By Justin Ong
The Malay Mail Online
April 2, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, April 2 — It is nearly a month since the words “missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370” were seared into our consciousness on March 8.

Along the way, we have learned the word “unprecedented” and all its other variations, but not the actual answers to what happened to MH370 and the 239 souls on board.

Here are three things that we gleaned from the story so far. Read the rest of this entry »

The Malay Mail Online
April 2, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, April 2 — Growing acrimony in China over Malaysia’s handling of the MH370 crisis could jeopardise Chinese buyers’ appetite for property development here, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The news comes as rancour in Beijing over the Malaysia’s continued inability to find the missing Malaysia Airlines plane that carried 153 Chinese nationals among the 239 people on board has already torpedoed the Visit Malaysia Year 2014 promotions in the country.

Families of the Chinese passengers on the doomed flight and their countrymen became hostile towards Malaysia following its announcement on March 24 that satellite data showed the plane “ended somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean”.

The absence of physical evidence of the flight led some families to label the Malaysian government “murderers” for implying that all those aboard were dead.

“For now, marketing homes in Malaysia is going to be a bit awkward. It’s just like how we don’t market homes in Japan to Chinese customers,” an anonymous Beijing-based real estate consultant told the WSJ.

But the expected drop-off will not only hit Malaysian property developers; Chinese real estate firms who invested heavily in the market here could now end up with lots for which they might find fewer buyers. Read the rest of this entry »

By Alex Watts, Sky News
01 April 2014

The mystery of what made flight MH370 crash thousands of miles off route in the middle of the southern Indian Ocean has filled news websites and TV bulletins for the past three weeks.

But despite the huge interest and speculation, are we any nearer to finding out what happened to the doomed Boeing 777 than when it vanished from radar on March 8?

What we do know is both the plane’s transponder and Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), an in-flight digital system that helps track planes after they have gone out of radar coverage, were disabled or stopped working less than an hour into the flight.

The Malaysia Airlines jet carrying 239 people then flew west for at least five hours before crashing somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

Six theories remain for why the plane disappeared – cabin depressurisation, toxic fumes, fire, hijacking, pilot murder-suicide, or simultaneous failures. Read the rest of this entry »

By Noelle Swan, Staff writer / April 1, 2014
The Christian Science Monitor

The search for Malaysia Flight 370 is complicated by the wide spread of ocean garbage, much of which looks just like plane crash debris in satellite images.

It’s a wing.… It’s a seat cushion.… It’s an icebox lid?

The search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has turned up a lot of debris. Unfortunately, so far at least, none of it appears to belong to the missing Boeing 777.

Vast quantities of trash bobbing around the ocean have made the Sisyphean search for wreckage from Flight 370 all the more complicated.

In the weeks since the March 8 disappearance of the plane, searchers have darted about the Indian Ocean, following evolving analyses of radar data and potential clues offered by satellite imagery.

Unfortunately, garbage floating on the ocean waves looks an awful lot like plane debris, says Malcom Spaulding, a former oceanography professor at the University of Rhode Island who has been involved in search and rescues since the 1970s.

“We essentially have had satellite-based images that give us tantalizing information that there might be a debris field,” says Mr. Spaulding. “But we don’t know whether anything in the debris field is associated with the accident.” Read the rest of this entry »

BBC News
1 April 2014

British submarine HMS Tireless has joined the hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

The Ministry of Defence said the Trafalgar class submarine had arrived in the southern Indian Ocean and would help search for the plane’s black box recorder.

It will soon by joined by Royal Navy coastal survey ship HMS Echo. Read the rest of this entry »

The Malay Mail Online
April 1, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, April 1 — Malaysia may be grappling with the crisis of flight MH370 but international rebuke, particularly from China, over its handling is not fully deserved, the Financial Times said.

In a commentary here, the business daily’s Singapore-based senior editor Jeremy Grant suggested that even China — Malaysia’s biggest critic since the Boeing 777-200ER’s mysterious disappearance on March 8 — would not likely have fared better.

He reminded China of its previous debacles in the face of public crises, such as the melamine-contaminated milk scandal in 2008 that had turned into a public relations nightmare for the republic.

In another fiasco, the Chinese authorities were accused of muzzling the media and attempting to cover-up the tragic high-speed rail crash in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, which killed 38 people and injured 192.

Despite its previous performance, China is now putting Malaysia under the spotlight over similar accusations. Read the rest of this entry »

The Malay Mail Online
April 1, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, April 1 — Commercial satellite firm Inmarsat has dismissed allegations of “evasiveness” in its absence from technical briefings on Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, saying existing rules precluded its active participation in place of British authorities.

The firm whose satellite provided the crucial information of the plane’s calculated position came in for accusations of furtiveness after a “Malaysian official” was reported as saying that it had declined an invitation to join a “high-level” briefing organised by the Malaysian government for families of Chinese passengers from MH370 in Beijing.

