MH370: How can jet disappear? In the ocean, it's not hard

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — In an age when people assume that any bit of information is just a click away, the thought that a jetliner could simply disappear over the ocean for more than two days is staggering. But Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is hardly the first reminder of how big the seas are, and of how agonizing it can be to try to find something lost in them.

It took two years to find the main wreckage of an Air France jet that plunged into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009. Closer to the area between Malaysia and Vietnam where Saturday's flight vanished, it took a week for debris from an Indonesian jet to be spotted in 2007. Today, the mostly intact fuselage still sits on the bottom of the ocean.

"The world is a big place," said Michael Smart, professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Queensland in Australia. "If it happens to come down in the middle of the ocean and it's not near a shipping lane or something, who knows how long it could take them to find?"

Amid the confusion, officials involved in the search say the Malaysian jet may have made a U-turn, adding one more level of uncertainty to the effort to find it. They even suggest that the plane could be hundreds of kilometers from where it was last detected.

Aviation experts say the plane will be found — eventually. Since the start of the jet age in 1958, only a handful of jets have gone missing and not been found.

"I'm absolutely confident that we will find this airplane," Capt. John M. Cox, who spent 25 years flying for US Airways and is now CEO of Safety Operating Systems, said Monday. The modern pace of communications, where GPS features in our cars and smartphones tell us our location at any given moment, has set unreal expectations. "This is not the first time we have had to wait a few days to find the wreckage."

Based on what he's heard, Cox believes it's increasingly clear that the plane somehow veered from its normal flight path. He said that after the plane disappeared from radar, it must have been "intact and flew for some period of time. Beyond that, it's all speculation." If it had exploded midair along its normal flight path, "we would have found it by now."

Malaysian civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, whose agency is leading a multinational effort to find the Boeing 777, said more than 1,000 people and at least 34 planes and 40 ships were searching a radius of 100 nautical miles (115 miles; 185 kilometers) around the last known location of Flight MH370. No signal has been detected since early Saturday morning, when the plane was at its cruising altitude and showed no sign of trouble.

Azharuddin said the search includes northern parts of the Malacca Strait, on the opposite side of the Malay Peninsula and far west of the plane's last known location. Azharuddin would not explain why crews were searching there, saying, "There are some things that I can tell you and some things that I can't."

Malaysian Maj. Gen. Datuk Affendi Buang, who is helping oversee the ongoing search, said the search will take time.

"The only thing I could say is it's difficult. There are so many examples of aircraft lost in the sea — you know it can take days, sometimes months, sometimes years," he said.

Some aviation experts are already calling for airlines to update their cockpit technology to provide a constant stream of data — via satellites — back to the ground. Information about key system operations is already recorded on the flight data and voice recorders — the so-called black boxes — but as this crash shows is not immediately available. Such satellite uplinks would be costly and the benefit is debated.

Just about every major jet to disappear in the modern era has eventually been found. The rare exceptions didn't involve passengers.

In September 1990, a Boeing 727 owned by Faucett Airlines of Peru was ditched into the North Atlantic after running out of fuel on its way to Miami. The accident was attributed to poor pilot planning and the wreck was never recovered.

More mysterious was the disappearance of another 727 in Africa. It was being used to transport diesel fuel to diamond mines. The owners had numerous financial problems and one day, just before sunset, the plane took off without clearance and with its transponder turned off. It is believed to have crashed in the Atlantic Ocean. One theory, never proven, is that it was stolen so the owner could collect insurance.

"I can't think of a water crash in the jet age that hasn't been solved ," said Scott Hamilton, managing director of aviation consultancy Leeham Co.

The Malaysia Airlines jet had been headed from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The 239 people aboard were mostly from China. In Beijing, passengers' relatives have complained that the airline has not been forthcoming with information, and that they've had to rely on news reports.

Some of those reports, however, have led to dead ends. Those false alarms appeared to leave searchers with little to go on.

Whether the plane broke up in midair or crashed into the water, there would be some debris.

If the plane broke up "for some aerodynamic reason, like the wing fell off or there was a depressurization, there'd be big chunks of wing and fuselage all over the place. So it'd be very unlikely that it would just be destroyed and turned to dust," said Smart, the aerospace engineering professor.

He added that much of the wreckage may be at the bottom of the sea, which is 50 to 60 meters (165 to 195 feet) deep in the area where the plane was last detected.

The size of the debris field will be one of the first indicators of what happened, aviation experts say. A large, widespread field would signal the plane likely broke apart at a high elevation, perhaps because of a bomb or a massive airframe failure. A smaller field would indicate the plane probably fell intact, breaking up upon impact with the water.

Discovering the debris can take days.

A week after an Adam Air flight carrying 102 people vanished over Indonesian waters on Jan. 1, 2007, an Indonesian navy ship detected metal on the ocean floor. But it would take another two weeks for the U.S. Navy to pick up signals from the flight data and cockpit recorders, and seven months for the boxes to be recovered. The fuselage remains on the ocean floor, and Adam Air is now defunct.

___

Gelineau reported from Sydney. Mayerowitz reported from New York. Chris Brummitt and Jim Gomez in Kuala Lumpur and Niniek Karmini in Jakarta contributed to this report.

MH370: TUDM kesan pesawat tak dikenali lepas MH370 hilang

SHAH ALAM - Tentera Udara Diraja Malaysia mendedahkan, sebuah pesawat tidak dikenali dikesan di ruang udara utara Selat Melaka selepas penerbangan MH370 gagal dikesan.

