MH370: What did ships notice on the day it disappeared?
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Mike Chillit's graphic archiving trackable shipping when MH370 crashed
Updated* When Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 inexplicably changed course on 8 March 2014 and from all indications eventually flew to its doom in the southern Indian Ocean, it must have crossed paths with the shipping below.
But has anyone systematically interrogated those container ships, or those fishing fleet mother ships that were legal?
And if they did, was the information of sufficient validity to refine the estimates of the paths that might have been taken by the 777-200ER with 239 souls on board, who had taken off on a scheduled flight between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing but vanished as a transponder identified airliner over the Gulf of Thailand about 40 minutes after departure?
These questions leap out of a graphic just tweeted by Mike Chillit (@MikeChillit), shown at top of page.
Note that the very closely spaced of the yellow dots do not in most cases indicate separate ships, but the same ship at each reporting interval during the day.
The darker blue shading shows the priority search portion of the so called 7th arc positions from which an incomplete signal from an engine monitoring computer on board MH370 was sent to an Inmarsat satellite parked above the equator on the western side of the Indian Ocean at the moment 777 is believed to have struck the water after its fuel was exhausted.
When MH370 diverted from its intended path it crossed the Malaysia Peninsula, as seen on military radar and headed toward the Andaman Sea after crossing the northern approaches to the Straits of Malacca. What happened after that remains controversial but on the basis of satellite and sat phone data, the jet eventually established itself on a southerly path before running out of fuel and crashing some seven hours and 39 minutes after lift off.
There are huge variables at play in the estimates and scenarios being relied upon by the Australian led ocean floor priority zone search in parallel to the Malaysia led investigation into the loss of the 777.
Had any of the shipping that could have conceivably been under those possible flight paths noticed MH370 at the relevant times, it could allow the discarding or modification of some of the estimated flight paths and potential debris zones on the bottom of an ocean where the key areas have only just been surveyed so that they could be safely examined at closer range by towed deep sea sonar scanning devices.
The question as to what shipping intelligence the search effort has gathered or sought has been asked earlier today.
That is not done as a criticism of the search effort, but out of curiosity. Very precise archived navigational tracking data exists for all substantial commercial shipping in the Indian Ocean because of the technology that is used, as is the case for aircraft movements when transponders and automated performance monitoring equipment is fully functional.
There is also a level of illegal fishing in the ocean that would not be making its various positions known.
The reality check in all of this is the degree of sky surveillance undertaken by normal shipping, which in most circumstances in today’s maritime environment, would be very close to nil.
However once MH370 had moved south of the equator flying activity also drops off. If a jet crossed those skies within sight of a ship at an unusually low altitude, or taking an unusual heading, at any altitude, it might well attract attention.
There are no scheduled flights that take a north-south route toward the zone where MH370 would have run out of fuel. There is nothing to fly to.
Fuel exhaustion in a modern jet airliner causes the ram air turbine or RAT to pop-out of the body of the plane to generate emergency electrical power from its tiny windmill rotor.
That power is selectively fed to some critical cockpit displays and systems, and even if the automated engine performance monitor has been switched off, it will turn itself on and attempt to send a message to the home base, in this case the Rolls-Royce engine facility in the UK, saying at the very least, the engines have powered down.
That messaging sequence, via a satellite and a ground station in Australia, was incomplete when it ended abruptly, defining the moment of impact with the surface of the ocean.
Given the dispersed state of the shipping that was showing up in the Indian Ocean SW of Australia at about dawn local time on 8 March 2014, the navigational lights, and any contrails, and possibly at close range, the actual body of the airliner might have been spotted by one or more of the vessels.
Unless of course it never flew south, as some critics of the Australian led search insist is the case.
*Updated
Mike Chillit has just provided this visibility guide (under clear skies) for shipping that was under or near the various flight paths assumed to have been followed by MH370 prior to fuel exhaustion and impact in the current priority search zone.
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As I said in another place, the yellow dots are about 30 km in diameter and the longitude grid lines are about 1000 km apart. For practical purposes, viewed to scale, there was no one there.
Which is not to say the matter should be ignored, just that it’s an extreme long shot. Why would someone who observed something relevant not have said so, given the level of international interest. Even anonymously, for your putative “illegal”?
Glen #1 may be right but this is a cheap investigation to perform and no reason exists to not do it. I presume that all ships have someone supposed to be awake and alert on their bridges 24/7? However the plane would not be low enough to be noticed until the very end of its doomed flight. (Ahem, as per the Kuda Huvadhoo scenario which I would still like to hear a more comprehensive or convincing rebuttal. Incidentally that scenario does not have to involve any crazy conspiracy theories involving Diego Garcia or Will + Kate. It could be identical explanation for the SOI scenario–whatever that might be–just a different heading when the plane turned near Penang.)
