Military radar-tracking evidence suggests the Malaysia Airlines jetliner missing for nearly a week was deliberately flown across the Malay peninsula towards the Andaman Islands, sources familiar with the investigation told Reuters on Friday. Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation’s Director General Azharuddin Abdul Rahman briefs reporters on search and recovery efforts within existing and new areas for missing Malaysia Airlines plane. Two sources said an unidentified aircraft that investigators believe was Flight MH370 was following a route between navigational waypoints – indicating it was being flown by someone with aviation training – when it was last plotted on military radar off the country’s northwest coast. The last plot on the military radar’s tracking suggested the plane was flying toward India’s Andaman Islands, a chain of isles between the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal, they said. Waypoints are geographic locations, worked out by calculating longitude and latitude, that help pilots navigate along established air corridors. A third source familiar with the investigation said inquiries were focusing increasingly on the theory that someone who knew how to fly a plane deliberately diverted the flight, with 239 people on board, hundreds of miles off its intended course from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. “What we can say is we are looking at sabotage, with hijack still on the cards,” said that source, a senior Malaysian police official. All three sources declined to be identified because they were not authorised to speak to the media and due to the sensitivity of the investigation.
Kuala Lumpur/Beijing: Multinational search operations for the Malaysian airliner that went missing March 8 continued Monday in the Indian Ocean but there is no trace of the aircraft.
Australian Defence Minister David Johnston said his country would do what it could to assist Malaysia to locate flight MH370 in whatever state it was in, Xinhua reported.
“We are now changing our focus to the central eastern Indian Ocean to try to solve this mystery,” he said.
Australia has provided two RAAF P-3C Orion aircraft to assist the Malaysian government in its search since March 9.
Malaysia Airlines MH370 with 239 passengers and crew on board vanished mysteriously about an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur early March 8.
The Boeing 777-200ER was initially presumed to have crashed off the Vietnamese coast in the South China Sea.
The plane was due to land in Beijing at 6.30 a.m. the same day. The 227 passengers included five Indians, 154 Chinese and 38 Malaysians.
Contact with the plane was lost along with its radar signal at 1.40 a.m. March 8 when it was flying over the air traffic control area of Ho Chi Minh City.
Johnston confirmed Australian aircraft were being directed by the Royal Malaysian Air Force commander for the western region search area and information on the search would be directed to the Malaysian authorities.
One RAAF P-3C Orion started searching in the Indian Ocean to the north and west of the Cocos Islands and the other would continue to search west of Malaysia.
France, which experienced its own search for a missing plane when an Air France flight disappeared off the coast of Brazil in 2009, has also confirmed its assistance, with the assignment of four experts.
India has supported search operations in the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal but this was suspended Sunday at the request of Kuala Lumpur.
The Indian defence ministry said the search would remain suspended until notice by Malaysia on which areas to search.
Malaysian authorities confirmed the pilot of the aircraft spoke to air traffic control after a signaling system was disabled on the jet, without referring to any trouble.
This comes as speculation grows about possible pilot complicity and a possible hijacking.
Malaysian Prime Minister Razak Sunday hinted at foul play, saying someone probably deliberately diverted the plane from its flight path from Kuala Lampur to Beijing.
“ALL right, good night,” were the last words heard by air-traffic controllers from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 on March 8th. That makes them a rarity in the baffling story of the disappearance of a Boeing 777 carrying 239 passengers and crew from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing: an undisputed fact. In the days following, the Malaysian government provided information only in dribs and drabs, much of it confusing, even contradictory.
It seemed possible that the agonising wait for the passengers’ families might be nearing an end. On March 20th Australia’s prime minister, Tony Abbott, told parliament that satellite pictures showed debris in the southern Indian Ocean, some 2,500km southwest of Perth, in an area where the 777 might plausibly have crashed. At 20 metres or so, one object seemed the size of a wing or tail fin. Aircraft and ships were headed to the area to investigate further. If the plane’s wreckage is found, and especially if its “black box” flight recorder can be recovered, what happened to flight 370 should become clearer. What is already beyond doubt is that air-traffic communication protocols need to be updated to ensure that, however rare, such a disappearance cannot be repeated. The distressed relatives of the mostly Chinese passengers are not alone in their bewilderment that, in a world of pervasive electronic surveillance, a 200-tonne passenger plane can vanish. With little concrete information, speculation has run wild. Commentators of varying degrees of authority have attempted to fill the blank canvas with theories ranging from an accident to suicidal tendencies on the flight deck, and conspiracies of a complexity that would seem farfetched in a disaster film.
