Last week, the Joint Investigation Team conducting a criminal investigation into the downing of idH17 issued their preliminary findings. Here’s what I think are the main takeaways.
— The findings strongly endorse the work of “open source intelligence” pioneer Eliot Higgins and his group, Bellingcat. In the immediate aftermath of the shoot-down, it was accepted by nearly every pundit and journalist that the missile had been fired accidentally by poorly trained militiamen who had somehow gotten their hands on an SA-11 Buk launcher and had a acquired a target without bothering to first identify it. But by painstaking work and great resourcefulness, the Bellingcat team was able to piece together an extremely convincing timeline, by which the launcher was brought across the border from a specific Russian military unit, was transported under the direction of the GRU (Russian military intelligence), shot down MH17, and was sent back across the border that night. As I’ve written previously, the timeline described by Bellingcat does not fit with the hapless-militiaman scenario very well. As the New York Times reported, “It is unlikely that anyone not connected with the Russian military would have been able to deploy an SA-11 missile launcher from Russia into a neighboring country.”
— While still admiting the possibility that the Buk crew acted on its own, the report shifts the emphasis to the once-unthinkable: that the missile launch was ordered by higher-ups:
…an investigation is conducted into the chain of command. Who gave the order to bring the BUK-TELAR into Ukraine and who gave the order to shoot down flight MH17? Did the crew decide for themselves or did they execute a command from their superiors? This is important when determining the offences committed by the alleged perpetrators.
As the New York Times put it, the JIT has signaled that it intends “to build an open-and-shut case against individual suspects and to diagram the chain of command behind the order to deploy and launch.”
One can just about imagine a wet-behind-the-ears lieutenant, newly trained and sitting nervously in the cab of his Buk TELAR, messing up and accidentally firing a missile at an unidentified target. But it is harder to imagine an experienced senior officer mistakenly giving the order. Indeed, the higher one goes up the chain of command, the less likely that the decision was made without explicit or implicit endorsement by an immediate superior. The implication, then, is that the order to shoot down MH17, if it did come from anywhere, came from the very top.
— One new piece of information that was revealed in last week’s presentation was that on the day before MH17 was shot down, a rebel commander was recorded making an emotional telephone call to a superior in the regular Russian military, complaining that his troops were vulnerable to Ukrainian air attacks—specifically, by Su-25 ground-attack jets—and that they needed Buks to protect them.
This could be interpreted as evidence that the delivery of the Buk that shot down MH17 was initiated by the militia. Alternatively, it could be a coincidence that a militia commander happened to ask for a missile system the Russian military had already decided to deploy. I think the latter is more likely, for the simple reason that the Buk missile system was not the most appropriate weapon for defending against Su-25s or the other low-altitude planes then in service against the separatists.
The Su-25 is more or less the Russian counterpart of the American A-10: it is designed for low-altitude strafing attacks, with a maximum altitude of 23,000 feet. Another plane used by the Ukrainian military at the time was the An-26 transport, with a maximum altitude of 25,000 feet. A potent defence against these planes would be the Pantsir anti-aircraft system, a mobile rocket launcher that also incorporates self-aiming quad machine guns to automatically blast low-flying attackers out of the sky. Compared to the Buk, which can reach targets above 80,000 feet high, the Pantsir can reach no higher than 26,000 feet. But unlike the Buk it can handle jets flying low under the radar, as the Su-25 can do.
It is known that Pantsirs were present and active in eastern Ukraine at the time of the shootdown. On July 14, an An-26 military transport plane was flying at about 20,000 feet when it was shot down. Ukrainian military assumed that it was downed either by a Pantsir or by an air-to-air missile fired from a Russian fighter jet flying on the other side of the Russian-Ukrainian border. On July 16, a Su-25 flying at nearly the same altitude was also shot down, again either by a Pantsir or an air-to-air missile. The blog Putin@War found satellite imagery of Pantsir units near the Ukraine-Russian border in August of 2016.
The limited reach of the Pantsir is one of the reasons that officials believed that airliners would be perfectly safe traveling higher than 32,000 feet, and so kept the airspace open to airline traffic. Buks were not known to be in the theater—and, indeed, up until the day of the shoot-down, it seems that they weren’t.
As a general principle, you do not want to send equipment into a poorly regulated battlespace that is any more powerful than it needs to be. The potential danger is too great. Retired U.S. military intelligence officer Peter Akins told me that, having had experience with many brushfire wars on its perimeter, the Russians know better than to carelessly hand out strategically powerful weapons like the Buk. “My guess is that they’re pretty carefully controlled,” he says. “We ran into real problems in Afghanistan with giving mujahadeen all those Stingers (MANPADS) that they used to take out Russian helicopters. Stingers have a relatively long shelf life. So once the mujahadeen became Taliban, if they could get to the top of a mountain in Afghanistan they could increase the operational envelope of the missile so that they could target US aircraft. So that’s one of the lessons that we learned, which is don’t give out MANPADS. I don’t know where the idea for ‘Let’s give an SA-11 to a separatist movement in the Donetsk National Sovereignty Front’ would have come from. That’s not the actions of a responsible government.”
