Singapore Airlines says sorry for Facebook post after MH17

SINGAPORE - After getting a drubbing on social media for making statements deemed "insensitive" after the downing of flight MH17, Singapore Airlines Ltd (SIA) issued a public apology on Saturday and expressed solidarity with families affected by the air tragedy.

Hours after the #Malaysia Airlines jetliner was shot down in eastern Ukraine on Thursday, killing 298 people, SIA's #Facebook and Twitter updates said its own flights were not using Ukraine airspace.

That triggered a flood of angry responses, with many lambasting SIA for not offering condolences to the victims' families and for mounting what some perceived as a publicity stunt during a crisis involving its neighboring country's flagship airline.

"You better come up with a more considerate, diplomatic and a more sensitive status before you lose customers," said a post by Edwin Lim on SIA's Facebook page. "Very, very inappropriate and disappointing status."

SIA, Singapore's best known brand, later also clarified that its flights had been re-routed to alternative paths that were away from Ukrainian airspace after the shooting of #MH17.

In a statement on Saturday, a spokesman from SIA said, "We are aware of that our Facebook and Twitter update on Friday morning may have come across as insensitive to some." The statement added that SIA had received many requests from customers seeking information about routes for their upcoming flights, however.

"We recognise that the information could have been better communicated and we sincerely apologise if it had offended our customers and anyone else in the online community."

According to Flightradar24, an online flight-tracking service, 66 other carriers flew hundreds of times in the area where MH17 was shot down in the last week. Malaysia flew there 48 times and SIA 75 times. The flight-tracking service also published an image showing an SIA flight from Copenhagen to Singapore was about 25 kilometres (15 miles) from MH17 when the Malaysian jet was brought down.
CBN News

MH17: Black box scuffle could mask the truth

Representatives from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation and Ukrainian experts arrive at the crash site. Photo / AP

Normally, when a crashed aircraft's black box is recovered, it can reveal exactly what happened to cause the disaster but in the case of #MH17, the political instability between #Ukraine and #Russia could hamper operations.

If the black box of MH17 is detained by an organisation in military and political dispute with others, the credibility of the analysis results may be in doubt. This case is different from that of MH370, where the black box has yet to be found, but the idea is the same. The black box is vital, as is the integrity of the evidence it contains. It is how we establish the provenance of the facts used in digital forensic analysis.

A piece of the plane lies in the grass as a group of Ukrainian coal miners search the crash site. Photo / AP

A group of Ukrainian miners assist rescue workers in the search for bodies of victims. Photo / AFP

That means that the black box data needs to be verified. If cloud-computing technology has been used, the verification can be done by cross-validating the flight status with other publicly available flight information. Recently at Microsoft, researchers have used cloud computing technology to predict the wind speeds with better accuracy when crowdsourcing the information with real-time flight data.

But if cloud-computing technology is not used, the public must rely on whoever found the black box to truthfully relay the information inside. They might not release the raw data: as has happened in the past, the investigator may choose to reveal only a transcript or partial snippets of the sound tracks.

There are lots of forces at play in this evolving situation. It is not yet clear whether MH17's black box has been found. Some reports have it on its way to Russia while others place two black boxes in the hands of Ukranian emergency services. The potential for problems is obvious. If both sides of the conflict produce their own analysis, who is to be believed? If only one has a black box, can we be sure of its analysis of the data?

Part of the jet after it crashed, near the town of Shaktarsk. Photo / AFP

The case of MH17 is exactly the same as MH370 in one respect - they should both have us thinking about how we monitor aircraft.

Real-time rather than offline verification would enable us to gather much the same information as that contained in the black box and allow us to cross-check it across sources more easily.

There would have been other flights nearby which can cross validate some of the data. Take speed for example - wind speed against those neighbouring flights could be used to indicate how fast MH17 was going. And because the real-time speed data is in the public domain - FAA offers access to them, for example - it would be hard, if not impossible, for whoever has the recorders of the individual flight to tamper with information about all the nearby flights.

Modifying flight data requires a substantial amount of computation. Making one lie is relatively easy but to cover up a lie that could be cross-checked by others, such as those operating neighbouring flights, would be much harder.

If we want the truth about MH17, we may have to look beyond the black box at data held elsewhere. Data is more powerful when it comes from a crowd, especially when the facts are likely to be disputed.The Conversation. NZH

Fury at Russia as world demands answers after plane's destruction over Ukraine

The crash site of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, a Boeing 777 that had been flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was shot down over Ukraine. Photograph: Dzhavakhadze Zurab/ITAR-TASS Photo/Corbis

The US has pointedly criticised Russian arming of rebels in #Ukraine as the world demanded answers over the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight #MH17 by a suspected Russian-made missile, resulting in the death of all 298 people on board the civilian airliner.

