The MH370 Miracle (updated)

If after nearly five years the disappearance of MH370 is still regarded as an unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) mystery, that’s because something that happened in the course of MH370’s vanishing is generally talked about as if it were unremarkable when in fact it is ridiculously unprecedented to the point of being virtually impossible. And if that fact could be more generally understood, the case would seem a lot less mysterious.

Call it the MH370 miracle.

OK, back up. Here’s the story of MH370 in a nutshell: a plane takes off and vanishes from air-traffic control radar. Weeks later, it turns out that the plane had reversed course, flown through an area of primary radar coverage, and then vanished from that. It’s gone. It’s dark. Off the grid. There is absolutely no way that anyone is ever going to know where this plane went.

Then a miracle happened. Something that has never happened before in the history of air travel and in all likelihood will never happen again. It’s this: three minutes after disappearing from primary radar, the plane began sending out a signal. A signal with unique and wonderful properties.

A Miracle Signal.

The general public has never heard about the remarkableness of this occurrence. It has been glossed over entirely. The ATSB and the mainstream press talk about the signal as something generated as a matter of course, like the cell phone data carelessly left behind by a fugitive criminal. But the Inmarsat data set is not like that at all. Not only was it not normal, it was unprecedented and produced in a way that cannot be explained.

Those of you have have been following the case know what event I’m talking about. At 18:25 UTC, MH370 starts sending signals to one of the satellites in the Inmarsat fleet: Inmarsat-3 F1, aka IOR, hovering in geostationary orbit over the equator at 64.5 degrees east.

The standard story goes like this: “Then scientists studying the signal realized that it contained clues about where the plane went.”

What gets omitted is how completely bonkers this is. In fact, there are two insane things going on here.

The first is that the signal exists at all. As far as I know, never in the history of commercial aviation has a plane been flying around with all of its communications equipment turned off, except for this one piece of gear. It. Just. Never. Happens.

Not ever.

Now at this point you might say, “But these were extraordinary circumstances, the plane had just been hijacked.” Okay, sure. But the point is that in order for this signal to exist, the hijacker/s must have done something extraordinary to the electrical system, something that pilots never normally do, that isn’t called for in any checklist, and for which there is no rational explanation that anyone has been able to come up with. And yet—voila! There it is, right at the exact moment it’s needed.

The second insane thing about the Miracle Signal is that it just so happens that this fortuitously appearing signal has embedded within it revelatory information—the BFO. Now, under any but miraculous circumstances, you would not expect this signal to tell you anything about the planes position or velocity. It’s a communications signal. It’s designed specifically to not have any navigational information. But lo and behold, it turns out that because of a quirky convergence of happenstance, the system is working in an unusual way that does indeed provide a hint—but only a hint!—of where the plane is going in a way that cannot be cross-checked with any other source.

This is the astonishing convergence:

1. The plane is equipped with a piece of equipment called an SDU that was manufactured by Thales. If this box had come from the other leading manufacturer, Rockwell Collins, there would have been no navigational information in the BFO data.

2. The plane is flying under the footprint of a satellite that is past its design lifespan and has run low on the fuel it requires for stationkeeping and so has started to wander in its orbit. If it had been functioning as designed then there would be no navigational information in the BFO data.

3. The subsequent path of the plane is along a north-south axis. It turns out that the information can’t be used to tell you where the plane traveled with any precision where the plane went, but it can tell you whether it went north or south.

4. The path lies entirely under that one satellite’s area of coverage. If the path had crossed over into another coverage zone, the connection would have been transferred over and the nav information would have been lost (but the direction of flight would have been unambiguously confirmed). For instance, if MH370 had flown east at IGARI instead of west, it would have flown into the coverage zone of POR, aka Inmarsat-3 F3, and re-logged on with that satellite.

5. The path lies entirely over water. If the plane had turned south earlier, or had headed east instead of west, it would have passed over land and either potentially been spotted or detected on radar.

6. MH370 used a satcom service called Classic Aero. If it used a newer, higher grade of service called SwiftBroadband, the transmissions between the plane and the satellite would have included position information.

So when we talk about MH370, and how the plane went into the southern Indian Ocean, what we’re talking about are six hours of data whose existence is nearly as miraculous as a little baby Jesus lying in a manger.

