Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)
researchgate.net
researchgate.net
* video by Mentour Pilot - https://youtu.be/Y5K9HBiJpuk
* great read, as usual, by Admiral Cloudberg, slightly older: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-y...
What in the actual fuck.
“…the supposed signals from the black boxes must have been false. Only much later was it discovered that the signals had probably come from the scanning equipment pinging itself.”
Wat.
“ATSB chose to assume that the plane spiraled in close to the seventh arc because it had not received enough funding to extend the width of the search area to 100 nautical miles.”
WAT.
* This one where the operations team apparently doesn't understand how their flight tracker works, and/or it fails to inform their users that last contact was X hours ago.
* One where the aircraft has a broken altimeter, and the suspicious pilots decide to ask the ATC for altitude confirmation, but the ATC radar only gets horizontal coordinates, the altitude information that ATC sees actually comes from a datastream from the aircraft itself. So they fatally decided to trust that instead of their own aircraft radar altimeter which was correctly telling them they were about to crash.
* The aircraft had either a single failed engine or the wheels were stuck outside, and the pilots asked the computer for how far they could travel in their current state, assuming it worked like a car, by projecting current consumption, but actually the computer just uses fixed data that does not take such exceptional situations into account. So they ran out of fuel early.
> “ATSB chose to assume that the plane spiraled in close to the seventh arc because it had not received enough funding to extend the width of the search area to 100 nautical miles.”
> WAT.
It seems the police department has insufficient funding to help drunks look for keys in the dark.
The operations team didn't have a flight tracker. The Flight Explorer website is a free consumer tool [1]. The actual flight tracking software is native [2].
Malaysia Airlines' flightops was essentially using Google Flights to track their planes. That's the WTF.
> actually the computer just uses fixed data that does not take such exceptional situations into account
I've never flown a 777. But modern GA flight computers, e.g. G1000, are pretty advanced about projecting fuel consumption. (Of course, this wasn't always the case [2].)
[1] https://travel.flightexplorer.com
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
[2] https://www.flightexplorer.com/products/professional/FE-Prof...
I think it's a UX failure in some sense. It's important information to know which number comes from what source.
So it should be clearly visible if a trajectory is prediction without up to date positional data.
It should be clearly visible which values are from the aircraft and which are from the ground.
It should be clearly visible that a range estimate is derived only from fuel sensors.
I hope that the 5Y process or whatever they used came to this conclusion as well, and not human error.
Human error is constant, design issues can be fixed.
Sometimes I think UX design should be mandatory for software developers and engineers. Even only reading The Design of Everyday Things would probably prevent a lot of catastrophes.
Human Factors is very much part of every airplane's design. From the ground up, and it involves all roles and every subsystems.
> Even only reading The Design of Everyday Things would probably prevent a lot of catastrophes.
I think you have a twisted assumption about how much care goes into aviation UX. The people who do these designs did much more than read a single book.
> It should be clearly visible that a range estimate is derived only from fuel sensors.
Good plan! Now tell us how you will do it. (Also clearly you are misunderstanding even the problem. The problem was that the range estimate was NOT derived from fuel sensors.)
I don't work in that sector which is why I went by the posted examples. Showing a predicted trajectory exactly the same as a measured trajectory seems like no care at all was taken.
>Good plan! Now tell us how you will do it.
I'd have to see an actual implementation. But e.g. the air traffic controller gets their trajectory shown the same? Make it a dashed differently colored line from the point you haven't gotten a sensor reading.
But by the way you're attacking people over small oversights in a comment I can't assume good faith from you.
The problem is not with any small oversights. The problem is with the attitude of your comment. You proposed that developers should should read a design book and that would prevent catastrophes. That is insulting.
Aviation is a mature field. People much more clever than you or me spent decades of their lives thinking deeply about how to make it safe. That includes the proper UX design of the systems involved. And they did a very, very good job at it. Aviation has an exemplary safety record, especially when contrasted with how inherently dangerous the activity is.
This means that all the low hanging fruits have been already picked. One can further increase safety of course. Nothing is perfect. But it requires very careful analyses, testing, and deep understanding to achieve very small wins.
This is the background we live in. In contrast to this your comment reads as "Everyone is an idiot. I know better. They should read this one book and it would save lives." It lacks humility. You don't even know what you don't know, and yet you act as if you possesses some deep insight the field lacks. At the same time you demonstrate your lack of knowledge with those small oversights you talk about. The problem is not the small oversights, but the momentous lack of humility.
