Last week, the Joint Investigation Team conducting a criminal investigation into the downing of idH17 issued their preliminary findings. Here’s what I think are the main takeaways.
— The findings strongly endorse the work of “open source intelligence” pioneer Eliot Higgins and his group, Bellingcat. In the immediate aftermath of the shoot-down, it was accepted by nearly every pundit and journalist that the missile had been fired accidentally by poorly trained militiamen who had somehow gotten their hands on an SA-11 Buk launcher and had a acquired a target without bothering to first identify it. But by painstaking work and great resourcefulness, the Bellingcat team was able to piece together an extremely convincing timeline, by which the launcher was brought across the border from a specific Russian military unit, was transported under the direction of the GRU (Russian military intelligence), shot down MH17, and was sent back across the border that night. As I’ve written previously, the timeline described by Bellingcat does not fit with the hapless-militiaman scenario very well. As the New York Times reported, “It is unlikely that anyone not connected with the Russian military would have been able to deploy an SA-11 missile launcher from Russia into a neighboring country.”
— While still admiting the possibility that the Buk crew acted on its own, the report shifts the emphasis to the once-unthinkable: that the missile launch was ordered by higher-ups:
…an investigation is conducted into the chain of command. Who gave the order to bring the BUK-TELAR into Ukraine and who gave the order to shoot down flight MH17? Did the crew decide for themselves or did they execute a command from their superiors? This is important when determining the offences committed by the alleged perpetrators.
As the New York Times put it, the JIT has signaled that it intends “to build an open-and-shut case against individual suspects and to diagram the chain of command behind the order to deploy and launch.”
One can just about imagine a wet-behind-the-ears lieutenant, newly trained and sitting nervously in the cab of his Buk TELAR, messing up and accidentally firing a missile at an unidentified target. But it is harder to imagine an experienced senior officer mistakenly giving the order. Indeed, the higher one goes up the chain of command, the less likely that the decision was made without explicit or implicit endorsement by an immediate superior. The implication, then, is that the order to shoot down MH17, if it did come from anywhere, came from the very top.
— One new piece of information that was revealed in last week’s presentation was that on the day before MH17 was shot down, a rebel commander was recorded making an emotional telephone call to a superior in the regular Russian military, complaining that his troops were vulnerable to Ukrainian air attacks—specifically, by Su-25 ground-attack jets—and that they needed Buks to protect them.
This could be interpreted as evidence that the delivery of the Buk that shot down MH17 was initiated by the militia. Alternatively, it could be a coincidence that a militia commander happened to ask for a missile system the Russian military had already decided to deploy. I think the latter is more likely, for the simple reason that the Buk missile system was not the most appropriate weapon for defending against Su-25s or the other low-altitude planes then in service against the separatists.
The Su-25 is more or less the Russian counterpart of the American A-10: it is designed for low-altitude strafing attacks, with a maximum altitude of 23,000 feet. Another plane used by the Ukrainian military at the time was the An-26 transport, with a maximum altitude of 25,000 feet. A potent defence against these planes would be the Pantsir anti-aircraft system, a mobile rocket launcher that also incorporates self-aiming quad machine guns to automatically blast low-flying attackers out of the sky. Compared to the Buk, which can reach targets above 80,000 feet high, the Pantsir can reach no higher than 26,000 feet. But unlike the Buk it can handle jets flying low under the radar, as the Su-25 can do.
It is known that Pantsirs were present and active in eastern Ukraine at the time of the shootdown. On July 14, an An-26 military transport plane was flying at about 20,000 feet when it was shot down. Ukrainian military assumed that it was downed either by a Pantsir or by an air-to-air missile fired from a Russian fighter jet flying on the other side of the Russian-Ukrainian border. On July 16, a Su-25 flying at nearly the same altitude was also shot down, again either by a Pantsir or an air-to-air missile. The blog Putin@War found satellite imagery of Pantsir units near the Ukraine-Russian border in August of 2016.
The limited reach of the Pantsir is one of the reasons that officials believed that airliners would be perfectly safe traveling higher than 32,000 feet, and so kept the airspace open to airline traffic. Buks were not known to be in the theater—and, indeed, up until the day of the shoot-down, it seems that they weren’t.
