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Post by Admin on Dec 29, 2014 22:38:43 GMT
An AirAsia jetliner flying from Indonesia to Singapore disappeared over the Java Sea yesterday (Dec. 28) with more than 150 people onboard. On the surface, the disappearance of Flight 8501 sounds similar to another recent tragedy in Southeast Asian skies: the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that went missing in March over the Indian Ocean when it was traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. However, the two passenger jets disappeared under very different circumstances. Flight 8501 left the city of Surabaya in Indonesia yesterday at 5:30 a.m. local time. The plane was bound for Singapore, but 40 minutes into the flight, air traffic control lost contact with the plane while it was flying over the Java Sea. Right now, 12 vessels, dozens of inflatable boats and six warships and military aircraft from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia are searching for the plane. Some experts suspect that bad weather might have brought down AirAsia Flight 8501. The plane was flying at 32,000 feet (9,750 meters) when it requested permission to fly higher to avoid a nasty thunderstorm. Air traffic controllers had not responded to the request yet when they lost contact with the plane, Tatang Kurniadi, National Transportation Safety Committee head, said during a news conference. Flight 370's disappearance back in March remains much more puzzling. The plane appeared to continue flying for hours after it switched off its transmitters and dropped off air traffic control radar. During travel, the plane unexpectedly banked left and crossed over the Malay Peninsula for a second time before flying into the Indian Ocean. No bad weather was reported in the area, and the pilot's last transmission to air traffic control was reported as "All right, good night." Ship crews spent months scouring the Indian Ocean, but the plane has still not been found. The missing plane has inspired several conspiracy theories. Experts are much more optimistic that the AirAsia plane will be found. The key difference is that Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 went down over the Indian Ocean far away from any major ports or shipping tracks. The Indian Ocean is almost 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) deep in some areas. The Java Sea, on the other hand, rarely reaches depths beyond 200 feet (60 m). It's a high-traffic waterway with several trade routes and is well mapped by oil companies. "The bottom is a lot shallower, which makes it easier for underwater searching to find if there is debris at the bottom," John McGraw, a former deputy safety director at the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, told Bloomberg News. "It's a mystery, but it's a mystery that will not last for long."
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Post by Admin on Jan 4, 2015 22:53:03 GMT
Federal aviation officials on Sunday were trying to determine what caused a small plane to crash in rural Kentucky — and how a 7-year-old girl was able to walk away from the tragedy that killed her family. The National Transportation Safety Board said it was investigating the crash of a Piper PA-34 near the southwestern Kentucky town of Gilbertsville late Friday. The NTSB scheduled a news conference for Sunday. Kentucky State Police Sgt. Dean Patterson said the crash's lone survivor, Sailor Gutzler, was the daughter of victims Marty Gutzler, 48, and Kimberly Gutzler, 46, of Nashville, Ill. Also killed were the girl's sister, Piper Gutzler, 9, and a cousin, Sierra Wilder, 14. "The Gutzler family mourns the loss of Marty, Kim and Piper Gutzler and Sierra Wilder," family lawyer Kent Plotner said in a written statement. "We are devastated by this loss but are confident that they rest in God's loving arms. Please pray for us, especially for Sailor Gutzler." About a half-hour after the plane reported engine trouble and lost contact with air traffic controllers, a Lyon County, Ky., homeowner called 911 saying a young girl had found her way to his house, police said. Sailor was treated at a hospital for non-life-threatening injuries and released Saturday. "This girl came out of the wreckage herself and found the closest residence and reported the plane crash," Patterson said. "It's a miracle in a sense that she survived it, but it's tragic that four others didn't." The homeowner, Larry Wilkins, told CNN the young girl had walked three-quarters of a mile in the dark through "very, very rough territory," barefoot except for one sock, and dressed in shorts and no coat. Marty and Kimberly Gutzler in a photo from his Facebook page. Sailor was barefoot except for one sock and was dressed for Florida — shorts, no coat — not for slogging through the January cold of Kentucky. Wilkins got her on his couch and called 911, alerting authorities that a plane had gone down and there was at least one survivor.
