The unsettling oddness was there from the first moment, on March 8, when Malaysia Airlines announced that a plane from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing, Flight 370, had disappeared over the South China Sea in the middle of the night. There had been no bad weather, no distress call, no wreckage, no eyewitness accounts of a fireball in the sky—just a plane that said good-bye to one air-traffic controller and, two minutes later, failed to say hello to the next. And the crash, if it was a crash, got stranger from there.
My yearlong detour to Planet MH370 began two days later, when I got an email from an editor at Slate asking if I’d write about the incident. I’m a private pilot and science writer, and I wrote about the last big mysterious crash, of Air France 447 in 2009. My story ran on the 12th. The following morning, I was invited to go on CNN. Soon, I was on-air up to six times a day as part of its nonstop MH370 coverage.
There was no intro course on how to be a cable-news expert. The Town Car would show up to take me to the studio, I’d sign in with reception, a guest-greeter would take me to makeup, I’d hang out in the greenroom, the sound guy would rig me with a mike and an earpiece, a producer would lead me onto the set, I’d plug in and sit in the seat, a producer would tell me what camera to look at during the introduction, we’d come back from break, the anchor would read the introduction to the story and then ask me a question or maybe two, I’d answer, then we’d go to break, I would unplug, wipe off my makeup, and take the car 43 blocks back uptown. Then a couple of hours later, I’d do it again. I was spending 18 hours a day doing six minutes of talking.
As time went by, CNN winnowed its expert pool down to a dozen or so regulars who earned the on-air title “CNN aviation analysts”: airline pilots, ex-government honchos, aviation lawyers, and me. We were paid by the week, with the length of our contracts dependent on how long the story seemed likely to play out. The first couple were seven-day, the next few were 14-day, and the last one was a month. We’d appear solo, or in pairs, or in larger groups for panel discussions—whatever it took to vary the rhythm of perpetual chatter.1
I soon realized the germ of every TV-news segment is: “Officials say X.” The validity of the story derives from the authority of the source. The expert, such as myself, is on hand to add dimension or clarity. Truth flowed one way: from the official source, through the anchor, past the expert, and onward into the great sea of viewerdom.
What made MH370 challenging to cover was, first, that the event was unprecedented and technically complex and, second, that the officials were remarkably untrustworthy. For instance, the search started over the South China Sea, naturally enough, but soon after, Malaysia opened up a new search area in the Andaman Sea, 400 miles away. Why? Rumors swirled that military radar had seen the plane pull a 180. The Malaysian government explicitly denied it, but after a week of letting other countries search the South China Sea, the officials admitted that they’d known about the U-turn from day one.
Of course, nothing turned up in the Andaman Sea, either. But in London, scientists for a British company called Inmarsat that provides telecommunications between ships and aircraft realized its database contained records of transmissions between MH370 and one of its satellites for the seven hours after the plane’s main communication system shut down. Seven hours! Maybe it wasn’t a crash after all—if it were, it would have been the slowest in history.
These electronic “handshakes” or “pings” contained no actual information, but by analyzing the delay between the transmission and reception of the signal— called the burst timing offset, or BTO—Inmarsat could tell how far the plane had been from the satellite and thereby plot an arc along which the plane must have been at the moment of the final ping.Fig. 3 That arc stretched some 6,000 miles, but if the plane was traveling at normal airliner speeds, it would most likely have wound up around the ends of the arc—either in Kazakhstan and China in the north or the Indian Ocean in the south. My money was on Central Asia. But CNN quoted unnamed U.S.-government sources saying that the plane had probably gone south, so that became the dominant view.
Other views were circulating, too, however.Fig. 5 A Canadian pilot named Chris Goodfellow went viral with his theory that MH370 suffered a fire that knocked out its communications gear and diverted from its planned route in order to attempt an emergency landing. Keith Ledgerwood, another pilot, proposed that hijackers had taken the plane and avoided detection by ducking into the radar shadow of another airliner. Amateur investigators pored over satellite images, insisting that wisps of cloud or patches of shrubbery were the lost plane. Courtney Love, posting on her Facebook time line a picture of the shimmering blue sea, wrote: “I’m no expert but up close this does look like a plane and an oil slick.”
Then: breaking news! On March 24, the Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak, announced that a new kind of mathematical analysis proved that the plane had in fact gone south. This new math involved another aspect of the handshakes called the burst frequency offset, or BFO, a measure of changes in the signal’s wavelength, which is partly determined by the relative motion of the airplane and the satellite. That the whole southern arc lay over the Indian Ocean meant that all the passengers and crew would certainly be dead by now. This was the first time in history that the families of missing passengers had been asked to accept that their loved ones were dead because a secret math equation said so. Fig. 7 Not all took it well. In Beijing, outraged next-of-kin marched to the Malaysian Embassy, where they hurled water bottles and faced down paramilitary soldiers in riot gear.
Guided by Inmarsat’s calculations, Australia, which was coordinating the investigation, moved the search area 685 miles to the northeast, to a 123,000-square-mile patch of ocean west of Perth. Ships and planes found much debris on the surface, provoking a frenzy of BREAKING NEWS banners, but all turned out to be junk. Adding to the drama was a ticking clock. The plane’s two black boxes had an ultrasonic sound beacon that sent out acoustic signals through the water. (Confusingly, these also were referred to as “pings,” though of a completely different nature. These new pings suddenly became the important ones.) If searchers could spot plane debris, they’d be able to figure out where the plane had most likely gone down, then trawl with underwater microphones to listen for the pings. The problem was that the pingers had a battery life of only 30 days.
On April 4, with only a few days’ pinger life remaining, an Australian ship lowered a special microphone called a towed pinger locator into the water.Fig. 8 Miraculously, the ship detected four pings. Search officials were jubilant, as was the CNN greenroom. Everyone was ready for an upbeat ending.
The only Debbie Downer was me. I pointed out that the pings were at the wrong frequency and too far apart to have been generated by stationary black boxes. For the next two weeks, I was the odd man out on Don Lemon’s six-guest panel blocks, gleefully savaged on-air by my co-experts.
