Quote:The MH370 Miracle (updated)
If after nearly five years the disappearance of MH370 is still regarded as an unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) mystery, that’s because something that happened in the course of MH370’s vanishing is generally talked about as if it were unremarkable when in fact it is ridiculously unprecedented to the point of being virtually impossible. And if that fact could be more generally understood, the case would seem a lot less mysterious.
Call it the MH370 miracle.
OK, back up. Here’s the story of MH370 in a nutshell: a plane takes off and vanishes from air-traffic control radar. Weeks later, it turns out that the plane had reversed course, flown through an area of primary radar coverage, and then vanished from that. It’s gone. It’s dark. Off the grid. There is absolutely no way that anyone is ever going to know where this plane went.
Then a miracle happened. Something that has never happened before in the history of air travel and in all likelihood will never happen again. It’s this: three minutes after disappearing from primary radar, the plane began sending out a signal. A signal with unique and wonderful properties.
A Miracle Signal.
The general public has never heard about the remarkableness of this occurrence. It has been glossed over entirely. The ATSB and the mainstream press talk about the signal as something generated as a matter of course, like the cell phone data carelessly left behind by a fugitive criminal. But the Inmarsat data set is not like that at all. Not only was it not normal, it was unprecedented and produced in a way that cannot be explained.
Those of you have have been following the case know what event I’m talking about. At 18:25 UTC, MH370 starts sending signals to one of the satellites in the Inmarsat fleet: Inmarsat-3 F1, aka IOR, hovering in geostationary orbit over the equator at 64.5 degrees east.
The standard story goes like this: “Then scientists studying the signal realized that it contained clues about where the plane went.”
What gets omitted is how completely bonkers this is. In fact, there are two insane things going on here.
The first is that the signal exists at all. As far as I know, never in the history of commercial aviation has a plane been flying around with all of its communications equipment turned off, except for this one piece of gear. It. Just. Never. Happens.
Not ever.
Now at this point you might say, “But these were extraordinary circumstances, the plane had just been hijacked.” Okay, sure. But the point is that in order for this signal to exist, the hijacker/s must have done something extraordinary to the electrical system, something that pilots never normally do, that isn’t called for in any checklist, and for which there is no rational explanation that anyone has been able to come up with. And yet—voila! There it is, right at the exact moment it’s needed.
The second insane thing about the Miracle Signal is that it just so happens that this fortuitously appearing signal has embedded within it revelatory information—the BFO. Now, under any but miraculous circumstances, you would not expect this signal to tell you anything about the planes position or velocity. It’s a communications signal. It’s designed specifically to not have any navigational information. But lo and behold, it turns out that because of a quirky convergence of happenstance, the system is working in an unusual way that does indeed provide a hint—but only a hint!—of where the plane is going in a way that cannot be cross-checked with any other source.
This is the astonishing convergence:
1. The plane is equipped with a piece of equipment called an SDU that was manufactured by Thales. If this box had come from the other leading manufacturer, Rockwell Collins, there would have been no navigational information in the BFO data.
2. The plane is flying under the footprint of a satellite that is past its design lifespan and has run low on the fuel it requires for stationkeeping and so has started to wander in its orbit. If it had been functioning as designed then there would be no navigational information in the BFO data.
3. The subsequent path of the plane is along a north-south axis. It turns out that the information can’t be used to tell you where the plane traveled with any precision where the plane went, but it can tell you whether it went north or south.
4. The path lies entirely under that one satellite’s area of coverage. If the path had crossed over into another coverage zone, the connection would have been transferred over and the nav information would have been lost (but the direction of flight would have been unambiguously confirmed). For instance, if MH370 had flown east at IGARI instead of west, it would have flown into the coverage zone of POR, aka Inmarsat-3 F3, and re-logged on with that satellite.
5. The path lies entirely over water. If the plane had turned south earlier, or had headed east instead of west, it would have passed over land and either potentially been spotted or detected on radar.
6. MH370 used a satcom service called Classic Aero. If it used a newer, higher grade of service called SwiftBroadband, the transmissions between the plane and the satellite would have included position information.
So when we talk about MH370, and how the plane went into the southern Indian Ocean, what we’re talking about are six hours of data whose existence is nearly as miraculous as a little baby Jesus lying in a manger.
Imagine if the authorities had announced back in March, 2014: “We’ve just realized that after it disappeared from military radar, the plane waited three minutes and then started broadcasting a Miracle Signal. This Miracle Signal has never been seen before, and will never be seen again, and it happens by a crazy quirk of circumstance to provide us a super intriguing clue, but instead of questioning how it came to be, we’re going to just accept the data it’s giving us and treat it as unimpeachable fact.”
Oh, and that’s not the end.
The really gobsmacking thing about the miracle signal is that it took place in the context of a bunch of other equally unlikely things.
Namely:
— If the data are accepted as face value, the only explanation for the plane’s behavior is that the captain hijacked his own plane. That means a man with no manifestations of stress or mental illness spontaneously decides to commit mass murder/suicide.
— On top of that, he decides to do it in a way that no suicidal pilot ever has: by waiting impassively hour after hour until his fuel tanks to run dry.
— Once his fuel tanks run dry, he dives the plane toward the ocean, thinks better of it and glides it in what just happens to be the right direction, and then dives it into the ocean once more. This sequence of events is psychologically implausible but is the only way to explain how the plane could have ended up outside a seabed search area the size of Great Britain.
— The debris then floats in a way that is not reconcilable with any known drift model. Despite being adrift for over a year, none of it picks up any biofouling organisms more than a few months old, and the flaperon picks up goose barnacles that somehow manage to grow in the open air.
I’ve always said that the 18:25 reboot is the crucial clue that lies at the heart of the MH370 mystery. What I’m saying now is that it should be understood in even stronger terms: the extreme improbability of the Miracle Signal means that it can’t be construed as an unintentional byproduct of a “normal” suicide flight. It just could not have occured that way by happenstance. It must have been engineered.
One of the most common things you hear from normal people (by that I mean non-obsessives like present company) about MH370 is, “I just can’t believe that in this day and age a modern airliner could just vanish.” Of course, they’re absolutely right. Things don’t just vanish, except in one context: magic. Magicians make rabbits disappear out of hats, then make coins disappear behind kids’ ears, they make themselves disappear behind clouds of smoke.
If you don’t like the idea that something inexplicably miraculous is the handiwork of a magician, then your other option is to suppose that events have been arranged by sheer luck. Indeed, every “innocent” explanation that anyone has proposed to explain the vanishing of MH370—like a pilot suicide scenario, or a lithium battery fire, or accidental depressurization—assumes that the fact that the plane was never found is due to an incredible chain of coincidences.
