Missing plane MH370 hijacked: Malaysian investigators

mattster

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Portrait of an artist: The Uyghur painter on MH370 - CNN.com

Memetjan Abdullah's ainting "Outlook," part of the National Art Museum of China's collection.
Beautiful painting indeed.....metaphorically powerful, and very impressive, but tinged with sadness !

The sadness is conveyed against the backdrop of the never ending construction cranes while a generation of older Uyghur men and women are witnessing with nostalgia, as their culture, language, and faith are slowly stripped away from a proud people.

The Han Chinese in their steroid-like paranoid, egomaniacal, nationalistic rampage are slowly but surely going to wipe out all the beautiful tribal cultures in China - just like the first settlers in the US wiped out the American Indian.

The only difference is that the date today is 2014 - its high time the human race learns the value of Tribal traditions and values.

The only place Uyghur culture will exist in 50 years from now will be in the Cultural show they put on for tourists visiting China.
 
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amoy

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Beautiful painting indeed.....metaphorically powerful, and very impressive, but tinged with sadness !

The sadness is conveyed against the backdrop of the never ending construction cranes while a generation of older Uyghur men and women are witnessing with nostalgia, as their culture, language, and faith are slowly stripped away from a proud people.

The Han Chinese in their steroid-like paranoid, egomaniacal, nationalistic rampage are slowly but surely going to wipe out all the beautiful tribal cultures in China - just like the first settlers in the US wiped out the American Indian.

The only difference is that the date today is 2014 - its high time the human race learns the value of Tribal traditions and values.

The only place Uyghur culture will exist in 50 years from now will be in the Cultural show they put on for tourists visiting China.
Well, that melancholy over "lost tribal values" is similar to a "tourist mindset".

Before a tourist visits an Indian reservation what fancies does he/she usually have in mind? An unchanged lifestyle - Mohicans, Pocahontas, or bufalloes probably. It might be a big letdown when the tourist ends up being shown around gambling operations run by tribes, casinos, bingos...

Tribals also aspire for a modern living or get adrift sometimes. Not all of them'd like to dress up in traditional costumes and stay in "museums" for tourists to indulge in "nostalgia". Spontaneously they wanna move ahead too.
 

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Emirates chief Tim Clark reveals suspicions over true fate of missing flight MH370

TIM Clark is no MH370 conspiracy theory crackpot.

As the recently knighted Emirates president and CEO told Aviation Week in July: "Something is not right here and we need to get to the bottom of it."


"Something is not right:" Tim Clark says the idea that MH370 could disappear without a trace is "suspicious".

Now, seven months after the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, Sir Tim has cast doubt on the official version of events.

In an extraordinary interview with German magazine Der Spiegel, he challenges the Australian Transport Safety Bureau's conclusion this week that MH370 flew south over the Indian Ocean on autopilot for five hours until it ran out of fuel and fell out of the sky, forcing 239 passengers into a watery grave.


The Australian Government's latest map of the search area and the revised flight path.

Instead, Sir Tim believes it is far more likely that "MH370 was under control, probably until the very end", questions the veracity of the "so-called electronic satellite 'handshake'" used by analysts to pinpoint the probable crash site and insists the mysterious cargo in the hold (removed from the manifest by Malaysian authorities) is a crucial clue to the puzzle.

That an aircraft the size of MH370 can simply disappear without a trace, "not even a seat cushion" was downright "suspicious", he said

The executive has vowed that he will not rest until the truth is known, declaring: "I will continue to ask questions and make a nuisance of myself, even as others would like to bury it."

And as the head of the largest operator of the Boeing 777 in the world (Emirates has a fleet of 127), "I need to know how anybody could interdict our systems".

Investigators have said the plane's tracking systems were deliberately disabled by somebody with extensive aviation knowledge in order to take it off radar.

Here are the highlights from the controversial Der Spiegel interview:

What do you think happened?

Clark: My own view is that probably control was taken of that airplane. It's anybody's guess who did what. We need to know who was on the plane in the detail that obviously some people do know. We need to know what was in the hold of the aircraft. And we need to continue to press all those who were involved in the analysis of what happened for more information. I do not subscribe to the view that the Boeing 777, which is one of the most advanced in the world and has the most advanced communication platforms, needs to be improved with the introduction of some kind of additional tracking system. MH 370 should never have been allowed to enter a non-trackable situation.

What do you mean by that?
Clark: The transponders are under the control of the flight deck. These are tracking devices, aircraft identifiers that work in the secondary radar regime. If you turn off that transponder in a secondary radar regime, that particular airplane disappears from the radar screen. That should never be allowed to happen. Irrespective of when the pilot decides to disable the transponder, the aircraft should be able to be tracked.

What about other monitoring methods?
Clark: The other means of constantly monitoring the progress of an aircraft is ACARS (Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System). It is designed primarily for companies to monitor what its planes are doing. We use it to monitor aircraft systems and engine performance. At Emirates, we track every single aircraft from the ground, every component and engine of the aircraft at any point on the planet. Very often, we are able to track systemic faults before the pilots do.

