A few things have happened recently in MH370 world that are worth taking note of.
No FMT. The seabed search in the southern Indian Ocean is all over but the shouting, and as a result I see that a consensus is forming that there could have been no “final major turn” into the southern Indian Ocean. Rather, if the plane went south, it must have loitered somewhere beyond the Malacca Strait until after 18.40 before finally flying a straight southerly path from 19:40 onward. This loiter, following a high-speed dash across the Malay Peninsula and up the strait, is quite bizarre, given that no attempt was made by anyone on board the plane to contact the ground, either to ask for help or to negotiate a hostage situation. So the presumption of a loiter doesn’t really shed light on motivation, it does effectively put yet another nail in the coffin of accident/malfunction scenarios.
More of the secret Royal Malaysian Police report released. Mick Rooney, aka @airinvestigate, has released a portion labelled “Folder 6: Audio and Other Records.” The new section contains an expert report analyzing the cockpit/ATC audio up to 17:21, which concludes (with less than 100% confidence) that it was probably Zaharie who uttered the final words “Good night, Malaysia 370.” It also includes ACARS data and the Inmarsat logs which had already been released back in 2014. In perusing the document I was not able to identify anything that would alter our collective understanding of the case, but I hope that others will offer their own assessments. And I applaud Mick for being the only one with the moral backbone to release this information. I am sure that more will follow. UPDATE: The next batch is here: “Folder 5: Aircraft Record and DCA Radar Data.”
Debris trail goes cold. I’ve plotted, above, the number of pieces of debris that have been found each month since MH370 disappeared. After the first piece of debris was found in July, 2015, a smattering of further pieces was found until April, May, and June of this year, when the number spiked and then dropped off again before ceasing altogether. This is a puzzling distribution, since drift models show that the gyres of the southern Indian Ocean act as a great randomizer, taking things around and around and spitting them out after widely varying periods of time. Would expect, therefore, to see the number of pieces found to gradually swell and then fall off again.
There is a complicating factor to this assumption, of course. Even if the pieces do arrive in a certain pattern, overlaid on top of this is the effect of an independent variable: the degree to which people are actively searching for them. It must be noted that a considerable amount of the June spike is attributable to Blaine Alan Gibson’s astonishing haul on the beaches of Madagascar that month. Indeed, Gibson by himself remains responsible for more than half of the 22 pieces of debris found thus far.
Earlier this week, several frustrated family members announced that they would be organizing their own beachcombing expedition, to take place next month. If their efforts prove less fruitful than Blaine Alan Gibson’s, it may raise questions as to what exactly was the secret to Gibson’s success.
@Ventus45
Just read the Auntypru posts. Great minds think alike!
@RetiredF4, We should all be grateful for our patience with one another. Hardly more than two agree about anything.
@Gysbreght, You raise a good point about the shadow volume. Early reports led us to believe that the flight sim data had been deliberately deleted, perhaps even “wiped clean” in a way that suggested a suspicous covering of tracks. But the data was not recovered from such deletion, it was recorded from a shadow volume that was sitting on a hard drive pretty as you please. This to me suggests that if Zaharie had acted nefariously but covered his tracks by deleting suspicious material, he wasn’t sophisticated to know about shadow volumes. (No insult intended, I sure didn’t.) But if he didn’t know about shadow volumes, that means they should be bursting with all the other evidence of his malicious planning — and there was nothing.
As you know Mick Rooney has the whole secret Malaysian police report and is slowly releasing it. I asked him if is there anything in the leaked report that gives insight into Zaharie’s state of mind. He wrote:
@Jeff:
Thanks for that. Great to have seen. Obviously nothing at all that raises an eyebrow among (police) investigators, still pilots and flight investigators apparently have him high up there. It is truly amazing.
But I wonder if it isn’t time to start looking thoroughly, or is there a general agreement on some (political) level that he is innocent? Police normally have a very developed sense about who’s guilty. Even if they are wrong….
@Jeff:
I am having nightmares about the day they find the plane behind a hanger at KLIA with the inside burnt out by Chinese firecrackers and fermented mangosteens.
Then we will all go to bed crying.
@DennisW
“Posted December 7, 2016 at 1:14 PM
@Gysbreght
The Shah fan club days are hopefully coming to an end. Lord knows, it has been an ordeal on the order of the “flat-earthers” and the anti-vaxxers (still ongoing).”
After seeing “Mick Rooney” review of the police report, if there was at least some handwritten notes then maybe as you said…..
But so much for meticulous planning by ZS however could be someone else.
Regarding the 18:40 BFO:
@Dennis W,
You said: “The 18:40 BFO is not squeaky clean even if the aircraft were heading straight South at that point (error ~15Hz). It is easily fixable with an altitude change. I am not much troubled by it, frankly.”
