Zaharie Shah’s Secret Psych Evaluation

571 thoughts on “Zaharie Shah’s Secret Psych Evaluation”

1. @ventus45 wrote

   “They were very specific, they said (essentially) that “they did not see it where the Malaysians said it was”.

   They never actually said that “we did not see it westbound AT ALL”.

   I understand it the same way. They were actually saying that MH370 was, to their knowledge, never flying south anywhere close to Aceh (the northwest tip of Sumatra), otherwise it would have been a massive concern to their air surveillance. But they never said it was not flying westbound but outside Indonesian FIR.

2. @Oxy
   “Mode S does not depend on what information has been transmitted, it depends on the way it was transmitted. If the received signal is in Mode S format it will be displayed.”

   The mode S transponder transmits only when interrogated by “allcall” or “selective call” and it contains always the 24 bit individual aircraft adress for individual identification, while mode A contains only the assigned 4 digit code

   “There are SSR Transponders with Mode S which have neither aircraft identification nor pressure altitude capability.”

   This statement is semantics. We know what kind of information the Mode S transmitted in case of MH370 and that it was EHC capable.

3. @DrBobbyUlich: You are going through contortions to make your path fit what a rational pilot might have done. You pass the airport, but then “pull a U-turn”. You are following waypoints, but then modify the route to skip a waypoint that is only miles away and go direct to another. You start to follow a STAR, but never descend. You select holding speed, but never enter a hold. And then you overfly the last waypoint and travel for hours into oblivion. I think your math is probably fine, but I fail to see the logic of this scenario, unless you attribute it to hypoxia, in which case I would reply that a hypoxic pilot would have met their ultimate fate an hour sooner.

4. @Victor (or anyone),

   Can you remind us how fast the cabin pressure can be reduced in the absence of mechanical damage? We hear “sudden” decompression and “explosive” decompression but how fast can this occur using only the valves?

   Thanks

5. @PaulS

   Sorry. Not ignoring you. I was traveling for five hours or so.

   The data at 18:25:27 is the gold standard, IMO.

   1> The radar data

   2> The ISAT data

   3> The cell registration data

   …all converge. It is truly a singularity with respect to confident believability. Then at 18:25:34 the ISAT system suddenly and inexplicable gagged on itself. The subsequent R channel BFO data shows what appears to me to be a recovery period from 176Hz to a believable value of 144Hz.

   I have no idea what happened between 18:25:27 and 19:41, not that I am not appreciative of the efforts of others trying piece it together. From my perspective, I simply resume my analytics at 19:41. I have elected to simply discard ISAT data between the 18:25:27 value and the 19:41 value because its interpretation requires too much speculation for my liking.

6. @JS

   Based on an FSX experiment (second hand report) and one or two air accident reports, I think it takes a few minutes until masks drop down at the equivalent of 13,500 ft altitude and further several minutes (15-20 minutes?) until cabin pressure is at a very critical level.

7. @Nederland

   “This would amount to a crash further north on the arc, which is also consistend with drift modelling.”

   Bingo. But try convincing those know-it-alls at ATSB.

8. @DrBobbyUlich:

   I performed some more experiments in FSX involving EOR with hold and offset.

   If the plane approaches an EOR in VNAV mode with ECON speed selected, I looked at 3 cases:
   1) Hold chosen at last waypoint and no route offset: Decelerates to hold speed before last waypoint, enters hold pattern and maintains best hold speed.
   2) Hold chosen at last waypoint and offset added to route: Decelerates to hold speed before last waypoint and continues on “straight” path and maintains best hold speed.
   3) No hold chosen at last waypoint: Continues at ECON speed and “straight” path.

   One way you can achieve the plane continuing to fly straight at the best holding speed AND hit near ANOKO is to enter a hold at the last waypoint and enter a small offset like 1 nm into the route before reaching the last waypoint. But this is yet another contortion in an already very contorted scenario.

9. ventus45 said, “‘I think that the “riddle” of the Indonesian statements is the big elephant in the room, that no one has ever solved.’

   There are so many elephants in the room that we’ll be shoveling dung for years.

