What has been attempted 2014-2024

I summarise what has been attempted scientifically in the past decade. The initial breakthrough was the research using the INMARSAT radio signals and flight simulations. We will call them forward algorithms. The debris found since August 2015 allowed the research on backward algorithms, backtracking on oceanic currents. The satellite images database has been searched but the aircraft itself was not found, due to the fact that most of the flight happened in the darkness of a moonless night. However, floating debris has been identified. Also, some unconventional methods have been used.

Scientific research based on:

• INMARSAT radio signals and flight simulations (UHF) – Forward algorithms
• Recovered debris – Backward algorithms backtracking on oceanic currents
• Search in the satellite image database – Multi-static image processing algorithms
• Unconventional methods:
  • WSPR radio ham signals (HF 10 MHz) – Multi-static radio signal algorithms
  • Underwater acoustic signals – Acoustic detection algorithms of the crash
  • Electromagnetic pulses in the underwater cables – Electromagnetic detection algorithms

Here is the total reference list of the 25 scientific papers published in the past decade on Malaysian 370, which try to calculate the trajectory or the location of the crash of this aircraft. Most of them are peer-reviewed. We used a colour code here for the method: INMARSAT signals in red, ocean drift in green, etc. This reference list was put together with help from ChatGPT 4.

All these results are represented on Google Earth. You see here the Broken Ridge. The INMARSAT flight simulation forward algorithms yielded solutions South of Broken Ridge. In magenta you see the last point the pilot entered manually in his flight simulator, as published in the Accident Investigation Report. This is also South of Broken Ridge, but this was meant to be a farther, unreachable point to be used in the Flight Management Computer to define a direction, not a destination. The ocean drift algorithms however converged North of Broken Ridge, and of course, they moved away the attention from our findings back to the initial search areas. We will discuss entropy and why it degrades accuracy. Interestingly there is one recent paper, [A24] in our list, which is based on ocean drift of alleged debris from satellite observations, reducing the entropy accumulation from 16 months plus down to 6 months minus, and that immediately shifted their results South of Broken Ridge, as you see down here. That’s why we believe that understanding entropy is a key issue.

This is a zoom in the area of our results. Here you see our initial finding [A1]. [A2] is Ashton’s team finding, they used the constant Ground Speed assumption which explains why they indicated a position more to the North. Our main research [A3] indicated the rectangular perimeter here, and [A5] in red represents the results of Davey’s team, published by Springer. In hindsight, these are the most credible research papers, based on various algorithms. They are multidisciplinary approaches, based on UHF radio signals, meteorology, and flight simulations.

Why did the ocean drift algorithms not concur with the INMARSAT/flight simulation algorithms?

In red you see the positions indicated by the forward algorithms, and in dark green the centre of gravity for the results by the backward algorithms. The flaperon found later on the Reunion island is shown here in light green and the oceanic currents in the Indian Ocean make a direct link between both these solutions and the African coast.

Ocean drift is not just about oceanic currents! Surface winds do intervene on any floating object, which is pushed by the vector addition of hydrodynamic and aerodynamic drag forces. Surface wind modelling would require the exact moment when the debris landed, which is unknown.

In 2015, we started our own research using ocean drift using the model above, but when we understood the impact of the accumulated entropy, we abandoned it. The final results would have been as inaccurate as the whole Indian Ocean. To our surprise, some published papers did not use a combined hydro- and aerodynamic model like ours, they did just backtrack on the currents. A floating object such as this flaperon is carried by the oceanic currents by the hydrodynamic drag force of the submersed part, but also by the aerodynamic drag of the part above the water, which is exposed to the surface wind. The drift force is a vector addition of the hydrodynamic drag and the aerodynamic drag. The ocean drift is not only about oceanic currents.

Ocean drift is driven by dispersion and entropy prevents a backtracking algorithm from providing accurate results.

Entropy effects accumulated in the 16 months+ time interval degrade the accuracy of the results beyond relevance.

The backtracking algorithms could provide accurate results only if the time interval is small. Accumulated entropy prevents accurate backtracking if the time interval is too large. This is obvious in this simple aquarium experiment: an aquarium is split in two by a wall. Ink is poured in one half. When the wall is removed, the dispersion starts to spread, but for a while, an observer can determine where the ink was poured. After a while, the place is less obvious, but at least the ink-contaminated half initially remains traceable. There is a time limit, however, beyond which an observer cannot say which half was initially contaminated. Backtracking could find any of the halves with an equal probability.

