Long-rumored police report of cell tower connection leaks at last — UPDATED

cxbkxxmwqaanpza

Twitter user @AirInvestigate just tweeted this picture. Thanks to reader Ventus45 for posting the link in comments. This presumable is part of the 1,000-page Royal Malaysian Police report that the Independent Group and others have been sitting on for months.

When Victor Iannello described the contents of this report to me, he implied that the only parts that were interesting were 1) the pages describing the flight simulator hard drive data points in the southern Indian Ocean, and 2) confirmation of the Penang cell-phone tower connection with Fariq’s phone. Apparently there was nothing in the rest of it that suggested any hint of what might have happened during the fateful final flight.

Here I’ve used Google Earth to drop a 32 km radius circle centered on Bandar Baru Air Itam on top of a map of MH370’s flight path taken from the “Bayesian Methods” e-book:

penang-turn-2

UPDATE 11/12/16: @Airinvestigate has posted a second part of the document on Twitter. He describes it as “parts clipped & redacted.”

rmp-cell-phone

Interesting to note that the Malaysian police are on the same page with many of those here in this forum in concluding that the plane was flying in excess of 500 knots and at an altitude of 35,000 to 45,000 feet–very clearly not the behavior of someone looking for an emergency landing spot.

223 thoughts on “Long-rumored police report of cell tower connection leaks at last — UPDATED”

  1. @Johan

    Towards the KL twintower is quite specific and conclusive IMO.
    But of course I agree to be carefull.

    I don’t know if the report is authentic f.i. and the issue is mentioned without further specific details.

    @Gysbreght

    With a sub-folder ‘777twintower’?
    Rather hear your opinion.

  2. ZS might have tried to make an image of a b777 flyby the twin towers as it’s probably not permitted airspace. Using the flight simulator probably didn’t give the desired effect except for us to ponder all sorts of motives.

  3. @Ge Rijn:
    I don’t demand that you would be able to verify or not, by yourself. If it is a media hoax it will show pretty quickly, but if it is RMP then we would expect them to be good enough to fool you and me, and a few more.

  4. @MH:
    No, it is does not appear impossible to pick that apart. But it depends. Why wait for so long to release it if it was damning enough? To avoid influencing the overall investigation?

  5. @Ge Rijn

    I think I agree with you a deleted subfolder labelled ‘777twintower’ is highly suspect. In fact given Captain Zaharie’s well documented political affiliations in this blog anything off his hard drive has got a question mark hanging over it.

  6. @Ge Rijn:
    “…why on Earth would Zaharie simulate a flight towards the KL twin-towers?…”

    ZS would make the perfect patsy to explain MH370 disappearance, if it wasn’t for the fact he was such a ‘normal’ person. It would have been easier to frame Fariq, but as the son of a well connected, high ranking civil servant he obviously has to be protected at all costs. I’ve been trying to get good information about Fariq and his family for several months, but have failed abysmally. The guy is either a ghost or someone has scrubbed all info off the internet.

    More signs of a cover-up, and the ongoing disinformation programme designed to confuse rather than provide clarity.

  7. @Boris Tabaksplatt

    It seems anyway disturbing, important information has been kept secret for a very long time.
    Fariq’s phone call, the SIM-data, this deleted ‘777twintower’ folder.

    And in line you mention there is no info to be found on Faric or his family anywhere.
    Protection or cover-up?

    Regarding Faric and his family I can except protection. But not the other withheld information that surfaces lately.

    If the French knew about this deleted ‘777twintower’ folder I can fully understand they decided to treat the case as a terrorist/criminal case.

  8. @all

    The “tower flight” is harmless. It is something any of us would do for the pure entertainment value. No big deal, IMO.

    The damning points are the SIO points which we have known about for some time, and most here casually dismiss. Unbelievable. The release of this flight sim info has absolutely no additional value for me. The phone registration time and tower identification are far more interesting and valuable to the investigation.

  9. @DennisW

    Entertainment value for a serious pilot to fly his plane (a 777) towards the KL-twintowers? Just for fun?
    Do you realize how macabre this is in the light of what happened to the New York Twin Towers in 2001?
    And in the light of the disappearance of MH370?

    And than also save those pictures and simulated flight(s?) in a special folder named: ‘777twintowers’?
    And delete this folder only a few months before MH370 vanished with this pilot as a captain?

    No big deal?
    You are in denial or something?

  10. @Ge Rijn

    No denial. I just have a much better calibration of human nature than you do. I could extend that to many other things as well.

    Recall the game “Grand Theft Auto”? You were awarded points for hitting pedestrians, and extra points for hitting people in wheel chairs. It is a game. Nothing more.

    However, to simulate a diversion to the SIO is not part of a game. There was serious intent.

  11. @DennisW

    I don’t know this game and I’m not at all interested in those kind of games.
    A game for whackos if they like playing those IMO.

