Malaysian flight with 239 people aboard missing, including 153 Chinese nationals

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[YouMakeMyDreams]

Taiwan sends unit to join search for missing airliner

Staff Reporter
2014-03-11

Taiwan's Chengkung-class frigate prepares to set off and assist in the search. (Photo/China Times)

Taiwan has sent a military frigate, a military plane and two coast guard vessels to assist in the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which has remained missing since losing contact with with air traffic controllers on March 8.

The two 1,000-ton coast guard ships departed from Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan on Monday and are likely to reach the area where the Malaysian airliner first lost contact by Friday at noon. The Chengkung-class frigate and a C-130 transport plane also set off from Magong Naval Base and Pingtung county on the same day to join in the 10-day search mission, according to Taiwanese news agency CNA.

Taiwan's Navy and Air Force were asked to increase patrols in the South China Sea to assist in the search while Fisheries Agency also asked fishing vessels operating the areas for helps.

The Malaysian airliner, which was carrying 227 passengers and a 12-member crew, took off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing on March 8 and vanished around an hour later somewhere between Vietnam and Malaysia. Without a scrap of debris found, its whereabouts and the circumstances causing its disappearance remain a mystery.

China has sent four warships to assist the search since 152 of the passengers on the airplanes are Chinese nationals. Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam have also dispatched vessels and aircraft to assist in the search.

 

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‘I’m Safe’: Last Status Update of Teenager on Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight

Kay Armin Serjoie / Tehran
March 11, 2014

Friends and well-wishers mourn an Iranian teenager who boarded the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 with a stolen passport in the hope of reaching his mother in Germany
Search Continues For Missing Malaysian Airliner Carrying 239 Passengers

The last status update Pouria Nourmohammadi posted on his Facebook page indicated he was “feeling excited.” The 19-year-old Iranian had good reason to be: he was embarking on the first leg of a flight that would ultimately take him to Germany where his mother was waiting to help him begin a new life.

But his journey was tragically interrupted. His flight, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing early Saturday morning with all 239 people on board. Nearly four days later, no trace has been found of the Boeing 777 in spite of a massive search operation conducted by at least nine countries.

Nourmohammadi had earlier hinted he would be going on a long, life-changing trip. “Because of some problems I will deactivate my account. Friends, seriously, if I’ve done any of you a bad turn, forgive me because maybe …” he posted on his Facebook page on Feb. 24.

It was only when he started posting pictures of himself in Malaysia at popular Kuala Lumpur landmarks like the Petronas Towers that some of his friends realized he had left Iran.

“So you’ve gone as well?” wrote one on March 4. “Will you ever return?”

“No,” replied Nourmohammadi.

The revelation that two Iranians had boarded the Malaysian jetliner with stolen passports raised suspicions of hijacking or terrorism. However this was played down by authorities on Tuesday. Ronald Noble, secretary general of Interpol, said at a press conference that Nourmohammadi and 29-year-old Seyed Hamid Reza Delavar were “probably not terrorists.”

The head of the Malaysian police force, Khalid Abu Bakar, also said on Tuesday that after having been in touch with Nourmohammadi’s mother in Frankfurt, he believed the teenager had been trying to reach Europe as an asylum seeker. Because of dire economic circumstances as well as restrictions on social freedoms at home, some Iranian youth opt to make such risky trips. Many of them must use illegal methods, usually involving human-trafficking rings. Nourmohammadi had left Iran with his official passport, but apparently used a stolen Austrian passport when he arrived in Kuala Lumpur.

Until a few weeks ago, Nourmohammadi’s Facebook page seemed much like that of any other 19-year-old. It has posts on cars, girls and video clips of youth poking fun at those in authority. But as he approaches his departure from Iran, his posts turn more cryptic, the youthful cheerfulness dims. Nourmohammadi knew he was taking a big risk: he asked friends to pray for him the night before he left. After he went through Kuala Lumpur International Airport’s passport control, he posted: “Thanks to all of those who prayed for me, I’m safe.”

When news broke that he was on Flight 370, the comments started pouring in on his Facebook page.

“If only he would post exactly the same message again,” said Tannaz Nasr yesterday, commenting on his “I’m safe” post.

“I’m waiting for a miracle,” commented Shaqayeq GT today.

“I don’t know you, but I wish from the bottom of my heart that you will return to your family,” said Vahid Ajami.

Some of those who commented made clear they saw Nourmohammadi as a victim. “If you are no longer in this world then you are at last free my son … damn those who forced you to flee your home,” wrote commenter Mojgan Shahnazi on Nourmohammadi’s picture in front of the Petronas Towers.

 

[YouMakeMyDreams]

Co-pilot of Malaysia Airlines flight had 'invited women into cockpit in the past'

Airline was twice prosecuted for allowing passengers with stolen passports to fly

PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 12 March, 2014, 12:17am
UPDATED : Wednesday, 12 March, 2014, 9:44am

Danny Lee [email protected]

Malaysia Airlines is investigating an Australian television report that the co-pilot on its missing flight had invited two women to stay in the cockpit for the duration of a flight two years ago.

Jonti Roos spoke about her flight on A Current Affair, which aired photographs showing the women in the cockpit.

The airline said it wouldn't comment about the report until its inquiry was complete.

Roos said she and her friend were allowed to stay in the cockpit during the entire one-hour flight in December 2011, from Phuket, Thailand, to Kuala Lumpur. Fariq Abdul Hamid and the other pilot talked to them, smoked and posed for photos, she said.

In other breaches of international protocol, it has emerged that Malaysia Airlines has twice been convicted of allowing passengers using stolen passports to fly on their planes.

In 2007, two passengers using passports taken during a burglary in Auckland were allowed to board a flight, despite a computer database warning that flagged the documents as suspect.

As the passengers were checking in, a staff member received an automatically generated directive from New Zealand's Advanced Passenger Processing (APP) system not to board the pair, but ignored the instruction and allowed them on the flight.

The airline received a 12-month suspended sentence over the incident, according to Immigration New Zealand spokesman Marc Piercey.

Watch: What we know about Malaysia Airlines flight MH370

Five years later, the carrier was again found guilty of a similar offence, when a check-in staff member generated a false passport number to allow a passenger to board, despite an APP warning from New Zealand. A New Zealand court fined the Malaysian carrier NZ$5,500 (HK$36,000).

The traveller was a Malaysian national and was the holder of a passport bearing the same number as a passenger on a previous international flight who was arrested in Thailand. It is unclear why the Malaysian was not stopped.

Malaysia Airlines declined to comment.

Two Iranian passengers travelling on flight 370 had boarded with stolen passports.

Security and risk consultant Steve Vickers, a former head of the Hong Kong police criminal-intelligence bureau, said New Zealand had a particularly effective system, adding that "security checks were a matter for governments, rather than airlines".

"Malaysia Airlines hasn't been the only airline subject to prosecutions around the region," he said.

Cathay Pacific, Chile's LAN Airlines and Aerolineas Argentinas have been fined a combined total of HK$200,000 under similar prosecutions by New Zealand.

 

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Hunt for Malaysia Airlines jet widens after conflicting reports it 'flew off course for an hour'

Search area is widened to include southern Andaman Sea

PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 11 March, 2014, 11:47pm
UPDATED : Wednesday, 12 March, 2014, 11:41am

Staff Reporters and Agencies

Confusion clouded the hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet today, after the country's air force chief denied having told a newspaper that the plane had been tracked by radar veering off course and travelling hundreds of kilometres to the Strait of Malacca.

Rodzali Daud was quoted by Berita Harian as saying the plane was last detected by military radar at 2.40am on Saturday, near the island of Pulau Perak at the northern end of the Strait of Malacca, at a height of about 29,500 feet.

However, he today denied making the remarks.

Berita Harian's report came after Reuters quoted a separate source who had been briefed on the investigation, as saying the aircraft had indeed made a detour to the west and did continue to fly to the Malacca Strait - one of the world's busiest shipping channels - at a "lower altitude".

The conflicting statements will raise further questions about the Malaysian government and its national carrier's handling of the search for the plane, whose scope has been significantly widened over the last four days to include a vast swathe of ocean and a significant land mass.

