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.
I have worked frequently with epoxy glue as well as with many other glues and all sorts of different material. Problems can arise when the surfaces are very smooth and polished or when a layer of paint is between the parts which should be merged. Therefore I always remove paint layers and/or rough it up before gluing. But when something becomes unstuck after some time you can always see clearly where the part had been glued on to.
It’s hard to judge just from pictures if that is the case, too, with the flap.
Bobby,
Thanks for your comments. I indeed remember all the issues you mentioned about. I don’t think it is a usual contrail, but it could be some other effect associated with the aircraft (smog etc. visible in IR). But before spending more efforts for the further analysis of the ‘hook’, I wanted to make sure this feature does really exist, and not a game of our imagination (or artifact of the image processing). I tried to apply various high-pass filtering, but so far I did not succeed in reproducing it.
Mattty-Perth,
‘If this is a mutilated part they obviously finished the job.’
I agree that it’s a non-functioning flaperon as a whole, however it has functioning sub-parts that remain undestroyed and that would not meet destruction requirements if someone was to scavenge, recondition and resell the sub-part.
Dennis,
I asked these questions earlier, but you did not comment. Some of them:
1. Langkawi – Penang issue. If CI was an intended destination, then every drop of fuel would be counted for by an experienced pilot. Sentimental memories about Penang vs fuel consideration?
2. Radar issues. MH370 was supposed to be tracked by 2 Indonesian radars, so it did not make sense to make such a ‘hook’ just to hide, unless the pilot knew that these radars were not operational. How could he know it? Radar avoidance is also inconsistent with the purpose to attract attention to make a political statement.
3. According to FI it was possible to send sms after 18:25 from the cabin as the respective communication data channels were functional again. Why nobody did it? What about the sunrise and changes in the altitude?
4. Why SDU came back? Earlier you suggested it was repaired by the co-pilot. If so, see question #3.
5. Motive. I will use the same argument against your scenario as you use against IG’s scenario. The motive you suggested is not really convincing: what would the pilot achieve in case of a successful landing? He would be immediately arrested, while passengers would be sent to their destination asap. In one week everybody would forget about the political background.
@Benaiahu, what does reconditioning mean? Applying a new coat of paint amongst other things on the part you would want to sell? Would it have to be sold on the black market? According to an article LG Hamilton has posted here some months ago there’s a thriving black market for B777 parts.
I would like to know all we can about the recovered part, including the postulated failure mode and all the details surrounding the maintenance mismatch that Boeing,the NTSB, and French investigators found. And I would prefer that information come from those with technical expertise, not a French prosecutor-judge. Once all the facts are on the table, we can begin to see how the evidence aligns with one or more scenarios. We might be disappointed if we rely too much on the technical details and timetable put forth by the French criminal legal system.
@all
With respect to the flaperon I would remind people that proving something to be true and proving something to be false are not at all symmetrical with respect to difficulty. Falseness is achieved with a single counter-example. Truth is incredibly more difficult to establish.
My favorite example of this asymmetry is Fermat’s Last Theorem, a very simple problem statement made back in 1637. It took mathematicians 350 years to prove it (Dr. Weil 1993). In the meantime no one doubted it was true, and computers around the world were searching for a counter example for a couple of decades.
The fact that nothing has been coming from the French indicates to me that all is well. If there were a simple reason why the flaperon was not the real deal, we would have heard about it by now.
@Dennis, you’re misreprenting the state of affairs a bit. There’s the mismatch of maintenance records. How can you say then that not one single problem has come to light? That problem is obviously important enough for the French for denying the all-clear for now. This may well be resolved soon enough. But it’s simply too early for declaring “all is well” or the opposite.
You would do well to hold on to your own maxime: patience 😉
@Oleksandr
Sorry if I missed your earlier comments. Sometimes I take off to the mountains for a few days, and don’t catch up on all the comments.
