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Tag: malaysia airlines flight 370
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Families Try To Raise $5 Million Reward

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Families Try To Raise $5 Million Reward

By Julie Makinen, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — Relatives of some of the passengers who went missing on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 have launched a campaign to raise a $5 million reward in the hopes of enticing someone to come forward with information about the jet’s disappearance three months ago.

The monthlong fundraising drive was launched Sunday on the crowd-funding site Indiegogo.

Organizers say the campaign will have three stages: collecting the funds, hiring a private investigation company to follow up on “qualified leads” and lobbying governments around the globe to change air safety, aircraft tracking and passport control policies to prevent another tragedy like Flight 370.

“The idea of a reward came up the second or third week after the plane went missing, but then nobody did anything about it,” said Sarah Bajc, who is serving on the seven-member administration committee and whose partner, Philip Wood, was on the plane. “We suggested it to the Malaysian government several times.”

Flight 370 disappeared March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people aboard. Initial searches off the southern coast of Vietnam, followed by a much more extensive effort off the western coast of Australia in the Indian Ocean, have turned up no debris or other signs of the Boeing 777.

In addition to Bajc, the reward committee includes four other people with loved ones on Flight 370, as well as Maarten Van Sluys, a Brazilian businessman who lost his sister when Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, and Ethan Hunt, the Australian chief executive of a 3-D printer company who has experience with crowd-funding.

Bajc said relatives of passengers from Malaysia and China were generally more hesitant to back the reward effort, and some were under pressure from government officials to maintain a low profile.

A detailed official calculus of the cost of the search efforts has not yet been made, but Australia alone has said that it would spend $84 million in 2013-14.

On Monday, Malaysia said that it had spent $8.6 million on search and recovery efforts by its air force, navy, police, fire and rescue department and maritime enforcement agency. It did not give figures for the administrative costs of the effort.

Malaysia Airlines, the country’s flag carrier, last month posted its worst quarterly loss in two years largely due to the disappearance of Flight 370 but did not break out the specific costs.

Malaysian officials are scheduled to meet with Australian search coordinators Tuesday and travel Thursday to China, the home country of the majority of passengers.

The Australian agency that has been coordinating the search is now defining a wider search zone — up to 23,000 square miles — and soliciting bids from private companies to conduct the next phase of the effort.

Exactly how, why and where the plane vanished remains a mystery. Steve Wang, whose mother was aboard the flight and who is not connected to the $5 million reward effort, said Chinese families are desperate for more details and are trying to organize a lawsuit, but have yet to agree on a firm to pursue the case.

“Our primary goal is not compensation, but information,” he said Monday.

Efforts to extract more details from airline representatives in Beijing have been difficult, Wang said, adding that the attorney for Malaysia Airlines, whom he could not identify by name, had a “terrible, terrible attitude.” The Chinese government was also “keeping their distance from us,” Wang said.

He said most of the families that he was aware of had so far received $5,000 in financial aid from Malaysia Airlines — a relatively small amount given that in many cases their primary breadwinner was aboard the aircraft.

Malaysia Airlines subsequently offered “preliminary compensation” payments of $50,000. But Wang said many families were reluctant to accept the money because Chinese lawyers had warned them that the terms entailed “lots of tricks” that might jeopardize future payments.

Malaysia Airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment on compensation issues.

With the search now in a lower-profile phase, a Chinese survey ship, the Zhu Kezhen, has started mapping an area of the Indian Ocean floor based on analysis from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau. Another Chinese vessel, the Haixun 01, and the Malaysian ship Bunga Mas 6 are providing support services.

Survey data is being transported to shore weekly for analysis by Geoscience Australia. Authorities expect a contracted survey ship to join the Zhu Kezhen this month.

The ocean floor mapping is expected to take about three months, officials with the Joint Agency Coordination Center said. An underwater search of the expanded area is expected to begin in August and take up to a year.

AFP Photo/Mohd Rasfan

Two Ships Scour 150-Mile Path For ‘Black Box’ Signal From Missing Malaysian Plane

Two Ships Scour 150-Mile Path For ‘Black Box’ Signal From Missing Malaysian Plane

By Julie Makinen, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — Investigators began searching underwater Friday for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, with two ships homing in on a 150-mile path in the Indian Ocean where analysts believe the jet probably went down.

