
MH370 Was ‘Manipulated’ Off Course to Its End, Report Says - abhiminator
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-30/mh370-investigation-unable-to-determine-cause-of-disappearance
======
vesrah
Link to actual report:
[http://mh370.mot.gov.my/MH370SafetyInvestigationReport.pdf](http://mh370.mot.gov.my/MH370SafetyInvestigationReport.pdf)

~~~
Bromskloss
Does "manipulated" simply mean that something was turned off? This is what I
can find in the report:

> Although it cannot be conclusivel y ruled out that an aircraft or system
> malfunction was a cause, based on the limited evidence available, it is more
> likely that the loss of communication (VHF and HF communications, ACARS,
> SATCOM and Transponder) prior to the diversion is due to the system s being
> manually turned off or power interrupted to them or additionally in the case
> of VHF and HF, not used, whether with intent or otherwise.

> Similarly, the recorded changes in the aircraft flight path following
> waypoint IGARI, heading back across peninsular Malaysia, turning south of
> Penang to the north -west and a subsequent turn towards the Southern Indian
> Ocean are difficult to attribute to any specific aircraft system failures.
> It is more likely that such manoeuvres are due to the systems being
> manipulated.

~~~
everdev
Manipulated = flown by hand

The leading theory is that auto-pilot and other systems were disengaged and
the craft flown to it's doom in a mass murder-suicide

~~~
DonaldFisk
The authors of the report couldn't find any reasons why either of the pilots,
or anyone else on board, might do this though.

~~~
everdev
Yeah, it's a true mystery. The recovered wreckage seems to suggest a remote
Indian Ocean crash site and I don't think there were any other plausible
explanations for why the plane diverted so drastically from it's intended
course outside of human intervention.

Malfunctions haven't produced this type of diversion before or since.

~~~
djerthro
Multiple dispositions possibly point to what is essentially unknowable.

Why did the plane deviate from its course with no alarms? With multiple crew
in the cabin, who among them would have missed the plane's course adjustment?
Why did they miss the adjustment? If they didn't fail to notice it, did they
cooperate, knowingly? If not, why were alternate communications not used? Were
the people responsible incapacitated? If they were incapacitated, how did that
go unnoticed in general, and cause further alarm, and alternate
communications? Could there have been a threat of violence?

Basically, what I'm driving at is that one might expect at least one stray
cell phone call in distress while over land, even if abrupt and short, with no
discernable information conveyed.

Taking into account an air tight disappearance, it doesn't reflect the type of
lone wolf depressive suicide like the European incident that crashed into the
mountain. Other options include: botched hijacking that failed to ransom
hostages; or sledgehammer as fly swatter, with possibly an entire plane
destroyed to target an individual of interest, signs pointing to state actors.

~~~
everdev
A few theories:

1\. The pilot waited until they we're alone in the cockpit then disabled all
communications and locked the door. Possibly with a fake story over the
intercom that kept people unsuspicious until away from land (diverting around
some bad weather, etc.)

2\. The pilot killed the co-pilot and then diverted the plane, same as above.

With a hijacking/ransom, the perps want to communicate, so I think that's out.

State actors is the only other one that makes sense to me, but it's still a
murder-suicide by human hand.

------
comboy
I wonder when are we going to have some low resolution (good enough to spot a
car) realtime recording of the full globe. I know it's tons of data but with
some machine learning it should be possible to skip most of oceans forests and
deserts (unless some unusual object appears in that area).

~~~
froindt
I think there are a couple orders of magnitude difference between your idea
and what it'd take to process.

My googling shows 148.94 trillion square meters, with 18.6 trillion

We'll being generous to say "good enough to spot a car" is 2 pixels with 1
meter pixel size.

To be moderately confident it's a car, I'd guesstimate we'd need quite a bit
higher resolution.

With no compression and RGB 24 bit encoding, that's 3 bytes/pixel, or 446 TB
of data per "frame" of our realtime recording. Of course that could be
compressed down a TON, but regardless it's a staggeringly large quantity of
data to work with.

> some machine learning it should be possible to skip most of oceans forests
> and deserts (unless some unusual object appears in that area).

As far as I can think through, you'd need to process the data in the oceans,
forests, and deserts if you want to find unusual objects. We can't do a
shortcut and say only 1/8 of the world is inhabited/developed in some way and
that's all we're going to monitor. Perhaps you take 1/4 or 1/8 of the data
from the vast amounts of uninteresting data and look for larger anomalies.

No matter how you look at it, there'd be a ridiculous amount of data and
processing required to do object detection on that scale.

