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Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Experts Unable To Replicate Inmarsat Analysis
McGruber (1417641) writes "The lynchpin of the investigation of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has been the pings from the plane to one of Inmarsat's satellites. The pings are the sole evidence of what happened to the plane after it slipped out of radar contact. Without them, investigators knew only that the plane had enough fuel to travel anywhere within 3,300 miles of the last radar contact—a seventh of the entire globe. Inmarsat concluded that the flight ended in the southern Indian Ocean, and its analysis has become the canonical text of the Flight 370 search. It's the bit of data from which all other judgments flow—from the conclusive announcement by Malaysia's prime minister that the plane has been lost with no survivors, to the black-box search area, to the high confidence in the acoustic signals, to the dismissal by Australian authorities of a survey company's new claim to have detected plane wreckage. But scientists and engineers outside of the investigation have been working to verify Inmarsat's analysis and many say that it just doesn't hold up."
really?
The aircraft did not crash; it was hijacked by the US Government, and flown to Diego Garcia under remote control after all the passengers were killed by asphyxiation at 45,000 feet. After landing the plane was refuelled, its logos painted over/covered up, and its valuable cargo (next generation radios with SDR technology) removed. It then took off again and flew on to its final destination--probably Kandahar, Afghanistan--where it will be outfitted with a large bomb (read: nuke). It will then be flown into an American city to cause a 'false flag' attack which will be blamed on Iran, North Korea, etc, as a casus belli for World War 3.
I would tell you more but som....hang on, there's a knock at the door.
The author of the article claiming that experts cannot replicate the data appears to be the editor of a social science / STS journal, not by training an engineer. Although I don't myself know enough about the subject to be able to refute either the Inmarsat claims or this article's refutation, I think it's notable that the people supporting the claim are engineers who specialize in satellite stuff, while the person refuting the claim is what appears to be a philosopher; I'd also add that the author portrays himself as an "investigator working on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370", but this appears to be a self-assigned title rather than his position as part of any formal or professional investigation. Looking at the scholarship of the journal he edits, it appears to have some level of rigour--IE it does not appear to be a vanity publication, so I'm not trying to cast out the guy as a crank, just to caution that I think the strength and balance of the headline and the post here place an awful lot of confidence in the article's credibility.
If Inmarsat haven't released all of the data used in the analysis, why is anyone surprised that they can't recreate it?
Not so. These critics may or may not be correct when they raise several issues, including the plane seeming to be moving at a good clip before it was taking off. But on the most critical of factors, they're totally wrong:
"Recall that the Marco-Polo math alone doesn’t allow you to tell which direction pings are coming from. So how could Inmarsat claim to distinguish between a northern and southern path at all? The reason is that the satellite itself wasn’t stationary."
No, the slow drift of the satellite wasn't a factor. I've yet to hear Immarsat formal statement of their rationale, but their graph shows quite clearly what it was. Their reasoning hinges on the fact that the plane began its deviant flight above the latitude of the satellite. That is quite important.
If the plane flies northward along a relatively fixed course, the doppler shift will aways show it moving away (down doppler). However, it the plane flies southward on a steady course, there'll be a short time (one ping it turns out) when it is approaching the latitude of the satellite and thus giving a more up (or less down) doppler. That's what you see in the Immarsat chart. Once the aircraft has crossed the satellite's latitude, then its southward path will have it traveling away from the satellite just like the northern route. It's that notch DOWN at between 18:30 and 19:30 followed by a rise upward that says southbound.
That said the critics do raise some relevant issues and they do point out the Immarsat needs to release a detailed report with all their reasoning, so it can be more intelligently critiqued.
40K people die every day of hunger and the while the USD 60M or more that were spent so far on this stupid search couldn't have prevented that, it would have helped a lot of people have another chance.
Either you say you care about the lives of people and then you just shake your head about this pointless waste of money or you don't care and then you wouldn't care about ML370 either. But you unless you're related or friends of anyone onboard that flight, you're just a for caring about the lives lost there and not about the people that die every day of hunger, war, and such...
