Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 - Missing Plane

[angelburst29]

This is one of those "odd reports" that you come across - that make little sense but might connect to something, at a later date?

To whom it may concern: please claim your Boeing 747s
http://news.yahoo.com/whom-may-concern-please-claim-boeing-747s-112803730.html

Kuala Lumpur (AFP) – Still puzzled by the mystery of missing flight MH370, Malaysian airport authorities now have the opposite problem:
three Boeing 747 planes left unclaimed at the country’s main airport.

The operators of Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) have placed a bizarre advertisement in a Malaysian newspaper seeking the owners of three 747-200F aircraft apparently abandoned there.

“If you fail to collect the aircraft within 14 days of the date of this notice, we reserve the right to sell or otherwise dispose of the aircraft” under Malaysian regulations, said the ad which ran in Monday’s edition of The Star.

The notice was addressed to the “untraceable owner” of the planes.

Zainol Mohd Isa, general manager of Malaysia Airports (Sepang), which operates the facility, said the airport had been trying to contact the planes’ last known owners.

He said they were “international” and not Malaysian, but declined to give further details.

“I don’t know why they are not responding. There could be many reasons. Sometimes it could be because they have no money to continue operations,” Zainol said.

In addition to wanting the planes to be claimed, he said the airport is seeking payment from the owners for landing, parking and other charges.

If no payment is received by December 21, the planes will be auctioned or sold for scrap to recoup the outstanding charges.

The notice gave the planes’ registration numbers as TF-ARM, TF-ARN, and TF-ARH. Zainol said two are passenger aircraft and one is a cargo plane.

It is not the first time this has happened at the airport, Zainol added.

In the past decade a few other planes, mostly smaller aircraft, were abandoned.

He said an aircraft that was abandoned in the 1990s was eventually bought and turned into a restaurant in a Kuala Lumpur suburb.

KLIA was the origin of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared after taking off on March 8, 2014 with 239 passengers and crew aboard in what remains one of aviation’s greatest mysteries.

Malaysia earlier this year confirmed that a wing part found on the French island of La Reunion in the Indian Ocean was from the plane. But no further wreckage has been found despite an intensive Australian-led oceanic search.

 

[angelburst29]

New data reveals a runaway power outage doomed the 777, supporting the theory a fire in the cargo hold turned the jet into a flying zombie.

Exclusive: MH370 Was Crippled by Sudden Electrical Failure
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/08/exclusive-mh370-was-crippled-by-sudden-electrical-failure.html

12.08.15 - The pilots of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 were suddenly confronted by a cascading loss of electrical power in which many of the airplane’s vital systems shut down, placing an urgent demand on the crew to understand and deal with the failures.

Before this loss of power occurred the crew had been able to make regular contact with air traffic controllers and the airplane was able to automatically transmit its position.

After it, no word was ever heard again from the pilots. Its two automatic reporting systems, the transponder continually sending the airplane’s position and a separate system reporting the condition of its critical systems at half-hourly intervals, both stopped working.

This new revelation of a serious technical problem and its immediate effects is buried in the arcane detail of a lengthy report (PDF) issued last week by the Australian Transport Bureau who are directing the search for the Boeing 777. It is the first official acknowledgement of what had previously been only speculation—that there was a sudden loss of electrical power capable of disabling vital systems.

As well as portraying a sudden crisis of control in the cockpit, the report greatly undercuts theories that the pilots themselves went rogue—far from harming the airplane it is much more likely that they were struggling to save it in a situation that most pilots would find hard to master.

The purpose of the report was to reinforce confidence that the undersea search for the airplane is being carried out in the right part of the Indian Ocean and has a high chance of success.

Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at 12:42 a.m. (Malaysia time) of March 8, 2014, bound for Beijing. Normally that flight would take around five and a half hours. In fact, it ended seven hours and 38 minutes later somewhere over the southern Indian Ocean, creating the greatest mystery in the history of modern aviation.

The last voice contact with the flight came 37 minutes after takeoff, with the captain signing off with the air traffic controllers in Kuala Lumpur, saying “Good night. Malaysian three seven zero.” The airplane was then on course heading out over the South China Sea.

Two minutes later the blip indicating the airplane’s position on the Kuala Lumpur controllers’ radar screens disappeared—indicating that the transponder was no longer working. At around the same time (as revealed later by military radar that had picked up the flight) the airplane made a sharp left turn, taking it back over Malaysia toward the Strait of Malacca.

The new report is not precise about when the airplane suffered its loss of electrical power: It places the blackout inside a 56-minute window between the final scheduled transmission from the system monitoring the airplane’s critical functions, the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, ACARS, and an unsuccessful attempt by the airline’s dispatchers to contact the crew.

But that window can actually be narrowed: The power loss must have occurred in the time between the attempt from the ground to contact the airplane and the last normal contact between the controllers and the captain, some 44 minutes, and very likely it happened very rapidly after the captain signed off—when the transponder failed.

However, whatever the extent of the power loss, the report makes clear that, remarkably, at least one system was able on its own to recover power and continue functioning.

Twenty-one minutes after the airline’s dispatchers tried to contact the flight the airplane was able to transmit a scheduled electronic “handshake” to a satellite.

Tracking the flight path of the Malaysian jet has always rested on one slender thread of data that was detected by the London-based satellite operator Inmarsat.

An Inmarsat ground station in Australia recorded seven electronic “handshakes” transmitted automatically from the 777 beginning with one before takeoff. From those brief and impersonal pulses and after many hours of calculations the searchers were directed to an area deep in the southern Indian Ocean, called the seventh arc, between latitudes 40 and 50 and more than 1,500 miles from the nearest land mass, southwestern Australia.

The handshakes, more commonly called pings, were sent at hourly intervals.

