Assessing the Reliability of the MH370 Burst Frequency Offset Data

north-and-south-routes

Last week we discussed what we know about the first hour of MH370’s disappearance, based on primary radar data and the first Inmarsat BTO value. Today I’d like to talk about the BFO data and what it can tell us about MH370’s fate.

As longtime readers of this blog well know, the Burst Frequency Offset (BFO) is a type of metadata that measures how different the frequency of an Inmarsat signal is from its expected value. It is an important value to a communications satellite operator like Inmarsat because if the value gets too large, the system will be operating outside its approved frequency limit. One cause of such a change would be if a satellite begins wandering in its orbit, which indeed was the case with MH370. The fact that the Satellite Data Unit (SDU) aboard MH370 did not properly compensate for drift in the Inmarsat satellite overhead is the reason the BFO data contains a signal indicating what the plane was doing.

While each of the BTO values recording during the seven “pings” tells us fairly precisely how far the plane was from the satellite at that time, the BFO data points taken individually do not tell us much about the plane was doing. Taken together, however, they indicate three things:

  1. After the SDU logged back on with Inmarsat at 18:25, the plane took a generally southern course. If we didn’t have the BFO data, we wouldn’t know, from the BTO data alone, whether the plane followed a path to the north or to the south (see above.)
  2. The plane had turned south by 18:40. The BFO value at the time of the first incoming sat phone call at 18:40 indicates that the plane was traveling south.
  3. At 0:19:37 the plane was in a rapid and accelerating decent.

However, as I’ve previously described, if all of these things were true, then the plane would have been found by now. So at least one of them must be false. In the course of my interview with him, Neil Gordon said that the ATSB is firmly convinced that #3 is true, and that as a result he suspects that #2 is not. Specifically, he points out that if the plane were in a descent at 18:40, it could produce the BFO values observed. Thus it is possible that the plane did not perform a “final major turn” prior to 18:40 but instead loitered in the vicinity of the Andaman Islands or western Sumatra before turning and flying into the southern ocean. If this were the case, it would result in the plane turning up to the northeast of the current search area. An example of such a route has been described by Victor Iannello at the Duncan Steel website.

It is worth nothing that such a scenario was explicitly rejected as unlikely by the Australian government when they decided to spend approximately $150 million to search 120,000 square kilometers of seabed. The reason is that it was deemed unlikely that the plane would just happen, by chance to be descending at the right time and at the right rate to look like a southward flight. For my part, I also find it hard to imagine why whoever took the plane would fly it at high speed through Malaysian airspace, then linger for perhaps as much as an hour without contacting anybody at the airline, at ATC, or in the Malysian government (because, indeed, none of these were contacted) and then continuing on once more at high speed in a flight to oblivion.

Well, is there any other alternative? Yes, and it is one that, though historically unpopular, is becoming imore urgent as the plane’s absence from the search area becomes increasingly clear: the BFO data is unreliable. That is to say, someone deliberately altered it.

There are various ways that we can imagine this happening, but the only one that stands up to scrutiny is that someone on board the plane altered a variable in the Satellite Data Unit or tampered with the navigation information fed back to the SDU from the E/E bay. Indeed, we know that the SDU was tampered with: it was turned off, then logged back on with Inmarsat, something that does not happen in the course of normal aircraft operation. It has been speculated that this depowering and repowering occurred as the result of action to disable and re-enable some other piece of equipment, but no one has every come up with a very compelling story as to what that piece of equipment might be. Given the evident problems with the BFO data in our possession, I feel we must consider the possibility that the intended object of the action was the SDU itself.

When I say BFO tampering has been “historically unpopular,” what I mean is that almost everyone who considers themselves a serious MH370 researcher has from the beginning assumed that the BFO data was generated by a normally functioning, untampered-with SDU, and this has limited the scenarios that have been considered acceptable. For a long time I imagined that search officials might know of a reason why tampering could not have occurred, but I no longer believe this is the case. When I questioned Inmarsat whether it was possible that the BFO data could have been spoofed, one of their team said “all Inmarsat can do is work with the data and information and the various testings that we’ve been doing.” And when I raised the issue with Neil Gordon, he said, “All I’ve done is process the data as given to me to produce this distribution.” So it seems that the possibility of BFO spoofing has not been seriously contemplated by search officials.

If we allow ourselves to grapple with the possibility that the BFO data was deliberately tampered with, we quickly find ourselves confronting a radically different set of assumptions about the fate of the plane and the motives of those who took it. These assumptions eliminate some of the problems that we have previously faced in trying to make sense of the MH370 mystery, but introduce new ones, as I’ll explore in upcoming posts.

