Christmas Island Revisited

Christmas Island Revisited

A great deal has been written about the terminus of MH370 by "experts" of all persuasions, some very good and some not so good. The prevailing theory among the cognoscenti is that the plane travelled pretty much directly South into the Southern Indian Ocean, SIO.  Problems with this scenario arose almost immediately. There is no plausible motive or causation hypothesis, and no debris from the aircraft has been found there. That did not deter the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars searching the ocean floor in that region. As we all know, nothing has been found. What most people do not realize is that the SIO hypothesis is flawed - the major flaw is the assumption relative to the fixed AP flight dynamics after the turn South. This turn is often referred to as the final major turn, FMT.

This fixed AP flight dynamic assumption has taken on a life of it's own. Too much has been invested to retreat from it. A few people, Dr. Victor Iannello and Jeff Wise among them, have proposed viable alternatives. However, they have not been seriously regarded by the people advising or conducting the search operation. The reality is the plane could be virtually anywhere on the last range ring. A competent analyst can create a set of flight dynamics to support a location North or South of the equator. While these flight paths might seem contrived, they are certainly not far removed conceptually from the flight dynamics used by the ATSB and "consensus" IG.  The observables suggest that MH370 was actively piloted prior to the FMT.  To assume that everything was "hands off" after the FMT is logically unsustainable (for me).

I have taken a somewhat more holistic approach to the problem. An approach that invokes the notions of motive, lack of radar sightings, and lack of debris. When one considers the totality of information, some of it nuanced, it becomes clear that the SIO terminus is tenuous at best. Neither pilot displayed any suicidal tendencies. Suicide is usually not the result of a spontaneous decision. It evolves over a long time period (i.e. the German Wings case), and warning signs are almost always evident.  It is more likely that Captain Shah simply wanted to make a political statement or negotiate a political concession from the Malaysian government. Shah had several landing locations available with a more Northern flight path depending on the status of "negotiations" going on in Malaysia between the government and his co-conspirators - Banda Aceh, Cocos, Christmas Island, Bandung,... Certainly flying into the SIO toward the current search area provided no opportunity to land the aircraft. Flying along the Southern coast of Sumatra/Java offers a diverse set of landing opportunities.

With that as background, I have constructed a revised flight path below which satisfies all the BTO and BFO data after and including the 19:40 handshake. The revisions from earlier postings are based on:

• Carefully derived BTO range rings using a WGS84 ellipsoid and correct sub-satellite centers. My original rings were made in haste using a spherical earth and centered at the nominal sub-satellite location over the equator.

• More care relative to speed and heading selection to better match the BTO and BFO data without the need to include arbitrary altitude variations.

• The conclusion that the PIC intended to land from North to South instead of South to North. This change was the result of considering surface winds from the Southwest at that time.

• The conclusion that the PIC did a flyby South of the Island to verify a clear runway before turning North for the final approach.
• It has been pointed out to me by a very sincere source that it is also possible that the PIC turned North to land at Bandung, and the intention was not to land on Christmas Island.

The Inmarsat BTO and BFO data were used in accordance with the vector diagram below.

The revised flight path is shown below along with the supporting data in spreadsheet form. The spreadsheet continues to be shown in two parts. The upper part calculates Doppler residuals based on the known observables. These residuals would be the same for any flight path. The lower part of the spreadsheet shows the aircraft location, speed, and heading used to match the residuals. The area inside the white circle will be the subject of additional discussion below.

Note that no altitude variations were used to reconcile the BFO data with the aircraft position, speed, and heading.

Edit 2/23/2016 to table below:

A 23:15 data point was added at the request of Oleksandr. No other changes were made.

In the table data above D2 refers to the aircraft and satellite Doppler, and D1 refers to the Doppler compensation produced by the AES. The heading lag is associated with the turn North and the Doppler change associated with this lag is quantified in an earlier post in this blog. A three degree per second turn was assumed with an inertial update interval of 0.25 seconds. Two values are shown for the 00:10 Doppler - one with no ROC or heading lag, and one with an ROC of +2 meters/sec OR a heading lag of 0.7 degrees (either accounts for the additional 7Hz of Doppler).

The aircraft speed at 19:40 was based on a calculation made in another post in this blog "Mid-flight Speed - MH370" below.

The conclusion is that the aircraft ran out of fuel during or shortly after the turn North, and went into the ocean almost due East of Christmas Island. Please take a look at "Coincidences - Are You a Believer ??" elsewhere in this blog.

The graphic below shows an enlarged version of the white circle area in the first graphic above.

The area inside the circle (with the exception of the 19:40 location) represents residual confusion. The radar data presented by the Malaysian government showed a last contact at a range of 200nm on a 295 degree radial. This contact was time tagged at 18:22 UTC. This location and time are not compatible with reaching the 18:25 UTC range ring location. The aircraft could not fly that fast. Other analysts have concluded that the radar data presentation was made in haste, and that the labeling was incorrect. They have used overlays to infer a last radar contact range of 250nm on a 285 degree radial toward Mekar.  An "official" correction to the radar data has never been made. It is also true that the GM400 radar at Butterworth has a manufacturer specified detection range of slightly more than 200nm, and that the radar data showed by the Malaysians did not come from a GM400 display. Until revised and officially certified data is available, I won't speculate on the flight path prior to 19:40.

A final comment is that the flight path associated with my analytics lies too far West to have been the sighting described by Kate Tee.  Kate could have seen the plane, but at a distance of some 70nm.

Of course, the usual disclaimers apply. While I believe the calculations above are correct, history has shown that making errors is virtually inevitable.

Update 20 November 2016

The flaperon found on Reunion Island has been confirmed by the French to have come from 9M-MRO (MH370). This finding and confirmation allows drift models to be created in an attempt to narrow down the likely terminus of the aircraft on the last ping ring. The most credible such model has been created by  Geomar, a Research Institute in Germany.

Dr. Jonathan Durgadoo and Prof. Dr. Arne Biastoch from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel used a state-of-the-art ocean model in combination with observational data. This provides a coherent realistic dataset for their drift analyses to determine the possible origin of the flaperon. To do so, they release virtual particles around La Réunion and compute their trajectories back in time. "Of course it does not make much sense just to track only a few particles within the model," Dr. Durgadoo explains. "We have traced back almost two million 'virtual' particles over a period of 16 months," Durgadoo continues. "For each month back, we subsequently calculated the probable region of the particles positions."

The Geomar model shows that the most likely origin of the flaperon is far to the North of the current search area, and compatible with the Christmas Island region terminal hypothesis.  The Geomar probability map is shown below. Other models such as the CSIRO model are suspect, IMO. There is virtually no probability (see map) that the flaperon originated from the current search area.

There is still no word from the French relative to the flaperon damage forensics or the pathology of the barnacles.