And sure, bad luck happens in life, but once the odds get astronomical—when you start having to start calculating the odds that a rabbit could spontaneously teleport out of a top hat—then it’s time to start thinking about possible sleights-of-hand.
Here’s a historical analogy. In May of 1942, a Japanese fleet invading New Guinea was attacked by US aircraft carriers in the Coral Sea, suffering heavy damage. How, just half a year after Pearl Harbor, had America’s thinly stretched naval forces managed to intercept the Japanese task force amid the vastness of the Pacific? There were two possibilities. Either the Americans had just gotten lucky, or they had managed to break Japan’s naval cipher, JN-25. The former was a stretch, but the admiralty was certain that the Americans couldn’t have broken their code. A mentality later branded as “Victory Disease” convinced them that they were vastly superior to their enemy. They themselves couldn’t imagine how to break their most sophisticated code, so there was no way the Americans could have done it. The Japanese Navy had nothing to fear.
Then, bad luck hits again. As the Japanese carriers are moving against Midway Island, lo and behold, the beleagured American fleet not only shows up but gets a jump on them, sinking all their aircraft carriers and turning the tide of the war. How lucky could those gaijin get? Apparently really lucky, because the Japanese leadership didn’t understand their codes had been broken until they’d signed their surrender on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri.
The search officials tasked with finding MH370 were in the same camp as the wartime Japanese. As far as they were concerned, it was inconceivable that they were dealing with an adversary capable of outwitting them. When I asked Mark Dickinson, vice president of satellite operations, how Inmarsat could be certain that the MH370 data hadn’t been tampered with to mislead investigators, he dismissed the idea out hand, saying: “whoever did that would have to have six month’s worth of knowledge of what would happen, in essence have to know how the data would be used.”
To be fair, some among the Japanese leadership were suspicious of the Americans’ good luck all along. And in the case of MH370, some of us have long smelled a rat. Earlier this year David Gallo, the man who found AF447, wrote, “I never accepted the satellite data from day one,” adding: “I never thought I’d say this….I think there is a good chance that MH370 never came south at all. Let’s put it this way, I don’t accept the evidence that the plane came south.” And this fall we learned that investigators conducting the last extant investigationinto the disappearance of MH370 are looking into the possibility that the Inmarsat data could have been hacked.
So far, these skeptics are still in the minority, but I think that their numbers will continue to grow. A more people become aware of the circumstances of the MH370 miracle, the penny will continue to drop.
UPDATE 12/23/18: It seems to me that mysteries can be divided into two categories.
The first I’ll call mysteries of indeterminacy. When Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan departed Lae Island on July 2, 1937, they were flying a primitive aircraft, by modern standards, and relied on the most rudimentary form of navigation. It’s no wonder that they never made it to their intended destination. What we don’t know, and may never know, is where exactly in the western Pacific they crashed.
The second type I’ll call mysteries of inexplicability. When a magician puts a ball into a closed fist, then reopens it to reveal that nothing is there, you’re astonished at how he could have done it.
In science, the question of whether an unknown planet X lurks at the edge of the solar system is a mystery of indeterminacy. The struggle to reconcile quantum mechanics and relativity is a mystery of inexplicability.
MH370 started out looking like a mystery of indeterminacy. The authorities had a good data set in hand, and developed an analytic method to generate a search area. They were extremely confident that, while they didn’t know exactly where the plane had landed, a few hundred million dollars worth of brute-force seabed scanning would give them an answer.
They turned out to be wrong. The plane wasn’t there. So now we understand that what we’re really grappling with is a mystery of inexplicability. There simply are no simple, widely-accepted explanations for how it could be that the plane wasn’t found. This kind of problem needs to be tackled in a fundamentally different way.[/size][/color]
Quote:Ed Dentzel says:
December 23, 2018 at 12:36 pm
Jeff, you and I have talked about this privately a couple times but I would like to put this into the public sphere now. And I deeply appreciate the interview you did with me last year on my podcast–still one of the best episodes Unfound has done.
The scenario you are describing, one which you know I agree with, is one that would’ve taken highly specialized, highly technical, highly organized, highly secret training and knowledge to accomplish. Not to mention that some “muscle” would’ve been needed on MH370 itself in case passengers and crew figured out what was going on and revolted. So, this plan would take both intelligence and physical ability.
There are almost 8 billion people on the earth. I am guessing less than 100 would’ve had all the above qualifications to pull this plan off if they wanted. I mean, how many people really knew that satellite was low on fuel? That sounds like very, very specialized knowledge–like being able to name off the top of your head who had the #1 music hit in the US the first week of August 1970. You know what I mean?
So, the group who would’ve had all the knowledge to pull this off successfully is very small. In fact, you could probably fit the entire group on a Boeing 777.
So, who are those people?
Maybe to use an example that people can better understand. If a bank robbery is videotaped from the street. And the robber comes out the front door wearing a mask, you can’t tell who is. However, if he runs down the street, and the police are able to determine from the videotape the guy covered 100 meters between two telephone poles in less than 10 seconds, well, that quickly narrows down who the robber could be. The police would start with Usain Bolt and work their way down.
This is what MH370 feels like to me. There could’ve only been a very low number of people who could’ve pulled this off. Who are they–their actual names, not just their country . . . and where were they on March 8, 2014?
If it was the Russians–just throwing that out there, then what division of their military would learn how to steal a jet like this? Where would they train to do this? How long would the training take?
Also, couldn’t we learn those answers by figuring out in our own military, or British military, or any other modern force, what branch and special force could do this? Moreover, do they even train for something like this scenario? Has it even crossed their mind that a jet could be taken over and made to disappear this way?
Isn’t solving this mystery as “simple” as that?
Maybe I need to throw this out as well: If in fact your scenario is correct, in the last 5 years have there been any mysterious or unexplained or suspicious deaths in the satellite communications community? Because I think if we are going to go down this path and own it 100%, then we need to start thinking in these terms–because loose lips sink ships.
Quote:MH370: Ill-fated flight we can’t forget
EAN HIGGINS
@EanHiggins
12:00AM JANUARY 12, 2019
It’s approaching five years since payroll manager Jeanette Maguire’s secure life with her husband Shaun and their children in a quiet Brisbane suburb imploded under the force of something still unknown which happened 35,000 feet over the South China Sea.
At 1.19am on March 8, 2014, the captain of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, acknowledged a Kuala Lumpur air traffic controller’s instruction to switch radio frequency to Vietnamese controllers for the next stage of the flight to Beijing, saying: “Goodnight, Malaysian Three Seven Zero.”