As a general principle, you do not want to send equipment into a poorly regulated battlespace that is any more powerful than it needs to be. The potential danger is too great. Retired U.S. military intelligence officer Peter Akins told me that, having had experience with many brushfire wars on its perimeter, the Russians know better than to carelessly hand out strategically powerful weapons like the Buk. “My guess is that they’re pretty carefully controlled,” he says. “We ran into real problems in Afghanistan with giving mujahadeen all those Stingers (MANPADS) that they used to take out Russian helicopters. Stingers have a relatively long shelf life. So once the mujahadeen became Taliban, if they could get to the top of a mountain in Afghanistan they could increase the operational envelope of the missile so that they could target US aircraft. So that’s one of the lessons that we learned, which is don’t give out MANPADS. I don’t know where the idea for ‘Let’s give an SA-11 to a separatist movement in the Donetsk National Sovereignty Front’ would have come from. That’s not the actions of a responsible government.”
— The weight of the JIT’s authority has, I think, severely undermined the army of Kremlin trolls who have been promoting a fog of pro-Russian conspiracy theories almost from day one. As Finnish defense writer Robin Häggblom put it, “the amount of evidence found in both open and non-open source has reached such levels that the question of whether a Russian supplied Buk shot down MH17 can now be considered a litmus test for whether you are under the influence of Russian propaganda or not.”
— The slow, grinding, meticulous building of the case against Russia feels unstoppable—and it could lead to a huge and potentially dangerous political crisis. In the wake of the JIT’s presentation, Moscow responded with such fury that the Dutch foreign minister summoned the Russian ambassador. In response, the Russian foreign minister summoned the Dutch ambassador in Moscow. Meanwhile, Australia’s foreign minister said that whoever was responsible for the shoot-down could face an international tribunal like the one who found Libyan agents guilty for the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie Scotland. Russia has already used its security council powers to block a UN investigation.
As I’ve been saying for a long time now, if it is determined that the Russian leadership deliberately ordered the shoot-down of MH17, the implications for MH370 are obvious—one of the difficulties in trying to understand MH370 is that, though it was clearly a deliberate act, there was no plausible motive. MH17 provides, if not understanding of what the motive was, clear evidence that a motive existed, in mid-2014, for a great power to take down a Malaysia Airlines 777. If an international Lockerbie-style commission is ultimately set up to assign criminal blame for Ukraine tragedy, then it is not too far out to imagine a similar body being established to do the same for MH370.
UPDATE: The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab has published a nice overview of the anti-aircraft weapons systems that Russia has deployed in Eastern Ukraine. It seems that the Buk TELAR deployed from July 16 to 18, 2014, was the only one that threatened civil air traffic over the region.
Oleksandr said at October 6, 2016 at 9:30 AM
” I have abandoned further detailed studies and refinements of the magnetic modes because it was noted that such modes do not exist on B777.”
@Oleksandr
From a “detective’s” point of view, it is a “dangerous assumption” to rule any “methodology” out, simply on the basis of it not being “obviously possible.
Just because an autopilot “mode” does not exist on the B-777, does not mean that it was “not deliberately piloted” in “effectively” the same, or “very similar” way.
I can think of two scenarios, for “deliberate action” by a “live perpetrator”, that anyone with even “basic” knowledge could use. The perpetrator does not have to be a B-777 rated pilot. Both are simple, and in keeping with KISS princilples.
Scenario One = “Some chosen = Desired, “Magnetic HEADING”.
Methodology: = Simply put autopilot in LNAV, and simply adjust the heading select knob every now and again, against the magnetic compass on the winscreen centre post.
Scenario Two = “Some chosen = Desired, “CELESTIAL OBJECT”.
Methodology: = Simply put autopilot in LNAV, and simply adjust the heading select knob every now and again, to keep the aircraft “HEADING” straight at that chosen “Celestial Object”.
My theory is Scenario Two. My “Celestial Object” of “choice”, is “CANOPUS”.
@Jeff: appreciated your proverbic “There is a difference between skepticism and cynicism. The former is essential to uncovering the truth, the latter is toxic to it.” It is head on. I hope a “practical cynic” at times is as close that one will get to a skeptic.