Panglima TUDM Tan Sri Rodzali Daud memberitahu, pesawat yang masih belum dikenalpasti itu mungkin pesawat Malaysia Airlines yang dijadualkan ke Beijing.

“Saya tidak kata bahawa ini adalah MH370. Kami sedang mengesahkannya. Kami masih bekerjasama dengan pakar," katanya dalam satu sidang media, hari ini.

Rodzali berkata, pesawat tidak dikenali itu dikesan pada jam 2.15 pagi Sabtu, selang kira-kira 45 minit selepas MH370 hilang dari skrin kawalan udara.

Katanya, radar tentera mengesan pesawat tidak dikenali itu berada pada kedudukan kira-kira 320 kilometer di barat laut Pulau Pinang.

Pendedahan itu muncul hanya beberapa jam selepas beliaumenafikan laporan akhbar bahawa radar tentera mengesan MH370 berpatah balik dan terbang ke arah Selat Melaka.

@sinar harian

The search for MH370: Key areas of confusion

False alarms, swirling rumours and contradictory statements have made the wait all the more agonising for the families of the 239 people on board the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

As the search dragged into its fifth day, here are some of the key areas of confusion:

Did the plane veer off course?

Malaysia's air force chief on Sunday raised the possibility that the plane inexplicably turned back after taking off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing a day earlier.

RMAF's Tan Sri General Rodzali Daud said the theory was "corroborated by civil radar", without giving further details.

Late Tuesday, Rodzali was quoted by a local Bahasa Malaysia daily as saying the aircraft had been tracked hundreds of miles from its intended flight path, over the Strait of Malacca.

Vietnam had initially said the plane was approaching its airspace when it vanished from radar screens.

Rodzali has since insisted that he did not make the comments attributed to him by the Berita Harian newspaper, and the report was "inaccurate and incorrect".

The search today swung even further up Malaysia's west coast, towards the Andaman Sea, but officials gave no indication there was a firm reason to expand the search other than its failure to bear fruit so far.

Timings

Officials say contact with the aircraft was lost at around 1.30am Malaysian time, about an hour after take-off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

Initially, Malaysia Airlines had put the last contact time at 2.40am.

The timing of 1.30 am would place the plane between Malaysia and Vietnam, where Vietnamese air traffic control and flight-tracking websites say the plane vanished off radar.

The later time of 2.40 am could suggest the plane had indeed veered radically off-course.

Despite the Malaysian air force chief's denial of the Berita Harian report, that theory has gained credence given the expanded search area off Malaysia's west coast.

Search areas

The search began in the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand, on the approach to Vietnamese airspace.

Since then, Malaysian authorities have widened the search radius several times as well as shifting its focus, fuelling accusations of official bungling and a slow-footed response.

Authorities have not said whether they have any firm indications that the plane might be in the Andaman Sea.

Vietnam suspended its air search and scaled back a sea search today - awaiting clarification from Malaysia about the potential new direction for the search, which involves dozens of ships and aircraft from several countries including China and the United States.

Debris

There have been several false alarms linked to debris spotted in busy shipping lanes in Southeast Asian waters.

Large oil slicks found by Vietnamese planes on Saturday yielded no trace of the plane, nor did debris found Sunday near Tho Chu island, part of a small archipelago off southwest Vietnam.

Malaysia sent ships to investigate a sighting of a possible life raft on Monday, but a Vietnamese vessel that got there first found only flotsam.

Chemical analysis by Malaysia on Monday found no link between the oil slick found at sea and the missing plane.

Stolen passports

Revelations that two of the passengers were travelling on stolen EU passports fuelled early speculation that the plane was the victim of a terrorist attack.

Malaysia's national news agency, Bernama on Sunday quoted Home Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi as saying the two suspect passengers had "Asian features", without elaborating.

It emerged on Tuesday that the pair appear to be Iranian illegal immigrants who were seeking a new life in Europe.

Phones ringing

Chinese media have reported that relatives have heard ringing tones when trying to call their missing loved ones' mobile phones.

The accounts of some passengers on Chinese messaging tool QQ show they had been online, other reports say, although the operator says that failure to shut the software down properly can give that impression.

Alfred Siew, a Singapore-based technology commentator, admits it is a "mystery", but said the matter could be merely due to a network error affecting some phones.

Luggage

Datuk Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, head of Malaysia's Department of Civil Aviation, said Monday that five passengers who had purchased tickets and checked baggage did not make the flight.

He told journalists their luggage was removed from the plane, as per standard procedure, when routine checks indicated the five passengers had not boarded before take-off.

But Malaysia's chief of police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar insisted yesterday that all passengers who booked the flight did board in the end.

However, muddying things further, Malaysia Airlines issued a statement hours later saying there were indeed four passengers who had valid bookings but did not check-in for the flight.

Balotelli

Malaysia's civil aviation chief, Azharuddin, also drew scorn on social media by referring to black Italian footballer Mario Balotelli when discussing the two suspicious passengers who boarded the plane with stolen passports.

When asked what the two suspects travelling on EU passports looked like, Azharuddin referenced Balotelli, who was born in Italy to Ghanaian parents and is an Italian international player, as an example of how one's skin colour does not necessarily indicate nationality.

Malaysia's transport ministry later issued a statement saying "no ill feelings" were meant by the comment, but the social media reaction underlined feelings of embarrassment with so much world attention focussed on the plane search. – AFP, March 12, 2014.

MH370: Confusion as search for flight MH370 spreads across Southeast Asia

The search for a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner expanded today to cover a swathe of Southeast Asia, from the South China Sea to India's territorial waters, with authorities no closer to explaining what happened to the plane or the 239 people on board.

