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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 

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.

AFP Photo/Eric A. Pastor

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

Search For Malaysia Airlines Jet Expands Across Asia

Search For Malaysia Airlines Jet Expands Across Asia

By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — The search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has expanded to cover an impossibly vast swath of Asia extending from Kazakhstan to Australia, with Malaysia appealing for as many airplanes and ships as the world can provide.

The countries where the Boeing 777 and the 239 people aboard could have gone, based on a signal picked up by a satellite, stretch north and west from the plane’s last known location and include Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, China, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand. Another arc stretches south and west between Indonesia and Australia and well into the Indian Ocean.

“We are looking at large tracts of land … as well as deep and remote oceans,” Malaysia’s acting transportation minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, said Sunday at a news conference in Kuala Lumpur, the capital.

Earlier search efforts focused on the flight path between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, over the relatively shallow Gulf of Thailand, but investigators now think it is more likely the plane headed over the Indian Ocean, with an average depth of 13,000 feet.

Family members are holding out hope that the flight was hijacked and landed in some obscure location where the passengers are being held for ransom.

“My gut feeling is that it landed. I still feel his spirit. I don’t feel he is dead,” said Sarah Bajc, a 48-year-old American teacher living in Beijing whose partner, Philip Wood, a 50-year-old IBM executive, was a passenger on the flight.

Malaysian officials said they are not yet classifying the incident as a hijacking and are considering a suicide mission by one of the passengers or crew. The pilot and copilot are high on the list of potential suspects, because of the expertise required to divert the plane. Both the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, and transponder were disabled shortly after takeoff.

The final, reassuring words from the cockpit — “All right, good night” — were spoken to air traffic controllers after the system had already been disabled, and whoever was speaking from the cockpit did not mention any trouble aboard.

Malaysian officials said they did not know whether it was the pilot or copilot who had spoken, but both are under investigation. Malaysian officials said police had searched the home of 53-year-old pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah and removed a flight simulator he kept there, and had also searched the home of the copilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27.

Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul, said on Sunday in an interview with Fox News that the investigation was increasingly looking at the cockpit.

“Something was going on with the pilot,” the Texas Republican said. “I think this all leads towards the cockpit, with the pilot and copilot.”

Despite speculation about Islamic terrorism, neither pilot had ties to militant groups. Malaysian officials said Sunday that the two had not requested to fly together on Flight 370.

The officials also said they had reinvestigated two Iranian men on the flight who were traveling on stolen passports and were sticking with their original determination: that the two were trying to sneak into Europe as economic migrants and had no terrorist links.

The flight departed Kuala Lumpur for Beijing at 12:41 a.m. March 8 and disappeared from civilian radar within 50 minutes. However, Inmarsat satellites picked up tracking information suggesting it remained in flight until at least 8:11 a.m. The satellite was only able to report the distances of the plane, not its exact position, so the search is following the two long arcs _ one extending north toward Kazakhstan and the other southwest over the Indian Ocean.

Aviation geeks using airport data from X-Plane, a flight simulator website, have identified more than 600 runways within range of the nearly 3,000 miles that the plane could have traveled from Kuala Lumpur.

The flight carried 227 passengers, 159 of them Chinese citizens.

“There’s still hope for my daughter and her husband to be alive,” the parents of one young woman told the Beijing News.

The problem with the hijacking theory is that no group has come forward to take credit for the airplane’s disappearance or to make demands.

“That makes it very difficult for us to verify if it is a hijacking or a terrorist act,” Hishammuddin said.

Anyone who commandeered Flight 370 would have had to take extraordinary measures. Those would have included manually disabling the ACARS and transponder and then executing a sharp westward turn during a 10-minute leg of the flight between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace, where there is little primary radar coverage.

Data show that as the aircraft zigzagged off course, it also rose to 45,000 feet, well above the approved altitude for a Boeing 777. Some experts believe that series of changes could have been a deliberate attempt to ensure that passengers could not use their cellphones or to incapacitate them by causing a shortage of oxygen.

Photo: Shyb via Flickr