On Tuesday morning Malaysian civial aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman said ships and planes were now also searching in the southern part of the Andaman Sea.

The senior military source last night told Reuters last night that the Beijing-bound plane, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew, was last detected over the Strait of Malacca at 2.40am, some 550 kilometres west of the original flight path.

"It changed course after Kota Bharu and took a lower altitude. It made it into the Strait of Malacca," the military official said. Malaysia Airlines had previously said the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing vanished from air traffic control screens at 1.30am, having taken off at 12.41am.

Police show two men who boarded the flight using stolen passports. They were identified by Interpol as Pouri Nour Mohammadi and Delavar Seyed Mohammadreza. Photo: AFP

Since the aircraft's disappearance, planes and ships have been deployed to the South China Sea roughly midway between Kota Bharu, on Malaysia's east coast, and the southern tip of Vietnam, along its planned flight path.

Aviation and counter-terrorism expert Chris Yates said: "If [the aircraft] diverted from its original flight plan and took a routing to the west to the Strait of Malacca, [it] may have been subject to a hijack."

Meanwhile, China deployed two military jets from Sanya , Hainan province, yesterday to join the search, adding to four warships and four civilian vessels already mobilised.

It could not be confirmed if Beijing had expanded its search efforts to the Strait of Malacca. Armed forces from Australia, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines and the United States have also joined the search.

Chinese nationals made up the majority of passengers on the ill-fated flight with 153, including one infant and one Hongkonger.

Also yesterday, the identities of two passengers on the flight who were travelling with stolen passports were revealed by Interpol as Pouri Nour Mohammadi, 19, and 29-year-old Delavar Seyed Mohammadreza.

Both men had initially travelled from Doha in Qatar to Kuala Lumpur last month with valid Iranian passports, said Interpol secretary-general Ronald Noble.

But when they boarded flight 370, the Iranian teenager was carrying a stolen Austrian passport belonging to a man named Christian Kozel, while the other man used a stolen Italian passport bearing the name Luigi Maraldi.

Earlier reports had indicated five suspect passport-holders on the flight but Noble said the other three passports had been cleared. "We continue to work with our member countries to follow all leads, and examine all options, including terrorism, organised crime and illegal movement of people," he said.

Vietnam's vice-transport minister, Pham Quy Tieu, pledged to expand the search area to 20,000 square kilometres of the waters in the eastern and northeastern part of Vietnam.

Reporting by Phila Siu in Phu Quoc Island, Vietnam; Danny Lee, Lana Lam, Sijia Jiang

 

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China's satellites 'missed best chance' to find missing Malaysia Airlines flight

Sky eyes were on other parts of globe during plane's ill-fated journey

PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 12 March, 2014, 12:17am
UPDATED : Wednesday, 12 March, 2014, 11:48am

Stephen Chen [email protected]

Hampered by poor co-ordination and a meagre staff, China did not immediately exploit the capability of its satellites to search for the missing Malaysian airliner, according to a Chinese scientist.

It was one of several potential problems raised by researchers, who are as frustrated as the public in the search for Malaysia Airlines flight 370.

When the Boeing 777 was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing last Saturday, no Chinese satellites were observing it, said Dr Chi Tianhe, a researcher in satellite imaging with the Chinese Academy of Sciences who took part in the search.

Several hours after Malaysia Airlines announced that the plane had disappeared, China used its satellites to scour the waters between Vietnam and Malaysia, state media said. They were part of a multinational effort using military equipment. The search has failed to find survivors, wreckage or debris.

"Chinese satellites' real-time surveillance capability will likely be strengthened after this incident," said Chi, a professor with the academy's Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth in Beijing.

Chi said his biggest regret was that while China had enough satellites to monitor a large area around the clock, including the search zone, the job had not been done. Monitoring every bit of land and sea would require a dedicated staff, he added.

The failure of the search has raised questions over its field and strategy, and its multinational co-ordination.

Professor Wu Dong, a satellite remote-sensing expert with the Ocean University of China in Qingdao , said the lack of satellite evidence of the plane suggested that the designated search zones could be wrong.

Professor Xie Tao, an expert in ocean satellite remote-sensing at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, said it was possible that the resolution of the satellites doing the search was not high enough, an assertion that Chi disputed.

"The waves would also distort microwave images and make analysis difficult," Xie said. And time was of the essence. "The longer the search takes, the farther the debris would be carried away by currents from the crash site."

For three days, Chinese researchers have employed high-resolution satellite imaging equipment to search for the Boeing aircraft. This has included satellites with many different sensors, including high-resolution optical telescopes, infrared cameras, synthetic aperture radar and microwave detectors.

The search project has also used military satellites with classified technological details. In addition, China has paid overseas commercial satellite companies to use their advanced satellites and to obtain their data.

The satellite equipment allowed researchers to examine specific areas of the sea for wreckage and debris day and night, under all kinds of weather conditions, Chi said.

Chi would not comment as to the size of objects that the satellites could detect but added that the resolution was "definitely high enough for the job".

Some US and Canadian satellites can distinguish an object as small as half a metre in size, but the ocean waves could make precise detection difficult. "If the object is non-metalic, such as plastic, it would be very difficult to spot with radar," Xie said.

While civilian satellites might have difficulty finding debris, military spy satellites should be able to do the job because they are designed to search for very small targets, Wu said.

Chinese warships have prowled the sea using powerful surface radar to detect objects on the sea's surface, and sonar to find underwater wreckage.

Wu said it was possible, judging from the lack of wreckage, that the plane made a successful water landing, but then sank to the ocean floor in one piece.

"But if the crew achieved such a miracle, why didn't they radio for help?" Wu asked. "From a technical point of view, I cannot find a good explanation for the complete disappearance."

The lack of evidence also frustrates Chi. "If such a large plane had fallen in the ocean, it would leave some signs on the surface," he said. "The plane seems to have disappeared completely. To us it is unreasonable."

 

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Malaysia probes people-smuggling link as jet search widens

AFP
March 12, 2014, 4:12 pm

Kuala Lumpur (AFP) - Two suspect men who flew on a missing Malaysian airliner appear to have been Iranian illegal immigrants, officials said Tuesday, lessening fears of terrorism but doing little to unlock the agonising riddle of what has befallen the plane's 239 passengers and crew.

The Malaysian military said they believe they had tracked the missing plane, with new evidence suggesting the plane changed course and may have travelled as far as the Malacca Straits.

Local newspaper Berita Harian quoted Malaysian air force chief General Rodzali Daud to say that the plane had been detected hundreds of kilometres away from the initial last contact point, and that a military base had reported detecting the plane at Pulau Perak.

Another unnamed military official said: "It changed course after Kota Bharu and took a lower altitude. It made it into the Malacca Strait."

But Malaysia's air force chief on Wednesday denied reports the jet had been detected far from its planned flight path.

“The (air force) has not ruled out the possibility of an air turn-back on a reciprocal heading before the aircraft vanished from the radar,” General Rodzali Daud said in a statement.

“This resulted in the search and rescue operations being widened to the vicinity of the waters (off the west coast of Malaysia).”

But he denied a Malaysian media report on Tuesday that quoted him as saying that radar had last detected the plane over the Strait of Malacca off western Malaysia.

That location would have indicated that Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 had banked far to the west of its intended flight path over the South China Sea.

Rodzali said he “did not make any such statements” and that Malaysian newspaper Berita Harian published “what is clearly an inaccurate and incorrect report”.

Authorities have said the plane's last known point of contact with air-traffic control was off eastern Malaysia early on Saturday.

On the fourth day of a multinational search at sea and on land, relatives desperate for news of loved ones aboard Malaysia Airlines MH370 said their hopes for a miracle were ebbing away.

Authorities have doubled the search radius to 100 nautical miles (equivalent to 185 kilometres) around the point where the Boeing 777 disappeared from radar over the South China Sea early Saturday, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

"We are intensifying our search and rescue, and hoping against hope there is still an opportunity for us to rescue (those on board)," Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters.

The 34-year-old son of Malaysian security guard Subramaniam Gurusamy was on the flight to do business in Beijing for an oil company.

"My three-year-old grandson is asking: 'where is Dad?' We tell him father has gone to buy sweets for you," Gurusamy, 60, said as he broke down in tears.