640 thoughts on “Assessing the Reliability of the MH370 Burst Frequency Offset Data”

  1. @DennisW,

    You said: “I never attack anyone deliberately.”

    You obviously have a very short memory.

  2. @Richard Cole

    Jeff is right. The maps have been extremely useful. If MH370 turns out to be lurking within the bathymetered area, southwest corner of the search area, and you get the chance to mark it as such on the map, it will be a day to remember. Hopefully Equator will check out that area in the mot too distant future.

  3. @Richard Cole
    Thank you so much…part of the reason I follow this accident is to keep ahead of the press articles, which tend to muddy the waters. I’ll take another look. Yes it is very hard to understand the exact boundaries of the theories vs. the actual search. Maybe we get lucky by December.

  4. @gloria. I wonder if Russia was annoyed with Malaysia for mh370 then retaliated with mh17. Specifically something important was disappeared that Russia wanted.

  5. @gloria – I suspect both Russia and USA didn’t want china to get it from mh370. So in retaliation mh17 happened.

  6. [comment redacted by JW] Gloria, due to the dubious nature of your recent contributions I’m setting your comments for manual approval.

  7. [Comment redacted by JW] @falken, I think I’ve made myself very clear on this topic. I will not tolerate false equivalence between Russia and the west.

    Last warning.

  8. Thanks @ Richard Cole for your kind efforts regarding the Hardy prediction.

    I aactually put up the report up there to see whether anyone could update us on that. Seems to me at least, you went out of the way to update us all. Kudos to you once again.

    Now I am just wondering whether Negroni got her hypoxia thingy right. For if she did, it would go some way to explaining what transpired between IGARI and FMT, deliberately of course. After which you only really one person still flying literally.

  9. @Wazir, Christine Negroni asked me out to lunch last year and we had a good long chat. She admitted that she hasn’t delved into the technical issues of MH370, didn’t think she needed to. I consider that a huge mistake. Her scenario doesn’t fit the evidence at all.

  10. @Kefffertje

    The Dutch have a number of useful colloquisms. One of my favorites…

    “when you burn your butt, you need to sit on the blisters” (Wie zijn billen brandt, moet op de blaren zitten).

    So it goes with BFO interpretations.

  11. @Falken, When MH17 was shot down by a missile, 295 innocent people lost their lives, more than 80 of which were children. It’s cold blooded murder, no matter how you kneed it. A mother and her 3 children, who lived just 5 miles from where I live, were killed. I attended that funeral and cannot begin to tell you what that was like. 4 coffins in a row. Her husband has no life to speak of, he goes through the motions each day but feels nothing. Russia had EVERY opportunity to present evidence from day 1. But no, they ignored request after request after request. Frustrated the entire investigation. But lo and behold, 2 days before the final report they come with radar images, which arelikely doctered now. The evidence is, that the missles were transported from Russia (4 of them) to the Ukraine. 1 missile shot that plane and killed all those people. The truck with the same missiles returned to Russia, minus 1. This investigation is about finding the people who committed murder and try them in a criminal court of justice. This isnt an attack on Russia, but if Russians did this they should be held accountable, the indivuduals who gave the order. Think of those 4 coffins, 3 of which were mere children. Any normal human being would want justice for that. Step away from your emotions and tell yourself: yes, whoever did this should be tried.

  12. @DennisW, Yes, it is a smuch used saying here:). What do you NOT know Dennis? Same as plucking feathers off a bald chicken (draw blood from stone). My clients love my sayings and translations of them. As a young girl my brother threw me against the stove and I literally burnt my butt:). He said it was my own fault because I teased him haha, SoI had to sit on the blisters… go figure….

  13. @Keffertje

    I spent a lot of time in Eindhoven. Siemens VDO was my customer as a tier one supplier of car navigation systems to BMW. Toine van Kessel, SVDO project manager, I regard as an early mentor in this domain. Whenever, I would offer what amounted to a ridiculous opinion on some matter, Toine would stare at me for a few uncomfortable moments, and then resume whatever he was going without comment. Great times and great memories.

  14. @DennisW, That is amazing. I was born in Son, a village just outside of Eindhoven. My father was an engineer with Philips Electronics which launched us into Asia:) I can console myself that perhaps the navigation system in my BMW has your fingerprint on it:).My respect for Ami goes up by the minute:).

  15. @Wazir
    I probably agree with Jeff on Negroni but I do feel that there may be need for ACARS and flight recorders to record/alarm on cabin temps and pressures and manual setting on cabin pressurization, assuming those things are not currently recorded/acted-on (not sure).

    Helios flight the engineer tried to tell the pilot to check the pressurization setting but it was too late for the pilot to concentrate on the task.