Amazingly, though, the system used to transmit the hourly pings, the Satellite Data Unit, SDU, was able to reboot itself within 60 seconds of the power failure and was able to send the subsequent hourly pings for the rest of the flight, while the ACARS remained silent, as did the transponder.

What caused the power loss?

The Australian report gives four possible causes:

One, a sudden failure that caused the airplane’s Auxiliary Power Unit, APU, to kick-in to restore emergency power.

Two, an action carried out in the cockpit using overhead switches.

Three, someone accessing the Main Equipment Center below the flight deck, pulling out circuit breakers and, later, resetting them.

Four, intermittent technical failures.

Clearly, these possibilities suggest a choice between actions that required deliberate human intervention (using the overhead switches in the cockpit or someone gaining access to the Main Equipment Center, pulling out the circuit breakers and then later resetting them) or the sudden onset of technical failures that the airplane’s backup systems were able to restore, at least in part.

In making this range of possibilities clear the report demonstrates that there is no data that could make a persuasive argument for either scenario. That can only be settled when—or if—the remains of the airplane are found and recovered.

However this new information seriously undermines one of the most persistent conspiracy theories: that the pilots did it.

First, the theory widely advanced in the early days of the disaster that as a first step to make the airplane “vanish” the pilots switched off the transponder. Nobody switched off anything at that moment—it now appears that a power interruption or failure could have disabled the transponder. (A transponder only works for ground tracking within radar range, otherwise its signals can be picked up only by other airplanes that are nearby.)

Second, that one of the pilots left his seat, opened a hatch in the floor, went down into the Main Equipment Center, pulled out the circuit breakers and later reset them.

I asked an expert on the 777 and its systems to comment.

He said that the idea that a pilot went below to pull one or more circuit breakers was extremely unlikely, even bordering on the absurd. He added: “Few airline pilots would even know how to get down to the lower deck while in flight.

“And even if they tried, few would be familiar with the locations of avionics components, or be able to find the relevant circuit breakers to pull. That kind of information is not even contained in the typical pilot training or operating manuals.”

He also explained that the pilots would most likely need to be following “non-normal” procedures to use the overhead switches that control electrical power generation as part of coping with failure messages flashing on their instrument displays.

Indeed, rather than this being an attempt to harm the airplane, the expert said, the pilots could very well have been implementing “a well-defined non-normal procedure” to respond what was a “very complex failure”—and that those actions were exactly what the pilots should have done.

However, he added, if it was a failure that went beyond anything anticipated in their training—“like a severe uncontained fire”—the crew may not have fully understood the severity of what was happening. “They would simply have no way of knowing.”

Simultaneously, he said, “they would have been trying to decide whether to divert and get on the ground as fast as possible.”

The captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was very experienced, with more than 18,000 hours flying time and 8,659 flying 777s. Fariqu Abdul Hamid, the co-pilot, had only 2,800 flying time experience and—this could well have been significant in a crisis, only 39 hours on the 777, no more than a few flights.

Most of the power to run all the 777’s systems and avionics comes from generators attached to each of the two engines. It is distributed throughout the airplane through multiple connections, many with backup systems and controlled by computers. The main concentration of computers, including those controlling the airplane’s communications systems, is in the Main Equipment Center.

In a Daily Beast special report, I examined a scenario in which a fire in the forward cargo hold of the 777, originating in a consignment of lithium-ion batteries that were being shipped on the airplane, could have breached a wall and reached the Main Equipment Center, seriously degrading the airplane’s avionics and leading to the incapacitation of the crew and passengers.

However, the avionics for the Satellite Data Unit, sending the pings, was located not in the Main Equipment Center but well clear of it, in the roof of the cabin behind the wings, because that is where the antenna to access the satellite is best positioned.

The picture in the Australian report of an airplane stricken by a sudden and extensive loss of electrical power, while in no way definitive, is entirely consistent with this scenario.

Indeed, the report gives dramatic new clarity to the “zombie flight” version of events in which the airplane, by then fatally crippled, makes one final change of course and then flies into the vast emptiness of the southern Indian Ocean without any sign of human direction or control. There is also much more detail about the airplane’s final moments in the air.

The report’s account draws on a scenario followed by Boeing in an engineering simulator (first reported by The Daily Beast) that shows Flight 370 cruising at a constant altitude of 35,000 feet for more than 5 hours at which point the airplane begins to run out of fuel.

The assumption is made that once Flight 370 made a left turn over the Straits of Malacca it was then being flown on autopilot. (The new report cautions: “The specific settings input into the autopilot are unknown. Furthermore, it is also unknown what changes (if any) were made to those settings throughout the accident flight.”)

Considering how little is known of what happened to turn the airplane “dark” the reconstruction of the flight and its conclusion is surprisingly graphic. As the 777 runs out of fuel the right engine flames out first, followed by the left engine 15 minutes later. The airplane then descends in a circling glide, covering as many as 100 nautical miles, hitting the water “uncontrolled but stable.”

As luck would have it, the final—seventh—ping sent from the airplane and intercepted by the Inmarsat satellite ground station was sent about 10 minutes before the airplane hit the water. Within those 10 minutes the SDU had lost power from the engines, the APU had automatically started (taking about a minute to restore power) and the SDU, because power had been interrupted, began automatically to log on again with the Inmarsat satellite and completed that process within seconds of the airplane crashing—thereby providing the Inmarsat analysts with one more essential clue to the final position of the airplane.

There can be no precise picture of how the airplane broke up on hitting the water. The only physical remnant from the crash appeared four months ago, washed up on the island of La Réunion near Madagascar in the western Indian Ocean.

