[UPDATE]-Malaysia Airlines plane crashes in South China Sea after the Flight Vanishesd with 239 passengers .

[nanana1]

Missing Malaysia Airlines plane: Vietnam reports object in sea that may be from plane

PHU QUOC ISLAND, Vietnam (Reuters) - A Vietnamese navy plane has spotted an object suspected of belonging to a Malaysian jetliner that went missing early on Saturday with 239 people on board, the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam said on its website on Sunday.

The authority said it was too dark to be certain the object was part of the missing plane, and that more aircraft would be dispatched to investigate the site, in waters off southern Vietnam, in the morning.

Malaysian officials had earlier said no wreckage had yet been found, despite a search involving 34 aircraft and 40 ships.

UPDATE [12:40am]: Vietnamese authorities believe that the piece of debris spotted off the country's waters may be a door from the flight MH370.

[nanana1]

Missing Malaysia Airlines plane: Vietnam reports object in sea that may be from plane

PHU QUOC ISLAND, Vietnam (Reuters) - A Vietnamese navy plane has spotted an object suspected of belonging to a Malaysian jetliner that went missing early on Saturday with 239 people on board, the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam said on its website on Sunday.

The authority said it was too dark to be certain the object was part of the missing plane, and that more aircraft would be dispatched to investigate the site, in waters off southern Vietnam, in the morning.

Malaysian officials had earlier said no wreckage had yet been found, despite a search involving 34 aircraft and 40 ships.

UPDATE [12:40am]: Vietnamese authorities believe that the piece of debris spotted off the country's waters may be a door from the flight MH370.

UPDATE [11.50am]: Vietnamese searchers say they cannot find the rectangle object - thought to be one of the doors of MH370 - that was spotted on Sunday afternoon.

[unknownasphyxiated]

where do you get those update?vietnam's infowars? <_<

[nanana1]

where do you get those update?vietnam's infowars? <_<

Live updates are provided by Yahoo Malaysia :

http://my.news.yahoo.com/mas-aircraft-goes-missing--says-airline-023820132.html

Do note that not all their reported news are verified for accuracy. ;)

[unknownasphyxiated]

hmm...it is known for copy and paste from other site without any verification...that why i don't use yahoo anymore

btw,thnx for the update

[nanana1]

hmm...it is known for copy and paste from other site without any verification...that why i don't use yahoo anymore

btw,thnx for the update

You are welcome !

Unfortunately, the other media sites are so slow with their updates on this missing plane and passengers. :(

[shamu726]

UPDATE [4.40pm]: Here are key points from the just concluded press conference by Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein and Department of Civil Aviation director-general Azharuddin Abdul Rahman:

1) Authorities are trying to verify reports of a sighting of what looks like an inverted life raft in the sea. Ships being sent to investigate reports. Report here.

2) Search and rescue main continues to be the main focus. New Zealand is the latest country to join efforts, with a Lockheed P-3 Orion aircraft. In the West Coast, search and rescue operations have been extended and expanded.

3) Claims of the Chinese Martyr's Brigade taking responsibility for case - Hishammuddin says all allegations will be investigated, but the primary focus is to locate aircraft. "We can relay this kind of information to agencies to investigate but we don't want it to distract ongoing operations." Report here

4) Hishammuddin also said authorities have done a study of the whole passenger manifest. "We have the capacity to detail every single aspect of the passengers involved. Information has to be delivered to relevant authorities. When it doesn’t affect the investigation, you will be the first to know," he told media.

5) He added that pictures of the passengers on stolen passports have been released to international intelligence agencies that have access to information such as biometrics, dates of birth, fingerprints, etc.

6) Declined to answer question on whether police report in Kelantan where a low-flying plane was allegedly sighted early in the morning of March 8.

7) When asked about the issue of the stolen passports, Hishamuddin put it in perspective by stating that there are 40 million passports reported missing to Interpol.

8) Security in Malaysian airports remain the same as the government is not treating this as a security threat yet.

9) Repeated calls to not disseminate unverified information, to not distress families of passengers with false information.

http://my.news.yahoo.com/mas-aircraft-goes-missing--says-airline-023820132.html

Edited March 10, 2014 by shamu726

[AlexCross]

I'm starting to think that they do not want to find the plane. They can find stars one million light years away, but they cannot find an object bigger than a house in 20 km range? With all the technology? GPS and etc? Every plane has a device named black box that should send signals, from what I know.

