Chinese ship steams to possible MH370 debris

AlJazeera

29 March 2014

A Chinese ship is steaming towards a search area in the southern Indian Ocean after one of the country’s military aircraft spotted three suspicious objects that could be related to the missing Malaysia Airlines jet.

China’s state news agency Xinhua reported that the Chinese military plane Ilyushin IL-76 had sighted three white, red and orange floating objects from an altitude of 300m on Saturday.

The Australian Maritime and Safety Authority (AMSA), which is coordinating the search, said late on Friday that five international aircraft had spotted “multiple objects of various colours”.

Among them was a New Zealand air force plane, which had spotted “objects” that could be related to Flight MH370.

The sightings had to be confirmed by ship, which was not expected to reach the area until Saturday, AMSA said.

The search operation had moved 1,100km north on Friday after AMSA received new information from Malaysia that suggested the plane had run out of fuel earlier than thought.

The shift followed analysis of radar and satellite data that showed the missing plane had travelled faster than had been previously calculated, and so would have burned through its fuel load quicker.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished from civilian radar screens less than an hour into a Kuala Lumpur to Beijing flight.

Malaysia says the plane was likely diverted deliberately but investigators have turned up no apparent motive or other red flags among the 227 passengers or the 12 crew on board.

Malaysian officials said the new search area was the result of a painstaking analysis of Malaysian military radar data and satellite readings from British company Inmarsat carried out by US, Chinese, British and Malaysian investigators.

Engine performance analysis by the plane’s manufacturer Boeing helped investigators determine how long the plane could have flown before it ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean, they said.

“Information which had already been examined by the investigation was re-examined in light of new evidence drawn from the Inmarsat data analysis,” Malaysia’s acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a news conference on Friday.

For more than a week, ships and surveillance planes have been scouring seas 2,500km southwest of Perth, where satellite images had shown possible debris from Flight MH370, which went missing on March 8.

Ten aircraft searching on Friday were immediately re-directed to the new area of 319,000sqkm, roughly the size of Poland, around 1,850km west of Perth.

The Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation was also redirecting satellites there, AMSA said.

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Flight 370, a mysterious ‘one-off,’ spurs calls to modernize tracking technology

By Joel Achenbach, Scott Higham and Ashley Halsey III

Washington Post

March 29, 2014

The bizarre tale of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 comes at a time when flying is safer than ever. Nervous fliers squeeze the armrests for dear life, but most passengers have no problem nodding off as their jetliner cruises seven miles above the Earth. They have internalized the statistical truth that the most dangerous part of an airplane trip is the drive to the airport.

Yet disasters still happen, including this one. Officially declared a plane crash at sea with no survivors, the event remains so deeply mysterious that it seems premature to refer to the people aboard as deceased.

Viewed in the broad context of aviation safety, this weird case actually fits snugly within a recent pattern: Airline disasters now tend to be unprecedented in nature — what investigators call “one-offs.”

In the old days, planes typically went down because of engine failures, wind shear, collisions or some other familiar problem. But turbine engines almost never fail these days. Improved radar helps pilots dodge the lethal downdrafts of thunderstorms.

Collision-avoidance technology commands the pilots of converging planes to make diversionary maneuvers.

Even if Flight 370 is the ultimate one-off, aviation safety advocates say there are lessons to be learned from this tragedy, starting with the need for tamperproof equipment that would stream data in real time to satellites and reveal a plane’s position.

“This could well be the kind of ‘black swan’ event that requires everybody to carry a location device,” said Chris McLaughlin, senior vice president of Inmarsat, the satellite company that helped calculate the likely flight corridor of the missing plane.

“As a ticket-payer, wouldn’t you like to know that the authorities know where your plane is at all times?” he said. “This is not expensive. We’re talking maybe a dollar an hour or less to get that information off the plane.”

Mary Schiavo, former inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation, which includes the Federal Aviation Administration, would go even further. She’d like to see the full “black box” data — a massive amount of information about the plane’s performance — streamed to ground locations during flight.

“There’s lots of reasons to have streaming data — not the least of which is to foil criminals — and to solve the mystery of what happened to your plane. It would have helped in 9/11. It would have been immensely helpful here,” Schiavo said.

Star Navigation Systems Group, a Toronto company, has designed black-box technology that streams data in real time. It costs about $50,000 per plane, plus $10 more to transmit the data for each flying hour, chief executive Viraf S. Kapadia said. Only one customer has bought the system, he lamented.

“It’s all about the money for the airlines, even though it’s not a lot of money,” he said.

“We’re using 1970s technologies instead of the data streaming that’s been available for nearly a decade now,” said Paul Hudson, president of FlyersRights.org. “The fact that airplanes can basically disappear over water is not only troubling to passengers, but it also gives a heads-up to those who would do a terrorist act or a murder-suicide. They would be virtually undetected. These planes can fly to almost any place on Earth nonstop.”

Sean Cassidy, an Alaska Airlines pilot serving as national safety coordinator for the Air Line Pilots Association, International, said his organization is wary of such a sweeping change in industry practice.

“How is the data being used? How is it being protected? And how is it really driving up the safety case?” he said. Referring to Flight 370, he said, “If this is such an incredibly, exceedingly rare event, I think it’s a little bit premature to begin discussing the way we transmit some of this data until we understand if that really would have made much of a difference in how this flight ended up.”

Katie Connell, a spokeswoman for Airlines for America, the trade organization for the leading U.S. airlines, said in an e-mail that it is “premature for us to speculate and/or discuss potential changes to safety and security procedures.”

Safety advocates contend that real-time data-streaming technology will become more critical in coming years simply because there is more air traffic and longer routes are being flown over increasingly remote areas, including the North Pole and great expanses of open water.

The industry roughly doubles in size every 15 years. People like to fly.

The civil aviation industry has been working with authorities for years on what is known as NextGen technology. Among other things, the new technology would allow airplanes to be tracked more effectively by satellite. The FAA’s work on NextGen has been sluggish, however. Few airlines are willing to invest billions of dollars until the FAA delivers the final regulations that will govern the system.

The human factor

Flight 370 was a modern aircraft with modern technology. The Boeing 777 had multiple robust mechanisms for communicating with or sending data to the rest of the world during flight. The transponder sent a radar signal and another system transmitted data via satellite to ground stations. But these systems were either turned off intentionally or somehow became disabled. No one in the cockpit radioed a distress signal or activated a hijacking code. No one used the jetphones in business class.

Authorities have released no evidence of wrongdoing or malicious intent by anyone on the flight crew. But in general, as technology improves, the remaining hazards in aviation are often found in the cockpit. Among the issues that safety advocates worry about are fatigue and inadequate training.

“What’s causing accidents these days is humans figuring out ways to crash perfectly airworthy airplanes. That’s the area that we really need to be focusing in on,” said John DeLisi, director of the Office of Aviation Safety at the National Transportation Safety Board.

He cited three recent examples of pilot error: Colgan Air Flight 3407, which crashed on its approach to Buffalo in 2009, killing all 49 people aboard; Comair Flight 5191, in 2006, in which 49 of 50 people died when the pilot used the wrong runway, one meant for small planes, and crashed; and Asiana Airlines Flight 214, which came in too slow in San Francisco in July and hit a seawall, resulting in three deaths.

DeLisi declined to address Flight 370. There is no evidence of pilot error, pilot suicide, hijacking or any kind of terrorist event, nor is there evidence of a mechanical malfunction, fire or decompression. There is, in essence, no evidence of anything other than that the aircraft did not go to China as planned but rather flew in a zigzag fashion into the southern Indian Ocean.

The Flight 370 disaster has some similarities to the tragedy that befell Air France Flight 447, which on June 1, 2009, with 228 people aboard, vanished in the Atlantic Ocean during a thunderstorm off the coast of Brazil. It took investigators five days to find the wreckage and two more years to locate the plane’s black box.

Learning from disaster

After the Air France disaster, the International Civil Aviation Organization, a U.N.-sponsored organization based in Montreal, began to study technologies designed to locate airliners when they go missing. Several task

forces examined in-flight streaming technologies and other ways to improve the chances of finding the black boxes, boost their battery power and increase the strength of the beacons they send out.

Recommendations of those task forces have yet to be implemented. This is a complicated process at “technical, political, legal, economic and operational levels,” ICAO spokesman Anthony Philbin said in an e-mail.

But Philbin put in a plug for the industry as a whole, calling it “arguably the most significant cooperative achievement in the history of human endeavour and perhaps our greatest shared example of what countries and peoples can ultimately achieve when they work together toward consensus-driven objectives.”

Any discussion of safety has to acknowledge the progress made in recent decades. Major plane crashes have become exceedingly rare. Disasters are instructional, and airlines and regulators make adjustments. For example, after the TWA Flight 800 disaster off Long Island in 1996, in which the plane exploded when a spark ignited fumes in an empty fuel tank, airlines began filling those empty tanks with nitrogen to prevent any such sparking.

Robert Benzon said the improvement in safety was one of the reasons he retired after 27 years as a lead investigator for the NTSB.

“I got kind of bored because I had no accidents to go out on,” Benzon said. “When I first started in the big-aircraft investigation business, each investigator in charge had two, sometimes three, concurrent investigations they were working on. Nowadays, if you’re really lucky as an investigator in charge, you’re doing one major accident. And even that is pretty damned rare now.”

