MH370 hijackers left fake southern data trail

[mralstoner]

Jeff Wise is a science writer and CNN analyst. He thinks the hijackers may have "spoofed" the satellite communications to make it look like the plane went south, when it actually went north.

It's very technical, but this is my understanding. (Bare in mind that while I know computers, I know nothing about planes).

- By the time MH370 left Malaysian radar coverage, it was electronically dark. All communications were off. It was invisible and effectively in the clear.

- Then strangely, the satellite communications were turned back on, but only enough to open and maintain a channel. No messages were actually sent.

- However, these hourly "handshake" signals did contain enough data to roughly track the plane's path, due to two sets of data: the BFO (Burst Frequency Offset) and BTO (Burst Timing Offset).

- The BTO was only recently introduced by the satellite company, and so the hackers may not have been aware of it.

- It is possible to spoof/fake the BFO data if you gain entry to the electronics bay which is via an unsecured (!) hatch under the carpet near first class.

- The BTO data suggests a fast direct flight north, along the borders between countries (a tactic to avoid radar detection).

- The BFO data suggests a "slow and meandering" route, perhaps due to sloppy fake data by the hijackers who were not aware of the BTO data also being collected.

- The BTO data suggests a landing in a Russian controlled part of Kazakhstan.

- There were 3 ethnic Russians on board.

That's as far as I understand it. Obviously the hackers must be very sophisticated and probably state-backed.

Jeff Wise has written a short Kindle book (only $3) which is very readable and not too technical.

I do have one quibble. He points to Russia as the likely hijackers. There's one problem with this. Two thirds of the passengers were Chinese. Russia and China are allies. Putin would never ever upset the Chinese like that. No way. So, China must be involved too.

Do I believe it? Yeah, it sounds reasonable to me.

Jeff Wise was part of The Independent Group but they don't endorse his theory.

For more info:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/201...heory.html
http://www.amazon.com/The-Plane-That-Was...B00TP07B0I
http://jeffwise.net/
https://twitter.com/ManvBrain

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNPsHQcE2OQ


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKUVg4AHuJI

These 2 videos show unsecured access to the electronics bay:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLmzvF2qkDY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S-Cggs1jOo

[Foxaèr]

[Thumpalumpacus]

From this picture alone:



... the author of the first link clearly forgot about Indian and Pakistani radars that would be covering the air above Kashmir. Given the proclivity of both those countries to fight over that territory, their lack of scrambling jets would indicate to me that the author has the course wrong, if not the entire guess.

[mralstoner]

... the author of the first link clearly forgot about Indian and Pakistani radars that would be covering the air above Kashmir. Given the proclivity of both those countries to fight over that territory, their lack of scrambling jets would indicate to me that the author has the course wrong, if not the entire guess.

I guess it depends how close to the borders they flew. From Jeff's website:

http://jeffwise.net/the-spoof-part-3-whe...-scenario/

As depicted, MH370 would have passed over the Andaman Islands about half an hour after disappearing from Malaysian radar. The islands belong to India, which maintains a radar station there. So why didn’t it pick up MH370? The answer, apparently, is that the radar is only turned on when a crisis is looming, which wasn’t the case on March 8. “We operate on an ‘as required’ basis,” the chief of staff of India’s Andamans and Nicobar Command told Reuters.

From there, MH370’s straight-line track would have taken it over Gorakhpur, India, and then on into Nepalese airspace. Nepal is a small, poor country, with no urgent concerns about aerial attack from India; radar coverage is most likely nonexistent. Ahead, however, would have lain some of the most disputed territory on earth. India and Pakistan have been in a state of semi-war over disputed Kashmir for more than half a century. India painstakingly monitors its border with Pakistan and frequently intercepts civilian aircraft that stray into its airspace without having processed the proper paperwork.

Likewise, China and India have been rivals since time immemorial, and fought a border war in 1962. In the months before MH370 disappeared, China had unilaterally declared control of airspace over disputed islands claimed by Japan, and has aggressively intercepted aircraft attempting to enter it.

