Yesterday, officials responsible for locating missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 announced that their two-year, $150 million search has come to an end. Having searched an area the size of Pennsylvania and three miles deep, they’ve found no trace of the plane.
The effort’s dismal conclusion stands in marked contrast to the optimism that officials displayed throughout earlier phases of the search. In August, 2015, Australia’s deputy prime minister Warren Truss declared, “The experts are telling us that there is a 97% possibility that it is in [the designated search] area.”
So why did the search come up empty? Did investigators get unlucky, and the plane happened to wind up in the unsearched 3 percent? Or did something more nefarious occur?
To sort it all out, we need to go back to why officials thought they knew where the plane went.
Early on the morning of March 8, 2014, MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing. Forty minutes passed the last navigational waypoint in Malaysian airspace. Six seconds after that it went electronically dark. In the brief gap between air-control zones, when no one was officially keeping an eye on it, the plane pulled a U-turn, crossed back through Malaysian airspace, and then vanished from military radar screens.
At that point the plane was completely invisible. Its hijackers could have flown it anywhere in the world without fear of discovery. But lo and behold, three minutes later a piece of equipment called the Satellite Data Unit, or SDU, rebooted and initiated a log-on with an Inmarsat communications satellite orbiting high overhead. An SDU reboot is not something that can happen accidentally, or that airline captains generally know how to do, or that indeed there would be any logical reason for anyone to carry out. Yet somehow it happened. Over the course of the next six hours, the SDU sent seven automated signals before going silent for good. Later, Inmarsat scientists poring over the data made a remarkable discovery: due to an unusual combination of peculiarities, a signal could be teased from this data that indicated where the plane went.
With much hard work, search officials were able to wring from the data quite a detailed picture of what must have happened. Soon after the SDU reboot, the plane turned south, flew fast and straight until in ran out of fuel, then dived into the sea. Using this information, officials were able to generate a probabilistic “heat map” of where the plane most likely ended up. The subsequent seabed search began under unprecedented circumstances. Never before had a plane been declared lost, and its location subsequently deduced, on the basis of mathematics alone.
Now, obviously, we know that that effort was doomed. The plane is not where the models said it would most likely be. Indeed, I would go further than that. Based on the signal data, aircraft performance parameters, and the available autopilot modes, there is a finite range of places where the plane could plausibly have fetched up. Search vessels have now scanned all of them. If the data is good, and the analysis is good, the plane should have been found.
I am convinced that the analysis is good. And the data? It seems to me that the scientists who defined the search area overlooked a step that even the greenest rookie of a criminal investigator would not have missed. They failed to ascertain whether the data could have been tampered with.
I’ve asked both Inmarsat scientists and the Australian mathematicians who defined the search area how they knew that the satellite communications system hadn’t been tampered with. Both teams told me that they worked with the data they were given. Neither viewed it as their job to question the soundness of their evidence.
This strikes me as a major oversight, since the very same peculiar set of coincidences that made it possible to tease a signal from the Inmarsat data also make it possible that a sophisticated hijacker could have entered the plane’s electronics bay (which lies beneath an unsecured hatch at the front of the business class cabin) and altered the data fed to the Satellite Data Unit.
A vulnerability existed.
The only question is: Was it exploited? If it was, then the plane did not fly south over the ocean, but north toward land. For search officials, this possibility was erased when a piece of aircraft debris washed ashore on Réunion Island in July of 2015. Subsequently, more pieces turned up elsewhere in the western Indian Ocean.
However, as with the satellite data, officials have failed to explore the provenance of the debris. If they did, they would have noticed some striking inconsistencies. Most notably, the Réunion debris was coated completely in goose barnacles, a species that grows only immersed in the water. When officials tested the debris in a flotation tank, they noted that it floated half out of the water. There’s no way barnacles could grow on the exposed areas—a conundrum officials have been unable to reconcile. The only conclusion I can reach is that the piece did not arrive on Réunion by natural means, a suspicion reinforced by a chemical analysis of one of the barnacles by Australian scientist Patrick DeDeckker, who found that the barnacle grew in water temperatures that no naturally drifting piece of debris would have encountered.
