Last month, I published an article in New York magazine about a secret Malaysian police report which included details of a simulated flight into the southern Indian Ocean. As Victor Iannello revealed in a comment earlier today, that information came from French journalist Florence de Changy, who had come into possession of the full police report but only shared a portion of it with me.
I have not seen the full report, but would very much like to, because I would like to form my own judgement of what they mean, and I think everyone who is interested in trying to figure out what happened to the missing plane, including the next of kin, are entitled to the same. Some people who have read the full reports have suggested that they give the impression that the recovered simulator files do not in context seem all that incriminating. Other people who have seen the full report have told me that the report contains material that makes it hard to doubt that Zaharie is the culprit. Of course, it’s impossible to rely on someone else’s say-so. We need to see the full report.
The reason I am writing this post now is that earlier today Florence published an article in Le Monde in which she describes having the full report as well as another, 65-page secret document on the same topic. Meanwhile, another French newspaper, Liberation, has also published an article indicating that they, too, have a copy of the report. And private correspondence between myself and a producer at the television network “France 2” indicates that he has as well.
Meanwhile, I know that independent investigators here in the US have the documents as well.
At this point, the secret documents are not very secret. Someone within the investigation has been leaking them like crazy, obviously with the intention that their contents reach the public. My understanding is that this source has placed no restrictions on their use. So journalists and independent investigators who have copies of these documents need to do their duty and release them — somehow, anyhow. Some people that I’ve begged and implored to do so have said that they fear legal ramifiations. Well, if it’s illegal for you to have these documents, then you’ve already broken the law. Use Wikileaks or another similar service to unburden yourself.
Free the data!
UPDATE 8/14/16: Apparently Blaine Alan Gibson has the document, too, according to a rant he post on Facebook. He reveals that the entire set of documents is 1,000 pages long.
@Nederland
I follow some dedicated twitterers on the subject closely but did not saw this document yet.
Some pieces in this document are named that where previous not. If not named those are called ‘unidentified part’.
I read those pieces named, identified as coming from a B777. Don’t you?
@ventus45
It’s not blind faith. IMO it’s common sence.
We’ll see.
@Johan
Would the water pressure not prevent any items from resurfacing?
Probably interesting to find out if all parts from the interior are from the same section, possibly indicating a rupture of the fuselage in that area rather than a wholesale fragmentation, or the opposite.
@Ge Rijn
There is also a remark column which indicates all items not so far reported as certainly or almost certainly, are “under evaluation” rather than already tested or confirmed, but I do agree if these items are already identified they most likely belong to a 777.
@Nederland:
I thought about adding that: parts that follow the hull down and rupture on the way might of course not resurface, e.g. wingparts. But t depends if they are boyant also after rupture (at a particular depth perhaps).
It is the rocket science of a pile of waisted technology.
@Johan
The cabin will not implode while sinking. It will slowly or fast (depending on damage) fill with water.
If still intact after impact on the water I can imagine sealed compartments like the fuel tanks will rupture due to the water pressure while sinking but not cause big parts to seperate and float back to the surface.
Likely all air will be pressed out of every piece. Or pieces like oxigen bottles etc. will be crushed to smaller volumes if they have no change to escape the fuselage in time.
Only materials that have no air contained in their structure but are lighter (sw) than water will be able to float back to the surface if they get the chance IMO.
Like the monitor mounting f.i.
IMO it will also be possible the fuselage broke or ruptured on impact on the seabed freeing some lighter than water pieces that floated back to the surface, f.i. the monitor mounting and maybe also some non-matalic interior panels/parts.
@Ge Rijn:
You are probably right.
@Johan
I wasn’t there when things happened like non of us.
It’s mostly still speculating trying to fit pieces together.
By now we only can be absolutely shure the plane crashed/ditched in the Indian Ocean.
In fact that’s all to be completely shure of IMO.
Everything else is still under scrutiny and questioned/doubted.
A break-through could come from the Pemba-outboard flap section.
At least to finally have certainty the flight was not a ghost-flight till the end but actively piloted with a attempted ditch.
