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.
@Nihonmama, I appreciate your collection of eyewitness reports.
The problem is that many of them can’t have been mh370 because they simply don’t fit into any reasonable time frame, even if we throw out all satellite data.
The Antara witness report is one of them. Mh370 would have circled over Malacca Strait the whole night and the early morning hours until it crashed from a low altitude into one of the busier waterways of the world. And no one saw any debris afterwards. It just doesn’t work.
Orion started a eyewitness report evaluation project which I liked a lot. Maybe this could be continued, since it brought some order and time frames into the whole mess.
Sometimes I feel that we had an overabundance of troubled and crashed planes on March 8 last year.
Jeff might know this: Is it normal that so many eyewitnesses with seemingly vivid and credible reports surface after a plane crash? Or is this unique re: mh370?
@Littlefoot:
Thanks for your comments.
I’ve posted these eyewitness accounts and others (and yes, aware that Orion has been evaluating these) for two simple reasons:
1. To log ALL witness accounts that myself and others are coming across, whether the times reported *fit* or not.
2. Probative value. There are aspects in some of the accounts that appear to be consistent. Furthermore, these witnesses in Indonesia (and elsewhere) gained nothing by fabricating. That means (from an investigative perspective) that their accounts (may) have probative value. Therefore, until all of the facts are in
(and we are far from that) and we actually know what happened to this airplane, it’s not prudent to dismiss information that doesn’t appear to “fit” initially. We may learn, as does happen often in criminal investigations, that these sightings that don’t ‘fit’ are relevant for another reason. To wit: was more than one plane “involved”?
We have at least two different reports (Antara and Daily Kicker) about these fisherman in Indonesia and three from Indonesia if you count ‘Hasbi’s’ sighting. Antara reports a time that doesn’t fit while Daily Kicker reports no time at all. The journo who reported Hasbi’s account (in Atjeh Post) clarified for @h1ppyg1rl that the originally reported (wrong) times were incorrect. So is the answer to discard all of the fishermens’ accounts because the time reported in Antara doesn’t work? If we did that, it would suggest that Antara’s version is more authoritative than the others. And that conclusion would be based on what?
This and other is why some of us (on Twitter) have now asked Tom Stalcup (Physicist and Co-creator of the documentary ‘TWA Flight 800’) to connect with Sarah Bajc and the other NoK sooner rather than later. There were over 600 witnesses in the TWA 800 case who were not allowed to give testimony in the hearings and many of them were told by the CIA (NOT the by FBI, which raises a thousand questions) “you didn’t see that”.
We don’t have anywhere near that number of witnesses in the case of MH370. At least not based on known reports. But in totality, there are too many eye/ear witness reports of a ‘plane’ as it traveled west, starting on the east coast of Malaysia, to the northern Malacca Strait, to dismiss those related to Indonesia as not relevant without more probing.
Why did the ATSB alert Indonesia to be on the lookout for debris when a well-known oceanographer and professor in Australia said there was “no way” debris from the SIO would cross the equator and land in Indonesia? Were witnesses in Indonesia (or elsewhere) threatened and reported times changed or not accurately reported? I don’t know. Were some of those witnesses possibly influenced by other news related to MH370. Maybe. But it doesn’t appear that any of the people who came forward stood to gain one thing by lying. And from an investigative perspective, that is not insignificant.
Is there a flight path into China consistent with the BTO data? Would that solve the puzzles of northern route? i.e. how did it avoid radar detection, and how did it not run out of fuel?
“A story spread mainly on Chinese social media that the craft had made a safe emergency landing in Nanning, China”.
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/missing-jet/social-media-spread-false-reports-safe-landing-n48081
Is that consistent with BTO data?
@Gysbrecht,
Fair question!
1.9.4.1/pg 43: The FlightID (properly, ‘FI’) is defined as an ‘official’ data word of 4 characters. Data entry requires 4 digits, 0 3 7 0 (the AN wouldn’t be entered, it’s a constant for the aircraft but this “Factual Information” doc is riven with misleading information).
