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Relatives of flight MH370 angry over order to check out of Beijing hotel
Provincial officials sent to Lido Hotel to persuade families they should return home
PUBLISHED : Friday, 02 May, 2014, 11:37pm
UPDATED : Friday, 02 May, 2014, 11:55pm
Laura Zhou in Beijing and Angela Meng
Hotel staff in a hall used as a service centre for relatives of flight MH370 passengers. Photo: Reuters
Malaysia Airlines' decision to shut down assistance centres set up for relatives of passengers aboard missing flight 370 has left the families angry and confused.
Yesterday, family members were asked to check out of the Lido Hotel in Beijing, where at least 100 police and several ambulances were on stand-by in case of trouble.
"Why did they ask us to leave so suddenly? Why couldn't they have given us five or six more days?" a woman from Henan province asked.
A receptionist at the hotel said a large number of relatives had checked out by late afternoon.
On Thursday, the Malaysian government released a preliminary report on flight MH370, which disappeared on March 8 while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board. It showed air traffic controllers took 17 minutes to notice the disappearance and four hours for officials to declare a search-and-rescue mission.
"That's why I think this is a political issue," said a Tianjin woman whose boyfriend was on board the flight. "Why else would it take them four hours to start the search?"
A search of the southern Indian Ocean where the Boeing 777 is believed to have gone down has found no sign of the airliner.
At a press conference in Kuala Lumpur yesterday, Malaysian acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said France took more than six hours to declare a rescue mission after Air France flight 447 went missing over the Atlantic in 2009. But, he said, the investigation team would still look into the issue.
That will come as little comfort to relatives.
"It is torture," said Nan Kaijun, a Shandong native whose brother-in-law was on board the plane. "If we go home, who are we going to direct our questions to? Who will update us on new developments?"
Provincial officials have been at the hotel trying to persuade relatives to return home, as well as offering temporary accommodation in Beijing if they wish to stay.
Bian Zengchao, a village-level official from Hebei , said he and nine other officials were told to escort three family members home. "We are worried about them," Bian said.
A woman from Henan said officials from her village had travelled to the hotel and pressured her to leave.
The Beijing Lawyer's Association has assembled 71 lawyers to provide free legal services. They will negotiate compensation.
Malaysia Airlines will begin to distribute US$50,000 to each family next week, but some relatives may not accept it yet.
"Accepting the money and signing with the lawyers would mean I accept that he's dead," the Tianjin woman said. "I'm not ready to do that yet."
International experts to take fresh look at data in hunt for flight MH370
Top officials agree on expanded search in remote area of Indian Ocean
PUBLISHED : Monday, 05 May, 2014, 11:14pm
UPDATED : Tuesday, 06 May, 2014, 8:20am
Associated Press in Sydney
Hashammuddin, Truss, Houston and Yang yesterday. Photo: AP
An international panel of experts will re-examine all data gathered in the nearly two-month hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet to ensure search crews who have been scouring a remote area of ocean for the plane have been looking in the right place.
Senior officials from Malaysia, Australia and China met in Canberra to thrash out the details of the next steps in the search for flight MH370, which will centre around an expanded patch of sea floor in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia.
The area became the focus of the hunt after a team of analysts calculated the plane's likeliest flight path based on satellite and radar data.
Starting tomorrow, that data will be reanalysed and combined with all information gathered so far in the search, which has not turned up a single piece of debris despite crews scouring more than 4.6 million square kilometres of ocean.
"We've got to this stage of the process where it's very sensible to go back and have a look at all of the data that has been gathered, all of the analysis that has been done and make sure there's no flaws in it, the assumptions are right, the analysis is right and the deductions and conclusions are right," Angus Houston, head of the search operation, said in the Australian capital.
Investigators have been stymied by a lack of hard data since the plane vanished on March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. A search for surface debris was called off last week after officials determined any wreckage that may have been floating had probably sunk.
"Unfortunately, all of that effort has found nothing," Australian Transport Minister Warren Truss said.
Houston has warned the underwater search is likely to drag on for up to a year.
Houston and Truss met with Malaysian acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein and Chinese Transport Minister Yang Chuantang yesterday to map out the next steps of the underwater search, which will focus on a 60,000 square kilometre patch of sea floor.
Officials are contacting governments and private contractors to find out whether they have specialised equipment that can dive deeper than the Bluefin 21, an unmanned sub that has spent weeks scouring the sea floor in an area where sounds consistent with a plane's black box were detected in early April.
The Bluefin has been limited by the fact it can dive only to depths of 4.5 kilometres - and parts of the search zone are likely deeper than that. Adding to the difficulties is the fact no one really knows exactly how deep the water in the search area is.
"I don't know that anyone knows for sure, because it's never been mapped," Truss said, adding that detailed mapping of the sea floor will be a key focus of the next phase of the search.
Steve Wang (left) and Jiang Hui won't stop searching. Photo: Wu Nan
Relatives of the Chinese passengers on board flight MH370 said they were prepared for a long- term battle to find their loved ones, as the final relative who had been staying at the Lido Hotel in Beijing checked out yesterday.
Steps they plan on taking include holding weekly meetings and setting up a website.
"I stayed as long as I can to confront the Malaysian side. They should respond properly to the relatives of MH370 passengers," said Jiang Hui .
Jiang, 41, is an IT engineer from Beijing.
His 70-year-old mother was among 239 passengers and crew on the Kuala Lumpur to Beijing flight that vanished without trace on March 8.
"I'm so disappointed that the Malaysian government and airline did not present their preliminary report to the families. They also never explained why they forced us to leave early," he said.
Earlier, Malaysia Airlines announced that it would close all of its family assistance centres worldwide by Wednesday. However, relatives were asked to leave the Lido by 6pm on May 2 without further explanation.
Jiang decided to stay in the hotel, after all the remaining relatives left by the May 2 deadline. Since then, he and his brother have paid 759 yuan (HK$955) a night for the hotel room.