@Victor I,
In response to Jeff Wise, you said: “You said, “Any termination outside the current search area must contend with the problem of the 18:40 BFO value, which suggests that a loiter did not take place.”
You also said: “Wrong, and you know better. It suggests that there was a descent at 18:40 while flying north. And the failure of the underwater search suggests that the plane turned to the south later than 18:40. That is, unless you buy into the Kazakhstan path, which has orders of magnitude more problems with it.”
I disagree with both of you on this point.
There is one (and only one insofar as I know) satellite data solution that matches the 18:40 BFO with an earlier FMT and without a descent at 18:40 and has sufficient fuel to reach the 7th Arc. In this case 9M-MRO was flying at 296 degrees true parallel to and about 12 NM north of N571, after having made an “offset” jog during 18:25:30-18:29:50. A left turn is made at 18:37:38 to waypoint ANOKO (which is passed at 18:42:35). The left turn (the FMT) ends at 18:39:25 on a true course of 185.5 degrees and continues after ANOKO on a true heading of 183.6 degrees until fuel exhaustion. After the jog, there is only one turn. There is no descent at 18:40.
The predicted BFO is 89 Hz (at Holding speed), which closely matches the measured BFOs then. The calculated engine PDA (for main engine fuel exhaustion at 00:17:29) is +3.2%, which is in the acceptable range for the used engines on 9M-MRO.
While adding more turns or an ongoing descent at 18:40 can force a match to the BFOs then, this single route is the only one I have found that fits all the satellite data with a FMT before 18:40 and no ongoing descent then. To me it is “squeaky clean.”
I should note that the reduced speed at Holding actually helps in fitting the BFOs and 18:40 and later.
The end point at 35.26S is NE of the current search area (the +/-40 NM area) but well inside the bayesian countours. It has been previously searched but only near the arc. It also appears roughly consistent with the southern end of the drift model zones.
The simplest explanation of the 18:40 BFO is an earlier FMT with no descent, and there appears to be just one solution. No loiter is required or suggested. It does require a “slow and curved” LNAV route after the FMT – which in this case is True Heading after a route discontinuity at ANOKO.
Here is a link to the detailed description and performance of this route:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzOIIFNlx2aUT081WTgyc3RqYTg/view?usp=sharing
@ROB:
We all feel something like that. But see it as a good thing to have 95 theses and nails on the map rather than one. I have great confidence in your judgement, so don’t you stray too far from here. We will always have new debris, and someone or something will crack open.
@Dennis re sunk cost and the difficulty of escape: aka the Concorde fallacy.
@Victor perhaps our esteemed host allows for “pointing” at aerodromes over the other side of the pole, south America way…
@Johan:
“I am having nightmares about the day they find the plane behind a hanger at KLIA with the inside burnt out by Chinese firecrackers and fermented mangosteens…”
Don’t even joke about it. I saw a ridiculous theory that that the plane never even took-off from KLIA for its journey to Beijing, with the whole thing being a spoof concocted by Penn and Teller at the behest of western intelligence. The kicker to this being that ZS is currently enjoying his retirement in Perth!
@DrBobbyUlich: For the purpose of that exchange, I considered 35.3S to be within the current search area, and already searched, even though the search was not performed as far from the 7th arc as the area further south. This is particularly true in light of the higher confidence we now place in the high speed descent at 00:19.
@Paul Smithson: I don’t know what Jeff means by his comment that any great circle path will fly over an airfield because as far as I can tell, this is patently false for a great circle path that aligns with 10N and 45S1. There is only airfield along that path. And if you start at 10N and move off that path, likely you will not cross ANY airfield. Perhaps I am missing something.
To that end, I have challenged the group. I supplied the coordinates for the three points. What is the probability that those three points are aligned along a single great circle path?
I am willing to listen to explanations or for somebody to tell me logic is faulty, but so far I have received nothing.
If there was intent for the simulated flight to fly towards McMurdo, can we use this information to help find the plane? Richard G. and I proposed one possibility. Perhaps there are others.
One of the interesting things about the path crossing at 26.9S is that it can be searched relatively inexpensively because the crossing point can be calculated quite exactly–the plane was flying in LNAV mode until fuel exhaustion so there are no vagaries due to wind, for instance, as compared to a flight with constant heading.
@DrB
When I run your numbers at 18:40 I get:
7.5N 94.5E 185.5 true, 465 kts -> BFO ~ 107.7HZ which is about 18.7Hz too high.
Could you double check please? One of us is wrong.
For the satellite I am using:
sp1840 = [18138.3, 38070.5, 1170.6] #km
sv1840 = [1.8, -1.1, 2.1] # meters/sec
@DrB
Correction to sv1840 above:
sv1840 = [1.8, -1.1, 21.4] # meters/sec
@DrB
I actually incorrectly used the 2.1 m/sec vs the 21.4 m/sec value for calculating satellite to ground station Doppler. Simple transcription error from the satellite calculation. When I make this correction your BFO is well within my tolerance range. I get about 4Hz error, but no matter. Sorry. My mistake.