They were the last words heard from any of the 239 souls on board MH370, one of whom was Maguire’s sister Cathy Lawton, who was travelling with her husband, Robert, and their close friends Mary and Rod Burrows on the trip of a lifetime to Asia.
After that last radio transmission at 1.19am, what is known is that within a couple of minutes the secondary radar transponder on MH370 was turned off, so the aircraft disappeared from air traffic controllers’ screens. A massive, wide-bodied Boeing 777 had vanished into thin air.
Military primary radar and automatic satellite “handshakes” later revealed MH370 turned around sharply to fly back over the Malaysia-Thai airspace border, and then made a lazy turn around Penang to fly northwest up the Straits of Malacca.
At some point, after it dropped out of primary radar range, the aircraft turned almost due south to end up somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean.
That much is known. What still isn’t known five years on is why all that happened on MH370 instead of what was supposed to, which was that the aircraft should have arrived in Beijing at 6.30am that day, with the Lawtons, the Burrows and the other 235 people on board safe and sound.
In that case, Cathy Lawton would still be alive today and Jeanette Maguire would not be struggling not only with the loss of her sister and brother-in-law, but also with the torment of not knowing where they are and why.
Maguire says she remains “gutted inside”.
“For me, I’m not going to know anything until they find that plane, and I have said that from day one. You can’t come up with any other evidence, so you have got to keep searching for that plane.”
Over the past five years there’s been a lot of excellent work done by a lot of people around the world — oceanographers, mathematicians, engineers, aviators, satellite experts — to try to establish what might have happened to MH370.
Jeanette Maguire is hoping for answers. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen
Armed with that knowledge, others have mounted some audacious efforts to find the aircraft. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau hunted for MH370 on the bottom of the southern Indian Ocean for more than two years, covering 120,000sq/km at a cost of $200 million to Australian, Malaysian and Chinese taxpayers.
Last year a British-owned, Houston-based private undersea survey company, Ocean Infinity, searched farther north across a similar-sized stretch of ocean from where the failed ATSB search left off, and also came up with naught.
Since MH370 was registered in Malaysia, the Malaysian government has responsibility for finding out what happened to the plane. Last July it released its much-anticipated safety investigation report, 500 pages long, with another 1000 pages of appendices.
The Malaysian-led investigation concluded somebody had deliberately flown the aircraft off course 40 minutes into the flight, and there were no signs of mechanical failure.
But, chief investigator Kok Soo Chon said, it was impossible to determine what actually happened without finding the wreckage and the black box flight data and cockpit voice recorders.
“The team is unable to determine the real cause for the disappearance of MH370,” he told the world media.
So, five years on, although a fair bit more is known, the fundamental cause of the disappearance of MH370 is not.
The question being widely asked is what to do next. The families of those lost on MH370, here and overseas, have a straightforward view: keep investigating, keep analysing, keep looking.
“I think they should start searching again,” Sunshine Coast woman Danica Weeks, who lost her husband Paul on MH370, says.
“This year has to be the year that something happens, I need some action with the Malaysian government.”
There was a foretaste of a renewed international campaign in Malaysia in late November when next of kin presented Malaysian Transport Minister Anthony Loke with what were claimed to be five new pieces of MH370 wreckage found off Madagascar.
One piece, a section of floor panel, was this week determined by Malaysian authorities to be likely from MH370.
Danica Weeks’s husband Paul was on the MH370 flight when it vanished. Picture: Facebook.
Grace Nathan, whose mother, Anne Daisy, was on MH370, said at the time: “The fact debris is still washing up now means the investigation should still be live … it shouldn’t be closed.”
It’s a view widely held in the aviation community.
“MH370 is one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history. I would like it solved,” former US airline captain and air crash investigator John Cox tells Inquirer.
“We know what happened and to a near certainty that it was a deliberate action,” Cox says.
“We do not have the wreckage or the recorders. To bring closure to the victims’ families would be a good thing.”
The Malaysian government says it is not unsympathetic to reopening the search, but it would need something new to go on.
“We are open to proposals, but we must have some credible leads before we decide,” Loke said at the November media event.
The best evidence towards where MH370 came down is what’s known as the Seventh Arc: a band off Western Australia on which MH370 is thought to have been at the seventh and last roughly hourly automatic satellite communication “handshake” relaying data from MH370’s engines to Malaysia Airlines engineers via a ground station in Perth.
The question is where up and down the Seventh Arc to look, and how far off it. The ATSB based its search on the assumption that at the end MH370 was a “ghost flight” with unconscious or dead pilots, and that it crashed in an uncontrolled dive after running out of fuel on autopilot.
A significant number of senior pilots, engineers, and air crash investigators believe the ATSB theory is wrong, and that MH370 was hijacked by Zaharie, flown to the end and ditched, taking the aircraft perhaps 100 nautical miles farther than the ATSB allowed for.
Mike Keane, the former chief pilot of Britain’s largest airline, easyJet; Simon Hardy, a serving senior British Boeing 777 captain; Australian former fighter pilot and Boeing 777 captain Byron Bailey; and veteran Canadian air crash investigator Larry Vance: they are all of this view. Last year Vance published a book supporting it with a detailed analysis.
Keane, Hardy and Bailey all believe MH370 lies just outside the southwestern edge of where the ATSB search ended and, though each of them has slightly different picks of latitude and longitude, a search across about 10,000sq km, which an outfit like Ocean Infinity could cover in a week or two for a ballpark figure of $10 million to $20m, would encompass them.
Other observers think MH370 lies the other way along the Seventh Arc — farther north.
It’s a possibility not excluded by David Griffin, the CSIRO oceanographer who led the complex drift modelling work that sought to determine where MH370 came down, based on where and when parts of the aircraft were found on and off the coast of Africa.
MH370 pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah passes through security just before boarding the ill fated flight.
The first piece of debris to be recovered was a 2m-long mostly intact flaperon, a movable part of the wing, discovered on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion in July 2015.
If MH370 had come down farther north along the Seventh Arc than had been searched, Griffin says, the currents suggest debris would have reached the far side of the Indian Ocean earlier — but that is not to be ruled out, he says.
“One possible explanation was no one was looking,” Griffin says.
What he means is that while French authorities were able to identify and recover what was pretty obviously a large part of a big aircraft, the same might not have been true for smaller, less identifiable pieces that might have been found earlier on African beaches by locals who might not have made the association with a plane, let alone MH370.
Even now, Griffin believes, it might be worth trying to retrieve more pieces of the aircraft that may have washed up, and searching for oral history on when they arrived.
It is one of several avenues of scientific and forensic exploration, Griffin suggests, which could yield new leads as to where to search for MH370, rather than just immediately sending more ships out to blindly scour more seabed around the Seventh Arc.