Hijacking seems unlikely: flight-deck doors are locked and sturdy. And investigations into the backgrounds of the crew and passengers have so far turned up no plausible motive. The first credible theory was that the plane had suffered a catastrophic mechanical failure and crashed, probably at sea. But a search along its flight path failed to turn up any sign of wreckage.
Then news emerged that Malaysian military radar had tracked the plane apparently turning west off its route shortly after the final radio message. Malaysian authorities added that its ACARS, an on-board system which transmits intermittent data about the performance of engines and other parts, appeared to have stopped functioning just before that, and that the transponder, another device that communicates a plane’s position to air-traffic control radars, appeared to have been switched off around the time of the turn. The fact that the pilots had not reported the switch-off led the authorities to infer foul play. On March 15th the Malaysian prime minister blamed “deliberate action”, with suspicion falling on the pilot or co-pilot. That the plane vanished between signing off with Malaysian air-traffic controllers and establishing contact with Vietnamese ones, and apparently continued flying for several hours under the control of a skilled aviator, lent credence to the assertion.
But this version of events was later revised by the Malaysian authorities. The ACARS, which sends messages intermittently, might have ceased functioning at exactly the same time as the transponder, it turned out. This makes the notion of an emergency more likely, perhaps a fire that incapacitated crew and passengers, leaving the plane to fly on ungoverned. The risk of an electrical fire is one reason why pilots are able to switch off on-board equipment, including that responsible for communications. But many are now calling for an automatic alert to be sent in such circumstances, so that ground authorities know that they should start tracking the plane with conventional radar.
The ACARS has at least provided information about the jet’s continued path, albeit wildly imprecise. Though it stopped transmitting data it continued to “ping” (send out a signal with no information other than that it was still operating) for six hours. That is about how long the plane’s fuel tanks would have taken to empty. But the pings were only picked up by one satellite, making triangulation to establish the plane’s path during that time impossible.
Malaysian military radar apparently lost contact with the plane as it flew over the Indian Ocean. (According to reports on March 19th, Thai military radar may also have tracked it turning off course.) That suggests it is somewhere on an arc hundreds of miles wide running from Kazakhstan almost to Antarctica (see map). Planes and ships from 26 countries have now joined the hunt. The northern part seems less plausible: it approaches land and passes through several countries with military radar primed to look for unidentified aircraft. But to the south, where the search is now focused, there is little coverage.
The information age is taking to the skies only slowly. Planes far out at sea keep in touch using VHF radio, and the newer ones send ACARS data continuously via satellite. Many are also equipped with ADS-B, another system that uses satellites and GPS to pinpoint their location when they are out of radar range. But flight 370’s ADS-B seems to have stopped transmitting about the time its transponder went off.
Clearer skies
Aircraft-tracking websites use several of these newer sources of data. They will eventually replace radar when their safety and reliability are beyond dispute, a long process in the plodding world of aviation regulation. And the next generation of communications technology, due in around a decade, will relay all flight information at once, acting like a real-time version of the black box that all planes now carry. Adding internet connectivity, as many airlines are doing, will provide another way to get a message to the ground.
Until parts of the plane are examined, how it came to grief will remain unknown. In the meantime, for the grieving relatives, there is little comfort to be taken from the fact that such mysteries should soon be a thing of the past.
While searching for missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean, an Australian airplane crew says they have spotted two objects. The aviators reportedly saw an “orange rectangular object” and a “gray or green circular object.” Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott also told the Malaysian government that a ship, the HMAS Success, is nearby and will be attempting to retrieve the objects either tonight or tomorrow morning. The objects are around 1,550 miles southwest of Perth, Australia.
An Australian plane has spotted an “orange rectangular object” and a “gray or green circular object” while searching for missing Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean, officials said.
