In last month’s New York magazine article about Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s flight simulator, I cautioned against treating the recovered data as a smoking gun:
…it’s not entirely clear that the recovered flight-simulator data is conclusive. The differences between the simulated and actual flights are significant, most notably in the final direction in which they were heading. It’s possible that their overall similarities are coincidental — that Zaharie didn’t intend his simulator flight as a practice run but had merely decided to fly someplace unusual.
What I failed to question was the report’s assumption that the six points all belonged to a single flight path. On closer examination that assumption seems ill supported. Rather, it seems more likely that the six points were recorded in the course of two or possibly three separate flights. They were interpreted as comprising a single flight only because together they resembled what investigators were hoping to find.
The first four points do appear to show a snapshots from a continuous flight, one that takes off from Kuala Lumpur and climbing as it heads to the northwest. Between each point the fuel remaining decreases by a plausible amount. Each point is separated from the next by a distance of 70 to 360 nautical miles. At the fourth point, the plane is at cruise speed and altitude, heading southwest in a turn to the left. Its direction of flight is toward southern India.
The fifth and sixth points do not fit into the pattern of the first four. For one thing, they are located more than 3,000 miles away to the southeast. This is six or seven hours’ flying time. Curiously, at both points the fuel tanks are empty. Based on its fuel load during the first four points, the plane could have flown for 10 hours or more from the fourth point before running out of fuel.
The fifth and sixth points are close together—just 3.6 nautical miles apart—but so radically different in altitude that it is questionable whether they were generated by the same flight. To go directly from one to the other would require a dive so steep that it would risk tearing the aircraft apart.
The picture becomes even more curious when we examine the plane’s vertical speed at these two points: in each case, it is climbing, despite having no engine power.
The ATSB has speculated that in real life MH370 ran out of fuel shortly before 0:19 on March 8, and thereafter entered into a series of uncontrolled porpoising dives-and-climbs called phugoids. In essence, a plane that is not held steady by a pilot or autopilot, its nose might dip, causing it to speed up. The added speed willl cause the nose to rise, and the plane to climb, which will bleed off speed; as the plane slows, its nose will fall, and the cycle will continue.
Could a phugoid cause a plane to climb—663 feet per minute at point 5, and 2029 feet per minute at point 6? The answer seems to be yes for the fifth point and no for the sixth. Reader Gysbreght conducted an analysis of 777 flight-simulator data published by Mike Exner, in which an airliner was allowed to descend out of control from cruise altitude in the manner that the ATSB believes MH370 did.
A diagram produced by Gysbreght is shown at top. The pink line shows the plane’s altitude, starting at 35,000 feet; the blue line shows its rate of climb. Worth noting is the fact that the phugoid oscillation does indeed cause the plane to exhibit a small positive rate of climb soon at first. But by the time the plane reaches 4000 feet — the altitude of the sixth point — the oscillation has effectively ceased and the plane is in a very steep dive.
Gysbreght concludes:
As expected for a phugoid, the average rate of descent is about 2500 fpm, and it oscillates around that value by +/- 2500 fpm initially. The phugoid is apparently dampened and the amplitude reduces rapidly. I was slightly surprised that it reaches positive climb values at all. Therefore I think that 2000 fpm climb is not the result of phugoid motion.
Not only is the plane climbing briskly at the sixth point, but it is doing so at a very low airspeed—just above stall speed, in fact. If the pilot were flying level at this speed without engine power and pulled back on the controls, he would not climb at 2000 feet per minute; he would stall and plummet. In order to generate these values, the plane must have been put into a dive to gain speed, then pulled up into a vigorous “zoom climb.” Within seconds after point six, the simulated flight’s speed would have bled off to below stall speed and entered into an uncontrollable plunge.
Perhaps this is why Zaharie chose to record this particular point: it would have been an interesting challenge to try to recover from such a plunge at low altitude.