Edited March 10, 2014 by AlexCross

[dMog]

I'm starting to think that they do not want to find the plane. They can find stars one million light years away, but they cannot find an object bigger than a house in 20 km range? With all the technology? GPS and etc? Every plane has a device named black box that should send signals, from what I know.

when a plane crashes into the ocean it breaks apart...and not into very large pieces...unless the ocean is like a lake on windless day and the plane does water landing and not a crash and the pane remains intact.... the currents and waves will scatter the debris over a very very large area...and by the way...there was smoke seen and some small plane pieces recovered...metal and engines sink by the way...sure lots of stuff will float as well as bodies if they are not still strapped into the seats...but as stated current and waves and will scatter derbris..and it is not like the navies there are equipped as well as US fleet...edit...the black box also will not float and the ocean is not 12 feet deep there

Edited March 10, 2014 by dMog

[AlexCross]

The sources from where i'm reding it, says:

There have been a few glimmers of hope, but so far no trace of the plane has been found.

I agree, It breaks apart, but it's not made of glass. If it wasn't an explosion, the pilot forced(controlled) the landing, so the impact wasn't so devastating.

This is how a plane crashes in the Ocean. A pilot would have controlled the landing way better without being distracted by terrorists and so on.

(Viewer Discretion is Advised)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwawGYg8FEU

The plane didn't break because of the impact, but because it hit something that floated on the water and pushed the head of the plane upward.

Edited March 10, 2014 by AlexCross

[spond123]

MISSING MH370: Mystery deepens as oil, debris links ruled out

last updated at 09:51PM - KUALA LUMPUR : Mystery deepened Monday over the fate of a Malaysian jet carrying 239 people, as tests on oil slicks scotched suspicions it was aircraft fuel while the search for debris failed to yield any trace of the missing aircraft.

Laboratory analysis of the oil samples showed they were not from the Malaysia Airlines jet but were a type of fuel used by ships, the Maritime Enforcement Agency said in Kuala Lumpur.

The area became a focus for frantic international search efforts for the Boeing 777 after the large tongues of oil were found in the water on Saturday, hours after the plane dropped off the radar.

In a day of conflicting information which deepened relatives’ anguish, initial reports of debris off southern Vietnam were ruled out, before an aircraft spotted another object which appeared to be a life raft.

Malaysia said it was sending ships to investigate the raft sighting, but a Vietnamese vessel that got there first found only flotsam in the busy shipping lane.

“When we reached the site we recovered only a mouldy cable reel cover,” Vietnamese army deputy chief of staff Vo Vo Tuan told AFP.

“I think there was only one suspect floating object there,” he said, conceding the amount of rubbish floating in the sea made it hard to be “100 percent sure” the ship had reached the location of the reported raft.

Anger mounted amid a scramble for answers, and China — which had 153 of its nationals on board — said Malaysia needed to “step up” its efforts after authorities admitted they were mystified by the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines (MAS) flight MH370.

Beijing’s state media lashed out at Malaysia and MAS over their handling of the crisis that began when the jet vanished early Saturday an hour after leaving Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing.

“The Malaysian side cannot shirk its responsibilities,” the Global Times newspaper, which is close to the ruling Communist Party, wrote in a scathing editorial.

“The initial response from Malaysia was not swift enough.”

Malaysia has launched a terror probe after at least two of the passengers on board the plane were found to have travelled on stolen passports. The country’s police chief said Monday one of them had been identified, but gave no further details.

Malaysia’s head of civil aviation, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, had few answers to the burning questions surrounding the plane’s fate. Asked whether it was possible the plane had been hijacked or disintegrated mid-air, he said nothing could be ruled out.

“We are looking at every angle. We are looking at every aspect of what could have happened,” he said.

“This unprecedented missing aircraft mystery — it is mystifying and we are increasing our efforts to do what we have to do.”

At a Beijing hotel, Malaysian embassy officials were processing visa applications for families wanting to take up an offer from MAS to travel to Kuala Lumpur to be closer to the rescue operations.