Peter.
I think it's pretty interesting that a number of devices detected pings, but there is apparently (as per the article) nothing was found in the area where they heard the pings.
So what did they hear? How can you get a false positive on a listening device looking for a specific frequency?
I wonder if instead of just sending out pings, a black box when hitting water should send out a burst of broad spectrum very high powered radio waves that satellites around the globe could detect...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The satellite transponder is just an amplifier and a modulator, things go up one frequency and come down another frequency and louder. The satellite and the transmitter are in motion relative to each other and the receiver. Hence there is Doppler and my understanding is that the analysis of the Inmarsat data was based on this Doppler. So does Inmarsat record and retain sufficiently detailed information about every signal sent through their satellites such that they can deduce their findings from analysis of played back signals, or are they managing the receiver in this case and analyzing the log from the receiver.
Nullius in verba
In a world where spy satellites have 1m resolution, the fact that no country says they found anything within a few days, speaks loudest.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Sounds like the next time we'll hear about mh370, the plane will be on its way to a building near you...
There is a claim that would seem to open the door for that.
BREAKING: Lt. Gen. McInerney Says #MH370 Is In Pakistan – ‘I Got A Source That Confirmed It Yesterday’
Hopefully it is just another conspiracy theory.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Like the signal reflecting off the ocean below instead of coming directly from the aircraft.
The only sure way to is to duplicate the flight path with a similar size aircraft using the same Engines and monitoring stations, using similar SAT positions. Only this time use a plane with extended range 777-200LR(verses missing 777-200ER) with minimal payload&maximum fuel and/or safely replicate the flight path in sections.
Use the resulting SAT/GPS data to help calibrate mh377 final resting spot.
Following the pings was a good method. The assumption made, as far as I can tell, was that there was no change in the flight path after the last ping was received. So we do not know that the methodology was wrong. In this the 'correctness' of the methodology would not be reproducibility, but success in locating the plan. So, on this case it appears the method may be 'not correct' but that is not necessarily because the analysis is invalid, but because the assumptions are incorrect. If a new analysis on the data can be done, and that analysis locates the plan, then we will have a test of validity. Otherwise we don't know. One assumption we can make with some small level of confidence is that someone was deliberately diverted the plan. It is likely reasonable to assume that other attempted to take back control of the plane, and it went down underacted long before fuel ran out. This may have happened along the extrapolated flight path, or anywhere in the indian ocean. I think a land crash of the plane would have been reported by now. A control landing would have resulted in whatever action those who commandeered the plan were intending. It is all guess work and assumption, and one starts with simplest model adding complications as needed.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
They are already writing their books, guaranteed
One thing to note, Georesoance did NOT find a plane. Further investigation into the company (though skipped over by the media outlets that got suckered by them) showed them to be just another shell company run by people with a long history of pseudoscience scams. They buy up defunct exploration companies in order to reuse the name, bilk some small investors that are eager to buy into the idea that a small pluky company has magic technology that 'the establishment' does not believe in.. usually ending up much poorer for the experience.
So basicly the media got fooled by some high tech psychics who normally would have been dismissed completely but somehow got just enough attention to be taken seriously.
Because next time there's a fire in the transponder circuits, the victim's families will be demanding it be put back in at great expense.
The rest of the explanation is that the crew were overcome by smoke/fumes. (They're supposed to have independent (bottled) oxygen supply, but it's happened before.) The aircraft flew on autopilot on the last entered heading until it ran out of fuel. (Which has also happened before.)
Why didn't they call a mayday earlier? The rule of thumb for pilots is: Aviation/Navigation/Communication. First you get control of the aircraft, understand what is happening. Then you work out your position/course and heading (actual and intended). Then, and only then, do you worry about telling anyone about it. If they were caught between "Navigation" and "Communication", that would explain their actions and their silence.
You are probably scoffing and going "Bah, what are the odds of that!" But your alternative scenarios are "Plane was hijacked by... conspiracy... secret landing... passengers killed/being held.... etc..."