The White House stopped short of directly blaming Russia for the plane’s destruction but linked its remarks on the disaster to the Kremlin’s support for separatists in Ukraine, urging Vladimir Putin’s government to stop inflaming the situation in the country and take "concrete steps" towards de-escalation.

Leaders from around the world reacted with shock and anger to the shooting down of the jet. The US said it had intelligence showing a surface-to-air missile was used.

The former US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, made some of the most potent remarks in a television interview, saying there were strong indications Russian-backed militia were to blame and action was needed to "put [Vladimir] Putin on notice that he has gone too far and we are not going to stand idly by".

Clinton called for the EU to increase sanctions on Russia, while the Australian prime minister Tony Abbott called on Russia to explain the disaster as it “now seems certain it’s been brought down by a Russian-supplied surface-to-air missile”. There were 28 Australians on board the plane, along with 154 Dutch nationals, 43 Malaysians, 12 Indonesians, nine passengers believed to be from the UK, four each from Germany and Belgium, three from the Philippines, one Canadian and one from New Zealand. The nationalities of 39 passengers had not yet been verified. Australia announced a national day of mourning and dipped flags in the capital, Canberra, to half mast.

The British foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, said: "We do believe that there were British nationals on board the flight. We are working through passenger data, cross-checking it and referencing it to establish exactly the numbers and identities of those British nationals."

A group of international HIV/Aids experts flying to Melbourne were among those killed.

The Malaysian president, Najib Razak, said international investigators must have full access to the crash site and the terrible and deeply shocking news marked “a tragic day in what has already been a tragic year, for Malaysia”, referring to the earlier disappearance without a trace of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Najib said the government of Ukraine had pledged a full and independent investigation and would negotiate with rebels to ensure a humanitarian corridor to the crash site. He said any wrongdoers must be held responsible and did not mention receiving a phone call of condolence from Vladimir Putin. Russia said earlier that its president had called to the Malaysian leader "to convey his deepest sympathy and support" to the victims’ families.

Najib said: “We must – and we will – find out precisely what happened to this flight. No stone can be left unturned.

A Malaysian mother reacts after seeing her daughter's name on the list of passengers on board Malaysia Airlines MH17. Photograph: Edgar Su/Reuters

The UN security council announced it would be convening a meeting on Friday as calls mounted for an international response. “There is clearly a need for a full, transparent and international investigation,” said the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, sending his condolences to the victims’ families.

Putin has reportedly ordered Russian military and civilian agencies to co-operate with any investigation but also said Ukraine has to take responsibility for the incident.

The huge loss of life threatens to have wide-ranging and unpredictable consequences, coming just after the US imposed further sanctions on Russia for continuing to provide weapons to the rebels. Defence and security experts said the Russian-made Buk surface-to-air missile system, known to be in the hands of pro-Russia fighters in Ukraine, was most likely used.

"This was not an incident, this was not a catastrophe, this was a terrorist act," said Ukraine's president, Petro Poroshenko.

The US vice-president, Joe Biden, said the plane appeared to have been "blown out of the sky", while the Ukrainian security services released an audio recording said to be rebel commanders discussing the fact that their forces were responsible with Russian officers.

The jet was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on Thursday when it was blown apart and fell in a shower of fiery wreckage over the village of Grabovo, part of the area controlled by pro-Russia separatists.

The European air traffic control body, Eurocontrol, said Ukrainian authorities had banned aircraft from flying at 32,000ft or below and the doomed aircraft had been cruising above that, at 33,000ft – however this apparently still left it within range of the sophisticated surface-to-air weaponry that pro-Russia forces have been using recently to target Ukrainian military aircraft. All civilian flights have now been barred from the area of eastern Ukraine.

Australia's foreign minister, Julie Bishop, said that if MH17 had been shot down it amounted to an "unspeakable crime" and a full international investigation must be allowed to take place. She said pro-Russia rebels, said to have retrieved the plane's black box flight recording equipment, must hand it over to authorities.

The US president referred to the "terrible tragedy" and said efforts were under way to determine whether Americans had been killed. "The world is watching," Barack Obama said. "The United States will offer whatever assistance we can to determine what happened and why." John Kerry, the secretary of state, made a statement of condolence and called for a "credible international investigation".

The field next to the tiny hamlet was a scene of charred earth and twisted metal as shocked local people milled around the scene. Body parts belonging to the 298 on board were strewn around. The body of what appeared to be a young woman had been flung about 500m from the centre of the crash.

US government officials confirmed to media outlets that a surface-to-air missile brought down the plane. US intelligence was reportedly still working to determine the exact location from which the missile was fired, and whether it was on the Russian or the Ukrainian side of the border.

Rebels in the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics have shot down several Ukrainian planes and helicopters in recent weeks. But they insisted they had no part in the downing of MH17, claiming instead that Ukrainian fire was responsible.