Cassidy, of the Air Line Pilots Association, said passengers trust pilots for good reasons.

“By the time you get to the captain’s seat, especially with a major airline, you have been checked, you’ve been trained, you’ve been through countless training situations, you’ve been evaluated by many, many instructors. By the time you get to that point, you should have a high degree of credibility and respect,” Cassidy said.

But DeLisi, the NTSB official, noted that some new pilots with small companies are paid shockingly low salaries.

“We love airline travel, and yet the economic model is one where new pilots starting out in their careers typically working for regional carriers are making, pick a number, $25,000 or $30,000, working long hours,” DeLisi said. “The number one thing for safety right now is to have a well-trained, well-rested, non-distracted crew.”

DeLisi said technological innovations will never obviate the need for a human in the cockpit. He cited the 2009 case of Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who famously landed a US Airways jetliner safely in the Hudson River after the plane struck a flock of geese and suffered engine failure.

“He did an amazing job of taking an extremely rare failure mode — impacting birds when you’re flying over the Bronx — and landing a disabled jet that is no longer producing thrust,” DeLisi said. “That defines why we still have humans in the cockpit. Because there’s no way you could have ever programmed the autopilot or had an unmanned vehicle make those decisions he made that day to safe those lives.”

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Flight MH370: Aircraft debris – or a load of rubbish?

By Neil Arun

BBC News

28 March 2014

A white speck on a black background. Zooming in, the spectral outline of something that was perhaps part of an aircraft.

It may be a vital clue in the riddle of flight MH370, fodder for the investigators and closure of a kind for the families of the missing passengers.

Or it may be a wayward shipping container, the remnants of a fishing boat, regurgitated flotsam from the tsunami that struck Indonesia 10 years ago, driftwood, plastic waste – or just a transient fleck of foam on a boisterous sea.

None of these possibilities can be discounted in the satellite images from the southern Indian Ocean where the search for the missing Malaysian Airlines jet has been focused.

In the absence of finer data, floating debris from the plane remains critical to solving the puzzle of its disappearance.

The location and condition of any retrieved wreckage can be keyed into a complex computer model of the ocean’s winds and currents. Scientists can then rewind the model to 8 March, the day the plane vanished.

If the simulation suggests that the fragments have a common origin, the search for the flight’s “black box” recorders can be centred around that point.

But what is the likelihood that the white specks in the satellite photos are indeed traces of the lost aircraft?

‘False positives’

Scientists have told the BBC News website that it is virtually impossible to conclude anything from the images alone.

For them, the hunt for the plane has only emphasised how little we know of the waters that cover two-thirds of the planet’s surface – a knowledge as shallow as the oceans are deep.

The Indian Ocean is a frontier where theory runs into chaos.

“This is more evidence of how non-existent our marine-debris observing system is,” says Nikolai Maximenko, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii.

He pored over satellite images after the 2011 tsunami in Japan – but struggled to spot anything significant there.

“I knew that there must be thousands of objects, yet the only object that I was able to identify was a tanker, having nothing to do with the debris,” he says.

“In some cases, you feel that there is something anomalous in the image but have no tools to prove it.”

Floating detritus

Problems with the latest search include the time lag between the retrieval of satellite data and the arrival of ships or aircraft in the zone.

Factor in the turbulence, and an aerial photograph may be as good a guide to location as the snapshot of a coin in the spin cycle of a washing machine.

Searching for clues in the satellite images is sure to turn up “a lot of false positives”, says Simon Boxall, an oceanographer from the University of Southampton.

The seas are awash in floating waste, and the Indian Ocean is no exception. But it is also a body of water about which relatively little is known.

The US and European institutions that do most of the world’s oceanographic research – tracking waste, studying marine life and mapping the seabed – have focused more on the closer waters of the Atlantic and Pacific.

Kara Lavender Law, an expert in marine debris with the US-based Sea Education Association, says most of the information on waste sightings does not come from the Indian Ocean.

“Of all the data that I can find, out of 10,000 points on that map, I see maybe five points west of Australia,” she says.

Moreover, the broad zone where the plane may have vanished is in the blackest of holes – even by the standards of the Indian Ocean.

Thousands of kilometres west of Australia, it is a part of the world that has rarely troubled corporations or governments.

The type of satellites that can scan the number plate of a car in Yemen – used by the US military and by firms such as Google – would not have been trained on these waters.

In fact, says Mr Boxall, it is unlikely that any satellites would have been capturing the kind of images that we are now seeing from that area.

That means it is very difficult to compare the recent pictures, purporting to show debris, with similar pictures before the plane went down. Those white specks may be fresh – or they may have already been there.

Scientists disagree over whether the aerial images are significant to the search. However, they also stress the need to keep an open mind until the blots seen from above have been spotted by ship.

The satellite photos cover a zone where the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean, encircling Antarctica.

There is a risk, says Mr Boxall, that waste in this area could have come from any of the world’s major oceans – all of which border Antarctica.

In that case, the flecks in the pictures may just be the floating detritus of globalisation, such as some of the thousands of shipping containers thought to be lost at sea every year.

‘Giant pinball machine’

Other experts are more optimistic that the satellite images show aircraft wreckage.

For a start, most of the world’s seaborne waste is generated in the northern hemisphere. Currents make sure most of it stays there, says Marcus Eriksen, a marine scientist who has mapped ocean debris for the US-based Five Gyres Institute.

Moreover, he says, large bits of “macro-debris” – such as plastic buckets – are typically found closer to the coasts of densely populated areas.

Meanwhile, the waste items that swirl around in the middle of the oceans – in sub-tropical whirlpools known as gyres – are often no bigger than a bottle-cap.

The search for the plane is centred in the southern hemisphere, thousands of miles from land. This could make it likelier that the large white specks spotted so far are connected to the missing aircraft.

The waters in the area are among the cleanest in the world, according to Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer who has tracked currents for the University of New South Wales in Australia.

Most of the water from the Southern Ocean gets “flushed northwards” towards the Equator. In theory, he says, this reduces – though does not eliminate – the possibility that floating objects in the search zone could be seaborne garbage from Asia.

However, even if aircraft fragments are discovered in the area, the likelihood that they will lead to the “black box” recorders diminishes with every passing day.

The computer models can at best hope to pinpoint where the jet went down within a 50km (30 miles) radius, says Mr Sebille. But that margin of error multiplies with the turbulence of the sea and the passage of time.

“It’s a giant pinball machine down there,” he says, referring to the ocean’s effect on floating debris.

“If you hit the ball at a slightly different angle, at a slightly different moment, [its] trajectory is going to be completely different.”

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 29 March 2014, 7:41 am and is filed under
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Geopolitical games handicap Malaysia jet hunt

The Malaysian Insider/Reuters

March 29, 2014

The search for flight MH370, the Malaysian Airlines jetliner that vanished over the South China Sea on March 8, has involved more than two dozen countries and 60 aircraft and ships but been bedevilled by regional rivalries.

While Malaysia has been accused of a muddled response and poor communications, China has showcased its growing military clout and reach, while some involved in the operation say other countries have dragged their feet on disclosing details that might give away sensitive defence data.

Several countries in the region, including China, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, are engaged in a series of territorial disputes in the South China Seas, with control of shipping lanes, fishing and potential hydrocarbon reserves at stake.

With the United States playing a relatively muted role in the sort of exercise that until recently it would have dominated, experts and officials say there was no real central coordination until the search for the plane was confined to the southern Indian Ocean, when Australia largely took charge.

Part of the problem is that Asia has no NATO-style regional defence structure, though several countries have formal alliances with the United States. Commonwealth members Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia also have an arrangement with Britain to discuss defence matters in times of crisis.

“There is … a pressing need for regional security structures to take a few leaps forward,” said air Vice-Marshal Michael Harwood, a retired RAF pilot and former British defence attache in Washington DC.

The risk, he said, was that the search instead became seen a national “test of manhood” and driver of rivalry. Already, several governments have been openly competing in announcing findings and satellite images.

The jet, which disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, was last officially detected hundreds of miles off course on the wrong side of the Malaysian peninsula.

As mystery deepened over the fate of the Boeing 777 and its 239 passengers and crew, most of them Chinese, it became clear that highly classified military technology might hold the key.

But the investigation became deadlocked over the reluctance of others to share sensitive data, a reticence that appeared to harden as the search area widened.

“This is turning into a spy novel,” said an envoy from a Southeast Asian country, noting it was turning attention to areas and techniques few countries liked to publicly discuss.

Chinese clout

With five Chinese ships heading to a new search area in the Indian Ocean on Friday, experts say China is revealing military capabilities it lacked just a handful of years ago.

Chinese officials have also spoken of the growing number of satellites it has put to the task, a sensitive topic nations rarely disclose.

“A decade ago, China wouldn’t even have been in this game at all,” says Christopher Harmer, a former U.S. naval aviator and search-and-rescue pilot, now senior fellow at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington DC. “It really shows how far they have come, much, much faster than most people expected.”

Ultimately, the only country with the technical resources to recover the plane – or at least its black box recorder, which could lie in water several miles deep – may be the United States. Its deep-sea vehicles ultimately hauled up the wreckage of Air France 447 after its 2009 crash into a remote region of the South Atlantic.

