[Peetwo]

MH370: OI search ends & 'he said, she said' wars heat up -  

While the OI search wraps up the MH370 theorists once again (yawn -   ) fire up debate on end of flight and the pilot did, err..didn't do it - FDS!   

First via news.com.au:

New MH370 murder-suicide theory ‘is absurd’

AVIATION experts have slammed the latest theory on missing flight MH370, saying the truth could lie in this photograph.

Kate Schneider @SchneiderK news.com.au
MAY 24, 2018 6:17AM

Experts talk MH370 on 60 Minutes. Picture: Channel 9 Source:Channel 9

WHEN aviation experts took to the air last weekend purporting to know the truth about what happened to MH370, the director of the seabed hunt for the plane Peter Foley and author Christine Negroni were left shaking their heads.

Senior Boeing 777 pilot Simon Hardy had joined five other guests on 60 Minutes where he voiced his belief that Captain Zaharie Shah downed the aircraft in an act of murder-suicide after using a home simulator to plot the flight path.

He claimed Mr Zaharie flew the plane over his hometown of Penang for an “emotional goodbye” before ditching it in the Southern Indian Ocean.

The program was aired just days before the release of the new book MH370: Mystery Solved, written by aviator Larry Vance, who also appeared on the Channel 9 show.

It comes as Malaysian authorities revealed the physical search would end next week.

Vance, a former senior investigator with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, also supports the controlled landing theory, arguing that the pilot deliberately took the aircraft to the most remote place possible so it would disappear.

“The evidence confirms it was a criminal act, committed by one individual who, as a pilot in the aeroplane, had a simple means to carry it out,” he wrote in his book.

Vance has also cited a piece of wreckage from the plane as proving his claim.

However, a notable omission from the panel was fellow aviation expert Negroni, who wrote the book The Crash Detectives detailing famous air disasters. And she has a very different view as to what may have happened to the plane.



Experts disagree on what happened to MH370. Picture: ATSB Source:Supplied

Negroni was particularly shocked not to have been included in the discussion considering her book is a bestseller and she has travelled the world — including Australia — to talk about its contents.

In a post on her website, Negroni slammed the conclusions made on the show as “preposterous” and “absurd”.

She wrote: “Ladies and gents, thanks to 60 Minutes, pilots Vance and Hardy are in the cockpit. They’ve fuelled up with alternative facts and are taking us on a flight to the absurd.

“Will we ever return from this remote region of reality? Stay tuned.”

She accused the show of airing “far-fetched”, “hokum” details. In particular, Vance’s claims around a wing flap that washed ashore in 2016 caught her attention.

Vance argues that photographic evidences shows the wing’s flaps were extended (down) when it impacted the water, indicating the pilot was in control of the plane until the end.

“The damage patterns on two recovered wreckage pieces (the right flaperon, and a section of the right outboard flap) prove that the landing flaps were extended (down) when the aeroplane settled into the water,” Vance wrote in his book.

“The flaps could not have been extended unless a pilot intentionally selected them to the extended position.”




This photo shows the difference between when the flaps are retracted versus the flaps being extended. Picture: ATSBSource:Supplied



This damage on a piece of wreckage from MH370 indicates the flaps were retracted at the point of fracture and separation from the wing. Picture: ATSBSource:Supplied

However, Negroni points to an ATSB report into the wreckage which indicates otherwise, writing: “One might have expected him (Vance) to have revisited that statement when a forensic examination showed the flaperon was very likely stowed, not deployed when the plane crashed.”

Indeed, the ATSB report from October 2017 states: “In 2015 and 2016, debris from MH370 was found on the shores of Indian Ocean islands and the east African coastline. The debris yielded significant new insights into how and where the aircraft ended its flight.

“It was established from the debris that the aircraft was not configured for a ditching at the end-of-flight ... analysis indicated that the flaps were most likely in a retracted position at the time they separated from the aircraft making a controlled ditching scenario very unlikely.”



The evidence from flight MH370.Source:Supplied

Negroni’s view has just been back up by MH370 search director Mr Foley, who co-ordinated the search on Malaysia’s behalf, and was quizzed by a Senate committee on the theories in Vance’s book.

Mr Foley, who said he has read the book, pointed to evidence that the plane was not under anyone’s control when it hit the water.

He said analysis of the satellite transmissions of the flight’s final moments showed the jet was in a fast and accelerating descent at the end. Debris from within the plane’s interior found washed up on the west coast of the Indian Ocean suggested significant energy on impact, he said.

“If it was being controlled at the end, it wasn’t very successfully being controlled,” Mr Foley said. “The flaps weren’t deployed.”

Mr Foley said an analysis at the bureau’s headquarters in Canberra of the second flap found on the island of Pemba, off the coast of Tanzania, in June 2016 determined it was “probably not deployed”. But French authorities prevented an Australian analyst from “doing anything meaningful in terms of analysis” of the first flap found.

French authorities are holding the flaperon as evidence for a potential criminal prosecution.

Mr Foley said his bureau therefore could not see whether the flaperon had lost its trailing edge — which would have happened had it been deployed — when the plane hit the water.

He did, however, say “it’s absolutely evident” that someone had initially flown the plane off course, ruling out some mechanical or electrical malfunction.



Experts talk MH370 on 60 Minutes. Picture: Channel 9

NEGRONI’S THEORY

Negroni insists her book is the only one with the facts.

“Far from speculating with no evidence at all that Captain Zaharie Shah lingered over Penang to get one last look at his home town before flying off into oblivion, my book is based on facts,” she said.

“I am baffled at how the producers of the Australian program along with the CBS This Morning and the Washington Post could have conducted any research at all into the MH370 investigation without coming across The Crash Detectives.

