When Australia called off the surface search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on April 28, Prime Minister Tony Abbot explained that “It is highly unlikely at this stage that we will find any aircraft debris on the ocean surface. By this stage, 52 days into the search, most material would have become waterlogged and sunk.”
But would the debris really have sunk? Modern aircraft are made of metal, composites, and plastic, materials that do not get waterlogged. If, as the Australian Transport Safety Board (ATSB) believes is most likely, MH370 ran out of fuel and then crashed, it would have been moving at hundreds of miles per hour when it hit the sea. Much of the resulting debris would have settled down through the water column, but innumerable pieces would have remained afloat. After Air France Flight 447 went down in the middle of the Atlantic in 2009, searchers found some 3,000 pieces of debris scattered across the surface.
With the passage of time, the absence of MH370 debris becomes increasingly puzzling. Recently Emirates Airlines CEO Tim Clarke expressed frustration over the ATSB analysis of the plane’s fate, saying: ”Our experience tells us that in water incidents, where the aircraft has gone down, there is always something.” This is true. As far as I know, there have been no cases where a commercial airliner has crashed into the sea and no parts were recovered, even if the crash occured in an unknown location far out in the middle of the ocean, as MH370’s presumably did.
Consider the fate of the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser “Clipper Romance of the Skies,” which disappeared on the first leg of a planned round-the-world flight somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii in 1957. An aircraft carrier was dispatched and found floating debris six days later, halfway between its origin and destination and 90 miles from its planned track, some 1,000 miles from the nearest land.
The area where MH370 is now believed most likely to have gone down is a bit further out to sea, some 1,500 miles southwest of Perth. But far more assets were been deployed in the search, including satellite, ships, and land-based aircraft. Indeed, the area was one of the first to be searched for surface wreckage back in March.
Still, it’s easy to imagine that even pieces of debris might have been overlooked in the vastness of the sea, especially given the uncertainty surrounding the plane’s crash site. That’s why many have long thought that the first hard proof of the plane’s fate might well take the form of flotsam washing up on a beach somewhere.
Despite Tony Abbott’s assertion, the ATSB remains open to this possibility, stating on its website:
“The ATSB continues to receive messages from members of the public who have found material washed up on the Australian coastline and think it may be wreckage or debris from MH370. The ATSB reviews all of this correspondence carefully, but drift modelling undertaken by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority [AMSA] has suggested that if there were any floating debris, it is far more likely to have travelled west, away from the coastline of Australia. It is possible that some materials may have drifted to the coastline of Indonesia, and an alert has been issued in that country, requesting that the authorities be alerted to any possible debris from the aircraft.”
It’s not clear why the AMSA believes that the debris’ main landfall would be to the north of the presumed impact area. Pioneering ocean-current researcher Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a retired professor of oceanography at the University of Washington, says that the South Indian Current should have been carrying MH370’s wreckage eastward, at a rate of five to ten miles per day. That implies an arrival window on the beaches of Western Australia of between mid-June and late September.
Computer models of drift patterns suggest a similar conclusion. I created the animated gif below from the website Adrift.org.au. Another website that yields similar results is Ocean Motion (my thanks to Brock McEwen for turning me onto that one).
Ebbesmeyer says that if we assume that the impact generated a million fragments, and that one-tenth of one percent of the fragments reach the coast, “that would give 1000 objects on the shore, or one per mile of Australian coastline. Not too bad odds.” Especially considering that beachcombers have been especially vigilant about collecting the world’s most famous pieces of flotsam. Back in April, a hunk of aluminum that washed up on an Australian beach generated headlines for days, before experts from the ATSB determined that it had not come from an aircraft (the ATSB has yet to reveal what it actually came from).
As I write this, warm weather is coming to Western Australia, and with every passing weekend more and more people are going to the beach. Earlier this month, on October 11 and 12, a nonprofit organization called the Tangaroa Blue foundation held its annual Western Australia Beach Cleanup. Some 1500 volunteers combed 130 beaches up and down the western coast collecting plastic rubbish and other debris. The goal of the event is to keep the coastline litter-free clean, but this year volunteers were well aware that they might well stumble upon evidence that could help solve history’s most puzzling aviation mystery. “When [MH370] first happened, and they said where they thought it went down, I said to myself, ‘Oh crap,” because I knew this is where it would come,” says event organizer Renee Mouritz. With those drift patterns in mind, the organization set up an informal protocol to pass along reports of any suspected MH370 debris to the AMSA. But so far, Mouritz says, “nobody has fed anything back to us.”