With respect to 1-4, I have pretty much tossed the events in the interval from crossing the Malay peninsula to the FMT in the trash. The Lido data is so flawed that it is simply not useful. I have given up trying to make sense of it. As I stated in my writeup, I will return to it when the radar data is actually made available (if ever).
With respect to your objection 5, it is not at all fair to compare my stated motive to the IG/ATSB stance of completely ignoring motive or causality. The IG/ATSB do not have a scenario. What they have is a spreadsheet.
Whether my motive is good or not is a different question. One cannot know how another person thinks about a course of action. Whether it makes sense or not is in the mind of the doer not the observer. History is rife with examples of this dichotomy. It is true that Shah was upset if not downright obsessed with the political situation in Malaysia. How he might elect to express his discontent is impossible to predict.
@Littlefoot
With respect to Dr. Weil’s proof, there are additional insights to be gained from the metaphor. Dr. Weil presented his proof at Stanford to a packed auditorium. I was in attendance. I must say the proof was over my head, as I expected it to be. The audience was a mixed bag from Stanford professors to street hippies. The questions afterwards are the lesson. The hippie types would ask what relevance the proof had to the “second coming”, or what does the proof mean with respect to “world peace”, and so on…
Not unlike the mix of opinions and questions one encounters with respect to MH370.
@Matty – Perth:
I’m not sure what your point is.
My point is that B777 flaperons do not grow on trees. They are manufactured by CASA in Spain. It should not be difficult to trace the history of any flaperon not accounted for, including those of the six B777 airplanes that apparently have been scrapped.
@Oleksandr
“Re: “A mechanical problem does not explain the lack of communication.”.
You known it can explain, right? It cannot explain some other things, or more exactly it cannot explain the whole set of ‘facts’. But what hypothesis can? Your CI version suffers of the same drawback (do I need to remind inconsistencies?). I don’t see why it would be more plausible than a technical failure or hijacking.”
because it’s lot easier to explain lack of communications in CI case than technical failure, especially after what was supposedly intentional fiddling with E/E bay, not to mention very possible conflict between pilots and other shenanigans that could take place in the cockpit and around it
“1. Langkawi – Penang issue. If CI was an intended destination, then every drop of fuel would be counted for by an experienced pilot. Sentimental memories about Penang vs fuel consideration?
2. Radar issues. MH370 was supposed to be tracked by 2 Indonesian radars, so it did not make sense to make such a ‘hook’ just to hide, unless the pilot knew that these radars were not operational. How could he know it? Radar avoidance is also inconsistent with the purpose to attract attention to make a political statement.
3. According to FI it was possible to send sms after 18:25 from the cabin as the respective communication data channels were functional again. Why nobody did it? What about the sunrise and changes in the altitude?
4. Why SDU came back? Earlier you suggested it was repaired by the co-pilot. If so, see question #3.
5. Motive. I will use the same argument against your scenario as you use against IG’s scenario. The motive you suggested is not really convincing: what would the pilot achieve in case of a successful landing? He would be immediately arrested, while passengers would be sent to their destination asap. In one week everybody would forget about the political background.”
1. what “sentimental” memories? It’s just imagination of a tabloid newspaper, not like he radioed and said “look I will overfly Penang because I am sentimental”. Btw do we have the radar track around Penang at all?
2. Radar wasn’t the problem, as long as he didn’t sway into their FIR they wouldn’t interrogate him as they could think it was some military plane flying in international airspace.
3. That’s questionable, who would have access to the cabin?
4. Who knows, maybe we’ll find out if the plane is ever found.
5. It would not have less impact than it has now (and the fact is that malaysian government ineptitude is discovered to the world) and he would be alive together with passengers, I guess on that basis alone it makes it a lot more probable destination?!
littlefoot
‘what does reconditioning mean? Applying a new coat of paint amongst other things on the part you would want to sell?
Yes, with varying degrees of craftsmanship.
‘Would it have to be sold on the black market?’
I don’t know.
After 11 days, it surely seems like August vacations in France have delayed the release of the inspection report.