1.9.5.3/pg 53 and Appdx 1.9A go on to illustrate actual ACARS msgs. In the msg you see FI (followed by 4 digit flight number) & AN – those ‘codes’ are part of the ACARS ‘grammar’.
Then within the msg content you see MH370: the content of the ACARS message is subject to different rules! In the case of this OOOI-Off msg the flight number is abbreviated by ignoring leading zeros: can’t do that where the FI is explicitly required but the OOOI handler does understand that form. Consider LHR-KUL, MH1, the FI is 0001 but the OOOI coding will use MH1 within the body of the msg.
If you’re really masochistic, lookup websites hosting live ACARS logs. Avgeeks run ‘plain old analog’ VHF receivers, decoding the data streams broadcast by aircraft into databases & serve them up on the web.
:Don
Gysbrecht,
I misquoted MH370-MAS370 and MH1-MAS1 in the context of my examples but I hope you can follow the ACARS msg structure vs the content.
:Don
Thanks again, Don.
Hi All,
I have a question regarding Jeff’s theory which I’m hoping someone can shed some light on. If I understand correctly, the SDU (satellite data unit) in the plane communicates with the Inmarsat satellite using a directional high gain antenna.
If the SDU was receiving false position and heading data from a malicious source, then wouldn’t it be unable to maintain the link with the satellite at all? The antenna would be broadcasting in the wrong direction and, as the plane went further north (under Jeff’s hypothesis) but the SDU was receiving position data indicating it was South it would direct the antenna north. Surely this would cause the link to be lost completely quite quickly?
If anyone can tell me why this is not correct I would appreciate it.
@Cuchalainn, This is a great question and something I and other people have spent some time thinking about. One answer is that the plane’s location and orientation, which are crucial to aiming the antenna, are fed to the SDU as separate parameters from the velocity information, which is not used in aiming the antenna but is a factor in the Doppler precompensation algorithm, so it should be possible to feed values which result in both a correctly aimed anenna and a suitably spoofed BFO. There may be a far more elegant way of achieving the same goal but that work is still ongoing.
@ “which of my words exactly do you disagree with?”
All.
It’s ok to attack ideas.
It’s not ok to attack people.
Maybe it’s all the radar data they have?
If there is military radar data from Indonesia or elsewhere which either shows the FMT or any part of the Southern path- would they withhold that vital piece of info from all except the ‘inside crunchers’ at the ATSB, etc.?
If so, then wouldn’t the ATSB paths and solutions be better informed? After all, they would possess both this mystery radar, the raw sat data, and will have refined their analysis with techniques brought forth by the IG and other outsiders.
This leads me to believe there may not be any radar ‘smoking gun.’ So what is the source of the Lido image? Let’s get back to that.
The Factual Information report is informative not only for what’s in it- but also what’s been left out.
The return flightpath is now illustrated as broken segments instead of a solid line. The accompanying narrative confirms several times where the target appears on Primary and then drops off. The radar plots in the report are attributed to Kota Bahru. However, the two ‘blips’ closest to Penang appear to be likely out of range for the Kota Bahru installation.
These ‘blips’ are shown as magenta segments on the Composite Flightpath v3. I’ve updated it and reduced to just a few MB:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yvqf0lkbfsdwyjs/mh370-composite.pdf?dl=0
In my opinion, the Thai Radar installation at Ko Samui may have been the only other Primary radar to have seen the flight. The entire flightpath from the Turning point to MEKAR would have very much been pushing the max range of that installation. For it to be possible at all, then flight would have to have been at a high altitude. The general consensus of speed and timing indicate that it was.
Back to the Composite, my opinion is that the Turning Point was out of range for both installations. Especially if there was an initial descent like some witness reports.
Then perhaps as the plane returned and gained altitude, the black segments were seen by both Ko Samui and Kota Bahru overlapping coverage- and so ‘confirmed’ with solid lines. If the magenta segments were only barely seen by Ko Samui- they could also be ‘confirmed solid’ based on position and bearing from last confirmed point. This method is alluded to in the report.