What he was doing at points 5 and 6, evidently, was testing the 777 flight envelope. This might seem like a reckless practice, but I think the opposite is the case. From time to time, airline pilots do find themselves in unexpected and dangerous conditions. For instance, as Gysbreght has noted, “On 7 october 2008 VH-QPA, an A330-303, operating flight QF72 from Singapore to Perth, experienced an In-flight Upset west of Learmonth, West Australia. The upset was caused by a freak combination of an instrumentation failure and an error in the flight control software, which resulted in an uncommanded pitch-down. The vertical acceleration changed in 1.8 seconds from +1 g to -0.8 g.” It would be better to experience a situation like this for the first time in a flight simulator in one’s basement, rather than in midair with a load of passengers and crew.
What Zaharie clearly was not trying to do was to fly to McMurdo Station in Antarctica, as some have speculated.
For one thing, while a 777 is fully capable of flying from Kuala Lumpur to Antarctica, it was not carrying enough at point 1 to make the trip. And if one were trying to reach a distant location, one would not do so by running one’s tanks dry and then performing unpowered zoom climbs.
The misinterpretation of the flight simulator data offers a couple of cautionary lessons. The first is that we have to be careful not to let a favored theory color our interpretation of the data. The investigators believed that MH370 flew up the Malacca Strait and wound up in the southern Indian Ocean, and they believed that Zaharie was most likely the culprit; therefore, when they found data points on his hard drive that could be lumped together to form such a route, that’s what they perceived.
A second lesson is that we cannot uncritically accept the analysis made by officials or by self-described experts. Science operates on openness. If someone offers an analysis, but refuses to share the underlying data, we should instinctively view their claims with suspicion.
Thank you so much Dennis, crafting that response must have taken a bit of thought and time (on Labor Day weekend no less). It really is appreciated, and now that I’ve been immersing myself into the research, I understood everything you just wrote.
Ultimately I have gained so much respect for the difficult analysis you all put in for these discussions. Remarkable.
Thanks for helping.
– B
@Jeff: with the suggestion that we stick to facts, I could not agree more. I’m so anxious to stick to them that I’ll ignore the delicious irony of this conversation.
Which is why I’d asked for you to remind me of the actual text of the post you excised – which, like all my previous posts, reflected my keen desire to get at the real facts of this case (digressing only to applaud & amplify Matt’s critique). But never mind – I’ll politely abide by your decision not to e-mail get it to me.
Moving on…
I’d like to “stick to the facts” regarding the flaperon’s serial number cross-checks. You claim Florence’s “only 1 of 12 matched (with the one being handwritten…)” reporting was off, citing secret evidence. Can we see this evidence? The chances it could “unravel under inspection” seem to exceed zero.
@DennisW,
You are correct. I should have listed the auto-pilot assumption. Without that, the aircraft could be anywhere on the 7th arc within a rather large maximum range. Searching that huge area is an unaffordably large task, which is one of the reasons why the ATSB made the same auto-pilot assumption so the search task was affordable.
You are welcome, Billy. I did not bother to describe satellite motion which is the same relative to Perth no matter what route the aircraft flies. The satellite motion relative to the aircraft is, of course, route dependent. Likewise the offset of the system (whole oscillator chain) deviation from zero offset is significant, but it is regarded as a fixed value over the flight time. It does vary, but we have no independent way to measure it in the case of the MH370 flight.
BTW, I am an EMT simply sitting around reading and playing on the computer while waiting for the pager to go off. Holiday weekends are not a particularly happy time for me.
@DrB
Yes, the task is formidable enough even using the AP constraint.
Here are some reads for your Labour weekend.
Mostly for keeping the brains alert. Not necessarily on target or factually correct.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2015/03/25/Pilot-left-alone-in-cockpit-highly-unusual-expert-says/5951427275162/
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/16/us/egyptair-pilot-sought-revenge-by-crashing-co-worker-said.html
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2014/03/20/malaysia-airlines-pilot-interested-in-atheism-attacked-government-on-facebook/
Please notice when published.
This U.S. 1987 incident is a “favourite”, most here will know if it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1771
@Brock McEwen:
Yes, their is a whole stinking heap of evidence and innuendo, but separating fact from fiction is a time consuming and difficult job. I’m reasonably confident up to IGARI, as too many people/systems involved to effectively hide changes to MH370 route. IMO after this point any evidence could be fudged/changed/forged to support the outcome that those involved in a cover-up want the public and non-involved governments to believe.
