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Tag: malaysia flight 370
New Search Zone Marked Off For Missing Malaysia Airlines Jet

New Search Zone Marked Off For Missing Malaysia Airlines Jet

By Julie Makinen, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — Australian authorities said Thursday that a 23,000-square-mile area in the southern Indian Ocean had been designated as a new focus zone where searchers will look for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Analysts who helped define the area said in a report the crew was probably deprived of oxygen and unresponsive in the final hours of the flight.

Experts from Boeing and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board were among the specialists who helped define the zone, based on satellite data and analysis of previous similar incidents.

The new zone, about 1,100 miles west of Perth, Australia, is farther south than where previous intensive search efforts were carried out this spring after the plane vanished March 8 with 239 people aboard. The flight was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it went missing.

Intensive searching involving aircraft, ships, and a robotic submarine in March, April, and May yielded no wreckage or other conclusive signs of the Boeing 777. The cause of the plane’s disappearance remains undetermined, although investigators have said they believe that it was the result of deliberate action of someone aboard the jet.

In the analysts’ report, released Thursday by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, they noted that for the five hours leading up to the aircraft’s final electronic “handshake” with a satellite, there seemed to be no large changes to the aircraft’s flight path, and there was no radio communication.

Based on that and other factors, they concluded, “the final stages of the unresponsive crew / hypoxia event type appeared to best fit the available evidence for the final period of MH370’s flight when it was headed in a generally southerly direction.”

Australia Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said the search was continuing with a mapping of the ocean floor in the newly defined area, to be followed by a comprehensive seafloor search.

The seafloor search, he said, should start around August and be completed within one year. The area is 58 miles wide and 400 miles long, covering an area as big as Lake Huron, the second-largest of the U.S. Great Lakes. By comparison, the area searched with a robotic, sonar-equipped submarine in May was about 330 square miles.

Malaysia and Australia said they were developing a memorandum of understanding to determine exact areas of cooperation in the search and recovery activities and work out financial details. Although Malaysia is officially the lead nation on the search and recovery, Australia has already said it will probably spend about $80 million on the effort by mid-2015.

AFP Photo/ Ted Aljibe

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Private Firms To Search For Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Private Firms To Search For Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

By Julie Makinen, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — Private companies specializing in deep ocean search will be hired to continue the quest to find Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Australia’s prime minister said Monday, and the cost could run more than $55 million and take six to eight months.

The U.S. Navy’s robotic submarine Bluefin-21 has searched more than 150 square miles of the floor of the Indian Ocean in an area where investigators thought they had detected pings from the Boeing 777’s black box transmitters in early April. We are “baffled and disappointed” that no wreckage had been found 52 days into the search, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said at a news conference in Canberra, Australia.

Now, Abbott said, the undersea search area will be expanded from the most probable impact zone to a much wider area totaling 21,621 square miles.

Side-scan sonar devices towed behind ships will be used to traverse the expanded search area, said retired Australian Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, who has been coordinating search efforts from Perth, Australia.

Abbott indicated that air searches for surface debris would be discontinued imminently. “It is highly unlikely we will find any debris on the ocean surface” now, he said, explaining that any material from the plane probably would have become waterlogged and sunk by this time.

“We are moving to a phase focused on searching the ocean floor over a much larger area,” Abbott said. So far, the visual search area has encompassed 334 flights totaling more than 3,000 hours and scoured 1.7 million square miles of the ocean surface.

Until the private companies can begin working, Abbott said, the Bluefin-21 as well as Australian, Malaysian and Chinese ships will continue operating in the search area. An Australian military plane will remain on standby in case suspected wreckage is identified, he added.

“I want the families to know, I want the world to know, Australia will not shirk its responsibility,” Abbott said. “We will not let people down.”

Asked about his comments several weeks ago that investigators were close to finding the wreckage, Abbott said he was “not in the business of making excuses for failure” but added that the search was perhaps the most difficult in history.

“Enormous efforts have been made,” he said, describing the jet’s disappearance as an “extraordinary mystery.”

Houston said investigators believe they are looking in the right area. “We were quietly optimistic,” he said, that the Bluefin-21 would find the jet wreckage.

But he noted that it took more than two years to find the undersea wreckage of Air France Flight 447 in the Atlantic Ocean after it crashed in 2009, and that in that case, the plane was found just 6.5 nautical miles from its last known position. Information about the last known position of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is much less robust.