Ukraine's SBU security services released a recording, which could not immediately be verified, of what it said were rebel commanders saying they had shot down a plane and then discovering with horror it had been a civilian jet.

On the ground in Grabovo a strong smell of aviation fuel and burnt rubber hung in the air as dozens of pro-Russian separatist fighters milled around the area in which workers from the emergency services were sifting through the wreckage. A dozen fire engines were on the scene.

One local resident, Alexander, had been working in a field a few hundred metres from the crash site and thought the aircraft was going to fall on top of him. Another farmer said he was on his tractor when he heard a loud bang. "Then I saw the plane hit the ground and break in two – there was thick black smoke," he said.

In a conflict that has not been short of dreadful twists, this was by far the most shocking and most gruesome to date. The 298 people aboard MH17 had no connection to the fighting except that their international flight was travelling through airspace above the battle zone.

Questions were raised as to why Malaysia Airlines had continued to fly over such a volatile region, where separatists were known to be shooting at aircraft. Qantas, the Australian carrier, said it had been steering clear of the area by 400 nautical miles for several months. Malaysia Airlines said after the crash that it had altered its flight paths and other airlines either did likewise or emphasised they had already been taking alternative routes.

"With immediate effect, all European flights operated by Malaysia Airlines will be taking alternative routes avoiding the usual route," said a statement from the airline. It added: "The usual flight route was earlier declared safe by the International Civil Aviation Organisation. International Air Transportation Association has stated that the airspace the aircraft was traversing was not subject to restrictions."

Throughout the Ukraine conflict the versions of violent incidents provided by Kiev and the Donetsk rebels have diverged wildly, with each side blaming the other for loss of life and the shelling of residential areas.

Now, with such a huge and unexpected loss of life, the stakes are immeasurably higher, and both sides again rushed to claim the other was at fault.

Those blaming pro-Russia rebels for the attack pointed to a post on a social media site attributed to a top rebel commander which claimed to have downed a Ukrainian transport plane around the same time as the first reports of MH17's disappearance surfaced. The post was later deleted.

The US and EU have heavily criticised Russia for providing the separatists in eastern Ukraine with logistical and military support, leading to a new set of White House sanctions against Russian companies, introduced on Wednesday, as rhetoric coming out of both Washington and Moscow has led to talk of a new cold war. Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the Guardian that any allegations of Russian involvement in the MH17 crash were "stupidity".

He said the Kremlin would not make a further statement because "no one knows" who is responsible.

Asked about the possibility of further US sanctions, Peskov said he could not rule it out: "The United States has recently been conducting a very nonconstructive policy and their actions are very unpredictable," he said.

Putin himself, who on Thursday returned to Russia from a summit of the Brics nations in Brazil, informed Barack Obama about the incident.

"The Russian leader informed the US president of the report from air traffic controllers that the Malaysian plane had crashed on Ukrainian territory, which had arrived immediately before the phone call," said a statement released by the Kremlin.

According to the statement, the pair spent most of the conversation discussing the deterioration of US-Russian relations, and Putin expressed his "serious disappointment" over the latest round of US sanctions against Russian companies.

Later Putin chaired a meeting on the Russian economy which began with a minute's silence and laid the blame for the crash at Ukraine's door: "There is no doubt that the nation over whose airspace this happened bears responsibility for the terrible tragedy," he said.

David Cameron, the British prime minister, tweeted: "I'm shocked and saddened by the Malaysian air disaster. Officials from across Whitehall are meeting to establish the facts."

The crash came four months after another Malaysia Airlines flight, MH370, vanished on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, two-thirds of them Chinese citizens. It has yet to be found despite a huge search.

The first rumours of another incomprehensible tragedy for the airline, this time in Ukraine, came as video appeared from villages nearby showing huge plumes of smoke rising into the air, with aviation sources telling a local wire agency that a plane had been downed.

The first official confirmation came when Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine's interior minister, wrote on his Facebook page that the plane had crashed in Ukrainian territory after being hit by a missile fired from a Buk launcher.

Malaysia Airlines soon confirmed the worst, announcing via its Twitter feed: "Malaysia Airlines has lost contact of MH17 from Amsterdam. The last known position was over Ukrainian airspace."

Igor Sutyagin, a Russian military specialist at the London-based Royal United Services Institute, agreed that the plane would almost certainly have been shot with a Buk, a vehicle-mounted missile system first developed in the Soviet era. The Malaysian aircraft,was beyond the range of Manpads – shoulder-launched missiles. Kalashnikov-carrying Russian sympathisers in Ukraine would not have had the expertise to fire them and would have needed either specialists who had "volunteered" their services from Russia or locally recruited specialists, he said, noting that the rebels had been firing at Ukrainian aircraft over the last week.

The Associated Press said one of its journalists had seen a similar launcher near the town of Snizhne earlier on Thursday.

