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.
@Ed, funny you should ask what the #1 music hit in the US was the first week of August 1970. It was “I am leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again” by John Denver, who himself died when piloting a plane.
No just kidding.
Merry Christmas all.
It is no secret that MH 370 was intercepted by Fighter Jets. Reasonable to suppose that the Interceptors could shed some light on the mystery. The GovetrGovernments
@Jeff
You have received another mention at:
https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/1057680/MH370-news-latest-missing-Malaysia-Airlines-plane-debris-boat
One of the things that bugged me about the air searches at the time, and still does, is that, even though two thirds of the planet is ocean, there are virtually no flying boats or seaplanes with decent range and ocean going capability any more. Those few that do exist can be counted on your fingers and toes, (16 to be precise – see below) and none of them were available anywhere below the equator at the time, and still aren’t.
The crucial SAR requirement in any Ocean SAR operation, is to be able to get to, and RECOVER, survivors and/or floating wreckage / debris “in a hurry”.
Having a whole bunch of Orions or any other “dry feet” aircraft go out and search is all well and good, but the “R” part of SAR is “Recovery”.
We don’t, and can’t do RECOVERY in a timely manner any more, BECAUSE we don’t have any ocean capable aircraft any more. Ships, unless they just happen to be close by, are simply too slow, way too slow.
Today, with the exception of the operational Beriev Be-200 Altair (of which only 14 were built, along with only 2 of the Beriev A-40 Albatros, from which it was developed) there is nothing in the aviation world with anything remotely comparable to the operational ocean capabilities of the great flying boats of the 1930’s 1940’s and 1950’s. The last Short Sandringham service by Ansett Airlines of Australia, to Lord Howe Island and back to Rose Bay in Sydney, was in 1974, and I was there to sadly watch the end of an era.
There are some turboprop flying boats in China and Japan, but they are few in number, and really only experimental now, although the new Chinese Flying Boat, the AVIC AG600 looks promising.
The next time something like an MH370 event occurs, those Beriev’s should be mobilised immediately.
@Billy, @ Jeff,
We have learned a great deal about Russian behavior in the last two years, far more than, you, Jeff, could have been aware of when you first raised the idea of a hijacking as a media diversion from the invasion of Crimea, which, to your credit, it certainly turned out to be–even if a media diversion is only part of the story, as seems likely to me.
From disinformation and blackmail to active measures and the assassination of political opposition to the use of mercenaries to shield Kremlin directed military action (such as in the Ukraine and in Syria) much has been revealed about means, methods and rationale. We know now, too, that the Russian mafia and the Putin state are essentially one and the same and that money laundering, large investment of criminally generated money and theft of resources are common.
We’re aware today that this is all part of the Gerasimov Doctrine, which Russian state media now openly discusses as part of the destabilization of Western democracies. Search for Russian MP Andrey Svintsov on Channel One for confirmation of active Russian asymmetric war, or, Jeff, as you say in your response to Billy, “hybrid war.”
That, hybrid war, is to me as good a start at teasing out motive as could be asked for. A diversion as part of the restoration of the historical CCCP boundaries that simultaneously tests the Western alliance. A threat for invested money missing from 1MDB. A rebuke to Chinese expansion, an assassination of technologists, a threat of more to come directed at knowing intelligence agencies, all of these are possible, just as the shoot down of MH17 could have been a set up, a second warning to Malaysians, a proxy attack on Dutch intelligence agency AIVD for digitally poking around Russian hacking operations and so on.
Is any of this any less believable than a Russian president pulling the strings of an American president in a way that suggests he works for him more than any ally or Western liberalism or the American people themselves?
@Michael John, your statement, “…the passengers are all apparently innocents.” I don’t believe we’ve ever gotten satisfactory information on the two rather martial looking ethnic-Russian Ukranians, other than that they both happened to be in the furniture business–not unlike Maria Butina.
Jeff, it’s been quite awhile and much has happened in the world since I last posted an MH370 comment on your blog. Regardless of what any of us might still believe about plane and its 239 souls, I do wish, as 2018 draws to a close, to commend your intuition when it came to Russia.
I will admit to absolute boob-grade ignorance regarding Putin right up through roughly the summer of 2016. For whatever reason, I just didn’t have him on my radar.
You, on the other hand, were on him like white on rice. And regardless of whether or not you are ever actually proven right about Russian involvement in MH370, my hat’s off to you for being the first guy I ever saw to approach Putin and his regime appropriately in print. I mean, here is aviation writer Jeff Wise, out on a limb, fingering Putin out of nowhere to almost universal ridicule, and then six months later, 100% evidence implicating Putin in the OTHER Malaysian 777.
Doubters. Coincidence. Flaperons. People like me telling you the Russia thing was bonkers.
Then, just two years later, Putin pulls off a coup that lands him in control of the entire US Government. That same guy Jeff Wise was screaming about with the Malaysia thing two years earlier?
I’m sure I’m not the only one applauding your prescience on Russia. Sadly, I have to assume whatever satisfaction you might derive gets rather lost in the knowledge of how heinous the overall situation is.
I still believe Shah did the deed in the SIO so this is not a “mea culpa.” More of an “admiror te.” What I mean by that is this:
You were so right about Russia, it doesn’t really matter if they took MH370. What does matter is that the West start ACTING like the Russians took MH370.
Here’s to 2019!
@Scott O
The “the two rather martial looking ethnic-Russian Ukranians” may not have been Russian state actors. However they may have generated enough concern within the Kremlin to order the shoot down of 9M-MRD as a warning shot that 9M-MRO was not to be used in a 9/11 event against Mother Russia.
As you sort of point out another way of solving the 9M-MRO mystery is the unraveling of 1MDB fund which is progressing within the US Justice Department. Increasingly it seems these events are on the same page.
“…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.”
Can you elaborate on this reasoning? It jumps over some background on the BFO I can’t recall. Thanks, and keep up the great work!
@SteveBarratt, I’m not sure I follow the logic in shooting down an innocent plane to prevent the use of a weaponized plane at some point in the future.
It provokes many questions, the first being, where would 9M-MRO have been positioned to allow for a later attack on Russia?
How would it have evaded Russian air defenses?
Where is that plane now?
If the goal was to attack Russia, why use a rogue flight when you could use–as was done on 9/11–a regularly scheduled flight whose path would take it near the desired target and only require a very short diversion from that path to hits its mark? That surely would attract less attention.
In fact, if you were a Ukrainian looking to wage terror style counterattacks against the Russians over the invasion of Crimea, why not use 9M-MRD itself as the weapon? The usual flight path of 9M-MRD/MH17 took it just minutes away from Crimea and directly over more legitimate Russian territory east of the Sea of Azov, including such cities as Rostov-on-Don and Krasnodar as well as many military bases.
As for 1MDB, I would not bet on it being the only trigger, but it certainly seems more relevant to MH-370 now that we know the extent of Russian money laundering and its emerging alliances and investments with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, who, in turn, were heavily invested in 1MDB and so had much to gain in making sure the return of stolen money was guaranteed.
@Scott O, JW
Nice rebuttal, very passionate, but I still am not convinced as to why you would create a media diversion, only to involve MH17 4 months later and bring the conflict back into the news again with more attention. And then furthermore, not introduce the debris on to the shores for such a long time that is intended to dupe everyone. The diversion, if that were the intent, would have been well enough to have been left alone without introducing any debris, and without shooting down another airplane in a war zone.
So I’m cool with with theories of data tampering, I think Jeff might be on to something there worth looking in to, but I’m not so sure media diversion and MH 17 should be tied into it (for many reasons). So I’m hoping there is another motive out there worth exploring.
big fan of the blog and lots of respect for JW.
@Jeff
Is another possibility for the “miracle” re-login that someone was trying to turn it back on?
