The discovery last week of what appeared to be a piece of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on the shores of Réunion Island seemed at first blush a giant leap toward solving the famously perplexing mystery. Officials declared that, based on photos, the part could only have come from a Boeing 777. And since only one 777 has ever been lost at sea, physical evidence of the vanished plane seemed at last to be irrefutably in hand.
This marked a huge break in the case, since before now not a single piece of wreckage had ever been spotted. The only evidence that the plane had gone into the ocean was a series of difficult-to-decipher signals received by the satellite company Inmarsat. The incongruity led some, including me, to question whether the plane had really wound up in the Indian Ocean at all. Back in February, I explained in New York how sophisticated hijackers might have infiltrated the plane’s electronic bay in order to spoof the satellite signals and take the plane north to Kazakhstan. MH370 wreckage on the shores of Réunion makes such explanations unnecessary.
Investigators hope to glean from the six-foot-long chunk important clues about where and how the plane went down. The piece, called a flaperon, forms part of the trailing edge of the wing, and was located just behind the right engine. The front part of it looks dinged up but more or less intact, but pieces on the side and much of the rear part have been ripped away. That damage might have taken place in the ocean, but if on inspection it appears to have been caused by high-speed airflow (as a plane might experience in a steep dive) or impact with the water, it could shed light on the flight’s final moments.
The fact that the debris was found on Réunion itself provides a hint as to where the plane went down. The island lies on the far side of the Indian Ocean from the suspected crash area, a distance of some 2,500 miles. The ocean’s strongest east-to-west current, the South Equatorial Current, runs about a thousand miles north of where searchers are currently looking. Should the search area be moved up? In the coming weeks oceanographers will be refining their models in order to figure that out. To lend a hand, biologists will examine the barnacles and other sea life found living on the debris in order to determine how long it was in the water and what part of the ocean it passed through.
But, as if steeped in the weirdness of all things MH370, the Réunion flaperon came wrapped in an unexpected layer of ambiguity.
All airline parts carry identifying labels, much as cars carry Vehicle Identification Numbers etched on the engine block. In the normal course of things, this plate should have been attached to the rib end of the flaperon and allowed investigators to make an instantaneous identification. As fate would have it, the plate is missing.
It’s going to be a tricky job, and the stakes are high: MH370 has unnerved the aviation community like no crash before. Until we can figure out what took it down, the danger is ever-present that it could happen again.
While the world’s attention is on the flaperon, however, the sonar-scanning of the seabed on the other side of the Indian Ocean promises to tell us even more about MH370’s fate. If the small flotilla of search ships can locate the plane’s primary debris field on the ocean floor, they’ll likely find the black boxes that can tell us exactly what happened to the flight. But even if they don’t, they’ll reveal something important about what happened.
The area they’re scouring was defined through analysis of the Inmarsat satellite data. Part of the data tells investigators that the plane must have wound up somewhere along a broad arc 3,000 miles in radius. Another part, subjected to a new and complex form of analysis, showed that the plane headed in a generally southern direction. Where, exactly, depends on how it flew. If the plane flew slowly it would have taken a curving path and wound up north of a subsea feature called Broken Ridge. If it flew fast, its path would have been straighter and taken it south of Broken Ridge.
Among the attractions of the latter option was that it fit with an easy-to-imagine scenario: that, after flying up the Malacca Strait, whoever had been in control became incapacitated and the plane flew straight south on autopilot as a “ghost ship” until it ran out of fuel. Once that happened, the plane would have quickly spiraled into the ocean within a few miles of the final arc, meaning that the debris would have to be located within a fairly small area of seabed.
Last October, after months of internal debate, Australian officials decided that the straight-and-fast scenario was more likely. They laid out a 60,000-square-kilometer search grid and hired contractors to begin scanning. Their confidence in their analysis was so great that they reportedly kept a bottle of Champagne in the fridge, ready to be popped at any time. The longer they searched without finding the plane, officials said, the more their confidence grew, because they knew the plane had to be inside that box.
