Apakah kejayaan yang dicapai oleh Perdana Menteri dari segi membanteras “rasuah besar-besaran” sejak April 2009?

Tuan Lim Kit Siang [ Gelang Patah ] minta PERDANA MENTERI menyatakan kejayaan yang dicapai dari segi membanteras “rasuah besar-besaran” sejak beliau memegang jawatan Perdana Menteri pada April 2009 dan jumlah serta nama-nama “jerung besar” yang didakwa dan disabit kesalahan kerana rasuah.

JAWAPAN: YB SENATOR DATUK PAUL LOW SENG KUAN

MENTERI DI JABATAN PERDANA MENTERI

Tuan Yang di-Pertua,

SPRM tidak pernah membezakan sesuatu kes samada kes itu besar ataupun tidak. SPRM sebagai sebuah agensi penguatkuasa sentiasa melaksanakan tugas menyiasat kes-kes rasuah tanpa mengira kedudukan, status dan fahaman politik seseorang individu.

Besar atau kecil sesuatu kes rasuah bergantung kepada impak buruk yang diterima oleh negara dan seluruh masyarakat akibat perlakuan rasuah tanpa mengira nilai rasuah yang terlibat samada kecil atau besar.

Namun begitu, tidak dinafikan terdapat beberapa kes yang menarik perhatian ramai kerana beberapa sebab, antaranya melibatkan individu yang berprofil tinggi, melibatkan kepentingan awam ataupun amaun yang besar. Antara kes-kes yang mendapat perhatian sejak penubuhan SPRM adalah:-

1. Pada 9.9.2013, Kolonel Dr. Kunaseegaran a/l Ragavabaidu, 50, Ketua Makmal Patologi di Hospital Angkatan lentera Tuanku Mizan, Wangsa Maju dituduh di Mahkamah Sesyen Khas Rasuah kerana meminta daripada pemilik sebuah syarikat swasta dan menerima suapan membabitkan wang sejumlah RM 700,000 sebagai upah bagi mencadangkan nama sebuah syarikat swasta untuk menjadi pembekal ubat-ubatan dan perkakas pakai habis perubatan bagi hospital tersebut.

2. Pada 2.8.2013, Datuk Sarchu Sawal, yang ketika itu Ketua Pegawai Eksekutif KPF Quality Foods Sdn Bhd dan Datuk Tan Han Kook, yang ketika itu Pengarah KPF Quality, masing-masing dituduh melakukan kesalahan di bawah Seksyen 409 Kanun Keseksaan yang melibatkan RM30 juta.

3. Pada 5.7.2013, dua pegawai kanan Petronas Carigali Sdn. Bhd, iaitu Idris M. Shuhud, 47, dan Ishak Hashim, 47, dihadapkan ke Mahkamah Sesyen atas tuduhan menerima rasuah bernilai RM426,000.

4. Dua ahli perniagaan dan seorang Pensyarah Kanan di sebuah Universiti tempatan menghadapi 20 tuduhan menggunakan dokumen palsu bagi memperolehi sejumlah RM 2.069 juta bayaran daripada Malaysia Technology Development Corporation (MTDC) di Mahkamah Sesyen Khas Rasuah Johor Bahru pada 27 Jun 2013.

5. Pertuduhan ke atas seorang penimbang tara bertauliah di Pulau Pinang pada 26 Jun 2013.

6. Seorang Pengarah Bahagian Jabatan Kerja Raya (JKR) Johor telah dituduh menyalahguna kuasa dalam pemberian kontrak bernilai RM230,800 kepada syarikat adiknya di Mahkamah Sesyen Khas Rasuah Johor Bahru pada 26 Jun 2013. Beliau didakwa mengikut Seksyen 23 (1) Akta Suruhanjaya Pencegahan Rasuah Malaysia 2009.

7.  Sindiket Penyeludupan Minyak Diesel ke Thailand, di Jeti Lembaga Kemajuan Ikan Malaysia (LKIM) Kedah.

8.  Pada 7 Disember 2012, bekas Pengarah Koperasi Permodalan Felda Quality (KPFQ), Datuk Tan Han Kook, 58, dan bekas Ketua Pegawai Operasi syarikat itu, Ching Siew Cheong, 50, dituduh atas 134 tuduhan menipu pegawai bank Malayan Banking Berhad dengan menggunakan dokumen palsu bagi permohonan tuntutan kemudahan ‘Banker Acceptance’ (BA) membabitkan lebih RM67 juta.

9. Pada 3 Oktober 2012, Prof Ir Dr Abdul Aziz Abdul Samad, bekas Timbalan Naib Canselor (Akademik dan Antarabangsa) UTHM telah dituduh meminta dan menerima wang suapan bernilai RM15,000.00 daripada seorang kontraktor sebagai balasan untuk membantu kontraktor berkenaan mendapat projek dari Pejabat Pembangunan dan Pengurusan Harta Bina UTHM. Wang tersebut telah dimasukkan ke dalam akaun peribadi miliknya di salah sebuah bank tempatan.

10. Pertuduhan terhadap Zainal Rashid bin Zakaria, Pengurus Bahagian Pengurusan Program YPM dan Datuk Dr Abdul Shariff bin Hamid, Ketua Pegawai Eksekutif CEO) YPM pada 16 April 2012. Kedua-dua tertuduh masing-masing menghadapi sembilan pertuduhan di bawah seksyen 18 Akta Suruhanjaya Pencegahan Rasuah Malaysia 2009 kerana menggunakan dokumen yang mengandungi butiran palsu yang membabitkan wang berjumlah RM33,850.00 bagi setiap satu transaksi.

11. Pada 9 April 2012, Timbalan Pengarah Bahagian Kandungan & Penguatkuasa SKMM, Noor Mohamed Khan bin Mohamed Mastan telah dituduh bersubahat dengan isterinya Pengurus Akaun Strategik Comintel Sdn. Bhd., Suraya Hani binti Akmad Zaki dan Pengarah Urusan Inter Eclipse Sdn. Bhd., Noor Shidin bin Mohd Noor untuk menipu dan seterusnya meminta rasuah sebanyak RM250,000.00 daripada Ketua Pegawai Operasi Syarikat Siaga Informatics Sdn. Bhd. Rasuah tersebut adalah sebagai balasan membantu syarikat tersebut memperolehi surat penganugerahan bagi tender projek ‘Mereka Bentuk, Melaksana, Menguji dan Pentauliahan Makmal Forensik Digital SKMM’.

12. Sindiket pemalsuan Perintah Pembahagian Harta Pusaka (Borang T) yang dilakukan oleh pegawai Amanah Raya Berhad (ARB). Berjumlah RM952,688.04 bagi pampasan tanah dibayar kepada seorang awam yang turut bersubahat dengan perbuatan pegawai tersebut dituduh pada 30.3.2012.

13. Pengarah Veterinar Memalsukan Dokumen Untuk Tujuan Kenaikan Pangkat dituduh pada 17.1.2012.

14. Pada 1 Julai 2011, SPRM telah menuduh Datuk Mohamad Daud Dol Moin, bekas Penolong Gabenor BNM atas dua pertuduhan di bawah seksyen 11(a) Akta Pencegahan Rasuah 1997, iaitu kerana kesalahan menerima wang suapan daripada Abdul Kayum berjumlah RM100,000 melalui dua transaksi berjumlah RM50,000 setiap satu. Sementara itu, Abdul Kayum pula telah dituduh dengan dua pertuduhan di bawah seksyen 11(b) Akta Pencegahan Rasuah 1997 kerana kesalahan memberi wang suapan berjumlah RM100,000 (RM50,000 bagi setiap transaksi) kepada Datuk Mohamad Daud bagi memperoleh kontrak percetakan wang kertas polimer RM5 untuk NPAL .

15. 0ps 3B yang dijalankan pada Mac dan April 2011 meningkatkan kutipan hasil cukai negara,.

16. Pada 10 Februari 2011, Hasbie bin Satar, Bekas Setiausaha Sulit Kanan Menteri Kewangan II telah dituduh di Mahkamah Sesyen Butterworth di bawah seksyen 4(1)(a) Akta Pencegahan Pengubahan Wang Haram dan Pencegahan Pembiayaan Keganasan 2001 (Akta 613).

17. Tangkapan dan pertuduhan telah dibuat terhadap Mohd Amin Suhaimi, 52 tahun, iaitu suami kepada bekas Ketua Pegawai Eksekutif (CEO) IIB atas tiga kesalahan meminta dan menerima suapan di bawah seksyen 16(a)(A) ASPRM 2009, membabitkan nilai keseluruhan suapan RM1.6 juta. Tertuduh didakwa meminta dan menerima rasuah tersebut dengan tiga kali pembayaran antara RM316,900 hingga RM816,900 daripada syarikat Detect Engineering Sdn. Bhd., sebagai upah kononnya bagi membantu syarikat berkenaan mendapatkan tender Membina dan Menyiapkan Sekolah Berasrama Penuh di Daerah Johor Bahru yang bernilai RM40,845,000 daripada IIB.

