Category: Aviation

It’s the holiday season, and I’d like to express my gratitude for the community of fellow obsessives who have helped turn over every conceivable stone in an attempt to solve the mystery of MH370 (and a few other aviation tragedies along the way). Audible has given me ten copies of the audiobook edition of “The Plane That Wasn’t There: Why We Haven’t Found MH370” and I’d like to pass them on to readers of this blog. I’ll send a redemption code to the first ten people who ask for one in the comment section. (If you’ve already read the Kindle Single, you can pass along the code to someone else as a present.)

UPDATE 12-17-15: They’re all gone. Thanks, everybody.

UPDATE 12-18-15: Okay, starting now, I’ll give a copy of the audiobook edition of “Fatal Descent: Andreas Lubitz and the Crash of Germanwings Flight 9525” to the first ten commenters who ask for it.

UPDATE 12-18-15: Once again they’re all gone. Happy holidays!

At a press conference earlier this month, Australian officials released a new report updating the scientific rationale for their continuing search of the southern Indian Ocean, which is expected to wrap up no later than June, 2016 after the expenditure of an estimated $130 million. “We have a high level of confidence that we are searching in the right area,” declared Assistant Minister for Defence Darren Chester.

As a result of this new analysis, the width of the area to be searched has expanded: from 20 nautical miles inside the 7th arc and 30 nm outside, to 40 nm inside the arc and 40 nm outside.

The key piece of data deployed to justify this reassessment was the newly announced finding that that the satellite data unit (SDU) requires only 120 seconds from fuel exhaustion to first log-on attempt, rather than the 220 seconds cited in earlier reports.

Assuming that the plane was operating as a “ghost ship” without a conscious pilot at the controls, its final moments played out like this:

• 00:11:00 Transmission from SDU to [ground station]. Hourly ping as previously described.
• 00:17:30 Approximate APU start time. APU requires approximately 60 seconds to provide electrical power.
• 00:18:30 Approximate time of SDU power restoration. SDU required approximately 60 seconds after power application to begin transmitting a log-on request.
• 00:19:29 SDU initiated log-on request. SDU began log-on process to satellite system.
• 00:19:37 Log-on request complete. SDU successfully logged onto satellite system.
• 00:21:06 Expected IFE [Inflight Entertainment System] set up of first ground connection. IFE set up request did not occur.

Here’s a nice visualization, from page 11 of the report:

Continue reading How Wide Should the MH370 Search Area Be?

What does the fact that a piece of MH370 washed up on Reunion Island tell us about the plane’s likely impact point? For the last few months independent researcher Brock McEwen has been hounding the ocean drift modelers of the world in an effort to shed light on that question. After carefully analyzing the results of nine drift models–CSIRO, UWA, GEMS, Deltares, GEOMAR, ICMAT, Adrift, IPRC, and OM–Brock, a trained statistician, concludes that taken together they suggest:

• Without implausibly strong wind effects debris could not have reached Reunion Island from the current search area.
• Before debris could have reached Reunion Island, other pieces should have washed up in Western Australia and on other shorelines in the Indian Ocean.

These points undermine the claim put forward in the most recent ATSB report that “the location of the recovered debris is consistent with drift modelling predictions of objects starting in the areas identified as possibly containing MH370.”

The entire report can be found here.

I hope that officials investigating the crash, whether they be in Australia, Malaysia, France, or elsewhere, take heed of Brock’s significant contribution. The evidence has long been mounting that the authorities are looking for the plane in the wrong place.

The ATSB has just issued a lengthy and detailed new report explaining its latest thinking regarding the underwater search for MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean, available here. For the most part the media are reporting that its basic point is that the current search area is the right one. While that’s true, there are some more interesting points buried within in it, and within its companion volume from Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG) which explores the logic in further depth.

Here are my bullet points—I invite readers to add their own, or to correct or elaborate upon my points.

— One of the most jaw-dropping revelations in this report is that after 18:01:49 there was just a single radar return point. Note only does this contradict data shown to passenger family members soon after the disappearance (see Victor’s note below, and the image above), it also raises questions about the reliability of that piece of radar data. Since it was detected at the far limits of the radar equipment, it is relatively inaccurate, and as a stand-alone piece of data it is much more likely to be anomalous.

— The report reiterates that the only way to deliberately depower the SDU is by pulling circuit breakers in the E/E or isolating the left AC bus from the cockpit, but offers no explanation of why this might have happened prior to 18:25.

— It turns out that the time to recycle SDU is not 2.5 min but only 60 seconds. This is particularly important when it comes to laying out an end-of-flight scenario that presumes fuel exhaustion.

— The report says that after fuel exhaustion ditching not possible, with or without a conscious pilot. There has been a great deal of debate about the possibility of ditching in this forum, and I hope (but doubt) that the report will lay the issue to rest.

—At last, we know the cost index for the initial portion of the flight: it was set at 52. Of course there is no reason to assume that the later portion of the flight was conducted at this setting but it helps us calibrate likely flight modes.