"Please bring back my son. I am praying for divine intervention. That is the only hope we have."

Malaysia had opened a terror probe, joined by FBI agents from the United States. But the revelation of the identities of two men who boarded the flight using stolen European passports suggested they were young Iranian migrants seeking a new life overseas.

Interpol named the pair as Pouri Nour Mohammadi, 18, who was booked to fly on to Germany, and Delavar Seyed Mohammad Reza, 29, who was ticketed through to Denmark.

Reza's ultimate destination was Sweden, where he intended to apply for political asylum, according to Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet.

The two travelled to Kuala Lumpur from Doha on their real Iranian passports, and their identification was helped by relatives in Europe who reported them missing, officials said.

"It is part of a human-smuggling issue and not a part of a terrorist issue," Interpol chief Ronald Noble told reporters in France, adding that the international agency was more and more "certain that these individuals are probably not terrorists".

- People-smuggling ring? -

Iran offered its assistance to the Malaysian investigation, pledging to provide "any information on the Iranians and their status as soon as it is available".

Police in Southeast Asia agreed that people-smuggling was emerging as the likeliest explanation for the identity fraud.

The two passports -- one Italian and one Austrian -- were stolen over the past two years in Thailand, where police have long been battling a thriving trade in Western documents used by criminal gangs.

"We believe that these two passports were stolen by a human-smuggling gang who send people to work in third countries, especially European countries," Lieutenant General Panya Maman, commander of Thailand's southern police region, told AFP.

Malaysia's national police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said his officers were not ruling anything out but were now focusing on theories including a hijacking, sabotage or psychological problems among passengers or crew.

Elsewhere on the judicial front, French prosecutors on Tuesday opened an investigation for manslaughter following the plane's mystery disappearance.

The move does not indicate any evidence of foul play necessarily, but is standard practice since four of the missing passengers are French nationals, and allows French magistrates to take a more active part in the investigation.

Flight MH370, captained by a veteran pilot, had relayed no indications of distress, and weather at the time was said to be good.

The vastness of the search zone reflects authorities' bafflement over the plane's disappearance. The operation has grown to involve 42 ships and 35 aircraft from Southeast Asian countries, Australia, China, New Zealand and the United States.

- 'Emotional breakdown' -

The plane's last confirmed radar sighting was off Vietnam's southern coast. "In terms of our assessments and predictions ? we have little hope of a positive outcome," Pham Quy Tieu, Vietnamese deputy minister of transport, said.

The search sphere now includes land on the Malaysian peninsula itself, the waters off its west coast, and an area to the north of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

That covers an area far removed from the scheduled route of flight MH370, which officials say may have inexplicably turned back towards Kuala Lumpur.

China, which had 153 of its nationals on board the plane, said it would harness 10 satellites equipped with high-resolution imaging to help in the search. Boeing said it was joining a US government team to try to unravel the mystery of what happened to its 777-200 plane.

Conflicting information has deepened the anguish of relatives, with tests on oil slicks in the South China Sea showing they were not from the missing jet and reports of possible debris from the flight also proving to be false alarms.

At a hotel in Beijing where relatives are gathered, a man in his 20s surnamed Su said: "I hope it is a hijacking, then there will be some hope that my young cousin has survived.

"My uncle and aunt had an emotional breakdown, they are not eating, drinking and sleeping."

A total of 17 Chinese relatives have so far taken up an offer from Malaysia Airlines to fly to Kuala Lumpur to be closer to the operation, and more are expected in the coming days, the airline said.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang reiterated demands for Malaysia to look after the relatives "and give them accurate information in a timely fashion".

Malaysia Airlines stressed: "We are as anxious as the families to know the status of their loved ones."

 

[YouMakeMyDreams]

Terror group claims responsibility of missing Malaysia Airlines MH370

AFP
Yahoo!7 and agencies March 11, 2014, 1:03 pm

A group known as the Chinese Martyrs’ Brigade has reportedly claimed it is behind the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Late last night, an email was sent to a number of journalists in China, threatening: “You kill one of our clan, we will kill 100 of you as payback.”

It makes a purported threat in the wake of a knife attack in Kinming last week, in which 29 people were killed and over 100 injured.

However, officials in Malaysia have cautioned the email could be a hoax designed to increase ethnic tensions in China.

“There is no sound or credible grounds to justify their claims,” said Malaysia’s acting Transport Minister, Datuk Seri Hishammuddin, adding that the email did not explain what had happened to the plane.

He also said the email was delivered through an encrypted Hushmail web service, which makes it “virtually impossibly” to trace.

A poster with words of support for the passengers of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. Photo: AFP.

Stolen passports probed in Malaysian plane mystery

Authorities questioned travel agents Monday at a beach resort in Thailand about two men who boarded the vanished Malaysia Airlines plane with stolen passports, part of a growing international investigation into what they were doing on the flight.

Nearly three days after the Boeing 777 with 239 people on board disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, no debris has been seen in Southeast Asian waters.

Five passengers who checked in for Flight MH370 didn't board the plane, and their luggage was removed from it, Malaysian authorities said. Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said this also was being investigated, but he didn't say whether this was suspicious.

Luigi Maraldi, an Italian man whose stolen passport was used by a passenger who boarded the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. Photo: AP.

The search effort, involving at least 34 aircraft and 40 ships from several countries, was being widened to a 100-nautical mile (185-kilometre) radius from the point the plane vanished from radar screens between Malaysia and Vietnam early Saturday with no distress signal.

Two of the passengers were travelling on passports stolen in Thailand and had onward tickets to Europe, but it's not known whether the two men had anything to do with the plane's disappearance. Criminals and illegal migrants regularly travel on fake or stolen documents.

Hishammuddin said biometric information and CCTV footage of the men has been shared with Chinese and U.S. intelligence agencies, which were helping with the investigation. Almost two-thirds of the passengers on the flight were from China.

The stolen passports, one belonging to Christian Kozel of Austria and the other to Luigi Maraldi of Italy, were entered into Interpol's database after they were taken in Thailand in 2012 and 2013, the police organisation said.

Electronic booking records show that one-way tickets with those names were issued Thursday from a travel agency in the beach resort of Pattaya in eastern Thailand. Thai police Col. Supachai Phuykaeokam said those reservations were placed with the agency by a second travel agency in Pattaya, Grand Horizon.

Thai police and Interpol officers questioned the owners. Officials at Grand Horizon refused to talk to The Associated Press.

Police Lt. Col. Ratchthapong Tia-sood said the travel agency was contacted by an Iranian man known only as "Mr. Ali" to book the tickets for the two men.

"We have to look further into this Mr. Ali's identity because it's almost a tradition to use an alias when doing business around here," he said.

The travel agency's owner, Benjaporn Krutnait, told The Financial Times she believed Mr. Ali was not connected to terrorism because he had asked for cheapest tickets to Europe and did not specify the Kuala Lumpur to Beijing flight.

Malaysia's police chief was quoted by local media as saying that one of the two men had been identified — something that could speed up the investigation.

Civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman declined to confirm this, but said they were of "non-Asian" appearance, adding that authorities were looking at the possibility the men were connected to a stolen passport syndicate.

Asked by a reporter what they looked like, he said: "Do you know of a footballer by the name of (Mario) Balotelli? He is an Italian. Do you know how he looks like?" A reporter then asked, "Is he black?" and the aviation chief replied, "Yes."

Mario Balotelli (left) has unwittingly been caught up in the missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 investigation. Photo: AFP.

Possible causes of the apparent crash include an explosion, catastrophic engine failure, terrorist attack, extreme turbulence, pilot error or even suicide, according to experts, many of whom cautioned against speculation because so little is known.

Malaysia's air force chief, Rodzali Daud, has said radar indicated that before it disappeared, the plane may have turned back, but there were no further details on which direction it went or how far it veered off course.

On Sunday, a Vietnamese plane spotted a rectangular object that was thought to be one of the plane's doors, but ships could not locate it. On Monday, a Singaporean search plane spotted a yellow object 140 kilometers (87 miles) southwest of Tho Chu island, but it turned out to be sea trash.

Malaysian maritime officials found oil slicks in the South China Sea, but lab tests found that samples of it were not from an aircraft, Azharuddin said.

