[Peetwo]

Yeah, but…

Ben makes several sound, valid points, all with merit and persuasive.  But has missed one important factor - the complete lack of faith around the world for anything that is published or said in relation to MH 370 being credible.  The last missive from the Maldives being a classic example.  Most were ‘happy’ with the official version; that the Maldives claims had been investigated, properly and discounted.  Then, for no discernible reason, up pops this ‘press release’, long after it could have been reasonably expected.  You could be forgiven for wondering why the Maldives civil aviation authority did not publish a definitive report, shortly after the claims of ‘sighting’ were made; one which stated that ‘they’ had investigated the claims and found them to be inaccurate, provide proof positive that an identified (company and tail number) aircraft had been in the vicinity at the time.  Full stop, walk away.

But no; we get this badly drafted ‘statement’ which is tardy and incites the theorists.  Few doubt the 'sighting' claims were invalid; logic seems to indicate and support that.  So,  why add fuel to a dead fire, so late in the day?  Must be a reason, the public response to the Maldives ‘report’ just indicts the total lack of faith in anything published or said which is presented as ‘official’.   Sad state of affairs.  

I reckon if they found the bloody thing tomorrow - someone would say it was a fake.

We now find a possible motivation for Dedley's passing strange clarification article (above) in the weekend Oz. Last night on the other Aunty.. , that dreaded show (that no journo in their right mind really wants to appear on) MediaWatch had a segment on the MH370 Maldives story... :

Episode 21, 22 June 2015 


MH370 Maldives theory debunked

A front page story in The Weekend Australian claimed flight MH370 had been spotted flying over The Maldives around the time it went missing. But the claim wasn't new and not especially plausible.

And now to another shaky story...on the world’s biggest aviation mystery, Malaysian Airlines MH 370, which vanished last year with 239 people on board.

Two months ago the front page of The Weekend Australian suggested it might have solved the puzzle:

The plane truth? Meet the islanders who say they can help Australia find MH370


— Weekend Australian, 4-5 April, 2015

Billed as an exclusive by the paper’s award-winning chief reporter, Hedley Thomas, the page-one story suggested that MH370 may have come down near the Maldive Islands just south of India.

Promoted by The Australian on social media, it was welcomed enthusiastically by readers.

... with Hedley Thomas now on the trail of MH370 it's bound to at last be found. His story today absolutely fascinating.


— Twitter, @davidjo555, 4th April, 2015

By this time several international news groups had also jumped on Hedley’s lead, with the

Huffington Post, The Daily Mail, The Independent and Britain’s Daily Express all keen to republish the claims, even if the Express described them as ‘astonishing’.

In fact, The Australian’s story was neither new nor especially plausible.

Similar claims had been dismissed within days of MH370’s disappearance.

There was no trace of the plane in Maldivian airspace, and satellite handshakes had convinced the experts from Boeing, Inmarsat, and the US, Australian and British governments, that MH370 had perished in the southern Indian ocean off western Australia

But after a year of searching had found nothing, Thomas had flown to the Maldives and interviewed six eye-witnesses who breathed new life into the tale:

HUMAAM DHONMAMK: The plane was travelling from this direction to that direction. It was white, big, I was ... remembering the colours of it on that day…


— The Australian, 4th April, 2015

As Hedley Thomas explained to Chris Smith on 2GB, the colours were right, the Maldives were in range, and the islanders had never seen anything like it.

HEDLEY THOMAS: This is an island that you could walk around in an hour and a half, Chris. It’s, it’s –

CHRIS SMITH: It's 60 hectares or something, is it?

HEDLEY THOMAS: Yeah, it's tiny.

CHRIS SMITH: But they are certain they saw a large passenger jet and large passenger jets do not cross the southern atoll, right?

HEDLEY THOMAS: That's correct and certainly not at low altitude.

— 2GB, Breakfast, 6th April, 2015

Now, setting aside what the experts regard as ‘conclusive evidence’ that MH370 did not come to the Maldives, there were a number of problems with The Australian’s story.

First, the plane was flying in the wrong direction: it should have been coming from the East, yet the witnesses all agreed it came from the North West. Thomas knew this ... but did not mention it in his story.

Second, MH370 would almost certainly have ditched before this mystery plane was sighted, at 6.15 am local time. It only had enough fuel to stay in the air for around 7 ½ hours. But these sightings came almost one hour later.

