Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of flight MH370? (2021)
admiralcloudberg.medium.com
admiralcloudberg.medium.com
>The Malaysian investigators did look into whether the cargo could have started a fire, noting that it consisted mainly of ripe mangosteen fruits along with a small number of lithium batteries. Extensive attempts by the investigators to get mangosteen juice to react with the batteries and trigger a fire were unsuccessful.
I'm sure plenty of people here have spent time wracking their brain on a hard problem and the image of a bunch of transportation investigators dousing batteries with juice in a late-night fit of desperation really gets me.
SENIOR OTL-QA-TEPH
Interesting that in at least one situation, the Air Force really did use frozen chickens to be extra-sure of the canopy durability.
The FAA has at its disposal a unique device for measuring the strength of aircraft windshields, in case of a collision with birds at high speed (which happens not so rarely). This device is a powerful pneumatic cannon that shoots a chicken carcass into the windshield of an airplane at a speed approaching the cruising speed of a civilian aircraft (for jet aircraft, this is approx. 800 km/h, for piston engines in the 1950s this figure was probably smaller, maybe 400-500 km/h). According to the theory, if the glass can withstand a collision with a chicken at such a speed, then it should all the more withstand a real collision with a bird in flight.
A certain British engineering company developing high-speed trains borrowed this gun from the FAA to test the strength of the windshield of its a new high-speed train. The cannon was brought to England, installed at the landfill, loaded with a chicken carcass and fired at the prototype train.
The result exceeded all expectations: the chicken broke through the glass, broke the back of the driver's seat and got stuck in the back wall of the car. The British sent test results to FAA and asked them if they had done everything correctly and if the gun was hitting too hard. After studying the description and consequences of the test, the answer was sent by telegram immediately: "Next time, defrost the chicken."
This paper shows test impacts of a 1kg steel hemisphere, which damage the windscreen but don't shatter it.
However one morning the test results were rather more "messy" than they were expecting. They had no clue what had gone wrong, so they reviewed the high-speed footage to see the chicken leave the barrel along with a stray cat that had been chewing on it when the cannon fired...
In general, onboard fires are one of the most dangerous scenarios in-flight, as I understand it. Crews are trained extensively for it.
I think this is, in part, what the analysis in the article concludes — even a fire would have to cause a very specific, never-before-seen combination of failures to lead to the outcomes observed from the outside.
The other day learned about farmers drying hay before stacking it, because (who would even imagine this?) it turns out stacks of hay can catch fire if there is too much moister in them, due to a biological chemical reaction.
Have to say the simulator part makes me lean heavily towards the pilot crashing it purposefully, from the article -
"The most widely reported piece of evidence tying Zaharie to the disappearance was a course he had charted on his home flight simulator about a month before the crash. Zaharie had a number of hobbies, including paragliding and flying model airplanes, but he also spent a lot of time at home on his computer playing flight simulator games. He sometimes uploaded videos of himself playing on his YouTube channel, where he comes off as affable and knowledgeable, if a bit socially awkward.
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. Furthermore, although initial reports indicated that the track had been intentionally saved by the user, later analysis showed that it was kept only in the system files, and certainly was not meant to be found. Was this a dry run? It seems too odd to be a coincidence."
Also discovering that black box is a misnomer is mildly humorous, these are apparently orange! - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_recorder
"Black box" in the sense that you are describing is an unrelated term.
> Wikipedia values accuracy, but it requires verifiability. Wikipedia does not try to impose "the truth" on its readers, and does not ask that they trust something just because they read it in Wikipedia. We empower our readers. We don't ask for their blind trust.
You see a lot more cases of people quoting Wikipedia on a topic than talking about Wikipedia's trustworthiness because it adds a second dimension. It's [Wikipedia, Topic] vs. [Wikipedia].
I might look up 100 different things on Wikipedia. The fact that Wikipedia has all sorts of flaws is something I only needed to learn once.
The orange box is the cockpit voice recorder.
First, successfully ditching an aircraft at sea is the ultimate test of piloting skills, and possibly one difficult to resist for the ego of a seasoned captain on his final flight.
Second, it seems out of character for a meticulous pilot to just let the aircraft slip out of his control and crash haphazardly at the very end of a carefully-plotted sequence of murderous steps.
Third, a ditching would better obfuscate the final resting place of the aircraft compared to an uncontrolled dive, as it would result in fewer scattered debris floating away.
Just some fun speculation on what's written in the original article, not like we'll ever know for sure.
I know I did a lot of poor flying….
Navigation is also a big part of the job. if you assumed you had to turn off parts of your nav equipment to avoid detection, then visual reference (ie flying the path to visually memorise/familirise yourself with wayppoints) would be something you'd certainly do - and a flightsim would be perfect for this.
I mean I'd still like to try out the new MS Flight Simulator because it's impressive technology.
I'd be curious which parts of the flight path those clips represented. Were they at important navigational landmarks? Were they nice vistas, places he wanted to see before a suicidal plunge? If they were only a few seconds each, that might indicate that he was checking those points for intentional reasons, rather than for fun.
