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.
@Matt Moriarty,
Please re-read my question regarding smoke in the cockpit coupled with loss of O2. I think you misunderstood what I was asking.
You responded to say smoke in the cockpit could be dealt with using the full-face masks and 100% O2. If there is no O2, as I hypothesized, the full-face masks won’t help, and O2 must then be obtained by retreating to the main cabin.
You said: “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.” I agree. However, the combination of dense smoke in the cockpit AND “loss” of O2 to the face masks will do just that. In this case the alternative to leaving his seat is dying rather quickly. “Loss” of consumable O2 could be due to pressure loss in the gas lines or even burning O2 in the gas lines. It might be possible to create both issues (i.e., smoke and loss of O2) with a single event such as a fire being fed by the pressurized O2 in the MEC.
Very limited access to the flight deck would hinder landing efforts. If the full face masks are unusable, and if the only O2 is a portable bottle, how could a pilot man the controls in a smoke-filled flight deck long enough to make a landing without a face mask? Perhaps he carried an extra set of goggles. That would help in seeing the controls and displays. However, my understanding is that the masks with the portable O2 bottles are not on-demand breathers. They are constant flow, I believe, and thus it would be very difficult to avoid also breathing some smoke while using one’s hands to operate controls. So if smoke was the dominant issue, perhaps the tactic might be to try to put out the fire / source of smoke first and then make a landing. One could shut off nonessential electrical equipment (like the left bus?) to see if that reduced the smoke, hoping to make the flight deck habitable for a long enough period of time to land the aircraft.
@Matt M. You misunderstood my response to [1]. I am suggesting divert “direct to”WMKK” was activated at IGARI. This produces a standard bank angle turn and a GS track to WMKK. At WMKK there is a route discontinuity since the only active waypoint has just been passed. The path after WMKK is magnetic track hold. Compensated for temperature, wind and magnetic declination in 15s steps.
Paul Smithson,
I took a look through your paper. I appreciate your effort, but sorry to say that it features all the possible “deceases” of all the trajectories ever suggested, including:
– Incompatible with BTO data even if you presume different BTO bias (1 millisecond error is equivalent to 300 km direct distance to the satellite, so a constant shift will not help – see your p11). There is nothing mathematically surprising about correlation you observed.
– Requires to discard all the radar data (or its absence) from 4 countries.
– Nothing is mentioned about BFO. Given that 18:25 BFO are consistent with radar heading, and 18:27 – with turn to NNE, I bet your BFOs are not compatible with your trajectory.
– Inconsistent with drift studies.
– Inconsistent with barnacle analysis.
– I am not clear what flight mode can justify such a curved route.
You are free to speculate about a cause or propose some new hypothesis (e.g. assume different BTO bias), but if you discard all the major data, there is really nothing to discuss.
@Oleksandr
First I don’t see what this has to do with your assumed speculations by Jeff Wise.
I’m not in for triangulating so I suggest we keep this out of the discussion.
Independent of cause I think it can be usefull to look at reasons why the AP was not engaged after the turn at IGARI as @Gysbreght concludes based on the radar-data.
You mention/link another possibility; a malfunctioning ADIRU.
The report states that this malfunctioning ADIRU also was providing wrong data to the primary flight computer and other systems in the manual mode.
Wouldn’t this mean that without a consious pilot the plane (also MH370) would have crashed sooner or later?
Dr. Bobby Ulich
–“…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)?”
I did a fairly detailed answer on the AP modes for Paul Smithson above, so check that out in case I don’t answer this sufficiently here…
Why autopilot? Well…hmm…I guess I just can’t imagine a human being wanting to ride the pitch trim for 6 hrs? That’s a terrible answer, I know, but nobody’s ever asked me that and I guess it just wouldn’t occur to me that anyone would want the tedium of hand-flying for that long.
