More MH370 debris found? Guess where!

There has been a report of the finding of more debris, possibly from an aircraft -- Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 ??? -- which washed ashore on Baa Atoll Fehendhoo and Fulhahdhoo, both in the Southern Maalhosmadulhu Atoll, which is part of... wait for it... the Maldive Islands. Here's a picture of the large piece of flotsam found nearly a month ago.

So what is it? There's a resemblance to the B-777 flaperon found on Réunion late last month. On the other hand, as the South China Morning Post suggests, it could be just a piece of "an unusual make of surfboard".

Inspector Mohammed of the local police has the debris in custody, and "officials" from Malaysia and Australia are on the way to take a closer look [and maybe catch some waves? Ed.]

While it's much too soon to declare a Told-You-So, Walt can't help but be reminded of the investigation by French author Marc Dugain -- see "MH370 - Just fancy that!" (WWW 18/12/14) -- who theorized that there has been a cover-up in the disappearance of the airliner, which could have been shot down by the American military operating out of their huge base at Diego Garcia!

Take a good look at this map. The blue horizontal line running across the middle of the image is the Equator. The olive-coloured island straddling the Equator at the right edge is one of the islands of Indonesia. The last radar "sighting" of MH370 placed the aircraft just about there -- let's call it Point A -- heading northwest.

The "experts" looking for the missing plane claim that it then turned nearly 300 degrees to head southeast to the area in which the search has been concentrated. See the map in "Current thinking on MH370" (WWW 31/7/15).

In the centre of the map above, just southwest of India, are the Maldives -- Point B. Due south of the Maldives is the British Indian Ocean Territory, which includes Diego Garcia, leased by the Brits to the US military. It's marked separately, the dot to the southeast of the island group.

Now look again at the map in "Current thinking on MH370". You will see that the North Equatorial Current of the Indian Ocean runs from Point A to Point B, almost in a straight line. If a plane came down, by accident or by design, anywhere along that line, any debris would most likely wash up on the Maldives first.

That's exactly what M Dugain thought. But his theory, propounded last year, was dismissed by the "experts" because, errr, that would lend credence to the idea that the US military had something to do with the disappearance of MH370 and, for some reason, didn't want their involvement to be known. Imagine that.

Current thinking on MH370

On Wednesday, in "Wreckage of MH370 (?) surfaces" (updated yesterday), Walt expressed doubt -- great doubt -- as to the probability of a piece of debris from Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 having drifted more than 3000 miles westward across the southern Indian Ocean to the island of Réunion, where a B-777 "flaperon" has washed ashore. (Yes, Walt has now learned that a "flaperon" is a part of the trailing edge of an aircraft's wing.)

Turns out, now, that the party line being put out by the Australian and Malaysian "authorities" responsible for the search doesn't say that. They deny the suggestion made by Walt [and others! Ed.] that they've been looking in the wrong place, off the coast of western Australia. No, they say, the debris (the flaperon and possibly a beat-up suitcase) could have drifted considerably farther, in a counter-clockwise fashion north following the Western Australia current, then west along the South Equatorial current, then southwest with the Moçambique (Mozambique) current to La Réunion. Do I have to draw you a picture? Voilà!

Yes, I've taken a map of the Indian Ocean and drawn on the currents named and a couple of others. No, I didn't make those up. The source for the location and direction of the warm (red), cold (blue), and luke-warm (I guess, in black) currents is "Currents and Tides", on the Marinebio website.

The spokesthingies for the governments involved are certainly correct in saying that the currents of the southern Indian Ocean move counter-clockwise. And yes, it's possible that if a plane fell into the sea -- "made a water landing", as the airlines would say -- in the search area (highlighted in yellow), pieces of debris could have gone all the way around from, say, 4 o'clock, counter-clockwise to 9 o'clock.

What the "authorities" aren't saying is that it's even more possible that the plane came down -- accidentally or on purpose -- closer to 12 o'clock, which I have starred in red because it's the location of Diego Garcia, site of a huge US military (air and naval) base.

From Diego Garcia, the Americans control virtually the entire Indian Ocean and the airspace above it. Suppose for a minute that a paranoid US radar operator and/or a trigger-happy US pilot mistook MH370 for an enemy aircraft and shot it down. Would the Pentagon (and the Prez) admit and say, "Gee, we're really sorry but you have to understand that we're protecting the world from terrorism and there's bound to be a bit of collateral damage, every now and then?" Walt thinks not.

Further reading: In "MH370 - Just fancy that!" (18/12/14), Walt reports on the theory of French author Marc Dugain -- a former CEO of Proteus Airlines -- that there has been a cover-up in the disappearance of the airliner, which could have been hacked and then shot down by the Americans! IMHO, the finding of debris on the shore of La Réunion adds strength to M. Dugain's version of what happened, the "official" version notwithstanding.

Search for MH370 being quietly scaled down

Walt doesn't have much time for conspiracy theories. I'm not a "birther". I don't believe Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor in advance. And I do believe the Americans really did land on the moon. (I saw it on TV so it must be so!) However, there are conspiracies to keep us from knowing the truth about certain things, such as the Third Secret of Fatima, which remains hidden deep in the archives of the Vatican. And then there's the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370.

If you haven't heard anything about the search for the plane -- or at least pieces of it -- that's because the US military doesn't want you to hear about it, and the Australian government, which is organizing the search in waters to the southwest of that continent is going along with their good friends and allies. Millions of dollars are being spent -- more than Australia could afford on its own -- looking for a needle in a haystack. And they're looking in the wrong haystack! Walt says it's deliberate!

