Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 missing!

AUSTRALIA DISMISSES MH370 CLAIMS BY EXPLORATION FIRM

Australian authorities on Wednesday dismissed claims by a marine exploration company that material found in the Bay of Bengal could be from missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Adelaide-based GeoResonance was quoted in Malaysian media and by Australia's Channel Seven as saying it had detected possible debris from a plane 5,000 kilometres (3,100 miles) from the current search location.

On Tuesday, Malaysia's acting transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein said he was verifying the information but Australia's Joint Agency Coordination Centre, which is fronting the search, downplayed any link.

"The location of MH370 suggested by the GeoResonance report (in the Bay of Bengal) is not in the Australian search and rescue zone," a spokesman for the government agency told AFP.

"The Australian led search is relying on information from satellite and other data to determine the missing aircraft's location. The location specified by the GeoResonance report is not within the search arc derived from this data.

"The joint international team is satisfied that the final resting place of the missing aircraft is in the southerly portion of the search arc."

The Beijing-bound Malaysia Airlines flight with 239 people aboard disappeared shortly after take-off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8.

Based on calculations involving the plane's speed and fuel and satellite data, investigators believe it veered off course and crashed into the southern Indian Ocean off Australia, although a massive hunt for evidence has so far yielded nothing on the surface or below.

The aerial hunt has been called off while the underwater search by an unmanned mini-submarine and other technology is being expanded across a huge swathe of seabed of about 56,000 square kilometres (21,600 square miles).

GeoResonance, which specialises in geophysical surveys to find oil and gas, groundwater, and uranium, said its research using images from satellites and aircraft had identified elements on the ocean floor consistent with material from a plane.

The company said it surveyed over 2,000,000 square kilometres.

"We identified chemical elements and materials that make up a Boeing 777... these are aluminium, titanium, copper, steel alloys and other materials," company representative Pavel Kursa told Channel Seven.

Another company representative, David Pope, told the broadcaster: "We're not trying to say that it definitely is MH370, however it is a lead we feel should be followed up."


Source : Sapa-AFP /nsm
Date : 30 Apr 2014 03:57
 
British marine archaeologist claims to have found flight MH370 3,000 miles from the search zone after spotting debris painted in the colours of Malaysia Airlines

A British marine archaeologist claims to have found the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 more than 3,000 miles from where authorities are currently searching.
Tim Akers, 56, had been studying Australian waters off Perth for years in a search for the remains of the country's lost WWII ship - the HMAS Sydney.
The search for the vessel was in the same waters that are believed to contain the missing flight MH370 off the coast of Western Australia.

A massive search operation involving satellites, aircraft, ships and sophisticated underwater equipment capable of scouring the ocean floor has failed to turn up any trace of the Boeing 777, which disappeared on March 8.
But Mr Akers, of North Yorkshire now thinks he might have discovered where the flight, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew, went down after it went missing en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
He claims to have identified a section of what he believes is part of the tail of the jet off the coast of Vietnam - just around 1,000 miles from where the plane took off.

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...debris-painted-colours-Malaysia-Airlines.html
 
MALAYSIA AIRLINES: MH370 FAMILIES SHOULD HEAD HOME

Malaysia Airlines on Thursday advised relatives of passengers who were aboard Flight 370 to move out of hotels and return home to wait for news on the search for the missing plane.

Since the Boeing 777 disappeared on March 8, the airline has been putting the relatives up in hotels, where they've been briefed on the search. But the airline said in a statement Thursday that it would close its family assistance centers around the world by May 7, and that the families should receive search updates from "the comfort of their own homes."

The airline said that it would establish family support centers in Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, and that it would keep in close touch with the relatives through means including phone calls and meetings.

Malaysia Airlines also said it would soon make advanced compensation payments to the relatives.

The plane vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and most of the passengers were Chinese.

No wreckage from the plane has been found, and an aerial search for surface debris ended Monday after six weeks of fruitless hunting. An unmanned sub is continuing to search underwater in an area of the southern Indian Ocean where sounds consistent with a plane's black box were detected in early April. Additional equipment is expected to be brought in within the next few weeks to scour an expanded underwater area.

The head of the search effort has predicted that the search could drag on for as long as a year.


Source : Sapa-AP /um
Date : 01 May 2014 13:57
 
AUSTRALIA TO HOST THREE-WAY MEETING ON MH370 SEARCH

Australia will host a meeting with Malaysia and China next week to determine the way forward in the frustrating search for flight MH370, officials said in Kuala Lumpur on Friday.

