2:40am is the time when Subang ATC notified Malaysian Airways that they had lost radar contact with the plane and decided that MH370 was missing.

They actually lost radar contact at 1:21am but there was nothing strange about that as they thought it was heading off to Vietnam.

It was only after Vietnam could not contact the plane and there was a flurry of attempts at contacting it that it was realised that it was missing and MAS should be contacted.

It is perfectly reasonable that in the initial days these facts were sloppily reported by various people as "Radar contact was reported lost at 2:40am".

By coincidence it was discovered several days later that there may have been military radar recordings of the plane elsewhere until about 2:40am. However, this has now been corrected to 2:19am.

Obviously, conspiracy theories can be built on such a co-incidence by those who like to look for such.

Inmarsat are not the enemy here - they're the only organization that's provided any useful information whatsoever to the search.

Inmarsat have gone far beyond where they need to go in providing the service they were paid for. They've put considerable time and effort into new work to help the investigators, and located the wreckage to within a million square miles. I don't see why a reasonable court would demand they hand over their private records, even to someone with standing to ask for them.

Their reputation is now at risk from all the doubts flying around. The best way to avoid that would seem to be to publish their 12-16 data points for the arcs and doppler speeds, with a summary of the conclusions that set off the Australian snipe hunt. Duncan Steel can redo his sums, which might focus the snipe hunt, and the more reasonable conspiracists will be satisfied.

Does anyone remember this earlier report - citing 'radar'? Since it is still not found, maybe worth re-looking at.

March 8th

Vietnam confirms MAS flight crashed into sea off Tho Chu island - The Malaysian Insider

Since Tireless was reported to have arrived in the general area on Monday 31st, that press release would seem to have been substantially overtaken by events.

Dangling a single microphone on a rope would seem to be less effective way to hear high-frequency pings than having seasoned and skilled ears using a big computer and a phased array of at least hundreds of them located beneath the thermocline. If I wanted to bet on the most likely to be successful, I'd put my money on the submarine.

Quick Reaction Alert
 

Is a 3 minute alert posture by the RMAF possible?

Yes, but consider what they need for 2 aircraft.

This is cockpit readiness. Assume a rotation of 2hrs on and 4hrs off. You need 6 crews per day and 12 for 2 days. That is a crew/aircraft ratio of 1:6. Then you have crews under taking routine training on leave etc.

A more normal peacetime readiness is Crewroom readiness - typically 15 minutes - but you still need 4 crews per day as a second pair would be on one hour. Typically you still need 6 crews in 2 days.

Small air force's would struggle to meet the task.

Thank you for interjecting a massive dose of sensibility. I have also read Duncan Steel's blog and it is long on hubris, and a deep self-satisfaction smugly based on exploiting the fact that not all technical details are revealed (I am redundant; I guess that self-satisfaction he oozes can be called "hubris," too). Back-tracking from press releases and simplified graphics is not a way to do science, regardless of how hard he implies it is. It just seems terribly self-aggrandizing and without sufficient details to refute the Inmarsat assertions prior to a comprehensive review.

Again, thank you. Very little is publicly known. Trying to extrapolate much more from press releases is not only futile, it's foolish. It seems we now have more high-profile media fools in this tragedy than we have victims.

Perhaps in the future we'll have a new phrase, the "Malaysian Ratio" - the number of self-professed, highly paid experts who talk confidently about something they honestly know nothing about, vs. the real experts working day and night to solve the real crisis. I think the ratio is running 1,000:1 at the moment.

Agreed, but only if the ssn is very,very near the impact point. Nothing from Inmarsat points to a search zone any one or multiple acoustic searches can grid search in a short while. While Tireless may have both sensitivity and specificity for this task, it won't have range. I honestly believe several US SSBN's are tasked likewise, but I do not believe it will help in a significant way, and it would be self-serving to claim it for a PR benefit.

I am going on record as saying this will be found. It may be a year or two. It may be within a month. Like AF447, the CVR and FDR will eventually be in competent air-board hands. It may take a while, but the search to find an answer is not going to be given up. The answer is going to be prosaic - it may be a single human-driven event. Or it may be a massively improbably technical one. But it is not going to be a massive conspiracy on behalf of multiple nation-states as the swell of opinion seems to favor.

The sudden reappearance of Anwar Ibrahim is quite unsettling. He is a politician hoping to use MH370 to his political advantage, which is dishonourable.

The fact that he has a direct relationship to the captain ought to keep him out of the spotlight, unless of course he is the one politician complicit in the entire thing...

@SheepGuts

Google the Innocence Project and then tell me you would happily take eyewitness testimony over scientific/technical evidence. In about 75% of convictions overturned by DNA evidence, the main evidence that secured the conviction was eyewitness testimony.

This is why two people can witness the same event but their testimony will not be the same. Plus, eyewitnesses will not necessarily see the whole picture and the bit they do see can be biased to a certain conclusion which doesn't reflect the truth.

I would say it would be a serious mistake to discount eyewitness testimony, but a even bigger mistake to put more reliance on it than the technical evidence. I would argue the technical evidence is more likely to give you the truth than eyewitness sightings particularly in a situation where people are panicked or under stress.

"We" don't have much choice in that regard, since it's "their" system that has yielded the results, and "they" know more about how it works than anyone else.

If they say too much about how their system works, then they might be more prone to interference or jamming.

If they were to publish their analysis as a novel technical result or a patent, then the journal or patent office would send it to suitable experts to review.
If they were to submit it to a preprint server, then everyone qualified could have at it, but the best arbiter of the quality of this analysis would remain Inmarsat's own professional pride and responsibility.

