Woman claims she saw flight MH370 on fire in the Indian Ocean

Posted by Unknown on Thursday, June 5, 2014 | 0 comments | Leave a comment...

The shadow of a Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) P3 Orion maritime search aircraft can be seen on low-level clouds as it flies over the southern Indian Ocean looking for missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 in this March 31, 2014 file photo.
Australian researchers today 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.

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Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: satellite data released after long wait

Posted by Unknown on Tuesday, May 27, 2014 | 0 comments | Leave a comment...

Malaysia’s government and British satellite firm Inmarsat on Tuesday released the data used to determine the path of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, responding to mounting calls from passengers’ relatives for greater transparency.
The data from satellite communications with the plane, which runs to 47 pages in a report prepared by Inmarsat, features hourly “handshakes” – or network log-on confirmations – after the aircraft disappeared from civilian radar screens on March 8.
Families of passengers are hoping that opening up the data to analysis by a wider range of experts can help verify the plane’s last location, nearly three months after the Boeing 777 with 239 passengers and crew disappeared.
The data’s release had become a rallying cry for many of the families, who have accused the Malaysian government of holding back information.
“When we first asked for the data it was more than two months ago. I never dreamed it would be such an obstacle to overcome,” Sarah Bajc, the American partner of a passenger, told Reuters from Beijing.
Based on Inmarsat’s and other investigators’ analysis of the data, the aircraft is believed to have gone down in the Indian Ocean, off western Australia.
Malaysian investigators suspect someone shut off MH370′s data links making the plane impossible to track, but investigators have so far turned up nothing suspicious about the crew or passengers.
In the hours after the aircraft disappeared, an Inmarsat satellite picked up a handful of handshake “pings”, indicating the plane continued flying for hours after leaving radar and helping narrow the search to an area of the Indian Ocean.
The dense technical data released on Tuesday details satellite communications from before MH370′s take-off on a Saturday morning at 12:41 a.m. local time (12.41 P.m. ET) to a final, “partial handshake” transmitted by the plane at 8:19 a.m. (8.19 P.m. ET). The data includes a final transmission from the plane 8 seconds later, after which there was no further response.
The data also featured two “telephony calls” initiated from the ground at 1839 GMT and 2313 GMT that went unanswered by the plane.
Malaysian officials were not immediately available to answer questions on the data.
Bajc said experts on flight tracking who have been advising the families would now be able to analyse the data to see if the search area could be refined and determine if Inmarsat and other officials had missed anything.
But she complained the report released on Tuesday was missing data removed to improve readability, as well as comparable records from previous flights on MH370′s route that the families had requested.
“Why couldn’t they have submitted that?” she said. “It only makes sense if they are hiding something.”
Calculations based on the pings and the plane’s speed showed the jetliner likely went down in the remote ocean 7 to 8 hours after its normal communications were apparently cut off as it headed to Beijing on its routine flight. The time of the last satellite contact was consistent with the plane’s fuel capacity.
The search in an area around 1,550 km (960 miles) northwest of Perth was further narrowed on the basis of acoustic signals believed to have come from the aircraft’s “black box” data recorders before their batteries ran out.
After the most extensive search in aviation history failed to turn up any trace of the plane, however, officials have said that it could take a year to search the 60,000 sq km (23,000 sq mile) area where it could have come down.
Malaysia, China and Australia said in mid-May they had agreed to re-examine all data related to the missing plane to better determine the search area as the hunt enters a new, deep-sea phase.
Malaysia is also leading an official international investigation under United Nations rules to probe the causes of the baffling incident.
-Reuters

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Raw MH370 data to be revealed

Posted by Unknown on Tuesday, May 20, 2014 | 0 comments | Leave a comment...

Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370
After months of clamoring, the MH370 raw satellite data that families have been demanding may soon be publicized.
Until now, Inmarsat, the company whose satellites communicated with the missing plane in its last hours, has said it didn’t have the authority to release it.
But on Tuesday, Inmarsat and Malaysian authorities said they were trying to make the raw data accessible.
“In line with our commitment towards greater transparency, all parties are working for the release of the data communication logs and the technical description of the analysis for public consumption,” Inmarsat and the Malaysian aviation officials said in a joint statement.
“It must also be noted that the data communication logs is just one of the many elements of the investigation information,” the officials said.
The statement did not say when the information would be released. But publication of the raw satellite data could allow for independent analysis of what happened on March 8, the day Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared with 239 people on board.
Some relatives of passengers weren’t sure what to make of the announcement.
“Their intentions have to be backed by actions, so I’d like to wait to see when that really happens,” said K.S. Narendran, whose wife was on the plane.
“Secondly, it’s just one piece of the whole amount of data that has been used to conduct the search,” Narendran told foreign media. “So when sharing Inmarsat data by itself is important, I think it will be essential as time goes by for the larger set of data to also be made available.”
But CNN aviation analyst Jeff Wise said “the box is going to open” when the data gets publicized.
“It could produce more theories. It will probably cancel out a lot of theories,” he said.
Either way, the release will hopefully give “a much better understanding of what’s been going on all this time.”


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Movie about missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370

Posted by Unknown on Sunday, May 18, 2014 | 0 comments | Leave a comment...

