MH370

Just now I did a Google News Search for MH370. I got “about 276 million results” That is an amazingly huge number. It reflects the interest of the whole world in the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, now more than one month ago. Here is the plane in better days. MH370 Until now the search for the black boxes of the MH370 has been a lot less successful, with no results at all the last two days. After a lot of confusion during the early days, it has now been generally accepted that MH370 has been diverted deliberately from its original course and finally crashed in the Indian Ocean, about 1000-1500 km west of Australia. Here are some maps of the search area, based on a complicated analysis of satellite data. A bit surprisingly, until now no debris has been found.

These maps are available for everybody and very interesting on this website: Marine Traffic In the top right corner you will find an option “Go to Area” where you can choose MH370 Search Area. The site has many options, just find out for yourself. In the picture to the right, you see the recent tracks of the Ocean Shield, an Australian vessel that has recorded a number of “pings”, possibly coming from the black boxes. But the last few days contact has been lost. Searching the Internet formore  information,

I found another very interesting website, this time not covering the marine traffic, but the air traffic. Flightradar24. Be warned, this site is addictive…! You can follow a flight, from the take off, live, as long as it is wihin reach of the radar. Click on a plane icon and you will get detailed flight information about speed, altitude. This is the information sent by the transponder on  board of the plane.

It is this transponder that was switched off on board of MH370, when the plane was about to cross over from Malaysian to Vietnamese air space. Just after the transponder was disabled, the plane diverted from its course in a western direction, and later turned to the south.

After the disappearance of MH370, MAS has decided to rename the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing from MH370 to MH318. I followed this flight from the start, last night, until it was about to leave Malaysian airspace. It is the last picture below.

After a few days of optimism, when several “pings” were recorded, now there is doubt whether  the black boxes will ever be recovered. In that case it may remain forever a mystery what has happened to MH370…:-(

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