MH370 still a mystery

[RA1]

Special analysis of satellite data has all but conclusively shown that this aircraft is down in the far reaches of the Indian Ocean. Naturally there will continue to be extensive searches for the FDR and CVR aka black boxes. However, they will be very unlikely to reveal why this happened.

It appears that the crew or one of them did accomplish this. Reaching into my own psyche the only thing remotely plausible is the captain was so distraught over the arrest of his "political hero" or some such that he decided to commit suicide and, further, rather than just dive into the sea, flew until the alternatives were exhausted, as was his fuel, and then suffered the consequences. In other words, he just flew until there was no way to rescue the flight or change the ultimate outcome. I consider this a double cowardly act but plausible.

Best regards,

RA1

[Guest hitoallusa]

Not sure why the plane off its normal course had not been detected by air surveillance systems in the diverted flight path is something I don't get. Is it because the plane was in the international waters? Is it possible the plane was accidentally shut down by a third country due to no response from the plane?

[RA1]

hito-

I don't think it was shot down. You are correct in that far out from land there is limited radar and therefore tracking of aircraft. The various military may have a different conclusion but I have never personally seen evidence of this. However, my interpretation of the "news" is that UK surveillance satellites did observe this aircraft during its' final flight but the information was only after "interpretation" and, after the fact.

I hope there is no real time monitoring of everything I do forever. That might inhibit my ID.

Best regards,

RA1

[lookin]

Wonder why they don't transmit moving aircraft data back to some satellite receiver instead of storing it on a 'black box' that may never be found. At least for large commercial aircraft. And, if not all data, then at least GPS coordinates. It shouldn't cost any more than even the occasional massive search like this one. And it may even provide a deterrent if the pilot or hijacker knows it can't be turned off.

I'm sure there's some excellent reason that this information needs to sink to the bottom of the sea, along with the plane, but it eludes me at the moment.

[MsGuy]

...he decided to commit suicide...

I've been wondering about that, RA1. Most folks just wouldn't have it in them to fly the plane into the water. On the other hand flying on past the point of no return is psychologically a much less difficult course of action.

...why they don't transmit moving aircraft data back to some satellite receiver instead of storing it on a 'black box' that may never be found. At least for large commercial aircraft. And, if not all data, then at least GPS coordinates.

Probably they don't require it because they haven't been requiring it. Once it soaks into the FAA's collective consciousness that a lucky GPS ping from one of the engines (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/malaysia/10720173/Malaysia-Airlines-MH370-how-was-it-tracked-down.html) is the only reason they could narrow the search from the entire Indian Ocean to an area the size of Cali west of Australia, they'll probably require a retro fit. My understanding is that an exhaustive lessons learned analysis on every airline incident is SOP on every FAA investigation. That's a big reason flying is so incredibly safe.

Or maybe not. After all, how often does a pilot decide to fly a commercial airliner off to Never Never Land after suffocating a couple of hundred passengers?

[RA1]

Exactly. A recent article asked how well does the FAA know the mental state of pilots? Then they went over a period of about 30 years "reaching" to find only 8 instances. The drivers in the US kill over 30,000 people per year on the ground. When and how should we evaluate their mental state?

I would think it fairly easy for "reverse" GPS signals to know where we are, just as we use GPS signals to know the same. One point is there has been little need to do so in the past. This mysterious instance doesn't really change that.

Best regards,

RA1

[MsGuy]

One point is there has been little need to do so in the past. This mysterious instance doesn't really change that.

Two small quibbles:

1) I don't know how the FAA balances the the equities of cost & rarity vs. the world wide media shit storm that follows a plane flying off to nowhere.

2) Maybe it's like all those copycat shootings in schools, post offices etc. Maybe, even as we speak, dozens of unbalanced pilots (or pilot wanabees) are saying to themselves, "Wow! How cool was that! Bet I could do it even better."

