Experts from all over the world have converged in Perth, Australia, to meet Seabed Constructor, the exploration vessel tasked with finding the wreckage of MH370, after its first stint in the search area. Technical experts and government officials are having meetings and dinners, touring the ship, and doing photo ops. Everything glitters and spirits are high.
Lost in this excited hubub is the fact that the latest search effort has already invalidated the expert analysis that got it launched in the first place.
In a 2016 document entitled “MH370–First Principles Review,” the ATSB explained that, given the absence of wreckage in the orginal 120,000 sq km search, MH370 most likely wound up somewhere near the 7th arc between 33 degrees and 36 degrees south. A subsequent document by the CSIRO entitled “The search for MH370 and ocean surface drift–Part III” narrowed the target area considerably. “We think it is possible to identify a most-likely location of the aircraft, with unprecedented precision and certainty,” it stated. “This location is 35.6°S, 92.8°E. Other nearby (within about 50km essentially parallel to the 7th arc) locations east of the 7th arc are also certainly possible, as are (with lower likelihood) a range of locations on the western side of the 7th arc, near 34.7°S 92.6°E and 35.3°S 91.8°E.”
The wording is important, because as the original search area was winding down, Australia, China and Malaysia said that it would only be extended if “credible new information” came to light. The CSIRO’s language sounded like an attempt to make the case that this condition had been met. And indeed, the three specified points were all included the “Primary Search Area” that Seabed Constructor recently focused its efforts on.
However, that area has now been searched. And once again, the plane was not where it was supposed to be. The CSIRO’s “unprecedented precision and certainty” was a mirage.
How is that, time and time again, officials heading up the search for MH370 exude great confidence and then come up empty handed? How can we account for four years of relentless failure?
The answer, it seems to me, is quite simple. Investigators have resolutely failed to grapple with the single most salient clue: The fact that the Satellite Data Unit (SDU) was rebooted. This electronic component is the part of the 777’s sat com system that generated the Inmarsat data that has been the basis of the entire search. There is no known way that it could accidentally turn off and back on again.
If one has no idea how the SDU turned on, then one can have no confidence in the integrity of the data that it generated.
The ATSB has never publicly expressed a theory about what could have caused the reboot, except to say that most likely the power had been turned off and back on again. There was always the possibility that, behind the scenes, they had figured out a way that this could plausibly happen other than being deliberately tampered with.
Just today, however, I received confirmation that the ATSB is in fact befuddled. Mike Exner is a stalwart of the Independent Group who is currently visiting Perth, where he has had dinner with employees of Ocean Infinity and Fugro, as well as members of the ATSB and the DSTG. In response to my assertion that investigators “had never stopped to ask how on earth the SDU… came to be turned back on,” Exner tweeted that “Everyone is well aware of the question. We have all asked ourselves and others how it happened.” However, Mike writes, “no one has the answer.”
One might forgive the expenditure of vast wealth and manpower based on data of dubious provenance if there was other evidence that independently supported it. But the contrary is the case: debris collected in the western Indian Ocean shows no signs of having drifted from the search zone, as I wrote in my previous post. It is increasingly clear that the plane did not go where the Inmarsat data suggests it did. The fishiness of the Inmarsat data, and the fishiness of the SDU reboot that created it, are all of a piece.
Soon, Seabed Constructor will return to the search area; some weeks or months after that, it will leave again, empty handed. When it does, people all over the world will ask: How could they have failed yet again?
The answer will be simple. It is this: Investigators never established the provenance of the evidence that they based their search on.
@joe nemo, there are three things fundamental to proving guilt in a crime. Means, motive and opportunity. Without a doubt, using your scenario, Shah had the means and the opportunity to kill himself–and others with him-but the motive remains mysterious.
You write:
If you’re asking why he would consider suicide in the first place, then I don’t know, but the usual reasons are failed relationships / financial troubles / radical ideology / clinical depression…and so on
We have no information to suggest he had clinical depression, financial troubles or a relationship so failed that puts him in a place where his only alternative was suicide and mass murder. And, as I’ve written before, he certainly does not fit the profile of an ideological radical of the sort who would sacrifice himself for a cause. Further, the psychiatric evaluation done for the Royal Malaysian Police by an independent psychiatrist found none of these things to have affected him in such a way as to push him over the edge to self harm.
But let’s set all that aside and say he was intent on committing suicide. There is a far easier way for him to do so, a method used by five other commercial pilots or airline personnel (so far as experts have identified). That is not through an elaborate scheme but the very immediate, brute force of driving the aircraft into a mountainside or the ocean. That has happened at times with a co-pilot in the cockpit and all passengers alive.
And even if Shah wanted to create the confusion and misdirection you suggest, he could have done so in the South China Sea, without the turn back at Igari, without a flyby of an air force base, without the FMT. See EgyptAir 990 for how that might work and how it might leave us with enough questions to doubt suicide.
I am speculating now as much as anyone, but atop the other things we know, it doesn’t feel totally off base, so:
Shah strikes me in what we know of his relationship with his own family, with Tim Pardi, with his social media outreach, his political concern, to be more conscientious that callous in his treatment of others. It’s hard to imagine people like that being so cavalier when it comes to the lives of several hundred other people. And finally, in my experience, anyway, when people plan out or commit a methodical suicide rather than do it impulsively, they tend to go through gyrations not for symbolic reasons–such as flying over home one last time or timing demise with sunrise–but to shield others from their act. Murdering all aboard doesn’t strike me as shielding.
So the mechanical scenario you suggest-it is certainly plausible given all we know. But the motivational one undermines it, significantly I think.
@Michael John, I haven’t looked into them.
@Scott O, Your reasoning is eminently solid here, but I don’t want you to overlook an even more powerful piece of evidence for Zaharie’s innocence. Simply put, the lack of wreckage in the southern Indian Ocean is strong evidence that the plane did not go south.
People will try to tell you that the Inmarsat evidence is ambiguous, or that it can support all sorts of termini along the 7th arc. This is either misunderstanding or willful misdirection. If no wreckage is found in the course of the current search, there is no plausible narrative that puts MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean.
@Jeff
People will try to tell you that the Inmarsat evidence is ambiguous
Actually any competent analyst will tell you that relative to a precise terminal location.
