[SystemSafety] MH370

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

The picture is more coherent than it seems. I wrote about this extensively on a specialist list earlier today, after looking at what was said yesterday. Three different news outlets in the US had different information from US intelligence sources, but were all painting a coherent picture.

NBA said, citing a US intelligence source, that no explosion-type event had been seen. Sudden catastrophic destruction is the only scenario, apart from human intervention, consistent with the ADS-B messages doing what they did. SBIR is a reliable asset; if something happened one would have expected it to show up. 

The WSJ had info that "pings", which I interpret as some sort of attempting electronic handshaking, continued for a number of hours beyond the Malaysian "point of last contact". The WSJ has not withdrawn, but has rather modified and elaborated, this proposal.

Reuters suggested that some further electronic communications had contained position, altitude, speed and bearing info, and constructed a route of continued flight between waypoints to the west of the Malaysian peninsula. This route in map form was widely distributed on the usual media.

Inmarsat has recently told a Guardian reporter, Gwyn Topham, that it was getting "pings" for hours afterwards. They didn't contain position or altitude info, but presumably triangulation-type analysis will yield some suggestion.

All the evidence from yesterday and today points towards deliberate intervention in the planned flight; none of it has been discredited and some of it has been elaborated. RR is party to the investigation, as the engine manufacturer, and deferred to the Malaysian lead when asked about possible communications it may have received after the Malaysian "point of last contact". Inmarsat is not party to the investigation and I think its comment to Topham is decisive.

I think we can assume that, for a few days preceding the anonymous comment to the WSJ, people in places with significant intelligence assets have been furiously evaluating all they have. I wouldn't be surprised to find out some agency has a very good idea exactly where the airplane is. 

If it's in the Indian Ocean, then it's highly likely that would have been deliberate - it had enough fuel to achieve landfall in that direction and then some.

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, University of Bielefeld and Causalis Limited

> On 14 Mar 2014, at 20:46, "Chris Hills " <safetyyork at phaedsys.com> wrote:
> 
> OK, OK... It's Friday.  I will say it:  They were abducted by aliens :-) 
> (and no one can prove me wrong :-) 
> 
> I think there is a lot of speculation and fragmented data from disjointed sources (not to mention political shenanigans to some extent and Newspaper guesswork I saw something in passing about warnings from a US watchdog about cracks in the ac 6 months ago) .  
> 
> I think it will be a while before all the *reliable* data ends up in one place and a coherent picture is put together.   By which time any wreckage is going to be well and truly dispersed and it will be back to a needle in a haystack, all be it a smaller haystack.   So as with AF447 it is going to be, I think, quite some time, if ever, before we get any real idea of what happened.