MH370: Pressure starts piling on govt

Jeswan Kaur| March 20, 2014

Free Malaysia Today

Grieving families, especially from China, are furious with the Malaysian government for its refusal to be forthcoming with information.

COMMENT

Even in the face of a heartbreaking crisis, the Malaysian government could not let go of its insatiable hunger for politicking.

The nation is left speechless and at a loss wondering why and how the national carrier Malaysia Airlines’ Boeing 777 plane, said to be one of the safest in the world, has disappeared.

It is day 13 since the MH370 Kuala Lumpur-Beijing flight has gone missing. International experts complementing Malaysia’s search and rescue efforts are baffled as to what became of the plane which was ferrying 239 people including the cabin crew.

Still, the Malaysian government refuses to get its act right. On Tuesday night, Defense Minister and Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein briefed politicians from the ruling BN coalition on the missing aircraft.

For reasons best known to him, Hishammuddin, who is also Umno’s vice-president, ignored politicians from the opposition camp. BN’s nemesis, Pakatan Rakyat was visibly upset at being left out.

Trying to conceal his reasons for discriminating against Pakatan politicians, Hishammuddin, who has since the MH370 ordeal been the face behind the government briefings on the missing plane tragedy, reacted in the most irresponsible manner, claiming that the Pakatan politicians had not asked to be briefed.

A catastrophe has occurred and the Acting Transport Minister has the time to make wisecracks and downplay the existence of his fellow opposition politicians.

Hishammuddin told reporters in Putrajaya that there was nothing to hide concerning the missing jetliner.

“We are transparent to the world. Why should we hide anything from the Malaysian parliament?” he said.

If that was indeed the case, why the ‘cloak and dagger’ briefing exclusive for the BN politicians?

Malaysia’s unity and stability had long suffered a blow in the face of boiling racial tensions. And now, even in the face of the missing Boeing 777 adversity, the Malaysian government continues to undermine its reputation, this time internationally.

Condemnation galore

Looks like Pakatan is not alone in its rebuke against Hishammuddin and the Najib-administration.

Grieving families, especially those of the Chinese passengers, are furious with the Malaysian government for its refusal to be forthcoming with information.

Exasperated with the Malaysian government’s poor handling of the ordeal, these families issued an ultimatum. Either the Malaysian government came clean about the missing plane or they would go on a hunger strike.

Beijing has been critical of Malaysia’s sharing of information, with state media and its netizens expressing anger at the handling of the incident by Kuala Lumpur.

“Now we have no news, and everyone is understandably worried. The relatives say they will go to the (Malaysian) embassy to find the ambassador,” said Wen Wancheng, whose son was aboard the missing flight.

“The Malaysian ambassador should be presenting himself here. But he’s not,” Wen had said, updating reporters after a regular meeting between Malaysia Airlines officials and family members at a hotel in Beijing.

The world watches with bated breath as to how the mystery of the March 8 missing jetliner will come to an end.

Meanwhile, the Malaysian government struggles to extricate itself from the pressure cooker stress it is currently facing, from its failure to be honest and lead an ‘organised’ search and rescue mission to being sensitive to the agony and anxiety plaguing families and relatives onboard the missing plane.

Jeswan Kaur is a freelance writer and a FMT columnist.

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 20 March 2014, 8:54 am and is filed under
MH 370
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.


New Form 3 exam system open to bias, abuse, says education activist

by Sheridan Mahavera

The Malaysian Insider

March 20, 2014

The new exam system that will replace the PMR for Form Three students this year is open to bias and abuse, and could jeopardise the future of children from poorer families, said an education activist today.

Mohd Noor Izzat Mohd Johari said that unlike the old system, where the Form Three exam is produced and graded by an independent body outside the school, the new one, PT3 or Form Three Assessment, will be done by the teachers of each individual schools.

Since PT3 results are used by students to apply to elite schools such as residential schools and the MARA junior science colleges, richer, more well off parents could pressure teachers into giving their children better grades.

“This is the situation that we are afraid will happen. When parents come to school and ask that teachers ‘take care’ of their kids,” said Mohd Noor Izzat who teaches art at a secondary school in Pahang.

Noor Izzat said this was a big worry for teachers after the PT3 was announced yesterday by the Education Ministry as part of its improvements to the school based assessment system (PBS).

The PT3 would replace the PMR (Lower Secondary Assessment) exam which will be stopped this year after being used since 1993. The PMR was in itself a replacement for the old Sijil Rendah Pelajaran (SRP), introduced since 1978 for the first batch of students under the Bahasa Malaysia medium of instruction.

Under the old system, the PMR exam is produced, administered and graded by the ministry’s examination board.

Graders and checkers are typically teachers from other districts and the information on which school a batch of papers comes from is kept secret.

In the PT3 that was announced on March 18, only the questions would be prepared by the examination board. According to media reports, the questions would be classified as easy, medium and hard, and placed in a central bank from which teachers can then choose from.

However, grading and administering the tests would be done at the school based on standardised guidelines by the examination board, said Education Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin.

Muhyiddin also said the board and a team of outside assessors would verify the results to ensure students get the marks “they deserved”.

Noor Izzat said the fear is that well-connected parents will be able to influence teachers and their school, leaving students from poorer families at a disadvantage.

While some improvements to the SBA, such as the reduced workload for teachers have been welcomed, Noor Izzat said some of the changes did not solve some of the system’s others weaknesses. Most notably how to ensure students actually understand what is being taught them.

The main problem Noor Izzat insisted again, is class size and the teacher to student ratio, which is normally one teacher to 40 students.

Large classes make it difficult to achieve the aims of SBA which is to ensure that teachers pay extra attention to students so they understand what is being taught and that weak students don’t get left behind.

So even with improvements such as a simplified DSP (document to track student’s academic performance), teachers will still rush through daily lessons rather than ensuring all their students truly understand what is being taught, said Noor Izzat.

“Each class is one hour long. Teachers are supposed to spend 30 minutes presenting the lesson. The other half is to ensure students understand what was taught. This includes assessing them.

“We are supposed to spend one to two minutes assessing each student to ensure he understands the lesson.

“But with 40 students, teachers are scrambling to fill in their DSPs. This is where weak students get left behind.”

Under the SBA, there are no annual exams. Students’ understanding is graded by a six-level band ranging from the lowest (band one) to highest (band six).

Teachers have complained that the criteria for grading students in these bands is vague. Students have complained to teachers that the system does not motivate them to achieve better scores.

Another common complaint is that students are easily bored by the non-competitive nature of the SBA where the emphasis is not on getting as many straight As as possible.

Nor Izzat, however, defended the SBA’s noble aim of ensuring that every student, regardless of family background and academic ability, is given the attention they need to understand and apply what they learn in school to real life.

“The SBA is a very good system and its aims are very noble. It’s good that we are implementing it but we are not tailoring it to our local context,” he added. – March 20, 2014.

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 20 March 2014, 9:18 pm and is filed under
Education
,
Muhyiddin Yassin
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.


Obama says plane search a ‘top priority’

The Malay Mail Online

March 20, 2014

WASHINGTON DC, March 20 — US President Barack Obama said yesterday the search for the missing Malaysian airliner was a “top priority” for the United States and offered every possible resource — including the FBI.

In his first on camera comments on the mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Obama offered thoughts and prayers to the relatives of the missing passengers.

“I want them to be assured that we consider this a top priority,” Obama told Dallas television station KDFW in an interview at the White House.

“We have put every resource that we have available at the disposal of the search process,” he said.

“There has been close cooperation with the Malaysian government.”

Obama said the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board and any agency or official that deals with aviation was at the disposal of the investigation. — AFP

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 20 March 2014, 8:22 am and is filed under
MH 370
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.


The Nightmare Never Ends For Families of Missing Jet

by Emily Rauhala/Beijing

TIME

March 19, 2014

The distraught families of passengers on missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 say their pain is compounded by a lack of information about the massive search now in its twelfth day

Grief stalks the halls of Beijing’s Metropark Lido Hotel. Families of the Chinese passengers aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 have spent the last 12 days sleeping, eating and waiting here. They pass the hours scouring the Internet and watching television, desperate for information about their loved ones. They are exhausted and angry.

It is easy to spot them in hotel’s bright courtyards and corridors. Some flew here from distant provinces and barely speak Mandarin Chinese. They look lost in a hotel packed with foreign tourists, a place where Rimowa, a luxury luggage company, sells suitcases for 10,000 yuan ($1,600). Many are visibly grief-stricken, their eyes swollen, heads bowed. All are wary of speaking to outsiders. After all, one woman asked, “What is there left to say?”

Even as the dozens of countries — and what seems like the entire Internet — study the case, the friends and families of the missing feel blacked out. They are trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare where each day brings a strange, disorienting, twist. It was a plane crash, then a terror plot, then a hijacking. Now, 12 days in, there is no real theory at all; it disappeared.

Tensions reached a boiling point Wednesday when a group of Chinese relatives of missing passengers criticized Malaysia’s handling of the search efforts during a news conference in Kuala Lumpur. Chaos broke out as Malaysian police roughed up journalists crowded around the group.

“I don’t care what your government does,” one woman shouted, CNN reports. “I just want my son back.”

Malaysia Airlines has given them three options: Stay in Beijing, fly to Kuala Lumpur, or go home. Some are applying for visas to travel to Malaysia should the plane be found nearby. Most are resigned to staying in China’s smoggy capital, where they can continue to push for information. “We will never leave without an answer,” said a man surnamed Ye, whose brother-in-law, Chen Jianshe, 58, is among the missing. “As long as we live, we will insist on answers.”

