As readers of this blog or my Kindle Single (or, now, New York magazine) know, I’m intrigued by the possibility that MH370 might have been hijacked and flown north to the Yubileyniy Aerodrome within the Baikonur Cosmodrome. If so, it would have come to rest on the specially-milled concrete at approximately an hour and a half before sunrise on Sunday, March 8. And then what? If it stayed where it was, it would have been easy to spot by land-imaging satellites overhead. To avoid detection, it would have to have either refueled and taken off again, or found some kind of shelter.
As it happens, the Kazakh steppe is a terrible place to hide a 210-foot long, 60-foot-high airplane. The flat, desert plain is sparsely populated and almost featureless, so that anything large and unusual is apt to stand out. There is no natural canopy of trees to shelter under. Though there are large buildings at the cosmodrome where space vehicles are serviced, there are no large structures near Yubileyniy.
After I began developing my “Spoof” hypthesis I spent days scouring first Google Earth, then free commercial satellite imagery looking for any hint that a plane could have been stashed in the vicinity. The pickings were slim. The Yubileyniy complex was built in the ‘80s as the landing site for the Buran space plane, and after the program was cancelled in 1989 it has largely sat disused. Occasionally the runway is used by planes carrying inbound VIPs and cosmonauts, but otherwise nothing has really happened there in decades. An overview of the area is depicted above.
The dark, fishhook-shaped line is the rail line connecting the airstrip to the rest of the Baikonur complex. Alongside it is a road from which a series of driveways lead off to the north. One of them leads to an isolated six-story building that stands surrounded by debris, berms, and trenches. I came to think of the area as Yubileyniy North. Here’s what it looked like in 2006 (click on images to enlarge):
As you can see, the area is desert, where vehicle tracks persist for many years. The six-story building casts a dark, short shadow to the northwest — the sun is nearly overhead. The road from the airstrip comes up from the bottom of the frame and curves to the right. Here and there rectangular patches of debris suggest where buildings once stood. Essentially, it’s a ruin. Here’s the same area, six years later:
Not much has changed. The sun is lower in the sky, so the six-story building’s shadow is longer. But nothing seems to have changed at all. The entire area of Yubileyniy is like this—the place seems have been left to slowly crumble in the desert sun for decades. There’s nowhere to stash a 777. On the other hand, the most recent imagery viewable here in Google Earth comes from 2012. Perhaps something has happened since then? I didn’t know anything about what kind of imagery is available from commercial sources, but I set out to learn. Before long I came upon a company called Terraserver, which lets you view high-resolution satellite imagery for free. I used it to scope around the general area of the Yubileyniy complex, and here’s what I found in an image of Yubileyniy North from October 31, 2013:
Suddenly, things are happening. A number of trucks are lined up in the parking lot in the upper-right part of the image. The six-story building is being disassembled. And what looks like a large rectangle of dirt has been bulldozed to the left of the building. The image resolution is so good that you can make out what I take to be the stripes left by the bulldozer blade as it worked back and forth horizontally. At the northern end of the rectangle is a berm which casts a shadow to the north. At the far northeastern corner lies what appears to be a trench with a well-defined corner on the upper right, with treadmarks leading out of it toward the southeast. I’m not sure what this dirt rectangle represents — are they building a pile of dirt, or a hole? — but what really gets my attention is the size of the thing. To give you a sense of scale, I’ve superimposed an equivalently proportioned 777 silhouette onto the image:
This struck me as interesting, to say the least. Naturally, I wondered what happened next. Fortunately, Terraserver had one more image that I could browse for free. This next one was taken on April 26, 2014:
Holy cow. All traces of both the building and the dirt rectangle have been erased. Various debris piles have been swept away, too. At first I thought that maybe the image had been digitally scrubbed, but if you look closely you can easily make out individual pieces of junk in between the cleared areas. So my interpretation is that the site was actually cleared and swept up.
So here’s the situation: nothing happens at Yubileyniy for decades; then, four months before MH370 disappears, the Russians start building a 777-sized something-or-other a mile and a half from a giant disused airstrip. Then, a month after the plane disappears, the area looks like it’s been erased.
What had happened in the meantime? To find out, I had to shell out cash from my own pocket to buy imagery from the main commercial satellite imagery provider, Digital Globe, via one of its resellers—in this case, a company called Apollo Mapping. The cash drain was painful, but at this point I was very far down the rabbit hole. Here’s what Yubileyniy North looked like on December 17, 2013:
The sun is low on the snow-dusted steppe; it’s almost winter. In a month and a half, workers have removed all but the bottom-most floors of the six-story building. You can make out the shadow of a crane projecting to the north from the middle of the remaining structure. A handful of trucks can still be seen in the parking lot. The dirt pile has been extended a few yards to the north; the berm at that end now overlies the what we saw as the sharp corner of the trench in the October image. Beyond the berm lies either a dark strip that could either be a long trench or just a shadow; to my eye the line of brightness at its northern edge implies the lip of a trench, but who knows. Work is clearly continuing. The next image, in black and white, is from three weeks later, January 9, 2014:
Now winter is in full effect. Snow blankets the entire region, and cold has descended: in the four days before this picture was taken, the temperature fluctuated between -15F and +14F. The disruption of the snow cover shows that work is very much underway. The building seems to be down to its last story. Trucks can be seen in the parking lot. I’m not sure what to make of the northern end of the rectangle; two dark strips are visible, perhaps one of them is a trench and the other is the shadow of a berm. Unforunately the resolution is not very good because the image was taken at a fairly low angle. The fact that work is continuing under such harsh conditions suggests a sense of urgency, to my mind; or perhaps these are simply hardy mofos. By the time the next image is taken, nearly two months have passed.
In this black-and-white image, the building has been completely dismantled and the dirt rectangle bulldozed flat. No berm remains at the northern end. Horizontal bulldozer tracks are still visible. The dark dirt is framed with a lighter border, suggesting perhaps a snowy slope. No trucks are visible, suggesting that the work crew has moved on. A color image taken four days later looks almost identical:
This image was taken two days before MH370 disappeared, on March 6. The next one was taken eight days after, on March 16:
When I first saw this picture, my heart leapt. The two scenes, taken just before and after the disappearance, looked so different that I was certain that something significant had occurred in the interim. Perhaps what was a rectangular depression in the March 6 image has now been filled in with sand (along with maybe, oh, who knows, a plane?).
