[Peetwo]

Recent update first from news.com.au:

Claims plane wreckage found in the Philippines could be MH370

October 13, 20153:17pm

REPORTS that a Malaysia Airlines plane wreckage had been found in the heart of the Filipino jungle have been unfounded.

Malaysia’s Police Chief General Khalid Abu Bakar said Philippine authorities had investigated the claims made over the weekend that a plane with a Malaysian flag and human remains inside had been found on the island of Sugbay in the Tawi Tawi province were untrue.

“The Philippines has confirmed there is no plane wreckage,” the state-run Bernama news agency quoted General Khalid as saying in a text message.

On Saturday, a man reported in Sandakan police station in the Malaysian part of Borneo that his nephew found aircraft wreckage, which could be part of the missing flight MH370.

Jamil Omar, a local audiovisual technician, told old Malaysian TV channel Astro Awani that his newphew and a few of his friends were out hunting for birds when they stumbled on the plane in early September.

They reportedly found skeletons in the pilot’s chair and cabin as well as a piece of cloth said to be a Malaysian flag.

Mr Omar, who doesn’t live on the island, said his aunt, who had been visiting him in Sabah, told him about the find.

“The residents on the island hunt birds for food and build their houses on the water. They don’t watch television and as such they have no knowledge of the outside world,” Mr Omar told Astro Awani.

“She (Siti Kayam, his aunt) was shocked to learn that the item, that was removed from the aircraft wreckage as claimed by the teenager, was the Malaysian flag.”

Mr Omar said the piece of cloth was still intact but had already been washed and added that several police officers had come to his home to record his aunt’s statement and took the piece of cloth with them.

Despite the location of the wreckage being far from the current official search area as well as Reunion Island, where the flaperon of the missing airliner washed ashore, the Malaysian government took the claims seriously and directed it’s Civil Aviation department and the Ministry’s Air Accident Investigation Division to look into the matter, Channel News Asia reported.

Malaysia’s police also said it would investigate the claims.

“There was no photograph to support the claim so we are relying on our counterpart to check,” Inspector-General of Police, Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar, told reporters on Sunday, adding that it could take one or two days before anything could be verified, The International Business Times reported.

Filipino police were also said to be baffled by the claims saying they have not had any reports of a plane crashing on any of their island, which ws confirmed today.

“We will check it out but if there is any aircraft that has gone down in our area there would have been alerts from civil aviation authorities.


“To date, there has been none,” Maguindanao-based Regional Chief Directorial Staff Senior Superintedent Rodoleo Jocson told The Star online.

“There have been no reports to our provincial police in Tawi Tawi of any aircraft wreckage being found as well.

Last month, French authorities confirmed a flaperon found on the shore of Reunion Island belonged to MH370.

The piece of the missing airliner was found by locals on the island on July 29.
A spokesman for the Australian Transport Safety Bureau told news.com.au the report of aircraft debris being found in the Philippines was being investigated.

“All the evidence to date, including the flaperon found on La Reunion which has been confirmed to be from MH370, points towards the aircraft being in the southern Indian Ocean,” he said.

 
And next from PT:

MH370 wreckage ‘find’ might ‘just’ be missing Flying Tiger Connie

Ben Sandilands | Oct 13, 2015 12:57PM |


Another Flying Tiger Super Connie at London Gatwick in 1964

Until MH370 vanished last year the largest missing passenger airliner was the Flying Tiger Line Lockheed Super Constellation that was carrying 107 people on a US military charter when it vanished in the western Pacific on 16 March, 1962.

It is just possible, remotely possible, that it has been found on a Philippine island near the NW tip of Sabah, a part of Malaysia, and mistaken for the lost Malaysia Airlines 777-200 that disappeared on 8 March 2014 with 239 people on board.

However the reports of wreckage including ‘many’ skeletons being found in jungle on Sugbay Island are unconfirmed, and burdened with confusion, contradiction and at this stage a seriously puzzling lack of real evidence.

One of the current reports about this find can be read here. Those who have been watching the story unfold have seen the discovery of plane wreckage and skeletons being variously credited to small boys looking for birds eggs, or to their grandmother, with the recovery of an apparently little damaged Malaysia flag as a souvenir.

A pilot is said to be seated upright in the cockpit, wearing communications gear on his head.

This is a frustrating story at this stage, putting aside the location of the wreckage, far from MH370′s claimed location somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean, even though it isn’t geographically far from where the Malaysia Airlines jet was last observed as a transponder identified object over the Gulf of Thailand, at the point where the crew had signed out of Malaysia controlled airspace and were presumed to be about to sign on with Vietnam’s ATC system as they followed their flight plan to Beijing.

There are three obvious possibilities at this stage.

The first is that the story is a hoax. The second is that it is MH370, and the third is that it an older lost airliner.

It is not impossible that Tiger Airways 739 came down on Sugbay Island, although it is further west than sightings of fireballs widely believed to have been caused by an explosion on the Super Constellation before it crashed into the ocean. It is also somewhat to the west of the intended track of a DC-3 freighter with only four people on board that vanished on an internal flight in the Philippines in 1982, which would not fit with ‘many’ skeletons.

There is a factual account of Tiger Airways 739 on the Wikipedia site.

There is supposed to be some resolution of the truth or otherwise of the wreckage find on Sugbay island in the Tawi-Tawi archipelago within a day.  This should have been possible in a much shorter interval, given that a television crew has already interviewed the grandmother, and an island location that was claimed to be accessible to youngsters bird nesting could not have been too far away.

Therefore, this story may have a disappointing ending, but there might still be alive, friends and family of  those who died on Flying Tiger 739 all those years ago, who might find comfort from knowing where their loved ones came to rest, as would those who grieve for the victims of MH370.

MTF..P2