Hisham agrees to PSC plan, but cabinet to decide

Ram Anand

Malaysiakini

Mar 24, 2014

MH370 Acting Transport Minister Hishamuddin Hussein today agreed with proposals for a Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) on the disappearence of the missing Flight MH370, but said the onus was on cabinet to decide on the matter.

“I agree that both sides (opposition and government) be together in this issue,” he said during his winding-up speech for the debate on the motion of thanks for the royal address at the Dewan Rakyat today.

“Not only at the Malaysian level, but on a global level we must show togetherness. But I alone cannot make a decision. As the responsible minister, I will bring this up to the cabinet for a decision,” Hishammuddin said.

He said this in response to a question from Lim Kit Siang (DAP-Gelang Patah) over the proposal for a PSC on the missing plane, which was made by Anthony Loke (DAP-Seremban) last week.

Hishamuddin also said the cooperation extended by the other countries in the search and rescue operations (SAR) for the Boeing 777-200ER was proof of the “global respect towards the country’s leadership”.

He endured a heated session in the Dewan Rakyat after he was hit with a barrage of questions late this evening, but he repeatedly stressed that Putrajaya had handled the crisis in a “transparent and brave manner”.

“We put aside out national security in order to reveal our air force radar data to confirm the flight turn back. If we did not take this brave decision, we would be still searching in the South China Sea,” he said.

Followed procedure

Hishamuddin also defended the government’s decision to reveal satellite signal data only after a week of SAR operations, after which it concentrated the operations in the northern and southern corridors.

“There was plenty of information and speculation from day one. Of course, if we were to act on every one of them, then we would not even have a SAR to conduct. We need to be consistent, that was why we searched in both the Straits of Malacca and South China Sea,” he said.

If the government acted without verifying information, the opposition would still use it as an argument to blame the government.

“This is an unprecedented incident in international aviation history. Every country will have something to learn from this in terms of aviation and airspace,” he said.

Hishammuddin insisted that the government, despite the local, and at times international criticism, had always followed the standard procedures and international regulations set by international aviation authorities in its conduct and also in its handling of information in relation to the missing flight.

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Kajang by-election result – MCA crushed while UMNO losing ground in Malay electorate

PKR President Datuk Seri Dr. Wan Azizah Wan Ismail is to be congratulated for a sterling result in the Kajang by-election yesterday.

Despite a massive 16.3% in reduction in the voter turn-out from 88.4 per cent in the 13th general elections last May to 72.1% yesterday, Azizah has established two results in the by-election: MCA remain crushed while UMNO is losing ground in the Malay electorate.

The new MCA national leadership deserves commendation that they can see winning at most 25% of the Chinese votes in Kajang as a “surge in support” among the Chinese voters.

If winning at most 25% of the Chinese votes is not a political  phenomenon of the MCA remaining “crushed”, then there is a new definition of the word.

In fact, MCA leaders are demonstrating that they are the  new “Ah Q” at the  most superlative in the Malaysian political landscape!

There can be no doubt that if the turnout of the Chinese voters had not dropped by a massive 20%, exceeding 3,000 voters, the BN/MCA candidate would have lost by a bigger majority than the 6,824-vote majority  last year.

This is especially the case when Azizah’s breakthrough among the Malay electorate is taken into account, raising the estimated Malay voter support from 35% last year to some 44% in the by-election yesterday.

The message in yesterday’s Kajang by-election is that Pakatan Rakyat stands for the future of Malaysian politics, while MCA and Barisan Nasional represent the past.

(Media Statement in Kuala Lumpur on Monday, 24th March 2014)

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MH370 lost beyond reasonable doubt, says MAS

by Lee Shi-Ian

The Malaysian Insider

March 24, 2014

Satellite data showed that flight MH370 flew into the southern Indian Ocean, Datuk Seri Najib Razak said today, as Malaysia Airlines said the flight is lost “beyond reasonable doubt”.

“Flight MH370 flew into the southern Indian Ocean,” the Prime Minister said in Kuala Lumpur tonight.

In a statement to relatives of the 239 people on board the flight, MAS said: “We deeply regret that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board have survived … We must now accept all evidence suggests the plane went down in the Southern Indian Ocean.”

Najib said families of the passengers and crew had been briefed of the latest development.

British satellite company Inmarsat and the UK Air Accidents Investigation Board (AAIB) had used a new system to calculate MH370’s flight path.

“I was briefed by representatives from the United Kingdom AAIB today and Inmarsat, who had performed further calculations on their existing data,” Najib told reporters.

“They had used a new type of analysis which had previously never been used before in an investigation like this,” he said.

“Both Inmarsat and AAIB have concluded, based on the new analysis, that MH370 flew along the southern corridor,” Najib told a press conference at the Putra World Trade Centre.

“The last position of MH370 was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth.”

“This is a remote location far from any possible landing sites. Therefore, it is with deep sadness and regret that I am informing you that MH370’s flight ended in the southern Indian Ocean.”

Najib declined to take any questions from the floor, saying a press conference will be held tomorrow to divulge further details.

A reporter with Capital TV could not accept the news as Najib spoke, breaking down in tears, as did another male reporter.

The Malaysia Airlines jet’s disappearance has been described as an “unprecedented aviation mystery” and is the subject of the longest aviation search in recent history, surpassing the 10-day search for

the lost Adam Air B737-400 in January 2007.

Prior to the disappearance of fight MH370, the deadliest crash of all time in Malaysian aviation history was on December 4, 1977, when flight MH653, a Boeing 737-200 (9M-MBD), was hijacked and crashed in Tanjung Kupang, Johor, killing all 100 people aboard.

The other accident involving MAS was on September 15, 1995, when flight MH2133, a Fokker 50 (9M-MGH), crashed during approach in Tawau, Sabah due to pilot error. The crash killed 34 people.

Present at tonight’s press conference were acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein and Foreign Affairs Minister Datuk Seri Anifah Aman.  – March 24, 2014.

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No Muslim tried to leave religion over past decade, minister says

By Zurairi AR

The Malay Mail Online

March 24, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, Mar 24 — Not one Muslim applied to convert out of their faiths in the Shariah Courts over the past decade, a minister said today, laying to rest previous claims of apostasy repeatedly made by religious hardliners.

To the contrary, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Seri Jamil Khir Baharom said 4,520 individuals embraced Islam in just four years between 2008 and 2012, according to the Federal Territories Religious Department’s (Jawi) records.

“So far, there were no Muslims, including new converts, who left the religion, based on the lack of applications to convert out of Islam in the Shariah courts,” Jamil said in a written reply to Kampar MP Dr Ko Chung Sen in Parliament here.

Ko had requested the number of non-Muslims who converted into Islam in the last ten years, and the number of Muslims who converted out in the same period.

However, Jamil said there were applications by those who were mistakenly registered as Muslims, particularly those in Sabah and Sarawak, who had asked to switch religions.

He said those registered as Muslims by mistake usually have names that sound like Muslims’ names.

Jamil also said that a more detailed record on new converts into Islam can only be provided by each state’s religious departments.

In Malaysia, laws bar non-Muslims from proselytising their faiths to Muslims, despite the Federal Constitution expressly stipulating under Article 11 that every Malaysian is guaranteed the right to freedom of religion.

Interfaith relations in the country suffered major blows over the past few years, owing to unsubstantiated claims by Muslim hardliners that Islam, the religion of the federation, has come under threat of apostasy and secularism.

In a recent case, Perak Mufti Tan Sri Harussani Zakaria alleged that up to 250,000 Muslims in Malaysia had become apostates, including 100,000 who converted to Christianity. The religious cleric had based his claim on an anonymous study.

In 2011, Selangor religious authorities raided an evangelical church in Petaling Jaya after receiving a complaint that Muslims were present at a dinner function there, sparking suspicion that Christians were attempting to proselytise Muslims.

Also in 2011, Malay daily Utusan Malaysia, citing unsubstantiated blog postings by two pro-Umno bloggers, claimed that a number of DAP leaders and several Christian clergymen took a pledge promising to take over Putrajaya, abolish Islam as the religion of the federation and install a Christian prime minister.

The paper also published a grainy photograph to back its claim.

Muslim groups have also repeatedly claimed that the Christians’ insistence on using the Arabic word “Allah” was born of a desire to proselytise to Muslims.

Muslims make up 61.3 per cent of the Malaysian population, followed by Buddhists at 19.8 per cent, and Christians at 9.2 per cent, according to the latest census data from 2010.

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Tears of grief and ambulance calls in Beijing when families told of MH370 crash

The Malay Mail Online

March 24, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, March 24 — Distraught, the Chinese families of those on board MH370 left a briefing by Malaysia Airlines in Beijing in “profound grief” after hearing that the ill-fated jetliner had crashed into the southern Indian Ocean.

“Awful scene. Chinese families leaving briefing room, wailing,” tweeted CNN correspondent Pauline Chiou, shortly after the tragic news was delivered, both in Malaysia and in Beijing.

