Kajang polls reflect positively on Pakatan

By
Ong Kian Ming
 | 7:50AM Mar 26, 2014

Malaysiakini

ANALYSIS To the casual political observer, two facts from the recent Kajang by-election would have stood out.

Firstly, the turnout decreased from 88 percent in GE13 to 72 percent. Secondly, the majority of victory decreased from 6,824 in GE13 to 5,379 – a drop of 1,445 votes.

On the surface, these results may seem like a negative reflection on Pakatan Rakyat’s and specifically PKR’s campaign as part of the ‘Kajang Move’. But a more careful analysis of the results reveals important findings that are positive for Pakatan, moving forward.

Pakatan increased its popular vote from 56.8 percent to 59.7 percent, a 2.9 percent increase. While this increase may not seem significant, one has to take into account that the lower turnout most likely decreased Pakatan’s popular vote.

Most of those who did not vote for a variety of reasons – did not return from outstation, it was the start of the school holidays, and thought that the outcome was already decided – would have been Pakatan voters, especially the younger voters whose turnout decreased more than the older voters (more on this later).

Secondly, Pakatan won in 14 out of 16 polling stations (not including postal and early votes) in the by-election compared with 12 out of 16 polling stations in GE13.

In Sungai Sekamat, a 78 percent Malay polling station, Pakatan turned a 239-vote deficit into a 45-vote majority. In Taman Delima, a 74 percent Malay polling station, Pakatan turned a 123-vote deficit into a three-vote majority.

Even in the remaining two polling stations which Pakatan lost – Sungai Kantan and Batu 10 Cheras – the deficit was reduced from 420 to 225 and from 157 to 151 respectively (See table below).

Secondly, Pakatan managed to increase its share of Malay votes from 35 percent in GE13 to 46 percent in the by-election.

This 11 percent increase is no mean feat, considering the continued attempts to perpetuate a climate of religious and racial intolerance by certain groups in Malaysia such as Perkasa, as well those who sacrificed a chicken and gave a reward of RM1,200 to anyone who slapped Teresa Kok, MP for Seputeh, over her ‘Onederful Malaysia’ YouTube video.

While Pakatan’s support among the Chinese did fall from 80 percent to 75 percent, this can largely be explained in terms of the lower turnout, especially among younger and likely pro-Pakatan supporters. As long as BN cannot overcome its negative image among younger Chinese voters, its deficit among this group of voters is likely to remain significant.

The Indian vote is harder to estimate. Given the small percentage of Indian voters, it is likely that Pakatan’s support among the Indians increased slightly from 60 percent to 65 percent, looking at the results from the polling stations with more than 15 percent Indian voters.

Greater support from young voters

Thirdly, and perhaps more importantly, is the increase in Pakatan’s support among the youth.

For the unfamiliar, voters cast their votes according to polling streams or ‘saluran’. They are arranged according to age, with the older voters in saluran 1 and the younger voters in the later saluran.

The average vote won by Pakatan in the final polling stream or saluran for each polling station increased by seven percent, from 59 percent in GE13 to 66 percent. In comparison, the average vote won by Pakatan in the first polling stream or saluran – the saluran with the oldest voters – for each polling station remained the same at 49 percent.

What this means is that the increase in the support for Pakatan from 57 percent in GE13 to 60 percent in the by-election came mostly from the younger voters.

At the same time, the turnout rate among the youth saluran fell from 87 percent to 69 percent, an 18 percent fall. In comparison, the turnout rate among the oldest voters – the first saluran – fell from 83 percent to 73 percent, only a 10 percent fall. What this means is that if the turnout rate among the younger voters had fallen by a smaller amount, Pakatan’s support as well as majority would have increased.

This is significant because the youth vote – the final polling stream – has always been the most liable to swing to either side. This is why BN poured so much resources into youth-related programmes and branding activities such as 1M4U and the 1Malaysia Youth Fund.

If the Kajang by-election is a bellwether for a larger trend nationwide, then it heralds well for Pakatan.

The older voters who are more likely to be BN diehard supporters are slowly but surely being replaced by younger voters whose political allegiance is not certain.

They will be more influenced by issues which will hurt BN and help Pakatan – cost of living increases especially with the introduction of the goods and services tax (GST), high profile corruption cases, abuses of power, Bersih and electoral reform, environmental concerns, just to name a few.

They are also more likely to be swayed by social media that will compensate for the effects of BR1M (Bantuan Rakyat 1Malaysia) cash handouts.

Challenges for Pakatan remain

The challenges for Pakatan to increase its vote share are still significant. Pakatan has to find ways to motivate younger people to register and to turn out to vote. Pakatan has to minimise its infighting so as to not turn off potential supporters.

It has to continue to showcase Penang and Selangor as models of governance in contrast to what BN is doing in Putrajaya. Pakatan has to increase its effectiveness as a check and balance on the BN government at the federal level and in the BN governed states. It must also strengthen its leadership at the local level, especially in the marginal seats and states.

This work is ongoing. And while the Kajang by-elections may not have been as decisive of a victory as Pakatan would have wanted, the underlying trends do point positively for Pakatan moving forward towards the next general election.

(Only data from 14 out of 16 polling stations were used because two polling stations only had two polling streams or saluran.)

____

ONG KIAN MING is MP for Serdang. He can be reached at
[email protected]
.

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Lessons from MH370: How can we never lose a plane again?

Alexander Trowbridge

CBS News

March 25, 2014

The heart-wrenching and costly search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 continues, even after Malaysian officials announced satellite evidence that the vessel plunged into the Indian Ocean with no survivors. What are the lessons from the tragedy? What can airlines and manufacturers do to prevent another prolonged and painful saga?

Mary Kirby, the founder and editor of the aviation news company Runway Girl Network says the key is connectivity.

“Nothing is ever going to be the same in aviation,” Kirby said in an interview with CBS News. “This is a pivotal moment, a watershed moment in the aviation industry where we are going to understand why it’s so important for connectivity to be core.”

By connectivity, she means the ability for those aboard a plane to send and receive information to the world outside the flight. For passengers, it’s the convenience of, say, logging onto the internet. For pilots, it’s essential cockpit communications. Kirby argues that one of basic steps to preventing another incident like MH370, in which the aircraft’s transponder and communication equipment were disabled, is making sure planes can’t disconnect in the first place.

“We need to not have the ability to simply switch off a transponder, and not know where an aircraft is at,” Kirby said. “If you allow the switch off of the transponder there needs to be an automatic backup.”

That automatic back-up would force the transponder to “click back on” in the event that the system is shut down manually, or in instances such as a fire on board. “Everyone I’ve been talking to in the last two weeks, they say that’s the nearest term, cheapest way of sorting it out.”

The second lesson: “We need to move towards a global, air-traffic control service. Space-based. When I say that, that’s satellite-supported that covers the entire globe including the [North and South] poles.”

This system is coming soon, Kirby says, with a network of satellites beginning to launch next year, with the capability to “see where every aircraft is in the world.” But full rollout, Kirby warns, is still a few years away.

In the shorter term, there are ideas currently being kicked around that involve utilizing the broadband capabilities, or “big connectivity pipes” many airlines are introducing to their fleets for passenger use.

“Those pipes haven’t been approved for what’s called ‘safety services,’ Kirby said.

Even still industry experts are looking at those capabilities, and their cost, and asking questions: “Is there any way we could use this pipe creatively to be able to transmit critical information to the ground, essentially piggyback off of the broadband pipe that is now supporting connectivity to passengers?”

Then there’s the question of streaming black-box data, an idea that gained traction in the wake of Air France 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 and whose black boxes were not recovered for two years.

“The reality is that it’s very costly to stream black box data in real time,” Kirby said. “Now there are some providers that are suggesting that you don’t need to stream in real time. You don’t need to stream in entirety. You could have bursts of data coming from the flight data recorder.”

Each lesson learned from MH370, and each solution proposed, will cost money. But, Kirby argues, when it comes to potentially survivable crashes in remote areas, the ability to locate the plane could mean saving lives.

“That’s what I try to remind people of whenever they bring up this cost issue,” Kirby said. “We’re talking about human lives here.”

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Malaysia Says Missing Plane Sent One Last Partial Signal

By KEITH BRADSHER, EDWARD WONG and THOMAS FULLER

New York Times

MARCH 25, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — The Malaysian authorities released new details on Tuesday to buttress their conclusion that Flight 370 must have ended in a crash in a remote part of the Indian Ocean.

But with no physical evidence of the plane’s fate yet found, and the search suspended for a day because of treacherous weather, distraught relatives and friends of passengers mounted an angry protest in Beijing, breaking through police lines and marching to the Malaysian Embassy demanding more answers.

Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia’s defense minister and acting transportation minister, said at a news conference near Kuala Lumpur that the plane appeared to have sent one more partial signal eight minutes after the last of the previously disclosed electronic “handshakes” between the plane and a satellite, which engineers have analyzed to infer the plane’s probable path after it disappeared from radar screens early on March 8. Mr. Hishammuddin called the newly reported signal a “partial handshake.”

Hishamuddin Hussein, Malaysia’s defense minister, said satellite data analysis has led officials to concentrate the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean.

“At this time, this transmission is not understood, and is subject to further ongoing work,” he said.

The last full handshake was recorded at 8:11 a.m., more than seven hours after the plane took off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing with 227 passengers and 12 crew members.

