Malaysian Airlines Flight MH-370 goes missing

A_Gupta · Post by **A_Gupta** » 11 Apr 2014 16:59

http://www.malaysiandigest.com/technolo ... -rest.html

KUALA LUMPUR: Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein must either confirm or deny a report by Umno-owned Utusan Malaysia alleging a US intelligence agency was behind the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, the DAP demanded today.

In an opinion piece last Sunday, the Malay broadsheet’s assistant news editor Ku Seman Ku Hussein aired a belief among conspiracy theorists that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was to blame for the missing jetliner, fuelling debate on the Umno-led federal government’s role in the aviation industry’s biggest mystery to date.

“He was implying that the CIA might have a hand in MH370,” Segambut MP Lim Lip Eng said, referring to Ku Seman.

“But until now the Malaysian government, the authorities, especially Hishammuddin, have said nothing. So I want Hishammuddin to respond to this assertion by Utusan,” he told reporters at the DAP headquarters here.

The opposition party’s parliamentary leader, Lim Kit Siang, acknowledged that such conspiracy theories surrounding MH370 had been floating around the Internet for the past month since the Beijing-bound plane vanished on March 8.

But the Gelang Patah MP said the claim had gained prominence for being published in a national newspaper controlled by the Barisan Nasional government’s main party.

UlanBatori · Post by **UlanBatori** » 11 Apr 2014 19:13

Guptaji:

would have been near overhead of the plane at some point (well, within 10-20°) if it headed on my route to Pakistan.

But that makes little difference: Unless it happened to send a signal to the INMARSAT, there is no telling where it was. It could have flown up and said Hi to PakSAT and come back down for all that INMARSAT can tell, in between pings, which is like 2 hours or 4 hours.

I still don't understand why there are not several deeeeep ocean listening posts strung down into the ocean all round the ping locations. How tough is it to lower a 2 km long wire with a weighted microphone from a buoy?

One assumes that the reason for not having the deep-sea visual-observer craft operating, is that it is noisy. OK, but why not string down these microphones into the depths? This is what tells me that this exercise is not serious, it sounds like a scientific exploration of ocean acoustics, plankton mating cries etc. One research ship, ONE "pinger-locator", all else is just surface-based/shallow???

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 11 Apr 2014 19:29

I think most of these warships , orions and poseidons were designed for and merely capable to hunting submarines down to 600m depth. not undertake scientific type exploration at 5000m. most of their gear is probably useless in such scenario.

they will have to bring in specialized deep ocean research ships with the mariana trench kit from woods hole, japan, france wherever such badass people and eqpt teams hang out. it might take a year or two to locate sea bottom debris. they found the titanic at great depth.

the rest might as well go home. its like P&S vs DLSRs in a low light atmosphere. its not a fair fight.

habal · Post by **habal** » 11 Apr 2014 19:31

What is there in the sea bottom ? Maybe many things, but not MH 370 for sure.

that is why the current searching gear is more than enough.

http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/v ... n.cnn.html

Philip · Post by **Philip** » 11 Apr 2014 19:55

As Oz officials draw us into the end game of the hunt for the BB,increasing hope in proportion to the decreasing time left for the BB to ping,the suspense is building up in excruciating fashion.

This reminds me of another similar incident,involving a famous US televangelist,Oral Roberts (who had a love for finery,diamond rings,Italian silk suits, and gold bracelets – airbrushed out by his staff on publicity pictures)
,who one fine morning got up and announced to his millions of listeners that God had spoken to him. God had told him that his dream of a new project required a huge amount of moolah to be collected before a deadline,%8M before march '87,otherwise the dear Lord would "call him home"! So the famous preacher announced that he needed X millions before the deadline ,otherwise....!

However, the year before on Easter he had told a gathering at the Dallas Convention Center that God had instructed him to raise the money "by the end of the year" or he would die. Regardless of this new March deadline and the fact that he was still $4.5 million short of his goal, some were fearful that he was referring to suicide, given the impassioned pleas and tears that accompanied his statement.

