Missing Malaysian plane: Satellite images show 122 potential objects
Australia says three more objects seen; Six theories to explain aviation's greatest mystery.
As the hunt for the MH320 black box intensifies, these are the two
flight recorders of the Air France flight 447, which crashed in 2009, in
Le Bourget, near Paris. Geoff Dell, discipline leader of accident
investigation at Central Queensland University, said if the black boxes
of a missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 were several kilometers
(miles) deep, ships might need to be almost directly over them before
the signal could detect them. If found in deep water, Dell expected that
unmanned submarines would be needed to retrieve them. That’s how the
black box from Air France Flight 447 was retrieved in May 2011, almost
two years after the Airbus A330 crashed with the loss of 228 lives.
The images from Airbus Defence and Space in France show the objects in a 400 sq km area of the ocean, said Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein.
Hishammuddin told a daily press conference it was not possible to say whether the objects came from the Boeing 777 which crashed on March 8 with 239 people aboard.
"Nevertheless, this is another new lead that will help direct the search operation," he said.
Earlier satellite data from Australia, China and France had also shown floating objects possibly related to MH370, but nothing has so far been retrieved despite a huge multinational search.
Hishammuddin said the Airbus images were taken on Sunday, received Tuesday, and immediately forwarded to the Australian agency coordinating the search.
He said the Malaysian Remote Sensing Agency had identified the 122 "potential objects" after analysing the satellite images.
Some were a metre in length while others were as long as 23 metres.
"Some of the objects appeared to be bright, possibly indicating solid materials," the minister said.
They were located about 2,557 km from Perth. The search effort has focused on waters far to the southwest of Australia.
Australia says three more objects seen
Australian authorities said on Wednesday that three more objects had been spotted by aircraft searching for a Malaysian jet missing in the southern Indian Ocean.
A civilian aircraft, one of 12 scouring the region some 2,500km southwest of Perth, had seen two objects thought to be rope, while a New Zealand Air Force P-3 Orion spotted a blue object, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said on its Twitter feed.
None was seen again on subsequent passes and none was distinctive of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, ASMA added.
Theories continue to abound - some plausible, some crazy... but all without hope
Satellite data that confirmed a Malaysian jetliner missing for more than two weeks crashed in the Indian Ocean included a final electronic signal that is still being investigated, Malaysian acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said on Tuesday.
"There is evidence of a partial handshake between the aircraft and ground station at 0019 UTC (GMT)," Hishammuddin told a news conference.
"At this time, this transmission is not understood and is subject to further ongoing work."
Preliminary analysis of the satellite "pings" had only been able to place the plane's final position in one of two vast arcs stretching from the Caspian Sea to the southern Indian Ocean.
Aviation's greatest mystery
Even if searchers are able to miraculously pluck Malaysia Airlines flight 370's "black box" from the depths of the vast Indian Ocean, experts say it may not solve one of aviation's greatest mysteries.
Planes, ships and state-of-the-art tracking equipment are hunting for any trace of the passenger jet, which Malaysia said crashed in the forbidding waters after veering far from its intended course.
They face a huge challenge locating the Boeing 777's "black box", which holds vital clues to determining what caused the plane to vanish after it took off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing on March 8.
But experts believe the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder may not yield answers on the riddle of how and why the plane diverted an hour into the flight, and embarked on a baffling journey to the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean.
The data recorder details the aircraft's path and other mechanical information for the flight's duration, and "should provide a wealth of information", US-based aviation consultancy firm Leeham Co said in a commentary.
But the cockpit voice recorder - which could reveal what decisions were made by those at the helm and why - retains only the last two hours of conversations before the plane's demise.
That means potentially crucial exchanges surrounding the initial diversion, which took place halfway between Malaysia and Vietnam, will be lost.
"Clearly, it won't reveal anything that happened over the Gulf of Thailand - this will have been overwritten by the end of MH370," it said.
Leeham added that it also remains to be seen whether the cockpit recorder will contain anything pertinent about the plane's final two hours, when it is believed to have either ditched or run out of fuel.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Monday that Flight MH370 had gone down in the Indian Ocean with its 239 passengers and crew, citing new satellite data analysis.
But its exact location and the circumstances of its diversion remain a mystery. No distress signal was ever received.
The possible theories
Three scenarios have gained particular traction: hijacking, pilot sabotage, or a sudden mid-air crisis that incapacitated flight crew and left the plane to fly on auto-pilot for several hours until it ran out of fuel.
Malaysia has said it believes the plane was deliberately diverted by someone on board.
But with the travelling public and aviation industry hanging on every twist in the drama, no firm evidence has emerged from a Malaysian investigation to support any of the theories circulating.
British aviation expert Chris Yates said that even if the black boxes are found, "it seems unlikely that we will get that answer" of why the plane ended up thousands of kilometres off course.
"We still have no idea as to the mental state of the pilot and co-pilot, we have no idea if somebody managed to get into the cockpit to seize the aircraft, and we've certainly had no admissions of responsibility since this whole episode started," he told BBC television.
"It is a mystery like no other."
Debris has been sighted far off Australia's west coast but an international search effort has been unable to retrieve any for confirmation, and wreckage could have drifted hundreds of kilometres from where the plane crashed.
"As investigators, we deal with physical evidence and right now we don't have any physical evidence to work with," Anthony Brickhouse, a member of the International Society of Air Safety Investigators, told AFP.
The batteries powering the locator signal of the black boxes will run out in less than two weeks.
A US device capable of detecting that signal even on the ocean floor was being sent to the scene, but weather and treacherous sea conditions have hampered the effort to pinpoint the black box location.
Paul Yap, an aviation lecturer at Singapore's Temasek Polytechnic, said that if the black box is not found, "chances are we are never going to find out what really happened".
"With the new satellite data, I think we can say it is a chessboard," he said of the wide search area.
"The question now is to find which grid on that chessboard to focus on, where the black boxes are."
Pitbull-Shakira
A 2012 Pitbull-Shakira song, Get It Started has been thrown into the mix.
The lyrics No Ali/No freezer/But for now, off to Malaysia were perceived to have been prophetic, seeing as ‘Mr Ali’ was the nickname given by the British media to one of the Iranian passengers with a fake passport.
Cloaking device
There were 20 employees of Texas-based Freescale Semiconductor on board and It seemed that there was a cloaking device involved, one created by the company and coveted by China.
Star Wars weapon
As per Natural News:."The frightening part about all this is not that we will find the debris of Flight 370; but rather that we won't."
"If we never find the debris, it means some entirely new, mysterious and powerful force is at work on our planet which can pluck airplanes out of the sky without leaving behind even a shred of evidence. If there does exist a weapon with such capabilities, whoever controls it already has the ability to dominate all of Earth's nations with a fearsome military weapon of unimaginable power."
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