The theory goes that if the scant trace was then picked up over the Malacca Strait (Lido Image) – the bearing and position was so different that it prevented that part of the path to be ‘confirmed solid’. Since the source is single, and deemed sensitive militarily, it was omitted from the Factual Information report. Funny how this crucial link came to the public light- the leaked photo does the job of ‘getting it out there’ without ‘putting it out there.’
Just to reiterate, I have no technical background, and these are just more observations from the peanut gallery, but I thought it was interesting enough to share.
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for your reply. That makes sense – as long as the SDU is provided with completely inconsistent heading, orientation and location data and it does not run any consistency checks on these I can see how the link could be maintained.
I am intrigued as to what the “far more elegant” solution you refer to is!
I greatly enjoyed reading your New Yorker article and Amazon book. Both were very well written.
Regards,
Cuchulainn
Nihonmama, Thanks for sharing the article. At the time of the eyewitness analysis, I was focusing primarily on those which might have witnessed the Turning Point at IGARI. I still think the various witness reports can help to paint the narrative if they can be corroborated with the technical info regarding the flightpath.
@Orion:
RE:
“The theory goes that if the scant trace was then picked up over the Malacca Strait (Lido Image) – the bearing and position was so different that it prevented that part of the path to be ‘confirmed solid’. Since the source is single, and deemed sensitive militarily, it was omitted from the Factual Information report. Funny how this crucial link came to the public light- the leaked photo does the job of ‘getting it out there’ without ‘putting it out there.’”
+100
And look at what I just found:
“Azharuddin said the search includes northern parts of the Malacca Strait, on the opposite side of the Malay Peninsula and far west of the plane’s last known location. Azharuddin would not explain why crews were searching there, saying, ‘There are some things that I can tell you and some things that I can’t.'”
https://twitter.com/nihonmama/status/443114226228281344
yupp Nihon that’s quite telling…
Over 30,000km2 now searched, over 50%.
Nihonmama – the Jindalee thing will never quite go away? Admittedly it sounds odd that the Laverton facility was essentially unplugged at the time but if it wasn’t it would have been seen right up to impact nearly. One seasoned foreign affairs writer told me at the time that Abbott knew where the plane went going by his language etc. But then he did his ass on the acoustic pings which was way off base, and now seemingly wants out of the whole thing when there would be good political return for him in finding it. Just got off the phone to this guy and Jindalee is constantly bringing in data that can be retrieved but it can be patchy depending on ionisphere etc, it can get hazy from one hour to the next. So the idea that it was not operational at the time I begin to doubt, but a detection would not be guaranteed out there, but Abbott was dead confident. Did they get a trace of something else????
Apologies for the contradictions in that post but he called me half way through.
JORN operates between 5 and 30 MHz so is really ’just’ a very large short-wave radio listening to reflections from its own transmitter. Anyone who has listened to a short-wave radio will be familiar with signals from far stations fading in and out as the ionospheric propagation (amongst other propagation modes) changes and the signal paths vary. Some nights reception of Radio Moscow can be very strong and sometimes poor depending on those factors. So these Over The Horizon (OTH) radars are patchy and hence only used for military purposes where any advantage is good and reliability is secondary – they are useless for tasks like traffic management. The first satellite I worked with in the late 70s was strongly interfered with by the new (at that time) Russian Woodpecker OTH radar (Duga-3) that used enormous transmit power (10MW). It sounded like a woodpecker on a short-wave radio.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Woodpecker.ogg
Richard Cole – I think they claim much better reliability looking north as opposed to west. Equatorial ionisphere is apparently a lot more stable, but it isn’t what a lot of people seem to think it is.
@Matty
I have had colleagues whose life’s work was studying the flakiness of the ionosphere. JORN’s own notes say:
…JORN is not resourced or tasked to conduct surveillance operations 24-hours-a-day 7-days-a-week.
…OTHRs do not continually ‘sweep’ an area like conventional radars but rather ‘dwell’ by focusing the radar’s energy on a particular area
…HF energy can be electronically steered to illuminate other ‘tiles’ within the OTHR’s coverage as required to satisfy operational tasking or in response to intelligence cuing.
