Fluid ontologies in the search for MH370

Abstract

This paper gives an account of the disappearance of Malaysian Airways Flight MH370 into the southern Indian Ocean in March 2014 and analyses the rare glimpses into remote ocean space this incident opened up. It follows the tenuous clues as to where the aeroplane might have come to rest after it disappeared from radar screens – seven satellite pings, hundreds of pieces of floating debris and six underwater sonic recordings – as ways of entering into and thinking about ocean space. The paper pays attention to and analyses this space on three registers – first, as a fluid, more-than-human materiality with particular properties and agencies; second, as a synthetic situation, a composite of informational bits and pieces scopically articulated and augmented; and third, as geopolitics, delineated by the protocols of international search and rescue. On all three registers – as matter, as data and as law – the ocean is shown to be ontologically fluid, a world defined by movement, flow and flux, posing intractable difficulties for human interactions with it.

Keywords:

• Malaysian Airways flight MH370
• Southern Indian Ocean
• fluid ontologies
• scopic systems
• maritime search and rescue

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Lorenzo Pezzani and Christian Bueger for the opportunity to present earlier versions of this paper at ‘In Dialogue / 3’ at The Bartlett, University College London and ‘Into the Blue: Rethinking Maritime Security’ at Cardiff University in 2014. My thanks also go to the journal's peer reviewers, whose comments were enormously helpful in revising and improving the paper.

Notes

1. Until MH370, Inmarsat was a relatively low profile UK satellite communications company. It was created in 1979 as the International Maritime Satellite Organisation, a not-for-profit venture created by the International Maritime Organisation to enable ships to stay in contact with the shore and call for help; emergency distress calls are still routed by Inmarsat as priority for free. The company was privatised in 1999, bought by private equity houses Apax and Permira in 2003, then floated in London two years later, trebling in value in the next half-decade. It was briefly a member of the FTSE 100 before a fall in the share price in 2010 and 2011. Now the share price has almost regained its old levels, rising by 9% as a result of Inmarsat's contribution to the MH370 search (Pratley, 2014).

2. ‘Ping’ is a common term in IT networking vocabulary. It refers to the utility used to test the reachability of a host on an IP network and to measure the round trip time of the signal. In an ACARS network, a satellite sends a signal about once an hour to a receiver on an aircraft, which sends back a response signal, or handshake, thus signalling that it is still on the network (Cenciotti, 2014).

3. A geo-stationary satellite is one that moves around the earth at the earth's own angular velocity and thus appears not to move. The location of Inmarsat-3 F1 can be seen in real time on Real Time Satellite Tracking and Predictions (http://www.n2yo.com/satellite/?s=23839). Because it was launched in 1996 and has deteriorated, it is no longer absolutely geostationary, but moves from a height of 35,793.3 to 35,806.2 km (22,370.8 to 22,378.9 miles) above the earth's surface and from 1.539N to 1.539S and 64.471E to 64.594 E. Taking into account these slight movements in relation to the earth adjusted the analysis of where the aeroplane had come down (Steel, 2014a).

4. On Saturday 8 March 2014 at 00.41 (Malaysian time, MYT), Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777–200 Flight MH370 departed from Kuala Lumpur International Airport bound for Beijing, where it was due to arrive at 06.30, 9 March 2014, with 227 passengers and 12 crew on board. At 00.42 it was cleared to climb to 18,000 ft. (and subsequently to 35,000 ft.) and issued a direct track by Kuala Lumpur Air Traffic Control (KLATT) to waypoint IGARI (N6°56.87′, E103°34.63′). At 01.07, the plane's ACARS data transmission link, which transmits signals about speed, altitude, position and fuel level every 30 minutes, sent its routine signal. At 01.19 KLATT instructed it to contact Ho Chi Minnh Air Traffic Control (HCMATT) as it was passing out of Malaysian airspace and into Vietnamese airspace. MH370 acknowledged with ‘Good Night Malaysian 370’. Two minutes later, at 01.21 it was observed on KLATT radar screens as it passed over waypoint IGARI. At 01.22 its ACARS transponder was turned off or ceased operating. At 01.35, though this was only revealed three days later, Thai military radar showed the jet climbing to 45,000 ft. and turning sharply west. It then fell to 23,000 ft. and climbed again to 35,000 ft. Its radar signal was infrequent and did not include a flight number. At 01.37 the flight's expected routine ACARS update was not sent. A minute later HCMATT asked KLATCC of its whereabouts. KLATCC made enquiries of Malaysian Air Services Operation Centre, Singapore Air Traffic Control, Hong Kong Air Traffic Control and Phnom Penh Air Traffic Control to establish its location. No contact had been established with any of these Air Traffic Control Centres. At 01.45 the aeroplane is thought to have dropped to 5000 ft. in what is known as terrain masking to avoid radar detection. This was on the basis of reports from Malaysian villagers of bright lights and loud aircraft noises. At 02.15 what was thought to be the aircraft showed up on Malaysian military radar, wildly off course over the Malacca Strait. At 05.30 the Kuala Lumpur Rescue Co-ordination Centre activated a search and rescue operation. At 08.11, an Inmarsat satellite 22,245 miles above the earth's surface recorded a faint signal from the plane. This is its last known contact. The search for the missing aircraft initially took place in the South China Sea, south of Vietnam's Ca Mau peninsula, the direction the aircraft would have been heading in if it had stuck to its course. When Thai military radar data was released on March 11, the search moved to the Straits of Malacca and then, on March 14, after Inmarsat satellite data and calculations were released, to the Southern Indian Ocean. On March 24, the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced that ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ (Flight MH370 ‘Crashed in South Indian Ocean, 2014), the plane had crashed in Southern Indian Ocean with no survivors. To date, no shred of evidence to this effect has been found.

