Missing Airplane: Malaysia Airlines MH370

[xjeepguy]

To Glacier ...

There is no depth to which a few people (fortunately a small minority) will stoop for money. Kind of like picking the pockets of a deceased person run across at an accident scene.

Fortunately it was apparently done by one or two bank employees through the banking system so the victims will be fully compensated.

Also , with electronic paper trails , how did they possibly expect to get away with it ? Those accounts were probably flagged shortly after the jet vanished . Stooopid !

[peaceseeker]

Evidence shows the plane was not taken down with a missile but actually a false flag perpetuated by Ukraine govt. et al ...I know it's difficult for many posters to entertain such a notion but facts are facts...

Malaysian Airlines MH17: Who Stands to Gain?
By Chandra Muzaffar
Global Research, July 27, 2014
http://www.globalresearch.ca/mh-17-who- ... in/5393540

Deleted BBC Report. “Ukrainian Fighter Jet Shot Down MHI7″, Donetsk Eyewitnesses
By Global Research News
Global Research, July 27, 2014
http://www.globalresearch.ca/deleted-bb ... es/5393631

“Support MH17 Truth”: OSCE Monitors Identify “Shrapnel and Machine Gun-Like Holes” indicating Shelling. No Evidence of a Missile Attack. Shot Down by a Military Aircraft?
By Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, July 31, 2014
http://www.globalresearch.ca/support-mh ... ck/5394324

And then this bit of spin...

Desperate MH17 “Intelligence” Spin by Ukraine Secret Service: Pro-Russian Rebels had Targeted a Russian Passenger Plane. “But Shot Down Flight MH17 by Mistake”
By Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, August 11, 2014
http://www.globalresearch.ca/desperate- ... ne/5395501

A very interesting treatise on the matter...

Air Algerie AH5017, Air France 447, Malaysian MH370 and MH17: Vanishing Aircraft, “Numerology”, and the Global Elite
By Jason Kissner
Global Research, August 01, 2014
http://www.globalresearch.ca/air-algeri ... te/5394526

[Donald G]

To peeaceseeker ...

The information available from your last comment certainly presents a bit of a different scenario than we have been lead to believe. As with any number of significant things that have taken place throughout history when the consequences of an act are too reprehensible and devastating to accept keep hiding the truth and blaming "the other guy".

The truth often (perhaps even usually?) seems to have no place in international politics.

[A_Britishcolumbian]

Flight MH370: Airline boss claims missing jet might NOT be in Indian Ocean after all
Oct 11, 2014 17:38 By Chris Richards

Emirates Airlines chief Sir Tim Clark said "Every single second of that flight needs to be examined up until it, theoretically, ended up in the Indian Ocean - for which they still haven't found a trace, not even a seat cushion."

An airline boss has claimed missing Flight MH370 might NOT be in the Indian Ocean after all.

Emirates Airlines president Sir Tim Clark also said he believes the jet, which disappeared on March 8 with 239 passengers and crew on board, was not on autopilot when it came down.

In an interview with German magazine Der Spiegel, Sir Tim, said: "Our experience tells us that in water incidents, where the aircraft has gone down, there is always something.

"We have not seen a single thing that suggests categorically that this aircraft is where they say it is, apart from this so-called electronic satellite 'handshake', which I question as well."

He added: "MH370 was, in my opinion, under control, probably until the very end.

Sir Tim's theory runs counter to current thinking that the Boeing 777 was on autopilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed into the southern Indian Ocean, having taken off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia en route to Beijing, China.

Emirates operates 127 777s, more than any other airline, and Sir Tim said he was suspicious that no-one seems to know where the jet came down.

He told the magazine: "There hasn't been one over-water incident in the history of civil aviation - apart from Amelia Earhart in 1939 - that has not been at least 5 or 10% trackable.

"But MH370 has simply disappeared.

"For me, that raises a degree of suspicion.

"I'm totally dissatisfied with what has been coming out of all of this."

Sir Tim said the search for the missing plane - led by Australia - must continue but that the investigation into its disappearance must be more transparent.

"There is plenty of information out there, which we need to be far more forthright, transparent and candid about," he said.

"Every single second of that flight needs to be examined up until it, theoretically, ended up in the Indian Ocean - for which they still haven't found a trace, not even a seat cushion.

"MH370 remains one of the great aviation mysteries."

