Searcher Claims MH370 'found'?

#1

There’s a news article claiming someone reckons they found plane wreckage. Have we searched this area before? Can we open up a new campaign to search? Please note that this article is rapidly being deleted.

"Australian amateur crash investigator Peter McMahon has spent years poring over NASA and Google Maps images since the plane disappeared in the Indian Ocean four years ago and claims he now thinks he has found it.

He believes the aircraft is 10 miles south of small islet Round Island - an area not included in the search operation by experts.

Mr McMahon said he sent his findings to the Australian Transport and Safety Bureau, which confirmed it could be the missing craft."

Full article: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5839167/missing-flight-mh370-found-on-google-earth-riddled-with-bullet-holes-crash-investigation-expert-claims/

#2

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If the plane is submerged under water, how can anyone see that it’s “riddled with BULLET HOLES”, from a satellite image and through water :thinking:

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confused8

#3

Hey, it’s the image news paper, they’re renowned for reporting sensationalist journalism, conspiracy theories, alien sightings, etc, etc, etc, whether there’s any truth in it or not. It’s their stock-in-trade style of reporting non-news nonsense to sell their papers; prone to over exagerating and over sensationalising. Mostly renowned for their topless page three girls :unamused:

#4

Hi @Isaac1

Thank you for posting this. And welcome to the Forum!!

I read this last night and wondered the same things that Em brought up. The riddled with bullets seems outlandish – how would anyone have that much ammunition on an airplane?? And the hint of conspiracy, that gov’t does not want 370 found… Then why did multi gov’ts spend hundreds of thousands or more trying to search for 370.

In addition, I wondered about heights / depths.

Under 3rd Google result for search term “water depth near Rodrigues Island”
“Port Mathurin is 130 metres long with a water depth of 7.6 metres”

7.6 metres = 24 ft 11 inches

My next question was… how tall is a fuselage without its landing gear (whether just not engaged, or ripped off in a crash)? To find that, I needed to know what type of plane was M370.

It was a Boeing 777. This page http://www.modernairliners.com/boeing-777/boeing-777-specs/ says the fuselage and this page http://www.flugzeuginfo.net/acdata_php/acdata_7773_en.php give some dimensions.

The second link has this:
|Wing Span |60,93 m | 199 ft 11 in |
|Wing Area| 427,8 m² | 4605 ft²|
|Length| 73,80 m | 242 ft 2 in|
|Height|18,51 m | 60 ft 9 in|

Guessing, the bottom of the fuselage/storage area to top has to be over 20 ft without landing gear.

cached version: ( https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:91DH70PEFGYJ:https://courses.washington.edu/ie337/Boeing%20Tour%20Facts.pdf+&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us ) lists landing gear height as 14 ft or 4.27 m.

Tail height: Top of tail to ground 60 ft 9 in or 18.44 m

Somewhere in all these numbers we can estimate the height of the body, with no landing gear. Has to be over 20 feet high, right?

My point is, can an airplane be completely submerged if the water depth is 7.6 metres = 24 ft 11 inches ?? It seems to me the body of the plane would be higher than the waves.

That area is coral reefs, a destination for divers. Certainly divers would have spotted a plane in 4 years?

Another question I had was, were any wrecks occur near that island? I could not find any.

All that said…

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Waves are so misleading. Remember all the images we saw? Whales; angels, ships…

Again, welcome to the group!

#5

Oh I do love it when someone else does the maths for me; I get all dislexically befuddled when I attempt that. It takes me so long, I’d just lose track of the point of it altogether :dizzy_face: :blush:

#6

have run out of likes again, so will have to send a :sparkling_heart:

#7

Haha I know I know. However, it was the top news story on every australian news site the other day. As I mentioned the articles have since been deleted. The Sun was one of the only ones that still had it up

#8

Riddled with bullets - completely agree. His claim would be much more credible if he didn’t add this in. However, I think he is referring to it being shot down rather than shot from the inside.

Good work on the math. I think this holds up if the water is shallow there. However, the satellite image looks considerably deeper than 7.6m just by the colour of it.

White wave tips were the worst part of the initial tomnod search for 370… I marked so many little white things which I’m sure 99% of them were just waves. However, you have to give it to him… the ‘wave’ tips he found do look eerily similar to a plane. Maybe if the shape is still there in an updated satellite image then this could eliminate the wave theory? Is there a way to check this?

Also, the area he is claiming he found this image is within the right area for the plane to go down. It’s close enough to Madagascar to explain some of the debris washing up.

Either way, I’d love for tomnod to open up a new search within this area.

#9

I agree; the article wasn’t specific enough to pinpoint exact area to narrow down the water depth. Took the only clues given. It could be further out from shore than what the article made it sound.

Shot down… Planes typically cruise at 30,000 feet. Shot down would imply a military plane shot down the plane… at night… for no good reason… and that M370 still managed to fly that far? I’m against that theory. Or ground to air missiles ("riddled*) but those typically shatter/blow up stuff, not riddle. Long shot to hit a moving plane traveling away from land.