> In the interest of knowing where every plane is at all times, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) began requiring that all airliners manufactured after the 1st of January 2021 include autonomous tracking devices that broadcast their location once per minute.
This is not to say MH370 was without incident, only that apparent contradiction may be unavoidable if you look closely enough at anything.
In the case of MH370, this is why I always found the simulator history of the pilot the most relevant. It doesn't require this long chain of relationships like some other things. It is the most impactful person recently doing something related to the event that is extremely weird behavior.
This was also relevant in that Airbus crash from maybe 15 years ago between South America and Africa.
This is not a problem on the main to/from North America routes because there are enough populated islands along the way (Iceland, Greenland, Hawaii, Guam, etc)
Radar (both primary and secondary, i.e. transponders) as well as ADS-B require line-of-sight, and oceanic air traffic control has to make due without that, which means operating either via ADS-C (i.e. planes self-reporting their position, autonomously determined via GPS or inertial navigation, via satellite communications) or effectively dead reckoning, augmented by occasional position reports via HF radio, which is called procedural control:
https://www.navcanada.ca/en/air-traffic/space-based-ads-b.as...
It's a very exciting technology, sure, but I think it's many years of testing and flawless operation as a secondary data source away from replacing ADS-C on oceanic routes.
Most of the South Pacific / South Atlantic / Southern Ocean (Antarctic); a lot of the North Pacific / North Atlantic / Indian / Arctic outside of the major islands and direct routes has nearly no coverage.
(And this is if you're a jet flying at high altitude. If you're down where smaller aircraft fly, I can point to areas on the US west coast that don't have radar or radio coverage. Heck, there's parts of the mainland US that don't even have NEXRAD weather radar coverage.)
Is that a good comparison, though? It seems like NOAA funding for the NEXRAD sites is perpetually inadequate. The one in Portland occasionally has outages that last a while. I would have guessed that civilian air control radar is better funded than NEXRAD, and military radar probably so well funded that every square inch of CONUS is covered by at least one.
The limiting factor is geography. Radar coverage in the US is excellent, but the mountains out west make universal coverage hard, and there's some areas that just aren't cost effective to cover.
At 40,000 MSL, yes, everything in the US is covered. Below 10,000 MSL though, there are definite gaps - especially in the mountainous west. It's just physics, the mountains block the signal, and filling in all the gaps is cost prohibitive. Instead, they just tell aircraft to fly higher if they want radar service.
As for outages... ATC radar goes out all the time. You just never hear about it because they either switch to an adjacent, (slower) en-route radar site as part of CENRAP [2], or fall back to procedural control (voice position reports on the radio). Redundancy is baked into the system at many levels, both technical and human.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Surveillance_System
[2]: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/9464/what-is-ce...
ATC radar is line of sight. At an altitude of 40,000 feet, you're beyond the radio horizon and lose coverage after about 380 miles - and that's the theoretical best case.
Oceanic air traffic control is primarily a non-radar environment, using procedural separation. Even over land, most of Canada (outside major cities and the airways between them) doesn't have radar coverage. There's a map showing the gaps here: http://ilanreich.com/Public_Pics/Alaska/Section%20One.htm
(The military does have over-the-horizon radar, but that's mostly used for missile defense. OTH radar isn't used for air traffic control.)
They are not used for air traffic control or other safety-critical purposes.
So it's not going to help at all in a MH370 scenario.
True, but that is ultimately the case for all flights outside of primary radar coverage.
These absolutely can be used for air-traffic control. ADS-B has better temporal resolution than radar, and ADS-C is at least as good as manual position reports over the radio (used for procedural control over oceanic/non-radar airspace).
However, it's worth noting that these aren't really "transponders" (in aviation, that usually refers to beacon used for Mode-A/C secondary radar). Also, these are all active systems, dependent on the aircraft's electrical bus and easily disabled. In the case of MH370 the transponder _was_ powered down for some reason.
The only system that the pilot can't turn off is primary radar, but again, coverage for this system is limited once you leave populated areas.
ADS-C is a two-way communications protocol; ATC can request a certain update interval and I believe also boundary conditions requiring extra location transmissions. If that communication fails, both the ATC and pilot are informed about the fact, and they can reliably switch to other means of communications (e.g. voice position reports over HF).
> These absolutely can be used for air-traffic control.
ADS-B is (at least for now) mostly an augmentation of primary and secondary surveillance radar, as well as something to give other aircraft better situational awareness (via ADS-B in), as I understand it. I don't think either ATC nor pilots are currently relying on it for safety-critical decisions.
The big problem is that it's always possible for some plane's ADS-B transmitter to fail (maliciously or otherwise). On land, you have secondary or primary radar to fall back to.
This applies doubly so to third-party (i.e. non-ATC/non-AOC) satellite-based relaying services, since not only the ADS-B transmitter can fail in that scenario (and ADS-B was not originally designed to be received by satellites), but the relay service could fail as well, and the failure mode would be much less visible to both parties than in ADS-C.
This matter isn't entertainment fiction, and nobody involved is Sherlock Holmes.
Hundreds of people died. Amateurs publicly casting blame on one of the presumed dead seems unfair to the individual accused, and insensitive to the families.
