[Peetwo]

And: FWIW more from the Negroni pen - HERE-.

Actually "K" I think that is from the Clive Irving keyboard and has much of the usual journalistic factual vagaries we come to expect from most attempted MSM coverage of the MH370 disappearance. (There is also some fundamental typo errors, for example...

"..By any measure the disappearance and death of 329 people is a serious event.."

...I think is supposed to read 239 people... )

However there is some interesting commentary, observations and opinion from Irving, which
for a refreshing change does not get lost in too much speculation or theorising on the shambolic MH370 search and accident investigation...
 
Examples:

...In her book Negroni writes that she was disturbed by a discovery made during her reporting that “for all the apparent effort to try to solve the mystery of MH370, authorities may not be as committed to finding out what went wrong.”

Negroni discloses the impotence of the internal auditors at Malaysia Airlines. This disclosure goes to one of the most fundamental questions: Why was Flight MH370 not equipped to report its position and condition more frequently than at half-hour intervals?

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...When it comes to aviation, Malaysia presents an illusion of governance. It has institutions that by name imply international standards of regulatory vigilance—a Ministry of Transport and a Department of Civil Aviation to supervise airlines, for example, and Malaysia Airlines itself has a Department of Quality Assurance and Regulatory Affairs (that’s who the auditors reported to). It’s when you come to question who gets appointed to these bodies and who ensures that they work as they should that it begins to look like a Potemkin charade...

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..Cronyism permeates all the national institutions, including those that for years have had oversight of commercial aviation. Inevitably, when a crisis as serious as the loss of MH370 occurs it exposes the cost of having political placemen, rather than professionals, in key positions. For example, CNN’s Richard Quest, the author of another book about MH370, interviewed Hussein more than a year after the disaster and reported: “…there is an astonishing gap in the minister’s perception of what happened and the rest of the world’s.”

Irving also summarises quite well on the unwieldy structure and strange dichotomy, when dealing with so many DIPs involved with either the investigation & search efforts:

To begin with, the internal hierarchy of the investigation is difficult to fathom. Politically the three most involved nations, and those financing the search, are Malaysia, China (152 of the passengers were Chinese), and Australia—because the crash site is closest to Australia and because of Australia’s expertise in air crash investigations.

However, a more comprehensive tally of involved parties reveals a burgeoning bureaucracy and a forest of acronyms.

At the head is the Malaysian Ministry of Transport’s Safety Investigation Team for MH370. In addition, by November 2014, there were five international partners providing specific skills: Boeing; Rolls Royce (maker of the airplane’s engines); Thales (a European aerospace conglomerate); the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board; and Australia’s equivalent of the NTSB, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.

Since then more groups have been listed as involved—the Australian Defence Science and Technology Group; the French equivalent of the NTSB, the Bureau d’Enquetes et d’Analyses, BEA; Great Britain’s Air Accident Investigation Branch; Inmarsat, the British satellite operator that identified the most likely search area; and Honeywell, the avionics company that provides systems to Boeing.

One part of the investigation appears to have grown into a minor industry, requiring technology that is not normally part of a crash inquiry: trying to pin exactly where over the southern Indian Ocean the flight ended. This is a wholly Australian-created gaggle of scientists led by the Search Strategy Working Group and the Flight Path Reconstruction Group, and includes a company called Global Environmental Modelling Systems, GEMS; the Australia, Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization, CSIRO; Geoscience Australia; and the Australian National University.

Having so many players involved must create a nightmare of an organizational chart. Who reports to whom? Who is in charge of what? When it comes to issues of transparency the ATSB has been put in the hot seat—they issue weekly updates on the search but they are not empowered to address such basic questions as, Why has the recovery of the debris washing up on beaches in the western Indian Ocean been left to amateurs? Why has not one cent been allocated to a methodical search there while $180 million has been spent on an undersea search that is so far fruitless?

Reading between the lines of ATSB news releases it’s obvious that the Australians are constrained by guidelines issued from Kuala Lumpur, guidelines intended to deflect or ignore any light being shed on the overall credibility, integrity, and competence of the investigation. The ATSB tries its best but although it is transparent about its own investigations into Australian accidents, in this case it limits its responses to reporters to technical details of the deep sea search and analysis of the debris.

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..In an attempt to counter the most lunatic theories 15 current and retired aerospace and communications professionals set up a body called the MH370 Independent Group. But having swatted away some noisome parties and issued some rather prolix technical documents they have recently gone dormant. They have probably succumbed to the kind of exhaustion that overtook those tasked to watch the Kremlin in the darkest days of the Cold War. Indeed, circling the MH370 investigation to probe it for clues is a new kind of Kremlinology, driven by a sense of duty but mostly ending in futility.

The people who suffer most from the Malaysian cover-up are the families of the passengers and crew. In September the High Court in Kuala Lumpur allowed an application for a general discovery document to go ahead, brought by 76 family members (66 Chinese, eight Indians, and two Americans). The families are asking for the release of 37 documents, including communications, correspondence, documents, notes, and investigators’ reports. The civil suit names those holding the documents as the Malaysian Airlines System, the Director General of the Department of Civil Aviation, the Royal Malaysian Air Force, and the government.

IMO where Irving totally nails it is contained in the last two paragraphs:

..The time has surely arrived when the responsibility for the investigation can no longer be left to the Malaysians. Other parties to the investigation with reputations for integrity to uphold, like the crash investigators from the U.S., Britain, France, and Australia, as well as Boeing, should end this farrago. After all this time, they cannot any longer hide behind the defense that the investigation is continuing and, calling up the lawyers, assert that as long as it is they are obligated not to comment.

It ought to be straightforward to distinguish between what is known and what remains unknown about what happened on that night in March 2014. That would be a start toward transparency. It is not a mark of failure to admit that much remains unknown or even unknowable, at least until more substantial evidence, like the flight data recorders, is discovered. And even if it is not, and in the end the mystery remains a mystery, there must still be accountability for the way the investigation has so far been handled. There surely must be no doubt now that the investigation of Flight MH370 is unfit for purpose.

So totally agree with Irving's sentiments -

For what it's worth & for those interested the Weekend Oz also ran a more expanded version of the Christine Negroni MH370 theory/story:

Good night, Malaysian

12:00am Christine Negroni

What happened to MH370 after this final message from the cockpit? An air safety specialist offers a theory.

 

MTF...P2