Vietnam briefly scaled down search operations in waters off its southern coast, saying it was receiving scanty and confusing information from Malaysia over where the aircraft may have headed after it lost contact with air traffic control.

Hanoi later said the search - now in its fifth day - was back on in full force and was even extending on to land. China also said its air force would sweep areas in the sea, clarifying, however, that no searches over land were planned.

The seas off India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands are also being combed for traces of the lost jet.

"We are expanding to the east of the expected route of the flight and on land," Lieutenant General Vo Van Tuan, Vietnam's deputy army chief of staff and spokesman for its search and rescue committee, told reporters.

The confusion over where to look is adding to one of the most baffling mysteries in modern aviation history, and prolonging the agonising wait for hundreds of relatives of the missing.

Flight MH370 dropped out of sight an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing early on Saturday, under clear night skies and with no suspicion of any mechanical problems.

Dozens of planes and ships have already searched tens of thousands of square miles of Malaysia and off both its coasts without finding a trace of the Boeing 777.

Adding to the frustration and uncertainty, Malaysia's military has said the plane could have turned around from its planned flight path, but there were conflicting statements and reports about how far and in which direction it could have flown after communication was lost.

Off course?

Malaysia's air force chief, General Rodzali Daud, denied saying military radar had tracked MH370 flying over the Strait of Malacca off the country's west coast, about 500km from the point, roughly midway between the east coast town of Kota Baru and Vietnam, where it was last seen by air traffic control.

Malaysia's Berita Harian newspaper on Tuesday quoted Rodzali as saying the plane was last detected at the northern end of the Strait of Malacca at 2.40am on Saturday, more than an hour after it lost contact.

"It would not be appropriate for the Royal Malaysian Air Force to issue any official conclusions as to the aircraft's flight path until a high amount of certainty and verification is achieved," Rodzali said in a statement on Wednesday.

"However all ongoing search operations are at the moment being conducted to cover all possible areas where the aircraft could have gone down in order to ensure no possibility is overlooked."

Indonesia and Thailand, which lie on either side of the northern part of the Malacca Strait, have said their militaries detected no sign of any unusual aircraft in their airspace.

The massive search operation involving ships and aircraft from 10 countries is spread out over the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea, which lie betweenMalaysia and Vietnam, and in the Strait of Malacca extending into the Andaman Sea.

An Indian foreign ministry official said Malaysia has sought its help in the search. India has a large military command in its Andaman and Nicobar islands and itsnavy patrols in the Malacca Strait.

One of several theories

A senior military officer who had been briefed on the investigation told Reuters on Tuesday that the missing aircraft had made a detour to the west after communications with civilian authorities ended.

"It changed course after Kota Baru and took a lower altitude. It made it into the Malacca Strait," the officer said.

After the comments from the officer, a non-military source familiar with the investigations said the reported detour was one of several theories and was being checked.

If the plane had made such a detour it would undermine the theory that it suffered a sudden, catastrophic mechanical failure, as it would mean it flew at least 500kmd after its last contact with air traffic control.

In the absence of any concrete evidence to explain the plane's disappearance, authorities have not ruled out anything. Police have said they were investigating whether any passengers or crew on the plane had personal or psychological problems that might shed light on the mystery, along with the possibility of a hijacking, sabotage or mechanical failure.

The airline said it was taking seriously a report by a South African woman who said the co-pilot of the missing plane had invited her and a female companion to sit in the cockpit during a flight two years ago, in an apparent breach of security.

"Malaysia Airlines has become aware of the allegations being made against First Officer Fariq Ab Hamid which we take very seriously. We are shocked by these allegations. We have not been able to confirm the validity of the pictures and videos of the alleged incident," the airline said in a statement.

The woman, Jonti Roos, told Reuters that she and her friend were invited to fly in the cockpit by Fariq and the pilot between Phuket, Thailand, and Kuala Lumpur in December 2011.

"I thought that they were highly skilled and highly competent and since they were doing it that it was allowed," Roos said. "I want to make it clear, at no point did I feel we were in danger or that they were acting irresponsibly."

Hugh Dunleavy, the commercial director of Malaysia Airlines, told Reuters there was no reason to blame the crew.

"We have no reason to believe that there was anything, any actions, internally by the crew that caused the disappearance of this aircraft," he said.

The Boeing 777 has one of the best safety records of any commercial aircraft in service. Its only previous fatal crash came on July 6 last year when Asiana Airlines Flight 214 struck a seawall on landing in San Francisco, killing three people.

US planemaker Boeing has declined to comment beyond a brief statement saying it was monitoring the situation. – Reuters, March 12, 2014.

Jumpa rakit getah di Selat Melaka

Oleh Mohd Helmi Irwadi Mohd Nor

Port Dickson: Satu objek dipercayai rakit getah keselamatan kapal terbang dengan tulisan 'boarding' ditemui sekumpulan empat nelayan kira-kira 10 batu nautika dari pantai di sini, semalam.

Penemuan kira-kira jam 12 tengah hari itu dipercayai dapat memberi petunjuk dalam usaha pihak berkuasa mengesan pesawat MH370 milik Penerbangan Malaysia (MAS) yang dilaporkan hilang dan terputus hubungan dengan menara kawalan sejak awal Sabtu lalu.

Nelayan Azman Mohamad, 40 berkata, mereka sedang menangkap ikan di perairan terbabit sebelum sebelum terpandang objek berkenaan tenggelam timbul dipukul ombak.