… and the normal cruise level is of the order of 10 kM….
Although the Malaysian government asked Australia to conduct the ocean search, I assume the interrogation of ships is more of a police matter, and therefore Malaysia’s responsibility.
I think the visible horizon from an airliner is such that in good visibility conditions (and with someone watching) those shipping positions would have seen nav lights and by daylight contrails across a broad area relevant to the current search focus.
Where I live I can readily identify jet airliner types cruising between FL300-410 under good conditions (and check them against a flight radar tracker centred over this part of the highlands).
An airliner set of contrails heading south in that part of the SIO would have been unprecedented and very surprising if the viewing was adequate.
What good would it do if somebody had seen it moving across the sky? It might shoot down some of the more ridiculous theories about the plane flying to Kazakhstan and so on, but unless it was seen when it was right at the limits of its fuel endurance it still wouldn’t narrow down the search area much.
If anything, the testimony from ships passing through the area in the days afterwards might have been more useful. At least they could tell us about possible debris (although I’m sure somebody would have come forward by now if anything like that had been sighted).
A couple of points: First, aircraft don’t always produce contrails, although they are quite common. Second, what were the weather conditions in the area at the time? Cloud cover may have precluded a visual sighting of both contrails and nav lights/strobes. If that was the case, then a ship would have to have been very close to the point where the aircraft went down, and the observer would have to be looking in the right direction to have a chance of seeing anything.
Mike Chillit is to be commended for his efforts and the question arises why this effort was not being made by the professional investigators a year ago?
Perhaps the answer lays in the fact five satellites did spot 300+ floating objects, all more than 2 metres across, one 5m, another 22.5m and another 24m across from 16-25 March 2014 yet what did the professionals do?
The Malaysian JIT team (composed of MAS airline staff and Government officials) demanded Australia call off the search for those objects.
On 24 March 2014 Chinese search planes made just one sweep east of these floating objects when successive satellite imaging indicated those objects were drifting SSW, not east.
This itself raises yet another question whether Australia even shared meteorological data with the Chinese?
On 25 March Chinese search planes were grounded at the demand of Malaysia’s JIT team by Australian officials who deceptively advised China there was a dangerous storm over the search area.
This image of the area Southeast of New Amsterdam and Isle St Paul betrays the actual weather in the search zone had surface winds of just 15 knots
http://i257.photobucket.com/albums/hh212/727Kiwi/MH370/wx27_3_14_zps4907a074.jpg
About 20 March HMAS Success was ordered to steam east away from those floating objects and returned some days later after they had drifted well to the South.
Then on 28 March 2014, at insistence of Malaysian Authorities the search area was shifted much further north to Zenith Plateau, trying to locate underwater pings from a ULB which Malaysia must have already known by then had not been replaced in 9M-MRO.
It takes selective nativity to ignore the determined, deliberate efforts by investigators to ignore clues.
These objects were ignored because those clues did not fit INMARSAT’s theory.
An objective approach would be to establish the facts and then develop a theory when you have found the plane.
If someone had seen something — even a distant southward contrail in the early morning sunlight — that could be extremely useful. It might be enough to position what remains a highly uncertain southerly track. But they didn’t see anything or they would have said by now. It’s a year ago, far too long to go asking and expect a rational response, unless it happened to be written down in a log. A long long shot.
Chillit’s point, if I read it correctly, was that there were so many eyes out there that they should have seen something, ergo, the plane didn’t go that way (his basic line for a while now). But the conclusion is false because he misreads the scale … which is odd, because he’s demonstrated many times that he has an adequate grasp of the vastness of the SIO.
@Fred these were conditions at the time.
http://i257.photobucket.com/albums/hh212/727Kiwi/MH370/Arcdebrisweather_zps34ed8009.png
Surface winds where the floating objects drifted from (about 45S, 85E) were 103-107 knots from 251 deg True.
Along the Southern Arc winds were 50 knots from 260 deg True, however I have seen claims of 100 knots along the southern arc.
http://i257.photobucket.com/albums/hh212/727Kiwi/MH370/MH370%20mb%20map_zpsakktz9ce.jpg
Vessels at the time would be experiencing big seas.
@Glen Given the weather conditions were so cold, windy and overcast how would anyone be out on deck even to notice much less able to see a plane at 35,000 feet.
