Two men, strangers to one another, go into the cockpit of an airplane and lock the door behind them. They take off and fly into the night. One radios to ATC, “Good night, Malaysia 370.” One minute later, someone puts the plane into a turn. It reverses direction and disappears.
Question: Did one of the men take the plane?
For many, it’s inconceivable that there could be any other answer than “of course.” Moreover, that since the details of the incident suggest a sophisticated knowledge of the aircraft, the perpetrator could obviously only be the man with the vastly greater experience — the captain. As reader @Keffertje has written: “Though I try to keep an open mind to all other scenarios, the circumstantial evidence against ZS simply cannot be ignored.”
For others, blaming the captain without concrete proof is immoral. There are MH370 forums where the suggestion that Zaharie might be considered guilty is considered offensive and hurtful to the feelings of surviving family members. Even if one disregards such niceties, it is a fact that an exhaustive police investigation found that Zaharie had neither psychological problems, family stress, money problems, or any other suggestion that he might be suicidal. (Having broken the story of Zaharie’s flight-simulator save points in the southern Indian Ocean, I no longer think they suggest he practiced a suicide flight, for reasons I explain here.) And far from being an Islamic radical, he enjoyed the writings of noted atheist Richard Dawkins and decried terror violence. And he was looking forward to retiring to Australia. If he was trying to make the Malaysian government look bad, he failed, because in the absence of an explanation there is no blame to allocate. And if he was trying to pull off the greatest disappearing act of all time, he failed at that, too, since the captain would necessarily be the prime suspect.
So did Zaharie do it, or not?
This, in a nutshell, is the paradox of MH370. Zaharie could not have hijacked the plane; only Zaharie could have hijacked the plane.
I’d like to suggest that another way of looking at the conundrum is this: if Zaharie didn’t take the plane, then who did? As has been discussed in this forum at length, the turn around at IGARI was clearly initiated by someone who was familiar with both aircraft operation and air traffic control protocols. The reboot of the SDU tells that whoever was in charge at 18:22 had sophisticated knowledge of 777 electronics. And the fact that the plane’s wreckage was not found where autopilot flight would have terminated tells us that someone was actively flying the plane until the end. But who? And why?
If Zaharie did not do it, then one of the passengers and crew either got through the locked cockpit door in the minute between “Good night, Malaysia 370” and IGARI, or got into the E/E bay and took control of the plane from there.
If we accept that this is what happened, then it is extremely difficult to understand why someone who has gone to such lengths would then fly themselves to a certain demise in the southern Indian Ocean. (Remember, they had the ability to communicate and were apparently in active control of the aircraft; they could have flown somewhere else and called for help if they desired.)
Recall, however, that the BFO values have many problems. We get around the paradox of the suicide destination if we assume that the hijackers were not only sophisticated, but sophisticated enough to conceive of and execute a spoof of the Inmarsat data.
Granted, we are still left with the issue of the MH370 debris that has been collected from the shores of the western Indian Ocean. Many people instinctively recoil from the idea that this debris could have been planted, as a spoof of the BFO data would require. Fortunately, we don’t have to argue the subject from first principles. Detailed physical and biological analysis of the debris is underway, and should be released to the public after the official search is called off in December. As I’ve written previously, several aspects of the Réunion flaperon are problematic; if further analysis bears this out, then we’ll have an answer to our conundrum.
@Oleksandr
Are you talking PIC or passengers? A smartphone definitely couldn’t, but a $20 dongle and laptop/tablet most certainly could – depends on how many geeks were on board, if you’re talking passengers. You also get aero band + FM radios, and some ‘travellers shortwave’ portable radios do aero band as well. If anyone had a Grundig, they’d be good by a window…
@JeffWise
–“Yet what the Zaharie’s flight sim hard drive recorded was not a steep fatal dive but two separate climbs — apparently executed by a person who was experimenting with sharp aerodynamic stalls.”
Yeah, well… Again, I do not know how these data dumps were derived, what caused them, were they manually exported with a keystroke like we used to do in XPlane, were they part of a larger recording of many data points, etc… These are instantaneous snapshots in time. That much we know. A snapshot of one instant of any flight state can be very misleading.
