Malaysian Airlines MH370 contact lost
Former chairman of NTSB speaks out
Live interview with former chairman of NTSB James Hall on Al Jazeera.
James Hall is chairman of Hall Associates.
Context was accident investigation
Summary
Strange that no confirmation of wreckage.
"If wreckage had been found, that information has to be made available to the families and then made available in a responsible manner via media to worldwide audience watching this disaster playout"
"Unfortunate that Malaysian govt is not competent to handle an investigation of this magnitude"
6 underwater investigations he dealt with took 6 weeks to get underwater vehicles to the known crash location, hard to put a time frame on this investigation as aircraft location is not yet known.
"In a normal investigation (by transportation bureaus such as in Australia and China) investigators not politicians handle investigation, then as information is identified it becomes public so it is a transparent investigation so the world knows that the facts being put forward are the correct facts."
"In this investigation facts come forward only to be corrected, its no wonder the families have lost confidence."
Ends
ABC Australia report families held a protest at Malaysian embassy in Beijing, demanding more information, they clashed with police.
Id be doing the same, there needs to be an explanation of how the authorities have determined that there are no survivors?
James Hall is chairman of Hall Associates.
Context was accident investigation
Summary
Strange that no confirmation of wreckage.
"If wreckage had been found, that information has to be made available to the families and then made available in a responsible manner via media to worldwide audience watching this disaster playout"
"Unfortunate that Malaysian govt is not competent to handle an investigation of this magnitude"
6 underwater investigations he dealt with took 6 weeks to get underwater vehicles to the known crash location, hard to put a time frame on this investigation as aircraft location is not yet known.
"In a normal investigation (by transportation bureaus such as in Australia and China) investigators not politicians handle investigation, then as information is identified it becomes public so it is a transparent investigation so the world knows that the facts being put forward are the correct facts."
"In this investigation facts come forward only to be corrected, its no wonder the families have lost confidence."
Ends
ABC Australia report families held a protest at Malaysian embassy in Beijing, demanding more information, they clashed with police.
Id be doing the same, there needs to be an explanation of how the authorities have determined that there are no survivors?
Last edited by mickjoebill; 25th Mar 2014 at 20:32.
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"Unfortunate that Malaysian govt is not competent to handle an investigation of this magnitude"
"In this investigation facts come forward only to be corrected, its no wonder the families have lost confidence."
Glad someone calls a spade a spade !
Inmarsat
Though Inmarsat analysis undoubtedly have been key to home in on a crash site, the Doppler method might not tell the full story. A jitter assessment would have to be performed on ping return clock rather than on return data. Maybe the sat guys here know how much raw data, or data about the raw data, is logged?
Sat earth stations have very precise frequency and time standards. Incoming RF would be downcoverted to an Intermediate Frequency (IF) that would be supplied to the sat modem for demodulation. If this IF was digitised by a SDR receiver tied to the station frequency standards, then reconstruction of the original analogue waveform arriving at the earth station would be possible.
The analysis of this waveform has been the rocket science here. I would struggle to separate doppler shift from other sources of frequency drift, especially with so little data to work with. There would have had to have been some serious maths at work, coupled with data from other aircraft and detailed historical information about the exact beam coverage patterns of their sat.
Another possibility is that deeper analysis found some too-weak-to-demodulate-so-not-initially-noticed signal on the "IF-tapes" for their POR bird. The IOR plus POR recordings would then give triangulation.
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It is possible the raw analogue RF was being digitised and captured for diagnostic purposes.
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Driver Airframe in post 8101 queries the effect of altitude and speed on amount of fuel required to fly a set distance.
From Boeing Data for B777-200ER.
Long Range Cruise. Engines RR Trent 892
All up Weight at start of distance, 200.0 Tonnes
Time in hours and minutes, fuel burn in 1,000s kg
Distance Flight levels
(nm) 100 200 300 400
Fuel Time Fuel Time Fuel Time Fuel Time
600 11.5 1.50 9.1 1.37 7.5 1.28 6.6 1.22
1200 23.3 3.18 18.8 3.12 15.6 2.52 13.9 2.38
2000 38.5 6.08 31.2 3.21 26.4 4.45 23.5 4.19
From Boeing Data for B777-200ER.