I know this, and I'm not saying there weren't clever people working on it. Maybe that came out wrong.
However I have worked on safety-critical systems in a mature industry (not aviation). And the maturity of the industry has IME often meant that a lot of the especially obvious low-hanging fruit are not looked at properly.
Overly bureaucratic processes and people that are too focused on their roles, means that especially a lot of those things that require empathy for the user and a bit of a wide-angle view get ignored until something happens.
This is a two-edged sword since institutions need the bureaucracy and processes to remember it the next time.
For example I'd be that a UX designer with empathy for the user would not put a touchscreen focused control into a car.
The lack of feedback makes it distracting which arguably cost a few lives already. But it's hard to measure without cameras observing people in the last seconds before the crash.
Since there's no numbers there's probably less of a pressure on automotive companies to make it safer. Bureaucratic companies don't work this way. They need to hurt in their profits first.
Yet almost all cars in the last ten years have a lot of touchscreen controls. Because it looks cool in the showroom, and Tesla already did it.
It's a really obvious safety issue. A really low-hanging fruit. But it's in the blind spot of the mature automotive industry.
No worries! What matters is that we can discuss it and figure things out eventually.
What i can totaly agree with you is that correct design is critical, and blaming individuals for their failings is not the way forward if we want to make an activity safer. I think this is the gist of what you wrote and it is absolutely correct.
The only thing i bristled at is that it is not a new insight and widely accepted tenet in aviation.
> For example I'd be that a UX designer with empathy for the user would not put a touchscreen focused control into a car.
Yeah. I agree with that point. I think modern cars have touchscreens for two reasons: It is cheaper for the manufacturers, (Less parts to assemble, and less parts to keep in stock) and it is slightly prefered by the costumers due to the showroom appeal. (As you also mention.) It is kind of like candy in that regard. Not good for people but they still want it.
In other words it is not the empathy and the understanding what is lacking. Just that the cost savings combine with the consumer appeal in such a way that they overpowered the UX considerations. Sad thing. But sadly not a situation where people reading a design book will change the incentive structure.
In fact I bet that if we dug into it we would find internal memos written by UX engineers pointing out exactly what you wrote, and other engineers in response pointing out that all those functions on the touch screens are “non safety critical”. I have seen those arguments often.
This is kind of the point I wanted to get at though, I've been in a few such meetings, and a lot of clever engineers will rubberstamp things that are outside their area because it's technically safe, but ignoring the human element. Even bringing up the human element often gets scoffed at, because "that's not what we do here".
I feel like the lack of a broad view on things is what bothers me the most about it. If more people had a broader view, these meetings might go differently.
Looking at an aircraft cockpit I see Billions of Buttons https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BillionsOfButton...
Would writing the equation, data sources, and output format for each of those buttons on the button be good UX?
No, I agree with you, this is not a UX problem it's a training one - a test question along the lines of "How does fuel prediction work on a B790" etc ...
Not true for glass cockpits. While there is a lot of skeuomorphism in avionic UI, there is also a good amount of situation-driven dynamism.
Modern GA avionics' fuel estimates are pretty much on the money given a flight plan.
What's more alarming is that they had a perfectly functional radar altimeter and ought to have known that this is a completely self-contained system; it doesn't depend on the flight computers, the pitot-static system, or any external information such as your current position or a programmed flight plan. If it's telling you that you're only a couple thousand feet above terrain, you really should listen to it and respond accordingly.
Neither of the pilots did.
No idea how it works on a passenger jet, but I would be shocked if it was different.
This is why the crew trusted the captain's altimeter over either of the other two because it precisely lined up with what ATC was telling them. Neither set of parties knew that they were the same incorrect figure derived from the same source. The captain correctly diagnosed that the entire pitot-static system had gone to shit, but still trusted ATC's figure, right up until they started hitting the ocean, even with the GPWS alarm from the (correctly functioning, entirely separate) radar altimeter blaring in the cockpit for over a minute.
Civil primary radar usually isn’t 3D and does indeed depend on transponder, i.e. secondary radar, supplied altitude data.
They should know what their radar supports in any case, and get suspicious when an aircraft asks them for a readback of airplane-supported altitude data.
The example I point to is tokamaks for fusion energy.
You also figure it out pretty quickly when you watch a few plans make physically impossible jumps between their dead reckoning location and their actual location.
