First topic message reminder :

Malaysia Airlines said it lost contact with a plane carrying 239 people on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
The plane disappeared on March 8, the problem is, with so little directional information to start with (six and a partial seventh ping, transmitted at hourly intervals), are we SURE we are even searching the right ocean? Why have we heard NOTHING from Rolls Royce re the real time engine management monitoring system? If those following the serious clues left available there is only one question to ask. Why does no one mention the Indian Oceans most advanced and secure air base, the stationary Aircraft Carrier located south of the southern tip of India called Diego Garcia? Not a peep. Not even an indication of a US managed military installation that monitors everything in this war region. In fact the best old metaphor regarding the lack of reference to this location is “The Silence Is Deafening.” Only one nation on earth has the technology to remotely block a planes radar and communications if they felt their base was under threat from a terrorist attack. I believe in the coming days or weeks it will be the USA who find evidence that the plane crashed ??? but in fact I believe it was probably shot down.

Since the French investigation team as reported "has concluded the first phase of inspection work" -- I parsed that phrase to mean that after two weeks of intensive analysis even the French believe that the flaperon most likely came from MH370.

For the French speakers/readers - A link to this morning's local newpaper report on the winding down of the Toulouse lab's work on the flaperon.
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The article states that it it cannot be established with 100% certainty that the flaperon does indeed come from the 777 which operated flight MH370.

It goes on to say that the barnacles found on the flaperon are endemic to the southern Indian Ocean.

One anonymous expert is quoted as saying the flaperon would not have floated on the surface, but rather submerged a couple of meters (the article does not explain how he arrives at that conclusion).

Finally, Jean-Paul Troadec, ex-president of BEA, is quoted as saying that the state of the flaperon (largely intact) indicates that the impact with the ocean was not violent, as, in his words, the debris would be smaller than that flaperon.

So there you have it - back to the balance of probabilities. We know that flaperon is from a 777, but we can only assume that it belonged to MH370.

MH370 crash site 'FOUND': Airline captain pinpoints exact co-ordinates of doomed plane

MISSING Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 could be found in the next FOUR WEEKS by search parties scouring the southern Indian Ocean after a pilot produced an ironclad mathematical formula.

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I see that Relatives of missing MH370 passengers insist their loved ones are being held prisoners ???
As sad as it may be but it might be better for these relatives to face up to the fact that their loved ones are gone! Without acknowledging this their lives will never return to normal and that can't be good for them.

It has all gone very quiet on MH370, but here is an update but still no answers
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Well they seem to be saying they have found parts but how many times have they said that? I'm sure one day someone somewhere will find something and we will all know the truth? that's if we are still here

Flight MH370 Probers Now Almost Positive that the Two Pieces of Debris Found off Mozambique Belong to the Missing Plane

When a flaperon or a wing part of a plane was found off the coast of Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean in the middle of last year, it created new hopes that the wreckage of the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 will finally be found.

However, after a thorough investigation into the flaperon, the result proved negative and that the debris found was from another plane.

Then in December last year and February this year, two pieces of plane debris were found off the coast of the African country of Mozambique. Unlike the debris found in Reunion Island, the two pieces of plane debris found off the coastline of Mozambique are consistent with models of ocean currents showing where the sea might have carried the wreckage of the ill-fated Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370.

The debris found on the beaches of Mozambique are from the tailplane and wing flap of a Boeing 777, which searchers believed to belong to Flight MH370.

After scrutinizing the debris in great detail, investigators are now saying that the parts are actually part of the Flight MH370. The discovery has sparked great hopes that the wreckage of the missing plane will soon be found before the search team officially ends their work this summer, reports The Week of UK.

It turns out that the investigators used unique stenciling method to identify the parts found off Mozambique. The two parts were found 130 miles apart.

According to the Australian investigators, some text is stenciled onto the parts that were found. One says ‘NO STEP’ and the other says ‘676EB’. They added that they are clearly the same font and design used by Malaysian Airlines, details BBC.

The debris also reveals other clues too. The parts are both from a Boeing 777 and it so happened that no other Boeing 777 has ever crashed in the southern hemisphere since March 2014 and none has reported losing any parts during their flight.

Determining the plane’s final hours

Investigators and amateur aviators have been attempting to determine the plane’s final hours from the time that the plane went off the radar on March 8, 2014. The plane’s last contact with air traffic control came less than an hour after take-off at Kuala Lumpur destined to Beijing in China.

According to the military radar, the plane deviated from its flight plan before it went out of range an hour later. Investigators have assumed since then that Flight MH370 went down somewhere in the Indian Ocean and killed all 239 people on board, most of them Chinese.

