[Peetwo]

Ben calls HOKUM (in other words BOLLOCKS..   )! - On US academics MH370 'no debris', vertical dive theory.

MH370 gets another dose of bad science and poor reporting

Ben Sandilands | Jun 12, 2015 8:37AM |


The laughable graphic that comes with the latest MH370 claim

Somehow, a group of mathematicians have managed to come up with a claim that MH370 dived head first into the south Indian Ocean and remained intact.

Their ignorance of the structural strengths and weaknesses of airliners and the evidence available from similar impacts is as shocking as the lack of editorial depth in papers that publish such rubbish.

When the mass of a jet airliner makes a high velocity impact with a body of water the structural integrity of the windscreen visors and the thin cylinder of the pressure vessel that is the cabin structure is ruptured and totally destroyed.

Both internally and externally. The water is rammed up through the cabin toward the tail and the walls have already been compressed and broken. Flesh and clothing is torn from the bodies of those who if alive are dead within a split second.

The hideous damage inflicted in crashes into water mimic very closely those of impacts with the ground, or buildings. Examples include the end of 2014 AirAsia crash in the Java Sea, the belly flop damage sustained by Air France AF447 in 2009, and the Silkair mass murder and suicide flight into the Musi River estuary near Palembang in Indonesia in 1997.

The deceleration measured by the flight data recorder in the Air France crash  into the mid Atlantic peaked at more than 32G. Some of those found floating on the surface had been cut in two by their seat belts.

Silkair was definitely a vertical dive. As the photo shown below indicates, the jet was torn to pieces.



That 737 required the pilot to have been in active control of the jet until impact, as jets do not ‘naturally’ enter into or follow a sustained dive when fuel runs out. Rather, they execute a series of abruptly variable arcing descents, or a spiral, until impact, which is what the official inquiries into MH370 believe is shown to have occurred during the last aircraft initiated ‘ping’ to an Inmarsat satellite, when was incomplete when it suddenly stopped, apparently on contact with the water.

(There was a subsequent attempt by the satellite to reconnect with the aircraft, to which there was no response.)

The learned mathematicians story seeks to answer why no floating debris was found.  Therein may be a real story.  About a week after MH370 vanished on 8 March 2014 on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people onboard, satellite image scrutiny began to find what looked like a floating debris field SW of Perth.

The haste with which the Australian managed aerial search was switched to the NE remains variously a matter of a complete bungle, or something more sinister, keeping in mind it took and continues to take direction from the Malaysian authorities, who were later found to have lied unashamedly about what they knew about MH370 from the moment the public became aware the flight was missing.

The unwillingness of Australia to query the direction and integrity and information it received from Kuala Lumpur in relation to MH370 is a very big festering issue, as often reported here in Plane Talking yet ignored by the same media that report the sort of clap trap found in this piece of editorial garbage.

There are hard stories to do about MH370, and easy ones, like the one being peddled as click bait in today’s papers.

MTF...P2

Addendum: Courtesy of Victor Iannello 

Victor Iannello, June 9, 2015

Here are my comments on “Malaysia Airlines Flight: MH370: Water Entry of an Airliner” by G Chen, C Gu, PJ Morris, EG Paterson, EG Patterson, A Sergeev, YC Wang, T Wierzbicki (2015) and the referenced paper “Impact Damage of the Challenger Crew Compartment” by T Wierzbicki and D Yue (1986):

1. Chen et al. predict a fracture failure mode resulting in the rupture of the fuselage and wings for a vertical speed of 22 m/s (43kn) when the plane hits the water. Certainly the vertical speed greatly exceeded this value for a near vertical entry into the water, resulting in a global failure of the structure. Therefore, by their own analysis, MH370 would have experienced a global structural failure with a near vertical entry.

2. Chen et al. claim that because the surface pressure reached 6 MPa and the yield strength of aluminum is 324 MPa, there was no local failure of the aluminum. In truth, the surface pressure and the tensile stresses in the aluminum are far from equal! Wierzbicki and Yue, for instance, found that a surface pressure of 1.2 MPa resulted in local tearing as the aluminum skin was elongated between the support rings to failure. (Do Chen et al. really believe that the skin of a B777 can survive a surface pressure of 6 MPa = 60 atm = 880 psi?)

3. Neither paper analytically addresses the buckling failure of the thin cylindrical shell. Chen et al. acknowledge that this failure mode can occur at low impact velocities based on NASA experiments with a true aircraft. Wierzbicki and Yue also acknowledge that this mode may occur at lower impact speeds than for the other modes considered, but at least partially justify ignoring this mode because of the presence of the tiles on the Shuttle. Obviously, there are no tiles on the skin of a B777.

In summary, the paper by Chen et al. cannot be used to justify the lack of debris with a near vertical entry into the water for the following reasons:

1. Using their own methodology, any reasonable entry speed will result in fracture failure and global failure of the structure.

2. Their predicted surface pressure would result in local tearing of the skin. Chen et al.’s assertion that there is no local failure because the predicted surface pressure is less than the yield strength of aluminum is incorrect.

3. Chen et al. completely neglect analyzing the buckling failure mode without justification.

TY Victor...

Victor also informs me that Prof Chen will be responding to questions posed from himself & others.. 

[Gobbledock]

Ben said;
"The unwillingness of Australia to query the direction and integrity and information it received from Kuala Lumpur in relation to MH370 is a very big festering issue"

Indeed it is. And only 3 plausible theories can apply to that statement;

A) Australia didn't have the balls to questions the Malaysians. (Very possible)
B) Australia is complicit in some sort of coverup (possible)
C) Beaker is an incompetent buffoon and is totally out of his depth (Extremely likely)

But as Ben's article says, the likelihood of a total disappearance is impossible. Some form of wreckage, even if very small, would be found somewhere on the surface, while the larger fragmented pieces sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Aagh yes the crowd goes wild as the sound of 'BOLLOCKS BOLLOCKS BOLLOCKS' can be heard around the nation!

[Peetwo]

[quote pid='1029' dateline='1434065670']

[b]Ben calls HOKUM - On US academics MH370 'no debris', vertical dive theory.

MH370 gets another dose of bad science and poor reporting[/b]

Victor Iannello, June 9, 2015

Here are my comments on “Malaysia Airlines Flight: MH370: Water Entry of an Airliner” by G Chen, C Gu, PJ Morris, EG Paterson, EG Patterson, A Sergeev, YC Wang, T Wierzbicki (2015) and the referenced paper “Impact Damage of the Challenger Crew Compartment” by T Wierzbicki and D Yue (1986):

1. Chen et al. predict a fracture failure mode resulting in the rupture of the fuselage and wings for a vertical speed of 22 m/s (43kn) when the plane hits the water. Certainly the vertical speed greatly exceeded this value for a near vertical entry into the water, resulting in a global failure of the structure. Therefore, by their own analysis, MH370 would have experienced a global structural failure with a near vertical entry.

2. Chen et al. claim that because the surface pressure reached 6 MPa and the yield strength of aluminum is 324 MPa, there was no local failure of the aluminum. In truth, the surface pressure and the tensile stresses in the aluminum are far from equal! Wierzbicki and Yue, for instance, found that a surface pressure of 1.2 MPa resulted in local tearing as the aluminum skin was elongated between the support rings to failure. (Do Chen et al. really believe that the skin of a B777 can survive a surface pressure of 6 MPa = 60 atm = 880 psi?)

3. Neither paper analytically addresses the buckling failure of the thin cylindrical shell. Chen et al. acknowledge that this failure mode can occur at low impact velocities based on NASA experiments with a true aircraft. Wierzbicki and Yue also acknowledge that this mode may occur at lower impact speeds than for the other modes considered, but at least partially justify ignoring this mode because of the presence of the tiles on the Shuttle. Obviously, there are no tiles on the skin of a B777.

In summary, the paper by Chen et al. cannot be used to justify the lack of debris with a near vertical entry into the water for the following reasons:

1. Using their own methodology, any reasonable entry speed will result in fracture failure and global failure of the structure.

2. Their predicted surface pressure would result in local tearing of the skin. Chen et al.’s assertion that there is no local failure because the predicted surface pressure is less than the yield strength of aluminum is incorrect.

3. Chen et al. completely neglect analyzing the buckling failure mode without justification.

TY Victor...

Victor also informs me that Prof Chen will be responding to questions posed from himself & others.. 
[/quote]

From Prof Goong Chen et.al - SOME COMMENTS, QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS REGARDING MH370

Overall Summary

Previous studies on the disappearance of MH370 has focused mainly on the flight path determination by satellite data analysis. (Inmarsat's analytics now has been mostly accepted as correct.) The work in has started the first study of numerical simulations of the crash of an airliner into water. However, the field of impact engineering, flight mechanics, fluid dynamics, and avionics that are needed in the study of aircraft crash is highly interdisciplinary and requires a large team to perform research. One of the main findings in, namely, vertical water entry being the final trajectory of MH370 could be accepted mainly under the assumptions of relatively medium to low speed upon water-entry that leads to local failures that don't progress globally, and, therefore, should not be taken too literally as universal and true at all speeds. Further CFD simulations and impact/failure analysis based on the parametrizations of important factors such as terminal velocity, altitude and pitch angle should further improve our understanding of what can and has happened to a crashed aircraft.