Scores of relatives made their way into the room, some in groups of five or six, clutching handkerchiefs and wiping away tears from their faces.

Others said they would not go. “There is more we can do here in China,” one woman told AFP. “They haven’t even found the plane yet.”

A team of Chinese officials from government ministries headed for Malaysia on Monday, tasked with investigating the incident and helping family members already there.

As the search entered a third full day, other families of missing passengers gathered at a hotel in Malaysia’s administrative capital, Putrajaya, sharing breakfast as they stared intently at television news bulletins.

The search effort in the morning zeroed in on waters off the remote Vietnamese island of Tho Chu, near where the two large oil slicks and debris were spotted on the weekend.

As part of the search effort involving several countries and dozens of planes and ships, mostly in the South China Sea, Malaysian authorities said they were also combing waters closer to their shores, further south of Tho Chu.

Malaysian officials have said there was a possibility that MH370 may have inexplicably turned back towards Kuala Lumpur.

The plane, captained by a veteran MAS pilot, had relayed no indications of distress, and weather at the time was said to be good.

Questions have also swirled over how the two passengers boarded the jet on stolen passports, sparking an investigation into possible links with terrorism and a probe into the sale of passports in Thailand — where the documents were stolen over the past two years.

Two European names — Christian Kozel, an Austrian, and Luigi Maraldi of Italy — were listed on the passenger list, but neither man boarded the plane.

Malaysian police chief Khalid Abu Bakar told AFP that the man identified as using one of the passports is a non-Malaysian who was identified using airport video surveillance.

Home Minister Zahid Hamidi reportedly said Sunday that the two passengers who used the passports looked Asian in appearance.

“I am still puzzled how come (immigration officers) cannot think: an Italian and Austrian but with Asian facial features,” he was quoted as saying by Malaysia’s national news agency Bernama.

The United States has sent an FBI team to help investigate the passengers, but US officials stressed there was as yet no evidence of terrorism.

Malaysia Airlines shares lost 20 percent at one point Monday as the market reacted to the jet’s disappearance, although clawed back most of those losses to close down 4.0 percent.

The incident is a serious blow for the carrier, which has haemorrhaged cash for several years amid mounting competition from low-cost rivals such as AirAsia.--AFP

Read more: MISSING MH370: Mystery deepens as oil, debris links ruled out - Latest - New Straits Times http://www.nst.com.my/latest/font-color-red-missing-mh370-font-mystery-deepens-as-oil-debris-links-ruled-out-1.506197#ixzz2vZhrhCnJ

Read more: MISSING MH370: Mystery deepens as oil, debris links ruled out - Latest - New Straits Times http://www.nst.com.my/latest/font-color-red-missing-mh370-font-mystery-deepens-as-oil-debris-links-ruled-out-1.506197#ixzz2vZhifqB9

[shamu726]

Search continues

Some 40 ships and 34 aircraft from nine different nations are taking part in the search in the seas off Vietnam and Malaysia.

Commander William Marks from the US Seventh Fleet, which is taking part in the search, said he expected the plane's flight recorders to be floating in the water.

He said the recorders, also known as "black boxes", were fitted with radio beacons that can be picked up by radar.

Despite a wide search, radar had not so far picked up any signals, he said.

None of the debris and oil slicks spotted in the water so far have proven to be linked to the disappearance.

Officials say they still have no idea what went wrong.

Analysis

Richard Westcott, BBC Transport Correspondent

This sudden disappearance is baffling experts. Pilots and investigators have described it as "weird" and "bizarre".

Most problems leave some kind of trace. If an aircraft's engines fail, it can still potentially glide for around 80 or 90 miles, giving the pilot time to radio a mayday call. If the cabin depressurises, maybe because it loses a window, the crew will rush to lose altitude, but the aircraft would not break up. Even if the pilots fell unconscious through lack of oxygen, the aircraft would keep flying and someone on the ground would notice it had gone quiet.

There are emergency codes pilots can enter if a hijacker's trying to break into the flight deck. And other aircraft flying around normally listen across to the emergency channel so they're likely to have heard any distress call. It all points to a sudden, catastrophic break-up in mid-air. But until they find the aircraft they will struggle to work out why.

Can a modern jet just vanish without trace?

