Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is Missing

Meanwhile, unconfirmed reports in Malaysian media say investigators probing the homemade flight simulator of the MH370 captain have found five runways from Indian Ocean airports programmed into it.

The Berita Harian Malay language paper quotes unnamed sources close to the investigation as saying that the airport runways were Male International Airport in the Maldives, Diego Garcia and three runways in India and Sri Lanka.

The source is quoted as saying that all the runways programmed into the simulator are 1000 metres long.

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getready said:

We can always ask the Malaysian bomoh to give us his valuable insights

The problem from the start was the country in charge has been found out to be incapable of leading this operation. Wasting valuable time and resources to search in the wrong location. Coupled with confusing misinformation, media speculation, stuff ups, lack of information and professionalism. The plane will be at ahe bottom of the Indian ocean by now. I doubt the bodies will be recovered. In the air France case, over 70 passengers are still lying in the bottom of the ocean. RIP

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Malaysian Disappearance Joins Longest in Modern Aviation

Malaysian Air Flight 370’s disappearance became the longest in modern commercial aviation as investigators lacking new information to back other theories explored the possibility of pilot suicide.

Whoever was operating the plane went to great lengths to avoid being detected, shutting off the plane’s transponder beacon and a text-to-ground messaging system before turning the Boeing Co. 777-200 off its course to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. While not ruling out hijacking or sabotage, Malaysian officials said they had to investigate the pilots.

“Yes, we’re looking at it,” Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said at a press conference in Kuala Lumpur yesterday referring to a question about pilot suicide.

The longest period in modern passenger-airline history between a disappearance and initial findings of debris was seven years ago, when Adam Air Flight 574 went missing off the coast of Indonesia’s South Sulawesi. The Boeing 737-400, operated by PT Adam Skyconnection Airlines, lost contact with air traffic control Jan. 1, 2007. Wreckage wasn’t found until 10 days later.

U.S. officials have said the most likely location of Flight 370’s final satellite transmission was over the Indian Ocean in a zone around 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) west of Perth, Australia, an area with some of the world’s deepest and most forbidding underwater terrain.

‘Most Probable’

The “most probable” theory is the plane carrying 239 people is beneath the ocean, though there isn’t physical evidence to make that conclusion, U.S. Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said March 16.

That area is “in the middle of nowhere, more or less,” said Rhys Arangio, operations and compliance officer for Austral Fisheries Pty., a Perth-based seafood company.

Satellite pings that weren’t turned off showed Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 operated for almost seven hours after last making contact on March 8, Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak has said. That may have taken the plane more than 3,000 miles from where it was last tracked and pushed it to the limits of its fuel load, if it was airborne the whole period.

The search for the missing airliner faces four enormous obstacles -- the absence of fresh clues, the time that’s passed, the distance from the nearest air and naval bases and the size of the area to be searched -- said a U.S. intelligence official with search and rescue experience.

Australia, U.S.

A lesser possibility being explored is a northern route over land toward Kazakhstan, though U.S. officials and radar experts said the jetliner probably couldn’t have passed through Indian or Chinese airspace undetected.

The U.S. Navy ended its search effort in the Andaman Sea and moved a P-8A Poseidon reconnaissance plane to Western Australia to better support the search effort, Commander William Marks, a spokesman for the Navy’s Seventh Fleet, said yesterday.

Australia started searching the southern Indian Ocean west of Perth with two sweeps over the region today and another due to be made later today, Prime Minister Tony Abbott told parliament. An AP-3C Orion aircraft that had been assisting the search from a base in Cocos Islands southwest of Java was being relocated overnight to the Royal Australian Air Force base in Pearce, near Perth, according to a statement from the Australian maritime Safety Authority today.

Sparse Population

The search group was liaising with Australia’s military about whether additional aircraft were available that could operate over long distances in the Southern Ocean, AMSA said.

The area off Perth is “pretty sparsely populated,” with some container shipping from Africa to Australia plying the route as well as tuna fleets and some trawlers, Arangio said.

Storm fronts will bring waves about 10 meters (33 feet) high comparable to those where Austral usually operates, around Heard Island in the Southern Ocean, he said.

“On the average day it may be flat or a few-meter swells,” he said. “If they get lucky, there’s every chance it might not be horrible for a few weeks at a time.”

Even if floating debris is found, it may be difficult to determine an area to begin searching for the crash site, said Mike Purcell, principal engineer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which helped locate the so-called black boxes from Air France Flight 447 after it crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Brazil in 2009.

Not Easy

“It’s not easy and it gets harder the longer the time goes by,” said Purcell, a leader of the search expedition. “Things will have drifted farther and farther the longer we have to wait.”

Searchers will try to listen for sound-producing pingers attached to the plane’s black boxes that emit signals for 30 days after becoming immersed in water.