[RA1]

The FAA is very much a political animal, therefore I don't believe they think in the terms you mention at all. Truthfully they have nothing to do with the pilots of Air Malaysia and are only involved as a courtesy or political necessity. The FAA reacts to political pressure from the Congress and, theoretically, is trying to have zero accidents (ala Al Gore and his silly pronouncements). It is quite easy to have zero accidents in aircraft or automobiles. Ground all aircraft and stop all autos from being on the road.

I would tend to agree with you if flying an aircraft was as easy as driving a car as some adverts claim but that is not true. In fact, driving a car (well) isn't that easy, either, else we would not have 30,000+ deaths and untold accidents in US cars per year. Truly there is a multifaceted weeding out process for pilots to include medical exams, the cost of pursuing this endeavor, the review of peers and the intense mental and physical effort necessary to become a pilot. No, pilots are not super human but they are dedicated.

There will always be screwballs, crooks and ne'er do wells in any field but so far not as many in aviation.

Best regards,

RA1

[Guest CharliePS]

If it was a deliberate act by the pilot, I can't help but wonder if he were trying to focus the world's attention on Malaysia for an extended period of time, to humiliate the government. Or did he have a twisted obsession with showcasing the technical weaknesses in the control system, which have been so forcefully exposed by this case? Whatever the motivation, to take with him 238 innocent victims, whose care has been entrusted to him, seems psychopathic, especially if they were aware of what was happening during those several hours. But I doubt that we will ever have answers to any of those questions, without evidence external to the plane.

[RA1]

I would vote for the attention on Malaysia long before proving the "control system" is weak. There is frequent conversation about how much control has already be taken from the captain and crew. It is or was the American way to have pilots think outside the box to solve problems while still in the air. Today, with fewer problems to solve, that authority has been somewhat to quite diminished. Still, pilots have overwhelmingly fought against such as putting cameras in the cockpit. Flying in the US controlled airspace ATC system is very much dependent upon accuracy and adherence to rules and regulations.

Foreign pilots and airlines do not necessarily have the same outside the box culture with which the US has done so well. The Asiana crash at SFO had to be partly caused by a difference in culture.

My opinion is the more rigid the controls the more dependent upon technology we become. When you have a PC that never "acts up" let me know. Then we can have a pilot and a dog in the cockpit. The pilot's job is to watch what the airplane is doing. The dog's job is to keep the pilot from touching anything.

Best regards,

RA1

[TampaYankee]

However, my interpretation of the "news" is that UK surveillance satellites did observe this aircraft during its' final flight but the information was only after "interpretation" and, after the fact.

You are quite right that this information was 'deduced' from the satellite data, however these are not surveillance sats but comsats. Their mission is to pass information around the world. To do that they receive and send data, usually time-tagged, from and to users, respectively. In this case it appears the data was health and performance status of the engines.

This was a reverse satellite orbit determination problem -- something I know a little about. Usually a tracking station records range (distance) data and possibly range-rate (distance rate-of-change) data by receiving that information from the sat transponder or by skin tracking noncooperative sats i.e. bouncing radar signals off the sat. In this case the 'tracking station' was the sat and the object tracked, the plane.

Because the transponder was turned off, the plane was not sending information intended to help with navigation, ie. orbit determination, or more aptly put flight path determination - same thing, different word. However they were able to process i.e. 'back out' some helpful data by mathematically processing time of transmission and time of receipt of the information packets.

If we had three independent accurate range measurements we could locate the plane in three dimensional space, say Lat, Lon and Alt. If we have only two ranges then we can locate its position on a circle in that three dimensional space, hence that first arc that was released with the northern and southern legs. Unfortunately, there was no range data available but the principle is still relevant.

It is also the case that position and flight path can be determined from range-rate information -- how fast the plane is approaching or receding from you. It is more complicated to extract the flight path from range-rate data but is quite do-able and done by NORAD and NASA everyday.

