Midnight, January 8, 2016. High above the snow-covered tundra of arctic Sweden, a Canadair CRJ-200 cargo jet made a beeline through the -76 degree air. Inside the cockpit, the pilot in command studied the approach information for Tromsø, Norway. His eyes flickered up from his reading to the primary flight display, an iPad-size rectangle on the left side of his control panel, where the indicator that showed how high the nose was pointing above the horizon had started to creep upward.
Not good.
The pilot felt no sense of movement, but that didn’t matter: One of the first things he’d been taught was that without being able to see the ground, it’s almost impossible to accurately judge whether you’re climbing or turning. A pilot must trust his instruments completely.
A klaxon sounded: The autopilot had turned itself off. There was no time to think. If the nose went too high, it could result in a deadly stall. On the display, a bright red arrow pointed downward: Descend! The pilot pushed forward on the controls, yet still the display said the nose was too high. He pushed more. Manuals and binders rose up into the air and clattered onto the ceiling. He was hanging in his shoulder straps as though upside down. An audio clacker went off: The plane had exceeded its maximum operating speed.
“Help me!” the pilot said.
“I’m trying!” the co-pilot called out.
What the pilot did not comprehend was that his plane had already lost nearly two miles of altitude and was pointed almost straight down. Forty seconds before, the automated system that guided the plane had suffered a partial malfunction, causing it to display an erroneous reading. Now the plane was hurtling toward the frozen landscape at 584 mph. At this rate, impact was less than 30 seconds away. And the pilot had no idea what was really going on.
The co-pilot toggled the radio. “Mayday, Air Sweden 294!”
* *
Automation — the use of systems to minimize human intervention — has been around since at least the automatic textile looms of the 18th century. For the most part, automation works just as it should, allowing humanity to accomplish things that would otherwise be impossible: sort through millions of web pages to find a precise phrase, inject the exact same dollop of jam into a donut a million times, or keep a plane stable and steady six miles up in total darkness. But as automation becomes increasingly capable, it is also becoming increasingly complex. These systems can surprise their creators, even when working as designed. And as artificial intelligence creeps into systems design, it’s becoming harder to figure out what’s happening inside our machines.
The first primitive autopilot was unveiled in 1914. By the 1930s, the technology was being used on commercial airliners. These simple devices, useful for keeping a plane heading in the right direction, gave way in the computer age to sophisticated systems that can take off, navigate, and land without any human assistance. The increasing power of airplane automation is a primary reason that the accident rate has fallen from 40 fatal accidents per million U.S. aircraft departures in 1959 to 0.1 today.
Commercial jets are expensive pieces of equipment — a Boeing 777 costs a quarter of a billion dollars — and great resources are lavished on making sure they work properly. Important systems are built triple-redundant, so it is extremely unlikely for them to fail completely. Systems even protect pilots from their own incompetence: If a pilot tries to command a potentially dangerous procedure, the automated flight control system will simply refuse to do it. (Sometimes pilots can override the system’s refusal; sometimes they can’t.)
Robustness, however, carries the inevitable price of complexity. Complex systems have a lot of parts, and that means there are a lot of ways that they can fail.
The spontaneously surprising behavior experienced by Air Sweden 294 was not an outlier. In 2015, a glitch caused a Lufthansa plane to suddenly dive steeply as it flew from Bilbao, Spain, to Munich. In 2008, a malfunctioning Qantas A330 abruptly plummeted while en route from Singapore to Perth, causing broken bones and spinal injuries among those on board. And in 2011, runaway flight controls on a Dassault Falcon 7X business jet caused it to unexpectedly pitch up into a steep climb while descending to land in Subang, Malaysia. If not for the quick thinking of the plane’s copilot, who slammed the controls and veered the plane hard onto its side, the result would almost certainly have been a fatal crash.
In many of these cases, investigators were later able to comb through the system and determine what went wrong. But not all. In the case of the Air Sweden accident, they were able to determine that the Air Data Inertial Reference Unit, or ADIRU — a device that tells the plane how it’s moving through space — had begun to send erroneous signals. But they couldn’t figure out why.
Obviously, we don’t want our machines running amok on us, and not only when we’re at 30,000 feet. If, as few dispute, we’re going to rely more and more on automated systems in the future, then we should have some understanding of when and why they can go haywire, and what we can do about it.
