Debris Located in So Indian Ocean

That pretty well puts it to bed and it also strengthens the argument that the crew was overwhelmed by smoke within minutes.  Otherwise an attempt to at least turn it around would have occurred.  All other theories can be assigned to a very low likelihood as well.  We still have to collect the black boxes but I am now pretty sure that we will discover last minutes with the crew fighting the consequences of a fire and likely a tire fire. 

What this has made abundantly clear is that aviation fires are a major treat and we need to engineer protocols that allow the pilot to survive and operate whatever systems are available.  Simple smoke sensors throughout the craft in the obvious enclosed spaces would also be extremely helpful.

Onboard fires are becoming a primary cause of airline accident and it is the one problem that new technology can address and potentially manage.  It may not be able to stop the fire but it surely is possible to prioritize survivability so that the plane has a maximum chance to get on the ground.

Malaysian prime minister says Flight MH370 ‘ended in the southern Indian Ocean’

Video: Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Monday that new information from satellite data showed missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 "ended in the southern Indian Ocean.”

By Jia Lynn Yang and William Wan, Monday, March 24, 9:44 AM E-mail the writers

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/malaysian-prime-minister-says-flight-mh370-ended-in-the-southern-indian-ocean/2014/03/24/cb28ffc6-b370-11e3-8020-b2d790b3c9e1_story.html

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Monday that the missing Malaysia Airlines plane went down in the southern Indian Ocean, effectively removing all hope that it might have survived the still unexplained diversion from its flight path more than two weeks ago.

Reading from a prepared statement, Najib said new information from satellite data showed that the plane’s last location was “in the middle of the Indian Ocean west of Perth,” a city on Australia’s west coast.

 “This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites,” Najib said solemnly. “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 said the families of those on board have been informed of this “heartbreaking” news about the ill-fated Boeing 777 that vanished March 8 with 239 passengers and crew on board. He did not take questions from reporters after delivering his remarks.

In a text message to family members, Malaysia Airlines said: “We deeply regret that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board have survived.” It added that “we must now accept all evidence suggests the plane went down in the Southern Indian Ocean.”

In Beijing, Chinese relatives of the missing passengers were called to the second floor of the Lido Hotel for an emergency meeting to receive the news. Paramedics attended the meeting, and wailing was heard from behind closed doors.

Najib said the new information on the fate of the aircraft came from Britain’s Air Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB) and the British Inmarsat satellite communications company, which previously had provided data indicating that Flight MH370 took either a northern or southern route after diverting from its flight path.

Najib said that after making further calculations and “using a type of analysis never before used in an investigation of this sort,” Inmarsat had essentially eliminated the northern route and “concluded that MH370 flew along the southern corridor.”

The announcement raised the question of why British, American or Malaysian authorities could not have reached the same conclusion more quickly from the Inmarsat data — a succession of hourly electronic “handshakes” between the plane and a satellite — which the company began analyzing within a day or two of the plane’s disappearance.

Vanita Supaya, a former Malaysia Airlines flight attendant who knew some of the crew on board, said the Malaysians should have solicited help from experts in the West much earlier. “It shouldn’t have taken them 17 days to tell us what happened to the aircraft,” she told BBC World News. “This is really very, very sad for the families.”

On March 18, Australia announced that analysis of the satellite data, carried out by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, had allowed investigators to narrow the search area to just 3 percent of the “southern corridor” suggested by Malaysia. The area being searched by the Australians is around 1,500 miles from land, precluding any safe landing for the plane.

The statements from Najib and the airline came after observers on a Chinese search plane on Monday spotted some “suspicious objects” in the southern Indian Ocean — two large floating objects and many smaller white ones.

With the search now in its third week, crew members on an Australian plane separately were able to see two objects, one gray or green and circular and one an orange rectangle, in another section of the 42,500-square-mile stretch of the southern Indian Ocean where observers have tried for days to find some sign of the missing airliner.

Until now, the sighting of possible plane debris has largely been confined to satellite images, making Monday’s visual sighting by human spotters aboard planes a potentially significant breakthrough for the massive search-and-rescue operation, one of the largest in aviation history.

According to a Malaysia Airlines, Flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur with 12 crew members on board, all Malaysians, and 227 passengers from 14 countries. Of the passengers on the Beijing-bound red-eye flight, nearly two-thirds were from China. Five of the passengers — three Chinese and two Americans — were children under 5 years old, the airline’s flight manifest said. There were a total of 38 Malaysian passengers on the plane and three Americans.

The manifest also listed two passengers — one Austrian and one Italian — who turned out to be Iranian men traveling on stolen passports. No links to terrorism have been found; the two were apparently trying to migrate to Europe.

Sarah Bajc, the fiancée of missing American passenger Philip Wood, said in an e-mail message that she was still processing the new information even as she grieved over it. Wood, 50, of Texas, was the lone American adult passenger on Flight MH370, according to the manifest. Bajc had been finishing up preparations to move to Kuala Lumpur with Wood when the plane disappeared.

Since then, Bajc has conducted a flurry of interviews, speaking eloquently of her love and plans for a future with Wood. She launched a Facebook page and Twitter accounts devoted to “FindPhilipWood.” She has said she hoped to sustain public attention and support for the ongoing search. But on Monday night, she said she was putting all of it on hold in light of the devastating new information.

“The announcement is on data only, no confirmed wreckage so no real closure,” she wrote in the e-mail. “I need closure to be certain but cannot keep on with public efforts against all odds. I STILL feel his presence, so perhaps it was his soul all along.”

At the Beijing hotel where families have awaited word of the plane’s fate for more than two weeks, the news was greeted by sporadic wailing as some passengers’ relatives sobbed loudly. Some clung to each other. A few sat silently, apparently in shock. Chinese authorities had paramedics and ambulances on the scene, and some relatives were brought out on stretchers from the ballroom where families have been briefed. A few relatives turned their anger toward journalists waiting with cameras outside the briefing area.

Some family members made the point that their lost relative was the only child in the family — their grief compounded by China’s one-child policy.

Many had held out hope up until Monday night that passengers might still be alive as hostages of a hijacking. And even now, from overheard comments, a few appeared to still harbor hope that survivors, against tough odds, may still be clinging to debris or wreckage in the ocean.

In recent days, anger among many Chinese families had turned into distrust and disbelief in Malaysia Airlines and Malaysian officials. One relative, who did not want to be identified, said this weekend that he believed Malaysia Airlines was lying about various aspects of the search and that Malaysian authorities would not tell passengers’ families even if the plane had landed somewhere safely.

Even before Monday’s announcements, search efforts had been focusing on a vast, remote area of the southern Indian Ocean.

The mission has been daunting. On Monday, just as soon as objects were spotted by the Chinese, they disappeared again. A U.S. Navy plane sent to investigate the spot 1,353 miles southwest of Perth was unable to relocate the debris.

A Chinese ship is also en route to the spot where the debris was seen, according to state news agency Xinhua. The Chinese have also asked the Australians to send more planes to the area.

A separate Australian ship was dispatched to follow up on the other sighting.

It was unclear Monday whether any of the objects spotted by observers were the same as those picked up by various satellite images, including one from the Chinese over the weekend showing a grainy image of a “suspicious floating object” 74 feet long and 43 feet wide. Large shipping containers are also often found drifting in the same waters, a part of the world where strong currents constantly move objects around with changing speeds and directions. Those leading the search hope to get close enough to the items and dredge them out to inspect further.

Finding the debris field is critical for locating the missing aircraft’s cockpit recorders, which will emit tracking signals for 30 days. Since Flight MH370 was lost 16 days ago, time is running out to find the black box containing two recorders: one with the last two hours of audio from the cockpit and the other with detailed flight data.

On Monday, the U.S. Navy ordered a black box locator to be moved into the area being searched. The Navy’s technology can locate black boxes to a maximum depth of 20,000 feet. The Indian Ocean’s depth ranges between 3,770 feet and 23,000 feet.

The underwater emergency beacon on a black box is designed to send a signal with a reach of two nautical miles. Its pings generally have a range of one to three miles, depending on ocean conditions and the terrain of the ocean floor.

“The more noise there is, the harder it is for the signal to be picked up,” said a U.S. official familiar with the devices. “There are a variety of noises in the ocean, and the range of the pinger also is affected by thermal layers.”

Activated when it comes in contact with water, the beacon has a battery life of 30 days.

“It might go longer,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the investigation. “But it’s not going to go two or three months. It might go 35 days.”

“The signal doesn’t gradually get weaker. It just goes dead,” the official said.

