An Australian woman whose brother was killed when the Malaysian Airlines jetliner vanished over the Indian Ocean in March also lost her stepdaughter to the plane that was downed over Ukraine, it has emerged.
The Associated Press reported that Kaylene Mann’s brother Rod Burrows and sister-in-law Mary Burrows were on board Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 when it vanished in March. Mann found out Friday that her stepdaughter, Maree Rizk, was killed along with 297 others on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
“It’s just brought everyone, everything back,” said Greg Burrows, Mann’s brother. “It’s just … ripped our guts again.”
In what is seen as an admission that MH370 will never be found, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said today that the surface search was being scaled back because it is ‘highly unlikely’ clues will be found on the surface of the Indian Ocean
Instead, the search will enter a new phase with the focus on the ocean floor – despite there being no ‘pings’ from what was earlier hoped were the aircraft’s black boxes.
Mr Abbott said that as the aircraft, which had 239 people on board, has been missing for 52 days, if there had been any debris from the aircraft it would have now sunk.
‘By this stage, 52 days into the search, most material would have become waterlogged and sunk’ said Mr Abbott.
He paid tribute to the ‘tremendous work’ of air crews from eight nations who have contributed to the search.
His words were seen as virtually admitting that the search had little prospect of finding the aircraft, particularly as a concentrated hunt by the undersea search vehicle Bluefin-21 in a ‘likely area’ had found nothing.
This could be the best news so far in the month long search for the missing Malaysia Airline. A Chinese vessel is reporting that it is picking up a sound deep in the Indian Ocean, consistent with the ping of a black box.
“I have been advised that a series of sounds have been detected by a Chinese ship in the search area,” Angus Houston, the chief coordinator of Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre, said in a prepared statement.
“The characteristics reported are consistent with the aircraft black box,” he said, adding that a number of white objects were sited about 56 miles (90 kilometers) away.
“However, there is no confirmation at this stage that the signals and the objects are related to the missing aircraft,” the retired air chief marshal said.
Neither the Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s Rescue Coordination Centre (RCC) nor the Australian Transport Safety Bureau can verify any connection to the missing aircraft, the statement said.
The captain of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 received a two-minute call shortly before take-off from a mystery woman using a mobile phone number obtained under a false identity.
It was one of the last calls made to or from the mobile of Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah in the hours before his Boeing 777 left Kuala Lumpur 16 days ago.
Investigators are treating it as potentially significant because anyone buying a pay-as-you-go SIM card in Malaysia has to fill out a form giving their identity card or passport number.
Family man: Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah with his wife Faizah Khan and two of their three children
Introduced as an anti-terrorism measure following 9/11, this ensures that every number is registered to a traceable person.
But in this case police traced the number to a shop selling SIM cards in Kuala Lumpur.
They found that it had been bought ‘very recently’ by someone who gave a woman’s name – but was using a false identity.
The discovery raises fears of a possible link between Captain Zaharie, 53, and terror groups whose members routinely use untraceable SIM cards.
Everyone else who spoke to the pilot on his phone in the hours before the flight took off has already been interviewed.
KUALA LUMPUR – Malaysia Airlines (MAS) has informed families of passengers on board missing flight MH370 that the plane is assumed to have crashed with no survivors.
The airline said this in a message to the families on Monday night, ahead of a press conference by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak.
“It is with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean,” Mr Najib told a press briefing shortly after the news broke.
He said based on new analysis, it is concluded that MH370 flew along the southern corridor, last position in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
The area is in a remote location, far from any land sites, he added.
He said MAS has briefed the families and Malaysia will hold another press conference on Tuesday.
Perhaps it’s just me, but this time of year seems to be the boring period between the fun of a nasty winter and the beginning of a well-earned spring. And I’m not just talking about the weather. American politics is on hiatus at this moment because it’s too early to get too riled up by the prospect of electing another do-nothing Congress, and since the one we have now is essentially done for the year, what else is there to talk about? The Affordable Care Act? Boring. Marriage equality? Done. The lost Malaysian plane? Probably found and the story will make a great movie one summer. Ukraine? Potentially deadly and maybe the foremost threat to world peace presently in the news.
This is not to say that these stories are not important because they are, but there doesn’t seem to be any movement or progress or yes-we-canism alive at the moment. The Republicans are still trying to figure out what it believes in and how it can appeal to groups that have shunned its message so far. The House will most likely remain in their hands, which guarantees us another two years of bills that will not become law until a GOP president is elected (shudder). And the Senate will probably also go red, but I’ve already treated that scenario.
I am not, though, down in the dumps. The Supreme Court is hearing arguments about whether religious companies can stop providing certain forms of birth control the ACA requires because it would be a violation of their religious rights. I’m thinking that Justice Roberts is aching to get back on the conservative horse he dismounted two years ago in the health care law case, but Justice Kennedy might be the wild card in this one. It is certain that Justice Scalia will lament the end of the republic if he’s on the losing side.
And the health care law will survive because about six million people will have signed up for insurance through the exchanges or Medicaid and throwing them off the rolls is just too mean for even today’s Republican Party. The law needs fixing and that’s where the focus is going to be in 2014 and 2016 and 2018 as companies and states decide that insurance is too expensive and want employees to sign up for the policies on the website. This will be revolutionary and the effect will be profound. I’m not surprised that neither party is really talking about this out loud, but it’s almost certain to come to pass sometime within the next five years.
