Missing Malaysian jet LIVE updates: Three flight games found deleted from MH 370 pilot's simulator
IndiaToday.in Kuala Lumpur, March 19, 2014 | UPDATED 17:07 IST
A Chinese relative of a passenger aboard a missing Malaysia Airlines plane is carried out by security officials as she protests before a press conference at a hotel in Sepang on March 19. Photo: AP.
Malaysia's defence minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a news conference on Wednesday that investigators are trying to retrieve the files. He also said that the pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, is innocent until proven guilty of any wrongdoing, reported Associated Press.
Hishammuddin said background checks have been received from overseas agencies for all foreign passengers on the plane except for those from Ukraine and Russia - which accounted for three passengers. He says none of the checks has turned up anything suspicious.
Relatives grow frustrated as no trace of Malaysian plane found
Relatives of passengers on the missing Malaysian airliner grew increasingly frustrated on Wednesday over the search's lack of progress as planes sweeping across vast expanses of the Indian Ocean and satellites peering on Central Asia turned up no new clues in the hunt.
An elderly woman, one of the relatives of Chinese passengers aboard missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, covers her face out of frustration as she leaves a hotel ballroom after a daily briefing meeting with managers of Malaysia Airlines in Beijing.
"It's really too much. I don't know why it is taking so long for so many people to find the plane. It's 12 days," Subaramaniam Gurusamy, 60, said in an interview from his home on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. His 34-year-old son Pushpanathan Subramaniam was on the flight heading to Beijing for a work trip.
"He's the one son I have," Subaramaniam said.
Investigators have identified two giant arcs of territory spanning the possible positions of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 about 7 1/2 hours after takeoff, based on its last faint signal to a satellite. Cmdr. William Marks, a spokesman for the U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet, said finding the plane was like trying to locate a few people somewhere between New York and California.
Aircraft from Australia, the U.S. and New Zealand on Wednesday scoured a search area stretching across 305,000 square kilometers (117,000 square miles) of the Indian Ocean, about 2,600 kilometers (1,600 miles) southwest of Perth, on Australia's west coast.
Merchant ships were also asked to look for any trace of the plane. Nothing has been found, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said.
China has said it was reviewing radar data and deployed 21 satellites to search the northern corridor of the search area stretching as far as Kazakhstan. Those searches so far have turned up no trace of the plane, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said Wednesday.
Early in the search, Malaysian officials said they suspected the plane backtracked toward the Strait of Malacca, off western Malaysia. But it took a week for them to confirm Malaysian military radar data suggesting that route.
Thai military officials said on Tuesday their own radar showed an unidentified plane, possibly Flight 370, flying toward the strait minutes after the Malaysian jet's transponder signal was lost. Air force spokesman Air Vice Marshal Montol Suchookorn said the Thai military doesn't know whether the plane it detected was Flight 370.
Investigators now will be checking previous Malaysian military radar data against the Thai data to see if they can confirm locations for the plane and possibly a direction it was heading in order to narrow the search area, aviation safety experts said.
The two sets of data have to be "overlayed" to confirm that the hits, or targets, are recording the same plane or that it is indeed a plane and not a flock of birds or even a rainstorm. To do that, investigators need to determine that both radars were looking at the same place in the sky at exactly the same time down to the second.
Because the plane's transponder had been turned off, the hits don't contain identification, location or altitude. Both radars were recording what's known as a primary return - essentially a radar signal bouncing of an object in the sky and returning.
"All you see is a little dot moving across the screen," said Rory Kay, a U.S. airline training captain and former Air Line Pilots Association safety committee chairman.
Malaysia has said the loss of communications and change in the aircraft's course are consistent with a deliberate diversion of the plane, whether it was the pilots or others aboard who were responsible. Police are considering the possibility of hijacking, sabotage, terrorism or issues related to the mental health of the pilots or anyone else on board, but have yet to say what they have uncovered.
Malaysia Airlines CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said some sort of problem aboard the plane was not out of the question, although he noted the plane was intact enough to send a signal to a satellite for several hours. Observers have noted that some sort of distress signal would have been likely in the event of a cockpit fire.
As further confirmation that someone was guiding the plane after it disappeared from civilian radar, airline pilots and aviation safety experts said an onboard computer called the flight management system would have to be deliberately programmed in order to follow the route taken by the plane as described by Malaysian authorities.