Russia's state-owned Channel One avoided speculation of who might have been behind the plane crash in its first bulletins on the subject, while the Kremlin-friendly Life News, whose reporters were first on the scene, said it was likely to have been brought down by Ukrainian fire, claiming that the rebels did not have any missile systems with the capacity to down a plane at that altitude.

However a report on the website of Russian state television from late June described how the rebels in Donetsk had taken control of a Ukrainian missile defence facility that was equipped with Buk systems. The report said that the rebels planned to "defend the sky over Donetsk" using the missiles.

On Thursday afternoon a social media site attributed to Igor Strelkov, a Russian citizen who has emerged as the commander of rebel forces in Donetsk, announced that the rebels had shot down an An-26 Ukrainian transport plane, and also that there was "information about a second plane". The post was later removed.

Audio was circulated on social media, apparently released by Ukrainian security services, purporting to be an intercepted conversation of pro-Russia rebels confirming they had shot down a civilian jet.

The conversation is apparently between a group leader and his superior and suggests that they initially thought they had brought down a military aircraft but later realised their error.

The group leader, "Demon", tells his boss: "A plane has just been shot down. [It was] 'Miner's' group. It crashed outside Enakievo. Our men went to search for and photograph it. It's smouldering."

After his men apparently inspect the crash site, Demon reports back. "Kazakhs from the Chernunkhino checkpoint shot down the plane. The plane disintegrated in mid-air … they found the first body. It's a civilian."

He carries on: "I mean. It's definitely a civilian aircraft."

His superior, nicknamed "Greek", asks him: "Were there many people?"

Demon replies: "A fuckton. The debris rained right into the yards."

Greek asks: "What's the aircraft?" and is told: "I haven't figured it out yet. I haven't reached the main section. I only looked at where the bodies began to fall. There are remains of chair mounts, the chairs, the bodies."

Greek asks: "Any weapons there?" and Demon says: "None at all. Civilian things, medical stuff, towels, toilet paper." "Any documents?" asks Greek, and Demon, perhaps realising what has just happened, replies: "Yes, an Indonesian student from Thomson university [in the US]."
The Guardian

Separatist Leader Says Rebels Did Not Shoot Down Flight MH17

People walk amongst the debris at the crash site of a passenger plane near the village of Grabovo, Ukraine, July 17, 2014. (Dmitry Lovetsky—AP)

The pro-#Russia separatist leader was not in a mood to discuss the downing of a passenger plane over eastern Ukraine on Thursday. He had heard about it on the news – 280 passengers and 15 crew on a Malaysia Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lampur – possibly shot out of the sky with a missile or some other projectile over the war-ravaged region of Donetsk.

Ukrainian officials had already laid the blame on the separatist rebels in that region. So who was responsible? Oleg Tsarev, one of the leaders of the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic, said the rebels did not shoot the plane down. “We don’t have weapons that can take down a plane from that altitude,” he told TIME, minutes after news of the crash broke.

But only three weeks ago they had plenty of those weapons. At the end of June, the Russian state media had congratulated the rebels on their latest military acquisition – a set of Russian-made BUK missile launchers seized from a Ukrainian air force base. “The Donetsk resistance fighters have captured an anti-aircraft military station,” declared the Kremlin’s main television network Vesti, which has been cheering on the rebel fighters since the war in eastern Ukraine began this spring. “The skies above Donetsk will now be protected by the BUK surface-to-air missile complex,” said the headline on the channel’s website.

The rebels quickly seemed to put their new rockets to work. The downing of Ukrainian military aircraft has become almost commonplace in recent days. An AN-26 military transport plane was shot down on Monday over eastern Ukraine, and the rebel leaders confirmed the same day that they had taken its four crew members hostage after they had ejected to safety. In the two days that followed, another two Ukrainian military aircraft, both of them SU-25 fighter jets, were reportedly shot down by the rebels. And Russian media trumpeted another rebel strike late on Thursday afternoon, claiming that a Ukrainian AN-24 had gone down over the town of Torez. The Times

Malaysia Airliner: Calls For 'Prompt' Inquiry

Ukrainian separatists are accused of downing the plane - but they say it was shot down by government forces, which Kiev denies.

Pressure is growing for an international investigation after a plane was reportedly shot down in eastern Ukraine killing all 298 people on board, including nine Britons.

American intelligence has indicated #Malaysia Airlines flight #MH17 was hit by a surface to air missile - but who fired it remains a mystery.

The jet, which was heading from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was travelling at an altitude of 33,000 feet (10,000 metres) when contact was lost.


An adviser to the Ukrainian interior ministry told the Interfax news agency the Boeing 777 was brought down by a Buk ground-to-air missile. There were 283 passengers and 15 crew members on board.