More than two-thirds of the 154 missing Chinese passengers are from outside Beijing, and their relatives returned to their hometowns from the Lido.
Members of the MH370 relatives council, which now calls itself the relatives' aid group, suspected that the end of their hotel stay was due to a protest by some 100 relatives outside the Malaysian embassy in Beijing on April 25, demanding information.
"Asking us to leave the Lido will break up the large group of relatives," said Steve Wang, a spokesman for the group.
"It's not that we want free accommodation and food from the airline. We're afraid that once we leave, there will be less and less information, and that we'll be completely ignored."
To Jiang, the hotel was like a battlefield where the more than 100 families could stand together and fight for the truth. They want their loved ones back, or at least to find out where they are.
"We'll never give up looking for them," he said.
The biggest problem for the relatives was that Malaysia Airlines stopped providing them with updated information and even made mistakes while collecting missing passengers' information, Jiang said.
The relatives' aid group has just released a statement with families in the United States, Malaysia, India and New Zealand to ask the Malaysian government to provide them with raw data.
"Above all, we still demand the release of the raw data," Wang said. "Experts from around the world may help us find our loved ones based on the data."
The relatives' aid group will shortly set up a website to gather all the information that might help to locate the missing plane. They also plan to find a venue in Beijing for their weekly or monthly meetings to brief relatives and continue communications with Malaysia.
Jiang said that he was tired of hotel food after staying in the Lido for two months and was looking forward to spending more time with his three-year-old daughter.
"At first I had to lie to her when she asked where her granny was," he said. "Now she asks less. I fear that she won't remember my mother at all."
Submersible's search for Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 returns to site of first ‘ping’
Bluefin-21 submersible to search area where first signal presumed to be from flight recorder of missing Flight MH370 was detected
PUBLISHED : Saturday, 10 May, 2014, 4:02pm
UPDATED : Saturday, 10 May, 2014, 4:03pm
Reuters in Perth
The Bluefin-21 submersible on the deck of the Australian navy ship Ocean Shield as it replenishes supplies and conducts routine maintenance and software modifications. Photo: AFP
An Australian naval vessel carrying an underwater drone involved in the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 left port on Saturday on its second mission to scan part of the Indian Ocean where the longest sonar ‘ping’ was heard over a month ago.
The Ocean Shield is heading to the area where a signal was first located and heard for some two hours on April 5, about 1,600 kilometres northwest of Perth to launch the Bluefin-21 submersible.
More than two dozen countries have been involved in the hunt for the Boeing 777 that disappeared from radar shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people, mostly Chinese, on board in one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries.
Weeks of daily searches have failed to turn up any trace of the plane, even after narrowing the area to an arc in the southern Indian Ocean. Batteries on the black box voice and data recorders have gone flat.
The search had been centred on a 314-square-kilometre area around the second ‘ping’ located and monitored for about 13 minutes on April 5, and which search authorities identified as their strongest lead.
United States Navy Salvage Supervisor, Captain Mark Matthews, in front of the Australian navy vessel Ocean Shield. Photo: AFP
With the search of that area complete, the focus is shifting to the area where the first, and longer, signal was detected the same day, US Navy Captain Mark Matthews told journalists at a naval base near Perth.
“What you do is you go look at your best indications and you pursue them until they’re exhausted,” he said. “These things don’t happen fast. These searches don’t happen on the hours or days cycle. These happen on the weeks and months cycle.”
Australia, China and Malaysia earlier this week pledged not to give up searching for the plane, even though air and surface searches for debris have been abandoned.
The Ocean Shield returned to Stirling Naval Base south of Perth earlier this week after more than a month at sea to resupply, change crew and perform software modifications and maintenance on the Bluefin.
The submersible has dived to a maximum depth of 5,005 metres in its daily 20-hour missions to scan the ocean floor using sonar, despite being only designed to dive to 4,500 metres, Matthews said.
With just three weeks left on loan from the US Navy, the pressure is on about how to proceed and who will pay for the next phase of the search. The Ocean Shield, which will take three days to arrive at the search location, is due back in port by the end of the month.
Last week, Malaysia released its most comprehensive account yet of what happened to Flight MH370, detailing the route the plane probably took as it veered off course and the confusion that followed.
The officials have said the focus will be on 60,000 square kilometres of seabed in the Indian Ocean that could take a year to search.
Malaysia Airlines set to seek out-of-court deals on claims, say lawyers
Although no wreckage has been found to even confirm a crash, experts say burden of proof is on carrier, which will want to lay matter to rest
PUBLISHED : Monday, 12 May, 2014, 3:05am
UPDATED : Monday, 12 May, 2014, 11:07am
Agence France-Presse in Kuala Lumpur
A message board for passengers on-board the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. Photo: Reuters
The lack of evidence indicating what caused flight MH370's disappearance raises a legal conundrum that aviation law experts say is likely to force Malaysia Airlines into out-of-court settlements with angry next-of-kin.
More than two months since MH370 disappeared, no wreckage has been found to even confirm a crash, let alone apportion blame.
However, relatives of the 239 people on board, mostly Chinese, can still pursue Malaysia Airlines because under international aviation law it is an airline's responsibility to prove it was not to blame for an accident.
"On the surface, [Malaysia Airlines] is responsible," said Jeremy Joseph, a Malaysian lawyer specialising in transport cases.
The "burden of proof" rested on the carrier to clear its name, he added.
Under International Civil Aviation Organisation rules, next-of-kin in a plane crash are entitled to an automatic minimum of about US$175,000 per passenger, regardless of fault, payable by an airline's insurance company.
But Malaysia Airlines is also vulnerable to civil lawsuits for potentially greater damages by hundreds of relatives already infuriated over the lack of information on the case.
The Beijing-bound plane disappeared on March 8 and is believed to have crashed in the Indian Ocean. Theories on what happened include a terror act, rogue pilot action, or mechanical problems.