Especially when it depends on bits like this:
> How these aspects of Zaharie’s life could have led him to commit an unspeakable act of mass murder is difficult to understand. But while he was said to be an affectionate and emotionally sensitive person who loved life, perhaps something dark lurked within him, something which he suppressed so thoroughly that no one else knew it was there. It is said that the people who seem happiest are sometimes also in the deepest agony, struggling against demons that they never reveal even to their closest friends.
Why not leave this real, recent tragedy to the professional investigators.
> The official report also did its best to paper over a number of failings that contributed to the plane not being found. In addition to the long delay in informing authorities — caused by missteps at the Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh City control centers, as well as at Malaysia Airlines — criticism should have been levied at the Malaysian military. Why didn’t they intercept the unidentified aircraft as it was crossing the north of the country? The military claimed it was because the plane wasn’t a threat. But how could they have known that unless they had identified it as MH370, rather than a foreign incursion? And if they had identified it as MH370, why didn’t they tell anyone until days after the crash? The most likely explanation was that the military simply wasn’t monitoring its own radar at the time that the plane flew through Malaysian airspace. But admitting this would expose a massive security vulnerability by revealing Malaysia’s military to be dangerously incompetent. Probably for national security reasons, the official report had nothing to say about this at all.
Seems like this is a pretty serious omission.
and
> Zaharie’s social life was also not as smooth as Malaysian authorities portrayed it to be. A combination of the leaked police report and interviews with people who knew him revealed that he had separated from his wife on an informal basis and was living alone in the family home.
So in essence Malaysian police were obfuscating the facts around the pilot, for whatever reason they may have. Perhaps they concluded based on further research that the pilot was probably guiltless. But whatever the reason, we do know that what they said in public diverges from what they found in private.
It seems to me that independent investigation and open source intelligence of this kind can be useful when there may be reasons for the official investigators to cover up certain parts of the story.
Lastly, I think there is a substantial difference between a crowd of people online with no real investigatory track record accusing someone (a la Sunil Tripathi) in the days/hours/minutes after the incident, and someone with a proven track record of credible investigatory reporting and some subject matter expertise, laying out some mixture of facts/theories/conclusions (that have already been circulating online) ten years after the fact.
People love to misuse this quotes. Even if Holmes said this, usually it is proven, and with evidences.
It only works if every possibilities are discovered or accounted for. It's wrong to simply disprove all of other possibilities that only some people can account for.
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I cannot believe that a "kill everyone" switch actually exists, and if it really does this seems like a bug. Especially because not hitting the switch would also kill everyone.
Yes, used incorrectly or maliciously, in the right circumstances, it can do so.
By the same reasoning, a huge percentage of the controls and switches in the cockpit can also have the same result.
Just disconnect the fuel to the engines, or push the control stick forward.
It’s a fricken giant metal tube flying through the air!
Passengers would've had their oxygen masks deploy, which works in normal circumstances, but they only last 12 minutes; intended to give the crew time to descend. When the pilot has no intention of taking that measure, you're screwed pretty fast, but they could fly into a mountain too if they felt like it.
Don't know if you said that with this crash in mind or not, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
Fundamentally, if the pilot of an airliner wants to crash, they will be able to crash.
With very rare exceptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber
Also, there are other situations where you may be inclined to disable bleed air, such as in a fume event where an engine is releasing turbine oil into the bleed air stream due to a mechanical failure or fire.
[1] https://www.flightglobal.com/g150s-pressurised-door-fatally-...
I mean, that's literally what I wrote.
But also, _not_ using the lever during landing would also kill everyone. Wild stuff.
This switch, just like all others, has very legitimate use cases.
For whatever reason, this doesn't seem to be widely discussed.
Sometimes I wonder whether some officials are trolling the conspiracy theory people, by editing something without even changing anything, just so people can freak out over it. Or give overlay specific denials just so people go "aha, they only said they never negotiated with Aliens from Mars, not that they didn't meet Aliens from Mars, nor that they didn't negotiate with Aliens from Pluto".
"At approximately 1:14 (a minute, 14 seconds into the audio, which can be heard here), the tone of the recording change to where to me, it sounds like someone is holding a digital recorder up to a speaker, so it's a microphone-to-speaker transfer of that information. That's a pretty big deal because it raises the first red flag about there possibly being some editing," he said.
The next part that raises questions is two minutes, six seconds in, through two minutes, nine seconds in, he said.
"I can hear noise in the room, along with the increase in the noise floor. I can hear a file door being closed, I can hear some papers being shuffled. so I'm further convinced that, beginning at 1:14 continuing through 2:06 to 2:15, it's a digital recorder being held up to a speaker."
"But yet, at 6:17, there's a huge edit because the conversation is cut off. It's interrupted. And the tone changes again," he said. "The noise floor, when you're authenticating a recording from a forensic perspective, is a very important part of the process. All of a sudden, we go back to the same quality and extremely low noise floor that we had at the beginning of the recording."
Someone once reconstructed an entire helicopter's location telemetry just from the dead-air hum recorded by a video camera. Don't underestimate the value of any piece of information. It's a failure if there's needless withholding.
how exactly do these guys fund themselves? this must be a horrendously expensive enterprise and fairly infrequent at that.