18. Rasuah dan Kerugian Berbillion Ringgit di Sime Darby Berhad – 2 Pertuduhan ke atas Bekas Pengurus Kanan Kebolehan Marin, Sime Darby, 2 pertuduhan atas Pengurus Besar Kanan Bahagian Pembangunan Perniagaan dan Pelaburan Projek Antarabangsa, 1 pertuduhan Bekas Pengurus Besar Kanan Sime Darby Engineering dan 2 pertuduhan ke atas Bekas Presiden dan Ketua Pegawai Eksekutif Kumpulan Sime Darby Berhad (SDB), Dato’ Sri Ahmad Zubair @Ahmad Zubir Murshid.

19. Datuk Seri Mohamad Khir Toyo (Bekas Menteri Besar Selangor) pada 6.12.2010.

20. Bekas Eksekutif Akaun Pelanggan Serantau, syarikat telekomunikasi Alcatel Network (M) Sdn. Bhd. iaitu Radziah Ani. Beliau telah dihadapkan ke mahkamah dengan pertuduhan memberi suapan sebanyak RM25,000 kepada Penolong Pengurus Perolehan Telekom Malaysia (TM), Mohd Asri Idris pada 17 Februari 2006.

21. Datuk Mirza Mohammad Taiyab (Ketua Pengarah Tourism Malaysia), Rosly Selamat (Bekas Ketua Pegawai Eksekutif) dan Lim Kim Tye (Bekas Ketua Pengawal Kewangan – Pembangunan Pelancongan Nasional Sdn Bhd – PEMPENA).

22. YB Mustafa Bin Salim – Bekas Adun Lenggeng

23. YB Yap Soo Sun – Bekas Adun Teratai

24. YB Dato Abdul Rahman Bakri – MP Sepang (Tuduh 2009)

25. Timbalan Pendakwaraya Md Azar Irwan Ariffin

26. Majistret Mohd Firdaus Bin Ramlan

27. Peguam Ranjit Singh Karam Singh

28. Ahmadi@Ahmad Zukni Bin Johari (CEO PUNB)

29. Ketua Pegawai Operasi Kesas Sdn. Bhd, Ahmad Kamaruzzaman Bin Abdullah

30. Pegawai Daerah Seberang Prai Tengah, Roslan Yahaya

Sekian, terima kasih.

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Controversy as shaman performs ritual to help find missing Malaysia Airlines plane

Lindsay Murdoch

Sydney Morning Herald

March 14, 2014

Kuala Lumpur: As Malaysia’s government struggled to defend its handling of the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, controversy has erupted over a witch doctor who carried out a ritual at the capital’s international airport, who claimed he was trying to find it.

Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim said the government had never before embarrassed itself to this extent on the international stage by allowing Ibrahim Mat Zin, the witch doctor or shaman, to perform a ritual in public that was an affront to Islam.

Malaysia is a predominantly Islamic country.

Mr Ibrahim, the witch doctor, used a supposedly magic carpet, held coconuts aloft and mimicked paddling before a group of reporters and photographers at the airport.

He claimed the symbolic ritual would help “weaken the bad spirits so the rescuers can find the plane if it indeed has crashed”.

Video of the scene
went viral online, drawing ridicule around the world.

Malaysian authorities responded by sending seven Islamic religious department officers to the airport to prevent Mr Ibrahim or any other shaman performing rituals that would be seen by Muslims to be contravening the teachings of Islam.

“Anyone going against sharia [Islamic] principles will be asked to disperse and if they refuse, we will arrest them,” said an Islamic department spokesman, Zaifullah Jaafar Shidek.

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Distrust adding to Malaysian jet confusion, say analysts

The Malaysian Insider

March 13, 2014

Deep distrust between Asian neighbours and sensitive security issues are jamming essential communication lines in the chaotic hunt for a Malaysia Airlines plane, analysts said today.

Bickering between Malaysia, China and others involved in trying to solve the baffling weekend disappearance of the jet has exposed longstanding tensions and prevented a coordinated response, they said.

“There clearly are communication problems on multiple levels. There is an underlying lack of trust in these matters,” Bridget Welsh, an associate professor of political science at Singapore Management University, told AFP.

“The issues of protecting territory, security intelligence and interests are starting to win over the common goal of finding the plane and closure.”

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 went inexplicably missing on Saturday en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.

Since then, there have been frustrating delays and much confusion in the release of scarce but essential information, such as radar data and satellite imagery.

Authorities appear to have no idea what happened to the plane, with the search covering both sides of peninsular Malaysia, an area of nearly 27,000 nautical miles (more than 90,000 square kilometres).

Levels of confusion appeared to hit startling new highs today when Malaysia said that Chinese satellite photos, which had appeared to indicate possible debris in the South China Sea, were released in error and showed no such thing.

China, which is deeply involved because there were 153 Chinese citizens on board, yesterday accused the Malaysian authorities of releasing information in a “chaotic” fashion.

It then appeared to surprise the Malaysians by releasing the satellite data. Malaysia and Vietnam deployed planes to the area highlighted by the Chinese but found nothing.

At his daily briefing today, Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters that China had told them the satellite photos were released “by mistake and did not show any debris”.

Highlighting the lack of cooperation, Vietnam Civil Aviation Authority deputy director Dinh Viet Thang earlier said Vietnamese officials had only learnt of the Chinese satellite sighting on the Internet, not from official channels.

Communist-run China, though, insisted today that Malaysia was to blame for the bulk of the confusion, while warning the search would continue to suffer unless there was greater transparency.

“As Malaysia Airlines is state owned, the Malaysian government is the core force in the fact-finding mission,” the state-run Xinhua news agency said.

“Unless transparency is ensured, the huge international search operation can never be as fruitful as we hope and expect.”

But Malaysia’s Hishammuddin denied that there were problems between countries involved in the search operation.

“On the search operations, it is not just Malaysian assets. We are talking about sophisticated equipment deployed by the US and China,” he said.

“To say it is just on our shoulders, I think that is unfair. Because the overwhelming support and effort on a multinational level, is something we should be proud of.”

Singapore-based Aviation expert Terence Fan said military radar from various countries may have detected the plane but governments were reluctant to share the data because it would reveal their capabilities and compromise security.

“There may be some military sensitivity because the radar is not continuous, it sort of sweeps around a couple of times,” Fan said.

“The rate at which they can take the picture can also reveal how good the radar system is and that I think is probably why the countries around here are not very fond of sharing the information.”

But again Hishammuddin defended his country, saying Malaysia was releasing sensitive radar data that would normally be kept confidential.

“Malaysia has nothing to hide,” he said.

Adding another layer to the tensions, much of the search has been focused on the South China Sea, which for decades has been one of Asia’s most volatile security flashpoints due to competing territorial claims.

China insists it has sovereign rights to nearly all of the sea, which has some of the most important shipping lanes in the world and is believed to hold enormous amounts of natural resources.

Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei and Taiwan also have claims to parts of the sea.

Perceived increased aggressiveness from China in staking its claims in recent years has rattled its neighbours, particularly the Philippines.

Manila says that on Sunday Chinese ships blocked two Philippine vessels from carrying supplies to soldiers at a shoal. The Philippines evaded the blockade by dropping food from a plane, it’s military said.

Graham Webster, a Beijing-based fellow at the Yale Law School China Centre specialising in US-China relations, said the search could have been an opportunity to build trust between the armed forces and civilian authorities of Asian neighbours.

“But there still may be real trust problems when it comes to sharing intelligence,” he said. – AFP, March 13, 2014.

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India Looking for Malaysian Jet as U.S. Sees Air Piracy

By Alan Levin, Kartikay Mehrotra and Anurag Kotoky

Bloomberg News

Mar 14, 2014

India’s navy set up a search zone for the missing Malaysian airliner in the Andaman Sea, hundreds of miles off the course of Flight 370, as evidence mounted that the plane may have flown long after controllers lost contact.

India has sent five ships and four aircraft to search for the plane, V.S.R. Murthy, commander for Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Indian Coast Guard, said by phone today. Aviation investigators are compiling signs the Boeing Co. (BA) 777-200 veered off its route and traveled west over Malaysia (MAS), beyond the limits of the country’s radars, according to two people who asked not to be identified with the probe active.

A satellite transmitter on the plane was active for about five hours, indicating the plane was operational after its transponder shut down less than an hour after takeoff, said three U.S. government officials. The 777 can cruise at 500 miles (805 kilometers) an hour or more, meaning it may have flown for as far as 2,500 miles beyond its last point of contact if it was intact and had enough fuel.

The information adds to the mystery surrounding the March 8 disappearance of the Malaysian Airline System Bhd. plane carrying 239 people. With no evidence of a mechanical failure or pilot error, U.S. investigators are treating the disappearance as a case of air piracy, though it remains unclear by whom, one person said.

Satellite Signaling

“I can’t think of a single example of a large airplane completely disappearing without seemingly leaving a trace for this many days,” said Hans Weber, president of Tecop International Inc., a San Diego-based consultant.