…When an OTHR dwells on an area, it is configured to either detect maritime vessels or aircraft but not both simultaneously.
So JORN’s rather like high-res recon satellites, great if they are looking in the right direction, but very unlikely to be looking in any particular direction accidently. If it was on at all.
Richard Cole – Australia might be best suited geographically to use that kind of system than just about anyone, so what do we have along the mountainous China-India-Pakistan border? I’m told a version of the same thing but the patchyness would be amplified? A conventional system would be elaborate yet be covered in blind spots at the same time? Also Jindalee is not typically bouncing back from mountainous areas which I’m assuming would not help, and as it is the software that sorts it all out is challenging. Lights up Singapore pretty well but this is an Island nation with plenty of ocean in every direction. Is it airborne radar on the tetchy China border?
Matty,
OTH radar is used when very long range is needed, the Russian Woodpecker system was looking for missiles rising over Europe and the North Pole. In the India/Pakistan/China situations you list the other side’s airfields are close, so the air threat is more short-range and I guess OTH radar less useful. The US east and west coast OTH systems were scrapped long since, Lacrosse and other space-based radar systems seem to be favoured now by the US but of course are mega-expensive. I would think that airborne radar is used tactically, keeping aircraft airborne permanently sounds expensive and not particularly reliable.
Jeff,
Have you ever tried to investigate about any flight cancellations or delays in & about the South-East Asia routes at the midnight of 7th March (early morning 8th March)? If there was any then it is plausible that hijackers having high-tech skills have used a fake flight id to flew to their destination.
It’s an interesting idea. Alternatively, it’s conceivable that as part of this plan hijackers filed a flight plan for a cargo plane or charter flight, then switched it out for 9M-MRO. Nothing is visible flying a BTO-compatible flight on flightradar24.com, but that only shows planes with ADS-B, which not every plane carries. If anyone out there has any insight into ATC procedures that would either let us investigate this option or rule it out, I’d be keen to know. (I.e., is there a source of flight information involving planes that have filed flight plans and are visible via conventional transponder, but not ADS-B?)
I have also thought about this in the past weeks, but my problem with this scenario always was, that if MH370 was switched midair to another flight ID, then a second plane would have gone missing that night, and that sure would have been known by now, no ?
http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2012/09/21/investigate-air-traffic-system-failure/
What if this happened again when MH370 disappeared? Airport operations were switching over around that time, with many new air traffic controllers being trained. The new systems being implemented at the time were a source of some controversy. Could it be that the real coverup here goes far beyond MH370 to a complete failure or commandeering of Malaysia’s ATC…for the second time?
@Peter Norton,
We discussed the possibility of a midair code switch of two planes a couple of days ago here.It’s possible – but the second plane would then have a problem. It could hardly continue to fly as mh370. It would have to fly without it’s transponder and land somewhere anonymously. If the second plane is a charter cargo flight this might just be conceivable. It’s certainly not a very elegant solution but it has the advantage of a real plane with a real flight plan having really started somewhere.
Another possibility is to file a bogus flight plan for a cargo plane to Kazakhstan which includes a crossing of the Bay of Bengal. Obviously the cargo plane never starts. Over the Bay of Bengal mh370 could then continue on the route mapped out by the filed flight plan and with the identity of this cargo plane. This way no second plane would be necessary. At least no other flying plane. The cargo plane would obviously exist somewhere.
There are a few problems with this and other identity switch scenarios: the flight should certainly not show up on flight tracking pages. Even if many – especially Russian cargo planes – don’t have ADS-B trackers, mh370 has one, which could potentially be tracked and give the trick and identity of mh370 away. So, this could only work with a somehow altered mode of mh370’s transponder.
A simpler but maybe riskier solution would be to leave the transponder switched off.Should the plane be discovered by civil or military primary radar it would be contacted and asked to identify itself. The crew – consisting of the hijackers of course – could simply bluff their way through by claiming a transponder malfunction and giving flight code and identity of that cargo plane for which the flight plan was filed. AT controllers would normally let the plane pass without fuss if there is a legit flight plan which the plane is following and if the route isn’t too crowded. Once in Kazakhstan the plane would be relatively free to let go of this bogus flight plan.