What does seem plausible to me is that he may indeed have “practiced” a power-off VNE+ dive right down to low altitude, but then – knowing what his ultimate intention was – didn’t actually let it hit the water and, instead, pulled out of it. The human being in me says that’s a logical thing to do…like putting a gun under your jaw but not pulling the trigger. I don’t really know, but you hear about that happening a lot in the months leading up to gun suicides.
The climb at high altitude may have been a practice run at pitching for best glide. If he wanted to squeak every bit of range out of the thing, he may have wanted to practice a little gliding at his anticipated weight. At flameout and 265KIAS, the first thing you’d do is raise the nose. It’d be instinctive.
But again, who knows?
What is noteworthy is that a guy with a flight sim spent even a nanosecond in the no-man’s-land of the SIO. I have thousands of hours in the sim and I never went there once. But if I had a desire to make a plane disappear there and wanted to have a solid grasp on the overall execution of such a thing, you bet I’d make a run at it on the sim.
And then delete the drives containing that data.
@all
Tom Hanks and Alec Baldwin had a “Sully” comedy sketch on Saturday Night Live a few days ago.
Watching live, I found the sketch a little painful with possible parallels to MH370 (re: its Fariq-like behavior allowing strangers into the cockpit). But OK, it possibly fits with this thread topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVMAwGXe3BY
@Stendec,
“Someone earlier on this thread said that, to their eye, it looked like an English speaker trying to sound Chinese.”
Maybe Uighur?
@TBill you just hit the birds… ))
If the autopilot was engaged before the flame-out, then disengaged at the loss of generated power, then without pilot input (hands off) the airplane would enter a phugoid in both cases, i.e. no stall.
The airplane stalls when the pilot pulls the nose up.
TBill:
To remain a second on the lighter side, and as a compensation for me not being able to see your clip in Sweden, I offer this, which you might have come across before (from 2013). It sits well with the Pom and Aussie debate, too. (Jeff, delete if you wish):
ALERTS TO THREATS IN EUROPE: BY JOHN CLEESE
by John Cleese – British writer, actor and tall person
The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent events in Syria and have therefore raised their security level from “Miffed” to “Peeved.” Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to “Irritated” or even “A Bit Cross.” The English have not been “A Bit Cross” since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies nearly ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from “Tiresome” to “A Bloody Nuisance.” The last time the British issued a “Bloody Nuisance” warning level was in 1588, when threatened by the Spanish Armada.
The Scots have raised their threat level from “Pissed Off” to “Let’s get the Bastards.” They don’t have any other levels. This is the reason they have been used on the front line of the British army for the last 300 years.
The French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from “Run” to “Hide.” The only two higher levels in France are “Collaborate” and “Surrender.” The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France ‘s white flag factory, effectively paralyzing the country’s military capability.
Italy has increased the alert level from “Shout Loudly and Excitedly” to “Elaborate Military Posturing.” Two more levels remain: “Ineffective Combat Operations” and “Change Sides.”
The Germans have increased their alert state from “Disdainful Arrogance” to “Dress in Uniform and Sing Marching Songs.” They also have two higher levels: “Invade a Neighbour” and “Lose.”
Belgians, on the other hand, are all on holiday as usual; the only threat they are worried about is NATO pulling out of Brussels .
The Spanish are all excited to see their new submarines ready to deploy. These beautifully designed subs have glass bottoms so the new Spanish navy can get a really good look at the old Spanish navy.
Australia, meanwhile, has raised its security level from “No worries” to “She’ll be alright, Mate.” Two more escalation levels remain: “Crikey! I think we’ll need to cancel the barbie this weekend!” and “The barbie is cancelled.” So far no situation has ever warranted use of the last final escalation level.
A final thought – ” Greece is collapsing, the Iranians are getting aggressive, and Rome is in disarray. Welcome back to 430 BC”.