So far, Washington has sent two Poseidon maritime reconnaissance aircraft to the southern Indian Ocean search as well as an underwater drone and its Towed Pinger Locator, specifically designed to detect the signals from black boxes. The locator will be fitted to an Australian ship.

Radar poker

While Putrajaya has been forced to reveal some of the limits and ranges of its air defences, the reluctance of Malaysia’s neighbours to release sensitive radar data may have obstructed the investigation for days.

At an ambassadorial meeting in the ad hoc crisis centre at an airport hotel on March 16, Malaysia formally appealed to countries on the jet’s possible path for help, but in part met with polite stonewalling, two people close to the talks said.

Some countries asked Malaysia to put its request in writing, triggering a flurry of diplomatic notes and high-level contacts.

“It became a game of poker in which Malaysia handed out the cards at the table but couldn’t force others to show their hand,” a person from another country involved in the talks said.

It was not until a week later that Malaysia announced a list of nations that had checked their archives.

Beijing, meanwhile, was dramatically upping its game.

Its ability to deploy forces deep into the southern hemisphere is particularly striking. Beijing has sent several deployments into southern waters in recent months, including warship visits to New Zealand and South America, while its icebreaker “Snow Dragon” helped rescue personnel from a trapped Russian icebreaker in the Antarctic late last year.

“China are deploying because that’s what great powers do, and there must be a political expectation for them to (do so),” said one former Western military officer. “How well they do it, only the USA will currently know (through surveillance and signals intelligence), and time will tell.”

As in the northern Indian Ocean, where Chinese forces operate alongside other nations to combat Somali piracy, current and former officials say all sides are almost certainly quietly spying on and monitoring each other at the same time.

Military secrets, meanwhile, remain the last thing on the minds of those still hoping for news of missing relatives.

“I don’t care about the secrets. I just want my son to return,” Liu Guiqiu, mother of missing passenger Li Le, told China Central Television. – Reuters, March 28, 2014.

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Here’s How They’ll Piece Together What Happened to Flight MH370

By Jordan Golson

Wired

03.28.14

The southern Indian Ocean is a vast, desolate and hostile place churned by relentless currents and vicious storms. It is rarely traversed by air or sea, and anything lost there may never be found. That includes Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

But those scouring a remote swath of ocean west of Australia received tantalizing clues this week, including new radar data about the plane’s velocity. The data, gleaned from radar between the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca, suggests MH370 was traveling faster than previously believed, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said. That means it would have run out of fuel sooner. The agency called this new information “the most credible lead to where debris may be located.” 1

The new lead prompted a sudden change in focus to an area 685 miles northeast of where everyone had been searching. They’d spent much of the week scouring an area 1,600 miles west of Perth, Australia, after satellite images taken Sunday by Airbus Defence and Space and Monday by Thailand’s Geo-Informatics Space Technology Development Agency revealed what might be a debris field.

The shift to yet another area underscores just how perplexing the search has been, and how investigators have been frustrated in their quest for answers. None of the aircraft or ships in the region have found anything of note, and the photos may reveal nothing more than whitecaps or the flotsam so often found at sea.

With little else to go on, investigators have so far relied upon the scant satellite and radar communication the plane had after going dark 90 minutes into its March 8 flight to Beijing with 239 people aboard. Finding a debris field would be akin to a homicide detective locating a body, allowing investigators to begin piecing together, literally and figuratively, what happened.

“Until they find debris,” said Dr. Vernon Grose, a former investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board, “they’re spending all that money on this, and it’s totally useless.”

Investigating an aviation disaster is exponentially more difficult when it happens at sea, and harder still when working in an area Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott called “as close to nowhere as it’s possible to be.” The search area targeted earlier this week covered 30,200 square miles — an area about the size of South Carolina — in water that plunges to 14,000 feet.

Eleven aircraft and six ships from four countries spent the week searched a region so remote that vessels traversing it can go weeks without seeing another ship. When Australian rescue authorities called for merchant ships in the area to join the search, the closest of them, the automobile transport vessel Höegh St. Petersburg, was two days away. Reaching the search site by air took four hours.

Even Air France Flight 477, which went down about 650 miles off the coast of Brazil with 228 people aboard in 2009, didn’t pose so great a challenge. Authorities knew the Airbus A330’s location four minutes before it hit the water, and they had some idea of what happened even before finding the black box data recorder and the bulk of the airframe two years later.

A map, released by the Malaysian Remote Sensing Agency, showing the approximate position of floating objects in the Indian Ocean.

A map, released by the Malaysian Remote Sensing Agency, showing the approximate position of floating objects in the Indian Ocean.

Grasping at Straws

In this case, Malaysian transport officials–joined by experts from the NTSB, the U.S. Navy, Boeing and others–have only the scantest details to go on. Without debris, never mind the data and voice recorders, investigating the plane’s disappearance is a bit like trying to find a missing person with only a handful of voicemails left over several days and hundreds of miles.

“With any mishap where you’re lacking empirical data, you’re just grasping at straws,” said retired Col. J.F. Joseph, a former Marine Corps pilot and aviation consultant.

The three primary goals of any aviation accident inquiry are determining what happened, how it happened, and why it happened. Until the first question is answered, little headway is made on the others. If investigators don’t have wreckage and conclusive data, they can do little more than make educated guesses.

“Without physical evidence, and a reasonable amount of it, there are going to be a lot of loose ends,” said Don Knutson, an aircraft accident investigator. “Enough loose ends where there is going to be a very inconclusive finding.”

Once the debris is found–and aviation experts remain optimistic at least some will be–ships will carefully collect it, tag it, and bring it to a warehouse or hangar, most likely in Australia.

The lightest, most buoyant pieces, such as seat cushions, sections of the fuselage, and the like, most likely will float or eventually wash up somewhere. Heavier parts like landing gear, engines, and large sections of airframe will sink, more or less directly below the point at which they hit the water. Locating a debris field will further focus the search area for these key components, and authorities almost certainly will, as they did with Air France 447, rely upon remotely operated submersibles to comb the sea floor. This will be particularly challenging, as the southern Indian Ocean has a volcanic and rugged floor and some of the deepest water in the world. It also is a brutally violent place, rocked by some of the most severe weather on Earth.

Before retrieving anything, recovery personnel will be briefed by Boeing, Rolls-Royce (which manufactured the engines), and others on how to pull up major components and minimize the risk of further damaging them. Once those parts are aboard recovery vessels, they will be treated with solvents to arrest the rapid corrosion that comes with submersion in salt water.

In many ways, aircraft crash reconstruction is like the world’s most complicated jigsaw puzzle, with half the parts missing. Everything that can be collected will be carefully reassembled to reconstruct the airplane as thoroughly as possible. This proved vital in the investigation of TWA Flight 800, which crashed off the coast of New York’s Long Island in 1996. Some eyewitness reports suggested it was brought down by a missile. But careful collection and assembly of the wreckage led investigators to conclude that an electrical problem in a fuel tank led to an explosion.

Metallurgists, engineers, and other experts will examine the debris in minute detail. They will be joined by evidence recovery teams and criminal investigators until foul play is ruled out.

Close examination of wreckage will provide key insights. Scorching or soot suggest a fire. The manner in which debris is torn, bent, or otherwise damaged can indicate whether the plane blew apart, broke up at altitude, or hit the water. If evidence points toward an explosion, experts will determine whether the blast was subsonic, suggesting the failure of something like a fuel tank, or supersonic, suggesting a bomb or missile. If wreckage indicates the plane hit the water, it also would suggest the angle and velocity of the impact. An examination of the cabin and cockpit could provide additional clues–if, for example, the oxygen masks were deployed. Individual components will be closely scrutinized for similar clues, and theories tested against identical parts.

Forensic pathologists, odontologists, anthropologists, and fingerprint experts will of course attempt to identify any bodies recovered from the sea and examine them for further clues. Burns and smoke inhalation suggest a fire, for example, and the nature of physical trauma would indicate the force with which the plane hit the water.

A Relentless Search for the Black Box

For all it can tell us about what happened to MH370, physical evidence can’t do much to explain why it happened and how the plane wound up thousands of miles off course. To answer that riddle, investigators must find the black box flight data and cockpit voice recorders. These two items, each a little larger than a shoebox, will be the focus of a relentless search. Investigators spent more than two years combing the sea floor for the black box Air France 447 before finding it 13,000 feet down.

The black box, which is actually orange, records at least 88 flight parameters–including airspeed, heading, attitude, altitude, autopilot engagement, and the position of various flight control surfaces–on a continuous loop for at least 25 hours. Recovering the black box and analyzing the data would allow investigators to recreate the flight in a simulator.

A modern cockpit voice recorder generally runs on a two-hour loop to log an incident in real-time. However, because Air Flight 370 might have flown for hours without any input from the pilot, there may be little recorded beyond the sound of the airplane’s last moments.

To aid the search for these vital components, the United States has dispatched a Bluefin-21 autonomous submarine that can dive to 14,763 feet and the the U.S. Navy’s Towed Pinger Locator 25, a hydrophone that can detect the telltale ping of a black box to a depth of 20,000 feet.

“I’m optimistic that they’ll find something,” Knutson said.

