Two men, strangers to one another, go into the cockpit of an airplane and lock the door behind them. They take off and fly into the night. One radios to ATC, “Good night, Malaysia 370.” One minute later, someone puts the plane into a turn. It reverses direction and disappears. Question: Did one of the … Continue reading What If Zaharie Didn’t Do It?
Last week we discussed what we know about the first hour of MH370’s disappearance, based on primary radar data and the first Inmarsat BTO value. Today I’d like to talk about the BFO data and what it can tell us about MH370’s fate. As longtime readers of this blog well know, the Burst Frequency Offset (BFO) … Continue reading Assessing the Reliability of the MH370 Burst Frequency Offset Data
It wasn’t supposed to end like to this. Earlier today, ministers from the three nations responsible for finding Malaysia Airlines Flight 370—Australia, China, and Malaysia—announced that they would stop looking for the lost jet once the current 46,000-square-mile search zone is completed this fall. The decision was essentially an acknowledgement that they’d come up empty-handed in their quest to … Continue reading Popular Mechanics: Where Did the Search for MH370 Go Wrong?
Well, we’ve been saying it here for a long time, but at last the ATSB has ackowledged the inevitable truth: the failure to locate any wreckage on the seabed in the southern Indian Ocean will mean that MH370 must have been piloted until the very end. To quote today’s story in the Independent: “the possibility that … Continue reading Life after the “Ghost Ship”
Since October, 2014, the search for MH370 has been guided by the assumption that sometime after it disappeared from Malaysian radar screens over the Malacca Strait it turned south and flew straight and fast into the Southern Indian Ocean on autopilot. The ATSB, which is conducting the search, has always been agnostic as to why … Continue reading Can We Rule Out a Ghost-Ship Endgame for MH370?
The discovery last week of what appeared to be a piece of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on the shores of Réunion Island seemed at first blush a giant leap toward solving the famously perplexing mystery. Officials declared that, based on photos, the part could only have come from a Boeing 777. And since only one 777 has … Continue reading New York: What the MH370 Wing Flap Tells Us, And What It Doesn’t
In yesterday’s post I argued that the reboot of MH370’s satellite communications system at 18:25 is a key piece of evidence about what happened to the missing plane. In fact, I would go so far as to say that we should discount any scenario which cannot explain the reboot. That being the case, I thought … Continue reading The Mysterious Reboot
by Victor Iannello Note: Ever since the idea of spoofing was first discussed, one of the main issues has been how falsified BFO values might have been calculated. Most of assumed that the values were arbitrarily selected to suggest a flight in a generally southward direction. Here, Victor Iannello presents an ingenious suggestion: that hijackers might have altered a … Continue reading Guest Post: Northern Routes and Burst Frequency Offset for MH370
Earlier this month, at a meeting between ministers from Australia, China, and Malaysia, the countries involved in the search for MH370 announced that, in the event that the plane was not found within the current search zone by the end of mission in May, the area would be increased “to extend the search by an additional … Continue reading The Reasoning Behind the Continued Search of the Southern Indian Ocean for MH370
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 … Continue reading What Was Going On at Yubileyniy?