China ship detected ‘pulse signals’ are consistent with MH370 aircraft black box

This photograph taken on July 24, 2013 shows crew members standing on the deck of the vessel "Haixun 01"

Chinese patrol ship picks up signal in Indian Ocean

China’s patrol ship, the Haixun 01, has picked up pulses with a frequency of 37.5 kilo hertz in the ...

MH370 search: Signal detected 'consistent' with black box, says Australian ex-military chief

Chinese aircraft spots new floating objects in search of MH370

A Chinese air force plane searching for missing Malaysian passenger jet MH370 spotted a number of white floating objects in the search area Saturday.

Ships sent to verify suspicious pulse signal Xinhuanet 2014-04-05

Verification underway after Chinese ship detects suspicious ... Xinhuanet 2014-04-06

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Planes and ships continue criss-cross search grid fo flight MH370 in Indian ocean | Watch News Videos Onlinehttp://globalnews.ca/video/1252652
 
PERTH, Australia — A Chinese ship involved in the hunt for the missing Malaysian jetliner reported hearing a “pulse signal” Saturday in southern Indian Ocean waters with the same frequency emitted by the plane’s data recorders, as Malaysia vowed not to give up the search for the aircraft.

The Australian government agency coordinating the search for the missing plane said early Sunday that the electronic pulse signals reportedly detected by the Chinese ship are consistent with those of an aircraft black box. But retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, the head of the search coordination agency, said they “cannot verify any connection” at this stage between the electronic signals and the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Military and civilian planes, ships with deep-sea searching equipment and a British nuclear submarine scoured a remote patch of the southern Indian Ocean off Australia’s west coast, in an increasingly urgent hunt for debris and the “black box” recorders that hold vital information about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370′s last hours.

After weeks of fruitless looking, the multinational search team is racing against time to find the sound-emitting beacons in the flight and cockpit voice recorders that could help unravel the mystery of the plane’s fate. The beacons in the black boxes emit “pings” so they can be more easily found, but the batteries only last for about a month.

A Chinese ship that is part of the search effort detected a “pulse signal” in southern Indian Ocean waters, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported. Xinhua, however, said it had not yet been determined whether the signal was related to the missing plane, citing the China Maritime Search and Rescue Center.

Xinhua said a black box detector deployed by the ship, Haixun 01, picked up a signal at 37.5 kilohertz (cycles per second), the same frequency emitted by flight data recorders. Malaysia’s civil aviation chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, confirmed that the frequency emitted by Flight 370′s black boxes were 37.5 kilohertz and said authorities were verifying the report.

Earlier Saturday, Xinhua reported that a Chinese military aircraft searching for the missing aircraft spotted “white floating objects” not far from where the electronic signals were detected.

Finding floating wreckage is key to narrowing the search area, as officials can then use data on currents to backtrack to where the plane hit the water, and where the flight recorders may be.

Houston said the Australian-led Joint Agency Coordination Centre heading the search operation could not yet verify the Chinese reports and had asked China for “any further information that may be relevant.” He said the Australian air force was considering deploying more aircraft to the area where the Chinese ship reportedly detected the sounds.

“I have been advised that a series of sounds have been detected by a Chinese ship in the search area. The characteristics reported are consistent with the aircraft black box,” Houston said, adding that the Australian-led agency had also received reports of the white objects sighted on the ocean surface about 90 kilometers (56 miles) from where the electronic signals were detected.

“However, there is no confirmation at this stage that the signals and the objects are related to the missing aircraft,” Houston said.

Still, Malaysia’s defense minister and acting transport minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, was hopeful. “Another night of hope – praying hard,” he tweeted in response to the latest discoveries.

There are many clicks, buzzes and other sounds in the ocean from animals, but the 37.5 kilohertz pulse was selected for underwater locator beacons on black boxes because there is nothing else in the sea that would naturally make that sound, said William Waldock, an expert on search and rescue who teaches accident investigation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona.

“They picked that (frequency) so there wouldn’t be false alarms from other things in the ocean,” he said.

Honeywell Aerospace, which made the boxes in the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, said the Underwater Acoustic Beacons on both the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder operate at a frequency of 37.5 kilohertz plus or minus 1 kilohertz.

Waldock cautioned that “it’s possible it could be an aberrant signal” from a nuclear submarine if there was one in the vicinity.

If the sounds can be verified, it would reduce the search area to about 10 square kilometers (4 square miles), Waldock said. Unmanned robot subs with sidescan sonar would then be sent into the water to try to locate the wreckage, he said.

John Goglia, a former U.S. National Transportation Safety Board member, called the report “exciting,” but cautioned that “there is an awful lot of noise in the ocean.”

“One ship, one ping doesn’t make a success story,” he said. “It will have to be explored. I guarantee you there are other resources being moved into the area to see if it can be verified.”

The Boeing 777 disappeared March 8 while en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people aboard. So far, no trace of the jet has been found.

Hishammuddin, the Malaysian defense minister, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur that the cost of mounting the search was immaterial compared to providing solace for the families of those on board by establishing what happened.

EPA/ABIS JULIANNE CROPLEY/AUSTRALIAN DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCEA handout picture made available by the Australian Department of Defense (DOD) on 02 April 2014 shows the HMAS Success searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, at sea in the southern Indian Ocean, 31 March 2013. 

“I can only speak for Malaysia, and Malaysia will not stop looking for MH370,” Hishammuddin said.

He said an independent investigator would be appointed to lead a team that will try to determine what happened to Flight 370. The team will include three groups: One will look at airworthiness, including maintenance, structures and systems; another will examine operations, such as flight recorders and meteorology; and a third will consider medical and human factors.