The Chinese made up a bulk of the passengers on board flight MH370, a total of 153 of the 239 people, including 12 crew members and two infants.

“It’s just awful… it is profound, profound grief,” said Chiou in a broadcast on CNN.

“I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just an awful, awful scene,” she said.

Chiou said a screaming woman was seen being taken away on a stretcher towards a waiting ambulance van. Behind her, another person, believed to be the woman’s relative, followed the stretcher to the vehicle.

One man, Chiou said, “lunged” at the media and had to be pulled back by the police.

The chaos was compounded by angry shouts and sounds of weeping relatives, some among whom reportedly lashed out at Malaysia.

The CNN correspondent, who was reporting from Lido Hotel in Beijing, explained that the media were kept away from the Chinese families who were holed up in a room on the hotel’s second floor to await the briefing from MAS.

The briefing, according to CNN, was done about 30 minutes before Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s emergency press conference here at 10pm.

According to several news reports, MAS first said in a text message to the families that it is assumed that there were no survivors from MH370 after the plane crashed into the southern Indian Ocean.

“We deeply regret that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board have survived… we must now accept all evidence suggests the plane went down in the Southern Indian Ocean,” the text message said, according to reports.

In contrast, Najib was careful not to say the plane had crashed during his press conference announcement at the Putra World Trade Center (PWTC) here.

The prime minister said the Boeing 777 aircraft had “ended” its journey in the southern Indian Ocean, a location he described as remote and far from any possible landing site.

He went on to explain that fresh data gleaned from British satellite firm Inmarsat confirmed that the plane had continued its journey towards the southern Indian Ocean and not along the northern arc, which was one of the possible sites identified earlier.

“Its last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean west of Perth. This is a remote location… far from any possible landing site.

“It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that according to this new data, flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean,” he said.

The Boeing 777 aircraft disappeared off the coast of Kota Baru, Kelantan, less than an hour after take-off at 12.41am on March 8 and has remained missing ever since.

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What happened on March 8 still haunts personnel on duty

Sunday Star

Sunday March 23, 2014

PETALING JAYA: A sense of responsibility for the missing MH370 has taken a toll on Air Traffic Controllers on duty the morning the plane disappeared on March 8.

There were 40 personnel on duty during the shift, including the Radar Controller, Flight Planner and Flight Data officers, who were directing the aircraft before handing over responsibility to their Vietnamese counterparts.

A senior Department of Civil Aviation officer told The Star some of those on duty can’t help but dwell on what happened to the plane.

“They have come to talk to me and kept asking why, why why, this had happened,” said the officer. “Despite assuring them they had carried out their duties, some can’t let go of the incident.”

He said all emergency protocol was followed immediately after MH370 disappeared off the radar.

During such emergencies there are three phases which must be followed.

The initial Alert phased in this case required the air traffic controllers or ATCs to contact their counterparts in Vietnam.

Subsequently Changi (Singapore) is contacted to determine if they had MH370 on their radar or if they were in communication with the missing aircraft.

“This had to been done within three minutes of the emergency.”

In the subsequent Uncertainty phase, ATCs will contact all aircraft in the vicinity to determine if they were in communication with MH370 or had the plane on their radar or had visual sighting of it.

This must be done within 15 minutes and when no one could detect the plane the final Distress phase was activated.

Two search and rescue trained officers are on standby during every shift and they immediately opened the Aeronautical Rescue Coordination Centre or ARCC.

“The officers called the air force, which confirmed they had detected the plane on their military radar but it had diverted from its path.

“We tried communicating with MH370 again but it didn’t work.

“By the time it dropped off military radar, we had already begun planning where to search for the plane,” he said.

Two weeks on, the DCA officer, who is among those coordinating the search and rescue mission at the ARCC, said he is baffled by the incident.

“We are working hard to follow up on every lead we get and we’ve been grateful for all the help we’ve been getting from other countries,” he said.

However he expressed concern that time was running out.

“I am worried, the decisions we make involve people’s lives and so many countries and public sentiment,” he said.

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Who is holding up satellite info in MH370 search?

The Malay Mail Online

March 24, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, March 24 — Satellite data allowed the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 that once spanned 30 million sq km to be whittled down to 68,000 sq km, but open questions exist over why authorities took so long to make this discovery.

The current search area some 2,500km southwest of Perth in Western Australia was calculated by the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and Australia using data provided by commercial satellite firm Inmarsat, according to a Washington Post report yesterday.

But the data between Inmarsat and the missing Boeing 777-200ER is the same that allowed Malaysian authorities to announce on March 15 that the plane could be in one of two corridors: a northern arc from northern Thailand to the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in central Asia, or a southern one from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean.

The latter corridor is where Australia said satellite images of debris possibly related to MH370 was found. Since then, China and France have provided additional data of other sightings in the area.

“Why it took the experts in Canberra and Washington so long to get their heads together is another open question, and not one that be entirely explained by Malaysian foot-dragging,” the Washington Post said in its report yesterday

“Compared to the first week, the progress since March 18 has been blazing (if investigators are indeed on the right track). You can see below how quickly searchers have begun narrowing down their target area, each day following where they think ocean currents are moving debris.”

Much of the initial criticism of Malaysia stemmed from the revelation that Inmarsat ― whose geosynchronous satellite over the Indian Ocean was vital in helping rescuers narrow down the search ― discovered the communications with MH370 and calculated its possible arcs on March 9, one day after the plane vanished.

Malaysia later explained that the information only came into its hands on March 12, and that US investigators then sought for it to be sent to their home country for “further processing”.

“Initial results were received on Thursday 13th March at approximately 13:30, but it was agreed by the US team and the investigations team that further refinement was needed, so the data was again sent back to the US,” Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein said in a statement on Friday.

It was also not until the next evening that Malaysia received the vetted findings, which Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak then announced the next day.

While the information helped shed light on the possible locations of the missing plane, it also angered families and countries of those aboard MH370 who felt Malaysia had wasted valuable time and resources conducting search operations in areas that satellite data showed did not contain the plane.

And after the initial euphoria of Australia’s announcement last week, the same questions about the pace that information is being added to the investigation are now being asked.

“The Australian search area was still nearly the size of Texas, but it was now of a size that searchers and satellites could start to focus on more productively.

“But there is still a question of why it took two weeks to get from Inmarsat’s calculations on March 9 ― one day after the plane disappeared ― to the corner of the southern Indian Ocean being scoured right now,” the Washington Post added.

MH370 and the 239 people on board disappeared less than an hour after the Beijing-bound flight left Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 12.41am on March 8. The plane and its passengers remain missing despite over two weeks of intensive searching by a multinational effort.

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After the traumatic news, time to answer questions on MH370 mystery

The Malaysian Insider

March 25, 2014

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak announced last night that Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was lost at a remote location in the middle of the Indian Ocean, possibly ending weeks of speculations as to the plane’s final stop.

That did not, however, answer several key questions which have been lurking ever since the Boeing 777 disappeared on March 8, sparking what aviation experts call the most mysterious plane tragedy in history.

Britain’s Daily Mirror looks at five questions still begging for answers.

1. No confirmed debris, so did plane really crash?

Investigators know where a plane crashed, even before finding debris. A single piece of wreckage is enough to determine whether the plane exploded or crashed. The key answer lies in the black box, which may take years to discover.

2. Where’s the black box?

This usually orange piece of equipment is about a foot long and can survive virtually any impact. Search teams are using a beacon locator to detect signals from the black box, which can last about two weeks more from now. Finding the black box is no easy task: Air France flight 447’s black box was found two years after the first wreckage was found in 2009.

3. Why did nobody call from the plane?

Passengers would have tried to make calls or send texts to loved ones, had they known there was an emergency. But at 10,000ft, and at a plane’s speed, nobody on board would get a phone signal.

4. Why no one noticed plane diversion?

At the centre of the mystery is the fact that radars did not detect this flying jet. This is perhaps why the conclusion was made that the plane could have flown to the southern Indian Ocean, where no radars are available. If it flew to the north, it was unlikely that it could pass by many heavily guarded countries without being detected. The question remains, however, on the failure to detect the plane near Malaysian air space.

5. Pilots, fire, or someone else?

Another belief is that the plane’s path was deliberately changed by someone onboard, first to fly west back towards Malaysia and then northwest. Did Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah and co-pilot Fariq Abd Hamid have anything to do with this? Such a speculation is fuelled by the fact that all communications had been turned of. Was it someone else? Or was it caused by some mechanical failure due to fire? – March 25, 2014.

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Answers to the mystery of MH370 will surface together with debris, paper says

The Malaysian Insider

March 25, 2014

In the aftermath of the devastating news that the flight of Malaysia Airlines MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean, questions emerged whether the mystery can be solved with the discovery of the wreckage.

But the man who led the 2009 Air France crash probe cautioned that even yesterday’s announcement might not be conclusive.