Looking back, he says the drift modelling studies done by the CSIRO and other oceanographers were good work for the time available, but there has never been a comprehensive, dedicated international collaborative project to this end. “I would like to get several modelling groups on to the job. They all did it in their spare time,” Griffin says.
Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah.
Similarly, he says although there was some examination of the crustaceans found on the flaperon, there had been very little scientific work done on their life cycle, which might have provided more clues to where it had started its journey across the southern Indian Ocean. He adds that many believe more investigation of Zaharie could unearth new pointers.
The issue, of course, is who should pay for more research, investigation, or undersea hunting. Malaysia bore the brunt of the cost of the ATSB-led search, picking up $115m of the tab, followed by Australia at $63m.
China, whose nationals accounted for two-thirds of the passengers, notionally put up $20m in kind including in the shape of a government vessel that, security experts claim, in fact spent most of its time in Fremantle spying on Australian military activity.
Vance has proposed the UN body the International Civil Aviation Organisation establish a fresh and independent air accident investigation team with a panel of highly qualified experts from several countries.
And a lot of people are pointing to Boeing, the manufacturer of the aircraft, which enjoyed a record $US10 billion in earnings in its last full financial year.
Boeing’s strategy has been to say as little as possible about MH370, resisting suggestions it should contribute funds to a search. Weeks launched what snowballed into a major international lawsuit against Boeing in the US, which failed in November on jurisdictional grounds.
She says she took the action only to get the aircraft manufacturer to do what its European arch rival, Airbus, did when Air France 447 went down in the Atlantic in June 2009 with the loss of all 228 on board. It took two years to find the Airbus A330’s wreckage in an undersea hunt similar to those mounted for MH370, and Airbus put up about €12m towards it, plus technical and logistical support such as supplying a transport plane and ship.
“What I wanted was for Boeing to say, ‘OK, we want to prove we are not negligent, we are going to find this plane’,” Weeks says.
Asked if Airbus thought Boeing should follow the lead it set with AF447 and cough up some millions in cash towards a new search, Airbus spokesman Justin Dubon says: “It is imperative for the entire aviation sector to learn as much as possible from accidents by understanding the root causes of these events in order to prevent them happening again.”
The families of those lost on MH370 believe, in the broader scheme of things, there are enough interested parties with deep pockets, such as Boeing, to fund a new search, and more than enough justification on grounds of both aviation safety and sheer compassion for the families of the disappeared.
The association representing the Chinese next of kin, MH370 China Families, is still not convinced Malaysia is telling the whole story, and many of its members have some lingering thoughts that the aircraft may have flown the other way and landed in Central Asia, perhaps as part of a hijacking involving hostages.
“We have not abandoned hope for the return of our loved ones,” the association says in a statement toInquirer.
“The search for the truth is not something money can buy.”
Ean Higgins’s book The Hunt for MH370 will be published by Pan Macmillan next month.
(01-12-2019, 08:08 AM)Peetwo Wrote: That Man 'Iggins back on MH370 -
Via the Oz:
Quote:MH370: Ill-fated flight we can’t forget
EAN HIGGINS
@EanHiggins
12:00AM JANUARY 12, 2019
It’s approaching five years since payroll manager Jeanette Maguire’s secure life with her husband Shaun and their children in a quiet Brisbane suburb imploded under the force of something still unknown which happened 35,000 feet over the South China Sea.
At 1.19am on March 8, 2014, the captain of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, acknowledged a Kuala Lumpur air traffic controller’s instruction to switch radio frequency to Vietnamese controllers for the next stage of the flight to Beijing, saying: “Goodnight, Malaysian Three Seven Zero.”
They were the last words heard from any of the 239 souls on board MH370, one of whom was Maguire’s sister Cathy Lawton, who was travelling with her husband, Robert, and their close friends Mary and Rod Burrows on the trip of a lifetime to Asia.
After that last radio transmission at 1.19am, what is known is that within a couple of minutes the secondary radar transponder on MH370 was turned off, so the aircraft disappeared from air traffic controllers’ screens. A massive, wide-bodied Boeing 777 had vanished into thin air.
Military primary radar and automatic satellite “handshakes” later revealed MH370 turned around sharply to fly back over the Malaysia-Thai airspace border, and then made a lazy turn around Penang to fly northwest up the Straits of Malacca.
At some point, after it dropped out of primary radar range, the aircraft turned almost due south to end up somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean.
That much is known. What still isn’t known five years on is why all that happened on MH370 instead of what was supposed to, which was that the aircraft should have arrived in Beijing at 6.30am that day, with the Lawtons, the Burrows and the other 235 people on board safe and sound.
In that case, Cathy Lawton would still be alive today and Jeanette Maguire would not be struggling not only with the loss of her sister and brother-in-law, but also with the torment of not knowing where they are and why.
Maguire says she remains “gutted inside”.
“For me, I’m not going to know anything until they find that plane, and I have said that from day one. You can’t come up with any other evidence, so you have got to keep searching for that plane.”
Over the past five years there’s been a lot of excellent work done by a lot of people around the world — oceanographers, mathematicians, engineers, aviators, satellite experts — to try to establish what might have happened to MH370.
Jeanette Maguire is hoping for answers. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen
Armed with that knowledge, others have mounted some audacious efforts to find the aircraft. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau hunted for MH370 on the bottom of the southern Indian Ocean for more than two years, covering 120,000sq/km at a cost of $200 million to Australian, Malaysian and Chinese taxpayers.
Last year a British-owned, Houston-based private undersea survey company, Ocean Infinity, searched farther north across a similar-sized stretch of ocean from where the failed ATSB search left off, and also came up with naught.
Since MH370 was registered in Malaysia, the Malaysian government has responsibility for finding out what happened to the plane. Last July it released its much-anticipated safety investigation report, 500 pages long, with another 1000 pages of appendices.
The Malaysian-led investigation concluded somebody had deliberately flown the aircraft off course 40 minutes into the flight, and there were no signs of mechanical failure.
But, chief investigator Kok Soo Chon said, it was impossible to determine what actually happened without finding the wreckage and the black box flight data and cockpit voice recorders.
“The team is unable to determine the real cause for the disappearance of MH370,” he told the world media.
So, five years on, although a fair bit more is known, the fundamental cause of the disappearance of MH370 is not.
The question being widely asked is what to do next. The families of those lost on MH370, here and overseas, have a straightforward view: keep investigating, keep analysing, keep looking.
“I think they should start searching again,” Sunshine Coast woman Danica Weeks, who lost her husband Paul on MH370, says.
“This year has to be the year that something happens, I need some action with the Malaysian government.”
There was a foretaste of a renewed international campaign in Malaysia in late November when next of kin presented Malaysian Transport Minister Anthony Loke with what were claimed to be five new pieces of MH370 wreckage found off Madagascar.
