Thursday, March 27, 2014

Still MH370 a puzzle which had really confused us

Passenger on the 12:35am Malaysia Airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The flight has been renumbered  MH318 since the disappearance of MH370.

Passenger on the 12:35am Malaysia Airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The flight has been renumbered MH318 since the disappearance of MH370. Photo: Reuters

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By PHILIP P. PAN AND KIRK SEMPLE

The search for MH370

The night sky was clear above the clouds, and the last glimmer of a setting half-moon had faded when Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, cruising at 10,000 metres over the Gulf of Thailand, approached the border between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace on its usual route to Beijing. What happened next should have been routine for a twice-daily milk run between two of Asia’s most important cities. Air traffic controllers outside Kuala Lumpur usually hand the jet off to their counterparts in Ho Chi Minh City as the flight cruises northeast toward the Chinese capital.

But in those early hours of March 8, pilots flying nearby heard an unusual crescendo of chatter on the radio frequencies used by radar control in Vietnam and Malaysia. Air traffic personnel in both countries were trying and failing to reach the plane.

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Cabin crew prepare to serve breakfast on MH318.
Cabin crew prepare to serve breakfast on MH318.Photo: Reuters

‘‘Any stations in contact with Malaysian 370, please relay.’’

Vietnamese and Malaysian controllers asked one aircraft after another to radio the jet. Pilots listened as one plane after another tried and heard only static.

‘‘Malaysian 370, this is Malaysian 88.’’

MH318 on the tarmac at Beijing after the flight from Kuala Lumpur.
MH318 on the tarmac at Beijing after the flight from Kuala Lumpur. Photo: Reuters

‘‘Malaysian 370, this is Malaysian 52.’’

People who heard the calls, describing them for the first time, said they were calm, even laconic. The pilots trying to reach the airliner had no reason to believe it had suffered anything more than an ordinary radio malfunction. But those initial attempts to find a plane in the skies would soon evolve into an urgent multinational search operation spanning land and sea in two hemispheres. They signalled the start of what has become perhaps the most perplexing case in the history of modern aviation - one that investigators say may take years to solve, or could remain a mystery forever.

More than two weeks after Flight 370 disappeared, unbridled speculation surrounds the unfolding global drama. So much is uncertain about what happened on the plane, and so much of what has been disclosed by Malaysian authorities has been contradicted, that no theory of its fate can be easily dismissed. On Saturday, the authorities said a Chinese satellite had made a new sighting of a possible object floating in the southern Indian Ocean in the area that is now the focus of the search operation, and China was sending ships to investigate.

Based on dozens of interviews with people whose lives were touched by the plane as well as with outside experts and investigators from the two dozen countries searching for answers, this report presents a portrait of Flight 370 and the search to find it using what is known to date. But by necessity, it is an incomplete picture.

A Routine Night

Malaysia Airlines flies the Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysia capital, to Beijing route every day, twice a day. Flight 370, which departs at 12:35am and lands at 6:30am, is often the cheaper option.

Passengers are advised to arrive at least two hours in advance. On March 7, a delegation of 34 Chinese artists, relatives and organisers who had spent the past five days participating in an art exhibit in Kuala Lumpur played it safe with the city’s unpredictable Friday night traffic and arrived about 8 pm.

Perhaps the most prominent of the artists was the flight’s oldest passenger, Liu Rusheng, 77, a calligrapher who had published an essay about how he much treasured life because he had ‘‘cheated death’’ six times, beginning with his abandonment as an infant by parents fleeing Japanese soldiers.

Daniel Liau, the delegation’s host, said Liu had ‘‘the energy of a young man''. He helped Liu and the other artists check their luggage. Then they stood chatting under the modernist scalloped ceilings of the main terminal for about 90 minutes. Later, after the group had passed through security and taken the monorail to the satellite terminal, Liau called them one last time.

‘‘How are the artists?’’ he recalled asking one of the organizers, Hou Bo, who replied they had reached the gate. ‘‘Everybody is OK,’’ Hou assured him.

