MH370 - Bad news about false pings in Indian Ocean leaks out

BEN SANDILANDS | MAY 13, 2014 9:06AM

Am image found on Twitter of a relative signing an MH370 Wall of Hope

While nothing official has yet been said about the MH370 data review which began in Canberra last Wednesday, some bad news has made it into the US media.

To quote:

The Wall Street Journal reports that authorities now suspect only the two transmissions detected April 5 are relevant to the search. Australian naval Cmdr. James Lybrand, captain of the Ocean Shield search vessel, told the Journal that a close analysis of signals detected April 8 raised doubt that they were from a man-made device.

Each of the transmissions on April 8 were intermittent and at a frequency of around 27 kHz — much lower than the 37.5 kHz frequency that black box beacons were designed to emit, Lybrand said. The April 5 transmissions were 33.3 kHz, Lybrand told the Journal.

Authorities remain hopeful that two April 5 signals are relevant, saying the low frequency could have been the result of weakening batteries and difficult deep-sea conditions, the Journal reported.

There are few other clues.

Signals picked up early in the search by British navy vessel HMS Echo were later determined to have been noises from the ship itself. A detection from a sonar buoy dropped in the ocean came from a passing commercial freighter.

There are signs that the Australian coordinated search body, the JACC, may be involved in an update or briefing today, as none other than Malaysia’s acting transport minister and defence minister Hishammuddin Hussein had tweeted last week that there would be such an event today.

Caution is advisable in trying to read too much into concerns about the future and past course of the search for the Malaysia Airlines 777-200ER with 239 people onboard that vanished on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on 8 March.

That is, the questioning and doubting is appropriate where it is made on scientific or analytic grounds, but this doesn’t mean the flight did not as investigators believe, come down in the Indian Ocean somewhere to the west, or northwest, or even southwest of Perth some 1600 kms out to sea.

The passive satellite stand by signals exchanged between an Inmarsat and MH370 show that the jet was airborne for seven hours 38 minutes.

The searchers therefore know how long it took to crash, but they do not know where.

Source: http://blogs.crikey.com.au