He added: "Personally, I have the concern that we will treat it as such and move on.

"At the most, it might then make an appearance on National Geographic as one of aviation's great mysteries," he said.

"We mustn't allow this to happen.

"We must know what caused that airplane to disappear."

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news ... ms-4420915

[Donald G]

Another "best guess" based on the collective lack of evidence to date. Although it looks small on a map there is a huge, dense jungle within a few flying (or gliding) minutes of where the plane made a sudden left turn.

In most such situations the simplest explanation often turns out to be the true explanation, when the entire truth becomes known. All kinds of articles associated to the passengers and luggage may already have been found or shown up but not been recognized as being associated to the plane that went down.

[Dizzy1]

"MH370 remains one of the great aviation mysteries."

"At the most, it might then make an appearance on National Geographic as one of aviation's great mysteries," he said

And there in lies a very plausible motive ...

He told the magazine: "There hasn't been one over-water incident in the history of civil aviation - apart from Amelia Earhart in 1939 - that has not been at least 5 or 10% trackable.

[Glacier]

Malaysia Airlines to officially declare plane as "lost".

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -lost.html

[Donald G]

I have no problem whatever with the search being called off. To continue the search after all possible avenues have proved fruitless is like continuing to perform artificial respiration after the patient has been dead for almost a year.

I understand what the families (and their lawyers) are saying but reality is reality. The plane or evidence of the plane will likely show up at some time in the future but it will not be because the search was continued indefinitely.

The bottom line to every such disaster is that life must go on for those remaining. No pun intended.

[Glacier]

The unsettling oddness was there from the first moment, on March 8, when Malaysia Airlines announced that a plane from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing, Flight 370, had disappeared over the South China Sea in the middle of the night. There had been no bad weather, no distress call, no wreckage, no eyewitness accounts of a fireball in the sky—just a plane that said good-bye to one air-traffic controller and, two minutes later, failed to say hello to the next. And the crash, if it was a crash, got stranger from there.

My yearlong detour to Planet MH370 began two days later, when I got an email from an editor at Slate asking if I’d write about the incident. I’m a private pilot and science writer, and I wrote about the last big mysterious crash, of Air France 447 in 2009. My story ran on the 12th. The following morning, I was invited to go on CNN. Soon, I was on-air up to six times a day as part of its nonstop MH370 coverage.

There was no intro course on how to be a cable-news expert. The Town Car would show up to take me to the studio, I’d sign in with reception, a guest-greeter would take me to makeup, I’d hang out in the greenroom, the sound guy would rig me with a mike and an earpiece, a producer would lead me onto the set, I’d plug in and sit in the seat, a producer would tell me what camera to look at during the introduction, we’d come back from break, the anchor would read the introduction to the story and then ask me a question or maybe two, I’d answer, then we’d go to break, I would unplug, wipe off my makeup, and take the car 43 blocks back uptown. Then a couple of hours later, I’d do it again. I was spending 18 hours a day doing six minutes of talking.


As time went by, CNN winnowed its expert pool down to a dozen or so regulars who earned the on-air title “CNN aviation analysts”: airline pilots, ex-government honchos, aviation lawyers, and me. We were paid by the week, with the length of our contracts dependent on how long the story seemed likely to play out. The first couple were seven-day, the next few were 14-day, and the last one was a month. We’d appear solo, or in pairs, or in larger groups for panel discussions—whatever it took to vary the rhythm of perpetual chatter.

I soon realized the germ of every TV-news segment is: “Officials say X.” The validity of the story derives from the authority of the source. The expert, such as myself, is on hand to add dimension or clarity. Truth flowed one way: from the official source, through the anchor, past the expert, and onward into the great sea of viewerdom.

What made MH370 challenging to cover was, first, that the event was unprecedented and technically complex and, second, that the officials were remarkably untrustworthy. For instance, the search started over the South China Sea, naturally enough, but soon after, Malaysia opened up a new search area in the Andaman Sea, 400 miles away. Why? Rumors swirled that military radar had seen the plane pull a 180. The Malaysian government explicitly denied it, but after a week of letting other countries search the South China Sea, the officials admitted that they’d known about the U-turn from day one.

Of course, nothing turned up in the Andaman Sea, either. But in London, scientists for a British company called Inmarsat that provides telecommunications between ships and aircraft realized its database contained records of transmissions between MH370 and one of its satellites for the seven hours after the plane’s main communication system shut down. Seven hours! Maybe it wasn’t a crash after all—if it were, it would have been the slowest in history.