Boarding began about midnight. The airline would have allowed the elderly - including Liu and his wife, Bao Yuanhua, 73 - and the families traveling with the two infants booked on the flight to get settled first. Next came the passengers holding passes for the 35 seats in business class.

Philip Wood, 50, an IBM executive from Texas and a regular on the flight because he was relocating from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur, held an economy ticket but hoped to be upgraded. He had long legs and was the holder of platinum frequent-flier card, said his partner, Sarah Bajc, 48, a teacher.

Bajc said she exchanged a dozen text messages with him before the flight about the movers, scheduled to arrive at their home in Beijing the next morning. ‘‘We discussed the state of packing, what still needed to be done,’’ she said. His last message came just before he left for the airport.

Others on the flight were just passing through Kuala Lumpur, including Shi Xianwen, 26, a new father returning to China from a business trip to Australia. At the airport in Perth, he spent 40 minutes picking out a bracelet watch for his wife, whose birthday was approaching, an employee at the duty-free shop said.

And two passengers boarded the flight using stolen passports, Pouria Nourmohammadi Mehrdad, 19, and Seyed Mohammed Reza Delavar, 29, Iranian men described by Interpol as migrants being smuggled into Europe.

Mohammad Mallaeibasir, 18, an information technology student in Kuala Lumpur, said the pair stayed in his apartment the night before they left. Mehrdad was a friend from high school in Tehran, he said, and he told him he was starting a new life in Hamburg, Germany, where his mother was waiting.

‘‘He was quite nervous,’’ Mallaeibasir recalled. ‘‘I could see it on his face.’’

The next night, he drove them to the airport and offered to help them check in, but they insisted on entering separately, Delavar first. The two high school buddies waited in the car for five to 10 minutes, smoking cigarettes, before Mehrdad got out to leave.

Mallaeibasir gave him a hug and told him to have a safe flight. His friend carried a large backpack and a laptop computer bag into the terminal, and that was the last he saw of him.

The Aircraft

The plane the passengers boarded was a Boeing 777, one of the world’s most popular and advanced passenger jets, and Boeing’s first fly-by-wire commercial aircraft, in which electronic controls replaced manual ones. Pilots send commands that are conveyed to the wings and other components, and a computer helps keep the plane steady.

The ‘‘Triple Seven'', as it often called, has all but replaced the 747 because it is cheaper to operate and can fly up to 16 hours without stopping to refuel. It also has one of the industry’s best safety records, with only two serious accidents in the 19 years it has been in service.

Malaysia Airlines, the nation’s state-run carrier, began using the Boeing 777 in 1997 and eventually had 15 of them in its fleet. One of them, the 404th model to roll off Boeing’s assembly line in Everett, Washington, was delivered to the airline in May 2002 and registered with tail number 9M-MRO. It was this plane that was used for Flight 370 and has disappeared.

Malaysia Airlines has said the jet has been involved in only one previous safety incident. On August 9, 2012, the tip of one of its wings broke off after it clipped the tail of a China Eastern Airlines Airbus A340 while taxiing at Shanghai Pudong International Airport. No one was hurt. Boeing said it sent a team of engineers and mechanics to remove and replace the damaged wing sections, and returned the plane to service after testing.

Boeing recommends a light maintenance inspection of the 777 after every 200 to 400 flights, or about 500 hours of flight time. Known as an ‘‘A check,’’ the inspection usually is conducted in a hangar by a team of about 15 engineers working about 10 hours, often overnight. Malaysia Airlines said the jet’s last ‘‘A check’’ took place Feb. 23, and uncovered no problems.

By the time it pulled up to the gate at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on March 8, the plane had completed more than 7500 flights and clocked over 53,400 hours in the air, according to Flightglobal, a news and data service for the aviation sector. That put it well within the average economic life of 23 years for a wide-body passenger jet.

