[Peetwo]

That man 'Iggins on a roll - 

Via the Oz this evening:

MH370 search based on unreliable satellite data, says air crash expert John Cox

• The Australian
  
  
• 9:57PM May 17, 2018
  

EAN HIGGINS


Reporter
Sydney
@EanHiggins

One of the world’s most respected air crash investigators has cast further doubt on the Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s theory of how Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 came down, saying satellite data on which the ATSB relies for its unpiloted “death dive” ­assumption is not reliable.

John Cox, a veteran US airline pilot and investigator with the US National Transportation Safety Board, has also said suggestions that recovered parts of the aircraft including a flap and flaperon survived mostly intact because they flew off in flight are unsupported.

Captain Cox’s assessments come ahead of a Senate estimates hearing next week where ATSB bosses will be grilled over alle­gations they stuck with their MH370 theory even when solid evidence to the contrary became available relatively early on.

Veteran air crash investigator Larry Vance this week said recovered parts of the aircraft showed it ended in a controlled ditching.

MH370 vanished on a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board, and military radar and automatic satellite track­ing data showed it ended in the southern Indian Ocean. 

At the request of the Malaysian government, the ATSB led a two-year search of 120,000sq km of ocean seabed, which cost $200 million but found no trace of the Boeing 777. The ATSB based its strategy on the theory that MH370 was a “ghost flight” flying on autopilot during the final stretch with incapacitated pilots, and that it crashed down at a rapid rate after fuel exhaustion. It relies for this conclusion on a part of the satellite data known as the burst frequency offset, which it claims can measure MH370’s vertical movement. It consists of two “power-up” electronic transmissions at the start and finish of the flight, and five full two-way “handshakes” in between.

Captain Cox said the ATSB analysis of the sixth and seventh “pings” showed a vertical difference that was “very high (almost too high) indicating an extremely steep descent”. But the seventh and last ping between the aircraft and the satellite was a power-up exchange and the vertical information was not as accurate. 

In his new book MH370: Mystery Solved, Vance writes that experience of other airliner crashes into water shows that if MH370 had come down in a steep, high speed dive as the ATSB assumes, it would have been pulverised into millions of parts, and the flaperon and flap recovered on islands off Africa could not have survived mostly intact.

The leader of the ATSB’s failed search for MH370, Peter Foley, and ATSB media spokesman Paul Sadler did not respond to emails from The Australian.

MTF...P2