The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Flight MH370

  • ‘Plane debris on remote island is breakthrough in Flight MH370’

    Plane debris washed up on the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean is almost certainly part of a Boeing 777, a Malaysian official and aviation experts said, potentially the biggest breakthrough in the search for missing Flight MH370.

    Malaysian investigators are expected in Reunion on Friday and the object, identified by aviation experts as part of a wing, would then be sent to a French military laboratory near Toulouse for checks, French police sources said.

    National carrier Malaysia Airlines was operating a Boeing 777 when the ill-fated flight disappeared in March last year en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, creating one of the most baffling mysteries in aviation history. It was carrying 239 passengers and crew.

    The plane piece was found last  Wednesday washed up on Reunion, a volcanic island of 850,000 people that is a full part of France, located in the Indian Ocean near Madagascar.

    Reunion is roughly 3,700 km (2,300 miles) from the broad expanse of the southern Indian Ocean off Australia where search efforts have focused, but officials and experts said currents could have carried wreckage that way, thousands of kilometers from where the plane is thought to have crashed.

    MH370 is believed to be the only 777 to have crashed south of the equator since the jet came into service 20 years ago.

    If the debris is confirmed to be from MH370, experts will try to retrace its drift back to where the bulk of the plane likely sank on impact. However, they cautioned that the discovery was unlikely to provide any more precise information about the aircraft’s final resting place.

    Nevertheless, the search area for MH370 could be refined, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said.

    “I presume that if this wreckage does turn out to be from a Boeing 777 that the analysts will do their best … to try to work out exactly where it came from,” he told Australian radio.

    “I don’t know how accurate that will be but I dare say it will give us some more evidence and it might enable us to further refine the search area, it might,” Abbott said.

    Aviation experts who have seen widely circulated pictures of the piece of debris, which is about 2-2.5 meters (6.5-8 feet) long, said it may be a moving wing surface known as a flaperon.

    France 2 television showed a picture of the part with the figures “657 BB” stamped on its interior. That corresponds to a code in the 777 manual identifying it as a flaperon and telling workers to place it on the right wing, according to a copy of a Boeing document that appeared on aviation websites.

    “It is almost certain that the flaperon is from a Boeing 777 aircraft,” Malaysian Deputy Transport Minister Abdul Aziz Kaprawi told Reuters.

    Boeing Co has declined to comment on the photos.

    A source close to the French investigation said the plan was to transfer the wing flap to France’s European mainland, along with a fragment of luggage that had also been found in the area.

    A spokesman for Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said a preliminary look indicated the luggage had not been in the water for long.

    Truss said the search for the main wreckage site would ramp up again once the stormy southern hemisphere winter had passed.

    “There is still a significant part of the priority search area that we haven’t looked at … I’m still confident that we’ll be able to find the aircraft in that area,” he told Australia’s Sky television.

    Investigators believe someone may have deliberately switched off MH370’s transponder before diverting the plane thousands of miles off course. Most of the passengers were Chinese. Beijing has said it was following developments closely.

    Lingering uncertainty surrounding the fate of the plane has been agony for the families of those on board.

    “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.

    Ghyslain Wattrelos, a French businessman whose wife and two children were on the missing flight, told French BFMTV the discovery of the debris had been “extremely painful”.

    “This doesn’t give hope, this is a moment I have been fearing,” he said. “As long as there wasn’t any evidence of a crash, of wounded, of dead or whatever, there was a little glimmer of hope for us.”

    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.

    Daniel Rose, a partner at Kreindler & Kreindler LLP in New York, which is representing more than 50 victims’ families, said the discovery was unlikely to trigger a wave of lawsuits.

    Families are pursuing a settlement with insurer Allianz through Kreindler, he said, but the firm could sue before a two-year statute of limitations under the Montreal Convention, which governs such accidents, expires in March 2016.

     

  • Flight MH370 crashed in south Indian Ocean, says Malaysia PM

    Malaysia’s Prime Minister has announced that the missing flight MH370 crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.

    Najib Razak said this was the conclusion of fresh analysis of satellite data tracking the flight.

    Malaysia Airlines had told the families of the 239 people on board, he said.

    The BBC has seen a text message sent to families by the airline saying it had to be assumed “beyond reasonable doubt” that the plane was lost and there were no survivors.

    There were 227 passengers on flight MH370, many of them Chinese.

    Relatives of those on board who listened to the announcement at a Beijing hotel wept with grief, and some were taken away on stretchers by medical teams, news agencies reported.

    Flight MH370 disappeared after taking off on March 8 from Kuala Lumpur.

    A big international search operation has been taking place in the southern Indian Ocean, along the southern arc or corridor of the plane’s possible route, more than 1,500 miles (2,500km) off the south-west coast of Australia.

    In the past day, both Australian and Chinese air force crews have reported spotting debris.

    The unidentified objects have been seen in separate parts of the vast search area, in some of the world’s most treacherous and remote waters.

    The revelation by Prime Minister Najib Razak came at a late-night news conference in Kuala Lumpur.

    It was based on new analysis by British satellite firm Inmarsat, which provided satellite data, and the UK’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB).

    The firms “have concluded that MH370 flew along the southern corridor, and that its last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth,” Mr Razak said.

    “This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites. It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean.”

    Mr Razak appealed to the media to respect the privacy of the families of the passengers and crew, saying the wait for information had been heartbreaking and this latest news harder still.

    The text message sent to families by Malaysia Airlines announcing the loss of the plane said: “Malaysia Airlines deeply regrets that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board survived… we must now accept all evidence suggests the plane went down in the Southern Indian Ocean.”

    Selamat Omar, the father of a 29-year-old aviation engineer who was on the flight, said some family members of other passengers broke down in tears at the news.

