Lost Jet’s Path Seen as Altered via Computer

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-flight.html?hp

by OWaz • 12 years ago

96 77 12 years ago

nytimes.com

andrewrice• 12 years ago

So is mechanical failure still in play?

matznerd• 12 years ago

It seems that something intentional brought the flight off of the original flight plan.

Steko4• 12 years ago

Intentional =/= terrorist hijacking/pilot suicide/random heist theory. A pilot trying to save an aircraft does things intentionally.

Steko4• 12 years ago

This doesn't disqualify a primarily mechanical reason.

alexeisadeski37• 12 years ago

Mechanical failure hasn't really been in play since the satellite data was released.

omarali• 12 years ago

Non-paywall link https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

fizx• 12 years ago

Or incognito.

notastartup• 12 years ago

thank you. Feel like an idiot trying to press the STOP button repeatedly in an attempt to prevent the pay me to read a few paragraphs thing.

joshlegs• 12 years ago

i think this is actually part of the business model a few newspapers are trying to take on. More of a 'gently encourage' people to buy subscriptions rather than a hard and fast 'Brick Wall' paywall. From what I hear, it's working pretty well.

nthitz• 12 years ago

Well, piracy is certainly not always a distribution problem.

aleem• 12 years ago

It's by design. It's called a leaky paywall.

e28eta• 12 years ago

I wonder if the other 3-4 satellite keep-alive transmissions would narrow down the potential area any?

Aloha• 12 years ago

Not unless the transmissions include that data, its not discernible from a single sat, beyond wide geographic area.

jonah• 12 years ago

How was this known? Do changes get relayed back?

sidww2• 12 years ago

ACARS is what the article seems to be saying is how they know. Last ACARS transmission was 1:07 am. Any pilots here who know whether ACARS actually transmits FMS information?

Edit: And if the report is correct and ACARS sent the information all along, why in the world did it take them 10 DAYS to find this out?

tim333• 12 years ago

According to wikipedia ACARS can include FMS info. It is odd that this has taken 10 days and even now is kind of leaked by "an American official". You'd think they would have checked that stuff straight away and made it at least semi public so aircraft experts could check it out.

Paddywack3• 12 years ago

My conspiracy theory:

The plane was hijacked and there has been contact with Malaysia/China/USA. One of the conditions for hostages to be held safely is that the Authorities do not make this public.

This would explain:

- the otherwise unbelievable delays and pure misinformation by the Malaysian government. Stalling for time.

- the fact that they did not publicly do background checks on all passengers until recently. They already know who the hijacker is. Now that there is pressure because of elapsed time and that people are seeing holes in the story, they need to be seen to be doing something.

What makes this implausible:

- it still does not explain where the plane landed and has been hidden without trace in the interim (perhaps they know - NW Pakistan, NE Afghanistan maybe, and just can't get to it without harming the hostages)

- it would be a diplomatic nightmare to have countries using their assets in a futile search when Malaysia already knows what has happened. (On the other hand, if they took 20 countries into their confidence then they would definitely have had a leak by now.)

- talking of leaks - I am sure even if it was a tightly held secret that they were in hostage negotiations, someone would have made it public by now. That's just the way things are these days.

EDIT: Formatting

mseebach• 12 years ago

You theory is plausible, but there is no need to explain the lack of public information. It's entirely reasonable that the investigators doesn't feel they require the inputs of thousands of amateurs and thus publicizing every shred of evidence they come across just isn't a priority(1).

Specifically addressing public background checks on all passengers: These are people whose families are grieving. The have a completely reasonable expectation of privacy, and I don't think there is good reason to ever publish any but the most rudimentary of information on these individuals.

Can you imagine a loved one dying in mysterious conditions and then have Reddit shred through their background information and publishing conspiracy theories about a link between their experimenting with drugs in college, a painful divorce and how that means they might be a suicide-hijacker (or whatever)?

1: I'm not saying there's no value in it, there are clearly some capable people pitching in left and right, but it's a radical paradigm shift in investigation, and while you're looking for a missing aircraft is a time for sticking to procedure, not undertaking paradigm shifts.

Paddywack3• 12 years ago

Hi. I agree with a lot of what you say. However, the information that I am referring to was plausible and already in the public domain, but that they were refuting.

Examples of this are the delay between the two comms engines being switched off; the Rolls Royce engine data; and their military satellites.

