[Peetwo]

'That man' Higgins sniffs a rort?

Courtesy the Weekend Oz x2 :

A question of confidence in filling $100m MH370 black hole

• Ean Higgins
  
• The Australian
  
• January 23, 2016 12:00AM
  

The revelation that Australia is relying on Malaysia to meet a potential $100 million “black hole” in the search to find MH370 demonstrates the pitfalls in the government’s approach to this project.

Australian Transport Safety Bureau chief Martin Dolan said on ABC Radio last week that Australia did not need to find out what happened on board MH370, since under international law the investigation was Malaysia’s responsibility.

The fact that Malaysia promised to contribute a survey vessel to the search, and it never showed up, does not augur well for the country’s enthusiasm over solving the mystery.

Mr Dolan and the bureau have fallen over themselves to avoid the clear evidence that the most likely scenario, given the deliberate flying evident in the first part of the flight back over Malaysia and the turning off of the radar transponder and cut in communications, is that captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah hijacked his own plane.

The bureau has said the first part of the flight doesn’t matter for its purposes, and is working only on the track from the last turn south and a scenario consistent with the crew passing out from lack of oxygen because of decompression or otherwise becoming “unresponsive’’.

Zaharie was a strong supporter and relative of Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, who the day before the flight had faced court where his acquittal on sodomy charges had been overturned, in what is widely seen as a politically motivated trial.

If it turns out that the loss of MH370 was a political statement by Zaharie, it would be a bad look for the Malaysian government. One has to ask in those circumstances how confident Australian taxpayers, who have so far put up $60m for the underwater search, can be that if the cost blows out, Malaysia will stump up as much as $100m to meet it.

&..

Questions over MH370 search funding shortfall

• Ean Higgins
  
• The Australian
  
• January 23, 2016 12:00AM
  

Australia is relying on Malaysia to fund a potential $100 million shortfall in the search for Flight MH370, as it emerges that a survey vessel promised by Malaysia to join the search never showed up.

Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss’s office would not produce any public statement from the Malaysian government in which it committed to meet the remaining cost of the search, and the Malaysian high commission did not respond to a similar request.

The Weekend Australian can also reveal that while nearly two months ago Mr Truss, whose transport portfolio covers the search for the Malaysia Airlines plane, said a Chinese vessel would join the search this ­summer, none has appeared; his department did not say when one would.

The federal government has taken prime responsibility for the search for MH370, which dis­appeared on March 8, 2014, on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, because its presumed final resting place, in the southern ­Indian Ocean, is within Australia’s search and rescue zone.

The hunt will be called off once the designated 120,000sq km target zone has been searched, ­expected in June.

Australia has committed $60m to the cost of the search, and China has recently committed $20m in “assets and financial ­contribution”.

In a statement this week to The Weekend Australian, the Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre, set up within Mr Truss’s department to orchestrate the search, said: “It is expected that the underwater search may cost up to $180m.’’

Asked how the $100m gap, understood to be the result in part of a declining Australian dollar against a US contract with the Dutch Fugro survey group whose three ships are conducting the search, would be met, Mr Truss’s spokesman said: “Malaysia has committed assets and financial contribution to fund the balance of the cost of the underwater search.”

The spokesman would not provide a copy of the tripartite agreement he said embodied the commitment, or produce any other corroborating statement from the Malaysian government.

Since the Boeing 777 was ­Malaysian-registered, under international aviation law Malaysia is charged with investigating its ­disappearance.

This point has been repeatedly stressed by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau when asked why, rather than work on the dominant opinion put by commercial airline pilots and other aviation experts that MH370 was hijacked by its captain, it relies on a theory consistent with the pilots becoming unconscious due to lack of oxygen during decompression or otherwise “unresponsive.”

Early last month, Mr Truss said “within the coming months a fourth vessel to be provided by China will add to the search ­effort’’.

Recent weekly bulletins from the joint co-ordination centre about the search have made no mention of a Chinese vessel joining the effort.

“Any new vessel entering the search will be announced at an appropriate time, prior to it arriving in the search area,” a co-ordination centre representative said.

Hmm...sounds like there are some serious questions that fall within the remit of 'the Heff' & his band of merry men & women that they could possibly ask at Estimates in a couple of weeks time...

- Okay tin hat donned:

Not sure how many people have a subscription to the Oz but some of the commentary, comment numbers must now have surpassed 1000 across all MH370 blogged articles, associated with the Higgins articles (above) & the Bailey articles is really very good.

Now although I don't totally agree with some of the finer points (opinions/theories), the best for today's Higgins article so far has to be from Mervyn, who IMO pretty much nails it: 

Mervyn 5ptsFeatured
1 hour ago

It would seem to me that the real story here is the sheer incompetence and bloody-mindedness of the ATSB, whose investigative members do not have the experience or knowledge of the airline pilots who have commented on this matter.

Consider for one moment the implications globally of the aircraft being found, and the recovery of the black box clearly shows that the pilot was in command right until the very end. Not only will that contravene all the rubbish that has been touted by the various authorities to-date, but will give the ATSB a resounding slapping which they so richly deserve.

There is no doubt that a very serious game of cover-up is being played by all the governments embroiled in this fiasco, no the least our own Australian government, but mostly the Malaysian government. Please do not think that for one moment because Australia commissioned Fugro to conduct the search, and that Australia guaranteed the fees for such search, that Australia is not part of the cover-up. When one controls the search, and more importantly the information dissemination, then one controls what is being reported!

