William Langewiesche is a titan among aviation journalists. He has covered, in depth, some of the most important air disasters of our time for outlets such as the Atlantic and Vanity Fair. He also has extensive experience as a professional pilot. His credibility on the subject of aviation is, in a word, unmatched. So when he turned his hand to the greatest aviation mystery of our time — the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 — there was every reason to hope that he would bring some clarity, at last, to a story fogbound in confusion.
The 10,000 word Atlantic cover story posted on June 17, however, did not accomplish that. Langewiesche writes evocatively, and he wrangles a mountain of information, but he falls victim to a siren temptress: the yearning for a concise and reasonable solution to a deep mystery.
“The simple story is usually the right one,” Langewiesche told me, during one of the many conversations we had while he researched the project. Having immersed myself in the technical arcana of this story for more than five years — first as a CNN contributor, then as a freelancer for New York, Popular Mechanics, and other outlets — I tried to show him that no simple answer can be made to fit the thicket of contradictory evidence that has grown since MH370 vanished on March 8, 2014 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. As the saying goes, “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” In the case of MH370, Langewiesche arrives at a solution that requires ignoring or dismissing whole categories of evidence.
It’s not a new solution. Langewiesche hitches his wagon to what has become the default, commonsense explanation, the one which the international authorities responsible for the search have implicitly held — the captain did it. This is a reasonable first pass at a theory of MH370. Since the plane was clearly taken by someone who knew what they were doing, and the only other person locked in the cockpit was the inexperienced first officer Fariq Abdul Hamid, then it must have been Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah who purposefully turned the plane around and flew it off into the darkness until it ran out of fuel and crashed in the remote ocean. Case closed.
Ah, but already we run into problems. Why would Zaharie, a financially comfortable suburban dad whose hobbies included making instructional home-repair videos, spontaneously decide to kill not just himself but all 238 other crew and passengers on the plane? Langewiesche acknowledges that there is no clear evidence Zaharie was psychologically capable of such an act, but then gets around this by invoking malevolent forces that must have hushed such evidence up. Langewiesche declares that the Malaysian government was “the most corrupt in the region” and “furtive, fearful, and unreliable in its investigation of the flight.” In his telling, the absence of evidence is taken as proof of a massive cover-up.
To be sure, Malaysia is not Switzerland. It is a still-developing country where overall levels of professionalism and competence can leave something to be desired — a fact that colored the country’s response to the airplane’s disappearance. In particular, the Malaysian military has been only intermittently forthcoming about its radar detection of MH370, and to this day has not revealed all its data. But there is no evidence that the authorities carried out a deliberate whitewash of the overall investigation.
Langewiesche says of the 495-page final Malaysian report that “nothing in the report was of technical value” and that it “was stuffed with boilerplate descriptions of 777 systems.” This is flatly untrue. The report contains a great deal of previously unreleased technical information, including detailed descriptions and analysis of recovered debris, revelatory information about the plane’s cargo, and an exhaustive examination of the plane’s divergence from its planned flight path.
True, this particular report does not go into great detail about the captain’s background, but we know from a leaked report that the police did spend considerable effort looking for any evidence of guilt. According to an internal document not intended to be seen by the public, they were unable to find any.
There are other, more technical, reasons to doubt that Zaharie was the perpetrator. A whole subset of them hinge around the fact that after someone on MH370 turned all the electronic communications devices off, they turned one back on — an obscure piece of equipment called the Satellite Data Unit, or SDU. After the role of this device came to light, I asked several experienced 777 pilots if they knew how to turn an SDU off and on again. They all responded with variations of: “What on earth is an SDU?”
Langewiesche speculates that perhaps the reboot happened because Zaharie turned off all the plane’s electronics, including the circuit the SDU was on, in order to reduce the electrical load on the engines and thereby hasten his getaway. I find this a very hard idea to swallow, and I doubt that any pilot has ever deliberately done such a thing. Doing so would improve one’s performance by a miniscule amount, at the expense of crippling the aircraft in multiple ways. A rough terrestrial analogy would be turning off your headlights on a dark highway to make your car go faster.
Though technically arcane, the SDU reboot is a crucial part of the MH370 mystery, because it was the reboot that led to the six hours of electronic pings that for the first year after the disappearance were the only clues investigators had as to where the plane had gone. Occurring a mere three minutes after the plane flitted out of Malaysian military radar coverage, the reboot put the plane in a bizarre, perhaps unprecedented, electrical configuration. This configuration resulted, by astonishing coincidence, in signals that encoded in a clear but unverifiable way just where the plane was going. (Unverifiable, in the sense that the data did not encode GPS data or other clues that could confirm the validity of the clue.) No plane has ever left this particular kind of electronic breadcrumb trail before, and none ever will again.