On the other hand, the lack of a large floating debris field rules out the
possibility of a high velocity water entry.

G. Chen says it would be both inaccurate and irresponsible for him or any
of his co-authors to speculate outside the scope of their research. They can offer
only a plausible, science-based theory as to the absence of a typical debris field
and fuel residue that the public has come to expect with aviation accidents. The
beauty of this, however, is that scientifically based forensics can still be deduced
based on the fact that there is a total absence of evidence (such as floating
debris and oil slick).

To reiterate, some media coverage has overstated their findings and claims
without providing proper context. G. Chen urges extra cautions for both
journalists and the general public to avoid the temptation to sensationalize or
extrapolate beyond the team’s results and expertise.

Clear as mud now??  

Moving on I see that Clive Irving (courtesy of the Daily beast) has put out another insightful article that summarises quite neatly the current status quo of the MH370 search & DIP's conundrums... :

Richard Wainwright/Pool/Reuters

[/url]
[url=http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/clive-irving.html]Clive Irving

NIGHTMARE

06.14.1512:01 AM ET

The Search for MH370 Unravels

The past month of moving targets, recriminations, and a notable lack of floating wreckage means it's time to question whether the airliner even hit the ocean at at all.

Is the fate of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 to be another Amelia Earhart?

As hard as it is to imagine that in this age a 330-ton airplane with 239 people on board can vanish without trace, like Earhart, some important people are now prepared to make that comparison.

And that is just one part of what is turning out to be a nightmare month for those searching for the Boeing 777.  

First there were charges that the Dutch company hired to take a leading part in searching the southern Indian Ocean for the remains of the 777 was ill-equipped for the task.  

Then one of the specialized vehicles used for deep water searching was badly damaged while it was sitting on the deck of its mother ship in atrocious weather conditions.

Finally Sir Tim Clark, the head of Emirates Airlines, which operates the world’s largest fleet of 777s, said last week, “It will be an Amelia Earhart repetition” and compared the search to a “goose chase.”

So what is going on here?  Is Sir Tim’s bleak outlook justified?

For whatever reason, Sir Tim seems to be leading a rush to judgment and, in the process, angering a lot of people who are dedicated to unraveling the most elusive and complex mystery in aviation history.

There are many motives at play here and the longer the mystery goes on the more invested those motives become.  

And without doubt the least attractive of these motives is the evasion of responsibility, which is shared by many parties.  

First, there is the airline industry itself, which was caught being derelict in its attention to a major weakness in airline safety already exposed by the 2009 loss of Air France Flight 447 in the south Atlantic: the inability to accurately track flights over oceans.

Second, there is the conduct of the investigation that, in turn, involves what one might call "the Malaysian problem." What happens when an airline owned and operated by a state unused to public scrutiny fails to explain its own failures and seeks scapegoats, like the pilots, in order to cover up those failures?

Third, there is the obligation of the airplane maker involved, Boeing, to assist the investigators in exhaustively testing every technical scenario that could have rendered the 777 vulnerable to whatever overcame its systems and allowed it to “go dark.” The same is true for Rolls Royce, who made the engines. They hide behind a wall of “no comment.”

Finally, there is the quality of leadership and the decision chain in the search operation as conducted by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB): how the contractors were chosen, how they were vetted, and the quality of the scientific support given to the search.

More than 15 months into the search,the single most unsettling lacuna is the failure to discover anyfloating wreckage.

Let’s first take Sir Tim Clark as a representative of his industry’s response to the loss of Flight 370. He is for sure the most innovative airline executive of his generation. Under his leadership, Emirates has made Dubai the improbable number one hub of international routes and set new standards of service. From the beginning he has been the most openly skeptical of how the investigation and search have been handled.

In an interview last year with German newsmagazine Der Spiegel he said, “All the ‘facts’ of this particular incident must be challenged and examined with full transparency. We are nowhere near that.”

This week, in an interview in Miami with a reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald, he said, “I am not going to say anything about what I think happened. It remains an unsolved mystery. Somebody knows more about this than they are prepared to say.”

In other words, Sir Tim is implying that there has been a cover-up. But of what?  

Having attempted to parse Sir Tim’s frequent and deftly phrased provocations, I suspect that he believes that human action in the cockpit was responsible for what happened, either by the pilots or by intruders. He has also said that to successfully execute such an operation would require more technical knowledge than any of his own hundreds of 777 pilots possess.

However, when it comes to answering the simple question — How is it possible for an airplane as sophisticated as a Boeing 777 to leave no record of the events that overcame it? — Sir Tim, like all other airline chiefs, is evasive.  

After the loss of Air France 447, French investigators urged immediate action to equip airliners with technology that would enable them to stream data in real time showing the performance of all critical systems to airline maintenance centers via satellite. Nothing happened as a result -- largely because the industry considered the chance of airliners crashing into deep oceans to be extremely remote.

Despite the fact that since the loss of Flight 370 there has been widespread astonishment and anger that the disappearance of hundreds of passengers can remain unexplained for want of such a readily available technology, the industry has made only a tardy and grudging response.

In the absence of any more conscientious and decisive authority it falls to the notoriously sclerotic International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a United Nations body representing 191 nations, to build a consensus and take action. When will that be achieved? According to the time table set by the ICAO: 2025.

Sir Tim seems quite content that his airplanes currently transmit data every 15 or 30 minutes, depending on the route and airplane. Lufthansa has narrowed that frequency to five minutes. That is not good enough. Fatal events can suddenly unwind in the time between those transmissions. There is no substitute for constant, live streaming of data. (Consider, for example, the web site of the solar-powered airplane, Solar Impulse, now attempting a world-girdling flight, where you can see, via live streaming, every movement of the instruments and controls.)

Having said that, Sir Tim’s frustration with the lack of transparency in the investigation is shared by many.  

The most immutable problem faced by the professional members of the investigative team, drawn from Malaysia, the U.S., Europe, China, Japan, and Australia, is the total absence of physical wreckage.  

Without that, the focus will have been on the possibility of criminal action; the immediate technical history of the airplane and its engines; the handling of the cargo; the performance of the airport management and air traffic control; and the human factors including the psychological and personal histories of the crew.

Many of these actions fall within the authority of the Malaysian government. Just how off-planet on this issue Malaysian politicians can be was shown when 89-year-old Mahathir Mohamad, who was prime minister for two decades and still has enormous backroom influence, said that Malaysia was being unfairly blamed for its handling of the case, and that the CIA and Boeing were involved in a joint conspiracy to conceal information.

Experts on Malaysia say that the current prime minister, Najib Razak, presides over an ingrained system of cronyism. For example, he is chairman of the advisory board of a national development fund that has incurred more than $11.5 billion in debts, much of which is said to have been dispersed as political favors. The questioning of arrangements like this is discouraged, despite government claims of transparency. This has been compounded by an alarming move against more public accountability by deploying new laws against “terrorism and sedition” that Human Rights Watch has said will have “a chilling effect on freedom of expression.”  

Given that mindset and that all the objects of the investigation are government operated (the airline, airport, air-traffic control), the investigation cannot avoid being entangled in well-protected political interests and fiefdoms.

The sea search, meanwhile, is being directed well clear of this kind of political complexity in Australia, but it has its own problems.

In April, a year after the search began, the area being searched was suddenly doubled, from just over 23,000 square miles to 47,000 square miles. This was surprising because until then the ATSB had said it was confident that it was looking in the right place. Indeed, the target area was moved further south last fall after new information came to light about the projected course taken by the 777.

As has become usual in official announcements about the search, there was no detail about how, why, and by whom the enlargement of the area had been determined. The decision was revealed in Kuala Lumpur when senior ministers from Malaysia, Australia, and China appeared together. They merely said that the decision had been made to “cover the highest probability area identified by expert analysis.”

That meant that searchers, who by then had covered more than 70 percent of the original target zone and felt that as the area left shrank the statistical chances of finding the airplane increased, now had 130 percent more ocean to deal with. The ministers said somewhat optimistically that it would take another year to complete the expanded search.

Originally the ATSB had said it would suspend the search during the Southern Hemisphere winter, beginning in May, when the ocean really demonstrated its reputation for foul weather. However, since the April announcement the search has persisted in conditions that impose frequent and long pauses and, as has now happened, can cause serious damage to the equipment – not to mention the emetic working conditions aboard the vessels.

Moreover, morale aboard the ships cannot have been helped by attacks on the competence of the technicians and the suitability of their equipment.  

The principal target of the attacks was the Dutch company Fugro NV that directs operations of the three ships involved. Paul-Henry Nargeolet, a former French naval officer who was involved in the search for Air France 447 in 2009 said, “Fugro is a big company but they don’t have any experience in this kind of search and it’s really a very specialized job.”

It’s important to point out, however, that a lot of the carping is coming from companies who were unsuccessful bidders for the search contract. Mike Williamson, the president of one of those companies, said, “I have serious concerns that the MH370 search operation may not be able to convincingly demonstrate that 100 percent seafloor coverage is being achieved.”

Deep sea searchers are a relatively small and highly competitive bunch of people, and sour grapes attacks are not unknown among them. But Williamson and the heads of two other companies detailed their critiques in letters sent directly to Australian authorities, copies of which were seen and reported by Reuters.