10. @all,

    Temperature Dependence of Fuel Flows

    While perusing the B777-200ER Flight Planning and Performance Manual for the GE engines, I noticed that there were Enroute Climb tables for temperature deviations from ISA of 0, 10, 15, and 20 C. When I plotted the tabulated Fuel Flows (FFs) for various Flight levels and weights appropriate to MH370, the temperature dependence of Fuel Flow is quite striking. Here is my plot :

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzOIIFNlx2aUajRmb0k3cjNfMFE/view?usp=sharing

    You will see that I have plotted the FFs (relative to the FF at ISA temperature) for five combinations of FL and weight encompassing the MH370 cruise regime (weights from 180 to 220 MT and FLs from 320 to 400). The very tight groupings indicate that the excess FF (expressed as a %) is virtually independent of aircraft weight and Flight Level, depending only on the excess TAT. The red dashed line has the 3% per 10C slope listed in the footnotes in the LRC tables in this same document. Clearly this is a crude approximation of the true temperature dependency up to ~10C. The enroute climb FFs exhibits a clearly nonlinear, essentially quadratic functional form. The black dashed line is the 2nd order polynomial fit to the average of the five data sets plotted here. The polynomial fit is nearly perfect.

    Based on this graph, I have drawn the following conclusions:

    1. The FF increases with temperature both for LRC at constant altitude and for enroute climbs, and there is no reason why their FFs should not vary with temperature in the same way.
    2. The LRC footnote coefficient is a crude approximation to the true function, and it overestimates the impact for temperature excesses up to ~6C and underestimates the impact for > 6C.
    3. A 2nd order polynomial of the form [ 1 + 0.00048*(dTAT)^2 ] matches the enroute climb data quite well.
    4. This function could be used in the Fuel Model for both climbs and for level cruising, and it will have a different effect on the average fuel consumption and on the best-fit PDAs compared to using the straight-line approximation.

11. @VictorI,

    Thank you for performing the FSX experiments on the effect of a lateral route offset on the execution of an upcoming holding pattern.

    The behavior you observed seems to be consistent with the Honeywell FMS manual – when a route offset is present when the holding fix is reached, the holding pattern is “aborted” and the path continues “straight” past the holding pattern fix. I think that means it will continue to the next waypoint in the route, or, if there is none, it will then declare an EOR error and follow constant true heading (at least it will in FSX).

    Your description of the events matches the expectation of a pilot friend, who was also clear to point out that virtually all pilots would not know for sure what would happen in this case because it is never encountered in practice, and they have no experience in this situation. He confirms that the FMS would begin to decelerate to the holding speed before reaching the fix, and that most likely that holding speed would be maintained by the FMS thereafter. In this situation the FMS will automatically set the holding speed when the deceleration begins. He did not know how far in advance the deceleration would begin. He also made the point that the FMC would display a warning message of the impending “end of offset” before the holding fix is reached. Then the pilot would normally zero the offset before reaching the fix. However, this requires pilot action, and if the flight crew were incapacitated before this warning message appeared, the holding pattern would be “ignored” at the fix and the route would continue. However, if the fix was also the last waypoint in the route, then an EOR error would occur. He also indicated that the route offset would continue from N571 to ANOKO.

    To summarize, in my straw-man scenario, it is possible to achieve best holding speed prior to arriving at ANOKO, and to continue that speed until fuel exhaustion simply by creating a holding pattern with ANOKO as the fix and not removing the route offset (entered near 18:26) before arriving at ANOKO. Once that holding pattern is entered, it will not be executed in LNAV unless the route offset is removed by the pilot before reaching the fix (ANOKO).

    An unanswered question is how large the lateral offset could be at ANOKO and still fit the satellite/wind/fuel data. I’ll look into that. Almost certainly a 1 or 2 NM offset would not change the fit appreciably. 12 NM, on the other hand, could be very significant.

12. VictorI, DrBobbyUlich. VictorI said, “I think your math is probably fine, but I fail to see the logic of this scenario, unless you attribute it to hypoxia, in which case I would reply that a hypoxic pilot would have met their ultimate fate an hour sooner.”

    The only ways I can think of to account for the OXY posting of the Learjet captain being hypoxic but conscious for some time, are human variability or else the account is dubious.
    As to the former there is no support in medicine or from other like experience that I have heard, though others may have. On the latter, so far as I can see it was never confirmed by other than the pilot’s (or pilots’) account, which might on its own be construed as cover for another cause.