As frustration builds and answers continue to be few and far between, the prospect of conflict grows. There have already been minor scuffles between relatives and officials. The hotel is now shrouded in airport-like security, with metal detectors, x-ray machines for bags, and body searches at the door. Police roam the hallways.

On Monday, at least two U.S. law firms specializing in airplane crashes had representatives milling about the lobby. They said they were there to tell passengers “about their options,” and to raise the idea of putting together a case in U.S. courts. Depending on what happened to the plane, a trial in the U.S. could yield better compensation, they said. Some families listened, others walked away.

For now, most are focused on getting through the day. Mr. Ye, who is waiting for word of his brother-in-law, said the families’ pain was compounded by a lack of information about the search. “Malaysia Airlines has doubled the number of hostages,” he said. “It is like they have a rope around each family’s neck and they are pulling it bit, by bit. It gets tighter every day.”

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 20 March 2014, 9:01 pm and is filed under
MH 370
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.


Urgent email to Najib for Cabinet endorsement tomorrow for a Parliamentary Select Committee on  MH370 to support SAR and standby for full-scale investigation into MH370 crisis

I have just sent an urgent email to the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak asking for Cabinet endorsement at its meeting tomorrow for a Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370 to support the ongoing search-and-rescue (SAR) operation and to stand in readiness for a full-scale investigation into the MH370 crisis after the SAR operation.

In my email to the Prime Minister, I informed him of the amendment moved this morning by the Pakatan Rakyat MP for Seremban YB Anthony Loke to the Motion of Thanks currently debated by Parliament proposing the establishment of a Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370 to give full support to the ongoing search-and-rescue (SAR) operation and to stand in readiness to conduct a full-scale investigation into the MH370 crisis after the SAR operation.

We are now in the 13th day after over 300 hours of the traumatic and agonizing multi-national air-sea search, now involving over a hundred ships, helicopters and aircrafts as well as radar system from 26 nations  for the missing MH370 Boeing 777-200 aircraft with 239 passengers and crew on board covering two vast tracts of territories totaling 2.24 million square nautical miles stretching from the southern Indian Ocean to Kazakhstan in the north.

We seem no nearer to the discovery of any clue to lead to the whereabouts of the aircraft or what happened in the early hours of  March 8,  although there are reports today of a new lead from Australian satellite imagery of two objects possibly related to the missing MG370 in the southern Indian Ocean, but which awaits verification.

When Malaysia expects unprecedented international unity in the world’s largest-ever multi-national SAR operation, Malaysians and in particular the Malaysian Parliament must demonstrate unprecedented national unity in support of the SAR mission for the missing aircraft after the SAR operation, to conduct a thorough and intensive investigation into the MH370 crisis.

It is with these objectives in mind that the amendment to the Motion of Thanks for the establishment of a Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370 has been  proposed by YB Anthony Loke, especially as the Yang di Pertuan Agong in his Royal Address in the official opening of Parliament on 10th March 2014 had specifically expressed sympathy and concern  for the passengers and  crew on board the aircraft and their families.

In my email to the Prime Minister, I stressed that as the nation most directly affected by the MH370 crisis, Malaysia must not only play a leading role in the SAR operation but also in a post-SAR multi-national parliamentary inquiry – which is why it is imperative that a Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370 should be set up without delay, even just to be in standby readiness until after completion of SAR operation before launching full-scale investigations.

In my email, I said: “I write to urge Cabinet approval tomorrow for a Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370 so that all MPs, regardless of BN or PR, whether Ministers or backbenchers, could give unanimous support to this proposal.

“However, if the government proposes to establish a Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370 by way of a separate motion during the current meeting of Parliament, Pakatan Rakyat MPs are open to such initiatives and are prepared to support such alternative propositions.”

(Media Statement in Parliament on Thursday, 20th March 2014)

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 20 March 2014, 5:58 pm and is filed under
MH 370
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.


After satellite find, 12 questions emerge about MH370

The Malaysian Insider

March 21, 2014

Five days after satellites captured images of debris and objects which may be linked to flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean and a day after the release of those images by the Australian authorities, reports have pieced together questions related to the search for the missing plane in waters 2,500km from Perth.

The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER (9M-MRO) took off from Kuala Lumpur at 12.41am on March 8 but disappeared en route to Beijing. There were 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board.

This morning, Australia said it would resume the hunt for objects found on the ocean surface.

Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) general manager John Young said yesterday the largest piece was about 24m. Ships and aircraft from the United States, United Kingdom and New Zealand have joined the Australian-led search effort.

Here are the top 12 questions on missing flight MH370:

When will we know whether the debris from the southern Indian Ocean is from flight 370?

The satellite images of the debris taken on Sunday have not been confirmed as MH370 but they are being seen as the best lead in the investigation for the missing plane so far.

Satellites had captured images of the objects about 23km from each other. The area is remote and far from commercial shipping lanes.

Would pieces of the plane still be floating?

One of the world’s top air accident investigators, Remi Jouty, head of the Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses, the French air accident investigation branch, says the missing jet may never be found if it crashed in the Indian Ocean, according to The Financial Times.

This is supported by Steve Wallace, the United States Federal Aviation Administration’s former director of accident investigation, who CNN quoted as saying that if the plane crashed into the water, large pieces would not be floating by now.

Only lightweight debris, such as life jackets and seats, not aircraft structure, could be floating days after the aircraft struck the water, he said.

Did the plane go too far?

Some of the wilder theories about the plane include hijacking. But discovery of debris in an area so far from MH370’s flight path suggests that there was most likely an emergency on board and the crew attempted to turn back.

Complications might have arisen, causing the crew to fall into unconsciousness, leaving the plane on a ghost flight until it ran out of fuel.

Mitchell Casado, a flight instructor on a Boeing-777 flight simulator, said that running out of fuel would be a big concern.

“There’s such few options,” CNN quoted him as saying.

“As long-range as this aircraft is, it’s a long way to any suitable airport out there. There are some small islands, you know, that you could possibly land at, but that would really be pushing your the limits of the airplane. So I would really be worried about running out of gas.”

The 777, when fully fuelled, can go 16 to 18 hours. Flight 370 wasn’t.

Planes and ships are in the area. What have they found?

AMSA, the agency coordinating the search for the missing plane in the sea off Perth, said four aircraft flew into the search area yesterday but found nothing of note.

A Norwegian cargo ship also joined the search yesterday afternoon, but had not found anything as of nightfall.

Bad weather is hampering the hunt. A second merchant ship is en route to the area, as is the HMAS Success. China and Malaysia will also send vessels.

If it’s not MH370, what else could it be?

CNN said the objects could be almost anything big and buoyant.

The swirling currents in the Indian Ocean can trap all sorts of floating debris. If the objects are not part of flight 370, then they might be shipping containers that fell off a passing cargo vessel.

However, CNN said that the area is far from commercial shipping lanes, and the larger object, at about 24m, was nearly twice as long as standard shipping containers.

If it is MH370, could the Indian Ocean location suggest what happened on that flight?

Robert Goyer, editor-in-chief of Flying magazine and a commercial jet-rated pilot, was quoted by CNN as saying: “The location would suggest a few very important parameters. The spot where searchers have found hoped-for clues is… nearly 6,400km from where the airliner made its unexpected and as yet unexplained turn to the west”.

The most obvious clue? It flew for many hours.

What do the satellite images show?

Two indistinct objects – one about 24m in length and the other about 5m long.

AMSA’s Young said, “Those who are experts indicate they are credible sightings. And the indication to me is of objects that are reasonable size and are probably awash with water, bobbing up and down out of the surface.”

How old are the satellite images?

They were taken by commercial satellite imaging company DigitalGlobe on Sunday.

Why only release them now?

The Indian Ocean is remote and covers about 20% of the Earth’s surface. AMSA said it took four days for the images to reach it “due to the volume of imagery being searched and the detailed process of analysis that followed”.

How did they know to look in this area?

Searchers believe the waters 2,500km from Perth are the most likely spot where the plane will be found.

Mathematical probability had narrowed the likely area to a square – and that was where these images have emerged.

Who is leading the search?

The Australians are leading the search in their area of responsibility, which includes a large area of the southern Indian Ocean. Malaysia remains in overall control of the search.

How long does the flight data recorder ping?

In an ocean this size, it would be difficult to pick up “pings” from the data recorders.

If the black box or transponder is at the bottom of the ocean, the warm waters may impede the pingers, affecting the ability of the pingers to be heard.

The black box’s batteries last about 30 days. MH370 has been missing for 14 days. – March 21, 2014.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 21 March 2014, 4:57 pm and is filed under
MH 370
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.


Chaos, karma and MH370

Azly Rahman

Malaysiakini

Mar 20, 2014

Waking up this morning I wrote this, concerning the fate of MH370:

in karma there is chaos

in kudrat there is iradat

in qada’ there is qadar

in randomness there is order

in silence there are screams no one will ever hear

in the falling of a tree in a forest there is no sound heard

in seeds of hope there are microbes of destructive forces

in memory there is forgetfulness

in history there is fractal geometry

in the rustle of language there is the violence of semantics

in 1414 these were not made to manifest

because the protagonist of the story and the antagonist are one

in the longest story told

whilst the white noise

of chaos

plays in the background…

If there is a watershed, a tipping point, or an apocalypse now to the limits of the neo-feudalistic culture of information suppression and cult of secrecy of Malaysia’s ruling elite, it is in this case of the missing aircraft MH370. In this case of international proportions lies Malaysia’s swan song – her chaos and karma in one.