Imagine if the authorities had announced back in March, 2014: “We’ve just realized that after it disappeared from military radar, the plane waited three minutes and then started broadcasting a Miracle Signal. This Miracle Signal has never been seen before, and will never be seen again, and it happens by a crazy quirk of circumstance to provide us a super intriguing clue, but instead of questioning how it came to be, we’re going to just accept the data it’s giving us and treat it as unimpeachable fact.”

Oh, and that’s not the end.

The really gobsmacking thing about the miracle signal is that it took place in the context of a bunch of other equally unlikely things. Namely:

— If the data are accepted as face value, the only explanation for the plane’s behavior is that the captain hijacked his own plane. That means a man with no manifestations of stress or mental illness spontaneously decides to commit mass murder/suicide.

— On top of that, he decides to do it in a way that no suicidal pilot ever has: by waiting impassively hour after hour until his fuel tanks to run dry.

— Once his fuel tanks run dry, he dives the plane toward the ocean, thinks better of it and glides it in what just happens to be the right direction, and then dives it into the ocean once more. This sequence of events is psychologically implausible but is the only way to explain how the plane could have ended up outside a seabed search area the size of Great Britain.

— The debris then floats in a way that is not reconcilable with any known drift model. Despite being adrift for over a year, none of it picks up any biofouling organisms more than a few months old, and the flaperon picks up goose barnacles that somehow manage to grow in the open air.

I’ve always said that the 18:25 reboot is the crucial clue that lies at the heart of the MH370 mystery. What I’m saying now is that it should be understood in even stronger terms: the extreme improbability of the Miracle Signal means that it can’t be construed as an unintentional byproduct of a “normal” suicide flight. It just could not have occured that way by happenstance. It must have been engineered.

One of the most common things you hear from normal people (by that I mean non-obsessives like present company) about MH370 is, “I just can’t believe that in this day and age a modern airliner could just vanish.” Of course, they’re absolutely right. Things don’t just vanish, except in one context: magic. Magicians make rabbits disappear out of hats, then make coins disappear behind kids’ ears, they make themselves disappear behind clouds of smoke.

If you don’t like the idea that something inexplicably miraculous is the handiwork of a magician, then your other option is to suppose that events have been arranged by sheer luck. Indeed, every “innocent” explanation that anyone has proposed to explain the vanishing of MH370—like a pilot suicide scenario, or a lithium battery fire, or accidental depressurization—assumes that the fact that the plane was never found is due to an incredible chain of coincidences.

And sure, bad luck happens in life, but once the odds get astronomical—when you start having to start calculating the odds that a rabbit could spontaneously teleport out of a top hat—then it’s time to start thinking about possible sleights-of-hand.

Here’s a historical analogy. In May of 1942, a Japanese fleet invading New Guinea was attacked by US aircraft carriers in the Coral Sea, suffering heavy damage. How, just half a year after Pearl Harbor, had America’s thinly stretched naval forces managed to intercept the Japanese task force amid the vastness of the Pacific? There were two possibilities. Either the Americans had just gotten lucky, or they had managed to break Japan’s naval cipher, JN-25. The former was a stretch, but the admiralty was certain that the Americans couldn’t have broken their code. A mentality later branded as “Victory Disease” convinced them that they were vastly superior to their enemy. They themselves couldn’t imagine how to break their most sophisticated code, so there was no way the Americans could have done it. The Japanese Navy had nothing to fear.

Then, bad luck hits again. As the Japanese carriers are moving against Midway Island, lo and behold, the beleagured American fleet not only shows up but gets a jump on them, sinking all their aircraft carriers and turning the tide of the war. How lucky could those gaijin get? Apparently really lucky, because the Japanese leadership didn’t understand their codes had been broken until they’d signed their surrender on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri.

The search officials tasked with finding MH370 were in the same camp as the wartime Japanese. As far as they were concerned, it was inconceivable that they were dealing with an adversary capable of outwitting them. When I asked Mark Dickinson, vice president of satellite operations, how Inmarsat could be certain that the MH370 data hadn’t been tampered with to mislead investigators, he dismissed the idea out hand, saying: “whoever did that would have to have six month’s worth of knowledge of what would happen, in essence have to know how the data would be used.”

