
MH370 flew as low as 1,500m to avoid detection, says paper   - trauco
http://my.news.yahoo.com/mh370-flew-low-1-500m-avoid-detection-says-011918423.html
======
rphlx
My guess is that the US, Russian, and Chinese militaries have the interest,
and operational ability, to track every in-flight commercial jet all over the
world. The IR signature alone makes a commercial jet obvious at any altitude
as long as the engines are running. So MH370 is probably not lost; its final
position is just being concealed by military protocol to avoid confirming
satellite capabilities that have, in all likelihood, existed since the 1960s.

~~~
alexeisadeski3
Why would the US deploy such satellites to view the southern Indian Ocean? I
could understand deployment in potential areas of interest, but that
particular area is about as boring as it gets.

My point is that even if those capabilities exist, it's not clear that they
would be able to help in this particular case.

~~~
adamcanady
Unless the satellites are in geosync, it's likely they are orbiting and could
just randomly come across the correct area at that time.

If not, I'm wondering why people like Skybox [1] didn't deploy resources
immediately to start covering ground. It seems like that approach would be
much more effective than ships in the ocean?

[1] [http://skyboximaging.com/](http://skyboximaging.com/)

~~~
Maxious
There is a protocol to task satellites to cover emergencies which was used in
this case

[http://www.disasterscharter.org/web/charter/activation_detai...](http://www.disasterscharter.org/web/charter/activation_details?p_r_p_1415474252_assetId=ACT-482)

Skybox is also contributing and has this visualisation of the Search Efforts
with Satellites to date including those that are needed to cover the expanded
search area [http://www.skyboximaging.com/news/in-search-of-malaysia-
airl...](http://www.skyboximaging.com/news/in-search-of-malaysia-airlines-
flight-370)

------
zaroth
Would have to be a pretty hardened pilot to take a 777 down to FL 50 and keep
her there anywhere except approach.

"Experts said flying a Boeing 777 in such a way would be dangerous, stressing
the airframe and possibly causing those on board to be air sick and suffer
from spatial disorientation."

This truly meets the definition of incredible. How could you be that good, but
then end up crashing the plane? If you _are_ that good, then you are not going
to crash that plane.

~~~
chrissnell
Military-style nap-of-the-earth flying, à la the raid on the bin Laden
compound. Those SOAR pilots surely have practiced this stuff for years. How
would a civilian pilot (or hijacker pilot) acquire these skills? Flight
simulator perhaps?

The pilot had a fancy flight simulator at home.

Now, there are plenty of legitimate reasons that a pilot would have a
simulator at home, so we can't pin too much to this discovery. Lots of pilots
buy small planes after they retire because they still love flying and he might
have built this simulator because it was fun. Other articles describe him as a
hardware geek and mention his YouTube videos demonstrating his homebrew
simulator consoles. Still, it seems suspicious to me, especially in context of
the recent revelation that the transponder and tracking systems were disabled
prior to MH370 signing off with Malaysian ATC.

Four days ago, I thought that a Central Asian hijacking scenario was next to
impossible. Today, I'm not so sure.

~~~
checker659
I wouldn't call it fancy. I mean, it was Microsoft Flight Simulator running on
a box with a joystick and four monitors hooked up and placed to look like a
777 cockpit.

Total cost should be less than 1000 bucks.

------
BadassFractal
Ignoring for the sake of argument the tragedy of hundreds of people getting
murdered / kidnapped, this is the most captivating news event we've had in a
while.

~~~
bsamuels
Russia invading Ukraine wasn't captivating?

~~~
pinkskip
But it doesn't effect my life. Being an avid traveler and flown on a 777
numerous times and flew with Malaysia Airlines I want to know what happened.

------
gklitt
What a poorly written article. It twice says that the plane "dropped/descended
1500m," when it should be written "dropped TO [an altitude of] 1500m."
(assuming I'm understanding the article correctly). A newspaper should at
least have sufficient grammar standards to clearly convey the main point of a
story.

~~~
lutusp
> What a poorly written article. It twice says that the plane
> "dropped/descended 1500m," when it should be written "dropped TO [an
> altitude of] 1500m."