If the beacon pings are to be useful, the search must home in on a compact area before the signals stop. Devices such as the U.S. Navy’s black box locater that was dispatched to the Indian Ocean are of little value until the search is dramatically narrowed.

“The classical way to search deep water is to lower behind a boat and tow a sonar system,” said Dave Gallo, who directed the search for the black box that went down in the Atlantic on Air France Flight 447 in 2009. “It’s a sled carrying sonars, normally in about 4,000 meters of water, so you’d have miles of cable behind the boat, and at the end of it, this instrument.”

That severely restricts the underwater territory the boat can cover.

“You can tow probably at 2 miles an hour or less because of the strain on the cable,” said Gallo, who works at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. “If you’re towing over mountain ranges, you have to be incredibly careful, lowering and raising it.”

The search is being conducted over a vast area of deep ocean with a mountainous ocean floor.

“The Towed Pinger Locator has some highly sensitive listening capability so that if the wreck site is located, we can hear the black box pinger down to a depth of about 20,000 feet,” said Navy Cmdr. Chris Budde, U.S. 7th Fleet operations officer. “Basically, this super-sensitive hydrophone gets towed behind a commercial vessel very slowly and listens for black box pings.”

After more than a week of dead ends spanning from Kyrgyzstan to the South China Sea, authorities have steadily zeroed in on a desolate area in the southern Indian Ocean. Five aircraft were scouring the area, with two more planes on the way Monday morning, according to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.

Monday’s search was meant to build on the most recent available satellite data — information provided by the French on Sunday. France on Monday also gave the Malaysians images taken by camera showing potential plane debris, Malaysia’s acting transportation minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, said at a news conference.

The object seen by a French satellite was 528 miles north of where planes and ships had been looking over the weekend, Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said in an interview with ABC Radio, Australia’s national public broadcaster.

The French Foreign Ministry said radar echoes from a satellite had indicated the presence of debris in the ocean about 1,400 miles from Perth, but gave no direction or date.

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

To make the search even more difficult, the weather in this area of the ocean can also be extreme. There were fears recently that a cyclone that hit Christmas Island over the weekend would be headed toward the search parties. AMSA said Monday, though, that the search area should not be affected.

Mike Barton, the rescue coordination chief at the Australian maritime agency, said the biggest challenge was the search area’s “remoteness from anywhere.” That meant search planes were operating at the limits of their fuel supply, prolonging the search, he said.

Satellites have the advantage of passing directly over an object, “but actually determining what it is from an aircraft at a lot lower altitude, looking into the sun, with haze and all the rest of it, is proving difficult,” Barton said.

If planes can find any of the floating objects or any new ones of interest, the next step will be to get a ship to the area and fish them out of the water. “Until we find them and have a good look at them, it’s hard to say if they have anything to do with the aircraft,” Barton said at a news conference in Canberra, the capital.

Meanwhile, there is still the mystery of what caused the plane to divert from its flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in the first place.

The Malaysian government said Monday it had interviewed 100 people, including members of the pilots’ families, as part of its investigation.

So far, there has been no indication that the pilots deliberately sabotaged the flight. Malaysian officials on Sunday rejected recent U.S. media reports that the passenger jet had been pre-programmed to turn sharply westward before it vanished from radar. Those reports, citing unidentified U.S. officials, said the plane’s last transmission through the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, at 1:07 a.m. on March 8, indicated the shift in route, casting suspicion on the two pilots.

This was not true, Malaysia’s Ministry of Transport said in a statement. “The last ACARS transmission, sent at 1:07 a.m., showed nothing unusual,” it said.

Authorities are still looking into whether the plane experienced some mechanical failure or accident.

The cargo included fruit, about 441 pounds of lithium batteries and Malaysian-manufactured radios, according to Malaysia Airlines. The airline has repeatedly said that the batteries, which are known to be flammable, were packed properly.

The spotlight is especially harsh on the state-owned company at the moment, with its every move being scrutinized. Around 3 a.m. Monday, a Malaysia Airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur to the Incheon Airport in Seoul had to make an emergency landing in Hong Kong when an electricity generator failed.

When asked about this during a regular news conference on the missing plane Monday afternoon, Malaysia Airlines chief executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said, “It’s not a safety issue per se. It’s a technical issue.”

Wan reported from Beijing. William Branigin and Ashley Halsey III in Washington and Simon Denyer in Kuala Lumpur contributed to this report.