Seabed search for missing Malaysian jet to widen

 

AP In this April 1, 2014 file photo, provided by the U.S. Navy, the Bluefin 21 autonomous sub is hoisted back on board the Australian Defense Vessel Ocean Shield after successful buoyancy testing in the Indian Ocean, as search efforts continue for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

The seabed search for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet is set to widen as a sonar scan of the most likely crash site deep beneath the Indian Ocean nears completion without yielding a single clue, authorities said on Friday.

Meanwhile in Beijing, about 50 relatives of Chinese passengers on the plane continued a sit-in protest outside the Malaysian Embassy after officials failed to show up to update them on the search.

The Australian search coordination centre said a robotic submarine had scanned 95 per cent of a 310 sq.km search area since last week but had found nothing of interest. The U.S. Navy’s Bluefin 21 is creating a three-dimensional sonar map of the ocean floor near where signals consistent with airplane black boxes were heard on April 8.

The search area is a circle with a 10km radius, 4.5 km deep off the west Australian coast. The search of the target area is scheduled to be completed within days.

“If no contacts of interest are made, Bluefin 21 will continue to examine the areas adjacent to the radius,” the centre said in a statement.

“We are currently consulting very closely with our international partners on the best way to continue the search into the future,” it added, referring to Malaysia, United States and China.

Malaysia hopes to release to the public next week a preliminary investigation report on the plane’s disappearance, an official in Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s department said.

“We are also looking at releasing the cargo manifest and aircraft seating arrangement,” said the official, who declined to be named, citing departmental policy.

The report has already been sent to the United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organization, the official said.

The Malaysian government, which has primary responsibility for the investigation, has been criticized for mismanaging the search, concealing information about the tragedy and of being too slow to update families of the missing on developments.

In Beijing, the relatives had marched to the Malaysian Embassy from their hotel on Thursday night after Malaysian officials failed to show up for a promised briefing.

“We keep on waiting because we want the news,” said Steve Wang, whose parents were aboard the flight and who has served as a representative for the relatives.

“What we are concerned about is where is the plane, and where are our loved ones,” Mr. Wang said.

Some relatives scuffled with police officers who tried to prevent them leaving the hotel. On Friday morning, more than 100 police and paramilitary officers had cordoned off the area around the embassy in a northeastern diplomatic district that is also home to the U.S. Embassy.

Mr. Wang said the relatives felt slighted by the failure of the Malaysian officials to appear for the briefing. A number of Chinese relatives have refused to accept the theory that the plane crashed in the Indian Ocean and insist that Malaysian officials have not told them the truth about the plane’s disappearance.

Australian Defence Minister David Johnston said this week that an announcement was likely next week on the next phase of the search for the Boeing 777 which vanished with 239 passengers and crew mostly Chinese on board on March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

On Friday, up to 8 planes and 10 ships were to search for debris over a 49,000 sq.km ocean expanse 1,600km northwest of the city of Perth where the search is headquartered, the centre said.

‘Malaysian jet may have skirted Indonesian airspace’

AP A U.S. Navy plane P-8 Poseidon takes off from Perth Airport on the route to rejoin the search operation for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in Perth on Sunday.

A Malaysian government official has revealed that the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 avoided Indonesian airspace after leaving Kuala Lumpur, The Sydney Morning Herald reported Monday.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorised to talk to the media, said Indonesian authorities said the plane did not show up on their military radar.

The plane could have deliberately flown around Indonesian airspace to avoid detection, or may have coincidentally travelled out of radar range, he said.

The revelation came as searchers for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet intensified in the southern Indian Ocean to determine whether a few brief sounds picked up by underwater equipment came from the plane’s black boxes, whose battery-powered pingers are on the verge of dying out.

Meanwhile, Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) said Monday that up to nine military planes, three civil planes and 14 ships will assist in search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

The search area is expected to be approximately 234,000 sq km.

Royal Australian Navy’s ship Ocean Shield is continuing investigations in its own area.

HMS Echo was en route to assist the Chinese vessel Haixun 01, which detected pulse signals in the Indian Ocean.

A Chinese ship picked up an electronic pulsing signal Friday and again Saturday, and an Australian ship carrying sophisticated deep-sea acoustic equipment detected a signal in a different area Sunday.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished mysteriously about an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur shortly after midnight March 8.

The Boeing 777—200ER was scheduled to land in Beijing the same day. The 227 passengers on board included five Indians, 154 Chinese and 38 Malaysians.

Despite extensive scouring of the remote southern Indian Ocean area by planes and ships off the coast of Perth, where the plane is believed to have crashed, no trace has been found.

China demands Malaysian satellite data on plane

BEIJING: China demanded Tuesday that Malaysia turn over satellite data used to conclude that a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet was lost in the southern Indian Ocean with no survivors during a flight to Beijing.

Among the flight´s 239 passengers, 153 were Chinese nationals, making the incident a highly emotional one for Beijing. Family members of the missing passengers have complained bitterly about a lack of reliable information and some suspect they are not being told the whole truth.

