Malaysian Airlines MH370 contact lost

[Propduffer]

@OleOle

The premise of the plane being southbound at 18:39 won't work unless it overflew Indonesian territory, which I consider extremely unlikely.

If we put 9M-MRO's position at 18:29 on the intersection of the ping ring and the FIR boundary (6° 0'5.68"N 96°46'17.43"E) (which is the closest possible position for the plane to have been to clear Indonesian airspace north of the tip) the distance to POVUS (the earliest point of a turn which would clear Indonesian airspace) is about 125nm. That's too great a distance to have been traveled in ten minutes.

[porterhouse]

or was someone on flight deck randomly resetting CBs trying to get things back on and working.

"randomly" resetting CBs is not part of standard operating procedure, these days pilots are usually not allowed to touch a CB unless they get permission from their maintenance department. Also attempt to "get things back on and working" is really incompatible with the flight of this aircraft. Faced with emergency they would be looking rather quickly for a land/airport and with the magnetic compass working (needs no electricity) they could steer aircraft in the right direction, specially in view of the excellent visibility in the area and their general proximity to land. So here we are - you can easily poke holes in any theory.

[whitav8r]

Winds aloft for MH370 Beginning at 18:22

Here is Richard Cole's list of winds aloft:
TIME Wind Direction WindSpeed(knots) Lat Lon
18:22:00.000 10 4 6.58 96.34
18:25:27.421 355 2 6.79 95.94
18:28:14.904 330 2 6.82 95.84
18:39:55.354 90 11 5.32 95.47
19:41:02.906 70 22 -4.01 93.25
20:41:04.904 85 12 -11.81 91.44
21:41:26.905 10 11 -19.64 89.76
22:41:21.906 275 44 -27.45 88.14
23:14:00.904 265 55 -31.63 87.54
00:10:59.928 245 43 -38.78 84.96
00:19:29.416 240 49 -39.82 86.22

I think the source is:
earth :: an animated map of global wind and weather

[Propduffer]

Nick, I'm aghast!

"It's explained somewhere that the PR_18_27_47.kml file is incorrect. Use Ping_Ring_18_29.kml instead."

This throws everything I've been working on for the last week off by 70 nm.

I thought one of the base assumptions was that the 18:29 ring and the 19:41 ring were 140nm apart, and the rings I've been using matched that pattern.

Also, the ring KML's I used were the most recent on Steel's site.

Where did the information about the incorrect 18:27 kml file come from?
I can't find it and I (we all) have to get this straight.


@OleOle
Read this please. It makes the turn south possible at 18:39.

[whitav8r]

Last Radar Contact Lat/lon

I thought that the last radar contact position @ 18:22 was approximately 6°35'53.39"N, 96°17'45.71"E, so getting at far as 7°20'24.52"N, 95° 7'46.74"E by 18:33 is very practical at 480 knots or so. From there and a little more west, due 194T avoids the NW tip of Indonesia. I'm not saying that's what happened though. I wonder if the radar at Lhokseumawe was operating that night.

[JamesGV]

Makes me wonder that to !

Lhokseumawe latest "in the news" effort managed to track and call down a U.S. transport a/c en route from the Maldives, via Sri Lanka to Singapore.

I can't see how the TNI missed this.



They have a CSF TRS-2215. Displayed range about 330. The TNI say 240. Narrowest point around 160

[OleOle]

@Propduffer

Hdg must not have been due south at 18:39. A southwesterly course like on the leg NILAM -> POVUS could be consistent with the BFO as well.

[JamesGV]

It is amazing to me that MH370 can appear and disappear three times.
And there is not one consistent story to be had !

T/O to IGARI and just beyond.
Malaysian Radar heading inbound to the North of Banda Aceh
Inmarsat from a disputed point to another disputed point.

Not one overlap in all three cases. Amazing.

[Propduffer]

@Nick
The substitution of the 18:29 ring doesn't fit with the other rings.

In Richard Cole's appendix B we find that there is a 255km difference between the 18:29 ring and the 19:41 ring, (137nm.)

Your suggestion gives a distance of about 66nm between these rings so that can't be correct.

My original placement appears correct.

[AAKEE]

I stand corrected. This is true, there is no "log off" recorded.
That in itself maybe significant.

Thats for the sat com. Would be nice to se the ACARS logs from VHF-com.
Early in investigation it was said that Acars was deliberately shut down.
If so, there should have been some kind of log of on those logs ?

[Ulric]

The point that needs to be made here is that any assumption for what happened between 18:29 and 19:41 implies an assumption about whether the plane was travelling east or west when it intersected the 19:41 arc. In turn, this affects the starting point for the long southward track hypothesised to have been flown on auto-pilot. It should be obvious that any constant speed or constant track solution for the later arcs up to 00:19 is rotatable around the satellite location. In other words, the terminal point is very sensitive to assumptions about what happened between 18:29 and 19:41 and the point at which the southerly course was started. The ability to rotate the track around the satellite without disturbing the timings for the southerly leg means that an assumption about the position of either end of the track (the point where it turned south or the terminal location) constrains the possibilities at the other end.

