Malaysian PM in Netherlands to discuss Ukraine plane disaster

Malaysia’s prime minister has arrived in the Netherlands ahead of a meeting with his Dutch counterpart to discuss plans for repatriating remains of Malaysian victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, and continuing problems accessing the crash site in eastern Ukraine.

Najib Razak is meeting with Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte Wednesday in The Hague before travelling to a military base in Hilversum, outside Amsterdam, where remains of more than 200 victims are being painstakingly identified.

The plane was shot down on July 17, killing all 298 passengers and crew, including 43 Malaysians and 195 Dutch. Some bodies have yet to be recovered at the crash site, which has been inaccessible to investigators for days due to fighting between the Ukrainian army and pro-Russia separatists.

Read more: Malaysian PM in Netherlands to discuss Ukraine plane disaster - National | Globalnews.ca

Ukraine: MH17 Verdict: Real Evidence Points to US-Kiev Cover-up of Failed False Flag

Until this past Monday, the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 on July 17th, 2014, was a potential game changer for global geopolitics and the New Cold War. However, a funny thing happened on the way to the Kremlin…

In this report, we will lay out the facts based on a wide breadth of available information and data surrounding MH17. We will also present and give critique to Washington and Kiev’s “mountain of evidence” that has saturated US and European-based media coverage since the incident took place.

21WIRE has compiled this report with the help of many contributors and references from English-speaking media, as well as material translated from Russian and Ukrainian media sources, along with other historical references to provide context.

Our objective is to get as close to the truth as possible. Although many revelations will appear to be self-evident, we still encourage the public to draw their own conclusions regarding this pivotal event.

Read more: MH17 Verdict: Real Evidence Points to US-Kiev Cover-up of Failed False Flag

The Netherlands: Dutch struggle with loss of 189 - by Jacquelin Magnay

Relatives of Dutch victims killed in the Malaysia Airlines crash have struggled to come to grips with the horrific loss of family and friends as they demand a thorough investigation. 
 
The country woke up in shock yesterday and flags were flying at half-mast as they digested the loss of 189 Dutch passengers as the toll grew throughout the day.

“I expect there to be a thorough investigation by the authorities into what has happened,” Sander Essers, who lost several relatives in the crash, said in The Hague.

Mr Essers lost his brother Peter, 66, Peter’s wife Jolette Nuesink, 60, and their two children, Emma, 20, and Valentijn, 17.

Their story is like those of many other Dutch citizens on the plane in the country’s second-worst air disaster.
The Essers family were on holiday travelling to Borneo to explore the jungle for three weeks with a group of friends when they ­boarded the ill-fated flight MH17.

“I spoke to my brother 20 minutes before he boarded the flight,” Mr Essers said. “But I can’t tell you what he told me” he said, as tears welled up in his eyes.

An Amsterdam man said he hadn’t been able to sleep since the disaster and had gone to Schiphol Airport to pay his respects to a Balinese friend who had died.

Artur Laumann, 36, arrived with a bunch of tropical flowers — “for tulips aren’t appropriate’’ — to ensure one of his friends would be remembered. He placed the flowers with a picture of his colleague Wayan Sujana and a message of condolence written in Indonesian, and then acknowledged the Australian reaction to the disaster had been more in keeping with the strength of the atrocity.

“Your Prime Minister Tony Abbott has spoken in very strong language but here, we are in shock,’’ Mr Laumann said. “I think we should be as angry as Australia and I think that very soon we will see our politicians speak out loudly too.

“I haven’t slept since hearing about the plane going down and it is only now that I am starting to tremble a bit and realise what has happened.’’

Mr Sujan was just 24 and had been visiting The Netherlands for several weeks with his boss, a hotel manager. Both were on board the ill-fated MH17.

Mr Laumann said he wanted to highlight the plight of the Indonesian victims, whom he felt may have been overlooked in the catastrophic loss of Dutch nationals.