I began pricing out tickets to Kazakhstan and searching the internet for advice on detecting large buried things with metal detectors. I located a Russian from St. Petersburg who’d made a gonzo two-day bike trek across the steppe to reach the Yubileyniy strip and sought his advice on how to get to the area without permission; he told me that he’d camped out at the airstrip overnight without anybody noticing him but then had tried to visit a busier part of the cosmodrome and gotten arrested. After he told them he was just scouting around because he was a huge fan of the Buran project, they let him go. I figured that if I was more careful I had a good chance of making it in and back.
But then I looked more closely, and examined the weather records. It just so happened that during this time interval spring fell on Baikonur like a hammer. On March 6, the temperature had only just peeked above freezing, by the 16th the daily highs had been in the 40s for the better part of a week. The thaw has completely changed the color palette. Everything that was covered in snow, and hence lighter colored, is now sodden and hence darker colored. White plains of snow are now damp brown sand. The darker earth of the rectangle is now drier and lighter-colored. After staring at these images for many hours I concluded that the most likely interpretation is that nothing has changed except for a temperature change.
And so we wind up back at our April 26 image:
By now the desert has returned to its normal dried-out state. The cluttered jumble seen over the winter has been replaced by almost featureless swatches of tan. A vehicle track overlies the northernmost part of the dirt rectangle, its borders now smudged and indeterminate.
I showed some of these images to construction experts and satellite imagery professionals, and received very little encouragement. Most likely, they told me, the work being performed was site remediation: a building was torn down, and construction debris thrown in a trench and covered up. As successive trenches are dug and filled in, a rectangular shape is formed. Simple as that.
And yet: the entire cosmodrome is littered with decades of abandoned equipment and derelict buildings, evincing a constitutional lack of interest in the concept of remediation. There is no commercial or residential activity for miles of Yubileyniy. Why, after decades, did the Russians suddenly need to clear this one lonely spot, in the heart of a frigid winter, finishing just before MH370 disappeared? And why is it that the greater part of the dirt rectangle was already laid out in the Oct 31 image, before the building was substantially demolished?
I don’t know. I tried to reach out to people who might know, but had no luck, and eventually I had to turn my attention to projects that might earn me some money. But I’d love to find out. If any readers have any special insight, I’d love to hear it.
UPDATE 4/3/2106: Since I wrote the above, Google Earth has added a new high-quality image of the site, taken October, 12, 2014. It gives a different impression from the last image–it doesn’t look any longer like the dirt was swept flat, like someone trying to cover their tracks.
To paraphrase good old Sherlock Holmes:
“If you have eliminated the impossible, one of the remaining solutions -however improbable – must be correct”
Words of wisdom – written by a guy who believed in fairies…
Yes, Jeff and Victor, the problem is the case is so weird that all scenarios are kind of outlandish, even if they are compatible with all known facts and the laws of physics. And that might be one reason for the discord which has crept into our normally decent and polite exchanges. Many call other people’s scenario whack-a-doodle garbage, not realizing, that their own championed scenario is probably equally fraught with problems.
And of course in the absence of new facts we tend to refine our pet theories since there is nothing better to do. And we have invested so much thought and time that we tend to be less tolerant.
@GlobusMax, could you elaborate re: taking the mind of a possibly criminal pilot into account. I’m all for it, since I always believed we’re are dealing with a crime here – whether the plane was abducted to Baikonur or ditched into the deepest crevasses of the SIO. So, besides number crunching a competent international criminal investigation is equally important here. And might even produce results, when all possible calculations have been done and the search has long been abandoned. Unfortunately I don’t trust the official Malaysian investigations on bit.They might even be the fox investigating the chicken theft.
Re: LANL analysis: a location consistent with @Bobby and @GlobusMax locations is inferable directly from the PUBLIC report (see p.7: heading from H01 = 246.9, which would intersect arc7 at roughly E83-84).
Larger issues:
1) Dr. Alec Duncan (of Curtin U, who LED the analysis of the acoustic event detected near Diego Garcia out of Rottsnest back in June) had never SEEN this work until I forwarded him the link.
2) Although it is dated July 3, I’m not sure ANYONE had seen this work in the public domain prior to last week; can anyone in this forum find evidence of independent public discussion of this report back in July?
3) Alec rejects LANL’s analysis and conclusion. From an e-mail to me (reprinted by permission):
“I checked the data and there certainly is a burst of energy prior to the ice cracking arrival, however if I look at signals from other strong ice cracking events in roughly the same direction I see exactly the same thing. Below is one example from a bit over an hour after the LANL event. It is therefore highly likely the precursor energy is also from the ice cracking event. It is actually to be expected that this would happen, given the way sound propagates in the Deep Sound Channel (DSC). The centre of the DSC (see sketch below) corresponds to a minimum in the sound speed, and as a result sound that crosses the sound channel axis at relatively steep angles spends most of its time in water with a sound speed that is faster than sound that travels straight down the axis. The steeply travelling sound therefore arrives at the receiver first, even though it has to travel a little further. This gives a “crescendo” of arrivals that builds up slowly and abruptly cuts off, which is pretty much what we see here. It is also likely that the steeply travelling sound will start to interact with the seabed as it comes into shallower water over the Australian continental slope, and if the seabed slopes are a bit different leading to the three hydrophones, then this would cause the loss of correlation noted in the LANL report.”
I’m NOT backtracking on the need to extend the search out to E83. It’s just that I began this week with nothing but trust in the signal data tying us to the 7th arc – and it looks to me like that’s how I’m going to end it.
LARGEST issues:
A) If they DO head out to E83 in March, the FURTHER 5-month delay in doing so caused by the Oct. ATSB report’s misrepresentation of its own performance limit should be scrutinized. With evidence of foot-dragging already piled high, this misrepresentation does not smell good. At all.
B) This is, by my count, example #5 of shoddy science being lauded by @ALSM in support of the arc7 theory du jour:
– decompression scenario (doesn’t fit BFO data)
– “must have been turning @18:40” (now mercifully withdrawn, I’m guessing?)
– statistically invalid choice of 50nmi lateral search range as 95% CI.
-lauding the “pilot mathematician” result (ignored wind, BFOs, and all BTO’s except last 3)
-lauding the LANL result (eviscerated by Dr. Duncan above)
ALSM is a razor-sharp analyst, who should know better. This concerns me.
