WHY THIS WAS NOT PREVIOUSLY RELEASED HAS BEEN CALLED INTO QUESTION.
ALSO, THE TWO MEN WHO TRAVELED ON STOLEN PASSPORTS ABOARD THAT PLANE HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED BY INTERPOL.
ALSO, MORE AND MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE PILOT'S PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE, HIS POSSIBLE MENTAL STATE, AND HOW HE HAD, IN THE PAST, INVITED YOUNG WOMEN INTO THE COCKPIT ARE SURFACING.
The investigation into the disappearance of flight MH370 is likely to turn into a criminal inquiry as mounting evidence points to a deliberate act, a leading air crash investigator said Wednesday.
With no distress call and no sign of a midair breakup,
questions are now being asked about how the Malaysia Airlines Boeing
777 could apparently fly hundreds of miles off course without being
tracked or detected by civilian radar systems.
“We don’t have much in
the way of evidence so far, but what there is suggests a deliberate
act,” said former National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)
investigator Greg Feith. "I think this will turn from an accident
investigation into a criminal inquiry."
“If the military radar evidence is
correct, what we see is not a slow, meandering curve but a deliberate
turn followed by a straight line,” he said. “The plane doesn’t appear to
be wallowing in the air, drifting left and right — it is being flown.”
Feith
said the abrupt end of communications suggests the aircraft’s
transponder was disabled deliberately rather than by a loss of power.
So was the airliner hijacked, or did one or both pilots deliberately steer the plane off course?
“At this stage, there is simply no way of knowing,” Feith said.
A sudden, catastrophic failure or explosion would leave behind a trail of visible debris on the ocean surface.
But
six days after the jetliner took off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing, no
trace of wreckage has been found, nor any signal from its emergency
transponder beacon.
MALAYSIA RELEASED A RADAR PLOT THAT PERHAPS WAS KNOWN ABOUT DAYS AGO AND WAS NOT IMMEDIATELY BROUGHT TO LIGHT.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Ships and planes from a dozen nations expanded the search for a missing Malaysian airliner Wednesday after newly divulged radar data suggested that the aircraft veered hundreds of miles off course before vanishing.MALAYSIA RELEASED A RADAR PLOT THAT PERHAPS WAS KNOWN ABOUT DAYS AGO AND WAS NOT IMMEDIATELY BROUGHT TO LIGHT.
CHINA HAS SINCE APOLOGIZED FOR RELEASING ITS SATELLITE IMAGES OF WHAT APPEARED TO BE FLOATING DEBRIS
A Chinese government agency said Wednesday that one of its satellites spotted “floating objects” in the “suspected crash area” of the Malaysian airliner, but there was no immediate confirmation that the unidentified pieces were part of the plane’s wreckage.
It said images of the objects, which ranged in size from 13 by 18 meters to 22 by 24 meters, were captured Sunday, a day after the plane disappeared. The agency did not explain why the images were not released until Wednesday.
Peter Goelz, former director of the US National Transportation Safety Board, told CNN last night: "It's (THE DEBRIS) where it's supposed to be. There was always great scepticism about this 90 degree turn. They have got to get vessels and aircraft there as quickly as humanly possible to find out where they have drifted to and get eyes on."
Goetz also speculated that China may have delayed this finding so as not to reveal its satellite capabilities.
CNN IS reporting the Chinese satellite images reveal three pieces of debris, the biggest 79-feet by 72-feet and the distance between the last known location of MH370 and new Chinese satellite image is 141 miles eastwards
The location of the suspected debris is half way between Malaysia and Vietnam close to the expected flight path of the aircraft which mysteriously disappeared at 1.30 am on Saturday morning.
And as the satellite imagery was released of debris the missing Malaysian jetliner was at the centre of a new controversy last night after it was claimed that American aviation chiefs warned six months ago that a similar kind of Boeing plane was vulnerable to a mid-air break up.
As searchers headed for a possible crash site for doomed Flight MH370, it emerged that the US Federation Aviation Authority gave airlines a deadline to fix a potentially fatal flaw in Boeing 777 jets.
The FAA reportedly warned the planes could break apart and suffer a drastic loss in cabin pressure because of cracks in the fuselage.
"I think the size of the pieces ... everything we've heard... gives good cause to believe that we've now (refocused) the area," former Federal Aviation Administration official Michael Goldfarb told CNN. "And that's a huge relief to everybody ... I think it's a high chance that they're going to confirm that these (are) pieces of the wreckage."
MALAYSIA RELEASES "NEW" RADAR PLOT OF PLANE'S FLIGHT PATH
Malaysia’s air force chief, Rodzali Daud, said Wednesday that an “unidentified plot” was seen on military radar intermittently for around 45 minutes after the plane disappeared. He said that radar trail ended at a point over the sea, 200 miles northwest of Penang, on Malaysia’s west coast.
“It’s a plot. An unidentified plot,” Rodzali said. “I’m not saying it’s MH370.”
“There are issues about the quality of this information,” Steven B. Wallace, former director of the Office of Accident Investigation at the Federal Aviation Administration, said Wednesday when asked whether the turn-around scenario was plausible. If the information is accurate, he added, it could suggest an unauthorized takeover of the plane’s controls.
“What happened here, if you believe this information [from the Malaysian military], was that the changing of course appeared to happen pretty much concurrently with the loss of the transponder,” Wallace said. “That has to suggest that control of the airplane was taken over by someone unauthorized.”