How might it have been possible to disable that tracking system?
Clark: Disabling it is no simple thing and our pilots are not trained to do so. But on flight MH 370, this thing was somehow disabled, to the degree that the ground tracking capability was eliminated. We must find systems to allow ACARS to continue uninterrupted, irrespective of who is controlling the aircraft. If you have that, with the satellite constellations that we have today even in remote ocean regions, we still have monitoring capability. So you don't have to introduce additional tracking systems

What, then, are you proposing?
Clark: My recommendation to aircraft manufacturers that they find a way to make it impossible to disable ACARS from the flight deck. And the transponder as well. I'm still struggling to come up with a reason why a pilot should be able to put the transponder into standby or to switch it off. MH 370 was, in my opinion, under control, probably until the very end.

If that is the case, then why would the pilots spend five hours heading straight towards Antarctica?
Clark: If they did! I am saying that all the "facts" of this particular incident must be challenged and examined with full transparency. We are nowhere near that. There is plenty of information out there, which we need to be far more forthright, transparent and candid about. Every single second of that flight needs to be examined up until it, theoretically, ended up in the Indian Ocean — for which they still haven't found a trace, not even a seat cushio


A three-dimensional models of the sea floor terrain in the MH370 search area.

Does that surprise you? The possible crash area west of Australia is vast and the search there only began following considerable delays.
Clark: Our experience tells us that in water incidents, where the aircraft has gone down, there is always something. We have not seen a single thing that suggests categorically that this aircraft is where they say it is, apart from this so-called electronic satellite "handshake," which I question as well.

At what point on the presumed flight path of MH370 do your doubts begin?
Clark: There hasn't been one overwater incident in the history of civil aviation — apart from Amelia Earhart in 1939 — that has not been at least five or 10 per cent trackable. But MH 370 has simply disappeared. For me, that raises a degree of suspicion. I'm totally dissatisfied with what has been coming out of all of this.

What can be done to improve the investigation's transparency?
Clark: I'm not in a position to do it; I'm essentially an airline manager. But I will continue to ask questions and make a nuisance of myself, even as others would like to bury it. We have an obligation to the passengers and crew of MH 370 and their families. We have an obligation to not sweep this under the carpet, but to sort it out and do better than we have done.

MH 370 remains one of the great aviation mysteries. Personally, I have the concern that we will treat it as such and move on. At the most, it might then make an appearance on National Geographic as one of aviation's great mysteries. We mustn't allow this to happen. We must know what caused that airplane to disappear.

Emirates chief Tim Clark reveals suspicions over true fate of missing flight MH370
 

Ray

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MH370 search to end? Rage over report that plane to be declared 'lost'

Kuala Lumpur, November 11, 2014

Relatives of MH370 passengers have criticised beleagured Malaysia Airlines after an official reportedly said authorities would set a date to announce the plane "lost", with an industry source saying such a declaration would see the search called off.

Both Malaysia Airlines and officials in Australia -- which is leading the search for the missing jet far off its western coast -- have denied the reported comments by the carrier's commercial director Hugh Dunleavy.

But Voice370, an association of MH370 victims' relatives, said in a statement late Monday that it was "bewildered" by the report last week.

"Such unilateral declaration brings intense agony and confusions to family members and makes us lose faith in the search effort," it said.

A New Zealand Herald article, citing Dunleavy, said authorities were working to set a date -- likely by the end of the year -- to formally announce the loss of the Boeing 777, which vanished off radars on March 8 with 239 people aboard.

"We don't have a final date but once we've had an official loss recorded we can work with the next of kin on the full compensation payments for those families," he was quoted as saying.

An industry source familiar with the MH370 saga said once the plane is declared lost, all search efforts will be stopped.

"The talk has been that the search has been futile so far and it's unlikely to bring anything," he said.

In a statement Monday, Malaysia Airlines distanced itself from Dunleavy's comments, saying it was his personal opinion and "ongoing search and recovery operations will remain and will not be discontinued".

It said any information regarding MH370 will only be communicated by the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) in Australia.

Officials at the JACC said Tuesday that Dunleavy's comments were "greatly disturbing for the families and loved ones of the passengers and crew on board MH370", reiterating Australia's commitment to the search.

MH370 inexplicably disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in what remains one of history's great aviation mysteries.

Australia has been spearheading the hunt for the plane, which is believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean off western Australia.

Some next-of-kin bitterly accuse the Malaysian government and airline of a bungled response and cover-up, charges that they have strenuously denied.

A Malaysian family last month sued the government and the airline for negligence in what is believed to be the first lawsuit filed over the disaster.
MH370 search to end? Rage over report that plane to be declared 'lost' - Hindustan Times
There is real good and genuine reasons to feel aggrieved.