Third ... if MH370 had in fact stayed in the air that long, it should have flown much further—almost to the coast of Africa, according to the international search team.

And fourth, if a Boeing 777 had been so low that its doors were clearly visible, hundreds of people on Kudahuvadhoo should have seen it.

But, Thomas asked in this video, what else could it have been?

HEDLEY THOMAS: Their stories are very similar. If they did not see MH370, what was the aircraft with similar markings, in the early hours of their holiday, Saturday, March 8, 2014?


— The Australian, 4th April, 2015

Well, it seems we now have an answer to that question ... Thanks to Le Monde and its Asia Pacific correspondent Florence de Changy, who went to the Maldives last month and published this story two weeks ago (English translation).

L’avion qui n’était pas le MH370


The plane which wasn’t MH370

— Le Monde, 11th June, 2015

As Le Monde’s story revealed there’s another island 50 kilometres south east of Kudahuvadhoo called Thimarafushi.

And it has a new airport that was opened in September 2013.

And on the day the mystery plane was sighted, civil aviation records show that a flight touched down on Thimarafushi at 6.33am.

The plane was a twin-engined De Haviland Dash 8 carrying 50 people

... flown and operated by Maldivian, whose livery is white, red and blue, just like MH370.

According to the Maldives Civil Aviation Authority, this plane had flown direct from the capital of Male, and would have tracked close to, or over, the island of Kudahoovadhoo as it came into land.

The authority’s chairman, Ibrahim Faizal, told Media Watch, as he told Le Monde:

It does correlate with what the people on the island would have seen. There was this Dash 8 aircraft during this time period and we deduced this has to be that flight.


— Ibrahim Faizal, Chairman, Maldives Civil Aviation Authority, 19th June, 2015

And he added:

No one who has seen this information at MCAA thinks it was the MH370. The island council president did not also think it was the MH370.


— Ibrahim Faizal, Chairman, Maldives Civil Aviation Authority, 19th June, 2015

So did Hedley Thomas talk to the CAA before writing his article?

He told Media Watch:

I telephoned and emailed several government agencies in the Maldives seeking comment before we published the story …


I did not receive a reply to these e-mailed attempts. My telephone calls were not returned.

— Hedley Thomas, National Chief Correspondent, The Australian, 19th June, 2015

Hedley Thomas also told Media Watch it wouldn’t have helped if he had talked to the CAA back then because Ibrahim Faizal did not know about the Dash 8 plane until later.

And on Saturday—after Media Watch began making inquiries—Thomas made the same points in The Australian, which announced – on page 13:

MH370 Maldives theory dismissed


Hedley Thomas

Sightings by villagers in the Maldives in March last year of an aircraft they believed could have been the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 have been reinvestigated by the head of the country’s aviation authority, resulting in the theory being all but ruled out.

— Weekend Australian, 20-21 June, 2015

Was it ever worth that front-page treatment? I don’t think so.

   
From the Le Monde article conclusion we get this from the Maldive's CAA Chief Ibrahim Faizal:

Although the islanders are reported in some of the previously published accounts as claiming to have seen a jumbo jet" or a "jet plane" with "a red line under the portholes" (as on the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777s), these details were not mentioned in any of the witness statements that we obtained. "In all probability, the [i]plane that the islanders saw was this domestic flight. There's nothing to convince us that it could have been MH370: neither the route nor the timing support that theory", says Ibrahim Faizal, head of the Maldives civil aviation authority, in an interview with Le Monde. [/i]

Following on from the MediaWatch segment last night, this morning Ben Sandilands from PlaneTalking posted this - More rubbish stories about MH370 leave key issues untouched

The embarrassing demolition of The Australian’s year old repetition of alleged sightings of MH370 in the Maldives, and after it had most likely crashed, on the ABC’s Media Watch last night leaves larger concerns about the flight hanging in the air.


Essentially they are whether or not the satellite data which underlines the search effort is bogus or deliberately corrupted, and why on the morning of the disaster on 8 March 2014 the immediate reaction of Malaysia Airlines was so pathetically disinterested it only tried to phone the cockpit twice.

Those questions have not been answered, although they have been posed many, many times by serious reporters and authoritative contacts in the industry for nearly as long as the flight has been missing.