“It’s a Penguin bestseller for goodness sake ... I’ve travelled the world speaking about it including in Sydney, Brisbane, London, New York and Hong Kong.”


Negroni claims the there is no evidence to back up the alternate theories.

“I don’t know what it is about Australia, but despite the lack of any evidence that either pilot was unstable or suicidal, Australian media loves that storyline,” Negroni said. “By contrast, in The Crash Detectives, I suggest that a rapid decompression of the aircraft rendered the pilots partially hypoxia and therefore incapable of making sensible decisions.

“One or both of the men on the flight deck then inadvertently flew the aeroplane off course until they succumbed. The plane flew on until it ran out of fuel in the South Indian Ocean.”

Negroni said there are several previous similar events along with maintenance records which show that the crew oxygen was serviced just before the ill-fated trip.



Christine Negroni doesn’t agree with the murder-suicide MH370 theory. Picture: Christine Negroni

Next the inevitable Byron Bailey retort to the ATSB, via the Oz:

Expert evidence doesn’t fly
BYRON BAILEY
It is time to stop the ATSB referring to its expert evidence to support the death-dive theory.

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MH370: why expert evidence doesn’t fly

Peter Foley as director of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau search for MH370 got away lightly during Senate estimates. Because he is not an aviator he could throw in red herrings such as talking about an overweight captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, aged 53, being on oxygen at 40,000 feet and not coping.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 left its planned route at 35,000 feet — a completely different kettle of fish as 35,000 feet on 100 per cent oxygen is the same, blood-oxygen level wise, as breathing normally at 10,000 feet.

Foley also didn’t mention that the passenger oxygen supply is a chemically generated individual mask system that lasts only 10 minutes. It is time to stop the ATSB referring to its expert evidence to support the death-dive theory. Unless scientists have flying experience they are not qualified to propose flight-path analysis.

The ATSB has no evidence to support its death-dive theory other than the two satellite tracking data sets over eight seconds showing a large doppler increase, which it claims indicates a rapid descent or “death dive”. Any descent will produce an increase in doppler shift, and a pilot on dual-engine shutdown would point the nose down fast, otherwise the drag configuration from the engines could stall the aircraft. In any event, with the ATSB admission that the pilot was in control for the first two hours of the flight, a mass murder has occurred.

Byron Bailey is a former RAAF fighter pilot and flew Boeing 777s as an airline captain.

Finally, also via the Oz   :

MH370 search called off
EAN HIGGINS
The Malaysian government has called an end to the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and its 239 occupants.

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Search called off for downed MH370 plane

Hopes the Malaysian government might fund another hunt for ­Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 appear dashed after the country’s transport minister last night said the current search will end on Tuesday with no extension

The move comes as the British airline pilot who postulated co-­ordinates where he claims the captain of MH370 ditched the plane said an Australian official’s ­assertion that the location was searched, is false.

MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, on a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, with satellite tracking showing it ended in the southern Indian Ocean.

The British-owned, but Houston-based subsea survey company Ocean Infinity started searching for the Boeing 777 in January.

“We want to know the details of this (search), the necessity of this, and if we find it is not necessary, we will not renew,” Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said yesterday after chairing his first cabinet meeting since taking office on May 10.

“We are reviewing the contract and we need to terminate it if not useful,” he said.

Transport Minister Anthony Loke just days ago said his first ­priority was to find MH370. But hours after Dr Mahathir made his remarks he said: “This morning I raised this in cabinet and agreed to extend to May 29.”

Asked if that meant no more extensions, he said: “Yes.”

In an open letter to Dr Mahathir yesterday, the group representing the families of those lost, Voice 370, asked the new government to examine whether there had been any cover-up of the MH370 investigation.

Ocean Infinity’s contract with the government had always been on a “no cure, no fee” basis, and it was to get up to $US70 million only if it found the aircraft. Ocean Infinity did not respond to emails.

There had been hopes the ­Malaysian government might ­extend the contract with Ocean Infinity to look in an area farther southwest than the first Australian-led search, identified by three senior airline pilots and an engineer as where they ­believe the aircraft’s captain brought the aircraft down. In 2015 captain Simon Hardy drew world headlines with a claim he had done simulations and ­extended calculations that placed MH370’s resting place about 39 degrees south and 87 degrees east.

Captain Hardy had talks at the time with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which led the first search for the plane.

The ATSB’s director of the failed search, Peter Foley, on Tuesday told a Senate estimates hearing: “Simon’s initial area where he was postulating the aircraft might have been controlled (to the end) … was actually searched. We went a long way to the east … 42 miles.”

But Captain Hardy said Mr Foley had not sent the searchers far enough. “Mr Foley tried to ­accommodate my workings by going 42 nautical miles and not 100 nautical miles,” he said.

“When I visited the ATSB in May 2015 I was aware that the offices were five miles from Canberra airport. Had I tried to accommodate Mr Foley by going only half of that distance, I would not have found the ATSB. In the same way, Mr Foley has not found MH370.”

ATSB media spokesman Paul Sadler did not respond to emails.

P2 comment - Putting aside all this tedious 'he said, she said' palaver, I still can't fathom how a Senate committee at Budget Estimates did not ask the simple questions like:

Q/ Based on all the available evidence provided to the ATSB/CSIRO/DSTG to define the 2x high priority search (125k sq km & now 25k sq km) areas, how come not one bit of physical piece of debris/evidence has been found in those areas? 

Q/ Does this indicate that the 'Bayesian methods' used to help define these high priority areas was indeed a flawed and limited approach?     

Q/ Why was Fugro the best value tender choice given that OI have covered so much territory in less than 3 months under a potential $70 million 'no find, no fee' contract? 

MTF...P2