@Matt Moriarty, @Gysbreght, I think it would be great if somebody with Microsoft Flight Sim X and the appropriate 777 add-on played around to see if they could get the plane into a similar configuration. I have a hunch that it would not match DennisW’s go-get-a-beer scenario.
Any takers? This could be a fun, easy way to significantly move the ball in the field of MH370 studies. I’ll run the results as a guest post.
@Johan, This didn’t strike me as very Cleese-ian, and sure enough:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/satire/terrorismalert.asp
@Matt Moriarty
You may well be onto something iro the flameout practice sim runs, because that would be the only part of the flight he would be unpracticed at, and nervous of messing up, or loosing his nerve. It fits with my theory that he had worked out everything carefully in advance, every detail, as you would expect from someone with his perfectionism and attention to detail. People do carry out practice runs for suicides. We had a case many years ago (1974, to be exact) where a tube (subway) driver, also in his 50’s coincidentally, killed himself and 50 plus innocent passengers when he powered into the tunnel dead end at Moorgate, London. There was no automatic train overrun protection, just a red signal. It turned out that in the weeks leading up, he had apparently practiced making platform overruns, possibly to see if he could hold his nerve when it came to crunch time (no pun intended) People on the platform that morning, recalled seeing the driver sitting rigidly at the controls, and staring straight ahead, as he drove at full speed into the tunnel dead end.
It happens.
@Oleksandr, The BTO track goes to Kazakhstan.
Using the calculated range of 2642NM from last radar hits the 7th Arc around 33S and also happens to be on a track headed directly for OLPUS.
@Jeff Wise: ” I have a hunch that it would not match DennisW’s go-get-a-beer scenario.”
I don’t see why not. The airplane needed to be set up in VNAV climb with autopilot engaged, and a quantity of fuel calculated to run out at the desired altitude. If the setup was with a small quantity of fuel he didn’t have to wait very long.
Just a bit more on the subject. I believe his plan was to ditch the plane heavily enough to make it sink quickly, leaving behind the minimum of surface debris. No easy feat to pull off when your every instinct as a professional aviator would be to pull up at the last moment, to save the plane, and your own skin. The self preservation instinct is a powerful one, even for someone who has made up their mind to kill themselves. Understandably enough, this must be what is at the back of the mind of someone intending suicide. You are going against every natural instinct. His worry must have been “if I bottle it, I’m going to end up with a largely intact plane floating on the surface that I can’t get to sink before being spotted, and then the ELT goes off. We have discussed this already, but as far as I can work out, the ELT cannot be deliberately deactivated by the pilot.
That’s it fo tonight folks.
@DennisW – I have difficulty understanding the loop in ZS’s guilt. Having two points that end without fuel on his Flight Simulator program makes ZS the prime suspect for the accident flight. I accept that. But you then say his plan was to go elsewhere but something went wrong. That’s the part I do not understand.
The alternate location was not found on his simulator. He is guilty because of the points on his simulator end in the middle of the SIO along with MH370. Why is he guilty if that was not his plan?
@Johan Zabivaka )))
@DennisW, @Gys, @JeffWise
I’m sorry to admit I can’t recall the expression of the “get a beer” theory in detail. Nor, like Lauren H, am I clear on how Z could be an unintentional culprit.
Dennis, can you restate the “get a beer theory” in one paragraph? Even if only to answer LaurenH’s question above.
I’m having trouble understanding the “flight state” mentioned by both Jeff and Gys.
Thx
@Jeff:
Ha ha ha ha! I didn’t realise that! Thanks, Jeff. That saved some of the on topic relevance!
It must have been the Russians. ..
@hilaryous: spasibo!
@Jeff:
I will refrain from mentioning The Onion’s rendering of the world’s most confusing airport, the Franz Kafka International Airport, Prague.
@Stendec & Normand:
I’d love to hear more about things surrounding the CMB and the suspiscious crew member, but I would prefer not having to guess.
@Matt Moriarty, The “get a beer” theory is that Zaharie sat down for a flight sim run, headed out into the SIO to try out a suicide scenario, and then left for a while as the plane flew boringly out over the featureless sea. Eventually it ran out of fuel and crashed, but just before the end two points were saved, and this is what the Malaysian police later recovered.