The Australians lowered an underwater robotFig. 9 to scan the seabed for the source of the pings. There was nothing. Of course, by the rules of TV news, the game wasn’t over until an official said so. But things were stretching thin. One night, an underwater-search veteran taking part in a Don Lemon panel agreed with me that the so-called acoustic-ping detections had to be false. Backstage after the show, he and another aviation analyst nearly came to blows. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! I’ve done extensive research!” the analyst shouted. “There’s nothing else those pings could be!”
Soon after, the story ended the way most news stories do: We just stopped talking about it. A month later, long after the caravan had moved on, a U.S. Navy officer said publicly that the pings had not come from MH370. The saga fizzled out with as much satisfying closure as the final episode of Lost.
Once the surface search was called off, it was the rabble’s turn. In late March, New Zealand–based space scientist Duncan Steel began posting a series of essays on Inmarsat orbital mechanics on his website.Fig. 10 The comments section quickly grew into a busy forum in which technically sophisticated MH370 obsessives answered one another’s questions and pitched ideas. The open platform attracted a varied crew, from the mostly intelligent and often helpful to the deranged and abusive. Eventually, Steel declared that he was sick of all the insults and shut down his comments section. The party migrated over to my blog, jeffwise.net.
Meanwhile, a core of engineers and scientists had split off via group email and included me. We called ourselves the Independent Group,11 or IG. If you found yourself wondering how a satellite with geosynchronous orbit responds to a shortage of hydrazine, all you had to do was ask.12 The IG’s first big break came in late May, when the Malaysians finally released the raw Inmarsat data. By combining the data with other reliable information, we were able to put together a time line of the plane’s final hours: Forty minutes after the plane took off from Kuala Lumpur, MH370 went electronically dark. For about an hour after that, the plane was tracked on radar following a zigzag course and traveling fast. Then it disappeared from military radar. Three minutes later, the communications system logged back onto the satellite. This was a major revelation. It hadn’t stayed connected, as we’d always assumed. This event corresponded with the first satellite ping. Over the course of the next six hours, the plane generated six more handshakes as it moved away from the satellite.
The final handshake wasn’t completed. This led to speculation that MH370 had run out of fuel and lost power, causing the plane to lose its connection to the satellite. An emergency power system would have come on, providing enough electricity for the satcom to start reconnecting before the plane crashed. Where exactly it would have gone down down was still unknown—the speed of the plane, its direction, and how fast it was climbing were all sources of uncertainty.
The MH370 obsessives continued attacking the problem. Since I was the proprietor of the major web forum, it fell on me to protect the fragile cocoon of civility that nurtured the conversation. A single troll could easily derail everything. The worst offenders were the ones who seemed intelligent but soon revealed themselves as Believers. They’d seized on a few pieces of faulty data and convinced themselves that they’d discovered the truth. One was sure the plane had been hit by lightning and then floated in the South China Sea, transmitting to the satellite on battery power. When I kicked him out, he came back under aliases. I wound up banning anyone who used the word “lightning.”
By October, officials from the Australian Transport Safety Board had begun an ambitiously scaled scan of the ocean bottom, and, in a surprising turn, it would include the area suspected by the IG.13 For those who’d been a part of the months-long effort, it was a thrilling denouement. The authorities, perhaps only coincidentally, had landed on the same conclusion as had a bunch of randos from the internet. Now everyone was in agreement about where to look.
While jubilation rang through the email threads, I nursed a guilty secret: I wasn’t really in agreement. For one, I was bothered by the lack of plane debris. And then there was the data. To fit both the BTO and BFO data well, the plane would need to have flown slowly, likely in a curving path. But the more plausible autopilot settings and known performance constraints would have kept the plane flying faster and more nearly straight south. I began to suspect that the problem was with the BFO numbers—that they hadn’t been generated in the way we believed.14 If that were the case, perhaps the flight had gone north after all.
For a long time, I resisted even considering the possibility that someone might have tampered with the data. That would require an almost inconceivably sophisticated hijack operation, one so complicated and technically demanding that it would almost certainly need state-level backing. This was true conspiracy-theory material.
And yet, once I started looking for evidence, I found it. One of the commenters on my blog had learned that the compartment on 777s called the electronics-and-equipment bay, or E/E bay, can be accessed via a hatch in the front of the first-class cabin.15 If perpetrators got in there, a long shot, they would have access to equipment that could be used to change the BFO value of its satellite transmissions. They could even take over the flight controls.16
I realized that I already had a clue that hijackers had been in the E/E bay. Remember the satcom system disconnected and then rebooted three minutes after the plane left military radar behind. I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how a person could physically turn the satcom off and on. The only way, apart from turning off half the entire electrical system, would be to go into the E/E bay and pull three particular circuit breakers. It is a maneuver that only a sophisticated operator would know how to execute, and the only reason I could think for wanting to do this was so that Inmarsat would find the records and misinterpret them. They turned on the satcom in order to provide a false trail of bread crumbs leading away from the plane’s true route.
It’s not possible to spoof the BFO data on just any plane. The plane must be of a certain make and model, 17equipped with a certain make and model of satellite-communications equipment,18 and flying a certain kind of route19 in a region covered by a certain kind of Inmarsat satellite.20 If you put all the conditions together, it seemed unlikely that any aircraft would satisfy them. Yet MH370 did.
I imagine everyone who comes up with a new theory, even a complicated one, must experience one particularly delicious moment, like a perfect chord change, when disorder gives way to order. This was that moment for me. Once I threw out the troublesome BFO data, all the inexplicable coincidences and mismatched data went away. The answer became wonderfully simple. The plane must have gone north.
Using the BTO data set alone, I was able to chart the plane’s speed and general path, which happened to fall along national borders.Fig. 21 Flying along borders, a military navigator told me, is a good way to avoid being spotted on radar. A Russian intelligence plane nearly collided with a Swedish airliner while doing it over the Baltic Sea in December. If I was right, it would have wound up in Kazakhstan, just as search officials recognized early on.
There aren’t a lot of places to land a plane as big as the 777, but, as luck would have it, I found one: a place just past the last handshake ring called Baikonur Cosmodrome.Fig. 22 Baikonur is leased from Kazakhstan by Russia. A long runway there called Yubileyniy was built for a Russian version of the Space Shuttle. If the final Inmarsat ping rang at the start of MH370’s descent, it would have set up nicely for an approach to Yubileyniy’s runway 24.