Hishamuddin Hussein, Malaysia’s acting transport minister, said that Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott had told his counterpart in Kuala Lumpur that the objects could be retrieved as soon as later Monday by a ship hunting the Boeing 777. It has come to our attention that the browser you are using is either not running javascript or out of date. Please enable javascript and/or update your browser if possible.
Britain’s Inmarsat used a wave phenomenon discovered in the 19th century to analyse the seven pings its satellite picked up from Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 to determine its final destination.
The new findings led Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak to conclude on Monday that the Boeing 777, which disappeared more than two weeks ago, crashed thousands of miles away in the southern Indian Ocean, killing all 239 people on board.
The pings, automatically transmitted every hour from the aircraft after the rest of its communications systems had stopped, indicated it continued flying for hours after it disappeared from its flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
From the time the signals took to reach the satellite and the angle of elevation, Inmarsat was able to provide two arcs, one north and one south that the aircraft could have taken.
Inmarsat’s scientists then interrogated the faint pings using a technique based on the Doppler effect, which describes how a wave changes frequency relative to the movement of an observer, in this case the satellite, a spokesman said.
The Doppler effect is why the sound of a police car siren changes as it approaches and then overtakes an observer.
Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch was also involved in the analysis.
“We then took the data we had from the aircraft and plotted it against the two tracks, and it came out as following the southern track,” Jonathan Sinnatt, head of corporate communications at Inmarsat, said.
The company then compared its theoretical flight path with data received from Boeing 777s it knew had flown the same route, he said, and it matched exactly.
The findings were passed to another satellite company to check, he said, before being released to investigators on Monday.
The paucity of data – only faint pings received by a single satellite every hour or so – meant techniques like triangulation using a number of satellites or GPS (Global Positioning System) could not be used to determine the aircraft’s flight path.
Keeping track
Stephen Wood, CEO of All Source Analysis, a satellite analytic firm, said it seemed that the investigators had narrowed down the area substantially. “But it’s still a big area that they have to search,” he said.
The incident is likely to spur a review of aviation rules, especially related to communications equipment and the ability to turn off a plane’s transponder.
But it is too early to say what that would entail because it remains unknown what made the plane divert from its original course.
“This type of incident will cause everyone who flies airplanes commercially with passengers to be really pressed for a whole new line of ways to keep track of their precious cargo,” said Wood, a former U.S. intelligence officer who headed the analysis unit of DigitalGlobe Inc, a satellite imagery firm, until July 2013.
DigitalGlobe last week provided images that Malaysia’s government called a “credible lead” for the massive trans-national effort to locate the plane.
Shortly after the plane went missing on March 8, Inmarsat used the ping data to plot two broad areas where the plane likely flew after it vanished from radar. One path took it north over central Asia, the other south to the Indian Ocean.
As days passed, more images and data became available, helping focus the search. But piecing that information together is time consuming and requires synchronizing the clocks of the various data systems, sometimes to a fraction of a second, said John Goglia, a former member of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.
“Every time they get additional information from an additional site, they’ve got to go back and revisit what they’ve already done,” Goglia said.
But the efforts are rewarded, he said, when all the sources of the data point to one spot at the same time.
The complexity of the work can take weeks, he added. “As difficult as this one was, I’m amazed that we’ve got some of what we’ve got so quickly,” he said.
Inmarsat said for a relatively low cost its satellites could keep tabs on flights and provide data exchanged between the air and the ground to help organise routes to save time and fuel.
Its systems, which are widely used in shipping, have been embedded into surveillance and communications technologies that allow air traffic controllers to build up a picture of where aircraft are, and to better manage routes.
“If you have that (…) capability you get a preferred routing at the right altitude that makes your aircraft more fuel efficient, but if you don’t have it you have to fly lower and get less priority in air-traffic control,” said David Coiley, Inmarsat’s vice-president for aeronautics.
The system is used in planes in the North Atlantic, Coiley told Reuters earlier this month, but it is not commonly used in all parts of the world.
Sinnatt said on Monday that such a facility would cost about $10 per flight. “It is something we have been pushing the industry to do because it significantly adds to safety,” he said. Other satellite providers are also developing tracking systems.
Authorities consider the doomed Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, missing for more than two weeks, to be lost “beyond any reasonable doubt” somewhere in the Indian Ocean, with all passengers and crew assumed to have perished.