In other words, there was little to distinguish this plane from the roughly 1170 other Boeing 777s now in use. That is why it is so important for investigators to determine if the plane’s disappearance was due to any malfunction or defect related to its design, build or engineering.

‘‘The industry does not like uncertainty,’’ said Mark Rosenker, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. ‘‘We will find out what happened.’’

Boarding

As they stepped on to the plane, the 227 passengers of Flight 370 were greeted by the flight attendants, four women in sarong kebayas and six men in grey three-piece suits. Some distributed hand towels, fruit juice and newspapers in business class; others helped those in economy find their seats.

Outside, ground crews loaded the passenger luggage into the jet’s cargo hold, which can carry up to six pallets and 14 shipping containers. The airline said there were no hazardous or valuable goods on the flight. But among the cargo was a ‘‘significant’’ amount of lithium batteries - which can be flammable - more than is typically sent in a shipment, one US official said.

After the doors closed, the chief steward, Andrew Nari, would have welcomed the passengers via the loudspeaker and reminded them to turn off their mobile phones. Before shutting off his own, he sent a message to his mother. ‘‘It was just a normal SMS telling me that his plane would fly off soon,’’ she later toldThe Star, a local newspaper.

In the cockpit were the pilots: the captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, a veteran aviator who joined the airline in 1981 and had 18,365 hours of flying experience, and his first officer, Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, who was transitioning to the Boeing 777 from the airline’s narrow-body fleet.

After nudging away from the gate, the plane taxied to runway 32R. The lights would have dimmed in the cabin before one of the pilots asked the crew to be seated for takeoff.

With two Rolls-Royce Trent engines each capable of generating more than 400,000 newtons of thrust, the jet raced down the 4-kilometre-long runway and lifted off at 41 minutes after midnight. As the plane banked and climbed, passengers on the port side might have spotted the glow of Kuala Lumpur and perhaps the Petronas Towers in the distance.

At 1:07 am, as the jet approached the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia, ground crews received what the authorities have described as a routine text message from the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, which sends regular updates on the condition of the plane by radio or satellite.

By then, the first beverage service of the flight was most likely underway - soft drinks, juice and peanuts in economy, and various drinks, including Champagne, along with a snack such as charcoal-grilled chicken and lamb satay in peanut sauce in business. The in-flight entertainment system offered a wide selection of movies in more than a dozen languages.

Air traffic control in Sebang, outside Kuala Lumpur, followed the plane by tracking its transponder, a device that ‘‘squawks’’ or emits an identifying signal in response to a signal from radar. The night began with Flight 370 squawking code 2157 and reporting altitude, speed and bearing.

As the plane approached Vietnamese airspace, Sebang informed the pilots that they were being transferred to radar control in Ho Chi Minh City. At 1:19 am, a voice identified by the authorities as that of the first officer, Fariq, replied, ‘‘All right, good night.’’

Two minutes later, Flight 370’s transponder stopped responding. It is unclear whether someone turned a dial on an instrument panel between the pilot and co-pilot and put the transponder in standby mode, or whether a malfunction caused it to go quiet.

One moment, radar scopes showed the plane traveling northwest at 471 knots (872 kmh). The next moment, it was gone.

The military in Vietnam marked the time at 43 seconds past 1:20 am.

Mystery Signal

As air traffic controllers struggled to re-establish contact with Flight 370, military radar at the Butterworth air force base on Malaysia’s west coast picked up an unidentified aircraft near where the plane disappeared.

But the watch team, normally an officer and three enlisted personnel, either failed to notice the signal or decided not to designate and track it as a ‘‘zombie'', which would have pushed the information up the chain of command and possibly alerted air command.

At a briefing on the base the next night, about 80 air force personnel were told there was ‘‘no proof’’ the unidentified signal showed the missing plane making a sharp turn, flying back across Peninsular Malaysia and then turning again and heading northwest over the Strait of Malacca, a person familiar with the situation said.

But investigators now believe that is exactly what happened.

The failure or refusal to recognise Flight 370 in the radar data meant the Malaysian authorities continued to concentrate search operations in the seas to the east instead of focusing on the west, where the plane was last seen northwest of Butterworth at 2:22 am, according to an image of the radar track.

The authorities also failed to move quickly on data that showed the plane continuing to fly nearly seven more hours - regular handshake signals from the plane to a satellite seeking to determine if the aircraft was still in range.

Chris McLaughlin, a vice president at Inmarsat, the satellite communications firm, said technicians pulled the logs of all transmissions from the plane within four hours of its disappearance. Then, after a day without sign of the plane, they began scouring the company’s databases for any trace of Flight 370.

‘‘We decided to go have another look at our network to see if there was any data that we had missed,’’ McLaughlin said. It turned out there was. Inmarsat technicians identified what appeared to be a series of fleeting ‘‘pings’’ between Flight 370, a satellite over the Indian Ocean and a ground station in Perth, Australia.

The signals - seven of them transmitted at one-hour intervals - were an important clue, because they could have come only from an antenna receiving power from the plane itself. But while they carried a unique code identifying the aircraft as Flight 370, the signals contained no positioning or other data that could indicate where the plane was when it sent them.

By Sunday afternoon, the engineers set to work using the principles of trigonometry to determine the distance between the satellite and the plane at the time of each ping, and then to calculate two rough flight paths. The plane, they concluded, had turned again. But it may have then traveled in more or less a straight line, heading north over countries likely to have picked it up on radar, or south toward the Indian Ocean and Antarctica. The Malaysian government said it received Inmarsat’s findings on March 12 and spent three days analysing and vetting it with investigators from the United States before redirecting the search toward the south Indian Ocean on March 15.

By then, more than a week had passed since the last satellite ping, recorded at 8:11 am on March 8, halfway around the world from where the plane should have been, on a tarmac in Beijing.

New York Times

Monday, March 24, 2014

It's gonna be a tragic history to our beloved Country, Malaysia

Is Malaysia Airlines telling us the truth about Flight MH370?

Bottles thrown during Malaysia Airlines press conference0:37

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Frustrated relatives of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vent their anger at officials by throwing bottles of water during a press conference.

IS Malaysia laying a deliberate smokescreen?

As the world waits for answers about missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, the families of its 239 lost passengers and crew are getting fed up with official furphies.

And they're not the only ones.

Vietnam has just announced it is suspending its air search for missing flight MH370 and scaling back its sea search as it waits for Malaysia to clarify the potential new direction of the multi-national hunt - not the first clash between the two countries on the issue.

Malaysian authorities have made a number of conflicting statements since Saturday, while failing to address rumours about the plane.

1. NEIGHBOURS GETTING ANNOYED

From the time flight MH370 went missing, the nations involved in its search have been out of step - in particular Malaysia and Vietnam.

Vietnam was quick to contribute its resources to the search effort and even quicker to make public each potential development. They promptly announced everything from reported radar readings to oil slick sightings and possible floating debris.

Guo Shaochun

Not happy ... Guo Shaochun, head of a joint working group sent by the Chinese government to be in charge of the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.

Meanwhile, Malaysia has been on the back foot, hosing down each new glimmer of hope.

And when the Malaysian authorities actually announce something, they have frequently backtracked or denied it within 24 hours.

Now Vietnam is fed up and has suspended its air search and scaled back its sea search as it waits for Malaysia to clarify the potential new direction of the multi-national hunt.

"We've decided to temporarily suspend some search and rescue activities, pending information from Malaysia," deputy minister of transport Pham Quy Tieu said.

And China, where two-thirds of the passengers are from, isn't happy either.

It's urged Malaysian authorities to "speed up the efforts" to find the plane. It has sent four ships, with another four on the way.

A shopping mall in Beijing suspended advertising on its large outdoor LED screen to display a search timer - an image of an aeroplane along with a digital clock marking the time since contact with the flight was lost.

