Flight Safety Information March 17, 2014 - No. 056 In This Issue Malaysia plane search straddles continent as police focus on crew Search for Malaysia Airlines jet expands across Asia Timing of Report by Flight's Pilot Focuses Inquiry Delta Jet Loses Wing Panel During Orlando-Atlanta Flight PRISM SMS Asia Pacific Aviation Safety Seminar, 21-22 May 2014, Bangkok, Thailand ERAU Research Survey Upcoming Events Malaysia plane search straddles continent as police focus on crew (Reuters) - Australia took charge on Monday of scouring the southern Indian Ocean for a missing passenger jet and Malaysia requested radar data from countries stretching as far as central Asia, amid mounting evidence the plane's disappearance was meticulously planned. No trace of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has been found since it vanished on March 8 with 239 people aboard. Investigators are increasingly convinced it was diverted perhaps thousands of miles off course by someone with deep knowledge of the Boeing 777-200ER and commercial navigation. Suspicions of hijacking or sabotage hardened further after it was confirmed the last radio message from the cockpit - an informal "all right, good night" - was spoken after someone had begun disabling one of the plane's automatic tracking systems. But police and a multi-national investigation team may never know for sure what happened in the cockpit unless they find the plane, and that in itself is a daunting challenge. Satellite data suggests the plane could be anywhere in either of two vast corridors that arc through much of Asia: one stretching north from northern Thailand to Kazakhstan, the other south from Indonesia into the Indian Ocean west of Australia. China, which has been vocal in its impatience with Malaysian efforts to find the plane, called on its smaller neighbor to "immediately" expand and clarify the scope of the search. About two-thirds of the passengers aboard MH370 were Chinese. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said he had spoken to Malaysian counterpart Najib Razak by telephone, and had offered more surveillance resources in addition to the two P-3C Orion aircraft his country has already committed. "He asked that Australia take responsibility for the search in the southern vector, which the Malaysian authorities now think was one possible flight path for this ill-fated aircraft," Abbott told parliament. "I agreed that we would do so." Malaysia's transport ministry said in a statement on Monday it had sent diplomatic notes to all countries along the northern and southern search corridors, requesting radar and satellite information as well as land, sea and air search operations. The Malaysian navy and air force was also searching the southern corridor, it said. FOCUS ON CREW The plane's disappearance has baffled investigators and aviation experts. It disappeared from civilian air traffic control screens off Malaysia's east coast less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing. Malaysian authorities believe that, as the plane crossed the northeast coast and flew across the Gulf of Thailand, someone on board shut off its communications systems and turned sharply to the west. That has focused attention on the crew. Malaysian police are trawling through the backgrounds of the pilots, flight and ground staff for any clues to a possible motive in what they say is now being treated as a criminal investigation. The last words from the cockpit of the missing plane were spoken as it was leaving Malaysian-run airspace and being handed over to air traffic controllers in Vietnam. The sign-off came after one of the plane's data communication systems, which would have enabled it to be tracked beyond radar coverage, had been switched off, Malaysia's Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said on Sunday. "The answer to your question is yes, it was disabled before," he told reporters when asked if the ACARS system - a maintenance computer that relays data on the plane's status - had been shut down before the "all right, good night" sign-off. It is not known who on board spoke those words, which were first revealed last week. The informal hand-off went against standard radio procedures, which would have called for the speaker to read back instructions for contacting the next control centre and include the aircraft's call sign, said Hugh Dibley, a former British Airways pilot and a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. Investigators are likely to examine the recording for any signs of psychological stress and to determine the speaker's identity to confirm whether the flight deck had been taken over by hijackers or the pilot himself was involved, he said. HOMES SEARCHED Police special branch officers searched the homes of the captain, 53-year-old Zaharie Ahmad Shah, and first officer, 27-year-old Fariq Abdul Hamid, in middle-class suburbs of Kuala Lumpur close to the international airport on Saturday. Among the items taken for examination was a flight simulator Zaharie had built in his home. A senior police official familiar with the investigation said the flight