Five weeks into the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, more than $30 million has been spent scouring great swatches of the southern Indian Ocean. Yet searchers have still not found a single piece of physical evidence such as wreckage or human remains. Last week, Australian authorities said they were confident that a series of acoustic pings detected 1,000 miles northwest of Perth had come from the aircraft’s black boxes, and that wreckage would soon be found. But repeated searches by a robotic submarine have so far failed to find the source of the pings, which experts say could have come from marine animals or even from the searching ships themselves. Prime Minister Tony Abbott admitted that if wreckage wasn’t located within a week or two “we stop, we regroup, we reconsider.”
There remains only one publically available piece of evidence linking the plane to the southern Indian Ocean: a report issued by the Malaysian government on March 25 that described a new analysis carried out by the U.K.-based satellite operator Inmarsat. The report said that Inmarsat had developed an “innovative technique” to establish that the plane had most likely taken a southerly heading after vanishing. Yet independent experts who have analyzed the report say that it is riddled with inconsistencies and that the data it presents to justify its conclusion appears to have been fudged.
Some background: For the first few days after MH370 disappeared, no one had any idea what might have happened to the plane after it left Malaysian radar coverage around 2:30 a.m., local time, on March 8, 2014. Then, a week later, Inmarsat reported that its engineers had noticed that in the hours after the plane’s disappearance, the plane had continued to exchange data-less electronic handshakes, or “pings,” with a geostationary satellite over the Indian Ocean. In all, a total of eight pings were exchanged.
Each ping conveyed only a tiny amount of data: the time it was received, the distance the airplane was from the satellite at that instant, and the relative velocity between the airplane and the satellite. Taken together, these tiny pieces of information made it possible to narrow down the range of possible routes that the plane might have taken. If the plane was presumed to have traveled to the south at a steady 450 knots, for instance, then Inmarsat could trace a curving route that wound up deep in the Indian Ocean southwest of Perth, Australia. Accordingly, ships and planes began to scour that part of the ocean, and when satellite imagery revealed a scattering of debris in the area, the Australian prime minister declared in front of parliament that it represented “new and credible information” about the fate of the airplane.
The problem with this kind of analysis is that, taken by themselves, the ping data are ambiguous. Given a presumed starting point, any reconstructed route could have headed off in either direction. A plane following the speed and heading to arrive at the southern search area could have also headed to the north and wound up in Kazakhstan. Why, then, were investigators scouring the south and not the north?
The March 25 report stated that Inmarsat had used a new kind of mathematical analysis to rule out a northern route. Without being very precise in its description, it implied that the analysis might have depended on a small but telling wobble of the Inmarsat satellite’s orbit. Accompanying the written report was an appendix, called Annex I, that consisted of three diagrams, the second of which was titled “MH370 measured data against predicted tracks” and appeared to sum up the case against the northern route in one compelling image. (See the chart at the top of the post.) One line on the graph showed the predicted Doppler shift for a plane traveling along a northern route; another line showed the predicted Doppler shift for a plane flying along a southern route. A third line, showing the actual data received by Inmarsat, matched the southern route almost perfectly, and looked markedly different from the northern route. Case closed.
The report did not explicitly enumerate the three data points for each ping, but around the world, enthusiasts from a variety of disciplines threw themselves into reverse-engineering that original data out of the charts and diagrams in the report. With this information in hand, they believed, it would be possible to construct any number of possible routes and check the assertion that the plane must have flown to the south.
Unfortunately, it soon became clear that Inmarsat had presented its data in a way that made this goal impossible: “There simply isn’t enough information in the report to reconstruct the original data,” says Scott Morgan, the former commander of the US Air Force Rescue Coordination Center. “We don’t know what their assumptions are going into this.”
Another expert who tried to understand Inmarsat’s report was Mike Exner, CEO of the remote sensing company Radiometrics Inc. He mathematically processed the “Burst Frequency Offset” values on Page 2 of Annex 1 and was able to derive figures for relative velocity between the aircraft and the satellite. He found, however, that no matter how he tried, he could not get his values to match those implied by the possible routes shown on Page 3 of the annex. “They look like cartoons to me,” says Exner.
Even more significantly, I haven’t found anybody who has independently analyzed the Inmarsat report and has been able to figure out what kind of northern route could yield the values shown on Page 2 of the annex. According to the March 25 report, Inmarsat teased out the small differences predicted to exist between the Doppler shift values between the northern and southern routes. This difference, presumably caused by the slight wobble in the satellite’s orbit that I mentioned above, should be tiny—according to Exner’s analysis, no more than a few percent of the total velocity value. And yet Page 2 of the annex shows a radically different set of values between the northern and southern routes. “Neither the northern or southern predicted routes make any sense,” says Exner.
