The k2p blog

How quickly we forget!  Or is it that what we can’t explain we don’t want to think about.

Ten weeks now.

Still nothing.

The headlines have gone. The relatives still know nothing and are struggling to find closure. The Malaysian government wants to draw a line now and move on. Death certificates have been / are being issued. Malaysian Airlines losses have increased sharply. The discussion is shifting to how to ensure live tracking and preventing this happening again.

But preventing WHAT from happening again?

When there is no plausible explanation, the implausible is no longer implausible. In fact, some implausible explanation now becomes certain.

The latest implausible suggestion now is that the plane was accidentally shot down in the South China Sea by US/Thai jets and everything subsequently was disinformation to cover that up:

Daily Mail: Cawthorne makes the incredible assertion that the plane was shot down accidentally over the South China Sea by a joint US-Thai joint strike fighter team, and the searchers sent in the wrong direction as part of a cover up.

He describes how a man, while working on an oil rig in the ocean at about the same time the plane’s transponder went off, saw a burning plane and how this was right near the military exercise being conducted with personel from various other countries.

He claims that these countries may have then sent searchers in the wrong direction in order to cover their tracks.

‘After all, no wreckage has been found in the South Indian Ocean, which in itself is suspicious.’

But I am sticking with the most plausible implausibility that the plane was deliberately destroyed and “disappeared” to prevent certain cargo and certain passengers from reaching Beijing. That control over the flight was exercised remotely, that the crew and passengers were incapacitated by the excursion to 45,000 feet and the plane then sent on a flight to nowhere to disappear in as intact a manner as possible.

Maybe we will never know.

But somebody does.

The Malaysian government has on 1st May released its preliminary report on the disappearance of MH370. The report is remarkably short (just 5 pages), raises more questions than it answers and could be heavily “laundered”. The material released includes:

1. a Malaysia Air Accident Investigation Bureau report dated April 9th: MH370 Preliminary Report
2. Cargo manifest: MH370 Cargo Manifest and Airway Bill
3. audio recordings of the cockpit conversations with air traffic control
4. a passenger seating plan

but more questions are raised than are answered.

• It took almost 4 hours after the last voice contact for the alarm to be raised.
• When search and rescue was called for the military were not brought into the loop.
• The Military ignored what they apparently did pick up on radar but classified as being “friendly”.
• The cargo contained over 2 tons (2453 kgs) of “lithium-ion batteries” (p. 5 of the cargo manifest). How was this possible when lithium-ion batteries were only to be carried on cargo planes?:

Boeing on-transport-of-lithium-batteries 042013

On January 1, 2013, changes to ICAO’s rules associated with transporting lithium batteries by air came into effect. These changes, intended to further enhance safe carriage, include required training for shippers; compliance checks prior to loading and stowage of lithium batteries aboard airplanes; and pilot notification of the presence, location, and quantity of most lithium battery shipments aboard the
airplanes. . ….
On February 13, 2013, ICAO issued a fast track amendment to the technical instructions to rescind permission allowing lithium ion airplane batteries up to 35kg to be shipped on passenger airplanes This amendment will restrict air transport of lithium ion airplane batteries to cargo-only airplanes. Boeing and its suppliers were already in compliance with this standard. The technical instructions which had become effective on January 1, 2013 allowed airline operators the flexibility to transport lithium ion airplane batteries on either passenger or cargo-only airplanes.

• The cargo also carried a large amount of “fresh mangosteens” but these were out of season.
• Some NBC audio experts have found that the audio released has been “edited”

Analysts who listened to the recordings for NBC News did not know why they were edited, but discovered at least four clear breaks in the audio that indicated edits.

The report is silent on most things. Were the passengers incapacitated due to the height excursion? Was there a height excursion? There is nothing in the material released to contradict the speculation that this was a deliberate act to prevent some passengers and some cargo from ever reaching Beijing.

Malaysian Insider: 

1. Why didn’t the DCA or the Kuala Lumpur Air Traffic Control Centre inform the Malaysian military that the MAS passenger jet was missing after it received a query from the Ho Chi Minh air traffic control?

2. Why the four-hour gap before initiating the search and rescue? Was it due to waiting for Malaysia Airlines to confirm that the plane was indeed missing?

3. Why the confusion that it was in Cambodian air space? Was that mystery ever solved?

4. Why did the military radar operator categorise an aircraft, now believed to be flight MH370, as a friendly aircraft as it travelled in a westerly direction that Saturday morning?