“The seas and oceans are real dustbins in which we find loads of things. We found wooden crates and fragments on beaches that had nothing to do with the crash. Today we must first of all identify the debris,” Alain Bouillard told Britain’s Daily Telegraph.

Recalling the difficult task of retrieving debris of the Air France aircraft which crashed into the vast Atlantic Ocean killing 228 people, the daily listed several questions which it said could surface in the course of the investigation into MH370.

Authorities have now confirmed the incident was a tragedy, after experts calculated its final destination to be somewhere in a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean off Australia.

Emotional scenes erupted last night after Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak broke the news, confirming that the flight had ended in the Indian Ocean and that the task was now to find the debris.

In an article listing six questions following the latest development, the Telegraph spoke of the huge task of getting to the main wreckage of the plane, despite deploying the latest technology to pick up signals from the black box, now the main target of investigators to unravel the mystery.

“In the case of AF447,” said the Telegraph, referring to the ill-fated Air France flight, “they had been underwater for two years – a record – and it was not known whether they would still contain any usable data.

“In fact, all the data – two hours of cockpit conversation and a wealth of flight parameters were intact. Without them, however, it is unlikely the reasons behind the crash will ever be known,” it added.

Yet another hurdle awaiting investigators is the task of making sense of the debris. Again, in the case of Air France, whose wreck was found in a limited area on the sea floor, investigators went over it “centimetre by centimetre”.

But that was the Atlantic. The Indian Ocean is notorious for its hostile environment, warned the paper.

“The southern part of the Indian Ocean is known for its strong currents, fierce winds, violent storms, 10-metre waves and heavy weather, which will only become heavier in the coming weeks.

“Most ships avoid it.” – March 25, 2014.

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Australia pauses MH370 hunt due to stormy weather

The Malay Mail Online

March 25, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, March 25 — Search for debris from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was suspended for today owing to difficult weather conditions in the area scoured, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) said today.

The Australian agency that is co-ordinating search for the Boeing 777-200ER with 239 on board said it was withdrawing ships and aircraft with the arrival of waves of up to 4m and gale force winds in the area.

“AMSA has undertaken a risk assessment and determined that the current weather conditions would make any air and sea search activities hazardous and pose a risk to crew. Therefore, AMSA has suspended all sea and air search operations for today due to these weather conditions,” it said in a statement today.

The delay comes just as Malaysia announced yesterday new data from British commercial satellite firm Inmarsat confirmed that the missing plane was in the southern “corridor” where Australia and Indonesia are searching.

Search could resume as early as tomorrow, as the Australian Bureau of Meteorology forecast that the current adverse weather could dissipate by evening.

“AMSA intends to recommence search activities for any signs of the aircraft once weather conditions improve in the search area,” it added.

Communications between MH370 and Inmarsat’s satellite gave Malaysian authorities the information to announce on March 15 that the plane could be in one of two corridors: a northern arc from northern Thailand to the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in central Asia, or a southern one from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean.

This was reduced yesterday to the southern corridor after Inmarsat and the Air Accidents Investigation Board (AAIB) of the UK analysed the data based on the Doppler effect to arrive at the plane’s most probable location.

The Doppler effect is why the sound of a police car siren changes as it approaches and then overtakes an observer.

The announcement also gave added credibility to reported sightings of debris registered by Australian, French and Chinese satellites overlooking the area.

Prior to yesterday’s announcement, search assets were necessarily deployed to both corridors although Malaysia gave “some priority” to the south due to the more challenging search conditions there.

MH370 and the 239 people on board disappeared less than an hour after the Beijing-bound flight left Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 12.41am on March 8. The plane and its passengers remain missing despite over two weeks of intensive searching by a multinational effort.

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Finding MH370 black box, wreckage could take years, says USA Today

The Malaysian Insider

March 25, 2014

The announcement last night that MH370 crashed into the Indian Ocean does little to solve the mystery of its disappearance, as aviation experts say it may take months or years to find the black box and wreckage, USA Today reported today.

It could also take years before an accident report was released with a probable cause, the report quoted experts as saying.

Analysis of satellite data was at a preliminary stage and the plane’s wreckage and the recorders must be recovered before facts were established, former National Transportation Safety Board accident investigator Al Yurman was quoted as saying.

“Some parts have to be recovered and positively identified that they came from that Malaysia Airlines plane,” Yurman said.

Once there was positive identification, investigators “have to backtrack” and find a debris field to determine whether the plane made a controlled or an uncontrolled descent into the ocean, he told USA Today. – March 25, 2014.

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Flight MH370 ended in ocean seen hiding answers in vast waters

The Malay Mail Online

March 25, 2014

                                  SYDNEY, March 25 ― While Malaysia’s conclusion that Flight 370 went down in the Indian Ocean may give closure to anguished family members, the search for wreckage in one of the planet’s most forbidding parts means the wait for answers to how and why may be a long time coming ― if ever.

Searchers came up empty again yesterday, the 17th day since the Malaysian Airline System Bhd. flight disappeared, as Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak of Malaysia said analysis of satellite data showed the flight “ended” in the ocean.

Even if objects spotted from aircraft and satellites can be located, the flight recorders that would unwind the mystery may be irretrievably lost in the abyss of the sea bed. The search for wreckage was suspended today because of foul weather.

For the 11-man crew on a US Navy P3 Orion stationed near Kuala Lumpur, the hunt for Flight 370 has meant fruitless days in the air monitoring radars and cameras, fixated on water so glaring it’s impossible to make out where it meets the sky.

“I’ve been staring at the ocean for the past two weeks,” said Petty Officer Second Class Jaimeson Whiteley, gazing through a round window about 18 inches wide at the back of his aircraft as it flew about 400 miles southwest of Kuala Lumpur. “Your mind starts making stuff up for you to see.”

Currents in the southern Indian Ocean are among the strongest on the planet, potentially moving objects hundreds of miles since the search began in the area. Some debris pulled up in the last two weeks turned out to be floating junk.

“At this point you’ve got two weeks’ worth of wind and ocean currents,” said Robert Mann, a former American Airlines executive who heads aviation consultant R.W. Mann & Co. of Port Washington, New York. “It’s going to be a difficult task to establish what the start point is.”

Nothing found

The world’s most sophisticated surveillance aircraft, with devices that can pick out a human from 30 miles and a life vest from 5,000 feet, have failed to find any trace of the jet in a search now in its third week.

HMAS Success from the Royal Australian Navy found nothing March 23, according to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, after an Australian Air Force P3 Orion cruising overhead saw a gray or green circular object and an orange rectangular item.

The Orion is a four-engine turboprop built by Lockheed Martin Corp., based in Bethesda, Maryland, and has been in service in the US Navy since the 1960s. The $36 million plane was designed to find submarines before evolving in the past three decades to include a search role.

‘Drifting needle’

Australia and the US have also been using the P8-A Poseidon, a heavily modified version of Boeing’s 737 commercial airliner.

Because the search area is about 2,500 kilometres (1,550 miles) from Perth, Australia, and farther still from other airfields, the surveillance planes burn most of their fuel loads going out and back, leaving only two or three hours to look each time.

“The expression ‘‘like finding a needle in a haystack’’ shouldn’t be used to describe search-and-rescue and recovery at sea,” Soufan Group, a New York-based security consultant led by former FBI counterterrorism specialist Ali Soufan , said in a briefing on its website. “A more accurate expression would be like finding a drifting needle in a chaotic, color-changing, perception-shifting, motion-sickness-inducing haystack.”

‘Going crazy’

The Malaysia-based US Orion, the first US asset to join the hunt, yesterday flew its eighth mission, heading southwest from Subang air base outside Kuala Lumpur to scour 43,000 square nautical miles of the Indian Ocean. Time over target: six hours. Call-sign: Rescue 71.

For a crew trained to identify ships and submarines, it’s tough not knowing what to look for, said Brandon Yaeger, 21, an acoustic operator on the aircraft who joined the US Navy three years ago.

“It could be pieces or it could be a vest,” he said. “My eyes are going crazy staring at the ocean.”

Investigators have determined the Beijing-bound flight from Kuala Lumpur was deliberately steered off course to the west and flown seven hours into open ocean at cruising speed. Whoever was piloting the jetliner turned off the plane’s transponder, which helps radar pinpoint location, and a text-to-ground messaging system.

The only information investigators had to locate the plane consisted of hourly pings to a satellite that contained data only on the plane’s identity.

Black boxes

Investigators said March 15 that the plane’s last transmission probably came from the Indian Ocean, though until today Malaysian authorities were talking about also searching a potential northern route over land toward Kazakhstan.

Najib’s comments triggered accusations by a group representing Chinese passengers’ families thatMalaysia was “delaying, hiding and covering up the truth.”

The best clues about who or what brought down Flight 370 would come from the two flight recorders, which pick up cockpit conversations as well as flight data. The so-called black boxes, which are actually bright orange to help find them in wreckage, emit pings for 30 days after becoming immersed in water.

