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 »

By Bill Palmer
CNN
May 2, 2014

(CNN) — If we were hoping that the finally released — but month-old — preliminary report on the March 8 disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 would help explain what happened, we were mostly disappointed.

But the report, issued Thursday and dated April 9, does add new insights on snafus in crucial communication between air traffic control centers and Malaysia Airlines on the morning Flight 370 disappeared. They are disturbing — and put the competence of the airline’s operations center in question.

Indeed the brevity of the report (five pages) seems to show a Malaysian Ministry of Transport still interested in sharing as little information as possible, especially when compared with the extensive detail in preliminary reports from other accidents, such as the loss of Air France Flight 447 in June 2009.

What we do learn from this new report is that the airline told controllers — who were already looking for Flight 370 — that everything was normal, delaying the realization that the plane was many hundreds of miles from where it was thought to be, and any attempts at finding it.

In fact, it would be three hours and 52 minutes between the time that the controller in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, reported to air traffic control in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, that Flight 370 had not contacted him as instructed, and the time that the Kuala Lumpur rescue center was activated. Read the rest of this entry »

The Malaysian Insider
MAY 02, 2014

Putrajaya was once again slammed by a Bloomberg columnist who compared Malaysia’s handling of the MH370 saga with South Korea’s response to the recent Sewol ferry tragedy.

In a scathing attack, columnist William Pesek said he would give top marks to South Korea for their handling of the ferry tragedy but found Malaysia sorely lacking in handling the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

He said the incidents could be described as tests for the two governments, if not of Malaysian and South Korean societies.

“The grades so far? I’d give Korea an A-, Malaysia a D,” he said in his Bloomberg column titled “One missing jet, one sunken ferry, two responses”.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Malaysian Insider
MAY 03, 2014

Audio forensic experts spotted several irregularities in audio recordings from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 which suggested they may have been edited, a United States news network reported.

According to NBC News, the experts said at least two different audio sources recorded the tapes, wherein one of those recordings may have been a digital recorder held up to a speaker.

The Malaysian Transport Ministry on Thursday released a 5-page preliminary report on the missing plane along with the audio recording.

Analysts who listened to the recordings also told NBC that they noticed four clear breaks in the audio that indicated edits, NBC reported. Read the rest of this entry »

Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammddin Hussein in his statement yesterday repeated ad nauseum that “we have nothing to hide” demonstrating a grave guilt complex on this issue.

In fact, Hishammuddin’s reiteration umpteenth time yesterday that “we have nothing to hide” is the most potent proof that he realizes that he is fighting a losing battle in the credibility war both nationally and internationally because of lack of openness and accountability in the MH 370 disaster crisis management.

While continuing to declare that “we have nothing to hide”, he continues to evade accountability and responsibility for what happened in the crucial and critical first few hours of the first day of the missing MH 370 tragedy on March 8, and even enlisted the help of Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) chief Angus Houston in the latter’s first public appearance in Malaysia yesterday since heading the multinational search for MH370.

I could not believe it when I read the media report that when asked about the Malaysian government’s preliminary report on the missing MH 370 made public on May 1 and how much attention should be given to past mistakes, Houston parroted Hishammuddin saying that efforts should be focussed “wholly and solely” on the ongoing search. Read the rest of this entry »

Today is not a good day to be a Malaysian as the world wakes up to critical and adverse media headlines on the Malaysian preliminary report on the missing MH370 Boeing 777-200 completing its eighth week of vanishing into the air with 239 passengers and crew on board without leaving any wreckage or clue as to what had happened on the fateful morning of March 8.

All over the world, the media splashed the shocking headlines of the admission from the first Malaysian official report that nobody noticed that Flight MH370 was missing for 17 minutes and no search was launched for another four hours.

Instead of answering the many questions that have been raised in the past eight weeks of the MH 370 disaster, both the preliminary report and the statement by the Acting Transport Minister, Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein, accompanying it have only provoked more questions.

Firstly, the five-page preliminary report on the missing MH 370 had been described as “scant at best” in contrast to the preliminary report into Air France 447 which was released one month after the plane disappeared and which was 128 pages long, while a preliminary report into the Qantas engine explosion over Singapore in 2010 was more than 40 pages with diagrams and charts. Read the rest of this entry »

By CHRIS BUCKLEY and MICHAEL FORSYTHE
New York Times
1st May 2014

HONG KONG — Seventeen minutes passed after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared from civilian radar screens before air traffic controllers in Vietnam and Malaysia raised any concerns about it, according to a Malaysian government report released on Thursday that described confusion and miscommunication in the hours that followed.