There’s an old saw that’s oft quoted in discussions of MH370: “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” But from a Bayesian perspective, the absence of data is itself data. If the plane crashed into the Indian Ocean, it should have created many pieces of debris, and some of those pieces should have wound up on a shore by now. The more time passes without that happening, the greater the possibility that the plane did not go into the ocean.
This idea makes some people extremely uncomfortable. Indeed, some people insist that we know that the plane is in the southern ocean because Inmarsat’s frequency data tells us that it must be. They argue that there are any number of reasons why the debris cannot be found. One is that the plane might have ditched gently enough to have remained intact, a sort of deepwater Miracle on the Hudson, though this obviously could not be the case if the ATSB’s default flew-south-on-autopilot-until-it-ran-out-of-gas scenario is correct.
Tim Clarke, for his part, appears less than completely convinced by the frequency data. As he puts it, “We have not seen a single thing that suggests categorically that this aircraft is where they say it is.” As time goes by without debris turning up, we can expect sentiments like Clarke’s to become increasingly common.
UPDATE: My assertion that no commercial plane crash at sea prompted Twitter use @fxnighttrader to alert me to the case of the Varig Boeing 707-323C freighter which disappeared off the coast of Japan in 1979. The plane had taken off from Narita and was 30 minutes into a planned flight to Rio de Janeiro when it ceased radio contact and was never heard from again. Intriguingly, among the cargo were 153 paintings by contemporary artist Manabu Mabe, which were valued at $1.24 million, or about $4 million in today’s money. @fxnighttrader writes, “This plane went into the ocean less than 200 miles from Japan and no piece was ever found,” but I think it would be more accurate to say that the plane vanished and no one ever figured out why.
UPDATE 2: Brock McEwan reports, “The ATSB seems to have just removed from their site all reference to the AMSA drift analysis.”
>> Indeed, some people insist that we know that the plane is in the southern ocean because
>> Inmarsat’s frequency data tells us that it must be. They argue that there are any number
>> of reasons why the debris cannot be found. One is that the plane might have ditched
>> gently enough to have remained intact, a sort of deepwater Miracle on the Hudson, though
>> this obviously could not be the case if the ATSB’s default flew-south-on-autopilot-
>> until-it-ran-out-of-gas scenario is correct.
The Immarsat ping evidence that the flight ended in the SIO is strong. The evidence that it flew the last leg on autopilot and ran out of gas is weak — that’s a tentative model. For all we know, Zaharie could have been riding the forecastle in high dudgeon to the very end. He could have deliberately entombed the plane in deep water by putting it down gently, or smashed it to smithereens in a power dive. Both of those scenarios seem perfectly plausible psychologically. So, if the lack of debris is really evidence (which I’m not that convinced of, as yet), we just need to admit how little we really know about the denouement in the SIO.
Much discussed by people more knowledgeable than I — I understand that this hurricane would have pushed any debris into unexpected drift patterns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gillian_2014_track.png
Thanks for that link, Lucy. I suspect that the hurricane’s main effects on floating debris would have been to push any material that protruded into the air; fully or nearly-entirely submerged debris probably would not have been moved much.
To be more specific, there is exactly zero evidence that the plane was on autopilot during the trip to the SIO. That is just one scenario which can be plugged into a mathematical model. Because it constrains the paths that can be fit to the BFO/BTO data, it has been a particularly attractive one to modelers — perhaps “seductive” would be the right term. We must carefully distinguish between assumptions and evidence.
There is some actual evidence that the flight terminated when the plane ran out of fuel: (1) the timing is about right and (2) there’s a hint in the final pings that the satcom rebooted due to a power cycle event associated with fuel exhaustion. How strong the “hint” is doesn’t seem to be very clear — I have seen no in-depth treatment of the evidence or possible alternative explanations. In any case, fuel exhaustion is not incompatible with human control input at the end.
