14 April 2014| last updated at 01:22PM
MH370 Tragedy: Official says underwater vehicle will be used in SAR
PERTH: Search crews will for the first time send an underwater vehicle into the Indian Ocean to try to determine whether signals detected by sound-locating equipment are from the missing Malaysian plane’s black boxes, the Australian head of the search said today.
Angus Houston said the crew on board the Ocean Shield will launch the underwater vehicle as soon as possible. The Bluefin 21 autonomous sub can create a sonar map of the area to chart any debris on the seafloor.
The move comes after crews picked up a series of underwater sounds over the past two weeks that were consistent with an aircraft’s black boxes.
“We haven’t had a single detection in six days, and I guess it’s time to go under water,” said Houston, the head of a joint agency coordinating the search off Australia’s west coast.
“Analysis of the four signals has allowed the provisional definition of a reduced and manageable search area on the ocean floor.
The experts have therefore determined that the Australian Defence Vessel Ocean Shield will cease searching with the towed pinger locator later today and deploy the autonomous underwater vehicle Bluefin 21 as soon as possible,” he said at a news conference in Perth.
But Houston warned the switch to the submarine will not automatically “result in the detection of the aircraft wreckage. It may not.”
Recovering the plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders is essential for investigators to try to figure out what happened to Flight 370, which vanished March 8. It was carrying 239 people, mostly Chinese, while en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing.
After analysing satellite data, officials believe the plane flew off course for an unknown reason and went down in the southern Indian Ocean. Investigators trying to determine what happened to the plane are focusing on four areas — hijacking, sabotage and personal or psychological problems of those on board.
Two sounds heard on April 5 by the Australian ship Ocean Shield, which was towing the ping locator, were determined to be consistent with the signals emitted from the black boxes.
Two more pings were detected in the same general area Tuesday, but no new ones have been picked up since then.
Houston said the search using the submarine will be “a slow and painstaking process.”
The sub takes six times longer to cover the same area as the ping locator, and will need about six weeks to two months to canvass the current underwater zone.
The signals are also coming from 4,500 meters (15,000 feet) below the surface, which is the deepest the sub can dive.
A visual search for debris was also planned for today over 47,600 square kilometres (18,400 square miles) of ocean centred 2,200 kilometres (1,400 miles) northwest of the west coast city of Perth, the centre said. A total of 12 planes and 15 ships would join the two searches. -- AP
14 April 2014| last updated at 01:26PM
MH370 Tragedy: Oil slick spotted in search area
PERTH: An oil slick had also been spotted in the search area with around two litres of fuel collected for testing, said Angus Houston, who fronts the Joint Agency Coordination Centre.
“I stress the source of the oil is yet to be determined but the oil slick is approximately 5,500 metres downwind... from the vicinity of the detections picked up by the towed pinger locator on Ocean Shield,” he said.
It would be a number of days before the oil could be conclusively tested ashore, but Houston said he did not think it was from a search vessel.
He emphasised that it was 38 days since the Boeing 777 vanished on March 8 and the black box batteries had a shelf life of only 30 days.
The US-made Bluefin-21, a 4.93-metre (16.2 feet) long sonar device will now scour the seabed.
The sonar device, which weighs 750 kilograms, can operate at a depth of up to 4,500 metres — roughly the depth of the ocean floor where the pings were detected. -- AFP
Malaysia Chronicle.....
Monday, 14 April 2014 16:12
MH37O SPIN OUT OF M'SIA TRASHED BY EXPERTS: Search in ocean MORE TRANSPARENT than ongoing probe in Putrajaya
- font size
- Comments (
Rate this item
(0 votes)
Malaysian authorities have so botched their efforts that the search under the sea looks clear by comparison.
Search underwater is much clearer than the one in Malaysia.
How many clues to the fate of Flight MH370 can be found without physical evidence, either from wreckage or from the flight data recorders? In trying to answer this it is important to make a distinction between the vast international sea search being directed from Australia and the investigation that remains in the hands of the Malaysians in Kuala Lumpur.
In both cases a lot is happening that cannot be directly observed and reported. Journalists covering the sea search get regular briefings from Angus Houston, the retired Australian air marshal who is directing naval and air operations from Perth. Some reporters have flown on search airplanes and have been able to show the immensity of the task, but no wreckage has been sighted and journalists end up as frustrated as the searchers.
