Did Mahathir countermand Musa’s directive to the police to avoid violence resulting in the Memali Massacre of Nov. 19, 1985?

The clarification by the former Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, Tun Musa Hitam that the then Prime Minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, contrary to what was believed by Malaysians in the past 19 years, was in fact in Kuala Lumpur when the Memali Incident took place on Nov. 19, 1985, has reinforced the case for a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Memali Massacre.

The RCI is necessary so as to unearth the truth about the Memali Massacre to provide a 30-year  closure to the families and loved ones of the 18 people – Ibrahim Libya, 13 villagers and four policemen – who were killed as up to now, they have been haunted by the spectre of not knowing the truth and in particular, who were responsible for the death of the 18 people in the Memali Massacres of Nov. 19, 1985.

Malaysians are entitled to know the truth of one of the biggest “blots” in the nation’s history – in particular who counter-manded the directive given by Musa as the Home Minister to the Police to avoid violence and bloodshed in the arrest of Ibrahim Libya.

The only person who is more senior to Musa, who was DPM and Home Minister,  in the administration at the time was Mahathir, the Prime Minister himself.

Did Mahathir countermand Musa’s directive to the police to avoid violence and bloodshed in the arrest of Ibrahim Libya, and if not, would he support a Royal Commission of Inquiry to establish the truth as to who had countermanded Musa’s directive as to cause the death of 18 people – Ibrahim Libya, 13 villagers and four policemen?

The Memali Incident, in retrospect, is now regarded as the first of a series of deplorable events in the 22-year Mahathir administration resulting in the emasculation of the professionalism, independence and integrity of national institutions, losing their political impartiality  as they became tools of their political masters – covering not only the police, but extending eventually to the judiciary, the Attorney-General’s Chambers, the Elections Commission, the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission and the civil service as a whole.

A full inquiry into the Memali Massacre will provide an unique understanding and insight as to how Malaysian nation-building process went wrong because of political interference with the independence, impartiality and professionalism of non-partisan national institutions and what must be done for Malaysia to get back to a proper beginning in the nation-building process.

Further, an RCI will provide a proper forum to propose an appropriate closure to the 30-year “blot” in the nation’s history, including a proper recompense to the families of the 18 casualties in the Memali Massacre.

                This entry was posted on Sunday, 6 April 2014, 11:59 am and is filed under
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Hishammuddin should explain whether he and the Cabinet had abandoned the proposal of a Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370 and if so, why?

Yesterday, the Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein announced an investigation team as well as three ministerial committees on the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, which enters into the 30th day of its disappearance on March 8, viz:

1. As per ICAO standards, an independent “investigator-in-charge” to lead an investigation team comprising three groups:

*an airworthiness group, which will look into maintenance records, structure and system of the airline;

*an operational group, which will examine flight recorders operations and meteorological aspects of the investigation;

and

*a medical and human factor group, which will look into psychological and pathological aspects as well as survival factors of those on board the plane.

2. Three ministerial committees, namely a next-of-kin committee, headed by Hamzah Zainuddin, the Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister; a technical committee led by Abdul Aziz Kaprawi, the Deputy Transport Minister and a deployment of assets committee, helmed by Deputy Defence Minister Abdul Rahim Bakri.

The investigating team is led by the Malaysian Government, but would include individuals from other accredited countries, including Australia, China, the United States, the United Kingdom and France and other countries who are in a position to help.

The first question to crop up is whether Hishammuddin and the  Cabinet have abandoned the proposal of a Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370 and if so, why?

On 25th March, when winding up the special motion tabled by the Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak to mourn the fate of flight MH370’s 239 passengers and crew, Hishammuddin assured Parliament that he  would  propose to the Cabinet the call by MPs for a Parliamentary Select Committee and a Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) to investigate the MH370 tragedy.

Has Hishammuddin fulfilled his undertaking to Parliament and tabled the proposal for a Parliamentary Select Committee or a Royal Commission of Inquiry to the Cabinet,  if so when, what was the Cabinet’s decision, and why?

Hishammuddin told Parliament at the time that both the Transport Ministry and the Royal Malaysian Air Force had separately set up an audit committee into the MH370 disaster, and that all these investigations will operate simultaneously  with the SAR (search-and-rescue) mission.

Hishammuddin owes MPs and the nation an explanation whether his announcement of an investigation by three groups and three ministerial committees into the MH370 disaster precluded and pre-empted the formation of a Parliamentary Select Committee on the MH370, and the government stand on the establishment of a Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370 disaster.

In fact, the terms of reference of the Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370 should be very much wider and more comprehensive than that of the Investigation Team as the Parliamentary Select Committee should go beyond the issues of the airworthiness of MH370 Boeing 777-200 aircraft, the operational aspects of the flight and the psychological and pathological aspects of the 239 passengers and crew, i.e. the “what, how and why” the plane disappeared on March 8, but the whole series of events after its disappearance which have provoked a thousand-and-one questions, controversies, confusion and conspiracy theories and most important of all, to send out a clear and unmistakable message, both nationally and internationally, that Malaysia has nothing to hide and to  restore national and international confidence in the transparency, good governance and reputation of the nation badly afflicted by the MH370 disaster.

Among the issues the Parliamentary Select Committee should investigate include:

*Whether the MH370 disappearance could have been averted if Malaysia’s air traffic controllers and the Royal Malaysian Air Force radar operators had been more vigilant and  acted promptly when the Boeing 777-200 aircraft vanished early March 8, with the immediate launching of a search-and-rescue operation.

*Whether a week had been wasted looking for MH370 in the South China Sea before switching the area of search from the east to the west, moving from the Straits of Malacca,  the Andaman Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Northern and Southern Corridors, and eventually to southern Indian Ocean; and

*Whether three days had been wasted looking for MH370 in the wrong part of the Indian Ocean because of poor co-ordinating among countries working on locating the missing aircraft.

In the wake of the MH370 disaster, Hishammuddin has been talking about the need to strengthen Malaysia’s military assets and to review the civil aviation sector, expecting  astronomical budgets  in these two areas.

It will also  be the proper province of the Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370 to review whether the MH370 disaster warrants new and additional budgets for more military assets and a more efficient civil aviation system and to make recommendations to Parliament, the government and the nation.

The Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370 should also initiate a global inter-Parliamentary inquiry into the MH370 disaster as this is not only a national but an international disaster affecting all nations in the world.

The Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak should ensure that the whole of Thursday, the last day of the current meeting of Parliament, should be reserved for a full parliamentary debate on the MH370 disaster, and what Malaysians MPs can do to help restore national and international confidence in Malaysia.

                This entry was posted on Sunday, 6 April 2014, 9:27 am and is filed under
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Johor is now the front-line state in the 14GE as PR victory in both Putrajaya and Nusajaya are now within reach for the first time in nation’s history

I congratulate PAS Johor for its successful three-day 60th Anniversary Carnival concluding with the ceramah tonight.

For 90 per cent of its 60-year history in the state, PAS Johor faced an uphill battle in the state as Johor had all along been  the fixed deposit state and virtually unshakeable fortress of UMNO and Barisan Nasional.

But a political sea change took place in the last 10 per cent  of the 60-year history of PAS Johor, which succeeded in achieving a political breakthrough in the 2008 General Elections  winning two State Assembly seats which increased to four State Assembly seats in the 2013 general elections last May.

Before 2008, if anybody should ask whether it is possible for the Oposition to win power in the Johor State Government, the answer would be an unanimous and categorical “No”!

But after the 2013 General Elections, if anybody should ask whether it is possible for Pakatan Rakyat to win the Johor State Government in Nusajaya, the answer would be a powerful “Yes” for the majority of thinking people in the State.

This is the extent of the political sea-change which has taken place in the state in the past six years.

Before the 13th General Elections last May, I had said that it would be easier to win Putrajaya than to win Nusajaya.  In the event, Pakatan Rakyat parties of DAP, PAS and PKR won 18 out of 56 State Assembly seats – one short of denying BN two-thirds majority in the State Assembly – and five out of 26 Parliamentary seats.

Until the 13th General Elections, UMNO and BN were so arrogant in Johore that their leaders  publicly boasted that they would ensure that Johore would be come a zero-opposition state.

Such claim is now history, for in the next and future general elections, what UMNO and BN would  be struggling to achieve is not a zero-opposition state, but to save themselves from being toppled from Nusajaya and relegated to an Opposition status in the state.

Johor is now the front-line state in the 14GE as PR victory in both Putrajaya and Nusajaya are now within reach for the first time in nation’s history.

The past one year since the May general elections have seen the country reeling from one national crisis to another – whether it be economic, educational, security, anti-corruption, nation-building, human rights,  good governance and in the past month the missing  MH370 Boeing 777-200 aircraft disaster with 239 passengers and crew on board and the second kidnapping of tourists in four months  in the east coast of Sabah.

It is clear that  UMNO and Barisan Nasional could only bring about “national transformation”  in words but not in deed, and there is a very bleak future for Malaysia unless there is a change of government.

Pakatan Rakyat stands ready to replace UMNO and Barisan Nasional whether in Putrajaya or in Nusajaya.

The three parties in Pakatan  Rakyat – DAP, PAS and PKR – have our differences, for example on the hudud issue between the DAP and PAS, but we have agreed that  our common political aims  like the pursuit of unity and harmony; the restoration of justice, democracy, human rights, good governance and the rule of law; the establishment of   a moral and ethical society where there is no corruption or abuses of power deserve to be given priority attention as compared to our political differences.