  16. @Keffertje

    VDO can rightly claim all the credit. They literally pioneered sensor fusion in car navigation – GPS, odometer, gyro, and map matching to make a truly robust system. I still have one of the early Carin systems in my 1990 Toyota 4×4 truck, and it still works better than any aftermarket product from the likes of Garmin. Even with a map database more than a decade old.

    When you get in an “urban canyon” like the San Francisco financial district, you separate the real deal from the wannabes. When you get in your car in a downtown parking garage, and spin down several levels the VDO system has you exactly at street level in the right place. A Garmin would be telling you that it is “searching for satellites” while you are wondering which way to turn. The difference between a BMW factory system, and something you can one click to your door from Amazon has to be experienced to be appreciated.

  17. @falken, Take a deep breath:). Russia is no doubt a wonderful country. That does not mean some people may have ordered this murder. Maybe it was the Ukraine. Let the investigation run its course. Do not let emotion distort your vision. Whoever did this, should be punished. You can agree right?

  18. @DennisW, It seems I need to have a serious conversation with BMW:). If you have a better system in your 1990 truck I want it lalso. Can I have your brain? Pretty please?

  19. @Keffertje:
    Thanks for reminding us of the human dimension. It easy to lose grip of that and easy to forget the particularities of the personal tragedies when dealing with the technical, judicial and formal sides of it day in and day out. And perhaps even hard to find the formal excuse for mentioning it — and then you may also need the individual experience, which you had. I have a tendency myself towards gallow’s humour ( since I am not here in the capacity of a rule-bound engineer but as a witness of sorts ).

    It was touching and impossible to hold off. The guilty will have to stand trial. Let us hope and assume that it was a stupidity by renegade hooligans, but looking at the circumstances as known, there will most probably be a higher officer in charge, whether he knows it or not. I assume this counts among warcrimes. You have a court for that, but perhaps it won’t show up there.

    I was in the Nerherlands as a kid, some time ago now. ( I might have passed through later without recalling it now. ) I remember it as a friendly and very familiar place to a Swede from mid-south Sweden (Småland to be precise, which happens to be about the size of the Netherlands). Almost too much like home, and without the little tension one might experience when visiting a country that is a neighbour, with a certain common history and the obligatory expectations, or simply culturally very different. Apart from it being a bit windy. Growing up in the Swedish mid-south, I have definitely also a foot on our west coast, a sheltered version of your Noordzee. A brother of mine working for a major Swedish-Swiss power transmissions company regular goes down to visit the Frisian Islands (Ost- if I remember), to get some wind through his thinning hair. And, yes, to tell them how to maintain their new windmills, to the familiar scent of salt, seaweed and jellyfish in the sun.

    I still have the clogs somewhere. But I’d like to go back.

  20. http://i.imgur.com/kMWp7PT.jpg

    Those “Swedish” Forest Cats are nice.

    but back to BFO/BTO data, I think Malaysia manipulated them due to the data’s chain of custody Inmarsat gave data directly to Malaysia then Malaysia passed it along to the search teams.

  21. @Keffertje
    “When MH17 was shot down by a missile, 295 innocent people lost their lives, more than 80 of which were children…” Thanks from me too for reminding us of the human dimension. As it happens, I flew over E. Ukraine a couple of weeks beforehand with SIA, enroute from LHR to SIN. I was angry that a carrier that I trusted had chosen to fly over a war zone while several other carriers had already re-routed their flights. The ATC centres which had declared it safe to fly that route over a certain flight level must surely take responsibility too. So I think the responsibility lies in three areas, not necessarily equally divided. I suspect the individual(s) who fired that BUK are long gone.

    @Jeff I found this article on Russia/Crimea/Ukraine illuminating and worrying. Please remove it if you feel it is biased or not suitable here.
    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-01/russia-consolidating-grip-on-crimea-war-on-europes-doorstep/7894178

  22. This may or may not be relevant here. Sorry if it isn’t.

    IMO, a global war is inevitable given the rising geopolitical and economic tensions everywhere. I would suspect as with previous wars two blocs would contest his war with the US, it’s NATO allies, Saudi Arabia and its fellow Sunni states, Israel, Japan, South Korea and ANZAC being in one bloc while Russia, China, North Korea and Iran heading the other. I would consider the current strategic movements as tactical manoeuvrings ahead of the inevitable showdown. We are sadly watching a rerun of the 1930s a combination of global economic malaise and rising political tension.

