MH370: Inmarsat data may be flawed, if not flat out wrong, says expert

Millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours have been spent but the authorities have nothing to show and convince the families that they were on the right track.

It has been more than two months since the MAS MH370 Boeing 777 jet went missing without a trace. The whereabouts of the aircraft remain a mystery, as is the fate of 239 people on board.

Questions are now being raised about the validity of the data from Inmarsat, which concluded that the flight had ended its journey in a remote location in the southern Indian Ocean, near Perth, Australia.

A computer scientist and GPS expert has claimed that Inmarsat may have wrongly calculated the final flight path of MH370 and its current analysis is ridden with many inconsistencies.

“Either Inmarsat’s analysis doesn’t totally make sense, or it's flat out wrong,” said Ari N Schulman, executive editor of the New Atlantis, a quarterly journal dealing with social, ethical, political and policy dimensions of modern science and technology.

“Until officials provide more information, the claim that MH370 went south rests not on the weight of mathematics but on faith in authority,” he said, referring to the British satellite service provider’s refusal to share its data and methodology despite various requests.

“Inmarsat officials and search authorities seem to want it both ways. They release charts, graphics and statements that give the appearance of being backed by math and science, while refusing to fully explain their methodologies,” he added.

According to him, the 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.

If Schulman’s claims are valid, that would render futile the current search being conducted in the Indian Ocean.

One wonders what Inmarsat and all the other authorities involved in the search for the missing plane, including the Malaysian government, are holding back.

Questions have been raised, pleas have been made and tears shed over the missing plane saga, but the authorities insist that the flight had met a watery end in the Indian Ocean, with nary a solid piece of evidence to back their claim.

The lack of convincing explanations for the aircraft’s disappearance have also made families of some passengers on board the flight to band together and form a group called Voice370. The group had recently issued an open letter to the governments of Malaysia, China and Australia.

They have called for the Malaysian government to release the raw Inmarsat data so that “it can be subjected to broader analysis by relevant experts”.

“In view of the lack of emergency locator transmitter activation and zero debris, we feel it is necessary that the data be subject to independent third party review.

“If Inmarsat's analysis is unable to rule out other flight paths as a possibility, that fact must be acknowledged,” Voice370 said.

Their concerns are understandable. Millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours have been spent scouring the vast and treacherous Indian Ocean looking for the missing plane but the authorities have nothing to show and convince the families that they were on the right track.

Any alternative theories put up by independent experts and concerned families immediately got shot down by those in charge, who hold on to the belief that the flight had indeed somehow vanished without a trace in the Indian Ocean.

What we know so far is the plane went missing on March 8, and the authorities claim it had crashed, with nothing to back up their theories. How much longer is their theory going to hold water? Only time will tell.

But for now, MH370 is also slowly but surely vanishing from the media glare or public attention.

The Ant Daily