The dollars flowed in ,in a steady trickle,but not fast enough.each day the preacher prayed to his flock to open their purses and donate generously and save his life (one millionaire reportedly sent him a million bucks because he thought the geezer was simply crazy!).Anyway,the weeks became days and them just hours and the suspense was incredible.The amount collected began inching its way upto the required figure and it looked like it would go all the way to the wire.At the 11th hour,50th something minute,preacher Roberts dramatically announced that he had "made it"! The truth was that he had actually collected $9.1 million before the deadline and was playing the game.Unfortunately for dear old Oral,the truth was outed by a newshound and his image suffered.

The same game is being played out in the IOR by the wizards of Oz,with the BB most probably already in the safe custody of a sub captain,to be handed over at the 11th hour. The world will then be treated to a great celebration of the amazing capabilities of the navy of the wizards of Oz!

PS:Detection gear is very sophisticated,capable of detecting a whole range of small objects like mines,SOSUS style sensors,etc. Detecting a "pinging" BB would be child's play if the BB is active.Sonars are son sensitive that they can differentiate the diff. sounds made by aquatic life and man made objects Many years ago a sub skipper told me how sensitive his sub's sonar was as his sonar officer could detect which patrol/missile boat was on patrol from the minute differences in the signature of their screws.

Here's another US pastor,who says don't believe the BS being trotted out,"they're lying" he says!
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/20 ... 36128.html

Pastor Manning gives a break down about flight MH370 the lying about hearing pings and the official story is bogus. In his usual no nonsense style, he explains why the official story is a lie and why we shouldn’t believe it.

Bade · Post by **Bade** » 12 Apr 2014 00:19

Why a protractor, a few pings here and a few pings there and an eye-eye-tea calculus course is not good enough or the combined dumbness of BRF ahead of the curve crowd....and whadya know, it is sourced from CNN the competitor for UBC.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/11/tech/inno ... ?hpt=hp_t1

UlanBatori · Post by **UlanBatori** » 12 Apr 2014 01:37

A protractor, water-filled ear

and eye eye tee calculus may not be sufficient but there are much easier ways to determine what a signal in one place means.

In acoustics, there is something called the Reciprocity Theorem: the source and receiver can be interchanged, no effect on the properties of the sound propagation in between.

OK, send recordings of Arundhati Roy and QE2 speeches or a 400% Anish Patel Bong Pinger down, and play them back from 4500 meters in the general vicinity - see how (or IF) they are captured on microphones located at different points in a rough circle. Move that around a bit, and you got the transmission properties of the whole region mapped.

Also, I assume that they can map the ocean floor depth to say 100 m resolution in that area?

Listen for the pings with multiple devices that actually display their output at the same screen, set with a notch filter around 37.5KHz. Capture ONE ping and you got it triangulated nicely.
Some of what I heard this morning on our competitors' non-stop blah-blah were pretty scary: they just record these things, and don't analyze them until hours later? This doesn't sound like a very professional set up. It's more like a 3-year research project. No sign of any hurry. Correction: Around cyclone season they want to exit there. One has reached New Zealand already.

Bade · Post by **Bade** » 12 Apr 2014 01:53

The question that Anish Patel can answer is, can the pinger (35kHz) be heard from those depths. The higher the frequency, the attenuation is even more.

The Bathymetric map resolution is poor too at 1 minute, i.e. 1/60th of 100km approximately for global coverage. The region of interest is perhaps not the most mapped though close enough to Aus land.
http://ferret.pmel.noaa.gov/Ferret/faq/ ... -data-sets

Running all those wave refraction models and circulation will take some computing power, outside the capability of routine military intelligence and their turnkey applications very likely.

Added later:
This one has a scale with their map tool. data is truly sparse that is publicly available at least.
http://www.marine-geo.org/portals/gmrt/

UlanBatori · Post by **UlanBatori** » 12 Apr 2014 02:03

Yes, but that is why one would simply dunk an Anish Patel Gong Pinger in the general vicinity, hold it on a wire and let it ping away - and see what you hear from 10 points around it - and take those points out to as far away as you can until you don't hear it.