@DennisW, With all due respect, you’ve never rolled up your sleeves to work with the Inmarsat data or read the DSTG paper, so you’re really in no position to comment.
And at any rate, we’re not speaking about precise terminal location; we’re talking about a probability distribution along the seventh arc. And everything with a non-zero value has already been searched (and will have been done out to a very comfortable margin by the end of the current search). No plausible case can be made for anywhere else. Your Coco Island theory is something you pulled out of your ass and have never tried to make an analytic case for–most likely because you knew you would fail.
By continually repeating your cherished piece of misinformation you are deliberately muddying the waters and preventing the community from reaching an understanding of the investigation. In general I value your contribution but I feel I am doing readers a disservice in allowing you to fog the discussion in this way, so I am gong to set your comments on manual approval and will delete future comments that mislead in this fashion.
Scott O said:
“@PS9, the affidavits you refer that I have seen do not state there was or is a criminal cover up–and certainly don’t say that a cover up was engaged in by federal law enforcement, as your last paragraph suggests.”
If you’ve read the affidavit by Henry Hughes, senior investigator, why have you not seen the following – it’s para 2 on the very first page:
“During that investigation, normal protocols and procedures were not followed, regulations governing these protocols and procedures were ignored and, in some instances, participants in the investigation actively undermined the investigation and committed illegal acts.”
Notice the part that said:
“… participants in the investigation actively undermined the investigation and committed illegal acts”
He’s talking about the FBI and the senior management of the NTSB undermining the investigation and committing illegal acts. And then the senior management of the NTSB producing a report conclusion that wasn’t based on forensic evidence.
I didn’t use the phrase ‘cover-up’ – TBill did in a different context first, followed by you. But would you not agree that sort of behaviour constitutes a ‘cover-up’?
Scott O said:
“And though you attempt to smear the FBI and the CIA as manipulating the outcome of the investigation, it was the NTSB itself that denied the petition to reopen the investigation.”
I haven’t attempted to smear anyone. I simply reported what the senior NTSB investigator (at that time) stated in his affidavit. Yes, it was the *senior* management of the NTSB that refused to reopen the investigation, I didn’t say it was anyone else, did I?. And it was also the senior management of the NTSB that came up with the original report conclusion that was not based on forensic evidence, according to Henry Hughes.
Scott O said:
“Generally “blowing the whistle” means alerting the authorities or public of something they were unaware–not that theories considered and dismissed should be reconsidered. ”
‘Blowing the whistle’, as I said, were their words. And he’s not talking about putting forward other alternative theories, but about forensic evidence discovered during the investigation that was ignored. Do you think that undermining the investigation and committing criminal acts are things the public already knew about? If the public didn’t know, then his words sound about right as a description of what those 6 NTSB investigators are now doing, wouldn’t you say?
Scott O said:
“The opinion of one person does not invalidate the conclusions of a group, ….”
There were (I think) 6 NTSB investigators that produced affidavits calling for the investigation to be reopened, not one. And it was not his ‘opinion’ – he was stating the facts (forensics) that were found during the investigation, plus the eye witness experiences.
Scott O said:
“… and, in fact, the quote you use from Henry Hughes essentially proves the point–Hughes may have had many professional experiences, but forensic explosives expert was not one he listed in his qualifications”
Doesn’t prove any point at all – later he states that the normal explosive tests that the NTSB *routinely* do with their own equipment (which came up positive for explosives on the fabric of the seats) were disregarded by the FBI. Perhaps they did have explosives experts as part of their group, or maybe they could call on them when needed, but no need to be an explosives expert to use a swab and insert it into an analysis machine, and the investigators are no doubt trained to use those machines or they wouldn’t be let loose with them.
One very big point you’re missing when you try to casually dismiss the evidence presented by Henry Hughes is the 500+ eyewitnesses that saw a bright light shooting up towards the aircraft from the ground. He says none were allowed to be interviewed by the NTSB in evidence, nor their verbal evidence presented to the inquiry. He says the eyewitness accounts were not consistent with a fuel tank explosion, and so were suppressed. As Henry Hughes says in his affidavit (around page 13):
“In addition, contrary to customary NTSB protocols, procedures and regulations, investigative groups, including mine, were required to provide a factual report, but ordered not to write an analysis. As Group Chairman of the Airplane Interior Documentation Group in charge of determining whether or not the damage to the airplane’s interior fit the official crash scenario, it is clear to me in hindsight that my analysis would have fit with what the suppressed eyewitness accounts (discussed below), explosives evidence and accurate wreckage locations showed: that the official theory for the crash– an explosion of the center wing tank–was not consistent with the hard evidence, eyewitness accounts and locations in which the wreckage was actually recovered.”
Not allowing the NTSB investigators to write an analysis of the evidence/forensics is a pretty big departure from investigation protocol – and for what reason were they prevented, solely in this investigation?
Scott O said:
“…(and here, the American government, not the Malaysian government, which is really what we should be discussing) a cover up.”
It would seem the MYG might have a jolly good one going, with their track record, I don’t think anyone would argue that’s not possible. But TBill mentioned TWA800 and conspiracy theories as a parallel, which (necessarily) involves the US government. And the question of whether a government (whichever one or even several) might be tempted to, shall we say, obscure or reinterpret the truth is very relevant to MH370 given the lack of transparency so far and should be considered, perhaps you’d agree.
See also Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870 back in 1980 where a civilian aircraft was accidentally shot down and 81 people died. That was officially declared by the investigating judge to be a multi-country cover-up requested by NATO, so yes, it’s happened before.
A picture is worth a 1000 words:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ogzbr5aefkclyj8/DataVsBayes.png?dl=0
Why the Inmarsat data is not spoofed
Jeff Wise and others have suggested that the reason the plane hasn’t been found thus far is because the Inmarsat data was spoofed to make the plane appear to have gone south, whereas it actually turned north.
Here are some reasons why that is highly improbable.
– the aircraft would need to cross multiple jurisdictions with radar coverage, and the presence of a radar trace won’t remain hidden in ALL of them, it would have been revealed very early in the investigation
– one suggested pathway for hacking, the angle of declination of satellite in the volatile memory of the equipment requires the equipment to be hacked beforehand, the hacking cannot be done quickly
– each new task adds more responsibilities which requires more manpower and adding more manpower risks revealing the plot. As it is, there are 3 different sets of skills required to pull this off:
– flying skills and using equipment in the cockpit
– fighting skills/ violence
– extreme survival skills
To add to this, hacking skills would be asking too much of two 45 year olds.
Plus, consider this. There is NO guarantee that…
– the spoofed signal is being broadcast AND received in the intended manner [someone would have to verify this, otherwise why bother?]
– the spoofed signal will match previous signals from the ‘normal’ segment of the flight or previous flights
– rogue signals such as the 2 telephone calls won’t reveal discrepancies in the signal
– Inmarsat would accept the BFO values instead of ignoring it or discarding it as corrupted
If there is no guarantee of a successful outcome and in the face of such uncertainty, why bother with a BFO spoof? why not remain silent because that too is equally, if not more effective.
And what happens if the spoof plan fails, or is not successful? What is the backup plan for the 2 perps? How do they escape? How do they land, where do they land, and how would they explain what happened to authorities and escape legal proceedings?
@JeffWise
Bit of an overreaction Re DennisW, Jeff? His sentence;
“Actually any competent analyst will tell you that”[,] “relative to a precise terminal location.”
was more in the nature of an offhand remark. Probably you’re still suffering from elevated
adrenaline, as a result of ALSM’s post which was expressed with his becoming-all-too-common
emotive unpleasantness.
Maybe we should consider an other option of “spoofed-tempered” data. Not being done at the source of the signal, but whilst the raw data was worked on.
Immarsat wanted the interpretation of the data to be done by “peer review” and avoid group thinking as they called it.
So al raw data was handed out for individual and isolated interpretation.
Teams working on it: Immarsat, Air Accident investigation branch, RR from the UK, NTSB, FAA, Boeing, Civil aviation Admin from China, Air accident Invst div and Malaysian Govt.
Having them work to an outcome that could be compared, hoping similar results and approach of each team member.
That meant the data was on a lot of drives, clouds or whatever…..
Could it have been hacked, tampered with at this point in time?
Then the data was sent several time to the US, no specific location known to me, for “fine tuning”.
Yet another point where it could have been manipulated, hacked or whatever. Did the US have sufficient interest to manipulated the data and as such the outcome?
I would think that comparing the raw and original data to the data that cam back from the “US” would be complicated, but have not sufficient knowledge to be sure about this.
Maybe being aware of this legal potential exposure, did Immarsat cover themselves by making the statement about spoofing. The did not have control over the raw data any longer and protected themselves.
It could be the data was read only, or protected. But that does not mean a lot for a serious person with ill intentions.
Not in a position to judge, but when I read the sequence of events again and seeing the various postings about spoofed data, it came to my mind as a possibility.
Anybody with more knowledge who can shed a light on this?
Another point that sticks in the back of my mind as possibly not getting sufficient attention, at least to my knowledge, is the fact that the plane upon reaching it cruising altitude confirmed that twice to ATC without being asked for.
It reached FL350 at 00.50.
At 1.01 it confirmed “ Malaysian 370 zero maintaining level 350” ATC did not ask for this.
Seven minutes later the did it again without being asked for. ATC just confirmed as usual with “mayasian 370”
Not a normal procedure and a experienced captain would certainly mention that to his jr pilot not to do, let alone allow it to happen twice or if the captain was PNF why did he do that twice?.
Did they sent a signal that something is (was) wrong hoping the ones who took control of the plane would not notice it?
Was this addressed and what is the opinion of the forum on this?
@Rein, It seems to me that once Inmarsat sent around copies of the data, it would be impossible to alter without different parties noticing, no? Also, if the intention from the beginning was to falsify the data, I don’t think they would have been so openly confused by it. It took them a long time to figure out how to make sense of the BFO data, as they’ve freely admitted.
@buyerninety, @DennisW has been a helpful and productive member of this group for a long time, but there is one dangerously mistaken idea that he keeps attempting to promulgate that I feel I must nip in the bud. The dominant forces of consensus in the worldwide discussion of MH370–namely the ATSB and the IG–spent years telling the world that they had the situation well in hand, and that the plane would be found in the search area. When that failed, the ATSB said that with a high degree of precision the plane must be in the new search area. With that premise on the verge of being debunked, the IG is already claiming that an endpoint just about anywhere could fit with the evidence. It’s a “heads I win, tails you lose” situation.
The image that Gysbreght linked to illustrates my point well. It’s from the ATSB report “MH370 — Definition of Underwater Search Areas,” published on June 26, 2014. It shows that based on what was understood about the Inmarsat data at the time, the plane most likely crashed north of Broken Ridge. The model this conclusion was based on was that the plane could have turned south at any time before 19:41 and that arbitrary changes of speed and direction were allowed at any ping arc. Also, the results were screened to minimize BFO error. All of these criteria were ultimately discarded or heavily modified. Interestingly, by the way, page 29 of this document shows that the BFO data does not fit any endpoint south of 34 degrees south — north of where the DSTG ultimately conclude the plane must have gone, based on BTO and autopilot data. Of course, the ATSB by this point had decided that the BFO data was too vague to be useful in pinpointing where MH370 crossed the 7th arc, but it’s a neat visualization of how poorly matched the BFO and BTO values are, which speaks to @Rein’s question–if the data was forged by Inmarsat or its partners, you’d expect them to forge it better.
@CliffG, I’m confused. You’ve been posting long comments about the underlying context for Russia’s role in hijacking MH370, then argue that the data couldn’t have been spoofed? Seems kind of schizophrenic. However, to address your points:
— You assume that most countries are under active military surveillance at all times. This is not the case. I cover this in more detail in “The Plane That Wasn’t There.”
— You see a difficulty in one suggested mode of hacking. You may or may not be right about this; we frankly don’t know enough about the SDU to know which exact methods may or may not be possible.
— The rest of your argument boils down to the general point that such an operation simply would have been too hard, too risky, too uncertain in outcome. To this I say: be careful about underestimating your enemy. Obama scoffed at Russia and denigrated it as a “regional power.” As he did so it was in the process of launching a massive information war against the US whose dire effects we are living with today.
@JW
“Simply put, the lack of wreckage in the southern Indian Ocean is strong evidence that the plane did not go south.”
it isn’t, however the wreckage will never be found unless they go more to the north, that said if their ego will allow them, it’s hard for them to accept that somebody else was right
@StevanG, How far north would you have them go?
@buyerninety, I just found this in my spam folder. Probably including multiple URLs caused it to be sent there.
@Jeff Wise: “@DennisW has been a helpful and productive member of this group for a long time, but there is one dangerously mistaken idea that he keeps attempting to promulgate that I feel I must nip in the bud.”
You lost me. What is the “dangerously mistaken idea” ?
@Gysbreght, The mistaken idea is that any endpoint on the seventh arc can be arrived at by varying arbitrary assumptions. This is dangerous because it makes the SIO hypothesis unfalsifiable.
@JW I would narrow the search area around the 7th arc and just go upwards all the way to Indonesia if needed, I’m confident it would be found.
@Jeff Wise: The inconvenient truths are that a very large range of endpoints on the 7th arc are compatible with the data logged by Inmarsat, and that the airplane could have flown another 100 NM after passing the 7th arc.
@StevanG, As I’m sure you’re aware, the “First Principals” report includes this:
@Gysbreght, You are certainly correct if people feel entitled to ignore whatever data doesn’t fit their hypothesis. For instance, you know as well as anyone that the BFO data indicates a vertical plunge at 0:19 (which your excellent sleuthing indicates could only have been the result of a deliberate pilot-induced dive). This is not compatible with flying a further 100 nm.
@Jeff Wise: I don’t know of “a vertical plunge at 0:19”, and anyway whatever occured in those 8 seconds doesn’t define the entire descent. The point is that a piloted descent is certainly not constrained to 15 or 25 NM from the 7th arc.
@Jeff Wise: I never said that the BFO’s “could only have been the result of a deliberate pilot-induced dive”.
As things stand at the moment:
– the BFO’s logged at 00:19:29 and 00:19:37 can only be explained by assuming a high rate of descent, increasing rapidly in those 8 seconds, and –
– those high rates descent occurring 2 minutes after fuel exhaustion can only be explained by assuming a pilot-induced manoeuvre.
Examples of pilot-induced manoeuvres could have been a pitch-down input in the recovery from a stall or an over-reaction to a stall warning, or a pitch-up input that resulted in extreme phugoid motion after releasing the controls. There are many possibilities, of course.
The BFO’s do not indicate “a vertical plunge“. I would rather think in terms of flight path angles between 15 and 30 degrees down, depending on the speeds achieved.
Seems like the discussion is flowing thick and fast here so I’m sorry if this BBC article was posted by someone else before me:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/deep_sea_mining
Absolutely bloody fascinating. A top secret CIA mission in 1974 to recover a lost Soviet sub deep in the Pacific which carrying highly classified Soviet code-books and weapons.
“…In the struggle for military advantage, the sub represented the crown jewels – a chance to explore Moscow’s nuclear missiles and to break into its naval communications.”
…So the CIA hatched an audacious plan, Project Azorian, to retrieve the submarine. That would have been hard enough. But there was another challenge as well – it had to be done without the Russians knowing…
The spies needed to create a smokescreen so they pretended to be exploring the possibility of deep sea mining.
A PR campaign conveyed a determined effort to find manganese nodules. These potato-sized rocks lie scattered in the abyss, the great plains of the deep ocean.
There had to be a frontman – someone rich and eccentric enough to be plausible. The reclusive billionaire inventor Howard Hughes was perfect for the role…”
Just wow!
(for the record, I am becoming less and less convinced of any American involvement in MH370, but my suspicions about another “Western” player have just kept growing and growing… some of the behaviour has personally struck me as very odd… just my $2… cough)
@Jeff Wise
My only disagreement with the IG is that they assume the final leg of the flight south into SIO was done on autopilot at some fixed combination of speed / course / altitude until fuel exhaustion which as you stated, constrains the viable range of endpoints to a limited section of the 7th Arc.
If we consider a live Pilot at the controls until end of flight however, then any number of speed / course / altitude changes are possible on the southern leg of the flight into SIO and any endpoint on the 7th Arc becomes viable.
I do agree the final BFO indicates a steep vertical plunge at 00:19 and was likely the result of a Pilot induced high speed terminal dive to impact very close to 7th Arc.
I therefore fully agree with @StevanG that the search should continue northward in a narrow ban along the 7th Arc until the MH370 debris field is eventually located on the seafloor.
As far as drift analysis of surface debris, I find it very difficult to believe a highly precise origin can be deduced based on arrival times in Africa. Even well mapped currents have chaotic elements like eddies & gyres which can trap & delay debris for random periods on its voyage across the open ocean.
@StevanG
I rather like that idea of yours. My area of interest lies on the Broken Ridge.. Albeit off the coast of Northern Sumatra….
“Inmarsat’s initial attempts to reconstruct the flight path of MH370 from the ping data used the last known location of the aircraft, viable aircraft speeds, and trigonometry
to identify flight paths that crossed each of the ping arcs at the appropriate time.
For these calculations, they assumed that the aircraft was “flying at a steady speed
on a relatively constant track consistent with an aircraft operating without human
control. The flight paths reconstructed by Inmarsat were then used by the ATSB
to define initial search areas for the aircraft in the southern Indian Ocean”
That’s from the SIAM review paper. I don’t like how they can take the aircraft’s last known ping data & viable speeds to justify the SIO end point. For starters we have no idea how accurate the 2nd lot of ping data is & nor do we know how fast the aircraft was flying. The General consensus seems to have been a formula based on average cruise speed.