At present, autonomous systems like those used in airliners are designed from the top down: Everything about them was put in place intentionally by human designers. As a result, their complexity, while vast, is also finite, so if something goes wrong, it’s at least conceivable that the error can be identified and fixed, perhaps with the help of technology. At Airbus’ headquarters in Toulouse, France, engineers developing a new aircraft put it through its paces in a giant contraption called the “Iron Bird.” Consisting of all the subcomponents of a plane wired together and hooked up to a flight simulator, the device allows the engineers to simulate a great variety of different configurations and test how different failures would propagate through the system. The Iron Bird operates throughout the years of each new design’s development, and is kept operational after the model enters service, to test modifications and any issues that might crop up. Ultimately, this kind of approach — methodically testing every possible combination of inputs and errors — could become sophisticated enough to eliminate flaws entirely. At least in theory.
That won’t be true in the future. The kinds of hand-crafted, top-down engineered systems like those found in today’s airliners will be superseded. Right now the cutting edge in artificial intelligence research is so-called “deep learning” built on neural networks. If presented with large amounts of data and trained to categorize it, these systems can then parse new data into the correct categories. Shown pictures of pandas, for instance, a machine could then go out and find new pictures of pandas on the internet. This is the technology that underlies state-of-the-art facial recognition and machine translation systems.
Deep learning-dependent systems aren’t programmed in the way a top-down system is, said Vasant Dhar, a professor of data science at New York University. “They learn as they go along, autonomously. This lets you solve problems that are practically impossible to solve top-down, by humans specifying the algorithms.” This flexibility will be crucial to the successful operation of many kinds of systems in the real world. Self-driving cars, for instance, will have to deal with a huge range of situations for which it would be difficult to write enough prescriptive rules to deal with every single eventuality. “Negotiating a crowded intersection, for instance, is very hard to program from the top down,” Dhar said, “but by watching humans do it many times, these systems can figure it out for themselves.”
The downside to a neural net, said Dhar, is that it’s essentially a black box. Unlike a top-down system, there’s no way for the people who built it to understand why it acts the way it does. “You can never be entirely sure about what it’s learned,” he said. “You can look at the input/output behavior and say, ‘Yeah, it’s doing well,’ it’s behaving the way you want, but you don’t really know why.”
It’s not that engineers can’t peer inside the system as it’s working, but that the way neural nets process information is fundamentally inscrutable. The systems are constructed in layers, with the data — say, a raw image — coming in at the bottom, and the output — for instance a description of what’s in the image — coming out at the top. If you examine the system in action, it’s possible to figure out what each computation element is doing in the top and bottom layers, but what goes on in between is harder to characterize. “We can actually see the internals very clearly,” said Kyunghyun Cho, a colleague of Dhar’s at NYU’s Center for Data Science. “Except we don’t know how to interpret them.”
The way that neural nets are constructed leaves them prone to peculiar and surprising behavior. When fed “adversarial examples,” for instance — sets of data that have been tweaked slightly — deep learning programs can be led wildly astray. An image-classification system presented with an imperceptibly tweaked image of a panda might instead label it a gibbon. While this kind of failure is unlikely to crop up spontaneously, it could be taken advantage of by hackers, for instance in working around a security system based on photos of users’ faces.
Self-teaching autonomous systems can behave in other surprising ways, too. Because they can sift through vastly larger amounts of data than humans, and can explore vastly greater numbers of potential outcomes, they can arrive at conclusions that have never occurred to mere humans. Famously, Google’s Go-playing system, AlphaGo, not only managed to defeat the world’s top-ranked human player last year but in the process made a move that so flabbergasted its opponent that he had to leave the room to collect himself. The gambit was so unusual that one commentator later admitted, “I thought it was a mistake.”
It was, instead, a stroke of genius. But sometimes a neural networks’ surprising outputs really are just mistakes. Recently researchers trained neural nets on patient data at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in an effort to develop rules for treating pneumonia patients. The nets’ overall advice was better than top-down generated algorithms, with one potentially lethal exception: They thought that pneumonia patients who already had asthma should be sent home. The researchers investigated and found that the nets had noticed that such patients recovered faster, concluding that this meant they were low-risk. In fact, it was the opposite — these patients were so high-risk that hospital policy was to send them to intensive care right away. It was the effectiveness of this strategy that misled the computer.
Before we turn over crucial areas of our lives to self-training autonomous systems, said Cho, “we’ll just have to spend more time figuring out how to verify their correctness.”