Given the discrepancies and inaccuracies, it has proven impossible for independent observers to validate Inmarsat’s assertion that it can rule out a northern route for the airplane. “It’s really impossible to reproduce what the Inmarsat folks claim,” says Hans Kruse, a professor of telecommunications systems at Ohio University.
This is not to say that Inmarsat’s conclusions are necessarily incorrect. (In the past I have made the case that the northern route might be possible, but I’m not trying to beat that drum here.) Its engineers are widely regarded as top-drawer, paragons of meticulousness in an industry that is obsessive about attention to detail. But their work has been presented to the public by authorities whose inconsistency and lack of transparency have time and again undermined public confidence. It’s worrying that the report appears to have been composed in such a way as to make it impossible for anyone to independently assess its validity—especially given that its ostensible purpose was to explain to the world Inmarsat’s momentous conclusions. What frustrated, grieving family members need from the authorities is clarity and trustworthiness, not a smokescreen.
Inmarsat has not replied to my request for a clarification of their methods. This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that in recent days experts had “recalibrated data” in part by using “arcane new calculations reflecting changes in the operating temperatures of an Inmarsat satellite as well as the communications equipment aboard the Boeing when the two systems exchanged so-called digital handshakes.” But again, not enough information has been provided for the public to assess the validity of these methods.
It would be nice if Inmarsat would throw open its spreadsheets and help resolve the issue right now, but that could be too much to expect. Inmarsat may be bound by confidentiality agreements with its customers, not to mention U.S. laws that restrict the release of information about sensitive technologies. The Malaysian authorities, however, can release what they want to—and they seem to be shifting their stance toward openness. After long resisting pressure to release the air traffic control transcript, they eventually relented. Now acting transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein says that if and when the black boxes are found, their data will be released to the public.
With the search for surface debris winding down, the mystery of MH370 is looking more impenetrable by the moment. If the effort to find the plane using an underwater robot comes up empty, then there should be a long and sustained call for the Malaysian authorities to reveal their data and explain exactly how they came to their conclusions.
Because at that point, it will be all we’ve got.
This is a cross-posting of an article that was published on Slate.com on April 18, 2014. You can read the original here.
@ Arthur
Triangulation would not be possible as of course that would require three receiving stations. With two there are two points at which the range circles intersect. As both satellites are approximately above the equator there still would be a possible last ping position both to the north and south. However, I guess those positions would possibly be more accurate than have been suggested so far.
@DrJ
It depends on one’s sign convention I suppose but surely positive valus=es of BFO indicate the aircraft moving away from the receiving satellite (relatively).
Also didn’t quite follow the bit about crossing the equatorial plane. It is possible for the aircraft to be travelling in the same direction (either towards or away) with respect to the satellite both before and after crossing the equator, so surely the sign would remain the same. Would you be kind enough to give a word of explanation please?
Just sat down to my 7.00 pm news to hear PM Abbott say that they are “baffled and disappointed” that they did not find any wreckage of MH370. Hmmm. I for one am not surprised, so what is going on? Should they have used a tuna lure?
Inmarsat stated indeed, that the plane was moving always away rom the satellite at the time of the ping handshakes. But that’s only true for those ping times. In between the handshakes the plane may well have moved towards the satellite. And if we can trust the reconstructed ping rings at duncansteel.com, the plane must’ve made a move westwards between 18:29 and 19:40 since the 19:40 ping ring is considerably closer to the satellite than the 18:29 ping ring.
I’m starting to get weary, though, of all further tries to coax anything trustworthy out of the Inmarsat data, since the data themselves might not be entirely trustworthy. I’m not accusing Inmarsat of lying, but it seems, that they edited and simplified the data before they released them. What they gave out was never intended for reverse engineering. I think, some very clever folks have shown convincingly, that the released data don’t allow the conclusion of the plane having taken the Southern route for sure. Which open up three possibilities: Inmarsat made a mistake; Inmarsat had outside info pointing to the South, which cant’ be shared publicly; or Inmarsat’s raw data together with the knowledge of their satellite’s exact movements and data processing showed a North/South sensibility, when compared with data of other B 777 flights on comparable routes.
If Inmarsat’s calculations are legit (and they may well be), they have done a terrible public realations job so far. Things like’completely new’ or ‘arcane math’ only rouse suspicion as long as there are no peer reviews. And don’t hold your breath as to the preliminary report. It was already stated, the Inmarsat’s calculations or raw data won’t be included.