While black boxes are designed to withstand depths of 20,000 feet and may work in even deeper water, the range of the pings is a mile, according to manuals from Honeywell International Inc., the maker of the equipment.

Without a signal from the boxes, finding the recorders will be a daunting quest, a task experienced by the search teams for Air France 447, which went down midway across the Atlantic Ocean in 2009. While debris was found within days of the crash and the flight path was known, it took investigators another two years to retrieve the recorders from the bottom of the sea.

Fishing boats

The three French aircraft-accident investigators who went to Malaysia a week ago to provide advice on locating MAS370 returned to France over the weekend, the French BEA investigation bureau said in a statement yesterday.

“Such a vast area does not, at present, make it feasible to conduct undersea searches,” the BEA said in the release. “An undersea phase to localise the aeroplane from flight MH370 could only be launched if the operations under way today enable a more limited search area to be defined than the current search areas.”

The P3 Orion crew’s biggest enemy is the weather, which can lay down a blanket of blinding clouds, said Chief Warrant Officer Jorge Guilloty, 34, the mission commander.

Its primary tool is radar.

“I’m the big picture,” said Francis Enriquez, 38, an air crewman first class from Florida who runs the plane’s radar, camera and metal detector from a booth in the cabin above the wing. “I can see in excess of 180 miles.”

All the same, the final tally after the six-hour search came to 52 fishing boats, one container ship and no trace of Flight 370. ― Bloomberg

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How British satellite company Inmarsat tracked down MH370

By Sophie Curtis

Telegraph

24 Mar 2014

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced today that, based on satellite data analysis from UK company Inmarsat, Malayian Airlines flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean, and no one on board survived.

In a press statement this afternoon, Mr Razak said: “Inmarsat, the UK company that provided the satellite data which indicated the northern and southern corridors, has been performing further calculations on the data. Using a type of analysis never before used in an investigation of this sort, they have been able to shed more light on MH370’s flight path.

“Based on their new analysis, Inmarsat and the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) have concluded that MH370 flew along the southern corridor, and that its last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth. This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites. It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean.”

Inmarsat’s role in the search for Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 began immediately after the aircraft disappeared.
 Although the main aircraft communications addressing and reporting system (which would usually transmit the plane’s position) was switched off, one of Inmarsat’s satellites continued to pick up a series of automated hourly ‘pings’ from a terminal on the plane, which would normally be used to synchronise timing information.

By analysing these pings, Inmarsat was able to establish that MH370 continued to fly for at least five hours after the aircraft left Malaysian airspace, and that it had flown along one of two ‘corridors’ – one arcing north and the other south.

“Effectually we looked at the Doppler effect, which is the change in frequency, due to the movement of a satellite in its orbit. What that then gave us was a predicted path for the northerly route and a predicted path the southerly route,” explained Chris McLaughlin, senior vice president of external affairs at Inmarsat.

This information was relayed to Malaysian officials by 12 March, but Malaysia’s government did not publicly acknowledge it until 15 March, according to the Wall Street Journal. Malaysia began to redirect the search effort that day, to focus on the areas the information described. However, some officials involved with the probe warned that the lost days and wasted resources could impede the investigation.

Meanwhile, Inmarsat’s engineers carried out further analysis of the pings and came up with a much more detailed Doppler effect model for the northern and southern paths. By comparing these models with the movement of other aircraft on similar routes, they were able to establish an “extraordinary matching” between Inmarsat’s predicted path to the south and the readings that it got from other planes.

“By yesterday they were able to definitively say that the plane had undoubtedly taken the southern route,” said McLaughlin.

These pings from the satellite – along with assumptions about the plane’s speed – helped Australia and the US National Transportation Safety Board to narrow down the search area to just 3 per cent of the southern corridor on 18 March.

“We worked out where the last ping was, and we knew that the plane must have run out of fuel before the next automated ping, but we don’t know what speed the aircraft was flying at – we assumed about 450 knots,” said McLaughlin. “We can’t know when the fuel actually ran out, we can’t know whether the plane plunged or glided, and we can’t know whether the plane at the end of the time in the air was flying more slowly because it was on fumes.”

Inmarsat passed the relevant analysis to the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) yesterday. The cause of the crash remains a mystery.

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MH370: Britain finds itself at centre of blame game over crucial delays

By Gordon Rayner, and Nick Collins

Telegraph

24th March 2014

With all hope now lost of finding their loved ones alive, relatives of the 239 people on board flight MH370 were increasingly expressing anger and resentment towards those they believe are to blame for the failure to locate the missing aircraft.

By singling out the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch and the British satellite firm Inmarsat as the source of the information that confirmed the Boeing 777 went down in the Indian Ocean, Malaysia’s prime minister may have directed part of that anger towards Britain.

The AAIB, working with Inmarsat, provided the only credible information on the Malaysia Airlines flight’s whereabouts, but a series of delays meant ten crucial days were lost before search teams began looking in the southern Indian Ocean, where it now seems certain the aircraft went down.

Inmarsat knew the day after MH370’s disappearance that it was likely to have flown along one of two “corridors” that later became the focus of the investigation, but vital resources were expended on looking in the wrong places because of a seeming breakdown in communications.

Exactly what went wrong, and who was to blame, remained unclear last night, but both the British and Malaysian authorities must brace themselves for a barrage of uncomfortable questions from loved ones of the dead.

The search for MH370 would have been hopeless had it not been fitted with a system called Classic Aero, a type of Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) which transmits data on location, altitude, heading and speed.

ACARS, as we now know, can be turned off manually, via a switch on the ceiling of the cockpit or behind the throttles between the pilot and co-pilot. MH370’s ACARS system was switched off at 1.21am on March 8, two minutes after the pilots’ last verbal communication with the ground. It is this deliberate act that has convinced investigators the pilots were on some form of suicide mission.

But Classic Aero also has a second terminal that operates independently of ACARS and cannot be switched off while the aircraft still has power.

Once every hour the system sends out a “ping” to satellites operated by Inmarsat. The pings play no part in ACARS, and merely serve to synchronise timing information and keep the connection to the satellite network alive.

Missing MH370

Inmarsat, which owns 11 telecommunications satellites, supports the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System free of charge, as a public service, to help locate stricken ships and aircraft.

The day after MH370 disappeared, Inmarsat began calculating the aircraft’s movements based on the hourly pings, which carried on until 8.11am on March 8, meaning the 777 had flown for around six hours after it was last tracked by military radar off the west coast of Thailand.

The pings contain no information about location, heading or speed, meaning the only information Inmarsat had to go on was the wavelength of the pings when they reached its satellite orbiting 22,245 miles above the earth.

Variations in the wavelengths proved that the aircraft was still moving until at least 8.11am. But they did not provide any clues about direction, meaning Inmarsat could only predict that it flew either north or south along two curved “corridors”.

By adding in the aircraft’s expected speed, Inmarsat worked out that the 777 was likely to have come down somewhere at the end of the two arcs.

The firm’s spokesman Chris McLaughlin said: “What we discovered was a correlation with the southerly route and not with the northern route after the final turn that the aircraft made, so we could be as close to certain as anybody could be in that situation that it went south.

“Where we then went was to work out where the last ping was, knowing that the aircraft still had some fuel, but that it would have run out before the next automated ping. We don’t know what speed the aircraft was flying at, but we assumed about 450 knots.”

Inmarsat also refined its prediction by comparing the ping data with pings from previous, normal flights.

The firm’s calculations were based on inexact science, but they quickly predicted the Texas-sized area of the southern Indian Ocean where it is now accepted that the aircraft crashed.

Yet it took until March 18 before rescue teams announced they had narrowed down the search area to the location 2,000 miles west of Perth, where several sightings of debris have been made.

The terrible question now being pondered by relatives is whether anyone might have survived and could have been saved if the message had got through sooner. At the very least, opportunities to locate the aircraft’s wreckage and all-important Black Box data recorders may have been missed.

What caused the delay? Inmarsat initially shared its data with SITA, a Swiss aviation IT company, but for reasons which are not yet clear, Inmarsat’s calculations did not reach the Malaysian investigators until Wednesday, March 12.

Even then, it would be another three days before the Malaysians shared the information with the passengers’ families and the public. And it took a further three days, until Tuesday, March 18, before Australia announced it had narrowed down the search area to a defined patch of the southern Indian Ocean.

Malaysia’s Prime Minister, Najib Razak, is reported to have told his investigators that all raw data had to be corroborated with other agencies before it was released to the public, to avoid the white noise of information and misinformation.

The Malaysian government has also suggested that it took a week to process all of the data it was receiving from multiple international sources and to eliminate red herrings.

According to the New York Times, US investigators tried telling the Malaysians they were looking in the wrong place a week after the aircraft disappeared, but their warnings were not heeded for several days.