If the plane didn’t go south, then where did it go? Not all the Inmarsat data, it turns out, was susceptible to spoofing. From the portion that wasn’t, it’s able to generate a narrow band of possible flight paths; they all terminate in Kazakhstan, a close ally of Russia. Intriguingly, three ethnic Russians were aboard MH370, including one who was sitting mere feet from the electronics bay hatch. Four and a half months later, a mobile launcher from a Russian anti-aircraft unit shot down another Malaysia Airlines 777-200ER, MH17. A year after that, the majority of pieces of debris wind up being discovered by a man who had spent the last three decades intimately involved with Russia.
Whether or not the Russians are responsible for MH370, the failure of the seabed search and the inconsistencies in the aircraft debris should undermine complacency about the official narrative. When MH370 disappeared, it possessed an obscure vulnerability that left its Inmarsat data open to tampering. Having spent $150 million and two years on a fruitless investigation, search officials have an obligation to investigate whether or not that vulnerability was exploited.
@Ge Rijn
“Boeing spending less then 0.001% of their 2016 profits on this new search would give them a cheap world-wide advertising campaign showing off their dedication to safety and concern for the passengers who step in their planes.”
I think you might be over-estimated the interested parties. World-wide advertising campaign?? Apart from the people on this and other blogs no one even remembers MH370, and I seriously doubt anyone on the blogs is going to buy a commercial airliner. The people who would be potential customers are smart enough to know that Boeing is not responsible.
Transkei-debris: MH370? My prediction (sure to go wrong) NO.
Hole pattern for rivets/fasteners is spaced much too widely for a fairing or other external aircraft piece. Compare with NO STEP piece. The oval archway section with interior ribbing is odd as well.
Now it does have Jeff Wise certified barnacles. But maybe the Ca/Mg ratio is out of spec. Who knows?
@Ge Rijn
“IMO they are idiots if they let this opportunity pass.”
Indeed, it is not every day you have the opportunity to toss $42M in the toilet.
It’s a $43m investment to hide the truth. If the truth revealed then it’s down the flusher..
DennisW. “..I can now add Fugro to the list of idiots – ATSB, CSIRO, DSTG”.
To the idiots you should include that group which offered peer support if not supervision, the SSWG. Then of course for not correcting these collective miscreants, other participants should be included: Boeing, Thales, Inmarsat, the National Transportation Safety Board of the US, the Air Accidents Investigation Branch of the UK and the Department of Civil Aviation, Malaysia.
All idiots.
As you would have it, the search was premature.
You really do think there was an option of not conducting a search for an aircraft in which so many had died, mysteriously, for what is now nigh on four years?
If so then the idiots are not just those outside your ranch.
I would say that getting any search going in the circumstances was essential. There was innovative, creative work done in getting a search of reasonable prospects going at all and competence in getting the whole organisation humming. It is called giving it a go. Yes there were flaws such as over-optimism and, most probably in some assumptions. However such flaws are only confirmed in retrospect and in light of new information. The CSIRO had insufficient informationat the time to do other than qualify the possibility that the flaperon could have come from the search area. Do you expect them to predict a statistical likelihood of a search area on a population of one?
I wonder if your criticism would have been as strident had the aircraft been found? You could not have guaranteed that the aircraft would not be found any more than anyone could (or should) have guaranteed it would be.
Your fulminating and crowing is doing no-one any good. What next is the question and how can we work towards that?
@David
“I wonder if your criticism would have been as strident had the aircraft been found? You could not have guaranteed that the aircraft would not be found any more than anyone could (or should) have guaranteed it would be.”
I don’t make guarantees.
The question is were the actions of the ATSB prudent? “Giving it a go” is the stuff of movies.
My contention has never been that the ATSB decided to look in the wrong place. My contention is they started an inexpensive undertaking with insufficient justification. I would also contend that if they had exercised good judgement we would now be funding a search in an area where the aircraft is much more likely to be found.
If these “give it a go” heroes were real, they would continue the search. As Chester says “it is not at all about cost”. Do you think Chester’s statement has any credibility whatever? If so, what are your heroes waiting for?
@Rob. Flaperon separation.
Caution. Do not pay close attention to the first section until you have scanned the whole.
The flaperon skin is carbon fibre reinforced plastic on Nomex honeycomb Rob so its t/e would not be weaker than the flap, at least not just for that reason. So for my purpose here I assume the flaperon t/e was down a little. Assuming the hinges and trailing edge failed on the flaperon striking the water, the rest could have rotated upwards about the two actuator hinges while also, pivoting about its outer hinge.