It’s not entirely clear that’s going to be possible, however. One approach, Cho said, would be to build a second machine to look at the first. “We can build another system that looks at the transparent internals of the first system and learn to interpret them,” he said. “You can think of it as something like having a baby raised in a culture with another language. I won’t be able to understand any of what those people in the other culture are saying, but the baby will be able to understand everything and explain it to me.”
But how can we trust the second system, that has assured us about the first?
Said Cho, “Society needs to invest in this kind of research.”
* *
It’s one thing for automation to learn unpredictably and surprise us. It’s another for the technology to become so advanced that we lose the ability to even understand what it’s doing. If we get complacent about machines making countless kinds of decisions on our behalf, the danger is less that they’ll run away from us than that they’ll run away with us.
“How do you really control these systems that you don’t really fully understand?” Dhar said. “One of the consequences of this change that has occurred in AI is that you now have a machine that has learned how to learn, which historically has been the purview of human beings. The machines can now learn stuff autonomously, and you have no idea whether it’s learning desirable things or undesirable things.”
In the years ahead, engineers will become increasingly familiar with a sensation that parents have experienced since the dawn of time: being surprised by an entity that they have brought into the world. Robots, like children, are going to teach themselves about the world and learn things their creators never intended. Among artificial intelligence researchers, this results in what’s known as the “control problem.” It turns out that under certain circumstances, even simple agents can learn to maneuver around constraints imposed on them in order to achieve their programmed goals. Stuart Armstrong, a fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, has devised a simple demonstration involving a robot tasked with pushing boxes onto a chute. The robot gets reinforced when it pushes a block down the chute. When a surveillance monitor is set up to watch the robot and shut it down after it delivers a single box to the chute, the robot can “learn” to fool the monitor by pushing boxes to block its view so that it can deliver more. (You can see a virtual robot figure this out in real time via an online Java implementation.)
“You get all sorts of weird behavior with a learning system,” said Anders Sandberg, a colleague of Armstrong’s at the Future of Humanity Institute. “It doesn’t need to be very complicated to behave in very surprising ways.”
As machines become more sophisticated, they will increasingly incorporate human behavior into their models of the world. To optimally achieve their goals they will have to adapt their strategies to our predicted behavior. If they think that we could hinder their objectives, for instance by turning them off, they will come up with ways to prevent that. Said Dhar: “We may not be able to ‘turn them off’ if they start behaving in a way we don’t understand.”
Working together, as a society, we may figure out a way to rejigger our settings so that we can maneuver our way out of danger. Or we might find ourselves overwhelmed by a problem whose dimensions we can barely comprehend.
* *
Forty seconds after their ADIRU malfunctioned, as Air Sweden 294 dove straight down through 20,000 feet, the pilot and his co-pilot could see their altitude unspooling at a horrendous rate, and knew they had to somehow regain altitude. But they were thoroughly disoriented, and instead of recovering control argued about whether to turn left or to turn right. For a moment, the pilot pulled back on the controls, causing the men to sink into their seats with three times the force of gravity. Then he pushed forward again.
One minute and 20 seconds into the incident, the jet hit the frozen ground with the velocity of a .45 caliber bullet. The impact instantly killed both members of the flight crew and carved a 20-foot-deep crater 50 feet across. When search-and-rescue helicopters arrived that morning, all that remained was an asterisk-shaped smudge of black on the flat whiteness of the valley floor.
Accident investigators still haven’t figured out what went wrong with the Inertial Reference Unit.
This story originally appeared on March 15, 2017 on The Outline.
“Forty seconds after their ADIRU malfunctioned, as Air Sweden 294 dove straight down through 20,000 feet, the pilot and his co-pilot could see their altitude unspooling at a horrendous rate, and knew they had to somehow regain altitude. But they were thoroughly disoriented, and instead of recovering control argued about whether to turn left or to turn right. For a moment, the pilot pulled back on the controls, causing the men to sink into their seats with three times the force of gravity. Then he pushed forward again.”
It’s the opposite of AF447, with the same desorientation…
A cautionary tale if there ever was one.
Could it be that the same sort of unpredictable behavior can arise in more abstract cybernetic constructs – such as, for instance, the legal framework from which entities like transnational corporations arise? As with the potentially dangerous outcomes of erratic auto-pilot systems, we seem to have cobbled together rule-based mechanisms that produce many undesirable results in the real world, with a similar confusion and helplessness in the face of such developments. Contemplating the current human predicament, it’s a thought that has occurred more than once, along with the notion of being “too smart for your own good”.