At the “sharp end” of the search, aboard the Australian vessel Ocean Shield and (as of last week) its companion, the British ship HMS Echo, the crucial and arcane work to interpret data from the towed underwater ping detector goes on beyond the eyes of the media. Houston is careful not to exaggerate the accuracy of the results (and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has had to walk back his more Panglossian view of the progress being made, now admitting that finding the black boxes would be “a massive, massive task.”)
No more signals
And it now appears highly unlikely that any more signals will be heard from the locator beacons on the black box.
As frustrating as this is, at least in the case of the sea search we do know who the participants are, the technical capabilities of the assets being used, and the results so far.
The land-based investigation is another matter. Since the Boeing 777 vanished, the Malaysian handling of the media has been impulsive, erratic, and contradictory, leaving an impression of private agendas. Something very basic is lacking: It’s never been clear what the ground rules are for what can and cannot be revealed.
Of course, we must understand that it’s a given that we cannot expect the same kind of transparency that the Australians permit for the sea search. There are political, corporate and competing national interests involved. Specifically, there are two strongly inhibiting pressures against transparency—the certainty of liability litigation on behalf of the victims’ families and the possibility of a criminal cause rather than a technical one.
Truth at the bottom of the ocean
The only means of bringing balance and integrity to the investigation lies 2.8 miles down on the silt-layered bed of the Indian Ocean.
However, in the absence of physical evidence from the airplane itself the forensic investigation still has plenty to look at and work with:
First, the recent history of the airplane itself and its engines, including the records of maintenance carried out and any reported operational problems.
Second, the retrievable picture of Flight 370 itself, beginning with the pre-flight briefing of the pilots, the en route weather reports, the fueling of the airplane, the checking and loading of cargo, the delivery of catering, as well as the security of the airline’s ground handling in the two hours before the airplane left the gate.
In fact, there are thousands of hours of diligent investigation to be carried out into a lot of verifiable evidence even before the post-flight profiling of all the passengers and crew. (The Malaysians now say that nothing significant has been turned up from this profiling.)
Flying low that low is impossible
The narrative of what happened in the first hour or so of Flight 730 has been, to say the least, a contentiously-contested area of inquiry. For example, there have been persistent accounts, the most recent last week, of extreme maneuvers by the airplane, ranging from soaring to 45,000 feet to diving down to 4,000 feet, implying that the pilots were trying to evade radar.
First, MH370 didn’t evade radar; the flight was picked up by both Malaysian and Thai radars but the intercepts were not reported in a timely manner and we have never been given a reliable mapping and time line of the flight’s radar track, such as it exists.
Second, the whole idea of an airplane the size of a 777 attempting to fly “under the radar” is risible: it’s not an F-15 and simply can’t fly that low. The trouble is that by the time stories like this are exposed for the rubbish they are, they have flashed around the world to excite a credulous public. Newspapers in Asia have been particularly hungry for any sensation.
A real challenge
Whatever law enforcement agencies are involved, and whatever the cooperation they do or do not get from the Malaysians, it must be a constant challenge for the investigators to restrain the selective release of completely unsubstantiated and far-fetched conspiracy theories, most of them, for whatever reason, intended to impugn the actions of the pilots.
The only means of bringing balance and integrity to the investigation lies 2.8 miles down on the silt-layered bed of the Indian Ocean. The whole story of Flight 370 is hopefully still intact within the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder (even though this records only two hours of cockpit conversations that would cover the essential period when the flight changed course). Given the history of the closest precursor of this disaster, Air France 447, the black boxes’ batteries die but the data can survive for years at great depths.
The data recorders, positioned in the 777’s tail section, were probably torn free on impact with the water and fell to the ocean floor, along with other heavier and larger pieces of the airplane, like the engines. Any piece of wreckage, no matter how large or small, can have its own clues—like, for example, evidence of fire or an explosion. But the only complete and definitive description of what happened to Flight MH370 is in those recorders.
