[Peetwo]

While you were sleeping, Ben Sandilands - who is once again jet-setting North - put out a (above average length for Ben) post that summarises part one of the MH370 7th arc SIO search, while again questioning the veracity of the Malaysian narrative in regards to the first hours, days & weeks of the mysterious disappearance of MH370:

MH370 search part 2 nears end but is the answer in KL not Indian Ocean

Ben Sandilands | May 24, 2015 8:12PM |

What needs to be kept in mind as the second phase of the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 enters its final days?

The issue that seems to tower above all is that the government of Malaysia hit the ground lying on 8 March 2014, even before the Boeing 777-200ER and the 239 people it carried had exhausted the fuel it was carrying for its red-eye early morning run from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

That question has often been asked here.

Malaysia urged the search partners to continue looking as far away as western central Asia, and the South China sea, when it knew the jet had been abruptly diverting westwards from its last reported location over the Gulf of Thailand in the gap between its being handed over from Malaysia’s air traffic control zone to that of Vietnam.

The Malaysia Government has not had the fortitude or decency to explain its duplicity, whether that was through fear, ignorance, incompetence or a determination to hide a truth known to itself.

Our government has not had the guts to publicly query this either. Do we have to wait a few decades for the release of the Cabinet papers? Or will it just blather on about everything but the core questions as to what Malaysia knew, and why it so willfully mislead the next of kin of the dead, and the rest of the world.

The US knew within a week of the flight disappearing that it had crashed into the Indian Ocean west to south-west of Perth. It said so through its White House spokesperson, possibly through frustration with the narrative being inconsistently peddled by Kuala Lumpur.

But did the US know this from its own observations from satellites or shipping, or was it across the realization in the Inmarsat company in the UK, that ‘pings’ from the flight to its satellite indicated it had turned south sometime after recrossing Malaysia and flying to oblivion in the Indian Ocean about seven hours 40 minutes after takeoff?

If you could see depth not light this is what typical terrain in the first priority search zone would look like.



These and many other questions dog the search for the jet, which is supposed to complete its deep sea scanning of a priority zone of 60,000 square kilometers by the end of this month, and then, barring a last minute discovery, move into a similarly sized second best priority zone surrounding the current area of prime interest.

To understand something of the constant concerns that a massive cover up is being perpetrated over the loss of MH370 consider the sequence of events.

The initial search, in Australia’s designated oceanic search and rescue zone, was aerial, and involved aircraft from many countries, soon supported by shipping, particularly from China, Malaysia, the US and Australia, as well as a cameo appearance by a British nuclear submarine which for some reason or other was in the vicinity and then vanished from the news within days.

The sea surface search was largely targeted by estimates as to how far floating wreckage would have moved from likely impact points and strongly guided by satellite imagery indicating what might have been debris from the jet.

No sooner had radar satellite imagery recorded objects solid and floating that the search was pulled in what seemed like undue haste to the NE of that area, even though aircraft had also made some unresolved sightings of objects.

Malaysia was then, as it is now, the party calling the shots as to search priorities.  Australia manages the search, and acts on the direction its gets, as well as trying to make sense of all of the other expert advice its gets and its own efforts to nail down the most probable places to find the hard, sunk evidence, like undercarriage parts, engines and sections of torn fuselage.

That first phase of the search looks quite odd with the passing of time, although as more shipping became available, the focus was naturally on picking up any acoustic pings that should have been emitted by the 777’s black boxes from the sea floor for at least a month.

Acting on the world leading skills of the Australian Navy’s acoustic analysis laboratory in Jervis Bay,  the head of the search effort Angus Houston and the Prime Minister Tony Abbott, made what with hindsight proved to be recklessly optimistic assertions that Australia had found the plane.

Those acoustic signals were not from MH370. Nor were those detected some distance from the Australian discovery, by a vessel from China.

This lead to the current and soon to end second stage of the oceanic search for MH370.  This involved a 200,000 square kilometres bathymetric survey of the otherwise mostly uncharted sea floor, which is places in more than 6000 metres deep.

