[Peetwo]

A debris of inconvenience continued -

Further to a leaked report from Meteo France (the French version of the BOM that was commissioned, much like our CSIRO, to reverse drift plot the flaperon) Jeff Wise blog yesterday:

French Judiciary Report Raises Fresh Doubts About MH370 Debris

– May 2, 2016Posted in: Aviation


After French authorities retrieved the MH370 flaperon from Réunion Island, they flew it to the Toulouse facility of the DGA, or Direction générale de l’Armement, France’s weapons development and procurement agency. Here it was examined on August 9, 2015 by marine biologist Joseph Poupin, a crustacean specialist at the Ecole Navale in Brest. He identifed the barnacles covering the flaperon as Lepas anatifera striata and noted that these creatures “always live on objects floating in the sea. The are situated in the water, just beneath the waterline.” Based on his observation that the flat, lower surface of the flaperon was less densely colonized than the curved, upper part, he surmised that the object must have floated upside-down, and noted that “later flotation tests should be able to confirm this point.”

Such flotation tests were conducted at the DGA’s Hydrodynamic Engineering test center in Toulouse. The results are referenced in a document that I have obtained which was prepared for judicial authorities by Météo France, the government meteorological agency, which had been asked to conduct a reverse-drift analysis in an attempt to determine where the flaperon most likely entered the water. This report was not officially released to the public, as it is part of a criminal terrorism case. It is available in French here.

Pierre Daniel, the author of the Météo France study, notes that the degree to which a floating object sticks up into the air is crucial for modeling how it will drift because the more it protrudes, the more it will be affected by winds:



This translates as:

The buoyancy of the piece such as it was discovered is rather important. The studies by the DGA Hydrodynamic Engineering show that under the action of a constant wind, following the initial situation, the piece seems able to drift in two positions: with the trailing edge or the leading edge facing the wind. The drift angle has the value of 18 degrees or 32 degrees toward the left, with the speed of the drift equal to 3.29% or 2.76% of the speed of the wind, respectively.

The presence of barnacles of the genus Lepas on the two sides of the flaperon suggest a different waterline, with the piece being totally submerged. In this case we derive a speed equaly to zero percent of the wind. The object floats solely with the surface current.

This suggests a remarkable state of affairs.

Inspection of the flaperon by Poupin revealed that the entire surface was covered in Lepas, so the piece must have floated totally submerged—“entre deux eaux,” as Le Monde journalist Florence de Changy reported at the time. Yet when DGA hydrodynamicists put the flaperon in the water, it floated quite high in the water, enough so that when they blasted it with air it sailed along at a considerable fraction of the wind speed.

As point of reference, Australia’s CSIRO calculates that that the drifter buoys that it uses to gather ocean-current data pick up a 1.5% contribution from the wind. Here is a picture of one such drifter, kindly supplied to me by Brock McEwen. You can see that more than half of the spherical buoy is out of the water.



It is physically impossible for Lepas to survive when perched up high in the air. Yet the buoyancy tests were unequivocal. So Daniel pressed on, conducting his analysis along two parallel tracks, one which assumed that the piece floated high, and the other in which it floated submerged. For good measure, he also considered scenarios in which the flaperon floated submerged until it arrived in the vicinity of Réunion, and then floated high in the water for the last two days. (Note that he doesn’t present any mechanism by which a thing could occur; I can’t imagine one.)

After running hundreds of thousands of simulated drift trials under varying assumptions, Daniel concluded that if the piece floated as its Lepas population suggests, that is to say submerged, then it couldn’t have started anywhere near the current seabed search area. (See chart above.) Its most likely point of origin would have been close to the equator, near Indonesia. His findings in this regard closely mirror those of Brock McEwen and the GEOMAR researchers which I discussed in my previous post.

Daniel found that when simulated flaperons were asssumed to have been pushed by the wind, their location on March 8, 2014 lay generally along a lone that stretched from the southwest corner of Australia to a point south of Cape Horn in Africa (see below). This intersects with the 7th arc. However, as Brock has pointed out, such a scenario should also result in aircraft debris being washed ashore on the beaches of Western Australia, and none has been found. And, again, the presence of Lepas all over the flaperon indicates that such a wind contribution could not have been possible.



Pierre Daniel’s reverse-drift analysis for Météo France, therefore, presents us with yet another block in the growing stack of evidence against the validity of the current ATSB search area in the southern Indian Ocean.

The most important takeaway from this report for me, however, is the stunning discrepancy between how the flaperon floated in the DGA test tank and the “entre deux eaux” neutral buoyancy suggested by its population of Lepas. No doubt some will suggest that the flaperon may have contained leaky cells that slowly filled as it floated across the ocean, then drained after it became beached. However, I find it hard to believe that an organization as sophisticated as the DGA would have overlooked this eventuality when conducting their wind tests. Rather, I read Daniel’s report as evidence that the French authorities have been unable to make sense its own findings. I suspect that this is the reason that they continue to suppress them up to this day.

And some comments..

Brock McEwen

Posted May 2, 2016 at 6:14 PM


Jeff’s reporting has implications which go WELL beyond whether to move the search box north. On buoyancy, barnacles, and drift, it seems French investigators were seeing the same fundamental contradictions WE were seeing.


So the task at hand is not to pick which of the above charts is “right” – the task is to reconcile them to each other. How can barnacle-indicated and buoyancy-indicated impact distributions derive from the exact same flaperon, yet come nowhere near to sharing any common ground?


If the entirety of the Meteo report’s analyses are accepted as solid, can anyone construct a plausible scenario in which the flaperon WASN’T planted?

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 JS

Posted May 2, 2016 at 6:53 PM


@Brock – I could envision it being tangled and dragged in a net. Not likely, but possible. Particularly if the net was not where it was supposed to be, and the flaperon was cut loose.


I think your work, the work of others, and Jeff’s article are converging on “the search is in the wrong place.” Not entirely shocking.


So admittedly a dragged flaperon is a reach. But playing devil’s advocate, what is the shortest distance the flaperon could have been moved by non-current forces to place it on a different drift path? Surely there must be some boundary areas where currents change quickly. Are they frequently fished or even navigated?

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jeffwise

Posted May 2, 2016 at 8:25 PM


@Phil, the problem is that the Lepas take 6-12 months to reach this size, and they required many months to cross the ocean from the presumed crash site–as I recall, according to Brock’s analysis the flaperon couldn’t even get to Réunion without some help from the wind. So it doesn’t have time to be stuck in rocks.

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VictorI

Posted May 2, 2016 at 9:41 PM


@jeffwise: Even if no conclusions can be drawn, the Meteo France report is rife with contradictions that demand answers. Perhaps we can get official comments on the sections of the report that are now released. Have you contacted any authorities?


A part drifting across the Indian Ocean completely submerged makes no sense, as many of us have been saying for some time.


But for that matter, I still have questions about how No Step could have drifted across the Indian Ocean. Based on the photographic and video evidence, it appears that the honeycomb cells were either poorly sealed, or not sealed at all, and any trapped air that aided the floatation would have escaped within days.


We have loads of questions. We need more answers.

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 Brock McEwen

Posted May 2, 2016 at 11:28 PM


@Victor: agree 100%.


The bitter irony is that, for the past 9 months, the world’s drift experts would have KILLED for empirical data on freeboard – by direct buoyancy testing OR as inferred from expert barnacle analysis. Only in the case of MH370 can the one drift group ever shown EITHER end up being shown BOTH – with each pointing the search to a different corner of the frigging OCEAN.


Reeks. To. High. Heaven. - You got that right Brock

MTF...P2