No significant legal moves have yet been made as families monitor an immensely difficult search in vast ocean depths that has so far found nothing.
Malaysia Airlines has begun making some payouts to families under an "advance compensation process" but has declined to reveal details.
"When there is no cause identified, it is hard to see how the airline has or has not shown the absence of fault," said Alan Tan, a professor of aviation law at the National University of Singapore.
The size of any damages would depend on where lawsuits were filed.
Next-of-kin can file in the country where an airline is based, where tickets were purchased, where the passengers were headed or where they lived.
Since most passengers were from China or Malaysia, most cases could be filed in the two countries, where courts are more conservative in awarding damages than in countries such as the United States.
Damages are typically based on the lost lifetime earnings of a victim and thus could total in the hundreds of millions for all passengers combined.
"In the US, settlements usually are in the US$1 million-US$3 million range. For Malaysians or Chinese, salaries are lower, and hence, recoveries will be lower," said Paul Stephen Dempsey, director of the Institute of Air and Space Law at Canada's McGill University.
A US law firm is already planning a "multimillion-dollar" lawsuit against Malaysia Airlines and aircraft maker Boeing, on behalf of an Indonesian passenger's family.
But legal experts said few cases were likely to end up in court. They expect undisclosed, out-of-court settlements between families and Malaysia Airlines and its lead insurer, German giant Allianz.
This would allow the loss-making carrier, which was struggling under intense competition even before MH370 disappeared, to quietly lay the matter to rest and focus on rebuilding its image.
"Because of its unprecedented nature, the courts are going to look at [MH370] very carefully. That is something the airline will try to avoid unless settlement expectations from the victims families are perceived by Malaysia Airlines as unreasonable," Joseph said.
Tan said: "This avoids court uncertainties and protracted litigation, and most claims will end up being negotiated and settled this way, particularly those outside the US."
In the case of Air France flight 447, which crashed in the Atlantic with 228 people aboard in June 2009, the airline's insurers made private compensation payments to relatives.
A Vietnamese rescue official denied that the signal of the missing Malaysian plane has been detected.
Pham Hien, director of the Vietnam's maritime search and rescue coordination center zone 3, told Xinhua Saturday that the information that the signal of the plane has been detected at some 120 nautical miles southwest of Vietnam's southernmost Ca Mau province is incorrect.
"We have no such equipment for positioning," Hien told Xinhua.
Malaysian authorities delayed search for missing MH370, admits PM Najib
Prime Minister Najib Razak says there were 'important lessons' for his government and the global aviation industry to learn from mistakes made during the search for the flight
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 14 May, 2014, 11:27am
UPDATED : Wednesday, 14 May, 2014, 7:06pm
Reuters in Montreal
Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak admitted that the start of the hunt for missing flight MH370 was delayed due to ‘confusion’. Photo: Reuters
Malaysia’s Prime Minister on Wednesday admitted that the start of the hunt for missing flight MH370 was delayed due to ‘confusion’, as the United Nations aviation agency said the industry would voluntarily start to improve the tracking of aircraft.
Prime Minister Najib Razak said in an article published in the Wall Street Journal that there were "important lessons" for his government and the global aviation industry to learn from mistakes made during the search for the flight, after the Boeing 777 disappeared from air traffic control screens on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing just over two months ago.
“We didn’t get everything right,” he wrote in the signed article. “In the first few days after the plane disappeared, we were so focused on trying to find the aircraft that we did not prioritise our communications.
”It took air-traffic controllers four hours to launch the search-and-rescue operation. But the plane vanished at a moment - between two countries’ air-traffic controls - that caused maximum confusion.
A map shows the possible path of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. Photo: Reuters
“Despite this, the search began about a third quicker than during the Air France Flight 447 tragedy in 2009. Nevertheless, the response time should and will be investigated.
“None of this could have altered MH370’s fate.”
Najib also called for the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) to adopt real-time tracking of civilian aircraft and other measures.
The agency said that the industry would voluntarily begin to improve aircraft tracking while the body develops mandatory standards following the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
“In an age of smartphones and mobile internet, real-time tracking of commercial airplanes is long overdue,” he said.
He also recommended changing airplane communications systems so they could not be disabled in mid-flight and prolonging the battery life of “black boxes”, which record cockpit conversations and aircraft data, to make them easier to locate after accidents.
“These changes may not have prevented the MH370 or Air France 447 tragedies,” he said, referring to an Air France flight that crashed en route to Paris from Brazil in 2009. “But they would make it harder for an aircraft to simply disappear, and easier to find any aircraft that did.”
The ICAO gave no firm timeline for when those binding standards on flight tracking would go into effect, reflecting the challenge of reaching an agreement with industry and governments around the world on a longstanding problem.
“A standard takes longer, it takes time. The process of cooperation is long but it’s important,” said Nancy Graham, director of ICAO’s Air Navigation Bureau, at a press conference.
No trace of Flight MH370 has been found since it went missing on March 8, despite the most intensive search in commercial aviation history.
The countries that belong to ICAO’s governing council met with industry groups on Monday and Tuesday in Montreal. They agreed global tracking of aircraft was needed following the disappearance of flight MH370, but did not commit to a binding, global solution or say when they would do so.
Instead, a task force set up by global airline industry group the International Air Transport Association (IATA) agreed to come up with proposals for better tracking by the end of September, and IATA said its members would begin implementing them voluntarily, before any rules were in place.
Kevin Hiatt, IATA’s senior vice president for safety and flight operations, said the task force would offer ICAO guidance as it develops binding standards.
“They’re going to take it and obviously they will review it very closely and take it to their Commission, but we have a much better chance of the ... standards coming back the other way to basically embrace what we’re already doing,” he said.
Inadequate tracking has been among the factors blamed for the failure to locate MH370, which is presumed to have crashed with 239 people on board in a remote part of the Indian Ocean about 1,600 km northwest of Perth, Australia.
