Flight MH370 families get $50,000 in first payouts

MALAYSIA Airlines' insurer has begun paying the families of passengers onboard Flight MH370 $50,000 each in initial compensation three months after the jet disappeared, a government official said Thursday.

So far six Malaysian and one Chinese family have received the advance payment, to which all the families of the 239 passengers and crew onboard are entitled, said Malaysian deputy foreign minister Hamzah Zainudin.

Talks with 40 more Chinese families are underway to ascertain they are the rightful claimants, said Hamzah, who heads a committee to support the missing passengers' next-of-kin.

Missing Malaysia Airlines plane 'deliberately diverted'

Malaysia's Prime Minister: "These movements are consistent with the deliberate action of someone on the plane"
The communications systems of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 were deliberately disabled, Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak has said.

According to satellite and radar evidence, he said, the plane then changed course and could have continued flying for a further seven hours.

He said the "movements are consistent with the deliberate action of someone on the plane".

The plane disappeared a week ago with 239 people on board.

Malaysia Plane: China debris images 'released by mistake'

CHINESE satellite images that were said to show debris from a missing Malaysian airliner were released by mistake, Malaysia's transport minister says.

Hishammuddin Hussein also denied a US report that the Boeing 777 might have flown for hours after contact with air traffic control was lost.

Flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing went missing late on Friday, with 239 passengers and crew on board.

The minister said the disappearance of the plane was unprecedented.

Was missing Malaysian plane taken by UFO?

Up till now, the whole world is still wondering what could have happened to the Boeing 777-200ER which took off from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, at 12:41 a.m. on Saturday, with 239 people on board. It was expected to arrive in Beijing at 6:30 a.m. the same day, after a roughly 4,350 kilometre journey. But around 1:30 a.m., air traffic controllers in Subang, outside Kuala Lumpur, lost contact with the plane over the sea between Malaysia and Vietnam.

Since then, all mouth has been agape with the unanswered question, what in the world must have happened to this jumbo jet? Thirty-four planes, 40 ships and search crews from 10 countries have been scouring the South China Sea near where the plane was last detected. The search has proved futile. It was thought that the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 must have crashed in the waters or maybe have exploded in the air, leaving debris as evidence of its end. But debris in the area has turned out to be unrelated to the plane. “We have not found anything that appear to be objects from the aircraft, let alone the aircraft,” Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, Director General of the Malaysian Civil Aviation Department, said on Monday.

Malaysia military tracked missing plane to west coast

A combination photo shows two men whom police said were travelling on
stolen passports onboard the missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 plane,
taken before their departure at Kuala Lumpur International

(Reuters) - Malaysia's military believes a jetliner missing for almost four days turned and flew hundreds of kilometers to the west after it last made contact with civilian air traffic control off the country's east coast, a senior officer told Reuters on Tuesday.

In one of the most baffling mysteries in recent aviation history, a massive search operation for the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER has so far found no trace of the aircraft or the 239 passengers and crew.

Malaysian authorities have previously said flight MH370 disappeared about an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur for the Chinese capital Beijing.