To add to what I wrote earlier, there have been reports of passengers having made cellular phone calls to their families from aircraft which are about to crash. Well, these most probably were made via micro-base stations in the aircraft carried over the aircraft's satellite link to the ground station.
According to Wikipedia, "the datalink for Malaysia Airline's avionics communications at the time of the incident was supplied by SITA, which contracted with Inmarsat to provide a satellite communication link using Inmarsat's Classic Aero service.
Satellite communications between MH370 and the ground stations was made from the satellite data unit (SDU) on MH370 to Inmarsat's satellite above the Indian Ocean, which relayed communication down to Inmarsat's satellite ground station in Perth, Australia.
SITA (Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques) is a multinational information technology company providing IT and telecommunication services to the air transport industry. The company provides its services to around 400 members and 2,500 customers worldwide, which it claims is about 90% of the world's airline business. Around the world, nearly every passenger flight relies on SITA technology.
"The phone call Fariq was reported to have tried to make over Penang even adds more weight to the MH370 disappearance being a deliberate act."
As far as I understand, it is not possible to make cellular telephone calls from high up in an aircraft, unless there are cellular micro-base stations or what are called femtocells installed on the aircraft itself, which are in-turn connected to ground stations through the plane's radio-communication systems.
Likewise if you can make a cellular phone call from the top floor of a very tall building, from the lowest level of an underground car part or from a metro train running underground or from an underground metro train station, this would only be possible if there are micro-base stations installed within these areas which are connected to your cellular operator's network usually via Ethernet LAN cable or fibre.
Cellular base stations ideally have their antennas mounted at a height of about four storeys above the ground. There usually are three antennas per base station, with each one covering a 120 degrees arc, with the set of three providing 360 degrees coverage of the ground around the base station. The beams of these antennas usually point horizontally outwards and slightly downward to cover a roughly circular cell area with a radius of from 3 to around 5 kilometres around the base station. The lower the frequencies used by the base station and the by the generation of cellular communications - i.e. 1G, 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G, the longer the range of the base station's coverage.
Each of these base stations usually are connected to the core of your cellular service provider's network via cable, usually fiber these days, or where a physical connection is not possible, via point-to-point, high-capacity microwave radio links.
To enable continuous coverage over a wide area beyond the range of each base station, the cellular network operator installs sets of seven base stations arranged in a honeycomb topology, with handoff or the cellular phone (such as in a moving vehicle) between base stations as it crosses between the respective coverage areas of adjacent base stations.
With the range of frequencies assigned for the operator's use by the communications regulator being sub-divided into seven sets different of frequencies used by each base station to avoid interference between of frequencies between adjacent base stations, and cellular base stations using the same sub-set of frequencies are placed far enough apart to avoid interference.
To come to the main point I wish to make, way back in the late 1990s, I was on the top floor of what was the 22-storey Sime Darby (now Wisma FGV) building in Kuala Lumpur and my 2G GSM (900MHz) cellular signal lost its connection to my cellular service provider's base station signal.
Later I experienced a similar loss of cellular signal when I was in one of the top floors of the 50-storey Maybank Tower (243.5 metres tall) plus the height of the hill upon which it stands.
So if my cellular phone lost its connection to the base station at such building heights, what more from a plane at heights of 35,000 feet (10,668) and way out above the sea, hundreds or even thousands of kilometres from terrestrial base stations.
All I am willing to say in public with regard the flight path which MH370 took after communications was lost after the aircraft crossed the Igari waypoint and at the critical juncture when it was transitioning between Malaysian and Vietnamese air-traffic control jurisdiction, is that MH370 was subsequently flown along a route towards the southern part of the Indian Ocean, which is the deepest, by someone either on board MH370 or remotely, who had an intimate knowledge of civil and military radar coverage along the route, with the intention to land the plane into the ocean, so that it would sink with the fuselage intact, thus leaving very little or no debris on the ocean surface, thus making it almost impossible to find MH370, as well as its black boxes, at depths between 5,000 to 8,000 metres.
This theory is supported by the fact that most of the debris such as the flaperon, engine cowling with a Rolls Royce logo on it, leading edge flaps, parts of the wing surface and so forth, which float and were subsequently discovered of islands such as Reunion on the other side of the Indian Ocean are parts from exterior parts of MH370, such as the wings, which would have been torn off by the impact of the aircraft being ditched under control into the Indian Ocean.
Whilst we can speculate all we want about what happened to MH370 that fateful day, we will only know the truth when the remains of that aircraft is finally found, even if it is at the bottom of the Diamantina Deep.
Also, I have my doubts about the that former Freescale Semiconductors Malaysia (now NXP Malaysia, and formerly Motorola Semiconductors) semiconductor assembly and testing plant being a "research and development centre of components for hi-tech military weapons and navigation systems".
