Why Can't We Find MH370 ?

[Music] oh [Music] it's been six and a half years since the malaysian airlines mh370 disappeared on route from kuala lumpur to beijing china with a presumed loss of all 239 on board and yet despite the most expensive air and sea search in aviation history and the launching of a whole raft of conspiracy theories only a few fragments of the plane have been discovered thousands of kilometers away on the other side of the indian ocean but the aircraft's actual location is still a mystery so considering all the effort that has gone into the recovery mission and the research into all the things that we've found out since why can't we find mh370 [Music] [Applause] [Music] this video is sponsored by brilliant the loss of mh370 has become one of the biggest mysteries in aviation history since the disappearance of amelia earhart and her navigator fred noonan in the central pacific whilst trying to circumnavigate the globe in 1937 but whereas earhart's disappearance was thought of as a tragic accident the loss of mh370 has boiled down to two possible outcomes firstly something happened to the crew that incapacitated them and the plane flew on by itself until it ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea soon after how it ended up in the indian ocean when it was flying north to china still isn't explained by this scenario the second is that someone on board took control of the aircraft and deliberately flew it to a remote part of the indian ocean and ditched the plane either of these outcomes is disconcerting if the crew were incapacitated and the plane was left to fly by itself then it would be imperative to try and find out the cause if however it was a case of hijacking or pilot suicide and the murder of all on board then the ramifications would also be worse for malaysia as a whole to many malaysians it's almost unthinkable that a well-respected pilot of the national flag carrier could do such a thing and in asian culture loss of face is one of the worst things that can happen this highlights the problem that mh370 poses we just don't know where it went down but in order to try and find that out we need to know where it was in its final few hours based on the evidence so far it's believed to be somewhere in the southern indian ocean around an area defined by a set of radio messages sent from a maintenance system that was never in any way designed to be a location device and assuming that it flew at altitude until it ran out of fuel because there was no direct gps tracking data sent from the aircraft its final course and location had to be reconstituted from data picked up by the immarsat satellite which received hourly maintenance broadcast from a plane's a cars data link system in the time from receiving the last transmission to the crash which could have been anything from a few minutes to almost an hour the plane could have flown on for hundreds of kilometers by comparing the timing delay from the acar system to it arriving at the satellite situated over the indian ocean the inmarsat engineers were able to determine a possible route along the so-called seventh arc that stretched from central asia to the north to the southern oceans in the south and passing about 2 000 kilometers west of perth australia ruling out the northern path due to a lack of radar evidence from the countries that it would have had to have flown over left for southern route as the most probable the data pings also continued for further six hours after the military radar lost contact with it over indonesian airspace meaning that it must have been in the air and operational during this time the issue of how mh370 ended up in the sea also has an impact on where the wreckage is likely to be if the aircraft was flying at a high altitude and on autopilot without a crew and ran out of fuel then it's likely to have ended up in a high-speed dive in similar accidents like the 1998 crash of swiss air 111 into the atlantic the effect of the high-speed impact with the sea resulted in the plane breaking up into over 2 million pieces if mh370 did the same then there will be very few large pieces left to float away and the distance traveled from a time of engines flamed out to hitting the sea would have been quite short in simulator tests it's thought to have been up to about 37 kilometers if however the plane was in a pilot controlled glide from a point of running out of fuel to making a controlled landing in the sea relatively intact simulator tests showed that distance could be up to 130 kilometers but this is assuming that the pilot waited until it ran out of fuel he could have just ditched the plane whilst it was still under power and before the fuel ran out to give the greatest chance of keeping the aircraft intact but either of these scenarios could place it at a considerable distance from the initial search area by analyzing the in-marsat data and knowing the amount of fuel the aircraft was carrying a search area of approximately 1.12 million square kilometers was defined this was later prioritized down to 000 square kilometers from the 18th of march to the 29th of april 2014 21 aircraft flew 345 flights with a combined flight time of over 3177 hours together with 19 ships from eight countries the initial belief by the atsb the australian transport safety board which led the search was that the crew were incapacitated by a hypoxia event like a sudden decompression and that the plane had flown on autopilot until the engines had flamed out due to lack of fuel but this still had to take on major assumptions such as it was flying in a straight line and at altitude either of which could have been wrong and could make a huge difference to where it really is but this scenario defined the initial search area which has been subject to underwater sonar scans in 2014 and has been the basis for all subsequent searches however investigators in the u.s and europe believe the evidence points towards a manual control takeover of the aircraft to flight into the southern indian ocean an area renowned for rough seas high winds and deep ocean floors and as the australian prime minister tony abbott said it's about as close to nowhere as it's possible to be part of this conclusion comes from the course the aircraft took shortly after the last verbal communication with air traffic control and what happened next all the data transmissions from the aircraft were suddenly lost along with all communications pointing to someone turning off the main electrical power systems and then relying upon the emergency ram air turbine to provide just enough power to fly the aircraft whilst keeping to a very careful and well-thought-out course following the thai malaysian border into the straits of malacca before turning towards the southern oceans this was done very carefully to avoid other aircraft and raising the concerns of the multiple civilian and military air traffic controllers in the area once it was in the indian ocean and out of indonesian radar range power seems to have been partially reinstated as the a car system started working again this scenario was given added significance some 16 months later with the discovery of an almost intact starboard flapper on something which crash investigators say would have been ripped apart by a high-speed impact with the sea this was based on previous high-speed impacts like the swiss air 111 and computer modelling of how the flaperon would have reacted in varying crash scenarios the flapper