The challenge facing the Pakatan Rakyat parties is whether we can unite to save Malaysia from being destroyed by those who are prepared to play the race and religious card to incite racial and religious hatred to further aggravate racial and religious polarization just to perpetuate their selfish vested political interests.

Let the leaders, members and supporters of Pakatan Rakyat, whether PAS, PKR or DAP, prove that we are the true Malaysians as compared to UMNO and Barisan Nasional by steadfastly striving for the rights and interests of all Malaysians, regardless of race, religion or territory.

(Speech at the  Karnival 60 Tahun PAS Negeri Johor ceramah at Parit Tarom, Muar on Saturday, 5th April 2014 at 10 pm)

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Malaysia flight MH370 shadows safety meeting

Kate Mayberry

AlJazeera

05 Apr 2014

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – When the aviation industry’s safety experts sat down in Kuala Lumpur for their annual meeting this week, there was one issue that was uppermost in their minds: the fate of missing flight MH370.

“I don’t think I could start my remarks in any other way than by acknowledging the human tragedy of MH370,” Tony Tyler, the Director General of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), told delegates as he opened the meeting earlier this week. “The best way for all of us involved in aviation to honour the memory of those on board is to learn from what happened to improve safety in the future.”

Four weeks after the Boeing 777-200 and its 239 passengers and crew went missing on a seemingly routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, the chances of finding out what happened remain remote.

Not a single piece of wreckage has been found and with no physical evidence, let alone the data and cockpit voice recorders, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s announcement on March 24 that the plane had “ended,” its journey in the southern Indian Ocean, thousands of miles off course, has done little to ease the anguish of the families of those on board.

For days, a multinational search force including Australia, the US and China has taken to the seas and the skies off Australia’s western coast, the search parameters refined regularly according to satellite imagery and the electronic “pings” that the aircraft continued to make even after normal on-board communications ceased to function. But the scale of the task remains immense. Daily search areas cover tens of thousands of square kilometres of some of the world’s most remote ocean.

Safety improvements

The fact that the plane was able to vanish has worried an industry that is proud of its safety record. Figures released this week showed that in 2013 for every 2.4 million flights involving Western-built aircraft there was one accident after which the plane could not be repaired. That was an improvement of nearly 15 percent over the five-year average.

“For our safety projections any loss of life is one too many,” said Nancy Graham, who has responsibility for the safety of the global airline industry as Director of the Air Navigation Bureau at the International Civil Aviation Organisation. “We are very focussed to getting to the root of any problem. We are disciplined about that.”

This week, IATA, which represents 240 global airlines, set up a special taskforce to advise on how best to ensure an aircraft can never again go missing. It’s due to present its findings by December and it’ll then be up to ICAO to introduce any recommendations. IATA’s Kevin Hiatt, who oversees safety and flight operations at the group, says that might involve third party or airline tracking and would be additional to existing data streaming tools and communications equipment.

“I want to be sure everyone understands that we’re not talking about tracking in terms of air traffic management and the handling of the aircraft in and around the air traffic system,” Hiatt, who spent twenty years as an airline pilot, told Al Jazeera. “We’re talking about the tracking of an aircraft separately to take into account an event like this.”

Despite the rapid development of mobile communications, the airline industry remains largely reliant on tried and tested equipment like ground-based radar, VHF radio and satellite communication.

MH370 was able to disappear after the cockpit transponder failed – investigators say it may have been turned off deliberately – and the ACARS system, which monitored the performance of the Boeing 777-200s two Rolls Royce engines, also stopped updating.

The last communication from the cockpit, as the pilots said goodbye to Malaysian air traffic control and moved into Vietnamese airspace, gave no indication that anything was amiss.

Shortly afterwards, Malaysia’s military radar picked up an object flying across the north of the country towards the Strait of Malacca and out into the Indian Ocean. The blip didn’t appear hostile so radar operators didn’t take action.

Long-term committment

As the plane disappeared from civil, and, possibly, military radar, it still continued to send out hourly electronic “pings” to a satellite from the British company Inmarsat. Technicians at the firm were first able to work out the aircraft had remained in the air for more than five hours, heading in one of two arcs – either north or south – and then that it had definitely taken the southern route, heading out into the Indian Ocean.

Many expressed shock that not only could the plane go missing, but that none of the passengers were able to alert anyone on the ground to what was happening. “We all think that we live in an interconnected world, but the reality is that there are gaps,” said Andrew Herdman, Director General of the Association of Asia Pacific Airlines whose members include Malaysia Airlines. “You get a couple of miles offshore or up in the air and you are out of the range of the ground stations. Our mobile phone is useless.”

IATA says any new tracking system will be made available to all airlines operating across the globe. “Maybe we work with what’s currently on board the aircraft maybe a refinement. It could be another technology. We’re keeping an open mind,” said Anthony Concil, IATA’s Director of Corporate Communications. “There are lots of systems on an aircraft. You can’t just pop a new piece of kit on. You have training requirements, procedural requirements and you want to be sure it doesn’t affect other things on the aircraft.”

Modern aeroplanes have millions of separate parts and thousands of different systems. Given the potentially catastrophic nature of any fire on board a plane, anything that requires power from the plane also needs a circuit breaker that would allow it to be isolated in case of any malfunction. The same would apply for any emergency tracker. Equipment that’s impossible to turn off may also carry a risk, according to experts.

With the batteries on the flight and data recorders due to expire in the next few days, the Australian-led search teams on Friday began looking beneath the waves, with two ships using underwater technology to scour a 240-kilometre track derived from date on the plane’s flight path.

The search is already the longest in modern aviation history, eclipsing Air France 447, which crashed into the Atlantic off the Brazilian coast in 2009. Searchers found the first debris from that plane after five days, but even with the search area narrowed down it was two years before the key flight recorders were recovered allowing investigators to piece together the chain of events that led to the crash.

The Indian Ocean averages a depth of nearly 4,000 metres and is renowned for its strong currents. With the approach of winter in the southern hemisphere weather conditions are likely to worsen as the days go on. While some have cautioned that the world may never know what happened to the Malaysian plane, Malaysia’s Najib this week assured families the search would not waiver.

“We are here today, but our thoughts are thousands of kilometres away,” he said in a statement after a visit on Thursday to Perth where search operations are co-ordinated. “I know that until we find the plane, many families cannot start to grieve. I cannot imagine what they must be going through. But I can promise them that we will not give up.”

Regulators too insist they’re committed to finding the plane. Knowing what happened to MH370 will be the key to ensuring it can’t happen again. “There’s a commitment to as long as it takes,” said ICAO”s Graham. “I have to tell you that an incident like this hurts all of our hearts.”

                This entry was posted on Sunday, 6 April 2014, 6:37 am and is filed under
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Memali families still seek answers, want closure after 30 years

by Looi Sue-Chern

The Malaysian Insider

April 05, 2014

Almost 30 years on, the survivors of the Memali incident that resulted in the deaths of 14 villagers and four policemen want to see justice for the lost lives and the truth revealed about why it took place and who was responsible.

Their hope has been rekindled by former deputy prime minister Tun Musa Hitam’s revelation last week that Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamed, who was prime minister at the time, was in Kuala Lumpur during the incident and contrary to media reports, not in China.

Now they want to know Dr Mahathir’s role in that incident.

Following this revelation, opposition MPs are now calling for a Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) into the incident.

For Saleha Husin, 61, whose husband Ibrahim Mahmud was at the centre of the police siege at the remote village in Baling, Kedah, an investigation would answer some of the questions on the minds of the families of those killed.

“It has been almost three decades. I don’t know what to say… but I would like some closure,” she told The Malaysian Insider.

“Our questions remain unanswered all these years,” she said.

Ibrahim, who was famously known as Ibrahim Libya, was an “influential” religious teacher and political leader who ran a religious school at his house in Kampung Charuk Putih.

Accused of spreading deviant teachings, he was the target of the police attack on the village on November 19, 1985. He was shot and killed along with others attending his class.

Saleha said Ibrahim was standing in front of her when he was shot.

“I ran to him when he was hit. A villager who was holding him laid his head on my lap.

“He was bleeding profusely… it was like water flowing from a tap. A short while later, I was told to surrender and get up.

“My husband was still alive then. He asked me what was going on. As I was forced to move away from him, I saw that others had been shot, too.”

Saleha was detained with more than 100 villagers who had allegedly “attacked” the police in the siege.

She said she was interrogated while in detention and asked all sorts of questions about Ibrahim’s alleged deviant teachings, with her late husband as made to sound like a criminal.

She said those who were detained like her were forced to admit that Ibrahim was spreading deviant teachings.

“I was detained for two months and seven days, most of it in the Alor Star prison after Tanjung Pari and Sungai Petani. There were no more interrogations at the Alor Star jail.”

When Saleha was released, she could not send for anyone to pick her up as she was only told at the last minute, so she took a taxi to her village.

“I found my home ransacked. My husband’s work space at home was in a mess and funds he kept for the use of the school, madrasah, surau and salary for teachers were gone,” she said.

Saleha had to pick her life up after that and take care of their five children. She now has 10 grandchildren, with two more expected to join the clan later this year.

She said she received RM20,000 as compensation for the death of her husband from the federal government in 2004, as did the other 13 widows from the village.

“We went to court for that but in the end, we had to settle out of court. We are kampung people so we just went with what the lawyer said.

“We were told that the court said the case was closed and since the lawyer went with it, we had little choice but to go along with it.

“The case never addressed the Memali incident. Our questions remain unanswered all these years,” she said.

