MH370 co-pilot made mid-flight phone call — report

KUALA LUMPUR — The co-pilot of missing Malaysian airliner MH370 attempted to make a mid-flight call from his mobile phone just before the plane vanished from radar screens, a report said Saturday citing unnamed investigators.

The call ended abruptly possibly "because the aircraft was fast moving away from the (telecommunications) tower," The New Straits Times quoted a source as saying.

But the Malaysian daily also quoted another source saying that while Fariq Abdul Hamid's "line was reattached," there was no certainty that a call was made from the Boeing 777 that vanished on March 8.

The report -- titled a "desperate call for help" -- did not say who he was trying to contact.

Fariq and Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah have come under intense scrutiny after the plane mysteriously vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.

Investigators last month indicated that the flight was deliberately diverted and its communication systems manually switched off as it was leaving Malaysian airspace, triggering a criminal investigation by police that has revealed little so far.

The fate of flight MH370 has been shrouded in mystery, with a number of theories put forward including a hijacking or terrorist attack and a pilot gone rogue.

There have been unconfirmed previous reports in the Malaysian media of calls by the captain before or during the flight but no details have been released.

The NST report said that Flight 370 flew low enough near Penang island on Malaysia's west coast -- after turning off course -- for a telecommunications tower to pick up the co-pilot's phone signal.

The phone line was "reattached" between the time the plane veered off course and blipped off the radar, the government-controlled paper quoted the second source as saying.

"A 'reattachment' does not necessarily mean that a call was made. It can also be the result of the phone being switched on again."

Malaysia's transport ministry told AFP that it was examining the NST report and will issue a response.

The Malaysian government and media have repeatedly contradicted each other and themselves over details of the search and criminal investigation. — Agence France-Presse

source: gmanetwork.com

Australian ship trawls for signals from missing Malaysian jet

SYDNEY/PERTH - An Australian ship which picked up possible "pings" from the black box recorders of a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner has been unable to detect any further signals and time is running out to narrow the massive search, officials said on Tuesday.

Angus Houston, head of the Australian agency coordinating the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, said the month-long hunt in the Indian Ocean was at a critical stage given the batteries in the black box beacons had already reached the end of their 30-day expected life.

A US Navy "towed pinger locator" onboard Australia's Ocean Shield picked up two "ping" signal detections over the weekend – the first for more than two hours and the second for about 13 minutes.

Houston said the signals sounded very much like black box beacons and represented the best lead in the search yet, but efforts to pick up the pings again had so far been unsuccessful.

"If we don't get any further transmissions, we have a reasonably large search area of the bottom of the ocean to prosecute and that will take a long, long time. It's very slow, painstaking work," said Houston.

The black boxes record cockpit data and may provide answers about what happened to the plane, which was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew when it vanished on March 8 and flew thousands of kilometers off its Kuala Lumpur-to-Beijing route.

Authorities have not ruled out mechanical problems as a cause of the plane's disappearance but say evidence, including loss of communications, suggests it was deliberately diverted.

Analysis of satellite data led investigators to conclude the Boeing 777 came down in an area some 1,680 km (1,040 miles) northwest of Perth, where possible pings were picked up and the search is now focused.

Bluefin on hold

An autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) named Bluefin-21 is onboard the Ocean Shield and could be sent to look for wreckage on the sea floor, but narrowing the search zone first was critical, Houston said.

"It is a large area for a small submersible that has a very narrow field of search, and of course, it is literally crawling along the bottom of the ocean," he said.

"That's why its so important to get another transmission and we need to continue until there's absolutely no chance the device is still transmitting."

The Bluefin will scour the ocean floor in 20-hour missions using sonar in an attempt to find the Boeing 777, before its findings are downloaded and analysed on board the Ocean Shield.

If anything unusual is spotted, the sonar on board the robotic vehicle will be replaced with a camera to take a closer look. The potential search area is about 4.5 km (2.8 miles) deep, the outer reach of the Bluefin's range.