@littlefoot
“And that might be one reason for the discord which has crept into our normally decent and polite exchanges. Many call other people’s scenario whack-a-doodle garbage, not realizing that their own championed scenario is probably equally fraught with problems. And of course in the absence of new facts we tend to refine our pet theories since there is nothing better to do. And we have invested so much thought and time that we tend to be less tolerant.”
What wise and compassionate observations!
Re: LANL analysis: addendum:
Dr. Duncan told me that, when his own team’s analysis of the same event was studied, they solved for a heading of 190 degrees (i.e. from Antarctica, like all the other signals HA01 fielded in those hours (except for the Diego Garcia event, of course) – not the 246.9 degrees (i.e. toward arc7) LANL claims.
Below is a link to the sketch (top right) to which Alec refers in my prior post, and a table (bottom right) of “noise events by time and direction” which supports his 190 degree result. He has placed an arrow on the Diego Garcia event, and boxed the “event” on which we’re being led to believe we should fixate.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-r3yuaF2p72N0pUR2VmVXhNbWs/view?usp=sharing
This is so captivating and all so very well researched hard to stop thinking about MH370.
I am reminded of an old saying: three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. It took a significant work crew to dig a hole, demolish & bury a six story building, & possibly a very big aircraft. Somebody, somewhere, knows something, and people being people, would talk, its an inherent character flaw in humans to flap their gums. Find a worker, you have answers.
@Brock. I’m pretty sure airlandandseaman will clear this up, but the LANL acoustic analysis and the LANL point may have nothing in common. If so, its my fault for inferring that. Good information though.
@GM: thanks. Yes, the coordinate may have been derived elsehow, but I headed out at 246.9 from HA01 in Google Earth, and verified the intersection point myself. If the hydroacoustic report is unrelated to LANL/ALSM’s argument, then both the coordinate to which it points AND the timing of its arrival in our midst are spectacularly coincidental.
@Brock: Indeed they are. I guess we need to wait and see. Thanks for doing the work of tying the heading to the point.
My understanding is that the LANL path model is not constrained in any way by the HA01 acoustic data. Their path model ends up “IVO 83.0E 40.4S”. It is a detailed excel model. The HA01 data provides some weak support for the same general area, but LANL does not depend on this data, and they warn that the HA01 data is so far, not proven to be related to MH2370. Lots of noise. Here is a summary of the LANL findings:
• Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 crashed in the southern Indian Ocean circa 00:20:15Z 8 March 2014 IVO 83.0E 40.4S.
• The aircraft flew a direct, great-circle flight path on an initial bearing of 193 degrees true from 18:25Z on 7 March 2014 until running out of fuel circa 00:19Z on 8 March.
• The aircraft flew at constant Mach 0.84 cruise the entire time after its disappearance from secondary radar circa 17:21Z, making an immediate 180-degree course reversal, a 50 degree turn to the right at 17:53 and a final 100 degree turn to the left at 18:23Z.
@GlobusMax:
Re —
My gripe with the current search strategy is that it does not appear Bayesian at all. It is a broad sweep of the arc based on the mathematics of fuel range and BFO. There is no taking into account at all of what a pilot or criminal might do.”
This is a great article written by John Fioretino (banned here):
“What’s ailing Bayes?”
https://twitter.com/jefiorentino/status/566951173656428544
I’m no expert on any of this, but am fascinated by your analysis. After reading the ebook, my biggest question was “If he’s right, then what happened to the plane?”
It seems to be there is a much simpler explanation than the notion that it was buried on site. The plane could have been cut into pieces and removed on a train along the tracks abutting the landing strip. Boeing transports intact fuselages by rail all the time. I can’t imagine it would take more than a few hours to cut off the wings and tail and load everything onto flat bed rail cars. The parts could be covered up and then transported to God knows where for final disposal. Cutting a 777 into parts small enough to fit in trucks would take much longer, involve more labor and hence be much riskier.
The odd middle-of-winter work you observe in the satellite photos could have been a cover used to avoid local speculation about the true purpose of restoring the old rail line to operation. And it would potentially have led to a series of trains entering and leaving the site right around the time the plane would have arrived. Also a convenient diversion.
I wonder if satellite imagery of the main Yubileyniy airstrip shows evidence of work on or usage of the rail track during the months before the event.
@ALSM: so we have a family of hypotheses – let’s call them the “relaxed attitude towards BFO error minimization” family:
At the “least relaxed” end of this spectrum is Dr.Bobby, who, though he chooses (wisely, IMO) not to MINIMIZE BFO error, he still pays attention to them, by setting an error TOLERANCE.
(I have not yet reviewed GlobusMax’s work – apologies – but am guessing his result fits in here somewhere, as he at least MENTIONS BFO fit.)
LANL, who disregard the BFOs (and wind) entirely.
The math pilot, who disregards BFOs (and wind, and 3F1 drift, and all but the last 3 BTOs) entirely.
Jeff (whose “made for TV” hypothesis is not necessarily what his HEAD would bet money on) is suggesting the BFO’s were FAKED.
It is unsurprising that they ALL run through the BTO arcs at cruising speed, and end at roughly the same point (counter)-clockwise around the BTO arcs – after adjusting for 3F1 drift and wind.
My issue is that the NTSB had this nailed by March 16. And Bobby had this nailed within a couple months of actually being PROVIDED (most of) the signal data (I recall ENDORSING his initial report in August – back when lack of surface debris was still only a baby elephant). Why have the ATSB/IG been DISMISSING this line of thinking for the past 11 months, during which time the FDR may have been rotting away?
@littlefoot: Yes. I think most people believe this was a deliberate act. I believe that pretty much implies criminal, albeit I could conceive other scenarios. So let’s presume criminal and start with what we know: the most curious thing to me is the criminal did not feign a mechanical failure. A criminal sophisticated enough to do this might try that. It appears to me this criminal intentionally took specific acts at FIR / country boundaries while sticking as much as possible to standard commercial air routes and fly over land as little as possible. I believe it has finally been established they must have flown at altitude from IGARI to Indonesia. This is consistent with not being a threat to Penang. They tried to be invisible to ATC, but they would have to be pretty stupid to believe they would not be seen on radar. All this implies to me, they were trying to antagonize the various militaries the least and confuse ATC the most. Their gambit worked: no fighter jets, no particular concern from ATC until way too late. This is a much more attractive option than the gambit of feigning mechanical failure, because that would just waste precious fuel and attract more military attention via erratic moves. All this gets us to 18:22 at the tip of Indonesia, presuming the Indonesians are honest about their radar.