@Boris:
Ha ha. I reacted to Jeff’s post on the police’ certainty about Z being clean in the sense that there was nothing to pin on him. In an investigation like this, with the money spent in the SIO and they find nothing on him. And nothing to find anywhere else, but a couple of remarkable coincidences and an astoundingly elaborate journey by the aircraft. And thousands of people chewing on figures for years. But we are ultimately here for getting at the truth the only way there is, not for the kick of making up a story. I allow myself some reflections on the mental labour involved. Nothing human is so alien that we can’t understand it, but sometimes it’s a challenge no doubt.
@VictorI, You are right; to get to the next airfield on that great circle you would have to pass through the antipode, which means that if you entered that into the FMC the plane would probably go on the reciprocal heading.
At any rate, I remain pretty lukewarm on the Car Nicobar-to-McMurdo idea, because the starting point is arbitrary and the end point has no special significance. I mean, if it turned out that Zaharie had some kind of ice-runway obsession or something…
Do I think the fact that two points on Zaharie’s flight sim happen to line up with an Antarctic runway is a coincidence? Yes, I think it is a coincidence. One man’s opinion.
@Jeff
…and you are entitled to it. At the end of the day we are all trying to help. I really believe that. Considering that there is no “chain of command”, we are all facing the loneliness at the top. Amazing that things seem to work as well as they do.
My own conviction remains that Z did it for some reason. There is simply too much circumstantial evidence that has piled up against him. Taken a piece at time, it can all be waved off. Taken in aggregate, it is pretty hard to dismiss.
@jeffwise:
First, thank you for agreeing that there are no other airfields along that great circle path ending at McMurdo Station.
You said, “At any rate, I remain pretty lukewarm on the Car Nicobar-to-McMurdo idea, because the starting point is arbitrary”
No, the starting point is NOT arbitrary. The path was reconstructed using an endpoint of McMurdo and finding the great circle path that satisfies the satellite data. After finding this path, I noticed the alignment with Car Nicobar Airport, which may or may not have significance. There really is only path that satisfies the McMurdo endpoint AND the satellite data, and it crosses the 7th arc at 26.9S latitude.
You said, “the end point has no special significance. I mean I mean, if it turned out that Zaharie had some kind of ice-runway obsession or something…”
As I have explained many times, I don’t think McMurdo was the intended destination. It served only as a distant waypoint, well beyond the estimated point of fuel exhaustion, that produced a path from the Andaman Sea into the deep SIO that stayed far enough away from Indonesia, or perhaps satisfied other criteria such as a maintaining a suitable distance from Australia to avoid detection by JORN.
I can accept your lukewarm feelings about this hypothetical path. What I can’t accept are unfair and incorrect statements that have been made. Perhaps we are making progress.
@All, I doubt the RMP report is going to reveal details that would incriminate their employees or MAS for that matter. As we can deduce from the litigation by NOK, they are fighting tooth and nail to keep documents out. They are manipulating crooks. I would like to read the interviews that were conducted shortly after MH370 disappeared. This because were still in shock and did not have the mind set yet to change their stories. But these are not in the report which is telling IMO. The report is utterly useless Imo.
@VictorI
I find it somewhat interesting that the N10 point in the sim was apparently at 40,000-ft altitude. Sounds a little analogous to what some feel what might have actually happened at IGARI re: altitude.
@DrBobbyU
I like your alternate flight path. It gets really close to Indonesia. I am more comfortable at the moment thinking the intent was to disguise the path south in case Indonesia or Singapore AWACS had a radar looking, I would not want them to see a big turn south. So I can justify going northwest before the double back to the south.
But the bottom line we do not know what happened, so your path is a good candidate. And yes, seems like they should have widened the search there at 35.26S.
@VictorI
The one thing I wonder about most in the Car Nicobar/McMurdo great circle route is the time between arrival ~18:53 at Car Nicobar and reaching the 19:41 arc point.
A pilot going dark, speeding away at top speed, avoiding Indonesian FIR, not communicating etc. is showing obvious intend to avoid detection and interception IMO.
And would like to leave this most critical air space as soon as possible.
Bringing and keeping the plane in a holding pattern/race pattern for ~45 minutes at ~20.000ft above or near Car Nicobar is contradicting this intend completely IMO.
After having succesfully avoided detection and interception I cann’t image a pilot with this intend would risk circling around there for such a long time.
As all other data fit this route this is a big problem that needs further/better explanation IMO.
@Ge Rijn
” is showing obvious intend to avoid detection and interception IMO.”
I tried to point across earlier that if the pilot’s intent was to avoid detection, he would have diverted a flight West where there would be no risk of detection until beyond Malay radar at the FMT. The flight path to the FMT would have been normal. Either that particular flight to Beijing needed to be diverted or detection avoidance was not a priority.