Caught on the back foot, the ATSB issued a response that seemed pained and defensive.

“These attacks are unfounded and unfair,” said ATSB Chief Commissioner Martin Dolan. “The search represents thousands of hours of work by hundreds of people who are dedicated, expert and professional. They are fully committed to finding the aircraft.”

In fact, the ATSB has increased the credibility of its critics by keeping a tight veil over scientific work crucial to the decisions it has taken. At the center of these decisions is the data that led in the first place to the deployment of the search vessels in the southern Indian ocean about 1,000 miles northwest of Perth, Australia.

This data came from the London-based communications satellite operator Inmarsat, in the form of the now famous seven “handshakes” exchanged between the Malaysian 777 and a satellite orbiting at 22,236 miles above the Equator.  

But, as a result of the two significant changes made to the area being searched it is now abundantly clear that the Inmarsat calculations were not precise enough to provide the Australians with a closely focused target. Nonetheless, the Inmarsat data remains the only guidance to the final course of the 777.

More than 15 months into the search, the single most unsettling lacuna is the failure to discover any floating wreckage. It is physically impossible for every piece of the 777 to have ended up on the ocean floor. In the relatively few cases of large intercontinental jets being lost over water, there is not one case where floating debris did not appear within days.  

Last fall the ATSB showed that it was aware of the need to address this absence. They said that a team of scientists who had developed a computer model for tracking oil spills was working on a drift model – by combining their knowledge of ocean currents and weather patterns they would be able to predict where and when wreckage from Flight 370 was likely to turn up. At that time their best bet was that debris would appear on the long coastline of Western Sumatra, part of the Indonesian archipelago, by March.

We are still waiting.

Repeated requests from The Daily Beast to the ATSB for an update on the drift model have been met with silence, the latest being this week. It is now a very troubling silence, with at least one highly consequential implication: An accurate drift model would require knowing with some certainty the original starting point - where the airplane hit the water.

If, indeed, it did hit water.  

After all, one explanation for the absence of floating wreckage would be that there is no floating wreckage – because the remains of the airplane lie undetected on some remote piece of terra firma. At this point perhaps it’s time to try thinking the unthinkable.

MTF...P2

[Kharon]

The big Kahuna calls Hokum on the large Lacuna.  Is MH 370 in the pacific?   

Bring it back ET; you know you want to…… …… ……… ……

[Gobbledock]

Why does 'the font of all things aviation safety related' ICAO, not get it arse kicked as well? ICAO sets out investigation processes in Annexe 13, yet hardly any state conforms with the annexe fully, yet ICAO appears to sit on it's hands and do nothing about it? They have been given the necessary muscle it needs by the UN, yet is doing what? After the Air France crash ICAO could've mandated specific changes, but hasn't followed through. Once again we have a missing plane and we face the same problem - it's whereabouts is an effing mystery.

So in brief - ICAO has the authority to demand certain actions by its various states, yet it doesn't appear to be doing so. Should we now be questioning ICAO's ability to carry out its function within the UN under the Chicago convention? It's a bloody big call but it is really starting to appear that way???

Oh how I wish ICAO could be brought before Senators Sterle, Xenophon, Heffernan and Fawcett for some robust questioning and deep drilling.

P.S Kharon, interesting that you mention E.T. Have you seen Looklefts wife? I believe E.T is alive and well!!

[Peetwo]

Update from Clive in "The Beast":

Samsul Said / Reuters

[/url]
[url=http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/clive-irving.html]Clive Irving

GIVING UP?

06.17.1512:32 PM ET

Exclusive: MH370 Search Cut Back by Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur has canceled the contract for a high-tech ship full of experts searching the ocean floor for the lost aircraft. Meanwhile, a Plan B model to find debris is in the works.

The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is losing one of the three ships assigned to it—and one of the world’s most experienced teams of deep-water search technicians that goes with it.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which is in charge of the search, has confirmed to The Daily Beast that the vessel, the GO Phoenix, will quit the search this Friday on the orders of Malaysia.

“The GO Phoenix, and the experts and equipment aboard are contracted by Malaysia,” Daniel O’Malley, the ATSB spokesman, said via email. The Malaysian government has advised that the contract will end with the completion of the current swing.”

The work of the GO Phoenix has been so important to the search that even though its equipment was badly damaged in a storm this month it returned to the search area with only a week left of its contract after repairs in the port city of Fremantle.

The ATSB gave no explanation of why the Malaysians decided not to continue the contract. After all, the Boeing 777 belonged to the country’s state-run airline, was crewed by 12 Malaysians, and carried 38 Malaysian passengers.

The GO Phoenix is operated by Maryland-based Phoenix International, whose role in the search for Air France Flight 447 was crucial in finding the wreckage in deep water at the bottom of the south Atlantic in 2011, two years after the airplane crashed.

The ATSB gave no explanation of why the Malaysians decided not to continue the contract.

In the search for Flight MH370 the GO Phoenix deployed a remote-operated side-scan sonar vehicle able to operate at depths as much as 20,000 feet. The area of the ocean floor being searched in the southern Indian Ocean is far more challenging than it was for the searchers in the case of Flight 447—three-dimensional mapping carried out for this operation has revealed a daunting underwater Alpine landscape with mountains, volcanoes and deep valleys.

Originally the Australians said that the search would be suspended by the end of May with the onset of the Southern Hemisphere winter and its severe storms and violent seas. However, with a search area of 47,000 square miles to be covered they have decided not to pull out.

“Winter conditions are expected to continue to hamper the search,” O’Malley told The Daily Beast. “This means several days of poor weather at a time as fronts pass through the area with several days of more benign conditions in between the fronts. We have excellent weather forecasting systems for the search area, and will take advantage of the periods of better weather to continue the search.”

After several requests over previous months, O’Malley finally responded to a question that, after more than 15 months since Flight 370 disappeared, has become increasingly worrisome:

Why, having commissioned experts to produce a computerized drift model to predict where floating wreckage would turn up and announcing that it would most probably turn up on the western coast of Sumatra by March, none has been found?

“Detailed drift modeling has been undertaken to supplement the original work that identified the western coast of Sumatra as the most likely first landing point for debris. The work, once finalized, will be released,” O’Malley said.

In other words, Plan A, not having panned out, has been succeeded by Plan B.

“There are several possible reasons as to why no debris has been found,” O’Malley added. “Key among them is the fact that the search in the Indian Ocean did not commence until nine days after the aircraft would have entered the water and in that time any debris would have been significantly dispersed by winds and currents. The initial search targeted an area covering the current underwater search area and thus represented the best chance to identify and recover any floating debris.”

This reply seems disingenuous (not to mention tortuous) on several points.

First, the nine-day delay in fixing the target area for the search (following data provided by the satellite operator Inmarsat) would have little bearing on a calculation that allowed a full year for the debris to reach the predicted landfall.

Second, by saying the initial area that was searched is now subsumed into the area now being searched ignores the fact that last April the total area to be searched was doubled. Until then there was high confidence that the searchers were in the right place, and seemingly the drift model was calculated using that location as the origin of the floating debris. Drift can’t be accurately calculated without a starting point, but the starting point suddenly became a lot less precise.

The fact is that by April, a year after the Boeing 777 disappeared, with more than 70 percent of the original area already searched, nothing had turned up.

Now we have a situation that with a far larger area to be searched the resources devoted to the operation have been reduced by one-third. And the difference is not just numerical. The two remaining vessels, the Fugro Discovery and the Fugro Equator, are operated by a Dutch company, Fugro NV, with crews who lack the experience of having taken part in the successful search for Air France 447.

It will be a long and tempestuous winter for them, and leaves a situation that raises more serious questions about the commitment of the Malaysian government to the search.

Passing strange - where is Foley or Dolan-- -- --starting to distance themselves perhaps??
MTF...P2

[Peetwo]

Deadley is back, this time it is not a re-run of a year ago...   

MH370 Maldives theory dismissed  

• by: HEDLEY THOMAS
  
• From: The Australian
  
• June 20, 2015 12:00AM
  

National Chief Correspondent
Brisbane



A view from the air of the capital of the Maldives, Male. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen Source: News Corp Australia

Sightings by villagers in the Maldives in March last year of an aircraft they believed could have been the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 have been reinvestigated by the head of the country’s aviation authority, resulting in the theory being all but ruled out.  

Maldives Civil Aviation Authority chairman Ibrahim Faizal said in early April that he was concerned the villagers’ claims had not been properly reviewed by Defence or other agencies in his country.

The Malaysia Airlines plane, with 12 crew and 227 passengers on board, went missing on March 8 last year.

Mr Faizal said at the time he believed the aircraft the villagers saw crossing the remote island of Kuda Huvadhoo at a relatively low altitude on the morning it would have crashed could have been the Malaysian jet.

Yesterday, he said he was now confident the villagers had seen a much smaller, 50-seat aircraft near the island at the time.

“I wanted to revisit it because I did not have all the information for me to make a call on it, hence why I had another look at this thing again,’’ he said in an email.

“I was not personally happy or satisfied at the time over what had happened (with the official review of the witness accounts).

“To be honest, now I have no reason to believe that it’s the MH flight. I am more firm in my conviction after speaking to the island council now. This whole issue was confused by other matters like the sighting of a fire extingu­isher — we found that this is not from any aircraft, let alone a B 777.