    “We accept the news of the tragedy. It is fate,’’ Selamat told Associated Press in Kuala Lumpur.

    The Malaysian prime minister said Inmarsat had been able to shed further light on the plane’s flight path by performing further calculations on the MH370 data “using a type of analysis never before used in an investigation of this sort”.

    According to Inmarsat, this involved a totally new way of modelling, which was why it took time.

    The company told the BBC the new calculation involved crunching far more data, which included what other aircraft were doing at the time.

    Inmarsat gave the AAIB the new data on Sunday, it said, which had to be checked before it could be made public.

    Officials said earlier that the plane automatically sent an hourly “ping” – a brief signal – to the Inmarsat satellite even after other communication systems on the plane shut down.

    Initial analysis showed the location of the final “ping” was probably along one of two vast arcs running north and south.

  • Missing airliner ‘changed course’

    Military radar suggests the missing Malaysia Airlines plane turned west, away from its planned route, before vanishing, Malaysia’s air force says.

    Flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing went missing on Saturday, after taking off with 239 people on board.

    The international search for any wreckage has been widened.

    Earlier, it emerged two men travelling on stolen passports on board the plane were Iranians with no apparent links to terrorist groups, officials said.

    The international police organisation Interpol’s Tehran bureau has said the two Iranians had no criminal records and had left Iran legally. One of the men is believed to have been migrating to Germany.

    The Malaysian authorities initially said flight MH370 disappeared about an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), as it flew over the South China Sea, south of Vietnam’s Ca Mau peninsula.

    No distress signal or message was sent, but it is believed the plane attempted to turn back, perhaps towards Kuala Lumpur.

    Officials still do not know what went wrong with the aircraft.

    The BBC’s Alice Budisatrijo says searchers are ‘using the naked eye’ to try to find the missing plane

    None of the debris and oil slicks spotted in the South China Sea or Malacca Strait so far have proved to be linked to the disappearance.

    Two-thirds of the passengers were Chinese. Others were from various Asian countries, North America or Europe.

    Relatives have expressed frustration at the lack of information about the plane’s fate.

    At least 40 ships and 34 aircraft are taking part in the search in the seas off Vietnam and Malaysia.

    Search teams from Australia, China, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, Philippines, New Zealand and the United States of America are assisting.

    The search is being conducted on both sides of the Malay Peninsula.

    The area has been expanded from 50 nautical miles (57 miles; 93km) from where the plane disappeared – over waters between Malaysia and Vietnam – to 100 nautical miles.

    Earlier, Malaysian police named one of the two men who travelled on the plane on a stolen passport as Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad, 18, and said he was probably migrating to Germany.

    Interpol identified the other man as Delavar Seyed Mohammadreza, 29.

     

    Experts have said the presence of two people with stolen passports on a plane was a breach of security, but one that is relatively common in a region regarded as a hub for illegal migration.

    Malaysian police say the younger Iranian was “not likely to be a member of a terrorist group”, adding that the authorities were in contact with his mother in Germany, who had been expecting her son to arrive in Frankfurt.

    And Interpol says the two men travelled from Qatar’s capital Doha on their Iranian passports, and switched to stolen Italian and Austrian passports to board the Malaysia Airlines flight.

  • China urges Malaysia to intensify search for flight MH370

    China has urged Malaysia to “step up its efforts” in the search for the Malaysia Airlines passenger plane that disappeared on Saturday.

    A massive search and rescue operation involving nine countries has found no trace of the plane or the 239 people on board – most of whom were Chinese.

    The authorities are further expanding the search areas in the Malacca Strait and the South China Sea.

    Flight MH370 vanished from radar en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.

    Relatives of the missing passengers have been told to prepare for the worst.

    Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang had earlier urged the Malaysian authorities to sharpen its search efforts.

    “We have a responsibility to demand and urge the Malaysian side to step up search efforts, start an investigation as soon as possible and provide relevant information to China correctly and in a timely manner,” he said.

    Patience appears to be wearing thin in the search for the missing aeroplane, says the BBC’s Celia Hatton in Beijing.

    The Malaysian authorities are attempting to address Chinese concerns – they have reissued a pledge to fly worried family members to Kuala Lumpur so they can be closer to the search efforts, our correspondent adds.

    But one victim’s relative – Guo Qishun, whose son-in-law was on the plane – said he did not see the point of flying to Malaysia.

    “If we go to Malaysia, we can do nothing but wait, just like we are doing in Beijing now. If we go to Malaysia, who can we rely on? Most of us don’t speak English,” he told the Associated Press news agency.

    Earlier, the Malaysian authorities said they had identified one of the two men travelling on the missing plane on stolen passports.

    Police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said they could not reveal his identity, but confirmed the man was not Malaysian.

    International police agency Interpol has confirmed the passengers were travelling with Italian and Austrian passports stolen in Thailand years ago.

    At a news conference on Monday, Malaysia’s civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman said the two men were “not Asian-looking men”.

    He insisted that all security protocols had been complied with before the plane took off.

    Experts say the presence of two passengers with stolen passports is a breach of security, but is relatively common in the region and could relate to illegal migration.

    Some 40 ships and 34 aircraft from nine different nations are taking part in the search in the seas off Vietnam and Malaysia.

    Azharuddin Abdul Rahman: “All security protocols have been complied with”

    Commander William Marks from the US Seventh Fleet, which is taking part in the search, said he expected the plane’s flight recorders to be floating in the water.

    He said the recorders, also known as “black boxes”, were fitted with radio beacons that can be picked up by radar.

    Despite a wide search, radar had not so far picked up any signals, he said.

    None of the debris and oil slicks spotted in the water so far have proven to be linked to the disappearance.