Since no one has come up with a reason that the Beijing flight was somehow special, I have to assume that detection was either not a concern or that he wanted to be detected.
@VictorI:
I am of following the discussion with interest.
I would like to ask about the difference in basic parameters for navigation between the sim and the Boeing / airline traffic. If there are such. You have probably been through it here, but still. It regards also how they are displayed. There are a lot of words here but few queries. And hopefully input you can use.
Are there the same navigational points in the sim as Z would use when planning for real? A captain planning and executing a normal flight would work with navpoints, not airports (esp when not endpoints). But if there are no navpoints, or different navpoints, he would probably think in terms of airports. Esp when planning something outside regular passsenger traffic — the responsible pilot would like to know where the airports are, and would (perhaps instinctively and naturally) think of the airports as intermediate stations. He would have to look up and know about airports for emergency anyway, is my thought.
So, does this change anything with the sim? It would be perfectly reasonable to pick McMurdo if there is not much else to choose from. Or does the the sim (on sceeen or through a manual etc) suggest airfields? (I recall reading by the way that sim games often have reward systems where you are supposed to land on a list of weird airports and fulfill other tasks to get “upgraded”, if that is to any help). What I am getting at is on the one hand that the likelihood for Z using the sim for actual planning rises if they use the same system, but that a different logic provenly used on a sim could be equally likely if his professional system of references is not at hand. But, in the latter case, it will perhaps put some indicative weight around what it was he actually tried to get an answer to. Not real or exact conditions or measures where such could not be obtained, but perhaps lats and longs and other things that would be migratable. Or, some/most/general things would be easily translatable for Z so that Nicobar and McMurdo on the Sim represents adjacent navpoints/flightpaths in the real world. Or he got general orientation or whatever. Or, a vanishing point.
The likelihood that Z used the sim for planning in this way (with McMurdo) will or will not rise also depending on how the game presents and displays things and hierarchizes between them. Your “coincidence” argument with Jeff may get a shot to the hull (or not, well at least the likelihood discussion) if McMurdo airfield shows up on a menu top right as soon as you enter the Indian Ocean. And have done so since Z’s first version in 198x.
Last. Answering also a cry of despair from some lost Dutchman recently. Could Z have used the sim for planning? If you have a miniature railway covering the basement floor in your villa with pretty approximate models of Dresden and Hamburg before the war (or whatever), a really big one and one you have spent a lot of time and money on, etc., and you are a train driver by profession etc., then of course the miniature will be used for planning, or conceptualisation. (When most people would be satisfied with finishing and trying out and leaving to others to play around with, some will enter that world as an obsession, for one reason or another and for longer or shorter periods. It is about, it would be about, “compensation”, which most people learn to “undo”.)
You know the arguments: having a sim, doing this and that on the sim is not proof. It is perhaps logically a gun, but not a smoking gun (if we are not sure his kids and relatives and housemaid and he himself played with it etc,) and not the one holding the smoking gun (which would equal the guilt ascribable to Jack Ruby without trial, give and take). But, to quote DennisW, in aggregate, and especially if we can make all parts of the motive (i.e. how he ticks, how he ticked, how he conceptualized) come together, then of course he used the sim for planning, or conceptualization, in one way or another. Everyone would pre-enact such a thing if they were not forced by circumstance in the air.
What would he want to know from a sim point in the SIO pointing towards McMurdo? Lats and longs for weather, light and vessel traffic information? If fuel would take him to (approx) the 7th arc at what FL? The shape of his trajectory? If a flightpath to McMurdo would take him close enough to whatever he estimated would be a good place to drop down? The time estimate from that point to FMT and expected flameout respectively? He couldn’t have flown — I mean he wouldn’t have considered flying by hand/wire all that way so he needed to have something to put into the navsystem, right? And to me most likely he knew at that moment that he probably wouldn’t sit out the journey. He would remove all evidence, put the FO in the pilot’s seat for all that and then suffocate or similar — or rely on obliteration.
Ouch. That was me.
@VictorI:
Could the significance of the last simpoint be that he wanted to think through what it would take in real life to avoíd a phugoid at flameout at all costs (the setting necessary), and ensure the hardest possible crash, without himself being alive? Or is that pushing it? Perhaps it is.
I’ll give it to you to dwell on.
@DennisW
If a pilot chose (by free will or under threat) to circle above or very near a military base like Car Nicobar for ~45 minutes (and still well in range of the Atjeh radar station) than I also assume detection/interception was not a concern.
At least not anymore.
Than you even can assume the 18:40 phonecall was not unanswered but used to declare demands and negotiate giving authorities an ~hour time to give in on the demands before deciding to steer into the SIO when demands were not met.