"If you are going to fly the airplane to a waypoint that is not a straight... route to Beijing, and you were going to command the flight management computer and the autopilot system, you really have to know how to fly the airplane," said John Gadzinski, a U.S. Boeing 737 captain.
Investigators have asked security agencies in countries with passengers on board to check their backgrounds, but no suspicious findings have been announced.
- Associated Press
Missing Malaysian plane assumed in southern Indian Ocean: Source
Investigators examining the March 8 disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines plane with 239 people aboard believe it most likely that the plane flew into the southern Indian Ocean, a source close to the investigation said on Wednesday.
"The working assumption is that it went south, and furthermore that it went to the southern end of that corridor," said the source, referring to a search area stretching from west of Indonesia to the Indian Ocean west of Australia.
- Reuters
Thai radar might have tracked missing plane
Ten days after a Malaysian jetliner disappeared, Thailand's military said on Tuesday it saw radar blips that might have been from the missing plane but didn't report it "because we did not pay attention to it."
Search crews from 26 countries, including Thailand, are looking for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which vanished early on March 8 with 239 people aboard en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Frustration is growing among relatives of those on the plane at the lack of progress in the search.
Aircraft and ships are scouring two giant arcs of territory amounting to the size of Australia - half of it in the remote waters of the southern Indian Ocean.
Cmdr. William Marks, a spokesman for the U.S. 7th Fleet, said finding the plane was like trying to locate a few people somewhere between New York and California.
Early in the search, Malaysian officials said they suspected the plane backtracked toward the Strait of Malacca, just west of Malaysia. But it took a week for them to confirm Malaysian military radar data suggesting that route.
Military officials in neighboring Thailand said on Tuesday their own radar showed an unidentified plane, possibly Flight 370, flying toward the strait beginning minutes after the Malaysian jet's transponder signal was lost.
Air force spokesman Air Vice Marshal Montol Suchookorn said the Thai military doesn't know whether the plane it detected was Flight 370.
Thailand's failure to quickly share possible information about the plane may not substantially change what Malaysian officials now know, but it raises questions about the degree to which some countries are sharing their defense data. At a minimum, safety experts said, the radar data could have saved time and effort that was initially spent searching the South China Sea, many miles from the Indian Ocean.
"It's tough to tell, but that is a material fact that I think would have mattered," said John Goglia, a former member of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.
"It's just bizarre they didn't come forward before," Scott Hamilton, managing director of aviation consultancy Leeham Co., said of Thai authorities. "It may be too late to help the search ... but maybe them and the Malaysian military should do joint military exercises in incompetence."
Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur at 12:40 a.m. on March 8 and its transponder, which allows air traffic controllers to identify and track it, ceased communicating at 1:20 a.m.
Montol said that at 1:28 a.m., Thai military radar "was able to detect a signal, which was not a normal signal, of a plane flying in the direction opposite from the MH370 plane," back toward Kuala Lumpur. The plane later turned right, toward Butterworth, a Malaysian city along the Strait of Malacca. The radar signal was infrequent and did not include data such as the flight number.
When asked why it took so long to release the information, Montol said, "Because we did not pay any attention to it. The Royal Thai Air Force only looks after any threats against our country." He said the plane never entered Thai airspace and that Malaysia's initial request for information in the early days of the search was not specific.
"When they asked again and there was new information and assumptions from (Malaysian) Prime Minister Najib Razak, we took a look at our information again," Montol said. "It didn't take long for us to figure out, although it did take some experts to find out about it."
The search area for the plane initially focused on the South China Sea. Pings that a satellite detected from the plane hours after its communications went down eventually led authorities to concentrate instead on two vast arcs - one into Central Asia and the other into the Indian Ocean.
Malaysia said over the weekend the loss of communications and change in the aircraft's course were deliberate, whether it was the pilots or others aboard who were responsible.
Malaysian police are considering the possibility of hijacking, sabotage, terrorism or issues related to the mental health of the pilots or anyone else on board, but have yet to say what they have uncovered.
