Tag: Malaysia

BEIJING (TIP): Grieving family members of passengers aboard MH370 held an emotional gathering in Beijing on Sept 10, six months after the plane disappeared, demanding answers and accusing Chinese authorities of turning against them. Chinese passengers account for about two-thirds of the 239 people aboard the Boeing 777, which vanished on March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to China’s capital, with dozens of their relatives reportedly beaten and arrested in recent months.

About 30 family members convened on Beijing’s Lama Temple, a popular Tibetan Buddhist site, to vent their frustration and pray for the missing on a day that marks both the six-month anniversary of the flight’s disappearance as well as China’s traditional Mid-Autumn Festival, a day for families to reunite. “In China, today is Family Reunion Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival,” said a 55-year-old woman Zhang, and whose daughter was aboard the flight. Australia has been spearheading the hunt for the plane, which is believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean. But the massive air, sea and underwater search has till now failed to find any wreckage.

KUALA LUMPUR (TIP): The black boxes recovered from the crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine will be sent to British aviation investigators for analysis, Malaysia has said. The decision by the Dutch-led team probing the disaster came after pro-Russian rebels controlling the crash site handed the boxes over to Malaysian officials on July 23, following an intense international outcry.

Transport minister Liow Tiong Lai said in a statement late Tuesday that it was normal procedure to send the boxes, which record cockpit activity and flight data, to the nearest laboratory approved by the United Nations aviation agency, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO). “The international investigation team, led by the Netherlands, has decided to pass the black boxes to the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch for forensic analysis,” he said.

The boxes will be flown to Farnborough, England, accompanied by Malaysian officials and other members of the investigation team, Liow added. 298 people, including 193 from the Netherlands, aboard MH17 were killed when it went down over crisis-hit eastern Ukraine on Thursday. The jet is believed to have been shot by a surface-to-air missile. had announced late Monday a breakthrough deal with separatists from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, following direct negotiations.

Besides the handover of the black boxes, the agreement also says that bodies from the crash will be sent to the Netherlands for analysis before being returned home, and provides for a safe route to the site controlled by the insurgents. The pro-Russia rebels currently stand accused by the US and some other nations of bringing down the aircraft, allegedly with a missile supplied by Moscow.

KUALA LUMPUR (TIP): Malaysia is hunting for a group of machete-wielding pirates who hijacked a tanker off its eastern coast, stealing a million litres of oil, in the latest in a spate of attacks in its waters, an official said on June 13. Pirates hijacked the Malaysia-registered tanker MT Budi Mesra Dua last Saturday off Bintulu in the oil-rich Sarawak state as the ship sailed from neighbouring Singapore.

“Ten machete-wielding pirates boarded the ship, which was carrying about a million litres of diesel. They took control of the tanker for about 10 hours,” Mohamad Sufi Mohamad Ramli, a local commander with the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency told AFP. The armed pirates siphoned off the diesel fuel to another ship, robbed the crew of their valuables and destroyed communication equipment before escaping, he said.

“We have activated 24-hour sea patrols around Bintulu waters (in the South China Sea) to prevent similar attacks,” Mohamad Sufi said.”We are hunting down the pirates,” he added. Pirates have attacked a number of vessels in waters off Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia recently. In April, pirates injured the captain and stole diesel fuel from a Thailand-owned tanker off the eastern coast of Malaysia. In the same month, three Indonesian crew were kidnapped and diesel fuel stolen from a Singaporemanaged tanker in the Strait of Malacca, an important shipping lane.

Officials on May 29 confirmed what we have feared for some time — that a relatively tiny search zone in the southern Indian Ocean is not the final resting place of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. From an underwater mission covering 850 sq km (320 sq mile) where acoustic “pings” were heard, the area being searched has now been extended to around a 60,000 sq km (23,100 sq mile) zone based on satellite data which remains disputed in some quarters.

The Australia-led search control team estimate it could be August — next year — before this region has been covered, and hopes of finding the Boeing 777’s flight recorders are becoming increasingly dim. With so much uncertainty surrounding the circumstances of MH370’s bizarre disappearance, it has become rich territory for aviation experts, bloggers and conspiracy theorists alike. Here we round up 13 of the most prominent theories as to where the plane ended up, and what went wrong in the first place.

