MH370: The Plane That Disappeared (Netflix)

[XelaM]

Has anyone seen this new Netflix documentary about MH370?

It's just unbelievable that in our time a passenger plane can just disappear without a trace.

I find the conspiracy theories in that documentary totally bizarre, but I also feel very sorry for the pilot's family who has effectively been scapegoated without any real evidence that he brought the plane down. If it was a murder-suicide why would he fly for another 8 hours instead of just crashing into the ocean where he was? It makes no sense. It's also an insane coincidence that two of Malaysian Airlines planes suffered tragedies in the space of just a few months in 2014 - nothing to do with any mechanical issues on the planes.

@Bepis who do you think it was? One of the passengers?

Problem with a lot of the assumptions around this (possibly fed by some documentaries, etc) that for example ATC, Ops staff etc are all seeing eyes. They definitely are not in many places.

There are many parts of the world outside of the likes of USA and Europe where there are gaps in ATC handovers due to things like position of radio installations, terrain etc..so you can go 5 even 10 minutes sometimes without able being to talk to ATC on either side of the border - as a result they are not going to start sending alerts for 5 min of no contact but they should start asking questions if it goes on much after that.

It looks like whoever was in control of MH put the aircraft into a tight'ish left turn to head south west very soon after the transponder went off. Gets it away from any primary radar in Vietnam PDQ...and starts generating uncertainty straight away. A 777 in the cruise is covers about 8 miles a minute so the aircraft was moving away from any last known position very quickly, and in a direction almost opposite to the one it was planned to go.

There appears to have been a bit of aa gamble taken on primary radar coverage over the Malaysian peninsula being poor - there are sometimes tensions in that part of the world but it's not a highly militarised border compared with say the old USSR and it was early AM local time, so there was little to zero chance of a meaningful fast, coordinated military response.

Finally the right turn up the Straits of Malacca then confuses the issue for anybody on the ground looking at primary radar even further- is what they are looking at legit airways traffic that has temporarily lost it's transponder?

Ops staff input - certainly prior to this incident you couldn't rely on some airline Ops staff knowing exactly where an aircraft was - they often didn't have real time tracking (as happened here) - it obviously should be better now.

IMO as an ex-Long Haul pilot myself I'll continue to maintain that there's no need for greater forces to have been at work - this really was something that could have relatively easily done by just one individual with the required knowledge.

It's establishing the motive for it all that's the continuing problem and that's where many think there might have been gaps in the investigation.

I assume there are tens or maybe hundreds of planes a day clocked by military radar, a few of which are off their original course for legitimate reasons - ATC instructions, weather, medical diversion etc - and it’s not the job of the military to know the up to the minute details of civilian flight paths - ?

ATC/Mil should all be coordinated (and is in many parts of the world) but yes, aircraft do deviate from flight planned track at time quite legitimately.

If you look at the report the mil/civvies (various) got a few primary radar returns that were of unknown origin, but what they were seeing (in terms of track/speed) made them effectively label it as an object of interest rather than a threat.

It's also worth bearing in mind the timescale from the transponder going off->first primary return -> to last primary return (at another radar) is quite short, not much if any time for the mil to physically respond.

Once the return went to the west off shore and tracked pretty up the northwesterly heading airway towards the Bay of Bengal (that's a busy, commonly used route) I suspect a few shoulders on the mil side of things were shrugged and they decided to concentrate on other things.

The significance of what they detected only seems to have become apparent in the following days, which TBH doesn't really surprise me.

Thanks @notimagain

Would the military radar know the exact planes for each “detection” or is it effectively “777 sized object here, here and here”?

I get that hindsight is 2020 and that Malaysia is not the USA and may have lacked some protocols in such an event, where red flags for terrorism would have gone up right away in a post 911 world.

@SheilaFentiman You say that ATC alerting sooner would not have mattered because in any case the assumption would be that the plane went down at last point of contact. Yet, when Malaysia airlines were notified, that doesnt seem to have been their assumption at all - they seem to have just assumed it was on course with a comms failure.

It seemed like Malaysia Airlines in particular really dithered on this. The fact that family were waiting in the arrivals lounge to see "delayed" on the screen is so awful and inconceivable. It's just you really would have thought - as a naive bystander - that when one of your planes goes missing you would call the military up quite quickly, in case either a rescue operation needs to be enacted or a terror threat tracked. And you would think that the military would quickly check their radar for any anomalies. I guess not but again, as a naive civilian, that seems crazy to me.

