[Peetwo]

Why Australia needs an MH370 inquiry    

"..Yes I am starting to think this whole stinking cesspool of lies & deceit definitely needs to go before at least a Senate Inquiry, I can think of a dozen or more very concerned & intelligent international MH370 followers who would be more than happy to make submissions and maybe even appear to give evidence to such an Inquiry.."

Part I: Cock-ups, cover-ups, lies, deceptions & disinformation

In today's weekend Oz 'that man' Higgins is back with a very comprehensive article that summarises quite succinctly where we are at with the tragic, diabolical, shambolic, shameful ( ) ATSB led MH370 SIO search:   

What lies beneath: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 search a sham?

The Australian
12:00AM July 30, 2016

Ean Higgins
[/url]
Reporter
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@EanHiggins
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For the past two years, Paul Kennedy has led the most expensive, logistically difficult and publicly scrutinised underwater search to solve the holy grail of aviation mysteries, the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

As the Perth-based project director of the Dutch Fugro survey group team whose vessels are still scouring the southern Indian Ocean for the Boeing 777, Kennedy is the man from the point of view of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which is orchestrating the search and employing Fugro.

In March last year, the ATSB media unit promoted a propaganda video, now on YouTube, featuring Kennedy, who answered some soft questions from an interviewer. The remoteness of the search zone and the wild seas meant the challenge was tough, Kennedy said in the video.

“We’re more than seven days’ sail from the nearest civilisation, which is Western Australia, so that’s an awful long way if things go wrong,” he added. “It’s rough where we are, it’s terribly rough, so you don’t sleep particularly well, so fatigue is one of our biggest issues offshore.” But Kennedy also stressed the sophistication of the search effort.

“The deep tow on board the vessel is called ‘Dragon’. It’s got three forms of sensors on board. The way I like to make an analogy, it’s got ears, it can listen, that’s the acoustic sensors on board; it’s got eyes, that’s the cameras; and it’s got a nose, it’s got a sniffer, it can sniff jet fuel. The acid test: people say, will you find it? The answer is: if it’s in the area we’re searching, we will find it.”

GRAPHIC: MH370 timeline

It was derring-do, Boy’s Own stuff, just the message the ATSB spin doctors wanted to get out there to suggest Australian taxpayers’ money was in the best hands for the search for the aircraft wreckage and its precious black box flight data and cockpit voice recorders.
That’s why when Reuters last week reported that the ATSB’s pin-up boy Kennedy had told the newsagency he now thought the whole premise of the $180 million search had been wrong from the start, the story went around the world, and all hell broke loose. The way Reuters reported it, Kennedy had decided that the ATSB had erred in determining the search area based on its “ghost plane” type scenario in which the aircraft spirals down fairly quickly after running out of fuel, with unconscious or dead pilots disabled by oxygen deprivation.

Rather, Kennedy said he now believed the “rogue pilot” theory, in which a fully conscious pilot glided the aircraft down to the sea, was probably right after all.

“If it’s not there, it means it’s somewhere else,” Kennedy told Reuters. “If it was manned it could glide for a long way. You could glide it for further than our search area is, so I believe the logical conclusion will be, well, maybe that is the other scenario.”

Reuters wrote this meant Kennedy thought his searchers “have been scouring the wrong patch of ocean for two years”.

As a case of biting the hand that feeds, it doesn’t get better than this.

For about 18 months the ATSB has fought a running battle against Australian airline pilot Byron Bailey and other pilots and aviation experts who have promoted the theory that MH370 captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah hijacked his own aircraft and flew it right to the end in a deliberate effort to disappear the plane.

The ATSB has consistently described the controlled glide scenario as “very unlikely” and stuck to its preferred “unresponsive crew/hypoxia” type of end-of-flight model, in which some unforeseen event such as loss of oxygen through decompression leaves the pilots dead at the controls and the aircraft running on autopilot until fuel exhaustion.

