MH370 missing

March 7, 2014 8:48 PM

Malaysia Airlines MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing is missing.

Flight MH370, operated on the B777-200 aircraft, departed Kuala Lumpur at 12.41am on 8 March 2014. MH370 was expected to land in Beijing at 6.30am the same day. The flight was carrying a total number of 227 passengers (including 2 infants), 12 crew members.

Rumors that the plane has landed in Nanning, China are debunked. Chinese media had originally reported Vietnamese officials saying they've picked up a signal, but this has also been refuted. There has been no contact nor distress signals, and the case is especially puzzling as the plane lost contact at the safest moment of the flight.

The last Malaysia Airlines-related fatal crash was in 1995, where a Fokker 50 crashed into a small town, killing 34 passengers and crew.

posted by divabat (1881 comments total)

The Guardian has live updates.

A modern plane just disappearing like that is terrifying. My thoughts are with all those poor people on board and their families.
posted by triggerfinger at 8:50 PM on March 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yahoo Singapore: Vietnam media quote Navy Admiral Ngo Van Phat saying military radar recorded MH370 crashing into sea 153 miles south of Phu Quoc island
posted by divabat at 8:53 PM on March 7, 2014

"There has been no contact nor distress signals" makes me think of TWA flight 800. Other than total catastrophic in-air destruction, it's hard to imagine another event in a modern airliner that wouldn't allow at least some sort of communication from the crew.
posted by barnacles at 8:55 PM on March 7, 2014

People on Twitter are speculating terrorism - who has such a beef against Malaysia that they'd attack Malaysia Airlines?!

This has gotten me really spooked. I am a lifelong flyer who's spent a lot of time on Malaysia Airlines. My parents just flew to Korea yesterday, possibly on MAS. This is hitting so many personal buttons, just wtf.
posted by divabat at 8:58 PM on March 7, 2014 [2 favorites]

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I, too, find it terrifying that in this day and age we can just... lose a big plane for a while.
posted by TwoStride at 9:02 PM on March 7, 2014 [2 favorites]

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posted by humanfont at 9:02 PM on March 7, 2014

From The Guardian:

James Fallows, following the story in The Atlantic, says whatever has happened to the plane is unlikely to be a result of chronic poor practices by Malaysia Airlines (“a good, competent and modern airline”). The Boeing 777 also has an excellent safety record.

So if it crashed, I'm wondering if it was due to human error, which is why the Air France flight went down a few years back.
posted by triggerfinger at 9:03 PM on March 7, 2014

divabat: "People on Twitter are speculating terrorism ..."

It seems like with modern security measures that terrorism would be one of the least likely reasons. A more recent crash with no distress signal was Helios 522, which was a bizarre one.
posted by barnacles at 9:05 PM on March 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

:S

My aunt works in Beijing and frequently flies back and forth between Beijing and KL to visit our family there. She's probably flown that route a dozen times in the last couple of years. Hell, I've flown that route.

This is hitting way closer to home than I'd like.
posted by Xany at 9:06 PM on March 7, 2014 [2 favorites]

I hope against hope that it turns up safe but it's looking like it's crashed. I've flown MAS a few times and always found them competent and safe.
posted by arcticseal at 9:11 PM on March 7, 2014

Thanks for the post. I'm Malaysian, and this hits altogether too close to home too - I've been tracking flights to Beijing from Singapore this summer, and I really really wanted to fly MAS for sentimental reasons. I still want to, but this is just awfully sad.

Meanwhile, some erstwhile acquaintances of mine are speculating that it's a ploy or hoax to divert attention from the Anwar case, which is the most WTF thing ever.
posted by undue influence at 9:13 PM on March 7, 2014 [2 favorites]

People on Twitter are speculating terrorism - who has such a beef against Malaysia that they'd attack Malaysia Airlines?!

It's WAY too early to jump to that conclusion, but in light of recent events, I'd expect Chinese officials to (pretend to?) do just that.
posted by Sys Rq at 9:13 PM on March 7, 2014

Here's the (first) MH370 thread on airliners.net, which is where I turn to for air-disaster information. It's morbid but they really know their stuff. From there I've learned:

* Route was KUL to PEK
* Unconfirmed but they suspect the specific aircraft is tail number 9M-MRO. That plane is only 11 years old.
* From records, 9M-MRO was involved in an accident in 2012. "The wing hit the tail of a China Eastern A340 with the tip left hanging. Not serious but noteworthy."
* This would be only the 4th ever loss of a 777
* Event now has a Wikipedia entry
posted by ceribus peribus at 9:14 PM on March 7, 2014 [16 favorites]

My dad was a frequent flyer, including in that part of the world, and for all that he's been gone for 25 years, I still get a chill when I hear about an air crash. A plane just vanishing is even more frightening. It feels like we ought to be able to keep better track, and yet, just losing things and people is the norm through most of history, and knowing where everything is all the time is the anomaly.

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posted by immlass at 9:15 PM on March 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

It appears the Vietnamese Navy has confirmed it crashed

My thoughts are with the families; how absolutely awful
posted by saucysault at 9:16 PM on March 7, 2014

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posted by Vibrissae at 9:22 PM on March 7, 2014

Been texting my dad who is flying home tomorrow. He's all "but our family friend says the plane landed safely in Kota Baru!" Gah.

Though honestly I'll gladly trade a "told you so" given the alternative ...
posted by divabat at 9:26 PM on March 7, 2014 [6 favorites]

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posted by Renoroc at 9:45 PM on March 7, 2014

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posted by rozaine at 9:49 PM on March 7, 2014

As freaky as plane accidents are, I like to remind myself that I'm a lot more likely to die in a car accident.
posted by mantecol at 9:50 PM on March 7, 2014 [3 favorites]

There are at least two infants on board, one from China, one from United States. I don't know why that information should make it seem even more horrendous, but somehow it does.
posted by Anitanola at 10:00 PM on March 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

Thank goodness the fact that this is such big news is because it is such rare news; considering the number of planes in the air at any one time it is a feat of engineering and human ability that there are so few catastrophic failures.

I know the next couple of days will be hard for you divabat, until your Dad is safe home. Be gentle with yourself.
posted by saucysault at 10:15 PM on March 7, 2014 [10 favorites]

It's not terrifying that a plane could be lost, it's stupid. Planes should have satellite uplinks reporting GPS position. Consumer versions of that cost about $200. But commercial planes mostly don't have them. Stupid.

Also stupid is the breathless breaking news and up to the minute speculation and rumor. The 24 hour news cycle and instant worldwide Internet communication makes it worse. It's ghoulish, unhealthy infotainment.
posted by Nelson at 10:19 PM on March 7, 2014 [13 favorites]

This is hitting way closer to home than I'd like.

At the risk sounding like a one-upsman, I flew from Boston-Logan to LAX a week before 9/11, and never thought more than "hmmm, that's weird."

Granted, "close to home" will vary from person to person, but let's keep a little perspective here.
posted by ShutterBun at 10:28 PM on March 7, 2014 [5 favorites]

So if it crashed, I'm wondering if it was due to human error, which is why the Air France flight went down a few years back.

Is that the flight where one of the pilots was pulling back on the stick while the other pushed forward, thus locking the controls until the plane lost so much airspeed it stalled despite there being absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong with the plane? That one was chilling to read about.

Nelson is right; there isn't an excuse for every single commercial flight to be outfitted with a GPS uplink. Planes should never be "lost" in this day and age.
posted by Justinian at 10:37 PM on March 7, 2014

Well, to be fair that was also written by someone who has family in KL, and - at least for me, having grown up here - is likely to be connected to someone on that flight, as I am rather distantly. For some people that's close enough that it gives them chills and saddens them, for some it isn't. And while it's not particularly commendable, it's natural that the first thought for many is "well, there but for the grace of God (or luck)", while others see the flip side of that and see that well, it just wasn't you.

But as the speculation turns into concrete fact, what happens will be less abstracted, and "perspective" will probably be more grounded to begin with, so we'll deal more with facts than "that is so scary to me because [X]".

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posted by undue influence at 10:40 PM on March 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

Dad's just apologised to me for the misinformation. Can't blame them really, my parents are worrywarts enough without a catastrophe.

They are flying MAS. I told them to anticipate being stuck in Korea for a while - been hearing flights cancelled today. (I doubt they'd cancel all international flights, but given that this is so new for MAS who knows what the response is.)

I've been working with a youth arts project where local youth collaborate with Malaysian youth on issues of citizenship and identity. A bunch of our kids are flying to KL and vice versa. I'm going to break the news to them in our next class. Hoping no one we know has been lost.
posted by divabat at 10:43 PM on March 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

"who has such a beef against Malaysia that they'd attack Malaysia Airlines?!"

They've got the same problem as everyone else in that part of the world: Islamic militants.

But it could also be someone who has a beef with China.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:44 PM on March 7, 2014

Does everything have to be about Islamic militants? Because no other religion has ever hijacked planes?

Please. The terrorism speculation is bordering on distasteful here.
posted by divabat at 10:46 PM on March 7, 2014 [19 favorites]

...It could also be an accident. I meant to add that. I was answering the "who has such a beef" question.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:47 PM on March 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

fair enough. i'm sorry.
posted by divabat at 10:48 PM on March 7, 2014

Reuters now reporting the plane crashed in the South China Sea.

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So sad.
posted by misha at 10:49 PM on March 7, 2014

From what I can tell on Twitter, authorities in China, Malaysia, and Vietnam can't seem to agree with each other.
posted by divabat at 10:54 PM on March 7, 2014

Reuters article tentatively confirming crash.
posted by divabat at 11:04 PM on March 7, 2014

Granted, "close to home" will vary from person to person, but let's keep a little perspective here.

I don't think it's unreasonable for my first thought to wonder if my aunt was on that plane. And I mean, she wasn't, but I imagine people with family who flew Brazil-France also had an uh-oh moment when they heard about Air France 447.

I'm sorry if that doesn't fit your vision of appropriate perspective in this situation.
posted by Xany at 11:08 PM on March 7, 2014 [28 favorites]

Much respect for the airline posting this:

"We regret to announce that Subang Traffic Control lost contact with flight MH370 at 2:40 am today.

We are currently working with international authorities on the search and rescue mission and as at 1400 hours, 08 March 2014, we have no information on the location of the airline."

Sadly, I cannot imagine a United States airline making such a clear statement.
posted by ITravelMontana at 11:18 PM on March 7, 2014 [3 favorites]

Regarding perspective, my father was an airline pilot. When I was a little kid, I couldn't mentally separate the plane my father was flying from any other plane. When he was on a trip and there was a plane accident, I thought he'd died until he came home. When he was home, I always asked him how he was going to be able to go to work now that his plane had crashed.

Anyhow, obviously I'm older now and have figured a thing or two out about the total number of planes. Also, my dad retired years ago. To this day, when I hear about a plane accident, I experience a reduced version of the same anxiety I felt forty years ago. It's irrational, but there it is. I don't know that I've mentioned this outside of my therapist's office before.

Anyhow, we all react the way we react to news of tragedy. I feel for the families and friends of everyone effected by this tragedy. Part of the reason I feel for them is because of my own personal anxiety - and obviously part is empathy and basic decency.

My sincere condolences to the families and friends. This is dreadful.
posted by Joey Michaels at 11:29 PM on March 7, 2014 [28 favorites]

It's not terrifying that a plane could be lost, it's stupid. Planes should have satellite uplinks reporting GPS position. Consumer versions of that cost about $200. But commercial planes mostly don't have them. Stupid.

How is this supposed to prevent airplanes from disappearing? The aircraft in this case was equipped with a location-tracking system that was broadcasting and then stopped broadcasting. That's why it's missing.
posted by Authorized User at 11:38 PM on March 7, 2014 [19 favorites]

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posted by univac at 11:39 PM on March 7, 2014

Of note, a Chinese plane with 200 people on board passed through the trajectory of a North Korean missile seven minutes after a test earlier this week. The plane was flying from Shenyang in China to Tokyo.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that North Korea was involved in this. Given the location, that seems highly unlikely. But given how recent that incident was, it felt worth flagging for the thread.

My condolences go out to the families of the passengers and crew.
posted by dry white toast at 11:46 PM on March 7, 2014

Because no other religion has ever hijacked planes?

Well, no. But it's not so much a religion as the adherents.
posted by mattoxic at 12:14 AM on March 8, 2014

Considering Malaysia is in itself a Muslim country, and the ruling party itself can be pretty extremist at times...yeah no.
posted by divabat at 12:18 AM on March 8, 2014

though the Opposition party isn't really helping matters either.
posted by divabat at 12:24 AM on March 8, 2014

Mod note: Comment deleted. Metatalk if you want to have a discussion about the appropriateness of the post.
posted by taz (staff) at 12:48 AM on March 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

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I've been following this all day. I hope it was quick and the passengers and crew didn't know it was coming. I also hope they find the wreckage soon.

(Although part of me is hoping this is one of those air crashes where one person survives against the odds).
posted by daybeforetheday at 1:17 AM on March 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

I hope. I always hope.
posted by Anitanola at 2:07 AM on March 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

the plane lost contact at the safest moment of the flight.

This is an absurd phrasing from CNN. Cruise is a safer phase of flight than landing or takeoff, but that doesn't make it "the safest moment".

It's not terrifying that a plane could be lost, it's stupid. Planes should have satellite uplinks reporting GPS position. Consumer versions of that cost about $200. But commercial planes mostly don't have them. Stupid.

The term "lost" is used when there is no conclusive knowledge of the state of the aircraft. It's a more complex situation than just "if only we had GPS tracking". The better phrasing would be that controllers have "lost contact with" the airplane, which is also mostly a statement of uncertainty but it at least avoids the implication that position is the operative issue. Perhaps some of your displeasure at news outlets for reporting speculation and rumor should temper your rash claims of airline and FAA stupidity.
posted by kiltedtaco at 3:09 AM on March 8, 2014 [10 favorites]

Based on that Guardian feed, there's a lot of anger from the families of passengers due to lack of information. I guess that's understandable, but at the moment there really seems to be no information.

For some reason I'm following this closely, I guess because of several trips I've made to Malaysia over the years, and because of the way the airline has just disappeared without any indication of where or what went wrong.

I'm not one for praying, personally, but I'm sure hoping.
posted by Jimbob at 3:09 AM on March 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

An Italian website is reporting that the one Italian passenger that was reported to be on the flight is safe in Thailand but had his passport stolen from him in august...
posted by QueenHawkeye at 3:26 AM on March 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

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posted by Smart Dalek at 3:35 AM on March 8, 2014

This is an absurd phrasing from CNN. Cruise is a safer phase of flight than landing or takeoff, but that doesn't make it "the safest moment".

What would you say the safest moment of flight is?
posted by Authorized User at 3:54 AM on March 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

I wonder if any of the passengers used cell phones to call or text friends or family. If not, I'd guess that whatever happened happened very quickly.
posted by amro at 4:01 AM on March 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

I think the problem with the wording there is that it implied that the safest moment is more like a singular peak (during which the plane disappeared), whereas the reality is that all the moments during cruise (which account for the longest portion of flight) are safer than the takeoff and landing phases.
posted by iamkimiam at 4:02 AM on March 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

What would you say the safest moment of flight is?

Bolting down the stairs to thankfully kiss the Tarmac always seemed like a safe flight moment.
posted by oceanjesse at 4:05 AM on March 8, 2014 [9 favorites]

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posted by oceanjesse at 4:05 AM on March 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Here's the passenger manifest from Malaysia Airlines, via The Guardian's live updates page.
posted by undue influence at 4:08 AM on March 8, 2014

amro: cellphones don't work too well when you're a hundred miles from land over the open ocean.

Justinian: "planes should never be lost in this day and age" — per the Aviation Herald incident log, the plane was on radar when it was observed to make a sharp turn and rapid descent, without any communication. Contact was then lost, presumably when the aircraft disintegrated in mid-air or crashed. The trouble is, it will have been cruising at approximately 550mph, at an altitude of nearly seven miles, when it went down. The wreckage could easily be scattered over an area of the South China Sea twenty miles long and five miles wide.

Adding a GPS location squawk via satellite link would tell us nothing useful that we don't already know about its location (from air traffic control radar). It would also cost a metric fuckton to retrofit every commercial aircraft in the global fleet (approximately 20,000 airframes in service), and probably require a whole new satellite constellation to handle the data from 20,000 aircraft making an average of over 50,000 flights per day, especially if we wanted it to do something useful like upload the Flight Data Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder logs in realtime (so that in event of another AF447 we don't end up waiting nearly a year to recover the black boxes—and, in the case of AF447, requiring a nuclear submarine, a couple of deep ocean exploration vessels, and costing millions).

Or did you mean "lost" as in "crashed"? Airliners are already the safest form of transportation per passenger-mile ever invented; you're more likely to die on one of a heart attack or other natural causes than in a crash.
posted by cstross at 4:19 AM on March 8, 2014 [30 favorites]

amro: cellphones don't work too well when you're a hundred miles from land over the open ocean.

My understanding is that Malaysia Airlines offers pay cell service on select Boeing 777 flights, and that it would normally work at anytime during the flight that it's permitted. I don't claim to be an expert, though.
posted by amro at 4:41 AM on March 8, 2014

I was working with and close professionally with a person who's wife's immediate family were lost in the Air France accident. We were working on a project together in Beijing. I was in contact with him in the immediate aftermath and to observe the horrific impact of that sort of loss was difficult. As far as I know his and his wife's life have gone a completely different direction.

I'll offer a . to all the families that have so much to deal with. I wish you well and remain hopeful that there might be something positive to come.
posted by michswiss at 5:11 AM on March 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

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posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 5:18 AM on March 8, 2014

New York Times says an oil slick has been sighted.
posted by gudrun at 5:20 AM on March 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

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posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 5:22 AM on March 8, 2014

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posted by travelwithcats at 6:03 AM on March 8, 2014

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posted by cmyk at 6:09 AM on March 8, 2014

oceanjesse: Bolting down the stairs to thankfully kiss the Tarmac always seemed like a safe flight moment.

You're FAR more likely to suffer an injury from using those stairs than from anything involving the flight itself. Jet bridge are a lot better than stairs, but still less safe than the actual flying.
posted by samworm at 6:11 AM on March 8, 2014 [6 favorites]

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posted by samsara at 6:57 AM on March 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

It does seem significant that two people reported to be on the plane were not, and/but their passports were stolen, right? Am I dense? Is this being intentionally left unspoken?
posted by Fists O'Fury at 7:36 AM on March 8, 2014

Don't tell me that the conspiracy theories about this being a hijacking or terrorist attack are true.
posted by divabat at 7:37 AM on March 8, 2014

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posted by joethefob at 7:40 AM on March 8, 2014

How common is passport theft/cloning? Is two on the same flight just by chance particularly improbable?

But terrorism speculation aside, I hope those people whose passports were stolen were easily contactable when the word came. I can only imagine the emotional whiplash you'd experience as the authoritative reached out to let you know your loved one had been killed in a plane crash when you thought they were at work, or out buying some milk or something.
posted by adamt at 7:45 AM on March 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

It does seem significant that two people reported to be on the plane were not, and/but their passports were stolen, right? Am I dense? Is this being intentionally left unspoken?

I don't have enough context to tell. Maybe stolen passports being used on flights in asia is A Thing that happens all the time?
posted by RustyBrooks at 7:45 AM on March 8, 2014

Don't tell me that the conspiracy theories about this being a hijacking or terrorist attack are true.

Personally, I don't have any view about this at this point--who does[?]--but it it seems odd to me to call that a conspiracy theory... Just sounds like a hypothesis to me.

I don't really know anything about air disasters--few of us probably do. All people can do in such circumstances is cast about for hypotheses. And the disasters most of us remember are, perhaps, not representative... So, perhaps that's a bad hypothesis from the perspective of someone who is knowledgeable... But from my perspective, anyway, it seems like one of the two or three obvious hypotheses.
posted by Fists O'Fury at 7:47 AM on March 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

If it was terrorism, wouldn't whichever terrorists it was have taken credit by now?
posted by amro at 7:51 AM on March 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

Oh, I don't mean to imply that you all support a conspiracy theory. It's just popped up all over Twitter and it just doesn't make any sense to me as to why they'd go after Malaysia Airlines.
posted by divabat at 7:53 AM on March 8, 2014

It's all good. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't being dense.
posted by Fists O'Fury at 7:54 AM on March 8, 2014

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posted by cristinacristinacristina at 7:55 AM on March 8, 2014

Also: well, Twitter.

The amazing thing about Twitter is that somebody actually figured out a way to make the internet stupider. I guess they figured that blog posts were too sober and reflective, and gave people too much time to think before they spoke to the world and eternity.
posted by Fists O'Fury at 7:56 AM on March 8, 2014 [15 favorites]

Pilots on PPRUNE, my go-to forum whenever there's an air disaster, are commenting that the sea over which this plane would have flown is crowded with fishing vessels, so many that it sometimes appears to pilots as a city beneath them.

It will take a day or two but I suspect some of the people on those vessels witnessed something in the sky, even though it was the wee hours of the morning. Perhaps someone shot some video.
posted by brianstorms at 7:59 AM on March 8, 2014 [6 favorites]

Stolen passports were used to buy two tickets for Malaysia Airlines missing flight - South China Morning Post

Two people named on a list of passengers on board missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 were not on the plane, but both had reported their passports stolen.

Foreign ministry officials in Rome and Vienna confirmed on Saturday night that the names of two nationals listed on the manifest of the flight matched those of passports reported stolen in Thailand.

China Southern, who jointly shared the route with Malaysian Airlines in what is termed in the industry a 'code share', said in a statement they had sold tickets to one Austrian and one Italian.


The revelations will raise questions over security at Kuala Lumpur's airport, and how the stolen passports were able to be used by people other than their rightful owners.

At a press conference on Saturday evening an airline spokesman refused to rule out terrorism as a possible reason behind the very sudden disappearance of the flight.

posted by infini at 8:25 AM on March 8, 2014

Is that the flight where one of the pilots was pulling back on the stick while the other pushed forward, thus locking the controls until the plane lost so much airspeed it stalled despite there being absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong with the plane? That one was chilling to read about.

Yes. Here's the story about it.
posted by triggerfinger at 8:47 AM on March 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

The stolen passports could have been used for the cause of terrorism.

Or the owners of the stolen passports might have been crime cartel members, drug runners, people in shady "import/export" businesses, or have some other not-particularly legitimate reason to launder their identities regularly, and had the misfortune to be on a doomed flight.

There's no reason to rule it out and no reason to leap to conclusions yet either.
posted by ardgedee at 8:48 AM on March 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

For this to be a meaningful terrorist act, somebody will eventually have to make a claim and stake a cause.

A terrorist incident that's indistinguishable from an accident is ineffective terrorism. It is like silently boycotting something you would never buy. So if there is terrorism underpinning it, there will either be follow-up news from a recognizable authority about communications they've had, or communications directly to the press, addressed either to the public or to relevant government or businesses. I think it's reasonable to wait until then before assuming terrorism happened.
posted by ardgedee at 8:51 AM on March 8, 2014 [6 favorites]

If the cause is to deter people from flying than our hypothetical terrorists have no need to stake claims and in fact would be better off not taking credit.
posted by Mitheral at 9:06 AM on March 8, 2014

I find it hard to believe the two stolen passport travellers weren't photographed/captured on security footage prior to boarding. I'd guess the authorities already know who the travellers with the stolen documents were.
posted by Keith Talent at 9:11 AM on March 8, 2014

There's no reason to rule it out and no reason to leap to conclusions yet either.

Sure, but I don't think anyone here is in any way jumping to conclusions. Looks like people are just floating tentative hypotheses and offering fairly tentative suggestions about evidence for and against those hypotheses.
posted by Fists O'Fury at 9:11 AM on March 8, 2014

All of this is just conjecture until someone finds physical evidence.
posted by arcticseal at 9:13 AM on March 8, 2014

I am suddenly feeling a bit paranoid.

The presence of one stolen passport shouldn't be too surprising. They get stolen for a reason, after all: people want to travel without being detected (or for identity theft and fraud, but that's not in the frame right now).

However, it gets interesting because two stolen passports were used to buy two tickets, via China Southern (the flight being a codeshare operated by Malaysian).

The probability of one person with a stolen/fake passport being on a given wide-body is not high, but is non-zero. But the probability of two stolen/fakes independently showing up on the same flight is vastly lower.

Inference: the presence of multiple stolen passports on a single flight is very unlikely to be a coincidence.

Next up: if you're part of a group using stolen passports and you simply want to travel from A to B undetected, you probably want to travel separately. (If one of you trips an alarm, you'd prefer that only one was caught rather than losing everybody.) KL to Beijing is a daily or more-frequent service -- they're both major regional hubs. So there's no obstacle to doing that.

Second inference: the folks with the stolen passports wanted to be on the flight together, despite the elevated risk of interception. Which suggests that for their purposes group action was the goal, rather than relocation.

Am I reading too much into this?
posted by cstross at 9:16 AM on March 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

Following up on brianstorm's awesome comment, here is a thread on PPruNe regarding the missing plane: MH370 Contact Lost. All speculation as well, but with some expert knowledge.
posted by rozaine at 9:18 AM on March 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

The probability of one person with a stolen/fake passport being on a given wide-body is not high, but is non-zero. But the probability of two stolen/fakes independently showing up on the same flight is vastly lower.

You don't know what the probability is of one person with a stolen passport being on the flight, so you can't say whether two on the same flight is unusual or commonplace.

if you're part of a group using stolen passports and you simply want to travel from A to B undetected, you probably want to travel separately

Nobody found out that there were two people traveling with stolen passports until they started looking into what happened to the plane, suggesting it would have gone undetected otherwise, and therefore there was no need to be so cautious.

Am I reading too much into this?

In the absence of more information, I'd say yes.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 9:24 AM on March 8, 2014 [12 favorites]

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posted by yeoz at 9:26 AM on March 8, 2014

Eh. Passports get stolen all the time. A lot of the world isn't equipped to confirm passports are valid at ports of entry/exit. Unless you've got some specific numbers on probability of someone traveling on a plane in SE Asia on a stolen passport that are really minute, it just seems like a coincidence to me. How many people fly on domestic American flights with illegitimate ID? Keep in mind that there have been repeated occurrences of state licensing offices having fraud problems where employees were selling "real" documents, not to mention the thriving industry in making credible fakes. Even with a pretty small rate of travelers using stolen / fraudulent documents, two of them on a 400 person plane is going to happen pretty frequently.

Also this is sad obviously. :(
posted by R343L at 9:28 AM on March 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

Two stolen passports could just be two members of the same family who obtained their fake documents through the same supplier that deals in stolen passports, I think. I'm not reading anything in until there's more of a reason.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:36 AM on March 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

Bangkok is a major centre in the trade of fake/altered/stolen passports. Such passports are very handy if you are moving drugs around.
posted by Mister Bijou at 9:39 AM on March 8, 2014

> You don't know what the probability is of one person with a stolen passport being on the flight, so you can't say whether two on the same flight is unusual or commonplace.

I wasn't able to find even one example of a crash with one person with a stolen passport on it. And this would pop up right away, as the "victim" announced that they were still alive. You can certainly find plenty examples of crashes with victims carrying fake passports...

Pending another example of a crash with even one victim carrying a stolen passport, I'd agree with cstross that having two such victims is extremely unlikely and has a strong possibility of being connected to the cause of the crash.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:40 AM on March 8, 2014

Two drug couriers?
posted by Mister Bijou at 9:41 AM on March 8, 2014

Prima facie I'd expect flying to be a pretty common thing to do with a stolen passport.
posted by Fists O'Fury at 9:46 AM on March 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

If p(person with stolen passport on flight) = 0.01, then for two persons, p(stolen passport) * p(stolen passport) = 0.001. Elementary stats.

And I suspect that for a 400-seater 777, p(stolen passport) is probably less than 0.01 -- otherwise we're assuming that one in 40,000 flyers is a ringer.
posted by cstross at 9:51 AM on March 8, 2014

Well, 0.0001 ... but why couldn't the fraction of fake passports be much larger than 1/40000?
posted by lukemeister at 9:54 AM on March 8, 2014

Years ago, when I was studying in Dublin, I was mugged by a guy who took my bag, with my passport in it. He dumped the bag, but the passport was gone. I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone ended up traveling on my passport. Lot's of non-terrorist people might have a reason to want to travel on a US or EU passport, whether for drug-smuggling purposes or to migrate illegally to a place to which they wouldn't be able to get a tourist visa or for some other reason.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:54 AM on March 8, 2014

> There aren't really that many plane crashes, period, nor that many in proportion to the number of flights made every day, or every year. That's not indicative of anything other than having a thankfully small sample size.

There were 119 plane accidents in 2012 alone, with 794 deaths. Since 2001, the world has averaged about 1000 fatalities a year. (Source.)

Most of these crashes are regional jets, but that's still a reasonable sample size. Pending anyone demonstrating even one stolen passport on any other crash, I'd say that the existence of two such passports on the flight is still deeply suspicious.

My understanding was that most stolen passports are used as raw material to produce fake passports....

> If p(person with stolen passport on flight) = 0.01, then for two persons, p(stolen passport) * p(stolen passport) = 0.001.

0.0001, actually. :-D
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:54 AM on March 8, 2014

Most of these crashes are regional jets, but that's still a reasonable sample size. Pending anyone demonstrating even one stolen passport on any other crash, I'd say that the existence of two such passports on the flight is still deeply suspicious.

I am not sure KL to Beijing qualifies as a "regional jet".
posted by Mister Bijou at 9:57 AM on March 8, 2014

The China Southern thing, *if* it correlates to some sort of terrorist plot, does take away the question of who would hate Malaysia so much to hijack their plane.

Do we know that the two fake passport holders bought tickets *together* and travelled *together*?

I'm trying to remember how check-ins work at KLIA. Malaysia was the first country to use RFID passports but I think the scan machines are only used by Malaysian passports. The security system is nowhere near as intense as the US.
posted by divabat at 9:57 AM on March 8, 2014

And I suspect that for a 400-seater 777, p(stolen passport) is probably

Please stop. Statistics are meaningless when the antecedent is guesswork. We're all welcome to our conjectures but kindly don't attach random numbers to them. It's hard enough to get people to understand probability as it is. :(
posted by phooky at 9:59 AM on March 8, 2014 [21 favorites]

> I am not sure KL to Beijing qualifies as a "regional jet".

Of course it doesn't. How did you get from what I wrote to that?

> Statistics are meaningless when the antecedent is guesswork.

The antecedent isn't guesswork - we have a large volume of hard data on plane crashes. Given that we have pretty detailed information about many previous crashes, and given that there wasn't(*) even one stolen passport on any of them, the claim that "having two passengers carrying stolen passports on a crashed plane is not improbable" does not seem correct.

(* - more precisely, that no one here has come up with any example of a stolen passport being attached to a plane crash victim. More data could of course invalidate the conclusion, if not the reasoning.)
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 10:11 AM on March 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

The odds of any individual being on the flight were very low (223 passengers out of millions of passengers). Therefore no one was on the plane because statistics.
posted by humanfont at 10:13 AM on March 8, 2014 [19 favorites]

The Interpol head honcho testified that they are tracking at least 6.7 million stolen passports in 2007. Let's call it 11 million.

So the probability of any random person on Earth holding a stolen passport is around 0.0016. My statistics chops suck, but I think the odds of one person out of 227 random people having a stolen passport are likely to be fairly high.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:17 AM on March 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

To sum up: none of us have a clue what any of this means. Also, actual investigations move a lot slower than metafilter threads.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:20 AM on March 8, 2014 [10 favorites]

> My statistics chops suck, but I think the odds of one person out of 227 random people having a stolen passport are likely to be around 1 in 3.

Were this the case, we'd be seeing stolen passports involved in plane crashes all the time, yes?
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 10:21 AM on March 8, 2014

Most of the passengers are/were Chinese citizens. I don't think it's likely, but this could be sympathizers/organizational allies* to some more extremist and religious section of the Uyghur independence movement against their "atheist oppressors". I'm not arguing for this idea at all and I hate immediate Islamophobic assumptions of "Muslim terrorists" but I'm sure it's being discussed on the Chinese internet given the Kunming attack this past week. It definitely gives a motive.

* from a Muslim majority country with a history of anti-ethnic Chinese opinions and actions at times (not all the time).
posted by Gnatcho at 10:23 AM on March 8, 2014

(Sorry, I edited my post to remove my speculative answer ... point is there are a lot of stolen passports running around and the number has at least doubled in the last five years)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:24 AM on March 8, 2014

from WSJ:
"Among the people believed to be on the plane was a group of painters and calligraphers. The group of 24 artists, organized by business-to-business e-commerce network IBIcn.com, had traveled to the Malaysian capital last Wednesday for an exhibition of their work..."
posted by artdrectr at 10:25 AM on March 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Mod note: Couple comments deleted. Folks, please don't use the edit function to add or remove content, it's for typo fixes only - if you need a delete just drop a note to the contact form. And let's keep it cool in here, we're all operating without much information and thinking about how to make sense of the few facts available.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:27 AM on March 8, 2014

First, we assume a perfectly spherical stolen passport in a vacuum...
posted by strangely stunted trees at 10:34 AM on March 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

Could we maybe have a little more respect for the dead here?
posted by crayz at 10:41 AM on March 8, 2014 [11 favorites]

List of (in my opinion mostly bullshit) theories on WhoDunit that I've seen floated:

* missile strike by North Korea or somebody
* Islamic militants from China or Malaysia
* anti-Islamic Chinese
* Ukraine/Crimea/Russia
* the pilot is Muslim therefore he crashed the plane on purpose
* alien abduction
* something Bermuda Triangle-esque
* Conspiracy by Malaysian Gov to distract from current political climate
* Conspiracy to hide MAS financial losses
posted by divabat at 10:43 AM on March 8, 2014

"the pilot is Muslim therefore he crashed the plane on purpose"

That has happened.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:09 AM on March 8, 2014

It's unlikely we'll learn anything about it until they recover the black boxes.

And if the plane went down in deep water, it could be a long time. It may well take days before they even locate the air frame, and weeks before robots can extract the black boxes.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:12 AM on March 8, 2014

Chocolate Pickle: Malaysia is a Muslim country, a large number of their crew are Muslim. Malaysian Muslims, even the most extremist ones, aren't prone to terrorism.

spitbull: the Bermuda Triangle one came from a Malaysian politician on Twitter, as a joke - as you can imagine it did not go down well.

There are a fair few Malaysians, including families of passengers, that aren't happy that MAS nor the Malaysian government are particularly forthcoming about anything. I have first-hand experience of their incompetence and shadiness, so I am somewhat sympathetic to their concerns, but at the same time I really doubt this was anything politically motivated.
posted by divabat at 11:16 AM on March 8, 2014

spitbull: the incompetence I'm talking about relates to the Malaysian Government, which I'm not going to relate here as my stories have nothing to do with this case. I've flown MAS zillions of times and have mentioned before about their stellar safety record.

The info about relatives being angry comes from here:

Relatives of those on the missing flight who were waiting at Beijing Capital International Airport were taken to a hotel and kept waiting in a room for hours, prompting complaints. One woman said no one from Malaysia Airlines had come to the room to talk to relatives.

[...]

At the Kuala Lumpur airport, a grief-stricken relative of a passenger aboard MH370 screamed uncontrollably as he was escorted out of the terminal by airline employees.

“Be truthful about this!” said the man, Koon Chim Wa, whose booming voice echoed through the cavernous terminal.

“They say they don’t know where the plane is,” Mr. Koon said, his hands and body shaking. “Is this a joke?”

I can't tell if your comment about levity is sarcastic or not - I can tell you that the Bermuda Triangle comment was met with a lot of horror by Malaysians.

I made this post. I've ranted many many times about the (mostly bullshit, as I said in my comments) theories people are spouting based on senseless "evidence". I made that list because I was so frustrated and angry by all the theories and I wanted to show the lengths people go to to claim conspiracy. In no way am I agreeing or joking around about this case.
posted by divabat at 11:27 AM on March 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

If p(person with stolen passport on flight) = 0.01, then for two persons, p(stolen passport) * p(stolen passport) = 0.001. Elementary stats.

[morbo] ELEMENTARY STATISTICS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY! [/morbo]

Even if you want to treat it the way you implicitly were -- as independent draws -- you have to start with the individual pr(carrying stolen passport). Call that x.

We know there were 227 passengers, so the probability of exactly zero passengers carrying a stolen passport is

pr(zero)=(1-x)^227

and the probability of exactly one is

pr(one)=(x)(1-x)^226 / (227!/(1!*226!))

And the probability of at least two people carrying stolen passports is 1-pr(zero)-pr(one).

If we use robotvoodoopower's back-of-the-envelope estimate that x=0.0016 then (using bitesti in stata because online tools get stroppy about calculating 227!) the answer turns out to be 0.052.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:35 AM on March 8, 2014 [12 favorites]

Which isn't to say that's a smart thing to do, because it isn't, because people on a plane aren't independent trials because people keep having those stupid "families" and "friends" that screw up the numbers. But if we're not going to do the statistics, we should at least choose not to do the vastly-oversimplified-but-correct-within-that-gross-simplification statistics instead of not doing the just-plain-wrong statistics.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:39 AM on March 8, 2014 [8 favorites]

using bitesti in stata because online tools get stroppy about calculating 227!

227! / 226! = 227.
posted by dirigibleman at 11:52 AM on March 8, 2014 [6 favorites]

Don't bring facts into it, Hindenburg.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:53 AM on March 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

Uyghur anti-Chinese extremism is mainly a nationalist rather than a global Islamist thing, if I can recall rightly. Though there are some connections to global Islamist extremism , which it has been in China's interests to highlight and play up.

Yeah, I agree and wish I had made that clearer (including that in my baseless speculation it could be Uyghurs and not allies/sympathizers). It mostly has to do with Han settler-colonialism from what I've read.

Like everyone else I don't know anything and I think it was most likely mechanical failure of some sort. My point in posting a baseless speculation (assuming the stolen passports had any meaning), was in response to divabat since, based on the passenger list, I doubted any intentional attack had Malaysia as its primary target.
posted by Gnatcho at 11:58 AM on March 8, 2014

There's been a few reports of the general crash area usually being full of fishing boats. Not one of those boats reported seeing something fall from the sky or land in their waters? No unusual water events?
posted by divabat at 12:05 PM on March 8, 2014

From a FlyerTalk thread: The captain had over 18,000 hours of flight time. The first officer had over 2,700 hours of flight time. MH has had a good safety record.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:09 PM on March 8, 2014

Spitbull, would you please turn on your MeMail? I'd like to send you a note.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 12:24 PM on March 8, 2014

A blog post about the pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:27 PM on March 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

A 2007 quote from the Interpol Secretary in my previous link: "The greatest threat in the world is that last year there were 500 million ... international air arrivals worldwide where travel documents were not compared against Interpol databases."

Also more recently: "... only a handful of countries are systematically using SLTD (Stolen and Lost Travel Documents Database) to screen travelers."

Based on this, it appears that people travel with fake identities all the time, in some countries more than others. I think this is an important counterpoint to the evidenceless smoking gun claims of Anonymous Senior Official and Anonymous Terror Analyst quoted in the media.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 12:42 PM on March 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

> p(stolen passport) = 0.001. Elementary stats.

Multiplication result aside, doesn't that assume that the two events are independent, i.e. that the two people on the flight with bogus passports were completely unconnected and unrelated? If I'm remembering that correctly it seems a pretty big assumption to make until we know, well, something, anything, about these two. Instead of nothing, which is what we know now.
posted by jfuller at 1:03 PM on March 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Incidents like this bring our own fears (and ignorance) to the fore, when we have very few "facts".

As spitbull points out, the likelihood of this being a "terrorist" act are far down the list of probables--but are high on the list of immediate assumptions.

That in itself points out how effective terrorism actually is--when people are so frightened that every major incident is subject to endless speculation about terrorism, the terrorists have, indeed, won. Terrorism is also a justification for "othering" a lot of the time; there is a (repellent) tendency for some to immediately look for and then post as "ahas!" surnames and the like when those things are, at best, poorly correlated with actually being a terrorist.

I hope that whatever befell this flight was over quickly, and that folks on board did not suffer. I also hope their family and friends get quick closure to the mystery of what happened, but experience tells us that will take a lot of careful investigation.
posted by maxwelton at 1:28 PM on March 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

Associated Press:

If there was a minor mechanical failure — or even something more serious like the shutdown of both of the plane's engines — the pilots likely would have had time to radio for help. The lack of a call "suggests something very sudden and very violent happened," said William Waldock, who teaches accident investigation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz.

Instead, it initially appears that there was either a sudden breakup of the plane or something that led it into a quick, steep dive. Some experts even suggested an act of terrorism or a pilot purposely crashing the jet.

"Either you had a catastrophic event that tore the airplane apart, or you had a criminal act," said Scott Hamilton, managing director of aviation consultancy Leeham Co. "It was so quick and they didn't radio."

posted by Chocolate Pickle at 2:36 PM on March 8, 2014

Yeah, that's the implication of a plane "crashing" while at cruise altitude. It takes an unfortunately awful amount of time for a plane to fall from the sky if it stops working which would give the pilots plenty of time to contact controllers. Given there was no radio call the implication is that either the plane exploded in flight, someone prevented the pilots from calling for help, or one of the pilots crashed the plane.

Likeliest explanations based on history, in rough order of probability for complete hull loss at cruise altitude (or controlled descent into terrain from cruise):

Spitbull: A bunch of the "highest probability" explanations you list fall way down in plausibility when you take into account the lack of distress call from the pilots. Pilot error does not cause a plane to dive into the sea from cruise altitude without any sort of communication. Mechanical failure, ditto. Unless that mechanical failure causes the plane to completely break up in flight, of course, but those are extremely rare kinds of failure.
posted by Justinian at 2:53 PM on March 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I don't mean that the airframe breaking up has to be the result of a bomb or anything. Just that the sorts of mechanical failure which lead to rapid decompression or the airframe breaking up are much rarer than the sorts of failure which can lead to a crash on takeoff or landing.
posted by Justinian at 3:11 PM on March 8, 2014

That's true. I don't think we have any idea at all whether the passport thing is related to the crash. It could be a coincidence.
posted by Justinian at 3:20 PM on March 8, 2014

Reuters:

"John Goglia, a former board member of the National Transportation Safety Board, the U.S. agency that investigates plane crashes, said the lack of a distress call suggested that the plane either experienced an explosive decompression or was destroyed by an explosive device.

"It had to be quick because there was no communication," Goglia said.

He said the false identities of the two passengers strongly suggested the possibility of a bomb.

"That's a big red flag," he said.

If there were passengers on board with stolen passports, it was not clear how they passed through security checks.

International police body Interpol maintains a database of more than 39 million travel documents reported lost or stolen by 166 countries, and says on its website that this enables police, immigration or border control officers to check the validity of a suspect document within seconds."
posted by travelwithcats at 3:40 PM on March 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

.
posted by homunculus at 4:13 PM on March 8, 2014

Surely someone would have noticed a plane exploding!
posted by divabat at 5:13 PM on March 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

(I'm sure the people on board would notice...)

I would think someone would notice a jet coming down whether it exploded or not. But the Gulf of Thailand is a big place, and there may not have been anyone near enough.

One article I read pointed out that if the plane blew up, wreckage would be spread widely, whereas if it was in one piece when it hit the water the wreckage would be very concentrated. So we'll get one hit once they find the wreckage.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 5:21 PM on March 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

According to the LA Times, the FBI has now gotten involved in the investigation.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 5:59 PM on March 8, 2014

Surely someone would have noticed a plane exploding!

Like who? Any fisherman likely to be up at 2am is probably not looking at the sky, but lines, nets, ocean, charts, motors, other boats. Besides, a plane breaking up is not necessarily going to produce a big light-filled explosion. Light comes from materials igniting, but it just takes a breach of the plane's physical integrity for an explosive decompression event. That can be caused by a bomb, but also by physical failure of some part. Not all explosive decompression events cause the plane to immediately crash, but it is one of the possible scenarios in this case.
posted by oneirodynia at 6:05 PM on March 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

Interesting comment from here:

I'm troubled and puzzled by the two passengers travelling on fake/stolen passports.

>>>

Just as an aside, on a course in the '80s about dealing with major incidents with numerous fatalities, one of the lectures was by Kentons, who at that time, and perhaps now, undertook the task of identifying victims from whatever remains were available at most of not all such events in the UK.

One of the many memorable things we learnt was the fact that in every such event, about 5% of the victims will be travelling under false identities, or secretly under their own identities, or otherwise are not quite what they appear to be. The speaker cited an amazing dance troupe of young girls, who turned out to be entirely male. Others were travelling on false passports, and on every flight, it seems, there is at least one gent with a lady not his wife/partner, who was supposed to be somewhere else entirely (the gent, not the lady).

So I wouldn't be too troubled or puzzled by this (I'm puzzled about why you are "troubled"); it's pretty much normal and doesn't mean anything.

I'm sure things have changed somewhat since the '80s, but a bit of data nonetheless.
posted by oneirodynia at 6:11 PM on March 8, 2014 [6 favorites]

oneirodynia: that sort of reminds me of a discussion I've had with a couple of Twitter folks about how the nationality lists on the manifests could be misleading, as they're basing that on passports but these people may be residents of some other country. For example, had I been on a flight that crashed about five years ago, I would be on the manifest as 'Bangladesh' despite being for the most part functionally Malaysian - trying to contact the Bangladesh government to look for me wouldn't work well. (And also I'd be resident in Australia at that point so you're better off looking for me there.)
posted by divabat at 6:13 PM on March 8, 2014

Twitter user @juliedemdam: My cousin is flying over Asia and this is her view. I wonder if they're troops searching for [the plane]. (Not verified.)
posted by shortfuse at 6:20 PM on March 8, 2014

Pilot of another plane headed for Japan flying over Vietnamese airspace claims he had brief, muffled contact with the MAS plane, at the request of Vietnamese ATC.
posted by Jimbob at 6:26 PM on March 8, 2014

Then there's this 2010 article: At least 10 passengers of crashed Air India plane had fake passports


At least ten passengers on the ill-fated Air India Express flight from Dubai were using fraudulent passports, it was revealed. Police in Mangalore in southern India, where the plane crashed last week killing 158 passengers and crew, have now launched an investigation into every travel document used on the flight.


India’s ambassador to the UAE, MK Lokesh, said 10 passports had been “tampered with”. Irregularities included false addresses and photos that did not match the user. The investigation was initiated when a Dubai resident registered a complaint with the Indian consulate after his passport number and other personal details, including his address, were listed as belonging to one of the crash victims.


May 27, 2010
posted by oneirodynia at 6:28 PM on March 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Oh, divabat, was that the flight you just mentioned you could have been on?
posted by oneirodynia at 6:30 PM on March 8, 2014

oneirodynia: oh no, my example was hypothetical. I never missed any flights that eventually crashed - my point was more that I had a Bangladesh passport until very recently, despite having never actually lived there, so if I had been on a passenger manifest it would have been misleading.

Someone talked about the possibility of fake visas for the Italian and the Austrian. They wouldn't need Malaysian visas but they would need Chinese visas.
posted by divabat at 6:33 PM on March 8, 2014

Twitter user @juliedemdam: My cousin is flying over Asia and this is her view. I wonder if they're troops searching for [the plane].

WHOA -- julie's my good friend. how random. I can verify she's real & truthful, at least. she says her cousin is flying to singapore.
posted by changeling at 6:47 PM on March 8, 2014

changeling - Twitter told me that Barack Obama follows her, so I thought, well, she's probably not a troll.
posted by miomiomio at 6:52 PM on March 8, 2014

"Asia" is pretty big and those boats don't really look like they're in a search formation, very closely spaced like that.
posted by Rumple at 7:05 PM on March 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

At least 4 people on MH370 were traveling with stolen passports. It may mean nothing, but there were more than two.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:35 PM on March 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

So is there something obvious I'm not getting here, with the stolen passports? You steal someone's passport, you use it to buy a ticket, but when you go through immigration or to get on the plane the officials are surely still giving the photo a cursory glance to make sure you look like the photo, right? They always have with me. So presumably the travellers with those passports look like the Austrian and Italian they were stolen from?
posted by Jimbob at 7:56 PM on March 8, 2014

Maybe the photos are more easily replaced with new ones, whereas the exact paper stock / printed patterns / other material aspects of the passports are harder to replicate? Just a guess. Not that the security officials would know the exact paper stock, etc. of every country's passport...
posted by shortfuse at 7:59 PM on March 8, 2014

A catastrophic electrical problem could cut communications, yes?

We really don't know much right now except this is a tragic loss of life.
posted by mazola at 8:02 PM on March 8, 2014

Jimbob: It must be fairly simple to swap out the picture on a stolen passport at least convincingly enough to get past airport security, probably many border crossings, etc. otherwise there wouldn't be a market in stolen passports.
posted by R343L at 8:15 PM on March 8, 2014

This is one of the reasons behind the push to including biometric identifiers and RFID chip in each passport. You could possibly replace the physical photo on a passport (though that is harder and harder to do), but if the passport had a RFID chip containing a digital image of the photograph as well, it wouldn't match the fake. Likewise, the person with the altered passport would not have the same biometric measurements as the original bearer, and so would be flagged at a properly-equipped passport control station.
posted by modernnomad at 8:28 PM on March 8, 2014

Weird. In my (Australian) passport, my photo is printed multiple times, with holograms floating over and under it. I guess that's not the case for other countries.
posted by Jimbob at 8:30 PM on March 8, 2014

Depends on the country, jimbob, or the age of the passport. Most western passports I've come across that have been issued in the last 5 years have the same kind of hologram features you're talking about. Though my most recent Canadian passport did not have biometrics, while my UK passport did. There's still no single global standard.
posted by modernnomad at 8:33 PM on March 8, 2014

Twitter user @juliedemdam: My cousin is flying over Asia and this is her view. I wonder if they're troops searching for [the plane]. (Not verified.)

They're cargo ships near Singapore. There are always masses of them passing through or biding for hire. Go to satellite view on Google Maps and you'll see them.
posted by Thing at 8:38 PM on March 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

He said the false identities of the two passengers strongly suggested the possibility of a bomb

Here is a Forbes article from the same person who was quoted where he says nothing about a bomb, and in fact claims it is too early to speculate about the cause of the crash.

If there were passengers on board with stolen passports, it was not clear how they passed through security checks.

Yes it is, because Interpol (the maintainer of the stolen passport database) says that not enough countries check against their database.

I hate to have to say this, but please stop quoting Reuters articles verbatim. Journalists, you suck. Friends of journalists, tell your friends they suck.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:48 PM on March 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

A pilot on a nearby flight was in brief radio contact with MH370 when the Vietnamese air traffic control could not raise them per this New Straits Times article.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 10:13 PM on March 8, 2014

Yes, that was posted approx 10 comments ago.
posted by mlis at 10:41 PM on March 8, 2014

AP: Plane may have turned back before disappearing.
(also jesus that is a creepy picture)
posted by divabat at 10:43 PM on March 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

Now searching Straits of Malacca as well as South China Sea. Less than 3 hrs of daylight left for today.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 12:53 AM on March 9, 2014

From the Grauniad's live blog, regarding the two stolen passports:

Both passengers used Thai bhat to purchase their travel tickets on 6 March, a day before the flight took off from Kuala Lumpur destined for Beijing.

The pair, who booked tickets with consecutive numbers, were due to fly to Beijing, then wait for around 10 hours before flying to Amsterdam. Once they arrived in Amsterdam, one of the passengers was due to travel on to Frankfurt and the other to Copenhagen.

posted by daveje at 3:05 AM on March 9, 2014

The brief communication and the turning back suggest a mechanical failure, I'd say. I suspect the passports will turn out to be nothing but the normal noise of false identities. It's unlikely that any incident executed by humans would happen so fast that there would be no communications, unless Malaysian Airlines doesn't lock cockpit doors. No one is going to be able to personally transport on board a bomb big enough to cause instant vessel loss. And if it was a bomb in cargo or planted elsewhere, the bombers would hardly be on board.
posted by tavella at 3:41 AM on March 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

daveje: I'll take the "stolen passports bought tickets with consecutive numbers" as support for my hypothesis that whatever their motivation, the passengers with those two stolen passports were working together.

Those two stolen passports bought tickets on MH370 for Thai Baht, the day before departure.

The tickets were KUL-PEK (Beijing), then a long connection window, then PEK-AMS. Then they diverged, one to Frankfurt and one to Copenhagen. The tickets were bought via China Southern.

This is a very odd routing if you want to fly to AMS on Malaysian, because Malaysian fly KUL-AMS direct. (I've been on that flight! In fact, Malaysian had four B777s, which mostly operated that route. There's about a 25% chance I was on the plane that crashed around this time last year ...)

Let us bear in mind that while Uighur separatists seem happier attacking railway stations with knives, Al Qaida spokesmen have denounced China as an "enemy of Islam" in the not-too-distant past.

Airline security in that part of the world is lax compared to the USA/EU. KUL operates gate security with cursory passport checking. I've no idea how easy it would be to get a suitcase onto the plane un-inspected, but AIUI checking is rather less thorough than over here. Maybe somebody thought that tactics that won't work here any more might still come in useful ...

My new hypothesis: if you wanted to get onto a Chinese airliner packed with Chinese folks flying to or from Beijing by using stolen passports without raising flags when you applied for a Chinese entry visa, this would be how to do it. The fact that it was a codeshare operated by Malaysian, in this scenario, suggests none-too-bright bad guys; that 75% of the passengers were Chinese suggests a motivation for them bringing the plane down anyway. ("Wrong airline, right target.")

I am now hoping even more desperately that this turns out to be an airframe failure -- possibly the spar of that wing that got damaged 18 months ago -- and the stolen passports belonged to smugglers or some other species of ordinary criminal, because the last thing we need is another round of global security theatre.
posted by cstross at 3:57 AM on March 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Now searching Straits of Malacca as well as South China Sea.

I'm guessing this is done just to emphasize that everything possible is being done. It's almost impossible for the plane to have diverted across the country without being detected. Probably a whole bunch of coast guard resources in the Straits area that cannot be diverted to the South China Sea but on the other hand having them just be idle in port might look bad so they're doing something.
posted by Authorized User at 4:02 AM on March 9, 2014

spitbull: I deny your reality and assert my own. (See comment n - 2 above yours.)

Another aspect emerges: 30 missing on MAS flight believed to be Freescale employees -- "As authorities scramble to search for the Malaysia Airlines MH370 flight that went missing. It is learnt that 30 on board are believed to be employees of Freescale Semiconductor Malaysia. According to a source close to the group, they were heading to China on a working trip."

Freescale Semi used to be the i/c wing of Motorola; it's still a big player in the embedded controller market. (Total employees, 23,000 globally; revenue in single-digit billions.)
posted by cstross at 5:10 AM on March 9, 2014

The tickets were KUL-PEK (Beijing), then a long connection window, then PEK-AMS. Then they diverged, one to Frankfurt and one to Copenhagen. The tickets were bought via China Southern. This is a very odd routing if you want to fly to AMS on Malaysian, because Malaysian fly KUL-AMS direct.

Not if you are drug couriers.
posted by Mister Bijou at 6:13 AM on March 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

Or a wealthy man and his mistress on a shopping junket.
posted by ardgedee at 6:19 AM on March 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Besides, internationally, it's often cheaper to fly from A to B via C.
posted by Mister Bijou at 6:50 AM on March 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

[Interpol] holds information on more than 39 million travel documents reported lost or stolen by 166 countries. This database enables INTERPOL National Central Bureaus and other authorized law enforcement entities (such as immigration and border control officers) to ascertain the validity of a suspect travel document in seconds. Stolen and Lost Travel Documents
posted by Mister Bijou at 7:13 AM on March 9, 2014

But not everyone uses the Interpol database. Still... 39 million travel documents is an awful lot of documents.
posted by Mister Bijou at 7:17 AM on March 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

It seems very unlikely that the plane came apart in midair, because airplane interiors are full of distinctive stuff that floats. The fact that they haven't found a debris field yet would argue that the plane hit the water in one piece and sank mostly intact
posted by localroger at 7:21 AM on March 9, 2014

From the Pilots Forum linked above:

Two passengers on the flight had onward flights from PEK meaning they avoided visa checks and would be allowed on the flight to PEK - PAX 1 had onward flight to AMS and then CPH, PAX 2 had onward flight to FRA both with China Southern Airlines.

Both passengers were using stolen passports.
posted by readery at 7:23 AM on March 9, 2014

Yeah... it's the kind of routing I'd take if I were a drug courier. Also, an EU passport is very handy if you are an "illegal" immigrant wanting to make a fresh start in the EU.
posted by Mister Bijou at 7:33 AM on March 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

In the evening of Mar 9th 2014 local time Malaysia's Transport Ministry reported, that no trace of the missing aircraft has been found at dawn Mar 9th after two days of search. The oil slicks as well as debris found so far are not related to the aircraft. Rumours like other crew establishing contact to the accident flight after radar contact was lost, phone contact to a mobile phone of one the passengers of the missing flight or the aircraft having landed in China or Vietnam, are false.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:49 AM on March 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

"When an Air India plane crashed in Mangalore in 2010 en route from Dubai, with the loss of 158 lives, as many 10 fraudulent passports were recovered."
Source: BBC
posted by Mister Bijou at 8:51 AM on March 9, 2014

It seems to me if the plan was to bomb this flight, then you don't need or even want two fake passport people to carry the bomb on board. It's redundant and doubles the risk of detection. It just seems less likely to me you'd put two of your team on a single-bomb, single-plane suicide mission. So, if bombing was the idea, then it seems more likely that the target was multiple connecting flights out of Beijing to European cities, and then one of the bombs went off prematurely. This also fits with comments I've seen that those stolen Euro passports would definitely be detected on entry through European immigration, even if they are fine for just getting around in East Asia. So as a means of getting into the EU they wouldn't be a smart choice.

An alternative is, if the passports have anything to do with it, then the fact there is more than one of them suggests an attempt to take over the plane with a team of hijackers. This seems unlikely since everyone knows that'll be harder to do post 9-11 between the cockpit doors and the motivated passengers. The brief turning back, if that is validated, is maybe suggestive of this alternative. And Kuala Lumpur has an attractive target if you're thinking of a repeat of 9-11. I doubt this is the case only because it seems so obviously seeing the present through the rear view mirror, and also would seem to have a low chance of success from the perspective of the attackers.

If the passports have nothing to do with this, and that's certainly possible, then truly it'll have to wait for the investigation. It could be some kind of incident paralleling one we already know about, whether Air France style crew fuckup, or the faultily-repaired wing on this plane catastrophically failing like that Japan airlines case from a while back, where a badly-repaired bulkhead failed years after it was "fixed". Or, it could be some completely new failure mode, though chances are there'd be hints of that found retrospectively (e.g., freezing pitot tubes were a known issue for Air France already, they just underestimated the risk).

The fact there was no distress call seems to not mean a real lot yet, since aircrew are taught to Aviate - Navigate - Communicate, in that order, so if you can't get past the first stage (fly the plane) you never get to the next ones.
posted by Rumple at 8:56 AM on March 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

The passport business is basically looking for your lost keys only underneath the streetlight. If there were any other facts to go on, I think the focus would be elsewhere.

No distress call means a rapid deterioration of the situation, but not necessarily an instantaneous one. The only scenario that I think it would argue against is a loss of power from both engines, which at cruise gives the pilots quite a bit of time to work with.

I don't know why people are using the phrase "explosive decompression". Loss of cabin pressure is not a significant threat to the safety of the flight, as it is a somewhat common occurrence as far as in-flight incidents go. Donning of oxygen masks and a descent to 10k feet is all that is required. Structural failure is however a threat to the flight, in which case decompression may be a symptom but is not really a cause.

The purported turn-back is compatible with basically any scenario you can imagine (including bad radar data) and has very little discriminatory power at this point.
posted by kiltedtaco at 9:19 AM on March 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

"The mysteries surrounding the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, and the true identities of some of its passengers, are as deep as the southeast Asian waters where multinational search teams are searching for the jet." This is the bullshit writing we get when there's nothing to report.

I'm still confused about the source and quality of position reports. Initial reports were that the plane was entirely lost, like no one knew where in SE Asia it was. Later reports was that the plane had some automatic GPS uplink independent of the ground-based ATC radar systems. But the reporting I've read indicates they still aren't really sure where the plane was, much less where it is now. I guess the ELT isn't working either.
posted by Nelson at 9:43 AM on March 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

To follow up on what Nelson said, I find it remarkable that we don't have an actual hard fix on where the plane was last detected by radar. The waiting is maddening, and I can't imagine what it's like for the families.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 10:06 AM on March 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Part of the problem is radar doesn't have complete coverage, particularly over water. You really want some GPS fix communicated from the airplane itself. In the US at least position uplinks are still not required for aircraft. Largely because of air carrier recalcitrance, also because of the hugely inflated cost of aviation-approved electronics. The $99 + $150/yr Spot receiver in my pocket does mediocre position reporting to satellites, but the equivalent aviation systems cost $20,000+ per plane.
posted by Nelson at 10:14 AM on March 9, 2014

parents update: they arrived fine, though their KUL-JHB flight was delayed.four hours because they were "checking something". My dad's joined in on the Vietnam Triangle bandwagon, sigh.
posted by divabat at 10:43 AM on March 9, 2014 [6 favorites]

If it were terrorism I would expect a credible claim of responsibility by now. The whole point of terrorism is lost if nobody knows who did it.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:28 AM on March 9, 2014 [4 favorites]

The whole point of terrorism is lost if nobody knows who did it.

I don't think that's true at all. The whole point of terrorisms is to put fear of helplessness into a population. I don't think this airline went down because of terrorism, but the lack of a party coming forward doesn't have anything to do with my opinion.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:30 AM on March 9, 2014

RobotVoodooPower: Journalists, you suck. Friends of journalists, tell your friends they suck.

Could we maybe not do this?
posted by Chutzler at 11:57 AM on March 9, 2014

The whole point of terrorisms is to put fear of helplessness into a population.

"The fundamental fear of terrorism is that it's not just random or unintentional."
posted by benbenson at 11:59 AM on March 9, 2014

benbenson, point taken, but I think it's much more complicated than that. It doesn't matter if a group claims responsibility.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:09 PM on March 9, 2014

If it were terrorism I would expect a credible claim of responsibility by now. The whole point of terrorism is lost if nobody knows who did it.

I'm pretty sure that there were no credible responsibility claims after Philippine Airlines Flight 434, because it was a practice run for the Bojinka Plot.
posted by oneirodynia at 12:10 PM on March 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

If a wing rips off or the tail structure, etc, and you get a big enough hole, those masks are a joke and the plane can disintegrate rapidly.

Yes, catastrophic structural failure is obviously a risk. The point is that the decompression part has little bearing on the airworthiness of the plane compared to whatever structural damage caused that decompression. Glancing at the list of incidents you linked, in every one I checked the decompression was a symptom, not a cause. E.g., KAL 902 - shot down by a missile, loss of cabin pressure not at fault. Turkish Airlines 981 - "The crash resulted from the rear cargo hatch blowing off, causing decompression and severing cables that left the pilots without control." Several others are listed as midair collisions, obviously not caused by depressurization. The fact is that loss of pressure is survivable as long as the damage that caused it doesn't otherwise impair the aircraft.

You really want some GPS fix communicated from the airplane itself.

I'm not really understanding why this position business is throwing everyone for a loop. The last known position, as reported in the aviation herald, was N6.9 E103.6. Presumably something very bad happened after that. I'm not sure what you expect the aircraft or radar or GPS to do after that point, none of them are magic and they all have their faults, and if this was an in-flight breakup then I wouldn't expect any of them to keep working. Sure a few more position reports would be helpful for the search, but they're not going to really tell us much more about the incident. This is where the ELT is supposed to take over.
posted by kiltedtaco at 12:13 PM on March 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

I found the bunch of pilots discussing possibilities on Quora here pretty interesting. Sounds like it would have to be something very sudden and very major not to trip all the redundant electronic beacon type systems present in a newer airliner.
posted by mathowie at 12:40 PM on March 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

Some people are claiming that if the plane exploded mid-air there would be debris all over the place by now. Is that actually true?

Also if the debris isn't from MH370 where is it from - another plane crash?

(I've ended up being a semi-debunker on Twitter. I feel like pulling a PicPedant and document the scams popping up, or something. There's been a few already.)
posted by divabat at 1:08 PM on March 9, 2014

NOTE: I don't think is what happened, but now my inner "action movie" fan is curious.

If you were making a Spy Adventure Movie Starring Top Actor, is there a plausible scenario where you could "steal" a 777 mid-flight by making it look like it vanished? Something like turning off everything that pings, taking it down to wave-top level and then hightailing it to your favorite handy abandoned airfield?
posted by maxwelton at 1:10 PM on March 9, 2014

SPECTRE would no doubt have a specially built Super Guppy transport that could hijack a 777 by engulfing it in mid air, but I doubt that's possible in real life.
posted by ceribus peribus at 1:42 PM on March 9, 2014

If you were making a Spy Adventure Movie Starring Top Actor, is there a plausible scenario where you could "steal" a 777 mid-flight by making it look like it vanished? Something like turning off everything that pings, taking it down to wave-top level and then hightailing it to your favorite handy abandoned airfield?

If you read mathowie's link the writer puts forward this as a "not really likely but technically possible" scenario. It explains both the swift loss of contact with the utter lack of debris, but only by posing something which in itself is even harder to explain and believe.
posted by Thing at 1:54 PM on March 9, 2014

Air.Crash.Investigation.S16E03.HDTV.x264-C4TV

I have watched enough of these to know that mechanical failure is the most likely cause. Like the horizontal stabilizer fell off and they were to busy trying to stay alive to call in.
posted by johnpowell at 2:09 PM on March 9, 2014

divabot: Some people are claiming that if the plane exploded mid-air there would be debris all over the place by now. Is that actually true?

I'm one of those people. Yes, if the passenger cabin is seriously disrupted at 30,000 feet then it would spray debris, much of which floats, over an area of tens of square miles. The fact that *nothing* has been detected in relatively clear weather argues heavily against this. There would be dozens of seat cushions, suitcases, and interior finishings floating around.

For the plane to go down without creating such a wide field of floating debris would require for it to be intact on hitting the water. For no debris to be found at all, as seems to be the case, would require the plane to hit the water mostly non-catastrophically, so as to also not disrupt the cabin too much on impact, so that such debris would be contained within the cabin as the plane sinks.

That could happen if the plane was under partial control, or if it was in an unrecoverable flat spin as it hit the water.
posted by localroger at 2:19 PM on March 9, 2014

El Pais has a photo from a Vietnamese plane which could be a solitary bit of debris from the crash.
posted by Thing at 2:33 PM on March 9, 2014

Thing, they've subsequently announced that the object in that photo is unrelated to the missing airplane.
posted by localroger at 3:02 PM on March 9, 2014

Ok, that's great. Thanks for the clarification.
posted by Thing at 3:10 PM on March 9, 2014

I thought I'd check the flight history on my usual tracking site that I use for my own flights, and this is a strange visual to see.
posted by mrzarquon at 3:15 PM on March 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

FlightAware does not have good data in SE Asia. They don't have data from all ATC in the area. FlightRadar24 has a little more. Neither show the possible evidence of turning back that has been reported from by the Malaysian military from their radar.
posted by Nelson at 3:44 PM on March 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

localroger: "Thing, they've subsequently announced that the object in that photo is unrelated to the missing airplane."

Have they? The WSJ is still reporting the "door" as a possible lead. Can you point to a solid rebuttal?
posted by crazy with stars at 4:08 PM on March 9, 2014

One of many reports.
posted by localroger at 4:43 PM on March 9, 2014

localroger: "One of many reports"

Thanks for the link. It's strange to me that some sources are still reporting the door as a possible lead, but I suppose many sources are working at the same geographical remove many of us are.
posted by crazy with stars at 5:25 PM on March 9, 2014

It's strange to me that some sources are still reporting the door as a possible lead

Hey, clicks = eyeballs = $$$. Gotta publish a new story about this missing airplane every couple of hours.
posted by Nelson at 5:26 PM on March 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Adding a GPS location squawk via satellite link would tell us nothing useful that we don't already know about its location (from air traffic control radar).

Charlie: Reports today are that they're shifting their search from the South China Sea all the way to the Andaman Sea.... which is on the other side of Thailand. They think the plane "may have turned around" and crashed in a completely different location. So clearly a GPS squawk would be a lot more accurate than what they got from radar since they apparently don't even know where the plane went down within a hundred miles.
posted by Justinian at 6:18 PM on March 9, 2014

Reports today are that they're shifting their search from the South China Sea all the way to the Andaman Sea.... which is on the other side of Thailand.

I'm kinda wondering if that whole thing regarding the Andaman Sea / Straits of Melaka is a bit of a token effort - Malaysia obviously has a whole pile of boats on that side of the peninsula, and want to put them to use doing something. I find it incredibly difficult to believe the plane could have turned around, made it all the way back across Malaysia / Thailand, without it communicating or being picked up on radar somewhere across the peninsula. But then the whole thing is awfully, depressingly strange.
posted by Jimbob at 6:28 PM on March 9, 2014

If that were the case it would be a depressing real life example of that streetlight & lost keys joke.
posted by Justinian at 6:30 PM on March 9, 2014

The effort isn't wasted though as it still good training.
posted by Mitheral at 7:02 PM on March 9, 2014

Danica Weeks anxiously waiting for news of husband on missing Malaysia Airlines flight
posted by readery at 7:31 PM on March 9, 2014

March 10 statement from Malaysia Airlines.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:33 PM on March 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the link roomthreeseventeen.

Malaysia Airlines' primary focus at this point in time is to care for the families. This means providing them with timely information, travel facilities, accommodation, meals, medical and emotional support. The costs for these are all borne by Malaysia Airlines.

Initial financial assistance has been given out to all families over and above their basic needs.

At least one caregiver is assigned to each family. These caregivers are well-trained staff and volunteers from Malaysia and other organisations.

As of now, there are more than 150 "Go Team" members consisting of senior management and caregivers at Beijing to attend to these families. In Kuala Lumpur, a different group of caregivers are attending to the families’ needs.

Families from other nations apart from China have been arriving at Kuala Lumpur since early yesterday. More are expected to arrive today.

That is great. Those poor, poor people. I can't imagine the anguish they are in.
posted by cashman at 7:39 PM on March 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

cashman: "Malaysia Airlines' primary focus at this point in time is to care for the families. This means providing them with timely information, travel facilities, accommodation, meals, medical and emotional support. The costs for these are all borne by Malaysia Airlines."

Yeah that's great and all, but you've lost a plane (!) with >200 passengers for over two days. I'm thinking finding that plane should still be your focus, and will go much further than some free hotel rooms.
posted by Big_B at 8:00 PM on March 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

What can the airline actually do to find their plane at this point? I understand the cynicism, but don't know what they can do, as opposed to the various military and other search operations going on.
posted by gingerbeer at 8:04 PM on March 9, 2014 [7 favorites]

Yeah that's great and all, but you've lost a plane (!) with >200 passengers for over two days. I'm thinking finding that plane should still be your focus, and will go much further than some free hotel rooms.

Uh, not every single employee of the airline is actually needed out in the middle of the ocean to look for the plane. Not to mention the fact that if they didn't find help family members find lodging, etc., they'd be criticized for that.
posted by scody at 8:24 PM on March 9, 2014 [8 favorites]

(belatedly i realised how silly my answer must be, carry on.)
posted by cendawanita at 8:30 PM on March 9, 2014

Internal Probe On Immigration Dept Commences - Zahid:

Home Minister Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said the detailed investigation would give special attention to the department's Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) branch.

"We will conduct an internal probe, particularly on the officers, who were on duty at the KLIA Immigration counter during flight MH370.

"I am still puzzle how come (immigration officers) cannot think, an Italian and Austrian (passengers) but with Asian facial features," he told reporters at the Kembara Bumi Suci 2014 convoy participants meeting with Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak at Seri Perdana here Sunday.

I was so hoping this was a hoax when I read a reference to this on another news site, but it seems not! I'm not sure where he's getting the 'Asian features' from, or why he thinks Asian-looking people can't also have European names, but I'm not entirely surprised that this attitude exists either.

on a side note: does someone want to co-run a fact-checking/debunking/PicPedantish blog about MH370 with me?
posted by divabat at 8:31 PM on March 9, 2014

> Yeah that's great and all, but you've lost a plane (!) with >200 passengers for over two days. I'm thinking finding that plane should still be your focus, and will go much further than some free hotel rooms.

In fact, it isn't the airline itself that's actually sending staff out there and searching - as we've seen so far, it's primarily the navies of the countries involved. I hardly think that MAS maintains such capacity for search and rescue operations year-round. It makes so little sense, then, for them to 'focus' on something they can't do anything about at all, and sit there twiddling their thumbs.
posted by undue influence at 8:39 PM on March 9, 2014

From the New Straits Times:

Vietnamese searchers on ships worked throughout the night but could not find a rectangle object spotted Sunday afternoon that was thought to be one of the doors of a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet that went missing more than two days ago.
Doan Huu Gia, the chief of Vietnam’s search and rescue coordination centre, said Monday that six planes and seven ships from Vietnam were searching for the object but nothing had been found.

This is the possible "door with window" that was spotted by a search plane just before sunset last night (March 9) which boats were not able to look for until this (Monday) morning.

Not the possible "yellow" debris that was spotted yesterday during the day which a search vessel reached about 7 pm last night and determined it was not MH 370-related.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:57 PM on March 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure where he's getting the 'Asian features' from, or why he thinks Asian-looking people can't also have European names, but I'm not entirely surprised that this attitude exists either.

I don't know where he's getting it from either (as far as I know there has been no public information about who was flying on those tickets?) but two people with Asian features flying together on passports from different European countries with European names would certainly be enough to flag them for further scrutiny such as checking if the passports have been stolen. Which they clearly didn't do.

Oh, we know they were probably flying together because the two tickets were sequentially numberered.
posted by Justinian at 9:05 PM on March 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

We don't know how he knows those two have Asian features to start with. I tweeted him asking about proof that those two have Asian features. I asked a Malaysian journalist who's been pretty adamant about factchecking about it and he says the Home Minister has a history of assuming things, which I don't find terribly surprising.

A lot of other news outlets are taking his quote about "how can Immigration people not question European names on Asian faces" and extrapolating it to "it's confirmed that they have Asian features" though we don't know that for sure.
posted by divabat at 9:11 PM on March 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

That is unfortunately par for the course. Some guy said something with little or no basis so we'll print it as fact and spend all day analyzing it!
posted by Justinian at 9:28 PM on March 9, 2014

I'm with you, Justinian (and Nelson, above) the clutching at straws is infuriating. But so is the lack of any real information.
posted by Jimbob at 10:16 PM on March 9, 2014

Some reports of 4 passengers with stolen passports with at least 2, but perhaps all 4, with contiguous ticket numbers, meaning they were purchased together
posted by zia at 10:52 PM on March 9, 2014

Yeah we know. It's either random noise, or drug couriers, especially with the onward plans of fly-to-Amsterdam-then-split-up. As has been rehashed in this thread over and over, there are 32 million stolen travel documents in the Interpol database - people are travelling with this stuff all the time. Until we find evidence of a bombing, or someone claims responsibility, it's a dead end.
posted by Jimbob at 10:58 PM on March 9, 2014

The Malaysian journalist I linked to a few comments ago and I are collaborating on a MH370 factchecking blog.
posted by divabat at 11:28 PM on March 9, 2014 [7 favorites]

"European" names are surely the most widely shared names on earth. Anybody who doubts that Christian Kozel and Luigi Maraldi could be of "non-white" appearance need to answer what they think Philip Roessler and Mario Balotelli look like. It's just straight out prejudice or ignorance, especially as on the flight itself the head of the cabin crew (whose nationality and identity is known!) was called Patrick Gomes.
posted by Thing at 12:10 AM on March 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

It's just straight out prejudice or ignorance, especially as on the flight itself the head of the cabin crew (whose nationality and identity is known!) was called Patrick Gomes.

I'd suggest that if you know a little about Malaysia, and the fairly outdated racial "awareness" of the ruling party, that one of their politicians would be quite ignorant enough to suggest that "Asian faces" wouldn't have European names.
posted by Jimbob at 12:20 AM on March 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

I don't want to go around in circles again, so I'll keep it short

Metal fatigue, bomb, missile, collision, fire can all cause it. Obviously it doesn't happen independently of other damage.

This is my whole point. If I'm going to start asking why did this plane crash, my suspects are going to be fatigue, bomb, fire, etc, not decompression. It is not itself an event which can cause a loss of the aircraft.
posted by kiltedtaco at 1:49 AM on March 10, 2014

Sunset again.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 3:58 AM on March 10, 2014

Following a report on a Vietnamese website here, now picked up by Yahoo Malaysia about a debris field 60 km southeast of Vung Tau, Vietnam.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 5:02 AM on March 10, 2014

Anybody who doubts that Christian Kozel and Luigi Maraldi could be of "non-white" appearance need to answer what they think Philip Roessler and Mario Balotelli look like.

Funny you should say that, Thing.

Department of Civil Aviation Director-General Azharuddin Abdul Rahman confirmed the men DID NOT look Asian. Asked what they looked like, he replied: "Do you know Balotelli (the famous Italian footballer). They look like Balotelli."

[via Yahoo!News]
posted by de at 5:46 AM on March 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

There is some new info on the two tickets for the passengers with stolen EU passports.

Apparently, they were booked on the MA flight with little advance notice and originally planned to travel separately on March 1st, flying with Qatar Airways and Etihad respectively.
The story also mentions an "Iranian contact", possibly a middle man.

Another story says that one of the travelers was identified based on security footage at the airport.
posted by travelwithcats at 5:49 AM on March 10, 2014

"Do you know Balotelli (the famous Italian footballer). They look like Balotelli."

Since I did not know Balotelli: Mario Balotelli.
posted by Georgina at 5:51 AM on March 10, 2014

Also, from The Guardian:

[Azharuddin Abdul Rahman] confirmed that five passengers had checked in for the flight but not boarded, adding that their baggage was removed from the aircraft as necessary in such cases.

They don't seem to be treating it as suspicious, but it seems so odd to me that people who were already at the airport didn't board the flight. Is it commonplace and I'm just not aware of it?
posted by Georgina at 6:22 AM on March 10, 2014

It's pretty common. People fall asleep or get lost in airports, maybe are too busy shopping at the duty-free.
posted by dominik at 6:26 AM on March 10, 2014

It's not uncommon, esp. for people who miss their connections in an unfamiliar airport while their bags make it. But since there's no way of knowing, the bags are pulled anyway. I was once on a BA flight where the pilot apologized for the delay and then added, "but we thought that you'd prefer to arrive 30 minutes late to London than 30 years too early in the next world."
posted by Westringia F. at 6:29 AM on March 10, 2014 [2 favorites]

Who checks in from the *airport* these days? They no doubt did online checkin.
posted by tavella at 6:34 AM on March 10, 2014

It's not uncommon, esp. for people who miss their connections in an unfamiliar airport while their bags make it. But since there's no way of knowing, the bags are pulled anyway

My now-wife and I once were once booted from an O'Hare-to-Grand Rapids (MI) connection when they brought a smaller plane than scheduled. Our bags were sent on without us.
posted by stevis23 at 6:44 AM on March 10, 2014

tavella: "Who checks in from the *airport* these days? "

People traveling who don't have access to mobile data services?