The fate of the missing plane has captivated the world since March 8, when the Beijing-bound Boeing 777-200 vanished mysteriously from civilian radar screens, less than an hour after departing Kuala Lumpur.
Families of the 239 missing passengers received a text message from the airline with the information, according to a CNBC producer who saw a copy of the message.”We deeply regret that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that the MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board have survived,” the message read.
(The airline, facing a backlash over the use of text messaging, later clarified that families had also been contacted in person and by phone, and that texts had only been used to supplement that).
At a press conference on Monday in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak delivered a terse statement. According to new information, the flight was most likely at the bottom of the sea, though the circumstances behind its disappearance were still unclear.
“It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that according to this new data, MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean,” said Razak, delivering the news that grief stricken friends and relatives had been dreading for days. He said a new analysis of satellite data indicates the missing plane was lost in a remote area of the world’s third largest water body, which spans more than 28 million square miles. Play Video Sad ending for Malaysia MH 370 CNBC’s Eunice Yoon reports the family members of Malaysia MH 370 are grieving after the Malaysia Prime Minister says the flight ended in the Southern Indian Ocean.
No confirmed sighting of the plane has been made since its disappearance, though unconfirmed reports have claimed to have spotted debris.
Malaysia Airlines said in a statement to the families that “our prayers go out to all the loved ones of the 226 passengers and of our 13 friends and colleagues at this enormously painful time.”
“We know there are no words that we or anyone else can say which can ease your pain,” the airline said. “The ongoing multinational search operation will continue, as we seek answers to the questions which remain.”
Malaysian flight MH370 tragedy abused by Chinese hackers for Espionage attacks The Mysterious Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, a Boeing 777-200 aircraft that has gone missing by the time it flew from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The Malaysian Prime Minister had also confirmed that the Malaysia Airlines plane had crashed in a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean. Cyber Criminals are known to take advantage of major news stories or events where there is a high level of public interest and now Scammers are also targeting tragedy of MH370 to trap innocent Internet users. Just a few days before we warned you about a Facebook malware campaign claimed that the missing Malaysian Airlines ‘MH370 has been spotted in the Bermuda Triangle’ with its passengers still alive and invites users to click a link to view breaking news video footage. This week, Security researchers at FireEye have revealed about various ongoing spear phishing and malware attacks by some advanced persistent threat (APT) attackers. According to the researchers, the Chinese hacking group called ‘admin@338’, specialized in cyber espionage attacks had sent multiple MH370-themed spear phishing emails to the government officials in Asia-Pacific, with an attachment referring to the missing Malaysian flight MH370. Malaysian flight MH370 tragedy abused by Chinese hackers for Espionage attacks The attachment file was actually merged with Poison Ivy RAT (remote access tool) and WinHTTPHelper malware to hijack the computer systems of government officials. The Chinese Hacking Group also initiated another attack against the US based think tank on 14th March. A malicious attachment was dropped via spear phishing mails, contains “Malaysian Airlines MH370 5m Video.exe”. The malicious attachment pretended to be a Flash video related to the missing plane and attached a ‘Flash’ icon to the executable file. “In addition to the above activity attributed to the Admin@338 group, a number of other malicious documents abusing the missing Flight 370 story were also seen in the wild.” researchers said.
As the search for any wreckage for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight continues, insurance experts have warned of “divergent” compensation claims, with the families of U.S. passengers potentially receiving millions more than their Asian counterparts.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said on Monday that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 – missing for more than two weeks – was lost “beyond any reasonable doubt.” New satellite data indicated the plane was probably at the bottom of the southern Indian Ocean, Razak added.
All 239 of the people on the plane – 227 passengers and 12 crew – are assumed to have died.
The airline must pay the families of those on board around $176,000 under a multilateral treaty known as the Montreal Convention, and said it had already given relatives $5,000 per passenger in compensation.
But relatives can also sue for further damages – and it is these further pay-outs that experts warn could vary widely.
“Compensation for loss of life is vastly different between U.S. passengers and non-U.S. passengers,” Terry Rolfe, leader of the aviation practice at Integro Insurance Brokers, told CNBC.
“If the claim is brought in the U.S. courts, it’s of significantly more value than if it’s brought into any other court. And for U.S. citizens there is no problem getting into the U.S. courts.” Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, CEO of Malaysia Airlines, says the airline’s top priority remains taking care of families and relatives from the missing MH370 jet.