Investigators had pointed to a sequence of events in which two communications systems were disabled in succession - one of them before a voice from the cockpit gave an all-clear message to ground controllers - as evidence of a deliberate attempt to fly the plane off-course in a hard-to-detect way. On Monday, they backtracked on the timing of the first switch-off, saying it was possible that both were cut around the same time, leading to new speculation that some kind of sudden mechanical or electrical failure might explain the flight going off-course.
Malaysia Airlines CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said some sort of problem aboard the plane was not out of the question, although he noted it still was intact enough to send a signal to a satellite several hours later.
As further confirmation that someone was still guiding the plane after it disappeared from civilian radar, airline pilots and aviation safety experts said an onboard computer called the flight management system would have to be deliberately programmed in order to follow the route taken by the plane as described by Malaysian authorities.
"If you are going to fly the airplane to a waypoint that is not a straight ... route to Beijing, and you were going to command the flight management computer and the autopilot system, you really have to know how to fly the airplane," said John Gadzinski, a U.S. Boeing 737 captain.
"If you were a basic flight student and I put you in an airborne 777 and gave you 20 minutes of coaching, I could have you turn the airplane left and right and the auto throttle and the autopilot would make the airplane do what you want," he said. "But to program a waypoint into the flight management computer, if that is what they flew over, is a little bit harder."
Investigators have asked security agencies in countries with passengers on board to carry out background checks.
China said background checks of the 154 Chinese citizens on board turned up no links to terrorism, apparently ruling out the possibility that Uighur Muslim militants who have been blamed for terror attacks within China might have been involved.
"So far there is nothing, no evidence to suggest that they intended to do harm to the plane," said Huang Huikang, China's ambassador to Malaysia.
A Chinese civilian aviation official has said there was no sign of the plane entering the country's airspace on commercial radar.
A group of relatives of Chinese passengers in Beijing said they decided to begin a hunger strike to express their anger over the handling of the investigation.
One relative displayed a sign reading, "Hunger strike protest. Respect life. Return my relative. Don't want become victim of politics, Tell the truth."
The search for the aircraft is among the largest in aviation history.
The U.S. Navy said P-3 and P-8 surveillance aircraft were methodically sweeping over swaths of ocean, known as "mowing the grass," while using radar to detect any debris in the water and high-resolution cameras to snap images.
Australian and Indonesian planes and ships are searching waters to the south of Indonesia's Sumatra Island all the way down to the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean.
Huang said China had begun searching for the plane in its territory, but gave no details. When asked at a Foreign Ministry briefing in Beijing what this search involved, ministry spokesman Hong Lei said only that satellites and radar were being used.
China also was sending ships to the Indian Ocean, where they will search 300,000 square kilometers (186,000 square miles) of sea.
The area being covered by the Australians is even bigger - 600,000 square kilometers (232,000 square miles) - and will take weeks, said John Young, manager of Australian Maritime Safety Authority's emergency response division.
"This search will be difficult. The sheer size of the search area poses a huge challenge," Young said. "A needle in a haystack remains a good analogy."
Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron telephoned his Malaysian counterpart to offer the U.K.'s help in the first direct contact between the two since the flight disappeared, according to Downing Street.
Cameron did not offer specifics on what particular military or civilian assistance could be provided, the prime minister's spokesman, Jean-Christophe Gray, said Tuesday.
"It was very much inviting any specific requests from the Malaysians," Gray said. "Prime Minister Najib said he would think about that and let us know if they have any specific requests."An international land and sea search for a missing Malaysian jetliner is covering an area the size of Australia, authorities said on Tuesday, but police and intelligence agencies have yet to establish a clear motive to explain its disappearance.
- Associated Press
Sailors inspect the flight deck of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Kidd in this U.S. Navy handout picture taken March 16, 2014. Reuters
An international land and sea search for a missing Malaysian jetliner is covering an area the size of Australia, authorities said on Tuesday, but police and intelligence agencies have yet to establish a clear motive to explain its disappearance.
Investigators are convinced that someone with deep knowledge of the Boeing 777-200ER and commercial navigation diverted Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, carrying 12 crew and 227 mainly Chinese passengers, perhaps thousands of miles off its scheduled course from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
But intensive background checks of everyone aboard have so far failed to find anyone with a known political or criminal motive to hijack or deliberately crash the plane, Western security sources and Chinese authorities said.
