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New Information May Narrow Down Malaysian Jet's Path
mdsolar (1045926) writes with this excerpt from Slate on the still-missing Malaysian Airline flight "In a case that is swirling with uncertainties, a few pieces of evidence have stood apart for seeming reliability. Among them was the revelation last Saturday by Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak that his country's investigators, in collaboration with U.S. authorities, had analyzed an electronic ping that MH370 had broadcast to the Inmarsat satellite at 8:11 a.m. on the morning of the disappearance. Based on this data, the investigators had determined that at that moment MH370 must have been somewhere along one of two broad arcs: one which passed through Central Asia, and the other of which covered a swath of largely empty Indian Ocean, far to the south. The revelation left a burning question unresolved: what about the six earlier pings, which had been exchanged between the aircraft and the satellite about once per hour? Could any position data be deduced from them? Today, Inmarsat revealed some crucial information. 'The ping timings got longer,' Inmarsat spokesman Chris McLaughlin stated via email. That is to say, at each stage of its journey, the aircraft got progressively farther away from the geostationary satellite's position, located over a spot on the equator south of Pakistan, and never changed its heading in a direction that took it closer—at least for very long."
The intermediate pings have always been considered along with the final pings to determine the arcs. The information at the end of the article - that a southern flight would be found on Indonesian primary radar returns - seems to contradict the large search effort being carried out currently on the southern corridor. It's also entirely possible that the flight wasn't picked up on Indonesian radar - even though it did fly south - if the Indonesian radar capability was not operating as it was expected to.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/cnns-don-lemon-is-it-preposterous-to-think-a-black-hole-caused-flight-370-to-go-missing/
Don Lemmon: " “is it preposterous” to consider a black hole as a possibility?"
' Mary Schiavo, a former Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Transportation, said, “A small black hole would suck in our entire universe, so we know it’s not that.” '
Our brightest minds are working on this...
"If the plane did travel south, its path should be detectable on stored Indonesian military radar returns." - Indonesian military is bunch of completely corrupted incompetent fools. SAR team should not trust a single information from Indonesia. The military radars that Indonesian military is suppose to have, probably don't even exist. Someone took money and never delivered the radars.
Because the extra weight may have caused the island to capsize:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
I'm no aviation expert but if I were to design a black box , I'd put a radio beacon on it (activated on impact) and a sonar beacon (activated on being submerged) . Someone on /. had pointed out that they already have such beacons which ping for 30 days after activation. Why are they not picking any of that? Have they used submarines in the search?
If these pings are the data the engines send to Boeing, then they are supposed to be sent every hour.So ping timings getting lomger? Since the pings are transmitted at the speed of light, over the distance the plane travels the change in ping timing would be too small to measure.
Here is a very detailed account of the trajectory data now available from Reuters. Maybe someone on this board knows air routes in South East Asia and can provide analysis or pointers to useful maps?
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
... MATH.
.
No country will give the radar data..they a secret regarding military capability.. If they have any information they won't tell it because it will give their coverage.. If they don't have anything then too as it will show the lack of it..
If any trace is found in Australian waters, it will either be detained or culled.
Most definitely (as the above poster and most readers will have spotted).
We live in a universe with Stephen Hawking in it instead of a fictional one with Dan Brown's characters in it. Due to that a black hole with a mass of a bus has a life of under a second. Why are we giving bodybuilders air time to regurgitate their thoughts misinformed by novels that rely on incredibly fucking stupid plot devices?
Skyvector is your friend.
It's been two weeks, the finest and most capable surveillance technology has been used, and still nothing has been found. The Aussie satellite images a few days ago seemed the most promising, but nothing's been found in the respective area despite expanding the search. No doubt the debris would have moved via the currents, but still.
How long exactly can Governments invest the time, effort and money to search until it's seen as a loss? I'm not saying that we should give up just yet, but if another week passes and absolutely nothing is found... then clearly we aren't as good as we think we are.
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2014/03/mh370-electrical-fire/
I believe something like that happened. Occam's razor and so on...
The fact that the pilot had built his own simulator also has a mundane reason that somebody on pprune had tracked down: He assisted with giving a real pilot's feedback to a third-party developer of aircraft for flight simulators (X-Plane IIRC).
Diego Garcia.
You can draw in the rest of the conclusions.
