MH370 - Source: Curt Lewis

MH370 crash: France launches new search for plane debris on Réunion Fresh air and sea searches begin on Friday on Indian Ocean island amid deteriorating relations between France and Malaysia over investigation A helicopter searches the sea on Réunion, after it was confirmed that the debris discovered belongs to missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. France has launched a renewed air and sea search around the Indian Ocean island of Réunion in the hope of finding more debris from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. The operation on Friday morning was announced 24 hours after a public prosecutor declared there was a "strong possibility" a wing flaperon discovered on an island beach was from the Boeing 777 that disappeared in March 2014 with 239 people on board. The search comes amid deteriorating relations between France, which is now heading the international investigation into the crash, and Malaysian officials who have been accused of "misinformation" and headline seeking. While Malaysian officials have stated the wing debris is definitely from flight MH370, French officials heading a legal investigation have been considerably more cautious. In Beijing, Chinese relatives of missing MH370 passengers marched to the Malaysian embassy to show their frustration with the search progress. Some demanded to be taken to Réunion island to see the suspected debris for themselves. The announcement of a renewed search was made in a joint statement from France's overseas and transport ministries. "Complementary analyses on this piece (flaperon) are being currently carried out. Following a request from the president and the prime minister, and to meet the needs of the inquiry, we have decided to deploy additional air and sea resources to establish the possible presence of new debris off Réunion," it said. On Friday morning, islanders reported a Casa plane overflying the zone around the Saint André beach where the flaperon was discovered nine days ago. French soldiers have also been deployed to comb the beaches and coastline along with gendarmes and helicopters. "France is fully playing its role in this international operation by making available all necessary means to help throw light on this tragedy," added the ministerial statement, concluding: "The French government understands the pain of the families for whom the discovery (of the flaperon) has awakened the hope of discovering the circumstances of flight MH370's disappearance." The mayor of Saint-André also announced an inch-by-inch search of the coastline from Monday and said any passengers' families who wished to travel to the island would be welcomed by locals. There is growing unease in France - and among the families of MH370 passengers - over a statement emanating from Kuala Lumpur. On Thursday, the Malaysian minister of transport Liow Tiong Lai claimed seat cushions and a window had been found on Réunion and handed over to French investigators, who later denied they had received any new debris. However, Christophe Naudin, a French air safety specialist, told L'Express magazine the language of the announcements - that of the Malaysian prime minister and the Paris public prosecutor - might have been different but they were saying the same thing. "The Boeing technicians confirmed that it (the flaperon) was a pice of a 777 and no other aircraft of this type is reported missing. The Malaysia Airlines experts then noted elements that linked it with MH370. No airline could have lost this kind of piece (of aircraft) without reporting it, so that leaves one possibility," Naudin said. He said the prosecutor's office was showing an "excessive administrative precaution which revealed an ignorance of the aeronautic business". The public prosecutor's office has denied any errors in its communications. "We have to talk within a judicial framework which means we have to be rigorous, complete and reliable. We will speak with certainty when the experts do so. There are still tests to be carried out," a legal source told the magazine. Frenchman Ghyslain Wattrelos, 50, whose wife and two children were travelling on MH370, which veered off route and disappeared from radar screens on 8 March 2014, one hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing, told Le Nouvel Observateur that Malaysia was "playing the misinformation game" and he was still not convinced by the crash theory. "They've lied from the first day," Wattrelos said. "Everyone is lying. The aircraft was hijacked, that's obvious! The transponders were cut and the plane took an intelligent trajectory flying close to borders to avoid radars. Clearly there was someone at the controls." He added: "I'm waiting for irrefutable proof of what's happened and right now we're far from that. If they find more debris, I might believe it was a crash but only if they tell me why, how and where. Otherwise, I will continue believing they've lied to us since the beginning. We all need to know what happened ... it's not possible for an aircraft to disappear like that."

