Tag: indian ocean
Indian Ocean Debris Almost Certainly From A Boeing 777: Malaysia

Indian Ocean Debris Almost Certainly From A Boeing 777: Malaysia

By Joe Brock

SAINT-DENIS-DE-LA-REUNION, France (Reuters) — Malaysia is “almost certain” that plane debris found on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean is from a Boeing 777, the deputy transport minister said on Thursday, heightening the possibility it could be wreckage from missing Flight MH370.

The object, which appeared to be part of a wing, was being sent to offices of France’s BEA crash investigation agency in Toulouse to verify if it was indeed the first trace of the lost plane to be found, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said.

Malaysia Airlines was operating a Boeing 777 on the ill-fated flight, which vanished in March last year en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in one of the most baffling mysteries in aviation history.

The plane was carrying 239 passengers and crew.

Search efforts led by Australia have focused on a broad expanse of the southern Indian Ocean off Australia. Reunion Island, where the debris was found washed up on Wednesday, is a French overseas department roughly 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles) away, east of Madagascar.

“The location is consistent with the drift analysis provided to the Malaysian investigation team, which showed a route from the southern Indian Ocean to Africa,” Najib said in a statement.

There have been four serious accidents involving 777s in the 20 years since the widebody jet came into service. Only MH370 is thought to have crashed south of the equator.

“No hypothesis can be ruled out, including that it would come from a Boeing 777,” the Reunion prefecture and the French Justice Ministry said in a joint statement.

Part of Wing?

Aviation experts who have seen widely circulated pictures of the debris said it may be a moving wing surface known as a flaperon, situated close to the fuselage.

“It is almost certain that the flaperon is from a Boeing 777 aircraft. Our chief investigator here told me this,” Malaysian Deputy Transport Minister Abdul Aziz Kaprawi told Reuters.

Abdul Aziz said a Malaysian team was heading to Reunion Island, about 600 kilometers (370 miles) east of Madagascar.

Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said the object had a number stamped on it that might speed its verification.

“This kind of work is obviously going to take some time although the number may help to identify the aircraft parts, assuming that’s what they are, much more quickly than might otherwise be the case,” he said.

Investigators believe someone deliberately switched off MH370’s transponder before diverting it thousands of miles off course. Most of the passengers were Chinese, and Beijing said it was following developments closely.

For the families of those on board, lingering uncertainty surrounding the fate of the plane has been agony.

“Even if we find out that this piece of debris belongs to MH370, there is no way to prove that our people were with that plane,” said Jiang Hui, 41, whose father was on the flight.

Zhang Qihuai, a lawyer representing some of the passengers’ families, said a group of around 30 relatives had agreed they would proceed with a lawsuit against the airline if the debris was confirmed to be from MH370.

Ocean Currents

The plane piece is roughly 2-2.5 meters (6.5-8 feet) in length, according to photographs. It appeared fairly intact and did not have visible burn marks or signs of impact. Flaperons help pilots control an aircraft while in flight.

Greg Feith, an aviation safety consultant and former crash investigator at the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), said his sources at Boeing had told him the piece was from a 777. Whether it was MH370 was not clear, he said.

“But we haven’t lost any other 777s in that part of the world,” Feith said.

Oceanographers said vast, rotating currents sweeping the southern Indian Ocean could have deposited wreckage from MH370 thousands of kilometers from where the plane is thought to have crashed.

If confirmed to be from MH370, experts will try to retrace the debris drift back to where it could have come from. But they caution that the discovery was unlikely to provide any more precise information about the aircraft’s final resting place.

“This wreckage has been in the water, if it is MH370, for well over a year so it could have moved so far that it’s not going to be that helpful in pinpointing precisely where the aircraft is,” Australia’s Truss told reporters.

Robin Robertson, an oceanographer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, said the timing and location of the debris made it “very plausible” that it came from MH370, given what was known about Indian Ocean currents.

Malaysia Airlines said it was too early to speculate on the origin of the debris.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said it was working with Boeing and other officials.

