I do not see that many posters 'from the east' on here and perhaps that in itself tells us something about the current western obsession with needing to know everything about an incident immediately , something we have been conditioned to expect by 'the media'. So after so many posts, some fascinating some bizarre I thought a few points of reflection about the overall incident might be an idea to bring a bit of perspective back, albeit from a personal point of view
I have visited Malaysia and worked with companies there .It is a complicated place politically and to western eyes there are a number of wrongs, it is said to be corrupt, but then who defines corruption and its political complexity is a reaction to the country's history and diversity. But their streets are pretty safe and not populated by druggies and 'gangstas' and their country pretty stable despite a potentially fairly inflammatory mix of races and religions. They don’t leave their elderly to starvation and mistreatment in state hospitals nor do their financial communities lie and cheat and steal money from governments and populace on a scale big enough to trigger global recession
Equally despite past troubles the ASEAN nations plus China and a few others get on quite well and certainly quite practically, as has been pointed out they do not have any reason to send Mach 2 interceptors after anyone with a radio failure.
All would agree that this is an unprecedented event and perhaps the US or Uk would have handled the media side more professionally but at the end of the day we would still know nothing more would we-making it quite clear that the media are not at all as important as they like to think they are .
Malaysia's preparedness for such an event, bizarre as it is, is probably no worse than any other country which has not had to deal with what could be 'an internal problem'. The US, for all their defence spending could not easily see rogue traffic over the domestic US pre 9/11 and worse still upheld the ludicrous idea that domestic passengers were subject to far less security than those on international flights.
As to the Malay Govt covering things up , well that's a hell of a risk to take for a small Asian country if the information you are hiding impacts China more than any other country, even their own.
Diego Garcia keeps popping up to, I am pretty sure if MH370 headed their the US Military would know about it, after he USS Vincennes tragedy though I think they would have been hugely reluctant to down another airliners , especially one from a friendly Muslim country. They would have been aware of its approach and identity for some time I am sure, and what real damage could it cause anyway, not least because it would be dark at DG at the time, Hitting a specific building would be close to impossible and a smoking hole on the airfield while tragic in terms of lives lost would have no material impact on the base itself. In any event who would be the target, DG is not American it is British.
So perhaps we should reflect a little before posting , especially if that is a critical and defamatory post, this is truly a mystery and hopefully will be solved on day , but for the countries involved and their experts and service personnel it is hard enough without the constant we know better attitudes displayed here and on so many TV news broadcasts.

The world did not see 911 coming...

The world did not see MH 370 coming...

Consider this... a 'perfect' terror plot?

Pick an airline, coerce or infiltrate of one of the Flight Deck into making a 350 tonne aircraft 'vanish'...(up to 450, depressurise, turn off systems, HDG SEL into the vast open spaces... or whatever other theories we may all simply continue to hypothesise about...)

Wait for some time... then repeat the event and another airliner vanishes... and perhaps one more...

The aviation world and business would collapse... what a coup.

I really do believe it is an absolute imperative to fit completely independent GPS tracking systems to all airliners. NOW...

ian w . your theory of little or no interest in an aircraft wandering around the skies might have some validity if the disinterested parties were unaware that an aircraft was missing. 370 was known to be missing at the time it should have contacted vietnam and it is inconceivable that the word did not reach all parts of se asia in a very short time. all surrounding atccs would be on alert for the aircraft on radio and radar. interest would be of a very high order I would say.

Inconceivable? Why?
As to "all surrounding ATCCs on alert" -- what is the trigger for this "high alert" and when would interest become of a high order? There is a time delay between "hmm, haven't checked in yet" and "where the EFF is that plane" of X amount. What do you think X is, in terms of minutes or hours?