US-based semiconductor electronic device companies have located in the developing countries of Asia, their labour-intensive, relatively low-tech, final assembly and packaging of electronic circuits built on tiny silicon chips (integrated circuits) into hermetically-sealed plastic or ceramic packaging with metal leads which enable them to be subsequently soldered onto printed circuit boards by circuit board manufacturer customers downstream from the assembly plants.
Such semiconductor integrated circuit assembly plants, including Intel, Texas Instruments, National Semiconductor, Motorola, Harris Semiconductor, Fairchild, Carter Semiconductor, Siemens and so forth began to be set up in Malaysia in the 1970s and they provided mass employment mostly to young women with an SPM (Year 11) school exam certificate, whose role was mostly to assemble together these integrated circuits with the aid of microscopes and other equipment which enabled them to perform such delicate tasks.
My first job after graduation with an electronics engineering degree was as a process engineer at the National Semiconductor semiconductor integrated circuit assembly plant in the Senawang Industrial Estate outside Seremban, Negeri Sembilan way back in 1980.
At the plant, we received arrays of integrated circuits built on circular silicon wafers at National Semiconductor plants elsewhere, and we diced the circular silicon wafers into individual silicon chips, each being identical integrated circuits, each of which we then mounted into a cavity within a ceramic base, then connected fine metal wires between mounting pads on the chip to the metal leads to the outside world, then placed a ceramic cover above the base, then hermetically sealed up the silicon chip within its ceramic casing, then trimmed off the metal bars holding the metal leads, then cleaned them of any oxidation, dipped them in molten solder, packed them into anti-static tubes and then shipped them out for final test at a National Semiconductor plant elsewhere, before they were sold to the market.
From what I understand today, amongst all these semiconductor plants, only Intel in Penang conducts design and development work on semiconductor integrated circuits, often in collaboration with their colleagues at other Intel locations around the world, whilst it has been slowly phasing out its lower-tech assembly plants to other countries.
NXP Semiconductor, which took over the Freescale Semiconductor plant in Sungai Way, Petaling Jaya, Selangor, describes its operations thus:-
"With a built-up area of 750,000 sq. ft. on a 20-acre site, this facility is dedicated to assembly and testing of the broad NXP portfolio of microprocessors, microcontrollers, digital signal processors, mixed signal and radio frequency (RF) products."
"Since its establishment in 1972, this facility has been recognized through various awards by the government and industry for its contribution to the development and growth of human resource talent, the benchmarking of sustainable development and prosperity and well-being of Malaysia. "
And here is a Wikimapia description of operations at the earlier Freescale Semiconductor plant.
"Formerly known as Motorola, Freescale Semiconductor Malaysia Sdn Bhd, located in Petaling Jaya, is a modern semiconductor facility for assembly and testing of integrated circuits (IC)."
"With a built-up area of 750,000 sq. ft. on a 20-acre site, this facility is dedicated to assembly and testing of microprocessors, microcontrollers, digital signal processors, mixed signals and radio frequency (RF) integrated circuits (IC) for the Networking and Computing Systems, Transportation and Standard Product Systems and Wireless & Broadband Systems market segments."
The design and development work of such semiconductor integrated circuits would have been done in D&D facilities in the U.S., or elsewhere in more advanced countries, and it would be really foolish of the U.S. government to allow design and development, or even the fabrication and assembly work on militarily sensitive circuitry outside of the U.S., let alone their used as building blocks (like Lego blocks) in the production of any militarily sensitive devices or equipment downstream from the semiconductor assembly plants.
If I recall right, a Freescale press release at that time explained that those engineers on MH370 had come from a newly established Freescale assembly plant in China to learn from their Freescale colleagues in Malaysia, and were on their way home on that ill-fated MH370.
When I joined the National Semiconductor plant in Senawang in 1980, our more experienced colleagues from National Semiconductor in Thailand had come to train our production operators , so this is a common practice amongst multi-national semiconductor plants.
As for certain parties trying to get their hands upon the technology and design behind a militarily sensitive, high-tech device or piece of equipment, would it make more sense to try and obtain that piece of equipment to reverse engineer it and know how it works, or would it make more sense to pay the designer or designers, or someone in the company to provide the design and blueprints of the device, which can very easily be done using Internet communications today.
Imagine if you want to make an especially unique and tasty seafood tomyam like that sold in a particular restaurant in Ha'adyai, would you buy the tomyam, take it home and try to reverse engineer it, or would you pay the chef to provide you the recipe, with full instructions on how to go about preparing all the ingredients, blending them together and cooking up the tomyam, including the temperature settings, types of cooking pots used and so forth?
To add to what I wrote earlier, there have been reports of passengers having made cellular phone calls to their families from aircraft which are about to crash. Well, these most probably were made via micro-base stations in the aircraft carried over the aircraft's satellite link to the ground station.
