Yoursay: Loke caught between devil and deep blue sea with MH370

YOURSAY | ‘It is up to the Harapan to reveal the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’

Hisham rubbishes American aviation writer's report on MH370

Anonymous_34fb: If former defence minister Hishammuddin Hussein and the previous BN administration hid facts about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 from investigators – as aviation writer William Langewiesche claims – then it is the duty and responsibility of the incumbent Pakatan Harapan government to set things right and reveal the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Harapan can’t just be armchair critics of the past government, accusing them of hiding the truth, when it can reveal what happened. Or is the new government in cahoots with the old to hide the truth?

Yong Yeok Fong: In any air crash investigation, all possibilities are checked, and the least unlikely one is most probably the answer. For MH370, the only possibility for the aircraft to end the way it did is if someone did so intentionally.

Even if the plane is found with its black box, my guess is nothing was recorded because someone had purposely switched off Acars (Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System) and other communication systems before it made the turn towards the Indian Ocean.

Langewiesche is right to say that the truth will not be found under the sea but on land, in secret files holding the answer to the world’s greatest aviation mystery.

Hang Babeuf: Langwiesche is a fine writer and a top investigative reporter on aviation matters. See his remarkable analysis of the EgyptAir 990 crash in 1999.

What he has to say has far more credibility than the mishmash served up by Hishammuddin.

Loke dodges press waiting to quiz him on damning MH370 claims

Teh Tarik: Poor Transport Minister Anthony Loke. He is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

If he reveals all the details of MH370 investigative reports, it might confirm what Langewiesche claims – that pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah intentionally crashed the plane into the ocean, and that police withheld evidence from investigators. Compensation for victims’ families then might run into hundreds of millions.

The conservative right would then pounce on Loke for embarrassing their community. The minister would be minced meat.

Zaharie was said to be a staunch Anwar Ibrahim supporter and was apparently very distressed by the 'kangaroo' court hearings he attended that day, which had again incriminated PKR leader for sodomy. This publicity would be negative for Anwar and Pakatan Harapan.

So Loke is in a lose-lose situation, but not one of his own creation.

Justice Now: Indeed, Loke is facing a very unwelcome task as a result of Langewiesche’s article. As the transport minister, he would probably now have to lie for the incompetents who handled the case before he came on board.

If he goes out there and tells the truth, the race and religious extremists will call for his blood. If he goes out there and lies, it is below his dignity.

The best thing for him to do is to give reporters the slip and avoid questions.

MH370 pilot crashed plane, while police hid facts - claims noted aviation writer

Vijay47: Nobody would ever describe me as even a minimal fan of former prime minister Najib Abdul Razak, Umno, or the previous government, but I will not agree that MH370 remains an international secret solely because of a nasty man’s machinations.

For sure, the mysteries are still unsolved, there are yet a million questions to be answered, but it would be monumental unfairness for blame to be squarely placed on only Malaysian shoulders.

Certainly, there was shocking disarray, “ineptitude and inefficiency during the early days of the incident,” the heads of MAS (Malaysia Airlines) and DCA (Department of Civil Aviation) were headless chickens with no clue about the statements they regularly released. They could not tell what was port, what was starboard.

And surprisingly, the only person who managed some degree of respectability was Hishammuddin, only to crash it later during the Lahad Datu invasion.

Malaysian authorities may have been guilty of all that Langewiesche accuses them of. But what about the rest of the world?

The routes that MH370 took in and outwards were common flight paths under the watchful radars of Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and perhaps India, China, and Australia. Stir in also the American security satellites.

None of them noted the strange wavering movements in the sky? Of course, the air force tracked the plane turning back towards home, a change that they deemed to be common vacillating occurrences within aviation habits.

I may be wrong but I don’t think any regional air authority came out with a solid report tracing the actual movements, at least in their airspace.

Then we have the crash itself. Granted that we never were told much about the real Zaharie, but did the pilot and Malaysia engineer things so brilliantly that the seas disgorged no debris even “upon the plane hitting the water at high velocity,” that Zaharie managed to find that one spot in the oceans where dead planes tell no tales?

Langewiesche does not come out with any hard facts or evidence, he merely lists a line of speculation that anybody and his brother can conjure up. If you ask me, I think the butler did it.

Redmann: This makes perfect sense. The 1977 MH653 crash at Tanjung Kupang was one of the first massive cover-ups by our government. Then we had one shot down over Ukraine.

So was MH370 a cover-up? Why not? Had the pilot been of a different ethnic category, the story could have ended entirely different, with dirty linen washed in public view on a daily basis.

Everything would have been put under the microscope for the sake of transparency.

Anticonmen: Why did Zaharie have a flight simulator in his home practising on the Indian Ocean region? Why did he select a night flight? Why did he receive a call from a mysterious woman just before the flight?

Why did he select a flight where the co-pilot was a rookie? Why did he select a plane that had a broken beacon that could not be detected by radar?

Why did he shut down the responders just after leaving Malaysian airspace? Why did he select a flight to Beijing with enough fuel to reach the Indian Ocean? Why did he do a last lap over Penang, his hometown? The previous government hid all this information.

Quigonbond: Langewiesche is probably trying to set up his next book so that it becomes a bestseller. If he really cares about the victims, he should start offering up new evidence instead of more suppositions.

The above is a selection of comments posted by Malaysiakini subscribers. Only paying subscribers can post comments. Over the past one year, Malaysiakinians have posted over 100,000 comments. Join the Malaysiakini community and help set the news agenda. Subscribe now.

These comments are compiled to reflect the views of Malaysiakini subscribers on matters of public interest. Malaysiakini does not intend to represent these views as fact.