All of this information was gleaned from reliable sources [their own military, the engine manufacturer, the normal ATC systems], and you are 100% correct in that it should have been verified before being released. But, my point is that the delay between the time the information first came to light [even through leaks] in release was just too excruciating long to comprehend. In the interim flatly they denied that the information even existed. I can only assume that some of the leaks from "official sources" were in part because they knew that materially[1] important reliable information was being held back.

On another note - I do feel for the families. The mis-information, delays and incorrect denials are only adding to the speculation. There must be a better way to report information.

[1]= Materially important to quelling speculation. Material to re-directing the futile searches in the wrong places.

alexeisadeski37• 12 years ago

More plausible than a lot of stuff that's been posted.

However, if true... You'd expect DevGru or Legionnaires or whatever the Chinese equivalent is to have acted by now.

sleepyhead2• 12 years ago

- the otherwise unbelievable delays and pure misinformation by the Malaysian government. Stalling for time.

Except that this is exactly how the Malaysian government usually operates. I have lived there for a year and can tell you that the Malaysian government is incompetent. Also they are used to talking to the local media which they control (and who is also incompetent).

the fact that they did not publicly do background checks on all passengers until recently. They already know who the hijacker is. Now that there is pressure because of elapsed time and that people are seeing holes in the story, they need to be seen to be doing something.

See above.

Paddywack3• 12 years ago

Oddly enough, I have lived there for a year as well.

I agree that the government is incompetent, partly because of cronyism and largely because of terribly applied affirmative action.

However, I did think that the enormous international support combined with international pressure would have helped mitigate this. They seem to respond well to international pressure - I always believed that most of their best achievements (of which there are a few) have come as a result of the perpetual pissing contest with neighbouring Singapore (not that I am sure Singapore even cares!).

dandelany3• 12 years ago

The Times seems to quote officials as saying they know this via ACARS messages. However, assuming the primary radar returns are good enough, this is reasonably inferred by its radar track alone - the chances of hitting 4 separate navigation waypoints (IGARI, VAMPI, GIVAL, IGREX) based on random human flying is pretty much nil. So this may be just confirmation of what most investigators were already assuming.

Sad as it is to say, at this point I think the most likely cause is a bizarre pilot suicide. That night one of the pilots likely allowed a dark, dark thought they once had to overtake them for some reason.

First this person programmed a set of remote 5-letter nav waypoints into the FMC without the other pilot noticing - not a difficult task by my understanding. Most likely to hide the evidence for insurance reasons, or just out of shame, to hide his actions from the world (a long flight also ensures the CVR will tape over the relevant bits after its 120min loop - CVR/FDR is one of the few things that cannot be disabled from the cockpit of a 777).

After the radio handoff, the other pilot left the cockpit for a moment. The perpetrator then set the transponder to standby and disabled ACARS messages from being sent via both VHF and SATCOM. Finally, in order to ensure hypoxia took hold quickly, he set the plane to climb as high as the autopilot would take it (which ended up being ~FL450), and then depressurized the plane, quickly and painlessly killing everyone aboard, including himself. Multiple airline pilots in the airliners.net forums have been discussing these possibilities and they seem to agree that all of these things can be performed by a single pilot, in a few minutes time, entirely from the cockpit. The ghost plane then flew the programmed route until running out of fuel.

While this is certainly bizarre, unlikely, and hard to fathom, I posit that it is the least unlikely scenario, because it can be done entirely by one person whose motives we don't understand. Historically, there have been many people who have done bizarre, horrendous things for motives we can't begin to understand - whether due to insanity, sociopathy or zealotry. I truly hope I'm wrong, but I just can't see a grand multinational hijacking conspiracy as being more likely than a sad man wishing to end his sad life in an evil way.

If you're thinking of replying to this with your own theory, let me just add that I say all of this not to add flame to the fire of speculation, or to accuse a potentially innocent man of mass murder, but to try and finally put the whole thing to rest in my own mind - I seem to have been rather obsessed with the whole story over the past few days. While the past week has been a flurry of information and misinformation, it's quite likely we will never know what happened to MH370, at least not for a very long time. We need to find the explanations for ourselves that allow us to come to peace with the incident personally, so that we can collectively move on at some point.

opendomain• 12 years ago

How can a pilot depressurize a plane? It seems crazy that this would be allowed while in flight unless there is a fire or some other emergency.

dandelany3• 12 years ago

I am certainly not an expert but I'm basing this off of a discussion in the airliners.net forum among users who generally know what they're talking about:

"Quoting nupogodi (Reply 178): Now, mandala, I have another question for you: I have heard that the outflow valves will not allow cabin altitude to drop below 14000ft as long as bleed air is working. Can you confirm or deny that? Is it possible to completely depressurize the aircraft without turning off in the "inflow" (don't know the jargon) ? If so, wouldn't the flight deck and cabin quickly grow incredibly cold? Or do you think intentional decompression is a valid hypothesis?"

