The k2p blog

I have just been watching the daily Press Conference today (Monday) and it is obvious that some incorrect information was given by the Minister at yesterday’s press conference.

Yesterday (Sunday) he had said that the ACARS system had been switched off before the co-pilots last transmission.

CLG: Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Tun Hussein told the media yesterday that the ACARS was turned off before the message. Previously, it was reported that the system was turned off after the last voice contact.

Today it became apparent that this was not necessarily true. The last ACARS transmission was at 0107 and it did not transmit at the next scheduled transmission at 0137. It must have been switched off between 0107 and 0137. The co-pilots last words to Air Traffic Control “All Right. Good Night” was at 0119.

What he should have said was that the voice transmission took place after the last ACARS transmission but not necessarily before it was switched off.

It was noticeable at today’s Press Conference that the Minister was avoiding comparisons with what was said yesterday.

It is Day 10 and the lack of any information is dropping the story to the bottom of the front pages. But the fate of 239 passengers and crew is still not known. It is becoming a mystery much more perplexing than the Mary Celeste.

The last military radar observation put the MH370 Boeing 777 on its way to (or close to) the Igrex navigational waypoint, south of the Andaman Islands. This was about 4 1½ hours into the flight. Then comes the final “ping”, 7½ hours into the flight, picked up by a satellite over the Indian Ocean. At that point the aircraft would have had 30 – 60 minutes of fuel left (30 minutes if flying fast and perhaps 60 minutes if flying close to its minimum speed). The ping places the aircraft – presumably with engines still running – somewhere along the Northern or the Southern corridors. The ping is silent on whether the plane was in flight or on the ground – but I think it does indicate the engines were still running.

twists and turns mh370 (malaysian insider)

The question becomes how did the aircraft get to the “ping” arcs from its last known position without being picked up by civilian or military radar. What “stealth path” did it follow?

Stealth paths MH370 (based on Mirror graphic)

It is becoming clear that not all military radar in the region is in continuous operation (because it is too expensive) or manned 24×7 unless it is a sensitive military area. For example, Indian military radar at the Naval base at Port Blair is not in continuous operation or the most advanced, because it is considered a “peaceful zone”. Military radar – even when active – tends to ignore signals from presumed commercial aircraft on well-travelled paths especially when they show up at the expected times.

NST: Investigators are poring over the Boeing 777-200ER’s flight profile to determine if it had flown low and used “terrain masking” during most of the eight hours it was missing from the radar coverage of possibly at least three countries. ……. 

By sticking to commercial routes, the flight may not have raised the suspicion of those manning primary (military) radars of the nations it overflew. To them, MH370 would appear to be just another commercial aircraft on its way to its destination.

What is known is that

1. the aircraft at times flew as high as 41,000 feet, sometimes at 23,000 feet and at times as low as 5,000 feet with cruising altitude being 31,000 -35,000 feet.
2. at 5,000 feet – in the right terrain – the aircraft would even be invisible to military radar
3. at 23,000 feet (or thereabouts) and if it was flying some 10,000 feet under and along the same track as some other regular commercial aircraft, it could have been hidden under the “shadow” of the other aircraft and would not immediately have been picked up. Especially if the other flight was a regular and expected flight.
4. until its last known position, the aircraft was flown very deliberately and very skillfully along a track which minimised its chances of being picked up.
5. Even the initial change of direction westwards was cleverly made just at the point where Malaysian Air Traffic Control was to hand over to Vietnamese Control.

The lenth of the “ping” arcs depend upon the plane’s speed. If the plane had been at normal cruising speeds it could have reached the vicinity of Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan. The route across China and Kazakhstan is a regular commercial route and dozens of flights followed that corridor on the night MH370 vanished. To be “concealed” from radar by the shadow of other commercial flights, MH370 would have been constrained to maintain a “normal” cruising speed. So it is not impossible for the aircraft to have followed a well-planned track, executed very well, hopping between different altitudes and hopping between different tracks of regular commercial flights, to get from its last known position to one of the “ping” tracks.  But it would have required considerable and detailed planning and some skill to implement. It is probably no coincidence that all this happened during the “dead” time of night in that part of the world (starting at 0100 Malaysian time and at the time of the last ping around 0800 in Malysia – 0530 in India or 0500 in Kyrgyzstan).

