MH370 gets another dose of bad science and poor reporting
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The laughable graphic that comes with the latest MH370 claim
Somehow, a group of mathematicians have managed to come up with a claim that MH370 dived head first into the south Indian Ocean and remained intact.
Their ignorance of the structural strengths and weaknesses of airliners and the evidence available from similar impacts is as shocking as the lack of editorial depth in papers that publish such rubbish.
When the mass of a jet airliner makes a high velocity impact with a body of water the structural integrity of the windscreen visors and the thin cylinder of the pressure vessel that is the cabin structure is ruptured and totally destroyed.
Both internally and externally. The water is rammed up through the cabin toward the tail and the walls have already been compressed and broken. Flesh and clothing is torn from the bodies of those who if alive are dead within a split second.
The hideous damage inflicted in crashes into water mimic very closely those of impacts with the ground, or buildings. Examples include the end of 2014 AirAsia crash in the Java Sea, the belly flop damage sustained by Air France AF447 in 2009, and the Silkair mass murder and suicide flight into the Musi River estuary near Palembang in Indonesia in 1997.
The deceleration measured by the flight data recorder in the Air France crash into the mid Atlantic peaked at more than 32G. Some of those found floating on the surface had been cut in two by their seat belts.
Silkair was definitely a vertical dive. As the photo shown below indicates, the jet was torn to pieces.
That 737 required the pilot to have been in active control of the jet until impact, as jets do not ‘naturally’ enter into or follow a sustained dive when fuel runs out. Rather, they execute a series of abruptly variable arcing descents, or a spiral, until impact, which is what the official inquiries into MH370 believe is shown to have occurred during the last aircraft initiated ‘ping’ to an Inmarsat satellite, when was incomplete when it suddenly stopped, apparently on contact with the water.
(There was a subsequent attempt by the satellite to reconnect with the aircraft, to which there was no response.)
The learned mathematicians story seeks to answer why no floating debris was found. Therein may be a real story. About a week after MH370 vanished on 8 March 2014 on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people onboard, satellite image scrutiny began to find what looked like a floating debris field SW of Perth.
The haste with which the Australian managed aerial search was switched to the NE remains variously a matter of a complete bungle, or something more sinister, keeping in mind it took and continues to take direction from the Malaysian authorities, who were later found to have lied unashamedly about what they knew about MH370 from the moment the public became aware the flight was missing.
The unwillingness of Australia to query the direction and integrity and information it received from Kuala Lumpur in relation to MH370 is a very big festering issue, as often reported here in Plane Talking yet ignored by the same media that report the sort of clap trap found in this piece of editorial garbage.
There are hard stories to do about MH370, and easy ones, like the one being peddled as click bait in today’s papers.
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We’ve all known since satellite BFO Doppler shift data was published in 2014 that there was no discernible Doppler shift between 00:11 UTC and 00:19 UTC. Because MH370 was not a helicopter the only logical assumption is that MH370 was in a prolonged spiral dive for eight minutes.
An eight minute dive implies entry from a very great height and that in turn implies decompression, not a pilot induced dive.
The claim that there were no debris is also woefully ignorant. There was a vast field of floating debris.
https://sites.google.com/site/mh370debris/home/debris-images
Texas A&M University at Qatar. What? Is this some kind of deflection from their world cup larceny & fraud cover-up?
I agree Ben…this is the worst kind of story, and full of ignorance. There are plenty of videos online showing test crashes of jets into solid and semi-solid objects. Hit a thing with jet speeds and large amounts of the structure gas off, which is why the total mass of all objects recovered is always much less than the mass of the aircraft before impact.
The breathtaking violence of a high speed impact renders big aircraft into chaff pretty quickly. Germanwings and the 9/11 events have provided ample graphic evidence of the aftermath of a fast crash. Similarly, the two stalled airbus hulls were largely intact owing to their relatively slow, flat impacts.
A spiral dive of 8 minutes duration implies decompression at high altitude and a long (hypoxic) ghost flight to SIO.
Some examples from Cessna 421C over Gulf of Mexico April 2014: http://blog.aopa.org/leadingedge/?m=201204
http://images.tbd.com/business/cessna-flight-track-flightaware.jpg
Also golfer Stewart Payne ended in a spiral dive after a long decompressed flight.
http://www.hypoxic-training.com/casestudies.html
These scenarios call into doubt whether MH370 ever made complex detour through Straits of Malacca?
The satellite handshake data can be plausibly explained by fire or subsequent extreme low temperatures scrambling the signal BTO values.
At risk of bringing in something that gets certain types going, there was the full on frontal crash of B757 into Pentagon.
http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/pentagon/
FINALLY, someone has called-out these mathematician charlatans for their Dr. Seuss explanation for what happened to MH370. Leave it to the illiterate media to hear the moniker “mathematician” (with maybe tenure at a respected university) and then to conclude that finally a solution has been found to the mystery of no debris discovered.
This guy might be a mathematician with access to a supercomputer, but he certainly has no knowledge of structural dynamics as they apply to thin-skinned airframe structures such as that of a modern airliner. There is no way in hell that an airframe stressed for a maximum internal pressure of maybe 17 psi (check the FAR regulations) could have withstood the impact forces of a high velocity impact with water, at presumably hundreds of km/hour.
This guy is ignorant of aircraft design, and the media are even stupider for having given this “academic” more than fifteen minutes of fame. What a load of utter crap.
This aircraft was intentionally ditched, like the miracle on the Hudson, and it is currently residing intact somewhere on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
Drinking straws are anazing things, or as thin walled tubes can doe remarkable things.
Mr Unger you are only thinking in two dimensions, when you go 3D it all changes.