Katanya, dia bersama tiga rakan yang mengikuti perkembangan kes kehilangan pesawat MH370 melalui media, tertarik untuk melihat objek itu dengan lebih dekat.

"Saya dan rakan sedaya upaya cuba mengambil objek itu dan berjaya sebelum menambatnya pada bot kerana bimbang ia tenggelam dalam laut.

"Objek itu mungkin tidak mampu terapung lama kerana koyak atau bocor," katanya, ketika dihubungi semalam.
Azman yang sudah 20 tahun menjadi nelayan berkata, mereka keluar menangkap ikan pada jam 8 pagi dan pulang kira-kira jam 8 malam.

"Sebaik menemui objek itu, saya terus menghubungi Agensi Penguatkuasaan Maritim Malaysia (APMM) di Kuala Linggi, Melaka, untuk mendapatkan bantuan selepas gagal menaikkan objek itu yang terlalu berat.

"Saya yakin penemuan objek itu penting kerana mungkin boleh menjadi petunjuk kepada usaha mencari pesawat MH370 kerana terdapat tulisan ‘boarding’ pada permukaan objek itu.

"Ia mungkin adalah rakit getah penyelamat yang dibekalkan kepada penumpang pesawat untuk menyelamatkan diri di laut," katanya.

Katanya, sebaik bot APMM tiba di lokasi, tugas mengangkat objek itu diserahkan kepada pasukan berkenaan, manakala mereka kemudian menyambung kerja menangkap ikan.

Sementara itu, jurucakap APMM Kuala Linggi ketika dihubungi mengesahkan sepasukan anggotanya dihantar ke tempat kejadian untuk menyiasat penemuan itu.

Bagaimanapun, katanya objek itu terus tenggelam dalam laut dan tidak sempat diselamatkan.

Artikel ini disiarkan pada : 2014/03/12@Harian Metro

China’s satellites missed detecting MH370 because they were eyeing other parts of the globe

Frustrated researchers have pointed out that China missed a golden opportunity to exploit the capability of its satellites in the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

The South China Morning Post quoted Dr Chi Tianhe, a researcher in satellite imaging with the Chinese Academy of Sciences who took part in the search, as saying that when the Boeing 777-200ER was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing last Saturday, no Chinese satellites were observing it.

Chi said while China had enough satellites to monitor a large area around the clock, including the search zone, monitoring every bit of land and sea would require too many people.

"Chinese satellites' real-time surveillance capability will likely be strengthened after this incident," Chi, a professor with the academy's Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth in Beijing, told the South China Morning Post.

China had used its satellites to search for the missing aircraft in the waters between Vietnam and Malaysia several hours after Malaysia Airlines announced that the plane had disappeared.

The failure of the search has raised questions over its strategy and its multinational co-ordination.

Professor Wu Dong, a satellite remote-sensing expert with the Ocean University of China in Qingdao, told South China Morning Post that the lack of satellite evidence of the plane suggested that the designated search zones could be wrong.

Professor Xie Tao, an expert in ocean satellite remote-sensing at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, said it was possible that the resolution of the satellites doing the search was not high enough.

"The waves would also distort microwave images and make analysis difficult.

"The longer the search takes, the farther the debris would be carried away by currents from the crash site," Xie said.

Chinese researchers have been using high-resolution satellite imaging equipment to search for the Boeing aircraft. This has included satellites with many different sensors, including high-resolution optical telescopes, infrared cameras, synthetic aperture radar and microwave detectors.

South China Morning Post said the search project has also used military satellites with classified technological details. In addition, China has paid overseas commercial satellite companies to use their advanced satellites and to obtain their data.

The satellite equipment allowed researchers to examine specific areas of the sea for wreckage and debris day and night, under all kinds of weather conditions, Chi said.

Although he would not say the size of objects that could be detected by the satellites, Chi said the resolution was "definitely high enough for the job".

Some US and Canadian satellites can distinguish an object as small as half a metre in size, but the ocean waves could make precise detection difficult.

While civilian satellites might have difficulty finding debris, military spy satellites should be able to do the job because they are designed to search for very small targets, Wu said.

He told the South China Morning Post that judging from the lack of wreckage, it was possible that the plane made a successful water landing, but then sank to the ocean floor in one piece.

"But if the crew achieved such a miracle, why didn't they radio for help?" Wu asked. "From a technical point of view, I cannot find a good explanation for the complete disappearance."

The lack of evidence also frustrates Chi. "If such a large plane had fallen in the ocean, it would leave some signs on the surface," he said. "The plane seems to have disappeared completely. To us it is unreasonable." – March 12, 2014.

@The Malaysian Insider

Was Flight MH370’s transponder intentionally switched off?

With confusion over where the missing flight MH370 was headed, the speculation is now centred on the Boeing 777-200ER's communications, including important transponder signals that send data on altitude, direction and speed.

The Malaysia Airlines passenger jet lost all communications at 1.30am on Saturday but yet showed up on radar for about 70 minutes longer until it vanished, having apparently moved away from its intended destination, hundreds of kilometres off course.

Those details – told to CNN by a senior Malaysian air force official, who declined to be named because he is not authorised to speak to the media – shed more light on what happened to the aircraft that mysteriously went missing early Saturday.

But many big questions remain, CNN said in a report today.

Why were the communications lost? Why was the Boeing 777 going the direction it was? And where did it end up?