To those who have great expectations from the ocean drift algorithms, I recommend this book. Moby-Duck is the true story of a shipping container full of plastic bath-tub toys which was lost during a storm in the Northern Pacific (Aleutian Islands). After many months, the ducks were discovered in the most remote and unexpected places in the Pacific but also in the Atlantic. This involuntary experiment is instrumental in understanding ocean drift as an entropic phenomenon.

Ocean drift backtracking to the initial location is based on modelling dispersion, which is affected by entropy. You cannot replicate the exact route of any given object. The route is subject to many so-called bifurcations.

If you release a group of separate objects at sea, they will land at different locations, as distant as thousands of miles away from each other. If you release objects far from each other, they might gather in a common place like the Great Pacific garbage patch.

The ocean drift papers either ignore the entropy and indicate a location or an area of the crash or consider it and end up with inconclusive results.

If the time interval between the release of a floating aircraft part at sea and the moment it is recovered is too large (16 months and above), the entropy causes excessive uncertainty in the backtracking results. That is why the INMARSAT-based algorithms and the ocean drift algorithms cannot compare in terms of accuracy or certainty. The only ocean drift algorithms that could provide a clue are those that track debris as observed from satellite images, which reduce the time interval from 16 plus months to 6 minus.

The INMARSAT algorithms themselves have their small share of entropy which intervenes between the 7th ping and the moment of crash, but the time interval of this descent is below half an hour. This atmospheric entropy causes the airplane with neutral controls to get random control inputs, which are unpredictable to our algorithms, so we need to avoid simplistic or speculative assumptions about the place of the crash with respect to the place of the 7th ping. The Independent Group’s claim that somebody flew the airplane manually during this final descent is an exception from the neutral controls assumption, but the active manual controls space of solutions can be included in the random control space of solutions.

Atmospheric Entropy also intervenes in the powerless glide of an airplane with neutral controls.

Understanding Entropy

In our efforts to find solutions to the MH370 mystery we found ourselves in a middle of an international crowd of experts, scientific researchers, pilots, sleuths, and journalists with the same objectives. This competition revealed our weak points (low self confidence, bad access to first hand resources, etc.), but also some aspects which seemed easy for us to understand and surprisingly hard for many others. The most striking example is the understanding of entropy. The entropy means that a system where randomness is characteristic may have many states out of which none is certain, there are many states, each with its own probability. With the passage of time, it is less and less conclusive to understand previous states from the current state, and there is a time limit after which the original information about a particular state of the system is completely lost. To illustrate this, we did the simple aquarium experiment where the dispersion of particles is that entropic phenomenon is taken as a proxy of the ocean dispersion. After a while from the beginning of the dispersion, an observer cannot determine anymore what was the initial state of the system.

We take an aquarium full with water, with a median wall plate splitting the aquarium into two halves. We pour ink in one half to colour the water, then we withdraw the wall plate. The dispersion phenomenon begins, but we are still able to determine which half was coloured after a couple of minutes. There is a time limit to this, though. After this time limit, an observer cannot backtrack visually the drift of the particles to a certain half. Both halves become equally probable to have been coloured at the beginning.

Why Entropy Matters in the Ocean Drift Modelling

When the first debris landed on African beaches after one year and 4 months from the crash, all the people obsessed with MH370 started to analyse if backtracking of these debris can reveal the location where the flight ended and the aicraft disintegrated. We started to do our own analysis based on the ocean currents and surface winds, but we quit this track when we realised that it is not getting us anywhere. In the 16+ months between the crash and the finding of the debris, the inherent entropy associated with the ocean drift phenomenon would make the results irrelevant. The computer model can perform this algorithm and backtrack the debris to the source, but the uncertainty of the result is unacceptable and if we try to calculate for example a 95% probability area of the source, we end up with a massive area where the aircraft could have crashed. So we dropped our research on this path. Now we see that many such papers have been published (see Table 1 and Figure 1). One of them [A12] seems to ignore the entropy altogether. Others take entropy just as to relativise their results (for example [A15]), and others consider the entropy properly, but this deprives the papers of conclusive numerical results, or leads to overextended areas (for example [A17], between parallels S17° and S33°). An interesting paper in this respect is [A25], which provides numerical results covering a large rectangular area, but that is based not on the debris landing positions, it is based on debris spotted much earlier, on satellite images. That makes this algorithm more likely to get relevant results, because the entropy applies to shorter time interval. The aquarium experiment demonstrates that time is a major constraint of drawing numerical conclusions with a decent degree of certainty in an entropic phenomenon.