“I am convinced now, given all the information and data we have, that it was not the MH but most likely the Island Aviation Bombardier Dash 8.”

Island villagers told The Weekend Australian in March that the aircraft they saw was very large with red markings, similar to the missing jet.

Court official Abdu Rasheed Ibrahim, 47, one of several witnesses, said: “I watched this very large plane bank slightly and I saw its colours — the red and blue lines — below the windows, then I heard the loud noise. It was unusual, very unusual.”

The Australia-led search for the plane, in the southern Indian Ocean more than 5000km away, is guided by calculations of weather conditions, fuel exhaustion and other variables.

No trace of it has been found.

Hmm...pretty big difference between a Dash 8 & a B777



MTF...P2

[Jacki_Binkley]

Deadley is back, this time it is not a re-run of a year ago...   

MH370 Maldives theory dismissed  

• by: HEDLEY THOMAS
  
• From: The Australian
  
• June 20, 2015 12:00AM
  

National Chief Correspondent
Brisbane



A view from the air of the capital of the Maldives, Male. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen Source: News Corp Australia

Sightings by villagers in the Maldives in March last year of an aircraft they believed could have been the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 have been reinvestigated by the head of the country’s aviation authority, resulting in the theory being all but ruled out.  

Maldives Civil Aviation Authority chairman Ibrahim Faizal said in early April that he was concerned the villagers’ claims had not been properly reviewed by Defence or other agencies in his country.

The Malaysia Airlines plane, with 12 crew and 227 passengers on board, went missing on March 8 last year.

Mr Faizal said at the time he believed the aircraft the villagers saw crossing the remote island of Kuda Huvadhoo at a relatively low altitude on the morning it would have crashed could have been the Malaysian jet.

Yesterday, he said he was now confident the villagers had seen a much smaller, 50-seat aircraft near the island at the time.

“I wanted to revisit it because I did not have all the information for me to make a call on it, hence why I had another look at this thing again,’’ he said in an email.

“I was not personally happy or satisfied at the time over what had happened (with the official review of the witness accounts).

“To be honest, now I have no reason to believe that it’s the MH flight. I am more firm in my conviction after speaking to the island council now. This whole issue was confused by other matters like the sighting of a fire extingu­isher — we found that this is not from any aircraft, let alone a B 777.

“I am convinced now, given all the information and data we have, that it was not the MH but most likely the Island Aviation Bombardier Dash 8.”

Island villagers told The Weekend Australian in March that the aircraft they saw was very large with red markings, similar to the missing jet.

Court official Abdu Rasheed Ibrahim, 47, one of several witnesses, said: “I watched this very large plane bank slightly and I saw its colours — the red and blue lines — below the windows, then I heard the loud noise. It was unusual, very unusual.”

The Australia-led search for the plane, in the southern Indian Ocean more than 5000km away, is guided by calculations of weather conditions, fuel exhaustion and other variables.

No trace of it has been found.

Hmm...pretty big difference between a Dash 8 & a B777



MTF...P2

Seriously??????????????????  Are you kidding me???  As if the islanders who live in the maldives can't tell the difference between their own planes and a 777?  Do they think we are that stupid, honestly how ridiculous is that?  There is a serious discrediting campaign in the works here after Blaine Gibson went to investigate on his own.  He spoke to the witnesses, got more info than anyone in the past year has done.  The officials didn't care to talk to anyone, now all of a sudden they are dismissing this theory, WTF???

The nagging question is why???  IF  there was no story here, why would they ramp up a discrediting campaign against Mr. Gibson??  There is something in this story and the powers that be don't want that happening.  They want to bury this as fast as possible which begs the question again, why??  

Mr. Gibson reported his findings, the witnesses said it was not a plane with propellers, it had red and blue lines on it.  The maldives plane doesn't have lines.  If this was the case why didn't they report this a long time ago........but no one questioned it so they left it alone.  Now that the truth of the matter has been found out, they are trying to discredit mr. Gibson and his findings to keep something from the public.  The truth of the matter is, that the majority of the people are starting to see how much BS has floated out there in this story.  The sad part is that the families can't have any closure due to political/military classifications.

What really happened that night?  Who and what doesn't want this plane found?  There are a whole lot of somebody's out there that know the truth, yet no one is talking.  Just more BS and flotsam floating to the surface to discredit and confuse people.  Time for the lies and BS to stop, the families deserve the truth, for once and for all.

[P7_TOM]

Anyone who has ever flown into, operated or been based anywhere near a ‘remote’ air service community will tell you.  Not only do the islanders and locals know each of 'their' aircraft, they know the pilots, what they had for breakfast, where and what they prefer to drink and their cousin who is employed by ‘the company’.  Why suddenly has this “official’ popped up saying the things he does.  

Go with Jacki on this one – someone, somewhere knows something.  Tim Clark’s tea lady probably knows more than Dolan, but that is to be expected.  BTW - Put the word out, the 'Commissioners’ own blog is open again and give him hell until he owns up.  I can tell a squealer.

[Peetwo]

Reply to this dubious Deadley story from Ben:

MH370 and the Maldivian sightings mystery

Ben Sandilands | Jun 20, 2015 1:31PM |



More than 15 months on, and the lies, and evasions persist

Dear MH370 watchers,

We have a Maldivian renunciation of sightings of the missing jet courtesy of a climb down in today’s The Australian.

If you just get the paywall, don’t worry, you can read what the author of the original exclusive published on 04 April this year is now retreating from with such alacrity by going back to the UK papers or the Sydney Morning Herald on 18/19 March 2014 which published the very same claims when they were fresh in the memory of the eyewitnesses.
The astonishingly similar reports by totally dissimilar reporters can be read in the UK Telegraph here, and the Sydney Morning Herald, here.  Incredibly independently consistent, and even though the Australian’s report came out a year later, one might be impressed that the original interviews done for it in March this year came up sounding almost like the sightings were made just yesterday.

But, but …. Do not totally dismiss the Maldivian sightings. If we invent, perhaps even stumble upon, an incredibly evil plot to deceive air crash investigators with all sorts of false electronic traces of MH370, and perhaps tinker with the accepted view of the speed of light, those sightings might be true accounts.

There is so much that is baffling about MH370 that nothing really can be totally ruled out. Including mass idiocy and ignorance in the media, including by yours truly.

The crash site of MH370 is confined by the time it flew, and the elevation in the sky of the satellite that received its final and incomplete automated communications sequence.

Let us think about the Maldivian visions in terms of thee two seemingly inviolable pieces of data.

1. MH370 flew for seven hours 37 minutes (some say slightly longer) after it took off from Kuala Lumur for Beijing at 12.42 am local time with at least 239 people on board on 08 March 2014, and
2.The emergency contact signal generated by an onboard ACARS data reporting system which ended abruptly at 8.19 am  that morning was received by an aged Inmarsat satellite over the equator of the west Indian Ocean which had to be approximately 40 degrees above the horizon in relation to MH370 no matter where it was at that moment.

How do we know that? Because the time stamped packet of data that passed through the satellite identified as being from MH370 allows a calculation of the distance it travelled between the Boeing 777-200ER and the satellite which generates an arc of possible points of origination at which it could only have been at a particular elevation above the horizon.

Putting aside the controversy over whether or not it hit the surface of planet earth in the northern or southern hemisphere sections of the arcs, the satellite as seen from the Maldives would have been much higher in the sky, ruling the Maldivian sightings invalid.
Unless. The evil plotters had the foresight and capability to manipulate the time stamping of the residual ACARS ‘pings’, or if extra-terrestrials, had the power to manipulate the speed of light for the purposes of thwarting the timely finding of a missing airliner!
We have to be serious. Within the variation in local times reported by the eyewitnesses, it should have already crashed, or not been where they reported it, and it couldn’t have sent an identifying signal in an abnormal transmission best explained by the exhaustion of fuel and the automatic deployment of a ram air turbine to deliver critical instruments enough power to function in its final moments.

The aircraft that sent the MH370 identifying signal to the Inmarsat couldn’t have done so in Maldivian air space.

That said, the official suggestion in today’s hasty retreat by The Australian that the islanders who said they saw a large jet airliner had actually seen a small turbo-prop is about as ludicrous as suggestions they saw a Malaysia Airlines 777.

What might have happened here? Let’s use that wonderful term that has crept into the reporting of other aviation mishaps and even instances of friendly fire in military accidents. Expectation fulfillment. With respect to the eyewitnesses, were they just being polite to the reporters or reporter who had suddenly entered their society seeking confirmation of seeing a great big jet low in the sky with (what did he say, a red stripe along its side?).

To be blunt, expectation fulfillment made fools out of Prime Minister Abbott, Angus Houston, and an entire Australian Naval Acoustics Centre of Brilliant Global Excellence, and again, yours truly, when early in April last year, it was declared that our search for MH370 had heard two distinct sets of pings from the flight data and cockpit voice recorders of the missing jet. I was so badly suckered by that I cry in my bed. Well, almost.

We keep hoaxing ourselves over MH370. It’s deeply embarrassing, and undoubtedly highly distressing to the next of kin.


Yours in sorrow and anger.