"Something happened to that airplane, that was obviously out of the norm, that caused it to depart from its normal flight path," said Mark Weiss, a former 777 pilot now with the Washington-based Spectrum Group consulting firm. "It's difficult not to speculate."

Peter Goelz, former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board, thinks all this information – if correct – ominously suggests that someone purposefully cut off the transponder and steered the plane from its intended investigation.

"This kind of deviation in course is simply inexplicable," Goelz was quoted as saying by the global television news channel.

Other experts aren't convinced that there were bad actors – be they hijackers or an ill-intentioned crew member. They say there could have been some sort of sudden catastrophic electronic failure or more that spurred the crew to try to turn around, with no luck.

"Perhaps there was a power problem," said veteran pilot Kit Darby, former president of Aviation Information Resources, adding that back-up power systems would only last about an hour.

"(It is) natural for the pilot, in my view, to return to where he knows the airports."

Still, while they have theories, even those who have piloted massive commercial airliners like this one admit that they can't conclude anything until the plane is found.

For now, the massive multinational search has yielded no breakthrough – which has only added to the heartache for the friends and family of the 239 passengers and crew on board.

The Malaysian air force official's revelations may provide more direction, though clarity and closure are still elusive.

"There are still as many possibilities out there, maybe more, now that we know about the transponders being off and the length of time that plane flew in the air without them," said CNN law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes.

"It still leaves mechanical, terrorism (and) other issues as much in the air as they were before."

According to the Malaysian air force official, the plane's transponder apparently stopped working at about the time flight controllers lost contact with it, near the coast of Vietnam.

The air force eventually and totally lost track of the plane over Pulau Perak, a tiny island in the Strait of Malacca – many hundreds of kilometres from the usual flight path for aircraft travelling between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, the official said.

If the data cited by the source is correct, the aircraft was flying away from Beijing and on the opposite side of the peninsula from its scheduled route.

But Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF) General Tan Sri Rodzali Daud has denied giving that statement and a Malaysian government spokesman said Putrajaya was unaware of the plane turning back towards the Malacca strait.

Why would the transponder – an electrical instrument in commercial airline cockpits that continuously transmits information such as altitude, location, direction and speed – have gone off? asked CNN.

Goelz and others said the only reason for someone to intentionally turn off the transponder was to conceal the plane's location and direction.

Someone with nefarious intentions of taking over an aircraft and steering it to where it wasn't supposed to be – or perhaps planning on crashing it – might do just that.

"You have to have a very deliberate process to turn the transponder off," he said. "There might still be mechanical explanations on what was going on, but those mechanical explanations are narrowing quickly."

Anthony Roman, a trained pilot and consultant, said that a fast-moving fire might have moved through the cockpit and rendered everything, including the crew, effectively powerless to do much more than turn the plane around.

"Fires are insidious," Roman told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "They can happen quickly and knock out multiple systems quickly." Darby, for one, believes purely mechanical issues remain the most valid possibility now. His main point is: "Everything is electrical."

In other words, if there's some sort of "catastrophic failure" for whatever reason, that could knock out systems like the transponder.

If that would happen, the plane could fly for some time without electricity but not indefinitely. Any attempts to steer it would be harder in the dark without functioning flight instruments said Darby, a retired United captain.

Authorities have said they're looking at all possibilities to explain what happened to the Malaysia Airlines aircraft.

On Tuesday, the head of the international police organisation Interpol said that his agency increasingly believed the incident was not related to terrorism.

"The more information we get, the more we're inclined to conclude that it was not a terrorist incident," Interpol secretary-general Ronald Noble said at a news conference in Lyon, France.

Yet – speaking on Tuesday about what he called a "very disturbing mystery" – CIA director John Brennan said, "We're not ruling it out. Not at all."

The two passengers who have dominated headlines the last two days entered Malaysia using valid Iranian passports, Noble said.

But they used stolen Austrian and Italian passports to board the missing Malaysian plane, he said. Noble gave their names and ages as Pouri Nourmohammadi, 18, and Delavar Seyed Mohammad Reza, 29.

Malaysian police had earlier identified Nourmohammadi, using a slightly different name and age, and said they believed he was trying to migrate to Germany. Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar said it did not appear the younger Iranian posed a threat.

"We have been checking his background," Khalid said, noting "other police organisations" have been consulted.

"And we believe that he is not likely to be a member of any terrorist group," Khalid said. After he failed to arrive in Frankfurt, the final destination of his ticket, his mother contacted authorities, Khalid said.

According to ticketing records, the ticket to Frankfurt was booked under the stolen Austrian passport. No one knows where these two men and the other 237 people on the plane ended up. Every lead that has raised hopes of tracing the commercial jet has so far petered out.

Over the past few days, search teams have been scouring tens of thousands of square kilometres of ocean off the west coast of the peninsula, in the Strait of Malacca, and north into the Andaman Sea. The search also encompasses the land in between the two areas of sea.

But it could be days, weeks or even months before the searchers find anything that begins to explain what happened to the plane, which disappeared early Saturday en route to Beijing.

In the case of Air France flight 447, which disappeared over the Atlantic in 2009, it took five days just to find the first floating wreckage. And it was nearly two years before investigators found the bulk of the French plane's wreckage and the majority of the bodies of the 228 people on board, about 3,657m below the surface of the ocean.

The Gulf of Thailand, the area where the missing Malaysian plane was last detected, is much shallower, with a maximum depth of only 79m and an average depth of about 46m.

Still, they have to find it first. The newly disclosed revelation about the plane's direction doesn't help, as it means less certainty and more time for currents to move the wreckage around, CNN said.