    Given all that, the stance of ancillary states becomes all more pertinent. With regard to MH370, that would also mean Malaysia’s. I would say that as of 2014, Malaysia was in the US camp but certain events since have altered that stance. This particularly has to do with massive investment inflow from China rendering Malaysia as a PRC proxy in the perception of observers. The fact that China just gave te Malays a rap on he knuckles in contrast to the ruckus they created over that embassy incident in Belgrade in 1999 is telling. A split ASEAN is a Chinese dream and they have it now with Malaysia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos in their orbit while the rest firmly allied to the US. MH370 is an enigma alright, IMO, given the evidence in hand, a personally created enigma, but ironically got dragged into the geopolitical game for being what it was and is to many people, a flight towards China.

  23. Bukh missile.

    The recent MH17 report mentions that the Buk-Telar (transporter, erector, launcher and radar) can launch autonomously, ie separate from its main search radar and command post.

    AWST July 28 2014, said that the missile can be indeed be launched from the Telar after bypassing the normal command and control checks and approvals, including IFF and non-cooperative target recognition (NCTR) modes. This is designed-in for an instance such as where these have been destroyed. Other like missile systems, “leave identification to the main search radar and command-and-control center; however, the launch units cannot engage and fire without central guidance. The Buk’s combination of lethality and lack of IFF/NCTR is unique”. This description is of a Buk M1 which had been superseded by the M2 and M2E, of “the same architecture” though the Telar radar of the later models might incorporate NCTR. I have found no mention as to what model Telar was used in this instance.

    Supposing though that the operators did not have access to the full range of interrogations and identifiers or command caution, responsibility might well be seen as more up the chain.

    Operator guilt depends in part on motive and whether this was a mistake locally in the fog of war. The overheard discussions lack any note of professionalism or planning and seem to be improvisations to meet an urgent need for local air defence.

    Those who specified, designed and distributed this weapon system bear some responsibility but in particular those who released the Buk-Telar with its limited command and control arrangement and who set rules of engagement, if any, need to be brought to account.

    Airliners regularly flew overhead, within range and low enough….though I suppose they would argue that a Ukrainian military transport aircraft might use this as cover.

    That aside it is not clear why the Ukrainians allowed these aircraft to transit when there was such a capability in the offing to the rebels and their Russian backers. They were users of this system so should have been familiar with the capability. Was this neglect deliberate to provide a corridor for its own military use or did it not occur to them (and other countries whose aircraft flew overhead) that there was a risk of such indiscriminate, hazardous and fighting-blind use of this weapon?

    I think there might be more evidence which needs to be presented before guilt and its distribution is clear.

    As I remember it the USS Vincennes, before shooting down the Iranian airliner, tried unsuccessfully to warn it. However that was an instance where even with all system and command precautions, mistakes still were made.

  24. @AM2, @Wazir, From what I understand, it all comes down to the SDU and reliable reference data. It is odd, to say the least, that Inmarsat/ATSB are not providing more data of other flights to enable the experts to do a proper determination of the terminus. Other critical data is missing, such as Indonesian radar records, which they say they don’t have. Amazing that the ATSB would burn over USD120m without knowing where they should look, jumping to conclusions based on incorrect data and assumptions. Geologists, Oceanographers and the like are having a field day for they could never have hoped to get such funding to study SIO ocean floor. The ATSB has become their best friend:).

  25. @David, Very good post! Fully agree that this investigation is long from being over and much is unknown. Would not surprise me that many parties have butter on their head. However, these past 2 years Russians have been uncooperative and withheld data. If they are not involved, as they claim, there would be no reason for them to take this position.

  26. @all

    As promised earlier – some additional commentary relative to the 9M-MRO Inmarsat BFO data – a bit rambling since it was constructed piecemeal, but the thrust is clear.

    It is still a work in progress, and cleanups/additions are still needed.

    http://tmex1.blogspot.com

  27. @Wazir:
    I don’t think war (WWIII) is imminent, and I don’t think it is wise to take that for granted or talking about it as if. Not speaking of it all is of course not clever either, but one needs to be careful. And some soft war in economic and other terms could naturally be said to be going on all the time, but that is far from the big one, which means dead people by the millions.

    Sometimes what looks like hostilities happen instead of war. Postponing it or making it redundant or as a sacrifice to an opinion. And the changes world society is going through is destined to rock a lot of boats. But I am pretty confident that responsible parties are acting with a new and better world in mind (at least one that is functional in relation to new knowledge, technology, transportation and communication and economics). Global war is not an incentive, but highly technologized societets are, and you don’t get that if you destroy them. And most people will need a future to look forward to. The WWII happened (in a sense; and also WWI) in a time when at least the West had discovered that there was a contradiction between trying to build something that would last for ever, and the possibility to make enough money out of it. That is a reason to go to war (for some), but hopefully not a sufficient one.