Captain Phillip Newell, the commander of HMS Echo, has 20 years’ experience of searching sea beds. Few of them are as poorly mapped as this one. “It should never be underestimated that trying to find an object this small on the sea bed at this depth is probably as hard a challenge as you will ever get,” he told the BBC. -thedailybeast.com
Monday, 14 April 2014 15:02
FIRST SIGHT OF MH370 DEBRIS? Oil slick spotted in search area, SUBMARINE to be deployed
- font size
- Comments (
Rate this item
(0 votes)
Search crews will for the first time send a sub deep into the Indian Ocean to try to determine whether signals detected by sound-locating equipment are from the missing Malaysian plane's black boxes, the Australian head of the search said on Monday.
Angus Houston said the crew on board the Ocean Shield will launch the underwater vehicle as soon as possible. The Bluefin 21 autonomous sub can create a sonar map of the area to chart any debris on the seafloor.
The move comes after crews picked up a series of underwater sounds over the past two weeks that were consistent with an aircraft's black boxes.
"We haven't had a single detection in six days, and I guess it's time to go under water," said Mr Houston, the head of a joint agency coordinating the search off Australia's west coast.
"Analysis of the four signals has allowed the provisional definition of a reduced and manageable search area on the ocean floor. The experts have therefore determined that the Australian Defensc Vessel Ocean Shield will cease searching with the towed pinger locator later today and deploy the autonomous underwater vehicle Bluefin 21 as soon as possible," he said at a news conference in Perth.
But Mr Houston warned the switch to the submarine will not automatically "result in the detection of the aircraft wreckage. It may not."
He also told the press conference that an oil slick had been detected in the search zone and that oil had been collected and would be brought back to land for testing over the next few days.
Crew members of the Australian Navy ship HMAS Perth continue to search for missing MH370 Photo: Reuters
Essential black boxes
Recovering the plane's flight data and cockpit voice recorders is essential for investigators to try to figure out what happened to Flight 370, which vanished March 8. It was carrying 239 people, mostly Chinese, while en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing.
After analyzing satellite data, officials believe the plane flew off course for an unknown reason and went down in the southern Indian Ocean. Investigators trying to determine what happened to the plane are focusing on four areas - hijacking, sabotage and personal or psychological problems of those on board.
Two sounds heard on April 5 by the Australian ship Ocean Shield, which was towing the ping locator, were determined to be consistent with the signals emitted from the black boxes. Two more pings were detected in the same general area Tuesday, but no new ones have been picked up since then.
Mr Houston said the search using the submarine will be "a slow and painstaking process."
The sub takes six times longer to cover the same area as the ping locator, and will need about six weeks to two months to canvass the current underwater zone. The signals are also coming from 4,500 meters (15,000 feet) below the surface, which is the deepest the sub can dive.
A visual search for debris was also planned for Monday over 47,600 square kilometers (18,400 square miles) of ocean centered 2,200 kilometers (1,400 miles) northwest of the west coast city of Perth, the center said. A total of 12 planes and 15 ships would join the two searches. - telegraph.co.uk
Alternative view of the day......
Before Its News....
Breaking! Official: MH370 Military Hijack.
Diego Garcia, Rendered High-Value Detainees
More Likely
Monday, April 14, 2014 6:28
Military avionic expertise was employed to dodge radar for hijacking Malaysian Airlines MH370 Boeing 777, according to officials’ new statements and information that also indicate both the Maldives islanders’ sightings of the low-flying Boeing 777 and thus the Diego Garcia use in the black operationare more probable.
Malaysia Airlines flight 370 was “thrown around like a fighter jet” to dodge radar detection after it “disappeared,” Malaysian military investigators reportedly now believe. This has been reported by the Independent UK in an article, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370: Stricken plane was ‘thrown around like a fighter jet in attempt to dodge radar’
Excessive high-speed, low-flying terraine masking
MH370 plane was “flown very low at a very high speed,” officials are now convinced, according to an unnamed source cited by The Sunday Times.
“And it was being flown to avoid radar,” the source concluded, an admisison the jetliner wasterrain masking. Until these new statements, other military officials attempted to cover up terrain masking – ever since the operation began on March 8, as Deborah Dupré reported on March 15 in the article, Malaysia Plane False Flag Military Operation.
