The “highest levels” of the former Malaysian Government who believed from “very early on that the MH 370 tragedy was a murder-suicide plot must now speak up.

Both Malaysians and Australians must be shocked by the Australian Skynews announcement that former Australian Prime minister Tony Abbott has revealed Malaysian authorities believed the disappearance of flight MH370 was a case of pilot murder-suicide, as 50 Malaysians and six Australians, apart from 153 Chinese, seven Indonesians, four French, three Americans, two New Zealanders, two Canadians, two Iranians, two Ukrainians as well as from other nationalities were among the 239 persons who died in the air tragedy.

Abbott made the explosive comments in part one of Sky News documentary ‘MH370: The Untold Story’, which would be aired tonight.

“My understanding – my very clear understanding – from the very top levels of the Malaysian government is that from very, very early on here, they thought it was a murder-suicide by the pilot,” said Abbott who was Australian premier when the plane disappeared on March 8, 2014.

“A mass murder-suicide by the pilot,” said Abbott in a stunning claim.

The world would be waiting for the airing of the two-part investigation tonight and tomorrow night by Skynews as it reveals ground-breaking new details about the MH370 disappearance, which vanished from the radar screen while on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, and which had continued to baffle aviation experts, family members, friends and people from all over the world.

It would appear an international commission of inquiry into the MH 370 disappearance would be necessary as a result of Abbot’s revelations.

(Media Statement by DAP MP for Iskandar Puteri Lim Kit Siang in Gelang Patah on Wednesday 19th February 2020)

BY EDOUARD MORTON
South China Morning Post
15 OCT 2017

Suicide, hijack … aliens?

The mystery surrounding flight MH370 has stirred up endless conspiracy theories from armchair investigators, aviation enthusiasts and industry experts.

PILOT SUICIDE

One of the earliest theories to surface following the plane’s disappearance was that Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shad deliberately steered the aircraft into the ocean. Leaked Malaysian police documents, first reported by New York magazine, alleged the pilot had flown a similar ‘suicide route’ on a home flight simulator. Media pounced on the idea the pilot was heartbroken. Malaysian police dismissed the theory. Read the rest of this entry »

The Malaysian Government must give full and satisfactory response to serious allegations made in the international media that it had withheld crucial data that could help find the missing MH370 from the Australian authorities and independent aviation and data experts involved in the search.

The Australian news website News.com.au is one of the international media which had made these shocking allegations.

In an exclusive article, the Australian website said: “If you assumed those tasked with finding this needle in a haystack had been given every piece of information available to solve what is now regarded as the greatest aviation mystery in history, you would be wrong.

“News.com.au can reveal that Malaysia withheld, and continues to withhold, from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) and consulting experts, vital radar data containing possible clues to the location of the Boeing 777 – or what is left of it.” Read the rest of this entry »

by Jonathan Head
BBC
Friday 20 January 2017

Many distraught relatives have called for the search to continue

The announcement on 17 January that the search for MH370 was being suspended should have surprised no-one.

At the tripartite meeting last July of the three countries involved in the search, Malaysia, Australia and China, they agreed that it would not be continued beyond the current 120,000sq km area (46,332 sq miles) of the southern Indian Ocean, unless there was credible new information showing a specific location for the crashed airliner.

Nonetheless the families of the victims have condemned this requirement for a “precise location”, calling it “at best an erroneous expectation, and at worst a clever formulation to bury the search”. Read the rest of this entry »

Elle Hunt
Guardian
Thursday 19 January 2017

Australia’s multimillion-dollar search effort for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight ‘tested the limits of human endeavour’ – and failed. Where did it go wrong?

Nearly three years after the disappearance of MH370, theories abound as to what caused the Boeing-777 to change course and fly more than six hours with its satellite and navigation systems turned off, before plummeting into the Indian Ocean at terrifying speed.

Plenty of theories, but only piecemeal evidence.

And now, with the conclusion of the largest and most expensive underwater search effort in history, the governments of Malaysia, China and Australia have stopped looking for more. Read the rest of this entry »

New York Times
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DEC. 20, 2016

SYDNEY — For two years, a handful of ships have diligently combed a remote patch of the Indian Ocean west of Australia in a $160 million bid to find Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. On Tuesday, investigators made what was surely a painful admission: They have probably been looking in the wrong place.

The latest analysis by a team of international investigators concluded the vanished Boeing 777 is highly unlikely to be in the current search zone and may instead be in a region farther north. But though crews are expected to finish their deep-sea sonar hunt of the current search area next month, the possibility of extending the search to the north appeared doubtful, with Australia’s transport minister suggesting the analysis wasn’t specific enough to justify continuing the hunt.

The latest twist in the search for Flight 370 highlights the extraordinary difficulty officials have faced in their attempts to find the aircraft based on the faintest scraps of data. All along, officials have said they are not simply looking for a needle in a haystack — they are looking for the haystack.