The plane could not have dropped off the sky.
 

sgarg

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USA has the ability to electronically hijack a US made Boeing plane. There is a lot of speculation of some important people on board this flight. People that USA did not want to reach China.

There is a silent war already on between east and west. A lot is happening but it is being kept under wraps. The revolution in Kiev did not just appear out of nowhere.

Why Russia has gone to such extreme lengths to develop commercial airliner Sukhoi Superjet has a very strong reason.

Western made airplanes can prove to be deathtraps in case of war due to rigged communication and flight control systems which can take commands from military satellites.
 
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Ray

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MH370: Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight Mystery 'Solved' By British Boeing 777 Pilot Simon Hardy

Huffington Post UK | By Sara C Nelson
Email
Posted: 02/03/2015 09:44 GMT

A senior British pilot claims he may have solved the mystery of what happened to Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Boeing 777 captain Simon Hardy also believes he knows where the doomed aircraft came to rest, following a six month examination of flight data.

Using a unique mathematical technique, Hardy pinpoints the location of the aircraft to 100 nautical miles away from where the Australian Transport Safety Board (ATSB) is currently carrying out it search, the Sunday Times reports.



What's more, a spokesman for the ATSB described Hardy's work as "credible" and confirmed the organisation has been in contact with him.

Hardy also told the newspaper he believes pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah performed a final "emotional" fly-past of Penang island, before landing the plane on water, where it sank intact.
 

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MH370: Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight Mystery 'Solved' By British Boeing 777 Pilot Simon Hardy

Hardy also told the newspaper he believes pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah performed a final "emotional" fly-past of Penang island, before landing the plane on water, where it sank intact.
Does it mean..the accident was indeed made up than technical gitches.
 

Ray

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Does it mean..the accident was indeed made up than technical gitches.
That is what is being suggested.

Or is it a deliberate attempt to muddy the water so that the truth never comes out?
 

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Malaysia says airplane debris found on Reunion Island part of Boeing 777

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 2 (Reuters) - Malaysia said on Sunday that airplane debris that washed up on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion has been identified as being from a Boeing 777, the same model as Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 which vanished early last year. "We know the flaperon has been officially identified as being part of a Boeing 777 aircraft," Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said in a statement. "This has been verified by French authorities together with aircraft manufacturer Boeing, U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Malaysian team comprising the Department of Civil Aviation, Malaysia Airlines, and Malaysian ICAO Annex 13 Safety Investigation Team for MH370."

Malaysia says airplane debris found on Reunion Island part of Boeing 777
 

happy

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I strongly believe that some people with vested interests are planting material (read items being found around Reunion) which will mislead the public and the relatives of MH370. Considering that it is nearly 600 days since the disappearance, nothing is impossible....
 

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'Lonely and sad' MH370 pilot might have been behind Malaysian Airlines plane's disappearance: report

"An intentional depressurisation would have been an obvious way – and probably the only way – to subdue a potentially unruly cabin in an aeroplane that was going to remain in flight for hours to come," Langewiesche, who is also a pilot, wrote.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/com...an-airlines-plane-report-20190618-p51yrz.html
 

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What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane
Five years ago, the flight vanished into the Indian Ocean. Officials on land know more about why than they dare to say


Updated at 10:25 a.m. ET on June 17, 2019.

1. The Disappearance
at 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The designator for Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight number was 370. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was flying the airplane. He was 27 years old. This was a training flight for him, the last one; he would soon be fully certified. His trainer was the pilot in command, a man named Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who at 53 was one of the most senior captains at Malaysia Airlines. In Malaysian style, he was known by his first name, Zaharie. He was married and had three adult children. He lived in a gated development. He owned two houses. In his first house he had installed an elaborate Microsoft flight simulator. He flew it frequently, and often posted to online forums about his hobby. In the cockpit, Fariq would have been deferential to him, but Zaharie was not known for being overbearing.

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In the cabin were 10 flight attendants, all of them Malaysian. They had 227 passengers to care for, including five children. Most of the passengers were Chinese; of the rest, 38 were Malaysian, and in descending order the others came from Indonesia, Australia, India, France, the United States, Iran, Ukraine, Canada, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Russia, and Taiwan. Up in the cockpit that night, while First Officer Fariq flew the airplane, Captain Zaharie handled the radios. The arrangement was standard. Zaharie’s transmissions were a bit unusual. At 1:01 a.m. he radioed that they had leveled off at 35,000 feet—a superfluous report in radar-surveilled airspace where the norm is to report leaving an altitude, not arriving at one. At 1:08 the flight crossed the Malaysian coastline and set out across the South China Sea in the direction of Vietnam. Zaharie again reported the plane’s level at 35,000 feet.

Eleven minutes later, as the airplane closed in on a waypoint near the start of Vietnamese air-traffic jurisdiction, the controller at Kuala Lumpur Center radioed, “Malaysian three-seven-zero, contact Ho Chi Minh one-two-zero-decimal-nine. Good night.” Zaharie answered, “Good night. Malaysian three-seven-zero.” He did not read back the frequency, as he should have, but otherwise the transmission sounded normal. It was the last the world heard from MH370. The pilots never checked in with Ho Chi Minh or answered any of the subsequent attempts to raise them.