Still, it is a race against time. Locating the devices will only grow harder as the current scatters debris ever further and the electronic beacon affixed to the recorders eventually run out of power, which is expected to happen around April 7. The search will go on, as long as necessary, but will only grow more difficult.

Solving the mystery of Flight 370 will be a long, slow and expensive process. The investigation into Air France 447 took three years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars; the TWA Flight 800 inquiry was no less intensive.

But aviation experts said it is imperative that we learn as much as possible about what happened, both for the families of those who died and for everyone who flies. There is a common refrain in aviation that the rules are written in blood. Every rule and regulation, every policy and procedure exists because someone was injured or killed.

“There’s some good that will come out of it,” Knutson said.

1UPDATED 10:05 a.m. 03/28/14: After this story was posted, the the Australian Maritime Safety Authority announced that it was shifting the search area based on new radar information.

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 29 March 2014, 12:40 pm and is filed under
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Interpol hits back at Malaysia’s stolen passport database claims

The Malaysian Insider/AFP

March 29, 2014

Interpol hit back yesterday at Malaysia’s claims that consulting a stolen passport database would have caused too much delays to be useful, after confusion caused by Kuala Lumpur’s failure to detect two illegal migrants on the still missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370.

Two passengers on the Malaysian Boeing 777 flight thought to have crashed into the Indian Ocean triggered an international terrorism probe this month after it was revealed they were travelling on stolen passports.

It was later reported that the pair were illegal migrants from Iran seeking a better life in the West and Malaysian authorities were criticised for not using an Interpol database designed to identify stolen passports.

But on Wednesday, Malaysian Minister of Home Affairs Ahmad Zahid Hamidi told parliament in Kuala Lumpur that consulting the database was too time consuming for immigration officers and caused airport delays.

Interpol shot back saying Malaysia’s decision to not consult the database before allowing travellers to enter the country or board planes “cannot be defended by falsely blaming technology or Interpol”.

“If there is any responsibility or blame for this failure, it rests solely with Malaysia’s Immigration Department,” the France-based organisation said.

Interpol said that it takes “just seconds to reveal whether a passport is listed, with recent tests providing results in 0.2 seconds”.

While some countries consult the database more than a hundred million times a year, “in 2014 prior to the tragic disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, Malaysia’s Immigration Department did not conduct a single check of passengers’ passports against Interpol’s databases,” the agency said.

“Had Malaysia consulted Interpol’s database, the fact that both passengers were using stolen passports would have been discovered almost instantaneously,” it added.

Interpol said earlier this month the two men were believed to have travelled to Kuala Lumpur via Doha using Iranian passports.

They then switched to stolen Austrian and Italian passports to board the Beijing-bound flight which vanished with 239 people on board. – AFP, March 29, 2014.

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 29 March 2014, 11:32 am and is filed under
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Missing Malaysia Airlines plane: New hope for clues to MH370’s fate as ships scour more hospitable search area

by Tom Allard, Adrian Beattie

Sydney Morning Herald

March 30, 2014

Aircraft scoured 252,000 square km on Saturday, almost the entire search zone, but the hunt was unsuccessful.

While numerous objects were sighted by surveillance planes and some recovered by vessels on the scene, AMSA reported that none of the debris that was closely scrutinized was from the missing Malaysia Airlines aircraft.

A flotilla of ships searched for more objects identified by military aircraft as possible wreckage of MH370 as an ever-expanding multinational effort to locate the missing Malaysia Airlines passenger jet stepped up a gear.

Late on Saturday, a Chinese surveillance plane reported it found three more objects – white, red and orange – in the new search waters, Chinese state media reported.

As new aircraft, ships and a team of navy divers prepared to join the search, the head of New Zealand’s Defence Force, Air Vice-Marshal Kevin Short, said the debris first sighted by its P3 Orion aircraft on Friday was between half a metre and one metre in size.

Most of the 11 objects were rectangular in shape, although there was another that was orange and resembled a shipping buoy.

Most were found in a relatively small area and sonar buoys had been dropped by the aircraft to assist ships who would be tasked to identity them.

Two Chinese ships, Haixun 01 and Jinggangshan, and HMAS Success arrived in the search zone, which was shifted 1100 kilometres north-east on Friday after fresh analysis of radar, satellite and MH370’s performance capability led Australian authorities to conclude the plane had not flown as far as originally thought.

Four more ships were due to arrive late on Saturday in a search area 1800km west of Perth and 319,000 square kilometres in size, almost 50 per cent bigger than Victoria and four times larger than the previous search zone.

While the weather was clear on Saturday morning, it deteriorated in the afternoon.

”We should not underestimate the difficulty of this work,” Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on Saturday. ”It is an extraordinarily remote location. These are inhospitable seas. It’s an inaccessible place. We are trying to find small bits of wreckage in a vast ocean and while we are throwing everything we have at it, the task goes on.”

Air Vice-Marshal Short said parts of the aircraft would be floating in the sea, such as fuel tanks from wings, composite materials and plastics.

“The only way to really identify them is to get them on board the ship,” he told Bloomberg.

Even then, it could be necessary to get the objects back to Perth for analysis “unless there is something very obvious in what they pick up”.

As it entered its fourth week, the search effort was augmented by the arrival of two Malaysia C-130 transport planes, which landed at RAAF Base Pearce near Perth on Saturday.

The frigate HMAS Toowoomba has been diverted from its task of scouring Australia’s northern reaches for asylum seeker boats and will join soon. It arrived at Garden Island naval base near Perth on Saturday and will take on a new crew that will include a contingent of navy divers who will be required to secure any found items.

HMAS Toowoomba will also carry a Seahawk helicopter.

On Sunday, the Australian navy vessel Ocean Shield is also expected to arrive near Perth and will take on board a towed pinger locator and a team of US military personnel who will operate the machine. It is designed to pick up any signal from the beacon of MH370’s flight recorder, known as the black box.

Its beacon is expected to run out of batteries in about nine days. This adds urgency to the search as the black box, which records cockpit conversations and flight data, is the key to learning what happened to the missing aircraft, which had 239 passengers and crew.

ADV Ocean Shield will also carry a Bluefin-21 unmanned submersible drone equipped with sensors and cameras. This can search the ocean floor for the black box even after its beacon has shut down.

While the new search area is remote and enormous, it presents two advantages over those further south. The ocean, at between 2000 and 4000 metres, is shallower. Also, the weather is generally calmer than the ”roaring forties” between Australia and Antarctica.

Commodore Peter Leavy, the overall military commander of the search effort, said: ”This is a very, very big operation … Normally a military exercise involving different nations is the result of a lot of planning. Something like this … we had to come together very quickly and just get on with the job.”

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 29 March 2014, 11:50 pm and is filed under
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Missing Malaysian Flight MH370: Search area shifts after Boeing looks at engine data

Kathy Marks

Guardian

28 March 2014

The search for wreckage from Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 moved 1,100km to the north-east yesterday following a fresh analysis of radar and satellite data. Five aircraft combing the new stretch of the Indian Ocean quickly found multiple objects which ships will try to locate on Saturday.

The search zone was re¬calibrated, bringing it considerably closer to the Western Australian coast, after data analysis indicated that the Boeing 777 – which vanished soon after taking off from Kuala Lumpur three weeks ago – was flying faster than initially estimated, and therefore would have run out of fuel more quickly.

Items spotted from the air included two rectangular objects that were blue and grey: two of the colours in the aircraft’s livery. Others were white or light-coloured. The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (Amsa), which is co-ordinating the hunt, said photographs of the objects would be analysed overnight.

For the past week, aircraft and ships have been crisscrossing an area about 2,500km south-west of Perth, pinpointed as the most likely spot where MH370 is presumed to have run out of fuel and crashed, killing all 239 passengers and crew.

Now search teams have moved to an area about 1,850km west of Perth, where their task will be easier. Not only is it closer to Australia, meaning spotter-planes can spend more time searching before they have to return to refuel, but the weather is more benign than further south, which is in the middle of a belt of strong westerly winds known as the Roaring Forties.

“This is our best estimate of the area in which the aircraft is likely to have crashed into the ocean,” Martin Dolan, the chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, told reporters in Canberra. The search was focusing on surface debris which could indicate where the main wreckage lay, he said, adding: “This has a long way to go.”

The new search zone – already being scoured by 10 aircraft from Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and the US – is still dauntingly large: about 319,000 sq km, bigger than the entire UK. And the waters are deeper: up to 4,600 metres, according to Robin Beaman, a marine geologist and research fellow at James Cook University in Queensland.

While five aircraft, including a New Zealand Orion, spotted  objects in the water, the AMSA said it was not immediately clear whether they were potentially debris from MH370, or just “sea junk”.

A Chinese patrol ship, Haixun 01, will try to find the objects on Saturday, as will Australia’s HMAS Success, expected to reach the site by this morning. Several other Chinese ships are also on their way, and Australian satellites are being redirected.

In Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian Transport Minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, said the hundreds of objects photographed by various satellites in recent days – and also spotted from aeroplanes – could still be debris from the missing airliner, swept hundreds of miles south by ocean currents.

The new search zone was identified following a fresh analysis of data from before radar contact was lost. Analysis of engine performance by Boeing also helped investigators to estimate how long it was likely to have flown before running out of fuel and coming down in the ocean.

Mr Hishammuddin said the new search area, “although more focused than before, remains considerable, and the search conditions, although easier than before, remain challenging”.