France was said to have offered help on March 9 but was ignored for a week before the Malaysians finally agreed to meet experts who took part in the two-year search for the flight data recorders of the Air France jet that crashed into the sea north of Brazil in 2009.

Malaysian officials have also been accused of failing to share all the information from their own systems because they did want to admit weaknesses in their radar and satellite operations.

And while international experts would normally be told within 24 hours about ACARS data the Malaysians withheld it for several days. It was this information that suggested the Boeing 777 was deliberately turned to the west, away from its planned route to Beijing.

The most likely explanation for the delays appears to be distrust between Malaysia and the other countries involved in the search operation.

Mr Najib has said that his country “shared information in real time with authorities who have the necessary experience to interpret the data”.

The Chinese government begged to differ, asking Kuala Lumpur to provide “more detailed information in its possession, including third-party information, in a timely, accurate and comprehensive manner”.

While the arguments went on, British and US intelligence agencies were gathering military and civilian satellite images to analyse them for possible debris. Images of two pieces of suspected debris were captured by an American satellite on March 16, but it was a further three days before the centralised analysis centre in the UK reviewed them. This was blamed on the “significant volume of imagery it was handling”.

On March 19, Malaysia Airlines told SITA to use the AAIB as the main analyst of the Inmarsat data. The AAIB, part of the Department for Transport, passed on its own interpretation to Malaysia, but it was not until Sunday, March 23 that a further calculation by Inmarsat convinced the Malaysians of the aircraft’s whereabouts.

Analysts realised that their calculations had not taken into account the geostationary satellite’s very slight movements in relation to the earth. Once that was factored in, the northern corridor was ruled out completely. The calculations were sent off to be checked over the weekend before being passed to Malaysia on Sunday.

The breakthrough led to Mr Najib’s announcement at 10pm local time last night that Inmarsat and the AAIB “have been able to shed more light on MH370’s flight path”.

He said the new analysis showed that the aircraft’s last position was “a remote location, far from any possible landing sites. It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean”.

Inmarsat is developing a new system to replace Classic Aero, that will automatically transmit location data, but international bodies have not yet made such a system mandatory.

James Healey-Pratt, a lawyer representing some victims’ families, said: “This Investigation does not compare favourably to that of Air France 447, where the Families felt they received information more accurately and quickly – without the trauma of having to endure an emotional roller coaster of wildly varying theories over the causes.

“Live Streaming Black Box type data is the simple solution.”

Both Inmarsat and the AAIB declined to comment on Malaysia’s handling of the investigation.

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MH370 crash inquiry could be among most challenging ever

The Malaysian Insider/Reuters

March 25, 2014

Confirmation that a missing Malaysian airliner crashed in the Indian Ocean opens the way for what could be one of the most costly and challenging air crash investigations in history.

Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said Flight MH370 had ended far from any runway, signalling a shift of focus from a search for survivors to a mission to recover bodies and hunt for debris and black boxes.

Based on fresh analysis of satellite data by UK-based Inmarsat, Malaysia’s decision to declare the aircraft lost in international waters marks a new phase in a search which has narrowed to an area southwest of Perth, Australia.

A civil investigation is likely to be carried out by Malaysia with the support of others, two people familiar with the matter said, ending two weeks of apparent legal limbo.

The launch of an official air crash investigation would give Malaysia power to coordinate and sift evidence, but it may still face critics, especially China.

Beijing has criticised Malaysia over the progress of the search and on Monday demanded that it hand over satellite data.

Inmarsat said its latest technical analysis indicated the jet had crashed in the Indian Ocean west of Perth.

Despite unconfirmed reports of possible debris, experts said it remained a mammoth task to locate wreckage without getting a closer fix on where the Boeing 777, with 239 passengers and crew on board, came down.

“If there is no tighter estimate of the location, they face the same challenges as before, looking for debris and trying to trace backwards,” said Matthew Greaves, head of the Safety and Accident Investigation Centre at Britain’s Cranfield University.

France’s air crash investigation agency, the BEA, which has briefed Malaysia on its experience in searching for the wreckage of an Air France jet that crashed in the Atlantic in 2009, said the search area would have to be narrowed before it would be any use starting to search underwater.

It took French investigators two years to find the wreckage of the Airbus A330, long after the emergency locating beacons on its black box recorders had stopped pinging their position.

“I think this will be considerably more challenging because (Air France) AF447 crashed close to its last known position and wreckage was found within days, so that gave a much smaller area of seabed to search,” said Paul Hayes, director of safety at UK-based aviation consultancy Flightglobal Ascend.

The official cost for the French-led underwater search for AF447 was 32 million euros ($44 million), but experts say it may have cost three or four times more after foreign and military costs. The current operation is seen as even more complex.

Forensic clues

Once any debris is discovered and examined, forensic experts will try to extract as much information as they can about the aircraft’s angle and condition when it entered the water.

Signs of bending or crushing can give some idea of the force of impact, while the concentration of different parts in one area might indicate whether the plane was intact or broke up at height. Even individual rivets can offer up some clues.

“Investigators are skilled at taking a huge amount out of very little,” said Greaves.

Malaysian police, who have started their own criminal inquiry, are investigating suspicions that the aircraft was deliberately diverted through hijack or sabotage. But investigators have not ruled out technical problems on the 11-year old plane.

Because of the peculiar circumstances in which the jet flew on for hours after changing course shortly after leaving Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8, some evidence may be missing.

Cockpit voice recorders keep two hours of tape before overwriting. Malaysian investigators believe the jet turned off course about 40 minutes into the flight but flew on for hours after that. However, flight data recorders can shed some light on cockpit behaviour such as positions of pilot seats and doors.

“It will be a long time before they give up and if there is any chance of recovering wreckage they will get to the bottom of what happened, but they may never get to the bottom of why it happened,” Greaves said.

Malaysia’s department of civil aviation will take the lead in a civil investigation to be carried out under United Nations rules, according to two people familiar with the matter.

But its relative lack of experience means it is likely to rely on foreign agencies, with some experts predicting a key role for Australia which is coordinating search efforts.

The United States will be accredited automatically as the country where the Boeing 777 was designed and made, as will Britain which supplied the Rolls-Royce engines. China is expected to participate because of the 152 Chinese passengers. – Reuters, March 25, 2014.

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MH370: Show me the evidence

– Robert Chaen

The Malaysian Insider

March 25, 2014

3 questions that were left unanswered in Prime Minister Najib Razak’s March 24th Press Conference:

1. How can a new radar analysis be conclusive beyond any reasonable doubt without any evidence of a piece of physical wreckage found?

Radar and satellite analysis has so far delivered no physical evidence.

2. What is the visual “proof” of this new analysis?

3. Why is this “new analysis” only available after 17 days after MH370 went missing?

Lessons in PR:

Is Prime Minister Najib Razak jumping the gun again?

PM Najib again did not take questions from the media during the March 24th Press Conference or the March 15th Press Conference. If you are to read a press statement and do not want to face the questions, it’s best to leave it to a press secretary or a minister to read the statement and let that person handle the press.

You can’t appear to show leadership and not take responsibility for your public statements. – March 25, 2014.

* Robert Chaen is a change expert and writes at www.robertchaen.wordpress.com.

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Missing flight MH370: now the plane is ‘lost’, what next?

Jon Swaine and Alan Yuhas

 theguardian

 24 March 2014

Without any confirmed sighting, the mystery of what happened to MH370 is very much unresolved. So what happens next?

The announcement by Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak that MH370 is assumed to have crashed into the southern Indian ocean, with no survivors, had a degree of finality to it. But without any confirmed sighting, let alone recovery of any part of the plane, the mystery of what happened to MH370 is very much unresolved.

What has been found so far?

On Monday, Chinese and Australian search planes spotted several more objects in the sea, about 2,500km (1,550 miles) south-west of Australia, which could be debris from the missing Malaysian jet. An Australian P3 Orion aircraft located two objects: one was described as grey or green and circular; the other orange and rectangular. An Australian navy supply ship, the HMAS Success, could reach the objects within several hours or by Tuesday morning, Malaysia’s defense minister Hishammuddin Hussein said.

A Chinese spotter plane crew, meanwhile, saw two large objects and several smaller ones spread across several square kilometers, state media reported. At least one of the items – a white, square-shaped object – was captured on a camera aboard the plane. A Chinese icebreaker, the Snow Dragon, was headed towards the area and would arrive on Tuesday morning local time.

There have been several earlier potential sightings. On Saturday, images taken on 18 March by a Chinese satellite were released, appearing to show an object measuring 22 metres by 13 metres about 1,550km (960 miles) south-west of Perth. This coincided with an update from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (Amsa) that a wooden pallet and “strapping belts of different lengths” had been spotted by a civil search plane.

Australian prime minister Tony Abbott first announced on Thursday that a “credible” sighting had been made in the Indian ocean, about 2,500km south-west of Perth, based on satellite imagery of two large objects.

What happens next in the search?