    The Indonesians are concerned about drugs and alcohol. http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/01/13/airlines-urged-to-conduct-more-frequent-medical-checkups-on-pilots.html

    Then there is oxygen lacing/contamination with hallucinogenics and other gases, including topping up inadvertently with the wrong gas.

    I would be the first to agree that there is no support for either in this instance, and neither do the circumstances lend to that.

    However while hypothetical other sources of irrational flying than hypoxia should not be dismissed entirely.

13. @DrB

    “continues “straight” past the holding pattern fix. I think that means it will continue to the next waypoint in the route, or, if there is none, it will then declare an EOR error and follow constant true heading (at least it will in FSX).”

    I have stayed out of the “what happens at an EOR event” because I don’t have any way to know. However, if I were the engineer designing the AP SW I would hold to the same great circle route. A starting point and a destination point define a unique great circle track. If in LNAV why would the AP simply not follow this track?

    An EOR event in this case requires the AP to do nothing except maybe flash a light or ring an alarm when the endpoint is reached. From a heavy lifting standpoint the track has already been computed. Just follow it.

    What does “continue straight” really mean in this context. Certainly continuing on the great circle route would emulate proceeding on the same heading as the AC was on at EOR. You would have to fly some distance to understand what really happens.

14. @DennisW,

    You are quite correct that it takes a lengthy simulation to discern the difference between a constant magnetic heading route and a constant true heading route. Basically you have to fly far enough that the magnetic declination changes by several degrees. As Victor has demonstrated (in his third attempt), in FSX both Route Discontinuity and End of Route errors have the same result – a constant true heading is maintained thereafter.

    As Matt Moriarty and others have said, Honeywell says a constant heading is maintained for those two errors, and whether it is magnetic or true depends on the position of the NORM/TRUE switch. Brian Anderson got a slightly different answer, not in writing, that seemed to imply the magnetic declination was not updated after the error, so the route could actually be a constant true heading.

    Ina previous posting I laid out several reasons why I think Honeywell may be wrong, and the actual path may be a constant true heading.

    The question can be answered in a full-up B777 simulator if someone can afford to do it for an extended post-EOR flight and they pick an appropriate region where the magnetic variation is large.

15. @David,

    To see the effects of hypoxia on pilots, watch the following:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_MI9UiYwJA

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX6uicFXEXw

    The effects are a severe reduction in capabilities accompanied by a euphoria that does not allow the sufferer to become alarmed. That is a very dangerous combination.

16. @Victor or @DrBobbyU
    Re: Headings
    Is the True Track or Magnetic Track an airline-optional heading choice? Do we know if MH370 had that capability?

17. MAS actually expanding somewhat now, after quite some route losses apparently in the wake of MH370/17.

    http://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2017-01-09/malaysia-airlines-order-25-widebodies-2017

18. @DrBobbyUlich. Thanks for the videos. The Kalitta one was what OXY posted. I have ben through the decompression chamber as a young fellow where I was unaware of passing out, the proof being, the normal trick, my watch had been removed.

    From times of useful consciousness tables the Kalitta captain would not have got through conscious and that was what I was commenting on.

    Change of topic. About your FF temperature table, not having access to that manual I very tentatively throw in a couple of points.

    One, the quadratic appears to have 100% as its vertex unless it is inverted at ISA-minus temperatures, ISA then being a plateau. That I doubt. If a vertex, climb speed and rate evidently are optimised for minimum power/maximum endurance at ISA as distinct from chosen economy at whatever the prevailing ambient, which looks odd.

    Also, supposing there to be a direct read across to the LRC table the 3% linear approximation would be reversed at minus temperatures.

    Incidentally, did ‘RR’ get left out in your 1?

19. @DrBobbyUlich @TBill @others

    I posted the same issue about TRUE/MAG headings after EOR/route discontinuity a few days ago with several questions. It did not appear on the blog(spamfilter?).
    Anyway I’m glad the subject has returned now.

    One of my questions was about; what would be a normal setting a pilot would choose on a long straight North to South flight (f.i. KL/Perth). Would he set the TRUE-MAG switch to TRUE in an early stage of the flight?