@izzy, I actually took out of this draft a paragraph about the unwanted effects of automating Facebook newsfeeds, which led to the ghettoization of misinformation and hence to Donald Trump’s election as president. I don’t think anyone can point to a more catastrophic unintended outcome than that.
@Jeff
“ghettoization of misinformation”
What is your meaning here?
@DennisW, I’m referring to the Breitbart/InfoWars ecosystem of lies and propoganda which at one time would have been relegated to the lunatic fringe but which now controls the US government. There’s a fascinating analysis of it here:
https://medium.com/hci-design-at-uw/information-wars-a-window-into-the-alternative-media-ecosystem-a1347f32fd8f#.xca1w7z86
I didn’t realise you wrote this, too! I was reading it on another site only earlier today – I’m studying neural networks currently 🙂
@JeffW great to see a new article up! Where did you get that picture from, it’s a nice bit of art.
@JW P.S. You misspelled ‘Manoeuvre’
@Jeff Wise:
Do you see any potential implications for MH370 ?
Dear Jeff, this was a very interesting article – thank you very much for putting all this together. As a long time reader of your blog, I applaud the constantly high quality of your writing and the thought-provoking ideas.
Can I ask whether the story about Air Sweden 294 is to insinuate the possibility that something similar might have happened to MH370? It’s definitely an interesting story in its own right and gives much to think about regarding humanity’s fast evolving AI brainchildren. With respect to MH370, whilst I could see the supposed steep ascent at the beginning of the disappearance as a result of something similar happening, ‘the rest’ makes it seem fairly hard to imagine that MH370 was the result of a complex systems failure? Having said that, ‘low probability’ obviously doesn’t mean ‘can never happen’. Thank you for your great blog 🙂
@Havelock, Thank you very much! I don’t think that MH370 fell victim to one of these automation failures; in the handful of cases that I’ve come across, they seem to involve a sudden uncommanded climb or dive, and are either resolved quickly or end in a fatal impact. So doesn’t match well with a six-hour flight to oblivion.
@Perfect Storm, So, no, probably no direct implications for MH370.
@JeffW
Reminds me a little bit of the article about the British Airways 777 flight last week delayed due to mouse on board. That is a serious crisis for airlines due to need to check all of the electronics wiring etc. Sometimes you just don’t know why there is a failure.
@JeffWise said:
“As I believe StevanG is pointing out, the factor in the crash that would seem to rule out Russian skullduggery is that a prime causal factor — the fog — would be out of the Russians’ control. ”
Not necessarily … the UK Government, for one, has been developing smoke/fog machines for military use since way back in the year 2000 …
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1369376/MoD-revives-smoke-screens-of-Great-War.html
“Each generator measures 3ft long, 2.5ft tall and 1.5ft wide, and is capable of creating enough smoke to cover about 2.5 square miles within three minutes.
Between four and six generators, which can be mounted on military vehicles, could obscure an airfield within 20 seconds. The generators work by injecting droplets of oil or carbon powder in the exhaust of a gas-turbine engine.
As compressed air is released through the exhaust, the vapour condenses into smoke. Different types of smoke could be used for confusing infra-red or thermal imaging systems.”
Perceived difference between ‘smoke’ and ‘fog’ at an airport if it has no smell?
Then in relation to Russia, a quick Google reveals this article from 2016:
“Russian armed forces caused the closed city of Severomorsk[1] to “plunge into the fog” for three days (10-12 August), reported Novosti Kratko and other Russian language news portals.[2] Special-purpose “stationary and mobile smoke screening (dymopuska)” devices[3] operated by the Radiation, Chemical, and Biological Defense Troops[4] generated the chemical fog that blanketed the Northern Fleet’s homeport.”
http://www.fpri.org/article/2016/08/russia-blowing-smoke-literally-military-uses-artificial-fog/
Never say ‘never’.
(PS. Jeff, your website SSL certificate is giving an error of not being valid in Firefox)
@PS9, Thanks for the info, I’d never heard of that before. I wouldn’t rule out anything at this point!
@TBill, A threat from the other end of the technology spectrum…
Jeff – Two successive US govts now have continued to show no interest in MH370 – rather like the rest of the western intel community. I believe they had it filed away early on while we were left grappling at crumbs.
