MH370 pilot made many turns and speed changes, new report reveals
airlineratings.com
airlineratings.com
The ionosphere is a very violent place for an HF radio signal. These radio waves do not travel in a straight line. They don't even come out of the ionosphere with the same polarization as they go in with. I cannot fathom how you could glean anything from a WSPR signal's RSSI.
edit 1: I'm just gonna live-text my thoughts on this as I go through it into this comment. First off, the software that this person developed, GDTAAA, doesn't seem to be available for viewing. Shame because I'd love to see it, but I guess I'll have to go by the paper.
edit 2: "An algorithm is run that calculates an expected received SNR based on the transmitter power and the short path distance" W O W, okay, not even taking into account an estimated noise for the receiving station. Nice. It also doesn't seem to take into account time of day, any of the different propagation modes like gray line, etc, or the wavelength of the transmission. Big yikes.
edit 3: WSPR signals have a transmission length of about two minutes. A 777 travels about 20 miles during that amount of time, and you're trying to use the average SNR of the entire 2 minute period to estimate whether an aircraft crossed the path of the signal. Even if the WSPR signal occupied the entire 20 mile-wide swath of sky that the aircraft was in during the WSPR transmission, the aircraft can only block about 0.2% of that swath at an given moment on account of it being absolutely tiny.
So if we were in a "spherical cow" universe, you could see how this would sort of act like a tripwire. A radio transmitter illuminates a single point in the ionosphere, and a radio receiver looks at that point. If a plane flies along that path, the signal goes dark, and you know something crossed your tripwire.
The sticky bit is that we aren't operating on points, we're operating on a continuum. If you aim your radio beam at the horizon, maybe 10% of the power is 10 degrees above that, and 5% is 20 degrees above that, and so on. The signal is "smeared" in the real world to the extent that it's not a plane-sized beam that is on or off, rather it's a big circle that gets brighter or dimmer as planes fly through it. And the circle is much, much bigger than any plane. I would be surprised if you'd even notice. (That is assuming an ideal one-hop HF setup. I have never heard of people routinely operating WSPR with an ideal setup, usually people use random wires that have very little directionality to them.)
An analogy that you can try right now is getting a camera with a lens that has a large front element (I just tried this with a 90mm f/2.8 lens). Take a picture at the widest aperture. Then stick your big ugly finger in front of the lens, right on the front element, and take another picture. If you look at the second picture, you won't know that your finger was there. There is no obvious finger, or even a finger-shaped shadow. If you compare it to the other picture, maybe you will notice a difference, but maybe you won't. You have to cover a lot of the lens before you notice. (Added fun: consider the 2 minute exposure time of WSPR. Take a picture with a 2 minute exposure time, and walk through the frame midway. Can you see yourself in that picture?)
I have to imagine that using WSPR transmitters is a lot like this. If you take lots of samples, maybe a single tiny airplane will make a difference. The data is technically there. But I don't think the random transmitters and receivers are consistent enough across cycles to be able to get this data from a single sample. (Remember that WSPR is 2 minutes transmit and 2 minutes receive. Does your radio heat up and cool down, shifting the frequency of the local oscillator in that interval? Mine certainly does!)
As I was reading the article, I thought "neat, but I'm not fully convinced" until I read the part where the author thinks he can do this arbitrarily and detect any airplane at any time, and that it is conveniently done with proprietary software that doesn't show up anywhere on the Internet. That caused the alarm bells to go off. I'm going to need a lot more data to be convinced.
Okay, I'm also skeptical. I mean passive radar is a thing but ... at least the presentation in the article appears confused. But if the approach works (whatever it actually is) it should be easy enough to validate it against known flight data for thousands of other flights.
https://hamsci2021-uscranton.ipostersessions.com/?s=EA-94-A8...
https://hamsci2021-uscranton.ipostersessions.com/?s=EA-94-A8...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gc0vVk3XBg
Remember that we're talking about a gigantic hunk of airborne metal, with a mandatory 50 miles of separation from any other gigantic hunk of airborne metal.
With that said, the article is claiming to do this detection without the waterfall plot or I/Q data, using nothing but a single scalar data point (receiver SNR) recorded once every two minutes. That is far-fetched sci-fi. If the WSPR stations were archiving the raw I/Q data at the SDR input, I might believe something useful could be recovered from that.
(It makes WSPR itself all the more impressive, however!)
There is certainly no 50 miles of mandatory separation between aircraft! Horizontal radar separation is 10 nautical miles at most (much less in busy airspace near airports), and vertical separation is 1000 feet.
Of course, the Southern Indian Ocean is very remote and it’s entirely possible that there were no other aircraft within 50 miles of the MH370 flight path.