The Canberra meeting, announced by Australia's MH370 search chief Angus Houston, follows the decision this week to scale back the costly search operation in the Indian Ocean that has so far turned up no evidence that the Malaysia Airlines jet crashed.

"That's a very important meeting because it will formalise the way ahead to ensure that this search continues with urgency and doesn't stop at any stage," said Houston, who is on a brief visit to Malaysia.

Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, who spoke to reporters in Kuala Lumpur along with Houston, said he would attend.

Officials have said recently that more sophisticated assets may need to be brought in for the so-far fruitless search of the Indian Ocean seabed for wreckage.

An intensive aerial search for surface wreckage from flight MH370 officially ended Wednesday, with ships also moving out of the remote search zone.

Australian authorities have said the focus would move "over the coming weeks" to an intensified undersea search.

The jet disappeared on March 8 with 239 people aboard and is believed to have inexplicably diverted to the Indian Ocean and crashed, but no evidence has been found.

Officials have said the focus will shift to an expanded underwater search with a sophisticated US Navy sonar device across a huge swathe of seabed.

While saying the challenge was immense, Houston said he was confident MH370 will eventually be found.

"We are totally committed, as three nations I believe, to finding MH370 and I am confident that with an effective search we will find the aircraft," he said.

China is involved because two-thirds of the passengers were Chinese.

The submersible Bluefin-21 has been scouring the seabed in an area where undersea transmissions were detected, believed to have come from the plane's black box flight recorders before their batteries died.

Houston said the Bluefin-21 would continue scanning until the end of May. He did not specify what would happen afterwards but said it could take between eight to 12 months to fully search the suspected crash area.

The zone was determined based on an analysis of imprecise data from satellites that detected the plane as if flew.

Hishammuddin and Houston both said they still believed the search was in the right area.

Authorities earlier this week dismissed claims by an Australia-based marine exploration company that it had detected elements in the Bay of Bengal, far to the north, consistent with aircraft materials and which could be from MH370.

Houston said three ships from Bangladesh were looking in that area but had so far found nothing.


Source : Sapa-AFP /lk
Date : 02 May 2014 08:39
 
AUSTRALIAN SEARCH HEAD CONFIDENT PLANE IS IN SOUTHERN INDIAN OCEAN

The chief of the Australian-led multinational team searching for a missing Malaysia Airlines plane on Friday said they are searching in the right area despite not having found anything related to the aircraft. "I am confident that the area in the southern ocean is the right search area," Angus Houston said in a press briefing in Kuala Lumpur following a claim by a private Australian exploration company that it had detected wreckage of a plane in the Bay of Bengal near Bangladesh. Houston said three Bangladesh navy ships were scouring the area in the Bay of Bengal where the Georesonance exploration company said it had detected what could be wreckage of Beijing-bound flight MH370 that disappeared on March 8. "As yet they (Bangladesh navy) have found nothing," he said. Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein shared the view of Houston that the lost Boeing 777, with 239 people on board, ended in the southern Indian Ocean. "I'm quietly confident that we are on the right track," he said, but admitted that the challenges ahead were huge. Houston said the new phase of the search, which would involve more deep sea equipment, could take up to 12 months. Hishammuddin said he would be going to Canberra on Sunday for a trilateral meeting with China and Australia about how to continue with the search and about the deployment of assets.


Source : Sapa-dpa /lk
Date : 02 May 2014 08:35
 
NO ANSWERS, ONLY HOPE AS MH370 CHINA FATHER HEADS HOME
by Neil CONNOR

Almost two months after he dashed to Beijing following the disappearance of his son's flight, Yan Jiacheng finally left a hotel he shared with other desperate Chinese relatives, still clinging to the hope that he could be alive.

"I don't want to leave of course, but I have no choice," Yan told AFP as relatives drove him 800 kilometres (500 miles) home after Malaysia Airlines said it would no longer provide accommodation in Beijing.

Softly spoken and non-confrontational, Yan was one of the quiet ones at the Lido hotel in the Chinese capital.

The hotel became a powder keg of conflict between highly emotional relatives seeking answers about their missing loved ones, and airline officials and Malaysian government representatives stymied by the way flight MH370 vanished.

Yan's younger son Yan Ling, 30, was one of the 153 Chinese passengers on the flight -- making up two-thirds of those on board.

The last time the pair had spent time together was when Yan Ling returned to the family home for Chinese New Year in late January.