Well they are about to do another 8 months and 60000 square kms on the basis of those sums they won’t release. Or will people power win?
@Matty, a victory of people power would be great, but I fear, there aren’t all that many people pushing them. In Germany the plane is already all but forgotten. And in other countries the reporting has dropped dramatically as well. There are still the next of kin, who deserve a convincing answer. They may gain hopefully more traction in the future. And then we, the geeks, are still out there. That doesn’t add up to a lot of people power.
So the search area has expanded… I guess the logic is that in the lack of any hard evidence and based on “fuzzy math” that you look harder in the same spot? It’s like when you misplace your keys and look through the most likely spots to find nothing. Then decide to do the exact same thing again. I don’t know, but I think most people sit down and start at the beginning and retrace their steps up to the point of misplacing the keys. It may be that you can’t find the keys in the kitchen because you left them in door as you came in with armfuls of groceries.
@Littlefoot – So you live by a mountain inhabited by witches? I am not sure it is a hike when the mountain has a road and a railway, but anyway… AND your dog is in the original Saxon territory? Are you sure this makes a certain spitz less suspicious?
@Rand – I think your right on that account. It would easier if some of the various bits of information that has come out could be corroborated. I find it difficult to treat anything without serious skepticism at this point.
@Gene, you’ve done some research 🙂
Yes, I live near the ‘Brocken’ or ‘Blocksberg’, as the witches prefer to call it. There isn’t really a road going up there, it’s more like concrete slaps on the last two kilometers, which are more annoying than anything, since there are holes in them. Former East Germany has put them there for their four wheel drives, in order to install spy radar devices
They were spying on the witches, if one wants to put it in a kind way. A steam railway (tiny) has been there for 120 years. We walked up to the barren and windy summit, which is littered with huge boulders. It really looks very suitable for witches. We walked all the way up. A stiff walk in the end, because the concrete slaps go up straight, and you have to cover 600 m in height in a very short time. We then opted to take the railway down (prudent folks do it the other way round), which is really nice. This tiny old railway goes right through the forest. You can almost touch the trees.
Matty: lol, tuna lures. BTW, 60,000 km2 yields how many posts per commenter here, based upon an average number of posts per km2 already searched?
Gene: Your lost keys analogy is fitting. I, too, believe someone needs to go back to start and begin the search for their missing aircraft once again in their own backyard.
Interestingly, I was just purusing pprune.org and found a reference, dated 15 Mar, to a media report where a senior Malaysian official was quoted to the effect, “…it appeared friendly.” He provided this response when asked as to why their was no reaction to the overflight on the part of the RMAF.
It likewise appears that the Malaysian press has been occupied with this line of inquiry from the start. Free Malaysia Today had a piece that posed the question: “If an aircraft can fly through our airspace undetected, what is the point in having an Air Force?” Perhaps going back to start will indeed force some clear communication regarding what is known of the flight in Malaysian airspace, simply because a competency defense will need to be mounted for intra-Malaysian consumption.
@littlefoot
I agree that we should not get hung up on the Immarsat data. Just because the data is mathematical and “high-tech” doesn’t make it necessarily that useful.
The ping data does tell us with some degree of certainty that the plane was powered up for several hours, that it used up most or all of its fuel, and that it ended up thousands of miles away from Malaysia, either to the north or south. Then the question becomes assigning likelihood to the north and south options. How you judge the relative probabilities is going to depend on the totality of data available, which is completely different for us (the public) versus Hishammuddin or US intel. The latter will have access to raw police reports, personnel files, communication intercepts and military radar, plus they will have a far better understanding of the political/historical context in which this event occurred. Do we really believe that the executive-level authorities here are completely in the dark about who did this and why, just because they are not talking about it? So in the dark that they could not even assign significantly different weights to scenarios which involve a secret landing in China/Kyrgystan versus scenarios which don’t? Because, if you don’t believe a secret landing was achieved or intended (likely entailing a broad criminal conspiracy with accomplices on the ground), then you can pretty much discount the northern arc.
I think Jeff is right on the money about the Immarsat/Doppler analysis being a smokescreen. Elimination of the northern arc probably wasn’t that difficult even a month ago, but to fully explain the rationale requires getting into theories (or intel) regarding causation, and clearly the authorities don’t want to go there publicly. It’s not hard to guess why that might be.
Chris,
You need to take the time to get it right.