@Keffertje: thanks. And that was with one hand as I fried the meatballs for my children, which are now sound asleep beside me. Peace, security, national souvereignty, monopoly of violence are by almost all states considered as fundamentals for prosperity, welfare, health and high age, progress, development in all aspects of society. You won’t see Ukraine (or any other nation) taking lightly the risk of losing a near half of its territory to outlaw secessionists wanting to bring that part of the country under the protection of the neighbouring superpower, which btw have ethnics spread all over Ukraine. (Ukraine, if I am not mistaken, have btw(!) quit using the definite article to distance itself from the Soviet Republic and former part of the Russian Empire…). The situation is fragile to say the least, Ukraine is huge, poverty stricken, suffering economic backlash for decades and contains a substantial amount of ethnicities, although Ukrainians and Russians are the majority. You may guess what happens to Ukrainians living in the east, and to Russians in the west. The NoK may have to take a breath. I am not a professional on intl investigations and negotiations but treatises and contracts are often formulated in a sense that aim to be valid under all kinds of unforseen circumstances. They are supposed to be binding (to get the job done) but they need also to give protection against developments what are more practical in nature and can be hard to forsee (the leadership of the investigation might shift to another country which by political or other developments is made sensitive to the wishes of another power; the crash site or areas around it may be seized by rebels or Russia in a conflict and “new evidence”, sent for investigation to Russia, might be discovered; evidence of a kind (bad for Russia, or bad for Ukraine) that might risk forcing Ukraine immediately into an armed conflict with Russia could turn up (which by then might be the wish of Russia), and Ukraine will then, at that future point in time, by chosing to wave or not to wave their veto have a chance to ride out a storm and/or send signals to their own population(s) about whether they will accept the charge, question it as biased, deem it overstated, turn it down, etc. dependiing on what the outcome will be and what state their nation is in at that point. I don’t think that can be questioned. The results of the investigation will still stand on the intnl scene without doubt. But Ukraine has the mood of some 110 million Russians to think about, from now and until the end of days.
@Oleksandr. “However, the absence of the debris in the current search area makes failed hijacking less likely.”
I do not see the connection but putting that aside the estimation by Dr Gordon that the prospect of detecting the wreckage as being in the low-70’s percent even if there, is disconcerting and reduces confidence in drawing conclusions and I note you do say, “less likely”.
“How else could it be flow in case of ADIRU failure and absence of communication means, especially if the left bus was depowered on purpose?”
What I was getting at more was the flight to the NW if not also the disappearance south into the never never. Why not circle?
@TBill, I do not believe that NDA’s have been put in place. In the case of Ukraine, multiple countries are part of the investigation and I suppose for political reasons and sensitivities they want to keep it under wraps until such time that information can be disclosed (when all parties agree).
@Johan, No meatball fight fest? I always told people they could eat off the floor at my house. And the walls. “The NOK may have to take a breath”. I understand this happens for a whole range of reasons, but that does not mean it is right. Russia needed to step up to the plate and take this one on the chin from day 1.
In Banking these days, compliance and risk regulations stretch further than the horizon. Banks have to ask for a whole range of personal documents, monitor payments and perform due diligence on anything that looks suspect, have to document that their corporate clients are environmentally and socially sound and have the proper approvals when dealing with Ultra High Risk Countries. The latest addition is that banks need to make sure the company/client isn’t evading taxes by implementing even more monitoring systems. On top of all that, central banks come in with their armies to audit and record that you have all of the required information, properly documented, stored and renewed yearly. Also, banks have to submit reports on policies and procedures in case of any disaster you can think of. Non-compliance results in heavy fines and ultimately the yanking of your banking license. Any prudent banker complies because it keeps you honest and on the straight and narrow.
MY investigation and lack of transparency related to 9M-MRO disappearance is abysmal. Minimum investigative standards should exist and countries should be held to them. How can it be that NOK have to go to court to obtain pertinent documents? What we have learned from this entire process is that improvements need to be implemented that go beyond safety measures, similar to banks. If countries want to fly their carriers into and over international jurisdictions, they should be subject to a pre-defined standard covering ethics, documentation requirements, investigation requirements and full transparency. And if countries do not want to play by this (much higher) standard they should be banned from flying in and out of jurisdictions until they do.
Mauritius wing part from MH370. Left outer flap trailing edge.
https://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2014/aair/ae-2014-054/
@JeffWise
“The JIT investigation is an international effort being carried out to the highest standards. Such bodies are our best hope at arriving at the truth in a world increasingly awash with sophisticated forgeries, troll armies, and elaborate disinformation campaigns.”
MH370. JFK. 9/11. Hillary Clinton. “Secret societies.” Western banking cartel.
The world is not run like you think it is.
@David
Significant. First identified piece of the left wing. And another outboard flap piece.
This time only a part of the trailing edge.
Did the rest of that outboard flap stay attached? It opens new questions. That trailing edge piece is clean on the edge and broke off in front of the end spar.
Why and how?
And this is the piece with the big hole straight through we discussed months ago.
Two outboard flap pieces from both wings also point to a level entry in the water IMO.
I have a feeling that hole through the piece could be quite significant too.
Some object must have shot through it with high velocity.
