Jeff Wise

Hot on the heels of a reported possible MH370 piece in South Australia, news reaches us that Blaine Alan Gibson has found three pieces of suspected MH370 debris in Madagascar. This article says, in part:

Three new fragments which could have come from Malaysia Airlines Flight 270 were discovered on the morning of Monday, June 6, on the Island of Nosy Boraha, in the northeast of Madagascar…

These fragments were found by Blaine Alan Gibson, an American businessman, while he was accompanied by a from the France 2 TV show “Complément d’enquête.” They were on a long, almost deserted beach near the village of Sahasifotra, where tons of waste arrive every day from the Indian Ocean.

One piece in particular, 77 cm wide by 50 cm, apparently made by composite materials, strongly resembles another fragment which Gibson found in February on the coast of Mozambique.

” These two fragments are very very similar: the same paint color, the diameter of the attachment holes is identical. and on the back the texture is the same. I believe that it is a piece from MH370,” Blaine Alan Gibson told our colleagues. Two other parts were also found, a smaller panel with the inscription “FB” as well as another plastic part which could be the frame of an economy class seat’s video screen.

UPDATE 6/9/16: Here’s a screengrab of a YouTube video showing a Malaysia Airlines 777 economy class seatback (thanks to reader @sk999). The coat hook in particular looks like a good match for the third piece.

Here’s an even better shot, via @BBCwestcott. Note the color of the fabric around the “COAT HOOK” button:

Some new information about suspected MH370 debris found in Africa:

1) Last month I wrote about a photograph taken of the “Rolls Royce” fragment three months before it was discovered by Neels Kruger and turned over to the authorities. This double discovery struck me as such a remarkable coincidence that I reached out to the man who took the photograph, Schalk Lückhoff, a 73-year-old retired doctor who lives about an hour away from the discovery site. I was fortunate enough to catch Dr Lückhoff just before he left on a monthlong photo safari to Kruger National Park. At the start of the interview I was under the impression that Neels Kruger found the piece the second time at Mossel Bay, 10 km from the Klein Brak River, but as Dr Lückhoff makes clear, this is not the case; Kruger also found the piece at at the mouth of Klein Brak river, about 250 m from where Lückhoff had photographed it. (Klein Brak is within the Mossel Bay municipality, hence the confusion.) Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Continue reading More about African MH370 Debris

The photo above is from an article on a French-language website. It says that the object was found two weeks ago by a French tourist, who gave it to a boat captain, who only gave it to the authorities on Tuesday, May 24. The piece is 80 cm by 40 cm and was discovered on a small island called L’ile aux Bernaches, which lies within the main reef surrounding Mauritius. It is now in the possession of the National Coast Guard, who will pass along photos to the Malaysians and, if they deem it likely to be a part of the missing plane, will send experts to collect it. (According to a second story here.)

The photograph above is the only one that seems to be available so far, and is quite low-res, but it seems to lack any visible barnacles, but has quite a lot of the roughness that barnacles leave behind after they’ve detached, as seen in the Mossel Bay piece. Perhaps worth noting that so far, pieces found on islands (Réunion, Rodrigues) have had substantial goose barnacle populations living on them, while pieces found on the African mainland have been bare. This piece breaks that trend.

Also worth noting, I think, is that all of the objects discovered so far were found by tourists, with the exception of the flaperon, which was found during a beach cleaning of the kind that only happens an tourist destinations. Drift models predict that a lot of the debris should have come ashore on the east coast of Madagascar, but this is not a place that tourists generally frequent. There are also large stretches of the southern African coast that probably see little tourism. All of which is to say that a concerted effort to sweep remote beaches should turn up a lot of MH370 debris.

I haven’t seen any speculation yet as to which part of the plane this latest piece might have come from–any ideas?

UPDATE 5/25/16: In a surprising coincidence, another piece of potential debris has also turned up on Mauritius. According to Ion News, the object was found by a Coast Guard foot patrol along a beach at Gris-Gris, the southernmost point on the island. It was found resting about six meters from the water.

UPDATE 5/26/16: In another surprising turn of events, Australia’s Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, Darren Chesterhas issued a media release in which he “confirmed reports that three new pieces of debris—two in Mauritius and one in Mozambique—have been found and are of interest in connection to the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370.”

