Cont: The Sinking of MS Estonia: Case Re-opened Part III

[Andy_Ross]

It is an early day report, within 24 hours of the accident and every single report including that of Koivisto, JAIC-appointed tells you it is an automatically-activated EPIRB with an HRU automatic release when submerged in water.

Not being funny but your denials remind me of anti-vaxxers, blind to factual information.

No. It says automatic transmit which it does after it is activated.


When they buoys were recovered they were seen not to be automatic activation models.
You yourself posted the model designation which shows they are not automatic activation.

Why would you take a newspaper report from 'within 24 hours of the accident' over the later official report of the recovery and testing of the buoys?

 

[JayUtah]

It is an early day report, within 24 hours of the accident and every single report including that of Koivisto, JAIC-appointed tells you it is an automatically-activated EPIRB with an HRU automatic release when submerged in water.

Asked and answered. Koivisto is not an expert in EPIRBs.

Not being funny but your denials remind me of anti-vaxxers, blind to factual information.

You haven't shown it to be fact. You've shown clearly erroneous early news reports, as well as your uncanny ability to read into them what you want to hear regardless of what they actually say.

You've been given the facts regarding the EPIRBs, from primary sources. You're scrambling instead to save face.

 

[Steve]

You're scrambling instead to save face.

Well there is a lost cause if ever I have seen one.

 

[Vixen]

So he gets place names mixed up and times wrong and you think he is reliable?

It is understandable, as Swedish is an official language in Finland, thus every place name has a Finnish name and a Swedish name. So, when he was interviewing people in Sweden, they would have of course, used their Swedish version. Also the East European Time Zone starts in the middle of the Baltic, so that too, is forgiveable. We know the time of the accident was 0100, so when he says the first helicopters arrived at 0200 we know he means 0300.

He too has the first helicopters leaving Berga as just after 0200, just as Aftonbladet of 28.9.1994, does except he has Y74 and Aftonbladet has Y64

Stefan Olsson of Y74 first to leave Berga and arrived at 0300. This is interesting as JAIC has Y64 and Y74 supposedly not arriving until about 0600

Y 64 took off from Berga at 0445 hrs, picked up a physician and a nurse from Huddinge Hospital and arrived at the scene of the accident at 0552 hrs.

JAIC report

JAIC has Y74 arriving nearer to 0700.

Y 74 (Boeing Kawasaki)
Y 74 took off from Berga at 0546 hrs. Carrying a physician and a nurse from Huddinge Hospital, Y 74 reached the scene of the accident at 0642 hrs.

ibid

Why has the JAIC only reported these two helicopters as arriving relatively late - as compared to others - and only rescuing seven.

Swedish Navy helicopter Y 64 1
Swedish Navy helicopter Y 74 6

Yet Kenneth Svensson and Olli Moberg/Stefan Olsson were proclaimed in early Swedish papers as great heroes. (Which, of course, they were in their own right.)

From that helicopter Olle Moberg, also 27 years old, was lowered. He managed to secure a new wire around the hero Kenneth Svensson, who was close to lose his own life in the battle to rescue survivors from the Estonia. ...
(Aftonbladet Wednesday 28 September 1994 ; by Sven-Anders Eriksson)
Kenneth Svensson assisted as rescue man in one of the first three Vertol-helicopters that left from Berga naval base outside Stockholm. The time was then just after two o'clock in the night

Aftonbladet Wednesday 28 September 1994.

According to Aftonbladet, Svensson saved 8 or 9.

 

[JayUtah]

It is understandable...

It's understandable that he would get one set of details wrong, but not understandable that he would get a different detail wrong, a technical one outside his field of expertise? You seem to be cherry-picking the evidence pertaining to the reliability of his reporting.

You said he was a journalist, but it seems he spent more time as a journalism professor at the private university just to the south of me. You said journalists need sources, which I agree they do. What was his source for the claim that the EPIRBs were immersion-activated?