Numerous nationalities
There were passengers of 14 different nationalities on board the flight, Malaysia Airlines said, with the majority – 152 – Chinese. There were also 38 passengers from Malaysia, seven were Indonesian, six were from Australian and three Americans were on board, among other nationalities.
Rolfe estimated that an American court could pay out between $8-10 million on a per-passenger basis, but compensation would be a fraction of this outside of the U.S. In China, she estimated relatives would receive less than $1 million per passenger.
Allianz, the main reinsurer for the missing Malaysia Airlines yet, has already started pay out on claims relating to its disappearance, according to Reuters.
The German insurance giant would not comment on financial details, but The Telegraph reported that some $110 million had been placed in an escrow account and Allianz had agreed to make hardship payments to the relatives of those on the fight.
Where claims can be brought
The Montreal Convention dictates that a claim has to be brought in one of five places: where the carrier is domiciled; its main place of business; where the ticket was bought; the destination of the flight or the primary residence of the plaintiff.
“So for the majority of passengers on this flight, this is either China or Malaysia and these countries have very limited views of damages as opposed to America,” Illinois-based aviation crash attorney Floyd Wisner told CNBC.
“They could evaluate these cases and say a Chinese life is (of) less value than an American life. That’s unfair and that’s going to cause problems.”
Indeed, Wisner said disparate pay-outs could lead to international backlash – especially if the plights of the families continued to be highly publicized.
“I would be raising holy hell if I was a family member of a passenger from one country getting less than someone who happened to be sitting next to me from another country,” he said.
Another option open to the families is a class-action lawsuit, which would allow multiple relatives to sue over the same legal grounds.
In theory, a class action would give the families more clout – because they’re acting together rather than just as one person.
“But where there’s more clients, there’s more money to be made – so a class action lawsuit is of massive financial benefit to the lawyers.”
The airline and insurer will want to avoid this by being pro-active, he added, reassuring relatives that their individual claims will be managed swiftly and sensitively. The theory of someone in the crew taking over the airplane is the most likely explanation for why the Malaysia Airlines flight 370 was diverted from its flight path.
One reason for the high compensation pay-outs in the U.S., according to New York-based Rolfe, was the sheer number of attorneys and litigators here willing to take on the cases.
“There are a significant numbers of lawyers here who take on these airline cases and they know how to use to court system. They’re used to doing it,” she said. “And there isn’t the same level of attorney or litigation or precedence in the rest of the world.”
Same amount per passenger?
Wisner said the airline could pay out between $500-750 million in total compensation to the families, and was likely to have liability insurance to value of around $1 billion.
But he added that the total amount paid out could be reduced by offering one amount per passenger – whatever their nationality.
“They could aim for one standard for all, ” he said. “It would be worth trying to avoid this disparate treatment and pay a flat-sum per passenger.”
Integro Insurance Brokers’ Terry Rolfe, however, said this was unlikely. “The families won’t sign off on it if they know they can get a higher pay-out in the U.S. courts,” she added.
Malaysian flight MH370 tragedy abused by Chinese hackers for Espionage attacks The Mysterious Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, a Boeing 777-200 aircraft that has gone missing by the time it flew from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The Malaysian Prime Minister had also confirmed that the Malaysia Airlines plane had crashed in a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean. Cyber Criminals are known to take advantage of major news stories or events where there is a high level of public interest and now Scammers are also targeting tragedy of MH370 to trap innocent Internet users. Just a few days before we warned you about a Facebook malware campaign claimed that the missing Malaysian Airlines ‘MH370 has been spotted in the Bermuda Triangle’ with its passengers still alive and invites users to click a link to view breaking news video footage. This week, Security researchers at FireEye have revealed about various ongoing spear phishing and malware attacks by some advanced persistent threat (APT) attackers. According to the researchers, the Chinese hacking group called ‘admin@338’, specialized in cyber espionage attacks had sent multiple MH370-themed spear phishing emails to the government officials in Asia-Pacific, with an attachment referring to the missing Malaysian flight MH370. Malaysian flight MH370 tragedy abused by Chinese hackers for Espionage attacks The attachment file was actually merged with Poison Ivy RAT (remote access tool) and WinHTTPHelper malware to hijack the computer systems of government officials. The Chinese Hacking Group also initiated another attack against the US based think tank on 14th March. A malicious attachment was dropped via spear phishing mails, contains “Malaysian Airlines MH370 5m Video.exe”. The malicious attachment pretended to be a Flash video related to the missing plane and attached a ‘Flash’ icon to the executable file. “In addition to the above activity attributed to the Admin@338 group, a number of other malicious documents abusing the missing Flight 370 story were also seen in the wild.” researchers said.
