Originally Posted by
artee
Agreed - that's the point where it went off the rails. MP is certainly in the "this aircraft was fully controlled" camp.
WSPR aside, there's the Marchand-Blelly work that also gets a run in the Mentour Pilot video. Notably, it too is not without some serious deficiencies.
Amongst those deficiencies is their contention that
all electrical generators were isolated at around the time that the aircraft went "dark" while over the Gulf of Thailand, thus triggering the deployment of the Ram Air Turbine. That would be an extraordinary action, unnecessary and irreversible (in terms of RAT deployment).
Much of their proposed flight path is based on the contention that the aircraft was descended to 30,000 feet (FL300) at the time it turned back towards the Malaysian Peninsula. There is no evidence to support this but there is good evidence (the air traffic control primary radar data from Kota Bharu) that roundly contradicts it. The aircraft was likely very much higher than their proposed cruising altitude at that time. This impacts both their speed and fuel consumption assumptions.
Then they run into the standard good many problems with a controlled, unpowered ditching hypothesis.
1. There's the decision to attempt a unpowered ditching in the first place; anyone familiar with the Ethiopian Airlines 961 unpowered ditching would be aware of the hazards associated.
2. The Burst Frequency Offset from aircraft's final log-on to the satellite network showed a high and rapidly increasing rate of descent; that is not consistent with a controlled descent, although it doesn't rule it out.
3. The final SATCOM log-on did not run to completion; that should not have been the case if the aircraft was in a controlled, sustained descent at that time. Their ELMS shedding explanation for the partial log-on does not seem to comport with either the known generating capacity of the APU (identical to an IDG) or the documented ELMS shedding protocols.
4. Their scenario calls for a Flaps 30 ditching; the ATSB evidence is that the flaps were stowed when they were torn off the wing.
5. Then there is the absence of the automatic activation of the aircraft's fixed emergency locator transmitter; something that you would likely expect given their scenario and the wreckage items liberated. Given the fairly ordinary performance of ELTs, I'm not losing too much sleep over this one.
6. Finally, there are the recovered wreckage items, which suggest something other than a "soft controlled ditching" (their words). At least one wreckage item, the section of the vertical stabiliser, is inconsistent with a controlled ditching.