The satellite communications came from an onboard monitoring system that, if fully activated, can send data about how the plane’s equipment is working to Boeing, according to the person familiar with the equipment.

While Malaysian Air never subscribed, meaning the system didn’t gather detailed information about the flight, it was in an idle position of sorts and periodically sent a pulse to a satellite.

The data doesn’t necessarily indicate the jet was flying the whole time. It may be possible for the system to operate if the 777 was on the ground, the person said. It probably can’t operate following a crash, especially on the water where components would likely sink, the person said.

Naval Search

Inmarsat Plc (ISAT), the London-based satellite operator, picked up “routine, automated signals” from Flight 370, according to a statement e-mailed by Jonathan Sinnatt, a spokesman. He declined to elaborate.

Inmarsat shared its information with SITA, the main carrier in that region for land- and satellite-based message traffic between aircraft and ground personnel. SITA in turn shared the data with Malaysian Airlines, he said.

Radar signals sent from the ground continued to reflect back from Flight 370 after its transponder went dead as the aircraft headed north from Malaysia toward Vietnam, said the people. After the transponder shut off, making the 777 harder to follow on radar, the plane turned left toward the west instead of continuing on its path.

South Korea is readying planes to help search for the missing jet, Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min Seok says at a briefing today. Vietnamese aircraft will continue searching in the area east of the airplane’s last known location in the South China Sea, as other nations search in the west, Lai Xuan Thanh, head of the country’s Civil Aviation Authority, said by phone today.

Indian Navy

The search by India’s navy covers 35,000 square kilometers (13,514 square miles) off the northern tip of Sumatra, Indonesia’s largest island. That is on the opposite side of Malaysia from the plane’s intended path to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.

India is searching primarily in waters just north of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, “but we are also searching the Andaman and Nicobar island areas north to south tomorrow,” said Harmit Singh, a navy spokesman in the Andaman Nicobar region. “Some areas to the west of Andaman and Nicobar are also being planned. The areas of search are being given by Malaysia.”

Search Area

India is the only country sending ships into the area at this time, said U.S. Marine Corps Major Jeff Pool, a Pentagon spokesman.

The search area has a northern edge 270 nautical miles from Port Blair and a western edge 70 nautical miles from Campbell Bay, said D.K. Sharma, an Indian Navy spokesman.

U.S. investigators have been studying a radar blip detected hundreds of miles west of the plane’s intended route, in the area of the Malacca Strait, about 2:15 a.m. local time March 8. That was 45 minutes after contact was lost with the jet flying to Beijing through the Gulf of Thailand.

The 777 had enough fuel to fly the 2,700 miles (4,345 kilometers) to Beijing and reserves to fly to a diversion airport.

The aircraft’s transponder normally sends signals to ground radar stations making it easier to follow and providing other information, such as its identity and altitude. While it’s possible for the unit to malfunction or be accidentally switched off, it is highly suspicious for the device to fail at the same time a plane makes an abrupt change of course.

‘Truly Agonizing’

Planes and ships from a dozen countries scouring land and sea on both sides of Peninsular Malaysia have yielded few answers on what caused Flight 370 to disappear.

Vietnam sent a plane to verify Chinese satellite images that appeared to show three floating objects, only to find nothing there. Malaysia’s acting transport minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, said yesterday that Chinese officials notified Malaysia the satellite images were “released by mistake” and weren’t related to Flight 370.

The U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is supporting the Department of Defense to find the missing aircraft, said spokesman Donald Kerr in an e-mailed statement. The Defense Department is following up on all leads on the potential path of the aircraft and assisting U.S. Pacific Command in its search for debris fields.

“It’s frustrating for everyone, but agonizing for the families of those passengers on the flight,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said at a briefing in Washington yesterday. “Our thoughts and prayers go out to them especially because this is truly agonizing for them.”

U.S. Navy

The U.S. Navy is moving the destroyer USS Kidd from the Gulf of Thailand to the Strait of Malacca to help in the search, Commander William Marks, a spokesman for the Navy’s Seventh Fleet, said in an e-mail.

It also will move a P-8A Poseidon aircraft into the area tomorrow to rotate with a P-3C Orion craft that has been involved in the search, he said. The P-3C is still in the Gulf of Thailand area, according to Pool, the Pentagon spokesman.

Boeing said it already has investigators on site to assist the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. These teams would probably include 777 structures experts who can quickly identify crucial aircraft components, said John Purvis, a retired accident investigator who headed Boeing’s investigations unit for much of the 1980s and 1990s.

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Long haul ahead for answers to missing MH370

by Joseph Sipalan

The Malay Mail Online

March 14, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, March 14 — While investigators have doubled efforts in the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, the chances of a swift recovery and more pertinently, answers to its sudden disappearance midflight, are looking more remote with each passing day.

US officials, who are aiding Malaysia in a multi-nation hunt for the Boeing 777-200 carrying 239 people, are pursuing a new lead west to the Indian Ocean, after its satellites picked up electronic pulses that signalled the plane remained airborne hours after it flitted off radar.

If proven true, it could make an already daunting operation even more difficult to conduct and coordinate as the sheer size of the Indian Ocean would increase the search area exponentially.

But the chances of finding the plane intact—seven days after flight MH370 was to hand landed in Beijing—in the world’s third largest water body are looking slim.

The Indian Ocean has an average depth of 13,002 feet (3,963 m) while its deepest point, the Java Trench is believed to be at -23,812 feet (-7,258 m), according to information in the CIA World Factbook.

The Boeing 777 aircraft had enough fuel to fly up to 8.30am on March 8, leaving it with some seven hours of fuel in its tanks when it lost contact with Subang Air Traffic Control (ATC).

When it disappeared, the plane was flying 120 nautical miles off Kota Baru in the east coast of Malaysia, between the waters of Malaysia and Vietnam.

The current search operation involving 12 countries and dozens of air and sea vessels are already scouring a watery expanse significantly larger than Malaysia’s total land mass of about 330,000 square kilometres.

As of yesterday, over 80 ships and aircraft have been split into groups to cover some 414,400 square kilometres of sea.

To the east of Peninsula Malaysia, search teams are looking over 107,500 square kilometres centred on the last point of contact the jumbo jet had with the Subang air control tower at around 1.30am on Saturday.

More teams have been deployed to the west of the Malay peninsula to scope an area nearly triple the size of the eastern waters, after the search was expanded, based on an earlier lead that the airliner could have turned back from the point of last contact.

The situation draws parallels with Air France flight 447, which plunged into the Atlantic Ocean not long after departing from the Rio de Janeiro-Galeao International Airport enroute to the Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport on June 1, 2009, killing all 216 passengers and 12 crew on board.

After three weeks of scouring over more than 1.3 million square kilometres of the Atlantic’s surface, the Brazilian military ended the international search, having recovered 50 bodies and 640 debris identified to have come from the aircraft.

It was two years and four underwater searches later when a team manning autonomous underwater vehicles found substantial remains of the aircraft and more passengers at depths of between 3,800m and 4,000m in the Atlantic on April 3, 2011.

A total of 104 bodies – along with the plane’s black box – were recovered from the deep-sea wreckage, bringing the tally of bodies recovered to 154. The operation was officially closed with 74 bodies still unrecovered.

In the case of flight MH370 possibly having ditched in the Indian Ocean, the Indian and US navies have since despatched vessels to search the area for any sign of the plane, starting with a 35,000 square kilometre area where the Indian Ocean meets the Andaman Sea.

While hope still remains that the passengers on flight MH370 are alive, the odds will only increase against their favour as the days continue to pass.

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Pentagon convinced of ‘manual intervention’ in MH370 transponder, communications shutdown

The Malay Mail Online

March 14, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, March 14 — Seven days since flight MH370 fell off the radar, two senior US defence officials are now convinced there was “manual intervention” that led to the shutdown of two communication systems aboard the jumbo jet that happened separately.

US broadcasting network ABC News cited one of the military officials as saying the information indicates the Malaysia Airlines (MAS) plane did not fall out of the sky due to a catastrophic failure of its systems, a theory that had been previously floated after the Boeing 777-200 vanished without a trace.

The report also cited US investigators saying the two modes of communication were “systematically shut down”.

That means the US team “is convinced that there was manual intervention”, ABC News reported on its website this morning, citing anonymous sources—bolstering speculation of a hijack.

According to ABC News’ report of the two unnamed Pentagon officials, the data reporting system was shut down at 1.07am on March 8, and the transponder, which transmits location and altitude, was shut down shortly after at 1.21am.

This is despite acting Transport Minister and Defence Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein saying in a news conference yesterday that the last transmission from the aircraft was at 1.07am on March 8, which indicated that everything was normal.

MAS chief executive officer Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, who was also at the same press conference, reiterated the minister’s statement, saying the last High-Speed transmission was at 1.07am and that “was the last transmission that we ever see from the aircraft, it did not run beyond that”.

Two days ago however, Department of Civil Aviation director-general Datuk Azharuddin Abdul Rahman had said the last posting was at 1.21am.