    And if so, would this set switch TRUE heading continue after a EOR/Route discontinuity?

20. @Ge Rijn
    Beginnner here.
    Normally flying long dist by waypoints. Near airports, air traffic control may give mag heading directions. Not sure when True is used much (polar regions it helps). That’s why recent ATSB report said mag heading is the more common.

    Re: MH370 True Heading mainly comes into greater importance if indeed that is default mode after discontinuity, discontinuity being when the pilot fails to input a complete route plan, and the AutoPilot does not know where to go next. Also in the case of MH370, True heading could be an intentional pilot choice to the SIO. I could recast DrBobbyU’s rationale and say pilot put in 183-South True Heading to approximate 180 due south True Track.

21. @DrBobbyUlich

    You have a perfectly viable CTH path that I watched you derive through a serious and methodical approach to interpretation of hard data. It is one of only two possible post-FMT scenarios that hold any water. So why not take “yes” for an answer?

    Yes, Doctor! If you have a CTH that fits the data, there’s a high probability that the nav reference was set to TRUE and a heading was set in the MCP. Don’t let the fact that only a conscious pilot could have commanded such a path get in the way of otherwise good science. You’re undermining your own good work, Bobby!

    Everyone needs to take his or her emotions and stuff ’em in the closet. Let the families of the missing be emotional. The rest of us should just do what we can to find the damned airplane.

    If BTO showed a CMH post-IGARI ending up near Maldives, I would easily believe that there was some sort of mechanical meltdown. But BTO does NOT show that.

    It clearly shows a dramatic turn between 18:25 and 19:40. Radar shows MH370 tracking an airway prior to the FMT that would never have organically been in the scratchpad, is not part of any arrival procedure in the region, could only have been added through a lengthy series of keystrokes, and just so happens to remain just outside the Jakarta FIR.

    Please stop with the hypoxia. You cannot have it both ways: It’s either a sneak attack where two pilots go so thoroughly gaga that they make one foggy-headed turn back and drift on to the Maldives to die a la Paine Stewart. Or it’s an event where you put on the mask and initiate a rapid descent, making a turn only once you’ve spoken to ATC and are very certain of the big picture.

    There is no hypoxia scenario where the transponder magically turns off, BOTH pilots go gaga, FORGET to descend and forget to call MAYDAY but DO TURN back, die of suffocation over the next 20 minutes but then come back to life to plug five or six waypoints into the FMC, re-engage LNAV but STILL don’t descend, die again of suffocation and again resurrect themselves to put the NAV REF in TRUE and dial the HDG knob to 180, only to die, finally, at FL360.

    Please, Bobby. Slice off the emotion and just let your good work be what it is.

22. @TBill

    Thanks.
    That’s why I mentioned a long North to South route (towards a Pole). I can imagine TRUE would be selected default early on such a flight to compensate for magnetic variation.

    Assuming the pilot on MH370 had the intention to make a long flight into the SIO would he have set the TRUE/MAG switch to TRUE before performing the FMT or after?

    To state it differently;
    Assuming hypothetically this was a normal flight from KL to Perth but with closed Indonesian airspace forcing the route to go West around Indonesia with one major turn near Nicobar Island (to pick one).
    What would the setting of the TRUE/MAG switch chosen by the pilot be? TRUE or MAG?

    And would he set the TRUE/MAG switch BEFORE the major turn or AFTER?

    Just try to figure out how a pilot would perform this ‘MH370-flight’ assuming it was a normal flight (with closed Indonesian airspace/FIR).

23. @DrBobbyUlich: “Temperature Dependence of Fuel Flows”

    You need to account for the following:

    1. Variation of true height versus pressure altitude.
    Flight Levels are pressure levels. The height difference between two pressure levels (e.g. sealevel standard pressure and FL350) increases with temperatures higher than the standard temperature, proportional to the ratio of actual/standard absolute temperatures at each altitude.