Primary radar relies on simple, raw pings off objects in the sky. Air-traffic-control systems use what is known as secondary radar. It depends on a transponder signal that is transmitted by each airplane and contains richer information—for instance, the airplane’s identity and altitude—than primary radar does. Five seconds after MH370 crossed into Vietnamese airspace, the symbol representing its transponder dropped from the screens of Malaysian air traffic control, and 37 seconds later the entire airplane disappeared from secondary radar. The time was 1:21 a.m., 39 minutes after takeoff. The controller in Kuala Lumpur was dealing with other traffic elsewhere on his screen and simply didn’t notice. When he finally did, he assumed that the airplane was in the hands of Ho Chi Minh, somewhere out beyond his range.

The Vietnamese controllers, meanwhile, saw MH370 cross into their airspace and then disappear from radar. They apparently misunderstood a formal agreement by which Ho Chi Minh was supposed to inform Kuala Lumpur immediately if an airplane that had been handed off was more than five minutes late checking in. They tried repeatedly to contact the aircraft, to no avail. By the time they picked up the phone to inform Kuala Lumpur, 18 minutes had passed since MH370’s disappearance from their radar screens. What ensued was an exercise in confusion and incompetence. Kuala Lumpur’s Aeronautical Rescue Coordination Centre should have been notified within an hour of the disappearance. By 2:30 a.m., it still had not been. Four more hours elapsed before an emergency response was finally begun, at 6:32 a.m.

Read: Malaysian officials update last words spoken from MH370

The initial search of surface waters ended in April 2014, after nearly two months of futile efforts, and the focus shifted to the ocean depths, where it remains today. Blaine Gibson followed the frustration at first from a distance. He sold his mother’s house and moved to the Golden Triangle of northern Laos, where he and a business partner set about building a restaurant on the Mekong River. He joined a Facebook discussion group dedicated to the loss of MH370. It was filled with speculation, but also with news that reflected useful thinking about what could have happened to the airplane and where the main wreckage might be found.

Although the Malaysians were nominally in charge of the entire investigation, they lacked the means and expertise to mount a subsea search-and-recovery effort; the Australians, as good international citizens, took the lead. The areas of the Indian Ocean that the satellite data pointed to—about 1,200 miles southwest of Perth—were so deep and unexplored that the first challenge was to map the undersea topography sufficiently to allow side-scanning sonar vehicles to be safely towed miles beneath the surface. The ocean floor was lined with ridges in a blackness where light had never penetrated.

Gibson began to wonder whether, for all the strenuous underwater searching, debris from the airplane might someday simply wash up on a beach somewhere. While visiting friends on the coast of Cambodia, he asked whether they had stumbled on anything. They had not. Debris couldn’t possibly have drifted to Cambodia from the southern Indian Ocean, but until the airplane’s wreckage was found—proving that the southern Indian Ocean was indeed its grave—Gibson was determined to keep an open mind.

In March 2015, a one-year commemoration of MH370’s disappearance was held in Kuala Lumpur by the passengers’ next of kin. Uninvited, and largely unknown to them, Gibson decided to attend. Because he had no special knowledge to offer, his arrival raised eyebrows. People don’t know what to make of a dilettante. The commemoration took place in an outdoor space at a shopping mall, a typical event venue for Kuala Lumpur. The purpose was to grieve collectively, but also to maintain pressure on the government of Malaysia to provide explanations. Hundreds of people attended, many from China. There was a bit of music on a stage. In the background a large poster showed the silhouette of a Boeing 777, along with the words where, who, why, when, whom, how, and also impossible, unprecedented, vanished, and clueless. The principal speaker was a young Malaysian woman named Grace Subathirai Nathan, whose mother had been on the flight. Nathan is a criminal-defense lawyer specializing in death-penalty cases, of which Malaysia has many because of draconian laws. She had emerged as the most effective representative of the next of kin. She took to the stage wearing an oversize T-shirt printed with a cartoon graphic of MH370 and the exhortation search on, and then proceeded to describe her mother, the deep love she felt for her, and the difficulty of enduring her disappearance. On occasion she quietly wept, as did some in the audience, including Gibson. Afterward, he approached Nathan and asked whether she would accept a hug from a stranger. She did, and they became friends.

Gibson left the commemoration determined to help by addressing a gap he had perceived—the lack of coastal searches for floating debris. This would be his niche. He would become MH370’s private beachcomber. The official investigators, primarily Australian and Malaysian, were heavily invested in their underwater search. They would have scoffed at Gibson’s ambition, just as they would have scoffed at the prospect that on beaches hundreds of miles apart, Gibson would find pieces of the airplane.