The part in bold is absolutely spot on...
However I believe that this should equally apply to the relevant authorities, and in particular the ATSB. The trouble with that is the ATSB has a significant history of lying, obfuscating & being complicit in cover-ups, see here - PelAir & Beyond: A: “cover-up or a balls-up”..? 
From that blog post the following is a comment from Karen Casey that had its origins from a Plane Talking post in 2012, that is not dissimilar to the Jacki post:

Flight Nurse comment from Planetalking blog: · Karen Casey Posted November 4, 2012 at 3:49 am

When will truth trump cover-ups that are with laced with selfish intent to save ones posterior? How ridiculous to have so many broken rules in an- audit, yet almost get away with it. There is a reason for the truth that is emerging, it’s for air safety & the failure of our regulator & investigative bodies results. It has been the survivors that have been the seekers of the real deal. What a disgrace. With both our Chief Commissioners under the microscope now, the amplification of this ordeal is finally happening. CASA & ATSB have a lot to answer for, dragging this on for selfish intent is criminal & at the least cruel to all on board. The coverup is surfacing and all will be revealed about the incompetencies of all parties involved. How unprofessional this has all been. How disappointing in the treatment of the people who have experienced hell from impact till now with our own government bodies involved. Does our government have enough integrity to investigate the individuals involved and actually DO something about this rather than just go around in circles. To add insult, let’s just throw in the fact that the ex-Pel-Air chief pilot at the time of the incident now works as an investigator for CASA…please!

“Just stop the B.S & tell the truth.” - See more at: http://auntypru.com/pelair-beyond-a-cove...07vyN.dpuf

   
MTF...P2

[Kharon]

Yeah, but…

Ben makes several sound, valid points, all with merit and persuasive.  But has missed one important factor - the complete lack of faith around the world for anything that is published or said in relation to MH 370 being credible.  The last missive from the Maldives being a classic example.  Most were ‘happy’ with the official version; that the Maldives claims had been investigated, properly and discounted.  Then, for no discernible reason, up pops this ‘press release’, long after it could have been reasonably expected.  You could be forgiven for wondering why the Maldives civil aviation authority did not publish a definitive report, shortly after the claims of ‘sighting’ were made; one which stated that ‘they’ had investigated the claims and found them to be inaccurate, provide proof positive that an identified (company and tail number) aircraft had been in the vicinity at the time.  Full stop, walk away.

But no; we get this badly drafted ‘statement’ which is tardy and incites the theorists.  Few doubt the 'sighting' claims were invalid; logic seems to indicate and support that.  So,  why add fuel to a dead fire, so late in the day?  Must be a reason, the public response to the Maldives ‘report’ just indicts the total lack of faith in anything published or said which is presented as ‘official’.   Sad state of affairs.  

I reckon if they found the bloody thing tomorrow - someone would say it was a fake.

[Gobbledock]

P2;

"The ATSB gave no explanation of why the Malaysians decided not to continue the contract"

Of course not. The ATsB probably haven't received an explanation because they are subservient and aren't entitled to one. They just do as they are told because the Dominatrix Malaysia has a leash around their neck and leads them hither and tither. Malaysia says 'jump' and Beaker says 'mi mi mi'. Welcome to Australia where as a nation we are everybody else's bitch.

"Australia - Safe footstools to all"

[aussie500]

It's winter, Go Phoenix pulling out of a dangerous search area needs no explanation. She always took a runner if anything stormy so much as looked at her, they did not like operating in rough weather. Their contract I would think only went as far as the end of the month, and they stuck to it despite the equipment getting damaged. I expected all three vessels to leave the area till spring, someone seems determined to keep looking.

And I always thought the white plane the islanders in the Maldives saw could have been from Diego Garcia, noisy lot they are over that way. The only actual interview I heard from one of the islanders, the person doing it was leading the witness telling them what they saw. He said a white plane and later changed it, after being reminded what he saw.

Not the best witnesses if that was the best of them.

[Peetwo]

Yeah, but…

Ben makes several sound, valid points, all with merit and persuasive.  But has missed one important factor - the complete lack of faith around the world for anything that is published or said in relation to MH 370 being credible.  The last missive from the Maldives being a classic example.  Most were ‘happy’ with the official version; that the Maldives claims had been investigated, properly and discounted.  Then, for no discernible reason, up pops this ‘press release’, long after it could have been reasonably expected.  You could be forgiven for wondering why the Maldives civil aviation authority did not publish a definitive report, shortly after the claims of ‘sighting’ were made; one which stated that ‘they’ had investigated the claims and found them to be inaccurate, provide proof positive that an identified (company and tail number) aircraft had been in the vicinity at the time.  Full stop, walk away.

But no; we get this badly drafted ‘statement’ which is tardy and incites the theorists.  Few doubt the 'sighting' claims were invalid; logic seems to indicate and support that.  So,  why add fuel to a dead fire, so late in the day?  Must be a reason, the public response to the Maldives ‘report’ just indicts the total lack of faith in anything published or said which is presented as ‘official’.   Sad state of affairs.  

I reckon if they found the bloody thing tomorrow - someone would say it was a fake.

We now find a possible motivation for Dedley's passing strange clarification article (above) in the weekend Oz. Last night on the other Aunty.. , that dreaded show (that no journo in their right mind really wants to appear on) MediaWatch had a segment on the MH370 Maldives story... :

Episode 21, 22 June 2015 


MH370 Maldives theory debunked

A front page story in The Weekend Australian claimed flight MH370 had been spotted flying over The Maldives around the time it went missing. But the claim wasn't new and not especially plausible.

And now to another shaky story...on the world’s biggest aviation mystery, Malaysian Airlines MH 370, which vanished last year with 239 people on board.

Two months ago the front page of The Weekend Australian suggested it might have solved the puzzle:

The plane truth? Meet the islanders who say they can help Australia find MH370


— Weekend Australian, 4-5 April, 2015

Billed as an exclusive by the paper’s award-winning chief reporter, Hedley Thomas, the page-one story suggested that MH370 may have come down near the Maldive Islands just south of India.

Promoted by The Australian on social media, it was welcomed enthusiastically by readers.

... with Hedley Thomas now on the trail of MH370 it's bound to at last be found. His story today absolutely fascinating.


— Twitter, @davidjo555, 4th April, 2015

By this time several international news groups had also jumped on Hedley’s lead, with the

Huffington Post, The Daily Mail, The Independent and Britain’s Daily Express all keen to republish the claims, even if the Express described them as ‘astonishing’.

In fact, The Australian’s story was neither new nor especially plausible.

Similar claims had been dismissed within days of MH370’s disappearance.

There was no trace of the plane in Maldivian airspace, and satellite handshakes had convinced the experts from Boeing, Inmarsat, and the US, Australian and British governments, that MH370 had perished in the southern Indian ocean off western Australia

But after a year of searching had found nothing, Thomas had flown to the Maldives and interviewed six eye-witnesses who breathed new life into the tale:

HUMAAM DHONMAMK: The plane was travelling from this direction to that direction. It was white, big, I was ... remembering the colours of it on that day…


— The Australian, 4th April, 2015

As Hedley Thomas explained to Chris Smith on 2GB, the colours were right, the Maldives were in range, and the islanders had never seen anything like it.

HEDLEY THOMAS: This is an island that you could walk around in an hour and a half, Chris. It’s, it’s –

CHRIS SMITH: It's 60 hectares or something, is it?

HEDLEY THOMAS: Yeah, it's tiny.

CHRIS SMITH: But they are certain they saw a large passenger jet and large passenger jets do not cross the southern atoll, right?

HEDLEY THOMAS: That's correct and certainly not at low altitude.

— 2GB, Breakfast, 6th April, 2015

Now, setting aside what the experts regard as ‘conclusive evidence’ that MH370 did not come to the Maldives, there were a number of problems with The Australian’s story.

First, the plane was flying in the wrong direction: it should have been coming from the East, yet the witnesses all agreed it came from the North West. Thomas knew this ... but did not mention it in his story.

Second, MH370 would almost certainly have ditched before this mystery plane was sighted, at 6.15 am local time. It only had enough fuel to stay in the air for around 7 ½ hours. But these sightings came almost one hour later.

Third ... if MH370 had in fact stayed in the air that long, it should have flown much further—almost to the coast of Africa, according to the international search team.

And fourth, if a Boeing 777 had been so low that its doors were clearly visible, hundreds of people on Kudahuvadhoo should have seen it.

But, Thomas asked in this video, what else could it have been?

HEDLEY THOMAS: Their stories are very similar. If they did not see MH370, what was the aircraft with similar markings, in the early hours of their holiday, Saturday, March 8, 2014?


— The Australian, 4th April, 2015

Well, it seems we now have an answer to that question ... Thanks to Le Monde and its Asia Pacific correspondent Florence de Changy, who went to the Maldives last month and published this story two weeks ago (English translation).

L’avion qui n’était pas le MH370


The plane which wasn’t MH370

— Le Monde, 11th June, 2015

As Le Monde’s story revealed there’s another island 50 kilometres south east of Kudahuvadhoo called Thimarafushi.

And it has a new airport that was opened in September 2013.

And on the day the mystery plane was sighted, civil aviation records show that a flight touched down on Thimarafushi at 6.33am.

The plane was a twin-engined De Haviland Dash 8 carrying 50 people

... flown and operated by Maldivian, whose livery is white, red and blue, just like MH370.