Selamat Omar, a Malaysian whose 29-year-old son Mohamad Khairul Amri Selamat was a passenger on the flight, told of getting a call from the airline saying the plane was missing.

"We accept God's will," Selamat said. "Whether he is found alive or dead, we surrender to Allah."

- Suspect passengers on missing jet had 'Asian features' -

Malaysia's interior minister said two passengers who used stolen passports to board a Malaysia Airlines plane that went missing with 239 people aboard had "Asian facial features", according to a report.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing vanished over waters somewhere between Malaysia and Vietnam early Saturday about an hour after taking off.

Fears of a terror attack have surfaced after it was revealed that at least two passengers boarded the plane with stolen passports -- one from Italy and one from Austria. The passport owners have been found to be safe.

"I am still puzzled how come (immigration officers) cannot think: an Italian and Austrian but with Asian facial features," Home Minister Zahid Hamidi was quoted as saying late Sunday by Malaysia's national news agency Bernama.

The report did not elaborate. Malaysian officials had earlier said they were examining CCTV images of the passengers.

"We will conduct an internal probe, particularly on the officers who were on duty at the KLIA (Kuala Lumpur International Airport) immigration counter during flight MH370," Zahid said.

Vietnamese searchers late on Sunday spotted debris off their coast but it has not been confirmed whether that was from the missing plane.

Malaysia's transport minister said Sunday the government was looking into the possibility of a terror incident and was liaising with intelligence agencies of other countries including the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.

 

[YouMakeMyDreams]

Crossed wires and dead ends in Vietnamese search for Malaysia Airlines flight

PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 12 March, 2014, 4:42pm
UPDATED : Wednesday, 12 March, 2014, 5:39pm

Phila Siu [email protected]

Deputy commander of the Vietnamese Air Force Do Minh Tuan (right) speaks to the media during a news conference at Phu Quoc Airport. Photo: Reuters

As the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 goes on, chaos and confusion surrounds search efforts in Vietnam. The chances of the jet being found in the area appear to be diminishing each day, as journalists hunt for reliable information and officials struggle to provide answers.

Vietnamese rescue teams have been working around the clock since the plane carrying 239 people went missing last Saturday, following up on almost daily reports of suspected plane wreckage being spotted in Vietnamese waters.

Attention has focused on waters surrounding Phu Quoc island in the southwest of the country. But, so far, each initially promising lead has turned out to be another dead end.

Tests carried out on an oil slick spotted by the Vietnamese airforce last Saturday confirmed it was bunker fuel, used by ships but not aircraft. On Monday, planes were scrambled to scour waters off Vung Tau province in the south after a Cathay Pacific crew reported seeing possible debris in the area.

Nothing was found.

Similar searches off Tho Chu island near to Phu Quoc on Tuesday also proved fruitless.

Meanwhile, scores of journalists from around the world have descended on Phu Quoc, where confusion and a shortage of official information on the search efforts have baffled many.

At daily press briefings authorities have repeatedly denied reports suggesting the plane might have crashed in nearby waters, even as the same authorities have pledged to beef up the country’s search and rescue efforts. Deputy transport minister Pham Quy Tieu said on Monday there was “no hope for positive information from the ill-fated plane”.

The Post gained access to the island’s navy base but officers there were unwilling to offer any update on the search operation.

One officer said that no command centre had been set up on the island. Hours later, a press briefing was held at the Phu Quoc air traffic control centre, which had been turned into a rescue command centre.

After Tuesday’s report that the Malaysian authorities had tracked flight MH370 near to the Strait of Malacca, the deputy transport minister announced that the country was suspending its air search and scaling back its sea effort while it awaited confirmation from the Malaysian authorities.

For the locals and tourists looking on, life continues in relative normality.

“Oh, the missing plane? I heard about it but I don’t know what happened,” is the reply most have given the Post in the last few days.

 

[YouMakeMyDreams]

Flight MH370 sent engine data before vanishing, says magazine

Yahoo!7 and agencies March 12, 2014, 6:24 pm

The missing Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER sent at least two bursts of technical data back to the airline before it disappeared, according to the New Scientist magazine.

The Malaysian Insider reports that the data may help investigators understand what went wrong with the aircraft,

with no trace of Flight MH370 found since it disappeared early on Saturday morning.

In one of the biggest aviation mysteries in memory, dozens of aircraft and vessels from an array of countries, including the US Navy, have failed to find a shred of evidence pointing to the plane's fate.

Major General Datuk Affendi Buang briefs the media during an update on the missing Malaysia Airlines plane. Photo: Getty.

"Malaysia Airlines has not revealed if it has learned anything from ACARS data, or if it has any," reported the New Scientist, referring to the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which automatically files technical reports during every flight so that engineers can spot problems.

The reports are sent at four stages throughout the flight - during take-off, the climb, at

a point during cruising and on landing - via VHF radio or satellite.

However, in a Malaysia Airlines statement, the airline claimed: "All Malaysia Airlines aircraft are equipped with ACARS which transmits data automatically. Nevertheless, there were no distress calls and no information was relayed."

New Scientist claims that the maker of the missing jet's Trent 800 engines, Rolls Royce, received two data reports from the now missing flight at its global engine health monitoring centre in Derby, England, where it reportedly keeps real-time monitors on its engines in use.

"One was broadcast as MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport, the other during the 777's climb out towards Beijing," it said.

Malaysia probes people-smuggling link as jet search widens

Two suspect men who flew on a missing Malaysian airliner appear to have been Iranian illegal immigrants, officials said Tuesday, lessening fears of terrorism but doing little to unlock the agonising riddle of what has befallen the plane's 239 passengers and crew.

The Malaysian military said they believe they had tracked the missing plane, with new evidence suggesting the plane changed course and may have travelled as far as the Malacca Straits.

A US Navy Seahawk helicopter takes off from the USS Pinckney in the Gulf of Thailand during search efforts. Photo: Reuters.

Local newspaper Berita Harian quoted Malaysian air force chief General Rodzali Daud to say that the plane had been detected hundreds of kilometres away from the initial last contact point, and that a military base had reported detecting the plane at Pulau Perak.

Another unnamed military official said: "It changed course after Kota Bharu and took a lower altitude. It made it into the Malacca Strait."

But Malaysia's air force chief on Wednesday denied reports the jet had been detected far from its planned flight path.

“The (air force) has not ruled out the possibility of an air turn-back on a reciprocal heading before the aircraft vanished from the radar,” General Rodzali Daud said in a statement.

“This resulted in the search and rescue operations being widened to the vicinity of the waters (off the west coast of Malaysia).”

But he denied a Malaysian media report on Tuesday that quoted him as saying that radar had last detected the plane over the Strait of Malacca off western Malaysia.

That location would have indicated that Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 had banked far to the west of its intended flight path over the South China Sea.

Rodzali said he “did not make any such statements” and that Malaysian newspaper Berita Harian published “what is clearly an inaccurate and incorrect report”.

Authorities have said the plane's last known point of contact with air-traffic control was off eastern Malaysia early on Saturday.

On the fourth day of a multinational search at sea and on land, relatives desperate for news of loved ones aboard Malaysia Airlines MH370 said their hopes for a miracle were ebbing away.

Authorities have doubled the search radius to 100 nautical miles (equivalent to 185 kilometres) around the point where the Boeing 777 disappeared from radar over the South China Sea early Saturday, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

"We are intensifying our search and rescue, and hoping against hope there is still an opportunity for us to rescue (those on board)," Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters.

The 34-year-old son of Malaysian security guard Subramaniam Gurusamy was on the flight to do business in Beijing for an oil company.

"My three-year-old grandson is asking: 'where is Dad?' We tell him father has gone to buy sweets for you," Gurusamy, 60, said as he broke down in tears.

"Please bring back my son. I am praying for divine intervention. That is the only hope we have."

Malaysia had opened a terror probe, joined by FBI agents from the United States. But the revelation of the identities of two men who boarded the flight using stolen European passports suggested they were young Iranian migrants seeking a new life overseas.

Interpol named the pair as Pouri Nour Mohammadi, 18, who was booked to fly on to Germany, and Delavar Seyed Mohammad Reza, 29, who was ticketed through to Denmark.