The reason I don’t think this works is that, as I wrote in the blog post “MH370 Flight Simulator Claim Unravels Under Inspection,” (August 31, 2016), at point 6 the plane has very low airspeed and no engine power yet is climbing at 2029 feet per minute. Based on Gysbreght’s analyis of Mike Exner’s flight sim data, this does not seem to match what we’d expect to see if the plane’s flightpath had deteriorated into a dive without human input.
@Keffertje:
I saw your post now. Do you have anything on the two Ukrainians?
Even Charles XII made an attempt to take Moscow, but was finally beaten, in Ukraine, while trying to recuperate south of the Russian winter.
@Johan,
Find the coffe man and you find the answer.
@Johan, I spent a lot of time and a fair bit of money trying to find out the deal on the Ukrainians, as I describe in “The Plane That Wasn’t There.” I hope to be able to do more.
@Lauren@Matt
The way point to McMurdo or the Cocos could have been entered to facilitate the FMT. The end points of the simulator likely have no relevance since Shah’s intention was to fly elsewhere after the FMT.
My speculation, and it is only that, is the data found on the simulator was the result of letting the plane fly to exhaustion on a simulated flight that was only intended to depict the details of the FMT. Shah never intended the simulator end points as a final destination.
@Jeff, Dennis, et al
Jeff wrote “…crashed…just before the two end points were saved.”
To me this is the golden question: What the hell ARE these points? How were they “saved?” What is the mechanism? What in God’s name ARE they?
When you make an FMC flight plan in X-Plane, it will spit out a simple text file with everything you programmed. If you want to fly the exact same flight, you can load saved flight plans from a folder. By now, Austin has probably built in an “invert” feature so you can fly a roundtrip without entering a hundred points in reverse order. I have to imagine MSFS has a similar feature.
The files I’m referring to will not contain anything to do with the flight state (vertical speed, turn rate, total fuel or any of the juicier stuff we saw in the Duncansteel piece) because that’s not their purpose. They will only show named waypoints, altitudes and Mach #s to be commanded by LNAV/VNAV. Somewhere in the guts of the sim, the fixes are indeed lat/lon, as the sim data shows, but within the FMC flight plan, they’re only ever listed as named waypoints unless you’re on a NAT or something where the route is defined by lat/lon.
So how is it that we have these six snapshots of an actual sim flight, with design variables such as turn rate, VS, groundspeed (but, strangely, not airspeed) shown in a big list of data (but not a comprehensive list, like a sim designer would want to study)?
Again, guys, these are snapshots of a flight-in-progress that were either A) clearly chosen by someone who wanted to “dump” that exact data at that exact moment in time; or B) total bullshit that I cannot make sense of.
Jeff, did anyone in the chain of custody of the stuff that made its way to you ever clearly explain what these “points” are? Until we establish that, we’re dead in the water, I’m afraid.
“Again, guys, these are snapshots of a flight-in-progress that were either A) clearly chosen by someone who wanted to “dump” that exact data at that exact moment in time; or B) total bullshit that I cannot make sense of.”
Perhaps the flight simulator software “crashed” and wrote out its dump file but as it maybe couldn’t complete the save state of the flight path. Or the video card device driver faulted and crashed the whole system.
@MH
The Duncansteel piece says they’re ” fragments of *.FLT files, this being the format used by FSX to store parameters, including position coordinates at arbitrary points during a run of the simulator.”
I can’t swallow the word arbitrary since computers don’t work that way. If MSFS is going to record the entire flight, it will take 60 snapshots a second (or whatever framerate your video hardware will support). There should be about 1.6 million of these fragments for a 7.5 hour flight if you ran 60fps. And those fragments should be listed in sequence within a single larger file containing way more variables than the ones we’ve seen.
When XP recorded a flight, it created the entire flight as a single file. Maybe Austin could crack it to determine what any of the thousands or millions of individual snapshots looked like. But I never did. And I don’t understand why this was done in the case of MH370.
