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MH370 pilot made many turns and speed changes, new report reveals

286 points by wglb 6y ago

GekkePrutser 6y ago
If this is true or means the suicide/mass murder theory is true. Basically the germanwings scenario except much more intricately planned. I still can't imagine how sick a person can be to do this. If he wanted to kill himself he should just have jumped off a bridge. I'm kinda still hoping it's wrong and there was a proper reason behind this. But either way I hope the families will het some kind of closure.
- mylons 6y ago
  misery loves company
- IntemerateApe 6y ago
  perhaps they want to go down in history, or they are so bitter and resentful they want to take others down. Like kids who do school shootings.. Not sure though.
  - schoen 6y ago
    > perhaps they want to go down in history Many people have done things like that in history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herostratus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herostratus), but that's also hard to reconcile with disguising one's role and responsibility and preventing proof of either from being established, isn't it?
- gustavo-fring 6y ago
  "I still can't imagine how sick a person can be to do this. If he wanted to kill himself he should just have jumped off a bridge." It seems difficult for emotionally healthy people to understand how unhealthy people are thinking and acting. I suspect he had some latent genetic triggers and whatever happened in life slowly chipped away at the human part that guards against going code red. If you think about it, I, being a person without covid (hopefully) don't have any clue what it's like to be on my deathbed with covid. If I did, I'd probably act differently. What scares me about it some is that this kind of inability to understand is what leads to conspiracy theories. Stephen Paddock couldn't have just been a narcissistic vengeful loner that did what he did because he was that depraved. No, there must be a bigger more complex, more ridiculous explanation. Paddock was actually making an arms deal with the Saudis, Of course, being ex-FBI (or whatever) himself, when that deal went wrong to "cover" his tracks he shot up a concert. I mean it is absurd on its face but when you get this dynamic of not understanding how other people behave, you get these almost supernatural explanations. Of course, you're not doing any of that, just throwing out my 2 cents.
  - sjg007 6y ago
    To understand a narcissist you have to look at their immediate area of control. When they can't control the thing that gives them relief or it falls apart, they will proceed to destroy it. This exists at every level and is only countered by checks and balances on power. Or you can choose to exit.
    - grioghar 6y ago
      What you’ve just detailed here is exactly why there was an elevated level of concern during a particular 4-year window, and a general sigh of relief once that time had passed.
      - gustavo-fring 6y ago
        I think you are absolutely on the money here, but I also think we didn't benefit and he benefitted greatly from the fact that people jumped to comparing him with one of the worst dictators of all time. Did his personality dispose him to possibly becoming something like that? Had his coup succeeded I'm sure we'd be closer. But he was compared to a mass murderer (conveniently in living memory, no comparisons to Timur or other autocrats) before he'd done anything but say tactless things. That enabled him to paint all criticisms of him as absurd (even though he would have anyway).
      - sjg007 6y ago
        If you think that's over, think again. It is not enough to forget; we need to obliviate 45.
        gustavo-fring 6y ago
        We need to understand that 45 is a symptom of a social and political system and not a one-off uniquely bad example.
        kmonsen 6y ago
        That is such a true and obvious statement, it was also an (most likely unintentional) trial run for the next one that will be more dangerous.
- philliphaydon 6y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SilkAir_Flight_185 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SilkAir_Flight_185 It’s happened before unfortunately :(
  - userbinator 6y ago
    More recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
- gumby 6y ago
  > I still can't imagine how sick a person can be to do this. If he wanted to kill himself he should just have jumped off a bridge. Jumping off a bridge seems quite difficult in the moment. Whereas it may be much easier to simply do what you always do, being distracted a bit by the need to execute details (that may feel emotionally innocuous) until you gradually slip across a point of no return and the decision is out of your hands. You could even work on controlling the plane all the way to the water, just as you were trained to until, of course, there was nothing further you could do. I do imagine that some passengers and crew must have noticed something weird about the in flight maps. Almost the entire flight path is out of phone range though so unless there was satellite internet there would have been nothing any crew could have done. Cockpit doors are armored these days.
  - gumby 6y ago
    BTW the Langweiche article in The Atlantic suggests that the passengers and crew were asphyxiated by flying over 40K feet for a period, hence no objections. Also the the end of the plane was seemingly more violent than simple descent. This doesn't contradict my vague scenario, but I wrote it after having read the posted article (about the clever ham radio hack) but before reading Langweiche's article which was mentioned in another comment.
  - guenthert 6y ago
    > Cockpit doors are armored these days. Perhaps there should be a device capable of sending a distress signal accessible from the cabin by flight-attendants?
    - tirant 6y ago
      Or even better. A device capable of sending that distress signal automatically without any intervention of the crew. It's not difficult to automatically detect emergency situations based on the different sensor readings available in a commercial plane. A similar solution could also be applicable to other means of transport. E.g. A similar solution would have been extremely useful for the indonesian submarine lost weeks ago.
- fighterpilot 6y ago
  This was a way to commit suicide while preserving honor (for himself or family) post-death, which is important to some people.
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    How is there any honor in murdering hundreds of innocent people?
    - ergocoder 6y ago
      You can't prove that, and that's why we still have the discussion. I'm sure there is an insurance payout at play as well.
    - kelnos 6y ago
      There isn't, which is why the pilot would have made it difficult or impossible to prove that's what happened. Without a determination of wrongdoing, his family would be in the clear, and would get any life insurance or pension payouts.
    - fighterpilot 6y ago
      I'm talking about other people's perceptions of him. If he thought he could make it look like an accident, it looks "better" (to some people) to die in a freak plane crash than it does to kill themselves (which looks "weak"). The insurance money is probably a better explanation but I think the above psychology would apply to quite a few people who wouldn't want to saddle their family with the perceived embarrassment of committing suicide.
