UPDATED 12/12/16: Just to underline the extraordinary implausibility of Blaine Alan Gibson’s finds, I’ve taken the extra step of putting in bold the three (3) separate occasions when Gibson hit the jackpot with a one-in-a-million stroke of luck. See if you can spot them below. My personal favorite is the one with the ATV.
On December 8, 2016, the Twitter account voice370 (@cryfortruth) Tweeted the following:
Another piece of potential debris washed up the shore and found by B.A. Gibson on the same beach where NOK Jiang found a piece yesterday. pic.twitter.com/PdXCkYX4oI
— voice370 (@cryfortruth) December 9, 2016
In a Facebook post the same day, Grace Subathirai Nathan (one of the NOK on the current debris-finding expedition to Madagascar) posted about the same find:
Another piece of debris found earlier today. This time by private citizen Blaine Alan Gibson while he was with two French journalists Pierre Chabert and Renaud Fessaguet.
He walked past the spot on the beach where next of kin Jiang Hui found a piece yesterday and nothing was there then 30 mins later on the way back the waves washed the piece on debris to the shore.
This just goes to show that debris can be there one minute and gone the next and vice versa.
She included some of the images that were also in the Tweet, among them this one:
I’ve already written in the comment section of the preceding post that I find it quite extraordinary that a purported piece of MH370 apparently washed up on the shore within half an hour of Blaine’s passing by the spot. The ocean is vast, the number of pieces of MH370 necessarily limited. The odds of finding a piece of the plane on any given stretch of sand is very small; the odds of finding something that washed ashore within the last half hour must be infinitesmal.
One would also would not expect a newly washed-ashore piece of debris to be free of biofouling, as I’ve discussed before. Something that just came out of the ocean, if free of biofouling, must have spent time ashore, gotten picked clean, then washed back out to sea, only to come ashore again within a few days. Truly miraculous.
I’ve voiced suspicions in the past about Gibson’s self-financed investigation. He said that he found his first piece of MH370 debris, so-called “No Step,” 20 minutes after starting his first beach search. Though it was found on a sand bar that is awash at high tide, it, too, was remarkably free of biofouling. Since then, he has found more than half of the pieces of suspected debris. All have have been completely innocent of marine life. His finds have excited remarkably little enthusiasm among the authorities; the Malaysians waited six months to retrieve one batch, and then only made that effort after their inaction was the subject of unflattering news stories.
Gibson is clearly an eccentric; before he found “No Step” he was bouncing around the Indian Ocean littoral, investigating crackpot theories and making himself known to the authorities and next-of-kin. In the past he has, he says, tried to find the Ark of the Covenant. A recent article in the Guardian had this bit:
Blaine Gibson, a lawyer turned investigator who arrived on Madagascar six months ago, said he has seen debris from the plane used to fan a kitchen fire by a nine-year-old girl on the island.
“It was light and it was solid and it was part of the plane,” said Gibson, 59. “When I put the word out around the village, another guy turned up with another piece he had been using as a washing board for clothes.”
Are we to believe that he walked up on a girl fanning a fire and, lo and behold, she happened to be fanning it with a piece of MH370? Instead of any of a billion suitable small, light, flat objects that exist in the world? What’s more, I am troubled by Gibson’s suggestion that the residents of this region are so materially impoverished that they would eagerly size on any scrap of material that comes their way and put it to immediate use—to incorporate into a shelter, to burn for fuel, to fan a fire with, or to use as a washboard. In fact I find this idea rather bonkers.
Some people feel that it is unacceptable to question Blaine Alan Gibson; they say that he has inspired and given hope to the next-of-kin. As I’ve said before, I feel that if we are going to solve this mystery, we have to put every piece of evidence under intense scrutiny, regardless of however someone may or may not feel emotionally about that scrutiny.
Indeed, I find the fact that Gibson and his associates try to aggressively silence questions about his finds even more arousing of suspicion.
UPDATE 12/11/16: A couple of points I’d like to add to the above:
— In September, Gibson enlisted the aid of Australian aviation journalist Geoffrey Thomas in claiming that two pieces of debris that he’d found likely came from the electronics bay, showed evidence of fire damage, and therefore supported the hypothesis that the plane had come to grief due to an accidental fire. This theory, while favored by some, is very much at odds with other evidence in the case. Australian authorities responded by saying that “contrary to speculation there is no evidence the item was exposed to heat or fire.”