At this point you can decide whether the criminal was hyper-sophisticated (e.g. Jeff Wise) or not so sophisticated. This alone does not determine north-south, but I would argue only the hyper-sophisticated would know anything about BFO, much less BTO. The turn becomes even more interesting if you probe the mind of the criminal as to whether they knew they would be caught on Indonesian radar or not, as we now know, either turn could potentially be caught on that radar. The criminal either got very lucky here or knew more than we may suspect.
In any event, I’ll branch off to my theory that it went south. I think south fits with a criminal at either end of the sophistication spectrum, at least up to knowing such a thing as BFO existed (kudos to Jeff Wise for bringing up the possibility they knew all about BFO). They may even know about BTO, but they know once they clear Indonesia, they clear local radar. If they head south, they want to avoid sophisticated radar at Diego Garcia and JORN. It just so happens this certain direct path heading gets them far from land, Diego Garcia, JORN, and if fuel calculations are right, a shot at being beyond shipping traffic. Also it’s gets me to a point near the roaring forties and maybe the Antarctic Circumpolar current where debris may just circulate around Antarctica and search and rescue is stretched to it’s extreme limits. I want to fly far, direct and fast there, minimizing fuel burn. I set it on autopilot cruise. I let it run out of fuel, or I take the controls at the end and try to minimize debris.
Why? If it weren’t for this pesky BFO, the Malaysian government would still be under the spotlight for the disappearance, instead of the Australian one. Maybe I want that to happen and think they may lose power due to it. Or maybe I want to kill myself, or both. Or maybe I was hijacked for some other purpose, but I was able to regain control and was able to punch in some coordinates quickly from memory that would ensure the plane would never do damage onshore. Maybe, in the hijacking scenarios, the revelation of BFO foiled my plans for this event.
Such are the thoughts I attribute to criminals :).
@Brock McEwen:
Well, in case the plane landed and refueled, the somewhat sacred 7th arc must be dismissed as well…
@DL: agreed.
I am on (and on, and on…) record as suggesting we should treat NO evidence provided to us as axiomatic – including primary radar, BFO’s, and even the BTO’s.
Time to think less like egg-heads, and more like cops.
Question #1: which of our suspects has been caught denying/delaying/deceiving us on key evidence? (Everyone will answer with the nation they trusted least BEFORE the fact, irrespective of the evidence staring us in the face. Isn’t patriotism grand?)
Brock: You ask: “Why have the ATSB/IG been DISMISSING this line of thinking for the past 11 months, during which time the FDR may have been rotting away?” The answer is that we have not dismissed that line of thinking. We simply have a different analysis that points us a little further NE. For one thing, the fuel required to get to 40S with Trent engines looks very marginal at best.
I remind all, we are not trying to predict where the plane is. We are trying to calculate, as best we can, the preferred area to search first, second and third, etc. These are distinctly different things…where to search and where, exactly, the airplane is. Fold into this the fact that we can only try to influence the bureaucratic official search. We don’t have any direct control. It’s like steering an aircraft carrier. Most IG people believe that if it is not IVO 38S, it is more likely to be found between 38-40S than 36-38S, and much less likely to be found anywhere north of say, 36S.
I have privately communicated with ATSB for months my own support for looking all the way down to 40S, in large measure due to Ulich’s credible work. That does not change my belief that it is closer to 37.7S, but ATSB certainly knows we do not reject any reasonably well done model that ends up on the 7th arc between 40S and 36S. I have made the suggestion that they should shift resources to include 40S.
@Brock:
“Time to think less like egg-heads, and more like cops.”
The key is not to think like a cop, but to think like the person you’re trying to catch. (Note that a law degree is required if one wants to apply for FBI agent).
And this —
“Dr. Alec Duncan (of Curtin U, who LED the analysis of the acoustic event detected near Diego Garcia out of Rottsnest back in June) had never SEEN this work until I forwarded him the link.”
— sure is interesting.
@airlandandseaman:
Kudos to LANL for thinking out of the box on the turn. I’ll be interested to see how their path plots. This is potentially plausible if trying to confuse Indonesia.
UAE 343 was also apparently behind MH370. I wonder if that could further confuse:
http://i.stack.imgur.com/yefiU.jpg
Seems odd to go to all that trouble, but if that’s what they actually did, it worked.
@nihonmama: Thanks for the article, it’s very good. I’m guessing the frequentists are in charge of this search. 🙂 Bayes priors are subject to politics and opinion for sure, and Bayes by it’s nature melds hunch and science too much for the purists, but Bayes did work in the USS Scorpion search.
If I ruled the world, I’d set up a prediction market where Bayes’ priors are computed by running odds and the proceeds of losing bets fund the search, so all experts could monetarily demonstrate how much they believe in their theories and benefit if correct. Search would proceed from most likely to least. Anyone withholding key information and too afraid to speak could bet w/o being implicated, automatically guiding the search to likely spots. Such a market was proposed to predict terrorism in the wake of 9/11 but of course it was rejected.
@ALSM: if you’ve been privately urging search officials NOT to stop the boats at s38 and turn back NE, then
A) bravo,
B) sadly, it hasn’t made a blind bit of difference
C) this private urging seems to me inconsistent* with the IG’s Aug-Feb stance on s40.
* I get that you were merely DOWNRANKING – not dismissing – Bobby’s work, but why on earth not PUBLICLY support shifting the search a further 2 degrees south back in AUGUST, when Bobby first called for it? Or in November, when I first showed that the ATSB misrepresented their own intersection point by this exact same 2 degrees latitude?
Your distinction between search advice and the precise impact location is excellent – I just wish it had been APPLIED by the IG. If the signal data is valid, then the intersection of arc7 and the performance limit is what we want the search to encompass. So an appropriate DISTRIBUTION of intersection points (taking into account reasonable RANGES for PDAs, FMT, and intangibles) should have been built, with the search covering that distribution. Instead, the IG accepted the ATSB’s inaccurate limit as gospel, and publicly turned up its nose at anything beyond this (doctored?) point estimate.
Yes, I’m impatient. Yes, I’m setting high standards for folks who (like me) are just trying to donate pro bono support. I’m just sick and tired of this state of affairs: a nude emperor, a public too far away to notice, and a “royal court” whose “kingpins” for 12 months have delivered little more to the general public than a few catty remarks within an otherwise gushing fashion report.