marricks 6y ago
Does anyone have more information in this WSPR system? I’m not certain how someone could have access to enough stations to pick up enough stray radio signals to detect a flight path. It sounds very intricate. Edit: sounds like it’s based off of amateur radio operators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_(amateur_radio_software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_(amateur_radio_software)
- visviva 6y ago
  I'm also interested in learning about how this can be used for tracking. From the paper [1]: > The method is based on pattern recognition of anomalies in the radio transmissions between stations in the global WSPR network in the received signal-to noise ratio (SNR) and/or the drift of the received signal when compared to the transmission frequency. These anomalies in transmission links may be due to a number of causes, including an aircraft crossing the transmission path. That's pretty vague, but it's a start. [1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/tvtfw14tfyfljie/Global%20Detection%20and%20Tracking%20of%20Aircraft%20in%20the%20Search%20for%20MH370.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/tvtfw14tfyfljie/Global%20Detection...
- entropea 6y ago
  It's based off of amateur radio yes. As a ham this is actually really really cool. A Raspberry Pi is able to transmit detectable WSPR off of it's 10dBm output from the GPIO and an antenna if you have a callsign and want to try it. There is a database & map of current WSPR activity on all amateur bands. I frequently use it for propagation indicators. https://wsprnet.org/drupal/wsprnet/map https://wsprnet.org/drupal/wsprnet/map
- wglb 6y ago
  This is the article that underscores much of this work on tracking: https://www.dropbox.com/s/w43gu64vn7jvmxm/Using%20the%20WSPRnet%20and%20Inmarsat%20Satellite%20data%20in%20the%20search%20for%20MH370.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/w43gu64vn7jvmxm/Using%20the%20WSPR... Quite fascinating.
wombatmobile 6y ago
William Langewiesche's well researched 2019 article in The Atlantic [1] presented a compelling set of facts and inferences for understanding what happened with MH370. He says evidence from the pilot's flight simulator reveals the obfuscating journey had been planned in advance. 53 year old Zaharie Ahmad Shah's life was unravelling. The reason we haven't heard the full story is that Malaysia's Air Force doesn't want their role in failing to manage the event to be scrutinised. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-malaysia-airlines/590653/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-m...
- gustavo-fring 6y ago
  Gives me some Breaking Bad vibes (the traffic controller) down to the discussion about accountability for why he was working.
- Steko 6y ago
  I didn't find it compelling at all. It mostly just makes a lot of assumptions and piles them all onto a suicide pilot theory that can be used to explain any action needed and has become unfalsifiable without recovering the wreckage. Here's a counterpoint: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-atlantics-william-langewiesche-dusts-off-discredited-conspiracy-theory-to-accuse-mh370-pilot-of-hijacking https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-atlantics-william-langewie...
  - argonaut 6y ago
    The counterpoint spends most of its words (rightfully) dismissing analysis of the pilot's psychology but does not persuasively address the flight simulator evidence. The arguments against that evidence mostly amount to how it is not conclusively incriminating. But this is not a court of law - we are not putting him on trial.
    - hugh-avherald 6y ago
      As someone who's used flight simulator games, I have definitely left the computer while cruising, forgotten about the flight, and come back to find myself in the middle of nowhere. Also the smoking gun simulator session was in a different aircraft to MH370 and with a significantly different initial route.
duxup 6y ago
>The flight path seems well planned and avoids commercial flight routes. The pilot appears not so concerned about fuel usage and much more concerned about leaving false trails. What would the motive be here? Leaving any trail would seem to leave enough behind to assume to the pilot was in control.... And yet efforts seem to also be to avoid being detected. I've seen other theories that indicate they think the plane was flown to avoid being noticed....and yet those also describe a very severe manure too. I feel like every theory has some contradictions. Has there been any reliable psychological data on who might have been at the controls?
- smabie 6y ago
  Arm chair theory: pilot wanted to commit suicide in an elaborate way without tarnishing his name. I feel like that's the simplest explanation, though I am curious about other theories.
  - guenthert 6y ago
    And killing dozens in the process? That ain't suicide. I don't think there is a simple explanation.
    - tremon 6y ago
      As mentioned in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046552), it's possible the pilot chose to make his plane unlocatable because if it cannot be proven he intentionally downed the plane, his family would receive a payout from the airline.
- kmonsen 6y ago
  Have you been around people with psychological disorders? There are no way you will understand the thought process and motive. You can still have empathy and help as much as possible, but understanding is difficult, even for experienced doctors used to treating this kind of patients. They can also appear normal and change very quickly. And it can happen to all of us.
visviva 6y ago
The paper referenced in the article can be found here (pdf): https://www.dropbox.com/s/tvtfw14tfyfljie/Global%20Detection%20and%20Tracking%20of%20Aircraft%20in%20the%20Search%20for%20MH370.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/tvtfw14tfyfljie/Global%20Detection...
owenversteeg 6y ago
That website (airlineratings.com) claimed to have "the only" airline safety ratings so I took a look, and unfortunately they seem to be completely bogus. I couldn't find one airline that didn't score the maximum on everything, including Ukrainian International Airlines which in my opinion has a very subpar safety standard. Does anyone know of other airline safety ratings?
- DN1010 6y ago
  Skytrax seems to be the industry standard. Edit: nevermind you said SAFETY ratings
- mustardgreen 6y ago
  Does Ukranian Airlines have a bad reputation besides the incident in Tehran? I rode it once, and besides it being a particularly rowdy flight, I found it to be a very strict and safe airline.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
    > I rode it once, and besides it being a particularly rowdy flight, I found it to be a very strict and safe airline I don’t think you can make that judgement rising on an aircraft. What is the pilot training and certification. What is their maintenance schedule? How old are their aircraft? What near misses have they had? Those are the types of questions that have more to do with safety than the experience of riding on a flight.
    - jhugo 6y ago
      > What near misses have they had? And don't forget about the ones that you never heard about due to a lax reporting culture. Turkey is (in)famous in this regard; you only find out about incidents when they're impossible to hide (like their frequent landing mishaps).
- darrenf 6y ago