Why heading? The only way I could imagine the FMT being something other than a big old counterclockwise twist of the HDG knob is if someone had entered a lat/lon (or, as Victor once suggested, a fix like McMurdo) into the FMC. If that was the case, then you put yourself solely into the realm of a premeditated act (which has been my position from the outset) because it would, by definition, involve A) a choice, B) several keystrokes, & C) prior research of either the fix or a desired set of coordinates. I cannot conceive of any “default” mechanism (or glitch, for that matter) that would fly to the SIO uncommanded using an FMC that should have been loaded with the flight to Beijing.
My gut feeling is that after clearing Aceh, the heading bug was rolled to a nice round number – 180 TRUE (not MAG) – and followed in TRK/SEL thereafter. I don’t have time to refigure the latitude on fuel, but that, by definition, would finish MH370 (+/- whatever heading changes occurred during the final dive) at precisely the same longitude as the end of the FMT.
@DrBobbyUlich
–“Please re-read my question…”
Yes, I see you did mention loss of O2. Sorry about that.
Everything you said in the “reread my question” comment is certainly possible. You don’t need me to ascertain that such a scenario is possible. I guess I’m just more driven by probability and I’d have to say that the probability of your assertion has so many decimal places that I just start to check out.
Ge Rijn,
“First I don’t see what this has to do with your assumed speculations by Jeff Wise.”
I would be happy to know that I misunderstood quite a few repeated messages from Jeff implying that his blog is not a right place for the discussion of mechanical failures. See, for example his recent post Oct 11, 7:44 am.
Re: “Gysbreght concludes based on the radar-data.”
We discussed this issue several times over 2 years, I think even at Duncan’s blog. Earlier I also came to the same conclusion based on the radar track presented in ATSB 2014. I even tried to fit the trajectory with the magnetic heading at that time, but it turned out that the magnetic declination was too small to explain the curvature.
“The report states that this malfunctioning ADIRU also was providing wrong data to the primary flight computer and other systems in the manual mode.”
Yes. In this regard I had a very speculative thought that if ADIRU was malfunctioning the crew of MH370 would have to switch it manually from EE-Bay. This is because ADIRU is a primary source of navigation data, and according to Boeing philosophy its internal logic prevents from shutting it down during flight from the cockpit.
“Wouldn’t this mean that without a consious pilot the plane (also MH370) would have crashed sooner or later?”
Yes, it would crash without pilot’s input in these conditions.
@Oleksandr
In my interpretation of that post from Jeff Wise I see nothing definite on banning discussion of a posible mechanical/electronical failure. He only states he assumes it was a deliberate premeditated action.
A mechanical/electronical failure would also require deliberate actions although not premeditated (in the sence of causing the failure).
I share the view it’s highly unlikely a failure like this occured before the turn at IGARI regarding everything that happened afterwards but I won’t discard the possibility completely at this time.
In my view if something like this happened it more likely happened at or just after 18:22. But also this is highly specutative and impossible to prove (yet).
But back on your comment about the malfunctioning ADIRU.
In this case you state the plane would have crashed without a consious pilot at the controls.
So then I conclude a (long) ‘ghost-flight’ would be impossible in such a case.
Can you agree on that?
Ge Rijn,
“So then I conclude a (long) ‘ghost-flight’ would be impossible in such a case.”
No.
Unless you assume cyber-hijacking, there were two separate major events: (1) at IGARI, (2) between 18:22 and 19:41.
What would prevent re-entering heading on POS INIT page if some IRU units were still functional, and re-engagement of the AP, say around 18:00 or later (we know that someone was conscious at least till 18:25)? In this case SAARU and GPS are sufficient to maintain the attitude.
@Ge Rijn, I appreciate your efforts to keep the conversation on track.
@Oleksandr, This is a moderated forum. While I try to encourage as broad a discussion as possible, it sometimes happens that I have to make a judgement call about the direction that the conversation is going. Occassionally very smart and well-intentioned people become stuck on a topic that others have moved beyond, and I have to step in. I think we’ve arrived at that point with the discussion about whether the turnback at IGARI might have been caused by an accident. Although this is a popular notion in the broader culture (cf Christine Negroni, David Soucie, Richard Quest) I feel that we have examined it at great length and found it poorly supported. Let’s move on.
