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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

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