    2. The variation of thrust with ambient temperature.
    The scheduled performance data are bsed on maximum clim thrust for the engine type. For most modern turbofan engines, thrust limits are ‘flat-rated’ up to ISA+10°C. Below the flat-rating temperature, the rated thrust is constant. Above that temperature the rated thrust is limited by the maximum gas temperature in the engine, and rated thrust reduces with increasing ambient temperature. That variation is dependent on the thermodynamic characteristics of the particular engine type.

    Both effects increase the time required to reach a particular Flight Level, and hence the fuel consumed during climb. You will see that if you account for the difference in ‘tape line’ height between ISA and ISA+10°C the fuel consumed actually increases less than 3%.

24. @Ge Rijn

    Flights are conducted via airways or compulsory fixes (oceanic tracks are essentially airways, too), all of which are by definition great-circle routes. The only portion of any flight conducted via headings are during radar vectors when approaching or departing, or for traffic conflict-avoidance while en route.

    The only TRACK you will ever be required to fly is “runway heading” on departure. Other than that, vectors are issued in headings since every plane in that sector is riding in the same wind and it’s up to ATC to adjust the vector to attain the desired path over the ground.

25. @Matt Moriarty

    Thanks. Than I like to propose a slightly different route.

    Assuming the flight was a normal flight from KL to McMurdo but with closed Indonesian airspace/FIR and only one major turn near Nicobar Island (to pick one) to avoid Indonesian airspace/FIR.

    How would you, as a pilot, program this flight?
    Is setting of the TRUE/MAG switch neseccary f.i.?

26. @GeRijn

    You’d input a route that contained whatever fix you’re talking about near Nicobar, followed by either NZPG (Pegasus at McMurdo) if it was in the database or S78E166 as a final waypoint and fly there in LNAV. There are at least three identified McMurdo strips and I’m not sure which one Victor used but where the path intersects the 7th arc would be almost identical regardless.

    Why do you ask this?

27. @VictorI, DrBobbyUlich, and others.

    Yes, an elephant in the room, showering us with its benison of excrement to the extent we’re in danger of being blinded by the obvious.

    This is just how a pilot would behave if he wanted to put us off the scent, to make sure we couldn’t reconstruct a logical flight path from the scraps we just might have got hold of before he got beyond the reach of Butterworth radar.

    Dr Bobby has been able to identify a believable CTH path outbound from the vicinity of ANOKO, which just about ticks all the boxes, and has enough fuel to reach the 7th arc.

    The contortions: the offset near NILAM, the careful, avoidence of IGOGU, the pretence of appearing to be preparing for a landing at Banda Aceh, the switching to true heading, constant holding KIAS, for the journey south, to allow unpredictable winds to waft him away from any predictable impact point.

    Clearly, he didn’t want a chance of us projecting a flight path to an impact point where we could spot tell tale debris in the ensuing days.

    Right from the moment he reached IGARI, his watchword was evasion and deception.

    There is no other explanation for it.

28. @DrBobbyUlich: “Temperature Dependence of Fuel Flows”

    Further to the above: Since the variation of fuel consumed in climb versus temperature deviation at constant thrust (below ISA+10°C) is different from that above the flat-rating temperature, the line you have drawn has a distinct ‘kink’ at ISA+10°C. To connect the four temperatures by a “2nd order polynomial fit” is therefore not appropriate.

29. @ROB: “Right from the moment he reached IGARI, his watchword was evasion and deception.”

    That must be the most elaborate way to kill yourself ever conceived.

30. First pilot fatality in a Jas 39 Gripen crash, at an airshow in Songkhla, southern Thailand. Suspected pilot error leading to overload and pilot passing out due to G-forces. No fatalities on the ground as it seems:
    http://www.svt.se/nyheter/utrikes/jasplan-kraschade-i-thailand-en-dod

31. @ROB:
    I am prepared to agree.

32. @Matt Moriarty

    I ask this for I assume if flight MH370 was an actively piloted flight also after FMT, the pilot would probably have chosen the most common route-programming before FMT.
    Like you suggest this would be; input a fix where you want to make your turn in the route followed by an end-destination/waypoint/airport where you want to go to after this turn flying in LNAV.

    Sorry if I’m repeating something quite obvious to any pilot (which I’m obviously not).
    I only want to understand if in normal circumstances the route inputs would be done before the major turn and if the TRUE/MAG switch then also had to be used on a long trip changing towards the Pole.
    It’s clear now to me.
    Only my question about the TRUE/MAG switch is not clear yet.

