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The latest theory is that it was hijacked by a stowaway/ stowaways.

From the DM; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... xpert.html

One of the more sensible theories I've come across so far.

Well, as the Inmarsat pings directed the search to where nothing was found, wouldn't it be logical to start again from this? Couldn't these have been faked?

And, considering even the Titanic was found, the MH370 also will be. One day.
(btw, a fascinating book about the search for the Titanic:
Robert D. Ballard, Discovery Of The Titanic (Exploring The Greatest Of All Lost Ships)

The point with the Titanic was that the position where it sank was known with considerable accuracy and the hull was intact. The difficulty was locating it on the sea bed and raising it.

In the case of MH370, there is no certainty, or if there is it is being withheld, over where it impacted the sea.

Furthermore, in the intervening 106 years, there has been massive progress in the technology that would locate and recover the aircraft.

There was an interesting mathematical model of oceanic currents and wind vectors which was applied to the wreckage location and which indicated a statistical probability set which suggests that the starting point of the wreckage's floating journey was many hundreds of miles North of the '7th arc' which had been used as a datum LOP for the search.

I know it's trite to say so, but they were looking in entirely the wrong place.

In a former lifetime I was involved in the search for a missing submarine in the Med. I had access to the radio logs and I said at the time that we were looking in the wrong place and that our datum should have been a large distance to the Nor'ard. We found fackorl of course. A couple of decades later a different search team looked where I said we should and they found it within half a dozen miles of where I had said we should have been looking. At the time of our search the whole thing was geopolitically sensitive as we were the USN SupSalv contractor, working in Egyptian waters, looking for a formerly British submarine which sank on its maiden voyage to Israel under the Israeli naval flag. We had US, British, Egyptian and Israeli submariners working in the Cairo office at a time (circa 1987) when such co-operation was politically sensitive and not to be disclosed to anyone. Not a situation which was conducive to open discussion of the fundamentals of the search. As my boss at the time said: we were not being paid to find the wreck, only to look for it. My suggested datum was based on logic. The official datum at the time was based on scanty radar and eyewitness evidence. Garbage, in other words.

I suspect that so much financial and political capital has been invested in the official theory of what happened to MH370 that there would be too much loss of face if they were to rethink the the search datum from scratch. I greatly doubt that the aircraft will ever be found other than by sheer good luck when/where somebody is looking for something else or doing swathe bathymetry with a multi-beam sonar to upgrade the nautical charts or perhaps doing something military.

Capetonian wrote: ↑

Tue Aug 14, 2018 8:56 am

The point with the Titanic was that the position where it sank was known with considerable accuracy and the hull was intact. The difficulty was locating it on the sea bed and raising it.

- and still they didn't find it on their first mission.

(OK, ok, I just had to try the text-fade feature )

Interesting UP, thanks.
It is my experience also, in a much more minor way, that any international enterprise does not have actually solving the problem anywhere near the top of its (unwritten) list of priorities. Saving face is always #1.

Yeah, and so well said:

Undried Plum wrote: ↑

Tue Aug 14, 2018 9:55 am

As my boss at the time said: we were not being paid to find the wreck, only to look for it.

Tha Jap WW2 battleship Musashi weighed 45,000 tons and was made of steel.
It took Microsoft boss Paul Allan eight years to find it, and they knew where it sank!

MH370 is made of aluminium, weighs about 100 tons and we've no idea where it sank.

AtomKraft wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 15, 2018 3:15 am

MH370 is made of aluminium, weighs about 100 tons and we've no idea where it sank.

Actually, that IS hard to understand - with all the air traffic control and systems and radars and whatnot.

probes wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 15, 2018 7:20 am

AtomKraft wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 15, 2018 3:15 am

MH370 is made of aluminium, weighs about 100 tons and we've no idea where it sank.

Actually, that IS hard to understand - with all the air traffic control and systems and radars and whatnot.

Probes there are vast tracts of airspace around the World that have no Radar coverage or indeed any ATC. The only indication of how long the aircraft remained airborne is from satellite beeps. So it really is a needle in the haystack scenario.

I made a mistake in my post about Musashi. It weighed 82,000 tons.

probes wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 15, 2018 7:20 am

Actually, that IS hard to understand - with all the air traffic control and systems and radars and whatnot.

I was astounded to learn of the total dependence of secondary radar. When the on board transponders were switched off, no civilian on the ground could track anything.