This is the crutch for me. The 1st search & suspect the 2nd is based on calculations from this formula. This was BEFORE any debris was discovered. Then the Flaperon was found & the rest of the debris. NONE of this debris shows signs of crush damage. Thus the idea that the aircraft was on autopilot & plummeted from the sky at fuel exhaustion is pretty much a null scenario. Thus the flutter idea for the damage to the trailing edge of the Flaperon. Although I am yet to see examples of this happening in past incidents or tests. So aside from Jeff’s planting theory the likely argument is that Mh370 either glided into the ocean or it ditched. The 1 thing supporting this theory is that the damage to flaperons trailing edge is similar to the aircraft that ditched in the Hudson…. The alternative idea is Mh370 broke up in mid air therefore why the debris is so widespread & why no more than 1 piece of debris washed up in each location (probably due to slower descent rates of the debris falling into the water). I still think the glide or ditch is a more likely conclusion. Although a quick look at the wave height in the 7th ARC at the time Mh370 disappeared would suggest that if Mh370 did ditch or glide Then the chances of break up are probably akin to an high impact descent.
IMO looking at the debris & taking all things into account including Bio Fouling & drift it would suggest that MH370 couldn’t have come down where the ISAT Data in it’s current guise suggests it did. The whole formula needs to be thought out again.
@PS9,
I have to agree with your concerns about the early stages of the Inmarsat data release. Though I would make some allowance for a delay in converting possibly multiple text-format log files into a searchable format like a SQL database, I don’t believe that explains the drip-drip release we saw.
Jeff has previously discouraged discussions on the validity of the BTO data so I will tread carefully here. Nevertheless, I remain concerned that this data may not have been vetted properly. The red flags as I see them remain as follows:
1. Moving to the top of the list was the reaction I got at the time from ALSM and his crew. His emotional response then, his emotional response now, his inability to distinguish between a factual statement, an inference, and an opinion, and his four year record of being wrong gives me no reason to trust anything he says. Note that I am not calling him a liar, just saying that I no longer trust his explanations and by extension those that he defends.
2. The inability for any knowledgeable party to explain why the BTO would be logged as an “offset,” when the constant making it an offset was not known prior to logging. No data expert logs half the data value and leaves the other half to be “derived” later. You can’t log data as an offset from a yet-unknown constant.
3. The lack of a plausible explanation for the scale and precision of the BTO logged. We don’t use 11-bit integers these days.
4. The lack of a plausible explanation for presenting the BTO data publicly as elevation angles. The “ping rings” were made public for the purpose of telling the public where the plane might have gone. Yet for some yet-unexplained reason, the data was presented as angles – information that does nothing to inform the public of the ring diameters. This was either a further obfuscation or a complete failure of the PR wing to present the data in an understandable format.
My suspicion is that the BTOs were offsets from a different constant – perhaps a half a second – and when that constant failed to fit the early portion of the flight, they went and derived a new constant of ~495us. Without a better explanation, I fear that some of the BTOs may be erroneous enough to make the search a waste of money.
@Sajid UK, who might that other wester player be – France?
@CliffG, in trying to catch up, a delayed response to your post on Ukraine’s outgoing yanukovych:
As someone who is fascinated by, if not an expert in, Russian asymmetrical warfare strategy, I’ve always been intrigued by the geopolitical possibilities around MH370 and MH17. That said, I don’t know if the risk/reward distraction from Crimea is significant enough to attribute the incidents to just that chess move. Mass killing of citizens is something the Russian government is familiar with; killing foreign citizens is less settled territory…
For precedent, see the Russian attack on Georgia, like Ukraine a western ally and NATO MAP participant. While the same “protection of ethnic Russians,” etc., argument was used for cover, as well as the disinformation and cyber warfare we’ve come to know, there was no larger diversion in the land grab that resulted in the taking of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, as one might have expected.
That said, one curious bit of information regarding MH17 is the timing of its demise with respect to what we know now to be the Dutch intelligence officials digitally tunneling into Cozy Bear, the hacking collective (backed by the SVR and only blocks from, the Kremlin). Cozy Bear accessed DNC servers, stole emails and other documents and attempted access to the State Department and other U.S. government networks.
Now, it’s clear that the Dutch penetration began during the summer of 2014 and went on for as long as two and a half years, only recently becoming public knowledge. That means MH17 isn’t likely direct retaliation. But it does make one wonder if the Dutch were paying the price for some earlier attempt at infiltration.
You can read about the case in the below link. The story contains one particularly intriguing sentence: “Whether any intelligence about MH17 was exchanged, is unknown.” I encourage anyone who can’t imagine spies being spies to check it out.
https://www.volkskrant.nl/tech/dutch-agencies-provide-crucial-intel-about-russia-s-interference-in-us-elections~a4561913
One thing is for sure: the Russians play the long game and do so incrementally. Believe it or not, they continue to take land from Georgia, moving border posts a handful of acres at a time. It’s slow motion aggression that doesn’t cross any red line. The other clear thing, given last week’s federal indictments, is that the Russians have a history of curious concealed and compartmentalized moves to destabilize the West and undercut confidence in government and media and elections, going back to before the two air tragedies. And who knows, maybe that is part of the reason for the larger distraction…
I’m assuming the Russian on board Mh370 was not responsible in the theory?
“The Russian passenger aboard vanished Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 is a 43-year-old diving instructor and a member of the Jewish community in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, a news report said.
Missing passenger Nikolai Brodsky was traveling from Bali, Indonesia, to his home in Irkutsk when the plane suddenly dropped off the radar without a trace on Saturday.
He had been on vacation with nine other Russian divers in Bali, said Vitaly Markov, first secretary of the Russian embassy in Malaysia.
Rabbi Aharon Wagner, head of Irkutsk’s Jewish community, informed Brodsky’s wife and his two sons — aged 11 and 17 — when he learned that their father was on the flight, The Times of Israel reported.
Brodsky “was close to Judaism, and the entire community was hard-hit by the news of the tragedy,” Wagner was quoted as saying by the Kikar Hashabbat news site”
@Gysbreght
“The BFO’s do not indicate “a vertical plunge“. I would rather think in terms of flight path angles between 15 and 30 degrees down, depending on the speeds achieved.”
I would ask what do you see as the minimum necessary altitude to achieve the final BFO’s? Also what is the distance traveled after the last BFO?
To me a corollary to intentional descent is that the active pilot may have descended prior such action, perhaps to around cloud layer level.
Scratch my last comment. I have just looked into the old articles written by Jeff. The Russian is a key player in the theory….