Yet investigators accepted the data unquestioningly. They discerned quickly that it fell into two main types. The first, which Langewiesche called “distance value,” allowed them to reconstruct the route that the plane must have followed — or rather, a pair of equally valid solutions, one leading off to the southern ocean, the other Kazakhstan. The second, dubbed by Langewiesche “Doppler value,” indicated that the southern route was the correct one. Hence, investigators had a route and an endpoint. They knew where to find the plane.
One problem: When they looked there, they didn’t find the plane. So they doubled the search area. No dice. They doubled it again, to an area the size of Great Britain. Still nothing. Langewiesche dismisses this failure as inconsequential, saying that “even a narrow swath of the ocean is a big place.” This misses the point. While the ocean is indeed a big place, far too big to probe in its entirety, the data pointed towards a portion of the ocean that was indeed searchable. Electronic signals are mathematical entities which can be analytically deciphered to a calculable degree of precision. Those sent from MH370 indicated that it was in a certain, searchable area of the ocean. It was not. The signals lied.
But how can signals lie?
The fact that the signals contained erroneous information leads, as I see it, to only one possible explanation: it was deliberately corrupted by someone. As it turns out, only planes of a particular type, carrying a particular kind of SDU, on a particular kind of flight path, flying under a particular kind of satellite, and subscribing to a particular level of Inmarsat service, would have been vulnerable to this kind of tampering. MH370 met all these criteria. It’s impossible to say what percentage of planes share the vulnerability, but it can only be a small number. This should have been a red flag for investigators.
As a journalist following the case from the beginning, this certainly was a major red flag for me. It spurred me to consult with technical experts, who said that while part of the signal data could readily be hacked from aboard the plane, other parts could not. This remaining data was enough to generate an approximate flight track indicating that the plane would have traveled north and wound up in Kazakhstan, a Central Asian autocracy that functions as a client state of Russia.
As it happened, just before the disappearance Russia had staged a “hybrid war” invasion of Ukraine that combined standard military assault with information warfare overseen by the GRU (Russian military intelligence). Four months later, the GRU shot down MH370’s sister airplane, MH17, over Eastern Ukraine. The fact that only 15 planes out of the 15,000 or so commercially registered around the world were Malaysia Airlines 777–200s, and that two of them had come to grief in such a short span of time, seemed too unlikely to be mere coincidence. Digging deeper, I found that there had been three Russians onboard MH370, including one whose daughter later wrote on social media that her father was “alive and well.” As I later would write in my book, The Taking of MH370, the mass of evidence taken together strongly suggested that the plane had been hijacked by Russia.
To be sure, this proposition raises the inevitable question: Why? The unsatisfying answer is, we just don’t know. But the evidence that Russia was heavily involved in the destruction MH17 is all but ironclad, and no other definitive explanation for MH370 has yet emerged. The best guess I can come up with is that Russia had decided to embark on a broad, aggressive attack against the West, and these two actions fit into an overall plan that included subverting the Brexit vote, tampering with the U.S. presidential election, poisoning the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain, and much else.
I explained this all to Langewiesche in the course of our many discussions. He rejected it out of hand. One of his objections was that if the plane went north instead of south, then the debris later pulled from the ocean must have been placed there deliberately. That sounds like conspiracy talk — but there is substantial overlapping evidence that this was actually the case. Despite supposedly drifting in the ocean for years, for instance, none of the recovered debris pieces had marine life more than a month or two old. But Langewiesche finds the idea of planting evidence inconceivable — mainly, it seems, because a large proportion of the debris was found by an American named Blaine Alan Gibson. And here, I think, is where his story really goes off the rails.
Gibson is an odd bird, even in Langewiesche’s generous telling. A man with no visible means of support, he travels the world dressed like Indiana Jones, pursuing ancient mysteries and receiving signs from dolphins. Yet for some reason he turns out to be the only human on Earth able to go looking for pieces of MH370 and find them. Indeed, more than half of the recovered debris pieces that have been gathered have been collected by him, personally. Twice, he has performed the feat — a feat that no one on Earth has been able to pull off, no matter how long they’ve been looking (and many people have been looking) — while TV cameras were rolling. I don’t think there’s even a word for how unlikely that is.
Gibson loves to spin yarns about his past adventures, but he is guarded about his particulars. He claims, without evidence, that people have threatened to kill him for his debris-collecting. But if you care to dig there is a lot that you can learn about him — none of it included in Langewiesche’s story. Most interesting to me, given that the multiple neon arrows pointing at Russia, is that Gibson is a fluent Russian speaker who for three decades was the owner of a company called Siberia Pacific, which he founded, with two Russians from Kemerovo Oblast, in 1992.