“In our secondary radar, we look at our radar and it was posting at about 1.21 in the morning, and the target disappeared at 1.30 in the morning,” he said.

Azharuddin was also present at the press conference yesterday, but did not mention the posting at 1.21am.

The inconsistent statements has added on to the many contradictory statements made by Malaysian officials since the investigation began.

New developments this morning has also pointed a second time to the possibility that missing plane had remained airborne for several hours after it disappeared from civilian radar at 1.30am on March 8.

According to a Reuters report, satellites had picked up faint electronic pulses from the MAS aircraft after its disappearance, which it said suggested that the plane’s maintenance troubleshooting system were “switched on and ready to communicate” with satellites at the time.

Citing sources, the report said the system “pings” about once every hour and in the case of MH370, around five or six such pulses were heard. This could mean that MH370, which was Beijing-bound and ferrying 239 people, had continued to fly on for a number of hours after it left the radar screens.

This latest data conflicts, however, with claims just yesterday evening from Malaysian authorities who had disputed reports in the Wall Street Journal that had pointed to the same possibility.

WSJ’s report had pointed to data allegedly transmitted from the Boeing 777’s Rolls Royce engines, which was described as “inaccurate” by Hishammuddin and confirmed by both the engine manufacturer Rolls Royce and Boeing Co.

The international business newspaper has since corrected its report, however, admitting it had wrongly cited US investigators as basing their suspicions on signals from the plane’s Rolls Royce engines.

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Radar data suggests MH370 plane flown deliberately toward Andaman Islands

The Malaysian Insider

March 14, 2014

Military radar-tracking evidence suggests that the Malaysia Airlines MH370 jetliner missing for nearly a week was deliberately flown across the Malay peninsula toward the Andaman Islands, sources familiar with the investigation told Reuters today.

Two sources said an unidentified aircraft that investigators believe was Flight MH370 was following a route between navigational waypoints – indicating it was being flown by someone with aviation training – when it was last plotted on military radar off the country’s northwest coast.

The last plot on the military radar’s tracking suggested the plane was flying toward India’s Andaman Islands, a chain of isles between the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal, they said.

Waypoints are geographic locations, worked out by calculating longitude and latitude, that help pilots navigate along established air corridors.

A third source familiar with the investigation said inquiries were focusing increasingly on the theory that someone who knew how to fly a plane deliberately diverted the flight, with 239 people on board, hundreds of miles off its intended course from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

“What we can say is we are looking at sabotage, with hijack still on the cards,” said that source, a senior Malaysian police official.

All three sources declined to be identified because they were not authorised to speak to the media and due to the sensitivity of the investigation.

Officials at the Ministry of Transport, the official point of contact for information on the investigation, did not return calls seeking comment.

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

The comments by the three sources are the first clear indication that foul play is the main focus of official suspicions in the Boeing 777’s disappearance.

As a result of the new evidence, the sources said, multinational search efforts were being stepped up in the Andaman Sea and also the Indian Ocean.

In one of the most baffling mysteries in modern aviation, no trace of the plane or any sign of wreckage has been found despite a search by the navies and military aircraft of more than a dozen countries.

The last sighting of the aircraft on civilian radar screens came shortly before 1:30 am last Saturday, less than an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur, as the plane flew northeast across the mouth of the Gulf of Thailand. That put the plane on Malaysia’s east coast.

Malaysia’s air force chief said on Wednesday an aircraft that could have been the missing plane was plotted on military radar at 2:15 am, 320 km northwest of Penang Island off Malaysia’s west coast.

This position marks the limit of Malaysia’s military radar in that part of the country, a fourth source familiar with the investigation told Reuters.

When asked about the range of military radar at a news conference on Thursday, Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said it was “a sensitive issue” that he was not going to reveal.

“Even if it doesn’t extend beyond that, we can get the cooperation of the neighbouring countries,” he said.

The fact that the aircraft – if it was MH370 – had lost contact with air traffic control and was invisible to civilian radar suggested someone aboard had turned its communication systems off, the first two sources said.

They also gave new details on the direction in which the unidentified aircraft was heading – following aviation corridors identified on maps used by pilots as N571 and P628. These routes are taken by commercial planes flying from Southeast Asia to the Middle East or Europe and can be found in public documents issued by regional aviation authorities.

In a far more detailed description of the military radar plotting than has been publicly revealed, the first two sources said the last confirmed position of MH370 was at 35,000 feet about 144 km off the east coast of Malaysia, heading towards Vietnam, near a navigational waypoint called “Igari”. The time was 1:21 am.

The military track suggests it then turned sharply westwards, heading towards a waypoint called “Vampi”, northeast of Indonesia’s Aceh province and a navigational point used for planes following route N571 to the Middle East.

From there, the plot indicates the plane flew towards a waypoint called “Gival”, south of the Thai island of Phuket, and was last plotted heading northwest towards another waypoint called “Igrex”, on route P628 that would take it over the Andaman Islands and which carriers use to fly towards Europe.

The time was then 2:15 am. That’s the same time given by the air force chief on Wednesday, who gave no information on that plane’s possible direction.

The sources said Malaysia was requesting raw radar data from neighbours Thailand, Indonesia and India, which has a naval base in the Andaman Islands. – Reuters, March 14, 2014.

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Rare but sometimes, plane crash sites are not found, says aviation expert

The Malaysian Insider

March 14, 2014

If efforts to find the missing flight MH370 fail as the search enters its first week, it might be that the crash site simply cannot be found, says a former aviation safety and security writer.

Citing a 1972 crash involving a Pan Alaska Airways flight, Sylvia Adcock, writing in CNN’s website, said a Cessna took off from Anchorage bound for Juneau in bad weather. The plane never arrived.

The search for the missing aircraft was intense and covered an area of 325,000 square miles, with up to 3,600 flight hours involved in the search for the wreckage. It was never found and the search was called off 39 days later.

On the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER which went missing on Saturday with 239 onboard, Adcock noted that Chinese satellites had captured images of what appeared to be a crash site.

But Vietnamese and Malaysian planes that searched the area in the South China Sea yesterday found no sign of wreckage of the Boeing 777.

“Such images are rare, and typically, when a plane goes down in a remote area with no witnesses, one of the most crucial tools available to investigators is radar,” Adcock said, adding that there were basically two ways to find a missing plane – radar and pilot communication.

Radar might pick up debris raining down from an in-flight explosion or it could rely on a plane’s transponder to rely information on a plane’s flight and its altitude, she said.

Flight MH370’s transponder stopped relaying data about 45 minutes after it left the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 12.41am.

“At first, the search area focused on the plane’s intended flight path, as officials went on the assumption that the plane did not change course,” Adcock said.

It was earlier reported that American investigators suspected the plane flew for four hours after its last known contact with air traffic control at 1.30am, but Malaysia has since rejected this report.

Adcock said military radar could have tracked “unidentified targets that could have been Flight 370 heading west towards the Strait of Malacca and possibly beyond” but without the jet’s transponder, the military could not identify the plane or give an altitude.

“It’s possible for a plane to literally fly under the radar” because coverage might not extend all the way to the surface. If that was the case, the plane simply remains undetected.

The Boeing 777 is large and for it to “disappear”, Adcock said, the search area which expanded this morning to include the Indian Ocean, “does not bode well for the likelihood of finding the plane”.

Today, Reuters reports that ships and aircraft are combing a vast area that had already been widened to cover both sides of the peninsula and the Andaman Sea.

The United States Navy has sent an advanced P-8A Poseidon plane to help search the Strait of Malacca and it had deployed a navy P-3 Orion aircraft to those waters.

US defence officials added that its 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.

“It’s almost impossible to simply crisscross such a large area in low-flying planes and boats,” said John Griffin, an associate professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University who specialises in air traffic control. He was commenting in Adcock’s CNN article.

“It’s a monumental task,” Griffin said. “It’s a vast area. There’s a lot of terrain there, remote areas where the plane could have crashed.”

All international flights are required to have an Emergency Locator Transmitter (ELT) but it is unclear if flight MH370 had the device onboard.

If it did have an ELT, it hasn’t been detected, which indicates that the plane has crashed in such a remote location that its signal was out of range or that the device malfunctioned or that it landed somewhere, said Adcock.

“But then you get into how do you hide a 777,” Griffin said. “This is a serious aircraft.” – March 14, 2014.

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Seismic event turns focus back to Vietnam waters

Malaysiakini

Mar 14, 2014

The search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 appears to be shifting back and forth between east and west of peninsula Malaysia, with latest information from scientists in China suggesting that the plane may have triggered a seismic event when it impacted the sea some 150km off the southern tip of Vietnam.

A team of seismologists at a top China research university said they detected a slight seismic event on the sea floor between Vietnam and Malaysia on March 8 which could be a result of an impact.

 “It was a non-seismic zone, therefore judging from the time and location of the event, it might be related to the missing MH370 flight,” said a statement posted on the University of Science and Technology of China website.

 This was also reported by the
South China Morning Post
.

