[Peetwo]

Captain's Log 06.03.17: Battle of the MH370 theorists continues...  

From the AP - AA&MH370 thread:

Captain's Log 04.03.17: Weekend Oz expose on MH370 3rd anniversary.

Via the Weekend Oz... :

Experts point to MH370 pilot

12:00amSTEFANIE BALOGH

Two globally respected aviation experts continue to point the finger at the captain of ­Flight MH370.


MH370 site a crime scene

12:00amMike Keane

On Wednesday it’s three years since the flight disappeared so it’s timely to review the search. Was it unlucky or wrong?

...If Zaharie was indeed responsible for the destruction of the aircraft, it is not only an aircraft “accident”: it is also a crime scene. It cannot be ignored, or forgotten, that there were 239 people on board MH370. It is highly probable that 238 passengers and crew lost their lives needlessly.

Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak has said we must “not only learn the lessons of MH370 but implement them”.

Several weeks ago, the Malaysian government, which under international law is in charge of the investigation into what happened to MH370, called a halt to the search.

So where is the resolve to find the truth?

To those who query the $200 million cost of the search, there are very good reasons to spend the time and money in solving the cause of this “accident”.

Lessons are learned from all aircraft accidents and these findings are passed on to the industry to enhance safety.

Furthermore, relatives and friends have a right to know what happened to their loved ones — and if any party is found to have been at fault, they have a right to seek compensation.

Finally, it places closure on conspiracy theories that always abound after an unsolved accident. These theories are often distressing for families and friends.
Malaysia is not a poor country and should be making “best endeavours” to find the aircraft so the cause of the loss of MH370 is found, otherwise there will remain the perception of a cover-up...

The Mike Keane article has attracted much of 'the Australian's' usual MH370 followers and critics like Byron Bailey's resident troll 'Mick':

Mick

8 hours ago

@Nicholas That's a terrific idea, Nicholas.  You would think that with nearly a century of flying experience between them Captains Bailey and Keane might be able to make some form of constructive contribution to the debate. 

Captain Bailey's only prognostication to date was on 14 May last year when he stated that the ATSB should focus their search "... at least 400 kilometres south and west ..."  of the current search area.  

That presumably considered "expert" forecast makes absolutely no sense.   The ATSB search area was centred longitudinally along the 7th arc.   Even with World Gliding Champion Jan Rothhardt at the controls, the airplane could not have travelled 400 kilometres south away from the 7th arc (a point some two minutes after fuel exhaustion);  under ideal conditions it might have made a little over half that distance. 

As for 400 kilometres west, well the further west you go, two things happen;  the final leg of the flight gets longer and the track flown by the airplane gets further west of south.   The longer leg means that the airplane must fly faster to cover the extra distance in the same time (the 7th arc is based on the time of 00:19 UTC).   For the airplane to be 400 kilometres west of the current search area would require an average ground speed of around 505 knots over the final leg; not impossible under ideal conditions.   However, the fact that the airplane would have had to have flown a track of around 195° with 40-80 knot westerlies to contend with means that conditions were far from ideal.   The combination of those two factors yields a required a true airspeed of more than 510 knots.  510 knots is the maximum speed of the airplane.  Even if a Yeargeresque pilot had have managed to sustain that sort of airspeed the airplane would have run out of fuel long before 00:19 UTC.

Hmm...them's fighting words...

One thing you notice with Mick's posts is that when it comes to the limited facts and hearsay evidence associated with the information vacuum surrounding MH370, the guy is a verifiable encyclopaedia. Basically put this Bailey troll has done his homework.

However it was the following post that gave me (I think ) a light bulb moment:

Mick

To the extent that there is a crime scene associated with MH370 it is this story and your butchering of the facts. 