@Matt Moriarty, I greatly appreciate your lucid and well-informed explanations.
@Brian Anderson, always delightful to get your input.
@Oleksandr
I don’t know exactly what is needed to re-engage the AP in case of such an ADIRU malfuction.
But as you stated yourself in any case active pilot input is necessary or the plane would crash.
IMO you effectively eliminate a ghost flight in such a case.
This is what I was looking for.
Ge Rijn,
“IMO you effectively eliminate a ghost flight in such a case.”
No. Probably I did not express myself clear. Let’s try in this way (time below is appropriate):
17:30-18:00 manual piloting due to multiple failures, including ADIRU;
18:00-18:xx someone is still alive; possibly re-engaged AP in the HDG Hold mode.
18:xx-00:20 ghost flight in the ATT mode; nobody is alive.
Here xx>25. Does it work for you?
@Oleksandr: No. None of these makes any sense. The first one, for many reasons that have been elaborated very many times; the second, because of the SDU reboot; the last, because a ghost flight would have terminated in the search area.
@Oleksandr
The timing of the failures is troublesome. As we discussed previously the aggregate probability is very low. Using the hull loss as a Bayesian prior, a mechanical failure starts off at around 20%. Add to that the precise timing at the IGARI hand off point and you lower that by a factor of 0.125 even given very coarse flight path time quantization. Add to that the lack of communication of any kind and you have an additional lowering, say 0.2. By the time you factor all these issues in you are looking at a something like a one in two hundred likelihood. I just don’t want to be walking into that kind of headwind when there is not a shred of evidence to support it.
Of course, you implicitly reject that the coordinates on Shah’s simulator have any significance whatever.
Jeff,
Your arguments make no sense to me at all.
1. “The first one, for many reasons that have been elaborated very many times”
What are these reasons? I already asked you several times, but you continue confusing low probability with impossibility. Sorry, I don’t buy your explanation that radar data from IGARI to Penang is inaccurate.
2. “the second, because of the SDU reboot”
So there was nobody alive in your opinion? How would SDU come back then? For what? And why after the disappearance from radars?
3. “because a ghost flight would have terminated in the search area.”
The area where the ATT terminates was not even defined. How can you state that it was searched?
Dennis,
The problem is that we assign different significances to different observations or “coincidences”. These can hardly be numerically quantified. For example, coordinates in Z. simulator: you think this finding is nearly sufficient to hang Z., while to me this is only two “cherry-picked” coordinates among a few thousands. The radar data is of huge significance to me, while you proposed to throw it into a garbage bin a while ago. And so on.
@Oleksandr
From a much broader perspective you have to wonder what the expectations are of people expressing alternate theories – you, Ventus, Paul Smithson, MH, and others. I have given up trying to sift through the data we have. Face it – nothing you say or do is going to change anything. The current search will finish, the plane will not be found, and that will be the end of it. Quit beating yourself up over issues that make no difference to anyone.
What are your expectations? One of my favorite questions I would ask my reports when I saw them grinding away on some task was “what would you do differently if you knew the answer?”. If you cannot define some actionable result associated with your efforts, you are basically wasting your time.
@Oleksandr, Everyone seems to understand these things except you. I’d exlain them again but if they didn’t make sense to you the first nineteen thousand times I don’t expect they suddenly will now.
Jeff,
I wrote: “18:00-18:xx someone is still alive; possibly re-engaged AP in the HDG Hold mode.”
You responded that this makes no sense “because of the SDU reboot”.
Can you explain what you meant?
@DrBobbyU @all
Several recent posts have mentioned burning oxygen theory. Oxygen of course does not burn by itself. It supports combustion of combustible materials. Therefore just guessing the O2 pipes are probably stainless steel…if not: yikes.
Thus a scenario that might force pilots out of cockpit would be loss of O2 pressure due to line break (say someone needed O2 in the EE Bay). Smoke or depressure scenario then forces pilots out for alternate air source.
Dennis,
This time I absolutely agree with you.