Whether the plane went to Baikonur or elsewhere in Kazakhstan, my suspicion fell on Russia. With technically advanced satellite, avionics, and aircraft-manufacturing industries, Russia was a paranoid fantasist’s dream.24 (The Russians, or at least Russian-backed militia, were also suspected in the downing of Malaysia Flight 17 in July.) Why, exactly, would Putin want to steal a Malaysian passenger plane? I had no idea. Maybe he wanted to demonstrate to the United States, which had imposed the first punitive sanctions on Russia the day before, that he could hurt the West and its allies anywhere in the world. Maybe what he was really after were the secrets of one of the plane’s passengers.25 Maybe there was something strategically crucial in the hold. Or maybe he wanted the plane to show up unexpectedly somewhere someday, packed with explosives. There’s no way to know. That’s the thing about MH370 theory-making: It’s hard to come up with a plausible motive for an act that has no apparent beneficiaries.
As it happened, there were three ethnically Russian men aboard MH370, two of them Ukrainian-passport holders from Odessa.26 Could any of these men, I wondered, be special forces or covert operatives? As I looked at the few pictures available on the internet, they definitely struck me as the sort who might battle Liam Neeson in midair.
About the two Ukrainians, almost nothing was available online.Fig. 27 I was able to find out a great deal about the Russian,Fig. 28 who was sitting in first class about 15 feet from the E/E-bay hatch.Fig. 29 He ran a lumber company in Irkutsk, and his hobby was technical diving under the ice of Lake Baikal.30 I hired Russian speakers from Columbia University to make calls to Odessa and Irkutsk, then hired researchers on the ground.
The more I discovered, the more coherent the story seemed to me.32 I found a peculiar euphoria in thinking about my theory, which I thought about all the time. One of the diagnostic questions used to determine whether you’re an alcoholic is whether your drinking has interfered with your work. By that measure, I definitely had a problem. Once the CNN checks stopped coming, I entered a long period of intense activity that earned me not a cent. Instead, I was forking out my own money for translators and researchers and satellite photos. And yet I was happy.
Still, it occurred to me that, for all the passion I had for my theory, I might be the only person in the world who felt this way. Neurobiologist Robert A. Burton points out in his book On Being Certain that the sensation of being sure about one’s beliefs is an emotional response separate from the processing of those beliefs. It’s something that the brain does subconsciously to protect itself from wasting unnecessary processing power on problems for which you’ve already found a solution that’s good enough. “ ‘That’s right’ is a feeling you get so that you can move on,” Burton told me. It’s a kind of subconscious laziness. Just as it’s harder to go for a run than to plop onto the sofa, it’s harder to reexamine one’s assumptions than it is to embrace certainty. At one end of the spectrum of skeptics are scientists, who by disposition or training resist the easy path; at the other end are conspiracy theorists, who’ll leap effortlessly into the sweet bosom of certainty. So where did that put me?
Propounding some new detail of my scenario to my wife over dinner one night, I noticed a certain glassiness in her expression. “You don’t seem entirely convinced,” I suggested.
She shrugged.
“Okay,” I said. “What do you think is the percentage chance that I’m right?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Five percent?”33
Springtime came to the southern ocean, and search vessels began their methodical cruise along the area jointly identified by the IG and the ATSB, dragging behind it a sonar rig that imaged the seabed in photographic detail. Within the IG, spirits were high. The discovery of the plane would be the triumphant final act of a remarkable underdog story.
By December, when the ships had still not found a thing, I felt it was finally time to go public. In six sequentially linked pages that readers could only get to by clicking through—to avoid anyone reading the part where I suggest Putin masterminded the hijack without first hearing how I got there—I laid out my argument. I called it “The Spoof.”
I got a respectful hearing but no converts among the IG. A few sites wrote summaries of my post. The International Business Times headlined its story “MH370: Russia’s Grand Plan to Provoke World War III, Says Independent Investigator” and linked directly to the Putin part. Somehow, the airing of my theory helped quell my obsession. My gut still tells me I’m right, but my brain knows better than to trust my gut.
Last month, the Malaysian government declared that the aircraft is considered to have crashed and all those aboard are presumed dead. Malaysia’s transport minister told a local television station that a key factor in the decision was the fact that the search mission for the aircraft failed to achieve its objective. Meanwhile, new theories are still being hatched. One, by French writer Marc Dugain, states that the plane was shot down by the U.S. because it was headed toward the military bases on the islands of Diego Garcia as a flying bomb.34
The search failed to deliver the airplane, but it has accomplished some other things: It occupied several thousand hours of worldwide airtime; it filled my wallet and then drained it; it torpedoed the idea that the application of rationality to plane disasters would inevitably yield ever-safer air travel. And it left behind a faint, lingering itch in the back of my mind, which I believe will quite likely never go away.
*This article appears in the February 23, 2015 issue of New York Magazine.
PM – I know a former Royal Australian Air Force pilot here who finished up in 777’s and he flew royals around here a number of time while still in. With VIP’s on board you could rule out totally some daybreak gawking at low altitude but with an empty plane?? The local movements would have been looked at I’m sure and it seems they don’t have a culprit atm. DG traffic has it’s own array of spendour to look at.
On any normal approach to the Maldives you are flying over pristine Islands so this is a rather odd manoeuvre that will probably stay a mystery.
@Matty
Interesting details re: flying royals around.
A more worrying coincidence (or not) around that time as Jeff has written about is the whole Putin/sanctions/Crimea…saga. And I still can’t get Tony Abbott’s threat to “shirt-front” Putin over the MH17 disaster at the Brisbane G20 out of my mind.
Anyway, enough of that and am still hoping for some good news from the SIO.
PM – It was conspicuous indeed that Abbott provided the sharpest condemnation of Putin when other players virtually stepped around it. Abbott put two and two together I think while most just tap danced. The “shirtfront” line was sincere I believe. He does after all have the distinction of KO’ing his own treasurer on the training track when rugby team-mates years earlier with a right hook, and the loss of those Australian lives was something he indeed took personally in a way I don’t think Obama could. So we have had a PM with a world drinking record – Bob Hawke – and now a former pugilist who is not averse to snotting people, and I have no doubt he would enjoy punching the shit out of Vladamir Putin.