The details of delays and miscues came in a preliminary report by Malaysia’s chief inspector of air accidents on the investigation into the missing jet, which left only tantalizing clues to its likely whereabouts that were not recognized or understood for days after it disappeared on March 8. Experts eventually concluded that the plane must have fallen into the southern Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia, thousands of miles from its planned route to Beijing over the Gulf of Thailand, where searchers initially wasted crucial days on a fruitless hunt. Read the rest of this entry »

International Business Times
Thursday, May 1, 2014

The question still remains – will the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 ever be found? A number of conspiracy theories with capricious notches of reputation regarding the disappearance of Malaysia Ailrines Flight MH370 have spread online ever since the jetliner went missing on March 8. Some people have rich imagination to propose such mind-boggling ideas and suggest the most enduring conspiracy theories about the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.

Here, we round up the most controversial theories that had beleaguered the search for the missing jetliner. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jonathan Pearlman, Sydney
Telegraph
01 May 2014

Map released as part of government findings on flight disappearance suggest it deliberately evaded military radars

Malaysia on Thursday released a preliminary report on the missing Flight MH370 which confirmed that the plane avoided flying over land after an unexplained westward turn and flew along a route apparently designed to prevent it being detected by military radars.

Releasing its first findings on the aviation mystery, the Malaysian government provided a detailed map showing the flight’s unusual path after it disappeared from the screens of air traffic controllers on March 8.

The map indicated that the plane did not – as previously believed – follow a series of predetermined navigational waypoints but instead flew directly above the Strait of Malacca and then turned again and travelled south above seas for about seven hours before crashing in the Indian Ocean. This route would have ensured the plane avoided flying over Indonesian territory – thereby reducing the risk of detection – though it may have passed over the northern tip of Sumatra.

David Learmount, an aviation expert, said the route suggested the aircraft was trying to evade detection and to ensure it was not tracked or targeted by the Indonesian air force. Read the rest of this entry »

Tim Akers believes he has discovered MH370 debris off the coast of Vietnam
He says satellite images appear to show tail, wings and other debris
Claims it is more likely plane crashed in South China Sea than Indian ocean
Authorities have been searching for aircraft off coast of Western Australia
Mr Akers had previously been studying Australian waters off Perth for years in search for remains of lost WWII ship – the HMAS Sydney
It comes as airline boss tells relatives of passengers onboard MH370 to go home and wait for further news

By JAMES RUSH and RICHARD SHEARS
Daily Mail
1 May 2014

A British marine archaeologist claims to have found the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 more than 3,000 miles from where authorities are currently searching.

Tim Akers, 56, had been studying Australian waters off Perth for years in a search for the remains of the country’s lost WWII ship – the HMAS Sydney.

The search for the vessel was in the same waters that are believed to contain the missing flight MH370 off the coast of Western Australia.

British marine archaeologist Tim Akers believes he has discovered debris from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 more than 3,000 miles from where everyone has been looking

A massive search operation involving satellites, aircraft, ships and sophisticated underwater equipment capable of scouring the ocean floor has failed to turn up any trace of the Boeing 777, which disappeared on March 8.

But Mr Akers, of North Yorkshire now thinks he might have discovered where the flight, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew, went down after it went missing en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

He claims to have identified what he believes is part of the tail of the jet off the coast of Vietnam – just around 1,000 miles from where the plane took off.

His findings appear to support reports this week from a US former pilot Michael Hoebel, from New York, who believes he found the wreckage of the flight off the coast of Thailand. Read the rest of this entry »

Five-page report details last known moments of doomed jet on March 8
It was released by Malaysian government in response to families’ anger
Document reveals first query about whereabouts was at 1.38am local time
But a rescue team was only alerted four hours later at 5.30am
Report recommends new worldwide standard of real-time plane tracking
Search is being scaled down and family help centres will close next week

By DAN BLOOM
Daily Mail
1 May 2014

Air traffic controllers did not notice Flight 370 was missing until 17 minutes after it vanished from radar, an official report has confirmed.

And they did not dispatch a rescue team until almost four hours later – despite contacting staff in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore.

The first official report on the plane’s disappearance was released by the Malaysian government today after politicians came under intense pressure from passengers’ families.

Written almost a month ago and dated April 9, the preliminary report has already been sent to the International Civil Aviation Organisation.

It was meant to stay confidential but Malaysian Prime Minister bowed to demands of families who complained the government had not done enough.