That piece of wreckage was a flaperon, a part of the airplane’s flight controls. There is one flaperon on the rear of each wing close to the fuselage. Although it is relatively small, the flaperon is very busy throughout the whole flight. It is part flap, the control surface that is lowered in a series of phases to increase lift for takeoffs and landings, and part aileron, a separate surface that moves up or down to control “roll”—to keep the wings laterally level at all speeds and altitudes or to control the degree of banking in a turn.

Because of its hyperactive role in the airplane’s flight controls the value of the flaperon to investigators is far greater than its size would suggest. Given the final minutes of the flight as simulated by Boeing, its actions would have been essential to maintaining stability in the glide. For that reason its discovery could add some better understanding of how the airplane hit the water.

The flaperon was in remarkably good condition, given that it had spent nearly 17 months in the water. In photographs the only visible sign of damage is that its thinnest part, the trailing edge, is badly shredded. The forward part, where it is hinged to the wing, appears to have made a clean break.

Estimating the forces that produced that break would be an important part of what investigators would do in order to try assess what role the flaperon was performing right up to the moment of impact. And, by looking at that, the investigators could get clues to how violent—or otherwise—the final seconds of the flight were.

The flaperon was taken from La Réunion to France, where it remains in the hands of the Bureau d’Enquetes et d’Analyses, BEA, having been examined there by experts who confirmed that it came from the Malaysian Boeing 777. (The BEA did not respond to a request from The Daily Beast for information on the examination of the flaperon.)

Meanwhile, in Australia the investigators seized on the discovery of the flaperon as a chance to confirm that their search was being conducted in the right place. Was landfall on the island consistent with the path that any floating wreckage would have taken if it originated in the area being searched?

A team at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, CSIRO, including oceanographers and weather experts, had been working for 16 months using a technology called drift modeling, to predict where, if any floating wreckage survived, it would wash up. Now they reverse-engineered the flaperon’s path from La Réunion back to the search area at the other end of the Indian Ocean, based on the elapsed time, distance, and oceanic conditions from July 2015 back to March 8, 2014, the day that the airplane disappeared.

The result, however, was rather less than assured. Indeed, in describing the findings the CSIRO team leader, Dr. David Griffin, was careful to hedge the bets: the arrival of the piece of wreckage on La Reunion Island “does not cast doubt on the validity of the present MH370 search area” he said, but then added, “it is impossible to use the La Réunion finding to refine or shift the search area.”

It was wise of the scientists to be as careful as this because they had made an embarrassing error in a previous drift model. They originally predicted that the first wreckage would wash up on the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, by July 2014—some 4,000 miles northeast of La Réunion.

When this didn’t happen they went back to the numbers and discovered that the data had been corrupted by a significant miscalculation of the effects of wind on the ocean.

It’s fair to say, then, that drift modeling, no matter how conscientiously conducted, is as yet far from being an exact science.

However, the absence of any further floating wreckage since the flaperon was discovered in July lends credence to the idea that perhaps major parts of the 777 did remain intact after impact and then sank, possibly through wave action forcing water into the engines and empty fuel tanks.

I discussed this possibility with the expert on the 777.

He advised caution on reaching any firm conclusions on the basis of a single piece of physical evidence—particularly when the flaperon is visible only in photographs and not by way of a physical inspection.

Nonetheless, he told me, “Even a pilotless jet could possibly get lucky and enter the water at a shallow angle and minimum sink rate that minimizes the impact.

“Most of the structure could have remained intact, or at least separated into only a few big pieces. Not a lot of extraneous debris may have exited the fuselage, particularly if there was no attempt at opening doors or deploying rafts in the water evacuation.”

That would be encouraging for the undersea search because the larger the pieces of wreckage the more likely they are to be detected.

Last week, when the new report was released, the Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said that he was “hopeful, indeed optimistic, that we will still locate the aircraft.”

The area being searched totals more than 46,000 square miles of which around 29,000 square miles have so far been covered. As a result of the new analysis of the flight path, priority has been given to the southern sector—the total search area is as long as the distance between New York City and Charleston, North Carolina, and about as wide as the I-95 corridor, little more than 60 miles. Using the new calculations, the length may be shortened as the width is expanded.

And, as the area remaining to cover diminishes—according to the math—the chances of finding the Boeing 777 should increase exponentially.

“We are anticipating that the search will take to around mid-2016 to be completed,” the official spokesman for the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, Dan O’Malley, told The Daily Beast.

The search has continued, operating 24 hours a day, during the southern hemisphere winter, even though the conditions were often appalling.

“There have been times when the vessels were obliged to break off searching because of rough weather,” said O’Malley. “The highest waves were 50 feet in a tropical cyclone. When the weather is really poor work becomes very difficult and obtaining adequate rest is difficult too, so it’s also very fatiguing.”

On two occasions crewmembers fell ill and their ships had to break off and return to their home port of Fremantle, 1,700 miles away.

“There is no helicopter with the range to fly out and recover a patient, and it’s too risky to winch a person from a ship in rough conditions. It’s at least 10 days sail for the round trip, so this delays progress on the search” said O’Malley.

Before the flight disappeared this was one of the most remote stretches of ocean in the world and its floor had never been mapped. Some of the ocean is as much as 20,000 feet deep, with extremes of terrain. Now, after a bathymetric survey using state-of-the-art equipment, the Australians believe that they have an accurate and detailed map of every piece of the seabed.

These extreme depths and challenging terrain call for the most advanced search equipment, an autonomous underwater vehicle, AUV. Since last May rough weather made it impossible to use this system.

This week, with the financial help of the Chinese (153 of the passengers were Chinese), a third ship equipped with an AUV will join the search.