"Turn pressurization to manual, open the valves... it will depressurize... Wanna make it quicker, just turn off the bleeds too (inflow)... Just pressing a few buttons... the longer button is the outflow valve in manual... Mandala499"

If anyone has information proving otherwise, I'd definitely be interested to hear it. Certainly a bit of a scary thought.

sokoloff• 12 years ago

That's the thing. Your "unless..." clause is the key element.

As background, I fly a twin engine piston airplane that's pressurized (Beech 58P). Different level of responsibility from a 777-ER (I have only 6 seats, including my own), but many of the same basic design principles apply.

My cabin is pressurized by air coming off the turbos (the turbos "make" higher than ambient pressure air, and that is fed into the cabin after passing through a restrictor and an intercooler). Turbines (jets and turbo-props) pressurize from bleed air (also high pressure air created in the engine, but via a different physical mechanism.)

If I have an engine or turbo failure, I need to be able to isolate the cabin from the smoke/fumes/fire that may be present on that engine. So, I have a red knob that can isolate the cabin from the feed from that side (and another knob that will isolate the other side).

Similarly, I have a cabin pressure controller, and on that a cabin dump switch. The controller controls a single outflow valve at the rear of the cabin, about the cross-section of a roll of toilet paper, and there is a second, spring-loaded valve of the same size that's designed to automatically open if the cabin were at risk of over-pressurization.

It would be trivial for me to dump the cabin quickly with a single switch. This results in a cabin rate of climb of over 3K feet per minute, which is painful on the ears, and within minutes the cabin will climb to the aircraft altitude. (I test virtually all of the systems annually prior to the annual major maintenance event, such that if a system has failed, I can have it addressed during major maintenance.)

Why is there a dump switch at all? Dumping the cabin is a great way to clear the cabin of smoke, so in the event of an electrical fire or smoke, once the situation is contained, I can dump the cabin, venting all the toxic smoke inside to the outside, with a supply of "clean" higher-pressure air entering at the front. Once the smoke has cleared, I close the outflow valve to re-pressurize the cabin from the engines.

The point of this wall of text is that aircraft are designed assuming that someday something will fail. When it fails, the pilots, assumed to be the "good guy", need to have the best chance possible to react.

All common, and many uncommon, failures have a specific checklist response, sometimes with initial items from memory. (With an engine on fire, you want to perform the initial response from memory, backing it up later with the written checklist.)

No plane is designed to protect the occupants from a pilot intent on killing everyone on board. The pilot has any number of ways to do that, so it's counter-productive to prevent the 99.99% emergencies from being responded to by a well-intentioned pilot in order to prevent the occasional madman from killing all aboard.

dm2• 12 years ago

I haven't heard anyone talk about the possibility of a pilot being paid to steal the plane.

A human has to be seriously mentally ill to kill over 200 people during a planned suicide.

When the transponders are turned off and communication can't be established shouldn't jets be scrambled to intercept or find that aircraft immediately? Military radar on jets would have found that aircraft if it was still in the air, right?

dandelany3• 12 years ago

Again, I find a single man's serious mental illness far more likely than a conspiracy to commit mass murder and theft. As for the military radar/jets - this incident has exposed a pretty big flaw in Malaysian airspace security, which likely explains why they've been so hesitant and late to communicate the facts of the primary radar track. If this had happened in America, Russia, China or the Middle East, you'd almost certainly be right.

kiiski• 12 years ago

Suicide like that is not unheard of. EgyptAir Flight 990: 217 dead[1] SilkAir Flight 185: 104 dead[2]

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SilkAir_Flight_185

omegant5• 12 years ago

Commercial pilot here, while possible (almost everything is possible at this moment), I don´t think it was a suicide, they even say at the article that if this is a suicide it´s inconsistent with previous cases where the pilot just pushed the controls and dived to the ground. Why it´s too complicated?:

-To kill everybody via hypoxia you don´t need to climb to Flight Level 450 (45k feet). FL350 works just as good, the difference in the time of useful consciousness is 10 to 15 secs (from 35' at 350 to 15' at 450), not worth the trouble of climbing and possibly stalling the plane. After that time you either pass out or you start not knowing what you are doing.