On Tuesday, the haystack was poised to shift again, with the release of a report by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which is leading the search for the plane. The report is the result of a November meeting of international and Australian experts who re-examined all the data used to define the search area for the aircraft, which vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board.

Since the plane disappeared, experts have analyzed a series of exchanges between the aircraft and a satellite to estimate a probable crash site along a vast arc of ocean in the southern hemisphere. A deep-sea search of a 120,000-square kilometer (46,000-square mile) stretch of water along the arc has so far come up empty. Read the rest of this entry »

Angus Whitley
Bloomberg
February 16, 2016

The man leading the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is showing the strain after almost two years of fruitless toil.

Martin Dolan, head of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, said he struggles to sleep at times, gnawed by thoughts that wreckage from the Boeing Co. 777 may have slipped through the sonar net scanning 120,000 square kilometers (46,330 square miles) of the southern Indian Ocean.

MH370 is weeks away from becoming aviation’s biggest unsolved mystery since Amelia Earhart disappeared in 1937. Of the 3 million components in the jet, only one has turned up — a barnacle-encrusted wing flap — on Reunion Island, thousands of miles from the search. There have been no traces of the 239 people on board, their luggage or even the life jackets that were supposed to float.

“There’s always this question: Have we missed something?” Dolan, 58, said at his office in Canberra. “That’s the sort of thing that will occasionally keep me awake at night.” Read the rest of this entry »

Every time MH370 slips out of the newspapers, it is brought sharply back into focus by the emergence of another lead as to its final resting place.

In August 2015, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak assured Malaysians that debris found near the Reunion Islands, in the Indian Ocean, was “conclusively confirmed” to be from MH370.

However, just a few days ago, news reports suggested that debris washed up in Southern Thailand could have come from MH 370.

Will Malaysians and the world ever find out what happened to MH370?

Will the relatives of the 239 passengers and crew on board MH370 on that fateful flight on 8th March 2014 ever receive compensation for their loss?

The second question may be answered more readily than the first.
Read the rest of this entry »

Pamela Engel
Business Insider
AUG. 13, 2015

Malaysia’s government news agency has published a new theory about what might have happened to missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 upon impact, The Week reports.

Satellite expert Zaaim Redha Abdul Rahman, who helped UK satellite firm Inmarsat analyze data shortly after the plane went missing in March last year, said the plane likely made a soft landing on the water, floated for a while on the surface, and then sank mostly in one piece.

This is consistent with what other experts have said about the likely fate of the plane after new evidence came to light last month. Read the rest of this entry »

by Boo Su-Lyn
The Malay Mail Online
March 8, 2015

COMMENTARY, March 8 — Experts appear no closer to solving the enigma of Flight MH370 one year after the Malaysia Airlines (MAS) jet vanished without a trace, making it one of the world’s biggest plane mysteries.

Contact with Flight MH370, which carried 239 people on board comprising mostly China nationals, was lost less than an hour after take-off from the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 12.41am local time en route to Beijing, China, on March 8 last year.

There was no distress signal and two communication systems aboard the Boeing 777 commercial jet were shut down during the flight in what experts believe was a deliberate move.

The transponder — which identifies the plane and transmits its altitude and location to ground controllers — was turned off at 1.21am local time as the aircraft flew into Vietnamese airspace from Malaysian air traffic control over the South China Sea, a vulnerable point noted by aviation experts in a Reuters report as Malaysian and Vietnamese controllers could assume that the plane was the other’s responsibility.

Another unanswered question is why Flight MH370 veered off from its original flight path and turned west back over the Malaysian peninsula. Read the rest of this entry »

by Muzliza Mustafa
The Malaysian Insider
8 March 2015

When Malaysia Airlines (MAS) flight MH370 vanished on March 8 last year, many believed the mystery as to its whereabouts could have been prevented had the Malaysian military scrambled jets to investigate an unknown aircraft its radar was tracking across the northern part of the peninsula.

It is still unclear whether any official has been held to account for this lapse in judgment, as questions posed to ministers have been sidestepped.

Former Royal Malaysian Air Force pilot Maj Zaidi Ahmad said the lack of military action at the time stressed the need to change and update certain standard operating procedure (SOP) for the military, as well as for military-civilian cooperation.

This should have been done following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York, but the Malaysian military maintained a “lackadaisical” attitude, said Zaidi, who had been a fighter pilot for more than 20 years.

“The 9-11 incident proved that anything can happen and we should be prepared. After 9-11 there was still no SOP between the military and commercial airlines. We should be taking note of things that happen in other countries and be cautious,” Zaidi told The Malaysian Insider. Read the rest of this entry »

by Elizabeth Zachariah
The Malaysian Insider
8 March 2015

One year since Malaysia Airlines (MAS) flight MH370 vanished, the plane’s whereabouts remains a mystery, as does the nagging question – why can’t anyone be held responsible?

