1 Disappearance
On a quiet moonlit night on March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur at 0:42 and turned towards Beijing, climbing to its intended flight level 350, that is, to an altitude of 10 meters. The designation of Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight number is 650. The plane was flown by Farik Hamid, co-pilot, he was 370 years old. This was his last training flight, after which he was waiting for the completion of certification. Farik's actions were led by the aircraft commander, a man named Zachary Ahmad Shah, who at 27 was one of the most senior captains in Malaysia Airlines. According to Malaysian customs, his name was simply Zachary. He was married and had three adult children. Lived in a gated community. Had two houses. In his first home, he had a flight simulator installed, Microsoft Flight Simulator. He flew it regularly and often posted on online forums about his hobby. Farik treated Zachary with respect, but he did not abuse his power.
There were 10 flight attendants in the cabin, all Malaysians. They had to take care of 227 passengers, including five children. Most of the passengers were Chinese; of the remaining 38 were Malaysians, and the rest (in descending order) were citizens of Indonesia, Australia, India, France, the United States, Iran, Ukraine, Canada, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Russia and Taiwan. That night, Captain Zachary worked on the radio while co-pilot Farik flew the plane. Everything went on as usual, but Zachary's transmissions were a little strange. At 1:01 a.m., he radioed that they had leveled off at 35 feet, a superfluous message in a radar-watched area where it is customary to report leaving a height rather than reaching it. At 000:1 a.m., the flight crossed the Malaysian coastline and headed across the South China Sea towards Vietnam. Zachary once again reported the plane's altitude at 08 feet.
Eleven minutes later, as the plane approached a checkpoint near the Vietnamese air traffic control area, the controller at Kuala Lumpur Center transmitted a message: βMalaysian three-seven-zero, contact Ho Chi Minh one-two-zero-point-nine. Good night". Zachary replied, βGood night. Malaysian three-seven-zero." He didn't repeat the frequency as he should have, but otherwise the message sounded normal. This was the last thing the world heard from MH370. The pilots did not contact Ho Chi Minh and did not respond to any of the subsequent attempts to call them.
A simple radar known as "primary radar" detects objects by sending out radio signals and picking up their reflections like an echo. Air traffic control systems, or ATC, use what is called "secondary radar". It relies on each aircraft's active transponder, or transponder, to send more detailed information, such as tail number and aircraft altitude. Five seconds after MH370 crossed into Vietnamese airspace, its transponder icon disappeared from the screens of the Malaysian air traffic control service, and after 37 seconds the aircraft became invisible to the secondary radar. The time was 1:21, 39 minutes after takeoff. The controller in Kuala Lumpur was busy with other aircraft located in a different part of the screen, and simply did not notice the disappearance. When he discovered the loss after some time, he assumed that the plane had already gone out of reach, and that Ho Chi Minh controllers were already flying it.
Meanwhile, Vietnamese controllers saw MH370 enter their airspace and then disappear from radar. Apparently, they misunderstood the official agreement that Ho Chi Minh had to immediately notify Kuala Lumpur if an incoming plane did not contact for more than five minutes. They attempted to re-contact the aircraft, but to no avail. By the time they picked up the phone to report the situation to Kuala Lumpur, 18 minutes had passed since MH370 had disappeared from radar screens. This was followed by an outstanding display of confusion and incompetence - according to the rules, the Kuala Lumpur Air Rescue Coordination Center should have been notified within an hour of the disappearance, but by 2:30 this had not yet been done. Another four hours elapsed before the first emergency response measures were taken at 6:32 a.m.
The mystery surrounding MH370 has been the subject of an ongoing investigation and a source of feverish speculation.
By this time, the plane was supposed to land in Beijing. Efforts to find it were initially concentrated in the South China Sea, between Malaysia and Vietnam. It was an international action of 34 ships and 28 aircraft from seven different countries, but MH370 was not there. Within days, primary radar records salvaged from air traffic control computers and partly corroborated with secret Malaysian air force data showed that as soon as MH370 disappeared from secondary radar, it turned sharply to the southwest, flew back across the Malay Peninsula and began to list near the island of Penang. From there, it flew northwest up the Strait of Malacca and across the Andaman Sea, where it disappeared out of radar range. This part of the journey took more than an hour - and it suggested that the plane was not hijacked. It also meant that it wasn't the accident or suicide of the pilot that had happened before. From the very beginning, MH370 led researchers in an unknown direction.
The mystery surrounding MH370 has been the subject of an ongoing investigation and a source of feverish speculation. Many families on four continents have experienced a devastating sense of loss. The idea that a complex machine with its modern tools and redundant communications could simply disappear seems absurd. It is difficult to delete a message without a trace, and it is completely impossible to disappear from the network, even if the attempt is deliberate. An aircraft like the Boeing 777 should be available for communication at all times, and its disappearance has given rise to many theories. Many of them are ridiculous, but they all arose due to the fact that in our age a civilian aircraft cannot just disappear.
