MH370 The lost Flight

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

The missing aircraft, 9M-MRO,
Incident summary
Date 8 March 2014
Summary Missing
Site Southern Indian Ocean (presumed)
Passengers 227
Crew 12
Aircraft type Boeing 777-200ER
Operator Malaysia Airlines
Registration 9M-MRO
Flight origin Kuala Lumpur International Airport
Destination Beijing Capital International Airport

pictured in 2011

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (MH370/MAS370)[a] was a scheduled international passenger flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing that lost contact with air traffic control on 8 March 2014 at 01:20 MYT,[b] less than an hour after takeoff. At 07:24, Malaysia Airlines (MAS) reported the flight as missing. The aircraft, a Boeing 777-200ER, was carrying 12 Malaysian crew members and 227 passengers from 14 nations.

A multinational search and rescue effort, later reported as the largest in history,[6] was initiated in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea.[7][8] Within a few days, this was extended to include the Strait of Malacca and Andaman Sea. On 15 March, based on military radar data and radio "pings" between the aircraft and an Inmarsat satellite, investigators concluded that it had first headed west across the Malay Peninsula, then continued on a northern or southern track for approximately seven hours. The search in the South China Sea was abandoned. Three days later the Australian Maritime Safety Authority began searching the southern part of the Indian Ocean.

On 24 March, the Malaysian government confirmed two independently made analyses by the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) and Inmarsat, and concluded "beyond any reasonable doubt", that the aircraft had gone down in the southern part of the Indian Ocean with no survivors. This conclusion led to all earlier search areas being abandoned, and efforts being concentrated on the Australian-led area. There has been no confirmation of any flight debris, nor has a crash site been found.

Disappearance

Route: Kuala Lumpur – Beijing. Insert: initial search areas and known path through waypoints IGARI, VAMPI, and IGREX. Small red squares: radar contacts. Small circles: claimed spotting of debris.
The flight departed from Kuala Lumpur International Airport on 8 March 2014 at 00:41 local time (16:41 UTC, 7 March) and was scheduled to land at Beijing Capital International Airport at 06:30 local time (22:30 UTC, 7 March). It climbed to its assigned cruise altitude of 35,000 feet (11,000 m) and was travelling at 471 knots (872 km/h; 542 mph)[25] true airspeed when it ceased all communications and the transponder signal was lost. The aircraft's last known position on 8 March at 01:21 local time (17:21 UTC, 7 March) was at the navigational waypoint IGARI in the Gulf of Thailand, at which the aircraft turned westwards, heading towards a waypoint called VAMPI in the Strait of Malacca,[26] primary radar tracking suggests that the aircraft descended as low as 12,000 feet (3,700 m). From there, the aircraft flew towards a waypoint called GIVAL, arriving at 2:15 local time (18:15 UTC, 7 March), thereafter to the Southern Thailand Islands (Andaman Coast) of Phuket, and was last plotted heading northwest towards another waypoint called IGREX.

The crew was expected to contact air traffic control in Ho Chi Minh City as the aircraft passed into Vietnamese airspace, just north of the point where contact was lost.[30][31] The captain of another aircraft attempted to reach the crew of Flight 370 "just after 1:30 am" using the International distress frequency to relay Vietnamese air traffic control's request for the crew to contact it; the captain said he was able to establish contact, and just heard "mumbling" and static.

Malaysia Airlines (MAS) issued a media statement at 07:24, one hour after the scheduled arrival of the flight at Beijing, stating that contact with the flight had been lost by Malaysian ATC at 02:40.[4] MAS stated that the government had initiated search and rescue operations. It later emerged that Subang Air Traffic Control had lost contact with the aircraft at 01:22 and notified Malaysia Airlines at 02:40. Neither the crew nor the aircraft's onboard communication systems relayed a distress signal, indications of bad weather, or technical problems before the aircraft vanished from radar screens.

