In a statement today, MH370 China Families said experts who had studied the flaperon, which had been categorically identified as belonging to the missing Boeing 777, did not agree with the suggestion that it had floated there on its own.
One such expert, they said, was aviation writer Jeff Wise, who after commissioning a study of the marine growth photographed on the flaperon, had come to the conclusion that “the object did not float there from the plane’s presumed impact point, but spent four months tethered below the surface”.
They said the French internal report by Pierre Daniel similarly concluded that the distribution of marine growth over the surface of the flaperon showed that it was completely submerged, yet French flotation tests showed much of the flaperon above the waterline.
“… if the flaperon did not freely float to Reunion, this, along with any other debris, needs to be viewed with suspicion,” they said in the wake of the failed search for the plane’s wreckage.
The statement also dwelled on the suggestion posted on a forum for physicists in May 2014 that Inmarsat and the Malaysian authorities might have colluded to tamper with satellite data before they were released.
“Following the March 8, 2014 disappearance of MH370, Najib Razak, prime minister of Malaysia, announced on March 24, 2014, that flight MH370 terminated in the Southern Indian Ocean. This, he said, was determined by a new form of analysis of the Inmarsat satellite ping data.
“China families immediately called for the release of both this data and associated analysis.
“After a delay of more than two months, the data was released on May 26, 2014. Two days later, a contributor to a physicists’ blog site claimed that he had pointed out the flaws in the data analysis, only to have the data modified to conceal the flaws and to conform to the March 24 announcement.”
They said the contents of the blog was in their media release.
A protracted surface and ocean floor search in the area off Australia has since failed to find any evidence of MH370, they said.
“We arrive at the third anniversary of MH370’s disappearance with no evidence and no answers.”