The chance of a random blogger finding a crucial flaw in Inmarsat's timing and/or frequency shift analysis is not great.

The Lost Ark would have been investigated by "Top Men", who would include Jones' peers - and rivals - and who would be well known to Jones, if the general had been the boss of a patent office or a journal editor. It would be normal for their identities to be kept from Jones, to avoid the suggestion of any collusion or potential unfair influence.

However, if anti-Inmarsat noise builds further, then the company probably will have to release their arc/speed results. It won't quieten any hard-line conspiracy theorists, but it would allow any reasonable commentator to be absolutely certain that the missing 777 went south.

@SheepGuts:

DNA was once an untried method that is now an accepted method. Just because something is untried doesn't make it invalid. As I understand it, Inmarsat tested this against flights to confirm their interpretations and that was subsequently referred to AAIB who agreed. I find it hard to believe given the magnitude of this incident that Inmarsat would release this if they were not 100% confident in their calculations.

And it still doesn't change the fact that eyewitness reports are inherently unreliable. I am not saying technical data is infallible because it still is subject to interpretation from the examiner, but generally technical information doesn't change and a consistent interpretation is usually reached repeatedly.

lynw,
You need to read my post again. The majority of air accidents and rescues surveyed in Australia 1999- 2012 by AMSA and the ATSB were first notified by visual and aural witness. This is hard data..... You cant ignore them. But they are being ignored the Fisherman, Businessman and Bus Driver at Kota Bharu, the Oil Rig worker off Vung Tau. And the passenger of Malaysia Airlines from Jeddah to KL. All ignored.. All put in Police reports or reported to the Searching station close by. They cant be all wrong! I am not saying ignore the tech info but use everything they have. The last known heading or track off the Malay Defence Radar and use visual witnesses. Everything. Don't let one piece of sat data discount all the other pieces.

How do you know they were ignored? Maybe they were investigated thoroughly and discounted. There is no requirement for a press statement on every avenue of enquiry; indeed we know from the litany of complaints here that there are many things that have not been covered.

Oh yes they can! Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable.

The ATSB data you cite refers to cases where the person on the ground saw an aircraft crash, or an aircraft in trouble, AND THEN raised the alarm.

lynw and I are referring to cases like this one (MH370), where the people on the ground ("witnesses") heard about the accident via the media, then came forward, or were contacted by authorities some other way.

As the TWA800 accident painfully showed, how a witness stores a memory of something they see, then recalls that memory, is very much subject to a whole lot of interpretation.

Nobody is saying these witnesses are being dishonest. It is just that there are significant limitations to the usefulness of eyewitness accounts.

Sheep Guts
many psychological studies tell us that 'they' could all be wrong but one or more of them may be right. The classic case of ignoring eyewitness testimony was the loss of several US atomic bombe from a B52 near Plomares, Spain. The fishermen who witnessed the event were not believed and much time and effort was wasted in consequence.

In the weeks that have passed, one would presume that the "Authorities" have contacted the Australian govt in relation to JORN (Jindalee operational radar network) project in the north of Australia.

In another industry I had a meeting with the directors of JORN a few years ago and its was astounding as to the coverage that this programme can achieve, let alone the information it can gather.

With this knowledge I'm presuming JORN would be able to track abnormal targets. One has to ask why it was not identified:confused:

JORN Radar scope
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...x-JORS.svg.png

Sheep Guts
You are totally hung up on your pet theory that has no relation to probability and you just won't let go. You indulge the classic strategy of inventing endless auxiliary hypotheses to justify your primary obsession that you are hung up on.
You absolutely know what happened and those of us with qualifications far in advance of yours are just summarily dismissed. It's endless and relentless.
Please state your qualifications or go away. How many thousands of hours do you have on wide-bodied Boeings in SE Asia?

Lets keep it simple - does everyone agree that there was power on that a/c until at least 0811 Malaysian Time?

" They can't all be wrong... " sheepguts.

Statistics and probability are unfortunately not on your side.
3 eyewitness events and one has to be true ? oh dear.

Maybe done to death..
 

The only tangible thing we have is the fact there were comms between ATC and A/C AFTER ACARS was registered offline. Satcomm was active.

Now forgive me for asking if it's been repeated but how how much of an alert would this event create on the display CDU?

Lets say ACARS was taken offline due to an electrical short/fire/surge/circuit failure.

We could ascertain at this point VHF radio comms was fine. There wouldn't be too much workload in the cockpit at this time?

@SheepGuts:

You need to re-read my post again. I am not saying eyewitnesses should be ignored I am simply pointing out that eyewitness testimony is proven to be unreliable and much more unreliable than technical evidence.

If all you have is eyewitnesses, then of course you need to investigate the validity of that evidence bearing in mind recall is not always complete, or accurate. If you have technical evidence that also needs to be assessed and investigated. Unlike eyewitness testimony though, that technical evidence is unlikely to change and the validation comes from another examiner using the same set of data and independently reaching the same conclusion.

In this case, Inmarsat have confirmed the aircraft pings long after these eyewitness reports saying they saw the plane. A company like Inmarsat is not going to put their reputation on the line over data they are not sure of. I suspect that these calculations would have been thoroughly validated and verified before release. The consequences for Inmarsat are very considerable if they have got it wrong.

The consequences for these eyewitnesses? they get the Daily Whinge probably paying them for their account and their pic in the paper. It's not rocket science to figure which one I would consider more credible and reliable. :hmm:

I am not saying all eyewitness accounts should be automatically ignored but their credibility and motives have to be considered, and considered in light of the technical evidence. The question becomes whether they genuinely reported something they think may be relevant even if they are mistaken or hoping the worlds press and its cheque book will come calling.