You say Trump is close to Putin; but what about Obama? Why would all these countries jointly sit on the matter. Could it be they saw the simulator data in the 1st two weeks? That’s when I folded, like a lot of people. You have ring-fenced Shah as untouchable and the blog has deteriorated to a sad level. Three years is a long run but it looks over.
@Matty-Perth, You wrote, “Why would all these countries jointly sit on the matter?” You may recall that Obama threatened the Syrian regime with a “red line” regarding the use of chemical weapons. When it turned out that they were indeed using chemical weapons, his lack of real leverage was embarrassingly exposed. Likewise, if it were revealed that Russia had targeted a civilian airliner, America and the rest of the international community would have been forced into an ugly confrontation.
We can’t discount the possibilit, however, that the Americans just didn’t figure it out. The US and Australia are both members of the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance, so one would expect that if American knew the truth about MH370, the Australians would, too. And their behavior very much suggests that they think it went into the SIO.
BTW, I don’t think I’ve “ring-fenced” Shah. If the plane did go south, and the debris is authentic, then Shah is really the only plausible culprit. Obviously I see some holes in this narrative, but I wouldn’t 100 percent rule it out.
@Matty-Perth
Re: MH370 secrecy/USA/all countries
My feeling is the international community respects the right of sovereign nations such as Malaysia to manage plane crash investigations including spin on cause. As long as Malaysia is not blaming Boeing or USA then I presume the U.S. will respect Malaysian handling of the situation.
Now then American citizens, it seems to me, are expecting exhaustive search for the plane and the causes, because that’s the way NTSB does it here. But obviously smaller countries may have much less interest in finding the cause, especially if the cause may be rooted in a weaknesses of the country itself.
If the USA did release the suspected cause, I am pretty sure it would be that the pilot flew off with the plane. This then puts criticism on Boeing for designing planes that the pilots can secretly turn everything off, and fly away. Nobody wants to go there. So there is ambivalence to finding cause.
Note that it took the loss of whole another passenger flight (Germanwings) before some airlines started taking some action re: rouge pilot. MH370 can be safely ignored as long as it is a mystery with no proven cause.
@Matty
“Why would all these countries jointly sit on the matter.”
What would be the benefit for getting involved?
Adam Air 574 also broke up in flight following a steep dive. The state of debris finds is similar to the one so far observed in MH370.
http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2008/AAIR/pdf/Final_AdamAir_PK_KKW_17032008.pdf
p. 31
Adam Air 574 was also the crash that before MH370 took the longest until first debris was found.
@matty:”Why would all these countries jointly sit on the matter.”
Simply because the geopolitical situation in that part of the world is all about the long running covert struggle for global domination between China and the West. Why would the West want to do anything about a situation which is helpful to their cause?
@ JeffW
A belated thank you for your reply and your clarification!
@Boris T
I had the (probably crazy) idea that maybe the hunt for MH370 could be restarted if someone prompted The Donald to take to the matter. As unpredictable and predictably crazy as he is, he might be rash enough not to consider these bigger geopolitical considerations as you lay them out. (Wether this is a good thing, is another question of course.) @Jeff, being a legit journalist, have you ever pondered the idea of attending a White House press conference and asking DJT, “Mr P, how can it be that a great American company like Boeing had one of our American-designed and American-built planes disappeared and yet we don’t chase it down until we’ve found it?”
@JeffW
Very good and timely article.
My former employer has done lots of R&D work using AI/NN for future FBW systems to help identify and compensate for faults. Today’s FBW systems, as you point out, are based on programmed logic, but this requires defining the characteristics of “all” potential failures and defining the reconfiguration of the system to work around them. Not a trivial problem – its hard to anticipate every possible fault. The AI/NN approach can learn the characteristics of faults injected on the Iron Bird – this could result in new hard logic or the use of the NN itself where it maybe able to discover and respond to failure modes that were not defined by the designers.
Regarding flight 294, pilots often forget the basics of “Needle, Ball, and Airspeed” in crosschecking the primary display. Even if ADIRU is faulting there is usually a standby attitude indicator and some other independent backup gauges. But it is easy to get locked on to the primary display and not just get the wings level and get the rate of change of speed and altitude to zero. If the pressure gradually fails to a vacuum driven artificial horizon, it is common for a general aviation pilot to follow it and not use the electrically powered turn rate indicator and just fall over. I don’t know what the Fly 294 had for backup instruments?
