[P7_TOM]

From: Ben Sandilands @ Plane Talking, courtesy Crikey.

There may be many things that justify calling out the ATSB, but for the most part the search for MH370 isn’t one of them, and today it hit back at recent criticism in The Australian over the most basic factual misrepresentations of its role, responsibilities, and the narrative it has updated at regular intervals.

The ATSB’s defence shouldn’t surprise regular readers of Plane Talking, or its twitter timeline.

The loss of MH370 has seen the mystery fall into the hands of fraudsters who faked a photo of wreckage on an Indonesian beach over the weekend, while misappropriating a range of Twitter accounts.

The MH370 search has attracted a great deal of reasonable, informed and no doubt at times, inconvenient criticism, especially in relation to some misleading narratives in Kuala Lumpur, and some hasty and shabby grandstanding in Canberra.

But it has also  become the plaything of conspiracy nutters who are so lazy they can’t get out of their own way to actually research the available documentation, good and bad, by mastering the amazingly useful device of a hyperlink.

And unfortunately for The Australian, which had two goes at publishing a good, but flawed analysis by ex fighter pilot Byron Bailey, it appears to have lost its own ability to use a thing called an editorial library and actually read its own files.

Some of us would crawl over broken glass and barbed wire to have the editorial research resources of any News Group publication. And it didn’t use them.

Under the circumstances, the response by the ATSB to Mr Bailey’s original story, and the one where he later partially corrected earlier errors, is an exercise in restraint.

You can read the ATSB response here, behind this 

Getting it 'wrong' just allows the opposition a free kick.  It had to happen; a little sooner than anticipated, nevertheless... Will that man 'Iggins now mop up? Balance the tale and perhaps explain why AMSA was eased out and ATSB slithered in, with the escape module pre-loaded.

Well, it's not a 'bated breath' issue, but a bit of dust and hair flying about fills in the time until the money clock stops ticking.