For months the search had been limited to two ships deploying torpedo-like towfish that scan the ocean bed with sonar. “The deep tow equipment is the most efficient method to search large swathes where the seafloor is relatively flat” explained O’Malley. “However some of the seafloor features have very steep gradients and maneuvering the towfish over them can leave ‘terrain avoidance’ gaps in the data. These are the areas we will search with the AUV.”

One thing is for sure among many that are not: should the searchers find the remains of an airplane that took 239 people to their deaths in such baffling circumstances it will be an unmatched achievement in the history of air crash investigations, and the only thing that can finally explain what really happened.

 

[mkrnhr]

don't know what's the likelihood of this, but while the search for any traces of MH370 on the ocean floor is still going on, they discovered a shipwreck : _https://www.atsb.gov.au/mh370-pages/updates/operational-update.aspx The ship hasn't been identified (yet?). Last year, another shipwreck was discovered within the framework of the same searches: _https://www.atsb.gov.au/newsroom/news-items/2015/mh370-search-discovers-shipwreck.aspx
Couldn't find any information on the exact locations though.

 

[angelburst29]

Man Who Found MH370 Flight Part Finds New Item on Reunion
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/la-reunion-man-found-mh370-flight-part-finds-37440651

Mar 6, 2016 - The man who found a wing fragment of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that disappeared nearly two years ago on a beach in the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion has found more mysterious debris, a square-shaped gray item with blue border, in nearly the same spot.

Johny Begue told The Associated Press on Sunday that he found the piece about 5:30 p.m. (1630 GMT) Thursday and turned it into the gendarmerie on Friday morning. A special gendarmerie air brigade in Saint Denis, the capital of Reunion, confirmed it received the item.

Begue found a wing fragment known as a flaperon on July 29 that French investigators identified in September as part of the passenger jet that disappeared with 239 people aboard on March 8, 2014.

Begue said that unlike the flaperon there were no barnacles on the latest item, which he said was square and estimated that it measured 40 by 40 centimeters (about 15.5 by 15.5 inches).

"I was running. After, when I stopped to rest, that's when I found the piece" lying on the stony beach several meters from the water, Begue said by telephone. "The same beach and nearly the same place."

He said the piece he found on the Saint-Andre beach was thinner and smaller than the flaperon, but the material had the same appearance, with a honeycombed interior.

"It looks like the other one, but I don't know if it's part of the plane or not. Experts will say," the 49-year-old Begue said.

The gendarmerie's Territorial Air Brigade confirmed that Begue turned over the piece on Friday morning, but had no further comment.

Begue's latest discovery came just days after an American, Blaine Gibson, found an airplane part in Mozambique, also with a coastline on the Indian Ocean but west of Reunion.

 

[angelburst29]

Australia’s minister for infrastructure and transport says plane wreckage potentially from the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has been discovered off the coast of Tanzania.

Suspected MH370 debris found off Tanzania: Australian official
http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2016/06/24/471977/Australia-Malaysia-MH370-Darren-Chester

In a statement released on Friday, Darren Chester said a "piece of aircraft debris" was found on Pemba Island in the Indian Ocean without elaborating on when the discovery was made.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which has been conducting the search on Malaysia's behalf, is seeking “further information” to determine whether the debris belongs to Flight 370, he added.

Earlier this week, officials from Australia, Malaysia and China met to discuss the search for the missing plane. Chester described the discussions as productive, but gave no further details ahead of a ministerial meeting scheduled for late July.

Recently, possible aircraft debris was found on Australia's Kangaroo Island, but the Australian bureau said it was not from the Malaysian airliner.

The MH370 flight vanished from radar on March 8, 2014, during a trip from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew on board.

Authorities say the plane likely crashed. However, officials have had no luck finding the main wreckage despite an extensive underwater search of a vast area.

Several pieces confirmed to be from or thought highly likely to be from MH370 have washed up over the past year on coastlines around the Indian Ocean.

 

[Ca.]

MH370: Search crew in race against time to find missing plane
Published on Jul 26, 2016

https://youtu.be/r9dG4ZlFeC8

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared more than two years ago, while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
It's believed it crashed in the Indian Ocean. The search for the wreckage will stop at the end of the year if nothing is found

MH370 pilot flew 'suicide route' on a simulator 'closely matching' his final flight
Saturday 23 July 2016
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/mh370-pilot-flew-suicide-route-simulator-final-flight-missing-malaysian-airlines-a7152581.html

A confidential document held by Malaysian police provides 'strongest evidence yet' the disappearance of flight MH370 was predetermined by its pilot

The captain of missing flight MH370 practiced crashing into the Indian Ocean on a simulated “suicide route” less than a month before his plane disappeared, police documents have revealed.

Pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah used an elaborate home-made flight simulator to trial run paths out into the remote southern Indian Ocean before his plane vanished under very similar circumstances.

The confidential document was obtained by New York magazine, and is part of a Malaysian police investigation into the pilot’s final days.

It provides strong evidence to suggest the disappearance of MH370 was not an accident, but premeditated mass murder-suicide, the publication reported.

The plane disappeared with 239 passengers and crew in March 2014.

Speaking about the incident at the time, the pilot’s wife and daughter said the 53-year-old had “retreated into a shell” and appeared “lost and disturbed”.

Mr Shah’s wife said the couple had separated three weeks before the flight’s disappearance, leading to suggestions from investigators that the incident was deliberate.

According to the document, the FBI recovered deleted data from the flight simulator on Mr Shah’s hard drive, detailing routes taken out across the ocean until he ran out of fuel.

Authors in the report said:

“We found a flight path, that lead to the Southern Indian Ocean, among the numerous other flight paths charted on the flight simulator, that could be of interest.”

Rumours had long been circulated that the FBI had discovered such evidence, but the information was previously withheld by Malaysian officials.