“Whoever altered the path of the jet, and disabled ACARS and the transponder, “had to be a passenger or crew member who knew how this airliner is flown, and how those systems are disabled, in great detail,” reports stated, avoiding stating the obvious: that the hijacking of the plane and kidnapping of the passengers (rendering), are military operations. Not only that, they have become standard operating procedures by the CIA, US military and allies.
The low altitude flying fits a new report by Malaysia’s New Straits Times newspaper that co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid tried to make a mid-flight phone call shortly before the plane disappeared. For the phone signal to reach the reported telecommunications tower near the Malaysian city of Penang, the plane would needed to have been flying under 7000 feet, the Independent reported.
The newspaper report said the signal ended abruptly before contact was established.
Malaysian Defence Minister and acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein argued that if this is true, he would have been made aware of the phone call much earlier, but was not. Military officials, however, have stated they were afraid to expose what they know, according to statements they made in a Reuters interview last week.
A US military spokesman on national corporate media network ABC News scoffed former theories that the missing plane flew low and at extremely high-speed. These aspects of the hijacking were not what government sponsored networks wanted the public to understand.
A U.S. military propaganda contributor for ABC national news, Stephen Ganyard, smiled as he said the idea of the plane flying low to avoid radar would take military precision training that the pilot obviously did not have.
Ganyard also discredited the Malidve islanders in attempt to convince the public that islanders would not know what they saw. In fact, other military officials were also quick to accuse islanders of The Maldives’ lying about their reports of seeing a very low-flying Malaysia Boeing within hours of MH370 leaving Kuala Lumpur.
According to Deborah Dupré’s sources in The Maldives, at least 20 islanders reported to police the sighting, as it was so unusual and frightened them. Police handed over the reports to the military for investigation that were dismissed. [Read: MH370 CIA Cover-Up: Military Tells Malaysia To Say Maldives Lied About Plane Sightings (Map))
In turn, the Malaysia government, seemingly under U.S. government control or threat, attempted to dismiss reports that residents in the Maldives saw the “missing” Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 the day it departed Kuala Lumpur, reflecting that Malaysia is under the tight fist of the United States military and CIA, neither known for telling truth, both notorious for human rights abuses globally, including at Diego Garcia.
Officials admitting this weekend that the plane flew as though by military expertise also concurs with new information that surfaced this weekend regarding Diego Garcia flights for black operations and the Pentagon and the UK repeatedly lying for years about those and people it has kidnapped and taken there.
In this author’s article, New Chilling MH370 Diego Garcia Links, the following is reported, with details:
“While the U.S. has vehemently refuted new claims that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 landed on Diego Garcia island south of the Maldives in the Central Indian Ocean, new information along with charity organization Reprieve’s previous research shows a sordid history of secret, unrecorded flights to the island, lies about them, torture there, and the British Government’s direct involvement there with the United States, its CIA and military.“More than one independent source has suggested logs of flights through Diego Garcia have been destroyed. However, an examination of records available for four other rendition flights conducted by the same plane (N379P) reveals it routinely operated under various ‘special status designators’ allowing them to fly wherever they liked, whenever they liked, indicating knowledge – and authorisation – at the highest echelons of both US and British governments.” – Reprieve (emphasis added)
Two Malaysia officials separately admitted that MH370 was hijacked. One of those officials pointed to the Pentagon for the crime, including keeping the passengers as hostages.
The latest theory comes as many believe the black box search was nothing more than a diversion and that the plane “disappearing and crashing” was impossible, yet used by corporate-government media as a decoy, a PSYOP, psychological operation.
Batteries of the black boxes, that record flight data, including conversations from the cockpit, only last a month, meaning the window has now passed and investigators must look at facts, instead of chasing plastic bags in the ocean.
The fact remains that no evidence exists that Boeing 777 ever crashed nor that its passengers, worth many billions of dollars in intellectual property, perished. The plane was hijacked, as officials agree. It is illogical to destroy many billions of dollars worth intellectual property.
Whether the jetliner was physically piloted to fly excessively fast and low, or was flown by wire, remotely as a drone, remains unknown. Either is possible.
Whether the 239 MH370 kidnapped passengers are being held as non-combatant detainees or hostages remains unknown. Either is possible.
One thing more certain with the new officials’ admissions, however, is that a giant step has been taken toward locating the hijacked MH370 and its kidnapped passengers.
No comments:
Post a Comment