As it turns out, only the headline suggests that the plane descended _to an
altitude of_ 1500m, not the article body, which always says the aircraft
descended 1500m. The headline includes the words "MH370 _flew as low as_
1,500m to avoid detection" [emphasis added], but this language is never
repeated in the article itself.

It's important also to say this article may have been translated from Malay,
which could affect its readability.

> A newspaper should at least have sufficient grammar standards to clearly
> convey the main point of a story.

Fair enough, but I think the headline didn't originate with the source of the
article.

~~~
yen223
>It's important also to say this article may have been translated from Malay,
which could affect its readability.

The article was from the New Straits Times, which is an English-language
newspaper. The initial report may have been written in Malay though.

------
pizza
> Today, Reuters reports that the last words from the cockpit of missing MH370
> – "all right, good night" – were uttered after someone on board had already
> begun disabling one of the plane's automatic tracking systems.

~~~
agwa
> Both the timing and informal nature of the phrase, spoken to air traffic
> controllers as the plane was leaving Malaysian-run airspace could further
> heighten suspicions of hijacking or sabotage, it said.

I've listened to a fair amount of air traffic control[1] and a phrase like
that, especially when signing off of a frequency, is not at all unusual so I
don't know why they're focusing on its informality.

[1] thanks to United offering it on one of their inflight entertainment
channels

~~~
exDM69
If you want to practice your radio comms skills or just want some soothing
radio chatter to calm your mind, you can get live air traffic control feeds
from here:

[http://www.liveatc.net/](http://www.liveatc.net/)

Indeed, informal greetings like the one mentioned in the article are not at
all rare. Real life ATC communication is not the robot-like mechanical talking
you might be used to from video games or movies.

------
confluence
I'd still bet on ocean crash. Flying low or not, heading across the Bay of
Bengal towards land, and you're going to get pinged with military radar.

~~~
jonah
India claims to not have their military radar on all the time. "Too costly."

~~~
pinkskip
Source?

~~~
jonah
[http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/15/us-malaysia-
airlin...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/15/us-malaysia-airlines-
defence-idUSBREA2E0JT20140315)

via

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/malaysia/1070...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/malaysia/10700892/Malaysia-
Airlines-MH370-plane-crash-live.html)

------
suyash
My wild guess: I think the plane was hijacked and taken to Iran (as there were
iranians in the plane with stolen passport) or to Pakistan.

~~~
confluence
This is probably the dumbest theory I've heard so far. You can just render
them in Europe and corporate jet them to anywhere on the planet.

No, let's take the entire god damn airliner! /sarcasm

Do conspiracy theorists even think their theories through before they say
them?

I'm guessing no.

------
Ryel
When things like this happen I always wonder if there are any agencies that
still consult "psychics"

------
lfuller
I may be missing something, but this seems like a very misleading headline.

The actual article states that the plane "dropped 5,000 feet (1,500m)" and
later that the "twinjet descended 1,500m or even lower". This simply means
that the plane descended by a relatively small amount compared to 35,000 -
40,000 foot cruising altitudes, not that it was skimming the ground at 5,000
feet.

~~~
lutusp
Yes, noticed this also, but I think the headline was written by someone other
than the source of the article. I think the article is meant to say _descended
1500m_ , not descended _to_ 1500m. Nothing in the article body suggests a
descent _to_ 1500m, and that would be a very inefficient altitude to fly a big
jet.

~~~
001sky
This is the article referenced by the guardian, its language is (properly)
articulared in much better english.

 _Kuala Lumpur: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 dropped to altitudes as low as
1524 metres (5000 feet) using a dangerous flying technique called “terrain
masking” to avoid radar in at least three countries, investigators believe._

[http://www.smh.com.au/world/missing-malaysia-airlines-jet-
ma...](http://www.smh.com.au/world/missing-malaysia-airlines-jet-may-have-
flown-under-radar-investigators-20140317-hvjlf.html)

~~~
lutusp
Thanks for this update and clarification.

------
jnsaff2
This article lost me midway second sentence.

"to evade commercial (secondary) radar coverage after it turned back from its
flight path en route to Beijing."

