Call on Najib to show national and international leadership by giving  full support for the establishment of  Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370

Ten days after my speech in Parliament proposing a Parliamentary Select Committee on the missing MH370 crisis, with 239 passengers and crew on board in the early hours of March 8; three days after the Pakatan Rakyat press conference on Wednesday  in Parliament on a formal proposition to set up a Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370 by way of an amendment to the pending Motion of Thanks for the Royal Address currently undergoing debate in the Dewan Rakyat and two days after the Pakatan Rakyat MP for Seremban Anthony Loke having moved the formal proposition in Parliament on Thursday for the establishment of a Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370, there is still not a word from the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak whether the government would support a Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370.

The search for the missing MH370 Boeing 777-200 aircraft is already the longest in modern passenger-airline history, as the previous record was the 10-day search for a Boeing 737-400 with 102 people on board  operated by Indonesia’s PT Adam Skyconnection Airlines, which went missing off the coast of the country’s Sulawesi island on January 1, 2007.

The MH 370 search has entered the third week with today being the 15th day of the  missing aircraft, but despite the deployment of the world’s largest-ever 26-nation multi-national air-sea search-and-rescue (SAR) operation covering two vast tracts of territories totaling 2.24 million square nautical miles (about the same size of Australia), there has been no clue as to what happened to the aircraft and the 239 passengers and crew in the early hours of March 8, how and why it happened!

All Malaysians fully support every effort by the government to find the missing MH370, fervently praying for the safety of the 239 passengers and crew, but they cringe at the spate of adverse publicity especially in the international media which put the country in a very poor light – especially the  many unnecessary confusions and contradictions which should not have happened at all.

The most recent incident is the admission by the MAS CEO yesterday that MH370 was carrying lithium ion batteries in its cargo, after he had denied five days earlier that it was carrying any hazardous materials or high-value items apart from three to four tonnes of mangosteens to China.

This has reignited the speculation that a fire might be responsible for MH370’s disappearance on May 8. Whatever the outcome of the controversy over MAS’ claims that the lithium ion batteries carried onboard MH370 were in compliance with the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and the International Air Transport Association (IATA), the question remains as to why the MAS CEO had denied such a cargo five days ago instead of being fully frank, factual and transparent so as not to undermine credibility and confidence.

The time has come for the Prime Minister to exercise leadership and authority in the  handling of the MH370 crisis, starting with him showing national and international leadership by giving  full support for the establishment of a  Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370 without any further delay or procrastination.

(Media Statement in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday, 22nd March 2014)

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 22 March 2014, 6:13 pm and is filed under
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Forensic experts find nothing suspicious in pilot’s flight simulator, says report

The Malaysian Insider

March 22, 2014

As the search for missing MH370 enters the third week, forensic experts examining the flight simulator which was seized by police from the home of Malaysia Airlines pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah have found nothing suspicious, The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) reported.

The simulator has been one of the main focuses of investigators as they worked to solve the mystery of the plane’s disappearance.

Investigators became suspicious after they discovered that Zaharie, 53, had deleted logs on a computer linked to the simulator on February 3, almost five weeks before the Boeing 777 with 239 people on board disappeared from the radar during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

It was reported that the computer hard drive was sent to FBI experts in the US for further scrutiny as investigators look into the possibility that the plane was hijacked.

Zaharie and his co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, had been a key focus of investigations after Malaysian authorities said they believed a “deliberate action” by someone on board caused the plane to lose communications and then turn around from its scheduled flight path.

Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein had said that the investigation into the flight simulator is part of the overall probe into all passengers and crew on board the Malaysia Airlines flight which has been missing since March 8.

Inspector-General of Police (IGP) Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar also said that initial investigations found that the data log from the simulator was believed to have been deleted on February 3.

He had said that the deleted data was data log from three types of aviation games.

“The three games in the simulator were ‘flight simulator X’, ‘flight simulator 9’, ‘X flight 10’,” he told the media.

Veteran pilot Zaharie, who has more than 18,000 flying hours, was described as a flying enthusiast by his former and current co-workers.

He was said to have spent his off-days operating the life-sized simulator which he had set up in his house.

Police also checked the personal, political and religious backgrounds of both pilots and the other crew members.

Intensive background checks on Zaharie failed to uncover any links to extremists groups or terrorism.

Attention on Zaharie also focused on his active support for Malaysia’s opposition party.

Zaharie is a member of the opposition Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) led by veteran politician Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim and his Twitter account “follows” a number of top opposition politicians, though it contains no posts by Zaharie himself.

There was even speculation that the pilot could have been deeply upset following Anwar’s conviction for sodomy – an allegation that was rejected by those who knew him.

Malaysian media reports have quoted colleagues as calling Zaharie – a 33-year Malaysia Airlines veteran – a “superb” and highly respected pilot, while acquaintances remember a gentle man who was handy in the kitchen and around the house.

Investigations have also failed to find anything suspicious in the background of Fariq, who was due to marry another pilot. – March 22, 2014.

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 22 March 2014, 7:25 pm and is filed under
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In mystery of MH370, some answers may never come

The Malay Mail Online

March 22, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, March 22 — One of — if not the — safest planes in the world, plying a busy commercial air route between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, on a clear night devoid of inclement weather, and piloted by a captain with over 18,000 hours of flight experience is now missing for exactly two weeks.

What at first appeared an improbable aviation disaster is now an “unprecedented” mystery in which the answer to most important question — where is Malaysia Airlines flight MH370? — remains firmly locked away.

Over the course of the last 14 days, the world was given vital clues about what transpired on the Boeing 777-200ER with 239 people including the two pilots and 10 crew members onboard.

Investigators piecing together events using bits of information now know that at 1.07am on March 8, 26 minutes after it departed Kuala Lumpur International Airport, the plane’s the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), sent its last transmission. Another, scheduled 30 minutes later, was never made.

Around 120 nautical miles off the coast of Kelantan, the co-pilot Fariq Ab Hamid contacted Subang Air Traffic Control to make the plane’s last radio transmission. The last words he uttered were, “All right, good night”.

At 1.22am, a person experts say must possess deep technical knowledge of the Boeing plane, turned off its transponder, rendering it invisible to commercial radar.

The plane was then flown westward from its intended path to Beijing, turning around at Checkpoint Igari in the South China Sea.

From there, it flew on to Checkpoint Vampi, northeast of Indonesia’s Aceh province and a navigational point used for planes following route N571 to the Middle East.

Subsequent plots indicate the plane flew towards Checkpoint Gival, south of the Thai island of Phuket, and was last plotted heading northwest towards another checkpoint, Igrex, used for route P628 that would take it over the Andaman Islands and which carriers use to fly towards Europe.

Malaysia later confirmed — albeit one week after the plane vanished — that its military radar captured MH370 as it flew across the peninsula, over the densely populated areas including Penang, before it flew beyond radar range some 200 nautical miles in the Straits of Malacca.

Last Saturday, it also confirmed that MH370 flew on for six hours longer than search and rescue teams initially believed, putting it thousands of miles away from where tens of planes and ships had been scouring in the South China Sea.

British commercial satellite firm Inmarsat said that one of its satellites was pinged approximately once an hour by MH370 between the time it severed communications with ATC and the final “electronic handshake” at 8.11am on March 8.

From this, investigators used the plane’s available speed range to deduce that it could be in one of two corridors: a northern arc from northern Thailand to the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in central Asia, or a southern one from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean.

The two divergent corridors were a result of the inability of this particular Boeing 777-200ER to tell the geosynchronous Inmarsat satellite where it was when it sent its “electronic handshake”, but only how far away in relation.

Efforts to “refine” the information to eliminate either corridor hit early obstacles after three of Malaysia’s neighbours — Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar — said their radars never saw the plane.

Last Saturday, India ruled out the possibility that MH370 slipped past its radar. A day later, Pakistan did the same.

In fact, beyond the Royal Malaysian Air Force’s (RMAF’s) primary radar sites in Kota Baru and Butterworth, no country has admitted to seeing MH370 on their radar screens.

Thailand later reversed its position, admitting 10 days after the plane vanished that three of its air force radars may have spotted the aircraft.

“We did not pay any attention to it,” Thai air force spokesman Air Vice Marshal Montol Suchookorn was quoted saying in an Associated Press report.

This neglect and foot-dragging in revealing information may have come out of a legitimate fear of exposing holes in their military defences, especially in a region as tighly-packed with multiple sovereign states but through whose airspace and waters see immense volumes of commercial traffic.

But Malaysia has also concluded that the plane is missing due to “deliberate action” and has subjected all 239 people onboard to an investigation under laws dealing with hijack, sabotage and other acts of terrorism.

The circumstances involved — key communications disabled at an opportune moment between two countries and a plane skilfully threaded through a series of checkpoints in a manner designed to skirt watching radars — point to skilled pilot or at least an experienced aviation technician.

Yesterday, Malaysia said foreign intelligence agencies have give the all-clear to the 227 passengers, even the two Iranians who had boarded the flight using the stolen passports of two Europeans, and a Ukrainian, due to the political crisis which broke out there shortly before Flight MH370’s disappearance.

Even so, the investigation has yet to wholly discount the possibility of a technical failure.

The US National Transportation Safety Board noted an unusual consignment of easily-flammable lithium-ion batteries — which are used for personal electronic devices such as smartphones — in the MH370 cargo list, which may spark a fire in the hold at high altitudes if poorly packed.

Despite the clues being gathered, however, criticism continues to be aimed at Malaysia for taking so long to come forward with information.

