Category: MH370

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.

Continue reading New York: How Crazy Am I to Think I Actually Know Where That Malaysia Airlines Plane Is?

BBC (UK) A wild and chilling theory about what happened to MH370, by Robert Cottrell

What if the MH370 flew north and landed safely on a Russian airstrip in Kazakhstan? Of course it’s a wild theory. It’s also a great yarn, with just enough data points to sound plausible.

Le Monde (France): Un an après, l’improbable disparition du MH370, by Florency de Changy

Mais si l’avion n’est pas au fond de l’océan Indien, où est-il ? Pour certains, il ne s’agit plus d’affiner des calculs déjà suraffinés, mais bien de remettre en cause la démarche tout entière. Se peut-il qu’une partie des données Inmarsat aient été trafiquées ? C’est la thèse du journaliste américain Jeff Wise qui vient de publier un livre numérique The Plane That Was not There (« L’avion qui n’était pas là »). Il propose un scénario dans lequel les « vraies fausses » informations d’Inmarsat ne sont là que pour faire diversion, alors que les vrais coupables sont les deux Ukrainiens et le Russe qui étaient assis à l’avant de l’avion et dont les passeports sont les seuls à ne pas avoir été vérifiés par leurs autorités nationales respectives. Le Groupe indépendant a immédiatement exclu Jeff Wise.

Das Bild (Germany): Das Sind die Theorien

Der amerikanische Wissenschaftsautor und Pilot Jeff Wise, der das Drama um MH370 seit Monaten für den US-Nachrichtensender CNN begleitet, glaubt sogar: Rebellen könnten die Maschine nach Zentralasien entführt haben – um die Boeing eines Tages für ihre Zwecke einzusetzen. Wise zu BILD: „Die Idee, MH 370 könnte nach Kasachstan verschleppt worden sein, ist nicht neu.”

Il Post (Italy): La teoria di Jeff Wise sul volo MH370, di Andrea Fiorello

Un anno dopo la scomparsa nel cielo dell’Asia del volo Malaysia Airlines MH370 – di cui non si hanno notizie dalle 2,40 del 3 marzo 2014, quando i radar persero le tracce dell’aereo circa due ore dopo il decollo da Kuala Lumpur con destinazione Pechino – il giornalista americano Jeff Wise ha pubblicato sul New York Magazine un lungo articolo che racconta la sua personale storia di “esperto” del volo MH370 e gli sviluppi delle teorie su cosa sia successo all’aereo, che lo hanno portato di recente a un’ipotesi che racconta come incredibile e convincente insieme.

RT (Russia): ‘True story!’ MSM spins theory that Putin hijacked MH370 and landed it in Kazakhstan, by Nebojsa Malic

Judging by his observations about MH17 and Russia, Wise has clearly fallen victim to what psychologists call confirmation bias – a tendency to see and interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions. However, almost the entire mainstream press in the West suffers from this when it comes to Russia – prompting several commentators to dub the phenomenon ‘Putin Derangement Syndrome.’ Witness the recent announcement by a “Pentagon think-tank” that Vladimir Putin is supposedly autistic, dutifully reported as fact. Now it seems Jeff Wise’s fantasy is due for the same treatment.

Continue reading Media Reaction to “The Spoof”

As readers of this blog or my Kindle Single (or, now, New York magazine) know, I’m intrigued by the possibility that MH370 might have been hijacked and flown north to the Yubileyniy Aerodrome within the Baikonur Cosmodrome. If so, it would have come to rest on the specially-milled concrete at approximately an hour and a half before sunrise on Sunday, March 8. And then what? If it stayed where it was, it would have been easy to spot by land-imaging satellites overhead. To avoid detection, it would have to have either refueled and taken off again, or found some kind of shelter.

As it happens, the Kazakh steppe is a terrible place to hide a 210-foot long, 60-foot-high airplane. The flat, desert plain is sparsely populated and almost featureless, so that anything large and unusual is apt to stand out. There is no natural canopy of trees to shelter under. Though there are large buildings at the cosmodrome where space vehicles are serviced, there are no large structures near Yubileyniy.

After I began developing my “Spoof” hypthesis I spent days scouring first Google Earth, then free commercial satellite imagery looking for any hint that a plane could have been stashed in the vicinity. The pickings were slim. The Yubileyniy complex was built in the ‘80s as the landing site for the Buran space plane, and after the program was cancelled in 1989 it has largely sat disused. Occasionally the runway is used by planes carrying inbound VIPs and cosmonauts, but otherwise nothing has really happened there in decades. An overview of the area is depicted above.

The dark, fishhook-shaped line is the rail line connecting the airstrip to the rest of the Baikonur complex. Alongside it is a road from which a series of driveways lead off to the north. One of them leads to an isolated six-story building that stands surrounded by debris, berms, and trenches. I came to think of the area as Yubileyniy North. Here’s what it looked like in 2006 (click on images to enlarge):

Continue reading What Was Going On at Yubileyniy?