The annual pilgrimage is replicated in tens of millions of homes across the country, where high-achieving offspring often find work in the booming cities after university, rather than in their backwater hometowns.

During regular family briefings at the hotel, the 60-year-old would sit near the back of the hall, sipping a cup of iced water provided by airline support staff and lifting his head only during the occasions when tempers frayed.

Sometimes he would find solitude away from the insults and allegations, sitting outside in the car park with his thoughts and a cigarette, while relatives burst out of the door behind him sobbing into their handkerchiefs.

In the early days after the plane's disappearance, the signs of sleepless nights were etched on his face, with bags under his eyes and his thin hair ruffled.

Now Yan is more outwardly composed, but inside he remains crippled.

He has "felt nothing but despair", he says, since his life was turned upside down by a phone call from his son's girlfriend on the morning of March 8, 56 days ago.

"She said two sentences. She told me 'The plane is missing. Yan is missing'. Then she said nothing more, as she burst out crying," said Yan, from Yancheng in the eastern province of Jiangsu.

His son's boss telephoned him to say that the aircraft was missing and he should travel to the capital.

"I dropped everything and made the journey here."

There were no flights available to Beijing from nearby airports, so he had no choice but to buy a standing ticket on a train which took "a day and night".

Even at normal times the crowded journey would be gruelling. In the circumstances it was mental torture.

"The plane has gone. The plane has gone. I knew it was something terrible," he said, recalling the thoughts that raced through his mind.

Yan described his missing son as "introverted", but his tone brightened as he proudly exclaimed: "His boss says he is an excellent worker. A really good engineer."

Yan Ling works for a medical equipment company in Beijing's Haidian district and had travelled to Malaysia on a work-sponsored "short-study trip" with a colleague, his father said.

The family are close, said Yan, who was joined in Beijing by his elder son while his wife, who has health problems, stayed in Yancheng.

A vast multi-national search has failed to find any sign of wreckage, and some Chinese relatives have embraced improbable conspiracy theories of hijackings and hostage-takings.

At times the reality of the most likely outcome hits Yan.

"The passengers have probably already died," he said. "I think so, but I don't dare to tell my family that."

Even so, as his voice broke with emotion, Yan refused to accept that he may have spent his last Chinese New Year with his son.

He still clings to the thought of Yan Ling one day walking through the door of the family home once again.

"That would be great. I would be so happy. I hope this day will come, and I will always keep that hope."


Source : Sapa-AFP /nsm
Date : 03 May 2014 05:34
 
MALAYSIA PLANE'S LIKELY FLIGHT PATH GETS 2ND LOOK

A panel of experts will re-examine all data gathered in the nearly two-month-old hunt for the missing Malaysia jet to ensure search crews who have been scouring a desolate patch of ocean for the plane have been looking in the right place.

Officials from Malaysia, Australia and China met in the Australian capital on Monday to work out the next steps in the search for Flight 370, which will center around on a patch of seafloor in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia. The area became the focus of the hunt after a team of analysts calculated the plane's likeliest flight path based on satellite and radar data.

Angus Houston, head of the search operation, said that data will be re-analyzed and combined with all information gathered in the search.


Source : Sapa-AP /nsm
Date : 05 May 2014 07:07
 
MH370 SEARCHERS MEET IN CANBERRA TO THRASH OUT FRESH PLAN

Officials from Australia, Malaysia and China will meet in Canberra on Monday to plot the next phase of the search for a Malaysia Airlines plane thought to have come down in the Indian Ocean. Flight MH370 vanished March 8 an hour into a night flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, most of them Chinese citizens. One of the biggest searches in aviation history has yet to come up with a trace of the missing Boeing 777. In the last tally, there had been 334 search flights and 4.5 million square kilometres of ocean scoured. Over 400 square kilometres of ocean floor had been gone over. Aviation experts and crash investigators will also be in the Australian capital to draw up proposals for commercial operators who are likely to take over. The officials convene as the UN Navy committed a submersible sonar scanner for another month of searching in an area around 1,584 kilometres north-west of Perth where searchers are confident the plane went down. The patch was a circular area with a radius of 10 kilometres from the point where the last acoustic signal was picked up April 8 by a ship towing an emergency beacon locator listening for black-box pings. Angus Houston, who is coordinating the search from Perth, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur on Friday that the search could take up to 12 months. Houston, a former Australian armed forces chief, said the Canberra meeting was to "formalise the way ahead." He said: "We are totally committed as three nations, I believe, to finding MH370 and I'm confident that with an effective search we'll eventually find the aircraft." A new undersea search area, 700 kilometres long and 80 kilometres wide, has been defined for commercial operators who will bring in a submersible able to go down deeper than the US Navy Bluefin-21. The Bluefin, which is limited to a depth of 4,500 metres and had to resurface to download sonar readings, trawled over 400 square kilometres of ocean floor without success. It is likely to be replaced with a submersible that can dive to 6,000 metres and stream data live to the ship towing it. Last month Prime Minister Tony Abbott said that bringing in commercial operators would cost 60 million Australian dollars (56 million US dollars) and that Australia would be "seeking some appropriate contribution from other nations involved but we'll ensure that this search goes ahead." The Australians were thought to be likely to ask for contributions at the Canberra meeting.


