Bangkok Post
8 Apr 2014

One month after flight MH370 vanished, there is still no proof of what happened to the plane or where it ended up, despite an intensive international search now focused on the Indian Ocean.

This handout photo taken on April 4, 2014 and released on April 7 by Australia’s Defence Department shows the HMAS Success readying a rigid hull inflatable boat (RHIB) near dusk following a reported sighting of potential debris

But authorities believe they may be zeroing in, after ping signals possibly emanating from the plane’s “black box” of flight and cockpit voice data were detected deep down in the search area.

Here are answers to some key questions:

Q: Are the ‘pings’ from MH370? Read the rest of this entry »

The Malay Mail Online
By Shazwan Mustafa Kamal
April 8, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, April 8 ― City lights may have brightened Dataran Merdeka last night, but the iconic landmark was unmistakably sombre, as small groups of people quietly gathered there to hold a candlelight vigil for the passengers and crew of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.

It has now been exactly one month since flight MH370 has been missing, and despite a multinational search operation which has spanned oceans and countries, no one knows where the aircraft has landed, save for theories and plausible scenarios.

By 11.30pm, a small group of 150-odd Malaysians of different races stood within the concrete jungle of Kuala Lumpur, saying little but hoping for the impossible.

From adults to the elderly and even children, people lit candles and formed a small circle around a sign which read “in remembrance of the one month since MH370 went missing.”

“We are here to offer our support for the families and relatives of those who were on board MH370. There is little we can do, so we pray to our respective God to try and make this painful moment as bearable as possible,” a 28-year-old who only wanted to be known as Hussaini told The Malay Mail Online. Read the rest of this entry »

Timeline of Flight MH370
CNBC.com
7.4.2014

The search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has entered its fourth week, with the plane believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, thousands of miles from its original flight path.

Just as the batteries on the locator beacons on the aircraft’s “black boxes” are nearing their limits, the searchers have detected signals they believe are “consistent” with the flight recorders.

Australian authorities said the signals may represent the best lead yet after the international investigation into the ill-fated carrier was initially stymied by several false leads.

Many questions about the fate of MH370, which left Kuala Lumpur en route to Beiing on March 8 with 239 passengers and crew, remain unanswered, including why the flight diverted from its planned route and what exactly caused it to crash.

The lack of information has taken a toll on the families of those on board the flight who until the announcement had been clinging on to hope their relatives may still be alive.

Here is a chronology of the latest developments: Read the rest of this entry »

By Mike M. Ahlers, CNN
April 7, 2014

(CNN) — After weeks of fruitless searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, it sounds like a promising sign.

When a Chinese patrol ship picked up two pulses in the southern Indian Ocean, the head of the Australian agency coordinating search efforts called it “an important and encouraging lead.”

Investigators hope the audio signals are locator beacons from the plane’s data recorders, but they’re not sure yet.

Is it the discovery we’ve all been waiting for? Could those be Malaysia Airlines Flight 370’s pingers?

Here are four reasons to believe and six reasons to doubt:

REASONS TO BELIEVE

1) The frequency doesn’t occur in nature.

The Chinese Haixun 01 patrol ship detected pulses at a frequency of 37.5 kHz, the Chinese state-run Xinhua news agency reported. That’s the same frequency of black box pingers — and that frequency is no accident. The pingers were designed to have that frequency because it does not occur in nature.

2) There were two separate events.

The Haixun 01 reported two pulses within 2 kilometers (1.25 miles) of each other. Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, head of the Joint Agency Coordination Center, described them as “fleeting, fleeting acoustic events.” One was described as being 90 seconds long; no time was given for the other, but it was evidently shorter. Read the rest of this entry »

Clive Irving
The Daily Beast
5.4. 2014

Hope to find MH 370 was virtually destroyed by a month of bungled searching. The only saving grace was one lonely satellite company’s brilliance.

It’s now a month since Malaysian Flight MH370 became modern aviation’s greatest mystery. Certain things are clear and many of them are disturbing.

First, the oversight of commercial air space in this part of Asia is chaotic. Jealously preserved divisions of power within each state made it impossible to achieve the kind of open, rapid and efficient exchange of information between the states themselves that is essential in an emergency. As s result, too much time has been spent chasing false leads, some of them dubiously motivated, and assessing data that turned out to be badly flawed.

As long as any physical evidence remains out of reach this is not only the most demanding sea search for an airplane ever undertaken, it’s a virtually impossible forensic challenge.

The initial failure to report radar sightings of what was probably Flight MH370 had costly consequences in a time-critical situation. Days were wasted searching the South China Sea, not the Indian Ocean.

It took at least a week to produce anything resembling a reliable time line of the Boeing 777’s course after the last contact between it and controllers. Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Townsend
The Observer
5 April 2014

With the batteries powering the black box from missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 expected to expire as early as Monday, experts have warned that the international hunt for the aircraft’s wreckage may be looking in the wrong area.

The flight recorders of the Boeing 777 emit a ping that can be detected by sonar equipment, but the devices have a battery life of around 30 days, which means ships hoping to locate the signal are rapidly running out of time.