Inmarsat, the British firm handling the electronic “pings” said to have been sent from MH370 for hours after its last contact with the ground, said it had now determined that it must have flown south. While the search had already been focused on the southern of two “corridors” indicated by the plane’s final ping as a potential final location, it had still been officially possible that it could have ended up somewhere to the north.

At the request of the Malaysian government, Australia has been overseeing the search for debris in the southerly search sector, from a military base near Perth. It has deployed four military planes, four civilian jets and two navy vessels. China has dispatched seven ships, including three warships and an ice-breaker, along with two military aircraft. Japan has sent two P3 Orion planes, New Zealand one, and the US is using an elite P8 Poseidon navy aircraft.

The US navy is also moving a black box locator into the region, called a Towed Pinger Locator. In a navy statement, Commander Chris Budde said: “If the wreck site is located, we can hear the black box pinger down to a depth of 20,000ft. Basically, this super-sensitive hydrophone … listens for black box pings.”

The boxes are designed to emit signals for at least 30 days following a crash, in accordance with international law. But depending on the strength of the black box’s battery at the time of a crash, they can continue “pinging” for another 15 days or so beyond that.

Nasa, playing a support role, said it would continue to use satellites and cameras on the International Space Station to search for flotsam. China, Australia and private companies are also continuing to scour satellite data for evidence of the plane.

What are they looking for?

Should investigators identify flotsam belonging to MH370, search planes will guide ships to the area so that they can retrieve debris and begin searching on the ocean floor – which in the south Indian ocean slopes from 2,500 metres deep to about 4,000 metres. If the debris field is found, searchers will try “to backtrack that debris to find the ‘X marks the spot’ where the plane actually hit the water, because that would be the center of the haystack,” David Gallo, a director of the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told CNN.

Sonar, special systems and submersibles, including automated underwater vehicles (AUVs) – the deep sea equivalent of drone aircraft – will scan the bottom for wreckage. Though the area still remains too vast for “feasible” undersea search, as France’s Bureau of Investigation and Analysis said in a statement on Monday, investigators will want to find the black box and fuselage. The black box, which comprises both the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, could solve many of the mysteries surrounding MH370, from the plane’s precise course and altitude over time to the status of the autopilot and fuel gauge; the cockpit recorder not only would have recorded the pilots’ voices, but also sounds such as engine disturbances. The condition of the fuselage, meanwhile, could determine whether an explosion took place, and moreover how the plane went down.

Where are they searching?

According to the statement by the Malaysian prime minister, it is now known that the plane’s last known position “was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth”. He added: “This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites.” The prime minister did not elaborate, but his statement suggested that investigators have now narrowed down their search area from the almost three million square miles of sea identified last week as the necessary search zone. However, debris from the plane may since have drifted significantly.

In a statement about the search on Monday, France’s BEA said that while it had been sharing with Malaysian authorities its “experience in the organisation of undersea searches” to find Air France Flight 447, which disappeared in June 2009, the search area remained so vast by the time its officials returned to France that underwater searches were still not possible.

Who will end up writing the final report on what happened?

Amid pressure from the US and China to allow more direct involvement by foreign authorities, Malaysia’s government has so far jealously defended its jurisdiction. Assuming that enough of MH370 is recovered to make an inquiry possible, and the debris is found in international waters, Malaysia is sure to want to oversee any official inquiry and final report into what happened, and why the plane apparently crashed.

The International Civil Aviation Organisation, which is part of the United Nations, has publicly clarified that the state of the airline involved takes the lead in the event of an accident in international waters. As a result, the official report on Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, was written by France’s Bureau of Investigation and Analysis.

Investigators have so far been searching an area far beyond Australia’s maritime boundaries, and it seems unlikely that the debris would drift far enough to alter this. If, however, the plane were to be recovered within Australian waters, the responsibility for an inquiry would pass to Abbott’s government. Malaysia would be invited to appoint a representative to the inquiry team.

In any case, those desperate to know precisely what happened may have to wait some time, however. The official report on Flight 447 was not published until July 2012 – more than a year after the flight data recorders were finally recovered.

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‘Set up PSC to probe MH370 mystery’

Leven Woon| March 25, 2014

Free Malaysia Today

Opposition leaders demand a Parliamentary Select Committee to investigate MH370 disappearance.

KUALA LUMPUR: Pakatan Rakyat leaders today made repeated calls to Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak to be forthcoming with the details over his statement last night on the missing MH370.

DAP parliamentary leader Lim Kit Siang and PAS’ Pokok Sena MP Mahfuz Omar were adamant that the parliament should best deal with MH370 crisis by setting up a bipartisan select committee (PSC).

They made the requests before and after Najib’s visit to Parliament today.

Najib was in the House today to table a motion of condolence to the passengers and crew of MH370, and it was followed by a debate session.

Mahfuz said Najib has not provided any new information in his speech to the House, hence formation of a PSC was necessary.

“The BN’s Backbencher Club chief (Shahrir Samad) has agreed to our idea of setting up a PSC to look into MH370 issue, so now we should just work towards that,” he told FMT.

Yesterday, Najib announced that flight MH370, carrying 239 people on board, had “ended its flight” in the southern part of the Indian Ocean.

Najib said based on the new analysis, it was concluded that MH370 flew along the southern corridor and that its last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth.

In reply to that, Lim said Najib’s remarks yesterday has added more questions.

“There has been no concrete evidence or any piece of wreckage, only satellite image suspected from the plane. For a lot of people it is not a closure

“The government wanted a closure, but this is a closure without a closure,” he told a joint Pakatan press conference today, before Najib’s arrival.

Hishammuddin misled the House

Lim said he felt outraged because Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein who was fielding questions in the House hours before Najib made the announcement at 10pm had deceived the House on the status of the search operations.

“It appeared to us that he already knew what was going on but he told Parliament that search and rescue operations are still going on. It is clearly a lie.

“I can understand that he cannot disclose what is going to be announced by the PM but he should not have misled the House,” he said.

The Gelang Patah MP repeated this during the debate of the motion of condolence in the House later.

Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim said Pakatan would take Najib’s announcement on its face value, but they were cautious as it was not conclusive yet.

“There are questions that are left unanswered, we are saying, do not (stop) sharing new information or discussion with other authorities,” he said.

Meanwhile, Minister in the Prime Minister Department Shahidan Kassim said besides PSC, the government has also received requests to setup a royal commission of inquiry on MH 370.

He said the government would study all options.

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Too soon to launch undersea search for MH370, say French investigators

The Malaysian Insider

March 24, 2014

French investigators today said it was too soon to consider launching undersea searches for the remains of the Malaysia Airlines jet that officials said went down in the Indian Ocean.

France’s BEA accident investigation service, which had sent three investigators to Kuala Lumpur, said the “extremely vast areas (involved) do not make it possible at this stage to consider undersea searches”.

“An undersea phase to localise the aeroplane from flight MH370 could be launched only if the operations under way today enable a more limited search area to be defined than the current search areas,” the BEA said in a statement.

It said its investigators, who had returned from Kuala Lumpur at the weekend, had discussed possible techniques for undersea searches with Malaysian authorities.

In particular they discussed “their experience… acquired during the search between 2009 and 2011 for the wreckage of Rio-Paris flight AF447,” it said.

It took 23 months for BEA investigators to find the wreckage of the Air France flight after it went down in the Atlantic in 2009.

Malaysia today said the MH370, which went missing more than two weeks ago, crashed in the Indian Ocean, but shed no light on the mystery of why it veered from its intended course. – AFP, March 24, 2014.

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Transcript: Malaysian prime minister’s March 24 statement on MH370

Washington Post

March 24 2014

Malaysian Prime Minister Najiv Razak on Monday said that, according to new data, flight MH370 ended up in the Indian Ocean. Here is a transcript of his full statement:

This evening I was briefed by representatives from the UK Air Accident investigation branch, or AAIB. They inform me that Inmarsat, the UK company that provided the satellite data which indicated northern and southern corridors, has been performing further calculations on the data, using a type of analysis never before used in an investigation of this sort.

They have been able to shed more light on MH370’s flight path. Based on their new analysis. Inmarsat and the AAIB have concluded that MH370 flew along the southern corridor and that its last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth.

This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites. It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, Flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean.

We will be holding a press conference tomorrow with further details. In the meantime, we wanted to inform you of this newest development at earliest opportunity.

We share this information out of a commitment to openness and respect for the families — two principles which have guided this investigation.

Malaysia Airlines has already spoken to the family of the passengers and crew to inform them of this development.

For them the past few weeks have been heartbreaking. I know this news must be hard as well.

I urge the media to respect their privacy and allow them the space they need at this very difficult time.”

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US sending undersea drone in hunt for MH370

The Malaysian Insider

March 25, 2014

The United States is sending an undersea Navy drone capable of exploring waters nearly 15,000 feet deep to potentially help search for any sunken wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, the Pentagon said yesterday.

