Hi,

As noted by the Indian navy is virtually impossible that the plane was able to enter the surveillance zone without being detected
The area Andaman Nicobars is a sensitive place under high supervision by the navy based in Port Blair

cell phones on or off?
 

If they are in "flight" mode, they do NOT transmit ANYTHING, by definition. Ditto for "power off". But it makes for good TV at times.

Non Habeus Corpus (Aircraft)
 

Some observations intended to prompt professional discussion....

1. SAR Meets Twitter. What that means is, this search for a "missing" airliner totally, thoroughly, completely breaks the mold for what has - until now - been known as Search and Rescue. That is, previously searches for crashed airliners (and related ops, freight primarily, but GA also and that balloonist guy too) have been operated in the realm of what I shall call "the physical" - where's the plane, looking for it in conventional ways. No longer. Not any more. No, this search has taken a great leap forward - it has jumped to what I shall call "the digital": ACARS pings, SATCOM receipt of same, HF and VHF signals, GPS data, the workings of cellular telephony, and likely other data categories whose frequencies were too high for my perception (or too low). This is quite different from conventional Search and Rescue. Closest possible comparator, AF 447, but not truly comparable. If qualified to point factual errors out, please do.

Corollaries of above premise include (a) that such a digital search is not one Malaysian authorities anticipated having to manage, and so let us understand the 'runaway train' this has become for them - as a point for context about their actions and pressers, only; (b) it is fair, reasonable, appropriate, and IMO necessary to enquire whether the current ICAO "air law governance" structure is optimized for such a higher-order search paradigm.

2. An Aviation Crime Investigation? It isn't the "traditional" investigation of a crash, paradigmatically exemplified by the intersecting of a T7 with the outer environs of a SFO runway. Nor is it within the parameters of the expected varieties of hijackings, commandeerings, or outright piracy and terrorist murderous acts. It's a different kind of legal problem set. Note, set, not merely one.

Corollaries are: (a) same two as above; (b) it is legally mandatory to acquire all evidence (the Capt.'s sim (further explicated below), both pilots' homes, the cargo manifest, the recent C-check records, the cellular numbers of everyone on the aircraft (hmm...fake passport info resonating here?), and anything else that could be relevant. As to the Captain's home simulator: it simply does not matter, legally, what anyone, and I mean literally anyone, thinks about his having a simulator. A very simple relevance claim is child's play to establish (i.e., it is neither unreasonable nor unrealistic to postulate that if bad-actors were involved in the incident, that they might have selected this flight in order to have this Captain's specific flying skills at their nefarious disposal; is there something in the sim which is consistent with this postulate?). In a criminal investigation legal counsel would never advise to forego evidence gathering on the premise that other members of a given profession think that an individual quite primarily and centrally involved was a regular guy and had normal interests. It's about the evidence, not the individual.

3. Public-private partnership. As we enter the second week of this incident I pause to kick the tires of an imaginary E-2C lumbering off the runway of what once was NAS Glenview (Illinois, USA), so that I may send a wing and a prayer to the fine men and women in the service of many different nations now engaged in the quest - for that is what it has become - for Captain Shah, his ship and crew, and the souls aboard. When their quest has been fulfilled, and they will find Flight 370, I have faith in their work and dedication, then the legal "fun starts." Later, I may post a legal advocacy theorem as to why, and how "the real juridical party in interest" is a legal and operational combination of the FAA and Boeing (as to form, 'public-private partnership').

Oh and a big Willow Run shout-out to WSJ writer Andy Pasztor, truly great work has he done on this incident! Kudos, mate! Now go find the aircraft.

With all the talk about having a 777 flight sim in home..plus according to the link posted earlier a model Bell Rc chopper,and a model Catalina float plane with the word 'Rescue' painted on top of the wings..probably just innocent fun.

BOAC
This Tweet of a Singapore newpaper was based on an article published by Reuters. Not a small news agency. Here the URL
Investigators focus on foul play behind missing plane-sources | Reuters


The public has seen many inaccurate leads so we do not know for sure if these three deviations of flightplan track actually happened or not.
Seeing the effort now on the west of Malaysia all the way to the Bay of Bengal it looks like the plane is west of Malaysia

inmarsat satcom
 

MAS claims on their website that they provide satellite telephone to their business class passengers in the 772.