With just the RAT providing power, the inner actuator then being in bypass could extend, the flaperon rotating in the horizontal plane towards the adjacent flap. The combination of these rotations would result in it striking the adjacent retracted outer flap inner end similarly to had the flaperon been housed. This would cause the flaperon crush damage evident at its outer leading edge (fig 6, http://thehuntformh370.info/sites/default/files/mh370_flaperon_failure_analysis_rev_2.0.pdf).
The flap inboard end would be lifted in being struck, the flap breaking in bending after the auxiliary support track, its outer end having flailed within its seal pan, broke its bottom link to the wing (fig 15, https://www.atsb.gov.au/media/5771939/ae-2014-054_mh370-search-and-debris-update_2nov-2016_v2.pdf ).
The track’s rear end would then scrape up the inside of the seal pan, which I deduce from the ATSB report, as the flap end rose. The track then broken entirely from the wing.
I have outlined this sequence before but now having the flaperon a few degrees down would help explain why the outer flap trailing edge did not separate at the flap inboard end, being of carbon fibre. As to the panels above the flaperon that you mention, they might have been taken out subsequently.
However looking into this more closely I now have a difficulty with it. What did the flaperon’s outer leading edge hit which caused the crushing damage? There is a strut parallel to the wing at about the right height, secured to a robust spur riser from a very robust cantilevered structure, itself supporting the flaperon hinge. Also secured to the riser is the cove lip door hinge point, which I feel sure you will remember. It looks as though this bar and the hinge point could have caused the crush damage. Bear in mind from Tom Kenyon’s photo the damage was to the underneath of the leading edge.
The problem is that the strut and hinge point are say ¾ the width of the cove lip forward of the flaperon leading edge, so would have required a large compressive force on the actuator, forcing that through its wing mountings, for that damage to result. Also it would have entailed shearing of the hinges, or at least the outer.
That would suggest high impact damage, undoing hitting the sea as the cause of the separation.
I hope you can follow the drift of that without a diagram or alternately you can find one of the flaperon with cove door assembly which will let you see the nub of the problem. I could well be missing something.
@David
“What next is the question and how can we work towards that?”
The only significant next question is where is the money going to come from to continue any meaningful search efforts, and who will be leading those efforts. I have absolutely no confidence in the tripartite nations involved in the past and current efforts.
@DennisW. I agree with you that the search should not continue until there can be more confidence. That does not mean it should not have been undertaken or that those who did that were idiots all.
Giving it a go is not foolhardy. It is trying something when in the balance and in this case when there is no realistic alternative, a reasonable prospect being in the offing.
Chester explained that the three deciders did not want to give next of kin false hope. That might have been unavoidable damage from the search having been conducted, but less I would suspect than not searching at all.
@DennisW. On your second, the object surely is to gain the confidence needed for a new search. The money is secondary as it was in this initial search.
@David
“Chester explained that the three deciders did not want to give next of kin false hope. That might have been unavoidable damage from the search having been conducted, but less I would suspect than not searching at all.”
Do you have any idea how lame that sounds? There is no such thing as false hope. Hope is hope. It is what helps you to continue in the face of adversity.
“I agree with you that the search should not continue until there can be more confidence. That does not mean it should not have been undertaken or that those who did that were idiots all.”
If you agree that the search should not continue then how can you assert that it should have been started?. We have more an better information now than what was available when the search was initiated.
If I had $10 for every time a geek walked into my office with a speed sheet, and I acted on it, I would be a lot poorer than I am today. The level of adult supervision in this entire process to date is startlingly deficient.
@DennisW. Time to move on with confidence building I reckon
in re sk999’s mention of a debris find yesterday in the Transkei, image available here:
http://www.avcom.co.za/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=185829
Does the pattern of composite on a 777 change with location of function? This piece has quite a different honeycomb pattern (as far as can be seen in existing photography) than material more concretely tied to MH370. Less true equal-sided honeycomb, as in the RR engine cowling, and more of a domed rectangle.
@David
No quarrel at my end. We need a heavyweight to step up, and I just do not see that happening. The current players are simply not at all up to the task.
My sense is that this whole incident will fade into obscurity with maybe a few more books being penned. Sad really.
@sk999 @ScottO
Look at the adjustable hinge in the middle of the cast oval archway and the seal surrounding the inner end of the piece. Where have we seen this before? : end seals of the flaperon and the same kind of adjustable hinge attached to the closing panel above the flaperon.