on was also damaged in such a way as to indicate that it was extended at the time something which would have only been done during a pilot controlled landing and if the aircraft had power only the trailing edge was eroded which suggests it was caused by hitting the sea during a ditching of the aircraft then there was the discovery of a flight path found on a computer simulator at the home of a pilot which followed a very similar path ending up in the approximate area of where it's believed to have disappeared there were about a thousand other flight paths found on the simulator but only one where the destination was the southern ocean well away from any possible place to land 32 pieces of debris have been found that could be linked to mh370 but only three have been positively identified all these were found on coast's thousands of kilometers away on the other side of the indian ocean which is pretty much where they are expected to be knowing how the currents flow around from the east to west no pieces have been found on the australian coast even though it is much closer to the presumed crash site than where they ended up experts say this proves that they had to have come down in an area where the ocean current flows away from australia and over to the western indian ocean but whether that was much farther north or south of the atsb's estimate remains unknown the barnacle growth found on the flapperon would have only occurred if it had been in the warm waters further north for an extended period of time leading some at the royal aeronautical society to suggest that it could have been trying to land at christmas island but ran out of fuel due to flying at a much lower altitude of 5000 ft and a slower speed since leaving the straits of malacca rather than into the southern indian ocean this is based on their extensive and exclusive investigation of the air traffic control responses from all the countries involved and the unusual course it took during the first part of the flight after the radar contact was lost ended entering the indian ocean but backtracking the debris from their final position to try and locate where they entered the ocean years earlier is a very imprecise science and can only give a general area over such long time spans and it doesn't rule out a more northerly or southerly crash location during the initial search and to direct submersible vehicles to the sea floor to take a closer look high resolution images of the ocean topography were required not only to know where they were going but also to know how deep they were in the initial aftermath some remote subs were sent to below their design depth simply because of the poor accuracy of their existing maps although we have maps of all the ocean floors most of these come from gravitational maps created from satellite data which have a resolution of around about two kilometers per pixel a greater accuracy of 300 meters per pixel is available from satellite mounted radar altimeters but this is still far too low resolution to find even the largest parts of an aircraft a few tens of meters in size due to the remoteness bad weather and lack of commercial interest in the southern oceans there have been very little in the way of high resolution mapping done what we do know is that the rugged ocean terrain in this area could easily hide an object like an aircraft even one the size of a boeing 777 to find something as small as an aircraft especially if it's broken up into smaller pieces requires high resolution scanning equipment such as side scanning and multi-beam sonar in the search these were towed behind ships which traveled 24 7 across the search area as the image data was coming in live anything found that could be of interest was marked over autonomous submersibles could be sent down to investigate although the underwater survey revealed a huge amount about the ocean floor in the area of research nothing from mh370 was found and the joint malay chinese and australian search was eventually wound up in january 2017. in october 2017 the company ocean infinity offered to search for mh370 on a no find no fee basis for the malaysian government and on the next most likely area based on drift analysis conducted by cicero the australian national science agency this new search area is a bit farther south and based on the ocean currents which travel towards africa where all the existing wreckage was found in 2018 using the vessel seabed constructor and its eight autonomous underwater vehicles ocean infinity searched a hundred and twenty thousand square kilometers over three months discovering more about the ocean floor and several shipwrecks at a depth of 3700 to 3900 meters and dating back to the 19th century but again no sign of the missing plane and this is where we currently are so could we find mh 370 if we really tried i certainly think so we've already ruled out certain areas so we know where it isn't we could start searching to the north where the royal aeronautical society think it is or to the south where the u.s investigators think it may be but either way this would cover a very large area and there's still no guarantee so the sticking point now seems to be money malaysia is happy for third parties to restart the search on limited areas but on a no fine no fee basis so there will be no blank checks to look for it until found 200 million dollars has already been spent on the search so far making it the most expensive in aviation history the 2018 search by ocean infinity would have cost the malaysian government 70 million dollars if they had found the aircraft so working on that basis to produce a high resolution search of a million square kilometers would cost in the region of about 500 million dollars and maybe take a couple of years even if other ships were to join in the search if we really wanted to find mh370 come what may and you had to perform a high resolution search of a large chunk of the eastern indian ocean west of australia before locating it several billion dollars might be needed but i wouldn't place any bets on that happening anytime soon unless a benevolent billionaire decides to pitch in with some funding if mh370 is in the sea then the only way we're going to find it in the deep ocean is with advanced sonar but this is a slow process with each sonar unit only being able to travel around about four kilometers per hour in recent years advances in auvs or autonomous underwater vehicles has allowed multiple units to work together as a group covering a much greater area at the same time essential for the large searches like mh370 these advances need skilled technicians not only to develop them but also to operate them and the one way you can build up your skills is by using something like brilliant the sponsors of this video brilliant is a problem-solving website and app so you're not tied to the desktop and you can develop those skills anywhere basically brilliant breaks down complex problems into small easily understandable parts before putting them back together to show the overall conclusion there are loads of great interactive courses and daily challenges covering everything from math and logic to quantum objects and computer science and loads of other things in between this hands-on active learning approach is great for all you curious minds out there who want to understand the world so if you want to support curious droid and get unlimited 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Channel: Curious Droid

