I haven’t written lately about the diappearance of the Malaysian Airline Boeing 777 for awhile since there was really nothing new to report.  As of my last post, the plane was presumed crashed in the Indian Ocean, with all passengers and crew lost even though not a trace of wreckage has been recovered.   The presumtion of a crash and also the presumed crash location (vague as it may be) have been inferred by analysis of communication signals between the plane and  a satellite done by the satelite’s owner, British telecommunications company Inmarsat.  Authorites have based their search on the assumption that the plane was somewhere within a large area of the Indian Ocean where no possible landing could have occurred when the signals stopped and this assumption was based on the sattelite data analysis done by Inmarsat. Since no trace of the airliner has yet been discovered, outside experts are attempting to confirm Inmarst’s analysis – and they are finding inconsistencies which call into question the accuracy of the analysis that all investigative assumptions have been based on so far – mainly the assumtion that the plane took a southern flight path over the Indian Ocean instead of north toward Pakistan.

mh370 inmarsat graph

“This graph is the most important piece of evidence in the Inmarsat analysis. What it appears to show is the frequency shifts or “offsets”—the difference between the normal “pitch” of the plane’s voice (its radio frequency) and the one you actually hear.
 
The graph also shows the shifts that would be expected for two hypothetical flight paths, one northbound and one southbound, with the measured values closely matching the southbound path. This is why officials have been so steadfastly confident that the plane went south. It seems to be an open-and-shut verdict of mathematics.

So it should be straightforward to make sure that the math is right. “

Problem is, it’s not so simple.  There are a few aspect’s of the airliner’s flight path before radar contact was lost that are absolutely known, and some of the Inmarsat analysis does not line up with that data.  Officials close to the investigation stand by the accuracy of their analysis, but will not release all relelvant data that outside experts would need to conclusively confirm it’s accuracy.

“Until officials provide more information, the claim that Flight 370 went south rests not on the weight of mathematics but on faith in authority….The biggest risk to the investigation now is that authorities continue to assume they’ve finally found the area where the plane went down, while failing to explore other possibilities simply because they don’t fit with a mathematical analysis that may not even hold up…After all, searchers have yet to find any hard evidence—not so much as a shred of debris—to confirm that they’re looking in the right ocean.”

When I wrote my first post on this I believe I said that when the truth about what really happened comes out (if ever), it would be stranger than fiction.  So far that is the case.  As they say, Stay Tuned.

Source Article:  The Atlantic.com – Why The Official Explanation Of MH370’s Demise Doesn’t Hold Up

Cross Posted at: Men Out Of Work Blog