Then the rivets are sunk and flushed. The white color shining through on the outside matches too. It won’t suprise me if there is a position number under the seafauling like the Liam Lotter piece.
IMO it’s clearly an aircraft piece.
The visible piece of honeycomb seems compressed in one direction. In the lowest part of the honeycomb close up you can see the honeycomb cells have their normal shape.
Must be B777/MH370 IMO. But ofcourse this has to be confirmed.
@TBill @others
IMO there is a clear indication too, something could have gone wrong with the plane. The plane suddenly returned to Malasia heading towards a suitable airport (Penang). This is what a pilot would do in case of a serious failure.
It seems unlikely now but no one can tell for sure yet there was no failure(s) of the plane causing the disappearance.
No direct indication of a failure ofcourse cann’t be a reason not to investigate further by Boeing (and others). If that would be a reason quite some airplane accidents would not have been investigated.
IMO it’s in the greatest interest of Boeing to find out if a failure of the plane could have been the cause or if they can exclude this. If they don’t and leave it like this they know they potentialy build an airplane that possibly has an unknown fatal flaw which could repeat itself.
Which is very bad advertising to customers and to the public IMO.
Inreresting development on the AVCOM blog, South Africa:
Ge Rijn said;
“No direct indication of a failure”…
There is a direct indication of a failure.
The last two actual transmitted ADS-B data records from the aircraft
showed an altitude of ‘0’. Previous transmitted ADS-B records had
correctly tracked MH370’s altitude as it climbed along its flightpath.
@Perfect Storm, I spent a lot of time thinking about a trip to Baikonur. As it happens, in summer of 2014 an adventurous Russian bicyclist rode a mountain bike for two days through the desert from the highway that bisects Baikonur to the Yubileyniy airstrip and camped overnight there, about a mile from the mysterious dirt pile, before getting too close to one of the active launch facilities and getting arrested. He tagged a bunch of pics showing his progress on Google Earth, and I contacted him and asked him for advice. After he was arrested, he told the guards about his enthusiasm for the history of the Buran project, and they let him off with a warning. So I was pretty excited to repeat his feat, but with a metal detector and a shovel. But as more sat images came in, my early impression that a hole had been dug and then filled in after March 8 was replaced by a conviction that it was never a hole but a mound of dirt a couple of feet high. So my enthusiasm for that project faded. Still, I have no idea what the project was actually for, and I do find the timing and location curious–I’d still love to know more.
As for Ukraine, that’s where two of the three ethnic Russians aboard MH370 are from. It’s proven impossible to find out much about them from behind my desk in New York, even with hiring local freelancers, but I think if I was able to get over there I’d have much better luck. Also, I would love to find someone who has served on a Buk crew and learn about operational procedures.
I fear that DennisW is right about crowdsourcing. On a couple of occasions people have tried to raise money this way to fund their efforts but they haven’t had much success, and they’ve gotten a lot of flak about their motives.
@Gysbreght, Thanks for that update. It seems that the France24 documentary has lit a fire under Malaysia’s ass.
BTW here’s a link to an English edit of that documentary. Interesting to see the footage of Blaine actually in the process of finding the piece of freshly washed-up debris that we discussed here a little while ago (the implausibility of this coincidence prompted me to write a blog post about it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC-ynwfzIFY
One thing that struck me on watching this was how small the pieces are. I’m not the first person to observe this, but to generate such tiny pieces, would require a lot of energy. This has led the ATSB to assume a very large debris field, and hence their exclusion of an impact point north of 32 south or whatever it was.
@sk999, You wrote, “But maybe the Ca/Mg ratio is out of spec. Who knows?” Just at a glance these barnacles look fairly young, so an Mg/Ca analysis most likely wouldn’t give much of a clue about the impact point, but I’d still be curious to find out what it would say. This piece must have been going around in circles somewhere out in the remote ocean.
@Perfect Storm: Baikonur is extremely unlikely for purely technical reasons: It doesn’t fall close to the 7th arc and there wasn’t enough fuel onboard to reach it. It also doesn’t have facilities to land a B777. Even if technically feasible (which it is not), if Russia was going to hide a B777, it is unlikely they would choose a location that is used as a launch site for its satellite customers, including Inmarsat.