‘’Wayan was from a little village called Periteran at the norther top of Bali where the ferry comes in from Java and his family were only told a few hours ago that he was on board,’’ said Mr Laumann, who promised his Balinese friend Susili that he would represent Mr Sujan and try and find out as many details as possible.

‘’They are from a poor country and don’t have access to information. It took many hours for the family to discover that Wayan had died. I just decided I should try and help and create a small memorial for him.’’

But another Dutchman, Henri Karsten, who was checking in for a flight to New York, said: “The Dutch people are still in a state of shock.

Read more: Dutch struggle with loss of 189 | The Australian

Technology: The mystery of flight MH370: How on earth, with all our technology, do we lose a giant plane? - by Sebastian Anthony

Three days ago, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished from radar off the south coast of Vietnam in the South China Sea. 239 people were on board — and at this point, it is presumed that they have all perished in some kind of disaster. A massive search and rescue effort involving 40 ships and 34 aircraft from nine different nations has yet to discover any sign of the missing aircraft. For me, this is almost incomprehensible:

Despite all of the awesome technology that mankind has developed, it’s still possible for a Boeing 777-200 with 239 people on board to vanish. For me, it’s mind blowing that all we have to go on is the plane’s radar signature — and even then, that last radar reading was so poor that the search area is thousands of square miles of open water. Surely, given the fact that we can track a damn smartphone anywhere on Earth down to a few meters, there’s a better way of keeping track of missing aircraft?

In the words of Malaysia’s civil aviation chief, the fate of MH370 is “a mystery.” The Boeing 777 took off from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia en route to Beijing, was cruising normally at 35,000 feet… and then disappeared. There was no distress call. The weather was fine. The plane’s last known position, via radar, was just south of Vietnam in the South China Sea — which is where search efforts have been focused so far — but one theory suggests that the plane turned back just after the last radar ping, meaning the plane could be hundreds of miles away in the Strait of Malacca. In the absence of any other information, there is speculation that the plane was target of a terrorist attack. 

For me, the most shocking aspect of the MH370 disaster is that we won’t know what fate befell those 239 souls until we find MH370′s Flight Data Recorder (FDR), aka the black box. Except for that last radar reading, we have absolutely no knowledge of the flight at all until we find that FDR. We have no clue what was said in the cockpit by the captain and first officer — though, seemingly, if something did go wrong, they didn’t even have time to send a mayday message. We have no clue if the plane hit a patch of bad weather, or whether it was hijacked. It really will be one huge mystery until the FDR is recovered — and there’s a good chance, if MH370 did crash into the ocean, that the FDR will never be recovered. In the case of Air France flight AF447, which disappeared off the coast of Brazil, it took two months to locate the wreckage, more than a year to find the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR), and the FDR was never found.

So, think about this for a moment. We live in a day and age where GPS (and other radio triangulation methods) can track your smartphone to within a few meters, almost anywhere on Earth. With dedicated, land-based tracking networks, vehicles and devices can be tracked to within a few centimeters. Even in the absence of GPS or radio tracking, inertial guidance (dead reckoning) has been accurate enough since the ’60s to accurately land a nuclear ICBM on the other side of the planet, or put the Apollo mission into space. (Read: Think GPS is cool? IPS will blow your mind.)

And then there’s connectivity. On land, there are networks (both commercial and governmental) that provide data connectivity almost everywhere. Over water is definitely harder, but satellites do provide pretty good coverage — and yes, that particular region of Asia is very well covered by communications satellites. Finally, even if an aircraft is out of satellite/radio coverage, there is absolutely nothing preventing the airplane from transmitting a really juicy low-frequency radio signal that could be picked up thousands of miles away. This is how they communicate with air traffic control, after all.

Why, then, does a plane like the MH370 keep all of its secrets locked up in a black box? Why don’t planes constantly transmit all of their black box data, so that we know their exact location, bearing, altitude, and other important factors, at all times?

The short answer is, there’s no good reason.

Read more: The mystery of flight MH370: How on earth, with all our technology, do we lose a giant plane? | ExtremeTech