Missing MH370 latest: Conspiracy theories as to what really happened
By Agencies
Published Saturday, June 07, 2014
This picture taken on March 31, 2014 shows a Malaysian Buddhist (R) wiping her tears as she offers prayers for passengers of missing Malaysia Airlines (MAS) flight MH370 at a Buddhist temple in Kuala Lumpur. Malaysian Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Hindus have come together to pray for the victims of flight MH370, offering glimmers of hope that deep divisions in the Muslim-majority multi-ethnic country could be overcome. (AFP)
LATEST UPDATE:
No firm evidence have been provided as to what really happened to missing flight MH370.
World's conspiracy theorists have weighed in with explanations of their own for the Malaysian Airlines plane's disappearance.
The plane was shot down
A new book, Flight MH370 – The Mystery, suggests that the missing Malaysian Airways plane may have been shot down accidentally by US-Thai joint strike fighters in a military exercise in the South China Sea. The book also claims that search and rescue efforts were deliberately sent in the wrong direction as part of a cover-up, the Daily Mail reports.
Alien abduction
Five per cent of Americans surveyed by Reason.com believe that the plane was abducted by aliens. Some bloggers have pointed to a number of recent UFO sightings in Malaysia as evidence for extraterrestrial intervention.
The Bermuda Triangle
The plane didn't actually fly anywhere near Bermuda, but some people – including one Malaysian minister – pointed out that the area where MH370 vanished is on the exact opposite side of the globe to the Bermuda Triangle. Unfortunately those people are wrong; the exact opposite side of the globe is closer to the Caribbean than Bermuda, The Sunday Times notes.
High-tech hijacking
The disappearance of flight MH370 may be down to the world’s first cyber hijack, according to the Sunday Express. It says that hackers could have accessed the aircraft’s flight computer and reprogrammed the speed, altitude and direction.
MH370 itself could be used as a weapon
Some people have expressed concern that the aeroplane may have been hijacked by terrorists and landed somewhere, to be used as a weapon at a later date.
Search to focus on '7th arc' in Indian Ocean
Based on new data and analysis, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) told the media that the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 will mainly focus on the "7th arc" in the Indian Ocean.
The total extent of the arc is from latitude 20 degrees south to 39 degrees south, reports ABC.
The ATSB added that the underwater search area will mostly likely be brought down to 60,000 square kilometres.
Australia probes British witness account
Australia was Wednesday investigating an account from a sailor who said she may have seen Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 on fire, as officials said the underwater hunt for the plane could dive much deeper.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which is leading the search at the request of the Malaysian government, is looking at the claim from a British yachtswoman made this week.
"The ATSB received... a message from a member of the public, reporting that they had seen what they believed to be a burning aircraft in the sky above the Indian Ocean on the night of the disappearance of MH370," a spokesman told AFP in an email.
"That information has been forwarded to the ATSB's MH370 Search Strategy Working Group for review."
Flight MH370, which was en route from Kuala Lumpur to the Chinese capital Beijing when it inexplicably diverted, is believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.
An extensive search for the plane, which vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board, has so far found nothing, including an intensive underwater hunt with a mini-sub that could dive to 4,500 metres.
The ATSB on Wednesday released a request for tenders for a company to dive even deeper, to depths of up to 6,000 metres (19,800 feet).
It said the successful bidder would be engaged as a prime contractor and provide the expertise, equipment and vessels needed to carry out the search for the Boeing 777 from August.
"The successful tenderer will use the data from a bathymetric survey (already under way) to navigate the search zone, which has water depth between 1,000 and 6,000 metres," it said.
Bathymetry refers to the study of underwater depths of oceans or lakes.
An international team is now determining a search zone of up to 60,000 square kilometres (24,000 square miles) based on where the aircraft last communicated with an Inmarsat satellite.
'A glowing plane'
British yachtswoman Katherine Tee added to speculation about the location of a possible crash site by revealing she saw a glowing plane over the Indian Ocean in March.
The 41-year-old said she told Australian authorities of her sighting of a plane with "what appeared to be a tail of black smoke coming from behind it" while she travelled from Kochi in India to Phuket in Thailand.
"There were two other planes passing higher than it -- moving the other way -- at that time," she wrote on sailing site Cruisers Forum, a firm for which she also works.
"I recall thinking that if it was a plane on fire that I was seeing, the other aircraft would report it."
She said she told no one at the time because she and her husband, who was onboard but asleep, had been having difficulties and had not spoken for about a week.
"And most of all, I wasn't sure of what I saw," she said. "I couldn't believe it myself."
But after confirming her yacht's position using GPS data in recent days, she said she knew she was in the "right place at the right time" and told authorities.