Left: The Malaysian lawyer and activist Grace Subathirai Nathan, whose mother was on board MH370. Right: Blaine Gibson, an American who has mounted a search for debris from the airplane. (William Langewiesche)
3. The Mother Lode
the indian ocean washes against tens of thousands of miles of coastline, depending on how many islands you include in your count. When Blaine Gibson started looking for debris, he did not have a plan. He flew to Myanmar because he had been intending to go there anyway, then went to the coast and asked some villagers where flotsam tended to drift ashore. They directed him to several beaches, and a fisherman took him there by boat. He found some debris, but nothing that came from an airplane. He advised the villagers to be on the lookout, left his contact number, and moved on. Similarly, he visited the Maldives and the islands of Rodrigues and Mauritius without finding debris of interest. Then came July 29, 2015. About 16 months after the airplane went missing, a municipal beach-cleanup crew on the French island of Réunion came upon a torn piece of airfoil about six feet long that seemed to have just washed ashore. The foreman of the crew, a man named Johnny Bègue, realized that it might have come from an airplane, but he had no idea which one. He briefly considered making it into a memorial—setting it on an adjacent lawn and planting some flowers around it—but instead he called a local radio station with the news. A team of gendarmes showed up and took the piece away. It was quickly determined to be a part of a Boeing 777, a control surface called a flaperon that is attached to the trailing edge of the wings. Subsequent examination of serial numbers showed that it had come from MH370.

Here was the necessary physical evidence of what had already been electronically surmised—that the flight had ended violently in the Indian Ocean, albeit somewhere still unknown and thousands of miles to the east of Réunion. The families of those aboard the airplane had to surrender any fantasies that their loved ones might still be alive. It came as a shock, no matter how rational and realistic they had been. Grace Nathan was devastated. She told me that she could barely function for weeks after the flaperon was found.

Gibson flew to Réunion and found Johnny Bègue on his beach. Bègue was friendly. He showed Gibson where he had found the flaperon. Gibson poked around for other debris but without expectation, because the French government had already mounted a follow-up search to no avail. Flotsam takes a while to drift across the Indian Ocean, moving from east to west at the low southern latitudes, and a flaperon might arrive sooner than other debris because parts of it could rise above the water and act as a sail.

A newspaper reporter in Réunion interviewed Gibson for a story about the visit of this independent American investigator. Gibson wore a search on T-shirt for the occasion. He then flew to Australia, where he spoke with two oceanographers—Charitha Pattiaratchi, of the University of Western Australia at Perth, and David Griffin, who worked for a government research center in Hobart and had been assigned to advise the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, the lead agency in the search for MH370. Both men were experts on Indian Ocean currents and winds. Griffin in particular had spent years tracking drift buoys, and had launched an effort to model the complex drift characteristics of the flaperon during its voyage to Réunion—the hope being to backtrack and narrow the geographic scope of the undersea search. Gibson’s needs were easier to handle: He wanted to know the most likely locations for floating debris to come ashore. The answer was the northeast coast of Madagascar and, to a lesser degree, the coast of Mozambique.

Gibson opted for Mozambique because he had not been there before and could bag it as his 177th country. He chose a town called Vilanculos, because it seemed safe and had nice beaches. He got there in February 2016. As he recalls, he asked for advice from local fishermen, and was told of a sandbank called Paluma that lay beyond a reef, where fishermen would go to collect nets and buoys that washed in from the Indian Ocean. Gibson paid a boatman named Suleman to take him there. They found all sorts of junk, mostly plastic. Suleman called Gibson over. Holding up a gray triangular scrap about two feet across, he asked, “Is this 370?” The scrap had a honeycomb structure and the stenciled words no step on one surface. Gibson’s first impression was that it could not have come from a large airplane. To me he said, “So my mind was telling me it’s not from the plane, but my heart was telling me it’s from the plane. Then we had to take the boat back. And here we get into the personal thing. Two dolphins appeared and helped lead us off that sandbank—my mother’s spirit animal. When I saw those dolphins, I thought, This is from the plane.”

Make of that what you will, but Gibson turned out to be right. The scrap—from a horizontal-stabilizer panel—was determined to almost certainly be from MH370. Gibson flew to the capital, Maputo, and handed the debris to the Australian consul. Then he flew to Kuala Lumpur, just in time for the second-anniversary commemoration. This time he was welcomed as a friend.

In June 2016, Gibson turned his attention to the remote northeastern shores of Madagascar. This turned out to be the mother lode. Gibson says he found three pieces on the first day, and another two a few days later. The following week, on a beach eight miles away, three more pieces were delivered to him. And so it has gone ever since. Word has gotten around that he will pay for MH370 debris. He says he once paid so much for a piece—$40—that an entire village went on a day-long bender. Apparently the local rum is cheap.