How Is Entropy Relevant to the Problem of the Powerless Glide

Another instance where entropy is not fully understood is the powerless glide of a Boeing 777 without anyone at the controls. Normally, there is no entropy involved in navigation, guidance, and control of an aircraft, the system is determinist. However, when the powerless glide starts and if no one is at the controls (not even the auto-pilot or basic yaw dampers), the flight dynamics of the aircraft starts to depend on small or large random perturbations, due to the atmospheric turbulence. Even if the air is calm, when descending new layers of the atmosphere are encountered, and they have various wind speeds, causing pitch and bank angles movements, and possibly not-dampened oscillations. Over the duration of the descent, this random inputs in the system induce entropy to the system.

This explains why so many excellent experts in flight dynamics and pilots with tens of thousands of hours of flight did not really understand the phenomenon. Nobody has flying hours experience in powerless glide of an uncontrolled Boeing 777. Moreover, the pilot’s bias is in favour of control scenarios explains why so many pilots joined the Independent Group controlled ditch theory. In the controlled airplane flight dynamics, entropy does not intervene. In the uncontrolled flight of 15 to 30 minutes, the entropy makes the difference. We could say that entropic flight and determinist flight are two different physical phenomena. The whole MH370 flight is determinist, with the exception of the last part, the powerless glide, which is an entropic flight. If you have 20,000 flight hours in determinist flight, it would very difficult to accept or to really understand the entropic flight. We see no other explanation why so many pilots and experts agree with the idea that a powerless B777 falls straight down in a vertical dive at a high angle. One example is the China Eastern Airlines CES 5735 crash on 21 March 2022 which was captured on a camera falling straight down, but that was deliberately controlled into that attitude. As a consequence of accelerating above Mach 1, the aircraft broke apart in flight. This is easy to exclude in the case of MH370 because all the recovered debris are consistent with an impact fracture and none found so far indicates in flight break up, so the attitude of the aircraft when impacting the water was not straight down. In this I agree with the IG and with all experts who favour a 7°-10° pitch down attitude at impact, but I see it as a manifestation of the randomness of the entropy of an uncontrolled airplane, whereas the IG believes that someone was at the controls ditching the airplane. The entropic flight theory includes scenarios where the glide distance would be longer and the aircraft would descend at a lower path angle. Our theory is the entropic flight with no one at the controls, but the controlled ditch scenario is included in the space of solutions.

The ATSB vs. IG Dispute

In [C2] the search operations are reported as marked by a fundamental dispute between ATSB and IG. ATSB considers that (i) no one controlled the aircraft during the powerless descent and (ii) consequently the airplane fell in a vertical spiral dive, more or less straight down. IG considers that (i) the airplane was manually flown during the powerless descent and (ii) consequently the gliding distance was much longer, including some flaps deployment, but also making the location of ditching less predictable by a number of turns the pilot commanded.

We agree with ATSB (i) and disagree with all other statements. As a matter of fact our research is agnostic to the problem of manual control, so even if someone would have controlled the aircraft, the ditching location would fall inside our calculated perimeter. Both ATSB and IG have logic fractures between their (i)s and (ii)s. The misjudgment is caused by ignoring the entropy of the flight by both. The deduction of the ATSB that a close spiral dive is the only scenario of how such a flight ends is wrong, there are more probable states, and the close spiral dive is not even the most probable. The deduction of the IG that if the impact was not at a high angle (like that which occurs in a close spiral dive) it means that someone must have been at the controls reflects the same mistake from the opposite angle. A deduction requires a determinist flow of states, but when the entropy is involved, such deductions lose grounds. A final state is a consequence of many intermediary states, each with a certain probability.

What Has Been Attempted Lately (since 2020)

Between 2017 and 2020, it seemed that nothing new could restart the search. By 2024, a series of new ideas hit the media: (1) the weak signals theory of Richard Godfrey promoted on www.mh370search.com [B14], based on forgotten evidence: the radio ham network HF radio signals in the region of the aircraft which might have been reflected by the aircraft and consequently deviated; (2) Vincent Lyne who came with the idea that the airplane did not fly until it ran out of fuel but was manually flown to the East, closer to the Australian Coast; (3) the researchers of the University of Cardiff, who announced a breakthrough in using the acoustic signals captured by underwater hydrophones at the time; and (4) Jeff Wise who announced a new search project in a recent video on News Nation [C10] that capitalises on the barnacles accumulated on the flaperon found in the Réunion during the 14 months of ocean drift.

I was surprised that these new ideas, although highly expected by the public, have no scientific merit whatsoever. Why is not anyone objecting to them?

Who is Jeff Wise? He is a journalist who was a founding member of the Independent Group in 2014 and was extensively featured in the Netflix MH370 Docuseries [C9]. There, he declared that he teamed with some aviation experts, but when the experts in unanimity rejected his theory as impossible, he had no choice but to exclude the experts from the group. There is some involuntary humour in the Netflix production, which relies 90% on extravagant journalist theories and just 10% on facts and aviation experts theories. To its credit, the movie opens all the imaginable scenarios, including the possible ones, not just the tabloid oddities. 