According to the Maldives Civil Aviation Authority, this plane had flown direct from the capital of Male, and would have tracked close to, or over, the island of Kudahoovadhoo as it came into land.

The authority’s chairman, Ibrahim Faizal, told Media Watch, as he told Le Monde:

It does correlate with what the people on the island would have seen. There was this Dash 8 aircraft during this time period and we deduced this has to be that flight.


— Ibrahim Faizal, Chairman, Maldives Civil Aviation Authority, 19th June, 2015

And he added:

No one who has seen this information at MCAA thinks it was the MH370. The island council president did not also think it was the MH370.


— Ibrahim Faizal, Chairman, Maldives Civil Aviation Authority, 19th June, 2015

So did Hedley Thomas talk to the CAA before writing his article?

He told Media Watch:

I telephoned and emailed several government agencies in the Maldives seeking comment before we published the story …


I did not receive a reply to these e-mailed attempts. My telephone calls were not returned.

— Hedley Thomas, National Chief Correspondent, The Australian, 19th June, 2015

Hedley Thomas also told Media Watch it wouldn’t have helped if he had talked to the CAA back then because Ibrahim Faizal did not know about the Dash 8 plane until later.

And on Saturday—after Media Watch began making inquiries—Thomas made the same points in The Australian, which announced – on page 13:

MH370 Maldives theory dismissed


Hedley Thomas

Sightings by villagers in the Maldives in March last year of an aircraft they believed could have been the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 have been reinvestigated by the head of the country’s aviation authority, resulting in the theory being all but ruled out.

— Weekend Australian, 20-21 June, 2015

Was it ever worth that front-page treatment? I don’t think so.

   
From the Le Monde article conclusion we get this from the Maldive's CAA Chief Ibrahim Faizal:

Although the islanders are reported in some of the previously published accounts as claiming to have seen a jumbo jet" or a "jet plane" with "a red line under the portholes" (as on the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777s), these details were not mentioned in any of the witness statements that we obtained. "In all probability, the [i]plane that the islanders saw was this domestic flight. There's nothing to convince us that it could have been MH370: neither the route nor the timing support that theory", says Ibrahim Faizal, head of the Maldives civil aviation authority, in an interview with Le Monde. [/i]

Following on from the MediaWatch segment last night, this morning Ben Sandilands from PlaneTalking posted this - More rubbish stories about MH370 leave key issues untouched

The embarrassing demolition of The Australian’s year old repetition of alleged sightings of MH370 in the Maldives, and after it had most likely crashed, on the ABC’s Media Watch last night leaves larger concerns about the flight hanging in the air.


Essentially they are whether or not the satellite data which underlines the search effort is bogus or deliberately corrupted, and why on the morning of the disaster on 8 March 2014 the immediate reaction of Malaysia Airlines was so pathetically disinterested it only tried to phone the cockpit twice.

Those questions have not been answered, although they have been posed many, many times by serious reporters and authoritative contacts in the industry for nearly as long as the flight has been missing.

The flight that sank the Maldivian sightings

The satellite data that has been relied upon concerns not so much its content but the time stamped interval taken for the information sent from MH370 to get to an Inmarsat satellite parked in geo-synchronous orbit above the the west Indian Ocean.
(There was more involved, but let’s hold onto the critical element, the time between signal being sent and received.)

If the understanding of the timing taken by the sequence of consequent exchanges of data between earth and plane via the satellite is correct then MH370 had to strike the earth at a place where the satellite had to be at a specific elevation above the horizon.

That requirement is satisfied along the so called seventh (and last) arc of potential locations from Kazakhstan to so far south in the mid Indian Ocean that iceberg sightings are on rare occasions reported by shipping.

It is not satisfied however by the equatorial gap between the northern and southern parts of the seventh arc crossing SE Asia and western Indonesia because if the jet was there it would have been closer to a western Pacific Inmarsat and the sequence it initiated, more than seven and a half hours after it took from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing, would have instead been received by that satellite first.

This essential geometry drawn by where MH370 could have been to satisfy the same elevation of the signal receiving satellite in the sky is a powerful constraint on efforts to model the crash location.

The southern seventh arc focus is the result of Doppler shift analysis of the signal which showed that MH370 had flown southwards from a point somewhere NW of Malaysia.

That analysis is how ever bedeviled by seriously confronting doubts about what the flight was actually doing before it flew south, if as is generally accepted, the Doppler analysis is correct and it really flew south.

And, perhaps not surprisingly given all the variables, nothing has been identified as being from MH370 during the priority area sea floor search SW of Perth.

The lack of success has encouraged an astonishing range of conspiracy or alternative theories as to where the flight, with 239 people on board, actually went.

If the timing of the satellite-aircraft (and ground station) data sequences is correct, any theory that it crashed into the South China Sea, or as of yesterday, flew through a 6000 metre deep gorge in China to crash near a temple according to one of many messages sent to Plane Talking or came down near the Maldives can be immediately ruled out.

And the Maldives report was dreadful rubbish, made worse for the reporter by the video material and his own statement published on the dreaded Media Watch site.
But what if the data in terms of timing was faked to mislead any search?

We need to ask some major questions at this point.  Why would such data be fabricated and how?

The ‘why’ is an immense ask. The resources that would have to be invested in such a carefully planned and premeditated act of mass murder and deception require some extraordinary motivation.

If the purpose was to kill specific people on board MH370 it would surely have been simpler to kill them before boarding.  If the purpose was to destroy or steal something in the cargo hold the most difficult way to do this imaginable would be after MH370 had taken off.

If the intention was to land it somewhere within its available fuel range a massive degree of planning would have been necessary, probably with the tacit approval of authorities in other states.

These would all involve escalating risk of disclosure, since nothing ever seems to remain secret for long in the post wikileaks, post Snowdon world.

There have of course been lucid, if highly unpleasant reflections on the political anti-Malaysia establishment views of the captain of the flight.  In the light of Germanwings and other similar alarming incidents, some act of criminal insanity (painstakingly planned and executed) cannot be dismissed.

Or  it could have been a perfectly planned heist (for what ever reason) which went totally wrong because of a passenger insurrection, dooming the flight to ultimately plunge to earth on the exhaustion of its fuel.

Or it could have been some totally unimaginable set of technical malfunctions.
But whatever it was, the Malaysian authorities and the airline responded to the sudden disappearance of MH370 as a transponder identified airliner on ATC radar screens with appalling indifference.

Why? As a stab in the dark, what if there was a generalized fleet wide threat made to Malaysia Airlines in an attempt to cause the grounding of the carrier? A threat it decided to ignore?

Almost everything that was subsequently said or done as the searching ramped up could be fitted into a plot to protect the national carrier from its responsibility for having not acted appropriately to a serious threat.

Whether data faking was part of that process remains unknown. This entire notion of a general threat against Malaysia Airlines isn’t supported by any direct evidence, and could thus be as much a rubbish thought as the Maldivian ‘sightings’ turned out to be, consigning this reporter to his own barbeque on Media Watch.

But there are enormous questions about the conduct of the airline and the Malaysian authorities to the disappearance of MH370, and they have not been addressed,  and they could yet prove critical to an understanding of what it was that happened to the flight and why.

Hmm...more than 15 months after this tragedy occurred & we are still no closer to unravelling the mystery of flight MH370... 

MTF..P2  

[aussie500]

I do not see how any sort of false story or any regurgitated 12 months later false story puts the Inmarsat data in doubt. They could have checked the flights soon as that story was first reported and debunked it a lot sooner, probably they did check. Why was it not news back then. Inmarsat data is still exactly the same as it ever was, someone just needs to come up with a new theory and some new calculations to fit the data.

I mean why ever did they think the autopilot was on in the first place? Because the Malaysians said they had tracked it traveling between waypoints, or was it the human intervention thing with the transponder being "turned off" and the plane flying low to avoid radar, or shadowing some other plane. Most of what the Malaysians have said has proved to be unreliable, where is the proof supporting the autopilot theory? Not that false cell tower contact, that was not mentioned in the Factual Report.
http://fox4kc.com/2014/04/14/u-s-officia...-vanished/
They would have surely made something of that if they had actual proof. Why leave that little red herring out there so long? yes they should restart the entire investigation and throw out a few assumptions they made.

If MH370 tried to avoid hitting something what would be the faster way to turn? If they did drop suddenly, because something happened, how would they get the plane back under control, not I think by relying on the autopilot. What ever happened on that plane the calculations with autopilot and waypoints seem to have failed, so how did they go wrong, all those people dropping end points on that 7th arc?

Maybe they best start assuming a more direct course to the SIO, with no pilot control and that MH370 flew through that 7th arc and kept going. Which would probably lead back to where the Australians deserted the original search to go on some wild goose chase. They had the facts about how much fuel was on board, yet they were searching farther south, did not discount that area back then did they. No they did that later, on the 27th March.