To be fair, some among the Japanese leadership were suspicious of the Americans’ good luck all along. And in the case of MH370, some of us have long smelled a rat. Earlier this year David Gallo, the man who found AF447, wrote, “I never accepted the satellite data from day one,” adding: “I never thought I’d say this….I think there is a good chance that MH370 never came south at all. Let’s put it this way, I don’t accept the evidence that the plane came south.” And this fall we learned that investigators conducting the last extant investigation into the disappearance of MH370 are looking into the possibility that the Inmarsat data could have been hacked.

So far, these skeptics are still in the minority, but I think that their numbers will continue to grow. A more people become aware of the circumstances of the MH370 miracle, the penny will continue to drop.

UPDATE 12/23/18: It seems to me that mysteries can be divided into two categories. 

The first I’ll call mysteries of indeterminacy. When Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan departed Lae Island on July 2, 1937, they were flying a primitive aircraft, by modern standards, and relied on the most rudimentary form of navigation. It’s no wonder that they never made it to their intended destination. What we don’t know, and may never know, is where exactly in the western Pacific they crashed.

The second type I’ll call mysteries of inexplicability. When a magician puts a ball into a closed fist, then reopens it to reveal that nothing is there, you’re astonished at how he could have done it. 

In science, the question of whether an unknown planet X lurks at the edge of the solar system is a mystery of indeterminacy. The struggle to reconcile quantum mechanics and relativity is a mystery of inexplicability.

MH370 started out looking like a mystery of indeterminacy. The authorities had a good data set in hand, and developed an analytic method to generate a search area. They were extremely confident that, while they didn’t know exactly where the plane had landed, a few hundred million dollars worth of brute-force seabed scanning would give them an answer.

They turned out to be wrong. The plane wasn’t there. So now we understand that what we’re really grappling with is a mystery of inexplicability. There simply are no simple, widely-accepted explanations for how it could be that the plane wasn’t found. This kind of problem needs to be tackled in a fundamentally different way.

230 thoughts on “The MH370 Miracle (updated)”

  1. Great article Jeff, I was curious if you heard back from those investigators about those Russian & Ukranian passengers!

  2. Wow. Aftet passing my comments off as gibberish Jeff you have just repeated everything I said more or less in your own post. My whole argument was to look at both the BTO & BFO Data backwards. It’s a simple mistake to make & 1 that changes the whole ball game. I’m not going to start a rant about that again. But I do hope someone some day will take a serious look at what I have proposed. Merry Christmas to all. By the way. I think the new format here works better.

  3. [content redacted] @Michael John, the stuff you are writing on this subject doesn’t make any sense. You don’t understand how BFO works. It is not simply a Doppler effect.

  4. very interesting read, thanks for remaining on top of the info, i look forward to more of your input! thanks jeff wise

  7. You convincingly equate the Inmarsat data/southern-path theory to the magic bullet theory.

    You’ve addressed this before Jeff, so apologies, and I suppose this exposes my ignorance, but: if indeed the data is junk/spoofed/tampered-with, how is it that one can draw ANY assumption from it? That is to say, I struggle to understand (and again, possibly because am so admittedly clueless as to the tech pieces of this) why one could/should simply invert it to find the answer. I’ll take one more crack at what is essentially my same question: MUST we accept AT ALL that the plane went some place on that 7th arc?

  8. Secrets of the unseen… Keep your karma clean.. You never know what can pop out and grab you…

  11. I continue to follow these articles with one day the mystery can be solved. Merry Christmas to all. Mukesh Harrikissoon and Myles Josh Harrikissoon

  12. What a load of bull crap…what you’re writing doesn’t make sense at all…ever watched “mayday” on National Geographic?
    If you haven’t then you should…there’s even an episode on the MH370 flight where everything is explained factually…

  13. @Truman, Excellent question. The answer is that if the data was spoofed, there must have been a mechanism by which that was accomplished. Looking at how the system works, we can see that there was a vulnerability in how the BFO data was produced, but no there is no similar vulnerability to be seen in the production of BTO data. Also, it was not known outside of Inmarsat that BTO data was being logged. So we have strong reason to suspect that even in the event of a spoofing attack the BTO data should be good, and this is the data that gives us the 7th arc (as well, of course, as the other arcs from which the DTSB was able to derive probably flight paths to the north and south).