-You don´t need to turn and fly for 6+ hours to random points, just keep your flight plan and selected altitude and the airplane will behave like the Helios (flying till the end of the flight plan and then holding till running out of fuel)

-Why flying for 6 hours if you want to suicide? passenger oxygen only works 15 min (time enough to reach a breathable altitude), the portable oxygen tanks for the auxiliary crew will work for 30 min more or less.. Look at this video of hypoxia test at 25k feet to see how fast you pass out http://youtu.be/hSrGfElyfVE

-why disconnect the communications? you only need to ignore them. why bother with the ACARS?

So far all the things are more consistent with a hijacking done by someone with some knowledge of flying a plane (like asking pilots to shut down coms, climbing descending, turning, introducing a waypoint), but not enough to know that flying at FL450 it´s so unstable for a plane like this, or that you´ll eventually will run out of fuel.

Also I must say that all theories are taking in to account good and skilled pilots and rational decisions at the cockpit (maybe from the hijacker). The captain really seems to be a skilled professional, but I don´t know about the flight officer. Friends of mine who are flying at Asian companies complain all the time how awful the instruction and flying skills are there. For example the pilots of the Asiana that crashed at SF just lacked basic flight skills, like using the thrust levers to do a normal landing. At china the flight officers are NOT allowed to take off, land or touch the controls below 1000' (How can you be a pilot without knowing how to land?, what happens if the captain has a heart stroke?). But I don´t know how good it´s pilot instruction at Malaysia Airlines.

I´ve seen very strange results during simulators when trying to solve emergencies, and all where very capable pilots. After all airplanes are very complex systems working in very different scenarios. Corrected procedures and system fixes are constant even on models that have been flying for 20+ years.

What I mean is that yet another possibility, is that the weird behavior is caused by some kind of emergency that went wrong somehow while trying to fix it, maybe due to a momentary bad decision that made everything more difficult, or just plain incompetence.

Also you can not trust all the theories and data they are releasing, it might be a bad interpretation, or just plainly wrong. For example, look at the Malaysian government, they told everybody that they lost track of the flight at one point. Everybody supposed that it was the actual point where they lost ALL contact (primary, secondary and acars), but it was just the secondary radar...and it took them almost a week to realize this. As this point is the ABC of Search and Rescue knowledge, I can not even imaging how many things they are screwing during this search..

edit to finish an incomplete sentence edit 2 missing words and improving some sentences

leoc4• 12 years ago

I´ve seen very strange results during simulators when trying to solve emergencies, and all where very capable pilots. After all airplanes are very complex systems working in very different scenarios. Corrected procedures and system fixes are constant even on models that have been flying for 20+ years.

The initial behaviour of the plane around the time the transponders went out seems very possible to explain in terms of a less-than-perfect response to a sudden emergency. But how could one square a) making a series of direction and altitude changes over a longish period of time, well after the initial incident, b) no attempt to communicate at the same time and c) at most, limited damage to the plane's systems with d) no foul play? It seems that at least one of those has to give...

matt-attack2• 12 years ago

time of useful consciousness is 10 to 15 secs

Can't most people hold their breath a lot longer than that? 30 sec seems like a minimum for the average person.

matt-attack2• 12 years ago

It'd be neat if autopilot was smart enough to know that it can't make its next waypoint, and therefore will attempt to land the plane on its own.

Are we just not there yet technology wise? I thought planes could in fact land themselves.

harshreality2• 12 years ago

The map with overlayed position information shows an arc of possible last positions given the position of the satellite that received the last known signal.

Edit: the satellite getting ACARS pings is apparently geosynchronous, so triangulation is not possible, but...

What is the arc of the final position based on? The Earth is not flat, and geosynchronous satellites are at about 36,000 km altitude (compare to Earth's radius of about 6375 km). Shouldn't the position, if based on ranging from a geosynchronous satellite, be much closer to a straight line (and actually dipping to lower altitudes in the center)? Why does the graphic appear to depict a range from a point low over the Indian ocean rather than a point in geostationary orbit?