Long Range Cruise. Engines RR Trent 892
All up Weight at start of distance, 200.0 Tonnes
Time in hours and minutes, fuel burn in 1,000s kg
Distance Flight levels
(nm) 100 200 300 400
Fuel Time Fuel Time Fuel Time Fuel Time
600 11.5 1.50 9.1 1.37 7.5 1.28 6.6 1.22
1200 23.3 3.18 18.8 3.12 15.6 2.52 13.9 2.38
2000 38.5 6.08 31.2 3.21 26.4 4.45 23.5 4.19
Last edited by ghw78; 25th Mar 2014 at 23:18.
What happened to the ship that was just a few hours away from the wreckage sighted by RAAF ..turned back due weather?
ABC reporter Wed morning;
80km surface wind yesterday.
Seas eased and less rain today.
NZ Orion heading off first.
HMAS Success would be probably first ship to scene if something sighted by air.
Ocean Shield heading from Sydney today with "black box finder"
ABC reporter Wed morning;
80km surface wind yesterday.
Seas eased and less rain today.
NZ Orion heading off first.
HMAS Success would be probably first ship to scene if something sighted by air.
Ocean Shield heading from Sydney today with "black box finder"
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ghw78
Easier to read?
From Boeing Data for B777-200ER.
Long Range Cruise. Engines RR Trent 892
All up Weight at start of distance, 200.0 Tonnes
Time in hours and minutes, fuel burn in 1,000s kg
Distance -------------- Flight levels
(nm)_______100__________200___________300____________400
_________Fuel Time______Fuel Time_______Fuel Time________Fuel Time
_600_____11.5 1.50_______9.1 1.37________7.5 1.28_________6.6 1.22
1200_____23.3 3.18______18.8 3.12_______15.6 2.52________13.9 2.38
2000_____38.5 6.08______31.2 5.21_______26.4 4.45________23.5 4.19
Long Range Cruise. Engines RR Trent 892
All up Weight at start of distance, 200.0 Tonnes
Time in hours and minutes, fuel burn in 1,000s kg
Distance -------------- Flight levels
(nm)_______100__________200___________300____________400
_________Fuel Time______Fuel Time_______Fuel Time________Fuel Time
_600_____11.5 1.50_______9.1 1.37________7.5 1.28_________6.6 1.22
1200_____23.3 3.18______18.8 3.12_______15.6 2.52________13.9 2.38
2000_____38.5 6.08______31.2 5.21_______26.4 4.45________23.5 4.19
China and Malaysia clearly want to just close this book, why are other nations investing so much $ in finding the Malay mess?
2. Because there is a practical (and economic) incentive: modern airliners should not just disappear. Knowing how one has will allow attempts to be made to avoid future repetitions.
Dillboy asked in 7743 "I'm wondering how long it will be before it is announced that the South China sea is to be revisited."
Not before somebody realises that the sat pings are a distraction.
What are the odds of the longest ever suicide/terrorist/unmanned autopilot flight also being solved by the first and novel use of technology that was never designed for the purpose?
Not before somebody realises that the sat pings are a distraction.
What are the odds of the longest ever suicide/terrorist/unmanned autopilot flight also being solved by the first and novel use of technology that was never designed for the purpose?
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If you didnt know there are SDR USB-dongles that can do ~3Mhz bandwidth full sampling costing ~10$. That a satellit ground-station is capable of something similar is not weird.
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When UnreliableSource said
he was clearly thinking of a recording at IF. The signal could well be reduced to a few key parameters, and even transmitting it raw would have take bandwidth numerically less than the IF.
It is possible the raw analogue RF was being digitised and captured for diagnostic purposes
Not sure if you bothered to read the piece on how INMARSAT applied their knowledge of their own systems to the science of radio waves and satellites to come up with estimates of the aircraft's position at various points in time.
Had other means been successful, they'd not have had to figure this out on the fly. As someone pointed out in that article, they " ... did about a year's worth of research less than two weeks."
That may be a slight overstatement, but it indicates how many man hours they applied to the problem to try and find a solution. During the first two days of the search, a lot of observers in the PPRuNe threads opined that they weren't finding any wreckage due to looking in the wrong place. That "wrong place" was the South China Sea.
Originally Posted by 4Green
Australian Commander 'We are not searching for a needle in a haystack. We are searching for the haystack'.
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If we assume Inmarsat could have digested more data from MH370, would it not be prudent for ICAO to recommend to its members to find means to ensure such data will be transmitted in any failure or deliberate disconnect scenario?