One of the frustrating aspects of falling down the rabbit hole of MH370 is dealing with the sheer volume of information that’s been processed in the last 12 months. A perpetually overlooked item on my to-do list is to bring together all the most crucial information in one well-organized place — I made an attempt with my “What We Know Now” blog post but I never really invested the time and energy to do it justice. Others within the Independent Group proposed putting up a Wiki but somehow that never happened, either. Well, just now Richard Godfrey sent me a link to a honking big pdf with much of the key information presented in graphical form. It’s in a Dropbox file here.

[Editor’s note: One of the most intriguing clues in the MH370 mystery is the fact that the airplane’s satcom system logged back on to the Inmarsat network at 18:25. By understanding how such an event could take place, we can significantly narrow the range of possible narratives. In the interest of getting everyone on the same page in understanding this event, I’ve asked Mike Exner for permission to post the content of a detailed comment he recently provided.  One piece of background: a lot of us have been referring to the satellite communications system aboard the aircraft as the “SDU,” but as Mike recently pointed out in another comment, it technically should be called the “AES.” — JW.]

Until we have more evidence to support the theory that the loss of AES communications was due to the loss of primary power to the AES, we must keep an open mind. Loss of power may be the most likely cause (simplest explanation), but the fact is we do not know why the sat link was down between 17:37 and 18:25. My reluctance to jump to the conclusion that it must have been due to the loss of primary AES power is based on decades of experience in the MSS (mobile satellite service) industry. It’s not just another opinion based on convenience to support a theory. Let me elaborate on a few possible alternative explanations.

Continue reading Guest Post: Why Did MH370 Log Back on with Inmarsat?

In some ways, the search for MH370 is going exceedingly well this week. The agency leading the search in the Indian Ocean, the Australia Transport Safety Board (ATSB), just released more information concerning technical aspects of the signal data, which will allow the Independent Group and other amateur investigators to refine their analyses of the plane’s final trajectory. The ships scouring the seabed looking for wreckage continue to press forward with their monumental task, and have now completed more than 12,000 square kilometres of the planned search area. And the respected British aviation website, Flightglobal.com, has published a brand-new analysis by independent investigator Simon Hardy which reinforces the work of the ATSB and the IG.

And yet, this isn’t the news that’s making headlines. What is? Try Googling the word “airliner.” The top return will link you to a theory by author Marc Dugain that was published by Paris Match. Dugain believes that MH370 was taken over by hackers and shot down by the US to prevent the plane from being used in a 9/11-style attack on the base at Diego Garcia. I could try to dismantle this notion methodically but suffice to say that it is as baseless as it is incendiary. Meanwhile, as if resonating to the same frequency of bonkersness, the UK Independent published a story today entitled “Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 theories: 17 possible explanations that could reveal fate of plane,” a compendium of conspiracy theories all of which were disproven long ago.

Why are experiencing this onslaught of MH370 nonsense right now? I think the problem is really two-fold.

Continue reading Sense and Nonsense in MH370 Coverage

Ever since the Independent Group first issued a public report offering guidance as to where search efforts for MH370 should be concentrated, people have been asking for details on group members’ calculated routes. Unfortunately, everyone is doing this work for free, in their spare time, and have other things to attend to as well, so providing explanations has not been a priority. At last, however, Richard Godfrey, one of the hardest-working of all, has gallantly stepped up and delivered a polished-up version of his latest theory so that all interested parties can have a look under the hood. Above is a screen shot of his model, which he dubs “MH370 Flight Path Model V13/1 Final,” as it appears in Google Earth. Details after the jump.

Continue reading Up Close: Inside an IG Southern Route

Guest Post by Michael Exner, Richard Godfrey, and Sid Bennett (Members of the Independent Group)

Beginning shortly after the release of the redacted Inmarsat data log on May 26th, 2014, independent investigators began analyzing the data using analytic models, with the goal of estimating the most likely end point for the flight path of MH370. A combination of secondary and primary radar data provided information about the path from takeoff at 1641UTCto 1822UTC. In its June 26th, 2014 Report, ATSB assumed that MH370 was headed southby 1941UTC, but left open the question of where MH370 went between 1822UTC and 1941UTC. In its second report on July 17th, 2014, the Independent Group (IG) pointed out that the ATSB analysisappeared not to considerthe available Inmarsat data at 1840UTC, and recommendedthat ATSB consider that the Final Major Turn (FMT) to the south may have occurred much earlier than 1941UTC. In its September 9th, 2014, Search Area Recommendation, the IG noted that recent news reports indicatedthat ATSB was reconsidering the time of the FMT, based on the “phone call data” at 1840UTC. On September 26th, 2014, the IG released a Further Progress report in which the IG concluded MH370 must have been flying in a southerly direction by 1840UTC. On October 8th, 2014, ATSB released an Update wherein they also concluded that the FMT must have occurred before 1840UTC, similar to the published IG analysis. Thus, ATSB and the IG agreed by October 8ththat the FMT must have startedbetween 1822UTC and 1840UTC.However, a more exact time for the FMT has remained uncertain. A closer look at the BFO data after 1825 suggests that the FMT started and ended close to 1840UTC.