The ATSB and former transport minister Warren Truss repeatedly rubbished Bailey, who wrote about MH370 first in The Daily Telegraph and then The Australian. So now the ATSB’s $180m action man, Kennedy, seemed to be siding with its arch-enemy, Bailey, in supporting the rogue pilot end of flight theory.

Fugro went into full PR damage control mode to try to mitigate the distinct impression that Kennedy had implied that the people running the ATSB — Fugro’s lucrative client — were idiots.

“Fugro wishes to make it very clear that we believe the search area to have been well defined based on all of the available scientific data. In short, we have been thoroughly looking in the most probable place — and that is the right place to search,” Fugro said in a statement. The statement did not, however, claim Reuters actually misquoted Kennedy.

But that was to be only the start of the ATSB’s credibility problems, and Bailey’s triumph, in recent days. Bailey, who consistently describes himself not as a journalist but a humble fly boy, flies corporate jets and before that made his living captaining aircraft such as the 777. He therefore knows a bit about practical aviation and broke one of the biggest scoops in the MH370 saga.

Writing in The Weekend Australian in January, Bailey said he had been told relatively early on by an Australian government source that “the FBI had recovered from Zaharie’s home computer deleted information showing flight plan waypoints”.

“Here, I assumed, was the smoking gun. To fly to the southern Indian Ocean, which has no airway leading from north of Sumatra to the south, the pilot would need to define flight plan waypoints via latitude and longitude for insertion in the flight management computer.

“When nothing about this emerged from ATSB I rang my source. He confirmed what he had told me and left me with the impression that the FBI were of the opinion that Zaharie was responsible for the crash.”

The significance of Bailey’s claim was huge. It suggested the FBI had secretly found Zaharie planned, then rehearsed on his home computer flight simulator, a specific and complex flight to what is absolutely the middle of nowhere in the southern Indian Ocean.

When The Weekend Australian asked the ATSB at that time in January if this sensational and crucial claim was correct, ATSB spokesman Daniel O’Malley dodged the question.

“The ATSB cannot comment on the accuracy of an alleged conversation … the ATSB is not responsible for the investigation of the accident; that … belongs to the Malaysian government,” O’Malley said in an email dated January 8.

Last week the ATSB’s efforts to marginalise Bailey, and steer around his claim that the FBI had found the critical flight simulator data and Australian investigators knew about it, were blown out of the water.

New York magazine revealed it had obtained a secret Malaysian police report on the findings of the FBI analysis of the hard disk drives on Zaharie’s flight simulation computer, which showed waypoints for a simulated flight that was eerily similar to the zigzag route MH370 actually took on March 8, 2014, when it reversed course on a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

The simulated flight, conducted only a month before MH370’s disappearance, like the actual flight deviated west back over Malaysia, over the Andaman Sea, then took a sharp turn south before ending in the southern Indian Ocean.

New York quoted one excerpt from the report that showed investigators regarded the find as significant: “Based on the Forensics Analysis conducted on the 5 HDDs obtained from the Flight Simulator from MH370 Pilot’s house, we found a flight path, that lead (sic) to the Southern Indian Ocean, among the numerous other flight paths charted on the Flight Simulator.”

Between Kennedy’s suggestion that the pilot hijack theory was right, and the confirmation of the FBI discovery of the simulated flight, Bailey claimed he had been vindicated and that the ATSB and Truss had been hiding the truth for two years while sledging him.

“How is it that a taxpayer-funded government department can be so devious?” Bailey asked in The Australian this week. During the past week Bailey has been one of the most sought-after talents on television and radio.

Stung by all this, the ATSB renewed its fierce personal attack on Bailey in a statement on its website this week, saying it was concerned about “the intense personal impact that claims such as Mr Bailey’s has on those who are suf­fering as a result of this tragedy”.

But, interestingly, the ATSB for the first time tacitly admitted the story about the FBI findings was true, though it downplayed its significance, saying: “The simulator information shows only the possibility of planning. It does not reveal what happened on the night of its disappearance nor where the aircraft is located.”