— Overall point: With these two documents, the Australian authorities have shed a commendable quantity of light onto the subject of how they have determined the likely flight paths that MH370 took after it disappeared. It is heartening to note that they have greatly shrunk the length along the 7th arc along which the plane might plausibly lie: by my reckoning, from about 630 nm to 380 nm. And the “fried egg” of maximum probability is smaller still, only about 150 nm long. However, I find it baffling that, given the incredible level of effort poured into figuring out how the plane might have traveled prior to fuel exhaustion, there seems to have been basically zero time spent figuring out how the plane would likely have traveled after the fuel ran out. Frankly, I was expecting a lot of analysis along the lines of Brock McEwen’s work on this topic. As it is, it seems that instead of examining flight modes they took a guesstimate from accident-investigation experts and added a fudge factor. The result is that, while this latest analysis shrinks the search’s target area on one dimension, it makes it fatter on the other. In current southern search area, they’ve looked about 18nm inside, 30nm outside 7th arc. According to the new report, they should expand the search box to a width of 80 nm, symmetric around the 7th arc. This is not progress, and I think the ATSB can do much better (and hopefully will in a future report.)

Some additional points from Victor Iannello

Before I could post the above thoughts, Victor emailed me some observations of his own, which I include here unedited:

“There are some very strange results reported starting on page 17. Here are some comments related to that and the BFO bias:
1. As the attached graphic illustrates, if we are to believe that primary radar data exists every 10 seconds up to 18:02 and then only a single capture at 18:22, the slide presented to the NOK on Mar 21 at the LIDO hotel is false or includes data not used in the report.
2. There is a statement that the ground speed observed by the radar prior to 18:02 is relatively high and implies the aircraft would be at low altitude. While this would be allowed from Ma number and available thrust considerations, the indicated air speed would be extremely high, the airframe would be stressed, and the fuel efficiency would be incredibly wasteful. This is not consistent with the fuel calculations after 18:22.
3. The groundspeeds they calculate from the radar data have tremendous variability, even after the Kalman filter is applied. I estimate the peaks to be about 550 kn (!) We need the raw radar data to see what the hell they are doing.
4. The bias term was observed to be time-varying and modeled with a SD of 25 Hz. But there is also a statement that “Substantial effort was made to characterise this structured bias. It was found to have a geographic dependency but it has not been possible to determine a quantitative function to compensate for this change in bias.” This implies the drift might not be a simple OCXO drift issue. In fact, perhaps it is the correction term that has a geographic dependency rather than the oscillator drift.

Overall, I am not sure their work adds much value over the deterministic approach that the IG and others has followed. The PDFs and assumptions on heading/speed changes of previous flights are practically irrelevant.”

He later added:

“Their approach of randomly spaced turns, accelerations/decelerations, and climb/descents will always favor straighter, more constant speed paths that fit the BTO data. Since commercial flights are relatively straight to conserve fuel, it predicts those flights relatively well. If MH370 flew relatively straight, it should work there, too. But there are no guarantees the flight was near straight. For instance, if the flight flew south, a circle “loiter” above Sumatra would be ranked low, as would a curved path that followed the coast of Sumatra. There is bias in their model that is not acknowledged. Also, fuel calculations are only indirectly included by limiting the range of speeds. The model seems overly complicated for the value of what is produced. It seems developed more to impress than to enlighten.”

UPDATE: 12/4/15

Reader Paul Smithson asked “how much of the newly-defined priority area has already been searched?” In the image below I’ve outlined in black the area already searched (via Richard Cole) on the “fried egg” map. (Click to enlarge) The original 120,000 sq km search area is outlined in red; the new 120,000 sq km search area is outlined in purple. As you can see, almost all of the high-probability area has already been scanned. As more and more is searched, the probability density of the area being scanned will decrease, so that search becomes ever less fruitful. The effort expended between now and the end of the scheduled search will, by my seat-of-the-pants estimate, increase the probability distribution coverage from aroun 85 percent to 90 percent.

In the aftermath of the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over the Donetsk region of Ukraine last July, two parallel investigations were launched by the Dutch governmment: one a civil inquiry to establish the cause of the incident, the other a criminal inquiry to establish responsibility. The first was completed last month, when the Dutch Safety Board released a report entitled “Crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17.” It concluded that the plane had been struck by a missile fired by a Russian-made Buk surface-to-air missile (SAM) launcher. Responsibility for the deed has yet to be assigned; the Dutch prosecutor’s office is expected to release its findings next year.

Those findings, I think, will surprise many people.

The commonly accepted scenario is that rebels obtained a Buk missile launcher and, believing that they were attacking a Ukrainian military transport, fired upon and destroyed a Malaysia Airlines 777 by mistake. In this telling, no one was truly to blame—it was all a big mistake, the kind of tragic misunderstanding that is all to common in war.

There is ample evidence for this narrative. Russian media reported that on June 29 the rebels had captured a Buk missile launcher. On July 14, a Ukrainian Antonov An-26 military transport plane was shot down over eastern Ukraine while flying at an altitude of 20,000 feet. On July 16, a Ukrainian Sukhoi Su-25 attack jet was shot down while flying at a similar altitude. Then, on July 17, a rebel commander named Igor Girkin boasted on social media that his forces had shot down another Antonov-26 transport plane belonging to the Ukrainian military. Girkin, a colonel in Russian military intelligence declared that “In the vicinity of Torez, we just downed a plane, an AN-26.”