Someone somewhere on this planet HAS to know what larger file (a flight “recording” for lack of a better term) these bits were plucked from. And that person has a lot of explaining to do.
@Rob. “…as far as I can work out, the ELT cannot be deliberately deactivated by the pilot”.
Awkward but if the test button is secured in the test position somehow it will ping once and then I believe it will not then work. Also it can be switched off at the unit if access can be gained.
User handbooks for the two ELT types are:
http://www.elta.fr/uploads/files/00a2b82a28496c1ff5d6d3513216879f6d4fd557.pdf
http://www.elta.fr/uploads/files/67e22a2ab4f420f72faf85383a6248949dc5d68f.pdf
Both need a data interface with the aircraft data bus to transmit GPS position. I gather this was not fitted and its provision remaining unusual as yet.
I am not the cofee man
@Dennis / Lauren
This was the thrust of my point above (3.45 on 23rd). The ‘getting a beer’ theory makes no sense.
We know that the aircraft ran out of fuel and crashed in the SIO. The sim points are only interesting if they represent some sort of advance planning for this real event. I can understand the power of this argument but would like to know more about how and why the simulator writes those points. Potentially strong evidence like this deserves strong scrutiny. It’s all we have. All the stuff about Anwar/marriage/relationships/YouTube videos is worth very little.
The idea that he was actually planning something ELSE on the sim and crashed in the SIO by accident on the sim run… and then did the exact same thing in reality, also crashing by accident, is stretching credibility. It is the result of trying to shoe-horn some sort of Java/Cocos landing into a motivation-led approach.
Jeff,
“The BTO track goes to Kazakhstan.”
I strongly disagree with this. Only if you assume BFO was spoofed in a simple, but very specific way, but BTO was genuine (btw, what are tracks corresponding to other values of the parameter Victor suggested to change?)
The two abnormally long BTO records in Inmarsat logs prove that it is practically possible to “insert” desired additional delay, though it is more complex compared to the modification of a single parameter to spoof BFO.
So, why do you think a “sophisticated hijacker”, who was capable of cracking the air defence systems of Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, India, and, who knows, what other countries, as well as to successfully plant debris in Mozambique, Reunion, SA etc, was unable to crack Inmarsat’s BTO, and modify AES/SDU electronics in order to “insert” additional desired delay? The same hijacker would then trow the idea to use BTO and BFO to Inmarsat. Isn’t Diego Garcia military is the best candidate for this role in the “spoof domain”?
@David
@Cofee
@David, thank you for shedding a little light on an otherwise rather obscure subject.
Speaking personally, I am confident that he would not have wanted to raise any suspicions before getting airborne, and wouldnt have considered tampering with any equipment, beforehand. I also think he would have been confined to the cockpit, after the diversion.
@Cofee, that’s a relief. We can eliminate you from our investigations.
@Oleksandr
Lets be honest, spoofing of the SATCOM data is a complete non-starter, about as likely as an invasion of intelligent beings from outer space (green in colour, sporting antennas, and with one eye in the middle of their foreheads) Actually, one could say it’s an insult to the people at INMARSAT and others, who were able to interpret the BFO data to show the plane went south, something that would definitely been considered unrealistic before MH370 created the challenge. As with so many things, necessity has been the mother of invention. Not that I mean this in any way to be a criticism of Jeff. On the contrary, I think Jeff is doing a really great job, keeping the discussion going.
Pour yourself another glass of wine.
The information found on the sim drives has been checked, the result is in the 1.000 pages police report.
This report has been leaked and the existence of the “two sim points” is the main issue of the leaked information.
Afaik more than a few people reading and posting on this board are in posession of this report or have close contacts to people who are.
The question is, why do we think that speculating about the validity of two sim points without having access to the complete report or at least without having access to the final detailed finding of the report will bear any usefull objective result? What keeps those people in the know from giving away this vital information and why are they feeding us just two bites of a comlete menue?
I measure the validity and the possible information of those data points on the unwillingness of those with access to the report to treat the rest of us with openess and respect. Imho there is not much hope to gain substantial progress without access to more information, information which is readily available, but obviously withheld for subtle reasons.