The investigation team will include officials and experts from several nations, including Australia – which as the nearest country to the search zone is currently heading the hunt – China, the United States, Britain and France, Hishammuddin said.

Officials have said the hunt for the wreckage is among the hardest ever undertaken, and will get much harder if there are no confirmed debris sightings and the beacons fall silent before they are found.

If that happens, the only hope for finding the plane may be a full survey of the Indian Ocean floor, an operation that would take years and an enormous international operation.

Hishammuddin said there were no new satellite images or data that can provide new leads for searchers. The focus now is fully on the ocean search, he said.

Two ships – the Australian navy’s Ocean Shield and the British HMS Echo – carrying sophisticated equipment that can hear the recorders’ pings returned Saturday to an area investigators hope is close to where the plane went down. They concede the area they have identified is a best guess.

Up to 13 military and civilian planes and nine other ships took part in the search Saturday, the Australian agency coordinating the search said.

Because the U.S. Navy’s pinger locator can pick up signals to a depth of 6,100 meters (20,000 feet), it should be able to hear the plane’s data recorders even if they are in the deepest part of the search zone – about 5,800 meters (19,000 feet). But that’s only if the locator gets within range of the black boxes – a tough task, given the size of the search area and the fact that the pinger locator must be dragged slowly through the water at just 1 to 5 knots (1 to 6 mph).

Australia’s Houston acknowledged the search area was essentially a best guess, and noted the time when the plane’s locator beacons would shut down was “getting pretty close.”

The overall search area is a 217,000-square-kilometer (84,000-square-mile) zone in the southern Indian Ocean, about 1,700 kilometers (1,100 miles) northwest of the western Australian city of Perth.

-  Nick Perry and Eileen Ng, Associated Press
Ng reported from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Associated Press writers Gillian Wong in Kuala Lumpur, Rod McGuirk in Canberra, Australia, Kristen Gelineau and Rohan Sullivan in Sydney, and Joan Lowy in Washington contributed to this report.

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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....

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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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Chinese families stage mass walkout, demanded China's inquiry into mysterious Flight MH370

Lone voice: The Malaysian delegation listening to the Chinese committee member talk in the hotel ballroom in Beijing. - AFP

BEIJING: Family members of Chinese passengers on board MH370 staged a mass walkout during a briefing by a high-level Malaysian delegation here.

A member of the committee that represents the relatives had asked them to leave the Lido Hotel ballroom as a show of discontent.

The families are convinced that the Malaysian authorities were hiding facts concerning the airliner, which had gone missing with 239 passengers and crew members.

Delegation members had just finished answering questions posed to them by the families a day earlier when the committee member stood up and addressed the crowd.

“Have you heard any updates related to our loved ones from the delegation?” he asked. “Have you heard any answers from the delegation in response to our key queries?”

The crowd shouted “No” in unison.

The man then asked the family members to leave the ballroom and to go “discuss the next course of action” with the committee in another room.

He stressed that the families should do so voluntarily.

After all the relatives had left, the man posed several questions to the delegation and then concluded with: “You have seen from the incident today that the Chinese people and the next-of-kin are united.

“What you are hiding now will ultimately see the light of the day. There will certainly be people who will receive due punishment.”

Despite the awkwardness of the situation, members of the delegation remained seated at the front of the ballroom.

They were Malaysian ambassador to China Datuk Iskandar Sarudin, Royal Malaysian Air Force air operations commander Lt-Jen Datuk Seri Ackbal Abdul Samad, Department of Civil Aviation air traffic services director Ahmad Nizar Zolfakar and representatives from Malaysia Airlines.

Lt-Jen Ackbal then spoke to the man.

“We would like to ask you how we can move forward from here. We have been trying our best to keep you updated and we have nothing to hide.

“We are telling you what we can tell. There are a few ongoing inquiries and we can only reveal information that will not jeopardise the investigations,” he said.

The representative retorted: “I do not want to hear you saying that you need to go back and check when we ask you simple questions.

“You no longer have to protect the safety of hostages. Which one do you put first, national interest or (the) search and rescue mission?”

After that, the man asked the delegation and news media to leave the ballroom because the families wanted the place for a closed-door meeting.

As the family members started streaming back in, the delegation and newsmen stood up and left.

Yesterday’s meeting was the sixth between the delegation and the families; one session lasted seven hours without a break.

Sources: The Star/Asia News Network

Chinese MH370 relatives demand Beijing probe 
- The Economic Times:

 

The document, sent to Beijing's special envoy in Kuala Lumpur, denounced Malaysia's handling of the search and asked the Chinese government to set up its own "investigation office".

Read more at: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/32831901.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

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China stresses importance of international cooperation on MH370 search

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  Flight MH370: two satellite objects spotted in southern Indian Ocean

The document, sent to Beijing's special envoy in Kuala Lumpur, denounced Malaysia's handling of the search and asked the Chinese government to set up its own "investigation office".

News of the letter comes as a committee set up by relatives of the 153 Chinese passengers has begun discussions with lawyers  ..

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/32831901.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppstThe document, sent to Beijing's special envoy in Kuala Lumpur, denounced Malaysia's handling of the search and asked the Chinese government to set up its own "investigation office".

BEIJING: Relatives of the Chinese passengers aboard missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 have demanded China mount its own inquiry into the disappearance, a letter shows.

The document, sent to Beijing's special envoy in Kuala Lumpur, denounced Malaysia's handling of the search and asked the Chinese government to set up its own "investigation office".

News of the letter comes as a committee set up by relatives of the 153 Chinese passengers has begun discussions with lawyers .. Read more at: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/32831901.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

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

Read more in Special Coverage:

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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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