(Once upon a time when I worked on the night shift of research projects, the “dead” time when things got missed was always between 0200 and 0400).

There are only 3 possibilities remaining:

1. the aircraft has crashed or been crashed into the Indian Ocean and all aboard have perished, or
2. the aircraft has landed at a secret location and some or all of the crew and passengers are alive and being held, or
3. the aircraft has crashed on land at an unknown location with little chance of any survivors.

I am inclined to believe it must be one of the first two. For want of any other explanation I am staying with a path over Myanmar, NE India and over Tibetan China to a barren area with a makeshift landing strip at the Chinese -Kyrgyzstan border.

This is surreal.

It has kept my attention totally engaged for the last 8 days.

If Tom Clancy had written this plot it would have been considered a little far-fetched. But we have seen a modern government, in this the 21st century, play out this unreal plot. It seems to be a remarkably daring and sophisticated exploit with many governments and agencies – not just the Malaysian – following a pre-written script like puppets.

But who is the puppet-master?

A Malaysia Airlines airliner (a Boeing 777-200ER – registration 9M-MRO) with 239 passengers and crew on board was stolen in mid-flight, on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing as Flight MH370, and taken to some unknown hide-away, by unknown perpetrators for some unknown motive. It happened 7 days ago but the theft was not discovered till now. The perpetrators covered their tracks so well that we don’t even know which way the plane was headed.

It could have gone North or it could have gone South.

It could have flown up to 2,000 nautical miles from its last known position.

It could have crashed in the sea, or not.

It could have landed on an uninhabited island in the Southern Indian Ocean, or not

It could be in Central Asia, or not.

The passengers may be alive, or not.

The pilot and co-pilot may have been involved, or not.

Other passengers may have been involved, or not.

Two passengers were travelling on false passports, but they were not terrorists – we think.

The aircraft may still be intact, or not.

But we are not confused.

We know with certainty that we don’t know what we don’t know.

Maybe the Malaysian Government and Malaysia Airlines were just unlucky to be chosen by the puppet-master. I am not entirely sure that any other government would not also have been compelled to follow this puppeteer’s script.

But there are still 239 lives at stake.

The Malaysian PM is holding a Press Conference – the first he is addressing since the plane vanished where he will make a short statement but will not take questions.

The Prime Minister upheld perceptions of Malaysian officialdom. The press conference started just 50 minutes late

• Turn back confirmed.
• Based on satellite , highly certain that ACARS communication was first switched off
• Near handover to Vietnam control, transponders were switched off.
• Deliberate action by someone on the plane – all possibilities being considered.
• Last satellite communication was on 0811 on 8th March (7 hours after the last normal communication)
• Still calculating how much further it could have flown
• Could have been on Northern or Southern corridor
• Likely to be in Corridor Along Thailand-Kazakhstan route or Indonesia-South India
• Ending Search in South China Sea, Focusing on New Corridors
• All aboard to be investigated

One of the pilots or someone else with flying experience hijacked the plane.

We don’t know who. 

We don’t know why

We don’t know where the plane is now (but it is not in the South China Sea).

We are now into Day 8 since the plane vanished. Finding the plane is still the main focus but investigating some form of “foul play” is now running second.

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CNN is tweeting that the plane could have taken one of two paths after its 5 hours of “silent” flying; one North West across the Andamans towards India, or one to the South West  which I make to be in the direction of Diego Garcia. Either way with no extra fuel it ends up in the Indian Ocean.

CNN tweet – Two possible paths

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The Telegraph: The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have been “an act of piracy” and the possibility that its hundreds of passengers are being held at an unknown location has not been ruled out, US investigators have said.

The search area is still limited by the knowledge of how much fuel was on board. That would have lasted for a total of a little over 8 hours at take-off (with the flight time to Beijing being about 6 hours). If the plane flew on for -say- 4 to 5 hours from its last known position it could still have had almost 2½ hours of fuel left on board at that time.