5. This has since been challenged as other investigators have subjected the data to different analytical techniques (Marszal, 2014; Schulman, 2014) and even the southern arc trajectory has been contested (Steel, 2014b). Inmarsat engineers themselves adjusted their initial calculations after changing their assumptions about how fast the plane was moving, and further refinement of the data shifted the long-term search site further south again (Associated Press, 2014).

6. Ocean data are coordinated by the Global Ocean Observing System, GOOS (http://www.ioc-goos.org/), established in 1991 by the United Nations. Three satellites are particularly important to this mission: Jason-2, Cryosat-2 and SARAL (K. Lee, 2014). Jason-2 is a collaboration between the French National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) and the USA's NASA and NOAA and was launched in 2008 (OSTM/Jason-2 Fact Sheet, n.d.); Cryosat-2 is an EU Space Agency research satellite launched in April 2010 (ESA's Ice Mission. n.d.) and is used largely to monitoring changes in the thickness of ice in polar-regions. SARAL is part of a technological collaboration between the Indian Space Station and CNES and was launched in 2013 (SARAL/Altika, 2013). These satellites have high-precision Poseidon-2 altimeters able to map ocean-surface topography within an accuracy of 5 cm (K. Lee, 2014). Complementing these satellite missions is a collaborative partnership between more than 30 countries to produce real-time data about the world's oceans, underpinned by a protocol of global data sharing, the Argo Program. The programme was named after the mythical Greek ship Argo, to emphasise its complementary relationship with Jason satellites and Poseidon altimeters. It has deployed a fleet of approximately 3600 drifting floats in the ocean worldwide since 2000. Argo floats are extraordinary sensing instruments stationed at a depth of 1000 m beneath the ocean surface (the so-called parking depth), from where they transmit regular data regarding their drift. Every ten days, they are programmed to change their buoyancy by changing their density (How Argo floats work, n.d.) and dive to a depth of 2000 m, then ascending to the sea-surface, measuring conductivity, temperature profiles and pressure as they do so. These data are transmitted to shore via satellites and distributed by the World Meteorological Organisation, adding to the data about sea level, speed, direction, ocean currents and heat stored in the oceans provided by Jason satellite missions. Chapter Three of the Fifth IPCC Assessment report of September 2013 was written on the basis of Argo data (Argo (oceanography), 2014). In the search for MH370, Australia's national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) used GOOS data as well as data from Australia's Integrated Marine Observation System, IMOS, (http://imos.aodn.org.au/imos123/), a national array of observing equipment (satellites, floats, moorings, radars, robotic gliders, etc., that monitor the ocean around Australia), as well as self-locating data marker buoys dropped into the ocean in support of the search, to run drift models to produce a possible debris field (K. Lee, 2014). This involved backtracking items spotted on the ocean's surface by satellite to their possible origin and forward tracking items from where they were spotted to where they could have drifted, to direct planes and boats to search areas (K. Lee, 2014).

7. Germany's commercial remote-sensing service provider, BlackBridge offering a similar crowdsourcing capability, with images from its satellites loaded onto a MapBox platform (Search for Flight MH 370, n.d.).

8. It was not revealed whether Tomnod played a role in identifying the data sent by Digital Globe to the Australian authorities. What was released though was that before its use in the MH370 search, Tomnod had 10,000 users. After the flight went missing, 3.6 million participants visited the platform, generating more than 385 million map views and tagging 4.7 million objects.

9. Section 4.1.1 of the Annex to the Convention requires that coordinating parties be given access to any information that may provide assistance in a search and rescue operation; in the MH370 search, this included classified surveillance data (Bateman & Bergin, 2014).

10. In addition to this, British naval vessel HMS Echo and Trafalgar-class nuclear powered attack submarine HMS Tireless, were deployed to the southern Indian Ocean two weeks after the first release of suspected wreckage images. This was significant, because HMS Tireless possesses advanced sensor platforms, possibly even the 2076 sonar system, one of the UK's most advanced and classified programmes, that complements ‘integrated active-passive detection capabilities’ with sophisticated imaging processes, enabling naval scientists to ‘see what they hear’ (Rogan, 2014).

11. For some time, pingers with frequencies of 30 to 50 kHz have been used to track deep ocean animals or as fishing net protectors (Richards, 2014).

12. Designed and manufactured by Bluefin Robotics, the Bluefin 21 is typically used by the oil and gas industry to conduct deep-water oilfield surveys.

13. Of these, the most significant during the search for MH370 were the Charter On Cooperation To Achieve The Coordinated Use Of Space Facilities In The Event Of Natural Or Technological Disasters (2000), which required that satellite data be released free of charge in support of the search effort, the International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue (1979), which determined that Australia co-ordinate the search effort in the Southern Indian Ocean as it fell within its Search and Rescue Region and the Montreal Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules for International Carriage by Air (1999), which governed compensation for the victims of the aeroplane's disappearance.

14. This conversation took place at the ESRC-sponsored Ideaslab on Maritime Security at Cardiff University, 26–27 June 2014 (http://piracy-studies.org/).

15. This team included representatives from the US National Transport Safety Board, the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch, China's Aircraft Accident Investigation Department, France's Land transport Accident Investigation Bureau, Australia Transport Safety Bureau, Boeing, Inmarsat and representatives from Singapore and Indonesia.

16. The only available surveys of this part of the ocean had been made by two Russian vessels during the International Indian Ocean Oceanographic Expedition (1959–1965), using dead reckoning (Smith & Marks, 2014).