Australian company detects ‘wreckage of a commercial airliner’ in the Bay of Bengal

Daily Mail – by Sam Web

An Australian company says it has located the wreckage of a commercial airliner lying on the ocean floor in the Bay of Bengal – an area located in the northern tip of the original search area, but thousands of miles from where authorities are currently focused.

Tech firm GeoResonance claims its sensor technology has found the wreckage of a plane in the Bay of Bengal, 118 miles south of Bangladesh.

The company said images taken of the same spot five days earlier showed it had appeared between the 5th and 10th of March 2014. The plane disappeared on March 8.  

It used the same technology to look for chemical elements in aircraft, such as aluminum, titanium and jet fuel residue.

The company, which uses its technology to excite the nucleii of a specific atom in order to detect it, started searching for the plane on April 12 by initially trying to find aluminium – the most abundant metal used to build the 777 model.

Once it detects aluminium it moves onto the next most abundant metal – titanium, followed by copper, steel alloys, then other materials – in order to narrow down the search.

Scanning ‘multispectral images’ taken from the air GeoResonance says it found an ‘anomaly’ in the Bay of Bengal.

However, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, which is coordinating the multinational search, dismissed the claim.

‘The Australian-led search is relying on information from satellite and other data to determine the missing aircraft’s location,’ the JACC said.

‘The location specified by the GeoResonance report is not within the search arc derived from this data. The joint international team is satisfied that the final resting place of the missing aircraft is in the southerly portion of the search arc.’

Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said Tuesday that China and Australia were aware of the announcement.

‘Malaysia is working with its international partners to assess the credibility of this information,’ a statement from his office said.

In what is seen as an admission that MH370 will never be found, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said yesterday that the surface search was being scaled back because it is ‘highly unlikely’ clues will be found on the surface of the Indian Ocean.

Instead, the search will enter a new phase with the focus on the ocean floor – despite there being no ‘pings’ from what was earlier hoped were the aircraft’s black boxes.

Mr Abbott said that as the aircraft, which had 239 people on board, has been missing for 52 days, if there had been any debris from the aircraft it would have now sunk.

‘By this stage, 52 days into the search, most material would have become waterlogged and sunk’ said Mr Abbott.

He paid tribute to the ‘tremendous work’ of air crews from eight nations who have contributed to the search.

His words were seen as virtually admitting that the search had little prospect of finding the aircraft, particularly as a concentrated hunt by the undersea search vehicle Bluefin-21 in a ‘likely area’ had found nothing.

Adding to the mystery is the testimony of sea current experts that anything that floats is likely to have washed up on rocks or a beach somewhere.

But nothing has turned up and air and sea searches have also failed to find even a slick of oil that could be linked to the missing plane if it had plunged into the sea.

Malaysia’s Prime Minister, Mr Najib Razak, conceded in an interview that investigators had made no substantial progress since March 28 – the date experts calculated from satellite data the plane  crashed into the Indian Ocean.

‘That’s all we have until today,’ Mr Najib told the Wall Street Journal.bbott discusses the scaling back of the MH370 search

Earlier, the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, questioned whether MH370 had even crashed into the Indian Ocean – and he blamed manufacturer Boeing for its fate.

He also suggested the reason passengers and crew did not act to stop whatever was happening on the Boeing 777 aircraft after it had taken off from Kuala Lumpur was because they were ‘somehow incapacitated.’

In an opinion piece, Dr Mahathir, who maintains a strong influence in Malaysia’s ruling party, said there was no chance, as had been suggested, that the pilot had committed suicide.

‘Even if the pilot wants to commit suicide, the co-pilot and the cabin crew would not allow him to do so without trying something,’ said the former prime minister.

‘But no-one, not even the passengers did anything.’

Dr Mahathir also questioned why no debris or oil slick from the plane has been found.

‘Can it be that the plane remained intact on crashing and sank with no trace and no-one launching  the lifeboat doors as we are told all these aircraft are equipped with?

‘Can one believe this plane quietly floated down into the raging sea and sank conveniently in the deepest part of the Indian Ocean?’

He said it must have taken some effort if the pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, had disabled the plane’s communication system.

‘The co-pilot would notice and for his own life he would have tried to do something.’

Dr Mahathir, 88, who was Prime Minister for 22 years, asked: ‘Was he disabled? Were all the crew members and the passengers disabled?’

He expressed his sadness that staff of Malaysia Airlines were targeted by Chinese relatives of passengers in Beijing last week ‘because they are blaming the wrong people.’

‘The loss of the plane is due to the makers, Boeing. How can Boeing produce a plane that is so easily disabled?’

In an era where passenger planes can be tracked on mobile phones and spy satellites operated by some countries are able to photography and identify a single person on the ground, Boeing had to explain how all these methods of tracking the aircraft ‘can be disabled, can fail.’

The former Prime Minister’s controversial comments did not end there.

‘Either Beoing technology is poor or it is not fail-safe.

‘I would not like to fly in a Boeing aircraft unless Boeing can explain how all its systems can fail or be disabled.’

Boeing, he said in his blog post, must demonstrate how the communication system could be disabled.

The company, he added, ‘must accept responsibility for building an aircraft that can disappear in mid-air so completely.’

Insisting that Malaysia Airlines were not to blame for the tragedy, he said it was standard practice that when a plane crashes, a team of experts would arrive at the scene soonest so as to find the cause of the crash

‘Boeing and the authorities in the manufacturing country should be looking out for the plane.

‘Maybe the plane type should be grounded. But Boeing has shown no interest and had said practically nothing.’

Responding to Dr Mahathir’s comments, a Boeing spokesman told MailOnline: ‘Our thoughts and deepest sympathies continue to be with the families and loved ones of those aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

‘Under the international protocols established for aviation accident investigations, Boeing continues to serve as a technical advisor to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, in support of the Malaysian authorities.’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2615901/Has-MH370-Australian-company-detects-wreckage-commercial-airliner-Bay-Bengal-thousands-miles-current-search-area.html#ixzz30JX1xDki
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