So the contrast is, "Thing which has happened to aircraft several times before", versus "Bizarre conspiracy by shadowy forces". I prefer the odds of the former until there's actual evidence of the latter.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
We still don't know what was in the cargo hold or if there was a billionaire on board. Did that plane have a richer suite?
We do know that Freescale Semiconductor, a US technology company having ties to both the Bush family and the Bin Laden family, had 20 senior staff on board Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. They had just launched a new electronic warfare device for military radar systems in the days before the Boeing 777 went missing, which caused it's stock prices to nearly double in the month prior to the crash; stock prices which have been steadily declining towards their previous levels since the bluefin failed to find wreckage.
Does that count?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
That theory is dumb on so many levels. First of all, "stealing" an aircraft is a ridiculous idea since to take off again with it requires too much cooperation from too many international parties for it to be feasible at all (there's a reason why aircraft don't have locks on the doors...). Second, if you wanted to use an aicraft for nefarious purposes a stolen widebody would be the worst choice ever. A small corporate jet would be the easiest to file an unusual flight plan for since the uber rich are reclusive and eccentric so that way you might get slightly closer to your target before any alarms are raised. Not to mention that any in-flight intercept would see just what's been filed and not the most wanted 777 in the world. And finally, there are much, much easier ways to get your hand on an aircraft if you have access to the same resources as would be needed to steal an aircraft in-flight (because that and maybe being swallowed by a black hole are the two theories that can be excluded completely). There are plenty of old aircraft that are practically given away if you have the resources to come and get them. Faking that paperwork is not a problem, if you have the same resources that you must have to get a stolen plane to take off. Old aircraft are so abundant because aircraft never get "too worn to fly" since they're maintained properly even in the third world due to international regulations. They only stop making economic sense to fly because new aircraft consume so much less fuel and at that point the old aircraft in perfect condition are nevertheless worthless.
Couldn't one look at the satellite ping data from MH370 from a week earlier or whenever the latest "good" flight was and compare ping data of the doomed flight? Also look at ping data from a flight that matches close to the flight path of the projected path of the doomed flight and see if satellite ping theory is actually plausible. That's one way to narrow down the possibilities.
I doubt they "lied" about the last cockpit words. At first they said it was "all right, goodnight" then they said "goodnight Malaysian three seven zero" Their inability to get it right the first time is just incompetence. They have shown themselves to be incompetent from the start. That's all this is.
soylentnews.org
The article is irrelevant since the ocean floor around the pings is still being searched.
Since the article can't even get a basic fact correct, I don't even trust their analysis.
FTA:
But now the search of 154 square miles of ocean floor around the signals has concluded with no trace of wreckage found. Pessimism is growing as to whether those signals actually had anything to do with Flight 370. If they didn’t, the search area would return to a size of tens of thousands of square miles.
The link the article uses to "prove" that says something different:
The hunt for a missing Malaysian passenger jet entered a new phase as an international team abandoned its aerial search and said efforts to find wreckage on the ocean floor may take as long as eight months.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
It looks like slashdot just linked to another conspiracy theory. Please quit doing that.
Until officials provide more information, the claim that Flight 370 went south rests not on the weight of mathematics but on faith in authority
Wasn't the main evidence against a northern path the fact that the plane would have to have flown over some (unlike Malaysia) heavily monitored airspace?
The company claimed that they have confirmed their methodology using data from other airplanes flying in similar area.
No sig today.
You need a pretty magic fire to knock out most of the electronics
That's not what was said. Learn to read.
First step when the pilots identify an electrical fire is to pull the breakers. (If it works, you reintroduce them one at a time until you isolate the fault.)
Second step is to turn towards a suitable landing site. The closest runway had an approach over mountains, so the pilots seem to have turned to an airport with a more open approach, then changed course again a little later (suggesting the issue had become more serious), they may also have increased altitude to try to starve the fire. That seems to be their last intentional manoeuvre.