Chaos Theory, drawn out of quantum mechanics and metaphysics or bio-cybernetics of living things in which an occurrence that seems to be an isolated case and random, may have its origin in an orderly pattern whose seed of its design contains both force of construction and destruction.

Karma is a concept borrowed from the Hindu-Buddhist philosophy signifying a rebirth or a reincarnation or even a reward or retribution governed by the Law of Manu or loosely put, the ‘wheel of life’.

We reap what we sow and as a government the ruling regime, too, may have followed such a pattern of randomness and order and is undergoing karma, judging by the hellish time the international media is giving the country in its attempt to arrive at an explanation of what is the truth is behind the story of the missing MH370; signified and symbolised as a ‘national carrier’ and hence representing the Malaysian government itself.

It is a ‘butterfly effect’ of an arrogant, well-guarded and well-deployed act of patronage especially in the way information is monopolised and how freedom of information, free speech, and freedom of the press is handled.

A cult of government secrecy

The ripples that created the waves from the flapping of the wings of a butterfly during the feudal times of the Malacca kingdom has travelled through space of time and traversed multiple epochs to create a cult of governmental secrecy and a culture of political repression used to suppress dissenting views, and now only to be faced with a karmic situation of epic proportions.

The truth behind the fall of Malacca, the truly legitimate rulers of the Malay kingdom, the reasons behind the countless usurpations between and amongst the degenerative rulers, the conspiracies of the traditional rulers with the colonial powers, real story of the interregnum, the deal made circa the granting of Independence, the riots of May 13, 1969, the many political murders unresolved, the numerous high-profile corruption cases still unresolved and the culprits unpunished, right till the brutal murder of the French-speaking Mongolian arms negotiator – these will never be known.

But all these are narratives useful as data for the chaos and complexity theory applied to the fractal-geometric evolution of the cult of secrecy leading to the inability for this regime to handle an international investigative audience whose culture is that of transparency and accountability.

The butterfly effect is here. Herein lies the effect of a degenerative culture of monopolising and manipulating information that existed even in feudal times – when the sultans of Malacca monopolised knowledge and asked the subjects or the ‘hamba sahaya’ to kow tow to them in the name of the ‘divine right of kings’ or the ideology of ‘daulat’ in which those ruled must be ruled by force and coercion and must never question the feudal rulers’ wishes, commands, and intention.

The international media is demanding all-out transparency and the current regime is learning to abide by the demands.

This is a moment of the deconstruction of the space of knowledge and power and the realisation by the public that the ruling regime cannot subscribe to its own Law of Manu in a post-modern weltanschauung or worldview that demands high-speed access to timely information on a case so crucial to the future of air travel safety specifically and to international standards of the cult of knowing and to the global citizens’ right to information, in general.

This is Malaysia’s swan song – a poetic justice moment of a karma.

Years of putting many in jail without trial, destroying the power of the independent judiciary, silencing the academics, punishing university students for speaking up, waging war on dissenting views, obsession with the big-time economic ideology of monopoly capitalism via a hideous form of crypto-chronic-crony-cultural-capitalism of half-baked Friedmanistic-run-wild form of neo-liberalism deployed liberally to support race-based political ideology – this is where our moment of chaos and karma meets.

It takes a missing plane to craft Malaysia’s newly-found need to totally dismantle her culture of secrecy. A sartor resartus of a post-modern informational sensibility.

It is time to make peace with ourselves. As a nation, we are imploding – this time while the world is watching.

DR AZLY RAHMAN, born in Singapore and grew up in Johor Baru, holds a Columbia University (New York City) doctorate in International Education Development and Masters degrees in four areas: Education, International Affairs, Peace Studies and Communication. He has taught more than 40 courses in six different departments and has written more than 350 analyses on Malaysia. His teaching experience in Malaysia and the United States spans over a wide range of subjects, from elementary to graduate education. He has edited and authored four books; Multiethnic Malaysia: Past, Present, Future (2009), Thesis on Cyberjaya: Hegemony and Utopianism in a Southeast Asian State (2012), The Allah Controversy and Other Essays on Malaysian Hypermodernity (2013), and the latest Dark Spring: Ideological Roots of Malaysia’s GE-13 (2013). He currently resides in the United States.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 21 March 2014, 7:25 am and is filed under
Azly Rahman
,
MH 370
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.


Critical Data Was Delayed in Search for Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight

By Andy Pasztor, Jon Ostrower and James Hookway

The Wall Street Journal

March 20, 2014

Investigators Are Still Working to Recover From the Delay

Four days went by before officials acted on satellite data showing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 flew for several hours away from the area being covered by a massive international search, people familiar with the matter said—a delay from which investigators are still working to recover.

The satellite’s operator, Britain’s Inmarsat PLC, on March 11 turned over to a partner company its data analysis and other documents indicating that the plane wasn’t anywhere near the areas on either side of Malaysia where more countries and ships had been searching for three days since the plane disappeared. The documents included a map showing two divergent north and south corridors for the plane’s route stretching some 3,000 miles from the plane’s last previously known location, the people said.

The information was relayed to Malaysian officials by Wednesday, March 12, the people said. Inmarsat also shared the same information with British security and air-safety officials on Wednesday, according to two of the people, who were briefed on the investigation.

Two additional people familiar with the Malaysian side of the probe said the information could have arrived in Kuala Lumpur as late as the morning of March 13.

Malaysia’s government, concerned about corroborating the data and dealing with internal disagreements about how much information to release, didn’t publicly acknowledge Inmarsat’s information until March 15, during a news conference with Prime Minister Najib Razak. Malaysia began to redirect the search effort that day to focus on the areas the information described, and said for the first time that deliberate actions were involved in the plane’s disappearance.

The disclosures about how the information made its way into the investigation underline how international efforts to find the plane have been repeatedly marred by distrust among the countries involved, confusion in many of Malaysia’s public statements, and criticism from many countries that has led some to suspend or change their search efforts in frustration.

The lost days and wasted resources have threatened to impede the investigation, according to some officials involved with the probe.

The delay also means that 12 days after Flight 370 vanished, investigators are still refining search maps, dividing regions to cover and seeking satellite-surveillance records from several countries along the routes the aircraft is now suspected of taking.

In acknowledging the satellite information Saturday, Mr. Najib said Malaysia “worked hand in hand with our international partners, including neighboring countries” and “shared information in real time with authorities who have the necessary experience to interpret the data.”

Another government official said Malaysia was cautious about revealing and acting on the data because “we don’t want to upset anybody with round after round of confusing information.”

U.S. national-security officials haven’t commented on information-sharing issues. Britain’s Ministry of Defense had no immediate comment and its air-crash investigation agency, which has been invited to assist in the probe, said it couldn’t comment on “an ongoing investigation.”

China’s government has complained about Malaysia’s response, with Premier Li Keqiang on Monday urging Mr. Najib to provide “more detailed information in its possession, including third-party information, in a timely, accurate and comprehensive manner,” according to China’s official Xinhua news agency. China’s foreign ministry didn’t immediately respond to a request to comment late Wednesday.

Within hours of Flight 370’s disappearance on March 8, Inmarsat started searching for clues. What little data it had on the short flight before it disappeared was provided to SITA, a Swiss aviation IT company, on the same day, Inmarsat said.

Late that weekend, Inmarsat’s team delved into its databases to retrieve periodic “pings,” akin to digital handshakes between the plane, a satellite and a ground station, said an industry official briefed on the investigation. The hourly signals provided a crucial clue that the missing 777 most likely remained intact with its engines presumably running hours after it lost contact with civilian radar.

Inmarsat Senior Vice President Chris McLaughlin said that on Monday, March 10, it began extrapolating the location of the jetliner using the aircraft’s changing angle and distance to the satellite, which orbits more than 22,000 miles above a point in the Indian Ocean. Mr. McLaughlin said the data was shared the following day with SITA, which in turn shared it with Malaysian officials.

At that point, the search was still focused primarily in waters east of the Malay Peninsula, and Malaysian officials hadn’t confirmed reports that Flight 370 had altered its course to Beijing about an hour after takeoff to fly west across the peninsula. Inmarsat’s package showed not only that the plane had continued flying for hours, but that it had made an even more radical course change later, ending up along one of two possible corridors, one heading northwest toward Kazakhstan and the other curving far south over the Indian Ocean.

The Inmarsat package, which included a map of the twin north and south corridors, together with readouts of data from a communication satellite, demonstrated the need for a dramatic shift in search areas, according to people briefed on the investigation.

One person said Malaysia chose not to disclose what it considered raw data, preferring to check it first with international partners.

Mr. Najib, the prime minister, had instructed his officials early on that all information coming in be corroborated with agencies such as the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration before releasing the information publicly, Malaysian officials say. They say that was intended to minimize red herrings in the search.

Complicating matters, Chinese satellite images released last Wednesday showed suspected floating debris from the plane. Though the images turned out to be dead ends, they distracted investigators and delayed announcement of Inmarsat’s findings, according to one person close to the situation.

Inmarsat officials, meanwhile, became concerned the data weren’t being acted upon quickly enough to help overhaul the search, according to a person familiar with the sequence of events. It turned last Wednesday to U.K. security authorities to more quickly disseminate the data, according to two industry officials. Malaysia Airlines, in turn, instructed SITA to use the U.K. Air Accidents Investigation Branch as the primary conduit for Inmarsat’s data, one of these officials said.

Publicly, Malaysian officials gave little new information. Asked last Thursday what data from the aircraft investigators were relying on, Malaysia Airlines CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said “no more systems from the plane” had provided information about the jet’s whereabouts.That day, Malaysia’s acting transport minister said that “whenever there are new details they must be corroborated.”