Finding the data recorders after that remains possible, but experts say it will become significantly more challenging if the signal beacons stop working.

Underwater attempts to pinpoint the ping continued, four weeks to the day after the airliner vanished, with the Australian navy’s Ocean Shield and Britain’s HMS Echo trawling an identified area using sophisticated underwater detection equipment.

However, some experts warn that they could be scouring the wrong stretch of remote Indian ocean. Aviation expert and former RAF Hercules pilot David Learmount said the failure to locate any floating wreckage meant that the search effort was effectively still working blind. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dennis Lynch
International Business Times
April 06 2014

Almost a month after Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 went missing over the Gulf of Thailand, searchers are focusing on two areas in the Indian Ocean where they detected possible signals consistent with MH370’s black-box pinger.

The signals were detected by the Australian ship HMS Ocean Shield and the Chinese ship Haixun 01 about 300 nautical miles away from each other.

Searchers are hastening to detect pinger signals because MH370’s black-box pinger battery could expire during the next two weeks. The pinger battery lasts from 30 to 45 days, with April 22 being the latest to find a signal. A confirmed signal would greatly narrow the search area, which is now the size of England.

The Chinese vessel Haixun 01 has reported two signals at the 37.5 kHz frequency. These signals were detected about a mile away from one another with equipment used just below the surface of the water. While not confirmed, the Haixun 01 signals are promising for their consistency, and one signal lasted 90 seconds. Read the rest of this entry »

Kate Mayberry
AlJazeera
05 Apr 2014

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – When the aviation industry’s safety experts sat down in Kuala Lumpur for their annual meeting this week, there was one issue that was uppermost in their minds: the fate of missing flight MH370.

“I don’t think I could start my remarks in any other way than by acknowledging the human tragedy of MH370,” Tony Tyler, the Director General of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), told delegates as he opened the meeting earlier this week. “The best way for all of us involved in aviation to honour the memory of those on board is to learn from what happened to improve safety in the future.”

Four weeks after the Boeing 777-200 and its 239 passengers and crew went missing on a seemingly routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, the chances of finding out what happened remain remote.

Not a single piece of wreckage has been found and with no physical evidence, let alone the data and cockpit voice recorders, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s announcement on March 24 that the plane had “ended,” its journey in the southern Indian Ocean, thousands of miles off course, has done little to ease the anguish of the families of those on board.

For days, a multinational search force including Australia, the US and China has taken to the seas and the skies off Australia’s western coast, the search parameters refined regularly according to satellite imagery and the electronic “pings” that the aircraft continued to make even after normal on-board communications ceased to function. But the scale of the task remains immense. Daily search areas cover tens of thousands of square kilometres of some of the world’s most remote ocean. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, 29 planes and 11 ships are scouring a search area of about 217,000 square kilometres 1,700 kilometres north west of Perth in a desperate race against time to retrieve the missing MH370-200 Boeing 777-200 aircraft’s blackbox before its batteries run out.

The CNN report that the aircraft’s black box battery life may be shorter than expected, lasting only 20 to 25 days, as flight MH370’s black box pingers have not been replaced in 2012, is most shocking news.

Monday in two days’ time will be the full month of the tragedy of the missing Malaysian Airlines (MAS) MH370 Boeing 777-200 aircraft which took off from the KLIA on March 8 at 12.41 am for a six-hour flight to Beijing but which disappeared within the first hour with no clue discovered so far as to its whereabouts despite the longest and largest-ever multi-national air-sea-undersea-satellite search. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ross Kelly in Perth, David Winning in Sydney
Wall Street Journal
April 3, 2014

The Australian head of the international search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has called the operation one of the “most challenging” he has ever seen.

As the chances dim for finding Malaysia Airlines 370’s “black box” flight recorders before the batteries in their locator beacons run out, Malaysian and Australian leaders sought to inject new momentum into a search of the southern Indian Ocean that has yet to find plane wreckage.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak met aircrews involved in the multinational search for Flight 370 at Pearce air base, near Perth, on Thursday. The visit is Mr. Najib’s first to Australia since the focus of the search swung abruptly to the southern Indian Ocean on March 20, based on satellite images of possible plane debris. So far, nothing related to the missing plane has been found. Read the rest of this entry »

Kathy Marks
Sydney
The Independent
03 April 2014

With as little as two days left in which to recover the black box of Flight MH370, Malaysian police have warned that the mystery of the plane’s disappearance nearly four weeks ago may never be solved.

The country’s Prime Minister, Najib Razak, who visited the headquarters of the multinational search in Perth today, promised relatives of the 239 passengers and crew that “we will not rest until answers are… found”. However, batteries in the locator beacons of flight recorders only last about 30 days, which means MH370’s will die next Monday, or even this weekend.

The hunt for wreckage of the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 continued in the Indian Ocean, with two British Royal Navy vessels joining seven other ships and eight planes. But since the search switched to the remote waters a fortnight ago, not a single piece of debris linked to the doomed flight has been found, despite exhaustive efforts. Read the rest of this entry »

By Mary-Ann Russon
International Business Times
April 2, 2014

Unmanned robot submarines will need to be brought in to locate wreckage of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane in the Indian Ocean once the search zone has been narrowed down.

Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur Ifor Beijing with 239 people onboard on 8 March but lost contact with air traffic control 50 minutes later.

After 26 days of searching there continues to be no sign of the wreckage. It is now assumed that the plane crashed into the Indian Ocean without survivors and the search for the plane has now been classified as a criminal investigation.

Unmanned submarines, which are known as Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV), were crucial in finding the black box recorders from Air France Flight 447 after it crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, killing all 228 people onboard.

Although some major wreckage was removed from the sea within five days of the crash, it took another two years and €32m spent on four deep water search missions before the black boxes were located at roughly 12,800 feet below sea level. Read the rest of this entry »

By TODD PITMAN
Associated Press
April 3, 2014

Bangkok: At the time — the evening of March 24 — it seemed like the breakthrough the world was waiting for.

In a hastily called speech, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced that an unprecedented analysis of satellite signals concluded that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 “ended” deep in the Indian Ocean, far from any possible refuge for the 239 souls aboard.

Finally, there was a solid explanation for what happened to the aircraft. A much more focused search could begin, and so perhaps could the grieving process for families from 14 countries. Najib’s announcement quieted wild speculation about desert islands and terrorists and covert operations.

But four weeks after the plane disappeared, the apparent pivot in the search is proving to be not much of a pivot at all.

Not a single piece of wreckage from the lost plane has been found, not even after a new analysis led investigators to change the focus of their search yet again. The latest search area is based on extremely limited satellite data combined with radar data taken some five hours before the plane is believed to have gone down. It is, as one search official said, “a very inexact science.”

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, whose country is coordinating the current search effort, spoke of “very credible leads” and “increasing hope” a day before Najib’s announcement. But on Thursday he said the search has become “the most difficult in human history.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Ludovica Iaccino
International Business Times
March 12, 2014

Missing Malaysian airlines flight crash

Saturday 8 March

Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 takes off at 12:21am local time (16:21 GMT) from Kuala Lumpur with 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board.

Flight MH370 was supposed to arrive at Beijing Capital International Airport at 6:30am but two hours after takeoff, air traffic control loses contact with the plane. It is last heard of 120 nautical miles off the east coast of the Malaysian town of Kota Bharu.

No panic call is received from the crew and weather in the flight path is clear.

The Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam (CAAV) confirms the jetliner never registered entering the airspace between Malaysia and Ho Chi Minh City.

Fear of a crash grow as Malaysia and Vietnam launch a search and rescue operation in the South China Sea. China dispatches two maritime rescue ships.

Terrorist plot, engine failure, disintegration, hijacking and pilot suicide all under consideration as the cause of the disappearance.

Malaysia Airlines releases the passenger list which includes 154 people from China and Taiwan, 38 from Malaysia, seven from Indonesia and six from Australia

Chinese premier Li Keqiang appeals to the Malaysian government to speed up the search operation.

Vietnam confirms seeing a giant oil slick and column of smoke in its waters. The slick is not connected to the missing aircraft, it is discovered.

Terror attack theory strengthens when two “missing” passengers of the flight MH370 reveal that their passports were stolen last year in Thailand. Read the rest of this entry »

The Malaysian Insider
April 03, 2014

As the search continues in the Indian Ocean for signs of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, the staggering amount of rubbish in the sea is hampering efforts to find possible debris from the missing aircraft.

Among those who had highlighted this problem is Fairfax writer Greg Ray whose article “The Ocean is Broken”, written last year went viral on social media, reported The Maitland Mercury.

In the article, Ray had quoted Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen who had sailed from Melbourne to Osaka and from there to San Francisco who expressed his sadness and horror at the astounding volume of garbage he encountered in the ocean during his journey.

Ivan told Ray that one of the things he noticed was the absence of the cries of the seabirds which, on all previous similar voyages, had surrounded the boat.

The birds were missing because the fish were missing.

Instead, in its place was a huge amount of garbage floating in the ocean. Read the rest of this entry »

Danny Lee in Kuala Lumpur
South China Morning Post
03 April, 2014

The first pieces of evidence that Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 crashed into the ocean may come to light when they are washed up on a beach, possibly within weeks, experts said yesterday.

Oceanographers said that currents and prevailing winds would likely push any floating debris towards Australia’s vast west coast.

In the event that the huge ongoing Indian Ocean search turns up nothing, small, buoyant items could appear before the wreckage of the plane itself is located.

An assortment of aircraft and ships scouring the ocean some 2,000 kilometres off the coast of Perth have so far found no sign of the missing Boeing 777. Read the rest of this entry »

By Bill Neely
NBC News
April 1, 2014

PERTH, Australia – The signs aren’t good. The search coordinators aren’t optimistic. And the chief of the new group heading the search for missing Flight MH370 is warning that the days of intensive searching might be numbered.

“Inevitably, if we don’t find any wreckage on the surface we are eventually going to have to, probably in consultation with everybody who has a stake in this, review what to do next,” retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston said.

That day may come soon.

The new search zone is yielding no results after more than 500 hours of searching by dozens of aircraft. Read the rest of this entry »