With no debris yet retrieved or positively identified, some relatives are still clinging to a sliver of hope. Eliz Wong Yun Yi, whose father, Wong Sai Sang, was on the flight, said: “After so many days, still no plane. We will not believe what they [Malaysian authorities] say until the plane wreckage is found.”

In Paris, the international police agency Interpol revealed on Friday that Malaysia’s immigration department had not checked passengers’ passports against its database at all this year before the disappearance of Flight MH370.

As a result, two passengers with stolen Austrian and Italian passports were able to board the jet on March 8.

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 29 March 2014, 7:21 am and is filed under
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More objects spotted after search shifts north

Malaysiakini

Jane Wardell and Rujun Shen

Reuters

Mar 28, 2014

MH370 An air and sea search for a missing Malaysian passenger jet moved 1,100km north on Friday, after Australian authorities coordinating the operation in the remote Indian Ocean received new information from Malaysia that suggested the plane ran out of fuel earlier than thought.

The dramatic shift in the search area, moving it further than the distance between London and Berlin, followed analysis of radar and satellite data that showed the missing plane had travelled faster than had been previously calculated, and so would have burned through its fuel load quicker.

Australia said late on Friday that five aircraft had spotted “multiple objects of various colours” in the new search area.

“Photographic imagery of the objects was captured and will be assessed overnight,” the Australian Maritime and Safety Authority (Amsa) said in a statement.

“The objects cannot be verified or discounted as being from MH370 until they are relocated and recovered by ships.”

The latest twist underscores the perplexing and frustrating hunt for evidence in the near three-week search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which vanished from civilian radar screens less than an hour into a Kuala Lumpur to Beijing flight.

Malaysia says the plane was likely diverted deliberately but investigators have turned up no apparent motive or other red flags among the 227 passengers or the 12 crew.

Malaysian officials said the new search area was the result of a painstaking analysis of Malaysian military radar data and satellite readings from British company Inmarsat carried out by US, Chinese, British and Malaysian investigators.

Engine performance analysis by the plane’s manufacturer Boeing helped investigators determine how long the plane could have flown before it ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean, they said.

“Information which had already been examined by the investigation was re-examined in light of new evidence drawn from the Inmarsat data analysis,” acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a news conference.

Aircraft redirected

For more than a week, ships and surveillance planes have been scouring seas 2,500 km (1,550 miles) southwest of Perth, where satellite images had shown possible debris from Flight MH370, which went missing on March 8.

Ten aircraft searching on Friday were immediately re-directed to the new area of 319,000 sq km, roughly the size of Poland, around 1,850 km west of Perth. The Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation was also redirecting satellites there, Amsa said.

A flotilla of Australian and Chinese ships would take longer to shift north, however, with the Australian naval ship the HMAS Success not due to arrive until Saturday morning.

The new search area is larger, but closer to Perth, allowing aircraft to spend longer on site by shortening travel times. It is also vastly more favourable in terms of the weather as it is out of the deep sea region known as the Roaring 40s for its huge seas and frequent storm-force winds.

“I’m not sure that we’ll get perfect weather out there, but it’s likely to be better more often than what we’ve seen in the past,” John Young, general manager of the emergency response division of Amsa, told reporters, adding the previous search site was being abandoned.

“We have moved on from those search areas to the newest credible lead,” he said.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said earlier that the shift was based on analysis of radar data between the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca. At that time, the Boeing 777 was making a radical diversion west from its course.

Malaysia’s civil aviation chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, said at Friday’s news conference he was “not at liberty” to give the exact path of the aircraft.

Officials close to the investigation told Reuters last week that the plane may have passed close to Port Blair, the capital of India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 550 miles (885 km) further northwest from where Malaysia has said its military radar last detected it.

Satellite images

The shift comes less than a day after the latest reports of sightings of possible wreckage, captured by Thai and Japanese satellites in roughly the same frigid expanse of sea as earlier images reported by France, Australia and China.

Images had shown suspected debris, including pieces as large as 24 metres (70 ft), within the original search area in the southern Indian Ocean.

Potential debris has also been seen from search aircraft, but none has been picked up or confirmed as the wreckage of Flight MH370.

Hishammuddin said it was still possible that those objects were debris from the plane, as any wreckage could have been swept hundreds of miles from the crash site by now.

“Because of ocean drift, this new search area could still be consistent with the potential objects identified by various satellite images over the past week,” he said.

The US Navy said on Friday it was sending a second P8-Poseidon, its most advanced maritime surveillance aircraft, to help in the search.

“It’s critical to continue searching for debris so we can reverse-forecast the wind, current and sea state since March 8 to recreate the position where MH370 possibly went into the water,” said Commander Tom Moneymaker, a US 7th Fleet oceanographer.

The United States has also sent a device that can be towed behind a ship to pick up faint pings from the plane’s black box voice and data recorders, but time is running out.

“We’ve got to get this initial position right prior to deploying the Towed Pinger Locator since the MH370’s black box has a limited battery life and we can’t afford to lose time searching in the wrong area,” Moneymaker said.

– Reuters

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 29 March 2014, 12:07 am and is filed under
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Three events in last 24 hours brought some semi-light  and “hope against hope”, however tenuous and unsubstantial, all is not yet lost for the 239 aboard MH 370 as long as no wreckage has been found

Three events in the last 24 hours have brought some semi-light and “hope against hope”, however tenuous and unsubstantial, in the long, bleak and agonizing 21-day ordeal of  the aggrieved that all is not yet lost for the 239 passengers and crew aboard Malaysian Airlines aircraft MH 370 Boeing 777-200 as long as no wreckage has been found.

The first is the statement by the satellite company Inmarsat, distancing itself from Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s definitive conclusion on the 17th day of the missing MH370 that the Malaysian Airlines flight had ended in the southern Indian Ocean with no survivors and the announcement of the end of the search-and-rescue (SAR) operation.

Inmarsat spokesperson Jonathan Sinnatt has been quoted  in the international media as saying that  Inmarsat had only provided the information and it was for the Malaysian government to draw its own conclusions.

He said: “We provide our information to the Malaysians, and they combine that with all the other information which they have, which we wouldn’t know about, and then they draw their conclusions from that and make their own announcements on that basis.

“We aren’t a party to what the Malaysians announced, that’s up to them, because they see the full picture. We just contribute one set of information”.

Najib had on the night of March 24 delivered a grim press conference announcing MH370 had “ended in the Indian Ocean”, with no survivors and an end to the “search-and-rescue” (SAR) operation and its replacement with  search-and-recovery (SAR) of wreckage debris,  citing analysis of Inmarsat’s satellite data.

This had understandably fuelled exasperation, despair and anger among the families of the passengers and crew, who refused to accept the conclusion until the aircraft or a piece of its wreckage is found.

And  despite announcing the finality of the end of Flight MH370 and SAR operation, the Prime Minister was himself unsure of its finality, which was why he announced in Parliament the next day that the Government would not declare a state of national mourning until more conclusive evidence was found to identify wreckage belonging to MH370.

The second event is the shifting of the air-and-sea search for the wreckage 1,100km to the north-east of “Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties and Screaming Sixties” bringing it considerably closer to the Western Australian coast, following a fresh analysis of radar and satellite data, indicating that the Boeing 777 was flying faster than initially estimated, and therefore would have run out of fuel more quickly.

The third event was the meeting of the Acting Transport Minister, Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein with some of the MH370 victims’ next of kin this morning and his assurance that the government would keep searching for the aircraft and the missing survivors – however remote the chances of success.

With no debris retrieved or positively identified, all must respect and give strength and support to  relatives of those on board MH370 who are still clinging to a sliver of hope, however tenuous and unsubstantial, that their loved ones had survived the ordeal of the 21-day missing MH370.

As Eliz Wong Yun Wi, whose father Wong Sai Sang was on the flight, said: “After so many days, still no plane. We will not believe until the plane wreckage is found.”

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 29 March 2014, 5:44 pm and is filed under
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Timeline of Malaysian Air’s Missing Flight 370

By
J. Kyle O’Donnell
  Mar 28, 2014 2:25 PM GMT+0800

Bloomberg

The disappearance of Malaysian Airline System Bhd. (MAS)’s Flight 370 has galvanized a multinational search, spawned theories ranging from an accident to air piracy and repeatedly dashed hopes that a resolution was at hand.

Below is a timeline of the events that began with the jet’s departure from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing:

March 8:

12:41 a.m.: Flight 370 takes off from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew members on board.

1:07 a.m.: Last transmission from the Boeing Co. 777-200ER via an onboard text-and-data messaging system known by the acronym Acars.

1:19 a.m.: Last communication from the cockpit. Initial investigation says copilot said, “alright, good night” as the last words. Plane leaves Malaysian airspace, heading across the Gulf of Thailand toward Vietnam.

1:21 a.m.: Radar transponder is switched off.

1:37 a.m.: Next Acars transmission is due, and never comes.

2:15 a.m.: Malaysian military radar spots an aircraft on the west side of Peninsular Malaysia that isn’t using its transponder. This development won’t be publicly known until about a week later. The radar target is Flight 370, heading away from its planned route.

6:30 a.m.: Flight 370 is scheduled to arrive in Beijing.