Throughout this process, the basic theory and underlying data from Inmarsat didn’t change significantly, according to three people briefed on the investigation.Rather, the days were spent verifying data and attempting to combine it with estimated fuel consumption to derive more-precise projections of how far the plane could have flown.

“The material was refined, but it wasn’t demonstrably different” from what Inmarsat first proposed earlier that week, according to one of these people.

It wasn’t clear how U.S. officials obtained the initial Inmarsat data, which they analyzed and helped translate into maps. Regardless, people briefed on the probe agree it took longer than expected for the information to spread from engineers and technical experts who cranked out the first version of the data to policy makers and then back down to officials directing specific elements of the searches.

—Marietta Cauchi and Charles Hutzler contributed to this article.

Write to Andy Pasztor at
[email protected]
, Jon Ostrower at
[email protected]
 and James Hookway at
[email protected]

                This entry was posted on Friday, 21 March 2014, 2:35 am and is filed under
MH 370
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.


In MH370 search, unforgiving spotlight on Malaysia

By Justin Ong and Boo Su-Lyn

The Malay Mail Online

March 21, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, March 21 — When Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared on March 8, the world poured out its sympathy to Malaysia.

The disappearance of a Boeing 777-200ER — considered one of the safest planes in aviation history — with 239 passengers onboard captured the world’s attention and the media obliged, with news outlets arriving in droves to cover the tragedy.

The first faces that the world saw of Malaysia was that of MAS chief executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya and Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) director-general Datuk Azharuddin Abdul Rahman.

From the offset, Azharuddin appeared uncomfortable in front of cameras, speaking with apprehension palpable to those watching.

As hours turned into days and with no signs of the plane, however, sympathy gave way to frustration and attention slowly turned from Malaysia’s loss of a passenger plane to its handling of the search.

Under the unforgiving glare of the assembled international and local media, whose reports were played again and again on 24-hour news channels and shared globally on social media sites to be further dissected, Malaysia’s well-coiffed image on the international stage began to be picked apart.

More focus began to fall on the words coming from Malaysia’s representatives.

Home Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi reportedly expressed disbelief that Immigration officials allowed two men with “Asian features” to board MH370 using passports stolen from an Italian and Austrian.

This later proved incorrect, with Azharuddin choosing to use Italian national footballer Mario Balotelli to help illustrate the point.

Azharuddin also fell foul to clarifications from the police, who revealed that the five passengers the DCA chief said checked in but never boarded MH370 never existed; every passenger booked for the flight was onboard.

Coming to the DCA chief’s defence, Cabinet minister Datuk Seri Shahidan Kassim said Azharuddin’s inconsistencies was only a secondary issue and accused the media of asking unnecessary questions of the official.

It was not until acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein came on to anchor Malaysia’s communications with the press that a cohesiveness began to show.

“Hishammuddin has done very well. But there were bungles by the director-general of the DCA, comments from the [Inspector-General of Police] and generals of armed forces — these people are not trained to deal with the media,” Wan Saiful Wan Jan, chief executive of the Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (IDEAS), told The Malay Mail Online.

On March 9, the military let slip that it saw MH370 fly west across the peninsula, but quickly denied the reports that followed, the first of what was a series of contradictions over the events surrounding MH370.

From then until Malaysia decided to confirm vital pieces of information — that the plane flew for hours longer than first known and in a direction completely away from the South China Sea where rescuers had searched for a week — what little details about the information appeared to come from the West.

As a result, Malaysia was alleged to be withholding information and being opaque by the rest of the world, including a most unlikely accuser in China.

“The government should just tell what it knows, what it does not know, and its plan of action to deal with the issue,” Arnold Puyok, a lecturer with the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, said when contacted by The Malay Mail Online.

Malaysia argued that it would irresponsible to release such data without corroborating as it did with various national agencies, notably the aviation authorities from the US and the UK.

Ibrahim Suffian of independent pollster Merdeka Centre noted that this might also have been the source of Malaysia’s problems.

“Given that the Malaysian authorities are also dependent on external parties abroad for technical assistance and that there is probably also investigation efforts by other countries, it is possible for leaks or scoops by journalists outside the country,” said Ibrahim.

Wan Saiful agreed on the need to verify data before disseminating it to the public, and said the problem lay with the amount of time it took to confirm the information.

In the midst of the national crisis that is MH370, the government said the issue was “bigger than politics”.

Yet it chose not to brief all lawmakers in Parliament. Instead, an event was held at a local hotel for the Barisan Nasional Backbenchers Club (BNBBC) to brief MPs from the ruling coalition on the timeline surrounding the plane’s disappearance, leading to vociferous complaints from those in the opposition Pakatan Rakyat pact.

Wan Saiful and Puyok said the government should have set aside partisanship in this instance, with the latter saying the government could not handle the issue alone.

But Ibrahim pointed out BN’s response was likely the result of its mistrust of the opposition, as well as the strain it was already under trying to manage the media. He suggested it was trying to cut down on the “spin” that could be used to attack the administration.

“I think the authorities are wary in dealing with the opposition because they can’t control how the information they pass on will be used by these PR MPs,” he said.

Foreign reports that linked Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim to the plane’s disappearance through pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s membership in PKR and familial ties to the opposition leader — the aviator is a distant relative of Anwar’s daughter-in-law — also led to suspicions that the authorities were behind the connection.

Despite calls to set aside politics, the IDEAS chief pointed out that supporters of Umno, the lynchpin of the ruling coalition, have jumped on the opportunity to attack Anwar over the link.

Although Malaysia’s image has taken a battering on the world stage, the observers said the administration could still learn vital lessons on how to manage perceptions, including the importance of being open.

“[The government] did make some miscues in its initial handling but since then it has done relatively well in trying to be transparent and forthcoming in the information provided to the public,” Lim said.

Misgivings aside, Wan Saiful was optimistic about what Malaysia would take away from the saga of MH370.

“I think we’re learning on how to deal with issues like this. There’s a degree of increasing maturity…

The bigger lesson is for our political parties to make their members become a lot more sensible,” he said.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 21 March 2014, 8:18 am and is filed under
Media
,
MH 370
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.


MH370: Australia says definite findings on debris likely within 3 days

The Malay Mail Online

March 20, 2014

SYDNEY, March 20 — Australia expects to make a quick deliberation on whether possible debris seen at sea is indeed from flight MH370, a report said today, but a first spotter flight failed to locate anything in bad weather.

Authorities should know something definite on the possible discovery of debris from the missing Malaysia Airlines plane within “two or three days”, the Australian Associated Press quoted Defence Minister David Johnston as saying in Jakarta.

But a Royal Australian Air Force Orion sent today to investigate possible wreckage from the Boeing 777 failed to spot debris, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) said.

The P-3 surveillance aircraft was sent to the Indian Ocean search zone some 2,500 kilometres (1,550 miles) southwest of Perth after Australia revealed the presence of two objects at sea possibly related to flight MH370.

“RAAF P3 crew unable to locate debris. Cloud & rain limited visibility,” AMSA said on its Twitter feed. “Further aircraft to continue search for #MH370.”

Three more long-range surveillance planes — one each from Australia, New Zealand and the United States — were due to inspect the area where satellite images taken Sunday showed the two objects, one as large as 24 metres (79 feet) in size.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott told parliament the images represented “new and credible information” but stressed that any link with flight MH370 had still to be confirmed. Malaysia also said the information offered a “credible lead”, but stressed it was too early to tell.

This “requires us overnight to verify and corroborate it”, Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters in Kuala Lumpur, adding that the overall search and rescue effort would continue in the meantime.

Currently, there are 18 ships, 29 aircraft and six ship-borne helicopters deployed in the search along two corridors stretching from the southern Indian Ocean to Central Asia. — AFP

                This entry was posted on Friday, 21 March 2014, 3:02 am and is filed under
MH 370
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.


No luck on first day of search at ocean site for debris linked to flight MH370

The Malaysian Insider

March 20, 2014

After many hours involving aircraft from Australia, New Zealand and the United States, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (Amsa) has said it has ended its search efforts for the day for possible debris from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Surveillance had scoured a remote and stormy section of the Indian Ocean for most of Thursday, looking for a pair of floating objects that Australia and Malaysia guardedly called a “credible” lead in the 12-day-old hunt for a missing passenger jet.

Australia said the objects – one was estimated at 24 metres across – were captured in satellite imagery, raising hopes of a breakthrough in the Malaysian plane’s mysterious disappearance as relatives of the 239 people aboard braced for another emotional roller-coaster.

Four search aircraft were dispatched from Australia – which has taken charge of the search in the southern Indian Ocean – to the area about 2,500 kilometres southwest of Perth where the grainy images were snapped.

The planes – two from Australia, one from New Zealand and one US aircraft – covered an area of 23,000 sq km without any sighting before the search was suspended for the day, said Amsa.

Amsa has released a statement saying that it has ended its search efforts for the day. They will resume tomorrow morning.

It earlier reported cloudy, rainy conditions and limited visibility.

A Norwegian merchant ship reached the site as daylight waned, and another merchant ship was en route.

The Australian navy’s HMAS Success was also headed for the area, and Britain sent a naval survey ship, HMS Echo.

Clearly wary of raising hopes following a series of past false leads, Hishammuddin warned of delays in verifying the apparent debris.

‘Awash with water’

The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew, vanished in the early hours of March 8 after veering drastically off course over the South China Sea while en route to Beijing.

Investigators believe it was deliberately diverted but still don’t know by whom, why, or where it ended up.

The satellite images, taken on Sunday, were first revealed earlier in the day by Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott. The larger of the two was described as measuring 24 metres.