I don’t know what the spacing is between the 11 Inmarsat satellites is, but if there are more or less equally spaced around the globe they should be about 7,000 miles apart. This is a good distance for a triangulation using two satellites. For each handshake you have the distance between the satellites, and the distances from each satellite to the aircraft calculated from the time delays. The three distances define a triangle. The critical point of the triangle, where the plane should be, will intersects the earth at two possible points, one above the equator and one below the equator (given an assumed aircraft altitude). (This may be the ambiguity you refer to.) But we know the aircraft started out above the equator, and the first ping was above the equator, so the southern point can be deleted for that handshake. Then, given the continuity of the flight path (the plane is not going to suddenly pop up in the soutern hemisphere) precise locations of the aircraft can be determined for all the subsequent pings.
As I said in my post, I don’t think usable data is available from two satellites, or we would have heard of it by now.
To determine the flight orientation the aircraft, they turned, in desperation, to to frequency shifts in the handshakes. That is a totally different ballgame, and their results are highly questionable, both functionally and theoretically.
Given the folly of the investigation so far, and the decision to do an endless and most likely futile search of the South Indian Ocean bottom, let us hope that the cries for an indepent peer review of the Inmarsat data and analysis will finally be heard.
Did u hear Malaysia lost a 265 million dollar jet liner.how ?oh the plane it disappeared on atc radar ! I heard Malaysia military watched a plane they suspected was mh370 on primary radar return towards Malaysia .The military in Malaysia couldn’t be certain it was mh 370 and made no effort to check if it was I guess .they couldn’t make radio contact with that plane ? No I guess not.what about the handoff to Vietnam atc ?did Vietnam ever inform the atc in Malaysia there plane mh370 had vanished and was not going to china?well I don’t know I suspect that they would have .I know Vietnam tried to contact plane to no avail.
this is a hypothetical conversation to show one explanation for creating a ” smokescreen ” it’s called Inmarsat . Plainly this is to keep media and inquiring minds from looking at these circumstance that just do not add up .
cha·rade ..
: something that is done in order to pretend something is true when it is not really true.
Lugig’s last comment spurred me to examine Dr. Kuang’s latest two posts, as provided by Juanita and clarified a bit by both her and Littlefoot.
Basically, if it is not possible to filter out the traces of other flights from the screenshot, then that which was presented by the Malaysian authorities cannot possibly be a true representation of the flight path of MH370. His other indications as to an error in the actual distance from Butterworth AFB, the flight time and the airspeed substantiate his claim that the Malaysian authorities are either being highly negligent or obfuscating the truth.
We have all arrived at this same general conclusion: its either this dead animal of incompetence over here or that nasty animal of obfuscation over there.
More importantly, as Dr. Kuang has indicated, if the described location of the aircraft at 18:22 UTC is bogus, then a fundamental data point for the Inmarsat methodology is likewise erroneous.
pdcurrier: I have about as much mathematics in me as a marsupial. Can you give us a thumbnail of what, say, an error of 60 nm longitudinally in the last known location of the aircraft would do to the Inmarsat analysis? Would it produce a substantial or inconsequential error in terms of establishing the terminus for the flight (and thus the designated search area)?
Likewise, Littlefoot: do your or Dr. Kuang’s computations for the flight over Malaysia produce a different last known location for the aircraft, given a flight from IGARI overflying PVL (Penang) and out over the water? What do you get upon reconciling the actual distance of 250 nm from Butterworth AFB with the stated distance of 200nm? Perhaps you could use skyvector.com to plot a point. Perhaps Duncan analyzed this element weeks ago.
Butterworth was a key base developed together with NZ support, if I recall correctly. One wonders if it actually has less than robust radar systems and processes or if they are rather Cracker Jack.
@ rand mayer
If you wanted to know about Malaysians radar capability you best bet would be to talk to the old pm anwar ibrahim . I will note the current leaders in Malaysia issued a warning to anwar to keep his mouth shut about mh 370 or else …guess he is not respecting that order ..
Anwar: Even sleeping airmen would have heard MH370 radar beeps – See more at: http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/anwar-even-sleeping-airmen-would-have-heard-mh370-radar-beeps#sthash.EpInsLPf.dpuf
*Former deputy pm anwar ibrahim.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_Ibrahim#Governmental_career_.281982-1998.29
@Rand, I have to look up my old notes. A couple of weeks ago a commentor at duncansteel.com stated, that the plane must’ve flown an average speed of 700 knots after it’s turn at IGARI to meet those waypoints over Malacca Strait in time. That’s clearly not possible for a B777.Unfortunately no one followed up on this. So I tried some calculations of my own, which turned out to be surprisingly difficult. I used skyvector for distances. But there were many uncertainties. No time was given, as to when and where exactly after IGARY the plane turned around. Then the times given for the radar sightings over Malacca Straight differed from day to day. The last sighting was first timed for 18:00, then 18:15, then it was shifted to 18:22 some miles before IGREX. So I checked several scenarios. Some were clearly too fast, others were still very fast, but just about credible. But how this commentor came up with speeds around 700 knots I don’t know. My own numbers were similar to Dr. Kuang’s, though he calculated a shorter distance and not the whole journey from IGARI onwards. So, I couldn’t say, that the waypoints the plane has reached according to the Malaysian authorities aren’t possible, especially since the given times shifted around for quite a while. But the plane must’ve been flying at top speed, which is surprising, if you consider all the turns and altitude shifts it has alledgedly executed. If we take information from undisclosed sources into account, who told us, the plane behaved like a fighter jet, and Inmarsat’s statements, that ‘the plane flew faster than we initially thought’, the high speed average has a certain ring of truth.
