Thursday, 26 June 2014
Search for MH370 could take 'decades': Malaysia Airlines
Sydney: The hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane will shift farther south of the most recent suspected crash site in a remote stretch of Indian Ocean, Australian officials said on Thursday.
They also said they were confident that the plane was flying on autopilot when it crashed.
Transport Minister Warren Truss told reporters in Canberra on Thursday that the new search area is based on fresh analysis of existing satellite data from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
The plane vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8 with 239 passengers and crew aboard.
Read:
Kuala Lumpur: The search for the missing Malaysian aircraft may take "decades" as its wreckage could be spread over a big area in the Indian Ocean, a top Malaysia Airlines official said, while criticising the government for not informing them about the air turn back made by the jet.
"Something untoward happened to that plane. I think it made a turn to come back, then a sequence of events overtook it, and it was unable to return to base. I believe it's somewhere in the south Indian Ocean," Malaysia Airlines (MAS) commercial chief Hugh Dunleavy said about finding the plane that has been missing for over three months.
"When (a plane) hits the ocean it's like hitting concrete. The wreckage could be spread over a big area. And there are mountains and canyons in that ocean. I think it could take a really long time to find. We're talking decades," he was quoted as saying by the Evening Standard daily.
The Beijing-bound Boeing 777-200 - carrying 239 people, including five Indians, mysteriously vanished on March 8 en-route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. The disappearance of the plane is one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history.
Dunleavy criticised the Malaysian government for taking so long to come out with the information that the missing plane had turned back over the Malay peninsula towards the Strait of Malacca.
"I only heard about this through the news," he said.
"I'm thinking, really? You couldn't have told us that directly? Malaysia's air traffic control and military radar are in the same freakin' building. The military saw an aircraft turn and did nothing," he said.
"They didn't know it was MH370, their radar just identifies flying objects, yet a plane had gone down and the information about something in the sky turning around didn't get released by the authorities until after a week. Why? I don't know. I really wish I did," he added.
Dunleavy described the initial hours when the plane was reported to have gone missing.
The official said he was heading to Kuala Lumpur airport to fly to a conference in Borneo when his phone flashed with an emergency text.
Dunleavy never made it to that conference, instead he spent the next 72 hours working non-stop to find out why the jet had gone missing and trying to explain his lack of an answer to hundreds of distraught relatives in a grief limbo.
He defended the airline's response to the disappearance of the plane, saying "care-givers" did not sleep, dashing between the hotel's ballroom and chaotic press conferences.
The hunt for the Malaysia Airlines plane, the search area in the Indian Ocean is to be moved back to a zone 1,800 kilometres west of Perth, previously dismissed in late March.
The new search area, to be focused on when an underwater probe resumes in August, is not be based on fresh data but on new analysis of the plane's flight path.
The shift was expected. The head of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said last week it would move south of an area where a remote-controlled underwater drone spent weeks fruitlessly scouring 850 square kilometers of seabed.
Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, said "certainly for its path across the Indian Ocean, we are confident that the aircraft was operating on autopilot until it ran out of fuel."
Read:
Kuala Lumpur: The captain of Flight MH370 has been identified as the prime suspect by a Malaysian police investigation into the disappearance of the plane after checks cleared all other people on board, a media report said on Sunday.
The criminal inquiry does not rule out the possibility the Boeing 777-200 plane was lost due to mechanical failure or terrorism, but the police view is that if it was the result of human action, the captain was the most likely perpetrator, reported a daily newpaper.
Malaysia's special branch focused the inquiry on Captain Zaharie Shah, 53, after intelligence checks failed to substantiate any suspicions about the other people on board the jet, the report said.
The Beijing-bound Flight MH370 - carrying 239 people, including five Indians, mysteriously vanished on March 8 en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. The disappearance of the plane is one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history.
Detectives conducted more than 170 interviews. They found that Zaharie, an outgoing, married man with a penchant for gadgetry and postings on social media, appeared to have made no social or work commitments for the future, the report said.
This stood in contrast to the plans of his co-pilot, Fariq Hamid, and the rest of the crew.
The investigators found that Zaharie had programmed a flight simulator in his home with drills rehearsing a flight far out into the southern Indian Ocean and a landing on an island with a short runway. These were deleted but computer experts were able to retrieve them, the report said.
The pilot had made no secret of his unusual hobby, creating aviation videos that were posted on the Internet. But behind the facade of a normal family life in a comfortable Kuala Lumpur suburb, with three children and a five-year-old grandson, police heard rumours of marital estrangement and tensions that have been denied by Zaharie's family, it said.
The initial results of the inquiry have not been published but have been shared with foreign governments and investigators, the report said.
They were disclosed by people in the aviation industry and government officials in southeast Asia, it said.
"The police investigation is still ongoing. To date no conclusions can be made as to the contributor to the incident and it would be sub judice to say so. Nevertheless, the police are still looking into all possible angles," the Malaysian police was quoted as saying by the British daily.
Truss said officials have not attempted to fix a moment when the plane was put on autopilot.
.jpg)