[Peetwo]

In Memoriam.

A hand that can be clasp'd no more—
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door. (A.L-T).

A memorial – to what, exactly? Almost any place you go, you will find a war memorial, where the names of those lost during the conflict are written. This is to honour those who consciously and willingly laid down their lives so we, today, may have a better one. There was a purpose to their sacrifice and it is proper that they should be remembered. Lest we forget.

But, to build a memorial to MH 370 is a cynical ploy. Some artsy-fartsy plonker will get a commission and a chance to prattle about ‘symbolism’ or some such clap-trap, while pocketing a large cheque and gaining ‘recognition’ for the work on some appalling day time ‘morning show’ squeezed in between the cash cow and the latest beautifying product. Some politicians will grab a few moments of ‘air time’, puff out their chests and try to pedal the notion that they are fit to run the country, etc. Desperately trying to convince you that they are warm, sensitive souls who care. It’s bollocks.

We’ll end up with a pigeon shit covered monstrosity which will end up a graffiti target. The council will, eventually end up passing an inflated ‘clean up’ cost to the rate payer, based on the initial cost of cleaning up the bunches of flowers and cheap stuffed toys left by those vampires; who although they have no grief, no personal stake and little interest take vicarious pleasure in haunting any tragedy – when the media is about; hoping their little performance may be seen.

Well: I’m sorry, but it gives me a dose of the screamings. There is an aircraft ‘missing’: a large, modern, reliable commercial aircraft with over two hundred souls on board – disappeared into thin air, without trace, explanation or even apology; and these fools want to build a bloody monument - to that. It will be a cynical monument indeed to deceit, incompetence and cover up at best.

Find the aircraft, find some answers, prevent this from ever happening again; or, live forever damned with the shame of it.

Selah.

Update 06/01/18: Via the Oz

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MH370: Ocean Infinity attempts to solve the mystery



Doctor David Griffin, left, and Doctor Andreas Schiller, oceanographers at the CSIRO in Hobart, have assisted in the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.

The Australian 12:00AM January 6, 2018

EAN HIGGINS




Sometime soon, maybe next week, an extraordinary, futuristic scene will play out in a remote swath of the southern Indian Ocean in a new quest to find the holy grail of aviation and unlock its mysteries.

An impressive but somewhat bizarre-looking ship with a massive helipad cantilevered over its bridge and a gigantic crane on the rear deck will stop in its tracks.

One after another, the crew will launch eight yellow unmanned boats and eight orange torpedo-like unmanned mini-submarines. The robot boats will stay in contact with the robot mini-submarines as they dart around on their own a few kilometres deep, hunting for the remains of an airliner that disappeared four years ago with 239 souls on board.

And with that, a new, audacious capitalist bid to find Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, after a previous search run by Australian bureaucrats failed, will be on.

The passage of time has done nothing to dampen the world’s fascination with the enigma of how a modern airliner on a regular scheduled flight could just disappear.

The Boeing 777 took off from Kuala Lumpur airport after midnight on March 8, 2014, headed for Beijing. About 40 minutes into the flight something very strange happened: radio contact ceased, the plane’s secondary radar transponder was turned off, and it turned around, flew a course near the Malaysia-Thailand airspace border, turned north up the Strait of Malacca, then headed south on a long track to the southern Indian Ocean.

At the request of Malaysia, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau led a two-year underwater search of a 120,000sq km target zone that ended a year ago without finding a trace of the aircraft. That failed search cost $200 million, paid for by the taxpayers of Australia, Malaysia and China.

Now private enterprise, with American can do-ism coupled with British and European technical skill, is stepping up to the plate.

The people who run Ocean Infinity — a crack international team of engineers, information technology experts, hydrographic surveyors, underwater robot submarine experts and others — and its shareholders have taken a big gamble on their own ability.

A few months ago Ocean Infinity, based in Houston, Texas, and London, put a juicy offer to the Malaysian government, which under international law is ultim­ately responsible for the investigation into the loss of the aircraft.