However, all is not lost regarding getting at least an idea of what happened, although details of the actors and their motives may never be aired. Small slips and contradictions are bound to happen when executing even the most carefully prepared plan. Human error and the unforeseen witnesses and unconsidered consequences will always occur. We all need to keep looking for tiny signs which will point us in the right direction.
RetiredF4,
“…there is no indication at all for a landing attempt, for a preparation to land, for communications attempt, or for attempt to communicate the desasterous state – an emergency like some assume— to ATC and everybody monitoring emergency frequency by means of ELT activation.”
One ELT was mobile with attached antenna, all inside of the cabin, so it could not work. The second ELT could be activated manually from the cockpit, but in my understanding its antenna is located in the tail section. Hence again cabling issue: if cable was damaged, it would not work.
That is why I emphasise that the probability of a technical failure in this case largely depends on cable routing behind the cockpit.
Just imagine a situation: you are piloting B777. Suddently: the left bus is depowered, radios and SDU do not work due to cut cabling and loss of the power of the left bus, you can’t dump fuel because jettison pumps do not work, ADIRU failed so that most of the AP functions are not available.
What would you do in such a situation?
@all
london march for europe… but its also EUs fault that they are heading out; thanks, RT
https://www.rt.com/on-air/358134-march-europe-london-brexit/
@Oleksandr, There have been a lot of planes lost to accident/malfunction/fire, etc, none of them look remotely like MH370. You state that the lost of comms could be due to cabling issues–what you fail to understand is that the 777 is robust and multiply redundant and there is simply no set of circumstances in which some catastrophic event could take out all the functionalities that we know the plane lost, yet leave behind all the ones that we know it had, including the ability to re-logon to Inmarsat, satellite telephony, navigate, etc. So this mysterious accident had to both be catastrophically crippling and yet totally harmless at the same time. And to happen very quickly, and at exactly the right time (six seconds after IGARI) that coincidentally would be the perfect place to disappear.
For me the bottom line is that in order to move forward, you have to leave behind possibilities that can safely be ruled out, and so for the purposes of this blog I’m going to press on with the understanding the disappearance of MH370 was not caused by an accident.
Another point that I seem to be in disagreement with a lot of people here is the idea that with speed and heading changes MH370 could have wound up anywhere on the 7th arc. As the DST paper explains, while it is physically possible to do this, it is statistically very unlikely to arrive at “slow, curving” destination north of Broken Ridge. People will continue to misunderstand this and so I am going to just press on without them.
@Oleksandr:
I might be wrong but I recall reading that the 777 (in question) does not have to dump fuel to land (on an airstrip). If that is relevant to your argument.
@Boris:
A covert operation would necessarily involve comparatively few people in choice positions and probably in a steeply hierarchical command order. Otherwise the likleyhood of eternal covertness would not be so great. A worldwide cover-up after the fact is not highly likely, at least not in the sense you suggest. So secret agencies would to me likely adapt their intial plans in accordance with what is possible to pull through. You need to come down from Everest to have conquered it. And pulling it through is what covert operations are about. And to me, few results of a single covert operation involving a passenger airliner with two Malaysian middleclass pilots would motivate doing all this and involving all these people. At a cost similar to invading South America. What you see, what we are seeing, is probably something else, which is interesting in itself. That does not mean that a covert operation necessarily didn’t happen, but not of the dimensions you suggest. As I see it. I said that before: if the plane was shot down in SCS, that would have been on the news immediately. Just like MH17 was. There would have been nothing much to cover up then, would it?
As apart from Hollywood movies, covert operations are not planned in accordance with what looks good on film and is likely to attract an audience. Rather the opposite.
“Unlike” was the opener I had in mind.
Jeff,
“There have been a lot of planes lost to accident/malfunction/fire, etc, none of them look remotely like MH370”
It is very rare in the aviation when commercial jets crash due to the same reason. Each one is a unique combination of malfunctions and/or pilot errors. Agree?