@GlobusMax:
“UAE 343 was also apparently behind MH370. I wonder if that could further confuse:
Seems odd to go to all that trouble, but if that’s what they actually did, it worked.”
MH370 was 14 nm directly behind UAE343 at 18:22 UTC
http://www.randengineering.ca/mh370.html
(by @KeyserSquishy – Twitter)
Now the question: who’s “they”?
“If I ruled the world…Anyone withholding key information and too afraid to speak could bet w/o being implicated, automatically guiding the search to likely spots.”
Love it. And I suggest you hold that thought.
For Mr. Wise.
Here’s another take on what happened to MH 370. Along with a fellow Dowser living in Western Australia, we dowsed this event in segments.
1st. someone ( plural?) got control away from the pilot.
2nd. They had a way point calibrated scrip in some kind of hand held GPS. This script went in a Straight line ( Great Circle due to the curvature of the Earth ), from Kuala Lumpur to Lahore, Pakistan. After grabbing control, they went low, doubling back to this original line, in the Sunda Straits. Then they went Westwards towards India.
3rd. Before landfall, the pilot perished trying to do his duty. This happened South of Bangladesh.
4th. Flying near the Himalayas, they ran short of fuel, and made a forced landing in Northern India, between Kashmir and Nepal.
5th. Here is where things should have ended, but with a refueling, they took off near daylight and flew along the Pakistani border, and then down the West Coast of India,low and slow, as the dawn broke.
5th. The final chapter is when they turned South West and flew over out over the Maldives, where these perps probably bailed out over their last landfall, still flying low and slow.
6th. The next stop was a watery grave for the aircraft and whoever and whatever was left aboard it. This is so far away from the search areas, that it was impossible to track it down. Our dowses put it well into the British claimed maritime protectorate, which it couldn’t have reached without refueling in Northern India.
There have been eye witness accounts of most of this, that were discounted as not being creditable, due to fuel limits. But with a refueling stop in the valleys of the South flanks of the Himalayas, it all fits together with our dowse of the first leg. Any parked aircraft, will have its fuel tanks left topped off, due to water condensation problems. Transferring these tanks into MH 370 gave it the extra range needed for this solution. People saw the large plane leaving the West Coast of India, flying low and slow. If it didn’t crack up on the first leg, the pinging would have continued until the ground crew disconnected all the power feeds. Ergo, no more pings on the second leg, over the Maldives.
Besides our map dowsing off of downloaded photos of the plane and its flight crew, if you stretch a string on a globe from Kuala Lumpur to the big Northern city of Lahore, in Pakistan, it lines up with those Northern solution Pings, for the first five and a half hours. And with those last ninety minutes on the ground, it would only burn minimal fuel, parked on some runway apron. I first thought it had ditched in snow high up in the Mt’s., It was my friend’s dowsing that opened up the second leg. But disregarding map dowsing, the eye witnesses on the West Coast of India, and the correlation of the course plotted between Kuala Lumpur, and Pakistan, avoiding most of the Indian controlled air spaces around their New Delhi Capital city’s air defenses.
My friend’s dowse has one other peculiarity. It follows the India Pakistani border down quite a ways, and then makes a big arc back over India, as if avoiding some border installation 2/3rds the way down the Sub Continent’s border zone.
My friend’s dowse also posits that both the Pilot and Co-pilot were soon killed. The Pilot is satisfied that he did his duty, leaving his “Slim Pickens” Co-Pilot, more ambivalent, about his own demise.
@GlobusMax,
Thanks for sharing your detailed thoughts. I like a lot of what you’re saying. Back when the SIO as final destination seemed to be unassailable – when there were no pesky doubts about the validity of the BFOs, no talk about spoofs and no nagging question, why oh why did the SDU/AES spring back to life miraculously around 18:25 – my train of thoughts was along the same lines. And it might still turn out that it is pretty close to what really happened. Even if there are implausibilities, the theory of the politically disgruntled suicidal pilot isn’t off the table.
Anyway, in a criminal investigation nothing is off-limits. Everybody has to be scrutinized and everything has to be questioned. There are no a priori villains or heroes. Nobody is off the hook. Even in Jeff’s scenario one of the pilots or other MAS stuff could’ve been in on it -however unlikely it might seem- since the plan of the perps would be even better if they had the help of an experienced pilot who can actually fly a 777 and bail them out of potentially critical situations. And even Inmarsat’s people aren’t above suspicion. Maybe one of them told a perp in a pub over a beer something he shouldn’t about their procedures. Happens all the time. That kind of thinking hurts and offends a lot of people. It casts a shadow of doubt on innocent people. Who knows, chances are good that Nikolai Brodsky, Oleg Chustrak and Sergei Deinika are absolutely innocent victims. But crime is ugly. If a cop casts his heroes, victims and villains in advance he diminishes his chances to solve the crime.
@Nihonmama, a good cops is able to think like a criminal 😉
Hi JS,
Yes, that is what I meant re DG.
In addition, in case of landing there, correct BTO data would immediately point on DG due to small ping ring radius. There is no other place to land, only water. Either AES had to be shut down for the rest of the flight, or data had to be faked to divert attention. This is in contrast to Yubileyniy – they even would not care; the 7th arc is too long.
I can’t find anything suspicious in Jeff’s images. Jeff’s comment is “The two scenes, taken just before and after the disappearance, looked so different that I was certain that something significant had occurred in the interim”. Spring came… What else?
@Brock said, “Instead, the IG accepted the ATSB’s inaccurate limit as gospel, and publicly turned up its nose at anything beyond this (doctored?) point estimate.”
This is not correct, as I have explained before here. The IG has performed its own fuel exhaustion calculations independent of those of the ATSB, which I believe might have been done inaccurately.
@littlefoot:
Re —
“good cops is able to think like a criminal”
You are right. GOOD cops. 😉
Perhaps I’m jaded. Seen an abundance of the other type — “casts his heroes, victims and villains in advance” —
which is why the Innocence Project is very busy.
I think your theory is very interesting. Do you think that the passengers were knocked out at an early stage? And what about mobile telephones? Shouldn’t it have been possible to track at least some of them if the plane landed somewhere?
@Oleksandr,
While I don’t subscribe to any particular destination, including DG, you make (or inspire) a really good point.
As long as a perp believes that the flight can be tracked, any trip to an island runway MUST be accompanied by a spoof, or it would be detected almost instantly.
The reverse is true – if we doubt the spoof, we can’t have a perp that 1) knows about the logging and 2) wants to land on an island.