2. PLANE NOT MISSING, JUST DELAYED

Air traffic controllers apparently lost contact with Flight MH370 at 2.40am on March 8 but the arrivals board at Beijing airport simply said the flight was "DELAYED".

For hours relatives waiting at the destination were completely in the dark, thinking the flight was just late.

Furious family members say they found out about the disaster from the media, not Malaysia Airlines.

It wasn't until 9.05am that Malaysia Airlines issued this statement: "We deeply regret that we have lost all contacts with Flight MH370 which departed Kuala Lumpur at 12.41am earlier this morning bound for Beijing."

3. CONFLICTING REPORTS ABOUT FLIGHT PATH

Malaysia's air force chief said Wednesday authorities have not ruled out the possibility the missing airliner inexplicably changed course before losing contact, but denied reports the jet had been detected far from its planned flight path.

"The (air force) has not ruled out the possibility of an air turn-back on a reciprocal heading before the aircraft vanished from the radar," General Rodzali Daud said in a statement.

"This resulted in the search and rescue operations being widened to the vicinity of the waters (off the west coast of Malaysia)." But he denied a Malaysian media report on Tuesday that quoted him as saying that radar had last detected the plane over the Strait of Malacca off western Malaysia.

This came after Malaysian military sources apparently said radar evidence shows missing Flight MH370 was hundreds of kilometres off course and travelling in the opposite direction to its original destination.

4. THE MISSING HOUR

Some publications initially questioned the veracity of the timeline of events. Malaysia Airlines originally said the plane took off at 12.41am Malaysian time, and at 2.40am it disappeared from radar in Subang, Kuala Lumpur.

A spokesman then confirmed the last conversation took place at 1.30am between the flight crew and air traffic control in Malaysia, but reiterated the plane did not vanish from air traffic control systems until 2.40am.

After mass confusion and many conspiracy theories sprouting from the timeline discrepancy, Malaysia Airlines updated the public record to state the last time of radar tracking at 1.22am and the last contact at 1.30am.

5. TERRORISM RUMOURS LINGERERED

Malaysian authorities activated counterterrorism units to "look at all possibilities" and maintained they were investigating two mystery men travelling on stolen passports - despite one of the men's mothers contacting authorities after he didn't arrive at his final destination.

Two passengers on the missing flight travelling on false passports became the focus of a grim investigation as aviation and security experts claimed a bomb was the most likely cause of the disaster.

After lengthy speculation about the intentions of the pair, they were last night eventually identified as asylum seekers 19-year-old Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad and 29-year-old Delavar Seyedmohammaderza.

Malaysia's Inspector General of Police, Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar, said Mehrdad was travelling on a stolen Austrian passport and was planning to meet up with his mother in Frankfurt, where he is believed to have planned to seek asylum.

He said the young man's mother had contacted Malaysian authorities to inform them of her concern when her son didn't get in touch with her.

6. APPEARANCE OF STOLEN PASSPORT HOLDERS

Authorities claimed the two stolen passport holders - who turned out to be Iranian asylum seekers - had been ofAsian appearance.

The Malaysian Home Minister that the two men were of Asian appearance before the Director-general of Malaysia's Department of Civil aviation, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, clarified that the two passengers were not Asian-looking.

Asked if they looked African, Mr Rahman would not comment except to point out that footballer Mario Balotelli was Italian but was not Italian-looking. He was apparently misquoted as saying the men looked like Balotelli, which added to general confusion about official explanations.

7. MYSTERY FIVE BECOME MYSTERY FOUR

Days after the flight, mystery still surrounds the identity of four passengerswho failed to board the flight.

On Monday Malaysia's civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman told a press conference that five passengers checked in for the flight but didn't end up boarding the plane. He was quick to assure the public their baggage was removed from the plane, in accordance with strict regulations.

However, it turns out the bags never existed in the first place because the passengers never made it to the check-in desk.

We now know there were only four people - not five - who missed Flight MH370.

Malaysia Airlines released a statement overnight that quashed the civil aviation body's claim, and in the process raised a whole new series of questions over what really happened in the moments before the flight.