A variation of that trick would be to claim the identity of a (maybe Russian) military cargo plane going to Kazakhstan. There have been some incidents in the last couple of month with Russian military cargo planes – one of them an Antonov’s An-124 – flying without transponder in European airspace.
The problem with bluffing it’s way through with a switched off transponder: while it has a good chance to work for this night, some air controllers might remember this incident later. And in the early weeks the Northern route was still very much on the table. A flight of a cargo plane without a functioning transponder to Kazakhstan might get some unwanted attention and scrutiny.
My favorite cargo plane for an identity switch would be an Antonov An-124. They don’t have ADS-B transponders, they have roughly the same size as a 777, they travel as charter flights all over the world, sometimes on unusual routes and often at night because the work with the cargo has to be done during day time. These huge Antonovs go often to Baikonur, because they are involved in the transport of the satellites. An Antonov An-124 going according to it’s flight plan to Baikonur wouldn’t raise any controller’s eye brow. A Russian military Antonov An-124 going into Kazakhstan wouldn’t be unheard of either. Of course mh370 could’ve landed in Kyzylorda as Victor offered as a thought experiment – even if the bogus flight plan had another destination.
An interesting tidbit is, that the pro-Russian rebels who shot down mh17, claimed later on their social pages that they had managed to shoot down a huge Ukrainian Antonov. When they realized their error they withdrew the statements. That’s the official version anyway. I don’t want to discuss in this comment other interpretations of this incident, but simply point out that a 777 can be mistaken for a huge Antonov on primary radar.
The problem is that there exist only 55 of these big transport planes. And they attract a lot of attention everywhere they show up. They are also very noisy. In the bogus- flight-plan version it’s hard to envision an airport with a long enough runway for them to start but with such lax supervision that the non-start of this plane slips through somehow. And at least the whereabouts of the civil Antonov An-124s should be documented somehow. Only Russian Polet Airlines which went belly-up at the end of 2014 had some planes of their fleet parked and unemployed. They have been accused of having been involved in some shady deals. They also had the biggest Iljushin (the Russian answer to the Airbus) as the one and only cargo version. At the end of 2014 they couldn’t pay for their ordered planes anymore and went bankrupt.
All this might’ve no relevance whatsoever for the conundrum of mh370’s whereabouts but it’s fascinating nevertherless to delve into Russian aviation history. I would’ve never thought that I might one day develop a fascination with Russian cargo planes, but I really spent some nights lately watching documentaries about huge Russsian or rather Sowjet-era planes on youtube. And I was side tracked and rewarded with clips of such a truly bizzare construction as the “Ecranoplan” or “Caspian Sea Monster”, which frightened Americans and Europeans alike during the Cold War.
Back to mh370: An Asian cargo plane might work as well in a switch scenario. I was concentrating on the Russian brand because their trip to Kazakhstan wouldn’t be suspicious in any way.
Kazakhstan is a possibility, but there are certainly others. See here to get an idea:
47 Sacks of Coke: A Charter Pilot’s Run
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-charter-pilot-becomes-an-unwilling-mule-for-1-5-tons-of-cocaine-a-1007402.html
Excellent reading, littlefoot, it added interesting details to the past ID-switch discussions. Your “other interpretations” (MH17) are quite a teaser :] Would they have potential implications for MH370?
@ GuardedDon:
Two things to think about, since they may be connected:
Firstly, what could have caused the Mode S symbol of MH370 to drop off from radar display at 1720:36 UTC, while the transponder continued to operate ‘satisfactorily’ until 1721:13, 37 seconds later?
[quote](From Factual Information report by Malaysian MH370 SIT)
(page 2)
Radar recording showed that MH370 passed through waypoint IGARI at 1720:31 UTC
[0120:31 MYT].
The Mode S symbol of MH370 dropped off from radar display at 1720:36 UTC [0120:36
MYT], and the last secondary radar position symbol of MH370 was recorded at 1721:13 UTC
[0121:13 MYT].