That any refuelling could have taken place during the 5 “silent” hours is at the very edges of science fiction. Mid-air refuelling is out of the question and there are not many places where – even with all possible cooperation from the ground – a Boeing 777 could have landed and refuelled. Any final destination in the Middle East would have required more fuel.

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Bangladesh has joined the search. India and Bangladesh are said to be checking sections of their coastlines some 15km out to sea. (I am guessing that these are areas where the currents are likely to carry debris from the Bay of Bengal).

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The New York Times says that a satellite firm claims its data could be analysed to give the location. One would hope that such data is already being analysed and that Inmarsat are not just sitting on the data waiting for someone to offer them a deal! . Apparently it is.

NYT:

SEPANG, Malaysia — As the hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet expanded into the daunting vastness of the Indian Ocean, a satellite communications company confirmed on Friday that it had recorded electronic “keep alive” ping signals from the plane after it disappeared, and said those signals could be analyzed to help estimate its location.

The information from the company, Inmarsat, could prove to be the first big break in helping narrow the frustrating search for the plane with 239 people aboard that mysteriously disappeared from radar screens a week ago, now hunted by a multinational array of ships and planes that have fanned out for thousands of square miles.

If MH370 was in fact hijacked and this report from Reuters (in full below)  about the radar data is correct, then the “diverted” flight path of MH370 looked like this: (See expanded map here via The Guardian for details). Somebody with much experience of flying must have been in charge of the aircraft. No doubt the passengers and crew are being investigated to see who else apart from the pilots had that kind of experience.

MH370 Presumed Diverted Flight Path

(See also this map reconstructed and tweeted by Singapore Today and this one from AirInfo. All are based on the Reuters report and the locations of the navigation waypoints).

UPDATE! —  The presumed flight path – even if correct – is 7 days old. The Indian search effort is now to include hundreds of uninhabited islands in the Andaman and Nicobar chain. (Of 572 islands in the chain only 37 are inhabited).

The WSJ also seems to confirm the flight of the plane westwards.

Malaysia Airlines’ missing jet transmitted its location repeatedly to satellites over the course of five hours after it disappeared from radar, people briefed on the matter said, as searchers zeroed in on new target areas hundreds of miles west of the plane’s original course.

The satellites also received speed and altitude information about the plane from its intermittent “pings,” the people said. The final ping was sent from over water, at what one of these people called a normal cruising altitude. They added that it was unclear why the pings stopped. One of the people, an industry official, said it was possible that the system sending them had been disabled by someone on board.

The people, who included a military official, the industry official and others, declined to say what specific path the transmissions revealed. But the U.S. planned to move surveillance planes into an area of the Indian Ocean 1,000 miles or more west of the Malay peninsula where the plane took off, said Cmdr. William Marks, the spokesman for the U.S. Seventh Fleet.

(Reuters) –

Radar data suggests missing Malaysia plane deliberately flown way off course – sources

Military radar data suggests a Malaysia Airlines jetliner missing for nearly a week was deliberately flown hundreds of miles off course, heightening suspicions of foul play among investigators, sources told Reuters on Friday.

Analysis of the Malaysia data suggests the plane, with 239 people on board, diverted from its intended northeast route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and flew west instead, using airline flight corridors normally employed for routes to the Middle East and Europe, said sources familiar with investigations into the Boeing 777’s disappearance.

Two sources said an unidentified aircraft that investigators believe was Flight MH370 was following a route between navigational waypoints when it was last plotted on military radar off the country’s northwest coast.

This indicates that it was either being flown by the pilots or someone with knowledge of those waypoints, the sources said.

The last plot on the military radar’s tracking suggested the plane was flying toward India’s Andaman Islands, a chain of isles between the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal, they said.

Waypoints are geographic locations, worked out by calculating longitude and latitude, that help pilots navigate along established air corridors.

A third source familiar with the investigation said inquiries were focusing increasingly on the theory that someone who knew how to fly a plane deliberately diverted the flight.