The HAL plant in Bangalore, India (which is in the middle of India and far from the seas or oceans around India), is a supplier of Flaperons to Boeing. Gysbreght said that the Flaperons are manufactured by CASA in Spain. It’s possible that Boeing has multiple Flaperon suppliers for original construction and/or aftermarket replacements. In addition, it is possible that MAS had purchased a replacement Flaperon directly from a third party supplier and not Boeing. (The following doesn’t apply to B-777’s but there are third party companies who supply after market parts such as Winglets directly to certain airlines. Boeing says it will not support aerodynamic calculations on a/c with third party Winglets.)
@Cheryl – I have all times of what happened spinning in my head so I usually need to confirm these times in a report. Based on Dr. Ulich’s White Paper and the ATSB and FI reports, here is the sequence of events up to the diversion:
1706:43 – Last ACARS Data
1719:30 – Good night Malaysia Three Seven Zero (sounds like he said Malaysian to me)
1720:39 – Arrive IGARI and turn right toward BITOD
1721:37 – Last Secondary Radar Data
1722:20- Begin Diversion Turn-Around
By 1730, the diversion turn-around had been completed and a plane (presumably MH370) was picked up by Primary Radar heading back towards the Malay peninsula.
@ABN397 – Actually, one of my June 2014 posts included predictions of the debris floating towards Africa. Unfortunately, I did not include the source of that information.
@SK999 – We have long ago accepted the errors in the Lido track. VictorI showed a slight right jog away from but still in line with N571, ending 10nm past MEKAR. The 200NM from Butterworth is wrong.
@Oleksandr – Your #5 is spot on. Remember what happened when the Delta flight that landed at the wrong airport in Kentucky? If MH370 landed on CI, the airline would apologize and say the pilot and FO will undergo retraining and possibly mental evaluations. Also, why risk landing a 777 on a 6900 ft runway when a 9800 foot runway is just an hour away in Bali.
@Lauren
Everyone knows you are an IG groupie. Why not just wave a flag and be done with it?
I am in a metaphor mood the last couple of days. I am old, and that is sometimes what old people do. The IG spreadsheets remind me of a course in convex optimization I took from Dr. Boyd at Stanford. Boyd was a colorful lecturer, and one day he posed the following question. “If I walked up to you on the street and showed you this 3×3 matrix, what could you say about it?” I laughed out loud. The thought of someone walking up to me on the street and sticking a 3×3 matrix in my face is completely incongruous. So it is with the IG and their spreadsheets – strolling into my life via the internet and shoving a spreadsheet in my face thinking that it deserves the status of a scenario. Not quite as funny as Boyd, but almost – completely vacuous in any case.
This just posted over at PPRuNe Forums > Flight Deck Forums > Rumours & News>Flaperon washes up on Reunion Island
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#477 (permalink)
cressidom
Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: Pacific Basin
Posts: 181
More Debris ?
Supposedly New Debris washed a shore at Reunion
Received via Twitter @francetvinfo unverified. Also reported on airlive.net
@Dennis – I am not an IG groupie, nor are my math abilities up to their level or yours. I just believe that after the FMT the plane continued on an AP course. I have no idea if it was true, magnetic, great circle or even if all of those tracks are valid options.
I am more of a Dr. Ulich groupie as I found his reasoning to be sound but I still do not agree with his constant air speed. I think VictorI’s speeds are more probable.
Since the TAC does not fully compensate for the offset force of having one engine out, I like Brian’s turn that starts as soon as the first engine flames out. But wonder since we believe the right engine flames out first why the plane started turning left instead of right?
I got the same amount of LH Tank fuel remaining after right engine flameout as ALSM, but I used a left engine burn rate of about 5,300 kg/hr after RE burnout instead of 3,642 kg/hr (6,072/2+20%) which means the plane flew a minute or so longer with both engines running, moving the impact a little further to the southwest on the 7th ARC.