Boeing declined to comment on the photos, referring questions to investigators.

Aviation consultant Feith said that if the part was from MH370, the bulk of the plane likely sank, while the flaperon had air pockets that allowed it to float below the water’s surface.

Finding the wreckage would involve reverse engineering the ocean currents over 18 months, Feith said. “It’s going to take a lot of math and science to figure that out,” he said.

(Reporting by Tim Hepher, Emmanuel Jarry and Matthias Blamont in PARIS, Lincoln Feast and Swati Pandey in SYDNEY, Alwyn Scott in NEW YORK, Siva Govindasamy in SINGAPORE, Sui Lee Wee in BEIJING and Praveen Menon in KUALA LUMPUR; Writing by Dean Yates; Editing by Alex Richardson and Paul Tait)

Photo: French gendarmes and police inspect a large piece of plane debris which was found on the beach in Saint-Andre, on the French Indian Ocean island of La Reunion, July 29, 2015. REUTERS/Zinfos974/Prisca Bigot 

Searchers Find No Sign Of Missing Plane, Only Garbage

Searchers Find No Sign Of Missing Plane, Only Garbage

By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — The search and rescue teams working off the west coast of Australia seeking the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 discovered what oceanographers have been warning — that even the most far-flung stretches of ocean are full of garbage.

For the first time since the search focused on the south Indian Ocean 10 days ago, the sky was were clear enough and the sea was calm, allowing ships to retrieve the “suspicious items” spotted by planes and on satellite imagery.

But examined on board, none of them proved to be debris from the missing plane, just the ordinary garbage swirling around the ocean.

“A number of objects were retrieved by HMAS Success and Haixun 01 yesterday,” reported the Australian Maritime Safety Authority in a release Sunday. “The objects have been described as fishing equipment and other flotsam.”

The disappointing results demonstrated the difficulty the search teams face trying to find out what happened to the Boeing 777 and its 239 passengers and crew. The plane disappeared March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Australian authorities said Sunday that a naval support ship, the Ocean Shield, will depart from Perth on Monday with a “black box detector” supplied by the U.S. Navy. The Towed Pinger Locator 25 carries a device that should be able to detect the so-called black boxes of the plane in waters as deep as 20,000 feet. The boxes record pilots’ conversations and flight data.

The search team is in a race against time because the recorder battery lasts only 30 to 45 days. The odds are stacked against finding it in time without a trail of debris to guide them. Investigators are merely surmising that the flight crashed into the Indian Ocean, based on an analysis of the flight’s path from engine data transmitted via satellite.

The most famous precedent is the case of Air France Flight 447, which crashed over the Atlantic on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009. It took two years to find the body of the aircraft and the recorder, even though pieces of debris were found within five days.

The south Indian Ocean is one of the most remote places on the planet, far from any islands, shipping lanes or flight paths. But the area accumulates surprisingly large amounts of garbage, trapped in the gyre of slowly rotating currents.

“In addition to foul weather, administrative bungling and the vastness of the search area, the search for MH 370 has been compounded by one other factor: the incredible amount of garbage already floating in the search area — and in oceans worldwide,” Marc Lallanilla wrote on the website livescience.com, where he referred to the search for Flight 370 as a “needle in a garbage patch.”

The lack of confirmed debris has prevented families from achieving any kind of closure over the deaths of their relatives. Chinese families, in particular, have rejected the assertion of the Malaysian government that the plane crashed with no survivors.

“We want evidence, truth, and dignity,” read banners that Chinese relatives held at an impromptu demonstration at a Kuala Lumpur hotel on Sunday.

Malaysia Airlines said Sunday that it will fly families of passengers to Perth and will set up a family assistance center to providing counseling and logistical support, but will do so “only once it has been authoritatively confirmed that they physical wreckage found is that of MH370.”