Regarding the final descent, the last two pings at 00:19:29 and 00:19:37 have strong negative BFO deltas relative to the ping at 00:11:00, which was only ~8 minutes earlier. The penultimate ping BFO delta is compatible with a 5,000 fpm descent. The final ping BFO delta, taken at face value, would suggest a descent rate of about 15,000 fpm (180 mph), with the plane accelerating toward the earth at about 2/3 g. Note that Immarsat personnel have suggested that the BFO at 00:19:37 as well as the six values from 18:25:34 to 18:28:15 (which indicate a 0.5g climb shortly after the plane pulled out of military radar coverage) are untrustworthy. So, make of this what you will.
To say “… zero evidence that the plane was on autopilot during the trip to the SIO…” is not factual. Maybe zero physical evidence, but the *combination* of human factors consideration and data strongly correlates with an autopilot scenario, although there are many of those, closely related in outcome (track, heading, true, magnetic, Econ, etc.).
The reality is that no one flies a 777 6 hrs by hand. Not even terrorists would do that. Nor could the flight have gone 6 hrs in a straight line ghost mode unless the AP was on. So let’s talk about the uncertainty associated with the question: Which autopilot mode it was in, not whether the plane fly for 6 hours with the AP off. Chance of that happening, regardless of all the accident and nefarious scenarios you favor, is very small.
Jeff: thank you for this excellent article’s measured yet firm raising of questions that desperately need to be asked. I really appreciate your work on this.
@airlandseaman
The relevant “payload” of the “autopilot” scenario, as with the “decompression” scenario, not to mention the “constant speed and altitude from diversion to SIO,” scenario, is that there was no human in control of the plane at the end point. And we just don’t know that.
@Luigi: The “payload” of the signal data you regard as strong – as it pertains to this thread’s subject – is a 180 tonne glider contacting a rolling, roiling ocean at extremely high velocity.
Which would cause surface debris, by expert(dare I say it?)…consensus. Whether a pilot was doing anything to prevent it or not. Period.
(References to “Sully” will be summarily dismissed. The Hudson was like GLASS.)
Luigi Warren
I never said that there was evidence that someone was or was not alive, controlling the plane to the end. I said that if there was someone alive, they would have used the AP to fly the plane, and if not, the plane must have been on AP to carry on for 6 hrs “unattended”.
Considerable debris was spotted in the vicinity of the current search, adjusted for drift in the direction Jeff suggests.
On March 21, a French satellite detected 122 objects ranging in size of up to 75′ feet long in a pattern suggesting a debris field, including:
On March 24, a Thai satellite detected 300 objects of varying sizes located about 120 miles from the French satellite sighting.
On March 26, a Japanese satellite detected 10 objects ranging in size up to 26’long and 4′ wide.
The attempt to recover this debris was abandoned on March 28 when the new search area was adopted.
None of the debris detected by these satellites was ever recovered or analyzed according to Martin Dolan.
So the premise of Jeff’s post–that there is an absence of evidence of debris–is questionable.
But then, how unusual is the failure to recover debris from an ocean crash hundreds to thousands of miles from a continent? Disasters like this are rare, but include:
No trace was found of a Pan Am Martin M-130 flying boat that disappeared about 500 miles from Manila in 1938.
No trace was found a BSAA Avro Tudor IV, which disappeared around 340 miles from Bermuda in 1948 or a BSAA Avro Tudor IVB which disappeared between Bermuda and Jamaica in 1949.
No trace was found of a Skyways Avro York which disappeared in the North Atlantic en route from Newfoundland to Jamaica in 1953.
No trace was found of Flying Tiger 739, Lockheed Super Constellation which was lost over the western Pacific in 1962.
No trace was found of a Varig 707 cargo plane which lost radio contact approximately 120 miles ENE of Tokyo in 1979.
I am not aware that any debris has washed ashore determined to be from AF447.
I am not aware that debris determined to be from any aircraft which crashed more than 200 miles away has washed ashore.