“This is not entirely surprising,” New York magazine reported. “There is a history in aircraft investigations of national safety boards refusing to believe that their pilots could have intentionally crashed an aircraft full of passengers.”

On Friday, officials from Malaysia, China and Australia announced the search for the missing aircraft would be suspended if the investigation gains no ground by December.

In a statement, the group of international minister said hopes of finding the wreckage were fading.

Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said:

“In the absence of new evidence, Malaysia, Australia and China have collectively decided to suspend the search upon completion of the 120,000 sq km (46,332 sq mile) search area.”

“Should credible new information emerge which can be used to identify the specific location of the aircraft, consideration will be given in determining next steps.”

The announcement came as investigators claimed they had been searching in the wrong location for the past two years, as the plane may have glided further out that previously considered.

Almost A$180m (£101m) has been spent on the search so far, making it the most expensive in aviation history.

 

[Ca.]

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 Published Aug 9, 2016
AFP news agency
_https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq5Ij2QI4TU
MH370 plunged into the ocean at high speed -- up to 20,000 feet a minute -- reinforcing analysis that the missing Malaysia Airlines jet crashed in the current search zone, a report said Tuesday.VIDEOGRAPHIC

Mar 7, 2015

https://youtu.be/Q9VsPKkq9zk

Session 14 June 2014
https://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,35099.msg500220.html#msg500220

 

[stellar]

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 Published Aug 9, 2016
AFP news agency
_https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq5Ij2QI4TU
MH370 plunged into the ocean at high speed -- up to 20,000 feet a minute -- reinforcing analysis that the missing Malaysia Airlines jet crashed in the current search zone, a report said Tuesday.VIDEOGRAPHIC

Mar 7, 2015

https://youtu.be/Q9VsPKkq9zk

Session 14 June 2014
https://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,35099.msg500220.html#msg500220

In light of what the C's said, I thought the video comment on 'Error 404' 'lane CANNOT be found' most appropriate.

 

[angelburst29]

Investigators searching for the debris of Malaysia Airlines flight 370 have admitted that they may have missed the wreckage, and need to go and re-examine some areas more thoroughly.

MH370: New Search Planned for Plane Wreckage Likely Overlooked
http://sputniknews.com/asia/20160901/1044834237/mh370-search-continues.html

A spokesperson for the Australian Transport Safety Bureau verified to the Daily Beast that plans to end the search this summer may now be canceled, as efforts may need to continue through next year. Search efforts have already cost a whopping $180 million.

In June, Dutch company Furgo admitted that there were areas of the ocean floor that were not scanned by sonar. A secondary search would focus on a southern portion of the Indian Ocean using a sonar-equipped remote vehicle. There are reportedly 6,200 square miles of the 46,332 square mile search radius that require further investigation. “These targets are scattered throughout the greater search area, and have been identified over the course of the underwater search,” Dan O’Malley, a spokesman for the ATSB, told the Daily Beast.

 

[Ca.]

_https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxnXYE-ij1o

Australian Government 2016:ATSB
Aviation safety investigations & reports
Investigation title:Published: 15 September 2016
_http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2014/aair/ae-2014-054/

Assistance to Malaysian Ministry of Transport in support of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 on 7 March 2014 UTC
Debris examination – update No. 3
Identification of large flap section recovered off the Tanzanian coast

Introduction

On 20 June 2016, a large item of debris was found on the island of Pemba, off the coast of Tanzania. Preliminary identification from photographs indicated that the item was likely a section of Boeing 777 outboard flap (Figure 1).

Assistance from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) was requested by the Malaysian Government in the formal identification of the item, to determine if the item came from the Malaysian Airlines Berhad (MAB) aircraft, registered 9M-MRO and operating as MH370. The Malaysian investigation team secured the item of debris and arranged shipping to the ATSB facilities in Canberra.

This document (Update 3) is a brief summary of the outcomes from the identification of the item, designated as Part number 5. It follows the identification of Part numbers 1 through 4, the outcomes of which were released by the ATSB in Updates 1 and 2, available on the ATSB website.

This debris identification summary is released with the concurrence of the Malaysian ICAO Annex 13 Safety Investigation Team for MH370.
Identification

Part No. 5

Part number 5 was preliminarily identified from photographs as an inboard section of a Boeing 777 outboard flap. On arrival at the ATSB, several part numbers were immediately located on the debris that confirmed the preliminary identification. This was consistent with the physical appearance, dimensions and construction of the part.

A date stamp associated with one of the part numbers indicated manufacture on 23 January 2002 (Figure 2), which was consistent with the 31 May 2002 delivery date for 9M-MRO.

All of the identification stamps had a second “OL” number, in addition to the Boeing part number, that were unique identifiers relating to part construction. The Italian part manufacturer recovered build records for the numbers located on the part and confirmed that all of the numbers related to the same serial number outboard flap that was shipped to Boeing as line number 404. Aircraft line number 404 was delivered to Malaysian Airlines and registered as 9M-MRO.

Based on the above information, the part was confirmed as originating from the aircraft registered 9M-MRO and operating as MH370.

Figure 1: Inboard section of outboard flap (inverted)

Figure 2: Exemplar part number and date stamp

Source: ATSB

Further analysis

At the time of writing, the flap section was being examined for any evidence of interaction with mechanisms, supports and surrounding components (such as the flaperon, which abuts the inboard end of the outboard flap) that may indicate the state of flap operation at the time of separation from the wing. This information may contribute to an increased understanding of end of flight scenarios.
Conclusions

It was confirmed that Part No. 5 was the inboard section of a Boeing 777 right, outboard flap, originating from the Malaysian Airlines aircraft registered 9M-MRO.