As for Vlad the Invader, I’m not ruling out a bit of shooting in Ukraine or areas local to it. It will depend on whether he heeds the economic warnings his aides are no doubt giving him. My sense is that Putin will ask for something big in return, negotiate, and take something smaller that gives him a say in Ukraine, but not the whole country. In the end, Ukraine will make a deal with the EU, but will always need to watch its eastern back.
All of this is in the future, and you can feel free to pay attention to it since you’re obviously not winning $1 billion dollars on March Madness because nobody has a perfect bracket left. The best we can hope for is common sense and pride in a job well done. Some things never change.
Notice the infamous flight simulator in the background. Authorities have discovered that a month before Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah piloted the missing MH370 flight from Malaysia, he deleted a log from the simulator.
Eleven days now into this drama, and there’s s6ill no word on what happened to the plane and its passengers.
With the whole world transfixed on what’s happening in Malaysia with the missing MH370 and its passengers, everyone has taken to the internet, learning about latitude and longitude and the three important metrics needed to correctly determine the Global Positioning of any ‘receiver’ on earth.
Enter Courtney Love.
Love has done her part to help out and has somehow figured out where the missing plane went down. She took to Twitter and Facebook to share her findings. “I’m no expert,” Love declares, “but up close this does look like a plane and an oil slick.”
I’m no expert but up close this does look like a plane and an oil slick. http://t.co/AR005kNTYR prayers go out to the families #MH370
The link in her tweet lead to an ocean showing three red arrows pointing to what Courtney said was oil and another red arrow in the bottom saying “Plane?”. She added her initials.
The items in the picture could be reflections of sunlight on the water’s surface or debris of some sort. Love however, thinks this could be more, like a plane or more specifically, the missing MH370.
You can’t blame her for trying. But I agree with the top commenter on her Facebook page. After seeing Love’s discovery, the commenter wrote:
“What are the odds though that it would land right next to a red sign saying ‘plane’?
The investigation is looking at the pilot off the missing Malaysia airplane and the political beliefs he held. And the strange move his wife and kids made a day before the Malaysia flight took off.
An image has emerged of the pilot of the missing Malaysia Airlines jet wearing a T-shirt with a ‘Democracy is Dead’ slogan as it has been revealed he could have hijacked the plane in an anti-government protest.
Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, a father-of-three, was said to be a ‘fanatical’ supporter of the country’s opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim – jailed for homosexuality just hours before the jet disappeared.
It has also been revealed that the pilot’s wife and three children moved out of the family home the day before the plane went missing.
It comes as FBI investigators say the disappearance of MH370 may have been ‘an act of piracy’ and the possibility that hundreds of passengers are being held at an unknown location has not been ruled out.
Officials also revealed that it is possible the aircraft could have landed and transmitted a satellite signal from the ground. If the plane was intact and had enough electrical power in reserve, it would be able to send out a radar ‘ping’.
A missing Malaysian airliner was apparently deliberately diverted and flown for hours after vanishing from radar, Prime Minister Najib Razak said Saturday, stopping short of confirming a hijack but taking the “excruciating” jet drama into uncharted new territory.
Najib said investigators believed “with a high degree of certainty” that systems relaying Malaysia Airlines flight 370’s location to air traffic control were manually switched off before the jet veered westward in a fashion “consistent with deliberate action”.
But a grave-looking Najib told a press conference watched around the globe that he could not confirm whether the plane had been forcibly taken over.
“Despite media reports that the plane was hijacked, I wish to be very clear: we are still investigating all possibilities as to what caused MH370 to deviate from its original flight path,” he said.
He called it an “excruciating time for the families of those on board.”
The new information appeared to cast aside a host of theories on the plane’s disappearance, which has transfixed the world and left frustrated families of the 239 passengers and crew baying for scarce information.
Stunning new information is being reported by Andy Pasztor at the Wall Street Journal: the Boeing engines on Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 which went missing on Saturday automatically downloaded information several hours after the plane was last seen on radar, indicating that it flew on to an unknown location.
After flying northeast on its scheduled path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, the aircraft’s transponders stopped emitting signals about an hour into the flight, at 1:30 am, when the plane was still south of Vietnam. According to a Malaysian air force official, the plane then made a turn to the west and headed back over the Malaysian peninsula and over the Strait of Malacca. At that point, Malaysian radar lost sight of the plane at around 2:40 am.
But now, American investigators and national security officials are saying that several hours after that last radar contact, the airplane’s Boeing engines automatically downloaded information as part of their normal operation, and that signal was picked up. Writes Pasztor:
The engines’ onboard monitoring system is provided by their manufacturer, Rolls-Royce, and it periodically sends bursts of data about engine health, operations and aircraft movements to facilities on the ground.
Rolls-Royce couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
As part of its maintenance agreements, Malaysia Airlines transmits its engine data live to Rolls-Royce for analysis. The system compiles data from inside the 777′s two Trent 800 engines and transmits snapshots of performance, as well as the altitude and speed of the jet.
The engines communicate with the ground every half hour, and now U.S. investigators believe the engines indicated the plane may have been flying up to five hours after taking off from Malaysia.
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