About seven days ago, at around 2.40am on 8th March 2014, a Malaysia airline flight MH370 of aircraft type Boeing 777-200 carrying 239 people on board went missing from radar. The flight departed from Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) and was expected to land in Beijing around 6.30am the same day, however, during the handover of air traffic control from Malaysia to Vietnam during the period the flight entering the airspace of Vietnam, Vietnamese air traffic control failed to detect MH370. Malaysian air traffic control tried to detect MH370 but to no avail too.
It was reported in a local newspaper that at around 5.30am same day, it was official that MH370 was missing and the search and rescue operation began. Search area was initially began at the border between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace in South China Sea just south of Hon Khoai island but was later expanded to Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea after raw data collected from the missing fligh suggested a possibility of a flight turn back. As at date of this writing, 11 countries namely the USA, Indonesia, Taiwan, Australia, China, Vietnam, Singapore, the Philippines, New Zealand, India and Thailand lend their hands to Malaysia in the search and rescue mission by deploying their ships, aircrafts and satellites. Unfortunately, no sign of the missing flight is detected up to today.
During the past six days, everyone were saddened by what happened to MH370 particularly the family members of the missing ones. Of the 239 passengers on board the flight, 152 were of Chinese nationals. Angers were mounting among the families due to the fact that there was no concrete result from the search and rescue operation up to this day. There were sighting reports of oil slicks, damaged rescue craft and objects but were all later found to be not from the missing aircraft. Every passing days means slimmer survival chance of these missing passengers. The most annoying and frustrating about this incident was that no one knows exactly where the aircraft is, up to today and search area is very wide covering South China Sea, the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea. If the search and rescue team has a lead on exact location of the aircraft, the search could have been more efficient. There's even an unverified news now that the USA believes the missing aircraft could have landed in the Indian Ocean based on latest flight data analysed and has deployed their USS Kidd to the location.
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| Search area of the missing aircraft |
On the internet especially Facebook, too many false reports and allegations were flooding the social network. False claims including early of the week, there were claims of MH370 being discovered with doctored picture shared on Facebook, that some of the family members of the missing passenger from China were deliberately flew by Malaysia Airlines to India as well as frustration of China government over the handling of missing aircraft by Malaysian authorities. This only shows that how free information, no matter how true of fake it is, they are flooding all over the net and it is up to our wisdom to differentiate all these. There are also certain part of Malaysian taking this opportunity to politicize the incident, blaming the incompetence of ministry and Malaysia Airline for handling this case though personally, I do feel that they are sincerely doing their best to tackle this situation.
As a typical Malaysian, I guess there's nothing much we can do at the moment except waiting for the relevant parties to locate the missing aircraft and pray that everything related to this incident can come to an end soon. Stop sharing information that is not verified as this will only cause confusion and anxiety particularly to the families of the missing passengers.
- Update 15/3/14 @ 2.18pm: Now it is officially announced that flight MH370 did indeed diverted its flights path after Malaysia radar lost contact with the aircraft and continued flying westward towards the area of Indian Ocean. Possible search area namely Northern Corridor Search and Souther Corridor search are now identified and decision has been made to pull out all search and rescue assets by the Malaysian authority from the South China Sea. The police had started to search the home of missing aircraft's pilot as soon as the above announcement was made.
- Update 19/3/2014: Satellite images identified two pieces of debris possible of that from flight MH370. One measuring 24 meters and another, 5 meters. According to officials, this finding is the strongest lead so far and assets were deployed to the South Indian Ocean, about 2,300km from Perth, Australia where the debris were identified.
- Update 20/3/2014: The two physical objects have yet to be located at South Indian Ocean as previously updated. Search is still ongoing.
- Update 22/3/2014: After several days of failed search on the debris spotted by the Australian, China has today spotted an object measuring 22 meter long and 13 meter wide about 120km away from the debris spotted by Australian from their satellite image. Efforts are now being carried out to search the object.
- Update 24/3/2014: The Prime Minister of Malaysia announced that fresh satellite data analysis from British company, Inmarsat concluded that flight MH370 ended it's journey in the very remote area of Indian Oncean, west of Perth, Australia. With the annoucement made, chances of survival of those onboard is persumed to be almost zero. With the depressing announcement, Malaysian are once again slip into deep sorrow.
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