@Oleksandr
If the continuous BFO function is known, and if the continuous altitude function is known, then there is a unique solution in the form of a path (lat, lon, alt). As Niels pointed out, these is an old note from June 2014 showing this in detail.
However, if the continuous functions are not known, the extrapolation error and uncertainty raises very quickly, because the positioning error gets amplified over time if the BFO is improperly interpolated.
So the answer is that there /is/ a solution, in principle, but it is of no practical use to us, because of the lack of continuous information.
I also agree with Niels that simple models are very useful when thinking about the time periods where we have no information.
Henrik
@ Oleksandr,
Since you cannot answer a simple question I will do it for you.
At 19:41 UTC, 0°N 93.7°E the tangential headings are 3.4° and 183.4°, and the radial headings are 93.4° and 273.4°.
According to Yap’s calculator the BFO’s at 500 kt groundspeed for those headings are respectively 195.2 Hz, 102.5 Hz, 146.9 Hz and 148.0 Hz.
The sensitivity of BFO to groundspeed at that time and location is therefore 9.3 Hz per 100 kt on a tangential heading, and 0.1 Hz on a radial heading.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-08/malaysian-air-team-still-hopeful-as-search-deadline-looms
Quote: If the plane isn’t found by late May and funds permit further investigation, “we would move further north, but we’d also have to contemplate whether we would go wider” from the place where fuel ran out, Dolan said.
@ Richard Cole:
Thanks for that link. Sensible article, sensible search strategy.
@Oleksander, Gysbreght
If we consider the approximation BFO=k1+k2(t, lat)* v_lat
So the second term can be reasonable approximation for sat. pos. component s_z sufficiently dominant.
The first term (k1) needs more attention. It is based on innerproduct of v_sat and position of a/c (with respect to sat pos.: p – s). At first sight all three terms in the innerproduct matter. Interestingly the relative change in (p -s)_x and (p-s)_y is small, which may indicate that k1 is a weak function of (variations in)p_x and p_y and a much stronger function of p_z. I think it is worth analyzing this further. Because if this is true one could (by fixing p_x and p_y for example at IGOGU) possibly find a numerical approx. for p_z based on a smoothened BFO(t) function (Without using BTO data, without any assumption on track type/ speed). No idea yet about errors introduced by fixing p_x and p_y
To find a solution to the first order DE one would need an initial condition for p_z (IGOGU @ 18:40 ??)
Looking forward for constructive discussions.
Niels.
Audio expert Steve Barber “has conclusively determined that the final cockpit transmission from MH370 – “Goodnight Malaysian 370” – was made by the plane’s co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid and not the pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shaw.”
http://t.co/3pcIhwHCGP
@Nihonmama
Zaharie’s wife and colleagues of umpteen years must all have some serious hearing deficits. LOL.
It’s immaterial regardless.
Or, wait, let me guess. They were coerced by UMNO and BN cronies to indeed say it was him, when they knew otherwise.
The big ‘frame Z’ conspiracy that has yet to materialize. Though when other facts come to bear that further incriminate him (which they will), surely the chorus of defenders will claim just this.
@spencer:
As predictable as the sun setting the west.
No doubt, you and others with the same agenda (on Twitter) will disappear into the woodwork when Capt. Shah (who is a prime suspect but whose guilt has not been PROVEN) is convicted in the court of public opinion — without MH370 ever being found.
That’s how it works.
Kinda like the clique of folks (with real and manufactured pedigree) who proliferated on the internet after 9/11 to smear and convict Steven Hatfill, who was (wrongfully) accused of being behind the anthrax mailings.
Or the people online with various sockpuppet personas who advocated for the invasion of Iraq. They melted away too when the “shock and awe” began.
Now, we’re seeing history repeat itself, this time with a different (or perhaps not completely) cast of characters.
But I don’t need to remind you of that sordid affair, do I?
But if, as you insist, Capt Zaharie Shah was the perpetrator, cui bono for the Australian IADS cmdr (Vice-Marshal Warren Ludwig) — who was in charge and based at Butterworth AF base the night MH370 disappeared — to cover THAT up?
@Nihonmama
Maybe address the issue I raised. Just a suggestion.
The ad homimen attacks are quite bizarre considering I don’t give a rat’s ass about any of the aforementioned garbage. I couldn’t care less about any of that crap, truly.
You do, however, amuse me with this supposed alter ego you’ve attached me to. Maybe I’m a shapeshifter. Idk.
Let’s try this again…I guess Z’s wife and colleagues have severely compromised hearing. LOL.
That some of you are trying to shift the focus to Fariq Hamid and cast suspicion in his direction is…words won’t serve me well so I’ll refrain. The poor guy was just doing his job, looking forward to a full and promising life.
It was not to be. Nor for the other 238 people that surely perished.
Spencer
@Spencer:
And let the record reflect that the question put forward —
“cui bono for the Australian IADS cmdr (Vice-Marshal Warren Ludwig) — who was in charge and based at Butterworth AF base [IN MALAYSIA] the night MH370 disappeared — to cover THAT up?”
— was not answered.
Henrik,
I agree with what you said. One would have to know BTO=BTO(t), BFO=BFO(t) and the altitude alt = alt(t) for the whole duration of the flight. This would result in 3 ODEs and 3 non-linear equations, which would be sufficient to determine 3 coordinates of the aircraft and 3 velocity components in the 3D space. I can only add that there is still a chance of the existence of bifurcation points, but it is a different issue. But the problem is that we know only a few discrete values of BTOs and BFOs, and know nothing about the altitude. To fill in the gaps, either a hypothesis or interpolation is required. How to explain this to Gysbreght? In his opinion [citation April 4, 2015 at 6:26 AM] “The ping ring at a certain time defines the longitude for a given latitude. That latitude is obtained from the north-south component of groundspeed defined by the BFO”. I tried various ways, but I did not succeed.