[Gobbledock]

"What ever happened on that plane the calculations with autopilot and waypoints seem to have failed, so how did they go wrong"

It isn't that hard. Just look at ANZ into the side of Mt Erebus. The computer navigation track had been altered just before the flight, shifting the flightpath from the safe, flat expanse of McMurdo Sound to a collision course with Mt Erebus, without the pilots being told of the change. Could something either 'accidental' or 'deliberate' have taken place with MH370? It would be a big call because the technology both onboard aircraft today as well as in the air today (satellite technology) is far more advanced than that of the 1970's kit. Plus it would have taken numerous other wilful acts in line with the Nav fiddling theory to have pulled off this level of aviation mischief. However once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

'Safe conspiracy theories for all'

[Peetwo]

Although the islanders are reported in some of the previously published accounts as claiming to have seen a jumbo jet" or a "jet plane" with "a red line under the portholes" (as on the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777s), these details were not mentioned in any of the witness statements that we obtained. "In all probability, the [i]plane that the islanders saw was this domestic flight. There's nothing to convince us that it could have been MH370: neither the route nor the timing support that theory", says Ibrahim Faizal, head of the Maldives civil aviation authority, in an interview with Le Monde. [/i]

More rubbish stories about MH370 leave key issues untouched

The flight that sank the Maldivian sightings

If the intention with the Le Monde, MediaWatch etc. circus, was to steal O2 from, shutdown & totally discredit the MH370 Maldivian theory, well it seems that strategy may have severely backfired for the powers to be (KL Govt) & associated minions (DIPs)..

Firstly off the twitter-verse all week there has been much discussion on the veracity of the Le Monde investigative journalism article. Questions like why Le Monde didn't interview the original witnesses that all gave statements to the Maldivian police. Then via @Julie this AM we get this courtesy of https://twitter.com/mingalababya:



Hmm..maybe the final moral of this story will end up being - 'loose lips sink ships' - either way it seems the world is bereft of true detectives/investigators; well at least when it comes to MH370..

MTF..P2  






 

[Peetwo]

It is a catch22, that the longer that the ATSB - with it's SIO deep-sea search contractor Fugro - continues to search without any discernible results, the more that criticism will grow & the louder the questions will be asked, the following is an example courtesy the Seattle Times:     

Searchers may have missed Malaysia Flight 370, critics say

 
Originally published July 3, 2015 at 4:57 pm Updated July 3, 2015 at 9:23 pm

Flight officer Rayan Gharazeddine, on a Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion, scans for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in March 2014. (Rob Griffith/AP)

Some critics say that the company hired to search for the plane could have easily missed the wreckage because they say its search ships are misusing sonar devices called “towfish” that are dragged above a ragged seabed that averages a depth of 13,000 feet.


By ROD McGUIRK
Associated Press

CANBERRA, Australia — Amid rising frustrations over the expensive, so far fruitless search for vanished Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, experts are questioning the competence of the company in charge, including whether crews may have passed over the sunken wreckage without even noticing.

Some of the strongest comments have come from a company whose bid for the lucrative job failed. But others have also criticized what they suspect is shoddy work, inappropriate equipment use and a focus on speed over thoroughness by the Dutch underwater survey company hired by Australia to find the plane that vanished in the Indian Ocean on March 8 last year with 239 people aboard.

There are also calls for the government to release the growing mountain of sonar data collected so far, which skeptics say could show whether searchers have overlooked holes in the dragnet big enough to conceal a fragmented Boeing 777.

“It strikes me as odd that you’re hiring a company that doesn’t have the assets, doesn’t have the track record,” said Steven Saint Amour, an aircraft-recovery expert based in Annapolis, Md.

The company leading the search, Fugro Survey Pty. Ltd., has gotten some confidence from the discovery of an uncharted wreck of a 19th-century merchant ship 12,800 feet underwater. This bodes well because pieces from the plane would be roughly 10 times as big as the bits of debris searchers found from the wrecked ship, Fugro search director Paul Kennedy said.

Kennedy, who has two decades’ experience in deep-sea sonar towing, dismisses much of the criticism as commercial rivalry and frustration at missing out on a major contract.
Some critics argue that Fugro easily could have missed the plane because detractors say its search ships are misusing 75 kHz side-scan sonar devices called “towfish” that are dragged above a ragged seabed that averages a depth of 13,000 feet.

The towfish were used to declare a corridor 6,600 feet wide clear of wreckage. But some critics argue this distance is too far to use such an acoustic system because the sonar image gets worse the farther the signal travels.

The image is said not to degrade with more modern equipment called Synthetic Aperture Sonar, or SAS.

There have been calls to use SAS, but Kennedy says it’s a developing technology with some questions about reliability. Because the search is in such a remote region, Fugro opted for established technology with ready supplies of spare parts.

Australian safety officials say the corridor isn’t too wide, and the equipment was tested thoroughly during sea trials.

Many experts want the raw sonar data released now, or at least reviewed by an outside party to ensure nothing has been overlooked.

Officials have refused, saying that doing the huge amount of work needed to review and analyze the data so it could be understood by the public would be an unwarranted distraction from search duties.

Critics also argue that sonar images released by Australian officials show shadows — areas where sonar has not penetrated because of an undersea mountain or some other obstacle — large enough to conceal a debris field as big as that left by Air France 447, which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.

Already the search has cost Australia and Malaysia $45 million. Australia expects it will cost an additional $80 million in the fiscal year that started Wednesday, and hopes Malaysia will again pay half.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau, or ATSB, which chose Fugro for the job, concedes that the area already searched contains “data gaps due to shadows caused by geological features.” But these shadows have been catalogued and will be searched later, officials said. More difficult terrain will be searched by an autonomous underwater vehicle, rather than the less maneuverable towfish.

An international team of investigators that analyzed transmissions between the airliner and a satellite calculated that Flight 370 most likely crashed somewhere within 23,000 square miles of seabed. It takes search ships a week to even reach that search area from the Australian west coast port of Fremantle.

If Fugro ends up empty-handed, it will most likely be because the plane didn’t crash where officials thought, said Geoff Dell, a former Australian Airlines air safety investigator and current head of accident investigation at Central Queensland University.

But it’s still possible, he said, that searchers “may have driven over the top of it and didn’t see it.”

If nothing is found, the search will end next year after a withering 46,000 square miles of remote ocean floor up to 4 miles deep have been combed with sonar and video.

But finding any mistakes after the search ends could be too late, said Mike Williamson, president of Williamson & Associates, which has searched for shipwrecks, aircraft, missiles and Apollo 11 rocket engines. The U.S.-based company lost out to Fugro on the bid to find the ship.

“If they find that they haven’t gotten 100 percent coverage, that means that everything they’ve done for the last 14 months is worthless. It would have to be redone,” Williamson said.

ROD McGUIRK

This predicament for Beaker & the ATSB MH370crew, is not helped when they appear to resist all attempts at full transparency and insist that we should remain in a information vacuum...FCOL? Example:   


"..Officials have refused, saying that doing the huge amount of work needed to review and analyze the data so it could be understood by the public would be an unwarranted distraction from search duties.."

What an absolute bollocks answer...

MTF...P2

[Peetwo]

It is a catch22, that the longer that the ATSB - with it's SIO deep-sea search contractor Fugro - continues to search without any discernible results, the more that criticism will grow & the louder the questions will be asked, the following is an example courtesy the Seattle Times:     

Searchers may have missed Malaysia Flight 370, critics say

 
Originally published July 3, 2015 at 4:57 pm Updated July 3, 2015 at 9:23 pm

Flight officer Rayan Gharazeddine, on a Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion, scans for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in March 2014. (Rob Griffith/AP)

Some critics say that the company hired to search for the plane could have easily missed the wreckage because they say its search ships are misusing sonar devices called “towfish” that are dragged above a ragged seabed that averages a depth of 13,000 feet.


By ROD McGUIRK
Associated Press

CANBERRA, Australia — Amid rising frustrations over the expensive, so far fruitless search for vanished Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, experts are questioning the competence of the company in charge, including whether crews may have passed over the sunken wreckage without even noticing.

Some of the strongest comments have come from a company whose bid for the lucrative job failed. But others have also criticized what they suspect is shoddy work, inappropriate equipment use and a focus on speed over thoroughness by the Dutch underwater survey company hired by Australia to find the plane that vanished in the Indian Ocean on March 8 last year with 239 people aboard.

There are also calls for the government to release the growing mountain of sonar data collected so far, which skeptics say could show whether searchers have overlooked holes in the dragnet big enough to conceal a fragmented Boeing 777.

“It strikes me as odd that you’re hiring a company that doesn’t have the assets, doesn’t have the track record,” said Steven Saint Amour, an aircraft-recovery expert based in Annapolis, Md.

The company leading the search, Fugro Survey Pty. Ltd., has gotten some confidence from the discovery of an uncharted wreck of a 19th-century merchant ship 12,800 feet underwater. This bodes well because pieces from the plane would be roughly 10 times as big as the bits of debris searchers found from the wrecked ship, Fugro search director Paul Kennedy said.

Kennedy, who has two decades’ experience in deep-sea sonar towing, dismisses much of the criticism as commercial rivalry and frustration at missing out on a major contract.
Some critics argue that Fugro easily could have missed the plane because detractors say its search ships are misusing 75 kHz side-scan sonar devices called “towfish” that are dragged above a ragged seabed that averages a depth of 13,000 feet.

The towfish were used to declare a corridor 6,600 feet wide clear of wreckage. But some critics argue this distance is too far to use such an acoustic system because the sonar image gets worse the farther the signal travels.

The image is said not to degrade with more modern equipment called Synthetic Aperture Sonar, or SAS.

