MH370 assumed to have crashed with no survivors, says Malaysia Airlines | Hacker News Reader

MH370 assumed to have crashed with no survivors, says Malaysia Airlines

theguardian.com

94 pointschmars73 comments

Would be interested in hearing what data they've collected that pushed them to make that declaration. Everything I've heard so far this morning is that there is mounting evidence, but nothing concrete.

Given the length of time the families (and the rest of the world) have been left hanging, I certainly hope there is slam-dunk evidence that this is the case, and that amendments and alterations won't be forthcoming.

From the statement:

Inmarsat, the UK company that provided the satellite data which indicated the northern and southern corridors, has been performing further calculations on the data. Using a type of analysis never before used in an investigation of this sort, they have been able to shed more light on MH370’s flight path. Based on their new analysis, Inmarsat and the AAIB have concluded that MH370 flew along the southern corridor, and that its last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth.

Looks like the data was there all along but unextracted.

I have heard of Inmarsat before, as a provider of satellite-based IP and telephony services.

Perhaps a device utilizing their service was in use on the plane (for in-flight broadband, perhaps?), and Inmarsat was able to review their usage data to help determine the plane's course.

Inmarsat is used for in-flight broadband, sometimes branded OnAir. But not on Malaysia Airlines flights as far as I can tell. See http://www.inmarsat.com/press-release/inmarsats-swiftbroadba...

Their satellites appear to regularly send out a ping as a low level part of their communications protocol to see what receivers are in range and to keep channels to them alive. The aircraft's SATCOM system continued to respond to those pings for a number of hours after it disappeared, and the new location information is based on analysis of the series of pings that occurred.

Yeah, but yet again it's a lot of words that avoid giving us any information: what analysis did they do, and how did they come to their conclusion?

Some sort of predictor/corrector algorithm likely exploiting high-resolution data that would otherwise be classified is my guess. See Kalman Filters for such a thing...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter

Inmarsat data tracks the Rolls Royce engines.

The data they have isn't position or direction, it is a set of metrics that report on engine performance and conditions.

They never had positional information, except by virtue of the timing signals for those data points to their satellite. Which is how they originally determined the arc shaped corridor.

They must have been able to cross-reference this signal with another satellite (or source) to say with certainty that the plane went down the Southern corridor.

I would be surprised if this was cross-referenced with one of their own satellites given that they could have done that a week ago. I'd speculate that they were supplied with access to some other source that had received the signals, and were able to use that to triangulate the position.

> They never had positional information, except by virtue of the timing signals for those data points to their satellite.

Does anyone have any more insight in to this? Was the protocol a one-way ping, or a ping-pong exchange? Previous reports have inferred that the data from the hourly pings were incredibly basic. Obviously timing signal propagation is the basis for GPS, but is it normal or even feasible to collect millisecond or microsecond transmission timings for engineering data fed via satellites like the ones operated by Inmarsat? What other variables would have been used for ranging?

1 millisecond at the speed of light is close to 300km.

I thought the distance measurement was derived from received signal strength.

edit: Other's have said that they are using Doppler shift.

This story from Telegraph is scanty in details. But it also mentions Doppler effect. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10719304/How-Brit...

> These pings from the satellite – along with assumptions about the plane’s speed – helped Australia and the US National Transportation Safety Board to narrow down the search area to just 3 per cent of the southern corridor on 18 March

So it looks like the announcement today is actually old news.

In any case, it's not entirely clear to me how the Doppler effect would distinguish between northerly and southerly passage.

Maybe it could be used to establish whether the airplane is getting closer to or getting further away from a satellite? Maybe even the relative speed?

http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/535538-malaysian-airlines...

I wrote a blog post last week explaining how the approximate track and final zone could be calculated using the ping data (if more than one ping exists) and dead reckoning (heading and speed). Mind you that I don´t really know the information available to the investigators, but it´s what I would do with some pings available.

http://delorbital.blogspot.com.es/2014/03/how-to-estimate-mh...