You don't need complex models or nothing - this simple (yes I know you have to go get wire to string down the APGP) experiment is all that is needed.

member_28502 · Post by **member_28502** » 12 Apr 2014 02:46

Bade wrote:Why a protractor, a few pings here and a few pings there and an eye-eye-tea calculus course is not good enough or the combined dumbness of BRF ahead of the curve crowd....and whadya know, it is sourced from CNN the competitor for UBC.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/11/tech/inno ... ?hpt=hp_t1

All you need is a Ashoka Compass box and high school Mensuration, period. no need to travel to eye eye tea.

Not to be confused with Compass Box Whiskey, we are in age of W(r)ong pings all the time

Also sean yen yen drew a graph like the ones I created for log log curve (ok scales) to get straight line (linear data) buy pinging two points one above the line and one below the line to make it a true fit (statistically) using distance formula to make it genuine

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 12 Apr 2014 03:02

Bade: While the article you linked is quite good with good technical information, there is another article linked in that article which has this "dumbing down" (AKA simplification beyond Einstein limit)

CNN wrote:(CNN) -- Just how hard is it to find a plane at the bottom of the ocean?
Imagine standing on a mountain top and trying to spot a suitcase on the ground below. Then imagine doing it in complete darkness.

This is quite an egregious analogy considering that the putative "suitcase" is "glowing" (albeit faintly). But then the "mountain" is moving as well as the whole floor of the valley.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 12 Apr 2014 03:13

UlanBatori wrote:Yes, but that is why one would simply dunk an Anish Patel Gong Pinger in the general vicinity, hold it on a wire and let it ping away - and see what you hear from 10 points around it - and take those points out to as far away as you can until you don't hear it.

You don't need complex models or nothing - this simple (yes I know you have to go get wire to string down the APGP) experiment is all that is needed.

a posteriori how close your physical model can get to the reality? Computational models with the right math and modeling with historical data can get you as close as you want depending on the amount and resolution of available data and the number of variables considered. On the other hand, the data to be sifted through can be reduced as well as computational resources required to model minimized if they are taking into account all the a priori information available for this particular incident.

I don't think neither CNN not BRF can talk in other than generalities. As long as the news remains sensational it will be talked about. In the former's case, if there are no shootings/knifings/Ukrain/Helathcare snafus then this rises to the top to fill the 24x7 news slots.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 12 Apr 2014 03:21

UlanBatori wrote:In acoustics, there is something called the Reciprocity Theorem: the source and receiver can be interchanged, no effect on the properties of the sound propagation in between.

Sire, I suppose this would be true only if the medium is isotropic and the geometry has mirror symmetry (i.e. ~~in speherical coordinates,~~ (sorry it is coordinate independent) it has both both rotation and translation symmetry).

Both assumptions are absent in the physical situation.

Please correct if there are any inaccuracies.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 12 Apr 2014 03:58

CNN had a serious looking official say that the 5th ping was a no ping. Its no from the black boxes.

Bade · Post by **Bade** » 12 Apr 2014 04:20

matrimc, the key point was in the CNN article, the frequency dependence for a large range of the signal sent out from underwater. You are right that the ocean properties as regards acoustic propagation are not isotropic, but for the frequency range in question other fundamentals override it.

We may soon find out that any pinger which sinks along with the airplane to such depths may never be heard from. The Air France flight in the Atlantic was at much shallower depth, maybe just at the threshold for the signals to make it to the surface or sub-surface where submarines normally operate.

Harpal Bector · Post by **Harpal Bector** » 12 Apr 2014 04:48

So is there any chance that the frequncy shifted by an amount that makes chinese observation credible?

Also this part about the AUS PM being conrradicted by his own appointee is making me scratch my head.