Source : Sapa-dpa /nsm
Date : 05 May 2014 03:56
 
INMARSAT OFFERS TRACKING MALAYSIAN PLANE'S LOSS

Inmarsat, the global mobile satellite provider, says it will offer free basic tracking services for planes flying over oceans to prevent another incident such as the loss of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.

The British company says in a statement Monday that the service is being offered to all 11,000 commercial passenger aircraft already equipped with an Inmarsat satellite connection - most of the world's long haul commercial fleet.

The Malaysian flight, with 239 people on board, disappeared on March 24. The plane automatically sent hourly signals to a satellite belonging to Inmarsat after the plane's transponder and its communication systems had shut down - but analysis of the data came too late to find the plane.

Inmarsat made the offer ahead of a conference in Canada on aircraft tracking.


Source : Sapa-AP /ar
Date : 12 May 2014 12:36
 
Garyvdh said:
INMARSAT OFFERS TRACKING MALAYSIAN PLANE'S LOSS

Inmarsat, the global mobile satellite provider, says it will offer free basic tracking services for planes flying over oceans to prevent another incident such as the loss of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.

The British company says in a statement Monday that the service is being offered to all 11,000 commercial passenger aircraft already equipped with an Inmarsat satellite connection - most of the world's long haul commercial fleet.

The Malaysian flight, with 239 people on board, disappeared on March 24. The plane automatically sent hourly signals to a satellite belonging to Inmarsat after the plane's transponder and its communication systems had shut down - but analysis of the data came too late to find the plane.

Inmarsat made the offer ahead of a conference in Canada on aircraft tracking.


Source : Sapa-AP /ar
Date : 12 May 2014 12:36
Click to expand...

This is like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, but a very good move, and should be taken up by all the carriers.
 
TECH TROUBLES HINDER RESUMPTION OF MH370 SEARCH

Technical troubles have hindered a resumption of the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 with a mini-sub lasting only two hours in the water before it had to be raised, officials said Wednesday.

Australian vessel Ocean Shield, carrying the US Navy Bluefin-21 submersible, arrived back in the southern Indian Ocean search zone Tuesday following a port visit to Perth after the air and sea hunt was scaled back.

The plan was for it to resume scouring the seabed where transmissions believed to have come from the plane's black box flight recorders were heard last month.

The Boeing 777 vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board after mysteriously diverting from its Kuala Lumpur-Beijing route. It is believed to have crashed far off Australia's west coast.

"The Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, Bluefin-21, was deployed from Ocean Shield yesterday (Tuesday) afternoon but was recovered about two hours later to investigate communications problems," said the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC), which is organising the search.

"Work continues to rectify the issue and to date, Bluefin-21 has not redeployed."

Air and sea searches over vast stretches of the Indian Ocean have failed to find any sign of MH370.

Australia, which is leading the hunt, has stressed that it believes it is looking in the right area based on satellite communications from the plane.

Officials have said an intensified undersea mission will begin once new and more sophisticated equipment to complement Bluefin-21 can be obtained to search at depths of more than 4,500 metres (15,000 feet).

The ocean bed in the prospective search zone is not just deep but largely unmapped, meaning specialist sonar equipment and other autonomous vehicles are needed.

JACC said it had now established a Military Coordination and Sub-Surface Planning Cell, led by a Royal Australian Navy hydrographer and US Navy Sea Systems Command representative.

"Preparations to conduct the bathymetric survey are continuing," it said, referring to a study of the ocean floor terrain.

"A Chinese survey ship is now in the search area and will assist in preparations for future operations."