@ScottO @others
On the Transkei-piece. Take a look at picture 4 in the following Jeff Wise blog-link:
http://jeffwise.net/2016/03/10/mh370-debris-storm/comment-page-1/
You’ll see exactly the same disformed pattern in the exposed honeycomb of the Liam Lotter flap fairing piece.
Picture 9 shows the complete inner outboard flap fairing assembly.
The Transkei-piece looks mostly like the aft-part of this assembly IMO.
The unevenly spaced rivet-line around the edge where that cast arch is visible in the Transkei-piece and its position also matches, as does the coned shape and its dimensions.
The inspection doors are not visible, although there seems to be a round shape visible on the inside of the Transkei-piece just behind the arch. The outside is covered in biofauling in that area so it’s hard to tell.
But then it could be the inside part of this flap fairing. Which could mean it’s the inboard aft flap fairing part of the left wing outboard flap.
Great Malaysia pics up on this piece this way but it’s cynical they do it like this now the search has ended.
It is also the first time as far as I know a Malaysian official has turned directly to a blog-site.
Lets be positive and say; better late than never..
@VictorI, Baikonur’s Yubileyniy airstrip lies about 75 nm from the 7th arc, though it is further than that from the high probability area defined by the DSTG’s BTO analysis–more like 250 nm. If MH370 flew there, then the 0:19 signal was not caused by fuel exhaustion as in the SIO scenario but was presumably the result of some kind of SDU fiddling. Yubileyniy certainly is big enough to handle a 777, and happens to be perhaps the most precisely engineered runway in the world, have been milled to meet the exacting standards of the Buran self-landing space shuttle program. While other parts of Baikonur are indeed used for a great many launches, these are from tightly controlled areas some distance removed from Yubileyniy. The residential area is 25 nm away, or about the distance from Stamford, CT to JFK airport, so there’s little danger than any unauthorized people would be aware of a pre-dawn landing at Yubileyniy.
I agree that the fuel load is a problem. I don’t know how big of a problem. In its early paper the ATSB spent a fair bit of time talking about fuel range (your memory for things that happened in 2104 is better than mine) but then stopped considering it altogether, perhaps because there were too many unknowns. But fascinated as I am by Yubileyniy I do not think it is the only possible landing point in Kazakhstan, if MH370 did indeed fly to Kazakhstan.
@Ge Rijn
Re: Boeing, we have Malaysian PM Razak declaring on 15-Mar-2014 the incident was apparent intentional diversion. That statement has stood the test of time, and appears to be correct. If Malaysia changed their mind and said it now appears to be a Boeing airplane defect, that might be an interesting debate, maybe some hidden info would be disclosed.
@jeeffwise: Sorry, Baikonur makes zero sense. Even if we assume the Russians purposely created a BTO signature to mimic fuel exhaustion at 00:19, there was not enough fuel to reach Baikonur, as several people have explained to you. I am amazed you still doubt this. Do the calculations yourself, or get somebody to help. I suspect you really don’t want to know the answer. As for having access areas tightly controlled at Baikonur, this launch site has such high strategic value it is certainly the subject of satellite surveillance. How quickly do you think you can prepare for and then hide a B777? You might be fascinated by the prospect of it, and even write a book about it, but it didn’t happen.
Ge Rijn,
After comparing Transkei piece with Lotter’s, I see what you are describing. Pattern of holes near Lotter’s right hand is more widely spaced than other pieces we have seen; also, the archway would go around the flap track, explaining its otherwise odd construction.
@Victor
Baikonur
Lets keep cool, Sir. We allknow that Baikonur is just one result of a possible spoof. There are plenty different kinds of spoof discussed here and Jeff Wise is just preferring one of those solvings.
But there are many others and indeed, when the the choice comes down between the probability of pilot suicide and the probability of an electronic spoof, you would have light years between them, because the probability of the bizarre suicide scenario you prefer was assessed by experts as about one in a billion, while the probability of electronic spoofs, hacks and the like is just day to day routine in our times and at a figure of sure more than 20 per cent.
So dont blame a visionary like JW for thinking out of the box, but try to find a way to support his visions. There will be a reward, maybe it takes some time.