Anticipation has repeatedly turned into frustration in the search for signs of Flight 370 as objects spotted from planes in a new search area west of Australia have turned out to be garbage. It’s a time-wasting distraction for air and sea crews searching for debris from the Malaysia Airlines flight that vanished March 8.
It also points to wider problems in the world’s oceans.
“The ocean is like a plastic soup, bulked up with the croutons of these larger items,” said Los Angeles captain Charles Moore, an environmental advocate credited with bringing attention to an ocean gyre between Hawaii and California known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which by some accounts is about the size of Texas.
The world’s oceans have four more of these flotsam-collecting vortexes, Moore said, and the searchers, in an area about 1,150 miles west of Perth, have stumbled onto the eastern edge of a gyre in the Indian Ocean.
“It’s like a toilet bowl that swirls but doesn’t flush,” said Moore.
The garbage patches are nothing like a typical city dump. In fact, most of the trash can’t even be seen: it’s composed of tiny bits of plastic bobbing just below the surface.
The larger items also tend to be plastic and are often fishing-related, Moore said, although he has come across light bulbs, a toilet seat, and, bobbing off the California coast, a refrigerator, complete with defrosted orange juice.
Seattle oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer has been studying the phenomena of ocean debris for years. He said there are smaller collections of garbage within the gyres.
“If you go into a house you’ll find dust bunnies,” he said. “The ocean has a mass of dust bunnies, each moving about 10 miles a day.”
Ebbesmeyer said he’s fascinated by what happens to the trash that spews from the hundreds of shipping containers lost overboard from cargo ships each year. He said there’s one that keeps belching out Lego pieces onto the beaches of Cornwall, England. Another spilled 2,000 computer monitors. Another released thousands of pairs of Nike sneakers.
Sometimes, he said, the containers themselves can become hazards as they bob about for months, buoyed by plastic objects inside or the air trapped behind watertight doors.
Trash also gets into the ocean after being washed down rivers or swept up in tsunamis, Ebbesmeyer said.
Scientists are particularly worried about small and seemingly ubiquitous pieces of plastic that can be from shopping bags, plastic water bottles or other household items. Waves break the items up into smaller pieces. Wing Cmdr. Andy Scott, of New Zealand’s defense force, said the crew in a P-3 Orion scouring the ocean for Flight 370 on Saturday spotted about 70 objects in four hours.
Three were deemed worthy of further investigation, he said, but none turned out to be from the missing plane. One was probably a fishing line, he said, another was a suspected icebox lid and a third was some unidentified brown and orange material.
A cluster of orange-colored items spotted on Sunday from an Australian search plane and thought to be a promising lead also turned out to be fishing equipment.
With garbage complicating an already fraught effort to find flight wreckage, Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott — elected late last year — said on Monday that the search is nowhere near over.
“I’m certainly not putting a time limit on it,” Abbott told the press at RAAF Pearce, the Perth military base coordinating the operation, “We can keep searching for quite some time to come.”
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MH370 Apparently Flown to Diego Garcia: Navy Intelligence’s Part in the Exposed False Flag Operation
Despite weak, questionable, and conflicting evidence, the general consensus in the MSM is that MH370 appears to have followed a primarily southerly route and crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean (over 1000 km SW of Perth, Australia) after running out of fuel. This theory is primarily based on the alleged satellite data of a British satellite telecommunications company named Inmarsat. There are significant questions about the reliability of Inmarsat’s findings, not the least of which is that no other satellite data has confirmed them and that the company has extensive military contracts. No evidence from any source has been found to confirm Inmarsat’s findings.
