Flight MH370: pilot 'practised landing on small island'
Investigators focus on flight MH370 pilot’s flight simulator drills for landing on short island runway
The pilot of the missing Malaysia Airways flight MH370 is now the chief suspect, according to investigators who have examined logs from the flight simulator he kept in his home.
Police have so far failed to turn up any hard evidence against Captain Zaharie Shah, but he is now the prime focus of the criminal investigation after intelligence checks cleared all other passengers and crew.
Investigators found that Zaharie had programmed a flight simulator in his home with scenarios rehearsing a landing into remote areas of the southern Indian Ocean and a landing on an island runway, The Sunday Times reports. Although he had deleted the drills before taking command of flight MH370, computer experts were able to retrieve them.
"Investigators have previously refused to 'clear' the captain’s flight simulator of suspicious activity," The Independent reports this morning. "It now appears they found evidence of routes programmed to take a plane far out into the Indian Ocean and practising landing using a short runway on an island."
Detectives, who have conducted over 170 interviews, also found that Zaharie had made no social or professional commitments beyond the date of the missing flight, in contrast to his co-pilot and the rest of the flight’s crew.
The investigation has not ruled out the possibility that flight MH370 was lost due to mechanical failure or terrorism, but the police view is that if it was the result of human action, the captain is the most likely perpetrator.
Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak, gave the first hint about the government’s suspicions of "deliberate action by someone on the plane" on March 15.
Zaharie's relatives have defended him against any suggestion of wrongdoing and Malaysian police have refused to confirm the contents of their interim report.
"The police investigation is still ongoing," they told The Sunday Times. "To date no conclusions can be made as to the contributor to the incident."
Nevertheless, the paper says that the initial findings from the investigation have been sent to foreign governments and investigators.
No sign of flight MH370 has yet been found, despite the most expensive search operation ever mounted. The Boeing 777 was lost on March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew.
Flight MH370: Australia to announce new search zone
20 June
After a fruitless two-month underwater search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, investigators are planning to shift their attention to an area hundreds of miles south of the first suspected crash site.
Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, said that the next phase of the search will scour 23,000 square miles of the ocean floor for wreckage with state-of-the-art sonar equipment, the Daily Telegraph reports.
Dolan said an announcement will be made next week on the precise location of the new search, which will probably be "hundreds of miles south" of where the Bluefin 21 underwater drone carried out its last unsuccessful survey.
That search had been launched when a signal was detected by search crews that was thought to be coming from the missing plane's black box flight recorder.
The new search will take into account information from the "brief, hourly connections" between the plane and satellites that were recorded before the flight is believed to have come down.
"All the trends of this analysis will move the search area south of where it was," Dolan said. "Just how much south is something that we're still working on.
"There was a very complex analysis and there were several different ways of looking at it," he added. "Specialists have used several different methodologies and bringing all of that work together to get a consensus view is what we're finalising at the moment," he said.
The new phase of the search will be undertaken by private contractors, The Guardian reports, and is expected to take up to a year.
Flight MH370 went missing on March 8 this year, and in the months since the plane's disappearance, no debris has been found and no crash site has been positively identified. The multinational search and rescue effort that began in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea has reportedly become the largest and most expensive in history.
Flight MH370: search looking in wrong place, say satellite experts
17 June
Search teams looking for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 have not yet tackled the area in which the missing plane is most likely to have crashed, satellite experts have said.
The British satellite company Inmarsat, which has been involved in the search operation, told the BBC's Horizon programme that it identified a "hotspot" in the Indian Ocean where the plane is most likely to have crashed.
The Australian naval vessel Ocean Shield was initially called to the area to investigate, but was "distracted" by a signal in a different region that was believed to be coming from the missing plane's black box flight recorder.
Two months were then spent trawling 330 square miles of ocean floor to the north west of Perth, but the search found no evidence of the missing airliner.
"It was by no means an unrealistic location but it was further to the north east than our area of highest probability," Inmarsat's Chris Ashton told Horizon.
Inmarsat identified the crash hotspot by analysing the "brief, hourly connections" between the plane and one of the company's satellites. Using that data, experts were able to trace flight MH370's likely speed and trajectory to identify an area in the Indian Ocean where the plane most probably came down.
"We can identify a path that matches exactly with all those frequency measurements and with the timing measurements and lands on the final arc at a particular location, which then gives us a sort of a hotspot area on the final arc where we believe the most likely area is," explained Ashton.
The Australian team leading the search operation will now target a new 23,000-square-mile area of ocean floor.
Inmarsat and the Malaysian government's decision to release the new data has been criticised by relatives of missing passengers, The Guardian reports.
"I am not convinced at all by the data," said Selamat Umar, whose son was on the MH370. "Why are they releasing it now? Before when we asked for it, they did not want to release it. What can we do with it now?"
Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/world-news/flight-mh370/57641/flight-mh370-pilot-practised-landing-on-small-island#ixzz35TCId634