[Peetwo]

MH370: 60 minutes & the Oz today??

Q/ Who really are the criminal/terrorists here?

He said she said

The 60 Minutes piece was interesting to watch, but mostly covered old ground. But I had two observations from the story;

1. Foley never looked at ease, not for one second. His body language mirrored that of a man who had just had a broomstick shoved up his ass sideways. And;

2. The lines were very very blurred as to who is running this effing investigation. The Aussies, Malays, or the god damn French?? One piece of wreckage goes to Australia directly, another piece goes to Malaysia and then to Australia. Another piece goes directly to the Frogs and after a year the Malayaians still don't have that piece in their possession and the Aussies can't answer why that is the case!

Seriously, who is sitting in the left hand seat?? What an embarrassment. The whole  investigation is in a state of flux, and the way it is being managed is a pathetic joke. And by default ICAO are a pissweak joke. Sitting idly by while nobody is sitting in the left hand seat.

The 60 Minutes reporter, although on the money for most of the grilling, is in my opinion not a formidable foe, in other words 'not a Richard Carlton' and Foley should have handled him without raising so much as a sweat. But Foley looked rattled, or was it pissed off, or was it both? Either way he didn't look or sound comfortable at all, in fact I thought he almost looked relieved when subtly casting doubt over the entire sordid mess. Or am I over-reading things? My impression was that there most definitely is a bigger game being played here by those in high places and the responses from Foley may indicate that those at the ATsB at his level and below might be getting somewhat sick and tired of the entire shambolic game and having to be the proverbial 'meat in the sandwich'?


TICK '60 Minutes' TOCK

Well, I put the much abused TV at risk again and sat through the 60 minutes ‘show’.  There was nowhere near 60 minutes of ‘useful’ commentary, but I managed, just, to resist the ‘Off’ button during the dramatized bits. That said, the interview with a ‘real’ accident investigator was worth the effort.

The notion that there was ‘someone’ at the controls is irresistible.  Whether it was the pilot or not is not proven and care was taken to avoid claiming that it was. IMO there is more ‘evidence’ against this being the case than there is for it; and, despite blaming the pilot being an easy ‘cop out’ that notion was not made into a major point, just part of the jigsaw.  Which is good, responsible reporting.  Sure it’s a possibility, but so is the possibility that another hand was on the controls that night.  

The notion of a controlled ditching was nicely managed; again, IMO this is a more likely scenario than the falling leaf, ‘ghost ship’ charade.  The ‘investigator’ believed and even Foley acknowledged the increased probability. It just makes better sense of what evidence we have.

Felt a bit sorry for Foley, whatever he was sitting on was not comfortable; looked like he was perched on a stool. When under pressure at Estimates he manages very well, stays cool and comes out as mostly credible, but GD has spotted the differences.  He was probably a little of both GD, rattled and pissed off, but it could be that he has to juggle so many balls and keep so many secrets that to drop even one ball would be a disaster.  It could also be that he was worried about what he does not know; or, has not been told and that concerns him.  Then again, it may be that it was not the public he concerned about, but the men behind the scenes.  Doubt he’d give a rats for the opinions of the great unwashed horde; but of  the faceless ones, those behind the screen, that is a whole other road to a  career of pain.

Aye well, duty done.  I doubt any of it will change the world, cure poverty, famine, disease or prevent war. I expect 99% of those who watched would have forgotten all about it by bed time, even so, it was good of 60 minutes to put the program on air and try to solve the riddle. I know ratings and advertising dollars had nothing to do with their motivation, nothing at all.

Alt_file_save_forget.

Ross Coulthart via the Oz today:

MH370 under control of pilot when it crashed: search co-ordinator
Ross Coulthart
The Australian
12:00AM August 1, 2016

The Australian official co-ordinating the search for missing ­Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has admitted for the first time that damage found to recovered wreckage suggests the plane was under the control of a pilot when it crashed into the ocean.

Peter Foley, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s program director of the operational search for MH370, has conceded severe erosion along the trailing edge of two recovered wing parts points to a controlled landing into the ocean. This is a sig­nificant ­admission because such a scenario is at odds with the preferred theory held by crash investigators that the jet was not under pilot control at the end of its journey.

His admission gives weight to the theory that a rogue pilot deliberately crashed the plane and ­raises further doubts over ­whether MH370 is within the search area.

Mr Foley was asked on 60 Minutes last night: “If there was a rogue pilot, isn’t it possible that the plane was taken outside the parameters of the search area?”

Mr Foley answered: “Yeah — if you guided the plane or indeed control-ditched the plane, it has an extended range, potentially.”

Larry Vance, one of the world’s most ­experienced air crash investigators and former chief ­investigator for the Canadian Transportation Safety Board, told the program he was confident the Malaysian jet was being piloted at the end of its flight.

Mr Vance, who wrote the ­investigation report into the 1998 SwissAir 111 crash into the ocean near Nova Scotia, based his analysis in part on damage that is clearly visible along the trailing edge of MH370’s flaperon that was recovered from the French territory of Reunion Island off Madagascar a year ago.

