For close students of the MH370 search controversy, there is another, third, attack on the ATSB managed search for the missing 777 in The Australian today by former fighter pilot Byron Bailey, and it variously repeats or adds to a set of errors on his part. Last week, in a second stab at the story […]

For close students of the MH370 search controversy, there is another, third, attack on the ATSB managed search for the missing 777 in The Australian today by former fighter pilot Byron Bailey, and it variously repeats or adds to a set of errors on his part.

Last week, in a second stab at the story in The Australian Mr Bailey retracted his silly claims about a flight to 45,000 feet by the Malaysia Airlines jet after it abruptly ceased to be a transponder identified aircraft on air traffic control screens while on its way to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board on 8 March 2014.

Those claims were based on an invention by a well known shock jock reporter, who similarly floated the technically mutually incompatible notion that the jet also miraculously hedge hopped at low altitude across the Malaysia peninsula.

In his second article Mr Bailey also admits to misreporting a US expert on the damage seen on the flaperon from the 777 wing recovered on La Reunion island in July last year.

And if that isn’t enough to have had a cadet reporter fired from any national newspaper with standards of editorial integrity, Mr Bailey continues to fail in this third article to address the evidence from the final signal sequence from MH370 that it was not under effective pilot control when it crashed into the south Indian Ocean seven hours 38 or 39 minutes after it had taken off from KL.

Writing as a longer term critic of the ATSB for entirely different reasons, I can’t understand why The Australian hasn’t responded in detail to the ATSB’s earlier rebuttal of Mr Bailey’s original article.

Mr Bailey continues today to invest the ATSB with investigative powers it doesn’t have when it is in fact the manager of the search, which Australia was obliged to conduct under ICAO rules.

His experience as a pilot is beside the point if he cannot get the fundamental facts right.

He may however be right, as anyone might be, that for a range of reasons the sea floor search for MH370 isn’t in precisely the right area it should be. It is a carefully modeled search, and it has at intervals been amended on the basis of further analysis. It also covers some very deep and complex terrain where there is a risk that MH370 may have been missed by the search equipment being used.

If the search is unsuccessful, MH370 might one day be found just to one side of one of the boundaries of the various search zones, or lying undetected under a pile of dislodged debris on the side of an underwater cliff.

(Visited 76 times, 1 visits today)