Australia confesses the prediction of where debris would wash up was wrong—and that they knew it several months ago.
Many experts had already assumed what French investigators have now confirmed: The Boeing 777 flaperon washed up on a beach of Réunion Island came from Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370.
Among the people who didn’t wait for the French announcement, the most significant were those leading the search for the remains of the 777 at the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.
For many months the Australians had been working on computer models that attempted to predict where any floating wreckage would end up. This work led them to make a widely reported prediction that wreckage would turn up on the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia last July.
The Daily Beast made repeated requests for information about the model on which this projection was based. In June, ATSB spokesman Martin O’Malley said: “Detailed drift modeling has been undertaken to supplement the original work that identified the western coast of Sumatra as the most likely first landing for debris. The work, once finalized, will be released.”
This week the Australians made a startling confession: Their first computer modeling was seriously flawed, and they had known this when O’Malley made his statement.
It was only after a new model was produced by a different group of oceanographers that the mistake came to light.
“An error was found in the way in which wind data was being transferred into the first model.” The Sumatra prediction was wrong by thousands of miles, and so was the timing: “There was an extremely low probability that any debris from MH370 would have made landfall at that time.”
05/08/15 Clive Irving/Daily Beast
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Many experts had already assumed what French investigators have now confirmed: The Boeing 777 flaperon washed up on a beach of Réunion Island came from Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370.
Among the people who didn’t wait for the French announcement, the most significant were those leading the search for the remains of the 777 at the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.
For many months the Australians had been working on computer models that attempted to predict where any floating wreckage would end up. This work led them to make a widely reported prediction that wreckage would turn up on the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia last July.
The Daily Beast made repeated requests for information about the model on which this projection was based. In June, ATSB spokesman Martin O’Malley said: “Detailed drift modeling has been undertaken to supplement the original work that identified the western coast of Sumatra as the most likely first landing for debris. The work, once finalized, will be released.”
This week the Australians made a startling confession: Their first computer modeling was seriously flawed, and they had known this when O’Malley made his statement.
It was only after a new model was produced by a different group of oceanographers that the mistake came to light.
“An error was found in the way in which wind data was being transferred into the first model.” The Sumatra prediction was wrong by thousands of miles, and so was the timing: “There was an extremely low probability that any debris from MH370 would have made landfall at that time.”
05/08/15 Clive Irving/Daily Beast
