Scott Henderson’s “Assumed” Inmarsat Data Graphic Made an Ass Out of Him

by Scott Creighton

Thanks to the good work of some readers here, it seems that graphic that purports to show the missing Inmarsat ping data is baseless… completely devoid of factual references.

It was put together by a guy named Scott Henderson who apparently works for a global design firm, Woods Bagot, which has an aviation department. I wonder if they’ll be in line for a contract if Malaysian Airlines is privatized.

The graphic purports to show Flight MH370′s path plotted via the missing pings from that Inmarsat satellite data which we’ve all been wondering about. As it just so happens, that info was supposedly released to the NTSB who came out with a partial plotting of the last three hours of flight time which by coincidence, took the plane on it’s southern track possibility, right to where the Aussies found a “possible object” floating around in the waters of the Garbage Patch in the Indian ocean.

People had been wondering about the missing ping data from the news reports. That last ping just happened to coincide with an area that would be right about where the plane went off the transponder tracking, which logically would imply that it was sitting there in the South China Sea underwater and had been there since it disappeared off the radar. Coincidentally, it’s also the approximate location of that first oil slick the Vietnamese found and we were told to stop looking at by the Malaysian defense minister when he disclosed that ghost blip on their radar which headed right back to an area near Butterworth Air Force base on the west coast of Malaysia.

Then, along comes Mr. Henderson, a self proclaimed “information architect and knowledge curator”, with a graph of the plotting of those missing pings. Problem is, he made the whole thing up.

When his graphic was getting some attention, Mr. Henderson was asked straight out to provide a link to his source for those missing ping plots. Basically, people wanted to know where he found the data that put that flight at those specific distances from the Inmarsat satellite at those specific times.

Nelson Minar ‏@nelson

@_AntiAlias_ could you share an URL for the source of the rings for 01:11, 02:11, and 04:11? WashPo only has to 05:11 http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/satellite-locates-malaysian-flight-370-still-flying-seven-hours-after-takeoff/2014/03/15/96627a24-ac86-11e3-a06a-e3230a43d6cb_graphic.html …

Curiously enough, the Washington Post article Mr. Minar makes reference to is now gone. So even those few ping locations are missing as well.

Mr. Henderson replied to Mr. Minar:

Scott Henderson ‏@_AntiAlias_ 16h

@nelson no source these are my rough reverse extrapolation of NTSB tracks based on constant speed and track assumptions

Thus, Mr. Henderson’s tracking graphic of the Inmarsat ping data is bullshit. It’s based on nothing. As was apparently the Washington Post’s article which purported to show the tracking of those pings after 5:11 since they removed that article completely.

Here is Mr. Henderson’s graphic, the most recent one. To his credit, he seems to make a bit of a disclaimer in the legend on the side over there on the right. It’s no wonder that the person who published this graphic on Photobucket cropped that part of the image off so we wouldn’t see it.

Notice the graphic states the dotted lines are “assumed” while the solid one is “published NTSB highest PROBABILITY solutions”. again, that tells you right there, it’s based on nothing. That’s like saying since the New York Times published the WMD claims made by Condi Rice in the lead up to the Iraq invasion, they must have been correct without bothering to examine the source.

Even the part of the track that purports to show what was “detected by radar” is completely misleading. According to the Malaysian military and every other authority involved, that track shows a “blip” that wasn’t identified as Flight MH370… so for him to post that as a definitive track for the flight “detected by radar” is extremely dishonest.

And speaking of dishonest, let’s take another look at that picture that was linked to in the comment section of the Washington Post article which dared to ask the question “what about those missing pings?”

Here is the Photobucket link to the image that someone left using part of Mr. Henderson’s misleading graphic. This one is even more misleading as they have removed the subtlety worded disclaimer.

I want you to notice something about these two “possible” tracks which the NTSB created based on nothing at all.

Notice where the northern track goes. Straight through Pakistan.

I wonder how that will play out in the future after the search ends up failing and the plane is never found in the Garbage Patch off the coast of Australia?

Yeah, unfortunately, I think we all know how that will eventually work into the official story of some future “terrorist act”

But all that aside, let’s finally be done with Mr. Henderson’s “assumed” contribution to the search for Flight MH370. Because we all know what happens when we assume.