It’s yet another twist in the mystery.
[content removed by JW] @Gloria, you are banned for trolling
@Oleksandr, DrBobbyU, Ventus45:
According to the B777 FCOM, ATSB reports, and the DSTG there are four AP roll modes apart from LNAV: HDG or TRK, TRUE or NORM (Magnetic). ATT is normally a transient state of the AP, but can persist longer when the IR part of the ADIRU is inoperative and the heading is not initialized.
@BobbyU
Ref: Fig 15 of Inmarsat paper
To remake a point, if the blue points on the graph were individual BFO measurements there should be around 170 rather than the 30 shown (170 is the average number of BFO measurements per validation flight from the DSTG paper sec 5.3). So either averaging has been performed to generate the blue points, or some filtering. Either way, trying to regenerate the statistics of the raw data from the blue points is dubious.
P.S. The main difference between True Track mode and ATT ‘state’ is that the former corrects for Coriolis and the latter does not.
@ Paul C posted October 6, 2016 at 3:04 PM
“@Jeff I see no point in further participation.”
Paul, the blog contributors are the tip of an Iceberg – with 90% being passive readers and I, for one, greatly value your contribution.
Don’t let the loud-mouthed attack dogs get you down as they don’t speak for the majority – they live in their own tiny (but loud) glide-path World.
Same @Gloria
– you’re both valued here!
Most of the passive readers can separate the wheat from the (loud) chaff. Keep up the good work & valued contributions both of you.
@GortoZ: “Most of the passive readers can separate the wheat from the (loud) chaff.”
Most of the active readers can’t. What do you know about the passive readers beside yourselves?
@GortoZ, I couldn’t disagree more.
@Richard Cole
Re: Figure 15
I agree, but elected not to pursue it any further. The difficulty of extracting the statistics in that manner makes it a questionable endeavor plus that a single sample of an ergodic process is not meaningful. My motivation for doing so relative to figure 5.4 of the DSTG book was simply to see if the variance in that figure was representative of the ensemble variances reported in Table 5.1.
@GeRijn
We speculated (Warren, me and others) at the time it was found, that it would have to be from the LH wing, because of the way the piece tapered.
You would expect at least something from the LH trailing edge to be knocked off during a ditching. This makes the ditching scenario all the more likely, and also indicates that flaps were at least partially deployed, in my opinion. A partial flap setting would be required to reduce the angle of attack, and allow it to impact in an as horizontal as possible attitude, to lessen the risk of major structural breakup.
@Jeffwise
Jeff, Putin on the Bridge (Manhattan). A portent of things to come, perhaps? 😉
Only joshing, of course.
@ROB: “A partial flap setting would be required to reduce the angle of attack, and allow it to impact in an as horizontal as possible attitude, to lessen the risk of major structural breakup.”
Flap extension permits the speed to be reduced at a given angle of attack. It is not required to reduce the angle of attack.
The optimum attitude is not horizontal. It is defined by the recommended ditching procedure, which says: Select Flaps 30; maintain VREF30 to touchdown; Flare airplane to achieve minimum rate of descent at touchdown. My guessw is that would result in a touchdown attitude somewhere between 5 and 10 degrees nose-up.
The NTSB report on the diotching of an A320 in the Hudson river states: “Other literature on this issue also suggested that, when no power is available to the airplane, using flaps may result in the airplane flying at a lower attitude and descending more steeply and make it more difficult for the pilot to judge the flare. The NTSB notes that the benefits achieved when using flaps, such as a lower stall speed, should be weighed against the challenges associated with using flaps.”
For the A320 the optimum pitch attitude was 11 degrees, and the accident flight ditched at 9.5 degrees nose-up.
The Mauritius fragment is confirmed to be from MH370:
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/debris-recovered-from-mauritius-from-missing-mh370-malaysia/3187278.html
@Gysbreght
Yes, thank you that’s exactly what I meant,but I don’t have the advantage of your command of sentence construction. I’m glad we’re on the same page, though.
Sully was criticized by some for not applying enough flap. Although the co pilot had got the APU up and running, Sully didn’t think he had sufficient hydraulic pressure to deploy the flaps to the recommended setting (if memory serves me right) and the result was an approach speed 20kts above optimal.
@Oleksandr
Interesting news, isn’t it. Pushes the mechanical/electrical failure scenario even further off the table.
I’ve added an update to the post with a link to the new report by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, “MH17 as a Result of a Pattern of Escalation.” Quite an interesting look at what systems have been deployed–all, except for the July 17, 2014 Buk, incapable of threatening civil air traffic.