Here's the first clue; MH370 was not carrying more than the required fuel load.  The airplane was carrying 49,100 kg of fuel when it left Kuala Lumpur;  37,200 kg of planned trip-fuel plus the mandatory reserves.  The reserves were to cover a 46 minute diversion to the primary diversion airport, Jinan Yaoqiang International Airport, and, because the weather forecast Jinan Yaoqiang was marginal, a further 1 hour 45 minutes worth for the secondary diversion airport, Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport.  I don't know how you can say "the weather was not an issue", it was.  Have you bothered reading the TAFs for ZSJN and ZBTJ for the relevant period?!   Visibility reducing in light snow and rain!
Regarding radio calls, take the time to look at the Factual Information Report (FIR) - it should be mandatory reading for anyone offering expert opinion on this flight.  Page 1, right up front, makes it clear that Captain Zaharie was conducting line training for First Officer Fariq on that flight.  Page 21, Air-to-ground communications makes it clear that the Captain handled the radio for every call after take-off, including the "Maintaining flight level 350" call that you incorrectly attribute to the First Officer.   Why was the Captain handling the radio?  Because the First Officer was flying as the Pilot in Command as would be expected on a training flight. 

With regards to the timing of the diversion, as you would know the handover from one ATC to another is one of the few times when a radio call is expected;  it is perhaps the worst time to try to "disappear" unnoticed. Malaysian air traffic controllers had coordinated the hand over of MH370 to their counterparts in Vietnam some 40 minutes before MH370 approached the boundary.  The failure to make contact was what triggered efforts to locate the flight.  Someone attempting to "disappear" MH370 would have simply made contact with Vietnamese ATC as expected and then diverted the flight; that would have delayed efforts to locate it by 20-30 minutes.

As to this breath taking climb to 35,700 feet, at the time it turned back MH370 was established at 35,000 feet.  Exactly what difference to the performance of emergency oxygen equipment would a climb of 700 feet make?  And you omitted the fact that less than 7 minutes after it "climbed to 35,700 feet" radar tracked it descending to 31,100 feet (FIR, page 3).   It should be noted that all of these altitudes were derived from primary radar which is notoriously inaccurate when trying to simultaneously resolve altitude, speed, vertical speed and bearing over short captures.  When the radar data for the turn back and transit across the Malay Peninsula have been reviewed and resolved to a complete and coherent track it becomes obvious that MH370 did not climb at all.  In fact, it was most probably on a very shallow descent. 

MH370's track back to Penang was entirely consistent with a diversion to what was at that time the nearest operational airport.  The airplane was tracking direct to waypoint KENDI (11 nautical miles south-west of Penang) which is the intermediate fix for an instrument approach to land on Penang’s Runway 04.   Moreover, the deliberate diversion to Penang is not contrary to the  ATSB's “unresponsive pilot” scenario at all.  The ATSB has repeatedly stated that their "... suggested end-of-flight scenario only applies to the final segment of MH370’s flight when it was heading in a southerly direction into the Indian Ocean."  Are you not aware of that ir did you just ignore it? 

As for MH370’s flight up the Malacca Strait, if you'd kept abreast of ongoing analysis of the radar and satellite data you'd know that it is now almost certain that the airplane did not track along airway N571 and while it may have tracked over or near waypoint VAMPI, it most assuredly did not track through MEKAR.  As for your contention that the airplane then "... proceeded to climb to a higher altitude", there is not one scintilla of evidence to even suggest leave alone support that. If anything, the satellite data suggests that the airplane may have initiated a short descent of around 2,600 fpm at that point. 

If you're going to be offering what I'm assuming is meant to be "expert" opinion on MH370 might it be possible that you properly acquaint yourself with the actual factual evidence first?    Surely that's not too much to ask?

Okay now compare that to PlaneTalking's resident (favourite) MH370 theorist 'Mick Gilbert':

Mick Gilbert
February 23, 2017 at 10:19 pm
Dan,
These recent papers don’t call into question everything. In fact they simply reframe two or three of the myriad assumptions that previous work has been based on.
Starting wide and narrowing things down; the airplane crashed in the Southern Indian Ocean; the debris finds support that. Drift analysis places it between 27°-ish – 37°-ish South and between 90° – 110° East. The satellite data cuts us a swathe through that zone. We’ve conducted a reasonable underwater search of the south-western end of the satellite swathe.
If you take Victor’s latest paper and read it in conjunction with the paper by Ian Holland (DSTO) on resolving the 18:25 UTC BFO data together with Richard Godfrey’s most recent paper on drift analysis/possible final major turn you get a relatively coherent story. Most importantly, none of them dispute that MH370 flew up the Malacca Strait – no evidence has ever been put forward to seriously challenge that assumption and there’s plenty that still supports it.
What we are seeing now is the general acceptance that:
a. MH370 was not navigating along airway N571,
b. there was a change in MH370’s direction of flight around the time of the first log-on at 18:25 UTC, and
c. that the final major turn must have occurred much later than previously modelled.
As they are three elements of my hypothesis, I’m just fine and beaut with that, chuffed in fact.
Victor has assumed that the change of direction that was occurring at 18:25 UTC was a one off and that the airplane then continued on a north-west track; his best fit to BTO/BFO is that after heading away from Penang on 290° it then turned slightly north onto 297°. Richard has assumed that the airplane flew on to around 8.5219°N 92.9501°E (which is much further north west than previously considered by others) where it made its final turn south(-ish) at 19:36 UTC. You’ll note that both Victor’s and Richard’s papers still place the airplane in the Malacca Strait.