    There is a lot to it. And today you have millions of experts working, not (only) in the war business, but with trying to handle risk and insecurity regarding all types of lateral matters that may lead to conflict (although the quality of that may fall short of the looks of it). Hopefully these things weigh against war on a global scale.

    My 5 cents.

  28. @David: interesting and valuable on the Bukh.

    @AM2, @David: I agree there seems to be more to dig up on flying over the war zone.

  29. @Dennis, Very interesting, thanks for this analysis. It’s not clear to me why, given the large uncertainty in BFO values, much value can be ascribed to the speed and heading implied by the 19:40 value. I’m not saying this sarcastically, I just really don’t understand.

    @David, Thanks for your insights into the Buk. It seems to me that the key question — how easy would it be for a Buk crew, operating in the stress and fog of war, with inadequate leadership and incomplete information, to accidentally target a civilian airliner? The answers is IMO far from obvious. I’ve been working for quite a while now to try to find a current or former Buk crew member to describe the launch protocols, so far without luck. If anyone has any leads I’d be grateful!

  30. @AM2, @David:

    I am not saying this applies here, perhaps rather the opposite, but there were times, and there will be places when air defence are instructed to shoot at any unidentified intruder of airspace. Especially (or perhaps misinterpreted by the military in charge) when the commander is sleeping or out of reach.

    The logic being: “I won’t stick my neck out for nobody, and he should’ve known better.” If those conditions apply, artillery will fire.

    In other cases there might be more of setting an example — we see you and we can reach you. Try doing that again. Which might apply to MH17 mistaken for a Ukrainian aircraft. Or artillery is guarding something of specific strategic value (building or moving or setting up something) from being detected.

    Excursion: In the early days of the Cold War Sweden had a spy-plane shot down by the Soviets right before lunchtime on 13 June 1952. Sweden was officially neutral but co-worked with the U.S. to spy on the Soviet Baltic Sea coastline. The plane (DC-3) was apparently well away from Soviet waters (this time) but appears to have come a bit close to a new Soviet battlecruiser in the Sverdlov-class. A reconnaisance-plane (a Catalina) looking for a wreck was shot down by a Mig a few days later (those were the days!). (Significantly, the events came to be named in Swedish press after the later incident — “the Catalina affair”.) The Swedish PM was informed personally by Khrushchev a few years later, but officially and publically the fact that the DC-3 was actually shot down by the Soviets was not disclosed until 40 years later. The Swedish public may have had suspiscions but the press did not treat the disappearance of the DC-3 as a result of a Soviet shootdown (intially and/or in the main).

    The wreck, perforated by bullets from a Mig-15, was rediscovered on 10 June 2003 (after three years’ search by a private initiative), 55 km east of Fårö in the Swedish economic zone. Only one body (of five) and no remains of any American radio equipment was found inside the wreck. Five seats evidenced that people had been sitting on them when the plane hit the water. The cockpit clock had stopped at 11:28:40, five minutes after a cut-short last radiocall to home tower.

    There are probably just as much beneath the surface of the Baltic Sea as above it. But history has arguably had a lot of time on its hands, too.

  31. @Johan
    Thanks for your interesting post. I agree there are many possibilities for the detailed circumstances of that BUK being fired and where responsibilities lie. No doubt we will have to await the final official report.

  32. Probably it could be more than stress, probably it has to do with the system itself:

    Military experts think that a Buk missile — an easy-to-use type of anti-aircraft weapon — is the most likely culprit in the destruction of a Malaysian Airlines passenger jet that’s thought to have been shot down over eastern Ukraine.

    These missile launchers are specially created for hitting high-altitude aircraft, and can fire at targets of up to 80,000 feet.

    But unless linked to other weapons or an air traffic control system, they are almost incapable of telling the difference between military and civilian aircraft. The Buk is mobile, easy to use, and capable of hitting aircraft at all but the most outlandish altitudes. Yet as the MH17 disaster proves, that comes with a huge potential drawback, especially when the weapon is in the hands of people incapable of using it responsibly.

    Pro-Russian separatists have apparently admitted that they have Buk missiles. These weapons reach far higher altitudes than the shoulder-fired rocket launchers that pro-Russian separatists have been using to destroy Ukrainian aircraft during the past week, high enough that they could reach the over 30,000-feet altitude at which the airliner was flying.

    The missiles are straightforward to operate and work as stand-alone weapons — they can function outside of a sophisticated networked air defense system.

    While that’s useful in some respects it also makes it unnervingly easy to make a mistake, particularly for guerrilla or non-conventional fighters who are capable of firing the easy-to-use missiles, but don’t have the training needed to distinguish between civilian and military aircraft by sight.

