[Peetwo]

Captain's Log 10.12.16: The shame of MH370 PT1.

Via Chillit's 7th Arc blog :

Using Satellites to Locate MH370

Posted on December 9, 2016 by Mike Chillit

This is so simple, some may hurt themselves with exuberant face palming. Resist for now.

For me, the revelation that this could be done came from one of my tweeps who posted an image of two white dots on a Reunion Island beach. I’ve tried to remember who that Tweep was, and so far haven’t succeeded. Fortunately, there is an audit trail in my own tweet history and I will find out who it was and thank HER (I believe a her) profusely.

That image was from St. Denis beach where the flaperon was found by Johnny Begue and formally reported to police on July 29, 2015. Mr. Begue fundamentally changed the search for MH370 that day. If we find it, it will be in no small part due to Mr. Begue and the subsequent harassment he took after hordes of journalists made a mess of that quiet picturesque community. Who can blame those who objected to being so rudely treated by the “media”?

When I saw the image, wheels began turning a little and I eventually asked myself if there was a way to figure out if one of those white dots was indeed the flaperon. It wasn’t an easy task. First of all, Mr. Begue speaks only French Creole. And he is not a social media aficionado as far as I know. How to contact him?

A break came when a man who followed me on twitter read some of the flaperon tweets and contacted me. His name is Michel Bourgeois, and he sent me a very simple message: “I know him”, referring to Johnny Begue. Mr. Bourgeois not only speaks perfect English to accommodate culturally challenged people like me, he offered to get in touch with Mr. Begue to ask specific questions on my behalf.

The information I needed from Mr. Begue was simple enough: Is either of the white objects shown in a Google Earth image of St. Denis beach the one he found on July 29, 2015. Mr. Bourgeois was unable to find out directly, so I enlisted the help of another Tweep by the name of Brigitte Lanteri, who speaks no English as I understand it, but who has Google Translate available to bridge some gaps.

Between the three of us misfits, we managed to ask Mr. Begue if he could explain exactly where he fished the flaperon out of the surf. He was more than happy to oblige and Mr. Bourgeois was innovative enough to put a GPS app on his cellphone and go to the very spot on St. Denis beach where the flaperon was found. It turned out that the flaperon was within perhaps 100 meters of where it appears on that Google Earth image taken July 23, 2015 by a brand new Digital Globe satellite, WorldView-3.

At least, at that point we believed we were making important headway. This was back in September or so. I had already done extensive work to determine that Reunion Island was almost certainly in the southern east-to-west path for aircraft debris when it crashed. I was not surprised by what we were now learning. But how to move the search forward?

I tend to be overly persistent when I encounter things I don’t understand, but want to understand. We are all like that. In time, I decided that if we could see the flaperon – or what appeared to be the flaperon – in the surf on Reunion Island, why couldn’t we use Google Earth’s Digital Globe images to explore other Islands? I was not interested in Madagascar where we already knew there was debris. I wasn’t interested primarily because even if we find debris on Madagascar, it doesn’t help us figure out where it drifted FROM. Madagascar is where all debris eventually goes to slowly dissolve under the hot sun. In terms of finding the crash site, it seemed to me more important to recreate the drift path. Which islands were catching debris? So I began using Google Earth for the first time ever as an exploration tool and I was shocked to discover what appeared to be aircraft debris on a tiny little island known as St. Brandon Island, or Cargados Carajos Shoals (Heavily Loaded Crow’s Nests).

And there was more than one piece of debris. But to figure out what I was looking at I had to find Leopold Romeijn (pronounced Romain). Dr. Romeijn is CEO of Satellite Imaging Corporation in Houston, TX. It was Dr. Romeijn’s subsequent work with images of the St. Brandon and Reunion debris that moved us forward rapidly. We now have 20 or more likely pieces of MH370 debris scattered around Rodrigues, St. Brandon, and tiny little Tromelin, which is west of St. Brandon, but not one of the Mascarene Islands.

As I’m writing this, we do not have final confirmation on how all of these pieces of the MH370 puzzle fit together, but this is what we think we know:

1. The St. Brandon debris item has a spectral signature roughly equal to Boeing 747 wing composition signature. We did not have a 777-200ER sample, but 747 is close enough for now. We aren’t missing 747s in the Indian Ocean. So we’re good to go.
   
2. Next, the speck we believe to be the flaperon on Reunion Island the following year has the spectral signature for carbon composite. That is as it should be.
   
3. It appears that debris from MH370 was in the Mascarene Island area almost a year before the flaperon was found. In fact, we have NOAA satellite-tracked data to show a buoy that was where we believe MH370 came down was hit by Cyclone Gillian three weeks after the crash and ended up north of St. Brandon in July 2014. Bingo!
   
4. But are we connecting all of the dots correctly? We think so, but further tests are being performed to help confirm what we think we know. Stay tuned.
   

In the days ahead, Dr. Romeijn and his staff will be working on pinning down the spectral signatures of the St. Brandon debris. There is additional debris on St. Brandon, and now on Reunion Island that we may now be able to certify as MH370 Debris. We may not be able to physically recover all of that debris, but it doesn’t matter. We don’t need it. What we need is to know where it came from. The “scatter pattern” for this debris will help us narrow down MH370’s final location. That is probably about 1,200 km west of Exmouth, AU, but we continue to work on that.

I should point out that most of this satellite imagery has been available since August 2014. No one checked it to find out if an underwater search was even necessary. And there is a lot of potential plane debris. In fact, the underwater portion of the search began in October 2014, three months or more AFTER debris from MH370 began hitting St. Brandon Island.

We live in a satellite age now. We can’t see those multi-ton image sensors, even by looking up, but we see the images they take every day on social media. For more than two years we have tried to find MH370 the same was ancient divers searched for sponges, lost treasure, and other gifts from the sea. Time to move on and embrace the satellite era, and people like Dr. Romeijn and his staff who have tools we could only dream of a few decades ago.

Now, here are some images of the various places we are looking, the debris we have, and one of the spectral analysis returns. More should be available within days.



St. Brandon Island; about 50 km long, and 1.3 square kilometer in area. Restricted access.



One of our Satellite Search and Spectral Analysis areas



St. Brandon (Wing) segment (Tests Continuing.



Very old St. Brandon wreck of some sort. Predates 2005 images.



Unconfirmed plane debris. Appears to be typical composite.



Second wing segment on St. Brandon. (Analysis continues)



Suspected wing segment



Spectral comparisons of Boeing 747s in Dubai to suspected wing segment on St. Brandon.


WorldView-3 image of St. Denis beach where flaperon is being tested for Carbon Composite construction

And in Madagascar the magnificent 7 continue to search for debris and campaign for local awareness to be on the lookout for possible items of MH370 debris:

For updates on the MH370 M7 efforts refer to voice370 on twitter or facebook...


MTF...P2