Some 133 missions have been completed so far in the multinational aerial hunt for debris in the southern Indian Ocean but have only turned up fishing gear and other detritus.

"They go on with the same intensity that we have carried through to this point in time," Defense Minister David Johnston told reporters. "We are throwing everything at this difficult and complex task."

Up to eleven military planes, three civilian planes and 14 ships will take part in the search on Tuesday, with the Australian coordination centre reporting good weather in the search area. — Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com

Chinese, Australian ships try to verify potential ‘pings’ from Malaysia jet

SYDNEY/PERTH, Australia - Chinese and Australian ships hunting for a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner have picked up separate acoustic signals in different parts of a vast Indian Ocean search area and are trying to verify if one could be from the plane's black box recorders.

Australian search authorities said on Sunday a Chinese patrol vessel, the Haixun 01, had picked up a fleeting "ping" signal twice in recent days in waters west of Perth, near where investigators believe Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went down on March 8.

More planes and ships were being sent to assist in that area, but meanwhile, Australia's HMAS Ocean Shield had reported a separate "acoustic event" some 300 nautical miles away.

The Ocean Shield is carrying sophisticated U.S. Navy equipment designed to pick up signals sent from the black boxes, which may hold the key to why the aircraft ended up thousands of kilometers off course.

"We are treating each of them seriously. We need to ensure before we leave any of those areas that this does not have any connection with MH370," Retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, head of the Australian agency coordinating the operation, told a media conference in Perth.

A black box detector deployed by the Haixun 01 picked up the signal with a frequency of 37.5kHz per second - the same as emitted by flight recorders - at about 25 degrees south and 101 degrees east, Xinhua reported on Saturday.

Australian search authorities said such a signal would be consistent with a black box, but both they and Xinhua stressed there was no conclusive evidence linking it to the Boeing 777.

"The 37.5kHz is the specific frequency that these locator pingers operate on," said Anish Patel, president of Sarasota, Florida-based Dukane Seacom, which made the black box locator.

"It's a very unique frequency, typically not found in background ocean noise," such as whales or other marine mammals, he told Reuters.

Southern area back in focus

Houston said analysis of earlier satellite data had again led investigators to refine the search area towards the southern part of the corridor.

"The area of the highest probability is, what we think, the southern part where Haixun 01 is operating. That is why we are really interested in the two acoustic encounters that Haixun 01 has had."

The water was around 4,500 meters (14,800 ft) deep in that part of the search area, Houston added.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said he was "hopeful but by no means certain" that the reported pulse signals were related to MH370.

"This is the most difficult search in human history. We are searching for an aircraft which is at the bottom of a very deep ocean and it is a very, very wide search area," Abbott told reporters in Tokyo, where he is on a visit.

Up to a dozen planes and 13 ships will be scouring three separate areas about 2,000 km (1,240 miles) northwest of Perth, Australia's Joint Agency Coordination Centre said on Sunday.

Sonar equipment

Authorities have not ruled out mechanical problems as a cause of the plane's disappearance, but say the evidence, including loss of communications, suggests it was deliberately diverted.

Malaysian authorities have faced heavy criticism, particularly from China, for mismanaging the search and holding back information. Most of the 227 passengers were Chinese.

Malaysia said on Saturday it had launched a formal investigation into the plane's disappearance that would include experts from Australia, the United States, China, Britain and France.

Normally, a formal air safety investigation is not launched until wreckage is found. But there have been concerns that Malaysia's informal investigations to date have lacked the legal standing of an official inquiry convened under U.N. rules.

Under International Civil Aviation Organization rules, the country where the aircraft is registered leads the investigation when the incident takes place in international waters.

Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said the investigation would comprise three groups: one would examine maintenance records, structures and systems; an "operations" group would study flight recorders, operations and meteorology; and a "medical and human factors" group would look into psychology, pathology and survival. — Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com

Corrected satellite data shifts focus south in search for MH370 — official

PERTH — Corrected satellite data has shifted the focus for the hunt for missing Malaysia Airline Flight MH370 to the south, the head of the agency coordinating the search mission said Sunday.

"The whole of the existing search area remains the most likely area that the aircraft entered the water, but based on the new advice the southern area now has a higher priority," retired air chief marshal Angus Houston said.

The Chinese ship Haixun 01, which has detected some signals that could be from the plane's beacons, is in this more southern area of the Indian Ocean search zone. — Agence France-Presse

source: gmanetwork.com

Math wizards stand ready to join Malaysia Airlines search

RESTON - Math wizards who pinpointed the final resting place of a doomed Air France jet deep beneath the Atlantic stand ready to do so again for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

No one has yet asked Metron, a scientific consulting firm, to join the search for the missing Boeing 777, but that hasn't stopped it from getting a head start, using the few nuggets of data currently in the public domain.

"We're trying to get our hands on all the publicly available data so we can start doing an independent assessment," Van Gurley, head of Metron's advanced mathematics applications division, told AFP on Wednesday.

As that assessment evolves, "we'll provide it to anyone who's interested," added Gurley at Metron's head office in Reston, Virginia, a suburb of Washington.

Founded in 1982, with a staff of 170 that includes experts in applied mathematicians, Metron conducts highly specialized mathematical analysis for US national security applications, such as sonar systems.

But it has also developed a much-used search and rescue protocol for the US Coast Guard based on a theorem developed by early 18th century English statistician, philosopher and Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes.

"It's a structured method that forces you to look at all the available information about a problem and then apply a confidence factor—how confident you are in any piece of information," Gurley said.

No single bit of data is ever thrown away, but as information is confirmed over time—say, when a speck in a satellite image turns out to be genuine debris—the probability that the target item is in a given spot evolves.

In the case of Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic in 2009 with 228 on board, the target was its flight data recorder lying at the bottom of the ocean.

The French air accident investigation agency BEA turned to Metron to figure out the most likely spot where the so-called black box might be—successfully, it turned out when undersea drones recovered it in May 2011.

In that case, however, floating debris from the Airbus A330 had been located within a week and the search area was limited to a circle about 80 miles (130 kilometers) in diameter, Gurley said.

That's practically a flyspeck compared to the vastness of the remote section of the Indian Ocean where the Malaysian authorities said Wednesday that "122 potential objects" had been spotted by satellite in recent days—with not a single piece of confirmed debris since the jet went missing on March 8.

"Everybody wants to know where it is, and the answer is: we don't know," said Gurly, sitting alongside a vivid computer image of the entire Indian Ocean depicting the latest search zones west of Australia.

Overlaid on the screen are green triangles, each representing a ship at sea, provided by exactEarth, a Canadian firm that tracks ship movements worldwide in real time using satellite signals.

Just three triangles stood out in the search zone Wednesday, all of them Australian vessels combing the waters for debris.

Commercial shipping lanes to and from Australia lie well to the north, and they're not especially crowded. Gurley acknowledges that Bayesian theorem doesn't guarantee success.

While the Coast Guard regularly uses Bayesian theorem to find, say, fishermen lost at sea, it came up short when Metron was asked in 2007 to find missing US adventurer Steve Fossett, who had been out flying a small airplane in a mountainous corner of California.

A year passed before a hiker just happened upon some of Fossett's belongings, some distance from where he was presumed to be. Bones found nearby were confirmed through DNA tests to be his.

Asked what the odds of locating Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, let alone the cause of its disappearance, Gurley said the technical means to accomplish the mission is at hand, as difficult as it might be.