— More on Gibson’s background from SeattleMet:
For the next 25 years, Gibson lived a life that could be described as unconventionally adventurous. After a short stint at Seafirst, he moved to Olympia and worked for three years in the office of Washington state senator Ray Moore. Then he joined the U.S. Department of State. But he didn’t last long there either; in the late ’80s he could see that the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse and decided to capitalize on it. For 10 years he lived off and on in the newly capitalist Russia, serving as a consultant to new business owners and fattening a bank account that would later fund his globe-trotting.
When I interviewed him after the “No Step” find, he told me that he speaks fluent Russian.
— Based on the total quantity of debris found in the last year and a half, one observes that the pieces turn up quite infrequently. Yet Gibson has now twice found debris with a camera crew present. In June he found three pieces while accompanied by a crew from the France 2 TV show “Complément d’enquête.” From the same SeattleMet piece:
In the first week of June he did, in fact, go to Madagascar. And on June 6 he led a French television news crew to a thin strip of land off the island’s east coast. They rode quads along the beach, and at the north end he signaled for the party to stop. The camera crew had a good reason to follow him: He is, to this day, still the only person to find a piece of Flight 370 while actually looking for it. And he’d done enough research to have a good idea where he might find more. But come on, it was still a one-in-a-million find. There’s no way he’d actually uncover another.
Right?With the cameras trained on him, Gibson dismounted and started walking. And as he got closer to the object that had caught his eye, he could see that it was gray fiberglass. It was almost a clone of No Step. Later, he found a handful of other pieces, one of which looked exactly like the housing for a seat-back TV monitor. He couldn’t be sure, but he had a pretty good idea they came from Flight 370.
To recap, Blaine and a TV crew rode in ATVs along the beach until he signaled them to stop, got out, and pointed to a piece of MH370 debris. Holy. Shit.
— This is the piece that NOK Jiang Hui found the day before Blaine discovered his on the same beach. Again, pretty clean:
— Note: I’ve take out a paragraph in the original in which I said that the location of the debris in the sand appears to be way too far from the water to have washed up there within the last half hour. Several commenters pointed out that the piece appears to straddle the wet/dry line demarcating the high water mark, and I concede that point.
UPDATE 12/12/16: There’s a story in Der Spiegel today about a tree trunk that washed up in New Zealand. The remarkable size and density of these organisms is so striking that this entirely natural phenomenon struck those who came upon it as something fantastical and alien.
I bring this up to emphasize how extraordinary it is that all the debris recovered by Blaine Alan Gibson, and indeed all of the suspected pieces of MH370 debris save two, have been recovered in a nearly pristine state. Yes, objects which spend some time ashore can become picked clean in time. But many of the pieces of debris recovered so far have been found within hours of being deposited. As I’ve previously written in some detail, such pieces would be expected to be colonized by a variety of marine organisms. If you look at galleries of objects which have washed ashore after having spent a similar amount of time at sea, such as tsunami debris collected in the US Northwest and Hawaii, it collectively looks very, very different from MH370 debris. Don’t take my word for it; there are links to such image galleries at the end of the piece linked above.
@DennisW
The driving motive might have been the “need” to “snatch” multiple assets “at one time”, to “ensure” you got them all, and the only time that they would be “all together” and “takeable” would be “on the aircraft”.
The Yogi Bear approach, you only need to snatch one picnic basket.
@Ventus45
That certainly cannot be ruled out. It is just not high on my list of possibilities. I still harbor concerns on the cargo and/or a political motive. There had to be a reason why that particular flight was diverted when a flight West would have been so much better in every way, and would have given the diversion another full hour before raising any alarm bells.
Of course, perhaps the early raising of alarm bells was the intention from the get-go. In which case a flight to Beijing becomes optimal.
@SusieC, Thank you for posting those 2 links. The NYTimes one was new for me. In the end it all comes back to the MY authorities IMO. Criminal and Civil liabilities can be big motivators when it comes to cover-ups. Sadly, NOK has to suffer through years of litigation to get a payout. TBill is keen to see aviation safety changes, which is a good thing. I am keen to see that the burdon of proof should be on the airline, not on the victims. That would be a great motivator for them not to entertain cover-ups IMO.
