MH370: Australia Seems Conspiring to Hide Something, Random Letter Sparks Questions on Au’s Security Radar
A random letter from John Williams from Lemon Tree Passage posted to Newcastle Herald's opinion section is now stirring interest from conspiracy theorists.
Mr William's letter said that Australia's security system is capable of tracking MH370 but why this system did not track the plane is such a perplexity.
"REGARDING missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Australia has a very high-tech, early warning coastal security system formally called the Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN).It can track surface craft as well as aircraft the size of a Cessna 182 at 3000 kilometres. If an unidentified aircraft, as suggested, came down our north-west coast, automatic alarms should have activated. If an aircraft the size of Boeing 777 with no identity response got through, what next? Or did it not enter our airspace?"
Curiously, a journalist named Peter La Franchi commented in detail, expressing his opinion that Australia, clearly has a lot more explaining to do, and on a wide number of fronts.
According to Mr La Franchi JORN has a range of at least 12,300km. The capability of this system was shown to journalists, himself included, through the Laverton radar station and the central control station in Adelaide in September 1999. He said Defence had actually demonstrated JORN's capability when the system was utilised by US to test its radar technology as was written in a press release dated July 27 2004. He implied that indeed, with JORN, MH370 should have been detected by Australian radar.
Mr La Franchi explained further that the Laverton, WA radar is aligned as a right angle, with the two array antenna extending from just west of north to due south west and due south east.
"This means this a permanent lobe of the radar facing across the Indian Ocean. The radar can be seen on Google Earth at -28.314032, 122.843153. If the radar is switched on, then the left lobe can only look directly into the Northwest, which is the identical direction the radar must look if it is to monitor the approaches to Australia's island territories. If as Defence has claimed, in statements to a number of media on 17-18 March 2014, that JORN was monitoring the northwest shelf area out to the island territories, then the left lobe was clearly switched on," he explained thoroughly.
With this, he explained that JORN can search most of the way to India.
"Given this, the only way for the radar not to have detected something like MH370 is for it to be switched off at the time, which raises its own questions."
The most interesting detail the Mr La Franchi pointed out is that Australia, Malaysia, Singapore and the United Kingdom jointly operate the Five Power Defence Arrangement (FPDA) integrated air defence centre based in Malaysia.
He said that Australia had even funded the modernisation of the centre back in 1990. The modernisation entailed for the centre to be able to "recognised air picture" of all of Southeast Asian airspace using feeds from both civil and military radars.
"That centre has a live feed into the Australian Air Defence Ground Environment (ADGE) which underwent extensive modernisation across the 2000s. The FPDA integrated air defence data is fused with data from JORN in the ADGE, with this data available in real time at centres in Adelaide, Canberra and Newcastle," he explained.
With this information at hand, Mr La Franchi could not understand why MH370 was never detected by Australian system.
"If the FPDA recognised air defence picture was operating - and it appears from Malaysian media claims that it was - then Australian defence force personnel would have been able to see that same data at the same time."