simulator programs were closely examined, adding they appeared to be normal ones that allow users to practice flying and landing in different conditions. A second senior police official with knowledge of the investigation said they had found no evidence of a link between the pilots and any militant group. "Based on what we have so far, we cannot see the terrorism link here," he said. "We looked at known terror or extremist groups in Southeast Asia, the links are not there." Background checks are also being made on the 227 passengers on the flight, including aviation engineer Mohd Khairul Amri Selamat, a 29-year-old Malaysian who worked for a private jet charter company. "The focus is on anyone else who might have had aviation skills on that plane," the second police source told Reuters. As an engineer specializing in executive jets, Khairul would not necessarily have all the knowledge needed to divert and fly a large jetliner. NORTH OR SOUTH? Electronic signals the plane continued to exchange periodically with satellites suggest it could have continued flying for about six hours after moving out of range of Malaysian military radar off the northwest coast, following a commercial aviation route across the Andaman Sea towards India. The plane had enough fuel to fly for a total of about seven-and-a-half to eight hours, Malaysia Airlines' Chief Executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said on Sunday. Twenty-six countries are involved in the search, stretching from the shores of the former Soviet republics of central Asia to the far south of the Indian Ocean. Three French civil aviation experts who were involved in the search for an Air France jet that crashed in the Atlantic in 2009 arrived in Kuala Lumpur on Monday to join the growing international search and investigation team. A source familiar with official U.S. assessments of satellite data being used to try and find the plane said it was believed most likely it turned south sometime after the last sighting by Malaysian military radar, and may have run out of fuel over the Indian Ocean. The Malaysian government-controlled New Straits Times on Monday quoted sources close to the investigation as saying data collected was pointing instead towards the northern corridor. Investigators were also looking at disused airfields in the region with runways capable of handling a large passenger aircraft such as the Boeing 777, the paper said. The New Straits Times also said that the plane dropped to an altitude of 5,000 ft or lower, using a low- flying technique known as "terrain masking" to defeat civilian radar coverage after turning back from its scheduled flight path. The reports could not be immediately verified. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/17/us-malaysiaairlines-flight-idUSBREA2701720140317 Back to Top Search for Malaysia Airlines jet expands across Asia Malaysian officials are looking as far as Kazakhstan. Relatives of passengers cling to hijacking theory. BEIJING - The search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has expanded to cover an impossibly vast swath of Asia extending from Kazakhstan to Australia, with Malaysia appealing for as many airplanes and ships as the world can provide. The countries where the Boeing 777 and the 239 people aboard could have gone, based on a signal picked up by a satellite, stretch north and west from the plane's last known location and include Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, China, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand. Another arc stretches south and west between Indonesia and Australia and well into the Indian Ocean. "We are looking at large tracts of land ... as well as deep and remote oceans," Malaysia's acting transportation minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, said Sunday at a news conference in Kuala Lumpur, the capital. Earlier search efforts focused on the flight path between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, over the relatively shallow Gulf of Thailand, but investigators now think it is more likely the plane headed over the Indian Ocean, with an average depth of 13,000 feet. Family members are holding out hope that the flight was hijacked and landed in some obscure location where the passengers are being held for ransom. "My gut feeling is that it landed. I still feel his spirit. I don't feel he is dead," said Sarah Bajc, a 48-year-old American teacher living in Beijing whose partner, Philip Wood, a 50-year-old IBM executive, was a passenger on the flight. Malaysian officials said they are not yet classifying the incident as a hijacking and are considering a suicide mission by one of the passengers or crew. The pilot and copilot are high on the list of potential suspects, because of the expertise required to divert the plane. Both the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, and transponder were disabled shortly after takeoff. The final, reassuring words from the cockpit - "All right, good night" - were spoken to air traffic controllers after the system had already been disabled, and whoever was speaking from the cockpit did not mention any trouble aboard. Malaysian officials said they did not know whether it was the pilot or copilot who had spoken, but both are under investigation. Malaysian officials said police had searched the home of 53-year-old pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah and removed a flight simulator he kept there, and had also searched the home of the copilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27. Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul, said on Sunday in an interview with Fox News that the investigation was increasingly looking at the cockpit. "Something was going on with the pilot," the Texas Republican said. "I think this all leads towards the cockpit, with the pilot and copilot." Despite speculation about Islamic terrorism, neither pilot had ties to militant groups. Malaysian officials said Sunday that the two had not requested to fly together on Flight 370. The officials also said they had reinvestigated two Iranian men on the flight who were traveling on stolen passports and were sticking with their original determination: that the two were trying to sneak into Europe as economic migrants and had no terrorist links. The flight departed Kuala Lumpur for Beijing at 12:41 a.m. March 8 and disappeared from civilian radar within 50 minutes. However, Inmarsat satellites picked up tracking information suggesting it remained in flight until at least 8:11 a.m. The satellite was only able to report the distances of the plane, not its exact position, so the search is following the two long arcs - one extending north toward Kazakhstan and the other southwest over the Indian Ocean. Aviation geeks using airport data from X-Plane, a flight simulator website, have identified more than 600 runways within range of the nearly 3,000 miles that the plane could have traveled from Kuala Lumpur. The flight carried 227 passengers, 159 of them Chinese citizens. "There's still hope for my daughter and her husband to be alive," the parents of one young woman told the Beijing News. The problem with the hijacking theory is that no group has come forward to take credit for the airplane's disappearance or to make demands. "That makes it very difficult for us to verify if it is a hijacking or a terrorist act," Hishammuddin said. Anyone who commandeered Flight 370 would have had to take extraordinary measures. Those would have included manually disabling the ACARS and transponder and then executing a sharp westward turn during a 10-minute leg of the flight between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace, where there is little primary radar coverage. Data show that as the aircraft zigzagged off course, it also rose to 45,000 feet, well above the approved altitude for a Boeing 777. Some experts believe that series of changes could have been a deliberate attempt to ensure that passengers could not use their cellphones or to incapacitate them by causing a shortage of oxygen. A former technology executive whose partner was the only adult American on board, Bajc has been one of the most proactive of the family members, setting up Facebook and Twitter accounts encouraging people to keep looking for the plane. In the week since the plane disappeared, Bajc has transformed herself into an amateur sleuth, mulling over nuggets of information she has gleaned from the Internet that give credence to the hijacking theory. "I am making the assumption at this point that the hostages are going to be leveraged," said Bajc. "This was clearly an orchestrated effort to take the plane. Why would anybody go to such efforts to hide themselves if they were going to crash the plane into the water or commit suicide?" Bajc said in an interview in her living room stacked with cartons in preparation for a move to Kuala Lumpur. The couple, both divorced, met in 2011 in Beijing and moved in together soon afterward, along with Bajc's teenage son. This year, they were in the process of moving on to new positions in Kuala Lumpur - he still with IBM and she with a school - and had just leased an apartment they loved on a tree-lined street within walking distance of their jobs. The couple last spoke on March 7, as Wood was getting ready to leave for the Kuala Lumpur airport for the red-eye flight back to Beijing. She sent a car to pick him up at Beijing Capital International Airport at 7:30 the next morning. Shortly before 8 a.m., the driver telephoned her to say that the flight hadn't arrived and that there was no information on the arrival board indicating a delay. Bajc was a little anxious, but only because movers were coming to pick up the cartons and needed Wood's passport to complete the paperwork. "Have you deplaned yet?" she texted him. When she didn't hear back, she called his Malaysian and Beijing cellphones. The former went directly to voicemail and the latter gave a message saying the user had the power off. Still surfing the Internet, she saw an alert about 8:30 a.m. saying that the plane was "missing." At 9 a.m., the doorbell rang. It was the movers. Bajc had to tell them, "I guess we're not moving