Reza's ultimate destination was Sweden, where he intended to apply for political asylum, according to Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet.

The two travelled to Kuala Lumpur from Doha on their real Iranian passports, and their identification was helped by relatives in Europe who reported them missing, officials said.

"It is part of a human-smuggling issue and not a part of a terrorist issue," Interpol chief Ronald Noble told reporters in France, adding that the international agency was more and more "certain that these individuals are probably not terrorists".

- People-smuggling ring? -

Iran offered its assistance to the Malaysian investigation, pledging to provide "any information on the Iranians and their status as soon as it is available".

Police in Southeast Asia agreed that people-smuggling was emerging as the likeliest explanation for the identity fraud.

The two passports -- one Italian and one Austrian -- were stolen over the past two years in Thailand, where police have long been battling a thriving trade in Western documents used by criminal gangs.

"We believe that these two passports were stolen by a human-smuggling gang who send people to work in third countries, especially European countries," Lieutenant General Panya Maman, commander of Thailand's southern police region, told AFP.

Malaysia's national police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said his officers were not ruling anything out but were now focusing on theories including a hijacking, sabotage or psychological problems among passengers or crew.

Elsewhere on the judicial front, French prosecutors on Tuesday opened an investigation for manslaughter following the plane's mystery disappearance.

The move does not indicate any evidence of foul play necessarily, but is standard practice since four of the missing passengers are French nationals, and allows French magistrates to take a more active part in the investigation.

Flight MH370, captained by a veteran pilot, had relayed no indications of distress, and weather at the time was said to be good.

The vastness of the search zone reflects authorities' bafflement over the plane's disappearance. The operation has grown to involve 42 ships and 35 aircraft from Southeast Asian countries, Australia, China, New Zealand and the United States.

- 'Emotional breakdown' -

The plane's last confirmed radar sighting was off Vietnam's southern coast. "In terms of our assessments and predictions ? we have little hope of a positive outcome," Pham Quy Tieu, Vietnamese deputy minister of transport, said.

The search sphere now includes land on the Malaysian peninsula itself, the waters off its west coast, and an area to the north of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

That covers an area far removed from the scheduled route of flight MH370, which officials say may have inexplicably turned back towards Kuala Lumpur.

China, which had 153 of its nationals on board the plane, said it would harness 10 satellites equipped with high-resolution imaging to help in the search. Boeing said it was joining a US government team to try to unravel the mystery of what happened to its 777-200 plane.

Conflicting information has deepened the anguish of relatives, with tests on oil slicks in the South China Sea showing they were not from the missing jet and reports of possible debris from the flight also proving to be false alarms.

A Vietnam Air Force search and rescue aircraft have yet to find any sign of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane. Photo: Reuters.

At a hotel in Beijing where relatives are gathered, a man in his 20s surnamed Su said: "I hope it is a hijacking, then there will be some hope that my young cousin has survived.

"My uncle and aunt had an emotional breakdown, they are not eating, drinking and sleeping."

A total of 17 Chinese relatives have so far taken up an offer from Malaysia Airlines to fly to Kuala Lumpur to be closer to the operation, and more are expected in the coming days, the airline said.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang reiterated demands for Malaysia to look after the relatives "and give them accurate information in a timely fashion".

Malaysia Airlines stressed: "We are as anxious as the families to know the status of their loved ones."

 

[YouMakeMyDreams]

Chinese ridicule Malaysia’s recruitment of ‘witch doctor’ to track missing plane

PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 12 March, 2014, 5:01pm
UPDATED : Wednesday, 12 March, 2014, 8:09pm

Sijia Jiang [email protected]

Ibrahim Mat Zin, also known as the Raja Bomoh Sedunia Nujum VIP, used spiritual methods and prayers at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport to help locate the missing plane. Photo: Reuters

Chinese netizens have mocked reports that the Malaysian government invited a witch doctor to help hunt for the missing state carrier's plane amid increasing criticism of the search and rescue operation.

Malaysian media reported that Ibrahim Mat Zin, a famous “bomoh” [shaman] also known as the Raja Bomoh Sedunia Nujum VIP, performed a prayer at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on Monday to help locate the missing MH370, allegedly at the invitation of one of the country’s top leaders.

“I think the plane is still in the air or has crashed into the sea,” he was quoted by Free Malaysia Today as saying.

Cynical Weibo users in China ridiculed the conclusion. “Wow, that is exactly what I think too,” many wrote.

One user who claimed to be Malaysian wrote: “I feel so ashamed as a Malaysian for the first time, not because of any wrongdoing on Malaysia’s part but for having a brainless prime minister.

"Instead of hiring a witch doctor holding two coconuts to be ridiculed, would be better off to do something down-to-earth. …. Stop losing Malaysia’s face!”

Another message that was reposted more than 10,000 times within less than a day read: “In the past few days, Vietnam has cleaned up all the trash on the sea. Whatever Vietnam found, Malaysia shook its head and just said ‘NO NO NO’. Out of distrust of Vietnam, it kindly invited a witch doctor to determine the location.”

Many expressed astonishment that spiritual methods were being considered in the hunt for the plane, as the operation entered its fifth day.

“China deployed 10 satellites, Malaysia deployed a few witch doctors…..is this action art?” said another message.

Jamil Khir Baharom, a minister in the Malaysian Prime Minister’s Department, had earlier said the government welcomed any help in tracing missing flight MH370, including that from bomohs, as long as their methods did not contravene the practices of Islam, Free Malaysia Today reported.

Muslims make up more than half of Malaysia’s population of 22.7 million people. Malaysian Muslims respect spiritual power and bomohs are well respected among believers.

The Raja Bomoh, who has 50 years of experience, rose to fame after offering his services in searching for victims in several major cases, including the Highland Tower tragedy, Kuala Dipang flood and the Mona Fendy murder, according to Free Malaysia Today.

“We use a fish trap hook and a bamboo binocular to search and ask for the victims to be found as soon as possible,” he said. He added that he would go back to the airport to perform another prayer in two days.

It is not unusual in parts of Malaysia for believers and politicians to turn to shamans. More than 200 people in the country were defrauded of a total of more than 23.4 million yuan (HK$30 million) in 2012 in cases involving shamans.

 

[YouMakeMyDreams]

Race against time to find Malaysia Airlines black box as battery sending signal 'will run out in 30 days'

PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 12 March, 2014, 12:46pm
UPDATED : Thursday, 13 March, 2014, 3:35am

Ernest Kao [email protected]

Relatives of passengers aboard missing Flight MH370 look dejected as they leave a hotel lounge in Beijing after failing to receive any encouraging news in their meeting with Malaysian officials.

Search teams are racing to find the flight recorders of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane before the exercise becomes a prolonged and potentially costly one resembling the search for Air France Flight 447, experts say.

An underwater locator beacon inside the black box that switches on automatically after a crash and sends out a sonar signal has not been detected.

"The battery life of the locator lasts 30 days. If they cannot find it within this window, it will become very hard to locate," said Professor Alan Lau Kin-tak, of Hong Kong Polytechnic University's engineering department.

No signal was received from the Malaysian plane's emergency locator transmitter, which is designed to emit distress signals from a plane after an accident. It has a lifespan of 24 hours.

The flight recorders of Air France flight 447 were uncovered nearly two years after it disappeared. Photo: AP

David Newbery, a Hong Kong flight captain and accredited aircraft accident investigator, said search teams faced similar difficulties when investigating the disappearance of the Air France Flight 447 over the south Atlantic in June 2009. The black boxes were found two years later.

"If you still haven't found the wreckage by the time the pinger stops working, you really have a problem," said Newbery.

The two shoebox-sized devices, thought to be indestructible, are located towards the tail of most aircraft. One is a digital flight data recorder which documents parametric data such as airspeed, altitude, heading, pitch and instrumental readings such as cabin pressure and engine temperature. The other device records the dialogue and radio communication in the cockpit.

Downloading the data readings from the recorders would help investigators learn if Flight MH370 exploded - one of several theories raised- or suffered a sudden loss of cabin pressure through a hole in the fuselage, Lau said.

The two boxes, which are actually coloured bright vermillion, are built to withstand an impact of up to 3,400 times the force of gravity and temperatures up to 1,000 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes, he said.