The release goes on:

“The Malaysian Government is yet to take custody of the items, however as with previous items, Malaysian officials are arranging collection and it is expected the items will be brought to Australia for examination,” Mr Chester said. “These items of debris are of interest and will be examined by experts.”

This means of announcing findings related to MH370 marks a departure for the Australian government, which in the past has provided updates from the ATSB (Australia Transport Safety Board) itself. The items are picture below, courtesy of Kathy Mosesian at VeritasMH370:

Continue reading New Potential MH370 Debris Found on Mauritius — UPDATED x3

Above is a picture that Neels Le Roux Kruger recently posted on the ‘MH370 In search of the truth’ website. He writes:

An interesting development with regards to “Klein Roy”.

‘This morning I was in contact with an individual from the town of George inland from Mosselbay in South Africa. The person, who is a frequent visitor to Klein Brak beach, was walking on the beach at Klein Brak on 23 December 2015 on an amateur ocean photo assignment. He captured images of the ocean and the beach – and he also took a photo of an object he though was part of a signboard. He said he did not think much of the object at the time and he didn’t examine it (or handle it) since it smelled of decomposing marine life. The fragment was covered in barnacles and mussels. He took a random photo and also notes that when he returned later the day the fragment was gone – probably washed back out to sea by the incoming tide. After reading about the investigation into the MH370 debris and the identification of “Roy” he made the connection to my photos of the piece and came into contact with the media.
Quite amazing – this is definitely the “Rolls Royce” fragment I picked up 3 months later in the same area!

This is exciting since it brings the time frame for the washing up of the RR fragment 3 months forward to at least December 2015. It is also an indication of the presence of substantial amounts of marine life on the fragment when it first washed up along the South African coast.

For reference, here’s an image of the piece as it was found by Kruger in March near Mossel Bay, South Africa:

Taken together, these photos make a compelling case for the idea — which I have strongly disputed here — that barnacle-encrusted pieces could be thoroughly cleaned by wave, sand, and sun after coming ashore.

The implication, then, is that the pieces were not “ineptly planted,” as I asserted, but that the lack of biofouling is due to the pieces spending time ashore before they were discovered.

UPDATE 5/18/16: Today an Afrikaans-language website published an article entitled “MH370 piece all photographed in December” by Eugene Gunning explaining how the photograph at top came to be taken. Below is the translation courtesy of Google Translate with a bit of cleanup on my part. Obviously parts are still pretty baffling, if anyone cares to help to polish up them up in the comments section that would be most welcome. Thanks to readers @SA Reader and @Afrikaans for alerting me to this story.

The debris of the missing flight MH370 Malaysia Airlines which was conducted in December on the beach of Little Brak River by a resident of Knysna.

Dr. Schalk Lückhoff, a retired physician from Knysna, may help to solve the mysterious disappearance of the missing flight MH370 Malaysia Airlines.

In December last year Lückhoff came accross a piece of debris on the beach of Klien-Brakrivier, which is presumaby from the missing aircraft. He didn’t realise at the time that it is from the missing aircraft.

This is the same debris that more than two months later by Neels Kruger, an archaeologist from Pretoria, seen on the beach and picked up.

The debris has been sent to the Malaysian government.

The plane went missing on March 8, 2014, shortly after it Kuala Lumpur took off en route to Beijing. There were 239 passengers and crew on board.

The Australia Transport Safety Board announced Thursday that the debris probably came from the plane.

Lückhoff said he walked at Klein Brak River on the beach on 23 December. It was about 07:22 when he saw an object on the beach. It lay on the riverbank. He took a picture of it.

“I was really busy,” he told to take pictures of fast-flowing water for a photography project. “The piece caught my attention because it was the only thing on the bare expanse of sand. Because it stank because of the decaying barnacles, I did not touch it and took a casual photo.

“I did not recognize what it was and thought it might be part of an old notice board. It was full of sand and mussels and just a small part of the letters put out.

“After the next high tide I haven’t seen it again and supposed that it washed back into the sea.”

When he saw the story about Kruger in the Cape, he recognized it.

Kruger said on inquiry that he is very excited about it. “It can make a contribution to the investigation.”

One of the peculiarities of the MH370 mystery is that, while we have only a very small handful of clues about the fate of the plane, some of them often get overlooked due to their highly technical nature. Today I’d like to revisit a topic that I’ve touched on before but which I feel continues to be get short shrift: the re-logon of the  MH370 Satellite Data Unit, or SDU. Just on its own, this little data point tells us a great deal about what happened to the missing plane.