For example, plane is hijacked, goes dark, cockpit is inaccessible. Maybe one of the pilots (now locked out of the cockpit) spends the next hour trying to get communications systems back online to raise the alarm. Maybe, as you suggested in a previous post, they go into avionics through the first class access hatch.
This culminates an hour later in them managing to get the SDU online, but nothing else. Maybe a hijacker stopped them at that point?
While it would make the SDU signal slightly less miraculous, I’d be interested in knowing if that is a likely scenario; or if it is likely that some other observable communications would have come on as well in this scenario.
@Chris, It’s been suggested that the captain locked the co-pilot out, and that the co-pilot then went into the E/E bay and started pulling circuit breakers. It’s certainly not impossible. The point, though, is that whatever scenario we come up with has to be made to fit after the fact to explain an unprecedented turn of events.
@John Mitchell, The reason that the BFO signal contains navigation information is due to a process called Doppler precompensation. Thales-made SDUs try to cancel out Doppler shift caused by the plane’s motion relative to the satellite by calculating the relative velocity and then shifting the transmission frequency by that amount. If the algorithm used were correct, then the BFO value would be zero and hence would provide to clue as to where the plane was or where it was heading. However, the algorithm erroneously assumed that the satellite was stationary. Its error gives us some clues about how the plane was moving.
@Matt Moriarty, Thanks very much, I really appreciate your kind words.
@billy, Thanks!
@Scott O, Didn’t know Maria Butina was involved in the furniture biz too, thanks for the tip!
@Jeff, I don’t have the source currently—perhaps the Washington Post?—but one of the more absurd parts of her back story is that she owned seven or eight furniture stores at about age 21 before she decided to give them up to become a publicist in Moscow where she coincidently met Alexander Torshin and founded a gun right group in a country where there are no gun rights and named it after language in the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, only to give that up, too, for university in Washington D.C. of all places. It makes me wonder if furniture makes for a good legend because it’s not so interesting as to provoke a lot of questions but is common enough to all of us to be able to discuss in passing conversation.
@Scott O, That line in your comment really jumped out at me because a Russian-American researcher who specializes in the Russian mob had just told me that furniture companies are an almost clichéd cover for organized crime.
@Billy
I appreciate your skepticism and, of course, I can’t claim to understand how all of the pieces perfectly fit together, but that does not mean they do not.
Perhaps there is a close link. Perhaps the Russians really believed the Ukrainians would be blamed for downing a civilian airliner instead of them, and it was just coincidence that it was another Malaysian aircraft. Perhaps the debris is from a legitimate crash but one not the result of pilot suicide or mechanical failure in the South Indian Ocean. There is still much to know.
But I will say this: before the Special Counsel investigation, the Steele dossier and other reporting, would we have connected Eastern European bot farms creating support for Bernie Sanders, Russian support of Black Lives Matter counterprotesters in Ferguson, Missouri and agitation of young male Incel groups online, Alfa Bank computers communicating with Spectrum Health servers and the National Enquirer speculating incessantly on the imminent death of Hilary Clinton, all as part of one sprawling, concerted effort?
@Scott O
Thanks for your comments which are appreciated. 9/11 was so many standard deviations off the mean that it can really be only attempted once. Let alone all the security now in place its a state of knowing in the populace that makes replication difficult.
Hijack a plane, land it and weaponise for a target in the next few weeks is sufficiently different for it to be successful. Of course ISAT data would need to be faked leading to a search elsewhere, in the belief of a more innocent explanation.
Ukrainian furniture experts on the passenger list of 9M-MRO may have raised alarms within the Kremlin. I don’t know. Whether this justifies a warning message by shooting down 9M-MRD is debatable. Ask the citizens of Grozny. Russians are pretty passionate about Mother Russia.
An interest of mine in my youth was Operation Barbarossa and the Russian front in general. There is a passion, strength of feeling that is almost limitless.
I note your comments on 1MDB and I agree with all of them.