@Olekdsandr, If you’re positing a scenario in which an accident occurs, and then someone presumably on the edge of consciousness puts the plane in an AP heading to nowhere before expiring, that doesn’t explain how the SDU gets rebooted. People have spent a lot of time scratching their heads over the SDU reboot and have only been able to come up with intentional acts.
Yes, the left AC bus can get isolated from the cockpit, but it is tricky to do and is not part of any checklist. No one is going to isolate the left AC bus and reconnect it 40 minutes later in the midst of a fatal airplane accident.
P.S. Re: O2
One crash scenario could be fire followed by depressuring. Depressuring could put out a fire due to low O2. Then we have to invoke a reason why the cockpit O2 masks failed.
It is still a little hard to understand why this scenario sets a course for Car Nicobar then to SIO, unless there was wild ride with HiJackers, which is possible.
@Oleksandr
If the ADIRU was failing like in 9M-MRG (your example) I understand (from you) the plane could only have stayed in the air if it was flown manualy. No way the ADIRU would repair itself and the AP could be re-engaged reliable in any way IMO (in such a case).
If after 18:xx noboby was alive anymore the plane would have crashed between 18:xx and FMT.
IMO there’s no way with a malfunctioning ADIRU (like in 9M-MRG) MH370 could have performed the FMT and the flight into the SIO without a conscious pilot behind the controls.
If the MH370 was flown manualy for some time after the turn at IGARI as @Gysbreght concludes from the radar-data this most probably had another reason then mechanical or electronical failure. I think this is interesting.
I agree (with Jeff and others) we have to look at the whole picture with this and than mechanical/electronical failure before IGARI is very unlikely.
I still don’t exclude it completely but it’s a dead-end for now IMO too.
If there would come any compelling evidence or indication the story could change.
F.i. if they would find a nose wheel door on a Malaysian or Vietnamese shore.
But there isn’t any clear indication something like you suggest happened (yet).
Not at IGARU.
On the contrary I would also say.
IMO if something like this happened it happened at or after 18:22 till FMT but not before 18:22.
For me discussion closed for now about mechanical/electronic failure at IGARI untill more credible evidence or indications show up.
@DennisW, I have just finished reading ISATs report on BTO and BFO analysis on Cambridge core. I can only be in complete awe of your understanding of the calcculations behind it, me a sjlemiel Economist and Jurist. I now better understand your terminus based on a loiter. But I understood enough to know that Ventus45 terminus is an impossibility. This is awesome reading and am sure I will read it and study it again. As for the data points on ZS SIM, I can only add that deleting them is equal to removing blood from a crime scene which is subsequently found using luminol.
lyrics of change…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgqGUBP3Cx0
@Keffertje
Yes it will take a while to catch up with the math experts.
I assume the “curved paths” that Neil Gordon talks about necessitate NAVigation mode to waypoints, or else just manual commands. I assume ghost flight still possible with set waypoint(s) in NAV mode.
I notice (see attached) that the ATSB generic curved paths (light blue @25000 ft) closely bracket Iannello/Godfrey home simulator cases. So that is my current adopted path (no need for math work, nor loiter).
http://thehuntformh370.info/sites/default/files/styles/gallery_large/public/fig%202.jpg?itok=ZBPguRAe
Jeff,
“People have spent a lot of time scratching their heads over the SDU reboot and have only been able to come up with intentional acts.”
Of course it was intentional act. But was the intent malicious? If yes, then it does not explain simultaneous disapperence from the radar screens. Or you think it was pure coincidence? If yes, then it is even less probable than a mechanical failure immediately after ATC handover.
The need in re-powering of the left bus to start fuel jettisoning, restore satcom, etc. is a way more plausible reason to me. May be not for you.
“No one is going to isolate the left AC bus and reconnect it 40 minutes later in the midst of a fatal airplane accident.”
How do you know this? In the case of Swiss Air 111 it was disconnected for a reason. And it could be exactly re-powering to blame on for the final loss of the control after 18:25. Why not?