Beyond that, on what do you base your set of presumptions? :confused:

From what is available to the public, the ATCC in Viet Nam had an interest, and they communicated their concern to a Point of Contact in Malaysia.
(Enroute ATCC asks Departure ATCC "we were expecting this flight, have not heard them check in as expected, were they delayed? Do you know where it is?" That sort of communication would be my guess. )

We can go on ad nauseam creating posts about Inmarsat pings but the $64,000 question remains 'Who was flying the plane post FIR handover, where to and why?'

Surely nobody really believes, any more, that it was flying itself having taken the trouble to go incommunicado except for satellite linked ACARS.

Anyone who doesn't think that there is a government agency that knows what happened to MAH370 is kidding themselves.

Not a scrap of identifiable wreckage? Just not believable.

Even Malaysian investigators can't figure out the "who". And they have far better knowledge of everyone on board than we do. They can't find anyone on the passenger list with terrorist connections or adequate knowledge of piloting a 777. The closest they got is one guy who used to work as a flight engineer for a jet charter company. And they can't find anything in backgrounds of either pilot that would raise any suspicion. At least so they say. It makes me wonder how hard it would be for an organized group of hijackers to simply intercept both pilots at some point prior to takeoff and to "substitute" their own guys without raising the alarm. But I don't want to go deep into conspiracy theory land.

As to "where to and why", southern route is only consistent with a very complicated and illogically executed suicide. I tried to point out a few pages back that actions up to 18:22 look less illogical and not so overly complicated if they were followed up (or were intended to be followed up) with a route to the west or to the northwest (most likely towards the Persian Gulf.) But that's still about as far as available evidence can take us.

On an open ATC channel with possibly dozen other aircraft listening in? And no one came forward and reported it in the media the morning after the disappearance? Count me as skeptical.

@hamster3null: the inmarsat press document with the doppler graph describes the method. It does not say that the AES adjusts transmit freq. Instead, it suggests freq search is done by the ground station. The ground station computes the expected sat down link doppler shift, any residual doppler shift is logged as the offset due to a/c + up link motion.

I have verified the qualitative Match to the published graphs, as have you. My calculations result in shifts 250% of those charted. By coincidence, this is the conversion factor for Hz to mph, so I wonder if in the hurry to publish, someone labelled the graph with the wrong unit or forgot about a conversion factor in the spreadsheet.

If there was any other kind of compensation going on, or the modeling was more sophisticated, I don't think we could Get such a good qualitative match. If anything, thus supports their calculation and their conclusion as to likely flight path.

One more guess about Doppler...
 

If the AES has to compensate for Doppler, it have to do this from its own.
When AES is pinged by the sat, it could "deduce" the offset from the signal frequency it receives. But it can't do that when it initiates the transmission.
How to do that?
From a patch of data (one for each Inmarsat sat) included in the AES?
If those data are related for a theoretical position of the sat, the remaining offset which was used to compare north/south routes could come from the wobbling of the sat which appeared slowly with the sat aging, and not included (or not "includable") in the data patch.
In this case, it could explain the low values of the offset compared to the true relative speed of the sat and a/c.
Il also could explain why there is no negative values in the published chart: the sat is at every time of the flight north of its theoretical position above equator.

Just an idea...

FBI finds nothing suspicious on flight sim
 

The FBI has completed of review of the in-home flight simulator that belonged to the captain of the missing Malaysia Airlines passenger jet and found "nothing suspicious whatsoever."
It was the latest dead end in the investigation of the jetliner's disappearance on March 8 with 239 people on board.
The home-made flight simulator belong to the plane's pilot Capt. Zaharie Shah. It was seized by Malaysian investigators when baffled authorities began to look into the background of the plane's crew. Officials looking for signs that the pilot may have practiced certain routes or maneuvers found that some files had been deleted from the simulator's computer. The simulator was sent to the FBI's lab in Quantico, Va.
"They (FBI analysts) have finished with the simulator. There is nothing suspicious whatsoever about what they found," a senior U.S. official told ABC News.
"There's nothing at all (criminal) about the pilot. Right now there is zero evidence of a criminal act by the flight crew," the official said.