What what? Do you want to pay for the search? How much do you want to pay for it? Every human endeavour is constrained by resources. The art of doing anything is figuring out how to best employ the available resources to achieve goals.
> What in the actual fuck.
Is this your first time hearing about humans being confused by complicated technology?
There is a difference between constraining activities based on resources at hand and adopting a hypothesis because it favours your resource constraints. (Searching for keys under the light is reasonable. Concluding the keys must be under the light is not.)
> Is this your first time hearing about humans being confused by complicated technology?
An airline using a free consumer tool [1] to track its planes is not a problem of complicated technology. (FlightExplorer has a professional edition, but it runs natively. If flightops were looking at a website, they were essentially using Google Flights to track their planes.)
Yes. And there is nothing to indicate that they concluded that the keys must be under the lights. In fact there is every reason to assume that they choose this assumption to fit their resource constraints. Because the other option would have been to not even start searching.
But turns out if you assume people are stupid, then they will appear stupid.
> An airline using a free consumer tool [1] to track its planes is not a problem of complicated technology.
Everything about aviation is complicated technology. The fact that there are free tools which provide almost the same answer the professional tools do, but can be misleading in edge cases is further evidence that the technology is complicated.
Also this is the problem with vacuous statements. The statement, I quote "What in the actual fuck." does not let us know what the commenter found curious about the situation. I thought it was that an operator misread the display. You think it is that the operator's had a "free" display instead of a professional one. But who knows. We could even ask why is it the airline who was bumbling around instead of just calling the ATC that the airplane is overdue and letting them figure out with their professional tools and training. Or maybe they are just surprised that airplanes sometimes fly and sometimes not. Who knows.
"ATSB chose to assume that the plane spiraled in close" based on their resource constraints. The resources are the light. They ruled out--according to this source--a hypothesis based on where the light was.
> the other option would have been to not even start searching
Why?! Even when ATSB chose their hypothesis the entire area wasn't searched.
> there are free tools which provide almost the same answer the professional tools do
Not for flightops! (And not this one.)
> but can be misleading in edge cases is further evidence that the technology is complicated
Have you flown a plane? This isn't an edge case issue, it means MA flightops was always blind on takeoff and approach for its entire fleet. That they thought this website was appropriate for the task represents a massive lack of training and protocol, let alone tooling or oversight.
> You think it is that the operator's had a "free" display instead of a professional one. But who knows
The article said MA flightops "were tracking the plane on the Flight Explorer website" (top comment). I pointed out that FE doesn't have a web-based professional app (comment you responded to). This isn't a "who knows" situation.
> We could even ask why is it the airline who was bumbling around instead of just calling the ATC that the airplane is overdue
Read the article at the top of this thread. Dempsey/Cloudberg goes into this in detail.
That is your reading of the sentence. "choose to assume" does not mean that they ruled out other options. It especially does not mean that they ruled out other options when it is combined with the second part of the sentence which describe that the reason they took this assumption is due to resource constraints.
> Have you flown a plane?
Yes.
> This isn't a "who knows" situation.
You are misunderstanding the whole paragraph. The "who knows" situation is what you, JumpCrisscross was thinking when you wrote "What in the actual fuck.". If instead of emotional venting you would have wrote a complete and full sentence we would not have had to speculate what you are incredulous about. Clear?
That brings PR. Same as "Perfect Hiding Place"
> Airplane accident fatalities increase just after newspaper stories about murder and suicide D P Phillips. Science. 1978.
> Abstract: Fatal crashes of private, business, and corporate-executive airplanes have increased after publicized murder-suicides. The more publicity given to a murder-suicide, the more crashes occurred. The increase in plane crashes occurred primarily in states where the murder-suicides were publicized. These findings suggest that murder-suicide stories trigger subsequent murder-suicides, some of which are disguised as airplane accidents.
I'm not particularly concerned about this, after the germanwings incident in europe and US (and possibly everywhere else as well) flight decks are required to always have at least two people: if one of the pilots wants or needs to leave one of the flight attendants must take his place.
> 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.
In any case I googled the keywords, it's called WSPR, and also found a critique:
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/nils-critiques-the-mh370-wspr-aircra...
And the full critique has suffered from linkrot, but Wayback Machine has it: https://web.archive.org/web/20220221112332/https://dk8ok.org...
(Sad how a URL that was live in 2021 is already dead in 2024...)
When asked to prove the above and publish a peer reviewed paper, they were unable to do so.
