In the past I've referred to them as the kids who couldn'tget a date for the prom. Now, I bet the engineers at the British satellite communicationcompany inmarsat will be the coolest kids of summer if the portion ofan airplane found in Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean turns out to be fromMalaysia Flight 370.
Jonathan Sinnatt, director of corporate communications for inmarsatsaid the company is not making any comment - certainly not before adetermination is made about whether the 6 foot long piece of what appears to bepart of a wing, is actually from the missing Malaysia Boeing 777.
They're mum now, but pocket-protector wearing communicationstechnologists at inmarsat haven't been quiet in the past. They've shared withthe scientific community the complicated formulas that allowed them to estimatewhere Flight 370 may have ended up. They opened their thought process tooutside review so others could comment and expand on what is known about thismysterious flight.
This is crowd sourcing at its finest and may provide alesson to the Malaysians and the Australians who have not been as open aboutsharing details of what they are up to.
Since selecting Fugro, a Dutch sub-sea engineering andexploration firm, to look for the airliner, all has been silent down underaccording to Colleen Keller, a mathematician at Metron Scientific Solutions.Her company helped the French air accident bureau find Air France 447 when it fellinto the Atlantic in 2009. She and others in the underwater search community complainabout the lack of information from the Australian-supervised search. Publishingdetails of their experiences would enable others to make suggestions andadvance the knowledge base.
"We don't know how well they've looked," she told me. "And wedon't have ship tracks that show where they dragged the sensors or at what depths." Answers to those questions and many morecan be programmed into a Bayesian math theory that weighs probabilities andhelps narrow and direct search efforts. It can also assign a likelihood to thequestion, 'if the plane has not been found, does it mean it is not there?'
How helpful is it when a global community of specialists contributethoughts on a particular problem? Ask inmarsat. They didn't pull theirassessment that the plane flew south into the Indian Ocean out of a hat. Theirinitial report evolved with the contributions of others.
Not all ideas are useful, however. For every valuable tip afar greater amount of nonsense is generated. I got that. The obvious big benefit tofinding a piece of MH-370 in the South Indian Ocean is that some nonsense, whatKeller calls the "anywhere else in the world" probability goes away.
Because aviation involves a considerable number of sophisticatedand highly technical components, it can be hard for the casual news consumer toseparate the plausible from the preposterous. This is crowd sourcing's dark side.
In my book being published by Penguin Books next spring, I tellthe story of several air disasters where it is the investigators who take advantage of thiscomplexity to bamboozle the public. Probable cause reports on air accidents thatjust don't hold up under scientific scrutiny include the crash that killed Dag Hammarskjöldin Zambia in 1961 and the death of 256 American soldiers and air crew on acharter from Gander Newfoundland in 1985 and the flight of a sight seeing Air New ZealandDC-10 into Mt Erebus in 1979.
For the most part, I'm upbeat on crowd sourcing because Ibelieve the scandalous deception in those crash investigations should be harderto accomplish in light of the 21 Century's global visibility. AndI'm sure that the families of MH-370 victims feel similarly though transparencyin the investigation and the search is a mixed report so far.
As we talked about the hopeful news from Reunion Wednesday,Keller reminded me of something that everyone assigned to solving the cash of themissing Boeing 777 ought to remember. "The whole world is waiting," she said.
And their bamboozle detectors are armed.