POSSIBLE SABOTAGE OR HIJACK

“What we can say is we are looking at sabotage, with hijack still on the cards,” said that source, a senior Malaysian police official.

All three sources declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the media and due to the sensitivity of the investigation.

Officials at Malaysia’s Ministry of Transport, the official point of contact for information on the investigation, did not return calls seeking comment.

Malaysian police have previously said they were investigating whether any passengers or crew had personal or psychological problems that might shed light on the mystery, along with the possibility of a hijacking, sabotage or mechanical failure.

As a result of the new evidence, the sources said, multinational search efforts were being stepped up in the Andaman Sea and also the Indian Ocean.

LAST SIGHTING

In one of the most baffling mysteries in modern aviation, no trace of the plane nor any sign of wreckage has been found despite a search by the navies and military aircraft of more than a dozen countries.

The last sighting of the aircraft on civilian radar screens came shortly before 1:30 a.m. Malaysian time last Saturday (1730 GMT Friday), less than an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur, as the plane flew northeast across the mouth of the Gulf of Thailand. That put the plane on Malaysia’s east coast.

Malaysia’s air force chief said on Wednesday an aircraft that could have been the missing plane was plotted on military radar at 2:15 a.m., 200 miles northwest of Penang Island off Malaysia’s west coast.

This position marks the limit of Malaysia’s military radar in that part of the country, a fourth source familiar with the investigation told Reuters.

When asked about the range of military radar at a news conference on Thursday, Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said it was “a sensitive issue” that he was not going to reveal.

“Even if it doesn’t extend beyond that, we can get the co-operation of the neighboring countries,” he said.

The fact that the aircraft – if it was MH370 – had lost contact with air traffic control and was invisible to civilian radar suggested someone on board had turned off its communication systems, the first two sources said.

They also gave new details on the direction in which the unidentified aircraft was heading – following aviation corridors identified on maps used by pilots as N571 and P628. These routes are taken by commercial planes flying from Southeast Asia to the Middle East or Europe and can be found in public documents issued by regional aviation authorities.

In a far more detailed description of the military radar plotting than has been publicly revealed, the first two sources said the last confirmed position of MH370 was at 35,000 feet about 90 miles off the east coast of Malaysia, heading towards Vietnam, near a navigational waypoint called “Igari”. The time was 1:21 a.m..

The military track suggests it then turned sharply westwards, heading towards a waypoint called “Vampi”, northeast of Indonesia’s Aceh province and a navigational point used for planes following route N571 to the Middle East.

From there, the plot indicates the plane flew towards a waypoint called “Gival”, south of the Thai island of Phuket, and was last plotted heading northwest towards another waypoint called “Igrex”, on route P628 that would take it over the Andaman Islands and which carriers use to fly towards Europe.

The time was then 2:15 a.m. That is the same time given by the air force chief on Wednesday, who gave no information on that plane’s possible direction.

The sources said Malaysia was requesting raw radar data from neighbours Thailand, Indonesia and India, which has a naval base in the Andaman Islands.

We are into Day 7 after the aircraft’s disappearance and there is still very little confirmed. But it is getting very weird.

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While US information is taking the search towards a hijacking and westwards, the Chinese have now reported a seismic event on the sea floor between Malaysia and Vietnam about 1.5 hours after the plane lost contact which suggests a catastrophic plunge into the sea along or close to the aircraft’s planned flight path.

Malaysian Insider: Chinese researchers have detected a “seafloor event” near the waters between Malaysia and Vietnam, an area suspected to be linked to the missing MH370 jetliner, reported Xinhua. The event occurred about one and a half hours after the plane’s last definitive sighting on civilian radar, a research group on seismology and physics from the University of Science and Technology of China was quoted as saying.

The research group told the Chinese news agency that the area – which is 116 km northeast from where the last contact with the Boeing plane was recorded – was a non-seismic region. “The seafloor event could have been caused by the plane possibly plunging into the sea,” said the group.

