[Peetwo]

MH370 NOK: From the heart -

Via the Oz today:

Don’t abandon search for our loved ones: MH370 families

• Amanda Hodge
  
• The Australian
  
• 12:00AM September 5, 2016
  

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South East Asia correspondent
Jakarta
[url=http://twitter.com/hodgeamanda]@hodgeamanda
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Problem is;

A) The ATsB are useless,
B) The Australian and Malaysian governments are 'in bed together', for reasons not fully understood at this time,
C) None of the political, procedural, investigative, bureaucratic or business interests actually give a rats arse because it doesn't affect them personally. None of their loved ones are dead and not accounted for.

The pain that the families and friends of the deceased are going through is unimaginable. My heart truly goes out to them and I can only wish that at some stage they in the near future, rather than the far future, receive some sort of closure that allows them to finalise their grieving processes and move on as best that they can.

In sympathy, Gobbles


R.I.P

Update: courtesy ABC PM

MH370 next of kin turn to Australia for support to keep search alive
Peter Lloyd reported this story on Monday, September 5, 2016 18:30:00
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Australia is stepping onto a diplomatic tight rope in its relationship with Malaysia.

High level officials involved in the Australian-led search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 are hosting a group of next of kin.

The Malaysian families coming here are in open revolt at what they say is their own government's unvarnished indifference to the fate of the plane, passengers and crew.

Relatives believe there is now 'credible new evidence' to justify more searching.

But they say no Malaysian official will meet them, so they're turning to Canberra for allies.

In a confronting first, they'll come face to face with physical evidence of what happened to the plane.

FEATURED:

Sarah Nathan - Australian Transport Safety Bureau

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Latest from the Oz :

MH370 pilot’s friendship with mystery woman revealed

Friend Fatima Pardi speaking about missing pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah.
Captain Zaharie: ‘This is not a lovey-dovey story,’ says Ms Pardi.
Wreckage from the missing plane, MH370: No answers on the fate of 239 people.
Former Malaysia Airlines chief pilot Nik Huzlan: ‘The human heart harbours deep secrets’.

• Amanda Hodge
  
• The Australian
  
• 12:00AM September 7, 2016
  

South East Asia correspondent
Jakarta
@hodgeamanda
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The pilot of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 had grown close to a married woman and her three children, one of whom has severe cerebral palsy, in the months before his disappearance and the two had messaged each other about a “personal matter” two days before the ill-fated flight on March 8, 2014.

The friendship, which quickly developed to a level where Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was playing an almost fatherly role to the children, had cooled in the weeks leading up to the accident at his instigation, the woman has told The Australian. But Fatima Pardi would not reveal the subject of their last WhatsApp discussion before the flight.

“That last conversation was just between me and him. I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

She added that Captain Zaharie had not seemed stressed.

“I’m afraid what I say will be misunderstood,” she said. “It was a personal matter, a private issue.”

The 35-year-old former kindergarten teacher, who now works for a Malaysian opposition party, has been interviewed four times by Malaysian investigators seeking answers over the dis­appearance of the passenger plane and all 239 people inside it.

In her first media interview, Ms Pardi said she and Captain Zaharie had grown close after meeting as political volunteers on election day, May 5, 2013, and the 53-year-old pilot had regularly visited her house and showered her children with gifts. She said the two were not having an affair and her decision to speak publicly was motivated by a desire to counter speculation Captain Zaharie might have hijacked the plane.

“This is not a lovey-dovey story,” she said. “He was a friend of mine. We were friends. He told me he saw potential in me and that he would help me build a better ­future for myself and my children.

“Since the incident, I have ­refused all interviews because I have been afraid that what I say will be mis­interpreted, and that it will hurt Captain Zaharie’s family’s feelings. Of course there was gossip, people will always talk whether you’re good or you’re bad.

People think I am the ‘other woman’. But we were close ­because the children loved him.
“I don’t believe that he loved me. I believe that he loved my children. Whatever my children said ‘We want this, we want that’, he would buy for them.

“I said to him he should stop doing that because I don’t pamper my children. He would say, ‘She’s just a kid’. So what could I ­conclude? That he loves children.”