Hell. I didn't have access to mobile data last week, because Verizon wanted to charge me an arm and a leg for data access in Canada. So, I checked in at the airport for my return flight.
posted by schmod at 6:47 AM on March 10, 2014

Baggage being removed from a flight because a passenger doesn't board is not uncommon. On a recent flight from JFK to Montreal we'd already pulled away from the gate when it was determined that a couple passengers hadn't boarded, but their baggage had been put in the cargo hold. We had to return to the gate and wait for a good hour for handlers to locate the baggage and remove it from the plane before we could take off. I recall the pilot saying this regulation applied only to international flights, but I may be misremembering.
posted by theory at 6:58 AM on March 10, 2014

I've been reading a bit about China Airlines 611, a 747 which suffered explosive decompression in 2002, killing all 225 people aboard. Like MH370, Flight 611 disappeared from the radar without any distress call. And also like MH370, which supposedly suffered previous damage to its wing, Flight 611 had sustained damage in a tail strike incident years earlier. 611's tail was improperly repaired, but it held for 22 years of flights until fatigue caused its catastrophic mid-air failure. The debris was located two hours after the disaster, and only 15% of the wreckage was recovered.

By all accounts, MAS's maintenance practices are substantially better than China Airlines' were, but if those reports of the MH370 aircraft's prior wing-strike accident are accurate, it wouldn't surprise me if a similar structural failure were responsible. It strikes me as being much more likely than silent foul play, in any case.
posted by Westringia F. at 7:10 AM on March 10, 2014

> Who checks in from the *airport* these days? They no doubt did online checkin.

Well, the issue isn't passengers checking-in but not making it aboard; the issue is passengers checking bags but not making it aboard. Online check-in can't account for the luggage making it into the hold.
posted by Westringia F. at 7:27 AM on March 10, 2014 [2 favorites]

Here is an updated map of the search areas.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:26 AM on March 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the link, roomthreeseventeen.
posted by drezdn at 9:19 AM on March 10, 2014

According to this Twitter feed: BREAKING: Civilian airliner reports "large, solid debris" off Vietnam coast. Vietnamese & Malaysian authorities to investigate. -Reuters
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:55 AM on March 10, 2014

roomthreeseventeen: "According to this Twitter feed: BREAKING: Civilian airliner reports "large, solid debris" off Vietnam coast. Vietnamese & Malaysian authorities to investigate. -Reuter"

I think that airline reporting is what's referred to in this PPRuNe comment, and it didn't pan out.
posted by barnacles at 10:08 AM on March 10, 2014

"According to this Twitter feed: [...]"

There seems to be nothing about this on the Reuters' site.
posted by travelwithcats at 10:15 AM on March 10, 2014

Who checks in from the *airport* these days? They no doubt did online checkin.

I've never understood online checkin, personally. It's not like it's saving me a trip to the airport, you know? I only consider it if the line at the self serve machines is too long.
posted by ceribus peribus at 10:39 AM on March 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

Who checks in from the *airport* these days? They no doubt did online checkin.

"Hahahaha" laughed the resident alien whose details seem to confound online check-in systems of all airlines in all countries.
posted by srboisvert at 11:12 AM on March 10, 2014 [3 favorites]

Westringia F.: "By all accounts, MAS's maintenance practices are substantially better than China Airlines' were, but if those reports of the MH370 aircraft's prior wing-strike accident are accurate, it wouldn't surprise me if a similar structural failure were responsible. It strikes me as being much more likely than silent foul play, in any case."

It would surprise me. A tailstrike is typically a violent and forceful action against the "spine" of the aircraft. On the other hand, I can't think of many things that could go wrong with a wingtip that could cause the instant and total destruction of a modern airliner (especially during a point of the flight when there is minimal load on the wings). The wings of a 777 are ridiculously strong.

This is absolutely something that should (and will) be investigated if the plane is located and recovered. However, until that point, any idle speculation is just that.

We have literally nothing to go on. Each of the theories being tossed around are almost beyond implausible.
posted by schmod at 11:15 AM on March 10, 2014

schmod--thanks for the link on the wing test--I forgot Alan Mulally was CEO of Boeing before Ford. Great to see the pride and enthusiasm of the project team.
posted by rmhsinc at 11:27 AM on March 10, 2014

Online checkins for international flights usually necessitate some sort of immigration check.

What I'm personally not understanding is how multiple times now Vietnam would report something only for Malaysia to refute it a little while later.
posted by divabat at 11:35 AM on March 10, 2014

On the other hand, I can't think of many things that could go wrong with a wingtip that could cause the instant and total destruction of a modern airliner

Not a wing tip, a wing. Concentrating the impact force at the tip means you're applying the maximum bending moment possible for that amount of force across the wing spar. And yes, that static test looks impressive, but it's not telling you what happens if you just bend it 70% of the way to breaking and then go on to fly it for another decade or 2 under non-abusive conditions. These sorts of incidents affect the fatigue life.
posted by indubitable at 12:07 PM on March 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

> What I'm personally not understanding is how multiple times now Vietnam would report something only for Malaysia to refute it a little while later.

Apparently you're not alone, divabat. Reported in Yahoo!News last night, UPDATE [8:38pm]:

[Department of Civil Aviation Director-General Azharuddin Abdul Rahman] also spoke about the media reports coming out of Vietnam.

"Vietnam has reported whatever they have found to their media. Whenever we receive such news, we contact our counterparts in Vietnam and all the time, Vietnam authorities deny that they have found whatever it is that they have disclosed to the media."

Yahoo, I know, but supposedly a direct quote from a press conference. Maybe the problem lies with Vietnam's complexities.
posted by de at 12:51 PM on March 10, 2014

For reference, this is what the wing of the MH370 aircraft (9M-MRO) looked like after its ground collision last year [via].

(And yes, speculation. I didn't mean to imply otherwise, only to say that of the various uninformed conjectures that are being entertained, this seems less implausible to me than others. Certainly all hypotheses should be thoroughly & expertly investigated, and hopefully will be without any obstruction.)
posted by Westringia F. at 1:12 PM on March 10, 2014

From the BBC:
Malaysia Airlines: How is the search being carried out?
posted by readery at 1:17 PM on March 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

From readery's link: Indonesia has dispatched a corvette, four rapid patrol vessels and a maritime surveillance plane after Malaysia requested assistance to scour the waters around Penang Island in the Malacca Strait.

I guess they are throwing everything they have at this so that's something.
posted by Big_B at 2:31 PM on March 10, 2014

Not quite everything. Indonesia has a whole bunch of corvettes.
posted by dominik at 2:40 PM on March 10, 2014

Real-time flight trackers seek missing Malaysian Air flight 370, find only holes: explains a bit more about how FlightAware and FlightRadar24 work. Apparently FlightRadar24 has its own network of ADS-B receivers. I think FlightAware gets at least some of its data directly from the FAA ATC network, but I don't know for sure.

Since I'm here, I'm surprised I haven't read more speculation on one possible cause: deliberate pilot suicide. I have zero evidence for this but it's an explanation that fits what we know, in particular for the lack of radio communication. Not sure it explains the lack of an ELT though.
posted by Nelson at 2:40 PM on March 10, 2014

That was a survivable crisis.

My understanding after reading about it in detail is not just that it was a survivable crisis but that it should barely have qualified as a crisis at all. The iced over pitot tubes are a minor malfunction at worst. The pilots simply screwed the pooch in horrifying fashion.
posted by Justinian at 2:52 PM on March 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

Your plane can still fly, but no one is alive to fly it.

I'm more than willing to be corrected on this, but the only case I can find where a plane was airworthy but the pilots were incapacitated by decompression was the learjet incident. It's possible, yes, but extremely rare amongst decompression incidents.
posted by kiltedtaco at 2:55 PM on March 10, 2014

Helios Airways Flight 522.
posted by Thing at 2:57 PM on March 10, 2014

And sadly, Helios is one case where the armored cockpit may have killed people. There was a flight attendant who finally managed to break into the cockpit, and who had a pilot's license and might have had a decent chance of landing the plane with instruction and enough time, but by the time he was able to get through the door it was too late, the plane was already out of fuel.
posted by tavella at 3:11 PM on March 10, 2014 [2 favorites]

> Indonesia has a whole bunch of corvettes

Sixteen, according to Wikipedia. I didn't realize the Indonesian Navy was so large, although it makes sense now that I think about it.
posted by The corpse in the library at 3:14 PM on March 10, 2014

> I can't think of many things that could go wrong with a wingtip that could cause the instant and total destruction of a modern airliner (especially during a point of the flight when there is minimal load on the wings).

I got curious & googled wing flutter. NASA's Langley Rsch Center's YouTube page has a bunch of old flutter test videos that show (less modern!) planes hitting "Galloping Gertie"-like resonances and flying to bits, sometimes after only a few oscillations. Needless to say, modern aircraft are designed to dampen such oscillations and are extensively tested both in simulation & real life; here's a neat video of Boeing's flutter test of its new 787 Dreamliner.

I have absolutely no idea what happened in this tragedy, but I can certainly imagine how the loss of a wing-tip, and the resulting turbulence around the blunt edge, could compromise the 777's ability to damp aeroelastic flutter.
posted by Westringia F. at 3:16 PM on March 10, 2014 [4 favorites]

I had honestly never heard of a corvette warship until that usage.
posted by Big_B at 4:13 PM on March 10, 2014 [4 favorites]

> Helios 522, while not an explosive decompression, involved the pilots basically forgetting to pressurize the plane in the first place, thus causing the pilots to lose consciousness, which led to fuel exhaustion, which led to a crash that killed 121 folks in 2005.

Jesus, that flight is terrifying on so many levels.
posted by mrzarquon at 4:30 PM on March 10, 2014

That Fox News' story linked above on real-time flight trackers mentions that only 60% of passenger aircraft have a black box (ADS-B transponder) on board. That surprised me. Are the transponders that expensive or why are not all airplanes equipped? This article argues that the technology is outdated, so is price really the deciding factor?
posted by travelwithcats at 4:31 PM on March 10, 2014

travelwithcats, I think you're confounding a couple of things. A "black box" is the Flight Data Recorder, the thing that's supposed to record what happened to an airplane to be recovered after an accident. They have been enormously useful to researchers to figure out what caused a plane crash. Recovery is not easy; it took two years to pluck the black box for AF447 from some 10,000 feet underwater, for instance. Closely related to the flight data recorder is the Cockpit Voice Recorder. In AF447, at least, they were separate boxes.

The Fox News article about plane tracking is talking about the ADS-B transponder, the thing on the airplane that's actively broadcasting the plane's identity during flight. There's a variety of transponder technologies in use right now. Long story short, airplanes mostly broadcast their identity, altitude, and (if you're lucky) GPS position and velocity. Those transmissions are designed to be picked up by ground stations for air traffic control and, in some circumstances, other airplanes. These transponders are the primary way ATC knows where airplanes are; passive radar is only secondary. We're in the middle of an FAA clusterfuck to upgrade these systems, I don't know the status of international law. But in general transponders work pretty well. What happened to the Malaysian plane's transponder signal is a central mystery that the black box may eventually unravel.

That Guardian article you linked is arguing that at least some of the data recorded in the black box should also be broadcast live from the plane during flight, so we don't have to recover the recorder to know what happened. That's a sensible enough idea, although as they say it's expensive and awkward. Something like that already happens now by the air carriers; IIRC Air France already had a fair amount of data from AF 447 the day it crashed thanks to engine monitoring, etc. (References welcome!)

I've been arguing something similar, which is that airplanes should be broadcasting their ADS-B information to satellites. In particular position data. And, this is key, up to satellites in orbit; not just down to ground stations. That way you get position coverage no matter where the plane is, in a global ATC system. There are a variety of technological and economical barriers to doing this, but I think it's doable.

It's not clear any of this discussion of transmitters on the plane is relevant; the lack of any voice radio communication from the pilot suggests no transmitter in the cockpit would have worked. Which then raises the question of the ELT, the emergency transmitter that's supposed to activate when a plane crashes. Modern ELTs include GPS receivers and broadcast identity and position data to satellites at 406MHz. They're also designed to work even in a catastrophic incident. Why there's been no ELT from this Malaysia Air flight is another mystery.
posted by Nelson at 4:58 PM on March 10, 2014 [4 favorites]

Can it be inferred that on the Helios flight the passengers were all dead of aphyxiation before the crash? The plane had 12 minutes worth of oxygen for passengers, the flight attendant had a portable oxygen canister. What a macabre scene that must have been.

Yet strangely better than the long silent glide after the engines cut out.
posted by Rumple at 5:03 PM on March 10, 2014

In tech's golden age, why can't black boxes do more?: 2011 article exploring the idea of black boxes uplinking data to satellites, motivated by AF447. Includes discussion of NTSB working on an implementation.
posted by Nelson at 5:04 PM on March 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

Kinda off-topic, but: I fly internationally maybe once per year. I check in online because...I don't know. I have absolutely no idea why I check in online. When I get to the airport, I still have to wait in the check in line in order to check my bags in. Online check-in, as far as I know, doesn't save me any time or effort or anything.

So, I guess, two part question: Part I: Am I missing something? Is my online check-in somehow offering me a convenience I'm not even aware of? Part II: Are there a lot of people like me who don't understand the point of online check-in? Are there any current or former MeFi airport workers who can estimate what percentage of people check in online vs. at the airport?
posted by Bugbread at 5:09 PM on March 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

I check in online in case I can get a better seat, make sure there haven't been any changes in timing or anything, and to try to ensure a vegetarian meal. (Someone once told me that if they overbooked I'd be in a more advantageous position for having checked in early, but I don't think that's actually true.) I feel like it's slightly faster and it means I have to groggily talk less to people, but I don't know that it makes a huge difference.
posted by jetlagaddict at 5:16 PM on March 10, 2014

Thanks to all who answered my question about checking in but not boarding. I hadn't considered people on connecting flights, especially -- that makes a lot of sense.
posted by Georgina at 5:20 PM on March 10, 2014

Checking in online get you your seat in the event that the flight is overbooked.
posted by srboisvert at 5:21 PM on March 10, 2014

Thanks Nelson.
Quoting the Fox news' article: "That data comes from the ADS-B transponder on the plane -- the so called black box [...]."
I didn't double-check that before I posted the question, but it makes sense that it's actually two separate things, like you pointed out.
posted by travelwithcats at 5:39 PM on March 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

Well, I check in online because I travel with a single suitcase whenever possible. And when I don't, there is often curbside checkin which almost never has any substantial line, and if not curbside checkin frequently the luggage self-checkin kiosks are much faster than having to stand in line for an agent. I haven't talked to a airline agent in person in probably a decade, except occasionally at the gate.
posted by tavella at 5:41 PM on March 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

By the way, really, don't read that AF447 transcript if you're already scared of flying.

Ooops, too late. Between that, and the Japan air flight where the crew battled to keep the plane going for over half an hour (one article I read said that passengers had time to write farewell notes) scared the bejesus out of me.

I do hope that at the very least this tragedy was instantaneous for all aboard.
posted by TwoStride at 5:52 PM on March 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

That's not very likely, unfortunately. Complete decompression at altitude could render everyone unconscious pretty quickly or a massive explosion could kill everyone but that would have to be a one really big boom.
posted by Justinian at 5:56 PM on March 10, 2014

Big_B: "I had honestly never heard of a corvette warship until that usage."

The car model was actually named after the ship class.
posted by Mitheral at 6:05 PM on March 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

tavella: " And when I don't, there is often curbside checkin which almost never has any substantial line, and if not curbside checkin frequently the luggage self-checkin kiosks are much faster than having to stand in line for an agent. I haven't talked to a airline agent in person in probably a decade, except occasionally at the gate."

Maybe it's an international vs. domestic flight thing? In the last two decades all my US-related flights have been international-only (that is, I've flown into the US from overseas, and flown from the US to overseas, but haven't flown from one US airport to another US airport). I've never seen curbside check-in or self check-in kiosks for any of my flights.
posted by Bugbread at 6:17 PM on March 10, 2014

Oh yeah that Fox News article just completely misuses the term "black box". The article's really about transponders, not flight data recorders, and I think it gets most of the rest of it right.
posted by Nelson at 6:24 PM on March 10, 2014

Crowdsourcing the search for MH370
posted by travelwithcats at 6:37 PM on March 10, 2014 [2 favorites]

Yikes, it is really upsetting to look at satellite pictures for bits that look plausibly like wreckage. :/
posted by bewilderbeast at 7:25 PM on March 10, 2014

Another interesting thing from that Prune forum is that one of the other major incidents involving a 772 was a cockpit fire that thankfully started on the ground. AvHerald has a report, along with pictures. The damage to the controls is astonishing. A fire like that might well be able to incapacitate a plane fast enough to mean no messages were sent, since it would burn the pilots to death to burn them until they flee to the temporary safety of the passenger cabin.
posted by barnacles at 7:40 PM on March 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

Oh, and the fire hypothesis has the added implications that the plane wouldn't have needed to broken up before it went into the ocean. Given the lack of debris field being found thus far, it doesn't seem like the plane disintegrated at 35000 feet, but rather nosedived into the water making as small a footprint as possible.
posted by barnacles at 7:43 PM on March 10, 2014

Wow, that Tomnod crowdsourcing imagery sure does load slowly.
posted by rollbiz at 8:04 PM on March 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

Urh, not only does that Tomnod load slowly, it doesn't even seem to work at all. After actually browsing around for a while to ease my sense of helplessness I found small scatters of stuff which "could" be debris. 99.9% that it isn't, but I thought that as seen as I was there it was burdened on me to actually tag it for somebody else to look at. So...I clicked to place a tag but it seemingly placed 19 at once and shot across the map to load a borked image down in one corner.
posted by Thing at 8:26 PM on March 10, 2014

From the New Straits Times:
Malaysian civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, whose agency is leading a multinational effort to find the Boeing 777, ....

Azharuddin said the search includes northern parts of the Malacca Strait, on the opposite side of the Malay Peninsula and far west of the plane’s last known location.

Azharuddin would not explain why crews were searching there, saying, “There are some things that I can tell you and some things that I can’t.” [my bf]

The official Malaysian sources (including the NST) are not very forthcoming but Vietnamese sites have a lot more information. One of their satellites, VNRED SAT-1 is due to pass over Tho Chu Island (original search area) right about now (11AM) but results won't be available until this evening.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:47 PM on March 10, 2014

So, I guess, two part question: Part I: Am I missing something? Is my online check-in somehow offering me a convenience I'm not even aware of? Part II: Are there a lot of people like me who don't understand the point of online check-in? Are there any current or former MeFi airport workers who can estimate what percentage of people check in online vs. at the airport?

Lots of frequent flyers or business travelers only take a carry-on, which means they can skip the baggage check line altogether. Checking in online if you aren't checking any baggage saves a shitload of time.
posted by triggerfinger at 9:13 PM on March 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

Rumple: Can it be inferred that on the Helios flight the passengers were all dead of aphyxiation before the crash? The plane had 12 minutes worth of oxygen for passengers, the flight attendant had a portable oxygen canister. What a macabre scene that must have been.

The autopsies suggested they were still alive but deeply unconscious, so the only one who suffered was the poor bastard trying to save the plane, likely.
posted by tavella at 9:41 PM on March 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

From the Straits Times (Singapore)(12:26 PM Tuesday):

Missing Malaysia Airlines plane: Search now focused on west of Peninsular Malaysia: Official

The search operations for the missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner is now focused on the west of Peninsular Malaysia in the Strait of Malacca, as no signs of the plane has been found in the South China Sea, officials said.

"The search and rescue teams have expanded the scope beyond the flight path. The focus now is on the West Peninsular of Malaysia at the Strait of Malacca," Malaysia Airlines chief executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said in a statement on Tuesday.

He said the authorities are looking at a possibility of an attempt made by flight MH370 to turn back to the Subang airport in Selangor, about 50km from the Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 9:59 PM on March 10, 2014

This is the BBC Persia report that originates the claim that the two fake passport holders were Iranian. Can someone who reads Persian help translate the article? My cursory Google Translate says that BBC Persia was contacted by someone claiming to be an Iranian living in Malaysia, but nothing conclusive.

Also an explanation of the claim that the suspect was Black [semi-self-link] - the writer was at the very same press conference that's mentioned here. Basically it came out of a badly interpreted question.

speaking of which: Would any of you that are giving great science-based knowledge of air crashes be willing to contribute to our blog?
posted by divabat at 10:21 PM on March 10, 2014

Lots of frequent flyers or business travelers only take a carry-on, which means they can skip the baggage check line altogether. Checking in online if you aren't checking any baggage saves a shitload of time.

But don't you still have to print your boarding pass? As long as I'm printing my boarding pass, I might as well just use the little self serve computer at the airport to check in anyway.
posted by Kwine at 11:25 PM on March 10, 2014

We're all still waiting to find out what happened and the fate of the people on that plane.

But I can't help but speculate about matters of policy which may come out of this.

If the two passengers who traveled using stolen passports did effect the destruction of flight MH370, how will governments attempt to close this security issue?

I am concerned there will be calls for biometric scanning.

If we discover the disappearance of flight MH370 was the result of an act perpetrated by the two passengers using stolen passports, I hope we will have the collective sense to reject any calls for biometric identification at the ports through which we travel.
posted by mistersquid at 11:32 PM on March 10, 2014

mistersquid: "I am concerned there will be calls for biometric scanning."

I don't think that's super likely. If the passports were RFID passports, then maybe, but otherwise what would be more likely is a push for more universal use of RFID passports, the argument being "if those passports had been chipped, this wouldn't have happened".
posted by Bugbread at 11:35 PM on March 10, 2014

INTERPOL created the Stolen and Lost Travel Documents (SLTD) database in 2002. The Austrian and Italian passports that were used to board this flight were in SLTD system, so the information was there to be found. The problem seems to be that most countries don't use it.

More from INTERPOL on the subject.
posted by Georgina at 11:51 PM on March 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

There already is a way to avert these kinds of situations - Interpol's Stolen Passports Database - the problem is that many countries don't use that database enough when checking in people (and they're pretty annoyed about that).

Interestingly Malaysia was the first country to introduce RFID passports, and Italian and Austrian passports are already RFID-enabled (though Austria has a chip-free option).
posted by divabat at 11:52 PM on March 10, 2014

I hope we will have the collective sense to reject any calls for biometric identification at the ports through which we travel.

Explain it to me like I'm stupid because I've been sitting here for 10 minutes trying to figure it out - why am I supposed to reject biometric identification at customs? What's the big thing I'm supposed to be upset and scared about? More trustable, personally-associated travel documents seems like a smarter idea than "You share the same name with someone on this watch list, so no flying for you!"
posted by Jimbob at 11:56 PM on March 10, 2014

Jimbob: "why am I supposed to reject biometric identification at customs?"

I'm guessing stuff in here, but considering "biometrics" would probably mean retinal scans or fingerprints or the like, not DNA testing or anything, I don't really see what the big deal could be. They'd find out before I did if I had glaucoma or something?
posted by Bugbread at 12:10 AM on March 11, 2014

Briefing by Malaysian officials happening now.
posted by theory at 12:11 AM on March 11, 2014

I think your link is off.
posted by Bugbread at 12:17 AM on March 11, 2014

Everybody who booked the flight boarded the plane, according to an official giving the briefing.
posted by theory at 12:19 AM on March 11, 2014

Never mind. Article text says briefing earlier was cancelled, but video at the top of the article is showing briefing happening now. Confusing site design.
posted by Bugbread at 12:20 AM on March 11, 2014

theory: there's been some twitter reports of people who missed the flights because they were sick or unavailable or something - sounds like they may be fake.

Also where did the 5 passengers story come in then?
posted by divabat at 12:27 AM on March 11, 2014

19-year-old Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad, an Iranian who appeared to be attempting to immigrate to Germany, is identified as one of the passengers flying with a stolen passport. Malaysian police have been in touch with his mother in Frankfurt, who has said she is expecting him to arrive.
posted by theory at 12:28 AM on March 11, 2014

Divabat: The police official is flatly denying the veracity of those reports. I missed his full explanation, but he seems certain.
posted by theory at 12:32 AM on March 11, 2014

OK, the fact that the police, the DCGA, and the various Ministers can't seem to have one consistent story going is making my debunking work all the more difficult to accomplish. I'm already grumbling to my collaborator about having to debunk a debunking of a debunking.
posted by divabat at 12:47 AM on March 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

divabat, thanks. Just a reminder to all and sundry... divabat's debunker debunking: here
posted by Mister Bijou at 2:56 AM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

Sunset, Thursday.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 4:07 AM on March 11, 2014

Also, regarding switching the search to the Straits of Malacca today, Berita Harian has published a more detailed explanation from the Chief of the Royal Malaysian Air Force which says that the RMAF base in Butterworth (near Penang on the west coast) detected a (primary radar) signal near Pulau Perak, a tiny island in the Straits, around 2:40 AM.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 4:26 AM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

Profile on some of the passengers
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:45 AM on March 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

A man travelling with a stolen passport on a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner was an Iranian teenager trying to migrate to Germany

Well that's just heartbreaking.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 7:43 AM on March 11, 2014 [14 favorites]

I think, given the news and noise about these stolen passports, a greater push to get all countries to use the Stolen Passports Database may be the one thing to come out of this.
posted by Thing at 8:14 AM on March 11, 2014

More on the new theory that the plane flew for more than an hour after losing contact, perhaps crashing in the Indian Ocean.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:25 AM on March 11, 2014 [3 favorites]

Gotta love the Vietnamese. Their Air Search and Rescue HQ announced at 22:11 the planned search area for tomorrow--Soc Trang Province and the sea between Phu Quoc and Tho Chu--because as of 19:46 they'd not received "official" word that the Malaysian air force had tracked MH370 to Pulau Perak off the west coast of Malaysia.

Now at 22:20, the Deputy Minister of Transport has requested clarification from Malaysia since it looks like the Malaysian government has sat on this information for two days during which time Vietnam, in the spirit of cooperation, had allowed two Chinese navy ships to enter their territorial water, despite ongoing diplomatic tension between the two countries.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 9:02 AM on March 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

Can't really blame the Vietnamese being pissed about that. A lot of wasted effort on a lot of people's part, in fact, and with every passing day what debris there is, is being dispersed.
posted by tavella at 9:06 AM on March 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

If the story with the military radar checks out, who's to say that the plane crashed at all? If it was possible to travel for 350 miles without being noticed, maybe it flew even further? It had fuel for more than 7 hrs, I think.
Are there any ideas why the plane changed its course? Can the military radar pick up on what aircraft it was specifically?
posted by travelwithcats at 9:24 AM on March 11, 2014

Yeah, I actually think a Helios or Lear Jet-type scenario sounds plausible. The longer the search goes without recovering anything, the more it appears the plane might have flown for a significant time after the reported last radar contact. If that is the case, then an abnormal response to an abnormal situation starts to sound like likely option, rather than the catastrophic failure/fire/bomb/etc scenarios. Or really, knowing nothing else about the incident our prior should always be a series of failures, but this one seemed so weird that it temporarily overrode that.
posted by kiltedtaco at 9:43 AM on March 11, 2014

If true, it does seem to bring the possibility of human intervention back into the mix. Would it be possible to simultaneously have a power failure that cut off all beacons and communication, a decompression or cockpit fire that took away human control (at least, if the pilots were still flying, I would have expected they would divert to the nearest airfield after such a power failure) and the plane *still* fly for a hour?
posted by tavella at 9:44 AM on March 11, 2014

Well, I know that a decompression incident could definitely lead to such a flight, so I guess the question would be how plausible it would be to have the transponders/beacons knocked out as well. Are they purely run off the plane's power system or does it take something else to put them offline?
posted by tavella at 9:46 AM on March 11, 2014

Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Passengers' Mobile Phones Ring But Not Answered
posted by Golden Eternity at 9:53 AM on March 11, 2014

Weird.
posted by mazola at 9:56 AM on March 11, 2014

Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Passengers' Mobile Phones Ring But Not Answered

That does not inherently mean the mobile phone is physically ringing.

From divabat's site: "I find the entire cell phone thing really odd..."

Also, previously on AskMe: What do outgoing phone rings mean?
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 9:57 AM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

That phone ringing story seems to be based on an understanding of how telephones works that hasn't really been true since landlines were dominant. Hearing a ring while calling a cell phone doesn't imply anything about what's happening on the receiving side. It's a little unusual that it doesn't go straight to voice mail, but there are a lot of reasons why that may be. One may be that the system which provides service on the plane provides the appearance to the network that users are connected to an actual physical cell somewhere, while in reality, that connection is being relayed through a satellite network and is non-deterministic. None of the major news outlets with this story could find an expert who knows how this stuff works for sure?
posted by feloniousmonk at 9:58 AM on March 11, 2014 [3 favorites]

Also reports of phones registering as online with an IM service, QQ, but I assume that registration might be subject to the same network issues.
posted by audi alteram partem at 10:10 AM on March 11, 2014

Actually, my favorite thing about the media going on about the phones is that it's been 3 days. It doesn't pass the sniff test.

Sure, it kind of creeps me out because I can envision some sort of scenario where everyone's still alive and just hidden away by, like, SPECTRE in an underground base or something. But in what scenario do the passengers have a bunch of electrical outlets to keep their phones charged?
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 10:15 AM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

From divabat's website: "All that proves is that the number is still in service and that their telco provider hasn’t cancelled their account. For instance, I could theoretically be hit by a bus right now (knock on wood!) and have the bus run over my phone, completely destroying it; if you called me after the crash, the phone would still ring, because as far as my telco provider is considered my number’s still valid."
posted by Mister Bijou at 10:21 AM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

Also not everyone has voicemail activated.

ARGH PEOPLE KEEP ASKING US ABOUT THE CELLPHONE THING ARGH STOP ASKING OR ELSE I WILL THROW A PHONE AT YOU
posted by divabat at 10:25 AM on March 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

The phone rings because the phone company routes the call to the last place it pinged, then tries to locate the phone by other cells before it routes to voicemail. That takes time, and if it were silent during those transfers people would just hang up.
posted by oneirodynia at 10:29 AM on March 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

Would there be any downside/upside in attempting to trace last known pings from passenger cell phones? At this point the operation seems to be grasping at straws anyway...
posted by mazola at 10:32 AM on March 11, 2014

It seems unlikely that they were pinging against physical cell towers vs. a "virtual" cell contained within the plane and connected via satellite. That's how the systems I've seen in the US work, but I'm not an expert on them nor do I know if this plane has the same kind of system. It's possible they could've pinged a real tower while over land, of course.
posted by feloniousmonk at 10:35 AM on March 11, 2014

So how long does a big airliner have to be silent before people start going "hm"? I would have thought that was a period measured in minutes. (By silent, I mean any form of active communication from the jet, whether it's a ping to a satellite or ground receiver from onboard data transmitters.)
posted by maxwelton at 10:35 AM on March 11, 2014

Malaysian plane sent out engine data before vanishing.

These reports are sent via VHF radio or satellite at take-off, during the climb, at some point while cruising, and on landing.

Take off and climb reports filed, cruising and landing: not.
posted by mazola at 10:35 AM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

I think the mobile phone issue is because in some countries they won't ring if the handset is turned off or not working.
posted by Thing at 10:38 AM on March 11, 2014

I think oneirodynia has it probably right. I think the phone ringing has to do with the phones having last connected to an overseas network and therefore the home network has to do some routing before it can work out if the phone is available.

There may also be idiosyncrasies to the Malaysian/Vietnamese/Chinese mobile network that cause this.

Only someone familiar with the mobile phone systems of at least Malaysia and China, and any mobile phone routing done via the airplane could say for certain what the phones ringing means.
posted by lrobertjones at 10:43 AM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

Reports of plane turning back refuted by RMAF.
posted by divabat at 10:47 AM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

It's like the Keystone Kops over there.
posted by Justinian at 10:48 AM on March 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

Well that's clear as mud.
posted by mazola at 10:53 AM on March 11, 2014

It's like the Keystone Kops over there.

The disappearance of MH370 has currently got aviation experts worldwide baffled. Maybe you should go over there and sort them out.
posted by Mister Bijou at 10:55 AM on March 11, 2014 [5 favorites]

However...

(Reuters) - Malaysia's military believes a jetliner missing for almost four days turned and flew hundreds of kilometers to the west after it last made contact with civilian air traffic control off the country's east coast, a senior officer told Reuters on Tuesday.

So, not by Berita Harian but maybe someone who reads Berita Harian? Also is a Facebook post by a Defense Journalist how one normally disseminates this information? The New Straits Times only got around to posting the BH story an hour and a half ago. The Straits Times at 8:28 PM.

It's also interesting combined with this article:

Four days after flight MH370 went missing in mid-air with 239 people on board, no nation has stepped forward to initiate and lead an official probe, leaving a formal leadership vacuum that industry experts say appears unprecedented.

Malaysian officials are conducting their own informal investigations, in cooperation with other governments and foreign agencies, but they lack the legal powers that would come with a formal international probe under UN-sanctioned rules...

Those powers include the legal rights to take testimony from all witnesses and other parties, the right to have exclusive control over the release of information and the ability to centralise a vast amount of fragmentary evidence.

Without a formal investigative process being convened quickly under rules set out by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a UN agency, there is a risk that crucial early detective work could be hampered, and potential clues and records lost, air accident experts said....

A lack of clarity over the investigation already appears to be a source of tension between Malaysia and China, which had up to 154 citizens on the Beijing-bound flight and is pushing for a significant role in the investigation.

China's Foreign Ministry urged Malaysia yesterday to step up its search efforts and start an investigation "as soon as possible and correctly".

The deputy head of China's civil aviation authority urged Malaysia to help a team of investigators it has said is ready to fly to the Southeast Asian nation to help with the probe....

The official familiar with the preliminary Malaysian investigation said the Malaysian government could not launch a formal probe until the crash site had been found, and that it planned to work closely with US authorities and Australia.

Witnesses such as cargo handlers, mechanics and company officials might be reluctant to speak to Malaysian investigators who were operating outside a formal ICAO-sanctioned probe which could offer them some protection from law suits, experts said...

The lack of a formal investigation also means Malaysia does not have exclusive control over the release of information...

posted by TWinbrook8 at 11:20 AM on March 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

I'm trying to get the journalist to send me the original copy of the release by email.
posted by divabat at 11:22 AM on March 11, 2014

It's like the Keystone Kops over there.

And thanks for proving the claim, TWinbrook8!

Seriously, this is a real-life enactment of the "combing the desert" scene from Spaceballs..

Malaysia Airlines new motto: "We ain't found shit!!"
posted by ReeMonster at 11:23 AM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

The disappearance of MH370 has currently got aviation experts worldwide baffled. Maybe you should go over there and sort them out.

The issue isn't that they haven't found the airframe, the issue is that all kinds of officials are out there making contradictory statements, sometimes within hours of the previous statement. See previous statement about the Keystone Kops. The messaging is crazy.
posted by Justinian at 11:31 AM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

NYTimes: "I guess to me it sounds like they were turned off deliberately.”
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:32 AM on March 11, 2014

What's also not helping is the media misinterpreting statements made at press conferences - for example, that whole saga with the features of the 2 fake passport holders.
posted by divabat at 11:34 AM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

divabat, I believe there are some language issues that are causing that to happen.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:36 AM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

Letterhead version of the RMAF statement.
posted by divabat at 11:48 AM on March 11, 2014

I've been in a MAS flight where someone tried to smoke in-flight. They cut that out pretty quickly.

That does explain MAS's 13th statement, however.

ACA is not to be trusted.
posted by divabat at 11:51 AM on March 11, 2014

My understanding is that Malaysia cannot open an investigation yet because they do not know the country in which the accident occurred, which by ICAO procedures should lead the investigation.

And yes the RAT deploys automatically in the event of power loss on both AC busses, dual engine failure, or all three hydraulic systems pressures low (confirmed with boeing docs).
posted by kiltedtaco at 11:55 AM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

It's good to be the king pilot.
posted by Justinian at 11:56 AM on March 11, 2014

That they took that one photo doesn't mean they managed to ride the cockpit for the entire duration of the flight or whatever else they're claiming.
posted by divabat at 11:58 AM on March 11, 2014

And if anything like this is involved, I imagine that will be the end of MAS.

Witnesses?
posted by de at 12:02 PM on March 11, 2014

This article is claiming Fariq as the pilot, but he was first officer of MH370.

The photo of the cockpit has them on the ground - you can see wheels on the road.

See also Chk Chk Boom.

As to why? There's already been a lot of people making up stories about their connection to MH370 for attention.
posted by divabat at 12:06 PM on March 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

Could someone explain more about ICAO procedure? I don't understand why the default provision, in case of a disappearance, is that there'd be a clear designation of who should run things until discovery jurisdiction, or whatever, comes into play. I'd imagine that it would be something like "until further evidence, the country of departure [or country of airline?] runs things." Is that not what happens? Is it complicated by the tensions in this region in particular, and/or is Malaysia ill-equipped to run this search and investigation?
posted by TwoStride at 12:07 PM on March 11, 2014

Wild speculation: the plane was hijacked by pirates who disabled the transponder, flew below radar for several hours to some secret jungle airfield.
posted by humanfont at 12:13 PM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

What puzzles me is that I haven't read about an Indonesian reaction to the Straits of Malacca scenario other than to reprint what other newspapers are saying. Pulau Perak is about midway between the Sumatra and the west coast of Malaysia. I imagine their military radar would've picked up something.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 12:37 PM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

While Malaysia is one of the top software piracy hubs in the world, I doubt they'd need to take down a plane .

(if anyone wants to work on examining the ACA story, go for it.)
posted by divabat at 12:39 PM on March 11, 2014

TWinbrook8, I don't think that a crash in the Straits of Malacca makes sense, in terms of wreckage. We're almost at five days now, and nothing washing ashore? The Strait of Malacca narrows to 2.8 km (1.5 nautical miles) wide.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:40 PM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

Until 13 years ago there was nothing at all remarkable about pilots inviting passengers into the cockpit. Until 20 or so years ago there was nothing at all remarkable about pilots smoking in the cockpit either, and even today it's hard to image how that would be a major safety issue. It's not particularly remarkable that people fly on stolen passpoprts. And it's still unremarkable that when you call someone's cell phone, it rings, even if it's off network.

What is remarkable is how people turn to any shred of information and immediately pounce on it assuming it's The Cause.
posted by Nelson at 12:44 PM on March 11, 2014 [10 favorites]

"Aviation experts have criticised the way Malaysian authorities have fuelled what is likely to be misleading speculation about what caused flight MH370 to go missing."
posted by travelwithcats at 12:46 PM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

What is remarkable is how people turn to any shred of information and immediately pounce on it assuming it's The Cause.

It is frustrating, but it's also a deeply common behavior. Observe the 9/11 attacks for a particularly salient example -- but there are others occurring everywhere around us. It's just something people tend to do unless they're pretty careful, and once the random assertions are uttered it's nearly impossible to stamp them out (witness the 9/11 "Truther" nutballs).
posted by aramaic at 12:58 PM on March 11, 2014

witness the 9/11 "Truther" nutballs

I've seen a bunch of posts on one particular message board insisting that we don't KNOW for sure it wasn't aliens. :/
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:02 PM on March 11, 2014

when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
posted by phaedon at 1:03 PM on March 11, 2014

Some major revelations today: The pilots turned off the plane's transponder, then turned nearly around and flew back across the Malaysian peninsula and made it all the way to the Strait of Malacca before crashing. No one knows why they might have done that. (Evidently the authorities have known this for a while without revealing it, and that's why they've been searching in the strait.)

With their transponder off, the jet wouldn't have been visible on normal traffic control systems; only things like military radar could have tracked them.

Also, the two stolen passports were used by two Iranians, one 18 and one 29.

Hijacking begins to be a plausible explanation... Or maybe UFO's.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 1:03 PM on March 11, 2014

The pilots turned off the plane's transponder, then turned nearly around and flew back across the Malaysian peninsula and made it all the way to the Strait of Malacca before crashing.

This is not fact. It's hypothesis.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:04 PM on March 11, 2014 [5 favorites]

Are you sure about the width roomthreeseventeen? I'm reading that the it is 65 km wide at its narrowest, with the current flowing northwest, ie towards the search area. But yes, it is similarly shallow and even more heavily trafficked than the Gulf of Thailand.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 1:05 PM on March 11, 2014

TWinbrook8, I'm not sure. I took it off the Wikipedia entry.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:05 PM on March 11, 2014

The pilots turned off the plane's transponder, then turned nearly around and flew back across the Malaysian peninsula and made it all the way to the Strait of Malacca before crashing.

Before losing contact.
posted by mazola at 1:05 PM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yeah, that is all basically still conjecture right now. There's no evidence they turned off the transponder rather than it failing somehow.
posted by kiltedtaco at 1:05 PM on March 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

Encyclopedia Brittanica
posted by TWinbrook8 at 1:09 PM on March 11, 2014

I deeply apologize - the statement from RMAF isn't him refuting that the plane turned back , but that he hasn't made a strong statement either way.

The RMAF has not ruled out the possibility of an air turn back on a reciprocal heading before the aircraft vanished from the radar and this resulted in the Search and Rescue Operations being widen to the vicinity of the waters of Pulau Pinang.

Note that Berita Harian and co are reporting that it's at Pulau Perak, while RMAF is saying that it may be in Pulau Pinang, two different places.
posted by divabat at 1:09 PM on March 11, 2014

Why has no one mentioned elves as a possibility yet?
posted by klausness at 1:10 PM on March 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

Maybe they were just the first to rapture.
posted by Golden Eternity at 1:18 PM on March 11, 2014

Why has no one mentioned elves as a possibility yet?

Well it hasn't been officially discounted either...
posted by mazola at 1:19 PM on March 11, 2014

I'm feeling better about my comment earlier in the thread that a GPS pinger which cannot be deliberately shut off by someone on the plane would have made this whole situation much less confusing. It's pretty obvious now that radar tracking is no substitute.
posted by Justinian at 1:24 PM on March 11, 2014

The claim is so outrageous it would take more than a photo in the airport lounge to convince me, for sure. But there are going to be witnesses, and other people these women told the story to soon afterwards, if it happened.

For the PR of the airlines, and for the memory of the pilots (who up until this point had been hailed in the media as utmost professionals) it's pretty dreadful. But for reality, it's inconsequential. This stuff used to happen all the time, it was par for the course. Hell, everyone smoking on a plane was par for the course, and when I was a kid there was practically a revolving door on the cockpit for all the people being invited up there. And, yes, ACA is a tabloid show of the worst kind. Actual relevance to the loss of MH370 is difficult to see.
posted by Jimbob at 1:27 PM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned here yet, but do we have any examples of large jets disappearing and wreckage never being found? Today's WSJ says the last precedent was in 1962...

"In 1962, a Military Air Transport Service charter operated by Flying Tiger Line carrying 107 passengers disappeared on a flight from Guam to the Philippines. The Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation was presumed to have crashed, but the wreckage was never recovered. According to the Aviation Safety Network, the search covered 144,000 square miles using 48 aircraft and eight surface vessels."

Is this the most recent example there is? Apologies if this has been covered already and I've missed it.
posted by triggerfinger at 1:32 PM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

(The Flying Tiger charter cargo air service was the forerunner to FedEx. Carry on.)
posted by vibrotronica at 1:38 PM on March 11, 2014

Here is the wiki for the Flying Tiger Line Flight 739.
posted by travelwithcats at 1:41 PM on March 11, 2014

Here is a list of all accidents and incidents involving commercial aircraft, if someone wants to check.
posted by travelwithcats at 1:44 PM on March 11, 2014

And here is the wiki for List of aerial disappearances

Nothing with lots of people on board since the 1962 tiger line fight but several large cargo planes that went missing.
posted by pixie at 1:45 PM on March 11, 2014

Blog by a Delta pilot talking about MH370
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 2:06 PM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

TL;DR - The pilot hypothesizes that the plane was hijacked, the pilot initially complied with the hijackers' demands, and when he realized what might happen he deliberately put the plane into the ocean.
posted by Justinian at 2:27 PM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

Third-hand via TPM:

Basically it's totally unclear what happened. But pilots who are discussing this on the cable nets point to another possible scenario: If the plane experienced a total loss of electrical power, that would turn off the transponders. But it would also allow the plane to keep flying, at least for some period of time.

So perhaps the plane experienced electrical failure, knocking out all communications and telemetry from the plane, the pilots turn around but somehow get lost and the plane eventually goes down.

Again, to be clear, that [is a] hypothetical sketched out by a highly experienced pilot. But purely a hypothetical based on an almost unprecedented and hard to interpret collection of data.
posted by RedOrGreen at 2:36 PM on March 11, 2014 [3 favorites]

That's another reason why I think separate GPS squawkers are a good idea; they can have their own battery power supply which can keep them going even if the plane experiences a total loss of electrical power.
posted by Justinian at 2:38 PM on March 11, 2014

You'd think there would have been attempts to text/call from passengers if 'knocked out electrical' were the case. In that area you'd think some would be successful?
posted by mazola at 2:40 PM on March 11, 2014

Yeah, I don't think the scenario on TPM makes sense unless some sort of decompression rendered everyone unconscious. One, for the reason you bring up. Two, the plane supposedly flew all the way across Malaysia and over the Andaman sea. If the pilots were in control and trying to recover from a loss of electrical power they would have tried to land somewhere rather than fly all the way across the landmass.
posted by Justinian at 2:42 PM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

Unde what scenario would a plane crossing peninsular Malaysia not have been picked up at all on civillian or millitary radar?
posted by Jimbob at 2:51 PM on March 11, 2014

How plausible is this scenario?
posted by divabat at 2:51 PM on March 11, 2014

I've seen it reported that this airframe did not have that satcom antenna installed.
posted by kiltedtaco at 2:54 PM on March 11, 2014

A kaiju caught the aircraft in its maw mid-flight, transponder was blocked by radiation. Enourmous monster attacks are well documented in the area. For example to cover up the Gulf of Tonkin incident and defeat a previous monster the US and Vietnam staged a decade long war to cover up civilian relocation, b-52 bombardment and ultimately the use of Agent Orange to poison the creature's food supply.
posted by humanfont at 2:55 PM on March 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

The pilot roomthreeseventeen linked to also still thinks TWA 800 was a missile (in the comments). She presents a somewhat plausible narrative, but I think she might have terrorists on the brain.
posted by stevis23 at 3:20 PM on March 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

She definitely has hijackers on the brain. Now that we've learnt that at least one of the fake passport holders is a teenage asylum seeker, the likelihood of it being a hijack is a little lower (not completely gone, but not an obvious yes either.)

This article claims that there's a device that if installed could have helped solve this mystery. Any evidence?
posted by divabat at 3:22 PM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm feeling better about my comment earlier in the thread that a GPS pinger which cannot be deliberately shut off by someone on the plane would have made this whole situation much less confusing.

I'd be surprised if there's very much at all that the pilots can't turn off if needs be, and that very, very little should be outside that control. If nothing else, anything electrical can short and start a fire, and when that happens I want the pilot to be able to kill power to it.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 3:25 PM on March 11, 2014

If you put the GPS pinger somewhere inaccessible while in flight I don't see how they could turn it off. It doesn't have to be in the cockpit or crew/passenger compartment. Hell, you could weld the thing to the outside of the airframe if you had to. Okay not literally but you get the idea.
posted by Justinian at 3:29 PM on March 11, 2014

Anything that emits RF is a hyper expensive PITA on a jet which is basically a sealed aluminum tube.
posted by localroger at 3:53 PM on March 11, 2014

Are any of the search countries using drones to assist in the search? This is something they could theoretically be used for, right?
posted by triggerfinger at 4:11 PM on March 11, 2014

The US Navy has a number of drones. I suspect they would be using them.
posted by Golden Eternity at 4:13 PM on March 11, 2014

Our summary of what we've fact-checked and debunked so far.

Sparked by finding an article from The Guardian that has such horrid reporting that it made me facepalm hard.
posted by divabat at 5:37 PM on March 11, 2014 [6 favorites]

Possible lead from villagers who heard noises.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:41 PM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

I just spent a minute figuring out if that report was from the east or west coast - here's a map - the people in Marang claim to have heard the noise to the east over the South China Sea. Still clutching at straws, obviously.
posted by Jimbob at 6:50 PM on March 11, 2014

If you put the GPS pinger somewhere inaccessible while in flight I don't see how they could turn it off.

Pop the circuit breaker.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:02 PM on March 11, 2014

RedOrGreen: "Basically it's totally unclear what happened. But pilots who are discussing this on the cable nets point to another possible scenario: If the plane experienced a total loss of electrical power, that would turn off the transponders. But it would also allow the plane to keep flying, at least for some period of time."

777s have ram air turbines, though (vid), and in fact its RATs are designed to not just provide hydraulic power but to provide electrical power too.
posted by barnacles at 7:06 PM on March 11, 2014

Pop the circuit breaker.

What circuit breaker? It could easily have a battery in case of power loss.
posted by Justinian at 7:21 PM on March 11, 2014

If you were making a Spy Adventure Movie Starring Top Actor, is there a plausible scenario where you could "steal" a 777 mid-flight by making it look like it vanished? Something like turning off everything that pings, taking it down to wave-top level and then hightailing it to your favorite handy abandoned airfield?

While unlikely, I had a similar thought today...and took it further with speculation on what could be done with a stolen 777. This isn't really speculation on this flight, which is absolutely tragic. But if one of these planes was stolen in this manner, what are the odds it could be later used as a weapon? With a traditional missile you'll light up radar screens like no tomorrow...but with an airplane, you have range and potential abilities to spoof a legitimate flight path. It's essentially a giant trojan horse that could be equipped with numerous kinds of payloads (chemical, nuclear, etc)

Again I don't feel that's what has happened here...but judging on how the response has been handled, and the complexity of the search...what once seemed unlikely to me suddenly seems plausible..and that's unsettling.
posted by samsara at 7:38 PM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

It's essentially a giant trojan horse that could be equipped with numerous kinds of payloads (chemical, nuclear, etc)

You'd have to be talking serious-evil-billionaire-in-a-lair-in-a-volcano plans, though, surely.

Where are you going to land it and take off from? Those planes need quite large runways - there are only a limited number of runways in the world where you'd be able to keep it, and presumably satellite imagery would be capable of imaging them and spotting it within hours. I really doubt you could easily take a 777 down and get it back up from some abandoned jungle airstrip.
posted by Jimbob at 7:45 PM on March 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

New developments regarding the search and rescue mission:
The Indian navy joins the activities with satellite support, China expands the search zone to include land areas while Vietnam scales down its efforts to a few search flights today.
posted by travelwithcats at 8:11 PM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

This is so strange. I normally have no taste for disasters, but this is such a mystery and a tragedy it sits in the back of my head a lot.
posted by Brainy at 8:21 PM on March 11, 2014 [3 favorites]

Where are you going to land it and take off from? Those planes need quite large runways

You wouldn't need to land it. Someone hell-bent on destruction could load it up with bio weapons (or whatever) and crash it in the middle of a large city (if you're using it in the missile sense).
posted by triggerfinger at 8:28 PM on March 11, 2014

This seems like a decent theory:

PPRUN - 'onetrack'

Let's say an oxygen bottle in the cabin exploded and caused major decompression, and took out a heap of electrical wiring and comms, including the transponder.
The crew immediately commenced a left turn to return to KL and initiated a rapid descent. However, hypoxia took over prior to reaching a low level and the crew became unconscious. The aircraft continued to fly in a gentle arc, back over the Malay peninsula, at a steadily reducing height, or at a low height preset by the crew on the AP.

In that case, there's a strong possibility the aircraft crashed into the Gunung Leuser National Park - one of the largest, largely unpopulated, mountainous wilderness areas in Northern Sumatra. An aircraft crashing into a high-elevation area of this park at 3:00AM local time would be heard by very few people - and it would disappear into the jungle just as GOL 1907 did.

posted by Golden Eternity at 8:31 PM on March 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

I think the first paragraph has possibilities (not that I know anything about aviation) but I come up against the lack of warning on Indonesian military radar. Even if a station was er, unmanned, I believe they can review tapes? And wouldn't there be fire upon impact that would register on satellite?
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:46 PM on March 11, 2014

It wouldn't disappear into the jungle all that rapidly. It would be readily visible for at least weeks.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:57 PM on March 11, 2014

Now Yahoo News reports that the search will be expanded into the Andaman Sea.
posted by travelwithcats at 9:00 PM on March 11, 2014

triggerfinger: "You wouldn't need to land it."

Unless you are planning some sort of adhoc mid air fueling and explosive/bioweapon/nuclear bomb transfer scheme you have to land it at least once.
posted by Mitheral at 9:04 PM on March 11, 2014 [6 favorites]

@divabat - that theory has now been picked up by the Sydney Morning Herald and quotes that same site I think.

(Personally I think the credibility of the argument on the original site suffers from the use of the "ringing phones" info, which seems to me a lot less significant than others are implying.)
posted by Cheese Monster at 10:06 PM on March 11, 2014

The next press conference is supposed to be at 3pm MYT today.
posted by travelwithcats at 10:17 PM on March 11, 2014

With the US hard-on for spy stuff and military hardware, if I was on a game show and the question was "The United States government knows the position of every aircraft larger than a Learjet flying at over 100' off the ground at all times--true or false?" I would probably have said "true." I guess I would have lost the lounge suite.
posted by maxwelton at 11:46 PM on March 11, 2014 [5 favorites]

WSJ:
The Malaysia Airlines Disappearance Shows Technology's Limits
Radar, Satellites Are Powerful Tools but Still Have Limited Reach

Subscription only but you can access the full text from Google News by clicking here.

The Aviation Safety Network, a database tracking accidents, lists 80 planes as "missing" since 1948. No trace of the planes or their occupants was ever found. . .

1979 - A Boeing 707 was lost in the Pacific Ocean after leaving Tokyo.

1990 - A Boeing 727 sent distress messages before vanishing after taking off from Reykjavik, Iceland.

2003 - A Boeing 727 took off from Luanda, Angola, and vanished.

2009 - A USCG C-130 Hercules crashed into the ocean off the California coast.
posted by mlis at 12:18 AM on March 12, 2014 [2 favorites]

It's been delayed until 4:30-5:00 PM Malaysian time.

Yesterday's was postponed for several hours as well and that's when we got the information about the Iranians on forged passports.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 12:18 AM on March 12, 2014

The first photos from the Vietnamese satellite VNRED-SAT-1 of the area around the island of Tho Chu in the Gulf of Thailand have been analyzed but show no signs of debris from MH370. It can show objects as small as 2.5 m x 2.5 m. It will download another batch of photos tomorrow.

The Chinese are supposed to be using their satellites too but have not heard anything re that.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 12:33 AM on March 12, 2014

It can show objects as small as 2.5 m x 2.5 m. It will download another batch of photos tomorrow.

The thing to remember about satellite imagery is that if it detects a 2.5m x 2.5m object, that object will occupy a single pixel and won't be identifiable, so with a satellite of that resolution you'd be hoping to see a fairly significant debris collection. The higher resolution the satellite (you'd really be hoping for something with sub-meter resolution), the smaller its field of view, and the less frequently it passes over a given spot on the Earth. So unfortunately, it's not as simple as getting the high-resolution satellites that take the kind of imagery you see on Google Earth to take images of the whole ocean in the area. It might be weeks before they swing past again.
posted by Jimbob at 12:45 AM on March 12, 2014 [2 favorites]

Now the Malaysian air force chief is denying that the plane was tracked heading to the west. See my previous comment about the Keystone Kops.
posted by Justinian at 2:15 AM on March 12, 2014

Yeah I have to say, I'm a bit weary of Malaysian authorities insinuating something, then 12 hours later vigourously denying they ever said it.
posted by Jimbob at 2:54 AM on March 12, 2014

Tho to be fair, it's clear nobody has any idea what the fuck has gone on, and the press conferences seem to be forcing them to say *something*.
posted by Jimbob at 3:01 AM on March 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

That thing I said this morning? Yeah, I never said it.
posted by Justinian at 3:03 AM on March 12, 2014

Are they denying having said it, or are they just changing their story (i.e. tacitly admitting they were wrong earlier, without actually saying that they were)?
posted by Bugbread at 3:50 AM on March 12, 2014

Sunset, Wednesday.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 4:22 AM on March 12, 2014 [2 favorites]

This is so strange. I normally have no taste for disasters, but this is such a mystery and a tragedy it sits in the back of my head a lot.

I get you on that. I think because at the moment, with no evidence, this does feel more like a movie than real life.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:56 AM on March 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

Are they denying having said it, or are they just changing their story (i.e. tacitly admitting they were wrong earlier, without actually saying that they were)?

I for one had understood that they had detected something but were not sure what but it could have been the plane, having crossed the peninsula. Journalistic echo chamber where everyone reports on any detail until it gets amplified and distorted seemed to have turned it into: "MH370 tracked over peninsula". The radar contact might not even be a plane
posted by Authorized User at 5:29 AM on March 12, 2014

This could very likely be a hoax, but: "Chinese Martyrs' Brigade" claims responsibility for missing jet. To my thinking, it's a bit suspicious that this communique was sent so long after the event. Anything's possible, but as we all know, it's not uncommon for looney tunes and wannabes to take credit for events like this.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:02 AM on March 12, 2014

Fascinating and beautiful map of wind and water currents for this region.

It appears that wreckage from MH370 would be blown onshore eventually unless it passed over Sumatra into the Indian Sea.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 6:10 AM on March 12, 2014 [9 favorites]

it = airplane
posted by TWinbrook8 at 6:44 AM on March 12, 2014

Fascinating and beautiful map of wind and water currents for this region.

Wind. It shows which way the wind is blowing. Adjust it to see the wind at different heights. Yeah, it is beautiful. Calming, too.
posted by Mister Bijou at 6:51 AM on March 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

Click the "earth" logotype in the lower left to change to currents.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 7:25 AM on March 12, 2014

spitbull: OK, this is just weird and I hope it's bullshit, but there is a report the pilot of MAS370 (at the time a copilot) had allowed (and in fact invited) two attractive young women to ride in the cockpit for the entire duration of an earlier international flight, takeoff to touchdown, and that the pilot and a different copilot had tried to get the women to stay with them for a few days in KL.

You'd think they were piloting an Italian cruise ship.
posted by gman at 7:25 AM on March 12, 2014 [3 favorites]

Click the "earth" logotype in the lower left to change to currents.

Whoops! Never noticed that "Ocean" option before. Thanks!
posted by Mister Bijou at 8:01 AM on March 12, 2014

The Chinese Martyrs Brigade thing has been dismissed as a hoax.

Part of the trouble with why the Malaysian authorities sound so inconsistent is because of bad reporting - see that whole debacle about the racial identity of the suspects with stolen passports . What sounds like a retraction is often "oi, I never actually confirmed that".
posted by divabat at 9:05 AM on March 12, 2014

A briefing session is being conducted now in Malaysia for families of passengers aboard mh370. It is currently midnight in Malaysia
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:06 AM on March 12, 2014

This letter, veracity unknown, is supposedly from an eyewitness on an oil rig in Vietnam that saw the plane burn.
posted by divabat at 9:12 AM on March 12, 2014

What that letter is describing sounds like a meteor. The object flew in a straight line, appeared to be on fire, and then the fire went out at a high altitude.
posted by vibrotronica at 9:42 AM on March 12, 2014

Is there a way to find out which astronomical incidents happened within a particular space and time?
posted by divabat at 9:45 AM on March 12, 2014

Let's tie it all together! Could a meteor have hit Flight 370?!?
posted by mazola at 9:51 AM on March 12, 2014 [4 favorites]

Further hypothesizing from (MeFi's own) cstross:

Having eliminated the stolen passport holders (illegal immigrants joining their families) and heard new admissions from the Malaysian military about the track of the airliner, I have a hypothesis about the disappearance of MH370 that doesn't require human malice—just a single terrible coincidence (of the kind that causes most major air disasters).

posted by RedOrGreen at 10:26 AM on March 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

Apparently, there is a satellite pic showing something that Chinese officials believe could be wreckage of MH370. Reported on 8:24pm GMT. Not sure if it's on land or on water.
posted by travelwithcats at 1:30 PM on March 12, 2014

"China's State Administration of Science (SASTIND) reported, they discovered three large objects sized 13x18, 14x19 and 24x22 meters at position N6.7 E105.63 (121nm eastsoutheast of the last known secondary radar position), all three objects within a radius of 20km (11nm) and published the satellite images, taken on Mar 9th 2014 at 11:00 Beijing time (03:00Z), see below. SASTIND stated they are committed to provide further search services to locate flight MH-370."
posted by travelwithcats at 2:01 PM on March 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yeah, a 777 is huge, but nowhere near 24x22 meters.
posted by dominik at 3:52 PM on March 12, 2014

No, that is the right size for a 777: the plane is 63.7m long with 60.9m wings.
posted by Thing at 3:57 PM on March 12, 2014

Yeah, but it is pretty slender. There's a rather useful diagram up on twitter.
posted by dominik at 4:02 PM on March 12, 2014

I, uh, don't think the object in the picture is likely to be a perfect square. The size estimate is just that.
posted by Justinian at 4:03 PM on March 12, 2014

(That said, I will be surprised if this is actually the debris.)
posted by Justinian at 4:06 PM on March 12, 2014

The Chinese are deploying ships and planes to investigate what they found through their satellites. No doubt they have higher resolution images than what they've released to the public. They are confident (maybe even know for sure) that this debris is wreckage from the plane.
posted by crazy with stars at 4:53 PM on March 12, 2014

Apparently on CNN, experts have said the pieces are too big to be the plane.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:59 PM on March 12, 2014

(I think they should still check)
posted by mazola at 5:00 PM on March 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

roomthreeseventeen: "Apparently on CNN, experts have said the pieces are too big to be the plane."

Well, if CNN is reporting that it can't be the plane, then it must be the plane.
posted by Bugbread at 5:01 PM on March 12, 2014 [25 favorites]

Graphic map linking the NZ oil rig worker's info with the Chinese satellite debris photo.

From the Guardian: A spokesman for the US seventh fleet has told CNBC news it is not changing their search area after the release of the [Chinese] satellite images.

The Vietnamese have sent a helicopter today to search these areas on land: lower U Minh forest (Ca Mau) and Upper U Minh forest (Kien Giang).
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:57 PM on March 12, 2014

The Chinese now saying the images are not the plane (Google translated page from Bild.de).
posted by oneirodynia at 9:20 PM on March 12, 2014

From the WSJ:

U.S. investigators suspect that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 stayed in the air for about four hours past the time it reached its last confirmed location, according to two people familiar with the details, raising the possibility that the plane could have flown on for hundreds of additional miles under conditions that remain murky.

Aviation investigators and national security officials believe the plane flew for a total of five hours based on data automatically downloaded and sent to the ground from the Boeing Co. 777's engines as part of a routine maintenance and monitoring program...

The engines' onboard monitoring system is provided by their manufacturer, Rolls-Royce PLC, and it periodically sends bursts of data about engine health, operations and aircraft movements to facilities on the ground.

Rolls-Royce couldn't immediately be reached for comment.

As part of its maintenance agreements, Malaysia Airlines transmits its engine data live to Rolls-Royce for analysis. The system compiles data from inside the 777's two Trent 800 engines and transmits snapshots of performance, as well as the altitude and speed of the jet.

Those snippets are compiled and transmitted in 30-minute increments, said one person familiar with the system.

12:50 AM ET Thursday
posted by TWinbrook8 at 10:19 PM on March 12, 2014 [6 favorites]

It sure would be nice if the Malaysian authorities could get their act together. Their uncoordinated approach and incompetence is responsible for some of the mystery here.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:39 PM on March 12, 2014

How can a large plane fly anywhere for four hours without appearing on a single radar (working transponder or not)?
posted by panaceanot at 10:46 PM on March 12, 2014

Four hours @ 800-900 mph. Flight circumference map, please.
posted by artdrectr at 10:54 PM on March 12, 2014

Yeah I had wondered about the transmitting-data-to-Boeing thing. I figured that since it hadn't been mentioned, the 777 must not have had that capability. Why are we only hearing about this now? Where were engines broadcasting to? What sort of radio frequencies? Where are the ground-based receivers? What's their range? If an aircraft, lost over the ocean and out of contact with all other forms of communication can send real-time data to Boeing, why isn't sending a bit of GPS data too?
posted by Jimbob at 10:55 PM on March 12, 2014 [2 favorites]

artdrectr, circumference map.
posted by Partario at 10:56 PM on March 12, 2014

Four hours @ 800-900 mph. Flight circumference map, please.


Evidence, if you need it, that Wolfram Alpha is useless. My request for "3600km radius around South China Sea" returned a resounding "huh wat?". I might have a look manually in a bit.
posted by Jimbob at 10:59 PM on March 12, 2014

Oh no matter, thanks Partario. I'll send a search party out to Broome, Western Australia...
posted by Jimbob at 11:01 PM on March 12, 2014

Public information re: Australian radar coverage map: Jindalee.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 11:12 PM on March 12, 2014

Would my assumption if that is indeed true, the likely direction was SW? I would think anything over populated areas would have been noted.

And wouldn't a series of pings from the engines provide data, even if crude, as to direction and distance? I would assume (always a danger), that where the ping was received and it's strength would be part of the data. Hell, if I was RR, I would have GPS or something similar built in to the data, just for additional data when trying to debug anomalies.
posted by maxwelton at 11:14 PM on March 12, 2014

Wow, Northern Australia has some good radar coverage.

Anyway, I remember watching something a while ago about the Boeing telemetry - some documentary? I think it was possibly in regards to the Dreamliners, but the story was "At any time in the flight, Boeing Engineers have full access to engine performance, plane location, altitude and velocity, and a range of other data, and can communicate with the pilot and airline staff to solve problems in real time." I guess maybe the 777 missed out on a lot of that cool shit.
posted by Jimbob at 11:20 PM on March 12, 2014

Holy sh...
Thanks Partario.
Jimbob: Please also send parties to Hunan and Guam when you have a minute.
posted by artdrectr at 11:21 PM on March 12, 2014

More like 5 to 600 mph I'd imagine. 800 is more than Mach 1.
posted by Rumple at 11:22 PM on March 12, 2014

Yeah I assumed those figures were supposed to be in kmh.
posted by Jimbob at 11:22 PM on March 12, 2014

This Wall Street Journal article (linked on Guardian liveblog) has more information about the suspected five-hour flight. Interesting statement: At one briefing, according to this person, officials were told investigators are actively pursuing the notion that the plane was diverted "with the intention of using it later for another purpose."
posted by Partario at 11:26 PM on March 12, 2014

Yeah, CIA Director John Brennan popped up Tuesday to say terrorism could not be ruled out. This being after the forged passports angle was put to bed and the Chinese Martyrs discredited.

I thought the timing was interesting. Or maybe suspecting terrorism is just SOP with CIA.

The previously voluble Vietnamese have been very quiet since last night.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 11:47 PM on March 12, 2014

There's nothing saying that the terrorists were one of the legit passengers, or that there aren't any other agendas.

(That said I am highly skeptical of the terrorism angle and all speculation about it comes off as a little too xenophobic for my comfort.)
posted by divabat at 11:56 PM on March 12, 2014

Speculation about the Iranian dudes with the fake passports specifically or terrorism in general? I don't see why speculation about terrorism is inherently xenophobic although it ends up that way in practice far too often.

I wish somebody would confirm with certainty whether the plane was flying for hours after the transponders went offline. Either it was picked up on radar or it wasn't. If it wasn't, we are still stuck with "we have no idea whatsoever what happened". If it was we're really down to two theories. One, some sort of catastrophic failure which resulted in loss of electrical power to the transponders and rapid decompression which rendered the flight crew unconscious... but did not cause the plane to crash rapidly. Or two, some kind of hijacking situation.

It's hard to come up with other plausible scenarios where the transponders go offline but the plane flies around for 4-5 hours anyway.
posted by Justinian at 12:02 AM on March 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yeah, "something going bad with a thing involving brown people" does not equal terrorism without material evidence. And material evidence is kind of the modus operandi of terrorists.
posted by Jimbob at 12:03 AM on March 13, 2014

What I mean is that a lot of the "IT MUST BE TERRORISTS!" speculation comes about (from what I've seen anyway) in the form of "Muslims flew the plane / bought fake tickets! MUST BE TERRORISTS! Most terrorists as MUSLIM! So MUSLIM TERRORISTS!". Seriously, stuff as facile as that.
posted by divabat at 12:07 AM on March 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

(When I called out someone on Twitter about it he was all "There was Muslims on the flight. Most terrorists as Muslim. You connect the dots." And he's far from the only one saying this.)
posted by divabat at 12:08 AM on March 13, 2014

Hah. Yeah, that's pretty awful.
posted by Justinian at 12:08 AM on March 13, 2014

divabat: "(When I called out someone on Twitter about it he was all "There was Muslims on the flight. Most terrorists as Muslim. You connect the dots." And he's far from the only one saying this.)"

I can't decide which rejoinder I'd go with.
A) "There was men on the flight. Most terrorists is men. You connect the dots."
B) "There was Muslims on the flight. Most Muslims is not terrorists. You connect the dots."
posted by Bugbread at 12:15 AM on March 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

When I called out someone on Twitter about it he was all "There was Muslims on the flight. Most terrorists as Muslim. You connect the dots." And he's far from the only one saying this.

As a frequent visitor to Malaysia, and passenger on their airlines (mostly Air Asia X) this shit pisses me off.
posted by Jimbob at 12:26 AM on March 13, 2014

My response to "ZOMG MUSLIMS!"
posted by divabat at 12:30 AM on March 13, 2014 [2 favorites]

"You tweet about Muslim terrorists. Most people who tweet about Muslim terrorists are racist assholes. You connect the dots."
posted by Justinian at 12:30 AM on March 13, 2014 [15 favorites]

Jimbob: "Anyway, I remember watching something a while ago about the Boeing telemetry - some documentary? I think it was possibly in regards to the Dreamliners, but the story was "At any time in the flight, Boeing Engineers have full access to engine performance, plane location, altitude and velocity, and a range of other data, and can communicate with the pilot and airline staff to solve problems in real time." I guess maybe the 777 missed out on a lot of that cool shit."

Have full access =/= monitoring anytime a plane is in the air. IE: MH370 could have the ability to communicate with Boeing but not actually be using what is essentially a trouble shooting tool during the mystery period.
posted by Mitheral at 1:25 AM on March 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

There's no reason to assume that an Iranian travelling on a stolen passport has plans to commit any sort of crime, but I think given that a plane has disappeared, you should probably look at the guys on the plane that weren't supposed to be on the plane.
posted by empath at 2:55 AM on March 13, 2014

I think given that a plane has disappeared, you should probably look at the guys on the plane that weren't supposed to be on the plane.

And they did and the guy's now-distressed mother was waiting at an airport in Frankfurt for him.
posted by Jimbob at 3:01 AM on March 13, 2014 [5 favorites]

The 5:30 PM press conference is in progress now. Defense Minister/Acting Transport Minister Hussein has said the WSJ report re MH370 flying for another 4 hours is inaccurate. They are denying that RR or Boeing received data after initial contact was lost with the plane at 1:07 AM.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 3:07 AM on March 13, 2014

There's no reason to assume that an Iranian travelling on a stolen passport has plans to commit any sort of crime

I disagree; there's plenty of reason to assume an Iranian travelling on a stolen passport has plans to commit a number of crimes. It's just that destroying an airplane isn't one of them. But stuff like visa fraud is a slam dunk.
posted by Justinian at 3:21 AM on March 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

The 5:30 PM press conference is in progress now. Defense Minister/Acting Transport Minister Hussein has said the WSJ report re MH370 flying for another 4 hours is inaccurate.

Ugh, so we're back to square one; nobody has a clue what happened, when, or where.
posted by Justinian at 3:22 AM on March 13, 2014

We're back to square one, and the WSJ is potentially as credible as a reddit comment.

Great.
posted by panaceanot at 3:39 AM on March 13, 2014

Also from the WSJ streaming coverage (time-stamped 5 hrs ago):

Indonesia hasn’t received a request from Malaysia for radar records in connection with missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, said Iskandar Sitompul, spokesman for the country’s armed forces.

Sunset, Thursday.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 4:17 AM on March 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

The Malaysian government is now saying that the release of those Chinese satellite images was a mistake. Seems like there's a lot of that going around.

If it now turns out the WSJ's reporting is correct and the Malaysian denials about the 4 hour thing are incorrect...
posted by Justinian at 4:30 AM on March 13, 2014

...large unidentified cylindrical object entering airspace means threat, and deal with terminally? Hush-money for Malay officials?

Don't mind me... I need to go chill on that grassy knoll over there >
posted by panaceanot at 5:08 AM on March 13, 2014

New theory: the flight never existed and this is a most curious case of mass hysteria. Fits all known facts, especially why the authorities are both laughably incompetent and change their minds daily.

Seriously though, the investigation would be better served if the countries and authorities involved just stopped, shut up, and reflected for a few days. They're making TEPCO look good.
posted by Thing at 5:40 AM on March 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

From Irrawaddy.org:

RANGOON — The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has expanded to Burmese airspace, according to Burma’s Department of Civil Aviation (DCA).

Tin Naing Tun, director general of the department, said the DCA granted permission for Malaysian authorities to search over Burmese airspace for seven days, beginning Wednesday [March 12]...

And now Malaysia has asked for radar data from Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 5:50 AM on March 13, 2014

As part of its maintenance agreements, Malaysia Airlines transmits its engine data live to Rolls-Royce for analysis. The system compiles data from inside the 777's two Trent 800 engines and transmits snapshots of performance, as well as the altitude and speed of the jet.

A few notes:

- This is primarily a Rolls-Royce thing, the data does not go to Boeing. It's a bunch of engine details, and since Boeing neither manufactures nor supports the engines, they don't have much of a part. The reason RR does this is because they frequently own the engines even when they're hanging on the airliner, and the airline pays RR for "power by the hour". This lets the airline focus on airline-things rather than detailed engine-things, and leaves the engines to the experts. RR tends to do this more than GE or PW.

- The engine data is transmitted via ACARS, which usually goes over VHF radio when possible (over land), but can also go over shortwave (over the ocean). There might be a satcom link too. This is where the first information about AF447 came from, prior to finding the black boxes. The 777 definitely has all this, as do almost all modern airliners. Exactly what sort of transmissions are enabled varies by operator.

- Most importantly: if someone is sitting on ACARS transmissions that were sent hours after the last radar contact, holy shit, that's a huge huge deal and needs to be made public right now.
posted by kiltedtaco at 5:58 AM on March 13, 2014 [12 favorites]

Aviation Herald:

On Mar 13th 2014 afternoon Malaysia's Transport Minister said in a televised press conference, that the last ACARS transmission was received from the aircraft at 01:07L (17:07Z), there were no later transmissions via ACARS (editorial note: which effectively states a report by a single US "news" paper of the engines monitoring recording information via ACARS for 4 more hours is untrue), the last transmission received from the aircraft indicated all systems were operating normally. Boeing and NTSB confirmed the last data transmission received from the aircraft was at 01:07L.

posted by kiltedtaco at 6:00 AM on March 13, 2014

How often is the engine data transmitted? I've read anything between 3x per flight - at take-off, reaching altitude and landing - to every 30 min.
posted by travelwithcats at 6:03 AM on March 13, 2014

Ohfercrissakes.

WSJ streaming:

Malaysian officials said missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 could have kept flying for several hours, but said they had received no data to indicate the flight remained airborne for an extended time.

[my ital]

No, what Acting Minister of Transport Hussein said was:

I would like to refer to news reports suggesting that the aircraft may have been flying for some time after the last contact. Those reports are inaccurate.

It's a war of words now. Neither Boeing nor RR will make a statement regarding the data although Hussein stated: "Since today’s media reports MAS has asked Rolls-Royce and Boeing specifically about the data. As far as Rolls-Royce and Boeing are concerned those reports are inaccurate."

So some possible equivocating there but for the WSJ to spin it like that...
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:13 AM on March 13, 2014

editorial note: which effectively states a report by a single US "news" paper of the engines monitoring recording information via ACARS for 4 more hours is untrue

Great Moments in Scare Quotes.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:13 AM on March 13, 2014 [2 favorites]

"Great" Moments...
posted by Bugbread at 8:26 AM on March 13, 2014 [4 favorites]

I know the ocean is a big place, and this airplane could have reached a quarter of the globe if it kept flying, but wow. This search process is looking more and more like an embarrassing, cringe-inducing, totally un-funny bumbling-detective "comedy".

Why even make statements to the press and then retract and un-retract them? Yes, 24-hour news cycle and all that - just say you're working on it and shut up until you have something solid...
posted by RedOrGreen at 8:32 AM on March 13, 2014

US Officials Have 'Indication' Malaysia Airline Crashed into Indian Ocean
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:37 AM on March 13, 2014

This search process is looking more and more like an embarrassing, cringe-inducing, totally un-funny bumbling-detective "comedy".

More like the PR for this search process has been an un-funny comedy.
posted by benbenson at 8:38 AM on March 13, 2014

I went to infowars for the first time in months.

1.) Their Malaysia airplane story so far is entirely reasonable.

2.) Jones' in-studio guest today is John McAfee! I think I will tune in.
posted by bukvich at 8:43 AM on March 13, 2014

Why even make statements to the press and then retract and un-retract them?

with the exception of zahid hamidi, the minister for home affairs, who really needs to learn to stop talking out of his arse, it's been my impression that it's been more of a firefighting exercise by the lead SAR agency in trying to provide correct information in the face of constant speculation, terrible media reporting (misunderstanding public statements, printing and republishing unverified rumours) and unverified/unauthorised sources chiming in (see the honourable minister above).
posted by cendawanita at 8:52 AM on March 13, 2014 [2 favorites]

*Malaysia to Verify Report on Flight 370 in Indian Ocean w/ U.S. BFW 16:38
*Malaysia Jet Said to Fly West as Probe Refocuses on Air Piracy BN 16:29
*MALAYSIA CIVIL AVIATION CHIEF AZHARUDDIN COMMENTED TO BLOOMB... BN 16:29
*MALAYSIA CIVIL AIR CHIEF SAYS HE HEARD OF U.S. CLAIM VIA REPORT BN 16:28
*MALAYSIA: PROTOCOL IS FOR IT TO BE TOLD OF DEVTS BEFORE MEDIA BN 16:28
*MALAYSIA TO VERIFY ABC REPORT ON FLIGHT 370 WITH U.S. TEAMS BN 16:27
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:43 AM on March 13, 2014

Mod note: Comment removed - maybe not a great time to make lulzy jokes about an ongoing likely tragedy.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:25 AM on March 13, 2014 [7 favorites]

Malaysia Flight: Satellite 'Received Signal'
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:29 AM on March 13, 2014

Now people are contacting me telling me HAARP is involved.
posted by divabat at 11:29 AM on March 13, 2014 [2 favorites]

I'm not sure how familiar you are with HAARP but this line from the Wikipeida article is worth mentioning

Computer scientist David Naiditch characterizes HAARP as "a magnet for conspiracy theorists", saying that HAARP attracts their attention because "its purpose seems deeply mysterious to the scientifically uninformed".

