New mystery emerges over MH370 after police chief claims he knows what happened to the missing jet

Posted by Unknown on Monday, September 15, 2014 | 0 comments | Leave a comment...

New mystery emerges over MH370 after police chief claims he knows what happened to the missing jet
A new mystery surrounding the disappearance of MH370 emerged today after a police chief claimed he knew what had happened to the Malaysian Airlines jet.
The head of the Indonesian Police Force, General Sutarman – who uses only one name – reportedly told a meeting of airline officials and senior police that ‘I actually know what had actually happened with MH370,’ giving rise to suggestions officials were aware of what caused the Boeing 777-200 aircraft to disappear but have chosen not to reveal the information.
His comment was witnessed by representatives of Lion Air and several high-ranking police officers in Jakarta, according to a report by the Indonesian news portal, Kompas.com.
But in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur today, Inspector General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar said he was shocked to hear of the comments by his Indonesian counterpart and he was planning to speak to him about the issue.
General Sutarman was quoted as saying: ‘I spoke to the Malaysian Police Chief Tun Mohammed Hanif Omar. I actually know what had actually happened with MH370.’
However, Mohammed Omar retired from the police chief’s position in Malaysia in 1994, and that role now being taken by Mr Bakar.
It is possible that General Sutarman is aware that Mr Omar had retired but had simply not mentioned that when he referred to him.
It is apparent from the current Malaysian police chief’s comments, however, that his Indonesian counterpart had not been in touch with him.
Mr Bakar told Malaysia’s Bernama news agency that he was shocked to learn of the comments because Malaysian police did not have any information about the missing jet.
‘I would like to know which media and when such a report was published’ said Mr Bakar. ‘I will ask my counterpart, whether he had said anything about the issue.’
With a full scale search due to get under way soon in the southern Indian Ocean, the search and rescue team (SAR) has found 58 solid objects on the sea bed, Malaysia’s Transport Minister, Datuk Seri Lai, said today.
The Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre, he said, was in the midst of recovering the objects in the hope that they were wreckage parts from the ill-fated jetliner.
‘The Ministry will verify the objects in its effort to draw a sound conclusion,’ Mr Liow said today in Kuala Lumpur.
A Malaysian vessel ‘Go Phoenix’, normally used for oil exploration, is expected to arrive in Perth, Western Australia, on September 21.
It will be accompanied by Australia’s ‘Furgo Discovery’ ship to search the ocean floor using towed vehicles equipped with sonar and video cameras.
-Mail Online

Tagged with , , , , , ,

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.

Tagged with , , , , , , ,

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

Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

More News

Most Popular

Tag Cloud

 

Recent News

Archives