China-owned media, whose 153 countrymen made up the bulk of those onboard MH370, were scathing with their censure, accusing Malaysian of wasting precious time and resources searching areas where it is now known that the plane flew over only briefly.

The delay will also have terminally complicated search in the “southern corridor”, a colossal and remote swathe of seawater with treacherous and icy currents fed from Antarctica.

Investigators said they have found what they say has been the best lead in a week after satellite picked up two indistinct objects floating in the Indian Ocean some 2,500km off Western Australia.

And even if the objects indeed turn out to be debris from the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, over a week of ocean currents mean there is no reliable way to establish if the plane went down near the site of discovery or were swept there from thousands of kilometres away.

Search teams are also racing against the clock to find the so-called “black boxes” — the flight data and cockpit voice recorders — in order to extract the information essential to explaining what transpired in the final moments of flight MH370.

While the two vital recorders have beacons that transmit their locations to those searching, these have only enough power to keep broadcasting for 30 days.

With 14 days gone, search teams have just 16 more days to scour hundreds of thousands of kilometres before the two go silent forever.

“This is undoubtedly going to take a while… It could take months or longer,” Mark Rosenker, a former vice chairman of the US National Transportation Safety Board, was quoted as saying by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

Rosenker pointed out that there was no known debris field in which to look for the crucial data recorders from the plane, without which he said crash investigators would be stuck “investigating a murder without a body”.

A safety consultant who worked on the case of the 2009 incident of Air France flight AF447 that crashed en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro also drew parallels between the search now and the nearly two years it took to hunt down the black boxes from the plane then.

The consultant pointed out that the search for AF447 took that long even when investigators knew the approximate area in which the plane went down.

“In this case, they have no idea where the flight ended,” Curt Lewis told the WSJ. “The task is tremendous.”

Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein has braced the country to as much as expect a protracted search with a pear-shaped ending.

“This is going to be a long haul. We have to trench down on this,” he told a daily news conference on MH370 yesterday.

Malaysia has vowed to keep looking for “as long as it takes” to find MH370, saying it owed this to the families.

It has now roped in over 26 countries to help search for the missing plane.

The search scope, now moved from just hundreds of nautical miles over the South China Sea to the two corridors, has now expanded to 7.68 million square miles (2.24 million nautical miles), or the size of Australia.

And with the prospect of hunt taking months and even years, it will need all the help it can get.

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 22 March 2014, 7:54 am and is filed under
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Kajang voters, Malaysia’s destiny is in your hands!

P Ramakrishan

Aliran

The Malay Mail Online

March 22, 2014

MARCH 22 — As you go to the polling booth on Sunday, 23 March 2014, remember that in your hands lies the destiny of this nation.

When you hold the ballot paper in your hand, remember that you are going to determine the future of our country. It is a heavy responsibility that you have been entrusted with but no generation of voters has ever been tasked with such a duty or been given such an opportunity.

What you do on 23 March must surely be the beginning of a new change that will provide the impetus for a new government.

It is not so much as casting your vote in favour of Pakatan or Barisan Nasional. You cast your vote in favour of fairness, justice, rule of law and democracy.

You are casting your vote to determine how this nation should be governed. You are going to express yourself very diligently and bravely, and let it be known in no uncertain terms what is best for this country.

The present government has failed to curb corruption which is the scourge of this nation. Corruption has become so rooted in our everyday life that it flourishes rampantly without any serious attempt to curb it.

Just look at the politicians and their lifestyle. Do you ever wonder how they have become so enormously rich? Why is that they are not investigated by the MACC and held accountable? Why they are not compelled to declare their assets publicly?

Will these super rich politicians sincerely declare, as did Thomas Jefferson, “I have the consolation of having added nothing to my private fortune during my public service, and of retiring with hands as clean as they are empty”?

Look at our unity. It is in a shambles. The unity and tolerance that we have enjoyed in the past has been destroyed by trouble-makers who are strident and shrill in their demands to keep us apart. They have gone out of their way to pit the Malays against the non-Malays without being reprimanded by the national leadership. They are even being funded by the government, thus conveying the message that the trouble-makers are being sponsored by the leadership. Do we want this to continue?

The entire world including Muslim countries are appalled by the monopolistic claim of Allah as the sole right of the Muslims here. The leadership has failed miserably in reining in these zealots and in giving real meaning to the claim that Malaysia is indeed a moderate country as the federal government has proclaimed to the world.

The judiciary has become an appendage of the government as seen in the way Anwar Ibrahim was persecuted and prosecuted, in a determined effort, without giving him an opportunity to defend himself adequately. Anwar was convicted by bringing forward the earlier dates that were agreed upon; why was the court in a hurry to convict him before nomination day for the Kajang by-election? What was the court’s interest in wanting to convict Anwar before nomination day?

The way Karpal Singh was convicted by the court has shocked all who cherish the right of freedom of expression and of opinion. It has bewildered the international community.

Why was the self-confessed killer of Altantuya acquitted and freed? Who ordered her to be blown up without a trace? Why was her immigration record wiped off from the computer and on whose orders? These are issues the courts should have addressed but unfortunately did not.

Our education system is an utter failure. The national schools are becoming like religious schools. Some Orang Asli children were punished for not reciting the Muslim prayers. During fasting month, it becomes so difficult for non-Muslim students to have their break. Some students were confined to the toilet areas to have their break. Some were insulted in derogatory terms when they were having their break in some corner of the school building. This kind of harassment should never happen under any circumstance — but it happens.

Biro Tata Rakyat (BTN), instead of promoting unity and ethics, has become a course to run down the non-Malays as ‘pendatang’. This agency is a danger to the nation and its harmony as it brainwashes attendees with warped thinking and insults citizens who are non-Malays.

There are a vast majority of Malaysians — both Malays and non-Malays — who do not agree with the way this country is being governed. They do not agree with the lopsided policies that deprive the deserving and enrich the cronies unfairly. They dare not speak up openly for fear of repercussions. It is this majority of Malaysians – at least, those of them who reside in Kajang — who now have the opportunity to pass judgement on the present government by voting against the BN without any consequence. Treat this by-election as a referendum on the BN’s misrule and express your displeasure without fear or favour.

Fifty-seven years of unbroken BN governance has ruined this country. Why are the rural Malays still in abject poverty? The Umno-dominated cabinet and government have failed to solve the problems of the poor and the marginalised.

The present government is totally incapable of curbing corruption; it is clueless as to how to promote unity; it is hopelessly incompetent in alleviating the status of women; it is ineffective in controlling crime; it cannot safeguard the rule of law; it is not accountable; it is anti-democracy.

If you want all this to change, then vote against the BN candidate!

Dear Kajang voters, as Eleanor Roosevelt stated, “In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.” — aliran.com

* P Ramakrishan, the long-serving former president of Aliran, has been granted a respite and now happily serves as an Aliran executive committee member.

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 22 March 2014, 8:33 pm and is filed under
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Malaysian jet saga highlights doubts over air traffic radar

The Malaysian Insider/Reu
ters

March 22, 2014

The ease with which a big jetliner melted into the ether after vanishing from Malaysian radar illustrates an uncomfortable paradox about modern aviation: state-of-the-art airplanes rely on aging ground infrastructure to tell them where to go.

While satellites shape almost every aspect of modern life, the use of radar and radio in the cockpit has, for many pilots, changed little since before the jet engine was first flown.

Even though Malaysia suspects someone may have hidden its tracks, the inability of 26 nations to find a 250-tonne Boeing 777 has shocked an increasingly connected world and exposed flaws in the use of radar, which fades over oceans and deserts.

“It’s not very accurate. The world’s moved a bit further along,” said Don Thoma, president of Aireon, a venture launched by US-based mobile satellite communications company Iridium and the Canadian air traffic control authority in 2012 to offer space-based tracking of planes.

“We track our cars, we track our kids’ cell phones, but we can’t track airplanes when they are over oceans or other remote areas,” he told Reuters.

Satellites provide the obvious answer, say experts.

“The way to go is satellite-based navigation and communication. In navigation, we need to get away from ground-based radar and in communications we need to get away from radios,” said radar expert and aviation consultant Hans Weber.

Inefficiencies caused by radar are costing travellers money through increased fares and penalising economies through extra delays, according to those who back an ambitious but potentially costly overhaul of the world’s major aviation routes.

“Since controllers use voice communication, they have to leave more space between planes because of the risk of losing contact,” said Weber, who heads Tecop International, a US-based consultancy.

Two mammoth proposals for new airspace systems in the United States and European Union could change all that, with significant profits at stake for aerospace firms on both sides of the Atlantic, though critics say the schemes are wasteful and late.

The US aerospace industry has been pressing for years for a US$40 billion (RM132.34 billion) overhaul of air traffic control systems, but the cost and complexity of the undertaking have slowed the effort and Congress has cut funding repeatedly.

The Next-Generation Air Transportation System, or NextGen, is due to be fully implemented in 2025, but automatic US federal spending cuts due to resume in 2016 could delay that, the industry says.

Parts of the system are already in place, such as the ADS-B surveillance system now installed in many cockpits, but others have lagged due to funding constraints.

Lockheed Martin, Harris Corp, Exelis Inc and Raytheon are among key contractors.

Europe, which has some of the world’s busiest skies with an estimated 33,000 flights a day, has ambitious plans through the Single European Sky ATM Research (Sesar). This research programme aims to triple airspace capacity, halve air traffic management costs and revamp Europe’s infrastructure by 2020.

A 2011 McKinsey study said implementing Sesar could boost EU gross domestic product by 419 billion euros (RM1.9 trillion) from 2013 to 2030, create 328,000 jobs and cut flight times by 10%.