Even if they don't find it, this is great advertising for them, and gives them a reason to test their technology. And if they do find it, even better advertising.
I wouldn't be surprised if their negotiated finders fee from Malaysia is still below cost.
I mean the article mentioned this company spent "millions" on the search. There's people that earn millions per day by doing nothing or sending a tweet. There's tons of money out there, it's just allocated poorly.
On Malaysian military:
> Why didn’t [the Malaysian military] intercept the unidentified aircraft as it was crossing the north of the country? The military claimed it was because the plane wasn’t a threat. But how could they have known that unless they had identified it as MH370, rather than a foreign incursion? And if they had identified it as MH370, why didn’t they tell anyone until days after the crash? The most likely explanation was that the military simply wasn’t monitoring its own radar at the time that the plane flew through Malaysian airspace.
I really want to believe that a single switch doesn't control whether people in the back of the plane can breather or not...
Really though there are plenty of switches in any cockpit that will result in the death of all aboard if no corrective action is taken.
Do you freak out about driving? Plenty of controls in your car you could say the same thing about. Yanking the ebrake at highway speeds in rush hour traffic isn't gonna end well.
Edit the 5th or so: There are also times when the pilot will legitimately and safely depressurize in flight, like when descending to the one of the super-high airports that are actually at higher altitude than typical cabin atmosphere, like La Paz Bolivia (over 13000ft, compared to a typical cabin altitude of 5-8000 or so. They do it gradually while descending, so they don't make everyones ears go bang all at once.
Edit the 6th: Also, there's a big difference between turning off bleed air (which is pretty benign) and actually hitting the emergency pressure dump control, which is protected by a guard that holds the switch in the normal/auto position.
First, you are seeming to act as if the power between passengers and pilots should be equal. Why would this ever be? The pilot has all the power and the passengers none. Thinking of past hijackings, it's obvious that it must be this way.
Second, the plane needs to be able to handle all sorts of 1 in a million events. Recall there were around 22 million flights in 2021, and of those, exactly 1 was involving a Boeing or Airbus jet (maybe that's even true for Embraer or Bombardier and that tier of airliner). This is because the pilot has a vast amount of controls that are required to handle various events. A plane is a pressurized tube flying thru the sky, of course controls for pressure in the cabin must exist to allow equalization under aberrant circumstances.
Finally, activating this "kill" switch would drop oxygen masks to every passenger in the plane automatically; the pilot does not have any say in this matter. While these masks obviously have limited duration, there isn't exactly a way the pilot could perform this mass murder without their own death or imprisonment being guaranteed too. Frankly, I find your representation of the purpose of the switch so immature as to be offensive.
Must have been quite distressing.
The idea is to keep everyone except the pilot alive but unconscious until things improve. I think it's preferable to everyone unconscious and eventually dead.
If both passengers and the pilot aren't being supplied with enough oxygen to remain conscious 100% of the time, then something has gone horribly wrong. If the reason passengers aren't being supplied with enough oxygen to remain conscious is because the pilot cut off their air supply intentionally, then that's even worse. (Though again, thankfully that situation seems to be extremely rare.)
Wait, is there an emergency pressure dump control?
I kind of just assumed turning off bleed air would be the only option, and I would have assumed that turning off bleed air would complete depressurisation within a few min.
Here’s what it looks like on a 737: http://www.b737.org.uk/images/cpcspanel.jpg
The switch is the guarded toggle a bit left of center on the bottom, next to the two round gauges.
(E.g., fuel selector switches that can enter an unexpected state while looking like they're in the correct state, take-off/go-around switches that could be triggered by a first officer wearing a watch reaching for the speed brake lever, attitude indicators with ambiguous backgrounds, three-pointer/drum-pointer/counter-pointer altimeters)
A few of them crashed after very long flights, on approach of the runway. Inexplicably, they suddenly felt right when they should have deployed landing gears.
So aircraft makers learned from that incident that no amount of training can mitigate a bad user interface. Especially if the user of your interface is dead tired after a 12h flight.
Now pilots would hear the warning, scan the indicators and see the indicator, and are trained to put on their oxygen masks immediately. The cabin masks would deploy automatically. Then they follow the checklist which is to descend to a safe level if the pressure is uncontrollable (which it wouldn't be if it's just switched off).
It's very unlikely the pilot would turn off cabin pressurisation, but it would be pretty gentle and warning alarms and indicators would start pretty quickly (including on EICAS on newer planes like the 777). The pilots could easily fix it well before their or the passengers' oxygen ran out.
Do you realize you're entrusting two people in the front of the plane with your life as soon as the plane takes off? There are probably DOZENS of switches that if they are flipped maliciously will result in everyone on the plane dying.
Surely it’s the biggest reddest flag in all the evidence and underemphasised purely because of the political implications of a murderous pilot.
The main question about it in my mind is one for aviation experts … why would any pilot plot and practice that course? Is there any possible motivation other than wanting to crash a plane in the middle of nowhere?
Because if not, it’s almost a closed, albeit morbid and troubling case and the rest would be details.