This entire story is manufactured news. "Look over here! This is shiny and exciting! Pay no attention to ongoing, substantive stories."
Explosive decompression in the flight cabin? Maybe even loss of oxygen to the entire plane might explain the lack of communication? With that being said; the plane is a zombie just flying on auto - pilot until fuel is exhausted? Scary thoughts about the people who died on this plane I'm having at 1am.
A.B.
"could of been": Is this Engrish or Ebonics?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
This was a deliberate and probably successful attempt to steal a plane. Probably for use in future terror attacks.
Some time after take off, a new route was programmed in. After the last communication from the pilot, the transponder and other communication systems were switched off.
The plane climbed to an altitude of 45000 ft to kill off all passengers except the pilots.
The plane flew north west over india tailing another plane so that it was invisible to Indian radar.
After crossing into Pakistan, it peeled off to land somewhere in north west Pakistan with the help of the pakistani secret service.
This is not an accident or fire because we know that a completely new route was programmed in
Since the last heading was northwest,it is unlikely that this plane will be found in the south in the indian. ocean. That whole search is an attempt at misdirection for some reason
It's Indonesia. They don't have to worry much about "intruders".
The Indonesians have searched their military radar records and did not detect the plane. http://www.antaranews.com/en/n...
The US knew where the plane was all along, thanks to Boeings telemetry. They knew it was hijacked to Pakistan for a terrorist mission. They sent in special forces to kill the terrorists and destroy the planes. To save Pakistan the embarrassment of admitting the plane was hijacked there, the US is reprogramming the black box and is planting debris near Oz.
I don't subscribe to this theory. After 9/11, I can buy a hijack for terrorist purposes. I cannot buy the idea of a US coverup.
... when you find the fucking thing.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. ~~ Hunter S. Thompson
Here is another link saying the same about all seven pings: http://www.themalaymailonline.... "Engineers at Inmarsat Plc, whose satellite picked up the pings, plotted seven positions for the Boeing Co 777-200ER on March 8, Chris McLaughlin, a company spokesman, said in an interview. The plane flew steadily away from the satellite over the equator while pinging, McLaughlin said. Malaysia needs to verify that information, Datuk Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, the chief of the nation’s civil aviation, said in Kuala Lumpur."
Yet the first ping should have been very near the last radar contact at 2:15 seen on your map. But that position appears to be farther from the satellite than the 5:11 circle. Could they be over correcting for system latency on the aircraft when plotting these circles? Maybe the system is faster when other things are turned off? Perhaps plotted circles need to be expanded out to the East?
Period!
There seem to be some mathematically irreconcilable things happening here. It is time to test some of these assumptions. A similar plane needs to be flown over proposed routes and altitudes with the same systems shut down to see if the satellite pings are consistent with a GPS log and to see if there are gaps in radar coverage that can account for the plane not turning up in records from Indonesia or Thailand or Myanmar or Bangladesh.
Terrorists want flashy things that attract attention. No on has claimed responsibility for this, and we don't even know what the fuck happened.
It's not terrorists. Unless terrorists have their own undetected airstrip, and are planning to use this plane later.
I think it's most likely some kind of maintenance failure. There are three common causes: pilot error, maintenance failure, design flaw.
Pilot error seems unlikely to me in this case. You would notice the lack of communication with the towers during several hours of flight.
Design flaw is possible, but not very likely unless more of these planes start disappearing.
That leaves maintenance.
Maybe some air pressure thing failed and the pilots lost consciousness and the plane just flew itself until crashing.
"... we have a system that carefully controls how much shampoo you can bring in your carry-on luggage, yet is completely incapable of responding if someone steals an entire aircraft."
So it now looks like this possibly hijacked plane loaded with people traveling TO China was hijacked and flown toward India/Pakistan. With the exception of the passengers being FOR China, this strange tale has an erie similarity to the 1930s novel and movie Lost Horizon about a hijacked plane with passengers from China being flown to the mysterious valley of Shangri-la hidden deep in the Himalayan mountains. Both hijackings even took place on a night flight.
