Tomnod

I am a member of Tomnod.com.  It is a satellite imaging website that uses crowdsourcing to search miles and miles of ocean imagery or earth imagery.  The public has help in the tsunami efforts as well as the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370.  I pored over miles and miles of ocean imagery myself, trying to find debris.  It is a unique concept and I would urge you to join.  Here is an email that I just got from them:

THANK YOU!

We had an incredible response to our search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. Over eight million of you joined Tomnod’s campaign and tagged 15 million satellite image clues. We are humbled and thrilled by the immense help that each of you contributed.

Search teams investigated all of the promising leads we discovered but the plane has still not been found. We mourn with the families and friends of everyone on board MH370. However Tomnod’s mission to crowdsource the world continues -- and we hope you’ll continue to join us!

Please consider joining them. Thanks.

Revising My MH370 Predictions - It's the Pilot

All of my previous inferences on what happened to Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 have been incredibly accurate.

However, I wish to revise one of them.  I previously made a published inference that the co-pilot was responsible for the loss of the flight.  I made that inference on the basis that he was the last one to speak to Malaysian air traffic control.

Now that the Malaysian authorities have change their story, and are saying that the pilot and not the co-pilot was the actual voice in the last transmission, I am amending my inference to say that it was the pilot who caused the loss of Flight MH370.

It makes sense.  Just a day before the flight, the pilot went to the trial of a political opponent of the Malaysian Prime Minister.  He was upset at the trumped up charges of the opposition leader.

My inference was based on the last voice from the cockpit, and since it was the pilot, it had to be him responsible.  The left turn for the plane had already been programmed into the flight computer before the final transmission.

Once again, time will tell.  It looks like the plane may be found.  We shall see.

The Software Oracle Strikes Again - Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370

Yesterday CNN had this screaming headline:

Click on picture for larger image

On March 18, I included the map below, and I specifically stated that Flight MH370 flew around the island of Sumatra in Indonesia to foil attempts at radar detection and would be found roughly 2,000 kilometers or 1,600 miles off Perth Australia.  This was when the world was searching in the Malacca Straits and speculating that the flight could be in Kazakhstan.

On April 2, the Malaysian authorities came to the same conclusion, that the plane was flown around Indonesia to avoid radar.

I stated that it was a deliberate act.  The Malaysian authorities are saying criminal which is deliberate.

My inferences and predictions have been bang on.  If they find the plane, and if they find the bodies of the crew, one of the crew members (either the pilot or the co-pilot) will be found murdered and the other flew the plane.

I should start another predictions blog.  Come to think of it, I did predict that the Seahawks would win the Super Bowl.  

Batting 1000 in MH370 Predictions

The world is abuzz with the latest possible find of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 by the Australians.  This is the diagram that they have released.

I have been making inferences all along, and two days ago, using logical inferences, I predicted that the search should start some 2,000 kilometers off Perth in Australia.  I published this map in the blog entry below:

Well some possible wreckage has been sited some 2,260 kilometers off Perth.  My inferences were within roughly 10 percent of where the possible wreckage was found.

If it turns out to be MH370, then I have batted 1000 on my inferences.  

Again, time will tell.

Probable Location of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370

(click on picture for larger image)

Probable Location of Flight MH370

I have been amazingly accurate with my inferences and predictions about Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370.  Days before it was even intimated, I put out the possibility that it was in the Indian Ocean.  And then a couple of days later before the authorities admitted it, I said that it was a deliberate act from the flight deck.  I even named the co-pilot as the rogue character (see entries below this one in this blog).

So here I go again.  Where to look?  Well we do know that the last satellite transmission was somewhere in the red arc pictured above.  It is cut off by the blue circle as the maximum distance and amount of fuel that the aircraft had.

So let's assume that the co-pilot wanted to fly the plane to kingdom come, until it fell from the sky never to be seen again.  What he is hoping for (and you read this here first) is that the plane is never found.  And it may never be.  My guess is that the flight path would circle around the island of Sumatra just in case there was radar there.  Remember, they wanted to avoid radar.  Then they would just fly straight south until the plane stopped flying.  They wouldn't want to come too near Australia on one side, and didn't want Madagascar's radar picking them up, so they flew pretty much south.