I’d give a higher probability to a track that showed a flight path that hit established waypoints on the way to CI and also met the BTOs. I just don’t see the a/c turning at each ring in order for it to hit the next ring on time.
If the 0019 logon signaled fuel exhaustion, then Gysbreght’s May 11 graphs could pinpoint the highest impact location. Those graphs would need to revised to incorporate wind and temperature to determine the exact range as there is only one combination of speed and constant altitude to meet the known endurance.
@Dennis
I’m not a Scientist like most of the IG, but a powerful method used in Science is to explore ‘How’ in order to gain more insight into ‘Why’.
As a longtime member of the peanut gallery, however, it would seem to me as if the IG premise (FMT->6hr AP->SIO->Steep Descent) doesn’t need a specific motive- or rather, it covers a couple of them without explicitly stating so.
Without endorsing any, a few of these could be:
Mech failure -> Incapacitation -> AP ghost flight
Murder -> Suicide -> AP ghost flight
Murder -> AP flight -> Suicide dive
Finding more debris, and any clues within, might shed more light into the final moments of the flight, and with any luck, help to narrow an impossibly large search area.
On the other hand, as more time passes without finding more debris, or any Sonar findings – options and funding will begin to wane, and if the search were to continue, more reliance would be given to the exploration of ‘Why’ to help inform any new possible search areas (including CI).
@All
Hopefully, the Reunion flaperon discovery will continue to energize a search for more debris, and if more is out there, that the drift models may prove helpful in locating it.
According to this particular drift model, the possibility for debris to wash up on a WA beach appears a magnitude more likely than Reunion. Does anyone know if there has been any recent coordinated search efforts between Perth and Albany? Why is this drift model (thanks Susie) so different than the CSIRO one?
http://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/mh370-debris-cant-be-on-reunion-island-and-the-maldives-at-the-same-time-says-expert/story-e6frfq80-1227477749825
You are confusing suppliers and subcontractors. Boeing buys many parts from suppliers: tires, wheels, brakes, computers, engines, cabin furniture, galley equipment, etc., etc. Subcontractors manufacture airframe parts under contract to Boeing, who owns the design, drawings, specifications and certification. Subcontractors deliver the manufactured assemblies or parts to Boeing and cannot sell them on the market.
I have a question.
It has been the conventional wisdom that the reason that we did not receive the ‘handshake’ is because the plane hit the water. What if the ‘handshake’ was turned-off intentionally?
Question: Do you think this would make a major change in where to look for the plane if the data/calculations started with a ‘turned-off’ scenario,
We have the ‘reboot’ so I am thinking the perp could have performed opposite of a reboot—i.e. a turn off of the communications.
If they do not find the plane, a major re-think is in order. I am thinking that the powers-that-be will need to go back and look at the data/calculations with an intentional turn-off of the ‘handshake’ as a major consideration.
If they do not find the plane in the coming year, the authorities should find people who have a proven history in finding stuff deep in the ocean. I am talking about Bob Ballard. James Cameron is another person they should contact. Between the two of them they would have the contacts (people with money, technology, experience, know-how, etc.) to conduct a decent search. Because of the large search area the search team would need to employ a large number of underwater search vehicles. I do not think Ballard/Cameron would attempt a search with just a handful of vehicles. A small number of vehicles would make the search time stretch out for decades.
How far the plane could go on the available fuel will keep the search area from being an unknown. In other words, the search area will have a set boundary—albeit a very large boundary.