It can be difficult to hear the pingers if they are blocked by undersea mountains, said Dave Gallo, director of special projects for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, in an interview. Layers of water with different temperatures can also block sounds, he said.

While the black boxes are designed to operate at depths of 20,000 feet (3.8 miles) and may work in even deeper water, the range of the pings is a mile, according to manuals from Honeywell International Inc., the maker of the equipment. That may make the signals difficult to pick up even if an underwater microphone is over the correct location.

Air France 447

The emergency locator transmitters on a 777 are designed for land and don’t work underwater, nor do the satellite transmissions that investigators have used to triangulate the likely last-known location.

In the search for Air France 447 wreckage, authorities were able to narrow down a 5,000 nautical-mile area after finding floating objects five days following the crash. They also had a last known position plus four minutes of signals from the plane’s so-called Acars system, which was turned off on Flight 370.

Even with those clues, the pings from Flight 447’s recorders weren’t picked up. It took two voyages over almost a two-year period to find the debris field with unmanned underwater vehicles that searched the ocean floor with sonar equipment.

Police searched the homes of the Malaysian flight’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, and Fariq Abdul Hamid, the first officer, taking a 777 simulator Zaharie had built at his house for experts to examine.

‘Alright Good Night’

Initial investigations indicated that the co-pilot had the last contact with air-traffic controllers, Malaysian Airline System Bhd. Chief Executive Officer Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said yesterday. “Alright, good night” were the last words from the cockpit, which came in at 1:19 a.m. as Malaysian air traffic controllers prepared to hand the plane over to Vietnamese counterparts, he said.

The jet made its last satellite contact at 8:11 a.m. on March 8, according to Najib. Malaysian officials previously said the plane was last tracked by its transponder, a device that helps radar find its location more precisely, at about 1:30 a.m.

The plane’s transponder and the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, which transmits text messages and data to and from planes, have multiple redundancies against failure. However, that’s only if they are not turned off from the cockpit, according to a person with knowledge of the plane’s system who wasn not permitted to speak to the press about an ongoing investigation.

Against Pattern

The engineers designed back up plans for every conceivable mechanical failure, though not for a scenario when someone intentionally turns off.

The actions on the flight deck indicate a high level of training in aviation and the 777 specifically, Patrick Veillette, a Park City, Utah, commercial pilot who has taught aviation safety, said in an interview.

“We’re not talking about sitting in a simulator or reading a book for an hour,” he said. “This would have required substantial training.”

There have been at least six airline crashes killing a total of 465 people that were caused by intentional actions by airline employees since 1982, according to AviationSafetyNetwork, which tracks accident data.

The most recent example of suicide came late in 2013, when a pilot steered an Embraer E-Jet into the ground in Namibia, killing 33, according to a preliminary report by the Mozambique Civil Aviation Authority.

EgyptAir

In 1999, a co-pilot aboard EgyptAir Flight 990 pulled back the power in a Boeing 767 and dove toward the ocean off Massachusetts after the captain left the cockpit to use the restroom.

The one case not involving a pilot was in 1987, when an employee of Pacific Southwest Airlines who had just been fired smuggled a gun aboard a flight and shot the crew, according to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.

In all of those cases, unlike the situation with the Malaysia flight, the end came quickly, usually with a dive into the ground. Also, investigators later found evidence of mental inability or high stress in the pilots’ lives, said John Cox, president of Washington-based aviation consulting company Safety Operating Systems, in an interview.

Suicide is rare even among private pilots, with eight recorded between 2003 and 2012, according to a newly published study by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

“This is completely against every other case that I’m aware of that we have seen,” Cox said.

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Maggern said:

I'm sorry if this has been answered before but...

THey're now entertaining the idea that the plane has gone down within Chinese territory. When I first read about the northern corridor, I waved it off as unlikely, simply because I doubted such a large and unidentified aircraft could breach a sensitive border area and fly across Chinese territory without the PLA having any idea it was there. Surely Chinese radar coverage in the western regions is sufficient to pick up such an aircraft. Also considering the topography of the western areas, it's unlikely the plane would stick below radar coverage (as they suspect it was doing around the Malay Peninsulaa).

Unless it crashed in some godforsaken part of the Himalayas...is it possible?

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cn_habs said:

What a pure joke this democratically-elected Malaysian government has become by the day?

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Beijing seriously needs to toughen up its stance to force those Malaysian bureaucrats such as inspecting/banning all Malaysian exports and let them rot in ports.

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t2contra said:

Missing Malaysia Airlines jet: Why didn't passengers make mobile phone calls?


March 18, 2014

A member of Indonesia's National Search and Rescue looks for missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 in the Andaman Sea area around the northern tip of Indonesia's Sumatra island .

A member of Indonesia's National Search and Rescue looks for missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 in the Andaman Sea area around the northern tip of Indonesia's Sumatra island . Photo: AFP

Malaysia backtracks on when airliner's communications were cut

Sepang, Malaysia: When hijackers took control of four airplanes on September 11, 2001, and sent them hurtling low across the countryside towards New York and Washington, frantic passengers and flight attendants turned on their mobile phones and began making calls to loved ones, airline managers and the authorities.

