Search for missing MH370 jet could turn on robot subs

This 2011 photo provided by Sylvain Pascaud shows the ship Alucia and the REMUS 6000 robot sub during the search for Air France Flight 447. Unmanned subs, also called autonomous underwater vehicles or AUVs, played a critical role in locating the wreckage of the lost Air France jet, two years after it crashed in the middle of the south Atlantic. The find allowed searchers to recover the black boxes that revealed the malfunctions behind the tragedy. Sylvain Pascaud, Associated Press

Two miles down or more and darker than night, the ocean becomes a particularly challenging place for human searchers.

If the wreckage of a missing Malaysian airliner rests somewhere in the Indian Ocean's depths, then investigators will likely need to entrust the hunt at least partly to robot submarines and the scientists who deploy them to scan remote swaths of the seafloor.

Such unmanned subs, called autonomous underwater vehicles or AUVs, played a critical role in locating the carcass of a lost Air France jet in 2011, two years after it crashed in the middle of the south Atlantic. The find allowed searchers to recover the black boxes that revealed the malfunctions behind the tragedy.

That search keyed off critical information: The search area for the Air France jet was much smaller than that for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, and the first pieces of wreckage were recovered within days of the crash.

Even then, it required two years and four deep water search missions before a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, using an AUV equipped with side-scan sonar, located the jet about 12,800 feet (3,900 meters) underwater.

"Air France 447 is a bit different from Malaysian Air 370 in that we had a few more clues to work with," said Dave Gallo, who led the search team from Woods Hole, located on Massachusetts' Cape Cod. The independent research institution has offered its services to investigators but has not been asked to join the current search effort.

Before unmanned subs can be sent down to look for the Malaysian jet, the search zone must be narrowed considerably. That depends on finding wreckage on the surface. Officials cautioned Wednesday that search planes, which have scoured the ocean for more than three weeks without finding any sign of the downed jet, aren't certain to find any wreckage and that investigators may not be able to determine the reason for its disappearance.

The size of the search area changes daily because of factors such as currents; on Wednesday it was 85,000 square miles (221,000 square kilometers).

But if investigators can zero in on an approximate crash location, they will likely turn to AUVs to begin the methodical task of tracking back and forth across miles of ocean floor in search of anomalies that might be wreckage.

"I like to think of it as mowing the lawn. You want to cover every bit of it," Gallo said.

"You need a little bit of luck and a lot of prayer that the oceans are going to cooperate, and then off you go."

The unmanned subs used by the Woods Hole team were developed as tools to research and monitor relatively shallow coastal waters, measuring variables like salinity and temperature over wide areas for hours on end. But AUVs are increasingly harnessed to perform some of the most demanding underwater jobs.

The U.S. Navy uses them to search for underwater mines because they can stay below the surface of even very cold water much longer than any diver, without the worry of exposing a human to danger. Energy companies employ unmanned subs to survey the floor at underwater drill sites.

In 2009, California's Waitt Institute sent down a pair of AUVs that surveyed more than 2,000 square miles of South Pacific ocean bottom over 72 days in an unsuccessful search for Amelia Earhart's plane.

The area off western Australia where search planes and aircraft are looking for the Malaysian jet slopes from about 2,600 feet (800 meters) to about 9,800 feet (3,000 meters) deep. But part of the zone drops into the narrow Diamantina trench, about 19,000 feet (5,800 meters) down.

"Let's hope the wreck debris has not landed over this escarpment. It's a long way to the bottom," said Robin Beaman, a marine geologist at Australia's James Cook University.

The U.S. Navy last week sent a Bluefin-21 autonomous sub to Australia to prepare for an eventual deep water search. That sub can dive to about 14,800 feet (4,500 meters). The largest unmanned subs used by Woods Hole researchers are built to reach depths of about 19,700 feet (6,000 meters).

Searchers can also use tethered submersibles, towed by ships from cable that allows for real-time data transmission to the surface and a continuous supply of power to the vehicle. But it is a very slow process. AUVs can scan a larger area more quickly, without being affected by conditions on the surface. But they must be brought back to the surface to recharge, and for researchers to download and analyze their data.

Even so, they are much better suited to the job of deep water search than any manned sub, whose descents are limited by air, light and power, as well as safety concerns, said William Sager, a professor of marine geophysics at the University of Houston.

Sager recalled that in 2000, when he climbed aboard a sub and ventured 5,600 feet (1,700 meters) down to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, all those factors limited time on the sea floor to just four hours, moving at a crawl. A researcher looking out a porthole into even the clearest water with a very bright light can't see beyond 100 feet, he said.

Unmanned subs are far more flexible. When Woods Hole engineers built their first REMUS 6000 sub a little more than a decade ago, they tested it off the Bahamas by driving it down a trench the scale of the Grand Canyon, said Chris von Alt, who led the team that developed the craft and then co-founded Hydroid Inc., the Massachusetts manufacturer of the subs.

The REMUS sub — nearly 13 feet long, 1,900 pounds and mustard yellow — is equipped with sonar that can be programmed to capture images of vast stretches of seafloor and the objects resting there. Powered by a lithium battery, the unmanned subs stay below the surface for 20 to 24 hours. Scientists on the surface are now able to modify instructions to the sub via an acoustic link that allows them to look at bits of data gathered by the vehicle, von Alt said.