 AFP Photo/Malaysian Maritime Enforcement

 

As Search For Debris Continues, Flight 370 Legal Action Begins

As Search For Debris Continues, Flight 370 Legal Action Begins

By W.J. Hennigan, Ralph Vartabedian and Don Lee, Los Angeles Times

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Calm seas returned Wednesday to aid the search for the missing Flight 370, but public protests and the first legal filing on behalf of a passenger hinted at a stormy forecast for Malaysia and its state-supported airline.

Executives of Malaysia Airlines said Tuesday that they would pay at least $5,000 to each of the families of the 227 passengers aboard the Boeing 777 that disappeared March 8, but the gesture appeared to provide little comfort to distraught relatives, about 100 of whom marched to the Malaysian Embassy in Beijing, where some clashed with police.

In the U.S., meanwhile, a law firm representing the father of a 24-year-old Indonesian passenger filed a petition for discovery against Boeing Co. and Malaysia Airlines, a legal move that is a precursor to what the firm said would be a “multimillion-dollar litigation process.”

“The big target would be Boeing because the families could sue in U.S. courts,” said Gary Logan, a Las Vegas attorney who handles aviation accident suits. “The U.S. is the place to be in terms of collecting damages.”

But any legal action against aircraft manufacturer Boeing would depend on finding the cause of the accident.

The company declined to comment. Malaysia Airlines didn’t reply to an inquiry.

The investigation has so far yielded no debris from the presumed crash zone in the southern Indian Ocean, much less any reason for the disappearance, which experts believe was caused by a hijacking, a suicidal crew member or a malfunction.

Malaysia Airlines might be forced to pay as much as $176,000 per passenger under the Montreal Convention of 1999, an international treaty that covers death and injury to passengers. A nearly $40-million payout would deliver a staggering blow to the carrier, which has been suffering financial losses for years.

Malaysia Airlines, a publicly traded company supported by the Malaysian government, lost $360 million last year, while airlines worldwide averaged an operating profit margin of about 4.7 percent, according to industry analysts.

“Malaysia Airlines was one of the biggest loss-making airlines, and that was before one of their aircraft mysteriously disappeared,” said Seth Kaplan, an analyst with Airline Weekly, an industry publication. “There weren’t many airlines — outside of India — that lost more money.”

Malaysian officials sought to allay rising anger in China and widespread doubt at home after they announced this week that an analysis of satellite data made it all but certain the flight had plunged into the south Indian Ocean with no hope for survivors.

The airliner’s chief executive, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, said Malaysia Airlines was prepared to fly families to Australia, but noted that the Australian government would grant visas to relatives only if evidence of the plane were found.

Search operations resumed Wednesday after strong gales and heavy swells grounded aircraft and drove ships away. As many as a dozen aircraft from six countries, including the United States, will focus their efforts on unidentified debris spotted by satellites, said the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.

Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said a high-level delegation would return to Beijing to meet with families of the Chinese passengers.

Hishammuddin said during a Tuesday evening news conference that information from the British satellite firm Inmarsat strongly suggested that Flight 370 veered southward over the Indian Ocean, not northward, where search crews had also been looking. The data and graph he released also suggested that such a crash probably occurred between 8:11 a.m. and 9:15 a.m. March 8, more than seven hours after the plane took off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital, en route to Beijing.

Airline chairman Mohamed Nor Yusof appealed to everyone Tuesday to “accept the painful reality that the aircraft is now lost and that none of the passengers or crew on board survived.”

A retired engineer who worked with Inmarsat’s spacecraft, built in El Segundo, California, by Boeing, expressed confidence in its ability to measure the minute shifts in transmission frequencies that formed the basis of the conclusion that the plane headed south. But other communications satellite engineers not involved with the spacecraft were skeptical about Inmarsat’s findings.

In its petition for discovery filed in Chicago’s Cook County Circuit Court, Ribbeck Law Chartered requests a wide range of information, including a manifest on any maintenance performed on the aircraft, information about its cargo and details about training of the airline’s crew. The firm represents the father of passenger Firman Chandra Siregar, and has been involved in several high-profile aviation cases.

Shen Bohan/Xinhua/Zuma Press/MCT