[Peetwo]

Update 24/04/17: Time for some MH370 truth - maybe?

From 'that man', via the Weekend Oz:

MH370 drift modelling raises new search hopes for Malaysian airliner

• Ean Higgins
  
• The Australian
  
• 3:37PM April 21, 2017
  

CSIRO used drift modelling to pinpoint a possible new MH370 search zone.

Air Safety Investigator Rejects MH370 Staff Claims.
 


Steve Creedy -editor


19 Apr 2017
Australian Transport Safety Bureau says no warning was issued to staff.

>
A scene from the MH370 search.

Australian air safety investigators have rejected a newspaper claim  “draconian legislation’’ was invoked in a decision to refuse a freedom of information request for material on the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

The Australian newspaper claimed the Australian Transport Safety Bureau had warned that employees who provided the information to the public or a court could face two years in jail.

But the ATSB said it issued no such warning.

“The Transport Safety Investigation Act 2003 (TSI Act) applies to ATSB investigations and reports, requiring investigators to protect evidence from disclosure other than in accordance with performing their functions under the Act,’’ the air safety investigator said in a statement in its “correcting the record” section.

“Consistent with international standards, the ATSB does not publish all the documents forming part of the investigation or report. This is to ensure cooperation and the future free flow of information to safety investigations.”

The newspaper has been attempting to use freedom of Information laws to get hold of the opinions international experts, including from the US and UK air crash agencies, Boeing, aerospace group Thales, and British satellite group Inmarsat, about satellite data used to track the course of the aircraft.

It says it was initially told the information could not be released because it “could cause damage to international relations of the commonwealth’’.  A subsequent review by ATSB chief commissioner Greg Hood cited the TSI Act.

The ATSB used the satellite data and other evidence to conclude the plane was most likely uncontrolled when it crashed into the sea.  This runs counter to a theory frequently run by The Australian that the flight ended in a controlled ditching.

The bureau also questioned a suggestion in the April 17 article that some officers were having second thoughts about its end-of-flight scenario.

“The ATSB is not aware of any officers who have concerns with the ATSB’s reported findings in this regard,’’ it said, noting the claim was made without any supporting evidence.

“The ATSB’s work in the search for MH370 has always been characterised by a willingness to listen to new ideas, and to apply all the known facts to lead the underwater search.

“The ATSB does not make any statement lightly, nor does it approach any issue with pre-conceived conclusions.’’

IMO this is why Hoody and the ATSB are a shot duck on anymore involvement with possible future plans to resume the MH370 SIO search. That and the fact that the CSIRO/ATSB boffins have now comprehensively confirmed that they got it wrong and ducked up the 1st $200 million search...   

'That man' in the Oz today:

Searching for the truth about MH370

Leading seaman, boatswain’s mate, William Sharkey searching for debris alongside the HMAS Perth of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean on April 13, 2014.

• Ean Higgins
  
• The Australian
  
• 12:00AM April 24, 2017
  

[url=http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/investigations/searching-for-the-truth-about-mh370/news-story/4b182ead9033308476b4d5ca688d5ba0#comments][/url][img=0x0]https://i1.wp.com/pixel.tcog.cp1.news.com.au/track/component/author/0573acb566bb47c45e64e4c55a998aba/?esi=true&t_product=the-australian&t_template=s3/austemp-article_common/vertical/author/widget&td_bio=false[/img]
Three months ago, as he stood on a dock in Perth alongside Transport Minister Darren Chester and ­Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai, Greg Hood must have hoped he would soon enjoy a break from the torture that was MH370.

As chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety ­Bureau, Hood was helping Chester and Liow steer through what they probably thought would be the last tricky media conference for the foreseeable future on the topic, held after they had welcomed back the last vessel from the fruitless underwater search for the Malaysia Airlines aircraft.

Australia had agreed to a ­Malaysian request to take on the challenging task of trying to find a Boeing 777 somewhere in a vast tract of cold, deep and difficult ­waters in the southern Indian Ocean where satellite-tracking data had suggested it had come down.

That two-year hunt, led by the Dutch Fugro marine survey group and funded by Australia, Malaysia and China, had worked to the strategy that the ATSB team had designed. It had cost $200 million, and not yielded even a trace of the aircraft. Hood made it pretty clear the ATSB would have liked to bring closure to the families of the 239 passengers and crew.

“Everybody wants to do the right thing — everybody’s got hopes,” Hood said at the press ­conference. “Having met a number of family members personally, they continue to have protracted and prolonged grief. I’m profoundly sorry for these people.”

It had been a difficult time for Hood since he had taken the reins of the ATSB last July when it was battling growing doubts expressed publicly by a variety of experts about the search strategy. An ­increasing number of highly ­experienced international airline pilots and air crash investigators disagreed with the ATSB’s working premise that the plane was on autopilot at the end with an incapacitated flight crew and crashed down in a rapid “death dive”.