This project, too, has been beset by delays due to friction over the control of airspace and Europe’s debt crisis. Airbus, Thales and Honeywell are involved in the scheme. Some controllers’ unions oppose the plan.

For decades air traffic controllers, working at their radar screens and using clipped radio communications with pilots, helped planes to thread their way through increasingly crowded airspace and maintain a low industry accident record.

These included crackly high-frequency links over stretches of ocean like the busy North Atlantic, where pilots try to report at regular intervals or pass messages via other jets.

On such routes planes equipped with satellite communications now increasingly use a messaging system called CPDLC to establish a data link with controllers, several pilots said. Using the same system, they can request changes in altitude too.

But it is not yet standard and the system needs airlines to pay for satellite service, something not all are willing to do.

Indeed, Malaysian Airlines had not signed up for satellite service on the jet which disappeared on March 8, complicating efforts to track the missing aircraft. Malaysian officials have not ruled out technical problems with the jet.

Simply providing the connectivity is not enough, however, and this is one reason the cockpit is moving into the digital age at a slower pace than the smart phones of their passengers.

“It has got to be super-reliable and secure. You can’t rely on any system that has a failure rate that would be perfectly acceptable for a cellphone: say, 1 in 100 calls. In aircraft, one in a billion is an acceptable safety factor,” said Weber. – Reuters, March 22, 2014.

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 22 March 2014, 8:08 am and is filed under
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Manifesto vs Moneyfesto in Kajang

– Sakmongkol AK47

The Malaysian Insider

March 22, 2014

Last night, I attended the launching of Reformasi 2 at Kajang stadium. The stadium was filled to the brim. It was a huge crowd. As usual, this morning, after waking up with arithmetitis, mainstream media will downplay the size of the huge crowd. Maybe 232 attended.

There were so many speakers. So we ended up mostly making rallying calls. The political platform has been explained widely throughout  the campaign period.

That Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail shall go on to win this by-election is just a formality. The question is how big will her majority be.

How big will depend on the voter turnout. I believe the voter turnout will not be as large as it was during the general election in May 2013. Be that as it may, Wan Azizah’s majority will be bigger than that one obtained by CC Lee.

The non-Malays will come out in big numbers to vote Wan Azizah. They are motivated by one reason only. The Umno people can challenge them to explain their conduct and ask once again what the Chinese want, that will be an irrelevant question. The question will be simply ignored. The basic desire and motivation is just to see BN get its butt kicked. They don’t like BN and its a subjective choice. Nothing much to explain.

Malays, on the other hand, complicate their own decision making and will be motivated by multiple considerations. They face a tougher decision but their difficulty is caused by mixed emotions. The Malays who did not vote Pakatan the last time because they didn’t want to vote a CC Lee, will come out to vote this time. They will vote Wan Azizah.

That will only reduce the votes which could have gone to Miss Chew Mei Fun. its the Umno Malays who will stay back. It’s not because they are disloyal to Umno, but because they have been conditioned into thinking in terms of Malayness, so they will not come out to vote for Chew Mei Fun. The will stay loyal to Umno but they will not vote for Miss Fun. How is CC Lee different from Chew Mei Fun?

Can Miss CM Fun read the customary “Al-Fatihah” when visiting a deceased relative? Wan Azizah at least can.

So Wan Azizah will enjoy a larger sweep of Malay votes this time. Miss Fun will suffer because the Umno Malays will stay back and if they come out this Sunday, some of them will vote for Wan Azizah.

Now let’s distil the issues in this Kajang election. Dr Mahathir and Daim Zainuddin are not the platform. What is Pakatan’s platform?

A platform is the public pronouncements of what the party intends to do economically and politically. It’s an articulation of their views on the various issues in the country, social and economics issues, its views on the country’s management, its attitude to the ruling government, and more importantly, it represents its commitment to bring about the desired changes that it thinks are of benefit to the country.

So, the Pakatan platform isn’t about being obsessed with Daim or Dr Mahathir. One important element of the platform is an attack against corruption and cronyism that is practised by Umno. I have attended two ceramahs with Anwar Ibrahim who mentioned the names of the two retirees. As for Dr Mahathir, who can say he has ever retired?

I would not conclude by the mention of the two names, that Anwar is obsessed with the two. But the names of the two were used for dramatic effects to accentuate the issue of corruption and cronyism. And it worked because it drove the crowds into a frenzy. Daim and Mahathir’s name are marketable.

As to the frequency by which Anwar mentioned the two names – I am told in his other ceramahs he also mentioned the two names – we can’t blame Anwar if he believes the two played a significant role for the condition that he has faced and is facing.

I am not going to rush in and proclaim Anwar is a saint but in Umno, where everyone is tainted with something and everything, and certainly moral deficiencies being one of them, the vehemence, venom and vindictiveness which Umno leaders mete out to Anwar by legal and extra legal means are almost inhuman. Anwar’s obsession with the two is excusable.

The two are considered as the principal architects with Dr M being the chief architect. As for Anwar’s obsession with Daim, I think it’s more personal.

I have had the opportunity to sit in with Daim on a number of occasions and I must openly admit that needling Anwar was rare, other than making bawdy jokes about Anwar. Maybe they have some private politics between them, I don’t know.

The platform PKR in particular offers to the people of Kajang is therefore made up of issues such as corruption and cronyism, the mismanagement of the economy, the lack of direction by which the nation is travelling, the weakness of the government in tackling community issues, the ineptness of the government in handling crime, the rising cost of living, the arrogance of those in power and of course the injustice inflicted on Anwar and his family.

The people of Kajang ought to carry the anger which they associate with the BN government to the ballot boxes tomorrow. They should vote with their heads but don’t disallow the human emotions. Let’s deal another death blow to BN and prove that Miss CM Fun is just a pawn whom Muhyidin Yassin finds attractive. – sakmongkol.blogspot.com, March 22, 2014.

* Sakmongkol AK47 is the nom de guerre of Raub MP Datuk Ariff Sabri Abdul Aziz.

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 22 March 2014, 12:51 pm and is filed under
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MH370: what are the obstacles in the search for Malaysia Airlines plane?

by Jon Henley

The Guardian

20 March 2014

Even if the two unidentified objects shown on satellite images floating in the southern Indian Ocean are debris from the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, finding them could prove to be a long and difficult process that may rely on good luck as much as on advanced technology, oceanographers and aviation experts warned on Thursday.

If the objects are recovered, locating the rest of the Boeing 777 on the ocean floor could turn out to be harder still. And if the fragmented and scattered remains can eventually all be collected and pieced together, working out exactly what happened to flight MH370 may be the toughest job of all.

“You know, we may never actually see anything,” said David Learmount, operations and safety editor at aviation news specialists Flightglobal. “It may simply not be feasible. That was actually my first thought when I heard of the flight’s disappearance: we may never find it. We may never know what happened.”

Poor conditions

The obstacles facing the Australian-led search operation, currently involving four aircraft and up to seven ships combing a 23,000 sq km area of ocean some 2,500 km south-west of Perth, are immense – starting with the fact that the satellite images on which the two objects were spotted date from four days ago, and weather and sea conditions in the area are hardly favourable.

“Those satellite images had to be gone over by hand,” said Simon Boxall of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. “That takes a lot of experts a lot of time. But the issue is that there are very strong currents where the flotsam was located. The Antarctic circumpolar current runs at around one mile an hour, which may not sound a lot but in ocean terms is very fast. In four days, those objects could have travelled 100 miles.”

That is in calm weather conditions, which these are not. Australia’s Maritime Safety Authority suspended the search operation as darkness fell on Thursday with no sightings reported, but Australian air force pilots said rough seas and high winds added up to “extremely bad” weather conditions. In stormy weather, waves in that part of the Indian Ocean can reach six metres.

“We’re talking about the Roaring Forties,” Learmount said. “There are continual strong westerly winds, a big swell, often high waves as well. Visibility is poor. But radar is of little help because it struggles in rough seas. Infrared is no good because the objects will be the same temperature as the water. We really have to eyeball these objects – but eyeballs struggle in poor visibiity. It may be days before we find whatever the satellite saw.”

Large pieces of floating debris from a crashed plane – if that is what it is – could also break up in heavy seas, other experts note. Fragments could quickly spread over an area covering tens of square kilometres, with semi-submerged material travelling at a different rate than objects floating on the surface. Professor Alexander Babanin, director of the Centre for Ocean Engineering, Science and Technology at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, said that if an object is suspended “it could be carried quite some distance, perhaps even more so than by waves, because ocean currents can be stronger than wave-induced currents”.

Worse for the searchers than the flotsam fragmenting, Boxall said, would be if it simply sank. “Are these objects still afloat?” he asked. “What keeps something afloat, a wing or part of the fuselage, say, is air trapped inside it. Particularly in bad weather and sea conditions, the chances of that air escaping are really quite high.”

MH370 search: satellite images of the two objects spotted

Satellite images of the two objects spotted. Photograph: UPI/Landov/Barcroft Media

Undersea issues

Assuming the flotsam is eventually spotted and identified as belonging to flight MH370, it will be collected by a surface ship guided from the air. Then begins the task of locating the aircraft’s remains on the ocean floor. “Whatever is found on the surface will be a very long way from wherever the plane fell,” Learmount pointed out, “which will be some distance from whatever’s on the ocean floor. And any deepwater rescue would need good weather, which means – if you’re lucky – summer. Right now we’re heading towards winter.”