Abbott told parliament the images represented “new and credible information” but stressed that any link with flight MH370 had still to be confirmed.

“The indication to me is of objects that are of a reasonable size and probably awash with water and bobbing up and down over the surface,” top Amsa official John Young said.

The images are the first solid clue since the search area was significantly broadened last weekend to take in a vast part of the Indian Ocean.

Experts said the fact that Abbott himself had released the information lent weight to its credibility, but warned it could be difficult to find the objects in an isolated corner of the Earth noted for strong currents.

“The current there is one of the strongest in the world, moving at as fast as one metre per second,” said Gan Jianping, an oceanographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

HMAS Success, which is capable of retrieving any debris, is some days away from the site.

The objects would have drifted for four days, making them a “logistical nightmare” to locate, said Australian Defence Minister David Johnston.

“We are in a most isolated part of the world. In fact it probably doesn’t get, if I can be so bold, more isolated,” Johnston told Sky News Australia.

He was later quoted as saying it could take “two or three days” before any firm conclusions are made.

If debris is found, the new and challenging task will begin of finding the black box to help figure out what befell the plane.

Malaysia has asked the FBI to help recover data which it said was deleted from a home flight simulator belonging to the plane’s chief pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

Zaharie, a respected 33-year veteran of the airline, has come under suspicion since investigators concluded the plane’s communication systems were disabled manually before it changed course.

US President Barack Obama, who is due to visit Malaysia next month, said on Wednesday he wanted anguished relatives to know Washington considers solving the riddle a “top priority”.

The search for the Malaysian jet is the longest in modern passenger-airline history. The previous record was the 10-day search for a Boeing 737-400 operated by Indonesia’s PT Adam Skyconnection Airlines, which went missing off the coast of that country’s Sulawesi island January 1, 2007. – AFP, March 20, 2014.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 21 March 2014, 2:53 am and is filed under
MH 370
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.


Satellite Company Says It Predicted Missing Plane’s Location 10 Days Ago

By PAOLO MARENGHI and MIKE TREW

abcnews

March 20, 2014

A British satellite company said today that it had indications that the missing Malaysia Airlines plane may have crashed into the Indian Ocean as early as two days after the plane’s disappearance.

The search for the jetliner did not move into the Indian Ocean until more than a week after the plane vanished in the middle of the night from Malaysian airspace on March 7.

“This is very troubling, just thinking of the time wasted and what was ever on the water moving farther away,” said ABC News consultant Tom Haueter, a former National Transportation Safety Board investigator.

Inmarsat, the maker of satellites, told ABC News that they had an “initial idea” on March 9 and by March 10 were “fairly certain” that the search parties should look in the south Indian Ocean for the vanished plane.

Inmarsat shared their data with a partner company the following day, on March 11, and with Malaysian investigators on March 12.

It was not until three days later, on March 15, that Malaysian authorities acknowledged that satellite data suggested the plane was not in the Strait of Malacca or the South China Sea and began redirecting search efforts to the Indian Ocean.

Asked whether the company was concerned Malaysia took so long to act on their information, Inmarsat spokesman Chris McLaughlin told the BBC that theirs was just one small piece of data in the Malaysian investigation.

“No, it’s not our place to be concerned,” McLaughlin said. “Our position was we shared data and an idea that could be tested against other data with the correct authorities on the Tuesday. We can’t possibly know what other data was in the investigation or what routes the Malaysian government were following.”

                This entry was posted on Friday, 21 March 2014, 8:08 am and is filed under
MH 370
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.


The hunt for MH370: which theories are plausible, and which don’t add up?

Jon Swaine and Tom McCarthy in New York

Guardian

20 March 2014

In the absence of hard facts, speculation about what really happened on Flight 370 has been rampant. But do any of these explanations hold up? We take a look at the competing theories

It’s 12 days since the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. A 250-ton Boeing 777-200 has, for the time being, vanished. Twenty-six countries have joined a search of 2.24m square nautical miles from central Asia to the southern Indian Ocean. Satellite images have given investigators cause to believe there may be debris in the southern Indian Ocean, but so far, a search of the area has found nothing.

In the absence of confirmed sightings, speculation has been rife about what happened to the plane and the 239 people on board, with competing theories feverishly discussed by professionals and amateurs. Some sound more plausible than others. Here, we assess the relative merits of the more prominent explanations for the plane’s disappearance.

1. What happened?

It was an accident …

Those remaining hopeful that no one deliberately wronged MH370 and its passengers were boosted by a much-shared online post by Christopher Goodfellow, a former pilot. Something malfunctioned, Goodfellow surmised, and a sharp turn to the left made in the flight’s first hour was, in fact, a swift attempted re-route by the pilot to the nearest runway on which he could land: a 13,000-foot strip on Pulau Langkawi, the largest island in an archipelago of 104 in the Andaman Sea.

    The left turn is the key here. Zaharie Ahmad Shah was a very experienced senior captain with 18,000 hours of flight time. We old pilots were drilled to know what is the closest airport of safe harbor while in cruise. Airports behind us, airports abeam us, and airports ahead of us. They’re always in our head. Always. If something happens, you don’t want to be thinking about what are you going to do – you already know what you are going to do. When I saw that left turn with a direct heading, I instinctively knew he was heading for an airport. He was taking a direct route to Palau Langkawi, a 13,000-foot airstrip with an approach over water and no obstacles.

Goodfellow theorised that “there was most likely a fire or electrical fire” He suggested that the plane’s transponder and ACARS (Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System) were shut off as casualties of a scramble to tackle this blaze. “In the case of fire the first response is to pull all the main [electrical] busses and restore circuits one by one until you have isolated the bad one,” he said, adding that the crew could have been incapacitated by smoke before they could land, leaving the plane to fly on for six or more hours on autopilot, before eventually crashing.

Goodfellow’s theory was comfortingly simple, but suffered from a major shortcoming. Malaysian authorities have said the plane appeared to have been re-routed a second time after that first sharp turn. A third tracking device, on the plane’s engines, continued sending intermittent electronic “pings” via satellite to the ground for another six hours, indicating that the plane continued to fly.

The final “ping” put its last known position on one of two arcs. Investigators said that the electronic “pings” put its last known position on one of two arcs of a circle emanating out from the satellite that detected it. One arc is to the north, over China, and the other is to the south over the Indian ocean, off the western coast of Australia. Goodfellow’s assumed autopilot could not have taken the plane to either destination.

“If the pings are accurate, the plane turned again,” said Patrick Smith, an airline pilot and an author on aviation. “Autopilot only does what it tells you to.” He went on: “It is also very unlikely that the plane could have carried on flying for hours after it had indeed suffered a fire or other mechanical catastrophe”. Smith concluded: “It is not a strong theory.”

It was no accident …

After it was discovered that the two separate communications systems were turned off, investigators said that they had concluded that MH370 was the victim of a hijacking or sabotage. “These movements are consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane,” Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak said. Little other solid evidence has been produced or cited by the Malaysians for why this conclusion was reached. Still, two theories followed.

a) The pilot or co-pilot were responsible

Attention has focused on captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, and first officer Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27. A transponder and ACARS can only be shut down by someone who knows what he or she is doing. “The flight crew, by virtue of the controls and the circuit-breaker panels in the cockpit, have the ability to remove power from them,” said Dennis Schmitz, a veteran engineer and executive in the aviation communications industry. Malaysian ministers also initially said, at a 15 March news conference, that one of the communicating systems was switched off before the last known verbal message from the cockpit – “all right, good night”.

But authorities later backtracked on this, admitting they did not know exactly when the systems were shut down. The pilots did not show signs of radical activity, although Shah’s support for a Malaysian opposition leader jailed the day before the flight has been much analysed. The pair also did not request to fly together, and appear to have been upstanding professionals, according to several profiles. Adding to the confusion, US officials briefed reporters in recent days that the plane was first manually rerouted before that final verbal sign-off – again indicating foul play in the cockpit from someone with technical knowhow. “That is a red flag,” said Smith.

Shah kept a flight simulator at home. Malaysian officials said on Wednesday that some files had been removed from it several weeks ago. “The experts are looking at what are the logs, what has been cleared,” Malaysian police inspector general Tan Sri Khalid Bin Abu Bakar told reporters, at a news conference. Hishammuddin Hussein, the defence and acting transport minister, appeared to confirm reports that the FBI had been asked to help analyse the files, which he said were being looked at with “local and international expertise”.

b) The plane was hijacked by someone else

If the plane was deliberately sabotaged, and the pilots were not responsible, someone else on the plane must have been. Malaysian military radar “appeared to show that the missing airliner climbed to 45,000 feet” before descending steeply, the New York Times reported, which could potentially indicate a struggle in the cockpit. However, this report also prompted speculation that a knowledgeable flyer had deliberately flown that high in an attempt to deprive some on board of oxygen, thus knocking them out or even killing them.

There remains a lack of consensus among experts about the precise technicalities of ACARS. A full disabling of the system requires circuits to be broken not only in the cockpit “but also in the electronics bay”, according to Smith. This bay is found beneath the flight deck, indicating that someone involved was at one point outside the cockpit.

The passengers included two men flying on stolen passports and at least one from China’s restive Xinjiang region, whose separatist militants were blamed for a knife attack at a railway station that killed 29 people earlier this month.

Yet the men travelling on stolen passports appear to have been seeking asylum in Europe and had no clear connection to terrorism or militant groups. Background checks on passengers and crew have turned up no likely suspects, and China has announced that it has unearthed nothing untoward in the profiles of the two-thirds of passengers who were Chinese. Commandeering the plane, disabling its communications systems and flying it smoothly would require organisation and expertise that would seem difficult to hide.