Passengers
152 of the 227 passengers were Chinese citizens, including a group of 19 artists with six family members and four staff returning from a calligraphy exhibition of their work in Kuala Lumpur; 38 passengers were Malaysian. The remaining passengers were from 13 different countries. Of the total, 20 were employees of Freescale Semiconductor, a company based in Austin, Texas – 12 of whom were from Malaysia and 8 from China. One passenger who worked as a flight engineer for a Swiss jet charter company was briefly suspected as potential hijacker because he was thought to have the relevant skill set.


But with no results from the multi-national search operation for the Boeing 777, which vanished on March 8 carrying 239 people, Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Thursday set a one-week deadline to locate the plane by mini-submarine. 

The Australian-led search effort is relying on a single US Navy submersible sonar scanning device to scour an uncharted seabed at depths of around 4,500 metres (15,000 feet) or more. 

Technical hitches, including the fact that the torpedo-shaped Bluefin-21 is operating at the extent of its depth limit, made for a slow start to the search. 

Launched from an Australian naval vessel, the device has so far made six deep-sea scanning runs but has detected nothing. 

"We have pursued every possible lead presented to us at this stage, and with every passing day the search has become more difficult," Hishammuddin, who is heading up the Malaysian government's response to MH370, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur. 

As the search and rescue effort expected to be the costliest in aviation history wears on, authorities have indicated alternative methods may be needed, including possibly deeper-diving devices. 


A second mystery around the disappearance of Flight MH370 has largely gone unnoticed: why hasn't the United States been in the forefront of providing information about it? The implications of this question are massive.

America has a fleet of the most sophisticated spy satellites, called "keyhole" satellites, covering the earth's surface daily with imaging systems comparable to those of the Hubble Space Telescope, but instead of data from any of these, we read of data from China and France. One can understand that the CIA does not want others to understand fully the capabilities of its satellites, but surely the lives of more than two hundred people are cause for some information, however indirectly supplied.

Then again, the American military has some of most sophisticated radars on earth, and there is, without a doubt, an installation of the highest capability at the secret base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. How could there not be? But we have read of no data from them, only from others less capable of telling us what happened.

Could it be that the United States shot down Flight MH370, either accidentally or deliberately, and now wants to keep it secret? The possibility of recovery of the full wreckage, even if its location were found, from 4 miles under the sea amongst underwater mountains is extremely remote at best, so the United States can remain confident that physical evidence will never emerge.


There would be nothing unprecedented in such an act: on at least 3 occasions, regrettably, America's military has shot down civilian airliners, only admitting eventually to the one they could not hide. They are also indirectly responsible for a fourth.

Iran Air Flight 655 was stupidly shot down in 1988 by the USS Vincennes in Iranian waters during the Iraq-Iran War, not only killing 290 people including 66 children, but there was a long period afterwards in which the U.S. admitted no wrong-doing, offered no apology, and no compensation to its victims (only 8 years later was a quiet settlement made).

It was a quite vicious set of circumstances and the injustice of it led unquestionably to the motive for bombing Pan Am Flight 103, killing 259 people and 11 on the ground, later the same year by people still unknown.  

TWA Flight 800 over the East Coast of the United States was certainly the victim of a shipboard American anti-aircraft missile accidentally released. The evidence included radar tracks and eye witnesses. But the U.S., instead of admitting its horrible error and compensating victims, conducted a long and almost farcical investigation headed up by the same FBI that gave us the farcical investigation into the Kennedy assassination.

Last, the fourth hijacked plane on 9/11, United Flight 93, of "Let's roll" pop legend, which crashed over Pennsylvania was almost certainly shot down by an air-to-air missile from a fighter plane. A plane was seen by witnesses, the distribution of the wreckage tends to support a shoot-down, and just the sheer impossibility of America's hundreds of billions of dollars in air defences staying asleep at the switch for a fourth event the same day argue powerfully for an attack.

I have no idea what event (a rogue pilot, a hijacker?) led to Flight MH370 turning off its communications, changing course, and flying low, but I do know that the event could not have gone unnoticed by America's military-intelligence eyes and ears, especially when its new course showed any possibility of Diego Garcia as a destination, a place which is top secret and from which America forcibly removed the locals when it leased it from Britain.  

It will likely remain one more "riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma," as Winston Churchill once described the Soviet Union, an expression now entirely suitable to a great many of the activities of the United States.