On July 31, 2016 Jeff opened a thread entitled “60 minutes Australia on Secret Malaysia Report”. It opened with two pages from the Confidential Malaysian police report that were shown in the TV programme. Below those pages Jeff posted a table containing a subset of data contained elsewhere in the Malaysian document. It turned out later that VictorI had put together that table from data he had selectively retrieved from other parts of the Malaysian document. Victor’s table contains both groundspeed (in ‘World’ coördinates) and airspeed (in ‘BodyAxis’ coördinates).
The following site gives an overview of the format and content of flight (.FLT) files, which are used when a session is saved off, often to be loaded again later on. It also gives examples of a B747 mission and a B737 IFR take off. That description shows that a .FLT file contains many more parameters than VictorI has selected for his spreadsheet table.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc707071.aspx
I think we can agree that the six data points are snapshots of points commanded by the user in different simulator sessions. It is also obvious that a simulator session does not have to start with a take off at KLIA. It can start anywhere, at a location, altitude, speed, etc. selected by the user.
All of this is obviously lost on DennisW, who is only interested in the geographical coördinates of the last two data points, even though they are not anywhere near Cocos Island, Christmas Island, or Java.
@Cofee:
No? I thought so. 🙂
@ROB:
Funny, it is exactly the same green men that I have seen. I wonder what wine you guys are drinking. The sun (well) is clearly (well) over yardarm here at least.
@all
Gesbreght said:
“All of this is obviously lost on DennisW, who is only interested in the geographical coördinates of the last two data points, even though they are not anywhere near Cocos Island, Christmas Island, or Java.”
I think he is generally correct about that.
To be clear:
1> I do not have access to the police report. The only information relative to the simulator I have is the same information that you all have access to in the public domain.
2> I do not have nor have I ever used a flight simulator program of any kind. I have no idea how and under what circumstances points are stored. That is an excellent question that someone should be able to answer.
3> I have no background in aeronautics, and speculating how a 777 behaves or how a flight management system operates would not be useful to our group.
What I do care about is piecing together all the information we collectively have in a coherent way. The sim points are part of that data set, and they have to be considered. I think most people here are happy to dismiss them as a red herring. That is certainly a possibility, but I am not comfortable with that when viewed in the context of all the other information we have.
Gesbreght also said:
“I think we can agree that the six data points are snapshots of points commanded by the user in different simulator sessions.”
I am not among the people who agree with the above statement. I am not saying it is wrong. I am saying I don’t know enough (see 2> and 3> above) to agree with it, and I am not willing to simply take Gesbreght’s word for it.
@Cofee,
I know the real coffee man, it’s not you, you are there!
I give this énigme to help but nobody lightup!
Who is the coffee man enter the cockpit for service?
Find more at: baddhu.wordpress.com
@DennisW
If you do not use a flight sim, how do you know CoCos is on the great circle line from Car Nicobar to McMurdo? My feeling is it must probably be McMurdo or a manual lat/long to fly a curved path, whereas straight paths go further south as we know. Niel Gordon said looking more like curved path now, which took me a while to understand his logic.
@David, @Rob
Thank you for the ELT discussion. My assumption is Z or HiJacker accessed unit before flight and turned it off. I am further thinking everything was turned off (flight data recorder etc).
@ROB, You wrote, “spoofing of SATCOM data is a complete non-starter… one could say it’s an insult to the people at INMARSAT and others, who were able to interpret the BFO data to show the plane went south.” This is essentially the argument that Mike Exner had against spoofing, when I first brought up the idea: that Inmarsat had to invent the BFO analysis from scratch, therefore no perp could have known that they would do it. This is a dangerous perspective to hold: namely to assume that the perp is less clever than yourself. I have always said that a BFO spoof would require highly, highly sophisticated perps; and indeed, if MH370 was hijacked in this way, the perps have outwitted Inmarsat, the ATSB, and the IG. I believe that this is an unacceptable conclusion for many of the latter. However I find the idea quite easy to believe. Is that insulting to INMARSAT? Well, you don’t always get to be the smartest person in the room, that’s just the way life goes.
