JEWISH KING JESUS IS COMING AT THE RAPTURE FOR US IN THE CLOUDS-DON'T MISS IT FOR THE WORLD.THE BIBLE TAKEN LITERALLY- WHEN THE PLAIN SENSE MAKES GOOD SENSE-SEEK NO OTHER SENSE-LEST YOU END UP IN NONSENSE.
OTHER MH370 STORIES I DONE
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-42-mh370-missing-plane-search-goes.html
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-41-mh370-missing-plane-search-goes.html
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-40-mh370-missing-plane-search-goes.html
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-39-mh370-missing-plane-search-goes.html
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-38-mh370-missing-plane-search-goes.html
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-37-mh370-missing-plane-narrowing.html
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-36-mh370-missing-plane-narrowing.html
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-35-mh370-missing-plane-narrowing.html
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-34-mh370-missing-plane-narrowing.html
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-33-mh370-missing-plane-what.html
LINKS FROM DAYS 1 TO 32 ABOUT MH370-777-200ER SEARCH
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-32-mh370-missing-plane-they-may.html
THE MISSING PLANE MH370 SITUATION AT 12:03AM SAT APR 19,2014
-indiatimes.com
We Gotta drive Home the truth-That the citizens of MH370-777-200ER Could be Kidnapped And we want them back Home.-chinasmack.com
The Family members can not be comforted till they Get Answers for their loved ones Lives back home or found in the Ocean.They need Answers so their grieving can have some closure.
Search and recovery continues for Malaysian flight MH370
Media Release-19 April 2014—am-JACC
Up to 11 military aircraft and 12 ships will assist in today's search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.Today the Australian Maritime Safety Authority has planned a visual search area totalling approximately 50,200 square kilometres, across three areas.Overnight Bluefin-21 AUV completed mission six in the underwater search area. Bluefin-21 has searched approximately 133 square kilometres to date. Data from the sixth mission is currently under analysis. No contacts of interest have been found to date.Bluefin-21 AUV's seventh mission has commenced. The weather forecast for today is isolated showers and south easterly winds.
-JACC
Current underwater search for Malaysia plane could end within a week
By Matt Siegel and Byron Kaye -APR 19,14-YahooNewsSYDNEY/PERTH, Australia (Reuters) - The current underwater search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, focused on a tight 10 km (6.2 mile) circle of the sea floor, could be completed within a week, Australian search officials said on Saturday.Malaysia said the search was at a "very critical juncture" and asked for prayers for its success.A U.S. Navy deep-sea autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is scouring a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean floor for signs of the plane, which disappeared from radars on March 8 with 239 people on board.After almost two months without a sign of wreckage, the current underwater search has been narrowed to a small area around the location in which one of four acoustic signals believed to be from the plane's black box recorders was detected on April 8, officials said."Provided the weather is favorable for launch and recovery of the AUV and we have a good run with the serviceability of the AUV, we should complete the search of the focused underwater area in five to seven days," the Joint Agency Coordination Centre told Reuters in an email.Officials did not indicate whether they were confident that this search area would yield any new information about the flight, nor did they state what steps they would take in the event that the underwater search were to prove fruitless.More than two dozen countries have been involved in the hunt.for the Boeing 777 disappeared from radar shortly into a Kuala Lumpur to Beijing flight in what officials believe was a deliberate act.Weeks of daily sorties have failed to turn up any trace of the plane, even after narrowing the search to an arc in the southern Indian Ocean, making this the most expensive such operation in aviation history."It is important to focus on today and tomorrow. Narrowing of the search area today and tomorrow is at a very critical juncture," Malaysian Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a media conference in Kuala Lumpur, asking for people to pray for success. Malaysia was asking oil companies and others in the commercial sector to provide assets that might help in the search, Hishammuddin added, after earlier saying more AUVs might be used.