As to Dr. Kuang’s statement, that the Malaysians fed false informations to the relatives during the briefings, I find it hard to assess, if we are dealing here with sloppiness (wrong distances) plus simplification (aka filtering out tracks of other planes), or if something more nefarious is lurking somewhere. I could well imagine, that someone was told to prepare something for the relatives from the original radar picture. This person then filtered out all flying objects other than MH370. On the original radar printout wouldn’t be any distances. So he had to put in some numbers, was sloppy and got it wrong. Those things shouldn’t happen, but they nevertheless happen all the time. At the moment I would be inclined to let it go, since I cannot see, what would be accomplished to feed slightly inaccurate info to the relatives. Dr. Kuang’s find is important nevertheless, because it shows, that the relatives did not see the original radar printout, but rather a prepared one.
I am neither a scientist nor mathematician but have been following your post because I enjoy intelligent debate and have felt that something was off from the beginning. I just read that an Aussie firm, GeoResonance found evidence consistent with a plane crash 3000 miles north in the Bay of Bengal. Here is the link
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/missing-flight-mh370-found-exploration-3470569
Thanks for keeping me well informed and making me tap into some long forgotten math skills.
Arthur,
“You need to take the time to get it right.”
huh?
@Chris, I think Arthur T mean to say, that you have to take the time delays into account.He’s not accusing you of sloppiness 😉
I read some time ago that there was another Inmarsat satellite that should have been able to “see” the plane as well but it was not working or something like that. I’m certain the story said it was stationed over the Pacific. I’ll have to see if I can hunt down the report again.
There was a comment earlier on about news coverage waning which is frustrating. However, I was heartened this morning to awake to two separate stories about independent searches that are taking place and claim to have found something of interest. One was a company in Australia who have scoured millions of square kilometers of satellite data and think they have seen wreckage in the Bay of Bengal, which would match with the woman who said she is convinced she saw a plane in the water there from her flight not long after MH370 disappeared. The second is a guy who has been trawling through tomnod images and thinks he has seen something in the South China Sea. Whether one of these are accurate or not, this tells me that people are mot prepared to give up the fight to find the truth. This is good news.
Let’s take a step back at look at this from a Public Relations standpoint. Let’s for a moment assume that the “authorities” in reality have absolutely no idea where the plane ended up within it’s fuel range. If you are the authorities, you have to consider what the reaction and consequences would be if you held a press conference and confirmed you have no data whatsoever that would give you any degree on confidence locating the plane in significantly smaller area than the fuel range of the plane. And that because the area is so large, unless no data is obtained (such as location of debris), there is a significant probability that the plane may never be found. How do you think the families and their supporters would react? How does this reflect on the safety and security of consumer air travel in general? Not good. If indeed they really don’t know where the plane is, it will be interesting to see how it all plays out over the coming years. When will they call off the search? 2 years? 5 years? 10 years? Whenever they think the media isn’t covering the story at all anymore and people (except the families) have forgotten about it?
“We have all arrived at this same general conclusion: its either this dead animal of incompetence over here or that nasty animal of obfuscation over there.”
Yes.
Wow, if the plane is really at the bottom of the Bay of Bengal, we would’ve dealt with a flock of incompetent animals, lead by actively obfuscating animals!
Then the whole Inmarsat info would be completely false. None of the calculations provided by them would be correct. That’s hard to believe, so let’s wait and see.
@Rand. You wrote: “Can you give us a thumbnail of what, say, an error of 60 nm longitudinally in the last known location of the aircraft would do to the Inmarsat analysis?”.
Duncan Steel’s post (http://www.duncansteel.com/archives/date/2014/04/09) provides a number of useful illustrations of the various ping circles of position (COPs).
Such a longitudinal error is not possible since the 18:29 ping arc at that latitude is running close to north-south. However, a latitudinal error will affect the locations of MH370’s touching the subsequent COP’s.
Using radius data from Dr. Steel’s http://www.duncansteel.com/archives/date/2014/04/09, a 60 nm north-south change at the 18:29 COP (radius 1881 nm) would translate to an 85 nm counterclockwise-clockwise shift at the 00:11 COP (radius 2642 nm).
The Bay of Bengal location roughly matches the 18:29 ping ring.
What are the odds that 18:29 was the last ping, and the subsequent hourly ones and the 00:11 ping belonged to a different plane, or were just completely misread?
The Bay of Bengal location would sure satisfy Occam’s Razor – the plane diverted to address a failure, and shortly afterwards ended up in the water. No hijacking, no six-hour ghost flight, no mystery airport and no strange courses to the southern Indian Ocean.
The only thing needed to support this location is a failure of some sort on the plane, an incompetent satellite analysis, and a few ships hearing pings that were probably self-generated.
Littlefoot,
I meant to say to Chris that he needed to take the time to think it through and see that a triangulation from two satellites is possible without ambiguity. (The only uncertainty is in the altitude of the plane.) You just need one point where you know the plane was north of the equator. That’s what I tried to explain in my post.
We are all in a rush.
@Arthur T, point taken. Sorry to have misread your comment to Chris.
Before we all get excited about the Bay of Bengal, we should wait a bit and find out, if this georesonance technique of this Australian company is even suitable to detect plane debris under water.
In keeping with my fascination with subs, from the UK Mirror:
For at least 21 hours a day Tireless went far deeper than usual before returning to periscope depth to report progress and receive new orders from the Australian authorities co-ordinating the search. The main difficulty the crew faced was not letting concentration waver as time ticked slowly by in the stillness of the control room.
The boat had to stay in exactly the right position as sailors slowly deployed a classified, super-sensitive listening device on the end of a long wire. This was towed for hour after hour.
Far from any noise the submarine may make, the array can pick up any sound, however tiny and fleeting.
As the sailors worked, never letting their eyes stray from the screens in front of them, they could hear the calls of whales, porpoises and dolphins – but signals from the black boxes remained elusive. Able Seaman Steve Farmer, 29, from Bournemouth, said: “The search meant a lot to me and to all of us on board.
“Each one of us in the sound room spent 12 hours a day for over three weeks searching for the black boxes’ emitted frequency. We didn’t want to give up.”
Tireless didn’t find anything. She was stood down after the Australian command announced there was “no prospect” of detecting further pings from the boxes.
So there you are, classified hardware was used to try and find the plane and it seems they covered areas where it was too rough for surface ships.
Jeff ,
Bringing up the public relations issue has me thinking suppose the plane was in trouble ( mechanically ,or hijack) and Malaysia atc ,Malaysian military all made a huge mistake.did they fail to tell the Indians up at ANC Andaman nicobar that a rogue jet liner was coming there way ?well that would be a huge mistake-pr nightmare .The fact is the Indians may have taken precautions .now who wouldn’t ? As inmarsat vp stated on youtube the plane flew over andaman n Nicobar .as I read more about that ANC base up on Nicobar I find it hard to imagine they let a uninvited guest into their airspace .
http://thediplomat.com/2014/03/andaman-and-nicobar-islands-indias-strategic-outpost/
Chris McLaughlin Vp of external affairs inmarsat stating radar showed plane over andamans.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FhRO-0Lx_kQ
@ Jeff –
There is definitely that ingredient. A search needs to look competent, organized, sleeves up, and appear to be conducted with the expectation of results. Anything less you draw ridicule, and credibility wise the show must go on. But whose show is it now? Without Abbott’s drive where would it be going? Who is now in charge? There seems to be a sort of dislocation between KL and Perth. The Malaysian PM seems to be implying Inmarsat is all they have, Abbott doesn’t give the impression that he has anything up the sleeve – or he wouldn’t have been in the deep south all that time – yet he is hellbent. Abbott is an unusually decent character for a politician, but he’s still a polly and this was always good fodder. But having run with the ball, he has noone to pass to now. The optics would be terrible if he were to drop it. The lobbying needs to be directed at Abbott, in particular a member of his govt called Dennis Jensen. He’s a PhD Physicist who is happy to go the other way on issues that are up his alley. He was the first active climate sceptic in the party and has broken ranks with the F35 acquisition among other things. And he’s not media shy.
Littlefoot
If you check out link I sent, there is a detailed explanation of the metals they found and the fact that they were not present before the plane went missing. Interesting stuff.