A lot of debris washed up that had nothing to do with the airplane. But of the several dozen pieces that have been identified to date as certain or likely or suspected to have come from MH370, Gibson has been responsible for the discovery of roughly a third. Some pieces are still being investigated. Gibson’s influence has been so large that David Griffin, though grateful to him, has worried that the perceived debris pattern may now be statistically skewed toward Madagascar, perhaps at the expense of points farther north. He has given this worry a name: “The Gibson Effect.”

The fact remains that, after five years, no one has yet been able to work backwards from where the debris has washed ashore and trace it to some point of origin in the southern Indian Ocean. In his insistence on maintaining an open mind, Gibson still holds out the hope of finding new debris that will explain the disappearance—charred wiring indicating a fire, for instance, or shrapnel-peppered evidence of a missile strike—although what is known about the flight’s final hours largely precludes such possibilities. What Gibson’s discovery of so many bits of debris has confirmed is that the signals analysis was correct. The airplane flew for six hours until the flight came suddenly to an end. There was no effort by someone at the controls to bring the airplane down gently. It shattered. There is still a chance, Gibson thinks, of finding the equivalent of a message in a bottle—a note of desperation scribbled by someone in his or her last moments on the doomed airplane. On the beaches, Gibson has found a few backpacks and a large number of purses, all of which have been empty. The closest he has come to finding such a note, he says, was a message written in Malay on the underside of a baseball cap. Translated, it read, “To whom it may concern. My dear friend, meet me at the guesthouse later.”

Illustrations by La Tigre
A—1:21 a.m., March 8, 2014: Over the South China Sea, near a navigational waypoint between Malaysia and Vietnam, MH370 drops from air-traffic-control radar and turns southwest, back across the Malay Peninsula.

B—Roughly an hour later:
After flying northwest above the Strait of Malacca, the airplane makes what investigators call the “final major turn” and heads south. The turn and the new course are later reconstructed from satellite data.

C—April 2014:
The surface search is abandoned and a deep-ocean search gets under way. Analysis of satellite data had located MH370’s final electronic “handshake” along an arc.

D—July 2015:
The first piece of debris from MH370—a flaperon—is discovered on the island of Réunion. Other confirmed or likely pieces have been found on widely dispersed beaches in the western Indian Ocean (locations in red).

4. The Conspiracies
three official investigations were launched in the wake of MH370’s disappearance. The first was the largest, most rigorous, and most expensive: the technically advanced Australian underwater-search effort, which was focused on locating the main debris in order to retrieve the airplane’s flight-data and cockpit voice recorders. It involved calculations of aircraft performance, the parsing of radar and satellite records, studies of oceanic drift, doses of statistical analysis, and the physical examination of the East African flotsam—much of which came from Blaine Gibson. It required heavy maritime operations in some of the world’s roughest seas. Assisting the effort was a collection of volunteer engineers and scientists who found one another on the internet, called themselves the Independent Group, and collaborated so effectively that the Australians took their work into account and ended up formally thanking them for their insights. In the annals of accident investigation, this had never happened before. Nonetheless, after more than three years and about $160 million, the Australian investigation closed without success. It was picked up in 2018 by an American company called Ocean Infinity, under contract with the Malaysian government on a “no-find, no-fee” basis. This search used advanced underwater-surveillance vehicles and covered a new section of the seventh arc, a section deemed most likely by the Independent Group to bring results. After a few months, it too ended in failure.

The second official investigation belonged to the Malaysian police, and amounted to background checks of everyone on the airplane as well as some of their friends. It is hard to know the true extent of the police discoveries, because the report that resulted from the investigation stopped short of full disclosure. The report was stamped secret and withheld even from other Malaysian investigators, but after it was leaked by someone on the inside, its inadequacies became clear. In particular, it held back on divulging all that was known about the captain, Zaharie. No one was surprised. The prime minister at the time was a nasty man named Najib Razak, who was alleged to be monumentally corrupt. The press in Malaysia was censored. Troublemakers were being picked up and made to disappear. Officials had reason for caution. They had careers to protect, and maybe their lives. It is obvious that decisions were made to not pursue certain avenues that might have reflected poorly on Malaysia Airlines or the government.

The third official investigation was the accident inquiry, intended not to adjudicate liability but to find probable cause, and to be conducted according to the highest global standards by an international team. It was led by an ad hoc working group assembled by the Malaysian government, and was a mess from its inception. The police and military disdained it. Government ministers saw it as a risk. Foreign specialists who were sent to assist began retreating almost as soon as they arrived. An American expert, referring to the international aviation protocol that is supposed to govern accident inquiries, told me, “Annex 13 is tailored for accident investigations in confident democracies, but in countries like Malaysia, with insecure and autocratic bureaucracies, and with airlines that are either government-owned or seen as a matter of national prestige, it always makes for a pretty poor fit.”

A close observer of the MH370 process said, “It became clear that the primary objective of the Malaysians was to make the subject just go away. From the start there was this instinctive bias against being open and transparent, not because they were hiding some deep, dark secret, but because they did not know where the truth really lay, and they were afraid that something might come out that would be embarrassing. Were they covering up? Yes. They were covering up for the unknown.”