Unfortunately whilst I commend Mike Chillit’s efforts, he can’t assume absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Wind chill alone mean that nobody would be out on deck on any of these ships.
As someone who spent almost a lifetime at sea on ships I have to tell you that the chance of some ship’s crewmember seeing anything would be almost zero.
Unless it crashed right in front of the ship and even then perhaps not.
the watchkeeping Officer would probably be reading a book with a look at the radar and GPS and making an entry in the log occasionally.
Everyone else would be inside most of the time. Modern ships have the crew numbers reduced to the minimum and a person is either on watch or in their cabin or recreation room. Deck maintenance is almost non existant these days.
Some very good points have been made about how difficult it would have been, especially as Tony Foot says, in current ships.
However this doesn’t tell us whether or not the ships were asked if they saw anything.
I would have thought a fundamental prerequisite by the authorities at first, and the investigators when appointed, would be to question all ships.
As some of us have repeatedly asked previously, why were the authorities in KL so totally disinterested they didn’t call every kampong, ever town, every port authority, every flight within a few hundred kms of the flight path.
Why were they so f*cking heartless, lazy and uncommitted?
Was it because they knew something then they still haven’t told us?
Has Mike (or anyone else) done the same plots in the Gulf of Thailand, Strait of Malacca, and points north and west of the Strait?
You may find the answer with a lot of Chinese nationals on board with 6 in particular who had the patent on the “freescale semi conductor” this was of particular interest as it had radar cloaking capabilities. The plane was not shot down it was obviously hijacked maybe to Vietnam. There were reports from locals who spotted such a large aircraft coming into land there and it was somewhat unusual to them. It is quite obvious the plane didn’t go down in the ocean as there were no bodies, no debri no nothing. If you keep playing with the idea the plane went down in the drink your just being silly. There are just so many things that float including bodies after a stint below to consider the idea.
While a good outside the box thought,
ships run over sailing boats on some regular basis, and said boats have radar reflectors.
Said route with zero out there, very low level of people paying attention to anything including radar.
Also as we know, eyewitness are not only poor, they are totally unreliable (one may get it right, 10 get it wrong and sorting out the right one means confirming non eye witness evidence.
We have eye witness that saw it crash off some island that obviously was people making up stories. some lie, some want publicity, it seems to be a human condition.
If the radar records had been kept they might have been a streak not noticed that might confirm a presence. No idea if they log them an deep them or they are purged after a voyage etc.
Again I like the thinking, but Ben, you are also beyond a keen aviation observer, a guy on a deck seeing a contrail would probably be so what, even if see forgotten and not recalled.
I might well dismiss it as an odd military flight.
If it came across the bow and when phoom maybe yes but even a few miles away with the watch situation no one might even be looking.
I think what Ben is driving at is that not all, not every single avenue of ‘ground’ investigation has been identified and, where required, eliminated for our enquiries, as they say. With a situation such as MH 370, every possible, impossible or improbable lead should have been followed. Sure, it would take a lot of time, many man hours of unproductive, mind numbing hard slog; but at least, for certain sure we would know that that Charlie in hut 13 was legless when he saw the spaceship grab the aircraft. Just saying…
Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people. W.C. Fields.
If Chillit was able to obtain these ship tracks to produce a graphic for that day, it seems below par and ultimately worthless to create such a graphic without start and end points or times for each track specified. Looking at this, one can’t tell where any particular vessel was at any particular time (at least, in order to compare with weather satellite images on that morning that could give any insight into potential visibility conditions from each vessel) and as a gauge of a given vessel’s heading, which might be a significant factor in what direction anyone on watch would have been facing, especially with respect to the relative portion of the sky involved to be potentially able to spot an aircraft in it. Its nearly worthless, except as a very crude indication of the [indeed, legal]shipping density over that region.
Another thing: no contrails should be expected once the aircraft descended into warmer troposphere. For that, Chillit might better have prepared a graphic showing the situation substantially farther north that might point out even more ships beneath a contrail that seemed to be flying toward nowhere. If the aircraft kept at altitude until fuel depletion, any contrail would have ended at that point. Spotting the aircraft during its final descent would have been very unlikely even if there were observers on these indicated ships actively scanning the skies for it in expectation.
As for being able to spot an airliner like that – if its still producing a decent contrail, in clear weather at sea it is entirely possible to spot it (barely above the horizon) at ranges of up to nearly 400 km, depending on the altitude of the aircraft (that range calculated for about 40,000 feet) and illumination angle (closer to a rising or setting sun dramatically increases the brightness of the contrail through forward-scattering of light).