Bade · Post by **Bade** » 12 Apr 2014 04:53

So they claim it is certified for depths up to 20,000 feet. Which part of the world's oceans did they drop it to test that, or is it just the physical integrity of the instrument at those depths that is being certified ?

With over 30 years of acoustic beacon design and manufacturing experience for the commercial and military markets, the Dukane Seacom beacons are designed to provide outstanding performance and reliability the aviation and maritime industries require.

DK Series Underwater Acoustic Beacons carry the tradition of the N15F210B, but with the addition of an extended useful life. These beacons are designed and certified to FAA TSO-C121, and can operate to a depth of 20,000 feet.

http://www.radiantpowercorp.com/dukane- ... acons.aspx

Harpal Bector · Post by **Harpal Bector** » 12 Apr 2014 04:56

Maybe they mean that it can withstand that much pressure.
I am not sure if that number can be used to calculate any kind of signal attenuation.

Harpal Bector · Post by **Harpal Bector** » 12 Apr 2014 05:08

Actually at 20kft at 10dB /km one is looking at 1e-7 in energy.

Bade · Post by **Bade** » 12 Apr 2014 05:11

http://www.wfla.com/story/25181923/sara ... flight-370

The beacons are attached to both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder.

Once they're placed underwater, they start emitting a beeping sound. It repeats every second at a frequency that cannot be heard by human ears. Once submerged, the signal can travel up to two nautical miles. And they can withstand some damage.
.......
Starting next year, the FAA will require that all pingers must keep transmitting for 90 days.

Officials say in 2018, there will also be a requirement for a new type of pinger that can transmit signals for longer distances - around eight to ten nautical miles.

So if the plane is sitting at depths of more than 2 miles, hopes of hearing the pings are dim indeed.

Harpal Bector · Post by **Harpal Bector** » 12 Apr 2014 05:14

20kft is 3.25 nm

Bade · Post by **Bade** » 12 Apr 2014 05:23

Harpal Bector wrote:So is there any chance that the frequncy shifted by an amount that makes chinese observation credible?

Also this part about the AUS PM being conrradicted by his own appointee is making me scratch my head.

If I recall right the Chinese observation was hundreds of kilometers away from where the more recent pings were recorded. If the average ocean depths are close to the limits of the range of detection in the vicinity of the search, then the detection has to be almost vertical to the location of the source, as it is the closest distance to the source.

So how can the two pings from the same source be so far apart ?

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 12 Apr 2014 05:29

Bade wrote:matrimc, the key point was in the CNN article, the frequency dependence for a large range of the signal sent out from underwater. You are right that the ocean properties as regards acoustic propagation are not isotropic, but for the frequency range in question other fundamentals override it.

The link you provided was informative. The portion I quoted is from another link which is listed at the end of the link you provided. May be the target audience are different for that article from which I quoted.

My only point is that it is lot more difficult than what it seems to be at the first cut. Back of the envelope calculations can take one only so far. Please correct if I am wrong, but you also seem to be saying the same thing (although couched in your characteristic satirical verbiage

).

As time goes by the locating the black boxes becomes harder (exponentially?). In that sense Chinese with their string and bucket or some such simple minded thingummy boggles the mind (unless they are engaged in dumbing down the science for mass consumption by their citizens). Even if news is controlled in their lal zamin, they still have to put up a show lest the news that they are not doing anything might percolate through SM back to their restive populace especially now that their exports are sagging, growth is stalling and economic gloom is on the horizon.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 12 Apr 2014 05:32

Bade wrote: So how can the two pings from the same source be so far apart ?

Bade: The article you quoted talks about sound channels which can transport sound for large distances (like a mu waveguide). ~~Is that what you are saying? or is it not possible given the attenuation and the distances involved?~~
Scratch that. After re-reading, I understand what you are saying - a couple of orders of magnitude tranport is not possible, so either Chinese or (inclusive) the Ozzies are lying.