    Is it necessary to set this switch to TRUE before or after making the major turn to the South?

33. @DrBobbyUlich: The fuel flow correction for temperature is based on two things:

    1) For a given thrust, the fuel flow will vary roughly as the square root of the total temperature ratio. In rough numbers, at FL350 and M0.8, this might contribute about 2% to the fuel flow for a 10K offset.
    2) The drag increases because of a change in Reynolds number at higher temperature. This might contribute another 1% for a 10K offset.

    I think without better understanding and compensating for these two effects, you are not going to do better than the temperature compensation advised by GE.

    The first principles fuel flow model I was developing, based on lift, drag, and engine performance, compensates for these effects, and I was able to calculate fuel flows over a wide range of temperature offsets, speeds, weights, and altitudes. However, I could only match the tabulated values for LRC and holding within several percent, which was sufficient for most calculations, but not for predicting the precise fuel endurance for MH370.

34. @Gysbreght

    Yes I agree with you for once. Extremely elaborate and extremely cunning. This plan had been thoroughly prepared. But not just planning his own suicide, but planning a way of getting back at “someone”, in a uniquely wicked way. Who are the likely “someones”? Well, take your pick: the Malaysian Establishment, MAS, private individuals. Revenge was the motive. Obviously, when you carry out a outrage of this magnitude, you wouldn’t still want to be around afterwards, to suffer the consequences. And If you had survived, the intended impact/effect of you action would be greatly diluted.

35. @Ge Rijn: There is no need to change the HDG REF switch from NORM to TRUE unless the plane is operating in polar regions (north/south of 84N/84S latitudes). Even then, the switch selection has no effect on the LNAV roll mode. Under normal conditions, the switch should be kept in the NORM position, which is why the switch is behind a protective cover that must be flipped up to access the switch.

36. @ROB

    Had the plane not crashed, it would not be an “outrage of this magnitude”.

37. @Ge Rijn
    I have been looking at variations of Victor’s VOCX to NZPG route. That’s a great circle route, but also waypoints APASI COCOS and POLUM are almost exact in the path depending on how you want to fly it. Without wind, I do not see big difference between Great Circle, True Heading, Mag Heading starting at Car Nicobar. Wind is going to push the plane to the east a little bit. So a pilot could dial in APASI or VOCX to COCOS or POLUM and track close to same path, and if Heading changed to True or Mag at that discontinuity point, it would not make too much difference.

    Low altitude FL100 loiter at VOCX (Car Nicobar) makes perfect sense if the low altitude gets the pilot below Sabang radar. Then later pilot heads south either still below radar, or if he pops into radar, the operator sees a brief blip heading south and does not correlate that to being the same plane he saw going west at Car Nic.

    I see SK999 argues on Reddit that the smoothness of the BFO data makes him think no loiter, so not a slam dunk.

38. DennisW, you wrote: “However, if I were the engineer designing the AP SW I would hold to the same great circle route.”

    According to the Honeywell manual (p. 264-265), the FMC implements 17 different navigation leg types (which map, in some fashion, onto the 23 RNAV leg types). The most common leg type for flying great circles is TF (track to fix). Only two leg types allow for a manual termination: HM (a holding pattern) and VM (heading to a manual termination). Your “follow a great circle” (to a manual termination) is not there. Further, suppose you were flying a CF (course to a fix) or DF (direct to a fix) type leg – there may not be a great circle defined before passing the fix. Much easier to maintain last heading – FMC doesn’t need to think after that.

39. Anyone else finds it strange that the change of PIC (between 0:40:40 and 0:42:50) occurred shortly after Z’s last WeChat Login at 0:40:02?

    Too bad the RMP does not have access to WeChat data, although I suspect China might have.

40. Richard Cole is reporting that Fugro Equator is surveying parallel to the 7th arc at about -32.98, 95.86, which is outside of the 7th arc and part of the new area defined in the “First Principles Review”. It may be the bathyscanning is preparation for later side-scan sonar work.

    https://twitter.com/richard_e_cole/status/820223968833638405

41. @Nederland: What I find extremely strange is that a pilot lined up on a runway, one minute before takeoff, is using WeChat on his cell phone. What was so important that needed his attention at this critical time?