For Zakaria Abdul Rahman, 52, who was arrested and detained under the Internal Security Act (ISA) following the tragedy, revisiting the incident might bring justice for their torment and the lost lives.

He said the events of that day have haunted the villagers since.

“We just want the truth, the facts so we can one day put this all to rest,” he said.

Zakaria, whose father Abdul Rahman Jusoh was shot in the abdomen and died of the wounds about two months later, said the villagers had been accused of attacking the police and even trying to topple the government.

“How could we have managed to attack the police when it was the police, including the Federal Reserve Unit, who came to our village in the hundreds, armed?

“We were in shock when they shot Ibrahim and fired tear gas. We never expected the police to go to that extent. Could we have done all those things we were accused of while most of us were in shock?

“Do you think it is so easy to overthrow the government? If it were true, we would have been hanged a long time ago,” he said when met at the village earlier this week.

Zakaria said there was also never any evidence that Ibrahim was heading a deviant sect and that people had gone astray.

He described Ibrahim as outspoken and critical of the government, and because he was influential, he had made his political rivals uncomfortable.

“What is considered deviant and whose definition? Is being with PAS a deviant act?

“Ibrahim taught religion and the folks here looked to him for knowledge and had great respect for the man. He never asked the people to shield him.

“He also worked for government religious bodies, so we think he would have been the first to stop any deviant acts. The people looked up to him and that was why they defended him,” Zakaria said.

“If the authorities tried to arrest a revered priest or monk, surely his followers will react in the same manner,” he said, adding that Ibrahim refused to be taken by the police because he did not want to be detained without trial under the Internal Security Act.

Zakaria was one of 36 men from the village detained under the ISA in Kamunting for about six months after the incident.

Datuk Muhamad Yusof Husin, who is a PAS senator today, was accused of being their leader.

It was reported that 159 people, including women and children, were detained in the incident. Police later arrested 36 people under the ISA in January 1986 but released them five months later.

Zakaria said the siege, which could not have been planned overnight, was politically motivated during a time when things were tense between PAS and Umno.

He said the questions he was asked during his interrogation were mainly political.

“The way I see it, it was all about politics. Dr Mahathir, Musa and local Umno division leaders here also bickered about the Memali incident at the 1986 Umno general assembly.

“It did not happen the way they want people to believe. It is far from it. Those who died, died defending themselves and others.

“Whether Dr Mahathir was in town or not is not a big issue. What matters is justice for the people of Memali,” he said.

The villagers have also been dealing with stigma and misconceptions because of the incident, Zakaria said, adding that outsiders tended to think that Memali folk were violent and behaved like gangsters.

Most of Zakaria’s immediate family members were involved in or affected by the incident. His elder brother Md Yusop was a policeman at the time. Two days before the incident, Yusop was transferred out of the area.

Another two brothers in the police force were also transferred. One sent to Pahang.

Yusop, 58, who is retired, said the transfer raised the people’s suspicions that something big was brewing but there was little they could do.

“There were four of us Memali boys based here in the police force. All of us were given transfer letters.

“I was closely watched while I was in Alor Star, where I had been sent. I had no days off so they could keep me there.

“I learned about what happened watching the news on TV3. I continued working but I was in a daze. There was nothing I could do to change anything,” he said.

Another Memali resident and former ISA detainee Zaman Mahmud, 62, who is also known as Pak Teh Man, has also called for justice for the villagers and Ibrahim, whom he described as a good religious teacher.

He said before Ibrahim began teaching, the villagers in Memali had little religious knowledge.

“I was upset when I heard about Musa saying that Dr Mahathir was in Kuala Lumpur at the time. Many of us want to blame him since he is the prime minister.

“I hope the files will be opened again. I hope they investigate the incident properly.”

Musa revealed last week at a political discussion that Dr Mahathir was in Kuala Lumpur during the Memali incident.

Yesterday, Musa said in a statement that he and the then acting inspector-general of police had briefed Dr Mahathir on what happened in Memali.

Musa said he had asked Dr Mahathir to postpone his pending visit to China, but Dr Mahathir decided to depart for China.

Dr Mahathir has since said he could not remember if Musa was right as the incident occurred a long time ago.

Some bloggers have defended Dr Mahathir and posted snapshots of a list with names of people who went to China with him. – April 5, 2014.

                This entry was posted on Sunday, 6 April 2014, 1:43 am and is filed under
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UMNO/BN cyber war unit has spawned the world’s  craziest cybertroopers and NGOs who continue to make fictitious and nonsensical claims …

The UMNO/BN cyber war unit has spawned the world’s craziest cybertroopers and NGOs who continue to make fictitious and nonsensical claims like the DAP aiming to recruit 10 million Red Bean Army cybertroopers by 14GE, paying them each Rm3,000 a month or a monthly budget of RM30 billion.

For one whole year, this will be an unthinkable budget of RM360 billion just to feed 10 million so-called “Red Bean Army” cybertroopers!

Only the craziest of the crazies will believe such nonsense, yet this could be seriously stated in a press conference last Tuesday  by various UMNO/BN NGO cybertroopers led by Abdul Rani Kulup Abdullah, President of Martabat Jalinan Muhibbah Malaysia (MJMM) and other NGOs like Ikatan Rakyat Insan Muslims Malaysia and  Pertubuhan Minda dan Sosial Prihatin (PMSP), claiming that DAP is now paying RM3,000 each to 800 cybertroopers in the so-called Red Bean Army (RBA), and that DAP has targeted recruiting 10 million cybertroopers in time for  the 14th General Elections.

This piece of nonsense of the DAP wanting to target 10 million cybertroopers in time for the 14GE was only reported by one newspaper – Kwong Wah Yit Poh on 2nd April 2014.

Paying RM3,000 each for 800 RBA cybertroopers will come to RM2.4 million a month, RM28.8 million a year or RM115.2 million for the next four years up to the 14GE.

Only the mindless and the craziest of people will believe or retail such nonsense, for DAP does not have any Red Bean Army of cybertroopers and we do not pay a single sen for any “cybertrooper”.

But it takes the cake that there are people, who claim to lead NGOs, who could be so mindless and crazy as to believe that the DAP not only has a RBA of 800 cybertroopers, but want to recruit 10 million cybertroopers by the time of 14GE although it would mean an annual budget of RM360 billion!

Those who could believe such nonsense of any organization spending RM360 billion a year to feed 10 million cybertroopers deserve to be emplaced in mental hosptials!

Clearly, these “mindless and crazy” people believe that those responsible for the UMNO/BN cyber warfare are as mindless and crazy as them as to believe such fictitious and nonsensical claims so that they will loosen their purse strings to finance these NGOs with tens of millions of ringgit of funding to plant lies and deceit on the Internet!

If the UMNO/BN  leadership under Datuk Seri Najib Razak can be so gullible as to fall for such fictitious and nonsensical claims so as to fund these mercenary  NGO Umno/BN cybertroopers, one can only pity UMNO and BN!

(Media Conference Statement in Gelang Patah on Sunday, 6th April 2014)

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Flight MH370: ‘Hunt for black box may be in the wrong area’

Mark Townsend

The Observer

5 April 2014

With the batteries powering the black box from missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 expected to expire as early as Monday, experts have warned that the international hunt for the aircraft’s wreckage may be looking in the wrong area.

The flight recorders of the Boeing 777 emit a ping that can be detected by sonar equipment, but the devices have a battery life of around 30 days, which means ships hoping to locate the signal are rapidly running out of time.

Finding the data recorders after that remains possible, but experts say it will become significantly more challenging if the signal beacons stop working.

Underwater attempts to pinpoint the ping continued, four weeks to the day after the airliner vanished, with the Australian navy’s Ocean Shield and Britain’s HMS Echo trawling an identified area using sophisticated underwater detection equipment.

However, some experts warn that they could be scouring the wrong stretch of remote Indian ocean. Aviation expert and former RAF Hercules pilot David Learmount said the failure to locate any floating wreckage meant that the search effort was effectively still working blind.

Finding floating wreckage is paramount to shrinking the search area: analysts can use data on ocean currents to rewind to the location where the plane entered the water.

Learmount, who is operations and safety editor of information website Flightglobal, said: “If they don’t find any floating wreckage they have no idea where to look. How much more clearly can I put it than that? We don’t know where to look, we think we know and we’re doing our best, but we may be wrong.”

He said that previous satellite reports indicating debris in a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean signified little because there was no evidence it was linked to MH370.

“The only thing was that there was a very indeterminate, very simple piece of information from a satellite system. It was not intended to be a location system but we’ve used it as such. It doesn’t give us a location. We’ve been looking for nearly a month and we haven’t found anything.”

Learmount said that one vital variable was the speed at which the aircraft hit the ocean, citing the case of Air France 447, which crashed into the Atlantic in 2009. In that case it took investigators two years to recover the black box: when they did, data revealed that the plane had “belly-flopped” on to the sea surface, meaning its impact was less severe and that larger pieces had survived.

He said: “We don’t know how this one hit the water. If it was an intentional effort to kill themselves and everybody else – and we have no proof but that’s the Malaysian government’s best guess – I doubt they would have attempted to belly-flop it.

“They might have put the aircraft into a very much higher-speed impact with the water, so the pieces would be smaller and much harder to see,” added Learmount, who served with the Royal Air Force for 10 years.

The multinational search team will continue to try to identify faint sound signals from the recorders that could lead them to the aircraft. The task is complicated by the fact that the search ships have to get within range of the plane’s data recorders to hear the. This is a tall order given the size of the search area and the fact that the pinger locator must be dragged slowly through the water at between one and five knots (one to six miles an hour).