DRONE GOES DEEPER THAN EVER BEFOREAfter almost two weeks without picking up any acoustic signals, and long past the black box battery's 30-day life expectancy, authorities are increasingly reliant on the $4 million U.S. Bluefin-21 drone, which on Saturday was expected to have dived to unprecedented depths.Because visual searches of the ocean surface have yielded no concrete evidence, the drone, with its ability to search deep beneath the ocean surface with "side scan" sonar, has become the focal point of the search 2,000 km (1,200 miles) northwest of the Australian city of Perth.The search has thus far centered on a city-sized area where a series of "pings" led authorities to believe the plane's black box may be located. The current refined search area is based on one such transmission.After the drone's searches were frustrated by an automatic safety mechanism which returns it to the surface when it exceeds a depth of 4.5 km (14,763 feet), authorities have adjusted the mechanism and have sent it as deep as 4,695 meters (15,403 feet), a record for the machine.But hopes that it might soon guide searchers to wreckage are dwindling with no sign of the plane after six deployments spanning 133 square kilometers (83 square miles). Footage from the drone's sixth mission was still being analyzed, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre said on Saturday.On Monday, the search coordinator, retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, said the air and surface search for debris would likely end by midweek as the operation shifted its focus to the ocean floor.But the air and surface searches have continued daily, and on Saturday the Joint Agency Coordination Centre said up to 11 military aircraft and 12 ships would help with the Saturday's search covering about 50,200 square kilometers (31,000 square miles) across three areas."The search will always continue," Hishammuddin said. "It's just a matter of approach."(Editing by Lincoln Feast and Nick Macfie)
Data Doesn’t Lie?-The fuzzy math behind the search for MH370.-By Jeff Wise
MH370 Search A Royal New Zealand Air Force P3 Orion aircraft searches for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, over the Indian Ocean on March 31, 2014.
Five weeks into the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, more than $30 million has been spent scouring great swatches of the southern Indian Ocean. Yet searchers have still not found a single piece of physical evidence such as wreckage or human remains. Last week, Australian authorities said they were confident that a series of acoustic pings detected 1,000 miles northwest of Perth had come from the aircraft’s black boxes, and that wreckage would soon be found. But repeated searches by a robotic submarine have so far failed to find the source of the pings, which experts say could have come from marine animals or even from the searching ships themselves. Prime Minister Tony Abbott admitted that if wreckage wasn’t located within a week or two “we stop, we regroup, we reconsider.”There remains only one publically available piece of evidence linking the plane to the southern Indian Ocean: a report issued by the Malaysian government on March 25 that described a new analysis carried out by the U.K.-based satellite operator Inmarsat. The report said that Inmarsat had developed an “innovative technique” to establish that the plane had most likely taken a southerly heading after vanishing. Yet independent experts who have analyzed the report say that it is riddled with inconsistencies and that the data it presents to justify its conclusion appears to have been fudged.
The mystery of MH370 is looking more impenetrable by the moment.
Some background: For the first few days after MH370 disappeared, no one had any idea what might have happened to the plane after it left Malaysian radar coverage around 2:30 a.m., local time, on March 8, 2014. Then, a week later, Inmarsat reported that its engineers had noticed that in the hours after the plane’s disappearance, the plane had continued to exchange data-less electronic handshakes, or “pings,” with a geostationary satellite over the Indian Ocean. In all, a total of eight pings were exchanged.Each ping conveyed only a tiny amount of data: the time it was received, the distance the airplane was from the satellite at that instant, and the relative velocity between the airplane and the satellite. Taken together, these tiny pieces of information made it possible to narrow down the range of possible routes that the plane might have taken. If the plane was presumed to have traveled to the south at a steady 450 knots, for instance, then Inmarsat could trace a curving route that wound up deep in the Indian Ocean southwest of Perth, Australia. Accordingly, ships and planes began to scour that part of the ocean, and when satellite imagery revealed a scattering of debris in the area, the Australian prime minister declared in front of parliament that it represented “new and credible information” about the fate of the airplane.The problem with this kind of analysis is that, taken by themselves, the ping data are ambiguous. Given a presumed starting point, any reconstructed route could have headed off in either direction. A plane following the speed and heading to arrive at the southern search area could have also headed to the north and wound up in Kazakhstan. Why, then, were investigators scouring the south and not the north? The March 25 report stated that Inmarsat had used a new kind of mathematical analysis to rule out a northern route. Without being very precise in its description, it implied that the analysis might have depended on a small but telling wobble of the Inmarsat satellite’s orbit. Accompanying the written report was an appendix, called Annex I, that consisted of three diagrams, the second of which was titled “MH370 measured data against predicted tracks" and appeared to sum up the case against the northern route in one compelling image. One line on the graph showed the predicted Doppler shift for a plane traveling along a northern route; another line showed the predicted Doppler shift for a plane flying along a southern route. A third line, showing the actual data received by Inmarsat, matched the southern route almost perfectly, and looked markedly different from the northern route. Case closed.