——————–
Niels,
I agree that the approximation BFO=k1(.,.,.)+k2(.,.,.)* v_lat might be valid, and it can probably be useful. But one would need to know expected errors (compared to the exact expression) and applicability range. It would be great to show that these are within 5 Hz, for example. However, in my understanding Gysbreght insists (or insisted) that BFO=k1+k2*v_lat is “The general equation”, which was a point of my arguing with him about it.
——————–
Gysbreght,
Have you read what I wrote? It seems you always mix 2D and 3D spaces, and also coordinate systems. Sorry, I’m giving up with my explanations. Perhaps I was not sufficiently clear; perhaps you will listen to Henrik, Niels, Jeff, and Richard. I agree with all of them, but I don’t see how your statements are consistent with theirs.
Nihonmama – Way back in the beginning the voice in the cockpit was said to be Hamid. Then Shah mania set in and anything and everything was claimed. The UK press even went as far as inventing interviews with his family and posting photo’s of some other family. “That’s not us” they said. A lot of unsourced Shah material is still getting peddled so it is it worth digging into the claim that his folks have verified the voice at all? I see it regurgitated everywhere that thee were remote SIO locations on the simulator yet we have no idea what was on the thing in reality.
Spencer – voice recognition is harder over the radio.
@Matty
Pretty amazing that the ‘renowned’ voice expert has come to this conclusion a full 13 months ex post facto.
and to then come to an erroneous conclusion, that ONLY he has arrived at. LOL.
Please read the factual report for the further clarification you apparently need.
Re new evidence in audio recordings:
The evidence is:
“Uh”
The accoustic expert is:
Steve Barber, an Ohio rock drummer.
Frankly, John F’n Tino’s press release is a bit short on detail. If there is a detailed report by Mr Barber, I missed the link in his press release.
Don’t know why we even talk about it here.
Cheers
Will
Richard Cole – An interesting moment coming up. As Dolan says – if funds permit. For ATSB and the contractors walking away now is unthinkable but the Aust govt has sent clear signals that it wants out and I don’t think Malaysia ever wanted in while China has used it as PR on the home front. A lively discussion coming up with contractors applying as much pressure as possible and some finger pointing in retaliation maybe. On the 7th ALSM calculated that they were 76% done and making very good progress so they are left with the margins now. They say they are “absolutely in the right spot” yet are planning to move north at the same time and fittng the ships for calmer weather?. One element of this will be simply extending the contract and the prestige of finding something will be gold for Fugro.
Some wealthy benefactor may even step in – after all 50 million is chicken feed to a lot of people, but if they do opt out the hat will go around and we get to see how much interest there really is out there in finding the plane among the govts that have been virtually mute. From the Australian angle it won’t be entirely financial, they will just be sick of it, it will be tying a lot of people up and it looks open ended atm. I think they want to extricate and maybe it’s best handled by the private sector anyway?
😀 you beat me to it
Spencer – actually I was enquiring as to whether we even had a reliable source claiming that the voice was categorically identified. As to the report you allude to, as MuOne points out, there isn’t one. Good day.
Nihonmama,
Bingo! What Steve Barber said is what I have stated from the time the audio recording was released way back on Duncan Steel’s blog. So a linguist,me,and a voice expert have reached the same conclusion apparently. I hear 2 voices with seemingly different accents, ages, and schooling backgrounds, right or wrong that is what I hear. If the end sign off is Fariq Hamid then he has less of an accent than Shah with a more sped up delivery, almost American sounding. If it is Captain Shah, then at times he speaks phrases in English with no accent at all. My bet is on Fariq Hamid there.
We don’t even know if Captain Shah was in the cockpit at the time of the sign off. And that sign off is blunt and short with an underlying hint or suggestion of some degree of some kind of urgency. Maybe if something was wrong one of them went down to the EE bay to investigate, which leads me to a question I asked here awhile ago, why is there not a little security surveillance screen with a few segments of the EE bay on it that can be monitored or viewed in the cockpit? Or is there in a B777?
Matty said a key thing too about voices being transmitted differently over radio. But if you study Captain Shah on his You Tube videos you can pick up his intonation and accent in the audio recording, which is what I did. What really is needed is other audio recordings of other MAS flights taken by Captain Shah and FO Fariq Hamid to compare their voices over radio on other flights to the MH370 recording of them, or supposedly them.
Spencer is tearing his hair out on this one!
@ Oleksandr:
here comes my reply to you, split into pieces, because just as last week, it still doesn’t go through
@Oleksandr:
Following up on the discussion we had, I will reply as noone jumped in in the meantime, but it would be better if a commercial pilot could have this discussion with you instead of me. Is there one here?
No terrorist group has claimed responsibility and investigators could not find anything pointing to psychological/suicidal problems … there are no concrete leads at all that suggest a nefarious act. There has been silence for over a year now. For me, this is why it somehow feels like a mechanical issue. I don’t know if you can relate to that?
My main problem is, that these aircraft are incredibly reliable. So a mechanical issue is already quite unlikely, but now you have to add on top of it all these other coincidences which, together, make it almost impossible.
You already know I value your thoughts, but I will play devil’s advocate here, because it’s counter-arguments rather than compliments, which will advance your theory, ok?
How can we explain that there is a mechanical failure which occurs in such a both catastrophic and instantaneous manner that not a single ACARS message was transmitted, yet not catastrophic enough to allow for 7 more hours of flight time ?
Maybe I don’t have enough experience as a passenger, but I have never been served food (let alone a warm meal – which is required for your dinner-preparation-caused-fire-scenario) if the plane was scheduled for take-off as late as 0:40 a.m. It’s a night-flight, people would like to sleep. I think you would wake more passengers trying to get some sleep than serving passengers expecting something to eat at that time, and airlines have become parsimonious with the meal they serve in recent years (at least in economy class), so I would really be surprised. Anyway, has there ever be a case of a meal preparation causing an in-flight incident ? I am sure, dinner preparation cannot result in “overload of the electrical system”. And even if it were the case, a fuse would just cut off the power and that’s it. Nothing would happen. I really think this is a dead end. The nose landing gear scenario is more plausible.
