Posted on 03/15/2014 7:40:16 PM PDT by Fitzy_888
Sepang - The radar blip that was Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 did a wide U-turn over the Gulf of Thailand and then began moving inexorably past at least three military radar arrays as it traversed northern Malaysia, even flying high over one of the country's biggest cities before heading out over the Strait of Malacca.
Yet inside a Malaysian air force control room on the country's west coast, where American-made F-18's and F-5 fighters stood at a high level of readiness for emergencies exactly like the one unfolding in the early morning of March 8, a four-person crew did nothing about the unauthorized flight. "The watch team never noticed the blip," said a person with detailed knowledge of the investigation into Flight 370. "It was as though the airspace was his."
It was not the first and certainly not the last in a long series of errors by the Malaysian government that has made the geographically vast and technologically complex task of finding the $50 million Malaysia Airlines jet far more difficult.
A week after the plane disappeared, the trail is even colder as the search now sprawls from the snowy peaks of the Himalayas to the empty expanses of the southern Indian Ocean. Nobody knows yet whether the delays cost the lives of any of the 239 people who boarded the flight to Beijing at Kuala Lumpur's ultramodern airport here. But the mistakes have accumulated at a remarkable pace.
"The fact that it flew straight over Malaysia, without the Malaysian military identifying it, is just plain weird - not just weird, but also very damning and tragic," said David Learmount, the operations and safety editor for Flightglobal, a news and data service for the aviation sector.
Senior Malaysian military officers became aware within hours of the radar data once word spread that a civilian airliner had vanished. The Malaysian government nonetheless organized and oversaw an expensive and complex international search effort in the Gulf of Thailand that lasted for a full week. Only on Saturday morning did Prime Minister Najib Razak finally shut it down after admitting what had already been widely reported in the news media: Satellite data showed that the engines on the missing plane had continued to run for nearly six more hours after it left Malaysian airspace.
Finding the plane and figuring out what happened to it is now a far more daunting task than if the plane had been intercepted. If the aircraft ended up in the southern Indian Ocean, as some aviation experts now suggest, then floating debris could have subsequently drifted hundreds of miles, making it extremely hard to figure out where the cockpit voice and data recorders sank.
And because the recorders keep only the last two hours of cockpit conversation, even the aircraft's recorders may hold few secrets.
With so much uncertainty about the flight, it is not yet possible to know whether any actions by the Malaysian government or military could have altered its fate. Responding to a storm of criticism, particularly from China, whose citizens made up two-thirds of the passengers, Najib took pains in a statement early Saturday afternoon to say that Malaysia had not concealed information, including military data.
"We have shared information in real time with authorities who have the necessary experience to interpret the data," he said, reading aloud a statement in English at a news conference. "We have been working nonstop to assist the investigation, and we have put our national security second to the search for the missing plane."
Malaysia Airlines issued a similarly defensive statement late Saturday afternoon. "Given the nature of the situation and its extreme sensitivity, it was critical that the raw satellite signals were verified and analyzed by the relevant authorities so that their significance could be properly understood," the airline said. "This naturally took some time, during which we were unable to publicly confirm their existence."
Aviation experts said that a trained pilot would be the most obvious person to have carried out a complicated scheme involving the plane. Yet for a week after the plane's disappearance, Malaysian law enforcement authorities said that their investigation did not include searching the home of the pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah.
On Saturday afternoon, the police were seen entering the gated community where Zaharie was said to have lived, and Malaysian media reported that they had searched his premises. The police declined to comment. It is not known whether the authorities made any effort to secure Zaharie's home and prevent any destruction of evidence over the past week.
Najib said on Saturday that "the Malaysian authorities have refocused their investigation into the crew and passengers on board." But Zaharie has not been accused of any wrongdoing. No information has been released yet on whether the homes of the co-pilot or flight attendants might be searched.
Even before the plane took off, Malaysian immigration officials had already allowed onto the plane at least two people using passports that had been logged into a global database as stolen, although there is no evidence that either person carrying a stolen passport was involved in diverting the plane.
A British Royal Air Force base in the colonial era, the Malaysian air force base at Butterworth sits on the mainland across from the island of Penang at the northern reaches of the Strait of Malacca. There, in the early morning hours of March 8, the four-person crew watching for intrusions into the country's air space either did not notice or failed to report a blip on their defensive radar and air traffic radar that was moving steadily across the country from east to west, heading right toward them, said the person with knowledge of the matter.
Neither that team nor the crews at two other radar installations at Kota Bharu, closer to where the airliner last had contact with the ground, designated the blip as an unknown intruder warranting attention, the person said. The aircraft proceeded to fly across the country and out to sea without anyone on watch telling a superior and alerting the national defense command near Kuala Lumpur, even though the radar contact's flight path did not correspond to any filed flight plan.
As a result, combat aircraft never scrambled to investigate. The plane, identified at the time by Najib as Flight 370, passed directly over Penang, a largely urban state with more than 1.6 million people, then turned and headed out over the Strait of Malacca.
The existence of the radar contact was only discovered when military officials began reviewing tapes later in the morning on March 8, after the passenger jet failed to arrive at its destination in Beijing. It was already becoming clear that morning, only hours after the unauthorized flyover, that something had gone very wrong. Tapes from both the Butterworth and Kota Bharu bases showed the radar contact arriving from the area of the last known position of Flight 370, the person familiar with the investigation said.
