[Peetwo]

Top first post Captain Wannabe...

Although the silence from the French BEA is becoming deafening and the information vacuum resolutely continues, Ben Sandilands has picked up on a slightly obscured statement from the JACC in their weekly update on the MH370 SIO search:

New MH370 search planning meeting proposed for next month

Ben Sandilands | Aug 19, 2015 4:09PM |


The search for wreckage on La Reunion has now been called off

The sea floor search for MH370 could get another and this time loosely described planning meeting between Australia, Malaysia and China in Canberra next month.
The announcement, slipped into the weekly search update from the Joint Agency Coordination Committee this afternoon, doesn’t even have a precise date, or agenda.

• It is proposed that officials from Australia, Malaysia and the People’s Republic of China will meet in Canberra in early September. Such meetings allow for information to be shared between all three countries as well as discussion of search operations. This meeting will particularly focus on planning to ensure the search is conducted as efficiently as possible, taking advantage of expected better weather with the onset of summer.
  

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if Australia, as the manager of the search effort, had a modicum of the determination of the public prosecutor’s office in Paris, and demanded that the Malaysians were more forthcoming as to what they knew about the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines flight between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing on 8 March, 2014, with 239 people onboard?

This is the massaged messaging given about the flaperon of a 777 retrieved from the shores of the French island of La Reunion in the west Indian Ocean on 29 July.

• The French led investigation team examining the flaperon has concluded the first phase of inspection work. French authorities will, in consultation with Malaysia, report on progress in due course. The French investigation team is working as quickly as possible in order to provide complete and reliable information.
  

The spectacle of the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak, rushing to announce that international authorities has identified the wing piece as being from MH370 several minutes before the deputy public prosecutor Serge Mackowiak said no such thing has been followed by Malaysia’s Transport Minister, Liow Tiong Lai, claiming the recovery of other parts of the jet which the authorities on La Reunion denied was the case.

The honesty and integrity of the executive branch of Malaysia is on trial in a court of public opinion they cannot control, despite the craven attitude of Canberra, and not just about MH370 but honesty in the management of Malaysia’s financial affairs.

The general gutlessness of Canberra is relation to what Kuala Lumpur knew about this flight and when is thoroughly offensive, given that the airline and the authorities did next to nothing in the early hours of that morning to trace any sighting of the flight, or to contact the pilots,  and persist, even in recent times, in making unreliable and changeable statements about it or pieces of claimed wreckage.

The search update can be read in full here.

Passing strange that there is not much fanfare or media hype with what would normally be considered a significant announcement - re the proposed tri-partite meeting. It's like they're all holding their collective breath pending an announcement coming out of Toulouse...

I also get the impression the degrees of separation is growing between the ATSB, the JACC & the Minister's office - or maybe that is just wishful thinking...

MTF...P2