‘Consensus’ on MH370 theory cut from report

Agencies guiding the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 have deleted of a claim of ‘consensus’ over the loss.

Investigators examine a piece of aircraft debris found off the coast of Tanzania.

Federal government agencies guiding the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 have failed to explain or even acknowledge their mysterious deletion of a claim they had “consensus” support from international scientists and air crash investigators for their “death dive” theory of how the aircraft came down.

As revealed by The Australian last week, a regular weekly bulletin issued by the Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre on July 27 downplayed reports that MH370 captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah might have glided the aircraft after it ran out of fuel to a position in the southern Indian Ocean that could be outside the current search area.

ATSB chief commissioner Greg Hood has recently promoted such a narrative in conjunction with the Malaysian government and Malaysian Airlines.

Mr Hood has insisted that analysis of Inmarsat satellite tracking data by Defence scientists had ­concluded that MH370 rapidly descended in an unpiloted crash.

The JACC bulletin of July 27 similarly sought to discredit the increasingly popular “controlled glide” theory, saying “for the purposes of defining the underwater search area, the relevant facts and analysis most closely match a scenario in which there was no pilot intervening in the latter ­stages of the flight”.

The bulletin initially said such a conclusion had been supported by a consensus of the Search Strategy Working Group, made up of experts from Inmarsat, Boeing, the US Nat­ional Transportation Safety Board, aerospace group Thales, the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch, the Malaysian Department of Civil Aviation and the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation.

But the following day, July 28, the JACC bulletin was amended online without explanation to remove the “consensus” line.

British aerospace engineer Richard Godfrey told The Australian the most likely explanation for the “consensus’’ line removal was that one of the experts on the strategy group complained that they did not support such a conclusion.

While the bulletin is issued in the name of the JACC, which is run out of the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development, it is prepared and issued by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.

JACC director Annette Clark and ATSB spokesman Daniel O’Malley would not answer questions about MH370.

Last Friday the ATSB ­published an item on its website under the heading “Correcting the ­Record”, saying The Australian’s report “falsely accused” the ATSB of secretly retracting information. “All the members of the Search Strategy Working Group have reviewed DST Group’s analysis and no objections to the analysis have been provided,” it said. But the ATSB did not acknowledge the fact the deletion was made, explain the reason, nor has the JACC restored the “consensus” line in the online version of the bulletin.

The Australian has obtained a copy of the original bulletin, which reads: “The last satellite communication with the aircraft showed it was most likely in a high rate of descent in the area of what is known as the 7th arc.

“This is indeed the consensus of the Search Strategy Working Group.”

The “consensus” line was reported internationally at the time, including by China’s Xinhua news agency, and Malaysia’s Bernama news service, but as of yesterday it remained deleted from the revised version of the bulletin on the ATSB website.

Mr Godfrey, who is a member of the Independent Group of ­scientists, engineers and other ­experts following the MH370 saga, first picked up the change in the bulletin.