[Peetwo]

MH370 & 'Drift wars'??

From the Budget Senate Estimates our MH370 super sleuth Chief Commissioner divined us with his superior wisdom on all things MH370 SIO search related :

Mr Dolan : No. To explain that: the initial stages of the search for MH370—looking for debris on the surface in the hope that there might still be survivors—was a matter of search and rescue, which is with the Australian Maritime Safety Authority. The questions of what techniques might be available in future for extensive search and rescue operations is really one for AMSA. For our purpose, which is the subsurface search—trying to define an area where the aircraft may be and searching for it—there is a highly specialised technique using towed sonar and other equipment.


Senator GALLACHER: They are all unmanned vehicles, aren't they?

Mr Dolan : Yes.

Senator GALLACHER: I am just curious why we did not have one above the ground as well as one below the sea.

Mr Dolan : I was not responsible for the surface search, so it is not a matter I can comment on.

Senator GALLACHER: Okay. So the search continues. Are we any closer?

Mr Dolan : Every day we cover more area is a day we should be closer to finding the aircraft.

ACTING CHAIR: You should just ask the Chinese. They might have something!

Mr Dolan : We are confident that, if we have defined the search area well—as we think we have—we have the techniques and the capability to find the aircraft. We have confidence but not certainty that we will find it.

Senator WILLIAMS: Are you surprised that you have not found any luggage or plastic bags floating? You would think that, if an aircraft went down anywhere in the ocean, there would be some sort of luggage or something floating—some evidence—and yet there has not been any of that seen, has there?

Mr Dolan : There are probably three points to be made there. The first is that, historically, if you look at the range of collisions of passenger aircraft with water, there are a range of possibilities, some of which have very little floating debris at all, some of which, such as Air France 447 in the South Atlantic, have extensive floating debris. We do not know how hard and at what angle the aircraft hit the water, so we do not know how much floating debris there would have been. The second is that we did not start looking for floating debris until about day 10, when a lot of it would already have been dispersed, so it was a difficult task. The third is that all the projections we can do say that any debris that there may be would most likely have been progressively floating further out into the Indian Ocean and ending up in one of those large gyres that collects a whole range of rubbish in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

Senator WILLIAMS: It is a mystery, isn't it?

Mr Dolan : It is.

Strange the complete disconnection by Dolan between the AMSA surface search for debris and the ATSB/CSIRO projections for debris, remembering that this was well before the discovery of the flaperon on Reunion island. Personally from experience as a former SAR pilot I find the flippant remarks from Dolan as completely risible. Why all possible means - theoretical or otherwise - weren't used to the point of exhaustion to find surface debris is beyond comprehension. There is something fundamentally flawed with the methodology used by the bureau, when they get to the point where they can no longer 'see the woods for the trees'...

Perhaps to highlight the flawed ATSB 'Beyond all Sensible Reason' (BASR) approach Mike Chillit has recently released a 'work in progress' report - MH370 update 09/11- that IMO is well worth taking the time to read...  

This is a very brief summary that examines some of the issues

that arise following the recovery of MH370’s right flaperon from

Reunion Island. That speck of debris is a step forward, but a

small step. It does not tell us, yet, as much as we need to know

to find the rest of the plane.


Included here now, as of September 11, 2015, are copies of

requests for information, and responses, from ATSB / JACC. They

are neither private nor confidential and should be shared with all

who wish to know how the search is being conducted.

[Please Note that the Getty Image on the previous page shows a LEFT flaperon. It is for illustrative purposes only. The flaperon that washed up on Reunion Island was from MH370’s RIGHT side.]

Mike Chillit

I personally think Mike should have titled it the 'Drift Wars' - as per section 2 - because it is an apt description on where the 'current' conundrum is within the bizarre MH370 'disinformation bubble'...   

When the flaperon was recovered at the end of July, speculation was rampant that search efforts in the Southern Indian Ocean were in the wrong part of the world. An estimated $120 million Australian dollars had been invested in a narrow strip of ocean
2,500 kilometers southwest of Perth. That strip is about 1,000 kilometers long, and about 120 kilometers wide (120,000 square kilometers). Nothing at all associated with MH370 has been found, although an old shipwreck and two lost-overboard shipping containers have now been mapped. Without finding debris of any kind, it was natural to wonder if the search was where it needed to be.

Concerns about the search location were magnified by Australia 10 months earlier when it asked Indonesia to be on the lookout for MH370-related debris, particularly along the western shores Sumatra and Java. Obviously, someone associated with Australia’s search expected drift to go northeast to Indonesian shores. But suddenly the only drift anyone had washed up on the far side of the Indian Ocean. How could that happen if Australia knew anything at all about drift patterns west of its own shores?

MTF...P2