But in case of a Car Nicobar/McMurdo great circle route I believe the time spent missing between 18:40 and 19:41 is probably more likely explained by another solution than a ~45 minutes holding pattern above or near Car Nicobar eventualy combined with a negotiation-scenario.
If no other solution is possible than the Car Nicobar/McMurdo route is highly unlikely IMO.
@DennisW
I think you are missing the point here.
It is clear that Z was not worried about “detection”, he wanted to “be detected”, to prove he was not bluffing. But, he did not want to “be intercepted”, and he gambled (correctly – and won) that he had more than enough “time” to “escape to safety beyond interception range” before anyone in Government and RMAF circles “got their act together.
See http://ventus45.blogspot.com.au/2016_06_01_archive.html
@Kaffertje: I agree that we should be careful about any conclusions in that report. Anybody that trusts the Malaysians to be truthful and forthcoming with evidence and analysis is in total denial of history.
@ventus45
My thoughts on interception have not stabilized. As a practical matter, what could the interceptors do besides shoot the aircraft down? Presumably an intercept would have resulted in the aircraft being tracked to a terminus.
@Kaffertje: Malaysia has demonstrated that investigative reports are not to be trusted if politically sensitive. The 1MDB scandal is an example of this, where billions of dollars were missing from the fund and over a billion dollars of that money was eventually transferred to Najib’s personal account. Yet, an investigative report looking into this found no evidence of wrongdoing.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/critical-1mdb-report-spares-malaysias-najib-razak-1460071319
The Obama administration’s Justice Department has chosen to move slowly in building a corruption case against Najib. It will be interesting to see how Trump’s Justice Department handles this.
@VictorI, Having spent months sitting on a trove of secret documents that you have adamantly refused to share with fellow investigators, you have lost the right to criticize Malaysia for not being “forthcoming with the evidence.”
Like you, Mick Rooney has seen the entire contents of the report, and informs us that there is nothing else in it whatsoever that implicates Zaharie. The fact that the report spends so much time on the .flt files shows us that they are not averse to finding and analysing such clues, where they exist. So the absence of further clues pointing to Zaharie’s guilt–even in shadow volume files that he evidently know about–indicates that there is no there there.
It seems that you have been aware of this fact for some time but have chosen not to disclose it.
@DennisW:
I believe that, technically, the ambition to avoid detection might vary with his position. Being one step ahead might suffice over Malaysia, but, in theory, it makes sense to me too to disguise the FMT (in one way or another), suggesting to slower and sleeping command lines and bureacracies that the plane continued northwesterly. In the same spirit that sent people looking for the plane at Igari, standing in awe when he passed over Malaysia seemingly looking for an emergency landing field. On the other hand, he might have figured that shortly after FMT, not much would be accomplished by an interception anyway, esp. if he didn’t approach land. They wouldn’t shoot down a plane obviously heading nowhere, I think.
For Z, I assume, hiding the crash site would be the optimal, and thus trying to avoid waiting satellites and alerted cruise ships etc. deep down south, but I guess he might have realised that he only could do so much, and that the odds for being spotted was on his side. If we forget about the Inmarsat data, which Z didn’t know about, he seems to have been eager for everyone to know that he was still in the air, but not where (he might have known about the pings, but not that they admitted tracing?), but it is not unlikely, to me, despite everything, that he wanted us to know he eventually had gone south, but not exactly where (raising the suspiscion that the sim points are false leads, planted by Z?). So a doubly disguised turn, perhaps touching a sleepy FIR or something, seemingly on a straight last leg down south, but then changing direction again at some point, would be logical to me? What do you say?
I hope we won’t be knicked for instigating crime here. Or getting admirers.
@VictorI
Discussing remedies relative to the Malay corruption with my JD SO shows how murky the fraud situation really is. The US could certainly freeze Malay assets in the US. Beyond that it would require negotiation with Malay asset holders elsewhere to try to convince them to apply sanctions of some sort (or course, that convincing would entail the US holding out some sort of carrot). There is apparently no “defined” international law that would dictate sanctions relative to behavior inside a sovereign state. It really is up to Malaysia to actually prosecute Najib.
@Johan
The situation is vexing to be sure. If the flight path toward McMurdo is correct, the Cocos were still a late option. If DrB’s more Westerly path is correct it was a suicide flight. I don’t think we have enough info to nail it one way or the other, although the wreckage not being found and the debris locations favor the McMurdo hypothesis, IMO.
@DennisW
Z was committed, there was “no going back” in his mind. If he was “intercepted”, he would ignore the fighter’s demands, and keep going, full well knowing that the fighter has limited fuel and it’s “options” are limited.
Option 1.
The fighter does the normal intercept routine.
Z ignores, maintains alt course and speed.
Fighter reports to HQ.
HQ orders option 2.
Option 2.