An emergency worker at the scene of the crash

As well as the Britons, the victims included 154 Dutch, 43 Malaysians, 27 Australians, 12 Indonesians, four Germans, four Belgians, three Filipinos and one Canadian.

Three infants are among the dead, and the nationalities of 41 passengers have yet to be verified.

Some of the passengers were on their way to a UN Aids conference in Melbourne, the Australian government has said.

Flames rise from wreckage of the Malaysia Airlines jet

Plumes of thick, black smoke could be seen rising high into the air near the village of Grabovo, Donetsk, where the airliner came down.

It was said to have split in half on impact, with burning wreckage scattered across a vast area.

Britain has joined the US and other countries in calling for an international probe into the disaster. US President Barack Obama has said it should be "prompt, full, credible and unimpeded".

Malaysia Airlines, still reeling from the loss of flight MH370 in March, has said the route taken by flight MH17 had been declared safe by the International Civil Aviation Organisation.

It has announced all its European flights will be taking alternative routes with immediate effect.

A spokesman for the airline said: "Malaysia Airlines is in the process of notifying the next of kin of the passengers and crew. Our focus now is to ... provide (them with) all possible care."

The Interfax news agency has reported that the plane's 'black box' flight recorder has already been recovered.

Officials in Kiev were quick to deny any involvement in the crash, with President Petro Poroshenko lamenting what he called an "act of terrorism".

US Vice-President Joe Biden said the jet appeared to have been deliberately "blown out of the sky", with an unnamed US official blaming Ukrainian separatists backed by Russia.

Armed Russians inspecting the wreckage of MH17

However, separatist leader Alexander Borodai said the aircraft was shot down by Ukrainian government forces - a claim backed by another separatist who told Reuters the rebels do not have weapons capable of shooting down a plane at such height.

Sky's Katie Stallard, in Moscow, said Igor Strelkov, the commander of the pro-Russian Donetsk People's Republic, appeared to have boasted about the incident on social media.

In one deleted message recovered by Sky News, he allegedly wrote: "We warned you not to fly over our sky."

The wreckage was scattered over a wide area

Ukraine's security service also released what it claimed was a recording of an intercepted phone call between two Russian military intelligence officers, discussing the downing of the plane.

Sky's Mark White, citing aviation sources, said the aircraft had been flying just 1,000 feet (300 metres) above a zone deemed "unsuitable for civilian aircraft".

"It raises questions about why the plane was near an area it had been advised not to fly through," he said.

"Did it stray into that area by accident or did the pilot decide it was a risk worth taking, perhaps as a fuel saving measure?"

Data from Flightradar24 indicated the plane, which took off from Schiphol airport at 12.15pm local time, had just passed the city of Kremenchuk, around 186 miles (300km) from the Russian border, when it disappeared.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said the incident was "absolutely unacceptable" and an "awful tragedy", but added: "This would not have happened if there were peace on this land ... and, certainly, the state over whose territory this occurred bears responsibility."

The disaster is the latest in a series of reported attacks on planes in Ukrainian airspace and came a day after one of the country's Sukhoi-25 fighter jets was shot down.

The United Nations Security Council is to hold an emergency meeting on Ukraine later today. Sky News

Malaysia boat carrying 97 sinks, 31 rescued, rest missing

KUALA LUMPUR: A boat carrying 97 foreigners overturned about two nautical miles off the western coast of Malaysia, a media report said here on Wednesday. Thirty-one people were rescued but others remained missing.

It was a wooden boat which capsized near Sungai Air Hitam off the western coast of Malaysia, Xinhua reported.

The fire and rescue department received a distress call at about 12.24 a.m. and their team reached the scene within 30 minutes, The Star reported.

The search operation was still on till last report and the fire fighters were monitoring the coastline. 

Malaysian armed forces chief in Thailand to boost bilateral military ties

BANGKOK, June 4 -- Malaysian Armed Forces chief Gen Tan Sri Zulkifeli bin Mohhd Zin is paying a two-day visit to Thailand to boost military relations between the two neighboring countries.

Gen Zulkifeli, who arrived in Thailand on Tuesday, was welcomed by General Prayuth Chan-ocha, Thai Army Chief and head of the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), at the Royal Thai Army Headquarter.

Gen Zulkifeli’s visit to Thailand as the guest of the Royal Thai Armed Forces is the first ever by the Malaysian Armed Forces chief.

The visit has demonstrated Kuala Lumpur’s strong ties with Thailand, especially in defense, and Malaysia was the first country whose military top brass has visited Thailand since the coup.

Thailand has continued to maintain close military ties with countries, despite the United States and Australia having downgraded official ties, following the NCPO seizure of administrative power on May 22. (MCOT online news)

MH370 is not in the Indian Ocean search zone, authorities say

The next stage of the search would be to map the ocean floor near where the plane is thought to have crashed. Photograph: Reuters

The missing Malaysia Airlines plane is not in the #Indian Ocean search zone where acoustic “pings” were detected, the Australian search team announced on Thursday, after a #US navy officer cast doubt on whether the "pings" were from a plane's black box flight recorder.