 This comes as US officials begin to set their eyes in the Indian Ocean after almost a week of futile search in the South China Sea, citing indications that the plane may have turned around after losing communication and flown on westwards for several hours.

 The 2.55am seismic event reportedly occurred 116km northeast from where MH370 disappeared from civilian radar over the Gulf of Thailand or 85 minutes after it lost communication.

“If it was indeed an airplane crashing into the sea, the seismic wave strength indicated that the crash process was catastrophic,” the statement said.

 Although yet to be conclusively determined, authorities seem to be leaning towards the possibility that the plane was airborne at least for a while longer after it lost all communications and fell off the radar.

 Initial fear was that the aircraft, with 239 on board, had crashed into the South China Sea, however, almost a week of combing at the ocean has yet to yield any results.

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US experts: MH370’s last ‘ping’ sent over water

The Malay Mail Online

March 14, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, March 14 — Flight MH370 had sent a series of “pings” or electronic pulses, with the last transmitted from a location over water at a cruising altitude, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported today as searchers cast their eyes further west towards the Indian Ocean in the hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines (MAS) passenger plane.

Citing several unnamed US military and space industry officials who had been briefed on the investigation, the US daily reported that the satellites had also received speed and altitude information about the aircraft from the five or six “pings” before the pulses disappeared, which the experts believe could help them decipher its route and location.

But the people involved in the matter had declined to divulge the specific flight path the plane had transmitted, WSJ reported.

According to the report, an industry official said it was possible that the system sending them had been turned off by someone onboard the plane.

The report follows new evidence showing the Boeing 777-200 jumbo jet carrying 239 people had continued its flight hours after it supposedly left radar detection.

This latest data conflicts, however, with claims just yesterday evening from Malaysian authorities who had disputed reports in the Wall Street Journal that had pointed to the same possibility.

The US navy, which has been roped in to help Malaysia search for the missing aircraft east of Peninsular Malaysia from where it vanished without a trace on March 8, had now turned its sights west towards the Indian Ocean.

WSJ’s report had pointed to data allegedly transmitted from the Boeing 777’s Rolls Royce engines, which was described as “inaccurate” by acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein and confirmed by both the engine manufacturer Rolls Royce and Boeing Co.

The international business newspaper has since corrected its report, however, admitting it had wrongly cited US investigators as basing their suspicions on signals from the plane’s Rolls Royce engines.

According to the paper, suspicions that MH370 stayed airborne for several hours had been based on an analysis of signals sent through the plane’s satellite communication (SATCOM) link.

WSJ cited people familiar with the matter as explaining that the SATCOM is designed to automatically transmit the status of onboard systems.

Lending more credence to the WSJ and Reuters reports is fresh information from US officials this morning that there is an “indication” pointing to the possibility that the Malaysia Airlines flight had gone down in the Indian Ocean, which is hundreds of miles off-course the aircraft’s original flight plan.

“We have an indication the plane went down in the Indian Ocean,” a senior Pentagon official told ABC News.

The official added there were indications that the plane flew four or five hours after disappearing from radar and that they believe it went into the water.

The plane was last spotted on radar at 1.30am on Saturday morning, about 120 nautical miles off the coast of Kota Baru which lies on the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia, near the South China Sea.

The Indian Ocean is far to the west of Malaysia.

For MH370 to reach that location, it would have had to fly several hours past 1.30am when it went missing. The aircraft, according to MAS, was carrying enough fuel to fly up to 8.30am that morning.

Rescue and intelligence officials are still verifying the credibility of the latest data received while search vessels head towards the Indian Ocean to continue their hunt for the aircraft there.

The Pentagon official reportedly  said that the USS Kidd was being moved at the request of Malaysia and is heading towards an area where the Indian Ocean and the Andaman Sea meet. It has helicopters aboard that can scour the area.

It should take more than 24 hours for the vessel to reach that location.

Vessels from India are also understood to be heading to the area to search for MH370.

As such, the new data has remained somewhat inconclusive for now, as have many other theories and information that have emerged on the mysterious disappearance of MH370 over the past seven days.

MH370 left the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) at 12.41am on Saturday morning. The Boeing B777-200 aircraft was carrying 239 people, including 12 flight crew members and two infants.

 –

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US: Search may extend to Indian Ocean

Malaysiakini/Reuters

Mar 14, 2014

A new search area for Malaysia Airlines (MAS) Flight MH370 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 spokesperson 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.

 The disappearance of the MAS 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 Peninsular Malaysia 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 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 Peninsular Malaysia and the Andaman Sea.

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

 US defence officials told Reuters that the US Navy guided-missile destroyer, USS Kidd, was heading to the Straits 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.

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.

Reuters

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Aviation experts question shift in search for MH370

The Malay Mail Online

March 14, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, March 14 — The dramatic expansion of the search for a missing Malaysian airliner suggests the plane flew thousands of miles off course, crossing — apparently undetected — a sensitive region bristling with military radar.

Aviation experts today queried the plausibility of such a scenario, but confirmation from US and Malaysian officials that the search was being widened into the vast Indian Ocean suggested it had credible underpinnings.

If there was a debate over what might have happened to Flight MH370, there was a general consensus as to the extraordinary nature of its disappearance without trace a week ago over the South China Sea.

“I would probably go ahead and say this is unprecedented,” said Anthony Brickhouse, a member of the International Society of Air Safety Investigators.

“In most investigations each day you move forward, you uncover more things, more clues,” Brickhouse told AFP.

“But in this one it seems that each day that goes by something that you thought was a lead turns out not to be a lead and you’re back to square one again.”

The expansion of the search area came as multiple US media reports, citing American officials, said the plane’s communication system continued to “ping” a satellite for up to four hours after it disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

The reports amplified on Malaysia’s belief, based on a radar sighting, that the plane may have mysteriously turned back towards Kuala Lumpur just over an hour into its flight when no technical problem was apparent, on a calm night in fine weather.

Somebody would have acted?

But Neil Hansford, chairman of leading Australian airline consultancy Strategic Aviation Solutions, balked at the idea of the plane flying on for undetected more than four hours through various national airspaces.

An aircraft, without any transponders on, going over the top of anybody’s airspace would have become a military incident and somebody would have done something,” Hansford said.

Southeast Asia, and particularly the South China Sea, is a hotbed of bitter territorial disputes that are the subject of round-the-clock surveillance by the competing parties.

Flying from the point where radar contact was lost to the Indian Ocean would have taken the plane through airspace monitored by Malaysian, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indonesian and Indian military radar.

“How did it get past all of that?” said Gerry Soejatman, an independent aviation analyst based in Jakarta.

One possibility is that the radar systems did pick something up, but it was unclear, and there was a reluctance to flag up data that would also reveal details about military radar capabilities.

“Defence is not only about having the capability but also not disclosing what capabilities you don’t have,” said David Kaminski-Morrow, the London-based air transport editor for Flight International.

“I am sure there is a lot of discussion in the back rooms on what information you want to put out there to help search for the aircraft, and what you don’t want out in the public domain,” he said.

Neither the US Navy nor White House has detailed the source of the intelligence that led to the redeployment of the destroyer USS Kidd towards the Indian Ocean.

But Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters that his government was “sharing information we don’t normally share for security reasons.”

Competing scenarios

The confounding mystery has fuelled a host of contending scenarios, including a mid-air explosion, terrorist act, catastrophic technical failure, pilot suicide or rogue missile strike.

The idea that it flew for hours, and thousands of miles, over the Indian Ocean would appear to lend credence to the notion of some sort of cockpit takeover.

The theory has gathered further weight from other unconfirmed reports that the plane’s two main automated communication systems shut down 14 minutes apart — suggesting this was done manually rather than caused by an explosion or other sudden catastrophic event.

But Soejatman said the time lag could have been the result of a fire.

“We have seen cases where there have been cockpit fires, and then the systems go down one by one,” he said. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be deliberate.”

Several analysts noted that speculation was being fuelled by the public’s widespread disbelief that a modern passenger plane carrying 239 people could just vanish — in an age of instant communication where smartphones have brought advanced technology into everyone’s pockets.

Although it has been almost a week, Paul Yap, an aviation lecturer at Temasek Polytechnic in Singapore, argued that the search was “still in its very early days” and that expectations had to be re-calibrated.

“The unusual problem and maybe the most important one in this case is that there is nothing that can tell them exactly how to deploy their resources,” he said.

“I know that is frustrating to hear … especially for the families, but right now that is the reality.” — AFP

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Classified data shows plane may have crashed in Bay of Bengal or Indian Ocean

The Malaysian Insider

March 15, 2014

Classified intelligence analysis of electronic and satellite data has indicated that the missing Malaysia Airlines (MAS) flight 370 likely crashed either in the Bay of Bengal or somewhere in the Indian Ocean, an exclusive report by the CNN said.

If this information is true, it would offer the first glimpse of concrete details about what happened to the Beijing-bound flight which went off the radar early last Saturday.