  18. Another great article, Jeff. This is slightly off-topic but I have a question about another aviation conundrum that has been taxing the minds of many UK commentators over recent days: the ‘drones’ that closed Gatwick airport for the better part of two days. My question is this: would ‘industrial-sized’ drones show up on radar in such a way that any alleged ‘sightings’ of them could be correlated with radar records and hence verified? It’s all happening at low altitude over a (usually) busy airport, remember.

  19. Wonder why so much debris has been found in the Indian Ocean and islands to the west on the African coast. Must be that the “hijackers” transported them there.
    This theory ranks with the that the world was created ca. 3-4000 years ago.

  21. @Mark Fox, Thanks! I haven’t looked at this topic but I would expect that radar systems would be able to pick even small drones at the sort of ranges that would be in play here, i.e. extremely short.

    The fact that this problem wasn’t cleared up immediately suggests malicious intent and sophisticated resources, though obviously it’s too early to jump to conclusions.

  22. For a satellite that was close to being retired and all these inexplicable events, it seems that the closest thing that makes sense is an obsolete satellite being hacked and obtaining control of all other systems of the plane.

    Is that even possible? Are sub-systems of the plane all interconnected to other sub-systems?

  23. @John W, That’s an interesting idea, one that hasn’t yet been explored as far as I know. A vulnerability that has been looked at in more detail involves altering a parameter within the plane’s satellite data unit.

  24. Jeff, you and I have talked about this privately a couple times but I would like to put this into the public sphere now. And I deeply appreciate the interview you did with me last year on my podcast–still one of the best episodes Unfound has done.

    The scenario you are describing, one which you know I agree with, is one that would’ve taken highly specialized, highly technical, highly organized, highly secret training and knowledge to accomplish. Not to mention that some “muscle” would’ve been needed on MH370 itself in case passengers and crew figured out what was going on and revolted. So, this plan would take both intelligence and physical ability.

    There are almost 8 billion people on the earth. I am guessing less than 100 would’ve had all the above qualifications to pull this plan off if they wanted. I mean, how many people really knew that satellite was low on fuel? That sounds like very, very specialized knowledge–like being able to name off the top of your head who had the #1 music hit in the US the first week of August 1970. You know what I mean?

    So, the group who would’ve had all the knowledge to pull this off successfully is very small. In fact, you could probably fit the entire group on a Boeing 777.

    So, who are those people?

    Maybe to use an example that people can better understand. If a bank robbery is videotaped from the street. And the robber comes out the front door wearing a mask, you can’t tell who is. However, if he runs down the street, and the police are able to determine from the videotape the guy covered 100 meters between two telephone poles in less than 10 seconds, well, that quickly narrows down who the robber could be. The police would start with Usain Bolt and work their way down.

    This is what MH370 feels like to me. There could’ve only been a very low number of people who could’ve pulled this off. Who are they–their actual names, not just their country . . . and where were they on March 8, 2014?

    If it was the Russians–just throwing that out there, then what division of their military would learn how to steal a jet like this? Where would they train to do this? How long would the training take?

    Also, couldn’t we learn those answers by figuring out in our own military, or British military, or any other modern force, what branch and special force could do this? Moreover, do they even train for something like this scenario? Has it even crossed their mind that a jet could be taken over and made to disappear this way?

    Isn’t solving this mystery as “simple” as that?

    Maybe I need to throw this out as well: If in fact your scenario is correct, in the last 5 years have there been any mysterious or unexplained or suspicious deaths in the satellite communications community? Because I think if we are going to go down this path and own it 100%, then we need to start thinking in these terms–because loose lips sink ships.

  25. In light of that helpful response, Jeff, it would seem (intuitively, to me) highly possible, if not probable, that clues related to mirror-image northern path likely exist–even today, long after the fact–in the form of satellite pictures / military intelligence / other things; is that incorrect or correct? And it would further seem to me that all of this already-available information would be far, far easier to comb through (not to mention orders of magnitude cheaper) than sending the equivalent of a ford taurus miles under the ocean to comb through uncharted territory.

    Has anyone even been willing to attempt this?

