The Gmail letter sent by an New Zealand oil rig worker of the coast of Vietnam turned out the be false. The journalist (Florian Witulski @vaitor ) who posted a photo Tweeted:

BBC also reported about the letter but it turned out to be false information... nothing at the Ho Chi Minh coast

Is there anybody un this forum who can shed some light on how modern radar equipment works? On the old fashoned CRT design you could simply adjust brightness to get rid of all the noise on the screen (birds etc.). How is sensitivity adjusted today? How is information filtered (i.e. are single returns filtered automatically by the software, because they are obviously noise, and are only repetitatve returns moving within a certain reasonable speed range shown)?
What exactly is recorded? Raw data? Displayed Data? Analyzed, filtered Data? Can we (the civilians...) run special analysis software on that data to scan through it for interesting details?

Checked FR24 at 07 MAR 2014 - 18:10 UTC (08 MAR 2014 02:10 local time)

FR24 shows SQ68 FL300 SIN - BCN B777W approx 200 miles north-west of Penang.

Military aircraft operating between Diego Garcia and Senkaku (or other islands in the South China Sea) would probably transit exactly through the area where the unidentified radar contact was plotted. Especially if Vietnamese an Indonesian airspace is to be avoided.

Air to air refueling might also happen in this region. Some military a/c is designed to have very small radar cross sections, so it might not be easy to identify plots of those a/c. The radar plots may well be totally unrelated to MH370. Support by FAA/NTSB makes sense.

...maybe for similar reasons why during the Cold War days a Cessna 172 could be successfully flown by a teenager, and landed on Red Square, en route from Helsinki to Moscow. :{

Life Raft Provisions
 

Generally, how long are the lift raft provisions designed to sustain life for? Could this still be a rescue operation if the airplane was ditched successfully or has it been too long now?

Wed 12th Mar Press Conference
 

The best PC thus far, they have clarified a few things. I think the pressure put on them to improve the PC has worked slightly, ideally would be nice if they could use the screen behind them to do a little demonstration of the sequence of events so every one is on the same page.

0121 Last radio contact
0130 Last ATC Radar contact
- then onto Military Radar, turn west to west peninsular -
0215 Military Radar loses the unidentified aircraft 200nm NW of Penang at an altitude of 29,500ft (FL295)

They confirmed the 5 passengers did not travel on the plane, but was then replaced by 5 on standby.

1. Would FL295 show the plane was under control by someone (hopefully pilot) for separations from traffic?

2. Which 5 would be on the Manifest? with 239 passengers surely they had space for the standby's anyway?

3. 0240hrs is now null and void?

See dyes post re:sq68 in area at 0210

I have my doubts mh370 was there an hour after initial contact lost, but we will find out eventually.

Radars can give elevation (not directly height), return time lag (not directly distance) and frequency shift (not directly line-of-sight speed), if they can form a 2D beam on the sky from a phased-array, broadcast a series of beams at different stacked elevations, or do an old WWII-Freya scan with a dish.

Analysis of this information, and the measured motion on the sky between scans then gives 3-D velocity, distance and height, correcting for refraction, Earth curvature and trigonometric coupling of height and distance to elevation.

Standard rotating antennas with dipole array transmitters, like the old iconic Heathrow radar on the concrete pillar by the tunnel entrance on the terminal island, don't do elevation, and rely on transponder broadcasts.

Isn't there a radar on top of Penang Hill? It's military and would serve Butterworth? Surely it would have picked up anything coming that way.

Did they mention anything about the direction/heading?

The core of confusion is probably that radar data is buried in a lot of noise. That would be the case if the aircraft was flying low, or if it was approaching the limit of radar range, or if the radar is not in a perfect health. They probably have only disconnected groups of dots. If that is the case, they would have difficult time being sure about continuity of any unidentified dots, especially in the presence of many other signals and general electronic noise in the area. The only sure way would be to compare data, possibly even raw radar data of all neighboring counties. However, that would reveal real, practical and not theoretical limits of their radar detection capabilities, and information about early warning capabilities is absolutely crucial for any military. Most likely, that is core problem now, they do not know how to safely cooperate at this extremely sensitive and highly technical level.

Beginning to change my mind about this,

Massive electrical failure at FIR boundary, with associated control issues (I'm not speculating on cause). Pilots attempt to set course for home on compass bearing, possibly maintaining level flight until it was no longer available..

Out of ATC/primary/SSR radar coverage or not, any Mayday call will almost undoubtedly have been picked up by any nearby commercial aircraft which will have been monitoring 121.5

Thus it would appear no Mayday call was transmitted, which suggests catastrophic failure or deliberate action as the only plausible options (IMO).

2 Things
 

1. It was a hi-jack (transponder turned off, no Mayday), and the plane was not under the control of the pilots. It flew to wherever was demanded, and something happened thereafter causing it to crash, probably from an effort to regain control (as with United 93 during events of 9/11). So it could be anywhere. An eye-witness will eventually come forward.

2. The most fearsome worry to come out of this is how come an aircraft can invade national territory without military or civil or satellite detection? This leaves a hole in the defense systems of all countries.