BTW, I have plotted my own ping rings for this and agree with the Australian report that the early rings agree with the submitted Malaysian Radar track.

[Ulric]

There is a difference between a clean shut-down and pulling the plug out.

[Pontius Navigator]

Originally Posted by porterhouse

"randomly" resetting CBs is not part of standard operating procedure, these days pilots are usually not allowed to touch a CB unless they get permission from their maintenance department..

I take issue only with this.
I would agree with USUALLY but in unusual circumstances where all else fails then 'random' maybe a last resort.

[Propduffer]

Ulric:

I have plotted my own ping rings for this and agree with the Australian report that the early rings agree with the submitted Malaysian Radar track

We should discuss this and attempt to reach agreement about the ping rings. No conversation can go forth without agreement here.

You plotted your own rings? This means that you calculated distance for each ring using the the BTO data and included the knowledge of the satellite's exact position at that time; did you also compensate for the Earth's oblong shape?

I'm not up for such mathematical gymnastics so I just copied the latest KML version on Duncan Steel's site. Then after being challenged by Nick above I measured the distance between 18:29 and 19:41 rings and the version I'm using matches the expected distance (137nm is close enough to my expectation of 140nm.)

I further checked this against a Richard Cole graphic. I have previously downloaded a drawing labelled "Track_zpse219149d.jpg" (no url) which has the title "Constant Speed path to the final search area" dated may 29th. And the ring plot that I'm using matches this Cole graphic. Although I don't have a url for that jpg I can direct you to page 39 of Richard's data analysis which has a similar graphic with the same information.

Comments from you would be appreciated.

[Propduffer]

OleOle

A southwesterly course like on the leg NILAM -> POVUS could be consistent with the BFO as well.

That works for me.

Although I can't stop myself from thinking that maybe the 18:22 location was really 6° 0'0.02"N 97°30'0.05"E and the plane flew along the FIR boundary to POVUS from there. Could your BFO numbers support that theory?

[olasek]

where all else fails then 'random' maybe a last resort

If my life (and my passengers') were on a line I very doubt I would be resetting CBs without authorization. This often lead to fires. This makes even less sense with redundancy built into 777. I rather fly with some functionality disabled than with smouldering cockpit.

[Ulric]

Originally Posted by propduffer

We should discuss this and attempt to reach agreement about the ping rings. No conversation can go forth without agreement here.

Just to be clear, I took Duncan Steele's calculated radii for the rings and used a kml circle generator to produce the kml files. I have also produced a set of kml waypoints for Malysian, Indonesian and Australian Airspaces from the data at fallingrain which are useful.
http://www.thesamestory.com/kmlcircle/
http://www.fallingrain.com/world/AS/waypoints.html

[Pontius Navigator]

Olasek, by 'random' I implied educated rather than random.

You said it would make nonsense of built-in redundancy - true, but when built-in fails then you're on your own.

Holding in a popped CB is one thing, popping CBs is another.

Pretty clearly this accident was outside any foreseen contingency, and while we are considering probabilities, nothing can be ruled out.

[Propduffer]

Ulric

How did you locate the centerpoints for each of the rings? The satellite wasn't stationary in it's orbit you know.

Would you be so kind as to post your KML file online so that we can all examine it?

[mm_flynn]

Originally Posted by AAKEE

Thats for the sat com. Would be nice to se the ACARS logs from VHF-com.
Early in investigation it was said that Acars was deliberately shut down.
If so, there should have been some kind of log of on those logs ?

I am not aware of any substantiated report that any system on MH370 was 'shut down'. All we know was that various systems were no longer responding at certain times. We also know that the satcom was 'off' at least twice by the fact that it logged on twice. 'Off' in this sense means that the aircraft terminal was not in a logged on status (due to loosing the signal, being shut down, having power lost, etc.) but doesn't tell the reason it was 'off'.

we have a last Transponder return time, a last ACARS message time, a Last RTF time, several missed phone calls times, but not a single logoff or power down message. Nor do I believe any of those systems generate such a logoff messages.

As such, I don't believe there is any information to establish if systems were individually powered down at their normal power controls, by pulling local circuit breakers, by pulling busses, because breakers popped due to overload, because the device was damaged (other than the satcom which clearly was not damaged in that it came back twice).

The two most obvious path's of speculation are
1 - some technical emergency happened which motivated the crew to power down most of the aircraft's systems and after a reasonable time (at minimum I believe the time between loss of transponder and logon of the satcom) power up at least the Satcom, but not use it.

Or

2 - someone (crew, crew forced by passenger, passenger) did the same series of events with the objective of making the aircraft disappear.

It does seem difficult to imagine a technical emergency that would a- be responded to in such a way, b - allow the aircraft to fly for many hours, c - prevent any communication (particularly given that the satcom was back on line for most of the time)