"Crucial time is passing," David Gallo, with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told CNN's Blitzer on Monday.

"That search area – that haystack – is getting bigger and bigger and bigger." Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Australia, the United States, China and Malaysia were all taking part in the search, White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

That helps takes all forms, such as many as 10 Chinese satellites monitoring the area to the helicopters ready-to-dispatch off of US warships.

CNN aviation correspondent Richard Quest described the search as "extremely painstaking work," suggesting a grid would have been drawn over the ocean for teams to comb, bit by bit. Quest said that the expanding search area shows how little idea rescue officials have of where the plane might be.

But he's still confident they'll find it eventually. "It's not hopeless, by any means. They will find it," he said.

"They have to. They have to know what happened."

Until they do, patience is growing thin for friends and family members of those aboard Flight MH370. As a middle-aged man – the father of one such passenger – shouted on Tuesday at an airline agent in Beijing: "Time is passing by." – March 12, 2014.

@Malaysia Insider

‘Impossible’ that MH370 skipped all radars, expert says

@Reuter's Photo

KUALA LUMPUR, March 11 — It is “impossible” for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 to have escaped all radar detection in the area where it was travelling, unless it entered remote territories, an aviation analyst has said, as the mysterious disappearance of the large aircraft continues to baffle experts around the world.

Frost and Sullivan Asia Pacific aerospace and defence consultant Ravi Madavaram listed areas like Alaska or the Atlantic Ocean as among the few remote areas where airships could possibly fall off the radar, but stressed that it would only be for “brief moments”.

“With so many borders and countries around the sea, it is impossible to skip all the radars,” he told The Malay Mail Online in an email interview.

The search for MH370 entered is fourth day today after more than 80 hours since the large aircraft carrying 239 people mysteriously vanished from sight at 1.30am on Saturday morning.

Experts and investigators have been thrown off by how the numbers have not added up over MH370’s disappearance, and despite intensive search efforts, the aircraft has remained missing, leaving behind not a shred of evidence.

The Boeing B777-200 aircraft was hovering somewhere 120 nautical miles off the coast of Kota Baru when it was last seen on radar.

A large battalion of military aircraft and sea vessels from at least nine nations have been circling the areas where MH370 was last seen — covering a wider expanse of 100 nautical miles today in the waters of the South China Sea, the Straits of Malaccca and Penang — but still, to no avail.

Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) director-general Datuk Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, in hours after the aircraft went missing on Saturday, has said none of the control rooms in neighbouring countries found the jetliner on their radar.

Azharuddin said that the controllers had crossed checked with counterparts in Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam before informing MAS of its missing flight.

With no sign of the aircraft on radar, experts are now toying with the possibility of a mid-air explosion or a major malfunction onboard the aircraft, caused by electrical or technical failures.

But Ravi discounted the likelihood of a total power cut onboard, saying that while it could be possible, it is very rare and has never happened before.

He pointed out that Boeing aircrafts are supported by three electrical power sources — two generators, one in each engine, an auxiliary power unit (APU) and a ram air turbine (RAT).

“For the aircraft to have total electrical failure, all three systems should have failed at the same time.

“This is pretty rare and has not happened,” said Ravi.

Asked if an electrical failure would affect distress signals, the expert pointed out that such malfunctions are typically reported by pilots to the Air Traffic Control (ATC).

At the time of the incident, however, the Subang ATC had not received any distress signals, even though military radar had detected the possibility that the aircraft might have made a turnaround in mid-flight.

“Total electrical failure all of sudden is remotely possible but with redundancy in the current aircraft’s, can be ruled out,” Ravi insisted.

The sudden disappearance of MH370 from radar in the early hours of March 8 and without any distress signal sent has continued to fuel widespread speculation on what happened inside the plane to cause it to disappear from sight.

Malaysian authorities say they cannot rule out terrorism as a cause for the airliner’s disappearance, especially after two passengers were found to have used stolen identities to board the aircraft.

The Boeing 777-200 aircraft left Kuala Lumpur and was about 40 minutes into its journey to Beijing when it vanished from the skies with 239 people on board.

@ Malay mails online

'Radar data can tell if plane blew up'

A veteran military and commercial pilot said today that with radar and transponder information alone, investigators should be able to tell if missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 blew up in mid-air.

The veteran pilot, with 40 years experience, said that since the military revealed yesterday that such readings exists to show that the missing Boeing 777-200ER aircraft may have changed course, then they should also quickly dispel or confirm one or two other theories being probed.

"We need the Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) to come up with the radar picture - the speed of the turnaround and height of the plane.

"What was the radar picture showing? During the turn back that came with a heading change, was it abrupt or gradual?" said the veteran Malaysian pilot, who declined to be named.

Looking at the radar and transponder data, the veteran pilot said, DCA could then rule out searching in the Straits of Malacca and zero in on the exact location of the plane.

"It is highly unlikely that the plane could turnaround and fly towards the Straits of Malacca without our radar detecting it anymore," he said.

Although rare, he said there have been two cases where a plane exploded and disintegrated in the mid-air - the 1988 Lockerbie incident and Trans-World Airlines Flight 800 (TWA 800) in 1996.

In the first tragedy, which occurred in December 1988, a terrorist bomb destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 270 people.

Meanwhile, the TWA flight exploded and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near New York in July 1996, killing 230 people onboard, probably caused by a faulty fuel tank.

'Information could be withheld'

At a press conference in KLIA yesterday, air force chief Rodzali Daud ( left ) said military radar records indicate the plane may have tried to change course, but could not reveal further details due to ongoing investigations.