Secondary (used by ATC) radar is based on transponders responding (the very
thing that was switched off).

Primary radar is usually military and does not need any device being on or
off.

------
elwell
That's not _that_ low.

------
cookingrobot
Why would it be hard to fly at an altitude of 1.5km over the ocean?

~~~
lutusp
It's not a question of hard, it's just not an efficient way to fly such a big
jet and it uses up fuel at a high rate. But various sources suggest that the
plane really did fly this low, in order to evade radar, and the confusion
surrounding this particular article is resolved elsewhere to mean "descended
_to_ 1500m" at least for a while.

------
tim333
Better written version of the story:
[http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/asia/9836664/Malaysian-jet-
avoi...](http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/asia/9836664/Malaysian-jet-avoided-
radars-in-three-countries)

------
geuis
Honest question. Would it have been possible for the plane to make it to North
Korea?

~~~
Cowen
Not without refueling somewhere. They didn't have enough gas to make it too
far past Beijing. [0]

[0]-
[http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/interactive/2014/03/world/malays...](http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/interactive/2014/03/world/malaysia-
flight-map/media/mh370-range.jpg)

~~~
tim333
Actually according to the Washington Post they did have enough fuel for N
Korea

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/new-twist-in-the-hunt-
fo...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/new-twist-in-the-hunt-for-missing-
plane/2014/03/13/dcee10da-aae6-11e3-98f6-8e3c562f9996_graphic.html)

------
alexeisadeski3
Einstein-Rosen Bridge transported it to ancient Prylaxo Civilization on
Sa03-P5 of Sector 401B.

------
trhway
people install satellite security systems on $200K cars. Couldn't airlines do
the same on a $100M plane.

~~~
DigitalSea
You make it sound so simple, when in reality it is anything but simple. Every
component in a plane is tested extensively before it can be installed and
used. When it comes to electronic components in a plane, things like
interference to other aircraft, other components on the plane, power usage and
interference to ground devices (radio stations, emergency frequencies, etc)
are all tested and considered.

Planes are massive powerhouses of technological wonder, adding something new
into such a machine would take considerable amounts of time and even then once
you've got it installed, who is going to maintain it? You've got to pay for
access to a satellite for the data to be tracked, where is the data stored? Is
the data encrypted? How do you make sure only the eyes intended to see the
data see it and nobody else? What kind of redundancy is there if the satellite
security system fails? Does the plane need bigger batteries to power such a
device, where does the power come from?

There are rules and processes to follow in the aviation industry and they're
very strict. And that's just the hardware, then you've got to write the
software, make sure it doesn't interfere with anything else on the plane, then
you've got to make it work for different planes, planes wired differently,
different hardware/software, controls. You're testing two different halves
that make a whole.

One does not simply just install a new piece of technology into a plane.
There's no DIY kit you can buy from Tandy.

Then there is a cost vs risk calculation thrown into the equation here. How
often does a plane just vanish like this? It doesn't happen very often and
probably not enough to warrant spending hundreds of millions of dollars
implementing a terrorist proof tracking/data collection system. Cars are
stolen everyday, it's a common thing, for planes it is not.

If things were that easy, they would have already done so, trust me. Nobody
wants to see their planes return more than the airline who paid for the plane,
paid for the maintenance, paid for the staff & fuel and need it to help recoup
the costs and make the business money.

Are we also not forgetting planes have quite good data capturing and
positioning systems already? The transponder was disabled which was the easy
one (a flick of a switch) but the ACARS maintenance tracker was also disabled
and as already highlighted, without advanced knowledge of the planes
internals, isn't something you can just disable with the flick of a switch.
Other advanced fall-back tracking methods were disabled, this isn't something
your standard pilot would know about.

~~~
trhway
>Cars are stolen everyday, it's a common thing, for planes it is not.

from time to time planes crash over ocean and search for black boxes may take
years like Air France 447
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Underwate...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Underwater_search))

~~~
lutusp
> from time to time planes crash over ocean and search for black boxes may
> take years like Air France 447 ...

Yes, and in that case, they knew within narrow limits where the plane went
down -- the crew were doing what they could to let their position be known. No
effort to sneak away with an airliner, as in the present case.

