I had fairly well concluded that the most likely cause was a fire disrupting the electrical and control systems, when CNN now say the sharp left turn was pre-programmed 12 minutes before sign off from Malaysian Air Traffic control, which was followed fairly quickly by that left turn.
CNN claim to have this from an US official, from data sent back before the reporting systems went off. It is hard to know what to make of it: obviously there are large economic interests that much prefer blame to lie with the pilots rather than the aircraft. But if it is true then the move was not a response to an emergency. (CNN went on to say the pilot could have programmed in the course change as a contingency in case of an emergency. That made no sense to me at all – does it to anyone else?)
I still find it extremely unlikely that the plane landed or crashed on land I cannot believe it could evade military detection as it flew over a highly militarized region. Somewhere there is debris on the ocean. There have been previous pilot suicides that took the plane with them; but the long detour first seems very strange and I do not believe is precedented. However if the CNN information on pre-programming is correct, and given it was the co-pilot who signed off to air traffic control, it is hard to look beyond the pilots as those responsible for whatever did happen. In fact, on consideration, the most improbable thing is that information CNN are reporting from the US official.
just got to yours
Kenneth Sorensen
20 Mar, 2014 – 9:30 am. Apologies if I repeated your observation that I got to when I made mine. Wouldn’t want you to think I was plagiarising without attribution.
Tim, so that’s changed already !
CNN said Monday & later said 4 days, so that’s the foist I’ve heard of Sunday .
I seriously wonder if this information has been released today as a sop to the grieving relatives after the fiasco at the press conference yesterday .
‘foist’ ?…..I seem to have gorn all oirish!!!
Kenneth Sorensen
20 Mar, 2014 – 10:32 am You will have noticed that Chevaline was the TWENTIETH anniversary of that big event as well as the FORTIETH for Munich.
Katie
20 Mar, 2014 – 10:34 am I never fail to be amazed by the outpourings of “experts” wheeled out for such occasions. So do we think they could have got there by ACCIDENT? Pilot looses his way or forgot where he was going?
Why did the pilot race down towards the South Pole. Was it in order to escape Immarsat, those satelites all are geo-sstaionary and do not cover anything south of the 78th parallel? Just asking, because the whole thing seem stupid, so may be this stupiity makes sense somewhere.
It can’t be a fire obviously.
When that was purported to happen, he was about 120 miles
of the east coast.
http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=9897609&postcount=1168
His sharp veer back to the south west, took him on course
for either Kota Bahru or RMAF Gong Kedak,
He could easily have landed at either one, though of course
the former would have been his first choice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultan_Ismail_Petra_Airport
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMAF_Gong_Kedak
As you can see from the flight route map, he flew right past
Butterworth. Right underneath the noses of those clowns
at the radar consoles there.
They have a very capable state-of-the-art 3D phased array
radar there, with a detection range of up to 280 miles.
Same with that at Gong Kedak.
Both radars definitely tracked the plane as it wandered from
east to west across the peninsular, a duration of at least 45 minutes.
If they had scrambled fighters to intercept and escort it down
safely, the whole world wouldn’t have to come running to
help search all over the oceans in both hemispheres like fools.
A colossal failure of the Malaysian air defenses.
If this had been a preemptive strike, say by Singapore’s F-15SGs,
the airfield would have been flattened in two minutes.
They’d be zooming away home before they even knew what hit them.
Tim, yes Chevaline was 40 years after the Olympics in 1972, but what do you imply happened in 1992. The Barcelona Olympics?
* It might not be wreckage
* The pilot may have gone psycho and set an auto course toward the southern ocean before asphyxiating all at altitude.
* The plane could have landed for reasons discussed and dummy wreckage has been dumped
* The plane may well have been shot down as a 9/11 type threat by any of the air forces, in response to which which all governments would help to cover up.
Also interesting that ACARS is in play to help clarify this investigation but the fact that UA 175 ACARS was communicating with ground stations in Pennsylvania 20 minutes after it crashed into WTC is not mentioned no-where. Except here.
http://pilotsfor911truth.org/ACARS-CONFIRMED-911-AIRCRAFT-AIRBORNE-LONG-AFTER-CRASH.html
IF that is the plane. IF!!!!!!