It had enough credibility for the United States to move its guided missile destroyer, the USS Kidd, into the Indian Ocean, and Indian officials to expand its search effort into the Bay of Bengal.

An aviation industry source told CNN that the flight’s automated communications system appeared to be intact for up to five hours, because “pings” from the system were received after the transponder last emitted a signal.

The CNN report said taken together, the data points toward speculation in a dark scenario in which someone took the plane for some unknown purpose, perhaps terrorism.

That theory is buoyed by a New York Times (NYT) report that the MAS plane made several significant altitude changes after losing transponder contact.

The paper said MH370 altered its course more than once as though it was still under the command of a pilot.

Quoting US officials and others close to the investigations, the report said the radar signals indicate that the jetliner climbed to 45,000 feet, above the approved limit for the Boeing 777-2000.

This happened right after it disappeared from civilian radar and made a sharp turn to the west.

The plane then descended unevenly to 23,000 feet, below normal cruising levels, as it approached Penang.

MH370 then turned from a southwest-bound direction, climbed to a higher altitude and flew northwest over the Strait of Malacca and towards the vast Indian Ocean.

While the Malaysian government has not released this radar information, it has shared it with the US and China.

The NYT report also stated that investigators have examined data transmitted from the plane’s Rolls-Royce engines, showing it descended 40,0000 feet within a minute. It added that they were not likely to view the readings as accurate because for the jetliner to have fallen such a distance, it would have taken  longer than one minute.

CNN also reported on the theory that MH370 could have landed in a remote Indian Ocean island chain, based on analysis of radar data made known recently – and that whoever was piloting the plane was following navigational waypoints that many have taken the plane over the Andaman Islands.

It quoted FBI assistant director James Kallstrom as saying that while this “movie plot theory” appeared complicated and was unlikely, law enforcement had to check such a possibility.

“You draw that arc, and you look at countries like Pakistan, you know, and you get into your ‘Superman’ novels, and you see the plane landing somewhere and (people) repurposing it for some dastardly deed down the road,” he told CNN.

Aviation experts contended that although highly unlikely, it was possible that someone could have hijacked and landed the jetliner undetected.

The international airport in Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman, is said to have a runway that is long enough to cater to a 777.

However, as the area is highly militarised due to its importance to India, Indian officials said the region was an unlikely target for hijackers trying to sneak in an airplane which had a wingspan of more than 200 feet, reported CNN.

Denis Giles, editor of the Andaman Chronicle newspaper, said there was no chance that an aircraft of that size could have landed in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

When the US sent the USS Kidd to scout the Indian Ocean, Cmdr. William Marks of the US 7th Fleet said of the scale of the search: “I, like most of the world, really have never seen anything like this.

“We went from a chess board to a football field,” he told CNN. – March 15, 2014.

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Could MH370 have landed?

The Malay Mail Online

March 15, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, March 15 ― With new evidence suggesting the possibility that missing jetliner MH370 had been deliberately piloted towards the Andaman Islands, another theory has now emerged out of the woodwork ― could someone have landed aircraft?

Reuters cited two sources yesterday as saying that investigators believe the plane had been directed between navigational waypoints after it lost contact with ground control, which indicated it was being flown by someone with aviation training.

It cited another source as saying that investigations are now looking at the possibility of foul play, with signs pointing increasingly to the likelihood that a person who knew how to fly a plane had deliberately swung the aircraft hundred of miles off its original course from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, towards the Andaman Islands.

“What we can say is we are looking at sabotage, with hijack still on the cards,” Reuters had quoted a “a senior Malaysian police official” as saying.

Although this is at best just conjecture for now, it may be one of the few working theories that could finally expose more conclusive leads to what experts have described as the most baffling of mysteries in aviation history.

But if the Malaysia Airlines aircraft had truly made the air turn-back as suspected, if it had headed to the Andaman Islands as satellite data and US officials have suggested, and if it indeed had landed, where in the remote Indian archipelago could it have parked itself so stealthily out of sight?

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, a chain of isles between the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal, is home to 572 islands, stretching across more than 700 kilometres north to south.

Only 37 of the 572 islands are inhabited. Its populace number to some 380,000 people.

“The rest are dense tropical jungle,” the WSJ quoted Colonel Harmit Singh, spokesman for India’s tri-services command, as saying.

According to the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) specifications, a Boeing 700 like MH370 would need between 1,160 to 1,500 meters to land at sea level, depending on its weight at the time of landing.

Reports say the aircraft could have achieved a safe landing if it had used the landing strip at Port Blair.

The main airport at the Andaman and Nicobar Islands of India is the Veer Savarkar Airport or the Port Blair Airport, which has a single runway measuring 3,290 meters in length, enough to fit a  landing by the Boeing 777.

But as stated in a CNN report yesterday, “it’s hard to imagine the Boeing 777 landing at any of the remote island chain’s mostly military airstrips without anyone noticing”.

“The islands are in a strategically important area for India. It’s a highly militarized zone with surveillance capacities covering a large part of the Indian Ocean, which would make it nearly impossible for an unidentified aircraft to enter the zone undetected,” the report added.

“There is no chance, no such chance, that any aircraft of this size can come toward Andaman and Nicobar Islands and land,” CNN quoted Andaman Chronicle newspaper editor Denis Giles as saying.

Meanwhile, Indian rescuers are scoping out these areas for signs of the MH370, which has now been missing for over a week since last Saturday.

Two navy warships from India have been dispatched to search southeast of the islands while the Indian Coast Guard has deployed aircraft and patrol boats to scour the area.

Inspector general of the coast guard on the islands V.S.R. Murthy called the search a “blind hunt”, according to WSJ.

“We’re looking everywhere; on the western and eastern coast of Andaman,” he was quoted saying, noting the wide watery expanse that searchers have to cover and the likelihood that even if the aircraft had crashed there, the currents would have carried its debris far away.

The jumbo jet ferrying 239 people to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur had mysteriously fallen off radar screens at 1.30am that morning, leaving behind minimal clues in its tracks to help investigators locate its position.

The first clue that showed the possibility of trouble inside the aircraft emerged when military radars picked up signals that indicated the plane may have made a turn-back in mid-flight, and headed towards the Straits of Malacca, to the west of its original location.

But Malaysian transport authorities and foreign experts have yet to confirm if the aircraft spotted on the radar screens was truly MH370.

Early yesterday, more leads surfaced to support the turn-back theory.

A Pentagon official was reported as saying that there was an “indication” that Flight MH370 had gone down in the Indian Ocean. The USS Kidd was immediately dispatched to the waters between the Andaman Sea and the Indian Ocean to search the area.

Later, a Reuters report said that satellites had picked up faint electronic pulses from the aircraft after its disappearance, which it said suggested that the plane’s maintenance troubleshooting system were “switched on and ready to communicate” with satellites at the time.

Citing sources, the report said the system “pings” about once every hour and in the case of MH370, around five or six such pulses were heard. This could mean that MH370, which was ferrying 239 people, had continued to fly on for a number of hours after it left the radar screens.

Global satellite company Inmarsat also revealed yesterday that it had registered “routine, automated signals” from MH370 during its flight from Kuala Lumpur, but did not specify the timing of the signals and how long they had transmitted for.

The Boeing 777 aircraft had enough fuel to fly up to 8.30am on March 8, leaving it with some seven hours of fuel in its tanks when it lost contact with Subang Air Traffic Control (ATC).

When it disappeared, the plane was flying 120 nautical miles off Kota Baru in the east coast of Malaysia, between the waters of Malaysia and Vietnam.

Malaysian officials have so far refused to confirm the reports on the satellite data.

Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein told the daily press conference at Sama-Sama Hotel here that investigators were well aware of the reports, but said they had come from “unnamed officials” and remain “unverified”.

“When I alluded to the search being expanded, basically it is because we have not found anything in the areas we have searched,” he said.

The current search operation involving 57 ships and 48 aircraft from 13 countries are already scouring a watery expanse significantly larger than Malaysia’s total land mass of about 330,000 square kilometres.

Asked to state what information Malaysia has with regards to the “indication” that Pentagon officials said may show that MH370 had diverted towards the Indian Ocean, Hishammuddin replied:

“I said a lot of unnamed officials are making certain suggestions. I think we need to go deeper into who actually made those statements. At the moment, I don’t have that information.”

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If DAP or any of Pakatan Rakyat parties had done what Perkasa had done in going against the King’s Speech on the National Unity Consultative Council,  we would have been accused of being anti-national, anti-Agong and traitors

In his royal address opening Parliament on Monday, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong not only endorsed the National Unity Consultative Council (NUCC) set up by the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak to preserve the country’s harmony and seek a common ground on various religious and ethnic matters, he “called on all parties to refrain from making any statement or action that might be deemed provocative or sensitive”.

The Yang di Pertuan Agong said: “Be mindful that when unity disintegrates, the country will head towards destruction. Therefore, we should reinforce unity by cultivating mutual respect and moderation in life.”