But they don't know what the sub has found until it surfaces and its data is fully downloaded to a computer.
The task requires patience and, for researchers whose livelihoods are focused on ocean life, a willingness to harness their expertise in a grim but necessary pursuit of answers.

"That's why you do it," von Alt said. "One of (the reasons) is, 'Why did it happen?' But the other is to get closure for the families who have suffered through the tragedy."

- Contributed by AP writers Adam Geller and Nick Perry in Wellington, New Zealand and videographer Steve Andrada in Woods Hole, Mass.

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Searching the vast seabed of jet hunt zone mostly flat with one trench for MH370

This undated graphic provided by Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia) Dr. Robin Beaman

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Two miles beneath the sea surface where satellites and planes are looking for debris from the missing Malaysian jet, the ocean floor is cold, dark, covered in a squishy muck of dead plankton and — in a potential break for the search — mostly flat. The troubling exception is a steep, rocky drop ending in a deep trench.

The seafloor in this swath of the Indian Ocean is dominated by a substantial underwater plateau known as Broken Ridge, where the geography would probably not hinder efforts to find the main body of the jet that disappeared with 239 people on board three weeks ago, according to seabed experts who have studied the area.

Australian officials on Friday moved the search to an area 1,100 kilometers (680 miles) to the northeast of a previous zone as the mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 continued to confound. There is no guarantee that the jet crashed into the new search area. Planes that have searched it for two days have spotted objects of various colors and sizes, but none of the items scooped by ships has been confirmed to be related to the plane.

The zone is huge: about 319,000 square kilometers (123,000 square miles), roughly the size of Poland or New Mexico. But it is closer to land than the previous search zone, its weather is much more hospitable — and Broken Ridge sounds a lot craggier than it really is.

And the deepest part is believed to be 19,000 feet within the range of American black box ping locators on an Australian ship leaving Sunday for the area and expected to arrive in three or four days.

Formed about 100 million years ago by volcanic activity, the ridge was once above water.

Pulled under by the spreading of the ocean floor, now it is more like a large underwater plain, gently sloping from as shallow as about 2,625 feet to about 9,843 feet deep. It got its name because long ago the movement of the Earth’s tectonic plates separated it from another plateau, which now sits about 1,550 miles to the southwest.

Much of Broken Ridge is covered in a sediment called foraminiferal ooze, made of plankton that died, settled and was compacted by the tremendous pressure from the water above.

“Think like it’s been snowing there for tens of millions of years,” said William Sager, a professor of marine geophysics at the University of Houston in Texas.

Like snow, the layer of microscopic plankton shells tends to smooth out any rises or falls in the underlying rock. In places, the layer is up to half a mile deep.

But if the fuselage of the Boeing 777 did fall on to Broken Ridge, it would not sink much into the muck.

“The surface would be soft, it would squeeze between your toes, but it’s not so soft that you would disappear like snow,” Sager said. “Something big like pieces of an airplane, it’s going to be sitting on the surface.”

Searchers will be hoping that if the latest area turns out to be where the plane crashed — and that remains educated guesswork until searchers can put their hands on aerial debris sightings and check what it is — the fuselage did not go down on the southern edge of Broken Ridge.

That’s where the ocean floor drops precipitously — more than 2 1/2 miles in places, according to Robin Beaman, a marine geologist at Australia’s James Cook University. It’s not a sheer cliff, more like a very steep hill that a car would struggle to drive up. At the bottom of this escarpment is the narrow Diamantina trench, which measurements put as deep at 19,000 feet, though no one is sure of its greatest depth because it has never been precisely mapped.

“Let’s hope the wreck debris has not landed over this escarpment — it’s a long way to the bottom,” Beaman said.

The Diamantina trench, named after an Australian navy vessel, is one of the deeper sections of the parts of the oceans that surround Antarctica, according to Mike Coffin, the executive director of the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at Australia’s University of Tasmania.

The trench’s rocky crags and crannies would make it difficult for ships using instruments like side-scanning sonar or multi-beam echo sounders to distinguish any debris from the crevices.

Searchers will especially be hoping to locate the jet’s two “black boxes,” which recorded sounds in the cockpit and data on the plane’s performance and flight path that could help reconstruct why it diverted sharply west from its overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing on March 8. The black boxes were designed to emit locator pings for at least 30 days, and are projected to lose battery power — and thus their pings — by mid-April.

The pinger can be heard as far as 2 1/2 miles away, but the distance can vary widely, depending on the state of the sea and the wreckage location, said Joseph Kolly, director of research and engineering for the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. Black boxes can get buried or muffled by other wreckage, and thermoclines, which are layers of water with great variations in temperature, can refract the signal, he said.

The sediment on Broken Ridge is unlikely to inhibit the ping — but on the escarpment or in the trench, rocks could scatter the sound, making it harder to detect, according to Mike Haberman, a research scientist specializing in acoustics at the University of Texas, Austin.

To pinpoint the ping they hear from the surface, searchers likely will run a submersible equipped with sonar several hundred feet above the ocean floor. The unmanned underwater vehicle will putter along at a slow jog, able to “see” objects on the floor that may seem out of place. But its vision is limited — in a day it could cover an area only about the size of Manhattan, Sager said.