5. Did the military radar operator check with DCA or civilian air traffic controllers before designating that mystery aircraft as friendly?

6. Why did the Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF) deny and then confirm a report that it believed the aircraft did an “air turn back” when Hishammuddin’s statement last night clearly showed the authorities were aware of an aircraft making a turn-back?

…. But the five-page preliminary report issued last night is scant on such details.

Global television news channel CNN reported last night that the equivalent preliminary report on Air France 447 was 128 pages long. “That report, produced by France’s aviation safety agency just one month after the plane went missing in 2009, offered specific details on communication between various air traffic control centres.

“Flight 447 was found more than a year later in the Atlantic Ocean; all 228 people on board had died,” CNN reported.

It also said that a preliminary report by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau into the Qantas engine explosion in 2010 ran more than 40 pages, including diagrams and charts. 

It was 7 weeks yesterday since MH370 vanished with all its crew passengers and cargo.

Barack Obama is visiting Malaysia – the first visit by a sitting US President for over 50 years. He has expressed “solidarity” with Malaysia regarding MH370 – whatever that entails.

Since I left Malaysia on 8th April – one month after the vanishing act – nothing further has emerged. There is still no trace of anything. No debris at all. No bits and pieces gradually making their way to the surface. No passenger effects or luggage washed up anywhere. As if everything and everybody had been vaporised.

The behaviour of the Malaysian Air Force in ignoring the aircraft while flying back over Malaysian airspace and which was picked up by military radar is still to be explained.

Searches are continuing under water, in an area of the Indian Ocean which has been calculated to be its final position. The handshake radio pings from the ACARS system on board when communicating to a wobbly Inmarsat satellite contained no location or direction of flight information.  Those are being inferred from an analysis of the Doppler variations caused by the satellite’s wobble. A method being used for the first time and unproven. The probability that this calculation method is in error and may even be invalid is not insignificant.

Malaysiakini: Family members of MH370’s passengers have expressed doubt on the analysis of Inmarsat data that Prime Minister Najib Razak relied on to declare, some say with questionable haste, that the plane had “ended in the southern Indian Ocean”.

But what is known is that the aircraft spent 23 minutes at 45,000 feet and then descended rapidly to 23,000 feet. The passengers (and crew?) being incapacitated by hypoxia is highly probable. At most the oxygen masks could have provided 12 minutes of oxygen – perhaps less. A lack of oxygen for this long a time (11+ minutes) would have led not only to unconsciousness (after 4 or 5 minutes) but a permanent and irreversible coma. It is not unreasonable to suppose that all passengers and most of the crew were already dead or in an irreversible coma just over an hour into the flight, by the time the plane descended to 23,000 feet. It remains faintly possible that the pilot(s) were conscious at this time but if the plane was under remote control at this time then they too would likely have been fatally incapacitated.

But I note that there is nothing emerging about the cargo. Or about the software engineers on board.

Malaysiakini: MH370’s cargo manifest remains a secret, and its contents are unknown besides disclosure of an uncharacteristically large shipment of mangosteens, which are not in season in March, and potentially hazardous lithium-ion batteries …

A terrorist hijack with no subsequent publicity or claims makes no sense. The return to 23,000 feet and the continued “stealth” flight for several hours to “nowhere” makes “pilot suicide” highly unlikely. And that leaves a deliberate act – by persons or agencies unknown – to first eliminate all the passengers and crew and then a flight to get rid of some very sensitive cargo, the entire plane and all evidence in a remote and inaccessible place.

But it was no accident.

I had dinner this evening with a varied group here in Kuala Lumpur.

I was rather struck by the reminder that a great deal of finding solutions lies in the framing of the problem.

Three were from the UK with peripheral connections to the airline industry who had just arrived from the Philippines. A couple were retired but knowledgable Australians and our hosts were our friends who were well respected Malaysian industrialists.

Inevitably the talk turned to MH370 and the mystery of its disappearance. Perhaps the problem lay in assuming that the disappearance was a mystery!

Of course this is all speculation but within this group some ” conclusions” were felt to be justified. It is almost impossible to avoid a conspiracy theory at some level since without some form of conspiracy, such a disappearance and such a long delay for the alarm to be raised should have been impossible.