To pass over any of these disputed areas, or to penetrate Chinese airspace, would be to invite detection and interception. But the ping-ring data suggests that MH370 didn’t fly over any of them. Instead, a straight-line course that begins near the plane’s last known location and intersects the ping-arcs at the correct speeds will pass over the borders between these countries. The route matches the strategy that the hijackers used earlier in the flight, diverting the plane at the boundary between Malaysian and Vietnamese control, then skirting the border of Thailand and Malaysia.

Steve Pearson, an avionics and mission systems engineer at the Royal Air Force Warfare Center, told me that traveling along the boundaries between two air-control zones, called FIRs, can be a way to avoid drawing attention. Back when he was an RAF navigator, he would take advantage of this dynamic to slip through airspace where he wasn’t supposed to be: “When we used to go to other parts of the world, you could fly down FIR boundaries, and each side thought you were in the other one’s control. You could fly right down the boundary and no one would talk to you. It’s something we didn’t do very often, I must admit, but it’s something you can do.”

[Anomalocaris]

From this picture alone:



... the author of the first link clearly forgot about Indian and Pakistani radars that would be covering the air above Kashmir. Given the proclivity of both those countries to fight over that territory, their lack of scrambling jets would indicate to me that the author has the course wrong, if not the entire guess.

The author also clearly forgot the southern track was deduced based on both the time of arrival of signals at satellite, and on the Doppler effect upon the signals received at the satellite caused by the weaving of the orbit of the satellite through the uneven gravity field of the earth. For transmitter on the northern track to create the same time of arrival and Doppler effect at satellite as a transmitter on the southern track, it would have to know in realtime the exact perturbations upon the trajectory of the receiving satellite and instantly change the transmitting frequency to mimick its effects.

[mralstoner]

The author also clearly forgot the southern track was deduced based on both the time of arrival of signals at satellite, and on the Doppler effect upon the signals received at the satellite caused by the weaving of the orbit of the satellite through the uneven gravity field of the earth. For transmitter on the northern track to create the same time of arrival and Doppler effect at satellite as a transmitter on the southern track, it would have to know in realtime the exact perturbations upon the trajectory of the receiving satellite and instantly change the transmitting frequency to mimick its effects.

Jeff does mention things like wobbling satellites and the doppler effect, but that's way above my pay grade. I have no idea. Jeff was part of the Independent Group, so I don't think he'd make any fundamental mistakes. You might find the answer on his website.

He does say that different planes had different satellite comms units, each having different ways of calculating the BFO: some were fakeable, while other units were secure.

[mralstoner]

Latest from Jeff Wise ...

The Malaysian Government Just Released a Huge Amount of New Data on the MH370 Crash. Here’s What It Reveals.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/201...epens.html

As recently as last week, Reuters ran a piece describing seven theories; CNN published one describing five. These stories don’t distinguish, however, between mere flights of fancy, which have been concocted without reference to anything we actually know, and testable scientific hypotheses grounded in the facts. By the latter definition, I count only three.

The first one, which I’ll called Suicide Pilot, imagines that the pilot locked himself in the cockpit and flew the plane into the southern ocean. This is, at present, the default scenario; on Saturday, the New York Times wrote a long story outlining its merits. The second theory, the Spoof, proposes that the plane was taken by a highly sophisticated hijack and flown north to Kazakahstan, as I outlined in this magazine last month. The third I’ll call Hero Pilot. It’s a version of a scenario laid out last March by Chris Goodfellow, who suggested that an accidental fire (or maybe unexpected depressurization) had rendered the pilots unconscious, so that the plane flew on into the southern ocean as a ghost plane. This idea was revisited last weekend at the Daily Beast by Clive Irving.

That’s it. These are the only three options that are currently making the rounds. If other scenarios are conceivable, no one is actively articulating them. These three theories all match the data to one degree or another, but they all have gaping holes. It’s like a baby beauty contest where all the contestants are ugly. The question is, which baby is the least ugly? ..

And, in my reading at least, I didn’t see any new evidence in Sunday’s report that made my hypothesis look any worse. Make no mistake, the Spoof is an ugly baby. It’s not clear how a plane traveling north could have evaded military radar detection in each of the countries it passed over, and it’s not clear how it could have flown as fast and as far as it did without running out of fuel. But to my eye, Sunday’s disclosure made it more attractive in comparison to its competitors. The game plays on....

Could the plane have flown straight into China, solving the radar and fuel puzzles?