Here's the opening plot for the 1937 movie from Wikipedia:
"Before returning to England to become the new Foreign Secretary, writer, soldier and diplomat Robert Conway (Ronald Colman) has one last task in 1935 China: to rescue 90 Westerners in the city of Baskul. He flies out with the last few evacuees, just ahead of armed revolutionaries. Unbeknownst to the passengers, the pilot has been replaced and their aircraft hijacked. It eventually runs out of fuel and crashes deep in the Himalayan Mountains, killing their abductor. The group is rescued by Chang (H.B. Warner) and his men and taken to Shangri-La, an idyllic valley sheltered from the bitter cold. The contented inhabitants are led by the mysterious High Lama (Sam Jaffe)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Horizon_(1937_film)
Like I said, there's a spooky similarity between that movie and how the plane's disappearance now appears. Perhaps someone should be checking to see if either the pilot or co-pilot was a fan of the film.
Looking more closely at that diagram the 2:11, 3:11 and 4:11 pings are not plotted, unfortunately.
Even without them though to get to either of the proposed flight paths plotted in lew of the AU search area would require the aircraft to have gone much faster than later plotted between last radar sighting 2:15 and the first of either of the plotted lines at 5:11. This would be needed to make up a distance almost equal to the plotted distance between pings.
Unfortunately, this map has non-factual locations for the circles other than 8:11. The angle information for the earlier pings has not been released, but artwork was drawn up that estimated these earlier pings from the reported estimated tracks attributed to the NTSB. This artwork, drawn by Scott Henderson, was likely the source for the map on theaviationist.com's site. See http://willyloman.wordpress.co... for details.
Inmarsat has been coy about the exact value of the ping angles. They issued a press release that said that the information had been given to the Malaysian government, and that anyone who wanted details should contact Malaysia. See http://www.inmarsat.com/news/i... IMHO, they have been doing this because the earlier ping data may make clearer that the aircraft track takes it over Malaysia, where the lack of detection may be a source of official embarrassment.
The earlier ping data may also indicate whether MH370 overflew Indonesia, or whether it flew west to avoid Indonesia, and that has an effect on the plane's remaining range and the estimate of the flight's bearing when it presumably turned southward toward the 90E/45S region where the SAR operations have been focused lately. It would appear that this data was factored into the NTSB track estimates, but the lack of an official release of the angle data has hampered the armchair/amateur speculation about the location. IMHO, if MH370 avoided overflying Indonesia, it may have been a deliberate attempt to lay a false track in a west or northwest direction.
You might as well consider the similarities to Oceanic 815 - though that flight was Australia to US, apparently ending up at Wallis Island - or not. Unfortunately for your fantastic theory, the current SAR effort is focused on the southern Indian ocean, not Himilaya. While the 8:11 angle estimate has a northern segment, all attention is leading toward the southern segment, at the extremum of the supposed fuel range of the plane.
Thanks! That is what I was looking for.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
The link is to an article that's a week old, and if you read the article carefully, the plot described ends at 2:15 AM, without knowing whether IGREX was reached. The Inmarsat angle data leads toward the southern Indian Ocean.
WHAT? That article is from 8 days ago!!! It's still talking about the Andamaan sea!! It says NOTHING about the search off Australia.
The diagram I saw two days ago showed all seven pings and their exact times (11 minutes past each hour), and that is how they have come up with these small slices of the arc. This article specifically states that:
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
Here is the image I'm talking about:
http://i1.minus.com/iPcccu2MDL...
What the NTSB has done is very simple. Assume it's most likely the plane is travelling at a steady speed, not too fast, not too slow, and mathematically match that to the available ping locations. BAM, you have the smalls slices shown there. All of the other areas would require the plane to do wierd things like turn around after the last ping, or slow down excessively, or speed up excessively.
OP's story/article is a pile of baloney, just like most media coverage. ALL of the pings have been used to create the new search areas, the ones that they've been carefully searching SINCE TUESDAY.
too bad radar doesn't cover the Indian ocean. the emergency beacons aren't transmitting either.
What's that? The pings "got longer"? OMG I've never heard that before, that sounds like new information!, post. post. post. post. post.
Ummm, except this was all published FIVE DAYS AGO, simply in a more useful form:
http://i1.minus.com/iPcccu2MDL...
They've been searching based on this "new information" since TUESDAY:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...
Slate, FutureWise, Jeff Wise, and Timothy, are all idiots who are FIVE DAYS OUT OF DATE.