MH370's last known position as tracked by military radar was roughly west of Phuket, although the search area has focused on a zone hundreds of kilometres (miles) further south.
In what could be another clue, researchers at Western Australia's Curtin University revealed Wednesday they had detected a low-frequency underwater sound which could have come from the plane.
A listening station off Rottnest Island, close to the Western Australia coast, picked up the signal at 0130 GMT on March 8.
Alec Duncan, from Curtin's Centre for Marine Science and Technology, said the noise could have come from the plane crashing.
"I wouldn't totally rule it out ... it's not impossible," he told AFP, but said it was more likely to have originated from a natural source, such as an earth tremor.
Iata to enhance aircraft tracking options
Following the disappearance of MH370, the International Air Transport Association (Iata) has announced plans to establish an industry task force to develop recommendations to improve global flight tracking.
Iata confirmed that the Aircraft Tracking Task Force (ATTF) expects to be in a position to deliver draft options for enhanced global aircraft tracking to the International Civil Aviation Organisation (Icao) in September, leading to presentation to the industry before year-end.
“Aviation stakeholders are united in their desire to ensure that we never face another situation where an aircraft simply disappears,” said Kevin Hiatt, Iata Senior Vice-President, Safety and Flight Operations.
“While states work through Icao to develop and implement performance-based global standards, the industry is committed to moving forward with recommendations that airlines can implement now,” he added.
The commitment made at the time of the task force announcement was to have them available by the end of 2014. Iata invited Icao and key stakeholders throughout the aviation industry to participate in the ATTF. The first meeting of the group was held on May 13, 2014.
Separately, but in conjunction with Iata, Icao held a Special Multi-disciplinary Meeting on Global Flight Tracking on May12-13. An outcome of the Icao meeting was a consensus among member states and the international air transport industry sector on the near-term priority to track airline flights. Icao will also begin considering performance-based international standards, on a priority basis, to ensure broader adoption of airline flight tracking across the aviation system.
Icao and Iata are working together to conduct a survey of vendors to identify options. Over the next few months, the ATTF will develop a set of performance-based recommendations to better ensure global aircraft tracking – meaning that there will likely be a number of options that airlines can consider.
These recommendations will be developed through an assessment of available products and services used for tracking commercial aircraft against specific criteria, including factors such as performance parameters, coverage, security, and cost. Additionally, the ATTF will define a minimum set of performance requirements that any system should achieve.
The ATTF includes representatives from Iata, Icao, Airlines for America, Association of Asia Pacific Airlines, Civil Air Navigation Services Organisation, Flight Safety Foundation, International Coordinating Council of Aerospace Industries Associations, International Federation of Air Line Pilots Associations, Boeing Commercial Airplanes, Airbus SAS, Bombardier Aerospace, and Embraer Commercial Aviation. [Staff]
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Undersea sound detected
A team of Australian researchers looking into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 released data on Wednesday about an unusual underwater sound recorded around the time the plane vanished, though the lead scientist acknowledged the chances it is linked to the jet are slim.
The low-frequency sound was picked up by underwater listening devices in the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia on March 8, the same day the Boeing 777 disappeared on a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people on board. Researchers at Curtin University in Western Australia have been analyzing the signal to see if it may be the sound of the plane crashing into the ocean.
But Alec Duncan, who's heading up the research, said the sound appears to have originated well outside the jet's projected flight path that officials determined based on satellite and radar data, and is therefore unlikely to have come from the plane.
"It's one of these situations where you find yourself willing it all to fit together but it really doesn't," said Duncan, senior research fellow with Curtin's Center for Marine Science and Technology. "I'd love to be able to sit here and say, 'Yeah, we've found this thing and it's from the plane' — but the reality is, there's a lot of things that make noise in the ocean."
The noise could have come from a natural event, such as a small earthquake, Duncan said. He put the chances of it being linked to Flight 370 at less than 20 per cent.
Soon after the search for the plane moved to the southern Indian Ocean, scientists from Curtin decided to check the data from their underwater acoustic recorders off Rottnest Island, near Perth, to see if they'd picked up anything of interest. The scientists normally use the recorders for environmental research, such as studying whale sounds. This time, however, the data showed a signal that they initially thought might be the aircraft crashing into the ocean — an event that would have produced a low-frequency sound that can travel thousands of kilometers (miles) under the right conditions, Duncan said.
Sailor reports seeing flight on fire
Meanwhile, a British sailor - who was at sea sailing from Cochin, India, to Phuket, Thailand with her husband on the night when the Malaysian plane disappeared – believes she saw a burning aircraft over the Indian Ocean.
She was alone on the deck when she sighted the plane and has filed an official report with authorities, reports DailyMail.
Chinese search ship in latest glitch
A Chinese ship mapping the ocean floor ahead of an intensive underwater search for missing Flight MH370 was returning to port Saturday due to a technical problem, officials said.