If the plane flew on for 4 or 5 hours after ceasing communication – then it must have been hijacked. When the pinging ceased the plane may not have crashed if the hijackers were sophisticated enough to shut it off as they had done with the transponders. The aircraft could then have continued flying after the pinging ceased. No black box signal suggests that it has not encountered water (or that it has been completely destroyed). If the black box has not been destroyed it must be on land. If on land the plane could could have crashed or it has been landed. If it has landed then the passengers may still be alive.

But I can make no sense of who such hijackers could be and where they could have been headed to.

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US officials believe the flight’s two communication systems were “systematically shut down”, indicating that the plane’s disappearence may not have been due to a catastrophic failure, according to ABC News. “The data reporting system, they believe, was shut down at 1.07am. The transponder – which transmits location and altitude – shut down at 1.21am,” the report says.

Hereandnow: Wall Street Journal reporter Andy Pasztor made news today with his story that missing Malaysian Airlines flight 370 could have flown for four more hours after its last confirmed contact, based on information routinely relayed from its Rolls Royce engines.

Malaysian officials denied that today. But Pasztor also claims that American investigators are debating whether “something weird and bizarre” and still unexplained happened in the cockpit, and that the Boeing 777 did not crash when it dropped off the radar, but may have landed.

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Foul play seems to be back into the picture with air piracy followed by a descent into water now assumed for the new search area.

National Post: 

Aviation specialists investigating last week’s loss of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 say evidence gathered so far suggests the plane veered off its path toward Beijing and travelled west over Malaysia toward the Andaman Sea, beyond the detection limits of the country’s radars, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the probe is active.

ABC News, citing a senior Pentagon official, said the plane may have crashed into the Indian Ocean. With no evidence of a mechanical failure or pilot error, U.S. investigators are treating the disappearance as a case of air piracy, though it remains unclear by whom, one person said.

India’s search team has been asked to explore “very specific coordinates in the Andaman Sea,” said Syed Akbaruddin, a spokesman for the Indian foreign ministry, without elaborating on those coordinates.

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Unconfirmed report that the engines continued to “ping” that they were ready to transmit infirmation and these pings were picked up by US communication satellites. Data was not transmitted because Malaysian Airlines does not subscribe to the service but the “pings” themselves are providing the indications that the plane continued flying and that it was westwards.

(now also reported here at ABC News: Malaysia Airliner Kept ‘Pinging’

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Malaysian Ministers continue to make silly statements:

This time the Communications Minister, Ahmad Shabery Cheek, is calling for nationalism and the cessation of all criticism of the government.

NST: “The government and those involved in the operation needs the people to support us. This is the time to unite under the banner of nationalism.”

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What the new indications are are not known but the US thinks the aircraft may have come down even further west than previously ever envisaged. They believe the plane flew west for 4 or 5 hours after disappearing from the radar before crashing into the water. I would guess that the new indications are from satellite imagery. But a location so far west also suggests that the plane was diverted/hijacked and was being flown with all communication deliberately switched off.

At today’s press conference why did Malaysia dismiss the US report that the plane had flown on for 4 or 5 hours as being “inaccurate”?

Where? Myanmar? Thailand? India?

Could it actually have been landed somewhere? Seems unlikely.

Reuters: “It’s my understanding that based on some new information that’s not necessarily conclusive – but new information – an additional search area may be opened in the Indian Ocean,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said. “And we are consulting with international partners about the appropriate assets to deploy.

“The Star:U.S. officials have an “indication” the missing Malaysia Airlines plane may have crashed in the Indian Ocean and is moving the USS Kidd to the area to begin searching, according to ABC News. It quoted a senior Pentagon official as saying that it will take another 24 hours to move the ship into position. 
“We have an indication the plane went down in the Indian Ocean,” the senior official said.

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Eagle Radio:

Communications satellites picked up a faint ‘electronic ping’ from the missing Malaysian aircraft after contact was lost according to a source close to the investigation.

The signal was an indication the aircraft’s troubleshooting systems were ready to communicate with satellites if required, but no data was sent because Malaysia Airlines had not subscribed to the full troubleshooting service, the source said.

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