If so it will create a lot of new problems to refine the search area. It might even turn out to be impossible in that case for so many new options become possible.
But at least it will also create a different approuch to everything already accomplished.
The story won’t be over but start again with ferocious intensity I assume.
@Ge Rijn:
I didn’t mean to cut you off, I am just a bit worked out.
And it is not solely MH370 fatigue.
Sometimes explanations will only generate the need for more explanations.
But the parts found will definitely play a big role in deciding what happened at impact. It would be strange if they could not read that off them. But with the speed they are working .,, it is like they had tenure…
I think once debris is actually down to the seabed it won’t resurface due to water pressure, especially if it’s a few miles down already.
@Nederland
The pressure doesn’t matter IMO. If a piece has a lighter specific weight than the water surrounding it, it will float to the surface no matter from how deep it seperated.
@GeRijn
The specific gravity of nonmetallic composites would be low but not buoyant, ca 1.5 . and metallic obviously heavier — most or all of the recovered pieces have honeycomb air spaces that did not collapse. Perhaps a few internal pieces floated up, but none of the exterior fragments could remain buoyant after deep submersion.
@Ikr
I can only agree on what you say. None of those honeycomb air spaces are collapsed under water pressure as it shows.
Only the monitor-mounting is a solid plastic piece that must have had a lower SW than water for it must have floated.
More of those kind of pieces could have made it back to the surface if the fuselage ruptured (or already was open in places) while sinking or when hitting the seabed IMO.
The irrepressible Byron Bailey has just had another pop at the ATSB (the Australian)and I quote “it’s cohorts of armchair experts”. (Ouch, I think he’s referring to the IG) “Armchair experts who have no flight deck experience and are not interested in who, what, why and when, but only where MH370 ended it’s flight” unquote. He could have a point!
He is saying the sequence of events immediately following the diversion is nothing like you would expect from a crew reacting to an onboard emergency, such as a sudden decompression. He has another point, there.
Byron expresses surprise at the lack of criticism from professionals. Criticism of the official ATSB stance, from those who do have flight deck experience, ie senior captains, training captains, from Qantas, Jetstar etc.
Well the simple answer to that is that senior aircrew, like ATSB staff, want to keep their jobs. Fugro’s Paul Kennedy had the temerity to voice what most (informed)observers had privately been thinking; that MH370 may have been under pilot control till the end. He was very quickly put in his place.
So what chance of the truth ever coming out?
@ROB
To be fair, the ATSB never claimed anything like that MH370 was a ghost flight already after the diversion at IGARI. They have frequently said Baily is misrepresenting their views. They only said there is no evidence for pilot inputs at some point after the FMT. Bailey consistently keeps on ignoring that.
@Ge Rijn
Just googled it and the pressure on debris at, say, 6000 m below sea level is 6549 pounds per square inch (psi). Sounds quite heavy to me.
@Nederland, @GeRijn, @Ikr:
I’ll be damned if there is capacity hanging around. Noted. I suspect that would be the case (remaining in the deep), but let’s say it depends? A cork-belt? Household plastic? Fabric/cloth/garment/ clothing/textiles? Wood? Paper? The soon-to-be-envisioned airplane auto-release buoy with a solarpanel driven beeper, and auto-pink-dye radioactive homing colour slick? ID-cards? Passports? Mangosteens? Other parts of the cargo and people’s luggage?
Don’t answer any of that. Here and now.
@ROB
Easy there big fella. You are going to upset AM2 by referring to dumb decisions, conclusions, and/or actions.
Here is the link, BTW:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/socalled-experts-have-their-head-in-the-sand-over-mh370/news-story/f2e189f006431333ed8d6c76cd7949f4
@all
BTW, you can defeat the paywall by inserting
Armchair experts who have no flight deck experience and are not interested in who, what, why and when, but only where MH370 ended it’s flight
in the Google Search box and clicking on the first link the comes up.
@Nederland:
… and beaten to it too.
I assume it is in the vicinity of that at 4000 m.
@Johan
Check it out:
http://www.calctool.org/CALC/other/games/depth_press
@all
Is there something I don’t know?