@Matt M – FWIW, perSkyVector, BEDAX >OLPUS is 180°
Can you help me to understand a little more about flight planning? Others have said that all you need are two points entered into one of the flight computers to get a route, but, in actuality, it seems real routes follow waypoints that give a slight zig zag. Is this true? Is it for ATC purposes?
@Mark Tan – The phones in Business Class on MH370 were only capable of passenger to passenger conversations.
@Matt Moriarty
There has been a lot of discussions concerning possible waypoints for directing a flight, for whatever reason, into the SIO.
Some time ago I proposed the following scenario:
Just suspend your disbelief for a moment, and imagine that the pilot had wanted the flight to terminate in a particular region of the SIO. Purely for the sake of argument, I will say he wanted the flight to terminate close to S38, E89. Our rogue pilot finds that if he inserts ISBIX after IGOGU, and following the turn at IGOGU, inserts a manual along-track waypoint with positive offset from ISBIX, with enough positive offset to ensure the plane stays on the same great circle path (namely IGOGU/ISBIX/Manual Along/Track Waypoint) until fuel ⛽ exhaustion, the plane will duly run out of fuel at or close to S38, E89. This way, he would avoid the need to specify a final waypoint by latitude and longitude.
I know this might sound a bit nonsensical, but our rogue pilot might have wanted fuel exhaustion to coincide with particular lighting conditions ie. Sun elevation. Perhaps he was considering ditching the aircraft shortly after sunrise, for example, to give himself a fighting chance of ditching along the swell. I am not a pilot, but I guess you would need daylight for that.
What is your opinion?
@Lauren H, “the phones were ony capable of passenger to passenger communications”. IMO, this is not correct. M9-MRO had just been revamped between August and September 2013, removing 1st class, adding Business class seats etc. The BC satellite phones were most certainly capable to make calls to the ground.
@Keffertje – How do you know “The BC satellite phones were most certainly capable to make calls to the ground?”
From Factual Information 1.9.5.1 subparagraph 4:
“CTU is the Cabin Telecommunications Unit, which provides an interface between the in-seat handsets and the SDU, for cabin telephony calls, were that functions available. In the case of 9M-MRO, the in-seat phones can only be used for seat-to-seat calling.”
@Lauren H, I tried to find the MAS page on their new BC IFE from April 2014. Sadly it no longer is there, since they terminated the 777 fleet. On it they advertised their new UFE system and air to ground sat phone capabilities on 777 that were refurbished. I am not sure the FI report is always correct.
@Rob
Why would a pilot want to avoid entering a specific lat/long heading such as -38/89 in your example? I am unclear if degree/min/secs or just full integer degrees can be entered.
@PaulSmithson
–“The path after WMKK is magnetic track hold…”
Ok. You realize that is not a great circle route, right?
@JeffWise
Thx! In turn, I greatly appreciate your dutiful comments-thread management.
@Oleksandr
you said:
“The problem is that we assign different significances to different observations or “coincidences”. These can hardly be numerically quantified. For example, coordinates in Z. simulator: you think this finding is nearly sufficient to hang Z., while to me this is only two “cherry-picked” coordinates among a few thousands. The radar data is of huge significance to me, while you proposed to throw it into a garbage bin a while ago. And so on.”
Yes, people are indeed different. To me the sim points are a slam dunk, and they were certainly not cherry-picked. The were among the only deleted points. How this cherry-picking impression got started I have no idea. It is game over in my view. How others can be orthogonal to that is a complete mystery to me.
The radar data is only interesting. First of all people keep calling it data when we really don’t have any data. Secondly is has proved to be totally useless for any purpose other than to make Gysbreght conclude Shah was not flying the aircraft. The man is clairvoyant no doubt. I have asked many times for an example of the usefulness of the radar information. I have never received an answer, and do not expect to receive an answer.
Now the whacko list is growing exponentially – throw out the BTO and BFO, forget about the radar data completely, and on and on… I am thinking it is time to move on, and will likely do just that.
@LaurenH
–” FWIW, perSkyVector, BEDAX >OLPUS is 180°
Can you help me to understand a little more about flight planning? Others have said that all you need are two points entered into one of the flight computers to get a route, but, in actuality, it seems real routes follow waypoints that give a slight zig zag. Is this true? Is it for ATC purposes?”