Anton,
While you ask some very important questions and make some very valid observations I’m obliged out of fairness to make the point that Mike Chillit, like myself, works on these matters for nothing, and if I dare speak on his behalf, probably also needs to look after a day job, or something else, which is true of my position.
The paid media continues to implode. Dozens of colleagues who had survived until till now in salaried positions lost their jobs yesterday. One reason the established media has been so weak in covering MH370 is that it has no resources, and often the more experienced writers are the ones being harvested.
Another factor is that Mike works in the Twitter format, which is very , very effective as a distribution tool, but has a rather constrained format, so that there isn’t a huge amount of information that can be included in a single graphic. However we do see evidence that Twitter is evolving, I hope for the better, to become a much more information intensive tool.
Yes, MH370 would have been hard to spot under many plausible scenarios, but were these ships even asked?
I see Mr Chillit has blocked me. How amusing, the first ever!
BTW, his pink zones are approximately 600 km wide. Can you really see a passenger aircraft from a heaving deck at 300 km range … I don’t think so. That’s before allowing for Simon’s 50+kt “sea breeze”.
Worth asking, no great hopes, better chance when it happened.
Also no great hopes they will find it either.
The impulse seems a good one…costs nothing* to ask, right?
*well…what? A couple of million in time to track everyone down and interview them?
As a practical matter you cannot see an aircraft at 33,000′ that isn’t making contrails. The visual range to the horizon is around 350 km, but much less to see contrails much above the horizon. What local time is the current estimate of the crash? Was it even much past dawn?
If the winds were even a fraction of Simon’s alarming values you’d have to imagine spray and squalls would have reduced the visual sphere to effectively nothing anyway.
Final point…by the time the search was focussed down there would a crew member even recall seeing (let alone where and when) a south bound contrail? When would the crew member first become aware of a possible connection between something unremarkable (to a deck hand) and something remarkable indeed?
OK, one last point: What new information could such a sighting, even if corroborated, convey, apart from validating the inmarsat general idea? And if that theory has not by now been already validated, what are they doing down there?
Just checked…sunrise in the local area was around 43 minutes before the estimated time of impact. It is safe to say that no external lights would have been lit if the event was caused by determined human action, as unpalatable as that seems to some.
As Ben alluded to, it is certain that Malaysia knew what was going on. They sent search crews to where they knew for certain that the plane wasn’t. Malaysia doesn’t want the plane found.
Not only Malaysia, though. Remember when the southern route was first mooted, we all carried on about how it took the Americans to guide Malaysia into searching in the south? How Malaysia was so inept that they couldn’t find that way themselves?
I would suggest that the US of A created the southern route to give Malaysia somewhere to point. I am suspicious of Inmarrsat and note how they have given themselves an out by saying they sent their interpretation of the data to Malaysia and the search is being undertaken where Malaysia wants as distinct from saying where Inmarrsat directed them.
I would suggest the search should be looking anywhere but where Malaysia has directed it to.
@ Ben: I agree completely. (And thank you for the background). I was merely pointing out the obvious deficiencies in these graphics in terms of extracting any further information out of them. I am actually in awe of him being able to eke out what he has! Perhaps it is an avenue he and others can further pursue…
In any case, you are entirely correct…the tantamount question is: “were these ships even asked?” That is indeed the kernel.
@ Confirmed Sceptic #24: Exactly. Any talk of external lights over that ~40 minute interval is irrelevant, and especially since the aircraft (presumably at cruise altitude at local sunrise) and any attendant contrail would be brightly visible against the dusk sky for at least an additional 10-15 minutes because of its elevation and precursory illumination by the rising Sun and brightening horizon that attends it.
That roughly 10-minute interval during dusk light could have presented a strong display.
If one backtracks, therefore, an aircraft moving along at a nominal 900 kph would place its greatest visibility about 600 to 750 km north of the spot it is expected to have come down according to the Immarsat scenario.
Just saying.
@Ben: “Dozens of colleagues who had survived until till now in salaried positions lost their jobs yesterday.
That is startling and most dismaying news. Despicable. I sincerely grieve. I share in the battle and consider myself applied wherever little I can in the safe arrival to decent port in the same boat.
#20 Ben
I have figured out the Hedley Thomas angle on the Kuda Huvadhoo story, [edited] ….and taking his cue from Rupe’s NY Post which first ran this story way back. (The same NY Post infamous for “headless body in topless bar” headline.) Just for a laugh.
……………..
#23 Confirmed Sceptic
Have the Inmarsat calculations, the algorithm, been validated?
