Malaysian airplane disappeared

It was 8 March 2014, the date when " Malaysia Airplane Flight 37" disappeared, after departing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 passengers and crew members on board. Official announcements have been questioned by many critics, and several theories about the disappearance have been proposed. 
A Vietnamese search team has found what they believe is part of a door and an airplane's tail in the first major breakthrough in the hunt for missing aircraft.

The suspected fragments have been located around 50 miles from south-west of Tho Chu Island.

Investigators are narrowing the focus of their inquiries on the possibility that the plane disintegrated in mid-flight, a senior source said on Sunday

'The fact that we are unable to find any debris so far appears to indicate that the aircraft is likely to have disintegrated at around 35,000 feet,' said the source, who is involved in the investigations in Malaysia.

The possible causes that could have brought down the flight 

Accidental shoot-down There have been two previous cases of passenger jets being brought down accidentally by the military .

U.S. officials also confirmed they have dispatched a team of safety experts including FBI agents to Southeast Asia to assist in the investigation of the Boeing 777, which disappeared shortly after takeoff with 239 people on board.

While the wreckage of the plane has still not been found, new photos of oil slicks in the South China Sea have emerged and some evidence is beginning to point towards a terrorist attack.

And dramatically, a second pilot who was in the skies over the South China Sea when the 777 vanished has spoken about hearing 'mumbling' at the other end of communications with the plane.

The captain, who asked to remain anonymous, told Malaysian media outlets he was asked to get in contact with the pilot flying the missing plane on an emergency frequency and establish their position.

He said he believes he spoke to the co-pilot, but that there were 'interference' and 'mumbling' before they lost the connection.

Earlier on Saturday, two oil slicks were spotted by the Vietnamese air force in the Gulf of Thailand, about 90 miles south of Vietnam's Tho Chu Island - the same area where the flight disappeared from radar.

The plane - carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members - took off from Kuala Lumpur at 12.21 am Saturday bound for Beijing, where it was expected to land at 6.30 am .

But after reaching 35,000ft and 120 nautical miles off the coast of the Malaysian town of Kota Bharu the plane vanished.

The lack of an emergency call 'suggests something very sudden and very violent happened,' William Waldock, who teaches accident investigation at Embry-Riddle. 

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said search operations in an area about midway between Malaysia and Vietnam's southern coast were being intensified.

It comes as the Vietnamese air force reported it has spotted two oil slicks, thought to be from the wreckage of the crash.

A Vietnamese government statement said the slicks were spotted off the southern tip of Vietnam.

They were each between six miles and nine miles long, officials said.

The statement said the slicks were consistent with the kinds that would be left by fuel from a crashed jetliner, but it was not clear if they were connected to the missing aircraft. 

'Vietnam rescue airplanes saw two oil spills and one smoke column in the area around 150 miles west of Tho Chu island, but we can't confirm it's from that Malaysia plane,' said Pham Quy Tieu, vice minister of transportation.

The disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines jet well into its flight has led experts to assume that whatever happened was quick and left the pilots no time to make a distress call.

It initially appears there was either a sudden breakup of the plane or something that led it into a quick, steep dive. Some experts even suggested an act of terrorism.

Possible causes for a crash include:

Catastrophic structural failure This could have damaged the air-frame or engines. Given the plane's impressive safety record, experts suggest this is unlikely.

Bad weather Planes are designed to fly though most severe storms, but poor weather has caused crashes in the past. However, the skies were clear in this case. 

Pilot disorientation The pilots could have taken the plane off autopilot and somehow gone course.

Failure of both engines In January 2008, a British Airways 777 crashed about 1,000 feet short of the runway at London's Heathrow Airport. There were no fatalities. Such a scenario is possible, but the plane could glide for up to 20 minutes, giving pilots plenty of time to make an emergency call. 

A bomb Several planes have been brought down by bombs. If the debris field is large it will indicate the plane broke apart high up.

Pilot suicide There were two large jet crashes in the late 1990`s that investigators suspected were caused by pilots deliberately crashing.

Hijacking A traditional hijacking seems unlikely given that a plane's captors typically land at an airport and have some type of demand. But a 9/11-hijacking is possible, with terrorists forcing the plane into the ocean.

Malaysia had dispatched 15 planes and nine ships to the area. The U.S. Navy was sending a warship and a surveillance plane, and Singapore said it would send a submarine and a plane. China and Vietnam also were sending aircraft to help in the search.

