More Leads In Disappearance Of MH370. Could There Have Been A Sighting Of The Plane Going Down?

Australia probes possible MH370 witness account

Reuters: Richard Wainwright, Pool

Seargent Trent Wyatt looks out an observation window aboard a Royal New Zealand Air Force P3 Orion maritime search aircraft as it flies over the southern Indian Ocean looking for debris from missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 April 11, 2014.

18 hr ago  By AFP

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Australia was Wednesday investigating an account from a sailor who said she may have seen Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 on fire, as officials said the underwater hunt for the plane could dive much deeper.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which is leading the search at the request of the Malaysian government, is looking at the claim from a British yachtswoman made this week.

"The ATSB received... a message from a member of the public, reporting that they had seen what they believed to be a burning aircraft in the sky above the Indian Ocean on the night of the disappearance of MH370," a spokesman told AFP in an email.

"That information has been forwarded to the ATSB's MH370 Search Strategy Working Group for review."

Flight MH370, which was en route from Kuala Lumpur to the Chinese capital Beijing when it inexplicably diverted, is believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.

An extensive search for the plane, which vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board, has so far found nothing, including an intensive underwater hunt with a mini-sub that could dive to 4,500 metres.

The ATSB on Wednesday released a request for tenders for a company to dive even deeper, to depths of up to 6,000 metres (19,800 feet).

It said the successful bidder would be engaged as a prime contractor and provide the expertise, equipment and vessels needed to carry out the search for the Boeing 777 from August.

"The successful tenderer will use the data from a bathymetric survey (already under way) to navigate the search zone, which has water depth between 1,000 and 6,000 metres," it said.

Bathymetry refers to the study of underwater depths of oceans or lakes.

An international team is now determining a search zone of up to 60,000 square kilometres (24,000 square miles) based on where the aircraft last communicated with an Inmarsat satellite.

'A glowing plane'

British yachtswoman Katherine Tee added to speculation about the location of a possible crash site by revealing she saw a glowing plane over the Indian Ocean in March.

The 41-year-old said she told Australian authorities of her sighting of a plane with "what appeared to be a tail of black smoke coming from behind it" while she travelled from Kochi in India to Phuket in Thailand.

"There were two other planes passing higher than it -- moving the other way -- at that time," she wrote on sailing site Cruisers Forum, a firm for which she also works.

"I recall thinking that if it was a plane on fire that I was seeing, the other aircraft would report it."

She said she told no one at the time because she and her husband, who was onboard but asleep, had been having difficulties and had not spoken for about a week.

"And most of all, I wasn't sure of what I saw," she said. "I couldn't believe it myself."

But after confirming her yacht's position using GPS data in recent days, she said she knew she was in the "right place at the right time" and told authorities.

MH370's last known position as tracked by military radar was roughly west of Phuket, although the search area has focused on a zone hundreds of kilometres (miles) further south.

In what could be another clue, researchers at Western Australia's Curtin University revealed Wednesday they had detected a low-frequency underwater sound which could have come from the plane.

A listening station off Rottnest Island, close to the Western Australia coast, picked up the signal at 0130 GMT on March 8.

Alec Duncan, from Curtin's Centre for Marine Science and Technology, said the noise could have come from the plane crashing.

"I wouldn't totally rule it out ... it's not impossible," he told AFP, but said it was more likely to have originated from a natural source, such as an earth tremor

Another Lead On The Disappearance Of Malaysian Flight MH370

From: The Times Of India

MH370 search: Low-frequency underwater noise detected off India's southern tip

PTI | Jun 4, 2014, 04.07 PM IST

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MH370 has still not been found.

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SYDNEY: Australian researchers on Wednesday said they have detected a low-frequency underwater noise off India's southern tip at about the time MH370 mysteriously disappeared, as a British woman sailing from Kochi to Phuket in March claimed that she may have seen the plane on fire. 

The researchers detected the mysterious noise, possibly that of an ocean impact, recorded by two undersea receivers in the Indian Ocean about the time the Malaysia Airlines plane ceased satellite transmissions and vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board. 

The researchers released an audio recording today of the underwater sound that they say could possibly be related to the final moments of the missing Boeing 777. 

"It's not even really a thump sort of a sound, it's more of a dull oomph," Alec Duncan, a senior marine science research fellow at Curtin University near Perth, who has led the research, told The New York Times. 

The general vicinity from which the noise emanated is a large area of the central Indian Ocean off the southern tip of India and about 3,000 miles northwest of Australia. 

But that is not consistent with calculations of an arc of possible locations in the southeastern Indian Ocean where the plane might have run out of fuel. 

Those calculations were from Inmarsat, the global satellite communications company. Scientists have struggled to figure out the origin of the noise. 

"If you ask me what's the probability this is related to the flight, without the satellite data it's 25 or 30 per cent, but that's certainly worth taking a very close look at," Duncan said. 

Adding to the uncertainty surrounding the plane's possible final location, a British woman sailing with her husband across the Indian Ocean from Kerala's port city of Kochi to Phuket in Thailand has claimed she may have seen the plane on fire. 

Katherine Tee, 41, reported on Sunday to the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) that is leading the MH370 search that she was on night-watch on the couple's 40-feet boat when flight MH370 vanished. 

The couple have since re-checked their sailing logs and believe they were near one of the projected flight paths for the aircraft, now missing for nearly three months. 

Tee, who was at sea for 13 months, said she did not report the sighting at the time because of marital issues and because she feared being mistaken. 

"I saw something that looked like a plane on fire. Then I thought I must be mad. It caught my attention because I had never seen a plane with orange lights before so I wondered what they were...," she told the Phuket Gazette. 

Media reports said Australian authorities were looking at Tee's claim. 



"It looked longer than planes usually do. There was what appeared to be black smoke behind it," Tee said. 

"I looked back through our GPS logs...what we saw was consistent with the confirmed contact which the authorities had from MH370," she said. 

Tee said she saw other planes nearby and thought they would have reported the burning plane. 

The search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight continues to focus along an arc hundreds of kilometers long, the area where investigators believe the Boeing 777 ran out of fuel, about 1,000 miles off the coast of Western Australia. 

Duncan says his team has calculated an "uncertainty box" for the signal's origin. It's area that stretches some 4,000 kilometres in length from southeast to northwest across the Indian Ocean, and spans some 200 to 300 kilometres in width at its widest point. 

The center of the long, narrow box is south of the tip of India, as shown in a map released today. 

Martin Dolan, the chief commissioner with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), has said an international team of experts continue to review the analysis of Inmarsat satellite data and aircraft performance. 

Dolan told CNN that he remains confident the final resting place of MH370 is somewhere along that arc, the so-called "partial handshake" with the satellite. 

"We've seen all the data. We've seen all the calculations. We are reviewing the calculations and are also developing our own model to cross check and verify that information," Dolan said. 

The massive Indian Ocean search for the Malaysia Airlines plane, which disappeared on March 8 carrying 239 people including five Indians, has so far failed to find any sign of the Boeing 777