The report did not explicitly enumerate the three data points for each ping, but around the world, enthusiasts from a variety of disciplines threw themselves into reverse-engineering that original data out of the charts and diagrams in the report. With this information in hand, they believed, it would be possible to construct any number of possible routes and check the assertion that the plane must have flown to the south.Unfortunately, it soon became clear that Inmarsat had presented its data in a way that made this goal impossible: “There simply isn't enough information in the report to reconstruct the original data,” says Scott Morgan, the former commander of the US Air Force Rescue Coordination Center. “We don’t know what their assumptions are going into this.”Another expert who tried to understand Inmarsat’s report was Mike Exner, CEO of the remote sensing company Radiometrics Inc. He mathematically processed the “Burst Frequency Offset” values on Page 2 of Annex 1 and was able to derive figures for relative velocity between the aircraft and the satellite. He found, however, that no matter how he tried, he could not get his values to match those implied by the possible routes shown on Page 3 of the annex. “They look like cartoons to me,” says Exner.Even more significantly, I haven’t found anybody who has independently analyzed the Inmarsat report and has been able to figure out what kind of northern route could yield the values shown on Page 2 of the annex. According to the March 25 report, Inmarsat teased out the small differences predicted to exist between the Doppler shift values between the northern and southern routes. This difference, presumably caused by the slight wobble in the satellite’s orbit that I mentioned above, should be tiny—according to Exner’s analysis, no more than a few percent of the total velocity value. And yet Page 2 of the annex shows a radically different set of values between the northern and southern routes. “Neither the northern or southern predicted routes make any sense,” says Exner.
Given the discrepancies and inaccuracies, it has proven impossible for independent observers to validate Inmarsat’s assertion that it can rule out a northern route for the airplane. “It’s really impossible to reproduce what the Inmarsat folks claim,” says Hans Kruse, a professor of telecommunications systems at Ohio University.This is not to say that Inmarsat’s conclusions are necessarily incorrect. (In the past I have made the case that the northern route might be possible, but I’m not trying to beat that drum here.) Its engineers are widely regarded as top-drawer, paragons of meticulousness in an industry that is obsessive about attention to detail. But their work has been presented to the public by authorities whose inconsistency and lack of transparency have time and again undermined public confidence. It’s worrying that the report appears to have been composed in such a way as to make it impossible for anyone to independently assess its validity—especially given that its ostensible purpose was to explain to the world Inmarsat’s momentous conclusions. What frustrated, grieving family members need from the authorities is clarity and trustworthiness, not a smokescreen.Inmarsat has not replied to my request for a clarification of their methods. This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that in recent days experts had “recalibrated data” in part by using “arcane new calculations reflecting changes in the operating temperatures of an Inmarsat satellite as well as the communications equipment aboard the Boeing when the two systems exchanged so-called digital handshakes.” But again, not enough information has been provided for the public to assess the validity of these methods.It would be nice if Inmarsat would throw open its spreadsheets and help resolve the issue right now, but that could be too much to expect. Inmarsat may be bound by confidentiality agreements with its customers, not to mention U.S. laws that restrict the release of information about sensitive technologies. The Malaysian authorities, however, can release what they want to—and they seem to be shifting their stance toward openness. After long resisting pressure to release the air traffic control transcript, they eventually relented. Now acting transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein says that if and when the black boxes are found, their data will be released to the public.With the search for surface debris winding down, the mystery of MH370 is looking more impenetrable by the moment. If the effort to find the plane using an underwater robot comes up empty, then there should be a long and sustained call for the Malaysian authorities to reveal their data and explain exactly how they came to their conclusions.Because at that point, it will be all we’ve got.This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.Jeff Wise is a New York-based magazine writer and author of Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger. A contributing editor at Popular Mechanics and Travel + Leisure, he specializes in aviation, adventure, and psychology. He tweets as @ManvBrain and blogs at JeffWise.net.