But when Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 did a wide U-turn in the middle of the night over the Gulf of Thailand and then spent nearly half an hour swooping over two large Malaysian cities and various towns and villages, there was apparently silence. As far as investigators have been able to determine, there have been no phone calls, Twitter or Weibo postings, Instagram photos or any other communication from anyone aboard the aircraft since it was diverted.

There has been no evidence ''of any number they're trying to contact, but anyway they are still checking and there are millions of records for them to process'', Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, chief executive of Malaysia Airlines, said at a news conference on Monday.
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The apparent absence of any word from the aircraft in an era of nearly ubiquitous mobile communications has prompted considerable debate among pilots, telecommunications specialists and others. Most of the people aboard the plane were from Malaysia or China, two countries where mobile phone use is extremely prevalent, especially among affluent citizens who take international flights.

Some theorise the silence signifies that the plane was flying too high for personal electronic devices to be used. Others wonder whether people aboard the flight even tried to make calls or send messages.

According to military radar, the aircraft was flying extremely high shortly after its turn – as much as 45,000 feet (13,716 metres), above the certified maximum altitude of 43,100 feet (13,136 metres) for the Boeing 777-200. It then descended as it crossed Peninsular Malaysia, flying as low as 23,000 feet (7010 metres) before moving up to 29,500 feet (8991 metres) and cruising there.

Vincent Lau, an electronics professor specialising in wireless communications at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said the altitude might have prevented passengers' mobile phones from connecting to base stations on the ground, even if the phones were turned on during the flight or had been left on since departure.

The hijacked planes on September 11 were flying very low towards urban targets when passengers and flight attendants made calls from those aircraft, he said.

Base station signals spread out considerably over distance. So mobile phones in a plane a few kilometres up, like Flight 370, would receive little if any signal, he said.

Base station design has improved since the September 11 attacks to provide better, more focused coverage of specific areas on the ground. But that also means somewhat less signal intensity is wasted in directions where callers are unlikely to be located, such as directly overhead, Mr Lau added.

Lam Wong-hing, a wireless communications specialist at the University of Hong Kong, said mobile phones transmit at 1 watt or less, while base stations typically transmit at 20 watts and sometimes much more. So even if a mobile phone showed that it was receiving a signal while aloft, it might not be able to transmit a signal that was strong enough to make a connection, he said.

The metal in an aircraft reduces mobile phone signals somewhat. If a passenger had pressed a mobile phone against a plastic window with a line of sight to a phone tower it is possible a connection might have been made even at a fairly high altitude, because plastic barely blocks a mobile phone signal at all, Mr Lam said.

Many aircraft carry satellite phones, and the Malaysia Airlines jet was equipped with them in business class. The plane continued to send satellite pings for nearly seven hours after it was apparently diverted.

But the satellite phones are part of an aircraft's in-flight entertainment system. If someone deliberately diverted a plane and turned off its transponder and other communications equipment, that person is likely to have disabled the in-flight entertainment system so passengers could not figure out from the map that they were flying in the wrong direction, said a telecommunications expert who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to the media. If the entertainment system was turned off, the satellite phones also would not work, the expert said.

Chinese media have reported that there have been some instances of people calling mobile phones of passengers of the missing flight and hearing ring tones, sometimes days after the plane disappeared. Telecom experts have dismissed that as evidence that the mobile phones are still in use, saying that a ring tone may be heard while the international phone system is searching for a phone and trying to connect a call.

There have been no reports of anyone answering calls to the mobile phones of passengers or flight attendants aboard the plane.

Investigators do not know if anyone aboard the plane even tried to make a call. One theory is that someone may have intentionally depressurised the plane as it soared to an unusually high altitude right after the turnaround, which would have quickly rendered passengers and flight attendants unconscious, pilots said. Whoever diverted the plane could have disabled the release of oxygen masks.

Dr James Ho, an associate professor of medicine at Hong Kong University, said death could come within minutes if someone were the equivalent of outdoors at 13,716 metres metres. But without information on the speed of depressurisation, it is hard to predict the medical consequences, he said.

A table used by pilots for ''time of useful consciousness'' without an oxygen supplement at various altitudes shows only nine to 15 seconds at 13,716 metres, compared with five to 10 minutes at 6705 metres.

Mobile phone service is widely available in sizable areas of western China and eastern Kazakhstan, raising the question of why nobody from the plane has tried to make a call if it did fly north and land safely, instead of flying out into the Indian Ocean until it ran out of fuel.

If the flight did land safely somewhere with the passengers and flight crew still healthy, whoever was in charge of the aircraft would also face a formidable task in any attempt to provide food, water and shelter for more than 200 people.

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