A pinger locator lent by the U.S. Navy was being towed by the Australian ship Ocean Shield, trying to pick up signals from the Boeing 777’s flight data recorder. A British ship with similar capabilities, the Echo, was also participating. The two vessels were dispatched to converge toward each other along the path more than 1,000 miles off the west coast of Australia.

Angus Houston, who is coordinating the search from the Australian city of Perth, said the path was chosen based on an analysis of six hours of satellite pings transmitted hourly from the plane to a satellite after other communications devices on the jetliner were turned off. But without speed or altitude data to factor into the calculations, investigators have had to model possible paths for the plane’s entry into the water.

Flight 370 disappeared 27 days ago en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people aboard, and Houston conceded that the battery life of the flight data recorder was getting close to expiring. He said investigators had no plans to obtain other pinger locators to add to the search. “These things are in very short supply,” he said at a news conference in Perth.

Australian Navy Commodore Peter Leavy, commander of the joint task force 658, said the two ships were traveling at just three knots (3.4 miles per hour) to search at depths of nearly 10,000 feet. At that rate, it would take more than 24 hours for the two ships to cover the 150-mile track.

“The search using subsurface equipment needs to be methodical and carefully executed in order to effectively detect the faint signal of the pinger,” Leavy added.

Even if the battery on the flight data recorder expires, Houston noted that investigators could continue their subsurface search. The Ocean Shield, he said, carries an unmanned underwater exploration vehicle that can search the ocean floor for up to 24 hours at a time.

In addition to the Ocean Shield and Echo, seven other ships were participating in Friday’s search, along with 10 military planes and four civilian aircraft. Some of those other ships carry helicopters that can help look for surface debris.

“We will continue the surface search for a good deal more time,” said Houston, adding that there was a “great possibility” of finding debris.

He emphasized that finding wreckage remained crucial to narrowing down the search area. “The area is vast and remote,” he added, comparing it to the size of Ireland. “We have not searched everywhere that the aircraft might have gone.”

Over the last week, the search area has been gradually nudged further northwest of Perth, and Houston said the zone would continue to be adjusted on a “semi-regular” basis.

Asked about the cost of the search, Houston conceded that “it’s a lot of money” but refused to get into specifics. He said Australian and Malaysia officials were working on drafting a “comprehensive agreement” about the search, including how to handle debris and victims if they are eventually found, and other “critical decision points.”

In an indication that authorities remain hopeful that the search will locate the plane, Houston said Australian officials were making plans to host relatives of people aboard Flight 370 who are expected to arrive in Perth shortly.

Asked about Malaysia authorities’ statement that the plane’s disappearance had been categorized as a criminal investigation, Houston said that decision was “not relevant” to the work of the searchers at this time.

Xinhua/Zuma Press/MCT

Australia Says Plane Search Efforts Are Only Increasing

Australia Says Plane Search Efforts Are Only Increasing

By Julie Makinen, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — Crews continued searching for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the Indian Ocean west of Australia on Tuesday as authorities emphasized ramped-up efforts to determine what happened to the airliner that went missing March 8.

Officials said an Australian military ship towing a pinger locator — which can scan the sea for the sounds of a beacon attached to the plane’s flight data recorder — left port for the search zone Monday night. It was expected to arrive in the search area about 1,250 miles west of Perth, Australia, on Thursday.

Searchers want to find debris from the Boeing 777, which was carrying 239 passengers and crew members, to narrow their quest for the flight data recorder. The pinger locator’s range extends only about a mile, and Australia said Tuesday’s search area was over 46,000 square miles. The beacon’s battery is designed to last only about a month, though experts say it could endure a week or two longer.

Australian officials said a Joint Agency Coordination Center, led by retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston and staffed by 20 people, was established to help coordinate the international search effort and investigate any debris that is found.

“The magnitude of our operations is increasing, not decreasing,” Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Monday at Pearce air force base near Perth, adding that investigators are “well short” of the point of scaling back operations.

“We owe it to the grieving families of the 239 people on board, we owe it to the anxious governments of all of the countries who had people on board that aircraft … to do whatever we reasonably can to get to the bottom of this mystery,” he said, calling the quest an “extraordinarily difficult exercise.”