— The weight of the JIT’s authority has, I think, severely undermined the army of Kremlin trolls who have been promoting a fog of pro-Russian conspiracy theories almost from day one. As Finnish defense writer Robin Häggblom put it, “the amount of evidence found in both open and non-open source has reached such levels that the question of whether a Russian supplied Buk shot down MH17 can now be considered a litmus test for whether you are under the influence of Russian propaganda or not.”
— The slow, grinding, meticulous building of the case against Russia feels unstoppable—and it could lead to a huge and potentially dangerous political crisis. In the wake of the JIT’s presentation, Moscow responded with such fury that the Dutch foreign minister summoned the Russian ambassador. In response, the Russian foreign minister summoned the Dutch ambassador in Moscow. Meanwhile, Australia’s foreign minister said that whoever was responsible for the shoot-down could face an international tribunal like the one who found Libyan agents guilty for the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie Scotland. Russia has already used its security council powers to block a UN investigation.
As I’ve been saying for a long time now, if it is determined that the Russian leadership deliberately ordered the shoot-down of MH17, the implications for MH370 are obvious—one of the difficulties in trying to understand MH370 is that, though it was clearly a deliberate act, there was no plausible motive. MH17 provides, if not understanding of what the motive was, clear evidence that a motive existed, in mid-2014, for a great power to take down a Malaysia Airlines 777. If an international Lockerbie-style commission is ultimately set up to assign criminal blame for Ukraine tragedy, then it is not too far out to imagine a similar body being established to do the same for MH370.
UPDATE: The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab has published a nice overview of the anti-aircraft weapons systems that Russia has deployed in Eastern Ukraine. It seems that the Buk TELAR deployed from July 16 to 18, 2014, was the only one that threatened civil air traffic over the region.
Stock out of campari soda, perhaps? That would be serious enough in my book.
@PS:
Yes, or worse, the orange juice to go with it. Who can’t recall ending Saturday pre-parties having to finish half of the one litre Campari bottle with nothing to dilute it with. You’d be raking that off the walls too.
@Johan
Great question. And yes, for me, the absolute most compelling aspect of the IGARI turn is that it was made to the LEFT.
Unless there’s a good reason not to, any pilot faced with an emergency 180 will instinctively turn into HIS or HER side of the airplane. It’s just the thing you do from your first solo. It’s the reason a standard traffic pattern is to the left. Wherever you’re going, whether VFR on a clear sunny day or in pitch black or clouds, you have an unconscious desire to see whatever it is you’re turning into, even if you can’t see it.
The fact that it was a left hand turn tells me it was initiated by the Captain.
I have never bought the aggressive chandelle from the moment I heard about it. The radar errors inherent at that slant range make it an easy thing to doubt. Plus, when I line up the original track from the FI, the one with the large gap during the turn, a M 0.84, 25 degree bank, 15nm diameter turn lines up almost perfectly with both the outbound and the inbound tracks.
But if there was a chandelle, that’s even more convincing that it was made by whoever was in the left seat because the chandelle went to the left as well.
If the turn had been made to the right, that would instinctively make me think someone in the right seat had either flown it or commanded it.
As a side note, the nosegear issue is just plain nuts.
A) a nosegear issue would have surfaced on retraction during on the climb out and you would have reported it immediately. US and some Int’l carriers would have even transmitted that failure via ACARS. Not only is the notion of a sudden nosegear issue appearing in the cruise portion of the flight difficult to believe, but where was the communication about it?
B) How do you tie a nosegear issue to loss of the XPDR, ACARS and both VHF and HF radios, including SELCAL, but not the SDU, the FMC, the fuel/oil pumps, etc for another 6 hours?
C) B777 can gravity-drop gear in an emergency, but I’ve never heard of anyone loading up the Gs at night, over an ocean, with limited buffet margins at Mach .84 to help it along.
@Matt M
The lack of communication has always been the death knell of any realistic mechanical failure scenario. It is compounded by the timing of the diversion being at an ATC handoff point. It (a failure induced scenario) is a complete and total non-starter IMO. The overwhelmingly logical conclusion is a deliberate and pre-meditated diversion.
Harking back to the Duncan days, where you were not an active participant, the axiomatic logic was a fixed AP route after the FMT. The justification being that it was the way pilots liked to fly airplanes. The mere mention of motive or causality brought the wrath of Duncan upon you.
Well, it is also true that pilots have shown a great preference for landing on surfaces designed for that purpose, commonly known as airfields. That logic would dictate a flight path that would be compatible with that option.
While I think DrB’s efforts to quantify all the AP flights compatible with unsearched areas on the 7th arc are a good thing, I would question the variability of those calculations relative to assumptions about where the FMT actually occurred, and also relative to the complete lack of any credible motive for flying into the SIO. I am not inviting a DrB comment relative to that question since it will not lead to anything resembling closure on the subject.
The drift data that has credibility strongly supports a terminus well North of the current search area, and well North of any terminus indicated by any AP route with a 19:41 location near the equator. A very late FMT is most likely what occurred. Flight paths in the direction of the Cocos or even farther North paralleling the coast of Sumatra/Indonesia are the most logical, IMO
@Matt Moriarty:
Can you please clarify what you have in mind with “the original track from the FI, the one with the large gap during the turn, …”?