DigitalGlobe has said before that they would not redo this campaign. Water searches are just too hard. @Mel_Nod has said DG does not maintain a water images archives, so it would require that DG point the satellite that way. Maybe if all we need is the strip showing the “airplane”, IF we knew Lat & Long, we could ask pretty please,

#10

This map is from the Mauritius Wikipedia page, showing the bathymetry around Rodriegues Island

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#11

I tried out the coordinates show in this photo… not a shallow water area…

Not near Rodriguez and I don’t get any feedback on any Round islet or island anywhere out that way… I love the way schlock news gets published… no related images? Just grab anything from anywhere… Make up ‘alternate facts’ and other fake news…

As for a new search… not likely going to happen, although having some of the early passes on that area might be fun… we really didn’t get over there with 370 maybe one of the regional storms after 370…

#12

Yes, as Isaac1 said it was the top news story on every Australian news site then rapidly deleted…probably the minute they realised it was all fake news. ‘If it sounds too good to be true, then it usually is’ :smirk:

#13

I decided to keep looking, trying to identify the images posted.
Was successful finding A Round Island NE of Mauritiius… but all my stuff doesn’t show any real ocean surface imagery out to 10 miles or beyond except for narrow strips along the shorelines… depth indicator shows that most of bottom would be beyond visual range of the surface… Also ran this in Google Maps for comparison.
Google Earth History allows looking at older strips… could not find one for the date on the one strip presented… I may look at other map sites… I’ve also looked at most of the shoreline strips and lagoons… not much to see there either.

Still rings quite hollow as a story…

#14

It would be interesting to get some actual images of the area… or maybe we could contact the guy who is making the claims and get some info from him?

#15

So it seems the original article may have been a bit misleading… a conversation thread with the guy who was apparently making the claims: http://www.therock.net.nz/home/shows/thane---dunc/2018/03/thane-s-in-contact-with-the-man-who-s-found-missing-flight-mh370.html

Almost makes it more interesting.

#16

Thanks.

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More baloney. No one in the US has disappeared over this disaster.

#17

This ‘news’ story is a good example of why SAR groups are quite vigilant about talking to media… any vague comment can be blown up at any time.

We use semi professional people to make press statements and/ or closely supervise people being interviewed. That is the theory… the media can be quite demanding and sneaky.
Now when a non involved (officially) person says something that can be misinterpreted, especially when that person has some credentials of any sort…
then it can be pounced upon… That person might have some real evidence, but that is not important to the borderline media… It is good to see that this article shows that there is a more responsible tack to take… that is try to corroborate the original statements… that is, firstly get the original stuff straight… and as correct as possible. then try to duplicate that experience, and then try to see if anything is there now. In my previous notes on the subject I started by examining what was given in the news… pictures from here and there and statements in the texts.
I am a bit unclear why MY GE imagery can’t duplicate anything he posted… perhaps a version difference… or maybe they get different stuff in Aus.
All valid ideas… I am about to examine a photo from this article… might come up with something there… the ‘original’ version was cropped down so I try again.

Most important thing when doing an analysis like this is to keep from being shifted away from where it leads… I was being bounced all over the place by improper, non related images used… Did you try plotting the ‘asian’ appearing Lat Long in the one image… It, when corrected,(notice the order and format) doesn’t go anywhere near Mauritius… and is not from GE either… maybe another news source. I don’t believe it… and press on… I did note it for further examination.
And here we get the same information without that and with more attached.
I’ll go now and see what I find… have to move the images to another computer though… takes time.

As they say…
Always keep an open mind, but, not so much that your brain falls out!.

#18

That’s like The National Inquirer and a few others here in the U.S.! :laughing:

#19

I have found out a few things… like…
Lost capability… Seems that Google decided to update my versions of GE at some point and took it upon themselves to change my settings a bit… They have a nice, slow animation of waves for the ocean where they don’t have data… I thought my eyes were going funny… they are anyway… Off with the watery surface… that and a few related things that made it more like the old way… got a lot closer to the chance of finding some real ocean surfaces… and a lot more historic photo strips that didn’t get prepared to allow the wavey thing I’m thinking.
Still not great…

On another side, I thought I had found in today’s article a picture with the coordinate bar in tact… since that is what we would like re that picture… I tried to read it. got some, but it turned out that the photo a small one in a screen capture of a facebook message which makes it even smaller. I can make out part of it, so I’m pretty sure it is somewhere near Round Is. near Mauritius, but not that accurate. I’d accept the sharp eyes that might exist in our group… or a better version of that photo… with coordinates… To me that object looks like one or more of the fishing fleet that we ran into a lot on the SV Celebration search… which was in the Pacific and all over the place… Those seemed to be a single entity, but were more often two boats or more working together… or unloading to a mother ship… (not a UFO). I don’t think that it is an aircraft of any sort… this is the elongated one with the two labels… not the ‘whole airliner’ one. No location for that one either… the other one with the red letters I found as a Chinese news release using a Chinese video marked up with coordinates and an arrow pointing to a surface object… but out off of Austrailia .

Still nothing to show for the review here… Anybody else got anything new.
OH OH… my email just went off and I have an invite to home cooked meal… Guess what… Bye til later

#20

I took my son to the barbers today for much needed haircut :face_with_raised_eyebrow: I had to laugh as the top two papers on the table were The Sun and The Star :laughing: Oh and The Mail :roll_eyes:

And I know, I know, he’s 17 now (as of yesterday) and should be able to take himself off to the barbers without his mum to hold his hand. Trouble is he grumbles about needing a hair cut but won’t take the time to go do it. So today I offered him lift out of school…and drove him straight there before he could talk his way out of one :rofl: