Friday 21 March 2014

Malaysia Airlines MH370: Air France investigator warns of 'colossal' task


Investigators seeking the missing Malaysia Airlines plane face a “colossal task” that is “far, far harder” than the two-year search for an Air France plane that crashed into the Atlantic, the man who led the French inquiry has warned.

Alain Bouillard’s comments came as experts described the hazardous stretch of deep waters that may contain debris belonging to flight MH370 as “one of the most hostile environments in the world”.

Mr Bouillard was in charge of the hunt for AF447 that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009 between Rio de Janeiro and Paris with 228 people on board. It only took six days for French and Brazilian naval forces to find the first bodies and the Airbus A330 tailpiece. But that was only the beginning of a long search to recover the main wreck and above all the flight recorders.

Mr Bouillard, 63, worked for France’s air accident investigation bureau, or BEA, a world authority on probing air crashes and also led the investigation into the Concorde crash outside Paris in 2000.

Three BEA members are helping the Malaysian authorities in their search for flight MH370 that disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing plane on March 8 with 239 people on board.

Four planes were trying to check whether two objects seen on satellite images were debris from the Boeing 777 in an area 1,550 miles south-west of Perth.

“This disappearance is still a great mystery, and will lead to an inquiry and a search that is far, far harder that what we had looking for Air France 447,”Mr Bouillard told The Telegraph.

“Firstly we had many more clues. We knew that the Air France plane had a problem, thanks to 24 ACAR messages sent over four minutes; we knew its precise location four minutes before impact, which allowed us to reduce our search zone to only 40 nautical miles,” he said. “That is nothing compared to the surface area of today’s search.”

He said he would remain very “prudent” over sightings of debris. “We were initially put off by satellite images of a fuel slick that turned out to be a false lead. Planes found debris that had nothing to do with the crash including of another plane on a beach,” he said.

If these indeed prove to be from flight MH370, he said experts would have to immediately start studying the currents in this zone to work out the “reverse drift” - a theoretical estimate of the initial position of bodies and debris by studying currents and winds in the crash area.

“Objects that have drifted for two weeks will have travelled a long way in that time. If you have currents at four knots, that mean four nautical miles per day and a considerable distance in 14 days,” he said.

Adding to the challenge, the images of the debris were taken eight days after the plane was spotted, meaning the debris itself would have floated much further east since the images were captured.

“After you have identified and examined some debris, you can piece together how the plane broke up. Was it in the air, was it during a sea landing, or did it hit the ocean surface? From that you can build up a scenario,” he said.

If the latest wreckage sightings turn out to be correct, the search will have to overcome a series of almost unimaginable challenges, not least waters so deep that only a handful of vessels would be capable of scouring the seabed for the plane’s black box.

“It [the possible debris] is in the middle of nowhere in one of the most hostile environments in the world,” said Professor Charitha Pattiaratchi, an expert on the Indian Ocean from the University of Western Australia.

Mr Bouillard said, however, that reaching the wreck was not the hardest task facing search teams. “We found the AF 447 at around 12,000 feet. The Phoenix Towed Pinger Locator (which can detect emergency black box beacons) can go down to around 6,000 metres. The first question is: where was the point of impact? We can only send out serious means once we have defined a much smaller search area.”

The search for Air France’s main wreck and black boxes long proved fruitless, despite gathering all the world’s vessels capable of finding them. These included underwater drones whose sonar can sweep large surface areas of the seabed to find objects; a deep towed sonar; two remotely operated vehicles and three autonomous underwater vehicles.

In the end they did away with complex equations predicting the wreck’s likely location and simply scoured the zone systematically. After detecting a large object on the sea floor, they sent down remote vehicles equipped with high definition cameras. Mr Bouillard was in the ship watching in real time when the black boxes were found. “It was a euphoric moment.”

He added: “Naturally we saw many mummified bodies, some lying down others still in their seats, all of which were brought back to the surface in a special container.”

“They still had the form of bodies but after two years were surrounded by a kind of white cocoon of micro-organisms and we had no idea what state they were in inside.”

Mr Bouillard said: “In this search, the means today are American - the drones, the remotely operated vehicles. But we can bring our experience in the methodology – all the experience we gained.”

Malaysian authorities said they had been speaking to French BEA experts on how they dealt with the “raw emotions” of passengers’ families. “The difficulty at first is to above all validate real information and not spread information that turns out to be false leads, it’s terrible for the families,” said Mr Bouillard. “Above all, we found it difficult to deal with the’ incomprehension that we weren’t able to find the plane, even within a 40 nautical mile zone.”

As for the current probe, he said: “There are three main questions you must ask in an inquiry. First, what happened, how did it happen and why did it happen? Today, we still have still made no progress on what happened.”

"It will be highly complex, collosal task and a result is anything but guaranteed."

Friday 21 March 2014

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/malaysia/10712857/Malaysia-Airlines-MH370-Air-France-investigator-warns-of-colossal-task.html

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Eight drown as boat capsizes in Bisalpur Dam


Eight persons today drowned when the boat they were in capsized in Bisalpur Dam in Tonk district, police said.

Around 15 persons, mostly labourers, were going in the boat from Kasira to Nagadia village in the Deoli police station area when the tragedy occurred at 10 A.M., they said.

While four of the boat's passengers were rescued by villagers and a rescue team, operations are in full swing to trace the remaining three or more missing persons, they said.

The District Collector and Superintendent of Police of Tonk have rushed to the spot.

The exact cause behind the mishap is yet to be ascertained, police said, adding that the eight bodies have been recovered.

Friday 21 March 2014

http://news.outlookindia.com/items.aspx?artid=833405

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Zambia: UTH records rise in number of unclaimed bodies


University Teaching Hospital management says dealing with over 30 unclaimed bodies every month is a huge challenge.

Hospital public relations manager Mwenya Mulenga said yesterday that the recent increase in the number of unclaimed bodies was also contributing to the shortage of space in the fridges at the hospital mortuary.

He said UTH disposes of over 30 unclaimed bodies every month and also spends about K7,000 every month to dispose the unclaimed bodies of.

"We have seen an increase in the number of unidentified bodies because of the so many unidentified patients that we have in the hospital that end up dying.

The unclaimed bodies are the ones that end up congesting our hospital fridges," Mulenga said. "Just two weeks ago, we disposed of about 33 bodies. There are many more that we need to dispose of this month. If we do not dispose them of this month, then the number accumulates and we can't allow that situation."

Mulenga said the high number of unclaimed bodies was contributing to the stench in the hospital and was also putting pressure on the compressors.

He said UTH was working with Lusaka City Council to ensure that many more bodies were disposed of as quickly as possible.

Mulenga said it was unfortunate that many families were neglecting their sick relatives at the hospital.

"When they die, no one comes to claim the body. One measure we have put in place is that when they are registering, they have to indicate their full physical addresses, but at times even if they do this, when their relative dies, they are nowhere to be found. They switch off their phones and when we try to follow them up; we at times discover that they have relocated," he said.

He said there was need for the general public to stop neglecting their sick relatives and make efforts to visit the hospital to identify their missing relatives.

Friday 21 March 2014

http://www.postzambia.com/post-read_article.php?articleId=46574

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