An Air France jet flying from Brazil to France vanished into the Atlantic Ocean on 1 June 2009, with the loss of all 228 people on board.

Debris was spotted the following day but it took nearly two years to locate the flight recorders and remains of the fuselage, deep on the ocean floor. The waters off Vietnam and in the Malacca straits are much shallower.

Flight recorders, or "black boxes" as they are often known, emit ultrasonic signals that can be detected underwater. Under good conditions, the signals can be detected from several hundred miles away.

But without knowing the trajectory of a plane as it went down or fully understanding wind and wave conditions if it crashed into water, searchers sometimes end up criss-crossing huge areas looking for relatively small pieces of wreckage, the Wall Street Journal notes in a things-to-know piece.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-26513506

Edited March 10, 2014 by shamu726

[dMog]

as to the stolen passports..Interpol reports they have on file some off 39 MILLION lost and stolen passports world wide..apparently it is quite common for passengers form this area of the world to fly with stolen documents..if it was terrorism someone would have taken credit for it by now

also fyi.... when a plane flying over anywhere in the world turns off its transponder it pretty much becomes invisible...especially when flying over areas of heavy air traffic...the usa air space at any one time has thousands of air planes in the air at any one time and the transponders are the only way to keep track of them all

[shamu726]

AFP has asked industry experts about major questions surrounding the MH370 disappearance, such as the possibility of a mid-air disintegration, reasons behind the lack of any signals and other theories about what might have happened. Full Q&A here.

[anuseems]

I've lost my batchmate and branch mate...

The family of a former Union minister who died in an air crash four decades ago were in agony this evening, fearing a repeat of the tragedy.

Canadian-Indian Muktesh Mukherjee, the 42-year-old grandson of Indira Gandhis steel and mines minister Mohan Kumaramangalam, was among the 227 passengers on board the Malaysia Airlines flight that has been missing since the early hours today.

Muktesh is the vice-president of operations in China for the Pennsylvania-based XCoal Energy and Resources.

Five Indian citizens too were on the flight, as was Mukteshs 37-year-old Chinese wife, Xiaomao Bai.

Kumaramangalam was killed on May 30, 1973, when an Indian Airlines flight crashed just before it was to land at New Delhis Palam Airport.

Were living in fear of a second disaster in the air in our family, a member of Mukteshs family said.

Mohan Kumaramangalams Dubai-based elder daughter Uma, the mother of Muktesh, left for Beijing early this morning after hearing news of the Malaysia Airlines flights disappearance.

The five Indian passengers represented the typical mix of families travelling to visit relatives and professionals flying in connection with their work that constitutes airline manifests around the world.

Vinod Kolekar, 58, was travelling with wife Chetana, 55, and son Swanand, 22, to meet another son, Sanved, who lives and works in Beijing, Indian officials in New Delhi and Kuala Lumpur said.

NGO activists Chandrika Sharma, 51, and Kranti Prahlad Shirshath, 43, were visiting Beijing to catch transit flights.

Sharma, a Chennai resident, was headed to Ulan Bator in Mongolia for a Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) meeting, officials said. Shirshath was headed to Pyongyang in North Korea where he works with a non-profit group that helps tackle natural disasters.

Muktesh studied at BITS Mesra before leaving for Canada to pursue higher studies. After postgraduating from Montreals McGill University, he joined ArcelorMittal a company where his father Malay Mukherjee held a senior executive position for almost two decades before leaving for XCoal.

Malay was the youngest executive director of public-sector steel giant SAIL posted at Bhilai in 1993 when Lakshmi Niwas Mittal asked him to join his Ispat Group. He retired from the group as a board member and joined Essar.

He now works independently in the steel sector.

We are trying to gather information and get the family together. Its a very sad time for us, said Mukteshs cousin Mangaljit Mukherjee, a Supreme Court lawyer.

Muktesh was never based in Calcutta but he has relatives in Calcutta.

Mukteshs family is spread not just across continents but across political parties too. Mohan Kumaramangalam was a veteran of the Indian communist movement before he joined the Congress in 1967.

When the Congress split, he stayed loyal to Indira, who appointed him steel and mines minister in 1971. His sister Parvathy Krishnan was three-time MP from the CPI.