Over the open ocean, where the MH370 was, there absolutely is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_(aeronautics)#Longi...
> The golden rule is the 10-minute rule: no two aircraft following the same
> route must come within 15 minutes flying time of each other. In areas with
> good navaid cover this reduces to 10 minutes
If you look on Flightradar24, over the Atlantic for example, you'll see several cases where there are multiple planes well within 15 minutes flying time of each other, on the same track, with separation of 2-3 thousand feet vertically.
One example as I write has AA9820 and UA46 following each other at 40,000ft and 37,000ft, at 15nm horizontal separation, and QR740 at 36,000ft about 30nm behind them. When airline traffic is at 100%, you'll routinely see them much closer than that.
There are many routes
I'd imagine there were dozens of aircraft crossing the Indian Ocean around the time MH370 disappeared. If his technique was that good he should be able to demonstrate for any day ending in Y how he can track flight paths compared to ADS-B data from the likes of flightradar24
Points for and against WSPR detecting MH370:
- Jindalee uses huge power: a beamformed antenna transmitting many kW and a beamformed receiver array 3km long (yes, one of the techs who was an amateur did plug his kit into one of the arrays).
- Jindalee uses a very stable timebase, meaning it can detect small Doppler shifts.
+ WSPR has a lot of receivers and transmitters, meaning the target is illuminated from lots of different directions. With the right signal processing, these signals might be synthesised into a large aperture. Are WSPR receivers typically coherent (I/Q)?
+ According to one article, there are 5000+ WSPR transmitters [1]. If each of these is transmitting 5W (what's typical in your experience?), that's 25kW. A useable power for an OTHR radar.
- The WSPRS transmitters have a low duty cycle and are not active simultaneously?
+ By its nature WSPR will sometimes fluke excellent propagation conditions, meaning it will be able to do things that might otherwise require higher power. With a large number of stations giving N^2 propagation paths, what are the chances of some of them being useable?
+ An aeroplane the size of MH370 is quite a big target for an HF radar, with quite a big Dopper shift.
+ By its nature, a received signal will contain information about the channel though which it passed. Minus: chances are this information is filtered out by WSPR's receiver processing.
- Does the WSPR database actually store enough information to post process? Ideally it would need to store the sampled waveform from a coherent GPS locked receiver. It looks as if each record is only a received SNR and a drift (presumably a frequency offset) and a timestamp in minutes?
- Are WSPR receivers typically GPS locked, meaning they might have the ability to measure small Doppler shifts and be coherently combined with each other?
I'd put the possibility of WSPR being able to detect an aeroplane into the "intriguing" category if (huge if) it stored the necessary data in its database. It would be a computational tour-de-force, involving synthesising a large number of WSPR stations into a single aperture, then using that aperture to form bins in range, azimuth and Doppler/velocity, then tracking a target as it moves between bins. Sadly, my guess is that WSPR does not store the necessary data.
(Maybe "intriguing" is overstating it. More "wouldn't it be cool if...")
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-05/malaysia-airlines-mh3...
My station transmits 10 watts (and that's on the high side for WSPR) into an omnidirectional wire antenna. Some WSPR stations use directional yagi antennas but that information isn't contained in the WSPR data. A WSPR transmission lasts around 1 minute 50 seconds but the frequency shift/signal strength is only calculated the once during that transmission (not sure if by averaging). A transmission has to start within a second of the start of an even minute. Some stations are GPS locked but I just click the PTT on my radio to start the transmission while looking at the time on my digital atomic receiver clock.
In answer to your questions some WSPR stations transmit every 2 minutes while others like mine only transmit once or twice an hour.
I'm guessing each station would need to lock its carrier to GPS and transmit as often as possible (10W would probably be okay with lots of stations). Similarly receiver local oscillators would need to be GPS locked (+/- 1ns?) and the receiver be coherent. Processing would need to be based on the raw stream of samples, but with a 6Hz bandwidth one could get away with a sampling rate of about 10 samples/s (Nyquist + a reality factor), each sample being a pair of 16-bit I/Q components. The low bandwidth might limit resolution. The signal processing would be the fun bit. Can all those receivers and transmitters be synthesised into one big array? Could the processing could be done in a distributed manner? Lots of interesting problems.
Apart from being an OTH radar, such a system would be the mother of all ionospheric sounders, as the main difference between a radar/sounder/communications is which features one chooses to extract from the received signal.
Is passive radar a thing in the amateur scene?
This entire article is predicated on the RF reflectivity of ionosphere being stable during its measurement of computerized triangulation, when in fact that the sky was in sunrise mode where the ionosphere starts to fall to a lower altitude.