One piece, a section of floor panel, was this week determined by Malaysian authorities to be likely from MH370.
Danica Weeks’s husband Paul was on the MH370 flight when it vanished. Picture: Facebook.
Grace Nathan, whose mother, Anne Daisy, was on MH370, said at the time: “The fact debris is still washing up now means the investigation should still be live … it shouldn’t be closed.”
It’s a view widely held in the aviation community.
“MH370 is one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history. I would like it solved,” former US airline captain and air crash investigator John Cox tells Inquirer.
“We know what happened and to a near certainty that it was a deliberate action,” Cox says.
“We do not have the wreckage or the recorders. To bring closure to the victims’ families would be a good thing.”
The Malaysian government says it is not unsympathetic to reopening the search, but it would need something new to go on.
“We are open to proposals, but we must have some credible leads before we decide,” Loke said at the November media event.
The best evidence towards where MH370 came down is what’s known as the Seventh Arc: a band off Western Australia on which MH370 is thought to have been at the seventh and last roughly hourly automatic satellite communication “handshake” relaying data from MH370’s engines to Malaysia Airlines engineers via a ground station in Perth.
The question is where up and down the Seventh Arc to look, and how far off it. The ATSB based its search on the assumption that at the end MH370 was a “ghost flight” with unconscious or dead pilots, and that it crashed in an uncontrolled dive after running out of fuel on autopilot.
A significant number of senior pilots, engineers, and air crash investigators believe the ATSB theory is wrong, and that MH370 was hijacked by Zaharie, flown to the end and ditched, taking the aircraft perhaps 100 nautical miles farther than the ATSB allowed for.
Mike Keane, the former chief pilot of Britain’s largest airline, easyJet; Simon Hardy, a serving senior British Boeing 777 captain; Australian former fighter pilot and Boeing 777 captain Byron Bailey; and veteran Canadian air crash investigator Larry Vance: they are all of this view. Last year Vance published a book supporting it with a detailed analysis.
Keane, Hardy and Bailey all believe MH370 lies just outside the southwestern edge of where the ATSB search ended and, though each of them has slightly different picks of latitude and longitude, a search across about 10,000sq km, which an outfit like Ocean Infinity could cover in a week or two for a ballpark figure of $10 million to $20m, would encompass them.
Other observers think MH370 lies the other way along the Seventh Arc — farther north.
It’s a possibility not excluded by David Griffin, the CSIRO oceanographer who led the complex drift modelling work that sought to determine where MH370 came down, based on where and when parts of the aircraft were found on and off the coast of Africa.
MH370 pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah passes through security just before boarding the ill fated flight.
The first piece of debris to be recovered was a 2m-long mostly intact flaperon, a movable part of the wing, discovered on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion in July 2015.
If MH370 had come down farther north along the Seventh Arc than had been searched, Griffin says, the currents suggest debris would have reached the far side of the Indian Ocean earlier — but that is not to be ruled out, he says.
“One possible explanation was no one was looking,” Griffin says.
What he means is that while French authorities were able to identify and recover what was pretty obviously a large part of a big aircraft, the same might not have been true for smaller, less identifiable pieces that might have been found earlier on African beaches by locals who might not have made the association with a plane, let alone MH370.
Even now, Griffin believes, it might be worth trying to retrieve more pieces of the aircraft that may have washed up, and searching for oral history on when they arrived.
It is one of several avenues of scientific and forensic exploration, Griffin suggests, which could yield new leads as to where to search for MH370, rather than just immediately sending more ships out to blindly scour more seabed around the Seventh Arc.
Looking back, he says the drift modelling studies done by the CSIRO and other oceanographers were good work for the time available, but there has never been a comprehensive, dedicated international collaborative project to this end. “I would like to get several modelling groups on to the job. They all did it in their spare time,” Griffin says.
Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah.
Similarly, he says although there was some examination of the crustaceans found on the flaperon, there had been very little scientific work done on their life cycle, which might have provided more clues to where it had started its journey across the southern Indian Ocean. He adds that many believe more investigation of Zaharie could unearth new pointers.
The issue, of course, is who should pay for more research, investigation, or undersea hunting. Malaysia bore the brunt of the cost of the ATSB-led search, picking up $115m of the tab, followed by Australia at $63m.
China, whose nationals accounted for two-thirds of the passengers, notionally put up $20m in kind including in the shape of a government vessel that, security experts claim, in fact spent most of its time in Fremantle spying on Australian military activity.
Vance has proposed the UN body the International Civil Aviation Organisation establish a fresh and independent air accident investigation team with a panel of highly qualified experts from several countries.
And a lot of people are pointing to Boeing, the manufacturer of the aircraft, which enjoyed a record $US10 billion in earnings in its last full financial year.
Boeing’s strategy has been to say as little as possible about MH370, resisting suggestions it should contribute funds to a search. Weeks launched what snowballed into a major international lawsuit against Boeing in the US, which failed in November on jurisdictional grounds.
She says she took the action only to get the aircraft manufacturer to do what its European arch rival, Airbus, did when Air France 447 went down in the Atlantic in June 2009 with the loss of all 228 on board. It took two years to find the Airbus A330’s wreckage in an undersea hunt similar to those mounted for MH370, and Airbus put up about €12m towards it, plus technical and logistical support such as supplying a transport plane and ship.
“What I wanted was for Boeing to say, ‘OK, we want to prove we are not negligent, we are going to find this plane’,” Weeks says.
Asked if Airbus thought Boeing should follow the lead it set with AF447 and cough up some millions in cash towards a new search, Airbus spokesman Justin Dubon says: “It is imperative for the entire aviation sector to learn as much as possible from accidents by understanding the root causes of these events in order to prevent them happening again.”
The families of those lost on MH370 believe, in the broader scheme of things, there are enough interested parties with deep pockets, such as Boeing, to fund a new search, and more than enough justification on grounds of both aviation safety and sheer compassion for the families of the disappeared.
The association representing the Chinese next of kin, MH370 China Families, is still not convinced Malaysia is telling the whole story, and many of its members have some lingering thoughts that the aircraft may have flown the other way and landed in Central Asia, perhaps as part of a hijacking involving hostages.
“We have not abandoned hope for the return of our loved ones,” the association says in a statement toInquirer.
“The search for the truth is not something money can buy.”
Ean Higgins’s book The Hunt for MH370 will be published by Pan Macmillan next month.
Quote:Boeing ‘must fund MH370 search’
EAN HIGGINS
Pressure is mounting on the Malaysian government to renew the hunt for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, and on the aircraft’s manufacturer, Boeing, to fund a new search.