  26. @Truman, I don’t know if such clues exist; in my experience combing through commercially available satellite archives for this story, I’ve seen huge gaps in coverage. But even if the clues, there hasn’t been any official interest in a possible northern scenario since March 2014.

  27. @Ed Dentzel, Thanks for your kind words. I think you’ve got it exactly right. The list of candidates is extremely short; if we didn’t already suspect that Kazakhstan is the endpoint for the flight, the fact that Russia has been engaged in multifaceted hybrid warfare against a large number of targets since pretty much this exact time in history would put them immediately under a flag of suspicion.

    Within Russia, the #1 candidate would have to be the GRU, given that they took down MH370’s sister airplane four and a half months later and then went on to tamper in Brexit, put Trump in the White House, poison the Skripals, etc etc.

    As to looking for suspicious deaths, needless to say, Russian intelligence figures throw themselves out windows, beat themselves to death, etc with great frequency.

  28. @jeffwise So where do you think the plane is located?
    And, would you bet your money on that?

    It’s frustrating to hear the possibilities and not see action on getting to the bottom of it.

  29. @Lynda, I have a really hard time imagining that the plane didn’t go to Russia. I don’t know if I’d put money on it. I toyed with the idea of making a public bet that the seabed search would be unsuccessful, but I wasn’t sure if it would be perceived as being in good taste.

    Yes, it is frustrating that we seem to be stuck on coming to grips with the mystery.

  30. Hi jeff – I think you need to work on motive and it might sway more people. I dont think your media diversion explanation is very strong.

  31. I’ve often wondered about a worm hole dimension maybe it’s sounds crazy but I watch a lot of syfy movies

  32. @Billy, It’s putting the cart before the horse to worry about motive before determining what happened and who did it. Perpetrators’ motives are often opaque, and never more so than in the context of hybrid warfare.

  33. All Boeing 777s (including serial #28420 which is MH 370) had to have oxygen supply lines replaced (Airworthiness Directive 2012-13-05) because of blow torch oxygen fires on the flight decks. My blog post of March 14, 2014 details what could have happened. With pictures.

    The most important unknown is what happens to flight instruments, transponders, auto pilots, auto throttles, satcoms, etc when they melt? Yes, they would have “burned”, but melting in place has different effects on operation. My question is what happens to circuit breakers…do they melt open or closed? What happens to an FMS as the screen melts into the unit? What happens to a heading control know when it melts? What happens to an altitude selector when it melts? It a transponder control head is in the center console and someone walks on it with say 250 pounds of pressure, can it continue to function?

    In the past, two aircraft were destroyed by this oxygen blow torch fire mishap while they were parked at gates. What if they were at altitude moving at .78 mach? Either the fire used all the oxygen in the jet, or the skin and windows were melted (as in the pictures) resulting in explosive decompression. Or both.

    Only discovery of the forward fuselage will prove or disprove the fire theory and answer the question if the AD was ever complied with. Perhaps a Malaysia Airlines accountant or bookkeeper or maintenance technician will come forward to tell us if the AD was ignored.

    Pictures of the destroyed Boeing jets and theories are on my blog at http://www.bluewaterditching.blogspot.com

  34. Actually the plane under one of world dessert… Arizona dessert.. Kidnap by???? If u don’t believe me go n check with special metal dictator !!!!tq

  37. The simplest explanation is Inmarsat jas gotten it’s data mixed up. Not like we can expect anyone to admit that.

    Nobody seems to question the likelihood of Mh370 flying for as long as ISAT claimed it did. The only solid evidence we have is a UFO return on military radar at the top of the Malacca Strait.

    There is as Jeff pointed out no evidence of insanity or ill intention by flight crew.

    There is no evidence Mh370 was hijacked, the passengers are apparently all innocents.

    So that leaves the possibility that Mh370 suffered some kind of mechanical failure or fire. But that doesn’t explain why it would fly for 7 further hours.

    Why isn’t anyone daring to question the validity of the Inmarsat Data?