Check this demonstration of drinking straw being pushed through a potato
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2007/03/29/2961443.htm?site=science/tricks&topic=latest
The other side when it hits water can be shown when an arrow is fired into water compared with a wall. Of course the arrow continues through the water.
The science is essentially there for what the mathematicians modelled but getting the plane to a vertical dive is the hard part, the wings and tail would likely break off and rupture the fuselage. But remember thin walled tubes are surprisingly strong in the longitudinal axis
Ghost, when you scale up the size, mass and energy the drinking straw analogy gets crushed too. How is the improbable 90 degree impact vertically any different to the horizontal insertion into a skyscraper or mountain?
On impact there is instantaneous deceleration, but the heavy trailing structure cannot decelerate quickly enough, so the structure collapses. Explodes, really.
Ben: great article; well said. On MH370 in particular, the MSM reports whatever creates a stir – whether it is true or not, and whether it is credible or not.
I conversed with Dr. Chen (lead author) yesterday via e-mail. He freely admits that he STARTS with the following PREMISE:
If no debris has been FOUND, then no debris was ever GENERATED
…and works backwards from there. Since the conclusion he arrives at is ridiculously INapplicable to MH370 (even more so than the click-bait reporting mentions: his conclusion requires entry speeds spectacularly below the minimum possible entry speed for a 777 in a nose-dive), that means either…
1) debris was generated, but has not been found, or
2) MH370 did not hit the water in the SIO
With every day that passes, probability shifts from 1) over to 2).
Dr. Chen published clarifying remarks today:
http://www.math.tamu.edu/~gchen/mh370.pdf
Brock,
By coincidence just finished reading Dr Chen’s clarification.
I am embarrassed for him.
The only thing that sinks without trace is the credibility of the original study, in my opinion.
I also find myself sitting to one side of the issue of floating debris, in that I am of the view that copious debris was captured by the satellite imagery analysis and in particular that of the French radar satellite.
That in turn leads to the sightings of numerous objects by aircraft, in bad visibility, shortly before the aerial search was unceremoniously and inexplicably yanked a good 1000 kms to the NE.
Debris of course tends to sink, and it had already been in the sea if from MH370 for more than a week, with the possibility that material was escaping to the surface.
If someone finds one of the main doors somewhat to the NE of the roughly guessed impact zone that would be empirical evidence that it crashed in the SIO, as such a comparatively dense object isn’t going to undergo trans oceanic migrations due to sub surface currents.
My concerns about the potential debris fields is otherwise I think untestable, unless documentation of a campaign of misleading the search management comes to light.
I hope that in the next generation of hard case reporters (should such a generation occur) there will be a persistent individual who revisits this astonishing event, and keeps pushing here and there in their career, until one day, the door to the truth swings open.
May it come to pass. May they prevail. May the descendants of the lost see what we cannot.
Brock
I have been an unyielding critic of the INMARSAT data, or rather the accepted interpretation of it. I have also been very complimentary of your efforts, therefore I would ask you to take the time to consider this response to your Point:
“…2) MH370 did not hit the water in the SIO”
Though I do not accept the satellite track assumptions, I do accept the data is genuine, but misleading. Fire in the high power amplifier next to the SDU unit could have melted the sealed frequency oscillator unit exposing it to ambient temperatures at altitude.
Alternately the same signal path travels through other avionics components which are not rated to ambient temperatures at 35,000ft.
Either way the BTO values would have been reduced, shifting BTO rings closer to INMARSAT. A way to recalibrate the data is simply to assume that MH370 turned back from Vietnam and the BTO values at 18:28 UTC are actually from northeast of Malaysia. (ie a 315nm offset west towards INMARSAT)
One thing I can agree with interpretation of the INMARSAT data is this, as MH370 flew south it continued to accept a timing signal from the Netherlands. Perth GES however has old technology processing and could not handle negative values from the opposite hemisphere. For this reason a partial signal compensation logarithm was applied.
This logarithm was unique to Perth and only applies to an aircraft crossing the equator south. That is why I am extremely confident it did end up in the SIO.
Brock there are some other indications that MH370 suffered electrical failure before 18:25 UTC & therefore the possibility of cockpit fire causing decompression at altitude would be corroborated.
The 18:25 UTC SATCOM handshake was a log-on request initiated by the aircraft. A log-on request in the middle of a flight is uncommon & occurs for only a few reasons. These include a power interruption to the aircraft satellite data unit (SDU), software failure, loss of critical systems such as the CMU providing data input to the SDU, or a loss of the satellite link due to unusual aircraft attitude, or excessive heat or cold affecting the automatic frequency oscillator.
Analysis was performed by the ATSB which determined that characteristics & timing of logon requests “best matched power interruption to the SDU.”
I can however narrow the cause even more than that. Assuming the 18:25 UTC logon request from the aircraft could only be caused by one of the above, let me narrow the cause even further:
It has been noted that there was loss of transponder data at 17:21 UTC. Last ACARS message was at 17:07 however since the next ACARS message was due after 17:21 UTC there is no reason to assume ACARS was lost any time before 17:21.
Both ACARS and transponder transmitted data formatted from 8-bit data to TCIP streaming data protocol by the CMU processor. The failure of this single piece of equipment fits bot the scenario for loss of ACARS, Transponder and power interruption to the SDU.
I think you are all forgetting about the giant parachute that, concealed from within the APU nacelle, pops out at approx’ 500m above the hardstand, just prior to an imminent and catastrophic collision.
Oh, and don’t be too hard on the “mathematicians”, without Bernoulli and his enigmatic equation, this would just be moot.
It was just a simple accident but concluded with a fascinating turn of events due to cockpit automation. It’s a long story: mh370site!com has most of it up now.
Spoiler alert: no conspiracies, no evil intent.
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