I have had the opportunity to do a little research on the question u posed about what sort of (primary) ATC radar was tracking the plane to 1.30am/BITOD as claimed.

The DCA document u referred to listed only the ‘terminal radar approach control’ primary radar (aka TRACON) of the various airports. This kind of primary radar typically has a range of 50 to 60 nm.

However, in addition to TRACON, ATCs have another form of primary radar with much greater surveillance range called ‘en-route long range’ or ‘air route service radar’ (ARSR). This type of primary radar has a range of between 180 to 300 nm, is typically operated in conjunction with the country’s military/air defense and located at the country’s perimeter or borders. Thus the USA have several ARSR-4s (or the latest version) at its borders.

Malaysia appears to be no different in having joint military/ATC long range primary radar, as the commercial director of Malaysia Airlines Dunleavy alluded to in saying the DCA and military radar were in the same building or words to that effect. The MATSMP radar system in Malaysia has been described as follows: “…a very modern system with Raster Scan Colour Display, fully integrated radar data called MRT- Multi Radar tracking systems [where radar data from various stations] are piped down to the ATCC Centre at Subang to form a real time complete picture of all the air traffic flying over the skies of Peninsular Malaysia…”.

Where are these long range primary radar located in Malaysia? From a quick search on the internet, there is such a radar at the airforce base at Butterworths/Penang at the north west (headquarters of the five nations defense arrangement) and another such radar at the north east coast at the airforce base at Gong Kedak (located at the border of Kelantan and Terengganu) where Malaysia keeps its fleet of Sukhoi Su-30 MKMs.

According to former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim who is now the leader of the Opposition, the radar at Gong Kedak was supplied by Marconi and its range would extend even to the Indian Ocean on the other side of Malaysia. I do not know the exact range but it most likely would not be less than 200nm.

The latest radar supplied to Malaysia, the GM 400 from Thales has a range of over 400km or 220nm.

@sk999 – I feel like you’re jumping into a more advanced statistical analysis when the results of a simpler one aren’t to your liking. A series of point ls should fit a line when the dependent variable is truly dependent on the independent variable, and they should not fit a line when the proposed dependent variable is actually independent.

The one-in-a-million probability of a correlation when the plane is sitting still is misleading, and so is your sample selection. I got less than .00001 on the 17. You are claiming that those 17 were chosen to “keep the table short.” So the data chosen by ATSB or Inmarsat doesn’t work, we add a few points back in, and that’s not a sampling bias?

In any case, I get that .000001 or something on the 17, and you got .5 on the 54. We should have gotten .999 for crying out loud. We have a short time interval, and a set of BTOs in a narrow range, and a stationary plane. There should be a stronger correlation than .5. The BTOs should barely move.

On the later BTOs, you are saying that they correlate because the BTO is part of the round trip. That, again, is the assumption I am challenging. You are using a circular proof – the BTO is part of the round trip, so there’s correlation, and since there’s correlation, the BTOs must be part of the round trip. Yet the correlation is almost perfect against the Z coordinate. What are the chances that there is correlation above .9 between the satellite’s position and the BTOs, despite the satellite movement being much smaller than the plane’s movement, and the satellite’s motion having an even smaller impact on the total trip time.

I will rerun my numbers, again with a least squares because I think the BTOs should either correlate with a line (for the original 17) or absolutely not correlate with a line (the last 7, against the Z coordinate.) I’ll post the results in the next day or so, with the hope that at least we can agree on numbers, if not interpretations.

“Regarding correlation of the later BTO points with satellite Z position, since the BTO measures the timing of a signal going through the satellite, there will always be a correlation between the BTO and the position of the satellite as it moves.”

U addressed the above part of your comment to @JS, I am sure @JS will respond and i do not have any mathematical or engineering background, but the point of the correlation is that if the plane was still flying during the pings, then there should not be a direct correlation between the movement of the satellite and the BTO (unless the plane was flying in exactly the same manner as the satellite at all such times).

