Mike Glynn is a former very experienced Qantas Captain. He has published an analysis of the weather during the flight of MH370 and in particular the influence of the weather on the formation of the flight path determined by the WSPRnet analysis.
You can download a copy of his report here
@All,
Mike Glynn flew to Bangkok from Sydney on the 7th March 2014, but he didn’t hear about the disappearance of MH370 until almost 24 hours later while in the immigration queue preparing to fly home to Sydney on the evening of the 8th.
He was standing next to a Cathay Pacific captain who told him the aircraft was missing and last seen over a waypoint called IGARI. IGARI was on his flight plan back to Sydney, so he made a note of it, thanked the Cathay pilot and went to a coffee shop to review the rest of the plan.
The Gulf of Thailand contains a mass of fishing boats every night, that is like a carpet that extends all the way down to the South China Sea. It’s an amazing sight. Here is a link to the view from the flight deck as Mike flew over IGARI. His only thought was that there was no way an aircraft could crash there and not be seen. He has been obsessed with the case of MH370 ever since.
The lights of IGARI (courtesy of Mike Glynn):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ctb4af29yrc1xad/Igari%20Lights.jpg?dl=0
Here is a link to an excerpt from Mike Glynn’s flight plan:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jqfw0l9ccnanzvl/IGARI.png?dl=0
@All,
A new article by Geoffrey Thomas on the paper by Mike Glynn:
https://www.airlineratings.com/featured/new-mh370-weather-analysis-supports-godfrey-wsprnet-tracking/
Mike Glynn’s weather analysis seems to suggest that whoever was piloting the plane was taking care to avoid bad weather.
it may be that further weather analysis could help to clarify the source of a burning plane spotted by a New Zealand oil rig engineer.
Mike McKay reported to the NZ police a potential sighting of what he thought might be a plane on fire for 10-15 seconds at about the time that MH370 disapppeared off the civilian radar.
His guess at the time was that the plane was about 50 to 70 kilometres away on a compass bearing of between 260 and 275 degrees from a position of latitude 08:22:30:23 N and longitude 108:42:22:26 E
Were the weather conditions at that time suitable to generate a mirage? In other words, is it possible that what he saw was a mirage of an event that was taking place close to Igari, 500 kilometres away?
If MH370 did experience a fire for 10-15 seconds, it might explain why Captain Zaharie Shah didn’t contact Ho Chi Minh ATC, and why the plane turned back towards Malaysia.
Such a fire might well have been spotted by many of the fishermen in the sea below, if the sky was clear at that time.
Below is an extract from an article by John Edens from March 4th 2016:
McKay said he was out for a smoke when he spotted what he thought was a burning aircraft.
“Of course, I ended up looking like a fool. But what happened to me is of no consequence considering those who lost family on the flight.
“I sent an observation in a confidential email hoping it would help find the loved ones of the families.
“This was leaked to the media. I saw something but the distances from the last known position make my observation being the plane unlikely under the generally accepted route the plane took after contact was lost.”
Vietnamese authorities sent a search and rescue flight from Vung Tau the next day, he said, but this operation was stood down when the initial response focused on the Andaman Sea, off the west coast of Thailand.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/asia/77535739/mh370-oil-rig-worker-fired-for-mh370-sighting-still-out-of-work
@TommyL,
I agree that it may be that further weather analysis could help to clarify the source of a burning plane spotted by a New Zealand oil rig engineer, but I believe the sighting by Mike McKay can already be discounted as being MH370.
What he thought might have been a plane on fire for 10-15 seconds at about the time that MH370 disappeared off the civilian radar does not fit with the fact that we know that MH370 was flying for 7.6 hours until 8th March 2014 00:19:37 UTC according to the Inmarsat satellite data and 00:20:24 UTC according to the WSPRnet data.
There are 290 data points from the Civilian Terminal Area Radar (TAR) at Kota Bharu and Butterworth Air Force Base between 17:30:33 UTC and 18:00:51 UTC. There is also a detection of the co-pilot’s mobile at the BBFARLIM2 base station at Bandar Baru Air Itam on Penang Island at 17:52:27 UTC.
MH370 diverted over Malaysia and ended in the southern Indian Ocean. We have the physical evidence of 36 items of floating debris to prove this and none of the debris shows any signs of fire.
There seems to be a general agreement that MH370 / 9M-MRO crashed into the Southern Indian Ocean once its fuel was exhausted.
It definitely appears to be the case that the WSPR / GDTAAA analysis is helping to locate the plane’s final crash location with greater precision.
What is not at all understood, and is completely open to speculation, is why the plane did not complete its scheduled flight to Beijing, ie:
why did the plane stop communicating?
why did it turn back towards Malaysia?
why was no attempt made to land?
Other than the passengers and crew, there seem to have been very few eye-witnesses and very few ear-witnesses to anything that happened after the initial forty minutes of the flight.
There has been a lot of speculation and quite a lot of mis-direction / mis-information, whether due to intentional deception, incompetence or misfortune.
Given that Mike McKay made the effort to log his possible sighting with the NZ police, it’s important not to completely discount his speculation in preference for our own preferred speculation.
Is it conceivable, albeit highly improbable, that there was a ten to fifteen second fire on the plane that was successfully extinguished, permitting the plane to keep flying for several hours, but that either the fire itself, or some part of the on-board emergency response to it involved the disabling, of the satellite communications, radio communications and the faulty in-flight entertainment system?
@All,
The NOAA apparent sunrise calculation at sea level for 8th March 2014 shows for 33°S 95°E an apparent sunrise at 05:34 Local Time in time zone UTC +6, which is 23:54 UTC. I assume MH370 was flying at 36,000 feet (10,973 m). Apparent sunrise from the pilot’s perspective would be 11 minutes earlier at 23:43 UTC at this altitude.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ymih49tvr0lkxyd/NOAA%20Sunrise%2033S%2095E%2008MAR2014%202334%20UTC%200534%20LT.png?dl=0
The GDAS Low Cloud Cover for 8th March 2014 00:00 UTC for the area in the vicinity of the MH370 crash location at 33.177°S 95.300°E is shown in the link below. You will see that there is an area just north of the crash location marked in dark blue, which means 0% cloud cover. The pilot may have been looking for a gap in the clouds to descend. The cloud cover scale is from blue 0% to red 100%.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/udey96tm45gtk43/Cloud%20Cover%200000%20UTC%2008%20MAR%202014%2033.177%C2%B0S%2095.300%C2%B0E.png?dl=0
It will be interesting to see if there is any contrails from 23:40 UTC onwards in the weather satellite imagery at the time. Here are the data from my paper “GDTAAA MH370 WSPRnet Analysis Flight Path Report”:
23:40 UTC 30.651°S 92.989°E 36,320 feet
23:50 UTC 31.978°S 92.717°E 36,320 feet
00:00 UTC 32.974°S 93.046°E 36,320 feet
00:10 UTC 33.872°S 94.426°E 36,320 feet
00:16 UTC 32.400°S 94.720°E 35,400 feet
00:18 UTC 32.875°S 95.015°E 33,000 feet
00:20 UTC 33.150°S 95.170°E 6,000 feet