“It would be brilliant if they heard the pinger, but they’s have to be very lucky because the water there is very deep,” said Learmount. “I honestly think in a case like this that if we don’t find the pingers and locate any wreckage there is little point searching the seabed. It would take forever and the cost would be astronomical.”

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MH370: Is it the pinger? 4 reasons to believe; 6 reasons to doubt

By Mike M. Ahlers, CNN

April 7, 2014

(CNN) — After weeks of fruitless searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, it sounds like a promising sign.

When a Chinese patrol ship picked up two pulses in the southern Indian Ocean, the head of the Australian agency coordinating search efforts called it “an important and encouraging lead.”

Investigators hope the audio signals are locator beacons from the plane’s data recorders, but they’re not sure yet.

Is it the discovery we’ve all been waiting for? Could those be Malaysia Airlines Flight 370’s pingers?

Here are four reasons to believe and six reasons to doubt:

REASONS TO BELIEVE

1) The frequency doesn’t occur in nature.

The Chinese Haixun 01 patrol ship detected pulses at a frequency of 37.5 kHz, the Chinese state-run Xinhua news agency reported. That’s the same frequency of black box pingers — and that frequency is no accident. The pingers were designed to have that frequency because it does not occur in nature.

2) There were two separate events.

The Haixun 01 reported two pulses within 2 kilometers (1.25 miles) of each other. Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, head of the Joint Agency Coordination Center, described them as “fleeting, fleeting acoustic events.” One was described as being 90 seconds long; no time was given for the other, but it was evidently shorter.

“I think the fact that we have had two detections, two acoustic events, in that location provides some promise which requires a full investigation of the location,” Houston said.

3) You usually know a ping when you hear one.

The pings are, under ideal conditions, easily recognizable. They “ping” like a metronome — with a steady pulse about once a second.

4) They’re in the right spot.

According to the latest analysis of Inmarsat satellite data and aircraft performance, the Haixun 01 is in the right spot. In fact, search supervisors, citing the new analysis, are moving the focus of the search to an area that includes the location of the Haixun 01.

“The area of highest probability, we think is now probably in the southern part of the area, pretty close to where Haixun 01 is operating,” Houston said.

Pulse signals raise new questions

REASONS TO DOUBT

1) The ocean is noisy.

In addition to the Haixun 01’s two “acoustic events,” ships detected two other events in a very short time, showing exactly how noisy the ocean is.

The British ship HMS Echo recorded one event that was determined to be unfounded. The Ocean Shield, an Australian naval vessel equipped with sophisticated listening equipment, has also detected “an acoustic noise” in another area of the ocean to the north. According to a CNN calculation, the Australian ship was about 350 miles (565 kilometers) away from the spot where the Chinese ship detected the pulses. It’s also unclear whether the sound the Australian ship detected was related to Flight 370.

The search team is urging patience and restraint.

2) Only one pulse was detected at a time.

The Haixun 01 detected only one pulse at a time. Assuming both black box pingers are working, are close together, and are unobstructed by debris or terrain — and those are, admittedly, big assumptions — they should have heard two pingers, perhaps like a metronome with an echo.

3) These aren’t ideal conditions.

While pingers are easily identifiable under ideal conditions, the current conditions are far from perfect. Video of the searchers show them listening to the hydrophone with earbuds, not headsets that would block out ambient noise.

So the steady “pings” — which actually sound like the snap of fingers — could be confused with or overwhelmed by other noise, such as the waves lapping against the boat.

The Chinese said they did not have time to record the pulses, precluding a scientific analysis of the sounds.

4) A spare pinger on the boat might have sent the signal.

In video of the Haixun 01, it appears the Chinese had a spare pinger in the boat.

Anish Patel, president of pinger manufacturer Dukane Seacom, says it is not recommended to have a pinger near the area where you are trying to listen.

If that pinger gets wet, it will start transmitting, potentially confusing search teams.

“I wouldn’t put one where I’m measuring,” Patel said. “It’s just not good common practice.”

5) The equipment was designed for shallow water.

The hydrophone the Chinese used to detect the pulse is “designed for shallow water applications,” not for the deep water, said Thomas Altshuler of Teledyne Marine Systems, manufacturer of the hydrophone.

“They are using it in a scenario outside of our normal operation,” he said.

Is it possible that it heard a ping from the depths of the Indian Ocean?

“It is possible, but it would be right at the edge of that detection (capability),” he said.

6) The underwater search of a vast area started only recently.

The search area is so large, and the underwater search has just begun. It almost defies belief that the pingers could be found so soon. But then again, almost everything about this case defies belief.

THE BOTTOM LINE

We’ll give the final word to Angus Houston.

“This is an important encouraging lead, but one which I urge you to continue to treat carefully,” he told reporters. “We are working in a very big ocean and within a very large search area, and so far, since the aircraft went missing, we have had very few leads which allow us to narrow the search area.”

                This entry was posted on Monday, 7 April 2014, 12:31 pm and is filed under
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The Hunt For MH370 Narrows On Two Possible Locations After Searchers Detect Potential ‘Pings’

By Dennis Lynch

International Business Times

April 06 2014

Almost a month after Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 went missing over the Gulf of Thailand, searchers are focusing on two areas in the Indian Ocean where they detected possible signals consistent with MH370’s black-box pinger.

The signals were detected by the Australian ship HMS Ocean Shield and the Chinese ship Haixun 01 about 300 nautical miles away from each other.

Searchers are hastening to detect pinger signals because MH370’s black-box pinger battery could expire during the next two weeks. The pinger battery lasts from 30 to 45 days, with April 22 being the latest to find a signal. A confirmed signal would greatly narrow the search area, which is now the size of England.

The Chinese vessel Haixun 01 has reported two signals at the 37.5 kHz frequency. These signals were detected about a mile away from one another with equipment used just below the surface of the water. While not confirmed, the Haixun 01 signals are promising for their consistency, and one signal lasted 90 seconds.

Related

Retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, who is coordinating the massive search effort, calls it the most promising possible evidence so far.

“I think the fact that we’ve had two detections, two acoustic events in that location, provides some promise, which requires a full investigation.”

He went on to stress that there is no confirmation of the origin of the signals, and told journalists, “I urge you to continue to treat (the news) carefully.”

He did say that Chinese search planes detected “white objects” floating on the surface about 55 miles away from where the signals were detected, according to the South China Morning Post.

The British Royal Navy ship HMS Echo is headed to the area where Haixun 01 detected the signal to deploy their listening equipment, which may be able to confirm the signals and possibly identify them. HMS Echo is expected to arrive early Monday morning.

Haixun 01 detected the signals south of where the Royal Australian Navy ship Ocean Shield is investigating signals it detected. Ocean Shield has the most sophisticated search equipment of any ships in the search; its specialized towed pinger locator can detect a black box up to 20,000 feet below the surface. The distance between the Haixun 01 and Ocean Shield signals suggests they came from two different sources.

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The Worst Place in the World for MH370 to Go Missing

Clive Irving

The Daily Beast

5.4. 2014

Hope to find MH 370 was virtually destroyed by a month of bungled searching. The only saving grace was one lonely satellite company’s brilliance.

It’s now a month since Malaysian Flight MH370 became modern aviation’s greatest mystery. Certain things are clear and many of them are disturbing.

First, the oversight of commercial air space in this part of Asia is chaotic.  Jealously preserved divisions of power within each state made it impossible to achieve the kind of open, rapid and efficient exchange of information between the states themselves that is essential in an emergency.  As s result, too much time has been spent chasing false leads, some of them dubiously motivated, and assessing data that turned out to be badly flawed.

As long as any physical evidence remains out of reach this is not only the most demanding sea search for an airplane ever undertaken, it’s a virtually impossible forensic challenge.

The initial failure to report radar sightings of what was probably Flight MH370 had costly consequences in a time-critical situation. Days were wasted searching the South China Sea, not the Indian Ocean.

It took at least a week to produce anything resembling a reliable time line of the Boeing 777’s course after the last contact between it and controllers.

It turned out that the Malaysian military had noted an unidentified airplane flying west, not north toward China, but did not report this to the civilian authorities for two days. The Thai military tracked what was almost certainly the same unidentified flight continuing out over the Indian Ocean but did not report it for ten days “because it wasn’t asked.”

As enraging as these lapses are, they should not come as a surprise. They are not the result of momentary negligence or incompetence. They reflect a long and deeply embedded status quo in the way international aviation is handled in one of the busiest air spaces in Asia.

None of the nations involved is technically backward. Thailand, for example, not only manages, and manages well, one of the world’s busiest international hubs, Bangkok, a key gateway between Asia, the Middle East and Europe, but has two regional airports into which thousands of tourists fly safely every day, Phuket and Chiang Mai. All these airports are in the process of upgrading their navigation aids to future international standards.

There are, however, throughout the region, sealed compartments of military and civilian authority—the Thai military radar, for example, covers swathes of airspace beyond the areas allotted for commercial traffic. Not only national security is involved. The interdiction of drug traffic and piracy is involved. Separate branches of the military—air force, navy, and army—have high degrees of autonomy and are not used to sharing information with politicians.

So it’s really not so shocking that when the need arises for states to share information, some of which may be classified, in a transparent and timely manner they simply don’t have the means, experience, or inclination to do so.

In this case the behavior is made even more complex by the shadowy role of Western intelligence agencies. We’ll probably never know if they swept up clues to the divergent behavior of Flight MH370, correctly identified and analyzed them and then passed them to investigators with admirable celerity—or deftly filtered the data before passing it on. They, too, would be acutely nervous about revealing the capabilities of their assets.