Here again is that link:
https://medium.com/@DFRLab/mh17-as-a-result-of-a-pattern-of-escalation-83f5ed602c8b#.7o1hrivis
@JeffW, VERY interesting and comprehensive article on Russian weaponry brought into the Ukraine. I am hoping the investigation will bring out more details and evidence that can be used in a court of law! Thank you for posting an update.
ROB,
“…Pushes the mechanical/electrical failure scenario even further off the table.”
Nope. This news only confirms what was previously assumed. It only eliminates one excessive prefix “if”; nothing else.
@ Gysbreght
“What do you know about the passive readers beside yourselves?”
In answer to your question: having read this blog for 1+ years I do so see patterns of pop-ups, constant contributions and trends accruing – how about you? What do you know, precisely ?
@Jeff “I couldn’t disagree more.”
That is your entitlement, especially as its your blog – what exactly do you disagree with – support for people offering opinions outside your fixed opinion, or what? Be exact …. and don’t hide behind the badge.
Gysbreght,
Re: “According to the B777 FCOM, ATSB reports, and the DSTG there are four AP roll modes apart from LNAV: HDG or TRK, TRUE or NORM (Magnetic). ATT is normally a transient state of the AP, but can persist longer when the IR part of the ADIRU is inoperative and the heading is not initialized.”
To be accurate, there are several more roll modes, but they seem to be irrelevant.
My current understanding of the ATT mode is similar to yours, except that besides the Coriolis force, it is also affected by varying (non-stationary) ambient wind conditions. And since the recent trend is to push acceptable BFO limits further, I can say that accounting for the wind-induced torque may also satisfy BFO and BTO data, with the terminus likely to be at ~25S.
With regard to the magnetic heading: were you able to find more clarifications on whether it is used for display only or navigation purpose? It appears that DTSG accounted for these two modes, but I am not clear why their relevant probability plots do not show spikes around 30S.
From the NTSB accident report (for the record):
and:
Bottom line: The damage to the flap trailing edge may be due to the pitch attitude and rate of descent, and is not evidence of the flaps being extended at impact.
@GortoZ, One of the very useful aspects of the latest MH17 news is that it has drawn the trolls out of the woodwork. The shootdown was unambiguously the work of the Russian military; hence, anyone promoting the idea that the Ukrainians might have done it is either employed as a Russian troll or a dupe who has fallen under their sway. So we can safely remove Gloria (and probably PaulC as well, though he seems less hardcore) without fear of losing potentially valuable contributions.
Russian propoganda surrounding MH17 has been very aggressive, so we have to be aggressive in pushing back against it. Regarding MH370, the picture is far less clear. I don’t know what anyone’s motives are, but there do clearly seem to be a subset of people who are more interested in muddying the waters than it working collegially to improve our collective understanding.
ventus45,
If it was piloted till the very end, the airplane could end up anywhere on the 7th arc, so that all the models become useless. A long while ago I asked Duncan Steel: “why constant heading?”. He answered “because it is the simplest assumption, which satisfies data”. It turns out that the aircraft is not found where it was supposed to be based on the simplest assumptions.
However, one peculiarity of these assumptions is their ridiculousness: absence of plausible logical explanation. The assumption of the magnetic TRK/HDG hold modes, if they exist on B777, suffers from the same drawback. In contrast, the ATT mode appears to be a way more plausible. It is a “legitimate” mode on Airbus A320, A330 aircrafts (a pilot can explicitly select “ATT Hold”), but transient mode on B777. So far only failed ADIRU can explain permanent ATT mode if no further human input was made. And it is consistent with all the observations. That is why currently I am more interested in the ATT mode. If it is confirmed that the magnetic HDG/TRK do exist, respective trajectories must be properly investigated. Then there will be many questions to ATSB.
David,
“I do not see the connection…”
The connection is that if it was a failed hijacking, then the plane would likely end up in the “ghost” HDG/TRK Hold mode after 18:40 (besides crashing shortly, which did not occur). E.g. accidently locked cockpit door etc.
“Why not circle?”
Without ADIRU normal holding pattern function does not work. The only possibility to mimic it is entering a turn followed by engagement of the AP. This scenario fits BFO 18:25-18:41. Why the center of Malacca? Perhaps to keep away from busy areas, but sufficiently close to major runways.
@Oleksandr: “It is a “legitimate” mode on Airbus A320, A330 aircrafts (a pilot can explicitly select “ATT Hold”), …”
On the A320, A330 the ADIRU has an “ATT” mode, where the output of ADIRU inertial data is limited to attitude data. The A320 or A330 autopilots have no “ATT Hold” mode that the pilot can select.