The reader is thus invited to draw their own conclusion.
Or perhaps they genuinely have some cool technology, and it could be sold into aero, military industries and they want to monetize it.
In that case the right thing to do would be to hand over their projected track data, which it sounds like they did.
They haven't published a patent either.
Again, the reader is invited to draw their own conclusion.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/56420/lift-to-d...
35000 ft x 20 ratio x 1/5280 mi/ft
So far I've not come across a more sophisticated theory that still passes Occam's Razor.
One should look for theories with less sophistication, not more.
But just know that these things did happen.
There's lots of indications that surfaced recently that the Israeli air force secretly shoot down Itavia Flight 870 in 1980 to stop a transport of nuclear technology to Iran. They had mistaken the correct flight because their intelligence in France (were the uranium was being produced for Iran) pointed them in the wrong direction.
A very interesting book on the topic has been recently released with a deep and thorough investigation across France, Italy and Israel and it is to date the most credible and documented explanation for who shoot down the flight.
The book has been followed by quite a lot of investigative journalism in Italy that gives this theory lots of credit.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/213592261-il-quinto-scen...
"In 2023, former Italian prime minister Giuliano Amato said that France downed the plane while targeting a Libyan military jet in an attempt to kill Muammar Gaddafi. Amato said that Italy tipped off Libya about the planned assassination and consequently Gaddafi did not board the Libyan military jet"
To be honest, this theory of mistaken identity sounds much more plausible than anybody shooting down (or bombing) a random passenger plane flying an Italian domestic flight on purpose. Whether the presumably Libyan plane they actually targeted was transporting nuclear material or Gaddafi, I have no idea. Shame on them anyway for covering it up.
Also Amato's words are quite meaningless as he never had an idea, and he was not prime minister at the time.
This reportage[2], albeit in Italian, aired by Italian state tv last year, starts by interviewing the person you quote Giuliano Amato, and he clearly points out that the government has never had a clear idea on who shoot it down. It goes into huge detail on all the elements behind the Israeli thesis and it's the only credible one for which he have substantial proofs, from the fact that France used civilian airplanes to transport uranium, to the fact that special cargo was indeed used on the very same flight (but in a different date), interviews with Israeli and French officials and Italian civilians that had seen fighter jets above the cost of Calabria and all pointed to Israeli fighters (albeit, not the F15s used in Operation Wooden Leg).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wooden_Leg
[2]https://www.rai.it/programmi/report/inchieste/Il-V-scenario-...
But another commenter already pointed out that she was pressed to write the book like that.
TLDR conspiracy theory.
This is such a great summary from The Atlantic for anyone, like me, trying to get up to speed on the MH370 story.
"Perfect Hiding Place": Australian Scientist Claims He's Found Where Missing MH370 Plane Is
The Malaysian Airlines flight, with 239 people on board, disappeared after leaving Kuala Lumpur Airport in southern Malaysia en route to Beijing, China, on March 8, 2014.
Years after its disappearance, an Australian scientist has claimed that he has found the "perfect hiding place" for the missing MH370 plane.
The Malaysian Airlines flight, with 239 people on board, vanished from radar after taking off from Kuala Lumpur in 2014. Its disappearance sparked the biggest search in aviation history with the whereabouts of the jet still unknown to this day.
Now, Tasmanian researcher Vincent Lyne has said that he believes he has figured out where the plane is. In a LinkedIn post, Mr Lyne claimed that the plane was deliberately ploughed deep into the Broken Ridge - a 20,000-foot-deep hole in the Indian Ocean.
"This work changes the narrative of MH370's disappearance from one of no-blame, fuel-starvation at the 7th arc, high-speed dive, to a mastermind pilot almost executing an incredible perfect-disappearance in the Southern Indian Ocean," the researcher wrote.
Also:
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/mh370-f...
https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/perf...
When has that ever been the narrative? It deviated from course, somebody performed that manouver and is "to blame"...
I'm in Australia, tangentially connected to the Fugro vessel ocean floor search that followed and almost from the outset heard very little other than "pilot appears to have evaded radar, swung plane about low, and gone waaaaay off course delibrately".
Various 'causes' have been hypoxia, hijacking, suicidal pilot | other flight crew - sans any real knowledge of happenings in the cockpit it's a standing mystery.
Also, if you would get out of the plane, you are then in the middle of the indian ocean with just your life vest and the sharks. You get maybe 3 days, because the water is warm.