(page 40):
The transponder on the occurrence flight was operating satisfactorily up to the time it was
lost on the ATC radar screen at 1721.13 UTC, 07 March 2014 [0121:13 MYT, 08 March
2014]. There was no message received from the aircraft to report a system failure.
[/quote]
Secondly, from page 52 of the report I understand that there are two kinds of data transmissions over SATCOM:
Data-2 are ACARS messages, and Data-3 are IFE messages. The IFE messages do not appear in SITA’s ACARS Traffic Log (Appendix 1.9A), but are they possibly routed via the SITA network?
Item 2 on page 53 states that the IFE beginning-of-flight message at 16:42 contained the Flight ID “MAS370”. Unfortunately item 8 on the same page does not state whether or not the two IFE connections over SATCOM after 18:25 contained the FlightID.
[quote] (page 52):
The SATCOM provided the Satellite link for the following functions:
Cockpit Voice – Call control via the Multi-function Control and Display Units (MCDUs)
and audio via the cockpit Audio Management Unit (AMU) and associated headsets
Cockpit Packet Data (Data-2) – Interface via the ACARS Management Unit (MU)
Cabin Packet Data (Data-3) – Interface via the Panasonic System 3000i IFE equipment:
– SMS/e-Mail
– BITE-offload
(page 53):
2. After take-off, the IFE SMS e-mail application sent a normal beginning-of-flight message
at 16:42 (containing the correct Airborne Earth Station [AES ID], Flight ID “MAS370”, origin
airport “WMKK”, and destination airport “ZBAA”), indicating that the IFE was receiving the
valid Flight ID, origin airport and destination airport from AIMS and the ICAO (AES) ID
from the Satellite Data Unit (SDU) at this time.
(…)
7. No Data – 2 ACARS traffic was observed after 17:07 UTC, 07 March 2014.
8. The IFE equipment set up two ground connections over SATCOM (for the SMS e-mail
application and Built-In Test Equipment (BITE) application) after the SATCOM
re-established the link at 18:25 UTC, 07 March 2014 (normal), but not after the
SATCOM re-established the link at 00:19 UTC, 08 March (abnormal). At no time during
the flight was any user data sent over the link by means of the SMS/e-Mail application.
[/quote]
@Q, very interesting, nice find!
@Gysbreght, fascinating, thanks for pointing this out.
Gysbreght,
RADAR scans the sky at 6-10sec intervals (antenna rotation rate). The responses are snapshots of a point in time (hence the many ‘+’ symbols discernable on the ‘Beijing Lido/Str Malacca’ image. I’d expect the RADAR system to extrapolate an aircraft course for a short period. The issue you highlight reinforces my view that the specific data pertaining to each target detection (or at least, the last in each sequence of detections) as a range-bearing or lat-long should have been published rather than some vague narrative about things ‘disappearing’.
ACARS: Note that Appd. 1.9A, the ACARS Traffic Log records msgs between two ‘nodes’: “MRO” and “QXSXMXS”, this log records only the AOC messages not the IFE communications.
The Factual Information document contains incorrect statements. Point 8/ quoted by you above, is an example: only one virtual circuit is established after the 18:25 IOR GES Log On. That observation will be submitted to the interested parties.
:Don
@Gysbrecht, that’s really interesting about mode S of the transponders having dropped off.
Here’s a link to a document from NetAlert about transponders, their modes,what happens in case of malfunction, displaying the identity of the plane etc.
http://www.dropbox.com/s/hpg0dg3bs2co27s/NetAlert-19%282%29.pdf?dl=0
@ GuardedDon:
On March 10 you wrote:
“‘Factual Information’, sat comms, etc. I would call into question whether the author of sect 1.9.5 was actually competent to write the material.”
I’m not disputing that, but maybe he was told by more qualified persons that the FlightID was missing from a ‘payload’ that would normally contain it, and just was not competent enough to explain it correctly?
Regarding extrapolation of radar echos, do all these radars extrapolate to 1721:13?
Quote from page 2:
“The disappearance of the radar position symbol of MH370 was captured by the KL ATCC
radar at time 1721:13 UTC [0121:13 MYT]. Military radar and radar sources from two other
countries, namely Vietnam and Thailand, also captured the disappearance of the radar
position symbol of MH370 at about the same time.”
@Peter Norton,
Thanks for enjoying my long posts about such highly speculative things as identity swap, switch, spoof, transponders, cargo plane or whatever might’ve helped mh370 to sail through unmolested to Kazakhstan -IF that even happened.
But I think if we contemplate the Northern route scenario at all, the risk of mission failure through discovery by a country’s primary radar has to be addressed. And the possibility of flight code and identity switch with a cargo plane seems rather elegant and tempting for a plane flying at night. But it has to be explored how that might or might not work on a technical level.
As to mh17: I only wanted to allude to the possibility that it was more than a random war casualty. I don’t doubt that the rebels shot the plane down with a BUK missile. The big question is why they mistook mh17 for an Antonov cargo plane and who could’ve been interested in downing specifically mh17. There are several possible answers for those who don’t believe in such a mindboggling coincidence.
But it gave me the idea that a 777 detected on primary radar might be mistaken for a huge cargo plane – maybe an Antonov. Jeff speculated that the shootdown of mh17 might’ve been something like a calling card of those who are responsible for mh370. Like: “See, that’s what we did! And we can do it again!” If mh370 really switched identity with a cargo plane it could also mean: “See, that’s how we did it!”
If on the other hand the Ukrainians are responsible somehow by directing mh17 over the rebels’ territory that day in order to provoke a shoot down, it could also be read as “We know what you did on March 8!”
But of course there’s no proof whatsoever that any of this really happened.
Brock – Finally caught that segment and indeed, no beard.
Interesting though that the ATSB got the brickbat for shifting the search north? I thought that Inmarsat were pretty much in the drivers seat at that point, while under the umbrella? No big rush to correct the record from anywhere if that’s the case?
If there is consensus that we are looking in the right spot then there are some interesting weeks coming up, either way.
Notice: The views opinions expressed in this post are solely mine and do not express the views of the IG or any other group.
In the event that we are incorrectly interpreting the BFO data set, paths to the north are allowed by the BTO data set. To explore these northern paths, I have reconstructed paths that make a turn to the north around 18:34 UTC rather than towards the SIO. I was particularly interested in the possibility that the plane successfully landed at an airport.
I first searched for airports that are within 10 nm of the 7th arc and require average flight speeds between Mach numbers (M) of 0.6 and 0.89 at FL350, incorporating our best estimate of the meteorological conditions. There were three airports that met these criteria: Kyzylorda (M = 0.863)and Almaty (M = 0.734) in Kazakhstan and Kuqa Qiuci (M = 0.664) in Xinjiang, China.
The high speed required to reach Kyzylorda Airport reduces the probability that the plane had sufficient fuel to have successfully landed at this airport. It is even less probable that the plane over flew Kyzylorda and traveled an additional 128 nm and landed at Yubileyniy. Even if somehow it is possible, it seems unlikely that perpetrators that so meticulously planned this incident would choose a destination where there was such a high risk of running out of fuel.
Similarly, the low speed required to reach Kuqa Qiuci will burn more fuel than appears to have been available.
On the other hand, the speed required to reach Almaty Airport appears to burn less fuel than was available, i.e., the airport can be reached with some fuel remaining. Although the speed for maximum range is between M = 0.79 to 0.84, the speed at which endurance is maximized is in the range of M = 0.70 to 0.75, for the range of weights of interest. In this range, the fuel flowrate to the engine is at its minimum. For instance, at a plane weight of 200,000 kg, the LRC speed is M = 0.824 and the fuel flow is 3,085 kg/hr/engine. By contrast, the “holding speed” is M = 0.746 and the fuel flow is 2,810 kg/hr/engine, representing a reduction in fuel flow of 8.9%.