While the ATSB media unit was keen to disseminate this “correcting the record” bulletin, its spokesman Tim Dawson failed to answer questions from Inquirer put to the organisation this week.

The man who replaced Truss as transport minister, Darren Chester, this week refused a call from Labor’s transport spokesman Anthony Albanese to come clean on what the Australian government really knew about the evidence indicating that Zaharie hijacked his own aircraft, as did Malcolm Turnbull, with both men saying this was up to Malaysia. The 777 was Malaysian-registered, which under international law makes Malaysia the lead investigator.

A Malaysian government agency has produced reams of interim technical reports, but none that makes any definitive statement of what happened or, revealingly, any mention of the FBI report.

The question that just about everyone — from aviation experts and the families of the victims to millions of interested bystanders around the world gripped by the addictive mystery — wants the answer to is this: why have Australia and Malaysia tried to suppress this evidence all along?

Why do the two governments seem to have done their best to avoid providing credence to the scenario that increasingly is viewed by the majority of informed opinion as being by far the likeliest: that, for whatever reason, Zaharie planned and executed a mass murder-suicide?

Aviation experts such as John Cox, an American airline pilot turned air safety consultant who has worked on many major air crash investigations, says all the evidence has always pointed towards a deliberate act by the pilot. He says the FBI find on the flight simulation, while not conclusive, adds to that conclusion.

Radar contact was broken 39 minutes into the flight and the plane’s radar transponder turned off, the route appeared to be deliberately flown to try to confuse or evade Thai, Malaysian and Indonesian radar, and there is no evidence of mechanical failure or a fire since no distress called was received and the aircraft flew on apparently smoothly for many hours after the final turn. Hijack by a passenger does not work well as a scenario because there was no claim of responsibility.

Cox believes it is imperative the FBI report and any other related material be publicly released.

“I believe in transparency in investigations,” Cox tells Inquirer. “If there is evidence, then it should be shared when it is proven and verified.”

There are several reasons Malaysia would not want a conclusion that one of its nationals committed such a heinous crime. One is obvious: it’s not a good look good for the Malaysian government or its majority state-owned flag carrier.

There are precedents for governments to try to resist such findings. In 1999 EgyptAir Flight 990 went down over the Atlantic en route from the US to Cairo, killing 217 people. The US National Transportation Safety Board concluded that, after the captain left the cockpit, first officer Gameel al-Batouti pushed the stick all the way forward to nosedive the aircraft into the ocean, with the repeated incantation, “I rely on God” in Arabic.

The Egyptian Air Agency put the crash down to mechanical failure of the elevator control system, but the NTSB said that could not explain the crash.

It would be particularly embarrassing to the Malaysian government if Zaharie brought down MH370 as a political statement. Zaharie was a supporter and, it is thought, distant relative of Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.

According to some reports, he attended a court hearing the day before the flight when Anwar’s acquittal on sodomy charges was overturned in what is widely seen as a politically inspired trial.

A second reason relates to compensation claims from the families of those who died — excluding Zaharie, 238 murder victims in such a scenario. While the position is not crystal clear, some informed observers say that if Zaharie were proved to have deliberately taken down MH370, it would nullify Malaysia Airlines’ insurance, and also expose the airline to a whole new and higher level of potential lawsuits based on criminal liability.

A spokeswoman for Malaysian Airlines says: “MAS has adequate insurance coverage in place to meet any legal liability that we may have in respect of those claiming as a consequence of the incident.” The spokeswoman describes allegations of pilot suicide as “unfounded and speculative”.

Australia is, at Malaysia’s request, leading the underwater search and is putting up $60m towards it, when only a handful of victims were Australian citizens.

As Frankfurt-based British aerospace engineer Richard Godfrey puts it to Inquirer, one would have thought the Australian government would feel obliged to reveal what inside knowledge it had about what happened to MH370, since that impinged on where to search.

