Since the 7 June publication of A Little Information is a Dangerous Thing, Duncan Steel, Jeff Wise, and Sid Bennett (also of the IG) have been kind enough to email their thoughts and corrections. I made a few changes to the blog and then stopped. Most visitors are going to read a blog entry once (if that). They aren’t going to go back and re-read ten pages to find edits. So let’s take Dangerous Thing as done (warts and all), and build a more nuanced understanding of what happened to MH370 through new contributions and further collective sweat.
Before I get us kick started below, I have one request. When you send an email to author@bradleywest.net, please let me know if I may copy the email (without your email address, of course, or even your name if you wish to remain anonymous) into the Comments section so that others may benefit from reading your exact words, too.
Thanks in advance.
Bradley West, Singapore 9, June 2015
Brighter lights in a dark room . . .
What I’ve learned since Sunday makes the probability of pilot mass murder greater, but doesn’t convincingly prove the ‘lone wolf’ theory, either. For the moment, there’s ample room for conspiracies and heaps of space for additional facts to be usefully put to work. Where we now stand:
- A pilot could definitely disable the ACARS and SATCOM from the cockpit, perhaps in more than one fashion. One anonymous contributor who came through Duncan Steel wrote that “. . . using the flight deck cursor . . . [deselect] SATCOM as an available datalink for ACARS Manager. Note VHF was already deselected, during pre-flight procedures, as evidenced in the ACARS Traffic Log. The datalink state ensures that no automatic ACARS messages were sent when the routing changed.”
It’s still controversial whether it’s possible to cut the power to the SDU/SATCOM from the cockpit, thereby affecting cabin lights, air conditioning, and the in-flight entertainment system. Most observers think that someone would need to get into the E/E bay below decks. Note by cutting power to the L MAIN Integrated Drive Generator and the L BACKUP Generator this then shuts off power to the LEFT MAIN BUS which in turn supplies the SDU and in-flight entertainment modules.
. . . but many objects remain in shadow
There’s still a lot that even the experts don’t agree on, including the following suppositions which were new to me:
- If MH370 had been on autopilot and crashed when it ran out of fuel, previously published IG work showed that it would likely have hit the ocean close to its last powered position. (See The Last Fifteen Minutes of Flight of MH370 by Brian Anderson, 24 April 2015 on www.duncansteel.com ). New mathematical analysis published in April, 2015 by Texas A&M University at Qatar (and assisted by many other academics and government staff) concluded that the plane would have entered the water nearly vertically. The wings would have sheared off completely, and the fuselage would have sunk without much, if any, debris in evidence. (See press release, Texas A&M Qatar Mathematician Theorizes what happened to MH370, 7 June 2015, www.duncansteel.com.) So an out-of-fuel plane wouldn’t necessarily have left anything floating in the ocean. This means that we need to amend the Conjecture Filter described in Dangerous Thing (7 June), relaxing the condition that the plane was under pilot control when it hit the water. As of 9 June, I thought that was the new consensus and as such, uncontroversial. Not so fast! Victor Iannello on Twitter 10 June posted a short, direct refutation of the Texas A&M research. In short, Victor Iannello’s research concluded the skin of a B777 would have ruptured and the airframe would likely have buckled if the plane struck the ocean even in a near-vertical, high speed dive. The resulting impact would have resulted in surface debris. This debate isn’t settled: stay tuned
- There’s a lot of thought being given to the question as to why the pilot—having disconnected the ACARS, powered down the electricity supply to the SATCOM (through a means as yet agreed, with or without an accomplice), depressurized the plane, and killed the passengers—decides to restore power as per the SDU re-logging on at 02:25. Sid Bennett emailed that he thought the reason for the re-powering was that this would allow the plane to repressurize and permit the pilot to fly without his oxygen mask. An anonymous IG contributor to Duncan Steel’s email mentions that crew outside the cockpit may have pulled the circuit breakers in the E/E bay to try to get the Flight Deck Door lock open. Possibly power was also cut to decommission one or more security cameras as well.
- A recent paper posted on www.duncansteel.com (see MH370 section, scroll down to 28 May 2015, MH370 Flight Path Model version 13.5d, by Richard Godfrey) suggests that there still remains a 30km x 100km swath of ocean that’s barely seen a ship. That 3000km2 area is absurdly large (though it’s only 5% of the total search zone) in which to look for two broken off wings and a fuselage on the bottom.
We are getting closer, folks. From the number of hits on the website, it seems that there are plenty of knowledgeable people looking in. Let’s hear from you. This riddle isn’t going to solve itself: that’s for certain.
I am intrigued by this mystery which if I follow your logic is lending itself toward the conclusion of murder suicide, which the German pilot more recently left no doubt about as to that scenario. It seems pretty clear that this was a deliberate action, but the question remains why? Also where in the vast empty reaches of the southern oceans… or do you subscribe to the following conjecture as written by Jeff Wise?
“For a long time, I resisted even considering the possibility that someone might have tampered with the data. That would require an almost inconceivably sophisticated hijack operation, one so complicated and technically demanding that it would almost certainly need state-level backing. This was true conspiracy-theory material.