today." http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-malaysia-plane-search- 20140317,0,7875855.story#ixzz2wDTLbMCM Back to Top Timing of Report by Flight's Pilot Focuses Inquiry SEPANG, Malaysia - A signaling system was disabled on the missing Malaysia Airlines jet before a pilot spoke to air traffic control without mentioning any trouble, a senior Malaysian official said Sunday, reinforcing theories that one or both of the pilots may have been involved in diverting the plane and adding urgency to the investigation of their pasts and possible motivations. With the increasing likelihood that Flight 370 was purposefully diverted and flown thousands of miles from its planned route, Malaysian officials faced more questions about an investigation, marked by days of contradictory government statements, that has ballooned into a global goose chase for information. Prime Minister Najib Razak acknowledged Saturday that military radar and satellite data raised the possibility that the plane could have ended up somewhere in Indonesia, the southern Indian Ocean or along a vast arc of territory from northern Laos across western China to Central Asia. Malaysian officials said they were scrambling to coordinate a 25-nation effort to find the plane. On Sunday, Malaysia's defense minister added a critical detail about investigators' understanding of what had transpired in the cockpit in the 40 minutes of flight time before ground controllers lost contact with the jet. The determination that the last verbal message to the control tower - "All right, good night" - came after a crucial signaling system had stopped transmitting, perhaps after being shut off, was likely to refocus scrutiny on the plane's veteran pilot, Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, and his young first officer, Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27. Commercial passenger planes use radio or satellite signals to send data through Acars, the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System. The system can monitor engines and other equipment for problems that may need attention when a plane lands. Although officials have already said that Acars was disabled on the missing plane, it had been unclear whether the system stopped functioning before or after the last, brief words were radioed to the control tower, in which the pilot did not indicate that anything was wrong with the signaling system or the plane as a whole. During a news conference on Sunday, the defense minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, who is also acting minister of transportation, gave a terse answer: "Yes, it was disabled before." The fate of the plane and the people it carried has become a formidable riddle, raising questions about possible terrorism, the identities of passengers and crew members, aviation technology and searching an enormous area that includes both the Indian Ocean and rugged, remote terrain in Asia. "It's something of the scope I've never seen before," Cmdr. William Marks, the spokesman for the United States Navy Seventh Fleet, which sent two guided-missile destroyers to join the search, said in a telephone interview. Of the size of the Indian Ocean, he added: "Essentially, it's like looking for a person somewhere between New York and California. It's that big." Malaysian officials on Sunday briefed representatives from 22 countries that could help search along the two corridors where satellite data indicate the plane may have wound up, having flown up to six hours after its disappearance beyond the range of military radar in western Malaysia. Mr. Hishammuddin said Malaysia would also ask China, France, the United States and other countries to provide satellite data. But establishing what happened to the plane also depends on reconstructing events in the cockpit in the early morning of March 8, when the jet was passing over the Gulf of Thailand between northern Malaysia and southern Vietnam. At that time, its communications links were severed, and it changed direction, flying across the Malay Peninsula and out over the Strait of Malacca. Given the complexity of that feat, experts and American government officials say, experienced aviators, possibly one or both of the pilots, were probably involved, either willingly or under coercion. The plane took off at 12:41 a.m. on March 8 carrying 239 people headed for Beijing and reached a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet at 1:01 a.m. Six minutes later, at 1:07 a.m., the Malaysian authorities say, the plane sent its last Acars message, which reported nothing amiss. Investigators have not said how they concluded the system was disabled or when they believe that took place. It does not send a message when it is turned off. But Mr. Najib said it shut down just before the jet reached the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which independent radar tracking recorded at 1:08 a.m. If the Malaysian account is accurate, and if one of the pilots shut off the system, that would mean he did so just after it transmitted a message. The authorities have not specified what time the last verbal exchange between the cockpit