The veteran pilot further told Malaysiakini that a commercial Boeing plane typically has a 12-kilometre turning radius and could be very slow and easily detected by the radar.

"If the turnaround is fast and tight, something is not right," he said.

DCA has, however said that there had been no distress call reported from the plane which went missing in the wee hours of the morning.

But the veteran pilot insists that even if civilian radar readings and the transponder did not give the information, the defence radar should also give a clue, but acknowledged that such information may be withheld.

"There is a possibility that MH370 could be out of radar coverage on primary mode. If that is the case, what about our air defense radar, did they see anything? This is a security question and the Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF) is privy not to answer in public," he said.

The plane, which took off after midnight on Friday from Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) went undetectable less than an hour later, and did not arrive in Beijing at 6.30 am on March 8 as scheduled.

Three day since the plane went missing, authorities are still searching for the airplane.

The missing plane had 227 passengers, including two infants, and 12 crew members on board. Of these, 152 are Chinese nationals, 38 are Malaysians and the rest are from 12 other countries.

@Malaysia Kini

'Pesawat terbang rendah dari biasa'

KOTA BHARU - Seorang nelayan di sini mendakwa melihat sebuah pesawat terbang lebih rendah daripada biasa di Laut China Selatan, kira-kira lapan batu nautika dari Kuala Besar, Pantai Cahaya Bulan, awal pagi kelmarin.

Azid Ibrahim, 66, berkata, dia melihat pesawat itu kira-kira jam 1.30 pagi semasa membawa lima kaki pancing di kawasan tersebut.

Menurutnya, pesawat itu terbang rendah menghala keluar dari negara ini menuju ke tengah laut.

“Ketika itu hanya saya dan Pak Da (kawannya) sahaja yang melihat kapal terbang itu. Yang lain tidur. Biasalah kami nampak kapal terbang di kawasan ini kerana ia laluan utama, tapi kali ini ia lebih rendah daripada biasa.

"Saya tidak pasti berapa tinggi kapal terbang itu dari muka laut, cuma nampak lampu besar buah kelapa dan di bawah awan. Itu yang saya hairan,” katanya ketika dihubungi, semalam.

Azid, yang sudah 10 tahun membawa kaki pancing ke laut berkata, dia hanya mengetahui mengenai kehilangan MH370 selepas mengikuti berita di televisyen, semalam.

Berikutan itu, dia membuat laporan polis di Ibu Pejabat Polis Daerah (IPD) Kota Bharu, petang semalam.

“Saya hanya ingin beritahu apa yang saya nampak malam itu. Mana tahu ia boleh bantu (pasukan mencari dan menyelamat).

@sinar harian

Family of Chinese passenger on missing MAS flight says mobile phone working

Desperate family members of passengers onboard the missing Malaysia Airlines (MAS) flight MH370 have urged MAS to use satellite technology to pick up signals from mobile phones on the aircraft before they run out of batteries, Singapore's The Sunday Times reported yesterday.

A Chinese family claimed they had successfully reached the mobile phone of a passenger on board the flight, which is still missing after it lost contact with air traffic controllers on Saturday.

A video clip of a man dialling the number of his elder brother was shown on a Beijing Television's news bulletin. The call got connected, but no one picked up.

The man, who did not give his name, spoke to reporters at a Malaysia Airlines briefing in Beijing, and claimed that he made a total of three calls, but no one answered.

An extensive air and sea search resumed for the third day this morning for the missing Boeing 777-200ER aircraft, as more questions arose over its last known location and the identity of some of its passengers on board.

Vietnamese authorities had found fragments believed to be the composite inner door and tail section of the 11-year-old passenger jet, 50 miles south-southwest of Tho Chu island.

Malaysian authorities also found oil slicks some 20 nautical miles from MH370's last known position when it disappeared from radar screens without even a distress call or signal.

Officials investigating the disappearance of flight MH370 with 239 people on board are narrowing the focus of their inquiries on the possibility that it disintegrated in mid-flight.

The MAS jet vanished after climbing to a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing in the early hours of Saturday, but search teams have not been able to make any confirmed discovery of wreckage in seas beneath the plane's flight path almost 48 hours after it took off.

Malaysia Airlines (MAS) is flying the first batch of families of passengers on board flight MH370 to Kuala Lumpur today.

The first batch would comprise family members of only two passengers as they have valid passports and visa to Malaysia.

Up to five family members per passenger would be flown to Kuala Lumpur in the subsequent flights offered by MAS, as the airline wants to bring as many families of the passengers to Kuala Lumpur to get the latest updates. – March 10, 2014.

@Malaysia Insider

Vietnam says it may have found missing jet's door

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Vietnamese aircraft spotted what they suspected was one of the doors of a missing Boeing 777 on Sunday, while troubling questions emerged about how two passengers managed to board the ill-fated aircraft using stolen passports.

Interpol confirmed it knew about the stolen passports but said no authorities checked its vast databases on stolen documents before the Boeing jetliner departed Saturday from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing with 239 people on board.

Warning "only a handful of countries" routinely make such checks, Interpol secretary general Ronald Noble chided authorities for "waiting for a tragedy to put prudent security measures in place at borders and boarding gates."

More than two days after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went missing, the final minutes before its disappearance remained a mystery. The plane lost contact with ground controllers somewhere between Malaysia and Vietnam.

However, searchers in a low-flying plane spotted an object that appeared to be one of the plane's doors, the state-run Thanh Nien newspaper said, citing the deputy chief of staff of Vietnam's army, Lt. Gen. Vo Van Tuan.