@Jeff Wise: In your reply to buyerninety you write:
That is not correct. The paths shown in the image I linked to are the tracks that “represent highest correlation with satellite data”, BTO and BFO. There is no mismatch between BTO and BFO values.
The mismatch is between the satellite data and the Bayesian methodology, i.e. assumed use of the autopilot and timing of the turn south. For example, yesterday TBill on the other blog proposed a path that ends parallel to Broken Ridge, and which he claims to be cosistent with BTO/BFO values. Such a path, if considered at all in Bayesian Methods, would be assigned such a low probability that for practical purposes it does not exist. That path is here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cUu6SHCcgQguETu8eTWWtiE7BNoPyNMfiuNI3kyB7qw/edit
@TBill: “I would ask what do you see as the minimum necessary altitude to achieve the final BFO’s? Also what is the distance traveled after the last BFO?”
The minimum necessary altitude depends on the average rate of descent in that 8 seconds. The ATSB Update of 2 November 2016 considers two cases: Case A (minimum) and Case B (maximum). In case A the descent rates for the two BFO values are 3,800 and 14,600 fpm. Assuming constant vertical acceleration the average descent rate is (3,800 + 14,600)/2 = 9,200 fpm, or 1227 ft of altitude in 8 seconds. Approximately 960 ft of that altitude loss would be converted to kinetic energy (higher speed) that could be recovered.
The distance traveled after the last BFO is approximately equal to the altitude at the time of the last BFO, plus 960 ft, multiplied by 12.5 .
@JS,
Your opinions on the validity or otherwise of the BTO data show that you have little understanding of what the BTO actually means.
In defence of ALSM, it was probably he who determined first how the calculation to derive the LOS range from the satellite ought to be done. At that time there were a number of [incorrect] competing views based on the rather ambiguous definition from official sources.
The BTO is absolutely an “offset” and the constant has nothing to do with that. The offset is a measure of the time delay from the start of a frame in the TDMA protocol. It is absolute, and measurable at the originating end of the data link, i.e. the Perth earth station. The constant is included in this measured delay.
The constant can be derived from the BTO calculation at points where the aircraft position was known absolutely, i.e. while on the ground before takeoff, and also while in the air immediately after takeoff and departing for IGARI. The constant accounts for all signal path delays inherent in the electronics, both on board the aircraft and at Perth.
The scale and precision is irrelevant. It is what it is, and it is what Inmarsat chose to log. We know that it is rounded or truncated to the nearest 20 usecs.
There are no “red flags” surrounding these numbers.
@PS9, I appreciate your thorough rebuttal of my comments on TWA 800. I apologize for conflating your post with TBill’s, and, yes, somehow I did miss Hughes’s claim of criminal acts.
None of that, however, changes my point of view. The evidence for a center fuel tank explosion is preponderant, down to prior incident, fuel gauge issues earlier in the flight, and forensic physical damage.
And I do think the opinion of one person–or six–does not make a case that seems (for nearly all of the six) to be more about territorial disputes–however well intentioned–than ultimate conclusions.
Likewise, the belief of six hundred (or however many actual) eyewitnesses. As we all know by now, untrained observers are notoriously unreliable–from the Invisible Gorilla test to, according to the Innocence Project, the 70 plus percent of people it has freed from prison by using DNA results to disprove eyewitness testimony.
Finally–and cautioning myself as much as anyone else as we think about what requires expertise and what doesn’t in this or any investigation–I believe determining whether explosives were used is, in fact, a bit more complicated than putting a swab into a machine. It’s been shown that TWA 800 had some explosive residue on a seat back. It’s also been shown that the plane was used, as I recall, for explosives detection training just two weeks prior to the accident. At the same time, no other evidence recovered showed signs–scorching, pitting, petaling–of an explosion. What’s more, the seat back findings would be irrelevant if we give credence to the eyewitness missile claims, surface- and air-to-air missiles having proximity fuses that detonate them before penetrating a target.
All,
Anyone attempting to make quantitative deductions based on figures from the June 26, 2014 ATSB report is doomed to fail. This report had the following cautionary note: “Additionally, work is continuing with incremental refinements in the BFO characterisation in particular the EAFC. The ongoing refinement may result in search assets deployment outside the currently defined priority area (orange) into the medium (blue) area.” One should heed that caution.
As the Oct 8, 2014 report made clear, the flight path reconstruction in the June report was based on the Eclipse 2 model of the AFC+SAT effects. It is now know that this model had serious errors. While the details of the model have never been made public, results based on this model were revealed in the ATSB Final Report of Oct 3, 2017, and one can infer that errors from this model were of order several hz, leading to errors in the location of the search zone of several hundred km along the 7th arc. It was only after Inmarsat properly understood how the signal chain at Perth was configured that it was able to create the Unified Model, which properly dealt with the AFC+SAT effects.
The consequence was that the search zone moved South. (Yet again – the previous OAMS model was even worse.)
@PS9
Re:TWA800 From an engineering perspective, anytime we have a fuel vapor/air mixture in a confined space, it is a disaster waiting to happen (due to static elec, etc). The type of explosion that results from igniting a air/vapor mixture is called a detonation (high energy)…that would seem to be the most likely explanation.
I feel somewhat similar for MH370. Once PM Razak said it was apparent intention diversion on 15-March-2014, my curiosity about the accident cause went way down. My mind is looking likely explanations, so once I think I know that, I am satisfied – unless something really solid proves otherwise.
Jeff Wise said;
“buyerninety, I just found this in my spam folder. Probably including multiple
URLs caused it to be sent there.”
Two URL’s are ‘multiple’? Back in ’17 (Heck, it was June ’16!) you told me you
enlarged the limit to four URL’s. No wonder my posts with information to
Gysbreght don’t appear.
@Jeff Wise
my apologies if I conveyed the impression that I’m on the Spoof bandwagon. I was NEVER in support of that theory.
I used to support the theory of controlled ditching in the SIO with the perps at the controls.
However, due to the consensus that has now emerged between ATSB and IG about the ghost flight from the FMT, and the final uncontrolled dive I am now in favor of that theory, plus the ‘loiter'(via SLOP) in the Andamans before the final major turn.
But of course, I am willing to change my opinion if new facts emerge.