New Data, Analysis and Luck Help Narrow Flight 370 Search Zone-Officials Factored In Satellite Temperature, Other Aircraft Speeds, Boeing Performance Calculations-By Daniel Stacey,Andy Pasztor and Jon Ostrower-connect-Updated April 16, 2014 9:35 p.m. ET-WALL STREET JOURNAL
Crews inspect the U.S. Navy's Bluefin-21 submersible, which has encountered technical problems this week in the search for the Malaysian jet. TK-A combination of cutting-edge science, dogged analysis and simple luck prompted searchers to focus the hunt for Malaysia Airlines 3786.KU -4.35% Flight 370 underwater, just days before the plane's black box recorders were expected to fall silent.Authorities got a first look at the sea floor Tuesday in an area that they believe is the jet's likely location, without detecting any wreckage. Hopes rest on a remote-controlled submersible from the U.S. Navy, which is seeking the first visual confirmation of wreckage that could lead investigators to the all-important recorders.It's a turn of events that seemed unimaginable less than two weeks ago, after an extensive air and sea hunt for surface debris had turned up little more than garbage. The frequent and seemingly fruitless shifts in the aerial search frustrated investigators and eroded the confidence of the public and families of the victims. The current effort may yet turn out to be another false lead.Staff at satellite communications company Inmarsat work in front of a screen showing subscribers using their service throughout the world, at their headquarters in London on March 25. Reuters.But over the past 11 days, an international team of experts has persistently recalibrated data and capitalized on new streams of information to zero in on a tight corridor in the southern Indian Ocean, according to senior Australian government officials, investigators from several countries and others briefed on the probe.The decision to narrow the search on April 4 amounted to a carefully calculated gamble. Investigators incorporated arcane new calculations reflecting changes in the operating temperatures of an Inmarsat ISAT.LN +0.07% PLC satellite as well as the communications equipment aboard the Boeing BA +1.49% 777 when the two systems exchanged so-called digital handshakes. Those links occurred regularly for some six hours after the plane deviated from its original flight path to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, and then headed south.The new analysis provided investigators with a "sweet spot" to begin the underwater search, initially using a black-box detector in an area of sea some 500 kilometers to the north of where military aircraft and ships had previously been looking, said Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.The international working group established by Malaysia to investigate the crash, which included U.S., British, and French technical experts, assembled the new analysis, which the ATSB vetted before incorporating into the Australian-lead search."There's a set of assumptions, some of which are factually checkable, others of which remain assumptions," Mr. Dolan told The Wall Street Journal. "We knew we were running out of time."The revised data also indicated the jet, carrying 239 people, may have been flying toward the Western Australian city of Perth and possibly traveling on autopilot when it crashed on March 8, though those specifics haven't been confirmed, he said.Nine days after the jet disappeared from civilian radar, search crews spent 10 days scouring an area of ocean for floating wreckage without success. Then the operation was abruptly moved to a new location some 1,100 kilometers northwest of Perth, based on new military radar data.
The narrowing of the search on April 4, which defined where the Australian naval vessel Ocean Shield would tow the U.S. black box locator, took into account factors including the position of the Inmarsat satellite relative to the sun.Crucial to Inmarsat's analysis of the pings was the Doppler effect: the change in frequency of sound or other waves depending on movement of their source relative to their recipient. Luck emerged when signals believed to come from the plane's recorders were detected past the equipment's intended 30-day useful life.Investigators relied on the principle that the satellite's temperature distorts the way it receives radio waves. The investigators analyzed changes in the temperature of the Inmarsat satellite on each occasion that the plane made contact and then made calculations about the jet's trajectory, according to Warren Truss, Australia's deputy prime minister.. Investigators also incorporated aircraft performance calculations from Boeing to fix the sweet spot, according to Mr. Dolan, developing the most precise projection yet of the jet's probable point of impact.At the same time, investigators further refined those projections by evaluating data from hundreds of other flights with similar equipment that crisscrossed the same region, according to Inmarsat officials. That established a baseline to better calculate where Flight 370 was presumed to have gone down."The Inmarsat model was designed for fine tuning," said Inmarsat Senior Vice President Chris McLaughlin, who said it revised the search area continually as new information arrived.The revelations about how the search proceeded help to explain why the Australia's Ocean Shield vessel was able to detect a string of acoustic signals, believed to have come from the plane's black box recorders, within 48 hours of starting its underwater search on April 4. And also why authorities, including Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott, were so quick to declare their confidence that they were closing in on the jet's location."We still haven't come up with a different alternative theory as to what it might be if it's not the pinger, but we're never going to give you a guarantee on this," Mr. Dolan said.When no new underwater signals from the recorders were detected in nearly a week, authorities deployed an unmanned submersible to scan the seabed for signs of plane wreckage Monday. The primary goal remains recovering Flight 370's flight-data and cockpit-voice recorders, in the hope they might reveal what befell the jet.After completing about six hours of its first mission Monday, the submersible reached its operating depth limit of about 3 miles, and its built-in safety feature returned it to the surface, underscoring just how difficult and protracted its mission is. The boundaries of the Bluefin-21's search zone encompass roughly 500 square miles. The device moves at a walking pace, and scanning the entire search area was expected to take between six weeks and two months.In the end, even Angus Houston, the former Australian military chief coordinating the search, acknowledges that luck has played a part in the effort. "The batteries of both devices are past their use-by date and they will very shortly fail. I think we are very fortunate in fact to get some transmissions on Day 33," he said last Wednesday.Describing the decision to switch to underwater searches, Mr. Houston told reporters "I think we have probably got to the end of the process of analysis." Noting that "the data we've got is the data we've got," he added "we'll proceed on the basis of that."Write to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com and Jon Ostrower at jon.ostrower@wsj.com