“In the light of the fact that the Australian people and the taxpayer have spent so much on the search, I think they should get some value for their Australian dollars,” says Godfrey.

Godfrey is a member of an international association of scientists, aviation experts and engineers known as the Independent Group, which continues to review the scientific evidence surrounding MH370.

The fact the ATSB, Chester and Turnbull won’t say what they know, Godfrey suggests, “points to the Australian government not wanting to upset the Malaysian government”.

The timing of Kennedy’s comments and the FBI revelations comes at a crossroads in the MH370 saga. Late last week, Chester and his Malaysian and Chinese counterparts met for an MH370 summit in Malaysia, and confirmed the stance that the three governments have maintained for months: once the sweep of the current 120,000sq km search area is complete in coming months — and less than 10,000sq km remain now — the two Fugro ships and a Chinese vessel will pack up and head for home.

In his statement on the decision, Chester says: “In the absence of credible new evidence to assist in identifying the specific location of the aircraft, a further search is not currently viable.”

Critics including Bailey and Godfrey say there is plenty of credible evidence already in the ATSB’s hands to indicate alternative locations of where to search — not new, but suppressed or inconvenient.

The final route MH370 took on its long leg south is, experts including Godfrey who has worked on satellite tracking technology agree, quite well established along what is known as the “seventh arc” of automatic electronic “handshakes” or “pings” exchanged between transmitters in the aircraft’s engines and a satellite.

The issues are just where the aircraft ran out of fuel along that route, and whether it then went down in an uncontrolled fashion, or was glided much farther by Zaharie.

Even if the controlled glide scenario were adopted, the current search area would, in fact, be an early part of where to look, as Fugro eagerly but correctly pointed out in its statement following Kennedy’s bombshell remarks.

But it would dictate a search band that was three times wider and longer because Zaharie could have glided the aircraft up to 100 nautical miles off, or farther along, the seventh arc.

The ATSB and Godfrey say a glide is not indicated by the satellite data, which can track flight path and vertical movement. In this case, they say, they show a very sharp end descent — an uncontrolled crash.

“The satellite data shows a dive in excess of 15,000 feet per minute, but accelerating,” says Godfrey, who independently has reviewed the satellite tracking material.

However, Godfrey and his Independent Group colleagues believe it would be productive, once the search of the current target zone is complete, to start a new search farther north along the seventh arc.

That suggestion is based, Godfrey says, on the fact while the hourly satellite handshakes show a consistent final leg south, the gaps between the earlier pings mean investigators cannot tell when the pilot began that final leg.

The turn might have been later and farther northwest than assumed by the ATSB, meaning MH370 would have run out of fuel earlier and farther north along the seventh arc.

Coincidentally, this week a team of researchers in Italy published a paper in the journal of the European Geosciences Union using the location of confirmed debris from MH370 to determine where the airliner might have crashed.

It also suggests that could be farther north.

Combing the difficult and deep waters of the southern Indian Ocean is an expensive exercise. The mathematics are pretty straightforward: trebling the search area, for example, would treble the cost.

But as Cox and Godfrey point out, collectively the government agencies of the world have never given up on trying to find lost airliners, whatever the cost.

The broader negative implications for aviation, they say, are just too great if the reason an aircraft goes down is not finally determined.

“The public will no longer enjoy flying, and the aviation industry will dive,” Godfrey warns.
“It’s important to find out: is Boeing at fault? It’s important to find out if this was a suicide pilot again.”

A wise, somewhat eccentric man who avidly follows all the latest developments & shenanigans coming out of the ATSB led MH370 SIO deep sea search, disagrees with my (& many others) premise that after the latest leaked FBI files and subsequent revelations/implications, that now should be the time to call for at least a Senate Inquiry into this whole stinking mess. Rather this gentleman believes we should continue to exhaust all avenues, follow up all leads, go back and review all the facts to narrow down the highest probable area to find MH370 and continue the search until the main wreckage of MH370 is found.

