Malaysia airlines 370 with 239 people on board, 8 March 2014 #25

[TheyDontSee]

FYI if anyone is interested, Coast to Coast AM will be discussing MH370 on the show TONIGHT with Richard Belzer who co-wrote a book on it with the shows host: George Noory
They'll be discussing this topic in the second half of the show (it's a 4 hour show).
Link to the show page: http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2015/03/10

 

[SouthAussie]

Not that this really matters at this point in time .... but it is so difficult for me to imagine how this towelette could be a plant. It was discovered 8 months ago, before the underwater search even started.

The beach is by a town of just 450 people. There are very, very few spots of civilisation along the entire coastline. If the couple were not beachcombers, there is a good possibility the pack would never have been found.

It is really difficult to explain just how desolate the West Australian coast is. It truly is a massively unpopulated and vast area. There could be lots of small items washed up on the beaches. The beaches have no access, no-one is going to walk along most of them ... ever. They are just so very remote. A fly-over would not even spot these small items.

If you follow the coastline in this Google map, you may get an idea of how very vast and unpopulated it is along there.

https://www.google.com.au/maps/plac...m2!3m1!1s0x2bd187cb4565831d:0x400f6382479e340

It goes along with Australia being only slightly smaller than continental USA, yet having a population of just 23 million people. Imagine the people from three New York Citys populating the entire USA - then imagine that most of that population is on the east coast.

 

[ilovepierre]

Let's hope this is the year the plane is discovered.
The discovery of that towelette is awesome!
Hopefully, people will be watching the shoreline and beaches for more items.

 

[gregjrichards]

"Malaysia's transport minister on Thursday vowed to take stern action against an air traffic control supervisor if it is confirmed that he was asleep on the job when Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared a year ago.

An interim investigation report last Sunday contained transcripts of conversations between air traffic controllers and the airline that revealed confusion after the Boeing 777 dropped off radar with 239 people aboard while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

The last voice contact was a "good night" message from the cockpit to the controllers at 1:19 a.m. on March 8. The shutdown of the transponder one minute later removed the plane's identification from commercial radar.

In one conversation four hours later, a Kuala Lumpur air traffic controller told a Malaysia Airlines official that he would need to wake up his supervisor when pressed on the exact time of the last contact with the plane. The controller came on duty after 3 a.m.

Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said his department viewed the matter seriously and was conducting an internal investigation, including whether the supervisor was on or off duty at the time in question."

http://news.yahoo.com/malaysia-vows-action-controller-slept-mh370-vanished-095342833.html

Thanks for all your posts and updates.

 

[SouthAussie]

More than 30,000 square kilometres (around 50 percent) of the priority zone have now been searched.

Still 4 ships involved in the search, with one heading back to Fremantle this week for resupply.

http://www.jacc.gov.au/families/operational_reports/opsearch-update-20150311.aspx

 

[squeaky]

Still here.... waiting for a positive development.... my heart races just thinking about the media frenzy that will explode if/when they find the plane.... but in the meantime it is just depressing that an object of this size with so many people on board can simply vanish into thin air.... this should not be possible

 

[SouthAussie]

THE underwater search for MH370 is on track to be completed by late May, but at least one expert is willing to bet the missing aircraft won’t be found by then.

Internationally respected oceanographer Erik van Sebille said it is more likely to be decades or even centuries before the Boeing 777 is discovered on the bottom of the southern Indian Ocean.

“In the context of the ocean this is a tiny, tiny speck,” said Dr van Sebille.

“Like many other missing planes, missing ships, it might take a very long time, decades, centuries before we stumble on it.

“A lot of the very ancient wrecks have only been found quite recently because people stumbled upon them.”

He likened the search effort as “trying to find your keys in the City of Sydney during a blackout”.

“It’s only if you’re very lucky and stumble upon them, will you find them.”

http://www.news.com.au/travel/trave...erik-van-sebille/story-e6frfq80-1227261698394

 

[dotr]

THE underwater search for MH370 is on track to be completed by late May, but at least one expert is willing to bet the missing aircraft won’t be found by then.

Internationally respected oceanographer Erik van Sebille said it is more likely to be decades or even centuries before the Boeing 777 is discovered on the bottom of the southern Indian Ocean.

“In the context of the ocean this is a tiny, tiny speck,” said Dr van Sebille.

“Like many other missing planes, missing ships, it might take a very long time, decades, centuries before we stumble on it.

“A lot of the very ancient wrecks have only been found quite recently because people stumbled upon them.”

He likened the search effort as “trying to find your keys in the City of Sydney during a blackout”.

“It’s only if you’re very lucky and stumble upon them, will you find them.”

http://www.news.com.au/travel/trave...erik-van-sebille/story-e6frfq80-1227261698394

Cannot even imagine the he-- the families of the missing passengers must be going through.
Having no idea where on earth their loved ones are, must make life like one endless, sleepless night.
If only there truly was a Shangri la...

 

[time]

Off topic, I guess, but have to wonder how the one German Pilot got locked out of the cockpit?

http://www.wired.com/2015/03/germanwings-flight-9525-black-boxes/

 

[gregjrichards]

Off topic, I guess, but have to wonder how the one German Pilot got locked out of the cockpit?

http://www.wired.com/2015/03/germanwings-flight-9525-black-boxes/

I wonder if MH370 was deliberately crashed like what has happened to the Germanwings flight by the co-pilot. Perhaps we will never know.

 

[time]

I wonder if MH370 was deliberately crashed like what has happened to the Germanwings flight by the co-pilot. Perhaps we will never know.

I know, we might not ever know.

Co-pilot appears to have crashed Germanwings plane deliberately, prosecutor ...

 

[ilovepierre]

I wonder if MH370 was deliberately crashed like what has happened to the Germanwings flight by the co-pilot. Perhaps we will never know.