UlanBatori · Post by **UlanBatori** » 12 Apr 2014 06:49

matrimcji:

I suppose this would be true only if the medium is isotropic and the geometry has mirror symmetry (i.e. in speherical coordinates, (sorry it is coordinate independent) it has both both rotation and translation symmetry).
Both assumptions are absent in the physical situation.
Please correct if there are any inaccuracies.

In Ulan Bator we use this Fatwa without any such hangups. I suppose if there is total internal reflection from some surface, then there is no path one way. Have to ask my yaks what they think of that. But otherwise, the reciprocity theorem just says that the path behaves the same way. Does not matter if there are severely absorbing/scattering things in between.

So this is the ideal way to get the characteristics of the medium. If there is no signal path, then, hey, what is the point of their seaching there, hain?

BTW, I think this is also the basis for a lot of System Identification techniques, for example involving buildings, flying yak tails, wings, even the skulls of Pakistanis. I wouldn't describe any of these as homo-genius (except for the Pakis), ice-o-tropic etc.

A_Gupta · Post by **A_Gupta** » 12 Apr 2014 06:51

http://resource.npl.co.uk/acoustics/tec ... bsorption/
suggests more like 7-8 dB/km attenuation at 37.5 KHz.

UlanBatori · Post by **UlanBatori** » 12 Apr 2014 06:59

a posteriori how close your physical model can get to the reality? Computational models with the right math and modeling with historical data can get you as close as you want depending on the amount and resolution of available data and the number of variables considered. On the other hand, the data to be sifted through can be reduced as well as computational resources required to model minimized if they are taking into account all the a priori information available for this particular incident.

This is all too difficult, but I am saying that in situations where computational models are completely impractical, applying reciprocity solves the problem. You put a pinger down at 4500 feet in the general vicinity and see what you sense out at the surface, all round it. This gives you the transfer function which may be as simple as a linear function (attenuation/amplification at each frequency, but no transfer between frequencies) or nonlinear, but whatever it is, it tells you what you expect to see - maybe 38KHz, maybe 34KHz, maybe the signal is spread out in frequency, and maybe the amplitude is down by a factor of a million. But you KNOW what happens in every direction. That's what you need to know, after all - you don't need to know which current is where, what thermal layer is where, or what fish is scattering what, what rocks exist in between - all those are irrelevant.

habal · Post by **habal** » 12 Apr 2014 07:19

bb battery is expired as of 2012, mind you.

please take that into account before getting along with the calculations.

UlanBatori · Post by **UlanBatori** » 12 Apr 2014 07:25

You try it with the oldest GongPinger that Mr. Patel can provide - or one taken from another Malaysia Airlines 777 (I bet they don't do routine maintenance on any plane, nothing special about MH370). Or Boeing could provide one. Go to the battery manufacturers and ask them for an old battery and put that in the device.

Bade · Post by **Bade** » 12 Apr 2014 08:02

Yes, but how do you do it concurrently with an active ongoing search of the true signal ? You could use different frequencies above and below the MH370 pinger values to tag the calibration signal.

At a ping every second, it is already 864000 or so pings over the last 10 days, and only 4-5 have been recorded so far. Even assuming a transfer function of 1 ( no attenuation, no dispersion) all isotropic only and detector efficiency 100%, and still we see only 4/864000. A very low probability event.

UlanBatori · Post by **UlanBatori** » 12 Apr 2014 08:08

As for how to do the calibration, it IS best done when the searchers are searching, because it saves you the trouble of setting up the receivers. You inform the searchers first that any Gong Pings at the relevant frequency range, heard in the next minute, are artificial, and to report the intensity and frequency of the ping.

Note that at 1500 m/s (speed of sound in water is 1500 m/s, not 5000m/s!!) it takes only 3 seconds for a Gong Ping to be heard on the surface if it is straight above, and slightly longer if it is off to the side. Just like the PAKMARSAT procedure, they can time the pulses when they are triggered, and measure the time taken to detect the Gong Pings, to confirm the distance that the path of the sound took.

I agree with you on the probability. It means that they are either in the wrong place or that a Gong Ping from a Gong Pinger with a weak battery, just cannot be heard from such depths, so far away.

