[Peetwo]

MH370 & the "he said, she said", spin & deception wars -

It would seem that the MH370 distraction propaganda campaign is working a treat. On social media there now appears to be a clear division between the 'pilot did it' - i.e. glided the aircraft - & the 'pilot didn't do it' - i.e. ghost flight with uncontrolled terminal dive at the end of flight. 

Perhaps to highlight this 'perfect storm' distraction here is part of a post of mine off the AA&MH370 thread:

..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 airspeed (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.  

Update to above post :  Geoffrey Thomas & Steve Creedy have apparently joined forces again to do a follow up to the MH370 Hoody article, this time they interview Blaine Gibson to give his perspective on the 60 Minutes program and the resulting MSM & Social media coverage since:  

MH370 sleuth says media reports are wrong on debris
Geoffrey Thomas & Steve Creedy 02 Aug 2016

US lawyer who has found most of the debris from MH370 says the 60 Minutes program's expert is not correctMr Blaine with the pieces of debris he found in Madagascar In March this year Jean Dominique and Suzy Vitry found this piece from the cabin interior on the beach of La Reunion. Confirmed as highly likely to be from MH370 by the ATSB 

http://www.airlineratings.com/news/749/m...tDZbL.dpuf

However what perked my interest was the following quoted text, which once again confirms the recent ATSB (Hood & Foley) analysis of satellite data pointing towards calculated ROD & TAS/Mach No. ("400km/h") at the assumed end of flight (00:19 BFO) :

The ATSB is sticking with the current search area based on satellite data and say the uncontrolled ditching is still the hypothesis that bests fits the few available facts .


These include an analysis of frequency differences that indicated the aircraft was descending between 1800m per minute and 3000m per minute during its final log-on request to a geostationary satellite over the Indian Ocean and at up to 6700m per minute eight seconds later when it receives an acknowledgment from ground station in Perth.

Another piece of key evidence is sitting in the ATSB laboratories in Canberra. Failure analysts are looking a large piece of the aircraft’s right main wing flap to see if it was extended on impact. 

If this proves not to be the case, it will serious blow to the controlled landing theory. 

So in case I missed something I revisited the DSTG analysis report - Bayesian Methods in the Search for MH370.

Reference extracts:

10.5 End of Flight

The output of the particle filter is an estimate of the pdf of the aircraft state at 00:19.

The aircraft was still in the air at this time and a model is required to describe the

distribution of how it may have descended. This has been primarily the responsibility

of the ATSB and the other members of the search team. A discussion of the different

methods used to model the potential motion is presented in [5]. The model for aircraft

motion after 00:19 leads to a prioritisation of the search along and around the final

BTO arc...

...The analysis in [5] leads to a probable scenario where the aircraft ran out of fuel at

some time between 00:11 and 00:19. The final satellite communications message

could be due to the modem rebooting under auxiliary power. Under this hypothesis,

the aircraft was already unpowered at 00:19. The spread of the kernel function is
then determined by the distance over which the aircraft could have moved, which

depends on whether or not the aircraft was under human control during this period.

Flight simulator studies of uncontrolled descents have shown a high likelihood

of the aircraft reaching zero altitude within 15 nm of the beginning of descent [5].


However, the beginning of descent is not known. It is possible for the aircraft to have

travelled farther, especially if a human was controlling the aircraft. As an indicative

kernel, and following advice from the ATSB, a uniform disc of radius 15 nm with

a Gaussian drop off with standard deviation 30 nm beyond this was chosen; this

represents the accident investigators’ assessment of the likely scenarios...

---

& from Para 10.9:

...The factors that do make a significant difference to the output pdf are the assumed

spread of Mach number and the end of flight model. The assumed Mach number

range covers the speeds feasible over long time durations. The lower end of this

speed range results in the Northern part of the pdf and the higher end of the speed

range results in the Southern part. Restricting the speed to only Mach numbers above

0.8, for example, would contract the pdf to the South. The consequence is that using

a smaller speed range within the bounds already modelled leads to a subset of the

search zone. If a different end of flight model is assumed the general consequence

is to spread the search zone over a larger area. Simulations have predicted that

the maximum distance that the aircraft could have glided under human control is

approximately 100 nm after 00:19 [5]. The search zone that this scenario would

imply is very much larger...

As can be seen there is no reference, from DSTG at least, to any of the BFO data (after 00:19) being calculated as stated in the airlineratings.com article; or indeed the 60 Minutes Peter Foley quote (Part I 08:50).

Within the DSTG book there is several references to the 00:19 BFO data being "unreliable". However apparently the ATSB, unlike the DSTG, are not concerned about this potentially "unreliable" data when analysing...

"...frequency differences that indicated the aircraft was descending between 1800m per minute and 3000m per minute ...and at up to 6700m per minute eight seconds later..."  

This raises a number of questions on the veracity of the statements made by CC Hood & Peter Foley.

Q/ After all this time what leads the ATSB to now believe the integrity of the 00:19 BFO as being secure enough to trust to calculate end of flight rates of descent between 1800 to 6700 metres per minute?

Q/ Where did the airspeed reference (i.e. 400 km/hour) come from?   

Q/ Finally how come we are only finding out about this 'analysis' now? 


So Hoody et.al in the words of former HoR MP and now Senator elect Pauline Hanson..."Please explain??" 

Putting my questions aside (above) the following is a Christine Negroni article that refutes -  i.e. the 'pilot didn't do it' camp - the aspersions & hearsay evidence that the 60 Minutes program say proves the 'pilot did it' :

Australia MH370 Pilot Suicide Theory Flies in the Face of Facts
July 31, 2016 / 7 Comments
9M-MRO on approach to LAX photo courtesy Jay Davis

Australia’s news program 60 Minutes told viewers on Sunday that the only possible explanation for the disappearance of Malaysia 370 is “that a skilled pilot deliberately landed the 777 on the water.”

Headline-making to be sure, but it’s unlikely to have gone down the way the program suggests.

The twenty minute report by correspondent Ross Coulthart, rejuvenates the pilot suicide theory with the help of Larry Vance, who was a senior investigator for the Canadian Transport Safety Board during the crash of Swissair 111 in 1998.

The key to the MH370 mystery, according to Vance is in the flaperon, a flight control surface located at the back of the wing. Found on a beach in Reunion Island in 2015, it was the first piece of wreckage to wash up.

The flaperon on Reunion Island

In the pictures, the flaperon has a mangled edge which Vance finds significant. Only if the flaperon had been extended by the pilot by the time the plane hit the water would the edge be in that condition.

“The force of the water is the only thing that could make the jagged edge that we see,” Vance told the reporter.

“When the flaperon was found then everyone in my opinion should have concluded it was a human-engineered event,” Vance said, meaning that the pilot used it in an attempt to purposely land on the surface of the South Indian Ocean. “There’s no other explanation.”
Where this theory goes terribly wrong is in the inmarsat data.

All we know about where this plane flew after it veered from its path northeast to Beijing on the night of March 8, 2014, comes from the signals between the aircraft and the satellite. Analysis of those signals led searchers southwest, to the expansive ocean that has so far yielded very little.

An engineer at inmarsat’s office in London

But the inmarsat data also shows that more than seven hours after departing Kuala Lumpur International Airport, the airplane sent a very different kind of signal. This one, a handshake message, that indicated the airplane was powering back up from an interruption of some kind.

The interruption was probably caused by the two-engine, wide-body airliner finally running out of fuel and the power-up was the result of the deployment of a ram air turbine.

The turbine, called a RAT is like a big box fan without the box. The blade drops from beneath the airplane into the wind and the turning provides basic power to supply the most critical flight controls.

“The RAT powers tail and wing flight controls but not the flaps,” said Mike Bowers, a retired Boeing 777 captain. “There’s a one-way check valve to prevent RAT hydraulic fluid from getting to the flaps. So the RAT cannot power the flaps.”

Simply put, once the plane ran out of fuel, the pilots were unable to move the flaps or the flaperon if the RAT was the only power source. How the flaperon got its ragged edge, who knows, but we can be pretty sure, it wasn’t because the pilots were using it to perfect their water landing techniques.

In wholeheartedly embracing the guided-landing theory, Coulthart, the 60 Minutes reporter, overlooked a truly curious piece of news from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau that makes the ditching scenario even less likely.

“We’ve got a bit of hard data that says the aircraft was in a rapid rate of descent,” Peter Foley, a sea and marine engineer responsible for overseeing the ATSB’s search said.

Forgetting the issue of the RAT not powering the flap controls, this would put another damper on the pilot-controlled ditching theory because the flaperon can’t be deployed above 20 thousand feet or at speeds higher than 265 knots.

Foley told 60 Minutes, “We’ve got a rate of descent that’s between 12 to 20 thousand feet a minute.”

For those of you who need a little assistance with descent rate numbers, it’s like “going straight down,” another retired 777 pilot explained.

“Bottom line I don’t think you can recover from a 12 to 20 thousand foot rate of decent,” Bowers, a former military fighter pilot told me, if the suicide theory required the pilots to pull out of that kind of a dive, and then make a controlled ditching on the sea, it’s probably not possible he said. “I don’t think you can get an airplane stabilized without exceeding the structural integrity of the airplane.”

How the Australians have new data on the speed of the descent, is a mystery to me. There’s no radar, nor do I believe is this information available from the satellite.
It is possible that the rate of descent was extrapolated by an entity involved in the investigation. Boeing perhaps? Or maybe the French BEA, which has posession of the part. The engineers would only need to work backwards. How fast would the airplane have to be plummeting to cause the kind of damage seen on the flaperon? That’s my guess. Anyway, I’ve asked the ATSB for clarification.

Wreckage in the lab in Toulouse, France

But assuming the ATSB’s Foley wasn’t feeding nonsense to Australia’s “leading current affairs program”, the Boeing 777 pilots I talk to say an entirely different scenario can explain the speed and maybe even the damage on the flaperon.

After flying at cruise altitude seven and a half hours through the night, Malaysia 370 ran out of fuel. When the engines lost power, the RAT deployed. The plane may have wallowed a bit, one pilot told me, but but let’s get real, it could not fly forever. And this could explain the high speed descent.

With no discredit to the retired Canadian investigator Larry Vance, who I do not know but whom the reporter calls “one of the world’s best,” his guided-pilot theory is complex, unrealistic, in some aspects impossible.

What’s staring everyone in the face is a much more straightforward scenario involving no convoluted plots, or inexplicable mind games coming out of left field from a formerly well-regarded captain.

I don’t know for sure what happened to MH370, though you can read my theory in my soon-to-be-published book, The Crash Detectives. But it is equally perplexing how some scenarios ignore inconsistencies and disregard basic aviation principals to take viewers on a flight to the absurd.

Hmm...RAT deploy? What about the auto-light off of the APU, which from my understanding would occur first? Anyway blind Freddy can see the problem here. When so called experts from either camp (PDI v PDNDI) start asserting 'facts' to an evidentiary trail that is made up of little more than hearsay evidence and supposition, with very little in the way of actual bona fide facts, well let's just say you end up with a perfect smokescreen of distraction...   

OK now back to my questions...

+ Q/ I may have missed this, but why wasn't Rolls Royce part of the SSWG?


MTF...P2