But the Yang di Pertuan Agong has been openly challenged and defied by the provocative and insensitive statements and actions of extremist organization Perkasa and other NGOs, led by Ibrahim Ali, which rejected “wholesale” the NUCC and have  set up the National Unity Front (NUF) as an alternative to the NUCC.

Yesterday, former Chief Justice Tun Abdul Hamid Mohamed was announced as the first chief of the Perkasa-backed NUF to challenge what the Yang di Pertuan Agong said in his Royal Address to Parliament on Monday.

The NUF is to  counter the NUCC on the ground that the composition of the NUCC, chaired by former Chief Secretary to the Government, Tan Sri Samsuddin Osman, does not reflect the Malaysian society and that  NUCC members are guilty  of “sedition” and being insensitive to the Malays and Islam.

If DAP or any of Pakatan Rakyat parties had done what Perkasa had done, in going against the King’s Speech on the NUCC,  we would have been accused of being anti-national, anti-Agong and traitors and all sorts of actions would have been taken against the DAP and Pakatan Rakyat leaders.

The question is why instigators and extremists like Ibrahim Ali and his ilk whether in Perkasa or other NGOs spawned by him had been allowed particularly in the past ten months a free hand to incessantly incite racial and religious animosities and hatred which, if unchecked,  can only result in the destruction of multi-racial and multi-religious Malaysia by provoking racial chaos and religious confrontation?

The Kajang by-election on March 23  is both significant and important, not only for the 40,000 voters of Kajang but also for the 30 million Malaysians – for it is an opportunity for the Kajang voters to speak loud and clear on behalf of all Malaysians, that they reject instigators and extremists who refuse to recognize that moderation and the preservation of inter-racial and inter-religious peace, harmony and solidarity must be the No. 1 duty and challenge of every patriotic Malaysian, regardless of race, religion, region or politics.

Even if the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak, is not prepared to take a stand on the importance  moderation and preserving the  inter-racial and inter-religious peace, harmony and solidarity in the country, then let the ordinary voters in Kajang in the by-election take a stand on behalf of the 30 million Malaysians – that ordinary Malaysians want the Prime Minister to act swiftly and boldly against instigators and extremists who want to destroy very fabric of Malaysia multi-racial and multi-religious society through their politics and language of hate and bigotry.

(Media Conference Statement in Kajang on the significance of the Kajang by-election on Saturday, 15th March 2014 at 12 noon)

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India scours uninhabited jungle islands for lost MH370 jetliner

The Malaysian Insider

March 14, 2014

Indian aircraft combed Andaman and Nicobar, made up of more than 500 mostly uninhabited islands, for signs of the missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 jetliner that evidence suggests was last headed towards the heavily forested archipelago.

Popular with tourists and anthropologists alike, the islands form India’s most isolated state. They are best known for dense rainforests, coral reefs and hunter-gatherer tribes who have long resisted contact with outsiders.

The search for flight MH370 turned west toward the islands after Malaysia’s air force chief said military radar had detected an unidentified aircraft suspected to be the lost Boeing 777 to the west of Malaysia early on Saturday.

Two sources yesterday told Reuters the unidentified aircraft appeared to be following a commonly used navigational route that would take it over the islands.

The Indian navy has deployed two Dornier planes to fly across the island chain, a total area of 720 km by 52 km, Indian military spokesman Harmeet Singh said in the state capital, Port Blair. So far the planes, and a helicopter searching the coast, had found nothing.

“This operation is like finding a needle in a haystack,” said Singh, who is the spokesman for joint air force, navy and army command in the Andaman and Nicobar islands.

The Defence Ministry said the Eastern Naval Command would also search across a new area measuring 15 km by 600 km along the Chennai coast in the Bay of Bengal.

The shape of this area, located 900 km west of Port Blair, suggested the search was focusing on a narrow flight corridor.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said China appreciated India’s search efforts. Most of the passengers on Flight MH370 are Chinese.

The 2004 tsunami devastated much of Andaman and Nicobar. In the wake of that disaster, a member of the reclusive Sentinelese tribe was photographed firing arrows at an Indian coastguard helicopter.

Another nomadic tribe, the Jarawa, are increasingly in contact with outsiders. Tribal rights group Survival accuses travel agencies of organising “human safari” tours to view the Jarawa, who are fish and turtle hunters and number about 400.

On standby is India’s most advanced maritime air surveillance plane, the P-8I Poseidon, a long range anti-submarine variant of the US Navy’s P-8A. India, the first overseas customer for the aircraft, has ordered eight P-8Is.

Indian ships are also helping the search by more than a dozen nations for the missing plane, one of the most baffling mysteries in the history of modern aviation. The ships are searching an area north of Sumatra, in the south Andaman Sea.

Andaman and Nicobar is of strategic importance for India, because of its location near the busy Malacca Straits shipping route. Over the past decade, India has built up its military presence on the islands with the joint command. – Reuters, March 14, 2014.

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London-based satellite firm says MH370 registered signals on its network

The Malay Mail Online

March 14, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, March 14 — Global satellite company Inmarsat revealed today that it had registered “routine, automated signals” from missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 during its flight from Kuala Lumpur.

The news adds to the intrigue surrounding the aircraft’s disappearance, particularly as it appears to corroborate reports that said satellites had picked up faint, electronic pulses or “pings” from MH370 hours after it was last heard from.

Inmarsat, a London-based firm, reported its findings in a statement on its website but did not elaborate on when or how long the signals were received.

“This information was provided to our partner SITA, which in turn has shared it with Malaysia Airlines,” it said in the statement, adding that further information should be obtained from MAS, the owner of the Boeing 777 aircraft that went missing.

SITA is a global specialist in air transport communications and information technology.

Earlier this morning, Reuters reported that satellites had picked up faint electronic pulses from the aircraft after its disappearance, which it said suggested that the plane’s maintenance troubleshooting system were “switched on and ready to communicate” with satellites at the time.

Citing sources, the report said the system “pings” about once every hour and in the case of MH370, around five or six such pulses were heard. This could mean that MH370, which was ferrying 239 people, had continued to fly on for a number of hours after it left the radar screens.

Rescue efforts have now expanded to include the Indian Ocean, following fresh leads that a US experts said shows an “indication” that the plane had flown in that direction.

If proven true, it could make an already daunting operation even more difficult to conduct and coordinate as the sheer size of the Indian Ocean would increase the search area exponentially.

But the chances of finding the plane intact — seven days after flight MH370 was to hand landed in Beijing — in the world’s third largest water body are looking slim.

The Indian Ocean has an average depth of 13,002 feet (3,963 metres) while its deepest point, the Java Trench is believed to be at -23,812 feet (-7,258 metres), according to information in the CIA World Factbook.

But according to US Navy Commander William Marks of the USS Kidd, the vessel can spot “something the size of a small wooden crate or basketball on the surface of the water.”

The vessel was dispatched to the Indian Ocean following reports on the possibility that MH370’s believed mid-air turn-back had taken the aircraft in that direction.

The Boeing 777 aircraft had enough fuel to fly up to 8.30am on March 8, leaving it with some seven hours of fuel in its tanks when it lost contact with Subang Air Traffic Control (ATC).

When it disappeared, the plane was flying 120 nautical miles off Kota Baru in the east coast of Malaysia, between the waters of Malaysia and Vietnam.

The current search operation involving 13 countries and dozens of air and sea vessels are already scouring a watery expanse significantly larger than Malaysia’s total land mass of about 330,000 square kilometres.

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MH370 hijack theory includes intent to use plane for ‘nefarious purposes’, say US officials

The Malaysian Insider

March 15, 2014

With evidence showing a missing Malaysia Airlines (MAS) Boeing 777-200ER could still be intact, US officials have not ruled out that flight MH370 was flown to a secret site so that it could be used at a later date.

There has been no trace or debris field on land or sea that is linked to the plane carrying 239 people, which vanished while on a red-eye flight to Beijing last Saturday.

“I am keenly interested in resolving this mystery so we can discard the possibility, however remote, that the airplane can be used for nefarious purposes against us in the future,” ABC News quoted a US official as saying.

The official added that “all our intelligence assets” are being used to try to figure this out.

Investigators searching for the missing MAS passenger jet said that they could not rule out hijacking and are looking at whether one of the plane’s pilots or crew could have been involved.

Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein made clear yesterday that investigators do not know what happened to the jetliner despite a week of intense searching.

US officials who have been briefed on the investigation have determined that the plane continued to “ping” a satellite long after its transponder stopped sending out signals and disappeared from radar.

The officials told ABC News that two of the plane’s communications systems were shut down separately, and that it appeared to have been done manually.

“There are four or five possibilities which we are exploring,” Hishammuddin told a presss conference at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang yesterday.

“It could have been done intentionally. It could be done under duress. It could have been done because of an explosion. That’s why I don’t want to go into the realm of speculation. We are looking at the all the possibilities,” he said.

When asked whether investigators were looking at whether one of the plane’s two pilots or cabin crew could have been involved in whatever happened to the plane, he replied. “We are looking at that possibility.”