The next satellite signal from the aircraft would have been due by 9:15 a.m., but it never came. Mr. Hishammuddin referred delicately to the likelihood that signals stopped because the plane ran out of fuel and crashed, saying that the timing “is consistent with the maximum endurance of the aircraft.”

His office later released additional technical details about the way the satellite signals had been analyzed and about how those calculations had narrowed down the search area.

None of this appeared to have diminished the mistrust felt by the relatives and friends of Chinese citizens who were on Flight 370, who have been bitterly critical of Malaysia’s handling of the search. A group of them protested outside the Malaysian Embassy in Beijing at midday Tuesday, demanding that officials tell them the full truth about the flight.

The group shoved past police officers as it left its hotel and arrived at the embassy on foot about 40 minutes later. The street was crowded with journalists, police officers and people trying to reach some of the other embassies on the street. A line of paramilitary police officers blocked journalists from following the marchers up the road.

The group presented a Malaysian diplomat with a scathing statement saying that the families would regard Malaysian leaders and the state-controlled operator of the flight, Malaysia Airlines, to be “murderers” if it emerged that missteps had led to the deaths of their loved ones.

Later in the afternoon at the hotel where the families were staying, a man who said that he represented them and that his surname was Wang asserted that the Malaysian government had not given any evidence to back its conclusion that the plane had crashed at sea with no survivors. He said most of the families did not believe that account.

The Malaysian ambassador to China arrived at the hotel after 3 p.m. and spoke privately to the relatives and friends gathered in the hotel ballroom. People in the room said the anger and frustration were palpable.

The Chinese government continued to express skepticism as well. “We are highly concerned with Malaysia’s conclusion, and have demanded full information and the evidence that supports the conclusion,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, said at a news conference.

In Kuala Lumpur, Mr. Hishammuddin bristled when a succession of Chinese journalists questioned him about delays in finding the missing jetliner. “Can I also remind you that we received satellite data from China, regarding sightings in the South China Sea, which made us distract ourselves from the search and rescue to search areas that had already been searched?” he said.

His office released calculations from Inmarsat, a British satellite communications company, based on the handshake signals. Those calculations pointed to an area of the southern Indian Ocean where the plane must have wound up, assuming it was flying at a ground speed between 400 and 450 knots, or about 460 to 520 miles per hour. That narrowed the search area down to one-fifth of its peak size, though it is still vast — about 470,000 square nautical miles, greater than the area of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington State combined.

Surveillance aircraft have been trying to sweep about 20,000 square nautical miles of ocean a day, though they could not do so on Tuesday because of a storm. The Australian Maritime Safety Authority said the search would resume on Wednesday.

“We are not searching for a needle in a haystack; we are still trying to define where the haystack is,” Air Marshal Mark Binskin, the deputy chief of the Australian military, told reporters at Pearce Air Force Base near Perth, Australia, where the aircraft are based.

David Johnston, Australia’s defense minister, said the search area was “probably one of the most remote parts of the planet” and one that “has shipwrecked many sailors.” He said an Australian ship that was hunting for possible floating debris had to move 75 miles off its station on Tuesday because of the weather.

Mr. Johnston called the maritime search, involving ships and aircraft from Australia, New Zealand, China, South Korea, Japan, the United States and other nations, “one of the largest efforts you’ll ever see.” But none of the vessels had yet recovered any of the large floating objects sighted by planes or satellites, suggesting that the plane could be in an altogether different area.

An American submersible craft capable of finding objects on the sea floor was being flown to Perth on Tuesday, but Rear Adm. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, said it would be useful only once the general location of the plane’s wreckage was known.

“It’s being sent there to be ready, should there be a need,” Admiral Kirby said. “And right now, there’s no need. We do not have a debris field.”

As for the Malaysian police inquiry into the plane’s disappearance, Khalid bin Abu Bakar, the forces’ inspector general, declined to discuss details on Tuesday, saying, “That would jeopardize the ongoing investigations.”

In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Airlines said that though the investigation had not found the plane or the reason it vanished, relatives of those on board had to let go of any hope for a miracle.

“We must accept the painful reality that the aircraft is now lost, and that none of the passengers or crew on board survived,” said Mohamed Nor Yusof, the chairman of Malaysia Airlines. He said the airline’s primary responsibility now was caring for the grieving families.

Keith Bradsher reported from Kuala Lumpur; Edward Wong from Beijing; and Thomas Fuller from Pearce Air Force Base, Australia. Michelle Innis contributed reporting from Sydney, Australia.

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Malaysia’s credibility at stake in search for missing flight MH370, says report

The Malaysian Insider

March 26, 2014

Putrajaya’s handling of search efforts for flight MH370 has set the country on a long road to repair its reputation, The Wall Street Journal said, following a slew of criticism over disorganised search efforts besides the conflicting and opaque information released since the aircraft disappeared on March 8.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) said that complaints have stung a government seldom used to such global scrutiny, and this week, authorities appeared to seek a new course.

The business daily cited Monday night’s press conference where Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak had explained how foreign experts had concluded from new satellite data analysis that the plane had gone down in a remote portion of the southern Indian Ocean.

WSJ said that Najib’s statement was uncharacteristically forthright, and the new information was released unusually fast – and the backlash was just as intense.

A source familiar with the matter told WSJ that Najib had dismissed the Malaysian army’s warnings that the country shouldn’t reveal sensitive military data to speed up the search, and overruled armed forces chief General Zulkefli Zin, who had opposed the release of the data.

“He (Najib) was quite adamant. He said this absolutely had to be done,” the source was quoted as saying.

Mike Smith, a crisis management expert at Australia-based Inside Public Relations Pty Ltd, told WSJ that Malaysia “swung the pendulum back too far the other way”.

“Malaysia needs to find some equilibrium and control, but that’s not going to happen overnight,” he said.

Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein had said at yesterday’s press conference that Monday’s announcement was because of Putrajaya’s “commitment to openness and respect for the relatives, two principles which have guided us in our investigations”.

He also said that despite new satellite analysis, physical evidence such as debris would be a more acceptable reason for families to come to terms with the claim that flight MH370 had indeed ended up in the Indian Ocean.

“Until we know that, it is very difficult to have closure for the families,” he had said.

Reuters said today that the prolonged and so far fruitless search and investigation have taken a toll, with dozens of distraught relatives of Chinese passengers clashing with police outside the Malaysian embassy in Beijing yesterday, accusing Malaysia of “delays and deception”.

The news agency added that Malaysia’s confused initial response to the plane’s disappearance and a perception of poor communications has enraged many relatives of the  153 Chinese passengers and has strained ties between Beijing and Kuala Lumpur.

The Economist earlier, in an editorial, also criticised Malaysia’s handling of the search and said the authorities had provided information “in dribs and drabs, much of it confusing, even contradictory”.

The newsweekly said: “Until parts of the plane are examined, how it came to grief will remain unknown. In the meantime, for the grieving relatives, there is little comfort to be taken from the fact that such mysteries should soon be a thing of the past.”

According to WSJ, some experts suggested that Malaysia and its national airline might still be able to recover from the fallout of the search for flight MH370 if it regains control of the information flow.

“But Malaysia is still in a bad place,” Smith, the crisis-management expert, was quoted as saying.

“They’ll be scrutinised no matter what they do.” – March 26, 2014.

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MH370 spent 23 minutes above maximum altitude, may have caused hypoxia, says expert

The Malaysian Insider

March 26, 2014

As investigators continue to analyse satellite data in the hope of finding answers on what happened to Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, an industry expert said the plane spent 23 minutes at up to 45,000 feet – way above its maximum altitude – and rendered everyone unconscious from the lack of oxygen, said a report in British tabloid Daily Mail.

The plane’s maximum service ceiling is 43,100 feet, but military radar had tracked the aircraft flying at between 43,000 feet and 45,000 feet shortly after the last communication from its cockpit.

“It was tracked flying at this altitude for 23 minutes before descending. Oxygen would have run out in 12 minutes (in a depressurised cabin), rendering the passengers unconscious,” said the source.

An expert said although the 777-200ER Boeing aircraft has a maximum service ceiling of 43,000 feet, it can probably fly safely at even greater heights.

But at that altitude, where the atmosphere drastically thins, it would take mere minutes if not seconds for hypoxia – a lack of oxygen – to set in, said the Daily Mail report.

Oxygen masks would have dropped down, but these only supply between five and 10 minutes of gas.

Andrew Rae, Professor of Experimental and Applied Aerodynamics at the University of the Highlands and Islands, told Daily Mail: “The venting of cabin pressure would be a problem at 10,000 feet, 30,000 feet or 43,000 feet, but the extra height might perhaps make things happen more quickly.

“The fact that the aircraft flew at 43,000ft should not itself trigger the emergency cabin oxygen supply.”

The air used for pressurising the cabin comes through the engine and wing, and is filtered before it enters the passenger environment.

The pressurisation system may need to be turned off if the aircraft enters dirty air, but investigators are looking at the possibility that it was disabled for sinister reasons, said the Daily Mail report.

Meanwhile Chris Goodfellow, a Canadian pilot with 20 years’ experience, said in a post on Google Plus that he believed a fire broke out aboard the plane.

In his post, which also appeared on Reddit and was widely reported, he said that the plane’s pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was doing exactly what he needed to do in an emergency – try to land the plane at the nearest airport.