Meanwhile international experts continue to re-examine satellite imagery and all the data collated so far to try to pinpoint a more precise location for the search.

JACC said vessels from Australia, Malaysia and China and an Australian aircraft remain on standby should any surface debris need investigation.


Source : Sapa-AFP /lk
Date : 14 May 2014 09:41
 
MALAYSIA PM URGES AIRCRAFT CHANGES TO PREVENT ANOTHER MH370

Malaysia's prime minister has called for international aviation regulators to implement real-time tracking of airliners to prevent a recurrence of the baffling disappearance of flight MH370, while admitting missteps in the first days of the crisis.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, Najib Razak conceded that a chaotic public message and slow start to search and rescue operations in the early days of the plane's disappearance were a mistake.

But he called for changes that "would make it harder for an aircraft to simply disappear, and easier to find any aircraft that did".

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) held a special meeting earlier this week in Montreal to discuss growing calls for real-time tracking of aircraft by satellite, cloud storage of "black box" data and other innovations.

"One of the most astonishing things about this tragedy is the revelation that an airliner the size of a Boeing 777 can vanish, almost without a trace," Najib wrote.

"In an age of smartphones and mobile Internet, real-time tracking of commercial airplanes is long overdue."

Najib also said regulators should change crucial communications systems to prevent them being manually shut off.

Malaysia has said MH370's transponder, which relays an aircraft's location, and its Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting Systems (ACARS), which transmits information on a plane's mechanical health, appear to have been shut off around the time it went missing.

The Malaysian premier also lent support to calls to extend the battery life of the location beacons for aircraft flight data recorders and to expand the capacity of cockpit voice recorders.

Black box beacons have a battery life of about 30 days. The European Union has proposed increasing that to 90 days.

Cockpit voice recorders can now only record the last two hours of pilot conversations. In MH370's case, any conversations that took place as the plane was diverted early in its mysterious flight would have been overwritten.

Some of the changes being considered by the industry were first proposed after Air France flight 447 crashed in the Atlantic in 2009, killing 228 people, but little has been done.

"These changes may not have prevented the MH370 or Air France 447 tragedies. But they would make it harder for an aircraft to simply disappear, and easier to find any aircraft that did," Najib said.

"The global aviation industry must not only learn the lessons of MH370 but implement them. The world learned from Air France but didn't act. The same mistake must not be made again."

The ICAO meeting this week is expected to lead to a working group that should present its recommendations within five months.

MH370 vanished on March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.

Despite a massive international search in the Indian Ocean, no trace has been found.

"In the passage of time, I believe Malaysia will be credited for doing its best under near-impossible circumstances," Najib wrote.

But he acknowledged "we didn't get everything right" and said his government would investigate why Malaysian air-traffic controllers, after first noticing MH370 was missing, took four hours to launch a search and rescue.


Source : Sapa-AFP /aw
Date : 14 May 2014 06:30
 
MH370 SEARCH ON HOLD AFTER TROUBLE WITH MINI-SUB

The hunt for the missing Malaysian passenger jet in the Indian Ocean was put on hold Thursday after technical issues with a US Navy mini-submarine that require spare parts to be sent from Britain.

Australia's Joint Agency Coordination Agency (JACC), which is leading the search, revealed Wednesday that the Bluefin-21 submersible lasted only two hours in the water this week before it had to be raised.

The JACC blamed "communications problems" for the aborted mission and after a more thorough examination, announced that spare parts will be needed before the sophisticated mini-sub can be used again.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board.

It is believed to have crashed far off Australia's west coast after mysteriously diverting from its Kuala Lumpur-Beijing route. No wreckage has been found, despite a massive international search operation.

The mini-sub had only arrived back in the remote southern Indian Ocean search zone on Tuesday following a port visit to Perth onboard the Australian vessel Ocean Shield.

The problems with the mini-sub mean Ocean Shield is once more steaming for land in order to pick up the spare parts, which are due to arrive in Australia on Sunday.

"Examination of the communications problem has established that a hardware defect exists in the transponder mounted on the Ocean Shield and a defect may also exist in the transponder mounted on the Bluefin-21," JACC said.

"This inhibits the ability of the two devices to communicate with each other.

"As a consequence, spare parts for both defects will be dispatched from the United Kingdom. The parts are expected to arrive in Western Australia on Sunday."

Ocean Shield is now en route to Dampier in Western Australia to pick up the transponder parts, with the journey "anticipated to take a number of days".