First, some basic background. Flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur International airport at 16:42 UTC on March 7, 2014 bound for Beijing. At 17:07:29, the plane sent an ACARS report via its satcom. At 17:20:36, five seconds after passing waypoint IGARI and a minute after the last radio transmission, the transponder shut off. For the next hour, MH370 was electronically dark. The next ACARS transmission, scheduled for 17:37, did not take place. At 18:03 Inmarsat attempted to forward an ACARS text message and received no response, suggesting that the satcom system was turned off or otherwise out of service. At 18:22, MH370 vanished from primary radar coverage over the Malacca Strait. Three minutes later the satcom system connected with Inmarsat satellite 3F-1 over the Indian Ocean and inititated a logon at 18:25:27.

The question is, by what mechanisms could MH370’s satcom have become inactive, then active again?

Logging on and off the satcom is not something airline pilots are trained to do. A pilot can deselect the satcom as a mode of transmission for ACARS messages so that they go out over the radio instead, but this is not what seems to have happened in the case of MH370. According to the ATSB report issued in June of 2014,

A log-on request in the middle of a flight is not common and can occur for only a few reasons. These include a power interruption to the aircraft satellite data unit (SDU), a software failure, loss of critical systems providing input to the SDU or a loss of the link due to aircraft attitude. An analysis was performed which determined that the characteristics and timing of the logon requests were best matched as resulting from power interruption to the SDU.

Like most of us, I’d never heard of an SDU before MH370 happened.

Continue reading The SDU Re-logon: A Small Detail That Tells Us So Much About the Fate of MH370

In an earlier post I described research conducted at the GEOMAR-Helmholtz Institute for Ocean Research in Kiel which suggested that, based on reverse-drift analysis of the Rénion flaperon, its starting point most likely lay in the tropical latitudes of the southern Indian Ocean, far north of the current seabed search area.

Today the same scientists published an update of their research, with a press release available here and the full report here. The upshot can be seen in the chart above, which shows the probability distribution of where the piece likely began its journey to Réunion island. Once again the authors have concluded that the greater part of the probability (98.7 %) lies far north of the seabed search area, shown as a white rectangle. The study’s authors suggest that their results might justify a shift of the search area:

The Australian search authorities are aware of this report. “Whether or not these new results will be used to facilitate the last few months of the ongoing search for MH370 is not clear,” Arne Biastoch summarizes.

One of the refinements included in the new study is that while the authors continued to assume that there was no direct wind effect on the flaperon (it being presumed to be floating essentially flush with the surface), they have included for the first time an effect called Stokes Drift, which results from wind-generated waves:

“In our recent calculations we included more physical processes in order to simulate the drift more realistically,” Prof. Biastoch explains. “In particular the drift induced by wind generated ocean waves is now included,” Biastoch continues. “Even though we use state-of-the-art modelling systems, representing the ocean currents in the Indian Ocean quite well, all simulations naturally contain limitations. Our investigation is one important piece of the puzzle in finding MH370.”

As a result of the new calculations the possible source region of the flaperon was refined, and “While it is shifted a bit southward from the initial study done last September, our basic result that most particles originate from a region north of the current search area remains unchanged,” states Dr. Durgadoo.

So should Australian search officials call a halt to the current search and relocate its ships further north? Actually, I don’t think they should. If the GEOMAR scientists are correct and MH370 did crash into the ocean west of Exmouth, the plane must have been following a low and curving trajectory of the kind that is not supported by any simple autopilot mode. That is to say, the plane would have been either conscious control the entire time or flying along a series of arbitrary user-defined waypoints.

The latter seems extraordinarily unlikely. First, we would have to surmise that whoever was in control of the plane decided to fly a basically random path, and to choose a cumbersome way of doing so, entering by hand pairs of latitude-longitude coordinates. This would be bizarre behavior, to say the least. Furthermore, as explained in the DSTG report issued last December, it is extremely unlikely that a randomly chosen set of slow segments would happen to match the ping rings. Instead, random sequences are only likely to match if they conform to a fast-and-straight flight to the south: in other words, if they end up in the current search area.

The former is problematic for the same reasons, and for an additional one as well. If the plane was under conscious control until the bitter end, then we cannot assume that, as in the unpiloted scenario, it spiraled into the sea once its fuel ran out. Instead, the conscious pilot might have chose to hold it into a glide far beyond the seventh arc. We have no reasonable expectation, therefore, that a narrow search along the seventh arc would yield the wreckage.

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 the marine life growing on it was examined and identifed as Lepas anatifera striata, creatures which have evolved to live below the waterline on pieces of debris floating in the open ocean.

Subsequently, 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.

Continue reading French Judiciary Report Raises Fresh Doubts About MH370 Debris

Earlier this week the indomitable Brock McEwen completed a much-anticipated statistical analysis of where MH370 debris would most likely wash ashore given a presumptive start point within the current seabed search zone. It’s definitely worth a look, but for the moment I’ll stick to the punch line, which is that while it is quite possible for Indian Ocean currents to carry debris from the search zone to the discovery locations in the western Indian Ocean within the appropriate time frame, Brock was not able to run any simulations in which debris turned up in Africa/Madagascar/Réunion but not in Western Australia. No matter how he changed the parameters, the result came back the same: debris should have washed up in Western Australia long before it washed up anywhere else.

The gap between Brock’s simulations and the actual state of affairs—five pieces of debris in the western Indian Ocean, and none in Australia—indicates, as Brock points out, that “either something’s wrong with the model, or something’s wrong with the search.”

A similar conclusion was reached by a different set of researchers using a different methodology. According to an article in the German newspaper Kieler Nachrichten, scientists from the GEOMAR-Helmholtz Institute for Ocean Research in Kiel (above) have completed a detailed drift analysis of their own in collaboration with colleagues in Great Britain. Simulating the course of two million pieces on a supercomputer, the researchers found that the locations of all five pieces found so far are compatible not with a point of origin in the current search area but instead “the plane, which had 239 people on board, must have crashed a lot further north.” (Hat tip to reader @MuOne for alerting me to this.)

It has long been clear that the wreckage of MH370 will not likely be found in the current search area. This, in turn, means that the “ghost ship” scenario can be ruled out: MH370 did not fly south on autopilot until fuel exhaustion and then plunge into the sea without human intervention. As this fact has become increasingly clear, the most popular backup scenario has been that a suicidal pilot flew the plane southward until it ran out of fuel, then held it in a glide so that it flew further south beyond the search zone. Both of these new drift analyses, however, suggest that this scenario is not correct, either. If the debris originated north of the search area, then the plane must have taken a slow, curving flight under pilot control.

Meanwhile, no further light has been shed on the obviously problematic absence of marine fouling on the African debris pieces. Neither Australian nor Malaysian officials have released any information based on the analysis that the Australians say they have carried out. This state of affairs should be troubling for everyone interested in the mystery of MH370, but naturally it is particularly difficult for the families of the flight’s missing crew and passengers. After I published my last piece on this topic, Chinese next-of-kin issued a statement which read, in part:

Following aviation writer Jeff Wise’s recent article questioning debris found near the coast of Africa, MH370 China families have restated their assertion the missing may still be alive and call for an offer of amnesty in exchange for the release of the missing… An extensive surface search and ocean floor search have found no supporting evidence MH370 crashed in the Southern Indian Ocean.… The sum of this is that there is no reason to believe MH370 crashed in the Southern Indian Ocean and reason to believe in a wholesale attempt at deception. We believe our missing loved ones may still be alive.

I understand that not everyone is ready to accept that the absence of marine life can only mean that the debris was planted. However, I take issue with the implication (made most publicly in a piece in the IBTimes ) that raising questions about the provenance of these crucial pieces amounts to a “conspiracy theory” or that it unjustifiably raises the next-of-kins’ hopes that their loved ones might be alive. If we want to solve this mystery, then we must deal in facts, not sling innuendo. Anyone who is legitimately concerned about solving this mystery will no doubt hope that authorities in Australia and Malaysia will respond forthrightly to the troubling questions that have arisen. It is not acceptable for this information to be buried.

UPDATE 5/1/16: After rereading the above it occurs to me that a very reasonable question concerning the GEOMAR research would be, “how much farther north must it have crashed?” The following diagram put out by the team in 2015 shows the results of the reverse-drift modeling for the the Réunion modeling, which they say is only reinforced by the inclusion of the locations of the debris found this year.