As time went by, however, a problem emerged: The plane wasn’t there. After six months, there was a 99 percent probability that the search had covered the calculated end point, and that number only kept climbing toward 100. Authorities stopped talking about how sure they were that it was in the 60,000-square-kilometer area, and announced that they would expand the search zone to twice that size.
What went unremarked upon in the general press was that there was no theoretical justification for the authorities to continue the search in this way. To get so far from the final arc, the plane would have to have been actively piloted, because only a conscious pilot could have kept the plane out of a death spiral. So the ghost-ship scenario was out the window. A plane held in a glide by a conscious pilot could travel for a hundred miles or more, far too huge an area of ocean to scan. The only reason to search the extra 60,000 square miles was that, for the authorities, it was better than admitting they had no idea what they were doing.
It also kept them from having to contemplate other unattractive alternative scenarios. Perhaps the plane didn’t fly straight and fast, but slow and curvy, and wound up north of Broken Ridge. It’s hard to imagine why someone would fly like this, but then again it’s hard to imagine why someone would sit patiently on a six-hour death flight to nowhere. If a slow, curvy flight was what happened, then again a terminal death spiral could by no means be assumed, and the required search area would be impossibly large.
To be sure, none of these scenarios make a lot of sense. But then, so much of what we know about MH370 is baffling. If the perps flew into the southern Indian Ocean because they wanted to disappear, why didn’t they just fly to the east instead of turning back over the Malay peninsula? If the aim was suicide, why not just put the nose down and crash right away, like every other suicide pilot we know of? And why did the perps turn off the satellite communication, and then turn it back on again, a procedure that — by the way — few airline pilots know how to do?
Though it has earned much less attention from the world press, the failure of the seabed search actually tells us a lot about what did or did not happen to MH370. And what it tells us is that this case is as weird as ever.
This piece originally ran on the New York magazine website on August 4, 2015.
OZ,
Oooops I meant “in like Flynn.” It’s late and I’ve had a day and a half.
@Cheryl
It seems from reports and photos that it is epoxied (or similar adhesive) to the composite surface.
Cheryl,
Yes, Benaiahu is correct. It is secured on with a glue-type adhesive. Speculation is that long-term exposure to seawater and whatever else eventually wore down the adhesive. To me, this sounds like a reasonable enough explanation to buy.
Thanks Benaiahu and Jay.
So it’s not “in like Flynn” (not Flint I am tired and it’s late and cannot type straight anymore today) on the flaperon then. Water loosening makes sense then.
I’m not buying “water loosening” epoxy. The whole point of epoxy is that it is a chemical, rather than evaporative process that is resistant to various elements.
Maybe corrosion of the aluminum leaving the epoxy nothing to bind to, but there doesn’t appear to be much evidence of corrosion either.
@JS, all
Whilst epoxy is indeed a fine adhesive system, I doubt any manufacturer of same would guarantee ANY such product after 12+ months in SEAWATER, an environment for which it was not designed anyway. (Don’t forget, they won’t drill/rivet the thing on, that would weaken the structure.) That said, I nevertheless tend to agree with the upshot of your argument, in that the investigators need to exercise considerable caution without the serial number plate in evidence. Which it seems they are doing.
Richard,
Thanks. Yes, it looks like “magenta buoys” are generic rather than MH370-specific.
Do you refer to the same animation as at the web page you cited, or CSIRO site provides a separate animation for MH370 specific buoys? What has happened to those buoys? If they had a short life, it is either ATSB’s negligence or another mistake in the search campaign.
———–
Dennis,
It is a way easier to validate a hydrodynamic model against surface current data derived from a buoy anchored at 10 m depth than to validate a PT model, which depends on wind and waves besides surface currents. At least such an approach would help to minimize uncertainty due to surface currents. Btw, buoys anchored at 3 m exhibit a way more stochastic behavior compared to those anchored at 10 m (personal experience).
@Oleksandr
In the animation at the CSIRO web page there is a population of ‘big magenta buoys’ that appears on dates/latitudes:
21-Mar-14/-45
30-Mar-14/-30
6-Apr-15/-22
They are all gone by 11-May-14. The dates/latitudes correspond roughly to the search areas at those times. I would guess these are the MH370 specific buoys but they were not intended for long-term use – perhaps they include the sono-buoys? They don’t seem to move in the same way as the sea-anchor buoys (smaller magenta symbols).