The post was soon after deleted, but not before it was picked up by mainstream Russian media.

Continue reading Assigning Blame for MH17

In the immediate aftermath of MH370’s disappearance, California attorney (and noted birther) Orly Taitz filed a FOIA request with the National Security Agency to find out what the organization had about the missing plane in its files. Unsurprisingly, the NSA wouldn’t say; they wouldn’t even confirm that they had a file at all. As grounds, they claimed that “FOIA does not apply to matters that are specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive Order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign relations…”

The NSA’s response presents an interesting logical puzzle. If the NSA doesn’t have any material relating to MH370, then surely it would not violate national defense or foreign relations to say so. So presumably the NSA does have such material. Yet in response to Taitz’s inquiry they specifically emphasize that they might not. While it’s hard to say for sure which is the case, it sure smells like the NSA has something they don’t want to talk about. (“Typically when the government does not have any records, it would respond to FOIA request attesting that there are no records in question,” Taitz writes.) If I had to guess, I’d hazard that it might have to do with the radar and signal-detection capabilities of the US and its allies in the area where MH370 disappeared.

In the spirit of Taitz’s inquiry, I recently submitted my own FOIA request to the FBI to see what would turn up. Two weeks ago, I received a reply. The FBI, too, said it could not turn over material to me, stating:

“The material you requested is located in an investigative file which is exempt from disclosure pursuant to 5 U.S.C. §  552 (b)(7)(A).  5 U.S.C. §  552 (b)(7)(A) exempts from disclosure:

records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes, but only to the extent that the production of such law enforcement records or information… could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings…”

You can see the whole letter I received from them here: Page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4.

Later in the same letter the FBI asserts that “this is a standard notification that is given to all our requesters and should not be taken as an indication that excluded records do, or do not, exist.” So again we run into the same logical conundrum as with Taitz’s NSA reply. If we assume that, in order for its contents to be categorized as non-disclosable, the file had to exist, then I take this to mean that the FBI has an investigation open into the hijacking of MH370. This by itself doesn’t necessarily mean that the plane was taken by third parties rather than the captain; the FBI was involved in the investigation of EgyptAir flight 990, which was ultimately deemed (by the US) a case of pilot suicide. The fact that they are considering enforcement proceedings, however, suggests that they believe that there are entities out there in the world against whom such proceedings could be brought.

 

Goose barnacles of the genus Lepas live exclusively on debris floating in the open ocean. Like other barnacles, their larvae spend the early part of their life swimming freely and then, in a final larval phase called the cyprid stage, search out a floating object on which to settle. Once they find a suitable object, says marine biologist Hank Carson, “cyprids in general do do a fair bit of exploration for that cementation spot” upon it, and with good reason: they’ll spend the rest of their life there. Among the criteria they assess is how crowded a spot is, what the underlying substrate consists of, and how deep it is. Once satisfied, they glue their heads in place.

In general Lepas barnacles like to spread out, and prefer a spot in the shade; they grow best away from the top of the water column. The reason is that close to the waterline, the rising and falling of waves periodically exposes the animals to the air, which interferes with their feeding. It’s unhealthy for them in other ways, too. “The uppermost centimeters of water are normally a quite harsh environment with strongly changing ecological parameters, like water temperature, salinity (heavy rains or intense evaporation in tropical areas). Moreover they are subjected to intensive UV radiation,” says Hans-Georg Herbig of the Institut für Geologie und Mineralogie in Cologne, Germany. “From several organism groups it is known that they avoid the uppermost centimeters of the water column.”

Continue reading How the MH370 Flaperon Floated — UPDATED

By Oleksandr N.

[Note: Oleksandr originally posted a link to this intriguing paper in the comments section, where it has generated a considerable amount of discussion. Oleksandr has developed one of the most intriguing hypotheses about the Inmarsat data to emerge in a long time. In a nutshell, he suggests that data that has long been viewed as spurious might in fact be an important clue as to what the plane was doing during two crucial and as-yet poorly understood periods of its final flight. — JW]

 

Introduction

There are two obviously abnormal BFO values of 273 Hz (18:25:34.461 UTC) and -2 Hz (00:19:37.443 UTC) recorded by Inmarsat. The first of them is inconsistent with the other BFO records in the same cluster of BFOs 18:25 – 18:27, and it is also inconsistent with the known heading and speed of the aircraft by 18:22.
The second abnormal BFO value of -2 Hz considerably differs from the BFO value of 182 Hz just 8 seconds earlier. Should this value be correct, it would imply an extreme descent rate (~15,000 ft /min).
While attempts took place to explain the BFO of 273 Hz as a result of some maneuver, such as a lateral offset, the second anomalous value of -2 Hz is widely believed to be erroneous.
This technical note provides an alternative view, suggesting that both the anomalous BTO values are valid, but they are the results of the inability of AES to apply Doppler compensation due to missing position/velocity data.

You can find the whole paper here.