It seems logical that the more debris, the more likelihood of a wash-ashore. But why the assumption of 1 million pieces? 9600 pieces comprised the 40% of the TWA Flight 800 Boeing 747 that was reconstructed.
So when Jeff says, “The more time passes without [debris washing ashore], the greater the possibility that the plane did not go into the ocean,” I say that the increase in that possibility, if any, is infinitesimal.
@Brock,
“is a 180 tonne glider contacting a rolling, roiling ocean at extremely high velocity.
…
(References to “Sully” will be summarily dismissed. The Hudson was like GLASS.)”
The assertion that the SIO is a rolling, roiling one is not correct. It certainly can be, but it is not so all the time.
I have sailed the ORVC Melbourne to Hobart West Coaster yacht race every year for the last 10 years. This is going from around S37 in Melbourne to beyond S43.4. We regularly float on GLASS anywhere along the course, a couple of times even when turning the corner around Maatsuiker Island (S43 39′, according to google earth).
Conclusion: depending on the weather on and a few days before Mar 8th around the touch down location, the water state could have been like Glass and a Houdson style ditching would have been possible.
Cheers
Will
@Bruce: thanks for the great info.
Not sure I buy your argument about debris somehow avoiding shoreline detection by breaking up less.
Regardless: the article merely asks the search team to explain the gap between debris predicted (by signal data + independent drift analysis) and debris FOUND (none). Here’s the list of answers to date, to which I’ve appended your suggestion:
MARCH: “It’s really far away / bad weather / all ocean garbage”
APRIL: “It sank”
MAY/SEPTEMBER: [no comment]
OCTOBER: “It all looped upcurrent around to Indonesia”
NOVEMBER: “We took pix of it in MARCH – so it WAS THERE – but it’s gone now”
I’m sure landlords with habitually deadbeat tenants will recognize this pattern.
airlandseaman,
I believe the issue is not whether the autopilot was used. As I see it the issue is until which time someone was in control of the autopilot and whether that person was able to take control of the airplane when the autopilot disconnected.
Gysbreght
Those are good questions. We will need the box to be sure, but my money is on nobody home at the end. The 001929 and 001937 BFO data are not consistent with the expected rate od decent for a best L/D decent. Even Inmarsat says the 001929 data is good, and that decent rate is double the expected rate. Does not sound like anyone was trying to land.
Bruce – most of those comparisons are not much chop. It’s common to see planes of those eras sitting on the bottom in one piece more or less. Fraction of the size, speed, and with a very solid construction. You don’t see the fragmentation we see with big jets, and there aren’t a lot of buoyant materials either.
Maybe a lot of the objects spotted from satellite were never recovered because they looked a bit too much like shipping containers? It would truly be a scandal if diligence was not shown here?
And a splendid shot of Injidup – I’ve been sledding down that dune a few times and it’s steeper than it looks. Sometimes it can drop you right in the water depending on sand shift. There is also tube ride for surfers when it’s big enough a few hundred metres north.
@MuOne: I believe your account – it just seems at odds with the descriptions of “the roaring forties” to which we were treated back when it was shutting down the March search for days at a time. Maybe things get hairier as one heads west?
@All: anyone know how to track down historical wind speeds for [s38, e88]? Closest I got in a quick search was Perth Airport (NOT very close at ALL), where March 7, 2014 winds were:
Wind Speed: 24 km/h
Max Wind Speed: 35 km/h
Max Gust Speed: 54 km/h
March 8 was similar, but waves at 8:19am that day would be, as MuOne says, largely a function of prior day winds.
source: http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/YPPH/2014/3/7/DailyHistory.html
The Chinese satellite photos of the area were taken March 9, so anyone adept at estimating wave dimensions from sat pix (I, sadly, am not) could also jump in.
@Brock:
According to data from the GDAS for March 8 at 0000z, at a height of 110 m, the conditions at (38S,88E) were:
Wind Speed = 8.88 m/s = 32.0 km/hr = 17.3 knots
Meteorological direction = 234 deg
Temp = 288 K = 15 C
Thanks, Victor!
So, NOT glass.
So, debris.