Ocean Infinity proposed to launch a new hunt for the aircraft on a “no find, no fee” basis — the Malaysian government would agree to pay a sizeable fee if the company found it. But if no wreckage were found, Ocean Infinity would have gone to all that effort for not a penny’s compensation.

Malaysia’s talkative Deputy Transport Minister Abdul Aziz Kaprawi gave some indication of the size of the deal. The government’s cabinet, he said in October, had agreed “to prepare a special allocation to the Ministry of Transport amounting to between $US20m ($25.46m) and $US70m if MH370 aircraft wreckage is successfully found within 90 days”.

So keen are the people who run Ocean Infinity to get started that this week they ordered the captain of the vessel they have leased, the Seabed Constructor owned by the Swire group, to set sail from Durban in South Africa for the new search zone, even though a final contract with the Malaysian government has yet to be signed.

It looks like a goer, though.



On Wednesday Malaysia’s Transport Minister, Liow Tiong Lai, told journalists: “We are making preparations and we will announce it next week, after we finalise the contract.”

Putting them side-by-side, what Ocean Infinity is about to do makes the previous hunt organised by Australian bureaucrats look like kids’ stuff. The ships in the ATSB-led search used a single tethered “towfish” at a time, or a single mini-submarine, known as an autonomous underwater vehicle. One ship managed to crash its towfish into an underwater mud volcano, breaking the towline, and it was lost for a while until recovered.

Beijing’s contribution to the ATSB-led hunt was a Chinese government survey vessel that was supposed to deploy a single AUV. But that vessel, the Dong Hai Jiu 101, hardly ever did any actual searching; as revealed by The Australian, it spent most of its nearly year-long deployment docked in Fremantle or just offshore, probably spying on Australian submarine and other military movements, according to security experts.

By contrast, Ocean Infinity sounds like a pretty serious mob. Its website describes the company as “ocean explorers mapping the unknown”.

“We go to unmapped locations to survey the seabed using the most advanced fleet of autonomous vehicles in the world.”

David Griffin, a CSIRO drift-modelling scientist who led a project commissioned by the ATSB to work out where MH370 came down based on where a few bits of the aircraft were washed up on the other side of the Indian Ocean, met the Ocean Infinity people in London last month to brief them on the first search.

“It’s a very impressive organisation,” Griffin told Inquirer. “They have got terrific equipment.”

Ocean Infinity plans to use eight AUVs at a time on independent search missions, enabling it to scan the seabed for MH370 much faster than in the first search.

They are mind-blowing machines. In their 6.2m bodies they carry side scan sonar, a multi-beam echo-sounder, a sub-bottom profiler, a high-definition camera, a conductivity/temperature/depth sensor, a self-compensating magnetometer, a turbidity sensor, and a methane and laser sensor.

The most important pieces of equipment for this search are the side-scan sonar, which can create images of things on the sea floor and distinguish metal; the multi-beam echo-sounder, which can produce three-dimensional im­ages; and the magnetometer, which can confirm if objects are metallic. The AUVs can message the surface robot ships known as unmanned surface vehicles about what they are doing, using acoustic positioning telemetry. They have on-board cameras and machine-vision software that can enable them to keep an eye on what’s ahead of them and dodge underwater cliffs or other obstacles.

The batteries can keep them going underwater for up to 60 hours — 2½ days.

The issue, however, is this: no matter how sophisticated the technology, it can’t find what it’s looking for unless the searchers have the right strategy of where to look.

Most expert observers think that had MH370 been in the ATSB’s 120,000sq km target zone, it would have been found; while the process was slower than what Ocean Infinity is planning, it still used high-quality technology that picked up things such as two shipwrecks with surprisingly high-definition.

The question being asked in the air crash investigation and airline pilot community is whether Ocean Infinity has the right assumptions as it heads into its new search. The plan is to look in a new 25,000sq km zone immediately to the north of the previous one.

It was, in fact, the ATSB and a panel of Australian and international experts including Griffin who had identified this zone as promising even before the old search had been brought to an end.

There are three main clues to where MH370 may be.