It also raises interesting questions about the importance of pilot mental health that are maybe uncomfortable for the industry, in addition to the fact that aviation tech could still completely lose a plane.
Bayesian Methods in the Search for MH370
Authors: Sam Davey , Neil Gordon , Ian Holland , Mark Rutten , Jason Williams
ADDED: The loss of the Scorpion described in that book reminds me of this as well. While some of the details related to what exact sort of torpedo failure caused the Scorpion sinking is a matter of debate, the betting money is on some sort of torpedo failure rather than a Soviet tit-for-tat or other complicated scenario for which there's no real evidence.
Is this one of these 1 in a billion chance thing or is it not as crazy as it sounds? Like even if you were intentionally trying not to leave a trace, it is so hard to plan the drift and spread of debris and get so lucky in them not being spotted.
I can see the appeal as a suicide method. You fly out for a while, it's quiet and pleasant, and before long there's no turning back, no possibility of rescue.
Edit: was wrong
If you think of a pristine beach its pristine because it gets cleaned up regularly. Any ocean facing beach these days accumulates so much trash. I used to do beach cleanup surveys on windward coasts, and we would regularly find stuff that could have belonged to an airplane (carbon fiber, composite honeycomb, etc.) it was almost never worth investigating since there was almost no way to know how long it had been in that beach and how long it had been floating in the currents before that. This was in the Caribbean, so I mostly assumed that all that stuff was related to drug smuggling planes. The only time we ever got a call back about something we found on the beach is when we found a drift buoy from NOAA.
This is the long way of saying that it surprises me not a bit that nothing much was found. It’s more surprising that anything at all was found
http://jeffwise.net/2019/03/09/the-russian-passengers-aboard...
Good read, but: all that detail and couldn't be bothered providing a (bracketed) degree-centigrade comparison.
I've definitely seen the comparison made, on random US articles which almost invariably show °C as well as °F, but I'm not sure that if someone asked me if I would recall the answer.
I know that 100°F is something close to 37°C, and I'll probably not forget 32°F for a while now. But it's fairly useless trivia as far as every day life goes.
How did that turn out?
See this: https://youtu.be/Jq-d4Kl8Xh4
The thought of being able to detect aircraft scatter using very low power HF signals over variable ionospheric propagation conditions at long range seemed almost impossible to me. The use of the WSPR (Weak Signal Propagation Reporting) [2] network and its highly efficient protocol is what changed my mind.
I'm much less of a sceptic having read the basis of the paper, at it appears there have been proving flights to evidence the technique can work. I haven't had time to research other workers who have reproduced the results, so would be interested if anyone has any links.
[1] https://www.mh370search.com/2022/03/14/mh370-wspr-technical-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_(amateur_radio_software)
"There are no WSPRnet anomalies observed at departure. At 03:30 UTC there is a drift anomaly 2 minutes behind the aircraft as well as 5 WSPRnet links just behind the aircraft, which may be due to the wake." [my emphasis here and below.]
"There is no obvious way to choose whether the aircraft turned to port or starboard to execute a 180° turn back towards Australia. I tried out both options and the best fit appears to be a turn to starboard."
And from a comment by someone apparently involved:
"There was one error of note, the initial turn of the aircraft after departure was to port and not starboard. Mike commented 'I should have told you that aircraft departing NSFA on RWY 08 will always turn to port due to terrain clearance considerations. If you’d known that then no doubt the first part of the route would have been a bit more accurate.'”
These quotes seem to suggest, if not outright imply, a detailed knowledge of the airplane's track by the person(s) searching the WISPRnet data for indications of that track, and if this is the case, then the test falls short of demonstrating an ability to determine the previously-unknown track of an airplane, which is what is needed for the MH370 investigation. I would be more than happy to update this opinion once I get a clearer picture of how these tests are conducted.
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/1cox7y91m89sjsv/GDTAA%20V2%20Blind...
I agree with your analysis that some pre-knowledge of the track is apparent here and therefore more fully blinded independent experiments would be needed to add credibility.
Given the number of airline flights at any one time and the near constant WSPR radio traffic I would have thought there is enough raw data out there to conduct further research. There may a PhD in this for someone :-)
I do worry, as implied in your emphasis, that the temporal resolution is very low. Given that the transmit time of all symbols is approx 110.6 seconds [1] plus the time for a WSPRnet station to decode a message will translate into spatial errors of various magnitudes proportional to the speed of the target aircraft, but perhaps this has been factored in.
I do remain intrigued enough to try and learn more about the robustness of the techniques.
The article even implies the controllers themselves did not know this:
>Initially, no one noticed the sudden disappearance of the airplane. After handing the flight over to Ho Chi Minh control, the Malaysian controller looked away from his screen, and when he looked back, the plane was gone. He assumed that it had flown out of radar range and returned to his duties without a second thought.
But there was no radar range limit. There was only a transponder range limit (or more likely an edge of the screen).
>In Vietnam, controllers expected the plane to contact them, but it did not, and they couldn’t find it on radar either. Controllers in Ho Chi Minh City began trying to raise the plane on radio without success. For 18 minutes, they sent out a series of increasingly desperate calls: would MH370 please respond? Could any planes in the area contact MH370? The only answer was silence.