and the air traffic controllers took place. But Mr. Hishammuddin's statement means it would have occurred between 1:08 a.m. and 1:21 a.m., when the plane's transponder stopped transmitting and ground control lost contact with the jet. The sequence of events does not rule out the possibility of someone taking control of the cockpit and forcing the pilot to disable the system, say good night to air traffic control and turn off the transponder. But if that is what happened, it means the hijacker would have had to seize the cockpit in the first 26 minutes of the flight. On a modern aircraft, it would be unlikely that a pilot would miss warning indications from onboard monitors that Acars had malfunctioned or been disabled, said Cengiz Turkoglu, a senior lecturer in aeronautical engineering at City University London who specializes in aviation safety. "I think they would certainly notice it," Mr. Turkoglu said in a telephone interview. "Acars system failure or downgrading would be alerted, the crew would be alerted." Mr. Turkoglu emphasized that a great deal was still unknown, but that the accumulating evidence about the plane's disappearance appeared to point to a deliberate act. "There is an argument that something, somebody, who has the expertise, had something planned," he said. "Who? I don't know." The Malaysian authorities have not singled out the pilots or crew members as the only potential suspects. Officials said on Sunday that they would scrutinize the backgrounds of all passengers and crew members onboard, as well as ground crew and engineers who worked on the Boeing 777 jet. "I understand the hunger for new details, but we do not want to jump to conclusions," Mr. Hishammuddin said. According to the airline, he said, "the pilot and co-pilot did not ask to fly together" on Flight 370. If true, that might undermine speculation that the two men could have acted in concert in the plane's disappearance. Mr. Hishammuddin confirmed that the Malaysian police had searched the homes of the captain and co-pilot in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday. The police took a flight simulator that the pilot, Mr. Zaharie, had kept at his home, and reassembled it for experts to examine, Khalid Abu Bakar, the inspector general of the Malaysian police, told reporters. Rohan Gunaratna, a professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore who studies security and terrorism in Asia, said that while the weight of suspicion would inevitably fall on the pilots and other crew members, investigators were following established procedure by examining everyone on the missing plane. Soon after the plane disappeared, F.B.I. officers and other American investigators "scrubbed" the names of the pilots and passengers, including two Iranian men who were traveling on stolen passports, to determine whether they had any connections to terrorists. They have found no such connections, officials said on Sunday, while cautioning that the home countries of some passengers had not yet supplied full background checks on their citizens who were aboard the plane. Reconstructing the Plane's Path The main communications systems of the Malaysia Airlines plane were turned off about 40 minutes into the flight, forcing investigators to try to piece together the plane's location from other systems. Sources: R. John Hansman Jr., Massachusetts Institute of Technology; American officials "You can't rule anything out, so everyone on the plane must be treated as a potential suspect," Professor Gunaratna said in a telephone interview. Even knowing where to continue the search for the plane is difficult. Until Mr. Najib's announcement about the likely course of the plane, many aircraft and ships were devoted to scanning the seas off Malaysia's east coast - precisely the opposite direction from the new focus of the hunt. "Malaysian officials are currently discussing with all partners how best to deploy assets along the two corridors" indicated by satellite data, the Malaysian Transport Ministry said in a written statement. "Both the northern and southern corridors are being treated with equal importance." A satellite orbiting 22,250 miles over the middle of the Indian Ocean received the final transmission, which, based on the angle from which the plane sent it, came from somewhere along one of the two corridors investigators are exploring. The northern arc touches southern Kazakhstan and northern Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia before running across a huge portion of western and southwestern China, and ending in northern Laos. To reach most of those areas, the aircraft would have had to traverse heavily militarized areas in China, India or Pakistan, although it could have tried to fly across Myanmar. The southern corridor, from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean, travels over open water with few islands. If the aircraft took that path, it might have passed near the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. Yet those remote Australian islands, with a population of fewer than 1,000 people, have a small airport. "It is a daunting