  There are plenty of airlines with ratings far from maximum on that site. Visit https://www.airlineratings.com/safety-rating-tool/ https://www.airlineratings.com/safety-rating-tool/ and sort by the Safety Rating column. Indeed Malaysian Airlines rates only 3 out of 7 https://www.airlineratings.com/ratings/malaysia-airlines/ https://www.airlineratings.com/ratings/malaysia-airlines/
AlexCoventry 6y ago
Wow, that is some amazing detective work.
lamontcg 6y ago
Didn't we already know this after a few days/weeks of the accident? The kind of analysis here might be new, but is it actually providing more data? And is it possible that the accuracy of this method has been improved by the developer knowing what the correct answer needed to be beforehand?
ajarmst 6y ago
I've not read the original report (and am unlikely to), but this quotation: '“WSPR is like a bunch of tripwires or laser beams (graphic below), but they work in every direction over the horizon to the other side of the globe,” Mr. Godfrey says.' is not an accurate characterization of this (or any) use of WSPR. It implies a degree of precision and clarity of signal that is completely misleading. I'm also very concerned about Godfrey's clear comfort with taking this very weak and contingent signal and using it to ascribe thoughts, motives and behaviour to the aircrew of MH370. You don't do that without substantial corroborating evidence from other sources when you have an intact Cockpit Data Recorder, much less whatever this is. Looks a lot like a familiar pattern: starting with a theory, finding some nice noisy data that needs 'expert interpretation', and then massaging it to confirm your theory.
- ellenhp 6y ago
  Yeah I'm not an expert in this stuff but I am an extra-class radio amateur and this sets off literally all my intellectual alarm bells. I'll take one for the team and go read the report but I agree that it seems like pure unadulterated bullshit. The ionosphere is a very violent place for an HF radio signal. These radio waves do not travel in a straight line. They don't even come out of the ionosphere with the same polarization as they go in with. I cannot fathom how you could glean anything from a WSPR signal's RSSI. edit 1: I'm just gonna live-text my thoughts on this as I go through it into this comment. First off, the software that this person developed, GDTAAA, doesn't seem to be available for viewing. Shame because I'd love to see it, but I guess I'll have to go by the paper. edit 2: "An algorithm is run that calculates an expected received SNR based on the transmitter power and the short path distance" W O W, okay, not even taking into account an estimated noise for the receiving station. Nice. It also doesn't seem to take into account time of day, any of the different propagation modes like gray line, etc, or the wavelength of the transmission. Big yikes. edit 3: WSPR signals have a transmission length of about two minutes. A 777 travels about 20 miles during that amount of time, and you're trying to use the average SNR of the entire 2 minute period to estimate whether an aircraft crossed the path of the signal. Even if the WSPR signal occupied the entire 20 mile-wide swath of sky that the aircraft was in during the WSPR transmission, the aircraft can only block about 0.2% of that swath at an given moment on account of it being absolutely tiny.
timcederman 6y ago
One of the best recent write-ups on what likely happened and the different possible scenarios. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-years-on-what-do-we-know-about-the-disappearance-of-malaysia-airlines-77fa5244bf99 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-y...
- bredren 6y ago
  If the same flight path and termination was found after being intentionally deleted and but still in the system files of his home computer—-why is there any discussion of all of the other possible theories?
  - Thorrez 6y ago
    Does the article timcederman linked say that (the flight path found after being deleted)?
    - bredren 6y ago
      > although initial reports indicated that the track had been intentionally saved by the user, later analysis showed that it was kept only in the system files, and certainly was not meant to be found.
  - Steko 6y ago
    Because it's not really the same path.
    - bredren 6y ago
      I’m no expert on the region but looking at these described points on a map they sound very similar. Do you have a link to the leaked report containing the deleted simulation? From Parent’s link: > In 2014, a leaked Malaysian police report revealed that among Zaharie’s saved flight simulator sessions was a very odd route which ran up the Strait of Malacca, turned south after passing Sumatra, and then flew straight down into the Southern Indian Ocean before terminating in the vicinity of the seventh arc. > Not only did the track resemble MH370’s actual flight path, it also contained a number of other intriguing details. >For example, the track wasn’t really a track — rather, it was a series of brief clips lasting no more than a few seconds each, indicating that Zaharie had programmed it in advance then skipped along it to various points without actually playing through the entire hours-long flight. ——— From op’s link: > The pilot of MH370 generally avoided official flight routes from 18:00 UTC (2 am AWST) onwards but used waypoints to navigate on unofficial flight paths in the Malacca Strait, around Sumatra and across the Southern Indian Ocean. The flight path follows the coast of Sumatra and flies close to Banda Aceh Airport,”
blondie9x 6y ago
This seems to be a pilot suicide. This has happened before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
S_A_P 6y ago
I think that someone wanting to commit suicide is going to do a pretty good job at succeeding if they are serious. I dont know that there is a good explanation for doing it other than they want to for reasons. If they are committed to the idea, the thought of killing others probably isnt a far leap.
Lammy 6y ago
When these planes are fly-by-wire how is it possible to guarantee that the actual human pilot was the person moving the flight controls?
- KirillPanov 6y ago
  When you figure it out, give Elon a call; NHTSA and him want to know too.
- jhugo 6y ago
  That applied even before fly-by-wire. Autopilots have existed for much longer than fly-by-wire has.
platz 6y ago
Why did it take 7 years to create a report on the collected WSPR data
- jhugo 6y ago
  This is being done by amateurs, so the amount of time taken should not be surprising. Knowing a little about WSPR, I am skeptical that the methods described can work.
mhh__ 6y ago
Given the topic of the thread: https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/media-guidelines/suicide-facts-journalists/ https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/media-guidelines...
lettergram 6y ago
So... it's clear that the flight path was carefully planned and had a plane full of semi-conductor engineers / researchers [1]. I have a hard time not imagining a hijacking / kidnapping. [1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/malaysia-airlines-plane-mh370-latest-conspiracy-theory-were-freescale-semiconductor-top-employees-1440097 https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/malaysia-airlines-plane-mh370-late...
elliekelly 6y ago
Perhaps a silly question but why do we need to collect the actual, physical black box from the plane? Why can’t planes use satellite signal to periodically upload a few seconds of cockpit recording or even just flight data? Is it as simple as the files would be too large?