In the absence of range-rate measurements (which is our case here) it does require good timing data and more than back-of-the-envelope calculations, but a capability that the sat company has. The basic idea is that if you know the time of transmission and the time of receipt of the information packet, then difference those times and divide by the speed of light to get the distance from the plane to the sat. That is a range measurement in principle. Three sets of independent time differences yields three ranges in principle. That requires at least 4 'pings' of information from the plane.

However, it is never that simple. The clock on the plane tagging the packets is different from the clock on the satellite recording time of receipt. This yields a timing error which is mostly a constant difference so if you have extra packets (pings) of info that yield extra time differences and thus extra range-rate estimates then you can use that to subtract out the time errors.

In practice NORAD and NASA routinely use tens and often hundreds of range or range rate measurements for routine satellite orbit determination because all measurements have errors and they require accurate results. The effect of those errors are averaged out with the large number of measurements.

In this case INMARSAT had only a handful of 'pings' to deduce 'location' making it unable to do a pinpoint location thus the sizeable search box. Nevertheless, kudos to them for their contribution.

[RA1]

Thanks for that clarification. But, don't you mean ACARS rather than transponder? A Mode S transponder does send all that information (if active and working properly) but not to a com sat but to ATC radar which may have some com sat features.

As I see it the principles you describe are the basic one upon which GPS works and, as you say, good yeoman work to deduce this (but it did take time). Any bets on why the Chinese want to see the exact data?

Best regards,

RA1

[Guest zipperzone]

I would be interested in hearing other member's opinion on the question below.

On a 1 to 10 scale, with 1 being no hope at all and 10 being a certainty that they will, how do you rate the chances of them ever finding the actual plane and recovering the black box?

Personally I would have to give it a 1.

[Guest parisrio2000]

I don't believe that the plane is in the south Indian Ocean, I think that doesn't make any sense. If they "find" anything there it will have been planted by govts. to hide embarrassment or to stop people from worrying...

I think this was a complicated procedure and that govt. resources were necessary to carry it out, i.e., that a state or states were involved in planning this. The purpose was to test US or China response, or possibly to reuse the plane later for an attack.

[AdamSmith]

I think this was a complicated procedure and that govt. resources were necessary to carry it out, i.e., that a state or states were involved in planning this.

Clearly the plane was taken by that secret cabal in Rio to fly their posse of ultra-high-end escorts in fitting style to their various black sites around the world.

[lookin]

I would be interested in hearing other member's opinion on the question below.

On a 1 to 10 scale, with 1 being no hope at all and 10 being a certainty that they will, how do you rate the chances of them ever finding the actual plane and recovering the black box?

Personally I would have to give it a 1.

I'll give it closer to a 10. The ping analysis done by the Inmarsat folks apparently reduced the search area to about three percent of the southern arc, still a large area, but a lot smaller than a few days ago.

I also heard that the aircraft's 'black box' will continue to send out a radio signal for another week to ten days before its battery dies. That seems to be the best window of opportunity for finding the wreckage from a distance and I'm sure there will be a lot of folks trying before that signal goes dark.

After that, I think it will be like looking for a sub in a large area of the ocean floor. The guy who found the Titanic has offered his services and I think his deep-diving submarine is at the scene or on the way.

I'll continue to avoid speculating on what actually caused the plane to go off course in the first place but I think it's noteworthy that, once the plane did change course soon after the last voice contact, it seems to have continued on at roughly the same speed, in the same direction, and at the same altitude until it ran out of fuel. That suggests that there was no human intervention after the initial change of course and soon after the last voice contact, and that would seem to suggest that the pilots were somehow incapacitated and no one else was at the controls either.

A breach of the fuselage, either through an equipment failure, or an explosive device in the cargo hold, would be consistent with the pilots' losing consciousness, along with passengers and crew, but I don't see how such a failure could also have also turned off the various pieces of signaling equipment.

That's where the 'black box' will come in handy and I'll predict that this will be one of the last flights we'll see with all the flight data and cockpit recordings consigned to a single device that has to be located and recovered with fingers crossed.