A follow up to my own question. I checked SHK accident report which showed the backup horizon directly between the pilot and copilot PFD and a combined altimeter, airspeed indicator, and compass below the AH – all independent of the ADIRU.
The SHK report stated: “The accident was caused by insufficient operational prerequisites for the management of a failure in a redundant system.”
I’ve never seen a probable cause like this. It must be a polite Swedish way of saying the pilots just ignored all of the available good information and just flew the aircraft into the ground from stable level flight.
@Hank, I recall a saying that was taught to be during a survival-training course, to the effect of, “three seconds, three minutes, three hours, three days, three weeks.” The idea being that, if stranded in extreme conditions, you can survive three weeks without food, three days without water, three hours without shelter, three minutes without air, and three seconds if you panic. The idea being that, above all else, no matter how bad your situation may suddenly seem, your first and most important job is not to panic. In this case, once the pilot panicked, the “cognitive tunneling” effect made it impossible to take the simple steps that would have saved his aircraft and his life.
@Havelock, I’ve reached out to the NTSB, and they’ve promised me that they will let me know when they can release information from the cast docket. I think that’s the best I can realistically hope for. But thanks for your suggestion.
@JeffW
I like the saying. Very true. It was just surprising to me that two very experienced pilots panicked in stable flight – but then it would not have been a crash to investigate – only a repair ticket for the faulty PFD.
@Matty:
“I had the (probably crazy) idea that maybe the hunt for MH370 could be restarted if someone prompted The Donald to take to the matter. As unpredictable and predictably crazy as he is, he might be rash enough not to consider these bigger geopolitical considerations…”
If you look at the history of the past few hundred years, it is obvious that geopolitics is always the number one priority, irrespective of the views of leaders and the general public. Don’t be fooled by the current MSM anti-Trump propaganda. The fact that even the POTUS has very little real power is being demonstrated right now for us all to see.
So I don’t think Trump is in a position to be able to start another search for MH370, even if he wanted to.
Chinese MH370 recovery vessel
Chinese wants their cargo abck
@Boris
“The fact that even the POTUS has very little real power is being demonstrated right now for us all to see.”
Very true. The press completely mislead in that regard (in most regards, actually). If we had responsible media the world would be a much different place.
@DennisW:”…If we had responsible media the world would be a much different place.”
Yes, it has been a long time since we had a genuinely free news sources. All of the worlds MSM are in the thrall of the state, financiers or other vested interest. This is the reason only a minority of the population have stopped believing the bilge being pushed at them.
Anybody with even an ounce of critical thinking can see through the blatant propaganda they are being constantly fed. The internet has become a game changer in how information is disseminated.
@Dennis @ Boris
The Founders Constitution
Amendment I (Speech and Press)
Document 29 Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell 14 June 1807 Works 10:417–18
Copy/Paste
To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, “by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.” Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by it’s abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day.
8 lines missed for brevity.
Next Para:
Copy/Paste
I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
Two Hundred Years and what has changed!
Cheers Tom L
@Tom Lindsey ..that’s why i only read the sports section…..( sometimes Dear Abby….)
http://www.drive.com.au/national/missing-malaysia-airlines-plane–police-deny-investigation-into-phone-call-from-mh370-cockpit-by-senior-pilot-zaharie-ahmad-shah-35buv.html
“Malaysian police have denied two British media reports that they are investigating a mobile phone call from the cockpit of Malaysia Airlines MH370 before take-off.
Police Inspector-General Kahlid Abu Bakar on Monday dismissed reports in Britain’s Mail on Sunday that police were investigating a call senior pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah made on his mobile phone shortly before the plane took off from Kuala Lumpur.
The newspaper claimed the call was to a mobile number obtained under a false identity, and that police had traced the number to a shop selling SIM cards in Kuala Lumpur.
The phone had been bought “very recently” by someone who gave a woman’s name, but was using a false identity, the report said.
The story was the second in a week to make claims about a pre-flight phone call, following a similar one in fellow UK newspaper The Sun.
Police initially declined to comment on the existence of the two-minute call made from the cockpit of the Boeing 777 aircraft with 239 people on board.
But Inspector-General Kahlid said that if the newspaper could provide the telephone number “that would be helpful”.
“If not … it is mere speculation,” he said.
Inspector Kahlid said investigations into what happened before and during the ill-fated flight were continuing.