7:39 a.m.: China’s Xinhua news agency sends a flash bulletin saying contact had been lost with Flight 370. Chinese passengers make up about two-thirds of the people on board the plane.

8:11 a.m.: Last satellite signal sent from the plane, known as a “handshake,” is detected. This development won’t be known for about a week.

8:19 a.m.: Evidence of a “partial handshake” between the aircraft and the ground station eight minutes after the last complete communication. This information was released March 25.

9:15 a.m.: No response from the aircraft when the ground station sent the next message, indicating the plane was no longer logged on to the network.

Initial search efforts focus on the Gulf of Thailand, where twin oil slicks stir concern that they signal a crash on the plane’s known route. The discovery that two passengers were traveling on stolen passports triggers speculation that terrorism may have been involved.

March 9:
 Vietnamese searchers find objects in the Gulf of Thailand only to conclude later that they’re unrelated to Flight 370. Representatives for the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing travel to Malaysia to assist with the investigation. Speculation arises that the plane deviated from its route.

March 10:
 Malaysia expands the search area farther into the South China Sea after a plane alerted Hong Kong air traffic controllers about possible debris. Vietnam searchers look for a suspected window piece that was spotted from the air. The leads prove fruitless. Searchers are unable to locate a yellow inflatable object that a Vietnamese helicopter spotted earlier.

March 11:
 The search expands east again as suspected debris is found off the coast of Vietnam. One theory evaporates as authorities in Malaysia and Interpol say the passengers with stolen passports probably aren’t associated with terrorism.

March 12:
 Malaysia says a criminal probe is looking into hijacking and sabotage among other theories. Vietnam says Malaysia hasn’t been cooperative in search and that the flight may have turned west after last signal. News reports surface that the co-pilot had guests in the cockpit in a previous flight.

March 13:
 Speculation of the crash’s location moves toward the Indian Ocean as evidence mounts that the flight continued away from its route after controllers lost radar contact. The shift in focus follows a brief flurry of optimism for a breakthrough. Chinese satellite images show floating objects between the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand, and the Malaysian government says later that they are unrelated to Flight 370.

March 14:
 The Andaman Sea becomes the latest empty lead in the search. Malaysia looks at the possibility of pilot and crew involvement, while Prime Minister Najib Razak postpones a trip to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to oversee the hunt.

March 15:
 Satellite transmissions trace the missing airliner to the Indian Ocean off of Australia. The pilots’ homes are searched, and Najib says new information shows the flight was intentionally diverted.

March 16:
 Searchers shift their sights to the Indian Ocean on the basis of the satellite-signals evidence, which shows that the plane operated for about seven hours after its last contact with air traffic control.

March 17:
 Australia leads the search in the Indian Ocean while the law enforcement probe spreads across multiple fronts. Authorities discuss pilot suicide as one possibility, police investigate a flight engineer who was a passenger.

March 18:
 The disappearance becomes the longest in modern aviation history. The U.S. joins Australia in the Indian Ocean search, scanning the waters across an area 1 1/2 times as big as California.

March 19:
 The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation joins Malaysia’s inquiry, which now includes a probe of data removed from the pilot’s home flight simulator on Feb. 3. An analysis of the 777’s probable fuel reserves helps narrow the Indian Ocean search area to a patrol zone about the size of Italy, half as big as a day earlier.

March 20:
 Satellite images of objects off Australia’s west coast spur an air-and-sea search across a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean. The photos were taken on March 16, and patrol craft aren’t able to locate any wreckage.

March 21:
 A second day of air searches turns up nothing. An analysis of so-called pings from the aircraft by satellite provider Inmarsat Plc (ISAT) concludes that the plane maintained a steady course and speed after radar contact was lost. The assessment is consistent with details suggesting that the plane was commanded, at least initially, from the cockpit and not disabled by an accident.

March 22:
 As the mystery reaches the two-week mark and a day of air and sea patrols produces nothing more promising than a sighting of a wooden pallet, China announces that scrutiny of satellite scans has revealed a new image of a large structure in the search zone. The photo, captured on March 18, appears to show an object measuring 22 meters by 13 meters floating 120 kilometers to the southwest of those in the March 16 images.

March 23:
 Malaysian authorities disclose that a French satellite has found radar traces of possible debris, without saying when and where the images were captured. Search efforts off Australia fail to produce a breakthrough as more aircraft join the hunt and ships with specialist equipment begin to arrive.

March 24:
 Najib, the prime minister, says Malaysia has concluded the flight ended in the Indian Ocean “far from any possible landing sites,” ruling out theories of a detour over Asia or an island landing.

March 25:
 Families and friends of Chinese passengers protested in front of the Malaysian embassy in Beijing. Malaysian Air and Boeing’s records of MH370’s maintenance and crew are sought by a law firm representing the uncle of one of the passengers as Chicago-based Ribbeck Law Chartered petitioned for information in Illinois state court.

March 26:
 Satellite images from Airbus Group NV taken on March 23 showed 122 potential objects in the southern Indian Ocean in a 400-square kilometer area, about 2,557 kilometers from Perth. Some were a meter in length, and others were as long as 23 meters, and some appeared to be bright.

March 27:
 Aircraft searching for the missing Malaysian jet suspended their operations because of bad weather. Thai satellite images taken on March 24 showed more than 300 objects in the southern Indian Ocean, while a Japanese satellite detected about a dozen pieces of possible debris in a March 26 image.

March 28:
 The three-week hunt for Flight 370 focused on a new area in the Indian Ocean after radar data indicated the plane probably flew a shorter distance than earlier estimated. The new zone is about 1,100 kilometers to the northeast of the previous search location.

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 29 March 2014, 10:30 pm and is filed under
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Call for RCI into the 29-year Memali incident, especially as the protagonists like Mahathir and Musa Hitam are still alive and can testify on  the tragedy which cost the lives of 18 people (including four policemen)

Former Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, Tun Musa Hitam, laid bare one of the nation’s longest-kept secrets when he revealed that the then Prime Minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, was in Malaysia during  the bloody Memali incident on Nov. 19, 1985 when police forces killed Ibrahim Libya and his followers in a clash which resulted in 18 casualties, including four policemen.

Musa’s revelation at a public discussion organised by Kelantan State Government held in Kota Bahru three nights ago came as a shocker as close to three decades, it was reported and believed that Musa took charge of the operations as Home Minister in 1985 because Mahathir was in China for a visit.

However, Musa said in Kota Bahru that Mahathir was in Kuala Lumpur when the bloodshed took place, adding: “In fact, two three days after that he was still in KL.”

In his response, Mahathir said he could not remember if he was in the country during the Memali incident and that he would have to check into his records to verify if Musa’s claim was true.

It is just incredulous and completely unbelievable that a person credited with an elephantine memory could not remember such an important detail in an incident, which together  with two other incidents, must rank as his three   “blackest and darkest” episodes in his 22-year premiership, especially as the Memali tragedy claimed 18 lives, which included four policemen.

The second “blackest and darkest” episode of the 22-year Mahathir regime was  the infamous Operation Lalang in 1987 where 108 persons were detained under the draconian detention-without-trial Internal Security Act for him to consolidate his political control and power in government, Umno and Barisan Nasional.

Strangely enough,  in an exclusive interview with Nanyang Siang Pao in  February this year, Mahathir denied responsibility for Operation Lalang and made  the preposterous claim that at the time of Ops Lalang, he was in China and the Home Minister was one “Musa”.

As I immediately pointed out in response, Mahathir was talking “rubbish” and was again guilty of selective amnesia as Mahathir was not only not in China, but was categorically in the country during the Operation Lalang dragnet and he was definitely the Home Minister at the time. Musa was the first Home Minister in Mahathir’s premiership, serving from 1981-1986, until he broke ranks with Mahathir resigning as Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister.

Again strangely enough, Mahathir’s “selective amnesia” was also displayed conspicuously in his third “blackest and darkest” episode under his premiership – his single-handed destruction of  the professionalism, independence, impartiality and  integrity of the judiciary starting with the first judicial crisis in the country with  his arbitrary and unconstitutional sacking of the then Lord President, Tun Salleh Abas and two Supreme Court judges, Tan Sri Wan Suleiman Pawanteh and Datuk George Seah in 1998.

Malaysians will never forget the sorry spectacle of the former Prime Minister appearing before the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Lingam VideoTape scandal in January 2008 virtually pleading “selective amnesia” when he had to say “I cannot remember” or its equivalent 14 times during his 90-minute testimony about incidents related to the fixing of judicial appointments.

For the past 29 years, Mahathir had absolved himself of the deaths of 18 people, including four policemen, in the deadly 400-strong police assault on Memali on 19th November 1985 – purportedly because he was away on a foreign visit to China.

If Musa is right, that Mahathir was in fact in Kuala Lumpur, was the latter in fact master-minding the Memali attacks and even overruled  Musa’s earlier directive to the police not to use force when arresting Ibrahim Libya and to withdraw should they encounter resistance?

Clearly, a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the 29-year Memali incident is  warranted by the fact that the protagonists like Mahathir and Musa Hitam are still alive and can testify on  the tragedy which cost the lives of 18 people (including four policemen).