The aircraft turned back towards Malaysia about 40 minutes into its scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. Its radar transponder was turned off and the last radio contact was made, and it flew what to aviation experts looked like a deliberate route along the Thai-Malaysia airspace border to the Andaman Sea before turning on the long final track south. Independent pilots and investigators believe the evidence shows a rogue pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, had hijacked his own aircraft and flown it to the end — outside the designated search area.

Another concern for the ATSB was that two sets of world-leading university oceanographers — working independently, one based in Europe and another in Perth — had said their “reverse-drift analysis” modelling of where a few bits of the aircraft had washed up on the other side of the Indian Ocean showed the ATSB had been looking too far south. They believed the evidence of the currents and winds suggested the aircraft lay to the north of the search area. A review the ATSB had commissioned in December through a gathering in Canberra of international experts had in fact agreed the next place to look was north, and identified a new 25,000sq km target zone which, one can estimate based on the last search, would cost about $40 million.

But by that time, the three ­governments — it’s thought most particularly Malaysia, which under international law has leadership of the search — had had enough. At that January media conference, Liow said his government needed “more empirical ­evidence before we move to the next search area”.

[img=558x581]http://cdn.thinglink.me/api/image/912681863154237441/1024/10/scaletowidth#tl-912681863154237441;1043138249'[/img]

Some might have thought that after the underwater search ended, the story that has gripped the international media for three years of what happened to MH370 would dissipate and die. The families of the victims might put it all ­behind them, and the aviation ­experts who have been privately burrowing into the data might lose interest. In fact, as it’s turned out, the families are angrier and more vocal than ever, and the experts have if anything intensified their efforts to establish new leads, which could provide clues to what happened to the aircraft and where to look for it.

For Hood, three months on, he’s found himself in controversy more than ever, with families of the Chinese and Australian victims not only blaming the ATSB for a failed search strategy but now, as they see it, for helping the Malaysians cover up the truth.

The ATSB maintains it’s simply doing its job. The ATSB had based what’s become known as its “ghost flight” and “death dive” theory on the automatic satellite data.

But the ATSB’s general manager for strategic capability, Colin McNamara, in February rejected a Freedom of Information request from The Australian to release analyses of the data by a panel of international experts, including from the US and British air crash investigation agencies, the European aerospace group Thales, Boeing and the British companythat owns and operates the ­satellite that tracked MH370, ­Inmarsat. McNamara said in his letter that if the documents were released it could “cause damage to the international relations of the commonwealth”.

In a review of McNamara’s decision requested by The Australian, Hood also rejected the FOI application. In his letter, Hood said information on the search work done to help Malaysia had been declared restricted, and subject to the Transport Safety Investigation Act, under which if any current or former ATSB staffer blurts it out to a journalist or even a judge in open court, he or she could be thrown in jail for two years. To the families of the victims of MH370, the ­suppression of the material sought by The Australian is disgraceful and unfathomable, and in their view points to a cover-up to protect Malaysia or the ATSB itself.

“You can’t not show us; what have you got to hide?” asked Queensland woman Danica Weeks, who was left a single mother to two small boys when her husband Paul went down on MH370.

“Mr Hood cannot just pull this draconian law on the FOI here in Australia; it’s unjust,” Weeks told The Australian. “What precedent is he setting for the future of Australia and its people?”

Weeks is taking up the offer of Brisbane barrister Greg Williams to any family members of MH370 victims here or overseas to work pro bono to use every aspect of the law to try to force Hood to release the material.

Williams, whose public and legal campaign against alleged nepotism at the University of Queensland took the scalp of its vice-chancellor, has pointed to various pieces of federal legislation which govern the conduct of the public service, which he thinks can be brought to bear.

Hood declined to comment.

But he and his ATSB colleagues are no doubt thinking the best way out of this continuing world of pain is to find MH370, and behind the scenes that’s exactly what they are trying to help make happen.

Even as Hood and the ministers officially drew the search to a close that January day in Perth, his team was working to that end.

The Malaysians have not said they will never agree to restart the search, but that they need a more precise location to look, and at the Perth press conference Liow had hinted that more drift analysis could help. “We are thinking that there’ll be more debris washing up in a short time to come,” he said.

While the ATSB had belatedly conducted its own drift analysis working with the CSIRO, the trick is that items of different shape, size and weight drift differently with the same winds and ocean currents. The drift models have been developed from the US tracking buoys over 30 years, which may not move the same way or speed as parts of an aircraft wing like a flaperon or a flap — parts of MH370 found washed up, respectively, on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion, and Tanzania.