Malaysia’s uncertainty about the data largely explains why the five-day search for crash evidence has been so chaotic. Authorities here still don’t know whether the plane crashed soon after 1:30 a.m., or instead cut off its transponders and went on a ghost flight across the country and perhaps beyond. For now, the ships and aircraft involved in the search are split between two bodies of water on opposite sides of the Malaysian peninsula.
Malaysian authorities have faced mounting criticism about their transparency and their handling of the case, and they struggled Wednesday to say why they were only now revealing the military data.
If the radar data can be confirmed as stemming from MH370, it means that the aircraft traveled across the country essentially unnoticed. Malaysia’s military says it noticed the recorded data only after the fact, not in real time.
Some aviation experts say that even Malaysia’s current search area doesn’t cover enough ground. If the plane indeed tacked west, it would have had enough fuel to make it toward India.
With India, Japan and Brunei now involved, Hishammuddin said 12 countries were searching for the plane.
China, which had 153 passengers on board, has been the most vocal critic of Malaysia’s response, and an editorial Wednesday in the state-run Global Times asked whether the Malaysian military “was hiding anything on purpose.”
“We hope Malaysia can face its own shortcomings, and cooperate with China with a more open and candid attitude,” the editorial said.
CBS news reported a strange invitation from downed airline pilot in 2011
With a void of information, social media users seized on an Australian report that detailed how two female teenagers, during a 2011 international flight, were invited into the cockpit by the same co-pilot who was on the MH370 flight. That co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, posed for pictures mid-flight and smoked cigarettes. The women — one of whom supplied photos to the Australian program, “A Current Affair” — stayed in the cockpit from takeoff until landing. Fariq also asked the guests to extend their stay in Kuala Lumpur, so he could take them out on the town.
Roos said she and her friend were allowed to stay in the cockpit during the entire one-hour flight in December 2011, from Phuket, Thailand, to Kuala Lumpur. She said the arrangement did not seem unusual to the plane's crew.
Fariq Abdul Hamid and the other pilot talked to the women, smoked and posed for photos during the flight, she said. The second pilot was not identified.
"Throughout the entire flight they were talking to us, and they were actually smoking throughout the flight," Roos said.
Roos told the program she was surprised when learned that Hamid was a co-pilot on the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
"When I realized it was the exact same co-pilot and not only that but I had met him and I have photos in the cockpit with him, that was quite shocking," she said.
Stolen Passport Users On Missing Flight MH370 Identified
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/11/stolen-passport-missing-flight_n_4939881.html
LYON, France (AP) — Interpol has released an image of two Iranians who were traveling with stolen passports on a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner.
The image showed the two men boarding a plane at the same time. Interpol secretary general Ronald K. Noble said Tuesday the two traveled to Malaysia on Iranian passports, then apparently switched to the stolen Austrian and Italian documents.
Noble said the recent information about the men made terrorism a less likely cause of the plane's disappearance, but that did not allay concerns about the ease of travel involving stolen passports.
Citing national authorities, Interpol named the two as Seyed Mohammed Reza Delavar, 29, and Pouria Nourmohammadi. Malaysian authorities say Nourmohammadi is 19, although Interpol's information indicated an age of 18.
Oil Rig Worker Claims He Saw Plane Crash
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/12/oil-rig-worker-says-he-saw-missing-plane-go-down-r/An oil rig worker told Vietnamese officials he believes he saw the Malaysian Airlines plane fall from the sky in flames off the south east coast of Vietnam, according to an email obtained by ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff.
[Woodruff has since tweeted that this letter was NOT a hoax.<<7:32 AM - 12 Mar 2014, ABC spoke with Richard Beaton w/Japanese Idemitsu Oil & Gas Co who hired Songa Mercur to drill & confirms email of Michael Mckay is real>>]
The letter, by Michael Jerome McKay, alleges that he observed the plane “burning at a high altitude” while he was aboard the oil rig “Songa Mercur” off Vung Tau.
Vietnamese aircraft were deployed to check the coordinates cited by New Zealander Michael Jerome McKay, the BBC reports. Bob Woodruff wrote on Twitter that Vietnamese authorities say they did not find anything at the location.
WE MAY NEVER LEARN WHAT HAPPENED TO THIS FLIGHT, BUT THAT TWO NATIONS WITHHELD INFORMATION FOR 3 DAYS DOES NOT BODE WELL AT ALL.
IF WHAT THE TWO YOUNG WOMEN SAID ABOUT THE PILOT INVITING THEM INTO THE COCKPIT FOR THE ENTIRE FLIGHT IN 2011 IS TRUE, WE MUST WONDER MUCH ABOUT THAT PILOT.
AND IF ONE OIL RIG WORKER SAW THE PLANE IN FLAMES, SURELY OTHER PEOPLE ALSO SAW IT. IF HE DID NOT SEE IT, WE CAN ASSUME THE PLANE MAY HAVE MADE THAT U-TURN, BUT WHERE DID IT GO AND WHY?
CHINA'S SATELLITE IMAGES MUST BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY, AS MUST THE RADAR PLOT OF THE AIRCRAFT REPORTED BY MALAYSIA.
ALL POSSIBILITIES, EVEN THE UNTHINKABLE, MUST BE CAREFULLY EXPLORED.
NO STONE SHOULD BE LEFT UNTURNED TO FIND THIS AIRPLANE AND DETERMINE WHAT HAPPENED TO THOSE ABOARD.
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