OTHER MH370 STORIES I DONE
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-42-mh370-missing-plane-search-goes.html
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-41-mh370-missing-plane-search-goes.html
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-40-mh370-missing-plane-search-goes.html
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-39-mh370-missing-plane-search-goes.html
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-38-mh370-missing-plane-search-goes.html
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-37-mh370-missing-plane-narrowing.html
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-36-mh370-missing-plane-narrowing.html
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-35-mh370-missing-plane-narrowing.html
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-34-mh370-missing-plane-narrowing.html
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-33-mh370-missing-plane-what.html
LINKS FROM DAYS 1 TO 32 ABOUT MH370-777-200ER SEARCH
http://israndjer.blogspot.ca/2014/04/day-32-mh370-missing-plane-they-may.html
THE MISSING PLANE MH370 SITUATION AT 12:03AM SAT APR 19,2014
Search and recovery continues for Malaysian flight MH370
Media Release-19 April 2014—am-JACC
Up to 11 military aircraft and 12 ships will assist in today's search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.Today the Australian Maritime Safety Authority has planned a visual search area totalling approximately 50,200 square kilometres, across three areas.Overnight Bluefin-21 AUV completed mission six in the underwater search area. Bluefin-21 has searched approximately 133 square kilometres to date. Data from the sixth mission is currently under analysis. No contacts of interest have been found to date.Bluefin-21 AUV's seventh mission has commenced. The weather forecast for today is isolated showers and south easterly winds.
-JACCCurrent underwater search for Malaysia plane could end within a week
By Matt Siegel and Byron Kaye -APR 19,14-YahooNewsSYDNEY/PERTH, Australia (Reuters) - The current underwater search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, focused on a tight 10 km (6.2 mile) circle of the sea floor, could be completed within a week, Australian search officials said on Saturday.Malaysia said the search was at a "very critical juncture" and asked for prayers for its success.A U.S. Navy deep-sea autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is scouring a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean floor for signs of the plane, which disappeared from radars on March 8 with 239 people on board.After almost two months without a sign of wreckage, the current underwater search has been narrowed to a small area around the location in which one of four acoustic signals believed to be from the plane's black box recorders was detected on April 8, officials said."Provided the weather is favorable for launch and recovery of the AUV and we have a good run with the serviceability of the AUV, we should complete the search of the focused underwater area in five to seven days," the Joint Agency Coordination Centre told Reuters in an email.Officials did not indicate whether they were confident that this search area would yield any new information about the flight, nor did they state what steps they would take in the event that the underwater search were to prove fruitless.More than two dozen countries have been involved in the hunt.for the Boeing 777 disappeared from radar shortly into a Kuala Lumpur to Beijing flight in what officials believe was a deliberate act.Weeks of daily sorties have failed to turn up any trace of the plane, even after narrowing the search to an arc in the southern Indian Ocean, making this the most expensive such operation in aviation history."It is important to focus on today and tomorrow. Narrowing of the search area today and tomorrow is at a very critical juncture," Malaysian Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a media conference in Kuala Lumpur, asking for people to pray for success. Malaysia was asking oil companies and others in the commercial sector to provide assets that might help in the search, Hishammuddin added, after earlier saying more AUVs might be used.
DRONE GOES DEEPER THAN EVER BEFOREAfter almost two weeks without picking up any acoustic signals, and long past the black box battery's 30-day life expectancy, authorities are increasingly reliant on the $4 million U.S. Bluefin-21 drone, which on Saturday was expected to have dived to unprecedented depths.Because visual searches of the ocean surface have yielded no concrete evidence, the drone, with its ability to search deep beneath the ocean surface with "side scan" sonar, has become the focal point of the search 2,000 km (1,200 miles) northwest of the Australian city of Perth.The search has thus far centered on a city-sized area where a series of "pings" led authorities to believe the plane's black box may be located. The current refined search area is based on one such transmission.After the drone's searches were frustrated by an automatic safety mechanism which returns it to the surface when it exceeds a depth of 4.5 km (14,763 feet), authorities have adjusted the mechanism and have sent it as deep as 4,695 meters (15,403 feet), a record for the machine.But hopes that it might soon guide searchers to wreckage are dwindling with no sign of the plane after six deployments spanning 133 square kilometers (83 square miles). Footage from the drone's sixth mission was still being analyzed, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre said on Saturday.On Monday, the search coordinator, retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, said the air and surface search for debris would likely end by midweek as the operation shifted its focus to the ocean floor.But the air and surface searches have continued daily, and on Saturday the Joint Agency Coordination Centre said up to 11 military aircraft and 12 ships would help with the Saturday's search covering about 50,200 square kilometers (31,000 square miles) across three areas."The search will always continue," Hishammuddin said. "It's just a matter of approach."(Editing by Lincoln Feast and Nick Macfie)
Data Doesn’t Lie?-The fuzzy math behind the search for MH370.-By Jeff Wise
MH370 Search A Royal New Zealand Air Force P3 Orion aircraft searches for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, over the Indian Ocean on March 31, 2014.