These electronic “handshakes” or “pings” contained no actual information, but by analyzing the delay between the transmission and reception of the signal— called the burst timing offset, or BTO—Inmarsat could tell how far the plane had been from the satellite and thereby plot an arc along which the plane must have been at the moment of the final ping. That arc stretched some 6,000 miles, but if the plane was traveling at normal airliner speeds, it would most likely have wound up around the ends of the arc—either in Kazakhstan and China in the north or the Indian Ocean in the south. My money was on Central Asia. But CNN quoted unnamed U.S.-government sources saying that the plane had probably gone south, so that became the dominant view.



Other views were circulating, too, however. A Canadian pilot named Chris Goodfellow went viral with his theory that MH370 suffered a fire that knocked out its communications gear and diverted from its planned route in order to attempt an emergency landing. Keith Ledgerwood, another pilot, proposed that hijackers had taken the plane and avoided detection by ducking into the radar shadow of another airliner. Amateur investigators pored over satellite images, insisting that wisps of cloud or patches of shrubbery were the lost plane. Courtney Love, posting on her Facebook time line a picture of the shimmering blue sea, wrote: “I’m no expert but up close this does look like a plane and an oil slick.”



Then: breaking news! On March 24, the Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak, announced that a new kind of mathematical analysis proved that the plane had in fact gone south. This new math involved another aspect of the handshakes called the burst frequency offset, or BFO, a measure of changes in the signal’s wavelength, which is partly determined by the relative motion of the airplane and the satellite. That the whole southern arc lay over the Indian Ocean meant that all the passengers and crew would certainly be dead by now. This was the first time in history that the families of missing passengers had been asked to accept that their loved ones were dead because a secret math equation said so. Not all took it well. In Beijing, outraged next-of-kin marched to the Malaysian Embassy, where they hurled water bottles and faced down paramilitary soldiers in riot gear.



Guided by Inmarsat’s calculations, Australia, which was coordinating the investigation, moved the search area 685 miles to the northeast, to a 123,000-square-mile patch of ocean west of Perth. Ships and planes found much debris on the surface, provoking a frenzy of BREAKING NEWS banners, but all turned out to be junk. Adding to the drama was a ticking clock. The plane’s two black boxes had an ultrasonic sound beacon that sent out acoustic signals through the water. (Confusingly, these also were referred to as “pings,” though of a completely different nature. These new pings suddenly became the important ones.) If searchers could spot plane debris, they’d be able to figure out where the plane had most likely gone down, then trawl with underwater microphones to listen for the pings. The problem was that the pingers had a battery life of only 30 days.

On April 4, with only a few days’ pinger life remaining, an Australian ship lowered a special microphone called a towed pinger locator into the water. Miraculously, the ship detected four pings. Search officials were jubilant, as was the CNN greenroom. Everyone was ready for an upbeat ending.

The only Debbie Downer was me. I pointed out that the pings were at the wrong frequency and too far apart to have been generated by stationary black boxes. For the next two weeks, I was the odd man out on Don Lemon’s six-guest panel blocks, gleefully savaged on-air by my co-experts.



The Australians lowered an underwater robot to scan the seabed for the source of the pings. There was nothing. Of course, by the rules of TV news, the game wasn’t over until an official said so. But things were stretching thin. One night, an underwater-search veteran taking part in a Don Lemon panel agreed with me that the so-called acoustic-ping detections had to be false. Backstage after the show, he and another aviation analyst nearly came to blows. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! I’ve done extensive research!” the analyst shouted. “There’s nothing else those pings could be!”

Soon after, the story ended the way most news stories do: We just stopped talking about it. A month later, long after the caravan had moved on, a U.S. Navy officer said publicly that the pings had not come from MH370. The saga fizzled out with as much satisfying closure as the final episode of Lost.

Once the surface search was called off, it was the rabble’s turn. In late March, New Zealand–based space scientist Duncan Steel began posting a series of essays on Inmarsat orbital mechanics on his website.Fig. 10 The comments section quickly grew into a busy forum in which technically sophisticated MH370 obsessives answered one another’s questions and pitched ideas. The open platform attracted a varied crew, from the mostly intelligent and often helpful to the deranged and abusive. Eventually, Steel declared that he was sick of all the insults and shut down his comments section. The party migrated over to my blog, jeffwise.net.