@Dennis et al
The IG did a lot of work on the possibility of a northern track before the the BFO data was available even, and before it was known how to discriminate using the BFO data and the famous anomaly of the North Perth.
While it seems possible, in principle, to create a mirror image path there is one fundamental reason why the IG could never get a northern path to fit. The winds are significantly different, especially across the Bay of Bengal and northern India and further northwards. Extremely strong westerly jetstreams at the time made fitting a path to just the BTO alone virtually impossible.
@Brian
Thx. I never worked out the details, just the principle. My impression was that a mirror image path would be across Africa. Again, I have not looked at this for a very long time so my recollections are what they are.
@Keffertje @Susie Crowe
In the NYTimes article, I particularly “liked” this couple paragraphs about a prior MAS insurance claim. Right down my alley:
“The airline had an unusual claim in 2000 for the total loss of an Airbus A330 traveling in the opposite direction on the same route as Flight 370.
In that case, a canister of a mysterious Chinese shipment destined for Iran broke open near the end of a trip from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur and began leaking, producing a smell that prompted the captain to conduct an emergency evacuation upon landing of all 266 people aboard. A subsequent investigation found that the hold was contaminated beyond cleaning with mercury and other chemicals that may have been precursors for the manufacture of nerve gas.
The Malaysian government ended up digging a large hole in the ground near the airport tarmac and burying the entire plane. Insurers paid a full settlement of $90 million.”
@TBill, It caught my eye as well. Makes you wonder whether there was something in the cargo. Woulnd’t put it past them and then subquently hide that fact and lie about it. When governments lie and fabricate and withhold evidence, should that be classified internationally as a criminal offence? Perhaps an Aviation International court of law would not be a bad thing to set up.
RetiredF4, You wrote, “what would be the reason that a possible perp would still be concerned where a possible search party will look?” The game is not to take a plane, or hide a plane. The goal is to control the narrative. If this seems obtuse, just look at the sister incident, MH17. Long after the truth finally began to emerge from the fog of misdirections, Russia is still spinning narratives.
The name of the game is confusion. It’s no accident that there are a million theories about what happened to MH370. The theories themselves are the point.
Someone told me a good analogy today. A man with a wristwatch knows what time it is. Give him another wristwatch, and he’ll never know what time it is.
The strategy of maskirovka isn’t to deny your enemy’s narrative. It’s to create a swarm of narratives, and to undermine the idea of objective truth itself. “Nothing is true and everything is possible.”
Honestly, I really don’t think that MH370 is all that baffling of a mystery. It’s just that most of the voices in the room are just there to make noise.
@all
Came across this article.
Just a bit of a refresher seeing the talk is covering alternate
tracks and cargo.
http://www.sify.com/news/malaysian-aircraft-370-truth-buried-in-the-pacific-imagegallery-0-columns-odumAyaefdgsi.html
Cheers Tom L
@Ventus 45
No need to snatch the picnic basket, too many additional items you do not want or need, maybe the destruction of the plane was the intent.
MH 370 flying west, destroyed, high enough, with enough force to spread small pieces across a large field, in an area of Andaman Sea, within range of the US and Thai military activity at the time.
Gibson’s either looked at where those pieces might potentially end up or the architects of this have salvaged enough to spread them further south for him and others to find.
@Jeff – looks like I missed the first half of the party but this is a great article.
I don’t believe anyone has outright accused Mr. Gibson of planting debris, only questioned his success in finding it. No angle of this disappearance should be insulated from suspicion, and that goes for him too. You are right to question his luck.
What I find fascinating is the near complete lack of interest in his findings by any government.
Besides a plant, what other theory explains the collective reaction to Mr. Gibson’s findings? How does one explain the lack of any organized search and retrieval on these beaches by a government entity? I can’t get past this.
@Susie Crowe:
I get the feeling that the paragraph was lost in a “good mood”. Either the insurance company simply don’t want MY to carry the search effort financially all by themselves or they have a secret benefactor. Or they do it together. Seems like they understand each other to me.
