[Peetwo]

MH370 lost in obfuscation & interpretation..

While we (again) continue to wait for word of confirmation of the true provenance of that flaperon, speculation has been rife in sections of the MSM, & lesser streamed media, on what indeed the 'passing strange' hold-up is...

First from Maddie Stone, courtesy the New York magazine:

The Case of the MH370 Wing Segment Keeps Getting Weirder
Maddie Stone
Filed to: MH370
8/29/15 2:00pm

When a wing section of a Boeing 777 washed up on the Indian Ocean island of La Réunion last month, the Malaysian government quickly ascribed the part to missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. But an ongoing investigation has failed to verify this claim, and the story just keeps getting weirder.

Shortly after the flaperon washed up, Boeing engineers confirmed that the wing segment belongs to a 777. And MH370, which went missing in March of 2014, is the only 777 unaccounted for. So case closed, right?

Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak figured it was, and on August 5th, he released a statement announcing as much to the world. But minutes later, French investigator Serge Mackowiak countered the prime minister’s remarks, saying that more tests were needed to conclusively determine the wing segment’s origin. Those test results were supposed to come within a day. Then it became a few days. Now it’s been several weeks.

What’s the hangup? According to New York Magazine, the ID plate that should have been attached to the inboard edge of the flaperon is missing. This plate, affixed to all 777 flaperons, ought to contain a serial number linking the part to MH370. Its absence has not only stymied the verification process, it’s resulted in other aspects of the wing segment coming under (perhaps excessive) scrutiny.

For instance, the flaperon was covered in barnacles. Barnacles everywhere! And people are freaking out about it. Barnacles all over seems to suggest the wing segment spent the last several months suspended beneath the ocean surface. But how?

While it’s easy to imagine a submarine or a scuba diver hovering peacefully 10 or 20 feet under the surface of the water, this is not something that inanimate objects are capable of doing on their own: Either they are more buoyant than water, in which case they float, or they are less buoyant, in which case they sink.

So, how could a six-foot-long chunk of airplane remain suspended beneath the ocean surface for a long period of time? At this point, there aren’t any simple, common-sense answers; the range of possible explanations at this point runs from as-yet-unidentified natural processes to purposeful intervention by conspirators.

There’s certainly a logical explanation for all of this, and we’ll find it eventually — perhaps we’ll even learn a thing or two about barnacle ecology in the process! In the meanwhile, the sleuths of the internet are sure to come up with all sorts of outlandish origin stories for the untagged flaperon. And the fate of flight MH370 remains as mysterious as ever.

Which Ben Sandilands (c/o Planetalking) posted on & has since received much excellent commentary on... :

MH370 wing part mystery defies resolution

Ben Sandilands | Aug 29, 2015 11:29AM


Children once thought their parents on MH370 might come back

The New York Magazine has published a succinct article as to why the wing part of a Boeing 777 washed up on La Réunion in the west Indian Ocean late in July continues to defy positive identification as having come from missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

It is based in part on another report in a less famous miracle of surviving quality journalism, the small circulation  La Dépêche in Toulouse, which is where the action is when it comes to the military laboratory where the so called flaperon from the wide body jet was sent for examination by the public prosecutor’s office in Paris.

French nationals resident in Paris were among the 239 people on board the jet on 7 March 2014 when it disappeared on a flight between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, and in French law their presumed deaths are subject to a criminal investigation.

However, the blunt summary for the lack of positive identification of the part is that to some extent Malaysia Airlines had stopped chronicling with exhaustive accuracy the history of every component of its 777 fleet, which includes not just date of manufacture or source (an important issue in these times of fake or bogus aircraft parts) but installation, maintenance, any removals, repairs and even use as a replacement for previous identical or near identical parts.

Removing the costly and obviously unnecessary burden of such tiresome compliance with the regulations (where they exist) or even good housekeeping is quite popular according to some sources among airlines run by ignorant bean counters, although one hesitates to suggest that this might possibly have been the case with Malaysia Airlines.

If Malaysia Airlines couldn’t be bothered making more than cursory calls to the satellite phone in the cockpit of  the missing jet on the night it disappeared, or even contacting the multitude of ships that were under possible paths it could have taken while in Malaysian waters why would such matters of parts numbers or inventory management even cross its collective mind?

It was after all, just a 777 with 239 people on board. Back to bed, yawn!

