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Surveillance aircraft patrolled a remote area in the southern Indian Ocean looking for a missing Malaysian airliner after Australia released satellite images of the region showing possible floating debris. Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said the photos represented a "credible lead" in the massive, multinational search for the plane, which disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board. The debris was found 2,500 kilometers southwest of the western Australian city of Perth. John Young with Australia's maritime authority said several Australian planes were headed to the area, but that search efforts could be complicated by poor visibility. A large...

CNN’s Don Lemon has been entertaining all sorts of theories about the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, including the chance something “supernatural” happened, but on Wednesday night, he actually asked panelists about the possibility a black hole was involved.

This video is an interesting dramatization. May help a few people understand what happens in the heat of the moment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLN5D4lOlos

A strange new possibility has turned up in the case of the missing airliner. Reports are coming out of Maldives that residents there saw a large airliner fly low a few hours after MH370 disappeared. 3.52 Reports from a Maldives news organisation that islanders saw a “low flying jumbo jet”. The Haveeru news website reports witnesses saw a plane flying low at around 6.15am on March 8. It was apparently flying north to south-east. A witness told the news organisation I’ve never seen a jet flying so low over our island before. We’ve seen seaplanes, but I’m sure that...

The investigation into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines 3786.KU +2.13% Flight 370 sharpened its focus on sabotage, according to aviation and industry officials, amid strong indications that one or more people on the plane deliberately changed its course and tried to mask its location. Officials suspect two different systems were shut off after the plane took off last weekend, one shortly after the other, people familiar with the investigation said. About an hour into the flight, the plane's transponders stopped functioning, making it much more difficult for air-traffic control personnel to track or identify it via radar.

Maldives 'witnesses' report seeing 'low flying jet' on morning that MH370 disappeared - follow latest updates on missing Malaysia Airlines plane

Hundreds of family members left to mourn without answers. Yet for those who have no personal attachment to the lost passengers of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the tragedy has turned into an exciting news story. Search for #MH370 on Twitter, and you get a thousand tweets offering explanations of the disaster that could be episodes of The X-Files. Google MH370 and you get over a billion hits. Like sharks at a shipwreck, the global media is reveling in a feeding frenzy of insatiable public interest. This is the inversion of the Sherlock Holmes investigative track — no theory can...

One of our planes is missing.That’s basically all we know for certain right now, but more than a week after losing contact with flight MH370, there are a lot of other suggestive bits of information. Unfortunately, a lot of it is, as usual, being reported by news readers who barely understand that you don’t want to keep the pointy end aimed at the ground for an extended time. Here’s some things we do know now.The first indication of trouble was when the transponder stopped responding to radar. This is the point where newspeople are saying it “dropped off the...

Piracy and pilot suicide are among the scenarios under study as investigators grow increasingly certain the missing Malaysia Airlines jet changed course and headed west after its last radio contact with air traffic controllers. The latest evidence suggests the plane didn't experience a catastrophic incident over the South China Sea as was initially suspected. Some experts theorize that one of the pilots, or someone else with flying experience, hijacked the plane or committed suicide by plunging the jet into the sea.

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...

Military radar data suggests a Malaysia Airlines jetliner missing for nearly a week was deliberately flown hundreds of miles off course, heightening suspicions of foul play among investigators, sources told Reuters on Friday. Analysis of the Malaysia data suggests the plane, with 239 people on board, diverted from its intended northeast route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and flew west instead, using airline flight corridors normally employed for routes to the Middle East and Europe, said sources familiar with investigations into the Boeing 777's disappearance. Two sources said an unidentified aircraft that investigators believe was Flight MH370 was following a...

Fox Video:Aviation expert on why Flight 370 may have been diverted I checked the page info and the video was last modified at 6:07:30 PM hoping to validate that this is the latest information on the story

Obviously, nobody can be sure what happened to Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. That does not mean, however, that some explanations are more likely to be true than others. For example, it is exceedingly unlikely that the flight was “abducted” by a UFO. Most everyone will agree that it is rational to rule that hypothesis out. Criminologists do not just pluck a subjectively preferred hypothesis out of thin air and then ramble about it. Rather, criminologists apply probabilistic/statistical reasoning to the analysis of empirical data. A few sentences should suffice to give a sense of why, at present, the hypothesis that...

KUALA LUMPUR—Malaysian aviation officials said Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 could have flown for several hours despite vanishing from radar, but they said they had received no engine-monitoring data indicating this, saying that the data for suggesting an extended flight didn't exist.

*SNIP*They’re alive — the “ringing cellphone” theory. A blog post on the Chinese government’s China.org.cn site reported that “19 families signed a joint statement requesting Malaysia Airlines to … explain why they could get through to their family members’ cellphones but they could not hear anything and the calls hung up.” “They submitted the telephone numbers to the airline, which failed to respond to their questions with active measures,” according to the site.

One of the two men who used stolen passports to board the missing Malaysia Airlines jet has been identified according to the nation’s inspector general of police. Authorities are not releasing details of his nationality but confirmed he is neither Malaysian nor from Xinjiang, China (the home of the Uighur separatists who have come under suspicion following Taiwanese authorities tip last week warning that terrorists were targeting Beijing’s international airport). Via LA Times,Malaysian authorities have identified one of the two men who used stolen passports to board the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, the nation’s inspector general of police told local...

IN A LITTLE-NOTICED DECISION in a New York courtroom on September 25, 2003, a man described as Osama bin Laden's "best friend" got some good news. U.S. District Court Judge Deborah Batts ruled that Mahmdouh Mahmud Salim could not be sentenced to life in prison. Salim--who was present at the founding of al Qaeda in 1989 and who was for years one of bin Laden's most trusted confidants--had been captured in Germany in 1998 and extradited to the United States for prosecution related to his role in the grand conspiracy that resulted in the 1998 bombings at U.S. embassies in...

PILOTS on a Boeing 777 from Perth to Kuala Lumpur battled to gain control of the plane last month after an unknown computer error caused the aircraft to pitch violently and brought it close to stalling. A flight attendant dropped a tray of drinks and another began praying as the Malaysian Airlines pilots fought to counter false information being fed into the aircraft's autopilot system and primary flight display. The glitch prompted plane manufacturer Boeing to issue a global notice to all 777 operators alerting them to the problem. Flight MH124 was about an hour out of Perth when...

AHMED HIKMAT SHAKIR IS A shadowy figure who provided logistical assistance to one, maybe two, of the 9/11 hijackers. Years before, he had received a phone call from the Jersey City, New Jersey, safehouse of the plotters who would soon, in February 1993, park a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center. The safehouse was the apartment of Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, who scorched his own leg while mixing the chemicals for the 1993 bomb.When Shakir was arrested shortly after the 9/11 attacks, his "pocket litter," in the parlance of the investigators, included contact...