@Jeff Wise
“RetiredF4, You wrote, “what would be the reason that a possible perp would still be concerned where a possible search party will look?” The game is not to take a plane, or hide a plane. The goal is to control the narrative. If this seems obtuse, just look at the sister incident, MH17. Long after the truth finally began to emerge from the fog of misdirections, Russia is still spinning narratives.”
I do nit buy into that explanation.
The dicisive difference between MH17 and MH370 is, that Russia was in the center of the heat with the shoot down of MH17, whereas according to the official investigation they are not even remotely connected to the loss of MH 370. It would be stupid to keep the “debris noise” up to that level, as it might shine like a lighthouse when a leak or any other development points the attention on them. The wreckage of MH17 was present from day one, but the wreckage of MH370 will be gone forever, if it did not crash in the SIO. The evidence is gone, they have nothing to fear about and cannot improve theire position by continue to plant debris in such an obvious way.
Whatever the motive for Russia would have been, and I can think of quite some of them, the mission has the status “accomplished”.
@Dennis
The ISAT data are not the holy grail for me, I respect them as what they are. I have my doubt with complicated spoofing scenarios, there are to much variables which could go wrong. But I have questioned and will continue to question their interpretation concerning the FMT and the complete exclusion of northern routes. The key development happend in the Malacca street and the Andamans area, we have not even pointed a flash light there.
Are you serious? The stall speed in any given configuration (i.e. flaps up) depends first of all on the weight of the airplane. At high altitude it also depends on the Mach number, which increases with altitude at any given IAS. In the AF447 accident the aircraft stalled at 38,000 ft at approximately 1.3 times the sealevel stall speed IAS. At high Mach number and high AoA the airflow over the wing is locally supersonic, shock waves cause separation of the airflow, ‘deterrent’ buffet, and loss of lateral control.
The following chart shows (for the A330-200) on the left the variation of stall speed IAS with weight, and on the right the increase of stall speed with altitude and Mach number:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zkpv5h9cz27stzp/A330_Vs1g.jpg?dl=0
@Havelock H: Hi. Can you explain the London Polo incident? I did a quick search but didn’t turn anything up. Was this when someone in the intell community was poisoned with a rare metal?
Thanks
@NYBanker
Google “Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko”. The short version is, a former KGB officer was killed in London in 2006. He was poisoned with Polonium in a tea cup (if this sounds preposterous, please do look it up. There was an official UK investigation, much as it really sounds like it, I did not make this up).
@Gysbreght, On July 31, 2016 at 5:15 AM you commented:
Unfortunately, I don’t quite understand the chart you just posted, but if we imagine that the stall speed at 37,651 feet could be on the order of 190 KIAS, then I think it’s not so far-fetched to suppose that at 45S1 the airplane was stalled, or close to it. Under the circumstances, a climb rate of 663 fpm could be considered brisk–perhaps, again, an artifact of the software’s save procedure.
Meanwhile, please note that the AGL altitudes of 45S1 and 45S2 are only one foot apart (37653 and 37654 respectively). To me this suggests that the second might have been copied off the first, or both created off the same original.
One possible interpretation of 45S1 and 45S2 is that Zaharie was experimenting with high-altitude, power-off stalls, then wanted to see how the same maneuvers would play out differently at low altitude.
@all, Reader @Scott informs me that for some reason he is unable to post comments to the website, so has asked me to post this for him:
@All, Not to flood my own website with comments, but in the wake of discussions about the probability of finding debris, I just put in a telephone call to a South African fishing outfitter, FlyCastaway (FlyCastaway.com) and spoke to one of the proprietors, Gerhard. FlyCastaway makes a lot of trips to St Brandon, aka the Cargados Carajos shoals, a series of sandbanks and islets north of Mauritius. The kind of fishing they do is flats fishing, meaning they spend a lot of time on beaches and in shallow water. Apart from a small transient population of fishermen, there are no inhabitants, and the environment is quite pristine, so pretty much everything that washes up there has arrived from a good distance away.
“Any object that gets dumped in the ocean eventually sinks or gets washed up somewhere,” he said. “We have some beaches that have a lot of plastic bottles, flip flops, and various types of shoes.”