The distance traveled would be a function of speed.  My guess is that they would travel at "normal" airline speeds -- not too fast and not too slow.  That would bring them close but not all the way to the maximum distance arc.   So if I were in charge of the search, I would start looking on the arc about 2000 kilometers off Perth Australia due west and look up and down the arc there. It stands to reason that MH370 is somewhere along that arc.  And if the plane is found, I am willing to bet that the pilot would found with either a bullet, or massive trauma to the head, and he was dead around the time of the turn west from the Beijing flight plan.

Time will tell, again!

Technology Solutions To Prevent a Repeat of Flight 370

Here are some real simple solutions to prevent a repeat of Flight MH370 scenarios from repeating.

1) When the transponder is turned off, before it goes off, it sends a signal that advises that it is being switched off.
2) There is real time monitoring and recording systems that monitor that signal.
3) The same for ACARS.  When it is switched off, before it goes silent, it transmits a switched-off signal as well.
4) A hue and cry is issued when the ACARS is turned off.  The airline head office and controlling ATC sector is notified immediately and repeatedly.
5) A secondary module called a handover module is hooked up to the ATC (Air Traffic Control) radar processors to monitor handoff.  As a plane is leaving a sector, a system generated message is sent to the ongoing ATC zone and the handoff is picked up.  If it fails, alarms go off.
6) Flight plans are filed in electronic format that is easily translated to machine readable format.
7) The radar processor has a flight plan deviation module that reads and monitors the flight plan.  If the aircraft is not where it is supposed to be, alarms are raised.
8) A QoS (Quality of Service) channel is created to stream meta-data realtime when the autopilot is set, programmed, re-programmed and/or changed. Any major changes in the cockpit or airplane are monitored in real time.
9) A flying plane transmits a machine generated heartbeat to the airline technical office every ten minutes.  The pilots have to manually acknowledge this signal even when the plane is on auto pilot.
10) All of this information is fed into a big data repository where it is mined for the benefit of the industry.

Inference -- And Fearless Prediction Again -- The Co-pilot did it!

Update:  I made this inference two days before any authorities did.

Update 2: 2 days later, authorities now say that the last voice transmission came from the co-pilot validating this earlier prediction.

As part of my job, I teach computers to make inferences.  I have an inference engine in my head.  Four days ago, using a well-reasoned argument, I inferred that the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, under a certain set of circumstances, was probably in the Indian Ocean. (See the entry two posts below this one.)   Today, it was announced that the USS Kidd is in fact searching the Indian Ocean, because telemetry signals indicated that the plane flew for hours after the transponders went silent.  The inference looks to be largely correct.

I have another inference to make.  New facts have come up.  Radar and ACARS (engine reporting to the satellite) data shows that it wasn't a random left turn.  The aircraft turned at specific GPS waypoints.  The only way that this could happen, was that either the autopilot was programmed that way, or a someone watched for the waypoints, and manually followed them.  Only a professionally trained pilot would know how to do this.

So that leaves two scenarios.  Either a professionally trained pilot hijacked the airplane, or the pilot or co-pilot did it.  The cabin door to the cockpit is reinforced so that if there was a hijacker, he would either have to break into the cockpit or sneak his way in.  We do know that the young 27 year old co-pilot was a loose cannon who invited women to fly in the cockpit, so that could be how the hijacker got in.  However, if that was the case, the older 52 year old pilot would have sounded the alarm and somehow issued a mayday - even as he was being killed.

The extreme knowledge of turning off the transponders, and then no mayday and then the plane flying for hours is very strange.  In any inferential reasoning, the rule of Ockham's Razor comes into play.  Ockham's Razor is a tool of logic.  It is referred to as the tool of parsimony.  Essentially, if there are two equally valid explanations for an event, we must take the simplest one.

The simplest explanation here, is that for whatever reason, be it mental illness, religious fanaticism or whatever, the co-pilot took over the plane, and flew it into the ocean.  When it is all said and done, there is a very very high probability that it will turn out this way.  The second most probable event is a hijacker, but I am betting that the co-pilot did it.