Quote from this article.
posted by jessamyn at 11:32 AM on March 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm trying to find more information - the problem with that eSkeptic article is that it's basically copy&paste from the HAARP website, and the other cite in the Wiki article (Popular Science) only has two lines of "experts say no".

For what it's worth, it's closed.
posted by divabat at 11:36 AM on March 13, 2014

Flight MH370 Search from Space: shows satellite imagery footprints on a map.
posted by Nelson at 12:07 PM on March 13, 2014 [2 favorites]

Oh, boy. Once the HAARP-ies start dipping their oars in, you know the real nutjobbery is about to commence.
posted by Atom Eyes at 12:32 PM on March 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

If we're talking about a scenario where everyone on board the plane was incapacitated fairly quickly, but the plane kept flying until it ran out of fuel, that suggests a few possibilities:

1. The slow decompression scenario, where the crew doesn't realize what's happening until it's too late, tries to turn back, and then passes out before they can complete the turn. Plane full of dead people flies for thousands of miles until it crashes into the ocean. This scenario has the advantage of having actually happened before, only not on this scale.

2. Pilots incapacitated, reinforced cockpit door holds despite all attempts by passengers and crew to force it, plane runs out of fuel. What could incapacitate the pilots like that? The passengers and crew would have several hours to work on the door. Could the cockpit door hold up that long? Would there be a way the crew could try to communicate with the outside world that would be accessible from outside the cockpit?

3. Terrorism. Could a shoe bomber, for example, blow a big enough hole in the hull to decompress the cabin and kill the crew before they could communicate? How much nerve gas would it take to kill everyone on board?

4. Theft. Hijackers quickly take over the plane, fly it to an out-of-the-way airstrip, land, then use their new 777 for nefarious purposes. There are many problems with this scenario. You'd have to control the passengers for a long time to get where you needed to go, and then make provision for them once you've landed. Maybe it would be easier to just kill them in the air. Can you do that without killing yourself, too? How do you navigate to the secret airfield undetected? How do you hide an airfield big enough land a 777 from satellites? How do you hide a 777 once it's on the ground? Remember, if this airliner is going to be of use to you in the future, you'll have to take off again. That implies a lot of support equipment, which only makes the stealth problem harder. This is Bond supervillain stuff. It would require months, if not years, of preparation with plenty of opportunities to be discovered along the way as you hew the runway out of the jungle and try to buy and get the support equipment in place. The only point in the favor of this scenario is that there is a lot of potentially usable land within 2,000 miles of the plane's last known location.
posted by vibrotronica at 12:35 PM on March 13, 2014 [2 favorites]

This is Bond supervillain stuff. It would require months, if not years, of preparation

Not to mention money. I bet you could buy a failed airline (through an indecipherable string of holding companies) with some 777 leases on the books for lot less money.
posted by maxwelton at 1:25 PM on March 13, 2014 [13 favorites]

Slow decompression seems incredibly unlikely. The pilots would notice (and almost certainly be aware of the previous accident involving a 737 to ignore any alarms to that effect, or ignore the automatic deployment of oxygen masks).

WaPo is also reporting the 4 hour thing. No word on where that data came from (so.... most likely some military or intelligence program that nobody wants to talk about in any detail).
posted by schmod at 1:28 PM on March 13, 2014

What a fiasco. It would be funny if it weren't about such a tragedy. So much incompetence going on.
posted by Justinian at 2:30 PM on March 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

From reading the helios 552 investigation it seems the crew have a emergency access code to open the flight deck door:

'From the sounds recorded on the CVR,
however, the Board could ascertain that this cabin attendant entered the cockpit using the
emergency access code to open a locked cockpit door.'
posted by pixie at 2:43 PM on March 13, 2014

Frankly, I am getting very suspicious of all the news reports quoting unnamed "officials". There is no way for us to evaluate the reliability of these comments and many times it seems journalists have misunderstood the nature of these comments. If these "officials" want to comment, why not make actual official comments on the record. It's notable that all the official statements by the Malaysians, the party responsible for communication as per ICAO protocol has been fairly straightforward and consistent, but very very sparse due to lack of information to disseminate.
posted by Authorized User at 2:46 PM on March 13, 2014 [2 favorites]

Another possibility: Carbon monoxide poisoning. I don't know any possible sources of carbon monoxide on an airplane, but it seems like there should be some. Auxiliary power units, maybe?
posted by vibrotronica at 3:04 PM on March 13, 2014

I have pity on the Malaysian authorities at this point. They don't have anything conclusive to say and various folks inside and outside their government are anonymously leaking left and right. Leakers always have an agenda, usually to get some fact out into the public and sometimes just to inflate their own egos. I wish reporters were more skeptical before repeating what they hear.

Rolls Royce is in an awkward position here. They may have data, but I've got to believe they'd wait on Malaysian Airlines' permission to say anything. Not just to save them embarrassment but also because this lost plane will no doubt end up in a zillion lawsuits. The ACARS system is essential to Rolls' jet engine business; the last thing they want to do is get into conflict with paying customers on who they share ACARS data with. Let's hope the search and rescue teams are privy to relevant information, though.

I'm more than a little curious about what the various military radars know. That part of SE Asia is pretty well armed and watches their airspace and borders. Even with all transmitters turned off, strange aircraft should be identifiable. I feel certain if the plane got anywhere near China's ADIZ it would not go unnoticed, less certain of Vietnam. Again, I hope the search teams at least have access to the relevant data.
posted by Nelson at 3:06 PM on March 13, 2014 [3 favorites]

US investigators clearly think the Malaysians are out to lunch because they are moving ships to the Indian Ocean.
posted by Justinian at 3:29 PM on March 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

Ok, I'm so confused. I'm watching ABC's nightly news, and they're reporting that the plane flew for four hours and that it appears that whatever happened was deliberate. They're saying hijacking or pilot suicide. What. The. Fuck.? Is that the way it's being reported elsewhere? Or am I just an idiot for watching US network news?
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 3:37 PM on March 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

US investigators clearly think the Malaysians are out to lunch because they are moving ships to the Indian Ocean.

US government clearly used HAARP to make plane disappear in order to have an excuse to move their ships to Indian Ocean ready to stage an attack on Christmas Island WAKE UP SHEEPLE
posted by Jimbob at 3:39 PM on March 13, 2014 [4 favorites]

Is that the way it's being reported elsewhere? Or am I just an idiot for watching US network news?

All sorts of stuff is being reported all over the place, based on tiny shreds of evidence and huge assumptions. It's not just US network news, but I imagine they're probably one of the worst.
posted by Jimbob at 3:40 PM on March 13, 2014

Yeah, the news reporting is highly inconsistent. (And not just the US too, ArbitraryAndCapricious - eponysterial, btw). No wonder people think the authorities are incompetent - there's too many layers of abstraction and the need for breaking news is getting in the way of actual fact-checking and verification.

The sad thing is that Malaysia Airlines has been solidly focusing on the families and keeping info about plane whereabouts to an absolute minimum, yet all of the media mismanagement is reflecting badly on them.
posted by divabat at 3:50 PM on March 13, 2014 [2 favorites]

Re: deliberate act:
This ABC report quotes a US source saying the two communication signals were shut off at different times, which the source says indicated a deliberate action rather than a single accidental cause:

Two U.S. officials tell ABC News the U.S. believes that the shutdown of two communication systems happened separately on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. One source said this indicates the plane did not come out of the sky because of a catastrophic failure. The data reporting system, they believe, was shut down at 1:07 a.m. The transponder -- which transmits location and altitude -- shut down at 1:21 a.m. This indicates it may well have been a deliberate act, ABC News aviation consultant John Nance said. U.S. investigators told ABC News that the two modes of communication were "systematically shut down." That means the U.S. team "is convinced that there was manual intervention," a source said, which means it was likely not an accident or catastrophic malfunction that took the plane out of the sky.

Re: decompression:
In this Guardian article, Boeing says this particular plane did not have the satellite transmitter thing that was being mentioned as a possible cause of decompression:

Boeing did state that an airworthiness directive about possible fuselage cracks issued by US authorities in November regarding 777s, which had been linked in some theories to flight MH370, did not apply as the missing plane did not have the specific antenna installed.

posted by LobsterMitten at 3:58 PM on March 13, 2014

Mmm. I'm not sure I buy that 14 minutes apart means human intervention, as opposed to a progressive problem. If they were a minute or two apart, sure, but if you are Bad Person who had taken over the plane and is turning off the various beacons, it seems rather odd to turn off data reporting and then wait around for 14 minutes to turn off the transponder. And I'd really expect them to turn off the transponder first, which is the most obvious and most heavily tracked of the beacons.
posted by tavella at 4:07 PM on March 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

708am in Malaysia so I expect gov officials there will be stating the ABC report is without merit any minute.
posted by mlis at 4:08 PM on March 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

Agreed about the progressive problem, tavella. It's weird to me that their expert doesn't see it that way.

And re: the Boeing/Rolls Royce data, from this AP report (via Guardian liveblog):

The official said the Boeing 777-200 wasn’t transmitting data to the satellite, but sending out a signal to establish contact. Boeing offers a satellite service that can receive a stream of data during flight on how the aircraft is functioning. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, said Malaysia Airlines didn’t subscribe to that service, but the system was automatically pinging the satellite anyway. The continuing pings led searchers to believe the plane could have flown more than 1,000 miles beyond its last confirmed sighting on radar, the official said. The plane had enough fuel to fly about four more hours, he said. Messages involving a different data service also were received from the airliner for a short time after the plane's transponder — a device used to identify the plane to radar — went silent, the official said.

So it sounds like, the plane sent the engine-data report twice while it was still in contact. Then ceased to send that data report, but still was pinging the satellite for (several hours?), and that's where the "it was still in the air for several hours afterward" is coming from? And the Malaysians have said they asked Rolls Royce and Boeing, and they said there hadn't been more engine data reports... but maybe RR and B don't have access to the record of the satellite as to who pinged it? Maybe that ping information only became available for whatever reason once the US govt got involved?
posted by LobsterMitten at 4:20 PM on March 13, 2014

Is the fact that ACARS stopped transmitting notable at all? I thought that the system only sent periodic transmissions?

The more notable thing would be if the plane disappeared from radar significantly earlier or later than the transponder stopped transmitting.

The seeming inability to establish a timeline is frustrating.
posted by schmod at 4:29 PM on March 13, 2014

Here's a new theory.

The idea is that there was slow decompression caused by a non-catastropic crack in the skin of the jet, not noticed by the pilots, who didn't put on oxygen masks and then blacked out from hypoxia.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 4:32 PM on March 13, 2014

That's not a new theory and it's already been mostly debunked since the plane in question was not carrying the satellite equipment in the FAA directive.
posted by Justinian at 4:34 PM on March 13, 2014

I mean, I can see why they are thinking human intervention, just because it starts to be hard to figure out a limited sequence of failures that result in first the data reporting system failing, and then the transponder, and the pilots being incapacitated or at least unable to control the plane at all, and yet it is in good enough shape to keep flying for hours. Various subgroups of those, but the whole sequence starts to look weird. But I don't think the 14 minutes is evidence for, and even kinda evidence against.

Though I wonder -- does this pinging system have any location data? And what powers it? I.e., is there any possibility that it was pinging from the wreckage from some standalone power source?
posted by tavella at 5:05 PM on March 13, 2014

All I can say is I feel pretty vindicated with regard to my first comment in this thread about the GPS squawker.
posted by Justinian at 5:11 PM on March 13, 2014

Also which NSAID should I take for the ache from patting myself on the back so hard?
posted by Justinian at 5:12 PM on March 13, 2014 [3 favorites]

Missing Malaysia Flight Left Data Trail
posted by mlis at 5:14 PM on March 13, 2014 [2 favorites]

Just from curiosity, does any airplane-knowledgable person know what it takes to manually disable the transponder and the communication system (whatever piece was turned off)? Is it easy or hard?
posted by LobsterMitten at 5:30 PM on March 13, 2014

I just looked this up on CNN. Yes it is possible to turn it off; it is a switch in the cockpit and sometimes it is necessary for pilots to briefly turn it off in flight. But not this flight.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 5:40 PM on March 13, 2014

I suppose it's possible they turned it off by accident while suffering from hypoxia and working through a decompression checklist they may have been unfamiliar with.
posted by Golden Eternity at 7:33 PM on March 13, 2014

Wait, what?

Communication satellites received intermittent data "pings" from a missing Malaysia Airlines jet, giving the plane's location, speed and altitude for at least five hours after it disappeared from civilian radar screens, people briefed on the investigation said Thursday.

WSJ streaming

(on preview) oh sorry mlis
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:39 PM on March 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

How long can the search for the aircraft go on with an expectation of actually finding recognizable debris? I imagine debris becomes increasingly difficult to spot, as more wreckage sinks or spreads out, but I don't know that intuition is a useful guide for this sort of thing.
posted by ddbeck at 7:47 PM on March 13, 2014

THE POLITICAL MYSTERY OF MALAYSIA FLIGHT 370
posted by mlis at 8:01 PM on March 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

My pet theory is that the newly-found "pings" were actually detected by the NSA -- after all, one of their main purposes is to monitor radio transmissions. They could have recorded the signal from their own satellites or even highly sensitive ground stations. Then the spooks had to do the "parallel construction" thing and come up with a plausible way that civilians could have gotten the same information. That would explain why everyone denied that ACARS data existed right up until today when everyone started confirming it.
posted by miyabo at 8:17 PM on March 13, 2014 [3 favorites]

Also, some more fodder for conspiracy theorists: a $100 SPOT satellite locator beacon could have prevented this entire search, since they transmit every 10 minutes and work almost everywhere in the world. But SPOT has been having technical problems in Southeast Asia for the past few weeks: link
posted by miyabo at 8:26 PM on March 13, 2014

My pet theory is that a chain of unlikely events occurred in a big, chaotic, and still largely untamed world.
posted by mazola at 8:30 PM on March 13, 2014 [17 favorites]

That's already been debunked.
posted by Golden Eternity at 8:33 PM on March 13, 2014 [10 favorites]

Finally, one horrifying possibility: we may never know what happened, since the black box only records the last hour or two before a crash, and there was at least 4 hours between the precipitating event and the crash itself in this case. If there was a struggle in the cockpit, it probably isn't on the cockpit voice recorder anymore; if there was a mechanical failure, the signals leading up to it are probably lost.
posted by miyabo at 8:34 PM on March 13, 2014

Also, some more fodder for conspiracy theorists: a $100 SPOT satellite locator beacon could have prevented this entire search

I agree that such devices sound extremely sensible and obvious, others have pointed out at the top of this thread that things that cost $100 for civilian usage end up costing $10,000 once you put them on a plane, due to the strict requirements in regards to electrical systems and radio transmissions.
posted by Jimbob at 8:37 PM on March 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

One other thing (finally): Apparently international flights have to have an emergency locator transmitter that signals the SARSAT system on 406 MHz. It's supposed to be installed in the airplane tail and activate automatically on contact with water. Does anyone know why it wouldn't have worked in this case? Or why it didn't work on Air France 447?
posted by miyabo at 8:46 PM on March 13, 2014

since the black box only records the last hour or two before a crash

Oh hey, I looked that up this morning because that was my impression too but according to the folks at Wikipedia, it has two aspects: a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder. True, the voice recorder could be between 30 minutes to 2 hours but the data recorder can record 17-25 hours on a loop.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:56 PM on March 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

Good podcast episode about black boxes Stuff you should know - How black boxes work.
posted by panaceanot at 9:01 PM on March 13, 2014

Breaking: Investigators now believe that television coverage of a missing plane could continue for weeks with no new data.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 9:19 PM on March 13, 2014 [13 favorites]

Two points from the Guardian's liveblog-
-The transponder will only respond if it's (in-effect) queried by a ground station, so if it were out of range of a ground station it wouldn't be surprising that it was silent. (According to their reporter Warren Murray.)

-NBC reports that US infrared-detecting satellites didn't detect anything (heat signature) that would suggest an explosion around the time the plane lost contact "or in the hours immediately afterward". (That also suggests to me that if the plane was shot down, the US would have detected the missile launch/strike, so, a point against that theory.)
posted by LobsterMitten at 9:55 PM on March 13, 2014

There's no way terrorists have the kind of hardware it would require to shoot down a passenger jet hundreds of miles over open ocean and at cruise altitude anyway. That's serious military hardware.
posted by Justinian at 10:12 PM on March 13, 2014

No, I thought there had been some (fringe) speculation about whether some regional military had (perhaps accidentally or due to a misunderstanding, eg its communications were dead so it couldn't identify itself) shot it down.
posted by LobsterMitten at 10:15 PM on March 13, 2014

There's been speculation about everything possible (and impossible) but 90% of the speculation doesn't fit any variation of reality, and the remain 10% is confusing and contradictory.
posted by Jimbob at 11:33 PM on March 13, 2014 [2 favorites]

I find it strange that this engine data is just coming out now. The organization in charge of maintaining and operating the system has staff who heard about the disappearance and immediately checked the relevant logs and found this data, out of curiosity if not policy. That's just how the types of people who do these sorts of things for a living think, the native human impulse to do so aside.

It's not so strange only we're just now hearing of it in the media but why is it is just now influencing the search itself? I have no idea what it means, but this situation is weird.
posted by feloniousmonk at 1:11 AM on March 14, 2014

Maybe they've been using it as part of their SAR efforts for a while but are only allowed to talk about it publicly today?
posted by divabat at 1:19 AM on March 14, 2014

"EXCLUSIVE: Radar data suggests missing Malaysia plane flown deliberately toward Andamans"
posted by travelwithcats at 1:44 AM on March 14, 2014

Interesting development, especially the detail regarding the plane flying between navigational waypoints. However, this article suffers from sources "close to the investigation" who refuse to be named...
posted by Jimbob at 2:30 AM on March 14, 2014

LINK Press conference now live
posted by travelwithcats at 2:34 AM on March 14, 2014

It definitely sounds like the focus of the investigation is moving towards hijacking or other human-centric causes.
posted by Justinian at 2:52 AM on March 14, 2014

"Why have you not searched the pilot's home?"

"I'll have to get back to you on that."
posted by TWinbrook8 at 3:03 AM on March 14, 2014

Possible flight path plotted according to data from military radars
posted by travelwithcats at 3:48 AM on March 14, 2014

8pm in that part of the world now, a full week after the flight went missing.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:57 AM on March 14, 2014

All I can say is I feel pretty vindicated with regard to my first comment in this thread about the GPS squawker.

Ugh, no. I've been letting this go for now, but since you keep bringing it up, there's a bunch of reasons why this sounds so great now but doesn't actually have any serious relevance. The biggest issue is that you're comparing an idealized perfect "GPS pinging" device to what has been a complete mess of misinformation and confusion both from the relevant authorities and from news services. Of course the idealized position reporter will look better by comparison. But two points 1) why would that actually behave any better than, say, radar, which requires zero hardware on board the aircraft to work, and 2) why would the information from this device not be similarly corrupted by this mess of a process by which the authorities have been releasing and then de-releasing and then leaking and then denying information about the position reports that do exist. Seriously, there is someone who the newspapers are willing to use as a source who claims the plane flew for hours after loss of contact; how is a "GPS pinger" not going to be embroiled in the same clusterfuck? Between primary radar, secondary radar and ACARS there is already plenty of position reporting for this aircraft, why would this hypothetical device be any more reliable?

BTW there's nothing in the aircraft that cannot be turned off—period. Even the CVR and the FDR have circuit breakers; there is zero hardware that you will be able to certify to fly on a plane that is always-on. So if communication was lost intentionally, same result. Catastrophic electrical failure, same result. Breakup of the airframe, same result. We don't have a damn clue which of these scenarios actually happened, so it's awfully premature to feel vindicated that your hypothetical solution would actually solve a problem when we don't know what that problem is yet.

This situation is overall ridiculous and has nothing to do with a lack of hardware on the plane.
posted by kiltedtaco at 5:47 AM on March 14, 2014 [10 favorites]

More generally: what the hell is with these reports of transmissions after 01:07L. Boeing, RR, and the NTSB all say there were no transmissions after 01:07. This is completely crazy if some unnamed source has information that the NTSB doesn't, or it's outrageously reprehensible for the news outlets to be reporting this if it's not true. If you're going to directly contradict the NTSB on an event that killed 239 people, you better have a damn good reason.
posted by kiltedtaco at 6:02 AM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

kiltedtaco,
the WSJ mixed it up, it was not the engine that sent out data. The WSJ published a correction, it says: "The investigators believe the plane flew for a total of up to five hours, according to these people, based on analysis of signals sent by the Boeing 777's satellite-communication link designed to automatically transmit the status of certain onboard systems to the ground." (emphasis mine)
And further: "[...] the link operated in a kind of standby mode and sought to establish contact with a satellite or satellites. These transmissions did not include data, they said, but the periodic contacts indicate to investigators that the plane was still intact and believed to be flying."
And even further: "An earlier version of this article and an accompanying graphic incorrectly said investigators based their suspicions on signals from monitoring systems embedded in the plane's Rolls-Royce PLC engines and described that process."

There are some pings of data - might be just passive - that were picked up by military radars along the coast. Detailed map of radar pings with corresponding flight path. It's confusing and unclear if this are the transmissions WSJ was talking about or some additional contact.
posted by travelwithcats at 6:22 AM on March 14, 2014

They are splitting hairs -- there were no successful ACARS transmissions, but there were connections to the satellite that is used to send ACARS transmissions. So Boeing, Rolls Royce, and the airline never got a normal ACARS message through on their networks, but the satellite operator can see the "pings."

I don't think the press releases are contradictory, just incomplete.

The satellite operator in this case is Inmarsat but we haven't heard anything directly from them.
posted by miyabo at 6:49 AM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

Inmarsat has released a statement:

14 March 2014: Inmarsat has issued the following statement regarding Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Routine, automated signals were registered on the Inmarsat network from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 during its flight from Kuala Lumpur.

This information was provided to our partner SITA, which in turn has shared it with Malaysia Airlines.

For further information, please contact Malaysia Airlines.

posted by devinemissk at 7:00 AM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

Reuters and Guardian are reporting that India is searching the Andaman Islands using heat-seeking devices on planes and helicopters. They would also search in a new area along the Chennai coast in the Bay of Bengal.
posted by travelwithcats at 7:13 AM on March 14, 2014

So theft is back on the table?
posted by vibrotronica at 7:37 AM on March 14, 2014

The latest from James Fallows, a reporter who is also a pilot: "explosion now is much less likely; deliberate destruction, by crew or attackers, more so"
posted by exogenous at 7:45 AM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

So if communication was lost intentionally, same result. Catastrophic electrical failure, same result. Breakup of the airframe, same result. We don't have a damn clue which of these scenarios actually happened, so it's awfully premature to feel vindicated that your hypothetical solution would actually solve a problem when we don't know what that problem is yet.

Two separate communications systems were turned off at different times, the transponder and the radio. The sat com stayed on a while too. This indicates no catastrophic breakup killing the electrical system all at once.
posted by Ironmouth at 8:47 AM on March 14, 2014

I just wanted to thank everybody for their intelligent contributions to this thread because if not for this, I would be going down the rabbit hole of every single crackpot theory rather than just checking this daily. You are truly putting the "Filter" in MetaFilter in the best possible way.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 8:48 AM on March 14, 2014 [32 favorites]

This indicates no catastrophic breakup killing the electrical system all at once.

Not really, though. The "event" could have been progressive, and the transponders were not turned off, but failed as the event got worse.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:51 AM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

The available data on this is totally contradictory, so I think it's way too early to start ruling out scenarios. The ABC report says that (presumably) ACARS was turned off at 1:07L, and the transponder turned off at 1:21L, but every other report has said that radar contact was lost at 1:07L. There's also an ambiguity with turning ACARS off; did it transmit a signal indicating it was being turned off, or are they just reporting the time of the last transmission, after which it could have remained on and just not transmitting. And as I've said before, there is very little confirmation of the satcom reports and many sources denying that anything was received after 1:07L.
posted by kiltedtaco at 9:00 AM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

One other thing (finally): Apparently international flights have to have an emergency locator transmitter that signals the SARSAT system on 406 MHz. It's supposed to be installed in the airplane tail and activate automatically on contact with water. Does anyone know why it wouldn't have worked in this case? Or why it didn't work on Air France 447?

I believe that the Air France flight had something like that but because it crashed in such deep water, it required nuclear submarines and other specialised submersibles to locate the signal.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 9:04 AM on March 14, 2014

It is a very short timeline of known events, yes.
posted by mazola at 9:11 AM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

So essentially, we know absolutely nothing at all except the plane took off.

And that contact was lost shortly after singing off with the Malaysian ATC.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:16 AM on March 14, 2014

So essentially, we know absolutely nothing at all except the plane took off.

As far as aircraft movement and communications goes. Information verified by the Malaysian-led group in charge of SAR and proto-investigation: We know it took off and that all contact was lost at 1:21. No debris has been found. The Emergency Location Transmitter has not activated. A radar contact was spotted that could be the aircraft.

Since there has been basically no new verified information for a while now, media has turned to anonymous sources who are brazen to flaunt ICAO conventions on crisis communication and has interpreted any statements to well beyond recognition.
posted by Authorized User at 9:17 AM on March 14, 2014 [6 favorites]

why would [a GPS pinger] actually behave any better than, say, radar, which requires zero hardware on board the aircraft to work

A GPS pinger would help in a lot of cases, including maybe this one. ATC radar generally relies on an active transponder on the aircraft responding to pings. Radar works without the transponder, but not nearly as well (no altitude, no plane identity, less accurate position). Radar coverage is also limited to line of sight, which works out to about 100 miles from land in most cases. There's lots of radar holes over water, also low in mountainous terrain. Military radar has better coverage, it's designed to find aircraft that are not looking to be seen, but it's not perfect. Finally, radar is a per-country system, a GPS pinger would be a centralized system whose data goes straight to the air carrier or the public.

You're absolutely right that a GPS pinger could be turned off just like the transponder and voice radios apparently were on MH370. I like the idea of an isolated GPS transmitter that can't be disabled, but it seems very unlikely. Aviation assumes you trust the pilot; no one seriously considers systems for doing something with a plane that's being flown by an untrusted pilot. Which is what makes hijacking so dangerous; there's very little anyone outside the plane can do.

I went researching the AF447 ELT, even scanned the final BEA report, but couldn't find a satisfactory discussion. The ELT apparently didn't work on impact. The report does recommend in future emergencies that the ELT be manually activated by the pilots; I don't think that's been adopted, and it's not clear it's even practical. ELTs are not completely reliable of course, and I imagine they work particularly poorly underwater. Whatever the case, all reports indicate MH370's ELT didn't activate. (ELTs can be disabled from the cockpit, at least in little non-commercial aircraft.)

Today's anonymous reports that the plane was flying navigation fixes is interesting. Flying airways requires a GPS receiver or at least a VOR receiver to find them. If the plane was accurately flying airways that'd make complete electrical failure unlikely. (Even if the pilots had a handheld backup in the cockpit, I can't imagine a pilot choosing that route in an emergency for which they are in control.)
posted by Nelson at 9:18 AM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

1) Turning off the transponder or any other transmitter is trivial. There are switches to do just that, plus circuit breakers. If the story that the ACARS stopped some minutes after the transponder, that's evidence for human action turning them off.

2) ATC adars work with the transponder. The radar scans, sending a beam of RF energy out. This bounces off the skin of the aircraft and is reflected back to the radar. The radar knows what direction the beam was pointing, and knows how long the beam took to be transmitted, reflected and returned, that gives the radar the distance. This is known as the primary return, and all radars have it.

The transponder* on the plane senses the radar beam and the *transmits* a message. This is picked up by a different antenna on the radar. On the very common ASR-11, the beam energy is picked up by the parabolic antenna, while the transponder's signal is picked up by the flat antenna on top. The primary return, or "skin return" needs the gain and narrow beam width of the parabolic antenna for two reasons. First, because that energy travels twice as far (out and back), it is four times weaker, plus most of the beam energy misses the plane and doesn't come back. Secondly, a wide beam width means the plane is somewhere in that beam, so a narrow beam makes the radar's position report more accurate. The transponder receiver's antenna on the ground has to have a wider beam because it take a tiny fraction of the second for the transponder to actually respond, at long range, the primary beam might not have it in view any longer.

The basic transponder return is a four octal digit code, ranging from 0000 to 7777. Mode C transponders provide the plane pressure altitude, a computer on the ground links the transponder code and pressure reading to a screen, where it then puts the flight number (it knows, say, that AA1186 is on 3471) and the altitude. Mode S transponders provide indicated air speed, plane's rate of altitude change, position, and other details. The ground radar integrates position over time to get ground speed, and altitude over time to see if the plane is climbing or descending, the speed and a climb/descend indication are then added to the standard data block next to the primary return "bilp" on the ATC radar screen. The block looks like this.

AA1886 48
348 ^24
S270N30 H187

This translates to:

HI! I'm American Airlines Flight 1886, and my speed-over-ground is 480 knots
I'm at FL348 (34,800 feet) and I'm climbing at 2400 FPM
I'm set to fly at FLY370, my indicated air speed is 300 knots and I'm flying at 187 degrees.

Turning off the transponder means that the plane's reported altitude and indicated airspeed will disappear. Furthermore, since the transponder's code disappears as well, the ability for the computer to link that blip to that flight number goes away as well. The radar still see the primary skin paint, and can still integrate ground speed. The trace will indicate direction, but altitude information is gone.

All radars have a primary return. You can see airplanes on weather radars, you just can't track them well because the radar turns too slowly. Turning off the transponder doesn't make the skin return go away. Integrating the transponder's info with the primary return is called "secondary surveillance radar," with the secondary data being the transponder's response.

FlightAware and other sites use the Mode S broadcast to get position, altitude, airspeed, heading, etc., but they're not radars -- they're listening for the transponder info and plotting it. They need a radar *somewhere* to scan that plane and trigger the response, but they don't need to be at the radar to hear it, they can then get the position/speed/altitude/heading data from the Mode S data block.

So, when you turn off a transponder, you lose most of the data block on an ATC radar, and anybody tracking via Mode S transponder returns will lose the plane entirely. But the ATC radar still sees the plane.

This is the thing bothering me. When a transponder goes away, an indicator on the blip appears. It's an odd thing to happen. A controller seeing it would be paying attention to that blip. And, if that plane then turned, he would see the plane turn.

Yet, nothing about that came out for days. Another mystery.


* Transponder: Trasmission Responder, which is what it does. It responds when it detects a certain transmission.
posted by eriko at 9:21 AM on March 14, 2014 [34 favorites]

If the story that the ACARS stopped some minutes after the transponder, that's evidence for human action turning them off.

How so? Could it not have been a technological problem that just got worse?
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:23 AM on March 14, 2014

Possible flight path plotted according to data from military radars

That's…odd. It's zig-zagging, and yet, it's hitting waypoints?

If it's a hijacker, it's a hijacker who knows how to fly -- that is, not only keep the plane in the air, but use the nav systems to go to a certain point. The chances of hitting four waypoints in the sky by simply flying random turns is astronomical.
posted by eriko at 9:23 AM on March 14, 2014

A GPS pinger would help in a lot of cases, including maybe this one. ATC radar generally relies on an active transponder on the aircraft responding to pings.

The aircraft also had an ADS-B system that broadcasts it's location on open frequencies and was well within range of receivers, I dont' see what kind of functionality a hypothetical GPS pinger would have over that.

Flying airways requires a GPS receiver or at least a VOR receiver to find them.

No, airplanes have inertial navigation systems, but yes if the plane was indeed flying on an air route, that would indicate someone was in control.
posted by Authorized User at 9:24 AM on March 14, 2014

If it's a hijacker, it's a hijacker who knows how to fly

Not necessarily. If you put a gun to a pilot's head, he might fly wherever you tell him to fly.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:25 AM on March 14, 2014

The latest from James Fallows, a reporter who is also a pilot: "explosion now is much less likely; deliberate destruction, by crew or attackers, more so"

I can't disagree. Transponder off, flying all over the sky to waypoints, and then trying to fly to a destination? If the flight track report is true (IF, KIDS, IF, NEVER FORGET THE IF) then the plane clearly flew far beyond the point that the plane when RF quiet, and apparently with purpose.
posted by eriko at 9:26 AM on March 14, 2014

Who would receive the GPS's reports?

The tragedy has been the disappearance of the plane, but since that moment the problem has entirely been one of communication and coordination between authorities. Years from now it might be revealed that Chinese, Vietnam or Malaysian air authorities had been sitting on data without sharing it, or had been receiving signals from the plane but not logging it, or had deleted their logs.

There should already have been multiple signaling systems that would have reported things but haven't. Another device that should have been sending a signal but didn't wouldn't have helped.
posted by ardgedee at 9:27 AM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

Slate: How To Steal An Airliner
posted by vibrotronica at 9:30 AM on March 14, 2014

WSJ story on a young family on board the flight.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:30 AM on March 14, 2014

Apparently, it is also possible to switch off the satellite communication. This did not happen at the time the plane vanished from civilian radars. Now, did it switch off after the 4+ hour flight due to the plane powering down or because it was turned off intentionally?

There are several airports in Andaman and Nicobar Islands, only one (IXZ) is open and operated by the Indian Navy. IXZ has a runway of 3,290 m (10,794 ft).
The other airport, CBD, has a runway of 2,717m (8,914ft). Theoretically, both would be long enough for landing a 777, which needs (at max. landing weight) a runway of 8,000ft. The other two airports have shorter runways.

If the signal the military radars picked up was indeed MH370, it's interesting that all of the other countries involved let an unidentified aircraft pass through.
posted by travelwithcats at 9:31 AM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

Flying airways requires a GPS receiver or at least a VOR receiver to find them. GPS, VOR, or Inertial guidance, all of which a B777 flying oceanic would have. Indeed, the whole thing would be integrated into a flight management systems. You could even punch in a series of waypoints and then tell the autopilot to fly the plane between them.

The ability to fly without VOR air routes is called "RNAV*" -- instead of flying between beacons, you flight from waypoint to waypoint. To do so, you need to know where the waypoints are, and you need to know, at all times, where *you* are.

RNAV routes aren't uncommon over land**, and are basically the default over ocean. I suppose a B777 could be delivered that wasn't capable of RNAV, but I doubt it's ever happened. Every modern airliners has RNAV on board.


* Originally "Random Navigation", but now, it's called "Area navigation."

** Many of the northern Transcon routes in the US are RNAV, because of the mountains in the west and the Great Lakes, beacon airways are thin. Being able to scoot across the lakes off the beacons makes it much easier to avoid weather.
posted by eriko at 9:32 AM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

travelwithcats: "If the signal the military radars picked up was indeed MH370, it's interesting that all of the other countries involved let an unidentified aircraft pass through."

This is the part that I don't get. Regardless of all the transponders/signal doohickys on the plane itself, it's pretty nerve wracking to think a huge plane can fly for any period of time on/over/or even near a landmass without someone tracking it and asking questions.
posted by Big_B at 9:40 AM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

This is the part that I don't get. Regardless of all the transponders/signal doohickys on the plane itself, it's pretty nerve wracking to think a huge plane can fly for any period of time on/over/or even near a landmass without someone tracking it and asking questions.

On the afore-mentioned pilot rumor network, there were some comments about how possible that indeed is in that area of the world. I guess we westerners have gotten used to a much-more controlled airspace as a legacy of the cold war.
posted by Authorized User at 9:52 AM on March 14, 2014

Yes, pedants, an inertial navigation system would work for that waypoint navigation in addition to GPS or VOR. INS is an electrical system too. My point is if that plane flew those airways, then the electronic navigation equipment was most likely working. Also goes without saying, that's not a route you voluntarily fly. If that route report is accurate, some sort of hijacking seems much more likely.

BTW, this version of the map (from this blog) is the best I've seen in that it's drawn on top of an aviation map with the intersections marked. Here's a map I plotted of the route on Skyvector's charts; the high airways view shows the intersections. I'm refraining from speculating on these routes because I don't really understand high airways or international routing. One thing I'd love to know is if the plane actually hit those points or just got kind of near them; that makes all the difference.
posted by Nelson at 9:53 AM on March 14, 2014 [4 favorites]

WSJ's Andy Pasztor, the guy who broke the story about the plane flying for hours, said yesterday it could have landed. 6:29 radio interview.
posted by travelwithcats at 9:55 AM on March 14, 2014

I suspect that since the radar data has not been released to the public and the original news article simply included waypoints with which the radar contact lined up with, those maps are actually made by linking those waypoints on the map and that's why they match, instead of the tracked contact matching the waypoints exactly.
posted by Authorized User at 9:56 AM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

Obviously these new updates, if true, raise a lot of questions about possible plane theft/hijacking. Are the previous ideas about electrical failure/depressurization/hypoxia ruled out? Is there any chance that after some sort of mechanical failure (at/after 1.07?), and in a confused state, the pilots tried to revert course back towards Malaysia using autopilot and waypoints, but got the direction somewhat wrong? Or does the new information (if accurate!) really strongly deliberate and conscious flight westwards towards waypoints, and human rather than mechanical means?
posted by ClaireBear at 9:57 AM on March 14, 2014

Is there a source for transcripts of the official press conferences? They are somewhat hard to follow and long as is.
posted by Authorized User at 10:07 AM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

Well, if you are looking on your radar logs for an airplane, and there is some probability you will interpret a blip from another airplane as the one you want, then most of your false positives are going to be on heavily used routes. These people are under a lot of pressure to find any blips that might be the right plane but they may just be looking at other planes with no transponder data. So I wouldn't necessarily believe the waypoint stuff.
posted by miyabo at 10:08 AM on March 14, 2014

The possibility that the plane was flown by waypoints for several hours is interesting given that contact was lost at a waypoint. If true (and it may well just be an artefact of how the information was released) it would be highly suggestive. Were this kind of navigation intended from the start then this would not be a coincidence, and whoever turned off communication and made the change of course must have been somehow in control some deal of time before the waypoint.
posted by Thing at 10:16 AM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

Thing, could you elaborate on your last sentence a bit?
posted by ClaireBear at 10:18 AM on March 14, 2014

Possible flight path plotted according to data from military radars

That's…odd. It's zig-zagging, and yet, it's hitting waypoints?

If it's a hijacker, it's a hijacker who knows how to fly -- that is, not only keep the plane in the air, but use the nav systems to go to a certain point. The chances of hitting four waypoints in the sky by simply flying random turns is astronomical.

Having sat in the cockpit of an aircraft in flight for several hours, I learned that there are literally roads in the sky and intersections where these airways meet. So you fly to one, then turn up another airway and then fly to another. Its not really zig-zagging, its going from one intersection to the other. Air traffic control usually routes you on which airway, which altitude and which waypoint you are headed for.

This could mean they wanted to appear like a random flight to air defense radars.
posted by Ironmouth at 10:25 AM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

Is there any chance that after some sort of mechanical failure (at/after 1.07?), and in a confused state, the pilots tried to revert course back towards Malaysia using autopilot and waypoints, but got the direction somewhat wrong?

It would have been very wrong. It would be obvious what to go for -- WMKN, Sultan Mahmud airport at Kuala Terengganu, which has an 11,400' runway pointing in from the ocean, so you don't even have to worry about minimum safe altitude. If that was too far, the 6800 foot runway at WMKC, Sultan Ismail Petra Airport at Kota Bharu, would be closest that they could confidently land on, but Narathiwat wouldn't be much farther and have 7000' of runway to work with.

It would be very unusual to program waypoints in a diversion situation. You'd punch up an airport and hit "direct." If (again, IF) they flew those waypoints, it's because they didn't want to land in Malaysia or Thailand. And since those aren't VOR intersections, the only way you could fly them is with RNAV.

Well, if you are looking on your radar logs for an airplane, and there is some probability you will interpret a blip from another airplane as the one you want, then most of your false positives are going to be on heavily used routes

Except look at the high altitude chart. That line of waypoints isn't on a route, it's crossing lots of routes. It's only at the end that it looks like it's trying to head at least somewhat in the general direction of the traffic, roughly along the P628 airway.

Indeed, it sort of looks like they were trying (or trying to make) people think that first, they were going for Banda Aceh in Jarkarta, then they turn towards Phuket in Thailand, then towards Port Blair (VOPB).

If that's the case and they were trying to steal the airplane, I would take a look at Car Nicobar AFB (VOCX). If they drop low at IGRX, they might drop off Jarkart/Thailand/Malaysia radar, then a turn to the left and make for Car Nicobar. Issue: It's a military airport, an Indian Air Force base.
posted by eriko at 10:26 AM on March 14, 2014

There is an Indian military base located on the Andaman Islands. One of the outposts is located on the Strait of Malacca. Hopefully their radar can provide some insight.
posted by feloniousmonk at 10:31 AM on March 14, 2014

Thing, could you elaborate on your last sentence a bit?

Thinking about it a little more, I don't think that it is quite right that whoever made the course change must have been in control for some time before the communications were turned off. The turning off and reaching the waypoint were several minutes apart, not at the exact same time. However, if the person making the course change meant to navigate by waypoints then it is a coincidence that they took over just before the plane was to hit one on its route.
posted by Thing at 10:36 AM on March 14, 2014

There's a nice runway on Greater Coco Island.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 10:39 AM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

But also, Thing, didn't the turning off of the transponder and the shift westwards occur not only near a waypoint but also between the Malaysian and Vietnamese (?) air traffic control boundaries - right after the pilot had said goodbye to the Malaysian one and before entering the Vietnamese airspace? In other words, it seems that it would be a natural place to disappear if one wanted to disappear and were well-versed in commercial flying? (I might have mangled the details here, and if so, apologies - I'm doing my best to follow the news of this situation intensely, but I know *nothing* about planes!)
posted by ClaireBear at 10:40 AM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yes, it would mean that if the plane was not hijacked by its pilots then whoever did hijack it had some existing knowledge of flying and technical details of the flight. The timing was not random but coincided with the steps that would need to be taken for the following part of the flight. Unless they "lucked out" the hijackers knew when to make a move.

Of course, this all still assumes some kind of hijacking, which might not be the case.
posted by Thing at 10:49 AM on March 14, 2014

Yes, contact was lost between Malaysian & Vietnamese airspace. Info if it was intentionally or not, was not released to the public.
posted by travelwithcats at 10:50 AM on March 14, 2014

Satellite Firm Says Its Data From Jet Could Offer Location - NYT

tl;dr: Location triangulation is possible using the Inmarsat ping logs.
posted by mwhybark at 10:51 AM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

Doesn't that assume that when it stopped pinging it stopped flying and didn't continue on, pingless?
posted by symbioid at 10:52 AM on March 14, 2014

qII, looks like that runway is about 1500 meters. is that long enough? Also, surely someone's checked there. Surely. Surely?
posted by mwhybark at 10:55 AM on March 14, 2014

At this point, any hard evidence would help. Even if the plane took off again.
posted by travelwithcats at 10:56 AM on March 14, 2014

It sounds like the Inmarsat data could also help reconstruct a more complete flight path, including where the plane went in the several hours it was out of radar range but still pinging the satellite. If nothing else, that would lead to a much smaller search radius based on how much fuel would have been left after the last triangulated location.
posted by stopgap at 10:57 AM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

Doesn't that assume that when it stopped pinging it stopped flying and didn't continue on, pingless?

No, because the only data derivable is the location of the a/c at the time of data transmission and receipt. If that coincides with the non-traveling position of the plane, great. But it seems more likely to just provide flight track data rather than final location.
posted by mwhybark at 10:58 AM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

Onion: Malaysia Airlines Expands Investigation To Include General Scope Of Space, Time
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 11:05 AM on March 14, 2014 [6 favorites]

To begin answering my own question about runway length, it does appear 1500m is long enough at sea level to both land and take off with a 777 under lighter loads. perhaps eriko can more closely parse the data, presented in this Boeing technical document.
posted by mwhybark at 11:07 AM on March 14, 2014

Sky News now reporting that automated pings were received by Immarsat satellites for a full five hours after disappearance.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:08 AM on March 14, 2014

I would have thought a stolen airliner would be essentially unsaleable, much like a stolen van Gogh--except that a reclusive billionaire couldn't keep it in his basement.

Like I mentioned earlier, I think there are a lot of better ways to get a 777 cheaply than stealing it...especially as you don't really want 240 murder counts on your head(s) if/when they catch you. And if you don't plan on killing the hostages, you don't want to babysit 240 people, either.

There is no stolen scenario which doesn't make more sense to accomplish another way. Even if you don't purchase the rotting remains of a bankrupt airline, you could start a new one (cargo, preferably), lease a 777, send it off for "paint" or whatever, and never make a payment. Big business has shown that you need to invest very little of your own money to make this happen. Hell, make some podunk town your airline's new home base and you can probably get the local council to kick in the money to start it.

You can, in true spy-thriller fashion, then decide that they thieves really wanted a person or persons on-board, or an item the plane was carrying. Again, this is the riskiest way to accomplish that goal, perhaps with the exception of kidnapping a large group of people--maybe someone needed a team of calligraphers? An item so valuable that it was under intense security to the point this was the easiest way to get it would not have been on a flight like this.

Which isn't to say none of this is possible, it's just really unlikely.
posted by maxwelton at 11:13 AM on March 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

To begin answering my own question about runway length, it does appear 1500m is long enough at sea level to both land and take off with a 777 under lighter loads

Yes, but that's assuming you land right at the landing end. Any drift down the runway before touchdown and you go long.

Looking at a sat image of that runway, I'd be loathe to try. It's narrow, short, and there's nowhere to really run off the runway. You either stick it or you die. The only reason you'd even try is if the only other option is "or die."
posted by eriko at 11:14 AM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

mwhybark I can't locate the link again but I was reading an airline pilot saying he'd take anything over 5000 ft in 777 emergency. 1500 meters is 4921 feet more or less. In the typical manner of this incident, it was reported that Myanmar had leased the island to the Chinese, who were building an airstrip. Both governments have since denied there is an agreement.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 11:17 AM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

The Great Coco Island airbase is in Burmese territory, is reportedly 1400m, and has been alleged by Indian sources to be a Chinese military base, but these allegations were withdrawn by India in 2005 (PDF, pg. 9 as paginated, p. 13 as rendered in PDF viewer).
posted by mwhybark at 11:18 AM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

A 727 was once apparently stolen.
posted by Chrysostom at 11:27 AM on March 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

Why is one obscure airstrip in the Andamans interesting? The plane had fuel to fly to most of India, or Sri Lanka, or Tibet, or China, or Bhutan. No pilot in distress would fly to a 5000' airstrip in the middle of an ocean in an emergency, they'd pick one of many fine airports nearby in Malaysia. Again, if that published route is accurate, the next obvious question is what the Indian radar in the Andamans saw. Maybe we'll find out eventually, no doubt through a leak.

MH370 Mystery Points To Need For Better Aircraft Tracking: industry magazine Aviation Week talks in detail about various in-flight reporting options including future work on satellite tracking. Page 1 is dull, gets detailed on 2 and 3.
posted by Nelson at 11:39 AM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

Amateur use of nightsat thermal source detection, posted Thursday 3/13, and currently making the rounds on FB.
posted by mwhybark at 11:46 AM on March 14, 2014

Why is one obscure airstrip in the Andamans interesting?

Just cuz quonsar noticed it was there, so I did the legwork.
posted by mwhybark at 11:48 AM on March 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

So my question in all of this, as the mystery deepens: How many screenwriters are now pounding out action/adventure thrillers based on the idea of some group stealing a large commercial airplane while it is in flight?
posted by nubs at 11:50 AM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm just sorta depressed by the thought of those people being terrified for 4-5 hours before dying, rather than just "what was that noise?" followed by darkness.
posted by aramaic at 11:53 AM on March 14, 2014 [29 favorites]

aramaic, I'm musing about screenplays because your line of thought was the first one I had and I didn't want to be on it any longer.
posted by nubs at 11:55 AM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

I agree with maxwelton in that there are many compelling counter-arguments to the theft scenario. And yet, here we are.

Since we're already through the looking glass, here are some more possibilities:

1. The DB Cooper Scenario: The hijackers never had any intention of setting the plane down. They flew over the Andaman Islands at low altitude, bail out, and leave the plane and passengers to fly on to their doom deep in the Indian Ocean and distracting the search parties long enough to make a clean getaway. Why would someone do this? A) Simple terrorism. As we have seen, the vanishing airplane is good publicity, and terrorism is essentially a PR stunt. B) Kidnapping a specific individual. Good luck keeping track of him/her after you push them out the back door over a jungle at 3 AM. C) Stealing high value object. The valuable object would have to be in the cabin and not in the cargo hold, which seems unlikely. All told, chances of success also seem pretty freaking low. You'd have to smuggle one or more parachutes onboard the plane for starters.

2. Mass Kidnapping Scenario: The kidnappers have already contacted the authorities with ransom demands. The authorities are keeping it secret, which might explain some of the confusion and contradictory information we've been hearing. Why would the authorities keep it a secret? What other signs would we look for if this scenario is actually happening?

3. Massive Terrorist Screwup: Other scenarios depend on competent and well-prepared terrorists. Maybe they had something else in mind, lost control of the plane, and it flew off into oblivion.
posted by vibrotronica at 11:57 AM on March 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

aramaic, that seems like the least likely scenario to me. Given 4-5 hours of everyone being awake, alive and hijacked, I have to believe that someone's cell phone would have worked, even for a few minutes.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:57 AM on March 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

How many screenwriters are now pounding out action/adventure thrillers based on the idea of some group stealing a large commercial airplane while it is in flight?

(I am actually a screenwriter working on a script right now, so I'm in a mode of gaming out possible endings to stories. I apologize to everyone if I'm being overbearing or inappropriate with my rampant speculation. On edit, my script has nothing to do with airline hijacking.)
posted by vibrotronica at 11:59 AM on March 14, 2014

Lithium battery theory
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:59 AM on March 14, 2014

I'm just sorta depressed by the thought of those people being terrified for 4-5 hours before dying, rather than just "what was that noise?" followed by darkness.


This. Six days ago or so, I couldn't have imagined that "something happened that caused everybody to die onboard immediately" would be the best case scenario as to what happened. But yet that's what I keep coming back to.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 12:14 PM on March 14, 2014 [12 favorites]

Lithium battery theory

So what precisely is that theory?
posted by mazola at 12:17 PM on March 14, 2014

For more explanation on the lithium-ion battery issue.
posted by nubs at 12:21 PM on March 14, 2014

>> Lithium battery theory
> So what precisely is that theory?

It's a non-starter of a theory. Here it is, in full:

As part of the investigation, officials are looking into concerns that lithium batteries in the cargo hold, which have been blamed in previous crashes, could have played a role in the disappearance, according to U.S. officials briefed on the latest intelligence and law enforcement developments in the investigation. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release details to the media.

They'd be stupid not to "look into concerns", but this isn't actually a theory or anything.
posted by RedOrGreen at 12:22 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

How many screenwriters are now pounding out action/adventure thrillers based on the idea of some group stealing a large commercial airplane while it is in flight?

What the hell, just reboot Airport '77.
posted by mazola at 1:15 PM on March 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

I would have thought a stolen airliner would be essentially unsaleable, much like a stolen van Gogh--except that a reclusive billionaire couldn't keep it in his basement.

Well, as long as we're on the subject of theft: Would someone (maybe a company or country) be interested in stealing the plane to reverse engineer the technology for their own aviation program?
posted by FJT at 1:22 PM on March 14, 2014

I have been thinking a lot about John Varley's story, "Air Raid" (novelized and crappily filmed as Millennium). Blaming time travelers from a dystopian future is probably still not likely, though.
posted by Chrysostom at 1:24 PM on March 14, 2014 [4 favorites]

What the...? Nobody is going to steal a plane for anything except terrorism purposes. You can just buy one yourself if you're a company or country with an aviation program.
posted by Justinian at 1:26 PM on March 14, 2014 [4 favorites]

Or it could be: attempted hijacking; plane heads for intended target; passengers/pilots revolt and bring down plane in god knows where. Ultimately, I don't think there's any way the plane and passengers are still around.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 1:40 PM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

(Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates, the United 93 scenario seems like the most likely to me.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:44 PM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

My crazy theory of the moment is that Malaysia's central bank was using this flight to make a regular shipment of a few pallets of currency (RMB, Dollars or Euros) to China. Someone found out about the shipments and stole the plane to get the money. I call this the "Cliffhanger theory."
posted by humanfont at 1:46 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

If it turns out that Kim Jong Un kidnapped a shit ton of people in order to hold them hostage to the world, well, that'd just suck.
posted by symbioid at 1:49 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

If it turns out that Kim Jong Un kidnapped a shit ton of people in order to hold them hostage to the world, well, that'd just suck.

Why wait a week, or at this point, longer?
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:51 PM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

You can just buy one yourself if you're a company or country with an aviation program

But, you'd still be reliant on a foreign manufacturer. Not only for parts, but probably for servicing, maintenance, and expertise.

And, if I buy a car, I can take it a part and do whatever I want with it. If someone bought a Boeing, do they have the same ability to take it a part and do whatever with it? Doesn't it come with certain obligations and legal promises not to do that sort of thing?

Also, the large airline industry is basically a duopoly between Boeing and Airbus. They sold $423 billion worth of jets last year. I'm sure there's a lot of non-American and non-European manufacturers that want to compete.

Eh, everyone has a crazy theory. This one's mine.
posted by FJT at 1:54 PM on March 14, 2014

It's hard to see what the purpose could have been, though. The only obvious target in that direction with a history of high profile terrorism is India, and why would you hijack a plane in Malaysia for that? For that amount of effort, you could hijack one a lot closer, and thus have a full load of fuel. Planes aren't actually great weapons when mostly empty. If the plane itself was the target, for hostages, terrorists generally would announce that so as to, y'know, provide terror. If someone just wanted to steal a plane you can rent one a lot cheaper, and it's hard to imagine there is any person or item on board sufficiently valuable to justify non-ideological theft.
posted by tavella at 1:57 PM on March 14, 2014

Alternate theory #3134 (aka 'Grand Unified Theory'): Plane is hijacked and taken off course to destination/purpose unknown. Unrelated, a lithium battery explodes in cargo rupturing the air frame, causing a slow decompression that incapacitates hijackers before their plan is complete. Plane continues on pilotless until ultimately hit by a meteor. Sharknado.
posted by mazola at 2:07 PM on March 14, 2014 [18 favorites]

Sharp Changes in Altitude and Course After Jet Lost Contact

Investigators have also examined data transmitted from the plane’s Rolls-Royce engines that shows it descending 40,000 feet in the space of a minute, according to a senior American official briefed on the investigation. But investigators do not believe the readings are accurate because the aircraft would likely haven taken longer to fall such a distance.

“A lot of stock cannot be put in the altitude data” sent from the engines, one official said. “A lot of this doesn’t make sense.”

posted by stopgap at 2:10 PM on March 14, 2014

Doesn't it come with certain obligations and legal promises not to do that sort of thing?

If you're prepared to kidnap & possibly murder a couple hundred people, being sued for IP infringement is a (very) small potato. Especially if you're a nation-state, because then you can pretty much ignore IP infringement entirely.
posted by aramaic at 2:12 PM on March 14, 2014

“A lot of this doesn’t make sense.”

Understatement of 2014.
posted by mazola at 2:12 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

For reference, falling 40,000 feet in under a minute is a minimum speed of about 450 mph, which would be consistent with a pilot suicide intentional dive or a United 93 scenario. It's not like it doesn't make sense because it's faster than a 777 can fly.
posted by stopgap at 2:13 PM on March 14, 2014

Yeah, a plane would take much longer than a minute to fall 40,000 feet. The question is how long a deliberate powered dive from 40,000 feet would take. That's just under 700 feet a second. Which is rather a lot but I have no idea if its too much for a powered dive or not.
posted by Justinian at 2:15 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

According to an article in the International Business Times:

The missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was equipped with four life rafts, enough to carry up to 290 people, and had sufficient stocks of food that would enable those on board the aircraft to survive for a week, said a representative of the airline.
posted by FJT at 2:21 PM on March 14, 2014

Well, that's suitably horrifying. (NYTimes article, not about the provisions)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 2:22 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

And for comparison: "The National Transportation Safety Board reported that [United 93] impacted at 563 mph (906 km/h, 252 m/s, or 489 knots) at a 40-degree nose-down, inverted attitude." At 40 degrees, I'd imagine it would take a lot longer than minute to descend 40,000 feet. I have no idea how a plane would react when pointed straight down.
posted by stopgap at 2:25 PM on March 14, 2014

What if the engine just fell off?
posted by empath at 2:30 PM on March 14, 2014

Is it even possible to pull out of a dive like that? I don't know if "flying under the radar" is even a thing with modern radar, but if so and if that's a controllable dive (and if the 40k ft dive is accurate) maybe someone was trying to do that.
posted by jason_steakums at 2:32 PM on March 14, 2014

Having worked a lot with thermal hotspot data, I don't think it's going to be that reliable for that purpose - although the author of that blog post has made a decent effort to be as thorough as possible. Basically, fires in the jungle are usually just fires in the jungle, due to human wood harvesting activity. You could pick any random night in the year and find hotspots that are sitting under flight paths.
posted by Jimbob at 2:35 PM on March 14, 2014

I think a falling engine without any drag or lift from wings would take about 50 seconds to fall 40,000 feet. I doubt the terminal velocity of a tumbling engine would take off too much from that time. I don't know what it would take for an engine to fall off, but didn't one fall off the plane that crashed in Queens in 2001? I would think a powered dive is more likely, but it sounds like investigators have ruled that out based on their data.
posted by stopgap at 2:39 PM on March 14, 2014

North Korea and Malaysia actually have pretty friendly bilateral relationships.

I did wonder about lithium ion batteries after having read Mark Dunn's American Decameron where those batteries are a plot point (someone runs with batteries and keys in the same pocket: the friction creates a fire, causing in what looks like spontaneous combustion). If I'd have a pet crazy theory it'd be that one.

Am now fielding questions about Saajid Badat's connection to this.

Authorized User: My collaborator and I are working on getting transcripts of the press conferences - we've just managed to find recordings of them, but they can be cumbersome to transcribe.
posted by divabat at 2:40 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

I predict that the accident will turn out to be due to pilot error (not following standard procedures or failing to properly notice/respond to the situation) combined with a mechanical or systems failure caused by a manufacturing defect, improper maintenance, or substandard repairs.

I don't see any need to jump straight to OMG TERRORISM or crazy Tom Clancy plots until the black boxes are found and investigators rule out the above based on their data analysis. This effort takes much longer than a news cycle to play out, so we'll just have to be patient.
posted by ceribus peribus at 2:51 PM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

Mod note: Couple comments deleted; maybe let's hold off on the goofing about aliens?
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:52 PM on March 14, 2014 [4 favorites]

NYT update: "Sharp Changes in Altitude and Course After Jet Lost Contact"

... Because the plane stopped transmitting its position about 40 minutes after takeoff, military radar recorded only an unidentified blip moving through Malaysian airspace. Certain weather conditions, and even flocks of birds, can occasionally cause radar blips that may be mistaken for aircraft, and the Malaysian authorities say they are still studying the signals to determine if they came from Flight 370.

But the person who examined the data said it leaves little doubt that the airliner flew near or through the southern tip of Thailand, then back across Peninsular Malaysia, near the city of Penang, and out over the sea again. That’s in part because the data is based on signals recorded by two radar stations, one at Butterworth air force base on the peninsula’s west coast, near Penang, and the other at Kota Bharu, on the northeast coast. Two radars tracking a contact can significantly increase the reliability of the readings.

(Bolding mine. No one is willing to confirm anything on the record yet.)
posted by RedOrGreen at 3:21 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

"CNN Exclusive: Analysis shows 2nd possible Indian Ocean path for airliner"
posted by travelwithcats at 4:08 PM on March 14, 2014

I have no idea how plausible this is but linking it anyway -- a DC area local news station is reporting that Boeing had previously warned the FAA about the possibility that a 777's computer systems might be vulnerable to attack, and also reporting on the demonstration of an exploit (using an Android phone to take control of some plane electronics) at a hacking conference last year - which we discussed here.
posted by LobsterMitten at 4:21 PM on March 14, 2014

I don't see any need to jump straight to OMG TERRORISM

I don't have any idea what caused the plane to disappear but at this point I'm not sure it's fair to characterize speculation as jumping straight to OMG TERRORISM. There are lots of weird things that don't add up and which make the most common causes of plane crashes (which is what you predict) less likely.
posted by Justinian at 4:24 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

For example, accounting for some of the "facts" (and I use that term loosely at this point) we think we know requires slow decompression which renders everyone unconscious. However, in such a case you would expect the plane to keep flying straight. But the latest info is that the plane flew in a pattern between waypoints after the transponders went offline. Which requires a conscious pilot. And rapid decompression or a catastrophic failure at altitude makes a plane flying that sort of pattern even less likely. The plane would crash relatively quickly.

Right now we're looking for an explanation which accounts for:

1) Various sources of information as to the plane's location, speed, altitude, etc going offline or being shut down at significantly different times.
2) No contact from anyone on the plane. Not from the pilots nor from anyone on a cellphone.
3) The plane keeps flying for hours after contact was lost.
4) The plane doesn't fly straight, it flies in a pattern indicative of either a conscious person at the controls or a pre-programmed autopiloted path that does not correspond to either the initial flight plan or a flight plan you would use in case of emergency. The plane should not have been flying in this direction under any circumstances.

Sure any of those 4 points could turn out to be based on erroneous information but as far as I can tell it's the best we have right now.
posted by Justinian at 4:34 PM on March 14, 2014

Oh! And the precipitating event takes place in exactly that very short window of time after the pilot has confirmed exiting Malaysian airspace but before the pilot has confirmed entering Vietnamese airspace. Obviously that's not evidence but it is a pretty terrible coincidence if a catastrophic event occurred then since it is the worst possible moment.
posted by Justinian at 4:41 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

To me, it is 2) which is hardest to explain. The others could be easily explained by hijacking by either the pilots or others.
posted by Thing at 4:47 PM on March 14, 2014

Is 2) not relatively easy to rationalise? A fire/technical problems removed the possibility for communications, or someone deliberately ceased communications as part of a hijack/United 93 style event?

4) is the one that makes least sense to me. I haven't heard any sensible arguments for that flight plan.
posted by mnfn at 4:56 PM on March 14, 2014

It's straightforward to rationalize almost any of the information taken by itself, it's when it all gets put together that it becomes more difficult.

No contact from anyone on the plane indicates to me that either there was a catastrophic mechanical failure, a slow decompression, or that the plane was hijacked. Are there other explanations?

And it's tough to explain away the flight path of the plane if there was either a mechanical failure or a slow decompression.
posted by Justinian at 5:04 PM on March 14, 2014

2) Or panic.
posted by divabat at 5:05 PM on March 14, 2014

2) or just they were flying in an area where cellphone communications wouldn't have worked anyway.

(This doesn't explain the pilot or staff, but could explain the passengers.)
posted by divabat at 5:05 PM on March 14, 2014

The plane flew back over Malaysia, though. To get over to the Indian side.
posted by Justinian at 5:06 PM on March 14, 2014

I don't know what that part of Malaysia is like, I guess. Is it relatively uninhabited? Or would there be cell towers?
posted by Justinian at 5:07 PM on March 14, 2014

Is 2) not relatively easy to rationalise? A fire/technical problems removed the possibility for communications, or someone deliberately ceased communications as part of a hijack/United 93 style event?

It would also mean that at no point whatsoever were passengers capable of making even the shortest calls from their mobile phones. Maybe that is the case, but the length and route of the flight after the breakoff of regular communication makes it something needing to be explained.
posted by Thing at 5:08 PM on March 14, 2014

It's pretty tiny.
posted by divabat at 5:10 PM on March 14, 2014

(That's what she said.)

Sorry. I was around Penang roughly 10 years ago and had reliable phone connection almost everywhere.
posted by dominik at 5:12 PM on March 14, 2014

When you're on the ground, sure. In the air is a whole different matter.
posted by divabat at 5:15 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

Not just calls; text messages. You need only the very smallest sliver of connectivity to text. Significantly less signal than for an actual call.
posted by Justinian at 5:16 PM on March 14, 2014

Not just calls; text messages. You need only the very smallest sliver of connectivity to text. Significantly less signal than for an actual call.

You also need to be holding the phone.
posted by popcassady at 5:19 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yeah. It's true that when you hear hoofbeats you should think horses. But sometimes it really is actually zebras.
posted by Justinian at 5:20 PM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

You also need to be holding the phone.

But what scenario lets the pilots fly the plane but makes passengers unable to work their phones?
posted by Thing at 5:21 PM on March 14, 2014

You've just been told to put all your phones on Airplane mode or switch them off. Suddenly an emergency happens. By the time you chill from your panic, get your phone out, turn it back on, and wait for the signal to pick up while you're 30,000 feet in the air, you'd probably have passed out or been killed or something.

Even when I've landed (anywhere in the world, including Malaysia) and the plane's taxi'ed into the airport I still have to wait a while before the phone picks up any sort of signal.

I tried looking up information of whether text messages were sent in AF447 and only found references to reports of text messages being denied as a hoax, but the original statement seems to be gone.
posted by divabat at 5:23 PM on March 14, 2014

Pilots are trained to be calm in the face of emergencies. Passengers? Not so much.
posted by divabat at 5:23 PM on March 14, 2014

People made calls from UA Flight 93. It's not an impossible thing to speculate happening. Presuming someone's state of mind in an almost-impossible-to-imagine situation is likely to not be a fruitful direction. Some people are eerily calm in catastrophes.
posted by jessamyn at 5:28 PM on March 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

UA Flight 93 was flying much lower, however. And most of the calls were not from cellphones.
posted by Thing at 5:28 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

To me, the new stuff reported in the NYT article suggests the Terrorist Screw Up Scenario: Plane takes off and climbs to altitude. Hijackers take over the plane, incapacitate the pilots, and turn off the transponders. Then, thinking they are no longer being tracked, they turn back towards Malaysia. Maybe the plan is to fly back to Kuala Lampur and crash the plane into the Petronas Towers, or maybe the target is in Penang. Either way, something happens en route. Maybe the passengers revolt, kill the hijackers, and realize there's no one left to fly the plane. Maybe they're not as good pilots as the 9/11 terrorists were. Maybe they just get lost flying at night over water. Maybe they depressurize the cabin and climb to 44,000 feet to kill the passengers, as the pilot in the Times article suggests, and accidentally deprive themselves of oxygen, too.
posted by vibrotronica at 5:29 PM on March 14, 2014

Also UA Flight 93 was still in the same country. This flight had a lot of international passengers, and who knows how many of them activated roaming capabilities on their phone.
posted by divabat at 5:29 PM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

Presuming someone's state of mind in an almost-impossible-to-imagine situation is likely to not be a fruitful direction.

This also applies to assuming people would be calm enough to call during an in-flight emergency.
posted by divabat at 5:30 PM on March 14, 2014

Right. People don't know. It's happened before. That's what we know.
posted by jessamyn at 5:31 PM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

It's happened before in a very different circumstance. Apples and oranges.
posted by divabat at 5:32 PM on March 14, 2014

Trying to find a middle ground, I think that the core of the problem is that the pilots were likely alive for over four hours after the plane lost contact, but there's no trace whatsoever from the passengers from those four hours.
posted by Thing at 5:38 PM on March 14, 2014

2) No contact from anyone on the plane. Not from the pilots nor from anyone on a cellphone.

I'm the kind of rebellious first-world anarchist guy who sometimes turns his phone on during the flight, just to see if I can pick up any cell signal. Experimentally. I've never got a sniff. It always surprised me that United 93 passengers were able to - I can only assume it was because they were flying low, over a part of the world with a very dense cellular network.
posted by Jimbob at 5:39 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

And as far as I know MAS hasn't enabled in-flight wifi or in-flight cellphone service. (They may have in-flight calls where the remote becomes a headset, but that requires a credit card and some pre-registering.)
posted by divabat at 5:40 PM on March 14, 2014

Flight 93 callers were not using cell phones. Back in 2001 most domestic airplanes had in seat telephone service provided by Verizon /GTE. It was really expensive and no one used it, except on 9-11. The service was discontinued because of the expense shortly afterwards. Some older planes still have the phones in the seat backs, but they no longer work.
posted by humanfont at 5:48 PM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

I just keep having thoughts of Lost because I don't really have anything else to relate it. Robinson Crusoe maybe.

The plot of Lost Horizon may have the eeriest parallels (in the beginning sequence, the pilot is shown to have been replaced with an impostor, who makes a sudden turn west and heads toward the Himalayas.)
posted by Ralston McTodd at 5:49 PM on March 14, 2014

Some of the callers from Flight 93 did use cellphones to make calls, but at low altititude.
posted by Thing at 5:50 PM on March 14, 2014

Malay language press are saying that MH370 squawked 'Tango', which is a secret code for a hijacking. Not sure if their source is reliable. Is the bit about Tango true?
posted by divabat at 5:53 PM on March 14, 2014

Wasn't the flight in the middle of the night? If the plane was commandeered by the pilot or copilot, couldn't the passengers have slept through most of the route changes? You might notice the initial bank when the plane almost turned all the way around, but without anything else, why would a passenger even know to place an emergency call?
posted by stopgap at 6:05 PM on March 14, 2014

Lots of people (including me, unfortunately) can't sleep on planes.
posted by amro at 6:12 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

You might notice the initial bank when the plane almost turned all the way around, but without anything else, why would a passenger even know to place an emergency call?

Anyone know if Malaysian Airlines planes have a route map / plane location on the TV screens?
posted by Jimbob at 6:12 PM on March 14, 2014

From what I recall of my most recent flights with them, yeah.
posted by divabat at 6:14 PM on March 14, 2014

Though if it's an emergency the in-flight entertainment system may not be functional.
posted by divabat at 6:14 PM on March 14, 2014

Presumably it would be possible for the pilot to turn off power to the passengers' TV screens, claiming "technical difficulties"?
posted by ClaireBear at 6:15 PM on March 14, 2014

According to (possibly inaccurate) data, some have speculated that the plane had a sudden descent: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/15/world/asia/malaysia-military-radar.html?_r=0

I think it'd be totally noticeable if a plane suddenly dipped 20,000 feet. I doubt that's normal for ordinary turbulence.

However, I gotta say, this doesn't look good at all. Where is all this data coming from? Does anyone have all of the available data? It sounds like everyone's contributing their bit to the media instead of effectively collaborating...

I'm astonished the plane hasn't been found yet. When I first read about this story last weekend, I was so sure the plane had landed in Southern China as first speculated. This story won't last long, I thought. It's turned out to be so fascinating! But all the more hard for the poor relatives. They may not ever know, at this rate.
posted by myntu at 6:16 PM on March 14, 2014

Is the bit about Tango true?

I see a New Straits Times article "Some crucial questions on flight MH370" from March 10th that says MAS does use that code word. (but that each airline has its own code word), but I don't know how reliable NST is.
posted by cashman at 6:20 PM on March 14, 2014

cashman: NST is usually pretty decent, it's one of the big English dailies. Interestingly that article seems to no longer exist on the NST site but is accessible via Highbeam.
posted by divabat at 6:24 PM on March 14, 2014

I've read that a plane with no radio communications can fly in a triangular pattern to signal distress; would that account for all the turns? (though, I think it's not meant for big airliner jets). The Tango thing might be part of a longer message, as Tango is the code/phonetic word for 'T'. If it was hijacked, there seems to be no attempt by the hijackers at making any kind of statement before the plane went down, except maybe these communications. (on preview, I see it's the Malaysian Airline distress signal).

I find this whole episode to be incredibly humbling. First, the ocean is so very large, and we are pretty small - even our massive aircraft carriers and navy vessels are still searching. And, second, while airline travel is routinized and dehumanized to a rather high degree, it's still a rather tenuous thing. All of the training and engineering and physics and nature have to come together for the plane to have a safe flight, but if you fuck up one tiny part of any of these, whether on purpose or not, it's all over. I feel so terrible and irrationally helpless for all the affected families that the world, for all that it's accomplished in science and military prowess, hasn't been able to find this plane yet.
posted by bluefly at 6:43 PM on March 14, 2014

The Tango thing might be part of a longer message, as Tango is the code/phonetic word for 'T'.

I'd have to imagine that if their code word for hijacking really is Tango, they used something else for T in their phonetic alphabet, or else that would cause all sorts of false alarms.
posted by jason_steakums at 7:11 PM on March 14, 2014

I've read that a plane with no radio communications can fly in a triangular pattern to signal distress

No, a plane on an instrument flight plan (as here and essentially all airliner flights) has specific procedures for lost communications. If it's something more urgent they're not going to putz around flying in triangles; they're going to find a place to put the plane down as safely and expediently as the situation allows.
posted by exogenous at 7:13 PM on March 14, 2014

There's a transponder code for hijack: 7500. Emergency is 7700 and lost comms is 7600 (when Ms. exogenous isn't answering her cell phone, I say she's squawking 7600).
posted by exogenous at 7:15 PM on March 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

The Wall Street Journal has been all over this story. The latest:

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Probe Sharpens Focus on Sabotage

"Officials suspect two different systems were shut off after the plane took off last weekend, one shortly after the other, people familiar with the investigation said. About an hour into the flight, the plane's transponders stopped functioning, making it much more difficult for air-traffic control personnel to track or identify it via radar.

In the ensuing minutes, a second system sent a routine aircraft-monitoring message to a satellite indicating that someone made a manual change in the plane's direction, veering sharply to the west. . .

[A]s details emerge an accident appears increasingly unlikely. The first loss of the jet's transponder, which communicates the jet's position, speed and call sign to air traffic control radar, would require disabling a circuit breaker above and behind an overhead panel. Pilots rarely, if ever, need to access the circuit breakers, which are reserved for maintenance personnel.

A physical disconnection of the satellite communications system would require extremely detailed knowledge of the aircraft, its internal structure and its systems."
posted by mlis at 7:16 PM on March 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

That WSJ article has a lot of new stuff in it. I hate that I'm reading all these anonymously sourced rumors, but at this point it's all we've got. I'm as guilty of being entertained by disaster news as everyone. The key quote that stood out to me was: In assembling the chain of events, investigators are trying to determine why the jet didn't travel farther from its takeoff point given the number of hours it apparently was in the air.
posted by Nelson at 7:22 PM on March 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

While we're all waiting and passing the time, you can read the single worst science article of all time on the Al Jazeera America site.

There's a lot of interesting math that search teams use to decide where to look, but that article explains absolutely none of it.
posted by miyabo at 7:26 PM on March 14, 2014

To be fair, that article is trying to describe Bayes' Theorem, and I've never read anything in my life that's satisfactorily enabled me to understand Bayes' Theorem. I think Bayes was a massive troll.
posted by Jimbob at 7:30 PM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

How the Missing Malaysia Airlines Jet Could Have Been Hijacked has some interesting thoughts about mindset
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:32 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

Does anyone know where we can make a list of press conferences that have taken place about MH370?
posted by divabat at 7:35 PM on March 14, 2014

Wiki article on Bayesian search theory. The important thing is that you incorporate both the likelihood of the plane going down at a particular spot, and the probability that you would actually find it if it did so -- for example there is no point in searching in a rainy area if you could search 100x faster in a sunny area. The whole process is automated by well-tested software so it is likely the search teams are using it now.
posted by miyabo at 8:03 PM on March 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

So you really do search under the streetlight because the light is better...
posted by Justinian at 8:12 PM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

Well, you search under the streetlight until daybreak, then you check the other places.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:24 PM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

There are reports in the last few minutes from a Reputable International News Organization that "The plane could have flown 1,000km off the coast of Perth, Western Australia."

Okay, fine, cool, but here is a thing that's going on; media organisations are grabbing unsourced drips of information or vague theories from some "expert" who they talked to and posting it instantly online because, in doing so, they instantly get 800,000 clicks on the article.

This shit is all going around in circles.
posted by Jimbob at 8:52 PM on March 14, 2014 [5 favorites]

Malaysian investigators conclude flight hijacked.
posted by xekul at 9:21 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

That is all over the internet, but it's from your typical, garden-variety "unnamed source". However, the Malaysian Prime Minister is giving a media conference in an hour, and that should be interesting.
posted by Jimbob at 9:36 PM on March 14, 2014

CBS: Malaysian investigators conclude flight hijacked

Also I did listen to the Alex Jones show in its entirety. Link here. It was a pretty brutal four hours but it's OK if you only do it a couple times a year.

1. Jones speculates that some earthbound rogue hackers took control of the plane from the ground and steered it where they willed. Claims sources that the airplane's (and all commercial jets') computers are vulnerable to this type of attack from NSA or CIA or Chinese or Russian or Iranian or your own clever teenager's counterparts.

2. the McAfee interview starting at around 2:09:50 is compelling and was almost worth suffering through the first two hours to get to but you all can just skip that crap! McAfee's hair and beard are stunning so you can just take a peek for that much. He is far more lucid than in his other recent interviews. They have video of McAfee shooting a .50 caliber anti-armored gun hand held. He is like a most interesting man in the world character. He has a new smart phone app, cognizant, which purports to show you just what permissions you are giving to facebook, twitter, google, &c on your phone.

(on preview my cbs link is same as xekul's)
posted by bukvich at 9:47 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

Live stream video and audio.
posted by divabat at 9:58 PM on March 14, 2014

On now: http://english.astroawani.com/videos/live

Is the PM on?

On preview: Cheers divabat.
posted by shortfuse at 9:59 PM on March 14, 2014

If he's talking about not entertaining speculations - that's the Transport Minister.
posted by divabat at 10:00 PM on March 14, 2014

Astro Awani front page says 1:30pm
posted by divabat at 10:02 PM on March 14, 2014

What's playing right now is a repeat of yesterday evening's pc
posted by cendawanita at 10:04 PM on March 14, 2014

Thanks. Do you think the PM will conduct the press conf in English, as the minister seems to be mostly doing?
posted by shortfuse at 10:06 PM on March 14, 2014

Probably a mix of English and Malay, depending on Q&A, but I'd imagine the most important information will be conveyed at least in English.
posted by divabat at 10:08 PM on March 14, 2014

yes, it's very likely as that has been the practice so far. all responses in Malay always follows the questions from the local Malay-language reporters, but they always return to English.
posted by cendawanita at 10:08 PM on March 14, 2014

Maybe the PM will defer to the US. There's a deal of posturing going on and the ducks are almost in a line. (China is off reporting a deep sea seismic event.)


The last two paragraphs of the above WSJ link -- Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Probe Sharpens Focus on Sabotage have been edited from:

If a criminal probe is launched, the FBI is likely to send in a phalanx of agents and other personnel. Such a probe is likely to involve many countries but aviation experts believe it would be headed by Malaysia because of the aircraft's nationality.

One U.S. official said Friday that pursuing an international criminal investigation would be "a huge challenge" because so many governments will have an interest in the process and outcome. So far, U.S. officials have not found derogatory information on the pilots or anyone else on the flight manifest, the official said.

to now read:

If a criminal probe is launched, the FBI is likely to send in a phalanx of agents and other personnel. Such a probe is likely to involve many countries, but aviation experts believe it would be headed by Malaysia because of the aircraft's nationality.

"The FBI would have full entrée into the case because of the American citizens on board," said Robert MacIntosh, who previously headed up international relations for the NTSB.