What possible location or ranging information could create an arc like that? If the ping was not to a geosynchronous satellite, that raises questions—the ping couldn't have been from the ACARS system, and it would mean triangulation might be possible.

Could it be a range from a low earth orbit satellite, or an over the horizon communications system? In the middle of the Indian ocean? The only thing even close to that is Diego Garcia, but the illustrated location is several hundred miles north of Diego Garcia. I'm discounting over-the-horizon radar, because I think that would have to mean they knew which blip was the missing plane, and isn't the only way to know that to be tracking it?

What about the second to last known signal, or the third to last? Given that we're not talking about arcs from points low over the Indian ocean, but from a point in high orbit, and the plane can only be within an ~8 mile slice from max altitude to the ground, and given that the earth is also curving away from the satellite, how can the arc of possible positions from the final ping cover that much ground?

Australia has radar coverage of some of the southern area where the plane might have been. Are we to believe nobody's checked Australian radar logs to eliminate part of the southern arc of final positions depicted?

Is this search being run by incompetent officials, or are they releasing purposefully incomplete or inaccurate information to the press, or is there some mysterious reason why they generated an arc like that from a geosynchronous satellite and why prior ACARS pings or radar logs don't help narrow the search area at all?

dingaling• 12 years ago

The satellite(s) that received those won't be in the same place,

Yes they will - the INMARSAT satellites are in geostationary orbit.

The arcs are derived from the areas where there is no overlap of coverage between those satellites.

tom_morrow• 12 years ago

the inmarsat satellites are on geostationary orbits.

the "4 or 5 undisclosed-to-the-public satcom ping data" might remain undisclosed due to a) already having been used to provide the resulting location estimate of the "last ping" or b) the data being deemed uninteresting or c) the usual combination of bureaucracy, secrecy, perceived nefarious aims and observed incompetent means.

JumpCrisscross• 12 years ago

Is this search being run by incompetent officials...?

You wouldn't be the first to call the Malaysians incompetent.

Vietnam has voiced concerns over "receiving 'insufficient information' from the Malaysian side." China, too, has found "'too much confusion' over Malaysia’s release of information."

The FT blames Malaysia's opaque political system. Malaysia has been lead by one party since 1957. The press is "either state-controlled or is instinctively government-leaning". Malaysia's system of affirmative action, which extends to the government, makes matters worse. It has fostered "a system where appointments are not always made on merit." Worse, "not only are non-Malays excluded but competent Malays are excluded as well if they happen not to be on the right side of the political divide."

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/307829fe-aac7-11e3-83a2-00144...

willyt• 12 years ago

Re the other pings. I have read elsewhere that the trip time for the ping is an implementation detail which is stored in some kind of routing table on board the satellite. It's used to calculate an efficient time division multiplexing strategy for the RF transmission protocol used. Hence only the trip time from the last ping is cached. There are records of previous successful pings, just not with any trip time data. The trip time data is what give you the diameter of circle to search on. The remaining arcs are the parts thought to have been within range given the fuel and flight time so far. Pings apparently occur every hour. The 'thickness' of the line of the arc is up to 1 hours flight time depending on how much longer the plane flew on after the last ping. Edited to clarify stuff about arcs and pings.

harshreality2• 12 years ago

Not sure what I was thinking regarding the arc and the satellite positioning. That part of the infographic makes sense.

trackofalljades• 12 years ago

This sounds pretty reasonable, and I have absolutely no technical expertise or personal experience with which to refute it, but does this fit with the claim by Rolls Royce that the engines' feedback systems were still talking to them well after the course change?

If you "pull the busses" do the engines still have the ability to send their telemetry data?

ccarpenterg• 12 years ago

Maldives island residents report sighting of 'low flying jet'

Source: http://www.haveeru.com.mv/news/54062

ejdyksen• 12 years ago

American officials and aviation experts said it was far-fetched to believe that a passenger could have reprogrammed the Flight Management System.

Unlikely? Sure. Far-fetched? Not as far-fetched as many other ideas that have been floated recently.

I recently bought a highly realistic 777 model for MS Flight Simulator X [1], and it has a very good replica Flight Management Computer. Also, when you purchase the software, it comes with thousands of pages of manuals for the real jet.

You can see the FMC being programmed inside the simulator here [2].

[1] https://www.precisionmanuals.com/pages/product/777LRF.html

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gx_NkdZEGE0&t=0m30s

Lost Jet’s Path Seen as Altered via Computer

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