[Peetwo]

More updates from 'that man' & the Oz on MH370:

MH370 search vehicle towfish crashes into volcano

• Ean Higgins
  
• AAP
  
• January 25, 2016 12:17PM
  

Fugro Discovery is returning to Fremantle where a replacement cable will be installed on the vessel.

The controversial search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has suffered a further setback, with one of the search vessels crashing an underwater “towfish” sonar device into an underwater “mud volcano” and losing it.

The Joint Agency Coordination Centre in Canberra today released a statement saying:
“Yesterday, while conducting search activities in the southern Indian Ocean, Fugro Discovery lost the sonar vehicle deep tow (towfish) being used to search the ocean floor.

“The towfish collided with a mud volcano which rises 2,200 metres from the sea floor resulting in the vehicle’s tow cable breaking. The towfish and 4,500 metres of cable became separated from the vessel and are now resting on the sea floor.

• More: MH370 theory does not stand up
  
• More: The case for pilot hijack
  
  

“There were no injuries to crew and it is believed it will be possible to recover the towfish at a later date.”

Fugro Discovery has commenced its return to Fremantle where a replacement cable will be installed on the vessel.

During the journey, JACC said, the spare towfish on board Fugro Discovery will be readied for future search activities.

The vessel is expected in Fremantle around 30 January.

The search for MH370, which disappeared in March 2014 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, is being carried out by the Dutch Fugro survey group, using three vessels.

The process first involved mapping the ocean floor, precisely to avoid the possibility of towing the sonar devices into uncharted underwater features.

The search has blown out in cost, and has not been helped by the failure of Malaysia to send a promised survey vessel.

A Chinese vessel which Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss early last month said would join the search this summer has also thus far failed to show up.

Critics, including commercial airline captains, have criticised the search strategy because it assumes the last part of the flight fitted a “type” of scenario of the pilots being unconscious due to lack of oxygen through decompression, or otherwise “unresponsive.”
Most pilots and other aviation experts believe the track of the flight back over Malaysia, and the cut in communications and turning off of the radar transponder, points to the captain hijacking his own aircraft.

The critics argue that initially, at least, the search was consequently in the wrong area.
A piece of suspected plane wreckage found off the east coast of southern Thailand is unlikely to belong to the missing aircraft, experts said yesterday.

This article garnered some more interesting commentary from Mick?? & Co...

Bruce

This whole saga is starting to smell very fishy (excuse the pun!). Why has the ATSB ruled out pilot hijack? Why are they not listening to the likes of Byron Bailey? Why are the Malaysians putting is such a pitiful effort?

What do the Malaysians fear will be revealed between the pilot and the leader of the opposition? Do Malysia actually want the plane to be found? What are the financial implications of not finding the plane by the time the Statute of Limitations (2 years) run out? And why the hell are we funding the search? It's not our plane and not in our territorial waters!!

Mick

@Bruce Bruce, there's no shortage of misinformation being peddled about the search for MH370, most of it to criticise the ATSB. 

Despite assertions from some quarters (Captain Bailey, for example) the ATSB has not ruled out pilot hijack.   They have not speculated on what caused MH370 to disappear because that's not their job.   There job is to find the wreckage and then hand over to the Malaysian authorities whose job it is to determine the cause. 

There are possibly three reasons for the ATSB not listening to Captain Bailey:

1. He has repeatedly and persistently misrepresented the ATSB, effectively creating a straw man of sorts that he then criticises and ridicules, repeatedly and persistently;
2. His theory does not account for all the known facts (it cannot account for cause of the the non-routine 7th and last satellite handshake);
3.  For an expert, his own work contains many alarming errors (I can expand on these if required). 

The Malaysians are not responsible for finding the aircraft, we are - it falls in our search and rescue zone under The International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue (1979).  Once the wreckage is found, the Malaysians have to fund both the recovery and the investigation.   That's how responsibilities are divvied up under International Law - it's a common sense approach based on mutual cooperation. 

Brian

@Mick Captain Bailey, from what I've read, has put forward an evidence-based assertion as to the causes of MH370's disappearance. He does so from a considerable position of expertise and, according to him, is a supported view by other pilots. If it does not account for all known facts, that doesn't mean the hypoxia theory becomes valid by default. If you have added insight (love to know your sources/position of expertise here) you should put those forward. But so far, his account is making significantly more sense than that being proposed by the ATSB.

The point that Captain Bailey has been making is that the possibility of locating MH370 depends on the assumptions made as to the causes of its disappearance. The ATSB may not have ruled out a pilot hijack, but that is a meaningless assertion if the resource available for the search are spent entirely on searching an area determined by the hypoxia theory.

And, if it's true that the ATSB has chosen not to listen Capt. Bailey because he "...criticises and ridicules, repeatedly and persistently" their organisation, that is a shocking example fragile public service egos reacting to being bruised over evidence-based decision making.

Mick

@Brian  The ATSB’s "hypoxia" theory as you put it, simply contends that the airplane was not under the command of a conscious pilot for the final portion of its flight (ie  that the airplane entered the water in an uncontrolled fashion soon after fuel exhaustion).   Captain Bailey can have his pilot hijack theory (which I hasten to point out includes passenger and crew (less pilot) incapacitation due to hypoxia), the ATSB hasn't postulated on those aspects of the flight, they simply contend that whatever brought MH370 to the Southern Indian Ocean, there was no conscious pilot at the controls at the end of the ride.  