@FloorWipes sorry, I wasn’t clear. I think a comms failure is the natural first assumption - and between them, the ATCs tried to contact the plane many times, and I think instructed planes in the air to try also, in case the shorter range contact worked.

I presume it’s protocol to keep trying this, for a while at least, before rousing the head of crisis management. As @notimagain said, the time between the transponder going off and the last military radar, miles off course, was one hour. I would assume at this point, civilian avenues were still being explored.

I don’t know at what point the system starts to think “crash” rather than “comms malfunction” but, at whatever point that was, search and enquiries would have started at the point comms were lost - as I think happened initially.

Yet, when Malaysia airlines were notified, that doesnt seem to have been their assumption at all - they seem to have just assumed it was on course with a comms failure

I’m a layperson but don’t understand this. Surely if you have a plane you think has lost comms, you ask the next jurisdiction to watch out for it? Again, no knowledge of this so maybe wrong but I thought planes were tracked by towers/controlling airspace or what not and pilots had to check in or tower/air space checks in when ‘changing hands’.

Surely if Malaysia thought it was a comms issue they would ask the next responsible air space to watch for it, track on their radar and give the thumbs up. Surely it would be known in all towers/airspace’s that the plane had a comm’s issue and would be scrutinised along its path as that means you have a plane unable to communicate coming in to land at destination (potentially), which I would think is an emergency issue to be managed by all responsible all along the route, not just Malaysia. Surely, you don’t just wait until it doesn’t turn up at the destination airport and go ‘oh, it’s missing’?

Sorry for using technically incorrect terms, I know nothing about flying planes apart from being a passenger in them😁.

Surely, with the first assumption being a comms malfunction of some sort, the next expectation would be that the plane may well turn back to the nearest accessible airport rather than carry on - and that this likely course of action is one that everyone should have been looking for? Therefore the idea that it would be difficult to make a connection between the missing plane and a radar point that's "off course" for the intended flight path also seems a bit unreasonable.

If you read the air traffic control bit of the report, there were definitely delays vs what was supposed to happen and confusion as to whose airspace the plane was in. If you believe that the senior flight crew did it, then this would be a clearly expected outcome by that person. He would know that the handover was the best time to turn off the transponder as it would buy more minutes as the countries caught up with each other, vs just disappearing off the secondary radar of one airspace only

I’m a layperson but don’t understand this. Surely if you have a plane you think has lost comms, you ask the next jurisdiction to watch out for it? Again, no knowledge of this so maybe wrong but I thought planes were tracked by towers/controlling airspace or what not and pilots had to check in or tower/air space checks in when ‘changing hands’.

The KL controller had handed the aircraft off as it approached their boundary, outbound, told the crew to call the controller in Vietnam (Ho Chi Mihn) at the boundary. There's quite often a gap of two/three minutes in many parts of the world where in effect nobody is watching an aircraft, even if they have radar... so there are blind spots/seams/ areas where ATC do effectively lose contact.

If you look at the report it took quite some for the controller in Ho Chi Min to actually register that they hadn't spoken to MH, and only then got back to KL on the phone and basically asked what's gone on at your end?

you don’t just wait until it doesn’t turn up at the destination airport and go ‘oh, it’s missing’

Can't dive into the report in detail now as to what happened on the night but the theory is if an aircraft loses complete radio contact the crew try to follow the flight plan (that's why there is one) to destination.

So the initial a loss of communications procedure doesn't make the assumption the aircraft is missing, that really comes into play once timing suggests the aircraft has run out of fuel.

if an aircraft loses complete radio contact the crew try to follow the flight plan (that's why there is one) to destination.

Ok but surely that is just one primary option and highly dependent on the reason for the loss of comms. We can rule out the electrical fire idea now, but with the knowledge at the time surely that is the type of thing you might ponder, hence possibly turning back. So shouldn't they have been on the lookout for a few potential courses?

Switching off comms at the handover point buys time and builds confusion, but in a better functioning system it might not have been enough to really disappear.