The report confirms the plane disappeared from Malaysian radar at 1.21 am on March 8 with 227 passengers and 12 crew on board, and no trace of it has been found since. Read the rest of this entry »

by Matt Siegel
The Globe and Mail
Apr. 30 2014

SYDNEY — Reuters

With the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 entering a new, much longer phase, the countries involved must decide how much they are prepared to spend on the operation and what they stand to lose if they hold back.

The search is already set to be the most costly in aviation history and spending will rise significantly as underwater drones focus on a larger area of the seabed that Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on Monday could take six to eight months to search.

But despite U.S. President Barack Obama publicly promising to commit more assets, the United States appears keen to begin passing on the costs of providing sophisticated sonar equipment that will form the backbone of the expanded hunt.

That means Australia, China and Malaysia – the countries most closely involved in the operation – look set to bear the financial and logistical burden of a potentially lengthy and expensive search.

“We’re already at tens of millions. Is it worth hundreds of millions?” a senior U.S. defense official told Reuters last week. “I don’t know. That’s for them to decide.” Read the rest of this entry »

By jaskiran kaur | April 29, 2014
International Business Times

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has recently announced the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has “entered a new phase,” focusing on larger area of the ocean floor.

Meanwhile, an American pilot claimed he has found wreckage of the missing airline. After 52 days of the search mission, Michael Hoebel, a pilot from New York, believed he has found the wreckage site of missing jet, Daily Mail reported.

The 60-year-old pilot reportedly spent hours scrutinizing satellite images made available to the general public by the Web site TomNod.com, before he concluded MH370 was lying underneath the Indian Ocean. He noted he has discovered the outline of the jetliner at the bottom of the ocean, off the northeast coast of Malaysia. The area was west of Songkhla in Thailand.

If debris lying at the bottom of the Indian Ocean were verified to be the missing Boeing 777, then it appeared to be in one piece, as per the image that was taken few days after the alleged crash.

The New York pilot informed his hometown news channel WIVB about his discovery. Read the rest of this entry »

The Malaysian Insider
April 29, 2014

Five days after Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak declared on CNN that a preliminary report on the disappearance of MH370 had been submitted to the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), an aviation expert has asked why is Malaysia hiding the report and not releasing it to the public.

While the world continued to wait for any evidence of the Malaysia Airlines flight, Malaysia had taken the “surprising” step of submitting a report to the United Nations agency, Clive Irving said yesterday in The Daily Beast.

“It’s not customary for air accident investigation reports to go to the ICAO. It’s the responsibility of each nation’s accident investigation agency to release the reports directly to the public as (it sees) fit, according to long-established protocols that demonstrate the independence of the investigators from both political and industry influence,” Irving said on the news portal.

More than 50 days have passed since MH370 went missing on March 8 and an Australian-led search in the Indian Ocean, where the Boeing 777-200ER was presumed to have crashed, has yielded nothing. Read the rest of this entry »

Lisa Cox
Sydney Morning Herald
April 28, 2014

The search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 will enter a new phase after 52 days of searching failed to find any sign of the plane wreckage, Prime Minister Tony Abbott has announced.

On Monday, Mr Abbott said it was highly unlikely that any debris from the plane would be found on the ocean surface.

But Mr Abbott defended the search operation in the southern Indian Ocean, saying authorities remain confident that signals detected weeks ago were from a black box recorder.

“Most difficult search in human history”: Prime Minister Tony Abbott addresses the media with the chief of the Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston.

Speaking in Canberra, Mr Abbott said the “most difficult search in human history” would switch its focus to underwater operations over an expanded area – roughly 700 kilometres by 80 kilometres. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ben Farmer, Defence Correspondent
The Telegraph
25 Apr 2014

A Royal Navy submarine has ended its search for the missing Malaysia Airlines passenger jet as a senior US defence official conceded the hunt for MH370 may now take years.

The Ministry of Defence in London said HMS Tireless had stood down after combing the southern Indian Ocean with its advanced sonar scanners, looking for the airliner’s black box.

The decision to stand down the Trafalgar Class hunter killer submarine was made after Australian commanders coordinating the international search said there was no chance of hearing more ‘pings’ from the lost black box.

A statement said: “With the Australian command assessing that there is no prospect of further acoustic detections associated with the aircraft black boxes, HMS Tireless has been stood down.”

A senior US defence official told the Reuters news agency that a fortnight of scouring the Indian Ocean floor with a US Navy submersible drone had turned up no wreckage.

Searchers would now have to increase the scope of their hunt.

“We went all in on this small area and didn’t find anything. Now you’ve got to go back to the big area,” he said.

“And now you’re talking years.” Read the rest of this entry »