Other protagonists who are still alive today and can throw light on the Memali tragedy will include the former Inspector-General of Police, Tun Hanif Omar, former Acting Inspector-General of Police,Tan Sri Dato’ Mohd Amin bin Osman, the then Information Minister Datuk Rais Yatim,  Deputy Home Minister at the time, Tan Sri Radzi Sheikh Ahmad, the then UMNO Secretary-General Tan Sri Sanusi Junid, the OCPD Baling during the Memali incident, Tunku Muszaffar Shah and a follower of Ibrahim Libya who is now Senator Muhamad Yusof Husin from Baling, Kedah.

I had in fact made the call for an independent commission of inquiry  into the Memali tragedy more than 29 years ago on the ground that the Kampong Memali Incident was  neither  a Muslim or Malay problem nor an UMNO or Pas problem but a Malaysian problem which must be dealt with on a non-partisan Malaysian basis.

The  terms of reference of the Independent Commission of Inquiry into the Kampong Memali Incident should include an inquiry  whether there was no other way for the police to handle the situation without provoking the loss of 18 lives; the causes as to why children and women could be worked into a frenzy in support of Ibrahim Libya, whether UMNO’s discriminatory policies against PAS supporters could have been an contributing factor; to present an independent and unbiased report on the course of events on Nov. 19 and to  make recommendations as to  the lessons to be learnt to prevent recurrence of the Kampong Memali Tragedy.

With the revelation of the 29-year  secret that Mahathir was in Malaysia during the Memali Incident, an independent commission of inquiry into all aspects of the tragedy which caused the loss of 18 lives including four policemen has become  most imperative.

As Parliament will be in session for another two weeks before reconvening on 9th June,  it would be most appropriate that all MPs, regardless of whether Pakatan Rakyat or Barisan Nasional, should unite and  support the establishment of a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the 1985 Memali Incident to establish the true circumstances leading to the tragedy and the lessons to be drawn by all concerned to avoid any repetition of such a tragedy.

                This entry was posted on Sunday, 30 March 2014, 11:51 am and is filed under
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Call on all MPs to reach a  parliamentary consensus that regardless of whether “black boxes” are retrieved or not, a parliamentary select committee on MH370 disaster  will start preparations and investigations six weeks after March  8

The fourth week and 23rd day of the longest and largest-ever multinational sea-and-air search for the missing Malaysian Airlines MH370 Boeing 777 which appeared to have  vanished into the air on March 8 with 239 passengers and crew on board  and the second day of a new search area 1,850 kilometres (1,150 miles) west of Perth have  all proved to be fruitless with items scooped from the sea by Chinese and Australian ships turned out to be fishing material or rubbish.

The multi-national SAR mission is in a race against time, as the “black boxes” – the flight recorders which pick up cockpit conversations as well as flight data – emit pings for 30 days after becoming immersed in water, i.e. by April 7.

The  MH370 “black boxes” may last at least 10 more days and perhaps a few weeks longer, depending on water temperature and other factors.

The “black boxes” are designed to withstand depths of 20,000 feet and may work in even deeper water, the range of the pings is a mile.

Cases where recorders were retrieved from the ocean include  TWA Flight 800 in 1996, EgyptAir Flight 990 in 1999, Alaska Airlines Flight 261 in 2000 and Air France 447 in 2009.

However, without a  signal from the boxes, it  will be a daunting task to find the “black boxes” of MH370 when its  debris have still to be found – a much more impossible task  than the challenge  faced by the search teams for Air France 447, which went down midway across the Atlantic Ocean in 2009. Although debris was found within days of the Air France 447 crash and the flight path was known, it took investigators another two years to retrieve the recorders from the bottom of the sea.

If the “black boxes” cannot be retrieved or the debris of MH370 cannot be established by April 7, i.e. the  30-day deadline for the “black boxes”, then the possibility that it may take longer than the search for Air France 447 for retrieval of  the MH370 “black boxes” will have to be faced.

Aviation records show over 12 air crashes where the “black boxes” could not be retrieved.

Are all investigations in the MH370 disaster to be held in abeyance until the retrieval of the “black boxes”, which could be an indeterminate length of time?

It is not  in our national interest to put off investigations and delay answers to the thousand-and-one questions which have surfaced in the past three weeks, not just about the “what, how and why” about the events leading to the disappearance of Flight MH370 on March 8, but also a whole series of questions surrounding the disappearance of the Triple Seven, the Search-and-Rescue (SAR) Operation and attendant queries and controversies.

This is why the Malaysian Cabinet should come out, without any further hesitation, with a clear-cut position that it would support the establishment of an opposition-headed Parliamentary Select Committee on the MH370 regardless of whether the “black boxes” of MH370 could be retrieved.

This will go a long way to send a clear and unmistakable message, both nationally and internationally, that the Malaysian authorities have nothing to hide and is prepared to support a full and independent investigation into the MH370 Disaster.

Hishammuddin said yesterday that the Transport Ministry will set up an international committee to probe the disappearance of MH370 and that international aviation and intelligence agencies would be invited to look into the issues over Malaysia’s aviation industry.

Hishammuddin also indicated that the Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF) will be doing an inquiry into the MH370  disaster.

The MH370 is not only a national but an international disaster, and just as the SAR had involved the largest-ever multi-national air-and-sea operation, the various MH370 inquiries must involve the participation of all countries who have special interests and/or stakes in the unprecedented aviation disaster.

A Parliamentary Select Committee on the MH370 Disaster for instance, should be prepared to be the basis for a full-scale and wide-ranging international multi-Parliamentary inquiry – probably the first of its kind – not only because the passengers come from a diversity of countries and the sea-and-air SAR operation had involved 26 nations, but because the MH370 disaster should continue to represent an international search for a better and safer global village for mankind.

I therefore urge all MPs regardless of political party or coalition to be conscious not only of our national but also international responsibilities in the MH370 disaster by reaching a parliamentary consensus that a Parliamentary Select Committee on the MH370 Disaster would  be formed, whether the “black boxes” are retrieved or not, and that the Parliamentary Select Committee should start preparations and  investigations six weeks after March 8.

(Media Statement in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday, 30th March 2014)

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‘Credible leads’ are not hard facts in MH370 quest

By Mark Odell in London

Financial Times

March 28, 2014

The sudden switch in focus across hundreds of kilometres of the southern Indian Ocean in the hunt for flight MH370 underlines just how little real information investigators have at their disposal.

The favourite phrase of officials is “the most credible lead”, of which they have had a few during the past week as the families of those aboard the Malaysia Airlines flight – and a fascinated global audience – wait for answers. But it reveals how much of the search is still down to trial and error.

“The information is very, very confused at the moment,” says Matthew Greaves, head of the safety and accident centre at Cranfield University in the UK. “They [the international investigation team] are trying to be as open as possible but some of the information they are releasing is wrong and they are having to correct it.”

After numerous “credible leads” of debris in parts of the southern Indian Ocean this week, in an area spanning 1.6m sq km, the search abruptly shifted 1,100km northeast on Friday after data appeared to help investigators get a fix on the speed of the aircraft.

Establishing the speed, just one of the many unknowns in a search that is by far the most perplexing of modern aviation history, is crucial as it should give investigators a better idea of where the aircraft would have sent it last “ping” to an Inmarsat satellite.

If the speed is not known, all that can be established is that MH370 was somewhere on a large arc, equidistant from the satellite, that spans thousands of kilometres of ocean.

But the explanation behind why the search has shifted closer to Australia – that it was travelling faster than first thought, burning more fuel and thereby reducing its range – appeared to contradict information out this week from Malaysian investigators.

That information predicted that the faster the aircraft had flown, the farther away it would have ended up from the west coast of Australia.

Even the chart published by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority on Friday suggests the latest search area is closer to where the aircraft should have gone down if it was flying more slowly – 400 knots compared with either 469kn or 475kn.

No one involved in the investigation in either Malaysia or Australia could be reached for comment, although drift and ocean currents were both possible explanations for the discrepancy.

Mr Greaves, who helps train investigators from the UK Air Accident Investigation Branch, which is one of the main agencies involved in the search, says the problem is that the hunt for MH370 is unlike any normal investigation.

“Normally, all of this gets done at a much slower pace and behind closed doors. Every investigation has good information and bad information to sift through but in this case they don’t have much to go on so they are putting out every bit of information they have.

“As soon as they find some debris that indicated the aircraft has gone down at sea things will be different but at the moment there is a total void,” he says.

The sightings by five aircraft on Friday of “objects of various colours” may give cause for hope. Much will depend on whether any debris can be retrieved by ships in the area this weekend.

Until that happens, search efforts will have progressed little since the beginning of the week, when investigators decided they had enough proof the aircraft had come down somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean.

Mark Binskin, vice-chief of the Australian Defence Forces, left little room for doubt about the challenges for the multinational teams, when he said this week: “We’re not searching for a needle in a haystack. We’re still trying to define where the haystack is.”

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‘Frustrated’ China mulls building 50 satellites following failure to find MH370, says daily

The Malaysian Insider

March 30, 2014

Frustrated over the failure to locate the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, Beijing is mulling the setting up a global monitoring network, the South China Morning Post reported today.

The Hong Kong daily reported that Beijing was considering building more than 50 orbiting probes so that it could monitor the entire planet.

Chinese researchers said if China were to increase its network of surveillance and observation satellites, it would be on a par or larger than the United States.

The report said Beijing has been frustrated by the failure to locate MH370 despite 21 days of search operations.

