Last month, I published an article in New York magazine about a secret Malaysian police report which included details of a simulated flight into the southern Indian Ocean. As Victor Iannello revealed in a comment earlier today, that information came from French journalist Florence de Changy, who had come into possession of the full police report but only shared a portion of it with me.
I have not seen the full report, but would very much like to, because I would like to form my own judgement of what they mean, and I think everyone who is interested in trying to figure out what happened to the missing plane, including the next of kin, are entitled to the same. Some people who have read the full reports have suggested that they give the impression that the recovered simulator files do not in context seem all that incriminating. Other people who have seen the full report have told me that the report contains material that makes it hard to doubt that Zaharie is the culprit. Of course, it’s impossible to rely on someone else’s say-so. We need to see the full report.
The reason I am writing this post now is that earlier today Florence published an article in Le Monde in which she describes having the full report as well as another, 65-page secret document on the same topic. Meanwhile, another French newspaper, Liberation, has also published an article indicating that they, too, have a copy of the report. And private correspondence between myself and a producer at the television network “France 2” indicates that he has as well.
Meanwhile, I know that independent investigators here in the US have the documents as well.
At this point, the secret documents are not very secret. Someone within the investigation has been leaking them like crazy, obviously with the intention that their contents reach the public. My understanding is that this source has placed no restrictions on their use. So journalists and independent investigators who have copies of these documents need to do their duty and release them — somehow, anyhow. Some people that I’ve begged and implored to do so have said that they fear legal ramifiations. Well, if it’s illegal for you to have these documents, then you’ve already broken the law. Use Wikileaks or another similar service to unburden yourself.
Free the data!
UPDATE 8/14/16: Apparently Blaine Alan Gibson has the document, too, according to a rant he post on Facebook. He reveals that the entire set of documents is 1,000 pages long.
@Ge Rijn
I can’t find that statement in this article or other newspapers reporting on this. And wouldn’t evidence of the flap being deployed rule out any extended glide?
If it was not deployed, then surely there was no attempt to make the plane disappear as much as possible. There would also be no verification that a skilled pilot was in control until the end.
I guess we have to wait and see.
@Richard Cole. “The model can then be applied back to measured 2014 conditions.”
I see what you mean. But I imagine there would need to be separate research into the flaperon responses to each of wind, waves, swell and currents; and in the model even adjustment for tides when inshore?
I am trying here to get a feel for what needs doing to meet the arc length aim criterion.
@Nederland
It’s in the article. A few alineas above the statement you posted.
Flaps deployed would mean there was hydraulic power at least from one engine or the APU and the flap was deployed by someone under a safe deployment speed which IMO can only be a fairly low speed. But I’m not a pilot (don’t know what exactly is possible with when deploying those flaps).
IMO it could mean first it made a kind of emergency descent then leveling out with decreased speed and deploy the flaps in the last stage of the flight preparing for a ditch.
If it’s proven not to be deployed I guess maybe at least they can prove it was not seperated by flutter but on relitively low speed impact with the water.
@David
In the same article Hood states;
“If it is not in the area which we defined, it’s going to be somewhere else in the near vicinity,” Hood said in an interview this week.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/article96586417.html#storylink=cpy
So I assume they are pointing to an arc lenght between ~33S and ~28S when mentioning those 5 degrees latitude.
An area that is suggested and discussed here in lenght weeks/months ago with a lot of reasonable arguments IMO.
If you want to justify looking further up north you also want to be sure that the plane didn’t glide much further beyond the arc, either because it crashed in an uncontrolled dive or it was ditched close to the arc.
I now suspect the former because the ATSB has recently confirmed the final BFO values, something they would be unlikely to do if they had evidence to suggest it was not an uncontrolled crash.
@Nederland
But there was also news the ATSB secretly distanced themselves from that consensus on a high speed descent/dive. Which suggest to me they found something else conflicting those BFO’s.
It’s a kind of conflicting statements we get now short after eachother IMO.