MH370: 'Burnt' plane parts discovered in Madagascar (Pictures)
_http://www.theweek.co.uk/mh370/57641/mh370-burnt-plane-parts-found-in-madagascar
American debris hunter Blaine Gibson finds five new fragments in Madagascar

Five new pieces of debris thought to be linked to missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 have been recovered on the coast of Madagascar.

Significantly, two of the small fragments appear to be burnt.

The debris was found near Sainte Luce, in south-eastern Madagascar, by three locals and passed on to Blaine Gibson, an American lawyer-turned-adventurer who has spent the past year scouring the coast for debris belonging to flight MH370.

The top layer of paint on two of the fragments was "scorched black", Gibson told Australian's Channel 7 news.

"If confirmed to have come from the plane, it will be the first evidence that a fire - possibly an electrical one - brought down MH370 rather than the actions of a suicidal pilot," NEWS.au reports.

Australian investigators will now analyse the pieces to see if they come from the plane, and whether they indeed point to a fire on board.

It is easy to understand the frustration of the victim's families, some of whom have accused the authorities of failing to do enough to locate the crash site, says the BBC's transport correspondent, Richard Westcott.

If the Australian-led search effort in the Indian Ocean wraps up as scheduled later this year, discoveries like these will be all the evidence we have about MH370's ultimate fate, "yet the only person looking for them is a self-funded, amateur American enthusiast".
Since becoming an adventurer, the former Seattle attorney has also travelled Ethiopia looking for the biblical Ark of the Covenant and studied the lost civilisations of South America.

For the past year, he has been combing the beaches of Mauritius, Mozambique and Madagascar in a one-man quest to unlock the mystery of the missing plane after becoming obsessed with the case.

"I was touched by the plight of the families," said the 58-year-old, who has no formal training in air crash investigation. He told the BBC earlier this year: "I just couldn't imagine how they felt, knowing nothing about their loved ones for a year… So I just decided, I'll go look for it for myself.

"I love travelling, and I love solving mysteries, and I love to do good things for people."

Gibson has found 13 suspected MH370 fragments that have washed up on East African beaches, including wing fragments, a piece of a seat and personal belongings of passengers, such as a bag and a laptop case.

Meanwhile, a piece of debris found on a Tanzanian beach in June has been confirmed as a wing part belonging to missing Malaysian Airways flight MH370, Malaysian officials have said.

A report on the find, issued by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which is leading the search efforts, concluded that the component belonged the right outboard flap of a Boeing 777. MH370 is believed to be the only missing Boeing 777 in the world.

The wing part, which was found on Pemba Island, off the coast of Tanzania, "was confirmed as originating from the aircraft registered 9M-MRO and operating as MH370", The Guardian( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/15/malaysia-confirms-debris-near-tanzania-missing-mh370-plane) reports.

Few confirmed traces have been found of the aircraft that disappeared soon after taking off from Kuala Lumpur on 8 March 2014, with 239 passengers and crew on board. Twenty-seven fragments from the aircraft have been found along the coast of East Africa.

So far, only one of the pieces examined by investigators has been publicly confirmed as belonging to the missing plane – a wing part called a flaperon that washed up on the French administered island of Reunion in July 2015. However, the ATSB has said that they believe four more fragments are "almost certainly" debris from the missing plane, whose crash site in the Indian Ocean is still a mystery.

MH370: Have search teams been looking in the wrong place?

13 September

An Australian mathematician who helped calculate the search zone for investigators looking for the wreckage of Flight MH370 now believes that the plane actually crashed further to the north-east.

Neil Gordon is the head of the Data and Information Fusion department at Australia's Defense Science Technology Group, which was brought in in the aftermath of the plane's disappearance in March 2014.

Based on the seven pings sent out by the plane in the six hours before it went off radar, Gordon's team calculated an arc which marked the point where the final ping was transmitted.

"The result was a probability 'heat map' showing where on the surface of the ocean the plane might have impacted," Popular Mechanics reports. However, in his first press interview, Gordon told the magazine that he had only ever estimated the chance of the wreckage being within the boundaries of the 120,000 sq km search zone to be in the "mid 70s".

The final ping was consistent with a sharp descent, appearing to rule out a theory that pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah held the plane in a glide after the jet's fuel ran dry, which might have caused the plane to crash further to the south-east. Gordon believes that the answer lies instead to the north-east of the current search zone, where the plane would have crashed if it had stayed in the air slightly longer than thought.

"If you look at the probability distribution, it would say, 'Go up north,'" Gordon said.

Gordon's hypothesis would explain why the crash site has eluded the efforts of the Australian-led recovery effort. So far, only isolated fragments from the wreckage have turned up along the East African coast – and time is now running out. Search operations are set to wrap up in December.

MH370: Mystery woman 'messaged pilot two days before flight'

9 September

The captain of doomed Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 messaged a female friend two days before the plane's disappearance regarding a "personal matter", it has been claimed.

Fatima Pardi, a 35-year-old mother of three, says that she and Shah met when volunteering together during the Malaysian elections and began exchanging WhatsApp messages.

Their friendship "quickly developed to a level where Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was playing an almost fatherly role to the children," reports The Australian. Shah would regularly visit her home, but Pardi says the pair were not having an affair.

"This is not a lovey-dovey story," she insisted. " He told me he saw potential in me and that he would help me build a better ­future for myself and my children."

Pardi admits that Shah messaged her two days before MH370 vanished from radar on 8 March 2014, but would not divulge details of the exchange, saying she feared it could be "misunderstood".

"That last conversation was just between me and him," she said. "I don't want to talk about it." She is understood to have spoken to Malaysian investigators on four occasions about her relationship with Shah.