This hideous farce and the indications of a lack of disclosure and candor and above all care for the lives of its those on the Malaysia Airlines 777 by the airline’s management and Malaysian authorities sits badly with the spectacle of the country’s embattled PM Najib Razak deliberately misleading the media about what experts had found in relation to the flaperon on the morning that the Paris deputy prosecutor gave a press conference concerning the testing of the component.

There is no conceivable excuse for the Prime Minister of Malaysia to publicly get things wrong in such a manner. Doesn’t the man have any respect for diligence and accuracy in his public statements? Which raises the similar carelessness with the truth of his transport minister, Liow Tiong Lai, in his insisting that parts of windows and other components had been recovered from La Réunion when they hadn’t.

We are not being told the truth by Kuala Lumpur. What is the truth? What did Malaysia know on the night and morning of the disappearance of MH370?  Why didn’t Malaysia Airlines keep full records of the history of the parts of the 777 involved in this mystery?
As the NY Mag notes, maddening implausibility is something that persists in every twist and turn of the MH370 mystery.

At around about the same time there was a breaking news story emanating from the Geomar Helmholtz Centre for Oceanography, in Kiel Germany - MH370 Update: Experts Say Search For Missing Malaysian Airliner Could Be Focussing On Wrong Area

...A wing part from a Boeing 777 aircraft that was discovered on the French island of Réunion "probably came from the eastern equatorial Indian Ocean," Villwock reportedly said. He added that the area from where the flaperon originated is thousands of miles from the previously presumed crash site at 35 degrees latitude south of the Equator. The experts came to this conclusion after using a model of ocean currents to guess its drift path, according to reports.

The Geomar institute reportedly said that it will give details on its findings at a news conference on Tuesday...

 Yes I know yet another group of experts making assertions & theories on limited publicly available information or hard evidence...

A point that Ben makes (amongst others) in his latest post on the subject:

MH370 theories might take a new drift from German study

Ben Sandilands | Aug 31, 2015 2:46PM |


False MH 370 finds on La Reunion, collected after the flaperon recovery

Tuesday morning German time several researchers from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel are to hold a media conference suggesting that the search area for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 needs to be shifted closer to the equator and middle of the Indian Ocean.

They have already briefed the German media on what their conclusions are with the most detailed of these reports appearing on Spiegel Online, and not unreasonably at this early hour, only in German.

This means they must have something substantial and yet unsaid to add to their findings, which appear to be based on photographic identification of the types of barnacles seen on a Boeing 777 flaperon, a part of the trailing edge of the wing, which was retrieved from the shores of La Réunion in the west Indian Ocean late in July.

They are reported as arguing that those particular growths have such localised marine habitations that they could not have come from the priority search area in the southern Indian Ocean SW of Perth, even though some of the reports quote them as saying that zone is at 35 degrees S, which in incorrect.

Whether their findings cause the currents of controversy to flow further away from the vastness of the sea floor search priority zone or back toward it remains to be seen. The researchers are attached to a prestigious marine research facility with much to lose if they get it wrong, and what they say in their detailed study obviously needs to be peer reviewed with those additional opinions as well as their own work considered very carefully by the Malaysia directed and Australia managed search.

The search for MH370, a 777-200ER which disappeared with 239 people on board on 8 March 2014 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, relies critically on evidence that the jet flew for seven hours 39 minutes before it sent its last ‘ping’ signals to a geo-stationary satellite which had to be about 44 degrees above the horizon in relation to the position of the airliner at that moment.  The line that connects all of the points from which the satellite would be at that elevation is referred to as the seventh arc, and in theory, it stretches for thousands of kilometres across the middle to southern reaches of the south Indian Ocean.

If those elements are bogus or mistaken the south Indian Ocean search loses credibility.  Similarly, if the wing part is conclusively ruled out as having come from MH370, the validity of the sea floor search would be undermined and dreadful suspicions about how the part came to be hastily portrayed as coming from MH370 by the Malaysian authorities would gain momentum.

The provenance of the recovered wing part hasn’t been established.

However the validation of the flaperon as having come from MH370 would not on its own confirm that the sunk sections of the jet are where the searchers are looking.  According to the JACC and ATSB, the flaperon’s recovery from the French island is consistent with revised CSIRO drift modelling as to where floating debris could have been taken by ocean currents in the time available.

The GEOMAR paper, based on preliminary media reports, contradicts that finding.
 

"..The standards of proof for assertions about where MH370 is or what might have caused it to disappear and crash, have to be very high. So far, they haven’t been met..."

 

The bit in bold...AMEN to that
MTF..P2