BALTIMORE, Maryland March 12, 2014 (9:53 am EST) - You see, there are 239 human beings on the missing Boeing 777 jet, the one that took off this past Saturday morning from the airport at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and vanished in the next hour or two. Keep telling yourself that. Stay accutely focused on it. Keep shouting it. Keep screaming it. Be very determined. That is about the only way investigators from around the world can keep pushing forward. The Malaysian Government is sort of running a search for the Malaysian Airlines Jet bound for Beijing, China. They are not doing a good job. That may be an understatement. One thing is certain: the chorus of complaints is growing in leaps and bounds. The complaints are coming from multiple sources. Most ominous for Malaysia, however, may be those coming from the Communist Rulers at Beijing. It has been reported that they have fired off a communique to Kuala Lumpur expressing frustration that has now morphed into anger. The summation of the communique was "hurry up." But other observers believe that is exactly what the Malaysians do not want to do. There is rampant speculation that the Malaysians are plotting how to handle what they think they will find when the wreckage is discovered. The Malaysian Police Chief blurted out on Monday that authorities are interested in the mental state of the passengers and crew. Huh? Even cool heads have lots of questions.
Take the respected Aviation Blog "Plane Talking." A dry and understated, very professional blog written by Ben Sandilands for the Crikey Media Site in Austrailia, its early coverage centered on the tragedy of a very large airline going missing when it was carrying 239 people. By Monday morning, when the Jet was missing and when the information being provided by the Malaysian Government was incomplete and sometimes contradictory. the Blog began raising its own questions. On Tuesday, as far as Mr. Sandilands was concerned, all bets were off. He described the news conference held by the Malaysian Government as "very chaotic." Mr. Sandilands pounced on the case of Malaysian Air Force Chief - and acting Transportation Minister - Rodzali Daud. Yesterday, Mr. Daud was quoted by scores of media outlets as saying the Missing Jet went severely off course immediately after its last routine radio contact with air traffic controllers at Subang, Malaysia. That was at 1:20 am Saturday. Earlier today Mr. Daud said he did not say what he was quoted as saying. Today, at what many people in the South Pacific call "pressers," Mr. Daud "confirmed what he denied he said yesterday."
Through "the clutter," of the statements by Malaysias leaders, it became clear to reporters that the military radar tracking of the missing jet went much longer than the civilian radar. The civilian radar lost the plane at 1:20 am. Yesterday Mr. Daud said the military radar followed the jet for an additional 80 minutes, until 2:40 am local time. That changed again today. Now, Daud said the military radar tracked the Jet until 2:15 am. During that stretch of 55 minutes, the Jet flew an additional 200 nautical miles. But instead of staying on course to Beijing, the plane was flying due west. The military radar tracked the Jet to a point over the entrance to the Straits of Malacca, one of the heaviest shipping channels in the world. At the mouth of the Straits sits a strange looking tiny Island called Pulau Perak. This island looks like the peak of a tall mountain poking out of the sea. There is no shore, just a shear cliff on all sides tapering to a point in the middle. It is in the skies over Pulau Perak that the military radar lost the plane.
At today's news conference there was the suggestion that no one in the Malaysian Military or Malaysian Government has sufficient expertise to analyze the military radar readings. Authorities do know that the Jet's bevy of transponders were turned off right after the 1:20 am contact with the Subang Air Traffic Controllers. Apparently, tracking a plane without activated transponders is tricky. If a plane without transponders loses altitude and flies below 1,000 feet, it is completely off the radar. Malaysian Authorities say they will seek the help of the United States in analyzing the data that they have. The hope is that they will get a track for the plane after Subang, and using that track they will get some kind of idea where the plane would have gone after it passed Pulau Perak. In the meantime, the search area has been moved to the other side of the Malaysian Peninsula, meaning the side where the Straits of Malacca are.
And, for the record, there is other information to plug in to the radar readings. The Aviation Herald - another highly respected Aviation information source - reported yesterday that at Khota Bhuru, a Malaysian City on the west coast of the peninsula, not far from the Thailand border, local police received calls from residents saying they had just witnessed a large airliner fly past just 1,000 feet overhead. The jet had flashing red lights, the police say they were told. And now a worker on an oil rig says he saw an explosion. The rig is said to be in the same area.
What has aviation experts exasperated with the entire search is the failure of Malaysian Authorities to address obvious questions raised by the data that they do have. Mr. Sandilands put it this way: "What is so frustrating in the lack of detail given by the Malaysian authorities is their failure to address such obvious questions. It would have known precisely what by way of scheduled airliners was flying over western Malaysia on Saturday morning. It doesn’t need military radar to answer that question.
These evasions or omissions in the briefing last night make it overwhelmingly likely that the original reports attributed to Rodzali Daud were correct, and that there is a cover up of important detail being attempted by the authorities, with less and less success with every day." The Sandilands blog is at this web site: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/
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