However, no message claiming responsibility for taking the plane appears to have been left by any passenger, and no group has claimed responsibility for it. And – to state the obvious – nothing appears to have been done with it.

2. Where is the plane?

a) Landed to the north

The northern of the two arcs identified by investigators as the possible locations from where the plane sent its final “ping” sweeps from southern to north-western China, prompting speculation that MH370 might have flown over south Asia towards smaller central territories, where it could have landed. Some have even suggested it could have been parked, awaiting use in a future terrorist attack. But “there are hundreds of planes in airports and depots all over the world,” Smith pointed out. “Why take this one and force the whole world to look for you?”

Kazakhstan and Krgyzstan were quickly singled out as potential landing spots. Yet both governments stressed that they would have detected the plane, and did not. “Even if all on-board equipment is switched off, it is impossible to fly through in a silent mode,” Serik Mukhtybayev, deputy head of the Kazakh Civil Aviation Committee, said in a statement. “There are also military bodies monitoring the country’s air space.” Dair Tokobayev, vice-president of Kyrgyzstan’s main civilian airport, told Reuters: “This plane did not fly over Kyrgyzstan’s territory.”

And for the plane to have reached that arc several hours after losing contact with the ground, it would have probably have needed to avoid detection by several major militaries in the region. While most countries protect the locations of their radar sites, researchers estimate that China alone has about 30 long-range systems.

“They must have long-range radar out there,” said Ron Ruggeri, a veteran air-traffic controller and instructor at Vaughn College of aeronautics and technology. “If the plane did go that way, somebody would have seen it.” He went on: “Things are also a little on-edge in that part of the world. If they did not know who this plane was, I’d expect them to scramble jets to find out”.

b) The plane flew somewhere else

Dismissing the significance of the two possible arcs, some have speculated that sightings show the MH370 went on to fly elsewhere. Residents of some remote islands in the Maldives said they had spotted a “low-flying jumbo jet” on the morning the MH370 disappeared, according to Haveeru, a local news site. Their description seemed to match that of the missing jet.

However the Maldives government swiftly dismissed the suggestion. “Based on the monitoring up to date, no indication of flight MH370 has been observed on any military radars in the country,” said the Maldives National Defence Force in a statement, adding that airport radar had come up short, too.

Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox, suggested on Twitter that the plane might have been “effectively hidden, perhaps in northern Pakistan, like Bin Laden”. The Pakistani government has firmly rejected the notion and said the plane was not detected by its radars. Indian officials have also pushed back against speculation the plane flew over the country.

c) The plane flew to the south and probably crashed into the sea

Proponents of the second arc, which curves away gradually from the western coast of Australia, have MH370 heading south from its sharp left turn, over the Indian ocean. The lack of confirmed sightings by radar systems to the north, and the fact that no wreckage of the plane has been recovered in Asia, has boosted speculation that this is the more likely of the two directions. On Thursday, the Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, told parliament in Canberra that satellite imagery had found two possible pieces of debris at a location 2,500km (1,500 miles) south-west of Perth. Detailed analysis of that imagery produced “new and credible information”, he said, although an initial aerial search turned up nothing.

After hitting the southern arc and flying on for a little longer, the plane could have descended into the two-mile-deep ocean and sunk, along with its two “black box” data recorders that will have collected information and audio from the cockpit. More than a third of the recorders’ 30-day batteries, which allow it to send a beacon-like signal to investigators, have now expired.

Experts stress that the south is likely to prove more fruitful. “I look for who would have the best intelligence,” said Dr Todd Curtis, a former airline safety analyst for Boeing. “The US has a view of what’s going on all over the world, and when the White House announced last week that it was despatching the seventh fleet to the Indian Ocean, it signalled to me that this was the most likely location. And since then, the Australians have taken the lead down there.”

Australia said on Thursday that it had halved the search area in the Indian Ocean – albeit to an area still covering 300,000 square kilometres – and moved it closer to Perth.

Reuters quoted a source close to the investigation on Wednesday as saying: “The working assumption is that it went south, and furthermore that it went to the southern end of that corridor.” Within hours, however, this had been challenged by the Malaysian defence and acting transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein. “They are both equally important,” he said of the two arcs. “But the southern corridor is much more challenging.”

                This entry was posted on Friday, 21 March 2014, 4:32 am and is filed under
MH 370
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.


Third Call to  Kajang voters – unite solidly to vote for Wan Azizah in Sunday’s by-election on behalf of 30 million Malaysians as vote of confidence in her becoming the first woman Prime Minister of  Malaysia

Open Letter to the Voters of Kajang on the Kajang by-election on Friday, 21st March 2014:

I had expressed two hopes in the Kajang by-election on Sunday.

Firstly, that the Kajang voters could  perform the impossible to make the Barisan Nasional candidate lose the deposit on polling day on March 23.

But this is just an  “impossibly tall order” which is unlikely to be achieved on Sunday, as we will then not be talking about the Pakatan Rakyat/PKR candidate Datuk Seri  Dr. Wan Azizah Wan Ismail winning the Kajang by-election or securing a bigger majority than the 6,824 votes won by former PKR Assemblyman Lee Chin Chen in the 13 General Election last May, but a humongous, unprecedented and unimaginable majority of some 24,000 votes.

This is because if the BN candidate is to lose deposit in Sunday’s by-election, the BN must be denied one-eighth of the votes cast. Assuming a voter turn-out of  80% of the 40,000 voters in Kajang, this means that  the BN must not win more than one-eighth of the votes cast or not more than 4,000 votes – which will give Azizah 28,000 votes and BN 4,000 votes from the 32,000 votes or a majority of some 24,000 votes!

In the 13GE in May last year, the PKR candidate won 80 per cent of the Chinese votes, 60% of the Indian votes and 35% of the Malay votes.

Is it possible in the Kajang by-election for Azizah and  Pakatan Rakyat to better on last year’s performance, raising the result to  support of 90% of Chinese votes, 70% of Indian votes and 75% of Malay votes?

I am told that BN candidate is sure of getting a “rock bottom” of 8,000 votes – a measure of how difficult and even impossible to get the BN candidate to lose deposit in the Kajang by-election.

I will be the most surprised person in Malaysia if my hope is realized and  this miracle is achieved in the Kajang by-election on Sunday.

But there is no more appropriate occasion in the history of Malaysian elections for over half-a-century than in the Kajang by-election for voters to forfeit the election candidate of the ruling coalition of Barisan Nasional.

This has nothing to do with Chew Mei Fun as the MCA/BN candidate but has everything to do with  sending a  clear and unmistakable message to the  trio of personalities in Malaysia –  the former Prime Minister, Tun Mahathir, the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak and the Perkasa President Ibrahim Ali because they must be held collectively responsible for the multiple national crisis facing  Malaysians – in particular the worst racial and religious polarization in the nation’s history undermining national unity and nation-building.

My second hope is that the 40,000 voters of Kajang by-election will perform the role of the legendary Justice Bao – nicknamed “Clear Sky Bao” (包青天) – by making Kajang the modern-day Kaifeng, the ancient Song Dynasty capital of China from where  Justice Bao  gained his reputation for uprightness, zero tolerance for injustice and corruption, to perform four noble objectives, viz:

* To save Parliamentary Opposition Leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim from the injustice of a five-year jail sentence which would also have disqualified him as Member of Parliament for Permatang Pauh;

*To save DAP National Chairman Karpal Singh from the injustice of a RM4,000 fine for sedition which would have disqualified him as Member of Parliament for Bukit Gelugor when he should not have been charged in the first place, as he was offering his opinion as the leading constitutional lawyer in the country and senior political leader during the developments of the Perak political coup d’etat in February 2009;

*To save the Malaysian judiciary and system of justice from relapsing into the “Dark Age of Justice” in the late eighties and nineties, when there was complete lack of national and international confidence in a truly independent judiciary and a just rule of law in Malaysia; and

*As patriots, to save Malaysia from the sextuplet of national crisis confronting the Malaysian people and nation since the 13GE last May – nation-building, economic, educational, security, anti-corruption and the system of justice.

I do not think I can achieve my first hope that the Kajang voters make the Barisan Nasional lose the deposit on Sunday’s by-election, which I admit is an “impossibly tall order” but I have confidence that my second hope, that the voters of Kajang will represent the 30 million voters at this important juncture of the nation’s history and development to achieve the four-fold objective to save Anwar, save Karpal, save the judiciary and to save nation is eminently realizable.

With two days to go before the Kajang by-election, I wish to make a third call to the voters of Kajang – to unite solidly to vote for Wan Azizah on Sunday on behalf of 30 million Malaysians  as a vote of confidence in her becoming the first woman Prime Minister in Malaysia.

If the Pakatan Rakyat succeeds in the 14th General Elections to capture Putrajaya by winning a majority of the parliamentary seats in Malaysia, the country may be seeing the first woman Prime Minister in Malaysia especially if Anwar Ibrahim is disqualified from standing as an MP in the next general elections because of the political and judicial shenanigans of UMNO/BN.

In Asia, we have seen woman Prime Ministers or Presidents like Indira Gandhi, who was Indian Prime Minister twice spanning 16 years; Pratibha Patil who was President of India for five years from 2007; Sirimavo Bandaranaike who was thrice  Prime Minister of Sri Lanka spanning 17 years; Benazir Bhutto who was twice Prime Minister of Pakistan for more than four years; Bangaldadesh  has produced two woman Prime Ministers, Khaleda Zia who was twice Prime Minister spanning more than 10 years and Sheikh Hasina Wajed also twice as Prime Minister also covering terms for over 10 years; Park Geun-hye the incumbent President of South Korea.

