MH370: 'Kemungkinan ke 'Grey Area'

Kuala Lumpur: Pesawat MH370 yang masih hilang berkemungkinan menuju ke Koridor Utara dengan melalui kawasan liputan radar rendah Grey Area untuk sampai ke destinasi misteri. Ini adalah berikutan di laluan terbabit terdapat kawasan pergunungan dan negara mundur seperti Nepal dan Myanmar tidak mempunyai teknologi radar canggih.

Penganalisis penerbangan Prof Dr Ahmad Samsuri Mokhtar berkata, radar tentera akan mengesan sebarang pergerakan dalam liputan mereka tetapi kebiasaannya mengabaikan perkara itu kerana ia bukan pesawat ketenteraan.

Saya percaya pesawat terbabit sudah menuju ke Koridor Utara dan melalui kawasan liputan radar minimum di antara sempadan negara tertentu.

Dalam bahasa mudah ialah pesawat terbabit terbang di hujung radar,” katanya.

Dr Ahmad Samsuri berkata, pesawat terbabit mempunyai kapasiti minyak mencukupi untuk terbang sekurang-kurang tujuh jam.

Bagaimanapun, untuk sampai ke destinasi misteri, pesawat terbabit perlu terbang dalam ketinggian tertentu untuk menjimatkan minyak serta kadangkala akan turun ke altitud rendah bagi mengelak dikesan radar,” katanya ketika dihubungi.

Menurut beliau, terdapat kes yang mana pesawat Charlie milik tentera Israel pada 1976 terbang dari Israel ke Uganda sejauh 4,000 kilometer tanpa dikesan radar dalam Operasi Entebbe bagi menyelesaikan krisis rampasan pesawat.

@Harianmetro

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

Radar, satellites are powerful search tools but their reach is still limited

In the last few days, as ships and planes are deployed to search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, radar and satellites have become powerful tools aiding the international teams scouring the seas.

While the use of the latest technology is invaluable in search and rescue missions, technology still has limited reach in some swathes of the planet, reports The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

"The fact is that, in many parts of the world… radar coverage is not complete," the report quoted David McMillan, chairman of the Flight Safety Foundation and former head of Eurocontrol, Europe's air-traffic coordinator, as saying. "It's clearly an area for further improvement."

In the same region in 2007, it took search and rescue crews 10 days to find the first few pieces of an Indonesian Boeing 737 that crashed in the sea near Sulawesi.

Searchers needed 36 hours to locate the first wreckage of Air France Flight 447, which crashed over the Atlantic five years ago with 228 people aboard.

"If a plane goes down in the ocean, it's very difficult to find it," Richard B. Stone, a former president of the International Society of Air Safety Investigators, told WSJ.

The Aviation Safety Network, a database tracking accidents, lists 80 planes as 'missing' since 1948. No trace of the planes or their occupants was ever found, according to ASN President Harro Ranter.

It has been a long while since an aircraft disappeared for as long as flight MH370.

"The fact that it's so rare is the reason everyone is paying attention to it," Bob van der Linden, chairman of the aeronautics department at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, told WSJ.

Disappearances used to be more common. Amelia Earhart was notable as one of the first female aviators to set distance records in the 1930s. But she remains in the public consciousness today more because she disappeared in her Lockheed Electra near New Guinea while attempting to circumnavigate the globe.

Today, the WSJ report said, radar can generally track aircraft large and small. But even in an age of global satellite navigation and the perception of world-wide surveillance, there are still significant areas untouched by radar or regular observation.

However, the report said empty spots are shrinking. In the 1970s, the 'Bermuda Triangle' loomed in people's imagination after several military planes disappeared in the Atlantic Ocean region between Florida, Puerto Rico and Bermuda, and other planes and ships were said to have vanished there. Supernatural explanations were eventually debunked.

"The accident rate in the Bermuda Triangle is no better or worse than anywhere else, but it sounds intriguing," the Smithsonian's van der Linden told WSJ.

Rational explanations haven't limited people's imaginations. The hugely successful TV series "Lost" focused on passengers of a jetliner that crashed on a mysterious island not found on maps.

The WSJ report said disappearances are often simply accidents in remote locations, based on an analysis of planes that eventually showed up. Air France Flight 447, for instance, vanished for more than a day before searchers found floating pieces of the Airbus A330.

Millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett disappeared in September 2007 while flying a single-engine propeller plane near Yosemite National Park in California. It took more than a year to find the wreckage.

Other accidents are often too difficult to investigate, or the small number of people killed is deemed too low to merit a costly search. "It is very expensive to do," said Stone, the accident investigator, to WSJ.

There is no doubt modern technology increases the chance the Malaysia Airlines flight being found as seen in the case of the Air France crash. The question is when.

"There's going to be a trace somewhere. It will be found," van der Linden told WSJ. "It may be a surprise about where it's found, but we don't know what happened on the airplane." – March 12, 2014.

@Malaysian 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