Note: I did not expect the authorities to find the plane in the initial search area and I do not expect the authorities to find the plane in the expanded search
@Lauren
“@Oleksandr – Your #5 is spot on. Remember what happened when the Delta flight that landed at the wrong airport in Kentucky? If MH370 landed on CI, the airline would apologize and say the pilot and FO will undergo retraining and possibly mental evaluations. Also, why risk landing a 777 on a 6900 ft runway when a 9800 foot runway is just an hour away in Bali.”
because if he landed in Indonesia he would very possibly get extradited in Malaysia and end up dead, there is also radar coverage over Indonesia and they could force him to land somewhere else not in Bali(or shoot him down if he wouldn’t obey) if he got into their airspace
@orion
“Without endorsing any, a few of these could be:
Mech failure -> Incapacitation -> AP ghost flight
Murder -> Suicide -> AP ghost flight
Murder -> AP flight -> Suicide dive”
mech failure couldn’t take you along thai border and right around indonesian FIR, I mean theoretically it could but the chance would be one in a gazillion, literally
in case of suicide why the hell would he make the turn towards Australia? I haven’t heard a single plausible reason yet.
Gysbreght – I understand the difference between sub-contractors and suppliers although I interchange the terms when I shouldn’t.
In either case, I interpret the 2009 press release that HAL would build the entire Flaperon to Boeing specifications. I don’t know how CASA is involved, nor do I know if the MH370 Flaperon is original or a replacement.
StevanG – If they fly by way of CI and then on to Bali, they could stay outside of Indonesian airspace until they are within 30 minutes of landing. That’s not enough time to scramble fighter planes.
@Matty-Perth
Your post was riveting. This unprecedented, unfathomable force of intellect fighting to capture the truth of MH370 is not without it’s scars after 18 months. You fight a storm full of information, deceit, politics, all posturing for a place where the truth could be irrelevant. Your group is sustained by the truth and your fortitude represents millions of people. So…..thank you to all for your journey of incomprehensible sacrifice, those of us less gifted will do our part so none of this is in vain
@DennisW,
I meant to include @everyone in the last but especially you, you seem a bit grumpy recently and could use a “pat on the back”
At the risk of sounding like a mad-tinfoil-hatter, I haven’t yet seen indications that the flaperons from MH17 have been reliably accounted for, have been made available to the French for comparison, etc.. How much MH17 debris have/do the Dutch had access to and been able to inventory? Is my understanding correct that it is very little?
Forgive me if I’ve missed any discussion (even conjecture!) on this — but I trust this group more than any other, even if the answer is “we just don’t know.” Frankly, I’d be delighted if that’s one 777 ‘out there’ that we could reliably rule out.
The precedent of the AA191 accident, I posted about a couple of days ago, has been niggling in the back of my mind.
It occurred to me, that a similar mechanical failure of MH370 could explain several of the early mysteries
– left AC bus off
– sharp corner in radar track
– possible slight drop in altitude
– early wobbly radar track
– comparably high speeds
To recap, AA191’s left engine came off and rolled over the wing. On its way over the wing, the engine fractured the hydraulic lines in the leading edge of the left wing. The loss of hydraulic pressure caused the leading edge flaps to retract with consequential loss of lift on the left wing causing the plane to roll left.
The hydraulic pressure loss also rendered the stick shaker inoperable denying the pilots any indication of stall on the left wing. They initiated the “loss of engine procedure” of nose up, gain altitude, slow down. That was the opposite of what was required to get out of the stall.
The second effect important in the MH370 context is the loss of the left AC bus after literally loosing the left engine, which powers it, with all the consequential loss of left AC Bus powered systems.
How does it relate to the MH370 mystery:
– a loss of lift, left roll, a small drop in altitude before recovery could explain the sharp corner in the radar track around IGARI
– total loss of left engine would explain the “left AC bus off” conundrum
– after recovery, the high speeds could be explained as a pilot reaction to the lack of lift. Lesser lift capacity requires higher speeds to avoid stall
– compromised maneuvrability through other damage of control surfaces caused by the departing engine could explain the wobbliness of the track.
– with all the above trouble to focus on, the later reboot could be explained by things settling down in the cockpit and pilots restoring systems, e.g. re-routing, bridging right to left AC bus, etc.
There are a lot of things that scenario doesn’t explain though
– why no comms after restoring systems
– apparently straight path to SIO
– no debris sightings near IGARI of a lost engine or other bits of plane coming off during the engine separation
– probably many more…
Any thoughts?