If i am not mistaken, each km of movement in the z axis by the satellite corresponded to 8 plus microseconds in BTO (especially true for the latter pings). Also as observed by @JS, the respective distances between the ping radii are roughly twice the distance traveled by the satellite on the z axis (again especially true for the latter pings).

The correlation also extends to the BFO, with BFO for the pings = fixed offset of around 90 + satellite velocity in knots (with a small aberration for the 19.41 UTC ping which aberration was probably caused by the eclipse as Inmarsat themselves indicated from a report by WSJ). Where the BFO was more or less the same, for the first and third ping, the satellite velocity also happened to be around the same. To my limited knowledge, there was no such correlation for the earlier transmissions.

The graphs for the BTO, BFO and the satellite movement/velocity all have the same shape (for the pings), with a dip in both BTO and BFO seen for the second ping at 19.41 UTC when the satellite happened to be around its northern apex (at 19.36 UTC) with z inversely peaking at such time.

I am not the only one having a problem accepting that these are all coincidences, see for eg the comment of a @Steve on Duncan’s blog in the latest thread.

On the point about primary radar, those are very good questions but unfortunately u have addressed them to the wrong person.

Those questions should be answered by the Malaysian ATC and the Vietnamese ATC since they are on record as having said that their primary radar tracked the plane up to 1.30am and to BITOD respectively. The statements by Vietnamese ATC were made in the early hours of March 8th and recorded in the calls between the 2 ATCs (see Preliminary Report), the statements on the part of the Malaysians were by the head of their DCA, who incidentally was the person in charge of the search in the first week, on March 8th and repeated in the following days that week including in the presence of hundreds of journalists and broadcasted to the world. Please see my previous comments for details of those statements.

Incidentally, Professor Stupples, speaking in the context of the primary radar of the Malaysian military, mentioned a range of 402 km. And there were some reports of the Malaysian DCA and military being located in the same building or something to that effect.

This primary radar tracking by the 2 ATCs would have been recorded. Malaysia has reportedly sealed this recording. See the report by the Straits Times. I have no knowledge whether Vietnamese took the step of preserving the radar recording for that night. In any case of a missing airplane the evidence of the ATCs would be at the forefront of the investigation but as is obvious to many already, the usual rules do not apply when it comes to MH370.

I hear what u are saying.

Whether it is theoretically possible or not, no one is going to admit now, that the pings could have been powered by battery power. But what if

(a) the signal strength of the pings ( which were transmitted over a period of 6 hours) was significantly lower than for the earlier transmissions? and

(b) the signal strength, just among the pings, show a gradual decline.

If the answer to the above questions are in the affirmative, the conclusion surely can be drawn that the pings were powered by battery power. It may not constitute conclusive proof that the plane was stationary during the pings but it will prove the pings were not powered by the plane’s regular AC or DC power and thus render untenable the critical assumption underlying this whole investigation and search in the Indian Ocean, that the pings necessarily mean the plane was still ‘powered up’ and flying.

As i have said many times before, Inmarsat can prove me wrong by releasing the data on the signal strength (and on the C/No and BER), if indeed there was no discernible difference between such data for the pings as compared to the earlier transmissions. The fact that Inmarsat have so far refused to do so, even after a 4 month search has turned up absolutely nothing, speaks for itself. Just what justification could there possibly be, to withhold this data, with the bodies of these 239 people continuing to languish in the sea and the suffering and anguish of the families.

“…based on these 17 values, it doesn’t look like we can say BTO correlates with total trip time.”

The R-squared test is easy to calculate but doesn’t say anything about the significance of a correlation. I never use it. A Spearman rank correlation test is far better. By the way, there are 54 data points in this time interval, and Inmarsat picked out only 17 (presumably to keep the table reasonably sized). Running the Spearman test on the full set of 54, I find a correlation coefficient of around 0.5 (not very big) but with a probabilty of only one in a million that it is due to chance. The correlation is very real. The data are not good enough to show that the correlation is linear with time, but they are consistent with it.

