The exhaustive search operation for
the MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean has resumed today in much clearer
weather, with air teams joined by both military and commercial ships as
officials scramble to cover the massive 600,000 square-kilometre search
area.
The first of Australia's Orion P3 aircraft has completed its two-hour sweep of the search area, some 2,500 kilometres (1,500 miles) south-west of Perth after American satellite imagery picked up two large objects – one up to 24 metres (78ft) in length.
Officials are preparing for the worst possible news, with several aviation experts now claiming the remote location of the debris would almost-certainly point to deliberate cockpit intervention, either by the pilots, the crew or passengers.
China stepped up its assistance in the search on Friday, sending three warships to join the expanding fleet. A fourth Chinese vessel, an icebreaker currently docked at Perth, may also join the search.
Neil Hansford, chairman of Strategic Aviation Solutions, told Network 10 this morning that he was convinced that what had happened to MH370 wasn't an accident, and said the evidence pointed to the plane's crew being involved.
'I think it's been put there either by one of the crew or both, and they've picked an area where the aircraft won't be found,' Mr Hansford said.
'This was a crew-related incident. It wasn't a catastrophic explosion. It wasn't hit by military ordnance.
'[The debris is] in about 10,000ft of water. In that part of the world there's currents.
'Whether it's terrorism or activism, it's certainly something that has been well structured and well planned.'
Mr Hansford pointed to the amount of fuel likely on board the Boeing 777-200, at nearly full capacity with 31,000 gallons instead of the 45 per cent loading required to pilot a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, as being a strong indicator that MH370's disappearance was not accidental.
He added that given the location of the debris, the plane very well could have headed for mainland Australia, blaming the co-ordination effort in Malaysia for the slow and frustrating search.
'This aircraft has been positioned to where it is; it could as easily, more frighteningly, have been positioned to the centre of Australia,' Mr Hansford said.
'[Malaysian investigators] have never had control of this incident from the time the passenger manifest was never checked against the stolen passport.
'We've only seriously been involved for really five for six days. We were all out looking in the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand until they realised they didn't have a clue.'
It comes as the team which led the exhaustive operation to recover Air France flight 447, after it crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, warned that it might take years to recover MH370's black box - if it can be recovered at all.
Rémi Jouty - head of the Office of Investigation and Analysis, France’s official air crash investigation centre, warned the mystery of what happened on doomed flight MH370 might never be unlocked.
‘The only thing I can say is it will be most difficult and the recovery is not guaranteed,’ Remi Jouty, told the Financial Times.
The French bureau has dispatched a three-strong team of investigators to Malaysia to assist local authorities in retrieving the plane's black box recorder, which records sound along with logging the flight's data.
The search area for MH370 will be substantially larger than that of France Air flight 447, given the debris may have been drifting for days and there’s no way of knowing whether the plane’s black boxes are anywhere near the rest of the wreckage.
This is where the US Navy Poseidon aircraft, which will fly on its second sortie to the remote target zone from 4pm Perth time on Friday, may be particularly useful to the search.
The Poseidon will make low swoops of the ocean and release buoys to measure the rate of ocean drift since the two objects hoped to be part of MH370 were spotted on satellite images yesterday at 11am (3am GMT).
A statement from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said four planes had searched an area of 8,800 square miles (23,000 square kilometres) about 1,550 miles (2,500m) south-west of Perth without success.
The area is about halfway between Australia and desolate islands off the Antarctic – one of the most remote locations on the planet
The difficult search operation, led by military aircraft from Australia, New Zealand and the US, was hampered by poor visibility, challenging weather conditions and its proximity from land.
New Zealand Air Commodore Mike Yardley reported his search officers were 'very deflated' after a Royal New Zealand Air Force team returned from its first run to the remote zone. without a sighting.
'They are hugely committed to the cause,' Air Commodore Yardley said, according to the New Zealand Herald.
'Once you've flown on these P3 Orions for 20 years you take it very personally that you're trying to find this aircraft to help those people who are left behind.
'You feel that it's your responsibility, you're doing it to help people. It's not a job, it goes past a job when you're doing search and rescue.'
It
takes an Australian search plane, the RAAF Aurion P3, four hours to
arrive at the debris search area from Pearce air base, and the aircraft
can only spend two hours scouring the area before needing to return to
Perth.
Mr Hansford suggests the pilots on MH370 may have used this knowledge to their advantage and dropped the plane in a part of the ocean it would never be found.
'If I was trying to lose an aircraft, and make sure there was no evidence... you'd certainly be looking to put the aircraft it in very, very deep water a long way from land,' he said.