@CosmicAcademy, Just to be clear, Victor’s argument isn’t against a spoof to Kazakhstan (which is where the plane went if the BFO was spoofed but not the BFO) but just against that specific runway. He feels that fuel considerations rule it out and that if the plane went to Kazakhstan it must have wound up further east. I concede he has a point but feel that there are too many unknowns in fuel-burn models to be absolutely certain.
@TBill
Razak also created a precedent with this statement made so early when so little was known only a week after. It focussed the minds in that direction very early on without any proof yet actualy.
In fact it was a very bold statement to make at that time.
Too bold, irresponsable even IMO.
It clearly suggested delibarate action from a pilot/hijacker steering the minds off from mechanical/electronical failure or another possible intervention (from Malaysian military?).
This early statement and also his very early statement the plane was lost in the SIO and all aboard had perished were premature and IMO opinion suspicious. Those statements came too fast asif he knew something no one could have known at that time within 2 weeks after the incident.
Was it a calculated distraction from what really happened? To deliberately steer investigators and the public opinion in a certain direction?
From the beginning, after this statements, I had the feeling Razak and the Malaysians tried to hide something crucial concerning their own role in the loss of MH370.
With those very premature statements they effectively steered attention towards the cockpit and pilot/hijackers and succeeded in most of us focussing on them and not on the possible role of the Malaysian Government and military or a mechanical/electronical failure of the plane.
Psychological a clever thing to do.
Steering away attention from the fact MH370 was tracked real time over the peninsula. They declared they did not percieve it as a threat so felt no need to scramble jets.
A roque plane that does not communicate and can not be identified was not percieved as a threat. Can anyone take this for granted?
Come on…
Now an official shows up on a forum for the first time, after the ending of the search..
Very interested in a new piece of debris.
It’s pathetic in a way after showing no interest in many pieces for more than a year.
It seems like a calculated manipulation to restore their image. Very cheep too, for it has no consequences anymore after the search ended.
Combined with all the data the Malaysians still refuse to make public or offer to the investigators I’m sure they hide something crucial.
In the end it could well be they shot at their own plane over the Malacca Straight and left it flying crippled on one engine into the SIO.
This would be something for them to cover up with any means.
From the beginning all their information has been almost totally wrong, contradicting, confusing, deleting progress, distracting.
Now they show up on a forum quite interested.
If it’s not total amateurism it’s a disgrace actualy to the NoK and moderate human intelligence.
@David, quoting the Higgins article in the Australian: “The effort had involved 300 rotating staff members on Fugro ships and 1.5 million man hours.”
This simply illustrates why blind searching, just to be searching is nuts — as they further point out, lives [of Fugro crewmen] were risked to cover a rather small portion of the 7th arc.
In the next 10 or 20 years, autonomous vehicles and improved sensors will come on line capable of mapping deep sea bed for a small fraction of the expeditionary ship model. The hard nut — refueling drones — likely will be small autonomous mother ships each being ‘sub tender’ to a fleet of submersibles.
At that point, I’d imagine that an Elon Musk+James Cameron type might look for and find MH370, or it might be found in the course of normal sea-floor mapping for resourcs.
But for present-day technology, continuing to mow the lawn with ships is pouring money [whether public or private] down the rat hole. Sorry Fugro, go home.
@TBill
The NW point on p. 46 of the June/August 2014 ATSB report was in reference to the search area from 2 to 28 April close to air route M641 from Cocos Island to Learmonth. I have to say that area yields the best results in the adrift simulation.
It is perhaps possible to combine this with a scenario to bypass Sabang radar:
https://www.allmystery.de/static/upics/fad1328963_earth13.png
The distance of the first leg from the 18:22 blip to the NW point is 297 nm, which amounts to an average ground speed of 446 kts, which could have to do with the presumed descent at 18:40. I presume a higher ground speed of around 495 kts for the second leg up to the 19:41 intersect (at around Lat 4.9) and the corresponding distance is around 250 nm. I also presume a flight towards waypoint AKINO, then onto MABIX. In that case, MH370 must have flown nearly on a tangent to the 19:41 ring immediately prior to its intersection (a heading of c. 174.3 degree) to match the BFO value. The deviation from the route to AKINO could be anytime sooner I think, resulting in slightly lower ground speeds.
It is not, however, possible to reconcile this with a direct path from 4.9 to ISBIX. To do that, one has to assume an intersection with the 19:41 ring much furhter north and closer to Sabang.