> Inmarsat data tracks the Rolls Royce engines.

This is not strictly correct. The pings that were being sent to the aircraft and which satellites received confirmations from were to the SATCOM system on board the plane. This is a multi-purpose communications channel. The ACARS is a maintenance reporting system which can send out various information about the aircraft at certain points, and which issued two reports about the Rolls Royce engines, but there were no further engine reports after the aircraft hit cruise altitude (it generally reports at takeoff, cruise, and landing).

Wrong - it tracks the plane's Satcom.

The RR data can optionally be sent via ACARS, which was manually switched off. So no data from that.

I think even one satellite is enough, if you have enough data points. You can tune the clocks based on the signals captured, when the location of the plane was known. After that each signal gives you a sphere, on which the plane is supposed to be. With reasonable assumptions about the altitude and speed of the plane, you should be able to locate the plane with enough accuracy to determine, if it was in the middle of an ocean or close to land.

Per The Aviation Herald they used new or at least additional sort of unrelated data as well http://avherald.com/h?article=4710c69b&opt=0 :

"Shortly after the PM's press conference of Mar 24th 2014 Inmarsat reported that the new analysis of their satellite data used to identify the corridor and final location was based on the Doppler effects modifying radio waves and frequencies depending on speed and direction of travel of the aircraft, these data were compared to other flights. The computations are not precise enough to give the accurate position, however, made it possible to identify the general location. The new modelling and comparism were developed after the first discovery of the data on Mar 11th 2014, the work is still in progress."

Perhaps it's the lack of certain types of data? If they've had cooperation from all countries within flyable range and searched every landing strip and airport by satellite (and surely the USA has quietly put their spytech in operation here), then is it possible to conclude that the plane must have landed in the water somewhere?

Cloud cover makes that impossible.

They knew based on the satellite data that it was either heading to Kazakastan or the Ocean.

Today's announcement is simply the inevitable switch from "Search and Rescue" to a "Recovery" effort. It's been 2 weeks, someone had to make the call that the possibility of finding people alive has diminished to the point beyond hope.

As a "Recovery" effort, the pace will continue, but they will no longer risk lives to find the wreckage.

Reason would dictate that if the plane had truly landed somewhere, it would have been found by now. Wild theories of said plane flying under some other similar plane to avoid radar detection would have been figured out already and would have not caused us to go on any wild goose chases in the Indian Ocean.

We all wanted that plane to be safe and sound.

Does anybody really believe anything else at this point? I don't see how it could have done anything but crashed somewhere, and we just don't know where or why yet.

If it landed safely, or even semi-safely somewhere, I don't see how there could be people still alive after this much time, but haven't managed to find some way to contact somebody.

I don't think much of any of the hijacking theories either. Okay, maybe it was an attempted hijacking and something went wrong, leading to the crash, but I can't see it having landed somewhere for later use, as some people seem to be speculating. Anybody who has access to a runway to safely land and take off again such a large jet, and who can afford enough fuel to get it in the air again and can actually get that fuel to it without somebody taking notice, plus make enough changes and file appropriate flight plans to fly it anywhere, surely has enough resources to just buy their own jet instead of using some wacky plan to hijack a fully loaded passenger airliner, thus drawing the full attention of the world.

You could assume with a high probability it crashed for 2 reasons: #1 noone came out with hostage demands (imagine cost of keeping alive and fed 250 people, for 3 weeks), or claimed terrorist responsibility. #2. NSA has a multitude of sophisticated satellites in the space (recently they lunch a new one that costed over a billion of dollars! -- payload: top secret) and its been known on the record that technologically less developed countries like Russia could spy and listen on foreign countries via satellites in late 70s, some 40 years ago. NSA knew from minute one what happened with this plane. The "problem" is that revealing to the public that the plane crashed and where it is buried has sadly no value and does not come close to over-weighing the benefit of keeping secret that they can see everything around the world up to a minute. If you would have a def con raised, all military personnel pulled back for duty, then it would be smart to assume the plane went to Afghanistan, or somewhere else where it could be re-branded into a nuclear missile, or something. Since there was nothing like this happening, there was no explanation other than it crashed and everyone is dead.