The boxes are also watertight to 600 metres and can stay intact for 30 days.

Lau has urged airlines to invest in real-time data link communications through satellites to ensure that plane tracking signals were always available.

Black boxes equipped with satellite transmitters could also ensure a signal would be picked up after batteries drain, he added.

After the AF447 accident, some in the industry suggested aircraft could continuously live-stream flight data. But Lau said airlines had been reluctant to impose such changes because of the expense.

"More weight means more fuel which means higher costs. If no one proposes anything first, no one in the industry will have impetus to change," he said.

Malaysia Airlines confirmed earlier this week that the missing aircraft did not have a continuous satellite link, citing the cost.

Warren Chim Wing-nin, honorary secretary of the Hong Kong Institute of Engineers aircraft division, said the technology would be hard to implement because of the sheer amount of data from the flight recorders that would have to be managed and processed.

"This is very expensive and a lot of sensitive data will most likely have to go through a third-party processor," he said. "This will obviously raise issues of security, privacy and sovereignty."

 

[YouMakeMyDreams]

​

 

[YouMakeMyDreams]

Malaysia Airlines flight: new theory emerges on how long plane kept flying

Report says computers on 777 were still sending routine data back to Boeing engine workshop hours after last sighting

Kate Hodal in Songkhla and agencies
The Guardian Thursday 13 March 2014 06.18 GMT

A Vietnamese military official looking out of an air force plane during the search for Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. A Vietnamese military official looking out of an air force plane during the search for Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. Photograph: Luong Thai Linh/EPA

A new theory has emerged that the missing Malaysia Airlines plane may have flown on for hours beyond its last reported sighting – adding a new twist to a saga of conflicting details and misinformation in the still fruitless search for flight MH370.

As Malaysia and Vietnam sent aircraft on Thursday to an area of the South China Sea where China said satellite photos showed possible wreckage, the Wall Street Journal reported that the plane had still been automatically sending data back to Boeing well after the time that authorities have said it dropped off radar screens.

The last definitive sighting of the aircraft on civilian radar came shortly before 1.30am on Saturday, less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, as it flew north-east across the mouth of the Gulf of Thailand bound for Beijing. The Wall Street Journal, citing two people in the US familiar with the details, said US investigators suspected the Boeing 777 actually stayed in the air for about four hours past that time.

The startling assessment was based on data automatically sent by the plane to Boeing’s engine department as part of a routine maintenance and monitoring program, the Journal said.

The report adds to a pile of speculation and confused accounts of the plane’s last movements. It raises the possibility that the plane, and the 239 people on board, could have flown on for hundreds of additional miles under conditions that remain murky. Authorities remain uncertain about which ocean to search for the jetliner, which went missing on Saturday after taking off from Kuala Lumpur.

On Thursday planes continued searching for three possible floating objects that appeared in Chinese satellite images not far from the plane’s original flightpath. Beijing urged caution, emphasising that it might amount to nothing. Vietnamese military officials said on Thursday that they had already searched the area earlier and turned up nothing but had sent an aircraft back anyway.

“It is true that the satellite was launched and detected some smoke and what were suspected metal shreds about 37km (23 miles) south-west of Ho Chi Minh City,” said China’s civil aviation chief, Li Jiaxing. “But after some review we cannot confirm that they belong to the missing plane.”

It was unclear why Chinese authorities had not alerted Malaysia to the debris earlier. Malaysia’s civil aviation chief told the Associated Press early on Thursday that he had only learned of the floating objects from news reports. An army official in Vietnam said authorities there were only alerted to the objects on Thursday and were verifying the information, Malaysia’s Star newspaper reported.

Malaysia’s transport minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, confirmed on Thursday that Malaysian authorities were looking into the lead. “Bombardier has already been dispatched to investigate alleged claims of debris found by Chinese satellite imagery,” he said on Twitter, apparently referring to a Canadian-made Bombardier aircraft being sent on the mission.

Malaysia’s civil aviation chief Adbul Rahman cautioned: “There have been lots of [previous] reports of suspected debris.”

Authorities have become increasingly desperate for a breakthrough, with teams plying 35,800 square miles, a vast expanse the size of Portugal ranging from the waters off Vietnam in the South China Sea to the Malacca Strait, parts of peninsular Malaysia and out towards the Andaman Sea.

The Chinese satellite information draws the 12 nations currently searching for the missing plane back towards where the search and rescue originally began, putting MH370 near where authorities initially said the last radar connection with the flight was at 1.30am. There have been other official statements that it showed up again at 2.30am near Malaysia, and just before that at 2:15am near the Malacca Strait.

Malaysian authorities said the search effort would stay focused on the South China Sea and the strait of water towards the Andaman Sea.

Flight MH370 vanished from civilian radar screens at 1.30am on Saturday between Malaysia and southern Vietnam in the Gulf of Thailand. It sent no distress signal and the pilots’ last transmitted message was “All right, good night”, a pleasantry to Malaysian air traffic controllers that gave no indication anything was wrong.

Sightings of potential wreckage have turned out to unrelated to the missing jet, and have included oil slicks and possible life rafts – one of which turned out to be a moss-covered cable reel and another that authorities said probably came from a sea vessel.

The growing frustration at being unable to locate the plane has frayed relations between Malaysia and China as nearly two-thirds of the passengers on MH370 were Chinese citizens.

The Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, made a barbed remarked at Malaysian authorities on Thursday, telling reporters during his annual press conference: “The Chinese government has asked the relevant party to enhance co-ordination, investigate the cause, locate the missing plane as quickly as possible and properly handle all related matters.”

The disappearance has led to massive speculation over what might have caused the plane to vanish from radar screens. Authorities have considered hijacking, sabotage, psychological or personal problems among crew or passengers.

Confusion even reigned over whether the particular 777 involved was subject to a safety alert from the US Federal Aviation Administration about cracks possibly developing in the fuselage around a satellite antenna. The FAA said the alert had been sent to 777 operators and was relevant to MH370 but Boeing told Reuters the Malaysia Airlines plane did not have the antenna and was unaffected.

Hussein, the Malaysian defence minister, told a press conference on Wednesday that “we have nothing to hide” amid claims Malaysia was not divulging all the facts. “There is only confusion if you want to see confusion,” he said.

The US said its satellite images had been checked for any sign of a mid-air explosion but nothing was found.

 

[YouMakeMyDreams]

Missing Malaysia Airlines jet 'may have flown on for four hours': US investigators

Jet engine maker Rolls-Royce confirms it has data from missing plane

PUBLISHED : Thursday, 13 March, 2014, 9:41am
UPDATED : Thursday, 13 March, 2014, 3:42pm

Teddy Ng, Danny Lee, Victoria Ruan and Associated Press

A Vietnamese official looks for signs of the missing Malaysian Airlines airplane off Vietnam's sea during search and rescue operations on Thursday. Photo: EPA

Investigators in the US believe the missing Malaysia Airlines jet may have flown on for four hours after vanishing from radar screens -- a suspicion based on automatically downloaded data from the plane's engines, it was reported today.

Rolls-Royce, the manufacturer of the two Trent 800 engines supplied to the missing jetliner, told the South China Morning Post on Sunday that it tracked and monitored all of its engines in real-time from its control centre in Britain.

Rolls-Royce said it would know if there was a change in engine power. Erin Atan, a spokeswoman for Rolls-Royce, said: “We know first-hand if there is something wrong with the engine, yes ... any kind of problem.”

Asked if other parties were made aware of the information from its control centre, the spokeswoman said the information would be passed on to Malaysia Airlines and the Malaysian authorities.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that the data from the engines are transmitted to the ground as part of its routine maintenance system.

The new information raises questions as to how far the aircraft may have travelled after losing contact with air traffic control officials, and whether anyone was in control of the plane, which had 239 people onboard.

Flight MH370's last known position was recorded roughly halfway between Malaysia and Vietnam. Malaysian authorities earlier said that they had tracked what could have been the craft changing course and heading west.

The fresh suspicions come following the publication of pictures by China which appear to show large chunks of debris floating in the sea.

The pictures, posted on a Chinese government department's website, show three large objects in the South China Sea off the southern tip of Vietnam, near to where the flight was last tracked, Xinhua news agency reported.