task to even begin to plan how you would search an entire ocean," said Commander Marks, the spokesman for the Seventh Fleet. Meanwhile, in the upscale western suburbs of Kuala Lumpur, the families of the pilot and the first officer kept a low profile on Sunday, as local and foreign journalists continued to camp outside their homes. Neighbors said that Mr. Fariq was the eldest of five children and that the family had moved to the neighborhood, popular with faculty members from a nearby university, about a decade ago. Residents said the family was kind, decent and pious. "He's a very nice man," Ayop Jantan, a retiree who lives two doors down from the family, said of Mr. Fariq. "When he comes back with his luggage, he greets me like an uncle." http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-flight.html?_r=0 Back to Top Delta Jet Loses Wing Panel During Orlando-Atlanta Flight Passengers on a Delta jet got a bit of a scare on Sunday when a panel on one of the wings apparently flew off during a flight from Orlando to Atlanta. David Watterson told ABC News he was falling asleep when he heard a boom and saw a missing wing cover and hydraulic fluid leaking from the opening. He told ABC News that while passengers remained calm, it was "concerning to see a big chunk of the plane missing." Michael Lowe later tweeted this image: A Delta spokesman told NBC News that the missing piece wasn't an issue for flying or landing. "The crew, knowing that, followed procedure by declaring an emergency to air traffic control as they were landing, which gave them priority clearance to land and alerted ground crews," Anthony Black was quoted as saying. Flight 2412 landed at 7:30 p.m., with no injuries. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/17/delta-jet-loses-wing-panel_n_4977400.html Back to Top Back to Top Asia Pacific Aviation Safety Seminar, 21-22 May 2014, Bangkok, Thailand The Association of Asia Pacific Airlines (AAPA) is holding the next Asia Pacific Aviation Safety Seminar (APASS) on 21-22 May 2014 in Bangkok. The seminar, hosted by THAI Airways International, is organised by the AAPA Flight Operations & Safety Working Group. This seminar is designed to create a common meeting place for all airlines from the Asia Pacific region, airports, aircraft manufacturers, regulators, insurers, ground handlers, MROs, service providers and suppliers to discuss and to be updated on the latest developments in aviation safety. Why attend? * Excellent networking opportunities for all safety stakeholders to exchange ideas on the important fundamentals and applications of aviation safety best practices, in-service experience and lessons-learned with like-minded aviation safety experts. * Topic-specific workshops in Cabin Safety, Flight Operations Safety and Safety Performance Indicators will enable participants to exchange views and debate on the practical approaches in managing some of the leading safety issues facing the region. Click here to find out more >> http://bit.ly/APASS2014 Back to Top ERAU Research Survey Researchers with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Worldwide are requesting that Aircraft Maintenance Technicians and Airframe and Powerplant Mechanics participate in their research study titled "Prevention of Back Injuries in Technicians and Mechanics". The purpose of the study is to identify protective factors and risk factors associated with back pain and back injury. The ultimate goal is to identify factors that are protective so that they can be implemented within organizations to curtail back pain and back injuries and to identify factors that can be improved to enhance safety for aircraft maintenance technicians and airframe and powerplant mechanics. Participation in the study is strictly voluntary. You will briefly answer questions about your work activities, perceptions of your workplace and your health. This questionnaire takes approximately 10 minutes to complete. All responses are anonymous as no personally identifiable information is collected. To participate in this important study please access the following link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CT8G2LH Thank you, Todd. D. Smith, PhD, CSP, ARM Principal Researcher Program Chair - Master of Science in Occupational Safety Management Program todd.smith2@erau.edu Back to Top Upcoming Events: North Texas Business Aviation Safety Show-Down is set for April 3rd http://www.aviationpros.com/press_release/11327425/north-texas-business-aviation-safety-show-down- is-set-for-april-3rd Middle East Air Cargo and Logistics Exhibition & Conference 2014 April 9-10, 2014 Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre (ADNEC) http://cargomiddleeast.com Airport Show Dubai May 11-13, 2014 Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre (DICEC) www.theairportshow.com/portal/home.aspx National Safety Council Aviation Safety Committee Annual Conference Savanah, GA - May 14-15, 2014 Contact: tammy.washington@nsc.org http://cwp.marriott.com/savdt/artexmeeting/ Asia Pacific Aviation Safety Seminar 21-22 May 2014, Bangkok, Thailand http://bit.ly/APASS2014 Curt Lewis