@Oleksandr, I think it’s important to separate out two aspects of a scenario that are required to make it plausible. First, there is, as you point out, the question of “plausible logical explanation.” Does a heading mode exist that could take a plane to a given point on the 7th arc? If imagine that the plane might have been under the control of a pilot who is allowed to make arbitrary turns, why would a person make arbitrary turns over the open ocean, at night?
Second, there is a subtler aspect, which is that this plausible logical explanation must also fit the observed ping rings. And here we run up against the problem that the DSTG identified, which is that in the universe of all possible flights, most of them are fast and straight. So if the flight was not fast and straight, it was only a matter of blind luck that it “looked” fast and straight.
@DennisW and I have been arguing about this for literally years at this point, but the fact is that if the pilot, say, happened to be steering toward Canopus, which resulted in a curving path, it is an extraordinary coincidence that this path created a pattern of ping-rings that just happened to match a more simple, normal, expected path.
Re: MH370 Heading
If I understand we have integer degrees as a target option I would suggest 32S 96E and then last few 25-30 miles I am turning due East stay on 32S and drop down on 7th arc.
Not sure if that fits final ping BFO and Not sure if integer degrees is all I have to work with as a heading.
One approach for future search is focus on INMARSAT 7th arc and give INMARSAT chance to get credit for defining 7th arc. Here assuming no big glide past 7th arc and the parts will tend to spread out as they sink. So making a couple long scans right down the arc as a last resort.
@Keffertje:
It was a while since the time of food wars. Living in a pretty limited space, although better now, and due to some other factors, I am not extremely fond of raking food off the walls too often But I know the attraction of it.
Regarding delays: I have no idea about the Russians but obviously this is not the clearcut case as with the American shootdown with a boatload of witnesses, and with room for evasion there will be evasion, I guess. With Crimea in the vicinity Putin did perhaps not contemplate dressing in sackcloth and ashes. Still, there is not necessarily a uniform Russian line of command we are looking at, although if borrowing a missile-launcher and driving it to Finland to shoot down an airliner happened within the Swedish army, the guilty would be hunted down to face the gravest consequences that the Swedish justice system could figure out. Even if the guilty were Finland Swedes, Scanians or Norrbottningar.
As to NoK compensation by insurance companies the praxis is laughable and has been for ages. The NoK will not get a dime until the insurance companies have had time to figure out how much they will have to pay and had time to earn that money back through different channels, to be at even score already before the money is handed out (that is my impression).
And as I said, even with the best intentions you won’t get a system of obligations working as there will always be a risk of other interests that weigh heavier. Insurance companies (and Banks) live off the every-day and for a person or a group of persons to manage they would have to know 5 years ahead exactly what would happen to them, and be insured by a company noone else had heard of, or a betting site.
@Jeff
I’m not even sure I would characterize our flight path discussions as an argument. More in the realm of metaphysics – that is, what is it possible to know?
I am OK with the straight path whatever that means. There are, of course, a family of straight paths that fit the BTO rings. Further refinement by bringing in the BFO data has proven to be an embarrassment (not yet acknowledged by all the cognoscenti).
When one looks at the ensemble of possible paths the search problem becomes intractable in finite time and expense. When I made that point before the search was even started, it was not warmly received. Hey, it is not my money.
Collectively, we have done some great work with limited information. Forget about the withholding of the simulator data, and consider Inmarsat for a moment. They had all the flight data long before it was given to the DSTG, and selected an example path (the Amsterdam flight in their figure 15 as an example of how well their method could be expected to work). Of course they did not discuss the Mumbai flight presented by the DSTG in their figure 5.4. It would not have served their purpose very well. Shameful, actually. So it goes.
Jeff,
“If imagine that the plane might have been under the control of a pilot who is allowed to make arbitrary turns, why would a person make arbitrary turns over the open ocean, at night?”
If you seriously consider long suicide scenario with nostalgic elements (e.g. sunrise, moonset, Penang), then why do you think it is implausible that the airplane was manually piloted by a mad pilot using traditional magnetic compass in front of him?
Re: “So if the flight was not fast and straight, it was only a matter of blind luck that it “looked” fast and straight.”