With the plane missing for 10 days, German insurer Allianz said on Tuesday it had started making payments on claims linked to the jetliner.
Malaysian Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a news conference the "unique, unprecedented" search covered a total area of 2.24 million nautical miles (7.68 million sq km), from central Asia to the southern Indian Ocean.
Flight MH370 vanished from civilian air traffic control screens off Malaysia's east coast less than an hour after take-off early on March 8.
Investigators piecing together patchy data from military radar and satellites believe that someone turned off the aircraft's identifying transponder and ACARS system, which transmits maintenance data, and turned west, re-crossing the Malay Peninsula and following a commercial aviation route towards India.
Malaysian officials have backtracked on the exact sequence of events. They are now unsure whether the ACARS system was shut down before or after the last radio message was heard from the cockpit - but said that did not make a material difference.
"This does not change our belief, as stated, that up until the point at which it left military primary radar coverage, the aircraft's movements were consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane," said Hishammuddin. "That remains the position of the investigating team."
Background checks clean
China's ambassador to Malaysia said his country had investigated its nationals aboard the flight and could rule out their involvement.
Background checks clean
China's ambassador to Malaysia said his country had investigated its nationals aboard the flight and could rule out their involvement.
U.S. and European security sources said efforts by various governments to investigate the backgrounds of everyone on the flight had not, as of Monday, turned up links to militant groups or anything else that could explain the jet's disappearance.
Malaysian police investigations have also failed to turn up any red flags on 53-year-old Zaharie Ahmad Shah, the captain, or co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27.
Accounts of their lives portray them as sociable, well-balanced and happy. Neither fits the profile of a loner or extremist with a motive for suicide or hijacking.
"I've never seen him lose his temper. It's difficult to believe any of the speculation made against him," said Peter Chong, a friend of Zaharie, describing him as highly disciplined and conscientious.
The New York Times cited senior U.S. officials as saying that the first turn back to the west was likely programmed into the aircraft's flight computer, rather than being executed manually, by someone knowledgeable about aircraft systems.
Malaysia Airlines Chief Executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya told Tuesday's daily news conference that that was "speculation."
Malaysian officials said on Monday that suicide by the pilot or co-pilot was a line of inquiry, although they stressed that it was only one of the possibilities under investigation. Police have searched their homes in middle-class suburbs of Kuala Lumpur close to the airport.
Among the items taken for examination was a flight simulator Zaharie had built in his home.
A senior police officer with direct knowledge of the investigation said the programs from the pilot's simulator included Indian Ocean runways in the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Diego Garcia and southern India, although he added that U.S. and European runways also featured.
"Generally these flight simulators show hundreds or even thousands of runways," the officer said. "What we are trying to see is what were the runways that were frequently used."
"Needle in a haystack"
Thailand said on Tuesday a re-examination of its military radar data had picked up the plane re-tracing its route across Peninsular Malaysia. The Thai military had previously said it had not detected any sign of the plane.
Thailand said on Tuesday a re-examination of its military radar data had picked up the plane re-tracing its route across Peninsular Malaysia. The Thai military had previously said it had not detected any sign of the plane.
What happened next is less certain. The plane may have flown for another six hours or more after dropping off Malaysian military radar about 200 miles northwest of Penang Island.
But the satellite signals that provide the only clues were not intended to work as locators. The best they can do is place the plane in one of two broad arcs - one stretching from Laos up to the Caspian, the other from west of Indonesia down to the Indian Ocean off Australia - when the last signal was picked up.
China, which, with Kazakhstan, is leading the search in the northern corridor, said on Tuesday it had deployed 21 satellites to scour its territory.
Australia, which is leading the southernmost leg of the search, said it had shrunk its search field based on satellite tracking data and analysis of weather and currents, but that it still covered 600,000 sq km (230,000 sq miles).
"A needle in a haystack remains a good analogy," John Young, general manager of the emergency response division of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA), told reporters.
Allianz, which confirmed last week that it was the lead insurer covering the airliner, said it and other co-reinsurers of the aircraft's aviation hull and liability policy had made initial payments.
"This is in agreement with the insurance broker, Willis, and is in line with normal market practice and our contractual obligations where an aircraft is reported as missing," Allianz said in a statement.