Deputy Foreign Minister Xie Hangsheng told Malaysia´s ambassador to Beijing that China wanted to know what exactly led Malaysia to announce Monday night that the plane had been lost, China´s Foreign Ministry said on its web site. "We demand the Malaysian side to make clear the specific basis on which they come to this judgment," Xie was quoted as telling Datuk Iskandar Bin Sarudin during their meeting late Monday.

There was no immediate response from the Malaysian side. Monday´s announcement sparked mournful, angry and chaotic scenes at the Beijing hotel where relatives had gathered. Around 2:00 a.m. Tuesday morning (1800 GMT Monday) a group of family members read out a statement condemning Malaysia Airlines and the Malaysian government and military and vowing to hold them responsible for the deaths of their loved ones.

The plane vanished less than an hour into an overnight flight March 8 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Relatives planned to stage a further protest outside the Malaysian Embassy in Beijing.

Missing Malaysian jet crashed in Indian Ocean: PM Najib

 

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia said on Monday the passenger jet which went missing more than two weeks ago crashed in the Indian Ocean, but shed no light on the mystery of why it veered from its intended course.
Prime Minister Najib Razak said new satellite analysis of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370’s path placed its last position in remote waters off Australia’s west coast, and far from any landing sites.

The sombre announcement on the fate of the plane ended 17 days of agonising uncertainty for relatives of those on board — two-thirds of them Chinese.“It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean,” Najib said. He said the flag carrier had already spoken to the families of the passengers and crew aboard the jet, which disappeared on March 8 on an overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. “For them, the past few weeks have been heartbreaking; I know this news must be harder still.”

Najib said he had been briefed by representatives from Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch, which relayed further analysis of satellite data by British company Inmarsat.

The airline, in a statement sent to families, said “we have to assume” the plane was lost. “Our prayers go out to all the loved ones of the 226 passengers and of our 13 friends and colleagues at this enormously painful time,” it said. “We know there are no words that we or anyone else can say which can ease your pain.”

The airline said the multinational search, which is scouring a stretch of the forbidding Indian Ocean to find any debris, would continue “as we seek answers to the questions which remain.”Malaysia believes the plane was deliberately diverted by someone on board. But the absence of firm evidence has fuelled intense speculation and conspiracy theories, and tormented the families of the missing.

Leading theories include a hijacking, pilot sabotage, or a sudden mid-air crisis that incapacitated the flight crew and left the plane to fly on auto-pilot until it ran out of fuel.The search swung deep into the Indian Ocean last week after initial satellite images depicted large floating objects there.

Hopes of a resolution to the mystery rose after a weekend in which an Australian aircraft spotted a wooden pallet, strapping and other debris, and French and Chinese satellite information indicated more floating objects.

An Australian-led multinational air and sea search has been scouring the vast ocean and there were two separate sightings on Wednesday of possible debris from the plane. Crew members of an Australian P-3 Orion plane reported seeing two objects, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott told parliament. Australian officials said they were different to pieces seen by a Chinese plane earlier in the day.

The Australian naval ship HMAS Success, equipped with a crane, was in the area, about 2,500 kilometres southwest of Perth, and will attempt to recover the objects.Abbott cautioned that it was not known whether the objects came from the missing Boeing 777. “Nevertheless we are hopeful that we can recover these objects soon and they will take us a step closer to resolving this tragic mystery,” he said.

The US Navy has added to the sense of an approaching denouement, ordering a specialised device sent to the region to help find the “black box” flight and cockpit voice data — crucial in determining what happened to the plane.

The high-tech device can locate black boxes as deep as 20,000 feet (6,060 metres), the US Seventh Fleet said in a statement. The search area ranges from 3,000-4,000 metres deep.The 30-day signal from the black box is due to fail in less than two weeks.

If a crash is confirmed, recovering the black box will be even more difficult than the case of the Air France jet that went down in the Atlantic in 2009, said Charitha Pattiaratchi, an oceanographer at the University of Western Australia.

As part of an investigation into the crash, Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said police have interviewed more than 100 people, including families of both the pilot and co-pilot.Malaysia Airlines said on Monday that 27-year-old co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid was flying the Boeing 777 for the first time without a so-called “check co-pilot” looking over his shoulder.

Vietnam scales down search for missing Malaysian jet

Vietnam has scaled down its search activities for the MH370 flight missing from last four days. (Reuters)

Vietnam said on Wednesday it was scaling back the search in Vietnamese waters for a Malaysian Airlines jetliner missing for four days, a senior Vietnamese official said.
“We still have plans to search with a few flights today, while other activities are suspended,” Deputy Transport Minister Pham Quy Tieu, who heads the Vietnam search, told reporters. Tieu said searches by ships were being suspended.
He said Vietnam had asked Malaysian authorities for information about reports that the plane, carrying 239 passengers and crew, had changed direction after its last known contact on Saturday but it had yet to receive any response.
Earlier on Wednesday, the head of Malaysia’s air force denied making comments that the Malaysian military had last tracked the plane far to the west of its course over the Strait of Malacca.