On a day of dramatic developments in the search for the plane, Australia’s transport safety authority said it had finished searching the area and declared that it “can now be discounted as the final resting place of #MH370”.

An underwater search vehicle, Bluefin-21, has scoured more than 850 square kilometres of the Indian ocean west of Perth since four acoustic signals – thought to be emitted by the missing aircraft’s black box flight recorders – were detected by a towed pinger locator in April.

“The joint agency coordination centre can advise that no signs of aircraft debris have been found by the autonomous underwater vehicle since it joined the search effort,” search authorities said.

“The search in the vicinity of the acoustic detections can now be considered complete and, in its professional judgment, the area can now be discounted as the final resting place of MH370.”

The statement came after claims by a senior US navy officer earlier in the day that the four acoustic signals may have been produced by the search vessel.

“Our best theory at this point is that [the pings were] likely some sound produced by the ship [the Ocean Shield] ... or within the electronics of the towed pinger locator,” the US navy’s deputy director of ocean engineering, Michael Dean, told CNN.

But the US navy said later that Dean’s comments were “speculative and premature”.

The statement by Australian search authorities did not address these new doubts over the origin of the acoustic signals.

Authorities said the next stage of the search would be to map the ocean floor near where the plane is thought to have crashed, a process which a Chinese ship, the Zhu Kezhen, has begun. The mapping is expected to take three months.

A private contractor is expected to begin an exhaustive 12-month search of the mapped area in August.

At the time the signals were picked up, the prime minister, Tony Abbott, said he was “confident that we know the position of the black box flight recorder to within some kilometres”.

The flight, which went missing shortly after leaving Kuala Lumpur on 8 March, has been the subject of an unprecedented multinational search effort. It was destined for Beijing but investigators say it was diverted from the flight path deliberately. -- The Guardian

Data Proposes Missing Plane Used Up Fuel and Crashed in Indian Ocean

HONG KONG — Raw satellite transmission data from the vanished #Malaysia Airlines #Flight370, released on Tuesday by the Malaysian government, provided further evidence that the plane crashed into the #IndianOcean after flying south and running out of fuel.

Malaysia and Inmarsat, the global satellite communications company, released the data after weeks of pressure from relatives of the mostly Chinese passengers and from the Chinese government itself. The Malaysian Department of Civil Aviation released the data as the country’s prime minister, Najib Razak, was on his way to China for an official visit.

The final satellite transmission was an automated request from the aircraft for another so-called electronic handshake.

The autonomous underwater vehicle after it completed a mission in the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.Search for Missing Malaysia Airlines Plane ResumesMAY 22, 2014
“This is consistent with satellite communication equipment on the aircraft powering up following a power interruption,” the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said in a separate statement. “The interruption in electrical supply may have been caused by fuel exhaustion.”


Tracking Flight 370
The sequence of events known by the authorities, in local times.

 
Mar. 8, 2014 00:41 AM
A Boeing 777-200 operated by Malaysia Airlines leaves Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing with 227 passengers, of which two-thirds are Chinese, and a Malaysian crew of 12.

Mar. 8, 2014 01:07 AM
The airplane's Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or Acars, which transmits data about the plane's performance, sends a transmission. It is not due to transmit again for a half-hour.

Mar. 8, 2014 01:19 AM
The cockpit crew acknowledges a message from ground control, saying, "Good night Malaysian three seven zero." No further voice messages are received from the plane.

Mar. 8, 2014 01:21 AM
Two minutes after the last voice transmission, the plane's transponder, which signals its identity, altitude and speed to other aircraft and to monitors on the ground, is shut off or fails.

Detecting a Plane
Mar. 8, 2014 01:37 AM
The Acars system fails to send its scheduled signal, indicating that it has been shut off or has failed sometime in the past half-hour.

Mar. 8, 2014 02:15 AM
An unidentified plane flying westward is detected by military radar. It ascends to 45,000 feet, above the approved limit for a Boeing 777, then descends unevenly to 23,000 feet and eventually flies out over the Indian Ocean. Investigators later conclude that it was Flight 370. It was last plotted 200 miles northwest of Panang.

Q. and A.
Mar. 8, 2014 06:30 AM
By now Flight 370 was scheduled to have landed in Beijing.

Mar. 8, 2014 07:24 AM
Malaysia Airlines announces that it has lost contact with the aircraft.

Mar. 8, 2014 08:11 AM
The last complete signal is received from an automated satellite system on the plane, suggesting that it was still intact and flying. The Malaysian authorities say the jet had enough fuel to keep flying for perhaps a half-hour after this.

Search Area Expanded
Mar. 8, 2014 08:19 AM
Inmarsat, a satellite communications company, says an incomplete signal representing a “partial handshake" may have been received.