So, the ATSB in conjunction with the CSIRO built some Boeing 777 flaperon replicas and also got their hands on a real flaperon and cut it down to resemble the damage found on the one discovered on Reunion, and set them adrift with radio transmitters off Tasmania, beside free-floating buoys.

The goal was to see how differently a real flaperon would have drifted, and refine the model to get a more accurate picture of where the starting point lies.

The ATSB released that modelling last Friday, and said “we are now even more confident that the aircraft is within the new search area identified”.

The CSIRO scientist who led the survey, David Griffin, told The Australian the new data could in fact narrow down the “highly likely” zone where the wreckage would be to 8000sq km, or even 4000sq km, essentially on the southern end of the new proposed search area. In coming weeks, the ATSB will also reveal a further ­refinement of the analysis of the satellite tracking data, and also a report on the original underwater search.

The ATSB is coy about the fact all this material is coming together around the same time, and about what it will do as a result of it. “The drift modelling and satellite data analysis activities are being completed as they were existing projects initiated as part of the operational search for MH370, and to possibly inform any future search activity,” a spokesman said.

Griffin, who said he “obviously” wants the search to recommence, said: “I think everyone who has been involved in the search in the ATSB is absolutely determined to bring it to a successful outcome.”

The expectation is that the ATSB will try to present the new studies as a package to argue it now has a sufficiently good idea of where MH370 is resting for the search to be resumed.

The ATSB leadership would likely make such a case privately to Chester, in the hope that he, possibly with the assistance of Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull, would in turn try to persuade their Malaysian counterparts to agree to restart the hunt. At the same time, Australia might suggest to leaders in Beijing they could again send a Chinese government vessel as their contribution, which could prove attractive to them.

The ship the Chinese sent last time hardly did any actual searching and, security experts believe, was used to spy on Australian military activity around Perth.

Just whether, on an objective analysis of the new ATSB material, Malaysia could be convinced to resume the search, is debatable.

Neither the new drift modelling study, nor the new satellite data analysis, can identify a precise point where MH370 came down, though it could narrow the field of probability.

The University of Western Australia scientist who led the ­independent drift modelling study, Charitha Pattiaratchi, said as soon as the flaperon was discovered in July 2015, it was pretty obvious the ATSB was looking in the wrong place. “We got time on the supercomputer in Perth, which is the fastest computer in the southern hemisphere,” Pattiaratchi said.

It showed clearly that the aircraft must have been farther north, because it would have taken ­another three months for the ­flaperon to get to Reunion had it started as far south as where the ATSB was searching.

“We said that in September 2015,” Pattiaratchi said, noting this was 15 months before the ATSB came to the same conclusion after stubbornly continuing to search the southern zone.

Beyond this, Pattiaratchi said, the science was inexact; while “positive” drift modelling worked well in predicting where a floating object would drift from a starting point, trying to do the reverse, of working out the starting point based on where an object ended up, involved far more variables.

The satellite data is thought to provide a good idea of the track of the aircraft along a band known as the “seventh arc”, but there is a lot of debate about whether it can determine vertical movement well enough to confirm the “death dive” theory the ATSB relies on.

Airline pilots including British captain Simon Hardy and the former chief pilot of Britain’s largest airline, EasyJet, Mike Keane, have been doing more work crunching the numbers on the increasingly popular theory that Zaharie flew the aircraft as far as possible and then glided it down after fuel exhaustion to sink it largely intact in a deep underwater trench, to make it disappear.

“He’s going to make damn sure that it carries through with a neat finish, not have it thrown away with everything else he’s done,” Keane told The Australian.

The rogue-pilot-to-the-end theory would indicate a resting point possibly even farther south than the 120,000sq km original search zone, or in a wider band east and west.

At the end of the day, though, any covert diplomatic campaign by Australia to persuade Malaysia to resume the search based on the new material from the ATSB would probably hinge more on politics than science. It would be conducted behind the scenes, and rely on convincing Malaysian officials they would look a lot better in world eyes and among their own constituents if they used the new material as political cover to bend to the domestic and international pressure while saving face.

The Australian leaders would point out that the relatives of the MH370 victims in Malaysia, not to mention those in Australia, China and other parts of the world, individually and through their international lobby group Voice 370 are going to keep making life difficult until a search is resumed — for as long as that takes.

“We are in a phase of extended consultations on how best to convey our resolve to not let the matter of search be given a quiet burial,” Voice 370 spokesman KS Narendran, who lost his wife of 25 years, Chandrika Sharma, told The Australian. “Our effort will be to ensure that the governments see the merits and their obligations in persevering with the search.

“We do not underestimate the enormity of the task … So we will ‘hasten slowly’.”

TICK..TOCK Hoody...



 
MTF...P2