In this case, Goodfellow said, that was a 13,000 foot strip on the island of Palau Langkawi, and that is directly where the aircraft was heading when it was last tracked.

He believed that the crew were overcome by smoke and the aircraft flew as a “ghost plane” for hours past the chosen airport before finally crashing into the Indian Ocean near the Maldives.

“We old pilots were always drilled to always know the closest airport of safe harbour while in cruise. Always,” Goodfellow had said. “Instinctively when I saw that left turn with a direct heading I knew he was heading for an airport.”

He said he immediately brought up Google Earth and discovered the runway, which had fewer obstacles blocking the plane’s approach than if Zaharie had attempted to return to Kuala Lumpur.

“This pilot did all the right things. He was confronted by some major event aboard that made him make that immediate turn back to the closest safe airport,” he said.

Retired pilot Eric Moody – who was in charge of the infamous 1982 British Airways Flight 9 which suffered engine failure when he flew through a volcanic ash cloud – said if it was a fire, the pilot would have wanted to get the plane on the ground immediately, instead of flying for another seven hours.

He also said it appeared that the communications were intentionally switched off and this would not have happened in an emergency.

In 1982, all four engines on the British Airways Flight 9 he was piloting from London to Auckland, New Zealand, failed when he flew through a volcanic ash cloud.

The cloud came from an eruption of Mount Galunggung in West Java, Indonesia.

Moody had to take emergency action and saved all 248 passengers and 15 crew on board by dropping from 37,000ft to 12,000ft to restart the engines.

Eventually, the flight made an emergency landing at the Halim Perdanakusuma Airport in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Even though he was behind the controls, he still didn’t find out the full account of what happened until declassified files were released 11 years later.

Moody, who lives in Chilworth near Southampton, Hants, believes the public have not been told the full story.

“What I will say is that some agency knows something more than what they are letting on and I have experience in this.

“It took 11 years to find out how Boeing was able to ring a ground engineer in Jakarta who got to us after about 15 to 20 minutes after landing.

“A phone call was made just when my engines started going wrong. It meant they knew what was going on as they were monitoring us on satellites.

“Satellite monitoring stations by Alice Springs and Guam were following us as we found out from declassified files years later.

“As such there is so much unknown right now but someone will know more and it could be any country.

“We don’t know what they’re watching,” the Daily Mail report quoted him as saying.

Flight MH370 disappeared from the radar on March 8 and despite an intensive multinational hunt, no sign of it has been found.

Satellite data analysis by Britain’s Inmarsat confirmed to Malaysian authorities that the plane had crashed in the Indian Ocean, as announced by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak on Monday night.

It was revealed yesterday that a final electronic signal from the plane was received at 8.19am (Malaysian time) on March 8.

“There is evidence of a partial handshake between the aircraft and ground station at 0019 UTC (GMT),” Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein told the press yesterday.

“At this time, this transmission is not understood and is subject to further ongoing work,” he had said, adding that unless debris is found, there could be no closure for the affected families. – March 26, 2014.

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Satellite hunters track jet’s flight

By Thomas Hale and Daniel Thomas

Financial Times

24th March 2014

Deep in the heart of Inmarsat’s London headquarters, just off Silicon Roundabout, screens illuminate the operations of 10 satellites, each 22,000 miles above the earth in geostationary orbit.

These screens provided the clues that helped unravel the mystery of where flight MH370 came down. They are inundated with daily updates – represented by pink and green lights – that were used by the company’s scientists and engineers to deduce a probable location for the crash.

Inmarsat moved into its present location in 1993, long before the area became synonymous with 21st century technological innovation.

Although technology is at its core, the origins of Inmarsat – short for International Maritime Satellite Organisation – differ greatly from the entrepreneurial tech start-ups that have come to dominate the neighbourhood’s offices and bars.

The organisation was set up as a non-profit initiative in 1979 at the behest of the International Maritime Organisation. It initially helped ships stay in contact with shore but its coverage soon became relevant to aircraft.

As they tried to track down MH370, scientists working for Inmarsat were initially confronted with a single “ping” identifying a location for the missing aircraft. After discovering several pings, however, they were able to discern a possible north-south route.

“We approached [the task of finding MH370] with the traditional view of a scientist: how can we solve this problem?” said Chris McLaughlin, senior vice-president of external affairs. “Our ‘eureka’ moment was realising there was more than one ping.”

The company was able to build up a hypothesis about where the aircraft might have ended up.

“By a process of peer review, we put out this potential data treatment to members of the UK space industry.

“We also worked with Boeing to see how the planes would operate and [on Sunday] we handed our additional thinking to the Malaysian investigation,” he said.

Inmarsat is one of the more overlooked British technology groups, in part owing to the unpopularity of the satellite sector among investors.

Rival communications groups in cable and telecoms, by contrast, have rallied strongly as the growth of mobile data and television content has rapidly increased thanks to the proliferation of smartphones.

The company provides voice and high-speed mobile data to governments and companies operating on land, sea or in the air, with long-term contracts to provide connectivity to ships and aircraft in civil and military use. The US government is a customer.

Inmarsat said this month the first of three satellites in its $1.6bn Global Xpress platform had passed initial testing. All three satellites will be fully deployed by the end of 2014, offering the world’s first seamless, global, high-quality mobile broadband service.

The company has invested heavily in satellites and is coming to the end of a costly rollout of “birds” that have laden it with debt.

The group’s relative obscurity is, perhaps, all the more surprising given the space-age nature of its business, with satellite launches that will benefit from all-electric propulsion systems and so-called “SpaceX” – a system of reusing space vehicles.

Satellites are often crucial in emergency situations when conventional communications can fail, or in this case where there is no coverage because of the height and remote location of the jet. Typical mobile communications cannot reach the height of most aircraft.

In March 2011, Iridium, a satellite phone communications provider, claimed to be crucial in linking services after the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. In the first 72 hours, Iridium voice and data traffic increased 700 per cent in the region.

Similarly, satellite communications were used extensively in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

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Undersea volcanoes could complicate MH370 wreckage retrieval, geologist warns

The Malaysian Insider

March 26, 2014

The recovery of MH370 and its black box is going to be an extremely difficult task as geologists believe the debris from the Malaysian Airlines aircraft could be lying above a giant undersea chain of volcanoes whose complex terrain has barely been charted, reported The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH).

To make matters worse, the only Australian vessel capable of charting depths of 3,000 metres, the RV Southern Surveyor, had been decommissioned in December, the daily said.

Robin Beaman, a marine geologist from James Cook University, told SMH that so little of the southern Indian Ocean sea floor, including the search zone, had been mapped in detail that any attempt to retrieve the wreckage would require extensive 3D mapping, possibly by ships with multibeam echo sounders.

“It’s bad timing really. Australia has no capability of mapping these depths,” he was quoted by SMH as saying.

Multibeam echo sounders send out sound pulses in the shape of a fan, returning depths of the sea floor directly under the ship and on either side, a pattern known as a swath.

Beaman said at the moment, the RV Southern Surveyor’s replacement in Singapore waiting to undergo sea trials.

He told SMH that the first piece of debris spotted by DigitalGlobe satellites on March 16 was located about 60 kilometres southwest of the active zone of the Southeast Indian Ridge, a chain of underwater volcanoes that ran from the southwest of Australia to below New Zealand.

Another object sighted by a Chinese aircraft was about 180 kilometres southwest of the ridge, while the suspected debris picked up by an Australian aircraft on Monday was spotted about 200 kilometres to the northeast of the ridge, he said.

“On the flanks of the ridge, which is very likely where any crash zone would be, there has been virtually no mapping apart from the odd strip,” he told SMH.

As such, he said it would be difficult to spot any debris without good charts and remote-operated underwater vessels due to the complex terrain of the ridgeline which has peaks tens of metres tall.

The area was last mapped almost 20 years ago using outdated technology.

These surveys charted several areas about 70 kilometres wide and research ships gathered detail on the sea floor as they sailed from one port to another, but the paths they charted were only about 10 kilometres to 20 kilometres wide, the SMH report said.

“It’ll be very unlikely that debris has fallen in those little 10 to 20-kilometre wide zones,” Beaman said.

The search for MH370 is now focused on the retrieval of the plane’s wreckage and black box to help investigators unravel the mystery of the plane’s disappearance, now entering day 19.

Satellite data analysis  by Britain’s Inmarsat confirmed to Malaysian authorities that the plane had crashed in the Indian Ocean, as announced by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak on Monday.

It was revealed yesterday that a final electronic signal from the plane was received at 8.19am (Malaysian time) on March 8.

“There is evidence of a partial handshake between the aircraft and ground station at 0019 UTC (GMT),” acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein told the press yesterday.

“At this time, this transmission is not understood and is subject to further ongoing work,” he said, adding that unless debris is found, there could be no closure for the affected families.

Yesterday, some 200 distraught relatives and family members of MH370’s Chinese passengers attempted to march towards the Malaysian embassy in Beijing, clashing with police and shouting slogans condemning the Malaysian government as “murderers”.

Beijing has at the same time demanded that Putrajaya hand over the satellite data which led it to conclude that the flight had crashed. – March 26, 2014.