According to David Gallo, director of special projects at the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the remote area of the southern Indian Ocean where the search operation is focused lies above a part of the south-east India ridge, which runs from east to west and slopes down from a peak that is roughly 2,500m (8,200 ft) beneath the surface to a depth of around 4,000m. Gallo said that, by deep-sea survey standards, the terrain is relatively straightforward and research submarines would be able to operate without too much difficulty.

“Once a piece of the debris is found – if it did impact on the water – then you’ve got to backtrack that debris to try to find the ‘X marks the spot’ where the plane actually hit the water, because that would be the center of the haystack,” Gallo told CNN. “And in that haystack, you’re trying to find bits of that needle – in fact, in the case of the flight data recorders, you’re looking for a tiny little bit of that needle.”

Once that “X” has been worked out – itself a process fraught with potential errors and miscalculations – accident investigators will send down autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) fitted with sonar to scan the sea floor or with high-resolution cameras to compile a detailed picture of the area. AUVs, also known as submersibles, which could take up to a month to be transported to the area, could be critical in locating the plane’s tail section and the vital black box containing the digital flight data – particularly so because, while the box’s data can still be recovered years after a crash, its electronic locator or pinger stops sending out signals after about a month.

The flight data recorder registers information for the first 25 hours of flight and could yield priceless information. The plane’s cockpit voice recorder, though, may prove less useful: it records for two hours and then resets itself and records over the top of the previous two hours’ recording. In the case of flight MH370, the plane is thought to have flown for several hours after the critical events took place and would have been recorded in the cockpit.

Lessons from past crashes

Two recent air crashes over water illustrate the daunting task facing the investigators. TWA flight 800 exploded in mid-air soon after taking off from New York’s John F Kennedy airport on 17 July 1996 on a scheduled flight to Rome via Paris, killing all 230 people on board. Reconstructing exactly what happened was vital to disprove conspiracy theories, one of which was that terrorists may have fired a rocket at the plane.

Wreckage scattered in thousands of fragments over some 75 sq miles of the Atlantic Ocean floor took US navy and other divers more than 1,600 hours to find and collect. Strewn along the flight path they first found a wing section, then the nose, the rest of the wings and the aircraft’s tail and engines. After painstakingly reconstructing all the wreckage that they had found, and finding no evidence that the plane had been hit by anything from the outside, the accident investigators concluded – in a report issed three years after the crash – that the Boeing 747 broke into pieces off Long Island following an explosion caused by an electrical short circuit that detonated the fuel tank.

Air France flight 447, which disappeared en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on 1 June 2009, was an even more complex investigation. Although the Brazilian navy found and removed the first major wreckage and two bodies from the sea within five days, it took four searches and nearly two years to find the rest of the wreckage of the plane, an Airbus A330, located up to four days’ sailing from the nearest port and more than 3,000m beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

The voice and flight data recorders were not recovered until May 2011 in an operation that was co-led by Gallo, and the final accident report, which concluded that the plane crashed following a series of errors by its pilots in reponse to a variety of technical problems, was only published in July 2012.

Learmount said that while the undersea terrain appears easier in the southern Indian Ocean than where Air France 470 went down, the weather and sea conditions will almost invariably be considerably worse. “They found AF470 by basically trawling the ocean floor,” he said. “That requires reasonable conditions. Once again, this is the Roaring Forties. You never get really good conditions in the Roaring Forties.”

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 22 March 2014, 8:03 pm and is filed under
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Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: What We Know Now

by Colleen Curry

abc news

March 21, 2014

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur on the morning of March 8, but lost contact with air traffic control an hour later and disappeared off the radar.

No trace of the plane and the 239 people on board have been found and few details about what could have happened to the plane have been determined.

Here’s what we know now as of now about the investigation into missing flight MH370.

Search Focuses on Indian Ocean off Australia, But Turns Up Nothing

*Five Australian and U.S. aircraft searched a region of some 15,000 square nautical miles today for signs of the plane’s debris after satellite images showed a couple of objects,the largest about 78 feet long, floating in the ocean. Finding them, however, will not be easy and the search today came up empty.

    *Norway has a freighter in the area searching the waters.

    *Australia’s navy also has dispatched a ship to the area.

    *Japan has sent two search planes

    *China is sending several ships and three military planes

    *A British navy ship is heading into the region

    *Malaysia has asked the U.S. for “pinger locator hyrophones” to help locate the black boxes that are presumed to be at the bottom of the ocean by now. The sonar buoys are used to detect the “ping” of the black box.

    *The search is taking place in a span of the Indian Ocean between Australia and the Antarctic known as the “roaring forties” for its sharp westerly winds and rough waters, conditions that may have pushed debris far afield or caused it to sink quickly after a crash. “It is an extremely remote part of the southern Indian Ocean… about the most inaccessible spot that you could imagine on the face of the earth,” Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said today.

 The Investigation

 *Satellite pings have shown that the plane traveled some 7.5 hours after its last known contact with radar, and that it likely flew in a southern arc toward the Indian Ocean west of Australia.

    *Malaysian and U.S. investigators searched the at-home flight simulator of Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah but found no clues pointing toward a nefarious motive. U.S. officials are trying to recover files deleted from the flight simulator. Police are still looking into whether Shah and copilot Fariq Abdul Hamid could have had anything to do with the plane’s disappearance.

    *A British satellite company said Thursday that they had indications the plane was in the south Indian Ocean nearly two weeks ago, but the search for the plane did not move to that part of the world until nearly a week after the plane vanished. The revelation cast more doubt upon the investigative abilities of the Malaysian authorities.

Timeline of Events:

*12:41 a.m.: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 takes off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia heading for Beijing, China. The plane shows up on radar two minutes after taking off.

    *1:07 a.m.: The last automated data transmission is sent from the plane. U.S officials told ABC News they believe that sometime after this transmission the data reporting system was shut down. Sometime after this transmission Kuala Lumpur’s air traffic control tells the plane’s pilot they are handing off to air traffic control based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The pilot responds, “All right. Good night.”

    *1:21 a.m.: The plane’s transponder, which transmits location and altitude, shuts down.

    *1:30 a.m.: The last moment that the plane was seen by Malaysian radar.

    *1:38 a.m.: Air traffic control in Ho Chi Minh City informs Kuala Lumpur air traffic control about the signal loss.

    *2:15 a.m.: Malaysian military defense radar picks up traces of a plane believed to be MH370 hundreds of miles west of its last contact point.

    *After 6 a.m., the Malaysian government announced it had lost flight MH370.

The Passengers and Their Families

 *Many of the passengers’ families have been huddled in a Beijing hotel where they have publicly complained about the lack of progress in finding the plane and accused the Malaysian government of withholding information and botching the investigation.

*Lawyers have arrived at the hotel seeking to represent families in lawsuits against various stakeholders in the plane’s disappearance, including U.S. company Boeing.

*239 people were on board the flight, including 227 passengers (including one infant and one toddler) and 12 crew members.

*Three Americans, including two children, are among the missing. Philip Wood, 50, an IBM executive, had just come from Texas where he was visiting family on his way to Beijing.

*A total of 14 nationalities, though 152 passengers were Chinese.

*Twenty passengers on the plane worked for the Austin, Texas, company Freescale Semiconductor. Another passenger, Chng Mei Ling, worked as an engineer for the Pennsylvania company Flexsys America LP.

*Pilot Zahari Ahmad Shah, 53, was a veteran pilot who joined Malaysia Airlines in 1981 and had over 18,000 flying hours.

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 22 March 2014, 8:36 am and is filed under
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Retired judges should stay out of politics, say lawyers, ex-judge

by V. Anbalagan

The Malaysian Insider

22nd March 2014

Retired judges must refrain from making remarks of a political nature or get involved in politics as such conduct touched on their integrity, said lawyers and a former judge.

They said unlike retired civil servants, the public still expected retired judges to have the traits of serving judges.

Their response came following the revelation that retired Court of Appeal judge Datuk Mohd Noor Abdullah had campaigned for Barisan Nasional in the Kajang by-election.

On Wednesday, Noor told a group of Umno members at a ceramah in Taman Koperasi, Kajang that Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak did not have absolute power to influence the judiciary to set aside the sodomy acquittal of opposition leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim.

However, he told The Malaysian Insider that he was at the Barisan Nasional-organised ceramah in his capacity as consultant and constitutional expert to explain a legal position.

“I spoke about the law and not politics like telling voters who they should or should not cast their ballots for,” he said.

On March 7, the Court of Appeal sentenced Anwar to five years jail, reversing the acquittal by the High Court in 2012, in a charge of sodomising his former aide.

The conviction prevented Anwar from contesting in the by-election. His wife and PKR president, Datuk Seri Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, will now stand as the party’s candidate, against Datuk Paduka Chew Mei Fun of BN.

One of the issues used by the opposition in their campaign in Kajang is that Najib was responsible for orchestrating Anwar’s conviction and five-year jail sentence.

Commenting on Noor’s appearance at the BN ceramah, retired Court of Appeal judge Datuk Shaikh Daud Ismail said his first impression was that Noor had joined Umno.

“Retired judges should not get involved in politics as it will show which side they were on while in office,” he said.

Shaikh Daud said politics was definitely out of bounds for retired judges, just as they should not go to court and argue cases before their peers or juniors due to public perception.

“Now litigants who had lost their cases before this judge may also contemplate asking for a review,” he said.

Lawyers for Liberty executive director, Eric Paulsen, described Noor’s behaviour as shocking as it appeared that the judiciary was not only working against the opposition on trumped-up charges in court, but also on BN’s campaign trail out of court.