Kumaramangalams son Phanindranath Rangarajan Kumaramangalam started his political career with the Congress before joining the BJP. He was power minister under Atal Bihari Vajpayee and died in 2000.

Mohan Kumaramangalams younger daughter Lalitha is a member of the BJP national executive and lives in Chennai.

Sharma, executive secretary at the International Collective in Support of Fish-workers (ICSF), was to present at the FAO meeting a paper on the livelihood of fish workers and sustainable fisheries, said ICSF adviser Sebastian Mathew.

She was working to draw the FAOs attention to the issues faced by small-scale fish workers, Mathew said, describing Sharma as a committed worker and a wonderful parent.

Sharma, who is from Haryana, has been living in Chennai for the past 20 years with husband K.S. Narendran, a management consultant. Their daughter Meghna studies English literature at Delhis Ambedkar University.

The family is in a state of shock, Mathew said.

Foreign office spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin told The Telegraph: Our high commissioner in Kuala Lumpur has personally spoken to the families of all the five Indian nationals on the flight.

Canadian embassy officials confirmed that Ottawa was in touch with the families of Muktesh and Bai.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1140309/jsp/frontpage/story_18061670.jsp

Edited March 10, 2014 by anuseems

[shamu726]

Was it a bomb, hijacking, pilot error or mechanical failure? CNN polled experts and laid out four possible scenarios and the related facts. Read it here.

[shamu726]

As leads fail to pan out, search for MH370 stretches from Sumatra to Hong Kong

Searchers are scouring more than 500,000 square nautical miles from the shores of Sumatra to Hong Kong to look for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 today as lead after lead failed to pan out over the past three days since the passenger jet vanished.

The flotilla of naval ships and some three dozen aircraft will comb both sea and the jungle-clad Malaysian-Thai border for the lost Boeing 777-200ER jet with 239 people onboard.

One thing the search and rescue team know is that the twin-engine aircraft is not in the air as it had only 7½ hours of fuel left when it vanished 40 minutes into the six-hour flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on Saturday.

The teams trying to find the passenger jet, which has a 61m wingspan, will scour data for radar signatures while seeking to detect pinging from black boxes as the search for visible wreckage proves elusive, Bloomberg reported last night.

The Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) and Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) said yesterday that none of the debris found were linked to the plane while an oil slick close the flight path proved to be bunker fuel, not jet fuel.

American experts said the first 72 hours was crucial for anyone to survive a plane crash but authorities are hopeful as nothing has turned up to suggest MH370 has met a watery end.

Search and rescue mission

"It is still a search and rescue mission," director-general of Civil Aviation Datuk Azharuddin Abdul Rahman told reporters at KLIA in Sepang last night.

"Unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, we have not found anything that appears to be objects from the aircraft, let alone the aircraft," he had said at an earlier briefing.

He announced the expanded search area after an international search and rescue mission failed to turn up any clues to what he called "an unprecedented aviation mystery".

Authorities were sending ships to investigate a report of debris found south of Hong Kong, but it would likely be today before authorities know if there was anything to those reports, he said.

But aircraft lost in waters kilometres deep have been found by remote-controlled submarines, or experts have gathered enough clues to determine what happened, accident reports since 1970 show.

“The capability is there,” Ronald Schleede, a former investigator with the United States National Transportation Safety Board, said in an interview with Bloomberg.

“I think they’ll find it.”

In the case of the Malaysia Airlines aircraft, the waters beneath the area where it seems most likely to have gone down are about 50m deep, Bloomberg reported, versus 3,900m in the case of Air France flight 447, where wreckage was found and removed almost two years after the A330 jet disappeared.

Technology to the rescue

While a signal from the wide-body Boeing 777 transponder appears not to be working, local agencies would ordinarily have tracked the plane, said Paul Hayes, a safety expert at London-based Ascend, which logs air crashes.

“One assumes that Malaysian air-defence radars would be watching approaches to their airspace and they need to be asked to have a look,” he said.

Emergency beacons from the jetliner’s so-called black boxes would be another potential tool. Investigators have said they aren’t hearing any “pinging” from the flight data and voice recorders, though that may be because the search area was currently so ill-defined, Hayes said.

Honeywell International Inc makes the boxes for most Boeing 777 planes but company officials in Asia declined to comment on whether the Malaysian plane was carrying its equipment.