Regarding correlations of the later BTO points with satellite Z position, since the BTO measures the timing of a signal going through the satellite, there will always be a correlation between BTO and the position of the satellite as it moves. It is the line-of-sight distance that we really want. Let’s address the real question – how much did the distance from the satellite to BITOD change during the last 7 data points (18:28 to 24:19)? Here’s the answer – 3 km, 20 microseconds in the round trip. 2 miles. It had negligible impact on the BTO. One can do the calculation with pencil and paper and a pocket calculator.

Alex Siew writes:

“This is the evidence from the air traffic control at KL and the air traffic control at Ho Chi Minh City, both of which had continued to track MH370 on their respective ATC primary radar those critical 9 minutes,”

Here is a link to a document that gives the range of all ATC primary radar in Malaysia:

http://aip.dca.gov.my/aip%20pdf/ENR/ENR%201/ENR%201.6/Enr1_6.pdf

Every one of the primary radars has a range of 50-60 nautical miles. The nearest radar to BITOD is at Kota Bharu. The distance from Kota Bharu to BITOD is 127 nm. That’s over twice the range. The nearest Vietnam ATC radar is at Camau. It is 131 nm away. Can you tell us which ATC radar was tracking MH370 and how it acquired such super-sensitive powers?

My key question about the battery system is “how long does it last?” I’m aware that it existed. There is no “business case,” so to speak, for battery power to an SDU beyond a few minutes. Longer times would require either more weight or more expensive replacements. I’m not saying its impossible, but it’s unlikely.

I think you already have your answer, though. In effect, you are asking “are you sure the batteries wouldn’t last 6 hours?” Your target audience would be the manufacturer(s). They are apparently quite sure at this point. Now, they could be wrong, but you are asking them a question they already think they know the answer to. You won’t get a different answer from them, even if they are wrong. Nor will answering it be high priority, since even from a lay perspective, there’s no logical basis for batteries lasting so much longer than necessary.

To go further with the floating SDU theory, you should probably be getting answers from independent sources. What model is the battery? What is the expected draw of the SDU in an alert but not transmitting state? If you had numbers at least approaching 6 hours of battery life, then at least the question might get a second look.

Bruce, there were other airports which would have been opened for eg Penang in Malaysia. In addition, there were military bases in that reqion which would also have primary radar for eg the Five Nations Base in Butterworth. If MH370 had flown back across Malaysia these primary radar would have picked it up. Yes, some people may have been sleeping but surely not all. And even if some had been sleeping on the job, as long as the radar is switched on it would have been picked up and recorded for after the fact review.

Also, both ATCs in KL and HCMC were tracking the plane on their primary radar until it disappeared at around 1.30am. A plane disappearing from radar firstly from SSR (at 1.21am) and then PSR (at 1.30am ) and also not radioing in or responding to radio calls for 9 long minutes (until the contact with MH88 at 1.30am), would have been a rare occurrence and both Malaysian and Vietnamese ATCs would have been on the lookout for the plane. By 1.38am the 2 ATCs were already on the phone. So it is inconceivable for KLATC to have missed the plane turning back and then crossing over Malaysia unless the plane had flown below primary radar range for the entire trip from BITOD to MEKAR. Penang was and is a big town, a lot of people would still be out in the streets at 2.00am on a Friday night and MH370 could not have flown at low altitudes past Penang without anyone noticing.

Other than the blip at MEKAR at 2.22am, there is nothing. No one really believes that this blip was MH370 but no one wants to come out and say it is bogus because without this blip, the people doing all this modelling would not even know where to start.

Can i take this opportunity to ask u and LGHamiltonUSA something. It is stated in the Preliminary Report: ” It was later established that the transmissions from the [ACARS] through satellite communication system occurred at regular intervals starting before MH370 departed Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia at time 12.56.08 MYT and with the last communication occurred at 01.07.49 MYT”

What does the time ’12.56.08 MYT’ signify to u?

Could it be that this was the time of the log off from the previous flight? Would u know what previous flight could have such a log off time?