“The investigation into the pilots is ongoing,” he said to a question, but said they have not yet searched their homes.

MAS chief executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya added to the speculation that the plane’s disappearance was the result of a plot rather than a catastrophic failure of the airplane’s systems.

“We cannot confirm whether there is no hijacking.

“Like I said from the start, and I’ve been very consistent, we are looking at all possibilities,” he said.

The 11-year-old jet vanished early Saturday about an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. It disappeared from radar at 1.30am local time.

After searching intently east of peninsular Malaysia in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea, much of the attention has shifted hundreds of miles west in the Strait of Malacca and the Indian Ocean.

Officials believe it may have flown west because Malaysian military radar picked up a signal after the jetliner disappeared, and they believe it may have been flight MH370.

“I will be the happiest person if we can confirm that (the military radar blip) is MH370 because then we could move all our assets to the Strait of Malacca.

“But at this time we cannot do that,” Hishammuddin said yesterday.

Investigators are trying to retrieve data from the satellites that had been pinged by the missing airliner in the hopes that those contacts might aid in plotting the plane’s final position.

Vietnamese officials added some details to the plane’s mystery yesterday by telling ABC News that when flight MH370 left Malaysian airspace and failed to make contact with Vietnamese air traffic controllers, the Vietnamese asked another plane in the area that was heading to Japan to contact MH370.

The Japan-bound plane reported back to the Vietnamese controllers that when it reached MH370 only a “buzz signal” came back, but no voices. And then the signal went dead.

The Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not say what time that contact was made.

Sources told Reuters yesterday that the investigation was focusing more on a suspicion the flight was deliberately diverted, as evidence suggests it was last headed out over the Andaman Islands.

In a far more detailed description of military radar plotting than has been publicly revealed, two sources told Reuters that an unidentified aircraft –  that investigators suspect was missing flight MH370 – appeared to be following a commonly used navigational route when it was last spotted early on Saturday, northwest of Malaysia.

That course – headed into the Andaman Sea and towards the Bay of Bengal – could only have been set deliberately, either by flying the Boeing 777-200ER jet manually or by programming the auto-pilot.

A third investigative source said inquiries were focusing more on the theory that someone who knew how to fly a plane deliberately diverted the flight hundreds of miles off its course from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

“What we can say is we are looking at sabotage, with hijack still on the cards,” said the source, a senior Malaysian police official.

The latest radar evidence is consistent with the expansion of the search for the aircraft to the west of Malaysia, possibly as far as the Indian Ocean.

“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,” said White House spokesman Jay Carney (pic, left), but did not specify the nature of the new information.

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

US experts are still examining the data to see if any information about its last location could be extracted, a source close to the investigation told Reuters.

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, they said.

Malaysia’s air force chief, General Tan Sri Rodzali Daud, said on Wednesday that an aircraft that could have been the missing plane was plotted on military radar at 2:15 am, 320 km northwest of Penang

Island off Malaysia’s west coast.

This position marks the limit of Malaysia’s military radar in that part of the country, a fourth source familiar with the investigation told Reuters.

Malaysia says it has asked neighbouring countries for their radar data, but has not confirmed receiving the information. Indonesian and Thai authorities said on Friday they had not received an official request for such data from Malaysia.

The fact that the plane – if it was MH370 – had lost contact with air traffic control and was invisible to civilian radar, suggested someone on board had turned off its communication systems, the first two sources said.

They also gave new details on the direction in which the unidentified aircraft was heading – following aviation corridors identified on maps used by pilots as N571 and P628 – routes taken by commercial planes flying from Southeast Asia to the Middle East or Europe.

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.

As ships and aircraft combed a vast area covering both sides of the Malaysian peninsula and the Andaman Sea, the US Navy was sending an advanced P-8A Poseidon plane to help search the Strait of Malacca, a busy sea-lane separating the Malaysian peninsula from the Indonesian island of Sumatra. It had already deployed a Navy P-3 Orion aircraft to those waters.

US 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 had deployed ships, planes and helicopters from the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands, at the juncture of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, an Indian military spokesman Harmeet Singh said on Friday.

Two Dornier aircraft were searching the land mass of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, a total area of 720 km by 52 km, Singh said.

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.

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. Three people died in the incident. – March 15, 2014.

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Satellites scour earth for clues as missing jet mystery deepens

The Malaysian Insider

March 15, 2014

An unprecedented international effort is under way from space to track the missing Malaysia passenger jet as satellite operators, government agencies and rival nations sweep their gaze across two oceans in search of elusive debris or data.

Six days after the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 went missing with 239 people on board, the search has widened to the Andaman Sea, northwest of the Malay Peninsula, with only one precious clue – an ephemeral “ping” detected five or six times after the plane lost contact – picked up in orbit.

Disaster relief agencies and governments are co-operating across political divides, and in the absence of a formal probe are finding informal ways to share information, including via China’s weather agency, a person involved in the search said.

“I haven’t seen this sort of level of involvement of satellites in accident investigation before,” said Matthew Greaves, head of the Safety and Accident Investigation Centre at Cranfield University in Bedford, England. “It is only going to get more important until they find some wreckage.”

Several governments are using imagery satellites – platforms that take high definition photos – while data from private sector communications satellites is also being examined.

China alone says it has deployed 10 satellites in the search in a pointed reminder of its growing influence in space. The United States is using all the capabilities that have a view of the area in question, including very high-resolution electro-optical satellites that can identify a car’s license plate from space, US government officials said.

“There are a lot of satellites looking at that area of the world,” said one source familiar with the network of US national security satellites.

But having conquered space, orbital nations have been rendered helpless by the sheer scale of the task back on earth.

“It is like finding a needle in a haystack and the area is enormous. Finding anything rapidly is going to be very difficult,” said Marc Pircher, director of the French space centre in Toulouse, run by the country’s CNES space agency.

“The area and scale of the task is such that 99% of what you are getting are false alarms.”

With no firm evidence about where the plane was heading, whether or where it crashed or if it landed, authorities have yet to launch an official probe. Until those questions are answered, it remains uncertain which country would be responsible for such an investigation.

Even so, sources close to the informal investigation encompassing the world’s leading space-faring nations as well as naval and air assets said on Thursday a brief “ping” sent hourly five or six times had been received by one or more satellites.

As they try to wring more information out of these faint carrier signals, experts will need to analyse the exact time of transmission and the strength of the signal. The number of satellites spotting the faint electronic blink will be crucial.

“If you have three or more data points, it should be relatively easy to triangulate where the aircraft is and the direction in which it is going in,” said Elizabeth Quintana, Director of Military Sciences at the Royal United services Institute.

“However, the sheer number of aircraft operating in the area may make it difficult to pinpoint where the signal was coming from.”

Satellite experts say the process of triangulation used to pinpoint the whereabouts of mobile phones might help narrow down the search, but would not be nearly as accurate as navigational results from the Global Positioning System.

“It will not be easy to find the position exactly because these are telecommunications satellites, not position-locating satellites,” said Pircher. “To track positions by triangulation you need extremely accurate computer clocks.”

Most aircraft are equipped to send and receive automatic text messages on any glitches to the airline via radio or satellite links, using either the medium-orbit Iridium constellation or the higher, geostationary satellites operated by Britain’s Inmarsat.

Certain single satellites can also detect a position from, say, a distress beacon by taking advantage of the Doppler effect. But this is not available on either network used by the airline industry to handle fleet communications, Pircher said.

One industry source said it was possible to figure out the location of a ship or plane that is the source of a “ping” by calculating the distance from the satellite to the item and the angle of elevation. The source said that such information about Flight 370 could become available in the next few days.

Another US government source did not rule out presence of some garbled data from the “ping”.

Canada, France, Russia and the United States are also co-operating through in a satellite-based search and rescue venture called Cospas–Sarsat, an official involved in the work said.

Inmarsat, whose systems were on the aircraft, said “routine, automated signals” were seen on its network during its flight from Kuala Lumpur, but Malaysian officials said none of them came after the Boeing 777 vanished.

Iridium said the “pings” from the aircraft were not handled by its satellites.

People close to the investigation into the disappearance of Flight 370 acknowledge gleaning clues from the plane’s flight path and whereabouts from satellite data can prove to be a difficult task.

In at least two instances so far, officials thought they had run across satellite imagery that might have pointed to the location of wreckage from the 777 off the east coast of Malaysia, only for the information to be discredited.

A complete veil has been drawn over what co-operation, if any, has been provided by military or high-powered satellites.

The jet vanished in an area of regional sensitivities not far from the South China Sea and near the Malacca Strait, where the region’s main actors have historically disputed over island ownership and maritime boundaries.

“It is possible governments have satellites looking, of course,” Greaves said. “The question is, will we get to a point were people will come under pressure to come forward.”

High-end electro-optical satellites may in any case be of limited use when so little is known about the jet’s whereabouts because they are designed to look at very small, precise areas.

“You are essentially looking through a soda straw at a given area. So you have to know where you’re looking,” a US government source said. – Reuters, March 15, 2014.

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