Views: 2,278,658

Rating: 4.8984814 out of 5

Keywords: paul shillito, curious droid, mh370, astb, ntsb, malaysian mh370, missing plane, why cant we find mh370, boeing 777, inmarsat, malaysia airlines, flight mh370, side scan sonar, multibeam sonar, ocean infinity, seabed constructor

Id: mxsfIlZlpV8

Length: 18min 5sec (1085 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/chateau_librarian]

Someone will find it one day like the titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic

[u/guardeddon]

So many inaccuracies. SMH.

Misunderstands ACARS. Erroneous attribution of CAPTIO's comments to RAeS.

Only 18 minutes sunk.

[u/HDTBill]

This is a very good review video.

However, they seem to have adopted many of France's/MH370-Captio's theories, and they are not giving IG's efforts equal consideration. Thus some of the specific data interpretations, such as (1) proposed RAT deployment at IGARI, and (2) proposed water ditch damage to the flaperon, are hotly contested. Also I am not a big fan of Captio's Xmas Island theory anymore.

I agree with premise that MH370 *might* be found with $Billion dollar search including re-analysis of the data.

I also agree in Malaysia, saving face is the main societal consideration, and so that means we probably leave MH370 on the ocean floor. Maybe a small search, Malaysia bowing to pressure.

Current search has no help from Malaysia and does make simplifying assumptions such as straight flight, crash near Arc7, basically resting in a "findable" spot. We have not yet even searched the search area bounded by simplifying assumptions, let alone the less simple case of "active" pilot possibilities, which are huge in area and potentially magnitudes worse in search-difficulty, if MH370 was possibly downed in a hard to find terrain location of extreme depths.