 

[Vixen]

Some good footage here, released by the Swedish Defence Forces of an Estonia helicopter rescue.

 

[JayUtah]

You're not answering the questions, Vixen. What was Jack Nelson's source for the claim that the EPIRBs were immersion-activated? Why should we trust his reporting on such details when he gets other such details wrong? How could the EPIRBs transmit their positions, as your other source claimed, when they have no way of knowing their position?

 

[Vixen]

You're not answering the questions, Vixen. What was Jack Nelson's source for the claim that the EPIRBs were immersion-activated? Why should we trust his reporting on such details when he gets other such details wrong? How could the EPIRBs transmit their positions, as your other source claimed, when they have no way of knowing their position?

It's not an academic textbook, hence there are no notes. It is a descriptive narrative of the survivors' accounts, together with some necessary background.

He is not postulating any theory but he does point out that Arlanda Airport's (Stockholm) shortwave radio was also not working - together with Stockholm knowing nothing at all about the emergency until 0157 when it rang up Finland to find out - and thus, Sweden's helicopters also had problems in communicating with important contacts whilst underway.

It is all very well saying the EPIRB's or the communications being down didn't have any effect - which I dispute - but that is not an excuse for the JAIC to not to investigate this issue IMV. If the communications were sabotaged, the public has a right to know about it and by whom and how.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

Yet more documentary evidence the Estonia EPIRB's were automatically-activated ones, as well as being of automatic release.



Helsingin Sanomat 29.9.1994 0200

Helsingin Sanomat is on a par with Der Zeit, Herald Tribune, Le Monde or Repubblica, Frankfurter Allgemeine, et al, before anyone calls it a 'finnish [sic] backwater rag].


Q.E.D. ::

No. There's nothing in that quote which says the EPIRBs were automatically activated, and obviously it's wrong about their only being one, about its being designed to transmit its coordinates and about it's going down with the ship. Looks like zero out of four.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Communications were not 'down' or 'sabotaged'

You have been shown a full timeline of events and radio traffic.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

every single report including that of Koivisto, JAIC-appointed tells you it is an automatically-activated EPIRB

You keep claiming that but it keeps not being there in the stuff you quote.

 

[JayUtah]

It's not an academic textbook, hence there are no notes.

So an unsourced claim reported by a non-expert as mere background to a human narrative.

He is not postulating any theory...

Irrelevant. You're citing him as an authority for the claim that the EPIRBs were immersion-activated. But he is not an expert and, despite your statement that as a journalist he would rely on outside sources, you're unable to determine what sources, if any, he relied upon for this claim.

It is all very well saying the EPIRB's or the communications being down didn't have any effect - which I dispute...

You can't put anything behind that disputation except your own inexperience and your inability to read your sources accurately. And it's such a very curious hill to die on. Every day you come up with what you think is a new slam-dunk to prove the EPIRBs were immersion-activated. It seems to be less about finding out what the truth is and more about you avoiding an admission of error.

Yes, we all know you hate the JAIC and you have your own highly-expert, well-experience opinion that they should have done things differently. But do try to stick to the point and avoid vilifying them at every turn. It's a desperate argument.

 

[whoanellie]

Erratum: Loyola.
"Who is Apprentice House?
Apprentice House Press is a book publisher based at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore. We publish books in diverse genres. Our criteria? The work must be good, and the author must be good with whom to work."
https://www.apprenticehouse.com/

That last sentence in "Who is Apprentice House" is a doozy.

 

[LondonJohn]

Yet more documentary evidence the Estonia EPIRB's were automatically-activated ones, as well as being of automatic release.



Helsingin Sanomat 29.9.1994 0200

Helsingin Sanomat is on a par with Der Zeit, Herald Tribune, Le Monde or Repubblica, Frankfurter Allgemeine, et al, before anyone calls it a 'finnish [sic] backwater rag].


Q.E.D. ::

Good grief. Can you not see what you're doing here, Vixen?