The observations stored in the vehicle’s memory can be accessed only by bringing it to the surface.

Under the best conditions, to survey the entire new search area could take between three months and up to nearly two years, depending on the quality of data needed to identify the debris, according to calculations by David T. Sandwell, a professor of geophysics who specializes in seafloor mapping at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.

Because it is such a painstaking — and expensive — process, most mapping has been focused on things that people consider useful, like underwater shipping hazards and potential oil deposits. With nothing much to interest people in the this part of the Indian Ocean, the maps tend to follow features like the volcanically active mid-ocean ridges, leaving big blank spaces in between.

There are 50-mile-wide strips of the search area where no shipboard measurements have been taken and scientists use less detailed satellite measurements and educated guesswork to depict what the floor actually looks like.

Precisely what the seafloor looks like in detail in the area of the new search is another in a long line of Flight 370 mysteries.

By JUSTIN PRITCHARD AND NICK PERRY  The Associated Press

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  • Flight MH370: two satellite objects spotted in southern Indian Ocean

Black box scanners arrive Australia as search for MH370 pins hope on new satellite images

Underwater scanners that will be used to try to locate the black box flight recorders from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 have arrived at the search headquarters in Australia, as crews pin their hopes on new satellite images showing 300 pieces of possible debris in the southern Indian Ocean.

The new information came as strong winds and icy weather forced planes and ships to call off their search on Thursday of an area where officials believe the plane came down almost three weeks ago.

Australian maritime officials said several planes had reached the search zone, located about 1,550 miles (2,500 km) south-west of Perth, but had returned early without finding any of the floating debris.

Sam Cardwell, a spokesman for the Australian maritime safety authority, said the planes had stayed in the area for about two hours. "They got a bit of time in, but it was not useful because there was no visibility," he said.

The bad weather is expected to last well into Friday, raising the possibility that the hunt for hundreds of pieces of debris that could be from MH370 will not resume until the weekend.

The arrival of sensitive tracking equipment offers a glimmer of hope for a breakthrough in what has become the biggest mystery in commercial aviation history.

An Australian naval vessel ship will sweep the seabed by towing an underwater listening device deep below the surface in the hope of picking up an ultrasonic signal from one or both of the plane's black box recorders, while a small submersible drone will be used to scan the sea floor for signs of wreckage.

Thursday's search involved 11 planes and five ships in an area of the vast southern Indian Ocean where officials believe the plane ran out of fuel and crashed, killing all 239 people aboard.

They were trying to locate 122 objects captured in French satellite images on 23 March that senior Malaysian officials described as the most credible lead yet as to the jetliner's whereabouts.

Later on Thursday, Thailand said it had satellite images showing 300 floating objects floating in roughly the same area. The objects, ranging in length from two to 15 metres, were found about 125 miles from the site where the French satellite had earlier spotted more than 100 pieces of debris.

Anond Snidvongs, executive director of Thailand's space technology development agency, said the information had been passed on to Malaysia. "But we cannot – dare not – confirm they are debris from the plane," he told AFP.

Officials from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said Thursday's search had been split into two areas totalling 78,000 sq km (30,000 square miles). The operation involves planes and ships from the US, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

Locating and retrieving at least some of the floating objects could prove crucial in the absence of any physical evidence supporting the theory that MH370 ran out of fuel hours after it turned sharply off course and disappeared from air traffic controllers' screens over the South China Sea en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Search teams are hoping that the detection equipment will be able to pick up acoustic pings emitted every second from the plane's black box flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder.

Each of the two recorders has a beacon, attached to the outside of the black box, which once activated by contact with water makes a sound every second.

But it is a race against time: the beacons have a battery life of 30 days, after which the pings begin to fade. Chuck Schofield of Dukane Seacom, a company that has sold the pingers to Malaysia Airlines, told Associated Press that the batteries might last an additional five days before dying.

Assuming that the plane crashed on 8 March, as Malaysian officials insist, that means the beacons aboard MH370 will begin to fade around 7 April and could go silent around 12 April.

The US navy tracking equipment – a special listening device known as a "towed pinger locator" and an underwater drone dubbed Bluefin-21 – has arrived in Perth, where the international effort is based and is being sent to the search site.

Reports said the equipment would be loaded on to the Australian navy's HMAS Ocean Shield, which will drag the locator through the water in the hope of picking up a signal.

The drone can dive to depths of about 4,500 metres, using sonar to form images of the ocean floor. Similar technology was used to locate the main wreckage from Air France flight 447 in 2011 – yet it still took searchers two years to recover the black box from the depths of the Atlantic.

The operation has been hampered by bad weather and conditions, prolonging the anguish of relatives after Malaysian officials said they had concluded that the aircraft had crashed into the sea with the loss of all on board.

Experts said search crews faced significant dangers due to frequent bad weather and the area's distance from land. "This is a really rough piece of ocean, which is going to be a terrific issue," Kerry Sieh, director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore, told Associated Press. "I worry that people carrying out the rescue mission are going to get into trouble."