Gerhard assured me that he and his fellow outfitters are well aware of MH370, have seen pictures of honeycombed debris found in the western Indian Ocean, and have asked their staff to keep an eye out. But the only thing they have spotted was a piece of pop-riveted aluminum, about 2m by 2m, which he thought might have come from a boat. It was found in around October 2015. Unfortunately they didn’t take any pictures. I asked whether the rivets were flush or stuck out; he said they stuck out, which leads me to believe the piece did not come from an aircraft.
The overall impression I came away with is that Blaine Alan Gibson is not the only person who has been looking for debris in the western Indian Ocean. Indeed I think there are quite a few south Africans who spend a lot of time on the ocean and shores of that area who are keeping a keen eye out.
New drift study
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1755876X.2016.1248149
@Jeff Wise: “Unfortunately, I don’t quite understand the chart you just posted, …”.
The use of the chart is illustrated by the example, shown as an arrowed dashed line on the chart. The example is for 160,000 kg, 15,000 ft, VS1G = 141 kt IAS. You start on the weight scale, go up until you intercept the line labelled “CONF. 0”, then go horizontally until you intercept the vertical line labelled “REF”. For sealevel you continue horizontally to the right and read the speed on the scale labelled “VS1G CAS (Knots)”. For an altitude you follow the guidelines from the “REF” line to the altitude on the scale labelled “Pressure Altitude (x1000 Feet)”, then horizontally to the VS1G scale.
So for a weight of 235,000 kg the stall speed at sealevel is 170 kt IAS, and at 18,000 ft it is 195 kt IAS for this airplane (A330-200). You can read the Mach number from the lines I pencilled in at top right corner.
” then I think it’s not so far-fetched to suppose that at 45S1 the airplane was stalled, or close to it.”
That may be so for the real airplane, but I have reason to believe that the simulator video game modelling is far from accurate in this respect.
@DennisW
“There had to be a reason why that particular flight was diverted”
1. it happened the same day after the opposition leader trial which could motivate the Captain to do something extraordinary
2. he wanted to prove the malaysian government/military is incompetent and likely wouldn’t intercept (or in this case even identify) a huge plane overflying the peninsula
could be one of these or both, I have yet to hear 3rd plausible reason for taking this route
@StefanG
Dear Sir,
the idea of as conection to the Anwar trial has been dismissed for a long time ago, since there was no political claim to be found besides some Uighurs. You are just repeating old wrotten stuff.
How childish you fool around here is to be sen as how cvhildish you supose Mr. Shahs mind would be, to show the inco9mpetence of the MY Government as a reason to kill 239 people. Shah was mature and far out of the boyscout age and its ultimately silly to attest him a childish mind zhe way you do. It just bounces back on what you personally are capable to imagine. And i am in dep trouble when thinking of you and your prospects in live.
@JeffW
Mike Chillit is looking for someone to recover 1/3 of a suspected plane wing from St Brandon’s so you should ask FlyCastaway when the next time they plan to stop by. Need a permit according to Chillit.
@StevanG
My third reason is favorable timing for dark moonless night and sunrise splashdown. The moon set at KLIA 12:41AM exactly same as MH370 take off. So if an earlier flight to Europe, there would have been a moon for a while on March 8 out to the FMT, and maybe radar still operating. Also not sure how sunrise would be on Europe flight, perhaps more like the simulator run, which I theorize is too far south (looks like intentional suicide that far south).
It would be good to know candidate westerly flights and typical waypoints MAS 777’s used for those routes. If that matched up with sim studies, we’d know something.
@CosmicAcademy
I never said he had intention to kill anyone, just to land in another country. (likely australian territory)
Why he didn’t succeed I don’t know. He was the fervent supporter of AI.
@TBill
Radar was operating that night, it’s just that radar operators were half asleep which often happens when there isn’t high alert. Radar operation has nothing to do with moonlight.
@StevanG
I am talking radar in other zones have the possibility of seeing what was happening in the Andamans if you are out there before their midnight. You’d rather come over there a bit later I would think. I do not know what time zone everyone is on.
Anyways you said “no other reasons you have heard” so I gave you another one. You set me up. I like the timing of the Beijing route.
I’ve had some more thoughts on BG.
So far mostly it the thinking has been that he might be planting stuff to the benefit of some party.