The images, captured at around 11am on Sunday - more than 24 hours after the plane disappeared - appear to show "three suspected floating objects", the Xinhua report stated.

The largest was estimated to measure 24 metres by 22 metres, Xinhua said.

A satellite image taken from space on Mar. 9, shows objects in a "suspected crash sea area" in the South China Sea. Photo: CCRSDA.

The images were originally posted on the website of China’s State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense.

China's Premier Li Keqiang said today work was ongoing to try and identify the "suspicious spots" in the images.

However, the Vietnamese said today that two spotter planes sent to the area had failed to find anything.

It was hoped the images would provide investigators with the first real clue as to the fate of the plane, which disappeared after leaving Kuala Lumpur for Beijing in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Since then, the search has covered 92,600 square kilometers (35,800 square miles), first east and then west of Malaysia and even expanded toward India on Wednesday.

No other governments have confirmed the Xinhua report, which did not say when Chinese officials became aware of the images and associated them with the missing plane.

China's aviation chief Li Jiaxiang said Tuesday: "We have been waiting for a search result, but regrettably there has been no certain outcome yet.

Photo: China Center for Resources Satellite Data and Application (CCRSDA)

"On one hand, we still have expectations, and sincerely hope that the missing flight can be found, but on the other hand, we have to be prepared for different scenarios.

"We'll never give up when there is a slice of hope."

He said China had made a number of suggestions in relation to the hunt, again urging Malaysia to step up the search and make the exchange of information smoother.

Malaysia’s civil aviation chief, Datuk Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, said Malaysia had not been officially informed by China about the images, which he said he was learning about from the news.

He said if Beijing informs them of the coordinates, Malaysia will dispatch vessels and planes immediately.

"If we get confirmation, we will send something,” he said on Thursday morning.

 

[YouMakeMyDreams]

Malaysia rejects China’s lost plane images, denies reports MH370 flew on for hours

Malaysian transport authories said on Thursday Chinese photos that raised hopes of a search breakthrough actually showed no wreckage

PUBLISHED : Thursday, 13 March, 2014, 6:45pm
UPDATED : Thursday, 13 March, 2014, 9:12pm

Agence France-Presse in Kuala Lumpur

Malaysia's acting Transport Minister Tun Hussein speaks at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Photo: Reuters

Malaysia on Thursday denied a media report that its missing airliner flew on for hours after last making contact, and said Chinese photos that raised hopes of a search breakthrough actually showed no wreckage.

“Those reports are inaccurate,” Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said of a Wall Street Journal report that said US investigators suspected the plane had flown on.

The report said data automatically sent to the ground from the aircraft’s Rolls-Royce engines suggested the Boeing 777 was in the air for four hours after its last contact with air traffic control at 1.30am Malaysian time.

“The last transmission from the aircraft was at 0107 hours which indicated that everything was normal,” Hishammuddin said.

The Malaysia Airlines (MAS) jet was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on an overnight flight when it disappeared.

“Rolls-Royce and Boeing teams are here in Kuala Lumpur and have worked with MAS and investigation teams since Sunday. These issues have never been raised.”

He also said China had told Malaysia that satellite photos released on the website of a Chinese state oceanic agency, apparently showing three large objects in a suspected crash site, were released “by mistake and did not show any debris.”

A huge search effort has failed to find any evidence of the plane’s fate despite scouring land and sea for six days.

It has been repeatedly dogged by false leads and conflicting information, drawing mounting accusations that Malaysia is bungling the response.

The effort involves dozens of vessels and aircraft from countries around Asia, plus the United States.

The Chinese agency’s images had prompted Malaysia and Vietnam to dispatch planes to the area in question in the South China Sea to hunt for the suspect objects.

“The publication of the images on the website is an accident,” Hishammuddin said, relating a statement he said he had received from China’s ambassador to Malaysia.

He said the Chinese government did not endorse the action and was investigating.

 

[YouMakeMyDreams]

Rogue jet not missing plane, Malaysian diplomat assures families

Frustrated relatives assured unidentified aircraft was not the missing plane

PUBLISHED : Thursday, 13 March, 2014, 6:57pm
UPDATED : Friday, 14 March, 2014, 1:13am

Andrea Chen [email protected]

The Malaysian ambassador Iskandar Sarudin (inset), in a phone call to a military source, said the military detected an unidentified aircraft at 0240 hours. He was photographed at a families-only briefing by The Mirror. Photos: Reuters,

The Malaysian ambassador to China has received confirmation from the Malaysian military that it detected a rogue jet just an hour after flight MH370 vanished - but denied rumours it was shot down.

Iskandar Sarudin, confronted by the frustrated families of Chinese passengers, called up a military source to dispel rumours on social media that the aircraft was shot down - and that it could have been the Beijing-bound flight.

Sarudin was bombarded by questions from concerned relatives at a Malaysia Airlines briefing at Beijing's Lido Hotel.

The military confirmed spotting the unidentified aircraft on its radar about an hour and 20 minutes after MH370's signal went cold on Saturday, the ambassador said.

A Malaysia Airlines representative at the same briefing said the military had not determined if it was the missing plane.

The ambassador was quoted as saying the military official had said the rogue aircraft was not deemed a threat, otherwise it would have notified its response teams.

The press was barred from the briefing, but some Chinese correspondents managed to get accounts and pictures from the event. They posted these on their newspapers' microblogs.

The families also asked about the mental health of the pilots, Captain Zaharie Shah and co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid. Shah had more than 18,300 hours of flight experience, while Hamid had 2,800 hours.

Malaysia Airlines said its investigation of the crew had not brought up anything unusual.

The airline representative also shed some light on the mystery of the continuing connection to some MH370 passengers' mobile phones. He said that at least two numbers could be reached and that the ringtones could be heard when dialled, but no one picked up.

But Malaysia Airlines said they had yet to confirm if the calls were actually connecting to the phones or if they were being redirected to telecom providers' servers.

Asked if the military radar had not been fully activated, the airline representative said the military could not track flight MH370's signal after it vanished from civil aviation radar.

Accounts described the meeting as tense. The aggrieved relatives stopped the officials proceeding to a media briefing until their questions were answered.

 

[YouMakeMyDreams]

Malaysia says no evidence missing plane flew hours after losing contact

By Anshuman Daga and Nguyen Phuong Linh
KUALA LUMPUR/HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam Thu Mar 13, 2014 2:42pm EDT

(Reuters) - Malaysian authorities said on Thursday there was no evidence that a jetliner missing for almost six days flew for hours after losing contact with air traffic controllers and continued to transmit technical data.

The Wall Street Journal said that U.S. aviation investigators and national security officials believed the Boeing 777 flew for a total of five hours, based on data automatically downloaded and sent to the ground from its Rolls-Royce Trent engines as part of a standard monitoring program. (r.reuters.com/ruw57v)

"Those reports are inaccurate," Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a news conference. "As far as both Rolls-Royce and Boeing are concerned, those reports are inaccurate. The last (data) transmission from the aircraft was at 01:07 a.m.(local time) which indicated that everything was normal."

Boeing and Rolls-Royce have yet to comment.

Reuters has previously reported that the plane's transmission of the so-called ACARS technical data ceased after it lost contact with air traffic control.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, with 239 people on board, dropped off air traffic control screens at about 1:30 a.m. on Saturday, less than an hour into a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. There were no reports of bad weather or mechanical problems.

It is one of the most baffling mysteries in the history of modern aviation - there has been no trace of the plane since nor any sign of wreckage despite a search by the navies and military aircraft of over a dozen countries across Southeast Asia.

"It's extraordinary that with all the (satellite and telecommunication) technology that we've got that an aircraft can disappear like this," Tony Tyler, the head of the International Air Transport Association that links over 90 percent of the world's airlines, told reporters in London.

"It will trigger a desire to see how can we avoid this from happening again... I wouldn't be surprised that the technology didn't exist already but is not being used."

The last definitive sighting of MH370 on civilian radar screens came as the plane flew northeast across the mouth of the Gulf of Thailand.

On Wednesday, Malaysia's air force chief said military radar had traced what could have been the jetliner to an area south of the Thai holiday island of Phuket in the Malacca Strait, hundreds of miles to the west of its last known position. However, he stressed the plotting had not been corroborated.

