'I'm an aeroplane engineer here's what actually happened to flight MH370'
An aeroplane expert and engineer has revealed exactly how missing flight MH370 could have met its demise, following the heartbreaking halt on the search for the plane. He believes this "perfect crime" could have crash-landed in only a handful of locations.
Recent efforts by marine robotics company Ocean Infinity have been unexpectedly suspended due to the time of year, after fresh hope that the notorious Boeing 777, with 227 passengers and 12 crew aboard, would finally be found. The plane which vanished on March 8, 2014, during its flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, continues to fuel one of the biggest enigmas in the history of aviation and is the deadliest single incident involving a missing plane.
Malaysia's transport minister, Anthony Loke, told AFP: "They have stopped the operation for the time being, they will resume the search at the end of this year." He added: "Right now, it's not the season." However, Ismail Hammad, Chief Engineer at Egyptair believes he has the answers to save everyone "money and time" and finally find the plane that has wreaked havoc on authorities and families.
First and foremost for Ismail the explanation is simple. Despite hundreds of conspiracy theories Ismail is convinced this is the work of a "hijacker" - the question is where it crashed when their plan failed. He said: "If the hijacker was looking for the perfect crime that would remain a mystery for a hundred years, he would have to land on one of the abandoned airstrips or lakes in the maze of the Philippine archipelago, which consists of 7,641 islands.
'Such airstrips are spread out and end in the sea, lakes or swamps, and not fly in a straight line to fall into the waters off the city of Perth , in an area that can be predicted by calculating the rate of the fuel consumption."
However, the hijacker's presumed lack of experience is also a significant pointer as to where the enormous plane could have ended up. Ismail said: 'Whatever the pilot's experience he would not be able to fly easily and accurately in a straight line on such a long straight route, above an open area of water, at night for such long hours'
The engineer said navigation from the coast of Malaysia to the south of Indian ocean would mean it could fall in front of Perth. However, whether or not the pilot was navigating with just a compass or if they did have a GPS system, they would have been able to navigate themselves over the Philippines islands because if they knew them and their cities lights well.'
Ismail added the autopilot computer is difficult to programme with just coordinates of a point in space. He added: 'Likewise, a pilot alone would not be able to continue flying a big aircraft like B777-200 for 9 hours since take off till vanishing, including the 3 hours on average it takes to check the condition of the aircraft and its documentations before the taking off according to the aviation regulations.'
Ismail concluded that without the autopilot system or navigation aids, using the aircraft's magnetic compass the search area should be narrowed to the Malacca strait to the Perth coast considering 'all those stresses'.
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New Statesman
17 hours ago
- New Statesman
Letter from Gaza: 'What I feel isn't just hunger. It's slow, internal erosion'
Photo by Omar Al-Qataa / AFP via Getty Images Monday It seems there's no escaping the chronic grief that has gripped everything in Gaza. Against my will, my identity as a Gazan has become tied to a life reduced to nothing more than a tent and an aid queue. A scene I witnessed remains etched in my memory. I was on my way to visit my friend Ola. The street was half-rubble, lined with shattered storefronts and twisted metal, the smell of dust still heavy in the air. Just before reaching Ola's house, I heard rising voices and hurried footsteps. I turned cautiously. A relief lorry had entered the neighbourhood at speed. People rushed towards it with a thirst they didn't bother hiding. Some climbed onto its back, grabbing whatever bags and cans they could reach and throwing them from the lorry. No one cared what the packages contained. People tried to catch everything that was thrown. Some bags hit the ground and burst open, scattering their contents across the street. Anything caught was a treasure. The crowd swelled quickly. Tense faces, pushing bodies, orders flying through the air: 'Grab this!' 'Pick up the bag!' The scene looked like a real battle, but the only weapon was hunger. In the chaos, a funeral procession slowly passed through the crowd. Four men carried a coffin draped in a flag. Chants of 'Allahu Akbar' rose above the noise. No one stopped. The crowd simply parted for a moment to let the body pass, then returned to the scramble behind the truck. Here, death passes beside you like it's part of the scenery. On the edge of the crowd, a man in his sixties was bent over silently, picking up scattered grains of lentils and rice – one by one – from the ground, reaching between feet, dust and debris. As I got closer, I recognised him. It was Ola's father. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe I walked past quickly. I didn't want him to notice me. I didn't want him to know that I had seen him like that. I felt a weight in my chest I couldn't shake, but I kept walking. The truck continued on and vanished from view, but people kept chasing it until their breath ran out. After several minutes, the noise faded. One by one, people headed home. The lucky ones returned with something, anything, for their children. The others returned empty-handed, carrying only their disappointment. I continued on until I reached Ola's house. When she opened the door, I followed her into the living room, saying nothing about what I'd seen. Moments later, her father entered. He was holding a small bag carefully, as if it contained something fragile. Ola took it from him eagerly, opened it, looked inside, then said with a pained expression: 'The rice is on top of the lentils – and it's full of sand and stones, Baba.' He didn't answer immediately. He sat beside her and rested his back against the wall. Ola softened her tone. 'Never mind,' she said. 'Thank you. We'll sort it out.' She poured the contents of the bag onto a large tray. Dust lifted into the air. I sat beside her and said, 'I'll take care of the lentils. You do the rice.' We removed the stones, blew away the dust, and separated the good grains from the broken ones. We didn't speak much. Inside me, thoughts were colliding. I just stared at what lay between my hands, picking up lentils, one by one – as if I were organising some of the chaos this day had created. If I hadn't lived through this famine myself, I would never have believed true hunger was real. I used to think hunger was just a passing sensation, something your body uses to tell you it's time to eat. You open the fridge, answer the call, and that's it. I don't know when the fridge turned into a decorative piece: useless. But the hunger here feels nothing like that. True hunger doesn't knock only on your stomach. It knocks on your dignity, too. It slows time: an hour feels like a day, and a day feels like an entire life of waiting. It changes you. It reshapes your thoughts, redefines sufficiency, rearranges your priorities. It teaches you arithmetic in a new language: number of loaves, number of meals. It shrinks your dreams gradually, not by forcing you to give up on them, but by sapping the strength needed to chase them. The most dangerous response is to get used to it: to wake up each morning without expecting anything, not searching for a meal – just continuing to exist. True hunger blends into life, dissolves within it, becomes part of your identity, your character, your daily vocabulary. But this pain is not my fate. I want it to stay unfamiliar, no matter how long it lasts. I want it to remain an intruder in my heart, no matter how often it returns. Normalising pain means surrendering to the idea that there is no alternative. It means withering while breathing. It means death while we're still alive. I can't accept this. I believe that joy – however small its margin – has a right to exist, even in the narrowest alleys of this siege. I believe it is my right to say, with clarity and courage: 'This pain is not me.' Sunday My body, barely midway through its twenties, behaves as if it has endured 70 wars. I wake to a heavy dizziness that drags me downwards, as though I'm drowning in a bottomless void. I cannot lift a bucket of water, nor sweep the floor, nor stand long enough at the sink. Every motion feels like combat, every postponed meal a dream deferred, every waking moment weighed down by headaches, hunger, and fragility. I don't know when breathing became a burden, or balance a luxury, or why getting out of bed became the first triumph on my daily battlefield. Ghazal, my neighbour's ten-month-old baby, has been crying since dawn. She wants milk. Israel is no longer merely an occupying force – that description is now stale, insufficient. Israel has taken up the role of the supreme administrative deity, the Lord of Registries, Permits, Approvals, and Denials. It starves at will, permits whatever goods it pleases, decides whether you deserve to be healed or die at the gates of coordination. All under its omnipotent authority. We live under the rule of a bureaucratic god, His Administrative Majesty, obsessed with delusions of grandeur, one who measures national security by the cholesterol content in our cheese, and the softness of our toilet rolls – each allowed entry only by pre-approved paperwork. Even before 7 October, we were lab rats in a laboratory run by a state that monopolises air and water and determines the fate of coriander. Yes – coriander. In a CBS News report from 2010, titled 'Israel's Gaza Blockade Baffles Both Sides', the absurdities of Israel's blockade policy were laid bare. The report stated: 'Military bureaucrats enforcing Israel's blockade of Gaza allow frozen salmon fillets, facial scrubs and low-fat yogurt into the Hamas-ruled territory. Cilantro and instant coffee are another matter – they are banned as luxury items.' Not tanks, not explosives, but an aromatic herb is deemed a threat to national security. In Gaza, life was measured by a checklist of what was banned or permitted, curated by the clairvoyant in the Ministry of Defence: Cinnamon? Approved. Chocolate? Forbidden. Plastic buckets? Take two. School notebooks? Security risk – one might write resistance poetry. Strawberry jam? Strategic threat. And then came this war. After two years of relentless bombing and rubble, it's as if Israel has placed us on a compulsory nutrition programme. We do not choose our meals; our meals are chosen for us. Lentils are permitted, tomatoes are suspicious, and chocolate is a crime. Flour – the white gold – is prohibited; bread loaves are besieged. This is no accidental famine. This is an engineered one – a war on our bodies, our clarity, our ability to move. And so, we continue to 'live' – or pretend to – under a system of forced feeding, where our ration cards are issued from Tel Aviv, and the national palate is dictated by the Ministry of Defence. Thursday The endless stream of food videos