The newspaper claimed investigators were treating the call as significant because anyone buying a pay-as-you go SIM card in Malaysia has to fill out a form giving their identity card or passport number. In practice, though, it is easy to buy a SIM card without handing over a passport.”
I just watched a 1-2 hour news conference in Germany in which an aviation expert laid out literally hundreds of facts which contradict the official crash theory.
I found it very interesting, because up until now I thought this was a completely clear-cut case. But the facts presented here, had never been published by the mainstream press and quite a few of them also had been suppressed by the official investigation reports.
I don’t know what happened, but it is clear that there is something unpleasant that authorities want to conceal.
Due to the sheer volume, I cannot translate all the points made in the German news conference into English, and I don’t want to pick some of them selectively. You really have to read/see the entirety of his arguments to get the complete picture.
What’s also interesting: the way mainstream media treated the news conference:
N24 cut-out of the news conference around halfway through (interestingly enough at a critical point – the cockpit door closing mechanism) and instead of showing the remainder of the event, the news anchors talked to an aviation analyst who didn’t deal in facts but resorted to character assassination (“they didn’t even apologize to the victims”) and criticized this *ongoing* news conference without even getting the full picture (again, this was a live event of which 50% was still to come).
n-tv also cut out of the news conference a little later, also at a critical point (the co-pilot’s alleged browser history … a man who has access to the original Germanwing technical documents uses Google search to find out how to lock the cockpit door?). Like N24, n-tv cut out of this breaking news to non-breaking-news content (“Telebörse”, an everyday scheduled round-up of the German stock market). n-tv also had an aviation analyst on the show, who conceded that the investigation has been carried out sloppily and that investigators will have to answer for their “incompetence”, but he said he doesn’t see any facts that would alter the outcome of the investigation.
I differ. Just watch.
@Perfect Storm,
Do you have any links to the video/transcripts/etc? 🙂
@Will:
The news conference is either still ongoing or has just finished.
So a transcript is certainly not yet available (let alone an English translation).
This is/was the youtube livestream of the news conference (carried partly by N24 and n-tv, as mentioned above):
http://youtu.be/RaJOTaPK0sc
Sorry I don’t have more at the moment.
Been looking around to try and find something in the press, but beyond the fact that his the co-pilot’s father still believes in his son’s innocence, there don’t appear to be any new details reported yet. Certainly nothing to contradict the official narrative.
Guess we’ll have to wait and see if they’ll get published later.
Don’t read the mainstream press regarding this issue, but the original content of the press conference.
In fact, they made a point of exposing how much got distorted and how many falsehoods were circulated by the mainstream press.
Now that the press conference is over, the youtube URL above has changed from a livestream to a downloadable video. So you can watch the whole press conference (in German) at
http://youtu.be/RaJOTaPK0sc
For full disclosure, I have to say that I don’t concur with people who see a conspiracy in *EVERYTHING*.
And right from the start, there were some who saw a conspiracy in Germanwings 4U9525, resorting to IMO absurd arguments.
In my mind, this accident has always been a clear-cut case with no doubt. The facts laid out in the official theory seemed clear.
But the video above points out so many falsehoods, that I now believe that something is indeed going on there …
I’m afraid I don’t speak German – so until the translations find their way into the news, I’m at a bit of a loss to know what they’re saying 🙂
FWIW, it did seem a bit of an open-and-shut case to me, so I’d be very intrigued to know what these ‘distortions and falsehoods’ amount to.
I know, I am sorry. I happen to speak German, but I am at a loss as to what I could do. The youtube video of the presser is over 2 hours long. And unfortunately I am way over my head at the moment and have next to no time at all. So I am unable to transcribe 2 hours of speech, let alone translate that to English. 🙁 I don’t know how to help. 🙁
It’s a pity, that they haven’t yet put out a written statement or a transcript. Maybe they will …
Or do you have a German friend who could watch the youtube video together with you and translate ?
Me, too!!
That’s why I was so surprised today.
For the record, I am not saying that the official theory must be wrong. But clearly something’s foul here.
Either something entirely different happened … or the official theory of the co-pilot suicide is correct, but there is something that happened in the process that someone wants to cover-up. (Maybe just for insurance/liability issues … the aviation expert in the press conference said that the plane’s “airworthiness certificate” which usually is valid for 1 year, had expired 1-2 days before the accident and has been extended in manuscript form and for a shorter than period than customary period. Sorry if as a layman I don’t use precise terms and don’t pin me down on the facts, I would have to rewatch the video … it’s just what I remember spontaneously.)
