BALTIMORE, Maryland March 29, 2014 - In Australia: Debris was apparently retrieved today in the area of the Southern Indian Ocean getting all the attention of searchers seeking a missing Malaysian Airlines Jumbo Jet with 239 people on board. Early reports, however, indicate the debris was not from the missing plane. But other debris seen by search planes seems to be more promising, and the recovery of this debris may be imminent. This, even as a top Malaysian official told grieving relatives not to stop hoping that the people on the plane are still alive. And the Independent newspaper in London reported Sunday that the United States Secret Service, and their counterparts in England and China have joined the investigation into the missing plane, an investigation all three agencies concede may be criminal in nature;;;.
In the United States: Former Treasury Secretary and President of Harvard University, Lawrence H Summers, said Sunday that the absolute most important point in the battle to improve the struggling USA economy is ridding the nation of the "terrible disincentives to bring cash home." Summers was speaking directly to policy makers, who, he explained, were making it utterly impossible to make cogent future business plans. He also took aim at the "disincentives" placed on earning money, both at the corporate and individual levels. He conceded that corporate taxes are actually at historic lows, but corporate leaders are mired in fog going forward, unsure of where Washington would strike next with taxes, fees and regulations. Doing business has to have an air of predictability about it, he said during an appearance on Fox News Channel.
In the crisis in Russia, Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia: The powerful Chairman of the USA House Intelligence Committee said this morning that while the West is concentrating on Russia having massed some 30,000 heavily armed troops on Ukraine's eastern border, he is more concerned about Russian Strong Man Vladimir Putin's marked buildup of both troops and advanced military equipment in South Ossetia, formerly a part of Georgia, but situated so that an army staging there would be a direct and ominous threat to both Georgia and Armenia. According to the Financial Times, Rep. Mike Rogers (Republican from Missouri) said today that Putin has contingency plans to invade both Georgia and Armenia. because he very much wants to establish a direct Russian land route to Iran. “They are moving some of their most advanced equipment into South Ossetia,” Rogers stated. “There is no reason to do that. The Georgian army really poses no threat. That’s certainly concerning.” Like Summers, Rogers was appearing on Fox.
A memorial service for the flight crew of the missing Malaysian Airlines Jet was held Saturday at Fo Guang Shan Temple in Maylands, near Perth in Western Australia. In attendance was Malaysian Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, who said he refuses to give up hope of finding some of the 239 passengers and crew alive. Hussein said that Malaysia is committed to seeing the investigation through to its final conclusion. "I cannot give them (relatives of the missing) false hope,' he said. 'The best we can do is pray and be sensitive to them, that as long as there is even a remote chance of a survivor, we will pray and do whatever it takes. What they (relatives) want from us is a commitment to continue the search, and that I have given, not only on behalf of the Malaysian government but the so many nations involved. For me as the minister responsible, this is the hardest part of my life, at the moment. Miracles do happen, remote or otherwise, and that is the hope that the families want me to convey not only to the Malaysian government, MAS, but also to the world at large."
The USA Naval Officer who is leading the sea search, Captain Mark Matthews, said that finding the black box from the missing jet is, really, "untenable." The newly identified search area is the size of Poland. The black box is the size of a child's school lunch box. A Chinese Ilyushin IL-76 plane spotted three floating objects, China’s official Xinhua News Agency said today, including two bearing colours of the missing jet.