@Oleksandr, The BTO track derives from the BTO values without reference to the BFO. If you assume that that BFO was tampered with, you might as well just throw it out. Even if you know exactly how it was tampered with (and we don’t) the error bars are so large that they aren’t going to tell you anything useful about where it went. Also, you asked how hijackers who figured out how to thread through air defense radars and plant debris could not have known that Inmarsat was logging BTO values. Well, the answer is that any plan, especially an elaborate one like this one would have been, is subject to the vagaries of “unknown unknowns.” In March 2014, it was not common practice for satellite communications providers to log that data, and they missed it. If you read the story of Operation Mincemeat, a similarly elaborate ruse by which the British fooled the Nazis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat), the Brits made several mistakes as well, but the Germans failed to pick up on them.
Parenthetically, if the spoof theory is correct, then another mistake the perps made was to allow the Réunion flaperon to be recovered with a full load of barnacles, which provided a lot more forensic evidence than they seem to have realized. This mistake was rectified on subsequent debris.
@DennisW @Oleksandr
First your 3 times misspelling of ‘Gesbreght’s’ name made me laugh. Like @Coffee announced it was not him who served the cofee 😉
Humor is nice.
Second I agree those SIO sim-data are the most strange artefacts. Whatever we know about them.
Out off all places why would someone try out climbs on stall speed in the SIO?
You can do this everywhere.
And if it was a ‘having a beer’ forgotten flight to McMurdo, attitudes like that wouldn’t make sence.
Unless it maybe was a phugoid reaction of the plane after fuel-exhaust?
I agree we (more specific the specialists which I’m not) need the whole picture of that data.
Those SIO sim-points definitely put more suspision on Zaharie. Like it or not.
It’s about finding the plane and the truth.
On psychologie my mind was carried away in this regard which I like to share.
‘Broken Ridge’ could be a metafore of a ‘broken backbone’.
A sign and location he could have chosen symbolically to identify himself with in the state he was in.
He broke his backbone actualy in 2007 with his para-gliding accident. He was on pain medication since, is what I read.
He probably saw the end of his career coming soon? His marriage was under stress. His loved girlfriend broke up the relationship shortly before.
His political hero Anwar was send to jail on probably political motivated charges.
This maybe was the drop to carry out his plan in a delusional state of mind.
He felt like a ‘Broken Ridge’ for a long time and in his delusion he had to make one final statement: Crash on Broken Ridge and leave as less evidence as you possibly can.
I’ll take a Port after this one if you don’t mind..
@Oleksandr
I first read ‘the bold’ 😉
But you meant ‘the bolt’.
I see your point but still awaiting further details.
@TBill
As discussed before (as I understand it) route-discontinuity (ghost fligth) paths after FMT can only be magnetic headings compensated for wind variation.
Great-circle routes or lon/lat routes can only be implemented by a pilot just before or after FMT.
IMO it’s about was it ‘Track’ or only ‘Magnetic heading’?
IMO this makes the difference between a actively piloted flight after FMT and a ghost-flight.
But I’m not a pilot by far so it’s only my interpretation of the information.
> A full file would contain millions of points during the flight.
Correct. Full file was deleted. These are un-overwritten sectors where the data in the sector from a former file was analyzed and was consistent with a data point from the flight log.
Also, in older MS FS programs, I could fly upside down and push the nose down (skyward), and get incredible rates of speed and climb. I don’t know if they ever fixed this.
@DennisW, MPat, @Gysbreght, I think we are all (excitingly!) in agreement that the flight sim data points could potentially tell us a great deal about whether or not Zaharie premeditated a suicide flight into the SIO, but that important information is being withheld in a suspicious manner.