Langewiesche spends an enormous chunk of his piece talking about Gibson, but doesn’t mention his Russia connections at all. He restricts himself to an uncritical telling of Gibson’s version of events, and that, more than anything else in the Atlantic story, is frustrating to me. Langewiesche first got involved in the topic because I reached out to him in 2017 hoping he’d help me get to the bottom of some curious claims that Gibson had made about a particular piece of debris. In a Facebook post, Gibson had said that locals had handed a piece to him after he visited a village and asked if they had anything that looked like wreckage. Later, he told an independent researcher that he had been visiting the village and saw a 7-year-old girl fanning a cooking fire with it. Then, he told someone else that he had spotted it while having breakfast at his pension; the owner’s daughter had opened a drawstring toy bag, and there it was.
Why was he telling contradictory stories? I wanted to find out, but knew that someone else would have to do the asking. I had been in text communication with Gibson for a long time, and interviewed him over the phone for a New York story in 2016, but he stopped communicating with me after I voiced some of my suspicions about his discoveries on my blog. I figured that given his insatiable appetite for media attention it would be impossible for him to turn down Langewiesche. And so it proved .(Gibson did not respond to a request for comment.)
Many twists and turns later, Langewiesche flew to Malaysia and spent several days hanging out with Gibson. Instead of sorting out his tangled past, Langewiesche fell under Gibson’s spell. The two had long, free-flowing chats. Langewiesche came away convinced that Gibson was an earnest soul.
In the end, of course, if Gibson really is an innocent free spirit who has dedicated his whole adult life, as Langewiesche apparently believes, to the cause of visiting as many countries as he can and “forgoing any chance of a sustained career and subsisting on a modest inheritance,” then his story has really no material bearing on the mystery of MH370 at all. He’s just a lucky eccentric who found a bunch of pieces that don’t really tell us much about what happened to the plane.
If, on the other hand, Gibson made his money as a legal consultant in Russia, as he told a journalist a few years ago, and if his area of professional expertise was the legal restrictions surrounding “secret cities” (i.e. those with nuclear power plants like Chernobyl), as a National Academies document indicates, then maybe he plays an important part in the story after all.
An advantage to being a literary lion is that your authority does a lot of your work for you. You don’t have to detail; you can assert. Langewiesche declares, for example, that “despite theories to the contrary, control of the plane was not seized remotely from within the electrical-equipment bay, a space under the forward galley. Pages could be spent explaining why.” And that’s the end of it. One wonders: if pages could be spent explaining, could not a sentence or two in a 10,000-word story?
There is no doubt that Langewiesche is a great magazine writer who has produced classic works of journalism, but there is something inherently “small-c” conservative about people who have won renown for their sagacity. They need to believe that the world as it exists is the same one in which they earned their laurels. Complicating evidence can be overlooked or ignored. Everything, in the end, must be simple. They shall declare it so.
Note: This story originally appeared on June 28, 2019 in OneZero.
Great job Jeff. Thanks for the background – it did seem Langewiesche was uncritically under Gibson’s “spell”, so to speak.
@Jeff Wise. Nicely written as usual Jeff.
Some comments:
1. You say, “In (Langewiesche’s) telling, the absence of evidence is taken as proof of a massive cover-up”, then comment, “But there is no evidence that the authorities carried out a deliberate whitewash of the overall investigation.”
While agreeing that absence of evidence is not a proof, equally wouldn’t a perfect whitewash result in none?
2. Of the pings you comment, “Those sent from MH370 indicated that it was in a certain, searchable area of the ocean. It was not. The signals lied.”
I suggest instead that they indicated likelihoods based on interpretation of them and other evidence. While those likelihood predictions have proven wrong to date this interpretation, including weighting with the other evidence, are subject to refinement still; and the wreckage could have been missed.
Also, those likelihoods depend on the subset that there was no active pilot.
To me it does not follow yet that the evidence must have been falsified.
3. On your point that,”…none of the recovered debris pieces had marine life more than a month or two old”, I think you mean weed since one mollusc on recovered wreckage was estimated by Geoscience Australia to be aged between 8 and 12 months.
@ Jeff Wise
this is a well written and badly needed rebuttal. The Malaysians should send you a check!
Jeff, I’m slowly beginning to come around to accepting the possibility of a northern route, but only if you countenance the possibility that the aircraft landed at a previously unknown secret airfield, one that’s unrecognizable on a satellite image.
– Could such an airfield exist and go unidentified by Western Intel agencies?
Persuasive rebuttal. This seems like an example of how fear of being associated with so-called conspiracy talk can take an otherwise brilliant empirical mind, close it down to important evidence, and turn its core argument into eloquent mush. Any student of history knows that governments routinely use what in another piece you refer to as magic tricks to get away with crimes. For some reason many modern journalists and citizens assume that history, at least this strain of it, has ended. Thank you for sticking with the facts wherever they lead you.
“… particular kind of SDU …” Honeywell, widely deployed, e.g. Swiss Air, Air France.
“… on a particular kind of flight path …” any flight path flown by any jet aircraft will do.
