[Peetwo]

Update on ATSB MH370 final report -

Via the ABC:

Image: 
Supplied
MH370 "almost inconceivable" mystery: ATSB
By Naomi Woodley on PM
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/radio/local_...report.mp3

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has acknowledged that it is unacceptable to society that Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 has never been found.

The ATSB released its final report on the search for the plane, which went missing somewhere over the southern Indian Ocean in March of 2014.

The wife of one of the passengers says the report should prompt the Malaysian government to resume the search.

Duration: 3min 13sec
Broadcast: Tue 3 Oct 2017, 6:15pm

MH370: ATSB says it's 'almost inconceivable' we don't know what happened to aircraft
By David Weber

Updated yesterday at 8:39pm
Authorities now have a much better understanding of where missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 is located but still do not know why it crashed, a new report has revealed.

In its final report into the search for the missing aircraft, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said the search area had been considerably narrowed to an area of less than 25,000 square kilometres that had the "highest likelihood" of containing MH370.



[b]PHOTO:[/b] A section of engine cowling from MH370 was found on a South African beach in early 2016. (Supplied: ATSB)

"The understanding of where MH370 may be located is better now than it has ever been," the report found.

The aircraft was lost during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8 2014, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members.

Its disappearance is one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history.

The surface and underwater searches which followed off the coast of Western Australia were the biggest in history.

"At the time the underwater search was suspended in January 2017, more than 120,000 square kilometres of seafloor had been searched and eliminated with a high degree of confidence," the report found.

We asked if you thought we'd ever find out what happened to missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370.



[b]INFOGRAPHIC:[/b] A map of MH370 showing the location of items recovered in the search. (Supplied: ATSB/Malaysian Government)

The ATSB said debris found on islands in the Indian Ocean and on the coast of Africa helped establish that the aircraft was "not configured for a ditching at the end-of-flight".

Recent re-analysis of satellite imagery taken two weeks after the aircraft disappeared had also identified objects which may have been debris from MH370, it found.

What debris and the ocean told modellers



CSIRO's Dr David Griffin says he's never been "so completely consumed by a scientific question" as he has during the MH370 search. Read more CSIRO analysis of the search.

The Malaysian Government was continuing work on the investigation into the circumstances surrounding the loss of the aircraft, the ATSB added.

"It is almost inconceivable and certainly societally unacceptable in the modern aviation era with 10 million passengers boarding commercial aircraft every day, for a large commercial aircraft to be missing and for the world not to know with certainty what became of the aircraft and those on board," the report said.

However, the ATSB said reasons for the loss of the aircraft "cannot be established with certainty until the aircraft is found".

"The ATSB expresses our deepest sympathies to the families of the passengers and crew on board MH370," the bureau said.

"We share your profound and prolonged grief, and deeply regret that we have not been able to locate the aircraft, nor those 239 souls on board that remain missing."







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From PT:

ATSB ‘last’ report on MH370 highlights data on pilot’s flight simulator


Ben SandilandsOct 3, 2017 2 Comments

Some very raw questions remain unanswered as ATSB drops its closing MH370 search report

& via the Oz:

‘Closer than ever on MH370’

1:17pm

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has published its final 440-page report into the search for the missing plane.

---

Air tracking interval ‘too wide’

12:00am RICK MORTON

The mandated 15-minute interval between tracking of commercial aircraft may not be frequent enough to narrow search areas.

Finally from Victor's blog:

ATSB Releases Final Report on MH370
by Victor Iannello Posted: Monday, 10/2/2017


The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has released a report entitled “The Operational Search for MH370”. It is a long document (440 pages) that is meant to provide final documentation of all of the ATSB’s activities related to this incident. There are no new conclusions, although we can gain some new insights:

• MH370 flew over or near IFR waypoints a cluster of waypoints near Kota Bharu called ABTOK, KADAX, and GOLUD and later PUKAR as it flew towards Penang. This implies that MH370 was following waypoints after the transponder stopped operating after the turn back.
  
• The registration of the first officer’s cell phone on a tower on Penang Island is officially acknowledged for the first time. A footnote citation says, “This information was obtained by the Royal Malaysian Police and reported to the Ministry of Transport Malaysia. Though a formal report was not available to the ATSB, information relevant to the search was shared.” Of course, this begs the question as to why the ATSB only learned of this information after the RMP report was leaked.
  