And nobody will find you if they don't know where they should be looking. An airplane life vest doesn't have an AIS transponder, only the life rafts/emergency slides do. If those weren't properly deployed, no chance of a vessel finding you. There are reports of shipwreck survivors about ships passing within a few hundred meters of them in calm seas, and failing to see them.
It is absolutely vital to keep the man-over-board in sight. Practically no exceptions.
Doing so will give them 60-90 minutes of extra air, the passengers' masks don't last that long.
At the end of the day, there are so many other ways for the pilots to down an airliner and kill everyone, they are ultimately the only people you can’t practically have the system distrust. The only thing you can do is the rule to always have two people in the cockpit but it doesn’t always help.
Ultimately the pilots have to be able to turn anything off that might malfunction.
Ultimately the pilots have to be able to turn anything off that might malfunction.
Also even if you (try to) take capabilities away they are by definition quite smart people and could probably figure a way round if they really wanted to.
On the other hand, the ability to shut down a system that has failed can save everyone on board.
There are approximately 40,000,000 flights each year. Almost all occur without incident. In the entire 120-year history of aviation, only a few accidents have resulted from the pilot intentionally crashing the plane.
If that extra pressure goes away for whatever reason, people are handed oxygen masks and tanks to help them stay alive. What the GP comment says is that the plane may have been depressurized at one point at high altitude. The pilot’s oxygen mask is usually designed to last longer than any of the other passengers’s masks do. So it’s not entirely implausible that the pilot can still guide the plane into controlled descent, while all the other passengers may have already passed out due to lack of oxygen.
Not most people. Nobody can breath if the altitude is high enough. There are some individual variability in how high is too high. That is of interest if you go mountaineering, but not really in a situation where an aircraft rapidly decompresses at the altitude MH370 was speculated to be flying at.
Read generously, they're talking about with supplemental oxygen. At 35k feet, even with pure oxygen, many people will not be able to breathe and most will not be able to comfortably. (Above 40k feet, supplemental oxygen no longer works--everybody needs pressurised oxygen.)
(Obviously nobody can breathe above the Armstrong limit, but that isn't relevant with a commercial airliner.)
That's why they tell you in safety briefings to always put your own mask on before helping others.
I think Petter's (Mentour Pilot) delve into it is quite good - there's a lot of detail I hadn't known.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/3f7fkk...
(There were a number of survivors in this case, though.)
That makes me wonder if being able to land a passenger plane on water is ever a factor in its design.
Because it is possible and foldr is incorrect in stating that it is not possible.
On the video he linked panicked hijackers were fighting with the pilots for the controls. Clearly that is not an ideal scenario for any kind of landing. Even more so for a tricky water landing one. But that is more of a reason to avoid hijackers fighting with the pilots, not proof that ditching is impossible.
Water landings are clearly not the preferred way to land. They are very risky. But they are also not as impossible as that comment makes them out to be. Here is a list of them from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_landing
The closest example I could find in the list you link was the following. But it ditched a few miles from the coast and had much smaller engines than a typical modern passenger airliner. Also, it was a cargo flight with only the pilots on board, and the captain was seriously injured.
https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/358285-airbus-ditching-butto...
Looks to be in a few airbus models.
https://simpleflying.com/airbus-aircraft-ditch-switch-emerge...
If I recall correctly I've read that the bigger the plane the less likely it is to work but I don't have sources.
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/down-in-deep-water-the-d...
In such a case, the emergency oxygen masks for passengers will drop, but those are only rated for 15 to 30 minutes.
After that Oxygen runs out, assuming the pilot maintains cruise altitude above 25000ft, everyone onboard will lose conscious via hypoxia within 1 minute, and be brain dead within 15 minutes.
No one (except the pilot) would be alive to see the plane crash.
Pilot can also re-pressurize the aircraft after 30 minutes, and breathe fine. Pilot oxygen masks are meant to last for at least an hour.
Perhaps the pilot's goal was to hide all the evidence as well as possible, to create a perfect mystery. Then a controlled ditching would make sense, although it kind of failed considering the debris which eventually reached Africa.
Without that, debris would only hint at somewhere in the Indian Ocean, probably.
[1] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-y...
Why of all the possibilities, you choose the most vile one and present it as if you know the facts?
I'm not making any assumptions about the pilot's motives or the final circumstances. I just wondered about the implications of a controlled glide, as the paper suggested. Is there any uncertainty, any margin for error? There certainly is.