IT’S not a Hollywood production, but a movie about missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is already in the works and could be in theatres within months.
Rupesh Paul Productions is promoting The Vanishing Act, a film about the plane tragedy, among buyers at the Cannes Film Festival.
A poster for the movie promises to tell “the untold story” of the missing plane, but in an interview Friday, the associate director of the movie, Sritama Dutta, said the only similarities between the thriller and the real-life disaster is that a plane is missing.
“It has got no similarities,” said Dutta, adding there have been so many developments with the actual case that it wouldn’t be practical to try to mirror it.
“We cannot keep up with the true facts, it’s changing every day.”
However the 90-second trailer for the film, posted to YouTube yesterday, features a cast of terrified passengers aboard a turbulent MAS jetliner and recreates some of the dramatic scenarios that could have played out on board the ill-fated flight after takeoff.
Dutta said Indian director Rupesh Paul will film the movie and a multiethnic cast for it could be revealed before Cannes ends May 25.
Paul presented the film idea to financiers with the teaser trailer on Saturday afternoon, according to Variety .
Paul told the magazine that he spent 20 days working on a screenplay based around a Malaysian journalist’s theory about what happened to the plane.
He said the journalist, who insists on anonymity for now, is one of the film’s investors. The film’s budget is about $3.5 million.
The trailer for the partly fictional film was shot over six days in an Aerobus parked in Mumbai, India.
Shooting the film will take 35 days and involve more than 200 actors.
Paul hopes to shoot the film in India and the United States and plans a worldwide release in September.
His erotic movie “Kamasutra 3D” is being screened outside the Cannes competition this year.
His personal website says Paul “redefines all-round talent” and “his free spirit has been prized and puzzled by many.”
Within weeks of MH370 disappearing Australian film Deep Water, about a plane that crashes into the ocean on its way from China, was shelved because of its resemblance to the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
The Hollywood Reporter stated Deep Water, a follow-up to Bait 3D, had been put on hold because of “uncomfortable similarities” to the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
“Out of sensitivity to the Malaysia flight situation, we’ve decided to put it on pause for now,” Gary Hamilton, managing director of Arclight Films told hollywoodreporter.com in March
The news from Cannes comes as the first book about the aviation disaster is set to hit bookshelves tomorrow, Fairfax reports.
Just over 10 weeks after the plane went missing, “Flight MH370: The Mystery” by author and journalist Nigel Cawthorne, will go on sale Monday.
American aviation author Christine Negroni, wrote Deadly Departure on TWA Flight 800, is also working on a book about the missing Malaysian flight, called Crashed, which will be published by Penguin.
Authorities still have not been able to locate Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which was carrying 239 people from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8 when it went missing. The search for the plane has made headlines worldwide.

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11 with links to Al Qaeda arrested in MH370 probe

Posted by Unknown on Sunday, May 4, 2014 | 0 comments | Leave a comment...

A group of 11 terrorists with links to Al Qaeda were yesterday being interrogated on whether they are behind the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, international media reported.

The suspects were arrested in the capital Kuala Lumpur and in the state of Kedah last week and are members of a violent new terror group said to be planning bomb attacks in Muslim countries.

The interrogations come after international investigators, including the FBI and MI6, asked for the militants, whose ages range from 22 to 55 and include students, odd-job workers, a young widow and business professionals, to be questioned intensively about Flight MH370.

Nearly two months after the Beijing-bound plane vanished soon after take-off from Kuala Lumpur, no trace has been found despite a huge sea search costing hundreds of millions of pounds. It is thought to have crashed into the Indian Ocean with 239 people on board.

An officer with the Counter Terrorism Division of Malaysian Special Branch said yesterday the arrests had heightened suspicion that the flight’s disappearance may have been an act of terrorism.

‘The possibility that the plane was diverted by militants is still high on the list and international investigators have asked for a comprehensive report on this new terror group,’ the officer said.

In interviews conducted so far, some suspects have admitted planning ‘sustained terror campaigns’ in Malaysia but denied being involved in the disappearance of the airliner, he added.

During the trial of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith Osama Bin Laden's son-in-law, Saajid Badat, a British-born Muslim from Gloucester, said he had been instructed at a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan to give a shoe bomb to the Malaysians.

He said: 'I gave one of my shoes to the Malaysians. I think it was to access the cockpit.'

Badat, who spoke via video link and is in hiding in the UK, told the New York court the Malaysian plot was being masterminded by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the principal architect of 9/11.

A mystery surrounding the cargo being carried by the missing Malaysian Airlines plane emerged on Friday when it was discovered that it had been loaded with items not specified on the manifest.

The aircraft was carrying 4.566 tonnes of mangosteens - an exotic fruit - and a shipment of lithium batteries, which were part of a separate consignment.

The batteries weighed 200kg, but that separate consignment totalled 2.453 tonnes. So what was being carried to make up the 2.253 tonnes in that separate shipment?

Questions have been raised as Malaysia Airlines said it will close assistance centres in Beijing and Kuala Lumpur for the families of the 239 passengers and crew on board the Boeing 777-200ER jet.(Daily Mail)

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