@Victor, @Brock,
Hold your horses! I posted some historic BOM (Australia) weather maps some time ago on DS or twitter. Will dig them out again.
From memory, there was a big fat high sitting over the SIO leading up to 8th March (read glassy sea in the lead up) and a small front went through just around 7/8 March. Maybe, Victors above data are from that front.
It will take time to build the sea state from glassy to roaring. There may still be a potentially benign sea state at 00:19.
Cheers,
Will
I do not want to come off as a complete crack-pot, but I came upon something in a comment section recently regarding 370. They posted these coordinates: -49.475156, 70.150058 Google Maps, SATELLITE VIEW, ZOOM IN. These are the waters around the French Southern and Antarctic Lands, a landmass in the South Indian Ocean just over 1000k west of Australia. Tell me what you think.
-49.475156, 70.150058 Googlemaps, SATELLITE VIEW, ZOOM IN. These are the waters around The French Southern and Antarctic Lands, close to where the current search is, relatively speaking. Tell me what you think
@Gysbreght
>> I believe the issue is not whether the autopilot was used. As I see it the issue is until
>> which time someone was in control of the autopilot and whether that person was able to
>> take control of the airplane when the autopilot disconnected.
Precisely, thank you.
Victor, Brock,
Found it. Stop looking!
http://www.duncansteel.com/archives/899#comment-10053
Regarding Victor’s reported winds at 110m height, one should note, that the wind strength at sea level is significantly lower than that at height. It would indicate rather low wind speeds of around 5kn (?) at most at sea level. That could mean glassy seas, or mere ripples.
Victor, can you post a link to your source for the wind strength?
Cheers
Will
Victor, Brock,
(Repost sans link…)
Found it. Stop looking!
duncansteel dot com archives 899
#comment-10053
Regarding Victor’s reported winds at 110m height, one should note, that the wind strength at sea level is significantly lower than that at height. It would indicate rather low wind speeds of around 5kn (?) at most at sea level. That could mean glassy seas, or mere ripples.
Victor, can you post a link to your source for the wind strength?
Cheers
Will
airlandseaman,
The person at the controls may have been just conscious enough to re-engage the autopilot at 00:19. The airplane would have ended as in the Geoffrey Thomas video and that would also fit the BFO data. AF447 exceeded 15,000 fpm in its descent.
airlandseaman,
in a phugoid the descent rate cycles between zero and double the steady descent rate.
It’s not like we failed in detecting debris in the search area. We detected plenty, in various patches, just nothing from a plane. It’s tempting to conclude that if MH370 went down in the SIO it simply did not leave a debris field – somehow?
To the best ofmy knowledge, the ATSB has not released the number of debris items recovered, any images of them, any other source the recovered items came from, or why/how they determined, the items were not from MH370.
It would be nice to see a report covering the above from the ATSB.
Cheers
Will
@MuOne: The values that I provide were from a table created by aqqa, who extracted the values from the GDAS datasets at http://nomad1.ncep.noaa.gov/datalink/ftp_data/pub/gdas/rotating/ using a tool from Unidata.
There may be NOAA data for the winds at sea level, but those values were not included in the table I was using.
MuOne – good point. I saw some video of stuff being retrieved but not from down there – it was further north. Some of the rubbish patches from down there were well defined and hundreds of kms apart so they would be unrelated? Either way if there was a debris field related to the plane we would have seen it most likely. They went from grid searching to responding to satellite images so it’s very hard to imagine they would have left the area without exhausting the leads. They were almost frantic to get a bit of plane and the move north I interpreted as another roll of the dice.
phugoid? We will see. On Sunday…finally…headed for the B777 simulator. Not talking toys here. 4 hours booked in the right seat with Sr B777 Captain in the left seat and instructor onboard. Will report results on Monday. Hope to record video.
airlandseaman,
Good luck! Just make sure you don’t shut down the engines like Geoffrey did, but allow the AP to disconnect.
It’s always fun to play around with this graphical weather interface:
http://earth.nullschool.net/#2014/03/08/0000Z/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-269.37,-35.93,377/grid=on
airlandseaman,
Professional simulators can record what happened, much like a flight data recorder in the airplane. That would be nice to have,if it can be arranged. Cheers!
airlandseaman,
Good luck, Mikey, I hope it’s not on your dime.