The flight that sank the Maldivian sightings

The satellite data that has been relied upon concerns not so much its content but the time stamped interval taken for the information sent from MH370 to get to an Inmarsat satellite parked in geo-synchronous orbit above the the west Indian Ocean.
(There was more involved, but let’s hold onto the critical element, the time between signal being sent and received.)

If the understanding of the timing taken by the sequence of consequent exchanges of data between earth and plane via the satellite is correct then MH370 had to strike the earth at a place where the satellite had to be at a specific elevation above the horizon.

That requirement is satisfied along the so called seventh (and last) arc of potential locations from Kazakhstan to so far south in the mid Indian Ocean that iceberg sightings are on rare occasions reported by shipping.

It is not satisfied however by the equatorial gap between the northern and southern parts of the seventh arc crossing SE Asia and western Indonesia because if the jet was there it would have been closer to a western Pacific Inmarsat and the sequence it initiated, more than seven and a half hours after it took from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing, would have instead been received by that satellite first.

This essential geometry drawn by where MH370 could have been to satisfy the same elevation of the signal receiving satellite in the sky is a powerful constraint on efforts to model the crash location.

The southern seventh arc focus is the result of Doppler shift analysis of the signal which showed that MH370 had flown southwards from a point somewhere NW of Malaysia.

That analysis is how ever bedeviled by seriously confronting doubts about what the flight was actually doing before it flew south, if as is generally accepted, the Doppler analysis is correct and it really flew south.

And, perhaps not surprisingly given all the variables, nothing has been identified as being from MH370 during the priority area sea floor search SW of Perth.

The lack of success has encouraged an astonishing range of conspiracy or alternative theories as to where the flight, with 239 people on board, actually went.

If the timing of the satellite-aircraft (and ground station) data sequences is correct, any theory that it crashed into the South China Sea, or as of yesterday, flew through a 6000 metre deep gorge in China to crash near a temple according to one of many messages sent to Plane Talking or came down near the Maldives can be immediately ruled out.

And the Maldives report was dreadful rubbish, made worse for the reporter by the video material and his own statement published on the dreaded Media Watch site.
But what if the data in terms of timing was faked to mislead any search?

We need to ask some major questions at this point.  Why would such data be fabricated and how?

The ‘why’ is an immense ask. The resources that would have to be invested in such a carefully planned and premeditated act of mass murder and deception require some extraordinary motivation.

If the purpose was to kill specific people on board MH370 it would surely have been simpler to kill them before boarding.  If the purpose was to destroy or steal something in the cargo hold the most difficult way to do this imaginable would be after MH370 had taken off.

If the intention was to land it somewhere within its available fuel range a massive degree of planning would have been necessary, probably with the tacit approval of authorities in other states.

These would all involve escalating risk of disclosure, since nothing ever seems to remain secret for long in the post wikileaks, post Snowdon world.

There have of course been lucid, if highly unpleasant reflections on the political anti-Malaysia establishment views of the captain of the flight.  In the light of Germanwings and other similar alarming incidents, some act of criminal insanity (painstakingly planned and executed) cannot be dismissed.

Or  it could have been a perfectly planned heist (for what ever reason) which went totally wrong because of a passenger insurrection, dooming the flight to ultimately plunge to earth on the exhaustion of its fuel.

Or it could have been some totally unimaginable set of technical malfunctions.
But whatever it was, the Malaysian authorities and the airline responded to the sudden disappearance of MH370 as a transponder identified airliner on ATC radar screens with appalling indifference.

Why? As a stab in the dark, what if there was a generalized fleet wide threat made to Malaysia Airlines in an attempt to cause the grounding of the carrier? A threat it decided to ignore?

Almost everything that was subsequently said or done as the searching ramped up could be fitted into a plot to protect the national carrier from its responsibility for having not acted appropriately to a serious threat.

Whether data faking was part of that process remains unknown. This entire notion of a general threat against Malaysia Airlines isn’t supported by any direct evidence, and could thus be as much a rubbish thought as the Maldivian ‘sightings’ turned out to be, consigning this reporter to his own barbeque on Media Watch.

But there are enormous questions about the conduct of the airline and the Malaysian authorities to the disappearance of MH370, and they have not been addressed,  and they could yet prove critical to an understanding of what it was that happened to the flight and why.

Hmm...more than 15 months after this tragedy occurred & we are still no closer to unravelling the mystery of flight MH370... 

MTF..P2