And what is being reported is what the ATSB is dribbling, because this is what our Government, in collusion with Malaysia and others, has decided is the best strategy to cover up the obvious - that the pilot may well have committed this atrocity as a extremist Islamist in the name of Islamic State!

If that is the case, and it does appear to be a logical albeit unproven possibility, then it is not unreasonable to assume that Malaysia, as a secular Muslim state, would seek to distance itself from such atrocity - and the easiest way to do this is to cosy up to Australia and quite easily convincing our relevant Minister that it is best served to sweep this matter under the rug than for the truth to prevail.

Consider for one moment the implications of a pilot with an Islamist bent behind the controls of a commercial airliner - there would be mass panic in air travel circles, with aircraft from secular Muslim countries banned from entering our airspace. Think Etihad, think Malaysia Airlines,  think Air Singapore. Think chaos.

Truss is a National, who are socialist agrarians, who believe in state protection of primary industries, and like every other farmer has a sense of entitlement to mass government handouts to maintain the status quo. He is the Minister for Transport because of his political position, not because of his competency or knowledge of matters transportation.

The theory submitted by the ATSB will over time be shredded, as more and more B777-200 pilots voice their knowledge and experience in this regard. However, for now, the ATSB is the "official" voice on this matter, and clearly it is doing the bidding of a subversive agenda, and not fulfilling the mandate for which it was empowered under law.

As I said, the real story here is about lies and deceit, not about air safety. Root out who is telling the lies and who is being deceitful, expose them publicly, and air safety will have meaning and precedence once again.

Now although Bailey comes across as somewhat arrogant & opinionated I have to admire the fact that he is prepared to face down any of his critics. One way he is doing that is by being interactive on the blog comments, where one dude called 'Mick' is repeatedly & comprehensively dishing it out.

Here is an example:

Mick 17 hours ago

I know that Captain Bailey is not a bona fide journalist but he would be well served by having a journalist proof his work prior to publication. That way he might avoid misrepresenting the Air Transport Safety Bureau. The ATSB have not postulated on the cause of the loss of MH370, that is not their job. Their job is to find the crash site and then hand over to Malaysian and US investigators whose job it is to determine the cause.

In order to determine the search zone the ATSB are working with limited data
- the known performance characteristics of the Boeing 777-200 ER in general (Boeing are assisting here)
- the specific performance characteristics of the actual aircraft that operated as MH370, rego 9M-MRO (Malaysian Airlines have assisted here)
- the projected flight path of the aircraft based on the analysis of satellite data (INMARSAT and The University of London have assisted here).

What the ATSB have said is "The limited evidence available for MH370 was compared with three accident classes: an in-flight upset, an unresponsive crew/hypoxia event, and a glide event (generally characterised by a pilot-controlled glide). The final stages of the ‘unresponsive crew/hypoxia’ event-type appeared to best fit the available evidence for the final period of MH370’s flight when it was heading in a generally southerly direction."

Note - "best fit", "available evidence", "final period", emphasis on "final period".

Captain Bailey's theory is that the captain, for reasons unknown, took control of the aircraft by securing himself in the cockpit, made the aircraft "dark" (difficult to track) by disabling all communications including the transponders, depressurised the aircraft so as to incapacitate and kill everybody on board, reprogrammed the flight management system (FMS), what most of us know as the "auto-pilot", to fly back across the Malaysian Peninsula and then down between Malaysia and Indonesia before turning south into the Indian ocean, repressurised the aircraft so that he would not freeze to death and then stayed at the controls for the remainder of the flight so that he could ditch in the Southern Indian Ocean whereupon he flooded the aircraft to sink it so as to avoid leaving any debris and he then died by either drowning or exposure.

One question immediately arises - why would the pilot risk a ditching in the Southern Indian Ocean, a manoeuvre fraught with the risk of an aircraft break-up (one only needs to look at video of the last moments of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 to understand the risk) in order to leave no debris in an area that no one would be looking at (there is absolutely no doubt that the captain was not aware that the INMARSAT satellite handshakes were even occuring leave alone that the data could be used to plot the course of the aircraft he had so painstakingly disappeared).

If you accept the first premise of Captain Bailey's theory - that the Captain was responsible for disappearing the aircraft as part of an elaborate suicide - once the FMS was reprogrammed, the Captain's efforts to disappear were effectively complete; he did not have to stay at the controls for the aircraft to fly the elaborate evasive track it subsequently flew. He could have completed the reprogramming very shortly after securing the cockpit and if the ultimate end he had in mind for himself was suicide, what method would he choose?

- hypoxia, achieved by taking his oxygen mask off, painless and certain, he would have lost consciousness and then died from lack of oxygen; or
- drowning, only after he had executed an extremely hazardous ocean landing that may have left him badly injured or killed him anyway.

If you opt for hypoxia (who wouldn't?) then the ATSB's unresponsive crew/hypoxia event accurately describes the terminal phase of the flight.

I fear Captain Bailey is simply and persistently looking for a very public fight where there's none to be had.

To which BB replied:

Byron 16 hours ago

@Chris @Mick The Australian did proof my article and left out a lot of the damning criticism of the ATSB and my challenge to the head of CASA to debate live on the ABC, why the ATSB report of 04 Dec 2015, so proudly presented by Warren Truss, was, to put it mildly a confection that did not agree at all with what I and a senior Emirates B777 Instructor experienced 3 weeks ago, in a Dubai B777 simulator when we tried their various Flame Out theories.

It is a bit of a ding-dong but if nothing else it is very entertaining...


MTF...P2