Or there IS no "right places" and it is all a bogus search. I bet if you lower a mike in any body of water larger than a pakistan , there is a 1/84,000 chance of hearing a Gong Ping. Given all the speed boats and propeller airplanes and CNN barracuda in the water, I wonder how they can make out ANYTHING.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 12 Apr 2014 09:30

UB ji: I am sort of getting the hang of your proposed method and bade's observation on the probability. In fact using your method one can even get an estimate of the probability of hearing the pings too, I guess. Say instead of sending a ping every 10 seconds one can set up to send the ping every second (assuming the Ping duration itself is less than a second) one can generate ten days worth of pings in one day. For rough estimate the sample size can even be reduced to a couple of hours or so of experimentation. If the detected pings come out to be far larger than 4/86400, the pings heard are pings that simply traveled too far through some freaky chance or generated by random chance - a fluke so to say. But the probability of 4/86400 is not too low to simply discard out of hand or is it?

UlanBatori · Post by **UlanBatori** » 12 Apr 2014 16:20

matrimc:
It is 400% certain that profs and other experts on Underwater Acoustics (a very well-funded, long-established field) would have rushed in to get the consulting $$ and maybe a nice vacation in the balmy SIO /Perth. So the techniques I stated above will have been proposed by them, long since. I assume that the computers on these fancy ships have enough processing power (meaning any PC bought in the last decade) to do the job, and they will have determined the answer (how powerful the Gong-Ping has to be, what it sounds like, how it refracts in that particular region).
See
http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/221357208569?lpid=82

Made by Anish Patel company, I assume.
See Specialists in UW acoustics

Also see ULB specs from Dukane: this may or not be the model in the Malaysian plane

Its a tiny thing, smaller than a Bose speaker, looks like. Puts out only 160.5dB at 1 meter (depth?)
No mention of output power at greater depths. I guess they have to make sure it doesn't kill everyone around, if Abdul manages to turn it on by bissing on it at KL or Karachi airport.

The textbook used in grad classes in Ulan Bator in the 1920s was written by expert on underwater acoustics. Whole section on Reciprocity Theorem etc.

PhD thesis of 6th coujin in Stone Age used this way of calibrating other (much more complex) pressure sensors: cassette recording of jet engine and its burner was used as source of broad-band (all frequencies) noise to get the sensitivity vs. frequency of the complex sensor in one shot. Environment there also, not homogeneous, isotropic etc.

Given that, many things here don't make any sense at all. If they heard the pings for 2 hours in one case and 1 hour in another, etc., why has the triangulation not worked? Maybe it has, so they have narrowed the search down to 18 sq. km. (with a most-probable center spot that is less than the plane size?) If they still want to wait to hear more pings, they must have a lot more doubt.

UlanBatori · Post by **UlanBatori** » 12 Apr 2014 16:32

No further gong-pings

Theo_Fidel · Post by **Theo_Fidel** » 12 Apr 2014 20:00

One more data point on the pingers from the AF477 searchers. Even 1000 feet away was not audible.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/11/tech/inno ... ter-sound/

Paul-Henry Nargeolet has seen the Titanic close up, where it rests 12,500 feet under the sea. And he has taken an underwater expedition to search for wreckage of Air France Flight 447, which plunged into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.

Experience has taught him to doubt.

"I don't trust very much the acoustic," he says.

The retired French naval commander has undertaken dozens of dives in submersibles to the Titanic to secure its artifacts.

After putting them into baskets, his crew affixed locator pingers to them so he could swing back around to pick them up later, he told CNN's Don Lemon.

"Most of the time we never heard them, and we knew where they were," he said. He was only 1,000 - 2,000 feet away from his pingers.

Signals believed to come from MH370's pinger in the Indian Ocean could be about 14,000 feet away from the ships listening for them.

Nargeolet doesn't put much trust in the readings searchers have taken.

"It's really hard to find this kind of pinger," he said.