Professor Chi Tianhe told SCMP that if China had a global monitoring network today, the 26 nations involved in the search operations for the missing Boeing 777-200ER (9M-MRO) would not be searching in the dark.

“We would have a much greater chance of finding MH370 and tracing it to its final position,” said Chi, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth.

“The plan is being drafted to expand our regional monitoring capability to global coverage,” Chi told SCMP.

The number of Chinese surveillance and observation satellites remained a state secret, but Chi estimated that the United States operated about 50 similar satellites, the report said.

It said a satellite costs about 400 million yuan (RM210 million) to build, according to estimates from experts in the mainland’s space industry.

To build 50 such satellites would cost at least 20 billion yuan (RM10.5 billion).

Professor Liu Yu told SCMP that the project would be a game changer for China if approved by Beijing.

“China’s ability to carry out observation from space would be altered tremendously,” said Liu, a remote-sensing expert at Peking University’s school of earth and space sciences.

“International earth-observation services today are dominated by the US and Europe, but if China launches more than 50 satellites for this purpose, the whole landscape will be changed,” Liu said.

“The more Chinese satellites there are in space, the easier our work becomes,” Liu told SCMP.

“By analysing data from numerous satellites positioned at different locations and equipped with different sensors, we can understand much better an area of interest,” he said.

However, the ambitious plans are likely to rattle many Asian countries and fuel suspicion of Beijing’s intentions, as a few countries are locked in territorial disputes with China.

On March 11, Al Jazeera reported that while it was true that the South China Sea disputes had been a permanent feature of regional affairs for some decades, recent events have been particularly disconcerting.

Since 2009, China has stepped up its paramilitary patrols in the area, with growing reports of Chinese surveillance vessels “harassing”, among others, Filipino and Vietnamese ships and fishermen, the report said.

In mid-2012, the Philippines and China came dangerously close to an armed conflict over the Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea, Al Jazeera said.

Equipped with superior military hardware, and backed by intensive diplomatic pressure, China eventually managed to outmanoeuvre the Philippines by gaining control of the disputed shoal.

By mid-2013, China pushed the envelope even further, with Chinese paramilitary vessels allegedly aiming to overrun Philippine military fortifications in the Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea.

The Second Thomas Shoal is close to the hydrocarbon-rich areas off the coast of the Philippine province of Palawan.

The balance of forces on the ground has rapidly shifted in China’s favour.

The report said China resilient economy has helped it accelerate its military spending, with a greater focus on its naval capabilities.

The ultimate aim, many analysts claim, was to make China a pre-eminent naval power in Asia – eventually, challenging the US naval hegemony in the Pacific theatre, the report said.

In response, the report said Southeast Asian states have accelerated their efforts at establishing a legally binding Code of Conduct (CoC) in the South China Sea.

It is hoped the CoC will dissuade China from reinforcing its paramilitary fortifications and surveillance patrols across the contested areas.

There have also been parallel efforts by the Philippines, Vietnam and Singapore to increase American military presence in Southeast Asia to hedge against China’s territorial assertiveness.

However, Al Jazeera reported that many Asean members have been reluctant to criticise China over the South China Sea disputes.

China is Asean’s largest trading partner and Asia’s biggest economy. – March 30, 2014.

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In epic MH370 hunt, experts say cost could exceed RM130.9m

By Syed Jaymal Zahiid

The Malay Mail Online

March 30, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, March 30 — The on-going search for Malaysia Airline flight MH370 is likely to exceed the US$40 million (RM130.9 million) spent to recover the remains of the Air France flight AF447 jet, experts have said.

Scientists from China — whose people make up two-thirds of the 239 people on board the passenger plane missing for 22 days now — speculate that a prolonged search could see the bill hit 10 times higher than that forked out for AF447, the South Morning China Post (SCMP) has reported.

The English-language Hong Kong daily reported France and Brazil had poured out over US$40 million to retrieve the flight recorder from the French plane that crashed en route to Rio de Janeiro from Paris, using sophisticated technology like underwater robots to scour the seabed in search for the wreckage.

Citing a Chinese oceanographer, the broadsheet reported the search for MH370 — now into its fourth week — has been far tougher than that of Air France and could cost more than US$200 million (RM654.5 million) annually to sustain a 26-nation hunt for the Beijing-bound plane whom some suspect may have crashed into the southerly part of the Indian Ocean.

“USD200 million per year is barely enough to maintain the effort,” Zhao Chaofang, a scientist at the Ocean University of China in Qingdao, was quoted saying.

International business news agency, Bloomberg, also noted that the inventory of military equipment engaged in the search that began in the South China Sea and has continued deep into the frigid waters fed by the South Pole, has been extensive.

Malaysia has deployed six ships, three helicopters, and two aircraft in the hunt, according to information issued by Australia’s Maritime Authority (AMSA). China has sent 10 ships, three airplanes, and three helicopters. Australia has contributed five ships of its own, including the HMAS Success.

The United Kingdom has dispatched the HMS Echo, a specialised survey vessel, to help search the sea almost 1,600 miles southwest of Perth. India, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates have all sent aircraft to help.

Meanwhile the US, which had set aside a US$4 million (RM13.09 million) for the search, have sent two warships, one state of the art surveillance Poseidon aircraft and Bluefin 21, an underwater surveillance drone capable of operating at depths as low as 14,700 feet to Australia for use in the search.

In yet another report yesterday by Taiwanese news website, Want China Times, the US Pacific Fleet had disclosed its two destroyers and helicopters cost around US$100,000 (RM327,000) per day each to operate while the two patrol aircraft cost around US$77,000 and US$43,000 per day respectively.

According to the Taiwanese report, the US said its federal government would have spent roughly US$4.5 million (RM14.72 million) so far. If the search goes on for a year, the US would be roughly spending whopping RM273.4 million in total.

The Chinese on the other hand have deployed several vessels together with two helicopters and two Il-76 cargo planes which have been searching the area off Western Australia where satellite images show objects suspected to be debris from the Malaysia Airlines (MAS) plane.

Quoting a military expert, the Taiwanese news site said it is hard to estimate the financial costs China has had to bear but noted that the Il-76 costs nearly USD10,000 (RM32,725) for each hour of flight, excluding wait staff help.

That would amount to US$3.36 million (RM10.996 million) after 21 days of search, Want China Times reported. It added that a year would cost US$58.4 million (RM101.08 million).

Liu Jianping, a military expert, was quoted saying the costs involved for vessels engaged in the search include fuel as well as water, food and medicine, salaries and subsidies for personnel.

“The vessels require constant maintenance and incur significant depreciation costs, said the expert, who estimated that a Chinese destroyer costs nearly US$100,000 (RM350,000) a day to operate and even more for the amphibious vessel,” Liu reportedly said.

Furthermore, China has mobilised 21 satellites at a rumoured cost of up to CN¥100 million (US$16 million or RM210 million) although a Chinese aerospace expert said the cost of using the satellites could be lower than expected since they do not necessarily have to be repositioned.

Regardless, the total spent by the US and China alone would amount to US$136 million (RM477.8 million) yearly excluding the costs incurred by the remaining 24 nations involved in the search.

The report assumed each nation would spend an average US$68 million (RM222.13 million) that would amount to US$1.7 billion (RM5.95 billion).

Bloomberg pointed out that a full public accounting will likely wait until a definitive outcome, since no one involved wants to appear callous or insensitive.

Meanwhile Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein had previously said that the country had not discussed the matter with other nations.

“Nobody, not the Malaysian government, none of our partners, have talked about dollars and cents. It’s all about trying to find the aircraft. It did not even cross our minds,” he said.

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In MH370, unity for the country not the same as for the government

COMMENTARY BY THE MALAYSIAN INSIDER

March 29, 2014

It must be said, time and again, that there is a difference between government and country. A huge difference. And asking people to unite for the country is absolutely different from asking people to unite

 for the government.

More so in the days and weeks after flight MH370 and the 239 people on board vanished without a trace. Many have asked to pray for the passengers and the plane, to unite for the flight and for the country.

That doesn’t mean that criticising the incompetence of the Home Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi or the inaccurate presumption of the Deputy Defence Minister Datuk Abdul Rahim Bakri is unpatriotic.

They are the politicians elected to parliament and appointed to public office as ministers and deputy ministers by the ruling government. They are not the country. All of us are the country.

They represent us in parliament and those who hold executive posts have to run the ministries and provide oversight to the civil service that makes sure the country is run well.

And if it isn’t run well, action must be taken to get it back on track.

So, it is interesting to see that the mainstream media is going gaga about how flight MH370 incident has united the country.

Why should they be surprised? All Malaysians love their country. Period. What more during a time of national tragedy and sadness.

It is this love of country that persuaded a large number of Malaysians to vote last May 5. It is this same patriotism that has made Malaysians battle corruption, cronyism, racism and chauvinism.

It is this love that keeps us Malaysians working to improve the country in spite of politicians who seek to divide us for their own interests.

Just like criticism against the Barisan Nasional government’s handling of MH370 should not be viewed as criticism against Malaysia, uniting behind the country at a time of sadness should not be construed as a thumbs up for Najib and his friends.

We are Malaysians and we only have one country to call home. But we have a choice of which government we want to run our country for us. – March 29, 2014.

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