MH370 Controlled Eastward Veering and Descent After the 6th Arc

Past expert analyses of communication signals from missing Malaysian Airlines MH370 reconciled Burst Frequency Offset (BFO) errors up to the 6th of 7 arcs for a southerly track. After the 6th arc, the Satellite Data Unit (SDU) power-up or reboot resulted in settling errors in the last two data points that were ignored (first search) and later bounded (second search). For the second search, investigators invoked a high-speed vertical descent to account for BFO errors for the south track fuel-starved scenario. Two searches disappointingly failed to find the implied violent-crash site. We report that interpretations were flawed in suggesting the plane dived vertically, as investigators did not recognize that BFO extrapolations implicitly implied mathematically that the plane was also cruising along the south track, but with no fuel. Our reanalysis used the “Penang Longitude” (PL) theory that predicted a similar southerly track to the 6th arc, and that MH370 subsequently veered eastwards and descended. Doppler Shifts from vertical motions were replaced with plausible horizontal veering and declination of a high-speed aircraft. Veering predicted by the PL theory plus controlled descent plausibly accounts for nominal 7th arc BFO discrepancies for the warm-reboot scenario. We conclude that the fuel-starvation scenario analyses wrongly implied a vertical high-speed crash that ignored the impossible implicit southerly cruise, with no fuel, assumption. Instead, MH370 was piloted to a precise glide landing under power, east of the 7th arc.

MH370 Eastward Descent After the 6th Arc

Past analyses of satellite and phone signals from missing Malaysian Airlines MH370 reconciled Burst Frequency Offset (BFO) errors up to the 6th of 7 arcs for a southerly track. After the 6th arc, the Satellite Data Unit (SDU) power-up or reboot resulted in settling errors. Investigators bounded these but needed to invoke a high-speed descent for nominal errors that remained from assuming the southerly track continued to the 7th arc. However, the implied violent-crash site was not found nor supported by damage found on debris, which instead suggested a glided landing. In our reanalysis, we relaxed the south track assumption and used the “Penang Longitude” (PL) theory that predicted a similar southerly track to the 6th arc, and that MH370 subsequently veered eastwards and descended. In essence, we simply replaced the Doppler Shift from vertical motions with horizontal veering of a high-speed aircraft. Our results suggests that veering predicted by the PL theory plus controlled descent plausibly accounts for nominal 7th arc BFO discrepancies. Synergistic resolution of observation by this theory suggests that MH370 did not violently crash at the 7th arc. Instead MH370 headed east towards a glide landing, predicted by the PL theory to be where the longitude of Penang intersects the 33oS latitude at a deep hole. The main lesson to learn is that all plausible scenarios need to be considered for complex high-uncertainty problems.

The language of suffering: Media discourse and public attitudes towards the MH17 air tragedy in Malaysia and the UK

‘If it bleeds, it leads’, events characterised by fatalities, are likely to attract high levels of media coverage. This study adopts a multidisciplinary approach to investigate public discourses on the MH17 tragedy in Malaysia and the United Kingdom. First, corpus-based discourse analysis was employed to explore the construction of the Malaysian Airlines tragedy MH17 in four selected Malaysian and British newspapers. In addition, an attitudinal study examining 50 Malaysian and 50 UK nationals’ perceptions of the tragedy was conducted. Keywords analysis revealed an overall tendency for the news media to construct the air tragedy through classifications between ‘us’ and ‘others’. Specifically, important ‘Us’ (Malaysian elites) and non-important ‘Other’ (non-Malaysian) in the Malaysian newspapers, versus good ‘Us’ (the West) and evil ‘Others’ (Russia) in the British newspapers. The attitudinal analysis shows, for both the Malaysian and the UK respondents, the most salient associations with the MH17 tragedy related to ‘ conflicts’.

Consideration of various aspects in a drift study of MH370 debris

On 7 March 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER aircraft operated by Malaysian Airlines as MH370 on the route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing abruptly ceased all communications and disappeared with 239 people aboard, leaving its fate a mystery. The subsequent analysis of so-called satellite handshakes supplemented by military radar tracking has suggested that the aircraft ended up in the southern Indian Ocean. The eventual recovery of a number of fragments washed ashore in several countries has confirmed its crash. A number of drift studies were undertaken to assist in locating the crash site, mostly focusing either on the spatial distribution of the debris washed ashore or on the efficacy of the aerial search operation. A recent biochemical analysis of the barnacles attached to the flaperon (the first fragment found in La Réunion) has indicated that their growth likely began in water of 24 °C; then the temperature dropped to 18 °C, and then it rose up again to 25 °C. An attempt was made in the present study to take into consideration all these aspects. The analysis was conducted by means of numerical screening of 40 hypothetical locations of the crash site along the so-called seventh arc. Obtained results indicate the likelihood of the crash site to be located between 25.5 and 30.5° S, with the segment from 28 to 30° S being the most promising.