The investigation into MH370’s disappearance has been filled with incompetence, cover-ups, and disinformation. The scope of this paper is not to rebut the loads of questionable and conflicting evidence, but to show that the evidence suggests that the plane was probably flown to a strategic US naval and satellite communication facility in the central Indian Ocean. On a small island named Diego Garcia, 450 miles from the Maldives, there is a US naval base with a runway that can accommodate jumbo jets. There is nothing else on Diego Garcia except for the US Navy base and its satellite communications facility.
Around sunrise at 6:15 AM on March 8, 2014 (9:15 AM Malaysia time), several residents on the Maldives island of Huvadhoo reported seeing a very low-flying jumbo jet. The residents provided good detail and described the aircraft as white with red stripes, which is very similar to the colors of MH370. According to some residents, the plane was flying so low they could see the doors on the plane. The residents stated that they sometimes see small seaplanes around the island, but this was the first time they ever saw a jumbo jet. People were coming out of their houses to see what was causing the tremendous noise. The eyewitnesses say that the airplane was traveling in a southeast direction toward Addu, the last and most southern island in the Maldives.[24]
There are several important facts and observations that need to be made at this point: * Huvadhoo residents would have been the first (the sighting happened around sunrise) and last to see the plane before it reached Diego Garcia, which is mainly south of Huvadhoo. Although there was one more Maldives island (Addu Island, about 50 miles straight south of Huvadhoo) before Diego Garcia, the plane was reportedly traveling in a southeast direction apparently in order to miss Addu Island. * If the plane was flying so low that some people could see the plane’s doors and it was very loud, then it was probably flying no more than 500 feet above sea level. At this flying height, the plane was flying low enough to avoid conventional radar. * The time the plane was spotted was about 8.5 hours from take-off and it had flown roughly 2,200 miles, averaging approximately 250 miles per hour. (From Kuala Lumpur to the original destination of Beijing was 2,700 miles.) Although the plane had more drag at the lower altitude and would have gotten worse fuel mileage, the much slower than normal speed would have compensated for the greater air resistance.[25] * From the point where the plane was spotted, there was another 500 miles to Diego Garcia, or approximately two hours at its then current speed.
The day after the sightings were reported in the Maldives media, the acting Malaysian transport minister stated that the Maldives reports were “not true,” based on a conversation between the heads of Malaysia’s and Maldives’ Defense Forces. Maldives National Defence Force stated there was no trace that MH370 had been picked up on their radar.[26] Of course not, the plane was apparently flying at around 500 feet and all other tracking devices have been intentionally turned off. The finding of the sightings being “not true” implies that the residents deliberately lied and no evidence or support was provided for this fact. Indeed, if the residents who spotted the plane were found to be intentionally lying in one of the most high profile international investigations in years, then it would likely be a crime and there’s no evidence they were charged with one. What would be the eyewitnesses motivation to tell such an alleged blatant lie?
As reported in the MSM, the head pilot of MH370, Capt. Zaharie Ahmed Shah, had a “sophisticated” self-built flight simulator in his house. Despite the FBI lying that they found nothing unusual on the simulator, several MSM organizations reported that Shah had Diego Garcia programmed into his simulator which suggests that he practiced flights to that remote island.[27] As a glance at Google Maps reveals, the closest easily-sighted amount of land to a direct path between the last-known location of MH370 and Diego Garcia is the Maldives, so it would make sense (especially if fuel was tight and navigation was uncertain) to aim for the Maldives en route to Diego Garcia.
A major Malaysian news organization reported that investigators found that Diego Garcia and its runway was among the top-five locations programmed in Shah’s simulator, along with Male, Maldives.[28] The only thing on Diego Garcia is the US Navy and commercial flights do not go to Diego Garcia. Given that Shah appears to have flown the plane at about 500 feet above sea level, practicing on a simulator would have been very helpful.
Diego Garcia is owned by the British government and is leased to the US government. US navy operations on the island include a large ship and submarine base, an air base, a communications and “space tracking” facility, and a logistics anchorage for regional operations, including for the Middle East. Diego Garcia was used as the launching pad for US bombers in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and as a logistics supply hub.