” flying under a particular kind of satellite …” If you mean a satellite with an inclined orbit, 2 of 4 of Inmarsat’s 3-F satellite were on inclined orbits on March 2014 and all of its 4-F satellites were on inclined orbits.
“… and subscribing to a particular level of Inmarsat service …” Aero-H, used by over 11,000 aircraft worldwide, according to Inmarsat.
@AH, @CliffG, @David, @DG, Thanks!
@sk999: “…particular kind of SDU” Right, and not Rockwell Collins, also widely deployed.
“…on a particular kind of flight path…” meaning that the BFO only discriminates north from south, so it would have been useless for an east-west route. Another feature of this route is that one of mirror paths went into the remote ocean, and another went to a Russian client state (and near a large Russian base).
“flying under a particular kind of satellite…” Valid point, but Inmarsat satellites aren’t the only ones out there. Also, if the path had passed into the zone of another satellite, the ambiguity would have vanished.
“… and subscribing to a particular level of Inmarsat service…” Yes, Classic Aero rather than Swift Broadband. The latter is also widely implemented.
Among other flights that would not meet these criteria are MH17, AF447, Helios 552, etc.
We could argue about the unlikelihood that MH370 would meet all these conditions, but at least we would be addressing the fact that the existence of the MH370 data set, and the inferences that could be drawn from it, is not something that is normal for a plane to generate. This is one of the many important aspects of the case that the mainstream press has never once grappled with, up to and including this Atlantic piece.
@David,
1. It’s weird to say that the Malaysians are incompetent, but that they also pulled off a perfect whitewash.
2. The stories that you have to tell in order to get MH370 outside of the search area are quite far-fetched. BTW if the signals are real there was an active pilot at the end.
3. It’s true that there were two individual shells, out of all of the pieces of debris collected, that the marine biologists thought could be older. But there were other complications, as I discussed here: http://jeffwise.net/2018/02/08/mh370-debris-fouling-supports-spoof-scenario/
“… and not Rockwell Collins, also widely deployed” Agreed. I have no statistics on which is used more widely. At some point I read that Aeroflot used Rockwell Collins, but now it is switching to Honeywell. So it is all time-dependent.
“… Helios 552” A Boeing 737, which likely did not have a SATCOM on board. Not sure what your point is.
AF 447 – do you know what equipment was on board? The final BEA report was singularly silent. The Malaysians, to their credit, have been vastly more informative. In 2009, only aircraft communicating through the 4-F series of satellites using Honeywell equipment would have been susceptible to your “spoof” hypothesis.
MH17 – ???? The complementary flight, MH16 (mis-identified as MH21 by Inmarsat and the ATSB) was used as a validation flight by both Inmarsat and by the DSTG. From Amsterdam to the Caspian Sea, MH17 would have communicated through 3-F2, whose orbit had very low inclination at the time. However, from the Caspian Sea to Kuala Lumpur, it would have communicated through 3-F1, and the BFO behavior would have been the mirror image of MH370.
” ‘…on a particular kind of flight path…’ meaning that the BFO only discriminates north from south, so it would have been useless for an east-west route. ” So what? Once MH370 had diverted, the original flight path was completely meaningless. At 1:41 UT on Mar 8, 2014, when 3-F1 was over the equator, the error in the Doppler compensation calculation among routes of any direction (N/S or E/W, doesn’t matter) would have been zero and thus, by itself, would have been useless for determining direction. However, due to the satellite motion (not included in the Doppler compensation calculation), the BFO would have been a direct measure of latitude. Better remember to “spoof” that too or else the BFO is a dead giveaway to your position.
“Another feature of this route is that one of mirror paths went … (near a large Russian base).” If you are thinking of Yubileyniy, forget it. Boeing’s performance charts from the Malaysian SAR report show that the plane would have exhausted its fuel well before reaching the 7th arc, much less Yubileyniy, and that is before factoring in the stiff headwind that it would have encountered. If the intent was to go there, it would have required a direct route from IGARI instead of the stupid, idiotic turnback across Peninsular Malaysia. Who the heck ordered that? Instead, it would have meant dealing with the radar systems of the military powerhouses of … Thailand. Burma. Sikkim. You know, definitely my choice of route if I were in charge. I would also have dumped the SDU overboard to save weight.
The SATCOM log-on at 00:19 indicates a system reboot after a power interruption due to fuel exhaustion. The BFO values logged at 00:19:29 and 00:19:37 indicate a pitch down manoeuvre commanded through the pilot’s control column. Those facts don’t fit any spoofing theory or controlled flight to Kazakhstan.
@Gysbreght, The 0:19 logon is consistent with a system reboot after fuel exhaustion, but doesn’t indicate it. The system could have been manually turned off and back on again, as it apparently was at 18:25.
Similarly, the BFO values you mention could be explained in that way, but we don’t really know what caused them. There was a BFO value at 18:25 that the authorities were unable to make sense of at all.