And yet, once I started looking for evidence, I found it. One of the commenters on my blog had learned that the compartment on 777s called the electronics-and-equipment bay, or E/E bay, can be accessed via a hatch in the front of the first-class cabin.15 If perpetrators got in there, a long shot, they would have access to equipment that could be used to change the BFO value of its satellite transmissions. They could even take over the flight controls.16
I realized that I already had a clue that hijackers had been in the E/E bay. Remember the satcom system disconnected and then rebooted three minutes after the plane left military radar behind. I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how a person could physically turn the satcom off and on. The only way, apart from turning off half the entire electrical system, would be to go into the E/E bay and pull three particular circuit breakers. It is a maneuver that only a sophisticated operator would know how to execute, and the only reason I could think for wanting to do this was so that Inmarsat would find the records and misinterpret them. They turned on the satcom in order to provide a false trail of bread crumbs leading away from the plane’s true route.
It’s not possible to spoof the BFO data on just any plane. The plane must be of a certain make and model, 17equipped with a certain make and model of satellite-communications equipment,18 and flying a certain kind of route19 in a region covered by a certain kind of Inmarsat satellite.20 If you put all the conditions together, it seemed unlikely that any aircraft would satisfy them. Yet MH370 did.
I imagine everyone who comes up with a new theory, even a complicated one, must experience one particularly delicious moment, like a perfect chord change, when disorder gives way to order. This was that moment for me. Once I threw out the troublesome BFO data, all the inexplicable coincidences and mismatched data went away. The answer became wonderfully simple. The plane must have gone north.
Using the BTO data set alone, I was able to chart the plane’s speed and general path, which happened to fall along national borders.Fig. 21 Flying along borders, a military navigator told me, is a good way to avoid being spotted on radar. A Russian intelligence plane nearly collided with a Swedish airliner while doing it over the Baltic Sea in December. If I was right, it would have wound up in Kazakhstan, just as search officials recognized early on.
There aren’t a lot of places to land a plane as big as the 777, but, as luck would have it, I found one: a place just past the last handshake ring called Baikonur Cosmodrome.Fig. 22 Baikonur is leased from Kazakhstan by Russia. A long runway there called Yubileyniy was built for a Russian version of the Space Shuttle. If the final Inmarsat ping rang at the start of MH370’s descent, it would have set up nicely for an approach to Yubileyniy’s runway 24.”
Rob, thanks for commenting. I, too, am familiar with Jeff’s Russian hijack-Kazakhstan put-down approach. It’s extremely detailed and fits with the facts as presently interpreted by Jeff, Victor Iannello and a couple other deep thinkers. The more research I do, the more I realize that the MH370 investigation space is peopled by some smart, opinionated folks and they are often at odds with one another.
Without spoiling the surprise, the 14 June True Lies post “One Conspiracy to Rule Them All” will definitely speak to Mr. Wise’s hypothesis.
A friend who wishes to stay below the radar given that he works in the satellite industry offered the following comment:
I enjoyed reading the latest blog, and here’s a very good argument in support of there NOT being a way of disabling the automatic lock on the cockpit door – or at least no easy way. Recognising that the Germanwings flight was an A320 and not a B777 (and therefore might have different access to the Electronics bay), I doubt that the Captain, Patrick Sondheimer, would have spent the last 25 minutes of his life trying heroically to break the door down if he knew of an alternative way in. And if the Captain doesn’t know, who does. There’s an interesting article on this topic in today’s Plane Talking: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2015/06/11/faa-blocks-cockpit-redesigns-following-mh370-germanwings/. If you don’t already know this site, there’s a wealth of info on MH370, but I suspect not much if any that you don’t know.
I have no idea what happened to MH370, but there are lots of reasons (all detailed by you) to satisfy the most discerning conspiracy theorist. All we can be sure of, also as you say, is that the aircraft was being piloted by someone until its last known point near the tip of Sumatra. A different topic, but I wonder in the meantime whether there have been any shake-ups in radar management on the Thai and Malaysian borders…..
What is truly amazing to me is that despite a lot of noise, it has not been made mandatory to upload black box data in real time via satellite. At the risk of sounding self-serving (but I’m not, as my vested interest with all the travel I do is to do with safety), the technology is there and it’s not particularly expensive. You’ve detailed the Inmarsat service well, and it works in the 1-2 GHz L-band which affords reliable low data rate (less than 400 kbps typically) communication. You might be interested to know that it is mandatory for all ocean vessels above a certain size to have an L-band terminal on board. In recent years the airline and maritime industries have been moving away from L-band to higher frequency Ku-band (12-14 GHz), which allows affordable data rates similar to home broadband systems, and companies like Panasonic are in the process of revolutionising air travel by equipping the planes of their customers with Ku-band phased array antennas to communicate at high speed to geostationary satellites. Which means the last place you can legitimately goof off and not respond to email is under threat…. (Disclaimer: Panasonic and many of their competitors are customers of various satellite operators including the one I work for). And then of course the GPS constellation is what drives SatNav systems through a receiver, so (to my non-technical mind) there really is no excuse for not making it mandatory for planes to be equipped with transmitter receivers so the satellite company and/or the airline HQ knows where a plane is at all times. The word transponder, by the way, comes from Transmitter – responder. As well as aeroplanes, satellites have them to receive an uplink frequency and transmit in a different (and therefore non-interfering) downlink frequency.
And now only 3 more sleeps until the conspiracy that rules them all. Will Khun Sa’s heirs turn out to have secretly kidnapped the Chinese silicon chip engineers on board to turn Myanmar into a super cyber terrorist state, or will the 2 Iranian stowaways turn out to be an advance guard of ISIS trying to turn the Lithium batteries into some kind of super bomb; or will the still undisclosed complete cargo manifest turn out to include something far more valuable/deadly? I can hardly wait!
Old friend, I realize now that you should have written the damn book and I should have sought employment in the transponder leasing field. Thanks for your comments and inputs.