Some airlines do track their aircraft around the world, but procedures vary widely.
Created in 1944, Montreal-based ICAO coordinates between the 191 states that have signed the Chicago Convention, the main treaty that governs civil aviation. The organisation sets binding standards, and prefers to find a consensus among member countries, which is time-consuming.
“The real issue is who is in charge of mandating better tracking,” said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst at Teal Group, in Fairfax, Virginia.
“If it is the industry, they will have to bear all the uncertainty about technical change, negotiations with pilots and so on. It is not just about nickel and diming in safety, there is real uncertainty.”
It has been nearly five years since French crash investigators recommended better tracking in the aftermath of the crash of Air France 447.
Hiatt, with IATA, said no task force was needed after the Air France crash because authorities knew enough to locate the wreckage within a few days: “MH370 went some place that we didn’t exactly know, where with Air France there was a good idea of where it went,” he said.
ICAO noted the substantial investment required by some airlines to install tracking gear. It asked the meeting to recommend that any standards ICAO backs be as widely adopted as possible, not rule out emerging technologies and be part of a solution that does more than simply track flights.
“Things move slowly as there are so many agencies as well as companies,” Aboulafia said. “Throw in uncertainty on costs and technological change that might make a major investment obsolete and it is a recipe for confusion.”
Malaysia's Defence Minister and acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein speaks at a news conference in Kuala Lumpur on May 15, 2014. Photo: Reuters
Malaysia Airlines (MAS) has revealed the loss of flight MH370 has had a "devastating" impact on its already shattered finances.
The tragedy contributed to a widening net loss for the first quarter of 2014 to 443.4 million ringgit (HK$1.06 billion), compared to a 278.8 million ringgit loss in the same period last year.
In a statement to the Malaysian stock exchange, the national airline, beset by high fuel costs and stiff competition from low-cost carriers, said: "The tragic MH370 incident had a dramatic impact on the traditionally weak first-quarter performance."
MAS said the "additional stresses" of the disappearance resulted in a high number of cancellations, with sales in China falling by 60 per cent in March.
The struggling airline has been losing money for three years running. In 2013, it made a full year loss of 1.7 billion ringgit (HK$4.04 billion). The steepening losses are expected to trigger a major overhaul of the state-run company.
Meanwhile, Malaysia has agreed with China and Australia to reanalyse and scrutinise all data that underpinned the search for the missing plane, in light of a lack of wreckage, as the search enters a new phase.
Some 70 days have passed since the jet disappeared on March 8. Officials will now prioritise deep-sea searches, with air and surface missions having been suspended.
Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia's defence and acting transport minister, said: "After more than nine weeks, the search has now entered a transition phase prioritising deep-sea search. We have entered a new, difficult phase which brings with it new challenges which we will overcome together."
Malaysia is considering deploying underwater vehicles as authorities prepare for a long-term search. Deputy defence minister Abdul Rahim Bakri said national oil company Petronas would provide two autonomous underwater vehicles.
It is assumed the plane crashed in the southern Indian Ocean. The Boeing 777 disappeared off civilian radar screens with 239 people on board - mostly Chinese.
Frustrated relatives of passengers aboard the Malaysia Airlines plane that vanished in March meet in Beijing. Photo: Wu Nan
More than 100 relatives of the 154 missing Chinese passengers on board Malaysia Airlines flight 370 met in Beijing last week seeking news of the hunt for the airliner. Some of them briefly blocked a conference room exit, preventing airline staff from leaving when the meeting ended.
The relatives have been filtering back to the capital for two weeks since they were persuaded to leave a family-assistance centre set up at the Lido Hotel in Chaoyang district.
Friday's meeting was attended by a working group set up to consult with relatives. But the Malaysia Airlines employees were prevented from leaving until uniformed and plain-clothes police arrived and the relatives scattered.
Some relatives from outside Beijing said they had returned to the capital because communications with Malaysia Airlines had ceased after they were persuaded to leave the assistance centre earlier this month or sent home by local government officials.
The group met in Shunyi , near Beijing Capital International Airport, to reiterate their demand that airline staff provide raw satellite data and more information about the missing Boeing 777 plane, which vanished from civilian radar an hour into a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8.Satellite data indicate it probably crashed in the southern Indian Ocean but an international air and sea search has turned up nothing.
Many family members remained in the city after Friday's meeting, while others returned to their homes in Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei vowing to reconvene in the capital tomorrow.
"I couldn't eat or sleep [because] I hadn't heard a word from Malaysia Airlines after I went home," said Gao Jianjun from Inner Mongolia . "I was helpless."
Malaysian Minister of Defence and Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein (centre) speaks during a press conference on the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in Kuala Lumpur. Photo: AFPG
Gao said his only source of information was an unofficial family-support group set up on Wechat, a social network, where relatives can share news updates related to the flight.
When word spread that a relatives' aid group had decided to draft an open letter to Malaysia Airlines requesting a substantive update on MH370, people said they would return to Beijing to deliver the letter together.
They arrived by train or plane from Shandong , Hebei and Henan .
The airline representatives said they would convey the working group's letter to headquarters and return with an answer in writing tomorrow.
Meanwhile, some of the relatives allege that they have been contacted by a Shanghai law firm purporting to represent the Malaysian carrier to discuss compensation.
"I'm so upset to hear the term 'compensation'. It's like suggesting my son is dead. I will not let him go without seeing any evidence," said Wen Wancheng from Shandong .
Song Jun, an employee of Malaysia Airlines, said it had offered a preliminary US$50,000 payment to help families cope with financial difficulties.
Jiang Hui, a spokesman for the relatives' aid group, said: "We want detailed answers. And we need them on a deadline."
Relatives said they were angered by the lack of hotels and dining facilities in the vicinity of the venue for Friday's meeting, which lasted several hours.