Malaysian Airlines has confirmed the majority of those on board are from Malaysia and China, with three Americans, two Canadians and seven Australians and passengers from France.It comes as Interpol criticized Thailand's lax airport security after it emerged at least two passengers' passports were stolen, prompting fears that terrorists might have used them to get on board the Malaysia Airlines flight M H 307

The possibility of a further two stolen passports used on the same flight is now being investigated as it emerges that no cross checks were carried out against Interpol's lost and stolen database.Procedural checks would have revealed that at least two passengers were travelling on stolen passports.Malaysian authorities now believe they have images of the two men using the stolen passports to board the flights. 

The images have been circulated across international intelligence agencies and will be cross-referenced with facial recognition software.

The passports were used to buy tickets booked in the names of Italian Luigi Maraldi and Austrian Christian Kozel on March 6, 2014, and issued in the Thai city of Pattaya, a popular beach resort south of the capital Bangkok.

Luigi Maraldi, 37, the owner of one of the passports, was listed as the sole Italian national on the missing flight. This afternoon he told how the document was stolen while he was on holiday in July last year on the island Phuket.

The owner of the other stolen passport was Austrian citizen Christian Kozel, 30, who's name also appeared on the passenger manifest.Mr Kozel discovered he had been listed when uniformed police officers turned up at his home in Salzburg at the weekend.He said he had reported the passport as stolen while he was in the same part of Thailand two years ago, and that it had apparently then been used by someone illegally.

In a statement issued today, the France-based international police body said information about the thefts was entered into its database after they were stolen in Thailand.

Officials from Italy and Austria also confirmed that the travel documents of both men were reported stolen in Thailand.Interpol said it was now investigating all other passports used to board flight M H 370 and was working to determine the 'true identities' of the passengers who used the stolen passports.'Whilst it is too soon to speculate about any connection between these stolen passports and the missing plane, it is clearly of great concern that any passenger was able to board an international flight using a stolen passport listed in Interpol's databases,' Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said in a statement.

Noble expressed frustration that few of Interpol's 190 member countries 'systematically' search the database to determine whether documents being used to board a plane are registered as lost or stolen.

The security breach has led to fears that missing Malaysia Airlines flight M H 307 may have been taken down by terrorists.But authorities have confirmed that no terrorist organisations have claimed responsibility and there has been no electronic 'chatter' to suggest any known terror group was behind the aircraft's disappearance.There is also no evidence of foul play and no mayday calls were received before the plane disappeared.  

It comes as the chief of the Malaysian Air Force said that radar indicated the missing plane may have turned back before it crashed.

Despite dozens of military and civilians vessels and aircraft criss-crossing waters to the east and west of Malaysia, no wreckage has been found, although oil slicks have been reported in the sea south of Vietnam.Malaysian Security officials earlier revealed they had footage of two passengers traveling on passports stolen in Thailand - one registered to an Italian and the other an Austrian - making their way through Kuala Lumpur passport control to the aircraft.The passengers being checked had all bought their tickets through China Southern Airlines.It appears that the tickets linked to the Italian and Austrian passports were bought together in Thai baht at identical prices, according to China's official e-ticket verification system Travelsky. The ticket numbers are contiguous, which indicates the tickets were issued together.It follows reports that an anonymous pilot told Malaysian newspapers that he had heard a 'mumbled' last transmission from the aircraft - although this is contradicted by air traffic controllers who say there was no distress call.

Vietnamese state media, quoting a senior naval official, had reported that the Boeing 777-200 ER flight had crashed off south Vietnam, but those reports have been denied, with the plane listed as 'missing'.

The Vietnamese Navy confirmed it detected the aircraft's emergency locator signal 153 miles south of Phu Quoc island in the South China sea.Admiral Ngo Van Phat told the Vietnamese newspaper Tuoi Tre that radar showed the aircraft had crashed into the sea off the southern tip of Vietnam, close to the border with Cambodia.The paper later reported the Admiral qualifying his statement, saying the radar had revealed the presumed crash site.

Malaysian naval vessels saw no immediate sign of wreckage when they reached the maritime area off the country's northeast coast this morning, a senior rescue official said.

Malaysia has sent three maritime enforcement ships and a navy vessel to the area, backed by three helicopters, a Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency official said.