• The two sources of the primary surveillance radar (PSR) data revealed to be the civilian radar at Kota Bharu and the military radar on Penang Island on Western Hill. The military radar captures are described as “not continuous” with no further explanation.
  
• After passing Penang Island, the report says the “Radar data shows the aircraft then headed to the northwest, eventually aligning with published air route N571 from IFR waypoint VAMPI. The validity of this section of the radar data was verified using the track of a commercial flight that followed N571 about 33 NM behind MH370.” This implies the radar captures shown to the NOK in Beijing on March 21, 2014, at the Lido Hotel, are valid. The performance of the military radar was verified by comparing the civil radar data to the military data as another commercial aircraft, likely to be EK343, trailed 33 NM behind MH370.
  
• The data recovered from the captain’s home flight simulator is discussed for the first time in an official report. An overview of the data is presented, suggesting a flight from Kuala Lumpur up the Strait of Malacca, and then towards the Southern Indian Ocean (SIO), ending in fuel exhaustion. The flight path recovered from the simulator did not match the MH370 flight paths that were reconstructed from the Inmarsat satellite data.
  
• The ATSB pegs the date of the simulator session as February 2, 2014. We know that the deleted file fragments were found in a Shadow Volume with the date February 3, 2014, so likely the session was created on or shortly before that date. It is not explained how the ATSB can be sure the session was created on exactly February 2, 2014, but this would be significant.
  
• There is mention that the last data point in the SIO suggested there was a user input of an altitude of 4,000 ft. (The evidence that the simulator’s user manually changed the altitude and other parameters during the flight was first presented in a paper by me and Yves Guillaume.)
  
• There is acknowledgement that the simulator data shows a beginning sequence that is similar to the flight the captain flew from Kuala Lumpur to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on February 4, 2014. (The significance of the similarities in path and timing between the simulator data and the captain’s flight MH150 to Jeddah was first discussed on this blog.)
  
• Although the ATSB does not speculate that the captain was responsible for the diversion, and although the simulator data was not deemed useful for reconstructing possible flight paths of MH370, based on the presentation of this data in the report, it is clear that the ATSB considers the simulator data to be significant evidence.
  
• Based on examination of the debris and a detailed study of the final BFO data, the ATSB believes that MH370’s flight ended in a steep, uncontrolled descent. This will serve to limit the distance from the 7th arc for future searches.
  
• Although there was an attempt by the official investigators to discern information about the crash site from an investigation of the marine ecology attached to the recovered debris, all results were inconclusive.
  
• No new drift analyses are presented. The ATSB reaffirms its belief that the most likely crash site is 35.6S, 92.8E, based on the drift analyses by CSIRO.
  

So, although there are no new conclusions in this report, there are some interesting new pieces of information. It is also important to note that Malaysia chose to omit key pieces of evidence from the Factual Information (FI) released in March 2015 that are presented in the new ATSB report. These pieces of evidence include details about the radar data, information regarding the simulator data found on the captain’s home computer, and the data related to the registration of the first officer’s cell phone as the aircraft flew near Penang. Although these omissions have been discussed in detail on this blog, perhaps with the release of the ATSB report, more will question why Malaysia chose to not disclose, and even deny the existence of, important evidence.

On a final note, the ATSB chose to acknowledge the contributions of some of the independent investigators, including many that comment here. The ATSB was kind enough to give a special recognition to Blaine Gibson:

The ATSB acknowledges the extensive contributions that many individuals and groups have made during the underwater search for MH370. Many contributors have provided credible, alternate and independent approaches and analysis of the limited data available. In particular, the ‘MH370 Independent Group’ comprised of scientists, researchers and individuals who have cooperated across continents to advance the search for MH370. The ATSB is grateful for their work collectively and individually including Duncan Steel, Mike Exner, Victor Iannello, Don Thompson, and Richard Godfrey. The ATSB also acknowledges the extensive and detailed contributions provided by Simon Hardy, Bobby Ulich and Robin Stevens.

The search for MH370 was significantly advanced after the first debris from the aircraft was found on La Reunion Island in July 2015. The subsequent efforts of Blaine Gibson in searching for and locating MH370 debris on east African coastlines did much to raise public awareness of the importance of the MH370 debris which led to many more items of debris being handed in. Mr Gibson met and communicated with ATSB during his 2015-2016 search expeditions and he is acknowledged for his outstanding efforts in communicating his debris finds to Malaysia, ATSB, the next of kin and the wider world.

MTF...P2