[Peetwo]

MH370: 60 minutes & the Oz today - PartII

Q/ Who really are the criminal/terrorists here?

MH370 under control of pilot when it crashed: search co-ordinator
Ross Coulthart
The Australian
12:00AM August 1, 2016

 

Quote from the above Ross Coulthart article:

..But as recently as Friday ATSB commissioner Greg Hood reiterated the view of the search team that satellite data from the Boeing 777 jet suggested it was plunging at almost 400km/h just before it crashed into the sea with 239 passengers and crew...

And quote from Greg Hood West Oz/Airline Rating/Yahoo7 article last Friday:

..Australia’s crash investigator has revealed that data indicates MH370 could have been plunging at almost 400km/h just before it smashed into the sea with 239 passengers and crew.


In his first interview as chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, Greg Hood told The West Australian the automated satellite link with the Boeing 777 showed its descent increased dramatically from about 1200m a minute to up to 6700m a minute... 

In last night 60 Minutes program Peter Foley rehashed some of the same information about the aircraft rate of descent at the presumed end of flight after the final 00:19 aircraft to satellite (BFO) ping. Refer to Part I YouTube video at about 08:50 minutes.

After reviewing all the available DSTG/ATSB information off the ATSB MH370 reports page - see HERE - nowhere is it stated that ROD and/or G/S (stated as 400km/h) was calculated off the aircraft transmitted satellite data. Which means this is either new information or information that the ATSB, SSWG and the Annex 13 JIT investigators have previously not made public.  

It could be that the ETM (engine trend monitoring) system data that was routinely transmitted from the a/c was somehow corrupted or was abbreviated but the following article gives you an idea of the sort of information that should have been transmitted from the aircraft and then recorded at the RR ground station:  

Aircraft Engine Monitoring: How It Works And How It Could Help Malaysia Air 370 Crash Investigators


John Goglia,  

Contributor

A lot of talk this morning about whether Malaysia Air Flight 370’s aircraft engine monitoring data indicate that the aircraft continued to fly for hours after its transponder stopped transmitting. While the  Wall Street Journal report that started all this talk may turn out to be incorrect – Malaysian officials are already disputing the story -one of the few facts that does not appear to be in dispute is that the Rolls-Royce engines on the BoeingBA +0.49%777 had an engine monitoring system.

A number of people are asking me just what exactly an engine monitoring system does – how it works, the data it collects, how it transmits the data and what is done with it.  (To be clear, I am only talking about the engine monitoring system.  Boeing also has an aircraft monitoring system but reports indicate that Malaysia Air did not have that Boeing system.)

Airline aircraft engine monitoring systems are used to check the health of the aircraft engines to avoid costly repairs, especially the time and cost of removing engines prematurely.

Aircraft engines are the most expensive components on an aircraft and can cost as much as $20 million.  Repairs are also extremely expensive, especially when an engine is taken out of service.  Before engine monitoring systems, engines had to be removed more frequently for repairs, at times in places far from repair facilities, necessitating the time and expense of transporting replacement engines and taking the aircraft out of service for longer periods of time.

Engine monitoring systems involve using sensors placed in various locations in an aircraft engine to gather information about the engine’s performance.  The sensors provide real-time information to pilots on the operation of the engines and also capture data for analysis of the performance of the engine over time.  The data captured reveals important information about the health of the engine.  For example, sensors will monitor how much fuel it takes to make a set amount of power.  Increases over time in the amount of fuel consumed would indicate a degrading of the efficiency of the engine, which means the engine is more expensive to operate and it will need maintenance to restore its efficiency.  Sensors can also detect impending failures and notify both the crew and ground stations.

The data from the sensors are accumulated and transmitted at regular intervals to ground stations monitored by the engine manufacturers. Alert messages indicating anomalies are instantly transmitted. According to Rolls-Royce’s website, their aircraft engine data is transmitted via satellite feed.  Rolls- Royce would analyze the data submitted and make recommendations to the airline for engine maintenance, as appropriate.

In the case of Flight MH370, analysis of the engine data captured by Rolls-Royce could provide important information with regard to engine performance at the time the transponder stopped transmitting.  This information would indicate, for example, if the engines were running properly or if certain parts were running too fast, too slow or too hot or if the engine was running at all.

In the Air France AF447 crash in the Atlantic in 2009, the Airbus aircraft monitoring system was critical in giving accident investigators vital clues as to what might have caused the crash before the flight data recorder was found.  The aircraft monitoring system indicated unusual aircraft speeds which could have been due to problems with the pitot tubes, critical components of the aircraft’s airspeed indicator.  These early clues allowed investigators to hone in on a possible accident cause and allow Airbus to make changes to the pitot tubes well before the black boxes were retrieved, which when recovered and analyzed confirmed the problem with the pitot tubes.

P2 comment: Ironically this article was written some days before the Inmarsat BFO recorded data was first made public, with that in mind it is very interesting to read some of the insightful comments.

The following pic is taken from the Rolls Royce basic blurb on their Engine Health Management system - see HERE - showing the engine probes and the data they record, in particular refer to the aircraft data box:

From that it is pretty easy to see that indeed it would be possible to calculate a fairly rudimentary ROD from the last 00:19 ping data transmitted from MH370. However this is provided that the information is not corrupted, or interrupted during transmission i.e. lost in translation. 

Of course if the stated data did actually enable the boffins from MH370 Search Strategy Working Group to be able to calculate a ROD and TAS/CAS, then it goes without saying that they should have been able to derive the same data from the other satellite pings.


MTF...P2