“You state that the lost of comms could be due to cabling issues”.
Not to say state, but yes I am suggesting that. Each radio is connected by a coaxial cable to respective antenna: 2 VHF + 1 HF on top, I guess along the centerline (based on the minimum distance) and 1 VHF on the belly, which should have been routed somewhere near the EE-Bay. The EE-bay is located just on top of the landing gear. There are oxygen tanks just next to the electronics (see video, link to which was posted by Ge Rijn). The access to the EE-Bay is not secured. On the basis of what do you rule out possibility of several cables to be cut simultaneously? I can be convinced that the loss of all communication means is not possible only if you can present scheme of cable routing in the area of EE-bay. I don’t see any other way to prove the opposite.
Generally, you are forgetting a number of other cases when multiple redundancy did not work. For example:
– Malaysian B777 9M-MRG. Triple-redundant ADIRU failed in part due to the ADIRU software glitch.
– Alitalia A320-200. Triple ADIRS failed as the crew switched off the only healthy IRS unit.
– QF32. Segregated wiring routes were cut by two pieces of debris, in result of which one of the engine could not be shut down after landing.
And many more cases.
“ability to re-logon to Inmarsat, satellite telephony, navigate, etc.”
The failure to find the aircraft in the current search zone proves that our assumptions about how it was navigated are wrong. What do we know about its ability to navigate? Satellite telephony was not successful. Do we really know why? Re-logon could be caused by many reasons, clearly involving human intervention. But do we know a real reason?
“disappearance of MH370 was not caused by an accident.”
Sabotage? Something similar to Daallo Flight 159, but followed by multiple hardware failures? Can you rule out it?
@MH I think you are right! If I were to build a flight sim using 5 HDDs, I would probably use one disk for the operating system (MK21?)
Then use the 4 other disks in RAID5. That would mean that half of each file is on two HDDs plus some parity data on a third HDD.
That would explain why VictorI mentioned only one HDD and the report 2. It could also explain why there were reports of the flight sim being broken, if a disk in the array were to fail then you’d have to rebuild it. Not a very easy task in Windows.
@Gysbreght
Re : “Yet we have enough evidence to link the sparse data points Inmarsat pulled from their database to one flight…”
I was only making a general statement.
Some highly regarded posters on this forum are quick to dismiss the flight sim data because it doesn’t fit with a straight and level and constant speed scenario.
Yet when talking about the satellite data which is even less informative than the flight sim data, it’s accepted as being part of one more or less straight level flight.
If a commercial pilot can be expected to fly straight and level in real world, that doesn’t mean the same pilot will fly straight and level in a entertainment flight sim.
Now we’ve got some IT forensic experts that report having found a “flight path”. Instead of doubting their finding (without having access to the same information as them), we should maybe try to explain why the flight sim data points don’t seem consistent and come up with a good explanation (Gysbreght’s idea of a landing might be one). That could maybe in turn help us with finding the plane…
@Dr.BobbyUlich
First of all, thank you for all the hard work you put into your model. Each time you release a new paper I’m amazed with the logical way you present it. Please don’t give up!
In connection with the above, may I ask if you are planning to test some mid flight landing/take off scenarios? You’re not far from an airport already in your last finding. Why not try to land ? 😉
@Sinux, Unlike the flight-sim data (at least based on the information we have so far), the Inmarsat data is all linked by a common factor: the aircraft ID. So the question isn’t whether these seven “pings” have a common source, but what the plane did to generate them.
(Obviously some have speculated that due to intentional deception, the seven pings might have been generated by two separate planes, only one of which actually went into the SIO, but I don’t think that changes the core point.)
Johan says: “…At a cost similar to invading South America…”
You clearly not aware of the scale and depth of the West’s integrated security services. Any organisation with even a hint of involvement with communication (physical & virtual), news-media, politics, police, and military have either been compromised or completely taken over by them. This explosive growth started in WWII and continued at an even faster rate during the ‘cold war’ and accelerated once again during the current ‘war on terror’.
Britain, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand merged their services in the 60’s, with Israel joining in the 80’s – mainly for use in an operational roles.