On CNN a representative from Inmarsat stated that airlines could track direction and speed tomorrow. Airlines simply need to enable the service, which is relatively cheap.

Considering how cheap this service is, shouldn't it become mandatory? Then the question becomes, how do you board a 777 at 600 mph and land it if the crew becomes incapacitated?

Then the question becomes, how do you board a 777 at 600 mph and land it if the crew becomes incapacitated?

If (extremely hypothetically) it turns out that this disaster could have been preventable if there had been some way for someone outside the aircraft to assume control, the tradeoff to be examined would be the benefits vs. hazards of extensive remote control capability, rather than some kind of commando raid techniques.

It's easy in retrospect to say that that should be mandatory, but how often does something like this happen? I bet there are a lot of cheap things we could do to mitigate extremely unlikely tragedies.

I am not looking back, I am looking forward. If it only costs $10/flight, shouldn't it be mandatory? Air France 447 happened 5 years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

So, we're talking about more than once per decade.

It only took a couple of days to find where the Air France 447 crashed despite its location. Moreover, I doubt either accident would have been prevented or people would have been rescued if the precise location of the crash was known sooner.

There is some value in knowing early where an accident occurred, but that is rarely a problem. How much is it worth to fix it for the few cases that happen in the middle of nowhere?

Your statement is inaccurate:

"While Brazilian Navy authorities were able to remove the first major wreckage and two bodies from the sea within five days of the accident, initial investigation was hampered because the aircraft's black boxes were not recovered from the ocean floor until May 2011, nearly two years later"

If they knew where the plane went down, it wouldn't have taken 2 years to find the flight data recorders. The "pingers" on the recorders lasted for about 30 days, which should be plenty of time, if you know where to look.

The cost of rescue & recovery is substantial. That money could be preemptively used to subsidize the tech that affects flight safety.

no, the question become, how to we land it without crew intervention or prevent such an occurrence where a crew or passengers can put a plane in harms way?

Can their be parameters using a known flight plan that prevent the computers from permitting actions that are contrary to the safe operation of the plane without notification of someone, if not possible prevention there of? (giving some leeway to have on board circumvention - two station bypass no adjacent/password/etc)

No. It's not possible to prevent a malevolent pilot from destroying the aircraft.

On the other hand, pilots need to be able to be in total control of the aircraft, including the ability to shut off any system on board. (See Swissair 111). In an emergency, you don't have time to mess about with two station bypass/etc.

If someone on the flight is conscious and able to operate the controls of the plane then the chances are high it can be landed safely. It is possible for a ground crew to talk someone through landing a plane, a lot of the work is automated and as long as there isn't a cross wind the landing itself is fairly easy.

Get the meatbags out of the cockpit and leave flying to the experts :)

Of course Inmarsat will encourage airlines to implement this. I believe it is in their interest as it makes them extra money and wouldn't cost them that much more. The senior vice president for external affairs claims it costs about a dollar an hour (www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-26723980). I'm no expert and pretty clueless but to me this doesn't sound like a trivial cost on a fleet of about 100 aircraft.

The world's a big place and we really don't have it all figured out. Simple explanations are probably the correct one. I do wonder how many flights daily could be drummed up by weird trivia if they were put under this much scrutiny.

So, how long until the 24-hour news networks switch to stories that have big ramifications instead of this interesting, but not very (world wise) impactful event?

Asking the news networks to stop talking about what is, in fact, a massively intriguing (albeit tragic) mystery is like asking water not to be wet.

Yeah, I know I'm shouting at the rain, but I would love to actually see 24 news ignore the Casey's[1] and mention but not fixate on the M370s. I guess the whole idea of what actually affects people is just lost in the shuffle.