It has often been suggested to have an identical plane fly the proposed route and see what Inmarsat would produce with its data. But I have never read that it was ever done. No doubt Inmarsat are keeping a low profile as there is no benefit, and potential liability, in getting in any deeper.
Just out of curiosity, sightings of big an loud jet with red and blue stripes flying low over Maldives on the disappearance night were reported by multiple eyewitnesses. Considering, as reported, it was very unusual to see plane at that time flying that low it was certainly something out of ordinary but reports were instantly dismissed as not related to MH370 however no one ever said which exactly plane was that and radar data would have to be readily available from either Maldives, Indians or Americans on Diego Garcia.
The inmarsat calculations ave been validated buy using data from other Malaysian 777s flying on known routes. So no not a reenactment, but if you get the sat pings from known aircraft and apply the same process as used on the MH370 pings, then cross reference that with the sample aircrafts known flight path it would be pretty easy to validate the MH370 arc calculations.
They did this validation on a number of flights. By validating the calculation method there is no real need to do a reenactment. Boeing data and simulations would provide the flight profile possibilities. Pretty sure Boeing would have run some comprehensive tests to help define the most likley crash site.
I agree that there may have been a window of opportunity of perhaps 30 minutes in ideal conditions where a hypothetical contrail would have been very visible, before the fuel ran out and the aircraft stopped making heat. Assuming that any hypothetical contrail was of the enduring variety, which they almost never are.
I will make the point again that the theoretical observer would have needed to be inside the maximum line of sight, or any contrail would have looked like a distant low stratus cloud. So, say a maximum of 150km east of the final track.
I think the logical next first step would be to consult aviation meteorologists to ascertain if they can rule contrails in or out on the day in question, and at which altitudes. (When they do occur, it is in a narrow band of altitudes)
I think that a person or persons unknown took the aircraft. They disabled all of the tracking electronics of which they were aware. Why then would someone that technically aware not disable their lights? If the goal was the perfect mystery, I mean?
BTW, the moon was less than half, and set at 02:17 local that night.
By the way…a meteorologist, using the Learmonth met data, predicted possible contrails above FL350. Learmonth is a long way distant, and I have never seen contrails stretch for that long. Meaning that the data set regarding atmospheric saturation at the various levels is more localised…that’s why clouds change over a few hundred kilometers instead of being a homogenous feature spanning continents.
Were any of these shipping operators using cameras on board their ships, e.g to monitor staff movements on deck etc.?
A very slim chance of anything being picked up in the background perhaps, but if digital records are kept, perhaps also worth checking.
Here is continental Australia’s highest mountain viewed from about 100 km away on Mt Nelse near Falls Creek in Victoria, on a day of excellent visibility: http://gergs.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Koscuisko.jpg
Reckon you could see an aircraft way over there? Unlikely, even through binoculars. What about a contrail, if there was one? Maybe, if you happened to be looking very carefully. Now try that from three times as far — that’s Mr Chillit’s 300 km radius pink zone. I’d suggest that he may be suffering from some quite extreme form of confirmation bias apropos his “it’s not in the SIO”.
@endeavour.paul@gmail.com
Whilst I do believe various parties have “guided” the investigation to various false assumptions, I still accept the basic premise that satellite data suggests the SIO.
Beyond that however the fact that it was not found by the seabed search proves the 7th Arc is not where they were looking. That confirms some underlying assumptions fed into calculations were plain wrong.
@Theoddkiwi
If a re-enactment flight cannot reproduce signal handshake pattern then it calibrates the wrong assumptions which have caused the seabed search to fail.
Hell of a lot cheaper to re-enact the flight than put four ships at sea for several months. Why not re-enact it?
What are they so scared of?
Simon Gunson, post #37.
“Hell of a lot cheaper to re-enact the flight than put four ships at sea for several months. Why not re-enact it?
What are they so scared of?”
The problem as I see it is that however many ‘unknowns’ they factor-in & however many combinations they might re-enact,
ultimately, they have to send some kind of underwater vessel to actually look at the sea-floor for wreckage for every plausible, potential outcome.
(It’s far, far too late to be looking for surface traces)
In the end I would suspect it will be a case of declaring MH370 ‘lost in an unknown location’ at some stage in the near future, rather than admit that they could continue the search ‘but it’s just too expensive & ultimately what will we really learn anyway’.
(I put that in quotes as it’s not my personal opinion but is roughly what I expect the authorities to say)
At some stage in the (distant.?) future I don’t doubt that MH370 will be found, somewhere.? (BSAA Star Dust)
My hope (looking desperately for a silver-lining) is that scientists are able to find something useful from of all the masses of new information now available about the SIO seabed.
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