The JACC also revealed that the Bluefin-21 was damaged as it was being hauled out of the water, but said it had been repaired with spare parts already on board Ocean Shield.

The intensive air and sea search for the Boeing 777 was drastically scaled back at the end of last month.

Officials have said an intensified undersea mission, to complement the Bluefin-21 operation, will begin once new and more sophisticated equipment can be obtained to search at depths of more than 4,500 metres (15,000 feet).

The ocean bed in the search zone is not just deep but largely unmapped, meaning specialist sonar equipment and other autonomous vehicles are needed.

Preparations to map the ocean floor are underway, with a Chinese ship in the search area to assist.

International experts are meanwhile continuing to examine satellite imagery and all the data collated so far to try to pinpoint a more precise location for the search.

The Bluefin had previously been scouring a 314-square kilometre zone centred around one of the transmissions believed to have come from the plane's black box flight recorders before their batteries died.


Source : Sapa-AFP /lk
Date : 15 May 2014 08:49
 
MH370 PUSHES TROUBLED MALAYSIA AIRLINES TO WIDER Q1 LOSS

Malaysia Airlines announced Thursday that its net loss widened in the first quarter as the impact of flight MH370's disappearance added to the struggling carrier's woes.

The state-controlled airline said it posted a net loss of 443 million ringgit ($137 million) for the three months ending March 31, compared to a 279 million ringgit loss in the same quarter in 2013.

The result was the airline's fifth straight quarterly loss and also the worst since the fourth quarter of 2011, when it recorded a net loss of 1.28 billion ringgit.

"The results were made worse with the impact on air travel in general following the disappearance of MH370," said Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, the airline's group chief executive.

"Operations were slowed for several weeks since early March when MH370 disappeared. Marketing activities were halted out of respect for the families of those on board the Beijing-bound Boeing 777 aircraft."

The debacle over the missing plane has compounded the problems faced by Malaysia Airlines, which had already lost a combined $1.3 billion over the past three calendar years as it founders in the face of intense industry competition.

Analysts say it faces a continued grim outlook in coming years unless it is forced to undergo aggressive reform, which has been resisted by powerful employee unions and other vested interests.

In a statement on Wednesday, the airline said "a thorough review of the business plan is being undertaken and all avenues are being explored to ensure the long-term sustainability of the company."

The carrier has undertaken a series of "turnaround" plans over the years, but each has failed to stem the tide of red ink blamed by analysts on poor management, a bloated work force, powerful unions, and industry competition.

MH370 disappeared on March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard. An extensive search in the Indian Ocean has found no trace of the plane.

The incident has ravaged the carrier's worldwide image and especially hurt bookings in the lucrative and previously growing China market.

Two-thirds of those on board MH370 were Chinese and the crisis has triggered fierce criticism in China of the airline and Malaysia's government.

The airline, which is 69 percent owned by government investment company Khazanah Nasional, said the first quarter loss was due in part to rising fuel costs.

Ahmad Jauhari said the airline must find ways to boost revenue to ensure its "future survival and sustainability in a market that is not showing any signs of letting up on competition", but he offered no specifics.


Source : Sapa-AFP /lk
Date : 15 May 2014 13:13
 
BOOK SUGGESTS MISSING MALAYSIAN AIRLINER ACCIDENTALLY SHOT DOWN

The first book about missing flight MH370 suggests it may have been shot down during a military exercise and the accident is being covered up, it was reported Sunday. Flight MH370 - the Mystery, written by Anglo-American author Nigel Cawthorne, cites anonymous sources to suggest that misinformation was released so the search would concentrate on the wrong area, The Sun-Herald newspaper reported. The book published by Sydney group New South cites a claim by New Zealander Mike McKay that he saw a burning plane from the oil rig he was working on in the Gulf of Thailand on March 8, the day the plane went missing. Cawthorne links the supposed sighting to joint US military exercises in the region at the time. Cawthorne writes if MH370 was accidentally shot down during live fire exercises "those involved would have every reason to keep quiet about it." He even suggests that if a flight black box is found it could be a fake planted by those involved in the coverup. But, he added, "I'm not saying that's what happened." The book goes on sale Monday. Meanwhile, the Australian navy ship Ocean Shield is waiting for repairs to be done to the submersible sonar Bluefin 21 before it can resume the search in the southern Indian Ocean. The Joint Agency Coordination Centre running the Indian Ocean search had no comment about the new book.


Source : Sapa-dpa /aw
Date : 18 May 2014 06:48
 
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