1) I don't care how tragic, it was a local story

I just wish the quantity of coverage was somehow related to the quantity of information available.

Yes, it's a fascinating event and I can see why they want to talk about it.

But once you've covered all available facts (which in the case of MH370 does not take long, and that was especially true in the days immediately afterwards) then it's time to stop and talk about something else for a while.

Cable-news is a broken product. Circa, on the other hand, has been phenomenal at reporting factual updates related to this story. I strongly recommend it for following news stories of interest.

One aspect of the 'infographic' has me puzzled. The search area inset (small box) is way south. It has two lines that say projected flight path. But the flight path is way north. Should the lines in the inset box blowup say 'debris field flow?)

There is still the possibility that the plane belly landed and the survivors are floating around in life rafts. It doesn't follow that because the flight terminated in the indian ocean, it crashed.

this announcement makes Malay government's unrealistic well known. Good job Malay Gov~

2 weeks. no wreckage. only people talking. as time is ticking they just get desperate to tell something. anything. i won't believe a damn thing.

they don't have a shred of a clue. there's only future profit to be secured.

edit: yeah, c'mon. give me downvotes, idiots.

I'm more intrigued by the reaction of the families. Is this a normal reaction from Chinese families?

Normal based upon what? Normal reaction for families with relatives on a flight missing for two weeks with no news about what happened to it?

point taken, but it does seem very extreme. did this happen during 9/11?

edit Also, are the families of NZ nationals, Australian, French etc behaving the same as the asians?

You're still wildly over-generalising. Why do you think that the Chinese, or 'Asians' can be categorised together? Why do you think that people from a country will, as a group, behave in an identical or similar way?

Why do you think they cannot? Or do you think that the thing called "culture" does not exist? How people show or do not show grief can and is the cultural thing.

China, let alone Asia, is not one "culture".

I think you're the only one who understood my comment.

Your remarks come out as really insensitive, although I don't think they were made with that intent. There is no possible way to imagine what it feels like to be in their situation.

The remarks weren't made with the intent of being cold and insensitive, though i admit i'm not the most sensitive of people.

edit: who knew asking about human/cultural behaviour was so frowned upon.

The problem for me was that it felt like the people were dehumanized and reduced to their culture in a situation which is so incredibly unique and must be so difficult to bear. This being said, maybe the issue is only that of timing and your question would be more pertinent later in time, after all the emotion has settled down.

I have trouble figuring out exactly what you're asking here.

Are you asking whether it's normal for people to scream, cry, or collapse after being told that a relative is dead?

That's what it seems like, but such a question is about on the same level as asking whether it's normal for a bear to relieve himself in a forest, so I'm confused.

What specifically do you deem as being "extreme"?

Why are you referencing the terror attacks on 9/11?

In the case of the Kiwis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI6TRTBZUMM#t=63. Is this group of screaming, chest-beating men any different in their expression of grief?

In the case of the Aussies: http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2012/aug/02/london-2012-aus.... Is this swimmer's loss really more significant than the loss of one's family and friends? I mean...no one died and this wasn't 9/11...right? Why is she crying, hiding her face, and hunched over?

In the case of the French: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2117014/Toulouse-sho.... This woman didn't even lose any family (maybe) and yet she has smashed her fists to the window, pressed her head close to the coffins, and is openly weeping.

I mean, look at these Americans: http://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/1360633/philip-seymour-hoffma... (http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/philip-seymour-hoffman-actor-strugg...). A freaking actor died and they're weeping and moping.

My point is that I don't fully understand what your intentions were, but I feel that your comments come across as xenophobic and disrespectful to the families who are currently experiencing loss.

Outrageously cold and immature to imply that the family members are overreacting and worse to imply that it might be related to their ethnicity. They've been given false hope for two weeks. I cannot begin to imagine the emotional torture they've had to endure.

Why wouldn't you expect how one outwardly reacts to a tragedy to be affected by one's culture and society? You are reading way more into his comment than he intended.