1. Shot down in a military training exercise
2. Flown north and shot down deliberately, prompting cover-up
3. Flown north in the ‘shadow’ of another plane
4. Tried to land on a desert island beach
5. Landed at a US military base
6. Headed for a remote airport in Langkawi, Malaysia
7. A fire throughout the plane
8. An explosion in the cockpit
9. A struggle at altitude
10. A botched hijack attempt
11. Pilot suicide
12. Sabotage – for a life insurance scam or corporate attack
13. A CIA cover-up

Finally, the former prime minister of Malaysia Mahathir Mohamad has waded in with his own theory – suggesting that, one way or another, the CIA is definitely hiding something. In a blog entry posted on 18 May entitled ‘Boeing Technology – What goes up must come down’, Dr Mahathir Mohamad makes ten claims including that the plane was taken over remotely by officials working for Boeing and the CIA.

“The plane is somewhere, maybe without MAS markings,” reads Dr Mohamad’s post on chedet. “Someone is hiding something. It is not fair that MAS and Malaysia should take the blame,” 88-year-old Dr Mahathir, who was Malaysia’s prime minister between 1981 and 2003, alleges. “Airplanes don’t just disappear,” he said, concluding: “For some reason the media will not print anything that involves Boeing or the CIA. I hope my readers will read this.” Boeing have denied Dr Mohamed’s theory.

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia’s aviation authority released on Tuesday satellite data used to determine that flight MH370 went down in the southern Indian Ocean following demands from sceptical relatives of those on board. The Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) said in a statement it had worked with Inmarsat to provide 47 pages of data communication logs recorded by the British satellite operator as well as explanatory notes for public consumption.

Family members of the 239 people on board the Malaysia Airlines plane, which vanished on March 8, had demanded that raw satellite data be made public for independent analysis after an initial undersea search found no wreckage. AFP was not immediately able to interpret the highly technical numerical data, which used the Doppler effect — the change in frequency of waves from a moving object — to decipher the Boeing 777’s final flight path.

BEIJING (TIP): In a rare move, China has shut down a diplomatic district here housing the Indian and American embassies as angry relatives of passengers of the crashed Malaysian jet held overnight protests over the so far futile search to locate the plane.

With no breakthrough despite the high profile multi-nation search operation nearly 50 days after Flight MH370 went missing, relatives of the 153 Chinese passengers had a stormy meeting with Malaysia Airlines staff yesterday after which they tried to protest in front of the Malaysian embassy located opposite the Indian mission here.

Police stepped up security since yesterday evening and sealed off the area today throwing the traffic in the busy area out of gear. Many relatives reportedly rushed to the Malaysian embassy last night. Wen Wancheng, whose son was on the flight said she had spent the entire night outside the embassy along with dozens of other protesters. This is the second time since the plane went missing, that the Chinese relatives demonstrated in front of the embassy demanding Malaysian officials come out with the truth about the lost plane.

Earlier, relatives had lashed out over the “abrupt” announcement by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Rajak stating the plane “ended” in the southern Indian Ocean where weeks of search on the surface and beneath the sea yielded no results. Mystery continues to shroud the plane which went missing along with 239 passengers and crew on board, including five Indians, on March 8 while flying to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.

This time the protesters said they were angry over the failure of Malaysian officials to be present at the briefing by the airline yesterday as promised before. It is rare for such protests to be permitted by the Chinese authorities. The protests this time took place before the weekend visit of US President Barack Obama to Kuala Lumpur, which is the first by an American President. Malaysia is one of the Asean countries that are locked in maritime disputes with China over the South China Sea islands. The others include the Philippines, Vietnam and Brunei.

KUALA LUMPUR (TIP): The search for missing flight MH370 is at a “critical juncture”, Malaysia’s transport minister said on April 20, two days after Australia’s premier said a submersible device had one week to find wreckage from the plane in the Indian Ocean.

“The search for today and tomorrow is at a critical juncture. We appeal for everybody around the world to pray that we find something,” transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein said. An underwater robotic submarine is expected to finish searching a narrowed down area of the Indian Ocean seabed for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane within the next week, after completing six missions and so far coming up empty, the search coordination center said Saturday.