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Washington paper says MH370 saga shows Malaysia must be more open

The Malaysian Insider

March 25, 2014

Putrajaya’s last-ditch pivot for openness in the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has not impressed its partners – be it Beijing that demands more information on satellite data or Washington bemused with contradictions in the hunt for the lost passenger jet.

A strongly-worded editorial from Washington Post today put the entire saga of the plane’s disappearance and Malaysia’s handling of the search as an unfolding disaster that reflects the country’s need for immediate change.

“It is entirely premature to say what happened to the airplane. But it is not too early for Malaysia’s leaders to draw lessons from their unsteady performance of recent weeks and commit themselves to transparency and openness.

“Their alternative is not working,” said the editorial headlined “Malaysia’s airliner response exposes a ruling malaise”.

The six-paragraph article written by the paper’s editorial board sketched out what it felt was wrong about Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s announcement last night on the lost MAS plane’s last position and the airline’s statement on the matter.

“If you are perplexed by Monday’s announcement on the missing Malaysian airliner, no wonder.

“Prime Minister Najib Razak declared that the flight “ended” in the southern Indian Ocean, and the state-owned airline said that “we have to assume beyond a reasonable doubt” that the plane went down in the ocean, far off its course to Beijing.

“Both announcements were vague; neither said much about why or how,” it said.

The editorial described the Malaysian government as being “ham-handed” in its dealings with grieving families and the global glare of attention since the plane carrying 239 people on board went missing on March 8 while enroute to Beijing.

It charged that the government delayed for hours saying anything after the plane first vanished, “and over the next few weeks much of the information it disseminated was conflicting, wrong or misleading”.

“Such a bizarre disaster would be difficult for any government to deal with, and a fair amount of uncertainty and confusion is expected.

“But the Malaysian government has shown signs of a deeper malaise that comes from a half century of rule without challenge or transparency,” the Washington Post editorial said.

The paper noted that when Najib was about to make a statement recently, the prime minister’s spokesperson had told reporters there would be no questions.

“According to Joshua Kurlantzick of the Council on Foreign Relations, writing in Bloomberg Businessweek, when reporters pressed for more access, the reply came back: “Go watch a movie.”

“When China, no champion of transparency, complains — as it did recently, asking for ‘more thorough and accurate information’ from Malaysia — you know the depth of the problem,” the paper said.

The Washington Post editorial pointed out that Malaysia had been ruled by the same governing coalition since independence and had enjoyed strong economic growth.

“We had hopes before last year’s election that, if the vote was free and fair, the country would be on a path toward a more competitive democracy.

“Mr. Najib has taken steps toward modernisation and reform, but the election fell short,” it said.

The influential US paper said Najib’s ruling coalition won a majority of seats in parliament “largely through gerrymandered districts, while the opposition coalition led by Anwar Ibrahim won a popular majority and disputed the outcome”.

“Clearly there is rising popular discontent with corruption, authoritarianism and ethnic favouritism of the ruling powers.

“It is especially disturbing that the government has renewed its politically motivated prosecution of Mr. Anwar on dubious charges of sodomy in order to sideline him from politics,” it said, referring to the May 7 appeals court ruling that jailed Anwar for five years after overturning a 2012 acquittal.

“The use of the sodomy charge is shameful and archaic, but as Graeme Reid of Human Rights Watch pointed out this month in Foreign Policy, if upheld, it could effectively remove Mr. Anwar from politics for 10 years.

“Malaysia should not tolerate this brazen manipulation,” the paper said. – March 25, 2014.

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Bad weather forecast as new images spur MH370 search

The Malay Mail Online/AFP

March 27, 2014

PERTH, March 27 — Thunderstorms and gale-force winds threatened to impede a frantic international search today for wreckage from Flight MH370 after satellite images of more than 100 floating objects sparked fresh hopes of a breakthrough.

Malaysia said the imagery taken in recent days by a French satellite showed “122 potential objects” in the remote southern Indian Ocean, although nothing has yet been pulled from the treacherous seas despite a multinational recovery operation.

Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein has cautioned that it was impossible to determine whether the objects were related to the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 which crashed on March 8 with 239 people aboard after mysteriously disappearing.

But the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is coordinating the search some 2,500 kilometres (1,550 miles) southwest of Perth, said they were in an area authorities have pinpointed as a potential crash zone.

“Positions in the satellite information released by Malaysia Remote Sensing Agency were within yesterday’s search area,” it said as a fleet of planes prepared to head for the search zone once again before the weather worsens.

Six military planes from Australia, Japan and the United States will fly sorties throughout the day, along with five civil aircraft, AMSA said, in an increasingly frantic hunt for clues to exactly what happened.

The plane deviated inexplicably off its intended course between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, flying thousands of kilometres in the wrong direction, before plunging into the sea. Malaysia believes the plane was deliberately diverted by someone on board.

Five ships are also in the search zone, including Australia’s HMAS Success and Chinese vessels Xue Long, Kuulunshan, Haikon and Qiandaohu.

But they are operating in a wild expanse of ocean described by Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott as “close to nowhere as it’s possible to be” where gale-force winds and towering waves are routinely whipped up.

Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology warned the weather was expected to deteriorate later today.

“Potentially thunderstorms down there as well as winds picking up, and they could get to gale force conditions,” said bureau spokesman Neil Bennett.

Lawyers fire first salvo

The new images, provided by European aerospace giant Airbus and depicting some objects as long as 23 metres (75 feet), came as US lawyers fired the first salvo in an expected barrage of lawsuits on behalf of grieving families.

Seeking closure, anguished families of those aboard are desperately awaiting hard evidence, which the aviation industry hopes can also provide clues to what caused one of aviation’s greatest mysteries.

But as the search continued, US law firm Ribbeck Law Chartered International said it was getting the ball rolling on potentially “multi-million dollar” lawsuits against Malaysia Airlines and Boeing.

“We are going to be filing the lawsuits for millions of dollars per each passenger based on prior cases that we have done involving crashes like this one,” the firm’s head of aviation litigation, Monica Kelly, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.

A separate statement by the firm, which filed an initial court petition in the US state of Illinois on Tuesday, said the two companies “are responsible for the disaster of Flight MH370”.

The airline declined detailed comment.

Malaysia’s Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said Monday that satellite data indicated the plane plunged into the sea in a region off western Australia, possibly after running out of fuel.

Relatives seek closure

MH370 relatives have endured more than a fortnight of agonising uncertainty.

Two-thirds of the passengers were from China, and relatives there have criticised Malaysia in acid terms, accusing the government and airline of a cover-up and botching the response.

Scores of relatives protested outside Malaysia’s embassy in Beijing on Tuesday and China kept up the pressure, with Premier Li Keqiang urging Malaysia yesterday to involve “more Chinese experts” in the investigation, according to a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman.

While Malaysia believes the plane was deliberately diverted, other scenarios include a hijacking, pilot sabotage or a crisis that incapacitated the crew and left the plane to fly on auto-pilot until it ran out of fuel.

Hishammuddin said Najib Razak met yesterday with Zhang Yesui, a Chinese vice foreign minister sent to Kuala Lumpur over the crisis, and provided him with a full update on the latest information.

Hishammuddin hit back at criticism of Malaysia’s handling of the crisis, saying “I think history will judge us well.”

Authorities hope to retrieve the “black box” and precious flight data, believing it could hold clues to what happened.

Australian Vice Admiral Ray Griggs said a specialised US Navy black box locator device had arrived in Perth and could be taken to the search area within days.

The clock is ticking, with the battery that powers its locator signal expected to run out in two weeks — AFP

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Cabinet should decide tomorrow in support of an Opposition-headed Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370 to be appointed in current meeting of Parliament whether the black box is discovered or not

Today is the 20th day of the missing MH370 disaster with still no answer as to “”what, how and why” as to the series of events in the early hours of March 8 resulting in the disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft with 239 passengers and crew on board, resulting in the longest and biggest-ever multi-national 26-nation sea-and-air search.

Although the search area has been narrowed considerably from the Northern and Southern Corridors to the south of Southern Corridor in the southern Indian Ocean, and despite the new satellite images revealing 122 objects that could be debris from the Boeing 777, the international search team today which had been bolstered to 11 military and civilian aircraft and five ships have ended empty-handed when they have to call off the search operation today due to bad weather.

Severe icing, severe turbulence and near zero visibility are forecast to deteriorate later in the day in the area some 2,500 kilometres southwest of Perth in the deepest and roughest waters in the world, roiled by the “Roaring Forties” winds that cut across the sea.

The winds are named for the area between latitude 40 degrees and 50 degrees where there is no land mass to slow down gusts which create waves higher than six metres.

However, more and more questions have multiplied with every passing day of the missing MH370, many of which have nothing to do with the technical explanations of the disaster or the retrieval of the “black box”.

For instance, the announcement in Parliament by the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Datuk Seri Shahidan Kassim that the government would consider setting up a Parliamentary Select Committee or a royal commission of inquiry (RCI) on the MH370 tragedy only after the “black box” had been discovered is highly debatable and questionable.

Was this decision taken by the Cabinet or only by one or two Ministers?

Yesterday, the Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein said that he would be taking to the Cabinet the proposal to set up a Parliamentary Select Committee or a Royal Commission of Inquiry, as he himself cannot make such a decision.

The Cabinet would only meet tomorrow. Can Hishammuddin or Shahidan pre-empt a Cabinet decision and unilaterally conclude that the Government would only consider a Parliamentary Select Committee or Royal Commission of Inquiry into the MH370 disaster if the “black box” is recovered?

