The plane went missing almost a year ago on March 8th 2014, but after months of searching and coming up with nothing, the Malaysia government issued a formal declaration stating that the passengers on MH370 is presumed dead.
The formal declaration, read Thursday by civil aviation director Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, will allow the families of those presumed dead to continue the compensation process with the airline or with insurers.
“It is therefore, with the heaviest heart and deepest sorrow that, on behalf of the Government of Malaysia, we officially declare Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 an accident in accordance with the Standards of Annexes 12 and 13 to the Chicago Convention and that all 239 of the passengers and crew on board MH370 are presumed to have lost their lives,” Azharuddin said.
The Australian government has been forced into an embarrassing admission that equipment used in the mammoth hunt for the wreckage of flight MH370 has been plagued by technical defects.
The revelation comes 68 days after the Boeing 777 disappeared from tracking systems, costing authorities around the world hundreds of millions of dollars.
In a statement released on Thursday by the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, a federal government initiative set up specifically for the MH370 search, it was announced that some of the tracking gear on defence ship ADV Ocean Shield was flawed.
It comes as the Australian government dedicated $89.9 million in the 2014 budget to continue the search for MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean. The Government estimates that it will have spent $10million already by June 30 this year, according to Australian Aviation.
I’m not kidding. CNN is still out there looking for the missing Malaysia plane, and on May 1st, almost two months since the plane went missing, CNN is spending an unimaginable amount of time reporting on… nothing.
Stephen Colbert took on the network and does a fairly accurate depiction of what CNN does on a regular basis these days!
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.
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.
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