'In the end if it is in the area it's only going to be found by sonar and other maritime assets, not by aircraft assets.
'There's unlikely to be any naval ships in the area [for days]. You've almost been able to put it (MH370) in with little chance of anything floating up too quickly to be able to isolate the wreck.'
In what has been described as the 'best lead' yet, air search teams called off the hunt at around 9pm Malaysian time (1pm GMT) after a ten-hour operation in treacherous conditions spanning an area the size of the English Channel failed to locate any wreckage.
Commercial pilot Robert Mark, who is editor of Aviation International News Safety magazine, said the site of the new search area off the coast of Perth in relation to the plane's last-known location reduced the likelihood that it was hijacked.
In the absence of any other evidence that suggested it may have deviated from its path in between those two points, he said it adds strength to the theory that an on-board emergency may have knocked out the crew, leaving it to fly on auto-pilot until running out of fuel.
What lends further weight to this idea is the fact the new search is being conducted in one of the remotest parts of the planet which offers few, if any, terror targets or landing areas.
Mr Mark told MailOnline: 'What I think is
interesting is that if you look at where the plane was last seen on
radar and where the debris has been found, it is almost a straight line.
'I would say it means that once the aircraft turned, it didn't change course. A mechanical fault or emergency seems more plausible to me.'
He said the plane could conceivably have flown on auto-pilot for another five to six hours, possibly a maximum of seven, from its last-known location off the west coast of Malaysia before running out of fuel.
The first of Australia's Orion P3 aircraft has completed its two-hour sweep of the search area, some 2,500 kilometres (1,500 miles) south-west of Perth after American satellite imagery picked up two large objects – one up to 24 metres (78ft) in length.
Officials are preparing for the worst possible news, with several aviation experts now claiming the remote location of the debris would almost-certainly point to deliberate cockpit intervention, either by the pilots, the crew or passengers.
A Royal Australian Air Force P3 Orion takes off
from Pearce air base to recommence a search for possible debris
belonging to missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. Two large objects
were spotted on satellite in the southern Indian Ocean, some 2,500km off
the coast of Perth
Two pieces of wreckage that are possibly from
the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 - one estimated to be 78ft in
size - have been found to the west of Australia, it was announced today.
Pictured: Satellite pictures released by the Australian Maritime Safety
Authority of the object thought to be related to the search for MH370
Australian Maritime Safety Authority Emergency
Response Division General Manager John Young describes to media the
satellite imagery of two objects possibly related to the search for
Malaysian Airlines flight MH370
The
Orion reported the fierce weather conditions which hampered Thursday's
10-hour search had vastly improved Friday, though some low cloud and
rain would still pose a challenge for the growing search party that now
includes 29 planes, 21 ships and six helicopters.China stepped up its assistance in the search on Friday, sending three warships to join the expanding fleet. A fourth Chinese vessel, an icebreaker currently docked at Perth, may also join the search.
Neil Hansford, chairman of Strategic Aviation Solutions, told Network 10 this morning that he was convinced that what had happened to MH370 wasn't an accident, and said the evidence pointed to the plane's crew being involved.
'I think it's been put there either by one of the crew or both, and they've picked an area where the aircraft won't be found,' Mr Hansford said.
'This was a crew-related incident. It wasn't a catastrophic explosion. It wasn't hit by military ordnance.
'[The debris is] in about 10,000ft of water. In that part of the world there's currents.
Aviation expert Neil Hansford says he's
confident that, whether it's an act of terrorism or activism, the
disappearance of MH370 was well planned
'Whether it's terrorism or activism, it's certainly something that has been well structured and well planned.'
Mr Hansford pointed to the amount of fuel likely on board the Boeing 777-200, at nearly full capacity with 31,000 gallons instead of the 45 per cent loading required to pilot a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, as being a strong indicator that MH370's disappearance was not accidental.
He added that given the location of the debris, the plane very well could have headed for mainland Australia, blaming the co-ordination effort in Malaysia for the slow and frustrating search.
'This aircraft has been positioned to where it is; it could as easily, more frighteningly, have been positioned to the centre of Australia,' Mr Hansford said.
'[Malaysian investigators] have never had control of this incident from the time the passenger manifest was never checked against the stolen passport.
'We've only seriously been involved for really five for six days. We were all out looking in the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand until they realised they didn't have a clue.'