- fisherjeff 6y ago
  No, I think it’s more an issue of reliability
  - fighterpilot 6y ago
    Does that matter if we're only going to use it in a situation like this? Some low reliability redundancy would still be nice
- moftz 6y ago
  That's a lot of data to transmit via satellite and satellite bandwidth is expensive. Most planes don't crash into the middle of the ocean with all of the transponders turned off so it's an expensive solution for a very rare problem. Satellite-based ADS-B seems to be the future going forward. Everyone can see a plane out in the middle of the ocean and can immediately know where to look if it happens to go down.
  - caf 6y ago
    Not that Satellite-based ADS-B would have helped in this instance, because the ADS transponder was turned off early in the piece.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    Is it actually lots of data? I assume it would all be just numbers, which can be quite small when stored in binary format (+ compression).
- bionade24 6y ago
  I guess this was a bandwith problem when most of today's commercial air planes were designed and later on no one considered it. Probably will come sooner or later.
gorgoiler 6y ago
Is this a proven technique? If I gave Godfrey a mountain of WSPR signal data and left him for a day under exam conditions could he reproduce the flight path of a flight I randomly choose? This must have already been done lots of times, to prove the technique? I am skeptical but at the same time... I Want To Believe.
supernova87a 6y ago
I don't know if others here also read the really interesting technical report on how the searchers used very presciently recorded data from Inmarsat to figure out where MH370 may have gone. (not the government overall incident summary or similar, but the paper in the Journal of Navigation, which I didn't know was a thing) It turned out that after the previous (Air France?) loss of aircraft, Inmarsat's operations team/executive decided that they should preserve data about the Burst Timing Offset (BTO) and Burst Frequency Offset (BFO) of every transmission to/from aircraft instead of discarding it as unneeded data (their disks were filling up). That data records the returned ping frequency and timing offset (hence the names) of the plane's transmissions to/from the satellites, even if it's just for a handshake, and no meaningful voice/data content is exchanged. After all, if a perfunctory handshake message contains no content, why save something as esoteric as the Doppler-shifted frequency you received it back on, or the timing difference? The executive in charge of that said, impressively, "we didn't exactly know why we might need it in the future, but we thought we should save that data." (paraphrasing, can't quite find the original quote right now) That frequency + timing offset was the key information in figuring out what radial + distance the plane may have been flying on, for 7 hours after all other systems stopped reporting, based on the hourly handshakes/pings of the sat-phone system. All other data reporting systems had gone offline or out of distance. They tested it against other aircraft (in same geographic area, time, and of same type even!) whose positions were known, and had confidence it was trustworthy enough to base the search areas on. It was a fascinating read to me at least. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-navigation/article/search-for-mh370/D2D1C4C99E7BFDE35841CFD70081114A https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-navigatio... and more generally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370_satellite_communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370_s...
- andi999 6y ago
  What surprises me about path reconstructed from immersat: the angle to the satellite is always the same, but the pilot didn't know (or care) the position of the satellite. So there is no reason to follow such a path (a straight path would change the angle) . This seems like a too big coincidence. To me the only explanation (except a huge coincidence) is either a stationary plane or of course faulty data.
cletus 6y ago
I don't know why there's still so much speculation as to what happened on this flight because it seems clear there's really only one explanation that fits the evidence: after leaving Malaysian airspace the pilot executed a series of maneuvers and turned the plane over the Indian Ocean where it either made a soft landing, filled with water and sank or crashed into the ocean. Given the minimal debris, it seems the soft landing may be more plausible. The maneuvers, radio silence and timing of leaving Malaysian airspace all point to deliberate action. There are questions here like what happened to the cockpit crew. As for the passengers, the most likely explanation I've seen is that the cabin was depressurized and hypoxia likely eliminated that problem. Why? The most likely explanation is suicide-by-plane much like the Germanwings incident. It seems like this was even more premeditated such that a lot of effort was made to make sure the plane wasn't found, likely this was so the pilot's family would get a settlement as the pilot's actions couldn't be ruled a suicide without the black box. Literally nothing else makes sense. I don't know how long the black box can retain information, particularly given it's likely ~4km under the ocean and by now has been for years. It's a shame the extensive (and expensive) efforts to locate the wreck have all failed. The search area is remote and deep making search operations difficult and expensive. This too seems to be by design. It also seems quite likely that investigators having the pings from the plane to narrow down the search area was a flaw in that plan. The pilot was likely unaware of this possibility, which again is more evidence of deliberate action. I do hope this can be settled one day.
- Zealotux 6y ago
  Soft landing is unlikely as the pieces found seems to be pretty damaged, they also found pieces from inside the cabin: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37820122 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37820122
  - flir 6y ago
    But if it broke up in the air/on the surface, wouldn't we expect a lot more debris? It's all very odd.
    - 6y ago
redis_mlc 6y ago
- dozens of pieces of wreckage have been recovered on various islands, so oceanic currents data can be used to track where they came from MH370: The key pieces of debris found by the public - BBC - 2017 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37820122 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37820122 - Islam doesn't permit voluntary suicide, but there are rewards for funding or committing violence to advance Islam. He could have rationalized the latter. - the voice and data recorder pingers only have batteries for 30 days, so you'd need to scan the seabed, which is expensive. Source: commercially-rated pilot who's followed MH370 casually.
supernova87a 6y ago
You would think they would validate this technique's accuracy by showing how it performs against all the aircraft whose positions are known as test cases. That they didn't do this (or maybe aren't discussing it) makes me weight this finding as much as any other noisy report of people believing they saw something in the sky.
w0de0 6y ago
Why are black boxes not buoyant?

