Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is Missing

KUALA LUMPUR, July 15 — Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah lacked the ingenuity needed to plot the disappearance of Flight MH370, his sister has said amid continued scrutiny on the aircrew in the hunt for the plane now missing for over four months.



Speaking for the first time since the mysterious disappearance of the Boeing 777 on March 8, Sakinab Ahmad Shah defended her brother’s name and insisted it was “impossible’ that the experienced aviator hijacked the Malaysia Airlines aircraft.

In a documentary aired on Channel NewsAsia over the weekend, Sakinab spoke of the incredulity in the family over the suspicion that befell Zaharie following the plane’s disappearance.

“We couldn’t figure out why somebody who would want to commit suicide would prolong the agony of flying for four, five, six hours just to land down there,” she said on the Singapore-based channel’s latest mini-clip titled “The Mystery of MH370”.

“If it was done, if he was the one who planned it, he has to be some kind of Einstein, which he was not,” said Sakinab.

Among the main focus of investigators is the background of all the 239 people on board the red-eye flight that disappeared shortly after taking off from the Kuala Lumpur International Airport.



Malaysian police are still looking at the possibility of a hijack, terrorism or even “pilot suicide” after the passenger jetliner was shown to have “deliberately” veered off-course towards the waters of the Indian Ocean, thousands of kilometres away from the plane’s original flight path to Beijing.

Zaharie became the chief suspect after investigators disclosed that someone had purposely shut off the plane’s transponder and performance reporting system in an apparent effort to mask its location as it flew off-course.

The final air-to-ground radio transmission was also believe to be made by the pilot.

The police have repeatedly questioned Zaharie’s family and seized a flight simulator hand-built to mimic that of the Boeing 777-200ER’s controls from his house.

The families of his co-pilot Fariq Ab Hamid and other cabin crew have also been questioned but no evidence has emerged to implicate anyone.

MAS’s commercial director, Hugh Dunleavy, previously came out to reject the theory stressing that the captain was a seasoned pilot with an excellent record.

In the documentary, Sakinab concurred with the assessment of Zaharie’s employers.

“It is impossible it’s him… we are left suspended mid-air with all kinds of speculations,” she said of the avid aviator..

“He was just a man who took so much to aviation. He loved aviation, he spent a lot of his funds buying model airplanes.

“If he could, I think he would attach wings to himself and fly... he loved flying that much,” she related.

Investigators have yet to pinpoint the location of MH370’s final resting place, despite months of frantic searching by international teams..

The hunt has been scaled back to an undersea operation in the southern Indian Ocean west of Australia that is expected to take between eight to 12 months.

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asif iqbal said:

What else do we have to witness before this stops? How many more have to die needlessly

Is Russia above international law??

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17: Pro-Russian Looters Rifle Through British Victim's Belongings And 'Take Bodies Of The Dead'
The Huffington Post UK

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ABC News Moscow correspondent Kirit Radia says: "OSCE on their visit to MH17 crash site today: "Some of the 'Donetsk People's Republic's' guards were visibly intoxicated and aggressive."

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MH370: satellite phone call revealed as Australia gives update on search

Failed call placed by Malaysia Airlines ground staff has been traced and supports Indian Ocean crash theory, say authorities

Staff and agencies
theguardian.com, Thursday 28 August 2014 07.43 BST

Malaysia Airlines staff tried to contact the crew of missing flight MH370 by satellite phone after it disappeared from radar, Australian authorities have announced, with details about the failed call now being used to refine the suspected final path of the plane.

Australia’s deputy prime minister, Warren Truss, said analysis of the failed call to the plane, which disappeared on 8 March, “suggests to us that the aircraft might have turned south a little earlier than we had previously expected”.

The airliner disappeared with 239 people aboard after flying far off its original course from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Based on a series of satellite signals from its automated systems, it is believed to have gone down in the southern Indian Ocean off Western Australia. The satellite phone call is a new and separate detail.

“After MH370 disappeared from the radar, Malaysia Airlines ground staff sought to make contact using a satellite phone. That was unsuccessful,” Truss said.

“But the detailed research that’s being done now has been able to … trace that phone call and help position the aircraft and the direction it was travelling.”

The minister said investigators still believed MH370 was somewhere on the search zone’s seventh arc, where its flight data communication systems emitted a final satellite “handshake”.

“It remains on the seventh arc – that is, there is a very, very strong view that this aircraft will be resting on the seventh arc,” he said.

Truss said ongoing mapping of 87,000 square kilometres of the ocean floor had uncovered “quite remarkable geographical features” including the discovery of new undersea volcanoes up to 2,000 metres (6,562ft) high.

“In one place in particular … the sea depth is as little as 600 metres and then falls away in just a very short distance to 6,600 metres,” he said.

Truss and the Malaysian transport minister, Liow Tiong Lai, signed a memorandum of understanding on Thursday on co-operation in the search for the missing Boeing 777 as it progresses to the expensive next phase. The agreement shares the ongoing costs between the two countries.

Liow said investigators had advised that success of the undersea search for wreckage and the aircraft’s back boxes with cockpit voice recordings and flight data was crucial to solving the mystery of the disaster.

“The investigation cannot continue without the search result,” Liow said.

“We need to find the plane, we need to find the black box in the plane so that we can have a conclusion in the investigation.”

Malaysia, as the country where the Boeing 777 was flagged, has overall responsibility for the crash investigation. But Australia has search and rescue responsibility for the area of the Indian Ocean where the plane is thought to have crashed 1,800km (1,100 miles) off Western Australia.

A Dutch contractor, Fugro Survey, will conduct the underwater search for the Boeing 777 starting in September. Three vessels towing underwater vehicles equipped with side-scan sonar, multi-beam echo sounders and video equipment would search for the plane, Truss said.

Before the underwater search starts, two survey ships are mapping the entire search area. The overall search costing tens of millions of dollars could take up to a year, Truss said.

The Chinese vice-minister of transport, He Jianzhong, who also attended the Canberra meeting, said the ministers had all agreed that the search would not be interrupted or given up. The plan had 153 Chinese passengers, the most of any nationality on board.

The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

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delft said:

A news conference in Canberra after talks between Australian, Malaysian and Chinese ministers:

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