No. The Ground station runs a continuous carrier on the P-channel. The Aircraft Satellite Data Unit compares the "offset" frequency it receives to the known frequency of that channel using a Phase Locked Loop with an Oven Controlled Crystal Oscillator as its reference. This offset frequency has the percentage difference of the Tx/Rx (1.6GHz/1.5GHz) added to it, and is used to adjust the Tx frequency by the same amount, but in the opposite direction.

The aircraft communicates this "housekeeping" data to the Ground station as a "burst offset" signal on the R-channel. The fact that the burst offset seems to be smaller than the expected doppler shift is the issue that is really creating the problems with those on this thread trying to make sense of it.

For good measure, here is a list of the data channels and for what purpose they are used:-

Remarks of Tony Tyler at the IATA OPS Conference, Kuala Lumpur
 

IATA - Remarks of Tony Tyler at the IATA OPS Conference, Kuala Lumpur

"Speculation—of which there has been much—will not make flying any safer. "

"Whether or not there is a security dimension to this tragedy, that two passengers could board an aircraft with fake passports rings alarm bells. Airlines are neither border guards nor policemen. That is the well-established responsibility of governments. The industry goes to great effort and expense to ensure that governments who require API (or Advance Passenger Information) receive reliable data. And, along with our passengers, airlines have a right to ask these governments review their processes for vetting and using this data—for example against databases such as the Interpol stolen and lost passport database. The information is critical and it must be used effectively.

It costs the airlines millions of dollars every year to provide API to some 60 governments. I’ve often wondered whether they were using it.

So in the name of the effective use of passenger data, we call on governments

To harmonize on the ICAO standard elements and eliminate all other requirements

To eliminate the collection of passenger and cargo data on paper forms

To create a single harmonized window through which airlines can submit electronic data to governments

And to use this data to improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of border controls. "

Nothern Route is possible?
 

Well I think so.

Many accept so easily that one country did not respond to an unidentified aircraft crossing their borders and overflying their territory, and not letting on until days later, but only a few accept the possibility of a nothern route.

What is the intersection of the satellite - ping flight path and the Nothern arc? What are the countries that would have to be overflown?

There is also nothing to say that these countries need to publicize instances of unidentified aircraft crossing their borders. In fact there are many good reasons why they cannot.

I am trying to help. Check the northern route.

This thought has been canvassed already: see e.g. http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/5...ml#post8380096

Police investigate possible poisoning of food on missing plane
 

Good grief. It is a routine check, since they have so little to go on. Irresponsible to portray as some important new development. Odds of it having anything to do with this situation are less than of the plane being struck by a meteor.

Isn't it a bit late to check for food poisoning ?

Every batch that was made would be good by now, 3 weeks later ?

hamster3null
You have a valid point indeed!

I don't know about that. I suspect that when word was passed that 370 had disappeared off radar and wasn't responding to calls - and that there had been no mayday or emergency codes - people started looking for it. But they weren't looking -up- for it, they were looking -down- because the general assumption would have been a crash, not that the plane was out joyriding far from its intended destination. Doubtful if anyone would have noticed a random radar blip and thought "gee, there goes that missing plane!"

Some thoughts
 

To my mind there are only two sensible reasons for this disappearance, both with similar scenarios after an event.

First a rapid depressurization leading to an hypoxia event. Someone turned the aircraft around but was unable to complete a diversion and the nav and management systems, having had their original inputs changed, but not finalised to a new destination due to crew incapacity, eventually went walkabout.

Second a smouldering cargo which vented toxic fumes from the wrapping which overcame the crew who, identifying a problem, turned back. This begs the question as to why tthe diversion wasn't called to ATC, but human beings don't always do the expected/necessary when faced with a crisis. Can anyone say what the fire suppression equipment on a 777-200 is able to cope with in terms of smouldering rather than outright fire?