Not an exciting solution but a rational one:
Quickly check google maps and enter
43° 54′ 26”N 87°28’27”E
And
43° 54′ 26”S 87°28’27”E
And you can see
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi
The city suffered unrest in May 1989 with 150 injuries, and was the site of major rioting in July 2009 triggered by violence in Southern China between ethnic Han Chinese and Southern Xinjiang Uyghurs. Official reports of the 2009 riots say that nearly 200 people were left dead, but the actual toll is unknown and disputed. Reports of extensive retaliation against the Uyghur minority have circulated ever since, despite the Chinese government having shut down access to emails and overseas phone calls for over six months
Hijacked but a false coordinate? South instead of North?
Did the hijackers make a dramatic error?
James, your term as an expert. It had been night! Possible?
And another thing. It is a major emergency when a plane loses its transponder signal. This is because only the transponder signal gives the plane’s altitude and, in busy air corridors, its loss dramatically increases the risk of collision. I believe that when the transponder signal is lost and radio contact cannot be made with the crew, jets are scrambled to escort the plane and report its altitude. My question to the Malasian authorties would therefore be: did you scramble fighter jets to locate the plane and, if not, why not?
If it would be my decision then i would send an airplane to …
43° 54′ 26”S 87°28’27”E
… to locate the blackboxes in case the parts seen are parts of the plane.
Maybe i am earning the $ 1 million prize money from warren buffet then ?
Bb
Bluebird: that’s a good find.
Tim, in reply, no I think… IF… it is part of MH370 it was ‘planted’… [ or should I say ‘plopped ‘ ? ] there , not crashed at all.
With all the crowd sourcing on Tomnod how come they missed it ?
Also, surely something of such a size would fold or break if dropped from a great height , I paced out 24 metres & really that is one great length to stay intact when hitting the sea.
Blue….
What is more amazing is the flight missed the Indonesian Air Force.
That looks deliberate.
A North track. then a West track (North West track ?),then a South track.
Certainly suggests a “hijacker” that knew what he was doing.
….and you would have to be madder than a box of frogs to even think you could enter Chinese air space without your transponder “on”.
@Tim V 20 Mar, 2014 – 3:54 pm
“am I never fail to be amazed by the outpourings of “experts” wheeled out for such occasions.”
CNN at one point had 50 experts on standby in the green room to cover any contingency. Don’t know how many of these are paid or do it as for prestige or self-promotion. (The topic of Internet security and cyber-warfare brings out droves of self-promoters. With MH370 we’ve been spared those.)
Some experts, particularly pilots who have recent experience on 777s, are knowledgeable. Many of the others are Former Directors of Agencies. If they ever had any hands-on technical knowledge it was 40-60 years ago, and I expect most of them were promoted or dropped in to their lofty positions via politics.
A few of the really old ones embarrass themselves. Example, one old-timer couldn’t understand how the plane could ping a satellite since sound waves don’t travel in space. He was thinking of submarines and underwater pings.
Well… finally worked out where that (or those) “pings” came from !
On a triple 7 the SATCOM radio pack is in the rear, up in the ceiling.
Guess “whoever” missed a trick there.
The “next” question.
If a total electrical failure (from a chain reaction)…
Engines will run.
Hydraulics will run (the engines are).
Packs still run (no on/off even if the breakers pop) hence SATCOM “ping”
Pressurisation (over ?)
Thrust levers (Probably won’t work or erratic ?)
The RAT (little turbine powered by airflow !) would deploy, so minimal electrics.
…and comms ! ….and NAV !
T’is weird this.
Surely the 777 SiM guys have tried this.
With surveillance overlords and their bullet-nose flashlights up our arses, a plethora of military and civilian sats (including infrared) probing for gnat-shit in rat-scat, a 777 cannot be effectively and competently tracked.
I digress…
How to steal an airframe.