Further analysis of satellite data confirms that the jet went down in the southern Indian Ocean.

Mar. 15, 2014 00:00 AM
The Malaysian authorities say the investigation has become a criminal matter because the jet appears to have been deliberately diverted. The plane's first turn off course, to the west, was executed using an onboard computer, probably programmed by someone with knowledge of aircraft systems.

The authorities say two passengers were Iranians who boarded using stolen European passports, but no links to terrorist groups are found.

One of the Chinese relatives, Wang Le, who lost his mother on the plane, was unimpressed with the release of the data. “What help will publicizing this data provide toward finding the airplane?” he asked. “This kind of data is too technical for family members, we cannot understand it, and we also don’t know whether it’s real or fake.”

Tim Farrar, a satellite communications consultant based in Menlo Park, Calif., said that the raw data appeared to support calculations by Inmarsat and by governments involved in the search that the missing plane, a Boeing 777-200, had crashed into the eastern Indian Ocean. These calculations have been that the lost plane turned south after it did a U-turn over the Gulf of Thailand, flew west across Peninsular Malaysia and then disappeared from radar just north of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

When Inmarsat and government agencies initially realized that the plane kept flying for six hours after its communications gear was turned off over the Gulf of Thailand, they suggested arcs of possible locations for the aircraft either to the north in Central Asia or to the south in the eastern Indian Ocean.

But the data released on Tuesday showed that small changes in the position of Inmarsat’s satellite relative to the Earth meant that the plane must have flown south, not north, Mr. Farrar said.

Conspiracy theorists have suggested that the plane flew west-southwest, perhaps to Diego Garcia, a British atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean where the United States maintains a large military base. Mr. Farrar said that the raw data disproved that.

“That’s clearly not consistent with these arcs,” he said.

One question ahead of the publication of the raw data was whether it would provide valuable information about aircraft movements to intelligence agencies in China, North Korea and elsewhere, and possibly to terrorists as well. The raw data finally released covers transmissions from the aircraft, a series of so-called electronic handshakes, but does not include more sensitive information on how Inmarsat’s ground station in Perth, Australia, receives and records satellite transmissions.

Mr. Farrar said that differences among the satellite transmission terminals aboard various aircraft around the world meant that releasing the raw data from the aircraft would not necessarily make it possible for intelligence agencies or others to track flights elsewhere.


In a series of statements released late Monday, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said the mapping of the ocean floor, already underway, would take at least three months to complete, in water that could be as deep as 20,000 feet. Once this bathymetric survey has been completed, the bureau said, it could take a further year to finish the deep-sea search of the ocean floor for debris from the Boeing 777.

The bureau’s chief commissioner, Martin Dolan, said that the complexities surrounding the search “cannot be underestimated” but that he remained “confident of finding the aircraft.”

The satellite signaling, referred to as a handshake, was between an Inmarsat ground station in Perth, an Inmarsat satellite and the plane’s satellite communications system. For each transmission to the aircraft, the ground station recorded a “burst timing offset” and “burst frequency offset.”

The burst timing offset measures the time it takes for a transmission to make a round trip between the ground station, the satellite and the plane and then back. That allowed the authorities to calculate the distance between the satellite and the aircraft.

The burst frequency offset was used to help estimate the jet’s speed and direction. This offset measures the difference between the expected frequency of the transmission and the frequency received at the ground station.

The Chinese survey ship Zhu Kezhen has begun mapping the ocean floor and will be joined by a commercial vessel in June. Private contractors will later be involved in the specialized deep-sea search for debris on the ocean floor.

The safety bureau also noted that the suspected final location of the aircraft happened to intersect a flight corridor from the Cocos Islands to Perth. But the bureau seemed to play down the significance of this, only briefly mentioning that the site had a single flight route over it.

Diplomatic relations between Malaysia and China have been strained since the loss of Flight 370. Chinese officials and particularly the Chinese state news media have been critical of Malaysia’s efforts to find the plane, and Chinese tourism to Malaysia has dropped by a third in the past two months.

Chinese relatives of Flight 370 passengers brushed aside a thin screen of police officers on March 25 and marched to the Malaysian Embassy in Beijing, where they threw plastic water bottles and yelled insults at the diplomats inside, in an incident that stirred a nationalistic backlash on Malaysian websites.
Source: The New York Times

Malaysia Release Satellite Data On Missing Jet

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — The Malaysian government has released 47 pages of raw satellite data used to conclude that the #missing Malaysia Airlines jet crashed into the southern Indian Ocean.
Some family members of the 239 people on board have been demanding #Malaysia release the data so that independent experts can verify it.