If one allows the possibility that whoever took the plane had the ability to tamper with the satcom system (and I take the 18:25 reboot as direct evidence of this) then any given BFO value has to be be viewed as suspect.
@Jeff Wise, fuel exhaustion is indicated by the fuel on board at departure and the flight time.
@jeff Wise,
“The system could have been manually turned off and back on again, as it apparently was at 18:25.”
Turning the system off and then at 18:25 back on again is a corner stone of your theory. You have to propose another theory to explain that at 00:19.
@Gysbreght, Again, consistent with, but not indicated. Fuel burn depends on how the plane is flown. The area of the southern Indian ocean in which time & distance of flight would be most consistent with fuel exhaustion at 0:19 was the first part to be searched; the plane was not there.
@Gysbreght, “You have to propose another theory to explain that at 00:19.” I would see it as fitting into the same theory, namely that the signals were generated by hijackers who knew how they would be interpreted.
Gibson is so obviously tied to Russia it’s almost comical. From the piece you linked to https://www.seattlemet.com/articles/2016/7/19/some-call-blaine-alan-gibson-s-search-for-malaysia-airlines-flight-370-an-obsession
“He worked for three years in the office of Washington state senator Ray Moore. Then he joined the U.S. Department of State. But he didn’t last long there either; in the late ’80s he could see that the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse and decided to capitalize on it. For 10 years he lived off and on in the newly capitalist Russia, serving as a consultant to new business owners and fattening a bank account that would later fund his globe-trotting. ”
So he dabbles in politics before getting a job (what kind of job?) in the State Department. Then he finds himself Russia. Imagine that. From the State Department to Russia. Although he apparently has no business experience he becomes a “consultant” to business owners. And he makes a fortune of course. Family ties non existent, always travelling solo, a cultivated Indiana Jones persona. It all adds up to someone whose various “missions” and “obsessions” and “studies ” are most likely state-funded.
@Jeff Wise.
To me, lack of evidence of a whitewash does not indicate there was, or wasn’t, one.
“BTW if the signals are real there was an active pilot at the end.”
Would you expand on that please?
Yes the age of the creatures examined at the ATSB’s behest does not sit well with drift durations. However, there were fauna reports from just the 5 first debris recoveries, though there was none on those from the 16 “likely-from-MH370” that were recovered later.
It does look likely too that the attachment of those fauna examined was in the tropics, though both this and their longevity depend on how reliable marine science is in these fields. For example, estimates of Lepas Anatifera barnacle growth vary amongst references. Aside from water temperature apparently it is much dependent on water flow, food availability, crowding and exposure to air.
Also I note that there is no comment in reports on the likelihood and effect on longevity of overcrowding and predation.
It is a shame to me that the ages of barnacles (Lepas Anatifera?) on the upturned yacht that drifted past Kangaroo Island were not researched for comparison since this had been drifting around the Indian Ocean for years and its date of overturning was known.
Some of these barnacles were well above water when photographed. I imagine that they would have been high and dry for long periods in calm seas and as we have discussed that suggests that Lepas Anatifera growth on the exposed flaperon trailing edge may not be anomalous as first it appeared.
These matters do remain unresolved, like the outlier speed of the “Roy” drift, though I do not see that they constitute evidence of flotsam planting.
@David, You wrote that “there were fauna reports from just the 5 first debris recoveries, though there was none on those from the 16 “likely-from-MH370” that were recovered later.” From the photographs I’ve seen, it appears that none of those other pieces had any remnants of sea life on them. This is not unexpected if they’re found after having spent a long time out of the water.
You asked about “if the signals are real there was an active pilot at the end.” If the signals are real, then the only way to reconcile the BFO values with the absence of debris in the search area is to suppose that after fuel exhaustion a pilot glided the plane for a bit, then pushed the nose down into a steep and accelerating dive, then pulled it out into another long glide, then pushed it down into a final high-speed impact. A plane couldn’t do this on its own.
The perfect whitewash is amazing, but I presume it happened.
You gotta figure Malyasia either knew in advavce the pilot might divert the aircraft (per @Freddie’s rumors posted here a few years ago) or by morning they knew what probably happened via their “situation room” review of primary radar monitoring data. Razak for whatever reasons (perhaps keeping peace with the political opposition) took a brilliant chess move by refusing to acknowledge the obvious pijacking to the international media, until he was finally forced to admit apparent intentional diversion on TV on March 15, 2014. At that time, the opposition was extremely angry to hear intentional diversion since that could implicate the Captain ZS. But Razak saved his presindency for 4 more years by telling the generic truth without blaming ZS directly.
@JeffWise
There is a very interesting parallel between MH370 and MH17 that was brought to light in an excerpt from a book that was published recently in an Australian news website.