Two points does indeed constitute a route – a great circle route. The fact that airways zigzag is a relic of the early days of ground based navaids. That, and airspace considerations.
If BEDAX – OLPUS shows 180 (and I’ll take your word for it since I’m at work and I can’t get OLPUS to load on my iPhone), that’s the initial outbound mag HDG leaving BEDAX. Over the course of that track, the mag track actually flown would vary with changes in declination.
@Rob
–“Perhaps he was considering ditching the aircraft shortly after sunrise, for example, to give himself a fighting chance of ditching along the swell. I am not a pilot, but I guess you would need daylight for that.
What is your opinion?”
Why would anyone who wanted a “fighting chance” fly 5 hours into the SIO?
The FCOM says on page 11.31.17:
I read this as saying that you must specify a final waypoint by latitude and longitude. An along-track waypoint can only be created between waypoints, and can not be created from a latitude and longitude waypoint.
@TBill
Well, basically for two reasons: No1, because extending a geodesic simplifies things, operationally. I know it’s possible to set up a waypoint by entering a latitude and longitude, but it lacks the simplicity of extending the geodesic that the aircraft is already following, and it ensures that the aircraft covers the maximum distance possible after making the FMT, which I believe could have been an intention of the pilot. And it also provided some planning flexibility. For example, if the flight had been delayed an hour, then to achieve the same lighting conditions at flameout, all he would need to was use waypoint KETIV instead of ISBIX, and extend the geodesic from KETIV, increase cruise speed from M0.81 to M0.84, and he would have made up for the delay in takeoff.
No2) The flight into the SIO does appear to be a straight line, according to the DSTG analysis, and this path does pass over, or extremely close to ISBIX, and surprise, surprise crosse the 7th arc not a million miles from S38, E89, in round figures.
Apologies all and especially to Dennis, for the evangelism, but extending a geodesic seems to me to be the most straightforward procedure, operationally. If you want to arrive at a preferred place after travelling through the night in probably difficult circumstances, you are going to use the simple option to achieve your ends, and what could be simpler than staying in LNAV and keeping the manoeuvring to an absolute minimum?
That’s my pitch.
Since no one here has claimed to have actually known ZS, our opinions that he doesn’t seem to fit the personality profile of a suicidal murder are based on reports of others in MY. We all know how truthful they have been. Here is a simple timeline within a few minutes of a possible sequence of events:
17:15 FO leaves flight deck to get coffee for ZS.
17:21 ZS starts diversion with FO locked out of cockpit. ZS shuts down all communications and then opens outlet air Valves (possibly shutting of passenger air masks too).
17:25 FO and cabin crew bang on door to gain entrance but recognize the depressurization and don the portable air masks. They try to get in through the escape hatch in the cockpit door but are unable to open it.
17:52 FO turns on cellphone to try to communicate with MAS office.
18:25 FO enters EE Bay and turns on switches to regain communication and also turns on AES.
18:35 FO shuts of pilot’s O2 supply in EE Bay.
18:37 ZS senses the loss of O2 and initiates the FMT to SIO before loosing consciousness. (Or if you really do not want to believe ZS didn’t do it intentionally you could say he wanted to head to Australia but passes out before entering the second half of the FMT?)
Problem is no known motive.
This scenario could end further north than the current search area or the pieces of the plane in the current search area were missed.
@Matt Moriarty,
With regard to my hypothesis that an oxygen fire put smoke into the flight deck, you said: “ I guess I’m just more driven by probability and I’d have to say that the probability of your assertion has so many decimal places that I just start to check out.”
You guess the probability is extremely low. I don’t, because It has happened before. Please check this out:
http://avherald.com/h?article=44078aa7/0000
With regard to a post-FMT constant heading route, you also said: “Why heading? The only way I could imagine the FMT being something other than a big old counterclockwise twist of the HDG knob is if someone had entered a lat/lon (or, as Victor once suggested, a fix like McMurdo) into the FMC.”