Sorry, last line in list should have been 6-Apr-14/-22
@Richard
My is that the MH370 specific bouys were not intended for drift modeling, but rather for pinger detection. In that application their lifetime only needed to exceed the battery life of the black boxes.
@Richard
“My” should read “My guess”.
@JS,
Aluminum by itself in salt water holds up real good. Salt water is a neutral pH (good) but contains chlorides (not good). Where issues pop up is when aluminum is in contact with a dissimilar material such that it allows galvanic corrosive action to take place. This includes steel and carbon fiber. Painted surfaces provide resistance to the electrolytic bridge between the aluminum and other material. This all assumes the plate is aluminum, if it’s stainless steel, different story. Also aluminum alloys comes with different levels of Mg and Si and that has an impact.
Also I don’t know if it’s specifically an epoxy, it’s some type of adhesive. In this case has a greenish color. https://www.dropbox.com/s/ouvtmv41cqflnrg/New5%201438202158gs8cUN.jpg?dl=0
Like so many others I have become almost obsessed about the truth behind MH370. Many of the blogs have become very daunting in their exchange of very scientific data, although having such educated intelligence can be an irreplaceable asset it can sometimes distance the basics. Motive and means…who had them? Malaysia Airlines prior to the 2 tragedies of their aircraft was 70% owned by the government (now 100%), it had suffered financial losses PRIOR and had massive layoffs. This equates to a government being in serious financial jeopardy, hundreds of people losing their jobs and income for themselves and family, which would have affected current employees at that time also. I saw an explanation for the Prime Minister of Malaysia and his seemingly unwillingness to stop distorting information. Apparently he is being investigated for pilfering over $700 million into his personal account from government accounts. This reeks of corruption, bitterness and opportunity yet I have yet to see this angle discussed and researched which provides resources like no other of supreme knowledge of this aircraft and air space. I realize this offers no scenario of events but curious if anyone has considered this aspect.
Additional information of Prime Minister allegations; it is now said the $700 ($675) was not from a state fund but a private donation from the Middle East…whaaat?
@Susie Crowe, you are right to remind us of the Malaysian angle. There are deep rifts within the Malaysian political landscape and right now Najib is clinging to his job by the smallest of margins. The general attorney had already prepared an arrest warrant – but was sacked before he could act. The whole political undercurrent is probably eluding us non-Malaysians. These things are as slippery as eels. But we shouldn’t forget them amongst all the technical discussions.
littlefoot, Thank you for dignifying my post with a response as I am way in over my head on this but so drawn to it. The idea of the Malaysian government being behind this with perhaps 1 or 2 former or current employees is possibly a more complex study than all the technical data because human behavior can be the most unpredictable. I had a thought and wanted clarification….is it officially unanimous that MH370 was “dark”, it appeared nowhere on acknowledged radar for almost an hour after signing off to Malaysia airspace? In other words..does everyone agree that no one knew where this plane was almost an hour?
@Susie Crowe
It’s hard to answer that question because all we have are radar plots after the fact. I personally happen to believe – and I think the overwhelming percentage of spectators would agree – what’s in the ATSB report, which is the big left turn after IGARI, crossing Malaysian peninsula to the south side of Penang, flying northwest up N571, then disappearing from primary radar before IGOGU.
There are plenty of people in the Chris Goodfellow camp (and or all the other “camps”) who refuse to believe any of the turns after the initial turn back. They can’t believe them, because their theory is completely sunk if they happened. So there’s that.
But if your question is, did MH370 do all this stuff without anyone noticing it on a radar screen after IGARI…then I would say absolutely yes and so would anyone who believes the basics of what’s been put forth by the various agencies.
With regards to simply identifying flaperon with MH370 as it relates to politically suggested ‘closure’ for families and friends:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/07/world/asia/mh370-families-debris.html
I feel for these families, this is awful. They should be the object of honor and respect, not the ones sacrificed as a result of dishonor. Bad, real bad.