There have been calls to use SAS, but Kennedy says it’s a developing technology with some questions about reliability. Because the search is in such a remote region, Fugro opted for established technology with ready supplies of spare parts.

Australian safety officials say the corridor isn’t too wide, and the equipment was tested thoroughly during sea trials.

Many experts want the raw sonar data released now, or at least reviewed by an outside party to ensure nothing has been overlooked.

Officials have refused, saying that doing the huge amount of work needed to review and analyze the data so it could be understood by the public would be an unwarranted distraction from search duties.

Critics also argue that sonar images released by Australian officials show shadows — areas where sonar has not penetrated because of an undersea mountain or some other obstacle — large enough to conceal a debris field as big as that left by Air France 447, which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.

Already the search has cost Australia and Malaysia $45 million. Australia expects it will cost an additional $80 million in the fiscal year that started Wednesday, and hopes Malaysia will again pay half.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau, or ATSB, which chose Fugro for the job, concedes that the area already searched contains “data gaps due to shadows caused by geological features.” But these shadows have been catalogued and will be searched later, officials said. More difficult terrain will be searched by an autonomous underwater vehicle, rather than the less maneuverable towfish.

An international team of investigators that analyzed transmissions between the airliner and a satellite calculated that Flight 370 most likely crashed somewhere within 23,000 square miles of seabed. It takes search ships a week to even reach that search area from the Australian west coast port of Fremantle.

If Fugro ends up empty-handed, it will most likely be because the plane didn’t crash where officials thought, said Geoff Dell, a former Australian Airlines air safety investigator and current head of accident investigation at Central Queensland University.

But it’s still possible, he said, that searchers “may have driven over the top of it and didn’t see it.”

If nothing is found, the search will end next year after a withering 46,000 square miles of remote ocean floor up to 4 miles deep have been combed with sonar and video.

But finding any mistakes after the search ends could be too late, said Mike Williamson, president of Williamson & Associates, which has searched for shipwrecks, aircraft, missiles and Apollo 11 rocket engines. The U.S.-based company lost out to Fugro on the bid to find the ship.

“If they find that they haven’t gotten 100 percent coverage, that means that everything they’ve done for the last 14 months is worthless. It would have to be redone,” Williamson said.

ROD McGUIRK

This predicament for Beaker & the ATSB MH370crew, is not helped when they appear to resist all attempts at full transparency and insist that we should remain in a information vacuum...FCOL? Example:   


"..Officials have refused, saying that doing the huge amount of work needed to review and analyze the data so it could be understood by the public would be an unwarranted distraction from search duties.."

What an absolute bollocks answer...

MTF...P2

Gone a bit quiet on here of late, although the veracity of the Le Monde Maldives story remains still largely outstanding on twitter, example:

Julie‏@nihonmama Jul 7

@PAIN_NET1 They can't put Maldives theory to bed b/c they're LYING. By @mingalababya http://on.fb.me/1JPfhKe  #MH370 pic.twitter.com/m5GuEmQi4Q
[/url]
[url=https://twitter.com/nihonmama/status/618551561405362176/photo/1]

Therefore I thought this might be of interest, from the just released QON index written question #103 from last Senate Estimates:

356/ATSB/RICE/MH370 search
1. Does the ATSB know about news reports of observations of low flying plane during the timeframe in question, and in Malaysian airlines colours? If not, why not (given they are leading the search)?
2. Has the ATSB followed up with any investigation of their own with the government of the Maldives, or local people or authorities, given that news reports exist that provide accounts of people in the Maldives observing a plane flying low?
3. Will the ATSB now conduct investigations in the Maldives and revisit analysis of acoustic data in this area? If not, why not?

Interesting? However Dolan will no doubt do the same as he normally does and fob the Senator off with some weasel worded, dismissive obfuscated answer...

MTF...P2  
  

[Peetwo]

As many MH370 followers would have heard there was a breaking news story overnight when a large piece of aircraft debris - resembling part of a flaperon - was discovered on a beach on Reunion island in the SW Indian Ocean, circled in red below:

 

The following is what has been reported in the Oz (on behalf of the APP) this am, plus some interesting speculative commentary so far... 
 

MH370 speculation sparked by debris found on Indian Ocean island  

• by: Jacquelin Magnay
  
• From: The Australian
  
• July 30, 2015 6:14AM
  

European Correspondent



Policemen stand next to a piece of debris from an unidentified aircraft found in the coastal area of Saint-Andre de la Reunion. Source: AFP




Police carry a piece of debris from an unidentified aircraft found in the coastal area of Saint-Andre de la Reunion. Source: AFP
Aviation officials are urgently assessing if a shell crusted wing flap discovered off the South Indian Ocean country of Reunion Island belongs to the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.  

The large chunk of debris washed up on the west coast shoreline at St Andrew on the island, and if it is determined to be from MH370 it will help solve one of the biggest aviation mysteries of all time.

Christian Retournat, a French airforce official based on the island, told CNN: “It is way too soon to say whether or not it is MH370. We just found the debris this morning.”

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau was notified by French officials on Reunion Island late on Wednesday (AEST) of the discovery of what appears to be part of a wing.

The ATSB is working with the plane’s manufacturer, Boeing, to identify if it is from MH370.

“We’ve received some pictures of the item and we are having them assessed by the manufacturers as to what they may be,” ATSB spokesman Joe Hattley told AAP.

“The French authorities have it secured,” Hattley said of the debris. “We’ll work with the French.

“First we need to determine what the item is and whether it is part of a Boeing 777 and then if it is part of MH370.”

Key to the investigation will be serial numbers on the wreckage.
“There’s two numbers you’d be looking for,” he said.

“One is a part number.

“Similar parts on different planes would have a number.

“And you’d have a serial number, a specific number to that particular component.

“If we can locate a serial number we might be able to match it to a specific air frame.”
Locals say the piece of plane appears to have been in the water for around a year.

French aviation experts were immediately assessing the photographs of the wing flap for any connection to MH370 and early speculation is that it could be the wing of a Boeing 777, the same as MH370.

MH370 disappeared after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on March 8, 2014, bound for Beijing with 239 people aboard.

In the 18 months since there have been extensive multi national searches including the Australian-led search off the west coast of Australia that was initiated by computer analysis of “pings” emanating from the plane which appeared to change course in a dead spot of radar activity between Malaysia and Vietnam.

There have been other aircraft crashes in the area near Reunion Island, including a twin engine crash in 2006, and an A310 which crashed off the Comoros in 2009.

With agencies

Terence

2 hours ago


If it is part of the wreckage from flight MH370 then it tallies with the reports of villagers near Kuda Huvadhoo, Maldives of a low flying aircraft of the same colours as MH370 on the day that flight disappeared. And according to the ocean currents for the Indian Ocean the final destination of this piece of aircraft flotsam tallies with the current drift. 



Rick H
1 hour ago

It is absolutely from the MH370,no doubt about it.I said to my wife just after it went missing that eventually the ocean will reveal it's secrets & something would wash up months or even years later.Being ex-Air Force is another reason why I've seen this thing happen so often before.So now the search begins.



Charles
45 minutes ago

All floating wreckage from any Maldives crash would remain in the northern hemisphere and first move west within the Equatorial Counter Current and eventually turn north, then east and end up in Indonesia.

All floating wreckage from a crash off the Australian coast would move north in the West Australian Current, then west in the Southern Equatorial Current until it passed Reunion Is on it way to Madagascar where it would turn south and eventually east and go around again. There is very little northern to southern hemisphere current movement, Maldives in in the north, Reunion is in the south. If this is MH370, then it probably came from off the Australian coast.

And this is what Ben has written so far:

Wing fragment possibly from MH370 found on remote island

Ben Sandilands | Jul 30, 2015 3:20AM |


One of the Twitter photos posted on French blog Peur Avion

A waterlogged section of what may (or may not) be part of the wing of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has been found on La Reunion island in the southern western Indian Ocean.

All that can be said with certainty at this stage is that looks as if it came off an aircraft of some size, and is claimed to resemble a wing part called a flaperon from a Boeing 777 similar to the 777-200ER that was operating the Malaysia Airlines flight between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing that disappeared with 239 people onboard on 8 March 2014.

News and photos of the piece of wreckage first appeared on a closed pilot forum AvGeek and in French on a web site ironically called Fear of Flying, calling itself Peur Avion rather than Par Avion.

The first mainstream English media to carry the reports was The Telegraph in London, but a slightly earlier report on the UK site Metro points out that it might also be from aircraft that crashed near the French outpost of La Reunion in 2006 or even the 2009 crash of a Yemenia A310, off the coast of the Comoros.

The Australian managed Malaysia directed search for MH370  is being carried out on a vast 120,000 square kilometre section of the southern Indian Ocean sea bed well to the SW of Perth and distant from La Reunion island.

When the initial sea and air search for MH370 began off the coast of Western Australia in March last year there were unconfirmed radar satellite and surveillance aircraft sightings of debris that may have come from the missing airliner.

That initial search began at a time when any floating debris from the crash would have been substantially dispersed and likely to have sunk.

It will be interesting to watch this developing story, with wild & rational speculation, Chinese whispers, regurgitation, after regurgitation spread like wildfire across the globe - what the wash up (pun intended ) will be, again we will just have to wait & see

MTF..no doubt..P2