Mystery shrouds the fate of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which has disappeared with 239 passengers and crew en route to Beijing. There have been reports that debris was found off the Vietnamese island of Tho Chu but these have not been confirmed.
Who was on board?
There were 227 passengers, including 153 Chinese and 38 Malaysians, according to the manifest. Two were children. All 12 crew members were Malaysian.
Among the Chinese nationals were a delegation of 19 artists who had attended an exhibition in Kuala Lumpur.
Two male passengers were travelling on passports stolen from an Austrian and an Italian in Thailand in 2012 and 2013 respectively,Interpol said in a statement. The two passengers were en route to Europe via Beijing.
A U.S. technology company says 20 of its employees were aboard the Malaysia Airlines plane.
When was the last contact made?
Flight MH370 departed from Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 00:41 on Saturday (16:41 GMT Friday), and was due to arrive in Beijing at 06:30. Air traffic controllers lost contact at 01:30.
At a time as yet undisclosed, a relative reportedly managed to call one of the passengers, who was carrying a Singapore phone. Malaysia Airlines has repeatedly tried to call the same number but no ringtone has been heard.
Where did the jet disappear?
It was flying over the South China Sea, south of Vietnam's Ca Mau peninsula. The normal route would have taken it over Cambodia and Vietnam before entering Chinese airspace.
No distress signal or message was sent but it is believed the plane attempted to turn back from its scheduled path, perhaps towards Kuala Lumpur Airport.
Have any traces of the plane been found?
Both waters to the east of Malaysia, in the South China Sea, and in the Straits of Malacca, along Malaysia's west coast, are being searched.
No wreckage has been confirmed despite an earlier indication that potential debris from an aircraft had been seen about 50 miles [80km] to the south-west of Tho Chu Island.
Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, head of Malaysia's Department of Civil Aviation, said on Monday: "Unfortunately, ladies and gentleman, we have not found anything that appears to be objects from the aircraft, let alone the aircraft itself."
What are the theories for a crash?
Common factors in plane crashes are poor weather, pilot error and airworthiness.
Weather conditions on this flight are said to have been good and the pilot, 53, who had more than 18,000 flying hours behind him, had been employed by the airline since 1981.
Malaysia Airlines has a good safety record and the jet, a Boeing 777-200ER, is said to be one of the safest because of its modern technology. One of the plane's wingtips was clipped in an incident while taxiing in 2012 but it was repaired and certified as safe.
David Learmount, Flight Global's operations and safety editor, told Journalists: "Today's aeroplanes are incredibly reliable and you do not get some sudden structural failure in flight. It just doesn't happen. It just won't happen."
Could it have been a terrorist attack?
The airline says it is not ruling out any theory while officials in the US, which is sending FBI investigators, say there is no evidence of such an attack yet.
The presence of two passengers with stolen passports is a breach of security, but could relate to illegal migration. "Quite a few people that do fly, especially in that part of the world, with improper identification or false identification," former head of the US air security agency John Magaw told journalists.
Claims have emerged from Malaysia that the two men were in fact Iranians who were heading to Europe to seek asylum.
When an Air India plane crashed in Mangalore in 2010 en route from Dubai, with the loss of 158 lives, as many as 10 fraudulent passports were recovered.
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 under water. 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.
Who are involved in the rescue mission?
Some 40 ships and 34 aircraft from nine different nations are combing the sea to the east and west of the Malaysian mainland.
The search teams have hundreds of square miles to cover and little information to go on apart from the last known location of the Boeing 777 passenger jet.
No confirmed wreckage has been found and tests showed that two oil slicks in the South China Sea were not related to the aircraft, officials said.
Latest Update:
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was hundreds of miles off course, traveling in the opposite direction from its original destination and had stopped sending identifying transponder codes before it disappeared, a senior Malaysian air force official told Journalists on Tuesday.
If correct, these are ominous signs that could call into question whether someone in the cockpit might have deliberately steered the plane away from its intended destination, a former U.S. aviation investigator said.
"This kind of deviation in course is simply inexplicable," said Peter Goelz, former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board.
However, veteran pilot Kit Darby, president of Aviation Information Resources, told newsmen that mechanical problems could still explain everything: A power failure would have turned off the main transponder and its backup, he said.
CNN law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes said the news "still leaves mechanical, terrorism (and) other issues as much in the air as they were before."
According to the Malaysian Air Force official, who declined to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media, the plane's transponder apparently stopped working at about the time flight controllers lost contact with it, near the coast of Vietnam. A transponder is an electrical instrument in commercial airline cockpits that continuously transmits information such as altitude, location, direction and speed.
The Malaysian Air Force lost track of the plane over Pulau Perak, a tiny island in the Strait of Malacca many hundreds of miles from the usual flight path for aircraft traveling between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, the official said.
If the data cited by the source is correct, the aircraft was flying away from Beijing and on the opposite side of the Malay Peninsula from its scheduled route.
Earlier, the head of the international police organization Interpol said that his agency increasingly believed the incident was not related to terrorism.
"The more information we get, the more we're inclined to conclude that it was not a terrorist incident," Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said at a news conference in Lyon, France.
Similar Disappearance Has Occured, Says Expert
The missing Malaysian airline with 239 people on board has drown much concern as aviation experts recalls similar major incident to the mysterious disappearance of the Airlines jetliner over the weekend.
Air France Flight 447 was flying over a large body of deep water when it suddenly went missing in 2009. Search-and-rescue operations found debris and some of the bodies in the weeks following the crash, but it took almost two years to find the main wreckage and the black boxes, deep in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
The final report into the disaster, which killed all 288 people on board, said the flight from Brazil to Paris was doomed by a combination of ice buildup, mechanical failure and pilot error. The plane had run into bad thunderstorms and stalled, and the pilots were insufficiently trained to fly manually during a high-altitude stall.
According to the report, the pilots were "completely surprised" by the technical problems, and appeared unaware they were going to crash until the final few seconds.
SIMILARITIES
Timing: The planes vanished from radar and were still missing three days after disappearance.
Circumstances: Both planes Went missing over large bodies of water.
Cruising Altitude: Both planes were at a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, where aviation experts have said that catastrophic accidents are rare.
Planes: Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777-200 and Air France Airbus A330 have good safety records.
Warnings: No emergency signals or distress messages were received, indicating a catastrophic failure during flight.
DIFFERENCES
Weather: No storms were reported in flight MH370’s path on Saturday.
Location: The Air France jet crashed farther away from land. The Malaysian Airlines jet appears to have disappeared closer to land.
Warning: Radar indicates the Malaysian Airlines flight may have turned back from its scheduled route to Beijing before disappearing. That indicates the crew had an indication of trouble.
Other theories: The news that some of the Kuala Lumpur-to-Beijing passengers were travelling on false passports has raised the suspicion of terrorism. Investigators are also looking at the possibility that the plane disintegrated in mid-flight.
Sources: BBC/CNN/Aljazeera/Wall Street Journal/ Business Insider
No comments:
Post a Comment