As the hunt for Flight 370 hit week six, the Bluefin 21 unmanned sub began its seventh trip into the depths off the coast off western Australia. Its search area forms a 10- kilometer (6.2-mile) circle around the location of an underwater signal that was believed to be coming from the aircraft’s black boxes before the batteries died. The sonar scan of the seafloor in that area is expected to be completed in five to seven days, the center said in an email to the Associated Press.

BANGKOK (TIP): At the time – the evening of March 24 – it seemed like the breakthrough the world was waiting for. In a hastily called speech, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced that an unprecedented analysis of satellite signals concluded that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 “ended” deep in the Indian Ocean, far from any possible refuge for the 239 souls aboard.

Finally, there was a solid explanation for what happened to the aircraft. A much more focused search could begin, and so perhaps could the grieving process for families from 14 countries. Najib’s announcement quieted wild speculation about desert islands and terrorists and covert operations. But four weeks after the plane disappeared, the apparent pivot in the search is proving to be not much of a pivot at all.

Not a single piece of wreckage from the lost plane has been found, not even after a new analysis led investigators to change the focus of their search yet again. The latest search area is based on extremely limited satellite data combined with radar data taken some five hours before the plane is believed to have gone down. It is, as one search official said, “a very inexact science.” Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, whose country is coordinating the current search effort, spoke of “very credible leads” and “increasing hope” a day before Najib’s announcement.

But on Thursday he said the search has become “the most difficult in human history.” The aircraft could indeed still be in the area planes and ships from several countries have been combing for nearly a week. Currents change the area each day, but on Thursday it was a 223,000-square kilometer (86,000-square mile) patch of ocean 1,680 kilometers (1,040 miles) northwest of Perth. Each unsuccessful day adds to the skepticism. “Without any kind of proof, uncertainty rules the day,” said Tim Brown, a satellite imagery expert at GlobalSecurity.org in Alexandria, Virginia.

People still can’t wrap their head around how a modern airplane that big could just go missing in the modern world.” The focus of the search has changed repeatedly since air traffic controllers lost contact with the Boeing 777 between Malaysia and Vietnam. It began in the South China Sea, then shifted toward the Strait of Malacca to the west, where Malaysian officials eventually confirmed that military radar had detected the plane. Then came evidence that the plane had continued flying for at least five hours after contact was lost. The plane automatically sent hourly signals to a satellite belonging to Inmarsat, a British company, after the plane’s transponder and all communication systems had shut down. The “pings” did not include specific location information, but the team of experts who studied them said they must have come from one of two vast arcs that ran through both the Southern and Northern hemispheres.

Najib’s announcement reflected a further refinement of that data that determined the aircraft could only have flown south, where it most likely crashed into the sea when it ran out of fuel. Days of costly and fruitless searches off the coast of Perth since then have employed satellites, advanced aircraft and ships, but so far there have only been dead ends. Last week, using revised estimates of how fast the plane was traveling when it left the Malacca strait, investigators moved the search area hundreds of kilometers (miles) north. But there’s no guarantee that the plane maintained that speed for hours before going down. “The problem is, we’re dealing with probabilities – estimates,” Brown said of the Inmarsat data. “It’s where they THINK the plane went down.” Or as Capt. Ross “Rusty” Aimer, a former pilot who now runs Aero Consulting Experts, put it: “Until we find a positive concrete shred of evidence — a piece of the aircraft — everything else is just conjecture, and it could be totally wrong.

So far, the satellite calculations have only directed us to oceanic garbage dumps.” Australian officials have expressed increasing pessimism in recent days. Angus Houston, who heads the joint agency coordinating the multinational search effort out of Australia, said investigators are using computer modeling to determine the plane’s final location, but two key variables needed to calculate that more precisely are unknown: the aircraft’s altitude and speed. “The starting point whenever you do a search and rescue is the last known position of the vehicle or the aircraft,” Houston said Tuesday. “In this particular case, the last known position was a long, long way from where the aircraft appears to have gone.” Satellite images taken from the previous search area captured hundreds of possible objects in the water, but searchers in planes and ships found nothing related to Flight 370.