“Somebody was flying the aeroplane at the end of its flight,’’ he said. “Somebody was flying the aeroplane into the water ... There is no other alternate theory that you can follow of all the potentials that might have happened. There’s no other theory that fits.”

Mr Vance said photographs and video of the flaperon, and more recent pictures of the wing flap found on the coast of Tanz­ania just over a month ago, show conclusive evidence of high-­pressure water erosion that cut a jagged edge along the trailing edge of both wing parts as they hit the water during a controlled landing by a pilot.

“The momentum of dragging that little flaperon through the water would be absolutely enormous,” he said.

“The force of the water is really the only thing that could make that jagged edge that we see. It wasn’t broken off. If it was broken off, it would be a clean break. You couldn’t even break that thing. I know from experience that it’s wide. If you wanted to break that off, you couldn’t do it and make it look like that.”

A critically important aspect, according to Mr Vance’s analysis, is that the evidence shows the wing flap and flaperon were extended for landing when the jet hit the ocean, and the only way they could have been extended is if a pilot manually selected them to be extended just before the aircraft went into the water.

“You cannot get the flaperon to extend any other way than if somebody extended it,” he said.
“Somebody would have to ­select it.”

Moreover, he said several course changes made earlier in the journey, including the U-turn back to Malaysia from the South China Sea, another course change along the Malay Peninsula and then another around the northern tip of Sumatra into the Indian Ocean, could have been made only if a pilot had entered co-­ordinates into the jet’s flight management computer.

Mr Foley, the ATSB’s surface safety investigation general manager, conceded this was correct: “There is a possibility … somebody (was) in control at the end and we are actively looking for evidence to support that,’’ he said.

But as recently as Friday ATSB commissioner Greg Hood reiterated the view of the search team that satellite data from the Boeing 777 jet suggested it was plunging at almost 400km/h just before it crashed into the sea with 239 passengers and crew.

He also said this meant no one was in control of the jet. Based on that satellite data, the Defence Science and Technology Group’s modelling has placed the jet as being “most likely” inside an area of 120,000sq km.

As Mr Foley now admits, however, such an analysis depends on the assumption the flight was uncontrolled after the jet ran out of fuel. A pilot could easily have ­glided or flown the plane well ­outside the current search area. Two senior 777 pilots also told 60 Minutes that the flap and flap­eron could have been extended only if the aircraft had at least one engine running, raising further doubts about the MH370 search team’s analysis, concluding that the jet must have run out of fuel before it descended at high speed into the ocean.

Malaysian police last week strongly denied the existence of any report showing the jet’s captain, Zahari Ahmed Shah, had plotted a route deep into the southern Indian Ocean on his home flight simulator, and that he later deleted this evidence off his computer, but 60 Minutes obtained a copy of that confidential Malaysian report. Mr Foley conceded the report was genuine.

Mr Hood had reportedly said it was an “FBI report” but more ­recent reports attribute its authorship to the Malaysian police. The report is not firm evidence of Captain Zahari’s culpability for the loss of MH370 but it does raise a disturbing suspicion, especially since the route he planned in his flight simulator clearly contemplated the jet would have run out of fuel over the Indian Ocean.

Malaysia’s decision to deny existence of this report has only fuelled concerns it is attempting to cover up pilot complicity in the loss of MH370.

In an astonishing admission, Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai also said Malaysia had still not taken possession of or examined the key flaperon evidence, even though it was recovered by French authorities more than a year ago on Reunion Island.
“We are unable to get the ­details from the French government,” he admitted.

Sources have said this was likely because French judicial investigators did not trust Malaysia to fairly investigate the growing evidence that the jet was downed by a rogue pilot, even though Malaysia has the power under international conventions to demand access.

Mr Vance also said the lack of any debris from inside the missing jet strongly suggested the aircraft hit the sea at a much slower speed than the search team’s satellite analysis suggested. He said when SwissAir 111 crashed into the sea off Nova Scotia, the plane exploded into two million small pieces, many floating for weeks, but there was no evidence of such a high-speed crash with MH370.

“I think the reason we don’t see debris from inside the aeroplane washing up in different places around the ocean is because that debris remained in the fuselage and the fuselage went to the bottom,” he said.

Danica Weeks, the wife of Paul Weeks, one of the missing passengers on board MH370, told 60 Minutes about a conversation she had with the Malaysian Prime Minister’s wife, Rosmah Mansor, that left her convinced the Malaysians know more than they have publicly acknowledged.

A month after the tragedy, she met Mrs Mansor at an air base in Perth. “She told me it was very horrible that somebody would do this to 238 innocent people. She was insinuating the pilot took the plane,” she said.

Ross Coulthart is a reporter with 60 Minutes.

 Hmm...IMO Mr Coulthart is a better writer than he is presenter...


MTF?- Definitely but not before (while imagining some Malaysian or Aussie pollie or bureaucrats face on the backend of the ball) I've smacked the beejeezus out of a little white ball first - ..P2