Such sunrise/sunset transitory phase is never a clean delineation of RF reflection but instead a noisy raster of bounced RF, much like an oversized blanket of aluminum chaff.He says evidence from the pilot's flight simulator reveals the obfuscating journey had been planned in advance.
53 year old Zaharie Ahmad Shah's life was unravelling. The reason we haven't heard the full story is that Malaysia's Air Force doesn't want their role in failing to manage the event to be scrutinised.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-m...
Here's a counterpoint:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-atlantics-william-langewie...
Also the smoking gun simulator session was in a different aircraft to MH370 and with a significantly different initial route.
If the reporting is credible, that's not what was found:
"the track wasn’t really a track — rather, it was a series of brief clips lasting no more than a few seconds each, indicating that Zaharie had programmed it in advance then skipped along it to various points without actually playing through the entire hours-long flight" [1]
>Also the smoking gun simulator session was in a different aircraft to MH370 and with a significantly different initial route.
It was effectively the same aircraft (777-200LR vs 777-200ER). From the ATSB report:
"It comprised four complete and two partial data captures of various aircraft and simulator parameters at discrete points during the simulation. The aircraft simulated was a 777-200LR
The initial data point shows the simulated aircraft at Kuala Lumpur International airport. No useful location data was available from the second data point.
The next two data points show that the aircraft had flown north up the Straits of Malacca. By the fourth data point the simulated aircraft had reached 40,000ft, was in a 20° left bank, 4° nose down, and had a southwest heading of 255°.
Data points five and six were in the far reaches of the Indian Ocean, 820nm southwest of Australia's, Cape Leeuwin, with the simulated aircraft having exhausted its fuel.
Data point five has the simulated 777 at 37,651ft, at an 11° right bank, and almost due south heading of 178°.
The sixth, and final, data point was incomplete. "It was 2.5nm from the previous data point and the aircraft right bank had reduced to 3°.The aircraft was pitched nose down 5° and was on a heading of 193°. At this time there was also a user input of an altitude of 4,000ft," says the ATSB." [2]
Also from the ATSB report: [3]
"Six weeks before the accident flight the PIC had used his simulator to fly a route, initially similar to part of the route flown by MH370 up the Strait of Malacca, with a left-hand turn and track into the southern Indian Ocean."
"There were enough similarities to the flightpath of MH370 for the ATSB to carefully consider the possible implications for the underwater search area. These considerations included the impact on the search area if the aircraft had been either glided after fuel exhaustion or ditched under power prior to fuel exhaustion with active control of the aircraft from the cockpit."
[1] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-y...
[2] https://www.flightglobal.com/atsb-details-mh370-captains-sim...
[3] https://www.atsb.gov.au/media/5773565/operational-search-for...
It all just looks like innuendo, or Bible Code or Nostradamus-style coincidences.
Besides, the two aircraft don't have that much of a difference in fuel burn. A professional 777 captain could certainly figure out how far the fuel on 200ER could get him.
Of course the FS data doesn't prove anything, but I can't see how the aircraft could have ended up where it ended without any input from either pilot. If both pilots died you would certainly expect a more straight flight-path.
In addition, the waypoints of the multiple track segments all have identical values for certain incidental values - something that is highly unlikely unless these segments were all recorded in the same session. This makes it extemely implausible that these segments, which are consistent with what is known of the aircraft's dog-leg track, were created accidentally.
That being said, you can throw out all the simulator evidence and still be left with a very strong case, from the reactivation of the Inmarsat equipment and the turn to the south, that someone was controlling the airplane an hour after it could have reached the airports at Kota Bharu or Penang.
The initial flight path matters least.
He mightn't have known which day and route would present the opportunity, which would also have to coincide with the right frame of mind for him to execute this operation. His opportunity might have depended upon who was assigned co-pilot on the day.
So, whatever initial flight path he took was outside of his control. What was under his control was the part we are trying to understand now - the rest of the voyage, and the destination.
That seems pretty persuasive. The Atlantic article guesses that the simulation was meant "to leave a bread-crumb trail to say goodbye." which seems laughably weak.
The suicide theory is the strongest one in absence of a better explanation.
Given the facts, the suicide theory seems like the leading one by occam's razor.
In addition, Irving has no qualms over speculating when it seems to suit his purpose. He claims that the rational choice for someone wanting to disappear would be to head east, ignoring the fact that one has to go further in that direction to reach the open ocean while avoiding radar.
Irving concludes by making an issue of the fact that the section of flap that washed up in Tanzania was not deployed at the time of impact, which is an utter non-sequitur.