Cheers
Will
Dennis,
My position is a simple one: before adjusting the speed of light to make ‘facts’ consistent with the hypothesis, it is always better to change a hypothesis.
With regard to my point #3, I think you missed it. According to FI it was possible to make/receive voice calls from the cockpit and send sms/e-mail from the cabin after 18:25. If passengers and flight attendants were alive and conscious by 22:30 (expected arrival time), why didn’t they send ‘SOS’? Just imagine: you expect to arrive by 22:30, but you are still in the air by 23:30. You don’t see the land, onboard maps do not show your location, and you observe sunrise at the other side of the aircraft. Wouldn’t you start asking questions what is going on? Wouldn’t you try to send ‘SOS’ as long as you have technical means to do it?
Yes, IG has failed to explain the spreadsheet. But AP scenario may find a number of explanations. For example, a while ago Gysbreght suggested a brilliant explanation: hijacker(s) incapacitated the passengers by 18:25, set constant heading (or entered the nearest WP) to have a break, then went to the lavatory and locked the cockpit door by mistake.
@littlefoot,
You a spot on with adhesives; you need to get adherence to the base material for the bond to work (not the paint). If you look up 777 flaperon plate as an image search, you should find what a newly installed data plate looks like. Note the colour of the material where the holes are and along the lower edge where it’s slightly skewed. Behind the plate will be a rectangle of paint free material; this is how the bond is supposed to be.
OZ
StevanG,
“5. It would not have less impact than it has now (and the fact is that malaysian government ineptitude is discovered to the world) and he would be alive together with passengers, I guess on that basis alone it makes it a lot more probable destination?!”
Ethiopian Airlines Flight 702. 20 years in prison. Any other impact?
@Lauren
I did not intend for my path to be interpreted as discretely articulated at the ring boundaries. It was just mathematically convenient to calculate the path in that manner to show feasibility. I could draw any number of smooth paths through approximately those points to create an acceptable flight path with respect to the ISAT data.
@Oleksandr
The communication system is flight deck enabled. Whoever was piloting the aircraft could have prevented such communication quite easily. My assumption is that is what was done. I did not miss your point. Likewise the calls made to the flight deck were ignored rather than unanswered by incapacitated crew members. Again, my assumption.
Lauren H
“@Oleksandr – Your #5 is spot on. Remember what happened when the Delta flight that landed at the wrong airport in Kentucky? If MH370 landed on CI, the airline would apologize and say the pilot and FO will undergo retraining and possibly mental evaluations. Also, why risk landing a 777 on a 6900 ft runway when a 9800 foot runway is just an hour away in Bali.”
Bali is a highly populated island. Thousands of tourists on its beaches just 1 km away from the runway. Also Bali is in Indonesia, while CI formally belongs to Australia. From this point of view I don’t have any problems with Dennis’ hypothesis. But political statement as a motive does not sound convincing to me.
@Lauren they wouldn’t have enough fuel to fly by CI and reach Bali.
@Oleksandr
yes 20 years in prison but that flight was only 2 weeks before MH370 so Zaharie couldn’t know all the consequences and the final court decision, bear in mind that people all over the Internet were joking in those 2 weeks about swiss military and it’s 9-17 working time so it was kind of embarrassment which Zaharie might have wanted to replicate in malaysian case
and if by chance he went to the very next link on wikipedia he would stumble upon another ethiopian hijacking which had exactly Christmas Island as a goal
Littlefoot/OZ – Anyone who has a modern corrugated iron roof will have modern adhesive compounds up there at all the usual trouble points. They sit quite happily on the coated surfaces of the sheeting which repel paint and defy the sun. And they sit there long term in the searing heat and driving rain and nightly moisture. My joins haven’t moved in 11 years and I’m in a damp creek/gulley with summer temps around the 40 celsius often. There are some brilliant products out there and I assume planes would be using them also?