MH17 was shot down exactly at the moment it was leaving Ukrainian ATC, and was being handed over to Russian ATC. It disappeared from Ukrainian radar after the very last communication from Dnipro ATC. Russian ATC never made contact with MH17.
MH370 also disappeared from Malaysian ATC radar and was hijacked just after making the last contact with Malaysia ATC. It never made contact with Vietnamese ATC.
https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/it-was-standard-practice-fatal-decision-that-doomed-mh17/news-story/47991c681bc78aef556898553f5ac92b
– Does this reflect a similar modus operandi between the perps of the two incidents? If the GRU was implicated in MH17, was it also responsible for MH370?
Speaking of the GRU, CliffG, on a seemingly unrelated but curiously overlapping topic, see this story about a GRU-controlled deep sea submersible. Is it odd that a 25 sailor boat had so many captains aboard?
https://news.usni.org/2019/07/02/14-sailors-die-on-secretive-russian-nuclear-submarine
@Jeff Wise. “From the photographs I’ve seen, it appears that none of those other pieces had any remnants of sea life on them.” Yes, though Geoscience assessments included fauna washed out of honeycomb etc as part of the quarantine process. The one Lepas Anatifera barnacle recovered with the No7 flap fairing was unattached, for example.
What washing there was in Malaysia is unknown and there seem to have been exceptions in Australia: no mention is made of washing of the Pemba part right outer flap or the left outer flap trailing edge.
That Pemba part flap had internal barnacles but the age of these was not investigated. Also, there was also a large shell inside. That was assessed though of no interest.
Re the active pilot: “A plane couldn’t do this on its own.”
Yes, unpiloted simulations have not got close to the timing of the descents and even allowing for their limitations it remains hard to see how they could.
@ScottO, Yes, sounds like the crew consisted of military rock-stars–this must have been a very high-end mission. I had no idea the GRU had its own submarine force! Imagine if the CIA had their own high-tech deep diving subs…
@CliffG, It is interesting that both occurred at the edge of airspace–I think that in the case of MH370 it’s clear that they wanted to take advantage of the brief window when no one would be watching them. In the case of MH17, I think it had more to do with creating a sense of ambiguity as to where the missile would have been coming from, and who would have been firing it. Also, the launch site was conveniently within the air defense radar umbrella of Russia.
@Jeff Wise, the CIA doesn’t need its own deep sea equipment. Being good capitalists, they contract it out to private enterprise!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer
More seriously, the above story does provoke the question of just how many other significant toys the GRU has at its disposal and whether it’s ever picked up, or, perhaps, dropped off, an object or two in the world’s oceans. ..
@ JeffWise & ScottO
Another crucial detail about MH17 that was repeated highlighted by most news organizations in the immediate aftermath of the crash was the fact that the plane avoided flying through storm clouds by doing a lateral offset of 20 miles from its airway.
But what struck me from this latest news item is the important fact that the pilot succeeded in coming back to the preplanned flight path after flying around the storm cloud. By the time the aircraft reached the area of the crash, it was already on it’s designated flight path, arriving perhaps a few minutes late.
This was never mentioned in any MH17 news items I have read previously! I was left with the distinct impression that the aircraft unwittingly flew into the conflict zone because of the route taken to avoid the storm.
This is highly significant because if someone was planning to hit MH17, they would have placed the missile launcher within striking distance of the flight path, and would not have known that the aircraft was going to take a lateral offset only a few minutes earlier.
Could the knowledge of the offset have changed the minds of the missile operators at the last minute? Probably not, because the BUK has a range of 50 km, which probably could accommodate for the slight change in flight path of MH17.
But the news stories which mentioned the detour appear to suggest that had the plane not deviated from it’s flight path, it may have avoided stumbling into the conflict zone and getting shot down. This conveniently distracts from the implication that MH17 was deliberately targeted.
@CliffG, Great point! I was long flummoxed by reports that MH17’s filed flight route was nowhere near the Buk rocket launcher–if that had been the case, then its shootdown must have been accidental. But as you point out, this turned out to be a misunderstanding, and in fact the Buk launcher had been dispatched to sit basically right under the scheduled flight path.
@CliffG, @Jeff Wise, this Buk positioning and its strike on MH17 becomes an even greater coincidence when you consider that, as I have read elsewhere (sorry, cannot locate reference just now), 700 other passengers jets overflew the area in the week prior to the disaster. An amazing coincidence.
One other anomaly that may or may not be worthy of consideration–the majority of passengers on this flight were Dutch. The attack is known to have occurred in the same window of time that the AIVD had gained access to Cozy Bear security cameras and computer network, and watched those Russian hackers crack the DNC servers. The incidence rests on a spectrum of from two birds on stone to dice roll coincidence.
@ScottO
Another curious aspect of this shootdown which I think shows premeditation on the part of the Russians is that they moved the Buk as far west as Donetsk before moving it east to Snizhne, right under the MH17 flightpath, just a few hours before the shootdown.