The Associated Press is asking experts to review the technical data, which was released Tuesday to family members and then to the media.
The plane left Kuala Lumpur on March 8 en route to Beijing.
An ongoing search effort in the southern Indian Ocean has found no trace of the plane. --AP

Malaysia to release satellite data from MH370 search

March 25, 2014: Malaysia's acting Transport Minister and Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein answers a reporter's questions during a press conference on the missing Malaysia Airlines, Flight 370, at Putra World Trade Centre (PWTC) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. (AP Photo/Vincent Thian, File)

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia –  Malaysia said Tuesday it will publicly release satellite data used to narrow down the search for the missing jetliner to the southern Indian Ocean.

The Civil Aviation Department and British company Inmarsat in a joint statement said they would do this "in line with our commitment to greater transparency."

Some family members of the 239 people on the plane have demanded raw satellite data to be made public for independent analysis.

The government says calculations using Inmarsat data showed Malaysia Airlines Flight #370 veered off course and ended in the Indian Ocean after it went missing March 8 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
No wreckage has been found, and an underwater hunt led by Australia continues.
Authorities believe the plane was flown deliberately off course, but are still investigating the cause of the disappearance.

"In moving forward, it is imperative for us to provide helpful information to the next of kin and general public, which will include the data communication logs as well as relevant explanation to enable the reader to understand the data provided," the statement said. It stressed the data was just one of many elements in the investigation.

The statement didn't say when or how the data will be released.
Malaysia has been criticized for its handling of the crisis, especially by relatives of Chinese passengers who make up the majority on board the plane.

Earlier this month, family members urged #Malaysia, China and Australia to review Inmarsat data for its accuracy. In a letter to the countries' leaders which is also posted on their Facebook page, the relatives said the data did not "support a definitive conclusion that no other flight path was possible."

"We feel that it is necessary that the data be subject to independent third-party review. It is our hope that with out of box thinking, the whole world can help to look for the plane," the letter said.

The search has moved into a new phase, with a Chinese navy survey ship to start mapping the seabed off the west Australian coast this week.
Source: Fox News

Former Malaysian Leader Accuses CIA of Cover-Up in Missing Jet

he former Malaysian Prime Minister accused the C.I.A., Boeing and the media of covering up crucial facts about the missing plane

A former Malaysian leader on Sunday accused American intelligence agents of covering up what really happened to the Malaysia Airlines plane missing since March.

Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad claimed that Flight #370, which disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board, claimed that the #CIA could have taken control of the Boeing 777, and lamented that the Malaysian government is bearing the brunt of the blame for a mystery that sparked a massive, expensive and as-of-yet unsuccessful international search for the plane.

“What goes up must come down,” Mohamad wrote in a blog post. “Airplanes can go up and stay up for long periods of time. But even they must come down eventually. They can land safely or they may crash. But airplanes don’t just disappear. Certainly not these days with all the powerful communication systems, radio and satellite tracking and filmless cameras which operate almost indefinitely and possess huge storage capacities.”

Mohamad said “the ‘uninterruptible’ autopilot would be activated—either by pilot, by on board sensors, or even remotely by radio or satellite links by government agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, if terrorists attempt to gain control of the flight deck.”
No evidence has emerged to support his theory, one of many conspiracy theories that have proliferated since the plane disappeared. Authorities believe it crashed in the Indian Ocean and that no one survived.
“Clearly Boeing and certain agencies have the capacity to take over ‘uninterruptible control’ of commercial airliners of which MH370 B777 is one,” Mohamed wrote.

“Someone is hiding something,” he added. “It is not fair that… Malaysia should take the blame. For some reason the media will not print anything that involves Boeing or the CIA.”

Source: The Times

Malaysian Police Arrest Al-Shahab Suspect

Malaysian police arrested an east African man on Thursday on suspicion of involvement with the al-Shahab Islamist militant group. A police statement said the arrest occurred near Kuala Lumpur. It didn't give the 34-year-old man's name but said he was wanted by Interpol for terrorism-related activities. It was unclear whether he would be extradited or held in Malaysia

"Police are investigating the subject's activities in Malaysia to identify any al-Shabab terrorist elements which might be hiding or carrying out activiti

es that might jeopardize the safety of Malaysia," the statement said.

Al-Shabab is Somalia's most feared militant group and has ties with al-Qaida. It carried out the Westgate Mall attack in Kenya late last year. While it recruits from the Somali diaspora, it has not been known to have a transnational agenda.

Organized Islamist militant cells have long existed in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines but a regional crackdown since 2001 has weakened them significantly. Their members have sought to make contact with other extremist groups in the Middle East and South Asia for funding, training or operational purposes.

Last month, Malaysian police said they arrested 11 terrorism suspects with links to networks outside Malaysia. It was unclear whether those arrests were linked with the one on Thursday. Local media said those suspects were believed to have been planning to travel to Syria, currently a popular destination for international jihadis, including those in Southeast Asia.

Source: ABC News