What happens if the “black box” is never recovered, as has happened in past air-disasters – does this mean that there would be no investigations as to what could have gone terribly wrong to cause not only a national but an international disaster like the tragic MH370 case?

This would make Malaysia an even bigger laughing stock.

Furthermore, there are many questions that must be answered and which do not depend on the discovery of the ‘black box’.

One such question was provoked by the reply of the Deputy Defence Minister, Abdul Rahim Bakri in Parliament yesterday that the Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF) did not intercept Flight MH370 when it was detected on military radar off the Straits of Malacca on March 8 due to the “assumption” that the flight had been ordered to turn back by the civil aviation control tower.

What is even more shocking is that when the Defence Minister, who is none other than Hishammuddin himself, was asked in his daily media conference on MH 370 later on the same day on Rahim’s statement in Parliament, Hishammudin replied lamely that he could  not confirm what Rahim had told Parliament.

This does not inspire confidence – when the Minister of Defence cannot confirm what the Deputy Defence Minister had just told Parliament!

If what Rahim said was true, that the RMAF did not intercept MH370 on the “assumption” that the flight was “non-hostile” and had been ordered to turn back by the civil aviation control tower, why didn’t the RMAF immediately cross-checked with the civil aviation authorities?

Wasn’t the failure to cross-check with the civil aviation authorities a gross dereliction of duty, especially as national security was involved?

How many times and in many locations did the military radar tracked MH370 in the early hours of March 8?

We now know that when the civil radar lost track of MH370 at 1.21 am on March 8, the department of civil aviation officers on duty immediately contacted the RMAF which confirmed that military radar had tracked the aircraft which had diverted from its course.

Why was there no follow-up action by both the civil and military aviation authorities between 1.21 am and 2.40 am when the military radar at Butterworth spotted the MH370, as well as after 2.40 am?

These questions need answer which do not depend on the discovery of the “black box.

There are many such questions, such as whether SAR operation was launched at the first available opportunity, when time was of the essence in an air disaster to ensure the safe rescue of passengers nd crew; the loss of over a week before the multi-national SAR operation involving ships, helicopters and aircrafts were switched from the South China Sea to the Straits of Malacca and later the Andaman Sea and the Northern and Southern Corridors, and many many others.

I call on the Cabinet tomorrow to decide in support of an Opposition-headed Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370 to be established in the current meeting of Parliament, which ends on April 10, regardless or whether the “black box” is recovered or not.

Immediate action for the establishment of an Opposition-headed Parliamentary Select Committee on the MH370 disaster is imperative for two reasons:

Firstly, it will be a key development to restore national and international confidence in Malaysia and the Malaysian Government to send a clear and unmistakable message that neither Malaysia nor the Malaysian Government has anything to hide and want a full and transparent accounting of the whole series of events constituting the MH370 disaster; and

Secondly, work must begin immedIately to lay the basis for a full-scale investigation into the MH370 disaster. As Malaysia is leading the multi-national SAR operation, similarly, the Opposition-headed Parliamentary Select Committee should form the nucleus of a multi-national Parliamentary inquiry into the MH370 disaster which had brought 26 nations together in an unprecedented pooling of their resources and intelligence.

I call on the Ministers at the Cabinet meeting tomorrow to overrule any suggestion that an investigation should only be launched after the retrieval of the black box, firstly, as it smacks of an avoidance of a full investigation; and secondly, it would be seen by the world as an attempt by the Malaysian government to continue with a opaque policy rejecting accountability and transparency.

(Media Statement at the Senai Airport on Thursday, 27th March 2014 at 4.45pm)

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FBI says review of MH370 computer files almost done

The Malay Mail Online/Reuters

March 27, 2014

WASHINGTON DC, March 26 — FBI Director James Comey told a House subcommittee yesterday he expects his agency to finish an investigation of computer files related to the missing Malaysia Airlines flight in the next one or two days.

Comey, who was testifying before an appropriations subcommittee on the FBI’s 2015 budget request, said Malaysian authorities gave the FBI forensic computer materials and that the agency’s review of those materials is nearly complete.

“I have teams working really around the clock to exploit that,” Comey said. “I don’t want to say more about that in an open setting, but I expect it to be done fairly shortly. Within a day or two we will finish that work.”

Comey did not say what results he expected from the FBI’s analysis. He also denied allegations that Malaysian authorities had not been open to assistance offered by the FBI in the investigation of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which has been missing for over two weeks.

The search for the plane continued yesterday as new satellite images revealed more than 100 objects in the southern Indian Ocean that may be debris from the jetliner. It is thought to have crashed on March 8 with the loss of all 239 people aboard after flying thousands of miles off course. — Reuters

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How Can Math Decide That Someone Is Dead?

The best evidence that flight MH370 crashed in the southern ocean.

By Jeff Wise

Slate

For the relatives of passengers aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the announcement by the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak on Monday must have registered as a double shock. First there was the fact that their loved ones were dead: “The past few weeks have been heartbreaking; I know this news must be harder still,” Najib said at a press conference after families were notified. More surprisingly, the announcement was made even though no bodies or wreckage had been recovered. Instead, the passengers’ fate had been determined by math alone. A U.K.-based satellite company, Inmarsat, had deployed a new kind of mathematical analysis to determine that the plane’s trajectory had carried it deep into the southern Indian Ocean, a region where there are were no landmasses upon which a plane can set down. Ergo, the passengers were all dead.

In Beijing, family members reacted with outrage, staging an impromptu march on the Malaysian embassy. One can only imagine how frustrating it must be to be told to abandon hope, to grieve in the absence of any material evidence of loss. They must have wondered if they could really believe what they were being told. Unreliable information has been reported throughout the search process, with assertions made about the flight only to be later refuted, modified, or quietly dropped. Amid all the uncertainty, how much credence should be given to this new mathematical formula, which seemed so complicated that hardly anyone could understand and whose underlying data remains veiled in secrecy?

That’s what I wondered when I heard the news, but after reviewing Inmarsat’s publicly released information with an expert, I’ve come to the conclusion that its findings are most likely sound. With caveats.

Since Inmarsat’s data is the only source of information we have about the fate of MH370, it’s worth reviewing how the system works. Inmarsat is a communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit over the Indian Ocean. Every hour or so, it sends out a short electronic message to subscribers that says, “Hey, are you out there?” The message contains no information as such; the satellite just wants to find out if that particular subscriber is out there in case it wants to talk. Kind of like picking up your telephone just to see if there’s a dial tone. On the morning of Saturday, March 8, MH370 replied seven times to these pings, saying, in effect, “Yes, I’m here.” The line was open for the plane to communicate with the outside world. But the system that generates the messages themselves, called ACARS, had been shut off. So nothing else was communicated between the satellite and the plane.

All the same, those pings tell us something important about MH370: They narrow down its location. Because light travels at a certain speed and electronics take a certain amount of time to generate a signal, there’s always a length of time between the satellite’s “Hey!” and the airplane’s “Yo!” The farther away the plane is, the longer it takes to respond because it has to wait for the signal from the satellite to travel that extra distance.

Imagine you and I are in a darkened room. You have no idea where I am, except you know that I’m holding one end of a taut 20-foot rope, and you’re holding the other. Therefore I must be 20 feet away. You don’t know where I am, exactly, but you know that I must lie somewhere along a circle that’s 20 feet in radius, with you at the center.

Clever engineers at Inmarsat managed to squeeze one more drop from the thimbleful of data.

MH370 was in an analogous situation. When Inmarsat pinged it at 8:11 a.m. and received MH370’s reply, the amount of time it took the plane to respond allowed investigators to calculate its distance from the satellite. This did not correspond to a specific location but to an arc of possible locations across Central Asia in the north and the Indian Ocean to the south. This information was announced to the public on Saturday, March 15, by the prime minister of Malaysia.

This result was a huge breakthrough for the investigation, and it raised a question: Could analysis of the six earlier pings narrow down the route that the plane had taken? The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board obtained the data from Malaysia and set to work.

The process is fairly straightforward. The first ping coincided more or less with the time when MH370 slipped out of range of Malaysia’s military radar. So we have a starting point. By knowing the interval to the next ping, and by estimating the plane’s speed, we can arrive at a distance traveled during that time. Given the radius of the next arc, it’s a simple matter to calculate a route by angling the distance traveled to meet up with that arc.

When the NTSB ran the numbers, the resulting plot showed the plane winding up in a remote part of the Indian Ocean, and that’s where searchers began focusing their efforts. Soon after, satellite photos showed large pieces of debris floating in the water, and the Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott jumped to the obvious conclusion: He announced on Thursday, March 20, that that investigators had found their first hot lead. “This is the first tangible breakthrough,” he said. “This is a very serious lead in the way that nothing else so far really has been.”

There was at least one problem undermining the certainty of Abbott’s assertion. Though the NTSB’s process worked for generating a likely path to the south, it could also be used just as effectively to create a path to the north. The satellite data itself is ambiguous—it provides no clues about which direction the plane is moving. So when the NTSB was plotting out a route to the south, it was also effectively plotting a mirror route, symmetrical to the first, that stretched northward along the Himalayas and on to Kazakhstan.

