[Peetwo]

Captain's Log 05.01.17: DOI Archive entry 170105

Today from Chillit's 7th Arc.. : When Governments Usurp

...There is a bit of research going around now that both pleases and irritates me. It pleases me because it appears to support two years of my own work on MH370’s final resting place. It irritates me because I spent a lot of time educating one of those who claims to be an author of the study (David Griffin) and he doesn’t credit me as the source for his new knowledge. Yet that individual was part of an extensive conversation between a NOAA colleague (Rick Lumpkin) with connections to all of the study’s authors. How did two national oceanographic bureaucracies learn the plane was likely to be in the Zenith Plateau area? They learned from Moi, and it will emerge (below) that Zenith Plateau was the farthest thing from their minds when I first approached them in February 2016.

My central concern is very simple and narrow: there is no attribution for two years of my own work that led these researchers to conclude MH370 is most likely in the Zenith Plateau area; not south of Broken Ridge where the original search is now wrapping up without so much as a moist towelette to show for three years and A$180 million. It is a small thing in the grand scheme of things. It isn’t something anyone could put in a bank. It may not even be something someone would add to a resume. But it is the fundamental way professional people and organizations do things...

...Posted by David Griffin on December 20, 2016, he is obviously not an author of a NOAA study published in The Guardian on December 14, 2016 that claims the plane came down near Zenith Plateau. Has Australia sunk to this level? Really? Notice the pronouns used in Dr. Griffin’s article, highlighted in yellow.

Griffin’s reference to “life-size, GPS-equipped replicas of the flaperon and two other found parts of the aircraft alongside oceanographic drifters” is a set of five faux flaperons.


ATSB’s Peter Foley and five faux flaperons built for the purpose of modeling drift rates and locations from the original (now to be abandoned) search area. This is laughably preposterous and has no know scientific merit. It effectively discredits the entire Australia-led effort to find MH370.

This ‘stunt’ may be the REAL reason David Griffin wants to claim he has had a change of heart and thinks the plane may have come down near Zenith Plateau. But if it is, he should have backdated his website so it isn’t so obvious nearly everything he has touched so far has been tainted in one way or another.

OK. Well, is it possible Rick Lumpkin was not the NOAA researcher who put Joaquin A. Trinanes onto the need for a proper drift study? No. Not likely at all. Lumpkin and Trinanes have worked together a long time. For example, they were co-investigators in 2004 for NOAA in an Eastern Caribbean study in which Lumpkin was a more senior researcher. And of course it is obvious that Griffin had inside knowledge gained from me personally and from Rick Lumpkin.

Conclusion:
This is a shameful example of how government researchers behave sometimes if they think they can get away with it. I have been pushing Australia and others to be more open to outsiders like myself for a long time. I’ve pushed a lot of buttons Down Under. We do that as fallible humans when we become frustrated with monolithic agencies that bully their way around for no good purpose. And I have had lots of company. Almost no one believes Australia has seriously tried to find that plane. And Australia is about to prove that by walking away from it entirely.

I suspect the Australian government in Canberra would like to have its thoroughly bungled search effort vaporized somehow. But sometimes you have to suck it up and do the right thing. Or let the next US administration do it with even more undesireable consequences quite possible.

It isn’t just Griffin’s claim he somehow experienced an epiphany that inspired him to think beyond the original search area. A lot of us around the world have contributed to the total effort to find MH370. Blaine Gibson, Geomar, Jonathon Durgadoo, and even Jeff Wise with his wholly improbable Kazakhstan scenario, forced at least a few people to begin thinking larger. Any properly documented effort to go beyond where we now are needs to include all of these efforts to show the stair-step progression it is. Not, as NOAA and Griffin have done: pretend they have worked in a vacuum.

Just too bad if someone in Canberra has had his feelings hurt. The secrecy and political interference have been horribly damaging. Face it. Try to learn. Stop hiding what has happened.

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MC Update 7th Arc blog... :

Dear Doctor Trinanes

Err..take two -

Dear Doctor Trinanes
Posted on January 4, 2017 by Mike Chillit
 
Dear Reader:
The following letter to Dr. Joaquin Trinanes had a wordo in the original email. In the 7th line from the top “I read with interest…” where the 7th line begins “estimate for longitude”. It is now correct, but originally read “latitude”. No other changes have been made. MC
 


 

MTF...P2