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Christine Negroni on continued mystery of MH370 - via Forbes:

Search Ending For MH370 But Mysteries Grow



Christine Negroni,  
Contributor

Only a few pieces of MH 370 have been found

The latest news from Australia is sure to disappoint once again people who lost loved ones on Malaysia Flight 370 and the larger group of people who just want to know what happened to the airliner that flew into oblivion on March 8, 2014.

The search for the Boeing 777 in the South Indian Ocean will come to an end in July, according to Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.
Coincidentally, that is the date when Dolan retires.

During my time in Malaysia helping ABC News cover the MH370 tragedy, I was mystified by the selection of the Australians to lead the underwater search for the airplane. The nation had proximity going for it to be sure and military ships and planes that could, and did, spring into action as soon as the satellite data suggested the plane flew in the general direction of Australia’s western coast.

The Pel-Air medical evacuation jet ditched off the coast of Norfolk Island in 2009. ATSB photo

At the same time, the ATSB was already the subject of great criticism over its shoddy investigation of another overwater air accident; the ditching of a Pel-Air medical evacuation flight in 2009 in which no one died. That crash occurred in shallower water and much closer to land.

The ATSB opted not to recover the Pel-Air plane or its black boxes. Only after a Senate inquiry and a Canadian review of the ATSB investigation did the agency take another look at its assessment of the crash – which had placed much of the responsibility on the pilot while ignoring the infractions of the politically-connected operator, Pel-Air. You can read more about the scandal here, or in my soon-to-be-published book, The Crash Detectives.

That is why when the Australians were given custody of the search for MH370, I wondered why, and I was not alone. But the Australians including the ATSB’s Dolan were eager to become the heroes in solving the world’s most riveting air mystery. In an interview in June 2014, Dolan told me enthusiastically that coordinating the search was “the challenge of a career.”

Who knows what political maneuvering was going on behind the scenes? But in the small world of underwater search and salvage there were those who thought the Australians had not selected the most experienced outfit when they gave the Dutch company, FugroWorld Wide, the multimillion dollar contract.

“How did a company with no real record in this industry and no equipment at the time end up with this huge job and get away with not producing any publicly available data for two years?” asked Rob McCallum, a manager at Williamson and Associates, an underwater recovery firm. That’s the kind of question I’ve heard in one form or another over the past two years.

Fugro’s critics are companies that were passed over for the job. They had their reasons for sniping about Fugro.

Still, the big names who assisted with the recovery of the Italian Itavia airliner in the Tyrrhenian Sea in 1980, the TWA 747 that exploded off the coast of New York in 1996, the search for the black boxes from Indonesia’s Adam Air in 2007 and the much-talked about, two-year effort to find Air France in the North Atlantic in 2009, were notably absent in the Malaysia 370 search operation.

So I don’t buy what the ATSB chief told Peter Lloyd, a journalist with the Australian ABC News, earlier this week.  If the plane is not found in the area defined as high probability, Dolan reportedly said, searchers “will know that the aircraft was not in that area.”

“The debris could have been lost in the topography,” said Steven Saint Amour of the Maryland-based search firm, Eclipse. Or the interpretation of the information could be wrong, or the quality of the equipment might affect the reliability of information. In short, many factors can explain why MH370 has not been found even if is in the area searched.

9M-MRO the plane that flew as MH370. Photo by Jay Davis

But in a case of history repeating itself, the ATSB is once again trying to wrap up a complex case with a tidy statement. It has adopted a “trust us we know what we’re doing” approach to questions about the reliability of a conclusion that the plane is not in the zone searched.

What Australia has now that it didn’t have in its tarnished investigation of the Pel-Air crash, is another government to which it can return the files and direct all further questions, and that is Malaysia.

In July, the missing Flight 370 will once again become solely Malaysia’s problem with no improvement in transparency over what the Australians have offered. Expect to remain mystified.

IMO in those last three paragraphs Christine totally nails the total shameful ineptitude of the ATSB (& by association the government) in the conduct of the MH370 SIO search -

MTF...P2