@Jeff, regarding cliches—and with the belief that it would take a very, very thin wedge in order to separate the Russian mob and the Russian government—I’ve heard a former intelligence officer and current writer/analyst say that creativity is not what will win the war for the Kremlin, as it lacks that, but rather the West and particularly America’s gullibility when it comes to “coincidences” and refussal to see the truth behind certain patterns. Surely the furniture business is just the first of many of them.
@Jeff Wise:
Love the new look of your website Jeff, and I think you are spot-on about the MH370 magical mystery tour which we, the members of the audience, have been subjected to. From the start, this was an obvious false flag event to black-wash the Malaysian Government and damage their ever closer relationships with China. The 1MDB affair is also part of this long-term project to try to stop China’s growing domination of this resources rich region.
‘Thales-made SDUs (to) try to cancel out Doppler shift caused by the plane’s motion relative to the satellite by calculating the relative velocity and then shifting the transmission frequency by that amount”
Pretty much answered the question I didn’t know I was looking to ask. Cheers Jeff. I believe that the BFO Data is the transmission frequency shift. As you so often point out. I don’t understand how the system works. But I am getting there….. Slowly. Let me ask a question:
“Doppler shift caused by the plane’s motion relative to the satellite by calculating the relative velocity and then shifting the transmission frequency by that amount”
Why not just take the aircraft’s current location in relation to the satellite & shift the transmission frequency in accordance? Wouldn’t that be more accurate then trying to work out it’s position using velocity?
@Scott O., 100%
@Michael John, You wrote, “Why not just take the aircraft’s current location in relation to the satellite & shift the transmission frequency in accordance?” The algorithm starts with the satellite’s position and absolute velocity (that is to say, in relation to some fixed coordinate system) and the airplane’s position and absolute velocity, and uses these to calculate their relative velocity. I don’t know what you mean by “work out its posiiton using velocity” but the system doesn’t do anything like this.
Oooops I may have that comment redacted. Again. Evidently I misunderstood the statement. Pretty much a fault of being a Native English speaker. Sometimes there is a mutitude of meaning behind certain words & it is understanding which of these meanings is the correct 1.
Thus my point -2 stationary at KLA (No movement in relation to 3F1) then around 180 at ACARS & again 200 at SCS. So basically the SDU compensates for the aircraft’s velocity (Doppler Shift) by using a new frequency at each transmission point in accordance to the aircrafts location to the satellite.
“If the algorithm used were correct, then the BFO value would be zero and hence would provide to clue as to where the plane was or where it was heading. However, the algorithm erroneously assumed that the satellite was stationary. Its error gives us some clues about how the plane was moving”
The algorithm was correct. It was 0 at KLA & we are able to understand it’s heading. The Doppler on board Mh370 corrected the “wobble” of 3F1 & also compensated for the Velocity or motion (Doppler) shift of Mh370. Thus giving the changes in frequency of the transmission signals. On the ground at KLA the Hz was 0. The satellite was stationary. At least as far as the data goes it was. Mh370 taxied. Moved away from the satellite so the SDU drops the frequency to minus 2. As the aircraft climbed away from KLA the SDU compensated the velocity stabilizing both the Satellites wobble & the aircraft’s movement thus giving a new frequency in accordance with a specific location. This happened again in the SCS. As the aircraft turned back towards the Malacca Strait the SDU compensated for that reduction by dropping the Hz. We can verify this theory. Take a look at the BFO Data. In reverse. As Mh370 climber away from KLA the Hz increased rapidly. Tapered at the SCS then dropped steadily as the aircraft crossed the Malay peninsula & across the Malacca Strait.
You don’t believe me Jeff. Neither do the IG. That’s fine. But you really should talk to ISAT directly about what I say. I’m confident they will validate my point. In the meantime. Censor away.
@Michael John, The seventh circle of MH370 hell is reserved for people who decide that they know better than Thales and the DSTG how to interpret BFO values.
If you don’t understand me. I will put it into a picture. Hopefully this will clarify my point.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ru5FU2Fjxo787KfinqfgbMjEmq2sWJsYLA/view?usp=drivesdk
It’s not about how the principle works Jeff. It’s not about understanding the concept. It is about looking at the bigger picture.