However, to address your points:
Military Radar Surveillance – I don’t know the truth, but I find your assertion of gaps in the radar coverage highly doubtful. The entire Bay of Bengal is a contiguous series of population centers teeming with humanity with many large cities and airports serving these cities 24 hrs a day. To suggest there are gaps in the radar coverage of these cities would mean a lot of planes are flying these gaps, something no sensible (or greedy) govt. would overlook because overflights bring in foreign exchange.
The perps could not have taken the risk of flying for many hours to the North.
Any covert operation that is long drawn out risks sudden exposure. The Malaysians may have been (arguably) incompetent in reacting slowly to a fast developing situation. But can the success of an operation depend on the incompetence of the authorities? Not likely and not for long. The behaviour of the aircraft after comloss from IGARI onwards clearly showed signs of piloting by perps who were aware of ETOPS and FIR boundaries, and strongly suggests that they attempted to confuse the authorities, but didn’t actually count on the Malaysians ignoring the aircraft completely.
I think the whole operation lasted just under 2 hours, from IGARI to FMT. The perps may have egressed the plane via parachute just before the FMT.
Hacking the SDU: Of course I don’t understand the intricacies of the SDU but I think there is sufficient information about it (it is a satellite modem according to the Inmarsat paper) to hazard a safe guess about what type of hack would be required. I think this would have to be done as a semi-invasive hardware hack (as opposed to a remote software hack).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNfRUNPluxU&t=677s
Any hack can be accomplished with enough time and resources, but both of these are in short supply in the hijacking scenario. From the time the plane turned back at IGARI to the reboot was just over an hour.
During that period, both perps would have to:
– overcome the crew and passengers,
– navigate and stabilise the flight,
– make preparations for egress from the aircraft before the final major turn.
Both perps would have to be proficient in piloting/navigation skills, fighting/violence skills, and extreme environment survival skills. Adding hacking skills to that is asking too much.
Spoofing is not critical to this mission. Hijacking and sending the plane into oblivion so that it is unrecoverable all the while conveying the impression of catastrophic failure was the immediate purpose of this whole mission.
Underestimating Russia
First of all, Russia is not my enemy. I have great respect for Russia. They are a great people and a great culture and they have some of the best scientists and computer programmers on the planet. I also greatly respect their military and its capabilities.
It is this respect for the Russian military that strongly dissuades me against believing MH370 theories that are impractical and risk-prone.
@Brian Anderson,
Since you also haven’t found a plane yet, after a search costing tens of millions of dollars, I’m going to take your comments with a grain (or ton) of salt.
You too blame any criticism on my “little understanding.” You are right in that I am not a satellite expert. However, I am a computer expert and in any case you’ve proven my points.
You say, “At that time there were a number of incorrect competing views based on the rather ambiguous definition from official sources.”
Incorrect? Ambiguous? The official sources? Exactly why? Why were the official sources in such bad shape that ALSM needed to sort out the data for them? That was my point and I think PS9’s as well – the official sources were bungling the report so bad that maybe we should be taking a more critical view of their abilities. You are suggesting that they were incompetent until ALSM showed up and helped them with their calculations? Did they have lunch in Perth or something?
Then you say, “The offset is a measure of the time delay from the start of a frame in the TDMA protocol. It is absolute, and measurable at the originating end of the data link, i.e. the Perth earth station. The constant is included in this measured delay.”
Yes, of course. The start of the frame was known. The constant was absolute. It was measurable. It was included in the log.
Yet nobody knew what ithe constant was, until somebody did some never-before-attempted fancy math? Or was this a PR stunt to show that folks could average a couple of numbers and come up with 495,679us?
Finally… “The scale and precision is irrelevant. It is what it is, and it is what Inmarsat chose to log. We know that it is rounded or truncated to the nearest 20 usecs.”
Wrong. It’s very relevant. You just don’t understand how logging works. You’re also assuming, with no basis, that it was rounded or truncated.
Show me how a computer programmer woke up one fine day in 2009 and said, “Hey, this signal came back 514,279us after the frame start. Let me round it to the nearest 20us, adjust it by a constant nobody knows about yet, and then log as 18,600 instead so that if another AF447-like accident happens people can use this data to find the plane.”
Because that’s what you’re saying happened.
@ Scott O.
As Jeff Wise has written, both MH370 & MH17 came immediately after sanctions from USA & EU. Sanctions are considered a signal of resolve in International Relations theories. Hence, both MH370 and MH17 could be considered signals of resolve by the Kremlin in response.
I think, MH370 was also considered a signal of escalation of the conflict, threatening to draw in China. Russia created ‘facts on the ground’ in Crimea, and China did the same with their island building efforts in the South China Sea in the summer of 2014. They both disputed US supremacy in what they considered their own neighborhoods.
It’s not clear if Russia and China worked in coordination, but noteworthy that most passengers on MH370 were Chinese. China could have hit back at Russia, but it didn’t have any pressing conflict with Russia, and a payback against Russia would not serve it’s wider geopolitical interests. But if Chinese president Xi didn’t push for advantage in some geopolitical arena, he would have been ousted. Hence the S.China sea islands.
There is no love lost between ordinary Russians and Chinese. But at the heads of state level, there is a convergence of interests between both Russia and China in trying to diminish US influence.
I don’t think we can underestimate the ‘distraction’ potential of MH370.
Leaders of democratic societies signal resolve to enemies by making threatening statements that could have audience costs if the threats not carried through. Distracting the audience, I think, diminishes the audience cost and makes the threats less potent.
For example, Obama paid a heavy audience cost when Assad bombed his own people in Syria with chemical weapons. Obama had stated that USA would consider Chemical weapons use a Red Line that should not be crossed, but didn’t carry out his threat when Chemical weapons were indeed used.
Obama also warned Russia against a Crimea referendum. Then MH370 disappeared, and Crimea held the referendum towards annexation by Russia. Nobody talked about audience costs.
Georgia was invaded during Beijing Olympics 2008. Nuff said.
I am having a hard time understanding the timeline with regards to Dutch intelligence hacking Cozy Bear and MH17. But I do know that there was quite a lot of arguments among EU members about the extent of the sanctions against Russia in 2014 with some members from Eastern and Central Europe being influenced by Russia to take a less agressive stance.