In contrast to this pattern of accidental or deliberate concealment there were some well-advertised flourishes of national pride. Satellite images from China, Thailand and France were used to arouse hopes that wreckage had been spotted—at first in the far southern Indian Ocean and, later, in the re-directed search zone closer to southwestern Australia. These sightings fed the news cycle frenzy for days, with even normally cautious experts allowing themselves to believe there was a high probability of locating wreckage. As it turned out, each sighting was not of a debris field but of the vast junk field the oceans have become. With this painful sense of anticlimax came, inevitably a feeling that the efficacy of satellite surveillance had, perhaps, been overblown.

Always at the center of frustration with the investigation were the Malaysians. They were serial bunglers, making unsupported statements, frequently contradictory and just as frequently reversed. What to make, for example, of how they reported something as simple and yet critical as the last words from the cockpit? Initially officials said they were “All right, goodnight.” Three weeks later, with the release of a transcript said to cover all conversations between the airplane and controllers, those words became “Goodnight Malaysia Three Seven Zero”—a more formal and familiar style.

We continue to accept that these were the last words. There is no record of a distress call, a Mayday. But in view of how flawed the record has proved to be, how do we know that a call was not made but went unheard or unrecorded?

From the beginning, it was obvious that at least some Malaysian officials wanted to steer suspicion toward the pilots and they have frequently been aided by journalists not too fussy about sources. Originally, the Malaysian timeline placed the last words from the cockpit after the 777’s transponder stopped working, suggesting that the crew were concealing a criminal act then underway. Two weeks later that was reversed—the call was made well before contact was lost.

Things got more personal. Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was an open supporter of the Malaysian political opposition. He wore a T-shirt deploring a rigged vote, reading “Democracy is Dead.” On the Mail Online website this came out as “fanatical missing airline pilot pictured wearing political slogan…” rather than realizing that he was standing up for democracy, not decrying it.

With reporting like that the Malaysians didn’t need to work too hard to smear the crew but they continued. A great show was made of raids on Captain Shah’s home and the seizure of his home-built flight simulator.  Among pilots this raised no red flag: it indicated an enthusiastic professional proud of his skills. It was darkly announced that material had been deleted from the simulator’s hard drive. The hard drive was sent to the U.S. for the FBI lab to expose its secrets. There were none.

As the search area became better focused, the flow of information, such as it was, shifted from Malaysia to Australia. With this, the Malaysians’ attempts to spin the story had diminishing effect. The accident remains technically within Malaysian jurisdiction. But the practical reality of location, where the city of Perth became the best place from which to gather and direct the massive search, has meant that the daily briefings from Australians are becoming more coherent.

None of this formidable commitment of resources would have been possible but for the existence of one extremely fragile link between Flight MH370 and the outside world that appeared from an unexpected place.

Just as the searchers stared into an endless void, wondering where to look next, the Malaysians announced that they had received information from Inmarsat, an operator of a fleet of satellites, based in London.

Between 2:30 a.m. and 8:11 a.m. on March 8, an Inmarsat satellite orbiting over the Equator at a height of 22,245 miles had picked up automatic signals from the 777. Through a novel set of calculations Inmarsat was able to narrow the airplane’s flightpath to an arc divided by the equator, one stretching north deep into Asia, the other south to the far stretches of the Indian Ocean.

Inmarsat’s calculations are arcane, and although the signals became universally described as pings, the technology involved is a lot more elaborate than pinging makes it sound. What matters, though, is the result. Investigators were now able to make better bets on the 777’s direction and speed. On March 24, with the help of the British Accidents Investigation Branch, Inmarsat was able to rule out the northern half of the arc. Finally, all the assets available for the search were directed south.

To refine the search area, investigators needed two key indications of the airplane’s performance in the last hours of its life: Its speed and its altitude. Given those, it would be a virtually routine calculation to determine how far it had flown before crashing.

But here there was—and remains—a problem. The Inmarsat data could not determine how high the airplane was flying. And altitude had a direct effect on its fuel consumption, and therefore on how far it could have flown. The higher it flew, the thinner the air, the more efficiently its engines worked and the faster it flew. (A precise computation of its range would also include its weight. This, at least was already known because an airplane’s weight and its distribution—the weight of the machine itself, of crew and passengers, of cargo and of its fuel—have to be confirmed before it leaves the gate.)

The search area was suddenly moved some 700 miles further north toward western Australia when the Australians announced that the 777 had been flying faster than originally thought and had therefore burned more fuel, decreasing its range.

At first sight, this was confusing. It could only fly faster if it flew higher. Generally, if it flew higher, it used less fuel, not more. But, like all jets, the 777 is aerodynamically tuned to cruise not at its fastest possible speed but at a lower speed where its fuel consumption is most efficient. It’s always possible to push it faster, from, say, 550mph to 600mph, to catch up time on a delayed flight. Then, being flown like a hot rod, it burns more gas.

Every calculation about this flight has a gaping lacuna. Between 1:07 a.m. and 1:37 a.m., when contact with the crew was lost, and 2:30am when the Inmarsat contacts began, the fate of the flight was settled. It changed course toward the Indian Ocean. Apart from that one fact, everything remains questionable. Did it climb to 45,000 feet?  Did it drop to 12,000 feet?  Did it make precisely the maneuvers you would expect in a sudden emergency, with the pilots desperate to save the airplane, attempting to get down to the nearest airport—or did it cavort through the sky during a dispute on the flight deck over control until it stabilized again?

Knowing and understanding how Flight MH370 came out of this phase is crucial to being absolutely sure of how far it was capable of flying. Were its speed and altitude settled by then, or still uncertain? The confidence shown by the Australians when they moved the target zone suggests they knew more about the 777’s early passage toward the Indian Ocean than we have been told. Indeed, it would be sensible and encouraging to assume that they have other knowledge that cannot be shared.

To be sure, a lot must be happening under wraps. And much of it concerns the riddle at the core of many riddles: Something happened to the 777 that seems to have taken out all the people on board but left the machine flying perfectly.

Boeing, together with National Transportation Safety Board engineers and probably analysts from NASA, must be running computer models that interrogate all the existing data to see if there is a credible explanation for how the Rolls Royce engines could perform as though in a normal flight for up to seven hours, receiving their fuel supply from the three tanks as they were programmed to do, supplying power to operate all the control surfaces which, in turn, were under the command of the autopilot, or more accurately the flight management computers—and how all this could happen without a word from the airplane either from the crew or the perpetrators of a criminal intervention.

In other words, just where in this nexus of systems is an event that left the crew silent, the destination transformed and yet did not fatally disable the airplane?

The most urgent task of any investigation is to establish whether an accident has revealed a flaw that requires immediate inspections of all similar aircraft. That is always what most agitates all travelers after a crash. The only previous alert of this kind covering the 777 came following a non-fatal crash landing at Heathrow in 2008. However in that case the fault was in the Rolls Royce engines, not the airplane, and was promptly fixed. Accidents are not, of course, always traced solely to mechanical sources. Sometimes they are a combination of the mechanical and the human, sometimes they are caused by external failings by, for example, traffic controllers, other aircraft or something that occurred during the loading of cargo and baggage. This investigation is wide open to any line of inquiry, mechanical or criminal and without a scrap of tangible evidence only one thing can be said with any certainty: The Malaysian 777 had no defenses against whatever occurred.

                This entry was posted on Monday, 7 April 2014, 10:50 am and is filed under
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Timeline of Flight MH370

Timeline of Flight MH370

CNBC.com

7.4.2014

The search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has entered its fourth week, with the plane believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, thousands of miles from its original flight path.

Just as the batteries on the locator beacons on the aircraft’s “black boxes” are nearing their limits, the searchers have detected signals they believe are “consistent” with the flight recorders.

Australian authorities said the signals may represent the best lead yet after the international investigation into the ill-fated carrier was initially stymied by several false leads.

Many questions about the fate of MH370, which left Kuala Lumpur en route to Beiing on March 8 with 239 passengers and crew, remain unanswered, including why the flight diverted from its planned route and what exactly caused it to crash.

The lack of information has taken a toll on the families of those on board the flight who until the announcement had been clinging on to hope their relatives may still be alive.

Here is a chronology of the latest developments:

April 7

Signals picked up by a black-box detector attached to an Australian ship were consistent with aircraft flight recorders, Australian officials said.

Two signals have been detected off the northwest coast of Australia, with the first held for 2.5 hours before contact was lost and the second for around 13 minutes. Confirmation of whether the signals are related to the missing flight could take several days, said Angus Houston, who is heading the Australian agency coordinating the search.

While the signals are about 300 nautical miles away from the location where a Chinese patrol ship detected a signal earlier in the week, but authorities noted that sound can travel great distances in deep water.

April 5

A Chinese patrol ship detected a pulse signal in the south Indian Ocean, according to a report from state-owned news agency Xinhua. Both Xinhua and Australian search authorities said the signal was “consistent” with a black box, but noted there was no conclusive evidence linking the signal to Flight MH370.

April 1

Malaysia released the full transcript of communications between MH370 and air traffic control before the flight dropped off of civilian radar. The last words were “good night, Malaysian three seven zero,” Malaysian authorities said. Previously, authorities had said the last communication was “all right, good night.”

“There is no indication of anything abnormal in the transcript,” Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia’s acting transport minister, said.

March 30

The search area was shifted closer to Australia after further analysis of satellite data suggested the plan may have been traveling faster than earlier estimates, possibly running out of fuel sooner than previously believed.

