FAKE PINGS, FALSE HOPE: What the heck are the Malaysian and Aussie authorities doing!

SELAMAT Osmar answered his phone. It was Malaysian Airlines.

He listened with rising disappointment but could say nothing but thank you. He didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t really mean thank you. He was being polite.

What they told him was that four underwater “pings”, thought to have come from the black box of MH370 in early April off Perth, were in fact not from the black box.

The same call was being made to people around the world as the airline rushed to tell families the devastating news before they saw it in the media.

Mr Osmar’s son, Mohammed Khairul Amri Selamat, a 29-year-old aviation engineer, was one of 239 people on board the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777-200. He wants more action and less talking by authorities and he wants the truth.

In Beijing Sarah Bajc feels the same way. Her partner, Philip Wood, was on board the plane. He was the love of her life. Ms Bajc cannot believe what has gone on since the day she learned that the plane was gone and so was her soulmate.

Anger has now overtaken sorrow, frustration exists where before there was grief. What the families want is truth and transparency in the investigation and for the plane to be found.

But now, close to three months since MH370 disappeared in the early hours of March 8 this year, there is still no trace of the plane, not a single piece of debris and what was considered to have been the best lead yet has now been dismissed.

The four pings, heard on April 5 and 8, by a towed pinger locator, were in fact not from the black box. More likely they were from the ship used to tow the locator, the locator itself or were other underwater sounds.

Desperate for closure ... Sarah Bajc whose American boyfriend Philip Wood was on missing Malaysian Flight MH370. Picture: Facebook Source: Supplied

So now it is back to the drawing board. The entire area, along an arc where satellite data indicates the plane flew in the early hours of that morning, will now be searched. It is vast — 60,000 square kilometres of deep and inhospitable ocean which authorities say will take a year to search using sophisticated underwater sonar equipment.

Despite millions of dollars being spent, massive tracts of land and ocean searched by two dozen countries, sophisticated equipment deployed and new techniques devised to interpret communications satellite data, there is still no answer to the question: Where in the world is MH370?

Is it in the depths of the southern Indian Ocean, off the coast of Perth, as authorities suggest?

Or is it somewhere else? Did it in fact disappear in the South China Sea not long after it went off radar as it was about to cross into Vietnamese air space? Or did it fly up the northern arc, toward Kazakstan?

And what happened to it? Why did it go so radically off its course from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing? Was it a catastrophic accident or was it human intervention?

None of these questions have been answered.

Search area for MH370 ... but still there are no answers. Picture: Joint Agency Coordination Centre website. Source: Supplied

Ron Bishop is a former US Air Force commander of 23 years and headed up the US Air Force rescue and special operations school. Now an aviation lecturer at Central Queensland University, he has a view that what happened to MH370 was not sinister and was not the result of some mad conspiracy or the fault of the pilot or copilot.

Mr Bishop thinks it more likely it was a mechanical issue, a fire perhaps, or smoke in the cabin, which caused the pilots to start turning instruments off in a bid to isolate the problem, hence the transponder and communications systems being switched off at the time the pilot attempted to turn the plane around and fly back to Malaysia.

‘We know they took a left turn and came back towards Malaysia and that would suggest they had a problem,” Mr Bishop said. ‘They lost cabin pressure or something overcame them … Then the plane just flew itself until it ran out of fuel.” Everyone on board had passed away well before it plunged into the ocean.

Mr Bishop opines that theories, based on little other than rumour and innuendo, pointing the finger at the pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, or the copilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, made little sense.

MH370 Captain ... Zaharie Ahmad Shah. Source: Supplied

First officer and copilot ... Fariq Abdul Hamid. Source: News Corp Australia

Malaysian authorities have released few details about the police probe into the case other than saying they believe the communications systems were deliberately turned off and that police are investigating four areas, including sabotage, terrorism, personal or psychological problems of someone on board. It has never been explained why authorities believe the shutting down of the communication systems was a deliberate act.

No matter what it costs it is imperative to find MH370 and find out what happened to it to avoid the same thing ever happening again. “Something failed and we need to find out what that failure was so we don’t do it again,” Mr Bishop said.

Authorities around the world remain convinced that the plane turned around, flew back over the Malaysian peninsula, over the top of Indonesia and down into the southern Indian Ocean where it plunged into the sea. What they don’t know is exactly where in that massive expanse of ocean this plunge occurred.

Last week authorities finally bowed to pressure from the grieving families on board and released the raw satellite data, from an Inmarsat communications satellite, which was used to track the plane after it was last spotted on military radar at 2.22am over Penang, Malaysia.

But the 47 pages contained largely lists of figures which were incomprehensible to most. Family members, like Sarah Bjac, were angered, saying that data needed to crosscheck and peer review the results with independent experts, had not been included in the release and that it was meaningless.

Scouring the ocean ... the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has confirmed that missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is not in the search zone where acoustic pings were detected. Picture: Australia Department of Defence Source: Getty Images

A team of experts from Inmarsat and the highly-respected UK’s Air Accident Investigation Board, had crunched the figures and came up with the view that MH370 flew down a southern arc.

Seven times the plane did a so-called “handshake” or communication with the Inmarsat satellite over a six-hour period — at 2.28am, 3.41am, 4.41am, 5.41am, 6.41am, 8.11am and finally at 8.19am. At each of these times the plane was somewhere along an arc although precisely where on the arc cannot be ascertained, making the job difficult to say the least.

The final handshake with the satellite was at 8.19am, now believed to be as it was falling from the sky.

International search ... Able Seaman Maritime Logistics – Steward Kirk Scott keeping watch as the search took place off the coast of Western Australia. Source: AFP

It was only a partial handshake probably because by this time the plane had run out of fuel and shut down. It then powered up again, probably due to emergency turbines which start automatically in the event of power failure to allow some equipment to operate. Figures done based on the satellite handshakes also indicated that at the seventh arc MH370 was out of fuel.

The area of this arc covers 60,000 square kilometres. The whole lot now needs to be searched.

It won’t be easy. Dr Erik Van Sebille, an oceanographer from the University of New South Wales, says deep ocean research is about as difficult as space exploration and is “painstakingly slow” requiring sophisticated equipment.

He warns against criticism in relation to the sounds mistaken for the black box. The ocean, he says, contains a cacophony of different sounds, ranging from sounds made by whales to the clicking noises emanating from little shrimps.

It’s little solace to people like Selamat Osmar or Sarah Bajc. -News.com.au