---

Mick Gilbert
February 24, 2017 at 5:25 pm
Dan,
No problemo. The search for MH370 is most assuredly an exercise in incrementalism; we’re chiselling away at the unknown by tap, tap, tapping on the sliver of what we know with a variety of different hammers called assumptions. And let’s be clear, even much of what we “know” has the fuzzy edges of uncertainty – some people talk about arcs and radar data as though they have laser-like precision; they don’t, the BTO arcs at any altitude are a good 20 nm wide.
Perhaps chief among the assumptions is the time and place of the final major turn; it is almost literally pivotal to our calculation of an impact site. Most modelling to date has assumed an “early” turn south, sometime between 18:28 UTC – 18:40 UTC. The earlier you turn south, the further you get to fly south before you run out of gas. Consequently, the ATSB modelling threw up a crash site that is very close to the south-western extreme of possibilities; an early FMT at 18:28 UTC, navigation by constant true track, autothrottle engaged and FMC in economy cruise mode – you could have only wrangled a bit more distance out of the airplane by progressively step-climbing as you burned fuel. It has always been a source of amusement to me that despite the ATSB pretty much using the same flight parameters that a “rogue pilot” would use to fly as far into the Southern Indian Ocean as possible, the “rogue pilot” theorists have been the ATSB’s most vocal critics. To me, that has underlined the general paucity of scholarship associated with their thinking.
Frankly, we are now at the point where we’ve well and truly rung as much out of the available data as possible so, quite logically, there’s a general re-evaluation of the myriad assumptions, much along the lines you’ve suggested.
(P2 comment - Also see MG's latest here: https://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking...ment-81373 )

To my untrained, ignorant knuckle-dragger mind, the similarities in writing style and bias criticisms of the other 'pilot did it' crowd are quite remarkable - just saying...

Personally I am more in the Botsy (Botswanna Hooligan) crowd when it comes to MH370 and theorising... :

Botswana O'Hooligan



@Andrew That is about how I see it for the norm on the ground is for the F/O to do the radio work and the captain to have his left hand on the tiller and right hand on the thrust levers and the left hand stays on the tiller until 80 knots when the hand over/take over to the F/O is carried out if he is flying the sector. The captain has his hand on the thrust levers until V1 for it is his decision and his alone to either abort or continue with the take off and on landing he does the take over again below 80 knots, resumes direction control via the tiller, and power via the thrust levers, and the F/O does the communication. In between those events on climb and in the cruise the captain takes on the role of the pilot not flying and does the housekeeping as in communication, keeping the log, asking stupid questions, and overseeing etc.

My opinion on 777 systems is worthless because I am not (actually wasn't now, but Boeing Jets have the wonderful option of being able to extend the gear at Mach 0.82) endorsed on 777's but if they are as sophisticated as corporate jets then their systems would be similar and basically fool proof and it would take someone au fait with the aeroplane to reprogram the flight management systems.

The norm, and please bear with me when I say "the norm" is that the flight plans in the flight management systems are inviolate and cannot be tampered with (think Air NZ and Mt Erebus) unless on pain of death via the flight captain of the aeroplane type so I very much doubt if MAS had a flight plan in the system of their 777 fleet to enable one to take a jaunt into the southern Indian Ocean, so someone reprogrammed that flight management system and it certainly wasn't blind Freddie.

And especially this in reply to Mick, for my QOTM nomination... :

Botswana O'Hooligan

@Mick Probably all true but the definitive answers are in the FDR and CVR so the trick is to recover them.

MTF...P2