I think they may have waited for the pilots to file their final flight plans before departure from Schipol, which the Russians would have had access to via Rostov-on-Don ATC.
This article in Bellingcat discusses the transportation route of the Buk and the Aeroflot theory, which I no longer hold. Although, the author supports the ‘Russian incompetence’ theory to explain the shootdown, I think Jeff Wise is correct in that the Russian Buk operators were connected to Russian Air Defense radar, knew exactly where to position the launcher, and told to expect it.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2018/08/08/addressing-aeroflot-mh17-conspiracy-theory/
If they followed it on FR24 they wouldn’t need Russian Air Defense radar.
Not sure if this was covered by others earlier, but as per the author of the article in the Atlantic, the way Zaharie communicated via the radios seems a bit unusual:
“Up in the cockpit that night, while First Officer Fariq flew the airplane, Captain Zaharie handled the radios. The arrangement was standard. Zaharie’s transmissions were a bit unusual. At 1:01 a.m. he radioed that they had leveled off at 35,000 feet—a superfluous report in radar-surveilled airspace where the norm is to report leaving an altitude, not arriving at one. At 1:08 the flight crossed the Malaysian coastline and set out across the South China Sea in the direction of Vietnam. Zaharie again reported the plane’s level at 35,000 feet.
Eleven minutes later, as the airplane closed in on a waypoint near the start of Vietnamese air-traffic jurisdiction, the controller at Kuala Lumpur Center radioed, “Malaysian three-seven-zero, contact Ho Chi Minh one-two-zero-decimal-nine. Good night.” Zaharie answered, “Good night. Malaysian three-seven-zero.” He did not read back the frequency, as he should have,”
Begs the question if Zaharie was actually handling the radios? Wonder if there is a way to check his previous radio recordings….
Ken
@CliffG, thanks for the Bellingcat story. I’m not sure I agree with what the author concluded from the significant facts and evidence gathered, largely because of some of the comments on the story left by both Western and former Soviet military readers. As one writer pointed out, even if the shoot down could be blamed on incompetence, why the Buk in the first place, which was surely overkill for the type of aircraft and flights the Ukrainian air force was employing. In another this: if you concede that it wasn’t overkill and air defense was the rationale for the Buk, why was it not a traditional Buk unit, which I understand to normally include six launchers, a radar and a command vehicle, and why remove it so quickly? Even with a civilian airline casualty surely there was still the need afterward for air defense of Russian/Separatist positions…
Very interesting article in a French news website. Reveals details of the French investigation into MH370.
Some key points:
– aircraft appears to have been piloted till the end
– 89 kg was added to takeoff weight, AFTER the plane’s take-off
– SATCOM unit was impossible to hack, and hard to reach
– French police had run facial recognition on passengers boarding; results inconclusive
– passenger list and seating were modified
http://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/vol-mh370-revelations-sur-le-crash-mystere-10-07-2019-8114283.php
@CliffG, Unless I’m mistaken the article is saying that the SDU is located high above the cabin and would be difficult to reach, especially if one were to try to do it in the middle of a crowd of passengers who may not wish for their plane to be hijacked. As a separate issue, the Satcom society has said that it would have been impossible for the plane to be hijacked remotely.
It’s not clear to me what, exactly, the new data revealed by Boeing consists of. It’s been known for quite a long time that the data indicates that the plane was under direct human control at the very end.
Regarding satcom manipulation (and avoiding the notion that there is already in place in Boeing aircraft a secret method for remote piloting), the idea that anything abroad MH370 let alone the SDU was unhackable, is at best naive and at worst stupidly arrogant.
Systems generally have two paths to vulnerability, one mechanical/electronic, the other psychologic/human. And either could work in our case alone or in concert. Ask the Iranian nuclear authority how unhackable its uranium enrichment facilities were. Ask the US Air Force how unhackable its drones in the Middle East are. Better yet, ask the NSA, which hacks the hackers, how unhackable its systems were.
The more complicated a system, the easier it is to hack, and the Boeing 777 consists of three million parts with somewhere north of 10 million lines of code to make them all work together (the 787 has about 14 million). That’s a lot of doors and windows, to say the least.
Or to put it the way Gene Spafford, the professor of computer security, Executive Director Emeritus of CERIAS and editor in chief of the journal Computers and Security. does:
“The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards – and even then I have my doubts.”
That does not describe MH370. And, @Jeff, returning to the idea of remote piloting, while there may be no hidden autopilot system in place for fully autonomous flight, and while the Satcom society might believe that means it is not possible to remotely pilot the aircraft as is, an 89kg piece of hardware added to the manifest after the fact just might be the digital to mechanical interface that changes that fact. Not at all suggesting that’s what happen, but only mean to saying anyone who believes in absolutes at this point is absolutely foolish.