    As one expert explained to Technology Review, the Buk’s ease of usability is also what makes the weapon so prone to tragic and costly errors like the MH17 crash.

    The system cannot tell the difference between civilian and military-type aircraft based on their transponder signatures alone. In order to tell the difference between targets, it would need to be interfaced with other weapons systems that can work off of additional information.

    Being a Soviet design, the user interface is fairly simple, says Michael Pietrucha, a former F-4G and F-15E electronic warfare officer and expert on air defenses. Pietrucha says he trained with German forces operating a similar Russian-built system during the 1990s.

    Pietrucha says that the Buk variant operated by the rebels might have been especially unable to distinguish between civilian and military air traffic because of a quirk related to aircraft transponders. The transponder is a device that broadcasts an aircraft’s identity when a radar “interrogates” it for information.

    Military and civilian aircraft often use the same transponder modes and therefore that signal is not used as a “discriminator” for a military targeting system, Pietrucha says. The system has to be tied into the national air traffic control system to use that information effectively.

    So the Buk can pick up the signal of an aircraft. But if it’s operating in standalone mode, it can’t tell whether that aircraft is a military target, or a jetliner with nearly 300 people onboard.

    As Thomas Gibbons-Neff reported in the Washington Post, the Buk can be interfaced with other systems, but U.S. intelligence sources believe the Buk was the only one anti-aircraft system operating in the area of the crash at the time the plane was shot down.

    image: https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/53c9768d6da811c164e03a3f/buk%20m2%20smallest.gif

    The transponder explanation seems likeliest here: Whatever unit shot down MH17 simply couldn’t see if it was a civilian or military aircraft — they could just see it was an aircraft in their airspace — because it wasn’t hooked up to a system that would have made such recognition possible.

    On some models of the weapon, radar systems are rudimentary at best. With untrained irregular soldiers at the helm, even a linked system could have made a terrible mistake. To the right is a GIF of a Buk M2 surface-to-air system in action. The radar and firing interface are relatively simple and user-friendly.

    “This definitely could have been an error,” Steve Zaloga, an expert on missile systems at the Teal Group, told Technology Review.

    Read more at http://www.businessinsider.co.id/the-flaw-in-the-buk-missile-system-2014-7/#FcgboRhaEzqZllV7.99

  33. @Wazir, @Jeff:

    Firing at a target that is not possible to identify and which could be civilian just as likely as military (and not posing an imminent threat) is hardly not allowed according to the laws of war. So maybe both sides were doing a tightrope act, but the it seems to be pretty evident that whoever pulled that trigger was doing the wrong thing or carrying out unlawful orders.

  34. @All
    According to Table 1.6E (“Aircraft Weight”) on page 30 of the FI report the actual take-off weight was 223,469 kg and maximum TOW was 286,897kg. So the plane had the capacity to carry an additional 63 tonnes.

    Page 30 of the FI also deals with the fuel load with regard to alternate airports:

    “The first alternate airport, Jinan Yaoqiang International Airport (China) was estimated to be 46 minutes from the diversion point with 4,800 kg fuel required and the second alternate airport, Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport (China) was estimated to be 1 hour 45 minutes with 10,700 kg fuel required.”

    Now that is where the curiosity arises – there are a lot of airports in China, so why would a Beijing flight include: Jinan (197nm from Beijing) and Hangzhou (606nm) as alternates?

    The Filed Flight Plan is at page 9 of the FI (Figure 1.1D Filed Flight Plan Message). Straight after the routing information, the following information appears:

    – ZBAA0534 ZBTJ ZBSJ

    ZBAA is the ICAO code for Beijing Capital International Airport and the alternates were listed as ‘ZBTJ’ (Tianjin Binhai International Airport) and ‘ZBSJ’ (Shijiazhuang Zhengding International Airport). Tianjin is 61nm and Shijiazhuang is 144nm from Beijing.

    The questions and implications for the FI are obvious so I won’t waste space dealing with them. Tianjin and Shijiazhuang much closer to Beijing, so are obviously more likely alternates.

    My interest is this: “Was MH370 carrying something ‘too secret’ to be on the manifest? Was the fuel required to carry extra WEIGHT (according to the original ZBAA ZBTJ ZBSJ plan) rather than being needed for extra DISTANCE (to a distant alternate airport) according to the FI?”

    Assume:
    1) the actual fuel load given in the FI is correct and was ‘just enough’ for the planned flight;
    2) the alternates were ZBTJ and ZBSJ – not Jinan or Hangzhou; and
    3) in calculating the fuel load, the crew knew the actual TOW (including ‘mystery cargo’).

    Then, working backwards from a known fuel load, what would be the calculated TOW?