286 points by wglb 6y ago

If this is true or means the suicide/mass murder theory is true. Basically the germanwings scenario except much more intricately planned. I still can't imagine how sick a person can be to do this. If he wanted to kill himself he should just have jumped off a bridge. I'm kinda still hoping it's wrong and there was a proper reason behind this. But either way I hope the families will het some kind of closure.

mylons 6y ago
misery loves company
IntemerateApe 6y ago
perhaps they want to go down in history, or they are so bitter and resentful they want to take others down. Like kids who do school shootings.. Not sure though.
- schoen 6y ago
  > perhaps they want to go down in history Many people have done things like that in history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herostratus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herostratus), but that's also hard to reconcile with disguising one's role and responsibility and preventing proof of either from being established, isn't it?
gustavo-fring 6y ago
"I still can't imagine how sick a person can be to do this. If he wanted to kill himself he should just have jumped off a bridge." It seems difficult for emotionally healthy people to understand how unhealthy people are thinking and acting. I suspect he had some latent genetic triggers and whatever happened in life slowly chipped away at the human part that guards against going code red. If you think about it, I, being a person without covid (hopefully) don't have any clue what it's like to be on my deathbed with covid. If I did, I'd probably act differently. What scares me about it some is that this kind of inability to understand is what leads to conspiracy theories. Stephen Paddock couldn't have just been a narcissistic vengeful loner that did what he did because he was that depraved. No, there must be a bigger more complex, more ridiculous explanation. Paddock was actually making an arms deal with the Saudis, Of course, being ex-FBI (or whatever) himself, when that deal went wrong to "cover" his tracks he shot up a concert. I mean it is absurd on its face but when you get this dynamic of not understanding how other people behave, you get these almost supernatural explanations. Of course, you're not doing any of that, just throwing out my 2 cents.
- sjg007 6y ago
  To understand a narcissist you have to look at their immediate area of control. When they can't control the thing that gives them relief or it falls apart, they will proceed to destroy it. This exists at every level and is only countered by checks and balances on power. Or you can choose to exit.
  - grioghar 6y ago
    What you’ve just detailed here is exactly why there was an elevated level of concern during a particular 4-year window, and a general sigh of relief once that time had passed.
    - gustavo-fring 6y ago
      I think you are absolutely on the money here, but I also think we didn't benefit and he benefitted greatly from the fact that people jumped to comparing him with one of the worst dictators of all time. Did his personality dispose him to possibly becoming something like that? Had his coup succeeded I'm sure we'd be closer. But he was compared to a mass murderer (conveniently in living memory, no comparisons to Timur or other autocrats) before he'd done anything but say tactless things. That enabled him to paint all criticisms of him as absurd (even though he would have anyway).
    - sjg007 6y ago
      If you think that's over, think again. It is not enough to forget; we need to obliviate 45.
      - gustavo-fring 6y ago
        We need to understand that 45 is a symptom of a social and political system and not a one-off uniquely bad example.
        kmonsen 6y ago
        That is such a true and obvious statement, it was also an (most likely unintentional) trial run for the next one that will be more dangerous.
philliphaydon 6y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SilkAir_Flight_185 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SilkAir_Flight_185 It’s happened before unfortunately :(
- userbinator 6y ago
  More recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
gumby 6y ago
> I still can't imagine how sick a person can be to do this. If he wanted to kill himself he should just have jumped off a bridge. Jumping off a bridge seems quite difficult in the moment. Whereas it may be much easier to simply do what you always do, being distracted a bit by the need to execute details (that may feel emotionally innocuous) until you gradually slip across a point of no return and the decision is out of your hands. You could even work on controlling the plane all the way to the water, just as you were trained to until, of course, there was nothing further you could do. I do imagine that some passengers and crew must have noticed something weird about the in flight maps. Almost the entire flight path is out of phone range though so unless there was satellite internet there would have been nothing any crew could have done. Cockpit doors are armored these days.
- gumby 6y ago
  BTW the Langweiche article in The Atlantic suggests that the passengers and crew were asphyxiated by flying over 40K feet for a period, hence no objections. Also the the end of the plane was seemingly more violent than simple descent. This doesn't contradict my vague scenario, but I wrote it after having read the posted article (about the clever ham radio hack) but before reading Langweiche's article which was mentioned in another comment.
- guenthert 6y ago
  > Cockpit doors are armored these days. Perhaps there should be a device capable of sending a distress signal accessible from the cabin by flight-attendants?
  - tirant 6y ago
    Or even better. A device capable of sending that distress signal automatically without any intervention of the crew. It's not difficult to automatically detect emergency situations based on the different sensor readings available in a commercial plane. A similar solution could also be applicable to other means of transport. E.g. A similar solution would have been extremely useful for the indonesian submarine lost weeks ago.
fighterpilot 6y ago
This was a way to commit suicide while preserving honor (for himself or family) post-death, which is important to some people.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  How is there any honor in murdering hundreds of innocent people?
  - ergocoder 6y ago
    You can't prove that, and that's why we still have the discussion. I'm sure there is an insurance payout at play as well.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    There isn't, which is why the pilot would have made it difficult or impossible to prove that's what happened. Without a determination of wrongdoing, his family would be in the clear, and would get any life insurance or pension payouts.
  - fighterpilot 6y ago
    I'm talking about other people's perceptions of him. If he thought he could make it look like an accident, it looks "better" (to some people) to die in a freak plane crash than it does to kill themselves (which looks "weak"). The insurance money is probably a better explanation but I think the above psychology would apply to quite a few people who wouldn't want to saddle their family with the perceived embarrassment of committing suicide.