The thing is that once you have compelling technical evidence that the disappearance was not accidental, it is reasonable to speculate about motives, and the weakness of those speculations does not weaken the independent case that it was no accident.
If I understand it correctly, they weren't operating their radar on a 24/7 basis - but don't want to admit that - which is crazy...
He could have simply nose-dived the plane to the water at any point. Why bother with all the evasiveness?
At the time, not a lot of pilots knew about the feature of the satellite communication unit that would allow investigators to estimate a track over the southern Indian Ocean. Without that, nobody would have known where the plane went after it left military radar range.
The maneuvers, radio silence and timing of leaving Malaysian airspace all point to deliberate action. There are questions here like what happened to the cockpit crew.
As for the passengers, the most likely explanation I've seen is that the cabin was depressurized and hypoxia likely eliminated that problem.
Why? The most likely explanation is suicide-by-plane much like the Germanwings incident. It seems like this was even more premeditated such that a lot of effort was made to make sure the plane wasn't found, likely this was so the pilot's family would get a settlement as the pilot's actions couldn't be ruled a suicide without the black box.
Literally nothing else makes sense.
I don't know how long the black box can retain information, particularly given it's likely ~4km under the ocean and by now has been for years. It's a shame the extensive (and expensive) efforts to locate the wreck have all failed. The search area is remote and deep making search operations difficult and expensive.
This too seems to be by design.
It also seems quite likely that investigators having the pings from the plane to narrow down the search area was a flaw in that plan. The pilot was likely unaware of this possibility, which again is more evidence of deliberate action.
I do hope this can be settled one day.
It's also unlikely that a 777 would succeed in making a 'soft' landing in the open ocean. It's not totally impossible in favorable conditions with a skilled pilot, but the odds are against it.
The plane had a fire onboard, which either disabled the transponder or the pilots deliberately disabled power to it as part of fighting the fire. They then turned towards their alternate, but poor crew resource management, the stress of dealing with the problem, and hypoxia impaired their judgement, so they missed their alternate. Eventually, the hypoxia incapacitated both pilots and the plane flew on autopilot till it ran out of fuel.
The most likely source of ignition would be the consignment of lithium batteries it was carrying. A similar situation brought down UPS Airlines Flight 6 and probably Asiana Airlines Flight 991.
In the case of your fire examples, beyond just speaking to ATC, the planes returned to ground (landing or otherwise) within half an hour.
In contrast, MH370 stayed in the air at least 6 hours past the last communication from the pilots, who did not try to contact ATC at any point after leaving their expected flight path.
More damning is the timing of the transponder being turned off. It happened on ATC switchover.
Sully was in a time crunch and still communicated which isn't a super human feat.
If there was a fire in the cockpit of my cessna, I would try my best to suppress the fire and instruct the other pilot to make a mayday call. Communication becomes a bit higher priority when the situation is that dire where no amount of "aviating" would make much difference.
This is one of those things where we never find out the truth unfortunately.
But if we take everything into consideration, three additional turns, direction where the plane went, exact moment when the plane lost it's transponder, ... - the most likely explanation is pilot suicide.
I doubt the automated systems fly plane good if the circuit breakers are all in the "on fire" state.
> The thick smoke required the pilots to communicate with nearby planes over VHF to relay messages to Bahrain ATC, as Bell was unable to see the radio through the smoke.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPS_Airlines_Flight_6
Given that whatever happened to MH370 occurred during an ATC handover (similar to UPS Airlines Flight 6), it's not hard to believe that the following scenario occurred:
* Shortly after the handover from Kuala Lumpur ATC to Ho Chi Minh ATC the crew realise there is a fire on the aircraft
* The pilot-in-command focuses on navigating to the alternate, while the pilot-observing runs through the fire checklist
* As they transit away from Ho Chi Minh ATC they lose range of the signal
* They don't prioritise switching ATC because they're still quite far away from their alternate and they are busily trying to get the fire under control
* Smoke enters the cockpit at this time and hinders their ability to operate the radio equipment
* They either lose track of the alternate because they are distracted by the fire or determine they can't land till the fire is under control (possibly because they cannot contact ATC), so they end up flying across Malaysia
* They eventually realise their error and attempt to turn back, but by this point oxygen in the cabin has depleted and they are unable to complete the maneuver
These sorts of things can happen, the three-person crew of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 were so distracted debugging a faulty light bulb that they didn't notice the autopilot disengaging and their plane slowly losing altitude before crashing. I imagine had the CVR not survived, people might be speculating that a member of that crew may have purposely crashed it.
It's possible, but it is just another in the line of coincidences that would need to happen for it to be something other than deliberate act by someone.