MH Experience - Fleet - Boeing 777-200 | Malaysia Airlines

Maybe it's just that - a claim, maybe not.

The rumor has it that Inmarsat plc is in possession of some position data of MH370. What I know about inmarsat is that they use various generations of geostationary satellites. The newer ones - I3/I4 - feature spot beams, so it should be possible to infer a vague line of position every time the ground/airborne equipment changes from one spot beam into another. With a series of that lines of position the course could be vaguely reconstructed.

Maybe something like that was communicated to ABC/WSJ Journalists and it ended up as "GPS postions were contained in the pings" ?

Anybody has more specific info on the Inmarsat Equipment used or used not on MH370 ?



Exclusive: Radar data suggests missing Malaysia plane deliberately flown way off course - sources | Reuters

This alleged report of waypoints deduced from primary radar can also be interpreted a little simpler: Just go west until you intersect the normal route into the indian ocean, then take that route. If VAMPI actually was really reached - or the right turn was made before - remains unclear. Maybe MAF didn't care too much because most of the track was in Thai airspace ?

Thanks for a great thread
 

I've read every single post in this thread and I wanted to take a second to thank everyone for their contributions-

I do understand that the mixture of professional and non-professional information can be confusing at times, however, I find the diversity of information incredibly useful-- I learn from questions answered, I skim over areas that I already know and slow down when new or expanded information is provided.

Overall, I wouldn't change much- it's extremely useful to an old GA pilot interested in keeping up with aviation.

The one thing that would help the thread is avoiding dissension as much as possible. A question or theory may seem way out in left field, however, the rest of us might appreciate out of the box thinking and something closer to the truth should emerge down the road one way or the other.

It seems logical to save corrections for major misinformation, especially intentional disinformation, and it would be best if we leave it to the pros to make that call. If noise levels are low and only Sr. contributors discredit a post, the rest of us will know that the information is extremely suspect.

Thanks again for a great thread, an incredible forum and I'm glad that PPrune is getting good press.

Perhaps if we are going to investigate the Captain's 'Flight Sim' activities, we should investigate all aircrew who take photographs of aircraft, or give up their own time to fly/commentate at air shows, or do other aviation related things.
While we're at it it, why not investigate all the ATCOs who volunteer to work at RIAT every year? Doing aviation related stuff in your own time?…Must be suspicious.
For many professional aviation licence holders, (myself included), aviation is a passion, not just a job. For others, (quite understandably), it is something which is left behind at the airport/ATC Centre, (or wherever), when heading home.

I don't recall this information having been posted on the thread:

Location: KUALA LUMPUR
Date: 8 MAR 2014
Moonrise: 12:57 (early afternoon)
Moonset: 00:40 (after midnight)
Moon at meridian: 19:13
Angle at meridian: 73.2°
Illumination at meridian: 49.2%
(First quarter at 21:27)

The flight was conducted entirely in darkness, moonset was just about take-off time. Not implying that this is of any relevance, for info only.

Jet fuel slick
 

Jet fuel is very close indeed to diesel. Ships use & leak same, as well as transport loads of it. It came from a ship.

Only if the phone has somehow been bugged. Nowadays that's achieved by installing malware, or reflashing with some non-official firmware.

But a non-modified phone shouldn't give any RF activity whatsoever when in flight mode or turned off.

CNN reporting from indian navy quote

We have been given specific co ordinates to search at. More planes and ships being rushed there.

See the press release perhaps for the answer to your question ?

No body is suggesting investigating all aircrew. Just those involved in missing aircraft!

Like any investigation you have to look at every possibility and use a process of elimination.

A lot of very sensitive souls on here when anyone raises the subject of foul play by the crew but I can think of two incidences in the last year or so that are Pertinent. In fact the last large aircraft hijack was carried out by the co-pilot of the flight.

It would *have* to include some kind of identifiable information. To distinguish transceiver a from transceiver b, some time of unique hardware address would have to be included in every frame sent between the satellite and the earth station.