43 Boeing 777’s are no longer in service. If the flaperon is not from MH370, it could be from one of these (link):
http://rebrn.com/re/alternate-flaperon-sources-421178/
Matt, If 5 seconds after IGARI the transponder shuts off and Inmarsat is unable to connect with ACARS for over an hour, does that mean the “radar plots” are conjecture? Hard to shame Goodfellow for his innocuous theory in support of a fellow pilot
I have not read the report and was not aware anyone had claimed MH370 on their radar during this time
Susie the motivation is always much easier to assign to one person than more of them, that’s why majority here agrees the Captain is 99% the one who diverted the plane from planned destination, it would also be nothing unprecedented as similar diverts happened before (one only two weeks before MH370 flight).
He was a friend of opposition leader who got jailed/sentenced that same morning and he was even physically present in the court. In absence of better reason for divert we tend to stick to that one.
As for radar, in a situation of low awareness it’s quite easy to imagine radar operator half asleep at night, especially if they used to hire people in those places using government connections (mindset = I have the connection I could relax since whatever I f*ck up my friend from the government will save my a**).
@DennisW, Richard
I think this is my third post on the subject. 33 SLDMBs (self locating datum marker buoys) were dropped into the southern Indian Ocean before the end of April ’14, mostly north of S32° latitude.
These SLDMBs weren’t associated with acoustic detection of the ULBs. They’re intended to measure drift.
AMSA had constituted a Drift Working Group in March, I assume the purpose was to reverse-drift any dtebris found in that phase, the task immediately in hand at the time.
:Don
Don,
So what are these 33 buoys doing now?
@GuardedDon
Save that post. In case you need it again.
@Oleksandr
Good question? Why would someone toss a drift bouy in the water with such a short operational life? Makes no sense at all.
@StevenG – So if I’m 95% sure the Captain did it, I’d be in the minority?
DennisW, Oleksandr
I assume the SLDMB buoys are optimised to record a detailed drift path in a localised area (rather than a whole ocean) over a short period of time (frequent tranmission of position) in an SAR operation. An SAR operation where the lost party likely wants to be found & had possibly made a distress call, activated a distress beacon or maintained routine location tracking,
Given general tenet of the comments here, isn’t it accepted that finding 9M-MRO was not the intended outcome of whoever put it there?
:Don
@Susie Crowe
Oh, yeah. The various turns from takeoff through loss of radar contact are certainly the accepted version. The ATSB report certainly includes these turns.
Neither Goodfellow or the crew who hang out at his page can be taken seriously. They still think it’s possible for MH370 to have been flying when the sun came up in Maldives, almost 9 hrs after it took off with only 7.6 total hrs of fuel on board.
ON ANOTHER MATTER:
Best photo I’ve seen yet showing just how much flaperon trailing edge is actually missing:
https://twitter.com/ashren/status/628021287399485440/photo/1
@Lauren the number was figurative.
@Jeff@Frederick
There is one possible suicidal scenario that matches with the ghost plane and the “point the nose down” scenario.
What if the suicide depresurize the plane after the last turn to the south (and also after rebooting the SDU), short after everybody onboard dies, the plane flies seven more hours and finally runs out of fuel, enter in the famous spiral dive and 500 days later some debris apears in Reunion island…..
Sounds Crazy?????
By the way!, i would like to thank Jeff for all of his work, specially for keeping an open mind and thinking out of the box!….
Thank you Jeff!
Regards,
Diego
“permanently and legibly” is pretty general as to method.
FAR 45.14 – Identification of Critical Components
Each person who produces a part for which a replacement time, inspection interval, or related procedure is specified in the Airworthiness Limitations section of a manufacturer’s maintenance manual or Instructions for Continued Airworthiness shall permanently and legibly mark that component with a part number (or equivalent) and a serial number (or equivalent).
[Amdt. 45–16, 51 FR 40703, Nov. 7, 1986]
Sorkin not Sorkiin. Some days I can’t type.
@StevanG
Quote from Lauren below:
“So if I’m 95% sure the Captain did it, I’d be in the minority?”
Never ever respond to a hypothetical. Just bad practice that will get you in trouble. It allows the poser to bait you. Never rise to the bait.
Interesting article from WSJ. [Thanks to someone on Reddit for the link.]