One U.S. official said Friday that pursuing an international criminal investigation would be "a huge challenge" because so many governments will have an interest in the process and outcome. So far, U.S. officials haven't found derogatory information on the pilots or anyone else on the flight manifest, the official said.

Some U.S. aviation experts question how smoothly any complex criminal investigation would proceed. Already, Mr. MacIntosh said, "certainly there has been competition between [Malaysian] civilian and military officials."

As the demand for answers heats up, Mr. Healing asked: "Are they prepared to deal with this kind of massive international investigation?

I feel it in my bones: a phalanx is more than a handful.
posted by de at 10:13 PM on March 14, 2014

The reporters at the press conference seem to be fixed on the pilot going berzerk.
posted by bukvich at 10:14 PM on March 14, 2014

That's yesterday's press conference, if you're watching from Astro Awani (Hishamuddin, Malay man in songkok, tan shirt, glasses).
posted by divabat at 10:15 PM on March 14, 2014

it would actually be genuinely surprising if this authority is handed over officially, not only from Malaysia to the US, but the US even wanting that in the first place, considering previous history of engagement.

(fwiw USA-MY also have a very high cordial relationship at g2g level, not just trade, for eg the FBI Academy does provide regular training to the Malaysian police, and the US Coast Guard as well, as well presence at border territories in partnership with local enforcement agencies.)
posted by cendawanita at 10:16 PM on March 14, 2014

Is this news conference started / on / still on? Because I've flicked through the 57 news channels on my TV and there's nothing going on. I guess TV news have moved on. Guess it had to happen some time.
posted by Jimbob at 10:26 PM on March 14, 2014

it's not yet started
posted by cendawanita at 10:27 PM on March 14, 2014

fwiw USA-MY also have a very high cordial relationship at g2g level

Malaysia seem to maintain a pretty cordial relationship with most countries. North Korea and US? Iran and Britain? Everyone except Israel, it seems, although even then there's an almost-billion dollar trade relationship. Not a bad effort. B+
posted by Jimbob at 10:29 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

however i want to criticise the general trajectory of the governance (and have!), the govt has always been committed in staying neutral diplomatically and maintaining relations with everyone (even Zimbabwe; though they were at the forefront at the anti-apartheid sanctions against pre-ANC South Africa), although now it's being confounded by all the latent fundamentalism and xenophobia that the domestic politicians are fostering. So even though at the highest levels they've remained pragmatic, the toxicity has pretty much affected the quality of their next gen of govt officials and diplomats.
posted by cendawanita at 10:33 PM on March 14, 2014

Another stream, showing the pc about to start: http://www.livestation.com/reuters?source=redirect (Via Reddit)
posted by shortfuse at 10:35 PM on March 14, 2014

Now South Korea and France are adding to the SAR efforts.
posted by cendawanita at 10:37 PM on March 14, 2014

aiyoh cepatlah sikit
posted by divabat at 10:37 PM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

if anyone needs translation for the awani feed, they're basically killing time while waiting for the signal to broadcast from the pc
posted by cendawanita at 10:44 PM on March 14, 2014

Lithium batteries plus nuclear materials = a big dirty bomb with good dispersal characteristics?

And while I'm engaged in paranoid thinking... Is Fukishima's stock really all that well-secured? (How would one would exfiltrate it without dying quickly and painfully, though?)

IIRC, Christopher Hitchens claimed back in the day that there was a terrorist group that used a nuke symbol as their flag, and very almost certainly had ex-Soviet warheads.

Idle paranoiac musings all, I hope.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:47 PM on March 14, 2014

Paranoid for sure.
posted by futz at 10:48 PM on March 14, 2014

I'm expecting the denials from Malaysian government officials to come any minute now. It's been at least an hour since reports were that the focus has moved to hijacking, so we're about due for other officials to deny those reports. Followed by the initial guys to deny those denials.

If the past is any indication at least.
posted by Justinian at 10:56 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

Press at PC told they won't be able to field questions.
posted by divabat at 10:58 PM on March 14, 2014

divabat: "Press at PC told they won't be able to field questions."

That doesn't look good.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 10:59 PM on March 14, 2014

Oh, I'm not sure why the talking heads on the TV say that without a claim of responsibility this is unlikely to be terrorism. Hell, the only claims of responsibility for the most spectacular act of terrorism in modern times (9/11) were false and retracted within hours.

Not that there is any evidence of terrorism as of yet. I feel like that always needs to be stressed. But I don't see that the lack of a claim of responsibility is counter-evidence.
posted by Justinian at 10:59 PM on March 14, 2014

PM is in the building.
posted by divabat at 11:01 PM on March 14, 2014

The Chinese ambassador has been spotted as well as rep from the Russian embassy. As well as the Americans.

well.
posted by cendawanita at 11:01 PM on March 14, 2014

Also Ukraine and India.
posted by divabat at 11:02 PM on March 14, 2014

Ukraine? wtf?
posted by mwhybark at 11:02 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

A couple of the passengers were Ukraine nationals.
posted by divabat at 11:03 PM on March 14, 2014

Malaysiakini's liveblogging the pc.
posted by cendawanita at 11:04 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

ah.
posted by mwhybark at 11:05 PM on March 14, 2014

Some news agencies are reporting that PM is delayed because he's talking to families first.
posted by divabat at 11:14 PM on March 14, 2014

News conference tldr; detection heading NW is legit. Seems deliberate. Serious investigation into passengers.
posted by Jimbob at 11:31 PM on March 14, 2014

WHAT?!
posted by divabat at 11:32 PM on March 14, 2014

They are basically confirming the plane was either hijacked or one of the pilots commandeered it.
posted by Justinian at 11:34 PM on March 14, 2014

Was the PM's press conference I just saw live? I can't tell. So much confusion.
posted by phaedon at 11:34 PM on March 14, 2014

I wonder how long it'll take to acquire new sat photos & compare to old photos to identify a new, very long runway in an unexpected location...
posted by five fresh fish at 11:34 PM on March 14, 2014

Yes
posted by divabat at 11:34 PM on March 14, 2014

KAZAKHSTAN?!
posted by divabat at 11:35 PM on March 14, 2014

7 hours from the last contact to last radar ping?? Did I hear that right?
posted by triggerfinger at 11:35 PM on March 14, 2014

yes, tht was the PM's conference. jeez, a hijacking. i don't know to feel better or worse that it's not mechanical failure.
posted by cendawanita at 11:35 PM on March 14, 2014

One of the pilots commandeering the plane still seems more likely to me than a hijacking.
posted by Justinian at 11:39 PM on March 14, 2014

7 hours from the last contact to last radar ping?? Did I hear that right?

Would that not require the ground crew to have overfilled the fuel tanks? Planes don't typically carry more fuel than they'll need for their planned flight.
posted by five fresh fish at 11:42 PM on March 14, 2014

1. Transponder manually shut off before the Malaysian east coast border.
2. The plane was turned around.
3. They are searching two corridors - north to Turkmenistan/Kazakhstan and south around Indonesia and the southern Indian Ocean (did I heard that part correctly?).

A deliberate act of this nature feels scarier to me than mechanical failure.
posted by pianissimo at 11:44 PM on March 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

@mpoppel New confirmed info means plane was still flying when Malaysia Airlines issued statement saying contact was lost with Flight 370
posted by triggerfinger at 11:44 PM on March 14, 2014

Would that not require the ground crew to have overfilled the fuel tanks?

I'm sure I've read somewhere that the plane had at least 7 hours worth of fuel. Last recorded contact was shortly after 1 am, last radar ping was 8:11 am.
posted by triggerfinger at 11:47 PM on March 14, 2014

PM's Twitter feed has text of the statement.
posted by divabat at 11:47 PM on March 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

from my fb feed:
My rough transcript of the useful part of Najib's update on MH370:

"...[W]e can say with a high degree of certainty that the aircraft communications, addressing and reporting system was disabled just before the aircraft reached the East Coast of Peninsular Msia. Shortly after, near the border of Msia and Vietnam air traffic control the transponder was switched off. Royal Air Force showed an aircraft did indeed turn back, flew in a westerly direction over Pen Msia then turned northwest.

"..These movements are consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane. Today, based on raw satellite data...we can confirm that the aircraft shown in the primary data is MH370. FAA, NTSB, AAIB, and Malaysian authorities, working separately on the same data, concur. Last communication between plane and satellite at 8.11am on Saturday, 8th March.

"The team is making calculations where the aircraft may have flown after the last point of contact. Due to satellite data, unable to confirm the last location of plane. Based on this new data, the aviation authorities of Msia have determined that the last communication was in either 1) northern corridor stretching from Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan to Thailand; 2) indonesia to southern indian ocean. Turning back to examining crew and passangers. Despite media reports that plane was hijacked we are still investigating all possibilities. Stopping search in South China Sea."
posted by cendawanita at 11:48 PM on March 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

A deliberate act of this nature feels scarier to me than mechanical failure.

Feel scarier to me too. But I'm telling myself that's because of the times. 20, 30 years ago hijackings happened all the time. Now they're rare as hen's teeth. But probability says they're never impossible.
posted by Jimbob at 11:49 PM on March 14, 2014

Holy shit, if there was satellite ping on the plane at 8:11am that's more than enough time to have headed over the Indian Ocean and crossed India to Pakistan and points northwest. How can a plane do that without being intercepted by the air force?

It's got to have gone down in the ocean? Except then you have to explain what it was doing over the ocean for 7 hours. Circling? Why?

Either it was flying in circles until the fuel ran out or it flew over land and nobody bothered to check it ou. I don't know which is worse.
posted by Justinian at 11:52 PM on March 14, 2014

Malaysian Royal Air Force?

...wikipedia...

Bugger me, I just learnt that Malaysia has a King.
posted by Jimbob at 11:52 PM on March 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

I'm sure I've read somewhere that the plane had at least 7 hours worth of fuel.

I could swear I'd read that it had 4 hrs left after "last contact" (the inital last contact, which started off the search).
posted by five fresh fish at 11:53 PM on March 14, 2014

7 hours of fuel is enough to get to Kazakhstan. 4 hours would get to India but no farther.

But again I can't imagine India wouldn't see a plane of this size over its airspace. It must have turned south and crashed into the ocean after running out of fuel. But that doesn't make any sense.
posted by Justinian at 11:57 PM on March 14, 2014

Does the satellite contact at 8:11a necessarily mean that the plane was still flying/operational, or is this something with a battery backup that could keep going after a crash/fuel loss?
posted by Westringia F. at 12:02 AM on March 15, 2014

Justinian: "Holy shit, if there was satellite ping on the plane at 8:11am ..."

How are they getting pings if comms and ACARS were switched off earlier? I don't really buy this new direction, and it sounds like an incompetent bunch of government officials are trying to get rid of this hot potato as fast as possible so that someone else can be blamed. "Not our fault it slipped airspace and wasn't picked up by multiple radars -- go ask India or Kazakhstan some difficult questions, instead!"

I just feel bad for the family, hopes being raised and dashed and raised and dashed. And it's almost certainly just a bunch of debris on the bottom of the ocean right now.
posted by barnacles at 12:03 AM on March 15, 2014

. And it's almost certainly just a bunch of debris on the bottom of the ocean right now.

Certainly.

Something is twinging at the back of my mind regarding the times though. Are they taking time zones into account? Are we? I can't get my head quite around what 8:11am means in terms of the flying time and fuel.
posted by Jimbob at 12:06 AM on March 15, 2014

NYT: The plane, a Boeing 777, was bound for Beijing and had fuel on board to fly at least 2,500 miles.
posted by triggerfinger at 12:07 AM on March 15, 2014

triggerfinger: "NYT: The plane, a Boeing 777, was bound for Beijing and had fuel on board to fly at least 2,500 miles."

But that is completely dependent on altitude and weather conditions, isn't it?
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 12:10 AM on March 15, 2014

I thought I read somewhere else (don't remember where) that flying at a lower altitude uses more fuel.

Also, this is almost a week old, but:

MAS chief executive officer Datuk Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said the MH370 had enough fuel to fly up until 8.30am
posted by triggerfinger at 12:13 AM on March 15, 2014

Jimbob: 8:11am Malaysian time (GMT +8)
posted by divabat at 12:13 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

I think it has to be one of the pilots. I don't see how this could happen otherwise.
posted by Justinian at 12:15 AM on March 15, 2014

So, several hours ago Nelson highlighted this quote from a WSJ story:

"In assembling the chain of events, investigators are trying to determine why the jet didn't travel farther from its takeoff point given the number of hours it apparently was in the air." [my emphasis]

Which I thought might be someone misspeaking -- because at this point, we don't know how far it travelled, do we?

Then I thought, ok, the US unnamed sources have seemed pretty univocal that they have some reason to believe (a) the plane crashed (b) into the Indian Ocean. If the US has some other source of info they are not releasing (some imaging or radar or something from a spy plane or sub or who knows that) that leads them to think firmly that they know broadly where the plane went down, that would make sense of the above quote.

The 7 hours thing fits with that... if they flew for 7 hrs, that means they could have made landfall in more places if they wanted, so maybe it makes less sense to fly over ocean until you just run out of fuel.

But the "we aren't sure which of two tracks it took" stuff is puzzling -- suggests the US info is not so clear on (a) and (b) as it had sounded like.
posted by LobsterMitten at 12:18 AM on March 15, 2014

It's happened otherwise before. From what I've seen online regarding the pilot, he seems to be a stand-up guy - an obsessive aviator, spending his spare time building cool flight-sim PCs. Of course, that's just an impression, and anyone can broadcast an impression. That's basically what social media is for. I don't know as much about the First Officer. But the tabloid of photos of the two guys chilling with chicks, I would think, would defeat any ideas of Nasty Angry Islamic Jihadists. Suicide, obviously, is always on the table. The Malaysian PM's comment, however, seem to suggest that they are doubling down on this line of enquiry.
posted by Jimbob at 12:19 AM on March 15, 2014

I first learned about the flight having gone missing last Friday afternoon (central time - 14 hours behind MYT before last weekend's DST), which would have been pretty close to the initial announcement from MA that they had lost contact with MH370 several hours earlier. It's kind of horrifying to me to think that the plane was potentially still in the air and flying at that time.
posted by triggerfinger at 12:22 AM on March 15, 2014 [3 favorites]

Here's a timeline of known events of the flight. It's a few hours old so doesn't include press conference info. I think all times are Malaysian times (i.e. the last communication at 1:07 am was in the same time zone as the last radar ping at 8:11 am).
posted by triggerfinger at 12:32 AM on March 15, 2014

Suicide, obviously, is always on the table.

But if it is suicide, then it would have been easier just to crash into the Gulf of Thailand anytime during it's regular flight path. Also, if the pilot or first officer wanted to commit mass murder and suicide, there were a lot of big cities along the coastline to crash into. But, they didn't do that either.

Instead, they flew west. Which makes no sense. What's out there?
posted by FJT at 12:36 AM on March 15, 2014 [2 favorites]

Here's a good infographic/timeline/chart on available fuel and ranges.
posted by triggerfinger at 12:45 AM on March 15, 2014 [2 favorites]

I just learnt that Malaysia has a King

And a very interesting kind of Kingship: all the state Sultans take turns. Their term on the throne is 5 years, I think and then they hand off to the next in line.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 12:45 AM on March 15, 2014 [2 favorites]

Instead, they flew west. Which makes no sense. What's out there?

Deep ocean? Not your day job? The void?
posted by panaceanot at 12:58 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

Soooo, Uighars?

Someone pointed out in another forum that the airports themselves supply potential weapons that could be used to hijack a plane: duty-free liquor bottles. I mean, if the Sept 11 terrorists used box-cutters, why not a broken bottle? All the time I see the carry-on bag allowance waived if you are holding armfuls of shopping bags from the duty-free shops. I might have disguised my excess baggage inside a duty-free bag on occasion.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 1:20 AM on March 15, 2014

TWinbrook8: "Soooo, Uighars?"

Knife attacks at train stations to terrorize the Chinese about taking a train, and now a missing airliner to terrorize the Chinese when flying?

Total speculation, I freely admit. Just a thought I had. I sure hope this gets solved! Poor family members...
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 1:32 AM on March 15, 2014

Knife attacks require a knife and an arm.

Hijacking a Boeing 777 requires a bit more than that.
posted by panaceanot at 1:40 AM on March 15, 2014

Actually, I've just read a more reasoned response: a Uighar hijacker would probably have kept the airplane on its original heading and crashed into eg, WTC equivalent in Beijing.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 1:47 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

panaceanot: "Knife attacks require a knife and an arm.

Hijacking a Boeing 777 requires a bit more than that."

Can't a group with common goals have separate teams with differing skill sets? e.g. You guys are best equipped for job A, and our team will take care of job B.

Just like their is a difference in skill set between flying airliners into buildings in New York etc than there is to, "OK, I light these fuses in my shoes when?"

I wasn't comparing the two acts as equal, but I'm fairly certain you knew that before you posted.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 1:48 AM on March 15, 2014

If it was Uighurs, then it would have been better to stick closer to the original flight route, as it passes close to numerous terror targets: Hong Kong, Chongqing, Beijing, Shanghai. Maybe even the Three Gorges Dam.
posted by FJT at 1:50 AM on March 15, 2014

I suggest we avoid derailing this thread by discussing Uighurs further unless evidence comes to light that implicates them?
posted by panaceanot at 2:11 AM on March 15, 2014 [5 favorites]

panaceanot: "I suggest we avoid derailing this thread by discussing Uighurs further unless evidence comes to light that implicates them?"

I totally agree, and will not comment on that further.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 2:14 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

Eh. There's no specific evidence implicating anyone at this point. Suggesting we wait for evidence is crazy talk. crazy talk.
posted by Justinian at 2:15 AM on March 15, 2014 [3 favorites]

News conference at 5:30 on Astro Awani and BFM Radio
posted by TWinbrook8 at 2:25 AM on March 15, 2014

Well, I couldn't possibly solve this mystery. Can...you?
posted by FJT at 2:33 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

or not.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 2:38 AM on March 15, 2014

Pilot suicide, has to be.
posted by Caskeum at 2:46 AM on March 15, 2014

or not.
posted by panaceanot at 2:49 AM on March 15, 2014

Commercial Break
posted by panaceanot at 2:54 AM on March 15, 2014

This story is weird enough that I sometimes imagine Rod Serling is narrating it to me in my sleep
posted by suburbanbeatnik at 2:57 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

From WSJ streaming:

Australia is waiting for a request from Malaysia before investigating a report that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 may have sent a satellite transmission signal from over the southern Indian Ocean...

...a spokesman for Australian Defence Minister David Johnston said. “We have contacted the Malaysians to tell them we are aware of the reports. But it is a Malaysia-led operation and it’s up to them if they think it’s something they want us to look into.”

Australian security and defense experts expressed surprise that a civilian aircraft could have traveled so close to Australian territorial waters without being observed, as the country operates one of the region’s most sophisticated and powerful surveillance radar networks.

The Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN) can scan over the horizon across Australia’s north and west... tracking all sea and air movements over a distance of 1,000 to 3,000 kilometers, depending on weather conditions. That would likely have meant the the Boeing 777-200 would have been spotted and tracked, even with its identifying signal devices switched off.

Waiting for a request? What does that mean? Can't Australia looks at its own radar signals?
posted by TWinbrook8 at 3:03 AM on March 15, 2014 [6 favorites]

Well, shit. I was very dismissive of the satellite ping claims and primary radar returns earlier because none of that makes much sense. Still doesn't but apparently it still happened. What the fuck happened?
posted by Authorized User at 3:49 AM on March 15, 2014

What does that mean? Can't Australia looks at its own radar signals?

As an Australian, let me assure you that our Government, including Defence Minister David Johnston, can barely tie their shoelaces without mummy's help.
posted by Jimbob at 4:01 AM on March 15, 2014 [10 favorites]

*Especially* Defense Minister David Johnston. Dude waited 3 weeks to comment on accusations that our navy had crossed into Indonesian waters & claimed it was because he was too angry about the cheek of the accusers to do it any sooner.
posted by harriet vane at 6:17 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

Unfortunately the suicide scenario makes more sense if they wanted the wreckage to never be found.
posted by kiltedtaco at 6:31 AM on March 15, 2014

kiltedtaco: "Unfortunately the suicide scenario makes more sense if they wanted the wreckage to never be found."

That's exactly what I've been thinking. The remaining question is who decided to commit suicide and take 238 other innocents with them?
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 6:37 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

who decided to ... take 238 other innocents with them?

The kind of person with the twisted mindset that thinks he is doing them a favour by sending them to 'heaven' ...
posted by woodblock100 at 6:44 AM on March 15, 2014

Harsh words from the Chinese:

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak revealed a trove of new information that virtually made the massive rummage in South China Sea for the Boeing 777 aircraft and the 239 people on board a huge waste of valuable time and resources....

Given today's technology, the delay smacks of either dereliction of duty or reluctance to share information in a full and timely manner. That would be intolerable.

As the leader of the international search and rescue mission, Malaysia bears inescapable responsibility. Other parties that possess valuable data and information, including plane maker Boeing, engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce and intelligence superpower the United States, should also have done a better job...

it is vital and imperative that the Malaysian side work more thoroughly and efficiently and other major information holders -- not least the Unites States -- be more open and forthcoming.

posted by TWinbrook8 at 6:53 AM on March 15, 2014

The kind of person with the twisted mindset that thinks he is doing them a favour by sending them to 'heaven' ...

According to an American official familiar with the investigation, but who asked not to be identified, it's the first manifestation of the Rapture.
posted by Mister Bijou at 6:55 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

because the chinese have always been known for their forthrightness in crisis communications
posted by cendawanita at 6:59 AM on March 15, 2014 [2 favorites]

I have to agree with the Chinese response on this one.

Yeah, China probably has a few cards that they're holding close to their chest, but all their past sins in this regard doesn't excuse Malaysia for wasting so much time, money and effort for a search that they knew to be pointless.

There is a lot of information that should have been shared sooner. Not really sure what the manufacturers should be sharing that they aren't already, but it would be very interesting and useful to know if the US have any information on the possible hijackers. They have a boarding list, after all.
posted by YAMWAK at 7:01 AM on March 15, 2014

I'd like to know more about why the pilot(s) would have flown the B777 up to 45k feet shortly after the trouble began. Do you suppose he or they put their oxygen masks on, took the plane up to that altitude (which is beyond Boeing's recommendations for max altitude) so they could asphyxiate the passengers without any trouble? This is some scary stuff! Total speculation, again.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 7:19 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

There's no indication that anyone was sitting on the satellite data for more than a day or so, which is probably the bare minimum time needed to confirm that it was valid, so the Chinese venting is pretty unfounded. It also sounds like Inmarsat might have discovered this data on their own after the search wasn't turning up anything, and it seems like such an edge case that it might be understandable that the Malaysian investigators didn't know about it.
posted by kiltedtaco at 7:25 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

I am surprised by the near-lack of news coverage on the missing passengers. I thought maybe I was just following more polite news sources, so I went to the Daily Mail, but all they have is a couple of social media/local news stories patched together with very little to say about a couple of passengers. A week into this and no major family interviews? Every other major catastrophe like this had lots and lots of human interest stories as soon as possible.

It seems to me that either we have gone Twilight Zone and the paparazzi are respecting privacy or that there has already been major handling & investigation of the passengers as potential co-conspirators or bargaining chips.
posted by viggorlijah at 7:31 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

Interactive map of the last known position of MH370
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:35 AM on March 15, 2014

Yeah, China probably has a few cards that they're holding close to their chest, but all their past sins in this regard doesn't excuse Malaysia for wasting so much time, money and effort for a search that they knew to be pointless.

What makes you think that they knew it to be pointless. Both the radar data and the satellite pings were very tentative and even so, they actually widened the search area considerably after the radar data was available. This is the first time that an aircraft has been tracked using satellite data like that.

I'm strongly inclined to think that whoever turned off the communications systems also turned off the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder. Without data from those it will be very hard to know what happened. We might never know.
posted by Authorized User at 7:36 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yeah, at this point the chances of finding the aircraft and of finding anything useful on the FDR/CVR seem low.
posted by kiltedtaco at 7:42 AM on March 15, 2014

woodblock100: "who decided to ... take 238 other innocents with them?

The kind of person with the twisted mindset that thinks he is doing them a favour by sending them to 'heaven' ..."

May I politely ask who you think sent them to heaven? The pilot? the first officer? a highjacker?
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 7:51 AM on March 15, 2014

All right, let me apologise and rephrase. I do not believe that this information should have taken this long to come to light. I feel that the Malaysian data exchange could be improved.
posted by YAMWAK at 7:52 AM on March 15, 2014

Last known contact was at 8:11am. The satellite handshakes hourly, so there is a possibility the aircraft flew for some time longer than that. The airline should know the exact fuel load, which puts a cap on flight time/distance, provided it was not refueled.
Here is a picture of the satellite position and where the aircraft could have been at the time of last handshake.
In the absence of raw radar data from the other countries, investigators can draw conclusions that a crash could be more likely because the duration of the flight corresponds with fuel load. If non-malaysian military radars picked up on MH370, that changes things. It might already have, according to this tweet by a BBC correspondent.
posted by travelwithcats at 7:56 AM on March 15, 2014

Slate is saying the plane MUST have landed in Central Asia. Which no one else is saying. Yay speculation.
posted by miyabo at 7:58 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

Re: rapid altitude changes. I recall reading there indeed was engine data, where did it say that? All I can find right now is that the Malaysian military radar picked up on the altitude changes. If they have engine data they should be able to establish if the data mirrors engine behavior during a landing and possible at what time that occurred.
posted by travelwithcats at 8:03 AM on March 15, 2014

May I politely ask ...

I was speaking in general terms; simply pointing out that such a mindset exists. That's all.
posted by woodblock100 at 8:05 AM on March 15, 2014

Hell, if it was flying south off Perth, it's pretty clearly entered Symmes Hole by now. Now, where are my Lost DVDs and my copy of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym?
posted by Sonny Jim at 8:09 AM on March 15, 2014

The last Malaysian military radar ping was at 2:15 - that's a long time until 8:11. If it landed in Kazakhstan or close by, there must be more radar data.
posted by travelwithcats at 8:13 AM on March 15, 2014

I'm strongly inclined to think that whoever turned off the communications systems also turned off the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder.

You can do that?
posted by dirigibleman at 8:13 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

You can turn off pretty much anything to isolate electrical issues. It's a violation of operating rules but that wouldn't be a deterrent in this case.
posted by cardboard at 8:23 AM on March 15, 2014

This story is weird enough that I sometimes imagine Rod Serling is narrating it to me in my sleep


"Unbeknownst to the passengers, the pilot has been replaced and their aircraft hijacked. It eventually runs out of fuel and crashes deep in the Himalayan Mountains, killing their abductor."

Will Frank Capra do?
posted by mwhybark at 8:58 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

Malaysian gov't graphic showing satellite position and triangulation-derived possible locations for last contact.

the southern route does indeed sweep quite deeply thru the Australian radar coverage area. Someone upthread posted a map showing the coverage.
posted by mwhybark at 9:10 AM on March 15, 2014

Even if the black box was turned off, it would still indicate what happened in the cockpit before it was turned off. So that would tell us if it was a traditional hijacking or a rogue pilot or whatever ...
posted by miyabo at 9:11 AM on March 15, 2014

mwhybark, I linked the same thing over an hour ago.
posted by travelwithcats at 9:13 AM on March 15, 2014

Actually on second thought that is one reason you might fly a plane around for a really long time before crashing it -- in the hope that the voice recorder would have expired any struggle that occurred. So someone determined to leave as little evidence as possible might leave the black box turned on.
posted by miyabo at 9:20 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

All known 5000 ft runways within the newly expanded range radius. (via RT from @cstross on the twitbox)
posted by mwhybark at 9:26 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

All known 5000 ft runways within the newly expanded range radius...

... and in countries where there are manned civilian and military radar systems as well as airport workers who might also notice an interloper.
posted by Mister Bijou at 9:33 AM on March 15, 2014

Unfortunately, the entire intersection of annuli for predicted flight range and satellite location (linked to by roomthreeseventeen, above) lies outside of the region searched by wnyc for 5000ft runways.
posted by pjenks at 9:57 AM on March 15, 2014

Is there a simple map that shows every known fix with a time stamp?

I'm puzzled by the (uncertain) reports of radical altitude changes and the plane not going in a straight line to a destination. If your goal is to hijack a plane and take it somewhere why mess around? OTOH if the plane has some unusual mechanical problem or if the crew is incapacitated, all sorts of weirdness is possible.
posted by Nelson at 10:07 AM on March 15, 2014

I was going to comment about maps too , whether a multi-layer Google Map could be made or does one exist already. All reported sightings, contact points, corridors.
posted by divabat at 10:19 AM on March 15, 2014

The map pjenks linked to is very interesting but it does make the assumption that the plane was flying in something close to a straight line the entire time -- not circling for a period, doubling back, or (if we're going there) sitting still on the ground. So the map is just another educated guess.
posted by miyabo at 10:19 AM on March 15, 2014

True, though at least the last ping received from the plane put it somewhere in the blue-shaded region regardless of its path... which raises the quesiton, if all the satellite pings are of this form - i.e., they just give us a ring-shaped region that it was in - can we build a picture of its prior path and figure out if it had been circling/zig-zagging?

I gather they haven't released the intermediate ping locations, so maybe *we* can't, but I imagine the investigators are doing this.
posted by LobsterMitten at 10:23 AM on March 15, 2014

Missing aircraft couldn’t have entered our airspace undetected: India
posted by mazola at 10:35 AM on March 15, 2014

CBC Interactive: Planes that vanished without a trace.

tl;dc Planes vanished a lot more in the 40s and 50s. Not so much now.
posted by mazola at 10:38 AM on March 15, 2014

A week into this and no major family interviews? Every other major catastrophe like this had lots and lots of human interest stories as soon as possible.

I'm not sure if things have changed, but early on the Chinese government supposedly put a leash on the local media about this:

Central Propaganda Department: The media may not independently analyze or comment on the lost Malaysia Airlines flight. Related coverage must strictly accord with authoritative information issued by the Civil Aviation Administration of China and with Xinhua News Agency wire copy. The domestic aviation department can promptly provide related information to passengers’ family members. All media must refrain from interviewing family members without permission, and must not incite any discontented sentiment. All media continue to give increased publicity to the Two Sessions.

For obvious reasons, we're not going to find an official memo about this, so it's difficult to verify it.
posted by FJT at 10:41 AM on March 15, 2014

It's been said elsewhere, but the US probably has very good radar coverage of Central Asia thanks to the bases in Afghanistan and nearby warships. That may explain why the US search is moving to the southern area of interest southwest of Australia. (Not that the other countries involved necessarily have bad radar, but they might not share the data with the US.)
posted by miyabo at 10:42 AM on March 15, 2014

Senior Afghan official on whether #MH370 flew over Afghanistan: "We do not have a radar. Go and ask the Americans."— Kevin Sieff (@ksieff) March 15, 2014

posted by mazola at 10:52 AM on March 15, 2014 [10 favorites]

Senior Afghan official on whether #MH370 flew over Afghanistan: "We do not have a radar. Go and ask the Americans."— Kevin Sieff (@ksieff) March 15, 2014

This is likely the most open and forthright answer in the whole of the investigation so far.
posted by Thing at 11:03 AM on March 15, 2014 [20 favorites]

Re: Maps
My understanding is that a satellite does not give an exact position, hence the two corridors. Satellites tend to have more than one antenna, pointed in different directions, and make no distinction between the received information.
What the investigators did was to compare data from different satellites for overlap, they could exclude areas covered by other satellites, thus knew which satellite the last ping(s) had to come from.
The last assumed contact point on military radar was (Pulau Perak) at 2:15. After that the aircraft left Malaysian airspace.

Now, if one could establish which satellite recorded the handshakes from MH370, it would be possible to draw corridors for every ping between 2:15 and 8:11 am, or possibly from 1:22 am on - when the last proper contact was. Then a route could be traced.

But since the aircraft could have flown for a while longer than 8:11 (hourly handshakes), they are probably working on calculations for a probable further route, to refine the search and find the plane.
posted by travelwithcats at 11:10 AM on March 15, 2014

If they did land the plane, then why? No demands have been made, at least publicly. Could you even sell a plane like this on the black market? Use it as a missile?
posted by rosswald at 11:14 AM on March 15, 2014

Neither of the corridors make any sense. The northern corridor requires the plane to fly over airspace in which is should have been constantly detected by radar. The southern corridor means the pilot was deliberately just flying around until he ran out of fuel and crashed. But in that case why not dive straight into the water much earlier in the flight?
posted by Justinian at 11:18 AM on March 15, 2014 [2 favorites]

They say "flying under the radar" for a reason. There are ways to be less noticeable.
posted by travelwithcats at 11:20 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

But the "we aren't sure which of two tracks it took" stuff is puzzling -- suggests the US info is not so clear on (a) and (b) as it had sounded like.

The only tracking info they have from the satellite is signal round trip time, which gives you distance from the satellite. You plot that circle.

You now erase the part around Malaysia, which was under radar coverage, then you have two "tracks" -- the arc that's north of Malaysia, and the arc that was south. You then plot fuel ranges, and cut out the parts beyond max range. This gives you basically two patches where the plane could have been when that one satellite got that ping.

If they went north, between China, India, and the US in Afghanistan, they were tracked by radar -- both countries have extensive air defense networks, and we have significant presence in Afghanistan. If they went south, they were over the Southern Indian Ocean, near the Kergulan Islands, which don't have an airport. The entire area is basically ocean. If they were over that spot, they crashed into the ocean.

If they flew low to get under the radar, they would have to get much closer to those countries to be seen -- but flying low means you're both burning more fuel *and* your going slower. If they did fly low, they're not nearly as far out as they could have been if they'd flown at high altitude.
posted by eriko at 11:21 AM on March 15, 2014 [5 favorites]

Do we know anything about the cargo on board? Could something extremely valuable (like a pallet of cash meant for a bank) been the real target?
posted by clockworkjoe at 11:23 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

For the northern corridor:
Time zones mean they could have flown in the dark all that time.
posted by travelwithcats at 11:25 AM on March 15, 2014

All right, let me apologise and rephrase. I do not believe that this information should have taken this long to come to light. I feel that the Malaysian data exchange could be improved.

Do you have any specific concerns about the protocols used and about how this unprecedented location data came to be known. Or do you have beliefs and feelings based on "hey it was kinda long before they told us this in a press conference".
posted by Authorized User at 11:25 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

'Water landing is a remote possibility' - DITCHING: Such emergency landing would have been extremely difficult without breaking underbelly of aircraft, says expert
posted by rosswald at 11:30 AM on March 15, 2014

I am not sure what to think about the reasons for such an elaborate hijacking. There are many possible targets. Just in 9 days there will be many important people for the Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague talking about preventing nuclear terrorism. I hope we'll find the plane and passengers until then.
posted by travelwithcats at 11:33 AM on March 15, 2014

Do you have any specific concerns about the protocols used and about how this unprecedented location data came to be known. Or do you have beliefs and feelings based on "hey it was kinda long before they told us this in a press conference".

One specific concern is that searches in the Gulf of Thailand and South China Sea were still being sent out as late as Thursday. They didn't need to tell the public the details of the location data, but they were still willing to waste time and care on something they must have known was pointless.
posted by Thing at 11:33 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

What the investigators did was to compare data from different satellites for overlap, they could exclude areas covered by other satellites, thus knew which satellite the last ping(s) had to come from.

As far as I understand, data from just one satellite was used. Inmarsat IOR marked in blue here. It is parked in geostationary orbit over the equator at 64 Degrees East and what they did was work out how long the ping took to travel to the satellite. Thus the possible paths lying around a circle centered on that point.

They didn't need to tell the public the details of the location data, but they were still willing to waste time and care on something they must have known was pointless.

What makes you think that they knew it to be pointless. Both the radar data and the satellite pings were very tentative and even so, they actually widened the search area considerably after the radar data was available. This is the first time that an aircraft has been tracked using satellite data like that. copy-pasting myself from 10 comments up
posted by Authorized User at 11:36 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

The southern corridor means the pilot was deliberately just flying around until he ran out of fuel and crashed. But in that case why not dive straight into the water much earlier in the flight?

I guess the working theory is that they wanted the plane to disappear completely. If it were a suicide it's even possible that they were already dead by deliberate depressurization and the autopilot was left to run the plane through a pre-programmed route. It would have been possible to disable the comms, program the route and initiate depressurization before the passengers were likely to notice anything wrong.

And this is of course complete speculation.
posted by Authorized User at 11:40 AM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

RE: Inmarsat IOR marked in blue here.
Yeah, I was thinking about AOR-E (yellow on that map) and POR (pink) - see how they overlap? The field between the yellow line and the pink line is still vast though.

EDIT: overlap with the field marked blue I mean.
posted by travelwithcats at 11:41 AM on March 15, 2014

Guardian: What we know for certain – and what's still speculation
posted by travelwithcats at 11:44 AM on March 15, 2014

In absence of a map of location fixes, I'll take a simple list. Time, position, altitude. The reporting I've read is conflicted about what we know. Last night's WSJ article says "the plane kept broadcasting its location hourly via a satellite communication system for five more hours". That suggests a fairly regular set of positions for the plane independent of radar. I haven't seen those positions reported anywhere, just the last ring around the satellite.

Another WSJ article suggests most of the Inmarsat fixes include precise data: "the transmissions included detailed information about the plane's location, speed and bearing." IIRC the last position from Inmarsat data is only that vague ring because it's not a complete message. Ie: just detecting some sort of signal, and not the data in the message.

The usefulness of this Inmarsat data makes me once again reiterate my position that satellite uplinks of GPS position would be enormously useful in a case like this. Although if there's a determined attacker in the cockpit shutting off reporting, that GPS pinger could be shut off too. I wonder if the data got to Inmarsat only because some hypothetical attacker didn't know about the engine reporting system? Or it's self-contained and they weren't able to disable it?
posted by Nelson at 11:53 AM on March 15, 2014

So there's two possibilities, I guess. One, a strange and elaborate suicide by one of the pilots. It'd almost have to be one of the pilots, given the skill shown. In which case it probably flew off into the South Indian ocean and crashed when it ran out of fuel. But that seems really bizarre; you can certainly believe in the suicidal impulse where a depressed pilot dives his plane into the ocean, and it's even thought there may have been a case of it with Egypt Air 990. But that's a hell of a lot different than flying for *7* hours just to kill yourself, and if they merely wanted never to be found, flying back across Malaysia to ditch in the Indian Ocean would have likely done it.

Second, it's somewhere in the northern arc and was a hijacking. In which case, you have to ask _why the hell Malaysia_? If you wanted to hijack a plane to somewhere in central Asia, there's plenty of places far closer. So it seems like either there was some reason it was an easier target, i.e. they had suborned a crew member, or there was something or someone on that plane that they really wanted. The latter of which sounds truly ridiculous and movie-plot like, but the whole thing is just strange.

Either way, it seems like the passengers must be dead. Even if it landed rather than crashed in the northern arc, it seems near-certain that if the passengers were conscious for any significant amount of time that some text messages wouldn't have been sent, and even if they were later incapacitated they'd be sent if a cell tower came within range. Especially if a plane was flying low to evade radar. And I can't imagine hijackers keeping good enough control of 200+ people that they could collect all the phones and disable them, not post 9/11.
posted by tavella at 11:55 AM on March 15, 2014 [3 favorites]

The passengers would have died from hypoxia if the plane really did go up to 45,000 feet. That's another reason I think it was one or both pilots. He/they could have put on their oxygen mask and deliberately flown up really high to kill the passengers.
posted by Justinian at 12:00 PM on March 15, 2014 [2 favorites]

But, again, that makes no sense for the southern corridor suicide theory. Why kill the passengers with hypoxia if you're just going to crash into the ocean when you run out of fuel?
posted by Justinian at 12:01 PM on March 15, 2014 [2 favorites]

Has there been any mention of anyone taking a look at the pilot's home flight-sim? If we're going to consider that it was the pilot that did it, there's a chance that he was practicing/sandboxing/fantasizing there, right?
posted by jpziller at 12:02 PM on March 15, 2014 [4 favorites]

The suicide scenario reminds me in some ways of the Fedex 705 incident. In that case, a Fedex pilot who was not piloting the plane tried to kill the pilots and crash the plane so his family would get his life insurance. Not that that is specifically what happened here, it is just an example of a surprisingly elaborate and premeditated scheme for someone to kill himself using an airplane.
posted by miyabo at 12:02 PM on March 15, 2014 [3 favorites]

The passengers would have died from hypoxia if the plane really did go up to 45,000 feet.

No. Only if the cabin lost pressure. The plane's not rated to 45,000' but that probably has more to do with aerodynamic performance than cabin integrity. Of course if an adversary in the cockpit wants to kill the passengers then they could deliberately disable pressurization, but again we're guessing.

It's funny how we keep looking for some rational explanation. Maybe the pilot went crazy. Maybe there's a crazy hijacker. Maybe something failed and a hypoxic pilot started acting irrationally. Maybe there's an unpredictable mechanical failure and the plane itself is behaving crazy. The truth doesn't have to make logical sense.
posted by Nelson at 12:12 PM on March 15, 2014 [2 favorites]

Are the rise and fall fast enough that they could be due to a struggle? (I have no idea if that's plausible at all)
posted by LobsterMitten at 12:29 PM on March 15, 2014

If not a struggle, it could be a strategy to prevent passengers and flight attendants from trying to batter down the door to the cockpit, maybe?
posted by YAMWAK at 12:32 PM on March 15, 2014

Worth mentioning that the 45000 ft estimate came from radar at a point where the plane was 150-200 miles from each of the radars - and at least based on one piece I read, altitude estimates from radar at that distance are quite unreliable*. When the plane was closer to the radars (i.e flying over the peninsular) the altitude was estimated at a more sane 30000 ft. So it's possible the "climb to 45000 ft" is simply a mirage.

(* would be interesting to know what the actual error bars on that estimate are.)
posted by pascal at 12:34 PM on March 15, 2014 [2 favorites]

Would it even be possible to deliberately depressurize the cabin at altitude from inside the cockpit?
posted by vibrotronica at 1:04 PM on March 15, 2014

Would it even be possible to deliberately depressurize the cabin at altitude from inside the cockpit?

Could someone have opened the window? Or would that be difficult to do?
posted by popcassady at 1:11 PM on March 15, 2014

I recall reading somewhere once that it is possible for the pilot/flight deck to lower the cabin pressure; if that is true, then whoever took over could have rendered the passengers unconscious or worse without them even being aware.

Poking around a bit, it does look like the environmental control systems of modern aircraft includes cabin pressurization controls but I know nothing about them, and whether or not they could be used to lower cabin pressure to unsafe levels.
posted by nubs at 1:13 PM on March 15, 2014

viggorlijah I am surprised by the near-lack of news coverage on the missing passengers. . .so I went to the Daily Mail. . .

FJT pointed out China may have restricted interviews of Chinese family members.

No need to visit the website of the UK newspaper that must not be named. NPR has a good roundup:

Vanished Malaysian Airliner Carried Artist Whose Name Vanished, Too.

Tales From Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Life's Small Moments Loom Large

Missing Malaysia plane: The passengers on board MH370

Who were the Indians on board the missing Malaysia Airlines jet? [Warning: auto-play video]

Missing Malaysian flight MH370: Paul Weeks spent his final days in Australia spending time with his family

Heart of middle Australia lost in flight
posted by mlis at 1:14 PM on March 15, 2014 [4 favorites]

Does anyone know what kind of (if any) background and/or mental health checks commercial pilots are subject to?
posted by triggerfinger at 1:54 PM on March 15, 2014

CNN is now reporting that the transponder was actually shut off just before it crossed from land to water...and the " Good Night " was uttered well after the transponder was turned off
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 3:16 PM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

CNN is reporting anything and everything regardless of relevance or veracity.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 3:32 PM on March 15, 2014 [6 favorites]

Sad but probably true. I have seen that particular assertion in more than one place, though.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:04 PM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

Today's NYT update contains a timestamped map like I've been asking for. However it only has the last military fix west of Malaysia after 1:34 of flight, then the satellite arcs for +7.5 hours. None of the reported hourly locations in the intermediate hours.

The sidebar says "A satellite picked up four or five signals from the airliner, about one per hour, after it left the range of military radar", which is in line with the WSJ article describing hourly messages. However the WSJ article says the messages include precise location and velocity data, whereas the NYT article says "The older satellite communications box fitted on the plane has no global positioning system ... But investigators have managed to calculate the distance between the “ping” from the plane and a stationary Inmarsat-3 satellite".

Also according to this article, the position calculation doesn't come from signal strength but rather "the angle from which the plane sent it". You can actually see the angles in the government position image at 40°. (One wonders what the error bar on that measurement is.)

I haven't seen any explanation on why there's such a big gap on the ring centered on Malaysia. it's nearly 25° of latitude or 1700+ miles. Do they exclude that from the possible range because of the satellite geometry? Or are they excluding it based on radar or other satellite location data?
posted by Nelson at 5:02 PM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

Apropos of nothing, I thought this was sweet.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 5:11 PM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

I haven't seen any explanation on why there's such a big gap on the ring centered on Malaysia. it's nearly 25° of latitude or 1700+ miles. Do they exclude that from the possible range because of the satellite geometry? Or are they excluding it based on radar or other satellite location data?

Somebody said upthread that it was excluded due to having radar for the area which shows no airplane. The middle of the arc would be roughly (though not quite) right for Butterworth airbase which both naturally has radar and was earlier tracking the flight. However, that is only what was put forward above and which I'm repeating.
posted by Thing at 5:22 PM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

Re: big gap / two corridors
We've talked a bit about it further upthread actually. If you look again at the coverage of the satellites (linked here before) you can see that Malaysia is covered by two satellites, the data of IOR (blue) and POR (pink) overlaps. The last ping must have been picked up only by IOR, not by POR or AOR-E (yellow, over the Atlantic). So bits of a theoretical perfect circle can not be valid.
They also exclude bits of the circle due to fuel load. Possibly to radars and the SAR mission in that region. Hence we end up with two corridors.
posted by travelwithcats at 5:29 PM on March 15, 2014 [3 favorites]

Excellent. Thanks for the clarification.
posted by Thing at 5:32 PM on March 15, 2014

US investigators are reported to believe the initial off-course left turn which precipitated this entire chain of events was likely pre-programmed into the plane's autopilot. That would basically require the pilot to be involved.
posted by Justinian at 6:06 PM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

We're never going to find out what happened, are we?
posted by orrnyereg at 6:15 PM on March 15, 2014 [5 favorites]

Not with that attitude! ;)
posted by cavalier at 6:22 PM on March 15, 2014 [3 favorites]

When I ponder the search area and eight days for debris to sink and disperse it seems really unlikely that anything substantial will be found.
posted by humanfont at 6:25 PM on March 15, 2014

I'm sure the lack of evidence will not stop all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories. Quite the opposite.
posted by Justinian at 6:26 PM on March 15, 2014

We're never going to find out what happened, are we?

Not with that attitude! ;)

This loss has troubled me all week. All those people lost and likely dead, all those families who hurt and yet don't have any answers.

The end limit of sophisticated technology is pain. We don't know and can't control what we're capable of.
posted by vers at 6:33 PM on March 15, 2014 [11 favorites]

From the Jakarta Post:

In a development that could make the mystery surrounding the missing Malaysia Airlines plane more puzzling, the Indonesian Air Force has revealed that its radar in Sumatra, which is closest to Penang on the Malaysian Peninsula, did not detect any aircraft in the Malacca Strait area under its coverage, around the time Flight 370 was lost early last Saturday.

This was from Friday.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 6:56 PM on March 15, 2014

I just started my very first episode of Fringe. That opening scene...
posted by shortfuse at 7:09 PM on March 15, 2014 [3 favorites]

Some papers in England are openly writing that the pilot of the airplane was a political extremist and downed the plane himself. Given, however, the utterly miserable quality of papers in that country it's hard to know if the story has anything more going for it than potential sales figures.
posted by Thing at 7:12 PM on March 15, 2014

Metafilter: The end limit of sophisticated technology is pain.
posted by localroger at 7:47 PM on March 15, 2014 [4 favorites]

The harassment of Anwar is despicable and does not reflect well on the Malaysian government and the captain was apparently (I haven't read his Facebook page) quite vocal about it. IMHO, that's not extremism, just common humanity.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:49 PM on March 15, 2014 [2 favorites]

TWinbrook8, who is Anwar?
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 7:53 PM on March 15, 2014

I know that the likely best outcome we can expect from this is finding the wreckage and being able to give some sense of closure for the families and friends.

But this past week has just been *so* weird and unprecedented that I can't help thinking how awesome it would be if the flight was hijacked, and the passengers are all safely released, after the Uighur hijackers get their ransom demand paid via Bitcoin, with the destination wallet and transactions being filtered by an underground crime ring in Crimea, who it turns out Edward Snowden has been freelancing for (when not breaching credit card numbers at Target), and that the Bitcoins are eventually used to buy flights on Virgin Galactic - which is then itself hijacked repeating the cycle. Watching CNN trying to find an expert to explain all that would be worth the price of admission. Plus the passengers would be home and safe. Huzzah!
posted by inflatablekiwi at 8:08 PM on March 15, 2014 [4 favorites]

This explains briefly about Anwar but the best part is the explain-to-me-like-a-5-year-old graphics for the airliner situation.
posted by maggieb at 8:11 PM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

Sorry, here is a Forbes account of the trial history.

Basically, he was a charismatic politician who seriously challenged the long-serving PM at the time, was arrested on sodomy charges to discredit him within the Muslim community and who has been in detention, under arrest, on trial, convicted, in solitary confinement, on appeal, re-arrested and re-tried since 1999.

I was there at the time of the original trial and I've forgotten the details but the whole thing stank to high heaven. Here's the wiki.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:12 PM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f582e940-ab90-11e3-90af-00144feab7de.html#axzz2w5kGMTAx
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 8:12 PM on March 15, 2014

This keeps getting worse and worse. I'm still hoping they'll find the wreckage soon. Those poor families.
posted by daybeforetheday at 8:14 PM on March 15, 2014

That being a supporter of Anwar marks you as a "political extremist" is a really sad reflection on the state of Malaysian politics - where just being vaguely "anti-Government" is enough to be considered "political extremism".
posted by divabat at 8:20 PM on March 15, 2014 [2 favorites]

Reuters India: 8:38 AM IST

India on Sunday put on hold its search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, at the request of the government in Kuala Lumpur...

"The search operation is not over, we are on standby and are awaiting instructions from the Malaysians," said a senior military official in Port Blair, capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, an archipelago west of the Malay Peninsula.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:26 PM on March 15, 2014

Andaman Chronicle, because every obscure island has its own online newspaper. The content is not particularly noteworthy. Discovered via the Fear of Landing writeup of MH 370, a reasonable summary by someone who's made a hobby of reading and explaining aircraft accident reports.
posted by Nelson at 8:40 PM on March 15, 2014 [3 favorites]

Timeline.
posted by mazola at 8:57 PM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

if anyone would like to wade through at least the last 200 comments in this fb post, feel free.

9M-MRO. Praying for a miracle, however unlikely.
The Captain goes back 34 years with me. The CoPilot is too young for me to remember. The InFlight Supervisor I know well as we used to fly together since my B737 days. The aircraft is just 11 years old.
What a nightmare.

DISCLAIMER :

I do not have privileged information. I have no access to inside information. Everything I write is based on my personal analysis, ( Best Educated Guess + logical thinking ) with print and electronic media as reference similar to most people. My input on the B777 is based on my memory after flying the aircraft for more than a decade.
I do not claim to be an expert in the Field of Air Crash Investigation.
I am not qualified nor trained in the Field of Air Crash Investigation.

THANK YOU

Capt Nik Huzlan
Ex Chief Pilot Regional Operations Malaysia Airlines.
Ex Vice President Haj & Charter Operations, Malaysia Airlines.
Ex Boeing 777-200IGW Pilot, Malaysia Airlines.
posted by cendawanita at 9:35 PM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

The Malaysia Chronicle link isn't loading for me, but here's the BBC on the same thing, article from the day before the plane disappeared: Malaysia jails [opposition leader] Anwar Ibrahim on sodomy charges [conveniently removing him from contention in an election later this month].
posted by LobsterMitten at 9:53 PM on March 15, 2014

MH370: life on hold for brother of missing Malaysia Airlines passenger

"I don't think I can get anything done," he said. His thoughts wander and at times he feels sick.

"This long wait is taking its toll on everyone. I don't really want to think about it too much; every time I think of it, it's hard to think through everything."

Wang's (not his real name, because he wishes to protect the privacy of other family members in China) sister is several years older than him and throughout their childhood she was his protector. She was just 16 when circumstances forced their family apart, and for several years she effectively raised him. "It was just the two of us," he said.

Even when he grew up, she would go out of her way to help him with anything he needed. Although he moved abroad some years ago, his daughter recently spent six months living with her aunt.

His sister had grown up into a lively, outgoing woman, "always busy doing things; always going places." Her son has told him she had been in Malaysia for business.

At first, no one dared to break the news to their elderly mother. But when she tried to call Wang's sister, and could not reach her phone, relatives were forced to explain that she was missing.

posted by cashman at 9:56 PM on March 15, 2014

Missing Plane: Grief And Anger Among Families [YouTube 2:58]

Amongst them the mother of student Lin Annan. She did not want to give me her name but with tears streaming down her face she said: "There's something I really want to say to my son. I love you. All of us love you."

The 27-year-old was returning home from studying.

"Most of all I'm hoping for a miracle to bring everybody back safely. All of them," his mother added.

---- ----

Wang Le's mother was on the plane. The well-educated 27-year-old's is engaged to a journalist. Now they find themselves at the heart of a story she would normally be reporting on.

He showed me the last message his mother, Zhang Chi, sent him before take-off. "Can we meet up when I get back to Beijing?" she wrote.

"She is a good mother," he said. "We have good relationship, like friends, we talk about everything."

Instead of planning his marriage, he's now comforting his father.

"Every evening I have dinner with my father. Now it's only us in our house. He talks about my mother, and sometimes he cries. He tells stories I've not heard before. He talks about my mum everyday".

posted by cashman at 10:00 PM on March 15, 2014

Tan Hang Kong is still hoping that three of his family members onboard the missing MH370 are alive and safe.

The 84-year-old father of Tan Ah Ming, 46, said since March 8, he had been praying and hoping for the safe return of his son, daughter-in-law Chuang Hsui Leng, 48, and grandson Tan Wei Chen, 19.

posted by cashman at 10:06 PM on March 15, 2014

I haven't seen any explanation on why there's such a big gap on the ring centered on Malaysia. it's nearly 25° of latitude or 1700+ miles. Do they exclude that from the possible range because of the satellite geometry? Or are they excluding it based on radar or other satellite location data?

Well, you would have two points if two satellites received information about MH370 at the same time. The two points in the globe would be the two places where both bits of satellite information are true. I realize that image shown only marks the location of one satellite, but perhaps there is a reason the other was left off...
posted by oneirodynia at 10:23 PM on March 15, 2014

Oh boo, I forgot that I left this page open a long time ago, and the satellite thing has long been covered up above. Sorry.
posted by oneirodynia at 10:27 PM on March 15, 2014

Are there any theories beyond

(a) pilot went nuts and ditched in the bottomless deep sea; and

(b) incredibly sophisticated hijacking, prelude to terrorism?

They both seem so far-fetched. A 7 hour suicide? That doesn't seem likely. Hijackers that know all about the transponders, multiple nation's radar facilities, hand-off zone, can literally disappear the aircraft? That doesn't seem likely.

Surreality.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:39 PM on March 15, 2014 [4 favorites]

Well, you mentioned Fukishima in a previous comment so, yes, there are plenty of theories.
posted by futz at 10:55 PM on March 15, 2014

Are there any theories beyond...

At this point, humanfont's idea that there was a large currency shipment on the plane (or something similarly valuable), isn't really any more farfetched than the other options.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 11:01 PM on March 15, 2014

This flight having anything to do with Fukushima is beyond farfetched.
posted by futz at 11:10 PM on March 15, 2014

Boy, that really got your goat, didn't it? And that despite the very clear disclaimer that it was absurdly paranoid. I'm kind of surprised it has you so enthralled.
posted by five fresh fish at 11:16 PM on March 15, 2014

They both seem so far-fetched. A 7 hour suicide? That doesn't seem likely. Hijackers that know all about the transponders, multiple nation's radar facilities, hand-off zone, can literally disappear the aircraft? That doesn't seem likely.

Yeah, irrational/deliberate crew activity is a deeply unsatisfactory explanation because it could be used to explain just about any kind of incident. And there is no evidence whatsoever of hijacking and it would have to have been very very lucky or very very sophisticated hijacking for there to be none.
posted by Authorized User at 11:29 PM on March 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

MH370's original heading off the NE coast of Malaysia, waypoint IGARI, is an intersection of national airspace boundaries. Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam all meet there. If you want to cause maximum confusion, that seems to be the place.

If you look at the timing, the plane took off and reached cruising altitude over the middle of the country at the 20 minute mark, so seatbelt signs would be on until then. 20 minutes later, the Air Traffic Control reported its last contact just off the coast. Before that, while it was still over land, the ACARS went off. After the last ATC report, the transponder went off. Then the indication on radar that the plane was changing course.

That's a lot of activity in a short amount of time if we're talking about an unauthorized intrusion into the cockpit at a time when the flight attendants are getting ready/serving the evening meal and at least some passengers could still be expected to be awake.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 12:05 AM on March 16, 2014

What do you think happened, TWinbrook8? What's your best guess at this point?
posted by suburbanbeatnik at 12:08 AM on March 16, 2014

Oh man, I hate to say it but based on the timing and the piloting skill, either the captain or the first officer continued flying the plane/Occam's razor/motive is still a question however.

Grabbing at straws, is it possible that either one had a friend deadheading in the jump seat? Haven't heard that possibility mentioned in my reading.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 12:25 AM on March 16, 2014

Some papers in England are openly writing that the pilot of the airplane was a political extremist

Beeline to the mail (I'm USian) and yes, yes they are. However it is hard to believe that even the most extreme politicist would figure out that hiding a loaded 777 would be the most attention-getting ploy of all.
posted by telstar at 1:53 AM on March 16, 2014

Surreal it is, sure. But remember how we all felt when the news of 9/11 broke? I thought it must be a joke, an awful piloting error...and then we found out that this was a well thought out plan.

According to the New Straits Time the investigators re-enacted the suspected flight path to compare the radar and satellite data with data from the missing aircraft. From the article: "The official said the new findings generated data identical to that which is believed to show the missing airliner [...]."
And: "That is why we can conclusively say which two possible directions the plane flew [...]." (Emphasis mine)
posted by travelwithcats at 2:02 AM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Today's press conference will be at 5:30 pm, that's in 22 minutes.
Here's the link to the livestream.
posted by travelwithcats at 2:08 AM on March 16, 2014

Many interesting questions raised by the press. The authorities actually confirmed a few things that were already reported.

Families of both pilots have been questioned. It was confirmed that the pilots did not specifically ask to be scheduled for this flight together.
The police has the captain's flight simulator and is checking it out.
They refocus on the backgrounds of crew and passengers but said at least twice that they are treating everybody the same, alluding to no specific suspects. But not all countries got back to them with background info yet. They also said that intelligence agencies didn't reveal any suspicious details about the passengers. He refused to name which agencies.

It was confirmed that one of the tracking systems was switched off before the last official communication happened.

The suspected flight path has been re-enected with a flight simulator. The data gained suggests that it was MH370's signal that was picked up by radars and the satellite, although he used the word "could" and made no definitive statements, unlike the NST article.

They are pretty certain about the corridors and said the data was analyzed independently by experts from the UK and the US and later compared. It turned out that both parties came to the same results. They also said they made calculations how far the aircraft could have flown based on different speeds. It was confirmed that the aircraft had the regular, expected fuel load.

They said the cargo load did not contain anything hazardous. That was a bit of a round about answer I thought. The reporter asked a more general question, if they knew what was loaded and about the cargo manifest IIRC.

They thanked all the countries involved for their help so far, but asked "other countries to come forward" with data. So there might be some tension on that front, as the defense systems of the region seem not exactly the state of the art. They hope more data will narrow down the search area, but don't prioritize either corridor so far, it seems.
posted by travelwithcats at 4:01 AM on March 16, 2014 [14 favorites]

Thanks for the update, travelwithcats.
posted by taz at 4:08 AM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Many thanks from me, as well, travelwithcats. This is becoming more heart wrenching each day. I can't imagine what the families are experiencing.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 4:16 AM on March 16, 2014

I didn't quite understand what the Inspector General of the Police meant. At first he said that all the passengers and crew were checked out and then he seemed to go back on that by saying they didn't have all the background info yet.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 4:42 AM on March 16, 2014

Thanks taz and InsertNiftyNameHere.

There are now 25 countries involved in the search. Massive.

This is the press statement, via the minister's Facebook page:

"MH370 PRESS STATEMENT
BY MINISTRY OF TRANSPORT, MALAYSIA
SUNDAY, 16 MARCH 2014

1. Search and rescue operational update
a. The search and rescue operation continues to be a multi-national effort, led by Malaysia.

b. Malaysian officials are contacting countries along the northern and southern corridors about MH370. These countries include: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, China, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia and France. Officials are requesting assistance from these countries.

c. Malaysian officials are currently discussing with all partners how best to deploy assets along the two corridors.

d. Malaysian officials are also asking countries to provide further assistance in the search for the aircraft, including: satellite data and analysis; ground-search capabilities; radar data; and maritime and air assets.

e. Both the northern and southern corridors are being treated with equal importance.

2. Update on the police investigation into MH370’s crew and passengers

a. As per normal procedure, the Royal Malaysia Police are investigating all crew and passengers on board MH370, as well as engineers who may have had contact with the aircraft before take-off.

b. Police searched the home of the pilot on Saturday 15 March. Officers spoke to family members of the pilot and experts are examining the pilot’s flight simulator. On 15 March, the police also searched the home of the co-pilot.

c. We appeal to the public not to jump to conclusions regarding the police investigation."
posted by travelwithcats at 5:02 AM on March 16, 2014

I can't help but think that it would greatly help if the US could dispatch a few 688 fast attack subs to the search areas to listen for the pings from the black boxes. I realize the search areas are enormous and the 688s are probably busy tracking other subs, and I'm guessing the US doesn't have any "spare" subs, but nothing can hear in the depths like an attack sub.

I'll be the first to admit that, at this point, things look really grim, but I sure wish they could find those recorders.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 5:27 AM on March 16, 2014

Malaysian authorities may be looking at the pilot's simulator, but if this report in the New Straights Times is correct they have also run a simulation of the flight: MISSING MH370: Re-enactment shows plane veered off course
posted by Mister Bijou at 6:01 AM on March 16, 2014

Ahem, Mister Bijou, if you cared to read 6 posts up, you would know that they talked about the simulation at today's press conference. If you look up 8 posts, you'll even find that very NST article.
posted by travelwithcats at 6:47 AM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Useful contribution: [Why and] How the Missing Malaysia Airlines Jet Could Have Been Hijacked
posted by Mister Bijou at 6:50 AM on March 16, 2014

Ahem, I read your post six up: "The suspected flight path has been re-enected [sic] with a flight simulator." News to me that simulator = re-enactment, you know, running some computer software is same as taking a plane up in the sky.
posted by Mister Bijou at 6:55 AM on March 16, 2014

Anyway, I apologise for skipping and skipping the last few posts. Including yours, which have been very helpful. Thanks.
posted by Mister Bijou at 6:59 AM on March 16, 2014

Mister Bijou @ 9:50, your link is broken.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:01 AM on March 16, 2014

Whoops. Not my night.

travelwithcats, about a dozen posts up, already posted link
posted by Mister Bijou at 7:06 AM on March 16, 2014

They said the cargo load did not contain anything hazardous.

I thought there was a 20000lb load of lithium batteries. Those things are hand grenades when they go sideways.

On second thought, that shouldn't have passed the sniff test. Those would be transported by cargo plane, not a passenger jet.
posted by five fresh fish at 7:07 AM on March 16, 2014

WSJ: What Satellite Data Reveal About Flight 370's Location, an update with little new info. They correct one previous puzzling thing they reported: "However, the 12-year-old Boeing jetliner wasn't configured to broadcast those definitive points of data, people being briefed on the investigation say, as they first believed." That puts them in agreement with the recent NYT story that the satellite data does not include GPS fixes after all.

Still doesn't say anything about the locations of the 5 hourly pings. I'm very curious to see them because they should let you estimate the plane's speed and whether it flew a direct course, even if it's just more angles to the geostationary satellite. Maybe the data is so confusing or incomplete they don't want to publish it.

I have a nagging feeling that part of why information is so slow to come out is that it is embarrassing to the air defense networks. I'm sure it's painful for Malaysia to admit they don't have radar sufficient to track a target like this.
posted by Nelson at 7:11 AM on March 16, 2014

If MH370 crashed in southern Indian Ocean it wouldn't be seen or heard.
posted by Mister Bijou at 7:19 AM on March 16, 2014

No need to apologize, Mister Bijou, really. I wrote about the press conference from memory. The reporter asked about a recreation/reenactment and Malaysian Airlines CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya replied they run a simulation, clarifying no real-life B777 was used.
Sorry if my wording was confusing. They put the video online now. You can watch the press conference here, that question starts at 27:31.
He said: "Not another 777. We reenact[ed] the flight in the 777 simulator. So we did that. [...] It confirmed basically, that could possibly be the triple 7."

P.S.: TWinbrook8 referred to the link for "How the Missing Malaysia Airlines Jet Could Have Been Hijacked" I believe, that link is broken.
posted by travelwithcats at 7:40 AM on March 16, 2014

Gawd... really not my night.

Let's try this: [Why and] How the Missing Malaysia Airlines Jet Could Have Been Hijacked
posted by Mister Bijou at 8:05 AM on March 16, 2014

Where did the lithium batteries thing come from?
posted by divabat at 8:07 AM on March 16, 2014

A couple of interesting reference sites: SkyVector shows the flight routes, waypoints, airport radars, and national airspace boundaries. Live Ships shows all container ships and tankers equipped with transponders in eg, the Straits of Malacca but the map also extends over land and covers the arc area up to Kazakhstan.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:09 AM on March 16, 2014 [3 favorites]

Really not your night:

Not Found

The page you are looking for could not be found.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:11 AM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

this link?
posted by jepler at 8:13 AM on March 16, 2014

I have a nagging feeling that part of why information is so slow to come out is that it is embarrassing to the air defense networks. I'm sure it's painful for Malaysia to admit they don't have radar sufficient to track a target like this.

Although I'm not so sure it relates to the flow of information we are receiving in this incident, it does seem apparent that many military radar networks are not all they're cracked up to be. This is true in the US too; why was it so difficult to determine the locations of the planes on 9/11 after they turned off their transponders? The report plays up the confusion amongst the various FAA centers, but never seemed to ask the question "Why did NORAD not pick up on four airliners flying around the country with their transponders off?" It's clear that countries are very sensitive about revealing any details of their air surveillance networks, but the bits and pieces we do get tend not to inspire great confidence.
posted by kiltedtaco at 8:14 AM on March 16, 2014 [7 favorites]

From the end of this article on the Guardian:

The satellite "pings" that were last read at 8.11am on Saturday – some six hours after Malaysian military radar last detected the aircraft over the Malacca Strait at 2.15am – could still have been transmitting data from the ground, if the plane were to have landed, said Malaysia's civil aviation chief, Abdul Rahman.

"The plane can still transmit pings from the ground as long as there is electrical power," he said.

I haven't heard this mentioned before in this thread. I suppose its not surprising that they can ping on the ground, however unlikely in this scenario.
posted by Thing at 8:16 AM on March 16, 2014

via twitter:

JoeSentMe.com ‏@joesentme 6m
MH370 simplified: We can't establish motive, don't know the means, are sketchy on opportunity and, by the way, we can't find the crime scene
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:26 AM on March 16, 2014 [4 favorites]

TWinbrook8 mentioned Australia's JORN (Jindalee Operational Radar Network) upthread and although it can detect "planes as small as a Cessna 172" and "has an official range of 3,000 km" (both from the wiki), this JORN fact sheet [PDF] states on page 3: "JORN does not operate on a 24 hour basis except during military contingencies. ".

So even the existence of sophisticated radar technology might not prove helpful.
posted by travelwithcats at 8:32 AM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm beginning to think I might not solve this one...
posted by mazola at 8:50 AM on March 16, 2014 [4 favorites]

So if the pilot was following waypoints, what are the potential flight paths that take the plane to the northern corridor?
posted by mazola at 8:58 AM on March 16, 2014

This is a nice map showing which parts of the ocean on the southern corridor are actually covered. It shows the Inmarsat satellites, point of last satellite contact and Australian radars. Source: Mark Reynolds, PhD. Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering at The University of Western Australia.

Explanation of the pic:
The red line marks last contact of IOR with MH370 at 8:11am. The aircraft could have been at one point on that line at 8:11. The blue line marks how far the aircraft could have flown by 8:11.
The pink line marks where coverage of POR stops. The plane could not have been east of that line, if it had been POR would have picked up on it at 8:11 as well.
The white circle around Australia is an estimation of JORN's reach.
There also is a green line far to the west, where the plane can not have been, or it would have been detected by AOR-E.
posted by travelwithcats at 9:22 AM on March 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

Re: potential flight paths
Check out SkyVector, TWinbrook8 linked. If you zoom out, you'll see there are many, many, many waypoints.
posted by travelwithcats at 9:28 AM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Nice Washington Post graphic.
posted by mazola at 9:39 AM on March 16, 2014 [5 favorites]

I almost wonder if it did cross over land, was identified on radar by another country, and then because there was no communication from the plane it was shot down and whoever did it is trying to keep it quiet.
posted by jason_steakums at 9:45 AM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

jason_steakums, unless it was shot down in a VERY remote part of the world without social media (which I guess is possible), that doesn't seem like a likely scenario to me.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:48 AM on March 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

Right, would whoever is piloting stick to the flight corridors? because IGREX on route P628 leads directly over Port Blair and the Indians have already said they didn't see it. IGREX is also the border between Malaysian and Indian airspace so if the pilot wanted to skirt the boundaries, flying from that point north via waypoints follows the perimeter of Indian and Burmese airspace and maybe the limits to their radar if anyone was watching in the middle of the night. I really have no idea, I'm just looking at the chart.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 9:52 AM on March 16, 2014

the plane it was shot down and whoever did it is trying to keep it quiet.

I'm pretty confident that US Satellites would ID any kind of mid-air explosion, anywhere in the world, but particularly in the former Soviet Republics, being so near both Afghanistan and Iran, not to mention the Ukraine.
posted by anastasiav at 9:52 AM on March 16, 2014

Someone did see the plane actually take off, didn't they?
posted by maxwelton at 9:53 AM on March 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

Possible over land ('northern corridor') scenarios:

1. plane evades radar
2. radar is not functioning (turned off; apparently that happens)
3. data is missed; plane is tracked but not identified
4. plane is given safe harbour/final destination by a country that colludes in the plan (conspiracy)

Anything else?
posted by mazola at 9:54 AM on March 16, 2014

Someone did see the plane actually take off, didn't they?

Malaysian ATC certainly did, and they know based on radar where it flew for approximately 7 hours.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:54 AM on March 16, 2014

(Another caper movie would involve stealing the plane in plain sight--ushering it to a hanger at the airport while a smaller, more nimble plane which could mimic the speed of the 777 is used to fly its route and eventually make it seem like something catastrophic had happened...)
posted by maxwelton at 9:56 AM on March 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

roomthreeseventeen:"Malaysian ATC certainly did, and they know based on radar where it flew for approximately 7 hours."

Huh?
posted by travelwithcats at 9:59 AM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm pretty confident that US Satellites would ID any kind of mid-air explosion, anywhere in the world, but particularly in the former Soviet Republics, being so near both Afghanistan and Iran, not to mention the Ukraine.

That's another thing I'm wondering about, what are the odds that US spy satellites were able to confirm what happened to the plane but aren't releasing the info so as not to tip their hand on their surveillance capabilities? I wouldn't be surprised if there were spy satellite eyes on that part of the world.
posted by jason_steakums at 10:00 AM on March 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

I've seen people also speculate about shadowing another (in-the-know) aircraft, mazola.
posted by travelwithcats at 10:02 AM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

jason_steakums - Surely there's ways for them to communicate that intelligence to searchers without taking credit for it?
posted by jpziller at 10:03 AM on March 16, 2014

Huh

Not sure what your question is. We know the plane took off, and we know it was in the air.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:04 AM on March 16, 2014

I'm not sure why anyone would be confident in the ability of satellites to detect an explosion. Such a capability severely depends on how bright the explosion is and where it occurs in the atmosphere. These satellites are fine tuned to detect specific types of events, usually rockets or nuclear explosions, so it's super non-obvious that they would be able to detect the in-flight breakup of an aircraft. I know of no such events that have been detected by satellites.

Again, the military is not magic.
posted by kiltedtaco at 10:08 AM on March 16, 2014

I believe the "Huh" was regarding "they know ... where it flew for approximately 7 hours".
posted by pjenks at 10:08 AM on March 16, 2014

"they know based on radar where it flew for approximately 7 hours."

Do you really think they know where it flew? It reportedly left Malaysian airspace (= areas covered by Malaysian radars). Did you mean satellites? The data from the satellites does not necessarily give a flight route if it was incomplete, and more importantly it was not shared with the public except the last handshake at 8:11am.
posted by travelwithcats at 10:10 AM on March 16, 2014

Oh, right, sorry.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:12 AM on March 16, 2014

About satellites detecting explosion, see my comment here; the US said earlier in the week they have infrared detecting satellites and they didn't see an explosion -- at least in the immediate area, now, who knows if they checked far away places like Kazakhstan. But I imagine they could go back and check now?
posted by LobsterMitten at 10:13 AM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Ok, if Richelson claims they have detected aircraft explosions in the past I'm willing to give some credence to it, but slightly grudgingly since he is often working with non-public sources. I guess that's just how it goes when it comes to stuff like this.

The statement alone that the satellites didn't detect anything is not particularly useful on it's own, since it doesn't tell you whether the satellites would have been able to detect the hypothesized explosion.
posted by kiltedtaco at 10:20 AM on March 16, 2014

down in a VERY remote part of the world without social media

Sounds like northern Burma and it's within the northern arc. Could have crashed. I just don't see how it could've gone into China. I bet their radar is always manned.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 10:24 AM on March 16, 2014

Series of Errors by Malaysia Mounts, Complicating the Task of Finding Flight 370

The radar blip that was Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 did a wide U-turn over the Gulf of Thailand and then began moving inexorably past at least three military radar arrays as it traversed northern Malaysia, even flying high over one of the country’s biggest cities before heading out over the Strait of Malacca. . .

Senior Malaysian military officers became aware within hours of the radar data once word spread that a civilian airliner had vanished.

The Malaysian government nonetheless organized and oversaw an expensive and complex international search effort in the Gulf of Thailand that lasted for a full week.

Only on Saturday morning did Prime Minister Najib Razak finally shut it down after admitting what had already been widely reported in the news media: Satellite data showed that the engines on the missing plane had continued to run for nearly six more hours after it left Malaysian airspace.
posted by mlis at 10:34 AM on March 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

This business is beginning to remind me of the painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.

Edit: correct link.
posted by Mister Bijou at 10:51 AM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

If you were to work backwards from the premise that the Malaysian government has been trying to "cover up" something since this began--not in a conspiracy sense, but that something colossally stupid or revealing was part of the original incident, where does that get you?
posted by maxwelton at 11:03 AM on March 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

Anybody remember when geedubya made his surprise turkey run to eye-rack with air force one pretending to be a lear jet? For some reason I'm reminded of that now.
posted by localroger at 11:08 AM on March 16, 2014

Grief, anger and despair: inside the Beijing hotel where relatives of missing MH370 passengers are staying.

On Friday, security guards tussled with several male relatives of the missing passengers who wanted to allow journalists into the hall to witness the poor treatment that they were receiving.

“It’s all bull****,” a man named Wang said of the conferences. “All they do is stall.”

Some family members said they were told not to speak with journalists, while others say they don’t want to give their names or appear on TV because they are shielding older and younger relatives from the news that someone they love was on the plane.

posted by cashman at 11:11 AM on March 16, 2014

I'm intrigued by the idea that no one wants to confess that their radar couldn't have tracked them over land. So they are letting everyone assume the plane must have gone down in the ocean and all is lost. Of course that leads me to they could be marooned in some inhospitable remote location desperate for help which is agonizing also. I feel so bad for the families. The unknowing must be unbearable because the imagination can conjure such horrible scenarios.
posted by double bubble at 11:37 AM on March 16, 2014

Senior Malaysian military officers became aware within hours of the radar data once word spread that a civilian airliner had vanished.

Unidentified radar data that showed an uncertain contact. The more accurate radar paths have only been reconstructed afterwards from data from multiple radars. Meanwhile there was a complete loss of communications to the aircraft which very strongly indicated that it had suffered a catastrophic event. Thus the SAR effort was split into two areas.

Aviation experts said that a trained pilot would be the most obvious person to have carried out a complicated scheme involving the plane. Yet for a week after the plane’s disappearance, Malaysian law enforcement authorities said that their investigation did not include searching the home of the pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

Hindsight much? These aviation experts are only saying this because of the unprecedented use of satellite pings to verify that the plane had not suffered a catastrophic event.

Only on Saturday morning did Prime Minister Najib Razak finally shut it down after admitting what had already been widely reported in the news media

It had been widely reported in the news media because the data was being used to assist in the search effort and had been widely disseminated to US officials.

Most of the media reaction seems to reveal an attitude where information that is not disseminated to the public means that it is either not known to the investigators or that it is being suppressed somehow.

It's interesting to note that this kind of public confusion and media storm happens almost every-time a plane crashes and that the parties with the most experience about this kind of stuff, namely NTSB, FAA, Boeing and Rolls-Royce have not criticized the Malaysian effort at all. Not that I would expect them to at this point unless the effort was utterly and completely mishandled
posted by Authorized User at 11:49 AM on March 16, 2014 [5 favorites]

Just looking at the map and the northern corridor. The investigators might assume MH370 could not have been in Chinese airspace at 8:11am, assuming strong aerospace defense. So a big chunk of the arc would not be valid. Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Kazakhstan would be left towards the west and Myanmar towards the east. Getting into Myanmar would be a fairly straight flight, yet it would be too short for ~7 hrs. There is another possibility, as Thing reminded us, the satellite can register pings even from an aircraft on the ground if it remains powered up. So....land it somewhere closer, yet on the northern arc, and let it run out of fuel. Does that even work with planes?

Now how to get to the western territory on the northern corridor from the last suspected point of contact at 2:15am? India was quick to posit no aircraft could have entered its airspace without detection. Which is probably not exactly true, as it was reported that the Indian islands are not monitored at night for example. Were the plane to fly around India and through Pakistan instead, it is certainly possible to make calculations about speed and fuel that could narrow down where a plane flying such a route could be at 8:11. That would be a long flight, probably longer than 7 hrs, so unlikely to reach any point on the northern arc by 8:11.

Another route could be through Bangladesh, Nepal and the Himalayas. The mountains lead towards the western territory mentioned before. It looks like a difficult terrain but the flight duration could be about right.