"It seems that they chose the office [location] on purpose to keep us away, because it is so remote," Wen said.
Two films inspired by flight MH370’s disappearance hawked at Cannes
Movies inspired by MH370's disappearance pitched at Cannes festival
PUBLISHED : Monday, 19 May, 2014, 9:58pm
UPDATED : Monday, 19 May, 2014, 9:58pm
Agence France-Presse in Cannes
The trailer for one of two films inspired by missing flight MH370 touted at Cannes. Photo: SCMP Pictures
Two films inspired by the missing Malaysian Airlines' flight MH370 are being touted to buyers at the Cannes Film Festival, barely two months after the plane vanished with 239 people on board.
Potential buyers were to get a sneak preview of A Dark Reflection by Fact Not Fiction Films at a "screening" scheduled for yesterday, according to a full-page advertisement in industry trade journal The Hollywood Reporter.
"What Happened on Flight 313?" reads the advertisement, which appeared on Sunday and shows a woman silhouetted at the end of a runway.
The runway lights glow behind her while overhead a passenger jet looms in the darkness lit by two harsh white lights.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared on March 8.
Air and sea searches over vast stretches of the Indian Ocean have failed to find any sign of the plane.
Meanwhile, a half-page advertisement in The Hollywood Reporter's Cannes edition on Thursday publicised another, similar film.
The advertisement for The Vanishing Act featured a plane rising out of the clouds under the caption "The untold story of the missing Malaysian plane". A 90-second teaser trailer showing terrified passengers and a gun being brandished was shot over six days in Mumbai, Variety said in a report.
It is being promoted by Indian film director Rupesh Paul, the man behind erotic movie Kamasutra 3D, and was presented to buyers in Cannes on Saturday.
Paul, who denied the film was insensitive so soon after the disappearance, said he began work on the project after being contacted by a Malaysian journalist who said he had a theory about what had happened. He then spent 20 days working on a screenplay using the journalist's idea for the ending, the report added.
Paul said he was confident he could make the movie work even if the wreckage of the plane was found. People had suggested to him that his investment would be wasted if the plane was found and the explanation put forward by his film turned out to be incorrect, he said.
"That's the biggest challenge I'm facing. ... Everyone in the world, they want to know what happened," he was quoted as saying.
In addition to being the world's biggest film festival, Cannes is also a huge film market and each year attracts more than 10,000 buyers and sellers from around the world.
It was not known whether the "screening" of A Dark Reflection would be of a full or partly completed film or another trailer.
MH370 has been missing since it mysteriously diverted from its Kuala Lumpur-Beijing route. It is believed to have crashed into the sea far off Australia's west coast.
Australia, which is leading the hunt in that area, has said it believes it is looking in the right place based on satellite communications from the plane.
Beijing (AFP) - Objects that crashed to the ground in China have been identified as space debris, state media reported, after a Russian rocket carrying a communications satellite fell back to Earth minutes after lift-off.
Qiqihar city in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, which borders Russia's far east, reported that several objects appeared to have fallen from the sky on Friday, the Xinhua news agency said.
After analysis, experts have concluded they were "parts from a carrier rocket or a satellite", Xinhua said Sunday, citing the China National Space Administration.
Authorities were communicating on the issue "with relevant parties", it added.
The report came after Russia's space officials said the Proton rocket's control engine failed Friday just over nine minutes following blastoff from the Baikonur space centre Moscow leases in Kazakhstan -- the latest blow to the country's once-proud space industry.
State television showed the carrier and its Express-AM4P satellite burning up in the upper layers of the atmosphere.
The 150-million-euro ($205-million) satellite -- built by Airbus Group's Astrium corporation -- was meant to provide Internet access to far-flung Russian regions with poor access to communication.
MH370 'may have been shot down by mistake during military operation'
Yahoo7 and Agencies May 19, 2014, 9:34 am
A new book has published accusations that the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 may have been accidentally shot out of the sky by US and Thai fighter jets in a training exercise mishap.
Flight MH370: The Mystery alleges that a US-Thai joint strike fighter jet training drill shot down the doomed passenger jet and its 239 on board, claiming the search party was intentionally sent in the wrong direction as part of a sophisticated cover-up.
Author Nigel Cawthorne describes how a man, working on an oil rig at the same time the plane's transponders went off, saw a burning jet near the military exercise being conducted.
"After all, no wreckage has been found in the South Indian Ocean, which in itself is suspicious."
He says the hundreds of families of victims will "almost certainly" never know what really happened in the early huors of March 8, 2014.
"Did they die painlessly, unaware of their fate? Or did they die in terror in a flaming wreck, crashing from the sky in the hands of a madman?"
The family of missing Brisbane man Rod Burrows has criticised the timing of the new book's release, saying they are still at pains after 71 days of ongoing search efforts to no avail.
"It's devastating for the families, it's been 10 weeks tomorrow and there's nothing," said Rod's mother, Irene.
Films inspired by missing flight MH370 touted at Cannes
Two films inspired by the missing Malaysian Airlines' flight MH370 are being touted to buyers at the Cannes Film Festival, barely two months after the plane vanished with 239 people on board.
Potential buyers will get a sneak preview of "A Dark Reflection" by Fact Not Fiction Films at a "screening" on Monday, according to a full page advertisement in industry trade journal The Hollywood Reporter.
"What Happened on Flight 313?" reads the advertisement which appeared on Sunday and shows a woman silhouetted at the end of a runway.
The runway lights glow behind her while overhead a passenger jet looms in the darkness lit by two harsh white lights.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared on March 8.
Air and sea searches over vast stretches of the Indian Ocean have failed to find any sign of the plane.
Meanwhile, a half-page advertisement in the Reporter's Cannes edition on Thursday publicised another similar film.
The advertisement for "The Vanishing Act" featured a plane rising out of the clouds under the caption "The untold story of the missing Malaysian plane".