This can be very misleading impression. Firstly, if I recall correctly, DSTG assumed constant flight level, hence nearly constant air speed. Variations in the altitude result in varying air speed. Secondly, there must be some bug in DSTGs approach: if they properly considered magnetic heading, they must have come up with much higher probability around ~30S. Thirdly, do you remember that 18:40 and 23:15 BFOs notably deviate from the “trend line”, which is a likely indicator of varying heading? Fourthly, “flying fast” result is a consequence of “flying straight” result and vice versa.
Gysbreght,
“On the A320, A330 the ADIRU has an “ATT” mode, where the output of ADIRU inertial data is limited to attitude data. The A320 or A330 autopilots have no “ATT Hold” mode that the pilot can select.”
Yes. What I meant is that a pilot can intentionally select the ATT mode on the ADIRS from the cockpit, which would result in the AP maintaining only the attitude of an aircraft.
@Oleksandr: “… which would result in the AP maintaining only the attitude of an aircraft.”
Where do you get that? The A320 and A330 have three independent ADIRU’s. Selecting ATT for one of the three ADIRU’s doesn’t change the AP mode.
Gysbreght,
I mean all the 3 units, accessible on a single ADIRS panel from the cockpit. Selecting ATT for one of the three IRU’s does not change the AP mode indeed. But what does prevent a pilot turning all the 3 knobs into ATT position?
@Oleksandr: Perhaps you’d better keep focussed on the B777, and refrain from dragging in other aircraft with a different systems architecture and design philosophy.
@Oleksandr,
You said: “If it is confirmed that the magnetic HDG/TRK do exist, respective trajectories must be properly investigated.”
This issue was settled more than two years ago on 26 June 2014 by the ATSB’s report “MH370 – Definition of Underwater Search Areas. On page 37 it says;” In-flight, the flight-planned route can be changed by the crew selecting a different lateral navigation mode or maintaining LNAV and changing the route entered in the FMS. Other lateral navigation modes include:
– heading hold (either a true or magnetic heading can be selected)
– track hold (either a true or magnetic heading can be selected)
With these modes the track or heading is manually selected on the mode control panel on the glare-shield. True or normal reference is selected by the crew using a switch located on the Captain’s inboard display panel. Normal reference is the usual setting which references magnetic North, unless the aircraft is operating at high latitudes, in which case the reference will change to true North. True North reference can be manually selected by the crew using the switch.”
@Richard Cole,
You said:” To remake a point, if the blue points on the graph were individual BFO measurements there should be around 170 rather than the 30 shown (170 is the average number of BFO measurements per validation flight from the DSTG paper sec 5.3). So either averaging has been performed to generate the blue points, or some filtering. Either way, trying to regenerate the statistics of the raw data from the blue points is dubious.”
I agree that some undefined selection process was used by Inmarsat, perhaps simply to make an understandable plot. Since we don’t know what process they used, we can’t determine exactly how much effect that selection process would affect the estimated RMS statistic. However, we can put some reasonable limits on this effect (beyond just saying it is “dubious”). First off, the standard deviation of the RMS estimate from the plot is about 25% of the calculated value simply because we have a limited number of data points to work with. We can’t improve on this even if we know exactly how the data were filtered. Furthermore, Inmarsat implies that all the BFO errors should be within +/- 7 Hz, not just the displayed/filtered values, so the RMS would not be expected to be much more than half of this 7 Hz upper bound. We also know from extensive MH370 data that the RMS must be more than 1 Hz. So we have rough bounds on the range of 1 to 4 Hz. The calculated RMS value (from the data in the Inmarsat paper) falls in this range and is roughly 3 +/- 1 Hz.
@DrB
First,the statistic you “estimate” from the plot is not nearly as robust as the statistics compiled by the DSTG for some 30 flights. Secondly, an RMS statistic is in itself meaningless when applied to oscillators as a class. Oscillator behavior is not well-modelled as a white noise process. In fact the noise is divergent in the frequency domain which is why Allan Variance and modified Allan variance are used by engineering professionals skilled in the art to describe oscillator behavior from Cesium clocks to the oscillator found in your watch.
Rather than argue about whether the RMS value is 3Hz or 5Hz or whether the ensemble mean calculated by the DSTG has any meaning, it would be much more fruitful to comes to grips with the fact that the interpretation you and others have been making relative to BFO error constraints is seriously flawed. That is the bottom line here.
Your analytics and the analytics of others which painfully constrain BFO error residuals to a few Hz or less, are not representative of the errors which will be routinely observed in the Inmarsat data oscillator chain. I have been pointing this fact out from the get-go based on some thirty years of oscillator experience. The published DSTG observations merely confirmed it in the context of the very problem we are trying to solve.