@DennisW
“…… A very late FMT is most likely what occurred. Flight paths in the direction of the Cocos or even farther North paralleling the coast of Sumatra/Indonesia are the most logical, IMO”
If MH370 had come round through BEDAX and below Sumatra at a constant speed to the Cocos Islands waypoint a dogleg would have been necessary with a track either to the SE or the NE to meet the BTO’s.
If it turned NE it could have headed up to a number of airfields on Java about two hours away.
Assuming a fuel low indicator comes on say one hour before empty (I do not know the actual fuel warning elapsed time of a 777) a decision would have to be made.
Either go for a forced landing on a small island runway with minimum facilities, after a traumatic flight, the early morning gloom following a pitch black night, almost definitely no lights on the runway, thunderstorms overhead and low cloud.
Or
Carry on to one of a number of suitable runways with full services and in daylight on the large island of Java.
According to the BTO’s it appears it ended up short by about 15 minutes from reaching a runway on Java either due to running out of fuel or for some other reason.
Dennis, I know what you will ask and no I do not know the answer to your other question which is lack of communication.
A very late FMT might bring MH370 towards the Chagos atolls or Cargados shoals where most debris sunk in the lagoons but a few lighter pieces broke off during impact.
Update to my last post:
A very late FMT and/or a slow drift South…..
@Freddie
Yes, it is a problem for both of us. I did not bring it up to put you down. I brought it up in the interest of full disclosure.
@DrBobbyUlich
–“I was hoping pilots like you might provide some insight into the conditions under which no immediate descent would be made for an emergency landing.”
Sadly, given the nearness of so many viable diversion options, I can offer no such insight. Assuming an emergency, I can’t make sense of it.
–“Some of the potential factors that have been discussed include excess landing weight, lack of communications, inoperative nose wheel/gear, and fire suppression.”
It would have been only 9800kg to dump to make Kota Bharu at MLW (less for KUL), so I discount excess weight. Besides, in a grave situation, you land at whatever weight you have to (FedEx cockpit attack over Memphis was 40,000lb overweight, for example.)
There certainly were no communications. None of us can prove why definitively. However, there are lost comms procedures and light signals available (it was VFR) at all towered airfields. So lost comms is a very poor reason for the lack of a descent if there was an emergency that required one. In this situation, only a lack of runway lighting would cause me to use a more distant field, runways being equal.
Inoperative nosegear? I don’t have a clue as to how this entered our collective consciousness. What would that do to the VHF radio stack? And how would a nosegear issue have developed after IGARI? And if it had developed, what prevented them from informing Ho Chi Minh?
As to fire, nothing gives a pilot “getdownitis” like an in-flight fire, or even just smoke. Oxygen is a dicey proposition in a fire and, provided the cockpit wasn’t filled with smoke (which is largely addressed with full-face quick donning masks), you’d be sweating bullets hoping it doesn’t melt your feed tube and ignite the O2 inside it. Fire=emergency descent in every NTSB report you’ll ever read on the subject.
As to the SIO route, I absolutely concur it was autopilot in HDG mode either mag or true.
@Gysbreght
“Can you please clarify what you have in mind with “the original track from the FI, the one with the large gap during the turn, …”?”
FI, p. 11, fig 1.1, RDP track. The original military radar record before they changed it a couple months later to the box turn chandelles in the ATSB report.
@DennisW, “The drift data that has credibility strongly supports a terminus well North of the current search area, and well North of any terminus indicated by any AP route with a 19:41 location near the equator. A very late FMT is most likely what occurred. Flight paths in the direction of the Cocos or even farther North paralleling the coast of Sumatra/Indonesia are the most logical, IMO”….
Times must be taxing with Hillary getting closer to confiscating your Glock so go ahead and bite my head off! Are you basing a very late FMT because of “negotiations” taking place on the ground? Or for other reasons, i.e. the data? Also if your pin (if my memory serves me right) is on 20S, would there not have been debris washed up on Indonesian shores?
@Matt:
Thanks a lot. A left turn thus by the captain thus. I see what you mean. (But with mainland Malaysia closer to the left and an AP turn perhaps that is less of a must?)
I wasn’t necessarily after the nosegear there, more like any landing gear (or other structure related to take-off/landing, or in principle anything that might be) stuck in a fawlty position, but I see what you mean about landing gear problems showing well before Igari. I assume the pilots would have noticed if one of the main landing gear was out even if acars and indicators weren’t working properly.
So that leaves other onboard circumstances. My primary interest here is a non-emergency situation to begin with, but admittedly a bit special since comms disappeared at the same time. Something that would make it natural to turn back, or that perhaps was unfolding (among passengers?) and not easy to immediately get the full grip of. Perhaps something even that would ask for a circling on the spot before deciding to go any further. A pilot falling ill over the instruments? Passengers getting ill? Seemingly unreliable instruments? Chinese passengers drinking all the Campari and getting noisy? I guess most events would not refrain you from continuing, leaving Malay airspace, but what would it take to make the pilots wanting to go back rather than continuing?