No comments on @Captain Dirck Hecking posting.
Cheers Tom L
@Tom L
I was going to post something, but did not want to upset AM2.
@DennisW
Shame.
Anyway I don’t think we can check if the safety alert
was carried out; the records were probably lost due to the fire in the maintenance records department How unfortunate.
Cheers Tom L
Shame.
I wonder if the safety alert was acted on.
Hard to check now as the records were probably in the maintenance department fire. How unfortunate.
(My first posting this piece didn’t appear to stick so there maybe two.)
Cheers Tom L
@Nederland:
How handy. Some 5850 psi or 400 atm or 40300 kPa at 4 km depth. Thanks.
@Tom L.
Here is a link to an old story on the subject. The last paragraph sort of says it all. Different antenna. Also the link says of 42 aircraft inspected (which had a representative number of hours on them) no other signs of cracking were observed.
Captain Hecking apparently did not do much homework on this. Plus that the circumstances of the disappearance are not consistent with that failure mode.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/malaysia/10691089/Malaysia-Airlines-mystery-US-issued-warnings-over-Boeing-777-weak-spot.html
@DennisW
Thanks mate.
Will check it out.
Cheers Tom L
@Tom L
Just for the sake of completeness I was going to tell captain Hecking that commentary (Byron Bailey comes to mind) from 777 pilots, while welcome, is like a cab driver commenting on the physics of ABS.
@Tom Lindsey:
Small observation. I agree in a general sense with the notion that there ought to be professionals out there (pilots of all walks of life) who could contribute to this. (Realizing at the same time that the “arm-chair” imagey is a provocation.) But one gets the feeling there is some esprit de corps that will decide who has the right to open his or her mouth. Further, and it may be related, you know what they say about referees in Football and hockey: the best ones are those you don’t see much of. I assume it is risk, trust, reputation and credibilty thing: you don’t want to have the hazard label stuck on you.
… and DennisW is probably right of course too.
@DennisW, @Johan
Agreed on those points.
Also there is probably a lot of people/states/companies not saying anything.
Even though it is a very unusual event it is carrying a lot of stigma to it.
An event to stay away from. In other words ‘It Stinks’
I don’t know any other way to say it.
Cheers Tom L
@Tom L
Yes, you will want a pilot to be “balanced” and professional and minding his business (actually). So freely talking and speculation is not sought after qualities, I guess. In addition to that, at the other end of things, pilot suicide and gross factory / maintenance neglience (and planes disappearing into nowhere) are perhaps as close as you will get to the “unsayable” among both passengers and the industry.
Some more from ATSB on their drift modelling and proposed (as yet unfunded) experimental work.
http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-experts-use-drift-modeling-to-define-new-mh370-search-zone-2016-8?IR=T
The criterion seems to be that any new model needs to yield a searchable search area up to 550km long (I speculated a similar number some weeks ago).
I read the discussion of the flap state to indicate that confirmation is required by ATSB that it was not deployed on impact, in order to give a searchable width, but the article does not state that as such.
Found via most recent reddit post
Courtesie of abcnews.go.com:
Foley said…
“Six replicas of the flaperon will be sent to Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization’s oceanography department in the island state of Tasmania where scientists will determine whether it is the wind or the currents that affect how they drift, Hood said. This will enable more accurate drift modeling than is currently available.
If more money becomes available, the Australian bureau, which is conducting the search on Malaysia’s behalf, plans to fit the flaperons with satellite beacons and set them adrift at different points in the southern Indian Ocean around March 8 next year — the third anniversary of the disaster — and track their movements.”
Wow. Would be nice if it eventuates…
@Richard Cole,
Ooops, you beat me to it.
@Richard Cole
Indeed, they don’t mention restrictions on longitude in case the flap was deployed and the plane possibly glided 100+ miles from the 7th arc. It only mentions a 5d latitude marge.
One thing I wonder about is how they can make good copies of the found flaperon if it’s not in their possesion.
And I wonder why they don’t plan to use copies of the outboard flap section too.