~~~
staticfloat
This is actually a pretty good argument for sparse data handling; push some
intelligence out to the edges of your network (e.g. the spy satellites or what
have you) that are collecting the data in the first place, and then only store
"interesting" pixels. E.g. regions where there are movement; regions already
determined to be of interest (densely populated areas, war zones, trading
vessel corridors, etc....)

There is research going on right now to build native camera systems that emit
data (at the hardware level) that is not dense but rather sparse; information
is transmitted as "blocks of pixels that changed between frame two and three"
rather than "here is the state of all pixels at frame two, and here is the
state of all pixels at frame three". In essence, doing a small amount of delta
compression within the hardware itself.

This seems like a really natural fit for an application such as this one; and
could potentially cut the amount of data needed to be paid attention to down
by orders of magnitude.

Many of these ideas are similar to what is used to compress video down in the
first place; it would be interesting to see a combination of video compression
technology and "region of interest" ML pruning, where the ML models are
applied only to interesting regions, as identified by the compression codec.
The codec already has done the analysis to figure out which portions of the
video have changed, which portions of the video are simply shifted versions of
information from the last frame, etc.... You could significantly speed up ML
analysis by making use of that kind of information.

~~~
photojosh
If anyone's interested to read more, I know of them as "event cameras" (as
distinguished from "pixel cameras". [0] is one of the universities doing
research into them. We're intrigued to use them one day for our automation
solutions, but they're a bit pricey at this stage.

A huge advantage of them is that you have practically instant latency on the
output, as opposed to restricted frame rates with motion blur from traditional
cameras. Have a look at [1] for a few demos. The spinning bucket path
reconstruction and drone visual odometry are my favourites.

[0]
[http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/research_dvs.html](http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/research_dvs.html)
[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3OFzsaPtvI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3OFzsaPtvI)

------
mcphage
> MH370’s cargo included 221 kilograms (487 pounds) of lithium batteries and
> 4.6 tons of fresh mangosteen fruit, according to its manifest. After
> extensive tests, Monday’s report ruled out smoke or fire caused by those
> goods mixing in the plane’s hold as a cause of the tragedy.

Wait, what do the mangosteen fruit have to do with anything?

~~~
timcederman
Ethylene gas emission (which is flammable) or suffocating levels of CO2.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MH370/comments/2176up/could_flammab...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MH370/comments/2176up/could_flammable_ethelyne_gas_or_suffocating_co2/)

------
m23khan
I hope the plane and remains of passengers are found during lifetime of the
victim's families so they may have some closure to this tragic chapter.

~~~
craftyguy
At the risk of sounding insensitive, what closure do the families need at this
point? Do some believe the passengers are all living on some island? The only
closure I can think of is technical, learning how it crashed so it could be
prevented in the future.

------
jobigoud
Question: do they "retire" flight numbers after a crash?

I keep seeing mentions of famous crashes by their flight number alone like
MH370 or AF447.

~~~
payne92
Generally, yes -- they are retired. See: [https://www.rhinocarhire.com/Car-
Hire-Blog/July-2014/Retired...](https://www.rhinocarhire.com/Car-Hire-
Blog/July-2014/Retired-Flight-Numbers-Famous-Flight-Codes.aspx)

------
jamestimmins
Is there a technological limitation that makes constant location broadcasting
infeasible somehow? I was very surprised that they're not constantly in
location contact.

~~~
klodolph
I found this article, which mentions MH370 specifically:
[https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/29/why-we-still-cant-track-
an-a...](https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/29/why-we-still-cant-track-an-
airplane.html)

One of the nice things about ordinary transponders and secondary radar is that
the information can be wired directly to traffic control for whoever controls
the airspace. With a satellite feed, you have to deal with the fact that
you’re introducing a completely new system (satellites and their associated
ground links), and you have to deploy enough satellites to cover the globe
which means a _constellation_ of satellites which is expensive to deploy. This
means that control of the satellites is in the hands of a small number of
countries or organizations with the funds to deploy them, which means that a
critical piece of your aviation infrastructure is no longer in your country’s
control. Reportedly, it’s also expensive.

------
lbriner
I wondered why they didn't go for a mesh network where planes transmit
location data over short wave to any other planes in the "area". They would
only need to keep the data for a relatively short period of time before
considering the data unneeded. Even in the Indian Ocean, there are usually
planes within a few hundred miles that should be able to receive the
broadcasts?