@ScottO … In the same passage, they also mention that a container was overloaded. The French appear to be implying that the 89 kg added actually represents a stowaway (and his clothes and luggage?). Also, I’m not suggesting MH370 was invulnerable, given time, resources (human), and opportunity.
But that’s the problem. Did the perps have all of these to carry out their plan?
@ScottO, I think there’s a specific problem in relation to the idea of a remote hijack of MH370: it couldn’t be controlled through the satcom if the satcom was turned off.
An excellent rebuttal and kudos to your admirable commitment in unraveling this mystery. Three questions, @jeffwise.
1. Assuming a northern route exist, would Diego Garcia be an equally plausible destination?
2. What gains could the Russians expect to gain from a detour if the plane was forcibly spirited to a Russian airfield? Freescale tech?
3. If I am a pilot, flying in that corridor wouldn’t I have encountered or sighted an unidentified plane on my radar? Under ICAO, am I obliged to report?
Sans complete military radar data plus regional radar data on track back, I am still sticking to my premise that there was no turn back, that it lies buried in the SCS and re-interviewing a certain Kiwi oil rig worker would be immensely helpful. Still following though and keep up the good work.
@Wazir,
1. No
2. We don’t really know what the motive was.
3. Any planes would have been quite far away. On-board radar used for tracking weather would not allow them to spot a wayward aircraft.
@Wazir…. what the Kiwi, Mike McKay, saw was most probably a bright parachute flair released by some military aircraft trying to see in the dark using low-light cameras.
Whose aircraft? Most probably US Navy.
What were they looking for? Probably the debris field for MH370.
They didn’t know the aircraft had turned back.
@ Jeff , Just to slake my curiosity why ‘no’ for Q1? Is it because DG doesn’t fit the 7 arcs configuration?
Additionally to Q3, what about this courtesy of Slate:
“If a plane has a TCAS installed, it can communicate with other planes just as the ground-based radar system does. The TCAS pings the other plane’s transponder and gets information on its location and altitude. If both planes have TCASs and Mode S transponders, the systems can even coordinate plans for how to avoid a collision. “
@cliffG : why look for debris field in the dark precisely around the same time MH370 vanished? By the way, how could they have known a RMAF “afterthought” that it turned back?
No malice intended in my queries. Just awestruck or flabbergasted (whichever) that a plane could vanish in this tech laden era and still remains missing. Gibson? Fat controller dropping clues on cue, comes to mind.
@Wazir R: RE “If a plane has a TCAS installed, …”
Transponder in STBY = No TCAS
Sorry if double-posted, minor hitch with the site maybe, comments not uploading. Saw this in the news today, appeared in various online places:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7251795/MH370-French-investigators-discover-mystery-200lb-load-added-flight-list-off.html
@Nederland:
Of course the airplane could have entered a steep descent after power loss. Of course the airplane could have developed speeds well outside the approved envelope in a steep descent. Of course at very high speeds the airplane can be damaged overload or flutter.
The issue is that there is no evidence that the airplane did enter a sustained steep descent where that could have occurred.
Consider these observations from Case 05 of the Boeing simulations in 2016:
Time; Vertical speed; Groundspeed; Bank angle
1816 seconds; -17130 fpm; 260 kt; -2.5 deg
1833 seconds; 350 fpm; 380 kt; -4.4 deg
1848 seconds; 14070 fpm; 231 kt; -9.5 deg
@Gysbreght
260 kt is slow, but -17000 fpm is fast descent, how do we figure stress level on the aircraft in air?
Well, I’d say we do have a steep descent final BFO reading that could imply the pilot put the nose down for a violent crash (and thus possible mid-air separation of flaperon). But the flaperon looks like it might be water impact damage per France.
@TBill: In that simulation, which was passive of course, the airplane was not subjected to unusual stress levels. Just a slow and gentle variation of pitch at low bank angle until impact.
P.S. The normal loadfactor did not exceed 1.85 g. The aircraft is designed for 3.75 g ultimate load.
@Gysbreght
@TBill
The most convincing argument in the DGA report to me seems to be the lack of damage to the leading edge which would have come down first if the flaperon separated in flight. True, this is the area where they complain about Boeing not supplying enough data, but I would very much think the DGA team has more than enough experience to state this with reasonable accuracy. This is just catiously worded.
There is always the possibility to construct a “freak scenario”, but I think the easiest solution is the best here.
The leading edge of the flaperon is probably metallic. My impression of Boeing denial of data is about the detail of composite material specifications, i.e. the trailing edge, which may be propriatory information of the subcontractor that supplies the flaperons to Boeing.
Since Case 05 was a passive simulation, it shows that if a person pushes the nose down, lets the rate of descent increase 10,000 fpm in 8 seconds, and then releases the controls, the airplane will pull up by itself without encountering destructive speeds or airloads.
Jeff – Has William Langewiesche responded to your critique? I haven’t seen anything new from him?