Looking forward to results…
It amazes me that ‘experts’ can not accept that MH370 could have been successfully hijacked, as the Bayesian model would suggest.
As an example, Boko Harem have hidden hundreds of women kidnapped from villages even with army/police actively searching for them. I believe the same can be said about the passengers of 370, especially given the fact that no search is on for them.
Thanks for the article Jeff.
Jeff: I have been in touch with the NCDC and they are retrieving the surface winds for us. It is the same guy that fed Woods Hole the data for the AF447 drift analysis. Data will come from NOAA/NCDC Blended 6-hourly 0.25-degree Sea Surface Winds
source: Multiple satellite observations: DMSP SSMI F08, F10, F11, F13,F14 F15; TMI; QuikSCAT; AMSR-E; Direction from NCEP Reanalysis-2
summary: Gridded and blended sea surface vector winds from multiple satellites with direction from NCEP Reanalysis-2; Global ocean coverage with a 0.25-degree resolution;
Mike, that’s great news about the simulator session on Sunday. Since you only have four hours, what scenarios/inputs are you planning?
If you have time, I would be very interested to know if the simulation results come out the same when you run a scenario twice. Dave Whittington’s simulation is the only recorded one I have seen, and it was at materially at odds with the reported results of other simulations. I guess the real question is whether there is any random value generator in the simulation for any factor that can effect the performance upon fuel exhaustion.
It seems to me as though performance upon fuel exhaustion is the key issue (e.g., direction and bank of turn and glide v. dive) and that if you focus on the last 20-30 minutes you might be able to test 8-12 scenarios.
Here’s hoping you can record and publish!
Will, as far as I know you are correct that the ATSB has not published any debris report.
The basis for my assertion was the following blog post on the ATSB site:
Martin Dolan, Chief Commissioner (author) said…
No recovered debris has been identified as originating from MH370, and the search effort has not found any debris associated with the satellite images or other visual detections.
JULY 17, 2014 11:27
Gysbreght – Thank you for clarifying the difference between “endurance” and “range.”
I have the following question for this group regarding the autopilot settings. I suspect there is a simple answer but I could not find it.
Many of the various impact location projections presume MH370 was on autopilot for the last several hours. Some of these projections presume constant speed and constant altitude. How is that accomplished? From what I have found, as the fuel burns the a/c gets significantly (20%) lighter and therefore requires less lift. Lift is dependent on many variables but let’s concentrate on speed, density of the air and shape of the airfoil. If the speed and altitude (air density) are considered to be relatively constant, one way to reduce lift would be to change the pitch of the a/c. (Other ways include increasing altitude and speed or decreasing altitude and speed.) But, I think that implies that the pitch at the initial cruise was not optimal. That doesn’t seem to be realistic. During the Payne Stewart ghost flight, their plane had reached around 48,900ft before running out of fuel.
So my questions are, “Is using constant altitude and constant speed a reasonable presumption?” If so, is the calculated average burn rate still reasonable?”
Bruce Lamon
The plan is to focus on the final few minutes and conduct several different runs with different initial conditions. Left vs. right tank first, near simultaneous vs. 10 minute flame out time difference, different autopilot modes prior to disengagement, etc. (Disengagement is certain after the second engine quits.) Also hoping to shed some light on how the AES power might have been turned off between 1701 and 1825…time for RAT and APU to resupply power after 2nd flame out. Flying by hand after loss of both engines will not be simulated. We know you can glide to a “landing” if flying by hand, and no spiral will happen as long as someone is flying by hand. Chances are very good, even with a good glide experience, you catch a wing tip when the stall starts, then cartwheel, like the plane off the African coast seen by everybody. Confetti at touchdown, or no confetti, is dependent on 1)must be flown by hand, and 2) virtually no wind or waves.
Larien H wrote at 1:29 PM:
“Is using constant altitude and constant speed a reasonable presumption?” If so, is the calculated average burn rate still reasonable?”