If all the pointers we have turn out to be true, this was a skilled person/group/agency/organization with solid knowledge of aviation including aerospace defense. If s/he/they know so much about how to do it in Malaysia, why not have the knowledge regarding other countries and their airspace/defense as well?
posted by travelwithcats at 11:54 AM on March 16, 2014

I too, feel for the families. Many have put their lives on hold, rushed to KL just to sit in this hotel and feel helpless. This long uncertainty must be very painful and imagination can run wild in the absence of information and facts. I hope closure comes soon.
posted by travelwithcats at 12:03 PM on March 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

It's interesting to note that this kind of public confusion and media storm happens almost every-time a plane crashes and that the parties with the most experience about this kind of stuff, namely NTSB, FAA, Boeing and Rolls-Royce have not criticized the Malaysian effort at all.

If all the pointers we have turn out to be true, this was a skilled person/group/agency/organization with solid knowledge of aviation including aerospace defense. If s/he/they know so much about how to do it in Malaysia, why not have the knowledge regarding other countries and their airspace/defense as well?

if this wasn't actually a real world situation (ie: a fiction), I'd say I loved where it was all heading. Instead, it's more of a Shrodinger's Cat sort of situation. Somewhere, some place, there's a plane full of passengers (or the remnants thereof) -- with uncertainty the only real certainty.

We live in strange times.
posted by philip-random at 12:07 PM on March 16, 2014 [3 favorites]

The white circle around Australia is an estimation of JORN's reach.

JORN doesn't see a full circle. The radar station watching that direction (JOR2) see about 180 degrees, centered north, so anything south of 23.6° S is going to be invisible to JOR2. So add a bit to that RED arc.

It also seems that whoever was flying was aware of JORN -- flying across Malaysia kept the plane well out of reach.

Not that I would expect them to at this point unless the effort was utterly and completely mishandled

Maybe not even then -- what they try to do is, in the background, explain why the matter was handled poorly, what could be done in the future, and if you need our help, please do ask. The NTSB has gotten vastly more cooperation over time with this approach. Part of this is that the NTSB and the UK's AAIB have a very strong and carefully defended reputation of completely honesty in their reports, including saying "we don't know" when they simply cannot find out what happened.

Which is probably not exactly true, as it was reported that the Indian islands are not monitored at night for example.

The outpost radar stations may not be monitored at night, but India has more than enough air traffic that the mainland ATC radars are being monitored 24x7x365.

Basically, to get to the "'Stans', that plane head three choices. Fly over large part of India, fly over large parts of China, or fly basically the China/India border and be seen by both of them.

The only way I see them going north and not being seen is if they go very low and land/crash in something like northern Myanmar or Bangladesh -- and even then, that's dicey. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's dicey, and if they dropped low to get away from radar, the fuel burn went way up *and* the ground speed dropped to at least 350kts, probably lower, depending on how low they went. At that speed and fuel burn, they probably don't even make Bangladesh.

Finally, Malaysia's AD radars are one thing, China's are another -- they are known to have several OTH radars (and, like the old Russian Woodpecker, occasionally cause problems for HF radio users.)
posted by eriko at 12:07 PM on March 16, 2014 [4 favorites]

It's interesting to note that this kind of public confusion and media storm happens almost every-time a plane crashes and that the parties with the most experience about this kind of stuff, namely NTSB, FAA, Boeing and Rolls-Royce have not criticized the Malaysian effort at all. Not that I would expect them to at this point unless the effort was utterly and completely mishandled

I second that. There's no evidence of mishandling of the search and rescue or subsequent investigation. We don't know enough about the behind the scenes to really make a judgement. My gut says give them the benefit of the doubt.

However, It does look like the Malaysian officials saddled with the communication aspects aren't accustomed to the onslaught of the international press at this intensity. And possibly some people (in Malaysia and out) don't know how to keep their mouths shut or their opinions to themselves. (I guess that last part isn't much of a revelation.)
posted by double bubble at 12:09 PM on March 16, 2014

And possibly some people (in Malaysia and out) don't know how to keep their mouths shut

The New Straits Times has been running this ad (right-hand column, scroll down halfway) which is a little strange. The headline says "The Cloud of Mystery May Clear Soon" and in smaller type below "Until then, be mindful about what you share."

Is this a reference to MH307?
posted by TWinbrook8 at 12:19 PM on March 16, 2014 [3 favorites]

Well. That's just creepy. When did it start running? Please tell me it was months ago. Surely it's just someone's idea of clever marketing?
posted by double bubble at 12:22 PM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm confused about one thing (well many thing, but...), CNN says ACARS was turned off. But that it was still pinging?
posted by double bubble at 12:25 PM on March 16, 2014

double bubble, my understanding is that ACARS usually transmits a rich data stream with lots of info about the engines etc, and *that* stream was turned off. Whoever turned it off didn't realize (and it sounds like even the officials may not have realized until the satellite company came to them?) that the unit was still pinging, i.e., just sending out what they're calling a "handshake" signal that didn't include any further data.
posted by LobsterMitten at 12:44 PM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

I think I read somewhere (sorry, will try to find link) that the satellite ping was not from the ACARS system but was instead something called Swift64, which is a communications system that uses the Inmarsat satellites. (I believe ACARS uses satellites from Iridium.)
posted by devinemissk at 12:49 PM on March 16, 2014

I don't know anything about Malaysian culture. Do they typically promote the concept of family pride and family shame? If someone were to commit suicide, would that be seen to reflect badly on their family?

It's pretty outlandish, I realise, but could either the pilot or co-pilot decide that flying an aeroplane that just disappears into nowhere be a way of saving face for everyone involved? Their disappearance left a mystery?

If they placed no value on the lives of others (suicidal people are often not thinking clearly), they could do exactly what we've seen here. Take the plane off radar, disable all contact with the rest of the world that they were aware of, make a rapid course adjustment to confuse authorities and then fly into the middle of nowhere, ditching into the sea when the fuel ran out. They'd leave behind a mystery. They might even convince themselves that the hope that their loved-one was still alive would be better than knowing that they were dead.
posted by YAMWAK at 12:56 PM on March 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

Here's a good description of the ACARS/Swift64/Inmarsat relationship (which I got slightly wrong above).
posted by devinemissk at 12:59 PM on March 16, 2014 [11 favorites]

That was very insightful.
posted by double bubble at 1:14 PM on March 16, 2014

Psychic Uri Geller called in to help find Malaysia Airlines plane by "significant figure"
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:29 PM on March 16, 2014

Stop it.
posted by double bubble at 1:33 PM on March 16, 2014

That actually makes it seem pretty impressive that anyone connected the dots and realized that even though the airline never paid for Inmarsat services, an Inmarsat terminal was installed on the plane and powered up. I hope whoever figured that out gets a medal or something.
posted by miyabo at 1:36 PM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

And earlier today Google News was showing me an article that said confidently that the plane had fallen into the Bermuda Triangle (which somehow had migrated rather far from Bermuda), so I'll take any bit of marginally insightful analysis I can get.
posted by miyabo at 1:37 PM on March 16, 2014

YAMWAK: This is based on my own personal experiences as someone with mental health issues, who has been suicidal, and who has been diagnosed and treated in Malaysia (and elsewhere). The caveat is that this information is at least 10 years old, and I don't know if anything's changed since then.

Awareness of mental health is sorely lacking. Your personal self-care is not seen as a priority. My school's policy was always "unless you're bed-ridden or severely contagious, show up". My anxiety and depression was derided as "it's all in your head, you're making it up" - while tons of people in my school were having bouts of "hysteria" from just being so stressed. It doesn't matter if you're stressed, or sick, or sad - achieve anyway. Get good grades. Don't slack off.

One of my classmates also had mental health issues (incidentally we shared a psychiatrist, though we were never friends) and ended up dropping out of school (I think she moved somewhere else). My teacher made a quip about how he hoped she wouldn't take the SPM(O-Levels) at our school else we lose our 100% pass rate.

I was suicidal at 11. Tried to cut my throat at school. The only other person who saw me was another student who said "you will go to hell for that". Even when I was open about my own struggle and how I needed help, it wasn't until I was approaching 17 and getting nightly panic attacks that I got my diagnosis - and even then I was stigmatized for it.

People don't talk about suicide or mental health issues. At all. My psychiatrist was a pretty great guy, but I was also shuttled around multiple doctors (my parents wanted a definite diagnosis) and every doctor diagnosed me with something else: schizophrenia, Tourette's syndrome, neurological disorders, whatever. It wasn't until I got checked out at John Hopkins and got the same diagnosis as my first psych that my parents were satisfied.

(And now, 10 years later, there seems to be more with my mental/hormonal health than we know about. I have a letter from my Australian psychiatrist telling me I'm a "diagnostic dilemma".)

I am really wary about the possibility that this was pilot suicide. Not because I don't think that's the case (I'm trying not to have any personal theories about it), but because I have no confidence in the ability of the Malaysian authorities or public to be able to figure out any signs of suicidality or depression. The international media as it is has been abysmal in their coverage (and blaming the Malaysian authorities for it) and they're not always the greatest with mental health cases either, but at least in places like Australia or the US there are stronger support and advocacy networks for mental health. Malaysia? Not so much.

Sometimes people are suicidal and you have no idea. Sometimes people express suicidality but aren't actually keen on following it. Sometimes you are in situations like much of Malaysia where you don't have space to talk about your mental health issues, your main focus is on the job, your personal problems stay out of it.
posted by divabat at 2:35 PM on March 16, 2014 [21 favorites]

Take a look at post four on this thread.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 2:44 PM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Thank you for sharing that, divabat. I am sorry to hear of the difficulties that you and others in Malaysia have had in getting the help and support that you need.

I hate to say it, but if this does turn out to be a suicide, there might be some slight portion of good to come out of it, as it would raise the profile of this problem in an unavoidable way.
posted by YAMWAK at 2:50 PM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

If they placed no value on the lives of others (suicidal people are often not thinking clearly), they could do exactly what we've seen here.

It fits, but I think the problem with this is that we're assigning motives as a result of the conclusions we know now. If this was a suicide, then at the time it was being thought of, the person who piloted the plane would have been able to anticipate the response of not only the local government and media, but also the response of a number of international governments and media. They would have be certain that the plane would never be located, and that there would be great confusion, instead of being seen as a mechanical failure, suicide/mass murder, terrorist incident, or something else entirely.

Of course, this doesn't discount the possibility of suicide, but I don't think it's any more or less likely than it was before.
posted by FJT at 2:55 PM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

From roomthreeseventeen's link:

Way-point Tracks
• The use of way-points to the navigate are conjecture. They happen to line up with the direction indicated by the primary radar returns and Inmarsat data to the north.
• While many believe the aircraft was under control - we cannot conclude if these way-point were used, or just along the path.

That's rather interesting, as the use of waypoints suggested a knowledgeable person still flying the plane several hours after it stopped communicating.
posted by Thing at 3:10 PM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Re: "use of waypoints suggested a knowledgeable person still flying the plane several hours"

IGREX is named as the last waypoint, the time was 2:15am. That's roughly one hour after last comms with ATC at 1:21am (on regular flight path's waypoint IGARI over to the other side of the peninsula).
posted by travelwithcats at 3:34 PM on March 16, 2014

There's a couple of nice maps in the thread roomthreeseventeen linked. I can't figure out how to link directly to the comment, but it's reply 45, by user socalgeo. He explains his calculations more fully, but:

Here he figures the maximum flight time radius from the point of last contact, and offers this map -- which shows the max straight line distance the plane could have gone, plus the two arcs where the last ping could have come from, all this superimposed on radar coverage. It shows what we've talked about -- that to get to the northern arc, you'd have to fly through dense radar coverage, with the least-covered area being Myanmar.

Here he figures the max flight distance if the plane turned south from its last known point... on such a path it would not have to cross any radar, and it would put it nicely at the southern arc.
posted by LobsterMitten at 3:48 PM on March 16, 2014 [4 favorites]

Suicide would require either the pilot or co pilot (depending on who was committing suicide) to subdue the other person or otherwise render them unable to control the airplane. Is this plausible? I've never really heard of anything like this outside of murder suicides which I've always thought of being more about the murder than the suicide.
posted by Mitheral at 3:49 PM on March 16, 2014

Re-reading, I think I've mis-stated the exact method that yields the last map - he says the second map is "a scenario where the plane continues to the IGREX waypoint and then turns south, skirting the Indonesian radars at Aceh, and then when clear taking a straight shot to the arc. The blue line is the flight path....it lines up right with where they have said they are searching." (But interested people will do well to just find his full comment.)
posted by LobsterMitten at 3:55 PM on March 16, 2014

I wonder where on the timeline the climb to 41K and then "irregular" dropping was. Because people have been assuming that depressurization would automatically knock out the passengers... but the oxygen would deploy. So if you wanted to disable everyone else on the plane, depressurizing and then tumbling the plane around is a pretty good way to do it, especially to keep crew members from getting to the portable oxygen before they pass out. So if it occurred before the turn back across Malaysia, it may have had the goal of silencing the passengers and explain no text messages.

I can mostly make the suicide thing work in my head, if I assume the person doing it had the highest goal of never being found. Disable the passengers and crew, maneuver through the inhabited areas and radars, and then put an autopilot course for Antarctica and take off your mask. Or maybe make an error with your own oxygen and pass out before you can take the dive into the sea.

But *damn*, that's a lot of anger. Not just depression, but really intense focused anger. You'd probably have to kill the other pilot personally, and then probably deliberately kill the passengers or at least terrorize them, all over a period of hours, and there are a lot of ways to kill yourself with minimum chance of detection with less effort. Depression can turn outward into violence, but the targets are usually people who the person thinks have wronged him.

People brought up the Fedex attack, and that's a good example -- you had a guy who was about to be fired, and not only did he want to kill himself he wanted to destroy Fedex for firing him, which explained the target and violence of the attack. So far we don't have any such thing for either pilot, no known job difficulties. Maybe something will come out that will give a sufficiently powerful motive. Being pissed about Anwar hardly explains it -- that it's vile behavior on the part of the Malaysia government is pretty much the opinion of any decent person, not a sign of extremism.
posted by tavella at 4:01 PM on March 16, 2014 [4 favorites]

The autopilot ("flight management computer") navigates using waypoints. So it could imply the pilot was flying the plane, or the pilot could have entered in the waypoints before becoming unconscious, or a hijacker could have had a list of waypoints in his pocket to type in.

One other thing -- the default behavior if you reach the last waypoint is for the airplane to circle the waypoint and wait for further instructions. So if the pilot is unconscious it would be plausible that the plane reached the end of its program and just circled in place for hours before running out of fuel. In that case the searchers are looking in the wrong place because they seem to be assuming the plane was flying in basically a straight line in some direction, not circling.
posted by miyabo at 4:02 PM on March 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

I can mostly make the suicide thing work in my head, if I assume the person doing it had the highest goal of never being found.

Or the goal could have been to embarrass the Malaysian government. The pilot or copilot kills the other, programs waypoints into the autopilot, and depressurizes the plane. Everyone dies quickly, and the plane flies to the south Indian Ocean where where the pilot assumes it will never be found (not expecting the satellite data that has complicated the search). The plan would have been to make it look like it crashed shortly after the last radio contact, and the Malaysian government would come off very poorly after being unable to find the plane where it "obviously" must have crashed.
posted by stopgap at 4:15 PM on March 16, 2014 [7 favorites]

It's also been mentioned elsewhere that the person in control of the plane might have changed his mind at some point after turning the plane around, ie he had second thoughts about whatever he'd planned to do with the airplane/passengers/cargo and having committed a despicable and monumental crime, the only way out would be to ditch the airplane in deep water where his actions would remain a mystery. For someone who absolutely loved flying, changing the heading to fly over the vast Indian Ocean (southern arc), setting the autopilot and flying on until the fuel ran out might be a peaceful ending. I'm not explaining this very well but I can't find the original post

But the authorities have paid scant attention to the southern arc, not even contacting Australia to search with Jindalee so I've also discovered there is a runway that can accommodate a 777 in northern Burma and that would explain the last ping although nobody on any side up there would want to piss off the Chinese.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 5:55 PM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 dropped to altitudes as low as 1524 metres (5000 feet) using a dangerous flying technique called “terrain masking” to avoid radar in at least three countries, investigators believe.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:10 PM on March 16, 2014 [5 favorites]

No info regarding the earlier pings was released. And it was stressed how both corridors are being treated with the same importance. The pings must have been analyzed by now, most likely at the same time they analyzed the 8:11am ping. If the data for the time 1:20-8:11 was received, it could be that it leads to an inconclusive analysis. That might explain why the SAR efforts slowed down a bit and we haven't seen much movement towards search sites in the Indian Ocean. The last two or more pings being on the same circle, would suggest a landing on land. But not necessarily.
posted by travelwithcats at 6:11 PM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

This is all nuts. Why spend so much effort to avoid radar if you're going to let yourself run out of fuel in the middle of nowhere west of Australia? The only thing that makes sense is the northern corridor. Maybe we're giving too much credit to the air defense networks of India and China and a 777 really could fly low over their airspace without detection...
posted by Justinian at 6:17 PM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

SAR efforts in that southern corridor would be pro forma anyway. There is too much ocean and too much time has passed. Finding the wreckage would be a fluke unless they have information they aren't sharing about where in that corridor the plane would have been.
posted by Justinian at 6:18 PM on March 16, 2014

One other thing -- the default behavior if you reach the last waypoint is for the airplane to circle the waypoint and wait for further instructions. So if the pilot is unconscious it would be plausible that the plane reached the end of its program and just circled in place for hours before running out of fuel. In that case the searchers are looking in the wrong place because they seem to be assuming the plane was flying in basically a straight line in some direction, not circling.

Is this really possible? It seems so straight forward.
posted by double bubble at 6:31 PM on March 16, 2014

A 777 at 5000 feet is going to be pretty loud. Heck, the MD-80's that pass over my house at 10k are already noisy enough, even in the dark I think a 777 would be notable. Unfortunately that article gives no indication of why unnamed investigators might think the plane was flying low.

The intermediate satellite data would be useful to see how far into the open ocean it flew. If it stays at the same range then those arcs are probable tracks, and either it crashed at the most distant ends of those arcs (or it landed and continued transmitting closer). If it flew into the ocean and then back away from the satellite, the focus would be on the closer end of the last-position arcs.
posted by kiltedtaco at 6:51 PM on March 16, 2014

Re: "If it stays at the same range then those arcs are probable tracks, and either it crashed at the most distant ends of those arcs (or it landed and continued transmitting closer)."

If it circled around the same spot for a significant amount of time, several pings could indicate the same distance.
posted by travelwithcats at 6:55 PM on March 16, 2014

The corridors we're seeing are just a mental aid. The plane was in only one spot along those arcs at 8:11am.
posted by travelwithcats at 6:56 PM on March 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

Yes I understand that. But between 1:27 and 8:11 it can either 1) Fly roughly along the arc or 2) Fly off the arc, towards the ocean and then back out to the arc, so those seem like worthwhile scenarios to consider (I guess I'm also going on the assumption that the plane was flying at fixed mach number and not intentionally slowed down). Landing early or circling are clearly possible but seem hard to justify, but to be fair none of this is easy to justify.
posted by kiltedtaco at 7:05 PM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Agreed, knowing the earlier pings (and therefore the inferred arcs/estimated positions of the aircraft at time of ping) would be helpful to make assumptions about the flight path of MH370. We could establish average speed from that and possibly even exclude an unlikely corridor. But like I said a few comments upthread, there are reasons why that info is not made public.
posted by travelwithcats at 7:13 PM on March 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

This story keeps getting more and more crazy by the minute. I really should ignore it, but I can't.
posted by humanfont at 8:44 PM on March 16, 2014 [5 favorites]

Oh now the Australians are searching the lower arc.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:46 PM on March 16, 2014

Is it possible that the "dropping below 5000 feet" claim is so that countries can say that their radar systems WOULD have picked it up no problem had the plane been at normal altitude, to avoid losing face by admitting they can't monitor whats happening in their airspace?
posted by Admira at 8:52 PM on March 16, 2014 [5 favorites]

Weirdest story I've seen about this:

Malaysian plane disappearance inspired by Tintin story.

I wonder how people who read that paper don't die from sheer ignorance.
posted by Thing at 9:35 PM on March 16, 2014

Have we reached Peak Dumb yet?
posted by mazola at 9:49 PM on March 16, 2014

I dunno, has someone suggested it's an elaborate kickoff for a new Lost series yet?
posted by maxwelton at 10:08 PM on March 16, 2014

One of the first jokes on Twitter. And third comment on this thread before it got deleted.
posted by divabat at 10:13 PM on March 16, 2014

If they actually were trying to fly low over the terrain to avoid radar, a mistake and subsequent crash seems like a plausible explanation for why no demands were made or credit taken or anything like that.
posted by feloniousmonk at 10:18 PM on March 16, 2014 [5 favorites]

From the Guardians live update site:

I’ve just spoken to Sidney Dekker, a professor at the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University and expert on aviation safety.

He dismissed the idea that flying at 5,000 feet would put extensive strain on the airframe, as some have suggested: “The only really relevant effect is a dramatic increase in fuel use - its range would be very much shortened by that; probably halved, at a very rough guess.

“Other than that, it would be perfectly capable of flying - if you go into Heathrow you are circling at 5,000 feet before they let you land,” he said.

He added that it is difficult to overstress a fly-by-wire (rather than mechanical) plane such as the 777, though he did add one caveat: if a plane was in an extremely fast dive and abruptly pulled out of the dive at its bottom, that could cause problems.

But perhaps more pertinently, he pointed out that altitude readings taken from radar recordings should be treated with extreme caution: “Particularly over oceanic areas, radar coverage is extremely unreliable and partial,” he warned.

Finally, he added one note of caution regarding the focus on the airline crew, based on his years of examining aviation disasters.

“In the absence of knowledge, it is so easy to blame it on the little guy - particularly if he isn’t there to answer back. It is so easy to say ‘the crew must have done something wacky,’” he said.
posted by Admira at 10:49 PM on March 16, 2014 [7 favorites]

Let me tease futz* a little more by expanding on my Fukishima comment: we're surely all aware of Tepco's incompetence and the controversies about unethical things its done in the past. And I've read that the clean-up effort was shopped out to the Yakuza. They, of course, are even more unethical, hiring the homeless to do the work and not bothering to adequately protect them, for instance. And the Yakuza aren't much different from the Sicilian Mafia, who are known to dump toxic and radioactive wastes willy-nilly along Africa's coast, violating all sorts of laws. Nor so different from the Russian Mafia, who sold nuclear warheads during the Soviet breakup to the highest bidders.

So here we have a metric shitton of highly radioactive waste and spent fuel rods, a corporate owner that is at best negligent and at worst will do anything to make or save a buck, and a criminal gang with direct access to really bad shit, an urge to make dirty money, and no scruples whatsoever.

Plus a very large and powerful aircraft that may be hauling several tons of lithium batteries**, which can be made to go off like a bomb.

Plus incredibly sophisticated hijackers who have potentially routed the craft to terrorism central.

Put it all together and what do we have? Paranoid thinking? Sure.

On the other hand, everything that has been confirmed as true so far is no less crazy.

Scary. I hope my fevered imagination*** is an order of magnitude more wacko than what has already happened.

*Note to futz: don't take this post seriously.

**I've read this claim several times in Reddit threads, with apparent news media support.

***Literally. I've been laid out by a cold virus this past few days. FMwheezyhackingphlegmyL.
posted by five fresh fish at 12:05 AM on March 17, 2014

I... what?
posted by Justinian at 12:49 AM on March 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

Mod note: Talk about conspiracy theories related to the flight if you feel it's relevant, but framing it as teasing or poking at someone else participating here is personal and unnecessary, so please drop that approach from here out, FFF.
posted by taz (staff) at 1:25 AM on March 17, 2014 [12 favorites]

If they were flying below 5000 ft, and using up a ton of fuel, then the circumference that is being ascribed just got a lot smaller, like northern Burma.

But I like Admira's point. Face saving.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 1:41 AM on March 17, 2014

Remember, we know nothing for certain.
Unless we are sure, speculation is useless or worse.
Perhaps we will never know the answer.
Everybody will always wonder.
Realistically, we are in new territory.
Tomorrow's world is upon us...

Maybe the imaginary has become real...
Under our societies, someone is pulling the secret levers of control.
Revelling in their untramelled power.
Dreaming of fantastical evil-genius anti-hero status.
Or hoping to influence the course of wider history.
Could such a person exist?
How could we ever know?
posted by Clathrate Bomber at 1:46 AM on March 17, 2014

I've been trying to be fairminded and sympathetic throughout this event, but inevitably my government forgets itself (and let me just say, this kind of low-grade incompetent menace is more credible in my experience than any outright conspiracy that's been put forth so far).

It seems that the Acting Transport Minister is preparing a briefing for MPs, but not Opposition ones.

The letter translated, reads: "the Right Hon member is to be informed that the Ministry [of Transportation - that's their letterhead] will hold a briefing regarding the incident of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 to be tentatively held at the following:

Date: 18 March 2014 (Tuesday)
Time: 8.30pm
Place: Aloft KL Sentral

2. Your kind attendance to the event is greatly appreciated and I am thanking you in advance."

It's signed off by the minister.
posted by cendawanita at 2:02 AM on March 17, 2014

Yes, taz. Sorry, taz. You too, futz.

J, the leading theory is that the airplane was jacked, right? So then the next concern is "what do they intend to do with it"? Well, one of the bigger terrorist threats has been that of dirty nuking a city. Fortunately, matériel, delivery, and effective dispersal have been their challenge. If this was a successful hijacking, two of those problems might now be solved. Corruption at a nuclear disaster site provides the missing piece.

It'd work for a Clancy novel or Hollywood movie.

Anyway, enough of that. It's wild speculation. Granted, that's all we've got for any explanation right now, but this one is particularly grim. I'm done with it.
posted by five fresh fish at 2:02 AM on March 17, 2014

fff woudn't there be a lot of ways to get a plane capable of serving as a dirty nuke delivery device that would be easier than hijacking a B777?
posted by benbenson at 2:08 AM on March 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

One of the horrfying things about the WTC attack was that normal planes with no special weaponry, full of everyday people, were turned into weapons that took down buildings. That aspect of the attack was as important as bringing down the buildings themselves, from a terror point-of-view. And it worked: Witness the vast awfulness that is the TSA, and the sad police state that has arisen from the ashes of the USA.

Had the 9/11 perpetrators used planes they had, say, stolen from a "banana republic" airline, loaded with explosives, and flown into buildings, the towers falling would have been just as horrible, but the state response would have been quite a bit different.

The goal of a "nuclear incident via plane" is to make the nuclear part happen, that's the real terror bit. And if that's the case, hijacking is about the worst way you could go about procuring a plane. Getting the plane is the least of your worries.

If a 777 goes missing with 240 people aboard and there is even a 1% chance that it might have been successfully stolen (ie, it could be flown again), if I'm Government/Boeing/Rolls Royce, I'd be doing what I could to really grill any 777 flying into my airspace for the next few years (at least) to make sure it's what it says it is. So, in addition to the very risky and prone-to-failure part of getting the plane in the first place, you now also have a shaky platform for delivering your nuclear threat.

I think all scenarios involving theft of the plane, either for re-use or re-sale, suffer from these two weaknesses.
posted by maxwelton at 2:39 AM on March 17, 2014 [8 favorites]

Oh _now_ the Australians are searching the lower arc.

Make sure you chuck us your mobile number, mate. We'll need an expert to tell us when the sun has set.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 3:39 AM on March 17, 2014

Weirdest story I've seen about this: Malaysian plane disappearance inspired by Tintin story.

I wonder how people who read that paper don't die from sheer ignorance

It's pretty indisputable that there are terrorist masterminds right now poring over Tintin books looking for inspiration for future terror plots.

However, Flight 714 is a pretty obvious red herring; a piece of deliberate misinformation, perhaps. The real key to the mystery lies in Tintin in Tibet. Presumably a secret rescue operation is now underway in the Himalayas to recover the sole survivor, and with him, irrefutable proof of the existence of yetis.
posted by Sonny Jim at 4:32 AM on March 17, 2014 [4 favorites]

From the most recent press conference:

1) Co-pilot was the one who said "Alright, Good night" at 1.19am (plane's transponder is switched off at 1.22am)
2) ACARS last transmission at 1.07am but it was NOT switched off at that time. No exact time is known, just that it was due to transmit again in 30 mins and didn't do so.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:33 AM on March 17, 2014 [3 favorites]

Mata hari sudah terbenam, mate.

Aduh.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 4:35 AM on March 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

"Alright, good night" comes around about half an hour after take off, shortly after the plane reaches cruising altitude and on the point where they have just handed off from Malaysian airspace and are yet to check in with Vietnam. Sounds like pilot/co-pilot pee-break time.
posted by rongorongo at 6:13 AM on March 17, 2014

Could any of the more knowledgable folks comment on whether this idea of a 'cyber hijack' is total hooey or not? If this is possible, is there a way to hijack a military device instead? (Understanding that the idea outlined in the article talks about using the entertainment system to access the flight controls. Shouldn't be an issue with an F-18 or a drone...)

Would someone nefarious go through the trouble of a proof of concept test? (Why waste your one shot at total surprise if you don't have a plan to use your new device, right?)
posted by jindc at 6:29 AM on March 17, 2014

Somebody looked into nearby flights that would mask 370. It would have flown over India at night though and I find it difficult to believe no one would have noticed the lights of two planes flying in close formation because that is so unusual. Unless the lights were turned off, I guess?

I do not know how the families have not been completely driven mad with all of the theories floating around as they try to cope with this terrible tragedy.
posted by saucysault at 6:32 AM on March 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

Could any of the more knowledgable folks comment on whether this idea of a 'cyber hijack' is total hooey or not?

At the bottom of your own link -

"The described technique cannot engage or control the aircraft's autopilot system using the FMS or prevent a pilot from overriding the autopilot," the FAA said in a statement following Teso’s demonstration. "Therefore, a hacker cannot obtain 'full control of an aircraft' as the technology consultant has claimed."

posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 6:39 AM on March 17, 2014

"Alright, good night" comes around about half an hour after take off, shortly after the plane reaches cruising altitude and on the point where they have just handed off from Malaysian airspace and are yet to check in with Vietnam.

That's incredibly common on handoffs. No sense not being polite, right? Plus, it acts as an acknowledgment of "I understand you are no longer then controlling ATC and that I have been directed to another."

So, you get things like this all the time.

Dramatis Persona:
ZAU: The Chicago Area Traffic Control Center
ZKC: The Kansas City Area Traffic Control Center
AA1186: A plane flying from Chicago to St. Louis

Scene: FL280, heading southeast, near Vandalia, IL.


ZAU: "AA1186, continue as directed, contact Kansas City on 127.1"
AA1186: "Roger 1186, Kansas City 127.1. Good night."
ZAU: "Good night."
AA1186: (switches to 127.125MHz) "Good evening, Kansas City, AA1186 entering."
ZKC: "AA1186, good evening, squawk 3252 and ident"
AA1186: "3252 and ident, 1186"
ZKC: "AA1186, radar contact, continue as filed."
AA1186: "Roger, 1186."

And, AA1186 has been handed off from the Chicago Area Traffic Control to the Kansas City ATC.

So, ending with "good night" is very typical. Up until that point, nobody would think anything is out of the ordinary. The Vietnam area controller, however, may well have started making phone calls when they didn't get MH370 checking in as expected, the question is how long would they have waited before contacting Malaysia's ATC and asking "Hey, we have MH370 filed through here, they haven't checked in, can you reach them?"

That's common because sometimes people forget to change frequencies on a handoff. Normally, you have two radios, and you leave one on your last frequency and change the other to the new one. That way, if you screw up that change, you can be contacted on your last known frequency.
posted by eriko at 6:40 AM on March 17, 2014 [13 favorites]

Daughter returns to Malaysia to await news of her father.

MELBOURNE - The daughter of the pilot who flew the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was living in Australia when the plane mysteriously vanished from radar screens.

Ms Aishah Zaharie, who lives in Melbourne, has returned to her family in Malaysia as she awaits news of her father, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, Australian news website news.com.au reported.

Ms Aishah, 27, graduated from Deakin University in Geelong in 2010 where she studied architecture. Her boyfriend Hazwan Anuar, also from her hometown of Shah Alam in Malaysia, graduated from Deakin University in 2011 with a masters in the same field, reported the website.

Ms Aishah and her boyfriend both studied at the International Islamic University of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur before moving to Victoria, said the report.

A friend of Ms Aishah, who did not want to be named, was quoted as saying that speculation about Capt Zaharie was "killing the family".

"On what the international media wrote about Captain Zaharie is not true (and) ridiculous. He's a nice man and loving father to his children," she said.

"What has been reported in the news by the international media ...very frustrating.

"They (are) waiting to blame the pilot. Speculation like this is killing the family," she added.

--

"Captain Zaharie is our friend's daddy. (our Melbourne's buddy).Our heart sank upon hearing the appalling news abt #MH370 .Thoughts n prayers goes out to the passengers on board also to their families," he tweeted,

The athlete's wife Tya Boo (@tyailyana) tweeted: "Pray for MH370 ...indeed so sad the pilot is my friend's daddy. Hope Aishah and family bersabar and banyak (patience and a lot of)."

As the search for MH370 entered its tenth day, Capt Zaharie's relatives posted a moving YouTube tribute to the man they love.

The three-minute video features a series of family photographs of Capt Zaharie and call it a "tribute to a man well-loved by many. The guy we all call Ari, Uncle Ari and Tok Manu Ari."

The video clip describes the pilot as "loving, reflective, generous, cool, sporting, intelligent, supportive, the list goes on and on …"

Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, a tribute.
posted by cashman at 6:46 AM on March 17, 2014 [4 favorites]

Pogo_Fuzzybutt,

The FAA was only denying the one technique, correct? And Boeing was trying to fix the entertainment system vulnerability. Are there other ways to take control of the flight system?
posted by jindc at 6:50 AM on March 17, 2014

Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68 (another 777)?
posted by Hlewagast at 6:51 AM on March 17, 2014 [5 favorites]

Well, one of the bigger terrorist threats has been that of dirty nuking a city. Fortunately, matériel, delivery, and effective dispersal have been their challenge.

Most of the stuff I've read/seen suggests that it's not just a challenge, but that actually building a dirty bomb that would kill significantly more people than a normal bomb is basically impossible -- if you disperse the radioactive material widely, then your large bomb that would kill 1000 people without radioactives kills 1000 plus a few more people than would otherwise be expected die from cancer later, and the threat to humans basically disappears the next time it rains. If you don't, then hazmat crews pick up the chunks of crud, and your bomb that would kill 500 people without radioactives still kills 500 people and maybe a couple of unlucky saps who actually get hit with radioactive shrapnel.

From the stuff I've read/seen, the only realistic additional threat from a dirty bomb compared to the equivalent normal bomb is media-induced panic.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:00 AM on March 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68 (another 777)?

Interesting theory. If MH370 got close enough, its primary return would merge with SQ86^* and it would be, for all intents, invisible to radar as long as they stayed close. If they flew a little behind and below, SQ86 would not notice them.

Issue -- SQ86 would have been at cruise. Airliners at altitude cruise at very near the fastest speed they can go. For the 777, typical cruise is Mach .84. The max they could go is Mach .89, a difference of 22 knots at FL350. Could MH370 have caught SQ86 in time to not be seen by Indian radar, that being the first they would have encountered? Would he have been in range of China's OTH radars (which would show a merging contact if so.)

Note: on that flightradar.com screenshot, you see the speed listed as 400kts. This isn't airspeed, that's ground speed. Traveling basically to the west, both planes would probably be encountering headwinds, which generally flow west to east on the Earth. This is why ORD-LHR is usually well under 8 hours, and occasionally under 7, and LHR-ORD is over 8 hours, and occasionally over 9.

But, unlike many theories, it fits all the facts we know so far. MH370 was there, as was SQ86. Nobody is reporting an unidentified primary return entering India. There was a ping from MH370, possibly in the northern arc, which SQ86 travelled near.

Question 1: At the time of that last ping, was SQ86 on that arc identified by the satellite ping? If so, this becomes a stronger theory, and I'm tempted to say *much* stronger. If it was a hundred-plus miles away, this becomes much weaker.

Question 2: Did either of the pilots of MH370 do any formation flying in their careers, esp. in large aircraft (example, air-to-air refueling.) If so, that demonstrates the skill needed.

Question 3: Did the captain practice this on the simulators he had?

* Let's all use either the three letter abbreviations (MAS370/SIA68) or the two letters ones (MH370/SQ86).
posted by eriko at 7:12 AM on March 17, 2014 [12 favorites]

Cashman - that video by Captain Shah's family is heartbreaking ... and a poignant reminder not to allow fear and the media to dictate false realities.
posted by cdalight at 7:21 AM on March 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yes, thank you for posting that video. I think we sometimes forget that the words we use online can be read by everyone, even the families of MH370.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:27 AM on March 17, 2014

Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68 (another 777)?
I really didn't expect that to be the best explanation I've seen for the data we have. It does not offer a "why" - but it does offer a "how" that meshes with the immediate prior known behaviour of MH370. If I were a script writer I would be happy with my plot twist.
posted by rongorongo at 7:36 AM on March 17, 2014

It think this is the SIA68 path
posted by saucysault at 7:37 AM on March 17, 2014

Cashman - that video by Captain Shah's family is heartbreaking .
We could also muse as to whether somebody who would upload a 5 minute video explaining how to repair a Whirlpool icemaker could be guilty of the sort of actions we are talking about.
posted by rongorongo at 8:23 AM on March 17, 2014 [6 favorites]

This is a strange theory. Would one have been able at all to plan it this way? Unlikely: what if SIA68 was delayed?
Or do we have to think that MAS370 simply lurked around until a plane came by?
Or is it that they were kind of astonished that they had made it so far without being detected, and then, "hey, look, another jet, let's hitch-hike"…?
posted by Namlit at 8:24 AM on March 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

If you click through saucysault's FlightAware link you get to the track log table for SIA68 which makes it much easier to pick off points. (For comparison, here's Flightaware's tracklog of the missing plane MAS370). I started getting all Hardy Boys on the track logs. But there's still no public information about the missing plane's location for the six hours between the last radar fix at 13:17 and the last satellite ping at ~19:13. FWIW, at 19:13 SIA 68 was estimated to be at 33.3997, 58.8358; that's 10 degrees south of the candidate MAS 370 positions. But that doesn't really disqualify the theory, perhaps MAS 370 had long since gone its own way after penetrating Indian airspace.

Truthfully, I think the "shadowing the other plane" theory is some Tom Clancy nonsense. So is the dirty bomb theory. Occam's Razor is usually right. A suicidal pilot, a mechanical failure, a hijacking gone wrong can explain all the things we know.
posted by Nelson at 8:27 AM on March 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

As long as investigators are still very intent on the northwest over-land route as a possibility I like the theory that they shadowed another plane, because they've really been focusing on that despite ample radar coverage making it seem like the route would be very unlikely without some other factor.
posted by jason_steakums at 8:37 AM on March 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

Question 1: At the time of that last ping, was SQ86 on that arc identified by the satellite ping?

So, no. To, reiterate Nelson's explanation, SIA68 was in Iran at the time of the last ping, 1000mi SW of the westermost edge of the "ping arc".

If the shadowing did take place, MAS370 would have to have broken off in India to reach the "ping arc" by 0011 UTC. Thus, it should have been picked up by radar within India and on China's southern border.
posted by pjenks at 8:49 AM on March 17, 2014

And it is improbably they would have found another northbound aircraft to mask with after leaving SIA68 as there were too many variables to ensure they would meet a scheduled aircraft at a planned time, although I guess they could try. It feel like I am looking for any shred of hope that the crew and passengers are safe somewhere.
posted by saucysault at 9:06 AM on March 17, 2014

March 16: "Daddy, Liverpool is winning the game. Come home, so you can watch the game! You never miss watching the game. It's your very first time. :')"

-Maira Nari, daughter of MH370's chief steward, Andrew Nari.

Earlier today she tweeted: "Sometimes you'll never know the true value of a moment, not until it becomes a memory."
posted by cashman at 9:48 AM on March 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

A man attempts to call his son, a passenger of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, after speaking to the media outside a rest area for relatives at Lido Hotel in Beijing, March 17, 2014.
posted by cashman at 9:56 AM on March 17, 2014

And it is improbably they would have found another northbound aircraft to mask with after leaving SIA68 as there were too many variables to ensure they would meet a scheduled aircraft at a planned time

Although, given that other A/C would have lights on, they could have jumped on an opportunity and followed a northbound that happened to pass close by.

And, yes, this is farfetched. Pretty much every, err…, nearfetched theory of what happened to MH370 has gone by the board. All that we have is farfetched, and that means either they went south and fell into the ocean after flying for some hours in a planned fashion, or they somehow went north.

Neither posit has much in the way of rationality in its favor. If you were just going to kill yourself and the plane, why bother flying all that way south? If you reject that, you need to figure out a way they go north, or you have to posit something where there wasn't human agency involved, or you invoke conspiracy, aliens, magic, or a combination.

The answer is going to be crazy, whatever it proves to be.
posted by eriko at 10:32 AM on March 17, 2014

According to Flightaware, SIA68 was nineteen minutes delayed on departure (they were supposed to leave SIN at 12.40, they left at 12.59, MAS370 was supposed to leave at 12.35 and was delayed to 12.43). This would account for the forwards and backwards tracks across the Malacca Straight that intersected the planned route (red line) and delayed route (blue line) on the first image if MAS370 was specifically looking for SIA68. Still doesn't answer what happened after, though. The last image illustrates Nelson's point, albeit with some mapping/projection problems. (Not my images, btw, via reddit)
posted by saucysault at 10:40 AM on March 17, 2014

The flying south part makes more sense if you consider that it might have been on autopilot. If the goal of the evasive flying was to make sure the plane was never found, there was never evidence from the black boxes, and therefore insurance paid out to the family (a la the Fedex attack.) It's possible that the pilot deliberately or accidentally succumbed to hypoxia and the plane flew on as a ghost plane. There aren't many waypoints in the South Indian/Antarctic ocean. It'd be interesting to see if any of the existing ones result in a position on the arc if plotted from the last likely known waypoints.

We haven't heard a shred of motive that would suggest a reason for any of the crew to do that, though. A depressive fit, you could see coming on without much external cause and leading to the impulse to dive it into the water, but everything about this has suggested considerable forethought and planning.
posted by tavella at 11:02 AM on March 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

I have zero idea what happened here, but I'm always fascinated by the Seconds from Disaster episodes where one little thing (slightly improper install of widget) lead to this and then to that and pilot error compounds the problem and on and on until Disaster.

Since the disappearance of MH370 is almost definitely purposeful, you have to wonder what small events led up to that decision. Why was someone so angry or distraught? A fluke of brain chemistry? Not enough attention as a child? Boyfriend/girlfriend broke up with them? Is it possible that if we could have changed one single thing, it would have averted this entire tragedy?

On a flight of 200+ people, there are surely at least one or two who Weren't Supposed to Be There Today (missed a previous flight, had to leave KL early due to family emergency, whatever). There were dozens of stories of people who were supposed to be in the Twin Towers when they fell, but had missed a bus or overslept or had their appointment cancelled.

I don't know whether the fact that each event in life is necessarily caused by another event makes life seem more or less random, if we can never know the causes.

This comment is intended to be more philosophical than actual speculation. My wishes are with the passengers, the crew, their families, and the SAR folks.
posted by desjardins at 11:09 AM on March 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

WSJ: Malaysia Airlines Gives New Timeline for Flight 370's Final Communication
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:21 AM on March 17, 2014

From roomthreeseventeen's link:

"But Malaysian Airlines CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said, "We don't know when the ACARS was switched off," adding it could have been disabled at "any time" between when the ACARS said all was all right with the plane's health and the next half hour when it should have, but didn't, transmit again.

The transport minister, standing next to Mr. Ahmad on Monday, didn't respond to the CEO's new timeline. The transport minister's office earlier said it stood by his portrayal of the sequence of events.

The discrepancy didn't change the overall assessment that someone in the cockpit either intentionally, or under coercion, switched off the transponders, and possibly even the ACARS."
posted by cashman at 11:31 AM on March 17, 2014

Israel tightens aviation security as hijacking suspected in Malaysia flight disappearance: Foreign airlines approaching Israeli airspace required to identify earlier; other security measures classified.
posted by rosswald at 11:49 AM on March 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

rongorongo: Or whether someone who is being accused of doing these things would have liked the videos "Seth Macfarlane on atheists and gay rights" and "Atheist Michael Newdow Demolishes Arrogant Moron on Fox News," as well as subscribing to Richard Dawkins' video feed.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 1:06 PM on March 17, 2014

As the list of "what if" and "maybe this" theories gets longer and more outlandish (and seemingly more impossible) the only thing that makes sense to me is that one of the countries saying they didn't see it on their radar is lying. I don't know who or why they would, but if someone were lying about their radar data, that would simplify this whole confusing mystery.
posted by Orb at 1:19 PM on March 17, 2014 [5 favorites]

As the list of "what if" and "maybe this" theories gets longer and more outlandish (and seemingly more impossible) the only thing that makes sense to me is that one of the countries saying they didn't see it on their radar is lying. I don't know who or why they would, but if someone were lying about their radar data, that would simplify this whole confusing mystery.

Or lying about their capability to have seen it if it was there.
posted by jason_steakums at 1:24 PM on March 17, 2014 [7 favorites]

I've got to believe the US knows whether the plane went north or south. I don't have much of a basis for that, only my perhaps erroneous belief that the world makes more sense than this story has made so far. Under this scenario the authorities are not making that information public because until they have eyes on wreckage they must operate as if there is still a possibility that someone (either passengers or perpetrators) are alive and so certain information has to be held close to the chest.

If it really is the case that nobody has the first clue whether a 777 with hundreds on board flew for thousands of miles either north or south after flying directly over Malaysia, well, stop the ride because I want to get off.
posted by Justinian at 1:26 PM on March 17, 2014

Another theory from Chris Goodfellow: electrical fire, pilots make immediate turn towards a best-bet runway (Palau Langkawi, a 13,000 foot strip with an approach over water at night with no obstacles), overwhelmed by smoke, plane drifts on autopilot in the Indian ocean.

(Not familiar with this guy, not sure if this is compatible with the later INMARSAT pings.)
posted by RedOrGreen at 1:56 PM on March 17, 2014

INFOGRAPHIC: Chronology of last known minutes of flight MH370
posted by travelwithcats at 2:07 PM on March 17, 2014

Courtney Love is pretty sure she has found the plane.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:07 PM on March 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

The theory from Goodfellow is from 4 days ago, before a lot of the new information came to light. Definitely outdated at this point.
posted by Justinian at 2:14 PM on March 17, 2014

If MH370 got close enough, its primary return would merge with SQ86 and it would be, for all intents, invisible to radar as long as they stayed close. If they flew a little behind and below, SQ86 would not notice them.

A Bird-of-Prey canna fire when she's cloaked!
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 2:19 PM on March 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

The theory from Goodfellow is from 4 days ago,
But he does provide some further analysis, in his comments section, which considers the new data (search for comment starting "Diego and all who have commented") - in summary: fire disables ACARS unknown to crew, all is felt normal at final radio transmission, fire disables further comms systems, pilot takes action by turning SW towards runway at Langkawi, attempts to climb to 45,000 feet might have been a last ditch to oxygen starve fire, crew overcome by smoke, plane continues on autopilot heading south until fuel exhaustion.
posted by rongorongo at 3:05 PM on March 17, 2014 [4 favorites]

I see the comment now, thanks! It's definitely a retcon but it's a good one. It requires an awful lot of stuff going just so but at this point any explanation will require that.
posted by Justinian at 3:12 PM on March 17, 2014

I think that Goodfellow theory doesn't explain the later course changes shown on the Malaysian military radar: hitting the various checkpoints and then leaving Malaysia flying toward the northwest.
posted by stopgap at 3:19 PM on March 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure we can trust that track. I'm not sure we can trust anything at this point.
posted by Justinian at 3:24 PM on March 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

Courtney Love is pretty sure she has found the plane.

Seems as legit as anything else we've learned so far.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 3:39 PM on March 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

Mod note: Still not really the time for jokes, folks.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 3:56 PM on March 17, 2014 [4 favorites]

The problem is that the fire has to let the plane continue to fly for six hours after disabling everything/everyone.

Fire would have been my guess if it had actually crashed near the loss-of-contact point.
posted by kiltedtaco at 4:55 PM on March 17, 2014

Further speculation on fire as a root cause from Air Traffic Management (Aimee Turner)
posted by rongorongo at 4:56 PM on March 17, 2014

The information at roomthreeseventeen's link seems to mitigate the captain/first officer's involvement. At least the "all right, goodnight" or whatever the sign-off was, might not have been a cold-blooded deception. But whatever happened happened between the sign-off at 1:17AM and the transponder ceasing at 1:21AM with the plane changing course shortly thereafter.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 4:58 PM on March 17, 2014

Questions Over Absence of Cellphone Calls From Missing Passengers does a good job explaining why there may be no passenger cell phone calls. Long story short: too high, or maybe passengers disabled.
posted by Nelson at 5:14 PM on March 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

sio42: "I still don't understand what could have happened so fast other than spontaneous incineration that absolutely no one on board used their cell phone."

It's been pointed out a couple of times that cell phones don't work at high altitudes and far at sea. The calls from Flight 93, if that's what you were thinking of, were from those phones built into the seats, that you swipe your credit card for, and if that system was disabled, intentionally or accidentally, or if it were not offered on this flight, then there would be no way for anyone to make any calls.
posted by Bugbread at 5:18 PM on March 17, 2014

Whoops, shoulda previewed.
posted by Bugbread at 5:22 PM on March 17, 2014

The calls from Flight 93, if that's what you were thinking of, were from those phones built into the seats

That's not accurate. It's entirely possible that MH370 was too far from towers or too high for cell phones to function, but passengers from Flight 93 could and did use cell phones.
posted by jessamyn at 5:24 PM on March 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

IIRC cell towers have really crappy vertical range, though, and if the plane really was flying at 45,000 feet at one point cell reception would be unlikely. Who knows, maybe that's the reason for flying so high (if it really was).
posted by jason_steakums at 5:27 PM on March 17, 2014

Nelson's article is an excellent read.
posted by mochapickle at 5:28 PM on March 17, 2014

Yeah, ignore what I said, and go read Nelson's article.
posted by Bugbread at 5:31 PM on March 17, 2014

Re Cell Phones: The above linked Air Traffic Management article cites this final report of a UPS Boeing 747 freighter which crashed in 2010 after a (lithium battery) fire in its cargo hold. In that case the fire took about two minutes to start to disable flight systems and fill the cockpit with smoke to the point where the crew could not see the controls. After a couple of more it seems to have affected the Captains's oxygen supply so that he lost unconscious. Given the potential speed at which a really nasty cargo hold fire could spread it is possible that MH370 passengers never had the opportunity to see whether they could make a call or not.
posted by rongorongo at 5:43 PM on March 17, 2014

That wasn't Courtney Love, that was the discovery of this guy on Twitter.
posted by divabat at 5:45 PM on March 17, 2014

That wasn't Courtney Love, that was the discovery of this guy on Twitter.

That she (or the page admin?) then MS Paint'ed "CL" onto. Nice.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 5:47 PM on March 17, 2014

Deliberate or accidental decompression could have killed the fire, and also explain the altitude changes. The turn back towards Malaysia would be a logical reaction for a plane in distress, and the transponder going out and the ACARS going off could have been the pilots pulling circuit breakers to fight a fire, and possibly some error in the cockpit emergency oxygen could lead to a decompressed plane flying onwards. If it wasn't for the multiple direction changes in the Malacca Strait, I absolutely would think it would be the leading theory. But those direction changes... there's no reason for a pilot fighting a fire to have put in those headings. They say pretty clearly there was active human intervention.
posted by tavella at 5:50 PM on March 17, 2014

The hard part about any fire theory is the plane flew one for at least an hour, closer to six hours if you believe the satellite pings.

So, you want to posit fire? Fine, but you need to explain why a fire let that plane keep flying that long, when historically, unchecked fire brings down planes fast.
posted by eriko at 5:55 PM on March 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

The argument would be, I think, that the high altitude excursion put out the fire. Doesn't seem all that plausible to me but nothing about this whole ordeal is plausible.
posted by Justinian at 5:58 PM on March 17, 2014

1) A lithium battery fire does not require an oxygen supply to burn.
2) A pilot who climbed the plane to put out a fire instead of descending immediately to land is totally 100% crazy. I'm more willing to believe the absurd "radar shadowing" thing than an intentional climb due to fire.

But I understand the point that nothing about this incident makes much sense.
posted by kiltedtaco at 6:07 PM on March 17, 2014 [3 favorites]

Yeah, taking a decompressed plane to high altitude to put out a fire seems like it could easily kill the passengers. How would you know in that chaos that the oxygen masks were working? Do you even deploy oxygen masks in a fire on a plane, or is that dangerous?
posted by jason_steakums at 6:14 PM on March 17, 2014

It's not my theory! One of the pilots going rogue is still the most likely as far as I'm concerned.
posted by Justinian at 6:16 PM on March 17, 2014

kiltedtaco: "A lithium battery fire does not require an oxygen supply to burn."

I'm not challenging your statement, I'm just looking for some science schooling: how can you have a fire without oxygen? Isn't the fire triangle "Fuel - Heat - Oxygen"?
posted by Bugbread at 6:20 PM on March 17, 2014

Check out the 4th bullet point in the Thermal Runaway section here on lithium batteries, they produce oxygen when going into thermal runaway. It's not like an endless supply though, after a bit it's just a regular fire.
posted by jason_steakums at 6:24 PM on March 17, 2014

And everything around a lithium battery would still need oxygen to catch fire.
posted by jason_steakums at 6:25 PM on March 17, 2014

Justinian: " One of the pilots going rogue is still the most likely as far as I'm concerned."

And if it was a rogue pilot or other inside entity it would be a simple matter to use a cellphone jammer to keep calls from going through.
posted by Mitheral at 6:28 PM on March 17, 2014

Landing soonest: The airport at Kota Bharu was closed at night. The airport at Kuala Terengganu (on the flight path) was probably also closed but its runway ends at the beach so potentially better.

Flying over the Malay peninsula after fire is put out at high altitude (although people have been saying that radar is very unreliable in determining altitude) to land at airport with best emergency equipment... KL. Doesn't explain the zig-zag, loathe to attribute it to pilot disorientation.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 6:29 PM on March 17, 2014

I was talking about a regular fire here, not a lithium-ion battery one -- there's plenty of ways fires can get started on planes without lithium. And the point about decompression was that a normal fire could have started and then gone out, in theory, without fatally compromising the air frame. Though it's a fair point about the altitude changes -- a pilot would be more likely to try to ditch in the water than do that.

However, as I said, all theorizing about fires (or simply decompression on its own) hits the wall of the course changes. If it had merely turned once and disappeared off into the southern Indian Ocean, people would be thinking Helios 522. In fact, that would have been a more effective way of covering up a suicide -- if that's what it really was, the author of the incident may have overthought themselves.
posted by tavella at 6:30 PM on March 17, 2014

and what prevents us thinking Helios 522 + pilots regaining consciousness partially and pressing buttons randomly that change the course equally randomly?
posted by carmina at 6:37 PM on March 17, 2014

So this is the latest thing from 5 minutes ago - whoever changed the course of the plane did so by keying in the waypoint, not by manual control - but I don't think that tells us anything more than the fact that the plane was flying towards the waypoint anyway. I think it's a circular argument.
posted by Jimbob at 6:37 PM on March 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

From that article:

Whoever changed the plane’s course would have had to be familiar with Boeing aircraft, though not necessarily the 777 — the type of plane that disappeared. American officials and aviation experts said it was far-fetched to believe that a passenger could have reprogrammed the Flight Management System.

It really doesn't seem that far-fetched, all someone needs is a list of commands to punch in and the knowledge of how to punch them in, which they could get any number of ways. Maybe it was someone who only knew the bare minimum of how to do that and they punched in the wrong numbers? That could explain the zigzagging.
posted by jason_steakums at 6:43 PM on March 17, 2014

How do they know the turn was initiated by autopilot? I'm assuming it's the mechanics of the turn, but what was tracking it at that time?
posted by mazola at 6:55 PM on March 17, 2014

> One of the pilots going rogue is still the most likely as far as I'm concerned.


It was certainly looking bad for one or both of the pilots but the shadow of doubt over their guilt came yesterday:

^ "Alright, good night" comes around about half an hour after take off, shortly after the plane reaches cruising altitude [...] Sounds like pilot/co-pilot pee-break time.

^ ACARS last transmission at 1.07am but it was NOT switched off at that time.


It's now entirely possible a rogue passenger (or 5) gained early control of the cockpit.
posted by de at 7:03 PM on March 17, 2014

apropos of nothing, but sort of related
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 7:14 PM on March 17, 2014

This guy has a long write up with an analysis of why he thinks it's an in-flight firem, which accounts for the turning off of electronics as well as the turning of the airline. Mind you, I'm of the mind that it was an in-flight problem and not a hijacking/crazed pilot/otherwise. Nothing the Malysian government, airline, or officials has done has left me thinking they have any idea what they're doing, and they keep changing their story on a daily basis.

I don't blame people for still focusing on the pilot or looking for evidence of hijacking. I think we humans are prone to wanting there to be a reason and someone to blame in a situation like this. If you can point the finger at an individual who screwed up it's almost a sort of comfort, whereas the alternative involving a uncaring random universe doesn't offer the comfort of assigning blame or being tractable.
posted by barnacles at 7:15 PM on March 17, 2014

barnacles, read the comments, that was posted a few hours ago.
posted by mlis at 7:34 PM on March 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

Maslow, my understanding is that ARCARs (the mechanism that is supposed to report every thirty minutes and did so at 1.07 but not 1.37 as scheduled) reports everything currently entered in the Flight management system (the autopilot, basically). The five digit code for the waypoint (and there is NO way five random letters were entered that just happened to be two waypoints nearby) were entered into FMS before the 1.07 ARCARS transmission.
If there was some sort of crisis/fire there would be no reason to enter waypoint so far off the scheduled flight path at least fifteen minutes before they were to take effect while the pilot continued to fly normally. The co-pilot also would have not said a calm "good night" in the face of a crisis. The suddenly turn westward over the peninsula was planned at least fifteen minutes before it happened according to the information released today.
posted by saucysault at 7:35 PM on March 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

from today's Times article:

The fact that the turn away from Beijing was programmed into the computer has reinforced the belief of investigators — first voiced by Malaysian officials — that the plane was deliberately diverted and that foul play was involved. It has also increased their focus on the plane’s captain and first officer.

on preview, what saucysault said too. fire / emergency landing scenarios feel increasingly untenable to me in light of this.
posted by Muffpub at 7:39 PM on March 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

Attempting the northwest route still makes the most sense to me, and I can't shake the thought that maybe one or more countries are lying about their radar capabilities, either technically or in terms of round-the-clock staffing, so as not to advertise gaps in their defenses.
posted by jason_steakums at 7:53 PM on March 17, 2014

I spent way too long reading about the interface to the FMS over the last couple of days. Suffice to say that the waypoint could have been entered in immediately before the turn began (not 15 minutes before) and the system is easy enough for a trained non-pilot to use.

The FMS does normally broadcast the flight plan via ACARS but like everything else this can easily be disabled. Today's info that the FMS was used for the very first turn could easily be derived from radar info since the FMS makes extremely precise, steady turns.
posted by miyabo at 7:58 PM on March 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

The FMS does normally broadcast the flight plan via ACARS but like everything else this can easily be disabled.

So either ACARS was disabled from broadcasting the FMS (which would not be normal procedure) at least fifteen minutes before the turn, or the ACARS broadcasted the FMS including the sharp turn fifteen minutes later. Either way, it sounds deliberately planned rather than a reaction to something like a fire.

From the article: Flight 370’s Flight Management System reported its status to the Acars, which in turn transmitted information back to a maintenance base, according to an American official. This shows that the reprogramming happened before Acars stopped working. Unnamed sources, but clearly stating the change in the FMS was transmitted via ARCARS at the 1.07 transmission. Why this wasn't immediately released ten days ago is another mystery.
posted by saucysault at 9:09 PM on March 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

I have no idea what the article is actually saying, honestly. If they have a flight plan from the FMS, does it actually match up to the data from radar and satellite? Or are they just saying a waypoint was added to the flight plan before ACARS shutoff but it's not on the path that the flight later took. Really a lot of the data we have is so vague that it is impossible to interpret.
posted by miyabo at 9:21 PM on March 17, 2014

From the gusrdisns live up date site

A search operation has exposed a “deep-seated reluctance to share military information” experts have told the Wall Street Journal.

While small aircraft could fly low enough to avoid radar, it would be almost impossible for a Boeing 777-200 to dodge an air-defense system operating effectively, according to Keith Hayward, head of research at the U.K.’s Royal Aeronautical Society.

“You’d have to fly well below 100 meters, and the 777 is not designed to fly that low,” Mr. Hayward said. “You would exceed the aircraft’s stress levels.”

Ground-based military radar typically has a range of up to 250 miles, its extent being limited by the Earth’s curvature, Mr. Hayward said. That should have put Flight 370 within the range of Thai military radar, and possibly also Indonesian and Indian radar, as it flew west of Malaysia. However, all three of those countries have said they saw no sign of the missing plane.

Malaysia’s neighbors “would be as helpful as they could be without giving away anything about their own weaknesses,” [Tim] Huxley [executive director of the International Institute of Strategic Studies-Asia] said.

Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said last week that Malaysia was divulging unprecedented national security information and invited other nations to overcome their reluctance and help find the plane.

India and China, which Flight 370 would have crossed if it moved along the northern corridor plotted by investigators, have more capable air-defense networks than Malaysia and its neighbors.

However, Indian officials gave conflicting comments Monday about whether radar systems on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands were operational at the time that Flight 370 may have passed.

China has advanced monitoring capabilities, including the Ganbala radar station in Tibet. At an altitude of about three miles above sea level, the station is the highest manually controlled radar station in the world.

Malaysia has asked Beijing for radar data, but it wasn’t clear whether China had complied with the request. Hong Lei, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, said Malaysia had made certain requests for information but he didn’t elaborate.
posted by Admira at 3:45 AM on March 18, 2014

What do we think about this theory on Wired?
posted by dominik at 4:18 AM on March 18, 2014

That Wired article is by Chris Goodfellow, making the same argument as his Google Plus post discussed earlier in this thread.
posted by stopgap at 4:34 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

India and China, which Flight 370 would have crossed if it moved along the northern corridor plotted by investigators,

A lot of reporters have had trouble understanding that the "corridors" are not flight paths, but that the plane was likely at a single point somewhere along the corridors at the time of the satellite transmission.
posted by stopgap at 4:37 AM on March 18, 2014 [8 favorites]

stopgap - I've noticed that too. I really like the graphics that show the 'corridors', but I can't help but wonder if there's a better way to communicate the concept, given how much trouble people are having with it. Whatever method used to communicate that would also translate quite well to teaching 'curves' in highschool math too, i imagine.
posted by jpziller at 4:49 AM on March 18, 2014

An article examines the emotional strain on the waiting families.
Coping with the trauma of missing flight MH370:
"But it is the nature of an ambiguous loss such as this, the feelings of not knowing what happened and holding hope, that can keep families frozen in time, unable to move forward and grieve."
posted by travelwithcats at 5:34 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Waiting family members have been photographed holding up signs that read "hunger strike".

Asked about it at the press conference, MAS CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said:
"We are doing all that we can to ensure that we are giving sufficient assistance, information and care to all the family members in Beijing. It is something that I will definitely look into but I am in regular contacts with the team in Beijing."
posted by travelwithcats at 5:41 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm not clear on what the hunger strikes are for -- I mean, I know it's to pressure the authorities, but I keep seeing references to "tell us the truth" and I'm not sure what "truth" they're referring to.

...is there some kind of theory they're espousing that they want to see vindicated? Or is it just a generalized "quit being so disorganized you idiots" type of thing? I feel like I've missed some coverage somewhere along the line.
posted by aramaic at 6:26 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Another conspiracy theory (highly speculative) is that if the plane *did* land somewhere, Diego Garcia (the US/UK military base in the Indian Ocean) is one of the more plausible destinations due being purely military and capable of keeping the event (radar blips and landing itself) under wraps. Why the plane would have diverted to the military atoll on the other hand, who knows? Was it carrying cargo of interest? Were the 20 Freescale Semiconductor employees part of the reason? Was there intent on giving China more reason to increase their presence in and around Malaysia? Or was the plane instead intended to be used as a weapon against the atoll, was shot down, and has now become a diplomacy nightmare as the U.S. scrambles to plant its debris far away from the actual crash site?

Like most conspiracy theories, they're likely far off from the reality and better suited for a Tom Clancy novel. But if all indicators point towards the plane trying to land somewhere else...it seems like a plausible destination if the right reasons are at play.
posted by samsara at 6:44 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

I have to say, each day that passes, I'm thinking more and more that this was some sort of fire or Helios-like accident. It's just becoming impossible to be anything else.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:48 AM on March 18, 2014 [3 favorites]

I have to say, each day that passes, I'm thinking more and more that this was some sort of fire or Helios-like accident. It's just becoming impossible to be anything else.

Yes, my feelings exactly.

For a while I was actually hoping it was a well-organized hijacking, and that those unfortunate passengers on board would eventually re-emerge from some hidey-hole in [*]stan.

Then it was incompetent hijackers, who were competent enough to vanish without a trace but not competent enough to read their fuel gauge correctly? Or pilots in a joint suicide pact with an Agatha Christie twist? Or ...?

But I'm coming back around to my initial feeling, that it was just a catastrophic fire / decompression / whatever, with the autopilots carrying out the last scrambled commands to the best of their abilities as the airplane flew deep into the open ocean before running out of gas.
posted by RedOrGreen at 6:58 AM on March 18, 2014

What we know: the plane is somewhere and nowhere.
posted by Mister Bijou at 7:04 AM on March 18, 2014

Has there ever been a hijacking without any demands made? Or without some group claiming responsibility?
posted by desjardins at 7:05 AM on March 18, 2014

Maybe it's a hijacking by someone who has no demands. Someone who snapped and decided on self-annihilation. You know, someone who went "postal".
posted by Mister Bijou at 7:07 AM on March 18, 2014

Re this Goodfellow article, isn't there an emergency code that opens the cockpit? Of course that wouldn't matter if no one else on board knew how to fly a plane esp with communications knocked out.

But it doesn't explain GIVAL to IGREX.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:19 AM on March 18, 2014

Mod note: I know it's a long thread, we can't reasonably expect everyone to read every single comment I don't think -- but reading back just a little bit and/or doing a page search to check if something's already been posted helps a lot, thanks.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane (staff) at 7:23 AM on March 18, 2014 [10 favorites]

Metafilter: it doesn't explain GIVAL to IGREX
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 7:23 AM on March 18, 2014 [4 favorites]

Thank you goodnewsfortheinsane.
posted by travelwithcats at 7:25 AM on March 18, 2014

Apropos asking people: could people please stop making jokes about it?! There are 239 people + their families & friends involved. Thx.
posted by travelwithcats at 7:28 AM on March 18, 2014 [5 favorites]

"It really doesn't seem that far-fetched, all someone needs is a list of commands to punch in and the knowledge of how to punch them in, which they could get any number of ways."

Including looking at the flight manuals or just spinning the dial marked "heading." ;) People act as if these flight management systems are so incredibly complex that no layperson could possibly operate them. They're really not that complicated at their most basic level. They, like airplanes in general, are actually incredibly simple at the highest level. (Note: I am not in any way saying I would like to attempt to land a 777, thanks, just that anybody here is capable of giving a 777's flight director an altitude, heading, and speed with no training whatsoever if it is already engaged.

At one point I had theories, but I'm having fewer and fewer as days go by. The crazy Diego Garcia theory that has been going around is obviously completely shot to hell by the arcs, but those are themselves a bit..unreliable at best.
posted by wierdo at 7:30 AM on March 18, 2014

It could be an incompetent hijacking where the hijackers' organization is too embarrassed to claim responsibility. Like the hijackers were basically untrained and only knew how to put numbers in the autopilot and then point the plane at a target once the autopilot took them there, but were either given the wrong autopilot codes or punched them in wrong and then basically had no idea how to correct their course and the plane just flew around until it was out of fuel.

Or perhaps hijackers threatened to blow up the plane if the pilots didn't acquiesce and the pilots decided to take it out over open ocean where nobody on the ground below would be hurt if the hijackers did that.
posted by jason_steakums at 7:30 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Including looking at the flight manuals or just spinning the dial marked "heading." ;)

Yep, or a flight sim, or finding instructions online, or being given a walkthrough by someone else with the knowledge, or just given a picture of what the flight system interface looks like and a list of numbers and buttons to punch.
posted by jason_steakums at 7:34 AM on March 18, 2014

an incompetent hijacking where the hijackers' organization is too embarrassed to claim responsibility

The smart move would be to claim they intended a suicide mission all along.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:42 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

The Freescale angle has led to some seriously silly conspiracy theories, including actively anti-Semitic ones. It's a dead end. It is unsurprising that a large company would have a group of members on one flight. It is unclear how massive, mysterious, plane-disappearance caper with global attention would be the best way to resolve what dispute would have occurred. If this was a business dispute, then we're talking about a company with less than half the revenue of, say, Nikon. If this was a national security dispute, then why wouldn't the Powers That Be have done this kind of thing to Snowden, Manning, et al.? Life is not Snakes On A Plane - not even mean and nasty people resolve disputes through the most bizarre, showiest means possible.
posted by Sticherbeast at 7:45 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Maldives island residents report sighting of 'low flying jet'
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:54 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

If the Maldives witnesses were not mistaken, if that was the same plane... it was flying north to southeast in the fucking Maldives? That just makes things even more confusing.
posted by jason_steakums at 8:01 AM on March 18, 2014

Wow. Not sure how reliable this is, given that attention-seekers have had over a week to study up on what to say. Assuming it is correct, is it compatible with the ACARS pings? Doesn't look like it - now I really want to know how large the error bars are on those "ping arcs".
posted by RedOrGreen at 8:03 AM on March 18, 2014

Not sure if the Maldives article's mention of 6:15 a.m. means 6:15 a.m. in the official timeline, or local Maldives time (if that's even different) or what. It sure seems like there's a long way to go from there for the plane to reach the satellite arc in two hours.
posted by jason_steakums at 8:05 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

I want to see an overlapped map of:

1. the northern corridor;
2. 'good' runways within reach of corridor;
3. possible flight paths using established flightways/waypoints that would get to those runways given last known waypoint location supported by fuel burn rate
4. altitudes of said runways.

And I want to run around like Tommy Lee Jones while I bark all that out.
posted by mazola at 8:15 AM on March 18, 2014 [4 favorites]

RE: the Maldives - Diego Garcia runway found in Captain Zaharie's flight simulator
posted by JoeXIII007 at 8:21 AM on March 18, 2014

I want to see an overlapped map of:

the northern corridor;
'good' runways within reach of corridor;
possible flight paths using established flightways/waypoints that would get to those runways given last known waypoint location supported by fuel burn rate
altitudes of said runways.


This. Does anyone know of any sources for KML or other GIS files that folks can use in this case?
posted by malaprohibita at 8:30 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

That Goodfellow article saying it's a simple electrical fire sure is making the rounds today. It mostly proves one point: you can always spot the pilot in a discussion because he's the one telling you he's a pilot. (Source: I'm a pilot.)

As noted above, his theory completely fails to explain the airway maneuvers west of Malaysia, "GIVAL to IGREX". If there was an emergency and they pilot was messing around with the flight plan, he'd be punching in "direct to airport". There's even a special button just for that purpose, at least on the small navigation computers I'm familiar with. It also doesn't satisfactorily explain the satellite-derived location six hours later.

I've been racking my brains for days trying to come up with some other explanation for that routing. Maybe a stressed pilot just punched in some airway whose name he remembered and it ended up generating that route? Very unlikely, but not impossible. Then again the public doesn't really even know if those waypoints were truly on the route; the information that's been leaked to us is unreliable. And some sort of fire is definitely possible. And once you posit that, all sorts of random aircraft paths become plausible. Planes with no control fly in weird ways.
posted by Nelson at 8:38 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Even if the arcs from the satellite pings are off, I don't think they'd be that far off. Additionally, they describe the low flying jet as being very noisy, indicating it was likely under climbing power. If they had been flying at low altitude for much time at all, they'd be out of gas by the time of that sighting. There are daily 777s to many destinations from the Maldives, including to points south(ish), so it seems highly unlikely this sighting is in any way related.
posted by wierdo at 8:40 AM on March 18, 2014

As noted above, his theory completely fails to explain the airway maneuvers west of Malaysia, "GIVAL to IGREX"

Maybe it's possible the maneuvers didn't happen, and our speculation about that is wrong.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:41 AM on March 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

Diego Garcia runway found in Captain Zaharie's flight simulator

This feels iffy to me, because why wouldn't he practice Diego Garcia and all sorts of other runways around there if he flies that part of the world all the time for his job and has an interest in home flight sims? I wish there were more detail about why Diego Garcia and the other runways of interest from the simulator were particularly notable.
posted by jason_steakums at 8:49 AM on March 18, 2014 [3 favorites]

Does anyone know if it's plausible that a fire could partially disable the aircraft yet allow it to keep flying for seven more hours?

And in case of a fire, would it be plausible to program in coordinates like (someone) did, rather than take manual control?
posted by Muffpub at 8:55 AM on March 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

My brother's a commercial pilot and we had a long conversation about this last night. This causes him pain. He can't see any way this makes sense without a deliberate act by the pilot (he's pretty sure it's not the co-pilot). He's of course obsessed with the details and finds in all quite maddening, especially the idle conjecture that gets picked up by media as facts.

His scenario is very dark. I didn't sleep well last night.
posted by readery at 8:58 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Readery, would you be willing to share what your brother's hypothesis/hypotheses is/are? It seems like many of the hypotheses floating around out there are not technically possible according to pilots.
posted by ClaireBear at 9:04 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Diego Garcia is about the *last* runway you would land at if you were planning a hijacking. I assume this is people implying that it's all an American plot.
posted by tavella at 9:05 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Diego Garcia is also the sort of runway a really dedicated pilot who spends much of their time flying across the Indian Ocean might practice for an emergency landing.
posted by tavella at 9:06 AM on March 18, 2014 [4 favorites]

I want to see an overlapped map...

I made this map showing pretty accurate "ping arcs" and the closest of the wnyc identified runways to the northern arc. There are only a few close ones so you could look up the altitudes. Along the southern arc there is literally nothing (except possibly Ile Amsterdam and neighbor, way off at the end)
posted by pjenks at 9:23 AM on March 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

Just in case someone wonders, I asked the mods to delete my two comments regarding the time difference between Malaysia and the Maldives, as it was incorrect. Miyabo's follow-up was also deleted, please post again, your comment was correct and helpful. Thx & sorry.
posted by travelwithcats at 9:24 AM on March 18, 2014 [3 favorites]

I wish there were more detail about why Diego Garcia and the other runways of interest from the simulator were particularly notable.

From the Maldives link

Satellite data suggests that the last "ping" was received from the flight somewhere close to the Maldives and the US naval base on Diego Garcia.
posted by drezdn at 9:32 AM on March 18, 2014

With all due respect to the passengers and crew and their families who are obviously suffering, this is just fractally weird. Seriously, just look at any one part of this whole situation, and it just becomes weirder.

I wonder how much of the apparent weirdness is coming from a Fukishima-style approach to news coverage, people somewhere saving face (which, given the albeit tenuous Diego Garcia thing, could very well be US officials saving face, I don't mean to make stereotypical obvservations about Asian cultures), or both.

It seems to me, some of it based on actual evidence of how the Malaysian government has been responding to this, that someone somewhere knows a lot more than they're telling. I'd bet on that someone being the US government, frankly. I'm not saying conspiracy theory, I'm saying "Well we know exactly where it is but if we said so we'd be exposing all sorts of intelligence assets."

Not a good reason when the lives of nearly 300 people are at stake, obviously.

All that being said I know fuckall about how planes work, but based on the amazing commentary above (many thanks especially to divabat and eriko, among others) it seems like there's just no way in hell that someone didn't plot that route.

I'd also like to echo the call for a plausible scenario in which a fire knocks out all comms while allowing the plane to continue flying for several hours. (Or have I missed that?)

What a terrible, terrible tragedy.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:41 AM on March 18, 2014

The elephant in the room with Diego Garcia is that it's not just a runway on an empty island, it's one of the more important American military bases in the region. It seems unlikely an aircraft with a disabled transponder would be able to approach without them taking self-defense measures.
posted by feloniousmonk at 9:42 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

feloniousmonk, I don't think there's any reason to believe that we would shoot down a commercial airliner just because we couldn't communicate with it, if that's what you're saying.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:45 AM on March 18, 2014

I'd question, though, the willingness of American commanders to give the order to shoot down an obviously civilian plane that's making a landing approach (assuming that's what was being done) even if it's radio-silent.

On the other hand, spinning out the DG hypothesis further: allowing them to land and then remaining totally silent about it lends credence to the There Was Something Important on the plane theory.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:46 AM on March 18, 2014

The Diego Garcia thing is a total red herring. It's a fantasy airport for pilots, an interesting place in the middle of nowhere you'll never get to land. I mean I've stared at the overhead imagery before thinking "wouldn't it be cool if I could land there?" It's a natural thing to play around with if you're a pilot geek with a simulator.

when the lives of nearly 300 people are at stake

I fear no one's life is at stake any more. It's astounding to me in the news coverage how people keep bending over backwards trying to hold out hope they're alive. It's remotely possible, but it's definitely not the likely scenario.
posted by Nelson at 9:47 AM on March 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

I fear the same thing, but this is all so weird I'm kind of hoping for a 90 Minutes at Entebbe endgame, maybe played out somewhere in Kazakhstan or something.

I don't know, grasping at straws, should probably shut up and keep reading.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:49 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

I think that it would absolutely be shot down if it was headed straight towards the fuel dump and wasn't stopping, but that's neither here nor there. My point was that at the least, you could expect a patrol of some kind to be sent to investigate, it's not just going to pass unremarked if it was anywhere within their purview.
posted by feloniousmonk at 9:50 AM on March 18, 2014

We only know a smidgen of the story. If the pointers that were made public turn out to be true, it raises the question if the person in charge of the aircraft was a special ops/military/highly trained individual and not a regular commercial pilot.
posted by travelwithcats at 9:51 AM on March 18, 2014

I found Ken Cubbin's "Cockpit doors, a false sense of security?" interesting article in light of MH370 speculation. He points out that the doors need to be opened about 20 times per flight on average. Doing this in a secure manner really needs a double "air lock" type door or the sort used by El-Al. But these are costly so manufactures and airlines come up with their own ad-hoc policies. While these procedures may be confidential they must also be widely circulated - so it can be assumed they are not that secret. There are probably also some quite predictable patterns of when a door is likely to be opened.
posted by rongorongo at 9:51 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Malaysia Airlines missing jet: Thailand gives radar data 10 days after plane lost. The new data doesn't seem to add anything significant. If anything, the absence of the plane on Thai radar is the more interesting fact.
posted by Nelson at 9:54 AM on March 18, 2014

Re: Passengers
Honestly, I find it more respectful for the press and other online public venues to assume they are alive. Regardless of my personal opinion.
posted by travelwithcats at 9:55 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

feloniousmonk, I don't think there's any reason to believe that we would shoot down a commercial airliner just because we couldn't communicate with it, if that's what you're saying.