The NSA and other US intelligence agencies have gone to insanely extreme lengths to avoid another 9/11 - like monitoring the majority of the world's electronic communications. 9/11 was done using commercial jets as weapons, so surely one of the highest priorities would be tracking every commercial jet that could be used to attack the US or its various military installations, embassies, factories, etc around the globe. Just imagine the shit storm there would be in the halls of power if terrorists pulled off the same trick AGAIN. Nobody in intel would risk that.
So if they are going to all the trouble of monitoring everybody's texts and gmail, surely they know what happened to MH370. It would be utter incompetence for them not to.
So why aren't they saying?
But if the passengers were allowed to keep their phones switched on, I am sure some of those phone would have been able to pick up signal somewhere along the way.. I know it flew on vast stretches of ocean, but at least there was some chance it was possible when they were flying low somewhere near the land.... What were your thoughts
Poster posting same link across multiple stories, probably spam or malware.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I believe something like that happened. Occam's razor and so on...
What does Occam's Razor have to say about a fire bad enough to take out radio and transponders but the plane is able to keep flying for seven hours?
Hint: NOT POSSIBLE. Which is what many other pilots have also said in response to that article.
Also not mentioned in that article is that there are large airports even closer than the one mentioned, so why not go to those? And the autopilot was told to turn before the "Good Night" call, why not mention a little thing like OMG FIRE then? Also, if the plane is on auto-pilot to a new airport please explain how that airport does not see them flit right overhead on radar as the autopilot takes them right overhead?
Even the Black Hole theory makes way more sense than the fire theory, just based on seven hours of flight time alone. PLEASE do not post absurd theories and clutter up the discussion.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Give them six months to re-paint the plane to match some other commercial aircraft and change out the transponders to match, then to load in the nuclear weapon or biological payload - after that we'll find the plane when they blow it up over whatever target city they've selected.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If the LiIon cargo caught fire and burned out the communications wiring
Then the whole plane in out of the air in under an hour. You CANNOT have a fire bad enough to take out all kinds of wiring and have a craft that will still be flying for very long at all, much less seven hours.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The only hypothesis that fits all of the facts (few as they are) is that of mass murder / co-pilot suicide, with a goal to ditch the plane where it could never be recovered.
Neither a fire nor malfunction nor loss of cabin pressure would simultaneously cause the transponder and ACARS and ADS-B to shut down while allowing the plane to fly for hours and make various turns on known flight corridors in between radar coverage areas.
A hijacker would have to be pretty lucky to get cockpit access and fully take over the plane at the exact moment that the flight was "in between" air traffic control areas and within 2 minutes of the co-pilot calmly saying "good night".
The Malaysian government's instance on talking about the captain's flight simulator is a red herring. He's an opposition supporter and they want to smear him. What matters is that the co-pilot is the last voice heard and yet the course change was already programmed into the computer when he spoke (according to ACARS).
They could easily get an old carrier plane and use that without setting off alarms
But you can't fly that old carrier plane right into the middle of highly protected airspace, where a 777 that has a cloned electronic transponder to match an existing flight going into a major airport can easily waltz into the airspace of a large city before taking a last minute diversion.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you want to believe that the fascists that are inside the U.S. government had nothing to do with
9/11, then your point is plausible.
Terrorists want flashy things that attract attention.>
Yes they do, which is why they will happily claim credit when the plane delivers a small nuclear weapon or biologic agent dump over a large city somewhere.
Until then, why would they say anything while they are still setting things up? It could lead to them being interrupted in the process of converting the plane to mimic some other commercial 777.
I think it's most likely some kind of maintenance failure.
The most likely thing is that someone stole the plane. All sort of "failure" theories totally fall down between the combination of no further radio contact, and the plane flying for seven hours after the transponders were switched off. You can't have a plane that has serious mechanical issues flying for seven hours, not without some kind of miracle which is WAY less likely than someone having taken the plane.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
But did anyone check the Airport and the Maintenance Hangar. Would be a riot to find out that MH 370 has been actually parked there the whole time ?
How well their radar works is likely secret.
What it can't do is more likely to be top-secret.
Which might be a reason not to release information about the actual track.
Another theory on why Inmarsat is not releasing the range data for the other pings:
1) If the US govt has the ability to track Inmarsat ground stations, they probably aren't telling.
