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Malaysia Releases Preliminary Report On MH370

Malaysia Releases Preliminary Report On MH370

Kuala Lumpur (AFP) – Malaysia on Thursday made public a preliminary report on Flight MH370 and other data that marks its most extensive release of information on the missing airliner to date, nearly two months after its mysterious disappearance.

The brief five-page report, which was submitted earlier to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), was essentially a recap of information that has already been released over time, and did not immediately appear to contain any major new revelations.

The report was accompanied by audio recordings of verbal exchanges between the cockpit of the Malaysia Airlines jet and air traffic controllers, and documents pertaining to the cargo manifest.

“(Prime Minister Najib Razak) set, as a guiding principle, the rule that as long as the release of a particular piece of information does not hamper the investigation or the search operation, in the interests of openness and transparency, the information should be made public,” an accompanying government statement said.

Malaysia is continuing to investigate what happened to the plane, saying this week it also had appointed a former head of the country’s civil aviation to head up a probe that will include members of the US National Transportation Safety Board and other foreign aviation agencies.

Thursday’s release did not contain any information from a separate Malaysian police investigation into whether a criminal act such as terrorism was to blame.

Malaysia’s government, which was heavily criticized for a seemingly chaotic initial response and comments to the media on MH370, has been tight-lipped about the progress of its investigations into the tragedy.

Some relatives of passengers have angrily accused the government and airline of incompetence and withholding information, which Malaysia denies.

The Malaysia Airlines flight vanished on March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard.

It is believed to have crashed in the Indian Ocean, but a massive hunt for the wreckage has been fruitless so far.

Shen Bohan/Xinhua/Zuma Press/MCT

Private Firms To Search For Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Private Firms To Search For 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. Data 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/Mohd Rasfan

Malaysia Airliner Search Points Up China’s Technology Gap

Malaysia Airliner Search Points Up China’s Technology Gap

By Julie Makinen and Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — In June 2012, China reveled in a major scientific achievement: The nation’s first manned deep-sea submersible, the Jiaolong, had dived more than 4.3 miles into the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean. The feat, state-run media said, put China among the elite ranks of such deep-sea-faring countries as the U.S., France and Japan.

Equipped with sonar equipment and two mechanical arms that can lift as much as 220 pounds, the submersible is just the kind of vehicle that might prove useful in the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which investigators now believe is resting 2.8 miles beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean. Of the jet’s 239 passengers and crew members, 153 were Chinese.

But while China has launched itself into the search effort with gusto — it focused its satellites to search for debris, scrambled ships and dispatched airplanes — the effort has thrown an awkward light on the gap between the country’s high-tech aspirations and its limitations.

China hasn’t offered the Jiaolong and the Australia-based search team hasn’t asked, leaving the lead role to a U.S.-built robot sub, the Bluefin-21.

“We are frustrated that we have this great vehicle and it’s not being deployed on this important mission,” said Cui Weicheng, who helped design the Jiaolong and was aboard the vessel on several missions.

Then again, Cui acknowledged, Chinese officials might be worried about getting the submersible to the search area. Its mother ship, the Facing the Red Sun No. 9, built in 1978, has had engine problems and is unreliable.

“On its last mission, from June to September 2013, the mother ship broke down many times,” Cui said. “It needed many repairs…I think that’s why the Chinese government may be hesitating to send it.”

Forty days into the quest to locate the Boeing 777, it’s been American, Australian and British equipment and vessels that have turned up what investigators have called the most promising leads. Meanwhile, officials in other countries have chafed about China getting out over its skis, rushing to release technical findings that proved to be false leads.

“We cannot deny that the United States has much more advanced technology in this regard,” said Xu Guangyu, a retired military officer who is a consultant with the Beijing-based China Arms Control and Disarmament Association. “The U.S. satellite system is much better, as is their ability to analyze very complicated data. These are things that we have to learn from the United States.”

Last week, the state-run China Daily newspaper ran a rather frank front-page article headlined “Tech Gap Exposed in Search Mission; Experts Say More Development Needed in Nation’s Advanced Maritime Equipment.”

A few days earlier, China had grabbed headlines — and caught Australian search coordinators off guard — when state-run CCTV announced that China’s Haixun 01 search vessel might have picked up acoustic transmissions from the jet’s data recorders. It was the first report of any such “pings.”