Iran Air 655.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:03 AM on March 18, 2014 [12 favorites]

five fresh fish, wow, I didn't know about that.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:07 AM on March 18, 2014

Korean Air Lines Flight 007, for that matter.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:13 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

re going postal: "running amuck" was originally a Malay concept.

Those of you wanting to make maps: I've been contacted by someone who works with GIS systems and wants to make a map too. If you like, MeMail me your email address and I'll connect you with her.
posted by divabat at 10:15 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Post 9/11 or even USS Cole, I'm not sure what the US military would do if a plane was coming near one of their bases and not responding to communications.
posted by drezdn at 10:18 AM on March 18, 2014

R317: it'd be a pretty shit military if it wasn't willing to shoot its own grandmother in the face if she was heading straight for the base and wasn't identifying herself.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:19 AM on March 18, 2014 [3 favorites]

According to this Beritan Harian article (in Malay), the airplane didn't carry any dangerous cargo, but it did have several tons of mangosteens.

(I'm not sure if that was meant to be a joke from the authorities or if it's yet another European Names with Asian Features derail.)
posted by divabat at 10:21 AM on March 18, 2014

R317: it'd be a pretty shit military if it wasn't willing to shoot its own grandmother in the face if she was heading straight for the base and wasn't identifying herself.

I understand that, but certainly there has to be some judgment call made about an airliner in distress?
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:23 AM on March 18, 2014

How would they know it's in distress if it's not communicating?

That's the point.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:41 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Maybe I'm missing this, but as far as I know, we still haven't seen the ping arcs ("satellite corridors", which is rather misleading terminology) for the rest of the flight.

We know from the last ping that the plane was (probably, with an unspecified uncertainty radius) on one of two arcs - a northern arc that would have had it fly through India/China/Pakistan/Myanmar, or a southern arc that is open ocean but approaching Australia. The gap between the arcs corresponds to Malaysian/Thai radar coverage, and the rest of the circle is out of range / covered by other satellites. So far so good, yes?

But the ACARS pings happen about once an hour (?), and I don't see similar arcs for the previous pings. Why not?

(a) I'm an idiot and failed reading comprehension. (P->100%, but may not be the right answer here.)

(b) Someone is sitting on them but hasn't released them because (i) it exposes some capability that they'd rather not, or (ii) keep out of the big boys room, you nosy amateurs.

(c) They don't exist - the system purges all but the last contact in the interests of disk space. This might have made sense in the 1980s I guess but surely such a policy would have been revised by now?

Does anyone know?
posted by RedOrGreen at 10:44 AM on March 18, 2014 [3 favorites]

it'd be a pretty shit military if it wasn't willing to shoot its own grandmother in the face if she was heading straight for the base and wasn't identifying herself.

in the Hollywood movie version, Denzell Washington (or whoever) trusts his gut and lets the airplane land (or fly past) ... or perhaps Sandra Bullock shows up at the last possible second with proof that there is no harm intended, it is in fact an airplane in distress.

In reality, the plane gets shot down well short of its imagined target, or it certainly should.
posted by philip-random at 10:48 AM on March 18, 2014

But that's an easily explainable situation. Surely the military would stand by its actions and this would be known, yes?
posted by mazola at 10:52 AM on March 18, 2014

Had flight MH370 appeared out of the blue on approach to Diego Garcia after its overnight off-course sojourn it would not be the plane in distress, but any surviving passengers and those closest to them; and we'd all watch helpless while it was fired on.

Is this conversation now all about the US and its assets?

It would appear this hijacking wasn't aimed at the US. Can we stop talking gratuitously about shooting people out of the sky? It's as distasteful as assuming everything is axis of evil bad.
posted by de at 10:54 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

As a slight aside, I'm confused about how the Malaysian military (and possibly other SE Asian countries' militaries) allowed such a large unidentified object to pass through their airspace apparently with no reaction from them. Is this right? If I correctly understand everything I've read, Malaysian military radar picked up an unidentified object flying through their airspace shortly after MH 370 disappeared, and apparently didn't do anything about it. Thailand too? It seems first of all bizarre to pay for military radar if you're not going to act on the data that it throws up, and if you're going to allow unidentified aircraft to enter your airspace anyway. It also strikes me as irresponsible, once MH 370 disappeared, not to have coordinated better between their civilian and military radar. Presumably had Malaysia done this, it could have stopped the plane as it was doubling back across their country westwards. Is this right?
posted by ClaireBear at 10:59 AM on March 18, 2014

You know, the real question here is still... why Gival to Vampi? It makes no sense under any scenario.

If it's a suicide, why wouldn't the pilot fly straight out into the Indian Ocean? He's already flying over Malaysia so he can't be *that* concerned about radar, and you could keep the same heading and only pass over some small islands. And even if turning up the Malacca Straight was some plan to avoid radar -- you can just go from Gival to Igrex and it will shoot you up the straits. Vampi actually brings you *closer* to likely radar, putting you just off the Thai coast.

Same if the pilot is heading north as a hijacking -- why not stay Gival to Igrex? Why buzz the Thai coast? It really does look more like a confused wandering than a logical plan, yet they seem pretty certain by the pattern of turns that it's a deliberately set course, and yet it's hard to see a pilot being so disoriented that they are putting illogical points in, and yet get ones that plot a course close together. Especially if there's a flat out 'return to airport' option.
posted by tavella at 11:05 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Tinfoil Hat: What if the jet's control system was remotely hacked and programmed to change course, shut down all communications, and ignore any further control from the jet console? What if some brilliant hacker has discovered the security hole to end all security holes and this was his first dry run?
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:06 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

The gap between the arcs corresponds to Malaysian/Thai radar coverage, and the rest of the circle is out of range / covered by other satellites.

I don't know if it was ever officially stated, but I think I read somewhere that the gap could also correspond to where the signal would have also been picked up by the next satellite to the east. Note that Thai radar data wasn't shared until today.

It would be interesting to know the error range of the satellite transmission angle since this is a novel (and probably complex) way of calculating plane location. For instance, was the calculation made by calculating round-trip signal time? Was the data transmission only one-way? Or was the plane's timestamp compared to the satellite's clock sort of like a reverse GPS? If the latter, you would need to know the accuracy of the timestamp from the plane. I suppose there could even be some relativity effects on the satellite clock that might not have ever been relevant before if it wasn't designed for this type of location calculation.
posted by stopgap at 11:08 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Tinfoil Hat: What if the jet's control system was remotely hacked and programmed to change course, shut down all communications, and ignore any further control from the jet console? What if some brilliant hacker has discovered the security hole to end all security holes and this was his first dry run?

That doesn't account for the lack of anyone trying to make contact with the rest of the world.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:08 AM on March 18, 2014

As a slight aside, I'm confused about how the Malaysian military (and possibly other SE Asian countries' militaries) allowed such a large unidentified object to pass through their airspace apparently with no reaction from them.

Well, you've got at least China and the US with assets in the region, I wouldn't be surprised if Malaysia thought the unidentified object was a military plane belonging to one of those countries doing a flyover. I'd imagine countries probably see that kind of thing all the time and it would seem pointless to even bother attempting to hail it.

Re: the plane being shot down at Diego Garcia, I don't know why the US would keep that a secret. It would be tragic but they would have been justified in their actions if it was heading straight for a target, whether the plane was communicating or not.
posted by jason_steakums at 11:10 AM on March 18, 2014

If it's a suicide, why wouldn't the pilot fly straight out into the Indian Ocean?

If we assume for the moment that a) it's pilot suicide, and b) that the copilot was complicit or subdued, and c) that the passengers and rest of the crew were somehow subdued (someone mentioned the sudden climb + depressurization?), then this flight pattern actually does make sense.

Some people who commit suicides don't want to look like they've killed themselves--for honour, family memory, insurance/benefits, whatever. Subdue the rest of the plane (somehow), turn all comms off, make some apparently purposeful course changes, fly past the point of no return.

You've now left behind a mystery, and an honourable death. You won't be vilified after death as that guy who killed nearly three hundred people.

Re: the plane being shot down at Diego Garcia, I don't know why the US would keep that a secret. It would be tragic but they would have been justified in their actions if it was heading straight for a target, whether the plane was communicating or not.

Imagine the negative PR. "USA shot down fully loaded civilian plane in distress." That's not a good reason, mind you, but from their point of view it's probably a pretty solid one.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:13 AM on March 18, 2014

If the US military knew anything they're not disclosing, then the past week of Navy deployments and search flights was a very expensive cover-up. Not impossible, but pretty unlikely.
posted by stopgap at 11:14 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Imagine the negative PR. "USA shot down fully loaded civilian plane in distress." That's not a good reason, mind you, but from their point of view it's probably a pretty solid one.

No, I believe (I'd rather believe) that the US military would do the honorable thing, stand up, and say yes we did it and here's why. "USA shot down unidentified aircraft heading for ammo dump on a military base after it failed repeatedly to acknowledge warnings" is really not much of a PR problem.

Tragedy, sure, but not a PR problem.
posted by RedOrGreen at 11:17 AM on March 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

Imagine the negative PR. "USA shot down fully loaded civilian plane in distress." That's not a good reason, mind you, but from their point of view it's probably a pretty solid one.

Well, "USA shot down fully loaded civilian plane in distress on collision course with ground target". That's an important distinction. There's nothing else that can be done in that situation, the choices are "the passengers die" or "the passengers and an unknown number of people on the ground die". It would be tragic but not indefensible.
posted by jason_steakums at 11:18 AM on March 18, 2014

Yes, because everything that happens to anyone, anywhere in the world, somehow must be intimately related to the United States. It is completely impossible that something occur which is not, somehow, either a result of actions by the United States or actions toward the United States.

I mean, it's not like foreign "people" have their own agency and internal life.
posted by aramaic at 11:18 AM on March 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

How long does it honestly take a fighter plane, say, to get in the air, and try to figure out what the situation is?
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:19 AM on March 18, 2014

Yes, because everything that happens to anyone, anywhere in the world, somehow must be intimately related to the United States. It is completely impossible that something occur which is not, somehow, either a result of actions by the United States or actions toward the United States.

I mean, it's not like foreign "people" have their own agency and internal life.

This line of speculation was explicitly dealing with the US base at Diego Garcia.
posted by jason_steakums at 11:19 AM on March 18, 2014 [9 favorites]

How long does it honestly take a fighter plane, say, to get in the air, and try to figure out what the situation is?

Generations, it seems.
posted by de at 11:23 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

"running amuck" was originally a Malay concept.

Having a pithier term than "going postal" does not mean SE Asians have some sort of increased propensity to the action. Edward Said wept.
posted by Panjandrum at 11:23 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

stopgap: Agreed, but again the negative PR of not doing anything at all?

For the record I don't think there's a US coverup of the "we blew it up" variety. If the Diego Garcia angle turns out to be actually relevant, then I might believe a coverup of a "we needed something on that plane desperately" variety.

RedOrGreen: I'd rather believe the same thing. But. Imagine this: you're the commander of the base, woken up in the middle of the night, told about this thing incoming. You give the order. Shortly thereafter you get a comminque stating to be on the lookout for such a plane because it's a missing civilian transport. After saying "oh fuck" a lot, you're probably going to call your superior and say "We may have a situation." Coverup seems likely from there, and it would be again impossible from a US standpoint to refuse to help out with this kind of humanitarian mission. There's could also be a left hand/right hand thing going on, or the TS/SCI thing preventing the left knowing what the right is doing.

jason_steakums, I get what you're saying, but world opinion being what it is nobody's going to pay attention to the 'collision course' bit, you know?

Bear in mind I'm obviously just wild-ass guessing like everyone here, just contemplating the consequences if X is true.

I think in all likelihood the most reasonable explanation is a hijacking gone wrong. Hijacker(s) overcome the pilots enough to kill comms, say "Take us to Wherever" and the pilots make it look like they're punching in the location while actually setting a course out to sea.

I can't think of anything--even as little plausible as that one is--that makes sense otherwise.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:25 AM on March 18, 2014

If it had been shot down by anyone in the area capable of doing so, would there be reasons they'd want to hide it? Say, fear that any involved may take retaliatory actions after the death of so many of their citizens on board?

Being shot down and then kept quiet would explain a lot of this, but what reason would any country have to do that?

On preview though, fffm's hijack and ditch theory makes even more sense. But still, I wonder.

/slaps more tinfoil on that hat
posted by cmyk at 11:28 AM on March 18, 2014

How long does it honestly take a fighter plane, say, to get in the air, and try to figure out what the situation is?

They made visual contact with Helios 522 and Ethiopian 702. Even the Soviet Union made an effort with Korean 007.
posted by ambrosen at 11:28 AM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

/slaps more tinfoil on that hat

*hands cmyk a coconut and magic walking stick*
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 11:30 AM on March 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

I think in all likelihood the most reasonable explanation is a hijacking gone wrong. Hijacker(s) overcome the pilots enough to kill comms, say "Take us to Wherever" and the pilots make it look like they're punching in the location while actually setting a course out to sea.

I can't think of anything--even as little plausible as that one is--that makes sense otherwise.

Yeah, this is my vote for most reasonable theory, too. Doesn't require the pilot or copilot's disposition to wildly change from what people knew of them before, hijackers could physically prevent passengers from trying to use phones even if they did work or prevent it with the threat of a bomb or something else that the passengers couldn't fight back against, and if the hijackers required the pilots to make the plane do anything and the pilots realize the lives of everyone on board are already a lost cause, there's nothing the hijackers could do about it if the pilots entered in a course that took them way over water where they couldn't do any further damage.
posted by jason_steakums at 11:51 AM on March 18, 2014 [3 favorites]

Mostly agree, though it's hard to imagine that the pilots would not attempt some sort of communication in that situation.
posted by mazola at 12:34 PM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Wow, I love how Thailand just released today information that they tracked the plane on their radar but didn't tell Malaysia when intially asked soon after the flight went missing. The reason they said justified holding back info? " Malaysia's initial request for information in the early days of the search was not specific."
posted by saucysault at 12:38 PM on March 18, 2014

Hey, they could have been asking about any number of missing 777s.
posted by Justinian at 1:16 PM on March 18, 2014 [5 favorites]

If we assume for the moment that a) it's pilot suicide, and b) that the copilot was complicit or subdued, and c) that the passengers and rest of the crew were somehow subdued (someone mentioned the sudden climb + depressurization?), then this flight pattern actually does make sense.

Some people who commit suicides don't want to look like they've killed themselves--for honour, family memory, insurance/benefits, whatever. Subdue the rest of the plane (somehow), turn all comms off, make some apparently purposeful course changes, fly past the point of no return.

You've now left behind a mystery, and an honourable death. You won't be vilified after death as that guy who killed nearly three hundred people.

The problem is, the course changes would make it *less* likely that it would be taken as a suicide. If all we had was a sequence of "comms go out, plane turns back towards Malaysia but then continues flying in a straight line out into the Indian Ocean", the overwhelming assumption from everyone would be that something had gone wrong that had taken out the comms, that the pilots had turned back to try for an emergency landing, but were overcome by hypoxia or smoke and the plane flew on as a ghost plane. Because variants of that have happened before. And experienced pilots would know that; they'd know that a plane under apparent conscious control would look far more suspicious than a simple, believable one turn story.

If they were concerned that a single track into the ocean would leave it potentially findable, you could easily program a slight turn in the middle of the Indian Ocean, far away from any likely radars, as opposed to the Malacca Straits, with the potential for multiple country's radar detecting it. And if they were concerned about picking up a jet escort that might be able to identify the crash spot, they had already flown at a very detectable altitude over Malaysia. Why all but taunt the air forces of multiple other countries to notice you?

Honestly, it almost does make the hijacking/pilots attempting to attract attention storyline believable. Though that of course brings up questions: if they went north, how could they possibly have escaped notice to end up in Central Asia, if the pilots weren't helping? And if it went south -- you'd think at some point the hijackers would try to take direct control and either crash it or turn it around, not have it sail on for so many hours to nearly the Antarctic Ocean.

As someone said above, it's fractally weird.
posted by tavella at 1:24 PM on March 18, 2014

So very weird indeed. My hardest problem is grasping that no one anywhere in the world seems to know anything about what really happened. And then I come back to the fact that the world is HUGE, and it is apparently even huge enough to hide from all of its residents evidence of 300 souls (living or dead), and a jumbo jet (in tact or in thousands of pieces, some of which would float and presumably be seen by someone). With all of the information available to us today -- and available immediately and exponentially -- it's just really hard to accept that there is no information about what occurred, or at least that we don't have the equation that would, by some sort of arithmetic, make sense of what we do know.
posted by mudpuppie at 1:33 PM on March 18, 2014

The problem is, the course changes would make it *less* likely that it would be taken as a suicide.

Yes, that's my point exactly. The family gets to go on living thinking their son died valiantly, the pilot committing suicide knows that his name won't be spat on.

Again though, I don't think pilot suicide makes any sense, unless we're talking a severe psychotic break. The last thing, when you're suicidal, is wanting to draw out your death; I think a suicidal pilot would drop the nose, crank the engines, and go straight down.

it's just really hard to accept that there is no information about what occurred, or at least that we don't have the equation that would, by some sort of arithmetic, make sense of what we do know.

This is why I think there is more known than we are being told. Most especially, I strongly suspect that the US government has pictures that would at least flesh out the story, but can't/won't release them for fear of revealing certain surveillance capabilities. I'm not getting all conspiracy theory here; I'm just saying that the US has eyes in the sky that see a lot and it would be surprising if they hadn't picked anything up.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 1:36 PM on March 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

Sorry, I misstated; I meant that the course changes would make it *more* likely it would be taken as a suicide. If you want it to look like an accident, make a single turn, don't make it look like it was under conscious control for hours.
posted by tavella at 1:38 PM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

I think I'm having a hard time being that cynical about it, but that's not to say you're wrong, fffm.
posted by mudpuppie at 1:38 PM on March 18, 2014

If a large country (U.S., China, whatever) had pictures of where it was but didn't want to reveal how they surveilled that couldn't they just send a jet to the area while "searching" and "accidentally" see it?
posted by DynamiteToast at 1:40 PM on March 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

This is the only plausible theory I've heard or read yet.
posted by fshgrl at 2:31 PM on March 18, 2014 [4 favorites]

Here's the interesting thing about the Diego Garcia connection:

Diego Garcia is in the Chagos Islands, which are owned by the British, but the U.S. has a significant naval base there. British law has extremely strict rules about the environment in the area--so strict that when the base was built in the 1970's, the Chagos Island natives were run off--sorry, 'relocated'--to the Seychelles area because they could not be trusted with the protection of what has been considered by some the most pristine waters in the world. Obviously, this rankled the natives, who have been protesting for years their right to inhabit the island.

Just a few days ago, the British press broke the story that the U.S. Diego Garcia Naval Base has been dumping human waste and sewage into those waters for years, polluting the waters To the point where the coral reef is dying. Though this just came out in the press, apparently the British Government has known about the pollution issue since April of last year.

All of this is almost certainly unrelated to the missing jet, of course. I seriously doubt there is any kind of Eco-terrorism going on, for example.

But...with the revelations coming out now about this pollution and cover-up, it certainly seems like a PR nightmare if, on top of all that, this same naval base shot down an unarmed, non-military passenger jet with 239 innocent people on board, so I figured it was worth mentioning.
posted by misha at 2:33 PM on March 18, 2014

misha: what's your source for your tale about the Chagos Island people being relocated on environmental grounds?
posted by Mister Bijou at 2:45 PM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yeah, my understanding was that they were relocated on security grounds.
posted by Chrysostom at 2:49 PM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Sorry, I meant to link that! I read it on the Independent.
posted by misha at 2:52 PM on March 18, 2014

Ah, I see. Fact of the matter is the Chagos Island people were forcibly removed in the 1970s because the US military wanted the place all to themselves. The fact the Brits -- who still own the island, but let the US use it rent-free -- are stopping the locals from returning on so-called "environmental grounds" is just Brits being economical with the truth.
posted by Mister Bijou at 3:04 PM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

This is the only plausible theory I've heard or read yet.

I'm with fshgrl. I have no expertise at all on any of this, but it feels right, not to mention tragic and entirely un-conspiratorial. A fire. A loss of electronics. An attempt to reach a comparatively close and easy landing option ... but smoke or a lack of oxygen won out.

A plane ultimately left on autopilot for six hours heading somewhere very remote and far away.

Very sad.
posted by philip-random at 3:14 PM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Can someone remind me why we're talking about Diego Garcia again? It's 1600nm from the last known plane radar fix and a hell of a long way further from the Inmarsat ring where the plane is believed to have last been seen. I'll say it again; finding Diego Garcia in a pilot's simulator is in no way surprising. I guess it's an interesting place given how it's such a secret secure military base, not to mention connected to the US torture program, but there's no meaingful evidence it has anything to do with MH 370 and a lot against it.

I share RedOrGreen's desire for more information about Inmarsat-derived location hints from previous hours during the plane's flight. I've been watching this part of the story pretty closely and so far have seen nothing about it other than a lot of people asking. Hopefully the relevant search teams at least have access to the info. My guess is the only reason the one Inmarsat location got out was that the company was frustrated the Malaysian government was ignoring them and had leaked it themselves to the media (WSJ?) already.
posted by Nelson at 3:15 PM on March 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

It was just pointed out to me that it would be surprising for flight simulators not to have those particular 5 runways, since they tend to have thousands of sample runways anyway. I couldn't get a clear idea about whether the articles mean "those 5 runways only" or "these 5 runways are included amongst others".
posted by divabat at 3:22 PM on March 18, 2014

I don't think it's a stretch that someone might like to fly/explore/land in local/interesting areas they're familiar with via a flight simulator.
posted by mazola at 3:27 PM on March 18, 2014

Nelson, eyewitnesses in the Malvides claim to have seen a low-flying jet where none had ever been seen before, possibly in colors similar to MH's. However as with everything else that's come out on this incredible case there is no corroboration and it's not consistent with the other evidence.
posted by localroger at 3:27 PM on March 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

This is the only plausible theory I've heard or read yet.

Except they *did not* head to the closest runway able to handle a 777. If the flew to Langkawi, they passed, by my count, 7 runways 6500' or longer, and the 2nd closest to their location when they made the turn was Sultan Mahmud Airport in Kuala Teenngganu, with an 11,400' runway.

IF they were on fire and they were trying to divert, they manually programmed their FMC a route that would keep them away from airports, instead of going to the FMC, hitting the AIRP button, which brings up a list of nearby *safe to land at for a 777* airports, then picking one of the closest 2 and selecting the bottom right function button, which, on that page, is labeled DIVERT NOW.

Seriously. ANY trained 777 pilot knows how to get a divert going. It's right there in the FMC. It would take *far longer* to program in the route they actually flew that to select WMKC or WMKC on the FMC and hit "DIVERT NOW"

No. It's not only not a plausible theory, it posits the absolute stupidest behavior by a set of trained pilots who are required to rehearse this procedure in simulators repeatedly. Suddenly, they forgot how to call up the diversion planning menu and went and typed in a route of five character waypoint IDs?
posted by eriko at 3:45 PM on March 18, 2014 [26 favorites]

This is the only plausible theory I've heard or read yet.

I'd like that theory too, but for two things. I'd like to know why the airport cited in that article would be a better choice than any of the others (and closer) airports provided in this map of airports supposedly capable of handling the 777. Also, what would explain the two course changes after the flight overflew that airport?

On preview, eriko touched on this but posting anyway for the links - which were gathered from other posts in this thread.
posted by forforf at 3:51 PM on March 18, 2014

Yeah eriko, I'm definitely not an expert or a pilot.

Right now some pilot friends of mine are having a heated debate about the details of what electronics would be working and what airport they might have diverted to etc on f'book. I guess the part they and, by extension I, found plausible is the fire/ emergency and that the pilots tried stuff, it failed and the plane crashed. All the hijacking and conspiracy theories seem insane.

I lived in Alaska once and planes go missing there a lot. I think people underestimate how hard it is to find a plane.
posted by fshgrl at 3:51 PM on March 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

There is also other not-officially-verified information that points towards a landing on land.

I think it's generally easier to wrap one's mind around an accident (however complex) vs. a precisely carried out hijacking. That's why many people believe it must have crashed in the ocean.
posted by travelwithcats at 3:52 PM on March 18, 2014

Some good analysis of the satellite angle calculations here. There is two-way communication, but it sounds like there are a lot of assumptions that go into the calculations, so I don't know how accurate they really are. The arcs are likely calculated based on either the delay between the satellite sending a ping and receiving a response, or the power level of the transmission. There is no discussion of any lag or processing time on the plane, which could lead to very different angle estimates. It also sounds like a banking plane could alter the perceived transmission power between antennas. I would interpret the arcs as more of a maximum distance from the satellite rather than a likely position. Again, I would be curious to see the intermediate ping calculations.
posted by stopgap at 3:55 PM on March 18, 2014

I suspect that when all the facts come out, they won't fit the facts.
posted by mazola at 3:56 PM on March 18, 2014 [6 favorites]

A follow-up post gives more timing detail. The plane is given a specific time slot to reply in, and the distance and speed calculations are based on delay and Doppler shift. So I think I have to retract my suggestion that the arc is more of a maximum distance.
posted by stopgap at 4:03 PM on March 18, 2014

Analysis of the southern arc, based on data from the intermediate pings, leads to a revised southern search area about 2400km WSW of Perth, Australia.
posted by stopgap at 4:11 PM on March 18, 2014

And here's the Australian Maritime Safety Authority's maps of the search area as described in their 18 March 2014 press release. It's a fairly specific area and while it seems heavily informed by the Inmarsat ring location, it's more specific than that.
posted by Nelson at 4:16 PM on March 18, 2014

Apparently it should be possible to reconstruct the intermediate ping arcs from the AMSA/NTSB southern search data. This would allow plotting the arcs on the northern route to test possible route hypotheses.
posted by stopgap at 4:28 PM on March 18, 2014

Ah, so they're using something analogous to GSM's timing advance field to derive the distance from the satellite. That should give a range accurate to within a few tens of kilometers at most (more likely closer to 1-2km), otherwise the terminals would be trampling all over each other when transmitting. Not terribly surprising it is logged, either. It's useful information to have for troubleshooting. It would also probably be relatively difficult to spoof that value, since it is measured by the base station (in this case the satellite), which then asks the terminal to transmit a bit earlier or later than it normally would.
posted by wierdo at 4:29 PM on March 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

Since the arcs are a mirror image, did anyone see a recalculation for the northern corridor?
Haven't read any official statement, but it seems like JORN was not in use. 3.200 km would be close to the maximum reach of radar 2 anyway, which does not cover the exact search area. What other info do you presume went into the calculations of the new search site?
posted by travelwithcats at 4:36 PM on March 18, 2014

It sounds like the assumptions for the southern search area were constant speed and heading, consistent with all (unreleased) intermediate ping arcs. This yielded only two possible southern flight paths. I don't know what their point of origin is — last known radar position?
posted by stopgap at 4:43 PM on March 18, 2014

So anything else than the inferred arcs? The speed can be calculated based on the distance between two arcs.
posted by travelwithcats at 4:50 PM on March 18, 2014

Interesting, the flight lines on that new southern search area seem to converge well east of the southern satellite arc from a point west of Australia and south of Java.
posted by jason_steakums at 4:51 PM on March 18, 2014

The speed can be calculated based on the distance between two arcs.

Right, but I think you need a point of origin to distribute the arcs uniformly. Since the two flight paths converge, maybe plotting them as great circles would give a second convergence point to use as the investigators' assumed point of origin.
posted by stopgap at 4:56 PM on March 18, 2014

I just woke up and logged on, the MeFi tab said (84) [new comments]. I thought Hallelujah! It's been found overnight! No, just a glitch.

With all of the information available to us today -- and available immediately and exponentially -- it's just really hard to accept that there is no information about what occurred, or at least that we don't have the equation that would, by some sort of arithmetic, make sense of what we do know.

I know, it's very humbling. Agony for the families and friends.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 5:41 PM on March 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

I wonder if they are also considering waypoints. There's very few in that part of the ocean, and if you assume they went from Igrex to Rerab, the southernmost, it looks like you end up where they are searching on the sort of flight path shown. Not sure why there would be two, though.
posted by tavella at 5:51 PM on March 18, 2014

fshgrl: "I lived in Alaska once and planes go missing there a lot. I think people underestimate how hard it is to find a plane."

Same in BC however those tend to be much smaller and less sophisticated planes. It's going to be a lot easier to find a 777 than a little Beaver.
posted by Mitheral at 5:56 PM on March 18, 2014

When you're talking about a search area comprising such a significant area of the Earth, the difference between a Beaver or Twin Otter and a 777 isn't so great. It's easy to spot runways where a 777 can obvioiusly and safely land from satellite views, because runways are very obviously manmade linear features. The plane itself, especially if broken up, but really even in flight, is much harder to spot.

I can understand why if anyone does have hard evidence they might withhold it because the ability to ferret such a small object out of a globe of surveillance data would suggest an existential threat to almost every other similar entity on Earth.
posted by localroger at 6:11 PM on March 18, 2014

Someone on reddit described it as a search for a single mis-typed letter in one bible of a set of 600 bibles.
posted by five fresh fish at 6:24 PM on March 18, 2014

Another as trying to spot a dropped quarter, on a four lane highway, while driving to work. And it might be under a leaf.
posted by five fresh fish at 6:26 PM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

MeFi's Own Rob Cockerham had some comparisons.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:40 PM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

From the Cockerham link, I liked the last comparison, "finding a short grain of rice at Disneyland."
posted by Bugbread at 6:53 PM on March 18, 2014

NBC is reporting that the hard left turn was pre-programmed into the flight's computer more than 12 minutes before the last radio transmission. That is essentially all she wrote for a mechanical cause of all of this.
posted by Justinian at 7:02 PM on March 18, 2014

finding a short grain of rice at Disneyland

Because Disneyland would only ever serve LONG GRAIN RICE AMIRITE.

Q-II's vouch notwithstanding, it's a very short and tiny needle in a very large and long-grained haystack.
posted by localroger at 7:05 PM on March 18, 2014

the hard left turn was pre-programmed into the flight's computer more than 12 minutes before the last radio transmission

i must have missed something - how could anyone know this?
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 7:07 PM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

From the NBC article: "The change in direction was made at least 12 minutes before co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid said "All right, good night," to controllers on the ground, the sources said.

The revelation further indicates that the aircraft's mysterious turnaround was planned and executed in the cockpit before controllers lost contact with Flight 370. But it doesn't necessarily indicate an ulterior motive.

"Some pilots program an alternate flight plan in the event of an emergency," cautioned Greg Feith, a former National Transportation Safety Board crash investigator and NBC News analyst.

"We don't know if this was an alternate plan to go back to Kuala Lumpur or if this was to take the plane from some place other than Beijing," the doomed flight's intended destination, Feith said."
posted by cashman at 7:16 PM on March 18, 2014

The video says ACARS reported it at 1:07. I didn't know that system reported that level of detail.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 7:19 PM on March 18, 2014

The first sentence is misleading. The change in direction did not happen before signoff. The claim is that it was programmed into the flight computer before signoff.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 7:21 PM on March 18, 2014

i've been following this story like it was crack. i have no idea what happened to the plane, but i would like to thank the metafilter contributors for a higher level of uninformed speculation than is available elsewhere. i have a growing sense that we'll never get a definitive answer.
posted by bruce at 7:21 PM on March 18, 2014 [15 favorites]

Hijacker(s) overcome the pilots enough to kill comms, say "Take us to Wherever" and the pilots make it look like they're punching in the location while actually setting a course out to sea.

I agree with this. My thoughts: hijacker breaches the cockpit, gets pilots to switch off communication devices. Says - "take me to x location" and the pilots program the waypoints - hijacker maybe none the wiser that they've just put in random locations. Maybe the pilot was trying to signal by the unusual selection of waypoints that they was under distress (if he was thinking they wouldn't make it, but that radars or satellites would show where they went). I read in one of the articles linked upthread that the climb to 45,000 feet followed by the uneven drop is consistent with a struggle in the cockpit, so maybe the pilots also tried to fight back. I also think that the plane flying for hours afterward would be more likely due to everyone being unconscious, like the Helios flight. So maybe during the struggle, something happened that caused the depressurization of the plane causing everyone to pass out and the plane to fly until it ran out of fuel.

Alternately, there were no hijackers, but it was one of the pilots and the other pilot tried to stop him, leading to roughly the same scenario above.
posted by triggerfinger at 7:23 PM on March 18, 2014

The first sentence is misleading. The change in direction did not happen before signoff. The claim is that it was programmed into the flight computer before signoff.

It's clear in the article that it is preprogrammed. I just can't copy the entire thing and post it here.
posted by cashman at 7:34 PM on March 18, 2014

This morning's NY Times article (tried to) say the same thing. No idea how or why they kept this secret since the first analysis of the ACARS messages.
posted by miyabo at 7:43 PM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm just surprised ACARS transmits even actions like programming that in.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 7:43 PM on March 18, 2014

ARCARS and FMS are linked so information about things like weather, flight plans and engine performance can be shared both ways automatically. Why no alarm was raised over the changed flight plan at 1.07 might be one reason the Malay authorities did not release this information until yesterday's press conference.

hijacker breaches the cockpit, gets pilots to switch off communication devices. Says - "take me to x location" and the pilots program the waypoints - hijacker maybe none the wiser that they've just put in random locations.

It is kind of weird that the hijackers would know how to breach the flight deck in the first fifteen minutes of the flight while it was still climbing without raising the pilots' alarm (or the alarm of the people in business class that had access to plane phones I thought?) but not have a ready list of waypoints taken off skyvector and would just trust the pilots to take them there. And why would the pilots disobey, aren't they supposed to follow the hijacker's orders? It would also mean the hijackers were on the flight deck when the co-pilot said "good night" to ATC instead of the innocuously-sounding code-word for distress he could have used.

I suspect there is a lot of information we do not know that would change a lot of people's opinion of what happened. As it is, none of the three main theories fit all of the available information we have.
posted by saucysault at 8:27 PM on March 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

per cendawanita's post on March 17, here is the NST write up:

Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein yesterday conducted a closed-door briefing for Barisan Nasional backbenchers to update them on the status of the investigation into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Speaking to reporters, he said the briefing...was meant to keep the parliamentarians in the loop on what had transpired so far.

The briefing, he said, was done at the parliamentarians’ request.

"This was not to share ideas or discuss sensitive issues about the investigation,” stressed Hishammuddin, who is also defence minister.

He said the parliamentarians had a responsibility to convey an accurate picture of the situation.

"The whole world is looking at us and it's important for us to be well-informed,” he said...

Hishammuddin said he was open to conducting a similar briefing for opposition members of parliament if they requested for one.

(my bf)

Note: The BN has been Malaysia's ruling coalition since Independence. The only serious contender is an allliance of opposition parties led by Anwar.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:35 PM on March 18, 2014

In case my point is not clear, why not debrief the entire parliament if "it's important for us to be well-informed". Why wait for a "request"?
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:41 PM on March 18, 2014

Conclusion: If not outright lying, there has been endless dissembling. The reason none of our conjectures can make sense is because we've been fed bullshit. We may never know what happened, because we're not being told the truth.
posted by five fresh fish at 9:09 PM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Meh, it's just more political games as usual for the ruling party. I mean next to throwing your opposition party leaders into jail on made up charges this is nothing. The level of BS produced by the leaders is pretty unbelievable, say only a few days ago the Deputy Home Minister insinuated that the Chinese and Indians were godless pagans who tolerate child rape. He was baited by a question on why the Malay community had a significantly higher rate of child rape cases, and his logic was that in reality the Chinese and Indians actually had higher rates, but because Islam doesn't allow child rape, only Malays report it to the police. seriously. He was being baited specifically because there was a case earlier where a 41 year old raped a 12 year old girl and once he was caught he immediately married her as a second wife (permissable under Islamic law) in order to try evade the rape charges.

I think what happened to MH370 is unprecedented. If anything good comes out of this I would expect all airlines to now have a direct line to the military: Malaysia has a squadron of SU-30's stationed on the East Coast at Gong Kedak, in future if an airliner ever drops off the radar by turning off its transponder they should immediately scramble an escort: the SU-30 can track an airliner 400km away, and they lost contact with MH370 140km from the coast, so it should have been more or less doable in this case, especially since it doubled back. Obviously the military isn't going to scramble jets on its own for any and every random radar return it gets, so this directive has to come from MAS itself saying they've lost contact with one of their jets and they need an escort / visual confirmation / short range VHF communication with it.
posted by xdvesper at 9:27 PM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

What amazing is how this plane is some sort of karmic reflector. People seeing the story they want to see, in the human interest, the international aspect, the terrorism claims. Because we know nothing about this situation, we prefer to project our own meaning on to the situation rather than accept we know nothing on it.

That's why I think it was a fire. We know nothing and it is the most parsimonious explanation. Planes catch on fire and when they do it is very bad. Commercial pilots don't hijack their own airplanes. Happened twice before this at most. Just so happened that one pilot did it three weeks ago in Europe. So that's what's fresh in CNN's mind.

I've never ever seen such rank speculation presented as news before, ever. But for CNN, it is lucrative. They are crushing in key demos and were up 100% in the ratings from before. Hell, I turned it on. I never turn on CNN.
posted by Ironmouth at 10:27 PM on March 18, 2014 [11 favorites]

I should think the other thing that comes of this is an international requirement for all aircraft to have an always-on location/direction beacon. It's unfathomable that in this day, an aircraft can simply vanish. Inexcusable.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:34 PM on March 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

five fresh fish: "I should think the other thing that comes of this is an international requirement for all aircraft to have an always-on location/direction beacon."

From what I've gathered through this thread, though, everything on an aircraft is designed to be turn-offable in case of electrical fires.
posted by Bugbread at 11:11 PM on March 18, 2014

> We know nothing

That's not the case at all. If the pre-programmed divert were a planned turn back due to any early flight emergency "All right, good night" at least 12 minutes and at most 40 odd minutes after deciding to turn back is simply not the professional response to KL's ATC on (temporarily) departing its airspace.

A fire is unlikely the cause.
posted by de at 11:32 PM on March 18, 2014

So it seems that a lot of countries in this region have acknowledged/are too embarrassed to admit that their military radar is not manned at night.

Is this something that a hijacker would know? A pilot?
posted by TWinbrook8 at 3:11 AM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Lack of Useful Radar Exposes Defense Weakness explores the issues of radar coverage and the relucatance among countries in SE Asia to share such information.


Series of Errors by Malaysia Mounts, Complicating the Task of Finding Flight 370:

The radar blip that was Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 did a wide U-turn over the Gulf of Thailand and then began moving inexorably past at least three military radar arrays as it traversed northern Malaysia, even flying high over one of the country’s biggest cities before heading out over the Strait of Malacca.

Yet inside a Malaysian Air Force control room on the country’s west coast, where American-made F-18s and F-5 fighters stood at a high level of readiness for emergencies exactly like the one unfolding in the early morning of March 8, a four-person air defense radar crew did nothing about the unauthorized flight. “The watch team never noticed the blip,” said a person with detailed knowledge of the investigation into Flight 370. “It was as though the airspace was his.”
posted by mlis at 4:25 AM on March 19, 2014 [2 favorites]

Malaysia Cedes Some Control in Search for Flight 370

But confusion over the effort spread Tuesday, with several nations, including India, Thailand, Japan and Indonesia, saying they had ships and aircraft sitting idle while they awaited instructions from Kuala Lumpur, which has been overseeing the international operation.

Instructions on how to proceed are "not very clear," said a senior South Korean military official in Seoul, which has offered a P-3C and a C-130 transport plane to the search fleet.
posted by mlis at 4:29 AM on March 19, 2014

Why the "startlingly simple" Chris Goodfellow fire theory is wrong. [via Slate]
posted by kreestar at 4:38 AM on March 19, 2014

We may never know what happened, because we're not being told the truth.

Please point out what statements you believe to be untruthful.

What amazing is how this plane is some sort of karmic reflector.

Totally.

The fire theory is just a non-starter at this point though. Planes do not catch on fire and then fly for six hours (Especially FBW ones!). Pilots would never turn off the transponder in response to a fire [1]. Pilots do not program a set of diversion waypoints during a fire, and then calmly say "Good night" to the controller 20 minutes later. Pilots would never intentionally climb a plane that was on fire.

In the first few days after the incident, I agree that fire was totally the best guess (c.f. SR111), but not finding the wreckage near the point of last contact and receiving the satellite handshakes six hours later are just really incompatible with fire.

[1] The Boeing Quick Reference Handbook says in event of fire, pull power to any obviously smoking/burning devices, but the transponders are located in the EE bay where the pilots would never see them. It does not say start throwing breakers to everything. It does not say anything about removing power to busses, as the Goodfellow writeup describes, since in a FBW aircraft you need those electrical busses to keep the flight computers running. Shutting them down would be make the plane uncontrollable. I understand that in an emergency people can do weird things, but Goodfellow should at least be honest that shutting off the transponders makes no sense rather than suggesting that all crew actions fit together perfectly. Not to mention shutting down the radios without at least sending out a mayday? Definitely super weird, definitely not reasonable behavior you can wave away with "aviate, navigate, communicate".
posted by kiltedtaco at 6:18 AM on March 19, 2014 [6 favorites]

Could the fire not have taken out the transponders?
posted by Admira at 6:36 AM on March 19, 2014

MeFi's Own Rob Cockerham had some comparisons.

The piece (for those who have not read it, it scales down the relative sizes of the Indian Ocean and a 777 to convey how much ocean there is to search and how little target there is to search for) is nice, but even when he gets down to the graspable area -- like finding a pen in San Francisco, say -- he is still using areas that offer a lot of hiding places instead of smooth ocean. I think to get a more accurate comparison, you need a relatively homogenous search area to convey the idea. If my math is right, this is comparable to searching a football field for a stray eyelash.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:46 AM on March 19, 2014 [2 favorites]

Yes, the transponders could have caught fire. But those are sitting in the EE bay right next to every other piece of electronics that control the aircraft, including the flight computers. So you need to burn up the transponders and the radios and disable the crew, but keep the plane airworthy. That's the part that just seems so difficult. And someone had to program in these diversions, which on their own are inconsistent with a fire. I'm definitely not going to say it's impossible, but it's a big stretch.
posted by kiltedtaco at 6:55 AM on March 19, 2014

Re: waypoints & sequence of events

At the press conference today there was the following opening statement:
"I am aware of speculation that additional waypoints were added to the aircraft’s flight routing. I can confirm that the aircraft flew on normal routing up until the waypoint IGARI. There is no additional waypoint on MH370’s documented flight plan, which depicts normal routing all the way to Beijing."

Later on, there was a question concerning waypoints. A reporter asked if radar data showed that the aircraft passed through at least two waypoints after the turn back. That question was dodged. Check out the video at 16:15 for that particular question.

The very next question: "There were reports today that the plane diverted course and went westwards before the pilot said goodnight. Can you confirm?" Authorities replied with "That's not correct". That question starts at 17:40 in the same video. The reporter was likely referring to CNN's report about the pre-programming of waypoints:
"On Tuesday, a law enforcement official told CNN that the aircraft's first major change of course -- an abrupt westward turn that took the plane off its route to China and back across the Malay Peninsula -- was almost certainly programmed by somebody in the cockpit.
The change was entered into the plane's system at least 12 minutes before a person in the cockpit, believed to be the co-pilot, signed off to air traffic controllers." Article was updated after the press conference.

At a previous press conference it was clarified that it is not clear when ACARS was disabled. The only thing that is known is the time frame: 1:07MYT (last proper ACARS transmission) - 1:37MYT (next scheduled ACARS transmission that did not come through).
posted by travelwithcats at 7:15 AM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Pilots would never turn off the transponder in response to a fire [1]. Pilots do not program a set of diversion waypoints during a fire, and then calmly say "Good night" to the controller 20 minutes later. Pilots would never intentionally climb a plane that was on fire.

We have an entirely new timeline. Malaysia now says "goodnight" transmission was before the systems stopped working.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/18/malaysia-s-sinister-timeline-for-flight-370-unravels.html

We know next to nothing about what happened to this plane. It is just a bunch of wild-goose chases. And fire or malfunction is the simplest explanation. It is more common than hijack, and massively more common than crewmember hijack.
posted by Ironmouth at 7:18 AM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

I do have to wonder if the whole "aviate, navigate, communicate" system will change in light of this situation.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:20 AM on March 19, 2014

he is still using areas that offer a lot of hiding places instead of smooth ocean

The ocean is only smooth on the surface. A major problem with the recovery of the Air France jet was that it sank into an underwater mountain range.
posted by localroger at 7:35 AM on March 19, 2014

And fire or malfunction is the simplest explanation. It is more common than hijack, and massively more common than crewmember hijack.

How common is flying for multiple hours after catching fire?
posted by Chrysostom at 7:42 AM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Right, the operative issue are the reports that additional off-track waypoints were programmed prior to the last ACARS update at 1:07. That report is super critical, and I think it's hinted at by the Malaysian authorities confidence in a "deliberate" action.

If those are not true, then I am happy to retract my reticence towards the fire scenario. But I haven't seen any statements directly contradicting that. The plane doesn't have to fly the actual waypoints prior to the sign-off, they can be pre-programmed, ACARS relays that update to the ground at 1:07, the pilots sign off, the plane reaches IGARI, automatically turns towards to the diversion waypoints, and the transponder is then turned off. I'm not making that timeline up as a wild guess, that's the sum total of the reports I've seen.

Also note that the aircraft doesn't necessarily fly "through" the waypoints, it flies towards them and when it gets close enough it turns towards the next one, so I wouldn't place much weight on that.
posted by kiltedtaco at 7:45 AM on March 19, 2014

roomthreeseventeen: "I do have to wonder if the whole "aviate, navigate, communicate" system will change in light of this situation."

It seems unlikely, I know I'm not going to stop trying to save my life in order to make it easier for rescuers to find my body.

Besides, everything seems to point to the occupants of the airplane in this case being unable or unwilling to contact anyone.
posted by Mitheral at 8:21 AM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

How common is flying for multiple hours after catching fire?

I was thinking a fire seemed like a good culprit but having Ctrl+Fed for "fire" through the List of accidents and incidents involving commercial aircraft (got back to the 60s then decided technology was so more advanced now it wouldn't be a fair comparison) , it seems like in past situations where there's been an in-flight fire in the cabin/fuselage (as opposed to an engine fire), the plane has crashed less than an hour after the fire is initially detected.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 8:21 AM on March 19, 2014

That's why I think it was a fire. We know nothing and it is the most parsimonious explanation. Planes catch on fire and when they do it is very bad.

If it's that bad, could you please provide a plausible explanation as to how a fire could be so bad as to incapacitate all aboard, while leaving the plane airworthy for at least four hours?

Commercial pilots don't hijack their own airplanes.

Oh I see.

Happened twice before this at most. Just so happened that one pilot did it three weeks ago in Europe.

Oh wait you meant they do.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 8:26 AM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Which just brings me right back to thinking that someone--USA, China, or Russia most likely--has to have some photos that shed light. There's no way that nobody at any of the multiple surveillance HQs in the States (or Russia or especially China) didn't task a couple of satellites to start taking as many photos of the area as they could as soon as they heard about this. That's assuming there weren't any taking pictures already.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 8:42 AM on March 19, 2014

There's no way that nobody at any of the multiple surveillance HQs in the States (or Russia or especially China) didn't task a couple of satellites to start taking as many photos of the area as they could as soon as they heard about this.

By the time most governments "heard about this" the plane was long gone.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:52 AM on March 19, 2014 [2 favorites]

Comments from two 777 rated air transport pilots, one of who was either flying for Delta or AA. In short -- that plane didn't act like it had a fire aboard.
posted by eriko at 8:53 AM on March 19, 2014 [7 favorites]

If it's that bad, could you please provide a plausible explanation as to how a fire could be so bad as to incapacitate all aboard, while leaving the plane airworthy for at least four hours?

Smoke inhalation. When Payne Stewart's plane decompressed it flew for hours, off course. If the people in the aircraft died or passed out from smoke inhalation, the plane could fly for hours by itself.
posted by Ironmouth at 8:59 AM on March 19, 2014

Tensions reached a boiling point Wednesday when a group of Chinese relatives of missing passengers criticized Malaysia’s handling of the search efforts during a news conference in Kuala Lumpur. Chaos broke out as Malaysian police roughed up journalists crowded around the group.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:03 AM on March 19, 2014

I mentioned my brother, who doesn't fly this plane, but has 20+ years experience as a commercial pilot. Many things in his life are like Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah's life. He does the handy videos of fixing things to Youtube. He oversees simulator training for the airline he works for. Once when I dropped by his place and he was flying something new, he had the plane's schematics spread out on his table; not something required but something he needed to know to make sure he and his passengers were as safe as possible. He's politically active.

This hits him hard. He can see no way but an intentional act. It's pretty awful.
posted by readery at 9:04 AM on March 19, 2014 [2 favorites]

Happened twice before this at most. Just so happened that one pilot did it three weeks ago in Europe.

Oh wait you meant they do.

My point is how extremely rare it is, especially when compared to the causes of all crashes. There is, to my knowledge, only one situation that has occured where a pilot crashed an airliner deliberately, the flight that went down off of Long Island.
posted by Ironmouth at 9:05 AM on March 19, 2014

He can see no way but an intentional act. It's pretty awful.

I think that's pretty short sighted. There's no evidence that it was intentional.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:06 AM on March 19, 2014

kiltedtaco, what reports do you have in mind?

I think it's possible to interpret the official statements one way or another, but the press blows stuff up and then that in turn is rephrased and spread. There is a lot of wrong info floating around.
There are testimonies that I am more likely to believe, like that Vietnamese ATC "frantically" tried to establish contact on 121.5 for example. Other things are repeated and repeated although the sources are not verified. I'm sure the Malaysian authorities have had grounds to label it "deliberate" action. Were those grounds interpretations of raw data that is verified, did this interpretations change in the mean time or was it a political reason to enable them to classify it under Section 130C of their penal code, making it an offense relating to terrorism?

I mean we can talk about the "unnamed officials". What do you guy think about those?

Anyway, if someone wants to read more into it: Apparently this woman's banner said: "We are against the Malaysian government for hiding the truth and delaying the rescue. Release our families unconditionally!" As mentioned upthread, there were some rough scenes prior to the press conference today.
posted by travelwithcats at 9:17 AM on March 19, 2014

There is, to my knowledge, only one situation that has occured where a pilot crashed an airliner deliberately, the flight that went down off of Long Island.

Murder/suicide is known or strongly suspected in the cases of: Silk Air 185, Egypt Air 990, Royal Air Maroc 630, FedEx Express 705, and Japan Airlines 350.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:24 AM on March 19, 2014 [7 favorites]

There is, to my knowledge, only one situation that has occured where a pilot crashed an airliner deliberately

In the interest of supplementing the discussion with verifiable facts, I filtered this Wikipedia list to incidents that are specifically the pilot crashing their own commercial scheduled flight. These include Japan Airlines Flight 350 in 1982, EgyptAir 990 in 1990, Royal Air Maroc 630 in 1994, SilkAir 185 in 1997, and LAM 470 in 2013. There may be others, I haven't done a full survey.

Yes, pilots crashing their own planes is uncommon. No, it's not unheard of. No, we have no real evidence either way about MH 370 yet. The conflicting information we're getting from Malaysian authorities and well-placed leaks is confusing enough, the last thing our intelligent discussion needs is confident assertions of fact without evidence.
posted by Nelson at 9:25 AM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

If not smoke, why not carbon monoxide? It's colorless, odorless, and creeps up on you and disorients you before killing you. Maybe there's a fire, a small one, in an area of the plane like the avionics bay that doesn't get a lot of O2. Isn't carbon monoxide produced by incomplete combustion? The pilots get an electrical fire alarm and start pulling breakers, unaware that they are in the first stages of CO poisoning. Maybe they succeed at extinguishing the fire and then change course to try to find a runway to set down on, but they're too far gone to pull it off, and the plane full of dead people crashes into the Indian Ocean hours later.

But really, at this point, I think my money is on terrorist attack gone wrong. But I think almost everything, from fire to theft to pilot suicide is still on the table. And I have no money.
posted by vibrotronica at 9:26 AM on March 19, 2014 [2 favorites]

There are testimonies that I am more likely to believe, like that Vietnamese ATC "frantically" tried to establish contact on 121.5 for example.

As others have suggested, major airports should have 24hr access to a search team that includes fast fighter jets with powerful radar that can be scrambled as soon as contact with any major flight has been lost for a significant amount of time and can co-ordinate with military ground radar.
posted by Golden Eternity at 9:34 AM on March 19, 2014

Smoke inhalation

Which is why they are trained -- repeatedly -- to put on the masks the moment they sense smoke. These masks go on incredibly quickly. Indeed, for most airlines, one pilot is required to be wearing the mask if they are alone in the cockpit above FL250 or regardless if they're above FL410.

There are checklists for in cabin fire. Here's one for a BAe 146 (scroll to figure 3.) Items in CAPS are referring to controls with that label or a setting on a control.

1) Oxygen Masks: Crew don, EMERGENCY (set oxygen switch to EMERGENCY)
2) Smoke Goggles: Crew don
3) Crew Communications: Establish (make sure you can hear each other)

4) ATC Transponder: A7700 (International code for emergency)
5) Air Traffic Control: Inform
6) PANEL FLOOD LIGHTS: Select STORM (Brighten panel in case of smoke)
7) Flight Deck Emergency Lights: ON (More light on the FD.)
8) GALLEY SWITCH: SHED (if fitted) (I'm assuming this means "cut power.")
9) FASTEN BELTS: ON
10) CABIN EMERGENCY LIGHTS: ON
11) NO SMOKING: ON
12) Flight Deck Door: Closed

Note:
1) Land at nearest suitable airfield
2) If source of fire can be identified, continue with appropriate procedure below

So. Mask On, Goggles On, Check your other pilot, Transponder to 7700, call ATC, then, if you know what the source of the fire is, ONE of you goes and deals with it. The pilot flying flies the plane, period. Note the order. Mask/Goggles. Transponder to Emergency. Call ATC. Configure a/c for the emergency, then and only then does one of you go deal with it.

ANYBODY following the checklists calls ATC. There are zero cases where you cut the power to the transponder and the radios first unless you have completely and utterly ignored the checklists about fire. That's not impossible, but it is incredibly improbable because of the repeated training they get on just this item. The fastest way to lose the plane is for the pilots to lose oxygen, so if there's any hint that oxygen is at risk, masks go on.

Fire is not a credible answer here. Fire in no way fits the facts. This is why the pilots who fly these planes are saying that the plane was flown the way it was, and it was not downed by a cabin fire. If these pilots were dealing with a fire, the first sign would have been the 7700 squawk, and the second would have been a mayday or pan pan call to ATC.

They did not squawk 7700. They did not contact ATC. They either completely and utterly disregarded the checklists, or they had no fire.

This plane was either deliberately flown somewhere by the pilots, or it was hijacked. There are no other explanations on the table that fit the facts and involve entities that actually exist. If we waive that last requirement, alien abduction and assumption into heaven also match the facts as we know them.

For this to be a fire, it needed to burn far longer than we've seen, and the flight crew needed to completely ignore their training. I can see a small chance one of those happening, but both? No. Occam says this was not a fire.

There are testimonies that I am more likely to believe, like that Vietnamese ATC "frantically" tried to establish contact on 121.5 for example.

Yes, that's step #2 if you should have contact with a flight and they're not responding on frequency. Step #1 is to go to their last assigned frequency and see if they forgot to switch. 121.5MHz is the international aircraft emergency frequency, everybody on the ground monitors it, and most airliners will monitor it if they don't need the 2nd/3rd radio for something. Usually, though, the 3rd radio is the ACARS datalink.

It's called the VHF guard frequency. If you're intercepted by military aircraft, you get on 121.5, because that's where they'll be calling you. The military version is the UHF guard frequency, 243.0MHz.
posted by eriko at 9:44 AM on March 19, 2014 [27 favorites]

Smoke inhalation. When Payne Stewart's plane decompressed it flew for hours, off course. If the people in the aircraft died or passed out from smoke inhalation, the plane could fly for hours by itself.

If the fire is bad enough to pretty instantaneously incapacitate the entire crew and passengers, please explain how the fire is not bad enough to take the plane down. This just makes no sense, and in any case eriko has very soundly refuted it above. Do you have any evidence to the contrary?

My point is how extremely rare it is, especially when compared to the causes of all crashes. There is, to my knowledge, only one situation that has occured where a pilot crashed an airliner deliberately, the flight that went down off of Long Island.

Your knowledge, as shown by more than one person above, is incorrect. Please stop asserting facts without evidence.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:04 AM on March 19, 2014

I can see a small chance one of those happening, but both?

Honestly, I agree with your analysis, there was likely not a fire. But one of the common features of major disasters is a bunch of things going wrong, none of which should have. That's why disasters aren't that common--there are usually redundancies and it's not likely everything fails at once.

Here, you have evidence that things did go spectacularly wrong, which is evidence that multiple unlikely things did happen in close proximity to each other. So yeah, it's unlikely that you had a fire & and poorly reacting crew at just the moment when the plane was between ATC regions...but something unlikely happened. My non-existent money is also on crew action, but the knots seem too complex for Occam to cut them at this time.
posted by stevis23 at 10:20 AM on March 19, 2014

You know, the most consistent fact in this whole thing is that the Malaysian authorities are being awfully sketchy with the facts. This is a government that goes so far as to jail the leader of the opposition on false charges and doesn't give the opposition the courtesy of even attending the same briefing on the search that the party in power gets. And it makes me wonder if there's some way in which Malaysia's government was culpable in this and they're trying to spin themselves out of the blame by controlling the release of straightforward facts so the party in opposition can't use it as a political weapon.
posted by jason_steakums at 10:28 AM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

You know, the most consistent fact in this whole thing is that the Malaysian authorities are being awfully sketchy with the facts.

There are uncomfortable parallels with Fukushima, as I noted above. (NB: again, not indulging in lazy Asian stereotypes here. Sketchy information coming out in drips and drabs, repeatedly recanted then unrecanted, etc etc.)
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:30 AM on March 19, 2014

jason_steakums and feckless fecal fear mongering, you are basing this on the daily press conferences you watched, yes?
posted by travelwithcats at 10:42 AM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm basing this on the news reports I've read of said conferences, yes.

I'm not saying there's necessarily any deliberate coverup by the Malaysian authorities--it's a fast moving situation with a lot of complex parts, and a world press that is desperate for any information anyone will give them.

In a sense, it's actually refreshing to see a certain amount of confusion instead of the party-line messaging we see more often in the west. Indicates there isn't a PR flack managing everything, and I think that's a good thing.

I guess the pertinent questions are What did the Malasyian government know and when did they know it, because ISTR there being some key fact they were in possession of that didn't get released for a couple of days, which would have changed the search patterns in those days.

Like I've said several times, I don't think there's any mendacity here. But I think there's probably some CYA and "we can't reveal surveillance capabilities" going on amongst several governments.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:52 AM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm basing this on the news reports I've read of said conferences, yes.

Here's where the problem starts: the news reports have repeatedly been really unreliable in actually conveying the content of the press conferences. That whole European Names with Asian/Black Features derail was one such example of the media completely misinterpreting statements at press conferences.

There's also been a fair amount of misattribution of sources, as well as the conflation between "can't confirm" and "deny".
posted by divabat at 10:56 AM on March 19, 2014 [4 favorites]

But I think there's probably some CYA and "we can't reveal surveillance capabilities" going on amongst several governments.

Well, it could also be some good old fashioned inter-departmental turf wars between the Ministry of Defense/Intelligence vs. Foreign/Public Relations. This is very true from what I have read about China's central government, in general.
posted by FJT at 10:57 AM on March 19, 2014

Yeah that too FJT.

divabat I'm sorry if I came across as ignorant.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:59 AM on March 19, 2014

Some of the confusion is that US authorities are not supposed to talk to the press under ICAO treaty rules, but they are doing so anyway. It is possible we are hearing things in the media that haven't yet trickled through official channels to the Malaysian team.
posted by miyabo at 10:59 AM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Sorry if I missed this being linked earlier: Malaysia Turns to F.B.I. for Help in Missing Plane Inquiry
posted by Chrysostom at 11:01 AM on March 19, 2014

feckless fecal fear mongering: "In a sense, it's actually refreshing to see a certain amount of confusion instead of the party-line messaging we see more often in the west. Indicates there isn't a PR flack managing everything, and I think that's a good thing. "

I don't buy this. To me, it indicates that the Malaysian authorities have serious, and crippling internal communications problems.

Also, I've never heard this criticism levied against the NTSB.
posted by schmod at 11:03 AM on March 19, 2014

jason_steakums and feckless fecal fear mongering, you are basing this on the daily press conferences you watched, yes?

As much as I can and in addition to reading reporting on the press conferences, yes, but the latter taken with a huge grain of salt (and this thread is doing a great job at catching spurious reports and explaining why they're wrong). I'm not saying that I believe that the Malaysian government is intentionally messing with the flow of information for some shady ends, just that intentional and unintentional miscommunication look the same from the outside, so I found it worth thinking about.
posted by jason_steakums at 11:11 AM on March 19, 2014

Distraught Relatives of Missing Flight 370 Passengers Dragged Away From TV Cameras by Malaysian Officials
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:42 AM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Lost in Air by James Salter in The New Yorker online.
posted by readery at 11:58 AM on March 19, 2014

/This plane was either deliberately flown somewhere by the pilots, or it was hijacked. There are no other explanations on the table that fit the facts and involve entities that actually exist.

It's hard to believe that the various governments involved can't identify potential hijackers from the passenger list after 10 days. So the odds are it was a pilot? For some reason I found the media rush to blame the pilots very distasteful, I think a lot of people did.

Having said that I do believe they'll find the wreckage off Australia so maybe we'll know.
posted by fshgrl at 12:17 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Here's what I don't understand about the black box, cockpit recorder, and related telemetry:

Why are they not broadcasting data in regular bursts? I understand the engines send telemetry data back to Rolls-Royce, but why for example is the cockpit recorder not just permanently broadcasting? Don't we know by now that keeping data all in one place is a recipe for lost data?
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 12:22 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

FFFM: This was discussed some time ago - continuous broadcasts would be expensive and resource-consuming, since you'll have hundreds of planes broadcasting immense amounts of data all the time. The tech isn't quite there yet.
posted by divabat at 12:25 PM on March 19, 2014

I understand the engines send telemetry data back to Rolls-Royce, but why for example is the cockpit recorder not just permanently broadcasting?

There are a *lot* of planes in the air. Build a network to handle running telemetry for every flight in the world is not a trivial thing.

Most spaceflight uses realtime telemetry. But there's exactly one ISS. There were four shuttles. There are something on the order of 5000 737s flying, and most of them are flying every day. US regulations require them to store 88 different parameters, most store far more, taking them several times a second, but sometimes faster if there's enough change.

It's a lot of data to stream. It's a hard problem for one aircraft. It's hard squared for one airline, and it's hard to the fourth power for all airlines.
posted by eriko at 12:30 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Oh, and that data to Rolls Royce? Four packets. IIRC, it's engine start, takeoff thrust, cursing, and landing. It's nowhere near a realtime stream.

Oh, and there's two data streams, the Flight Data Recorder and the Cockpit Voice Recorder. So, 2(hard⁴)
posted by eriko at 12:32 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Is this a tech area that aerospace is working on fixing? The sheer volume of data that gets sent around the world on a daily basis seems to indicate that this is a fixable problem.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 12:34 PM on March 19, 2014

Oh, and that data to Rolls Royce? Four packets. IIRC, it's engine start, takeoff thrust, cursing, and landing.

I realize this is a typo but I love the image of a data stream of nothing but the pilots swearing up a storm.
posted by jason_steakums at 12:34 PM on March 19, 2014 [13 favorites]

Metafilter: 2(hard⁴)
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 12:37 PM on March 19, 2014 [5 favorites]

That "sheer volume" isn't sent through the atmosphere from constantly shifting locations. It's mostly over fiber, with a chunk bounced off of geostationary satellites.

"Fixable problem" and "economically feasible solution" don't always overlap.
posted by stevis23 at 12:38 PM on March 19, 2014

Okay so why can't it get bounced off satellites into some sort of data storage facility like NSA/GCHQ/Google have?

It would seem to me that having everybody in ATC around the world know for sure exactly where everything is would be a valuable tool.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 12:40 PM on March 19, 2014

"Fixable problem" and "economically feasible solution" don't always overlap..

Right. We can put broadband internet with near continuous coverage on a lot of aircraft, but it's expensive. It's probably possible to continuously monitor lots and lots of aircraft, but it just hasn't been worth spending so much money to do it. Black boxes, transponders and CVRs have done the job well enough.
posted by jjwiseman at 12:42 PM on March 19, 2014

Building that kind of data storage infrastructure is expensive. But, y'know, win-win if you can repurpose the NSA assets for it.
posted by jason_steakums at 12:43 PM on March 19, 2014 [3 favorites]

You also have to ask how many problems it would solve. It would tell us where MH370 went, but very few large planes disappear in recent decades.
posted by Chrysostom at 12:44 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Distraught Relatives of Missing Flight 370 Passengers Dragged Away From TV Cameras by Malaysian Officials

That poor, poor woman. The look of anguish on her face in that guardian video is haunting. Don't drag her out of the room, give her a hug. I understand it is a media briefing room, so I get it. That poor woman, wondering where her son is. That has to be devastating. What is her name? And her son's name?
posted by cashman at 12:49 PM on March 19, 2014 [5 favorites]

I wish people would do us the courtesy of reading the discussion before posting. We've been talking about the feasibility of satellite uplinked data for over a week now. The 2011 article In tech's golden age, why can't black boxes do more? does a great job explaining the limitations. It's not so much a technical problem but more of a cost problem; airlines don't want to pay for the equipment. It's not an accident that it's an engine monitoring system that happened to have a satellite uplink. In that case, the engine manufacturers have a business case to pay for that uplink.

No type of uplink would help against a pilot who's deliberately sabotaging systems. Unless the uplink itself were tamper-proof, which then raises other risks. Aviation is predicated on the belief you trust the guy in the cockpit.
posted by Nelson at 1:02 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yes because clearly I haven't been reading this discussion.

Cost, as far as I'm concerned, isn't a factor--this should be a safety thing mandated by governments around the world, if for no other reason than to save intense amounts of money on SAR operations.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 1:15 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

And where do you suppose they'll get the money from, particularly countries in the Global South, many of which are still in debt and don't have a lot of income?

Cost is absolutely a factor.
posted by divabat at 1:18 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Most airplanes are made by Boeing or Airbus. Legislate it there.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 1:23 PM on March 19, 2014

Boeing and Airbus are not countries with systems of law.
posted by divabat at 1:30 PM on March 19, 2014 [2 favorites]

airlines don't want to pay for the equipment.

Well if airlines didn't have to pay for things they didn't want to pay for, I get the impression air travel would be significantly more dangerous.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 1:31 PM on March 19, 2014

We've been through this like a million times. Search the thread for "GPS pinger" and you'll find the whole story.
posted by kiltedtaco at 1:33 PM on March 19, 2014

But the countries where they are headquartered are.

And what EndsOfInvention said.

Here's a simple way to do it without mandating specific equipment: airplane manufacturers are now required to pay all SAR costs relating to lost hardware.

Done and done, and this thing would have been solved in a couple hours max.

I've read the GPS pinger stuff, kiltedtaco, and I find any argument based on cost to be unconvincing at best.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 1:34 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

well, they HAVE to find the damn jet before the thread expires, right?
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 1:35 PM on March 19, 2014 [4 favorites]

Right. That's why I don't make the cost argument. I make the "it would only have helped in this super idealized world which we don't live in" argument.
posted by kiltedtaco at 1:35 PM on March 19, 2014

Or to put it another way: there is no sane reason why it's trivial to find a missing iPhone and impossible to find a missing airplane.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 1:36 PM on March 19, 2014 [3 favorites]

It's trivial to find a missing iPhone down the street. It's a lot harder if you dropped your iPhone in 200 meters of water several hundred miles from the nearest land.
posted by Justinian at 1:37 PM on March 19, 2014 [4 favorites]

(I mostly do agree with you as evidenced by my disgust earlier in the thread that there is no GPS pinger on modern aircraft. I just don't think it's trivial.)
posted by Justinian at 1:38 PM on March 19, 2014

Or if whoever is in possession of it turns it off.
posted by kiltedtaco at 1:38 PM on March 19, 2014

Well if airlines didn't have to pay for things they didn't want to pay for, I get the impression air travel would be significantly more dangerous.

Indeed. See also Air Canada 797 where 23 people burned to death in 1983 because airlines had been putting off paying to install smoke detectors and emergency cabin lighting. End of the day, air carriers and plane manufacturers are going to resist demands to install equipment that costs them money, at least until they are either required to by regulation or it becomes cheaper than losing lawsuits.

I like the idea of GPS position uplink, and like I said the very day the plane disappeared I think it should be required equipment. But it's not clear a GPS position uplink would significantly enhance safety. Also worth noting; airplanes already require equipment broadcasting their GPS position to satellites in case of an accident; the ELT. Unfortunately the ELT apparently didn't go off in MH 370. It didn't work in AF 447 either. A continuous uplink would be better, but it's not a panacea.
posted by Nelson at 1:41 PM on March 19, 2014

Or if whoever is in possession of it turns it off.

If there is no access to it from the passenger/cargo holds there is no way to turn it off.
posted by Justinian at 1:45 PM on March 19, 2014

Hell, this is even a place where the engine manufacturers could step in. The engines already send a small amount of telemetry data, how hard would it be to step that up to (say) every half hour (or more frequently) with GPS data? It's really not a lot of data to be sending, less than the average SMS AFAIK.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 1:55 PM on March 19, 2014

We've been over this. The risk of fire from malfunctioning equipment that cannot be turned off is very much non-negligible, and that is a huge barrier to certifying any such hardware. The only benefit would be faster SAR in a deliberate sabotage case, not a safer aircraft.

The same data stream (ACARS) that transmits engine data already does transmit position information (in various cases). That's how AF447 was located. But it was disabled during this flight by somebody in the cockpit.

Seriously, there are reasons behind all of this, many of them already discussed in this thread.
posted by kiltedtaco at 1:59 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

planes cannot be tracked in realtime or close to.

I think the trick is that they essentially are via radar. GPS broadcasting is kind of the long tail of tracking - when else would it have been needed?
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 2:09 PM on March 19, 2014

Mod note: Comment removed, please cool it a little if you're having trouble not reacting badly to people having a conversation.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:16 PM on March 19, 2014

I realize this is a typo but I love the image of a data stream of nothing but the pilots swearing up a storm.

FL330 = Foul Langage Level 330.
posted by eriko at 2:18 PM on March 19, 2014 [2 favorites]

I have read the entire thread.

There is no sane reason why planes cannot be tracked in realtime or close to. A self-contained GPS unit is proof against fire.

The only actual argument is cost, and I DGAF about that; airline manufacturers, as pointed out above, will resist anything if they think it'll cost more, and the only way to force them to do so is to make it legally or financially impossible not to.

Stick 'em with the SAR bill and boy howdy will you see changes.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 2:21 PM on March 19, 2014

Would this improve the safety of flight?
posted by kiltedtaco at 2:35 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

That question is irrelevant. You are not going to make me change my mind, I suggest you stop trying now.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 2:36 PM on March 19, 2014

Perhaps we could just let the GPS derail die? It's not really relevant to what actually happened to the Malaysian Airlines flight.
posted by Chrysostom at 2:42 PM on March 19, 2014 [7 favorites]

I think it's an open question whether there is sufficient free bandwidth on the relevant satellites to justify the overhead of 20,000 odd flights simultaneously phoning home. You can't just send these messages over some nebulous network: in order to satisfy the purpose of being a globally reliable location transponder, it requires a correspondingly reliable network. I think Iridium's constellation provides the most coverage, but I know even it has dead areas. The answer to the question "why didn't this complex organization implement my obvious idea?" is rarely "because they're all cheapskate morons who never thought of it."
posted by feloniousmonk at 2:43 PM on March 19, 2014 [6 favorites]

Unless you have some new information about the Malaysian Airlines flight seems like talking about general aviation safety issues is about all we have left.
posted by Justinian at 2:52 PM on March 19, 2014

Where on the spectrum are you going to get enough bandwidth to allow real-time info to be transmitted pretty much constantly from every airborne aircraft at once? We need an answer that's better than "magic."
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 3:02 PM on March 19, 2014 [3 favorites]

Stick 'em with the SAR bill and boy howdy will you see changes.

Let's run the numbers. (I think I got these all right but I'd welcome any corrections to my math)



According to table 1, there were 9,989.9 thousand flights in 2011 and 9,821.0 thousand in 2012. Let's call it an even 10 million for conversation's sake.

Since we want these location results to always be available, we're presumably not going to depend on radar or other radio based methods. Instead we'll use a satellite like SPOT.

Handily, SPOT offers asset tracking, which for $99.99 a year will transmit coordinates every "every 5, 10, 30 or 60 [minutes]." That's cheaper than the messenger plan which offers SMS and other features for $149.99 a year. If you'll forgive my rounding again, that's $1,000,000,000 per year. Kind of steep, but a fantastic price IMO. If we're broadcasting every 5 minutes during the average of 8 hours and 28 minutes per day a year that Air New Zealand's fleet flies, we're looking at 102 transmissions a day, or 37,084 per year. Per plane.

Probably not the type of usage SPOT intended so I think they'd be more inclined to charge more instead of handing out a bulk discount, but hey, a price lists's a price list. 26¢ per ping sounds pretty competitive to me.

In the other corner, we have the MH370 SAR clocking in at an unprecedented Rs 800 crore. (Crore is a South Asian unit of numbering equal to ten million)

At today's exchange rates, Rs 8,000,000,000 is $131,232,000 USD.


Looks like we're going to need almost 10 more huge SAR operations to pay for our GPS system.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 3:07 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

One correction: Those 10 million flights were only from "U.S. airlines and on foreign airlines serving the United States".
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 3:17 PM on March 19, 2014

If there’s that kind of money lying around, why not use it to attempt casualty reduction in the mode of transportation that kills roughly a million people every year? Intriguing as it might be when it happens, airplanes disappearing is not exactly a big problem.
posted by klue at 3:19 PM on March 19, 2014 [11 favorites]

airline manufacturers, as pointed out above, will resist anything if they think it'll cost more, and the only way to force them to do so is to make it legally or financially impossible not to.

That may be true, but it doesn't necessarily follow that they should be required to pay for this particular thing.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 3:21 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

That may be true, but it doesn't necessarily follow that they should be required to pay for this particular thing.

Indeed, had the persons flying the plane not have deliberately disabled the systems used to track the plane we would have been find.

Safeties don't work when they're deliberately disabled.
posted by eriko at 3:28 PM on March 19, 2014 [8 favorites]

Exactly. It's the difference between trying to find your house keys when you've lost them (i.e. check the usual places), as opposed to trying to find your house keys when someone's taken them and hidden them (yikes!).
posted by mazola at 3:33 PM on March 19, 2014 [2 favorites]

Ugh, the coverage of this on MSNBC is the worst. On and no about the pilot's possibly nefarious intentions.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 3:51 PM on March 19, 2014

Well, probably $85k.
posted by Chrysostom at 4:20 PM on March 19, 2014

FFFM, you're not a pilot. I'm not a pilot. There are, however, several pilots in this thread, and several people with relatives who are pilots, who they've discussed this issue with. The people with piloting knowledge are saying that all electronic systems must be disable-able, or it will make flying more dangerous. You say that "a self-contained GPS unit is proof against fire", and you know what? That makes sense to me. But multiple people in this thread who know more about this topic than you or I, and who I have no reason to believe are in the pocket of Big Airplane, are saying that that is not the case. Is there some reason that you believe that the folks with airplane knowledge on MeFi are all lying or incorrect, and that you know more about safe airplane design?
posted by Bugbread at 4:55 PM on March 19, 2014 [3 favorites]

feckless fecal fear mongering: "A self-contained GPS unit is proof against fire."

Even accepting the premise that self containment is proof against fire or at least a fire that endagers the airframe, complete self containment is going to be a difficult task. You need to bring power to the device which I guess could use inductive coupling to a battery so that the device could operate even if the feed is turned off. You need to provide a self contained transmitter and antenna powerful enough to hit either a land based monitoring station or a satellite from the middle of the Pacific or over the North Pole. And you have to certify the package (and power connections) for every airframe you want to install it on. Even a simple thing like the cockpit vestible screen linked earlier costs tens of thousands of dollars. And then as noted above you need to pay for monitoring of the signal. And you need to pay for testing and maintenance of the transponder. And the cost of fuel to fly these devices.

Resulting in a system that is already essentially provided by existing systems with the net result being maybe a few flights a century don't disappear into the ether.

There must be dozens of other things we could do with that kind of expenditure to make flying safer or less horrific.
posted by Mitheral at 5:15 PM on March 19, 2014

The black boxes are self-powered (for a time, if breaker power is interrupted) and nobody seems to worry about them starting fires.
posted by localroger at 6:42 PM on March 19, 2014 [2 favorites]

From yesterday's New Straits Times,

According to a commercial airline Boeing 777 pilot who requested anonymity...

“It is MAS procedure to switch ACARS ...off...but this is only for flights to China as the service provider for MAS does not cover China. Some if not all pilots switch them all off for a while and then later switch SATCOMM back on to force the system into SATCOMM mode.”

That the NST is saying this is news. The quoted pilot has no explanation for the transponder being turned off.

Watching travellingwithcats' link to yesterday's press conference, it appears they are backing away from the zig zag waypoints:

Q: Can you confirm that after the turnback radar data shows that the plane passed through at least two waypoints before it headed out into the Bay of Bengal?

A (Azharuddin): I think that was something that we were (?) going to investigate. I think we have passed through that stage now. What we're going to do now is find the aircraft. Let us investigate on that.

Q: Do you have a picture(?) that shows it passing through?

A: I think that is something the investigation is doing. What we're going to concentrate now is on finding the aircraft. That's why we have the northern and southern corridor.

A (Hishammuddin): The reason why we are looking for the aircraft is that we hope that by locating the aircraft we are able to find the black box. And if we do find the black box then your question will be categorically answered.

I'm so confused.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:09 PM on March 19, 2014 [2 favorites]

According to this summary of the Iridium constellation, it can accommodate 172,000 users presumably of the now-obsolete phone service which IIRC delivered 28kbps. Nowadays they offer packet comms similar to SMS with a module capable of both up and downlink requiring 5VDC at 500 mA and a simple omnidirectional antenna. Make: magazine ran a squib on them last quarter; they are actually accessible to hobbyists. It should be possible to make such an avionic module small, durable, and with considerable built-in battery life after mains failure. I think the main problem on an airplane would be getting the antenna outside of the aluminum fuselage.