Fighter fires cannon (with tracers) from close abeam, so that Z can clearly see it. The classic “shot across the bows” so to speak.
Again, Z ignores it, maintains alt course and speed.
Fighter reports to HQ.
HQ orders option 3.
Option 3.
Fighter retards to astern, to assume firing position, and with cannon, fires short burst, or bursts, at outer section of wing, near the tip, with the intention of producing damage, but not enough to “endanger flight”.
Although damaged, it is obvious to Z that the fighter does not actually want to “shoot him down”, but “force him down”. If the fighter did want to shoot him down, he would aim for and fire at the wing/fuselage junction. Thus Z breaks from straight and level flight to make it harder for the fighter to “nibble at his wing”. Sooner or later, the cannon will run out of ammo, or the fighter will run short of mission fuel to return to base, and will be forced to break off to return.
Again, Fighter reports to HQ.
HQ considers option 4.
Option 4.
Is to “shoot him down”.
Will HQ give the order ?
Even if they did, will the pilot obey in these circumstances ?
Doubtful on both points.
Further, cannon fire alone is unlikely to bring down a 777, unless it hit something crucial. Airliners can absorb punishing damage and still fly.
Would he go for a missile shot, presumably a Sidewinder ?
Answer is no. He could not, because there is none there, out on the rails. You see, you don’t leave live missiles on aircraft on the ground for any considerable length of time. There was no reason for a fighter to be armed with missiles at Butterworth that night, so they weren’t. In fact, you don’t normally leave a full drum of cannon shells on board either for any length of time, but, I am assuming someone was a bit slack and left them in there.
All in all, if the “target” does not cooperate, interception is useless unless there is a commitment to actually shoot the aircraft down.
If you are not prepared to shoot it down, there is little point in intercepting “a known to be non cooperating target” to begin with, it only makes you look impotent and stupid.
As for “onward tracking”, once outside the range of ground based PSR’s (which by then he was) the only means of tracking further is the fighter’s radar. Once the fighter “turns for home” his radar is looking the other way, no more tracking.
In any case, it is clear that there was no scramble out of Butterworth. The houses are so close to the runway, that any scramble would have been reported on day one. It didn’t happen.
@Jeff
“Like you, Mick Rooney has seen the entire contents of the report, and informs us that there is nothing else in it whatsoever that implicates Zaharie.”
That (implication of Zaharie) would certainly be in the eyes of the beholder. Their are many people (I think you are among them) who do not believe the sim dat points implicate Zaharie, and still struggle to dismiss them as irrelevant. How can we trust people from that group to be objective relative to things implicating Zaharie?
@Johan: In the MSFS simulator, the navigational parameters are programmed and displayed in a similar manner to the real aircraft. The more recent version of the B777 created by PMDG is more accurate than the older one (vintage 2004) created by PSS, which was used to create the recovered data found on the captain’s computer.
Regarding waypoints versus airports, when creating a flight plan using the native flight planner in FS9, you select departure and destination airports, and then waypoints along the way. The need to specify a destination airport to create a flight plan is what prompted me to consider airports in Antarctica. For the standard FS9 software, the only destination airports in Antarctica are Base Marambio, McMurdo Station, Palmer Station, Petrel, and Isla Rey Jorge. Only McMurdo aligns with the points 10N and 45S1, and the alignment is remarkable, whether or not people want to acknowledge this.
During a flight, on the Control Data Unit (CDU), which interfaces with the Flight Management computer (FMC), there is a hard button labeled ALTN. Pressing that button opens a screen that lists the closest airports, the estimated time of arrival, and the estimated fuel at the time of arrival. To navigate to one of those airports, you choose one to be active, and then select “DIVERT NOW”. It is meant to be as easy as possible for the pilot in an emergency situation. McMurdo would never be an option on the screen for an aircraft situated in the Andaman Sea, if that is your question.
Regarding the reason for the simulation: I am not sure. There are certainly easier and more accurate ways to generate the technical data to plan the diversion of MH370. For that reason, I lean towards believing it was to create an experience for the captain. And saving flight files could be a way for the captain at a later time to relive that experience multiple times. I claim no expertise in psychology, but detailed planning and role playing is sometimes done before the act of suicide is completed. It is called “suicidal ideation”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicidal_ideation
@DennisW, You wrote, “Their are many people (I think you are among them) who do not believe the sim dat points implicate Zaharie, and still struggle to dismiss them as irrelevant. How can we trust people from that group to be objective relative to things implicating Zaharie?”
I am confident that if there was anything there the IG would have brought it swiftly to our attention.
However, I wouldn’t say that the flight sim data don’t implicate Zaharie. A no-fuel scenario in the southern Indian Ocean is obviously a red flag. We need to look at it more carefully. Most acutely, I think we need to figure out exactly what the simulated plane was doing just before and after the 45S2 .flt file.