Without having dived back into it, I recall that the the Curtin acoustic findings were corroborated with H-phones that they retrieved from much further north up the west coast. It pointed to southern India. They worked meticulously on this for months on the quiet aware of the gravity of the work.
@Victor: re: performance limit (PL): thanks for clarifying. While “independently wrong” vs. “wrongly dependent” is a distinction without a difference to the NoK, I should have been more precise, and stand corrected.
And I certainly do NOT condemn the IG for failing to nail down a precise PL. I throw failure to provide the tools required to properly VALIDATE the official working PL (PDAs, anyone?) onto the huge pile of suspicious activities carried out by search officials. My report was meant to SUPPLEMENT – not replace – the items on your list of legitimate grievances.
@nihonmama: I’ve heard two interpretations on UAE343, just like everything else in this saga. Or maybe I misunderstood. The Rand hypothesis looks a lot better though. I will hold the thought.
@littlefoot: Indeed the whole SDU/18:25 thing is puzzling. In many respects Jeff is the only one to come up with an explanation for it, even though it seems far-fetched. The only thing I can come up with is it was something to do with preparing for the turn or was intended to confuse the Indonesians or all of us for that matter. Kudos to Jeff for tackling both of these, but I’ve read everything and they are still a mystery to me. I can’t help but think definitively solving this would be a major breakthrough.
Just getting back into this, I heard an argument that there is no evidence the SDU ever went down, and the logon was triggered by in-flight entertainment, but that is countered by the timing bias that is only applied to the BTO at 18:25 on first power-up. Is that confirmed by chance? So much to absorb.
As far as other people to help, I think that’s very plausible. I’ve wondered at every international terminal I have been to what exactly keeps two passengers on different flights from switching flights / tickets. Receiving customs has not checked I was supposed to be on that flight, only my passport. Boarding gate has only checked my ticket. Perhaps I haven’t travelled enough and that is not common. Throw Dopplegangers into the mix, and even if they check, it doesn’t guarantee the passengers on the fight are who they think they are.
Also questionable is the issue of passenger control, which is the biggest argument against a solo suicidal pilot, with supposed ability of the crew to enter the cockpit and hypoxia questionable as I understand it. The only thing I can figure here is they did, find both dead, and have no clue how to change the autopilot or or raise help to do so. I would think the crew would be trained to at least try some things with communication, and perhaps this explains the SDU.
In fact, we could almost go a step further, and say that if the perp intended to land anywhere intact, he either had to be completely ignorant of the satellite system, or he had to bring along a spoof.
A question for the satellite experts:
Is there evidence in the data that shows definitively that the signal chain was, in fact, AES ==> IOR 3F1 ==> GES?
Rationale:
The timing of the AES reboot and FMT appear rather coincidental to the casual observer. You have an AES that reboots for unknown reasons, and the resultant math after the reboot indicates the plane must have been heading south. (As it rebooted, it was heading west… at the next data point, it was headed south… therefore there must have been a turn in between). Of course, that math is based on the assumption that the system was operating normally. One instinct upon observing this is to ask… could something have changed in the system that, if the plane had actually continued on it’s last known course, would produce the southerly conclusion simply as an *artifact* of the assumed (normal) geometry of the signal chain?
Along these lines… what if the AES was merely re-programmed to relay via another satellite? This would skew the mathematics about a certain point. It can be shown that using different satellites as the transit point, BTO and BFO graphs rather similar to the actual graphs can be derived. In this regard, far less knowledge about BFO and BTO would be required to produce the actual data observed.
[Aside: as to why someone might turn the AES back on deliberately… I suppose for one, it would obscure the trail by producing erroneous results based on the more obvious BTO calculations (remember, the more arcane BFO calculations were looked at afterward to narrow down the turn direction). Also, I suppose it would allow one to monitor the plane in realtime. ]
So my question is… is this possible from a technical standpoint?
JS,
As I mentioned before, I am open to any theory as long as it is supported by logic, physics, and math.
A spoofing theory appears to be interesting, but the top candidate among this class of theories should be DG in my opinion:
– DG is remote and military-controlled;
– There are no radars to detect the aircraft over the Indian ocean;
– CIA is likely technically capable of organizing such a ‘disappearance’ to cheat Australian, Chinese and Malay intel. serv., and may probably have a motive;
– Inmarsat satellite is at ~(64.5E, 0N), while DG is at ~(72.4E, 7.3S). Maldives are at ~(73.2E, 3.2N). The smallest ping ring would have radius of ~800 km if BTO data is available and not faked for such a scenario, which leaves DG and Male the only candidates for landing. But Male can be almost immediately discarded – it is full of tourists, the airport is small, and there is no place to hide B777.
– It would be consistent with Kate’s witnessing.
I missed the NY Magazine Q&A session by a few minutes. I think at a minimum that US satellite recon is the best in the world and the agencies involved in the collection, analysis, and dissemination do not as policy distribute publically this imagery. Also, it’s highly plausible we have at least one satellite parked above high value Russian military sites, recording constantly. So if this plane landed at Baikonur, US intelligence would have seen it. Sorry, but I don’t buy into a conspiracy of enforced silence.
Second, I fail to see what possible reason Putin would have in doing this. The Russian’s knew that NATO and the “West” would at best throw up some mildly bothersome economic sanctions. By a non-invading invasion of Ukraine Putin demonstrated very clearly to the world exactly his calculus of International Relations.He won and knew so. But “disappearing” a plane without attribution really yields nothing when Russia could have played its own economic warfare cards and caused serious problems.
Third, I think it’s physically impossible that this plane travelled that far north without once getting painted either by civilian ground radar or by military radar, either ground based or airborne.
Let’s look at what we do know. The plane turned East and South from its intended course. Humans must have initiated this action. It was either the pilot acting alone, the co-pilot acting alone, both acting together, or a hijacker; no other possibility exists. We also know that the plane’s transponders were turned off. Again, humans did this.
If an emergency arose, why didn’t the pilot or copilot broadcast the plane’s status and take immediate actions to get the plane headed towards a runway? The pilot had in excess of 18000 hours of flight time in that model. That’s about 2 years of continuous, equivalent time in the cockpit. Unless he was already dead/incapacitated, or unless he was the one who deliberately turned the plane, I don’t see how he would not have immediately put out a distress call.The same logic applies to the co-pilot.
