Originally Posted by awblain
If you don't trust the Inmarsat data, then there's nothing else to go on.
Thank you for interjecting a massive dose of sensibility. I have also read Duncan Steel's blog and it is long on hubris, and a deep self-satisfaction smugly based on exploiting the fact that not all technical details are revealed (I am redundant; I guess that self-satisfaction he oozes can be called "hubris," too). Back-tracking from press releases and simplified graphics is not a way to do science, regardless of how hard he implies it is. It just seems terribly self-aggrandizing and without sufficient details to refute the Inmarsat assertions prior to a comprehensive review.
Again, thank you. Very little is publicly known. Trying to extrapolate much more from press releases is not only futile, it's foolish. It seems we now have more high-profile media fools in this tragedy than we have victims.
Perhaps in the future we'll have a new phrase, the "Malaysian Ratio" - the number of self-professed, highly paid experts who talk confidently about something they honestly know nothing about, vs. the real experts working day and night to solve the real crisis. I think the ratio is running 1,000:1 at the moment.
Originally Posted by awblain
If I wanted to bet on the most likely to be successful, I'd put my money on the submarine.
Agreed, but only if the ssn is very,very near the impact point. Nothing from Inmarsat points to a search zone any one or multiple acoustic searches can grid search in a short while. While
Tireless may have both sensitivity and specificity for this task, it won't have range. I honestly believe several US SSBN's are tasked likewise, but I do not believe it will help in a significant way, and it would be self-serving to claim it for a
PR benefit.
I am going on record as saying this will be found. It may be a year or two. It may be within a month. Like AF447, the CVR and FDR will eventually be in competent air-board hands. It may take a while, but the search to find an answer is not going to be given up. The answer is going to be prosaic - it may be a single human-driven event. Or it may be a massively improbably technical one. But it is not going to be a massive conspiracy on behalf of multiple nation-states as the swell of opinion seems to favor.