The multi-national search team is combing both bodies of water, which total 27,000 square nautical miles (93,000 square km), an area the size of Hungary.

Hishammuddin however said the focus was on the Gulf of Thailand and the nearby South China Sea, where the plane lost contact. The United States will send the world's most advanced maritime surveillance aircraft, the P-8A Poseidon, to join the search later this week.

WRONG IMAGES

On the sixth day of the search, planes scanned an area of sea where Chinese satellite images had shown what could be debris, but found no sign of the airliner. Hishammuddin said the images were provided accidentally.

"The Chinese government neither authorized nor endorsed (putting it on a website)," he said. "The image is not confirmed to be connected to the plane."

It was the latest in a series of false signals for the Boeing 777-200ER, adding to the confusion and agony of the relatives of the passengers.

As frustration mounted over the failure to find any trace of the plane, China heaped pressure on Malaysia to improve coordination in the search. Around two-thirds of the people aboard the lost plane were Chinese.

Premier Li Keqiang, speaking at a news conference in Beijing, demanded that the "relevant party" step up coordination while China's civil aviation chief said he wanted a "smoother" flow of information from Malaysia, which has come under heavy criticism for its handling of the disaster.

If the military radar signal cited by air force chief Rodzali Daud was the missing plane, the aircraft would have flown for 45 minutes and dropped only about 5,000 feet in altitude since its sighting on civilian radar in the Gulf of Thailand.

That would mean the plane had turned sharply west from its original course, travelling hundreds of miles over the Malay Peninsula to a point roughly south of Phuket and east of the tip of Indonesia's Aceh province and India's Nicobar island chain.

Indonesia and Thailand have said their militaries detected no sign of any unusual aircraft in their airspace. Malaysia has asked India for help in tracing the aircraft and New Delhi's coastguard planes have joined the search.

U.S. EXPERTS ASSISTING

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said in a statement that its experts in air traffic control and radar who traveled to Kuala Lumpur over the weekend were giving the Malaysians technical help.

A U.S. official in Washington said the experts were shown two sets of radar records, military and civilian, and they both appeared to show the plane turning to the west across the Malay peninsula.

But the official stressed the records were raw data returns that were not definitive.

Authorities have not ruled out any cause for the disappearance. Malaysian police have said they were investigating whether any passengers or crew on the plane had personal or psychological problems that might shed light on the mystery, along with the possibility of a hijacking, sabotage or mechanical failure.

Hishammuddin however said media reports that police had searched the homes of the missing aircraft's crew were false.

Two of the passengers on board were discovered by investigators to have false passports, but they were apparently seeking to emigrate illegally to the West.

The Boeing 777 has one of the best safety records of any commercial aircraft in service. Its only previous fatal crash came on July 6 last year when Asiana Airlines Flight 214 struck a seawall with its undercarriage on landing in San Francisco, killing three people.

(Additional reporting by Niluksi Koswanage, Siva Govindasamy, Yantoultra Ngui and Al Zaquan Amer Hamzah in Kuala Lumpur, Ben Blanchard in Beijing, Mai Nguyen, Ho Binh Minh and Martin Petty in Hanoi, Tim Hepher in Paris, Mark Hosenball in Washington and Brenda Goh in London; Writing by Raju Gopalakrishnan; Editing by Nick Macfie)

 

[YouMakeMyDreams]

US suggests search for missing flight expand to Indian Ocean as MH370 'satellite pings' revealed

PUBLISHED : Friday, 14 March, 2014, 8:09am
UPDATED : Friday, 14 March, 2014, 8:54am

Reuters in Kuala Lumpur and Washington

File photos of USS kidd with MH370 inset. Photos: Reuters, EPA

A new search area for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 may be opened in the Indian Ocean, the White House said, significantly broadening the potential location of the plane, which disappeared nearly a week ago with 239 people on board.

Expanding the search area to the Indian Ocean would be consistent with the theory that the Boeing 777 may have detoured to the west about an hour after take-off from the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing.

"It’s my understanding that based on some new information that’s not necessarily conclusive - but new information - an additional search area may be opened in the Indian Ocean," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters in Washington.

Carney did not specify the nature of the new information and Malaysian officials were not immediately available to comment.

Jay Carney. Photo: AP

The disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines plane is one of the most baffling mysteries in the history of modern aviation. There has been no trace of the plane nor any sign of wreckage despite a search by the navies and military aircraft of more than a dozen countries across Southeast Asia.

Satellites picked up faint electronic pulses from the aircraft after it went missing on Saturday, but the signals gave no information about where the jet was heading and little else about its fate, two sources close to the investigation said on Thursday.

But the "pings" indicated its maintenance troubleshooting systems were switched on and ready to communicate with satellites, showing the aircraft was at least capable of communicating after losing touch with air traffic controllers.

The system transmits such pings about once an hour, according to the sources, who said five or six were heard. However, the pings alone are not proof that the plane was in the air or on the ground, the sources said.

Malaysian authorities have said the last civilian contact occurred as the Boeing 777-200ER flew north into the Gulf of Thailand. They said military radar sightings indicated it may have turned sharply to the west and crossed the Malay Peninsula toward the Andaman Sea.

The new information about signals heard by satellites shed little light on the mystery of what happened to the plane, whether it was a technical failure, a hijacking or another kind of incident on board.

While the troubleshooting systems were functioning, no data links were opened, the sources said, because the companies involved had not subscribed to that level of service from the satellite operator, the sources said.

Boeing and Rolls-Royce, which supplied its Trent engines, declined to comment.

Earlier Malaysian officials denied reports that the aircraft had continued to send technical data and said there was no evidence that it flew for hours after losing contact with air traffic controllers early last Saturday.

"It’s extraordinary that with all the technology that we’ve got that an aircraft can disappear like this," Tony Tyler, the head of the International Air Transport Association that links over 90 percent of the world’s airlines, told reporters in London.

Military Deployment Grows

Ships and aircraft are now combing a vast area that had already been widened to cover both sides of the Malay Peninsula and the Andaman Sea.

The US Navy was sending an advanced P-8A Poseidon plane to help search the Strait of Malacca, separating the Malay Peninsula from the Indonesian island of Sumatra. It had already deployed a Navy P-3 Orion aircraft to those waters.

American defence officials told Reuters that the US Navy guided-missile destroyer, USS Kidd, was heading to the Strait of Malacca, answering a request from the Malaysian government. The Kidd had been searching the areas south of the Gulf of Thailand, along with the destroyer USS Pinckney.

India’s Defence Ministry has ordered the deployment of ships, aircraft and helicopters from the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands, at the juncture of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. An Indian P8I Poseidon surveillance plane was sent to the Andaman islands on Thursday.

China, which had more than 150 citizens on board the missing plane, has deployed four warships, four coastguard vessels, eight aircraft and trained 10 satellites on a wide search area. Chinese media have described the ship deployment as the largest Chinese rescue fleet ever assembled.

Wrong Images

On the sixth day of the search, planes scanned an area of sea where Chinese satellite images had shown what could be debris but found no sign of the airliner.

A satellite photo released on a Chinese government website indicates the possible debris of MH370. Photo: Screenshot via Sina

Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a news conference the images were provided accidentally, saying the Chinese government neither authorised nor endorsed putting them on a website. "The image is not confirmed to be connected to the plane," he said.

It was the latest in a series of contradictory reports, adding to the confusion and agony of the relatives of the passengers.

As frustration mounted over the failure to find any trace of the plane, China heaped pressure on Malaysia to improve coordination in the search.

Premier Li Keqiang, speaking at a news conference in Beijing, demanded that the "relevant party" step up coordination while China’s civil aviation chief said he wanted a "smoother" flow of information from Malaysia, which has come under heavy criticism for its handling of the disaster.

Malaysian police have said they were investigating whether any passengers or crew on the plane had personal or psychological problems that might shed light on the mystery, along with the possibility of a hijacking, sabotage or mechanical failure.

The Boeing 777 has one of the best safety records of any commercial aircraft in service. Its only previous fatal crash came on July 6 last year when Asiana Airlines Flight 214 struck a seawall with its undercarriage on landing in San Francisco, killing three people.