Meanwhile, a core of engineers and scientists had split off via group email and included me. We called ourselves the Independent Group, or IG. If you found yourself wondering how a satellite with geosynchronous orbit responds to a shortage of hydrazine, all you had to do was ask. The IG’s first big break came in late May, when the Malaysians finally released the raw Inmarsat data. By combining the data with other reliable information, we were able to put together a time line of the plane’s final hours: Forty minutes after the plane took off from Kuala Lumpur, MH370 went electronically dark. For about an hour after that, the plane was tracked on radar following a zigzag course and traveling fast. Then it disappeared from military radar. Three minutes later, the communications system logged back onto the satellite. This was a major revelation. It hadn’t stayed connected, as we’d always assumed. This event corresponded with the first satellite ping. Over the course of the next six hours, the plane generated six more handshakes as it moved away from the satellite.

The final handshake wasn’t completed. This led to speculation that MH370 had run out of fuel and lost power, causing the plane to lose its connection to the satellite. An emergency power system would have come on, providing enough electricity for the satcom to start reconnecting before the plane crashed. Where exactly it would have gone down down was still unknown—the speed of the plane, its direction, and how fast it was climbing were all sources of uncertainty.

The MH370 obsessives continued attacking the problem. Since I was the proprietor of the major web forum, it fell on me to protect the fragile cocoon of civility that nurtured the conversation. A single troll could easily derail everything. The worst offenders were the ones who seemed intelligent but soon revealed themselves as Believers. They’d seized on a few pieces of faulty data and convinced themselves that they’d discovered the truth. One was sure the plane had been hit by lightning and then floated in the South China Sea, transmitting to the satellite on battery power. When I kicked him out, he came back under aliases. I wound up banning anyone who used the word “lightning.”

By October, officials from the Australian Transport Safety Board had begun an ambitiously scaled scan of the ocean bottom, and, in a surprising turn, it would include the area suspected by the IG. For those who’d been a part of the months-long effort, it was a thrilling denouement. The authorities, perhaps only coincidentally, had landed on the same conclusion as had a bunch of randos from the internet. Now everyone was in agreement about where to look.

While jubilation rang through the email threads, I nursed a guilty secret: I wasn’t really in agreement. For one, I was bothered by the lack of plane debris. And then there was the data. To fit both the BTO and BFO data well, the plane would need to have flown slowly, likely in a curving path. But the more plausible autopilot settings and known performance constraints would have kept the plane flying faster and more nearly straight south. I began to suspect that the problem was with the BFO numbers—that they hadn’t been generated in the way we believed. If that were the case, perhaps the flight had gone north after all.

For a long time, I resisted even considering the possibility that someone might have tampered with the data. That would require an almost inconceivably sophisticated hijack operation, one so complicated and technically demanding that it would almost certainly need state-level backing. This was true conspiracy-theory material.

And yet, once I started looking for evidence, I found it. One of the commenters on my blog had learned that the compartment on 777s called the electronics-and-equipment bay, or E/E bay, can be accessed via a hatch in the front of the first-class cabin. If perpetrators got in there, a long shot, they would have access to equipment that could be used to change the BFO value of its satellite transmissions. They could even take over the flight controls.

I realized that I already had a clue that hijackers had been in the E/E bay. Remember the satcom system disconnected and then rebooted three minutes after the plane left military radar behind. I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how a person could physically turn the satcom off and on. The only way, apart from turning off half the entire electrical system, would be to go into the E/E bay and pull three particular circuit breakers. It is a maneuver that only a sophisticated operator would know how to execute, and the only reason I could think for wanting to do this was so that Inmarsat would find the records and misinterpret them. They turned on the satcom in order to provide a false trail of bread crumbs leading away from the plane’s true route.

It’s not possible to spoof the BFO data on just any plane. The plane must be of a certain make and model, equipped with a certain make and model of satellite-communications equipment, and flying a certain kind of route in a region covered by a certain kind of Inmarsat satellite. If you put all the conditions together, it seemed unlikely that any aircraft would satisfy them. Yet MH370 did.

I imagine everyone who comes up with a new theory, even a complicated one, must experience one particularly delicious moment, like a perfect chord change, when disorder gives way to order. This was that moment for me. Once I threw out the troublesome BFO data, all the inexplicable coincidences and mismatched data went away. The answer became wonderfully simple. The plane must have gone north.