A 90-second teaser trailer showing terrified passengers and a gun being brandished was shot over six days in Bombay, Variety said in a report.
It is being promoted by Indian film director Rupesh Paul, the man behind erotic movie "Kamasutra 3D", and was presented to buyers in Cannes on Saturday.
Paul, who denied the film was insensitive so soon after the disappearance, said he began work on the project after being contacted by a Malaysian journalist who said he had a theory about what had happened.
He then spent 20 days working on a screenplay using the journalist's idea for the ending, the report added.
The film-maker said he was confident he could make the movie work even if the wreckage of the plane was found.
People had suggested to him that his investment would be wasted if the plane was found and the explanation put forward by his film turned out to be incorrect, he said.
"That's the biggest challenge I'm facing.... Everyone in the world, they want to know what happened," he was quoted as saying.
In addition to being the world's biggest film festival, Cannes is also a huge film market and each year attracts over 10,000 buyers and sellers from around the world.
It was not known whether the "screening" of "A Dark Reflection" would be of a full or part-completed film, or another trailer.
MH370 has been missing ever since it mysteriously diverted from its Kuala Lumpur-Beijing route.
It is believed to have crashed into the sea far off Australia's west coast.
Australia, which is leading the hunt in the ocean far off its west coast, has said it believes it is looking in the right area based on satellite communications from the plane.
Underwater search for MH370 resumes after technical glitches
PUBLISHED : Thursday, 22 May, 2014, 6:02pm
UPDATED : Friday, 23 May, 2014, 6:46pm
Agence France-Presse in Sydney
An officer kneels next to the Phoenix Autonomous Underwater Vehicle ‘Artemis’ Bluefin-21, which has been helping the search. Photo: AFP
A mini-sub searching for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 recommenced its operations on Thursday after technical problems, as it enters its final week of scouring the Indian Ocean seabed for signs of the aircraft.
Australia is leading the search for the plane which vanished on March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people onboard and is using the Bluefin-21 mini-sub until new equipment can be obtained.
“The autonomous underwater vehicle, Bluefin-21, was deployed from the vessel around 2:00 am this morning. It remains underwater on its search mission,” the Joint Agency Coordination Centre said.
The US Navy Bluefin-21, which can plunge to a depth of some 4,500 metres (15,000 feet), was brought back to shore last week to fix technical issues which saw it pulled from the water.
It resumed its search in the remote area of several transmissions believed to have come from the missing aircraft’s black box recorders.
“Over the next week, Bluefin-21 will search the remaining areas in the vicinity of the acoustic signals detected in early April by the towed pinger locator... that are within its depth operating limits,” JACC said.
“This continues the process that will ultimately enable the search team to discount or confirm the area of the acoustic signals as the final resting place of MH370.”
The Australian ship which deployed the Bluefin-21, Ocean Shield, is expected to leave the search area on May 28 and return to Perth on May 31 to demobilise the mini-sub.
MH370 is believed to have crashed into the southern Indian Ocean but despite a massive air and sea and underwater search, no sign of any wreckage has yet been found.
While the aerial and sea surface searches have been scaled down, the operation is moving to the next phase which will involve using sophisticated equipment to scan the unmapped ocean bed.
Negotiations are underway to engage contractors to do this work.
JACC said Chinese survey ship Zhu Kezhen left the west Australian port of Fremantle Wednesday to start mapping areas of the ocean floor in preparation for the commercially contracted deep ocean search.
Another Chinese ship Haixun 01 was Thursday to depart for the area to support this operation, tasked with delivering survey data to Fremantle weekly for processing by Australian officials.
JACC said work was continuing to review and analyse all the data and information relating to the likely flight path of MH370.
“This work will confirm the best areas on which to focus an effective future search,” it said.
Scientists sceptical of satellite firm Inmarsat's raw data on missing Malaysian flight MH370
Scientists question quality of information in 47-page report released by British company
PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 27 May, 2014, 11:10pm
UPDATED : Wednesday, 28 May, 2014, 1:04am
Stephen Chen and Wu Nan in Beijing and Danny Lee
Malaysia's aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman answers media questions this week at a hotel in Kuala Lumpur. Photo: AFP
Scientists have questioned the quality of raw data released by British satellite company Inmarsat that was used to determine Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 crashed into the Indian Ocean.
They said the information was insufficient to plot its course.
The London-based firm released a 47-page report yesterday detailing data communication logs recorded by the satellite operator, 10 weeks after the plane vanished on the way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew on board. The Doppler effect, changes in the frequency of waves from a moving object, was used to deduce the flight path from the data.
But Steve Wang, spokesman for a support group for relatives of the 154 missing Chinese passengers on board, said: "The data they have is only separated data - how could it precisely define the track of the plane? I don't think the Malaysia side is really honest about all the data they have."
Relatives of those on board the Boeing 777 when it vanished want to draft in independent experts to recreate information and determine the plane's course.
Dr Li Min, a researcher at Wuhan University, said the data was insufficient and could not be used to determine the plane's route or last known position.
"With such data, we can only calculate the distance between the plane and satellite. It is a relative position, which means, in theory, the plane could be anywhere on a large sphere around the satellite," he said.
Inmarsat and Malaysia's Department of Civil Aviation have also been accused of putting on a political show to coincide with Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak's visit to Beijing.
Jiang Hui, a member of the family aid group, said: "Personally, I think the data might be helpful … [and] could become key evidence that the Malaysia side had lied."
Inmarsat admitted the data it had released had been simplified and that it had published parts that were "important". Mark Dickinson, Inmarsat's chief engineer, told a US television interviewer the data could not in itself be used to recreate Inmarsat's work, but only to make a judgment about its findings.
"What's more pertinent is to see the messages and the important bits of information … and some explanation behind how the numbers are used," Dickinson said. He said it required a lot of engineering expertise "from different fields".