“Such misbehaviour further sullies the abysmal reputation of the judiciary and lends further credence to the accusation that the judiciary is not free from political influence,” he said.

Paulsen also said Noor’s appearance at the ceramah was in support of BN as Anwar’s conviction was a deciding issue for voters.

“In the past it was BN politicians who defended the judiciary, but this time around the testimony of retired judge is used to convince the public that the government had no hand in Anwar’s conviction,” he said.

Lawyer N. Surendran said it was unbecoming and unprecedented for a retired judge to conduct himself in a such a “disgraceful” manner.

“He is extremely pro-Umno and pro-Malay rights and this in turn raises questions over his impartiality and professionalism when he was on the bench,” he said.

Surendran, who is Padang Serai MP and PKR vice-president, said Noor’s conduct  had also brought further disrepute to the judiciary.

“A retired judge at all times must conduct himself in line with the office he once held,” he added. – March 22, 2014.

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 22 March 2014, 12:57 pm and is filed under
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What happened to MH370? A pilot and a flight attendant give their views

Carmen Fishwick

Guardian

21st March 2014

Speculation about what really happened on missing flight 370 has been rampant. A commercial long-haul pilot and an experienced cabin crew member discuss the possibilities

We may never know what happened to missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and the 239 people on board.

The Guardian spoke to a long-haul commercial pilot and a former Thomas Cook flight attendant – people who understand aeroplane emergency procedures and rules about access to the cockpit and communication systems – about key details in the competing theories doing the rounds about the plane’s fate.

Commercial long-haul pilot for a major airline (anonymous)

In what circumstances would you communicate with the ground to say there was an emergency?

In an emergency all pilots are trained in a golden rule: ANC, which is to aviate, navigate, communicate, in that order.
 We first of all make sure the aircraft is flying safely; if it isn’t then this is our priority before anything else. Once the aircraft is flying safely within the flight envelope [appropriate limits], and away from any potential threats such as terrain, severe weather, traffic, we will then navigate the aircraft. We may then consider navigating towards an airport or safe area if the emergency is very time pressing.

Once the aviate and navigate tasks are taken care of, we would then communicate our situation or emergency in the form of a pan-pan or mayday to air traffic control. However, if an emergency is severe, any of the two pilots can make a very quick mayday call at any time such as: “Mayday mayday mayday, MH370, smoke on board, stand by.” It would only take two or three seconds to transmit.

How could someone access the cockpit?

There is a door code you can enter which only the crew know, or you can press a doorbell, which prompts the crew inside the flight deck to check the camera and monitor screen to check who is trying to access the flight deck. We will generally not open the door if a passenger is within close proximity to the door; also if we leave the flight deck for a toilet break, we won’t attempt to re-enter the flight deck if there are passengers within close proximity. The door and the locking mechanism are incredibly strong, bulletproof, and once locked nobody will be able to break the door down.

Can a pilot override this access?

Yes. I won’t say how for good reason.

Could a pilot access the transponder and Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) system without being questioned by cabin crew?

The flight computers will be in what we call the avionics bay; pilots would not enter the avionics bay unless they have good reason to do so, and it’s also not possible in some types of aircraft. If a pilot wanted to enter the avionics bay for no apparent reason, the other pilot would question why they were doing this, as well as cabin crew.

But to stop the ACARS system from transmitting, you simply have to turn it off on the flight computer within the flight deck. Boeing call this the FMS and Airbus call this the FMGC. Another way of stopping the ACARS system from working is to simply pull a circuit breaker within the flight deck, which would stop electronic power being supplied to the system.

To turn the transponder off, there is a simple switch within the flight deck. It would take two seconds to turn off. To turn the ACARS off, you would need to know how to navigate through an FMS system, or know where the circuit breaker was. Alternatively if someone had broken into the flight deck, and they were aware of the various communication systems, then they could force the pilots to turn them off.

One question I keep being asked by friends and family is: “Can the pilots turn off the black box?” The answer is no.

Is it normal for a pilot to have a flight simulator at home?

It’s not that uncommon; pilots generally love their job. I’ve got a flight simulator programme on my computer but rarely use it. Some pilots love their job so much that in their spare time they like to fly simulators, fly aerobatics and train other pilots. The job is more of a lifestyle than a 9-5 job, so I don’t see it as concerning that the captain had set up a very basic flight simulator at home.

How dangerous is it for a commercial aircraft to fly at 45,000ft, and does the theory that MH370 was flown to that height in order to deprive the cabin of oxygen hold up?

No, it doesn’t. The cabin and flight deck atmosphere at high cruise altitude generally has the atmospheric pressure of 8,000ft above sea level.

Rapid decompression is a theory, and if the plane experienced a decompression the crew would have to don their masks quickly to avoid passing out. But on the emergency procedure, step one in case of decompression is to don masks. We have an oxygen supply, separate systems for the passengers and crew.

The altitude at which an aircraft can fly depends on its weight, essentially. When an aircraft takes off, fully fuelled, with a full load of passengers, it will initially climb to an optimum cruising altitude. Over time as fuel is burnt off, the optimum cruising altitude increases, so pilots perform a step climb throughout the flight as the plane becomes lighter and lighter.

There are also limitations on the maximum altitude a plane can fly for a given weight, and if exceeded there is a risk of high speed stall. If you Google “coffin corner” it may make more sense. In terms of the conditions within the cabin and flight deck, there would be no issue with 45,000ft.

Could a pilot force decompression to occur and prepare for it?

No – impossible.

What do you think of the existing theories as to what might have happened?

It would be wrong of me to speculate about what has happened, but I think it’s important to try to separate what we know and what we don’t know.

We know the aircraft has changed course, intentionally. We know the ACARS and transponder have been turned off intentionally, or have simultaneously failed, which is unlikely. We know there hasn’t been a mayday call. We know the aircraft has flown for several more hours, which would indicate it hasn’t been the victim of a bomb or other attack.

What we don’t know is whether someone breached the flight deck, the aircraft suffered decompression, the aircraft experienced an electrical fire which has incapacitated the crew, knocked out the ACARS and transponder but has not been severe enough to disable the aircraft completely.

I would say someone breaching the flight deck is possible, decompression is possible and fire is a possibility.

The crew may have been dealing with an electrical fire and began turning off the electrical systems which supply power to the transponder and ACARS system, but as previously stated it would take them two seconds to say: “Mayday, mayday, mayday, MH370, electrical fire, stand by.”

Once they find pieces of the fuselage they can quickly establish basic facts such as: did the aircraft break up in the air, or on impact with the ocean or ground? If it broke up in the air was it because of an explosion or major malfunction of the airframe? And if there are any signs of fire on the wreckage. The ultimate objective will be to locate the black box and cockpit voice recorder, but as in the case of Air France 447, it may take a long time.

Lee Cobaj, long-haul cabin crew member of 18 years

If you saw a pilot accessing the cargo or area where communication systems were positioned would you question what they were doing?

I’ve never seen flight crew have to enter those areas in flight so would probably ask what they were up to but would likely believe whatever they told us. We don’t have that kind of technical knowledge.

How much communication do you have with the pilots throughout a flight as lengthy as the one from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing?

Lots. The purser – the person in charge of cabin crew – will be liaising with the flight crew throughout boarding. The cockpit then becomes sterile for take-off so there would be no communication for the first 20 minutes of the flight, and it’s 40 minutes before we’re allowed to enter the cockpit. Along with 20-minute checks, we’ll be chatting regularly with the pilots. Crew quite often pop up front when they’re on breaks too for a face-to-face chat.

Would the cabin crew be aware that the flight had changed direction or taken an unplanned turn?

Any severe turns or dips would be noted … and would probably result in a call to the flight deck from the senior cabin crew member.

How long could the autopilot fly an aircraft, for example if the pilots were incapacitated, without cabin crew knowing?

The aircraft could fly to its destination and even land on autopilot but the cabin crew are trained to communicate with the flight crew at least every 20 minutes to ensure that neither of them are ill or incapacitated. Procedures are in place to gain access to the flight deck if necessary, for example in the event of no response.

If someone locked themselves in the cockpit what would the cabin crew do?

We have a procedure to gain access to the cockpit in an emergency. Entry is rather a sensitive situation, and even as ex-crew I feel a bit weird giving it away.

Ultimately, we would do everything we could not to let a hijacker in, even if that meant they would kill us. Sounds dramatic but I don’t doubt for a moment that the majority of crew would lay down their lives to stop it happening. The flight crew have cameras outside the door so they can see what’s going on, it only covers the forward galley … but they would be able to see any strange goings-on in that area.

But if there was someone in there that was familiar with the systems they would be able to override our entry and there’s nothing else we can do.

Do you know of a technical event where the cabin occupants would be unconscious but the cockpit may function normally?

Not on a commercial aircraft but I’m pretty sure that has happened on a private jet flight.

The Helios flight, where the pilots passed out in the cockpit, was part of our annual training. Before that happened we had post-9/11 steel doors which could only be unlocked from the inside either by switch or manually. After Helios, keypads with normal entry codes and emergency entry codes which give us five seconds to enter were brought in.

What are cabin crew trained to do in a hijack situation?

Cabin crew are taught in the main to comply with hijackers; however their first action is to maintain the safety and welfare of the passengers – and I don’t know a single cabin crew member that wouldn’t fight to death to prevent a terrorist gaining access to the flight deck.

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 22 March 2014, 1:46 pm and is filed under
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Flight MH370: Airlines on RED ALERT over lithium battery FIRE RISK in passenger cabin

By Ted Jeory

Sunday Express

March 22, 2014

AIRLINES were placed on red alert over potentially catastrophic fire risks from lithium mobile phone batteries just 11 days before Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 took off carrying a cargo of them, the Sunday Express can reveal.