Chinese relatives of passengers stage a protest in Kuala Lumpur to demand the Malaysian government apologize for its handling of the search and for the prime minister’s statement claiming the flight ended in the Indian Ocean.

Tuesday, March 25

Search suspended: Search operation for wreckage of the flight is temporarily suspended due to poor weather conditions in the southern Indian Ocean.

Monday, March 24

Confirmation of flight’s fate:Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak says fresh analysis of satellite data tracking MH370 shows the flight went down with passengers and crew members in the southern Indian Ocean, west of Perth – a remote location, far from any possible landing sites.

Informing relatives: Malaysia Airlines sends text messages to families saying it has to be assumed that that none of those on board MH370 survived. The airline says arrangements will be made to take relatives of passengers to the recovery area once it receives approval from the investigating authorities.

More debris spotted: Earlier in the day, a Chinese plane spotted two white, square-shaped objects in an area identified by satellite imagery as containing possible debris from the missing airline.

Sunday, March 23

Search continues: An international force resumes its search efforts, zeroing in on two areas some 2,500 km southwest of Perth in an effort to find an object identified by China and other small debris including a wooden pallet spotted by a search plane on Saturday.

Debris sighting: French satellite images show possible debris from the missing jet deep in the southern Indian Ocean, Malaysian authorities said. The statement gives no details as to whether the objects were in the same vicinity as the other possible finds.

Hope of resolution: Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott says there is “increasing hope” of a breakthrough in the hunt for the missing airliner.

Saturday, March 22

Satellite captures possible wreckage:China releases a new satellite image of what could be wreckage from a missing Malaysian airliner.

The satellite took an image of an object 22 meters by 13 meters. The image location was about 120 kilometers south of where an Australian satellite viewed two objects two days earlier.

The wing of a Boeing 777-200ER is approximately 27 meters long and 14 meters wide at its base, according to estimates derived from publicly available scale drawings.

Floating objects sighted: AMSA says a wooden pallet has been spotted by a search aircraft, and that it was surrounded by several other objects, including what appeared to be strapping belts of different colors.

Friday, March 21

Search efforts bear no fruit:International search efforts in the remote southern Indian Ocean fail to turn up anything and Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss says suspected debris may have sunk. Aircraft and ships renew a search in the Andaman Sea between India and Thailand, going over areas that have already been exhaustively swept.

Thursday, March 20

Australian satellite spots debris: Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott says satellite imagery has found two objects possibly related to the search for the plane.

Four aircraft are on route to the site to investigate the objects that are located approximately 2500 km Southwest of Perth. The largest piece of debris is 24 meters, according to satellite images.

Water in the search area is “several thousand meters deep” and poor visibility in the area could hamper the search, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) said.

Wednesday, March 19

FBI assisting investigation: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced the FBI will be assisting the Malaysian government with the investigation, according to the Associated Press.

Malaysia discounts Maldives sighting: Investigators probing the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines jetliner with 239 people on board have discounted reports the plane may have been sighted over the Maldives, Malaysia’s Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said.

Several residents of Kudahuvadhoo, one of the more remote a tolls in the Indian Ocean island chain nation, had reported seeing a low-flying aircraft on the morning of March 8, when Flight MH370 disappeared enroute from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Files were deleted from flight simulator: The Associated Press reported that investigators are trying to restore files deleted last month from the home flight simulator of the pilot aboard the missing Malaysian plane to see if they shed any light on the disappearance, Malaysia’s defense minister said Wednesday. Files containing records of the simulations carried out on the program were deleted on Feb. 3, Malaysian police chief Khalid Abu told the news conference.

First insurance payments made for missing plane: German insurance company Allianz said it has made initial payments in connection with the missing Malaysian Airlines plane, according to The Associated Press. Allianz’s global head of communication Hugo Kidston confirmed Wednesday that the Munich-based insurer and “other co-reinsurers of Malaysia Airlines aviation hull and liability policy have made initial payments.”

Jet said to be most likely in southern Indian Ocean: Investigators probing the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines jetliner with 239 people on board believe it most likely flew into the southern Indian Ocean, a source close to the investigation told Reuters.

“The working assumption is that it went south, and furthermore that it went to the southern end of that corridor,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Missing jet’s U-turn programmed before signoff: The missing Malaysia Airlines jet’s abrupt U-turn was programmed into the on-board computer well before the co-pilot calmly signed off with air traffic controllers, sources told NBC News.The change in direction was made at least 12 minutes before co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid said “All right, good night,” to controllers on the ground, the sources said.

The revelation further indicates that the aircraft’s mysterious turnaround was planned and executed in the cockpit before controllers lost contact with Flight 370, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate an ulterior motive.

Tuesday, March 18

China finds no terror link to its nationals: The Associated Press reported that checks into the background of the Chinese citizens on board the missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner have uncovered no links to terrorism, the Chinese ambassador in Kuala Lumpur said Tuesday.

The remarks will dampen speculation that Uighur Muslim separatists in far-western Xinjiang province might have been involved with the disappearance of the Boeing 777 and its 239 passengers and crew early on March 8.

Thai radar may have spotted missing plane: A spokesman for Thailand’s air force said it may have detected Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 with radar minutes after the missing jetliner’s communications went down, The Associated Press reported.

The radar tracked a plane that was flying toward to the Strait of Malacca, which is where Malaysian radar also tracked Flight 370 early March 8. The spokesman said the air force didn’t share the information earlier because it wasn’t specifically asked for it.

Change in flight path entered via cockpit computer: New information suggests the change in the flight’s direction was plugged into a computer in the cockpit by someone familiar with airplane computer systems. The fact that the turn was programmed into the computer in the cockpit raised more questions about the possible involvement of one of the flight crew.

Monday, March 17

New phase of search underway: Search and rescue missions in the northern and southern corridors begin. Australia and Indonesia lead search in their own regions. A total of 26 countries are involved in the search.

Sunday, March 16

Search party expanded: The number of countries involved in the ongoing search for flight MH370 has expanded to 25 from 14, the Malaysian Transport Minister said at a press conference on Sunday, noting the search has entered a new phase and become more difficult.

Additional countries involved in the search effort include Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Corridors remain in focus: The search area remains focused on the northern and southern corridors identified earlier this weekend. Officials are currently discussing with all partners how best to deploy assets along the two corridors, both of which are being treated with equal importance.

Further investigating crew and passengers: All crew members and passengers on board flight MH370, as well as engineers who may have had contact with the aircraft prior to take off are being investigated, the Malaysian police chief said. He noted that hijacking, sabotage, personal and psychological problems remain the four areas of focus on this front.

According to the authorities, police searched the homes of both the pilot and co-pilot on Saturday, March 15. Experts are examining the flight simulator found in the pilot’s house, they said.

Authorities also confirmed that the pilot and co-pilot did not request to fly together.

Saturday, March 15

“Deliberate” action taken on board: Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak reveals at a press conference that actions taken on board Flight MH370 were deliberate – including the disabling of the aircraft’s communications system shortly before the plane reached the east coast of Malaysia as well as the flight’s divergence from its planned route.

Turn back confirmed: Najib confirms that the plane turned back from its planned flight path over the over the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea, flying in a westerly direction back over the Malaysian Peninsula before turning northwest.

Last signal: The last confirmed signal between the plane and a satellite came at 8:11 a.m. Malaysian time — about 7 1/2 hours after takeoff.

New focus for search: Analysis of the plane’s last communication with satellites places the aircraft in one of two “corridors” – a northern one from northern Thailand through to the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, and a southern one from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean, Najib said. Search efforts in the South China Sea are scheduled to end.

Friday, March 14

A new Indian Ocean search area possible: The White House said late Thursday that the latest expansion of the search area may be in the Indian Ocean. Several “pings” from the aircraft were picked up by satellites for up to four hours after going off radar, according to a NBC News report citing sources. The pings would indicate the plane was able to communicate. But the data would be unlikely to include exact location or direction.

The U.S. destroyer, USS Kidd, was headed into the Strait of Malacca from areas around the Gulf of Thailand, at the request of the Malaysian government, as part of the expanded search area.

Thursday, March 13

Malaysia denies Wall Street Journal report: Malaysian Transport Minister Seri Hishammuddin dismissed claims that the missing aircraft may have flown for about four hours past the time it disappeared off tracking systems. The Wall Street Journal had reported that the plane could have flown on for an additional distance of about 2,200 miles (3,500 km). Hishammuddin said their search efforts have always been focused on the South China Sea.

No link in satellite images: China’s civil aviation chief said there was no proof that floating objects in the South China Sea captured in satellite images on Sunday were connected to the missing Malaysia Airlines plane. Chinese authorities also said that the satellite images had been mistakenly issued.

Wednesday, March 12

Search efforts intensify: The area of search for the missing aircraft expands to 27,000 nautical square miles covering the South China Sea and Strait of Malacca, with a total of 12 countries participating in the operation. There are a total of 42 ships and 39 aircraft currently involved in the multi-national search.

Search scale-back in Vietnamese area: Vietnam says it is scaling back its search in Vietnamese waters for the missing plane, Reuters reported.

Sighting of objects in South China Sea: A Chinese government agency releases satellite images of what could be debris from Flight MH370 were released by a Chinese government agency.

Tuesday, March 11

Clarity on stolen passports: Interpol identifies two Iranian men as the passengers traveling on stolen passports: Pouria Nourmohammadi, 18, and Seyed Mohammed Reza Delavar, 29. The two men swapped their passports in Kuala Lumpur, using stolen Italian and Austrian passports to board the airline.