Diego Garcia also happens to be the place where the US has several hundred “bunker-buster” bombs stored in event of a possible attack on Iran. The Scotland Herald reported in 2010 that a Florida-based shipping company (Superior Maritime Services) entered into a contract with the US government to ship 387 “Blu” bombs used for blasting hardened or underground structures.[29] Thus, Diego Garcia might well be a logical staging area for a false flag operation against Iran. Coincidentally, Superior Maritime Services does lots of military work and is located in the same Florida County (Broward) as GA Telesis.
With the bunker buster bombs stored at Diego Garcia, it’s probable that there is an Israeli presence there that is involved in the planning and preparation of a possible attack on Iran. It’s likely that there has been military coordination between the US and Israel and it would make sense that Diego Garcia would be used given its state of the art satellite systems (to identify Iran’s potential nuclear sites) and its probable use as a launch pad for possible bombing strikes against Iran.
Another significant unanswered question is why didn’t Diego Garcia’s sophisticated satellite systems pick up any data on MH370 given it allegedly flew within about one thousand miles of the base and allegedly crashed about 2,000 miles from Diego Garcia. There’s speculation that US military and intelligence did have the means to monitor MH370’s flight. Diego Garcia’s satellite systems would almost certainly have had the capability to pick up the same “pings” that Inmarsat’s satellite allegedly picked up.
The Feeble Framing of Iran and the Exposed “Plan A” of the Attempted False Flag Operation
For about the last decade, Israel and US neocon hawks have been trying to convince the world that Iran is six months away from producing a nuclear bomb, and the dire consequences if they’re not stopped. Israel’s cited source for this evidence is their vaunted intelligence services which have been proven wrong time and time again. Realizing that President Obama and the rest of the world is sick and tired of their “crying wolf,” Israel and certain neocon related elements within the US military and intelligence apparatus are clearly getting desperate for action which now appears to be in the form of a joint false flag operation to implicate Iran.
The Iranian connection to MH370 was established quickly when two Iranian men were found to have boarded the flight using stolen passports. Although many American MSM organizations have floated the theory that the Iranian men could have been party to a terrorism plot, most MSM organizations have not promoted it as likely theory. However, Fox News and its owner Rupert Murdoch have been aggressively promoting this theory along with the Israeli mainstream media. These false flag actors are clearly trying to set the stage that Iran is most likely behind MH370’s disappearance and that they are probably going to use the plane in some sort of terrorism attack.
One of the first signs that the fix was in on Iran, is when the UK Daily Mail noticed the obviously photoshopped picture of the two Iranian passengers on Flight MH370. The March 24, 2014, Daily Mail pointed out that both Iranian men had the exact same green pants, brown shoes, and leg positions in their photos.[30] In a very strange excuse, the Malaysian police said the image of one man had been accidently placed on top of the other when they were photocopied. MH370’s pilot’s apparent complicity in the diversion of the plane to Diego Garcia and the flagrant errors and cover-ups attempted by the Malaysian government may indicate certain individuals in Malaysia may have been recruited into the likely US/Israeli covert operation.
There are several different ways that a false flag attack involving two identical Malaysian Airlines 777’s could have been undertaken, but now that the plan has been exposed we will probably never know what was actually being planned. However, one possible scenario is that GAT’s Malaysian 777 in Tel Aviv was undergoing retrofitting for the operation that probably included such things as automated flight systems, Iranian/Russian parts, explosives, etc. The Malaysian Airlines name would be painted back on the plane and it would be used in another 9/11-type attack. MH370 would be disassembled at Diego Garcia and identifying parts would be placed at the crash site of the substitute plane suggesting that it was indeed MH370 and that the Iranians had retrofitted it for the operation.
Naval intelligence’s fingerprints are all over MH370’s disappearance, from it’s likely flight path to Diego Garcia to Abdol Moabery’s possible involvement in the Navy Intelligence. The fact that GAT had an identical Malaysian Airlines 777 sitting in a hangar in Tel Aviv is another long shot coincidence that is too hard to ignore. US and Israeli intelligence do not think inside the box and they were apparently up to some of their old tricks in the case of MH370. With hundreds of one-ton bunker buster bombs sitting in Diego Garcia dying to be used, the temptation of using them and attacking the second most significant oil rich country in the world was apparently too much for the US military and Israel to resist. Now that Plan A has been foiled, we’ll now have to wait awhile to see what Plan B has in store.