There may have been a depressurisation during the climb (caused by the fire), pilot error, or some other screw up. Most accidents have a primary cause, but a bunch of other stuff going wrong. AF-447 was initially caused by a faulty air-speed sensor, but ultimately a series of mistakes by the pilots killed the plane.
there's no question that a small fire could burn for hours
MH-370 had only just taken off. Pilots who've discussed this are thinking nose wheel-well fire filling the cabin with toxic smoke. The question is why the pilots didn't use their own oxygen supply. (They might have delayed turning on the main cabin oxygen, fearing feeding the fire (a la SAA 295), but why delay using their own supply?) Bad decision by the pilots, or flaw in the 777?
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
None of the electronics went off before their last communication. Where is your source for that? There were alot of blogs that assumed that since the last Acars signal was at 1:07 am and the last communication, "Good night Malaysian three seven zero", was at 1:19am it was turned off. However that means nothing since Acars works in 30 min increments so it's next message wouldn't have been till 1:37 am. The system could have failed anytime between 1:19am and 1:37am.
Cell phones would not have been able to work at that distance and speed.
The flight's satellite phones wont work if eletronics are off.
The number of suitable hangars with suitable runways to land on nearby is pretty limited. Maybe all of them should simply be checked.
That's been considered, and I assume the checks would already have been completed.
You can see all the known runways on this map: http://i.imgur.com/Iwa6Ali.jpg
The rest of the discussion here is interesting as well. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
In a Boeing 777 there are circuit breakers for the cockpit voice recorder & the flight data recorder however they do not stop them from working. Once the breaker is tripped they switch to their internal battery supplies. Both boxes contain batteries to power themselves since they each have sonar beacons used to locate the boxes in an underwater crash.
Far 25 25.1459 states that "Any single electrical failure external to the recorder does not disable both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder." So disabling the bus on these box wouldn't have been enough.
More specifically, it collapsed as though the FIRST floor could no longer support the weight of the entire building on top of it. You can see that in the videos.
You can see the exact same thing in your kitchen if you have a gas stove. I know it's more fun to read spy stories than to actually try an experiment, but just know that I'm going to ignore any replies from you until you try the experiment yourself.
Go get a few wire coat hangers or similar metal wire, and some pans. In your kitchen, set up some wire supports to hold a pan four inches above the flame. Try to make the supports symmetrical, like the way a professional building would be designed. Pretend that the wire costs a million dollars per inch, so you'll use the minimum amount of wire necessary to hold the pan up. A bundt cake pan or something with a central opening would be the best simulation, simulating the center elevator columns.
Also keep in mind WTC 7 was tricky to design because the first couple of floors were built around / over an existing power station, so it was designed to use fewer, stronger supports than most buildings would. (You can't put a 40' wide support column right through a part of the power station).
Once the first pan is in place, add three more "floors" (pans), so you have four or more floors, each a few inches apart.
Now tturn the fire on high and wait 5-15 minutes. What Wil happen is that the heat will soften the metal supports just a bit at first, then more so as they heat up. At some point (as high as 500-600 degrees), they'll get soft enough that they collapse under the weight of all those pans. The stack will drop, just like WTC 7.
I KNOW yyou want to argue with me right now. That's cool, you can do that. But first, go in your kitchen and give it a try. Then you can argue from actual knowledge as opposed to repeating silly ghost stories about topics you're unfamiliar with.
The "molten" stories trace back to two original sources. One is describing what they saw, the other is describing a photo. Both refer to red hot beams in the days after. An exact quote is "lifting a molten steel beam". Obviously if it were truly molten, it wouldn't be a beam anymore and noone would be lifting it.
This makes sense, because there's nothing that would maintain molten steel for weeks. About the only things that could do that would be certain types of fault lines or an underground coal seam. Some silly people who have clearly never messed around with thermite have mentioned thermite as if it had some magical properties. From someone who HAS made thermite, I can tell you it burns several milliseconds, not several weeks. That's how it gets so hot - by releasing all of its energy quickly.