But questions quickly arose when photos showed searchers using a commercially available $16,000 hand-held device, made in the United States, dangled over the side of the boat. An Australian navy ship, meanwhile, towed a deep-water pinger locater lent by the U.S. military.

Little more was said about the purported pings until this week, when Angus Houston, the retired Australian air chief marshal who has been coordinating the search efforts from Perth, said the Chinese data had been “analyzed and discounted as a credible transmission.” He said investigators were relying on four other detections made by the American pinger locater.

Though Houston tried to minimize the awkwardness of the Chinese disclosure, other governments have bluntly admonished Beijing.

Malaysia’s acting transportation minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, rebuked it for wasting time by posting satellite imagery purporting to show debris over the South China Sea, along the aircraft’s intended flight path. The photos, he said, had been released by “mistake.”

China ought to be familiar with such “nontraditional security” missions. In the last decade, its military has practiced similar operations during exercises with foreign militaries and governments, said Dennis Blasko, a former U.S. Army attache to China and author of “The Chinese Army Today.”

“This gives them a chance to implement that type of training in a real-world situation,” Blasko said.

But the search has exposed a lack of trust not only in China’s information, but in its intentions.

India, for instance, refused a request last month for China to send four warships to join the search around the Andaman Islands.

“China has been sniffing around Indian waters for a long time. Delhi was naturally suspicious of that request,” said C. Raja Mohan, an Indian academic who has written widely about Sino-Indian maritime rivalry.

In China, where the search has received wall-to-wall media attention, the public is eager to see the country make a breakthrough contribution. Asked about it Monday, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said that China was “going full steam ahead with the search operation.”

As speculation ran high last week that China might dispatch the Jiaolong, named for a fabled sea dragon, authorities posted a statement on the submersible’s long-dormant Sina Weibo microblog account, apologizing for not keeping the account up to date. It explained that the team lacked the staffing to share fresh information.

Internet users met the message with disappointment and derision.

“To be honest, we don’t really care if you actually write posts on Weibo,” one commenter said. “We care about whether you can appear in the ocean southwest of Australia.”

Said another, “We need a dragon that can dive into the ocean, not a worm that can only bluff.”

AFP Photo/Malaysian Maritime Enforcement

More Signals Are Detected That May Be From Malaysian Jetliner

More Signals Are Detected That May Be From Malaysian Jetliner

By Julie Makinen, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — An Australian ship hunting for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has picked up two more transmissions similar to those of the jet’s “black boxes,” and the coordinator of the search said Wednesday the “pings” were helping to narrow the search area significantly.

The vessel Ocean Shield, towing an acoustic detection device lent by the U.S. Navy, recorded pings of five and seven minutes’ duration Tuesday afternoon and evening, said Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, who is coordinating the search efforts from Perth, Australia.

Houston said authorities were not ready to deploy a sonar-equipped underwater vessel to scan the seafloor for debris. He noted, however, that the last signal was “very weak” and that the time to deploy the underwater vehicle was “not very far away.”

The Ocean Shield can search six times as much area as a submersible can in the same time, Houston said.

“We need to make hay while the sun shines,” Houston said. Batteries on the black boxes are designed to last 30 days, and the search entered its 33rd day Wednesday, he noted. The Boeing 777, carrying 239 passengers and crew members, disappeared in the predawn hours March 8 while en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing.

The ocean where the pings were detected is extremely deep — more than 2.5 miles — and analysis shows the seabed has high levels of silt that may be “tens of meters” thick, potentially complicating the search, Houston said.

“We know more about the surface of the moon than our own seabed,” said Australian Navy Commodore Peter Leavy.

A plane was deployed Wednesday to drop sonar buoys equipped with hydrophones that descend 1,000 feet below the surface, and which can transmit any sound back to search aircraft via radio, Leavy added.

The search area, about 1,400 miles northwest of Perth, has been “significantly reduced” to about 28,000 square miles, Houston said, enabling a “much more thorough” search.

Houston cautioned that it took 20 days for an underwater search vehicle to locate the wreckage of the Air France flight that plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean off Brazil in 2009, even though searchers had a better fix on the crash site.

AFP Photo/Malaysian Maritime Enforcement