Do not underestimate the global reach of this combined operation.
Johan,
“I might be wrong but I recall reading that the 777 (in question) does not have to dump fuel to land (on an airstrip). If that is relevant to your argument.”
Did you see what happened with Emirates B777 in Dubai one month ago? In comparison, MH370 had more than 30 tons of kerosene. No chances to land if belly landing was anticipated. The problem is that the jettison pumps do not work if the left bus is depowered. The crew would have to restore power first. Or just burn fuel. Perhaps they attempted the former and even succeeded by 18:25.
@Oleksandr, What I’m trying to do on this blog is to clear away the fog and answer these questions with as much clarity as possible: what do we know about what happened to MH370? What can we rule out?
To do this, we need to weigh the data we have and exclude what looks dubious. Then we have to start looking at the data as a whole, and try to deduce what scenarios are possible and which are not. If a scenario is not possible, we should not waste further time thinking about it.
If you look at the all of the data together, an accident scenario is simply not supportable. If you disagree, go ahead and write up a specific scenario which includes all of the important data points, most crucially the precise timing of the turnaround, selective loss of electronics, the SDU reboot, high-speed (and ergo high-altitude) flight with precise navigation, availability but non-use of satcoms, and the absence of wreckage in the current search area.
If you are able to do it, that would be a useful contribution. I know Bobby Ulich is working hard to find possible “ghost ship” routes that terminate outside the current search zone, and kudos to him for that.
In the absence of that I see no value in continued hand-waving on this subject.
Jeff,
“If you look at the all of the data together, an accident scenario is simply not supportable.”
I don’t know how you came to this conclusion.
“If you disagree, go ahead and write up a specific scenario which includes all of the important data points”.
Yes, I disagree. I have posted the description of a specific scenario several times. If you disagree with any points I made, please go ahead and explain why. You always confuse low probability with impossibility.
What I am most interested now is the ATT roll mode. Based on FCOM it appears to be possible to activate the ATT mode with zero bank angle when ADIRU fails: by engaging the AP at bank angle <5 deg. Can you rule it out? Yes or no? I am asking this question for several months.
@Oleksandr:
I overlooked your landing gear/belly landing angle. Well I am the wiser now. Your scenario is likable.
On 2/18/2016 in a response to @DrB, I posted, “I agree that the availability of a battery-powered portable radio on board is significant. That just about makes the loss of communication an intentional act …”
Even if all hard wired radios were inop, they could have used the portable radio for communication.
@Jeff Wise:
Normally this is a very good approach. However, if you suspect that a cover-up about the fate of MH370 is going on, then it is difficult to know what is fact and what is fiction. Right from day one my nose was telling me we were being fed a diet of misleading facts and fictions.
So if you trust all the data, you end up with MH370 somewhere in the SIO, at or near the current search area. It then becomes a choice of two scenarios, ghost flight on autopilot or human intervention by hijackers or pilot e.t.c. Only the first scenario (the official one) makes much senses, otherwise this is a fairly unique event in which neither hijackers or pilot want publicity for their actions and for everyone know just how clever they have been.
@Jeff: you asked readers for a plausible accident scenario:
– MH370 fatally wounded near IGARI by live-fire military exercises gone awry
– Inmarsat data doctored to cover this up
Not nearly as fatally flawed as most remaining accident-based theories (I tend to agree with you on those). The timing, location, and number of debris finds is more rationally explained as either planted (we’ve yet to reconcile the flaperon’s barnacles to its buoyancy) or escapees from containment efforts (prevailing currents from IGARI seem to run S, then SW through Sunda Strait to the IO, and eventually WSW toward Africa) than as what one would expect from a high-energy impact anywhere on the 7th Arc.
It also does a much better job of explaining a search strategy which has seemed – from Day 1 to Day 910 – to defy logic.
Not endorsing this theory; just demonstrating why it is perfectly reasonable to consider the Inmarsat data itself dubious – a fog to be cleared away in order to finally see the truth.