Agence France Presse reports that Australian officials said today that the hunt for MH370 will not be expanded beyond its current search area "unless there are specific new leads". Back in April, 13 months after the plane vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, it was announced that the search zone would double in size, to cover 46,300 square miles in a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean. But now the Australian-led Joint Agency Coordination Centere says "In the absence of credible new information that leads to the identification of a specific location of the aircraft, governments have agreed that there will be no further expansion of the search area."

What makes the JACC think they're going to find anything way out there, far off Australia's west coast? The zone was supposedly determined by analyzing data from satellite signals which indicated the plane went down in the Indian Ocean after mysteriously diverting. To be in the area being searched, it would have had to be off its planned course by about 140 degrees. It would also have had to turned some 50 or 60 degrees to the southwest from the course it was on when last observed by Malaysian radar!

When last "seen", the plane was near the west coast of Malaysia, heading west-northwest (WNW), not southwest (SW). Seems to me it would make more sense to follow the last observed heading, which would have taken the plane in the general directin of the Bay of Bengal, Sri Lanka and the southern tip of India. That area is watched closely by the US military from its huge base on Diego Garcia, a flyspeck in the middle of the Indian Ocean leased to the US by the Brits.

The conspiracy theory which Walt finds least plausible is that the Americans somehow hijacked MH370 by remote control, and flew it to Diego Garcia to be "repurposed" for use in the Middle East. A similar theory says the hijackers were Chinese -- as were most of the pax on board -- and flew it to somewhere in southeast Asia or western China.

Walt thinks the more likely explanation is that a USAF or US Navy fighter intercepted MH370 when their radar tracked it way off course, and shot it down either deliberately or "by accident". That would be consistent with US military SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) -- shoot first and ask questions (such as identity) later. Covering up such mistakes in hopes that they will be forgotten is also SOP.

Walt is not alone in giving credence to this explanation. See "MH370 - Just fancy that!", posted here just before Christmas 2014, and "MH370 officially 'an accident'; take the money and STFU", a month later.

So... if the JACC wants a lead, there it is. In case they don't understand the message, Walt will put it in three words: Ask the Americans!

MH370 - Just fancy that!

We haven't heard much about the search for the Malaysian Airlines B-777, flight MH370, which went "missing" back in March. Buried on the inside pages of the mainstream papers, some weeks back, was a squib about the search being resumed in the southern part of the Indian Ocean, west of Australia, but when or if this actually happened was unclear.

Regular readers of WWW [and if you're not one, why not?! Ed.] will recall Walt's repeated advice to search near the British territory of Diego Garcia, a small island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, graciously leased to the US military for use as a strategic air force and intelligence base. See "Latest on MH370: Inmarsat says search was off target; Canadian ex-pilot blames Malaysian authorities for 'bungled inquiry', suggests ulterior motive" and "Aussie officials now say maybe MH370 WAS hijacked", both posted in June.

Well, guess what, boys 'n' girls? There are others who think that there's a lot more to the story than we've been told by "the authorities" in general and the US military in particular. France 24 reports that French author Marc Dugain -- a former CEO of Proteus Airlines -- theorizes, in a six-page article in Paris Match, that there has been a cover-up in the disappearance of the airliner, which could have been hacked and then shot down by the Americans!

M Dugain believes argues that MH370 crashed near... wait for it... Diego Garcia. The Americans have always officially denied that flight MH370 came anywhere near Diego Garcia, but then, what else would they say. After all, the US military does not have a sterling record of truth-telling.

M Dugain's theory into the disappearance has all the ingredients of a spy thriller and, says France 24, has grabbed the French public’s attention. His investigation took him to the neighbouring Maldives -- nice place to go for business purposes if you can manage it! -- where residents told local media on March 9th (the day the plane disappeared) that they had seen an airliner fly in the direction of Diego Garcia.

"I saw a huge plane fly over us at low altitude," a fisherman on Kudahuvadhoo island told Dugain. "I saw red and blue stripes on a white background" –- the colours of Malaysia Airlines. Other witnesses confirmed the sighting, but their claims were promptly dismissed by "the authorities".

So what happened? M Dugain speculates that a modern aircraft such as Malaysia Airlines' Boeing 777 could have been hijacked by a hacker. "In 2006, Boeing patented a remote control system using a computer placed inside or outside the aircraft," he wrote. This technology led him to the idea of a "soft" remote hijacking.

But the writer also suggests that a fire could have led the crew to deactivate electrical devices, including transmission systems.Whatever the initial reasons for leaving its flight path, M Dugain suspects that the plane headed to Diego Garcia, where a number of scenarios may have played out, including the US Air Force shooting it down for fear of a 9/11-style attack.

M Dugain met the mayor of neighbouring Baarah island, who showed him pictures of a strange device found on a beach two weeks after the plane had disappeared. The object was immediately seized by the Maldives military. Two aviation experts and a local military officer concluded that the object was a Boeing fire extinguisher.

For the extinguisher to have floated, the writer says, it must have been empty, having been automatically triggered by a fire. He adds that precedent exists in which fires on board aircraft caused all passengers and crew to die of asphyxiation, while the plane’s automated systems extinguished the blaze and kept it in the air.

The rest of his article draws more conclusions from the information that has remained buried than from new facts. He notes that the search operation in the southern Indian Ocean was based on satellite data from the last organization to receive a signal from the airliner. That would be Inmarsat, a British company which is "very close to intelligence agencies".

For M Dugain, the suppression of testimonies from the Maldives, the unlikely event that Diego Garcia’s US intelligence officers "equipped with the best technology in the world may have 'lost' a 63-metre-long object", and the secrecy surrounding the cargo in the plane’s hold all point towards a large-scale cover-up.

And that, dear readers, is exactly what Walt said, about half a year ago. But why (I hear you asking) would the Americans shoot down a civilian airliner which was, for whatever reason, off-course? Because they're paranoid! That's why!