Five weeks into the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, more than $30 million has been spent scouring great swatches of the southern Indian Ocean. Yet searchers have still not found a single piece of physical evidence such as wreckage or human remains. Last week, Australian authorities said they were confident that a series of acoustic pings detected 1,000 miles northwest of Perth had come from the aircraft’s black boxes, and that wreckage would soon be found. But repeated searches by a robotic submarine have so far failed to find the source of the pings, which experts say could have come from marine animals or even from the searching ships themselves. Prime Minister Tony Abbott admitted that if wreckage wasn’t located within a week or two “we stop, we regroup, we reconsider.”There remains only one publically available piece of evidence linking the plane to the southern Indian Ocean: a report issued by the Malaysian government on March 25 that described a new analysis carried out by the U.K.-based satellite operator Inmarsat. The report said that Inmarsat had developed an “innovative technique” to establish that the plane had most likely taken a southerly heading after vanishing. Yet independent experts who have analyzed the report say that it is riddled with inconsistencies and that the data it presents to justify its conclusion appears to have been fudged.
The mystery of MH370 is looking more impenetrable by the moment.
Some background: For the first few days after MH370 disappeared, no one had any idea what might have happened to the plane after it left Malaysian radar coverage around 2:30 a.m., local time, on March 8, 2014. Then, a week later, Inmarsat reported that its engineers had noticed that in the hours after the plane’s disappearance, the plane had continued to exchange data-less electronic handshakes, or “pings,” with a geostationary satellite over the Indian Ocean. In all, a total of eight pings were exchanged.Each ping conveyed only a tiny amount of data: the time it was received, the distance the airplane was from the satellite at that instant, and the relative velocity between the airplane and the satellite. Taken together, these tiny pieces of information made it possible to narrow down the range of possible routes that the plane might have taken. If the plane was presumed to have traveled to the south at a steady 450 knots, for instance, then Inmarsat could trace a curving route that wound up deep in the Indian Ocean southwest of Perth, Australia. Accordingly, ships and planes began to scour that part of the ocean, and when satellite imagery revealed a scattering of debris in the area, the Australian prime minister declared in front of parliament that it represented “new and credible information” about the fate of the airplane.The problem with this kind of analysis is that, taken by themselves, the ping data are ambiguous. Given a presumed starting point, any reconstructed route could have headed off in either direction. A plane following the speed and heading to arrive at the southern search area could have also headed to the north and wound up in Kazakhstan. Why, then, were investigators scouring the south and not the north? The March 25 report stated that Inmarsat had used a new kind of mathematical analysis to rule out a northern route. Without being very precise in its description, it implied that the analysis might have depended on a small but telling wobble of the Inmarsat satellite’s orbit. Accompanying the written report was an appendix, called Annex I, that consisted of three diagrams, the second of which was titled “MH370 measured data against predicted tracks" and appeared to sum up the case against the northern route in one compelling image. One line on the graph showed the predicted Doppler shift for a plane traveling along a northern route; another line showed the predicted Doppler shift for a plane flying along a southern route. A third line, showing the actual data received by Inmarsat, matched the southern route almost perfectly, and looked markedly different from the northern route. Case closed.