marricks 6y ago

Does anyone have more information in this WSPR system? I’m not certain how someone could have access to enough stations to pick up enough stray radio signals to detect a flight path. It sounds very intricate. Edit: sounds like it’s based off of amateur radio operators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_(amateur_radio_software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_(amateur_radio_software)

visviva 6y ago
I'm also interested in learning about how this can be used for tracking. From the paper [1]: > The method is based on pattern recognition of anomalies in the radio transmissions between stations in the global WSPR network in the received signal-to noise ratio (SNR) and/or the drift of the received signal when compared to the transmission frequency. These anomalies in transmission links may be due to a number of causes, including an aircraft crossing the transmission path. That's pretty vague, but it's a start. [1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/tvtfw14tfyfljie/Global%20Detection%20and%20Tracking%20of%20Aircraft%20in%20the%20Search%20for%20MH370.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/tvtfw14tfyfljie/Global%20Detection...
entropea 6y ago
It's based off of amateur radio yes. As a ham this is actually really really cool. A Raspberry Pi is able to transmit detectable WSPR off of it's 10dBm output from the GPIO and an antenna if you have a callsign and want to try it. There is a database & map of current WSPR activity on all amateur bands. I frequently use it for propagation indicators. https://wsprnet.org/drupal/wsprnet/map https://wsprnet.org/drupal/wsprnet/map
wglb 6y ago
This is the article that underscores much of this work on tracking: https://www.dropbox.com/s/w43gu64vn7jvmxm/Using%20the%20WSPRnet%20and%20Inmarsat%20Satellite%20data%20in%20the%20search%20for%20MH370.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/w43gu64vn7jvmxm/Using%20the%20WSPR... Quite fascinating.

wombatmobile 6y ago

William Langewiesche's well researched 2019 article in The Atlantic [1] presented a compelling set of facts and inferences for understanding what happened with MH370. He says evidence from the pilot's flight simulator reveals the obfuscating journey had been planned in advance. 53 year old Zaharie Ahmad Shah's life was unravelling. The reason we haven't heard the full story is that Malaysia's Air Force doesn't want their role in failing to manage the event to be scrutinised. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-malaysia-airlines/590653/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-m...

gustavo-fring 6y ago
Gives me some Breaking Bad vibes (the traffic controller) down to the discussion about accountability for why he was working.
Steko 6y ago
I didn't find it compelling at all. It mostly just makes a lot of assumptions and piles them all onto a suicide pilot theory that can be used to explain any action needed and has become unfalsifiable without recovering the wreckage. Here's a counterpoint: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-atlantics-william-langewiesche-dusts-off-discredited-conspiracy-theory-to-accuse-mh370-pilot-of-hijacking https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-atlantics-william-langewie...
- argonaut 6y ago
  The counterpoint spends most of its words (rightfully) dismissing analysis of the pilot's psychology but does not persuasively address the flight simulator evidence. The arguments against that evidence mostly amount to how it is not conclusively incriminating. But this is not a court of law - we are not putting him on trial.
  - hugh-avherald 6y ago
    As someone who's used flight simulator games, I have definitely left the computer while cruising, forgotten about the flight, and come back to find myself in the middle of nowhere. Also the smoking gun simulator session was in a different aircraft to MH370 and with a significantly different initial route.

duxup 6y ago

>The flight path seems well planned and avoids commercial flight routes. The pilot appears not so concerned about fuel usage and much more concerned about leaving false trails. What would the motive be here? Leaving any trail would seem to leave enough behind to assume to the pilot was in control.... And yet efforts seem to also be to avoid being detected. I've seen other theories that indicate they think the plane was flown to avoid being noticed....and yet those also describe a very severe manure too. I feel like every theory has some contradictions. Has there been any reliable psychological data on who might have been at the controls?

smabie 6y ago
Arm chair theory: pilot wanted to commit suicide in an elaborate way without tarnishing his name. I feel like that's the simplest explanation, though I am curious about other theories.
- guenthert 6y ago
  And killing dozens in the process? That ain't suicide. I don't think there is a simple explanation.
  - tremon 6y ago
    As mentioned in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046552), it's possible the pilot chose to make his plane unlocatable because if it cannot be proven he intentionally downed the plane, his family would receive a payout from the airline.
kmonsen 6y ago
Have you been around people with psychological disorders? There are no way you will understand the thought process and motive. You can still have empathy and help as much as possible, but understanding is difficult, even for experienced doctors used to treating this kind of patients. They can also appear normal and change very quickly. And it can happen to all of us.

visviva 6y ago

The paper referenced in the article can be found here (pdf): https://www.dropbox.com/s/tvtfw14tfyfljie/Global%20Detection%20and%20Tracking%20of%20Aircraft%20in%20the%20Search%20for%20MH370.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/tvtfw14tfyfljie/Global%20Detection...

owenversteeg 6y ago

That website (airlineratings.com) claimed to have "the only" airline safety ratings so I took a look, and unfortunately they seem to be completely bogus. I couldn't find one airline that didn't score the maximum on everything, including Ukrainian International Airlines which in my opinion has a very subpar safety standard. Does anyone know of other airline safety ratings?

DN1010 6y ago
Skytrax seems to be the industry standard. Edit: nevermind you said SAFETY ratings
mustardgreen 6y ago
Does Ukranian Airlines have a bad reputation besides the incident in Tehran? I rode it once, and besides it being a particularly rowdy flight, I found it to be a very strict and safe airline.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  > I rode it once, and besides it being a particularly rowdy flight, I found it to be a very strict and safe airline I don’t think you can make that judgement rising on an aircraft. What is the pilot training and certification. What is their maintenance schedule? How old are their aircraft? What near misses have they had? Those are the types of questions that have more to do with safety than the experience of riding on a flight.
  - jhugo 6y ago
    > What near misses have they had? And don't forget about the ones that you never heard about due to a lax reporting culture. Turkey is (in)famous in this regard; you only find out about incidents when they're impossible to hide (like their frequent landing mishaps).
darrenf 6y ago
There are plenty of airlines with ratings far from maximum on that site. Visit https://www.airlineratings.com/safety-rating-tool/ https://www.airlineratings.com/safety-rating-tool/ and sort by the Safety Rating column. Indeed Malaysian Airlines rates only 3 out of 7 https://www.airlineratings.com/ratings/malaysia-airlines/ https://www.airlineratings.com/ratings/malaysia-airlines/