Criticism of the Malaysian authorities' handling of the incident has continued, with relatives of the 154 Chinese passengers on board MH370 ridiculing Malaysian government and airline officials at a meeting in Beijing on Wednesday.

On Thursday, Malaysia Airlines ran a full-page message of condolence in the New Straits Times. "Our sincerest condolences go out to the loved ones of the 239 passengers, friends and colleagues. Words alone cannot express our enormous sorrow and pain," it said.

Chinese insurance companies have started paying compensation to the families of passengers, according to Xinhua.

Several Chinese celebrities took to social media to voice anger at the Malaysian government. In a widely shared post on Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, the singer and actor Chen Kun said he would boycott Malaysian goods, while the Hong Kong-born actor Deric Wan called for evidence that the plane had crashed.

"What Chinese people wanted was the truth of the missing plane instead of a pointless press conference," he said on Weibo, according to China Daily.

But in an opinion piece in Thursday's Global Times, Wang Wenwen said that while Malaysia had handled the crash aftermath ineptly, raw emotion should not be allowed to determine relations between the Chinese and Malaysian governments. "It is too early to let public opinion lead the way at the current stage. Whether Beijing-Kuala Lumpur relations will dim depends to some extent on how the [Chinese] government will act between diplomatic manoeuvering and public opinion."

The New Zealand family of Paul Weeks, one of the passengers, added their voice to criticism of the Malaysian authorities. "The whole situation has been handled appallingly, incredibly insensitively," Sara Weeks, the missing man's sister, told Radio Live in New Zealand.

"Everyone is angry about it. "The Malaysian government, the airline – it's just all been incredibly poor. Who's to say they couldn't have located the plane the day that it happened?" - The Guardian


Don't let extreme feelings preempt MH370 findings

 

A ground crew member directs a Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion upon its returns to RAAF base Pearce from searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 over the southern Indian Ocean on Wednesday. Photo: AFP

Monday was a dramatic day for the Chinese relatives of those aboard the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 that disappeared over two weeks ago.

After the Malaysian side announced that the airliner had "ended in the southern Indian Ocean" and none of the passengers survived, relatives of the 154 Chinese citizens on board became furious. They released a statement accusing the Malaysian government of being "murderers" and protested outside the Malaysian embassy in Beijing the next day.

These families have the support of the Chinese people, notably with doubts over the information released by the Malaysian side and criticism against the Malaysian government on China's social media.

When Victor Wong, a Chinese-Malaysian singer well known among the Chinese public, expressed his condolences to the relatives of the victims on his Sina Weibo account, a flurry of comments followed, blaming him for being hypocritical and calling for a boycott of his performances in China.

Many also urged the Chinese government to take a tough stance toward Malaysia, which is thought by many to have mishandled the search for the missing plane.

This mysterious accident is being followed by the world, as are China's reactions. In the eyes of some Western observers, China is "doing its best to foster a sense of aggrievement" and "exploiting international incidents for domestic gain."

Indeed, Malaysia should take most of the blame as it dragged this painful accident on for too long. Its approach in handling the aftermath of the tragedy raised doubts from international watchers. The grievances of the Chinese people didn't come from nowhere.

There have already been analyses in the foreign media speculating on a strained relationship between China and Malaysia, despite the fact that Malaysia was the first ASEAN country to establish diplomatic ties with China in 1974 and that Malaysia is China's largest trading partner among ASEAN countries.

China's tourist agencies have reported a sharp decline in the number of Chinese travelers choosing to visit Malaysia.

The past few years have seen the Chinese government facing increasing pressure from the public in making diplomatic decisions. There is a worrying sign that the public mood might be fanned by some opinion leaders at the price of ruining good people-to-people relationship between the two countries.

It is too early to let public opinion lead the way at the current stage. Whether Beijing-Kuala Lumpur relations will dim depends to some extent on how the government will act between diplomatic maneuvering and public opinion.  - Global Times

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  Flight MH370: two satellite objects spotted in southern Indian Ocean

Families filing lawsuits over MH370 while new 122 objects identified by a French satellite

A model of a Boeing 777 aircraft is displayed as representatives of US law firm Ribbeck Law Chartered International hold a media briefing at a hotel in Kuala Lumpur on March 26, 2014. Family members of the victims of the ill-fated Flight MH370 are filing a RM4.95 billion (S$1.9 billion) suit for compensation, against Boeing and Malaysia Airlines. -- PHOTO: AFP 

KUALA LUMPUR - Family members of the victims of the ill-fated Flight MH370 are filing a RM4.95 billion (S$1.9 billion) suit for compensation, against Boeing and Malaysia Airlines.

Chicago-based firm Ribbeck Law Chartered, who is acting on behalf of the family members, has started proceedings by filing a petition of discovery in an Illinois court.

Ms Monica Kelly, the lead lawyer from Ribbeck Law, said the firm which specialises in aviation law had been approached by family members from China and Indonesia.

Of the 239 people on board MH370, there were 153 China nationals and seven Indonesians.

Ms Kelly said they had spoken to family members in many countries and expected about half of those affected to take part in the suit.

She said the fact that neither the wreckage of MH370 nor the bodies of the pasengers have been found would not affect the case, as they would be inspecting the rest of the MAS fleet for similar design flaws.