on our phones is visual torture. Chocolate truffles, fresh bread, our phones flaunt a world that doesn't acknowledge our hunger. I don't ask for a hot meal or a varied menu – I only ask that lentils not be the law. What I feel isn't just hunger, it's slow, internal erosion. It doesn't bruise the skin, but it devastates the soul. This is a cold form of death – without blood, without noise, without witnesses, without headlines. The administrative God does not stop at controlling our bellies and our prescriptions, it interferes in our families too – deciding whom we love, whom we marry, with whom we live, and who may be officially registered as our child. Under the label of 'family reunification permits', Israel decides who may legally exist in Gaza or the West Bank, and who remains a shadow – an unrecognised citizen in their own homeland. Thousands of Palestinian families remain torn apart because the occupation refuses to acknowledge them – either because one spouse is from Gaza and the other from the West Bank, or because a child was born abroad. According to Human Rights Watch, Israel froze 'family reunification' in 2000, later resuming it for only a very limited number of cases, as a 'political gesture', not a human right. Even survival requires security clearance. Patients in Gaza are not 'evacuated' – they are 'coordinated'. And coordination can be denied, because their bodies are not yet deemed trustworthy. Thousands of patients, including children with cancer, heart conditions, and kidney failure, wait on endless lists of stamps and signatures to determine whether they will be treated, or buried. As for the students? Their stories are even more absurd. Bright young minds with scholarships from top international universities, with visas and funding secured are trapped – because 'the crossing is closed' or their names are not 'security approved'. In the logic of the supreme administrative deity, knowledge is a threat, travel is a gamble, and any Palestinian outside Gaza is a potential crisis. Thus, a scholarship becomes a suspended miracle, and medical treatment becomes a dream with an indefinite delay. This is not just an occupation. It's a sarcastic supply manager, distributing food aid to the starving beneath rubber bullets and pepper spray, guarded by an overweight American soldier seemingly assigned to protect sacks of flour. Israel has perfected the art of total control – over stomachs, minds, hearts, classrooms, and hospital wards. Is there any place left where Israel cannot reach? Sondos Sabra is a Palestinian translator and writer. Her account of the war appears in 'Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide' (Comma Press), out now. Related
Scotsman
19 hours ago
- Scotsman
Why we shouldn't kill 'menacing' seagulls in towns – and what to do instead
Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Around a month ago, I visited a friend who lives in Burntisland. His third-floor flat overlooks a level roof at the back, which a lesser black-backed gull had chosen to nest on and hatch a chick. It felt like a privilege to watch this fluffy new being investigate her world, while her parent watched carefully. This memory makes quite a contrast to the screaming headlines that we frequently see at this time of year, proclaiming gulls to be a 'menace' or a 'nuisance' and blaming them for 'mugging' and 'divebombing' people. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Such language is unhelpful and misleading. It implies that gulls are acting maliciously against us, which is simply not true. It turns gulls into the enemy, rather than seeking to understand the causes of any tension and seek solutions. Seabirds like kittiwakes are devoted and protective parents of their young (Picture: Dan Kitwood) | Getty Images Gulls are constituents too While some within the media are responsible for creating and amplifying a negative and inaccurate depiction of gulls, disappointingly, politicians also make judgmental, harmful statements about them. In June, during a member's debate in the Scottish Parliament, various MSPs vilified gulls using the same inflammatory words as the tabloids and demanded that they be 'controlled' – a widely used euphemism for 'killed'. MSPs represent their constituents. Gulls cannot vote but are constituents in the other sense of the word, being part of a larger whole, our shared community. And the human constituents, who do vote, overwhelmingly want wild animals to be protected. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad A 2024 poll of more than 7,000 people in the UK found that 92 per cent think that it is important to protect wildlife in towns by legislation or regulation, and 76 per cent believe that human survival depends on protecting the survival of wildlife. MSPs should not allow scare stories to muffle the voices calling for us to live in harmony with other animals. Preventing gulls from gaining access to rubbish is one way to reduce the problems they can sometimes cause without resorting to killing them (Picture: Vincenzo Pinto) | AFP via Getty Images Intelligent and resourceful Thankfully, many don't, and other MSPs who spoke in the debate did so thoughtfully and well. At OneKind, we hear stories every day from our supporters that confirm how much people care about animals and want governments to do more to protect them. For more than 100 years, we have advocated for animals, supported by individual donors who want animals to be fairly represented in debates. For many gull species, natural nesting sites and food sources are dwindling, due mainly to human activities. As intelligent and resourceful birds, they have adapted to life in towns, and what they have found is safe nesting sites and abundant food sources. Gulls are devoted, protective parents. When people come near to their nest, they feel that their eggs or chicks are threatened and dive towards people to communicate this. Far from the nefarious intentions too often mis-attributed to gulls, this diving behaviour is born of deep care. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The other main complaint made about gulls – taking food from people's hands – is a foreseeable consequence of decades of directly feeding them, littering, and having unsealed and often overflowing bins. Stop feeding gulls There are simple changes that could go a long way to reducing the behaviours that people have complained about. Everybody could stop feeding gulls and littering, and authorities should ensure that all bins are secure and 'gull proof' and seek measures that allow gulls and humans to feel safe during the birds' breeding season. There are some vulnerable people who can be at risk from gulls' defensive behaviour, and it is, of course, very important that they are protected. There is help available for business owners, local authorities and individuals to minimise harms to gulls and advise on more complicated situations. For example, Humane Wildlife Solutions is a business that offers expert advice and non-lethal alternatives to 'pest control', including services relating to gulls. They have also worked with NatureScot to develop guidance for the non-lethal removal of eggs and chicks. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Across the UK, many local authorities understand their responsibilities and are seeking to co-exist with gulls, adapting their practices accordingly. It was reported recently that in Lowestoft kittiwakes began nesting in the town centre following the destruction of a derelict building at the docks where some had been nesting. They found ideal nesting sites in the town and the numbers grew. Building owners are now, rightly, being encouraged to provide simple wooden nesting ledges for them, in sites that are less inconvenient for people, rather than trying to remove the gulls. Sharing the planet In 2018 South Ayrshire Council launched their 'feed a bin, not a gull' campaign, encouraging people to dispose of food waste and other litter responsibly. Local primary school children took part by designing posters for the launch, a good initiative to empower and educate young people. This is the path that those in power and the media should be following, seeking solutions to help people live alongside gulls and other wild animals, not repeating worn narratives of domination. The Scottish Government plans to hold a summit to discuss issues relating to gulls. I urge them to choose this less travelled path. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Now – in a time of nature and climate crises, following the devastating impact of Covid and avian flu, both linked to industrial animal farming – is an opportune time to recalibrate our relationship with other animals. We must learn to share a little better the finite space on our planet. Can we care more and blame less? Can we look beyond the problems and remember the joy that comes from connecting with others, including our fascinating, clever gull neighbours?
The Independent
3 days ago
- The Independent
United Airlines flight forced to turn back to Heathrow as ‘fumes' fill part of plane after take-off
A United Airlines flight bound for San Francisco made a dramatic turnaround back to Heathrow after 'fumes' filled up the plane's food preparation area. Flight UA949 took off from London Heathrow at 12.45pm on Wednesday 30 July for an 11-hour flight to the Californian city. The Boeing 777 managed only 27 minutes in the air before unexpectedly returning to its departure base. The plane reached as far as Milton Keynes, then ditched its flight path and looped back to London, flight tracking data shows. United Airlines told The Independent: 'United flight 949 from London Heathrow to San Francisco returned to London shortly after take-off to address fumes in the aircraft's galley.' The galley is the area in which cabin crew prepare food and store trolleys, and is where the toilets are typically found. 'The flight landed safely, passengers deplaned normally at the gate, and we're working to get our customers to their destinations as soon as possible.' After landing, three fire engines met the plane on the taxiway. There were 272 passengers onboard at the time, along with 13 crew members. Heathrow airport confirmed that the plane landed safely and did not have a wider impact on flight operations that day. After the diversion back to the airport, the flight was ultimately cancelled. The aircraft is still at London Heathrow and is expected to take off at 8.50pm on Thursday 31 July, FlightRadar shows. Heathrow, along with all other UK airports, were disrupted yesterday due to an unrelated air traffic control issue. The incident comes just days after another United Airlines flight was forced to immediately divert back to Washington Dulles Airport after a mechanical issue. The Munich-bound flight took off at 5.40pm local time on Friday, 25 July, yet circled back to the airport moments later. The airline confirmed that the flight returned to the ground shortly after take-off to 'address a mechanical issue'. All 219 passengers and 11 crew members deplaned as normal at the gate after the aircraft landed safely. 'The flight was subsequently cancelled, and we arranged alternate travel arrangements to take customers to their destination as soon as possible,' a spokesperson for the airline added.
