The Malaysian Insider
May 07, 2014

Putrajaya must be transparent about the circumstances that led to flight MH70 vanishing two months ago, and should apologise for shortcomings in the search for the missing plane, the husband of one of the passengers wrote in an open letter to the prime minister.

K. S. Narendran, whose wife Chandrika Sharma was on the Malaysia Airlines plane with 238 other people, said the families have lost their loved ones but Malaysia had lost its credibility in the search for the Boeing 777-200ER.

“Perhaps the most serious casualty second only to the loss of the plane is the severely impaired credibility of your Government and the airline’s handling of the crisis.

“The skimpy Preliminary Report released to the public this week, supposedly based on your guidelines does little to enhance your government’s commitment to transparency, and therefore only adds fuel to doubts, suspicion and speculations,” he wrote in an email to Datuk Seri Najib Razak dated May 4, 2014. Read the rest of this entry »

By Gopi Chandra Kharel
International Business Times
May 6, 2014

The projected flight trajectory of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, shown by an arc, could have been a mistake. (Photo: Australian Maritime Safety Authority)

It appears that the authorities are not sure if the data gathered in the nearly two-month hunt for the missing Malaysia jet, which projected the likely flight trajectory of MH370 shown by an arc, was a correct analysis after all.

An international panel of experts is in the process of re-examining all data gathered so far, in order to be sure if the international team has been looking for the missing plane in the right place, officials said on Tuesday.

Senior officials from Malaysia, Australia and China met in the Australian capital to discuss the next move in search for MH370, after two months of intense efforts in the southern Indian Ocean yielded no tangible results. The meeting hashed out details of plans for another search operation that could take up to a year to complete and will cost about A$60million – an amount that has raised quite a few eyebrows.

Now that the authorities are not even sure if the search operation thus far for the missing MH370 plane was taking place in the right place, it is likely to raise further questions from the family members of the passengers aboard, as well as the public. Read the rest of this entry »

BY TIM HEPHER PARIS
Reuters
May 6, 2014

(Reuters) – European safety officials on Tuesday proposed tougher rules for ‘black box’ flight recorders in the strongest regulatory reaction yet to the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) said it would propose increasing the recording time on cockpit voice recorders to 20 hours from two to make it easier to understand plane accidents and prevent vital evidence being overwritten.

Newly published proposals would also bring into force recommendations made by French crash investigators after the loss of an Air France jet in the Atlantic in 2009, but which remain bogged down in talks among regulators.

These include the addition of a new pinger frequency making it easier to locate the recording devices under water, where lower frequencies travel further. Read the rest of this entry »

by Henry Austin
NBC News
6th May 2014

Only “a handful” of commercial vehicles can search the depths of the southern Indian Ocean in the area that is believed to be the final resting place of missing Flight MH370, an expert said Tuesday.

Officials announced Monday that all of the data compiled in the hunt for the Boeing 777 will be re-examined to make sure the right area is being scoured as part of a new $55-million phase of the operation.

Capt. John Noble, the former general manager of the International Salvage Union, told NBC News that it made sense to narrow down the search area as much as possible.

“You’d be lucky if there was a handful of vehicles that can to go to the sort depths of the ocean that we are talking about here because they simply don’t make them,” Noble said. Read the rest of this entry »

By David Molko, CNN
May 6, 2014

“I’m an engineer, so we don’t talk emotions too much.” Those were the words of Capt. Mark Matthews of the U.S. Navy shortly after the Australian Defense vessel Ocean Shield had discovered a series of pings in the southern Indian Ocean.Perhaps he didn’t want to discuss his feelings. But he had a twinkle in his eye, a bit of what he called “cautious optimism.” I’ve seen that same glimmer shining through on the faces of dozens of others involved in the arduous search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. It’s been there through each new lead, and even through some of the setbacks.

The search for the missing Boeing 777 has gone on for eight weeks now. We’ve all had to learn a new technical language: from Inmarsat satellite data and the “Doppler Effect,” to the TPL-25 and Bluefin-21. We’ve heard countless theories about where the plane might have gone and who might have been flying it.

Both the science and the science fiction have, at times, almost drowned out what this search is about at its core: solving the mystery of what happened to the 239 men, women, and children who were on board MH370. Read the rest of this entry »