[TampaYankee]

Thanks for that clarification. But, don't you mean ACARS rather than transponder? A Mode S transponder does send all that information (if active and working properly) but not to a com sat but to ATC radar which may have some com sat features.

As I see it the principles you describe are the basic one upon which GPS works and, as you say, good yeoman work to deduce this (but it did take time). Any bets on why the Chinese want to see the exact data?

Best regards,

RA1

Yes you are quite right. ACARS was the system.

As for the Chinese, I suspect that is mostly for domestic politics and because they haven't been too impressed with the Maylays. However, the Maylays didn't do this analysis, the Brits did. Thus we come back to domestic politics and 'trust but verify'.

[Guest Paragon]

The Maylays didn't call mayday! The Malays didn't either, nor did they do a very good job on the whole thing. I have a friend who took off from the same aiport on the same night, also Malaysian Airlines, who wonders if she encountered any of the fateful passengers and thanks her lucky stars she didn't draw this plane.

Oh, on the 1 to ten guess, I am guessing 4.

[Guest CharliePS]

I think that the plane, or at least parts of it, will eventually be found, but probably not before the boxes have stopped pinging. The ocean in that area can be quite deep, and the weather is making search and recovery difficult, especially now that winter is approaching that part of the earth. This case could take even longer than the two years it took to recover enough of the Air France plane to determine what caused it to plunge into the Atlantic. I followed that investigation with a morbid fascination, because I happened to be flying across the Atlantic that same night, and my flight intersected the path of the Air France flight.

It seems pretty clear that the plane was deliberately turned around and headed back toward Malaysia, but why it was done is a mystery, and the steady flight in one direction for hours does remind one of the Payne Stewart incident, in which it was confirmed that no one was conscious and the plane simply kept going on autopilot until it ran out of fuel. Without the box with the mechanical data, we may never know what actually occurred.

[Guest hitoallusa]

Well I give to 8. They found wreckage of Air France flight after two years if I am correct so it will take time but I am hopeful.

I would be interested in hearing other member's opinion on the question below.

On a 1 to 10 scale, with 1 being no hope at all and 10 being a certainty that they will, how do you rate the chances of them ever finding the actual plane and recovering the black box?

Personally I would have to give it a 1.

[ihpguy]

I'm with RA1 with whatever he thinks.

Last night on Piers Morgan and his guests, the varied opinions made my head spin more than HITO trying to choose a pair of CFM pumps for a night on the town.

[Guest hitoallusa]

Oh my what an improper statement for a southern lady! I will simply interpret CFM as Chic, Fabulous and Magnificent pumps.. I dream about what I am going to put on my wedding though.. It changes all the time. I don't usually go out at night though, good guys actually don't hang out at bars..

I'm with RA1 with whatever he thinks.

Last night on Piers Morgan and his guests, the varied opinions made my head spin more than HITO trying to choose a pair of CFM pumps for a night on the town.

[ihpguy]

CFM = Shelley Winters said it first HITO: COME FUCK ME!!!

...and BTW, I am no southern lady, I am a man who likes and needs a man for sex, in all ways, shapes and forms.

[ihpguy]

Back to MH370, I'm still trying to figure out the climb to 45,000 then the dive to 12,000 then back to cruising altitude. Mixing in there somewhere, two basically 90 degree turns. They had a 777 pilot on who posited that at one point the pilot/co-pilot might have been headed to MH's maintenance base at Penang, but for some reason kept on flying until the fuel ran out. He thought that if they were wearing oxygen masks, they might have forgotten to press that transmit buttons on the side of the masks in order to communicate. Seems as logical as anything else. Although the climb and rapid descent and then climb back to cruising altitude still remain unexplained.

[Guest hitoallusa]

I have seen on PBS something about micro or satellite polar shift/reversal.. Maybe that happened during the flight? But it doesn't explain why the communication devices were off though.. hmm..