Malaysian Airlines MH370 and HMAS Success

The fate of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 has captured the imagination of the world.

It has also been accused of fuelling a Parliamentary diversion tactic to help minimise the damage from the resignation, or “Standing Aside” of Arthur Sinodinos from his portfolio of Assistant Treasurer. Surely our Government would not stoop to such self-serving tactics!

One of my associates in attempting to bring truth to the National Narrative has put a couple of facts together to draw an interesting conclusion. By putting together media reports of Tony Abbott’s pre-question time announcement on Thursday and previously unpublished screen grabs from the publically available “http://www.marinetraffic.com” he has spotted an apparent anomoly in the public timeline. Thank you Vince.

WHEN THE ANNOUNCEMENT WAS MADE

Beginning with the announcement by Tony Abbott, the public record is consistent with its reports of the announcement being made in Parliament at 2;07pm on Thursday 20th March.

While the Hansard is not yet available, reports at the time as well as live blogs all confirm that fact.

One example is that of the Canberra Times in its “The Pulse” blog

“2:07pm: The PM now updates the house on the missing Malaysian plane.

“I would like to inform the House that new and credible information has come to light …”

The PM says that the Australian Maritime Safety Authority has received information from satellite imagery about two objects that have been identified.

They may be related to the search.

A plane has been diverted to try and find it.

Three more will follow.”

News.com.au March 21, 2014 11:52AM has commented that there may be further questions to be asked about Tony Abbott’s handling of the situation.

. . . . if nothing of use is discovered Tony Abbott could be asked to further justify his announcement of ‘new and credible’ information before it could be further tested. Mr Abbott had not alerted Opposition Leader Bill Shorten yesterday of the statement he was to make – just before the start of a Question Time in which stood-aside Assistant Treasurer Arthur Sinodinos was going to be the chief subject of discussion. There is no hard rule on notifying an Opposition Leader of a statement, but frequently Prime Ministers will share information on a nonpartisan matter before it is released.

The big question comes from the Prime Minister’s own official website where, on Friday 22nd March 2014 it reported on a press conference held in PNG.

QUESTION: Prime Minister, what’s the latest on the search for the plane outside of Perth and also did you jump the gun yesterday by talking about it in Parliament?

PRIME MINISTER ABBOTT:  Shortly before Question Time yesterday we received credible evidence that there was debris in the Southern Indian Ocean, very close to the southern search corridor for ill-fated Flight MH370 and shortly after receiving that credible evidence, as you’d expect, I communicated it to Prime Minister Najib of Malaysia.

“Shortly before Question Time”! This was the phrase I thought I had heard as the PM rose to his feet in the House of Reps. Fine. So it was all happening and the information had been just handed to the PM, who, nontheless, had contacted the Malasian PM before coming into the House.

As Tony Abbott said, vessels and aircraft were already on the way to the area where the possible debris had been reported. Swift action by a very active Government. Very creditable.

WHAT WAS HMAS SUCCESS DOING AND WHEN?

Yet these screen grabs from the Marine Traffic website change the impression of urgency and instant responses.

Which looks quite innocuous until we find the next screen grab – which has a date and a time on it.

So I looked at Success on 19th march and saw that she had left Port Kwinana at 03.11 on 19th March. That is 8 hours behind WA time so WA time was 11.11am. On 19th march.

Here is a grab of its route to the time it went out of range.

Here is a screen grab, taken today, of the distance travelled (straight line), showing when it left Fremantle in a rather hard to read green box. Success is in about the same position as is shown in the image above which shows a UTC time of 12.03 (20.03 or 8pm WA time – I think) so the 7 hours from 11.11pm WA time fits when you take the northerly diversion around the North of Rottnest Is. into account

SUMMARY AND FINAL QUESTION

So, after a long, involved and documented discussion about what our Prime Minister said and how at least one media outlet had concerns, along with a series of screen shots showing the position of HMAS Success and when she left port, we come back to the question. Who knew what and when? Why did he not follow the convention of informing the Opposition Leader about the development? Had this information just come into the hands of our Prime Minister as he claimed or had he been sitting on it since the day before and waiting for the optimum time to release it? Not in any way to distract from his Government’s embarrassment over the Sinodinos affair.

On 20th march 2014 Abbott made his announcement about the Satellite Debris.  He said he got creditable information just before Question Time on 20th. However he must have known at least 24 hrs before because HMAS Success left port 26 hours before the announcement was made in Parliament. Before that sailing there would have been  a process of planning to equip, provision and man the ship. Even more hours to be added to the time.

I leave you, my patient reader, to draw your own conclusions.

Whew, I got through that whole post without mentioning the phrase “Lying to the Parliament”

I also failed to mention Peta Credlin, éminence grise extrordinaire