@Boris:
I am not underestimating the reach and influence of “Western” intelligence and security work, I just don’t think they work as you suggest. In a sense, I believe they are actually much much better than you suggest, which was one of my points. (The “invading South America” part was a bit jokingly, though). The most of what I said I think stands. In the world you paint up, a few years in, more or less every “Westener” in civil service and elsewhere would have a couple of crosses to carry around from knowing they had participated in gruesome coverups of fatal mistakes made by secret agents running amok with firearms, airliners and barnacle-ridden secret replicas of wingparts. That world would very soon be uninhabitable and unmanagable. That may be the intensified world of a frenzied media, trying to cook a soup off every nail, but it can’t be the real world. The basic idea must be to try to it almost effortlessly.
@Boris:
That is a good observation: A hijacker that prefers to remain anonymous! As silly as it sounds, that idea might perhaps enter the head of someone in a world of assymetric warfare. But the incentive for the authorities to respect that after the fact appears weak. Don’t they?
I will stop commenting on everything. Please excuse my trigger finger.
@Jeff Wise
Exactly my point :
1. We have enough information to rule in Inmarsat data (as long as we decided to trust them).
2. We don’t have enough information to rule in or out the flight sim data!
So yes what happened to generate the Inmarsat data? This has been studied a lot.
But then also what happened to generate the flight sim data? This has not been studied much, except to say there seems to be inconsistencies – let’s just forget about that data set.
Imagine if in the first days of the release of Inmarsat data we had the headlines : “Inmarsat data unravels under inspection!”
Maybe the flight sim data is worthless in the end.
But it’s too early to tell.
The fact that this data is not enough to prove guilt as believed by the experts and reported by Florence, only means that the experts looking at the flight sim did a proper impartial job IMHO.
@Johan
I know how you feel. Sometimes you just have to sit on your hands, or go and make a cup of tea, or do some gardening or something, and just let it slide for a bit. This thing has a life of it’s own.
@Johan:
There are many many different types of agent, and the majority have good careers in the real world, and are placed in businesses that need to be controlled by the security services. This is usually post-university, but sometimes after a military career. They are nothing like the spies depicted in James Bond films or in John le Carré novels. They are part of everyday life and you will likely have met hundreds of them if you’re as old as me.
There are lots of red flags regarding the current Inmarsat business and I would think that due to it’s importance for SIGINT, this organisation would be run by the security services, rather than simply infiltrated. If you want to understand the importance of SIGINT to covert operations just get hold of a first edition of Gordon Welshman’s bio ‘The Hut 6 Story’, for some hints about the usefulness of SIGINT. He was a pioneer in his field and one of the (deliberately) forgotten heroes of Bletchley Park. He was sent to the US after the war to help them to develop their ‘cold war’ SIGINT programme along the same lines as Britain’s.
usa and china ratify climate agreements – this is it…
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/02/politics/obama-asia-meetings-xi-erdogan-duterte/index.html
@Jeff
you said:
“Another point that I seem to be in disagreement with a lot of people here is the idea that with speed and heading changes MH370 could have wound up anywhere on the 7th arc. As the DST paper explains, while it is physically possible to do this, it is statistically very unlikely to arrive at “slow, curving” destination north of Broken Ridge. People will continue to misunderstand this and so I am going to just press on without them.”
Statistics has nothing to do with it. The plane was not being flown by a robot acting under Monte Carlo control. It is physically possible, and cannot be brushed aside by statistical arguments. I have no idea where you are coming from with that.
What annoys me is the conclusion drawn by many people that if the plane is not in the current search area that the Inmarsat data is wrong, or flawed, or somehow tampered with. That is absolutely not the case. The Inmarsat data needs additional constraints to establish a flight path. It is those additional constraints that are wrong. If you insist on restricting your analytics to a fixed AP setting after the FMT, you are arbitrarily removing a huge set of possible flight paths.
@ROB:
Yes, thanks for the understanding words. Especially with a smartphone and a second language. It’s the attraction of karaoke, for crying out loud. And it becomes extra silly with the linguistic errors and poor idiomatics and drive-by terminology. (!)
@Johan
I admire your second language skills. Very impressive constructions and highly nuanced. I can barely ask for a beer in any language besides English.
@Boris:
Well, this might not be the place to finally unravel the secret workings of “Western” security services. I agree with your picture now that is to some extent nothing else than the daily workings of leading strata of the nations. It is probably a good idea to see them as one and the same, or potentially so. It is about national security. But I still don’t think they will go about planting wingparts on beaches or come up with satellite signal offset data or send hundreds of pour souls into the depths of the SIO in, by all earthly measures, small flying and floating metal containers to fake a search operation. And for how long could they keep that away from, who? Chinese or Russian intelligence? Which might be less smart but probably not blind and deaf. Or the global public? Nah. That does not sound like a durable thing. How long does it take until som freckled remote drone pilot who wants a season ticket to the Arizona Cardinals defects to Beijing with that information? How would that look? And man is a peculiar enough animal to accomplish all or most of these silly things more or less through individual or local initiative, they don’t need an agency to double up the “sillyness” (in many cases).
@Dennis: humans don’t behave according to a Monte Carlo bell curve distribution. No computer, formula, or flight manual can rule out an erratic flight path. On that point, you are absolutely correct.
But consider this: a half-dozen BTO values laid out in a row in the Inmarsat pdf which – if authentic – are precisely what one would see if the flight happened to be straight and at cruising speed.
You don’t have to defend your theory against academics who find erratic flight paths “messy”. What erratic path advocates must resolve (and haven’t) is the staggering coincidence that these messy speed, altitude, and heading changes all cancel out perfectly to produce values which by pure chance RESEMBLE a straight and fast path.
(Victor and Richard at least avoid this coincidence – they still traverse Arcs 2-7 at roughly cruising speed, along a track consistent with a standard flight mode. But even then, they can only get to ~30°S by postulating nearly an hour spent loitering in Indian airspace – something I’d thought Indian authorities had ruled out emphatically.)
@JeffWise
You wrote: “What I’m trying to do on this blog is to clear away the fog and answer these questions with as much clarity as possible: what do we know about what happened to MH370? What can we rule out?”
I love that idea. Can we please start with this:
If it is accepted that MH370 made multiple turns up the Malacca Strait and then a near-hairpin turn south after passing Sumatra, one can categorically rule out the notion that the plane was flying without human input.
Ya? Any objectors?
@MH
http://imageshack.com/a/img923/3806/V1Co1V.jpg
Austin got 6133fpm @105KIAS @400,000lbs, power off.
@Johann
Please clarify what you mean by: “Being dead is a good start.” The way I read it, you’re wishing death on me. Please tell me there’s another possible interpretation.
@Brock,
Is it really a staggering coincidence, though?
The degree of “erraticness” in the maneuvers is constrained – too erratic, and the plane goes in the ocean or breaks up. It’s also constrained by the plane’s performance limits.
It might be a staggering coincidence if an erratically flown helicopter left this data. But less so for a jet.
I’m curious to see – if you generated a number of non-crashing erratic flights on a simulator, how linear they would look from a satellite checking in every hour.
@Brock
The Australia government has spent upwards of $180M searching the very area where these compelling straight line flight paths told them the aircraft terminated. The aircraft has not been found there as of today.
I well recall the giddy early days on Duncan’s blog when the “we don’t need no stinking motive” crowd was convinced by the shear weight of Occam’s Razor simplicity that they had the problem bagged. They proudly displayed all their pins in a map clustered closely together ahead of the ATSB search area to show they had not “cheated”. That was then, and this is now.
I also well recall being told by Duncan himself that if I wanted to consider non-AP paths that I should go elsewhere. Being a thick skinned person I ignored him, but was not able to convince anyone that the light at the end of the tunnel just might be an approaching train.
I fully endorse the new path produced by Victor and Richard even though it has much higher BFO residuals than other paths with a more Southern terminus. These other paths do suffer from a significant negative attribute, however. The plane has not been found there.
As far as the Indian airspace is concerned, all I have heard from them is the coy statement that they did not see the aircraft. That begs the question – were they looking? They have never said that they were. I believe their radar was not operational at the time. Likewise with Indonesia.