Assuming 172,000 voice users x 28.8 kbps = total network bandwidth of around close enough to 5 gigabits/sec to consider the difference a rounding error.

Several sources seem to show around 5,000 flights in the air with ADS-B enabled, meaning they're large commercial either in, to, or from the US, or enabled for such flights. Let's say there are 20,000 planes that should be tracked globally. If we were to devote Iridium entirely to them, that would give us a channel of 250 bits/sec to every airplane flying. In practice that's truly excessive. A packet containing full plane ID and GPS position and velocity is well under 1 kilobit. This means the Iridium constellation could carry such a message from every large plane flying in the world about every 4 seconds.

That in turn is also excessive; should such a system make such a ping every 5 minutes, or even every 10, it would hugely narrow these searches when the worst happens. At every 5 minutes -- a frequency which would give you a 50 mile fix on the fastest commercial jets -- the global system would consume about 1.5% of the Iridium system's existing global bandwidth.

Contrary to something stated previously there are no holes in Iridium coverage. It was designed to be globally continuous and despite the loss of a couple of birds (one due to a space collision) it still is.

So while there is the issue of the vastly inflated cost of engineering it for aircraft and deploying, the satellite infrastructure to collect the data does exist and such pingers could be battery powered for some time just like the black boxes. A next generation Iridium constellation is also in the works, which is intended to be compatible with the existing system but would vastly expand the global bandwidth and make the whole thing even easier.
posted by localroger at 7:10 PM on March 19, 2014 [5 favorites]

Hm, that is an interesting tidbit. This was a flight to China but even if it was recommended MAS procedure to switch ACARS off, they were about to enter Vietnamese airspace so it would have been premature to do so at that point. And like with all the anonymous sources, it's hard to verify their motivation and the info itself.

Re: waypoints. I found it odd that they were unwilling to give a straight answer to that question and instead talked for almost 90 sec IIRC about that it was not relevant anymore. I guess the data they have leaves a lot of room for interpretation. As they get new data, they might have to adjust their assumptions.
Besides, as I mentioned upthread, there might be other reasons that prompted them to label it "deliberate action" (hitting waypoints was part of that justification). Now that it is a matter of terrorism (as per sec. 130 of their penal code) they likely have other means and measures available vs. before.
posted by travelwithcats at 7:58 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Putrajaya knows where MH370 is but is not telling to protect its interests, says aviation expert:

"We’re dealing with military organisations, and they don’t want to tell you, and especially they don’t want to tell you if it looks like they really screwed up," Hans Weber, a San Diego-based aviation consultant, was quoted as saying in the article.

"The military doesn’t want to look bad in its own country. I think there is a lot of incentive for the militaries there to not come clean.

However, the article said there is no evidence that anyone knows where the plane is, while pressure is building up from grieving families of the passengers and crew on board for an answer.
posted by travelwithcats at 8:13 PM on March 19, 2014

Australian news sources are starting to report that something may have been found. Apparently, a press conference will be held in an hour.
posted by Griffynn at 8:16 PM on March 19, 2014

(better link)
posted by mwhybark at 8:20 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Thank you, localroger.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 8:33 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

I so hope, for the sake of the families, that this information pans out. Whatever it is.
posted by double bubble at 8:35 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

A bit more: Satellite technology has identified two objects that may relate to missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the Indian Ocean, Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Thursday. Mr. Abbott made the remarks during a regular sitting of Australia’s parliament. Search aircraft are on their way to the scene and are expected to arrive shortly... [hit the WSJ paywall]
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:36 PM on March 19, 2014

two objects that may relate to missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Oh man, please be life rafts.
posted by jason_steakums at 8:38 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

SMH link

"The Australian maritime safety authority has received information based on satellite imagery of objects possibly related to the search," Mr Abbott said.
"Following specialist analysis of this satellite imagery, two possible objects related to the search have been identified."
"I should tell the House - and we must keep this in mind - the task of locating these objects will be extremely difficult and it may turn out that they are not related to the search for flight MH370," Mr Abbott said.
"Nevertheless, I did want to update the House on this potentially important development.’’
Mr Abbott said he had informed his Malaysian counterpart, Prime Minister Najib Razak, and promised to keep him updated.
posted by Admira at 8:39 PM on March 19, 2014

Someone has created this map, based on the last radar position NW of Penang (no zigzag waypoints) and showing the possible southern corridor 8:11AM position.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:48 PM on March 19, 2014 [2 favorites]

Trust an Australian to find something in offshore waters that doesn't belong there.
posted by Jimbob at 8:50 PM on March 19, 2014 [2 favorites]

Any link to streaming video of Australian press conference?
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:55 PM on March 19, 2014

I have no idea who will be carrying it. I mean, I imagine ABC24 will be, but they geoblock non-Australians for everything except serious, long-term news. Head to your local channel and hope?
posted by Jimbob at 8:59 PM on March 19, 2014

ABC (The Australian one) has a general live news stream here, but clicking the play button doesn't do anything for me.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 9:01 PM on March 19, 2014

Yeah, you're geo-blocked. Sorry.
posted by Jimbob at 9:02 PM on March 19, 2014

Huh. You'd think they'd at least let you know.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 9:02 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Livestation.com might work
posted by TWinbrook8 at 9:14 PM on March 19, 2014

Contrary to something stated previously there are no holes in Iridium coverage. It was designed to be globally continuous and despite the loss of a couple of birds (one due to a space collision) it still is.

As a frequent customer of Iridium I fucking guarantee there are holes. Large, large, frequently encountered holes. Also their phones don't work very well from canyons or in very bad weather, particularly driving snow. I've heard they aren't great under heavy tree canopies either but never tested that one.
posted by fshgrl at 9:17 PM on March 19, 2014 [4 favorites]

urgh, I have to get out of the computer lab in about 15 mins. If someone can obtain a copy of the PC that would be amazing.
posted by divabat at 9:17 PM on March 19, 2014

CNN is covering it now with Anderson Cooper. They are going to broadcast the press conference.
posted by cashman at 9:18 PM on March 19, 2014

In the meantime, (autoplay) video of the announcement.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 9:18 PM on March 19, 2014

ABC just tweeted that the geoblock will be lifted for the presser at 15:30 AEDT.
posted by the duck by the oboe at 9:19 PM on March 19, 2014 [2 favorites]

Reddit-sourced ABC24 streamer. Haven't tried it, ymmv, etc etc. Spamminess of site unknown.
posted by mwhybark at 9:20 PM on March 19, 2014

Works for me. Not very spammy, just one big ad on the side. No pop ups.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 9:24 PM on March 19, 2014

CNN Live Stream - pardon if this has been posted.
posted by shortfuse at 9:27 PM on March 19, 2014

Press conference beginning.
posted by cashman at 9:31 PM on March 19, 2014

"possible indication of debris"
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 9:33 PM on March 19, 2014

They are sending a lot of assets to the area. Hope that is a good sign.
posted by maggieb at 9:34 PM on March 19, 2014

He hasn't said yes or no yet, but a lot of resources still en route, so I guess at least that's not a hard no.
posted by adamt at 9:35 PM on March 19, 2014

(and here's one that works in iOS)
posted by mwhybark at 9:36 PM on March 19, 2014

Largest object around 24 meters according to the press conference.
posted by jason_steakums at 9:37 PM on March 19, 2014

A US Poseidon should be onsite at very soon if it is not already there.

One object is likely 24 meters, others are smaller.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 9:37 PM on March 19, 2014

The largest object appears to be 24 meters.
posted by enn at 9:37 PM on March 19, 2014

Basically listing all the planes and ships involved in the search and when they will arrive on the scene but not showing us any photos yet. More satellites being retasked.

"Experts say they are credible sightings" "Largest image assessed at 24 meters"
posted by TWinbrook8 at 9:37 PM on March 19, 2014

Largest debris is thought to be 24 meters. The map they had pinpointed an area they said was about 1400 miles West/SouthWest (forgive me if that's not the right way to state it) of Perth.
posted by cashman at 9:37 PM on March 19, 2014

No aircraft have yet sighted the objects visible on the satellite imagery.
posted by enn at 9:38 PM on March 19, 2014

How big is the largest object?
posted by mazola at 9:38 PM on March 19, 2014 [10 favorites]

SMH have a live update site for those unable to view the PC for whatever reason here
posted by Admira at 9:39 PM on March 19, 2014

This guy is great.
posted by mazola at 9:41 PM on March 19, 2014 [3 favorites]

I can't believe it's been 13 days. They also noted that after they found the images, they directed other satellites that are capable of higher-resolution pictures to take better pictures of the area.

They diverted a merchant ship to the area. There is a warship capable of recovering anything that is found to be from the flight, but it won't be there for a day, I think. They also mentioned US Navy involvement, I believe.
posted by cashman at 9:41 PM on March 19, 2014

Al Jazeera America tweeted a map of the search area
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 9:41 PM on March 19, 2014

Clear and concise. Just a bit of hand-waving about what other countries want to be involved. High res photos to come.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 9:51 PM on March 19, 2014

Full statement released by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority
posted by Admira at 9:52 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Australian yammering is a refreshing change to CNN.
posted by mazola at 9:52 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Spotter from a US P-8 says "significant radar returns" coming from search area.
posted by theory at 9:55 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

David Wright is an ABC (the US one) correspondent currently on the P-8 looking for the objects. He had to "surrender phones, iPads, laptops & cameras before boarding", but ABC is somehow getting messages from him.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 9:58 PM on March 19, 2014

According to the guardian update site

"The defence official now said that they were working towards releasing some of the satellite imagery to the public."
posted by Admira at 9:59 PM on March 19, 2014

Jon Williams, also of the American ABC, is relaying messages from the P-8. That's where the "significant radar returns" quote comes from.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 10:01 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug: "David Wright is an ABC (the US one) correspondent currently on the P-8 looking for the objects. He had to "surrender phones, iPads, laptops & cameras before boarding", but ABC is somehow getting messages from him."

It could just be that he isn't allowed to have anything capable of video (or audio) recording, but is able to use radio or the like to communicate verbal messages.
posted by Bugbread at 10:01 PM on March 19, 2014

That Al Jazeera tweet just has the map of the projected possible area that was posted yesterday; it's not updated to reflect where they say they may have found objects. (I think, correct me if I'm wrong) Do we know where, or if it's in that shaded area (which was just a prediction)?
posted by LobsterMitten at 10:03 PM on March 19, 2014

Updated map from Australian Maritime Safety Authority
posted by Westringia F. at 10:07 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

US ABC Nightline has audio updates from Wright in the P-8. He says they will have 3 hours to survey the site.
posted by maggieb at 10:07 PM on March 19, 2014

More maps/info on the Australian search, directly from the AMSA (the map I linked above corresponds to Day 3 "Cumulative area searched").
posted by Westringia F. at 10:25 PM on March 19, 2014 [2 favorites]

https://twitter.com/radioditch/status/446518821244137472

@radioditch: Reporters on-board the Navy P8 enroute to the debris sighting reporting crews are receiving a 347MHz EPIRB signal as they get closer. #MH370
posted by bobloblaw at 10:37 PM on March 19, 2014

(& wow, that's some eye-watering parallel condestruction in AMSA's tagline. "Safe shipping, clean seas and saving lives." GAH. *twitch*)
posted by Westringia F. at 10:37 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

More information about how Malaysia delayed the search:

Critical Data Was Delayed in Search for Missing Malaysia Flight
posted by mlis at 10:38 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

"It's important to remember that aircraft aren't the only ones who use those freqs for emergency beacons. Could be off a ship. Wait. #MH370" -@radioditch


But sounds like there's something there.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 10:45 PM on March 19, 2014

I really hope this new development actually pans out. Definitely keeping my fingers crossed. (I thought ELTs on aircraft were either at 121.5MHz or 406MHz, though, so my confidence in the reporting being done is somewhat low at the moment..Also, I could do without WSJ's continuous bullshit machine, but we all know how likely that is to be turned off even for a little while.)

Also, regarding Iridium, localroger's calculation is all well and good, but is a measurement of the total system capacity, not the capacity of any individual Iridium satellite. Since the vast majority of flights take place in one of about three or four relatively small areas, the actual bandwidth available would be much less.

Mode S* (on which ADS-B is based) is cool, but the primary reason it exists is not for improved accuracy and lower cost to ATC than operating standard radar in sparsely populated airspace, but because there were so many planes flying around in European airspace that the Mode A/C transponders were saturating the available spectrum and talking all over each other.

*S stands for "select," as in selective interrogation.

All aircraft flying in European airspace above a certain size are required to have a Mode S transponder at this point. The FAA will be requiring ADS-B come 2016. Why do I mention this? Because aircraft so equipped "squit" their position unsolicited once every few seconds. Some equipment also includes information like a "cleared to" altitude from the FD, among other things. Point being,
posted by wierdo at 10:53 PM on March 19, 2014

Does a 24m chunk of debris seem rational (not that there's been anything rational so far)? An aircraft cratering into the ocean wouldn't leave big pieces, would it? Maybe if the pilot was trying a water landing?

Fingers crossed for a miraculous ending.
posted by five fresh fish at 11:05 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

I think the size of the wreckage would depend on too many variables. I suppose it's possible that a large piece of the fuselage (for example) might remain intact.
posted by orrnyereg at 11:09 PM on March 19, 2014

Are there any islands or landmasses in that area?
posted by divabat at 11:09 PM on March 19, 2014

And, for the families' sake, I hope we find out what happened soon, one way or another.
posted by orrnyereg at 11:10 PM on March 19, 2014 [2 favorites]

https://twitter.com/followmma/status/446525119750766592

@FollowMMA: Just got off the phone with a friend in the US Gov who tells me the conclusions drawn from the satellite are that it is from a plane...


https://twitter.com/followmma/status/446529971415445504

@FollowMMA: "There are commercial satellite images that are being witheld that more clearly show the debris but we need to be 100% positive."#mh370
posted by bobloblaw at 11:18 PM on March 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Are there any islands or landmasses in that area?

Frankly, no, not for another few thousand km, and then you're in the antarctic.
posted by Jimbob at 11:20 PM on March 19, 2014

I know others, like myself, were wondering about the earlier satellite pings. Here's an updated WaPo map with 5:11, 6:11, 7:11am position arcs (in addition to the 8:11am on from before) & the possible trajectories which motivated the Aussie search areas. (Sorry if this has been posted already; I didn't see it before.)
posted by Westringia F. at 11:22 PM on March 19, 2014 [5 favorites]

diagram
posted by bobloblaw at 11:24 PM on March 19, 2014 [3 favorites]

This feels to me like the most legit lead in a while, if only for the AU, NZ and US assets being mobilized. Most simple scenario for me is that plane turned around - for whatever reason - to the south-west, and then just kept going until it could go no more.
posted by Jimbob at 11:25 PM on March 19, 2014

Australian written statement, dropping buoys to model drift patterns.
posted by bobloblaw at 11:53 PM on March 19, 2014

There must be dozens of other things we could do with that kind of expenditure to make flying safer or less horrific.

How much do you reckon has been spent searching for this plane the last two weeks?
posted by one_bean at 11:53 PM on March 19, 2014

Satellite photos are up.
posted by bobloblaw at 12:02 AM on March 20, 2014

I'm assuming that the military is looking at a rather better quality satellite photo, because I can't see anything much object-like there, it looks like a patch of wave crests to me.
posted by tavella at 12:08 AM on March 20, 2014

Link's broken for me. Dropbox sez nothing's there.
posted by drhydro at 12:10 AM on March 20, 2014

Yeah, broken for me too.
posted by Bugbread at 12:11 AM on March 20, 2014

Are there any islands or landmasses in that area?

Frankly, no, not for another few thousand km, and then you're in the antarctic.

pretty much the definition of middle of nowhere.
posted by philip-random at 12:11 AM on March 20, 2014

There's the Kerguelens, but any survivors has never been a realistic possibility even if the plane didn't land in the most brutal seas in the world.
posted by tavella at 12:17 AM on March 20, 2014

The Guardian has the images here
posted by Admira at 12:23 AM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm assuming that the military is looking at a rather better quality satellite photo, because I can't see anything much object-like there, it looks like a patch of wave crests to me.

No, probably not (although, as they said, further commercial satellites are being tasked). That's pretty much what a sat image of the area would look like. As I said above - satellite imagery is not miraculous.
posted by Jimbob at 12:33 AM on March 20, 2014

WSJ:Critical Data Was Delayed in Search for Missing Malaysia Flight

The same WSJ that earlier accused Rolls-Royce and Malaysia of lying and then had to recant after RR refuted it. Best taken with more than just a grain of salt.
posted by Authorized User at 12:34 AM on March 20, 2014

Couldn't The Grauniad made those images any smaller? Who do they think we are, richy mcrichersons with 28.8k modems?
posted by Justinian at 12:37 AM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

Images & maps, directly from AMSA.
posted by Westringia F. at 12:42 AM on March 20, 2014

Just need to say I'm pretty glad that PM Abbott didn't give the press conference himself. We wouldn't want to subject the international audience to that. Best left to the experts.
posted by Jimbob at 12:48 AM on March 20, 2014 [2 favorites]

Wow, those are images from Mar 16. So, three days is the lag on analyzing sat photos to find the eyelash on the football field.
posted by LobsterMitten at 12:54 AM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yeah. Satellites are fantastic things. But they obey the laws of physics. And data management.
posted by Jimbob at 1:45 AM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

Also their phones don't work very well from canyons or in very bad weather, particularly driving snow. I've heard they aren't great under heavy tree canopies either but never tested that one.

Not a factor for airplanes in flight. GPS has similar problems for similar reasons.

Couldn't The Grauniad made those images any smaller? Who do they think we are, richy mcrichersons with 28.8k modems?

Umm, it says right above them to "click here to view larger versions."

Yeah. Satellites are fantastic things. But they obey the laws of physics. And data management.

And, alas, there's a lot of crap in the oceans.

24m is 78 feet, if that's debris from the plane, it's a fuselage piece, a wing piece, or one of the stabilizers, which are 21.5m/70' long. The fuselage on a 772 is 63m/209' long and 6.1m/20' in diameter. The wings are about 53x10m (180x30'), the horizontal stabs are 21x5m (68x16'), and the tail fin is 18x4m (59x13').

The first object has a hint of a curve to it, which implies fuselage. This may well be me reading something into it, but I suspect that's one of the big factor to send the planes out.

The second object is a blur, indeed, in panchromatic, it's really not classifiable as an object, but the multispectral imager is much clearer about something being there.

WARNING: This may be a false alarm. This debris may not be related to the flight.
posted by eriko at 2:40 AM on March 20, 2014 [4 favorites]

I thought ELTs on aircraft were either at 121.5MHz or 406MHz, though, so my confidence in the reporting being done is somewhat low at the moment.

They are, but the 121.5Mhz ones have been deprecated for years. The newer (and by newer, I mean the last 20 years) ones run on 406MHz. They're both more accurate in position and have a serial number, so if you've registered it, it says very clearly that *you* are in trouble, not that somebody is in trouble. There were also ones on 243MHz, they've also been sunsetted.

While I can see someone in a small craft cheaping out with an old 121.5MHz unit, I don't see a flagship carrier like Malaysia Airlines not having a 406MHz ELT.

I have no idea what they'd be hearing on 347Mhz.
posted by eriko at 2:49 AM on March 20, 2014

AMSA has tweeted about 20 minutes ago (0447 USCDT, 0947UTC) that the RAAF P3 Orion on-scene has not found the debris, but clouds/rain are limiting visibility.
posted by eriko at 3:18 AM on March 20, 2014

It's also the middle of the night there. Hopefully the weather will improve in the morning.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:44 AM on March 20, 2014

Graffiti tells it like it is. Posted on the Malaysian Department of Civil Aviation website back on March 13.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 5:14 AM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

TWinbrook8: "Graffiti tells it like it is. Posted on the Malaysian Department of Civil Aviation website back on March 13."

Why does it have four engines?
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 5:25 AM on March 20, 2014

You're looking for accuracy from a grafitto?
posted by TWinbrook8 at 5:34 AM on March 20, 2014 [2 favorites]

On Iridium: The design spec for the Iridium constellation is that there should always be at least one bird 20 degrees above the horizon at all times. Right now this tool says I have two.

Of course, as with GPS, if that bird is behind a bunch of trees, a canyon wall, a metal building, or a lot of dense nasty clouds and rain, you may not get a connection. None of these are factors for a plane in flight though. Also, because the service is duplex, the pinger knows whether it connected, and can retry the ping if it fails.

Of course nobody designs a real system based on using its maximum bandwidth but that's always a starting point. Actually, the 5 gigabit/sec bandwidth figure is Iridium's claim for maximum voice users; that may already be downgraded from the real theoretical bandwidth to something they consider realistic throughput. Even if it isn't, it's hard to imagine a situation where a system would be flooded by continuous use of 2% of its theoretical maximum bandwidth. Even if you happen to have a lot of planes in a place served by only one bird at the moment, as noted above it's duplex so any pings that fail due to message collisions can be retried. The voice service would pretty much have to be engineered that way to work at all.

This is all not to say that such a system should be built, only that the math says it is actually possible and that the space infrastructure does already exist to support it. The cost vs. benefit numbers are very hard to run because yeah it's very expensive, but the SAR and recovery are also very expensive when a plane goes down, most especially when it goes down in a remote location which is exactly what the system would be for.

There is something of an emotional component to the money we throw at aircraft recovery, because even though cars kill far more people than airplanes there is a much greater sense of helplessness in the grip of mighty forces when you are killed by the airplane. You personally have a lot more control over whether you're killed by a car, so people aren't as invested in calling out the satellites and nuclear subs to figure out what happened when someone drives off a cliff.
posted by localroger at 5:39 AM on March 20, 2014 [2 favorites]

If an EPIRB survived the crash it should have been detected immediately by Cospars/Sarsat. They're going to have to explain why that didn't happen.
posted by miyabo at 6:02 AM on March 20, 2014

24m sounds awfully big for a floating piece of aircraft debris. My suspicion is that big chunks of fuselage will all sink, and the floating debris one expects would be smaller bits and pieces that have a bit of buoyancy to them. Parts of the wing might be the best bet. If I had time I might check what bits of AF 447 were first to be recovered and which had to be located on the sea floor.
posted by kiltedtaco at 6:11 AM on March 20, 2014

Also interesting to note these are commercial satellite images. Although you never know, the debris could have been found on a spy satellite and they're using a blurrier commercial satellite for the press release.

Also the images were taken 4 days ago, so someone took their time analyzing them.
posted by miyabo at 6:12 AM on March 20, 2014

miyabo: "Also the images were taken 4 days ago, so someone took their time analyzing them."

How many pictures did the satellite take, and what do you think is a reasonable time frame for scouring the pictures to find ones that showed potential debris?
posted by Bugbread at 6:28 AM on March 20, 2014 [5 favorites]

24m sounds awfully big ...
Picture showing AF crash debris ... ~10-12m, floats and holds several people standing on it.

so someone took their time analyzing them
So some questions:
1) What does the image timestamp refer to? When the satelite took the photo, when it was downloaded to a terrestrial server?
1a) Is there any post-processing required of the image and how long does that take?
2) Should any protocol be followed before releasing images to the public. For example, perhaps consulting one or more crash debris experts, notifying the various national and international government agencies of the finding, etc, and how long does that take?
3) When were the SAR assets notified to investigate further, could that have happened prior to the release to the public?

I enjoy the counter-claims and alternate theories, but if you can't provide anything to back up a counter-assertion, then why bring it up at all? It just adds noise.
posted by forforf at 6:35 AM on March 20, 2014

Picture showing AF crash debris ... ~10-12m, floats and holds several people standing on it.

That's a good find, a tail fin floats. A 777 tail fin is not twice the size of an A330 tail, but that's nice to see that this is within the ballpark. I rescind much of my skepticism.
posted by kiltedtaco at 6:39 AM on March 20, 2014

A section of wing would also float, esp if the in-wing fuel tanks are empty.
posted by eriko at 7:24 AM on March 20, 2014

A section of wing would also float, esp if the in-wing fuel tanks are empty.

Which would be the case if the plane crashed because it ran out of fuel.
posted by localroger at 7:44 AM on March 20, 2014

I was curious about the report of 347 MHz, but the tweet by @radioditch that was the source was deleted and I can't find any other reporting about that frequency. Probably just a mistake. Emergency Locator Transmitters broadcast on 121.5 MHz and 406 MHz and are designed to be picked up from satellites; the lack of an ELT signal with MH 370 is part of the problem. (AF 447 also had no ELT signal; I've yet to find the analysis on why it failed.)

The Flight Data Recorder ("black box") also has a beacon signal to aid recovery; according to this source it "radiates a pulsed acoustic signal into the surrounding water upon activation of its water-sensitive switch, and will activate automatically on submersion in salt or fresh water with an operating life expectancy of 30 days to a depth of 20,000 feet." So audio, not radio, presumably so it works well underwater. I imagine that's part of why sub-hunting equipment is used to look for underwater airplane wrecks.
posted by Nelson at 7:54 AM on March 20, 2014

I was curious about the report of 347 MHz, but the tweet by @radioditch that was the source was deleted and I can't find any other reporting about that frequency. Probably just a mistake.

Last night he responded to a tweet saying that CNN reported it, but I couldn't find anything to that effect elsewhere online. Looks like that tweet is gone too.


Interestingly, he is still saying there's a "beacon signal" in multiple tweets.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 8:00 AM on March 20, 2014

New position reports for the plane were posted in this thread. Thanks!

Westringia posted this WashPo article which shows arcs for 5:11, 6:11, 7:11, and 8:11 leading to the search area. That article still has no information about the plane between 2:15 and 5:11. I'm not certain from the article's text, but I think those arcs are backtracked from the search team's hypothesized plane track rather than directly from Inmarsat data.

bobloblaw posted a diagram which seems to be sourced from this tweet by Scott Henderson @_AntiAlias_. It's appealing in that is has arcs for 01:11, 02:11, and 04:11. But it's entirely his amateur reconstruction based on the NTSB probable tracks, he says "arcs are symbolic of where the arcs could be to give NTSB track.". I don't consider this reliable.

Reading between the lines, I think no one has released the source data for the Inmarsat location fixes; everyone's working backwards from the search team's track hypothesis (which is presumably based on the Inmarsat data). Is there a better version of the official track hypothesis than these yellow lines? From an official source I mean, not the various fan fiction maps floating around.

(The WashPo article also has slightly different info about the black box than I quoted from elsewhere. "This device transmits sound that can be heard from depths no greater than 14,000 feet")
posted by Nelson at 8:21 AM on March 20, 2014 [2 favorites]

If all this is true, it seems like the plane crossed the Malay peninsula, but flew around Sumatra, and then headed almost straight south. Baffling.
posted by kiltedtaco at 8:53 AM on March 20, 2014

If all this is true, it seems like the plane crossed the Malay peninsula, but flew around Sumatra, and then headed almost straight south. Baffling.

I don't know anything about tides or currents, but how far can wreckage travel in two weeks? Is it possible the plane didn't head south, but the wreckage did?
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:55 AM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

There were stories days ago that said the ocean southwest of Perth was the most likely last location. Example.
posted by something something at 9:15 AM on March 20, 2014

I've seen people somewhere else repeat over and over again that the 7:11 and 8:11 pings both indicated the aircraft was close to the 40° line. If true, this could mean several things. But it's rumors. It would be very interesting to see the data, from an official source. AFAIK it was not published yet.
Every map I've seen so far seemed to be based on the maps for the search site AMSA published. AMSA provided those maps without any clarification how they calculated their possible routes.
posted by travelwithcats at 9:27 AM on March 20, 2014

> Is there a better version of the official track hypothesis than these yellow lines? From an official source I mean, not the various fan fiction maps floating around.

Does this help, Nelson? John Young (AMSA) explains
posted by de at 9:32 AM on March 20, 2014 [2 favorites]

Thanks, de, that's great. If I may summarize, it's AMSA saying they used the Inmarsat data along with assumptions about the aircraft speed to come up with the two tracks. I just keep hoping to see the source data for myself, I find the technology fascinating.

(It's such a relief to hear the Australian communications. Professional, clear, unambiguous. I have a lot of sympathy for the Malaysian authorities' problem; I mean, a whole plane just disappeared? But the English language reports of what they were saying were so confusing. It's been reassuring to hear a professional communications team in Australia manage their end of things. Although maybe this is culturally relative, I wonder if I'd feel differently if I were Malay.)
posted by Nelson at 10:05 AM on March 20, 2014 [5 favorites]

Nelson, I agree with you. Part of the relief of hearing there might be wreckage, finally, this morning, was the relief that the Australians are in charge of that part of the search. The Malaysian/Chinese governments have been so incredibly weird about the entire thing.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:25 AM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

Thank you for the link de. I am a bit confused by the explanation given. Young says:

"AMSA has defined a possible search area with information available to us from a range of sources, both international and national."

"What we have done, is to work with the US NTSB, which has [...] already done some work on transmissions that were made from the aircraft at approx. hourly intervals during its flight. And both transmissions were detected by a communications satellite over the Indian Ocean. And with the time of those communications and the distance they can't plot an exact position for each one, but sequentially they can be build up into a possible path that the aircraft took. The search area you see here is based on the last one of those reports, what would likely happen to the aircraft after that and it has then been moved to account for water movement and weather since the 8th of March."

a) What national information is he thinking of?
b) What does "both transmissions" mean?
posted by travelwithcats at 10:50 AM on March 20, 2014

Wow, Lobstermitten linked to these maps from user socalgeo on airliners.net (post currently numbered 43, unlinkable) on Sunday. Shows the plane heading south skirting radars.
posted by maggieb at 10:57 AM on March 20, 2014

maggieb, that is not the area they are searching now, if that's what you're getting at.
posted by travelwithcats at 11:11 AM on March 20, 2014

No, but to my non-pilot eye that looks like someone who knew exactly where the radar coverage was and got out of it as fast as possible.

I really, really hope they find the cockpit recorder.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:15 AM on March 20, 2014

Yep, but he was modelling a covert southern path to nowhere while many others were all over Andaman and Diego Garcia and zigzags to waypoints.
posted by maggieb at 11:21 AM on March 20, 2014

Yeah those maps on airliners.net from socialgeo are what I dismissively called "Fan fiction". Some random guy is speculating on what could have happened.

Maps can be particularly infectious misinformation because they look so certain. I think it's irresponsible to share speculative maps without some strong disclaimers or indications of uncertainty on the map itself. That WNYC map of 634 runways also felt irresponsible to me since it brought so much focus to "where did the mystery plane land?" when there was no evidence it landed at a runway at all.
posted by Nelson at 11:28 AM on March 20, 2014 [3 favorites]

I really, really hope they find the cockpit recorder.

I thought the voice recorder records in a loop. I forget how long the loop is, but no more than two hours — it used to be only 30 minutes. So if the last several hours were straight flight and the pilots were incapacitated, then it's likely to be just silence. The data recorder has a much longer cycle so it should have data from the full flight.
posted by stopgap at 11:34 AM on March 20, 2014

Could overwritten data from the voice recorder be recovered? In this case there is a strong case for finding out what happened much earlier.
posted by Thing at 11:47 AM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

a) What national information is he thinking of?
b) What does "both transmissions" mean?

travelwithcats,

a) the national information includes weather and drift modelling (water movement), I believe, and Aus would share its radar information with US investigators; and

b) Young says "those transmissions", not "both transmission".
posted by de at 11:58 AM on March 20, 2014

Why would the voice recorder record silence? Even my antique phone answering machine pauses during silence.
posted by five fresh fish at 12:02 PM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

The WashPo article talks about what we expect to find on the black box. 25 hours of flight data, 2 hours of cockpit audio, 2 hours of "digital messages". I don't know if that's 2 hours of time including silence or 2 hours of actual sound. It's tempting to speculate on how useful this data will be if it's recovered, but it's kind of pointless to.
posted by Nelson at 12:05 PM on March 20, 2014

For timing reasons, basically. And because an aircraft cockpit isn't very silent, and you want to be able to pick up very quiet sounds. It's amazing how many accident reports have used the particular sounds that different types of switches in the cockpit make as evidence.
posted by kiltedtaco at 12:05 PM on March 20, 2014 [4 favorites]

Yeah, it would be very unfortunate if this ended up being a Helios/Payne Stewart like situation and there simply WAS nothing from the last two hours to go on.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:08 PM on March 20, 2014

NPR reported that the "significant radar contacts" were from a freighter but apparently unrelated to the satellite imagery.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 12:15 PM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug: "NPR reported that the "significant radar contacts" were from a freighter but apparently unrelated to the satellite imagery."

That stinks. I'm practically freaking out about this (I know a lot of people are, including Mefites), so I have no idea how the families could even cope with this.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 12:24 PM on March 20, 2014

Ah. Picking up ambient noise makes sense.
posted by five fresh fish at 12:41 PM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

I am hoping that a good bit of information that was disseminated earlier about times things were switched off and flight paths is indeed wrong and this WAS a an accident, not due to human intervention. There was so much extraneous bullshit, I look forward to an article that can pare it all down to what was really known and when.
posted by readery at 12:43 PM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

Is it still dark over the search area? When will the sun rise/set there? Does that even matter with the radar on the search aircraft? Can they station KC-135s or similar air tankers to refuel the P-3s and P-8s so they can spend more time on station?
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 1:12 PM on March 20, 2014

It's 4:15 in Perth, so I'd say it's probably two more hours?
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:15 PM on March 20, 2014

roomthreeseventeen: "It's 4:15 in Perth, so I'd say it's probably two more hours?"

Many thanks. With a three hour flight time, hopefully the search planes are en route.

Also, sorry for my flurry of comments and questions. I'll shut up now.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 1:27 PM on March 20, 2014

P-3s are extremely fuel efficient, they can fly for an entire day with no need to refuel. But it does take them 4 hours each way to/from land. My guess is searching during nighttime is too complicated/expensive for a non-emergency situation but I'm not sure about that. In addition to radar they can detect submarines with a magnetic anomaly detector but I don't know if that works on airplanes (aluminum is much less magnetic).
posted by miyabo at 1:32 PM on March 20, 2014

There was no searching overnight. (AMSA_News twitter)
posted by de at 1:39 PM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

"The owner of a Norwegian car carrier said it planned to search through the night for two large objects sighted off Australia that could be debris from a missing Malaysian jetliner, despite the official search being suspended because it was too dark." Source: Reuters

Those, both....are my ears that bad!? I kinda hoped Young hinted at more than "just" the oceanographic info.
posted by travelwithcats at 2:21 PM on March 20, 2014

Analysis of satellite pings based on the released southern route rules out the SIA68 "shadowing" theory for the northern route.
posted by stopgap at 3:23 PM on March 20, 2014 [2 favorites]

I look forward to an article that can pare it all down to what was really known and when.

The Search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: an NYT interactive. Summarizes what we know to date, emphasis on maps and timelines.
posted by Nelson at 4:31 PM on March 20, 2014 [9 favorites]

Thanks Nelson. That NYT article is a very good summary.
posted by lenny70 at 4:40 PM on March 20, 2014

From ABC News [US]:

Inmarsat, the maker of satellites, told ABC News that they had an "initial idea" on March 9 and by March 10 were "fairly certain" that the search parties should look in the south Indian Ocean for the vanished plane.

Inmarsat shared their data with a partner company the following day, on March 11, and with Malaysian investigators on March 12.

It was not until three days later, on March 15, that Malaysian authorities acknowledged that satellite data suggested the plane was not in the Strait of Malacca or the South China Sea and began redirecting search efforts to the Indian Ocean.

It was on March 11 that the Director of the CIA said terrorism could not be ruled out and everyone fell down the rabbit hole of Kazakhstan.

[on preview]
re the NYT infographic linked by Nelson: I always thought the wonky altitude (up to 45000 ft, down to 23000 ft) happened when the plane turned back over the Gulf of Thailand. It happened after it crossed over the peninsula, in the Straits of Malacca at 2:15AM.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 4:44 PM on March 20, 2014

Sorry to interject, but are there any reports of recon planes over the search area?
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 5:59 PM on March 20, 2014

From WSJ streaming: An Australian PC-3 Orion aircraft left for the search zone at 0915 Sydney time (2215 GMT on Thursday), the Canberra-based maritime authority said. A second Australian PC-3 Orion and civilian Gulfstream jet were due to depart at 0000 GMT, while a third Australian PC-3 Orion was expected to head off at about 0200 GMT.

A U.S. Navy P8 Poseidon aircraft is due to leave for the search zone at about 0500 GMT.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 6:06 PM on March 20, 2014

From the website "The Aviationist" All you need to know about MH370: facts, timelines, systems, findings, theories
posted by readery at 6:18 PM on March 20, 2014 [2 favorites]

It's currently 09:18 in Perth. With that many RECON planes in the air... hopefully we have something more concrete in eight hours or so...
posted by PROD_TPSL at 6:19 PM on March 20, 2014

The Sydney Morning Herald is live-blogging the search.

Apparently each RAAF P3 Orion can only search for about two hours because the area is so far from land. (Four hours flying, two hours searching, four hours flying home.) No wonder they're trying to get boats into the area.

Tony Abbott, the Australian PM, is currently in Papua New Guinea but is expected to hold a press conference soon to talk more about the search.
posted by Georgina at 6:29 PM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

PROD_TPSL: "It's currently 09:18 in Perth. With that many RECON planes in the air... hopefully we have something more concrete in eight hours or so..."

It's the first rainy day in Perth for months, too. I hope that means the weather is moving off the ocean and over this way to clear a view for all the spotters.
posted by barnacles at 6:48 PM on March 20, 2014

Georgina: "Apparently each RAAF P3 Orion can only search for about two hours because the area is so far from land. "

That's why I wonder why they don't have refueling tankers orbiting the search area. To be fair, I've no idea if P-3s or P-8s can aerial refuel, but I bet they can.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 8:55 PM on March 20, 2014

I think they're just being as safe as possible with the search operation, last thing you want to do is have to send out a rescue team for your search team.
posted by jason_steakums at 9:04 PM on March 20, 2014 [2 favorites]

Graffiti tells it like it is. Posted on the Malaysian Department of Civil Aviation website back on March 13.

That's a pun (which you probably already know, TWinbrook8): "doa" is the Malay word for "prayer".
posted by divabat at 10:06 PM on March 20, 2014 [6 favorites]

I got some aviation/aerospace scientists to answer some tech questions about MH370.
posted by divabat at 12:05 AM on March 21, 2014 [8 favorites]

Divabat, I just want to give you praise for your blog. It's very informative and great at explaining what's going on to lay people like myself.
posted by daybeforetheday at 2:48 AM on March 21, 2014 [5 favorites]

This is just getting downright depressing (for me, who had no one on board). It's making me very sad.... Not that I think I'm the most affected. I can't comprehend much more pain.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 2:51 AM on March 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

China has deployed 5 ships and 3 helicopters; Japan is joining in with 3 P3 Orions; France is lending equipment for black box retrieval. I can't see us failing.
posted by de at 2:52 AM on March 21, 2014

de, does this imply there is no longer active searching in other areas?
posted by adamt at 2:54 AM on March 21, 2014

I believe so, things are concentrated and intensifying. So far this is a surface search only. It's rather urgent the pieces are found and identified.
posted by de at 3:00 AM on March 21, 2014

adamt: "de, does this imply there is no longer active searching in other areas?"

Please say that's not true. I can't imagine a worse situation where the searching countries say, "Fuck it. Every man for himself." That seems to defeat the whole point of an organized, targeted search. I freely admit that I know nothing about these things, though.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 3:01 AM on March 21, 2014

Oh! I have no knowledge of north corridor search efforts.
posted by de at 3:04 AM on March 21, 2014

Malaysian officials are finally acknowledging that Lithium Ion batteries were in the plane's cargo.
posted by barnacles at 4:30 AM on March 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

From the WSJ streaming:
"Malaysia is awaiting permission from Kazakhstan to use the central Asian nation as a search base for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet that veered off course two weeks ago.

Malaysian authorities say they will devote equal importance to searching a northern corridor"
posted by TWinbrook8 at 5:55 AM on March 21, 2014

From yesterday: Ocean Debris And the Search for the Malaysia Airlines Plane
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:55 AM on March 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

Mod note: Switched the shortened url for the full one in your link, divabat. Incredibly minor thing, but please avoid using shortened urls on mefi; it doesn't have any utility here where links get wrapped up in hrefs anyway, and means it's much harder for folks to know where a link is actually going when it's obscured by a shortener.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:23 AM on March 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

Re Lithium batteries:
"These are not regarded as dangerous goods... and were packed as recommended by the International Civil Aviation Organisation," said Malaysia Airlines CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya.

I believe these are the IATA regulations that they are referring to. Quite newly introduced after the 2010 UBS cargo plane accident I linked to above. The regulations clearly classify lithium batteries as dangerous goods and adds on page 11: "Primary (non rechargeable) lithium metal batteries and cells, (UN 3090), are forbidden for transportation aboard passenger carrying aircraft." Only if the cells are contained within devices may they be carried - and the total number of cells is small in terms of number and weight - may they be carried at all.
posted by rongorongo at 8:34 AM on March 21, 2014

A (significant) lithium battery fire would have almost certainly caused a crash long before fuel exhaustion. The Halon fire extinguishers they use in the cargo compartment cannot stop lithium fires. They do prevent open flame, but not the shit-ton of heat, and as soon as it dissipates, blammo, huge fire again. This is because heat causes the lithium compounds in the batteries to decompose, releasing oxygen inside the battery itself, where the Halon cannot reach.

They did some related testing after the UPS crash in Dubai if anyone is interested in knowing more. It's in the report, whose link I don't have handy, but is probably somewhere upthread.
posted by wierdo at 9:26 AM on March 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

Andrea Mitchell on NBC reporting that U.S. aircraft will not search tomorrow (Sat.) so crew can rest. Australian and New Zealand planes will continue search without taking time off for rest.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:33 AM on March 21, 2014

Kind of amazing the stark cultural differences two simple sentences can illustrate, no?
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:05 AM on March 21, 2014

The Telegraph has reportedly obtained a transcript of the last 54 minutes of communication between Flight MH370 and ground control. This is their liveblog, I guess they are liveblogging their own find?
posted by troika at 10:08 AM on March 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

ffm, I do wonder if the difference is simply that Aus and NZ have more available pilots ready to go that they can just switch out.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:11 AM on March 21, 2014 [8 favorites]

Kind of amazing the stark cultural differences people are willing to impute from insufficient facts to match pre-existing biases, no?
posted by Chrysostom at 10:16 AM on March 21, 2014 [11 favorites]

I'm guessing you just try and coordinate resources as best you can. I have no idea how long the Americans have been going at it as opposed to the Australians.

*shrug*
posted by mazola at 10:17 AM on March 21, 2014

Yeah the Telegraph liveblog is a big zero, as is all the news today. But they were promoting a link to a good article: How MH370 vanished - and how it could have been avoided which describes in details all the communications from the missing plane.

This article is the first place I've seen it reported that it's impossible to turn off the thing that was pinging Inmarsat satellites. That's interesting and, honestly, surprising to me. I've been careful to say all along it's not impossible or even a bad idea to have some sort of GPS pinger the pilot can't disable. But it would be unprecedented. Well, here's a precedent. (A second one; as pointed out above the black box recorder is also impossible to disable. In that case, specifically because the pilot is not trusted.)
posted by Nelson at 10:40 AM on March 21, 2014

Neither the black box nor the Inmarsat equipment is impossible (or difficult) to disable. They both have circuit breakers, like every other piece of electronics. Pulling the circuit breakers on the FDR/CVR is sometimes done intentionally after an incident (when back on the ground) so that they don't continue to record and overwrite potentially relevant information.

Maybe there's no "off" switch on the hardware itself, but a circuit breaker will certainly do the same job.
posted by kiltedtaco at 10:50 AM on March 21, 2014

Yeah, the argument I've seen in some places that the pilot needs to be able to remove power from any electronics device on the plane including the black box in case of electrical fire or whatever seems specious to me. Can they remove power from all of our laptops?
posted by Golden Eternity at 10:53 AM on March 21, 2014

Yeah, by switching off the seat power. The plane generates electricity with enough current to continue to feed a fire. Your laptop is not connected to the aircraft's electrical system unless you have it plugged in, so is not a danger in the same sense that a built in electrical device without a circuit breaker would be.
posted by wierdo at 11:00 AM on March 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

This article is the first place I've seen it reported that it's impossible to turn off the thing that was pinging Inmarsat satellites.

Is this like a maritime system where there is a unit on the antennae itself that can ping the sats? It can't send any info because its not conneceted to the computers inside the boat but it pings the sats to orient the antennae to the best ones.
posted by fshgrl at 11:34 AM on March 21, 2014

Removing power from a laptop will not turn it off because laptops have batteries. The FDR and CVR also have batteries for the underwater locator beacons. Supplying relatively fire-safe battery power to a device like a GPS pinger for a period of a few hours would not be a difficult technical challenge.
posted by localroger at 11:35 AM on March 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

At least in the world of high-drain batteries (e-cig mechanical mods, flashlights, RC vehicles, that stuff) there are a number of safer chemistries like the AW IMR batteries that basically vent out before thermal runaway gets to the point of starting a fire, but I don't know if that chemistry exists for the kind of batteries you need for long life/low-drain applications like transmitters. I suppose you could design a failsafe that automatically ejects the battery out of the plane if it reaches a certain temperature, or put the whole thing in a fireproof box with external ventilation that kicks on when it reaches a certain temp, but now you've got systems on top of systems and more points of failure. Maybe a completely external box that's sealed from the elements but has weak spots intended to blow if the battery vents or combusts. It isn't by any means impossible, but it isn't trivial either. Battery failure of consumer devices on the plane would be an even trickier problem to solve.
posted by jason_steakums at 11:56 AM on March 21, 2014

Neither the black box nor the Inmarsat equipment is impossible (or difficult) to disable. They both have circuit breakers>

Are you certain of that? Do you have a reference? The Telegraph reports "there is no way that it can be switched off unless the plane itself loses power, according to Inmarsat." If there were a circuit breaker, I'd expect it to be mentioned there, but maybe it's just sloppy reporting. I understand that aircraft electrical systems traditionally have circuit breakers and I'm wondering if this equipment is different.

(I'm also curious about black box power; surely it's designed to continue recording what it can even if the entire electrical bus fails?)
posted by Nelson at 12:00 PM on March 21, 2014

Drone Warfare Is Why We Can’t Find Malaysian Airlines Flight 370
posted by homunculus at 12:06 PM on March 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

The Sydney Morning Herald suggests pilots polled on the probable cause (assuming the area being searched for debris is where MH370 ended up) - favour an event which rendered crew unconscious, followed by a ghost flight until fuel exhaustion. This article looks at what happens when a plan runs out of fuel. And this one suggests a couple of potential causes including a broken off satellite antenna and an explosion in the crew's emergency oxygen supply.
posted by rongorongo at 12:07 PM on March 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

Interesting unrelated: plane crash via passenger suicide. Pacific Southwest Airlines 1771
posted by Chrysostom at 12:14 PM on March 21, 2014 [3 favorites]

Chrysostom, uh, wow, that's going to give me nightmares.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:16 PM on March 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

I think a ghost flight is a good theory for what happened in the end and why the plane seemingly flew until both engines flamed out, but a fire can't be the cause of this due to the length of flight. That leaves us with some kind of decompression issue, which could have been caused by an accident or something more sinister. If it was an accident why did the plane climb to 45,000 ft, way above its threshold?
posted by ob at 12:16 PM on March 21, 2014

CVRs were recently (2008) required to add a 10-minute battery (technically a RIPS - recorder independent power supply - so as to not require a specific energy storage technology) to address bus failures. It affects new aircraft built after April 2010 only. There is no FDR battery requirement because it relies on outputs from all the systems on the plane.
posted by cardboard at 12:22 PM on March 21, 2014 [3 favorites]

[cardboard beat me to the answer on the FDR/CVR, and with better information.]

As far as breakers for the SATCOM, looking through one particular 777 AMM I see many breakers controlling several different components of the system, but I admit that the incident aircraft could have a different type of SATCOM hardware that does something entirely different (but I think that's less likely than a miscommunication by the newspaper). I can't say for sure without having that specific aircraft's manual.
posted by kiltedtaco at 12:29 PM on March 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm reasonably convinced that the last six or so hours of the flight were a ghost flight. Whatever the cause of the initial issue was, accident, suicide attempt, hijacker, I don't think anyone was alive in the cockpit by the time it was flying south towards Antarctica. The question is, when did it start? Given it appears to have been following flight points, it's possible that it could have started much earlier. If they were essentially random, it would explain quite a bit. I know people have been linking to those maps from airliners.net and saying they were avoiding radar, but when you actually look at the radar and not giant crayoned marks on them, the plane would have avoided more radar by flying on at the first turn heading. The Gival to Vampi zigzag in fact keeps it in the densest area of radar coverage by *three countries*. It makes no sense for reasons malicious, but it would also be a rather inefficient way to alert for a hijacking. Yet if it was random, how the hell did those particular waypoints get in?

At the moment, I have severe doubts that anyone in the plane was alive after the altitude changes.
posted by tavella at 12:47 PM on March 21, 2014

Interesting unrelated: plane crash via passenger suicide. Pacific Southwest Airlines 1771

Wait, the plane hit the mountain with such velocity that it essentially disintegrated, yet they were able to recover a hand written note on a paper bag? Say wha now.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 12:51 PM on March 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

Wait, the plane hit the mountain with such velocity that it essentially disintegrated, yet they were able to recover a hand written note on a paper bag?

Lightweight and small durable things can be tossed from an explosion surprisingly intact. A lot of what floated down from the disintegration of the Shuttle Orbiter Columbia was of this nature -- bits of paper were light enough to decelerate before they burned up, and floated down mostly intact.
posted by localroger at 1:00 PM on March 21, 2014 [5 favorites]

That's super weird and incredible and wow.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 1:03 PM on March 21, 2014

Right... there were a lot of papers that survived 9/11 as well.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:04 PM on March 21, 2014

Supposing it were a ghost flight and there was no mechanical change in the cockpit (ie nothing leaning against the controls), how would a plane come down? Would it keep level and just gradually glide lower?

The high-speed crash from that Wikipedia link sounds like the attacker probably grabbed the controls and pointed it downward at a sharper angle while it still had full power, no? So that crash might have experienced much greater forces on impact than a hypothetical ghost-flight/fuel-exhaustion scenario?
posted by LobsterMitten at 1:08 PM on March 21, 2014

AFAIK, a plane without fuel will glide down to earth at a steady rate. Of course it'll break up on impact, but with nothing like the force of a powered dive.
posted by ob at 1:12 PM on March 21, 2014

How long would a plane this big and heavy glide for though?
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 1:14 PM on March 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

According to this article it could have glided for about 100km after it ran out of fuel. I don't know how long that'll take but it's some considerable time, and if you're near an airfield, with some great flying, you can make it.
posted by ob at 1:24 PM on March 21, 2014

This is a classic example of that.
posted by ob at 1:25 PM on March 21, 2014

At the moment, I have severe doubts that anyone in the plane was alive after the altitude changes.

One hopes. Otherwise, passengers spent hours waiting for the crash and death. What horror.
posted by five fresh fish at 1:25 PM on March 21, 2014

One hopes. Otherwise, passengers spent hours waiting for the crash and death. What horror.

I have to think this couldn't have been the case. I understand 7 hours of no calls from the plane if nobody's alive or awake. Otherwise, somebody would have called, and probably gotten through.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:27 PM on March 21, 2014

So many cell towers in the Indian Ocean.
posted by five fresh fish at 1:28 PM on March 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

The Helios flight lasted around 15 minutes from first engine flameout to crash.
posted by pixie at 1:28 PM on March 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

So many cell towers in the Indian Ocean.

I'm not saying that, but they presumably weren't over the Indian Ocean all seven hours, right?
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:31 PM on March 21, 2014

sio42: "The article says five thousand times the force of gravity. That's insane. "

5k g's That's crazy! I don't buy it.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 1:56 PM on March 21, 2014

It's kind of a nonsense way to phrase it, is all. The plane wasn't experiencing 5k gs of acceleration, which is the normal context you'd talk about that force; it was traveling at a high enough speed that the notional force the plane would be applying to the ground (and vice versa) at the moment of impact would be 5,000 times the force it'd apply were it just sitting on the ground.
posted by cortex at 2:01 PM on March 21, 2014 [3 favorites]

I understand 7 hours of no calls from the plane if nobody's alive or awake. Otherwise, somebody would have called, and probably gotten through.

This has been addressed:

[A]ltitude might have prevented passengers’ cellphones from connecting to base stations on the ground even if the phones were turned on during the flight or had been left on since departure. ¶ The hijacked planes on Sept. 11 were flying very low toward urban targets when passengers and flight attendants made calls from those aircraft. . . . ¶ Base station signals spread out considerably over distance. So cellphones in a plane a few miles up, like Flight 370, would receive little if any signal . . . . Base station design has improved since the Sept. 11 attacks to provide better, more focused coverage of specific areas on the ground. But that also means somewhat less signal intensity is wasted in directions where callers are unlikely to be located, such as directly overhead. . . . ¶ . . . [E]ven if a cellphone showed that it was receiving a signal while aloft, it might not be able to transmit a signal that was strong enough to make a connection . . . .

None of which is even relevant once you're out over the ocean. And anecdotally, the one time I noticed I hadn't turned off my phone on a flight in the US, I had no signal.
posted by stopgap at 2:04 PM on March 21, 2014 [4 favorites]

The craziest thing about that story is not the speed on impact, but how he manages to deliver hollywoodesque one liners in the midst of a mass murder-suicide.
posted by klue at 2:11 PM on March 21, 2014 [9 favorites]

5k g's That's crazy! I don't buy it.

The plane was travelling at 1,240 km/h. That's 1,240,000m/h, or 344ms^-1.
If it decelerated from 344ms^-1 to 0ms^-1 in, say, 5m (randomly guessing at a 5m deep impact crater), then the deceleration took roughly:
5/344 = 0.01453s
Which makes the deceleration:
344/0.01453 = 23,675ms^-2
1g is 9.81ms^-2
So the plane experienced:
23,675/9.81 = 2,413g
That's the average g sustained during the crash, but it wasn't a constant force, it would have maxed at double that at the start and reduced to 1g at the end, so
2,413g x 2 = 4,826g
So yeah 5k g seems about right, and like cortex said, it's just that amount at the instant of impact and it reduces after that point.

Disclaimer: This is based on my A-level Physics course (B grade), taken 14 years ago.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 3:07 PM on March 21, 2014

If some object had shattered the cockpit windshield (from either inside or outside), what would the effect have been?
Sorry if this has been answered up thread.
posted by artdrectr at 3:11 PM on March 21, 2014

Passenger jets are designed forty ways from Sunday for stability, so even without power it would be very unlikely to auger in. That's a very rare crash mode because it almost has to be commanded, but you saw it with United 93, for obvious reasons, and also with ValuJet 592 which sustained very heavy fire damage to its controls. Both planes more or less disintegrated on impact.
posted by localroger at 3:25 PM on March 21, 2014

I had a crazy thought this morning, lying in bed a 6:30 am. Do you think it would have been possible for an array of hydrophones to triangulate the position of a plane crashing into the ocean? I've realized now that the array I've linked isn't anywhere near the Indian ocean, and so is probably irrelevant, but does anyone know if such an array operates in the area? I guess if I did, the experts would be onto it.
posted by Jimbob at 4:31 PM on March 21, 2014

Jimbob, the whole problem with the southern Indian Ocean is that it's not only one of the remotest places on Earth -- worse even than Antarctica, which is dotted with research stations -- it's not on the way from anywhere to anywhere else, either, so there's no particular reason for anything to be there. Although it's fortunately found other purposes the main justification for the hydrophone system is to track nuclear submarines, whose purpose in the whole nuclear war game is to hide. Inasmuch as the southern Indian Ocean is about as far from the United States as you can get without leaving the planet, it's a pretty bad place to hide your nuclear assets if you're planning a strike on the US, so there's not much reason for the US to target the area for sub detection.
posted by localroger at 5:15 PM on March 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

And anecdotally, the one time I noticed I hadn't turned off my phone on a flight in the US, I had no signal.

A woman across the aisle from me made a phone call a few weeks ago. That was over the continental US, but over a fairly empty part of the west, and she clearly had signal at that point.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:45 PM on March 21, 2014

There's also:

1. Not everyone has activated roaming
2. Roaming doesn't necessarily activate that quickly
3. Not all regional mobile telcos have roaming arrangements with each other
4. There's a zillion phone companies from tons of companies represented in that flight

Trying to compare the cellphone situation here with what happens in US airspace is, as I've mentioned before, apples and oranges.
posted by divabat at 6:59 PM on March 21, 2014 [3 favorites]

So now Malaysia is requesting US "underwater" assets. I knew those 688's would come in handy. If anything can find those pinging boxes, it's a US fast attack boat.

They've probably been prowling the area for days now, so I don't expect it will take them long to find the boxes. Then again, they'll not want to tip their hand regarding their capabilities, so they'll probably delay any "news" for a bit.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 9:28 PM on March 21, 2014

Cyclone warning
posted by TWinbrook8 at 3:15 AM on March 22, 2014

China spotted debris in southern corridor, says Malaysia:

China's state news agency Xinhua said the object [22 metres by 13 metres] was spotted 120 kilometres away from those spotted by Australia.

posted by de at 4:26 AM on March 22, 2014

If some object had shattered the cockpit windshield (from either inside or outside), what would the effect have been?

The cockpit windows are layered and tested against such threats - in particular bird strikes. If the object hit from the outside with such force that it managed to penetrate the window, it could injure the crew member immediately behind, but I couldn't find examples of any such occurences in airliners. The GA aircraft are much more vulnerable.

Otherwise, window panes crack for a variety of reasons, this is a potentially serious but usually contained failure.

As to the effects of decompression, there was an accident where a whole window frame separated at altitude: BA Flight 5390. They managed to land safely.
posted by hat_eater at 5:45 AM on March 22, 2014 [2 favorites]

Thanks hat_eater.
BA Flight 5390 required quite a bit of luck (and some quick hands by the co-pilot) not to lose the captain straight out of the plane.
That type of catastrophic windscreen incident is what I was supposing.
posted by artdrectr at 9:45 AM on March 22, 2014

Malaysia’s Crisis of Confidence by Tash Aw.

Most people I speak to here acknowledge that an incident like the disappearance of Flight 370 is unprecedented and say they appreciate the monumental task facing the government.

For many, however, the authorities’ ponderous response and mishandling of information mirror the way Malaysia is run.

The offhand, sometimes defensive nature of the early press conferences, coupled with occasional attacks on the foreign media, are widely perceived as the arrogance of a government unaccustomed to global attention and accountability.
posted by mlis at 11:19 AM on March 22, 2014 [4 favorites]

According to WSJ, a civilian airplane in the search area spotted some small debris, including a wooden pallet per the Australian PM.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 6:32 PM on March 22, 2014 [2 favorites]

Yesterday's search area via ASMA showing location of Chinese sighting and location of new debris sighting.

Cumulative search areas (including today's search area - happening now)

(Sunday, AEDT 1300)
posted by de at 7:02 PM on March 22, 2014 [5 favorites]

HMAS Success is now in the area and conducting search activities.
Image gallery (it's PR but watch this link)
posted by de at 7:31 PM on March 22, 2014

http://www.news.com.au/world/missing-malaysia-airlines-flight-mh370-search-resumes-after-chinese-satellites-spot-object-in-indian-ocean/story-fndir2ev-1226862354302

Phone records of Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah have reportedly revealed he took a two-minute phone call from a mystery woman using a mobile phone number obtained under a false identity, The Mail Online reports.
Investigators are understood to be treating it seriously because anyone buying a pay-as-you-go SIM card in Malaysia has to fill out a form giving their identity card or passport number.
This ensures that every number is registered to a traceable person.
In investigations into the Captain’s life, police are believed to have traced the number to a shop selling SIM cards in Kuala Lumpur.
It was bought “very recently” by someone who gave a woman’s name – but was using a false identity.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:00 PM on March 22, 2014

I had a nightmare last night, where I was trying to get past an abandoned food service trolley on a plane full of people slumped over in their seats with oxygen masks dangling from the ceiling. The nightmare seemed to last for hours.

What a very real nightmare for people who had loved ones on board.
posted by panaceanot at 8:40 PM on March 22, 2014

Image gallery (it's PR but watch this link)

Password protected now.
posted by cashman at 9:26 PM on March 22, 2014 [1 favorite]

Search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370: objects seen with naked eye

An Australian civil aircraft reported sighting a number of small objects during the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said in a statement early on Sunday morning.

AMSA media release
posted by Cheese Monster at 9:27 PM on March 22, 2014

(Upon reading the article more thoroughly - the debris seems not even that strongly suggestive of wreckage from MH370. One of the items was a wooden pallet, the other items were not identified in the article, and they were found in the search area "within a 5km radius". Another plane was not able to find the debris. A marker buoy was dropped and a merchant ship has been asked to find and identify it. Based on the headline I thought this was going to be a breakthrough. Ho hum!)
posted by Cheese Monster at 9:38 PM on March 22, 2014

Image gallery (it's PR but watch this link)

^ Password protected now.


Sorry cashman, the links turned fickle not long after I posted them.

There's a link to the HMAS Success Image gallery (number S20140681) at the very bottom of this AMSA media release [pdf]. Oddly the link there even occasionally responds: "Your session has ended". Quirky.

Not much there just yet, but the HMAS Success is tasked with debris retrieval among other things so could be a gallery to follow.
posted by de at 10:07 PM on March 22, 2014

It's 7:00pm in Western Australia.
Sunset was 6:24pm

10 minutes ago: Malaysia says French satellites spot objects in MH370 search area
posted by de at 4:06 AM on March 23, 2014

Note: The actual airliner pallets (LD7, LD8 and LD11) are made of aluminum, and are designed to be mechanically handled. However, it's not uncommon for the shipper to put a wooden pallet onto the airline pallet to speed transport once the load is off the airplane, see this image for an example. So, it's not impossible for that pallet to have come from MH370.

You can also see the clever machine that loads them -- the rollers on the deck of both the base level (for getting pallets on to it) and the lifter are driven. The operator can rotate them, if needed, pull them onto the lift deck, lift them, then slide them into the aircraft. The aircraft also has systems to move the pallets into place and lock them down. On a passenger flight like this, the last container in will be passenger luggage.
posted by eriko at 6:46 AM on March 23, 2014

Yes, if the shipper plans to transfer the entire pallet load to ground transportation they will need another pallet because the aluminum airline pallet is both specialized for air transport and property of the airline.
posted by localroger at 7:04 AM on March 23, 2014

Phone records of Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah have reportedly revealed he took a two-minute phone call from a mystery woman using a mobile phone number obtained under a false identity, The Mail Online reports.


whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:14 AM on March 23, 2014

The Malaysian Ministry of Transport made an important correction/clarification in their latest press release:

3. Update on ACARS transmission
a. The last ACARS transmission, sent at 1.07am, showed nothing unusual. The 1.07am transmission showed a normal routing all the way to Beijing.

This seems to invalidate the fact reported on March 17th by NYTimes and NBC that "the reprogramming [of the Flight Management System to include a U-turn] happened before the Acars stopped working".

But, if that was the last ACARS transmission how do they know that the Flight Management System was reprogrammed at all? The NBC article does mention that the re-program might have been an "alternate flight plan", so perhaps multiple flight plans were transmitted but the primary "activated" one was unchanged?

Today's Washington Post story cites this as the Malaysian Government's denial of "recent U.S. media reports that the flight was pre-programmed to turn around before it vanished from radar."
posted by pjenks at 9:20 AM on March 23, 2014 [1 favorite]

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Is Still Missing. You Secretly Hope It Stays That Way.

Hannah Arendt, Lawrence of Arabia, and Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
posted by homunculus at 10:28 AM on March 23, 2014

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Is Still Missing. You Secretly Hope It Stays That Way.

I guess this is one of those instances when someone says "you" when they actually mean "I"? He may want it to stay missing as some sort of protest against the ever-expanding surveillance state, but I want it to be found and for someone to tell me conclusively what happened to the damn plane.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:48 AM on March 23, 2014 [25 favorites]

This seems to invalidate the fact reported on March 17th by NYTimes and NBC that "the reprogramming [of the Flight Management System to include a U-turn] happened before the Acars stopped working".

If this latest report is true, and the earlier reports are wrong, that's a huge deal. The reprogramming of the FMS prior to 1:07 would have really sealed the deal that it was some sort of deliberate action in the cockpit rather than a mishap, and I was giving this report a little more credence in the expectation that it might explain why the Malaysian authorities seemed to be confident that there was deliberate action involved. If it's not true, then I think weird response to a weird mishap becomes plausible again.
posted by kiltedtaco at 11:03 AM on March 23, 2014 [2 favorites]

At this point I doubt the factual accuracy of most of what the Malaysian government has told us. The reprogramming of the FMS, the radar fixes west of the country, all of it. Far too much confusion and contradiction coming out of them. Sadly, the press leaks about Inmarsat fixes have turned out to be more accurate, apparently, at least accurate enough to convince Australia and friends to conduct a serious search operation in the middle of nowhere.

Unfortunately the Malaysian government is presumably in charge of any investigation into the pilots. Let's hope they manage that better than they did the press briefings. There were some reports of them inviting the FBI in to help, at least to look at the pilot's flight simulator. I take the lack of updates about the investigation of the crew and passengers as good news; maybe they're actually trying to get the story right before talking.
posted by Nelson at 11:10 AM on March 23, 2014 [5 favorites]

The ACARS reprogramming never made sense to me. The ACARS data they had right away, it's presumably in a standard format, if there was a reprogramming to particular flight points it would have been visible right away. Instead of having to rely on realizing fleeting radar contacts meant something, days later.
posted by tavella at 11:55 AM on March 23, 2014 [1 favorite]

Two interesting bits of information:

A post from PPRuNe with interesting maps

And from the Weather Graphics website, Investigation of a possible southern arc contrail
posted by readery at 1:34 PM on March 23, 2014 [2 favorites]

Wow, that contrail thing is amazing if it pans out. Go nerds!
posted by LobsterMitten at 1:41 PM on March 23, 2014

I'm getting the impression the ocean is like one of those Deep Field Hubble scenes: Take enough thorough imaging of a random section of ocean and you're going to find some debris.
posted by Justinian at 4:21 PM on March 23, 2014 [2 favorites]

I'm getting the impression the ocean is like one of those Deep Field Hubble scenes: Take enough thorough imaging of a random section of ocean and you're going to find some debris.

We have dumped a lot of crap into the oceans. However this part of the Southern Indian Ocean isn't exactly the high-traffic area. About the only shipping that passes through is going from southern Africa to southern Australia, and there isn't that much on that route.
posted by eriko at 7:17 PM on March 23, 2014 [2 favorites]

U.S., U.K. Deeply Involved in Sparking Indian Ocean Search
posted by mlis at 9:16 PM on March 23, 2014 [2 favorites]

Objects are being recovered from Day 7 search area.
posted by de at 3:07 AM on March 24, 2014

First time we had debris confirmed, and we have a ship nearby -- hopefully, they'll be able to snag the debris and give us a good look.
posted by eriko at 3:10 AM on March 24, 2014

From WSJ streaming:

On Monday, a spokesman for the Pacific-based U.S. Seventh Fleet said the Navy was bringing a black-box locator to the region. The system could help locate Flight 370′s flight recorders... if the plane crashed into the ocean where depths can reach 13,000 feet.

The TPL-25 Towed Pinger Locator System has been able to locate black boxes on downed Navy and commercial aircraft to a maximum depth of 20,000 feet anywhere in the world, the U.S. Navy said...

“Australia has black box detectors, but they cannot operate at the sort of depths that may be required if we find debris,” said a spokesman for the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which governs aircraft safety in the country.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 5:19 AM on March 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

Press conference by the Malaysian prime minister in an hour (10 PM local time).
posted by barnacles at 6:08 AM on March 24, 2014

The Guardian live blog has a new entry stating that relatives of passengers have been "called to an emergency briefing" to take place before the Malaysian press conference.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 6:24 AM on March 24, 2014

Update on same blog: They are sending the families to Australia....
posted by mochapickle at 6:31 AM on March 24, 2014

Emergency press conference in about a half hour.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:31 AM on March 24, 2014

Sure sounds like they found it.
posted by Ironmouth at 6:48 AM on March 24, 2014

And while I don't want to get my hopes up, you wouldn't fly everyone to Australia for wreckage or remains, right? I suppose it depends on who decided to fly the relatives over.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 6:50 AM on March 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

The following SMS message has been sent to relatives: "Malaysia Airlines deeply regrets that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board survived. As you will hear in the next hour from Malaysia's Prime Minister, we must now accept all evidence suggests the plane went down in the Southern Indian Ocean
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:52 AM on March 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

It must be something distinctively from an airplane to go that fast from picking up objects to press conference. Maybe a body/bodies, even, if they are flying relatives to Australia? Doesn't seem much reason to have them there otherwise.
posted by tavella at 6:52 AM on March 24, 2014

They brought in paramedics to the family meeting.

Press conference starting... no questions, no photos.
posted by mochapickle at 6:53 AM on March 24, 2014

Conference video stream
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 6:56 AM on March 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

BBC says Malaysian PM's statement is based on satellite info, not found debris... which is surprising.
posted by modernnomad at 7:02 AM on March 24, 2014

So, wait, no debris, but they know it ended in the Indian Ocean? What new evidence could they have?
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:03 AM on March 24, 2014

UK Accident Investigation says there was innovative Inmarsat satellite transmission analysis that showed MH370 took the southern route
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 7:05 AM on March 24, 2014

UK's AAIB and Inmarsat have been running further calculations and what seems like an algorithm tht's never been used in this kind of investigation to establish that the flight path was along the southern corridor, at the southern Indian Ocean, where there are no possible landing sites.
posted by cendawanita at 7:05 AM on March 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

I can only assume they must have conclusive satellite evidence as to it being somewhere over the Indian Ocean at some point in time, and then doing the maths about how much fuel the plane had and how far it possible could have gone from that point onwards, leading to a conclusion it must have gone down there.
posted by modernnomad at 7:06 AM on March 24, 2014

so they don't know where it is, just that it definitely took the southern arc.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:07 AM on March 24, 2014

between the sightings made by the french, chinese and australian satellites and the assets being galvanised in the area, and Tony Abbot's personally calling the Msian PM, it seems extremely likely that the confirmation of the found debris is a matter of time. i must emphasise that's my personal conclusion based on available info.
posted by cendawanita at 7:08 AM on March 24, 2014

UK's AAIB and Inmarsat have been running further calculations and what seems like an algorithm tht's never been used in this kind of investigation to establish that the flight path was along the southern corridor, at the southern Indian Ocean, where there are no possible landing sites.

Has this been written up yet? It would be interesting to read the details of how that analysis would work.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:10 AM on March 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

no details from the PM's statement, that much i can tell you.
posted by cendawanita at 7:11 AM on March 24, 2014

And AAIB's website just went down with a "Service Unavailable" message in the last 30 seconds
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 7:13 AM on March 24, 2014

I'm confused. Is there a press conference occurring right now? Or did it happen and end in the last 20 minutes?
posted by cashman at 7:20 AM on March 24, 2014

cashman, it's over.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:20 AM on March 24, 2014

very quick; it's over. Will provide more info tomorrow, apparently.
posted by modernnomad at 7:20 AM on March 24, 2014

It happened and was pretty short. Here's the statement.

Najib Razak

PM NAJIB RAZAK’S PRESS STATEMENT ON MH370

24 MARCH 2014, 10PM

This evening I was briefed by representatives from the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB). They informed me that Inmarsat, the UK company that provided the satellite data which indicated the northern and southern corridors, has been performing further calculations on the data. Using a type of analysis never before used in an investigation of this sort, they have been able to shed more light on MH370’s flight path.

Based on their new analysis, Inmarsat and the AAIB have concluded that MH370 flew along the southern corridor, and that its last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth.

This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites. It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean.

We will be holding a press conference tomorrow with further details. In the meantime, we wanted to inform you of this new development at the earliest opportunity. We share this information out of a commitment to openness and respect for the families, two principles which have guided this investigation.

Malaysia Airlines have already spoken to the families of the passengers and crew to inform them of this development. For them, the past few weeks have been heartbreaking; I know this news must be harder still. I urge the media to respect their privacy, and to allow them the space they need at this difficult time.

ENDS

posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 7:20 AM on March 24, 2014 [4 favorites]

Thank you. R.I.P. to them, and prayers to the families.
posted by cashman at 7:24 AM on March 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

Fascinating.

.
posted by mazola at 7:47 AM on March 24, 2014

Thank you to everyone who participated in making this thread so informative.

. For the lost passengers and crew.
Peace to the families.
posted by theBigRedKittyPurrs at 7:57 AM on March 24, 2014 [4 favorites]

.
posted by Mister Bijou at 8:18 AM on March 24, 2014

Semoga ahli keluarga penumpang dan krew pesawat #MH370 terus tabah.
posted by mazola at 8:19 AM on March 24, 2014

I feel awful for the whole situation, but most especially for the four little children on board.

.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:22 AM on March 24, 2014

I knew it was naive, but I really was holding out hope they might find them in Kazakhstan or something.

.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:29 AM on March 24, 2014 [5 favorites]

It's not a good outcome but I am glad there is a conclusion to this awful event.
. Peace for those involved.
posted by ichomp at 8:46 AM on March 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

.
posted by one teak forest at 8:48 AM on March 24, 2014

Heartbreaking.

.
posted by mdonley at 8:54 AM on March 24, 2014

No :(
posted by divabat at 9:16 AM on March 24, 2014

I hope Inmarsat and the AAIB's analysis narrows down the flightpath and gives searchers a better idea of where to look for the black box and flight data recorder, though PM Najib's description sounds very similar to the possible flightpaths already suggested by the US NTSB, where AMSA started searching for debris on the 18th.
posted by nangar at 9:16 AM on March 24, 2014

Where you search for the CVR/FDR and floating debris are going to be very different now. Stuff that's floating is floating in the "Roaring Forties," 40°S is infamous for the strong westerly winds and seas.

This is mainly because down there, there's no land to really stop the winds and waves. The southern parts of the Indian and Pacific, as well as the Southern Ocean, are just windy and wild. This is why sailing from England or the US west coast to India or Australia, you go around Africa, not South America.

So, the tail probably sinks quickly, taking the recorders with it. Anything still floating has drifted two weeks in a wild area of the ocean.

I'm just hoping the new work with the sat info has also helped them tighten up the potential track.
posted by eriko at 9:50 AM on March 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

CNN has a video (autoplays) of Anderson Cooper interviewing Chris McLaughlin, Sr. VP of External Affairs at Inmarsat. Not much more technical detail but itsounds like they found some sort of pattern in transmissions from other flights and were able to correlate with the data from MH370.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 10:21 AM on March 24, 2014

CCTV News piece about Inmarsat using the Doppler effect in their analysis.
posted by divabat at 10:26 AM on March 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

In a large way, this flight has been a story about being 'off-the-grid': shut out from expected forms of communication and tracking methods and being in the dark.

I think it's fascinating that in the end, and in the middle of nowhere, Flight MH370 ultimately left a data trail to hint at its fate.
posted by mazola at 10:31 AM on March 24, 2014 [6 favorites]

From the interview linked above: when he was asked if there's any further data Inmarsat could provide, McLaughlin (Inmarsat Sr. VP of External Affairs) replied,

Sadly, this is the limit. There's no global decision---even with the Air France flight of five years ago---no global decision to make direction and distance reporting compulsory. On ships, you have long-range identification and tracking, and they have to log in every six hours to say where they are. Well obviously on aircraft, they'd have to log in at 5-600 kts, every fifteen minutes. That could be done tomorrow, with the existing technology that we have, but the mandate isn't there globally.

.
posted by Westringia F. at 10:39 AM on March 24, 2014 [4 favorites]

From the Guardian, quoting the New York Times:

“Our measured series of signals very much mirror the predicted southern track after the last possible turn,” said Chris McLaughlin, a vice president at Inmarsat, adding that they were consistent with previous indications that the plane continued on at a more or less constant speed and direction for the last hours of the flight.

He said that Inmarsat was confident enough in the new analysis, which it reviewed with Boeing and with a number of independent aviation experts, that the company submitted its findings on Sunday to the Malaysians by way of the British safety agency, the Air Accidents Investigations Bureau.

Continuing from the NYT article inself (semi-paywalled):

“What we still can’t say is what happened at the end, when the plane ran out of fuel,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “We have no way of knowing if it dropped from the sky or glided.”

Inmarsat has provided investigators with its estimate of the plane’s coordinates when it emitted the last of the signals, at 8:11 a.m. Malaysian time on March 8. “We are very comfortable with the guidance we have been giving,” he said.

That's it for quoted bits from Inmarsat's VP, McLaughlin, in the NYT article, but it does sound like they were able to come up with a least rough coordinates for the pings. (It bugs me that the part about coordinates isn't in direct quotes. I hope it's true that they were able to do that.)
posted by nangar at 10:53 AM on March 24, 2014

I was wondering if they were getting the info from doppler shifts in the pings, looks like that was it. Nice work.
posted by tavella at 11:22 AM on March 24, 2014

Can someone fluent in Mandarin translate this Tweet?
posted by divabat at 11:25 AM on March 24, 2014

According to this slashdot comment, it looks like these systems log frequency differentials for diagnostic purposes, and by going through the logs and doing comparisons with old data or other MH jet data they were able to tease out the doppler component, which gives the relative velocity between the satellite and signal source. Since this would be different at different latitudes because of the Earth's curvature, with the Earth's surface rotational speed being different, it was then possible for them to rule out the northern route.
posted by localroger at 11:45 AM on March 24, 2014 [9 favorites]

. to all 239 on board.
posted by daybeforetheday at 11:46 AM on March 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

The aircraft had like 5 separate systems of varying levels of automation that could be used to locate it. It had an ADS-B system that broadcasts location information constantly and automatically. It had a transponder that replies to secondary radar and can be used to locate it. It had an ACARS system that also transmitted information that could be used to locate a plane. It had multiple radio systems with which you could ask the pilots where they are. And it had an Emergency Location Transmitter which should transmit information in case of an emergency. However due to the violent nature of plane crashes that doesn't always work.

I guess they could have added a sixth system. If this was pilot suicide, maybe a system that pilots cannot deactivate would have discouraged it.
posted by Authorized User at 11:50 AM on March 24, 2014

...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
posted by PROD_TPSL at 11:50 AM on March 24, 2014

Can someone fluent in Mandarin translate this Tweet?

This is probably not very useful but I did an online OCR of the image using newocr.com, cleaned it up a bit and used google translate to get:

Malaysia Airlines MH370 154 bits mesh sac twilight win chu Statement

At 22:00 on March 25 in the Malaysian Prime Minister Bo township 内吉布 no direct evidence of love brother, issued a statement on Malaysia Airlines MH370 final port in the Southern Ocean E crashed were no survivors to Malaysia Airlines MH370 passengers families.