U.S. and Malaysian officials were said to favor the southern route, but some people (including me) argued that the northern route was more plausible. It allowed for a denouement in which whoever was in control of the plane came out alive. But there was really no way to tell until an aircraft or identifiable wreckage came to light. The satellite data was inherently ambiguous.

Or at least, that’s what many of us thought. But somehow the clever engineers at Inmarsat managed to squeeze one more drop from the thimbleful of data contained in those pings. They’ve been a little cagey about how exactly they did it, so I turned to communications-satellite pioneer Mike Exner, president and CEO of Radiometrics Corp., to explain how he thought they extracted more information.

“This is an old satellite,” Exner said. “When satellites start to run out of hydrazine, you can’t keep them exactly geostationary.” Instead of keeping perfectly still above a certain spot, the satellite begins to slowly wobble. Over the course of the day, it makes a narrow figure eight around a central spot located on the Earth’s equator.

“It’s a small effect,” Exner says, “And normally you’d overlook it.” But in the hunt to overcome the symmetry of the ping data, Inmarsat likely realized that it could use the wobble of the satellite to its advantage. The satellite itself, depending on where it is in its orbit, will have a different relative motion compared to a northbound and a southbound plane. That relative motion can be detected as a Doppler effect, the frequency change you hear when a train whistle that’s coming towards you dips in pitch as it whooshes past. The effect was subtle and difficult to tease out of the data, but when Inmarsat ran simulations, it found that the amount of Doppler effect observed in the MH370 data matched the predictions for the southern route and not the northern one. Comparisons with other flights whose location and speed were known supported that conclusion. That’s the finding that the Malaysian prime minister reported.

So do we know now where MH370 went? Not exactly. The path that the plane is presumed to have taken still depends on the speed that the plane is presumed to have been flying. Inmarsat generated routes based on two different airspeeds—400 knots and 450 knots—and came up with end points that are hundreds of miles apart.

For his part, Exner believes the range of route possibilities is even larger than Inmarsat’s projections suggest. He points out that MH370 was detected diving to 12,000 feet before disappearing from Malaysian military radar. A Boeing 777 going 310 knots at 12,000 feet burns a bit less fuel than one going 440 knots at 30,000 feet, so there’s no question it could have stayed aloft that long. The resulting flight profile is still consistent with Inmarsat’s ping distance and Doppler data, but results in a track that is much shorter and curves to the east near the south coast of Sumatra and Java.

Even though Inmarsat’s presumed approach makes sense and its calculations seem credible, that is not to say that its results are necessarily accurate. Before scientists publish a finding, it must undergo peer review by independent authorities in the field. Inmarsat has declared itself absolutely confident in its results and says that its results were “peer-reviewed” by the British government, but showing one’s work to self-chosen sympathetic colleagues is not peer review. Until Inmarsat’s findings are looked over by a truly independent panel of experts, it will be hard to have unequivocal confidence in the report.

And if searchers don’t start finding wreckage in the current search area soon, it might be time to revise some basic assumptions—and start to look in a different place.

Jeff Wise is a New York-based magazine writer and author of Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger. A contributing editor at Popular Mechanics and Travel + Leisure, he specializes in aviation, adventure, and psychology. He tweets as @ManvBrain and blogs at JeffWise.net.

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 27 March 2014, 9:08 am and is filed under
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How grief brings us together

By Dyana Sofya
 –
Malay Mail Online

March 27 — One of my father’s favorite bands is the Bee Gees. I grew up listening to them especially during weekends when he would spend hours in front of his elaborated sound system listening to old classics, from Santana’s Black Magic Woman, Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall to Sweet Charity’s Teratai.

My mother who loves to chat, be it face-to-face with another person or on the phone was not fond of my father’s weekend routine because it would be too noisy for her to listen to herself but they however subconsciously insist to be in the same room despite their different needs.

The tragedy of MH370 made all of us realise the value of family, unity and togetherness. Those onboard of MH370 are someone’s father, mother, son and daughter. We may have different backgrounds, nations, languages, colours, cultures, likes, dislikes, habits, and manners in every way of life, nonetheless, they are our brothers and sisters in humanity.

The incident showed us that we are all connected, we are first and foremost, human beings. We share the same feeling of worry and disbelief throughout the seventeen days hoping for a clue, an answer to the missing MH370 together with 239 of its passengers and crew. All of us were concerned and baffled on how a technology-advanced aircraft goes missing without a sign. Our hearts stopped at once for a second when the Prime Minister made the announcement that flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean. All of our hearts, thoughts and prayers go to the passengers and crew, their family members and friends.

A friend of mine said, “The families of 239 people need our strength, our compassion and our attention.” And I agree. We should reach out and help in any way that we can.

We may all grieve in our own ways. Some seek answers, some choose to get a closure, and some resort to anger. Some spend hours on conspiracy theories. However, the sadness of loss is universal. Instead of judging one another or get into a quarrel, we should just look into one another’s eyes, understand that this is a difficult moment and let the negativity go. We don’t need to add to the agony and loss of those who are directly affected.

It’s simply human to be vulnerable, it is not a weakness. We need each other and need to look out for each other. This incident has brought us together.

At times like this shoulders to lean on, arms around one another, hands to hold to are all that we need. Everything else can wait.

We should be reminded to appreciate the people around us, our parents, family members, friends and foes, colleagues, neighbours and even the makcik who sells kuih by the roadside where we always get our evening pisang goreng from. Acknowledge their existence, a simple salam or hello, show them that we care, give them a helping hand, a kind act, we might be the sunshine that they need for that particular day. Caring about others, showing compassion and leaving an impact on people bring happiness to both the giver and receiver.

A moment of acceptance and appreciation is a moment of unity and togetherness.

Despite our differences, we are after all, one big family. Families are there for one another. We are now a family in grief and we should lend shoulders as well as support to each other under this Malaysian roof that we shared. Cherish our family. Group hug.

MH370, you will always be in our hearts.

I have not been spending time with my parents and I will be going back to Ipoh one of these weekends to listen to old songs with my father and gossip with my mother, in the same room at the same time. Dear God, please grant me the ability to do so. Also, I need to dodge questions about marriage when I visit my grandmother at Kuala Kangsar road. (God, I need help with the dodging, too)

My love and prayers for the passengers and crew of MH370, their family members, friends and those who are directly affected by the tragedy.

To MH370,

I keep the memory of you and me, inside. We don’t say goodbye.

-Immortality, written by the Bee Gees, sung by Celine Dion.

Al-fatihah.

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A company embroiled in tragedy must display tact

By John Gapper

Financial Times

March 26, 2014

GM dealt deftly with a fatal fault while Malaysia Airlines’ crisis has become a diplomatic disaster

General Motors and Malaysia Airlines are both in trouble but one is giving a lesson in how to handle a fatal crisis while the other is offering a masterclass in how not to. There is a glaring contrast in the behaviour, and ability to cope with public criticism, of Mary Barra, GM’s chief executive, and Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, the chief executive of Malaysia Airlines – although Ms Barra has a simpler task.

Both face the most critical corporate challenge – how to respond when your customers die because they used your product or service. The GM accident victims were a dozen drivers or passengers of faulty compact cars; in Malaysia Airlines’ case, the presumed victims are the 239 passengers of the missing flight.

Ms Barra, who took over as GM’s boss in January, has so far reacted in an exemplary manner. She has stepped up to take personal responsibility, admitted that GM is to blame and apologised; emphasised her sorrow “as a mom with a family of my own” and promised not only to make amends but to use the crisis as a turning point for GM.

Mr Ahmad oversaw the blunder in which some families were informed of deaths by text message. Having emphasised in a statement that he responded “as parent, as a brother, as a son”, he relapsed into defensive corporate-speak in a BBC Radio interview. Describing the criticism as “unfair”, he insisted that his airline had “given beyond . . . what I call the standard scenario”.

“Thanks a bunch” would be the mildest response of anyone who has lost a loved one in what was far from a “standard scenario”. Some MH370 relatives, tacitly encouraged by the Chinese government, have protested at the Malaysian embassy in Beijing. A flight tragedy has become a diplomatic and corporate disaster for Malaysia Inc.

This contrast is partly down to the evident gulf in personality and skill between Ms Barra and Mr Ahmad. The fact that Ms Barra is a woman helps – a “mom” is more sympathetic than a “parent”, and Mr Ahmad’s retreat into alpha-male tetchiness evoked the response of Tony Hayward, BP’s former boss, to the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010.

But Ms Barra is also in a better position than Mr Ahmad by circumstance. She was dealt stronger cards, which she has so far played well. He has a miserable hand, despite the fact that GM is obviously to blame while Malaysia Airlines may not be. MH370 was a Boeing 777 with Rolls-Royce engines and it could have caught fire, been hijacked or many other things.

First, Ms Barra has certainty. The GM deaths had a clear cause – a flaw lurking in the ignition switch of Chevrolet Cobalt and other GM compacts, which can be fixed. The problem has essentially been solved already, even if GM had to recall 1.6m cars and faces political scrutiny and legal action from bereaved relatives. It knows what it has to do.

Malaysia Airlines faces the equivalent of BP’s uncapped well. It has not even found the aircraft, and the accident investigators are nowhere near assigning a cause. Scraps of information have been steadily leaked, creating a free-for-all of speculation and a suspicion that the airline is still hiding things.

“Accident investigators can usually sift through the wheat and chaff in private but that is happening in public. There is such a void of information that they are being forced to release what they have,” says Matthew Greaves, head of Cranfield University’s safety and accident investigation centre.