Two ships from the maritime police were headed to the site about 60 miles (90 kilometers) south of Tho Chu island in the Gulf of Thailand, the same area where oil slicks were spotted Saturday.

"From this object, hopefully (we) will find the missing plane," Tuan said.

The missing jetliner apparently fell from the sky at cruising altitude in fine weather, and the pilots were either unable or had no time to send a distress signal — unusual circumstances under which a modern jetliner operated by a professional airline would crash.

Authorities were checking on the identities of the two passengers who boarded the plane with stolen passports. On Saturday, the foreign ministries in Italy and Austria said the names of two citizens listed on the flight's manifest matched the names on two passports reported stolen in Thailand.

"I can confirm that we have the visuals of these two people on CCTV," Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said at a news conference late Sunday, adding that the footage was being examined. "We have intelligence agencies, both local and international, on board."

The thefts of the two passports — one belonging to Austrian Christian Kozel and the other to Luigi Maraldi of Italy — were entered into Interpol's database after they were stolen in Thailand in 2012 and last year, the police body said. But no authorities in Malaysia or elsewhere checked the passports against the database of 40 million stolen or lost travel documents before the Malaysian Airlines plane took off.

In a forceful statement, the Interpol chief, who has called passport fraud one of the world's greatest threats, said he hoped "that governments and airlines worldwide will learn from the tragedy."

"Now, we have a real case where the world is speculating whether the stolen passport holders were terrorists," Noble said. "Interpol is asking why only a handful of countries worldwide are taking care to make sure that persons possessing stolen passports are not boarding international flights."

Troubling details also emerged Sunday about the itineraries of the two passengers traveling on the stolen passports.

A telephone operator on a China-based KLM hotline confirmed Sunday that passengers named Maraldi and Kozel had been booked on one-way tickets on the same KLM flight, flying from Beijing to Amsterdam on Saturday. Maraldi was to fly on to Copenhagen, Denmark, and Kozel to Frankfurt, Germany.

She said the pair booked the tickets through China Southern Airlines, but she had no information on where they bought them.

As holders of EU passports with onward flights to Europe, the passengers would not have needed visas for China.

Interpol said it and national investigators were working to determine the true identities of those who used the stolen passports to board the Malaysia Airlines flight. White House Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken said the U.S. was looking into the stolen passports, but that investigators had reached no conclusions.

Interpol has long sounded the alarm that growing international travel has underpinned a new market for identity theft: Bogus passports have lured illegal immigrants, terrorists, drug runners, pretty much anyone looking to travel unnoticed. More than 1 billion times last year, travelers boarded planes without their passports being checked against Interpol's database of 40 million stolen or lost travel documents, the police agency said.

In addition to the plane's sudden disappearance, which experts said was consistent with a possible onboard explosion, the stolen passports strengthened concerns about terrorism as a possible cause. Al-Qaida militants have used similar tactics to try to disguise their identities.

Still, other possible causes included a catastrophic failure of the plane's engines, extreme turbulence, or pilot error or even suicide. Establishing what happened with any certainty will need data from flight recorders and a detailed examination of any debris, something that will take months if not years.

Malaysia's air force chief, Rodzali Daud, said radar indicated that before it disappeared, the plane may have turned back, but there were no further details on which direction it went or how far it veered off course.

"We are trying to make sense of this," Daud said at a news conference. "The military radar indicated that the aircraft may have made a turn back, and in some parts this was corroborated by civilian radar."

Malaysia Airlines Chief Executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said pilots are supposed to inform the airline and traffic control authorities if the plane does a U-turn. "From what we have, there was no such distress signal or distress call per se, so we are equally puzzled," he said.

A total of 34 aircraft and 40 ships from Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, China and the United States were deployed to the area where ground controllers lost contact with the plane, the maritime border between Malaysia and Vietnam.

Of the 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board, two-thirds were Chinese, while the rest were from elsewhere in Asia, Europe and North America, including three Americans.

Family members of Philip Wood, a 50-year-old IBM executive who was on board the plane, said they saw him a week ago when he visited them in Texas after relocating to Kuala Lumpur from Beijing, where he had worked for two years.

"There is a shock, a very surreal moment in your life," said Wood's brother, James Wood. "With a situation like this, when a plane just disappears ... it leaves you with a lot of questions."

The other two Americans were identified on the passenger manifest as 4-year-old Nicole Meng and 2-year-old Yan Zhang. It was not known with whom they were traveling.

After more than 30 hours without contact with the aircraft, Malaysia Airlines told family members they should "prepare themselves for the worst," Hugh Dunleavy, the commercial director for the airline, told reporters.

Finding traces of an aircraft that disappears over sea can take days or longer, even with a sustained search effort. Depending on the circumstances of the crash, wreckage can be scattered over many square kilometers (miles). If the plane enters the water before breaking up, there can be relatively little debris.

A team of American experts was en route to Asia to be ready to assist in the investigation into the crash. The team includes accident investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board, as well as technical experts from the Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing, the safety board said in a statement.

Malaysia Airlines has a good safety record, as does the 777, which had not had a fatal crash in its 19-year history until an Asiana Airlines plane crashed last July in San Francisco, killing three passengers, all Chinese teenagers.

___

Brummitt reported from Hanoi, Vietnam. Associated Press writers Rod McGuirk in Canberra, Australia; Didi Tang, Gillian Wong and Louise Watt in Beijing; Joan Lowy in Washington; and Scott Mayerowitz in New York contributed this report.