In the end the investigation produced a 495-page report in weak imitation of Annex 13 requirements. It was stuffed with boilerplate descriptions of 777 systems that had clearly been lifted from Boeing manuals and were of no technical value. Indeed, nothing in the report was of technical value, since Australian publications had already fully covered the relevant satellite information and ocean-drift analysis. The Malaysian report was seen as hardly more than a whitewash whose only real contribution was a frank description of the air-traffic-control failures—presumably because half of them could be blamed on the Vietnamese, and because the Malaysian controllers constituted the weakest local target, politically. The report was released in July 2018, more than four years after the event. It stated that the investigative team was unable to determine the cause of the airplane’s disappearance.

* In 1999, EgyptAir Flight 990 was deliberately crashed into the sea by its co-pilot off the coast of Long Island, resulting in the loss of everyone on board. In 2013, just months before MH370 disappeared, the captain of LAM Mozambique Airlines Flight 470 flew his Embraer E190 twin jet from cruising altitude into the ground, killing all 27 passengers and all six crew members. The most recent case is the Germanwings Airbus that was deliberately crashed into the French Alps on March 24, 2015, also causing the loss of everyone on board. Its co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, had waited for the pilot to use the bathroom and then locked him out. Lubitz had a record of depression and—as investigations later discovered—had made a study of MH370’s disappearance, one year earlier.

From the November 2001 issue: William Langewiesche on EgyptAir 990

In the case of MH370, it is difficult to see the co-pilot as the perpetrator. He was young and optimistic, and reportedly planning to get married. He had no history of any sort of trouble, dissent, or doubts. He was not a German signing on to a life in a declining industry of budget airlines, low salaries, and even lower prestige. He was flying a glorious Boeing 777 in a country where the national airline and its pilots are still considered a pretty big deal.

It is the captain, Zaharie, who raises concerns. The first warning is his portrayal in the official reports as someone beyond reproach—a good pilot and placid family man who liked to play with a flight simulator. This is the image promoted by Zaharie’s family, but it is contradicted by multiple indications of trouble that too obviously have been brushed over.

he experimented with a flight profile roughly matching that of MH370—a flight north around Indonesia followed by a long run to the south, ending in fuel exhaustion over the Indian Ocean. Malaysian investigators dismissed this flight profile as merely one of several hundred that the simulator had recorded. That is true, as far as it goes, which is not far enough. Victor Iannello, an engineer and entrepreneur in Roanoke, Virginia, who has become another prominent member of the Independent Group and has done extensive analysis of the simulated flight, underscores what the Malaysian investigators ignored. Of all the profiles extracted from the simulator, the one that matched MH370’s path was the only one that Zaharie did not run as a continuous flight—in other words, taking off on the simulator and letting the flight play out, hour after hour, until it reached the destination airport. Instead he advanced the flight manually in multiple stages, repeatedly jumping the flight forward and subtracting the fuel as necessary until it was gone. Iannello believes that Zaharie was responsible for the diversion. Given that there was nothing technical that Zaharie could have learned by rehearsing the act on a gamelike Microsoft consumer product, Iannello suspects that the purpose of the simulator flight may have been to leave a bread-crumb trail to say goodbye. Referring to the flight profile that MH370 would follow, Iannello said of Zaharie, “It’s as if he was simulating a simulation.” Without a note of explanation, Zaharie’s reasoning is impossible to know. But the simulator flight cannot easily be dismissed as a random coincidence.

In Kuala Lumpur, I met with one of Zaharie’s lifelong friends, a fellow 777 captain whose name I have omitted because of possible repercussions for him. He too believed that Zaharie was guilty, a conclusion he had come to reluctantly. He described the mystery as a pyramid that is broad at the base and one man wide at the top, meaning that the inquiry might have begun with many possible explanations but ended up with a single one. He said, “It doesn’t make sense. It’s hard to reconcile with the man I knew. But it’s the necessary conclusion.” I asked about the need Zaharie would have had to somehow deal with his cockpit companion, First Officer Fariq Hamid. He replied, “That’s easy. Zaharie was an examiner. All he had to say was ‘Go check something in the cabin,’ and the guy would have been gone.” I asked about a motive. He had no idea. He said, “Zaharie’s marriage was bad. In the past he slept with some of the flight attendants. And so what? We all do. You’re flying all over the world with these beautiful girls in the back. But his wife knew.” He agreed that this was hardly a reason to go berserk, but thought Zaharie’s emotional state might have been a factor.

Does the absence of all of this from the official report— Zaharie’s travails; the peculiar nature of the flight profile on the simulator—not to mention the technical inadequacies of the report itself, constitute a cover-up? At this point, we cannot say. We know some of what the investigators knew but chose not to reveal. There is likely more that they discovered and that we do not yet know.