He won't believe that any part of MH370 has been located until someone sees wreckage with their own eyes.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 12 Apr 2014 20:17

I tend to believe old school bathyscape rats like the french commander...and the crew on board jacques cousteau secrets of the sea calypso ship...hardcore diving crowd.

all this hi tech shi tech UI driven searching doesnt work beyond controlled env and shallow waters.

ibnlive:

Kuala Lumpur: The co-pilot of missing Malaysia Airlines plane made a desperate call from his mobile phone moments before the jet went off the radar with 239 people on board under mysterious circumstances on March 8.
The call from co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid's phone, however, ended abruptly, but not before contact was established with a telecommunications sub-station in Penang state, the New Straits Times reported on Saturday.
The call was made as the jet was flying low near Penang island on Malaysia's west coast, the morning it went missing.
Co-pilot of missing Malaysian plane made mid-air phone call: report
A man, one of the relatives of Chinese passengers onboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, prays near candles before a briefing with Malaysian officials at a hotel in Beijing. (Associated Press)

"The telco's (telecommunications company's) tower established the call that he was trying to make. On why the call was cut off, it was likely because the aircraft was fast moving away from the tower and had not come under the coverage of the next one," the paper said, citing unnamed sources.
The paper said it was unable to ascertain who Fariq was trying to call as sources chose not to divulge details of the investigation. The links that police are trying to establish are also unclear, said the report.
Investigators are poring over this discovery as they try to piece together what had happened moments before the Boeing 777 Flight MH370 went off the radar, some 200 nautical miles northwest of Penang, the paper said.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 12 Apr 2014 20:24

http://www.nst.com.my/nation/general/ca ... e-1.562612

A different set of sources close to the investigations told the NST that checks on Fariq's phone showed that connection to the phone had been "detached" before the plane took off.
"This is usually the result of the phone being switched off. At one point, however, when the airplane was airborne, between waypoint Igari and the spot near Penang (just before it went missing from radar), the line was 'reattached'.
"A 'reattachment' does not necessarily mean that a call was made. It can also be the result of the phone being switched on again," the sources said.

Read more: Call traced to co-pilot's phone - General - New Straits Times http://www.nst.com.my/nation/general/ca ... z2ygcYEWoh

A_Gupta · Post by **A_Gupta** » 12 Apr 2014 20:39

^^^But they want to be able to locate the plane within a few square kilometers if at all possible, rather than going to a precise spot to pick up something. Obviously they would like to pinpoint the location of the plane's blackbox if they could - but that would really be frosting on the cake. So Nargeolet, while being completely right, may be also missing the point.

vasu raya · Post by **vasu raya** » 12 Apr 2014 21:24

Most likely all the passengers were unconscious, else there would be more than one cell phone connecting to that tower while flying over Penang due to all the maneuvers being made - assuming all the passengers have switched off their phones while take off. Even if there were some stray ones, the towers around Kaulalumpur would have registered them and if they weren't switched off the same should be registering around Penang even if the Passengers were rendered unconscious.

UlanBatori · Post by **UlanBatori** » 12 Apr 2014 21:52

So if the co-pilot or anyone else made any cellphone call, that means that
(a) the plane did not suffer a collision
(b) it was not under autopilot etc.

So all this cra* about dodging radar and then just flying off into the wild blue yonder seems utterly nonsensical. If the call was to the co-pilot's home, what great security purpose was achieved by not revealing that fact all these weeks?

At this point I think the passengers' relatives would be justified in asking the arrest of the Malaysian PM and his flunkies. Or, the PRC would be justified in sending a small contingent of, say, 300,000 couriers to convey some advice to the entire Malaysian regime to accompany them to the Gobi Happy Valley Debriefing Center. The need to have the pakistan beaten out of him to reveal all that they know.
And I don't seem to be alone...

The preliminary internal enquiries come as tensions mount between civilian and military authorities over who bears most responsibility for the initial confusion and any mistakes that led to a week-long search in the wrong ocean.