The US disclosure that it was pre-positioning the sonar-equipped Bluefin “autonomous underwater vehicle” in Australia came hours after Malaysia announced that the jetliner which disappeared over two weeks ago had crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.

All 239 people on board were presumed dead, airline officials said.

“We have more than 200 families out there that are grieving right now. They just got some stark news today from the Malaysian government,” said Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby, adding the “the whole world grieves with them”.

The Bluefin drone is just over 5 metres long and weighs 800kg, according to a Navy factsheet. Kirby said it can operate for more than a day at slower speeds.

The decision to pre-position the equipment in Australia comes in addition to the previously announced deployment of a “Towed Pinger Locater”, essentially a high tech piece of sonar equipment which can detect an aircraft’s black box.

Time is critical, since the locator beacons on black boxes – the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder – fade out after about 30 days.

The US military loaned this locator technology to France during its effort to locate the black box from an Air France jetliner that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in June 2009.

If it is used in the search for the Malaysian jetliner, it is expected be towed behind an Australian commercial ship.

Both the undersea Navy drone and the towed pinger locator were flown out of a New York airport yesterday and are expected to arrive in Perth, Australia today, the Pentagon said.

Ten American civilian personnel and uniformed members of the military were also flying to Australia to operate or prepare the equipment, it said.

But in both cases, the Pentagon cautioned that the US technology would only be employed once the search area was significantly narrowed.

“In order for this technology to be useful, you have to have an identified area on the sea bottom that you want to go take a look at,” Kirby said.

“You have to be able to go give it some parameters – and right now we’re just not there.” – Reuters, March 25, 2014.

                This entry was posted on Tuesday, 25 March 2014, 6:47 am and is filed under
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Without plane wreckage, doubts linger over MH370’s Indian Ocean crash

The Malay Mail Online

March 25, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, March 25 ― Malaysia formally announced last night that flight MH370, missing for over 17 days now, crashed into the Indian Ocean but despite confirmation from local and foreign experts, doubt still lingers over how the plane went down, and whether it did at all.

For many, the lack of solid proof ― such as plane wreckage ― still means that the Boeing 777 aircraft ferrying 239 people could have landed somewhere safely and is merely awaiting rescue from search teams.

In Beijing, distraught families lashed out at Malaysia for concluding that the plane had crashed without offering concrete proof..

“Where is the proof?” one woman screamed after attending a Malaysia Airlines (MAS) briefing there, according to CNN.

“You haven’t confirmed the suspected objects to tell us no one survived.”

On UK’s The Telegraph website, a man commented on the daily’s article on how the aircraft was tracked to the Indian Ocean, saying: “Uhm, they haven’t found anything yet, but they speculate based on this new data that the plane went that way, but there is no actual proof that it really did…. Seems like a coverup to me….”

Across Twitter and on TV news stations last night, one key question ― the same question that has been uttered since the crisis began on March 8 ― reared its head again: Where is flight MH370?

“We know nothing about how the plane went down… We know nothing,” aviation specialist Richard Quest said on CNN.

But according to Chris McLaughlin, senior vice president of external affairs at Inmarsat, there is no doubt that MH370 had taken the southern route to the Indian Ocean and there, it ran out of fuel and ended its nearly eight-hour journey.

The British satellite firm was responsible for arriving at the conclusion that MH370 had indeed veered off its flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in the north, and that it had headed westwards before going either in a northerly direction past Thailand and towards Turkmenistan or in a southerly direction towards the Indian Ocean.

Yesterday, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak told an emergency news conference that further calculations by Inmarsat of its satellite data indicated that MH370 had definitely taken the southern route to the vast, wild Indian Ocean, west of Perth.

Speaking on UK’s Sky News last night, McLaughlin said Inmarsat’s scientists used the “doppler effect” to identify the plane’s track marks, which is by studying the change in frequency between the aircraft and the satellite as each one move away from one another.

“And they tested off against a number of other aircraft… known flights… and come to the conclusion that only the southern route is possible,” he said.

McLaughlin said the matching patterns between the flight path and Inmarsat’s satellite data gave a “very, very good fit” to indicate that flight MH370 had been the aircraft that went down in the Indian Ocean.

Unfortunately, he said, the “pings” registered on Inmarsat’s satellite from the aircraft does not offer the plane’s specific position.

“It would be simple to do.. costs less than a dollar and an hour to do it but at the moment, the legislation doesn’t require it,” he said.

He said if all airplanes are required to be fitted with such communication systems, satellites would be able to receive “pings” that would offer details on the plane’s location, rendering it easier to locate them in future incidents.

“What information does it give? It gives an approximate direction of travel, plus or minus 100 miles to a track line,” he said.

MH370, a Boeing 777 aircraft, disappeared off the coast of Kota Baru, Kelantan, less than an hour after take-off at 12.41am on March 8 and has remained missing ever since.

Early investigations saw searchers concentrated on the waters off Malaysia’s east coast — in the South China Sea and between Malaysia and Vietnam — where the plane was last heard from before it lost contact with the Subang Air Traffic Control (ATC).

But local military radar later spotted the plane flying westwards, forcing the authorities to redirect its search efforts to the Straits of Malacca.

More information from foreign military and satellite data then confirmed the plane’s flight to the west of Malaysia, hundreds of miles away from its original flight path to Beijing.

According to Inmarsat on March 14, its satellite registered “routine, automated signals” from the missing Malaysia Airlines aircraft during its flight from Kuala Lumpur.

On March 15 — a week after MH370’s disappearance — Najib told a press conference that Malaysia would call off the search at the South China Sea and Straits of Malacca.

Search troops were then redirected troops to scour two corridors — a northern arc from northern Thailand to the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in central Asia, or a southern one from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean.

On March 20, authorities in Australia announced what they said was a possible breakthrough in the the two-week hunt for MH370.

Satellite images taken by DigitalGlobe, a Colorado satellite imaging company showed at least two objects in the Indian Ocean, south of the search zone for MH370 that Australia was leading.

The largest of the objects found measured 24 metres or 79 feet in length, Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) Emergency Response division general manager John Young said.

Since then, much focus has been given to the search south of the vast Indian Ocean.

Over the weekend and earlier yesterday, several reports of alleged “debris” streamed it from the French, Australian and Chinese — some picked up by search planes, some via satellite images.

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19th Day of missing MH370 drowned by sea of confusion over fate of aircraft and 239 passengers and crew on board

Two events in the past 36 hours highlight the tragic development of the 19-day disaster of the missing MH370 Boeing 737-200 airliner, where a sea of confusion has swept over Malaysians and people worldwide concerned about the fate of the aircraft and the 239 passengers and crew on board, viz:

(1)  The announcement by the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak on Monday, 25th March (17th Day) at 10 pm that “using a type of analysis never before used in an investigation of this sort”, the last position of the missing aircraft was in the middle of the Indian Ocean west of Perth, and that “flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean”. Bottom line – all 239 passengers and crew had perished in the crash with no survivors. However, more than 17 hours later, acting Transport Minister Datuk Hishammuddin Hussein told Parliament yesterday afternoon that the SAR (search-and-rescue) operation would continue and that he would not give up so long as there are still hope for the 239 passengers and crew.

(2)  Flags at government agencies, schools and the private sector in Johor and Perak flown at half-mast as mark of respect for the passengers and crew of MH370; but in Parliament yesterday, the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak said that the Malaysian Government would not declare a state of national mourning until more conclusive evidence was found to identify wreckage belonging to MH370.

This is the reason why families, relatives, friends and well-wishers of the 239 passengers and crew, who after 19 days of excruciating anguish, and who would want to have closure of their ordeal, reacted so emotionally and even hysterically to the Prime Minister’s announcement of a finality to the missing MH370 of having been lost in the southern Indian Ocean with no survivors – when it is “a closure without a closure” as no  piece of wreckage of the aircraft has yet been sighted.

Is the SAR operation to Hishammuddin still “search-and-rescue” or is it now standing for “search-and-recovery” without any expectation of finding anyone aboard the MH370 alive?

As I said in Parliament on Monday night, there were a thousand-and-one questions about the 17-day MH370 disaster, from why no immediate follow-up action had been taken when the MH370 had disappeared from both the civil and military radar in the first hour of the missing aircraft on March 8, why more than a week had been lost in the SAR in South China Sea when radar information had pointed to the northern and southern corridors, and the international perception that the Malaysian authorities had not been transparent and forthright about the whole tragedy.

There had been even more questions after the Prime Minister’s announcement that the Boeing 777 had perished in southern Indian Ocean.

Anwers to all these questions, confusions and controversies need be given, not only to next-of-kin of the affected passengers and crew and to all Malaysians, but also to the international society.

This is why the establishment of a Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370 headed by an Opposition MP is imperative to restore Malaysia’s international image and reputation,  for it will be a clear message to Malaysians and the world that the Malaysian authorities have nothing to hide and are prepared for the whole truth to be investigated and revealed about the events surrounding the MH370 disaster.

There should not be any delay in the establishment of the Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370.