You seem to forget that the FMC defaults to a heading mode when a route discontinuity occurs (when the last entered waypoint is reached). It appears likely that that the FMC then maintains a constant magnetic heading, but the magnetic declination is not updated. Effectively the result is a constant true heading route thereafter. If the last entered waypoint was BEDAX (or another nearby waypoint), essentially all of the post-FMT route would be flown at a constant true heading.
You also said: “My gut feeling is that after clearing Aceh, the heading bug was rolled to a nice round number – 180 TRUE (not MAG) – and followed in TRK/SEL thereafter. I don’t have time to refigure the latitude on fuel, but that, by definition, would finish MH370 (+/- whatever heading changes occurred during the final dive) at precisely the same longitude as the end of the FMT.”
Many people have looked vigorously into a 180 degree true track route, including at least Inmarsat, me, and Victor. Unfortunately, so far no one has been able to match the satellite and fuel data. What does seem to fit much better is a ~180 degree true heading route. It is not yet clear to me if the GDAS 4-D wind data are sufficiently accurate to determine if the most-likely course was exactly 180.0 degrees true heading or 180.0 degrees magnetic heading or just an arbitrary, non-integer number in the neighborhood of 180 degrees.
@DennisW
“The current search will finish, the plane will not be found, and that will be the end of it. Quit beating yourself up over issues that make no difference to anyone”
Earlier this year I posted “In March 2014 the Chinese searched the sea near Christmas Island which was an unusual area to go to in the first two weeks after the disappearance and which one would imagine had been triggered by some evidence or disclosure.
With nothing turning up in the Southern Indian Ocean it is possible they will return to the area near Sumatra and complete a more extensive search.
……. A flightplan …… gives an exact fit with the ping rings and waypoints with straight paths and constant speed round below Sumatra.
This is quite extraordinary when you think about it.
This is just the sort of information that would encourage the Chinese to renew the search close to the coast of Java near the 7th arc.”
I am still hopeful the Chinese will go back and have a more extensive look around up North once this search terminates.
Correction of copy/paste error:
The last sentence in the quote before the Examples should read: “Latitude and longitude waypoints cannot be used to create along–track waypoints.”
Just for the record, this document:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc707071.aspx
describes the format and content of flight (.FLT) files. It also illustrates that with a few examples, including a B747 in takeoff from Victoria Intl Airport, Canada, and a B737 takeoff from Mojave Airport, U.S.
These examples illustrate that VictorI’s nomenclature modification of the velocity parameters in incorrect. My position that the FSX software on Z’s home computer was not operating correctly is therefore correct.
@Freddie
Yes, the Chinese did search around CI, but it was West of the island, and the 7th arc is East of the island. Who knows what they were doing? I doubt any additional underwater searching will be undertaken once the ATSB wraps it up.
@Freddie
Can you tell us any more about these meetings Shah had prior to the event? At the moment you have given us very little, but someone must know something and we sure need new, credible information otherwise the chance of finding the plane approaches zero.
@Matt M. Yes, I’m aware of difference between rhumb line, GC and magnetic.
@Jeff:
What is the dernier cri about the text-messages from mh370 before take-off, do you know? I saw an article about the infamous Ethan Hunt which claimed there were non whatsoever after boarding. I believe you had an idea about that at some stage.
I came across this anniversary statement by Z’s sister which is hard to remain indifferent to. And that straightens out questions for me. She may be wrong about his abilities to plan this (he knew how to use youtube), but probably not about the likelyhood of it being him (from her perspective, admittedly). As a relative she will be expected to defend him but it is not very probable that she is making things about his life and character up completely. People would protest (maybe they have, but it didn’t reach here). He had all the reasons in the world to stay alive, as far as we can tell. If he wasn’t fatally ill or facing physical or mental degradation, bipolar, got kicked out of his job, risked incarceration, bankruptcy, dishonor etc. He seems like a guy who would enjoy a good food-war too. And shooting a Glock. His terroristic or political disposition is not conspicuous.