You're very obviously trawling the internet for anything that (you think) supports your (incorrect) claim about the EPIRBs.

But for all your efforts - which I imagine are fairly considerable, pathetically - you keep dragging up nothing more than contemporaneous media reports that were made when the actual facts were not yet properly known. They are speculation. Nothing more or less than that.

In this particular instance, the person quoted is trying to figure out why the EPIRB signals weren't picked up that night. His supposition is that it was because the EPIRBs went down with the ship (and, activated or not, they cannot transmit through a large column of water).

But the source didn't know at that point - because nobody knew at that point - that the EPIRBs had indeed released (automatically) and floated free on the surface after the ship sank. So, what actually happened was not what he was supposing might have happened. He also obviously didn't know the specification of the EPIRBs (and their deck mounts) - because if he had, he'd have known that his supposition was wrong, and that EPIRBs wouldn't have gone down with the ship.

It's also easy to infer that he didn't know whether the Estonia's EPIRBs had automatic activation or were manual-only. Because few if any people - outside of the ship's owners and whoever last maintained the buoys - actually did know at that point. So his low-information supposition (and that's all it ever was, Vixen: a supposition, not a statement of fact), however sincerely it was intended, was factually wrong on two counts: 1) the EPIRBs did not fail to operate because they had gone down with the ship (because they were auto-released, which he clearly didn't know at that time); and 2) the real reason why the EPIRBs failed to operate was because a) they were manual-activation only, and b) nobody in the crew remembered to (manually) switch them on.


Q. E. D.

 

[GlennB]

Erratum: Loyola.

Who is Apprentice House?
Apprentice House Press is a book publisher based at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore. We publish books in diverse genres. Our criteria? The work must be good, and the author must be good with whom to work.

https://www.apprenticehouse.com/

If that is the standard of their English then I wouldn't trust their assessment of anything literary.

 

[LondonJohn]

From his author profile:

He is from Utah. He makes some mistakes in thinking Åbo and Turku are two different towns and seems not to realise there is both a Swedish and a Finnish archipelago, plus he muddles up Swedish time with the time zone of the accident site. Apart from that he makes a good fist of it, IMV.

Trouble is: YV has proved to be extraordinarily deficient on a consistent basis when it comes to an understanding of this disaster, Vixen.

I didn't spot any spelling mistakes, and they usually leap out.

Did he spell as many people's names incorrectly as you do on a constant basis?

I thought it was a good read, in fact. Good quality hardback but no photo plates, though.

Good. All in all, an excellent and trustworthy review/assessment/endorsement from you. I must get myself a copy and read it ASAP.


(Not)

 

[LondonJohn]

Erratum: Loyola.

https://www.apprenticehouse.com/

"Apprentice House" LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

(There's a publisher's name to inspire confidence in prospective readers )

 

[LondonJohn]

It is an early day report, within 24 hours of the accident, and every single report including that of Koivisto, JAIC-appointed tells you it is an automatically-activated EPIRB with an HRU automatic release when submerged in water.

Not being funny but your denials remind me of anti-vaxxers, blind to factual information.

Jeez, you really can't see how this is a gigantic reason why those reports were incomplete and inaccurate, and were largely based on supposition and inference rather than hard facts?

A very early newspaper report, prior to any form of actual investigation, is not "factual information", Vixen.


(And don't worry: you're not being funny)

 

[JayUtah]

"Apprentice House" LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL



(There's a publisher's name to inspire confidence in prospective readers )

It's mean to play on the name Prentice Hall, a respected publisher. Apprentice House is run by students under faculty supervision to teach the business of publishing.

 

[LondonJohn]

It's mean to play on the name Prentice Hall, a respected publisher. Apprentice House is run by students under faculty supervision to teach the business of publishing.

Exactly. It's not what one would term a "real" publisher. And its name is a clear indicator of that.

I can't somehow see Bernstein and Woodward having had "All the President's Men" published by Apprentice House (even if they'd offered the authors a king's ransom as an advance...)