The bottom line is that a flight that ends at Almaty Airport appears to be allowed when constrained by the BTO data set, the fuel
consumed, and the prevailing atmospheric conditions.
This is summarized in this graphic:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qymdoyar3r3h4o3/Northern%20Paths%20to%20Airports.jpg?dl=0
I have removed the image from the previous post and replaced it with one with higher image quality. It can be found at:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ib0ajkpv4cimsyt/Northern%20Paths%20to%20Airports.png?dl=0
@Gijsbrecht
item 10 on p. 54 (refering to 1825:34)mentions:
“no flight ID was sent to the GES during the Log-on.”
Or were you refering to the 1827:03 and 1828:05 events (items 11 and 12 on p. 55)?
Niels.
@Victor,
Thanks. Something to chew on, since it’s highly unlikely that the sophisticated perps of our scenarios would risk their lives and mission failure by something as mundane as fuel shortage.
Here’s a link to the airport’s homepage:
http://www.alaport.com/en/today.html
It’s interesting that the prominently featured news are about those three Russian/Ukrainian airlines which fly all of the non-military Antonov An-124’s. And the airplanes are explicitly mentioned.
Russian airlines:
Volga-Dnepr Airlines and Polet Airlines (which is bankrupt and grounded since end of 2014; but there might be revival plans)
Ukrainian airlines:
Antonov Airlines
A filed flightplan for an An-124 from – let’s say – Bangkok to Almaty would certainly not stick out as unusual.
Big question: Almaty is a big international airport. Wouldn’t anyone – even in the early morning hours – realize that the big plane which just landed there isn’t an An-124 but the 777 from Malaysian Airlines everybody is looking for frantically, though in a very different area?
Would it be possible to refuel the plane on the runway and fly it immediately to a different destination without raising a few eyebrows?
@Victor, Fascinating.
@littlefoot:
Notice: The views opinions expressed in this post are solely mine and do not express the views of the IG or any other group.
I have not thought a lot about the logistics of landing at Almaty. For now, I am concentrating on the technical aspects, including how the BFO data may be explained. I have some opinions about this which I am not ready to speak about.
@victor
I think there maybe a military airfield nearby Almaty where it might have landed.
I am wondering if it flew from IGARI more straight towards this military base than fly through the Mallaca Straights. This might make more fuel available. Also the path skirts between less sensitively protected boarders where India, China etc are focused.
@Victor1
Really nice analysis approach !
If you allow ~40 NM (less) from the 7th arc
and ~ 60 NM west of Almaty, are there
any other possible airports ?
Re the BFOs: There was a post a few weeks ago – showing the BFOs of a MH21 flight
which was approximately 30 minutes ahead
of MH370 at ~ 18:25 with slightly different
direction and speed. Satellite position and velocity different by 30 minutes.
The apparent difference in the BFOs of
MH370 were approximately 30 – 40 hz less than
MH21. So until the large differences in BFOs
can explained – I don’t think you need to be
able to explain the BFOs for your analysis.
It could simply be that the Inmarsat BFOs for handshakes are not accurate or have been
redacted.
@Myron and @Greg Yorke: The suggestion to explore other military and civil airports close to the 7th arc and reachable by an appropriate speed is excellent.
@VictorI:
Forgot one thing.
If you allow your very small turn at ~ 18:34
(or as late as 18:40) the path to Almaty is ~ straight and the BTOs satisfy the original March 17th BTOs (none less than the 18:26 BTO).
To fly West of Almaty and still satisfy
the March 17 BTOs, a very small curved path is required. (or two or more straight legs).
@Victor,
Don’t worry,I completely understood, that this exploration is solely yours and doesn’t reflect the general opinion of the IG.
It’s important nevertheless, since the fuel-budget question makes or breaks the northern route scenario.
@Myron,
that’s great thinking. If there are military airfields nearby they would make much more appropriate landing spots, if they’re long enough for a 777.
@littlefoot
With the size of various Russian military /cargo aircraft they would have already built appropriate length runways and I am sure the B777 can land on such runways with ease.
But if it didn’t matter the keeping the airframe they could have a controlled hard landing.