Originally Posted by
RichardC10
The problem with this story is that the reporter has gone to Inmarsat for fact-check and got "your story is entirely wrong" yet he has still published.
He got "your story is wrong but we won't tell you why it's wrong". The technical term for this is "stonewalling". If I were him, I would have published too. The conclusion - that 'until officials provide more information, the claim that Flight 370 went south rests not on the weight of mathematics but on faith in authority' - seems undisputable.
by law they are prevented to release such information if they are participants in the investigation.
By whose law and in which jurisdiction?
Yet this story implies they are completely incompetent (or worse) and by extension also AAIB who have stood behind this analysis in its presentation to the Malaysian authorities.
Well, that's one possible interpretation. Another is that they were given "MH370 did not enter Indian airspace" as an input and they gave a competent conclusion that was conditional on that. In this scenario, failure to produce a northbound track in late March was an understandable oversight rather than incompetence. By now they can't revise their conclusions, because Australians spent something like $43m based on their word and they'd be exposing themselves to a huge liability if their information proved false. It's a classic case of "no good deed goes unpunished". This is why big companies have lawyers checking every word of every press release and every bit of information that is released to the public. The fact that Inmarsat got voluntarily involved at all seems like a lapse of judgement on their lawyers' part.