Jeff ,
Two years searching for these false pings then it’s over .Argos satellite systems states very clearly using the Doppler effect is dependent on triangulation for accuracy. My point they will have plenty of area to search since Inmarsat data could be off by hundreds of km.
It’s full steam ahead with Tony and Angus –
Air Chief Marshal Houston said he believed from analysis of satellite data that the aircraft was in the area to be searched. “I think we are in the right area,” he said.
Mr Abbott said the new phase of the search would involve a thorough analysis of the aircraft’s probable impact zone. He renewed his pledge to do everything possible to find the plane.
“I want the families to know, I want the world to know, that Australia will not shirk its responsibilities in this area. We will do everything we humanly can, everything we reasonably can, to solve this mystery.’’
Mr Abbott said that would cost an estimated $60m and Australia would welcome contributions from other nations.
There is a lot of skepticism in the public over this and it’s costing money.
Jeff – I know one of Dennis Jensen’s former staff members quite well, just wondering if you were to send him an updated copy of your smokescreen article he could very well get interested enough to have a chat?
I haven’t heard much about the Chinese government lobbying for more info to be released by the Malaysians. Maybe it has and this hasn’t been reported in western media, but if it hasn’t I would find that curious. Does anyone know if the Chinese government has been chasing the Malaysians for more disclosure?
@Littlefoot – East German secret police and listening posts on top of a mountain? Are you implying that Charly is Stasi? This is not looking good! I am a little worried about a site that I service that was formerly named Charly’s Guest ranch. Sensing a conspiracy here… 😉
Hmph, so the official request for information door is closed as well. Foiled again.
http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=2198&category=Environment
Interesting news: According to duncansteel.com,Inmarsat has released their data for all the ping rings. If that’s true,route calculations don’t have to rely anymore on reverse engineered ping rings.Have they really relented to pressure for more openness? If so, it’s only a small step, since the main question about their preference of the Southern direction is still unanswered.
Is this a reaction to newest media reports about the plane wreckage being in a completely different location? Duncan Steel btw poohoos the idea, that the georesonance method is capable of finding underwater plane wreckages. I have no idea if he’s right or wrong. More knowledgeable people have to answer that question.But for what it’s worth, the alledged wreckage location in the Bay of Bengal of the Australian company is NOT identical with the location near the Andamans, where the Indian woman has claimed to have seen a floating plane during a flight.
@Gene, so my dog would be ‘IM Charly’ (Informeller Mitarbeiter/Informal Collaborator)? Well, officially he’s my therapy dog. He helps me treating old and demented people. And he’s very helpful. If my clients don’t remember me, they always remember Charly and are inclined to trust me. That would be a perfect smokescreen.
As to MH370, we are at a point, where speculating is free for all. A pilot saw a cloud, which resembles vaguely a shark with a missing flipper, but he insists, that it is a plane with a missing wing in the South China Seas. Maybe the Indian Ocean is full of lost airplanes; that makes the task even more difficult. The media clearly have run out of real news. Tony Abbot has gone from ‘the plane will be found in a few days’ to ‘we might never find it’.
Yes, folks, get out the deck of cards, Gene might supply a few six packs; we’re in for a long wait. And I might contribute a few other unsolved mysteries we could take a crack at.
Thanks, Littlefoot. I will be curious to see if anything changes in the analysis at duncansteel.com and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, I will remain the cynical one in the peanut gallery and simply offer the Malaysian authorities congratulations where it is due: “good timing on choosing this precise moment to come forth with more information.”
I also can’t help but remain curious as to what is additionally known regarding the flight between the last voice transmission to KUL ATC at 17:19 UTC, and the first of the six Classic Aero pings at 18:22. The aircraft did indeed ‘disappear’ at 18:22, but apparently not before.
Another ‘fact’ apparently debunked:
http://www.pprune.org/8453604-post10348.html
According to this comment, the ‘big boom’ didn’t happen (though the comment could be false, too). If those instruments are really as sensitive as claimed, the plane was ditched (or ditched itself through automatic gliding), which would explain the lack of a large debris field…. or it simply didn’t end up in the Southern Indian Ocean. The problem is of course, that there was no measured seismic boom either along the Northern arc.Which brings us into the conspirational territory of a safe landing with the passengers dead or alive…
What baffles me , is the sheer number of so called facts, which come from ‘very credible and well informed sources’ or ‘insiders’, which prove to be false after floating around for a while. Especially this ‘boom’ info was worded carefully, came from credible long time commentors and had the ring of credibility, except for the fact, that the timing was off. This ‘info’ was coming out too late.