General Rodzali Daud, the commander of Malaysia's air force, publicly acknowledged the existence of the radar signals for the first time on Wednesday, well into the fifth day after the plane's disappearance. He emphasized that further analysis was necessary because the radar plots of the aircraft's location were stripped of the identifying information given by the plane's onboard transponders, which someone aboard the aircraft appears to have turned off.
The failure to identify Flight 370's errant course meant that a chance to send military aircraft to identify and redirect the Boeing 777 aircraft was lost. And for five days the crews on an armada of search vessels, including two U.S. warships, focused the bulk of their attention in the waters off Malaysia's east coast, far from the plane's actual path.
Rodzali went to Butterworth air force base the day that the plane disappeared and was told of the radar blips, the person familiar with the investigation said. The Malaysian government nonetheless assigned most of its search and rescue resources, as well as ships and aircraft offered by other nations, to a search of the Gulf of Thailand where the aircraft's satellite transponder was turned off, while allocating minimal attention to the Strait of Malacca on the other, western side of Peninsular Malaysia. -ndtv.com
"Malaysian Airlines (Mas) is a state-owned airline. History of MAS begins with the formation of Malayan Airway Limited company, linking the Penang and Singapore by air in 1937. After Singapore separated from Malaysia in 1965, the company changed its name to Malaysian Airlines Limited." http://www.jobsfair.my/job-at-malaysian-airlines-mas/
Malaysia
bad asia
Has me asking was there another stand down order?
Malasia is deliberately lying. They have known for days it was a bomb from moslems. They know that if their security was that lax that their air port in Kuala Lampur is total toast. This is all about money. The US doesn’t want you to know because that jack ass nobamma doesn’t want you to know and “the war on moslems is over” remember?
The Malaysian government - its airline, its airforce, its civilian administration - displayed utter incomptence at the moment of truth, and then made covering up its incompetence its first priority thereafter.
A Malaysian Airlines plane passed right in front of me this afternoon as I was driving on University Parkway in Sarasota, Florida. Could this have been the missing flight 370? It was about 3:15 in the afternoon. Obama was waving out one window.
I’ve thought all along that the reason information seems to be so slow in coming and contradictory is because Malaysia is going look like a bunch of incompetent fools when the facts all are known. And Asians hate that.
roflmto!
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/missing-malaysian-airlines-fears-over-3247649
TITLE: “Did pilot hijack missing plane HIMSELF in anti-government protest? Fears over Captain Shah’s links to Malaysian opposition”
Excerpt:
Fears emerged tonight that the pilot of the missing Malaysia Airlines jet may have hijacked the plane himself as an anti-government protest.
Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was a fervent supporter of his country’s opposition leader who was jailed for homosexuality - illegal in Malaysia - only hours before flight MH370 vanished with 239 passengers and crew on board, the Sunday Mirror can reveal.
And in a new twist, it emerged that the pilot’s wife and three children moved out of the family’s home the day before the plane’s disappearance.
(...)
Seems as if the Malaysian top brass might have allowed this flight to go on its merry way and then proceed to send the US on a wild goose in the opposite direction.
I doubt it, so what is he going to do with the plane, bomb Malaysia for not liking homos?
After hearing today on Judge Jeanine how they KNEW the plane had continued flying even after the transponder and ACARS were turned off and didn’t even bother to go try to locate the plane, yeah, something stinks to high heaven here
It’s clear to me that the Malaysians don’t want to find the plane and the bodies, because then they will have to pay the 237 million dollars in insurance to the Chinese. Delay is denial.
The question I keep having is are they really this incompetent or is there something big they don’t want us to know?
This sounds like an opposition website with an axe to grind against the ruling party. A high level of readiness in peacetime during the post Cold War-era? In terms of land area, Malaysia is 8x the size of Switzerland, which has the Air Force active only during normal work hours. Add in the South China Sea, which divides Malaysia's two halves, and it's clear its area of responsibility is perhaps 20 to 30x Switzerland's. Yet their defense budgets are almost identical. The phrase "high level of readiness" should not be used in association with any Southeast Asian military apart from Singapore's and Vietnam's.
Malaysia is still trying to “save face” but it makes me ask if the plane got significantly more fuel than a flight to Beijing would require. If so, a flight to Iran is possible. They certainly could hide a plane there.
The pilot was not happy with the politics. below is a translation of his facebook page posted on another forum.
"Politics of fear.. This is what it’s boiled down to… Questioning the qualification of the individuals who dare to standup. (Anuar or Hadi .) These are our only hope to restore democracy. 50 years in power by a single party (coalition) does not say much about democracy in the country. If these leaders willing to stand in the line of fire the least we could do is support them. They might not be perceived to be the best candidate but sacrifice is necessary to achieve the goal of free democracy. When you renovate a house you have to suffer all the consequences. From dust, to the contractor that run off with the money, Aliens workers keeping an eyes on your family. WHY DO YOU RISK THAT? Because at the end after all the loss of extra ringgit for overprice items the contractor billed you and you elude the alien predators from robbing your house and harming your family you know it will be worthwhile."
So now I have three scenarios. Technology-theft, this pilot becoming a terrorist and trying to take down the airline (state run), and oh those uighurs still manage to make it into the top three conspiracies.
And the Malaysian government put a guard at one or both pilot’s residences and only decided to search them after it became pretty obvious they stole the 777.
I’d say this op involves the Malaysian government and possibly Iran or Pakistan.
I think the NSA did it.
Well if this pilot IS gay I doubt he goes to Iran, Yep Iran, they sure love their gays over there LOL..and yes waiting an entire week when they knew this smelled of something criminal, I dont trust a word out of the Malaysian military, same goes for the Chinese
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