Read the full report here.

 

Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), is plagued by conspiracy theorists. According to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, since the disappearance of MH370, “conspiracy theorists have been busy trying to solve the mystery themselves. Many have contacted Dolan.”

“You’ve got this big mystery and everyone wants to know the answer and everyone wants to help,” the SMH quotes Dolan as saying. “It’s unhelpful, for the sake of the families more than anything else, in the sense that it has the potential to undermine confidence in what we are doing.”

I feel somewhat guilty for being one of those peanut-gallery denizens who have tormented him. Along with my fellow obsessives in the Independent Group, I’ve been straining my brain for the last eight months trying to make sense of the strangest aviation mystery in history. Yes, I’d like to be helpful; yes, I’d like to know the answers. And yes, I may have unwittingly undermined confidence in what the ATSB was doing, for instance by publicly saying that I thought they were looking in the wrong place. (Though, to be fair, they were in fact looking in the wrong place.)

Nevertheless, I must take issue with one aspect of the article’s characterization of my subculture: the use of the term “conspiracy theorist.” Now, look: I get it. My wife says that I remind her of the Kevin Costner character in “JFK.” I ruminate about the intracacies of a famous case and try to piece them together in a new way that makes more sense. I’m obsessed.

There’s a big difference, however, between true grassy-knoll conspiracy theorists (or 9/11Truthers, or the-moon-landing-was-faked believers) and MH370 obsessives like me. It’s this: there is no default, mainstream narrative about the missing Malaysian airliner. There is no story that officials and all reasonable people agree makes sense.

This isn’t the result of laziness or incompetence. It’s just that the data is so strange.

A lot of people don’t get that. Ever since the mystery began, certain voices have been invoking the principle of Occam’s razor, saying that when we try to formulate a most likely scenario for what happened to the plane, we should choose the answer that is simplest. People who are making this argument are usually in favor of the argument that the plane suffered a massive mechanical failure and then flew off into the ocean as a ghost ship, or that the pilot locked his co-pilot out of the cockpit and committed suicide. However, as I’ve argued over the course of several earlier posts, neither theory matches what we know about the flight.

Instead, I’ve argued that an accumulation of evidence suggests that MH370 was commandeered by hijackers who had a very sophisticated understanding of airline procedure, air traffic control, avionics systems, military radar surveillance, and satellite communications. In other words, what happened on the night of March 7/8 of this year was a intentional act. And when it comes to human schemes, Occam’s razor goes out the window. Instead of simplicity, we should expect complexity, not to mention red herrings and any other form of subterfuge.

Whenever I hear Occam’s razor invoked, I inevitably find myself thinking of something that Sarah Bajc said on CNN. Bajc’s partner, Philip Wood, is one of the missing passengers, and she has been very open minded in considering alternative explanations to what happened that night. “There are 40 crazy stories that you could tell about MH370,” she told the anchor. “And one of them is going to turn out to be true.”

I’ve come to think of this as the Bajc Postulate, which I think should replace Occam’s Razor in situations like this. It goes like this: “When trying to unravel human deception, don’t expect simplicity.”

Continue reading Occam’s Razor is Overrated

 

Disquieting news in the Wall Street Journal today; the paper reports today that the official inquiry into the disappearance of missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 is riven with disagreement:

Ongoing differences of opinion between five teams of experts that include Boeing Co. and the Australian military have led to search vessels being deployed in two different priority search areas. These zones overlap in some places but in others are hundreds of miles apart, highlighting how efforts to solve one of modern aviation’s biggest mysteries remain little more than educated guesswork. Searchers may only be able to scour around 80% of the probable crash sites before government funding runs out.

For its part, the Australian Transport Safety Board (ATSB) issued a response that essentially confirmed the gist of the WSJ article:

[ATSB chief commissioner, Martin] Dolan said that earlier there had been consensus amongst the five groups, based on the data available at the time, but once the data had been refined, “the results from the methodologies did not coincide exactly. There is no disagreement, just the deliberate application of differing analysis models,” said Mr Dolan.

One would like to think that, nine months after the plane went missing, that the experts would have ironed out any loose threads in their understanding of the plane’s final trajectory. Especially given the fact that Inmarsat scientist Chris Ashton told the BBC program Horizon that the company had cracked the nut way back in March, saying: “The graphs matched, the data worked, the calculation was solved.”

But if we take a closer look at the history of the accident investigation, it’s not surprising disagreements exist. For all the confident press statements that the authorities have released, behind the scenes investigators have always struggled to make sense of the data in their possession. It’s not a matter, fundametally, of a difference in opinion between experts; it’s a matter of inconsistencies within the data sets themselves.

Continue reading Why MH370 Search Officials Can’t Agree Where to Look