Is there a reason why black box telemetry isn't sent live during the flight? Even if the data the box records is too high frequency (too much data) to send over the air, I would have thought it would be possible to send it less frequently.
It turned out that after the previous (Air France?) loss of aircraft, Inmarsat's operations team/executive decided that they should preserve data about the Burst Timing Offset (BTO) and Burst Frequency Offset (BFO) of every transmission to/from aircraft instead of discarding it as unneeded data (their disks were filling up). That data records the returned ping frequency and timing offset (hence the names) of the plane's transmissions to/from the satellites, even if it's just for a handshake, and no meaningful voice/data content is exchanged.
After all, if a perfunctory handshake message contains no content, why save something as esoteric as the Doppler-shifted frequency you received it back on, or the timing difference?
The executive in charge of that said, impressively, "we didn't exactly know why we might need it in the future, but we thought we should save that data." (paraphrasing, can't quite find the original quote right now)
That frequency + timing offset was the key information in figuring out what radial + distance the plane may have been flying on, for 7 hours after all other systems stopped reporting, based on the hourly handshakes/pings of the sat-phone system. All other data reporting systems had gone offline or out of distance. They tested it against other aircraft (in same geographic area, time, and of same type even!) whose positions were known, and had confidence it was trustworthy enough to base the search areas on.
It was a fascinating read to me at least.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-navigatio...
and more generally:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370_s...
To me the only explanation (except a huge coincidence) is either a stationary plane or of course faulty data.
Nowadays, that could be a GDPR violation.
GDPR only relates to personal data. The data discussed here clearly isn't personal by any stretch of the imagination. This is the same mentality that thinks ordinary website cookies fall under the GDPR. They don't, unless you are using them to track me or identify me (advertisers take a bow), in which case, you need to ask my permission to do so. And so you should.
Also, if you google “are car number plates personal data”, I don’t think anybody can reasonably conclude that is incorrect for car number plates. Certainly, https://sapphireconsulting.co.uk/2020/07/17/is-a-car-registr..., http://www.privacylegal.eu/personaldata.html, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/205002/10379059/DPR-..., https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio..., https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/car_number_plates_per... (to pick a few from google’s first result page) agree car number plates could be personal data.
I don’t see why plane number plates would be different. Yes, few planes are privately owned, but some definitely are, and they store data that can be used to find out where your plane was.
Also, if there is personal data in there, “we didn’t know whether it would ever be used, but started recording this information anyways” clearly is against the GDPR.
So, I stand by my claim this could be a GDPR violation nowadays.
Do you have a link to the leaked report containing the deleted simulation?
From Parent’s link:
> In 2014, a leaked Malaysian police report revealed that among Zaharie’s saved flight simulator sessions was a very odd route which ran up the Strait of Malacca, turned south after passing Sumatra, and then flew straight down into the Southern Indian Ocean before terminating in the vicinity of the seventh arc.
> Not only did the track resemble MH370’s actual flight path, it also contained a number of other intriguing details.
>For example, the track wasn’t really a track — rather, it was a series of brief clips lasting no more than a few seconds each, indicating that Zaharie had programmed it in advance then skipped along it to various points without actually playing through the entire hours-long flight.
——— From op’s link:
> The pilot of MH370 generally avoided official flight routes from 18:00 UTC (2 am AWST) onwards but used waypoints to navigate on unofficial flight paths in the Malacca Strait, around Sumatra and across the Southern Indian Ocean. The flight path follows the coast of Sumatra and flies close to Banda Aceh Airport,”
I still can't imagine how sick a person can be to do this. If he wanted to kill himself he should just have jumped off a bridge.
I'm kinda still hoping it's wrong and there was a proper reason behind this. But either way I hope the families will het some kind of closure.
Not sure though.
Many people have done things like that in history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herostratus), but that's also hard to reconcile with disguising one's role and responsibility and preventing proof of either from being established, isn't it?
It seems difficult for emotionally healthy people to understand how unhealthy people are thinking and acting. I suspect he had some latent genetic triggers and whatever happened in life slowly chipped away at the human part that guards against going code red. If you think about it, I, being a person without covid (hopefully) don't have any clue what it's like to be on my deathbed with covid. If I did, I'd probably act differently.
What scares me about it some is that this kind of inability to understand is what leads to conspiracy theories. Stephen Paddock couldn't have just been a narcissistic vengeful loner that did what he did because he was that depraved. No, there must be a bigger more complex, more ridiculous explanation. Paddock was actually making an arms deal with the Saudis, Of course, being ex-FBI (or whatever) himself, when that deal went wrong to "cover" his tracks he shot up a concert. I mean it is absurd on its face but when you get this dynamic of not understanding how other people behave, you get these almost supernatural explanations.