Latest blog from Ben Sandilands.

MH370 Day Five yields a new last possible radar fix | Plane Talking

MH370 Day Five yields a new last possible radar fix
BEN SANDILANDS | MAR 12, 2014 10:14PM | EMAIL | PRINT
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After running more than two and a half hours late the day five media briefing in Kuala Lumpur has come up with a new last possible radar trace for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

It was picked up by defence radar at 2.15 am on Saturday morning, 200 nautical miles or 360 kilometres NW of Penang as an unidentified aircraft at 29,500 feet according to the chief of the Royal Malaysia Air Force, Rodzali Daud.

This is almost precisely where Mr Rodzali earlier today denied saying to the Malaysia Media that this was where defence radar saw the missing airliner after it was tracked flying across the Malaysia peninsula to the northern approach to the main Strait of Malacca.

In other words, in this very chaotic media conference, the air force chief confirmed what he denied he said yesterday, although he did not go into as much detail as was reported in the national media.

This time he said “I am not saying it was MH370.” And he also gave the radar trace a new time, 2.15 am local time, not 2.40 am, which was coincidentally or otherwise the time of last contact with the airliner originally given by Malaysia Airlines before it began a process of changing times and event descriptions on a regular and confusing basis.

It was made clear, through the clutter of the media conference, that this radar sighting inspired the original extension of the search area from the Gulf of Thailand to include the western side of the Malaysia peninsula, and today’s further extension much deeper into the Andaman Sea.

MH370 was a 777-200 service carrying 239 passenger and crew on a regular Kuala Lumpur to Beijing service. To recap, it left KL at 12.40 am, it disappeared as a commercial radar trace at 1.22 am close to the area where such radar visibility to the Malaysia air traffic control system drops off, and was never observed as entering Vietnam controlled air space on a path intended to cross that country to the South China Sea and continue past Hong Kong toward its destination.

There are reports of emergency frequency radio contact with MH370 up to 1.30 am, which haven’t been convincingly ruled out, and which was originally the revised time Malaysia Airlines said it had its last contact with the airliner in the same breath that it said it lost the radar trace at 1.22 am.

It is this constant stumbling over what should be precise and unambiguous markers for the progress of MH370 which have helped undermine the credibility of the airline, which seems to be rewriting the basic information every time it opens its mouth.

This Wednesday night’s delayed media conference was a hair tearer for the technical aviation media because for its brief duration the panel reversed the usual definition of primary and secondary radar, referring to the primary radar used by Malaysia defence as being secondary in purpose, and the secondary commercial radar as performing the primary role. Which is both right sounding but wrong.

The commercial radar uses transponders on airliners to identify them by flight number to air traffic controllers. The defence radars primarily records flying objects without using transponder generated identification for commercial flights.

The acting transport minister and minister of defence Hishammuddin Hussein said that apart from looking further into the Andaman Sea, the search would also maintain a dual focus on the South China Sea between Vietnam and Hong Kong.

The air force chief Rodzali Daud said the agencies from other countries were helping Malaysia reconcile the radar traces picked up by defence radar with those recorded by the commercial air traffic control radars as well as enable a better understanding as to what the military radar saw near Pulau Perak, as he didn’t say it did to the Malaysian media yesterday.

If it wasn’t an airliner looking like an airliner at 29,500 feet in Malaysia airspace that was seen by the defence radar, at a point where it should also have been easily discoverable by normal civilian ATC radar that in itself on a ‘normal’ day would be a puzzle that the authorities would presumably try to resolve without delay.

What is so frustrating in the lack of detail given by the Malaysian authorities is their failure to address such obvious questions. It would have known precisely what by way of scheduled airliners was flying over western Malaysia on Saturday morning. It doesn’t need military radar to answer that question.

These evasions or omissions in the briefing last night make it overwhelmingly likely that the original reports attributed to Rodzali Daud were correct, and that there is a cover up of important detail being attempted by the authorities, with less and less success with every day.

If they are in the Andaman or South China Seas, the traces of those who were on board MH370 are rapidly vanishing, and the dispersal of floating items of wreckage will make the location of the crash site and the black box flight data and voice recorders, which would have sunk, that much more difficult to find.

Hi. This was posted earlier:

At 29,500ft, wouldn't conventional 'airport' radar have picked the plane up too?

I think we need to wait until the radar trace is published now-

But I suspect we will eventually find the aircraft not far from the last position where it appeared to be ops normal.

Anything else just seems too far-fetched to me.

Bob…
If there were survivors, they'd be in rafts with beacons, and their location would have been know within the time it took to broadcast to and from satellites 10,000km up.

SATCOM and Telemetry Data?
 

Concerning Data:

Why has nobody confirmed/announced if there were any transmissions sent via SATCOM? Seems to be the elephant in the room - the media currently appears to have an unhealthy tunneled obsession with; radar, ads-b, voice comms, gps, black boxes, etc.

Surely ACARS and engine telemetry data could shine a good dose of light on this incredibly sad fiasco.

Many aircraft today also have Panasonic Avionics high-bandwidth eXconnect GCS (Global Communications Suite) to augment SATCOM.