German business daily Handelsblatt has reported payments in the case would be around 100 million euros ($139.13 million) for the aircraft and the people aboard.What if the missing Malaysia plane is never found?
~Reuters
~Reuters
A woman looks at messages of support left for family members and passengers onboard the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) in Sepang, outside Kuala Lumpur March 18, 2014. Reuters
The plane must be somewhere. But the same can be said for Amelia Earhart's.
Ten days after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared with 239 people aboard, an exhaustive international search has produced no sign of the Boeing 777, raising an unsettling question: What if the airplane is never found?
Such an outcome, while considered unlikely by many experts, would certainly torment the families of those missing. It would also flummox the airline industry, which will struggle to learn lessons from the incident if it doesn't know what happened.
While rare nowadays, history is not short of such mysteries - from the most famous of all, American aviator Earhart, to planes and ships disappearing in the so-called Bermuda Triangle.
"When something like this happens that confounds us, we're offended by it, and we're scared by it," said Ric Gillespie, a former U.S. aviation accident investigator who wrote a book about Earhart's still-unsolved 1937 disappearance over the Pacific Ocean. "We had the illusion of control and it's just been shown to us that oh, folks, you know what? A really big airliner can just vanish. And nobody wants to hear that."
Part of the problem, said Andrew Thomas, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Transportation Security, is that airline systems are not as sophisticated as many people might think. A case in point, he said, is that airports and airplanes around the world use antiquated radar tracking technology, first developed in the 1950s, rather than modern GPS systems.
A GPS system might not have solved the mystery of Flight 370, which disappeared March 8 while flying from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing. But it would probably have given searchers a better read on the plane's last known location, Thomas said.
"There are lots of reasons why they haven't changed, but the major one is cost," he said. "The next-generation technology would cost $70 to $80 billion in the U.S."
Experts say the plane's disappearance will likely put pressure on airlines and governments to improve the way they monitor planes, including handoff procedures between countries. Flight 370 vanished after it signed off with Malaysian air-traffic controllers, and never made contact with their Vietnamese counterparts as it should have.
And if the plane is never found, liability issues will be a huge headache for courts. With no wreckage, it would be difficult to determine whether the airline, manufacturers or other parties should bear the brunt of responsibility.
"The international aviation legal system does not anticipate the complete disappearance of an aircraft," said Brian Havel, a law professor and director of the International Aviation Law Institute at DePaul University in Chicago. "We just don't have the tools for that at present."
The families of the missing, of course, would face the most painful consequences of a failed search.
"In any kind of death, the most important matter for relatives and loved ones is knowing the context and circumstances," said Kevin Tso, the chief executive of New Zealand agency Victim Support, which has been counseling family and friends of the two New Zealand passengers aboard the flight. "When there's very little information, it's very difficult."
Tso said the abundance of speculation about the plane's fate in the media and elsewhere is not helpful to the families, who may be getting false hope that their loved ones are still alive.
It has been nearly 50 years since a plane carrying more than two dozen people vanished without a trace, according to a list of unexplained aviation disappearances tracked by the Flight Safety Foundation. An Argentine military plane carrying 69 people disappeared in 1965 and has never been found.
Earhart, the first female pilot to cross the Atlantic Ocean, vanished over the Pacific with Fred Noonan during an attempt to circumnavigate the globe. Seven decades later, people are still transfixed. Theories range from her simply running out of fuel and crashing to her staging her own disappearance and secretly returning to the U.S. to live under another identity.
There is also an ongoing fascination with the Bermuda Triangle, where several ships and planes disappeared, including a squadron of five torpedo bombers in 1945. Studies have indicated the area is no more dangerous than any other stretch of ocean.
More than two dozen countries are involved in the effort to find Flight 370 and end the uncertainty, with dozens of aircraft and boats searching along a vast arc where investigators believe the plane ended up, judging by signals received by a satellite.
Gillespie and other experts said they expect the plane will eventually be found, even if investigators have to wait until some wreckage washes ashore.
"We all expect we're going to find this plane and the chances are probably pretty good that we'll find something. But you know, I think everyone thought that about Amelia Earhart as well," said Phaedra Hise, a pilot and author of "Pilot Error: The Anatomy of a Plane Crash." ''We know there's a chance that we may never find out what happened. Which is a little scary, isn't it?"
- Associated Press
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