1. A “simple” catastrophic event followed by 7 hours of flying to nowhere makes little sense.
2. A hijack “gone right” makes more sense than a hijack “gone wrong”.
3. We should assume that what was achieved – the complete disappearance of aircraft and crew – was what was intended.
4. The 239 passengers and crew perished a long time ago, and probably when the plane went up to 45,000 feet.
5. The objective was to prevent certain cargo and/or certain passengers from completing their journey.
6. The rest of the deaths were collateral damage.
7. Whether the aircraft continues under a false identity or has been crashed into the ocean is irrelevant since the aircraft was irrelevant.
8. If certain key passengers or the cargo were to be the target then the hijacking was probably state sponsored.
9. The time delay between last contact and an alarm being raised (about 5 or 6 hours)  is suggestive that the Malaysian and some other governments were aware that something was up.

And now I cannot get it out of my head that the mystery lies in unravelling who wanted the plane, passengers, crew and cargo NOT to reach their destination – to vanish from the face of the earth.

All of this may be speculation but I am convinced that many Sate Governments  know a great deal more than they are letting on and that one or more of them know precisely what has transpired.

A hijacking gone right?

I just came across this graphic from malaysiakini. I hadn’t seen the altitude presented graphically before.

The altitude excursion about 1 hour into the flight up to 45,000 feet could have rendered everybody on board unconscious. If it was done deliberately or otherwise is still the burning question.

Graphic from Malaysiakini

It does not add to the confidence when the story keeps changing. Tha last reported words from the cockpit were not “All right, good night” from the co-pilot but ” Goodnight. Malaysian three seven zero”  and it is not yet finalised as to who spoke the words.

I noticed today that Tony Abbott was quoted as saying that

“The accumulation of evidence is that the aircraft has been lost and it has been lost somewhere in the south of the Indian Ocean,” he told reporters at the Perth military base coordinating the search.

“That’s the absolutely overwhelming wave of evidence and I think that Prime Minister Najib Razak was perfectly entitled to come to that conclusion, and I think once that conclusion had been arrived at, it was his duty to make that conclusion public.”

But as far as I am aware the evidence of its location south west of Perth in the Indian Ocean is entirely – and solely – based on the analysis of routine communication signals between the ACARS system on the plane and Inmarsat’s satellite.

Slate: On the morning of Saturday, March 8, MH370 replied seven times to these pings, saying, in effect, “Yes, I’m here.” The line was open for the plane to communicate with the outside world. But the system that generates the messages themselves, called ACARS, had been shut off. So nothing else was communicated between the satellite and the plane.

…. When Inmarsat pinged it at 8:11 a.m. and received MH370’s reply, the amount of time it took the plane to respond allowed investigators to calculate its distance from the satellite. This did not correspond to a specific location but to an arc of possible locations across Central Asia in the north and the Indian Ocean to the south. … 

Could analysis of the six earlier pings narrow down the route that the plane had taken? ……  The first ping coincided more or less with the time when MH370 slipped out of range of Malaysia’s military radar. So we have a starting point. By knowing the interval to the next ping, and by estimating the plane’s speed, we can arrive at a distance traveled during that time. Given the radius of the next arc, it’s a simple matter to calculate a route by angling the distance traveled to meet up with that arc.

When the NTSB ran the numbers, the resulting plot showed the plane winding up in a remote part of the Indian Ocean, and that’s where searchers began focusing their efforts. …… Though the NTSB’s process worked for generating a likely path to the south, it could also be used just as effectively to create a path to the north. The satellite data itself is ambiguous—it provides no clues about which direction the plane is moving. 

….. the clever engineers at Inmarsat managed to squeeze one more drop from the thimbleful of data contained in those pings. …….. 

“This is an old satellite,” Exner said. “When satellites start to run out of hydrazine, you can’t keep them exactly geostationary.” Instead of keeping perfectly still above a certain spot, the satellite begins to slowly wobble. Over the course of the day, it makes a narrow figure eight around a central spot located on the Earth’s equator.

“It’s a small effect,” Exner says, “And normally you’d overlook it.” But in the hunt to overcome the symmetry of the ping data, Inmarsat likely realized that it could use the wobble of the satellite to its advantage. The satellite itself, depending on where it is in its orbit, will have a different relative motion compared to a northbound and a southbound plane. That relative motion can be detected as a Doppler effect. ….. The effect was subtle and difficult to tease out of the data, but when Inmarsat ran simulations, it found that the amount of Doppler effect observed in the MH370 data matched the predictions for the southern route and not the northern one. Comparisons with other flights whose location and speed were known supported that conclusion ….