Captain Bailey looks to pick a fight when there is none, and I'd suggest that his repeated and persistent criticism of the ATSB is a more likely an example of a fragile professional pilot's ego being bruised.


Brendan

@Mick @Bruce  I was a bit in the dark about this, until reading, on here and ATSB that it looks like the aircraft's last "handshake" was probably triggered by fuel exhaustion, the exact cause of the handshake being the SatCom rebooting after its power had been interrupted by the second engine stopping,  and then restored by the APU starting. The batteries would not have kept the SatCom powered up, hence the reboot

Presumably the aircraft was at cruising altitude when the fuel ran out, and under autopilot, and so the aircraft would have adjusted for the loss of the first engine and maintained its path, the ability to maintain altitude on a single engine being irrelevant as the second engine failed shortly thereafter.

I guess the autopilot would have remained engaged after the first engine failed but then after the loss of the second one it gets interesting.

1. If there was pilot in the cockpit (which seems unlikely) would 13 minutes of APU fuel (the dregs in the tank) give him time to glide for a landing (like on the Hudson).

2.  If there is no pilot, i.e. he has checked out hours earlier, does the autopilot remain engaged and maintain some degree of stability for the aircraft, at least for 13 minutes and maybe land it gently on the water, or does it just give up, in which case does the aircraft's natural stability allow a graceful landing or does it just crash?

Anyway if the fuel ran out at the time of the last handshake, the aircraft can't be far from there, so why hasn't it been found? It appears that the data from Inmarsat is not really designed to fix position (compared to GPS which is very accurate), hence the 100,000+ square km search zone.


Mick

@Brendan  After the second engine shut down there would have been at total loss of power from the engine powered generators which would caused the following:

• the autopilot and auto-throttle would disconnect
• a small windmill-like generator called the RAM air turbine (RAT) would deploy from the fuselage;
• the APU would attempt to auto-start.

The combination of the RAT and batteries would have provided emergency power to critical systems and hydraulics (primary flight controls - ailerons, rudder and elevators - would be powered, secondary flight controls - spoilers, flaps, flaperons - would not). 
The APU auto-start would have taken about a minute to complete, once fired up the APU effectively provides full electrical power. 

However, once the auto-pilot and auto-throttle disconnect, they need to be manually re-engaged; the return of full electrical power would not have re-engaged either automatically. 

14 minutes (one minute of RAT/batteries plus 13 minutes of APU) would be barely enough time to get the airplane in a powerless glide from cruising altitude onto the water, the pilot would have had to expedite part of the descent.   Further, the pilot would have to contend with a probable APU flame-out right at the critical moment of ditching.
That all begs the question, if there was a conscious pilot at the controls why would you let the airplane run out of fuel before attempting a ditching. 

Captain Bailey asks us to believe that Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, having executed his plan of disappearing his aircraft perfectly thus far and with only the controlled ditching (in order to minimise debris) left as the final act in his virtuoso performance, let's his airplane run out of fuel, thus forcing him to attempt a dead-stick (no engines) ditching in the open ocean with just the APU running for full hydraulic control (remember he needs full hydraulics to lower the flaperon). 

It simply doesn't make sense - why make the hardest part of the disappearing act even harder?

To address your last point, no, the INMARSAT handshakes are not designed to fix an airplane's position.   A lot of very clever analysis (of the sort derided by Captain Bailey as "used for stock market analysis")  has gone into calculating the airplane's location from the limited data. 

Will be fascinating to see (presumably tomorrow) how BB refutes the very factual commentary from Mick & Brendan in his next MH370 instalment..

Also today in the Oz:

Fishing net snags MH370 search ship

• Mitchell Bingemann
  
• The Australian
  
• January 28, 2016 12:00AM
  

Reporter
Sydney


The hunt for Malaysia Airlines MH370 has hit another snag, ­literally, after a vessel’s underwater communications equipment was caught on a fishing net.

The Havila Harmony — one of three vessels of the Dutch Fugro survey group conducting the underwater search for the Boeing 777 — sustained damage to its HiPaP pole, which is lowered through the hull and carries an acoustic transceiver used to control the autonomous search vehicles.

“Divers confirmed the pole was bent and fouled with fishing net. The vessel was subsequently dry-docked at the BAE Systems ship lift facility to allow the pole to be replaced,” said a statement from the Joint Agency Co-ordin­ation Centre overseeing the international search for MH370.

The vessel is expected to ­be back in the search area early next week after ­repairs in Fremantle.

Earlier this week, the $1 million “towfish”, while being towed underwater by the Fugro Discovery, sank after it struck a mud volcano rising about 2200m above the sea floor in the southern Indian Ocean. The Fugro Equator continues the search.

Australia, Malaysia and China have committed to searching 120,000sq km for the missing aircraft. More than 85,000sq km of the sea floor have been searched so far. MH370 disappeared in March 2014 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board

It is anticipated that the search of the agreed area will be completed around the middle of the year, but should no credible new information that leads to the identification of a specific ­location of the aircraft be ­uncovered, the governments have agreed to not expand the search area.

The search has blown out in cost, and has not been helped by the failure of Malaysia to send a promised survey vessel

MTF..P2