Of course, you're not doing any of that, just throwing out my 2 cents.
> the human part that guards against going code red
What?
> What scares me about it some is that this kind of inability to understand is what leads to conspiracy theories.
Sorry but this is exactly the sort of speculative leap that you proceed to deride in the rest of the paragraph.
I'm not citing dozens of resources here but I feel really safe in saying that most medical literature on various mental disorders have a large faction of researchers (academic, medical, non-quack, quack) that will say that these mental disorders have a huge genetic as well as environmental compoenent. Please tell me and show me otherwise.
Sorry but this is exactly the sort of speculative leap that you proceed to deride in the rest of the paragraph.
Yes, you're right, but it is also informed by the academic literature on conspiracy theories which is readily available and everyone has access to. Here's a literature review:
Understanding Conspiracy Theories - Douglas - 2019
Sorry to hear it; OCD sucks.
> One of the things you learn through medical treatment by qualified physicians is the general belief that a disorder like OCD has genetic factors.
To say that a human phenomenon "has genetic factors", or that something has "huge genetic as well as environmental component[s]" is nearly meaningless, as there's little about our species' functioning that wouldn't have anything to do, somewhere in the causal chain, with some genetic code being expressed or/and some environmental thing being tripped too. Not to mention that for about 50 years, nearly everything human beings do or say or fart out has been called "genetic" at some point. One needs to say more than that. Or at least, here's a stranger on the internet trying to ask you to do so.
The issue, with OCD and with every other mental disorder, is that we can't really say that much more. Hence my "what?". There are many reasons for this, beginning with the fact that after a lot of money and effort and time, we're nowhere close to being able to define any of these conditions beyond groupings of behaviors that, in someone's eyes, sometimes appear together. In other words, we have no known underlying pathophysiology to refer to, no "lesion" or disease entity we can verify outside of the perception of the sufferer or the observer (friend, coworker, physician). Note that this is not to say that the phenomena aren't real -- they're very real, and people suffer horribly -- it's just to say that the way we talk about constructs like OCD or depression is, in a way, overly confident, whether we're saying they're environmental or asserting their genetic basis on some web forum. We talk about these things as if we know as much about them as we know about the flu, or cancer, or Covid-19, and we simply don't.
Here's a good summation of the state of things from 2013 (it hasn't changed since). And before you shout "quack", know that this comes from the highest levels of "official", mainstream medicine - the kind your doctor listens to. Here's Tom Insel, former head of the NIMH:
> "Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, [mental disorder] diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever."
[At the time he said that, around 2013, Insel began scaring a lot of the bigwigs in his field because he started mouthing off about this and other skeletons in the mental health closet. Here's another one:
> “I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs—I think $20 billion—I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.”]
There's a bigger reason we can't say much, however: the entire project of "genes for mental disorders / mental health / psychiatry" has been a monumental failure. I'd cite a bunch on the matter, but I've written enough to bore everyone here to tears, so I'll just give you what I think is the seminal gloss on this [x], which I highly recommend.
So with mental disorders and genetics, the absence of proof is in the absence of pudding, as it were. This is how I know that you weren't given a blood test, or a genetic test, or a brain scan to confirm your physician's OCD diagnosis - because one doesn't exist. I'm a mental health professional (non-physician), in clinical practice for a decade, and I can't order such a test! (And brother I'm fuckin' dying to!) There isn't any test because we don't know what the thing is beyond "the nature of chest pain", in Insel's words. We have things like this [y], but they don't say that much (see [x] for why), and in that paper's case the authors couldn't even find any good twin studies on OCD to include, leading them to say find only "mixed support for the familial aggregation of OCD" (1573).
What I'm belaboring the point to try and say is (sorry for that) that if we don't know what the thing is - if, in mental health, we're using constructs with extremely little scientific validity - it's very, very hard to say anything concrete about genetic factors, or latent cases, or triggering. Not in the case of OCD, and much, much less so in the case of a very vague "inability to understand", as you put it earlier.
> most medical literature on various mental disorders have a large faction of researchers
We're appealing to "most" and to "general belief" here as a measure of truth? On HN? Come onnnnn
> Yes, you're right, but it is also informed by the academic literature on conspiracy theories which is readily available and everyone has access to. Here's a literature review:
Sorry to say this, but "informed by the academic literature" creates the impression that something very specific has been shown or said on some matter, when in fact what you've shown is pretty vague. They're weasel words.