It is also interesting to note that radars in the west of Indonesia are generally older and work at only 70% of their capability, and some for only 12 hours a day:
http://jakartagreater.com/perisai-pertahanan-indonesia/ via google translate
@ikr
“But for present-day technology, continuing to mow the lawn with ships is pouring money [whether public or private] down the rat hole. Sorry Fugro, go home.”
If Boeing were to commit $42M to the search at least a third of it would find its way into Najib’s bank account, a third would be used for things like pier maintenance in Perth, and maybe a third of it would actually fund some search activity. There is simply no concept of accountability in any of the tripartite governments.
I was amused by Danica Weeks calling for Boeing to “come to the plate”. Even she apparently does not believe her own transport minister who claims “it is not at all about the money”. She did not, however, mention anything about searching leading to “false hope”.
@Ge Rijn
Linked below is yet another drift study done in your preferred manner, that is tracking drifters originating on the 7th arc in the primary search area. Sure enough, it shows ReUnion as a distinct possibility. Of course, one has to disregard the absence of debris on the WA coast. Maybe we need to encourage Blaine to look in WA.
https://phys.org/news/2017-01-oceanographic-analysis-potential-site-mh370.html
@Victor, @ Jeff
Victor, you presume that the Russians would surely not want a country that monitored Baikonur by satellite (presumably the U.S.) to see that it landed the plane there. But that might not be the case at all. In fact, if the action were meant to illustrate a threat, a sighting is exactly what the Russians would want.
U.S. satellites have watched Russian military columns power into Ukraine for nearly the past three years now but that does not stop the Russians from removing identifying markings from that materiel and publicly denying that their troops are active in the Donbass, for example.
If you’re interested, theintereptermag.com has very good live coverage of the war in Ukraine and it shows just how active the Russian military is there, despite Moscow’s protests the contrary.
(Of course this still does not address the fuel range issue.)
@Ge Rijn
I believe you’re right as to identification. And I also find it odd that Aslam Khan has reached out on the AVCOM blog within 24 hours of initial posting given so much prior disinterest in the debris prior to the conclusion of the search. To be sure, he has been quoted in debris stories before, but the immediate hands on interest here is very different.
@DennisW
Thanks. Indeed this is the kind of drift analyzis that matters IMO.
Undrogged drifters used only and taking into account the time frames.
The fact that some drifters landed on Australian shores and even one on the shores of Java does not devaluate the conclusions.
It only tells it did not happen or debris that landed there is still found.
The Western Australian shores are for the most part very desolated especialy North of Geraldton, Shark Bay, Carnarvon till Exmouth.
I drove along that coast line from Cape Leeuwin to Exmouth so I think have an fairly objective impression of the chances finding any debris along that coastline.
I remember Blaine Gibson went there too looking.
I can imagine he soon gave up. Too hot, too desolated, too long a coast line ineccesable for hundreds of miles.
@ScottO: If you are a proponent of the theory that Putin took the plane, you have to decide whether or not he wanted the West to know he took the plane. In a particular scenario, you can’t have it both ways.
And as you say, this still doesn’t address the fuel range issue. I studied the feasibility of northern paths in detail by finding paths that matched the BTO, and in particular ones that terminated near airports. The path that went to Yubileyniy Airport was 128 nm past Kyzylorda Airport near the 7th arc. It would take an additional 7,500 kg of fuel above the initial load of 49,400 kg just to reach Kyzylorda Airport and would require an average Mach number of 0.864 at FL350. And that’s with zero fuel reserve, which would be quite an absurd flight plan.
Here is the paper I wrote back in July 2015 to study northern paths:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/693pvqgqpawglj6/2015-04-29%20Northern%20Routes%20for%20MH370.pdf?dl=0
By the way, a path to Almaty Airport is not limited by fuel. However, it requires flying over China for hours. There are also paths that end in China that satisfy the fuel requirements.
Looks like route IGOGU-Baikonur passes within range of 7 or so THD-1955 and maybe 6 or so 36D6 surveillance radar installations of India. This info is from 2010 and so may be out of date.
@Ge Rijn
I think there is a general lack of appreciation for the remote nature of most of the shoreline where debris might be deposited. I have never been in WA, but I have heard comments such as yours from others. Then again Australians are very active in the out of doors, and seem to think that if debris made its way to WA some of it would have been found by now.