Ok, then why didn’t they land within Malaysia? If there is a fire you cannot put out, AFAIK SOP is landing as soon as possible. Even if the pilot has lost all means of communications, he would still be forced to land at the nearest possible runway (or ditching on water close to shore, but that would likely kill passengers). There are special procedures for that, e.g. setting transponder to 7600, etc.
see: http://j.mp/1D0u9T6
They wouldn’t go into the Straight of Malacca, or even further than that.
What would be the purpose of that ?
Your scenario requires a fire that is simultaneously
– big enough to destroyed all means of communications
– small enough to keep the plane airborne for 7 hours
– big enough to incapacitate the crew
From what I have read, in case of a fire which you are unable to extinguish, you would not even dump fuel, but try to land ASAP …
“if an aircraft is on fire, you’re not going to waste time dumping fuel, your going to land, *now*.” j.mp/1Dp4u8d
… let alone circling for hours to burn fuel!
“The plane is capable of dumping 1 ton (1000 kg) per minute or 60 tons per hour. So it would take about one hour to dump the excess fuel for a safe landing. Fuel jettisoning (dumping) facility is available in most long range planes (eg. Boeing 777/747, Airbus A340/380) but optional on medium haul plane such as the Airbus A330. In an emergency such as a fire where landing is the priority, the fuel dumping may be disregarded. The plane landing gears are still capable of absorbing the excess weight but they may require additional maintenance check.” j.mp/1C48aqi
Also consider that “fuel cannot be dumped if there is an engine fire as the trailing fuel can ignite.” j.mp/1BJUz7N
That’s why I limited my comment to “especially if the fire is located in the nose landing gear”, although I guess you wouldn’t necessarily know exactly where your fire is, and even if you knew, you couldn’t be sure that other sections of the plane are not yet affected.
So I think the bottom line is, land as soon as you can, no burning fuel, no Straight of Malacca.
I have never heard of that. I think even in case of a fire, SOP is not landing in water but on land. The Ocean is not like the Hudson, you have a high risk of killing your passengers when attempting a water landing, and even if you just “skid into the water” as you suggest, there is so much that can go wrong (fire in the cabin, smoke, night/darkness, water pouring in –> panic, people drown … it’s not easy to evacuate all people at night time in such conditions) . It may sound counter-intuitive, but a landing on land may still be the safer option.
“Post-impact fire does occur and there have been fatalities due to smoke inhalation or thermal injuries, but the percentage is lower than you imply. Most occupants in a large aircraft accident survive according to the NTSB.” usat.ly/1IgGHXj
I’ve got news for Steve Barber. He states that he blocked out the ATC and just listened to the pilots detecting every time Fariq Hamid speaks he begins with that “uh.” I agree with him but that “uh” alone doesn’t signify Hamid.
Well guess what? In the Youtube video of Captain Shah, the one entitled “How To Tune Aircon…..” within the first minute, yes 60 seconds of it I counted about 12 times he stutters with an “Ah or Uh” in his speech. So that “Uh or Ah” is part of Captain Shah’s speech pattern as well.
I based my decision that is was Hamid more on the delivery, intonation, and accent.
The MOT report said so:
“The tracking by the Military continued as the radar return was observed to be heading towards waypoint MEKAR, a waypoint on Airways N571 when it disappeared abruptly at 1822:12 UTC [0222:12 MYT],10 nautical miles (Nm) after waypoint MEKAR.” (page 3)
“The primary target (military radar) appeared to track west-northwest direction joining RNAV Route N571 at waypoint VAMPI then to 10Nm north MEKAR”. (page 7)
It appears the person in the cockpit selected a waypoint close to Penang, followed by VAMPI, MEKAR and then possibly one more for the turn south into the Indian Ocean. That would be at least 4 waypoints.
How else would the plane end up there ? Autopilot neither makes turns on its own nor selects waypoints on its own. Or should this be one more coincidence? There are already way too many. If at every moment we rely on coincidences, we might as well assume MH370 was brought down by a meteorite. That’s a coincidence too …
I think this is why they would land ASAP in the first place.
This is actually a very good point though!
*Landing.*
Especially if fire is not yet put out!
And according to your scenario it cannot have been put out, because that’s what would have ended up incapacitating the crew.
At any rate, I cannot imagine a pilot leaving his FO alone in the cockpit in an emergency situation to go into the E/E bay to repair stuff or to the rear of the plane to mess around with the satcom control rack. That’s hardly part of his job profile.
I still doubt that a pilot would consciously leave Malaysia in case of any emergency. But in case there is indeed a compelling reason to do so, then yes, I guess your scenario could work if they lost control when attempting to land at Maimun Saleh and the plane continued straight down the SIO like Helios airways.
Well, that’s already quite a lot, no? (if true)
Again, because the plane
– crossed Malaysia at 90° (shortest distance),
– then staid in the middle of the Malacca Straight and
– finally went all around Indonesia.
Most obvious reasons for avoiding landmasses are:
(1) avoiding to appear as a threat to military
(2) avoiding radar detection (as much as possible)
I didn’t suggest an emergency. You did 😉
Yes, there have been a couple of theories floated here:
jeffwise.net/2015/01/29/guest-post-why-did-mh370-log-back-on-with-inmarsat
I think one theory was that the left AC bus was isolated in order to cut power to AES w/o leaving the cockpit. Perpetrator waited until he was out of radar reach, then he needed a system powered by the AC bus: e.g. cabin pressurization control system because he was using the oxygen mask up to that point; or opening of the cabin door: to go to the toilet … or something more sinister.
Maybe you are right. But maybe Shaw knew the region quite well. And if it were other perpetrators – possibly in a state sponsored plot – they might have had the required information.
I hinted at some, but someone with more knowledge should give that answer.
Honestly, I have come to a point (already before 4U9525 but now all the more so) where I resigned myself to embracing more and more the idea, that Shah or Hamid shut down the all communication right after handover and steered the plane to the SIO for whatever troubled reason. It actually requires just these 2 assumptions. Everything else is 100 times more complicated.
I really hope that something else happened, because this would be the saddest of all scenarios and everybody would be left wondering why he did that, never finding a definitive answer.
But with all experts homing in on the SIO and taking into consideration that this is the most straightforward explication, I am starting to fear that this is what really may have happened, sadly.
MuOne,
Hi MuOne!