Shah's personal life and mental state in the run-up to the disappearance of the aircraft has come under close scrutiny, with a leading theory suggesting that the crash was caused deliberately. A route similar to the one that MH370 took when it went off-course over the Indian Ocean was found in Shah's home flight simulator, but his family and friends have repeatedly insisted that he was not stressed or disturbed in the months before the crash.

A year-long investigation into Shah’s personality by the Malaysian transport ministry found that there was "no known history of apathy, anxiety or irritability" and "no significant changes in his lifestyle, interpersonal conflict or family stresses" in the months before the crash.

"There were no behavioural signs of social isolation, change in habits or interest, self-neglect, drug or alcohol abuse" in either the captain, first officer or the ten other members of cabin crew who went down with the plane’s 227 passengers, it found.

Shortly after the disappearance, several media reports claimed that Shah’s wife, Faizah, had left him a few weeks before. Their family has denied this, saying that they were a happy couple who had nothing beyond "normal" marital issues.

Several aviation experts still believe that a deliberate manoeuvre on the part of the plane’s captain is the strongest theory to explain the aircraft’s movements in its final moments, the BBC reports.

But even if Shah is proven to have been in control of the plane as it plummeted to Earth, this could be evidence of either a suicidal dive or his desperate last-minute efforts to avert such a crash. While some believe Shah was in control of the plane, gliding it onto the water himself, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which is leading the search, says the SATCOM data matches most closely with a scenario in which there was no human intervention during the last moments of the flight.

29 August: MH370 'veered off course earlier than thought'

Flight MH370Credits: Getty Images News

After further analysis of the satellite data used to establish the plane's location, investigators announced that the missing aircraft may have changed course earlier than had previously been thought. As a result, they said they would focus their efforts further south, to an area 1,100 miles off the west coast of Australia.

The piece of debris found off the Mozambique coast in December 2015 Credits: Handout

Police carry the piece of debris that washed up on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean. Investigators are trying to determine if the piece of metal could have come from missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.Credits: Yannick Pitou/AFP/Getty Images

Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean
https://www.google.fr/maps/place/R%C3%A9union/@-21.1304585,55.2462863,10z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x2178778110b8e43b:0x4a7f8e89ecdbeaf9!8m2!3d-21.115141!4d55.536384

MALAYSIA has blasted reports which claimed the pilot of the doomed MH370 plane had been found ALIVE.
Mon, Feb 15, 2016 (Snip:)
_http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/644059/Malaysia-Airlines-Flight-MH370-pilot-alive-Taiwan-hospital-missing-plane

A doctor called Syed Boon Sulong was quoted as saying: "The patient is still very weak and sick, and his brain seems to be blocking access to a certain part of his memory in order to protect him from pain that these memories could generate.

"His health is too fragile for the moment, but over time, he should able to remember everything.”

But Transport Minister Datuck Seri Liow Tiong Lai quickly brushed off the claims warning people not to “speculate”.

He added:

“The ministry will provide updates on MH370 from time to time.

“Any information regarding MH370 must be referred to us. Do not speculate.”

 

[angelburst29]

"The Crash Detectives,” by Christine Negroni, asserts that Flight MH370 should never have departed, as the emergency communications systems were flawed -- and the author claims that the airline was aware of the issue.

Malaysia Airlines’ Missing Plane Should Never Have Flown, New Book Claims
https://sputniknews.com/asia/20161004/1045967681/malaysia-airlines-book-claims.html

The book, published on Tuesday, asserts that Malaysia Airlines had received a safety audit in 2013 that should have grounded all of their wide-body passenger planes, as their equipment would not let them report their position more frequently than at 30-minute intervals.

"The aircraft functioned just fine," Negroni, an aviation journalist and industry veteran told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "The airline couldn't track it. The airline could not track the aeroplanes as often as they were required to do."

Negroni believes that Malaysia owes the world, and particularly Australia, which has spent over $60 million on the search, an explanation. She is calling on the Turnbull government to demand that they do. "I'm kind of fed up with everybody saying without the black box we're not going to know what happened to Malaysia 370," Negroni said. "[Even] with the black box you might not know what happened to Malaysia 370, but it's a dodge to put all the eggs in that basket.”

"It keeps everybody from going back to the Malaysians and saying, 'Let's see what you found out about the maintenance records, let's see what you found out about the servicing of the crew oxygen canisters, let's see what you found out about the last time the mask oxygen interface was inspected.’ Were the masks working properly? We don't even know."

Negroni’s theory is that the captain left the cockpit and the plane experienced an emergency decompression. "I believe the captain probably left the cockpit, leaving the first officer in command of the aircraft," she said. "By some mechanism, and I can't tell you what, there was a sudden and rapid decompression of the aircraft, causing the first officer to respond inappropriately." A loss of oxygen triggers a condition called hypoxia, making people disoriented, as if they are drunk. Negroni believes that the officer in command may not have put his mask on fast enough to make rational decisions. If her theory is correct, it is likely that the passengers did not suffer long. "So I think the first officer reached over to the transponder to dial in 7700, the emergency code, so that everyone around him would know that he's having an emergency. He shouldn't have done that first, he should've put his mask on first, but I don't think he did,” Negroni said. "After he went to turn on the transponder, I think he inadvertently put it to standby which would have severed the connection, severed the ability of anyone on the ground to know this aircraft was Malaysia 370."

Flight MH370, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, disappeared from radar screens on March 8, 2014, less than an hour after takeoff. There were 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board.

Investigators believe that the aircraft may have been unmanned and flown by the autopilot system in its final hours, before crashing into the ocean at a speed of up to 230 mph, after running out of fuel.