"We've had successful cases where the plane, the victims or even the blackbox were not found," said Ms Kelly, during a briefing with the press in Kuala Lumpur.

"We have done many cases where wreckage was completely destroyed, or no bodies found, or wreckage found but no black boxes working. We are not relying on these things to start the legal process," said Kelly, during a briefing to the press here.

She said such suits can take anywhere between four months to five years, but expects this case to take between one-and-a-half to two years.

The firm would focus its suit against Boeing, as they believe it was a case of equipment malfunction but could expand the defendants to include other component manufacturers or even those who trained the crew. 

A Malaysia Airlines spokesman said the airline is aware of the lawsuit.

"Our lawyers have been advised of this development.

" At this point in time, our top priority remains to provide any and all assistance to the families of the passengers and crew.

"Other matters will be dealt with appropriately," the spokesman said in a statement.

Mr Manuel Von Ribbeck of Ribbeck Law said they are 100 per cent confident of winning the suit, as according to the law, passengers are never at fault.

Mr Ribbeck said the coverage for compensation is about RM4.95 billion, and the firm would demand the full amount be paid.

For the purpose of the lawsuit, the firm assumes that the passengers are dead, based on Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak's announcement.

"We hope that miracles can happen, but based on the data we've seen so far, it does not look good for the flight and her passengers," said Mr Ribbeck.

Boeing, the manufacturers of the 777-200 aircraft, has been on the receiving end of a number of lawsuits in the past.

The most recent lawsuit was in January this year by a group of passengers, represented by Mr Ribbeck Law, who were aboard an Asiana Airlines flight that crash-landed in San Francisco on July 6 last year.

Three people were killed and more than 180 others hurt.

France's Satellite imagery shows 122 'potential objects'

This handout picture received from the Malaysian Remote Sensing Agency (MRSA) on March 27, 2014 shows imagery taken on March 23 by a French satellite showing more than 100 floating objects (within higlighted boxes) in the remote southern Indian Ocean.

KUALA LUMPUR: The Malaysian Remote Sensing Agency (MRSA) has identified 122 “potential objects” that could be linked to the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in an area of the southern Indian Ocean, about 2,557km from Perth.

The MRSA had analysed satellite images provided by France’s Airbus Defence and Space.

Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein said the new development supported “the most credible lead” for focusing the search in the southern Indian Ocean, alluding to the analysis of British investigators that pointed to the area.

The objects were in an area of about 400sq km, he told the daily press conference at the Putra World Trade Centre here yesterday.

“Some objects are a metre in length, others as much as 23m long. Some of the objects appeared to be bright, indicating they are possibly solid,” he said.

Hishammuddin, who is also Defence Minister, added that the MRSA findings were immediately forwarded to the Australian Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Perth.

“It must be emphasised that we cannot tell whether the potential objects are from MH370.

“Nevertheless, this is another new lead that will help direct the search operation,” he said.

Hishammuddin said the search operation now had four separate satellite leads, from Australia, China and France, showing possible debris.

What had to be done now was to determine whether it was really debris and linked to MH370, he added.

Hishammuddin said Australia was leading the search effort in the southern Indian Ocean while Malaysia continued its coordinating role.

“Australia has divided the search area into two sectors: East and West.

“With the improved weather, 12 planes were deployed to the search area – six in the East sector and six in the West,” he said.

In the East sector, the search would be conducted by one Australian P3 Orion, and three Australian civilian aircraft, one Chinese Ilyushin IL-76 and one New Zealand P3 Orion.

Involved in the West sector were a US P8 Poseidon, two Australian P3 Orions and one each from South Korea and Japan as well as a civilian aircraft.

Hishammuddin also said an international working group was helping refine Inmarsat data to further narrow the search area.

The working group – consisting of Inmarsat, the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch, Civil Aviation Administration of China, the US National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing and Rolls Royce as well as the relevant Malaysian authorities – will attempt to determine more accurately the final position of MH370. - The Star/ANN

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  Flight MH370: two satellite objects spotted in southern Indian Ocean

Flight MH370 ended in southern Indian Ocean! All 239 lives lost, British Inmarsat & AAIB cited, no evidence

 

Search area for Malaysian Airlines flight MH370.

Analysis by the British satellite company Inmarsat and the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) was cited on Monday by the Malaysian prime minister as the source of information that has narrowed the location where the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have crashed into the southern Indian Ocean to a corridor a couple of hundred miles wide.

The analysis follows fresh examination of eight satellite "pings" sent by the aircraft between 1.11am and 8.11am Malaysian time on Saturday 8 March, when it vanished from radar screens.

The prime minister, Najib Razak, said: "Based on their new analysis, Inmarsat and the AAIB have concluded that MH370 flew along the southern corridor, and that its last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth.



"This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites. It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean."

He added that they had used a "type of analysis never before used in an investigation of this sort".

The new method "gives the approximate direction of travel, plus or minus about 100 miles, to a track line", Chris McLaughlin, senior vice-president for external affairs at Inmarsat, told Sky News. "Unfortunately this is a 1990s satellite over the Indian Ocean that is not GPS-equipped. All we believe we can do is to say that we believe it is in this general location, but we cannot give you the final few feet and inches where it landed. It's not that sort of system."