Second, GM possesses authority. It is being investigated, and the US Department of Justice may accuse the car manufacturer of fraud if it is found to have hidden a fault of which it was aware when the Cobalt was launched in 2005. But Ms Barra has sufficient autonomy to step forward publicly and take the lead.

“If you do not communicate clearly and often, someone else will do it for you,” says Shuba Srinivasan, a professor of marketing at Boston University. “By taking a personal stand, she changed the narrative from the product recall to how she was handling it.”

Malaysia Airlines is trapped in the middle of a vast inquiry involving 26 countries, led by Malaysia’s government, which took a week even to declare publicly who was in charge. “The story kept switching during the first week. One guy would say one thing and another guy another thing. It was very difficult,” says one of the public relations consultants who have been called in to give advice.

Last, GM has a narrative. It went through Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009 and emerged with new management, culminating in Ms Barra’s appointment. The Cobalt was a product of a time when it produced cheap, low-quality cars in the US. Although no one would say so publicly, the Cobalt fiasco is emblematic of old GM.

Ms Barra is a GM veteran but she has not been tied to the problem (if she were to be, it would threaten her position). Instead, she had a story to tell – that the Cobalt shows why GM needs to change. She has capitalised on this by announcing three further product safety recalls and telling employees “we will be better because of this tragic situation if we seize this opportunity”.

Spoken as any PR consultant would advise, and with apparent sincerity. The problem with not having a tale of redemption through crisis is that one will be thrust upon you. Mr Ahmad admits that he may resign as a result of the disaster, and his airline and country clearly need someone to take the blame. Both the grieving families and the narrative may demand it.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 28 March 2014, 3:07 am and is filed under
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Deputy Defence Minister should resign or be sacked for plunging government and country into greater credibility crisis in the long-running MH370 disaster

The Deputy Defence Minister Abdul Rahim Bakri should resign or be sacked for plunging the government and country into a greater credibility crisis in the long-running MH370 disaster.

Already, Malaysia is in the eye of the storm not only over the hitherto inexplicable 21-day disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft but the centre of an international hurricane over our crisis management with great distrust that the aggrieved families are not given all the relevant information.

As a Canadian media specialist has rightly pointed out, in the world of crisis communications, perceptions can be killers.

In these circumstances of an international crisis over our crisis management, it is just unacceptable that we have a bumbling and bungling Deputy Defence Minister who could be so irresponsible and reckless as to talk rubbish in Parliament on Wednesday, saying during the winding-up speech for the Defence Ministry in the debate on the motion of thanks for the royal address, that the Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF) did not attempt to intercept MH370 when it was detected on military radar off the Straits of Malacca on March 8 as the RMAF had “assumed” that the plane was ordered to turn back by flight traffic controllers.

It is not good enough for him to make a U-turn after more than 24 hours of shaming the RMAF, the government and the nation and say that his remarks in the Dewan Rakyat on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370’s turn back had been proven erroneous, and that it was based on his own assumptions.

Compounding his egregious error in Parliament, Abdul Rahim claimed yesterday that conclusive answers will only be available when the debris from the plane is found.

This is another “rubbish”. Is Abdul Rahim now claiming that unless the “black box” is recovered, it is not possible to find out why there were no follow-up actions by RMAF when MH370 disappeared from civilian radar but were detected by military radar?

This question remains unanswered, and its answer need not wait for the retrieval of the “black box”, as Parliament and Malaysians are entitled to know why there were no follow-up actions by both the RMAF and Civil Aviation air-traffic controllers in the early hours of March 8 when MH370 first disappeared into the skies!

As I have always maintained in Parliament and outside, the MH370 disaster must unite all mankind, not just Malaysians, regardless of race, religion, politics or nationality in the common mission to locate the plane and to pray for the safety of the 239 passengers and crew on board.

There can be no room for petty politics or differences. At the same time, the crisis should not be used to ignore or deflect the thousand-and-one-questions that have cropped up as a result of the 20-day MH 370 disaster – as up to now, nobody is closer to the answers as to what, how and why the series of disastrous MH370 events unfolded on March 8.

The Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Datuk Seri Shahidan Kassim has arranged for a briefing on the MH370 disaster for Pakatan Rakyat MPs by the acting Transport Minister, Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hashim, on Tuesday night.

Together with other PR MPs, I will attend the briefing by Hishammuddin, to hear the latest updates of the MH370 disaster and to convey to him the burning questions about the MH370 crisis, not only in Malaysia but also world-wide.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 28 March 2014, 10:19 am and is filed under
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How communicating in crisis went wrong for M’sia

Nancy Argyle

Malaysiakini

Mar 27, 2014

COMMENT
In the very specialised field of disaster communications, there is one cardinal rule.  Do no harm. It’s a rule that the teams communicating the crisis of disappeared Malaysia Flight MH370 did not seem to fully comprehend.

While there were many things that they did right, their actions were overshadowed by what went wrong and, despite Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Abdul Rajak seeming to sincerely feel the anguish of the families, puzzlingly, the actual communications effort from others did not reflect it.

In a crisis, the expectations placed on government officials are at their highest. This is the one time that the public has very little tolerance for error. After all, if you can’t trust your government in a disaster, who can you trust?

Unfortunately, the needs of the public and media in a crisis often clash with the traditional “knee-jerk” reaction of officials trying to control the information coming out. It’s an all too common scene that you see happen all over the world and through many different disasters.

So what went wrong with communications surrounding the disappearance of MH370 and how could this have been done better?

I’m not privy to everything the Malaysian government and airlines communications teams may or may not have done but that doesn’t actually matter. From thousands of kilometres away, I can tell that the perception exists that they withheld information and failed the families during a critical time. In the world of crisis communications, perceptions can be killers.

When I hear media complaining about the lack of transparency, families stating they don’t believe in what they’ve been told and celebrities suggesting boycotts of Malaysia, it’s quite clear that the communications team has lost all credibility with the ones they serve.

While many have suggested that the disappearance of MH370 is an unprecedented situation for the crisis team, nothing could be further from the truth. The accident, itself, may be unprecedented but communicating through it is not. A good crisis communications team should be able to handle any disaster scenario.

In my experience of leading teams through a number of disasters, I learned that the disaster type is not that relevant. Good planning, team training and a good process will see you through anything. Certainly, as a team, you’ll be adjusting your process to the individual event but, overall, disaster communications are quite similar from event to event because the “intent” of your role does not change.

However, much like the maligned pilots of MH370, we cannot always determine intent from actions. Did Malaysian officials intend to mislead the public, create barriers to information and increase the suffering of the families? Probably not. Did they fail at meeting the expectations of the public and media and the needs of the families? Unfortunately, yes, and these failures increased the dismay of an entire nation and secondarily traumatised the relatives of the missing.

Learning the hard way

These types of failures highlight the importance of crisis communications and how often it is underestimated and done badly. Many governments learn the hard way that they were unprepared for the communications side of a disaster even though they were well-prepared for an operational response. Ironically, no matter how good your operational response is, if your communications are poor, the public will perceive that you have failed on both accounts.

Without competent disaster communications leadership, any company or government tends to flounder in the very harsh sea of public scrutiny. Disasters are a time when organisations are put “under the microscope” exposing any flaws very quickly. To be fair, the finding of flaws would happen to any organization or person, for that matter, when scrutinised to that degree.

So, what can be done differently for the future?

First of all, it helps to have a healthy respect for information voids. Information voids, no matter what the reason, are deep, dark pits that most organizations never climb out of. The public and media will assume that, if you’re not talking, then you’re hiding something. It’s human nature and it’s not going to change anytime soon.

Disasters provide a number of very painful learning lessons that, in the end, can help improve crisis communications for future events. Without this pain and scrutiny, nothing gets better and officials make no changes. With this pain and scrutiny, significant improvements often occur to avoid a repeat of the first experience.

Good crisis communications should deliver critical information in a timely manner, ease fear and anxiety, comfort the people impacted, dispel rumours, assist the media and support the responders. Most importantly, even if you have no information to share, you must still keep communicating.

In North America, and no doubt in many other countries, we are used to communicating even when there is an on-going investigation and information is limited due to legal restrictions or other issues.

We use this time as an opportunity to reach out to the general public through media outlets which have the ability to touch large audiences. We share what we know about the event but we also share our knowledge base because, during a disaster, people are highly interested and motivated to learn.

As an example, I participated in the communications response to a devastating forest fire which claimed more than 200 homes. Prior to that event, an educational brochure teaching people how to create a green zone around their homes to resist fire simply sat on shelves, gathering dust.  During the event, that same brochure flew off the shelves and had to be reprinted to meet the demand.  People were hungry for information and scared about losing their own homes.

When experiencing an information void, there is much that can be shared. Sometimes, we talk about the search and rescue teams and the challenges they face. Other times, we provide preparedness advice, talk about why there is a void in news or offer insight into disaster technology.

Listening is also important

But, just as important, we also listen. We want to hear from the public and media, to understand their concerns and to provide information that helps them.

During the nearly dozen disasters I’ve managed, we often operated a communications center 24 hours a day, set up public hotlines so anyone could call in, day or night, arranged for “town hall” meetings with the public, provided scheduled media conferences three to four times per day and issued written updates in between those conferences, if needed. It took a team of approximately 10 well-trained communicators to accomplish this.