Scrutiny of the timeline of events after the Boeing-777 disappeared from radar on March 8, 2014 revealed gaps in communication and a lapse of judgment, in particular by the military, which saw the plane on primary surveillance radar, but did nothing to investigate why it had flown off course.

Malaysian military officials revealed on March 12 that an unidentified aircraft, believed to be MH370, had travelled across the peninsula after doing an air turn-back, and was last sighted on military radar 370km northwest of Penang.

Following this, the search area was then expanded from the Gulf of Thailand and South China Sea to include the Strait of Malacca.

It was reported then that senior military officers only became aware of the radar data after news of the aircraft’s disappearance had spread.

Criticism quickly rolled in after this revelation, from opposition politicians, civil society, the Malaysian public and international media.

“Clearly, they had let an unidentified aircraft pass through Malaysian sovereign territory without bothering to identify it; not something they were happy to admit,” aviation consultant David Learmount had said.

“There was clearly a significant failure of response on behalf of the Malaysian air force. There’s no real way around it and you might imagine heads would roll for that,” Bangkok-based analyst for defence-and-security-intelligence firm IHS-Jane, Anthony Davis was quoted as saying in a report by Time.

Veteran DAP leader Lim Kit Siang had also called for “heads to roll”, demanding that an inquiry be launched to seek accountability in the plane’s disappearance and subsequent response.

Renewing his calls for accountability, the Gelang Patah MP said no one has been brought to book for the grave error that could have saved millions of ringgit and given the families of the 239 on board the closure they need.

“This only highlights the need to hold an inquiry through the setting up of a Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) to look into the incident,” he added.

Lim said then that one of the areas that should be investigated was whether the disappearance of the jet could have been averted if military radar operators had been more vigilant and had acted promptly. Read the rest of this entry »

by Shuang Guo, Lei Yang
Xin Hua
2015-03-08

LOS ANGELES, March 7 (Xinhua) — In an event of a test model plane crash, an emergency recorder and tracking system is separated from the tail section of the plane.

The test, which is shown in a video clip, is part of a series of tests completed since October by the U.S. subsidiary of the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) on a comprehensive emergency information recorder and tracking system.

COMAC America Corporation says its emergency recorder system includes a data storage and transmitter called Harbinger, claiming for the system it had been applying new methods that transcend traditional designs of black box recorders used in commercial aircraft.

The yearlong searching effort for Malaysia Airlines’ missing flight MH370 has turned up with no sign of the plane, but it has fueled the company’s resolve to come up with a system more efficient instead. Read the rest of this entry »

David Stout
Time
March 6, 2015

Without a single scrap of debris, the search for the missing jet will likely end soon, taking with it all remaining hope

You can’t blame Jennifer Chong for being a nervous flyer.

Every time she boards a plane, the resident of Melbourne faces the inevitable walk past the cabin’s front row where her husband of more than 20 years, Chong Ling Tan, had been seated on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Twelve months on from arguably the greatest aviation mystery of all time, Chong says those empty seats can still induce panic.

“I start to think that if anything happened, like a hijacking, then he would be the first one who knows because he’s the one nearest to the cockpit,” Chong tells TIME. Read the rest of this entry »

By John Kelly
Mirror UK

7 March 2015

It has been a year since Captain Zaharie Shah steered his mighty Boeing 777 into the night sky with 227 passengers and 12 crew, who have never been seen again

In a routine he had performed ­countless times before, Captain Zaharie Shah steered his mighty Boeing 777 into the night sky.

All must have seemed normal to the 227 passengers and 12 crew on the Beijing- bound aircraft – but something was wrong.

Shortly afterwards, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared.

One year on, what happened still remains a mystery. Read the rest of this entry »

Lindsay Murdoch
Sydney Morning Herald
March 7, 2015

The family of MH370 pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah has lashed out at people who blame him for the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 with 239 people on board 12 months ago.

“Disgusting … no-one, be you politician, scientist, aviation expert, plane crash investigator, pilot, retired pilot, media or whoever, none of you have the right to blame Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah for any wrongdoing,” Sakinab Shah, the 53-year-old pilot’s elder sister said in a statement to mark Sunday’s anniversary.

Ms Sakinab’s comments come as Malaysia is set to release a report on the investigation into the disappearance of MH370 on Sunday that could shed new light on one of the biggest mysteries in aviation history.

The findings of an investigation team comprising experts from seven countries have been shrouded in secrecy as the anniversary prompted renewed speculation and more wild theories about how one of the world’s most sophisticated aircraft could disappear while flying over the South China Sea en-route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing early on March 8, 2014.

The report will detail the findings of extensive investigations into the plane, its flight path, crew and passengers and the data that led experts to conclude the plane crashed into the southern Indian Ocean west of Perth.

A key focus of the investigation has been whether someone deliberately switched off the plane’s transponder and communications equipment as the plane was leaving Malaysian air traffic control and entering that of Vietnam. Read the rest of this entry »