The pilot murder-suicide ­theory to explain the plane’s disappearance was again raised in July when a New York Magazine article cited leaked information from the Malaysian MH370 ­investigation, alleging Captain Zaharie had plotted a similar though not identical path to the one MH370 is believed to have taken to the southern Indian Ocean on his flight simulator less than a month earlier.

Australian and Malaysian authorities have confirmed the leaked information but said the simulated route showed only the “possibility of planning”.

Last week, New York Magazine author Jeff Wise corrected the story on his personal blog post, saying it now appeared more ­likely the information was from “two or possible three separate flights” and not one single flight plot to the southern Indian Ocean.

Despite the revelations, Transport Minister Darren Chester told The Australian “hopes are fading” fast the airliner can be found and confirmed the search was due to finish if nothing new came to light.

Retired Malaysia Airlines chief pilot Nik Huzlan, a friend and contemporary of Captain Zaharie, said he was not particularly convinced by the simulator theory, given that in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001, ­attacks “every pilot with a flight simulator programmed in New York and tried to crash into the twin towers”. “You don’t get a flight simulator to do the mundane things you can do in the real thing,” he said.

He believes the plane dis­appeared as a result of “human intervention” and Captain Zaharie — a friend of 30 years he describes as “cool, funny and as normal as can be” — was the “most likely” culprit by process of elimination.

“The captain is the person best placed to have both the opportunity and capability,” Mr Huzlan told The Australian. “Then it goes down to the first officer, chief steward, No 1 cabin guy, then so on and so forth down the pecking order of the aeroplane staff and then passengers.

“No professional pilot who has followed this case can deny this possibility, or come up with an ­alternative theory that convinces them it is not human intervention. You just can’t dismiss it.

“The human heart harbours deep secrets.”

The critical factor, he said, was that things began to go wrong on the flight only in the 90 seconds of unsupervised airtime after Captain Zaharie had signed off from Malaysian air traffic control and was due to sign into Ho Chi Minh ground staff. Two data messaging systems, the transponder and the Aircraft Communications ­Addressing and Reporting System then failed, or were switched off, yet someone was still flying the plane, judging by the multiple unscheduled turns it then took.

Ms Pardi says there is no way a man so motivated by a desire to do good could be responsible for the deaths of 238 other people. She had met him when they volunteered for the People’s Justice Party, a centrist multi-racial political party formed by twice-jailed former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, to whom he was distantly related to by marriage.

Anwar had lost an appeal on sodomy charges hours before the doomed flight. Reports Captain Zaharie had been an observer in court have been discredited.

“He was a nice person, a good person. We both wanted to make a change for our country. That’s why we were involved in politics,” she said. “We talked about family, we talked about interests and that’s how he got close with me and my children. He always came to my house and brought things for the kids …. toys, food.

“He always encouraged me to look after my children. Sometimes having a disabled child makes you so sad because you can’t do anything for your child, but he gave me advice and inner strength.

“If I ever complained that I was tired or too busy at work, he would say, ‘You should not complain ­because my work is harder than yours. I can’t afford to make any mistakes because one mistake could ruin everything.’ ”

As the friendship developed, Captain Zaharie would regularly call in to see Ms Pardi and her children, then aged 3, 6 and 10, on his return from long flights. In ­between visits, the two would talk on the phone, she said. “Last time I contacted him was two days ­before the tragedy. I did not know he was on the flight until everyone from the party started contacting me asking ‘Is the captain on the plane?’ I said no, but when I got home from work I watched the news and saw his name.”

The two saw each other less frequently from January 2014 because of a “personal matter” she would not elaborate on. Captain Zaharie continued to see her children after she urged him not to “let the children become victims of this separation”.

In the months after MH370’s disappearance, there was persistent speculation about the state of Captain Zaharie’s marriage. Though his wife, Faizah, and three adult children have not commented publicly on the issue, close relatives insist there were no problems so grave they may have caused a respected pilot with 32 years’ flying experience to snap.

Captain Zaharie’s brother-in- law Asuad Khan Mustafa told The Australian his sister’s marriage suffered “storms here and there”, like any other, but the childhood sweethearts enjoyed a close relationship that could weather difficulties, including infidelity.