Speaking to UK newspaper The Guardian, Inmarsat vice-president for external affairs Chris McLaughlin denied they had turned down the invitation, saying that it was not the private firm’s place to be invited to begin with.

“We haven’t been invited. Why would we? The Air Accident Investigation Branch are the proper people to speak. Inmarsat is a technical adviser to the AAIB.

“That is not us being evasive, that is the Chicago convention protocol,” McLaughlin told the UK daily.

The Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation regulates rules regarding aviation and establishes how air accident investigations are conducted. Read the rest of this entry »

The Malaysian Insider
April 01, 2014

Aviation industry experts now want Malaysia’s air traffic controllers to reveal their response when flight MH370 vanished early March 8, after the authorities finally said last night that the plane’s pilots said “Good night Malaysian three seven zero” and not “All right, good night”.

The change in the conversation transcript is the latest in a series of changes in information about the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER (9M-MRO) which disappeared with 239 people while en route to Beijing 24 days ago.

“Subang air traffic control (ATC) has not said what it did when the plane vanished after it signed off from Malaysian airspace. Did they launch an immediate search and rescue?

“If the lack of military response is anything, it raises a lot of questions about the ATC’s standard operating procedure (SOP),” an aviation expert told The Malaysian Insider, citing International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) regulations require immediate alerts to relevant search and rescue units. Read the rest of this entry »

The Malay Mail Online
April 1, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, April 1 — Searchers wasted three days looking for MH370 wreckage in the wrong part of the Indian Ocean because of poor coordinating among countries working on locating the missing aircraft, the Wall Street Journal wrote today.

Citing opinions from those familiar with the probe, the business paper said the international team of experts involved in investigations have all been performing their roles but are working separately from one another, each in their own area of expertise.

One person, according to WSJ, said that although investigators have been dutifully sharing information with their international partners in the Malaysian-led probe, “Malaysian officials didn’t feel it was their role to ensure that foreign experts were sharing refined data among themselves”.

“They don’t have the necessary structure for inter-agency coordination. It has exposed their lack of preparation to deal with such a disaster,” the paper quoted James Keith, former US ambassador to Malaysia, as saying previously.

Last Friday, the search for MH370 abruptly shifted to an area 1,100 kilometres northeast of where search planes and ships were initially looking for the missing jetliner’s wreckage in the Indian Ocean, far southwest of Perth, Australia. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the 24th day in the fourth week of the multi-national sea and air search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft, with today’s search outcome by a total of 10 aircraft and 10 ships from Australia, Malaysia, US, China, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea as empty-handed and fruitless as the earlier 23 days.

Except there is now an element of desperation as the search is in a race against time, with only about two weeks left to find the aircraft’s pair of black boxes before they stop emitting locator pings.

The boxes, designed to ‘ping’ for at least 30 days, contain sounds recorded in the cockpit and data on the plane’s performance and flight path that could help answer why it diverted sharply west from its overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on 8th March.

What has made the new search area 1,100 km north east of the old site in the southern Indian Ocean frustrating is that it contained a higher volume of ocean trash that may be mistaken for wreckage.
Read the rest of this entry »

By Mark Odell in London
Financial Times
March 28, 2014

The sudden switch in focus across hundreds of kilometres of the southern Indian Ocean in the hunt for flight MH370 underlines just how little real information investigators have at their disposal.

The favourite phrase of officials is “the most credible lead”, of which they have had a few during the past week as the families of those aboard the Malaysia Airlines flight – and a fascinated global audience – wait for answers. But it reveals how much of the search is still down to trial and error.

“The information is very, very confused at the moment,” says Matthew Greaves, head of the safety and accident centre at Cranfield University in the UK. “They [the international investigation team] are trying to be as open as possible but some of the information they are releasing is wrong and they are having to correct it.”

After numerous “credible leads” of debris in parts of the southern Indian Ocean this week, in an area spanning 1.6m sq km, the search abruptly shifted 1,100km northeast on Friday after data appeared to help investigators get a fix on the speed of the aircraft. Read the rest of this entry »

Tom Allard
Sydney Morning Herald
March 30, 2014

Finding the black box flight recorder of the missing Malaysia Airlines passenger jet is simply ”untenable” as things stand at the moment, the US Navy officer who will lead the search has conceded.

The deeply pessimistic assessment from Captain Mark Matthews came as the Royal Australian Navy vessel Ocean Shield was being loaded with a ”pinger” locator and an underwater drone critical to recovering the black box .

However, ADV Ocean Shield will not arrive in the 319,000 square kilometre search area for three to four days, while the beacon on the black box could have only four days of battery power left.

”It all depends on how effective we are at reducing the search area,” said Captain Matthews, a search-and-recovery expert who was involved in the two-year search to find the black box of Air France flight 447, which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean.