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Post by Admin on Jan 26, 2015 22:28:20 GMT
Malaysia Airlines' website was down for at least seven hours after being hacked by a group calling itself "Lizard Squad" and "Cyber Caliphate." The people behind the hack of the U.S. Central Command's Twitter and YouTube accounts earlier this month also called themselves Cyber Caliphate and claimed to be allied with the Islamic State. The airline, already reeling from the loss of two flights last year with 537 people on board, acknowledged Sunday's hack in a tweet from its official Twitter account. The website was brought back online by midafternoon Monday in Malaysia, which is 13 hours ahead of Eastern Time. Users logging onto the Malaysia Airlines website found an image of a lizard wearing a top hat and a message reading "404 — plane not found." A message below the image read, "Hacked by Lizard Squad — official Cyber Caliphate." When the site was initially hacked, users saw an image of a Malaysia Airlines plane in flight with a caption reading, "404 — plane not found. Hacked by Cyber Caliphate," with no mention of the Lizard Squad. Lizard Squad tweeted that it was "going to dump some loot found on malaysiaairlines.com servers soon," and posted a link to a screenshot of what appeared to be a passenger flight booking from the airline's internal e-mail system. The booking was made by Malaysian Amy Keh, who said she had made it in October for her mother and two relatives to travel from Kuala Lumpur to Taiwan in March.
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Post by Admin on Jan 29, 2015 22:32:05 GMT
Malaysia's government on Thursday officially declared the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which went missing last March, an accident. The official declaration by the country's Department of Civil Aviation should clear the way for the compensation process to proceed for families of the 239 passengers and crew on board, now also officially presumed dead. "Without in any way intending to diminish the feelings of the families, it is hoped that this declaration will enable the families to obtain the assistance they need, in particular through the compensation process," Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, director general of the civil aviation department, said in the statement. No trace of the plane, missing since March 8, has been found. But in the statement the government sought to assure "the families of the passengers and crew that the search for MH370 remains a priority." The chief coordinator of the Australian-led search operation said several months ago that it may take a few more months to finish searching the area where the plane is suspected of going down. The flight departed Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing. For many months, search teams from nearly a dozen countries that included the United States, China and Australia have scoured the Gulf of Thailand and Indian Ocean in search of the missing plane. Search teams have combed nearly 1.8 million square miles of ocean and believe the flight ended in the southern Indian Ocean. “Based on the same data, we have concluded that the aircraft exhausted its fuel over a defined area of the southern Indian Ocean, and that the aircraft is located on the sea floor close to that defined area,” Abdul Rahman said in a statement. Abdul Rahman emphasized in his statement Thursday that the declaration of the plane’s disappearance as an accident is “by no means the end.” “We will forge ahead with the cooperation and assistance” from other countries, he said in his statement. “MH370, its passengers and its crew will always be remembered and honored.” Thirteen nationalities were represented among the 239 people aboard Flight 370, but the majority -- 154 -- were Chinese citizens. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying on Thursday said “the Chinese government expresses its deep sorrow for the misery of those on board, and offers its profound sympathies and sincere condolences to their families.”
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Post by Admin on Mar 8, 2015 22:26:25 GMT
A much-awaited report into Malaysia Airlines (MAS) Flight MH370 found no evidence to explain why it vanished, as the leaders of Malaysia and Australia declared that the search would go on for the plane one year after it disappeared. The report by an international team of investigators, released yesterday, looked in detail at the plane's maintenance history, profiles of the crew, the cargo as well as radio and radar transmissions during its final minutes. Analysis of the pilot and co-pilot's behaviour found it was normal just before and during the flight. "There were no behavioural signs of social isolation, change in habits or interest, self-neglect, drug or alcohol abuse of the captain, first officer and the cabin crew," the 584- page interim report concluded. The engines were also operating normally when the plane - flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing - vanished soon after take-off on March 8 last year. But the report also said the plane was carrying 221kg of lithium-ion batteries as cargo, which did not go through security screening before being loaded, adding that they were "inspected physically". American carriers United Airlines and Delta announced this year that they would no longer carry bulk shipments of lithium-ion batteries, after Federal Aviation Administration tests found that overheating batteries could cause major fires. But the report did not suggest that the batteries had anything to do with the plane's disappearance. The report also noted that a battery for an underwater locator beacon for one of the two black boxes had expired a year earlier. An expired battery could have hampered efforts to locate the aircraft during the search. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak voiced hope that the plane would be found and said the government was committed to the search. His Australian counterpart Tony Abbott yesterday promised to continue following all credible leads and said the search in the treacherous southern Indian Ocean might even be expanded. Australia is leading the search in a rugged 60,000 sq km patch of sea floor about 1,600km west of the Australian city of Perth.
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