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Australia's main scientific agency said yesterday it believed with "unprecedented precision and certainty" that a missing Malaysia Airlines aircraft crashed into the sea north-east of an area scoured in a fruitless, nearly three-year underwater search. Its assertion is based on satellite pictures taken two weeks after MH370 went missing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board a flight to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. But the Australian government rejected the conclusion of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), saying it was not specific enough. The Boeing 777 is thought to have been diverted thousands of kilometres off...

STARTLING new evidence has virtually pinpointed the location of MH370 — 1258 days since it disappeared. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has today released an explosive new report that effectively narrows the search zone for the missing plane down to an area half the size of Melbourne. GeoScience Australia has been examining four satellite images taken in the weeks after the plane went missing in the area identified late last year as MH370’s likely resting spot. They found 12 objects in those images that they deemed man-made and 28 that they regard as possibly man-made. The images were taken by...

Malaysia said on Friday pieces of debris found in Seychelles are not from missing flight MH370, which vanished in March 2014 on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board. The location of the plane has become one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries. It is believed to have gone down in the Indian Ocean. Various pieces of debris have been collected from Indian Ocean islands and Africa's east coast and at least three of them have been confirmed as coming from the missing Boeing 777. Seychelles reported on Thursday the discovery of two pieces of...

A remote part of the Indian Ocean has become, by chance, one of the best-mapped parts of the underwater world. The ocean is vast, deep, and unexplored. When Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared three years ago this week, the search brought the ocean’s vastness into sharp relief. This is how deep and dark it is three miles down. This is how unlikely you are to spot a downed airliner in 120,000 square nautical miles of open ocean. This is how much we know about the ocean floor—less than we know about the surface of Mars. As the search dragged on...

The lawsuit, filed Friday against Boeing in U.S. District Court in South Carolina, names seven malfunctions, from an electrical fire to depressurization of the plane's cabin, that could have led to the crew losing consciousness, the plane's transponder stopping its transmission and the plane flying undetected until it crashed after running out of fuel. It came as families of the missing passengers and officials marked Wednesday's third anniversary of the Boeing 777's crash. ... The U.S. lawsuit was filed by Gregory Keith, a special administrator for families who lost loved ones on the Malaysia Airlines flight. It names 44 victims...

“Despite every effort using the best science available, cutting-edge technology, as well as modelling and advice from highly skilled professionals who are the best in their field, unfortunately, the search has not been able to locate the aircraft,” the Joint Agency Coordination Center in Australia said in a statement. “The decision to suspend the underwater search has not been taken lightly nor without sadness,” the agency said. The jet carrying 239 people on board vanished from civilian radar in the early hours of March 8, 2014, without so much as a distress call from its pilots. After several false starts,...

The report added that “debris drift modeling results present strong evidence that the aircraft is most likely to be located to the north of the current indicative underwater search area”. It identified an area of approximately 25,000 sq. km “with the highest probability of containing the wreckage of the aircraft. The report went on: “The experts concluded that, if this area were to be searched, prospective areas for locating the aircraft wreckage, based on all the analysis to date, would be exhausted.” The governments of Australia, Malaysia and China, where most of the passengers were from, have previously agreed to...

A large piece of aircraft debris found on the island of Pemba off Tanzania in June was from the missing Malaysia Airlines jet MH370, it has been confirmed. The debris, an outboard flap, will be examined further to see if it can provide any clues about the Boeing 777's disappearance. It went missing in March 2014 with 239 passengers and crew on board soon after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, bound for Beijing.

Charred debris, possibly belonging to the missing MH370 plane, has been handed to investigators - raising the prospect of a flash fire on board the ill-fated jet. An American amateur investigator handed over several pieces of blackened debris to Australia's Transport Safety Bureau on Monday in what may prove to be a breakthrough in one of the biggest mysteries in aviation history. Blaine Gibson said the material, which had washed up in Madagascar, included what appeared to be an internal panel.

Mr Vance was formerly investigator-in-charge for the Canadian Aviation Safety Board and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, and has led more than 200 air crash investigations. He was the chief author of a report into the 1998 SwissAir Flight 111 crash off Nova Scotia, Canada which killed 229 people. The force of that crash broke the plane into more than two million pieces. He told 60 Minutes that an absence of such wreckage was one factor suggesting MH370 landed in controlled circumstances. "Somebody was flying the airplane at the end of its flight," he said. "Somebody was flying the...

The home flight simulator belonging to the MH370 pilot had a route plotted into it which ended in the Indian Ocean, officials have confirmed.... ...The confirmation corroborates earlier reports that the device had programmed in it a route similar to the one which investigators believe the doomed flight took on its final voyage.

A team led by Eric Jansen, from the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change in Italy, is the latest to try its hand at using modelling to identify the impact site. The approach relies on two years of high-resolution data that describe the currents and wind conditions across the Indian and Southern oceans. Multiple simulations were used to predict where objects might drift given different starting points. These forecasts were then analysed and the greatest weight given to those tracks that best matched the locations of known MH370 debris items. These are the parts of the Boeing 777, such as an...

MH370 pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah. New York has obtained a confidential document from the Malaysian police investigation into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that shows that the plane’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, conducted a simulated flight deep into the remote southern Indian Ocean less than a month before the plane vanished under uncannily similar circumstances. The revelation, which Malaysia withheld from a lengthy public report on the investigation, is the strongest evidence yet that Zaharie made off with the plane in a premeditated act of mass murder-suicide. The document presents the findings of the Malaysian police’s investigation into...

Top searchers at the Dutch company leading the underwater hunt for Malaysia Airlines jet MH370 say they believe the plane may have glided down rather than dived in the final moments, meaning they have been scouring the wrong patch of ocean for two years. Flight MH370 disappeared in March 2014 with 239 passengers and crew onboard en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. Searchers led by engineering group Fugro (FUGRc.AS) have been combing an area roughly the size of Greece for two years. That search, over 120,000 square kilometers of the southern Indian Ocean off Western Australia, is expected to...

ULAANBAATAR (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday the United States would consider any Chinese establishment of an air defense zone over the South China Sea to be a "provocative and destabilizing act". U.S. officials have expressed concern that an international court ruling expected in coming weeks on a case brought by the Philippines against China over its South China Sea claims could prompt Beijing to declare an air defense identification zone, or ADIZ, as it did over the East China Sea in 2013. "We would consider an ADIZ...over portions of the South China Sea as...

Jeff Wise, a private pilot and freelance writer, who has written a book on MH370, was among those to suggest the parts were planted. "There is only one reasonable conclusion to draw from the condition of these pieces. Since natural means could not have delivered them to the locations where they were discovered, they must have been put there deliberately. They were planted," he wrote last month. Photo: Dr Schalk Lückhoff

Photos of the debris discovered over the weekend appear to show the fixed leading edge of the right-hand tail section of a Boeing 777, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly. MH-370, which disappeared two years ago with 239 people aboard, is the only known missing 777. People who have handled the part, called a horizontal stabilizer, say it appears to be made of fiberglass composite on the outside, with aluminum honeycombing on the inside, the official said. The part is being transported to Malaysia. Malaysian transport minister Liow Tiong Lai...

An object that could be debris from a Boeing 777 has been found off Mozambique and is being examined by investigators searching for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, sources told NBC News. Early photographic analysis of the object suggests it could have come from the doomed jet, which vanished almost exactly 2 years ago.

BANGKOK (AP) - A large chunk of metal that could be from an aircraft washed ashore in southern Thailand, but Malaysian authorities on Sunday cautioned against speculation of a link to a Malaysia Airlines flight missing almost two years.

story from AP, so, not risking an excerpt.