Interpol says it does not believe the disappearance of the jetliner is a result of a terrorist attack. Nourmohammadi is believed to have been traveling to Europe as an asylum seeker, according to the Malaysian police.

However, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Brennan says intelligence officials cannot rule out terrorism as a factor.

‘Turned back’ possibility probed: Malaysia’s military look further into the possibility that the airplane turned back after flying over Kota Bharu on Malaysia’s northeast coast, an official from the Malaysia’s Transport Ministry told NBC News.

Police investigation: The Malaysian police say their investigation will look into four key areas: hijacking, sabotage, psychological and personal problems among crew and passengers.

Allegations against first officer: Photos and videos emerge of a Malaysia Airlines co-pilot identified as first officer Fariq Ab Hamid entertaining woman inside the cockpit during a previous flight. The airline says it is “shocked” by the allegations and has not been able to confirm validity of the claims.

Monday, March 10

Oil slick results: Malaysian authorities receive test results from the oil slick spotted off Vietnam’s coast, which came back negative for jet fuel. The oil turns out to be fuel oil typically used in cargo ships.

Search area widened: Malaysia’s civil aviation announces that the search area will double to 100 nautical miles to cover a larger area of the Gulf of Thailand between Malaysia and Vietnam. This came after several leads from the original 50 mile-radius search parameter proved erroneous.

Shares tumble: Shares of Malaysia Airlines plummeted 18 percent to a record low in intraday trade but pared losses by the end of session to finish down 4 percent.

Sunday, March 9

‘Turn back’ claims: Radar tracking the flight suggests it may have “turned back” from its scheduled route to Beijing before vanishing.

Search area widened: Search radius widens to 50 nautical miles from 20 nautical miles of the last-known position of the plane, including the Strait of Malacca. More countries join the search and rescue operation including China, U.S., Singapore and the Philippines.

Stolen passports: Interpol confirms two passengers had used stolen passports and said it was checking whether others aboard had used false identity documents.

Saturday, March 8

Flight takes off: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 departs at 12:41 a.m.local time on Saturday, and is due to land in Beijing at 6:30 a.m. on the same day. The flight was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members. The passengers are of at least 12 different nationalities; all crew on-board are Malaysians.

Mysterious disappearance: The flight loses contact with air traffic controllers about an hour after taking off. The last-known position of the plane was 120 nautical miles off the east coast of the Malaysian town of Kota Bharu, Malaysia Airlines chief executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said. The aircraft was flying in good weather conditions and disappeared without warning or a distress signal.

Search efforts begin: Malaysia and Vietnam mount a joint search and rescue mission for the missing flight.

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One month on, Malaysians hold silent vigil for lost flight MH370

The Malay Mail Online

By Shazwan Mustafa Kamal

April 8, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, April 8 ― City lights may have brightened Dataran Merdeka last night, but the iconic landmark was unmistakably sombre, as small groups of people quietly gathered there to hold a candlelight vigil for the passengers and crew of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.

It has now been exactly one month since flight MH370 has been missing, and despite a multinational search operation which has spanned oceans and countries, no one knows where the aircraft has landed, save for theories and plausible scenarios.

By 11.30pm, a small group of 150-odd Malaysians of different races stood within the concrete jungle of Kuala Lumpur, saying little but hoping for the impossible.

From adults to the elderly and even children, people lit candles and formed a small circle around a sign which read “in remembrance of the one month since MH370 went missing.”

“We are here to offer our support for the families and relatives of those who were on board MH370. There is little we can do, so we pray to our respective God to try and make this painful moment as bearable as possible,” a 28-year-old who only wanted to be known as Hussaini told The Malay Mail Online.

Hussaini, who attended the candlelight vigil along with his wife, Fatin and daughter said that it was important for everyone to never forget the people who were on board the ill-fated flight.

For Nason Ponniah, turning up at the vigil was “the very least” Malaysians could do, adding that he could not imagine the pain the families had to go through.

“I was driving here earlier, and just thinking about losing someone, a son, mother… I couldn’t take it, I started crying.

“It’s made worse because we don’t know what happened,” he told The Malay Mail Online.

Peter Chong, a close friend of MH370 pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, told attendees that right now the most important thing was for those affected by the missing aircraft to get the support and love from all Malaysians.

“Malaysians should stand up, it is not a moment to chase scapegoats,” he said.

The vigil, organised by the DAP, saw a host of MPs and leaders from the party including DAP parliamentary leader Lim Kit Siang, Penang Chief Minister and party secretary-general Lim Guan Eng, Puchong MP Gobind Singh Deo, Serdang MP Dr Ong Kian Ming and Segambut MP Lim Lip Eng.

It was of several held simultaneously in other states throughout the country.

“We are here to show solidarity to those men and women who are risking their lives in the search-and-rescue operation,” Lip Eng said.

When the clock from the old courthouse building opposite Dataran Merdeka struck midnight, a moment of silence and prayer was observed, as the lit candles blazed fiercely into the night.

Shortly after that, the crowd slowly dispersed, as silently as when they first came.

The plane bound for Beijing, China in the early hours of March 8 fell off the Malaysian radar about an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport but did not reappear on Vietnamese radar as expected.

The Boeing 777-200ER which was carrying 239 people “ended” in the Indian Ocean, according to Malaysia’s Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak.

No debris has so far been found.

Search teams are racing against time to find the plane’s black box before its battery life ends.

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Q&A on the MH370 mystery

Bangkok Post

8 Apr 2014

One month after flight MH370 vanished, there is still no proof of what happened to the plane or where it ended up, despite an intensive international search now focused on the Indian Ocean.

This handout photo taken on April 4, 2014 and released on April 7 by Australia’s Defence Department shows the HMAS Success readying a rigid hull inflatable boat (RHIB) near dusk following a reported sighting of potential debris

But authorities believe they may be zeroing in, after ping signals possibly emanating from the plane’s “black box” of flight and cockpit voice data were detected deep down in the search area.

Here are answers to some key questions:

Q: Are the ‘pings’ from MH370?

A: That remains to be determined, but Australia’s search chief said Monday one of the country’s naval ships had twice detected signals “consistent” with aircraft black boxes, the strongest indication yet that the hunt for the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 was on the right trail.

The Ocean Shield is towing a US Navy deep-sea device designed to detect signals from “black boxes”, moving slowly back and forth across the ocean to try to pin down a location.

Australian search coordinator Angus Houston said if further readings can be obtained, it could be possible “to establish whether the detections can be confirmed as being from MH370”.

But the signal beacon on the black box has an average battery life of around 30 days, and could expire any day now. And numerous undersea factors can distort such signals and their location.

Q: If they are from MH370, what happens next?

If the pings are confirmed, authorities would deploy a submersible device to scan the seabed for debris.

If found, the difficult task of reaching and recovering the black box in ocean depths ranging from 4,000-5,000 metres (13,100-16,400 feet) would begin.

Seafloor-mapping and recovery is “a very intense and time-consuming process”, said Anthony Brickhouse, an assistant professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in the United States.

But lessons were learnt during the two-year search for the data recorders from the 2009 crash of Air France flight 447, which contributed greatly to today’s body of knowledge, he said.

“We know a lot more now that we did before Air France about how to do this,” he said.

Q: If the pings are not from MH370, might the plane never be found?

If the pings are confirmed not to be from MH370, the search is back to square one, raising the daunting spectre of an open-ended surface search for floating debris or painstaking seafloor-mapping.

But Air France showed that success is still possible.

Its black boxes were not located before their signals expired, necessitating a two-year search using submersible drones and other means to locate a debris field.

A Remotely Operated Vehicle which can recover items in extreme depths was eventually sent down to pluck the recorders from the seabed.

But authorities had a better idea where the Air France crash occurred. Houston warned that in any scenario, “the recovery operation will take a long, long time” for MH370.

Q: Was the plane commandeered by hijackers or terrorists?

A: This theory gained early attention due to the revelation that two Iranian passengers boarded using stolen passports, and after Malaysian authorities said the plane appeared to have been deliberately diverted.

But Interpol said the Iranians were apparently just illegal immigrants heading to Europe, and Malaysian police last week said investigations had “cleared” all of the plane’s 227 passengers.

“I think the possibility of this theory is pretty low,” said Terence Fan, an aviation expert at Singapore Management University.

“No one has claimed responsibility or made any demands or any specific threats that we know of to Malaysia Airlines or Malaysia in general. I think we are looking more at technical problems on the plane.”

Q: Did one or both of the pilots go ‘rogue’?

A: Malaysian authorities have said a knowledgeable flyer likely diverted the plane and that its communications systems appear to have been shut off around the time MH370 went missing, suggesting deliberate action in the cockpit.

All of this has led to intense scrutiny of Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, and First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, but no evidence has yet emerged to suggest either held extremist views, had pyschological problems or any other motive.

Zaharie, a 33-year veteran of Malaysia Airlines, was a respected senior pilot and evaluator of younger aviators.

Questions were raised about Fariq when a young South African women said she and a friend were invited into the cockpit of a 2011 flight that he served on — in breach of cockpit security rules.

But those who know Fariq have attested to his good character. He was engaged to be married, according to reports, and was considered a promising pilot.

Q: Did MH370 become a ‘ghost plane’?

A: This idea gained traction after Malaysia announced on March 15 — a week after MH370’s disappearance — that the plane apparently flew for nearly seven hours after vanishing from radar.