So even when they were actively looking for it, it was invisible to their "radar". True radar would have told them there was a plane-sized metal object in their airspace even if it refused radio contact and had no transponder...
It turns out you can make an entire plane full of people completely invisible by throwing 1 switch. Who knew?
Plus don’t militaries have radar anyways for air defense? How is it possible that no radar from multiple countries picked up a silent Boeing 777 flying to nowhere?
Primary radar requires relatively a lot of power, and has other issues (e.g. target correlation) that make it of limited use for ATC purposes during enroute flight. If such radars exist, for military purposes for example, ATC may not have access to them as it's not really essential for their work. There are also large coverage gaps over oceans and in remote areas where nobody cares to monitor. These radars would only have a range of a couple hundred nm maximum, so they would not see deep into the Indian Ocean either.
So called 'over the horizon' radars also exist, but require truly massive amounts of power, not to mention capital to build, and also have very low spatial resolution. Apparently Australia's $1.8bn system was aimed in the wrong direction at the time of MH370's disappearance, or it might have had some low precision data to contribute.
But it does break the bank. Radar may not be new tech, but it is still expensive to operate. Even the US is removing radars. To be fair, the US has thousands of airports (and even more small airfields), but it has a huge area to cover.
Also, the military angle is covered in the article.
This is amazing.
Oops
For comparison the plane that D B Cooper used had a stairway in the back(sometimes called airstairs). He was able to override the in flight lock and get out that way. My understanding is that the db cooper incident is in a large part why they don't put airstairs on planes any more.
But now you have me watching videos on 777 doors. they open outward than forwards, like most airline doors they probably have a interlock to prevent them from opening in flight, if you could override that, I don't think you could push them forwards against the slipstream.
They don't do it because it's completely inefficient to carry this weight and waste this space from economic point of view. It's way better to carry few more paying passengers instead.
They still carry things like this on private jets, i.e. Golfstream.
I’ve always wondered how normal this is to cross paths with other planes that closely. I’ve seen other planes way off in the distance before but never that close.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...
Otherwise, the article is quite interesting.
edit: satellite data needs to be bogus though, so my theory makes perfect sense
I saw a simulation that looked fairly convincing, that showed if the plane was ditched in a controlled glide from where the last ping was received, assuming that's were it ran out of fuel, then the plane would have glided out of the area that was searched. They also claimed that the damage on the flaperons and other control surfaces that washed up was fairly consistent with landing fairly level, where those control surfaces may have been ripped off but most of the rest of the plane might have been fairly intact and would have quickly sunk in mostly one piece. It seemed fairly plausible.
Didn't the plane have two power interruptions, the first of which it is known that the plane wasn't in the process of crashing at high velocity? I wonder what effort was made to compare them, possibly allowing the effects of crystal drift and Doppler to be separated?
Maybe any unexpected frequency offsets after the first power cut can be entirely attributed to the crystal warming up after the power cut? Maybe it could be assumed that the crystal behaves similarly after each power cut, as crystals are typically repeatable with temperature? In that case the characteristics of the crystal are known after the second power cut and Doppler can be determined.
I'm sure this would have been thought of, but one has to ask.
I didn't see any comments referring to this +1hr blackout of the sat unit. This happened right after the 1.19 ATC handoff.
Does anyone know if this signal could have been faked (e.g. by someone sitting in a boat in the ocean)? I assume the tx and rcv end points have some sort of private identifier.
Did the MH370 incident change anything about the communication systems used by modern aircrafts?
> Even without finding the plane, a number of lessons have been drawn from the disappearance of MH370. Many of the responses to the disappearance centered on the fact that in the 21st century, commercial airliners should not just disappear. In the interest of knowing where every plane is at all times, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) began requiring that all airliners manufactured after the 1st of January 2021 include autonomous tracking devices that broadcast their location once per minute. To give greater coverage of airplanes manufactured before that date, Inmarsat (which supplies satellite relays to nearly all commercial airliners) changed the frequency of its handshakes from once per hour to once every 15 minutes. The European Aviation Safety Agency began requiring that the “pingers” on aircraft flight recorders last at least 90 days, rather than 30. ICAO also amended its guidelines to require that airliner designs approved after 2020 include cockpit voice recorders that record 25 hours of conversations (instead of the current standard of two), and that flight data recorders either stream data to a location on the ground or be designed to float to the surface after a crash. (Like all ICAO regulations, these only come into force if adopted by the member states, which may take some time.)
What if the plane was struck by a meteorite? It certainly sounds like there was some kind of incident that caused them to turn around abruptly to head back but they were disabled. It is possible they experienced an extreme rare event. Rare dpesnt mean impossible, just highly unlikely.
The real story is: plane disappears as transponder signal is lost. Plane cant be raised via radio or sat phone. Sat phone shows plane still flying. Malaysian military tracks plane but does nothing as they are asleep at the wheel.
We really don't know. Only the black box does. I could talk about different alternative scenarios, both corroborating the murder-suicide plot and a rare catastrophic event. But I'm not looking to drive traffic so its just as much pointless fiction.