In this image I have overlayed the full BFO chart. All I’m asking is you look at it. Read the data backwards. 0 is KLA. You will see how my point above works. From 0 at KLA you have 3 points. KLA- ACARS- SCS. All increases. Then as the aircraft crosses the Malay peninsula & the Malacca Strait there are decreases. Whether it is just an uncanny coincedence this happens or not is another matter. Maybe you can understand better than I can why this works as it does. All I know is that the BFO provides a footprint for Mh370. My attitude on that will never change.
[Post redacted for containing misinformation/JW]
@Scott O.
@Jeff Wise
So … any “furniture experts” on MH17 ? What were the passengers on this one up to ? Has anyone looked into this ?
@Jeff Wise
I understand that you are leaning towards Russian involvement. But have you considered anything regarding the United States interest I’m preventing China from receiving sensitive techinologal equipment being smuggled out of Malaysia.
Their were several employees of Huawei on the plane, not to mention the Freescale employees and the mysterious cargo. The US is intensifying it’s attacks on Huawei, even arresting its employees. Is it smart to think that the US Navy or Air Force would not have detected this plane during its 8 hour journey?
Also, a US Air Force General took a top position at Inmarsat in March of 2014.
Science, BFO l, and debris drift aside, Does anyone suspect that the western coalition (US, UK, Canada) prevented the plane from carrying its cargo and occupants to China? Like a rendition.
@Petra, Yes, the two Ukrainians aboard the plane co-owned a furniture factory/store called Nika Mebel. It had a web site but no landline or address. If you wanted to order a piece of furniture you had to call a cell phone, and then pay cash once it was delivered. According to the men’s lawyer, each was clearing $2 million per year.
@L. Rush, You can’t solve a crime by thinking up who might have had what motive. You have to look at the evidence and see what sequence of events they portray.
@Michael John, It looks like you’re deliberately trolling now so I’m going to hand-approve all your posts from now on.
@Jeff, @Petra
Jeff, unless I’ve missed something, I believe you meant to say the ethic Russian Ukrainians were aboard MH370, not MH17.
Petra, I wouldn’t imagine a pro-Russian Ukrainian aboard MH17 except by accident. The suggestion here is that such actors with respect to MH370 could be hihackers. Putting hijackers aboard an aircraft you intend to shoot out of the sky with a missile doesn’t make sense. Of course we now know that pro-Russian Ukrainians if not Russians themselves did fire that missile.
@Scott O., Yes, of course you’re right, I read too quickly.
@SteveBarratt,
Responding to your comment on passion and to follow on a comment I made to Jeff Wise, Westerners don’t always appreciate the circumstances and experiences that make the Slavic mind different from theirs. Certainly that was seen in World War II in the aftermath of Barbarossa, where human life may have not been measured with the same value east of the front as it was to the west. Your comment reminded me of the Russian strategy of marching its own soldiers across minefields as a method of clearing the way for there troops and armor. When one’s own people can be treated thus, what the Russians did to Grozny (at many different times in history) doesn’t seem so extreme–though I’d call that city and the surrounding republic less Mother Russia and more an Unwilling Adoptee.
Sorry, I must have done something wrong. My comment does no go through ?
How does the new logon happen at 1825 with no identification? The signals sent to Inmarsat had no flight information to id the plane.
How hard is it to create a fake data set of bto and bfo values? Were the values given by Inmarsat reasonable or were they contradictory or questionable in any way? Could you plot a course from the last radar contact and place the plane in a remote location by using a made up series? What did Fairborn specialize in with Inmarsat?
@Scott O. & @Jeff
Let me elaborate on my scenario. I am thinking we could glean more about MH370 by looking closer at MH17. Assuming it’s not a coincidence that such tragic losses occurred to the same airline in such a short time & the bizarre details are about the same 2 countries. This one has the excuse that it flew over a war zone. It has closure & no one is interested in it anymore. It’s a job done right.