Search leaders also fear that the missing jet may have gone down in a part of the ocean where the bottom includes a trench that is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. This possibility emerged on the same day that Malaysian officials acknowledged that the three well-known intelligence agencies, and the CIA are now fully involved in the investigation. M16 and the CIA have been helping Malaysian investigators look for reasons behind the almost unbelievable disappearance of the large Boeing 777 over three weeks ago. Both of those agencies and China's top intelligence agency are concentrating on the sudden left turn the jet made moments before it was lost to ground radar. Officially, there are four possibilities for the plane's vanishing: 1) terrorism; 2) hijacking; 3) personal or psychological problems among the crew or passengers; and 4) a catastrophic failure of on-board equipment or on the body of the jet. It has been disclosed that British M16 agents are zeroing in on terrorism links in the wake of an admission in a American Court by a British man, Saajid Badad, that in 2001 he gave a shoe bomb to Malaysian men who asked for it in order to blow up an airplane cockpit door so that they could access the plane's pilots in order to carry out a 9/11-style hijacking. In addition, British, American and Chinese intelligence agencies are all "on board" working the analysis of the "pings" the missing jet sent out, and which were picked up by the earth-orbiting satellites of several nations.
The American Captain, Mark Matthews, has a high-tech "ping detector" being towed behind his warship. Whether the device can find the black box of the missing jumbo jet depends on whether the Captain and his crew can get his vessel close enough to the plane's black box. "It all depends on how effective we are at reducing the search area," Matthews said. He was involved in the search for the black box of the French Jet that went down in 2009 in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Matthews said the ping locator his ship is towing must be within one mile of black box to detect its pings. And once the Captain and the search team believe they are in the area of the box, it can only be towed at a speed of three miles per hour to be effective. On top of the difficulty of making such a find in a vast ocean is the fact that the battery in the black box is only days from running out of energy. Without the pings, finding the black box becomes extremely difficult. Matthews conceded that losing the ping could mean never finding the box. Then there is the sea floor in this part of the Indian Ocean. The bottom is covered in sediment. The entire area of the bottom is dominated by what is known as the "Broken Ridge." Depths here are between 2,625 feet (about one-half mile) to 9,843 feet (a bit shy of two miles deep). There is more than one large plateaus on the bottom. The one fartherest south ends at the Diamantina Trench. Sea floor mapping efforts have measured this trench to a depth of 19,000 feet, but they concede it could actually be much deeper in some areas. Not all parts of the trench have been mapped, officials say.
One of the planes involved in the search had to be diverted to respond to a distress signal sent by a fishing vessel said to be 3,241 kilometres southwest of Perth, but only 648 kilometres north of the Anarctic mainland. Strangely, efforts by Australian maritime officials to contact the vessel have been unsuccessful. Even the nature of the distress signal is unclear. The Australian Maritime Safety Authority re-tasked a RAAF P-3 Orion airplane participating in the search for the Malaysian Jet to respond to the fishing vessel. The plane is equipped with a number of apparatus that could help the crew if they are in danger. The main feature is a collectin of survival gear that can be dropped from the Orion to the Vessel's crew. A civil jet with emergency personnel has left Melbourne the investigate the emergency beacon. This aircraft will need five hours to get to the scene, leaving it two hours on site.
The BBC interviewed a renowned oceanographer about currents and other characteristics of the sea now being searched. Erik van Sebille, from the University of New South Wales in Australia, said that the ocean waters there are among the cleanest in the world. This part of the Indian Ocean is flushed northwards towards the equator, vastly reducing the amount of debris from land areaa likely to be found by searchers. In other words, the debris being found is far more likely to be from the missing plane if, in fact, it crashed somewhere near here.
Meanwhile, the South China Post, quoting Reuters, said the search for the missing Malaysian Jet will certainly be the most expensive in the history of aviation, far higher than the cost of searching for the missing French plane that crashed in 2009 in the middle of the Atlantic. France and Brazil (the two nations at the beginning and intended end of the doomed flight) spent a combined $40 million over the two year span that the search took. When the plane was located, underwater robots were used to scour the ocean floor. Some 50 bodies had been recovered when the search was halted due to extreme costs.
France and Brazil spent more than US$40 million over two years to recover the black boxes from Air France flight 447, which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 en route to Rio de Janeiro from Paris. Officials halted the operation, which used underwater robots to scour the seabed, after search crews found 50 of the 228 bodies.
Some observers believe China has already spent more than that.
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