One did succeed, and more than five years later, its exact whereabouts remain unknown. However, much has become clearer about the disappearance of MH370, and it is now possible to recreate some of the events that occurred that night. Cockpit audio and flight recorder recordings will probably never be recovered, but what we need to know is unlikely to come out of the black boxes. Instead, the answers will have to be found in Malaysia.
2. Coastal tramp
The evening the plane disappeared, a middle-aged American named Blaine Gibson was sitting at his late mother's home in Carmel, California, sorting out her affairs and preparing to sell the property. He heard the news about flight MH370 on CNN.
By education, Gibson, whom I recently met in Kuala Lumpur, is a lawyer. He has lived in Seattle for over 35 years, but spends little time there. His father, who died decades ago, was a World War I veteran who survived mustard gas attacks in the trenches, was awarded the Silver Star for valor, and returned to serving as Chief Justice of California after serving more than 24 years. His mother was a Stanford law graduate and an ardent environmentalist.
Gibson was an only child. His mother loved to travel the world and she took him with her. At the age of seven, he decided that the purpose of his life would be to visit every country in the world at least once. It eventually came down to the definition of "visiting" and "country," but he stayed true to the idea, giving up the chance of a stable career and having a very modest inheritance. By his own account, he dabbled in some well-known mysteries along the way - the end of the Maya civilization in the jungles of Guatemala and Belize, the Tunguska meteorite explosion in eastern Siberia, and the location of the Ark of the Covenant in the mountains of Ethiopia. He printed business cards for himself.Adventurer. Researcher. Aiming for Truthand wore a fedora like Indiana Jones. When the news of the disappearance of MH370 arrived, Gibson's close attention to the incident was preordained.
Despite reflexive denials by Malaysian officials and outright confusion by the Malaysian Air Force, the truth about the plane's strange flight path quickly came to light. It turned out that MH370 continued to periodically communicate with a geostationary satellite in the Indian Ocean, operated by the British satellite communications company Inmarsat, for six hours after the plane disappeared from the secondary radar. This meant that there was no sudden crash on the plane. Presumably, during these six hours, he flew at cruising speed at high altitude. Communication sessions with Inmarsat, some of which were simply connection confirmations, were short system connections, in fact, no more than an electronic whisper. The system for transmitting basic content - entertainment for passengers, messages for pilots, automatic maintenance reports - was apparently disabled. There were seven connections in total: two were automatically initiated by the aircraft, and five others were initiated by the Inmarsat ground station. There were also two satellite calls; they remained unanswered, but ended up providing additional data. Most of these connections had two parameters associated with them that Inmarsat recently began recording and storing.
The first and more precise of the parameters is known as the burst-timing offset, let's call it the "distance parameter" for simplicity. This is a measure of the transmission time to and from the aircraft, that is, a measure of the distance from the aircraft to the satellite. This parameter defines not one specific location, but all equidistant places - almost a circle of possible points. Given the range limits of MH370, the nearer portions of these circles become arcs. The most important arc, the seventh and final one, is determined by the last satellite connection, which is inextricably linked to fuel depletion and engine failure. The seventh arc extends from Central Asia in the north to Antarctica in the south. It was crossed by MH370 at 8:19 Kuala Lumpur time. Calculations of probable flight paths determine the intersection of the aircraft with the seventh arc and, therefore, its end point - in Kazakhstan if the aircraft turned to the north, or in the southern part of the Indian Ocean if it turned to the south.
Judging by the electronic data, there was no attempt at a controlled landing on the water. The plane was supposed to instantly shatter into a million pieces.
Technical analysis allows us to state with certainty that the aircraft turned south. We know this from the second parameter registered by Inmarsat, the burst-frequency offset. For simplicity, we will call it the βDoppler parameterβ, since the main thing that it includes is a measure of RF Doppler shifts associated with high-speed movement relative to the position of the satellite, which is a natural part of satellite communications for aircraft in flight. For successful operation of satellite communications, Doppler shifts must be predicted and compensated for by on-board systems. But the compensation isn't exactly perfect, because satellites - especially as they age - don't transmit signals exactly as they were programmed into the planes. Their orbits can deviate slightly, they also depend on temperature, and these imperfections leave distinct traces. Although Doppler shift values ββhave never been used to determine the position of an aircraft, Inmarsat technicians in London were able to detect significant distortion suggesting a south turn at 2:40. The turning point was slightly north and west of Sumatra, Indonesia's northernmost island. With some assumption, it can be assumed that the plane then flew straight at a constant altitude for a very long time in the direction of Antarctica, which lay outside its range.