The warning was issued by French authorities last month after a fire on board an Air France Boeing 777 in 2010 was found to be caused by a phone’s lithium battery.

They had discovered that the battery had slipped into the moving mechanism of a business class seat, crushing it and sparking a fire.

As a result of that incident and a series of other fires over the past few years, they told the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) to investigate the risks of people taking mobile devices into aircraft cabins.

Their main concern centred on an Air France flight from Atlanta to Paris, which experienced a fire over the Atlantic near Ireland in December 2010 at 38,000ft.

Cabin crew had noticed a burning smell and switched off the in-flight entertainment system to minimise the hazard, but when they removed the seat cushion they saw naked flames.

They then doused the flames with water, which extinguished the fire and the plane later landed safely.

However, in its report published last month, the Bureau d’Enquetes et d’Analyses (BEA) said that while there had been studies into carrying lithium batteries in cargo holds, none had ever been carried out on the risks of letting passengers using them in the cabin.

Neither is there any uniform and internationally accepted solution on how to extinguish such fires, it said.

It said using water on the Air France flight could have made the problem worse, adding it “implied the emission of a potentially noxious gas that is bad for health. Its use in the cockpit could clearly be dangerous.”

The report ordered the EASA to “propose appropriate procedures in case of a fire on this type of equipment”.

It has emerged that Flight MH370, which went missing two weeks ago, was carrying a cargo of lithium batteries in its cargo hold.

Malaysian authorities today said there was nothing to suggest this was linked to the disappearance.

However, aviation experts worry that the increasing use of mobile devices such as iPhones and iPads on board planes, together with passengers’ demands to recharge their lithium batteries while flying, will heighten the risks of further fires.

In their report, the French investigators said: “During dismantling of the seat, a spare external battery from a passenger’s electronic device was found severely damaged in the structure of the seat. It showed traces of fire.

“It is possible that it slipped under the seat covering, behind the armrest or down the side of the seat.

“The crushing of the battery in the seat mechanism likely caused a short-circuit, leading to an increase in the internal temperature. The exposure of the lithium electrodes to the air caused a fire, and oxygen contributed to the combustion.

“These batteries can be subject to overheating, in particular lithium-ion. Just extinguishing the flames does not stop the phenomenon, except if the battery is then cooled.

“Extinguishing actions and cooling are necessary to stop the internal reaction. During the incident, throwing water on the fire achieved this.

“Throwing water on a lithium battery fire can, however, revive the flames and make it more difficult to extinguish because of the reduction of lithium in water, which leads to the release of hydrogen, which is highly inflammable.”

It added: “Transporting lithium batteries in the cabin to supply power to personal electronic devices is not subject to any regulations or harmonised preventive measures between airlines. “Some airlines have chosen to ban carrying them in checked-in hold baggage.

“As of the day of the incident, Air France cabin crew had been trained to use CO2) extinguishers on electrical fires, avoiding any means containing water.

“However, the airline’s operations manual did not include any specific instructions relating to lithium battery fires.”

The report said that while the US Federal Aviation Authority has published guidance on how to extinguish lithium battery fires–it advises using halon or water to put the fire out and always to use water to cool the battery–no such recommendations have been sent out from the EASA.

It says lithium batteries are known to be dangerous and they have caused several emergency landings.

A UPS plane crashed in Dubai in September 2010 after a cargo of lithium batteries was set alight.

And last May, another Air France Boeing 777 from Paris to Rio suffered a fire from a passenger’s mobile device battery.

The French report said: “Many studies are currently under way relating to the transport of lithium batteries as cargo.

“The hazards of the latter have been identified. Nevertheless, none of these studies relates to batteries of mobile electronic devices transported in the cabin.”

It concluded: “Many studies are currently under way on the danger relating to transporting the various types of lithium batteries in cargo holds.

“Nevertheless, the danger represented by transporting them in the cabin has not been taken into account.

“Faced with a lithium battery fire, actions to extinguish the flames then to cool the components are required to stop any internal reaction.

“There is no consensus on the procedure to apply, specifically on the use of water during extinction of the flames.

“Consequently, the BEA recommends that EASA evaluate the risks associated with fires to batteries contained in mobile electronic devices transported in cabins by passengers and crew, and propose appropriate procedures in case of a fire on this type of equipment.”

Malaysia Airlines issued a statement today saying it was in compliance with the International Civil Aviation Organization and the International Air Transport Association requirements and classified as “non-dangerous goods.”

Aviation expert David Learmount, of Flight Global, said it was highly unlikely that a fire had been the cause of the Boeing 777’s disappearance.

He said the most likely cause was the deliberate actions of someone on board.

Chinese satellite photographs released today highlighted more debris in the Indian Ocean, but none as yet been found by search and rescue teams.

                This entry was posted on Sunday, 23 March 2014, 8:33 am and is filed under
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When Zahid derided the dream of having a woman Prime Minister in Malaysia, he trampled on this year’s International Women’s Day theme “Equality for Women is Progress for All”

Barely two weeks after Malaysia joined the world to celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8, the Najib administration through the Home Minister, Datuk Seri Ahmad  Zahid Hamidi  trampled on this year’s International Women’s Day theme “Equality for Women is Progress for All”.

With such mentality by those who wield power in the Najib premiership, it is no wonder that Malaysia’s gender equality index ranks so lowly as compared even with neighbouring countries in Southeast Asia.

The 2013 Global Gender Gap Index published by the World Economic Forum (WEF) ranked Malaysia 102 out of 136 countries, with other Asean countries besting Malaysia save for Cambodia (104) and Myanmar, which was not listed.

In the 2013 Global Gender Gap Index, Philippines was placed 5th in the world above Singapore at 58, Thailand at 65, Laos at 60, Vietnam at 73 and Indonesia at 95.

The index measures gender equality across four areas of health, education, economics and politics, covering 90% of the world’s population.

Malaysia’s ranking in the index has steadily slipped from 72 in 2006 when the report was launched.

With Zahid’s contemptuous dismissal yesterday of the dream of a woman Prime Minister for Malaysia, there is not only little prospect of any improvement in Malaysia’s ranking in the 2014 Global Gender Gap Index but a possibility of further slippage.

Zahid should explain why he and the UMNO leadership is so contemptuous of the idea of having a woman Prime Minister – following my statement that Datuk Seri Dr. Wan Azizah Wan Ismail could be Malaysia’s first woman Prime Minister?

As I have pointed out, Asia has seen woman Prime Ministers or Presidents like Indira Gandhi, who was Indian Prime Minister twice spanning 15 years; Pratibha Patil who was Indian President for five years from 2007; Sirimavo Bandaranaike who was thrice Prime Minister of Sri Lanka spanning 17 years; Chandrika Kumaratunga who was Sri Lanka President for 11 years; Benazir Bhutto who was twice Prime Minister of Pakistan spanning more than four years; Bangladesh has produced two woman Prime Ministers, Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina Wajed, each having served in this office twice covering over 10 years; and Park Geun-hye the incumbent President of South Korea.

Closer home in ASEAN, we have Philippines producing two woman Presidents – Corazon Aquino, for over six years, and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo for over nine years; Megawarti Sukarnoputra, President of Indonesia for over three years; and Yingluck Shinawatra, the incumbent Prime Minister of Thailand since 2011.

Farther afield, we have incumbent woman head of governments or states like Angela Markel, German Chancellor for more than eight years; Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Prime Minister of Denmark; Erna Solberg, Prime Minister of Norway; Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, President of Argentina; Dilma Rousseff, President of Brazil and Joyce Banda, President of Malawi.

Women have served as head of governments or states in Asia-Pacific, Europe, Africa and the Americas, including Margaret Thatcher (United Kingdom), Golda Meir (Israel), Gro Harlem Brundtland (Norway), Mary Robinson (Iceland), Tansu Ciller (Turkey), Kim Campbell (Canada), Helen Clerk (New Zealand) and Julia Gillard (Australia).

There are at least 13 states in the 57-nation Organisation of Islamic Co-operation (OIC) which have had women as either Prime Minister or President, namely: Pakistan, Indonesia, Turkey, Bangladesh, Kyrgyzstan, Mozambique, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Senegal, Mozambique, Mali and Gabon.

My question to Zahid is: As women have been Prime Minister or President in Asia-Pacific, Africa, Europe, Americas and in 13 of the OIC countries, why not in Malaysia? Why should this dream of Malaysians be a nightmare for Zahid?

(Media Statement in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday, 23rd March 2014)

                This entry was posted on Sunday, 23 March 2014, 3:04 pm and is filed under
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A Routine Flight, Till Both Routine and Flight Vanish

By PHILIP P. PAN and KIRK SEMPLE

New York Times

MARCH 22, 2014

The night sky was clear above the clouds, and the last glimmer of a setting half-moon had faded when Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, cruising at 35,000 feet over the Gulf of Thailand, approached the border between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace on its usual route to Beijing. What happened next should have been routine for a twice-daily milk run between two of Asia’s most important cities. Air traffic controllers outside Kuala Lumpur usually hand the jet off to their counterparts in Ho Chi Minh City as the flight turns northeast toward the Chinese capital.

But in those early hours of March 8, pilots flying nearby heard an unusual crescendo of chatter on the radio frequencies used by radar control in Vietnam and Malaysia. Air traffic personnel in both countries were trying and failing to reach the plane.

“Any stations in contact with Malaysian 370, please relay.”