Joystick? Although fly-by-wire is an onboard function, I see no reason why a UAV being flown remotely couldn’t be accomplished in a 777 . Field-of-view from a camera (drone) makes it easier for the operator, but fly-by-sight is possible if the shadowing rogue-jet merging into MH 370’s radar image accompanies the target. JMO
http://therebel.org/james-corbett/753226-how-to-steal-an-airplane-from-9-11-to-mh370
FoxNews commentators are increasingly vexed that the US hasn’t taken over the entire investigation and solved the mystery quickly. “Is there no way to force ourselves on the incompetent Malayasians,” they ask.
Let me suggest Homeland Security declare some terrorist, wanted dead or alive, was a passenger using a fake name. That would justify intervention.
Most reports say the world-renowned FBI has the pilot’s flight simulator’s hard drives at their US headquarters, to reconstruct yesterday’s notorious deleted files.
A CNN expert let slip they did not have the originals but copies of the drives. Either that’s for legal reasons and Malaysia needs to retain original evidence, or Malaysians aren’t as stupid as we’re told, and are protecting against the FBI dramatically announcing discovery of terrorist connections or visits to bondage pages. Or he’d printed-out cigarette coupons.
Inmarsat executive being wheeled out on Newsnight now!!!! Linked to story that Malaysians delayed data was passed ten days ago but wasn’t used within context that the debris COULD be “credible” lead. In Chevaline terms “It’s definitely the motorcyclist.”
Inmarsat told Malaysia on the 10th March that the plane WASN’T in the area in which they continued to search and didn’t either apply this intelligence or inform the public. Make no doubt this BBC critical line, plus the British firm speaking on camera, would not happen without FO/MI6 approval. He also said after the info was passed Tuesday 11th US sent ships to the south on the 13th. Note that bit of information, it could be important not least because as I said earlier, only one US ship was mentioned in the 18 specified.
The other expert represented “Blue Water Exploration” that appears to have Florida/Australian connections. His line was that with the passage of time, currents, drift etc its unlikely the plane will be located or recovered. Mmmm that’s convenient. The firm advised on the following.
“April 2011 – The wreckage of Air France Flight 447 has been found at a depth of 3,900 metres by a team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute using the Waitt Institute’s twin REMUS 6000 Autonomous Underwater Vehicles. David Mearns of BWR provided expert advice during the search to both the UK Air Accident Investigation Branch and France’s Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses. Specifically David advised the AAIB and BEA about the most probable location of the wreckage based on his analysis of the leeway drift of floating wreckage and bodies recovered after the crash. Keith Conradi, Chief Inspector of Air Accidents at the AAIB, praised David’s “invaluable contribution” and commented: “that the position predicted by David was shown to be remarkably accurate.”
Indeed! LOL Mochyn69
20 Mar, 2014 – 2:49 pm
A point I made earlier uan Kerr
20 Mar, 2014 – 4:58 pm. I agree it’s an important one. Standard protocol especially since 9/11 ((it was altered briefly in the US immediately before) to scramble fighters if commercial planes fail to respond. So why hasn’t Malaysia been asked to explain not only when it went dead but even less inexplicably when it returned over Malaysian airspace?
I agree with your sensible point NR
20 Mar, 2014 – 7:03 pm. I don’t doubt for a moment there are true experts in everything. (A maxim our science teacher liked was endeavour “to know something about everything and everything about something” which remains an unfulfilled ambition in my case I hasten to add) My point was that who speaking about what is almost as important as what they say. The media is dominated by a limited number of “talking heads”. They are the “favourites” often excluding the people who really know what they are talking about. Rupert Murdoch’s advice to Rebecca Brooks may be salutary. It was to keep out of the public eye. It’s why you seldom see the makers and shakers being interviewed and particularly sensitive political issues are at stake. When they do, particularly with an ostensible criticism of a national government or investigation, you can be sure it would be considered response with British Government consulted and blessing. It makes me even more certain of my earlier point and a similar to the device employed in the Chevaline mess.
Tim V 2:02 pm. You may be on to something here, especially in [tacitly?] assuming that I am “on the job” of connecting the dots and starting the layer removal process, using my my oh so special “backward engineering” tool kit.