@Paul Smithson
You wrote an interesting piece. What I didn’t quite grasp was how you end up 750km outside the 7th arc and still “fit” the BTO. If BTO is essentially a range from 3F1, wouldn’t a point outside the 7th arc therefore have a higher BTO than the arc itself and therefore not match the BTO we’ve all been working with for two years? I mean, it’s not like we have BTO figures from any time snapshots other than the arcs, right?
I also got completely lost the moment you got into predicted vs observed. Predicted where? And by whom?
Looking at it against the declination map, I basically buy the curve of your flight path going into progressively greater West variation if the assumption is a ghost flight on a mag HDG. But you didn’t show any work regarding fuel consumption, altitudes, TAS, wind, etc, so I’d have to start from scratch to validate your claim of 45S as an end point, which I don’t have time to do. I also can’t quite plot 207 mag from the post-IGARI turn through WMKK. The closest I could come, even fudging it in your favor, was 203 mag, which would absolutely affect your end point.
But your approach does absolve one of ever having to deal with the issue of why there was no distress call and that, I suppose, is something.
All of this, mind you, is the kind of aggregated data I would love to hand over to Larry Stone to make sense of, as much as we all love poring over this affair in our own ways!
Thanks for the read!
@Johan, Matt will no doubt provide excellent pilot perspective :). Given that I travel a lot (primarily to/from USA, Caribbean and within Europe) it takes a true emergency event to return/divert/land an aircraft. This because it is very costly and no carrier is going to eat away their profit margins unless they have to. Mechanical/severe weather emergencies aside (the obvious reason), I have thus far only experienced emergency turn-arounds/landings when someone falls seriously ill (like in immediate need of medical attention)or when passengers pose a real danger to others on board.
Matt Moriarty,
You either don’t read, or you can’t grasp the whole picture. I feel your knowledge can be useful, but if you want to share it with this group, you need to find some other approach to express yourself.
You wrote: “It would have been only 9800kg to dump to make Kota Bharu at MLW (less for KUL), so I discount excess weight.”
The weight is not an issue. If belly landing was anticipated by the crew, large amount of fuel would likely cause inferno. Without emergency services’ support on the ground, chances to survive would be minimal. Do you agree with this? Jettison pumps do not work when the left bus is not powered.
Re “Inoperative nosegear? I don’t have a clue as to how this entered our collective consciousness. What would that do to the VHF radio stack?”
This is because you did not read previous discussions. Again, there are several possible explanation (note some confuse possible with probable). Firstly, similar situation have already occurred in the past – Swiss Air 111. Secondly, one of the three VHFs does not work when the left bus is depowered. Thirdly, it appears that the area behind the cockpit is a bottleneck for the coaxial cables. What do you know about cables routing in this area? A piece of rubber or flash fire (due to oxygen tanks in the EE-bay) could possibly damage the cables. Puncturing by tire rubber occurred relatively frequently as a reason of accidents, and a result is at the mercy of fortune. In this regard recent EY-450 incident, also B777, might be relevant. The probability of the wires to be cut by tire debris is indeed low, but anyway something unorthodox did happen.
The second explaination is similar to Swiss Air 111, followed by the crew incapacitation sometime between 18:27 and 19:41.
Re: “And how would a nosegear issue have developed after IGARI?”
Tire burst, for example. One may also speculate that improperly fixed bolt one week early caused vibrations, which eventually resulted in cracks in the wheel rim or similar failures. Why IGARI? Why not?
Re: “And if it had developed, what prevented them from informing Ho Chi Minh?”
By the means of what, assuming that the coaxial cables were damaged?
Re: “Fire=emergency descent in every NTSB report you’ll ever read on the subject.”
Imaging a situation: pilots hear a loud bang immediately followed by a jerk (due to the lost ADIRU) and a few dosens of alarm messages. What do they do in this situation? They don’t know yet what problem they are facing.
The reason I am wasting my time to speculate on this matter is simple. Two years ago I realized that the set of assumptions suggested by IG and ATSB is lacking in the internal consistency. Respectively my prediction was that the plane would not be found in the current search priority area. This prediction was later reinforced by the drift studies and barnacle analysis, both indicating the likely area between 20 to 30S. What options do we have now:
1. Outerskirts of the current search area due to gliding. This theory is based on the previous ridiculous set of assumptions + one more on top. In addition it contradicts to the drift studies and barnacle analysis.
2. Magnetic HDG/TRK. If they do really exist on B777 as suggested by a number of recent comments, then DSTG likely did a bad job by imposing lower limit of 0.73M. However, these AP modes are based on the same set of assumptions.
3. The ATT mode I am chasing for a long while. It would result in the terminus area 25-30S, subject to how wind is accounted for. It is consistent with the drift studies. It is also consistent with Kate Tee’s observation, including the altitude, radar data. However, it seems the only possibility for the persistent ATT mode on B777 (in contrast to A320, A330) is the failed ADIRU.
4. Piloted flight, LNAV. The plane can be anywhere on the 7th arc, from Indonesia to the “roaring 40th”. Modelling is useless in this case, while a plausible motive consistent with observations has been never suggested.
5. BFO poofing. Recently discovered debris require sophisticated planting to explain sophisticated spoofing, which makes it extremely unlikely.