@jeffwise: I’ve lost my right to criticize Malaysia? Wow.
Look, you can believe what you will, and promote what you will. As the plane is not likely to be found in the near future, your Kazakhstan theory is safe for the foreseeable future. Maybe you can offer an updated version of your book for the holiday season.
Merry Christmas!
@Boris T.
“I agree with your comments. It is ridiculous that anyone would think that they could succeed in a ‘stealth suicide’ mission. The skies in the part of the world where contact was lost with MH370 are under constant military surveillance, due to local disputes and the global geopolitical situation between the East/West super-powers. ”
apparently it wasn’t that hard if you have sleepy malaysian radar operator and Thailand not caring about unidentified aircraft going along their airspace
I bet this plane would have been detected (and intercepted or at least given a try) if it roamed through indonesian airspace, they are a bit more sensitive
Hello everyone,
one major theory/strand of thinking seems to be the following: Perp (most likely Z) either selects flight mh370 or just ‘loses it’ that night. diverts plane over the peninsula, fully realizing that he/she/it might (likely) be spotted etc.
Logically, I don’t quite follow this reasoning. If Malaysia had really noticed the missing flight, even factoring in incompetence/lack of options re interception, would they not at the very least have a) informed nearby countries that a stray airliner might be coming their way and b) tried to (have) the plane tracked? I realise that you mostly have a pretty dire opinion of Malay competence, and whilst I agree to some extent, I think the logic “Z didn’t care/actually wanted them to see him, and didn’t bother picking a westerly flight” is logically not quite convincing.
I mean, the guy seems to have gone to quite considerable lengths (literally) to hide his final resting ground. Then why take the risk of being tracked? And even if you say the Malaysians are both corrupt and incompetent, and would rather cover something like this up than alert other countries/ask the yanks to have a sat aligned, some part of me is having a vision of a raging Malay general, madly angry at that guy giving him the finger, doing everything to spoil this guy’s game. Especially if we see the Malays as wholly incompetent, I doubt whether Z could have assumed they would have been so coolly composed and calculating that they would – during this night, in total shock – have immediately reasoned that it is in their best interest to watch the guy disappear and hope they never hear from the plane again.
So basically, I think there still is no 100% convincing answer to the question of “why that plane, that night?”. I want to add that I think that ventus45’s thinking through the scenario was most helpful. Personally, I have a (limited) background in psychiatry. From that point of view, and whilst I realise that my psych experience is with western patients, I find it unconvincing that a guy should have suddenly snapped without any prior indication of suicidality. Yes, the sim routes could technically be seen as ideation, but as several things here, I find that speculative. Possible, yes, but I can show you millions of people around the world who enjoy letting simulated planes crash into water and don’t go suicide-murder in real life. (I’ve done that myself!!!) It’s similar to shooter video games: Say you have a mass shooting to solve, and you have a suspect on whose computer you find such a game. How sure will you be that he’s really the perp? It might raise the probability slightly, but no more.
I wonder if ZS motive for using the mFSx was to investigate how a B777 would behave as a glider i.e.: no fuel, no automation to help a disabled B777.
He would do this because one of his other hobbies was flying gliders. Inspiration could have come from the Glimly Glider incident.
@VictorI
For the loiter, we do not need to have a race track pattern do we? My version would travel waypoints northwest before coming back on flight paths and making a right FMT turn.
@JeffW
My question would be what does FBI think? Not what does Mick Gilbert think, who according to Ben S. admits has a certain pro-pilot viewpoint. It’s OK to have a particular viewpoint, but we need to be skeptics.
@Johan
Flight sim is not a game in the sense of points. It tries to be like flying a plane in real life. PSS 777 was one of the first to have good enough graphics to look “real”.
@JeffW
I retract above it is Mick Rooney, not Mick Gilbert, but still I ask what does FBI think?
Another thing: if the logic is that Z ‘snapped’ that particular night and chose the flight at random, we imply a state of mind that I find incompatible with the idea that he should have put so much effort into trying to create the impression that it might ”not’ have been him, for his family’s sake.
Also, If you argue that he chose this flight to give the malays the finger, then again that seems at odds with the logic of trying to cover up.
I’m sorry, but so far nothing really adds up. I’m inclined to find the more outlandish theories counter intuitively more likely because by now, all we really know is that this incident defies basically years of patient forensics by brilliant minds (you!). So any actual solution will by default be quite outlandish. I go for Kazakhstan
@havelockhammond
On your comment:
“Say you have a mass shooting to solve, and you have a suspect on whose computer you find such a game. How sure will you be that he’s really the perp? It might raise the probability slightly, but no more.”
Analogy:
Say you have an airplane disappearing with 238 souls to solve, and you have a pilot who happened to be the captain of that flight, where you find a computer with a sophisticated flight simulator game.