@David, @Richard Cole, I think it’s worth pausing to consider just how bonkers the new ATSB duplicate-flaperon idea is. First of all, as the leaked French Météo report makes clear, they couldn’t figure out how the flaperon floated in the first place — the barnacle distribution flatly contradicted their own flotation tests, so they had to run the drift models twice, once for each flotation mode.
Second, presumably they’re going to space these things out along the 7th arc then let them go. But to get a useful result, you’d have to release hundreds or thousands of the things. The fate of one particle tells you nothing about how the total probability distribution will unfold.
To even broach this idea suggests they have absolutely no idea how drift modeling works–which I can’t believe. So to me this sounds like something they came up with to make the public think they have an actual plan going forward.
@JeffWise
Of course we may be seeing snippets of a complete plan of which the flaperon copies are only part.
On the numbers point, the current drift models are informed by tracking data from tens of drifters so thousands of new drifters (of whatever sort) are not required. The aim seems to be (based on one report) to improve the models with new data using drifters matched to MH370 debris. The aim is not to release thousands of ‘yellow duck’ analogues and see where they turn up.
I agree that it is not yet clear exactly what the six flaperon copies will tell them. Of all the debris items, this is the one most affected by wind, orientation etc. So they could be dropped at exactly the same point and move off in different directions under those influences.
I can’t see how this planned drift experiment will help narrow the search area sufficiently to make a further search viable. A single large weather event in this turbulent and stormy ocean will have a massive effect on where individual semi-floating objects will end up. Too many variables and not enough data available produces very imprecise models.
@Richard Cole
They presumably want to see how the flaperons move relative to model developed for drifters, eg, whether wind/current components match their standard models.
Maybe it’s a part of a bigger and well thought through plan.
But if it’s only 6 flaperon-replicas (and how would they ever replicate them if they don’t have the original?).
I agree with Jeff Wise 6 flaperons put on different spots along the 7th arc will probably not be of much use.
And indeed Meteo could not figure out how the flaperon drifted anyway so how would the ATSB do it without the original available for testing?
Then they better use the outboard flap section and make copies of this piece. They can drift-test this piece in every way it possibly did.
But again also; Mpat’s drift-model (and others) used at least 177 historical undroged buoys passing one box (current search box) with a significant outcome of 31 buoys landing at the islands and shores of Africa.
With 20 pieces found so far, to start with at least 100 flap(eron) copies would be a more usefull and realistic start IMO.
But I also assume there must be more to this idea than only this 6 flaperon-copies.
If it’s only this it won’t raise a lot of funds I’m afraid.
In The Guardian, Foley states something else that wasný in the other article:
“Foley told AP that analysis of a flap that washed up on Tanazia in June suggested it had not been deployed when it hit the water, but rather retracted inside the wing. A pilot attempting a soft landing would have extended the wing flaps.
The ATSB is awaiting the verdict of a Boeing accident investigation team on their findings”.
This is quite significant to be said by the ATSB director before the verdict of a Boeing team confirms the ATSB findings and a final report is made public.
He actualy states the ATSB has found the flap was retracted when it seperated and only awaits confirmation by Boeing.
The Guardian article:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/19/search-for-mh370-may-be-extended-by-australia-if-funding-can-be-found?CMP=twt_gu
Another phrase in the Guardian article suggests also the ATSB is in possesion of the flaperon:
The ATSB was conducting further analysis of the flaperon that was found on Réunion Island off the coast of Madagascar in July last year, 15 months after the plane went missing, in the hope of narrowing a new possible search area.
@Jeff Wise: “the barnacle distribution flatly contradicted their own flotation tests”
Perhaps the barnacle science is not as definitive as some considered it to be?
Sorry if I’m a bit running fast now..
But IMO a lot of important stuff is happening right now.
Reading between the lines Foley also suggests with; ‘it had not been deployed when it hit the water’, the flap did not seperate by flutter but by impact with the water.
@Boris Tabaksplatt:
It is at these occassions you wish you had a second set of door keys with a beeper remote.