 

[angelburst29]

Australian investigators confirmed Friday that debris discovered in May in Mauritius belongs to the still-missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Authorities Confirm Debris Found in Mauritius From Malaysia Flight MH370
https://sputniknews.com/asia/20161008/1046124344/mauritius-debris-confirmed-malaysia-flight.html

The 239-passenger flight disappeared in March 2014, on its way to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, and the Malaysian and Australian governments have been working together to find the plane’s remains ever since.

Last month, Darren Chester, Australia's infrastructure and transport minister confirmed that debris found in Mozambique by a US lawyer "is almost certainly from MH370."

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau announced that the airframe section was "a trailing edge section of Boeing 777 left, outboard flap, originating from the Malaysia Airlines aircraft registered 9M-MRO," adding that "a part number was identified on a section of the debris," along with a manufacturer-assigned "unique work order number" that matches the MH370. The Mauritius debris is the third item confirmed to be a section of the ill-fated passenger jet.

 

[angelburst29]

Two US attorneys seek to jointly represent relatives of 32 passengers presumed killed in the crash of missing Flight MH370 in the largest legal action against Malaysian Airline System Bhd (MAS).

MH370 Victims’ Families Seek Help From ‘More Experienced’ US Lawyers
https://sputniknews.com/world/201610151046352109-mh370-crash-case/

The group of relatives first applied in August to Steven Marks and Roy Kalman Altman to represent them in their suit. According to family members, they failed to find local lawyers with enough aviation knowledge to help them win their civil case.

"There are no other lawyers in Malaysia with such expertise and experience in handling aviation matters," said the plaintiffs' representative Michael Yap, as cited by the New Straits Times.

Marks, a lawyer based in Miami, has acted as lead trial counsel for a number of victims of general aviation and military accidents, many involving foreign claimants, according to his official website. He has handled numerous airline accidents, including a Silk Air crash between Jakarta and Singapore in 1997 and the 2010 American Airlines Flight 331 crash in Jamaica.

Marks' colleague Altman is a winner of the Federal Bar Association's annual "Top Young Lawyer Award." He represents the family of Phillip Wood, one of the American passengers from the disappeared Malaysian Airlines flight. The application has been scheduled for a hearing in late October. Judge Hanipah binti Farikullah told Marks and Altman to turn in their paperwork Friday so that she could make a decision on whether they could appear on behalf of the victims' families next week.

More than 230 people were aboard MH370 when it vanished without a trace after communications were cut during a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014.

The next of kin of 32 passengers filed a collective lawsuit March 7, claiming that the presumed crash of the plane and deaths of their loved ones were due to negligence by the airline. They accuse MAS of breaching the contract of carriage, which says it is responsible for the airworthiness of the aircraft and the safety of people on board.

 

[T.C.]

https://www.sott.net/article/332891-Investigation-gives-more-information-on-final-moments-of-Malaysia-Airlines-Flight-MH370

Investigation gives more information on final moments of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370

When Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 mysteriously disappeared shortly after takeoff in March 2014, there was probably no one at the aircraft's controls when it crashed, a new analysis suggests.

Satellite data contradicts recent claims that pilots were able to steer the aircraft during its final minutes of flight, right before it plunged into the ocean, Time.com reported.

According to a statement released Wednesday (Nov. 2) by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which is leading the search-and-recovery mission for the missing flight, models of the plane's final trajectory and evidence from wreckage linked to the missing flight show that preparations were not made for a controlled ditch, an emergency water landing under a pilot's guidance.

Since MH370's disappearance, little evidence has surfaced to confirm what, exactly, took place after air traffic control in Malaysia lost contact with the plane. The ATSB report accompanies the launch of a two-day meeting in Canberra, held from Nov. 2 to 4, by an international team of experts to review progress made in the investigation thus far.

The ATSB evaluated data from satellite communications (Satcom), and found that the final signals from MH370 were consistent with "a high and increasing rate of descent" — a sign that no one was wrestling with the airplane's controls to pull it into a more controlled glide, officials stated in the report.

Wing wreckage provided further evidence that MH370's final descent was out of control, the ATSB report stated. A wing flap identified as part of MH370's right wing had washed ashore on June 20 in Tanzania, and was checked for signs that it had interacted with "mechanisms, supports and surrounding components" in the wing that would suggest the flap was extended into a landing position prior to the crash.

But close examination confirmed that the flap was not deployed, the investigation found. By contrast, it likely would have been deployed during a ditching, if the pilot had been in control, officials said.

Other pieces of debris thought to belong to the missing flight are described in the ATSB report. To date, more than 20 potential pieces of wreckage have been recovered from Mauritius, Reunion and Rodrigues islands, from the east coast of Madagascar, and from the eastern and southern coasts of Africa.

However, the main airplane body and the remains of the 239 people on board the flight have yet to be discovered.

More than 42,000 square miles (110,000 square kilometers) of seafloor have been searched so far, and officials will continue to look for MH370 in the 46,000-square-mile (120,000 square km) search zone through early 2017, the ATSB said in a statement.

"Ministers went to great lengths to explain this does not mean the termination of the search," the statement said. "Should credible new information emerge that can be used to identify the specific location of the aircraft, consideration will be given to determining next steps."

I don't see how the fact that based on their data there didn't seem to be an attempt to land means that no one was at the controls.

 

[Ruth]

https://www.sott.net/article/332891-Investigation-gives-more-information-on-final-moments-of-Malaysia-Airlines-Flight-MH370

I don't see how the fact that based on their data there didn't seem to be an attempt to land means that no one was at the controls.

Well, I don't know about you, lol, but I'd like to know if those 20 'potential bits' of MH370 found, actually did belong to the aircraft, and if so, where is the rest of it, including the passengers? 'Potential bits' don't make an air crash. It would be awfully weird if we had to use the whole planet as a potential crash site, and if it is MH370, that there might be wreckage spread out over the entire globe.