Johan,
It is actually not a scenario, but rather an attempt to marry logic and math. Two years ago I realised that the assumption of a single FMT followed by the HDG/TRK HOLD mode makes no sense. Thus my prediction was that the plane would not be found in the current search area.
I found it remarkably interesting that all problems related to a technical failure scenario are gradually resolved. It is like a puzzle where 90 of 100 pieces are already connected. The keys are ADIRU failure + depowered left bus.
There was a question why the crew did not attempt landing. Is not Emirates Flight 521 sufficiently convincing? There was a question why the crew did not attempt to dump fuel – depowered left bus is the answer (jettison pumps did not work). So these are just explanations that fit into the scenario.
Maybe India and Indonesia haven’t bothered or don’t have a replay capacity to look in detail of flight events that happened in the past. Hope there is clarification available.
@Oleksandr
The closest airport from IGARI is at Kuala Terenggua which is almost exactly 180 degrees from the flight path at the time. MH370 practically flew right over it. Kuala Terneggua has a very generous 15,000′ runway, and an approach from over the ocean. It would be hard to find a better place to make an emergency landing from the IGARI location. Shah did not elect to go there.
Points on Shah’s simulator correspond to a location in the SIO. These points were created a short time before the MH370 diverted.
Despite several radios on board including a battery powered backup, no attempt to communicate was made.
My sense is that you are beating on a dead horse.
@DennisW: “These points were created a short time before the MH370 diverted.”
VictorI said when the “Shadow Volume” that contained those files was deleted. Do you know when these files were created?
Sorry for the interruption.. Can someone provide me with a rough figure on the fuel burn rate for the 772ER+Trent at holding speed/altitude (minimum drag)? According to R. Godfrey’s and V. Iannello’s response to the DSTG book those should correspond to something around 20000 ft / 210 kIAS @ about 190 tonnes gross weight, if I got it right. I’d be interested in how it compares to typical rates under “normal” cruise conditions, particularly like those which were used to pin down the current search area.
@Gysbreght
I read it right here in “New York”.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/07/mh370-pilot-flew-suicide-route-on-home-simulator.html
@DennisW: oh.
@Gysbreght
Oh my.
Dennis,
“The closest airport from IGARI is at Kuala Terenggua…Kuala Terneggua has a very generous 15,000′ runway…”
DXB runway is of similar length. Did it help Emirates 521? The issue is not in runway length.
“Points on Shah’s simulator correspond to a location in the SIO.”
Then what? You are chasing witches. As I mentioned earlier, unless you can show that data are authentic and points belong to the same simulation session, this argument does not hold water. I have doubts about the authenticity of this data because of a number of parties interested to hang everything on Z. Also because of unbelievable coincidence of the timing when this data was released. Even if data is authentic, a number of sources tell that it cannot be proven that data belong to the same simulation session. Why do you buy this garbage?
“Despite several radios on board including a battery powered backup, no attempt to communicate was made”
Again, the issue could be not in the power, but in cables. The left bus knocks down SDU and one VHF radio. HF radio may not work for known reasons. What is left: 2 VHFs and 1 ELT. If respective cables are placed in the proximity to each other in the area behind the cockpit, they could be cut simultaneously by debris. Can you demonstrate that this is impossible? Given the diagrams and photos shared by Don, in conjunction with the “minimum distance” concept, I would think these cables are placed in the proximity to each other.
Finally, how do you know that no attempt was made?
@DennisW says: “…I believe their radar was not operational at the time. Likewise with Indonesia…”
You have got to be kidding! To see why it isnear certain that all player in that area would be running military radar 24/7 at the time, the context is important. All countries in that part of the world were/are trying to claim any bit of rock sticking out of the sea, or in the case of China, building their own. This mainly because massive deposits of gas and oil had been discovered, and every county wants to ensure their share of the potential profits from this. Biggest players are China, Britain and USA, with China causing most concern because they are directly on the spot while the West has to act through proxies – mainly India, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore.
I’d bet my shirt that anything moving in that area would be tracked and recorded at any time day or night. The only limiting factor would be the coverage of individual radar stations in the area.