Could this be true?
It could be true. I want it to be true. But I don’t think it’s true:
A British aerospace engineer claims to have pinpointed the precise coordinates where Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 crashed and dropped to the bottom of the southern Indian Ocean, injecting new hope one of aviation’s great mysteries might finally be solved.
According to revolutionary aviation tracking technology used by Richard Godfrey, MH370 hit the ocean 1933km west of Perth, at 33.177°S 95.300°E, with the plane falling a depth of 4000 metres to the floor below.
“The prime crash location is at the foot of the Broken Ridge in an area with difficult underwater terrain,” Mr Godfrey’s report, released today, claimed…
Mr Godfrey’s research, which he claims will lead to the discovery of MH370 next year, is based on Global Detection and Tracking of Any Aircraft Anywhere (GDTAAA) software and Weak Signal Propagation Reporter (WSPR) data.
It’s astounding that it’s been almost eight years since that plane vanished.
CNN could send Anderson Cooper to cover the story. Relevance! Ratings!
Given that from satellite pings and bits of debris they know in a very rough way where the plane went down, it does surprise me that the Australian equipment has never located it.
Cornhead, you beat me to it! I was working overseas during the disappearance and subsequent search and it was 90% of CNN International’s coverage for months.
33.177°S 95.300°E qualifies as the middle of nowhere.
33.177°S 95.300°E qualifies as the middle of nowhere.
Brings to mind Point Nemo(48°52.6?S 123°23.6?W), which is geographically the farthest point from any land in the entire world ocean.
Most experts on HF propagation are very skeptical of Godfrey’s claims (See https://www.rtl-sdr.com/nils-critiques-the-mh370-wspr-aircraft-scatter-theory/). I’ve used WSPR before and it uses extremely weak signals and relies on heavy DSP and repeated broadcasts over hours to extract a single 50 bit message. It seems unlikely that the tiny variations from the scatter off a single airplane could be reliably detected from all the usual HF noise and large propagation variations.
@Art Decothey know in a very rough way where the plane went down, it does surprise me that the Australian equipment has never located it.
In Australia’s defense the ocean floor is really quite large compared with plane wreckage. Imagine being asked to find a specific penny that you know is lying on a street somewhere on the island of Manhattan. For your convenience, they’ll stop traffic while you look…
Plane parts are bigger than a penny, but then again there’s only 23 sq miles of Manhattan to search.
Using Google Earth it seems the 3 closest points of land to that place are Ile Amsterdam, Ile St. Paul and the SW horn of Australia all of which are slightly over 1000 miles away. Of course Google Earth or I may be missing some small island.
Yet, they still do not know what happened to Amelia Earhart.
Ahh Amelia….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1xLpdsIE-M
Yet, they still do not know what happened to Amelia Earhart.
They had a satisfactory idea from the beginning, one accepted by her husband. There’s been a mess of chaff thrown up over the years, one handful claiming she and her navigator were kept as prisoners by the Japanese government and (nuttiest of all) one which claimed she returned to greater New York and lived out her life in a new career and under an assumed name.
I’ll believe it when they find the wreckage.
Color me skeptical.
Even if he’s identified the exact location that the plane hit the water, if its debris descended through 4 kilometers of water before it reached bottom, the pieces are going to spread out across a huge area. This is evidenced by the pieces that have washed up on shores hundreds or thousands of miles away.
They might find an engine. Maybe. They might find a couple of other pieces of debris identifiable as having come from an aircraft; but the idea that they’re going to find anything big enough, or even enough pieces, to be considered “the aircraft” is a bit far fetched.
Only one way to find out, send a robot sub to the spot and see. Yes a engine should be basically intact and it’s a small straight pin to find in a corn field.
Good luck hunting
In 1950 a DC-4 crashed into Lake Michigan just off South Haven. It has never been located.
A bit over my pay grade, but a skim of the article suggests that would need real time from when it happened ionospheric calibration data from over the horizon radars — which belong to government security agencies — to stand a chance of his plan working.
Australia built one of these in the 1980s. Haven’t given it a thought since, but seem to recall it was pointed North to cover the Indonesian Archipelago and beyond. Did they ever aim one at the Indian Ocean (these are big fixed array things, can’t just rotate, I think).? Don’t know. By the 90s, peace was breaking out all over and the money would have gone on IVF for lesbians or literary grants for supposed Abos who are paler than I am.
It’s possible, I guess that various agencies have a good idea where this plane went down but don’t want to acknowledge capabilities. So a hint here and a nudge there to a ‘hobbyist’. Maybe?
Or maybe he’s cracked it all by himself in spite of the odds.
@Robert Shotzberger:In 1950 a DC-4 crashed into Lake Michigan just off South Haven. It has never been located.
Yeah they are still looking for it to this day. In fact two of the mass graves of the victims were lost and not rediscovered until 2008 and 2015. And it’s not like someone hadn’t known, at one time, exactly where they were… yet they could not be found.
The encouraging thing is that the location is more or less the same that was identified by the drift models that went on to predict probable locations for debris to wash up. And lo and behold, it eventually did, off Madagascar and areas of south-eastern Africa. As autonomous underwater vehicles continue to develop, I feel it’s likely that one will be dispatched to cruise a search pattern on this area using side-scan sonar and so forth, to see what’s on bottom. I think they’re using these now to chart the ocean bathymetry in detail, anyway. This water depth is a challenge though – if something were to be located it would be at or beyond the limitations of most present-day equipment to try to follow up.
Not sure what useful purpose it will serve though – aside from a merciful sense of closure for the families.
R’lyeh is a fictional lost city that was first documented in the H. P. Lovecraft short story “The Call of Cthulhu”, first published in Weird Tales in February 1928. R’lyeh is a sunken city in the South Pacific and the prison of the entity called Cthulhu.
* * *
The location of R’lyeh given by Lovecraft was 47°9?S 126°43?W in the southern Pacific Ocean. August Derleth placed it at 49°51?S 128°34?W. Both locations are close to the Pacific pole of inaccessibility or “Nemo” point, 48°52.6?S 123°23.6?W, a point in the ocean farthest from any land mass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%27lyeh
Gps is so fake they took 8 years to find it.