Which brings us back to the demise of MH370. It is easy to imagine Zaharie toward the end, strapped into an ultra-comfortable seat in the cockpit, inhabiting his cocoon in the glow of familiar instruments, knowing that there could be no return from what he had done, and feeling no need to hurry. He would long since have repressurized the airplane and warmed it to the right degree. There was the hum of the living machine, the beautiful abstractions on the flatscreen displays, the carefully considered backlighting of all the switches and circuit breakers. There was the gentle whoosh of the air rushing by. The cockpit is the deepest, most protective, most private sort of home. Around 7 a.m., the sun rose over the eastern horizon, to the airplane’s left. A few minutes later it lit the ocean far below. Had Zaharie already died in flight? He could at some point have depressurized the airplane again and brought his life to an end. This is disputed and far from certain. Indeed, there is some suspicion, from fuel-exhaustion simulations that investigators have run, that the airplane, if simply left alone, would not have dived quite as radically as the satellite data suggest that it did—a suspicion, in other words, that someone was at the controls at the end, actively helping to crash the airplane. Either way, somewhere along the seventh arc, after the engines failed from lack of fuel, the airplane entered a vicious spiral dive with descent rates that ultimately may have exceeded 15,000 feet a minute. We know from that descent rate, as well as from Blaine Gibson’s shattered debris, that the airplane disintegrated into confetti when it hit the water.

7. The Truth
for now the official investigations have petered out. The Australians have done what they could. The Chinese want to move on and are censoring any news that might inflame the passions of the families. The French are off in France, rehashing the satellite data. The Malaysians just wish the whole subject would go away. I attended an event in the administrative city of Putrajaya last fall, where Grace Nathan and Gibson stood in front of the cameras with the transport minister, Anthony Loke. The minister formally accepted five new pieces of debris collected over the summer. He was miserable to the point of being angry. He barely spoke, and took no questions from the press. Nathan was seething at the minister’s attitude. That night, over dinner, she insisted that the government should not be allowed to walk away so easily. She said, “They didn’t follow protocol. They didn’t follow procedure. I think it’s appalling. More could have been done. As a result of the inaction of the air force—of all of the parties involved in the first hour who didn’t follow protocol—we are stuck like this now. Every one of them breached protocol one time, multiple times. Every single person who had some form of responsibility at the time did not do what he was supposed to do. To varying degrees of severity. Maybe in isolation some might not seem so bad, but when you look at it as a whole, every one of them contributed 100 percent to the fact that the airplane has not been found.”

And every one of them was a government employee. Nathan had hopes that Ocean Infinity, which had recently found a missing Argentine submarine, would return to the search, again on a no-find, no-fee basis. The company had suggested the possibility of doing so earlier that week. But the government of Malaysia would have to sign the contract. Because of the political culture, Nathan worried that it might not—as so far has proved true.


If the wreckage is ever found, it will lay to rest all the theories that depend on ignoring the satellite data or the fact that the airplane flew an intricate path after its initial turn away from Beijing and then remained aloft for six more hours. No, it did not catch on fire yet stay in the air for all that time. No, it did not become a “ghost flight” able to navigate and switch its systems off and then back on. No, it was not shot down after long consideration by nefarious national powers who lingered on its tail before pulling the trigger. And no, it is not somewhere in the South China Sea, nor is it sitting intact in some camouflaged hangar in Central Asia. The one thing all of these explanations have in common is that they contradict the authentic information investigators do possess.

That aside, finding the wreckage and the two black boxes may accomplish little. The cockpit voice recorder is a self-erasing two-hour loop, and is likely to contain only the sounds of the final alarms going off, unless whoever was at the controls was still alive and in a mood to provide explanations for posterity. The other black box, the flight-data recorder, will provide information about the functioning of the airplane throughout the entire flight, but it will not reveal any relevant system failure, because no such failure can explain what occurred. At best it will answer some relatively unimportant questions, such as when exactly the airplane was depressurized and how long it remained so, or how exactly the satellite box was powered down and then powered back up. The denizens of the internet would be obsessed, but that is hardly an event to look forward to.

The important answers probably don’t lie in the ocean but on land, in Malaysia. That should be the focus moving forward. Unless they are as incompetent as the air force and air traffic control, the Malaysian police know more than they have dared to say. The riddle may not be deep. That is the frustration here. The answers may well lie close at hand, but they are more difficult to retrieve than any black box. If Blaine Gibson wants a real adventure, he might spend a year poking around Kuala Lumpur.


https://www.theatlantic.com/magazin...=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

I had feeling that it was CFIT from the day one . Looks my guessing was not bad it matches others too
 

sorcerer

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MH370 'shot down by US to seize electronic equipment on the way to China'


Florence de Changy, who has been investigating and reporting on the MH370 for many years, argues that the American military used signal jamming technology to wipe the plane from radar screens – before shooting it down after a failed attempt to re-direct it.


She argues the US sought to seize sensitive electronic gear on its way to Beijing, as The Daily Mail reports.

 

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