At the same time, I could imagine him to be – intentionally or unintentionally – provoking, or trying to provoke, a reaction from someone, maybe in the hope of getting some insight from the reaction itself, or more prosaically in order to get paid off (- maybe from his point of view this would sort of be a ‘bonus’ in addition to the money he might hope to make out of NOKs and publicity).
From the point of view of ‘neutral observers’, the interesting bit might be whether at some point BG either simply stops his involvement with the search, or whether he disappears in some fashion or has an accident. If one of the more ‘sinister’ theories hold true, the guy might be seriously miscalculating.
All – Is there any connection between Blaine and Boeing? He being a lawyer from Seattle makes me wonder…
@Sunken Deal, No connection that I’ve heard of. As far as I know he’s never practiced law.
Yep, I dug into it a bit more and found no connection to Boeing. Agreed that he’s never practiced law, though he was admitted to the Washington Bar in 1993. Both of his parents were lawyers, and prominent ones at that — his father was the Chief Justice of California. Read the interesting bio of his father’s life in the link below…you can see he has some world class connections (and likely wealth).
In digging around in Blaine’s past, I was also intrigued by his expertise in the rugged terrain of the Pariyon and Temurdara Lakes area of Tajikistan, but didn’t find any connection of note (yet) to a 7th arc northern route.
http://www.cschs.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/2007-Newsletter-Fall-A-Son-Remembers-Gibson.pdf
@Jeff,
OT I know, but perhaps this might help balance the WaPo link you recommended.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-14/someone-has-officially-called-cias-bluff-over-russia
@Brian
Using Wapo and balance in the same sentence is a challenge.
Now that Petraeus did not make the cut for Secretary of State, he is available for CIA Director. He could clean the place up a bit.
@Keffertje
You posted on November 24, 2016 at 11:00 PM:
“Najib does not tolerate any criticism or push back of the people”.
It reminded me of the ABC Four Corners guys who were arrested for simply trying to ask Najib a question. This led me to consider, if that kind of fear and intimidation is a reality, why it would be so difficult for anyone with firsthand knowledge to speak and how easily this would impede an investigation.
I think the deep scrutiny of Blaine is a little unfair, but not the suspicions surrounding the debris.
Anyway, DennisW said: “There had to be a reason why that particular flight was diverted when a flight West would have been so much better in every way”
I’m confused as to why everyone is assuming a Europe-bound flight is easier to divert?!
With a Europe-bound flight:
1. More Westerners on board = greater and much swifter interest and scrutiny regarding the disappearance (military and media)
2. Malaysian ATC already tracking it westward then having it suddenly disappear over, say, the Andaman Sea – wouldn’t this result in having to alert Indonesia, India, and more importantly the United States (Diego Garcia/Doha) almost instantaneously???
So, diverting at BITOD and doing a 180 meant that everyone’s first instincts were to look at the South China Sea. No requirement to alert DG, and less media coverage in the first few hours since its just an internal Asian flight…
@Sajid UK,
Why would they have to notify anyone? Don’t westbound flights over the Andaman Sea disappear at from radar routinely many times a day?
@Sajid
A West bound flight would be perfectly normal up to the FMT. There would be no suspicion whatever created by flying over the Malay peninsula. The FMT would be made after the aircraft cleared Malay radar.
Basically a flight West gives about one hour more time before any alarms are raised. A diversion at IGARI smells like the pilot wanted it to be known early.
@Sajid @DennisW @others
It could be interesting to know if Zaharie was sheduled on a West bound night/evening-flight in the weeks after 7-3-14.
If planned by Z. this could be an indication he specifically chose flight MH370 and not an easier West bound flight.
I argue if a conviction of Anwar was a decisive motivator (among other motivations perhaps) to carry out some kind of hijack/terrorist act with the plane or to let it dissapear he -on first sight- far better could have picked a West bound flight some time later (if he was sheduled on one).
Does anyone here has information about West bound night/evening flights Zaharie was sheduled on after 7-3-14?
@all
Nothing new in this, only a refresher.
At the time MH370 went missing, Khazanah Nasional Bhd., which like 1MDB, is another government owned wealth management fund, owned 69.4% of Malaysian Airline System. In 2013 Malaysia Airlines had lost more than $300 million.