Does this explain my interest in #3?
Matt Moriarty,
Your insights from a pilot’s perspective are helpful. Thanks.
-“Inoperative nosegear? I don’t have a clue as to how this entered our collective consciousness. What would that do to the VHF radio stack?”
My description of that item was too terse. I meant it to include an exploding tire. Could a nose wheel tire explode at cruise altitude and cause electrical damage in the MEC?
-“As to the SIO route, I absolutely concur it was autopilot in HDG mode either mag or true.”
I have made numerous arguments for this, but I am curious why you think it must be autopiloted and why a heading mode? Do you think the pilot might have intentionally set a heading mode, or is it just an unintended consequence of inaction (i.e., a FMC default)?
My final question is, can you imagine a scenario whereby the flight deck would rapidly become uninhabitable as a result of dense smoke generated nearby and loss of O2 and/or full face masks, and yet the aircraft continued flying until fuel exhaustion? If the flight crew retreated to the main cabin, they could use the portable O2 bottles there to stay alive (temporarily) and occasionally venture into the flight deck for brief periods. If smoke and toxic fumes were continually generated by an internal smoldering fire, could that make it impossible to land the aircraft or even to take aggressive measures to clear the smoke or put out the fire or descend to a low altitude? How long would a portable O2 bottle last? Could it be just long enough to make the FMT about 90 minutes after diversion?
@Keffertje:
I understood you belonged to the seasoned flyers. Your conclusions are what I myself would suspect. It will be about two or three things that will make a plane turn back rather than continue, land or emergency land (to which I count Oleksandr’s scenario in this respect). They happen all to be about the physical health and (legal) security of the individuals (citizens) onboard, with reference to their seclusion, not the aircraft as such. Maybe Matt has more to offer.
@Keffertje
Hillary (or any else for that matter) is a better choice than Donald. Living in California renders you apolitical in any case. A vote for anyone but a democrat is a waste of time, so I don’t even bother to check those boxes.
The late FMT is necessary to reconcile Northern routes with the ISAT data and the notion that the intent was to land the aircraft at an airfield. I rejected the current search area early on for lack of plausible causality, and that is still the case. I was never able to reconcile suicide or mass murder with the profile I have built up relative to Shah. I pushed mechanical issues down on my list simply due to probability, and the details surrounding the diversion.
So, it is a process of elimination more than anything else.
@Matt Moriarty: Thanks for clarifying the radar picture you referred to. I agree that a standard 180 at default bank fits inbound and outbound tracks very well. But why was autopilot off after the turn?
@Matt M. Thanks for taking the time to read the paper. A few responses to your remarks below.
1. The path is great circle from point of diversion (inclusive turn diameter) to WMKK, then route discontinuity at WMKK and continued magnetic track hold thereafter. Earliest turnback gives you a (final bearing) of 207T = 207M at WMKK (where magnetic declination is 0.03W – to all intents and purposes zero). What *nobody* has been able to answer definitively is whether the B777 does actually revert to track-hold (M) on route discontinuity (other possibilities being heading-hold M or T, or track-hold T). If you have any insight on this, please share.
2. The modelled track thereafter takes into account magnetic declination change throughout the path thereafter (and it is 207M, not 203M). Ground speed along this track into account local temp and net head/tailwind.
3. As regards endurance/range. The endurance is obviously identical since the time of fuel exhaustion (second engine flameout assumed ~00:17:30) is the same. Range is also very similar +/- 50NM (depending on speed and path assumptions) as a detour west, north-west + FMT + long leg until fuel exhaustion).
4. “Predicted BTO” is the BTO that *should* be observed according to the model path positions, assuming that BTO ought to represent round trip propagation delay plus a constant (using the same “classical” BTO calculation and bias that everybody else uses). As you rightly say, this path ought to have BTO values that are significantly greater than those that were actually observed. What is strange is that there seems to be a very good linear correlation between predicted BTO and observed BTO. This strikes me as too strange to be pure coincidence. My working hypothesis is that some unspecified disruption of synch/burst timing has distorted the numbers in a systematic fashion. I am still researching a candidate mechanism by which such a distortion could occur.
@Oleksandr, You wrote, in response to @Matt, “You either don’t read, or you can’t grasp the whole picture. I feel your knowledge can be useful, but if you want to share it with this group, you need to find some other approach to express yourself.” I strongly disagree. Matt’s assessment is compelling and well stated. It reinforces what has been quite clear for a long time: that the diversion at IGARI must have been intentional.
@DennisW, @Keffertje:
“Hillary (or any else for that matter) is a better choice than Donald.”
A proverb by Dennis that will likely be remebered and cited in the annales long after mh370 has been found and all our efforts here are since long forgotten. I could give you a foreigners view on the present elections (candidates) but this is under the aviation tag. Let’s be content with saying that I think your Glock will be safe for years to come, Dennis, however the election ends. If you use it with moderation.
Jeff,
You wrote “Matt’s assessment is compelling and well stated.”
So far I din’t find anything compelling, well stated, or novel in his statements. To me it was only loud noise from “Z. did it camp”.