Intact MH370 Part Lifts Odds Plane Glided, Not Crashed, Into Sea How hard did Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 hit the water after it ran out of fuel and plummeted from cruising altitude? Not as hard as you might think, accident experts say. The relatively intact condition of the wing piece that washed up on Reunion island off Africa suggests the Boeing Co. 777 may have hit the water more gently than in a head-on crash, according to former U.S. National Transportation Safety Board investigators Greg Feith and Jim Wildey, and Hans Weber, president of aviation consultant Tecop International Inc. "That piece maintained its integrity. It's not crushed," Feith, a former senior investigator with the NTSB, said by phone from Denver. "You can deduce it was either a low-energy crash or a low-energy intentional ditching." Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak's statement early Thursday that the piece, known as a flaperon, came from MH370 confirms that the plane crashed in the Indian Ocean. But it brings investigators and family members of the deceased no closer to understanding why the plane deviated from its Kuala Lumpur-to-Beijing route and what happened in the flight's final moments. There's no firm evidence of the angle at which the plane hit the sea, let alone whether a pilot was at the controls. A high-powered stalling crash, like the one that plunged Air France Flight 447 into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, isn't the only way a plane can fall into the sea. "The speculation among pilots right now is that it must have come down at a relatively shallow angle," said Tracy Lamb, an aviation safety consultant and former Boeing 737 pilot. "It looks like the flaperon was broken off by the engine pod ripping off as it was dragged through the water on the initial impact." Despite their lumbering appearance, commercial aircraft are quite capable of gliding considerable distances without engine power. After birds were sucked into its engines over The Bronx in 2009, U.S. Airways flight 1549 completed a turn and flew about two-thirds of the length of Manhattan island before ditching in the Hudson River. In a 2001 incident, an Airbus Group SE A330 en route from Toronto to Lisbon ran out of fuel over the Atlantic and glided for 144 kilometers (90 miles) before landing 19 minutes later at a coastal airfield in the Azores islands. That might explain why the seafloor search for MH370 found no evidence of the aircraft in the immediate vicinity of a zone where its fuel is thought to have run out. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau initially searched in a box 10 nautical miles on either side of that zone on the assumption that the plane would have plummeted in a fairly tight spiral into the sea, Commissioner Martin Dolan said in an interview in March. The zone has since been extended to a wider radius to cover the possibility of a lower-energy crash at a more shallow angle. Such a scenario would help explain the absence of debris on the ocean surface, Tecop's Weber said. "A nose-first plunge is unlikely, in my opinion, since the part is too big and intact for that," he said by phone. A higher-energy impact would tend to disintegrate large objects like the flaperon found on Reunion: "Such a plunge should have resulted in the plane being shattered into smaller pieces." The absence of debris from the crash has confounded investigators. Previous crashes in water have almost always left floating debris, the bureau said in a briefing note on its website yesterday. Much of that debris could have sunk by the time the surface search began in that area nine days after the plane disappeared. "By this time much of any debris left floating after the crash would likely have either sunk or have been dispersed," the bureau wrote. "The opportunity to locate and recover debris from the sea surface diminishes rapidly over the first few weeks from the time of a crash." Investigators scanned 4.6 million square kilometers (1.8 million square miles) of ocean surface, with 29 aircraft carrying out 334 flights and 14 ships on the sea as part of the operation, Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said at a press conference in May. The search "initially, briefly, targeted the correct area," the bureau said yesterday, adding that this was the best chance investigators had to recover material. There are other possibilities to explain the good condition of the flaperon. Other parts of the plane could have taken the brunt of the crash, shielding the wing, according to Jim Wildey, former chief of the NTSB's materials laboratory. While pictures of the flaperon suggest the crash was relatively benign, "if they find just one piece, it's going to be a far stretch" to assess how the accident occurred, he said in an interview. That hasn't stopped conjecture among pilots puzzled by the chain of events. "It's currently speculated by a lot of other pilots in the industry that there was a pilot at the controls," consultant Lamb said. Someone might have needed to adjust the degree at which the nose was pointing up or down to get the plane from cruising flight to a shallow-angled descent. Any resolution to the mystery will depend on more detailed analysis of the flaperon, and ultimately on discovery of the flight recorders somewhere on the Indian Ocean floor. "Was the flaperon extended, which would indicate that it was flown under pilot control?" Weber said. "Sounds crazy, but there is no scenario for this accident that doesn't have some crazy aspect to it."

MH370 families accuse Malaysia Airlines of 'hiding truth' Tensions between Malaysia Airlines and the Chinese families of MH370 passengers rose on Friday after international media were blocked from attending a Beijing meeting to update relatives on debris recovered from the missing plane. As many as 100 family members had gathered at a Malaysia Airlines outlet in an airport cargo base to question the airline on why Malaysia appeared more certain than French investigators that the flaperon, or wing flap, found on the French island of Reunion last week was from MH370. Flight MH370 disappeared on March 8 last year while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, with 239 people on board. On Thursday families of had pointed out discrepancies between televised announcement by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak that the wing flap was from MH370 - making it the first piece of evidence of the fate of the aircraft - and a later statement by French prosecutors who are heading the examination of the wreckage, which was less definitive. The family members of MH370 passengers kneel in front of foreign media gathered outside the Beijing office of Malaysia Airlines. At Friday's meeting, a large contingent of foreign media representatives were blocked by police from the airline's office at the cargo base. This prompted some family members to refuse to go ahead with the meeting. Others who attended the meeting quickly walked out after the airline's staff gave them the same information as they had received yesterday from Najib's announcement. No Malaysian government officials, nor Malaysia's ambassador to China, were in attendance. Outside the meeting, family members bent on their knees in front of the media representatives, asking them for help in learning the fate of their family members. The families also railed at police officers monitoring the gathering, with one elderly man saying: "Listen, you can shoot us, I won't back down." A woman told CNBC: "I lost five of my relatives on the flight, three generations gone. Malaysia don't care about us at all. The police always come and try to stop me from causing trouble. My sister is on that flight- that's my sister. I won't bow down." The meeting later restarted but a large group of families refused again to attend, and then halted again, with relatives leaving to instead protest in front of the Malaysian Embassy. In the early hours of Thursday, Malaysian PM Najib had announced that an "international team of experts have conclusively confirmed that the aircraft debris found on Reunion Island is indeed from MH370." The fragment of wing had been flown to mainland France after being found last week covered in barnacles on a Reunion beach, and examined by a team of experts from the U.S. and Australia as well as France and Malaysia. After Najib's announcement, Paris Prosecutor Serge Mackowiak said that there was a "very strong presumption" that the flaperon was from MH370. He said this was based on technical data supplied by both the manufacturer and airline but gave no indication that experts had discovered a serial number or unique markings that would put the link beyond doubt The expert team was due to continue their examination of the flaperon and a separate fragment of luggage, also found on Reunion, on Friday, he said. Later on Thursday, Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai told reporters that paint color and maintenance-record matches proved the wreckage was from MH370, adding: "We appreciate the French team and their support and respect their decision to continue with the verification." He said investigators on Reunion had collected more aircraft debris, including a plane window and aluminum foil, but there was no confirmation they also belonged to the missing plane. Malaysia has asked the governments of neighboring Mauritius and Madagascar to help widen the search area, he told reporters. China's foreign ministry on Thursday warned Malaysia not to lessen the intensity of its MH370, now that some wreckage had been recovered.