It Might Have Flown into Space, Ex-President Girma

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Former Ethiopian President Girma Wolde-Giorgis who had been an assistant teacher of air navigation and flight control, Director General of the Ethiopian Civil Aviation Authority and Board member of the Ethiopian Airlines had given today his idea as to what might have happened to the Malaysians Airlines missing Flight MH370.

In a phone call he made to a local FM station in Addis, Girma said that the airplane might have gone out of earth’s atmosphere and gravity into space. The search to find the airplane that has disappeared for more than five days is continuing. There were 227 passengers, including 153 Chinese and 38 Malaysians, according to the manifest.

Two were children. All 12 crew members were Malaysian. Among the Chinese nationals was a delegation of 19 artists who had attended an exhibition in Kuala Lumpur. Two Iranian men were travelling on stolen passports, Interpol said in a statement. They are believed to have been en route to Europe via Beijing.

Malaysian police named one as 19-year-old Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad. Interpol identified the other as Delavar Seyed Mohammadreza, 29. There were no apparent links to terrorist groups, officials said. Flight MH370 departed from Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 00:41 on Saturday (16:41 GMT Friday), and was due to arrive in Beijing at 06:30.
Air traffic controllers lost contact at 01:30. Malaysian officials speaking in Beijing to relatives of missing Chinese passengers said that the last verbal communication with the plane came at the boundary between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace. Told by Malaysia’s air traffic control that the flight was being passed to Ho Chi Minh control, the reply came back: “OK, roger that”.

No distress signal or message was sent. The plane’s planned route would have taken it over Cambodia and Vietnam, and the initial search focused on the South China Sea, south of Vietnam’s Ca Mau peninsula. Malaysian officials then suggested that the plane may have unexpectedly turned west before disappearing. The search has been widened to include the Strait of Malacca – off the west coast of Malaysia – but the country’s air force chief says he was misquoted about the plane being tracked over the Strait.

There have been a number of reports of possible wreckage or oil slicks related to the plane but these have, to date, all proven to be unrelated to the missing airliner. Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, head of Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation, said on Monday: “Unfortunately, ladies and gentleman, we have not found anything that appears to be objects from the aircraft, let alone the aircraft itself.” Common factors in plane crashes are poor weather, pilot error and airworthiness. Khalid Abu Bakar, Inspector General of Police, said on Tuesday that they were also looking into four areas: hijacking, sabotage, psychological problems among the passengers and crew, and personal problems among the passengers and crew.

Weather conditions for this flight are said to have been good and the pilot, 53, who had more than 18,000 flying hours behind him, had been employed by the airline since 1981. Malaysia Airlines has a good safety record and the jet, a Boeing 777-200ER, is said to be one of the safest because of its modern technology. One of the plane’s wingtips was clipped in an incident while taxiing in 2012 but it was repaired and certified as safe. Air accident investigator David Gleave told the BBC: “It is very unusual for an aircraft to just disappear like this.

“We would normally expect the emergency location beacon to help us find it, or the bleeping units attached to the black boxes and the recorders, so it’s very unusual for it to have disappeared very quickly from the radar systems.” He added: “If something happens very quickly with the aircraft it can disappear off radar, but we would normally expect in something like a depressurisation or a terrorist attack for the aircraft – if it did descend – to descend relatively slowly so that it would appear on radar… and for the pilot to be able to communicate something to air traffic control either through the transponder or by voice.”

The airline says it is not ruling out any theory while officials in the US, which is sending FBI investigators, say there is no evidence of such an attack yet. The presence of two passengers with stolen passports raised questions about a breach of security, but officials have now identified both individuals and say they are not believed to have any terror links. “Quite a few people… do fly, especially in that part of the world, with improper identification or false identification,” former head of the US air security agency John Magaw told the BBC. When an Air India Express plane crashed in Mangalore in 2010 en route from Dubai, with the loss of 158 lives, as many as 10 fraudulent or stolen passports were recovered.

An Air France jet flying from Brazil to France vanished into the Atlantic Ocean on 1 June 2009, with the loss of all 228 people on board. Debris was spotted the following day but it took nearly two years to locate the flight recorders and remains of the fuselage, deep on the ocean floor. The waters off Vietnam and in the Malacca straits are much shallower.

Flight recorders, or “black boxes” as they are often known, emit ultrasonic signals that can be detected under water. Under good conditions, the signals can be detected from several hundred miles away. But without knowing the trajectory of a plane as it went down or fully understanding wind and wave conditions if it crashed into water, searchers sometimes end up criss-crossing huge areas looking for relatively small pieces of wreckage.