No passengers made any calls, even from the air phones. Also, do we know that no passenger had a satellite phone? Sat phone works independently of a cell tower connection. Whatever happened on that plane happened almost immediately.
Another thing about the passengers: we only know how many were on board based on what the airline claimed. But if you were going to mount a hijacking you would do so with some inside help. One place to target is the boarding crew: why do we blindly accept the passenger manifest as accurate and complete?
This is a mystery and perhaps the mystery of our times. I think the plane did crash in the Southern Indian Ocean. As to why no debris or bodies or anything was discovered is equally perplexing. One hopes for the families and for the flying public that a responsible government discovers the wreckage and the data recorders get properly analyzed.
@Brock said, “While ‘independently wrong’ vs. ‘wrongly dependent’ is a distinction without a difference to the NoK, I should have been more precise, and stand corrected.”
Independently wrong? To my knowledge, the path that was presented by Richard does not use the wrong performance limit as it is based on the performance characteristics of the actual engine and plane. Do you have technical information to the contrary? You might argue that other paths are possible, and we may disagree whether some of the those paths are indeed allowable, but I don’t believe that the performance limit is violated for Richard’s path and is not “wrong” on this basis.
As for whether a latitude of 40S can be reached, I do not believe the IG has yet made that determination, but I do know that people are working towards answering that question.
Phil,
If you pick up a copy of the MH370 Data Comms Log at dca.gov.my you’ll see that all satcom signalling units routed via IOR (Indian Ocean Region). IOR is only served by I3-F1 and the Perth Ground Earth Stn.
The evidence is that AES made a new Log-On (with the GES) 18:25. ATSB’s Search Strategy paper stated that Log-On was consistent with a power-on. No evidence exists, & the question has been answered, that the AES made a Log-On through another service region, eg POR.
You ask could the AES inherent operating characteristics be different after 18:25 than exhibited during prior operation? No, if there was a possibility for such a variance I’d expect to see calibration procedures. There are no such procedures described in the Aircraft Maint Mnl section for the AES.
:Don
@Brock:
“@ALSM: so we have a family of hypotheses – let’s call them the “relaxed attitude towards BFO error minimization” family:
At the “least relaxed” end of this spectrum is Dr.Bobby, who, though he chooses (wisely, IMO) not to MINIMIZE BFO error, he still pays attention to them, by setting an error TOLERANCE.
(I have not yet reviewed GlobusMax’s work – apologies – but am guessing his result fits in here somewhere, as he at least MENTIONS BFO fit.)”
I can save you trouble. I have not run BFO since before we even knew how BFO worked for sure. I rely on the fact that 40S appears to be shown to work by Dr. Ulich. In fact, the last timing analyses I ran were using reverse engineered ping rings. I have a lot of catching up to do. I do plan to run my hypothesis for BFO and BTO and look for a fit, but that may take some time. I will specifically be looking to see if BTO/BFO supports a pass-through and course change slightly southwest at waypoint RUNUT to test the hypothesis. It’s a very pre-conceived notion, so it won’t fit your error classification, but it takes into account the human element. I want to see if they could have acted as my hunch told me they acted last March. I’m very stubborn about it until I conclude it’s not possible.
@GuardedDon
Thanks for the reply.
When I say another satellite, I am not referring to an Inmarsat satellite. The signals were recorded at Perth GES, yes… I’m asking if it is an absolute certainty that it was routed via I3-F1 or whether it could have got there another way (i.e. relayed via a satellite belonging to someone else).
In other words, is there any conceivable way the GES log-on could be physically achieved without going through I3-F1 specifically.
@littlefoot:
And here’s how a good investigator would proceed:
Fact: MH370 disappeared on March 7, 2014, en route from KL to Beijing.
Question: Have there been any other aviation crashes or disappearances involving Malaysia Airlines recently?
Answer: Yes. One other.
Question: Where?
Answer: Over Ukraine.
Question: When?
Answer: July, 2014. MH17 was shot down en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.
Question: Shot down? Do they know who did it?
Answer: By most accounts, it looks like it was the work of Russian-backed separatists using a BUK. But there are some hanging chads. Pieces of the aircraft were left behind by the investigators. Some Dutch journos are asking why. And they’re still trying to identify the origin of the shrapnel found in the pilot’s bodies.
Question: OK. Any other crashes/disappearances related to Malaysia or its national airline recently?
Answer: Not related to Malaysia Airlines, but there’s another.
Question: What airline is that?
Answer: Air Asia (Indonesia) an affiliate of Air Asia Group, which is domiciled in Malaysia.
Question: Where’d that one crash?
Answer: In the Java Sea. It was en route from Surabaya, Indonesia to Singapore.
Question: When did that crash happen?
Answer: December, 2014.
Question: So hang on — we’ve got three crashes within a year and all three planes were Malaysian-owned?
Answer: Yes.
Question: hmmmm. So would it be fair to say that right now, Malaysia seems to be the common denominator?
Answer: It seems so.
Question: OK. Is there anything else that we know of that ties these planes to Malaysia? People on the planes? Cargo?
Answer: Well, in the case of MH370, cargo’s a big question. Malaysia hasn’t released the full cargo manifest, despite pleas from the next of kin and others to do so.
Question: What about the other two?
Answer: Well, MH17 was blown to bits. But there’s one other thing stands out right now.
Question: What is that?
Answer: A passenger on MH17. She was related to two of Malaysia’s top officials.
Question: Really. Who?
Answer: The Prime Minister and Defense Minister of Malaysia. The passenger was their step-grandmother.
Question: Are you kidding?
Answer: No.
Question: Passenger manifests are not public information. Who would have known she was on MH17?
Answer: Right now, we don’t know.
Question: OK. What about the plane that crashed in the Java Sea.
Answer: Don’t know. Much of the fuselage remains in the water after several failed attempts to lift it. But they did find the black boxes.
Question: Any report on those recordings yet?
Answer: Well, a preliminary report is due out soon, I think. But it won’t include analysis of the two flight recorders.
Question: What? Why not?
Answer: No reason has been given as far as we can tell.
Question: hmmmm. This doesn’t smell right. What’s going on here?
Answer: I don’t know. But it sure feels like someone has it out for Malaysian airlines. Or people in Malaysia.
Answer: I’m inclined to agree. At least based on what you’ve just told me.
Question: Anything else?
Answer: Well, we’ve gotten a report that some blogger in a Chinese online forum warned of a disaster – specifically AirAsia — two weeks before it crashed. And the blogger also said that all Chinese should “avoid Malaysian airline and AirAsia”.
