The first tragedy took place in March. Flight 370, on route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, simply vanished from the radar screens less than an hour after takeoff. Although the last time the crew contacted the air controllers was when the plane was flying over the South China Sea, it was later discovered that the aircraft had deviated from its planned flight route and crossed the Malay Peninsula. Further analysis of the satellite data led an international team of investigators to the conclusion that the aircraft went down in the southern Indian Ocean. However, the multinational research efforts brought about no results. Not one piece of confirmed debris has been found after more than 1.5 million square miles of water were scanned.
Australian experts who took charge of the search operations said it might take another year to find the location of the crash site. This, however, doesn’t mean that the relatives of the 239 missing passengers and crew members, the majority of whom were Chinese, will ever find out what actually happened to their loved ones. The mystery of flight 370 is also puzzling to experts because until this tragedy, the Boeing 777 was considered one of the safest aircrafts out there, says Chris Yates, British expert on aviation safety, security, counter terrorism and terrorism matters.
“Something very sudden did happen of course, so sudden in fact that the pilots and co-pilots didn’t have sufficient time to make an emergency call and you know, thinking in terms of what might happen on board an airplane, it could well be a sudden system malfunction that doomed the aircraft but then again – that sort of thing doesn’t normally happen in everyday travel. The 777 aircraft is one of the safest airplanes in the world; it’s been flying for nearly 20 years and only in recent times has it developed a history of technical or operational issues”.
In July, Malaysia Airlines flight 17 crashed in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donetsk while en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. All 298 people on board were killed, including 193 Dutchmen and 38 Australians. Due to the fact that Kiev has been conducting a military operation against independence forces in the area of the crash site, access to the plane’s wreckage by the investigators was inhibited. However, just hours after the incident, Western politicians and the media launched a blame campaign, accusing Russia of being involved in downing the aircraft. The version presented by Kiev authorities claimed that independence supporters of eastern Ukraine, supposedly equipped and advised by Moscow, shot down the plane. This assertion was eagerly backed by the US although no evidence was provided. The reason is that Washington was simply not interested in unveiling facts but in finding a scapegoat, says Paul Craig Roberts, former assistant secretary of the US Treasury and current chairman of The Institute for Political Economy.
“As soon as the world learned that the Malaysian airliner had gone down, Washington was controlling the explanation. It was out with the story that Russia did it, or the Russian government helped the ‘separatists’ in Eastern Ukraine do it. There is no evidence, but the accusation and insinuations are repeated over and over, and this is a propaganda trick to establish the truth by repetition. It’s only the Russian government that has released any evidence; they have released satellite photos of the Ukrainian missile batteries in place; they have released the flight path of a Ukrainian jet which approached the Malaysian airliner prior to its demise. And they have repeatedly asked for evidence, which Washington has yet to provide”.
Donetsk independence leaders have argued that they do not have weapons capable of shooting down a plane flying at 32,000 feet. The preliminary report on the crash released by the Dutch Safety Board in early September didn’t confirm Kiev’s version either. The document only stated that the Malaysian Boeing broke up in the air as the result of structural damage “caused by a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from the outside”. In December it was reported that on the day of the tragedy a Ukrainian Air Force Su-25 fighter jet took off from a Dnipropetrovsk airbase with air-to-air missiles on board and returned empty. The Russian Investigative Committee checked the information and proved it to be reliable. Kiev, however, denied the claims.
With investigations into two Malaysia Boeings still underway, another Malaysia airplane went missing in December. AirAsia flight QZ 8501 on route from Indonesia to Singapore went off the radar with 162 people on board, including 17 children. As of December 29th, the Airbus A320-200 is believed to have crashed in the Java Sea.