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Possible INMARSAT rf processing
I am not knowledgeable about the rf front end for the INMARSAT, but I am knowledgeable about AEHF and a few other communication satellites, and I would hypothesize they are similar. The comms between the satellite and the ground terminals (in this case, the aircraft terminal node controller (TNC)) use a form of PSK. All of the baseband and "IF" processing is done synchronously using digital processors, so there are digital to analog (D/A) converters prior to the upconverters and A/D's immediately following the downconverters. I don't know what the state of technology is today, but the converters may be sampling on the order of 400 MSPS to 1GSPS. For the receiver, the first digital process which is performed following the A/D is a fast fourier transform to channelize the data. This is then followed by a phase lock loop (PLL), which removes the doppler. By simply logging this phase correction used in the PLL (simply a number indicating radians per sample period) and sending it in the downlink to the INMARSAT earth station in Australia, INMARSAT would be able to reconstruct the doppler. This may be normal payload telemetry.
Last edited by RichManJoe; 25th Mar 2014 at 23:14. Reason: Clarity
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Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly called this accident correctly one week prior to the Malaysian Prime Minister's official announcement yesterday. O'Reilly said the plane was at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. You might not like his political views, but he nailed it-- unlike countless armchair experts in our profession.
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@nupogodi
As an forensics professional, you are aware that magnetic force microscopy has never been used to recover data off once-overwritten magnetic media. I assume you are also aware of the 2006 NIST Special Publication which stated that using magnetic force microscopy to recover data from magnetic media of any considerable density is impossible. Since you would know all this, I wonder why you would make such a statement.
It is also irrelevant since the CVR/FDR would not be recording to magnetic tape on the accident aircraft.
It is also irrelevant since the CVR/FDR would not be recording to magnetic tape on the accident aircraft.
Without wishing to don a tin foil hat (the world must be running short of tinfoil by now if this thread is anything to go by
), consider this. The DSS sanitisation processes for hard disks requires the devices to be either degaussed (complete magnetic wipe to the point the drive becomes effectively unusable) or destroyed. One wipe cleans the drive but does not sanitise the drive which is interesting if NIST insist this recovery is impossible and one wipe sufficient... suggests to me that not everyone is buying into that being an absolute fact 
Although, even if you did get a mapping of the magnetic patterns, you are a long long way from reconstructing that to meaningful data. While it may be possible, the reality is that its very unlikely anyone actually will do this. In my experience the biggest things to worry about in computer forensic examinations are encryption and dealing with what you do find and making sure you do interpret that properly.
@Coastalpilot:
Since the FBI has had the Capt's computers almost a week, I wonder if the lack of information relative to them is meaningful. Seems to me that if they had found anything of consequence we would have heard of it by now. Further it seems to me that they would have found anything incriminating by now if it were there. Does that make sense? I'm not a computer guy
Indications files deleted closer to final Malaysian Airline flight - CNN.com
The article suggests that on the 22nd the FBI examiners were just days into the examination of what they call a large volume of data. Depending on how much data they have, it can take a while to investigate all of it. It is not uncommon for forensic investigations to take weeks if there is a considerable amount of data so no response so far is not really conclusive of anything and examiners will generally want to examine in full before drawing any conclusions.
What I would be prioritising is retrieving deleted files and seeing if I could run those files in the simulator. This does also assume nothings encrypted and password protected... if there are passwords/encryption, then this data could take many months to restore and examine.
Interestingly there is a suggestion that the Malaysians may have messed up this part of the investigation. Firstly, they waited 6 days before searching the pilots home which would have allowed someone time to amend data on that. While they have strict laws on probable cause, the time delay would be of concern about tampering.
Also there seems to be some question about how they searched and seized - the whole CSI/Hollywood scenario of walk in, switch computer on, start typing on the keyboard looking for things springs to mind. If someone has hinted to CNN that they have concerns that the evidence wasnt secured immediately there will be concerns about the integrity of the evidence and that not securing it could have altered, deleted or added data which taints the whole process and casts doubt on any results they find.
What becomes more confusing is that 3 days ago when CNN were stating FBI experts were just days into the examination, this was stating with certainty there was no evidence on the computers:
Malaysia Airlines flight: investigators find nothing suspicious in pilot's flight simulator
The question then becomes the sources of these - is one based on an examination by Malaysian forensic examiners or from the FBI? Even this becomes a mess to determine reliable sources. It would seem rather odd for the Malaysian examiners to state that there was nothing suspicious if they hadnt examined all the data and then send the drive off to the FBI for retrieval of the deleted data. But I doubt the FBI would issue such a conclusive statement this early on in the examination if they havent examined all the data yet.