“We’re Muslim, right, so why worry? You can marry four (women), so who cares?” he said, adding the couple had actively been planning for the future.

An interim report into the flight’s disappearance released in March last year by Malaysia’s Transport Ministry found Captain Zaharie’s ability to handle stress at home and at work was “good”, and there was nothing untoward in his financial affairs.

“There was no known history of apathy, anxiety or irritability. There were no significant changes in his lifestyle, interpersonal conflict or family stresses,” the report found, after a year-long analysis.

“There were no behavioural signs of social isolation, change in habits or interest, self-neglect, drug or alcohol abuse of the captain, first officer and cabin crew.”

It makes no mention of Captain Zaharie’s friendship with Ms Pardi or that it was considered significant enough to warrant four interviews with investigators.

The pilot analysis references his healthy personal financial situation, his flying record, medical checks and psychological state.

The Australian has been told by former Malaysia Airlines staff, including a former airline chief steward and Mr Huzlan, that the company did not conduct psychological evaluations of pilots or crew.

Ms Pardi said she did not know whether Captain Zaharie’s ­immediate family knew about their friendship, but she had since taken her children to meet his elder sister, Sakinab, who, she said, was “touched” by how close her youngest child had been to her brother. She had once asked Captain Zaharie why he wanted to play such a fatherly role in her children’s lives and he had replied: “I just want to be close to them.”

“He (Captain Zaharie) told me his kids had grown up and he loved children. Sometimes he would just drop by for 10 or 15 minutes,” she said. “He said he spent a lot of time alone in his house — just him and the maid.”

Ms Pardi said Captain Zaharie was particularly close to her youngest daughter, who was three when MH370 disappeared, and it had taken the now six-year-old more than two years to accept he was not coming back. “She kept asking, ‘Where is he, why is the plane not coming back, what happened to the plane?’ I just tell her to pray for him to come back and she prays every day for him.”

She keeps a photo of the two of them at a cafe on her phone: they are close and smiling.

Though Ms Pardi will not ­reveal the subject of their final ­exchange, she said if she could have the conversation over, she would tell Captain Zaharie: “I will continue your dreams for me. He wanted me to be serious about politics. Now, in my career, every time a chance comes to me of course I will think ‘This was his prayer for me’.”

Asked whether she thought that last conversation might hold a clue to one of the world’s aviation mysteries, Ms Pardi replied: “I don’t know.”

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Next an update to the DOI archives -  

Courtesy AFP via asiaone.com ...

Mozambique shows 3 new pieces of suspected MH370 debris

AFP | Tuesday, Sep 6, 2016 Joao de Abreu 



Joao de Abreu ®, President of Mozambique's Civil Aviation Institute (IACM), and a marshal display pieces of suspected aircraft wreckage found off the east African coast of Mozambique at Mozambique's Civil Aviation Institute (IACM) in Maputo on September 5, 2016.
Photo: AFP
 
MAPUTO - Mozambique authorities on Monday exhibited three new pieces of aircraft that washed up along its coast and are suspected of belonging to the missing flight MH370.The largest item is a triangular shaped piece which is red and white on one side and metallic on the other.

It was picked up late last month by a South African hotelier off the waters of Mozambique's southern province of Inhambane.Joao de Abreu, director of Mozambique's aviation authority said it was the first time a coloured piece had been found.At a news conference, he said the piece could be "an aileron, a flap,(or) an elevator." On the inside, "we can see a label which will make it much easier to identify which aircraft it belongs to," he said.

The other two pieces are smaller and were picked up by the son of a European Union diplomat near the southern resort of Xai Xai and handed to the authorities last month, he said, giving no further details.The items will be sent to Malaysia for examination.Malaysia Airlines jet MH370 vanished in March 2014 with 239 people onboard as it was flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.Australia, which is leading the search, has determined that the five pieces of debris examined so far - found in Mozambique, South Africa and Mauritius - almost certainly came from the plane.The first debris linked to MH370 - a two-metre-long (almost seven-foot) wing part known as a flaperon - washed up on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion a year ago. - See more at: http://news.asiaone.com/news/world/mozam...huccr.dpuf

[*]MTF...P2