The giant US plane-maker’s European rival, Airbus, has told The Weekend Australian it contributed €12 million in cash plus technical and logistical support towards the successful two-year undersea search for one of its aircraft, the A330 flown as Air France flight 447, which went down in the Atlantic in June 2009.
Airbus has implied Boeing has a similar duty to help solve the mystery of MH370, the Boeing 777 that disappeared on March 8, 2014, with the loss of 239 lives.
As the fifth anniversary of the loss of MH370 approaches, next of kin have called on Malaysia to launch a new undersea search.
“This year has to be the year that something happens,” Danica Weeks, who lost her husband Paul on MH370, told The Weekend Australian. “I need some action with the Malaysian government.”
Ms Weeks said Boeing should help fund a renewed search.
MH370 vanished from air traffic controllers’ screens 40 minutes into a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, when its pilots ceased radio contact and its secondary radar transponder was turned off.
Military primary radar and automatic satellite “handshakes” later revealed the plane had turned back, darted around the Malaysia-Thailand airspace border, and flown up the Straits of Malacca before turning south to the southern Indian Ocean.
Two undersea searches, one led by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau and another by the private British-owned, Houston-based marine survey company Ocean Infinity, have failed to find the aircraft.
In July, the Malaysian-led safety investigation report into the disappearance of MH370 said it was not possible to determine what happened to the plane without the recovery of the wreckage and the black box flight data and cockpit voice recorders.
Air France 447 disappeared on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on June 1, 2009, but its resting place was not discovered until May 2011.
The recovery of the black boxes revealed the aircraft had stalled after ice crystals developed in the plane’s Pitot tubes, which measure airspeed, causing the autopilot to disengage. The pilots reacted incorrectly, putting the plane into a stall from which it never recovered.
Boeing spokesman David Sidman said the US company had supported the Malaysian MH370 investigation “by providing technical expertise and assistance”.
“Should credible new information emerge that results in government authorities resuming the search, Boeing stands ready to provide technical support as requested by the government investigating authorities,” he said.
Quote:
Victor Iannello
@RadiantPhysics
A new study of #MH370's flight path near Penang suggests the navigation system was operational and the flight computers were programmed before the turn for a path northwest up the Malacca Strait.
More details and discussion here: http://mh370.radiantphysics.com/2019/01/...nd-penang/
(02-28-2019, 11:03 AM)Peetwo Wrote: MH370: That man 'Iggins in the Oz
Via the Oz today:
MH370: the plane truth is out there
EAN HIGGINS @EanHiggins
12:00AM FEBRUARY 28, 2019
MH370 pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah.
A Malaysia Airlines plane parked on the tarmac at Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
Somewhere out in the southern Indian Ocean, maybe in one of the underwater canyons of Broken Ridge, but beyond the Seventh Arc, lies the answer to the world’s greatest aviation mystery.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when some very strange things happened on the Boeing 777. They caused a pilot to turn around, fly a zigzag course back over Malaysia, up the Straits of Malacca, then south to vanish in the middle of nowhere, all without a word from anyone on board.
Five years after it disappeared, the aircraft is still there, probably in very deep and cold water, well preserved along with the 239 souls on board, but just not yet found.
Once it is discovered the mystery can be solved. The flight data recorder, the cockpit voice recorder, the identity and disposition of anyone in the cockpit at the controls, the configuration and nature of damage to the different parts of the aircraft and, macabre though it is, the pathology of those on board will provide the clues.
We will learn why the aircraft turned around about 40 minutes into the flight. We will glean insight as to why at that time the secondary radar transponder was turned off and there was no further radio contact after the captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, delivered the last transmission: “Good night, Malaysian three seven zero.”
Extreme theories
Over the years since MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, there has been no shortage of speculation about what happened. Some believe it may have been a hijacking gone wrong. Others think there may have been a fire on board, possibly caused by the combination of cargo including lithium-ion batteries and the tropical fruit mangosteens.
There are those who look at accidental depressurisation, in which the pilots became a bit hypoxic, or light-headed, because of a faulty oxygen supply — not enough to pass out but enough to make silly and illogical decisions and fly the aircraft in a strange way.
Then there are the more extreme theories, such as that a rogue nation such as North Korea hacked into the aircraft’s control systems and electronically “captured” it.
Others, including some families of the Chinese passengers on the flight, say the official interpretation that MH370 flew south is wrong, and the aircraft was in fact hijacked and flown northwest to Central Asia and landed at an Islamic rebel air base, its passengers and crew still held hostage to this day.
And there is one theory that the captain, his marriage having collapsed, took a parachute on board in his flight crew bag, and depressurised the aircraft to kill everyone else.
He then set the aircraft on a course on automatic pilot, bailed out, and was picked up in a boat by his mistress to find a new life under stolen identities in another country.
Mass murder
Most professionals in the aviation business, though, believe the evidence best points to Zaharie having hijacked his own aircraft in a complex and cunning act of mass murder-suicide. The only debate there is whether, as the Australian Transport Safety Bureau maintains, MH370 was a “ghost flight” by the end, flying on autopilot with no one conscious and crashing down rapidly after fuel exhaustion. Or did Zaharie fly the aircraft to the end, making a controlled ditching to try to keep as much of MH370 intact as possible and sink it with a minimal debris field?
If the ATSB officials had worked on the premise that a pilot flew the aircraft to the end, they would effectively have had to say they believed MH370 was most likely hijacked by Zaharie. By saying instead, as they did, that MH370 had an “unresponsive crew” at the end, they could avoid making such a call publicly.
Many veteran airline captains and top air crash investigators suspect the ATSB officials, even if subconsciously, came up with what became known as their “ghost flight” and “death dive” theory to avoid having to publicly embarrass the Malaysian government and its government-owned national flag carrier by saying one of their pilots took 238 passengers and crew of many nationalities to their deaths.
The ATSB says, emphatically, no: the bureau’s officers have told Senate estimates they worked objectively on facts, science and logic, consulting the best experts in the field to establish their target search area, without bias or subjective influences.
If the ATSB is right, the aircraft came pretty much straight down after it ran out of fuel, producing a relatively narrow search zone. If Zaharie flew the aircraft to the end and ditched it, he could have taken it a much longer distance, perhaps 100 nautical miles and well outside the search area the bureau defined.
Where to look
There have been two extensive searches of the seabed, the first led by the ATSB at the Malaysian government’s request, the second by the British-owned, Houston-based private undersea survey company Ocean Infinity. Both came up with naught.
The MH370 mystery will not finally be solved until the aircraft is found and the black boxes recovered.
The question would be where to look. The best clue on where to find MH370 remains the satellite data, which tracked seven roughly hourly automatic electronic “handshakes” over the course of the flight.