Najib, in addition to being
Chairman of The Board of Advisors for 1MDB
was also
Chairman of the Board for Khazanah Nasional Bhd.
@JS @DennisW @Ge Rijn
I don’t mean to be a dumbass, but I still don’t see how a Westbound flight is less discrete.
I see DG is the biggest problem here…
Say a MH370 flight from KL to Amsterdam suddenly turns goes dark where the current FMT supposedly occurred (Andaman Sea).
This cuts out the need for the turnback over Malaysia, but surely also results in DG being placed on high alert almost immediately.
Again, I emphasize, a 777 full of Westerners going dark over the Andamans with US military radar showing it might might be heading straight for them?!
The turnback at BITOD means that local militaries (and more important DG) are ‘deceived’ into thinking the plane has disappeared over the South China Sea so won’t be triggered into raising threat levels.
Don’t westbound flights over the Andaman Sea disappear at from radar routinely many times a day?
What JS said above is very interesting in the context of the turnback.
If flights do routinely disappear, then surely its reasonable to expect DG radar/radars to be activemost of the time. (And that leads to a whole set of totally different questions)…
But if it isn’t true, and DG capabilities lie dormant or at least wound down some of the time, then the deceptive turnback makes sense (ie its a very long-winded way to avoid triggering DG into immediate action – for whatever reason).
Arggh, I meant JS said Don’t westbound flights over the Andaman Sea disappear from radar routinely many times a day? The rest is what I’ve said. Sorry for any confusion!
@Sajid
“I see DG is the biggest problem here…”
DG is irrelevant. It is over 1400nm from the approximate location of the FMT. I have no idea what you are talking about.
It would be good if @airinvestigate can release any further details if there were planning notes. If none, then this disappearance was not of ZS’s planning but some one else’s
@Sajid UK,
They go dark because there’s no radar over the Indian Ocean for all practical purposes. There’s also no radar over the Atlantic or the Pacific.
Yes, yes, I realize somebody has some radar capability. I’m talking civilian though. A plane flies west, passes the Andamen islands, and as far as Malaysia is concerned, that’s it. It’s many hours before it’s due on India’s radar.
Recall AF-447. It was quite a while before the radar it left and the radar it was supposed to greet figured out that something happened. So long, in fact, that there was criticism that people could have survived the water floating had the rescue gotten there sooner.
Whatever action occurred as a result of MH370 not arriving on Chinese radar, figure if it was a western flight it would have taken several more hours.
As for any nervousness about a jet unaccounted for 4 hours away from DG, come on. Google Earth DG. It’s a runway. What exactly is a civilian airliner going to do to it?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/15/thousands-airline-pilots-flying-suicidal-thoughts-harvard/
Interesting study about depression and pilots, and it says that pilots often hide mental health problems for fear of losing their job.
@SusieC, Spot on. There can be no doubt that people have been silenced as it relates to MH370. Najib and his side-kicks have lied and deceived from day one. Nothing that they have spoon fed the general public can be taken at face value or trusted. The man is a despot in sheeps clothing. It’s baffling how so many entities involved in this search have danced to Najib’s pants legs without even blinking or blushing. I am also not holding my breath that the NOK will get a fair trial or a fair verdict in the MY courts. It will be another one of those pseudo democratic ploys only the ignorant can fall for.
The search will come to an end soon and MY will not lift a finger or spend another dime on it. They have wanted this thing to go away from the start, and it begs the question, why? Hopefully one day, people will talk and be able to support their words with documents and data.
@ed
Wow.
@TBill
I tend to take stuff like the info in Ed’s link with a large dose of salt. The recent spike in the diagnosis of autism is a great example. Do you really think autism is on the rise or is the increase related to looking harder for it? Shrinks and climate scientists have a lot in common. They have to find something of concern to justify their existence.
@MH, I asked Mick Rooney (@airinvestigate) about that and he’s made it clear that the police found no planning notes — no expressions of suicidal ideation, no angry political screeds, no forlorn loveletters, absolutely nothing to suggest that he was at anything other than an even keel.
Analysis on the Rootclaim website finds the pilot or copilot suicides to be the most likely explanations: https://www.rootclaim.com/claims/what-caused-the-disappearance-of-malaysia-airlines-flight-370-8369