'Our aircraft asset spotted an orange speck in the sea where the last signal came from. We sent a vessel to search the area and it was confirmed that it was nothing,' he said.

The signal picked up by the Navy is believed to be the Emergency Locator Transmitter, which can be activated manually by the flight crew or automatically upon impact.

Crying relatives of Chinese passengers on board the plane wept at Beijing airport as it became clear the jet had probably crashed.An unconfirmed report on a flight tracking website said the aircraft had plunged 650ft and changed course shortly before all contact was lost.The route would have taken flight MH370, a B777-200 aircraft, across the Malaysian mainland in a north-easterly direction and then across the Gulf of Thailand.

The pilot of the passenger plane is Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, a 53-year-old Malaysia who joined the airline in 1981.His co-pilot was 27-year-old First Officer Fariq Ab. Hamid, also from Malaysia, who joined the airline in 2007.If the aircraft has crashed, and all the passengers and crew are killed, it would the deadliest aviation incident since November 2001.In that incident, 265 people died after an American Airlines Airbus A 300 crashed in Belle Harbor, Queens, after leaving JFK Airport in New York. The deaths included five people on the ground.

The plane 'lost all contact and radar signal one minute before it entered Vietnam's air traffic control,' Lieutenant General Vo Van Tuan, deputy chief of staff of the Vietnamese army, said in a statement issued by the government.

More than 10 hours after last contact, officials from several countries were struggling to locate the plane.All countries in the possible flight path of the missing aircraft were performing a 'communications and radio search', John Andrews, deputy chief of the Philippines' civil aviation agency, said.Xinhua said China has sent two maritime rescue ships to the South China Sea to help in the search and rescue efforts.

'It couldn't possibly be in the air because it would have run out of oil by now,' Shukor Yusof, an aviation analyst at S&P Capital IQ, said. 'It's either on the ground somewhere, intact, or possibly it has gone down in the water.'Aviation experts said that if the report of the aircraft suddenly plunging was correct it could be due to a number of factors.

Finding planes that disappear over the ocean can be difficult. Airliner 'black boxes' -  the flight data and cockpit voice recorders - are equipped with 'pingers' that emit ultrasonic signals that can be detected underwater.

Under good conditions, the signals can be detected from several hundred miles away, John Goglia, a former member of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, said.

If the boxes are trapped inside the wreckage, the sound may not travel as far, he said. If the boxes are in an underwater trench, that also hinders how far the sound can travel. The signals also weaken over time.Unconfirmed reports said it was believed the missing aircraft was involved in a crash in August 2012 when it damaged the tail of a China Eastern Airlines plane at Shanghai Pudong Airport.The reports said that in that incident the tip of the wing of the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 broke off.Retired American Airlines captain Jim Tilmon told CNN that 'it doesn't sound very good,' as the search continued for the missing jet.

'The route is mostly overland, which means there would be plenty of radars and radios to contact the plane.'I've been trying to come up with every scenario that I could just to explain this away, but I haven't been very successful.'Mr Tilmon said the jet was 'about as sophisticated as any commercial airplane could possibly be.'

A leading aviation safety expert has said it is 'extraordinary' that the pilots of a missing Malaysia Airlines plane carrying 239 people did not make a distress call.

The Boeing B 777-200 aircraft would have been cruising at about 35,000 feet when it lost contact over the South China Sea, giving the pilots 'plenty of time' to report any technical problems, Flight Global's operations and safety editor David Learmount said.

Mr Learmount said: 'Something happened and the pilots did not tell anyone. Why? It's a good question.'It's extraordinary the pilots failed to call because they had plenty of time to. Unless there was a bomb on board but there has been no evidence of that.'

Mr Learmount, who is a pilot, drew comparisons with the Air France 447 plane crash over the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, which killed 216 passengers and 12 aircrew, including five Britons.The aircraft crashed when pilots lost control after ice crystals affected sensors used to measure the plane's speed, he said.

Mr Learmount said: 'This is an historical comparison and could be a coincidence.

'Modern aircrafts are beautifully built and incredibly safe.

'If the engines were to fail because of some kind of interruption to the fuel flow, they can glide with no problems whatsoever for about 40 minutes at that height.' 

Mystery or not, accident or not, terrorist act or not, this was a tragedy that people will never forget..