If I put on my tin foil hat, I might detect signs of deliberate desinformation activities…
@Rand, after a first dirty calculation of some commentors at pprune.org, there aren’t any monumental changes. I’m very interested in the first few pings. Did the plane really fly West for a while?
And you’re right: The plane wasn’t really lost until 18:22. Why then did the Malaysian authorities claim, the plan tried to avoid their radar? This is apparently not true at all. If the plane went really south, only the Indonesian radar was avoided, according to most route reconstructions.
@ Littlefoot –
I think the Malaysians were in damage control from early on. I guess it proves one thing – if you spit out a lot of crap in a hurry, sorting out the truth becomes almost impossible from then on as speculation fills the reality void. I could never really see why CMST would be so guarded with boom data if they had any, and nothing heard in the media here since I passed it on to them. I think Abbott would have been standing there pointing to it if he could. A boom in the Indian Ocean 7.5 hours later would strongly point to the southern route. As it is I don’t think they have a bloody clue.
@Matty, Tony Abbott certainly sounds clueless by now.
I think, it’s interesting, that Inmarsat’s ping ring data got released now by the Malaysian authorities. In my comment above I wrote, Inmarsat released them, but that isn’t strictly true. The Malaysians simply released a very fuzzy image of a data sheet given to them by Inmarsat a couple of days after the plane’s disappearance. You really get the sense, that the Malaysian authorities want to reinforce the notion of the plane flying on for hours. If that’s true and the ping rings are valid, the plane can’t have ended up in the Bay of Bengal. This notion, true or false, shakes at the very foundations of Inmarsat’s calculations. So, the release of the ping data seems to be well timed damage controll.
Apparently, the ping ring info was released together with other tidbits, like the audiotrack of the communication with the cockpit before it was cut off, during the lastes briefing of the relatives.
David Pope, one of the heads of GeoResonance,was just on CNN. Sober and convincing. He says that their findings have been ignored for a month, so they have gone public. They are sure they have found the metalic signature of a submerged aircraft in the northern Bay of Bengal.They have used a Russian spectral technology which sounds like something out of Star Trek to me. But who knows. They have a track record.
According to CNN, the JACC dismissed GeoResonance’s claims and doesn’t plan a follow up, because it’s not in the indicated search areas. They are still satisfied, that the plane went down somewhere along the Southern arc…
Why are the ‘experts’ on CNN (Jeff and two others excluded) failing to make a distinction between Inmarsat’s north/south arc determination, which was easy to calculate and reliable, and their Doppler analysis, which was fudged and is totally unreliable ?
pdcurrier Thanks for your clarifications and the time you put into doing the calculations; they are good for my more verbal soul.
Re the Georesonance report, I wish to God that they had included some flight time correlations in their press release. The company is credible, and their methodology does have a proven track record. I would only suggest that they fire their PR manager.
The anomaly that Georesonance supposedly located is at an approximate depth of 1,000m. Perhaps the PRC will take the bait and send out one of their surface ships periodically based in Myanmar out to have a looksy.
One thing I am not going to be doing is scanning the Indian press for indications as whether their primary radar installations in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands did or did not detect MH370. As Freud used to say, yet only privately, sometimes a dead animal is just a dead animal.
As for the JAAC, I can’t imagine that they would pursue any such lead, as they are concerned not with locating the aircraft per se, but rather locating the aircraft in the area to which they have been directed to look.
Let’s see if yet another satellite driven data set can solve this most intractable mystery and provide the next-of-kin some relief for what must be their unimaginable torment. Not only an aircraft, but 239 people have completely disappeared, vanishing without a trace. Think of it.
Just to throw a bit of Devil’s Advocate thinking into the mix… How de we know that the newly released Inmarsat/Malaysian data isn’t edited to suit the current hypothesis? It’s not like they are going to put something out there to contradict themselves. Then again that does seem to be the habit of the Malaysian government… On another note and seeing as I don’t know my Doppelganger shifts from my Burst Frequency Offsets, don’t the plotted points on the new graph look a lot like the plotted points on the earlier release of the northern route? Six packs? We are gonna need a couple of two-fours, wienies, marshmallows and good fire for the next round of this thing!
@Littlefoot – More mysteries?
Thanks for the info re:GeoResonance. I’m completely open to their claims. Everything seems possible right now. And the plane was definitely going into that direction, when it was last spotted on primary radar.
The big problem is of course, if they are right, not only Inmarsat’s BFO charts would be doubtful, but the whole story about the plane flying on for hours and it’s distance to the satellite, which allowed the calculations of the two arcs, would go down the drain. That would be a major, major disaster. Would the