So the initial a loss of communications procedure doesn't make the assumption the aircraft is missing, that really comes into play once timing suggests the aircraft has run out of fuel

I understand that but would think that the assumption of loss of comms would mean scrutinising via radar all along intended flight path rather than just worrying if it hadn’t landed somewhere once it should have run out of fuel? So, once Ho Chi Min got back to KL to say not only have we not heard from them but they have disappeared from radar, would have raised a flag to ‘missing’ rather than comms issue?

"but they have disappeared from radar, would have raised a flag to ‘missing’ rather than comms issue?"

I am not sure of the details, but, on the night, disappearing from secondary radar could have been a transponder fault (rather than a deliberate switch off as is now believed). It disappeared from all secondary radar at 1721:13 UTC. I am not sure how easy it is to identify a specific plane from primary radar.

@HoppingPavlova

I understand that but would think that the assumption of loss of comms would mean scrutinising via radar all along intended flight path

As @SheilaFentiman has mentioned it's wasn't just radio that had gone off, the transponder was off as well which renders most civilian ATC systems "blind" certainly at shorter range. No transponder operating means (in the civilian world) shorter detection ranges and no way of definitely identifying any "blips" if an aircraft is not in radio contact.

I think TBH we're going off at a bit of a tangent here. The report is a fairly typical incident/accident/safety report - no stone gets unturned and the sub-optimal stuff gets commented on in the hope of improvement...The comments in the report don't imply they were in some way responsible or screwed up in a major fashion but they did contribute to some confusion.

Even if ATC around the region had known immediately that the handover between KL and Ho Chi Minh hadn't happened they would still have struggled to definitely tie in primary any returns to MH whilst the flight was still airborne , they couldn't have intervened and once the aircraft went off primary radar they (both civilian and military) would have been blind to the postulated turn to the south.

I disagree that it's a tangent. It is one of the most interesting parts! And it seems quite fundamental to preventing a similar thing happening again, in terms of the mystery aspect.

There was a decent gap between the disappearance from primary radar to the disappearance from secondary radar and while it wouldn't have been possible to definitively identify MB370 on primary radar, someone could have had a really good go.

Sorry I mean disappearance from secondary to primary

p243 of the report linked above shows the table of events wrt ATC actions, all the calls and so on.

I perhaps should have read the whole thread first 🙈. I've read your comments as well as @notimagain and what you say makes complete sense. Thank you for both of you taking time out to explain things.

From what has been described, it seems that documentary was no entirely factual so I think I'm going to have a read of the report.

It's a sort of agree and disagree.

It's of interest to the aviation community in general because you in general you need ATC to be a bit more on the spot than happened this night in case in the future there's an incident/accident invllving loss of comms where the loss of time becomes critical. That's why the report effectively gives ATC a not so subtle kicking, not to prevent the basics of a MH370 scenario happening again..

In the case of MH370 itself even if Ho Chi Min ATC had been on the ball with handling during the uncertainty phase, been absolutely optimal througout and had got messages out to the region on the required timescale nobody outside of Ho Chi Minh / KL would have been aware of any concerns until the aircraft had coasted out and turned north west on the airway...and those returns are on file anyway.

apologies for the awful typos in ^^

Fundamentally IMHO, getting bogged down in the ATC aspects is a bit of a distraction, if people want to look for reasons or more important solutions it might be best to look elsewhere.

This may sound like a daft question but if the pilot was not in touch with ATC when the plane turned, would other planes have noticed he was in the wrong place? Wouldn't he have crashed into other planes with no guidance? Would other pilots have seen him flying?

It was night:

If the plan was to disappear then the external lights could be turned off.

With the transponder off the flight wouldn't be visible on other nearby aircrafts' Traffic Alert systems (TCAS).

Aircraft cruise at standard levels a thousand feet apart so the chance of collision could be avoided by flying at a non-standard flight level.

@notimagain I didn't even think of that, thank you. Completely forgot it was at night time as well. It definitely sounds like a planned and deliberate act though.

Malaysian Airlines made a statement that the flight was missing at 2324 UTC, about an hour after it should have landed and about an hour before the last Inmarsat contact - i.e. it hadn't quite reached fuel exhaustion when the announcement was made. Presumably the internal conclusion came some time before the announcement.

There was about 5 hours between the disappearance from secondary radar and the expected landing time.