McLaughlin told CNN that there was no further analysis possible of the data. "Sadly this is the limit. There's no global decision even after the Air France loss [in June 2009, where it took two years to recover the plane from the sea] to make direction and distance reporting compulsory. Ships have to log in every six hours; with aircraft travelling at 500 knots they would have to log in every 15 minutes. That could be done tomorrow but the mandate is not there globally."

Since the plane disappeared more than two weeks ago, many of the daily searches across vast tracts of the Indian Ocean for the aircraft have relied on Inmarsat information collated halfway across the world from a company that sits on London's "Silicon Roundabout", by Old Street tube station.

Using the data from just eight satellite "pings" after the plane's other onboard Acars automatic tracking system went off at 1.07am, the team at Inmarsat was initially able to calculate that it had either headed north towards the Asian land mass or south, towards the emptiest stretches of the India Ocean.

Inmarsat said that yesterday it had done new calculations on the limited data that it had received from the plane in order to come to its conclusion. McLaughlin told CNN that it was a "groundbreaking but traditional" piece of mathematics which was then checked by others in the space industry.

The company's system of satellites provide voice contact with air traffic control when planes are out of range of radar, which only covers about 10% of the Earth's surface, and beyond the reach of standard radio over oceans. It also offers automatic reporting of positions via plane transponders. It is possible to send route instructions directly to the cockpit over a form of text message relayed through the satellite.

Inmarsat was set up in 1979 by the International Maritime Organisation to help ships stay in touch with shore or call for emergency no matter where they were, has provided key satellite data about the last movements of MH370.

Even as the plane went off Malaysian air traffic control's radar on 8 March, Inmarsat's satellites were "pinging" it.

A team at the company began working on the directions the plane could have gone in, based on the responses. One pointed north; the other, south. But it took three days for the data to be officially passed on to the Malaysian authorities; apparently to prevent any more such delays, Inmarsat was officially made "technical adviser" to the AAIB in its investigation into MH370's disappearance.

Inmarsat's control room in London, like some of its other 60 locations worldwide, looks like a miniature version of Nasa: a huge screen displays the positions of its 11 geostationary satellites, and dozens of monitors control and correct their positions. A press on a key can cause the puff of a rocket on a communications satellite 22,236 miles away, nudging its orbit by a few inches this way or that.

More prosaically, Inmarsat's systems enable passengers to make calls from their seats and also to use Wi-Fi and connect to the internet while flying.

If the plane has its own "picocell" essentially a tiny mobile phone tower set up inside the plane then that can be linked to the satellite communications system and enable passengers to use their own mobile phones to make calls, which are routed through the satellite and back to earth.

After its creation, Inmarsat's maritime role rapidly expanded to providing connectivity for airlines, the media, oil and gas companies, mining and construction in remote areas, and governments.

Privatised at the end of the 1990s, it was floated on the stock market in 2004, and now focuses on providing services to four main areas: maritime, enterprise (focused on businesses including aviation), civil and military work for the US government, and civil and military work for other governments. The US is the largest government client, generating up to a fifth of its revenues of about £1bn annually. The firm employs about 1,600 staff.

-  Charles Arthur, technology editor The Guardian

 This graphic from The Telegraph indicates the suspected flight path of MH370 and the location of the past week's debris sightings and searches:

China demands more information from Malaysia

Earlier, China’s foreign ministry urged Malaysia to provide all available information and evidence o...

China search plane spots "large objects" related to missing Flight MH370

 China search plane spots "large objects"

A Chinese search plane reports it has discovered floating debris that could be related to the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean.

The crew says it spotted two "relatively large" objects and several smaller ones spread over several kilometers. China has diverted its icebreaker ship, Xuelong, toward the location where the debris was spotted. It's expected to arrive on early Tuesday.

China has also asked Australia to send its aircraft to the area. Ten planes are combing the southern Indian Ocean.

Australia said the search area was widened from 59,000 to 68,000 square kilometers.

The expansion came after French satellite revealed "floating debris" in an area north of pictures previously captured by Australian and Chinese satellites. It's the third set of satellite images in a week.

The Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss says the new lead is promising. He cautions that the search in the icy southern Indian Ocean remains difficult, as rain was expected today.

"We still don't even know for certain that the aircraft is even in this area. We're just, I guess, clutching at whatever little piece of information comes along to try and find a place where we might be able to concentrate the efforts," Truss said.

Malaysian authorities have said the black box is expected to run out of power in two weeks, and won't be able to send any signal thereafter.

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  •  Flight MH370: two satellite objects spotted in southern Indian Ocean

Chinese satellite spots large new object could be related to missing MH370

The Chinese embassy here confirmed Saturday that Chinese satellite spotted a 22-meter-long and 13-meter-wide floating object along the southern corridor missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 might have taken. Malaysian acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, who placed the size of the object at 22 meters by 30 meters at a press conference, later corrected his statement. Photo: Xinhua / State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense

The Chinese embassy in Malaysia confirmed Saturday a Chinese satellite had spotted a floating object along the southern corridor missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 might have taken.



The satellite images, which China's State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense said were taken Tuesday, show that the 22-meter-long, 13-meter-wide object was about 120 km southwest of suspicious debris, one of which was of similar size, captured by an American satellite two days earlier and announced by Australian authorities Thursday.