On a personal level I totally agree with him and in an ideal, totally transparent and honest world there would for be no need for a consensus, we would continue the search indefinitely until MH370, the black boxes and the dark secrets within were all revealed.

Unfortunately however we do not live in an ideal world that is devoid of geopolitics and the self-interests, secret agreements of individual nations that are signatories to United Nations ICAO convention. Nowhere is this argy, bargy world of geopolitics more prevalent than with the tragic mystery of MH370.

IMO the leaked FBI Captain Z files revelation is just more of the same tactics of MH370 lies, deception, disinformation and distraction. I am also very suspect on the 'suspension' of the search statement that came out of the tri-partite meeting. Although this is a good PR exercise for the tri-parties, IMO it is also a very clever way, through the international (ICAO & IMO) conventions, to keep control of both the narrative and future search attempts (private and/or other directly interested parties/governments) anywhere near the 7th arc or indeed the SIO.

Therefore I would argue that the inevitable Australian inquisition (Parliamentary, Judicial or RC) should not be delayed while the bureaucratic powers to be obfuscate, procrastinate and attack anyone who dares to question the 'agreed' MH370 script. No the time is now. 

Finally for the sake of debate and to perhaps reinforce my call for an MH370 inquiry, here is a couple of excellent quoted comments from the Higgins article - i.e. food for thought:

Dean

6 hours ago


I cannot understand why the Australian media has been so complicit in this outrage against the victims, their families and the Australian taxpayer. What is now established as certain fact is that the ATSB has had in their possession for a very long time facts that completely undermine the basis for their search area. No coherent explanation has ever been given why this information was ignored and actively suppressed. Explanations that have been given were essentially false denials embroidered with ad hominem slurs against anybody who dared to question their secretive judgment. The only satisfactory outcome now possible, for the peace of mind of the Australian taxpayers at least, is the removal of very large chunks of the ATSB management, if not the closure of the entire department and establishment of a new body with very different standards and responsibilities, and most importantly new personnel not connected with this investigation.

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Andrew

1 hour ago


It looks like the ATSB came up with a viable theory and followed the leads.  The problem arises when exculpatory evidence began to seriously test their theory - but they'd become too invested in the original hypothesis.  Too many senior people backing a theory - and backed themselves into a corner.  Rather than consider the alternate they attacked those advocating the alternate.  This (exculpatory evidence changing the course of an investigation) frequently happens in criminal investigation - but the ATSB are not criminal investigators.  You'll note that the very interesting piece of evidence - to wit- the flight path on the simulator was discovered by the FBI (criminal investigators) while the ATSB and others are focusing on the physical evidence - satellite data - drift analysis etc.  Essentially they need to seriously consider this as a  murder investigation - stop looking at the metaphorical gun (the aircraft) and start looking more closely at the person who pulled the trigger.  Whatever happened - this dismissal of viable alternate theories - especially where there is evidence to support those alternates - is very poor investigative form.

Richard
1 hour ago

I think the evidence that it was a sham is very convincing, which leaves the question of why, and what does the Australian government know that it refuses to disclose?
At the end of the day an awful ot of lives were lost and many people have suffered terribly, some will continue to suffer for decades, and inconvenient truths should not remain hidden.

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Botswana O'Hooligan

17 minutes ago

Simple logic would dictate the maximum size of the area where the wreckage should be so one takes the maximum altitude the aeroplane may have been at and where they thought it would run out of fuel, draw a circle based the best lift/drag ratio, add in a projected wind effect, and you come up with a circle of about 240,000 square kilometres in area, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less, and that's the area to be searched. In case the ATSB theory is correct and the aeroplane went straight in, you start either a creeping line ahead search or an expanding square search from the most likely spot where the final glide started. Anybody with SAR experience can figure that out and one suspects that the ATSB know it too unless they are incompetent, but why didn't they use it?

 



MTF...P2