The report did not explicitly enumerate the three data points for each ping, but around the world, enthusiasts from a variety of disciplines threw themselves into reverse-engineering that original data out of the charts and diagrams in the report. With this information in hand, they believed, it would be possible to construct any number of possible routes and check the assertion that the plane must have flown to the south.Unfortunately, it soon became clear that Inmarsat had presented its data in a way that made this goal impossible: “There simply isn't enough information in the report to reconstruct the original data,” says Scott Morgan, the former commander of the US Air Force Rescue Coordination Center. “We don’t know what their assumptions are going into this.”Another expert who tried to understand Inmarsat’s report was Mike Exner, CEO of the remote sensing company Radiometrics Inc. He mathematically processed the “Burst Frequency Offset” values on Page 2 of Annex 1 and was able to derive figures for relative velocity between the aircraft and the satellite. He found, however, that no matter how he tried, he could not get his values to match those implied by the possible routes shown on Page 3 of the annex. “They look like cartoons to me,” says Exner.Even more significantly, I haven’t found anybody who has independently analyzed the Inmarsat report and has been able to figure out what kind of northern route could yield the values shown on Page 2 of the annex. According to the March 25 report, Inmarsat teased out the small differences predicted to exist between the Doppler shift values between the northern and southern routes. This difference, presumably caused by the slight wobble in the satellite’s orbit that I mentioned above, should be tiny—according to Exner’s analysis, no more than a few percent of the total velocity value. And yet Page 2 of the annex shows a radically different set of values between the northern and southern routes. “Neither the northern or southern predicted routes make any sense,” says Exner.
Given the discrepancies and inaccuracies, it has proven impossible for independent observers to validate Inmarsat’s assertion that it can rule out a northern route for the airplane. “It’s really impossible to reproduce what the Inmarsat folks claim,” says Hans Kruse, a professor of telecommunications systems at Ohio University.This is not to say that Inmarsat’s conclusions are necessarily incorrect. (In the past I have made the case that the northern route might be possible, but I’m not trying to beat that drum here.) Its engineers are widely regarded as top-drawer, paragons of meticulousness in an industry that is obsessive about attention to detail. But their work has been presented to the public by authorities whose inconsistency and lack of transparency have time and again undermined public confidence. It’s worrying that the report appears to have been composed in such a way as to make it impossible for anyone to independently assess its validity—especially given that its ostensible purpose was to explain to the world Inmarsat’s momentous conclusions. What frustrated, grieving family members need from the authorities is clarity and trustworthiness, not a smokescreen.Inmarsat has not replied to my request for a clarification of their methods. This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that in recent days experts had “recalibrated data” in part by using “arcane new calculations reflecting changes in the operating temperatures of an Inmarsat satellite as well as the communications equipment aboard the Boeing when the two systems exchanged so-called digital handshakes.” But again, not enough information has been provided for the public to assess the validity of these methods.It would be nice if Inmarsat would throw open its spreadsheets and help resolve the issue right now, but that could be too much to expect. Inmarsat may be bound by confidentiality agreements with its customers, not to mention U.S. laws that restrict the release of information about sensitive technologies. The Malaysian authorities, however, can release what they want to—and they seem to be shifting their stance toward openness. After long resisting pressure to release the air traffic control transcript, they eventually relented. Now acting transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein says that if and when the black boxes are found, their data will be released to the public.With the search for surface debris winding down, the mystery of MH370 is looking more impenetrable by the moment. If the effort to find the plane using an underwater robot comes up empty, then there should be a long and sustained call for the Malaysian authorities to reveal their data and explain exactly how they came to their conclusions.Because at that point, it will be all we’ve got.This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.Jeff Wise is a New York-based magazine writer and author of Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger. A contributing editor at Popular Mechanics and Travel + Leisure, he specializes in aviation, adventure, and psychology. He tweets as @ManvBrain and blogs at JeffWise.net.