In the Jeff Wise’s interview on 4 October 2024 [C10]: “… the data that these scientists retrieved from the INMARSAT satellite system very clearly suggested that it had gone in Southern Indian Ocean, what’s more, it suggested a specific place in the ocean, but when they searched that place, it wasn’t there. And so this raises questions. Basically, we have to throw open all of our assumptions and ask them all of the other possible things that could have happened with this plane”.

This is not true. “That place” is a considerable area because the place that INMARSAT signals algorithms can calculate is not the place of the crash. It is the place the airplane recovered from the power blackout due to the fuel starvation of both engines, but from that point, it could have glided quite a long distance (between 60 and 120 NM), and we have no clue in which direction. It may spiralled down in a steep turn or extend the gliding path by rebalancing itself due to random movements of the atmosphere or the change of wind which occurs during descent. For instance, 30% of the area resulting from our [A3] paper has never been searched. Also, various scientists and experts based their calculations on different assumptions and “that place” is not even unique.

After Jeff Wise presents his new hopes from the pattern of barnacles grown on the flaperon, he explains his ideas on what might have happened: “I think there are these two distinct possibilities: one is that, as the officials assumed, the pilot committed mass murder-suicide, for reasons we don’t understand. He seems to have been a calm, stable person, but I guess human beings are capable of anything. That is possibility one. Possibility two is that, while it seems like a hijack, this was the work of very sophisticated hijackers who got into the unlocked electronics bay, which is accessible to anybody from the cabin and tampered with the black box that connected with the satellite and that created the signals that looked like the plane went in the Southern Indian Ocean, when in fact it went in another direction.”

This idea failed to seduce me. Why would anyone use sophisticated spoofing techniques of a communication signal, which was not even used for navigation, instead of just cutting it off? The Netflix Docuseries (2023) MH370: The Plane That Disappeared [C9] places a similar hypothesis that INMARSAT themselves tampered with the radio signals to supply a false, misleading clue. Even fiction should be more credible. Without the INMARSAT signals (true or fake), the search area would have been a staggering 67 million square km, an area larger than Europe, Asia, and North America put together. Why would someone engage in sophisticated electronic war techniques instead of simply cutting off the SATCOM transceiver circuit breaker and avoiding any signal being sent out? As a matter of fact, the transceiver was cut off for a while, but it was reconnected at the time of the first ping. We know that because that first ping was a special type, a logon ping, a request on power up. If this accidental reconnection had not been made, there would have been no clue where did this plane flew for 6 more hours. Moreover, we would not have had any clue that it flew for 6 more hours. What could be more misleading than that keeping the search teams inside a circle in the Andaman Sea?

I need to make this point: it is extremely hard to tamper with this signal in a consistent way. It should be consistent with itself, correlating the BFOs and BTOs tampering, but also consistent with the flight dynamics of a Boeing 777 and the wind pattern at the moment of flight. It should be tampered with to fool a calculation algorithm which you do not know yet. We invented our algorithm in 2014, and we published it in August 2014 [A1]. Even if the INMARSAT team who published their algorithm in October 2014 [A2] would be part of the conspiracy, we did an independent search using our own method. No way could someone make these fake signals consistent with two different methods, out of which one was not yet invented at the time. So, we can certify that the INMARSAT team did not tamper with the signals they published in March 2014.

Faking the BFOs from the ground to create the impression of flying at a certain speed is possible, but it is challenging to fake the BTOs. You need to be closer to the satellite than the position you want to spoof because you can artificially increase the delay of a signal, but you cannot decrease it unless you can do time travel. To fake the BFO from the aircraft in flight in another direction, as Mr. Wise suggests, is downright impossible. The distinct possibility number two is, in fact, impossible.