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

Farther afield, we have incumbent woman Prime Ministers or Presidents like (1) Angela Markel, German Chancellor for over more than eight years; (2)  Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Prime Minister of Denmark; (3) Erna Solberg, Prime Minister of Norway; (4)  Alenka Bratusek, Prime Minister of Slovenia; (5) Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, President of Argentina for more than six years; (6) Dilma Rousseff, President of Brazil since 2011; (7) Atifete Jahjaga, President of Kosovo since 2011; (8) Laura Chinchilla, President of Costa Rica; (9)  Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia for more than eight years and (9) Joyce Banda, President of Malawi since 2012.

Women who have served as heads of governments or states include Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of United Kingdom for over 11 years; Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel for over five years; Gro Harlem Brundtland, Prime Minister of Norway three times spanning over nine years; Mary Robinson,  President for Iceland for more than six years; Tansu Ciller, Prime Minister of Turkey for over two years; Jenny Shipley and Helen Clarke who had served as Prime Ministers of New Zealand for two years for the former and  nearly nine years for the latter; Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia for over three years; Michelle Bachelet, President of Chile for more than four years; Dalia Grybauskaite, President  of Lithuania for more than four years and Roza Otunbayeva, President of Kyrgyzstan.

It is time Malaysia catches up with the rest of the world in terms of gender equality, starting with the first woman Prime Minister in the near future – and there cannot be a better candidate than Datuk Seri Dr. Wan Azizah.

This will be a historic role for the people of Kajang to vote for Azizah as a first step to Putrajaya and the first woman Prime Minister in Malaysia.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 21 March 2014, 12:03 pm and is filed under
Kajang by-election
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.


What if MH370 is never found?

The Malaysian Insider

March 21, 2014

March 21, 2014.Dozens of ships and aircraft have joined the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 but after 14 days, experts have now raised the question: what if the Boeing 777-200ER (9M-MRO) is never found?

Although many experts think such an idea seems unlikely, especially in the age of modern technology, history has shown that it was not impossible, AP reported today.

“When something like this happens that confounds us, we’re offended by it, and we’re scared by it,” Ric Gillespie, a former aviation accident investigator was quoted as saying.

Gillespie wrote a book about American aviator Amelia Earheart’s still-unsolved 1937 disappearance over the Pacific Ocean.

“We had the illusion of control and it’s just been shown to us that oh, folks, you know what? A really big airliner can just vanish. And nobody wants to hear that,” he added.

Journal of Transportation Security editor-in-chief Andrew Thomas was quoted in the same report as saying that the problem also lies in the fact that airline systems were not as sophisticated as what was widely perceived.

Airports and airplanes all around the world use “antiquated radar tracking technology” – first developed in the 1950s – rather than modern GPS systems.

Although a GPS system might not have solved the case of the missing MH370, it would have at least given investigators a better read on the Boeing 777-200ER’s last known location, Thomas said.

“There are lots of reasons why they haven’t changed, but the major one is cost. The next-generation technology would cost US$70 billion to US$80 billion (about RM230 billion to RM260 billion) in the US,” he was quoted as saying.

MH370’s disappearance on March 8, while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, would also put pressure on airlines and governments to improve their monitoring systems, including handoff procedures between countries, said the AP report.

Besides that, without any wreckage, it would be hard to pin the responsibility on the airline or the manufacturers or other parties, it said.

“The international aviation legal system does not anticipate the complete disappearance of an aircraft,” Brian Havel, a law professor and director of the International Aviation Law Institute at DePaul University in Chicago, said.

“We just don’t have the tools for that at present.”

Families of those on board MH370 would be the ones to face the “most painful consequences” of a failed search.

“In any kind of death, the most important matter for relatives and loved ones is knowing the context and circumstances,” said Kevin Tso, chief executive of New Zealand agency Victim Support, which has been counselling family and friends of the two New Zealand passengers aboard the flight.

“When there’s very little information, it’s very difficult.”

The huge number of speculation and rumours about the plane’s whereabouts has not been helpful to the families, he said, adding that they may be getting false hope that their loved ones were still alive.

It has been almost 50 years since a plane carrying more than two dozen people disappeared without a trace: in 1965, an Argentine military plane carrying 69 people disappeared and has never been found.

However, Gillespie and other experts were optimistic that flight MH370 would eventually be found, “even if investigators have to wait until some wreckage washes ashore”.

“We all expect we’re going to find this plane and the chances are probably pretty good that we’ll find something. But you know, I think everyone thought that about Amelia Earhart as well,” Phaedra Hise, a pilot and author of “Pilot Error: The Anatomy of a Plane Crash”, was quoted as saying.

“We know there’s a chance that we may never find out what happened. Which is a little scary, isn’t it?” – March 21, 2014.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 21 March 2014, 4:25 pm and is filed under
MH 370
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.


5 Eyes in the Sky: The TRUTH about Flight MH370 and SPOOKSATS

By Simon Sharwood

The Register

21 Mar 2014

Comment
 That the US and other nations operate spy satellites capable of taking very detailed photographs of Earth is not in doubt. But the idea that those satellites have been pressed into service to find downed Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, and that it is therefore possible to infer some of the satellites’ capabilities, is very debatable.

That’s not stopped some of the media from suggesting that the reason Australia’s Maritime Safety Authority did not mention the source of the images it used as the basis for its decision to explore the Southern Ocean, was because to do so would reveal that they came from a military satellite.

In these post-Snowden days, such hints are serious stuff.
The public knows a lot more about the scale and scope of US surveillance efforts than it did this time last year. Interest in such information remains keen.

But speculation the candidate MH370 debris was found by spooksats is obviously dubious, because the images ASMA has released are clearly marked as having their copyright assigned to DigitalGlobe, a US-based outfit known to operate at least three imaging satellites and which last year boasted it can, on request, photograph anywhere on Earth every 12 hours.

Also a well-established fact is that the US imaging satellite operators like DigitalGlobe are prevented from letting the public access the highest-resolution photographs their craft can capture. Those restrictions are made by the US government and DigitalGlobe appealed against them in September 2013.

As this report to a US Senate committee illustrates, that request has been taken seriously, largely for commercial reasons:

The Committee understands that a commercial data provider has requested licensing approval to collect and sell on the open market, electro-optical imagery with a ground sample distance of 0.25-meter. Recognizing the ability of U.S. commercial imagery providers to contribute more substantially to the national security mission at a lower cost point, and consistent with the U.S. policy of enabling U.S. companies to maintain a leadership position in this industry, the Committee encourages the GEOINT functional manager and the DNI to promptly review this licensing request. The Committee is concerned that foreign commercial imagery providers may soon be able to provide imagery at or better than the currently allowed commercial U.S. resolution limit of 0.5 meters. As foreign firms approach or surpass this level of resolution, current restrictions on U.S. commercial imagery data providers put the United States at a competitive disadvantage and may harm an industrial base that is important to national security.

Perhaps DigitalGlobe’s fleet can do even better than .25 metre resolution. If it can, it is entirely reasonable to assume it would be shared with the US’s partners in the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing alliance, one of which is Australia. And Australia operates a Defence Imagery and Geospatial Organisation (DIGO) that boasts its capabilities include “the process of examining an image collected from satellites or aircraft to identify features, describe activity and interpret what is occurring at a given place on the Earth’s surface.”

AMSA has cited DIGO as a source.

For what it is worth, it is known that the US government rents satellites. In 2013 it even leased a Chinese satellite, according to US News.

It’s therefore entirely plausible that DIGO and its ilk around the world regularly receive 0.25 metre or better resolution images from a DigitalGlobe or other commercial satellite and that its find of the “credible” candidate for MH370 debris is the result of business as usual, not special efforts.

It is conceivable that US authorities spotted the candidate debris using classified, never-for-public-eyes sources and then made it known where those searching for MH370 should look. It’s also a little bit plausible, because while DigitalGlobe has created a crowdsourced image database to help the search for MH370, it appears that effort is not the source of yesterday’s find.

If the US went to such lengths to conceal its capabilities, that’s a matter for wider debate.

But speculation something secret has been pressed into service is just that. It’s also worth considering the track record of the media outlet offering this analysis, as it has twice of late jumped to alarmist conclusions about intelligence matters. Fairfax media, the source of the notion that MH370 was found by spooksats this week, followed Crikey by reporting in July last year that a subsidiary of Telstra, Australia’s dominant telco, had agreed to US surveillance of voice traffic on a submarine cable. The “secret document” Crikey uncovered was actually a pro-forma document any submarine cable operator landing in the US signs. Those documents all authorise surveillance, so the notion Telstra alone had thrown open its digital doors was dubious.

In November 2013, another report suggested Telstra’s purchase of deep packet inspection products represented a surveillance effort. As we pointed out at the time, it would be of more interest if a major telco did not operate deep-packet inspection kit as the absence of such tools would indicate lax management of mission-critical networks.

The Reg, and your correspondent, make mistakes. But mistakes like the ones recorded here are particularly unhelpful if they heighten public paranoia.

Happily, the source of the spooksat speculation has calmed down and reported on the existence of DigitalGlobe and even extracted a confirmation it is the source of the images that are sparking so much hope for information about MH370.

If only that story had come before the spooky speculation.

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 22 March 2014, 9:02 am and is filed under
MH 370
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.