(Media Statement in Parliament on Wednesday March 26 2014)

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Election 2013 broke every rule in the book, Bersih panel finds

By Pathma Subramaniam

The Malay Mail Online

March 25, 2014

SUBANG JAYA, MARCH 25 — Every single principle governing the running of a free and fair election was breached during last year’s May 5 federal polls, Bersih’s People’s Tribunal concluded in its findings released today.

Panel member former United Nations Special Representative and constitutional law expert Yash Pal Ghai said Election 2013 had fallen short of every aspect of democracy and violated the standard of free and fair elections.

He agreed that the election had been free to some extent because those who were registered voters were not blocked from casting their ballots but said this freedom was more in a “narrow sense” of the word.

During Election 2013, the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) retained federal power with 133 seats to Pakatan Rakyat’s (PR) 89 seats despite losing the popular vote contest to the federal opposition, garnering just 49 per cent of the total votes cast.

“We have found ourselves compelled to reach a conclusion that there were multiple failings in the way GE13 was conducted and that virtually every tenet of free election was violated at some place and at some time,” said Yash Pal, who headed the tribunal.

“There were so many breaches of law, disregard of procedures that we have to conclude that elections were not free and fair,” he said, reading out the verdict and recommendation of the five-person panel.

The recommendations, which included proposed amendments to the constitutions on electoral reforms, were concluded after the panel considered sworn statements from 75 witnesses.

Of the 75, 49 appeared personally during public hearings from September 18 to 21 last year.

The panel also proposed reduce the voting eligibility age from 21 to 18 years, and called for equal voting access for Malaysians living abroad.

Yash Pal said the various complaints from individuals who never registered as voters and those who were transferred out of their voting districts, indicate a “deliberate act of fraud”.

“Registering one or two people in the wrong constituency might be carelessness; registering those who have not sought registration is suspicious,” said Yash Pal, adding that it is hard to exonerate the Election Commission (EC) of collusion as identification cards are required upon registration.

Noting the difficulty in ensuring an electoral roll is completely void of discrepancies, another panel member, lawyer Datuk Azzat Kamaluddin, said political parties should establish a specific unit to check the voter registry.

This, he pointed out, is to prevent from a complainant running into legal constraints when it comes to challenging discrepancies in the roll. The Election Act 1958 provides no legal avenue to those who want to challenge a gazetted electoral roll.

On the first-past-the-post electoral system practiced by Malaysia, Yash Pal labelled it questionable as it relies heavily on the fairness of delineated electoral boundaries, which has been repeatedly questioned by federal opposition lawmakers and activists here.

“Individual voters will not be equally represented if they are in constituencies with significantly different number of voters and the actual outcome of overall results can severely be affected by moving boundaries.

“A witness gave evidence that, on average, a vote for BN was worth 1.6 times a vote for PR, because PR-leaning constituencies are on average larger,” he said, adding that it does not reflect “the principle of one person, one vote, one value”.

In order to reduce the glaring ratio, the panel proposed amendments to laws defining the criteria on the size of urban and rural constituencies, crucial to the delimitation process.

The Electoral Integrity Project (EIP), a study by University of Sydney and Harvard University, recently showed Malaysia’s electoral demarcations as the worst of 66 countries in terms of fairness and integrity of its electoral boundaries.

Today, the Bersih panel mooted the idea of a Boundaries Commission, to avoid burdening the EC on the matter of drawing boundaries.

Former Indonesian Election Commission deputy chairman Ramlan Surbakti Ramlan Surbakti suggested that the commission could be set up using the similar mechanisms used in Indonesia to select its EC.

According to him, anyone capable is allowed to apply to sit on the EC but the applicants are vetted by a committee formed by the Indonesian president and the names are then submitted to parliament for further scrutiny.

Apart from these recommendations, the panel also proposed a revamp of the EC members’ appointment process, equal access to the media and transparency on political funding.

The panel also suggested stricter regulations enforced on the caretaker government to stave off “promises designed to influence outcome of the elections”.

Bersih 2.0 chairperson Maria Chin Abdullah said the polls watchdog has requested for an appointment with Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak to deliver the report on the findings.

                This entry was posted on Wednesday, 26 March 2014, 2:45 pm and is filed under
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How satellites tracked down flight MH370 – but why we still can’t find the plane

By Sebastian Anthony

ExtremeTech

March 25, 2014

Yesterday morning, the Malaysian prime minister confirmed that Malaysia Airlines flight 370 crashed in the south Indian Ocean, killing all 239 people on board. Curiously, though, despite the PM’s confidence, this conclusion is based entirely on second-hand information provided by UK satellite company Inmarsat. There is still no sign of debris from MH370, and investigators still have absolutely no idea what happened after the final “All right, good night” message from the cockpit. If you’ve been following the news, you probably have two questions: How did Inmarsat narrow down MH370′s location from two very broad swaths across central Asia and the Indian Ocean, and furthermore, if we know where the plane crashed into the ocean, why haven’t we found it yet?

How Inmarsat tracked down flight MH370

After flight MH370′s communication systems were disabled (it’s still believed that they were disabled manually by the pilots, but we don’t know why), the only contact made by the plane was a series of pings to Inmarsat 4-F1, a communications satellite that orbits about 22,000 miles above the Indian Ocean.

The initial Inmarsat report, which placed MH370 along two possible arcs, was based on a fairly rudimentary analysis of ping latency. Inmarsat 4-F1 sits almost perfectly stationary above the equator, at 64 degrees east longitude. By calculating the latency of MH370′s hourly satellite pings, Inmarsat could work out how far away the plane was from the satellite — but it couldn’t say whether the plane went north or south.

To work out which direction was taken by flight MH370, Inmarsat, working with the UK’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), says it used some clever analysis of the Doppler effect. The Doppler effect describes the change in frequency (the Doppler shift) as a sound/light/radio source travels towards the listener, and then again as it moves away. The most common example is the change in frequency of a police or fire truck siren as it passes you. Radio waves, such as the pings transmitted by flight MH370, are also subject to the Doppler effect.

Basically, Inmarsat 4-F1′s longitude wobbles slightly during its orbit. This wobble, if you know what you’re looking for, creates enough variation in the Doppler shift that objects moving and north and south have slightly different frequencies. (If it didn’t wobble, the Doppler shift would be identical for both routes.) Inmarsat says that it looked at the satellite pings of other flights that have taken similar paths, and confirmed that the Doppler shift measurements for MH370′s pings show an “extraordinary matching” for the southern projected arc over the Indian Ocean. ”By yesterday [we] were able to definitively say that the plane had undoubtedly taken the southern route,” said Inmarsat’s Chris McLaughlin.

MH370, Australian satellite imagery of possible plane debris

So, where is flight MH370?

At this point, if we assume that Inmarsat knows what it’s doing, we know with some certainty that flight MH370′s last satellite ping originated from around 2,500 kilometers (1,500 miles) off the west coast of Australia. Because we know how much fuel the Boeing 777 was carrying, we know that it probably ran out of fuel sometime after that last ping, crashing into the Indian Ocean. Assuming the plane was flying at around 450 knots (517 mph, 833 kph), the potential crash zone is huge.

The southern Indian Ocean is one of the most inhospitable and remote places on Earth. Its distance from major air and navy bases make it one of the worst possible places to carry out a search and rescue mission. Even if satellite imagery purports to show debris from flight 370, waves, weather, and ocean currents mean that the debris will be constantly moving. ”We’re not searching for a needle in a haystack,” said Mark Binskin, vice chief of the Australian Defence Force. “We’re still trying to define where the haystack is.”

Multiple nations are sending search-and-rescue aircraft and ships to the region to look for flight 370, and the US is deploying its Towed Pinger Locator — a device that can locate black boxes up to a depth of 20,000 feet (6,100 meters). The flight data recorder (FDR) or cockpit voice recorder (CVR) generally only have enough battery power to ping for a month or two, so time is of the essence.

What happened to flight MH370?

So, the million dollar question remains: What series of events led to Malaysia Airlines flight 370 ending up in the Indian Ocean?

There appear to be two likely options. The most pertinent point still seems to be that the plane’s ACARS (automated reporting system) was manually disabled. This would indicate that the plane was either hijacked, or that the ACARS had to be disabled for some other reason (a fire). It’s possible that there was some kind of disaster on-board, killing or disabling everyone, and the plane continued on auto-pilot until it ran out of fuel. It’s also possible that the plane was hijacked (perhaps by a passenger or one of the pilots), and they continued to fly the plane on some kind of suicide mission.

Neither of these explanations quite ring true, but really, given the dearth of information, it’s the best that we can do. At this point though, we should be terrified of another eventuality: Given where the plane crashed, we may never find the flight data recorder (FDR) or cockpit voice recorder (CVR) — theorizing about the fate of flight 370 might be all we can ever do.

                This entry was posted on Wednesday, 26 March 2014, 7:31 am and is filed under
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