@JW
“3. The absence of debris being found on African shores in 2014 suggests that the impact site was likely not north of 25°S.”
actually totally opposite, the only way it could reach Reunion at that time requires impact site to be north of 25°S
@Michael John
“Thus the idea that the aircraft was on autopilot & plummeted from the sky at fuel exhaustion is pretty much a null scenario.”
exactly, and you know what’s interesting? BFO data shows descent rate becomes lower as you go up the arc…descent rate at 40S is around 12000 fpm while at 20S it’s around 3000 fpm or so, make your own conclusion
@StevanG
I already did. I’m no expert either but it seems to me that the formula the ISAT Data is based on is calculated using the assumption that 9M-MRO was flying to typical flight expectations. Which is fair enough. Despite the rest unknown between SDU loss & Re Log on them it would make sense for the experts to search where that assumption lead too. They have done that. Twice. We still have a bit of a way to go on the 2nd search but the priority areas have already been cleared with no sign of the aircraft. So IMO either 9M-MRO wasn’t flying to typical flight expectations or the SDU was corrupted.
On the flip side we have to look at logic. 9M-MRO was making some unexpected but controlled movements up until the FMT. You only have to look at the alleged flight path to see that. Some say the plane loitered off the coast of Northern Sumatra. Fair enough. Makes sense. Sounds like they were trying to decide on the next step. But suddenly we have the FMT & the what some would call a suicide run into the SIO. Does this make sense? Not to me it doesn’t. Simply because it doesn’t fit with the 1st part. IF Mh370 loitered off the coast of Northern Sumatra what was it doing? More to the point what was the pilot doing? We can argue about the Data all day & all night. But until the aircraft is found EVERYTHING is still a theory.
@CosmicAcademy
Thanks for your comments. Yes I agree the atmospheric pressure at FL350 is too low for supplemental oxygen to be of any use. It needs to be pressurised. However for this to work properly don’t you need a pressurised suit around the thorax to be able to exhale?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_suit
I guess this equipment is available in the cockpit of modern commercial aircraft.
@StevanG
“exactly, and you know what’s interesting? BFO data shows descent rate becomes lower as you go up the arc…descent rate at 40S is around 12000 fpm while at 20S it’s around 3000 fpm or so, make your own conclusion”
My conclusion is trust but verify. Final BFO was something like -2?
I note that the recent paper MH370-Captio.net (which could be considered a version of this path) seemed to not address the -2 BFO so that was one weakness of the paper (unless I am mistaken).
@CliffG
At the risk of sidetracking the blog’s topic into Neo Cold War politics, I’ll try to explain what I meant with regard to Cozy Bear and MH17. Consider:
To the best of our current knowledge the shoot down of MH17 and Dutch penetration of Cozy Bear happened in the same month or so during the summer of 2014.
The public doesn’t know for sure if one was a predicate for the other, i.e., Dutch spying to learn the truth about MH17 or MH17 to punish the Dutch for spying, though it does seem that the Russians were unaware of this particular Dutch exploit, as it continued for several years.
That said, one does not hack into a state-level hacker’s system and area-wide security cameras without detection on a first try.
So the question I’m posing is this: is it possible that MH17 was retribution for prior probing or even breaching of Russian systems by the Dutch security service rather than an act meant to underscore the point you argue was already made with MH370?
If the Russians proved they can act on any airliner anywhere in the world with MH370, MH17 was likely not a random target. So why that airliner from that airport with those nationals on it? Is it possible it was to scare off NATO member states who were potential witness to Russian attempts at disrupting Western elections–the reason Cozy Beat existed?
(An ancillary question might be why Malaysian Airlines both times, though that might be the only real coincidence in all of this….)
@JS,
Then I hope you are enjoying the salty taste in your mouth.
But, even as a self-professed “computer expert”, you still do not understand, or choose to misconstrue facts.
It was not until ALSM published his paper on the proper calculation of the round trip Burst Timing Offset, that interested observers outside the official sources correctly interpreted the description [only the description] that had been provided publicly. That description included the words “nominal terminal”. It was the wording of this description that was ambiguous.
The BTO is a measure of the total round trip delay from Perth to the satellite to the aircraft, and back again. The location of Perth is known. The location of the satellite [at a precise time] is known. When the aircraft is on the ground at KL it’s position is known. Hence the BTO can be compared with the expected round trip delay. The difference is the mystical constant. The constant my be subtly different in different aircraft and precisely which channel is used, but it is still a constant. It can be verified using the known location [based on ACARS information] of the aircraft during the first 30 minutes or so of the flight too.
There is no “fancy math” involved. The formula is simple and well understood by many people.
You continue to mis-represent the facts when you blather about some programmer “adjust it by a constant nobody knows about yet”. That is just nonsense. It is the total round trip delay which is logged, and this is the BTO. It includes the “constant”.
What is wrong with rounding or truncating the number to 20 usecs. Inmarsat confirmed that is how it is done.
In any case, the BTO alone cannot determine the location of the aircraft. It can place the aircraft at a certain distance from the satellite at a particular time, with reasonable precision. That allows one to calculate the location of an arc on the earth’s surface. Again many people have done this independently. But you wouldn’t understand that either.
7/03/2014 16:42:31.906 IOR-R1200-0-36ED IOR 305 4 R-Channel RX 0x62 – Acknowledge User Data (R-channel) 125 (14900)
7/03/2014 22:41:21.906 IOR-R1200-0-36ED IOR 305 4 R-Channel RX 0x15 – Log-on/Log-off Acknowledge 204 (14540)
Thus Ping Ring 6 (22.41) is just shy of KL Airport (Closer to the Satellite)
What I am curious of is how accuracy AFTER reboot can be confirmed. Whilst it was sat on the tarmac at KL we knew where it was. At the time of Re Boot it had left radar so no exact location is known. So what I don’t understand is that whilst the Arcs should look like they do in a perfect world how can we be sure that the SDU was working Normally? Especially after the mysterious loss & reboot? How much faith can we have in the timings? If you can guarantee 100% that the SDU was responding as it should after Reboot then I would like to know how that can be proven?