Maybe those 2 probable agents on MH370 weren’t on the best terms with their employer or were carrying something so important (info in their heads) to their employer & had to be stopped by another party even at the cost of other hundreds of lives. What if they were the target ? So what could have anyone wanted from MH17, the one shot over Ukraine, coincidently the home of the 2 mysterious fellows on the first plane ? What brought the other one down ? The motives for not intercepting MH370 in time are ridiculous. Plus the appearance of this magic ISAT data. And the search for debris headed by someone with links to Russia.
I know, why not stop them on the ground & have to bring down planes. It’s just unbelievable that there are so many countries involved & can’t gather between them another couple hundred millions / year to continue searching the SIO. It’s obvious no one wants it found or everyone knows it not there anyway. It doesn’t look like Boeing is making to much of a fuss either.
What I am suggesting to you, as I don’t have any means, is to look for links to Russia / Ukraine for those on MH17 too or even better – what if the folks at ISAT have part time jobs at furniture companies. Arguing about coordinates on an ocean sure keeps us busy. Maybe we can crowdfund to get ourselves a wistleblower ?
@Trip
Read on radar coverage for the area. Indonesia & Australia. The BFO & BTO are not corroborated by radar. At least in the press they said they hadn’t seen the plane where it supposedly went.
@Michael John
This theory would be consistent with the sighting made by the woman returning from pilgrimage. That she saw a plane under water in that area but was
laughed off. If the pilots wanted indeed to land at Penang or Langkawi and started a go around maneuver but were incapacitated and didn’t make it and the plane ran out of fuel right there, off the coast of Malaysia, during the go around or higher up to the Andamans, or there even wasn’t a go around –
remember the Lido image ? – but what would explain the later hours of supposed time in the air ?
I am asking – it is possible that the figures in the BTO & BFO could be generated by the plane loitering ? Maybe there was indeed a glide at the end of fuel exhaustion & the plane remained afloat for those hours & transmitted those numbers – but from the north of Sumatra ? The indonesians insisted that they hadn’t seen it on radar even though they should have if it had made the FMT over there. The faulty satellite, the faulty SDU ? Anyone know about the state of the ground station ? These people hand over a piece of paper with some numbers & we just believe that they were generated by that equipment ? Okay, end of scifi writing for today.
JeffW- The re-logon at 1825 would be a mini-miracle only if it was unintentional. But if the tech saavy pilot at least knew there would be a logon to the Inmarsat global satellite network, the action could be considered an intentional message to the world that MH370 was a diverted flight. Also the apparent climb to FL430+ after IGARI was high enough to paint a radar blip on regional radar screens, not really an evasive tactic as has been previously suggested by many.
We are expecting a hijacker to claim responsiblity. And I believe he did indeed claim responsibility, opting for a non-verbal approach. The purpose of the non-verbal approach was probably plausible deniability of the crime.
The intended victim of this scheme was obviously the unpopular Prime Minister Najib Razak, who nonetheless made some great “chess moves” by not acknowledging the pilot’s apparent motives and plot.
@TBill, You wrote “The re-logon at 1825 would be a mini-miracle only if it was unintentional.” It’s extremely important to understand that normal commercial pilots did not at that time know about the existence of the SDU. To suggest that the re-logon of the SDU was intentional is to imply the involvement of actors several levels of technical sophistication above even the most experienced airline captain.
@Jeff Wise: I don’t know what went wrong, but my comment is stuck. Can you clear it ?
@TBill
An alternative explanation of the data set sees Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah as the victim and Prime Minister Najib Razak as a perpetrator.
Jeff you are correct about your ideas. I know the why and where of the MH370 but who will recognize me? Ocean Infinity, No, You, maybe? We can talk if you want. contact at my email please
Vernon
@Niu Yunu, I’m not sure what comment you’re referring to, your last two comments have posted without problem–why don’t you try again?
Jeff you are correct with your ideas and I know the secrets why and exactly where the plane is. Well, so who will recognize me, ocean infinity, nope, who then? You? If you want, we can talk, Happy New Year, Vernon