The recorders would normally begin sending signals if an aircraft broke up or hit the water, with the pinging lasting for 30 days until independent power supplies run out, Bloomberg reported.

Searchers can also use underwater microphones to help find the boxes, with Honeywell’s equipment emitting signals that can be heard from 4.5km deep, according to company reports in 2009 during the investigation of the Air France A330 disappearance over the Atlantic en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

The recorders are also designed to withstand 3,400 times the force of gravity on impact, making it highly likely the boxes will have withstood any breakup of the plane.

But at this point, it was impossible to know if the plane exploded at altitude or could have broken up on hitting water, though the struggle to locate surface wreckage was perplexing, said Hayes.

http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/as-leads-pan-out-search-for-mh370-stretches-from-sumatra-to-hong-kong

[nanana1]

Why are they searching the Straits of Malacca area which is not on the flight path ? :s

[shamu726]

UPDATE [11.45am]: Media reports say the two passengers travelling with stolen passports on board MH370 were Iranians. A friend of one of the passengers said he had hosted the pair in Kuala Lumpur days before their flight to Beijing. The friend claimed that the men had bought the fake passports as they wanted to migrate to Europe. Read it here.

[shamu726]

Why are they searching the Straits of Malacca area which is not on the flight path ? :s

The Indonesian Navy has deployed four warships and one patrol aircraft to the Malacca Strait to assist in the search of the missing Malaysia Airlines aircraft, despite being far to the west from the location where contact with the aircraft was lost over the South China Sea, off the southern coast of Vietnam.

But Navy spokesman Commodore Untung Surapati said on Sunday that a search of the Malacca Strait had been requested by the Malaysian military.

He refused to speculate on why the Malaysian authorities had asked for a search to be carried out in an area far from the South Vietnamese waters where the Boeing B777-200 was believed to have gone missing.

“In the case of an emergency, you never know. The plane could have drifted far to the north of its actual flight path, or even west. But according to the request from the Malaysian military, they suggested that some radar detections were recorded over the Malacca Strait,” he said.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2014/03/09/ri-deploy-warships-search-expands-malacca-strait.html

Edited March 11, 2014 by shamu726

[shamu726]

China deploys 10 satellites as ‘unprecedented mystery’ over missing Malaysian jet deepens

BEIJING: As the unprecedented mystery over a missing Malaysia Airlines plane deepens, China on Monday pressed 10 high-resolution satellites to scurry South China Sea to find leads that could help locate the flight with 239 people on board.

China's Xi'an Satellite Monitor and Control Center has launched an emergency response for the search and adjusted up to 10 high-resolution satellites to locate the missing plane which is presumed to have crashed on Saturday, the People's Liberation Army said.

Citing the Centre, the army said the centre purged the original commands of several satellites to offer full services in weather monitoring, communication and other aspects for the search, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/China-deploys-10-satellites-as-unprecedented-mystery-over-missing-Malaysian-jet-deepens/articleshow/31798720.cms

[shamu726]

MH370: What's needed to find it

A B.C. geophysicist specializing in underwater missions says it could cost tens of millions of dollars to bring up the wreck of the missing Malaysia Airlines jet if it is found on the ocean floor.

It is still not clear what happened to the Boeing 777 after contact was lost on Friday, but it is assumed at this stage that it crashed into the Gulf of Thailand off Vietnam with 239 people on board.

Peter Kowalczyk, one of the founders of ​the Vancouver-based mining exploration company Ocean Floor Geophysics, specializes in ocean floor exploration using remotely operated underwater vehicles, or ROVs.

He says ROVs will be used to look for pieces of the wreck of flight MH370, but searchers first have to narrow down the search grid.

B.C. geophysicist and submarine expert Peter Kowalczyk

says it will cost tens of millions of dollars to bring the flight

wreckage up from the ocean floor once it is found. (CBC)

"The most important problem now is to find the wreckage, find the site of the crash, because the longer it takes to find where it happened or some evidence of it, the harder it will be to find where the aircraft is on the bottom," he said.

Kowalczyk said the Boeing 777's black box would have a device that is emitting "pings," or short signals.