In addition to the media conferences, as a team leader, I sometimes provided up to 100 personal media interviews per day. My staff and I would have a running bet on how many times my cup of tea would need to be re-heated because I was on the phone so much. Many days, I never finished the cup of tea I started in the morning.

The Canadian government agency I worked for at that time had to instill some limits on its crisis teams. Shifts of work had to be no longer than 14 hours per day during an emergency. After two weeks in a disaster, you had to receive one day off. To accomplish this, communicators were rotated through shifts and duties to cover off the 24-hour operation.

Prior to a disaster, my team had go-kits of personal items always packed and stored in our vehicles in case of a call out. The team came from many different departments of the much larger provincial government (a province that is about four times the size of Malaysia) which meant that they had to travel from their locations and then meet at the command centre for the disaster.

Our mandate was to have a fully-functioning communications center set-up and running within 45 minutes of wheels down. This meant that, within 45 minutes of landing, we were responding to media calls. Usually, we were located close, but not too close, to the actual disaster which meant always setting up in a building you’d never been in before.

My communications team was hand-picked and trained. Some personalities are well-suited for this kind of work and others are not. Ultimately, this is a critical team that must function at a very high level due to its serious responsibilities. This is not a marketing team.  There is no “spin” in crisis communications.

Clearly, without preparation, plans, protocols, exercises and a specialized communications team that provides sound advice to officials, a disaster can become an extremely challenging event with poor outcomes for the very government in charge of it. Regrettably, the price is even higher for the victims who suffer because of that mismanagement.

While careers may end for some officials, the families of flight MH370 have to live with an experience that has shattered their world and their trust.

There is no comfort for them in knowing that the deaths of their loved ones will likely prompt life-saving changes in aviation as well as important changes in the way their government handles future disasters. Right now, there is just deep, unrelenting pain that was made worse by information dispersal that did not appreciate the first rule of “do no harm”.

My heart goes out to each and every one of them.

NANCY ARGYLE is one of Canada’s most experienced disaster communicators. She is also a university lecturer.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 28 March 2014, 6:29 am and is filed under
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MH370 mystery complicates last rites for the missing

Agence France Presse

March 27, 2014

Kuala Lumpur:  Malaysia has said all 239 people aboard flight MH370 are believed dead, but the failure to recover bodies is complicating efforts to lay their souls to rest, relatives and religious leaders said on Thursday.

The flight carried passengers from around the world following a number of major religions, and the failure to achieve closure via last rites has added to the anguish of grieving relatives.

Hindus traditionally perform special prayers on the first, 16th and 30th day after a person’s death.

“I will not do any solemn prayers until I am really convinced my son is dead,” said Subramaniam Gurusamy, 60, a Malaysian Hindu whose son was on the plane.

“How can we say everyone is dead when we have not found the plane or the black box?” he added, referring to the trove of on-board flight data that is being sought for clues to what happened.

“There have been instances when someone is lost in the jungle and is believed to have died but comes out alive after many years.”

The Malaysia Airlines flight went missing en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8. Malaysia believes it crashed in the southern Indian Ocean but no wreckage has yet been found, despite an ongoing multi-nation search.

Jamil Khir Baharom, Muslim-majority Malaysia’s minister in charge of Islamic affairs, was quoted by local media as saying Muslims aboard MH370 were still seen as “missing”, and that proper funeral rites cannot be performed until the search is called off.

Hindus were being advised, however, to “accept fate” and go ahead with their prayers, said Mohan Shan, president of Malaysia Hindu Sangam, the country’s main advisory body on Hindu worship.

“They can’t do the funeral rites until they get the bodies. But they can perform prayers at home or in temples on the 30th day,” he said.

“It’s a difficult time to pass through. Without the body we cannot 100 per cent confirm they are dead. But we have to ask them to accept the fate. There is no point in waiting.”

Usually in a deadly accident, Taoists must perform funeral rites at the site where the death occurred, said Tan Hoe Chieow, president of the Federation of Taoist Associations Malaysia.

But he said due to the unprecedented nature of MH370, families could go ahead with such ceremonies elsewhere, perhaps in their homes.

“We hope they can come to terms with this unfortunate incident. They have to come to terms with the reality. Some are still holding on to hope,” he said. “In this particular disaster I don’t think it’s possible to retrieve the bodies.”

Christians also could lay their loved ones to rest without a body if they are convinced they died, said Reverend Wong Kim Kong, a Christian community leader.

“They should not be discouraged, but acknowledge the fact that their loved ones are in a better place, that is – heaven,” he said.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 28 March 2014, 3:28 am and is filed under
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Can flight MH370 lead to political change?

The Malaysian Insider

March 29, 2014

Will Malaysians have the appetite for a political witch hunt after the flight MH370 crisis?

A writer contributing to Al Jazeera website says that right now many are emotionally exhausted with the affair and by the time all the questions have been answered and murkiness cleared, it could be business as usual in Malaysia.

“Once the dust settles on this tragedy, could the lessons learnt act as a catalyst for the political shake up, or even awakening, that Malaysia so urgently needs?

“Will the Malaysian people demand a more answerable government from now on – and more importantly will the ruling elite deliver?” freelance writer Zarina Banu wrote in Al Jazeera this week.

She pointed out the clumsy and conflicting communications over flight MH370, which was carrying 239 people on board when it disappeared en route to Beijing on March 8. No physical wreckage or debris has yet to be found.

But she said Malaysians were split about the way the leadership has managed these catastrophic events – a fissure that mirrors a virtual 50-50 political divide between the government and the opposition.

“The less urban, latched-on population believe the government has been doing a sterling job. This demographic tends to back the ethnically Malay ruling party, the United Malays National Organisation (Umno) and is buoyed by how calmly acting Transport Minister (Datuk Seri) Hishamuddin Hussein, has been toughing it out in front of the world’s media.

“In fact, many Malaysians have felt the international media is giving them an undeserved kicking. Night after night, the emotions of Chinese relatives have been aired on mainland media, while in the US, Republicans and Democrats have demanded more American involvement in the search and investigation,” Zarina said.

She also noted that Malaysians had equally felt that the national carrier has been taking great pains to treat the families of the 239 victims on board the Boeing 777 with care and sensitivity.

Malaysia Airlines, until now with a reputation as one of Southeast Asia’s best carriers, was a great source of pride for many in Malaysia, she said.

But Zarina said “the urban, plugged-in, analytical rest of the population are more cynical”.

“Nineteen days into the tragedy they want to know why, despite the widespread availability of 21st century communications equipment, that Malaysia, of all countries, managed to ‘lose’ a plane. The failure of the Royal Malaysian Air Force to intercept the jet has left many Malaysians feeling unprotected and embarrassed by the laxness of their armed forces,” she said.

Pakatan Rakyat had been pressing the government in Parliament over the heedlessness of its armed forces, only to be told that it was playing partisan politics at a time of tragedy, she said.

“This deflection of blame and initial arrogant nature of the Malaysian leadership during the first chaotic days is vexingly reminiscent of the behaviour of the ruling party, Umno and its coalition flunkeys.

“Time and time again, the leadership plays the so-called unity card,” she said, noting that the ruling coalition employed the fear of violent disunity among the three races of Malays, Chinese and Indians to instil compliance and suppress open debate.

“Race and religion are used on a daily basis to rupture the relationships between the three ethnic groups. Today, unlike in the 1970s and 1980s, there is very little intermingling, between Malays, Indians and Chinese.

“The country now has Malay teachers telling their third, fourth and fifth generation Malaysian-born Chinese and Indian students to go back to where their forefathers came from and as time goes by, the Chinese and Indians are finding themselves increasingly politically and economically crowded out of their home,” Zarina said.

She noted that Malaysia was home to a young population – where out of 29 million people around 11.5 million are between the ages of 10 and 29.

And that many are using social media to “vent their grievance and put pressure on the leadership to reform its silo thinking”.

“But without institutional fractures and a change of government to what extent can the disappearance of a plane spark concrete political reform?

“The opposition may continue to press for answers about how the plane went undetected for so long, but whether the government will furnish a credible response in return is arguable.

“Once the heat is off and the international media circus leaves Kuala Lumpur taking its cameras and commentary to another news hot spot the government will undoubtedly settle into its old ways,” Zarina said.

She also argued that Malaysia “tinkered at the edges of authoritarianism and is relatively corrupt – Transparency International ranks Malaysia 53 out of 177 countries – and the leadership deploys powerful tools of social control covering legislation, the media and distribution of state finances to maintain its power”.

“Moreover, Malaysia’s political blueblood – of which the acting transport minister is a member – co-opts an unskilled and unmerited network of friends and relatives into a heady mix of power and money that can deliver riches and status to those on the inside,” she said.

“Will Malaysians even have the appetite for a political witch hunt after the crisis? Right now, many are emotionally exhausted with the affair. They’ve never experienced a trauma of this magnitude played out millimetre by millimetre in front of the world.

“Like the families themselves, Malaysians are hoping that hard evidence of the plane and what brought it down will quickly emerge to deliver complete closure to the tragedy.

“Only at that point can they start looking at the ramifications. But by then, it might be too late and rather than the disaster serving as a catalyst for change, it will be business as usual,” she said. – March 29, 2014.

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 29 March 2014, 12:02 pm and is filed under
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