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As The TerryReport observed Sunday night (3.16.14), the north and south lines leading from the last known position of flight 370 were, at best, misleading. The new search area is the entire Indian Ocean, 3 million or so square miles. This expanded search zone reflects what The TerryReport believed as of Sunday, and that is that the lines north and south represented only a vague outline of where the huge 777 passenger jet might have gone.
There is no complete word (and there probably never will be one) as to whether the analysis of the Inmarsat data was either wrong or misinterpreted. The best estimate is that too much emphasis was placed on too little information and that a false conclusion was reached. No surprise there, if that is the case.
I did not believe from the start that the Inmarsat data, lacking GPS signals, could provide information that specific. In fact, Inmarsat says on its website that it assigns spotbeams to satellite phones using GPS. If the requires that kind of information to locate a return signal for a phone, why wouldn’t it be also required for an aircraft? We know from public statements that the data bursts being exchanged between the satellite and the aircraft did not have GPS information.
The spotbeam is a specific, higher intensity satellite signal sent to a smaller area on earth than the larger, general beam. Thus, if you know spotbeam 34b was used, for example, you would know that a signal, and the aircraft, were in that zone. As it moved through various spotbeams, you could then plot the direction of travel. Though the spotbeams are smaller than the larger footprints (signal zones) of the satellite they are still large and, using that data, it would be difficult to establish a line of travel with any sort of accuracy. The spotbeam, also, would not tell you if the aircraft moved out of one spotbeam and back into between the transmission times for the aircraft. The downtime would represent a blank, unknown period.
Here’s where we are: it is highly unlikely that flight 370 traveled over land without being picked up by radar systems. So, if it went out over the Indian Ocean, it is likely lost in a very, very big place. The probability is that no wreckage will be found without some blind luck or additional information not available to the public. Some have suggested that debris might wash up somewhere in the coming months or weeks. If that’s the case, it will still be very difficult to find where the main wreckage is located, but at least the search area could probably be reduced. (The area might be the size of Texas and five other states, for example, rather than as large as the whole 48.)
The problem now is that the area of the ocean is almost as big as the entire United States (minus Alaska and Hawaii). That’s too much territory to have much of any hope of finding anything. Of course, satellites are being pressed into the effort and they can send back high resolution images. If this effort is carefully coordinated to cover the entire area and those images are searched bit by bit, then there is still some small hope.
The idea of a hijacking has been high on consideration almost from the start. If so, it is likely that it was a hijacking by a mentally deranged person with little or no idea what they wanted to accomplish. It seems much more likely now, however, that something went wrong mechanically with the aircraft and that it crashed into the ocean. The pilots could have entered new coordinates into the auto pilot system while they were trying to cope with some other emergency. They might have been trying to get the aircraft to the nearest landing point and somehow miscalculated. Once they discovered this error, however, it might have been too late to take corrective action and, in fact, they might have already been dead by lack of oxygen or some other calamity on the aircraft. It wouldn’t be that surprising if someone killed the pilots (even one of the pilots himself) and the aircraft flew on guided by auto pilot until it crashed. In 1999, a private jet carrying golfer Payne Stewart and others had in an flight failure, everyone died from lack of oxygen and the plane kept flying until it ran out of fuel and crashed. At high altitude, there are only a few seconds to get an oxygen mask in place before loss of consciousness.
Will we ever know? Some information about where the aircraft is will likely come at some point. Recovering the flight data recorder seems much less likely now and, without that, the cause would never likely be determined. It took two years to locate Air France flight 447 between Brazil and Africa and a long time after that to bring up the black boxes from 10,000 ft. down. In that case, the flight was on its known flight path and debris was found floating in the ocean.
Doug Terry, 3.18.14
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