I don't think this "strange coincidence" should be dismissed as the reason so easily.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-m...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Airways_Flight_2...
theories that it was apparently transporting weapons to apartheid regime in a commercial airliner which caught fire over the indian ocean and consequently covered up.
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr...
There's some neat math people used to try and find the plane that gets alluded to, but not explained in depth, and the post is a reasonable summary, but didn't really change my mind much and my previous awareness was based on overhearing cable news, so it's not really anything new.
It's written well enough to be entertaining, but isn't really enlightening.
Not something a passenger can do. Not something that can be explained as the first & last presentation of an unknown technical flaw.
i don't think the comment about TL;DR OR asking chatgpt is completely out of line. I could see businesses being built on top of chatgpt to create summaries of articles on the internet. This is a pretty big use case.
Sometimes, people want a more efficient way to read articles, rather than actually reading them. If a service could be created that summarizes the main point of an article, I think there's value (and a potential business) in it. You might even be able to ask chatgpt or a service on top ofit, "has this article any new conclusions about the state of Mh370?" without actually reading the article.
Is it too much to assume that readers have had at least high school education and know about lead sentences and summary paragraphs?
A good executive summary is better than just lead sentences.
The problem is, if ChatGPT doesn't have the data, it likes to create completely fictional narratives.
"Perhaps the most compelling reason to believe that Zaharie hijacked his own plane is its simplicity. It’s the only explanation that doesn’t rely on a series of independently improbable events: given a desire to do it, everything else falls into place as a reasonable part of the plan. In fact, from the timing of the transponder failure to the specific locations of the turns to the flight path into the Southern Indian Ocean, it would be harder to come up with a better way to make an airliner disappear. Why believe that this is a coincidence when it could well have been the goal from the very beginning? Furthermore, whoever was flying the plane had extensive systems knowledge and excellent hand-flying ability. Who else on board had those skills but Zaharie? Indeed, it’s by far the easiest answer."
Really, I can only point to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34509899t. Maybe look into the MS Estonia sinking, the cover-up (of the unfortunate results of a spy game) is very obvious there.
https://bocpages.org/wiki/Magic_Window
> "Magic Window" is track number 23 on the Geogaddi album. The song is one minute and forty-six seconds of pure silence.
Communication devices lost contact.
The first turn can only be done by an experienced pilot.
No distress calls. Or passenger attempted cellular communication when they became within range.
Flight path matches similarly to Pilot’s in-home game simulator.
If an explosion occurred wiping out communication devices, it was only a matter of time before they crashed. The plane was on radar and tracked going south for several hours.
Due to the many turns, someone had to be in control of the plane in some capacity after the first turn.
It leaves me to two conclusions.
An alien parasite froze everyone. Made the pilot turn off communications. Made the pilot fly a flight pattern that closely resembles the one at home.
The pilot picked that specific flight as his last. Why he didn’t just nose dived immediately will be answered in the remaining hours he was on that flight. It would be inhumane to keep crew/passengers alive to witness their own demise. Thus I believe he was alive and alone heading south.
There are only a thousand reasons aircraft operators might want to know where their planes are and if there are any issues. I’m sure that the gps position and black box data could be streamed over radio and/or satellite.
Also, real-time streaming of GPS position for the thousands of flights in the air at any given time is not a trivial problem (but technology is improving and ICAO is pushing for such solution[3]).
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/08/us/mh370-fifth-anniversary-ma...
[1] https://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2014-04-10/malaysia-airli...
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/malaysia-airlines-flight-370-pr...
[3] https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/9/11184544/un-flight-trackin...
I imagine there are optimization that could be done to reduce the cost further. Big customers with constant rate usage can probably negotiate a more favorable price etc.
I suspect that there are some extra costs making it "flight ready" and all that stuff, but the fact of the matter is that GPS chips are cheaper and more plentiful than ever, we have Starlink coverage in Antarctica now, and they're send more and more satellites up every week now. There are costs in securing it and then receiving the data and such but it all seems really inepensive compared to the planes, the insurance payouts and the search and recovery efforts.
But technology in aviation moves (generally for very good reasons!) at a different pace than in many other industries, and in this case it unfortunately meant having an operational satellite communications system on board (used for engine performance data telemetry transmitted to the manufacturer), but not having it wired up to ADS-C, an existing standard which allows automated position reporting over that same connection.
Inmarsat has modified their offerings [1] since MH370: One free ADS-C position report every 15 minutes for planes that do support it (implying that transmission cost is a concern for not activating the option unless required for air traffic control via FANS), and the ability to piggy-back a position report onto a "handshake/ping" for those that don't, which would presumably have included MH370.
For aircraft not equipped with any Satcom, some satellite constellations (including e.g. the latest generation of Iridium satellites) include payloads that allow direct tracking of ADS-B signals as well.
[1] https://www.icao.int/Meetings/GTM/Documents/Inmarsat.pdf
Admittedly a lot of this was before our new era of satellite constellations, but surely the future should now be "per second updates and streaming audio/video via satellite"?
Also there's a whole lot of air traffic.