Professor Zheng Zhengqi, who studied satellite communication at the School of Information Science and Technology in East China Normal University, said the search for flight MH370 might have stretched the capability of Inmarsat and its satellites.
However, one former staunch critic of the Inmarsat data, Duncan Steel, a physicist and visiting scientist at Nasa's Ames Research Centre in California, posted on his blog: "The data now made available appear to make sense."
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau said the final attempted contact from the satellite to plane, which was partially successful, suggested an interruption to the electricity supply caused by fuel exhaustion.
The airliner disappeared on March 8. It is thought to have crashed in the Indian Ocean, off western Australia, but an extensive search has found nothing.
Malaysia and British satellite firm release data on missing flight MH370
Malaysian government releases 47 pages of raw satellite data used to conclude that missing airliner crashed into the southern Indian Ocean
PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 27 May, 2014, 12:46pm
UPDATED : Tuesday, 27 May, 2014, 5:24pm
Agencies in Kuala Lumpur
Relatives of passengers aboard the missing Malaysia Airlines plane said they had received the data report used to determine the path of the plane. Photo: Wu Nan
Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation and British satellite firm Inmarsat on Tuesday released the data used to determine the path of missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370, following mounting calls from passengers’ relatives for greater transparency.
Relatives of passengers on the missing jet said they had received the data report, comprising 47 pages of raw satellite data, compiled by Inmarsat and Malaysian officials and they published it on their Facebook page.
The Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) said in a statement it had worked with Inmarsat to provide 47 pages of data communication logs recorded by the British satellite operator, as well as explanatory notes for public consumption.
Analysts said it would take time to draw any conclusions from the raw, ”highly technical” data.
The underwater drone involved in the search for the missing flight. Photo: Reuters
The data communications log comprises 14 pieces of data from seven “handshakes,” or pairs of numbers, between the aircraft and the satellite, Inmarsat said last week. One number is time information, the other is frequency.
Some family members of the 239 passengers and crew on board have been demanding Malaysia release the data so that independent experts can verify it.
The Boeing 777 disappeared on March 8 during a scheduled service between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing. Officials, relying in part on the Inmarsat data, have said they believe the plane ended up over the southern Indian Ocean, where it crashed into the sea.
Nothing has been found despite weeks of extensive searches at the surface and on the seabed.
Authorities believe the plane was flown deliberately off course, but are still investigating the cause of the disappearance.
Leading theories being probed by investigators include a possible hijacking, rogue pilot action or mechanical failure.
Screenshot of the satellite data communication logs.
This is the information released to the families of the satellite data communication logs.
The highly technical numerical data used the Doppler effect - the change in frequency of waves from a moving object - to decipher the Boeing 777’s final flight path.
Inmarsat plotted models of the flight’s route by measuring the Doppler effect of the hourly satellite 'pings' from the aircraft, giving corridors arcing north and south along which the plane could have flown for at least five hours.
Despite the plane’s communication systems being switched off, satellite pings were still bouncing back from the aircraft.
The pings are sent from a ground station to a satellite, then onto the plane, which automatically sends a ping back to the satellite and down to the ground station.
They do not include global positioning system (GPS) data, time or distance information, so the British satellite operator measured the amount of time it took for the pings to be returned.
They then compared those figures to data from other Malaysia Airlines planes and similar flight routes, which definitively showed the plane could only have been going down the southern corridor, and would eventually have run out of fuel.
They established an “extraordinary matching” between Inmarsat’s predicted southern path and readings from other planes on such routes.
Inmarsat’s interpretation of the data was subsequently verified by the international investigation team, which includes the DCA, the US National Transport Safety Board, Britain’s Air Accidents Investigations Branch, and China’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Department.
But, with no sign of the plane found since its disappearance on March 8, relatives were sceptical.
“There is no mention on why they are so sure the Inmarsat data is highly accurate and reliable, to the extent that they have thrown all resources there,” the families said in a May 20th report to the governments of Malaysia and Australia, which is coordinating the search efforts.
Shukor Yusof, an aviation analyst with Malaysia-based Endau Analytics, said that the satellite data was “highly technical” and required an expert to decode.
“There are very few people who can make head or tail as to what the numbers indicate. To me as a layman, it looks like a sequence of signals that were given out by the aircraft possibly indicating its flight path,” he said.
Greg Waldron, Singapore-based managing editor with aviation publication group Flightglobal, said the satellite data was consistent with what Inmarsat had previously revealed.
“Basically it shows the timings of the handshakes of the plane with the satellite over the Indian Ocean,” he said.
“But I would not dare to guess if they are searching in the right place. The fact that they are using this type of data shows how desperate the search for the plane is.”
The DCA has previously stressed that satellite data was just one of several elements being examined by investigators.
Malaysian authorities have been tight-lipped on details, saying they can only divulge information once it has been verified and when its release will not affect ongoing investigations into the plane’s disappearance.
Australia, which is leading the hunt in the Indian Ocean, has committed up to US$84 million towards the search operation over two years.
Pings not from MH370 black box: US Navy officialPings not from MH370 black box: US Navy official
The missing Malaysia Airlines plane is not in the Indian Ocean search zone where acoustic "pings" were detected, search co-ordinators have confirmed.
"The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has advised that the search in the vicinity of the acoustic detections can now be considered complete and in its professional judgment, the area can now be discounted as the final resting place of MH370," the Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre said on Thursday.
JACC announced on April 7 that a pinger locator towed from the Australian navy vessel Ocean Shield had picked up two acoustic signals, with one held for more than two hours.
At the time, it described the signals as consistent with flight data or cockpit voice recorders, the most promising lead yet and likely from a man-made source.
Two days later, two more signals were detected, holding for about five and seven minutes.
Members of the Malaysia team involved in the search of the Malaysia Airlines MH370 brief relatives of Chinese passengers onboard the missing plane at a hotel in Beijing, China. Photo: AP
JACC's statement on Thursday came hours after CNN reported that the search had gone back to square one, citing US Navy deputy director of ocean engineering Michael Dean as saying the pings came from some other man-made source unrelated to MH370.