”Right now, the search area is basically the size of the Indian Ocean, which is an untenable amount of time to search.” Read the rest of this entry »

The fourth week and 23rd day of the longest and largest-ever multinational sea-and-air search for the missing Malaysian Airlines MH370 Boeing 777 which appeared to have vanished into the air on March 8 with 239 passengers and crew on board and the second day of a new search area 1,850 kilometres (1,150 miles) west of Perth have all proved to be fruitless with items scooped from the sea by Chinese and Australian ships turned out to be fishing material or rubbish.

The multi-national SAR mission is in a race against time, as the “black boxes” – the flight recorders which pick up cockpit conversations as well as flight data – emit pings for 30 days after becoming immersed in water, i.e. by April 7.

The MH370 “black boxes” may last at least 10 more days and perhaps a few weeks longer, depending on water temperature and other factors.

The “black boxes” are designed to withstand depths of 20,000 feet and may work in even deeper water, the range of the pings is a mile.

Cases where recorders were retrieved from the ocean include TWA Flight 800 in 1996, EgyptAir Flight 990 in 1999, Alaska Airlines Flight 261 in 2000 and Air France 447 in 2009.

However, without a signal from the boxes, it will be a daunting task to find the “black boxes” of MH370 when its debris have still to be found – a much more impossible task than the challenge faced by the search teams for Air France 447, which went down midway across the Atlantic Ocean in 2009. Although debris was found within days of the Air France 447 crash and the flight path was known, it took investigators another two years to retrieve the recorders from the bottom of the sea. Read the rest of this entry »

The Malay Mail/AFP
March 30, 2014

PERTH, March 30 — A new search area failed to yield an immediate breakthrough in the hunt for ill-fated Flight MH370 today, as Australia appointed its former military chief to help coordinate the operation in the Indian Ocean.

Debris spotted by aircraft and then picked up by ships combing the new search zone proved not to be from the Malaysian Airlines’ Boeing 777, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) said.

“It appeared to be fishing equipment and just rubbish on the (ocean’s) surface,” an AMSA spokesman told AFP.

As the hunt resumed 1,850 kilometres (1,150 miles) west of Perth, Australia said former defence force chief Angus Houston would head a new unit to help in the search, which involves the militaries of seven nations — Australia, China, Malaysia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and the United States. Read the rest of this entry »

The Malaysian Insider

March 30, 2014

Frustrated over the failure to locate the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, Beijing is mulling the setting up a global monitoring network, the South China Morning Post reported today.

The Hong Kong daily reported that Beijing was considering building more than 50 orbiting probes so that it could monitor the entire planet.

Chinese researchers said if China were to increase its network of surveillance and observation satellites, it would be on a par or larger than the United States.

The report said Beijing has been frustrated by the failure to locate MH370 despite 21 days of search operations.

Professor Chi Tianhe told SCMP that if China had a global monitoring network today, the 26 nations involved in the search operations for the missing Boeing 777-200ER (9M-MRO) would not be searching in the dark.

“We would have a much greater chance of finding MH370 and tracing it to its final position,” said Chi, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth.

“The plan is being drafted to expand our regional monitoring capability to global coverage,” Chi told SCMP. Read the rest of this entry »

By Syed Jaymal Zahiid
The Malay Mail Online
March 30, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, March 30 — The on-going search for Malaysia Airline flight MH370 is likely to exceed the US$40 million (RM130.9 million) spent to recover the remains of the Air France flight AF447 jet, experts have said.

Scientists from China — whose people make up two-thirds of the 239 people on board the passenger plane missing for 22 days now — speculate that a prolonged search could see the bill hit 10 times higher than that forked out for AF447, the South Morning China Post (SCMP) has reported.

The English-language Hong Kong daily reported France and Brazil had poured out over US$40 million to retrieve the flight recorder from the French plane that crashed en route to Rio de Janeiro from Paris, using sophisticated technology like underwater robots to scour the seabed in search for the wreckage. Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Krishnan
The Independent
29 March 2014

Some small and as yet unidentified objects were said to have been recovered from the Indian Ocean on Saturday but experts have warned that salvaging MH370 in some of the world’s deepest and most turbulent waters will not be easy.

David Mearns, owner of Blue Water Recoveries in West Sussex and one of the world’s most experienced deep-sea shipwreck salvagers, described the efforts that would be undertaken to recover the plane that disappeared with 239 people on board on 8 March.

He said that the seabed some 1,800km (1,100 miles) from Perth, Western Australia, may not be “precisely mapped out” which could rule out many systems for recovering any parts of the Boeing 777 that may have sunk. He said the operation would be divided into two phases: recovery and salvage.

“Only a small number of systems have the technology to search that far,” he said. “A handful of companies will have the equipment and necessary expertise within their teams to do this.” Read the rest of this entry »