First they have the original to make good copies.
Second a mix of both flaperon and flap-section copies will give a better overall result IMO.
@Ge Rijn
Perhaps the flaperon ‘copy and distribution’ plan has been in preparation for some time – the flap fragment recovery is much more recent.
Clearly, only a relatively large item can carry a beacon (and it needs to be at least partly out of the water). I guess if big items with beacons were being dropped in the sea there would also be a much larger number of small message-in-a-bottle type items, but those need to found on beaches to be useful.
If the ATSB scheme were to implemented then it would not yield results till late 2017 at the earliest, it is not clear if that would allow searching in southern summer 2017-18.
There must be confidence that conditions will not vary markedly year by year, not just wind but swell and currents, potentially leading to a large spread. To settle spread size with some confidence otherwise might take annual repeats.
@David
I would think the fragment ‘copy and distribution’ plan is primarily to validate a model, in that case using measured 2017 weather/sea conditions. The model can then be applied back to measured 2014 conditions.
@Richard Cole
At least it’s a sign of their determination to find the plane. Hat off for that.
6 flaperons seems a small number to me.
Remember the MPat drifter based forward drift model (and Griffin).
It needed 177 undroged buoys to land 31 of them on African shores coming from the current search area after ~20 months.
With only 6 flaperons, chances are great IMO none of them will end up on or near a shore but keep circeling around like most of the 177 buoys did after ~20 months.
But as you and @David suggest they probably have done their homework allready.
And offcourse it’s a positive developement.
@Ge Rijn
The copies don’t have to actually land anywhere (and as you say they probably won’t). The aim may be to get the relevant tracking data for the models and six months may be enough to determine the general direction the items end up moving, which may be enough for the validation. However, there is a chaotic element and six is not many to take that out.
@Richard Cole
Yes I agree. In 6 months they will probably allready give a good indication of where they are heading in general.
And within those ~6 months it probably also can give a good indication why no debris is found on Australian shores (yet).
@Ge Rijn
Perhaps it’s a cunning ploy to get their hands on the flaperon. Must be worth a try.
Lets hope the French fall for it.
The latest piece of news from the ATSB seems to suggest that the flap was not deployed when it hit the water, as opposed to earlier reports by the WSJ:
‘”The rate of descent combined with the position of the flap — if it’s found that it is not deployed — will almost certainly rule out either a controlled ditch or glide,” Foley said’
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/article96586417.html
@Nederland @Rob
In the same article:
Foley said his bureau’s analysts were working on the flap to ascertain whether or not it was deployed when the plane hit the water. They will test their hypothesis with the Boeing accident investigation team to validate their findings.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/article96586417.html#storylink=cpy
In fact when stating the statement you posted, he also states the opposite:
If it’s found that the flap was deployed it will almost certainly mean a glide and controlled ditch and rule out a high rate of descent.
@Rob
Who knows what they allready got from the French..
Maybe the French send the ATSB a copy some time ago?
The ATSB has not shown any new evidence that the last BFO value should now be considered to be valid, against INMARSAT advice that it should be discarded.
Even if examination of the debris would conclusively establish that the flap was retracted at impact, that finding wouldn’t rule out controlled ditch or glide. The airplane glides better with flaps retracted than with flaps extended.
@Nederland
In the same article:
Foley said his bureau’s analysts were working on the flap to ascertain whether or not it was deployed when the plane hit the water. They will test their hypothesis with the Boeing accident investigation team to validate their findings.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/article96586417.html#storylink=cpy
In fact when stating the statement you posted, he also states the opposite:
If it’s found that the flap was deployed it will almost certainly mean a glide and controlled ditch and rule out a high rate of descent.
@Rob
Who knows what they allready got from the French..
Maybe the French send the ATSB a copy some time ago?
@Gysbreght
I guess you are right.
There where more succesfull glides and landings with retracted flaps.
I think deployed flaps will at least prove the plane descended under control of a pilot and most probably attempred a ditch.
It is a good thing the passengers are not in a hurry to be saved. And that no manned Kon-Tiki will be needed this time.