AlexCoventry 6y ago

Wow, that is some amazing detective work.

lamontcg 6y ago

Didn't we already know this after a few days/weeks of the accident? The kind of analysis here might be new, but is it actually providing more data? And is it possible that the accuracy of this method has been improved by the developer knowing what the correct answer needed to be beforehand?

ajarmst 6y ago

I've not read the original report (and am unlikely to), but this quotation: '“WSPR is like a bunch of tripwires or laser beams (graphic below), but they work in every direction over the horizon to the other side of the globe,” Mr. Godfrey says.' is not an accurate characterization of this (or any) use of WSPR. It implies a degree of precision and clarity of signal that is completely misleading. I'm also very concerned about Godfrey's clear comfort with taking this very weak and contingent signal and using it to ascribe thoughts, motives and behaviour to the aircrew of MH370. You don't do that without substantial corroborating evidence from other sources when you have an intact Cockpit Data Recorder, much less whatever this is. Looks a lot like a familiar pattern: starting with a theory, finding some nice noisy data that needs 'expert interpretation', and then massaging it to confirm your theory.

ellenhp 6y ago
Yeah I'm not an expert in this stuff but I am an extra-class radio amateur and this sets off literally all my intellectual alarm bells. I'll take one for the team and go read the report but I agree that it seems like pure unadulterated bullshit. The ionosphere is a very violent place for an HF radio signal. These radio waves do not travel in a straight line. They don't even come out of the ionosphere with the same polarization as they go in with. I cannot fathom how you could glean anything from a WSPR signal's RSSI. edit 1: I'm just gonna live-text my thoughts on this as I go through it into this comment. First off, the software that this person developed, GDTAAA, doesn't seem to be available for viewing. Shame because I'd love to see it, but I guess I'll have to go by the paper. edit 2: "An algorithm is run that calculates an expected received SNR based on the transmitter power and the short path distance" W O W, okay, not even taking into account an estimated noise for the receiving station. Nice. It also doesn't seem to take into account time of day, any of the different propagation modes like gray line, etc, or the wavelength of the transmission. Big yikes. edit 3: WSPR signals have a transmission length of about two minutes. A 777 travels about 20 miles during that amount of time, and you're trying to use the average SNR of the entire 2 minute period to estimate whether an aircraft crossed the path of the signal. Even if the WSPR signal occupied the entire 20 mile-wide swath of sky that the aircraft was in during the WSPR transmission, the aircraft can only block about 0.2% of that swath at an given moment on account of it being absolutely tiny.

timcederman 6y ago

One of the best recent write-ups on what likely happened and the different possible scenarios. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-years-on-what-do-we-know-about-the-disappearance-of-malaysia-airlines-77fa5244bf99 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-y...

bredren 6y ago
If the same flight path and termination was found after being intentionally deleted and but still in the system files of his home computer—-why is there any discussion of all of the other possible theories?
- Thorrez 6y ago
  Does the article timcederman linked say that (the flight path found after being deleted)?
  - bredren 6y ago
    > although initial reports indicated that the track had been intentionally saved by the user, later analysis showed that it was kept only in the system files, and certainly was not meant to be found.
- Steko 6y ago
  Because it's not really the same path.
  - bredren 6y ago
    I’m no expert on the region but looking at these described points on a map they sound very similar. Do you have a link to the leaked report containing the deleted simulation? From Parent’s link: > In 2014, a leaked Malaysian police report revealed that among Zaharie’s saved flight simulator sessions was a very odd route which ran up the Strait of Malacca, turned south after passing Sumatra, and then flew straight down into the Southern Indian Ocean before terminating in the vicinity of the seventh arc. > Not only did the track resemble MH370’s actual flight path, it also contained a number of other intriguing details. >For example, the track wasn’t really a track — rather, it was a series of brief clips lasting no more than a few seconds each, indicating that Zaharie had programmed it in advance then skipped along it to various points without actually playing through the entire hours-long flight. ——— From op’s link: > The pilot of MH370 generally avoided official flight routes from 18:00 UTC (2 am AWST) onwards but used waypoints to navigate on unofficial flight paths in the Malacca Strait, around Sumatra and across the Southern Indian Ocean. The flight path follows the coast of Sumatra and flies close to Banda Aceh Airport,”

blondie9x 6y ago

This seems to be a pilot suicide. This has happened before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

S_A_P 6y ago

I think that someone wanting to commit suicide is going to do a pretty good job at succeeding if they are serious. I dont know that there is a good explanation for doing it other than they want to for reasons. If they are committed to the idea, the thought of killing others probably isnt a far leap.

Lammy 6y ago

When these planes are fly-by-wire how is it possible to guarantee that the actual human pilot was the person moving the flight controls?