Using the BTO data set alone, I was able to chart the plane’s speed and general path, which happened to fall along national borders. Flying along borders, a military navigator told me, is a good way to avoid being spotted on radar. A Russian intelligence plane nearly collided with a Swedish airliner while doing it over the Baltic Sea in December. If I was right, it would have wound up in Kazakhstan, just as search officials recognized early on.



There aren’t a lot of places to land a plane as big as the 777, but, as luck would have it, I found one: a place just past the last handshake ring called Baikonur Cosmodrome. Baikonur is leased from Kazakhstan by Russia. A long runway there called Yubileyniy was built for a Russian version of the Space Shuttle. If the final Inmarsat ping rang at the start of MH370’s descent, it would have set up nicely for an approach to Yubileyniy’s runway 24.

To the best of my knowledge, this airstrip is the only one in the world built specifically for self-landing airplanes. The 777, which was developed in the ’90s, has the ability to autoland. From a hijacking perspective, this feature allows people who don’t have commercial-piloting experience to abscond with an airplane and get it safely on the ground, so long as they know what autopilot settings to input.

If MH370 did land at Yubileyniy, it had 90 minutes to either hide or refuel and takeoff again before the sun rose. Hiding would be hard. This part of Kazakhstan is flat and treeless, and there are no large buildings nearby. The complex has been slowly crumbling for decades, with satellite images taken years apart showing little change, until, in October, 2013, a disused six-story building began to be dismantled. Next to it appeared a rectangle of bulldozed dirt with a trench at one end.

What got my attention was the size of the thing. I’ve added the silhouette of a 777 for scale.

Work proceeded deep into the winter. In the four days before the following image was taken on January 9, 2014, the temperature fluctuated between -15F and +14F.

By March, the building was gone and everything had been bulldozed flat. Eight days after MH370 vanished, it looked like this.

Construction experts told me these images most likely show site remediation: taking apart a building and burying the debris. Yet why, after decades, did the Russians suddenly need to clear this one lonely spot, in the heart of a frigid winter, finishing just before MH370 disappeared?

Whether the plane went to Baikonur or elsewhere in Kazakhstan, my suspicion fell on Russia. With technically advanced satellite, avionics, and aircraft-manufacturing industries, Russia was a paranoid fantasist’s dream. (The Russians, or at least Russian-backed militia, were also suspected in the downing of Malaysia Flight 17 in July.) Why, exactly, would Putin want to steal a Malaysian passenger plane? I had no idea. Maybe he wanted to demonstrate to the United States, which had imposed the first punitive sanctions on Russia the day before, that he could hurt the West and its allies anywhere in the world. Maybe what he was really after were the secrets of one of the plane’s passengers. Maybe there was something strategically crucial in the hold. Or maybe he wanted the plane to show up unexpectedly somewhere someday, packed with explosives. There’s no way to know. That’s the thing about MH370 theory-making: It’s hard to come up with a plausible motive for an act that has no apparent beneficiaries.

As it happened, there were three ethnically Russian men aboard MH370, two of them Ukrainian-passport holders from Odessa. Could any of these men, I wondered, be special forces or covert operatives? As I looked at the few pictures available on the internet, they definitely struck me as the sort who might battle Liam Neeson in midair.

About the two Ukrainians, almost nothing was available online. I was able to find out a great deal about the Russian, who was sitting in first class about 15 feet from the E/E-bay hatch. He ran a lumber company in Irkutsk, and his hobby was technical diving under the ice of Lake Baikal. I hired Russian speakers from Columbia University to make calls to Odessa and Irkutsk, then hired researchers on the ground.

The more I discovered, the more coherent the story seemed to me. I found a peculiar euphoria in thinking about my theory, which I thought about all the time. One of the diagnostic questions used to determine whether you’re an alcoholic is whether your drinking has interfered with your work. By that measure, I definitely had a problem. Once the CNN checks stopped coming, I entered a long period of intense activity that earned me not a cent. Instead, I was forking out my own money for translators and researchers and satellite photos. And yet I was happy.