Question: Are you making this up?
Answer: You can’t make this up.
Question: Do you know if the investigators of the crashes involving Malaysia Airlines or AirAsia are looking into that blogger? Who they could be and if that person has possible links to any other groups?
Answer: At this time, we don’t know if those authorities are looking into the Chinese blogger or not. The timing of that post sure doesn’t seem random, though.
Answer: No, it doesn’t. So we should look at it whether the air crash investigators do or not.
Questions:
Are these three planes related events? Big IF, but right now, doesn’t seem unreasonable to think they might be.
If the three are related, WHO would/could be behind all this? Are we looking at a criminal enterprise, a state actor, a terrorist outfit, what? (SUSPECTS)
WHY would the perps have done this? (MOTIVE)
Did the perps have help?
Are the perps trying to send a message? If so, to whom?
Have we seen the whole show? Or is there MORE coming?
We also need to learn more about this blogger and AirAsia. How did he/she know two weeks before the fact? It also appears the blogger linked MH370 and MH17 to the same entity behind AirAsia 8501 crash. Maybe if we figure out who the blogger is, we can back into more information that will help us blow this thing wide open.
What could possibly go wrong (with the search)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClvLp4vXJ5I
@LGHamilton@GlobusMax
From Forbes magazine:
This conspiracy theory would be just one more ridiculous theory except for the possibility that it raises the false hope for the families of the victims of Flight 370 that the plane could have landed safely in a remote airfield.
I suppose they are ‘small-minded and ‘angry’ also. Sigh.
@Victor: I refer only to the hypothetical that S40 turns out to have been accessible after all. Despite begging Boeing for it, I have no special info from which to build a PL (hardly fair, when the ATSB has enough to produce TWO: one for each of Figs. 2 & 3…)
@Matty: in September, Curtin reaffirmed the Rottnest Island recording’s directional indication – but they DID use triangulation from Scott Reef to move their best-estimate epicentre NW – from East of DG to NNW of it, in the Arabian Sea.
I asked Dr. Duncan a few months back about WHY their September report further toned down their (already toned-down) likelihood assessment that the DG event was MH370-related. He cited inconsistency with the BTO data as the #1 reason for caution – both before and after folding in Scott Reef:
(reprinted by permission)
“If, however, something comes up that refutes the (BTO) data, then these (low frequency) acoustic localisations would be worth a much closer look.”
If the signal data is thrown out, the “Curtin event” is back on the table.
I’ll start out by stating that I know very little about this case other than what I’ve read on a few blogs over the past 12 hours.
That being said, I’ve had several questions, many of which have been covered thoroughly here and elsewhere. A couple questions I had that still remain perhaps someone could help me out with. Note: If I’m completely uneducated and any of the theories I’ve read about are complete garbage, please dismiss them immediately.
If MH370 didn’t go down in the ocean as part of an accident or other similar event, and it was in fact re-guided elsewhere, the main unsolvable questions are of course ‘how?’ and ‘why?’
I read into the Field McConnell theory that states that the Boeing aircraft in question was equipped with an “Uninterruptible Autopilot” feature, which could potentially allow someone to gain control of the plane (even from a remote location off of the plane) if they had enough experience with the equipment. Is this plausible? Also, couldn’t this feature be used to override a hijacker and assist in landing the plane safely at one of the many accessible landing strips in range?
Beyond that, he touches on the whole Freescale patent tangent. From what I learned from perusing through a few pages regarding that, this was a patent developed by a US company (through several Chinese employees), and it could be used to make previously “un-stealthy” aircrafts immediately much more stealthy. Several of these individuals who have great knowledge of this technology (including the four Chinese employees directly linked to the patent that was still pending) were on this flight.
Is this not somehow a motive to hijack MH370? There are many nations that would love to get their hands on this type of information for their military (or terrorist?) needs.
The interview I had viewed most recently is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agoXo7qnLKk
I understand that this may indeed have nothing to do with trying to uncover what went on last March, but it does potentially provide a possible motive.
Putin is a man who was involved in blowing up apartment buildings and killing innocent Russians in order to start a war and become President of Russia. So it’s not hard to imagine he would be involved in an elaborate plan to make a plane vanish just to prove his point to the West. We are of course talking about the same guy who sent assassins to kill an outspoken critic of his with a dose of Nuclear death
For what it’s worth, I fully expect in the near future for some truly befuddled Kazakh construction worker to contact CNN and explain in detail how routine and mundane the project at Yubileyniy was, providing clear evidence that no 777 came anywhere near that area. That is not to say that I don’t truly admire all the work Mr. Wise has put in, because I truly do–it’s magnificent. To all of the commenters I’ve seen on various sites who claim Jeff doesn’t know what he’s talking about, I think it’s safe to say that Jeff may very well be in the top 5 people on earth in terms of knowing the ins and outs of this case. However, all it would really take to squash this entire particular discussion would be for someone who worked on “Yubileyniy North” to come out and claim otherwise. I’d say it’s only a matter of time.
Why? Is this some sort of mad Ruskiephobia, or some deeper malaise that effects you?
There were bound to be many things going on around the world around this time, why did you fixate on this spot? Why fly a plane to an open field and then bury it? the remediation suggestion is far more plausible… Perhaps buying something radioactive?
I think you are drawing a long bow and I suspect your reasons for doing so.
@Nihonmama..”I want to get rid of my Step GrandMother… she bugs the hell out of me
“OK, how about we disappear the plane or land it in Russia and bury it.. or maybe ask the Nazi putschist regime in Kiev to shot it down and blame Eastern Ukrainian independence forces..?”
“She’s a real bitch… can you do all 3?”
I posted a potential sighting on page 6 of the peanut gallery thread it was held in moderation so I won’t add links, they are on the original post.
I saw it in the comments section of a Daily Mail story.PUBLISHED: 21:44, 18 March 2014
“Jaxx, Langkawi, Malaysia,
My friend watched a large plane flying very low at 2.20am on the evening of the disappearance. It had no lights on apart from the undercarriage which was brightly lit. This was at Gungung Raya , Langkawi, Malaysia. Gungung Raya is a large mountain on the island. She thought at first it was going to crash but maintained its low flight through the mountains. This is an area of dense rainforest. The Thai plane sited on radar was at 2.13am at Butterworth around 10 mins flyiing time from here. My friend has lodged a report with the police”