Model Disclaimer

The wreckage-location engine produces a probability distribution over position, conditioned entirely on the evidence you supplied. A 90% containment contour means that, if the model's assumptions hold and your inputs are accurate, the wreckage lies inside the contour in nine of ten equivalent scenarios. It does not mean the wreckage is there.

Hypothesis rankings express relative consistency between a proposed mechanism and the evidence in the ledger. They are not probabilities of causation and carry no evidential weight of their own.

• Garbage in — an incorrect last known position, an inverted wind vector or a mis-timestamped fix will move the answer by tens of kilometres with no warning sign in the output.
• Unmodelled control input — a deliberate or sustained manual input after the last fix violates the sampled trajectory family and can place the aircraft entirely outside the contour.
• Drift over long durations — surface drift error grows superlinearly with elapsed time; multi-day searches should re-run with updated current fields rather than relying on the original field.
• Bathymetry resolution — GEBCO grid spacing is coarse relative to sonar swath planning; local terrain can invalidate a sector plan.
• Detection model — assumed probability of detection for a sweep is an estimate; an optimistic value causes the Bayesian update to wrongly downweight a swept area that was in fact searched badly.

Known failure modes and back-test results are documented in full on the Methodology page, including cases where the model performed poorly. We publish the misses deliberately.

Transcription of cockpit, ATC and interview audio and extraction from documents are machine-generated. They mishear, they hallucinate plausible words in noise, they lose speaker attribution under crosstalk, and they degrade on non-native accents and non-English speech.

Every AI output enters the ledger unverified and labelled. Verification by a competent human against the source recording is mandatory before the record is treated as evidence. Do not quote a machine transcript in a report without that verification.

Deployment of search vessels and assets, allocation of search effort, calling off a search, grounding an aircraft or fleet, issuing an airworthiness directive or safety recommendation, disciplinary action, prosecution, and settlement of a claim are decisions for the competent human authority. Platform output is one input among many and must never be the sole basis for any of them.

Search operations at sea carry risk to life. Treat the contour as a prioritisation aid subject to the judgement of the search coordinator, who holds information the model does not.

The engine is back-tested against historical hull losses with known recovery positions, and the results — containment rate and mean error — are published on the Validation page and refreshed as the model changes. Back-test performance is retrospective and against a small sample; it does not guarantee performance on your occurrence, which may differ in ways the sample does not cover.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, no warranty is given that any reconstruction is correct, that any hypothesis reflects actual causation, or that wreckage will be found within any contour. Liability is limited as set out in the Terms of Service.