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=French+Deepen+Role+in+MH370+Probe+Investigating+judge+plans+travel+to+Malaysia+as+questions+persist+over+wing+section+found+on+R%C3%A9union+Island&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gws_rd=cr&ei=80rFVYv9JqfGmQWG2ZWwCg
@AM2, thank you. That is a very interesting article, indeed. I like the inquisitive spirit of the French. Even if it’s hard to imagine that the flap didn’t come from mh370, they want to make sure – even if what JS has said might play a role as well: as long as the flap isn’t confirmed from the plane they can keep it in their possession.
http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/did-mh370-pilot-captain-zaharie-ahmad-shah-try-to-save-the-plane/story-fniztvnf-1227473799894?sv=fe82f031d0dd99b752ed7fc46ba6be2e
@littlefoot
Yes, all credit to the French at the moment for doing things properly but I hope for everyone’s sake that it isn’t a political ploy. Lots of unanswered questions… if the Malaysians have lost paper maintenance records did they have an electronic backup; what if they haven’t maintained that part appropriately or have done something non-standard – will that impact on compensation claims by NoK; my non-expert reading of the various drift models is that this find will not confirm we are searching in the right area (rather, it indicates the contrary) – so will Malaysia, China, Australia (and French et al.) reassess search area and priorities now? Sigh…
@AM2
No doubt it is a ploy, but I am still very OK with it. The Malays deserve it. Too bad for the NoK, but it is unavoidable if they cannot comprehend what is going on.
From Bloomberg:
Data Plate
In France, meanwhile, the examination continued seeking definitive evidence tying the flaperon to the vanished plane.
The person familiar with the investigation said a data plate on the flaperon was missing when investigators first examined it in France on Wednesday, making a firm identification more difficult. Separately, Malaysia’s Liow said a maintenance seal on the wing part matched Malaysia Airlines’ records.
The flaperon was manufactured by EADS CASA Espacio LS, a Madrid-based aircraft company that is now a division of Airbus Group SE, another person familiar with the probe said. Investigators are turning to the company for help in the examination of the piece.
E-mails seeking comment from Airbus weren’t immediately returned.
A bore scope was inserted into the flaperon Thursday to examine the interior in search of definitive markings, the person said. None were found. The scope provided video images without having to take the flaperon apart or damage it.
AM2/Dennis – I personally don’t think it’s a ploy; more a trust no one/nothing sort of stance. It’s what I would do. Keep the Malaysian govt in a box.
@Matty
I still have a hard time buying Exner’s high speed breakup, when at this point, all we have is a single piece of the a/c. It separated during the “Landing” in the water.
@Chris
Exner has no pedigree in this domain. While his explanation “makes sense” one has to wonder why he ventured into an explanation. People do this sort of thing for a living. Let them do their thing. I am, frankly, quite surprised that several IG members “signed up” for it (none of whom has any credentials in this domain either). I’m not saying Exner is wrong. I simply don’t know, and neither does he or the other signatories.
@Matty
I think it is a ploy relative to a positive ID. Nothing more than that. By taking that stance the French avoid violating the ICAO rules, and they are an ICAO member. I don’t think anyone doubts the flaperon came off MH370.
@AM2: I asked Alec for an update re: Dampier. It remains unrecovered, despite multiple attempts. He included enough detail to convince me that nothing untoward is to blame (and I am notoriously suspicious…) – just severe logistical challenges.
It remains worth remembering that, due to this station’s location/surroundings, they are NOT expecting this station to have anything of value.
Chris/Dennis – I’ve added my ten cents on it that’s all. In the case of flutter the forces would have built up or progressed. In the case of water it would have been sudden and to my naked eye it looks sudden by the state of the flaperon. The damage and the separation would need to be almost simultaneous according to the length of my thumb. As it appears now it would have a very reduced profile as well in the case of flutter.
And yes, signing a statement to this effect carries no weight if we are not trained.
@Brock
Thanks very much for asking Alec again and please pass on thanks. It was a long-shot asking for this and I presume the Dampier equipment wouldn’t record anything from the current search area due to its position on the NW coast but it is well placed for detections from the N (just allowing for the small chance that the crash occurred there).
