Free Republic

MALAYSIA AIRLINES FLIGHT MH370 MISSING 36m Editor's note: Numerous tweets are noting the discovery of airline debris off the coast of La Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean and speculating about a possible link to the missing Malaysia jet MH370. Jon Ostrower, the Wall Street Journal’s aerospace reporter, says the debris appears to be an airline flap. - Tom The airline debris found on Reunion Island was discovered on the coast of St. Andrew by trail maintenance workers - @clicanoore read more on clicanoo.re MALAYSIA AIRLINES FLIGHT MH370 MISSING 9m Local report: Investigators say the debris found on Réunion Island...

Air safety investigators have a "high degree of confidence" that aircraft debris found in the Indian Ocean is of a wing component unique to the Boeing 777, the same model as the Malaysia Airlines plane that disappeared last year, a U.S. official said Wednesday. Related Stories US official: Debris in photo belongs to Boeing 777 Associated Press Searcher says wing find won't change MH370 seabed search Associated Press Australia Official: Too Early to Say If Plane Debris from MH370 The Wall Street Journal Authorities study plane debris found off Madagascar for links to missing MH370 Reuters Investigators believe debris found...

France's air crash investigation agency is studying a piece of plane debris found on Reunion Island off the east coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean for possible links to missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, a spokesman said on Wednesday. A person familiar with the matter told Reuters the part was almost certainly from a Boeing 777 but that it had not yet been established if it came from MH370. A U.S. official said air safety investigators had a "high degree of confidence" the debris was from the same model as MH370, the Associated Press reported. No trace has been...

The disappearance Sunday of AirAsia Flight 8501 was the third air incident this year involving Malaysia, where budget carrier AirAsia in based. Here's a look at the two other disasters, as well as the latest missing flight, which went missing with 162 people aboard less than an hour after taking off from Surabaya, Indonesia, for Singapore. The disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 on March 8 triggered one of modern aviation's most perplexing mysteries. Flight 370, carrying 239 people from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, vanished without a trace, sending searchers across vast areas of the Indian Ocean. An initial...

OSCE representatives were NOT allowed to wreckage. The terrorists brought heavy equipment to the area around the crash site of the Malaysian Boeing 777 National Security Council reported. "The terrorists had been brought heavy artillery and mined the area around the crash site MH17. This makes it impossible [for investigation] of international experts," - said the Security Council. In addition, terrorists equipped new combat positions near the Torres where liner of Malaysian Airlines was brought down. Now today, the militants once again not allowed OSCE representatives to debris. It is reported that observers have been trying several days to get...

Military radar evidence suggests the missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner was deliberately flown west toward the Indian Ocean’s Andaman Islands, sources told Reuters on Friday as mounting evidence pointed to a criminal inquiry into Flight MH370. Two sources told Reuters that an unidentified aircraft – believed by investigators to be the missing Boeing 777 - was following a route between navigational way-points, indicating it was being flown by someone with aviation training when it was last plotted on military radar off the country's northwest coast.

The captain of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 received a two-minute call shortly before take-off from a mystery woman using a mobile phone number obtained under a false identity, as investigators question the pilot's estranged wife, a British newspaper reported. It was one of the last calls made to or from the mobile phone of Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah in the hours before his Boeing 777 left Kuala Lumpur on March 8, reported The Mail on Sunday. Investigators are treating it as potentially significant because anyone buying a pay-as-you-go SIM card in Malaysia has to fill out a form giving...

Hannity interviewed Gen McInerny who surmises the missing plane landed in Taliban controlled Pakistan airfield.

Investigators have said someone on board the plane first disabled one of its communications systems — the Aircraft and Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS — about 40 minutes after takeoff. Around 14 minutes later, the transponder that identifies the plane to commercial radar systems was also shut down. The fact that both systems went dark separately offered strong evidence that the plane's disappearance was deliberate. On Sunday, Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said at a news conference that that the final, reassuring words from the cockpit — "All right, good night" — were spoken to air traffic controllers...

Whenever a plane goes down, experienced air craft investigators look at the general circumstances and mentally draw up a list of the most likely causes — not to leap to conclusions, but to prioritize lines of enquiry and organize competing hypotheses. As information comes in, it should be possible to eliminate those hypotheses one by one until at last a full understanding of the circumstances remains. The goal is to make sure that the problem will never again bring down an airliner. This philosophy works: Year by year, fewer commercial airliners are lost to accidents. The downside is that, as...

ON THE WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORT THAT THE PLANE FLEW ON FOR HOURS MALAYSIAN officials denied a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report that cited unnamed US investigators claiming that the missing plane had carried on flying for four hours after falling off the air traffic control radar. Yesterday, Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said Malaysia Airlines (MAS) had verified with the aircraft's maker Boeing and engine supplier Rolls- Royce that the last time the plane transmitted data was at 1.07am local time last Saturday. The Beijing-bound MH370 had taken off at 12.41am, but lost radio contact with air traffic control...

SEPANG: The Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) has denied that the debris found near Vietnam's Tho Chu Island was from of the missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 airplane. DCA director-general Datuk Azharuddin Abdul Rahman said authorities have confirmed that the objects spotted floating in the sea about 100km south-southwest off the island did not match the body of the missing aircraft. It was spotted by the Singapore search team. "In the meantime, we are still verifying if the oil slick it matches the MAS Boeing 777-200 with relevant authorities," he said. He added that the search radius has also been expanded...

SEPANG: A BOEING 777 pilot, who was flying 30 minutes ahead of the missing Malaysia Airlines aircraft, said he established contact with MH370 minutes after he was asked to do so by Vietnamese air traffic control. The captain, who asked to not be named, said his plane, which was bound for Narita, Japan, was far into Vietnamese airspace when he was asked to relay, using his plane's emergency frequency, to MH370 for the latter to establish its position, as the authorities could not contact the aircraft. "We managed to establish contact with MH370 just after 1.30am and asked them if...

Vietnamese authorities searching waters for the missing Boeing 777 jetliner spotted an object Sunday that they suspected was one of the plane's doors, as international intelligence agencies joined the investigation into two passengers who boarded the aircraft with stolen passports.

An advertisement placed in The Seattle Times on Wednesday by a group hoping to encourage Washington state to keep up its fight to secure the coveted work on the new Boeing 777 includes a notable miscue. At the top of the full-page ad, under the all-caps text "The Future of Washington," is pictured not a Boeing jet, but rather an A320 from archrival Airbus.

Farnborough: UK prime minister rumoured to have tour of Airbus Corporate Jetliner for government jet UK prime minister Tony Blair is to take an evaluation tour of the Airbus A319 Corporate Jetliner (ACJ) today at the Farnborough air show, speculation has it. The UK head of government is addressing the air show today at around 15:00 on the importance of aerospace to the UK economy. After this, he is understood to be offered a chance to look around a corporate interior version of the ACJ. Airbus does not have an ACJ on the static display at the show, where security...