“Ghost planes” — in which the crew is incapacitated, leaving the plane to fly on aimlessly — have occurred before. In 2005, a Greek Helios Airways plane with 121 aboard flew for hours after a sudden lack of oxygen incapacitated the cockpit crew. It crashed, killing all aboard.

Some believe MH370’s pilots diverted the plane due to such an event — possibly attempting to return to Kuala Lumpur airport — but were subsequently incapacitated, leaving the plane to fly on autopilot.

The shutting off of communications systems may have been an attempt to stem a fire cause by faulty electrical circuits.

The stretch of ocean where the plane is believed crashed is also about the distance it would have travelled before running out of fuel, the airline has said.

“For pilots, when something bad happens it’s ‘Aviate, navigate, then communicate’,” said Brickhouse. “If ‘communicate’ is the third step, in a catastrophic failure your job is to fly the plane first. That may be one reason why we don’t know what happened.”

Q: Do we know everything the authorities know?

A: The Malaysian government has continually refused to release full details of the sequence of events around the time MH370 went missing, and what little that has been released has frequently been contradictory.

This has helped sustain conspiracy theorists who allege that the truth is being hidden or manipulated by Malaysia’s authoritarian government — which has a history of covering-up embarrassing scandals and coddling the flag-carrier Malaysia Airlines.

Malaysia has said it is hiding nothing, but “there are things here and there that suggest they know a bit more than they are telling”, said Fan.

“Maybe they are discussing some details with US investigators or there is a slight possibility of some terror link that they are trying not to release.”

Q: What aviation changes might arise from MH370?

A: The aviation industry has a history of learning from disasters and implementing safeguards, making air travel one of the world’s safest modes of transport.

However, unless MH370’s black box or some wreckage can be recovered, that learning process cannot begin.

But MH370 has already sparked new discussion of implementing real-time satellite tracking of airliners to stop them going missing, and possibly reassessing the pilot’s ability to turn off communications systems.

“Having an improved way of tracking aircraft and always knowing where every aircraft is at any given time” is “clearly now a high priority,” International Air Transport Association chief Tony Tyler said last week.

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Satellite data analysis suggests MH370 flew inverted to site of acoustic signals

The Malay Mail Online

April 8, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, April 8 ― New analysis of partial satellite communications with Flight MH370 that places it in the Indian Ocean location where acoustic signals were detected by search teams have led authorities to believe they may have found the site of wreckage.

British daily, The Telegraph, reported today that the final satellite contact or “half-handshake” ― as it is referred to in aviation jargon ― could have been the moment when the plane ran out of fuel, turned upside down and plunged into the water.

Citing Chris McLaughlin from British satellite company Inmarsat, The Telegraph reported that analysis of the new signals were made at 00.19 GMT ― 8.19am Malaysian time ― on March 8, just eight minutes after Malaysia Airlines (MAS) Flight MH370’s last regular hourly handshake.

The daily reported that the signals were further scrutinised by an international team of experts and the latest analysis showed the plane to be travelling faster than previously presumed, burning up more fuel, and would have landed even further north along the same arc.

“The partial handshake would be the plane running out of fuel and faltering for a moment, so the system went off network and then briefly powered up and had communication with the network. The plane looked for a final communication before it went off ― and that was it,” McLaughlin was quoted saying.

The daily also cited a former British Airways pilot who flew Boeing 777s, Stephen Buzdygan, as saying that the jetliner would have continued staying airborne but may have turned over on its back as the engines shut off one after the other.

“Without fuel, assuming the crew were unconscious and no one was flying the plane, it would glide.

“Engines have separate fuel supply, so the chances are it won’t go in with the wings level. With no autopilot correction, it would slowly turn on its back and go down at an angle and the wings will be ripped off,” the pilot was quoted saying.

International searchers are racing against time to find the crucial flight data and cockpit voice recorders that may hold the only clues in the “unprecedented mystery” of the disappearance of the Beijing-bound plane carrying 239 passengers and crew on board.

Batteries powering the emergency locator transmitters equipped on the black boxes have a rated life of 30 days; the plane went missing on March 8 or 31 days ago.

An Australian ship, Ocean Shield, had picked up two sets of signals consistent with the beacons from aircraft black box recorders over the weekend had not registered any further pulses and are reportedly separate from those picked up by a Chinese search ship that had placed the site farther south.

The first set was heard on Saturday and lasted for two hours and twenty minutes; the second set lasted 13 minutes.

Ocean Shield, which is towing a deep-sea pinger locator, has since lost track of the pings but is trying to relocate the signals.

Retired Australian Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, who is leading the multinational search, said the second set included two distinct sounds which would be consistent with transmissions from separate pingers attached to the black box’s flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder.

“In the search so far it is probably the best information that we have had,” Houston was quoted saying by The Telegraph.

“We are encouraged that we are very close to where we need to be. I would want more confirmation before we say ‘this is it’.”

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Searchers Get Robot Squad Ready to Hunt for Malaysian Jet Debris

By Alan Boyle

NBC News

April 8th 2014

Don’t expect instant gratification in the race to recover wreckage from the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, even if searchers confirm they’re hearing pings from the Boeing 777’s black box.

The operation won’t be like the thrill-a-minute treasure hunt in the movie “Titanic”: Identifying the wreckage will require painstaking passes by a torpedo-like autonomous robot called Bluefin 21, which will be operating at the very limit of its range.

If the side-scan sonar readings identify a field of debris, the robot sub will go over the territory again with high-resolution video cameras, pinpointing the locations of the black-box recorders and other evidence.

It’s only after those clues have been collected that searchers can send down yet another kind of robot, connected to a search ship and capable of bringing debris up to the surface.

The first part of the task will require programming the Bluefin 21 in advance to look for something the size of a shoebox in a search area that could span hundreds of square miles.

‘”Anytime you’re trying to find something that small in an area that large, it is going to be exceedingly complicated and difficult,” Chris Johnson, spokesman for the U.S. Naval Sea Systems Command, told NBC News. “It takes a huge amount of patience. This is one of the most difficult things the Navy does.”

Job 1: Confirming the pings

The U.S. Navy has contracted with Maryland-based Phoenix International Holdings to lend underwater assets to the international search, operating from the Australian ship Ocean Shield. Phoenix has played a lead role in searches for sunken debris ranging from a Civil War ship to real-life surveys of the Titanic shipwreck to the Air France jet that was lost in 2009.

Johnson said the estimated cost of the Navy-Phoenix operation is $3.6 million, which covers transporting and operating the Bluefin 21 as well as a device that picked up what could be black-box pings.

The device, known as a towed pinger locator, was dragged behind the Ocean Shield over an area of the Indian Ocean roughly 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) west of Perth, Australia. The locator detected pulsed signals on the right frequency for the black boxes, for as much as two hours at a time. Detection equipment aboard a Chinese ship reportedly picked up the signals as well.

“The new developments over the last few hours have been the most promising lead we have had,” Malaysian Transport Minister Hishamuddin Hussein told reporters in Kuala Lumpur on Monday. He spoke nearly a month after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared on March 8, as it flew from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard.

Robo-sub ready to go

If the go-ahead is given by the Joint Agency Coordination Center in Perth — the headquarters for the international search — the Bluefin 21 would begin a pre-programmed survey of the seafloor. One of the Bluefin 21’s most recent claims to fame was its role in the search for wreckage from Amelia Earhart’s airplane, which disappeared in the Pacific in 1937.

The 16-foot-long (5-meter-long) robot, built by Massachusetts-based Bluefin Robotics, is built for surveys that go as deep as 2.8 miles (4,500 meters). That’s just about how far down the seafloor is in the Indian Ocean search area.

Searchers typically program the propeller-driven robo-sub with the coordinates for a back-and-forth search that’s been compared to mowing a lawn. First, the vehicle will survey the area with side-scan sonar. It can stay underwater for 25 hours at a time, and cover up to 40 square miles in the course of a day, Johnson said. The sonar readings are stored in the robot’s removable memory, and retrieved once the sub comes back up topside.

If the sonar scan turns up objects of interest, the Bluefin 21 would be refitted with high-resolution cameras for a visual survey. The robot would have to dive closer to the seafloor for a concentrated survey of the target area. When the imagery is brought back up, analysts would pore over the pictures, looking for the shoebox-sized cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder.

We’re going to need another robot

Assuming the black boxes and other wreckage are identified, what comes next? That would be up to the Joint Agency Coordination Center.

“We don’t know what the next step would be,” Johnson said. “Presumably an ROV would be what you’d need to get debris off the seafloor.”

ROVs — that is, remotely operated vehicles — are equipped with arms and claws to pick up debris and bring it up to the surface. Unlike the Bluefin 21 and other autonomous robots, ROVs have a real-time connection with their operators for communication and control.

Several ventures around the world manufacture ROVs capable of working at depths of 3 miles and beyond. But if Phoenix is involved in the operation, it will almost certainly use its Remora 6000 ROV, which is rated to a depth of 3.7 miles (6,000 meters).

The Remora 6000 came into play during the recovery of Air France wreckage and the inspection of Titanic wreckage in 2011. Weeks or months from now, the ROV could well become the star of the show once more.

But that star turn would come long after the pings from the Malaysia Airlines jet have faded to silence. That’s what makes the next couple of days so crucial: If the ping detections are confirmed, that will at least give the robots a realistic area to search.

It’s by no means a slam dunk, but Phoenix International’s operators are accustomed to long, grueling searches. After all, it took them two years to locate and recover the Air France wreckage.

Alan Boyle is the science editor for NBC News Digital. He joined MSNBC.com at its inception in July 1996.

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