I also have a problem with the distinct possibility number one, as mentioned by Mr. Wise in the video. He indicates that the hijacker committed mass murder and suicide. In our opinion, the scenario that checks the most details of this case is consistent with a parachute jump of the hijacker in the Malacca Strait, with the rest of the flight being carried automatically. We noticed it, but since our calculations did not depend on one scenario or another (hijacker on board waiting for 6 hours to die, a hijacker on board flying the aircraft, hijacker already dead, or hijacker evacuated from the airplane), we were careful not to launch speculation which would compromise our scientific, fact-based work. We presented this idea in public for the first time as late as 2018 in a EUROCONTROL seminar at the University of Glasgow [B15]. Since then, not only that we found no detail to contradict this scenario, but we also learned from Higgin’s book [C2] The Hunt for MH370 that this was a scenario that circulated. Also, we found that Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah had parachute jump training and even an alibi to carry his parachute on board. He had done it before, he used to train in China between flights. The Boeing 777 is a special type of aircraft with a door under the cockpit, which can be opened from the inside. Jumping through this door presents no risks, as opposed to the normal doors. In my opinion, the descent of the airplane as caught on the military radar under 10,000 ft in the Malacca Strait, was done on purpose to enable normal breathing and opening of this door. After the jump, the airplane climbed back, exited the radar coverage area, then turned and continued to fly in VNAV/LNAV modes based on the flight plan input in the FMS. Fragments of this flight plan were recovered from his home flight simulator, and they include 6 waypoints consistent with the trajectories that we found.

I also have doubts about the other theories mentioned above. The researchers of the University of Cardiff studied the sounds captured by hydrophones (underwater microphones placed in Australia) and announced they will find new clues in June 2024: https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/mh370-breakthrough-signal-detected-malaysian-airlines-b2565711.html [B16].

Right from the start, they assumed that the aircraft impacted the water with 200 m/s, and the kinetic energy that was absorbed by the crash was proportional to this speed squared. In reality, the fragmentation of the debris and the fracture mechanics tell another story. On a glide slope of 7° to 11°, the impact speed was proportional to the tangent of that angle. Moreover, the horizontal speed of a powerless airplane is barely above the stall speed, which is not more than 80 m/s. Now 80 x tan(11°) worst case is below 16 m/s. So, the University of Cardiff experts expect a sound proportional to the kinetic energy of around 250,000 kg x 200^2 / 2 = 5000 MJ. I believe that more realistically we should expect a sound proportional to 250,000 kg x 16^2 / 2 = 32 MJ. If someone wants to understand what fragmentation results from 5000 MJ, please check the fragmentation of GWI 2592 in the pictures on the Internet. I know that this was rock, not water, but at 200 m/s, the water behaves like concrete.

There are two sounds captured from Cape Leeuwin, none of which having the correct timing for the 7th Arc. However, this needs to be further investigated. To my amazement, many people take this 7th Arc in a very approximate way, as a true circle at the intersection of two spheres. Our paper calculates the 7th arc as the intersection of the sphere with the centre in the actual position of the satellite (not the nominal position, the satellite wobbles at a large amplitude) with the rotation ellipsoid WGS84 augmented with the altitude of the flight. So by 7th Arc we understand a set of such Arcs, one for each altitude of the flight, and accurately calculated.

Probably the most extreme story in this new ideas gallery is the weak signals theory of Mr Godfrey and some other experts. Unless they make their weak signals data public, no independent researcher can check it. However, even if we do not calculate anything, it is enough to look at the trajectory published on Mr Godfrey’s site mentioned above to realise that no airplane flies like that. I would challenge Mr Godfrey to use a Boeing 777 simulator and try to replicate his trajectory by flying it, either manually or automatically. The only way to fly like that is to input a couple of hundreds of waypoints in the FMS, entered as latitude and longitude. In order to do that in the cockpit, you need a long time. The hijacker needed to be quick in his actions, including this programming. No way could he spend so much time on it.

Also, I do not appreciate scientific results which are updated to cope with criticism. This multiple-turns trajectory appeared after the initial finding of the WSP team was found to contradict the strong INMARSAT signals. This initial version of the results was removed and replaced with the new version in 2023. We stand by our results published in 2014-2015 and would not consider updating them because that would destroy any confidence in the method.

Mr Lyne, on the other hand, is a declared fan of Larry Vance, a Canadian accident investigation expert who saw the flaperon recovered in Réunion and published a book with the title MH370: Mystery Solved [C1]. The book sold very well, while the mystery remained in place like a rock. I recommend you read both the book and the scientific paper of Mr Lyne (which he claims to have been accepted by the Journal of Navigation, but I can only find a self-published paper instead) to make your own opinion. The paper with essential modifications and with a modified title was published in December 2024 [A28].

The public is thirsty for new explanations and new ideas. Actually, the public is entitled to a definitive explanation. But if these new theories remain unchallenged, if the true scientists keep quiet and vacate the floor, I do not hold my breath until the mystery is truly solved.

Our papers were published between March 2014 and July 2015 [B13], [A1], and [A3], and our findings were independently confirmed twice, in 2016 and 2017, respectively [A5], [B3]. Our work relied on the INMARSAT signals on the 7 pings. Our latest research will be published soon after the presentation in the 14th International EASN Conference in Thessaloniki, Greece [A27].

References

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