MH370: Details of who was on missing plane are being withheld, says airline chief
Sir Tim Clark also raises doubts about the role of the Malaysian military on the night flight MH370 went missing
A senior airline executive has said that he believes information about who was on board Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is being withheld and called into question the role of the Malaysian military the night that the plane went missing.
Sir Tim Clark, chief executive of Emirates, also dismissed the theory that one of the pilots had deliberated crashed the Boeing 777. A suicidal pilot would have dived straight into the sea, he said, rather than performing the complex procedure that would disable the aircraft's navigation beacons.
"That requires you to leave the flight deck and go down through a trap door in the floor," he said. "But somehow this thing was disabled so much so that the ground tracking capability was eliminated."
The comments came to light in the previously unpublished transcript of an interview conducted by specialist German aviation journalist Andreas Spaeth.
In it he suggested that people involved in the investigation into flight MH370, which disappeared on 8 March with 239 people on board, are concealing information about who was on the plane.
"We need to know who was on this aeroplane in the detail that obviously some people do know," he said, and "we need to know what was in the hold of the aeroplane, in the detail we need to know, in a transparent manner.
"I think we will know more if there is full transparency of everything that everybody knows. I do not believe that the information held by some is on the table,"
Clark also questions why the Malaysian military allowed the aircraft to proceed unhindered on its unusual course.
"This is a very busy part of Southeast Asia, the notion that we should not be able to identify if it is friend or foe, or we can on primary radar and do nothing about it, is bizarre," he said. "What would have happened if the aircraft would have turned back to fly into the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur?
In excerpts of the interview previously published by Der Spiegel, Clark questioned whether flight MH370 had even ended up in the southern Indian Ocean, where search teams are now scouring the ocean floor for the aircraft's wreckage.
"We have not seen a single thing that suggests categorically that this aircraft is where they say it is, nothing, apart from this 'handshake', which calls my electronic engineers to start thinking 'what is all this about?'."
The "handshake" refers to a weak electronic signal believed to have come from flight MH370, although Clark says it may have come from another source.
In an article he wrote for the Wall Street Journal in May, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, said criticism of his government was misplaced.
"Without physical evidence, or a clear explanation for why this happened, peoples' attention has naturally focused on the authorities – and Malaysia has borne the brunt of the criticism," he wrote.
"In the passage of time, I believe Malaysia will be credited for doing its best under near-impossible circumstances."
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Malaysia Airlines "could not comment on whether pilots were trained to disable Acars or how many people on board the flight would have known how to stop the system, as the matter was under investigation".
Source: http://www.theweek.co.uk/world-news/flight-mh370/57641/mh370-details-of-who-was-on-missing-plane-are-being-withheld-says#ixzz3JqKCODnx
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