The local military weren't interested in civil traffic.

ian16th wrote: ↑

Thu Aug 16, 2018 12:45 pm

probes wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 15, 2018 7:20 am

Actually, that IS hard to understand - with all the air traffic control and systems and radars and whatnot.

I was astounded to learn of the total dependence of secondary radar. When the on board transponders were switched off, no civilian on the ground could track anything.

The local military weren't interested in civil traffic.

With the greatest respect I would like to point out that in order to track any aircraft on primary radar you need to be in two way radio contact. This is so that you can identify the aircraft by seeing it make two turns as instructed and then you can maintain identification. In this scenario you had an aircraft which was from what I understand not under any form of radar control and no one was in active two way radio contact. So everyone on the ground were totally helpless when the transponder was switched off.

Also most radars have a maximum range, for example when I was at RAF NORTHOLT our primary radar and LHR's secondary radar had a sixty mile radius. So as I stated above, there is a lot of airspace out there that is out of radar range. And a lot of flights operate procedurly with set radio reports at certain points on route. (for example on the Atlantic tracks every sixty degrees Longitude ) The onus being on the aircraft reporting in; if it doesn't then if ATC have no radio contact it is not their fault if they have lost contact and have no idea where it is or what has happened to it.

And a lot of flights operate procedurly with set radio reports at certain points on route. (for example on the Atlantic tracks every sixty degrees Longitude )

That does not sound right, Mrs Ex A. If it were so flights departing London for eastern USA would make just one call. Is it not every 10 degrees?

wings folded wrote: ↑

Thu Aug 16, 2018 3:10 pm

And a lot of flights operate procedurly with set radio reports at certain points on route. (for example on the Atlantic tracks every sixty degrees Longitude )

That does not sound right, Mrs Ex A. If it were so flights departing London for eastern USA would make just one call. Is it not every 10 degrees?

Stand corrected Sir, blame me asking Ex-Ascot on the spot question whilst posting. My fault entirely. Sorry.

Just trying to illustrate my point about lack of World secondary or even primary radar coverage as well as coms procedures.

Modern aircraft such as the 777 do not need crew action to make position reports, all of the housekeeping is done by ACARS and satellite link. The aircraft gathers the information required and makes the position report automatically at the required time (it does not need to be a fixed positions any more, it could be every five minutes), it can also make company reports of position and mechanical status. Additionally outside agencies can interrogate the aircraft as required. Of course, if the crew disables the satellite link none of this takes place.


.

Mrs ExA

I was thinking of search radars, we wouldn't expect an attacking a/c to kindly switch on a transponder or carry out manoeuvres at our request, not the GCA type equipment.

In my time, we had a/c primary radar equipment that had ranges of much more than 60nm. I saw a picture of the entire Mediterranean Sea taken from the H2S screen of a Valiant.

The ground based stuff is much more powerful.

What is the range of the kit at Flyingdales?

Fylingdales is a PAR. A perimeter acquisition radar. These can see at very long ranges and are used to detect incoming ICBMs a long long way away. Think thousands rather than hundreds.

Incidentally, sites like this one would be number one on the target list were there to be an attack, and although I've never been inside the one in Yorkshire, it appears to be hardened against nuclear attack, ie shock mounted. I wonder how widely that's known to the locals?

The Strine Jindalee/JORN OTH long range radar network is world class. It surveills an astonishing distance to the North and West of the island, including much of the speculated route thought to have been flown by MH370.

Unfortunately, it was not operating at the time of that flight and can provide no useful data.

MH370 probe 'reopened'

France has reopened the investigation into the fate of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 amid claims of a Malaysian cover-up, according to the French newspaper Le Parisien.

The report said the move was triggered after Malaysia’s long-awaited “final report” failed to provide an explanation for the aircraft’s disappearance. The 239 passengers on the flight included four French citizens.

Le Parisien reported investigators are keen to verify data from the British global satellite network operator Inmarsat, which tracked the aircraft’s pings to the southern Indian Ocean off Western Australia, where it is believed to have crashed.

Relatives of those on board MH370 issued a statement in response to the news urging the Malaysian government to release all data, including military radar data, for review and analysis by independent experts.

The French paper noted the 449-page report by Malaysian authorities into MH370’s disappearance released last month (BTN 6 August) was universally condemned, with accusations by victims’ families of a cover up at worst and incompetence at best.

They were particularly critical of the decision to rule out a murder/suicide plot by chief pilot Zaharie Shah, despite evidence showing someone intentionally disabled the plane’s communication systems before manually rerouting it.

The French government has not so far commented on any new investigation.

http://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/l ... 844253.php