@Ge Rijn
does it mean the flap was attached to the wing upon impact? If so, can it be excluded there was some attempt to ditch but without extending the flap (e.g. after a glide beyond fuel exhaustion)?
RE: “Recent analysis of the final satellite signals also suggest the plane was descending at a rate of between 3,700 metres (12,000ft) and 6,100 metres (20,000ft) a minute before it crashed. ”
How did the ATSB arrive at those values? If taken at face value, the last BFO value of -2 Hz at 00:19:37 UTC would suggest a rate of descent of about 14,000 ft/min at zero groundspeed. For various groundspeeds and headings that value changes with plus or minus 500 ft/min.
My two cents to the remake flaperon drift program.
They have some drifter data, for whatever model they opt. They can release some of the same drifters together with the flaperon remakes and could compare the resulting deviation of both models, the drifters and the remake flaperons. That way it should be possible to validate or correct the present drift models.
If the drifters and the remakes are observed live the effect of weather phenomena can be recorded too and if the past weather phenomena are available a weathe influence model could be developped.
IMHO the whole exercise makes sense to validate already available drift data or to develop a correction factor to the known drift data in order to move the future search area to the north or to the south of the present one.
We will see the end of the search followed by the start of the drift validation program next year. If those gained informations look promising, a further subsea search will not start before 2018. Without a usanle result there will be no public funded search anymore
@Nederland
I think yes. He (Foley) states the flap was more likely buried in the wing than deployed when it hit the water. So it must have been attached to the wing when the plane impacted the water.
I think a ditch can not be excluded without extending the flaps.
In fact succesfull (long) glides and landings have been made before without flaps extended.
The Gimly-glider offcourse but also te Air Transat 236 glide to the Azores which glided 120km and landed safely without flaps (on a runway though..):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236
@Ge Rijn:
You are right, the article is a interesting read, particularly as a kind of bridge-head or attempt to consolidate what is known. Remains to see if they are in the right or are merely trying to keep up the good spirits. But the main fall line suggests some confidence.
@Jeffwise
I just had a flashforward ( the opposite of a flashback)
All six replica flaperons end up on the beach at Reunion.
Naturally, they should have names. May I suggest Brian, Dougal, Dylan, Ermintrude, Florence and Zebedee.
This article which is similar to the one in The Guardian actually shows a picture of the replica flaperons (apologies if it has been linked before)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3748471/Air-crash-investigators-dump-replica-MH370-wing-flaps-ocean-track-satellite-bid-missing-jet.html
@Jeff
I agree that just on numbers its “bonkers” to get a useful probability distribution from just 6 items, you would need at least tens in each of several places as yet unsearched. However this would be impractical so at least they are doing something positive.
@ROB:
Hard to disagree with that. Esp. since the Seven Dwarfs are one too many.
AM2:
I saw a glimpse of them before commercials invaded the screen. Already there. Looks like he got them cheap, and hoppfully he did. Or they finally came up with something to use their new 3D printer for.
@Johan. Yes, I thought 3D printer too. Perhaps “Made in France” – who knows 🙂
Ge Rijn
You have my deepest sympathy, hockey-wise 🙂
@Jeff
Re “Free the Data !”
Why just for the sim ?
What about:
(a) Radar: Victor repeatedly called for the radar, no joy.
(b) Cargo: Many repeatedly called for the full manifest – what are the missing two tons, no joy.
(c) ISAT: Many have called for the full unredacted log, no joy.
(d) Debris: Not a single engineering report on any of the debris items has been published. Both the French and ATSB have had plenty of time. Not a scrap has a single part number or serial number on it, how convenient.
As an “investigate journalist”, surely these four “lines of enquiry” deserve being put under the microscope.
@RetiredF4
I think you have the essence of it. The point is not to see where the “decoy” flaperons go, but rather to observe the movement of those flaperons relative to the drifters that have been employed to establish the existing drift database. This data can then be used to refine the analytics while still using the existing drifter database.