As always, and you have already started to do, the best place to start in is to reconstruct the timing of various events and then look whether a pattern emerges of things that either did not seem to happen in a timely manner, or required all kinds of position reversals to ‘re-orient” the narrative.
There are time points we either know for sure or can surmise/believe with high degree of confidence. These include that final voice transmission, the time (range) the plane went off the civilian radar grid (transponder off), the ACARS turn-off time (range), the time point at which the Malaysians announced officially the plane went missing, and the planned landing time at Beijing which didn’t happen.
Then with somewhat less certainty we have the time at which malysian military radar claimed to have detected the plane (only one point? two time points?, and the time the Thai military has finally admitted to having detected it.
Then come the Imarsat satellite “pings” over several hours, all the way to 8:11AM, supposed to be the last one, which should provide a nearly independent set of time points (unfortunately not correlated with location).
May be we should have a hand plot of these two time lines, with a confidence level attached to each point (based both on the officials’ and our own intuition as to how much they can be believed).
With this at hand, we can now superpose a separate time chart which will list the points in time when we know information was disclosed to the Malaysians and the time they chose to either reveal it, and/or adjust the search parameters and/or retract previous information. To this group belongs this strange 4-5 hour delay (is it more) for the Imarsat satellite data to be disclosed, which you discussed. And at a later point the 4 day delay between the time the Australian satellite saw the images and the time they were officially revealed (4 days!). Somewhere in between there’ll be the radar data of a third country that the Malaysians don’t feel at liberty to disclose, which we do not, as of yet know.
I agree Tim V, that those “pings” which are apparently taken now as a certainty, made hash of the earlier time line as broadcast by the malaysians, considerably extending the flight time range, and taking it well out of the South China sea first search region. They led to the now-famous arcs that guide the current search. Arcs that appear to bypass the Maldives as well as Diego Garcia, and in which we all place the greatest confidence (assuming perhaps someone knew what they were doing when plotting them and had access to the input data (satellite position etc.).
So, what we have so far, is one time line for the plane during the first 1-2 hours, a second timeline detailing the time gaps between information given to the Malaysian vs disclosed by them publicly, and a chart of time data based on “pings” out to the last and final “ping”. It was stated somewhere that the reason we cannot have the “arcs” corresponding to mid-point pings is because they may have been erased and written over (I think I saw that from a commenter at The Guardian, not from some official reply to reporters that never seem to ask the most pertinent questions).
So far, so good, but the interesting part comes once we try try to come up with a corresponding matrix of places where the plane could be, corresponding to the different time points.
I think only once we have all these elements together in one place can we start venturing to who told what when, before speculating on the why. I am not ready to do this yet, because I think we need a bit more information before dwelling on the various players. he one thing that is clear so far is that by all accounts, the Malaysians know more than they are telling. As do, I suspect, those in charge of the Imarsat satellite data. As do the Americans, which we’d be fools not to suspect given their dense satellite and radar coverage. Unlike Chevaline, the outlines of a potential cover-up are not yet, at least to me, though I’m beginning to see something like an outline.
Sorry for the long post restating so much of what is already known and been discussed. My excuse is that sometimes, building a time-space matrix is useful, especially when the motives and the protagonists are unknown (and perhaps destined to remain so, we’ll see). At least it’s useful for me as a way of organizing the known information (known knowns), making it clearer which are the known unknowns (eg, the “arcs”), the unknown knowns (e.g., radar data from more parties) and the unknown unknowns (which we cannot do anything other than guess at this time).
As there’s little to report at present, why has SKY not shipped Kay Burley off to the Maldives to interview those who saw a plane flying low early that morning ?
Have we heard of any leading journalist doing that ?
I gather there’s quite a number of people who saw it so surely it’s worth the effort .
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/malaysia/10706853/MH370-Maldives-Islanders-claim-to-have-spotted-low-flying-jet.html
http://english.astroawani.com/news/show/mh370-was-the-missing-plane-seen-flying-over-the-maldives-on-march-8-32089
http://metro.co.uk/2014/03/18/flight-mh370-residents-on-remote-island-in-maldives-saw-jet-matching-missing-malaysia-airlines-planes-description-4640688/
http://i.imgur.com/zNgnicG.png?1