Australian Defense Minister David Johnston said Monday that 1,000 sailors were searching by sea and 100 personnel from 10 countries — including the U.S., China, Japan and South Korea — were searching by air. Flight 370 was traveling from Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, to Beijing when it disappeared.

Abbott said Australia would bear the costs of the new coordination center, saying it was “only reasonable” that it would foot the bill as the country in whose search and rescue zone the aircraft had probably come down. However, he added that “at some point there might need to be a reckoning; there might have to be some kind of tallying” of the expenses of the overall search.

The search effort will be a prime topic at a meeting of Southeast Asian defense ministers beginning Tuesday in Hawaii.

Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said Monday that he would discuss the search with his colleagues from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and raise the possibility of deploying more “specific military assets” — such as possible deep-sea search-and-recovery technology — “in the event that we need to embark on a more complex phase of the operation.”

The majority of passengers on Flight 370 were Chinese nationals. A group of them arrived over the weekend in Kuala Lumpur from Beijing, and Hishammuddin said the Malaysian government would soon hold a high-level briefing — including “international experts who were not available during the briefings in Beijing … including experts from China” — for them.

Hishammuddin held a session Saturday with Malaysian and Chinese families in Kuala Lumpur, calling it “the most difficult meeting I’ve ever attended.”

“The families are heartbroken. For many, the strain of the past few weeks has been unbearable. But the one message they delivered to me again and again is not to give up hope,” he said.

In a statement late Monday, the Malaysian government said the final words received by ground controllers at 1:19 a.m. on March 8 were, “Good night, Malaysian three-seven-zero,” The Associated Press reported. Earlier the government had said the final words were, “All right, good night.” The statement said investigators were still trying to determine whether the pilot or co-pilot spoke the words.

 Xinhua/Zuma Press/MCT

 

Clues Emerge On Malaysia Jet, But Weather Halts Search

Clues Emerge On Malaysia Jet, But Weather Halts Search

By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — More tantalizing clues emerged Thursday about the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 as fresh satellites photos showed a debris field in the South Indian Ocean off Australia, but the retrieval was frustrated by poor weather.

Thailand announced that it had spotted 300 floating objects on an earth observation satellite photograph taken Monday, although Anond Snidvongs, director of the Geo-Informatics Space Technology Development Agency, cautioned: “We cannot — dare not — confirm they are debris from the plane.” Japan also announced Thursday that one of its satellites had spotted debris in the same area.

The latest findings corroborate satellite photos taken over the weekend and provided by the French showing a debris field.

However, a flotilla of ships and planes has not been able to retrieve any of the debris for closer inspection because of gale-force winds and swelling seas. For the second time this week, the weather forced a suspension of search efforts.

A U.S Navy P-8 Poseidon aircraft scheduled to join the search Thursday afternoon was grounded, while Australian and Chinese planes that went out in the morning were called back.

“The forecast in the area was calling for severe icing, severe turbulence and near zero visibility,” Lt. Cmdr. Adam Schantz, the officer in charge of the U.S. Navy Poseidon P8 aircraft detachment, was quoted telling the Reuters news agency.

“Anybody who’s out there is coming home and all additional sorties from here are canceled.”

Five ships are continuing their efforts in a 30,000-square-mile search area in the rough waters of the Indian Ocean southwest of Perth, an area that Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott called “as close to nowhere as it’s possible to be.”

The delay is especially maddening because promising satellite photos were released Wednesday showing 122 objects in the ocean that could be wreckage from the Boeing 777. With the heavy seas and winds, however, the debris is likely to drift elsewhere.

The waters of the South Indian Ocean are among the most treacherous in the world with underground volcanoes and strong westerly winds between the latitudes of 40 and 50 degrees south contributing to a phenomenon called the “roaring forties.”

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared March 8 on a red-eye run from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Although the Malaysian government last weekend declared the flight lost without survivors, many families say they are unwilling to give up hope until confirmed debris is found.

However, Chinese insurance companies have begun to pay compensation on life insurance policies for passengers aboard the flight.

China Life, the country’s largest life insurance company, said Thursday that it had already paid $680,000 to families of seven passengers. “China Life is deeply grieved at the news and will ensure compensation and all other related services are fully implemented,” a company spokesman was quoted telling the official Xinhua news agency.

Two other Chinese insurance companies said they were also paying claims on the assumption that all passengers on the flight had died.

AFP Photo/Chaideer Mahyuddin