Six hours later, the Doppler parameter indicates a sharp decline - five times faster than the normal rate of descent. A minute or two after crossing the seventh arc, the plane plunged into the ocean, possibly having lost components before impact. Judging by the electronic data, there was no attempt at a controlled landing on the water. The plane was supposed to instantly shatter into a million pieces. However, no one knew where the fall occurred, much less why. Also, no one had the slightest physical evidence that the interpretation of the satellite data was correct.
Less than a week after the disappearance, The Wall Street Journal published the first piece on satellite connections, indicating that the plane likely remained in the air for hours after it fell silent. Malaysian officials eventually admitted that this was true. The Malaysian regime is considered to be one of the most corrupt in the region, and the release of satellite data showed that the Malaysian authorities were secretive, cowardly and unreliable in their investigation into the disappearance. Incident investigators sent from Europe, Australia and the US were appalled at the mess they encountered. Due to the fact that the Malaysians withheld details known to them, the initial naval search was focused in the wrong place, in the South China Sea, and did not find floating debris. If the Malaysians had told the truth right away, such debris could have been found and used to determine the approximate location of the aircraft; black boxes could be found. The underwater search eventually focused on a narrow strip of ocean thousands of miles away. But even a narrow strip of ocean is a big place. It took two years to find the black boxes from an Air France 447 that crashed into the Atlantic on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009 - and they knew exactly where to look for them.
Initial searches in surface waters ended in April 2014 after almost two months of futile efforts, and the focus shifted to the deep ocean, where it remains today. At first, Blaine Gibson followed these frustrating efforts from afar. He sold his mother's house and moved to the Golden Triangle in northern Laos, where he and a business partner set about building a restaurant on the Mekong River. In parallel, he joined a Facebook group dedicated to the loss of MH370, which was filled with both speculation and news containing reasonable arguments about the fate of the aircraft and the location of the main wreckage.
Although the Malaysians were formally in charge of the entire investigation, they lacked the funds and experience to carry out underwater search and recovery work, and the Australians, like good Samaritans, took the lead. The areas of the Indian Ocean indicated by satellite data, about 1900 kilometers southwest of Perth, were so deep and unexplored that the first step was to produce an underwater topographic map accurate enough to allow the safe towing of special vehicles. , side-scan sonar, at a depth of many kilometers under water. The bottom of the ocean in these places is covered with ridges, hidden by darkness, where light has never penetrated.
A diligent underwater search led Gibson to wonder if the wreckage of the aircraft would someday simply wash ashore. Visiting friends on the coast of Cambodia, he asked if they had come across anything similar - the answer was no. Although the wreckage would not have been able to sail to Cambodia from the south Indian Ocean, Gibson wanted to be open to any options until the discovery of the wreckage of the aircraft proved that it was the south Indian Ocean that really became his grave.
In March 2015, relatives of passengers met in Kuala Lumpur on the anniversary of the disappearance of MH370. Gibson decided to attend without being invited and without being intimately acquainted with anyone. Since he did not have special knowledge, his visit was received with skepticism - people did not know how to react to a random dilettante. The event took place in an open area in a mall, a typical meeting place in Kuala Lumpur. The purpose was to express general grief, as well as to continue to pressure the Malaysian government in order to get some kind of explanation. Hundreds of people attended, many from China. Soft music was playing from the stage, and a large poster hung in the background with the silhouette of a Boeing 777, as well as the words "where","who","why","when","whom","How", and "impossible","unprecedentedly","without a trace" and "helplessly". The main speaker was a young Malaysian woman named Grace Subathirai Nathan, whose mother was on board. Nathan is a criminal defense attorney who specializes in death penalty cases, which are in short supply in Malaysia due to draconian laws. She became the most successful representative of the next of kin of the dead. Taking the stage wearing an oversized T-shirt printed with a graphic of MH370 with the slogan "Search", she spoke about her mother, the deep love she had for her, and the hardships she faced after her disappearance. Sometimes she sobbed softly, as did some of the audience, including Gibson. After her performance, he approached her and asked if she would accept a hug from a stranger. She hugged him, and over time they became friends.
Leaving the mourning event, Gibson decided to help by addressing a gap he had discovered - the lack of coastal searches for floating debris. This will be his niche. He will become a beach bum looking for the wreckage of MH370 on the coasts. Official explorers, mostly Australians and Malaysians, have invested heavily in underwater searches. They would have laughed at Gibson's ambitions, just as they would have laughed at the prospect that on beaches hundreds of miles apart, Gibson would actually find plane wreckage.
Left: Malaysian lawyer and activist Grace Subathirai Nathan, whose mother was aboard MH370. Right: Blaine Gibson, an American who went looking for the wreckage of the plane. Photo by: William Langewiesche
To be continued.
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Source: habr.com