As I have pointed out (or tried to point out) before, forward drift modeling is fraught with errors the most notable of which is the bias introduced in picking the starting points. You have to be very exhaustive in this regard, like Brock’s recent effort, or else you may completely miss high probability areas where you did not drop any drifters.
Dropping drifters where you think the plane crashed is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and flies in the face of proper experimental protocol.
@all
New on newsfeed but nothing new!
http://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/mh370-recovery-to-target-black-boxes-and-mobile-phones/news-story/544f40381551189e68f7e576f47b426c
Cheers Tom L
The dropping of only five “Drifterons” will acheive absolutely nothing, no matter how you look at it, so why are they doing it ?
The French could not even determine how the recovered flaperon floated with any certainty. Apparently they came up with “two modes”, one where windage was significant, and one not.
Let’s assume they configured these flaperons to represent both modes, so let’s have two types, call them Drifteron-A’s and Drifteron-B’s.
Even then, for any given “drop point” you would need at least half a dozen of both types to get any useful tracking, so that is twelve (a dozen) per drop point.
Then you have to determine where and when you are going to drop them.
If they simply decide to “seed the arc”, on the 8th March 2017, you can not say with certainty that what will follow will be representative of 2014, but, if enough (= many) are dropped at each point, and there are lots of points, you may get something that is statistically useful.
Let’s say you have a “drop point” every one degree of latitude (60 nautical miles) from Java to 40 south, then you need about five hundred of them (250 type A and 250 type B), just for that one line.
Then, what about other possibilities, including a glide away from the arc ? If you go to the limits both ways, (inside the arc and outside the arc) and if you spaced them one degree longitudinally for each latitude, you would need four more “lines”, two inside and two outside the arc. You now have five lines, so we need two and a half thousand of these things.
Even then, would we be any further along to finding the aircraft ?
I doubt it, but it would waste another two years whilst we all watched them drift day by day (the ATSB or gEOSIENCES aUSTRALIA) WOULD ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO PUT UP A REAL TIME TRACKING PAGE, (just like the CSIRO – I think ? ) used to have for some sharks.
@Ventus
You are missing the essence of the experiment, which is to determine how flaperons drift relative to the dirfters used previously to create the drift data base. No one cares where the seeded flaperons, however many there may be, actually go. The observed differences will then be used as a calibration tool so that the drift data that already exists can be tuned to the drift characteristics of the flaperon.
Seeing those ‘flaperon replicas’ they don’t look like replicas of the found flaperon but more like flaperon-like-copies without a trailing edge. Same dimensions as the found flaperon most probably but other materials used on first sight (no honeycomb) and different (internal) construction.
I can hardly imagine this will float the same as the original flaperon.
And they must have had the idea quite some time ago for it would take considerable time to design and build those copies with that satelite equipment installed. Maybe months of preparation. Indicating they where not that sure of the Inmarsat data and current search area as they stated all the time.
It all makes an odd impression to me now.
I cann’t see the use of only 6 of these kind of ‘copies’ floating around in the IO at all anymore.
If you are realy sceptical this action might serve well as an excusse to delay further search for years to come.
‘We are waiting for the flaperon-copies final data’, could then be the standard statement.
http://tuoitrenews.vn/society/33337/vietnam-district-chairman-denies-statement-on-mh370-debris-discovery-newspaper
Anyone with any comments on the photo in the above link
The debris in the link above, taken together with this one:
http://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/mh370-search-more-plane-debris-washes-up-on-malaysian-east-coast/news-story/9efbf1c5997d96795937c7e8cd4337ba
and another debris from an area in the gulf of Thailand fronting waypoint IGARI all plausibly point to an alternative crash site in the South China Sea.
[Rest of comment deleted by JW. No, Wazir, it doesn’t. Please stop.]
@Richard Cole, DennisW, Retired F4,
David Griffen’s model assessed tracks and timing using 2014 data and selected drift rates. As I read it those rates can be now measured in Tasmania (Ge Rijn reservations aside) and inserted into his model. Sea trials could validate in the way that air trials validated SATCOM calibration and interpretation using say a half dozen examples. I doubt the duckie data are useful for a confident localisation on a short arc segment. Just one example would be not knowing their barnacle colonisation. More generally though:
1. Aside from the remaining area to be searched there are 20 sonar contacts requiring closer examination, which is interesting, the latter presumably funded within the current search.
2. Greg Hood has said the wreckage will be very near the current search area and Peter Foley has said that the flaps were most likely retracted.
3. This would limit the area to proximate to the 7th arc, if the high rate of descent continued to the crash. There is no evidence of that of which I am aware. It would seem to assume that the crash was the cause of no IFE connection being completed, this becoming evident a minute and a half after the high-descent BFO and consistent with a high descent rate from both high or low altitude. However the ATSB has noted earlier that there were other possible explanations for an IFE connection failure.
4. Jeff Wise, Ge Rijn and Ventus45 have pointed out that the use of the flaperon instead of the part flap (it seems now there are two of these) introduces the extra uncertainty in drift rate as it tumbled/reorientated. This choice might be because time of arrival, as per the David Griffin assessment, is a strong indicator of its geographic source. The flaperon had barnacles indicating it was discovered shortly after being washed ashore. The flap parts could well have arrived well before discovery. The other obvious candidate, probably less subject to uncertainty as to drag, would be “RR”.
5. Perhaps the Bureau and NOAA weather and wave information are accurate and comprehensive enough for Griffin model use once the flaperon response to them is known. Waves however are dependent not just on wind but time, and swell can be independent. Then we have any variations in 2014 from the norm with currents, buried somewhere in drifter data by mixing with other variables. Collectively this raises what accuracy can be expected from this new approach and whether the limits of that can be estimated. It may be that successive years of verification trials might be needed such that confidence becomes high enough.
6. To me, it would be wise to parallel this work with a comprehensive aircraft track review, perhaps via an invited forum. Otherwise the drift effort might be seen as window dressing which, while it might help in other ways, is unlikely to lead to a new search.
One more remark. Peter Foley is reported to have said that, “We will never know what happened to that aircraft until we find it”. While seemingly a statement of the obvious it also can be seen as indicating there is little prospect of other information being disclosed. I would imagine he is reasonably acquainted with the prospects of developments in Malaysia and of disclosures from there.
@jeff, @all
hi, as you know, I am somehow linking this to climate change [irrelevant stuff deleted by JW. Falken, please don’t do this. We’re talking about something else here.]
@ventus45, you asked, “Re ‘Free the Data !” Why just the sim?” The answer is that the Independent Group, as well as a significant number of other journalists and independent investigators, have the 1,000-page Malaysian police report, and could release it to the general public if they chose. The other data remains in the hands of search officials.
The irony of course is that individuals who once cried out loudly for information to be released are now sitting on a trove of crucial data and refusing to release it!
I know that I’m repeating myself but it blows my mind that we’ve come to this, and I don’t want to just let it go.
@David
Some interesting points you made.
Indeed the barnacle colonisation is not replicated (and possibly cannot). This would surely affect the way it drifts over time and the way it behaves in wind, waves and currents. But you can also assume those barnacles will also start to grow on those replicas over time. The original flaperon would also have started clean.
The use of the flap section instead of the flaperon IMO could be a better choice for they have it in hand and they can replicate its form and behavior more precisely.
But the arrival time (and with that the general traveling speed) of the flap section is less certain than the flaperon because of the lack of barnacles and therefore not knowing when it ~arrived.
In this case it would indeed be better to use the RR-piece which also was first found with a lot of barnacles.
Beside that, using the flaperon and the RR-piece would cover the whole stretch of distance between where debris is found till now in space and ~time.
But still I now believe only using 6 flaperon copies (which also seem not to be representive replicas) cann’t be of any use to refine a search area. They’ll have to use at least a whole lot more copies or accompyaning drifters to give any usefull statistic result IMO.
And this approuch indeed also would take years to give results that will then still be uncertain IMO.
@David:
“One more remark. Peter Foley is reported to have said that, ‘We will never know what happened to that aircraft until we find it.’ … I would imagine he is reasonably acquainted with the prospects of developments in Malaysia and of disclosures from there.”
It is a good observation about what fooley/imvestigation might know about this more than the rest of us. But there are several things coming together in that phrasing. It’s a linchpin. I see perhaps first of all the orientation towards the Australian horizon of things. And the fundraising at hand. There will be people who would have expressed themselves like that with culprit behind bars and plane laying, at a closer look, at their feet. Perhaps not in the MH370 case though. Literally.
But also, it is a just statement at the right time. And he knows it. Whether there will be a body to examine is another matter.
Sorry, Foley. No pun intended.
@Jeffwise
Jeff, if the IG really are sitting on a trove of data, and refusing to release it, then it’s totally unforgivable.
The whole thing is turning into a shambles. Someone is definitely tying the ATSB’s hands. For them to have to resort to such a harebrained scheme as the releasing of a handful of flaperon lookalikes into the ocean, instead of going a few extra miles downrange of the PDF hotspot, and finding the plane, well it just beggar’s belief.
@ROB
>… instead of going a few extra miles downrange of the PDF hotspot, and finding the plane…
That’s the ‘the current analysis is completely correct and the aircraft debris is just outside the searched area’ line.
There are many who would say that far too much searching has already been done on the basis of the current analysis. I don’t think it is harebrained to pursue other lines of enquiry.
@ROB
Measured by the part of the current search area allready searched without result the current analysis proves to be incorrect for more than 95%.
Other drifter/buoys-based analysis showed a crash south of 36S, debris should have washed up the shores of South and West Australia. Where nothing showed up till now.
All more recent drift-models point to an area at least north of 36S.
You keep stating the plane must have glided way south of 38S ignoring al those drift-analysis.
Which analysis make you so sure to allow you ignoring all this other analysis?
@Ge Rijn
The drift analyses cannot be relied on. The reason why the plane hasn’t been found yet, is down to one thing and one thing only – they didn’t go far enough downrange. They didn’t, or couldn’t consider someone deliberately gliding (or flying) the plane to a controlled ditching. Plain and simple. That’s how it has turned out. It’s what the flaperon is telling us, as well. And as for the BFO values at 00:19:29 and 00:19:37, they just cannot be relied as accurate snapshots of the descent rates at these instants. The vertical acceleration of this magnitude coinciding with the SDU coming back on the air? Statistically virtually impossible. And if you discount the final BFO values as unreliable, and take on board the negative search result in the vicinity of the 7th arc, you can say goodbye to the uncontrolled dive scenario.
So what are you left with? Well I’ll tell you. You are left with debris that validates a controlled ditching, You are left with a flight path independently supported by the Bayesian analysis, that crosses the 7th arc at S37.6, E88.6, which rendezvous with sunrise, following a 7 hour flight in darkness, having followed a straight, unwavering course following the FMT. The statistical probability of this being a random occurrence – well you try and work that on out.
If they had any confidence in drift analyses, then why would the ATSB need to resort to the harebrained (yes Richard, I said harebrained) plan to track 6 dummy flaperons?
@David, @Ge Rijn:
I quote from the Daily Mail article:
“Six replicas of the flaperon will be sent to Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization’s oceanography department in the island state of Tasmania where scientists will determine whether it is the wind or the currents that affect how they drift, Hood said. This will enable more accurate drift modeling than is currently available.
If more money becomes available, the Australian bureau, which is conducting the search on Malaysia’s behalf, plans to fit the flaperons with satellite beacons and set them adrift at different points in the southern Indian Ocean around March 8 next year — the third anniversary of the disaster — and track their movements.
Meanwhile, barnacles found on the flaperon and an adjacent wing flap that washed up on Tanzania in June are being analyzed for clues to the latitudes they might have come from. The flap is in the Australian bureau’s headquarters in Canberra where it has been scoured for clues by accident investigators.”
Note the following (that you may not have considered):
1. “Wind or current”. They are not saying that the first and primary goal is to get at a possible crashsite from backtracking. They are rather asking themselves if a flaperon-sized object will follow the winds or follow the currents. And they want to study how this particular object performs, in a general sense. This in turn will be used to modify their drift analyses for this object. (The wind may catch it on one side, but not the flip side. It may turn around on its level when caught by wind, but only to loose the wind’s grip and go with the current. Etc. Etc. )
2. Only if they get funding will they insert beacons and drop them in the ocean. This as a second step which assumedly will give additional knowledge about how they perform in the investigated places and time of year. Which will be used to better their drift analyses further I assume. It is explicitly not divining-rod hopes for the backtracking, but with a little luck (with the positions of currents, existence of general wind direction in certain areas, and appearances of exceptional weather, perhaps), it does not seem wholly unlikely to me that they, with benevolent factual conditions, can get an answer they can use. Or not at all. At the same time they will possibly get a kind of differential between debris exposed to the wind, and objects that are not.
3. While the text is clear over that the flap and the flaperon are two different pieces, one will not necessarily catch from one reading there that it is the barnacles that is the common denominator in Canberra. The flaperon is not there, only the flap. (I assume the French won’t let go of their thingy until the Xth republic.) Whether there are two flaps in circulation and in whose hands the other one must be right now you probably know without me having to look that up. Whether the barnacle growth will (substantially) affect drift by wind or current, and what it tells about what side it mainly floated on through which waters is likely something that can be used to rule in or out certain paths that the tests suggests.
So, I don’t know, it may bear fruit after all. These days you don’t rely on one analysis, and discover it was wrong; you compute in the millions, and receive patterns of likleyhood. You all know that. How exact it can be and what they need of that in terms of their search methods I can’t say.
There may still be flaws to the hypothesis. But they will no doubt have the time to correct that as they go along.
… and for rounding off that with a kind of disclaimer: wouldn’t one expect them to more or less be in the possession of that knowledge in a generalized and suffficient sense already? Or is it the Aussies wanting to discover the gunpowder once again? And kill some time?
@Johan, The way the text is written, it does seem that the Daily Mail is saying that barnacles were found on the Pemba flap, but I haven’t read any previous mention of them, and they aren’t visible in pictures I’ve previously published here, or in these newer ones:
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/missing-jet/mh370-search-pictures-show-wing-flap-found-pemba-island-n613021
I’d love to get this clarified. I find it interesting that of the 21 items listed in the inventory recently released by the Malaysian MOT (http://www.mot.gov.my/SiteCollectionDocuments/kemalangan%20udara/Summary%20of%20Debris%20Recovered.pdf) only three barnacles on them. I find this extraordinary. As I’ve written before, tsunami debris that washed ashore in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest after a similar amount of time was found heavily fouled.
@Johan
I just don’t see how they can make reliable data out of these copies if they don’t have the specific information from the original flaperon and if they did not use the original materials and construction (as it clearly looks like from the copies-photo).
The original flaperon had also cracks in panels and holes in some places f.i.
How do they know which compartments filled up with water and how long did that take f.i.? This would be decisive on how the flaperon was positioned in the water.
Most probably the weight of the growing barnacles influenced the way the flaperon drifted in and out of the water also. How will they replicate that?
And if they did not use honeycomb for the panels (as it seems) how is the exact same buouncy and weight-balance established?
And why build 6 copies if you plan to test first small-scale in Tasmania without the funds to do the project in the ocean?
One copy will do for testing in Tasmania don’t you think?
I don’t know. We have to assume they did their homework thoroughly but to me it seems odd they now come with this news and the day after release a photo with those 6 flaperon copies packed and ready to go.
There must have been months of preperation and work to produce those copies.
Maybe they where lying around for a considerable time allready and pulled out of the closet when the time was right.
I had some hope on the idea but with this photo and new information I’ve become quite sceptic of this all.