The search is focused some 2,500km off
Australia's west coast, where satellite images revealed two pieces of
debris floating in the open ocean
An RAAF AP-3C Orion is one of the Australian aircraft scouring the new search zone in the southern Indian Ocean
It comes as the team which led the exhaustive operation to recover Air France flight 447, after it crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, warned that it might take years to recover MH370's black box - if it can be recovered at all.
Rémi Jouty - head of the Office of Investigation and Analysis, France’s official air crash investigation centre, warned the mystery of what happened on doomed flight MH370 might never be unlocked.
‘The only thing I can say is it will be most difficult and the recovery is not guaranteed,’ Remi Jouty, told the Financial Times.
The French bureau has dispatched a three-strong team of investigators to Malaysia to assist local authorities in retrieving the plane's black box recorder, which records sound along with logging the flight's data.
The search area for MH370 will be substantially larger than that of France Air flight 447, given the debris may have been drifting for days and there’s no way of knowing whether the plane’s black boxes are anywhere near the rest of the wreckage.
Search teams working to recover the debris from the 2009 Air France crash, which plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean
This is where the US Navy Poseidon aircraft, which will fly on its second sortie to the remote target zone from 4pm Perth time on Friday, may be particularly useful to the search.
The Poseidon will make low swoops of the ocean and release buoys to measure the rate of ocean drift since the two objects hoped to be part of MH370 were spotted on satellite images yesterday at 11am (3am GMT).
A statement from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said four planes had searched an area of 8,800 square miles (23,000 square kilometres) about 1,550 miles (2,500m) south-west of Perth without success.
The area is about halfway between Australia and desolate islands off the Antarctic – one of the most remote locations on the planet
The difficult search operation, led by military aircraft from Australia, New Zealand and the US, was hampered by poor visibility, challenging weather conditions and its proximity from land.
New Zealand Air Commodore Mike Yardley reported his search officers were 'very deflated' after a Royal New Zealand Air Force team returned from its first run to the remote zone. without a sighting.
'They are hugely committed to the cause,' Air Commodore Yardley said, according to the New Zealand Herald.
'Once you've flown on these P3 Orions for 20 years you take it very personally that you're trying to find this aircraft to help those people who are left behind.
'You feel that it's your responsibility, you're doing it to help people. It's not a job, it goes past a job when you're doing search and rescue.'
The search has now resumed for missing flight
MH370 2,500kms off the coast of Australia, with sophisticated RAAF
Orion P3 aircraft spearheading the Australia-led mission
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced
in Parliament on Thursday that new and credible information had come to
light in the search for MH370
Mr Hansford suggests the pilots on MH370 may have used this knowledge to their advantage and dropped the plane in a part of the ocean it would never be found.
'If I was trying to lose an aircraft, and make sure there was no evidence... you'd certainly be looking to put the aircraft it in very, very deep water a long way from land,' he said.
'In the end if it is in the area it's only going to be found by sonar and other maritime assets, not by aircraft assets.
'There's unlikely to be any naval ships in the area [for days]. You've almost been able to put it (MH370) in with little chance of anything floating up too quickly to be able to isolate the wreck.'
Vast: This Google Earth map shows just how remote the search area is in the southern Indian Ocean
Aviation
experts are still trying to unravel the enduring mystery of flight
MH370 after debris thought to belong to the missing plane was spotted in
the Indian Ocean.In what has been described as the 'best lead' yet, air search teams called off the hunt at around 9pm Malaysian time (1pm GMT) after a ten-hour operation in treacherous conditions spanning an area the size of the English Channel failed to locate any wreckage.
Commercial pilot Robert Mark, who is editor of Aviation International News Safety magazine, said the site of the new search area off the coast of Perth in relation to the plane's last-known location reduced the likelihood that it was hijacked.
In the absence of any other evidence that suggested it may have deviated from its path in between those two points, he said it adds strength to the theory that an on-board emergency may have knocked out the crew, leaving it to fly on auto-pilot until running out of fuel.
What lends further weight to this idea is the fact the new search is being conducted in one of the remotest parts of the planet which offers few, if any, terror targets or landing areas.
Robert Mark, editor of Aviation International
News Safety magazine, says the location of the debris would add strength
to the theory that an emergency may have knocked out the crew, leaving
it to fly on auto-pilot
'I would say it means that once the aircraft turned, it didn't change course. A mechanical fault or emergency seems more plausible to me.'
He said the plane could conceivably have flown on auto-pilot for another five to six hours, possibly a maximum of seven, from its last-known location off the west coast of Malaysia before running out of fuel.
Post a Comment
One way to contribute to the development of this website is by always dropping your comment whenever you read a post.
Don't leave without dropping yours