    Calculated TOW less 223,469kg, equals weight of ‘mystery cargo’.

    If there was a ‘mystery cargo’ there are knock on effects for flight endurance too but that is not my immediate issue.

    Note: Distances from Beijing stated above are according to: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/distances.html?n=33 so are not necessarily correct distances in creating a flight plan.

  35. @Jeff

    “@Dennis, Very interesting, thanks for this analysis. It’s not clear to me why, given the large uncertainty in BFO values, much value can be ascribed to the speed and heading implied by the 19:40 value. I’m not saying this sarcastically, I just really don’t understand.”

    It is a matter of the size of the error, Jeff. Even assigning a three standard deviation error to the 19:40 BFO value would not alter the Southern track conclusion. Likewise with the rate of descent at 00:19. A three standard deviation assignment of error would not alter that conclusion either.

  36. @DennisW

    @Jeff

    It is a matter of the size of the error, Jeff. Even assigning a three standard deviation error to the 19:40 BFO value would not alter the Southern track conclusion. Likewise with the rate of descent at 00:19. A three standard deviation assignment of error would not alter that conclusion either.

    Dennis, if you could just clarify something for me. I think you’re saying the BFO at 00:19 can be reliably taken to indicate actual rate of descent? If yes, does this include both BFO’s. ie the one at 00:19:29 and the one at 00:19:37? Or do you mean something else?

    Thanks

    Rob

  37. @ROB

    My recent comments assume that the BFO values at 00:19:29 and 00:19:37 are “representative”. That is they are subject to the same statistics as the other BFO values. It is possible that there are additional errors that corrupt these data points. I don’t know if that is true or not.

  38. Jeff,

    With regard to the recent Etihad EY-450 Boeing-777 incident on September 27:

    “On Sep 28th 2016 The Aviation Herald received information that the tread of left nose wheel tyre separated from the tyre and impacted the Avionics Door so hard, that the door buckled open. The rubber bounced off the door and went through the left hand engine causing an engine surge and bang during rotation. With a gross weight of 346.5 tons the crew determined Vref at 196 KIAS and Vapp at 201 KIAS. Following landing 11 of 12 main tyres deflated after their fuse plugs melted.”

    Source:
    http://avherald.com/h?article=49e9311d

    I think it is time to start seriously consider mechanical failure of 9M-MRO.

  39. @Dennis W

    Just out of curiosity was the test flight as described here; http://tmex1.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/dstg-bfo-datat.html?m=1 the actual exact flight path or predicted flight path throughout the flight as some areas flown over (from BOM to KUL) small portions of seas. I’m hoping they used ACARS for this accuracy. Third party tracking is not entirely accurate espessially over seas.

  40. @Sajid UK

    Yes, I had the same instinctual feeling that this case was going to be far stranger than we at first suspected, right from the word go… There was just something about the way it was being reported in those first few weeks.

    @Jeff

    Thank you for allowing me to post my thoughts on this subject on your blog. I was going to have left my last comment to fend for itself, but there are a few points made in it that I’d like to try and make a little clearer, less ‘poetic’.

    I know this will probably ruffle a few feathers on this blog, but I’m going to make a comparison to the way President John F. Kennedy’s murder rapidly accreted layer upon layer of theories, counter-theories, deliberate disinformation and folklore – after enough time, the signal-to-noise ratio overwhelmed the forensic evidence. I may as well confess that, these days, I belong to that small band of credulous cranks who believe that, yes, Lee Oswald, most probably acting alone, shot and killed President Kennedy that day in Dallas. However, what I also don’t doubt is that:

    Many criminal, political and ethnic organisations in America and abroad wanted Kennedy dead for any number of reasons.

    Several of these organisations were already in the advanced stages of preparation for the achievement of this aim.

    Someone may have had a seriously embarrassing reflexive negligent discharge from their brand new, only recently introduced AR-15 after Oswald’s second shot tore through the President’s throat.

    What none of them could have predicted or planned for was being preempted by a mentally-disturbed returned-defector Trotskyite USMC marksman firing out of a book-depository window in one of the most right-wing cities in Texas.

    For the first twelve hours after the shots were fired, the world went on full nuclear alert. Looked at with the evidence then at hand, it looked, for all the world, as if a staggeringly brazen and incompetent KGB decapitation strike had taken place. We are all extremely lucky that cooler heads prevailed.
    The organisations, agencies, cabals, and Politburos of the world were probably only beginning to realise just how compromised and vulnerable to investigation they were when Jack Ruby stepped out of the crowd and fired the fatal ·38 slug into Oswald’s abdomen on live TV. That was the MH17 moment, when the even remotely possible became the distinctly probable and the Universe showed us, once again, that, when it comes to random acts of mind-bending coincidence and surrealism, we are mere amateurs in the game.