The seventh and last handshake has given searchers a long arc upon which MH370 is thought to have come down, but not the point on the arc where it lies.
One obvious option would be to search a progressively wider stretch around the Seventh Arc beyond that already covered, or farther north or a little farther south.
The problem with such an approach is that it would still be based on the ATSB’s assumptions about how the flight ended, which have been progressively challenged by new facts and independent expert analysis.
Between the ATSB-led search, which cost $200 million of Australian, Chinese and Malaysian taxpayer money, and that of Ocean Infinity, about 250,000sq km of seabed in the southern Indian Ocean were covered.
An increasing number of aviation professionals are asking: since the search based on the ATSB’s theory failed to find the aircraft, why not consider a new hunt based on the alternative scenario that Zaharie flew the aircraft to the end?
Pilots’ conclusions
Byron Bailey, Simon Hardy and Mike Keane are three highly experienced aviators who started their careers as military officers and went on to the top of their profession as senior airline captains.
The trio have each studied the MH370 saga and concluded that the evidence shows only one possible conclusion: Zaharie flew the aircraft to the end and ditched it.
They have each pursued their own calculations of where MH370 lies, producing different outcomes but all in a relatively small area just outside the southern end of where the ATSB searched.
Hardy identified this search zone in 2015. He used the same radar and satellite tracking data to develop a mathematical formula based on similar calculations of speed, wind, direction and endurance along the Seventh Arc as the ATSB employed, but with the additional assumption of a controlled glide or engines-running descent of about 100 nautical miles at the end and a ditching by Zaharie.
Hardy spoke with me from Mumbai, where he had arrived after piloting a Boeing 777 from London. In addition to his lengthy flying experience, he also has a large amount of engineering and track-plotting expertise.
He took up a Royal Navy flying scholarship aged 17, and the British navy put him through university to earn a design engineering degree.
He served as a senior design engineer working on torpedo guidance systems.
Hardy’s process followed basic geometry, solving simultaneous equations, and fundamental navigation techniques such as taking three bearings to work out a position. He used the seven arcs to make calculations of simple logic of distances and speed. Like the geometry one learns at school, Hardy’s analysis had a very satisfying end: a logical “QED” showing MH370’s likely resting place.
Hardy’s reckoning puts the most likely co-ordinates at 40 degrees South and 086.5 degrees East. But allowing for some elasticity in the variables, he proposes a search area of 7000sq km.
Hardy put his findings to the ATSB but the bureau did not search where he proposed.
Keane started his flying career as a navigator in the Royal New Zealand Air Force, before moving to the Royal Air Force as a fighter pilot.
He then went into civilian aviation, retiring as chief pilot of Britain’s largest airline, easyJet.
Keane likes the idea of searching the deep underwater canyons known to be in this area, where he thinks Zaharie would have tried to sink the plane, including the Geelvinck Fracture Zone. His best guess is 38 degrees 15 minutes South, 86 degrees 48 minutes East.
Bailey also began his aviation career as a navigator in the RNZAF, switched to the RAAF as a fighter pilot, and then became an airline captain, including flying Boeing 777s for Emirates.
He points out that he and his colleagues’ calculations are not very different from those of the ATSB’s early search plan based on the Defence Science and Technology Group’s original “hot spot” of probability.
Bailey’s estimate puts MH370 gliding after pursuing a true track of 188 degrees. He puts MH370 at 39 degrees, 10 minutes South, 88 degrees 15 minutes East.
If a new hunt were launched in their proposed 7000sq km search zone, and the pilots are right, MH370 could be found in a week or two at the rate Ocean Infinity searched, at a cost of perhaps $10m to $20m.
There’s no guarantee of success — there are still too many unknowns. But thus far the searches based on other approaches have failed. At the time of writing, the pilots had the most developed and authoritative alternative theory of where to look.
With the fifth anniversary of the disappearance of MH370 approaching, that informal professional team makes a compelling case that their analysis deserves a shot to offer the families hope of closure where others have tried and failed.
The is an edited extract from Ean Higgins’s book The Hunt for MH370, published this week.
&..
Jeanette awaits MH370 answers
EAN HIGGINS
Not knowing the whereabouts of the remains of her beloved sister and brother-in-law compounds the grief for Jeanette Maguire.
In the living room of her home in Brisbane, Jeanette Maguire has a small shrine, of sorts, to Cathy and Bob Lawton, her sister and brother-in-law, lost on MH370.
The little collection has a photo of the couple on their wedding day, a couple of purple candles from the memorial service for the MH370 disappeared, and one of the china dolls Cathy used to collect.
A small wooden plaque has the word “Sister” on it and the words, “God made us sisters, our hearts made us friends”.
There is also a small handpainted candleholder showing butterflies darting around flowers, and the words: “Butterfly Wishes … believe in the beautiful, amazing woman you are.” The candleholder was, Jeanette said, what “one of my beautiful old work colleagues bought me for Christmas in 2014, after Bob and Cathy’s disappearance. It was an amazing present and represented all that she saw me go through that year.”
Those MH370 next of kin I’ve interviewed have carried on, coping with their grief and lack of knowing, each in their own way.
As a family, Jeanette said, “we are very loving, very strong”.
“To get through in our world, we have a lot of humour between us.”
But the MH370 families still struggle every day with the unhealed emotional wounds.
“I am still gutted inside,” Jeanette said. “A big part of me is lost with them. Bob was like my big brother. I was 11 when Cathy met Bob.”
In her case, Jeanette’s job as a payroll manager has been her refuge.
“My safe haven was to go to work and lead a different life.”
But, Jeanette said, she just cannot escape MH370.
“Dealing with Cathy’s girls and grandchildren … I am here, but I am not here. At least if we know where they are, at least we have their burial area,” Jeanette said. “At least we will have the place.”
Quote:
Ghyslain Wattrelos. Document reference 000_11P1RPByline / Source / Credit Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP
Ghyslain Wattrelos lost his family in flight MH370 on 8 March 2014 and then conducted the investigation.
His wife and two of his three children were in Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 on March 8, 2014, departing from Kuala Lumpur. The 239 passengers will never arrive in Beijing, their destination. Since then, the father of the family faces the walls of a deafening silence in his fight for the truth. On the occasion of the release in paperback of his testimony Vol MH370: A devious life , Ghyslain Wattrelos agreed to take stock of the unfathomable mystery of this plane evaporated in the sky of the southern hemisphere without leaving any trace, five years ago.
Sebastien Bataille. At first, you gave yourself a year in your quest for the truth. Today, however, you seem more determined than ever. Did you finally refuse to resign yourself?