@Matty. Thanks for that PerthNow article, its good to read something positive about Captain Shah to balance all the negative.
Mh370 isn’t in the Southern Ocean.
They planned this for a very long time, and it was always Malaysian airlines as the targeted carrier.
For their plan to work, they need everybody to believe that mh370 is in the southern ocean.
Even with this weeks announcement of the flap being found does not stop my belief that this was a hijack.
Now I’ll speculate widely about mh17. That crash scene was inaccessible for some time. In a lot of plane crashes there is widespread wreckage, but often a few pieces are often undamaged.
What would have stopped them finding a few good pieces that would still work well, swap them out, and take the mh370 pieces by military aircraft and throw them out. Eventually they will float to somewhere and be found.
Voila you have the evidence. Mh370 is in the southern ocean and every body will believe it.
Meanwhile who ever is behind this already has this planned all the way to target, wherever that is. Almost certainly a dirty b….
Reminds me of the story carried out by the British secret service during WW2.
The allies wanted to convince Hitler that they would attack at Calais. So they got a recently deceased body from the morgue of the right age, and physical attributes, filled his lungs up with salt water, dressed him in a senior British naval uniform, and attached false plans for the invasion of Europe at Calais in a brief case. There was a whole background to this man who never was.
From memory a British submarine threw his body into the water with a life preserver off the coast of Spain. The body washed up, and the brief case found its way to the German embassy and then to Berlin.
On D.day hitler held some of his best forces up at Calais for over a day by which time, the allies were fully ashore.
And so the flap has ended up in the Indian Ocean, and we all know it ended up in the Indian Ocean. Correct! End of story.
The people behind this needed it to be found, to complete the story. The other thing is that if a major country is behind this, they want complete deniability for the attack that is coming.
I read your book and was already with you as you substantiated as much as possible that it took the northern route.
The western officials publicly want the plane to be in the southern ocean. It solves a difficult political question. Far easier then a 777 loaded with nasty material being flown against a western city.
Before 911 nobody could imagine that anybody could hijack 4 planes and do what they did.
This is just another variation on that plan
@DiegoSenin, Thanks for your kind words. Far from sounding crazy, what you describe is pretty much what has been the official default scenario for the last year or so. The problem is that if such a chain of events unfolded, the Australians should have found wreckage on the seabed by now. What this tells us is that someone appears to have been in active control of the plane until the very end.
Jeff
IMHO they are not ‘violating’ anything. ICAO ‘rules’ do not over-rule national law, there are several precedents for that. If the french judge considers the flaperon to be potential evidence in a criminal proceeding, he can keep it as long as he needs it, whoever originally ‘owned’ it.
I found this comment on Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/MH370/comments/3fxyib/alternate_flaperon_sources/) quite interesting.
HairBrian 17 points 1 day ago
As I was the Quality Manager at a producer of 12 million automotive HVAC valves for 8 years, I can assure you if you gave me any one of those 12 million parts I can tell you what day and maybe hour it was made, where it went before assembly, and with a few calls I can extrapolate where the vehicle was assembled and subsequently shipped.
[–]HairBrian 38 points 1 day ago
Without the primary metal – indented stamped – numbers, I can still use hundreds of subtle telltale features from machining marks, extrusion qualities, grain, assembly tool marks, torque values… I could go on and on. I had “warranty” parts to examine every day almost, and 99% of them were upstream system failures. I also had customers misplace parts used for analysis that subsequently came to me for analysis from vehicles because they screwed around with them for whatever at their desk without marking them clearly not to be used. I got them figured out each time because it happened a lot. Sweet justice when they came in person all pissed off at me for making this shit defect only to have me inform the Engineer it came from his desk, after finding wrench marks on it and his colleague confirms he had a few parts he wrenched on to check this or that. Busted. So yeah, being a huge assembly and a massive worldwide mystery I guarantee there are a dozen guys like me who wouldn’t sleep until they could see it, and from a one minute look already check the ten most reliable tells, half of which would be dead giveaways. No way could you fool me with my own part, I had customers try it a few times to pass blame and they always missed something.