"The technology is available to get to the ocean bottom in this part of the world and search it," he said. "But it's an incredibly challenging task—and I think it's really going to come down to time, and will." — Agence France-Presse

source: gmanetwork.com

New images show more than 100 objects in Indian Ocean that could be MH370 debris

PERTH/KUALA LUMPUR - New satellite images have revealed more than 100 objects in the southern Indian Ocean that could be debris from a Malaysian jetliner missing for 18 days with 239 people on board, Malaysia's acting transport minister said on Wednesday.

The latest sighting came as searchers stepped up efforts to find some trace of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, thought to have crashed on March 8 after flying thousands of miles off course.

"It must be emphasized that we cannot tell whether the potential objects are from MH370," Hishammuddin Hussein told a news conference. "Nevertheless, this is another new lead that will help direct the search operation."

The images were captured by France-based Airbus Defence & Space on Monday and showed 122 potential objects in a 400 sq km (155 sq mile) area of ocean, Hishammuddin said. The objects varied in size from one meter to 23 meters (75 ft) in length, he said.

A dozen aircraft from Australia, the United States, New Zealand, China, Japan and South Korea were once more scouring the seas some 2,500 km (1,550 miles) southwest of Perth in the hunt for wreckage on Wednesday, after bad weather the previous day forced the suspension of the search.

"The crash zone is as close to nowhere as it's possible to be but it's closer to Australia than anywhere else," Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said, before leading the country's parliament in a moment's silence.

"A considerable amount of debris has been sighted in the area where the flight was last recorded. Bad weather and inaccessibility has so far prevented any of it from being recovered. But we are confident that it will be."

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak this week confirmed Flight MH370, which vanished while flying to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, had crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.

Citing satellite-data analysis by British company Inmarsat, he said there was no doubt the Boeing 777 came down in one of the most remote places on Earth—an implicit admission that everyone on board had died.

Recovery of wreckage could unlock clues about why and how the plane had diverted so far off course in one of aviation's most puzzling mysteries. Theories range from a hijacking to sabotage or a possible suicide by one of the pilots, but investigators have not ruled out technical problems.

Australia, China and France have all released satellite images over the past week showing possible debris in the same general area as the latest sighting, but no confirmed wreckage has been located.

Passenger relatives distraught

An Australian navy ship returned to the area after being driven away by gale force winds and 20-meter (66 ft) waves on Tuesday, while a Chinese icebreaker and three Chinese navy vessels were now in the search zone.

Two Chinese ships were looking for a two-meter floating object spotted earlier in the day by an aircraft, China's state news agency Xinhua reported.

The United States has sent an undersea Navy drone and a high-tech black box detector which will be fitted to an Australian Defense vessel due in Perth in the coming days.

The so-called black boxes—the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder—record what happens during flight, but time is running out to pick up locator beacons that stop about a month after a crash due to limited battery life.

Malaysia said on Tuesday that the US "Towed Pinger Locator" would not arrive in the search area until April 5, which would give it only a few days to find the black box before the beacon battery would be expected to run out.

The prolonged and so far fruitless search and investigation have taken a toll, with dozens of distraught relatives of Chinese passengers clashing with police in Beijing on Tuesday, accusing Malaysia of "delays and deception."

Malaysia's confused initial response to the plane's disappearance and a perception of poor communications have enraged many relatives of the more than 150 Chinese passengers and have strained ties between Beijing and Kuala Lumpur.

Chinese special envoy, Zhang Yesui, met Malaysia's Najib on Wednesday and called for "unremitting efforts" to find the plane, Xinhua said.

Multinational investigation

Flight MH370 vanished from civilian radar screens less than an hour after taking off and investigators believe someone on the flight may have shut off the plane's communications systems.

Partial military radar tracking showed it turning west and re-crossing the Malay Peninsula, apparently under the control of a skilled pilot.

The air crash investigation is shaping up as one of the most costly and difficult ever. Normally, an official investigation can only begin once a crash site has been identified. That would give Malaysia power to coordinate and sift evidence.

A government source told Reuters that Malaysia would lead the investigation, but hoped other countries, especially Australia, would play a major role. —Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com