I don't think we'll ever know

 

[Roselvr]

I wonder if MH370 was deliberately crashed like what has happened to the Germanwings flight by the co-pilot. Perhaps we will never know.

I think they will find the plane. I've always felt someone tried to hijack it.

 

[time]

I think they will find the plane. I've always felt someone tried to hijack it.

Same here, I still think it was a hijacking.

 

[Roselvr]

I think they will find the plane. I've always felt someone tried to hijack it.

I don't think they'd be spending the kind of money they are if they didn't think it was in the area. I feel that they have classified info (from the Navy ship that Kate & her hub saw) that we will never know about.

 

[ilovepierre]

Same here, I still think it was a hijacking.

I hover between hijack and technical problems.
Right now, I'm going with a hijack situation.

 

[gregjrichards]

"IN JUST over a fortnight, key ministers from Australia, Malaysia and China will meet to decide if the search for MH370 should go on.

The tripartite meeting in Kuala Lumpur will consider the feasibility of expanding the current underwater search in the southern Indian Ocean, where the aircraft is believed to have crashed.

Other options to be considered remain unclear with authorities insisting they are looking in the right place for the Boeing 777.

Almost two-thirds of the Federal Government’s budget for the MH370 search is yet to be spent, leaving a sizeable sum for further investigations into the plane’s disappearance.

A total of $89.9 million was allocated in last year’s budget for the complex underwater search now into its sixth month.

To date, $30 million has been spent on the search and related costs with Malaysia’s Government pitching in an equivalent sum.

The money has been split between the Australian Defence Force and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, plus set up costs for the Joint Agency Coordination Centre."

http://www.news.com.au/travel/trave...-of-mh370-search/story-fnizu68q-1227283566080

 

[gregjrichards]

New article today

"The tiny Indian Ocean island of Kuda Huvadhoo is the sleepy fishing community that the world forgot. Some of its villagers believe an aircraft they saw on the morning of March 8 last year could hold the key to modern aviation’s most confounding mystery — the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Some of the locals on the 60ha of sand and coral in the Maldives chain do not understand why, after more than a year, invest*igators involved in the search for the Boeing 777 have not come to hear first-hand about the large, low-flying passenger jet they insist they saw that fateful morning.

They wonder why the year-long search has not ventured here to listen to accounts from witnesses who were surprised by the unidentified aircraft. Two told The Weekend Australian they could see distinctive red and blue markings — similar to the striping on the missing plane which was heading west towards the Maldives when last spotted on radar after departing Kuala Lumpur.

Their suspicions are no match for the highly sophisticated calculations based on satellite connections with MH370, which have put its likely crash zone along an arc about 1800km southwest of Perth.

Intriguingly, however, acoustics scientists are not ruling out the possibility that a distinctive high-energy noise they measured about the time of the presumed crash might have come from the aircraft hitting the ocean or imploding at depth in an area near the *Maldives."

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/bus...-help-find-mh370/story-e6frg95x-1227290748703

 

[watcher9]

I could not see the whole article because it was only available to subscribers.

This article from a year ago has a map which shows where the island of Kuda Huvadhoo is located.
Sorry I have never been able to bring a picture or map in.

http://www.ibtimes.com/malaysia-air...aldives-examining-latest-theory-mh370-1562221

I know all this was discussed a year ago, but what the heck?

The witnesses were discounted because of the time which was calculated by the plane's normal cruise speed but to me, if the plane did lose some power, it could have been flying lower than cruise speed. I don't know what a lower speed could be that would still keep the plane in the air while still meshing with the witnesses' statements?

Their statements of seeing the plane makes a lot more sense than the intricate turns they suspected.

But the fire plus emergency diversion theory, as compelling as it is and similar to other known incidents, leaves one question unanswered. If the pilots tried for a landing at Langkawi and missed because they became incapacitated, the autopilot would have kept them flying straight and level on the last compass heading. (Which would have taken MH370 more or less over Kuda Huvadhoo, by the way.)
Yet we know from Malaysian military radar tracking that after passing the west coast of Malaysia, MH370 zigzagged north and west, toward the Andaman Islands, following precise waypoints. Shortly before reaching the Andamans, it was lost to radar, and might have possibly made the Maldives, before disappearing toward one of the two arcs -- one in Central Asia, the other off the west coast of Australia -- where satellite pings say it must have ended its flight.

 

[time]

Thanks you two for the articles on the sighting in the Maldives... I still think it could have been MAL 370 and why didn't they investigate the sighting. The Maldives is the perfect place for a hijacked plane to land in my opinion.

In other news, this helicopter exploded in midair.

KUALA LUMPUR: Rompin MP Tan Sri Jamaluddin Jarjis was among the six people on board the helicopter which crashed in Jalan Sungai Lalang, Kampung Pasir Baru, Semenyih here today.

Jamaluddin, who is also the chairman of Chairman of PR1MA Corporation Malaysia, was on board the helicopter which was en route from Kuantan to Subang.

The Eurocopter AS365N2 Dauphin helicopter was carrying six people including captain Clifford William Fournier, operations assistant: Aidana Baizieva, private secretary at the Prime Minister office, Datuk Azlin Alias, Jamaluddin's bodyguard Razakan Seran and Datuk Tan Huat Seang.

http://english.astroawani.com/malay...5-others-dead-semenyih-helicopter-crash-57108

And, "Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad Calls on Prime Minister Najib Razak to Resign"
http://www.wsj.com/articles/malaysi...ime-minister-najib-razak-to-resign-1428153386

Six years ago, Malaysia’s former leader, Mahathir Mohamad, played a pivotal role in bringing down a prime minister. Now he is attempting to do it again...

Probably all unrelated, but interesting.