My thinking is if Barber is a drummer then he is astute on sounds. He was the one who determined cross talk communication going on in the Kennedy assassination tapes that the experts did not pick up on that was later confirmed. I would not hastily “pooh-pooh” Barber just yet and he is articulate enough on Youtube.
I’m in agreement with Barber. The only thing Barber failed to mention is that the “uh or ah” is also a part of Captain Shah’s speech pattern. He (Shah) stutters with that quite often in his Youtube videos. So the attribute of using “uh” is not exclusive to Hamid.
I think there are a few examples of Shah saying “uh or ah” in the recording, without going back to it one that jumps to mind is Shah confirming they are going to “ah, Beijing.”
I bet I have studied the recording as much as Barber has. A musician voice expert and a linguist coming to the same conclusion,at different times without conferring,maybe there’s something to it.
Thinking about QF32, where 6 minutes into the flight one engine “exploded”, but it took the crew about 2 hours to land, because they needed that much time to diagnose exactly what problem they had: Theoretically that could also have been the case with MH370.
But unlike MH370, the plane seems to have circled close to the airport:
http://avherald.com/img/qantas_a388_vh-oqa_singapore_101104_map2.jpg
PS: I found the culprit. For whatever reason we are not allowed to post links to stackexchange.com
@Matty@Cheryl,
Here’s a link to the FACTUAL report (that Matty claims doesn’t exist)
http://mh370.mot.gov.my/download/FactualInformation.pdf
Please see section 1.5.10. Zaharie is identified as making the last 11 or so utterances.
Of course, a drummer that takes a year to come to a different conclusion probably knows better. LOL.
Cheryl – Curious thing about radio from Army experience is that voices you otherwise know in an instant can take a while to place, sometimes you just didn’t place them at all unless they were distinct ones. If they are similar to begin with? The Americanized accent is a big clue and often a pointer to age. Check out the accents on a lot of young Israeli’s for example, they could easily be American because they learnt English via the media or had it reinforced there. Increasingly in the media you hear Americanized English coming from everywhere and it’s fairly recent.
@All
So we have the factual report, Zaharie’s wife and Zaharie’s colleagues all identifying the final transmission as being the voice Zaharie Shah.
And then we have Cheryl and a drummer claiming otherwise, that they have reached an altogether different conclusion. LOL.
Cheryl, how’s the hair pulling?
Spencer – the report I was referring to was Barber. I’ll ask you again – do we have a solid instance where Shah’s wife quotably takes ownership of the voice? I see the findings you refer to and I wonder if that was unanimous across that group?
@Matty
According to The Telegraph, Geoff Taylor, deputy editor of New Zealand’s Waikato Times, said he and his co-author Ewan Wilson spoke to Zaharie’s brother-in-law Asuad Khan in Penang and then to the 53-year-old pilot’s wife.
Asuad had initially claimed the voice from the cockpit was not Zaharie’s but after calling his sister in the presence of the two journalists, she confirmed the voice belonged to her husband.
If you want to believe a drummer and our resident voice expert Cheryl,you are free to do so.
I’ll put my chips in with the wife, the brother-in-law, the 5 colleagues and the interim report.
I mean, are we really having this debate?
Cheryl,
I meant no offence to you or Steven Barber. You may well both be highly skilled in detecting relevant nuances in the recordings and be right about who was speeking last.
Though trying to find anything about Mr. Barber’s credentials as an audio expert (inferred here was/is someone trained in the analysis of audio recordings for the purpose of ID-ing people), I pulled a blank.
My problem lies more with the “independent investigator” employing Mr Barber’s services, proclaiming, with a lot of fanfare, the “audio-expert’s” (see implied inference above) analysis many months ago. After a year, the only base for his claims to have uncovered new evidence is “uh”.
Re accent, with how much certainty can one distinguish two people’s accents in
“Malaysian – uh – three – seven – zero”?
Cheers
Will
@PM, @littlefoot: Dr. Duncan just responded yesterday, granting me permission to post his “Scott Reef” detailed report to this forum. Here it is:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-r3yuaF2p72X0lqWWQtZEtFRTQ/view?usp=sharing
The basic conclusions (and some of the main data elements) were already well-publicized back in September – but lots of additional detail (coordinates, standard deviations).
MuOne,
Well it’s a short phrase so it could be similar with 2 different people from the same nationality speaking it in English or it could be distinctly different depending upon delivery, pitch, intonation, syllabic pronunciation, age, etc. And in this case it’s over radio and as Matty pointed out, can alter voice.
In this case as far as your question goes, the last voice has very little hesitation time between the numbers 3, 7, and 0 without an elongated eeeee in the zero, delivery time was fairly quick. It sounds more like English spoken here. The other voice had a more distinct pronunciation of the zero and a longer delivery time and to me a more husky or raspier quality in it signifying Shah to me. It’s not that easy to tell, a person with an accent could sometimes sound without one I suppose in short phrases such as this especially over radio.
Spencer,
The long blonde hair is intact still! Ok, I am trying to find in that report you linked where it says they all said including the wife it was Shah? Or was it just those 2 authors while interviewing Mr. Asuad Kahn? I have a problem with that, I just can’t imagine Mr. Kahn calling his grieving sister on the spot in the midst of an interview. I got the impression his respect for her would go deeper than that. Why did he not discuss that in the 4 Corners piece then about who spoke last?
I am not a voice expert and never claimed to be here, I am schooled in linguistics, languages, and familiar with accents. They are two different things a linguist and a voice expert. I speak 3 languages and am familiar with all kinds of nationalities speaking, or let’s say trying to speak, English on any given day in the NYC surrounding area where I work.
Spencer – I think you just confirmed that there is indeed nothing quotable from Mrs Shah. Pertinent though that the brother in law said it wasn’t Shah. That’s that lack of unanimity I was proposing. If they have to study it at all makes my point. If you were sitting in the same room as these guys you discern their voices quickly. If you were hearing them on the radio it gets much harder. The fact that people who knew him well did not agree is proof of that. Question: did the so called experts agree that Shah was behind the mic or did it hang on something; like Mrs Shah’s testimony? The ability to discern a voice is not totally down to time spent together. That’s why some people can compose concerto’s in their head and some can’t sing a line.