First, how is what you've said informed by the source you cite? The source you cite sorta says everything and nothing: it's a review, right?, so the authors aren't coming out and making a claim -- they're just telling the reader their view of the state of field w/r/t conspiracy theories, psychology, and politics. And the field seems to say ... well, a bit of everything, if you read the review. All the way from ...
> "Goertzel proposed that conspiracy beliefs comprise part of a monological belief system where these beliefs comprise a self-sealing and expanding network of ideas that mutually support each other"
to ...
> "It is important for scholars to define what they mean by “conspiracy theorist” and “conspiracy theory” because—by signalling irrationality—these terms can neutralize valid concerns and delegitimize people."
In fact, the authors devote a great deal to points of view like this latter quote, making me wonder if the review is making the point you think it's making.
Second, sure, what you've cited is indeed a "review", but no one in political science, psychology, or elsewhere puts much stock in reviews as a category as reliable evidence of anything, at least not sight-unseen. They're a great format, and they're even better for the author (because you learn a shit ton), but they're basically book reports. There are some highly impactful ones in every field, but they're diamonds in the rough. There's a way to do reviews highly rigorously [z], but this isn't doing that. Also, not that impact factors are the be-all and end-all, but this journal isn't at the top of its niche. In fact, this niche ("political psychology") isn't exactly overflowing with Nobel laureates, and it's hard to tell what it's contributed in terms of major, lasting, replicated findings. And that's to say nothing of the major evidentiary crisis in psychology and psychological research in the last ten years concerning replication and scientific rigor -- and that's only research psychology, not even "mental health" or "psychiatry", which are in much worse shape, as I outlined earlier.
[x] Joseph and Ratner, "The Fruitless Search for Genes in Psychiatry and Psychology: Time to Reexamine a Paradigm" in "Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense", Harvard University Press, 2013. The book is here - https://www.amazon.com/Genetic-Explanations-Nonsense-Sheldon... - and you can find it for, uh, cheaper, in your favorite, uh, website. For books. You know the ones I mean.
[y] https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.1...
Perhaps apply the principle of charity and avoid attributing a negative/dismissive/argumentative tone when maybe there wasn't one?
It's not wrong but it's very pedantic and not considerijng that the reason I didn't spell it all out and cite a bunch of sources is because the entire subthread is besides my main point. That shit is exhausting.
Not to make an argument from authority but having dealt with OCD and a lot of caregivers over a decade and having been in graduate level academia for a decade I know a little more about scientific research and how it ideally works than the poster gives any credit for. It's just very rude and not half as smart as it thinks it is.
Yes, I know what a literature review is. I mean, in their words, come onnn.
Then we have the Malaysian government, not wanting to admit to the embarrassment that one of their most experienced, thought-to-be-solid pilots could do something like this, and that they all missed any possible signs that it could happen. As much as we're consciously skeptical of the Malaysian government's report and claims, I bet their words do have a subconscious effect, adding doubt to the murder-suicide theory.
It’s happened before unfortunately :(
Jumping off a bridge seems quite difficult in the moment. Whereas it may be much easier to simply do what you always do, being distracted a bit by the need to execute details (that may feel emotionally innocuous) until you gradually slip across a point of no return and the decision is out of your hands. You could even work on controlling the plane all the way to the water, just as you were trained to until, of course, there was nothing further you could do.
I do imagine that some passengers and crew must have noticed something weird about the in flight maps. Almost the entire flight path is out of phone range though so unless there was satellite internet there would have been nothing any crew could have done. Cockpit doors are armored these days.
This doesn't contradict my vague scenario, but I wrote it after having read the posted article (about the clever ham radio hack) but before reading Langweiche's article which was mentioned in another comment.
Perhaps there should be a device capable of sending a distress signal accessible from the cabin by flight-attendants?
A similar solution could also be applicable to other means of transport. E.g. A similar solution would have been extremely useful for the indonesian submarine lost weeks ago.
Which is one of the elements of MH370 that suggests a deliberate act: it did go almost entirely dark, but for the hourly satellite pings. If the flight recorders are ever found then it may be learned if this was so, and whether it was malfeasance or part of a lost fight against malfunctions/fire.
I think "crew" is the key part here, right? I understand a system like this would be designed in such a way a single crew member could not make a plane go dark -- or make it stay dark after disabling the safety systems. For example, a rogue pilot can manage to turn the beacons off, but any other from the cabin crew can just turn it on again while the pilot is in the cockpit, etc.
I still need to find out which changes this even brought to the entire airline ecosystem.
Giving a flight attendant a backdoor code would make them more susceptible to a hostage situation.. It's one of those damned if you do, damned if you don't situations I guess. There is no perfect answer in the situation where the most trusted person is compromised without compromising security in all the other scenarios.