Modern satellites can shift terabits per second. They can handle a lat/long pair every couple of minutes sent by every oceanic flight in the air comfortably (even when only using the L-band, which needs much smaller and simpler antennas than those used for in-flight Wi-Fi).
There has been a German and Chinese flight since with 100+ fatalities where this happened. Given how few crashes there are on commercial flights its one of the biggest risk factors today.
I would have said the 787 lithium battery risk was more concerning personally. Or the 737 Max problem.
In terms of fatalities and hull losses, pilot suicide is a much larger risk than the 737 Max. It’s made worse by outdated FAA rules that would have pilots grounded for seeking treatment.
If you consider that the number of 737 Maxes in service was not that large, it's pretty clear that MCAS was more dangerous than pilot suicide.
If you compare it on an hourly basis it is still safer but not nearly as safe as people would like to think. Especially if you add in small commercial/charter planes
Because of more active drivers and low occupancy cars, I would think from first principles for a constant rate of suicide ideation in the population the risk of death by driver suicide as a side effect is high, and must actually be higher than pilot suicide risk. You are not in the car but the accident affects you. You are driving more often that it's more statistically likely to drive near another driver who deliberately drives dangerously, than the risk of a pilot ending it all.
But if we stop obsessing with the risk of pilot suicide and were just talking overall risk, passenger/miles is the best measure there is. Trains might win.
So fall into a depression and need to talk to a therapist and get a pill to help you out while you get back on your emotional feet? Well now your airline is going to ground you for however long they feel like. They are incentivized to be as careful as possible about known issues.
This means pilots feel like they have to bottle up things like anxiety or depression or suicidal thoughts, which of course means they might not get the help they need.
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence indicating that pilots will seek treatment under false names, or, worse, self medicate with alcohol for what would otherwise be treatable and minor conditions.
When I got my medical I was coached by my instructor to volunteer absolutely no information that wasn’t asked. It was strongly hinted that I should not recall ever having been treated or diagnosed with any mental condition.
"Aviation authorities swiftly implemented new recommendations from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency that required two authorised personnel in the cockpit at all times, but by 2017, Germanwings and other German airlines had dropped the rule."
Plus let's not forget AF447 where a mistake by one pilot (involuntarily) stalling the plane wasn't caught by the other pilots until too late.. To be fair this was during an emergency caused by pitot tube 'failure', so there were lots of things to process.
Find My: Boeing 777
2) name the AirTag “Boeing 777”
3) you have your personal Boeing in Find My to show off
Sometimes they retire the flight number. Then it can't happen again. Looks like that's the case here [1]
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/03/13/289800435...
> Even without finding the plane, a number of lessons have been drawn from the disappearance of MH370. Many of the responses to the disappearance centered on the fact that in the 21st century, commercial airliners should not just disappear. In the interest of knowing where every plane is at all times, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) began requiring that all airliners manufactured after the 1st of January 2021 include autonomous tracking devices that broadcast their location once per minute. To give greater coverage of airplanes manufactured before that date, Inmarsat (which supplies satellite relays to nearly all commercial airliners) changed the frequency of its handshakes from once per hour to once every 15 minutes. The European Aviation Safety Agency began requiring that the “pingers” on aircraft flight recorders last at least 90 days, rather than 30. ICAO also amended its guidelines to require that airliner designs approved after 2020 include cockpit voice recorders that record 25 hours of conversations (instead of the current standard of two), and that flight data recorders either stream data to a location on the ground or be designed to float to the surface after a crash. (Like all ICAO regulations, these only come into force if adopted by the member states, which may take some time.)
I think now, after another documented murder-suicide, there's also been a change in regulations requiring at least 2 people to be in the cockpit at all times. Other commenters point to additional changes
There isn't much that can be done to "prevent" incidents like this.
This would help prevent a nefarious pilot from taking the plane down.
Arguably, many of the things suggested might potentially have prevented Zaharie from carrying out his plan, assuming the scenario described in the article is true, depending on his motives: if the plane could have been intercepted in mid-flight, if he would have been found out almost instantly, his family wouldn't have been able to collect life insurance; if his motive had been less financial for his family and more about the intellectual challenge of getting away with the perfect crime, this too would have made his task more difficult.
But that aside, when we say "prevent the next MH370", it's ambiguous: we could interpret that as "prevent a pilot from deliberately crashing their plane and killing everyone on board", or we could interpret it as "prevent a plane from vanishing", which has been devastating to families in its own unique and horrible way. In other words: locating the wreckage faster - or at all! - has value too, and shouldn't be dismissed.
If real-time flight tracking data is frequently and continuously monitored 24/7 like in NoC, it probably can prevent the disaster like MH370 from happening again.
The latter real-time virtual blackbox proposal if accepted can be even more pro-active in preventing future incidents, and it can be easily integrated and embedded with the real-time location tracking albeit with extra cost to the airline operators.
Apparently the latter proposal according to ICAO was rejected due to the complaints from the pilot's union that cited privacy concerns. It seems that pilot's privacy is of higher pririty than the passengers' safety. You can have all your privacy in your house but when you are piloting aeroplane with many people life is your responsibility, pilot's privacy probably the least of your concern.