KirillPanov 6y ago
When you figure it out, give Elon a call; NHTSA and him want to know too.
jhugo 6y ago
That applied even before fly-by-wire. Autopilots have existed for much longer than fly-by-wire has.

platz 6y ago

Why did it take 7 years to create a report on the collected WSPR data

jhugo 6y ago
This is being done by amateurs, so the amount of time taken should not be surprising. Knowing a little about WSPR, I am skeptical that the methods described can work.

mhh__ 6y ago

Given the topic of the thread: https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/media-guidelines/suicide-facts-journalists/ https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/media-guidelines...

lettergram 6y ago

So... it's clear that the flight path was carefully planned and had a plane full of semi-conductor engineers / researchers [1]. I have a hard time not imagining a hijacking / kidnapping. [1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/malaysia-airlines-plane-mh370-latest-conspiracy-theory-were-freescale-semiconductor-top-employees-1440097 https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/malaysia-airlines-plane-mh370-late...

elliekelly 6y ago

Perhaps a silly question but why do we need to collect the actual, physical black box from the plane? Why can’t planes use satellite signal to periodically upload a few seconds of cockpit recording or even just flight data? Is it as simple as the files would be too large?

fisherjeff 6y ago
No, I think it’s more an issue of reliability
- fighterpilot 6y ago
  Does that matter if we're only going to use it in a situation like this? Some low reliability redundancy would still be nice
moftz 6y ago
That's a lot of data to transmit via satellite and satellite bandwidth is expensive. Most planes don't crash into the middle of the ocean with all of the transponders turned off so it's an expensive solution for a very rare problem. Satellite-based ADS-B seems to be the future going forward. Everyone can see a plane out in the middle of the ocean and can immediately know where to look if it happens to go down.
- caf 6y ago
  Not that Satellite-based ADS-B would have helped in this instance, because the ADS transponder was turned off early in the piece.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Is it actually lots of data? I assume it would all be just numbers, which can be quite small when stored in binary format (+ compression).
bionade24 6y ago
I guess this was a bandwith problem when most of today's commercial air planes were designed and later on no one considered it. Probably will come sooner or later.

gorgoiler 6y ago

Is this a proven technique? If I gave Godfrey a mountain of WSPR signal data and left him for a day under exam conditions could he reproduce the flight path of a flight I randomly choose? This must have already been done lots of times, to prove the technique? I am skeptical but at the same time... I Want To Believe.

supernova87a 6y ago

I don't know if others here also read the really interesting technical report on how the searchers used very presciently recorded data from Inmarsat to figure out where MH370 may have gone. (not the government overall incident summary or similar, but the paper in the Journal of Navigation, which I didn't know was a thing) It turned out that after the previous (Air France?) loss of aircraft, Inmarsat's operations team/executive decided that they should preserve data about the Burst Timing Offset (BTO) and Burst Frequency Offset (BFO) of every transmission to/from aircraft instead of discarding it as unneeded data (their disks were filling up). That data records the returned ping frequency and timing offset (hence the names) of the plane's transmissions to/from the satellites, even if it's just for a handshake, and no meaningful voice/data content is exchanged. After all, if a perfunctory handshake message contains no content, why save something as esoteric as the Doppler-shifted frequency you received it back on, or the timing difference? The executive in charge of that said, impressively, "we didn't exactly know why we might need it in the future, but we thought we should save that data." (paraphrasing, can't quite find the original quote right now) That frequency + timing offset was the key information in figuring out what radial + distance the plane may have been flying on, for 7 hours after all other systems stopped reporting, based on the hourly handshakes/pings of the sat-phone system. All other data reporting systems had gone offline or out of distance. They tested it against other aircraft (in same geographic area, time, and of same type even!) whose positions were known, and had confidence it was trustworthy enough to base the search areas on. It was a fascinating read to me at least. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-navigation/article/search-for-mh370/D2D1C4C99E7BFDE35841CFD70081114A https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-navigatio... and more generally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370_satellite_communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370_s...

andi999 6y ago
What surprises me about path reconstructed from immersat: the angle to the satellite is always the same, but the pilot didn't know (or care) the position of the satellite. So there is no reason to follow such a path (a straight path would change the angle) . This seems like a too big coincidence. To me the only explanation (except a huge coincidence) is either a stationary plane or of course faulty data.

cletus 6y ago

I don't know why there's still so much speculation as to what happened on this flight because it seems clear there's really only one explanation that fits the evidence: after leaving Malaysian airspace the pilot executed a series of maneuvers and turned the plane over the Indian Ocean where it either made a soft landing, filled with water and sank or crashed into the ocean. Given the minimal debris, it seems the soft landing may be more plausible. The maneuvers, radio silence and timing of leaving Malaysian airspace all point to deliberate action. There are questions here like what happened to the cockpit crew. As for the passengers, the most likely explanation I've seen is that the cabin was depressurized and hypoxia likely eliminated that problem. Why? The most likely explanation is suicide-by-plane much like the Germanwings incident. It seems like this was even more premeditated such that a lot of effort was made to make sure the plane wasn't found, likely this was so the pilot's family would get a settlement as the pilot's actions couldn't be ruled a suicide without the black box. Literally nothing else makes sense. I don't know how long the black box can retain information, particularly given it's likely ~4km under the ocean and by now has been for years. It's a shame the extensive (and expensive) efforts to locate the wreck have all failed. The search area is remote and deep making search operations difficult and expensive. This too seems to be by design. It also seems quite likely that investigators having the pings from the plane to narrow down the search area was a flaw in that plan. The pilot was likely unaware of this possibility, which again is more evidence of deliberate action. I do hope this can be settled one day.

Zealotux 6y ago
Soft landing is unlikely as the pieces found seems to be pretty damaged, they also found pieces from inside the cabin: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37820122 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37820122
- flir 6y ago
  But if it broke up in the air/on the surface, wouldn't we expect a lot more debris? It's all very odd.
  - 6y ago

redis_mlc 6y ago

- dozens of pieces of wreckage have been recovered on various islands, so oceanic currents data can be used to track where they came from MH370: The key pieces of debris found by the public - BBC - 2017 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37820122 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37820122 - Islam doesn't permit voluntary suicide, but there are rewards for funding or committing violence to advance Islam. He could have rationalized the latter. - the voice and data recorder pingers only have batteries for 30 days, so you'd need to scan the seabed, which is expensive. Source: commercially-rated pilot who's followed MH370 casually.

supernova87a 6y ago

You would think they would validate this technique's accuracy by showing how it performs against all the aircraft whose positions are known as test cases. That they didn't do this (or maybe aren't discussing it) makes me weight this finding as much as any other noisy report of people believing they saw something in the sky.

w0de0 6y ago

Why are black boxes not buoyant?