Malaysian acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein put the size of the object at 22 meters by 30 meters at a press conference, but later corrected his statement.

Australia's acting prime minister Warren Truss said Saturday the suspicious objects remained "the best lead" in the massive search for the missing flight.

The objects might have either drifted or sunk, but "if there's something to be found, I'm confident this search will find it," Truss told a press conference.

The hunt would continue "indefinitely" until "we are absolutely satisfied that further searching would be futile," he said. "That day is not in sight."

In response to Xinhua queries, he said there were many explanations for the satellite images provided by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) but they remained "a very credible lead."

What Australia needed to do now was exert all possible efforts to search for the missing plane, he told Xinhua.

On Thursday, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the Australian satellite had spotted two objects, one 24 meters long, in the southern Indian Ocean possibly related to the Boeing 777 aircraft which disappeared early March 8 while carrying 239 people from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

The discovery led the multinational search forces to focus on a 36,000-square-km sea area about 2,500 km southwest of Perth, but so far there have been no findings of note.

Meanwhile, two Ilyushin Il-76 aircraft from the Chinese Air Force left Malaysia on Saturday for Australia to join the search in the southern Indian Ocean.

With Australian and New Zealand airforce P3 Orions limited by the vast distances and their dependence on infrared imaging, the Chinese IL-76 will be a welcome relief to the authorities here as the challenges of the task at hand begin to overwhelm available resources.

Commander Liu Dianjun told Xinhua he hoped the integration of Chinese military assets could precipitate a swift conclusion to the agonizing international search.

A Malaysian military official said the arrival of the Chinese aircraft beefed up the assets deployed for the search and rescue operation and boosted confidence of all the staff from different countries involved in the operation.

Truss also said the same day the arrival of Chinese military aircraft had provided a glimmer of hope.

A Chinese joint working group also paid two visits to family members of Chinese passengers on Saturday and Wednesday.

Guo Shaochun, head of the Chinese task force, said two weeks had passed since flight MH370 went missing and they were as anxious as the family members about what happened to the passengers.

Guo said the Chinese government attached great importance to coordinating support with Malaysia for the family members, and the Malaysian authorities said they would always be responsible.

"Please be at ease and take good care of yourselves, whether staying in Malaysia or leaving the country, your choice will be respected," he said.

Family members said their major concern was to find their loved ones, and they hoped Malaysia would keep them posted about any findings and intensify search and investigation efforts.

Meanwhile, the Indian government told Malaysian investigators it had found no evidence the missing jet flew through its airspace after checking its radar records, local media reported Saturday.

India's response is crucial, as any of their radar data could help identify whether the jet turned north or south after disappearing off radar, but the issue is also sensitive because of the presence of military radar. - Xinhua

Chinese vessels divert to southern Indian Ocean

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DigitalGlobe: Large area slowing search, the satellite images found might not be related to the MH370

WASHINGTON: The sheer number of images covering a large swath of ocean contributed to a delay in revealing what could be debris from the Malaysia Airlines plane that has been missing for nearly two weeks, a satellite image company said.

DigitalGlobe Inc, a Colorado-based company that collects imagery for the US government and other countries, as well as private companies, confirmed on Thursday that it had collected satellite images on March 16 that appeared to show debris that may be related to the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.

It said it provided the images to Australian authorities, which released them on Thursday.

DigitalGlobe said the Australian government had begun combing through the imagery of the current search area only in the last few days, after the massive international effort was expanded to the southern Indian Ocean region and waters near Australia.

Malaysian officials described the images as a credible sign of a possible wreckage from the flight, which left Kuala Lumpur on March 8 en route to Beijing with 239 people aboard and vanished after about an hour of flight.

Australian authorities, however, cautioned that the debris in the pictures might not be related to the missing plane.

“Given the extraordinary size of the current search area, the lengthy duration of the analysis effort was to be expected,” DigitalGlobe spokesman Turner Brinton said in a statement.

Brinton said the company’s five high-resolution satellites capture more than three million sq km of earth imagery each day.

“This volume of imagery is far too vast to search through in real time without an idea of where to look,” he said.

The large objects that Australian officials said were spotted by satellite five days ago are the most promising find in days as searchers scour a vast area for the plane.

The larger of the objects four days ago measured up to 24m long and appeared to be floating in waters several thousand metres deep, Australian officials said. The second object was about five metres long.

Brinton declined comment on whether the debris was spotted by DigitalGlobe’s own analysts, government analysts or Internet users participating in a “crowdsourcing” effort launched by the company to help locate the plane.

Brinton said the images were captured on March 16 by the company’s Worldview-2 satellite at a resolution of about 50cm, and the company was continuing to collect imagery over the area where the possible debris had been spotted.

DigitalGlobe said it had been collecting images over a broader area than the official search area, while focusing the efforts of its crowdsourcing volunteers on the search areas identified by authorities.