According to Wikipedia, "the datalink for Malaysia Airline's avionics communications at the time of the incident was supplied by SITA, which contracted with Inmarsat to provide a satellite communication link using Inmarsat's Classic Aero service.
Satellite communications between MH370 and the ground stations was made from the satellite data unit (SDU) on MH370 to Inmarsat's satellite above the Indian Ocean, which relayed communication down to Inmarsat's satellite ground station in Perth, Australia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SITA_(company)
SITA (Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques) is a multinational information technology company providing IT and telecommunication services to the air transport industry. The company provides its services to around 400 members and 2,500 customers worldwide, which it claims is about 90% of the world's airline business. Around the world, nearly every passenger flight relies on SITA technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370_satellite_communications
So if the SDU on MH370 was turned off or disabled, cellular phone calls from MH370 to someone on the ground would have been impossible.
I have a doubt about this:
"The phone call Fariq was reported to have tried to make over Penang even adds more weight to the MH370 disappearance being a deliberate act."
As far as I understand, it is not possible to make cellular telephone calls from high up in an aircraft, unless there are cellular micro-base stations or what are called femtocells installed on the aircraft itself, which are in-turn connected to ground stations through the plane's radio-communication systems.
Likewise if you can make a cellular phone call from the top floor of a very tall building, from the lowest level of an underground car part or from a metro train running underground or from an underground metro train station, this would only be possible if there are micro-base stations installed within these areas which are connected to your cellular operator's network usually via Ethernet LAN cable or fibre.
Cellular base stations ideally have their antennas mounted at a height of about four storeys above the ground. There usually are three antennas per base station, with each one covering a 120 degrees arc, with the set of three providing 360 degrees coverage of the ground around the base station. The beams of these antennas usually point horizontally outwards and slightly downward to cover a roughly circular cell area with a radius of from 3 to around 5 kilometres around the base station. The lower the frequencies used by the base station and the by the generation of cellular communications - i.e. 1G, 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G, the longer the range of the base station's coverage.
Each of these base stations usually are connected to the core of your cellular service provider's network via cable, usually fiber these days, or where a physical connection is not possible, via point-to-point, high-capacity microwave radio links.
To enable continuous coverage over a wide area beyond the range of each base station, the cellular network operator installs sets of seven base stations arranged in a honeycomb topology, with handoff or the cellular phone (such as in a moving vehicle) between base stations as it crosses between the respective coverage areas of adjacent base stations.
With the range of frequencies assigned for the operator's use by the communications regulator being sub-divided into seven sets different of frequencies used by each base station to avoid interference between of frequencies between adjacent base stations, and cellular base stations using the same sub-set of frequencies are placed far enough apart to avoid interference.
To come to the main point I wish to make, way back in the late 1990s, I was on the top floor of what was the 22-storey Sime Darby (now Wisma FGV) building in Kuala Lumpur and my 2G GSM (900MHz) cellular signal lost its connection to my cellular service provider's base station signal.
Later I experienced a similar loss of cellular signal when I was in one of the top floors of the 50-storey Maybank Tower (243.5 metres tall) plus the height of the hill upon which it stands.
So if my cellular phone lost its connection to the base station at such building heights, what more from a plane at heights of 35,000 feet (10,668) and way out above the sea, hundreds or even thousands of kilometres from terrestrial base stations.
All I am willing to say in public with regard the flight path which MH370 took after communications was lost after the aircraft crossed the Igari waypoint and at the critical juncture when it was transitioning between Malaysian and Vietnamese air-traffic control jurisdiction, is that MH370 was subsequently flown along a route towards the southern part of the Indian Ocean, which is the deepest, by someone either on board MH370 or remotely, who had an intimate knowledge of civil and military radar coverage along the route, with the intention to land the plane into the ocean, so that it would sink with the fuselage intact, thus leaving very little or no debris on the ocean surface, thus making it almost impossible to find MH370, as well as its black boxes, at depths between 5,000 to 8,000 metres.
This theory is supported by the fact that most of the debris such as the flaperon, engine cowling with a Rolls Royce logo on it, leading edge flaps, parts of the wing surface and so forth, which float and were subsequently discovered of islands such as Reunion on the other side of the Indian Ocean are parts from exterior parts of MH370, such as the wings, which would have been torn off by the impact of the aircraft being ditched under control into the Indian Ocean.
Whilst we can speculate all we want about what happened to MH370 that fateful day, we will only know the truth when the remains of that aircraft is finally found, even if it is at the bottom of the Diamantina Deep.
Also, I have my doubts about the that former Freescale Semiconductors Malaysia (now NXP Malaysia, and formerly Motorola Semiconductors) semiconductor assembly and testing plant being a "research and development centre of components for hi-tech military weapons and navigation systems".
