For a few days now I've been thinking, in my funny little unresearched way ... I wonder if they're not finding the plane because that's not where it is?
This morning's headline:
Is the MH370 Even In The Indian Ocean?
Not a single piece of wreckage from the lost plane has been found, not even after a new analysis led investigators to change the focus of their search yet again. The latest search area is based on extremely limited satellite data combined with radar data taken some five hours before the plane is believed to have gone down. It is, as one search official said, "a very inexact science."
Last week, using revised estimates of how fast the plane was traveling when it left the Malacca strait, investigators moved the search area hundreds of kilometres north.
But there's no guarantee that the plane maintained that speed for hours before going down.
"The problem is, we're dealing with probabilities โ estimates," Brown said of the Inmarsat data.
"It's where they THINK the plane went down."
Or as Captain Ross "Rusty" Aimer, a former pilot who now runs Aero Consulting Experts, put it: "Until we find a positive concrete shred of evidence โ a piece of the aircraft โ everything else is just conjecture, and it could be totally wrong. So far, the satellite calculations have only directed us to oceanic garbage dumps."
Australian officials have expressed increasing pessimism in recent days. Angus Houston, who heads the joint agency coordinating the multinational search effort out of Australia, said investigators are using computer modeling to determine the plane's final location, but two key variables needed to calculate that more precisely are unknown: the aircraft's altitude and speed.
"The starting point whenever you do a search and rescue is the last known position of the vehicle or the aircraft," Houston said Tuesday.
"In this particular case, the last known position was a long, long way from where the aircraft appears to have gone."
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