Anecdote. While moving in Brigade formation at the conclusion of an exercize which was quite a logistical undertaking there was some confusion. Someone made some very disparaging remarks on the radio about the ensuing cluster that was heard by absolutely everyone and that sort of Ra-tel is heavily punishable. No one ever got pinged for it and it was a big talking point. Then weeks later I discover it was my best friend – and there were witnesses. I didn’t put a face to it for a moment. Have you used radio much?
@Cheryl@Matty
You say this and that about the unreliability of voice recognition…and then conclude that it was Fariq Hamid’s voice (Cheryl, I believe you have stated reaching said conclusion).
LMAO, seriously. What a farce, and let us just altogether ignore the FACTUAL report that in plain sight and wording, and, unequivocally, states that it was Zaharie’s voice.
Matty,
Good points there. The fact they had to study it and bring in so many colleagues and even Yaya (MAS CEO at the time) was unsure of who spoke last says something.
For all we know the last voice was dubbed in, in the recording. Maybe it is Shah on the ORIGINAL, but we did not hear the original. We all heard some edited version of it.
What if the last voice was neither Shah nor Hamid? What if it was dubbed in for whatever reason or the perp himself? This was the one who was curt, did not repeat back the HCM instructions from ATC remember, whereby all other former instructions were repeated. ATC, possibly asleep at the wheel, did not pick up on it or did not question it either if MH370 got their specific insructions to contact HCM on that frequency. Ok, so the pilots know the frequency like the back of their hand but wouldn’t ATC want to make sure of that?
I found in the report that Spencer linked (thank you Spencer) in the 1-5-10 area of who they think spoke what when. They think in Clearance/Lumpur Ground/Lumpur Tower that Fariq Hamid is speaking and in the last 2 parts Approach Radar and Lumpur Radar that it is Captain Shah. Funny, I hear it in reverse. If FH is speaking at the getgo he sure has a heavy accent, which I doubt. I got the impression that Shah started and possibly they transitoned to Hamid at the cruise portion? How can that long drawn out good morning malaysian 3—-7—-0 in the beginning be Hamid? If it is then it is Hamid just waking up from a nap with quite an accent.
I don’t know, but I think there are clues in the recording and probably more in the original.
@Cheryl
I really don’t think you can just summarily dismiss the factual report in regards to who was speaking/transmitting when.
There is no described uncertainty in the report and the delineation is crystal clear, per as you stated above.
To ostensibly throw Mr. Hamid under the bus with misleading and uncorroborated conjecture, that is completely unsubstantiated, is really poor form.
Spencer,
Yes if I had to choose, my linguistic opinion would be that is it Fariq Hamid of the two. And yes it is hard to discern, but even over radio that voice sounds distinctly different than Captain Shah on Youtube. It’s not written in stone, I could very well be wrong. And yes, I see what the report says but we don’t know what version they listened to, what we heard could be quite different. You and the report could very well be spot on, but I hear what I hear.
I don’t view this as a farce whatsoever. I see it as intelligent folks coming together to fine tooth comb things perhaps overlooked with the main goal of helping the grieving families and aviation in general. It’s about gathering info, dissecting that info, agreeing and disagreeing with each other respectfully, all in an effort to get at the truth to whatever happened to that missing airliner.
Spencer,
Ok, let’s say I accept what the report says for the time being. Ok, general consensus says it was Shah, colleagues say it was Shah, report says it was Shah, ok then it WAS Shah. Ok, case closed on that, you are right I am wrong. I’ll accept that and eat crow.
But ya know, I’ve now got that same nagging itch that Jeff has……………!!!!!
@Brock
Thanks for this and please pass on thanks to Dr Duncan. Great to have the extra details. So the estimated event time of 00:25 UTC would be 05:25 Maldives time.
@Cheryl
What itch? Evil genius, scuba diving, 777 rated pilots with intimate knowledge of the regions radar installations and FIR’s executing a flawless hijacking right at the optimal moment (hand over)…all at Putin’s behest. Oh, and they spoofed and pulled circuits and shut off buses and murdered 235/6/7 pax and crew.
For what? To project Russian power, to cannibalize an airplane? LOL.
Do you know how completely absurd all of this is? Geeez.
No.
Spencer – I would be curious to know if there was a unanimous view among the experts that it was Shah, and how heavily Mrs Shah’s evidence counted. I can hear my brother in-law’s voice perfectly well just sitting here. In fact I recon I know it as well as my sister but our ability to distinguish it on radio next to a similar one is not determined by which one of us is married to him. It’s our respective ability to hear sounds. If you threw this out to a range of experts what would come back? These aren’t actual voice recordings remember. You are talking through a device.
But this bit of yours had me laughing:
To ostensibly throw Mr. Hamid under the bus with misleading and uncorroborated conjecture, that is completely unsubstantiated, is really poor form.
Spencer, since when did you care about throwing people under buses? And how does questioning this finding constitute throwing Hamid under a bus? It just means he would be the last person to transmit. Oh I forgot – that was part of your smoking gun.
@Matty
Thanks for the primer on radio transmission. I was lost in the weeds until you enlightened me as to the delicate nature of said topic.
Quite a few posters here (I won’t name then unless prompted) have been tweeting about Mr, Hamid and his possible/likely culpability. All in a shameless effort to convolute and muddy the all to clear water. Really sad to bear witness to such callousness. All steeped in falsehood.
I’ll throw Zaharie under the bus as I choose, for he destroyed the lives of 238 innocent human beings just hoping to get to Bejing.
That you can’t grasp this grim reality is your problem, not mine. Or, please do put forward another scenario that has any plausibility…hint, it doesn’t exist!
Cheers mate
Spencer, the whole thing has got the better of you I’m afraid.
I provided a “general” and a “particular” expression for the equation that approximates the exact output of Yap’s Calculator.
In the particular condition of Time: 19:41:03 Z Location: 0°N 93.726°E Altitude: 35,000 ft Groundspeed: 500 kt the error between approximation and exact output is zero when the heading is North or South, + or – 0.8 Hz when the heading is East or West, with a sinusoïdal variation in between. The error is proportional to groundspeed.