There are a few theories floating around about how this happened that suggest a possible narrative that explains this. Essentially: by the time the in-flight maps would have shown anything weird, it was too late, and shortly after that, everyone outside the cockpit would have died. My paraphrased version:
Right before Zaharie made his first (unscheduled) turn, he could have gotten the first officer to leave the cockpit, probably by telling him that one of the cabin crew needed to see him in person about something (the first officer was a young rising star in the airline, and likely would have followed his superior's instructions without question). He'd then lock the cockpit door, put on an oxygen mask, and depressurized the cabin, maybe even cutting power to the cabin lights to make things more confusing.
Before anyone could react, he'd start the first turn. Based on simulations done, it was a pretty violent turn, pushing the plane to its limits; the first officer and many/all of the cabin crew would have been on their feet, and would have been knocked around to the point that they may not have been able to get oxygen masks on in time to prevent unconsciousness. Even if any of them, including the first officer, could get a mask on, there's not much they could do. They would assume there was an emergency, but the first officer would be unable to get to the cockpit (locked, plus the need to be tethered to an oxygen mask's supply), and the cabin crew would generally not try to get into the cockpit in that situation, but would attempt to secure the cabin and do their best to manage the passengers.
Most passengers would probably be able to get their masks on (if they were already belted into their seats), but the oxygen in those masks runs out in some surprisingly-small number of minutes: in the event of depressurization the masks are a stopgap measure to keep everyone conscious/alive while the pilot descends to an altitude where the masks aren't necessary, but in this case the pilot intentionally did not do that. Most, if not all, passengers would follow the steps drilled into them by the safety video: put their oxygen masks on, help anyone next to them, and stay belted into their seats. They'd assume that there was a legitimate issue with the plane, not that the pilot was trying to kill them.
Even if anyone noticed the in-flight maps during that time, they wouldn't have much time to puzzle over it, and would likely assume that the weird course was a result of whatever emergency was going on in the cockpit.
I'm sure there is an insurance payout at play as well.
If he thought he could make it look like an accident, it looks "better" (to some people) to die in a freak plane crash than it does to kill themselves (which looks "weak").
The insurance money is probably a better explanation but I think the above psychology would apply to quite a few people who wouldn't want to saddle their family with the perceived embarrassment of committing suicide.
Edit: nevermind you said SAFETY ratings
I don’t think you can make that judgement rising on an aircraft. What is the pilot training and certification. What is their maintenance schedule? How old are their aircraft? What near misses have they had? Those are the types of questions that have more to do with safety than the experience of riding on a flight.
And don't forget about the ones that you never heard about due to a lax reporting culture. Turkey is (in)famous in this regard; you only find out about incidents when they're impossible to hide (like their frequent landing mishaps).
Edit: sounds like it’s based off of amateur radio operators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_(amateur_radio_software)
From the paper [1]:
> The method is based on pattern recognition of anomalies in the radio transmissions between stations in the global WSPR network in the received signal-to noise ratio (SNR) and/or the drift of the received signal when compared to the transmission frequency. These anomalies in transmission links may be due to a number of causes, including an aircraft crossing the transmission path.
That's pretty vague, but it's a start.
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/tvtfw14tfyfljie/Global%20Detection...
There is a database & map of current WSPR activity on all amateur bands. I frequently use it for propagation indicators.
Quite fascinating.
If I gave Godfrey a mountain of WSPR signal data and left him for a day under exam conditions could he reproduce the flight path of a flight I randomly choose? This must have already been done lots of times, to prove the technique?
I am skeptical but at the same time... I Want To Believe.
What would the motive be here?
Leaving any trail would seem to leave enough behind to assume to the pilot was in control....
And yet efforts seem to also be to avoid being detected.
I've seen other theories that indicate they think the plane was flown to avoid being noticed....and yet those also describe a very severe manure too.
I feel like every theory has some contradictions.
Has there been any reliable psychological data on who might have been at the controls?
I feel like that's the simplest explanation, though I am curious about other theories.
https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/media-guidelines...
That they didn't do this (or maybe aren't discussing it) makes me weight this finding as much as any other noisy report of people believing they saw something in the sky.
MH370: The key pieces of debris found by the public - BBC - 2017
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37820122
- Islam doesn't permit voluntary suicide, but there are rewards for funding or committing violence to advance Islam. He could have rationalized the latter.
- the voice and data recorder pingers only have batteries for 30 days, so you'd need to scan the seabed, which is expensive.
Source: commercially-rated pilot who's followed MH370 casually.
I have a hard time not imagining a hijacking / kidnapping.
[1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/malaysia-airlines-plane-mh370-late...