42. @VictorI

    Another suggestion is that the pilot did not show signs of anxiety on CCTV before boarding the plane (Jeff’s blog above). Perhaps the final WeChat communication influenced the possible decision to divert the plane or this was a decision ‘on short notice’ (seeing that the deletion of critical files also occurred on the day of an MH370 flight)?

43. @ROB

    “Right from the moment he reached IGARI, his watchword was evasion and deception.

    There is no other explanation for it.”

    If a pilot wanted to drop a plane into the far reaches of the SIO (“with evasion and deception”) starting at KL, the pilot would not pick a flight that headed to IGARI. A flight diversion from IGARI is like saying, “Hey, look at me. I am diverting this flight.”

    The notion of deception and evasion simply does not fit the facts of the flight.

44. @sk999

    At the end of the day, it does not matter how I would have designed the SW. What matters is how the SW was actually designed. I actually regretted my worthless input shortly after clicking the post icon. The collective here has wrung their hands over this issue, including inputs from the manufacturer, in scores of posts.

    As a relatively passive observer my conclusion is that nobody knows “jack shit” about how this system actually behaves in the circumstances we are postulating.

45. @VictorI

    Thanks for making the TRUE/MAG switch finaly clear to me related to a long flight to a Pole. MH370 did not come near 84S didn’t it..

    @TBill

    Related to the above your comment is also telling to me;

    “Without wind, I do not see big difference between Great Circle, True Heading, Mag Heading starting at Car Nicobar”.

    Even wind won’t make much difference you say.
    So, can I conclude the whole issue about a Mag-heading or a True-heading after FMT isn’t important enough to make substantial difference to a possible crash area?

    Magnetic variations and wind variations are to small to cause substantial different (curved) flight paths on that route to the SIO compared to straight (great circle) flight paths?

    Your other suggestion was discussed before I remember and is still quite interesting I think.
    I also suggested a steep descend after (or during) FMT some months(?time flies) ago with the purpose to dive under the Indonesian Atjeh radar and clime back to altitude after out of radar range.

    Considering the ‘smoothness of BFO data’ I have @DennisW’s arguments in mind which hold water IMO.
    So maybe @sk999’s trust in the BFO data could be misplaced?

46. @DennisW

    Thank you for pointing that out.

    We’re looking forward to next Friday! Donald’s inauguration! Nigel Farrage (Mr Brexit) has his seat booked in front of the Capitol. And who ever said politics was boring? Good point is he supports the 2nd amendment, so the Glock will stay.

    More importantly, it looks like ATSB are getting ready to look outside the arc in Dr Bobby’s area, so all is not lost yet. Yippee!

47. @VictorI

    That sounds very encouraging. ATSB obviously think there is a chance they’ll be allowed to search the 20,000sq km area. If that’s the case, the plane might still be found.

48. @Ge Rijn

    The autopilot mode is important but only close to polar regions. For example, if COCOS IS (YPCC) was selected as waypoint, the autopilot mode would not change the flight path up to that point, but it would change the crash location as the path is approaching the magnetic pole.

49. @ROB

    For more then a year now contributors here have been arguing the crash area had to be more North based on good arguments (and you never was one of them, never mind).
    Now finaly the ATSB seems to get the picture also in the last weeks of the search.
    Isn’t it a bit cynical and tragic?

    IMO they wasted a lot of time and money.
    It was already clear a year ago. Even soon after the flaperon-find. Which only builded with every find after it.

    Better late than never I agree. Stay positive. The persistent discussion looking at all angles from different perspectives has been remarkable here. I’m sure it hasn’t been in vane and still isn’t.

    Although hard sometimes for the NoK I hope it serves as a kind of solitude for them so many ‘ordinairy’ people are still trying to solve this mystery.

50. @Nederland

    Yes, but it would make not a substantial difference according to @VictorI and @TBill’s explanations as I understand it.
    The magnetic variations and wind variations would be too small to allow a substantial deviation compared to a straight flight path (f.i. great circle) till a possible MH370 crash area in the SIO between ~30S and ~40S.

    Arguments against this conclusion?

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