    Your perception of your capabilities above others is familiar to me by now. If you are happy with those I smile to you.

    IMO the simulation SIO points are not off the table completely yet.
    This new information could shed another light on those too.

  12. @all
    Throwing us more clues, they are.

    The thing I noticed was the undersea mountains and Broken Ridge showing up in some of the graphics. Is that from the simulator graphics?

  13. @Ge Rijn

    Well 235 million people seem to disagree with you. Cut and paste from Wikipedia below. You really do need to get out more.

    Relative to posting, I make a serious attempt to only post things that are correct including the radius of a circle that you recently disagreed with. You should really think more carefully about what you post.

    //begin cut-paste

    “Subsequent titles would follow and build upon the concept established in Grand Theft Auto III and the series has continued receiving significant acclaim ever since. Film and music veterans have voiced characters, including Ray Liotta, Burt Reynolds, Dennis Hopper, Samuel L. Jackson, James Woods, Debbie Harry, Phil Collins, Axl Rose, and Peter Fonda.[5] The series has been critically acclaimed and commercially successful, having shipped more than 235 million units, as of September 2015.[6] The Telegraph ranked the GTA series among Britain’s most successful exports.[4]”

  14. @DennisW:
    “…The ‘tower flight’ is harmless……The phone registration time and tower id are far more interesting and valuable to the investigation…”

    Yes. This is not the first time a red herring has been thrown into the pot, just as some significant piece of evidence has surfaced. Classic way to throw people of the scent and keep them on the wrong track. If the case, definitely worth more work on the phone connect over Penang Island.

  15. @Ge Rijn
    There is a graphic on about page 5 of the Preliminary Investigation Report

    The is a Reddit thread. Victor says:
    “People have assumed that the simulated flight to the SIO that was deleted from MK25 was created using FSX and a PMDG 777-200LR model. This is true of what was installed on MK26, which was the primary drive for the computer. In fact, the deleted flight was created using FS2004 (aka FS9) and using the PSS 777-200LR model. This model was created by the company Phoenix Simulation Software, which is now called BlackBox Simulation. FS9 was installed on drive MK25 on Dec 23, 2013, and uninstalled on Feb 20, 2014.”

    So maybe good thing I did not install MS FSX yet.

  16. @Boris

    Yes, I’ve spent quite a lot of time looking at the information relative to the phone registration. My conclusion, when coupled with other data, is that the aircraft was above 20,000 feet altitude, and at a ground speed near 500 knots, as it flew South (more than 20km South) of the basestation.

  17. @David,

    The ATSB’s description of the Current Search Area is confusing. Their latest “Operational Search Update” includes a map showing the +/- 40 NM wide strip from 35.5S to 39.5S called “Indicative Search Area” and lists it at 120,000 sq. km. This area appears to match the green “rectangle” in Figure 9 of the December report. That does not guarantee it matches the actual area they plan to cover. Richard Cole has pointed out that the area covered appears to reach 120,000 sq. km already, although the ATSB says they have covered “more than 110,000 square kilometers of the seafloor . . .”.

    Dr. Gordon’s exact quote was this; “Another figure you should probably have in your head, I suppose, is that the 120,000 square kilometers that’s currently funded for searching, encompasses approximately 72-ish, 75-ish percent of the probability.” I take this to mean he is assuming the probability of detecting the aircraft when they loook for it is 100%. He also said: “Well, I’ve just told you, we’ve only searched just over 75 percent of the probability. When we started I’d have said there was a one in three chance you wouldn’t find it, even if everything was as you’d expect.” (I think he meant one in four). This is entirely consistent with the Figure 2 in Jeff’s interview posted on September 17, 2016, which shows the upper end of the 99% probability curve at 33.4S, 95% at 34S, and 90% at 35S. So it appears there is a fairly significant probability (more than 10%) that the aircraft is further north of the +/- 40 NM zone.

    As an aside, I think this probability function is skewed because it does not appear to consider the fuel/endurance for each path. Maybe I missed that in the DSTG report, but I don’t recall seeing a fuel model as part of the calculations they did. With fuel included, the far SW region would be much reduced in probability and the NE region would be much increased. Thus the probability of the NE “tongue” could be much higher than shown in Figure 2.

    I have no complete explanation of why Dr. Gordon says the 120,000 area is 75% probability and the ATSB says it is 90%. I suspect it is because the width of the probability contours is beyond the 40 NM limits of the CSA. If you “clipped” the probability contours at +/- 40 NM and integrated the result, the CSA probability would be increased, but I don’t know if this would bring it up all the way to 90% from 75%.

    I don’t know how much weight the ATSB is putting on the drift studies, other than to say it is more likely to be to the NE of the +/- 40 NM box.

  18. @Boris Tabaksplatt

    I’m definitely not throwing a red herring into the pot. It was just something that crossed my eye reading this report.

    Longer time contributors should know I have no intend at all to obstruct an ongoing discussion.

Comments are closed.