One is automatic hourly electronic “handshakes” between transmitters in the engines of the Boeing 777 and an Inmarsat satellite, relayed to ground stations. While not really designed to track aircraft in this way, experts think the seventh handshake shows the arc MH370 was travelling on the long final leg south. That “seventh arc” shows the final track but not the point on it where the aircraft came down.

But that is where the second main clue comes in. Years after it went down, bits of MH370, some quite large and intact, started washing up on the other side of the Indian Ocean on the coast of Africa and the islands off it, including a flaperon and a flap, which are movable parts of the wings.

Griffin and his team did a painstaking analysis of the drift modelling, even building models of the flaperon with adjustments made to reflect damage on the real one, and put them in the ocean and tracked them to see how they reacted to wind, waves and current.

That study determined that the aircraft came down just north of the completed search area.

There’s one other clue that turned up in August last year.

Four satellite images of what could be debris, taken two weeks after MH370 went missing, have been re-examined, prompting Geo­science Australia and the CSIRO to home in on two narrow strips, no larger than 10km to 30km each. Their report places the likeliest location of the aircraft “with unprecedented precision and certainty” at 35.6 degrees south, 92.8 degrees east.

The satellite images contain up to 70 objects, of which up to 12 were “possibly man-made”, ­according to Geoscience Australia. Their dimensions match some of the plane debris that washed up on African beaches last year.

Griffin says while these photos have been available all along, the concentration was on the southern search area, and when the decision was made to look to more northerly scenarios, the ATSB asked to re-examine them in high resolution — a slow process.

Griffin has seen the images and says you can clearly see “large, white objects” consistent with debris from “an aircraft hitting the ocean and breaking up into parts”.

“It’s hard to see what sort of other marine objects these might be,” Griffin says.

The part of the seventh arc where Ocean Infinity is going to start searching is, in fact, consistent with this new clue: The Economist got the first interview with the company about the search this week and reported the plan is to begin at about 35 degrees south and work north from there. Because Ocean Infinity thinks it can survey 1200sq km a day using the eight AUVs, the maths work out that the 25,000sq km search zone could be covered in three weeks.

So does Griffin think this hunt will find MH370? “We think there is a very good chance,” he says. “If you are prepared to take the risk and search, this is the most likely place. How likely, I can’t estimate.”

There is, however, one nagging doubt in the professional aviation and air crash investigation community: the ATSB’s theory of what happened on MH370 and how it came down, which it used to determine the old search area and the new one. The ATSB worked on the basis that at the end of the flight the pilots were incapacitated and the aircraft crashed down fast after fuel exhaustion.

Most professional pilots believe the evidence points to Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah hijacking his own aircraft, depressurising the cabin to kill the passengers and crew while he was on the pilot’s more extended oxygen supply, flying the aircraft to the end, and ditching it in a deep spot of his own choosing to sink it in as close to one piece as possible.

They have now been joined by two of the world’s best known and most experienced air crash investigators: American John Cox and Canadian Larry Vance, who have examined photos of the flap and flaperon, which were mostly intact but had damage to the trailing edge. Vance, who is writing a book on MH370, believes this evidence clearly points to a ditching with flaps down.

He says had the plane crashed down rapidly as the ATSB says it did, they would have been pulverised, as was found in one high-profile investigation he helped lead, Swissair Flight 111, which in 1998 crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia after an on-board fire.

“In the Swissair crash the hydrodynamic forces of hitting the water basically exploded the aircraft from the inside out,” Vance told Inquirer.

When Inquirer sought comment from the ATSB on Vance and Cox’s analysis and whether it still believed its “ghost flight” and “death dive” theory, its spokesman Paul Sadler referred this and other inquiries to the federal government’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre, whose spokesman said such questions should go to the Malaysian government.

Cox does not think that Ocean Infinity should not be conducting the search; even if the ditching theory is right, Zaharie would have flown it somewhere, and the drift modelling and satellite photos show that may well be where the AUVs are about to look.

“Ocean Infinity has ideas about the location of the aeroplane,” Cox told Inquirer. “There is one certainty: we won’t find the aeroplane if we don’t look for it. Therefore, I’m glad they are looking.”

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MTF...P2