Still, it occurred to me that, for all the passion I had for my theory, I might be the only person in the world who felt this way. Neurobiologist Robert A. Burton points out in his book On Being Certain that the sensation of being sure about one’s beliefs is an emotional response separate from the processing of those beliefs. It’s something that the brain does subconsciously to protect itself from wasting unnecessary processing power on problems for which you’ve already found a solution that’s good enough. “ ‘That’s right’ is a feeling you get so that you can move on,” Burton told me. It’s a kind of subconscious laziness. Just as it’s harder to go for a run than to plop onto the sofa, it’s harder to reexamine one’s assumptions than it is to embrace certainty. At one end of the spectrum of skeptics are scientists, who by disposition or training resist the easy path; at the other end are conspiracy theorists, who’ll leap effortlessly into the sweet bosom of certainty. So where did that put me?

Propounding some new detail of my scenario to my wife over dinner one night, I noticed a certain glassiness in her expression. “You don’t seem entirely convinced,” I suggested.

She shrugged.

“Okay,” I said. “What do you think is the percentage chance that I’m right?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Five percent?”

Springtime came to the southern ocean, and search vessels began their methodical cruise along the area jointly identified by the IG and the ATSB, dragging behind it a sonar rig that imaged the seabed in photographic detail. Within the IG, spirits were high. The discovery of the plane would be the triumphant final act of a remarkable underdog story.

By December, when the ships had still not found a thing, I felt it was finally time to go public. In six sequentially linked pages that readers could only get to by clicking through—to avoid anyone reading the part where I suggest Putin masterminded the hijack without first hearing how I got there—I laid out my argument. I called it “The Spoof.”

I got a respectful hearing but no converts among the IG. A few sites wrote summaries of my post. The International Business Times headlined its story “MH370: Russia’s Grand Plan to Provoke World War III, Says Independent Investigator” and linked directly to the Putin part. Somehow, the airing of my theory helped quell my obsession. My gut still tells me I’m right, but my brain knows better than to trust my gut.

Last month, the Malaysian government declared that the aircraft is considered to have crashed and all those aboard are presumed dead. Malaysia’s transport minister told a local television station that a key factor in the decision was the fact that the search mission for the aircraft failed to achieve its objective. Meanwhile, new theories are still being hatched. One, by French writer Marc Dugain, states that the plane was shot down by the U.S. because it was headed toward the military bases on the islands of Diego Garcia as a flying bomb.

The search failed to deliver the airplane, but it has accomplished some other things: It occupied several thousand hours of worldwide airtime; it filled my wallet and then drained it; it torpedoed the idea that the application of rationality to plane disasters would inevitably yield ever-safer air travel. And it left behind a faint, lingering itch in the back of my mind, which I believe will quite likely never go away.

[Glacier]

Well they've found something... just not what they were looking for.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/malaysia-ai ... an-indian/

[Dizzy1]

(CNN)—Apparent airplane debris found off the coast of Reunion island, a French department in the western Indian Ocean, is being examined to see if it is connected to the 2014 disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a member of the French Air Force in Reunion said Wednesday.

The debris was found off the coast of St. Andre, a community on the island, according to Adjutant Christian Retournat. "It is way too soon to say whether or not it is MH370. We just found the debris this morning," Retournat said.

He said the debris -- what appears to be a wing flap -- has been taken to the island, located about 380 nautical miles off the coast of Madagascar.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/29/africa/mh ... index.html

[Dizzy1]

There are 3 other possibilities where the piece may have come off of ...

- Yemenia 626 which crashed near the Comoros in 2009 which was an A310.
- Ethiopian 961 which was hijcacked and ditched off the coast of the Comoros in 1996 which was a B767-200.
- South African 295 which crashed off the coast of Mauritius in 1987 which was a B747-200.

The Ethiopian and South African flights are most likely not probable, given the length of time the piece would have been in the ocean and relatively good condition the piece is in.

Given the direction of the currents in the South Indian Ocean, if this is indeed from the missing B777 - it would be definitive proof that the aircraft did end up in the South Indian Ocean.

Fortunately, there are serial numbers on aircraft parts so if it is still attached, it should be relatively easy to find out what aircraft it came off of.

[Dizzy1]

[Dizzy1]

Looks like its very likely to be off a B777, the panel number has matched ...





... even though the image below is directly taken from Malaysian's maintenance manual, I don't think that number is airline specific, just aircraft specific. Regardless, if it is indeed off of a B777, its with 99% certainty its off MH370.

[Donald G]

To Dizzy1 ...

Informative post. Thanks. The simplest explanation may prove to be right again.