@Oleksandr
Your tone seems rather different in some posts than I’m used to read from you.
Your name is not hacked by coincidence?
Ge Rijn,
No.
Interesting discussion. A couple of comments (and summary);
a) MH370 turn back at IGARI was a deliberate act, but not in response to a Boeing failure. The description by @DennisW that the dataset around MH370 is a ‘rats nest’ is beautiful.
b) MH370 and MH17, apart from the MG, seem unrelated (I was warming to idea that they might have some connection). Thank you @Ge Rijn for some excellent posts.
c) MH17 appears to be a Russian stuff up. Though why the MG let it fly through a war zone is a mystery.
@SteveBarratt:
With the grandmother onboard… 🙂
I agree about the rating of Ge Rijn’s posts.
@DennisW:
… and discrimination.
@Oleksandr
Just asking. It happened before on this blog you know.
I think the ‘Z. did it camp’ can be interpretated rather widely.
Also a scenario like yours would most probably imply Zaharie who made the decisions and flew the plane most of the time don’t you think. At least he would be responsible as the captain for any actions taken in flying the plane.
If you look at it this way you are also in the ‘Z. did it camp’ IMO.
Only in your scenario the motivation would be more clear ofcourse.
Hope you stay open for discussion.
I think you and @Matt Moriaty have interesting points of view in their own right.
@DennisW, OT, We have our own home grown high school drop out politicans 🙂 and even an animal party we can viote for when we get really frustrated. Democrats is the way to go:). It is indeed a process of elimination, but am still struggling with the “loiter” scenario. Not because it could not have happened but more the rationale behind it. If it was not ZS intention to commit suicide or murder 238 innocent people, what did he expect would happen before using PAX and aircraft as leverage? That the other side would give in? And what if they had? Where would he go? Live in exile as a fugitive? In what country? And if he had to commit such a heinous crime, would he not have insisted on some sort of communication from the ground before going through with it? And then I wonder, how does one give the sign that negotiations/blackmail can commence, M9-MRO being airborne? Apologies for all these questions, but this is what I find difficult to reconcile. It’s easier just to assume suicide in that case.
I wonder why you are misleading your audience with statements that are your personal opions and are simply not true.
A B777 can be perfectly flown manually at all altitudes. Pilots are trained to do that in the simulator. They get little opportunity to practice manual flying at altitude because normal operation is on autopilot from shortly after takeoff until final approach for landing. However, MH370 ceased to be normal operation after passing IGARI and we don’t even know whether a qualified pilot was flying it after the diversion. If the radar data show that contrary to normal practice the airplane was not flown on autopilot, then the question should be what can that tell us.
Your opinion that the radar indications can be dismissed as artifacts of the processing is not based on facts. The DSTG received primary radar data at 10 second intervals from 16:42:27 to 18:01:49. Before IGARI these data show perfectly constant heading and groundspeed, and after IGARI they show variations of these parameters that are not compatible with automatic flight.
Factual Information states that the position and heading of the radar return from both Civilian and Military Radar, suggested that it was from the same target. Would it be strange if different radars at different locations independently produced the same artifacts?
Can you substantiate in any way that it is reasonable to assume that the following varations are just errors of measurement:
Groundspeed variation 50 kt
Heading variation 15 degrees
Error in target location 8.5 NM ?
@Matt: left turn.
Another, related thing, while thinking about it (and excuse me again if I bring up issues already dealt with):
About the left turn: also since the most of the debris that has turned up belong to the right wing, suggesting perhaps that these did not take the full force of impact and even might have fallen off a little earlier (hypotethically): could any of the wingparts, according to your experience, have malfunctioned at Igari and either forced a left-hand turn because a right-hand turn couldn’t be (expected by the pilot to be) properly executed, or a left-hand turn as an attempt by the pilot to rattle the malfunctional parts on the right-hand wing? Depending on what wing (-part) is doing the most of the work in a bank. I recall a slight turn right on the flight path before Igari, and would guess the rh trailing wingparts being less put to work when banking left.
I have an eerie feeling we’ve been through this, but it would in any event be good to hear it from you.
@Keffertje
Yes, lots of loose ends in all scenarios. I have the same questions you do, and no answers that transcend my personal opinion. Like many things in life you align yourself with the preponderance of evidence, and test it against alternatives. For example, there are many things to support that there was no mechanical failure, but there is nothing to support that there was no loiter.
Actually, the loiter, is not something that occurred to me. In my original scenario paralleling the coast of Indonesia/Sumatra I merely allowed the plane to travel further to the Northwest after Penang before initiating the FMT. A brief loiter accomplishes the same thing. Take your pick.
Often forensics come down to what we (me and working colleagues) referred to as “the last man standing”. Meaning that eventually everything that is incorrect collapses, and die hard people clinging to incorrect views self-destruct. We are watching that process in action for the last couple of weeks.
@DrBobbyUlich
Can you give a few more specifics about the limited extra search area, outside of current box, that you see has merit? Perhaps I would agree with you on that basis.
I am thinking the home flight simulator was in NAV flight mode to McMurdo. If you go by the Z home simulator case presented by Iannello/Godfrey (not their adjusted path but the actual home simulator path – black line)that path hits 30S reasonably close to the current search box, and arguably an “updated” search box might now give more emphasis to that more NE area.