  38. Yes, great write up, Jeff.

    Another miracle is of course the fact that Inmarsat had only recently started to log the additional (BTO) data. This purportedly as a result of the AF447 crash.
    Inmarsat’s reasoning behind this is questionable: Allegedly they were unable to provide much information to the AF447 investigating team at the time, so they decided to start storing additional data, “on the hunch” that it might be helpful in future investigations. This even though there was no such problem for flight AF447 as its ACARS was still operational – reporting its exact position – when it went down.
    Then, only after the MH370 crash did they assemble a team to try and figure out whether the additional data was of any real help, doing the math they could have prepared around the time of the upgrade. In the end the additional data was helpful only because the satellite was wobbly.
    On top of all that, one of the key members of Inmarsat team suddenly died.

    From an interview with Mark Dickinson, then vice president of satellite operations at Inmarsat:

    The fact that this data was available was thanks to additional storage capacity Inmarsat had incorporated during its ground network upgrade in 2013. This, in turn, was a direct result of the company’s involvement in the search for Air France 447 flight in 2009, where 229 people lost their lives. While Inmarsat was not directly involved in this investigation, the company took steps to store more data fields with the thought that this information could prove valuable in the future.

    “We added the BTO values to the GES logs that we stored following our experience with AF447. When we took this decision, we did not know precisely how it might be useful but we had a hunch and decided to make the investment. So we went through an upgrade process on our software for all of our ground stations so that we could record this information. This rolled out in Perth last year,” Dickinson says. “If it wasn’t for that upgrade, we would not have had the relevant data and hence the range rings that we, and the international investigation team, were able to construct.”

    (https://www.aviationtoday.com/2014/12/01/inmarsat-exec-talks-about-operators-role-in-search-for-mh370/)

  39. Jeff Wise, could it then be possible that MH 370 was accidentally brought down by a missile during a live military trainning that took place in the vicinity of the area where the plane went down? This might imply a massive cover up to avoid a potential backlash against those countries involved in the military trainning?

  41. Mh370 could have been flown to Diego Garcia and then later used in place of Mh12. A perfect and simple way to dispose of the plane. The Ukraine officer said the bodies were in an advanced state of decomposition. The ID numbers of the two aircraft were very similar and could easily be altered. Did anyone check the wreckage of Mh12 to ascertain if the ID had been tampered with.
    If not, why not. It should be done to rule out the possibility of a switch.
    Almost the perfect crime..

  42. @Ray, Unfortunately, that theory doesn’t fit the data that we have. Also, the bodies found after the crash of MH17 were not in an advanced state of decomposition.

  45. That doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen in that manner.
    It was reported the bodies were in an advanced state of decomposition.
    Jeff, you are the first person I have heard from to say they weren’t. I’m not saying they were, I wasn’t there.
    I got the impression from your article that the data could have been falsified.
    The plane hasn’t been located after an extensive search, the wreckage could have been planted to make it look as though it went into the ocean..
    For a thorough investigation the wreckage of Mh12 should be checked to rule out the possibility of a switch.
    That is if it is still available to be checked.
    Thank you for replying.
    I think all avenues of investigation should be followed through to completion regardless of what any data or other evidence shows.
    As was stated in your article, there is only a very small group of people with the expertise capable of carrying out this crime and therefore any deception to cover it up.
    Just offering a humble opinion.
    Thanks Jeff.

  46. @ Jeff @ all

    Merry Christmas Jeff, Merry Christmas guys, and my ‘Wow!’ comment was a reference to the ET signal received by the Big Ear telescope many decades ago. This article reminded me of that haha

    @ Ed Dentzel

    In the last 5 years have there been any mysterious or unexplained or suspicious deaths in the satellite communications community?

    ‘Mysterious/unexplained/suspicious’ and ‘satellite communications’ – how strange that (although beyond the last 5 years) the one case that jumps out for me is the bizarre murder of Sa’ad al Hilli and his family in the French Alps in 2012.

  47. Great article @Jeff
    Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all.
    (Re: the flaperon… I don’t buy that it was from MH370… not for a single second. Like you said, Jeff… smoke and mirrors. Now let me just pull a flapperon that doesn’t quite match out of my hat.)

  48. Only “suspicious” death in the satellite community that jumps out at me is James Fairbairn. He worked at Inmarsat & had an heart attack. This is obituary:

    FAIRBAIRN Stuart James Suddenly, but peacefully, in Uxbridge, Middlesex on 17th March 2014

  50. I’m not sure that “Hacked” was a fact either. Maybe imagination is a bit harsh though. Informed opinion might be a better term…

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