Richard Godfrey is the author and he used WSPR "The WSPR protocol exchanges call sign, location and other information between radio stations." I guess it's this?
I’m always skeptical of anything based on ‘revolutionary new technology’ established as the credible source of the claim, without a deep dive or explanation of said tech.
The claim that the pattern was flown at a constant groundspeed of 497 knots[1] seems to imply no (or little) wind at that place, altitude and time. Is that plausible?
[1] This claim appears in Godfrey's original, so it is not a case of the reporter misunderstanding.
There is a straight line flight path(if I'm reading this right)looking like a longitude correction, followed by a latitude correction (in the wrong place) for a landing at "BEDAX". Holding pattern waiting for radio comms? Then a ditch to the nearest open sea? Was someone spoofing GPS data? PS: if I am taking out of my hat, then please disregard. I am not a flier, and had to check which is lat and long!
Most names on an air chart are waypoints. A waypoint is essentially a named pair of GPS coordinates. There are vastly more waypoints than airports. BEDAX is a waypoint in the ocean, you can’t land on it.
No problem! Myself gotten into this subject not long ago.
Another cool thing is navaids, those are also labeled on charts but they are more interesting than simple waypoints because they have radio. Some navaids are directional and tell your instruments whether you are moving towards them or not, and on which vector (degrees relative to north). You can use navaids and basic radio instruments in an airplane to figure out where you are on a map and where you are heading without any electronics and GPS, you just need to know their frequencies (charts specify those).
“If the pilot’s goal was to make MH370 disappear without trace, then why waste fuel with a holding pattern and why not head directly to most remote area possible of the Indian Ocean without deviation?”
I mean I know literally nothing at all and am speculating on top of speculation. But if you were gaming out this plan, wouldn't that seem an opportune moment to execute your plan to disable the other pilot?
For the airplane to have reached this position, whoever was at the controls at this time must have disabled the other well before, as it is utterly implausible that the other pilot could have been persuaded to cooperate in the flight path to that point, and only slightly less plausible that the pilots conspired to follow that flight path. From these considerations, the other pilot must have been incapacitated at least by the time the airplane flew past Penang, a more-than-adequate airport for an emergency landing, and probably at or before the alleged emergency that started the events.
As for the pilot's motives, if this holding pattern did occur, we can only speculate - and I, for one, can speculate that the pilot was balking at taking the final step that would lead to his death, but he was flying a planeload of people killed by his own hand...
The aircraft was at 36,000 feet in the hold. Perhaps the pilot put the plane in the hold so he could subdue remaining crew and pax or mess with something outside of the cockpit?
At that altitude anyone without oxygen would be passed out or dead (higher than Mt Everest).
In another tragedy, A Greek 737 had a pressurization issue (crew failed to communicate because one was Ukrainian and the other was Greek) and it killed everyone except a flight attendant. The FA could not get the plane off autopilot to descend. The aircraft flew to the last waypoint in the FMS and entered a hold and continued holding until it ran out of fuel and crashed.
Perhaps that was what happened with this hold except it eventually left the hold for some reason and continued until it ran out of fuel and descended into the ocean?
China shoots down MH370 because U.S. forces were intercepting it and seizing electronic equipment on the way to China that China didn’t want the U.S. to intercept.
Or secret autonomous TikTac drone has gone rogue and is targeting specific airliners to bring down that may evolve and threaten its air supremacy.
Please knock off these baseless conspiracy theories. There are 0 electronics in the world that the U.S. is going to shoot down a commercial airliner over. The CIA would just actually do CIA stuff like set up fake companies to ship or receive these items, or impersonate a driver, or any number of other actual realistic things that don’t involve outright murdering lots of people. Oh and good luck keep everyone quiet about it….
Maybe they just had a fume event, suffered from aerotoxic syndrome and went mad without realizing it? Maybe they had sparks and fire in the cockpit. B-777 tend(ed?) to do that. (According to Wikipedia at least)
Fuel dumped by an airplane breaks up into small droplets in the turbulent slipstream and quickly evaporates before it falls very far - and, being distributed from a fast-moving airplane, leaves only a thin and quickly-dissipating slick on the surface.
If the goal was, as you suggest, to get rid of any trace of the fuel, one would simply not do it close to the surface!
As it happens, I believe the Inmarsat events and radar intercepts indicate that the airplane was flying at a normal cruising altitude, and the the claim that it flew this pattern puts it at 36,000ft.
The simplest way to crash without leaving a fuel slick is to fly until fuel exhaustion. Spending 22 minutes in a holding pattern would put off estimates of how far the airplane could have gone on its fuel load (as would dumping fuel en-route), but I have no reason for thinking this was a motivation of the person then in control of the aircraft.
Speculation but maybe the murderer pilot (idk if there’s a better name? Terroist?) didn’t known how to dump the fuel or didn’t know that it would just dissipate?
This is just piling speculation upon speculation without evidence - and if the person flying the aircraft did not know how to dump fuel, then that would, of course, defeat the original speculation about the purpose of this alleged holding pattern!
If going by the book, the pilot probably would have to ask for clearance (although maybe not if they're over international waters?), but it really is a button press (or two of them): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEf35NtlBLg&t=705s