Australian experts are also checking two other pieces of flotsam that were found on beaches recently. One has a Rolls Royce logo and turned up in South Africa. The other was found on Rodrigues Island.

Continuing their search

Despite founding new parts, the three search ships tasked in finding the wreckage of the ill-fated plane continue to comb the belly of the ocean to look for the main body of the Flight MH370.

The sea search is due to end this summer and barring the discovery of new evidence, they will stop looking from there, having done so for over two years already.

Early this year, the Air Transport Safety Bureau of the Australian government has debunked rumors that the pilot of the ill-fated Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 has hijacked his own aircraft before it crashed.

Dan O’Malley, a spokesman for the ATSB, said that the rouge pilot theory as claimed by some rumors is rubbish.

They dismissed the suggestion that Malaysian pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah who steered the ill-fated plane on March 8, 2014 hijacked his own aircraft, citing it as baseless assumptions.

New parts found suggest sinister ending to MH370 flight

PEKAN BARU: The plot thickens, as new parts found suggest a sinister ending to the plane’s flight.

Evidence gathered from small parts collected across the Indian Ocean (see graphic) suggest the ill fated Malaysia Airlines (MAS) Boeing 777 may have crash landed in the sea, ripping apart the cabin.

The Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (#MH370) was a scheduled international passenger flight operated by Malaysia Airlines that disappeared on 8 March 2014 while flying from Kuala Lumpur International Airport. But it went missing on the radar, and is yet to be found, two years later.

The latest discoveries of MH370 parts indicates the plane would have taken a different path from the search zones, or would have either exploded in the sky or upon contact with water.

Did it crash near the Christmas Island? Or did it fly near the Diego Garcia nuclear base?

For the first time there are indications that when Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 hit the water its fuselage was torn open by the impact, say news agencies.

Four pieces of wreckage so far recovered were from the external parts of the jet: a wing control surface called a flaperon, found on Réunion Island; two pieces of a horizontal stabilizer, found near Mozambique; part of an engine cowling, found on the east coast of South Africa.

However, another piece seems to put the puzzle together, while it defies earlier assertion by ‘experts’ that the fuselage could have remained intact upon the craft’s landing in the sea.

All the analysis does not dismiss a more sinister scenario, altogether, though no one is talking about a possible explosion in the air anymore, because they can’t figure out why the debris were not found for two years if the plane had exploded in the air instead?

What could have caused an air born explosion? The engine, ripping apart? Fuel tanks burst? Or a foreign object – a missile – hitting the plane while it was on course to its fatal destination in the Indian Ocean?

There are also questions on whether the plane has crash landed where the search party is on.

Malaysia and Australia are adamant they will not change the course of the search, and they are now saying there are dim chances the airplane will ever be found.

Other people are saying the plane took a different flight path, from that shown by the ping of the plane along the southern part Indian Ocean, nearer to Australia’s Perth city’s coast.

They say, the plane could have crashed nearer to Indonesia, and it could have sunk around the Christmas Island where there is no search done.

Others say it might have simply crashed near the Diego Garcia Island, where there is an active US nuclear base manned by armed forces. Diego Garcia is an Island that belongs to the Republic of Mauritius, and has been illegally occupied by the British which leased the Island to the Americans.

The plane could have been on course towards the nuclear base, says some conspiracy theorists.

One of the lightest part of the plane, the external cowling of an engine with the Rolls Royce logo is floated the farthest distance, to the South African coast.

This indicates the plane would have crashed landed and imploded on the sea or exploded in the sky.

On March 8, 2014, within hours of MH370’s disappearance, the China-based website china.com and the Taiwan-based China Times released a story attributed to the US Embassy in Beijing, which is roughly translated as:

“The US Embassy in Beijing claims that USAF Base at U-Tapao in Thailand monitored a distress call from Malaysia Airlines MH370 at 2.43 am. The pilot said that the cabin was breaking apart and he was making a forced landing. Malaysia Airlines was notified.”

The US has never confirmed this story, nor has China ever produced evidence that it received this information from the US despite media requests.

Author Florence de Changy will be releasing the English version of her book “MH370 Didn't Just Disappear” where she discloses that these reports came from a message on the Chinese social media site Weibo. The message was from an account claiming to represent the US Embassy, but upon further inspection, the account was an impostor account that was made to look like the US Embassy account.

This shows that almost immediately after the disappearance, there was already an effort to plant false information.

As the search ends for MH370, what we know -- and what we never will

Hopes that the wreckage fragments from MH370 will tell more about the jet's last moments have been dashed.

Stories that the search for MH370 will be called off by the end of July aren’t new, as those who follow the saga would know better than those who wrote the latest general media stories with no doubt sincere, but indignant, bewilderment.