I do not agree with posters who claim the debris finds will “dry up” as pieces sink or get buried. I think there is merit to the sink and bury scenario but I still believe that there is a great deal of debris that will still be recovered. I ran some statistics on the historical rate of debris finds, and given the level of search activity there is about a 40% chance of a debris find in any given month (60% probability of no debris find in any given month). I did not attempt to adjust for seasonality which probably has some impact.
The most recent finds by the NOK and Blaine and the Transkei piece certainly fit the pattern.
http://tmex1.blogspot.com/2016/12/debris-statistics.html
@Ge Rijn
http://www.avcom.co.za/phpBB3/download/file.php?id=330802&sid=12bec35d995c2dd685d6ddd418c7eef1&mode=view
Looking at above picture of Transkei piece, there may be a wide angle (at
the top visible part), (~120°). Not sure if its merely a trick
(misinterpretation) of perspective, or if the piece is merely bending due
to being held upwards.
If it is a wide angle, the piece could be from the tail horizontal end piece;
http://photo.sf.co.ua/g/217/18.jpg
(I don’t mean the piece you see in the picture nearest to the camera – I
mean the missing piece you don’t see, that would fit in that empty
gap.)
@Buyerninety
Is this a B777 tail?
I see what you mean but the end of that side where it should fit in, has an angle where the Transkei piece is straight.
Yes, Asiana Airlines Flight 214.
Cheers
@Dennis
Didn’t mean to suggest that debris is hopeless now, just that it’s not [we hope!] a renewable resource, and each circuit of the gyre will degrade surfaces and provenance, and send more clues to Davey Jones. It’s commendable that Khan was on the ball to get access to the Transkei piece [and we hope the cricketer’s find in Mossel], but it’s at least two years late to be organizing a plan for retrieval of these pieces. The problem is always that this is second-rate information, and we won’t care when we find the debris field. Now that they are confronting the reality that the plane will not be found anytime soon, the brighter officials at least can see that big pieces, and substantial sections of control surfaces have a tale to tell. [Imagine what an investment of one day’s operation by Fugro would have accomplished in retrieval and forensic preservation of debris!] If the Transkei is in fact from MH370, we’re starting to fill in quite a chunk, aren’t we?
Especially if the original flaperon can be pried off the Inspector’s trophy wall.
…I meant to say that OFFICIALS AND INVESTIGATOR, with their high confidence in finding the crash site have seen dispersed debris as of “second-rate information”, therefore not worth much interest or effort.
@VictorI
“By the way, a path to Almaty Airport is not limited by fuel. However, it requires flying over China for hours. ”
any path to Kazakhstan/Russia requires flying over radar covered areas
there is simply no way for a civilian plane (flying at cruise altitude) to evade radars on the way
@Ge Rijn
I agree it is very suspicious the way Malaysia handled everything, but that just shows why it does not make too much sense for Boeing to now to jump into the lead.
@Nederand
How are you calculating BFO’s?
@StevanG, As we learned from the spotty nature of primary radar coverage over the Malacca Strait, where three nations’ radars were supposed to be operating but only Malaysia’s apparently was, military radar coverage is far more limited than is generally realized. As RetiredF4 has pointed out here before, it’s like Swiss cheese but reversed. Historically, India has focused its air defenses on the border with Pakistan, and China has focuses its air defences on Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. I doubt there was any primary radar surveillance of the northern route during the time it would have taken place.
I’ve done a fair bit of research into this and will get around to writing it up if there is ever enough interest in this aspect of the spoof theory.
@TBill
Lou Villa, who is also posting on this forum, gave me access to his version of the BFO calculator by Yap Fook Fah, but I think you can also download it from here:
http://www.duncansteel.com/archives/1366
note 4 at the very bottom.
I think the proposed route to BEBIM should work, but it requires reduced ground speed at around 450 kts after crossing the first ring.
It’s probably addictive, and I spent several hours today trying to work out routes, before realising that I probably messed up the last two rings on google earth, but the BFO calculator also comes with ping rings as I just noted, in the “satellite model” folder. So I should take a few day off from this – otherwise I go ping.
@Jeff
“I doubt there was any primary radar surveillance of the northern route during the time it would have taken place.”
I also gave some time to this question when Victor showed how the spoof could have been done by changing a parameter in the AES. I came to the same conclusion you did. Radar detection is not a good reason to reject a Northern path.
worst case for overflying China territory is no more than two hours in the remotest area.