The real question is, was it logged (most likely if they have logs of the pings, they have the logs of the hardware address) and do Malaysia Airlines, Boeing, Inmarsat (or whoever the satellite company is), and the manufacturer of the electronics have records that can match the unique hardware address to the missing plane. At the level it seems they're tracing this, it almost definitely wouldn't have the plane's tail number or serial number, it would be something similar to a MAC address in a computer or tablet.

Personally, looking at that image, I would be asking questions of the Thai radar operators.

Sure, about 1000000000000000000000000000000000000 times on this thread (give or take a few 100).

Or maybe MH looked at the manifest and couldn't find anything of note on there ? :ugh:

ACARS 'Ping"
 

Not a PING (TCP/ICMP); more a handshake with the ability to include free text. That 'Free Text" -really formatted data, in this case about Donkey Health wasn't transmitted due to the lack of subscription. It's Possible the ACARS handler also included some other info, but more likely not. It's not impossible any other data was transmitted indadvertantly or, (conspiracy theorists, collected by a non aviation actor) it's software; bugs et al happen; this is systems management & monitoring data so not likely subject to the rigors of safety of flight code..


128 16 16 8 8 56 8 16 8 8 32 48 8 128 8
pre-key bit sync char sync SOH mode address ack/nak label block ID STX Seq No. Flight No. Text ETX CRC BCS


pre-key A maximum of 128 bits is transmitted to allow for the transmitter to key. If the transmitter keys up and settles on frequency quickly, it is possible to see most of the 128 bits, if the transmitter is slow then much less than 128 bits is seen. The received signals therefore does not always contain all 128 bits during this pre-key sequence. The sequence is also designed to compensate for variable response times of receiver squelches and AGC settling times. At 2400bps, 128 bits equates to about a 20th of a second (53.333mS to be precise).
bit sync 16 bits of alternate bits to allow the decoder to lock into the bit speed.
char sync 2 bytes with a unique bit pattern allows the decoder to precisely character syncronise to the following 8 bit bytes.
SOH Start of header marker byte.
mode Type of transmission. (AGCS-1, AGCS-D etc).
address Aircraft Registration number. Filled with a special sequence if a squitter burst.
ack/nak Acknowledged/Not acknowledged. Advises other station if a re-send is necessary.
label Label identifies type of message being sent. Usually a letter and a number. See labels table.
block ID Single byte which increments on each successful transmission.
STX If STX present, then text message follows.
Seq. No. Message sequence number. Usually made from the current time (minutes/seconds). Only transmitted in downlink data blocks.
Flight No. Aircraft carriers international flight number. Only transmitted in downlink data blocks.
Text The text message itself. Just as with AX25 packet, the actual length is variable but limited to a maximum of 220 characters.
ETX End of text marker. If ETB is transmitted instead then more text follows in a subsequent data packet.
CRC Checksum.
BCS End of packet block marker byte.

Its much more likely position & speed calculated by doppler/multi station trig than anything else.

It would be pretty pointless if it didn't.

Think of it as a post man or woman who knocks on your door and asks you to pay for a parcel Cash on Delivery, but won't tell you who has sent it. :)

(Response to 1stSpotter, #3249, http://www.pprune.org/8374926-post3249.html)
Exactly.

More logical surmise:
1. The US has known about the Malaysian mil radar track almost from the beginning. Not credible that they missed its significance; therefore all news since has been smoke.

2. As the plane was navigated after going silent the navigators had some other purpose than to crash it.

3. The Mal. radar track ends where their coverage drops off with the aircraft at FL29.5. The countries whose radar would have picked it up from there must be a short list. So obviously these parties have been queried. The likelihood is the US and Malaysia (at a minimum) know more about where the plane went.

Obvious questions now:
a. Where might it have landed without detection?
b. What would the min. infrastructure requirements be to allow it to be used further, and does that narrow the list from a.?
c. Could its identity be changed (different transponder data, different livery)?
d. Could a disguised 777 be used as a weapon, or weapon delivery system, in a target country such as the US, Europe, China, etc.?

I would welcome comments including leave off with such posts on this site.