2) If the plane went somewhere that they don't want told, (North)
then it must be interesting/frustrating to be an Inmarsat engineer looking at the range data, but being told not to release it.
3) if the plane went somewhere that they don't mind telling, (South)
then the US govt might be ok with Inmarsat releasing the data because it would cover up the sources and methods in 1).
4) There may be a private contractural NDA limiting what Inmarsat can release.
(Don't air your customer's dirty laundary.)
Looks like we'll just have to wait.
The fire theory is wrong, and it is not the simplest explanation in any shape or form. Not only was transponder switched off, but ACARS was too. Here's the thing - ACARS kept transmitting for 7 hours!! That system was fully functional - it had power, it was still transmitting to the stations. That is how we know the plane did not crash immediately. It was manually switched to a mode in which it no longer actively sent data.
If there was a fire on board, then it magically: Took out all radios instantly, switched ACARS operating mode (plus ACARS can also be used to send messages, and the system was still working, yet it wasn't utilized to report an emergency either), killed the transponder, shut down the preprogrammed autopilot course, flew the plane for 7 hours with multiple heading changes and many "abnormal" altitude changes (flying above flight ceiling for the aircraft, flying lower than normal over Malaysia, etc), instantly killed every passenger (because no cell phones were switched on or even passively connected while flying lower than normal over Malaysia), allowed the pilot to manually fly the plane for hours (multiple altitude and course changes that were very strange) but without trying any other methods of communication (cell phones, ACARS messages, etc), and it all started IMMEDIATELY after Malaysia air traffic controllers turned over control of the aircraft as it was leaving their airspace. That is not the simplest explanation by any stretch of the imagination. The simplest explanation is: Someone with a technical knowledge of the aircraft decided to do whatever the hell they wanted with it at the very first opportunity when the plane was not longer being monitored by Malaysian flight controllers.
Personally, I believe one of two things had to have happened immediately after the "event" began (when the plane was released by Malaysia air traffic control) - 1) the pilot managed to kill all the passengers extremely fast - for example by flying at a very high elevation (above the service ceiling even) and depressurizing the plane (at that elevation people lose consciousness in under 8 seconds), or 2) none of the passengers suspected anything was wrong until far out into the Indian ocean and out the range of all land-based cell towers.
Better known as 318230.
Yah, blame it on the Mexicans.
rewriting history since 2109
Interestingly, you link says at the bottom: "All track. arcs and probability zones are symbolic only / not accurate." and since they can't possibly be consistent with the new information, apparently the new information is indeed news.
Bzzt. http://i1.minus.com/iPcccu2MDL... does not show the factual location of the pings. Read the caption. It shows "Examples" of pings that could have given the tracks that the NTSB released. The actual location of the pings has not been publicly released, even though the ping data must have strongly influenced the NTSB tracks that have been published. This image from minus.com was drawn by Scott Henderson, who has explained that the pings shown in the diagram were drawn to illustrate the process that the NTSB presumably employed. This artifice got some strong negative reactions, such as http://willyloman.wordpress.co...
Knowing the actual ping locations, particularly the 3:11 and 4:11 pings, could help clarify when the turn to the south took place and better pin down the complete track.
Tweets from Scott Henderson, who drew the diagram you cite, clarify what information we do and don't have: https://twitter.com/_AntiAlias...
This earlier slashdot post still seems like the best theory, nothing seems to contradict it
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Here is a list of the current ten theories on the disappearance of flight MH370.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
does not match with your theory.
WSJ reported a while back that all the ping data were used to produce the arcs for the final ping. But it has not been reported before that the second ping was farther from the satellite than the first and the third farther than the second and so on to the seventh. That constrains the path early in the disappearance. Since Indonesia has confidence in its radar, this new information suggests that either their confidence is misplaced, the plane used evasion methods within the radar coverage that Indonesia may be able to discover, or the plane did not fly South.
While much has been made of the border defenses to the North, the constraint provided by this new information allows overflying Bhutan (though not Nepal). Bhutan has a very small army and measures its performance in Gross National Happiness. It has no air force and has a border with Indian that requires no passport. It is flexible with its border with China. These borders may be less closely watched than some others. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... The Myanmar/India border crossing that would need to be prior to this may not be closely guarded either.