“The efforts of millions of online volunteers around the world allowed us to rule out broad swaths of ocean with some certainty,” Brinton said. — Reuters

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DigitalGlobe Inc, a satellite company that provides the image of missing Flight MH370; Australian plane fails to locate debris

DigitalGlobe's WorldView-2 satellite>

Meet WorldView-2, the satellite that provided Australian authorities with the images that appear to show two objects in the Indian Ocean 2500 kilometres south-west of Perth that may be related to missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Launched on October 8, 2009, and owned by US satellite company DigitalGlobe, WorldView-2 provides imagery at a resolution of approximately 50 cm. It takes a new image of any place on earth every 1.1 days (1 day ,  2 hours and 24 minutes).

The satellite, among four others that DigitalGlobe owns, weighs 2800 kilograms, operates at an altitude of 770 kilometres, and is able to collect nearly 1 million square kilometres of imagery every single day, which is then distributed to those who pay for access to DigitalGlobe's imagery.

Satellite imagery provided to AMSA of possible debris from MH370.

DigitalGlobe confirmed on Friday that it was the one who provided the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) with the satellite images that were captured on March 16, showing the two objects in the Indian Ocean.

"We have been informed by an Australian government official that it was our imagery Prime Minister Abbott referred to in his recent comments," the company said in a statement.

"Working with our customers, DigitalGlobe continues to task our satellites to collect imagery of a wide area that includes the waters around where the possible debris was identified."

The satellite images released by the Department of Defence.

A clue that DigitalGlobe's satellite was used lies in the imagery released on Thursday afternoon by AMSA to the media after its press conference, which said that DigitalGlobe owned the copyright of the images.

Despite this, when Australian Maritime Safety Authority's general manager John Young took to the podium on Thursday to explain to reporters the discovery of the images that might show pieces of MH370, he carefully omitted to tell them the source.

When asked about it, he avoided the question.

And when reporters phoned Australian defence officials to ask the same question, they were given a firm "no comment" or "we can't discuss".

This may seem odd, because the satellite's owners, DigitalGlobe, were only too happy to tell the media on Friday.

The contrast highlights a longstanding syndrome. Australian officialdom is hyper protective of US intelligence and its sources - even more protective than the Americans themselves.

It's a symptom of the Australian defence establishment's mentality as an anxious junior ally, afraid of giving its senior partner any reason to curtail the flow of intelligence.

A DigitalGlobe spokesmen declined to comment on whether the debris were spotted by DigitalGlobe's own analysts or analysts from governments that use its service, such as Australia and the US.

It couldn't have been discovered by internet users participating in a "crowdsourcing" effort launched by the company to help locate the plane though, as the Australian search area has not yet been uploaded to the site, operated by DigitalGlobe and called Tomnod.

The large objects that Australian officials said were spotted by satellite four days ago are the most promising find in days as searchers scour a vast area for the plane.

The larger of the objects taken four days ago measured up to 24 meters long and appeared to be floating in water several thousand metres deep, Australian officials said. The second object was about five meters long.

DigitalGlobe is the parent company of Tomnod, which has been progressively releasing select areas of satellite imagery to a crowd of more than three million to scour through.

The satellite company has not said if it will release imagery that encompasses the search area off the coast of Western Australia to the public on Tomnod.

"We're working to confirm further details," DigitalGlobe said.

"In the meantime, other customers including the US government and other governments have been receiving our imagery for their own search efforts."

DigitalGlobe said that the sheer number of images covering a large swath of ocean contributed to the delay in revealing what could be debris from the Malaysia Airlines jetliner that has been missing for nearly a week.

"Given the extraordinary size of the current search area, the lengthy duration of the analysis effort was to be expected," a DigitalGlobe spokesman said.

The company's five high-resolution satellites capture more than 3 million square kilometers of earth imagery each day.

"This volume of imagery is far too vast to search through in real time without an idea of where to look," the spokesman said.

A number of Australian government agencies pay DigitalGlobe for access to imagery generated by their satellites, including the Australian Antarctic Division and Geoscience Australia.

Tender documents show that Geoscience Australia alone has paid DigitalGlobe almost $1 million since July, 2012, for satellite imagery over Wide Bay in Queensland and of imagery over the Great Barrier Reef.

It's not clear though through tender documents if Australian intelligence agencies and Defence also pay for access to DigitalGlobe's imagery, as Fairfax was unable to find contracts between them and DigitalGlobe.

DigitalGlobe said no conclusions have been reached about the origins of the objects shown in the imagery near Australia, and it was not aware that any subsequent search missions that have been able to locate them.

"But the experience again demonstrates the unparalleled geographic reach and persistence that satellite imagery provides for critical government missions and emergency response situations," it said.

It's unclear if DigitalGlobe has any restrictions placed upon it by the US government concerning who it shares its satellite imagery with.

- The Sydney Morning Herald with Peter Hartcher and Reuters

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Xi, Abbott hold phone talks over new findings on missing jet Chinese President Xi Jinping and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott held a phone conversation Thursday over possible objects from a missing Malaysian jetliner.

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China mulls sending Xuelong to join search mission for MH370 The Chinese icebreaker Xuelong, or Snow Dragon, awaits orders for the search of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 at the port of Perth, a southwestern port city of Australia, March 20, 2014. Xuelong will set off to the waters where suspected debris of the missing flight MH370 has been found, according to the State Oceanic Administration of China. (Xinhua/Tang Zhijian)

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