@Gysbreght
About why the auto-pilot was probably not on after the 180 turn at IGARI, I was thinking on some options. So I take a shot:
-The most simple one; the AP did not work/was not available.
-The pilot/hijacker had not decided on a specific location yet where to go to thus did not enter an AP waypoint after the turn.
-The pilot/hijacker wanted to keep full control at all times during this most risky part of the flight regarding detection and interception so he could change course at any given moment.
@Ge Rijn:
– A B777 has two autopilots, normally both are operating, one monitoring the other
– in AP modes other than LNAV the AP can be used without entering a waypoint in the FMC
– the pilot/hijacker has full control over the course while on autopilot. By using the control wheel/and column he immediately gets direct control and the autopilot is automatically disconnected. He did not do anything special regarding detection or interception.
@PaulSmithson
Couple things:
1) Lots of confusion about AP modes. Please know this: the ONLY way to guarantee a great circle route over thousands of miles is with LNAV, meaning there is some distant waypoint to which you’re flying. If your path to the SIO is dependent on a great circle route, someone would have had to input a lat/lon, meaning a great circle route with wind correction applied by the AP.
And, btw, I didn’t read the path you drew as a GCR because of the tightening of the curve at the south end. I chalked it up to the ever increasing west variation. This, I’ll admit, might be because I’m a total boob when it comes to Mercator maps.
Regardless, if your thesis is that a pilot rolled the HDG/SEL knob over to WMKK and then became incapacitated, there is almost ZERO possibility of a great circle route (unless the good Lord blew you onto one every step of the way). If he had the presence of mind to roll over using TRK/SEL (which would have been wise because he would have taken wind correction workload off his plate while he fought the plane) you can ignore wind on the way to 45S but you’d have to figure the path at every instant against progressive variation.
HDG/SEL will hold a path that will vary over the ground according to BOTH mag var and wind. TRK/SEL will hold a path over the ground that curves with variation changes but is immune to wind because of AP wind correction.
I would urge you to refigure your thesis based upon what I just told you and see where you end up. If you’ve never figured wind corrections you’ll need a crash course and you’ll also need to do your own fuel consumption calculations. You’ll also need to do two paths. One with HDG and one with TRK. The only difference between the two, again, being a wind correction.
2) I understand what you mean now by predicted vs observed. And you may be onto something.
3) I would love to see you flesh out your paper with more descriptive text, photos of the debris you refer to, and without using a great circle assumption.
I’m saying this because you are the only guy in two years who seems to have the beginnings of a theory that satisfies many of the previously weak aspects of the incapacitation scenario.
However, you will need a watertight case for
A) whatever mechanism you can find to prove that BTO is valid but “distorted”
B) totally invalidating the radar plot up the Strait (and saying “because the Malaysians suck” doesn’t cut it).
But I do hope you keep at it and come back with something. It’d be nice to hear a case that Z was a hero presented in a remotely credible way.
@DrBobbyUlich
–“My final question is, can you imagine a scenario whereby the flight deck would rapidly become uninhabitable as a result of dense smoke generated nearby and loss of O2 and/or full face masks, and yet the aircraft continued flying until fuel exhaustion? If the flight crew retreated to the main cabin, they could use the portable O2 bottles there to stay alive (temporarily) and occasionally venture into the flight deck for brief periods. If smoke and toxic fumes were continually generated by an internal smoldering fire, could that make it impossible to land the aircraft or even to take aggressive measures to clear the smoke or put out the fire or descend to a low altitude? How long would a portable O2 bottle last? Could it be just long enough to make the FMT about 90 minutes after diversion?”
Remember, what allowed the rule change on oxygen above FL250 was the certification of masks that could be on and operational within 5 seconds without disturbing eyewear. It takes something quite extraordinary to make a pilot flee his seat, especially since even dense smoke (not fire, but pure smoke) should have been manageable with full face masks set to 100% O2.
A fire could cause them to quit the flight deck. But then how does a 777 continue for another 6hours aloft and make a series of turns, several of which (if you believe the radar plot up the Strait) would have been, by definition, LNAV turns involving delicate and accurate keystrokes, with a fire sufficient to cause the pilots to throw in the towel?
Short of that, dense smoke would have been cause for an immediate descent.
It’s been interesting reading Paul Smithson’s paper. His theory literally eliminates 100% of the why and how of the failure scenario. He’s got an uphill battle on a few fronts to make it actually work, but it does eliminate the need for conjecture on what may have incapacitated the pilots.
@Paul Smithson
Lots of issues with you scenario.
As you know:
1> BTO issues – no clue about BFO since I did not try to estimate it from your flight path. Did you look at BFO at all? Don’t know if you have published speed and track at the BTO rings somewhere. If you do, I would appreciate a link for a quick BFO check.
2> The radar data – difficult to dismiss.
3> The FO phone connect near Penang.
You have a very big hill to climb.
@Paul Smithson
I read your paper with great interest. It’s quite intriguing by it’s radical other approach and interpretation of information.
Though besides problems mentioned (like @DennisW in previous post) I see two other major problems.