New Data, Analysis and Luck Help Narrow Flight 370 Search Zone-Officials Factored In Satellite Temperature, Other Aircraft Speeds, Boeing Performance Calculations-By Daniel Stacey,Andy Pasztor and Jon Ostrower-connect-Updated April 16, 2014 9:35 p.m. ET-WALL STREET JOURNAL
Crews inspect the U.S. Navy's Bluefin-21 submersible, which has encountered technical problems this week in the search for the Malaysian jet. TK-A combination of cutting-edge science, dogged analysis and simple luck prompted searchers to focus the hunt for Malaysia Airlines 3786.KU -4.35% Flight 370 underwater, just days before the plane's black box recorders were expected to fall silent.Authorities got a first look at the sea floor Tuesday in an area that they believe is the jet's likely location, without detecting any wreckage. Hopes rest on a remote-controlled submersible from the U.S. Navy, which is seeking the first visual confirmation of wreckage that could lead investigators to the all-important recorders.It's a turn of events that seemed unimaginable less than two weeks ago, after an extensive air and sea hunt for surface debris had turned up little more than garbage. The frequent and seemingly fruitless shifts in the aerial search frustrated investigators and eroded the confidence of the public and families of the victims. The current effort may yet turn out to be another false lead.Staff at satellite communications company Inmarsat work in front of a screen showing subscribers using their service throughout the world, at their headquarters in London on March 25. Reuters.But over the past 11 days, an international team of experts has persistently recalibrated data and capitalized on new streams of information to zero in on a tight corridor in the southern Indian Ocean, according to senior Australian government officials, investigators from several countries and others briefed on the probe.The decision to narrow the search on April 4 amounted to a carefully calculated gamble. Investigators incorporated arcane new calculations reflecting changes in the operating temperatures of an Inmarsat ISAT.LN +0.07% PLC satellite as well as the communications equipment aboard the Boeing BA +1.49% 777 when the two systems exchanged so-called digital handshakes. Those links occurred regularly for some six hours after the plane deviated from its original flight path to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, and then headed south.The new analysis provided investigators with a "sweet spot" to begin the underwater search, initially using a black-box detector in an area of sea some 500 kilometers to the north of where military aircraft and ships had previously been looking, said Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.The international working group established by Malaysia to investigate the crash, which included U.S., British, and French technical experts, assembled the new analysis, which the ATSB vetted before incorporating into the Australian-lead search."There's a set of assumptions, some of which are factually checkable, others of which remain assumptions," Mr. Dolan told The Wall Street Journal. "We knew we were running out of time."The revised data also indicated the jet, carrying 239 people, may have been flying toward the Western Australian city of Perth and possibly traveling on autopilot when it crashed on March 8, though those specifics haven't been confirmed, he said.Nine days after the jet disappeared from civilian radar, search crews spent 10 days scouring an area of ocean for floating wreckage without success. Then the operation was abruptly moved to a new location some 1,100 kilometers northwest of Perth, based on new military radar data.
The narrowing of the search on April 4, which defined where the Australian naval vessel Ocean Shield would tow the U.S. black box locator, took into account factors including the position of the Inmarsat satellite relative to the sun.Crucial to Inmarsat's analysis of the pings was the Doppler effect: the change in frequency of sound or other waves depending on movement of their source relative to their recipient. Luck emerged when signals believed to come from the plane's recorders were detected past the equipment's intended 30-day useful life.Investigators relied on the principle that the satellite's temperature distorts the way it receives radio waves. The investigators analyzed changes in the temperature of the Inmarsat satellite on each occasion that the plane made contact and then made calculations about the jet's trajectory, according to Warren Truss, Australia's deputy prime minister.. Investigators also incorporated aircraft performance calculations from Boeing to fix the sweet spot, according to Mr. Dolan, developing the most precise projection yet of the jet's probable point of impact.At the same time, investigators further refined those projections by evaluating data from hundreds of other flights with similar equipment that crisscrossed the same region, according to Inmarsat officials. That established a baseline to better calculate where Flight 370 was presumed to have gone down."The Inmarsat model was designed for fine tuning," said Inmarsat Senior Vice President Chris McLaughlin, who said it revised the search area continually as new information arrived.The revelations about how the search proceeded help to explain why the Australia's Ocean Shield vessel was able to detect a string of acoustic signals, believed to have come from the plane's black box recorders, within 48 hours of starting its underwater search on April 4. And also why authorities, including Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott, were so quick to declare their confidence that they were closing in on the jet's location."We still haven't come up with a different alternative theory as to what it might be if it's not the pinger, but we're never going to give you a guarantee on this," Mr. Dolan said.When no new underwater signals from the recorders were detected in nearly a week, authorities deployed an unmanned submersible to scan the seabed for signs of plane wreckage Monday. The primary goal remains recovering Flight 370's flight-data and cockpit-voice recorders, in the hope they might reveal what befell the jet.After completing about six hours of its first mission Monday, the submersible reached its operating depth limit of about 3 miles, and its built-in safety feature returned it to the surface, underscoring just how difficult and protracted its mission is. The boundaries of the Bluefin-21's search zone encompass roughly 500 square miles. The device moves at a walking pace, and scanning the entire search area was expected to take between six weeks and two months.In the end, even Angus Houston, the former Australian military chief coordinating the search, acknowledges that luck has played a part in the effort. "The batteries of both devices are past their use-by date and they will very shortly fail. I think we are very fortunate in fact to get some transmissions on Day 33," he said last Wednesday.Describing the decision to switch to underwater searches, Mr. Houston told reporters "I think we have probably got to the end of the process of analysis." Noting that "the data we've got is the data we've got," he added "we'll proceed on the basis of that."Write to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com and Jon Ostrower at jon.ostrower@wsj.com