US-based semiconductor electronic device companies have located in the developing countries of Asia, their labour-intensive, relatively low-tech, final assembly and packaging of electronic circuits built on tiny silicon chips (integrated circuits) into hermetically-sealed plastic or ceramic packaging with metal leads which enable them to be subsequently soldered onto printed circuit boards by circuit board manufacturer customers downstream from the assembly plants.
Such semiconductor integrated circuit assembly plants, including Intel, Texas Instruments, National Semiconductor, Motorola, Harris Semiconductor, Fairchild, Carter Semiconductor, Siemens and so forth began to be set up in Malaysia in the 1970s and they provided mass employment mostly to young women with an SPM (Year 11) school exam certificate, whose role was mostly to assemble together these integrated circuits with the aid of microscopes and other equipment which enabled them to perform such delicate tasks.
My first job after graduation with an electronics engineering degree was as a process engineer at the National Semiconductor semiconductor integrated circuit assembly plant in the Senawang Industrial Estate outside Seremban, Negeri Sembilan way back in 1980.
At the plant, we received arrays of integrated circuits built on circular silicon wafers at National Semiconductor plants elsewhere, and we diced the circular silicon wafers into individual silicon chips, each being identical integrated circuits, each of which we then mounted into a cavity within a ceramic base, then connected fine metal wires between mounting pads on the chip to the metal leads to the outside world, then placed a ceramic cover above the base, then hermetically sealed up the silicon chip within its ceramic casing, then trimmed off the metal bars holding the metal leads, then cleaned them of any oxidation, dipped them in molten solder, packed them into anti-static tubes and then shipped them out for final test at a National Semiconductor plant elsewhere, before they were sold to the market.
From what I understand today, amongst all these semiconductor plants, only Intel in Penang conducts design and development work on semiconductor integrated circuits, often in collaboration with their colleagues at other Intel locations around the world, whilst it has been slowly phasing out its lower-tech assembly plants to other countries.
NXP Semiconductor, which took over the Freescale Semiconductor plant in Sungai Way, Petaling Jaya, Selangor, describes its operations thus:-
"With a built-up area of 750,000 sq. ft. on a 20-acre site, this facility is dedicated to assembly and testing of the broad NXP portfolio of microprocessors, microcontrollers, digital signal processors, mixed signal and radio frequency (RF) products."
"Since its establishment in 1972, this facility has been recognized through various awards by the government and industry for its contribution to the development and growth of human resource talent, the benchmarking of sustainable development and prosperity and well-being of Malaysia. "
https://www.nxp.com/company/about-nxp/worldwide-locations/malaysia:MALAYSIA
And here is a Wikimapia description of operations at the earlier Freescale Semiconductor plant.
"Formerly known as Motorola, Freescale Semiconductor Malaysia Sdn Bhd, located in Petaling Jaya, is a modern semiconductor facility for assembly and testing of integrated circuits (IC)."
"With a built-up area of 750,000 sq. ft. on a 20-acre site, this facility is dedicated to assembly and testing of microprocessors, microcontrollers, digital signal processors, mixed signals and radio frequency (RF) integrated circuits (IC) for the Networking and Computing Systems, Transportation and Standard Product Systems and Wireless & Broadband Systems market segments."
http://wikimapia.org/147912/Freescale-Semiconductors-Malaysia-Sdn-Bhd
The design and development work of such semiconductor integrated circuits would have been done in D&D facilities in the U.S., or elsewhere in more advanced countries, and it would be really foolish of the U.S. government to allow design and development, or even the fabrication and assembly work on militarily sensitive circuitry outside of the U.S., let alone their used as building blocks (like Lego blocks) in the production of any militarily sensitive devices or equipment downstream from the semiconductor assembly plants.
If I recall right, a Freescale press release at that time explained that those engineers on MH370 had come from a newly established Freescale assembly plant in China to learn from their Freescale colleagues in Malaysia, and were on their way home on that ill-fated MH370.
When I joined the National Semiconductor plant in Senawang in 1980, our more experienced colleagues from National Semiconductor in Thailand had come to train our production operators , so this is a common practice amongst multi-national semiconductor plants.
As for certain parties trying to get their hands upon the technology and design behind a militarily sensitive, high-tech device or piece of equipment, would it make more sense to try and obtain that piece of equipment to reverse engineer it and know how it works, or would it make more sense to pay the designer or designers, or someone in the company to provide the design and blueprints of the device, which can very easily be done using Internet communications today.
Imagine if you want to make an especially unique and tasty seafood tomyam like that sold in a particular restaurant in Ha'adyai, would you buy the tomyam, take it home and try to reverse engineer it, or would you pay the chef to provide you the recipe, with full instructions on how to go about preparing all the ingredients, blending them together and cooking up the tomyam, including the temperature settings, types of cooking pots used and so forth?