"Our best theory at this point is that (the pings were) likely some sound produced by the ship ... or within the electronics of the Towed Pinger Locator," he said, according to the report.
JACC has also confirmed the end of the Bluefin-21 mission, with the underwater drone detecting no signs of aircraft debris since it began scanning the sea floor off the West Australian coast on April 14.
Pings not from MH370 black box: US Navy official
Underwater signals that focused the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 are no longer believed to have come from the black box, according to a US Navy official.
The Bluefin-21, operating from the Australian navy’s Ocean Shield vessel, has been searching a remote area of the Indian Ocean where four acoustic transmissions, believed to have come from the aircraft's black box, were detected in early April.
The US Navy's deputy director of ocean engineering Michael Dean told CNN there was now broad agreement that they came from some other man-made source unrelated to the jet that disappeared on March 8 carrying 239 people.
"Our best theory at this point is that (the pings were) likely some sound produced by the ship ... or within the electronics of the Towed Pinger Locator," Dean said.
If the pings had come from the recorders, searchers would have found them, he said.
The Phoenix International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Artemis was used as part of the underwater search for the missing jet. Photo: Getty Images
"Always your fear any time you put electronic equipment in the water is that if any water gets in and grounds or shorts something out, that you could start producing sound," Dean said.
Other countries involved in the search had reached the same conclusion, he told CNN.
Australia is leading the search for the plane which vanished on March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people onboard and is using the Bluefin-21 mini-sub until new equipment can be obtained.
Chinese ship on MH370 search mission returns to port after technical glitch
PUBLISHED : Saturday, 31 May, 2014, 12:46pm
UPDATED : Sunday, 01 June, 2014, 5:14am
Agence France-Presse in Sydney
A Chinese naval ship. The Chinese survey ship, Zhu Kezhen, is returning to port after a technical problem. Photo: AFP
A Chinese ship mapping the ocean floor ahead of an intensive underwater search for missing Flight MH370 was returning to port yesterday due to a technical problem.
The massive Indian Ocean search for the Malaysia Airlines plane, which disappeared on March 8 carrying 239 people, has so far failed to find any sign of the Boeing 777.
The Chinese survey ship, Zhu Kezhen, was conducting a bathymetric survey - or mapping of the ocean floor - to help experts determine how to carry out the next stage of the search on the previously unmapped ocean seabed.
"Zhu Kezhen suffered a defect to its multibeam echosounder and is coming into port to conduct the necessary repairs," Australia's Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre (JACC) said. "The journey is expected to take a couple of days."
The search for MH370 has been continually frustrated and last week Australia ruled out an area considered a possible resting place of the plane after a mini-sub dived repeatedly to the seabed and found nothing.
Officials believe the plane diverted from its Kuala Lumpur to Beijing route and ended up in the Indian Ocean, but have little to go on besides satellite signalling messages sent between aircraft, satellite and ground station.
Experts are now reanalysing this satellite data to confirm a search area as well as mapping the sea floor in preparation for the commercially contracted deep-sea search, which is expected to begin in August and take up to 12 months.
JACC said an Australian contracted survey vessel would also be involved in conducting the bathymetric survey, and would arrive in the search area this month.
Australia is leading the hunt for MH370, which disappeared in its search and rescue area, in consultation with Malaysia and China, whose citizens accounted for nearly two-thirds of those onboard the flight.
Malaysia insists it is doing all it can in what is an unprecedented situation but the relatives of those on the plane have expressed anger and frustration at the lack of progress, nearly three months after the plane vanished.
A boy looks at a painting of the missing Flight MH370 aircraft at the viewing gallery of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Emirates chief Tim Clark has questioned why fighter jets did not intercept the flight. Photo: EPA
Emirates chief Tim Clark has reportedly questioned why fighter jets did not intercept Malaysia Airlines flight 370 when it veered widely off course, but said he believed the missing plane will be found.
Clark said that more information on the disappearance of the Boeing jet, which was carrying 239 people from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, was needed before the industry changes its aircraft tracking procedures.
The Emirates boss told The Australian Financial Review at an annual airlines conference in Doha that the plane would have been intercepted by military aircraft if it had flown off course over other countries.
“If you were to fly from London to Oslo and then over the North Sea you turned off and then went west to Ireland, within two minutes you’d have Tornadoes, Eurofighters, everything up around you,” he said.
An autonomous underwater vehicle is deployed in the southern Indian Ocean to look for the missing flight. Photo: Reuters
“Even if you did that over Australia and the US, there would be something up. I’m not quite sure where primary radar was in all of this.”
His comments came as the International Air Transport Association conference looked at ways of improving the tracking of aircraft through flight data transmissions or technologies to monitor their movements.
The International Civil Aviation Organisation has also formed a working group to explore tracking methods.
“In my view we are all plunging down a path that [says] ‘we have got to fix this’,” Clark said. “This is the door closing after the horse has gone 25 miles down the track.
“We need to know more about what actually happened to this aeroplane and do a forensic second-by-second analysis of it. I think we will find it and get to the bottom of it.”
Australia is leading the hunt for MH370, which is believed to have crashed in the Indian Ocean, but there have been no signs of the plane since it vanished over the South China Sea on March 8 despite an intense air, sea and underwater search.
Malaysia’s air force has acknowledged that military radar tracked what it called an “unidentified object” - later determined to be MH370 - crossing back through Malaysian airspace and out toward the Indian Ocean after the plane diverted.
The air force said it took no action because the aircraft was not deemed “hostile”, drawing heavy criticism over the lost opportunity to intercept or further track the plane.
Malaysia’s government has defended the air force decision, without elaborating on how it was made, but Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein has said military procedures would be reviewed in the wake of MH370.
