[Peetwo]

Possible MH370 debris pics overlooked -

Courtesy the Times:

‘Missing flight’s debris spotted by The Times’
Bernard Lagan, Sydney
December 4 2017, 12:01am, The Times


A New Zealand air force patrol aircraft took the picture of what could be wreckage from the plane - TONY CHENG

Experts monitoring the search for the Malaysia Airlines jet that went missing in the Indian Ocean nearly four years ago have suggested that pictures first published in The Times three weeks after it disappeared showed wreckage from the lost plane.

The significance of the images may have been missed by Australian search organisers who failed to find any surface debris from Flight MH370, which disappeared in March 2014 with 239 people on board.

A group of independent scientists, engineers and aviation experts has published a paper which suggests that the debris photographed was ignored or wrongly identified by search controllers.

The Australian government has long rejected accusations that it missed or ignored potential debris in pictures taken by the 22 aircraft that searched millions of square miles of the Indian Ocean in the six weeks after the jet vanished. An international £113 million search has proved unsuccessful but the government has insisted that none of the photographed objects was “assessed” as being connected to it.



The pictures were taken over the Indian Ocean from a New Zealand air force Orion maritime patrol aircraft on March 28 and published the next day in The Times, which had a reporter on the search plane. The leader of the surveillance crew on the Orion, which included airmen seconded from the RAF, told his men he believed that they had found a debris field while searching for MH370, which had gone missing 20 days earlier on March 8, 2014. The plane was on an overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it mysteriously turned around and headed into one of the world’s remotest areas.

Australia’s Maritime Safety Authority, which co-ordinated what became the world’s biggest aerial search, issued a press release saying that the New Zealand search aircraft and four other planes had sighted many objects on the same day. It said: “The objects cannot be verified or discounted as being from MH370 until they are relocated and recovered by ships.” Few if any of the objects floating about 1,200 miles west of Australia, were retrieved but the authorities later said they were confident that none was from the missing jet.

The claim has long puzzled members of the MH370 Independent Group, a collection of scientists who are investigating the mystery and monitoring the search. The paper’s author, Victor Iannello, an American engineer who has published several articles on the disappearance, has suggested that a large, rectangular panel photographed from the Orion and published in The Times could have come from the missing aircraft. He said that other military search plane photographs, some taken in the same place the next day, and obtained by his group’s members, included objects that resembled a suitcase, a panel with wires and a cargo package.

It was 500 days before the first confirmed piece of wreckage from the jet washed up on the island of Reunion. Several other items have washed up on islands in the eastern Indian Ocean and on the coast of Africa.
A new underwater search is likely to start in January. The Malaysian government is expected to sign a contract before Christmas with an American company that will be paid a multimillion-dollar success fee if the missing plane is found. It will search a newly identified 10,000 square mile section of the Indian Ocean floor believed by Australian government and other international experts to be MH370’s most probable crash zone.

MTF...P2