"Ships that are looking for the wreckage will be listening for that ping, and if they hear it, with their sonar gear they will be able to triangulate the position of the wreckage on the bottom," he said. "The water is not incredibly deep [in the Gulf of Thailand]. It's deep water, but they have a good chance of finding that."

Searchers will have only about a month, however, before the pinger's battery, if working, dies out.

"If they don't find it within a month, then it becomes much harder, because they will have to search for the wreckage using other clues," Kowalczyk said.

If no one locates the pinger, then searchers will have to search for the wreckage using autonomous underwater vehicles, or AUVs, which Kowalczyk characterizes as "smart torpedoes."

"They go away for 18 hours and you have programmed into them a lawnmower-type pattern, so they'll search back and forth, and they'll make an image of the bottom using sonar," he said.

People would then have to review those images, looking for anomalies that look like pieces of a plane wreck.

Even if someone does pick up the ping, finding debris based on the black box's position alone could still prove to be difficult.

When an Air France flight went missing over the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, it took almost two years to locate the bulk of the wreckage in very deep water, in an undersea mountain range.

"They had to be able to search inside canyons and to design their sonar pattern so that they were covering what was a very difficult place to look. Kind of an analogy on land, you can think [of] if you're using a helicopter to look for something and you're flying through fog," Kowalczyk said.

Once wreckage of the Malaysia Airlines jet is located in the Gulf of Thailand, the location of the pieces will have to be mapped out carefully. Then, searchers would begin a salvage operation using ROVs to carry the debris from the ocean floor to the surface.

Investigators would then be able to begin piecing together the story of flight MH370 and the 239 people aboard when it fell out of the sky.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/malaysia-airlines-flight-mh370-what-s-needed-to-find-it-1.2566309

Edited March 11, 2014 by shamu726

[vnoctober]

Spotted a white spots on the sea!

Full story in Vietnamese: http://beta.vnexpress.net/tin-tuc/thoi-su/may-bay-casa-chup-duoc-dom-trang-khac-la-tren-mat-bien-2961941.html

[kn_andre]

Breaking News ... Malaysia Airlines flight missing, March 2014

Mar 11, 2014, 08:46 AM GMT( 08:46)

Photo: Authorities release images of both men who boarded Malaysia Airlines flight on stolen passports - @AFP

see original on twitter.com

Malaysia Airlines flight missing, March 2014

07:53

Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad named as Iranian teen using stolen passport on Malaysia Airlines jet - @BBCBreaking

end of alert

=============================================================================================================

I have been watching and Following this Developing Story since the Onset and i have been waiting for some sort of Positive News to come out of it since it happened ... But as Hours turn into days, the Hopes of finding Survivors are getting Slimmer and Slimmer ... My Heart Goes out to the Distraught Families who are very much Undergoing Unimaginable Amount of Sorrow at this Point. I would not wish this sort of Situation on my Worst Enemy ... I Pray they can at Least find the Plane or remnants of it so that the Families can have a sense of Closure ... Because, without some sort of Closure, Most Families Can Not and Will Not be able to Move on with their Lives.. My Deepest Condolences to all the Families and Friends Involved.. More Strength and Zeal to all those taking part in the Search and Rescue Operations too .... Cheers Everyone ...

Edited March 11, 2014 by kn_andre

[shamu726]

From the press conference by Malaysian Inspector General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar:

The identity of the passenger traveling with a stolen Austrian passport: He is Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad, 19 from Iran. He was traveling to Germany, where his mother had been waiting for him, with plans to migrate. His mother got in touch with Malaysian police when he failed to arrive and confirmed that she had known that he was traveling with a stolen passport. Checks on him found that he was 'not likely to be a member of any terrorist group'. He entered Malaysia on Feb 28.

Read full article.

The authorities' statement supports an account given to the BBC by a young Iranian in Kuala Lumpur who says he was a school-friend of one of the men who boarded the airliner using a stolen passport.

He says the friend and another Iranian, also using a stolen passport, stayed with him before taking the Malaysia Airlines flight, and that they had hoped to settle in Europe.

Reports from Thailand suggest that the tickets of the two men, routing them to Amsterdam via Beijing, had been bought through a Thai travel agent and an Iranian middleman.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-26525281

Edited March 11, 2014 by shamu726