~~~
dingaling
Partly because such events are so rare that such complexity wasn't even
considered necessary. It would be designing for the literal one-in-100-million
case.

And partly because they already transmit ACARS, CPDLC and ADS-B over VHF
SATCOM[0]. Why mesh when you can upload directly into the network and settle
the bills cleanly with SITA.

[0] and also CPDLC over HF

------
tpdrmd
[http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/jeff-wise-
mh370...](http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/jeff-wise-
mh370-theory.html)

this was published 3 years ago, but he came to a similar conclusion. really in
depth dive as to the systems that could have been 'manipulated'

------
booleandilemma
_We are unable to determine with any certainty the reasons that the aircraft
diverted from its filed planned route,” Kok Soo Chon, chief inspector of the
MH370 investigation team, told reporters in Putrajaya, outside Kuala Lumpur.
“The possibility of intervention by a third party cannot be excluded.”_

Which 3rd party? And why? Did someone try to steal the plane, maybe?

~~~
akhilcacharya
I paid close attention to the story when it broke and yes, stealing the plane
was a running theory up until the Northern route was ruled out.

The problem with this is that if it was stolen, there is zero plausible
explanation for where or why it would be taken.

~~~
coolspot
Popular conspiracy theory pushed by Russian state media is that MH370 [1]
disappeared in March 2014 was then used for false flag operation as MH17 [2]
in July 2014.

Both are Boeing 777-200ER.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370)

[2] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17)

------
nasredin
IIRC the planes now ping the satellite every 15 (or 5?) minutes instead of 60.

So hopefuly the next time this happens the search area would be smaller.

~~~
rootusrootus
Says in the article that it will be once per minute starting in 2021, with
requirements tightening over time before then, starting this Fall.

------
phyzome
I suppose since they were over the ocean, none of the passengers would have
been able to make distress calls on cell phones.

~~~
DmenshunlAnlsis
From the report, you’d seem to be totally on point.

 _To ascertain the probability of making calls inside an aircraft from
differentaltitudes, a reconstructed flight using a King Air 350 over the said
area andduring the same time when the signal “hit” happened was carried out
shortlyafter the disappearance of MH370. The flight was conducted from an
altitudeof 24,000 ft with step descents every 4,000 ft until 8,000 ft. The
next descentwas to 5,000 ft but at 1,000 ft interval. An expert from a Telco
service providerconducted the test using three different brands of phone and
relatedequipment that were carried on board the King Air 350. Test call will
beautomatically answered by the server in the event of connectivity. In
summary, during the tests, it was found that it was difficult to
maintainsuccessful call connectivity above 8,000 ft. However, one brand of
phonewas able to make a call at 20,000 ft. Only one cell phone service
providerrecorded the highest call attempts using their 3G network above 8,000
ft.Two service providers could only provide connection below 8,000 ft._

Earlier in the report the altitude was estimated to be between 24,000’ and
47,000’ so no cell would have worked.

------
mehrdadn
Could someone explain why the obvious explanation that "maybe they sweeped the
right spots of the ocean, but at the wrong time" seems to go almost entirely
unconsidered? i.e., I was always imagining what if the plane was in motion at
the time they were sweeping so that they missed it?

~~~
pjc50
Sunk material tends to stay in the same place on the bottom. If it was
floating we would expect it to wash up eventually.

~~~
mehrdadn
How long does it take to sink to the bottom though? My memory is hazy on the
timing, but I seem to recall they started searching immediately (?), and I was
thinking "what if it's still moving...?" at the time.

(Edit: The ocean depth was around 4.5km.)

~~~
mrguyorama
My gut feel is that it would take far less than a day to sink to the bottom,
especially as planes are not very buoyant. Since they were searching in
entirely the wrong areas until a little while after the incident, when they
got better data, I think it's safe to assume the wreckage was settled by the
time they searched its area

~~~
snowwrestler
Air France 447 (a very mysterious airplane disappearance prior to MH370) was
found not far from its last known position in the Atlantic Ocean:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#2011_sea...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#2011_search_and_recovery)

In fact it seems the key decision in finding that wreckage was to include
areas that had already been searched in a new analysis on where the wreckage
was likely to be:

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/527506/how-
statisticians-...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/527506/how-
statisticians-found-air-france-flight-447-two-years-after-it-crashed-into-
atlantic/)

~~~
cwkoss
It would be horribly unethical, but as it is hard to validate work, I wonder
if there is much cheating in the undersea searching industry.

