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Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Experts Unable To Replicate Inmarsat Analysis
McGruber (1417641) writes "The lynchpin of the investigation of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has been the pings from the plane to one of Inmarsat's satellites. The pings are the sole evidence of what happened to the plane after it slipped out of radar contact. Without them, investigators knew only that the plane had enough fuel to travel anywhere within 3,300 miles of the last radar contact—a seventh of the entire globe. Inmarsat concluded that the flight ended in the southern Indian Ocean, and its analysis has become the canonical text of the Flight 370 search. It's the bit of data from which all other judgments flow—from the conclusive announcement by Malaysia's prime minister that the plane has been lost with no survivors, to the black-box search area, to the high confidence in the acoustic signals, to the dismissal by Australian authorities of a survey company's new claim to have detected plane wreckage. But scientists and engineers outside of the investigation have been working to verify Inmarsat's analysis and many say that it just doesn't hold up."
It's really not about the people on the plane. It never has been past the first few hours.
It's about a world wide industry that doesn't like expensive bits of it fall out of the sky for no reason. It's also not about the money. Hell, we could shut down an aircraft carrier battle group and feed the entire planet for a decade - don't look to humans to be rationale about that issue and don't try to conflate them.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
One thing to note, Georesoance did NOT find a plane. Further investigation into the company (though skipped over by the media outlets that got suckered by them) showed them to be just another shell company run by people with a long history of pseudoscience scams. They buy up defunct exploration companies in order to reuse the name, bilk some small investors that are eager to buy into the idea that a small pluky company has magic technology that 'the establishment' does not believe in.. usually ending up much poorer for the experience.
So basicly the media got fooled by some high tech psychics who normally would have been dismissed completely but somehow got just enough attention to be taken seriously.
In general, people seem to have a strong distaste, often backed by substantial investigative resources, for mysterious mysteries cropping up in the course what what is supposed to be a routine and mature process.
Commercial aviation (at least the large-aircraft stuff, stats for dinky little aircraft are less reassuring) is ordinarily so well hammered out that basically every air crash has a strong element of mystery to it and so the investigators come and try to figure out what went wrong.
Compare to cars, which kill plenty more people (and, unlike malnutrition and ghastly tropical parasites) people we usually care about; but still get minimal investigative attention because so many of the accidents are either 'operator was piss-drunk and/or exhausted', 'operator was flagrantly disregarding the rules for that area of the road', or 'vehicle maintenance was somewhere between horrendous and nonexistent'.