Ghyslain Wattrelos. I'm not resigned at all but I'm at a point where I did everything I could do. I do not know what else I can do. I think that today I can not go for the truth. It will come to me one day or another, so we must continue to talk about it, tell those who know: "Speak". Go get the truth, when you have no idea where the plane is, it's a little complicated.
In your book, almost everyone takes for his rank: the French authorities, justice, the official investigation, etc. Five years after the fact, who do you want the most?
I blame those who know and do not say anything. To those who hide the truth, and there are many, some countries anyway. It's no longer a feeling of revenge. Anyway I fight against a lot stronger than me. People know what happened and do not want to tell us. I want to know why we killed them, that's all. There is a reason. I just want to know why someone decided to kill them, take them away from me and I want to make some opinion of myself if that reason may be valid or not. People I met know exactly what happened. I do not know who - because I do not know who knows - but I want those people.
You suspect the Elysee - under Holland - to have placed you on listening, a practice that recalls the Mitterrandie. Have you thought of filing a complaint against the French State?
No, again, it's not a personal revenge against something. The French state, I need it even if it did not help me much. In addition, they are no longer the same people at his head. The fight is not there, anyway I will not be able to prove much. Today you have to fight against people who may have a little bit of the truth, because they will end up talking.
It seems dangerous to approach too closely the truth in a case where are mingled the higher interests of several nations, I think of the film I as Icarus , with Yves Montand ...
Many people have been threatened, whether journalists or people close to families who are trying to investigate. I was not threatened directly but several people tell me to have been, such as the "debris hunter" or a woman, Sarah Bajc. In fact, the closer we get to the truth, the more dangerous it can be, unless ... I think the people who made that decision five years ago are no longer in power today, so it will be less in less dangerous somewhere.
The heart of the case lies in the United States (note: the FBI was in Malaysia the day after the tragedy to seize the pilot's flight simulator)?
The French justice will go but I feel that the United States block the road. At least for the moment. It is still in negotiation between the American authorities and the French justice, there is still no date of planned.
Especially since we are in a context of diplomatic tension ...
I do not know if it's playing in that setting, or if it's going that high, but it can not help anyway. The plane was followed by radar, by AWACS, we know exactly where he is. So we searched where it was not and we did not find it, it's obvious. If we had wanted to find him, we would have found him very quickly. We see it well with the small plane of the footballer.
Your inner conviction about where the plane would be?
I am almost convinced that he did not cross Malaysia but fell into the China Sea. It is not at all where they say it is (Editor's note: in the Indian Ocean according to the official version).
The research focused on the level of the China Sea, but at the beginning ...
Very little time. At the end of four or five days, we came across something as if by chance, we said, "Well, no, he's on the other side. "We stopped everyone from looking in the China Sea at one point.
What would prevent today to restart research in the China Sea?
Nothing, but what I think is that everything has been picked up. The problem is there. Presumably, we picked up a number of debris. There is not much left ...
No longer looking for a wreck?
No, no ... We have a big American fleet that is in the China Sea just then ... There were big military maneuvers the week before, with this American fleet, with Thais, Malaysians, Chinese , and the Vietnamese I believe.
Florence de Changy, in her book The Flight MH370 has not disappeared , writes that relations between the United States and Malaysia have warmed up considerably just after the tragedy ...
Coincidentally, a month later, there is an historic Obama visit to Asia. All of a sudden he becomes very friendly with the Malaysian Prime Minister, whom I consider to be one of the most rotten men on earth. He invites him to play golf, etc. Yes, all of a sudden the relationship becomes warmer. It's the same with China. At first she is furious: she sends emissaries to Malaysia, they come back even more furious, like the Chinese government. I tell myself then we'll know quickly. But China is silent when? Right after Obama's visit to Malaysia ... It is obvious that there is a negotiation on this story between China and the United States at the time of Obama's visit.
You locate the crux of the problem but a "safe" investigation is possible, if the threats fall on those who try it?
To carry out an investigation, it would be necessary for journalists from several countries to come together. This, we have seen in some big surveys, on the Panama Papers and company, but I have never seen journalists allied themselves on it ... (note: the alliance in question which brought to light the Panama Papers is called the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists).
Is a translation of your book in English considered to affect international public opinion?
I was expecting someone to ask me but we did not do it. Now it may be a little late. Florence de Changy, for your info, tries from the beginning and as luck would have it, it can not happen ... Must also say that there have been books, more than twenty, of which more than half in English written on this story.
Where are you today with the French authorities?
I tried to see Macron, he refused to meet me. He made me see by his chief of staff, who told me he knew nothing. He asked me who I was, I found it a little outrageous but here ... It seems obvious that Macron does not want to lie to me, so he does not receive me. For them, it's a story that no longer concerns anyone, which concerns a Frenchman, a European, so we pass ...
Quote:
What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane
1. The Disappearance
At 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The designator for Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight number was 370. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was flying the airplane. He was 27 years old. This was a training flight for him, the last one; he would soon be fully certified. His trainer was the pilot in command, a man named Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who at 53 was one of the most senior captains at Malaysia Airlines. In Malaysian style, he was known by his first name, Zaharie. He was married and had three adult children. He lived in a gated development. He owned two houses. In his first house he had installed an elaborate Microsoft flight simulator...
CONTINUE READING
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Quote:Guarded Don A specific location (and no solicitation for membership) might help to emphatically discount this against the inevitable tide of erroneous conflation.
Who was the original poster?
Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association Australia Guarded Don the specific location has been provided to the ATSB, along with the name and contact details of the person who found the item.
![[Image: photo_2021-01-25_14-12-19-e1611565365157.jpg]](https://linesabouttimes.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/photo_2021-01-25_14-12-19-e1611565365157.jpg)
Missing MH370 - 7th Anniversary. In memory of those souls lost on MH370 - RIP
(03-08-2021, 06:44 AM)Peetwo Wrote:
Via Sky News Oz:
New evidence triggers calls to 'restart' MH370 search
08/03/2021|3min
Aviation experts have told Sky News the search for MH370 “must be restarted” as new evidence emerges about its possible location.
Today marks seven years since the Malaysian Airlines aircraft and 239 people disappeared but new leads may help settle one of aviation's most puzzling mysteries.
Quote:Sky News aviation expert Byron Bailey says he is not giving up hope in the search for doomed flight MH370 seven years after it disappeared.
“I’m very disappointed, I’ve been writing to prime ministers, leader of the opposition pointing out the facts of the case, and they’ve just been showing no interest,” Mr Bailey told Sky News.
“We have our fingers crossed, we’re never going to give up.
“It’s been going on now for seven years and it's appalling. This was a monstrous crime of mass-murder and our government is just turned its back on it.”
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