    In the ‘Rush to Judgement’ that followed, anybody with an agenda, a guilty conscience, or acts of staggering incompetence to conceal pushed reams of squid-ink, maskirovka and misdirection into the waters, to muddy them as quickly as possible. An industry was born, as well as a new phrase, originally conceived as an insult: ‘Conspiracy Theory’. It helped cover the truth and sense of panic, which was too embarrassing to admit to at the time.

    To get back to the subject of this thread, it is beginning to look like the acoustic data is either spurious or suspect, and that the BFO and BTO analysis has not led to anything other than obfuscation and counter-theorising. The debris distribution does seem to point to a more Northerly impact point than the pings suggest. I mentioned Passive Radar in my previous post. For those who don’t play with sdr dongles, passive radar is the technique of using multiple passive sensors with already existing RF background signals to triangulate targets; Bluetooth, WiFi, television and FM broadcasts can be used to detect people, vehicles, aircraft; even micrometeorites and returning spacecraft in the upper atmosphere. In the case of MH370, flying dark through the night-time expanse of the Indian Ocean, the sky would have been invisibly lit up by waves of international shortwave broadcasts skipping between the ionosphere and the ocean surface towards their intended target areas, some on a wavelength only slighter longer that that used by the British Chain Home system of WWII. If enough Amateur Radio stations in the area had been alerted, perhaps some full-band data-dumps of the HF bands could have been gathered and analysed – kind of like using All India Radio, BBC and China Radio International signals as a poor-mans’s JORN. Time synchronisation of different recordings would have been relatively trivial, due to the Caesium-clock time signal stations that dot the HF bands…

    Unfortunately, the sheer amount of storage space needed to log the entire HF band means that any relevant data has probably long-since gone the same way as the first few hours of MH370s CVR information.

    As for my previous suggestion of taking into consideration who (or rather what) lies in the middle of the Indian Ocean, which may have had a certain psychological draw for whoever was at the controls, I’ll leave you with a date, and you can draw your own conclusions from there: May 2, 2011.

  41. @Joseph Coleman

    My understanding is that the flight data you are referencing was obtained via ACARS and subsequently the ACARS data was used to compute a BFO in the usual manner. These computed BFO’s were then compared to the BFO’s logged by Inmarsat. The reported BFO error is the difference. These results should map directly to how BFO’s have been used by the analytical community. Similar errors should be anticipated.

  42. Re: Irving – in Susis Crowe link

    Irving:
    “Other parties to the investigation with reputations for integrity to uphold, like the crash investigators from the U.S., Britain, France, and Australia, as well as Boeing, should end this farrago. After all this time, they cannot any longer hide behind the defense that the investigation is continuing and, calling up the lawyers, assert that as long as it is they are obligated not to comment.”

    Why is the above true? Of the named countries above we have:

    6 Australians
    4 French
    3 Americans
    0 British

    So Australia is behaving in a manner consistent with its ICAO member status. They can be taken off the table relative to lack of involvement.

    The French have their own game going on. No one knows what it is, but I am sure they are not going to toss millions of dollars in the ring to participate in a search for the aircraft. Likewise with the Americans. In each of these cases the disappearance is viewed as an act of a pilot for unknown reasons. Neither France nor the USA has any investigative authority in another sovereign state – Malaysia. What would Irving expect them to do?

    The Brits have no skin in the game, and with respect to Boeing there is not a shred of evidence there was anything aircraft related in the disappearance. At the end of the day you don’t run around the world spending money solving problems that are not your problems.

    Irvine makes no mention of Indonesia or India who had 7 and 5 passengers on the plane respectively. Perhaps it is because these nations have no pedigree relative to the investigation of aircraft related events. Whereas France and the USA clearly do. However, the US, France, and Britain are not tarnishing their reputations by not get involved as Irving implies.

    Of the people on board 153 were Chinese and 38 were Malaysians (plus it was a Malaysian aircraft). Those nations are involved in the meetings along with Australia which presumably are the basis for defining search strategy.

    I don’t get Irvine’s beef with the US, France, Brits, and Boeing at all. Frankly I am disappointed in the Aussie and Chinese tolerance of the Malay behavior. China has a lot of citizens involved and has spent some money, and Australia has spent a lot of money. It is not clear what their expectations are or why they are being so patient with Malaysia.

    I also do not understand Irving’s reference to the frequency of inflight reporting. If the system can be turned off it does not matter how often said system reports when it is functioning. Oh well, I suppose he had to fill space in the Daily Beast and needed to write something.

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