What isn’t Malaysia telling us?

Needle in a haystack ... a Vietnamese air force helicopter pilot shows a crew member checking a map during a search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.

8. HOW SECURE WAS THE COCKPIT? POSSIBLY NOT VERY

The laid-back approach to security of one of the flight's copilots has also come under scrutiny after two women came forward to detail how he broke rules by inviting them into the cockpit during a flight in 2011.

Investigations into the copilot of the flight have discovered he once invited a Melbourne tourist and her friend into the cockpit where he smoked, took photos and entertained the pair during a previous international flight.

In a worrying lapse of security, it's been revealed pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid and his colleague broke Malaysia Airline rules when they invited passengers Jonti Roos and Jaan Maree to join them in the cabin for the one-hour flight from Phuket to Kuala Lumpur in 2011.

Ms Roos, who is travelling around Australia, told A Current Affair she and Ms Maree posed for pictures with the pilots, who smoked cigarettes during the midair rendezvous.

Malaysia Airlines said it was "shocked" by allegations.

"Malaysia Airlines has become aware of the allegations being made against First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid which we take very seriously. We are shocked by these allegations," a statement by the airline said.

"We have not been able to confirm the validity of the pictures and videos of the alleged incident. As you are aware, we are in the midst of a crisis, and we do not want our attention to be diverted."

Now ruled out as terrorists ... Two young Iranian men who were travelling with stolen pas

Now ruled out as terrorists ... two young Iranian men who were travelling with stolen passports on missing Malaysia Arlines Flight MH370.

9. LIGHTS IN THE NIGHT SKY

While Malaysian authorities are not underf ire for this, there is ambiguity over several reports of locals claiming to have seen the lights of a low-flying aircraft in an area of the Malaysian coast, just below the Malay-Thai border.

It is this area which is now included in the widened search area.

A fishermen who was in his boat at sea says that at about 1.30am he saw the lights of a low-flying aircraft in the area of Kuala Besar.

Azid Ibrahim told The Star newspaper in Malaysia that the plane was flying so low that that the lights were "as big as coconuts".

And another man, about 30km south of Kota Baru, is reported to have seen "bright white lights" from what he thought was a fast-descending aircraft at about 1.45am on Saturday morning.

He has since reported what he saw to authorities after seeing the lights from his home that evening.

Flight MH370’s chief pilot ... Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, a 53-year-old Malaysian, was i

Flight MH370’s chief pilot ... Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, a 53-year-old Malaysian, was in charge of the missing Malaysian Airlines plane.

10. WHEN WAS FINAL RADIO CONTACT?

THE pilot of a Boeing 777 flying just 30 minutes ahead of the doomed Malaysia Airlines aircraft was the last to make contact with flight MH370.

Vietnamese air traffic control requested the pilot make contact with MH370 to relay a message to contact authorities on the ground.

The pilot, who asked to remain anonymous, told the New Straits Times that his aircraft, bound for Narita, Japan, was able to make contact using an emergency frequency.

"We managed to establish contact with MH370 just after 1.30am and asked them if they have transferred into Vietnamese airspace.

"The voice on the other side could have been either Captain Zaharie (Ahmad Shah, 53) or Fariq (Abdul Hamid, 27), but I was sure it was the copilot.

"There were a lot of interference … static … but I heard mumbling from the other end.

"That was the last time we heard from them.

"We lost contact."

11. DID DAMAGED WINGTIP WEAKEN PLANE?

IT has emerged that the missing Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 was involved in a 2012 runway collision with another aircraft that left it with a broken wingtip.

Details of the incident at Shanghai's Pudong airport in August 2012 - in which its wingtip was broken when it hit the tail of another aircraft - emerged as one of several theories on the disappearance of the flight to Beijing, including the likelihood of an on-air bombing.

Devoted to his job ... Flight MH370 pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s personal flight si

Devoted to his job ... Flight MH370 pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah's personal flight simulator.

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