What is so "intriguing" about it ? Try losing a family member in such a horrible way that you don't even know what happened to them. Then, ask the same question to yourself (whatever race/ethnicity) you belong to. Comments like yours is the reason HN needs comment moderation badly.

I'm really surprised by the downvotes and reactions you're getting.

Seeing people scream and faint, having to be carried out on stretchers upon hear the news, is not a reaction that North Americans are used to seeing. It is not "normal" to see North Americans react that way. That's not a condemnation against those who do, it's just a statement of fact. OP then asked if it's "normal" for Chinese families, without any implication that they're wrong in doing it. I suspect there would have been slightly less backlash if he asked if it was common.

I was immediately curious about the same thing. I pondered whether or not China's "one child" restrictions could make these losses that much worse. Upon reflection, I thought that I might consider having at least two children in order to make such a tragic event slightly more bearable.

Or, perhaps the media singled out the most extreme reaction and it isn't typical.

The difference is noteworthy enough to make one curious, and there isn't anything wrong with that.

Occam's razor.

"Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected"

No signals = Mid-air explosion.

Hijacking, abduction, bermuda triangle, parallel universe, bitcoin theft, patent stealing, or whatever stupid conspiracy theory people wanted to believe never passed the test of Occam.

Except that's not what the evidence suggests...so Occam's Razor doesn't apply in this instance.

Occam's Razor always applies... but the simplest possible explanation needs to account for why the thing would fly seven hours off course for the purpose of blowing up over the Indian Ocean.

I don't think anyone thinks the plane blew up. At some point it likely just ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean.

The simplest possible solution with the facts that we have now is that one of the pilots (one of the pilots wife and children moved out of the family home the day before liftoff) wanted to commit suicide (taking many victims with him), but for some reason wanted to leave a mystery. Perhaps relating to insurance in some way -- hoping the black box would never be found that revealed any of the actions. Their tactic might have been to continue flying into no-return range in such a way that they didn't have to fully admit to what they were doing until it was too late.

It is terribly crass to make someone a villain when they might have been simply a victim, but of all the possible explanations that is all that seems to fit right now. That someone wanted to leave a mystery, and intentionally crashed in a place and way where it was incredibly unlikely that they would ever be found, and it turns out that only a communications handshake and some technical excellence led to it possibly being found.

It is terribly crass, especially when rumor and conjecture about the pilot's personal life (no newspaper of any repute has verified this) is used as a basis for these remarks.

This particular rumor is less vicious that the ones about him being a political fanatic, or a Muslim extremist, but no less sad a reflection of how far the press has fallen.

Given the facts of this case thus far, you might be overdoing it with the outrage. Of course details of the lives of the pilots are being poured over given that every indication includes one of their involvement.

Not outraged, just disappointed with the state of reporting. While I might not agree with your theory, I don't disagree with the need to pore over the crewmembers' backgrounds, or the plausibility of your overall point.

What bugs me is just one point that is not fact. Would you consider reading this: - an NYT story on the pilot's background and how it got twisted out of shape by tabloids (http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/19/pilot-of-missing...), and - a WaPo story with a named source who clarifies that his wife "moving out" was her normal practice of staying with their grown children whenever he flew (http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/agony-mounts-for-familie...)

- and see if it changes your point of view? or at least, how you might describe the pilot's state of mind the next time you share your thoughts?

Huh? There were signals: That's how we know the plane took an extremely unexpected course and flew essentially until its fuel was exhausted. How does that imply a mid-air explosion?

Mid-air explosions actually have a very significant radar signature, called 'bloom', as the debris field expands.

If your theory is that the aircraft exploded somewhere between Malaysia and Vietnam then it would have appeared as a rapidly-increasing radar return even on civilian radars.

Source: personal anecdote from ex-mil radar operator, who also noted that it was possible to track the larger pieces of debris from the target drones and direct the following-up missiles towards them

Mid-air aircraft explosions also have a very significant IR signature, which will show up on missile warning satellite observations. TWA-800 did, for example.

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