5 things MH370 has taught us about aviation

By Alex Pearlman  |    March 19, 2014

Boston Globe

The continuing search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has consumed the world’s attention for almost two weeks now. The mad quest to find the Boeing 777 has yet to answer the main questions on everyone’s mind: Where is that plane, and what happened to the people on it? Yet the search and the surrounding news coverage have revealed some surprising — and in some cases unsettling — facts about an industry the average person likely takes for granted.

We expect to fly and land safely, and these days, most flights do. But the system isn’t perfect, and in the time we’ve been engaged in the mystery of the lost plane, we’ve learned some noteworthy details about commercial aviation, technology, and national security.

1. Systems that collect information about flights have significant limits.

On Flight 370, a key communications system aboard the plane was somehow shut down. But that can happen for safety reasons.
 As BusinessInsider reported:

A pilot can shut the whole thing down by disconnecting a circuit breaker, and the plane’s manual would tell him how to do it. That’s for good reason, Patrick Smith, an airline pilot and author of Cockpit Confidential, wrote on his blog: “In the interest of safety — namely, fire and electrical system protection — it’s important to have the ability to isolate a piece of equipment, either by a standard switch or, if need be, through a circuit breaker,” Smith explained.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, explained why finding the cockpit voice recorder — often known as the “black box” — may not provide the answers:

A cockpit voice recorder, which would have recorded any activity or commotion, captures only two hours of sound, constantly overwriting the oldest material. Because the plane flew on for many more hours, the key events have been wiped away. If searchers do find the “black box,” they’ll instead have to rely on a flight-data recorder, which provides technical information about the plane’s behavior.

2. Seemingly strange behavior by pilots isn’t always evidence of foul play.

CNN’s coverage suggested that in the face of a lack of suspicious activity, we may want to give pilots the benefits of the doubt.

“I’ve worked on many cases were the pilots were suspect, and it turned out to be a mechanical and horrible problem,” said Mary Schiavo, a CNN aviation analyst and former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation. “And I have a saying myself: Sometimes an erratic flight path is heroism, not terrorism. And I always remind myself of that, not to jump to that conclusion. Sometimes pilots are fighting amazing battles, and we never hear about it.”

Wired also suggested the transponder would be the first thing to go in the event of an emergency, with an experienced pilot at hand:

The loss of transponders and communications makes perfect sense in a fire. And there most likely was an electrical fire. In the case of a fire, the first response is to pull the main busses and restore circuits one by one until you have isolated the bad one. If they pulled the busses, the plane would go silent. It probably was a serious event and the flight crew was occupied with controlling the plane and trying to fight the fire. Aviate, navigate, and lastly, communicate is the mantra in such situations.

3) Planes can hide in the shadow of other planes.

Slate.com explained a detailed Tumblr post from aviation enthusiast Keith Ledgerwood:

He argues the 777 could have flown over India and Pakistan, avoiding military radar detection by turning off its communications systems and following a Singapore Airlines 777 so closely the two aircraft “would have shown up as one single blip on the radar.” In his blog, Ledgerwood established that the Singapore Airlines flight was in the area. The collision avoidance systems installed on all modern airliners operate using the transponder, which someone on the Malaysia flight could have turned off. So the Singapore crew wouldn’t have detected a plane on their tail, Ledgerwood speculates.

4) Satellite coverage is lacking in a lot of places on earth, namely the open ocean
.

Mashable pointed out that despite the heavy traffic of satellites orbiting the planet, few are designed to track airliners. There are wide swaths of the earth untouched by radar or satellite data:

It only seems natural to turn to the many satellites that hover above our atmosphere in search of answers. NASA has satellites in orbit that track events like heat flashes, but those failed to provide any clues. The agency’s MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) satellite, for example, tracks wildfires. So, had MH370 crashed and burned, it seems like this satellite should have seen it. However, the problem is its location. “They are polar orbiters and would have had to be viewing the exact place and time where the airplane was in order to detect any heat from an explosion — if that’s what happened,” David J. Diner, senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Mashable via email.

5) Air defense in the area is pretty lackluster.

The Washington Post makes the point that most of these Southeastern Asian countries should probably beef up monitoring their airspace:

Apparently all an aircraft needs to do to avoid detection in this contested region is to stop announcing its presence (note to China: stop investing in stealth). While not quite as shocking as the ability of Mathias Rust to land a plane in Red Square during the Cold War, the disappearance of MH370 has flagged several questions relating to the maritime capabilities and military preparedness of Malaysia and neighboring states. Reports suggest that some of the countries that MH370 may have flown over regularly disable their military radar at night or in the absence of a clear external threat to reduce costs. . . . Flight MH370 demonstrates that competing territorial claims in these areas are not backed up by the ability to exercise control of these waters effectively, even by China.

Reuters basically said the same thing:

More than a decade after Al Qaeda hijackers turned airliners into weapons on Sept. 11, 2001, a large commercial aircraft completely devoid of stealth features appeared to vanish with relative ease. . . . The reality, analysts and officials say, is that much of the airspace over water — and in many cases over land — lacks sophisticated or properly monitored radar coverage. Analysts say the gaps in Southeast Asia’s air defenses are likely to be mirrored in other parts of the developing world, and may be much greater in areas with considerably lower geopolitical tensions.

Some of these revelations are alarming, in light of how much trust we put in airline safety; others shed light on the military environment in a strategically important region. For the moment, though, this new information comes as small consolation to the families of the MH370 passengers, who are desperate for the multinational search effort to just find the plane.

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 22 March 2014, 9:35 pm and is filed under
MH 370
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.


Another fruitless day as Indian Ocean search fails to show any sign of missing plane

The Malaysian Insider/AFP

March 21, 2014

Spotter planes spent a second fruitless day scouring a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean for wreckage from a Malaysian jet today, as Chinese relatives of the missing passengers clashed with Malaysian officials.

Australian and US military aircraft usually used for anti-submarine operations criss-crossed the isolated search area 2,500km southwest of Perth, looking for two floating objects that had shown up on grainy satellite photos taken several days before.

Although the images were too indistinct to confirm as debris from flight MH370, Australian and Malaysian officials said they represented the most “credible” leads to date in the hunt for the plane and its 239 passengers and crew.

Today’s search concluded “without any sightings”, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (Amsa) said in a statement.

The planes flew low under the cloud cover rather than rely on radar, after poor weather the day before hampered the search.

“We replanned the search to be visual, so aircraft flying relatively low, with very highly skilled observers looking out of the windows,” said Amsa official John Young.

“This means aircraft operating more closely together and we will need more aircraft for this task.”

Friday’s aerial contingent comprised three Australian air force P-3 Orions, a US Navy P-8 Poseidon and a civil Bombardier Global Express jet.

The distance from the west coast of Australia allows the planes only about two hours of actual search time before they must turn around with enough fuel to get back to Perth.

Two merchant ships were helping with the search, but Australia’s HMAS Success, which is capable of retrieving any wreckage, was still days away.

“This is going to be a long haul,” Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a daily press briefing in Kuala Lumpur.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who first revealed the satellite images in parliament, defended himself Friday against suggestions he may have “jumped the gun.”

“We owe it to the families and the friends and the loved ones … to give them information as soon as it’s to hand,” he said.

Abbott said he had spoken to Chinese President Xi Jinping who he described as “devastated” by the disappearance of MH370 and the 153 Chinese nationals on board.

Malaysia has been criticised for its handling of the crisis, especially by Chinese relatives who have accused authorities and the flag-carrier airline of providing insufficient or misleading information.

A delegation of Malaysian government and military officials flew to Beijing for what turned out to be a bad-tempered meeting with relatives.

The event began with family members yelling at delegates to stand up when they were being introduced.

“You have wasted so much time,” shouted one.

The nature of the events that diverted MH370 from its intended flight path on March 8 remain shrouded in mystery, although Malaysian investigators have stuck to their assumption that it was the result of a “deliberate action” by someone on board.

Three scenarios have gained particular attention: hijacking, pilot sabotage, and a sudden mid-air crisis that incapacitated the flight crew and left the plane to fly on auto-pilot for several hours until it ran out of fuel and crashed.

If the objects in the remote southern Indian Ocean are shown to have come from MH370, some analysts believe the hijacking theory will lose ground.

“The reasonable motives for forcing the plane to fly there are very, very few,” Gerry Soejatman, a Jakarta-based independent aviation analyst, told AFP.

Sarah Bajc, the partner of American passenger Philip Wood, said she had clung to the notion of a hijacking plot that might result in the passengers’ eventual safe return.

“So if this debris is indeed part of that plane, then it kind of dashes that wishful thinking to pieces,” Bajc told CNN.

The often storm-swept area is far from recognised shipping lanes and the satellite images were taken on March 16, meaning the objects would have been drifting for days in a volatile maritime region.

“It’s really off the beaten track,” said Tim Huxley, chief executive of Wah Kwong Maritime Transport Holdings in Hong Kong. “It’s a lonely, lonely place.”

If debris is found, the mammoth task remains of locating the “black box” flight data recorder, which offers the best chance of peeling back the layers of confusion and mystery surrounding MH370.

There has been little progress in what essentially became a criminal investigation after it was determined that the disappearance of the plane was probably deliberate.

Malaysia has asked the FBI to help recover data it said was deleted from a home flight simulator belonging to the plane’s chief pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, but otherwise no evidence has emerged to implicate him.

Malaysia Airlines CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya confirmed that the aircraft had been carrying lithium ion batteries in its cargo hold, but dismissed suggestions that they might have been the source of a fire that caused the plane to crash.

“These are not regarded as dangerous goods… and were packed as recommended by the International Civil Aviation Organisation,” Ahmad Jauhari said. – AFP, March 21, 2014.

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 22 March 2014, 7:45 am and is filed under
MH 370
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.