You state that the Indonesian radars insist they did not see MH370 flying along the M. Straight and they should have seen it.
If they should have seen it there they sure should have seen it crossing Sumatra don’t you think? And what about Singapore?
IMO a crash area at 45S 89E should have delivered most debris on South/West Australian shores according to the drifter based drift models. Still nothing is found there.
Using Adrift on that location produces only drifters towards the shores of South/West Australia and hardly any towards the north or east. That’s easy enough to find yourself:
http://adrift.org.au/map?lat=-44.2&lng=92.1¢er=32.7&startmon=Jan
Anyway thanks for your interesting paper.
Further west however, produces a very interesting drift pattern.
If the aircraft was human flown heading for Canopus the terminus would be around 37.00S 69.75E.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qdixty5h4xpj82k/Canopus-1.pdf?dl=0
The drift is
http://adrift.org.au/map?lat=-37&lng=69.5¢er=-20&startmon=Mar
@ventus
Those coordinates are nowhere near the 7th arc. Are you serious? Do people want to start tossing the ISAT data aside? Why? The fact that the aircraft has not been found is not relevant to discarding the ISAT data. Same question to Paul S. Both of you are outside the scope of acceptable consideration IMO.
Yes Dennis, I am perfectly serious.
I agree with Paul on one MAJOR point.
The “radar” and “ISAT” narrative has always had a lot of unexplained holes, and still does, and it does not appear that any amount of “calculation” will ever resolve them.
It is therefore time to think along alternative lines, like a detective investigating a mystery, rather than “just the forensic lab” looking at one set of “scientific (engineering) data”. We have been only looking at one part of the problem, and it has got us nowhere.
It is high time we seriously re-considered the hitherto assumed “sanctity” of the BTO’s, and if necessary, discard them, and “start again”.
Remember (1), The RADAR data.
The only radar data we have is “Malaysia’s” radar data, and it is bloody shoddy at that, in itself, reeking of “sus”.
Consider, No solid Thai post Igari primary radar data, nor in the Malacca Strait ?
Consider, No Indo post Igari primary radar data “OF ANY KIND”, not over MY peninsula, not over Penang, not up the Malacca Strait ?
Verdict = Radar Narrative = “not credible” M’lud.
Remember (2), the ISAT data is ONLY “Malaysia’s” ISAT data, NOT Inmarsats’s, they refused to release it, AND, in their JON Article, they “studiously” used the data in the MY and ATSB reports to “demonstrate method” only. Is that not a “hint” that something is not quite “ridgy-didge” ?
Verdict = ISAT Data = “non corroborated” M’lud.
Remember (3), the “confirmed” (?) Debris, drift analysis “does not support”, though it “does not exclude”, a debris “source” in the ATSB’s 120,000 square kilometre zone.
I don’t like having to say it, but we have been very “blinkered” in our investigations so far.
It is time to stand back, take the blinkers off, and consider other scenarios.
I have corresponded separately to Paul S on this issue some time ago. I suggest that almost any path you might like to draw, of roughly the same length and the same general direction will also show a resulting curve through constructed BTO numbers that is similar in shape to the original curve of BTO numbers. I have demonstrated this to Paul using paths significantly West and significantly East of his own. There are only these 8 numbers to consider. Paul’s curve through his own 8 numbers, numbers constructed to match his guess at a path, does not match the original precisely, and the offset is different at each point. All one can say is that the curve through the BTO numbers themselves is of the same general shape. It does not prove that the original BTO numbers are wrong.
@ventus
I am afraid we are in complete disagreement. You are sounding like Andre Milne. There is no reason to suspect the radar data or the ISAT data is wrong. We have always known that it is not sufficient to determine a terminus, but it is certainly not wrong.
@Ventus45.
Very well said.
In agreement with @Ventus45 regarding the radar and isat data as these have not been collaborated… if anything far too many questionable holes in the story they tell.
Dear all,
I have some thoughts to share and curious for opinions. Let’s start with the pax. In the 777 normally there should be in seat sat com at least in C/Cl. Why did no pax pick up that sat com to make a call? If I would know something is wrong or in an emergency I think no one cares to spend a couple of USD to make that last call. So, either sat com was disabled by someone (e.g in the cockpit) , pax didn’t notice anything or died because of an event immediately before anyone picking up the in seat phone.
Secondly I don’t know which inflight entertainment system this particular airplane had. I know some have USB ports to upload documents and to work on them in the plane. Is the inflight entertainment system isolated from all other systems? No. The system itself is not well protected and I could imagine that someone could have used this “door” to gain more control. It sounds a bit like conspiracy – I know – but it might not be impossible.
Ge Rijn,
“About why the auto-pilot was probably not on after the 180 turn at IGARI, I was thinking on some options.”
Instead of guessing, why don’t you consider cases of the intentional AP disengagement, which have already happened in the past? Like this one, again ADIRU-related:
“https://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2005/aair/aair200503722.aspx”
Also Google on the “Children of magenta” to understand some possibilities why the plane could be flown manually.
I hope Jeff Wise does not mind us to continue discussing something unrelated to his speculations supported by the absence of evidence.