Did MH370 Run Out of Fuel at the 7th Arc?

Thank you Captain Blelly for your interest and comment on MH370 running out of fuel at the 7th arc. The issue of MH370’s fuel exhaustion has been addressed both by Larry Vance, and by me in the recently published Journal of Navigation (JN) article which was widely reported in the press so I presume you have read it? That paper has been out since about 2021 as a preprint and later on my Researchgate site. The reviewers took 2 years to get back to me without any explanation for the delay. FYI the paper does reference the tailend erosion modelling by the Captio group and Argiris?Kamoulakos. One of the reviewers surprised me by their depth of knowledge of the modelling components used in the finite-element simulation so I’m assuming they carefully studied your work. Still, this was an excellent study that I was happy to reference but it worries me that Larry Vance’s work does not feature in your references as both studies firmly support the notion of a controlled ditching, except Larry’s, and this recent work of mine, are suggesting that MH370 still had fuel available.

In early 2021, I inquired with the ATSB about the electronic switching interpreted by you and others as indicative of fuel exhaustion. They referred to their report, which mentioned an alternative, less likely explanation but did not elaborate, instead pointing to a now-unavailable document. The material on a glide-phase and ditching has since been updated in their Operational Search report on pages 99-101. My interpretation is in the Journal of Navigation paper, and Larry's expert assessment is in his book, which I have mentioned numerous times.

On total fuel available, the decoded flight tracks from the Pilot-In-Command flight simulator tracks (see my papers on the Malacca Track Riddle and MH370 Flight Hidden in Simulated Triple-Twist Riddle) identifies “flight length” as the critical planning metric used by the mastermind related to fuel consumption calculations against flight length. Your equivalence of time to fuel-consumption implicitly assumes some kind of optimal automatic velocity-altitude-weight-etc profile devoid of human interference. My take on this is that a mastermind pilot would not let the fuel run out (as explained in this LinkedIn article) and then do a glide. Rather a true mastermind would do the glide before fuel runs out in order to leave enough fuel for the controlled ditching with fuel available as I have been at pains to explain, fruitlessly it seems, in this article. Hence, the high-speed dive (your “unexplainable dive”) at the 7th arc is more likely the recovery stage from that low-fuel consumption glide phase. I have subsequently tracked MH370 flying through the clouds (5 satellite images) creating a 300 km trail of cloud anomalies that align well with the expected final flight track. I have also tracked highly-reflective and other surface debris from the crash site and tracked this debris field across to Réunion Island using the MODIS satellite and Google Earth Engine. These are new evidence unexplainable by any other location and theory.

?Surprisingly, you also come up with the same explanation of an exit from the high-speed dive in your Variant 2 trajectory, as evident in the quotes below from your paper, but we do disagree on fuel availability and you have made up an explanation for the trajectory after the “unexplainable dive” from the second BFO which implies a much shorter range of glide away from the 7th arc. You should also note from the JN paper that the explanation of the second BFO requires an eastward turn otherwise that BFO is not explainable by a southerly track. And that BFO is simply explainable as an increased (controlled) declination, plus eastward veering. Lastly note the statement in the JN paper that “Simply put, the aircraft is not a gravitationally accelerated lead-weight when it runs out of fuel; despite what a decoupled (BFO) model might lead some to believe.” So here are the selected excerpts from your report (with my bolded phrases):

?Page 71: Please note that Table 17 does not include the BFO (-2Hz) of the last burst emitted by the SATCOM at 00h19:38 UTC. This peculiar case is addressed as a variant of the final descent presented in the next section. Details can be found in Annex 1: Variant 2 of the End of the Flight” of this report.

Page 76: At this point in time, the Inmarsat measured BFO of -2Hz raises questions. If this value is correct, it implies a rate of descent of at least -14500fpm meaning that the aircraft was diving just after the crossing of arc 7. No convincing technical explanation has been found for this “extraordinary” BFO. Nevertheless, we analyse it in Annex 1 of this report and present an alternate descent path including an explanation for this BFO. Since all searches of the wreckage in the Arc7 area were unsuccessful and since very few debris were found eventually, the best interpretation is operational: the person in command recovered from this unexplained dive and the aircraft continued its controlled gliding descent before a proper ditching.

Figure 58: Variant 2 of the end of flight including a dive followed by a quick recovery (Blelly/Marchand)

Page 85: The small number of pieces of debris found and their type led to a conclusion that the aircraft did not violently crash into the water with a high speed. Otherwise, it would be similar to crashing into a concrete wall spreading thousands of pieces around. In our view, it is perfectly possible that after the start of the dive – it being voluntary or involuntary – the person in command recovered from this very quickly.

Lastly, my work is based on reconciling ALL evidence, and I do not use the capitalized word ALL lightly as there are over a dozen publications that comprehensively deal with evidence from MH370. The remaining work underway currently is with Dr. Usama Kadri on discovering the surface sounds from the controlled ditching. Dr. Kadri and I hope to report on this once we have finalized checks on one promising set of signals. The deep sounds have previously been reconciled by me and this is reported in the JN article and documented in the “There Lies MH370” report.

None of this evidence is reconcilable to your location. You should also be aware that your reliance upon the old CSIRO drift model has also been seriously questioned and rectified in the “Drift versus Sail…” report using the carefully collected CSIRO field data from drift experiments. The most stringent test of any drift model is to explain the innocuous Malaysian Airlines towelette found by the Millers at Thirsty Point, Cervantes on the 2 July 2014. The drift-formula-corrected and highly-resolved CSIRO model using data-assimilated real-time currents predicted this find from my location within a day of the Millers discovering it on their daily walk along an isolated 4WD beach. I don’t see any way of this find being explainable by your location and less so by reliance upon the old CSIRO model which was drifting the flaperon way too quickly.

Since judgement day approaches, let’s just wait and see what Armada 78 06 finds or doesn’t find. One of us will have to face the question of whether we can handle the truth. My regret in all of this is the lack of formation of a Scientific Technical Working Group that would have dealt with all of these issues collaboratively and recommended locations for a successful final search. As you French say “C'est la vie”. As for the truth, if they don’t find MH370 at my location, I will hand in my license as a scientist, and return to digging weeds from my overgrown backyard, plus congratulate you of course. Whatever location it is found in, I will be highly relieved to see this dreadful MH370 saga come to an end.