (1) he is not explaining the interior parts such as the seat back which suggests hard landing per Blaine Gibson…last I knew Gibson thought that showed a hard landing, and (2) hard to explain flap control when out of fuel.
On the latter point, aren’t they saying one engine would run out of fuel first? So one remaining engine could give hydraulic power?
@ROB, thanks, your clarification helps. Extending the flaps before the pilot was ready to make the approach but as long as he still had some fuel won’t make any sense.
I think the discussion about a piloted or unpiloted flight after FMT and the reasoning about is a bit weird.
Normally no one will assume a flight will suddenly change somewhere on route from a piloted in an unpiloted one.
Unless you would have absolute certainty about that like flying next to it and see for yourself like they did with the Helios flight.
I think it’s strange someone ever declared the flight was unpiloted after FMT and so many picked up on this without no evidence or obvious indication at all, while it’s far more logic to think the flight was piloted till the end.
Just as any flight (except Helios).
Now many try to prove the obvious and normal happened; an all piloted flight. While this is not nesecarry and logic at all.
If you want to think the flight was unpiloted after FMT you will have to prove that. You’ll have to prove the abnormal not the normal.
And while this cann’t be proven and there is not any obvious reason or indication to it you’ll have to accept the most logic, obvious and normal situation happened:
the flight was piloted also after FMT till the end.
It’s maybe a bit unclear what I mean to say.
It’s in short: when someone tells me the sky is green I don’t have to prove to him the sky is blue. That person has to prove the sky is green not only to me but to everyone.
@ Tom L Its a great read and makes more sense of the facts as known about the Malaysian flight . Would not agree on everything outlined in the article as to motive but it has a lot of technical information on the history of remote controlled flight that make the possibility of MH370 being abducted by external control feasible .
@Ge Rijn
According to Rayleigh scattering there is a little green, but the color that gets most often absorbed is the blue color.
Also the Sun isn’t yellow, red or orange. It is white.
@Ge Rijn
Pretty much all flights, piloted (normal), end up at their destinations or diversions.
Another category of flights, piloted (hijacking), land at not their
intended destinations or not their intended diversions, but numerically overwhelmingly end at a known place, nearly always by landing.
Another category of flights, unpiloted, numerically overwhemingly end
up crashing on land or at sea. (Where the crash site is known, it is
usually near the estimated exhaustion point of the aircraft fuel.)
9M-MRO (end point) has not been found after all this time and given all
the circumstances known about it, it is rational to consider hijacking
as cause, and it is rational AND also numerically probable to consider
unpiloted as cause.
(Some here would argue a subset of hijacking WITH some latter aspect of unpiloted.)
Therefore, we are considering an event which was ‘abnormal’, but for
which most of the known circumstances fall within the parameters of a
set of known events – ‘unpiloted flight’.
(I do not intend to engage in a back and forth about the cirumstances,
I merely let the above speak for itself.)
@buyerninety
I don’t intend to back and forth either.
I guess what I mean speaks for itself too.
One thing; with unpiloted I don’t mean all those crashes on sea and land where the pilot had no control over the plane anymore, commited suicide or had fuel exhaustion.
I regard those planes as piloted too. There was a consious pilot behind the controls.
Unpiloted to me is unconsious or dead pilots behind the controls or a remotely controlled plane.
While MH370 was clearly flown by a consious pilot till FMT there is no reason or prove at all to assume the flight after FMT changed into a unpiloted flight.
The one who declares this unlogical statement without any prove or obvious indication has to prove it.
Not the other way around; the one who declares the most obvious and logical.
@Ge Rijn
I am totally with you on this one, and my history of participation goes back to the very beginning. The post FMT AP flight dynamics (pick a mode, many have been used) go back to the very early post event days when it was discovered that a constant speed and heading route satisfied the ISAT data very well. This became the default Occam’s Razor assumption. Not a horrible assumption, but it certainly cannot be used to exclude other more actively piloted flight paths. The IG and SSWG did not see it that way at all. Alternative flight paths were rejected with the vigor of alien abduction theory rejection today. Likewise motive was considered a “taboo” subject not worthy of analysts consideration. That was something for a Glock carrying moron to worry about, not someone who could do matrix algebra and delve into the intricacies of BFO. Those were heady days. indeed.
How times have changed with the absence of wreckage from the underwater search, and the discovery of debris (and the lack of debris) in places inconsistent with the primary search area. The “mainstream” scientific community has had (for the most part) to utter a collective “oops”. The dive bomber terminal dynamics suggested by the 00:19 BFO are now also coming under fire based on the condition of the recovered debris.
Interesting to be and to have been a part of what amounts to the biggest misuse of analytical boundary conditions since people were convinced that the earth was flat. I cannot even think of anything to compare it to since then.
@Jeff Wise
What if the suicidal pilot wanted one final thrill before dying and flew the last stretch just above the wavetops at full speed ‘Firefox’ style, then finally nosed into the ocean (somewhere along Broken Ridge) at very high speed and very shallow angle?
Call it a ‘Full Speed Ditch’ if you like.
Wouldn’t you expect the resulting wreckage to differ significantly from both the steep, high speed vertical dive, and the low speed controlled ditch attempt scenarios?
Initial contact could tear off an engine, a wing, or the entire belly, possibly resulting in some kind of cartwheel situation where some high-side components (like a flaperon) might be flung away from the wreck relatively intact as opposed to the total obliteration you would expect in a high speed vertical dive impact.
The pilot would also certainly expect to be killed instantly in such a crash, and the plane itself to be utterly destroyed assuming that was his intent, so no fear of that slow miserable death by drowning as with a controlled ditch scenario.
@TBill
It’s unfortunate that Vance really brought little new to this discussion. Both his OZ 60minute statement and the MSN clip cover the same points in nearly the same words, and to me, suggest that he pretty well made his judgment of a low speed ditch from pix of the Reunion flaperon — specifically the condition of the trailing edge. He may well be right in this, but he hasn’t raised anything novel. And surely it would require hands-on examination of all surfaces of the flaperon AND the Pemba flap to reach a definitive judgment [or find that this, too, is underdetermined].
And Vance just doesn’t seem to be aware of all the other debris, or he may vaguely know that some has been found but hasn’t checked just what. That’s where a prepared interviewer would have been helpful — to show him some of what has been found, and ask how that might be consistent with a more or less violent ditch.
Finally — and this may be unfair, given my own advanced age — I wonder if Vance is still active, or has seen much of the current generation of jets, or has worked on debris fields far from land. In the MSN interview, he says that it’s telling that we haven’t found anything from the interior [I think he hedges a little here], and that if the hull was breached, we’d expect seat cushions, etc, rather than the “less buoyant” control surfaces. What we see in the recovered debris is that much of the composite structural material is buoyant and capable of floating for years. Not sure if the seat cushions are intact that long??
In the end, whether piloted or not at the end, it’s very likely that the secrets of MH370 will remain on the Indian Ocean floor.