Gysbreght – my point is that planting debris(plane junk) might be well within the capabilities of some of the MH370 bandits currently running around. Headline hunters. The trace-ability of the flaperon is another issue.
Dennis,
My understanding of FI is that the communication system which provides sms and e-mail service to the cabin (Panasonic IFE) was functioning properly after 18:27 (self-correction: 18:27, not 18:25 as I wrote earlier). Citation, FI, p. 55:
“18:27:03 – The IFE sets up a Data-3 ground connection (X.25 circuit) over SATCOM for an sms/e-mail application after the SATCOM link is re-established.”
Note that the cockpit has MCDU for audio connection and “Data-2” interface for data. I.e., the cockpit and cabin have different data interfaces.
What is your understanding of this? Perhaps Don could clarify.
@all Anyone know if the flaperons on a 777 are life-limited parts per FAR43.10?
This articles explains the term:
http://www.aviationpros.com/article/10387502/life-limited-parts-understanding-the-new-rule
@Oleksandr
Yes, Don would be the resource for this answer.
@orion, @susie
…why is the drift model in this article “MH370 debris can’t be on Reunion Island and the Maldives at the same time, says expert” different from the CSIRO’s:
This one from Professor Pattiaratchi looks as if its from the same set as one I linked to earlier (dated late? July 2015) where he had also factored in the Leeuwin current which runs N to S down the coast of W Australia. See graphic at the foot of this article and some comments about it
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-31/mh370-australia-increasingly-confident-debris-from-missing-plane/6663264
The Professor had provided a markedly different model last year with only a few “tendrils” stretching towards Reunion. I would guess that the CSIRO’s model used some slightly different assumptions and parameters again but these are all based on the current search area.
It would be good to get a definitive answer from the Professor as to whether there is any direction/location in which debris can in fact drift across the equator; from various graphics it looks as though a N to S drift current down the coast of Africa might cross.
@All,
May I suggest that we all move over to Jeff’s new article about barnacles? It’s getting a bit unwieldy here with si many comment pages filled already.
@OZ,
Could you post a few links to pictures of the ID-plate and where exactly it’s supposed to be on the flap?
Are there pictures of our specific flap and the spot where the ID-plate used to sit?
@littlefoot,
Richard Cole found this link a while back; good photos.
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/other-asian-australian-south-pacific-airlines/491861-mh370-discussion-speculation-thread-121.html
OZ
@OZ, thanks!
Lauren H,
Isn’t that EXACTLY what I stated. The comms were OFF prior to initiating the actual IGARI turn. You did not state anything differently than I.
@littlefoot,
These images can be clicked to be seen in full resolution. The data plate is then more clear:
http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/6462442/1/#138
Replace the “138” by “173” for another pic.
BTW take a look at your Google+ messages.
@Ron, thanks, too!
@Littlefoot
I’m not really into barnacles. I never believed they would be insightful. I’ll stay here for now.
Dennis – I was hoping for a solid 12 months of marine build up at least. That would take it away from the warped private investigator who wanted to make a splash. Interested to see what else might have attached there.
@Dennis
LOL, my thoughts exactly re: the barnacles
@Matty
I am hoping that the French have got their hands on the full ISAT and radar data by now. I think its soon time for a review regardless of the flaperon’s provenance.
@ MuOne:
There is nothing in the AA191 accident that relates to MH370.
@Gysbreght,
A B777 engine cannot come off mid flight? They would have thought the same for the DC10s.
Cheers
Will
@MuOne,
The AA191 engine separation was due to rogue maintenance practices that had appeared in a time of technology infancy and ignorance (forklifts and engine pylons don’t mix).
Times have changed!
I can assure you that worldwide this particular incident is taught in human factors classes in some form for both engineers and pilots.
OZ
And this piece of debris just found, which looks very, very, interesting!
Ahmed Mahloof @AhmedMahloof 51m
Member of Parliament, Former Spokesperson of Progressive Party of Maldives, Former Manager of Maldives National Football Team