@Dennis W,
I do not ” painfully constrain BFO error residuals to a few Hz or less.” In fact, the BFOs after 18:40 contribute very little to the constraint of any route fitting I have ever done.
In general, the BFOs are grossly less constraining than each of the BTO errors, the lateral navigation errors, and the air speed errors. You are mistaken if you think the BFOs significantly drive my route fitting process. It is much more the case of just checking the converged solution to see what the BFO errors are, and I use the Inmarsat bound (not RMS) to judge acceptability.
@DrB
Of course, the BTO errors are constraining I am glad we can agree that the speed of light is constant at least over time frames equivalent to our lifetime.
The Inmarsat bound is totally bogus. They have studiously avoided even saying what it represents. You repeatably refer to it as the equivalent of “coming from the mount”. If it had that degree of believability, how do you explain figure 5.4 of the DSTG book? I have asked you that same question going on three days now, and you keep dancing around it.
The reality is you cannot explain it, and are choosing to stick your head in the sand instead. On top of that you imply a criticism of the recent work of Godfrey and Iannello based on one of their BFO residuals being in the 11Hz range. So what?
@Oleksandr
You quote in a previous post (7-10 9:33):
“If it was piloted till the very end, the airplane could end up anywhere on the 7th arc, so that all the models become useless”.
A long while ago I asked Duncan Steel: “why constant heading?”. He answered “because it is the simplest assumption, which satisfies data”.
I wondered about the firts part before as it has been stated several times earlier.
Why assume the airplane could have ended everywhere on the 7th arc if piloted so that all models become useless?
IMO this not the most logic to assume or a criterium to decide there’s no use in looking at the possibility of an all piloted flight.
Also a pilot probably would have chosen an AP-mode (around FMT) till end of flight that could fit the data.
And if ‘constant heading’ is the simplest assumption to fit the data then he probably chose such an AP-mode.
The difference between a ghost-flight and a piloted flight after FMT could only be the ‘end of flight scenario’ after 0:11 and -if piloted- he was perhaps flying to a chosen destination on an AP-mode till at least 0:11 which satisfies the data best.
@DrBobby:
Since you’re active again on this board — I’m curious if you still believe that the contrails you reported in early 2015 show the track of MH370, ending near 40S?
I don’t recall seeing these really engaged — as opposed to simple dismissal..
Thanks
Bobby,
“This issue was settled more than two years ago on 26 June 2014 by the ATSB’s report “MH370 – Definition of Underwater Search Areas.”
I am not so sure it was solved. The issue is that in a number of documents it is stated that desired magnetic heading can be selected at a location. But there is no unambiguous statements whether magnetic heading is kept constant, or corresponding true heading is constant. For example, FCOM 11.50.2: “Only the active waypoint course can be referenced to magnetic north. All subsequent waypoint courses are true courses”. What does this mean? ATSB 2014 also does not explicitly state the existence of these modes: constant magnetic heading is in the list of their assumptions (p25). DSTG also did not bother to provide any further explanation or reference as to why they included magnetic HDG/TRK.
At the very end you might be right. But then I would like to ask: if magnetic HDG/TRK Hold modes do really exist:
– Why the respective area is not included into the seabed search area as another priority area? The peak probability should be around 30-32S.
– Why DSTG does not show higher probability area corresponding to the magnetic HDG/TRK?
– Why is IG still in doubt with regard to the existence of these modes? I believe they are in possession of more accurate information with regard to many aspects.
– Why is Jeff Wise so confident that the absence of debris in the current search area indicates a no-ghost flight?
Ge Rijn,
“Why assume the airplane could have ended everywhere on the 7th arc if piloted so that all models become useless?”
Because a number of turns made on purpose could result in the “impression” of a fast and straight flight, especially bearing in mind the uncertainity in the BFO data. See, for instance, the path proposed by Dennis towards CI. Of course, probability of such a coincidence would be low, but possibility can not be ruled out.
Re: “Also a pilot probably would have chosen an AP-mode (around FMT) till end of flight that could fit the data.”
Who knows what to expect from a mad pilot, who first kills >200 people and then flies to the middle of nowhere for several hours only to commit suicide. Why would he chose an AP mode after the FMT? Perhaps it was better to keep himself busy with something. I guess ROB is the right person to explain this.
Re “The difference between a ghost-flight and a piloted flight after FMT could only be the ‘end of flight scenario’ after 0:11 and -if piloted- he was perhaps flying to a chosen destination on an AP-mode till at least 0:11 which satisfies the data best.”
Why would only the end be different? Not all, not a section of a flight after the FMT?