Since March 8th Malaysia Airlines announced MH370 has 18 days to lost to Ma Hang Ma Ma Dian military government continued to perform strongly delaying the truth, hide, hide. Attempt to deceive the families of the passengers. Attempt to deceive the people of the world. This despicable act not only fooled Wo mouth wrecked my puppets'] 154 Chinese passengers families D Qu Dian body, while mistakenly seeking to delay the search and rescue operations. Fog Liang Jia a lot of manpower, material resources, the loss of the most precious Rescued day tribute inch machine. 154 relatives if I puppets r] machine lose their lives, embarrassed B Mody Malaysia Airlines, the Ma administration, the military is to kill a horse looking puppets'] IJ son loved ones will actually hand.

Here I am] 154 Malaysia Airlines MH370 Chinese families of passengers on Mahang Qi Ma government, military horses made ​​the strongest protest to condemn Wo mouth!!! And will take all possible means to pursue Malaysia Airlines Dian Dian Ma Ma government military unforgivable the guilt!

Malaysia Airlines MH370 passenger dependents Committee
2014/3/25) 2:00

It's obviously wrong, but it sounds angry.
posted by pjenks at 11:59 AM on March 24, 2014

military horses and puppets. oh my.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 12:04 PM on March 24, 2014

Sounds like they think the passengers could have been rescued if the plane was located earlier, which is highly unlikely. But well, weeks of this would not leave most people in a terribly rational mood. For all people have been bashing Malaysia, the few days of delay in not picking up the radar track is fairly insignificant in the timeline. And hell, for the first couple of days of that -- who would even think to be looking anywhere but on the immediate track?

In fact, having just checked a timeline, the revelation of the turn and the start of searching in the Indian Sea was March 11, and it went missing March 8, so we are talking maybe 1 or 2 days at most. It's not like anyone else recognized the radar traces -- Thailand saw it, and probably Indonesia, but no one realized what it was.
posted by tavella at 12:32 PM on March 24, 2014

If anything good comes of this, I believe that airlines and governments will do a much more thorough job in the future should this ever happen again.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:35 PM on March 24, 2014

Whatever 'this' is.
posted by mazola at 12:40 PM on March 24, 2014

Does anyone know whether it might have been possible to intercept MH370 and save the passengers if the disappearance and potential path had been able to be figured out in the first few hours after the plane's disappearance?
posted by ClaireBear at 12:41 PM on March 24, 2014

A much better paraphrase and a partial quote of the statement by the families is here.
posted by pjenks at 12:45 PM on March 24, 2014

No. There's been other ghost planes, and the only thing that could be done was to track their path. There's no way of controlling them externally (for very obvious reasons), and we don't have any capability to board them in midair.
posted by tavella at 12:47 PM on March 24, 2014

Very unlikely, ClaireBear. Most likely military jets would have been scrambled to make sure it wasn't being repurposed 9/11-style, and those pilots would have been able to do nothing but watch helplessly as the ghost plane ran out its fuel and hit the water.

The idea of rescuing the passengers also assumes someone was still alive on the plane after it made its last course correction and settled into the death march south.

Also, the possibility of doing a Sullenberger-style successful ditch in the Indian Ocean in the "roaring forties" is very poor. Sullenberger was able to pull it off mainly because he had a relatively smooth river to try it in. Every time it's been tried in the ocean the plane has disintegrated or cartwheeled.
posted by localroger at 12:47 PM on March 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

Since [the doppler shift] would be different at different latitudes because of the Earth's curvature, with the Earth's surface rotational speed being different, it was then possible for them to rule out the northern route.

This doesn't quite make sense, since 1) The satellite is in geosynchronous orbit, so there is no latitude dependence and 2) North and South are symmetric in this, so there's no way to differentiate based on doppler shift alone. There must be some additional information involved, but I can't figure out what it is.
posted by kiltedtaco at 12:48 PM on March 24, 2014

Rotation of the earth. The closer you are to the equator, the faster the rotational speed. This is why space launch sites like to be as close to the equator as they can be -- if you take off to the east, it's free ΔV.

So if the plane was further to the north, it would have been moving faster to the east, from the point of view of the satellite.
posted by eriko at 12:55 PM on March 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

Ohhhhh I'm going to throw something ridiculous out so that someone can tell me why it's ridiculous, but it might work? I forgot, the Inmarsat satellites are not completely fixed, they have a few degrees of orbital inclination (1-3º is what I can find roughly). That means that they have some north-south motion over the course of the day, which is roughly

(circumference of geostationary orbit) * 3 degrees / 360 degrees / 12 hours = 16,000 miles per hour

That's a really rough estimate, and probably will drop by a factor of a few in detail, but it's enough to beat out the motion of the aircraft itself. So if I measure the doppler effect of all the aircraft in the north compared to the doppler effect of all the aircraft in the south when, say, the satellite is moving net-southwards, they should be split into a shifted-up in frequency group (all in the south) and a shifted-down group (all in the north). This is a wild guess and I fully expect someone to tell me why I'm wrong, but I figure I should put my neck out there for once.

The rotation of the earth/latitude is still not relevant here, since all points fixed to the ground have zero doppler shift relative to a truly geostationary satellite. The rotational speed you're referring to is relative to an inertial frame, which the geostationary satellite is not.
posted by kiltedtaco at 1:05 PM on March 24, 2014 [3 favorites]

I'm hoping Inmarsat or NTSB or someone releases a detailed account of how they did the signals processing. It's a fascinating tour de force of technology, and something of a miracle that they had the source material to reconstruct an approximate track. (Or else it's all a cover for a secret intelligence capability.) I'd love to read how it worked.
posted by Nelson at 1:10 PM on March 24, 2014 [4 favorites]

kiltedtaco, I think your math is wrong. Plugging in numbers I get this for a 3 degree inclination in geosynchronous orbit:

(3 * (35,786 km + radius of earth) * 2 pi) / 360 = 2 207.7 km

Which works out to under 200 kph relative to the surface of the earth. Or is it my math that's wrong?
posted by idlewords at 2:04 PM on March 24, 2014

Rotation of the earth. The closer you are to the equator, the faster the rotational speed.

Yes, but the relative velocity between the two (a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, and a fixed spot on the surface of the earth) is perpendicular to the direction from one to the other, so there's no component of the velocity towards or away from the satellite, and thus no Doppler effect.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 2:09 PM on March 24, 2014

I am so defeated by some weird parentheses thing going on with google calculator! 100-150 mph effect, not 1000 mph! I knew there was going to be some gap in my story. Might still be detectable, but now you'd have to include details about the speed of the aircraft and their different paths.
posted by kiltedtaco at 2:11 PM on March 24, 2014

Bear in mind that the N/S symmetry is broken by the fact that the region to the north is much more densely populated than the region to the south. I imagine this could have a few consequences:

First, it would not surprise me if the antennas on the satellite were biased northward. If they are, the signal coming "from behind" (south) might be slightly weaker than one at the same distance from the north, and it's possible that you might be able to detect that difference by comparing data from flights going to Europe/Central Asia to those going to Australia.

Second, the north is much more densely covered by primary radar. It's possible that having worked out two symmetric trajectories, they were able to eliminate the northern one based on the fact that it would have had to fly over closely-monitored airspace and yet wasn't detected.

All speculation, of course, but my point is that the situation is perhaps not as ideally symmetric as it would be for a Consider-A-Spherical-Earth.
posted by Westringia F. at 2:17 PM on March 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yikes, mea culpa on the surface of the Earth not moving w/r/t a GEO sat. Maybe it has to do with the fact that on the southern trajectory the plane would be receding from the satellite since the equator is closer to the satellite than the south pole, and on the northern it would be approaching?
posted by localroger at 2:49 PM on March 24, 2014

A non-zero inclination does give the satellite some velocity with respect to points on the surface of the earth, but I don't think it's a lot (like 250 km/day for a point at 40 degrees south latitude): https://gist.github.com/wiseman/9749487
posted by jjwiseman at 3:02 PM on March 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

Am I being too old-fashionied or is it legitimately kind of terrible that they apprently notified the families via text message?
posted by TwoStride at 3:33 PM on March 24, 2014

Yes, it is. Person to person makes such a big difference, the more so when they have followup questions.
posted by Thing at 3:35 PM on March 24, 2014

TwoStride: They notified the families in person and on phone where possible. Text message was used as a backup.
posted by divabat at 3:39 PM on March 24, 2014 [6 favorites]

Thanks for the clarification, divabat.
posted by TwoStride at 3:49 PM on March 24, 2014

like 250 km/day for a point at 40 degrees south latitude

Yeah, that makes sense, the issue being that the motion of the satellite is mostly tangential to line of sight from the aircraft, since geosynchronous orbit is way way away from the earth compared to reasonable distances along the earth. This is also worse since the aircraft was way off in longitude and moved generally along the tracks of constant satellite elevation angle, again putting less of the satellite's motion along the line of sight. These factors seem to add up to make this infeasible. Damn.

It's going to drive me crazy until they release the details on this determination.
posted by kiltedtaco at 3:52 PM on March 24, 2014

Perhaps interestingly to some, in the video that Slashdot linked, the Inmarsat rep basically echoes the sentiment first penned here by Nelson upthread that it's ridiculous that these planes aren't required to be fitted with position reporters. Considering that that's the industry he's in, when he says it would be relatively inexpensive and simple with existing technology, I think that carries a bit more weight than our speculation here.
posted by localroger at 4:07 PM on March 24, 2014

Well, that's because he sells position location satcom equipment. It is completely unsurprising that he's saying that.
posted by eriko at 4:23 PM on March 24, 2014 [7 favorites]

Re: the doppler shift
It is being discussed in this forum. A summary of their thinking, as I understand it (and noting that I don't know if this is correct or even plausible, but thought it worth linking):

If the satellite was absolutely fixed then the Doppler shift would be the same irrespective of whether the plane was heading north or south BUT the sun and moon cause a slight - but predictable - wobble in the orbit of the satellite and since that wobble is also N/S that will add a very small but measurable extra value in the existing Doppler shift. If the satellite was heading south at the same time as the plane then the Doppler effect would be squeezed by a tiny bit and the wavelength decreased - ie very slightly blue-shifted. If the satellite was moving north whilst the plane was heading south then the radio wavelength would be stretched - very slightly red shifted. [by user Unixman]

Sun and moon gradually deform the orbit of a satellite in a geostationary orbit, causing it to "wobble" N/S daily unless the satellite spends fuel to correct. Most satellites do this periodically. If you look here List of satellites in geostationary orbit most satellites have "inclination" (wobble amplitude) of less than 0.1 degrees. (If the satellite is left on its own, its inclination is going grow ~1 degree per year.) Fortunately for us, Inmarsat-3 F1 is an old satellite (launched in 1996 and the second oldest Inmarsat satellite in orbit), which means that it must be running out of fuel, which means that its owners are probably trying to conserve fuel and skipping N/S compensation maneuvers. It has inclination of 1.6 degrees. [by user hamster3null]

posted by LobsterMitten at 4:35 PM on March 24, 2014 [4 favorites]

(Or maybe that is just a rephrasing of what you were saying above, kiltedtaco?)
posted by LobsterMitten at 4:39 PM on March 24, 2014

> it would not surprise me if the antennas on the satellite were biased northward. If they are, the signal coming "from behind" (south) might be slightly weaker than one at the same distance from the north

Further to my speculation, here are two PDFs from Inmarsat showing that indeed, the bandwidth & power distribution for Inmarsat's aviation satellites is not uniformly distributed over the coverage area, but rather concentrated in regions with higher demand:

• Rocket Science Made Simple: Satellite Connectivity For Aviation Explained [PDF]
• Inmarsat Classic Aeronautical Services [PDF]

The power appears to drop off considerably in the south Indian Ocean where there aren't spot-beams enhancing it. Perhaps there was a detectable difference in the signal intensity when the plane left high-performance area which would not have occurred if it had gone north?
posted by Westringia F. at 5:06 PM on March 24, 2014 [3 favorites]

Also, it sounds like Australia have called off the search for today due to bad weather in the search area. This earth wind map shows what the winds are doing in that area right now.
posted by LobsterMitten at 5:19 PM on March 24, 2014

It's also mostly a visual search. Rain and low clouds ruin that. They could certainly fly in it -- we fly planes through hurricanes after all -- but if they can't see the ocean surface for any real distance, it's not worth flying the mission.
posted by eriko at 5:24 PM on March 24, 2014

LobsterMitten: Yeah, the PPRuNe discussion is the same effect I was talking about. The effect is definitely there, I'm just not sure if it's distinct enough to be useful in this case (after jjwiseman's more precise calculation).

I'm actually confused why Inmarsat didn't know this answer immediately from the spot beam information. I guess the satellite has one whole-hemisphere antenna which picked up this transmission, and they didn't think that the absence of the transmission from the northern beams was enough evidence that the plane was in the south?
posted by kiltedtaco at 5:32 PM on March 24, 2014

Or else it's all a cover for a secret intelligence capability.

Yeah, I suspect that they actually have data from Australia's over-the-horizon radar system (about whose capabilities the Australians are a bit secretive), and they're just trying to come up with some other semi-plausible explanation for why they're so sure that the plane went South.
posted by The pets.com Mascot at 6:11 PM on March 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

jfc i just saw the covers for the malaysian dailies today and my heart is fuckin' broken
posted by divabat at 7:45 PM on March 24, 2014

Or a lot of very smart, very dedicated people put in a many, many long hours to try to see what they could get out of the data they had. Not everything is a cover-up.
posted by beowulf573 at 7:46 PM on March 24, 2014 [10 favorites]

Last Tuesday, user awblain at PPRuNe.org was suggesting precisely this use of (at that time) potentially available doppler frequency shifts of the Inmarsat data packets:

18Mar 19:02
18Mar 21:29

I think what awblain was suggesting was a pretty simple use of the doppler data: as an additional piece of information (radial velocity) to be used in combination with the existing hourly ping position rings in constructing potential flight paths.

If Inmarsat is able to accurately determine --- by doppler shifts in the frequency data --- the radial component (with respect to the satellite) of the plane's velocity, then the direction of the plane is uniquely* specified, assuming: (1) a value of the speed and (2) a position on the ping arc. The set of all ping arcs from 1811UTC (last radar contact) to 0011UTC (last ping), along with the corresponding radial velocity values, could then be used to single out a couple viable paths, i.e., paths connected by a sequence of velocity vectors that lead back to the known point of origin. I guess the data is such that only a southern route is viable.

* There are actually two possible velocity directions at any point on the ping arc, pointing at the same angle from the radially outward direction, but one can probably be immediately excluded due to the known origin of the plane.
posted by pjenks at 8:47 PM on March 24, 2014 [4 favorites]

New press conference (they have not recovered any objects yet, they say), and a protest held by relatives in Beijing outside the Malaysian embassy - Guardian liveblog
posted by LobsterMitten at 9:39 PM on March 24, 2014

Sounds like no new info on the flight or the recovery; in talking about the determination that the flight crashed, they said it was just the logical conclusion from knowing where the last ping was, not a result of any new information. Both press conferences (by Australia, and separate one by the airline) seemed to focus mainly on the families -- on what efforts will be made for the families in bringing them to Australia, and (at the airline one) how they have treated the families throughout.
posted by LobsterMitten at 10:07 PM on March 24, 2014

reading the liveblog and following up on the commentaries about how well-organised the protest is, in Beijing no less, I'm quite interested to know what exactly is China's intention here.
posted by cendawanita at 10:11 PM on March 24, 2014

My friends just told me that Indonesian news is reporting that the plane has been located? Ahhh no, miskomunikasi.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 2:33 AM on March 25, 2014

Malaysia's Ministry of Transport has released a technical description of Inmarsat's analysis: facebook, Guardian link.

At the latest press conference Hishammuddin also included this tidbit:

There is evidence of a partial handshake between the aircraft and ground station at 0019 UTC. At this time this transmission is not understood and is subject to further ongoing work.

posted by nangar at 5:35 AM on March 25, 2014 [3 favorites]

Could the missing 0015 UTC transmission be because the airplane was outside the area coverage of the satellite? Someone above has posted the Inmarsat technical pages and there is clearly an area of much lower, perhaps no-coverage at all, near the areas where the plane transmitted at 0011 UTC.
This could explain why there was a signal at 0019 UTC. But what does 'partial' mean? Any clues?
posted by carmina at 6:04 AM on March 25, 2014

What Happened to MH370? 'The Biggest Mystery Since Amelia Earhart'
posted by bukvich at 6:26 AM on March 25, 2014

The missing ping was actually at 0115 UTC, not 0015 UTC, that is, just over an hour later. I assume this would have been the satellite's next regular check-in. The plane's antenna didn't respond.

The 0019 UTC "partial handshake": No idea. Obviously not the regular hourly ping. All I know is they're trying to figure it out. If it was incomplete, they may be assuming it was aborted transmission from the plane just because there was nothing else in the area. I don't know.

It would obviously be very, very helpful for the searchers if they could figure out the plane hitting the water would have triggered some kind of aborted signal. (I have no idea if that's true or not.)
posted by nangar at 6:37 AM on March 25, 2014

Slightly larger version of the doppler shift plot.

50 Hz on this plot is about 24 knots. It's not obvious to me what's going in to their calculations for the northern and southern tracks, so I might have to make a model of this myself.
posted by kiltedtaco at 6:39 AM on March 25, 2014 [4 favorites]

I wonder if the last "partial handshake" has something to do with engine flameout and thus the RAT being deployed. Would the system ping because of this?
posted by ob at 6:46 AM on March 25, 2014

Wow, the amount of detail they've released on the Doppler calculations is great. Including some Doppler-derived data for every single hourly check-in. But they still haven't released arcs for every hour. So weird.

That "partial handshake" is a very tantalizing incomplete clue. Honestly I think it's irresponsible to release that data without understanding where it came from. It's so tempting to say "oh it must be related to the plane finally crashing", I mean the time lines up! But there's no direct evidence for that being the case.

The thing that's supposed to happen when a plane hits the water is the ELT going off and sending an emergency alert with a position to satellites listening for that signal. I've mentioned this a few times already; it's troubling there was no ELT transmission. There was none for AF447 either, so maybe they just don't work well in the water. Or maybe we got unlucky; the Wikipedia article notes that global coverage is incomplete and that an area can be out of satellite hearing for 2 hours.
posted by Nelson at 7:11 AM on March 25, 2014 [6 favorites]

NYT added a new graphic How Far Could the Debris Have Traveled? Answer: "hundreds of miles". Shows a plot of squiggly blue lines for buoys that drift and are monitored via satellite uplink.
posted by Nelson at 7:31 AM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]

Indian Ocean sea floor under suspected MH370 wreckage unmapped and unknown
posted by Golden Eternity at 7:57 AM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]

> That "partial handshake" is a very tantalizing incomplete clue ... It's so tempting to say "oh it must be related to the plane finally crashing"

Yep. You're right. My earlier (hopeful) speculation about that doesn't make sense, because if the plane had crashed the frequency offset would have changed, and in Inmarsat's analysis, that would have been noticed.
posted by nangar at 8:21 AM on March 25, 2014

But they still haven't released arcs for every hour. So weird.

Yeah, it seems like they don't want others to make the calculations for themselves (I think it's impossible without those other arcs). I don't know if that's irresponsible or responsible.
posted by pjenks at 9:47 AM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]

Nelson: the amount of detail they've released on the Doppler calculations is great. Including some Doppler-derived data for every single hourly check-in. But they still haven't released arcs for every hour. So weird.

Absolutely seconded. After leaking every ad hoc theory and rumor, they're being oddly secretive about this one aspect - why? But at least the intermediate Doppler information makes me less willing to believe that this is a half-assed cover for Australian over-the-horizon radar capabilities.

In any case, until the black boxes or some wreckage or some physical evidence turns up, people won't find closure on this. There will be a thousand conspiracy theories - and those poor, poor families. Do they get provisional death certificates? How long do they put their lives on hold? Hurts to even contemplate the situation.
posted by RedOrGreen at 10:27 AM on March 25, 2014 [3 favorites]

What are these ghostly false positives in the hunt for the missing plane?
posted by Rumple at 12:39 PM on March 25, 2014

> After leaking every ad hoc theory and rumor, they're being oddly secretive about this one aspect - why?

You seem to be combining the press and all of the agencies involved into a global "they" that's telling us this but not that. The press has been reporting a lot of random rumors and theories. Inmarsat hasn't been leaking rumors, though Malaysia's MOT hasn't released data from them as completely as we'd like.

The intermediate arcs can be approximately reconstructed from the predicted 450 and 400 knts tracks and the ping times in the Inmarsat data MOT released, so it's not like MOT's actually suppressing it. I think this has to do with how the data and analysis were released: Inmarsat > AAIB > MOT > press release from MOT to the general public. The press release would have been prepared by PR people from info relayed from Inmarsat. The PR people wouldn't have realized how important the intermediate arcs would be to amateurs trying to reconstruct Inmarsat's analysis. (It's still doable, but leaving that out makes it harder.)


Regardless, I agree that "there will be a thousand conspiracy theories" about this. This hijacking seems so senseless. Somebody hijacked an airliner flying from Malaysia to China and either tried to fly it to Antarctica and or bury it in the Indian Ocean where they thought it would never be found? Even if the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder are recovered we'll still probably never know why this happened. We'll have a better idea of how it happened, but not why.
posted by nangar at 3:16 PM on March 25, 2014 [4 favorites]

Could the partial handshake at 00:19 UTC be as simple as an OOOI event ("On the ground") initiated by landing sensors, without ACARS being on? Or would someone have had to be alive in the cockpit around that point to switch ACARS back on to register an OOOI event?


> But they still haven't released arcs for every hour. So weird.

Reports are there were 6 complete handshakes ending with the last at 00:11 UTC. I count 8 on the graph (blue line) timed after ACARS 'off'. The first 3 are in quick succession (certainly not hourly), so possibly considered as one arc (giving 6 arcs expected); and the final 2 (22:44 UTC and 00:11 UTC) are 90 odd minutes apart. It's annoying when details are discrepant.

I'd like to see the arcs plotted, too. Explanations of the rapid timing on the first 3 pings and the late timing on the last ping would be interesting, too, given hourly automation has not been the case. Was ACARS possibly switched back on after 22:44 UTC but before 23:44 UTC, preventing the expected hourly handshake around 23:44 UTC? Why the 90 minute gap?

Was the (late) 00:11 UTC ping initiated automatically, or did Inmarsat send off a manual ping at that point?
posted by de at 5:42 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]

On reflection: Why isn't Inmarsat's data consistent with ACARS being switched back on over the last hour or so of the flight?
posted by de at 6:10 PM on March 25, 2014

The Washington Post has an excellent map showing just how hard the search really is.

Basically, you have to take off from Perth in Australia, fly 1600 miles, then search. Oh, and make sure you break off that search with enough fuel to fly the 1600 miles back.

The analogy they use sums it up. It's like trying to find a crashed airplane somewhere in Texas, but your search flights have to take off and land in New York City. (Never mind that Texas isn't under water in the roaring forties)
posted by eriko at 7:02 PM on March 25, 2014 [3 favorites]

This video from the search area is also a reality check for just how hard it must be to spot wreckage let alone recover anything.
posted by Rumple at 7:19 PM on March 25, 2014 [7 favorites]

eriko, why no refueling over the search area?
posted by mlis at 7:26 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]

This video from the search area is also a reality check for just how hard it must be to spot wreckage let alone recover anything.

Dear god. That video. Those poor people. It made me want those people on the boat in the video to turn back before they are lost too.
posted by cashman at 8:38 PM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]

Something I hadn't seen before (though I may have missed it?) was that apparently the plane had been out of service for a while? From WTOP (local news radio in DC):

As investigators dig into what happened to the plane, a check of publicly available flight records for the missing aircraft identified as MSN 28420 - 9M- MRO, raise a key question about the plane.

The records indicate the plane flew the day before, March 7, from Beijing to Kuala Lumpor. But it appears the plane may have been out of service for an extended period of time prior to its flight on March 7. [...] According to flight log documentation, the plane was possibly out of service for more than a month before its March 7 flight.

I didn't immediately find any other source saying this, but just noting it here as part of our record of info we've come across. The only other mention I find in news stories about the maintenance records quotes people as saying there wasn't anything unusual about them.
posted by LobsterMitten at 8:41 PM on March 25, 2014

fyi, Storypick (who helped popularise the video) retracted the post, and noted tht's not from the MH370 search, but from an earlier footage of an oil and gas carrier in a hurricane in the Indian Ocean. Still a scary place, that part of the world.
posted by cendawanita at 9:08 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]

mlis,

The closest land to the search area consists of places like this.
posted by lukemeister at 9:09 PM on March 25, 2014

lukemeister, why no KC135 or KC10 or whatever to provide refueling. They could fly from Perth.
posted by mlis at 9:22 PM on March 25, 2014

Not sure I'd look to WTOP for much beyond the latest water-main breaks & OPM status announcements, but...

We did discuss upthread (#5456043 & #5452997) that 9M-MRO had been involved in a ground-strike accident ~19mos ago which took out a large chunk of a wing tip. Is the "out of service for an extended period of time" distinct from that repair?
posted by Westringia F. at 9:26 PM on March 25, 2014

Yeah, agree that WTOP is not the world's most solid source. It sounds like they're saying it was out of service for a month or so immediately prior to Mar 7, i.e., in Feb of 2014. (If this is true, and they're saying it's from "publicly available records", I don't know why nobody else would be reporting it. So very possibly they are mistaken.)
posted by LobsterMitten at 9:32 PM on March 25, 2014

Hmm... FlightAware's activity log for 9M-MRO [registration/pay-walled] indicates it was flying in Feb 2014: screenshot (via). The screenshot only goes to Nov 2013, but it seems to have been flying rather consistently that whole time.

Whether this is more or less reliable than WTOP, though, who knows.
posted by Westringia F. at 9:47 PM on March 25, 2014

mlis,

I can't comment on that. Perhaps flight time by search crews is limited.
posted by lukemeister at 9:52 PM on March 25, 2014

> Reports are there were 6 complete handshakes ending with the last at 00:11 UTC ...

The burst frequency offset analysis graph released by MOT starts from takeoff. There are ten handshakes total. The first four would be the pilots talking to air traffic control. The remaining six would be pings from the satellite after the transmitter became inactive.

The hourly check-ins from the satellite aren't all at exactly one-hour intervals. The first two and last are after intervals a bit longer than an hour. The middle four pings are at just about one-hour intervals. I don't know why the timing fluctuates. My guess would be that routine pinging of inactive transmitters (to see if they're still on and in range) runs as a background process, with priority given to processing active transmissions. The pattern is consistent with traffic dying after midnight in most of the satellite's service area and then picking up again when it's around 7:00 or 8:00 am in Southeast Asia. (That is, pinging gets delayed when radio traffic using the satellite is heavy.)
posted by nangar at 10:52 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]

> ... with priority given to processing active transmissions.

I feel certain reestablishing communication with MH370 was top priority. ACARS data is slim, automated, independent of pilots talking to ATC, and informs Arrivals Boards. People were running in all directions giving priority to MH370.


> The burst frequency offset analysis graph released by MOT starts from takeoff.

No, it starts at taxiing (or something); take off is the 2nd point on the blue line (12:41am MYT), and all up the blue line joins 12 ordered (time, burst) pairs from taxiing(?) until 08:11 MYT.

The first 3 are easily understood to be properly functioning OOOIs (egs: taxi, take off, climb); the 4th is the "final 1:07am ACARS" we've been hearing about that was carrying FMS data. No arcs required.

Then come the ACARS-off automated hourly handshakes: there are 8 points (remaining), not 6, and they're (really) far from hourly, initially and finally.

The first of the automatic pings would have an expected time: 18:07 UTC (based on last ACARS contact plus an hour). But there was nothing until 20 or so minutes later. Commencing at approximately 18:28 UTC there were 3 rapid fire reciprocated pings: 18:28, 18:29 & 18:30 (say). I'd like that somewhat late rush to establish "handshakes" explained to me, and accept any arcs would be so close together they are as good as one arc.

After that there are 4 well behaved hourly measures (again approximate times): 19:44, 20:44, 21:44, 22:44. These look automated enough. No problems. The system works.

However there is no 23:44 UTC handshake, as expected. None. Not even partial. Could that be because the ACARS was back on? (Yes or no?) That question has an answer.

What initiated the (late and final) 00:11 UTC complete handshake (way off the hourly schedule): automation or ground observers (manually) initiating a handshake? That is a question Inmarsat/UK-AAIB can answer. We have been provided with the time of the last ping -- 08:11am -- from very early in the investigation and have (merely) assumed the 6 arcs are approximately at: 0311am, 0411am, 0511am, 0611am, 0711am, and 0811am MYT -- it's not so.


If the ACARS were switched back on for the last hour (say), can the ground station initiate a manual, not automated, handshake and expect a return? If the answer is yes, then the partial handshake that followed at 00:19 UTC could so easily mark the time of impact, a mere landing sensor sending an OOOI back to ground, on impact.
posted by de at 1:48 AM on March 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

French satellite images show a potential debris field with 122 objects of various sizes. Hishammuddin called it the "most credible lead" so far at today's press conference. Pics.
posted by travelwithcats at 3:18 AM on March 26, 2014

lukemeister, why no KC135 or KC10 or whatever to provide refueling. They could fly from Perth.

The primary search now is visual -- radar can't really see things floating on the surface unless they just up high enough to get over the waves. So, the search is limited by daylight hours (falling, it's becoming winter in the Southern Hemisphere) and by crew fatigue.

Basically, they're leaving well before dawn, flying out to the site, searching as long as they can. By that time, there isn't much daylight left, so they go home.

Ideally, what you want there is an aircraft carrier, which can stay on station and handle 2-3 hour search flights.

The RAAF does have refueling aircraft, the KC-30A. These are based on Airbus A330s. It can handle both boom and probe/drouge refueling systems, and because this is metafilter, it can also be refueled in flight.

Finally, while it appears that tests were done with refueling P3 Orions, it was never put into service. The RAAF version, the AP-3C, may have that capability, but the US planes don't. It wasn't considered critical because the P-3 already has a 13 hour flight time capability.

The P-8 Poseidon definitely can be refueled -- it doesn't have the endurance of the P-3. Countering that is the speed -- the P-8 is based on a 737 and cruises closer to 500kts IAS, rather than 350kts.
posted by eriko at 3:54 AM on March 26, 2014 [4 favorites]

I feel certain reestablishing communication with MH370 was top priority.

Do we have any reason to think that at the time MH370 was still in the air Inmarsat knew its satellites were in contact with the airplane? Or even knew the plane was missing? My impression is that Inmarsat only realized they could be of help a couple of days after the plane went missing. I've heard nothing to suggest that Inmarsat was trying to communicate with the plane while it was still in flight.

I don't think there's much use right now in trying to figure out what the Inmarsat communications mean beyond what the authorities are telling us. They haven't released enough raw data, and I imagine none of us here have any expertise or knowledge of how those systems work. Somewhere at Inmarsat and some British aviation agency are people who do understand this stuff and have presumably driven the search in the direction it needs to go. I just hope some day a full technical report comes out, because like I've said before the technology here is fascinating.
posted by Nelson at 9:21 AM on March 26, 2014 [5 favorites]

China demands satellite data from Malaysia. "China demanded that Malaysia turn over the satellite data used to conclude that a Malaysia Airlines jet had crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, killing all 239 on board. ... Deputy Foreign Minister Xie Hangsheng told Malaysia's ambassador that China wanted to know exactly what led Mr Najib to announce that the plane had been lost, a statement on the ministry's website said."
posted by Nelson at 9:38 AM on March 26, 2014

Remember: Nobody considered this plane missing for quite some time. They had a normal signoff with Malaysian ATC. It wasn't until Vietnamese ATC did get them checking in for a couple of hours that people started to think something was wrong.

*In retrospect*, the timing off the lack of transponder and ACARS broadcasts became important. But at the time, nobody really noticed. This wasn't the only plane in the sky.

So, stop focusing on what ifs an hour after they took off. Nobody, but nobody, even thought there was a problem until several hours passed, and it definitely was noticed when the plane didn't show up in Beijing.

But when that plane turned west? Malaysia didn't care because they'd handed off the flight. Vietnam didn't care because they hadn't gotten the flight yet. Suspicion grew as they didn't check in, but they were heading south to nowhere before anybody really started asking where this plane is.
posted by eriko at 9:52 AM on March 26, 2014 [7 favorites]

Deputy Foreign Minister Xie Hangsheng told Malaysia's ambassador that China wanted to know exactly what led Mr Najib to announce that the plane had been lost, a statement on the ministry's website said."

I really wish China weren't pulling this unnecessary crap. At this point, if China has some kind of evidence that the plane didn't crash, then they should be the ones telling everyone else what led to that conclusion.
posted by Jimbob at 10:12 AM on March 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

How Inmarsat hacked their data to find flight MH370.
posted by carmina at 11:11 AM on March 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

Here's a question I've idly wondered about, and eriko just reminded me of it. So this plane turned off its transponder and thus was only showing up on plain old radar, without the additional info a transponder gives.

Isn't it *very* unusual for a plane of this size to be flying around without a transponder on? If you're a radar watcher in the Malaysian military (or whatever), does it catch your eye that this plane isn't showing up with transponder data? Is it something that a radar system could/should flag (i.e., mark the plane-blip with a "hey, this thing looks like a commercial airliner but its transponder is off" icon)?
posted by LobsterMitten at 11:32 AM on March 26, 2014 [2 favorites]

As air traffic controllers struggled to re-establish contact with Flight 370, military radar at the Butterworth air force base on Malaysia’s west coast picked up an unidentified aircraft near where the plane disappeared.

But the watch team, normally an officer and three enlisted personnel, either failed to notice the signal or decided not to designate and track it as a “zombie,” which would have pushed the information up the chain of command and possibly alerted air command. . .

The failure to recognize Flight 370 in the radar data — or refusal to do so, to avoid the embarrassment of admitting an unidentified plane had breached air defense — meant the Malaysian authorities continued to search in the seas to the east instead of the west of the peninsula. Military radar last recorded the signal at 2:22 a.m. about 200 nautical miles northwest of Butterworth, according to an image of the radar track.
posted by mlis at 12:34 PM on March 26, 2014 [2 favorites]

Mentioned in the article mlis linked to is the story of artist Liu Rusheng who at 77 had cheated death six times.
But the experiences had not left him jaded.

To the contrary, he wrote in his essay that "fate has been good to me’’.

"The creative road ahead is long, and I’m willing to make greater efforts to progress," he wrote.




posted by readery at 12:47 PM on March 26, 2014

There's quite a bit of nonsense, and little helpful information, in the "How Inmarsat hacked their data" link:

Say the satellite and the plane were both at the same height above the Earth’s surface and the plane was flying in a straight line away from the satellite. This simplified version breaks the problem down into one dimension. If you knew the position and velocity of your satellite and you knew the velocity of the plane, you could easily map the plane’s position over time.

Actually, if the plane were flying directly away from the satellite at a constant relative velocity, then the doppler shift would be constant and you would have no information about the plane (other than its relative velocity). Even if the plane's speed were changing, you would have no information about its position.

...since the satellite is orbiting Earth and the plane is also moving, albeit at a different velocity, this becomes a very complex problem

Actually, as many have said above, the geostationary satellite simplifies the problem since only the plane is moving with respect to the Earth's surface.
posted by pjenks at 3:19 PM on March 26, 2014

China wanted to know exactly what led Mr Najib to announce that the plane had been lost

While I don't think that members of the general public have a right to all of the data (or at least I'm not convinced one way or the other), I think that it's perfectly reasonable for China to expect that Inmarsat and the UK share the full data set with them. In fact, I'm shocked that they have not (if they indeed have not).
posted by pjenks at 3:22 PM on March 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

pjenks, I think what they realized is that becuase of the Earth's curvature, there is a subtle difference in the northbound and southbound Doppler curves, because the plane can't be flying in a straight line. On the northbound path the doppler curve rises more quickly and shallows out as the plane approaches the equator, eventually dipping, forming a convex-up graph; southbound, the curve rises at first only very gradually and then ever more more rapidly as the plane recedes from the equator, and is therefore pulling ever more quckly away from the satellite. This curve eventually crosses the northbound curve but makes a concave-up graph.

The actual doppler data closely match the second graph, and data from other flights were used to confirm that the technique has enough precision to be predictive.
posted by localroger at 3:47 PM on March 26, 2014 [2 favorites]

> Do we have any reason to think that at the time MH370 was still in the air Inmarsat knew its satellites were in contact with the airplane?

No, we don't. There's probably more indication to believe Inmarsat didn't have anyone monitoring the handshakes as they happened. But I'm poised to jump on reason the moment it surfaces, because for me there is an incoherence. The data doesn't quite match my expectation of hourly automated handshakes in the event of ACARS failure.

By the same measure we look at an early left hand turn away from a direct flight path and think "Ah-ha, there's some deliberate action on someone's part here", I look at the handshake data -- as it's necessarily presented to us -- and think "Ah-ha! Inmarsat manually established 'automated' communication around the time of the last radar fix, and had to reestablish that handshake just prior to impact." Deliberate efforts. Or?

The technology's brilliant, but the theatre is same-same. Inmarsat is a corporate entity, and a long life tells me that ACARS messages aren't the only thing subject to packaging.
posted by de at 3:54 PM on March 26, 2014

Wait, so because Inmarsat said "hourly" but there's one handshake that occurred after 90 minutes, on a handshake system that basically none of us have ever heard of before and whose detailed workings we know almost nothing about, your conclusion is that it's probably a conspiracy?
posted by kiltedtaco at 5:47 PM on March 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

Nope. Not conspiracy.
posted by de at 6:13 PM on March 26, 2014

Dunno about you, kiltedtaco, but I feel capable of taking in the actual data, AND the reasons it varies from the repeatedly stated model: "The analysis follows fresh examination of eight satellite "pings" sent by the aircraft between 1.11am and 8.11am Malaysian time on Saturday 8 March, when it vanished from radar screens" as if it were factual.

And I see no problem wondering how early Malaysian Airlines called on Inmarsat for assistance (if they did). It would be sheer hell, I imagine, watching the 'pings' live from an aircraft gone missing through to the silence of 01:15 UTC.

Not enjoying inconsistencies leaping out at me, and not enjoying my science dumbed down, and having a healthy appreciation of corporate communication just doesn't make me a conspiracy theorist on your say so, kiltedtaco. Damned offensive.
posted by de at 6:51 PM on March 26, 2014

Let's not get into a personal dust-up here.

de, I'm also not totally clear on what you're saying. I understand that the timing of the pings is puzzling, but I'm not understanding why you think this suggests Malaysia or the airline had contacted Inmarsat while the flight was still in the air. As far as I understood (and it's possible I have missed something), Malaysia and the airline... and even Inmarsat itself... did *not* know during the time the plane was in the air that this pinging was happening. So, no manual action on the part of Inmarsat to do anything during that time.

Is there something specific that makes you suspect otherwise? Or just general "something doesn't add up here"?

Also, you mentioned above the possibility of ACARS being turned back on during the last hour of the flight. I'm not fully understanding why you think that would yield the weird last ping. I thought Malaysia Airlines didn't subscribe to the information-sending service that Inmarsat offers, and thus there were only pings... from that, I was taking it that the Inmarsat satellite is not involved in relaying/collecting ACARS transmissions. I thought they were two separate systems, separate both on the plane and on the transmitting and receiving end. Is that wrong?
posted by LobsterMitten at 7:03 PM on March 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

While I know nothing about the system, it seems that it sends (or attempts to send) spontaneous pings for certain important engine events. If the event was "ran out of gas" that could have triggered a ping while the plane was still flying straight and level, having only *just* run out of gas.
posted by localroger at 7:16 PM on March 26, 2014

Only if ACARS was back on, localroger. OOOI event reporting is an ACARS function, else all that is expected of the unit with ACARS-off is "hourly handshakes" back to a ground station (in this case Inmarsat I presume).

Something doesn't add up. I've not found anything explicitly stating when Inmarsat became involved. Maybe I'm missing it. I know they did their corridor and doppler calculations after all data was in, that's no issue. But Inmarsat strikes me as an emergency go-to for Malaysian Airlines in the event of ACARS failure (especially with a lost passenger plane in the air), and I can't have it that the airline sat on its hands until 06:30 MYT wondering what to do with the arrivals board at Beijing.

If Inmarsat can handshake a unit with ACARS-on, then the doppler data (as released to the public in a graph) is, while IMO significantly inconsistent with hourly automation without further explanation, consistent with a troubleshooting scenario of firstly Inmarsat establishing the automatic handshakes (which for some reason hiccoughed), only to lose it again sometime after 06:44 MYT. The 07:44 MYT was a non-event, possible reason being ACARS was on again for the touch down. "Not possible" would satisfy my quandary completely.

An explanation of discrepancies just wouldn't go astray.

There's every chance I'm barking up a wrong tree. Let's leave it drop. (The search has just been called off for the day due to weather deterioration. Perth time: 1:00pm.)
posted by de at 10:00 PM on March 26, 2014

Conor Myhrvold's "How I Narrowed Down The Location Of Malaysia Air Using 'Monte Carlo' Data Models", with a link to a very comprehensive iPython notebook: Modeling the Last Flight of MH370 with a Markov Chain Monte Carlo Method
posted by jjwiseman at 11:23 PM on March 26, 2014 [7 favorites]

As far as I know, Malaysian Airlines or airlines in general don't have a direct business relationship with Inmarsat. Inmarsat provides satellite services for companies that then provide complete telecommunications packages to other companies. In this case Malaysia Airline was buing that service from SITA. As stated previously, tracking an airplane using this method is completely unprecedented so I there would be no emergency procedure to contact Inmarsat in case of ACARS failure.
posted by Authorized User at 2:42 AM on March 27, 2014 [3 favorites]

jjwiseman: Conor Myhrvold's Monte Carlo Analysis

That's great. Thanks.
posted by pjenks at 3:38 AM on March 27, 2014

I can't have it that the airline sat on its hands until 06:30 MYT wondering what to do with the arrivals board at Beijing.

Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Alright, stupidity is harsh in this case, but I think you're underestimating the amount of paralysis organizations have to overcome when confronted with unprecedented, puzzling trouble. The extraordinary panache with which NASA saved Apollo 13 is the exception, not the rule.
posted by stevis23 at 6:49 AM on March 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

A key thing is the airline was reportedly not an Inmarsat customer and was not paying for the data package that allowed satellite uplinks. (Some reports then had Air Malaysia denying that, saying they were customers, I don't know if that discrepancy was resolved.) My guess is the airline didn't even know Inmarsat had any transmissions at all until Inmarsat contacted them.

I don't understand the timing of the published message graph either. But the reason something doesn't add up is because we've only been given a tiny sliver of the information about the transmissions. Which shouldn't surprise anyone, usually this kind of analysis only comes out two years after an incident. And unless one of us is an expert on Inmarsat's data uplinks, we don't really know how that system is supposed to work.

I went back and documented the timeline of the Inmarsat data release. There was several days' delay before the Inmarsat data was taken seriously. Inmarsat told the Malaysian authorities what they knew on March 11 or 12, but it wasn't until March 15 that the data was officially acknowledged. (Inmarsat publically announced the existence of the data on March 14.) Malaysia was already searching to the west as early as March 11, perhaps based on information from military radar. Basically the Inmarsat data is caught up in the same confusion and mess as the rest of the early search. Inmarksat said as much themselves, "I think they have made an honest attempt to try to run a very complex investigation. But people will draw their own conclusions."
posted by Nelson at 7:26 AM on March 27, 2014 [4 favorites]

Another satellite spotted around 300 floating objects.
posted by travelwithcats at 7:42 AM on March 27, 2014

Yes. Those 3 handshakes in close succession around the crucial 02:30 MYT will have an explanation outside "hourly automation". Eventually.

I was well jumping the gun. It helps no end knowing Malaysian Airlines is not an Inmarsat client.
posted by de at 7:59 AM on March 27, 2014

There's been some ambiguity about Malaysian Airline's exact relationship with Inmarsat. I don't have time to research it myself, but the Wikipedia article has a good overview with links to references.
posted by Nelson at 8:18 AM on March 27, 2014

The Straits Times: Malaysia says there's sealed evidence on MH370 that cannot be made public

A Malaysian team have told relatives of Chinese passengers on board the missing Malaysia Airlines (MAS) flight MH370 that there was sealed evidence that cannot be made public, as they came under fire from the angry relatives at a briefing on Wednesday.

The sealed evidence included air traffic control radio transcript, radar data and airport security recordings.

The article also contains a great summary of the frustration family members must be feeling:

During the question-and-answer session, a relative said: "Thanks for demonstrating your ability to read every word out of the powerpoint slides."

posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 8:46 AM on March 27, 2014 [2 favorites]

I think it's likely that a "handshake" consists of three pings in rapid succession, rather than just one, probably for redundancy in case of radio interference. In cases where the plane was moving in straight line, the frequency offset of the pings would be the same, so they'd be superimposed on the graph.

And, yeah, a more complete explanation by Inmarsat of their data would be helpful.
posted by nangar at 9:43 AM on March 27, 2014

Only if ACARS was back on, localroger.

OK that makes sense, thanks for clearing it up. I recall someone somewhere saying that the pings exist at all because the data system was attempting to log into an Inmarsat service to which MH doesn't subscribe, and there were no further data because the login was rejected.
posted by localroger at 3:15 PM on March 27, 2014

Onboard an RNZAF P-3 Orion searching for MH370
posted by sarahw at 6:23 PM on March 27, 2014

AMSA: New credible lead shifts search area 1,100 KM north-east
posted by divabat at 8:09 PM on March 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

Oh wow, refining the area by a lot because new analysis of the radar info from the early part of the flight suggests the plane was flying faster (and burning more fuel) than previously thought. And the flight path "may be the subject of continuing refinement."
posted by LobsterMitten at 8:35 PM on March 27, 2014

So all of those satellite shots of a "debris field" were crap?
posted by Justinian at 9:52 PM on March 27, 2014

The new search area.
posted by de at 10:20 PM on March 27, 2014

Japan satellite spots "probable" MH370 objects

Have the search vessels planes even spotted any of the objects observed by the satellites? This is maddening.
posted by Golden Eternity at 10:36 PM on March 27, 2014 [2 favorites]

In joint statement AMSA & ATSB:

The depth of the water in the search area is between 2000 and 4000 metres.

Still no video of press conference on-line.
posted by de at 11:37 PM on March 27, 2014

AMSA and ATSB MH370 media briefing [YT]
posted by de at 12:52 AM on March 28, 2014 [1 favorite]

Re: So all of those satellite shots of a "debris field" were crap?

There is garbage accumulating in the Indian Ocean Gyre, it's even called the Indian Ocean garbage patch. Usually currents break down bigger parts and for example plastic might not even be visible to the naked eye after a while. Plastic trash is not the only thing, over the last few days there were reports of rope, belts and wooden pallets, all of which will take different amounts of time to decompose. But it all starts out as solid pieces that humans throw away (or get lost). It is entirely possible that the satellite pics showed objects completely unrelated to MH370.
http://5gyres.org/ has some more info.
posted by travelwithcats at 3:32 AM on March 28, 2014 [1 favorite]

New search area (pdf, AMSA). The revised higher speed tracks are really close to the eastern track suggested by the NTSB (shown here, pdf) on which AMSA based it's initial search operations, but have the plane running out of fuel much further north.

From Hishammuddin's press conference:

The international working group included representatives from the UK, namely Inmarsat, AAIB, and Rolls Royce; from China, namely the CAAC and AAID; from the US, namely the NTSB, FAA, and Boeing; as well as the relevant Malaysian authorities.

The group has been working to refine the Inmarsat data, and to analyse it – together with other information, including radar data and aircraft performance assumptions – to narrow the search area.

Information which had already been examined by the investigation was re-examined in light of new evidence drawn from the Inmarsat data analysis.

(Note: The new search area map includes the earlier suggested 400 knot track from Inmarsat's initial burst frequency offset analysis. My understanding from what AMSA's said is that they're no longer using that.)
posted by nangar at 3:42 AM on March 28, 2014

The Guardian has this quote fom an oceanographer about some of the satellite images:

Take the Thai image as a good example which supposedly shows several hundred "targets" in a small area. As someone who has analysed optical images of the oceans for many years, all but two to three of these objects are likely to be sea-foam and wave breaking.

This image was taken at a time of high winds and the pattern is consistent with hundreds I've seen over the years. It is also important to emphasise that the ocean is sadly full of debris from many sources ...

posted by nangar at 6:08 AM on March 28, 2014 [1 favorite]

AMSA has confirmed sitings of multiple objects in the new search area.
posted by nangar at 6:26 AM on March 28, 2014 [3 favorites]

Clever.
posted by de at 6:38 AM on March 28, 2014

> My understanding from what AMSA's said is that they're no longer using that.

My understanding of the (new) 400 knots path is that's the speed (required) for the path of best fit factoring in the new data surrounding:

  * available fuel (from review of radar data),
  * aircraft performance,
  * heading implied by Doppler analysis, and
  * distance required to reach the 08:11 arc by 08:11 am.

One path with some drift analysis and 'other tools' as John Young is apt to say.
posted by de at 6:50 AM on March 28, 2014

That's the first sign I've seen that it may not been the pilots. They're well trained to fly at the sweet spot between speed and fuel consumption.

Note: it is not proof -- and of course, if your goal was to run out of fuel, flying faster just helps that.
posted by eriko at 8:27 AM on March 28, 2014

Without having an idea of motive, it's hard to know who may have initiated that.
posted by mazola at 8:38 AM on March 28, 2014

A Look Into the Lives of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370's Pilots
Interviews With Friends, Family Offer a Portrait of the Missing Plane's Pilots
posted by mlis at 9:33 PM on March 28, 2014 [1 favorite]

Mistrust Between U.S., Malaysia Strains Probe
posted by mlis at 9:36 PM on March 28, 2014 [1 favorite]

Navy Jet Lacks Key Feature for Flight 370 Search
Navy Says Aircraft 'Currently Not Capable' of Refueling In-Flight

This answers my question from the other night about why the USN P-8A was not refueling in-flight.

The U.S.Navy's newest aircraft is on its first high-profile mission, searching for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, but the aircraft lacks a key feature that could aid the search for the missing jetliner. The P-8A Poseidon can't refuel in-flight.

The jet, designed for hunting submarines, has been flying daily missions over the Southern Indian Ocean for weeks, now flying roughly 1,150 miles to get to the search area off the coast of western Australia.

The search zone was revised closer to the Australian coast Friday after new estimates of the missing jetliner's possible final location took into account Malaysian military radar which tracked the Boeing 777 flying faster than first thought after it vanished March 8.

While the jet is fitted with an in-flight refueling system to refill its gas tanks without having to land, the aircraft is "currently not capable" of doing so and won't be able to until around 2017, said U.S. Navy spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Sarah Flaherty.
posted by mlis at 9:43 PM on March 28, 2014 [2 favorites]

Missing Flight 370: Time is Running Out for Black Box Search
High-Tech Scanning Equipment Is Days Away From New Search Zone

Graphic
posted by mlis at 9:47 PM on March 28, 2014 [2 favorites]

AMSA:

The Haixun 01 and HMAS Success reported they have retrieved a number of objects from the ocean but so far no objects confirmed to be related to MH370 have been recovered.

posted by nangar at 5:35 AM on March 29, 2014

Malaysian official: Praying for plane survivors, but ...

Earlier this week, loved ones of those aboard missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 heard this: "All lives are lost."

But Saturday, a Malaysian official met with relatives and then told reporters he had not closed the door on the hope of relatives that survivors may exist among the 239 people aboard the Boeing 777-200 ER that went missing March 8.

"Even hoping against hope, no matter how remote, of course, we are praying and we will continue our search for the possible survivors," said Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia's acting transportation minister.

WTF?
posted by mazola at 1:03 PM on March 29, 2014 [2 favorites]

I was wondering about the new search site, which is 600+ miles from the original spot. The calculations for the original search site in the southern Indian Ocean took into account the fuel load and assumptions about speed. If the aircraft flew indeed faster how does that match the last ping at 8:11L? If it flew faster and used up the fuel over a shorter distance shouldn't its last ping be at an earlier time? Apparently an aircraft like the B777 could glide for about 50 miles after fuel exhaustion, nowhere near a distance of hundreds of miles that could account for up to an hour (or more, depending on speed) of time.
posted by travelwithcats at 3:19 PM on March 29, 2014

travelwithcats: "Apparently an aircraft like the B777 could glide for about 50 miles after fuel exhaustion, nowhere near a distance of hundreds of miles that could account for up to an hour (or more, depending on speed) of time."

Somewhat relevant, there's a fascinating post in PPrune by a 777 pilot who got permission to use a real-live 777 simulator and documents what happened when the plane ran out of fuel.
posted by barnacles at 9:15 PM on March 29, 2014 [7 favorites]

travelwithcats, when investigators say the plane was travelling faster than first estimated they're only talking about that first wayward east to west leg over the top of Malaysia, the leg where radar provided time and location data.

The plane therefore entered the general southbound leg with less fuel, too little to make the distance required to reach the 08:11 arc via the first proposed "south corridor", at any speed. That corridor is now deemed not possible.

It remains a given that at 08:11am the plane was on the 08:11 arc, (so necessarily further up to the east than at first estimated).

All points along the 08:11 arc are equidistant from the satellite, not from the point the plane made its southbound turn. A more south easterly direction provided the plane with a shorter distance to the 08:11 arc, meaning the plane crossed that arc 'higher up' and closer to the west coast Australia. The distance and time provide the estimated 400 knots.

No doubt the new proposed path is a better fit for the direction of travel implied by the Doppler analysis, too.
posted by de at 12:44 AM on March 30, 2014 [2 favorites]

From the Straits Times:

"We would like to confirm that the last conversation in the transcript between the air traffic controller and the cockpit is at 0119 (Malaysian Time) and is "Good night Malaysian three seven zero," DCA said in a short statement issued on Monday night.

"The authorities are still doing forensic investigation to determine whether those last words from the cockpit were by the pilot or the co-pilot,'' said the statement.

It was reported earlier that the last words from the flight were "Alright, goodnight", spoken by co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid.

posted by TWinbrook8 at 1:58 PM on March 31, 2014

I do not believe you.
posted by cashman at 3:52 PM on March 31, 2014

At this point the most likely outcome appears to be that the plane is never discovered.
posted by Justinian at 10:29 PM on March 31, 2014 [4 favorites]

At this point the most likely outcome appears to be that the plane is never discovered.

Strange, isnt it? I've been checking this thread twice a day for weeks now. The activity here and the water cooler chatter irl really dropped off when they found satellite images and decided to focus on the southern corridor - the public feeling seems to be that the case is more or less solved. But the satellite images and extensive boat and plane searches have found nothing actually related to the craft - it's all just flotsam and other ocean junk. Except for more speculation based on closer and closer analysis of the data, we don't conclusively know that much more than we did last week. It really does seem like they will never find anything and that we will just assume it crashed into the southern Indian ocean. And as far as I can tell, we still don't have any conclusive idea of why the plane diverted to a new course and eventually disappeared.

I am still unsatisfied and unsettled and have very little hope of ever fully finding out what happened.
posted by mosessis at 11:16 PM on March 31, 2014 [6 favorites]

AF447 was eventually found by sidescan sonar. Surface debris has had time to travel very far and sink far from the crash site due to the rough seas and strong currents; the actual wreck should be on the bottom somewhere near the possible tracks identified by the satellite clues. It may take a few years but I doubt they'll give up and I think they will eventually find it.
posted by localroger at 5:40 AM on April 1, 2014

Is it just me, or does it seem like the Malaysians have started to deflect blame toward other groups (Inmarsat, AAIB, Boeing, etc.)? Some of their most recent announcements seem designed to get the Chinese relatives focused on someone else.
posted by aramaic at 6:14 AM on April 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

I agree it's going to be very hard to ever find the plane. The black box sonic pings seemed to be the best bet but the battery only lasts ~30 days, time is quickly running out. After that stops working, barring some classified technology I don't see how they're going to find the plane. It's likely 9000 feet underwater, and at best we know where it is within a .. 500 mile radius? Some impossibly large space. And unfortunately it's not like AF447. That plane's wreckage was found on the water within a couple of days of the crash (I believe aided by ACARS data), greatly narrowing down the location. And even then it took nearly two years to find stuff because of the depth.
posted by Nelson at 7:05 AM on April 1, 2014

Australia is preparing for a protracted recovery process.

A Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) was established on Monday and is being led by Air Chief Marshal (Retd) Angus Houston AC AFC (Ret'd) in Perth to effectively communicate Australian government activities in relation to the search and recovery operation.

This Australian government initiative will provide timely information to families of passengers and crew on board the missing aircraft and inform the public about the latest available information. [JACC/media]

Day 2 on the job and Angus Houston is already stating it like it is: Wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 may never be found.
posted by de at 8:35 AM on April 1, 2014

Here's two more takes on that briefing described in the SMH article de just posted. The WSJ is pessimistic: Search for Missing Malaysian Plane Hampered by Lack of Certainty. The Guardian report does its best to highlight the optimistic.
posted by Nelson at 8:37 AM on April 1, 2014

"We would like to confirm that the last conversation in the transcript between the air traffic controller and the cockpit is at 0119 (Malaysian Time) and is "Good night Malaysian three seven zero," DCA said in a short statement issued on Monday night.

Dumb question: what is the actual source for this transcript? Normally I'd assume it comes from an airplane's voice recorder but clearly that's not that case here. Is this chatter normally recorded on radar side? Or is this just recollection from a controller?
posted by mazola at 8:42 AM on April 1, 2014

The Royal Aeronautical Society has a post on theories about what happened to MH370.

This week, the RAeS Flight Operations Group (FOG) held a two-day conference ... which included speakers representing pilots, airlines, manufacturers and regulators. We took the opportunity to ask a selection of these highly experienced and extremely knowledgeable speakers some questions as to what might have happened aboard the missing 777. A summary of their amalgamated answers appears below:

....

One technical expert highlighted the fact that, for every plausible scenario suggested so far as to what might have happened to MH370, there was at least one contradictory statement.

Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), which has been assisting AMSA in current trackng for this search, has posted a video of simulated debris drift in the Indian Ocean from 2009 covering the current and previous search areas. (via)


I'm pessimistic about the chances of the plane being found. I can deal with the idea that it's just this bizarre and inexplicable thing that happened and just get fascinated with the technical details, but for families of the passengers and crew and their friends, the idea that they may never know what happened has to be really hard to deal with.
posted by nangar at 8:50 AM on April 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

As mentioned above, it took two years to find AF 447 with sonar, and they only covered the area within 40 nm of the last known position. The odds are not good for finding it with sonar.
posted by kiltedtaco at 9:05 AM on April 1, 2014

what is the actual source for this transcript?

I don't know for certain, but I assume from a ground station recording of the ATC conversation. At least in the US, ATC radio traffic is always recorded and kept for weeks. If anything unusual happens a copy is made for the record. (There's also amateur-made recordings with spotty coverage, see LiveATC.) I'd assume all international ATC radio communication has some sort of recording infrastructure, it'd be crazy not to.

What I can't understand is how there was ever any ambiguity what those last communications were. The originally reported words came from an official Malaysian briefing. It's terribly unprofessional to brief the world with incorrect information. It's not just a tiny difference, either; the new words "Good night Malaysian three seven zero" include the airplane's call sign and sound way more professional than the initial reports. In the end it's probably not significant, but it sure does reinforce the idea the Malaysian authorities don't really know how to handle communications in this kind of intense international event.
posted by Nelson at 9:26 AM on April 1, 2014

That mis-reporting of the sign off is huge to me and makes me wonder about everything that was initially reported. Do we know the changes in altitude that were initially reported happen? These mistakes only add the to sense of tragedy.
posted by readery at 9:48 AM on April 1, 2014

MH370 Search: Beacons and Pingers and Locators: Fear of Landing blog post about how the black box underwater beacon works. In my experience the author is particularly reliable in her reporting about aviation accidents.

Last week, I was a guest on a radio show where I explained that trying to find the aircraft wreckage underwater with these locators was looking for a needle in a haystack. “It’s worse than that,” interrupted an ex-NTSB investigator. “We don’t even know where the haystack is yet.” That’s a pretty perfect summary of the situation.

posted by Nelson at 10:06 AM on April 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

Al Jazeera America tweeted a link to this transcript. It's just a Scribd document without a specific source, but it looks like it was posted by their social media producer.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 10:10 AM on April 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

I read through that transcript and it seems entirely ordinary to me. (I'm a pilot, but only tiny planes in the US; no expertise with commercial flights or international ATC.) What's missing is information on who was talking on the plane. Presumably they've identified the voices by now?

If you were really looking for straws to grasp, you could read something in to how the plane says "Morning" in greeting to Lumpur Radar at 12:46:51 and then says "Good Night" when signing off at 01:19:29. But it's the middle of the night so it's ambiguous. At least in American English, "Morning" is more of a "hello" and "Good Night" is more of a "goodbye", it seems ordinary enough to me.

I like that Lumpur Approach greeted the plane with selamat pagi. That's technically not correct (not in English) but it's the common sort of casual communication you'd expect in routine ATC.
posted by Nelson at 10:47 AM on April 1, 2014

Poor Coordination Led to Flawed Search for Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
The Search Area Shifted Abruptly on Friday After Authorities More Fully Merged Two Investigative Strands
posted by mlis at 1:41 PM on April 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

In the end it's probably not significant, but it sure does reinforce the idea the Malaysian authorities don't really know how to handle communications in this kind of intense international event.

I can't understand how it could possibly happen. The very first reports, the very first information that indicated something unusual was going on, was that the pilot hadn't signed off with his call sign, hadn't acknowledged information regarding the Vietnamese ATC he had to talk to next, and that this was somehow weird. So much consideration in the past weeks has been driven by the idea that the pilot/co-pilot didn't communicate with ATC in the proper way before communication stopped.

And your point regarding the Malaysian authorities, the same one as I have raised before, explains so much. The Malaysian authorities are used to dealing with a placated media that they control. They really, really aren't used to dealing with actual journalists who want actual, real, unbiased, useful information. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that when this is finally all over, the Malaysian government is just going to breathe a sign of relief and say "good, finally it's over, we can get back to doing what we're good at, and dealing with journalists via Barisan National press releases!".
posted by Jimbob at 5:22 PM on April 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

> "good, finally it's over, we can get back to doing what we're good at, and dealing with journalists via Barisan National press releases!"

Oh, entirely written into the Abbott government's good neighbour JACC initiative. Ex-Australian defence boss reportedly to head MH370 search; and the rest:

Sydney's Daily Telegraph said Houston's brief was to not only lead the search but also coordinate the often delicate diplomatic contacts with search partners in Malaysia, China, the United States, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand.

He will also ensure the joint agency provides a single point where the families of the 239 people who were onboard the flight when it disappeared on March 8 can obtain information, the newspaper reported.

It said services available to the families, most of whom are Chinese, would include up-to-date information and travel assistance, including visa services, accommodation advice, interpreter services and counselling.

Somewhere I did read that Malaysia was also setting up shop in Perth to continue councelling services to relatives of the passengers and crew lost on flight MH370. Houston, we could still have a problem.
posted by de at 9:14 PM on April 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Seems the media has stopped reporting on this after some of the stuff retrieved from the Indian Ocean was just rubbish floating on the seas. Is there a reliable source for updates on whats happening?
posted by Admira at 6:02 PM on April 3, 2014

Australia's SBS is posting updates here.
posted by acorncup at 7:30 PM on April 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

Simply bookmark my next comment and any time you need an update, refresh the comment. This should work indefinitely.
posted by Justinian at 10:42 PM on April 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

UPDATE: NOTHING HAS BEEN FOUND
posted by Justinian at 10:42 PM on April 3, 2014

The Joint Agency Coordination Centre is posting twice-daily updates here.
posted by nangar at 10:52 PM on April 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

It is now 6.30 pm, Fri April 4th in Perth, around sundown. Here was today's search area. I don't think you'll find any mention of it at JACC even though JACC has been set up to keep us all current and on the same page, as it were.

The latest JACC media release (hot off the press) states:

“There has not been any change in the search,” Commodore Leavy said.

Here's an AMSA page to bookmark (scroll down to 'Files'). There you'll find the daily search maps to assess for yourself what exactly is being termed 'no change'.
posted by de at 3:32 AM on April 4, 2014 [1 favorite]

No, I'm wrong. The map is provided by JACC in its first press release of the day, stating:

Today's search area will focus on three areas within the same vicinity.

'In the same vicinity'? OK.
posted by de at 3:56 AM on April 4, 2014

In the absence of any search news, some continue to verify/reconstruct the Inmarsat ping-doppler conclusions. One notable "reconstructor" is space scientist Duncan Steel who has done a series of careful analyses of the published data (a meta-post to all of his prior postings on the subject was posted today). These include:

28Mar: Error analysis of ping rings (including timing error, satellite position and earth shape)

1Apr: Analysis of Inmarsat doppler data

and

2Apr: "The Inmarsat-3F1 Doppler Data Do Not Exclude a Northerly Flight Path for MH370"

He has been assisted in his newest postings by engineer Mike Exner, who has apparently calibrated the published "burst frequency offset" doppler data to get the absolute line-of-sight velocities for the plane.

Perhaps most interesting is a throwaway line from yesterday's post:

Mike only had [one ping ring] to use. We now have others (which I will be posting on this webpage in a while).

posted by pjenks at 6:53 AM on April 4, 2014 [3 favorites]

Seems from the comments that the new ping ring data comes from a nice analysis on reddit of the published constant speed paths.
posted by pjenks at 7:05 AM on April 4, 2014

Those links are fascinating, pjenks, but it looks like they're all working from the limited published data and trying to reverse engineer more data points. That's fraught with statistical peril. I'm particularly skeptical of any claims that the reverse engineer brigade on Reddit can somehow divine a more accurate prediction than the Inmarsat and SAR folks with access to all the real data.

Here's a bit of new news: Malaysia Airlines might not have done battery maintenance on the black box pingers. It's ambiguous and probably doesn't make a big difference anyway, but we may only have had 20-25 days instead of 30. We're on day 28 now. These battery lifespans aren't total cutoffs, the signal just starts fading out.
posted by Nelson at 9:05 AM on April 4, 2014

Nelson, Yes, the reddit analysis is a reverse-engineer of the constant-speed flight path data points, but I think that, thus far, the doppler analyses only use published data points. They are simply drawing possible flight paths and then checking whether it matches the doppler offsets plotted by Inmarsat (which seems to be exactly what Inmarsat did, though I assume they looked at an exhaustive sample of "possible" paths).

I'm not as skeptical of the reddit reverse-engineering (it's important to note that they are not actually making claims on direction or the fate of the plane... they are just trying to extract the unpublished ping rings). They take the two published constant-speed paths, which I think are both great circles, and then do a best fit to get the radii of ping rings at the times of the prior pings (going back 1.5h, 2.5h, ... along each constant-speed path). There's certainly error in the analysis, but it sounds like a very reasonable/straightforward approach.

I have not yet seen an analysis which combines reverse-engineered ping rings and the doppler data. I think one could actually predict likely paths (rather than verify random paths) under various speed assumptions. Perhaps that is what Steele is doing now.
posted by pjenks at 9:22 AM on April 4, 2014

If the pilot (or whomever was at the controls assuming a criminal act) deliberately put the plane into the water as gently as possible at the limit of fuel how intact could it remain on impact? Sullenberger actually landed an A320 on the Hudson, after all. Could a pilot have more-or-less landed the thing and just let it sink in one piece?
posted by Justinian at 6:38 PM on April 4, 2014 [1 favorite]

(I know a 777 is a lot bigger and the ocean is not the Hudson, that's why I'm asking)
posted by Justinian at 6:39 PM on April 4, 2014

The Roaring Forties are definitely not the Hudson...
posted by saucysault at 6:43 PM on April 4, 2014

Sure, but that doesn't mean the surf is always at storm levels. Secondly, the search area isn't actually in the Roaring Forties anymore. The moved it significantly northward where it's not like that.
posted by Justinian at 6:55 PM on April 4, 2014 [1 favorite]

Plots of the reddit pings are up.
posted by pjenks at 10:19 PM on April 4, 2014 [2 favorites]

Justinian, are you familiar with Pan Am Flight 6?

"The crew calculated the added drag left them with insufficient fuel to reach San Francisco or to return to Honolulu..."

posted by TWinbrook8 at 3:09 AM on April 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

'Pulse signal detected' in search for lost plane MH370
posted by pixie at 5:24 AM on April 5, 2014

Wow! I really hope that's it.
posted by nangar at 6:16 AM on April 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

Well that could be great news about the ping! Or it could be nothing.

Here's a great example of how bad news reporting is and why it's dangerous to try to read too much in reported details. Here's the English Xinhua report which is the source of the "pulse signal detected" news. AP picked that up and republished the finding; here's NPRs copy of the AP story at 9:33AM and here's AP's copy of their story at 9:43AM. Compare these three quotes from the articles:

Chinese patrol ship Haixun 01, searching for the missing Malaysian passenger jet MH370, detected a pulse signal with a frequency of 37.5kHz per second in southern Indian Ocean waters Saturday. A black box detector deployed by the Haixun 01 picked up the signal at around 25 degrees south latitude and 101 degrees east longtitude.

A black box detector deployed by the ship, Haixun 01, picked up a signal at 37.5Hz per second at around 25 degrees south latitude and 101 degrees east longitude, Xinhua said.

Xinhua said a black box detector deployed by the ship, Haixun 01, picked up a signal at 37.5 kilohertz (cycles per second), the same frequency emitted by flight data recorders.

It's a very simple fact they're trying to report, the frequency 37.5kHz. The source Chinese article calls it "per second" which is nonsensical but at least the correct number. The AP rewrite of the story then misquotes the number as 37.5Hz, as if the k didn't matter, and repeats the "per second" nonsense. The corrected AP version reports the frequency correctly but then omits the latitude and longitude from the entire article.

It's illiterate reporting, a game of telephone played by people who don't understand basic scientific measurements.
posted by Nelson at 6:57 AM on April 5, 2014 [12 favorites]

'Pulse signal detected' in search for lost plane MH370

"There is no confirmation at this stage that the pulse is coming from the missing plane. The battery on MH370's black box is due to run out on Monday."

The stor(ies) of the disappearance of this plane is just too much.
posted by cashman at 6:59 AM on April 5, 2014

Good on Haixun 01 for detecting something. What were they doing up that far? When? What day? Thursday the 3rd? It takes ships days to get anywhere.


> 25 degrees south latitude and 101 degrees east longitude

That's west of Learmonth, in the new low-key search area of Friday 4th; no-one has adequately explained why the major shift further north; but someone had done an unmentioned search prior to the 4th. (See the grey shaded area?) Who? When?



It'll be it.
posted by de at 7:11 AM on April 5, 2014

Location of 37.5kH signal shown on today's search map (by PPRuNe user PortVale). The Haixun 01 may have been moving between search areas.
posted by nangar at 7:36 AM on April 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

JACC update:

The Chief Coordinator of the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston (Ret'd), said reports that the Chinese ship, Haixun 01, had detected electronic pulse signals in the Indian Ocean related to MH370 could not be verified at this point in time.

...

“The deployment of RAAF assets to the area where the Chinese ship detected the sounds is being considered.

“I will provide further updates if, and when, more information becomes available.”

We'll see, I guess.
posted by nangar at 9:31 AM on April 5, 2014

In depth in the NYT:

Hours after the report, the Australian chief coordinator of the Indian Ocean search, retired Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston, said “the characteristics reported are consistent with the aircraft black box.” He also noted that white objects had been spotted floating in the water about 56 miles from the area where the sounds were heard.

But he urged caution, saying the reports could not be immediately verified -- a sentiment echoed by Malaysian and Chinese officials. [...] False alerts can be triggered by sea life, including whales, or by noise from ships. An alert sounded on the British Royal Navy vessel HMS Echo last week turned out to be false, according to the Australians.
posted by RedOrGreen at 12:02 PM on April 5, 2014

A senior Malaysian government source told CNN that Flight 370 flew around Indonesian airspace after it dropped off Malaysian military radar. The plane may have been intentionally taken along a route designed to avoid radar detection, the source said.

The conclusion was reached by investigators after reviewing radar track data from neighbouring countries, CNN reported.

So far, it's just CNN reporting this with the Straits Times (Singapore) reprinting it.

Meanwhile, the Malaysian police have been examining all the closed-circuit tv footage from KLIA, the toll plaza on the way to the airport, and the road in between and have been able to track every passenger's arrival to the departure gate:

Criminal investigators looking into the possibility of foul play by those on missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have found some leads to narrow down their probe... Police on Wednesday said they had "obtained some clues" on what might have happened to the flight, based on the statements recorded from more than 170 people...

It was the same day that they cleared all 227 passengers of the flight. They, however, did not give the same clearance to the aircraft's crew.

Their probe had focused on four possible areas: hijack, sabotage personal problems and psychological problems.

Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar had said police were looking at the crew of the flight, as the main "subjects of investigations".

per the Straits Times. The article states that this is a separate investigation from the team that is searching for the airplane.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 3:14 AM on April 6, 2014 [3 favorites]

Remember, the mere fact that CNN is reporting something doesn't necessarily mean it is false.
posted by Justinian at 5:00 AM on April 6, 2014 [11 favorites]

Guardan: Another unconfirmed signal has been detected in a different area. A British ship is headed to the Haixun 01's location.

The third signal was detected on Sunday morning by the Australian navy ship Ocean Shield, located around 300 nautical miles away from the Chinese ship.

Houston said he did not know at this stage whether the acoustic signal detected by Ocean Shield was 37.5kHz, the frequency emitted by a black box locator beacon, but the lead was “something that needs to be investigated”.

The HMS Echo, a British navy ship carrying a towed pinger locator, was being sent to assist Haixun 01 but would take 14 hours to arrive at the rendezvous, said Commodore Peter Leavy of the Australian navy.

The Ocean Shield would further investigate the signal in its own area before heading to join the Haixun 01 and Echo, Leavy said.

posted by nangar at 5:26 AM on April 6, 2014

I admit to being confused about the difference between vessels which tow a ping detector below them and those like the Haixun 01. The former seems to be slow moving with a limited range; the latter seems to be able to detect a signal from a long way off (at least in terms of getting a bearing and frequency). Why have both?
posted by rongorongo at 6:30 AM on April 6, 2014

Transcript of [JACC] press conference, 6 April
Angus Houston introduced 'acoustic events' to the search vernacular; mentioned a change to plane speed estimate:

Today, the international investigative team has this morning advised of a correction to the satellite data that has been used to calculate the probable flight path of MH370. The correction arises from new information about the state of the satellite itself when it received transmissions from MH370 during its flight. The effects of the correction is to raise the priority for searching the southern component of the existing search area ahead of the northern component.

And IMO Houston was annoyed that word of acoustic events had leaked; and was not all that prepared to be facing questions. Tomorrow's active search area(s) will be shifted to where Haixun 01 just happens to be, because Inmarsat.

Just to complicate matters, also this morning Ocean Shield reported an acoustic event miles away from Haixun 01's detections, so Ocean Shield will not be steaming to the new search site.

Unlike AMSA & ATSB, JACC is pure politics, so it's difficult to know what to think.
posted by de at 7:45 AM on April 6, 2014

Sigh. Those poor families. It could be months, or years, or never.
posted by cashman at 6:35 PM on April 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

It seems likely to either be weeks or never. What are the odds of the plane being randomly discovered a year from now?
posted by Justinian at 6:51 PM on April 6, 2014

I could see it becoming someone's hobby/obsession, if we don't find it shortly. Like the Atocha or the Titanic.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:08 PM on April 6, 2014

I could see it becoming someone's hobby/obsession

Someone's? It will become a hobby/obsession industry.
posted by localroger at 7:58 PM on April 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

Well Australia's the place for promoting drip-fed obsessions, and Australia needs a manufacturing industry. We're all in for an intractable dose of the Abbott government's JACC.

Today's search and recovery brief.
What stock-standard rhetorical rot.

Today's cumulative search area map.
That southernmost section is probably where the subsurface activity is. Maybe.

This snippet is a classic: HMS Echo is en route to assist the Chinese vessel Haixun 01, which detected pulse signals in the Indian Ocean.
The Indian Ocean! Oh good.

And who is HMS Tireless assisting?

Take heart: You're not going mad -- getting any unclassified information from an Abbott government shield is like pulling teeth because everything becomes classified; we should thank our lucky stars Celine Dion won't be around to do the theme song; and Angus Houston, when questioned about why the Ocean Shield and Echo swept that all important 240km path, did manage to disclose "Well, that area has been picked because on the basis of the analysis and, as you know, it's on the basis of the six hours of pings [...] there was an additional ping where we think the aircraft might have run out of fuel."

Small mercies.
posted by de at 8:10 PM on April 6, 2014

JACC news conference: The Ocean Shield may have picked up the real thing (usual notes of caution). JACC has updated their media report with a map showing the underwater search area, the arc of the partial handshake, and location of signals picked up by the Ocean Shield and the Haixun 01.
posted by nangar at 2:28 AM on April 7, 2014

from nangar's press conference link: ...[Ocean Shield] has detected signals consistent with those emitted by aircraft black boxes. Two separate signal detections have occurred within the northern part of the defined search area. The first detection was held for approx 2 hrs and 20 minutes. The ship then lost contact before conducting a turn and attempting to reacquire a signal. The second detection on the return leg was held for approx 13 minutes. On this occasion two distinct pinger returns were audible. Significantly this would be consistent with transmissions from both the Flight Data Recorder and the Cockpit Voice Recorder...

To quote Winston Churchill: Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 3:37 AM on April 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

This thread is due to close soon. I hope someone opens a new one because we're clearly not done with this story.
posted by barnacles at 4:05 AM on April 7, 2014 [9 favorites]

JACC's media releases
AMSA's media kits (daily search maps)
MOT's Facebook page

divabat's fact-checking blog
Duncan Steel's blog
PPRuNe thread

Guardian coverage

What am I leaving out? It might be good to include more news media links. And it might make sense to wait a bit and see if the search teams locate any wreckage.
posted by nangar at 5:09 AM on April 7, 2014 [2 favorites]

This thread is due to close soon.

Wow. It's been an entire month already.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 6:21 AM on April 7, 2014 [3 favorites]

Transcript of JACC's press conference.
posted by nangar at 7:37 AM on April 7, 2014

What am I leaving out?

Just how measured Australian authorities are with the release of information. Houston is quietly popping corks (and probably over being annoyed at losing the tasking of Echo to Haixun 01's press leak).

This is the first time a map of the subsurface search area has been released; and still no mention of HMS Tireless.
posted by de at 7:46 AM on April 7, 2014

This thread dies approximately at the same time as the batteries powering the pingers.
posted by jjwiseman at 11:40 AM on April 7, 2014 [19 favorites]

The Aviation Herald's page.
posted by kiltedtaco at 12:34 PM on April 7, 2014 [3 favorites]

This thread dies approximately at the same time as the batteries powering the pingers.

That is an eerie, creepy thought.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 4:19 PM on April 7, 2014 [2 favorites]

See you when HMS Tireless surfaces; Houston mentioned 'a few days'. Tireless arrived 5 days ago and there's not been a peep since.

We'll find it. Retrieval may be a mother (but only of invention).
posted by de at 7:39 PM on April 7, 2014

Good Night Malaysian Three Seven Zero...
posted by mazola at 8:47 PM on April 7, 2014 [24 favorites]