Not only the game but also several shortly before the disappearance deleted SIM-data that show a striking similarity with the data that show crucial stages of a flight path recorded during the actual flight.
How sure will you be that he’s really the perp?
It might raise the probability slightly, but no more?
@TBill, I don’t know what the FBI think.
@Victor
45S 104E is there, in the sim, for a reason. It did not just happen to get there by itself, and I don’t really “buy” the McMurdo idea, even though it is stunningly precise. I think I can prove that it is there for another reason, also precise, which proves it was definately for planning purposes.
Consider this hypothesis.
Sunrise on 22Dec2013 at that position (45S 104E) is 21:15 UTC.
22 December is the summer solstice in the southern hemisphere, the longest day of the year, ie, the earliest sunrise, and latest sunset, for any given location in the southern hemisphere.
The position (45S 104E) represents fuel exhaustion from the FMT, ie, a distance, a range.
In this case, he had pre-determined his fuel exhaustion “range” from “his FMT”, (from whatever flight he was planning off) so he wanted to see how far south and how far east (simultaneously) that he could get, with that fuel range, from his FMT, AND get there at dawn. Ie, he needed to satisfy 3 criteria simultaneously, Fuel Exhaustion (range), at local dawn (time), at Lat/Lon (position), on the longest day.
Now, he could have, and would have, pre-calculated it pretty closely, but he probably needed to make a couple of runs in the sim to make sure he had got it spot on, which could explain why there are two southern 45S positions in the log files. There may even have been more runs that the computer investigators did not find (possibly). But all that is by the way.
In any case, the point to note is this.
This time (21:15 UTC) is a full 3 hours befor MH-370 ran out of fuel.
This means that he originally must have planned the flight off a much earlier flight, one scheduled for departure at about 9pm to 9:30pm local time in KL, and going west, up the Malacca Strait.
So, what we need to look for, is all the MAS scheduled flights, whose standard Flight Plan Routes, go through, or very close to, the calculated position of the FMT, at about 15:30 UTC (instead of 18:30 UTC), AND which would be expected to have about the same fuel (including standard reserves) to go from KL to FMT to 45S 104E.
In other words, a fuel range of about 3,800 nautical miles is needed, or a scheduled flight length of about 3,000 nautical miles is required. So a destination like Dubai or Abu Dhabi would “fill the bill”, if the departure times gelled.
Does anyone have a full MAS flight schedule for 2013/2014 that could be searched for MAS 777 “candidate flights” ?
If we find one, we could then do some detailed flight planning off that, which could be fed into the post FMT models for MH-370, which “might” help refine it’s actual path.
@DennisW
Dennis, you said: “I tried to point across earlier that if the pilot’s intent was to avoid detection, he would have diverted a flight West where there would be no risk of detection until beyond Malay radar at the FMT. The flight path to the FMT would have been normal. Either that particular flight to Beijing needed to be diverted or detection avoidance was not a priority. Since no one has come up with a reason that the Beijing flight was somehow special, I have to assume that detection was either not a concern or that he wanted to be detected”.
I say how about MH370 being chosen purely because it came hot on the heels of the trial verdict – he hadn’t needed to be clairvoyant to know in advance what the verdict was going to be – and it happened to be redeye night flight with a “relatively” inexperienced first officer?
Yes, he took a calculated risk on being detected by primary radar. A risk I think he had weighed up and was prepared to take. From his flight path, you can see that he went to some lengths to avoid detection. He flew along an FIR boundary, he flew at above average cruising speed, he avoided Indonesian controlled airspace, and (slightly more controversially) he switched off the SDU until he got outside of what he judged to be Butterworth’s radar range limit. If MAS had tried to ring him up during the first hour, all they would get was a dead line. once he was beyond radar range, he didn’t care if they knew he was still airborne, because they wouldn’t know where the hell he was.
@all
I mentioned earlier that I recently read “Goodnight Malaysia 370”, by Geoff Taylor at the recommendation of a collaborator. I had not read it earlier. I think it provides some interesting insights into Z’s state of mind. It is certainly a good read. I would recommend it. You can down load a free version from AMZN.
The Amanda Hodge article is also good. You may need to do the Google trick to get around the paywall.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/aviation/mh370-pilots-friendship-with-mystery-woman-revealed/news-story/1e5d5b18a3a87e4765830c311f1e87ac
@VictorI, I so agree as it relates to MY and their cunning ways. I need to get it off my chest at times because it makes my blood boil. Najib and his consorts are so corrupt and I do not trust what they put out there, not 1 bit. If Trump is going to be good for anything :), I hope he throws some cash at it just to be a pain in the ass to the Malaysians. That will make me feel good and pour another glass of wine for a toast. I feel for the NOK that keep running into walls of deceptions and lies. But 1 day Victor, I am convinced information will leak that has been kept from the public for so long. Najib belongs behind bars and Hussein too! Thank you for responding to my post.