Asked about the cost of the search so far, Abbott declined to provide specifics, saying authorities had been using military assets that governments would be “paying for anyway.”

The Boeing 777 vanished March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people aboard. Authorities have said they believe a deliberate act by someone aboard the aircraft led to its disappearance, but they have not offered more specifics.

AFP Photo/Eric A. Pastor

Malaysia Airlines Has ‘Work To Do’ Fixing Image, Says CEO

Malaysia Airlines Has ‘Work To Do’ Fixing Image, Says CEO

Kuala Lumpur (AFP) – Malaysia Airlines, which was already haemorrhaging cash in the face of intense competition, has “got a lot of work to do” recovering from the disappearance of MH370, its CEO said Monday.

The flag-carrier airline has reported hefty losses for three years running, and MH370 now raises the spectre of a potential drop in bookings over safety concerns and possible huge payouts to passengers’ families.

“First and foremost, obviously this incident has affected the airline,” CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said during a regular MH370 press briefing in Kuala Lumpur. “We’ve got a lot of work to do. The airline obviously needs to get itself together.”

The plane disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8 with 227 passengers and 12 crew on board.

Followed intently around the world, the crisis has been a public relations disaster for the airline, which had previously boasted a solid safety record.

Relatives of the 153 Chinese passengers on board have criticized the airline and Malaysian government as “liars” and “murderers,” alleging the truth was being concealed.

Airlines can take “up to six months to recover from what we call a ‘market reputation issue’ and … we intend to do that quicker,” Ahmad Jauhari said.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published Sunday, he said ticket sales had suffered after MH370, calling it “natural.”

But the newspaper said he did not provide specifics on sales, nor comment on how the airline’s financial results would be affected.

On Monday, when he asked whether he would resign as a result of MH370, Ahmad Jauhari said: “As far as my own personal position, I have work to do here.”

Analysts have long blamed poor management, government interference, a bloated workforce, and powerful, change-resistant unions for preventing the airline from remaining competitive.

They say the only thing keeping the airline afloat was financial support from Malaysia’s state investment arm, which owns 70 percent of the carrier.

The company announced a 1.17 billion ringgit ($360 million) loss for 2013, higher than expected by analysts. It lost 2.5 billion ringgit and 433 million ringgit, respectively, in 2011 and 2012.

A U.S.-based law firm has said it planned to initiate “multi-million-dollar” lawsuits against Malaysia Airlines and Boeing, manufacturer of the aircraft.

AFP Photo/Mohd Rasfan

Malaysian Police Say Nothing Suspicious Among The 227 Passengers

Malaysian Police Say Nothing Suspicious Among The 227 Passengers

By Julie Makinen, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — A British submarine joined the search Wednesday for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet as Malaysian police said their probe of the 227 passengers found no personal or psychological problems or motivation to hijack or sabotage the aircraft.

Authorities are continuing to investigate the pilot, co-pilot and 10 other crew members for clues as to how and why Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished March 8, police Inspector-General Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar told Bernama, the Malaysian state news agency. Investigators said previously that they believed the jet’s disappearance was the result of deliberate action by somebody on board the plane.

Conditions for Wednesday’s search for the Boeing 777 in the Indian Ocean were fair, but the quest turned up no evidence of debris, Australian authorities said. Ten planes and nine ships searched an area of about 91,500 square miles more than 900 miles west of Perth, Australia.

The Tireless, a Trafalgar Class submarine that has joined the hunt, has advanced underwater search capabilities, Australian officials said. The British navy vessel Echo, a hydrographic survey ship, also was participating in the search.

An Australian vessel towing a pinger detector that could pick up transmissions from the plane’s flight data recorder has apparently not yet arrived in the search area.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak was due to visit Perth on Wednesday and Thursday to be briefed by Angus Houston, who is coordinating the Australian-led search.

Meanwhile, Malaysia Airlines held a closed-door briefing in Kuala Lumpur, the capital, for family members of the missing passengers. Flight 370 was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it disappeared, and the majority of passengers were Chinese nationals.

Houston said investigators were continuing to try to narrow the search area based on their analysis of satellite and other data but the task remained an extremely challenging one.

“We don’t have a precise aircraft location for six hours before the aircraft went into the water somewhere,” Houston said in a radio interview Wednesday. “So it’s a very difficult task for the search coordination centers in Malaysia and also in Australia, (with) no precise data from which to start the search.”

AFP Photo/Eric A. Pastor