[u/Donelifer]

Who was on that jet that important for it to be covered up this good? There's footage of this on board one of Elons starlink satellites I'm sure, assuming they really do TRIP(time-reversed infrared photography).

[u/7degrees_south]

u/Gysbreght thanks for sharing your radar analysis. I did the same analysis back when ALSM shared the (updated) data with sufficiently precise timestamps. As the investigators discovered, calculating point-to-point speed produces a horrible amount of noise in derived speed and course. You need to calculate SOG/COG across 4,8,10 data points to get a smoother picture. Because the range data is highly accurate, the main noise problem is coming from the radar's azimuth data. If you smooth that (which is entirely defensible since it is impossible for the a/c to jig around every 4s) you can then obtain an exceptionally smooth speed derivation. Smoothing speed and azimuth in this way only really works for straight-ish sections, so more difficult to apply during the turn after clearing the west coast of peninsular Malaysia. Nonetheless, my final conclusion was that:

1. The speed from Kota Bharu to west coast was in the region of 530kt, but does not appear to be very constant/consistent. And the Butterworth data is anyway much noiser/less precise than the Kota Bharu. However, if you model that segment at FL340, you find an excellent match to M0.87, being max rated speed.
2. After clearing the coast the speed drops abruptly to somewhere in the 508-510 vicinity. For the last straight segment up to 1802, my best estimate was 510 at 291. This segment also matches a "round number mach" at FL340 - in this case M0.84.

So one hypothesis consistent with observed speeds and speed variations is that the transit was flown at M0.87/FL340 until clearing the west coast, then reduced to M0.84 /FL340.

There remains the puzzle of arriving at Arc1 around 100s early. If you model it at M0.84 from the 1802 LKP the steady diminution in tailwind scrubs about 20s of that, but you still arrive ~80s too early (if memory serves). Implying either an offset between the timebase of the radar and the satellite datasets, or a jig to the right (the so-called SLOP), or throw out LIDO data and presume a slow-down/different trajectory towards Arc1.

Closer inspection of LIDO suggests to me that the trace up to 1802 (in fact slightly after*) is the Butterworth datasource because the position datapoints are so much denser (sweep period 4s) and the squiggles look the same. While the military radar has 10s period. I haven't simulated 10s spacing on position points to test this hypothesis but would be interesting to try and match it up against LIDO. It it does match, that would a) be a sort of validation of the data b) derive the corresponding timestamp for the majority of LIDO datapoints with illegible timestamp labels. Would be an interesting exercise to try if I can find the time.

*speculative: slightly after might reflect "coasted" datapoints that are on the radar record but discarded from the version shared with ALSM.

[u/Gysbreght]

Food for thought.

Radar Kota Bharu cumulative increments track distance versus time, resulting groundspeeds shown in the chart:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/t069eyanlbmkrtb/Radar_cumulative_vs_time.pdf?dl=0

[u/Gysbreght]

Food for thought (2)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/a42nh6wcpb32evj/MH370_Analysis_Civil_Radar.pdf?dl=0

Edited 20-10-19 (incorrect figure 6 corrected to figure 9)

[u/Gysbreght]

The autopilot is off from the "Air Turn Back" until the end of primary radar at Pulau Perak at 18:01:59 UTC.

The civil radar at Kota Bharu and Butterworth provides accurate and detailed data. Military is can be accurate be can be sometimes error. The civil radar data groundspeed from 420 kt increased to 520 - 540 kts at the time entered the "Cone of Silence" at radar at Kota Bharu. The groundspeed then decreases to 500 kt, increases again to about 540 kt, then again at 500 kt at end the radar data near Pulau Perak.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/23lfowgnomrcpad/MilitaryRadar_SafetyInvestigationRept.pdf?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/kjvf7ic6j32hb7u/Civil_and_Bayes_Groundspeeds.pdf?dl=0

[u/Gysbreght]

Posted by u/pigdead 8 months ago

Visualisation of MH370 radar data back across Malaysia

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Filtered course data over a slope 15 points:

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https://www.dropbox.com/s/d7su8cn6ojyzeao/15-point%20slope%20course%20Kota%20Bharu%20radar.pdf?dl=0