Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Flew for About Four Hours Past Last Confirmed Location
March 13th, 2014Update: Plane’s Communications System Was Pinging Inmarsat Satellite
So both the engines and communications systems were pinging two different companies’ satellites.
Via: New York Times:
David Coiley, a vice president of Inmarsat, a British satellite telecommunications provider, said the missing plane had been equipped with an Inmarsat signaling system that sends out a “keep-alive message” to establish that the plane’s communications system is still switched on.
The plane sent out a series of such messages after civilian radar lost contact, he said. Those messages later stopped, but he declined to specify precisely when or how many messages had been received. Mr. Coiley said Inmarsat was sharing the information with the airline and investigators.
“It does allow us to determine where the airplane is relative to the satellite,” he said of the signal, which he likened to the “noises you might hear when a cellphone sits next to a radio or a television speaker.” He said: “It does allow us to narrow down the position of the aircraft” — at the moment when the signal was sent.
Such equipment automatically checks in to satellites, much as a mobile phone would check in to a network after passing through a mountain tunnel, he said. Because the pings go over a measurable distance at a specific angle to one of the company’s satellites, the information can be used to help calculate the trajectory of an aircraft and narrow its approximate location — though not necessarily its resting point.
“Communications systems are part of the mandatory requirement for operating any flight, and we are comfortable that it would have been operating accordingly,” Mr. Coiley said.
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Update: Radar Data Suggests Missing Malaysia Plane Deliberately Flown Way Off Course
Via: Reuters:
Military radar data suggests a Malaysia Airlines jetliner missing for nearly a week was deliberately flown hundreds of miles off course, heightening suspicions of foul play among investigators, sources told Reuters on Friday.
Analysis of the Malaysia data suggests the plane, with 239 people on board, diverted from its intended northeast route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and flew west instead, using airline flight corridors normally employed for routes to the Middle East and Europe, said sources familiar with investigations into the Boeing 777’s disappearance.
Two sources said an unidentified aircraft that investigators believe was Flight MH370 was following a route between navigational waypoints when it was last plotted on military radar off the country’s northwest coast.
This indicates that it was either being flown by the pilots or someone with knowledge of those waypoints, the sources said.
The last plot on the military radar’s tracking suggested the plane was flying toward India’s Andaman Islands, a chain of isles between the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal, they said.
Waypoints are geographic locations, worked out by calculating longitude and latitude, that help pilots navigate along established air corridors.
A third source familiar with the investigation said inquiries were focusing increasingly on the theory that someone who knew how to fly a plane deliberately diverted the flight.
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I didn’t know those aircraft were constantly sending data about the engines back to the ground.
Via: Wall Street Journal:
U.S. investigators suspect that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 stayed in the air for about four hours past the time it reached its last confirmed location, according to two people familiar with the details, raising the possibility that the plane could have flown on for hundreds of additional miles under conditions that remain murky.
Aviation investigators and national security officials believe the plane flew for a total of five hours, based on data automatically downloaded and sent to the ground from the Boeing Co. 777’s engines as part of a routine maintenance and monitoring program.
That raises a host of new questions and possibilities about what happened aboard the widebody jet carrying 239 people, which vanished from civilian air-traffic control radar over the weekend, about one hour into a flight to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.
Six days after the mysterious disappearance prompted a massive international air and water search that so far hasn’t produced any results, the investigation appears to be broadening in scope.
U.S. counterterrorism officials are pursuing the possibility that a pilot or someone else on board the plane may have diverted it toward an undisclosed location after intentionally turning off the jetliner’s transponders to avoid radar detection, according to one person tracking the probe.
…
But the huge uncertainty about where the plane was headed, and why it apparently continued flying so long without working transponders, has raised theories among investigators that the aircraft may have been commandeered for a reason that appears unclear to U.S. authorities. Some of those theories have been laid out to national security officials and senior personnel from various U.S. agencies, according to one person familiar with the matter.
At one briefing, according to this person, officials were told investigators are actively pursuing the notion that the plane was diverted “with the intention of using it later for another purpose.”
As of Wednesday it remained unclear whether the plane reached an alternate destination or if it ultimately crashed, potentially hundreds of miles from where an international search effort has been focused.
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The engines’ onboard monitoring system is provided by their manufacturer, Rolls-Royce PLC, and it periodically sends bursts of data about engine health, operations and aircraft movements to facilities on the ground.
“We continue to monitor the situation and to offer Malaysia Airlines our support,” a Rolls-Royce representative said Wednesday, declining further comment.
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The engines’ onboard monitoring system is provided by their manufacturer, Rolls-Royce PLC, and it periodically sends bursts of data about engine health, operations and aircraft movements to facilities on the ground.
“We continue to monitor the situation and to offer Malaysia Airlines our support,” a Rolls-Royce representative said Wednesday, declining further comment.
Anyone compentent enough to shut off transponders, drop to low altitude and divert is smart enough to divert to a runway, not the middle of open ocean, UNLESS this is all a black-bag distraction. The passengers are no doubt dead. Nobody has claimed responsibility, and that alone screams that this is a spook cartoon.
Watch for world-wide implementation of real-time passport use monitoring in the name of “curbing terror.” The whole thing is a rerun of the planes used on 911, which ultimately had nothing to do with the intended outcome.
I don’t know what this is but after reading this and while listening to NPR on the way home I had to turn the radio off because they did not include the information presented in the article referenced here. WTF?
I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but yes-ser-ee – a grand hijacking. Put that in your pipe and smoke it NSA and CIA. Punch your way out of this paper bag you morons.
Also, and this is what I want to remind myself of, when there is an event like this, in prior history of late, it seems that the main story is a subterfuge to direct our attention away from the really important event that is occurring. For me, even though I have very little money in the markets, that’s where I am keeping my inner eyeball. Somthing’s coming.
After 9/11 turned my whole worldview around, I’m easily inclined to believe something like Steve said (above). I was intrigued by a theory Michael Rivero was toying with that the plane, being worth about $300m in hard to get parts, had been hijacked. Now he’s moving away from that and thinking it got flown to Diego Garcia, a place with a very interesting history and “the only runway in that part of the Pacific long enough to land the 777 safely and then allow a takeoff”. BTW, John Pilger did a great story on the forced depopulation of the island by the British in 1971.
I haven’t been able to thoroughly read the details (if they’ve even been released to the press), but the reports of passenger cell phones ringing is interesting. I think cell phones only tend to work on planes when flying over major cities on land, perhaps when the plane isn’t so high. No passenger texted during the flight, but if these phones are currently able to ring, you’d think they need to be near a tower, and they could triangulate right away. That suggests that the phones really aren’t ringing
I had no idea that Rivero had mentioned Diego Garcia until I read Dennis’s post above. Yesterday I had the same though- it diverted to Diego. Reports have said that cell phones and instant messages were going through during that “missing” stage of the flight, but there were no responses. Dead passengers, I would assume.
Diego Garcia is a secure US Air Force base where one might encounter “special weapons” and B-52 bombers. It is NOT used for parting out stolen aircraft. A more plausible motive would be for use as a repainted decoy filled with stuff that causes death and destruction, although it would have been easier to obtain a mothballed aircraft from the desert for such evil end routing. Or maybe they have…I don’t know.
For your consideration:
Leuren Moret: Flight 370 was US demo for Putin; Patent scam; Payback for Tribunal vs Israel, US/UK
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUgWhUkkzr4