[Peetwo]

Reference Wikipedia - A phugoid or fugoid /ˈfjuːɡɔɪd/ is an aircraft motion where the vehicle pitches up and climbs, and then pitches down and descends, accompanied by speeding up and slowing down as it goes "uphill" and "downhill." This is one of the basic flight dynamics modes of an aircraft (others include short period, dutch roll, and spiral divergence), and a classic example of a negative feedback system.

MH370 & Hoody's floating, diving leaf theory? -   

Totally agree "V" too many variables, unknowns & educated guesses. Couple that with the latest unverified ROD calculations made from previously stated 'unreliable' ping data and dramatic throw away lines like...

"..MH370 could have been plunging at almost 400km/h just before it smashed into the sea with 239 passengers and crew.."

...makes you wonder what on earth Hoody & Foley are playing at? Why on earth would the ATSB be drawn into such an obvious pissing match?
A rehash:

MH370 & the "he said, she said", spin & deception wars -

As can be seen there is no reference, from DSTG at least, to any of the BFO data (after 00:19) being calculated as stated in the airlineratings.com article; or indeed the 60 Minutes Peter Foley quote (Part I 08:50).

Within the DSTG book there is several references to the 00:19 BFO data being "unreliable". However apparently the ATSB, unlike the DSTG, are not concerned about this potentially "unreliable" data when analysing...

"...frequency differences that indicated the aircraft was descending between 1800m per minute and 3000m per minute ...and at up to 6700m per minute eight seconds later..."  

This raises a number of questions on the veracity of the statements made by CC Hood & Peter Foley.

Q/ After all this time what leads the ATSB to now believe the integrity of the 00:19 BFO as being secure enough to trust to calculate end of flight rates of descent between 1800 to 6700 metres per minute?

Q/ Where did the airspeed reference (i.e. 400 km/hour) come from?   

Q/ Finally how come we are only finding out about this 'analysis' now? 


So Hoody et.al in the words of former HoR MP and now Senator elect Pauline Hanson..."Please explain??" 

Putting my questions aside (above) the following is a Christine Negroni article that refutes -  i.e. the 'pilot didn't do it' camp - the aspersions & hearsay evidence that the 60 Minutes program say proves the 'pilot did it' :

Australia MH370 Pilot Suicide Theory Flies in the Face of Facts
July 31, 2016 / 7 Comments
9M-MRO on approach to LAX photo courtesy Jay Davis


“We’ve got a bit of hard data that says the aircraft was in a rapid rate of descent,” Peter Foley, a sea and marine engineer responsible for overseeing the ATSB’s search said.

Forgetting the issue of the RAT not powering the flap controls, this would put another damper on the pilot-controlled ditching theory because the flaperon can’t be deployed above 20 thousand feet or at speeds higher than 265 knots.

Foley told 60 Minutes, “We’ve got a rate of descent that’s between 12 to 20 thousand feet a minute.”

For those of you who need a little assistance with descent rate numbers, it’s like “going straight down,” another retired 777 pilot explained.

“Bottom line I don’t think you can recover from a 12 to 20 thousand foot rate of decent,” Bowers, a former military fighter pilot told me, if the suicide theory required the pilots to pull out of that kind of a dive, and then make a controlled ditching on the sea, it’s probably not possible he said. “I don’t think you can get an airplane stabilized without exceeding the structural integrity of the airplane.”

How the Australians have new data on the speed of the descent, is a mystery to me. There’s no radar, nor do I believe is this information available from the satellite.
It is possible that the rate of descent was extrapolated by an entity involved in the investigation. Boeing perhaps? Or maybe the French BEA, which has posession of the part. The engineers would only need to work backwards. How fast would the airplane have to be plummeting to cause the kind of damage seen on the flaperon? That’s my guess. Anyway, I’ve asked the ATSB for clarification.

Wreckage in the lab in Toulouse, France

But assuming the ATSB’s Foley wasn’t feeding nonsense to Australia’s “leading current affairs program”, the Boeing 777 pilots I talk to say an entirely different scenario can explain the speed and maybe even the damage on the flaperon.

After flying at cruise altitude seven and a half hours through the night, Malaysia 370 ran out of fuel. When the engines lost power, the RAT deployed. The plane may have wallowed a bit, one pilot told me, but but let’s get real, it could not fly forever. And this could explain the high speed descent.

With no discredit to the retired Canadian investigator Larry Vance, who I do not know but whom the reporter calls “one of the world’s best,” his guided-pilot theory is complex, unrealistic, in some aspects impossible.

What’s staring everyone in the face is a much more straightforward scenario involving no convoluted plots, or inexplicable mind games coming out of left field from a formerly well-regarded captain.

I don’t know for sure what happened to MH370, though you can read my theory in my soon-to-be-published book, The Crash Detectives. But it is equally perplexing how some scenarios ignore inconsistencies and disregard basic aviation principals to take viewers on a flight to the absurd.

Hmm...RAT deploy? What about the auto-light off of the APU, which from my understanding would occur first? Anyway blind Freddy can see the problem here. When so called experts from either camp (PDI v PDNDI) start asserting 'facts' to an evidentiary trail that is made up of little more than hearsay evidence and supposition, with very little in the way of actual bona fide facts, well let's just say you end up with a perfect smokescreen of distraction...   

OK now back to my questions...

+ Q/ I may have missed this, but why wasn't Rolls Royce part of the SSWG?

Bizarrely the 'he said, she said' wars continue unabated in the Oz today:

MH370 in catastrophic death dive, says analysis


Search director Peter Foley and Australian Transport Safety Bureau chief commissioner Greg Hood. Picture: Kym Smith

• Brendan Nicholson
  
• The Australian
  
• 12:00AM August 9, 2016
  

Defence Editor
Canberra

[img=0x0]http://pixel.tcog.cp1.news.com.au/track/component/author/9e8d7209e1c2ac7ea9fc05a8a39849e0/?esi=true&t_product=the-australian&t_template=s3/austemp-article_common/vertical/author/widget&td_bio=false[/img]
Exhaustive analysis by Defence scientists of automated signals ­received from Flight MH370 in its final moments has revealed that the Malaysia Airlines jet fell very fast — up to 20,000 feet a minute — as it crashed into the Indian Ocean off Western Australia.
The scientists have found that happened at 8.19am (WA time) on March 9, 2014, after the aircraft ran out of fuel and the two giant engines flamed out, the left engine first and then the right about 15 minutes later.

The Australian has been told in a series of briefings that simulations by Boeing, the aircraft’s manufacturer, indicate that once engine power was lost, MH370 would have slowed and lost lift. Its nose would have dropped and it would have descended in what the scientists call a fugoid motion in a series of downward swoops.

As it gathered speed, it would have gained lift and climbed again. As that speed fell off, its nose would have dropped rapidly once more, the aircraft falling into ­another steep dive.

That process is likely to have been repeated until it hit the water, probably with one wing down.

The impact would have been catastrophic. That fits with new analysis of sets of brief signals sent automatically between the aircraft and a satellite.

While the aircraft has not been found, the discovery of some ­pieces of its interior indicate it broke up on impact. Critics of the search strategy have suggested that the pilot could have landed MH370 ­intact on the ocean well outside the current search area. But Australian Transport Safety Bureau chief commissioner Greg Hood said analysis of the signals most closely matched a scenario in which there was no pilot at the controls at the end of the flight.

Mr Hood said the new data ­extracted from the signals reinforced the view of those leading the search for MH370 and its 239 passengers and crew that it was likely to have crashed in the 120,000sq km area now being searched.

He said extensive testing by Boeing indicated that after running out of fuel the aircraft would have dropped from 35,000 feet at a rate of between 12,000 feet a minute and 20,000 feet a minute. That rapid descent was confirmed by the signals data.

An aircraft making a normal landing would descend at 2000 feet a minute.

ATSB specialists in Canberra are examining a wing flap likely to have been torn from MH370 by the impact which drifted for over a year and eventually washed up on the coast of Tanzania.

The flap would have been part of the right wing next to the flap­eron which washed up on Reunion Island.

GRAPHIC: Boeing’s crash theory

A 2014 FBI report revealed that MH370 pilot Zaharhie Ahmad Shah had previously plotted a course down into the southern Indian Ocean on a simulator in his home computer, but that ­report does not deal with what happened to MH370 in its final hours.

The Australians leading the search do not doubt that the pilot may well have been responsible for the jet’s disappearance but they say critics of the search strategy are wrong to assume that means they are looking in the wrong place.

There are two distinct questions, they say: who was responsible for the disappearance, and where is the aircraft now?

MH370 search program director Peter Foley told The Australian that with almost no tangible ­evidence, the likely crash area was not defined by investigations of what the pilot might have done but by months of unprecedented examination of signals transmitted by automatic systems on the jet as it made its lonely flight southward and calculations of when it would have run out of fuel.

Crucial to that research was a Defence Science and Technology Group team headed by Neil Gordon, Mr Foley said.

Just after midnight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur as normal and headed for Beijing. The last heard from the crew was a standard radio message bidding KL “goodnight”.

Malaysian military radar picked up the jet making two turns which took it back over the Malaysian Peninsula.

As more evidence emerged it became clear that MH370 made at least one more turn at the northwest tip of Sumatra towards the southern Indian Ocean.

Those three turns would have to have been made by a pilot.

As the plane flew south, equipment fitted to it automatically sent routine signals as a series of “handshakes” with a satellite linked to a ground station in Perth.

That maintenance system was separate from systems controlled by the crew and was designed to provide data, via satellite, about the state of parts such as the ­engines.

Seven such connections were completed, which is how technicians worked out that MH370 was still flying long after ground controllers lost contact with it.

Two satellite phone calls made to MH370 went unanswered but analysis of the signals enabled the Defence scientists to confirm that the jet was then still heading south.

After the six hourly maintenance “handshakes” came a seventh signal from the aircraft which was out of sequence. The investigators believe that was when MH370 started to run out of fuel and the first of its two engines flamed out. That automated signal warned that something was wrong.

Mr Foley said the ATSB had ­always kept an open mind. “Our hypothesis is based on what we know to be hard facts,’’ he said. “We have actively looked at all scenarios and anything that will help us find the aircraft.”

"HARD FACTS"? - BOLLOCKS!

Nope my questions still stand...

This raises a number of questions on the veracity of the statements made by CC Hood & Peter Foley.

Q/ After all this time what leads the ATSB to now believe the integrity of the 00:19 BFO as being secure enough to trust to calculate end of flight rates of descent between 1800 to 6700 metres per minute?

Q/ Where did the airspeed reference (i.e. 400 km/hour) come from?   

Q/ Finally how come we are only finding out about this 'analysis' now? 

 Q/ I may have missed this, but why wasn't Rolls Royce part of the SSWG?

+ Q/ If the general consensus is that the fugoid end of flight ROD calculations have a high probability of being correct, does this represent new & credible information that will lead to a continuation of the search? If not, why not? 

MTF...P2