Vietnamese and Malaysian controllers asked one aircraft after another to radio the jet. Pilots listened as one plane after another tried and heard only static.

“Malaysian 370, this is Malaysian 88.”

“Malaysian 370, this is Malaysian 52.”

People familiar with the calls, describing them for the first time, said they were calm, even laconic. The pilots trying to reach the airliner had no reason to believe it had suffered anything more than an ordinary radio malfunction.

But those initial attempts to find a plane in the skies would soon evolve into an urgent multinational search operation spanning land and sea in two hemispheres. They signaled the start of what has become perhaps the most perplexing case in modern aviation — one that investigators say may take years to solve, or could remain a mystery forever.

More than two weeks after Flight 370 disappeared, unbridled speculation surrounds the unfolding global drama. So much is uncertain about what happened on the plane, and so much of what has been disclosed by Malaysian authorities has been contradicted, that hardly any theory of its fate can be easily dismissed. On Saturday, the authorities said a Chinese satellite had made a new sighting of a possible object floating in the southern Indian Ocean in the area that is now the focus of the search, and China was sending ships to investigate.

Based on dozens of interviews with people whose lives were touched by the plane as well as with outside experts and investigators from the two dozen countries searching for answers, this report presents a portrait of Flight 370 and the search to find it using what is known to date. But by necessity, it is an incomplete picture.

A Routine Night

Malaysia Airlines flies from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing twice daily, nonstop. The red-eye, departing at 12:35 a.m. and landing at 6:30 a.m., can carry a hodgepodge of travelers: vacationing  Malaysian families, European businessmen pursuing deals, Chinese tourists returning home after visiting relatives or shopping.

Passengers are advised to arrive at least two hours in advance. On March 7, a delegation of 34 Chinese artists, relatives and organizers who had spent the past several days participating in an art exhibit in Kuala Lumpur played it safe with the city’s unpredictable Friday night traffic and arrived about 8 p.m.

Perhaps the most prominent of the artists was the flight’s oldest passenger, Liu Rusheng, 77, a calligrapher who had published an essay about how much he treasured life because he had “cheated death” six times, beginning when, as a baby, he was abandoned temporarily by his parents as they fled Japanese soldiers invading China.

Mr. Liu had “the energy of a young man,” recalled Daniel Liau, the delegation’s host, who accompanied the travelers to the airport and helped them check their luggage. They stood chatting under the modernist scalloped ceilings of the main terminal for about 90 minutes. Later, after the group had passed through security and taken the monorail to the satellite terminal, Mr. Liau called them one last time.

“How are the artists?” he recalled asking one of the organizers, Hou Bo, who replied they had already reached the gate. “Everybody is O.K.,” Mr. Hou assured him.

Boarding began about midnight. The airline would have allowed the elderly — including Mr. Liu and his wife, Bao Yuanhua, 73 — and the families traveling with the two infants booked on the flight to get settled first. Next came the passengers holding passes for the 35 seats in business class.

Philip Wood, 50, an IBM executive from Texas and a regular on the flight because he was relocating from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur, was in coach, but hoped to be upgraded. He had long legs and a platinum frequent-flier card, said his partner, Sarah Bajc, 48, a teacher.

Ms. Bajc said she exchanged a dozen text messages with him before the flight about the movers, scheduled to arrive at their home in Beijing the next morning. “We discussed the state of packing, what still needed to be done,” she said. His last message came just before he left for the airport.

Others on the flight were just passing through Kuala Lumpur, including Shi Xianwen, 26, a new father returning to China from a business trip to Australia. At the airport in Perth, he spent 40 minutes picking out a bracelet watch for his wife, whose birthday was approaching, an employee at the duty-free shop said.

And two passengers boarded using stolen passports: Pouria Nourmohammadi Mehrdad, 19, and Seyed Mohammed Reza Delavar, 29, Iranian men described by Interpol as migrants being smuggled into Europe.

Mohammad Mallaeibasir, 18, an information technology student in Kuala Lumpur, said the pair stayed in his apartment the night before they left. Mr. Mehrdad, a friend from high school in Tehran, told him he was starting a new life in Hamburg, Germany, where his mother was waiting. “He was quite nervous,” Mr. Mallaeibasir recalled. “I could see it on his face.”

The next night, he drove them to the airport and offered to help them check in, but they insisted on entering separately, Mr. Delavar first. The two high school buddies waited in the car for five to 10 minutes, smoking cigarettes, before Mr. Mehrdad got out to leave.

Mr. Mallaeibasir gave him a hug, told him to have a safe flight and watched as his friend carried a large backpack and a laptop computer bag into the terminal. That was the last he saw of him.

The Airplane

The plane the passengers boarded was a Boeing 777, one of the world’s most popular and advanced passenger jets, and Boeing’s first fly-by-wire commercial aircraft, in which electronic controls replaced manual ones. Pilots send commands that are conveyed to the wings and other components, and a computer helps keep the plane steady.

The “Triple Seven,” as it often called, has all but replaced the 747 because it is cheaper to operate and can fly up to 16 hours without stopping to refuel. It also has one of the industry’s best safety records, with only two serious accidents in the 19 years it has been in service.

Malaysia Airlines, the nation’s state-run carrier, began using the Boeing 777 in 1997 and eventually had 15 in its fleet. One of them, the 404th model to roll off Boeing’s assembly line in Everett, Wash., was delivered to the airline in May 2002 and registered with tail number 9M-MRO. This was the plane used for Flight 370 that has disappeared.

Malaysia Airlines has said the jet has been involved in only one previous safety incident. On Aug. 9, 2012, the tip of one of its wings broke off after it clipped the tail of a China Eastern Airlines Airbus A340 while taxiing at Shanghai Pudong International Airport. No one was hurt. Boeing said it sent a team of engineers and mechanics to remove and replace the damaged wing sections, and returned the plane to service after testing.

Boeing recommends a light maintenance inspection of the 777 after about 500 hours of flight time. Known as an “A check,” the inspection usually is conducted in a hangar by a team of about 15 engineers working about 10 hours, often overnight. Malaysia Airlines said the jet’s last A check took place on Feb. 23, and uncovered no problems.

By the time it pulled up to the gate at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on March 8, the plane had completed more than 7,500 flights and clocked over 53,400 hours in the air, according to Flightglobal, a news and data service for the aviation sector. That put it well within the average economic life of 23 years for a wide-body passenger jet.

In other words, there was little to distinguish this plane from the roughly 1,170 other Boeing 777s in use. That is why it is so crucial to determine if the plane’s disappearance was due to any malfunction or defect related to its design, build or engineering. “The industry does not like uncertainty,” said Mark Rosenker, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. “We will find out what happened.”

Boarding

As they stepped onto the plane, the 227 passengers of Flight 370 were greeted by the flight attendants, four women in sarong kebayas and six men in gray three-piece suits. Some distributed hand towels, juice and newspapers in business class; others helped those in economy find their seats.

Outside, ground crews loaded the passenger luggage into the jet’s cargo hold, which can carry up to six pallets and 14 shipping containers. The airline said no hazardous or valuable goods were on the flight. But among the cargo were a “significant” number of lithium batteries — which can be flammable — more than is typically sent in a shipment, one American official said.

After the doors closed, the chief steward, Andrew Nari, would have welcomed the passengers via the loudspeaker and reminded them to turn off their cellphones. Before shutting off his own, he sent a message to his mother. “It was just a normal SMS telling me that his plane would fly off soon,” she later told The Star, a local newspaper.

In the cockpit were the pilots: the captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, who joined the airline in 1981 and had 18,365 hours of flying experience, and his first officer, Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, who was transitioning to the Boeing 777 from the airline’s narrow-body fleet.

After nudging away from the gate, the plane taxied to runway 32R. The cabin lights would have dimmed before one of the pilots asked the crew to be seated for takeoff. With two Rolls-Royce Trent engines, each capable of generating 92,000 pounds of thrust, the jet raced down the 2.5-mile-long runway and lifted off at 41 minutes after midnight. As the plane banked and climbed, some passengers might have spotted the glow of Kuala Lumpur and perhaps the Petronas Towers in the distance.

At 1:07 a.m., as the jet approached the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia, ground crews received what the authorities have described as a routine text message from the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or Acars, which sends regular updates on the condition of the plane by radio or satellite.

By then, the first beverage service of the flight was most likely underway: soft drinks, juice and peanuts in economy; and in business, various drinks, including Champagne, along with a snack such as charcoal-grilled chicken and lamb satay in peanut sauce. The in-flight entertainment system offered a wide selection of movies.

Air traffic control in Subang, outside Kuala Lumpur, followed the plane by tracking its transponder, a device that “squawks” or emits an identifying signal in response to a signal from radar. The night began with Flight 370 squawking code 2157 and reporting altitude, speed and bearing.

As the plane approached Vietnamese airspace, Subang informed the pilots that they were being transferred to radar control in Ho Chi Minh City. At 1:19 a.m., a voice identified by the authorities as that of the first officer, Mr. Fariq, replied, “All right, good night.”

Two minutes later, Flight 370’s transponder stopped responding. It is unclear whether someone turned a dial on an instrument panel between the pilot and co-pilot and put the transponder in standby mode, or whether a malfunction caused it to go quiet.

One moment, radar showed the plane traveling northwest at 542 miles per hour. The next, it was gone.

The military in Vietnam marked the time at 43 seconds past 1:20 a.m.

Mystery Signal

As air traffic controllers struggled to re-establish contact with Flight 370, military radar at the Butterworth air force base on Malaysia’s west coast picked up an unidentified aircraft near where the plane disappeared.