Once it’s obstacles and depths were known with precision the 60,000 square kilometres which were thought most likely to contain the heavy part of the wreckage were then imaged with towed sonar scanning platforms.

These were backed up by a large autonomous underwater vessel that could resolve in fine detail anything the looked suspiciously like parts of MH370 to the scanners.  Concerns that MH370 may have been scanned but not recognized where allayed by the recent discovery of a what looks like a 19th century shipwreck in the search zone at a depth of almost 4000 metres.

But the southern Indian Ocean is a massive place, and the calculations and assertions used to predict just what path MH370 flew before it ran out of fuel have not yet produced the goods.

It is possible that parts of the floating wreckage might also remain undiscovered along the southern Australian coastline, or over in Chile, or western Africa, or one day Cornwall.
The solid wreckage should include the flight recorders, and recoverable personal devices like mobile phones that may include images of whatever it was that happened in the cabin.

However that emphasis on finding the remains of MH370 takes the narrative away from the extraordinary events that took place in the airline and in government on the morning of its disappearance.

Malaysia Airlines exhibited incredible indifference to the loss of one of its airliners. Instead of hitting the phones until its fingers bled ringing every kampong, every ship, and calling every other aircraft that might have seen something or helped speed the search, it was next to useless.

It didn’t exhibit any depth of care or compassion its statements.

The lies about what the Malaysia Air Force saw, or didn’t see, and the confused state of the accounts as to exactly what the airline meant when it started making excuses to the Vietnam ATC system as to the path it argued MH370 had flown up over Cambodia instead reflects exceedingly poorly on the humanity and competency of its management, and the authorities it worked with.

The behaviour of the airline and its government and its relevant aviation and defence authorities are reason to believe that answers as to what happened to MH370 might be more readily found in Kuala Lumpur, than in the pitch black depths of the southern Indian Ocean.

  
People may not be aware but Simon Gunson has a page on his website devoted to the subject of MH370 debris (or lack there of): Home - MH370 Debris they say never existed. From that page Gunson made some observations that very much support the contention of the PT article (above): 

...Instead of conspiracy theories speculating about the cause of MH370's loss, the real conspiracy is about Malaysia's cover-up to misdirect search efforts. It is not a story of mere incompetence. There is a deliberate effort to mislead. The press media in Malaysia owned and controlled by the Governing UMNO Party has recklessly disseminated false and misleading conjecture including conspiracy theories as part of a PR spin disinformation operation.

Commentators wrongly claim that there were never any debris, but there were and this site aims to record that fact so that conspiracy theorists are unable to distort the facts with incorrect statements...

 
IMO some of Gunson's theories in regards to MH370 are contentious but the debris (or lack there of) drift modelling/analysis etc. is not. For mine it is the major elephant in the room that questions the whole veracity of the ATSB SIO search. (Footnote #1)

Also last week David Learmount (on his new blog) put out a post titled - MH370: all they have to do is look in the right place. A rather obvious statement I would have thought..  

However what really piqued my interest with the Learmount post was this bit...

"..The ATSB called Hardy to meet them in Canberra on 15 May, and the plan was that he was to visit the survey ships in Fremantle on 20 May. This will all have happened by now. The ATSB have demanded that Hardy not disclose any discussions, although I can’t see what purpose secrecy would serve. Perhaps they just want to control the release of information themselves..

..It will just be interesting to see how close the MH370 wreck is to Hardy’s refined predictions, which he will have been sharing with the ATSB.." - Hmm..that's a bit arrogant DL..(typical Pom  )

Why does the secret squirrel bollocks not surprise me...   Learmount is right, Dolan and his overseeing Mandarin have much to control & potentially obfuscate..FFS!

As for calling up Hardy?? - Grasping at straws or - based on other intel - a higher than most probability??

MTF...P2

#1. I see that P7 has posted on - Australia, ATSB and MH 370 - in reference to the JRCC's custom debris drift modelling (the NWM) program, which I will indeed be contributing to very soon..