On a related note, I think it’s time to acknowledge that Duncan Steel’s blog has gotten very strange. Last week Richard Godfrey put up a post about how MH370 might have been flying from airport to airport, looking for a place to make an emergency landing. (Which, alas, Ben Sandilands picked up uncritically.) It even made reference to Kate Tee. The post before that was about how the flight simulator points line up with McMurdo station in Antarctica–ignoring the fact that, as we’ve been discussing here lately, the flight-sim save points don’t look at all like a plane that has run out of gas en route to somewhere else. Add in the fact that the Independent Group has been trying to spin their interpretation of the flight-sim points, while preventing anyone else from seeing the full report, which in my mind is both unconscionable and highly suspicious.
The IG long ago staked its reputation on the wreckage being found in the southern Indian Ocean search zone; having been proven wrong, they seem to either have gone off the rails entirely, or to be actively generating a smokescreen of confusion.
@Mike Schwab, Could you elaborate on the “un-overwritten sectors”? Do you mean that it’s plausible that there should exist these partial log fragments? Is it possible that these points were saved inadvertently rather than deliberately?
You are inconsistent with the above if you take the geographical coördinates out of their context and ignore everything else that those data tell us. I appreciate that you have no background in aeronautics or flight simulators, but that is no excuse for ignoring the opinions of those who do.
It is also inconsistent with your statement that you ignore the primary radar data and what they clearly tell us about the dramatic events after IGARI.
@Mikeschwab
Would it be also possible (however slim) that the or an unwritten sector containing this particular file(s) could also have been from a even prior/earlier new (of the same windows version) installation, installed after a previous full format and installation if windows OS was beyond repair or crashed?
I believe RetiredF4’s points about the 1000-page report and Z and the simulator makes perfect sense. As long there are some people more or less knowledgeable about the unpublished report about Z and his sim there is not much use in discussing the sim data at all. They who know will have to act in some way to convey some credibility around it. I also recall Jeff made a notable retreat from Z’s possible guilt after assumedly hearing that the report had nothing at all on him. I don’t disbelieve the data as such, but only the report can shed light on how they are meant to be understood in smaller and greater context. And what are we actually waiting for? That the ones with access to the report will get the time to finish reading it in full, or get their mass market books ready for publication? After all, there are people here who have quarreled over that data longer than Hitler actually was in office.
It is very peculiar to me that Z, a man beyond suspiscion in most regards, with a lot of friends and family around him, is said to have planned all this in minute detail and still left no clue or trace whatsoever around him, except these pretty damning data points deep into the SIO. (I am not by that suggesting they were planted by the police.) On the other hand, Z seems to be one of probably only few people (in and around the known possible suspects at hand) with the time on his hands, and probably the wits, and opportunity (incl. his flying ability of course), to think this through and carry it out. That, his accident — with the constant pains and handicap that (most likely) would follow for many, many years — and a few possible traits in his general psychology and evident preferences regarding what to preoccupy himself with in his spare time, tend to speak for him as being the most likley guilty one. (It also, nota bene, makes him a bit of a target for maliciscious acts and planning.)
Sifting through the popular press I noted that he belonged to a flight sim forum, was very extrovert with his interest, and invited friends and collegues over. That is not a dream for a forensic analyst, but there would be, on the other hand, a lot of chances for the police to hear someone that would have anything negative to say about him. Wouldn’t a guy like that have appeared to someone among all the people he made exchanges with as a bit strange, bipolar, lacking/losing in judgement, being inclined to stepping over the line, megalomania, self-destructiveness or melancholy? Not one? According to the reports as we have been told not so.
And aren’t we in a sense demanding quite a lot of a province boy who see seems to have spent more of his adult life in a cockpit (real or virtual) than sleeping, and on top of that raised kids, nursed a family home, nurtured hobbies and socialised and managed his profession? And primarily: how would he be able to leave no other trace or suspiscion? And, being so diligent with computers etc., how could he believe it would be enough to delete the data points without a reformatting of the disc? And didn’t he even leave something in the desktop dustbin? And how come there is only trace of one/two excercises in SIO, which are not very telling of what went down? Wouldn’t it be likely that there were a lot more data points where he accustomed himself with other possibly unknown sides of such a journey? Or were his discs reformatted at a point before that? I don’t find it likely to practice only once or twice.
There were btw another one in the crew with a sim, but it doesn’t tell us much of course.