But the watch team, normally an officer and three enlisted personnel, either failed to notice the signal or decided not to designate and track it as a “zombie,” which would have pushed the information up the chain of command and possibly alerted air command.

At a briefing on the base the next night, about 80 air force personnel were told there was “no proof” the unidentified signal showed the missing plane making a sharp turn, flying back across Peninsular Malaysia and then turning again and heading northwest over the Strait of Malacca, a person familiar with the situation said.

But investigators now believe that is exactly what happened.

The failure to recognize Flight 370 in the radar data — or refusal to do so, to avoid the embarrassment of admitting an unidentified plane had breached air defense — meant the Malaysian authorities continued to search in the seas to the east instead of the west of the peninsula. Military radar last recorded the signal at 2:22 a.m. about 200 nautical miles northwest of Butterworth, according to an image of the radar track.

The authorities also failed to move quickly on data that showed the plane continuing to fly nearly seven more hours: a series of regular handshake signals from the plane to a satellite seeking to determine if the aircraft was still in range.

Chris McLaughlin, a vice president at Inmarsat, the satellite communications firm, said technicians pulled the logs of all transmissions from the plane within four hours of its disappearance. Then, after a day without sign of the plane, they began scouring the company’s databases for any trace of Flight 370.

“We decided to go have another look at our network to see if there was any data that we had missed,” Mr. McLaughlin said. It turned out there was. Inmarsat technicians identified what appeared to be a series of fleeting “pings” between Flight 370, a satellite over the Indian Ocean and a ground station in Perth, Australia.

The signals — seven of them transmitted at one-hour intervals — were an important clue, because they could have come only from an antenna receiving power from the plane itself. But while they carried a unique code identifying the aircraft as Flight 370, the signals contained no positioning or other data that could indicate where the plane was when it sent them.

By Sunday afternoon, a team of Inmarsat engineers set to work using the principles of trigonometry to determine the distance between the satellite and the plane at the time of each ping, and then to calculate two rough flight paths. The plane, they concluded, had turned again. But it may have then traveled in more or less a straight line, heading north over countries likely to have picked it up on radar, or south toward the Indian Ocean and Antarctica.

The Malaysian government said it received Inmarsat’s data on March 12 and spent three days analyzing and vetting it with investigators from the United States before redirecting the search on March 15.

By then, more than a week had passed since the last satellite ping, recorded at 8:11 a.m. on March 8. It appears to have come from over the southern Indian Ocean, halfway around the world from where the plane should have been, on a tarmac in Beijing.

Kirk Semple reported from Kuala Lumpur and aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 318. Reporting was contributed by Michael Forsythe and Chris Buckley from Sepang, Malaysia; Keith Bradsher from Hong Kong; Edward Wong from Beijing; Rahman Roslan from Kuala Lumpur; Nicola Clark from Paris; Thomas Erdbrink from Tehran; Jad Mouawad and Christopher Drew from New York; and Eric Schmitt, Michael S. Schmidt and Matthew L. Wald from Washington. Amy Qin and Mia Li contributed research from Beijing.

                This entry was posted on Monday, 24 March 2014, 12:41 am and is filed under
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After running out of fuel, plane likely glided a hundred kilometres more, says expert

The Malaysian Insider

March 21, 2014

Yet another speculation  – if indeed it turned out that debris spotted by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority are that of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 – is that the aircraft had run out of fuel and continued to glide before it finally made its descent into the ocean.

An aviation professional, speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, said newer aeroplanes would continue to glide, even after their fuel reserves had been exhausted.

“All the aeroplanes glide.

“They’ll go 10 (kilometres) along for every one down,” said Professor Jason Middleton from the University of New South Wales’ School of Aviation.

This is of course supposing that the whole crew and passengers on the flight had become unconscious due to a mechanical failure which caused low cabin pressure, resulting in the plane turning into a ‘ghost flight’ for several hours.

This happened in 1999 to a jet carrying professional golfer Payne Stewart, which flew for several hours with its passengers and crew unresponsive, before running out of fuel and crashing in South Dakota, US.

In such a scenario, if the flight 370 had run out of fuel somewhere over the Indian Ocean at a cruising altitude of around 10km, it could have glided for 100km without petrol in the tanks or a conscious pilot in the cockpit.

Middleton said its final touch down would depend largely on the weather, but warned that even with the best pilots manning it, the rough Indian Ocean would “guarantee a messy crash into the waves”, the paper reported.

Yesterday, Australia announced spotting two objects on satellite images that could potentially be linked to the missing plane.

It comes as scores of countries engaged in the longest search and rescue operation in modern passenger-airline history.

The previous record was the 10-day search for a Boeing 737-400 operated by Indonesia’s PT Adam Skyconnection Airlines, which went missing off the coast of that country’s Sulawesi island Jan. 1, 2007.

                This entry was posted on Monday, 24 March 2014, 12:17 pm and is filed under
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Australia ‘clutching’ at MH370 leads after new data

The Malay Mail Online/AFP

March 24, 2014

PERTH, March 24 — Australia said today that French satellite data indicating floating objects possibly related to missing Flight MH370 were outside the current search zone, while admitting to “clutching” at every piece of new information.

Malaysian authorities yesterday received details from France indicating floating objects in the area of the southern Indian Ocean being scoured for the missing Malaysian jet which disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board.

The information was passed to Australian authorities who are coordinating the hunt for the plane, now focused on a remote stretch of ocean 2,500 kilometres (1,500 miles) southwest of Perth.

But Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said the latest potential sighting of debris was about 850 kilometres north of where aircraft and ships have been looking since Thursday.

“Certainly the area where debris has been picked up by satellites is of particular interest, and they’re the focus of a lot of the searching,” Truss told ABC radio.

“The French sighting is I guess a piece of new material because that is in a completely different location. That is about 850 kilometres north of our current search area.

“So we need to check that out as well.”

While Malaysian authorities initially said the latest data came in the form of images, France’s foreign ministry clarified this, saying it came in the form of “satellite-generated radar echoes”.

A radar echo is an electronic signal that contains information about the location and distance of the object which bounces the signal back.

Hopes of a breakthrough have been fuelled by satellite images or data captured by Australia, China, and now France in recent days, along with the visual sighting of a wooden pallet and other debris from a spotter plane on Saturday.

But Truss cautioned that “we still don’t know for certain that the aircraft is even in this area”.

“We’re just, I guess, clutching at whatever little piece of information comes along to try and find a place where we might be able to concentrate the efforts,” he added.

Australian, US and New Zealand planes have been flying sorties searching for four days looking for the Boeing 777 and they were to be joined by Chinese and Japanese aircraft today.

Truss said yesterday’s search proved “fruitless” and warned of deteriorating weather, stirred up by Tropical Cyclone Gillian which is expected to track at least 1,000 kilometres north of the search area.

“Clearly it won’t be cyclonic when it gets down into the freezing waters that we’re dealing with with this search,” Truss said.

“But certainly it could stir up less favourable weather.” — AFP

                This entry was posted on Monday, 24 March 2014, 8:58 am and is filed under
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Clueless politicians and rivalry make search for MH370 even harder, says academic

The Malaysian Insider

March 24, 2014

With the world’s eyes following every move it made in the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, Malaysian authorities could have done better in devising a comprehensive major emergency response mechanism, said an opinion piece published today in China’s Global Times.

The opinion piece written by Oh Ei Sun, a senior fellow with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, said that at times conflicting statements issued by various Malaysian authorities, ranging from transport to the military, had only caused confusion and further grief.

Oh was also a former political secretary to Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak.

“This negative perception of Malaysian handling of the present incident may be caused by two features in Malaysia’s political environment that are alien to most Chinese,” Oh said in the piece titled “Malaysia’s political rivalries bedevil search for lost MH370 flight”.

First, said Oh, Malaysia’s public service system distinguished between civil servants who were career professionals and members of the administration, who were politicians.

Serving civil servants could not become the political heads of their departments, he said, adding that members of the administration were ministers, deputy ministers and political secretaries.

However, all served at the pleasure of the prime minister, who was, in turn, answerable to a democratically elected Parliament, Oh said.

“Such politicians obviously are often not professional or even well versed in the particular ministry they happen to head.

“And unlike China or the United States, Malaysia has not installed a ‘spokesperson’ system. The press conferences are chaired by the various politicians in person. When facing the onslaught of the international media, some politicians shine while others wane,” Oh said in his Global Times piece.

The second factor, said Oh, was that on the surface, Malaysia practised a centralised political system in which the prime minister or ruling party president devised policies and subordinate departments executed them.

In reality, to make it to the top of the Malaysian political hierarchy, Oh said, politicians needed to have a group of influential supporters.

“These political supporters, in turn, grab more supporters, and the same pattern persists all the way down to the level of the average voters.

“In order to retain their support, high-level politicians have to dish out various types of political largesse, most prominent of which is a ministership. Once appointed a minister, the politician will typically develop his ministry into essentially a personal fiefdom.

“And since rivalry is rife among most politicians, inter-departmental cooperation or even just coordination is extremely difficult, even in the face of a major crisis.”

Oh said this could explain why it took almost a week before a lead agency was appointed to coordinate the handling of the MH370 search efforts.

“Malaysian political reality dictates that some ministers will not accept being led by others, for fear of losing face.

“But paradoxically, as the resolution of the present incident may drag on and thus attract further criticism of weak leadership, understandably none of the ministers concerned is particularly keen to shoulder the lead.” – March 24, 2014.

                This entry was posted on Monday, 24 March 2014, 9:17 am and is filed under
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