The massive Indian Ocean search for the Malaysia Airlines plane, which disappeared on March 8 carrying 239 people, has so far failed to find any sign of the Boeing 777.
The Chinese survey ship, Zhu Kezhen, was conducting a bathymetric survey -- or mapping of the ocean floor -- to help experts determine how to carry out the next stage of the search on the previously unmapped ocean seabed.
"Zhu Kezhen suffered a defect to its multibeam echosounder and is coming into port to conduct the necessary repairs," Australia's Joint Agency Coordination Centre said in a statement.
"The journey is expected to take a couple of days."
The head of Australia's transport safety bureau has defended the fruitless hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, saying he is confident that search teams are targeting the right area.
Satellite analysis in the days after the Boeing 777 went missing on March 8 with 239 people onboard placed the jet somewhere in a huge tract of the Indian Ocean stretching from near Indonesia south towards Antarctica.
But in a setback, the area believed to be the jet's most likely resting place based on the detection of acoustic "pings" was Thursday ruled out after an extensive underwater search.
Australia's Transport Safety Bureau chief commissioner Martin Dolan told AFP the source of the acoustic transmissions, thought to be man-made, was still a mystery.
"To be frank, we don't know. We like to be the experts but sometimes we just don't know the answer," he said, refusing to speculate on whether they came from the Australian vessel hunting for signals from the aircraft's black boxes.
Dolan, whose organisation is playing a key role in the search effort, said the four signals detected in April were then the best lead in the hunt for the plane, which mysteriously diverted from its Kuala Lumpur to Beijing route.
"This was the best area to look at the time. We still don't have anything that confirms that it's the wrong place. But we will do our analysis and we will determine the best search area for the next phase."
Dolan said while experts were reassessing the satellite data that led the search to the southern Indian Ocean, the linear arc produced by analysis of this information still likely represented the plane's flight path.
"That arc is definite. We know that somewhere close to that very long arc is where the aircraft will be found," he said in an interview late Thursday.
The arc was produced by analysing satellite signalling messages, also referred to as "handshakes", between the ground station, the satellite and the aircraft's satellite communication system.
Dolan said experts believed the aircraft would be found near the area representing the last of these signals, thought to be have been sent when the plane ran out of fuel.
"The thing that we're absolutely confident of is somewhere on that long arc we will find the aircraft," he said.
"But because it's so long we have to be able to find a much smaller segment of the arc to concentrate our search and that's what our analysis is looking at defining.
"So we are reanalysing all the satellite data and aircraft performance information and everything else to define an area of up to 60,000 square kilometres, which is the most likely one for the location of the aircraft."
The next phase will focus on using the satellite data to confirm a search area, completing mapping of the sea floor and getting towable sonar and other equipment to carry out an intensive deep water search, which could take up to a year.
Dolan voiced confidence that investigators had been given all the information available, but said he could understand the anger of relatives still looking for answers almost three months after the plane went missing.
"We're conscious that people don't have a particular confidence in the analysis," he said. "We have a much higher confidence. But we are nevertheless doing a cross check to verify it."
Dolan said the search was considered unique because there was so little information to go on, likening it to a worst-case scenario for aviation safety authorities.
"In an organisation like mine you work out what's the worst thing that will ever happen and hope that it never does," he said.
"And Australia has been very good at managing the safety of aviation, but our worst case scenario is a widebody passenger aircraft in mid-ocean.
"We've actually got plans to deal with this sort of thing, we just hoped we would never have to use those plans for real."
Malaysia releases satellite data
Malaysia's aviation authority released on Tuesday satellite data used to determine that flight MH370 went down in the southern Indian Ocean following demands from sceptical relatives of those on board.
The Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) said in a statement it had worked with Inmarsat to provide 47 pages of data communication logs recorded by the British satellite operator as well as explanatory notes for public consumption.
Family members of the 239 people on board the Malaysia Airlines plane, which vanished on March 8, had demanded that raw satellite data be made public for independent analysis after an initial undersea search found no wreckage.
AFP was not immediately able to interpret the highly technical numerical data, which used the Doppler effect - the change in frequency of waves from a moving object - to decipher the Boeing 777's final flight path.
The DCA has previously stressed that satellite data was just one of several elements being examined by investigators.
Malaysian authorities have been tight-lipped on details, saying they can only divulge information once it has been verified and when its release will not affect ongoing investigations into the plane's disappearance.
But no sign of the plane has been found despite a massive and costly search for the flight that mysteriously diverted from its Kuala Lumpur-Beijing route 11 weeks ago.
Australia, which is leading the hunt in the Indian Ocean, has committed up to US$84 million towards the search operation over two years.
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