In the current search area, even those clues have been lacking. “We have not had any satellite data, I’d have to say, that has given anything better than low confidence of finding anything so far,” Mick Kinley, deputy CEO of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, said Tuesday. But he also said plane and ship crews “have by no means exhausted” the search area. Affected families, particularly those of some of the 153 Chinese passengers, have lashed out at Malaysian authorities for essentially declaring their loved ones dead without any firm proof. Najib said Thursday that everyone involved in the search is thinking of the families and their suffering. “I know that until we find the plane, many families cannot start to grieve,” he said. “We will not rest until answers are indeed found. In due time, we will provide a closure for this event.”

Malaysia’s government on Wednesday organized a closed-door briefing for the families in Kuala Lumpur with officials and experts involved in the hunt. Steve Wang, a representative of some of the Chinese families who were also briefed in Beijing via video link, said most relatives remain skeptical. “They said themselves that there are many different possibilities, but they are judging on the basis of just one of them.We all know this can’t convince us,” Wang said. “Hope dwindles by the day and sadness grows. I believe the plane must be somewhere and someone must know, but we do not know who knows it. “What else can I do but wait in bitterness?” he said. “Two sleeping pills may get me two hours of sleep if I am lucky.” Dr Michael Phillips, a Shanghai-based Canadian psychiatrist, said that without bodies or even wreckage, families are caught in an emotional “no man’s land.”

“A whole bunch of things can complicate grief, but in this situation it’s clearly complicated because they’re not sure the people are dead,” Phillips said. “Your logical head would say, ‘Oh, of course they’re dead,’ but your heart will say, `No, no, no, I don’t know.’” The lack of physical evidence also weighs on the investigation into the crash. Just like on Day 1, every theory remains on the table, including electrical or mechanical failure, terrorism, hijacking and pilot murder-suicide. On April 2, Malaysian Inspector General Khalid Abu Bakar sounded the most pessimistic note yet, warning that although investigations will go on, at the end of it “we may not even know the reason” the plane veered off course. The most vital clues are trapped inside the plane’s black boxes, or are hoped to be. Information from the flight data recorder will show what the jetliner was doing, but it may not explain why. The cockpit voice recorder, which only records audio from the flight’s final couple of hours, could simply be silent if the pilots were incapacitated before the plane went down.

PERTH (TIP): The search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in remote seas off Australia headed underwater on Friday, April 4, with a U.S. Navy high tech “black box” locator deployed for the first time as the battery life of the cockpit data recorder dwindles.

Australian authorities said the so-called Towed Pinger Locator will be pulled behind navy ship HMAS Ocean Shield, searching a converging course on a 240 km (150 miles) track with British hydrographic survey ship HMS Echo. “The area of highest probability as to where the aircraft might have entered the water is the area where the underwater search will commence,” Retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, the head of the Australian agency coordinating the operation, told reporters in Perth.

“On best advice the locator beacon will last about a month before it ceases its transmissions so we’re now getting pretty close to the time when it might expire.” On Monday it will be 30 days since the jetliner lost communications and disappeared from civilian radar less than an hour into an overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8.

Experts have warned the Towed Pinger Locator may be of little use unless investigators can get a much better idea of exactly where the plane went into water, because its limited range and the slow speed at which it must be pulled behind the ship mean it cannot cover large areas of ocean quickly. Houston said the start of the underwater search in earnest did not override the need to keep searching for surface wreckage of the plane, as a find would be the most effective way to pinpoint a sub-sea hunt.

“This is a vast area, an area that’s quite remote. We will continue the surface search for a good deal more time,” he said. “I think there’s still a great possibility of finding something on the surface,” he said. “There’s lots of things in aircraft that float. In previous searches life jackets have appeared which can be connected to the aircraft that was lost.” HUGE SEARCH AREA On Friday, up to 14 planes and nine ships were scouring the search area of about 223,000 sq km (86,000 sq miles) – roughly the size of the U.S. state of Minnesota – some 1,680 km (1,040 miles) west-north-west of Perth, he said.