Yes, in cruise the autopilot will maintain a constant altitude. It controls the pitch attitude to maintain lift=weight. Whether the pitch attitude changes with reducing weight depends on the speed schedule.
The autothrottle controls the speed. It depends on what is the controlling parameter. A speed can be entered in the Mode Control Panel on the glareshield either as a CAS (calibrated airspeed) or a Mach number. In both cases the TAS (true airspeed) will vary with the ambient temperature as the flight proceeds to more southern latitudes. At constant CAS/Mach pitch attitude reduces with reducing weight. Another possibility is that the controlling speed is generated by the FMC (Flight Management Computer). In ECON mode the speed depends on the cost index (CI). For CI=0 the FMC will calculate the speed for maximum range, which reduces as the weight of the airplane reduces as fuel is consumed, while the pitch attitude remains essentially constant.
I can’t comment on the “average fuel burn rate” since I don’t know who calculated it and on what basis. The ATSB Update has calculated the (range) performance boundary for MRC (maximum range cruise), so that could mean the variable speed resulting from ECON mode with CI=0. OTOH in the second bullet when talking about wind they say “true airspeed remained constant”, so it’s not quite clear.
Gysbreght does a good job of explaining the various AP control modes. It was most likely in ECON mode. That is SOP with virtually all airlines. But what we expect to find is that the end point does not vary much with AP mode. They will all maintain the same altitude until the first flameout, then descend as necessary to maintain a safe speed. The CAS and heading may change a bit over the flight depending on the OAT, AP mode and winds. But over the full family of possibilities, we don’t expect more than a 100-200 NM variation in the 7th arc intercept point. Given that it was under the control of the AP, it was probably left at FL350 on a constant mag heading or track, ECON Mode. The compass deviation is almost zero there, so mag and true are virtually the same. Pilots nearly always use a mag heading if they are in the tropics, and typically do not change to true unless they go beyond +/- 60 degrees lat.
Well, that is typical of the IG. You make many assumptions, and ignore any other possibility. What was normal SOP about this flight? Was it diverted by a B777-qualified air transport pilot?
@airlandseaman: thanks for the NCDC data request.
Inasmuch as WAVE conditions at impact point & date seem (oddly, IMO) to be a hot topic, here – and would NOT have been for AF447 – can we ask the NCDC to throw in whatever wave data they might have, as well?
I know we should be able to deduce waves from wind, but getting the wave data directly might in the end save time…and keystrokes.
Gysbreght & airlandseaman
Thank you for the information regarding the AP.
As for the burn rate, Dr. Ulich used the reported 43,800kg at 17:07 and an endurance of 7.1333hr from 17:07 to 00:15 to get an average burn rate of 6.13mt/hr.
The hits just keep on coming.
Thank you Ron Black.
Until at least mid-2014, the commander of peninsular Malaysia’s air defense was a former Australian officer: Air Vice-Marshal Warren Ludwig of the Royal Australian Air Force:
“HQ IADS commander was, till at least mid-2014, Air Vice-Marshal Warren Ludwig of the Royal Australian Air Force whose long career includes combat service in Afghanistan.
We see that the military commander at the critical hours of MH370 was probably an Australian officer not a Malaysian. This may help us understand the Australian involvement later during the search after MH370 in the Southern Indian Ocean.”
http://t.co/d63miy7r7P
How can it be that the likely military commander during MH370’s critical hours was an Australian, NOT A MALAYSIAN, but the aviation press(and other) didn’t report THAT?
#geopolitics
And one more:
Malaysia is being blocked by the Dutch from the MH 17investigation:
http://t.co/YnOyHyTlh6
Nihonmama
Posted October 24, 2014 at 8:32 PM
“How does Angus Houston, who’s sitting in Australia, *know* that “investigators will never be able to connect MH17 shootdown to “a particular group”?”
Correction (per Ron Black):
Air Vice-Marshal Warren Ludwig of IADS HQ (whose purpose is to defend the airspace of Peninsular Malaysia — not North Borneo — and
Singapore, together with local military, is STILL an Australian officer, unless he’s retired in the last few months.
“For some political reason the commander was always an Australian Officer.”