It has been there in large letters at the end of every official search update for more than a year, stating that unless there was a discovery or a credible new lead, the deep ocean search would end when the designated priority search zone had been fully examined.

Less than 15,000 square kilometres remain unsearched of the last-gasp 120,000-square-kilometre zone that was identified on the “known probabilities”, and that remaining terrain will likely be exhausted by the end of this July. Or maybe sooner.

But there is one perhaps not surprising morsel of new information in the interviews given by the outgoing chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, Martin Dolan, in relation to the five pieces of wreckage so far identified as coming from the missing Malaysia Airlines 777.

That is, they don’t tell us all that much. Little has been deduced from them as to the last moments of the flight, which went “dark” over the Gulf of Thailand en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board on March 8, 2014, or so Dolan said.

The fragments — from a right-side horizontal stabiliser near the tail; from the trailing edge of the right-hand side of the wing; from the cowling of one of its two engines; and from a bulkhead panel near the first door on the right — do, however, allow a few obvious but not necessarily helpful conclusions to be drawn.

They have all been torn or detached off the main body of the jet. The cabin panel is arguably ominous for those who believe in a survivable ditching at the end of MH370’s flight to oblivion. It appears to have been sheared off at a hinge.

Given its location, it points to an enormous force of water smashing inward through the cockpit of the 777 on impact with the sea.

The mechanics of “liberating” the cabin fitting from its housing do not therefore seem amenable to a controlled ditching of the jet, as some followers of the mystery have suggested.

When MH370 struck the Indian Ocean, it was a blunt force that tore that panel off its location near the right front door. It was torn free of its setting, and it escaped to the surface from a hole in the jet.

Keep in mind that the plug nozzle type setting of the main doors of all jet airliners are structurally very strong and are often found intact in a mess of smaller pieces of wreckage in plane crashes. The three-metre-wide piston of high-velocity water was unlikely to have come in through the door, but from in front of it, and past it. In seconds.

The fuselage itself is of thinner gauge construction, albeit with a flexible strength that accommodates cabin pressurisation cycles according to very different design and certification criteria for doors and the associated slides and release mechanisms, which are intended for human activation and deployment.

You should, if you are a very good, attentive passenger, dutifully read all you need to know about doors and smaller exits from the handy “how to get out of the plane when the cabin crew are ‘incapacitated’ drill” that is set out in the safety card.

If the search is declared over without result in coming weeks or months, there are two major questions to be asked about it, apart from potential criminal action or negligence related questions that can only be answered in KL.

The first: “Has MH370 been passed over or missed by the search effort?” The answer would be “possibly”.

The search zone is in a very complex and often very deep area of the south Indian Ocean, and the ATSB has acknowledged that risk and commissioned follow-up repeat looks at some locations.

The second: “Were there too many variables at play for the definition of a most probable search zone?” The self-evident answer to that one would be “yes”.

For all the various pluses & minuses of Simon Gunson’s comments over the duration of this investigation,
he has always been adamant, that the choice of the primary search zone was flawed from the start.

Since the satellite-imaged debris-field was never actually searched by surface-vessels at all and that debris-field was never ‘back-tracked’ through sea-states & drift-patterns to give a potential impact-point
AND
the fact that with comparatively very little sea-floor still to explore, the search has turned-up nothing at all relating to 9M-MRO,
it seems reasonable to assume that at very least that the defining of the primary search area is somewhat flawed.
More likely is valediction (at this stage of the search.!) of the conspiracy-theory that the Malaysian authorities deliberately sought to ensure that the ‘debris-field’ was neither properly searched, nor used as the basis for an alternative search area.?

I read recently that the search is going to stop in June? this must be very distressing for all the family's who have no answers as to what has happened to their loved ones. my thoughts are always with these people and always will be until they get some answers.

Australian MH370 search authorities are hopeful a wing part found in Tanzania will shed light on how the flight crashed, amid a lack of public information on debris found a year ago. As the underwater hunt far off Australia's west coast draws to a close without any sign of the plane, there has been speculation the flight's final resting place may be outside the current search zone in the southern Indian Ocean.

Andy wrote:

Australian MH370 search authorities are hopeful a wing part found in Tanzania will shed light on how the flight crashed, amid a lack of public information on debris found a year ago. As the underwater hunt far off Australia's west coast draws to a close without any sign of the plane, there has been speculation the flight's final resting place may be outside the current search zone in the southern Indian Ocean.

What do you think of this Andy. Is this the final chapter [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Without proof or evidence, how can anyone say yes or no to the fact it was the fault of the crew? It's heresay....