Britain is also sending HMS Tireless, a Trafalgar-class nuclear submarine with sonar capabilities and a Malaysian frigate was due to arrive in the search area on Saturday. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak on Thursday, April 3, joined his Australian counterpart Tony Abbott in a tour of RAAF Base Pearce, near Perth, where aircrews from seven countries have been flying dozens of missions deep into the southern Indian Ocean. Malaysian authorities have faced heavy criticism, particularly from China, for mismanaging the search, now in its fourth fruitless week, and holding back information.

Most of the 239 people on board the flight were Chinese. “The world expects us to do our level best, and I’m very confident we will indeed show what we can do together as a group of nations; that we want to find answers, that we want to provide comfort to the families and we will not rest until answers are indeed found,” Najib said. Authorities have not ruled out mechanical problems as causing the disappearance, but say all the evidence suggests the plane was deliberately diverted from its scheduled route. Malaysia’s police chief said the investigation was focusing on the cabin crew and pilots, after clearing all 227 passengers of possible involvement in hijacking, sabotage or having personal or psychological problems that could have been connected to the disappearance.

SYDNEY/KUALA LUMPUR (TIP): Aircraft and ships scouring the southern Indian Ocean for wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 were racing to beat bad weather on March 27 and reach an area where new satellite images showed what could be a debris field. The international search team has been bolstered to 11 military and civilian aircraft and five ships that will criss-cross the remote search site with weather conditions forecast to deteriorate later in the day.

New satellite images have revealed more than 100 objects that could be debris from the Boeing 777, which is thought to have crashed on March 8 with the loss of all 239 people aboard after flying thousands of miles off course. “We have now had four separate satellite leads, from Australia, China and France, showing possible debris,” Malaysian acting transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a news conference in Kuala Lumpur late Wednesday. “It is now imperative that we link the debris to MH370.” The latest images were captured by France-based Airbus Defence & Space on Monday and showed 122 potential objects in 400 sq km (155 sq mile) area of ocean, Hishammuddin said.

The objects varied in size from one metre to 23 metres (75 ft) in length, he said. Flight MH370 vanished from civilian radar screens less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing, and investigators believe someone on the flight may have shut off the plane’s communications systems. Theories range from a hijacking to sabotage or a possible suicide by one of the pilots, but investigators have not ruled out technical problems. Partial military radar tracking showed the plane turning west off its scheduled course over the South China Sea and then recrossing the Malay Peninsula, apparently under the control of a skilled pilot.

The logistical difficulties of the search have been highlighted by the failure so far to get a lock on possible debris despite the now numerous satellite images and direct visuals from aircraft and ships. The search area some 2,500km (1,550 miles) southwest of Perth has some of the deepest and roughest waters in the world, roiled by the “Roaring Forties” winds that cut across the sea. The winds are named for the area between latitude 40 degrees and 50 degrees where there is no land mass to slow down gusts which create waves higher than six metres.

The search was called off for a full day this week because conditions were too dangerous for the search crews, which come from Australia, the United States, New Zealand, China, Japan and South Korea. Meteorologists say the current break in the stormy weather will be short. “This is only going to be a narrow window of opportunity by the looks of things, because another weather system is moving in for Thursday, which looks like that will bring an increase in winds again and also lead to a reduction in visibility through the rain associated with the cold front,” said Neil Bennett, a spokesman for Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology.

Passengers’ relatives distraught

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak this week confirmed Flight MH370 had crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, citing satellite-data analysis by British firm Inmarsat. Recovery of wreckage could unlock clues about why and how the plane had diverted so far off course in one of aviation’s most puzzling mysteries. The United States has sent an undersea Navy drone and a high-tech black box detector which will be fitted to an Australian ship due in Perth in the coming days.

The so-called black boxes — the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder — record what happens during flight, but time is running out to pick up their locator beacons, which stop about a month after a crash due to limited battery life. Malaysia said on Tuesday that the US “Towed Pinger Locator” would not arrive in the search area until April 5, which would give it only a few days to find the black box before the beacon battery would be expected to run out.

The prolonged and so far fruitless search and investigation have taken a toll, with dozens of distraught relatives of Chinese passengers clashing with police in Beijing on Tuesday, accusing Malaysia of “delays and deception”. Malaysia’s confused initial response to the plane’s disappearance and a perception of poor communications have enraged many relatives of the more than 150 Chinese passengers and have strained ties between Beijing and Kuala Lumpur.