PS: I translated “airworthiness certificate” from memory and from German, so the term is quite likely incorrect.
Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that you should translate it all for us…! 🙂
I’m sure it will find its way onto the net soon enough.
I know, but I would have liked to help.
Maybe one day I can. But I doubt it will be in the next couple of months.
Other than distorted mainstream articles? I doubt it.
BTW, that’s what I found so absurd today:
Rather than broadcasting the entire press conference, the 2 above-mentioned German news channels cut out halfway through and then continued to talk ABOUT the (still ongoing) press conference.
That’s like cutting out of a football game at halftime and then discussing the game (instead of showing the second half).
Interesting old 2016 article linked by Malaysian Twitter user RichardLi. (I’ve ‘Google Translated’ as best as I could).
Official Malaysian Government Jet stationed in KAZAKHSTAN … Who Uses it?
PKR secretary-general Rafizi Ramli today asked the PM’s Office to confirm whether the 9M-NAV ACJ320 is still in Kazakhstan or not.
According to Rafizi, he was informed that since last week until 12 June (2016), the government’s official jet was in Kazakhstan according to aircraft data.
“That raises the question why that particular modified jet that is in Kazakhstan,” he said in a press conference. (The PM’s Office stated it was for routine maintenance)
Rafizi said he checked with luxury aviation companies in Kazakhstan but couldn’t verify the Office’s claim that it was there for maintenance.
“Unfortunately, until now there has been no report on the activities of maintenance of ACJ320 9M-NAV… (but we know the plane was in Kazakhstan) as movements and activities are reported in detail by aircraft data sites like aerotransport.org,” he said.
Kazakhstan never gets a mention, but no wonder – the daughter of PM Najib Razak is married to a citizen of that country (!)
https://suarakami11.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/kantoi-jet-rasmi-kerajaan-berada-di.html
@Sajid UK, Great find!
@Jeff @all
Thanks Jeff!
I don’t know how things stand with Ken Staubin over here, whether he’s considered reliable or not, but he’s also recently tweeted some interesting info regarding possible manipulation of the E/E bay. He suggests the plane may have been “hijacked from the E/E bay with a laptop plugged into the PMAT -Portable Maintenance Access Terminal” (Apologies to those already aware of this/apologies to Jeff if its already been discussed in his book).
Nonetheless, interesting info for those reading it for the first time.
http://www.teledynecontrols.com/productsolution/lse/overview.asp
http://www.teledynecontrols.com/productsolution/pmat/overview.asp
I’m wondering if this leaves open the possibility of the E/E bay being tampered with long before March 8th 2014, ie, days/weeks beforehand maybe with the plane on the ground, as opposed to an in-flight during the night of March 8th.
There is a good discussion going on in the other place about a possible Andaman descent. For some this supports their theory of a loiter, but if you back a northern path, there’s always a possibility that such a descent may have been undertaken to evade Indian radar before flying north (!)
@Sajid UK, Thanks for the update. Yes, I was quite intrigued very early on by the PMAT, though I’m not sure that would be the only one to patch into the fly-by-wire controls and take control of the airplane. I suppose it is possible that 9M-MRO was hacked some time before the plane disappeared, but given the three stocky Russians on board the plane I don’t think we need to assume so.
A bit of context for the Andaman descent: there is no evidence for it, as such. The only reason it was postulated is that the absence of the plane in the 200,000 sq km search area is only congruent with a southern terminus if the plane wasn’t already flying south at 18:40. And given the BFO value at 18:40, this is only possible if the plane was in a descent at that time.
So, if the plane flew north after 18:25, there is no reason to imagine that the plane was descending at 18:40. In fact, given its route calculated from BTO values, its speed was high so it must have stayed at cruise altitude for the duration.
“A bit of context for the Andaman descent: there is no evidence for it, as such. The only reason it was postulated is that the absence of the plane in the 200,000 sq km search area is only congruent with a southern terminus if the plane wasn’t already flying south at 18:40. And given the BFO value at 18:40, this is only possible if the plane was in a descent at that time.”
it most likely was, whether they planned to land in Banda Aceh or for whatever else reason
I came across discussion to the effect the Malacca straight data seems mostly data derived from EK343. Anyone else see that and have feedback ?