The path of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean, Prime Minister Najib Razak said at a news conference in Kuala Lumpur.
PEARCE
AIR FORCE BASE, Australia — Malaysia’s prime minister said Monday that
further analysis of satellite data confirmed that the missing Malaysian
airliner went down in the southern Indian Ocean with its passengers and
crew. The announcement narrowed the search area but left many questions
unanswered about why it flew to such a remote part of the world.
Experts
had previously held out the possibility that the jet could have flown
north instead, toward Central Asia, but the new data showed that it
could have gone only south, said the prime minister, Najib Razak.
Mr.
Najib appeared eager to bring some finality to the families of the
passengers on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, two-thirds of them Chinese
citizens. The families have grown increasingly angry about the lack of
clear information about the plane’s fate. The Boeing 777, with 227
passengers and 12 crew members on board, was headed from Kuala Lumpur to
Beijing when it disappeared on March 8.
The
aircraft’s last known position, according to the analysis, “is a remote
location, far from any possible landing sites,” Mr. Najib said. “It is
therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that,
according to this new data, Flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian
Ocean.” More after the cut.......
Possible flight paths
AUSTRALIA
INDIAN OCEAN
Perth
Areas previously
searched
Albany
OBJECTS SPOTTED
March 16 (satellite image)
March 18 (satellite image)
Monday’s planned
search areas
March 24 (by a Chinese plane)
The
new analysis of the flight path, the prime minister said, came from
Inmarsat, the British company that provided the satellite data, and from
Britain’s air safety agency. The company had “used a type of analysis
never before used in an investigation of this sort,” he said.
Shortly
before the prime minister spoke at 10 p.m. local time, Malaysia
Airlines officials informed relatives of the missing passengers and crew
about the conclusion. Most were told in person or by telephone, the
airline said, and some were sent a text message: “Malaysia Airlines
deeply regrets that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that
MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board survived. As you
will hear in the next hour from Malaysia’s Prime Minister, we must now
accept all evidence suggests the plane went down in the Southern Indian
Ocean.”
In
a statement afterward, the airline said that the families “have been at
the heart of every action the company has taken since the flight
disappeared,” and that when it “receives approval from the investigating
authorities, arrangements will be made to bring the families to the
recovery area.”
The
hunt for the missing plane has focused on a section of the southern
Indian Ocean in recent days, and an Australian naval vessel searched
there on Monday after a military surveillance aircraft spotted what was
described as possible debris from the missing jetliner.
Mr.
Najib said the Malaysian authorities would hold a news conference on
Tuesday to give further details about the satellite data analysis and
other developments in the search.
After
his announcement, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a
statement demanding to see the analysis that led to Mr. Najib’s
announcement.
“We
have already asked that the Malaysian side go further in providing all
the information and evidence used to reach this conclusion,” said the
statement from Hong Lei, a spokesman for the ministry.
“China’s
search work is still continuing,” the statement said. “We hope that the
Malaysian side and other countries will also be able to continue their
search work.”
But
the waters off western Australia pose formidable challenges for the
hunt. After a number of false sightings over more than two weeks of
search efforts, Australian officials were cautious about what the crew
members of a Royal Australian Air Force P-3 Orion aircraft had spotted
as they combed the search area Monday.
Prime
Minister Tony Abbott told Parliament that the crew reported seeing two
objects, “a gray or green circular object” and “an orange rectangular
object,” in the ocean about 1,550 miles southwest of Perth, in western
Australia.
“We
don’t know whether any of these objects are from MH370,” Mr. Abbott
said. The objects in the water could be flotsam, he said.
Even so, the tenuous lead was treated in Australia as a significant development.
The
Australian Maritime Safety Authority said that a naval survey ship, the
Success, was on the scene and that the crew was looking for the
objects. Andrew Thomas, a journalist with the Al Jazeera television news
network who was aboard the Orion aircraft, said that the crew spotted
four confirmed objects, that flares were dropped and that the Success
was nearby.
The
floating objects spotted by the Australian plane were different from
the possible debris reportedly seen during the first search flights by
two Chinese Air Force Ilyushin IL-76 aircraft the same day. Later on
Monday, Australian authorities said all search aircraft had finished
their missions for the day and had reported no further sightings.
The
crew of one of the Chinese planes spotted “suspicious objects,”
according to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, which had a
reporter on the search plane. But the description was vague, and the
observation was made during poor weather conditions. A Chinese diplomat
in Australia, Qu Boxun, told reporters that the plane was at “a very
high altitude when the objects were spotted.”
Chris
McLaughlin, a vice president at Inmarsat, the British satellite
operator, said the company had spent the past six days reviewing data
about Flight 370 in close consultation with Boeing and others involved
in the investigation and came to the conclusion that the plane must have
flown to the south. “Our measured series of signals very much mirror
the predicted southern track after the last possible turn,” Mr.
McLaughlin said, adding that they were consistent with previous
indications that the plane continued on at more or less the same speed
and in the same direction for the last hours of the flight.
He
said that Inmarsat was confident enough in the new analysis, which it
reviewed with Boeing and with a number of independent aviation experts,
that it submitted its findings on Sunday to the Malaysians by way of the
British safety agency, the Air Accidents Investigation Branch.
“What
we still can’t say is what happened at the end, when the plane ran out
of fuel,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “We have no way of knowing if it dropped
from the sky or glided.”
A
777 jet could certainly fly for hours on autopilot, according to
experts. " ‘Heading select mode’ is dumb,” said a former Boeing
instructor pilot who spoke on the condition that he not be named,
referring to one way the plane’s autopilot could be set. “It doesn’t
know anything except, ‘maintain this heading,’ ” he said.
The
instructor, who has trained Boeing pilots at airlines around the world,
said that the plane would probably fly until fuel was exhausted in one
engine, after which the plane would most likely become destabilized and
crash without a skilled human pilot at the controls.
Inmarsat
has provided investigators with its estimate of the plane’s coordinates
when it emitted the last of the signals, at 8:11 a.m. Malaysian time on
March 8. “We are very comfortable with the guidance we have been
giving,” he said.
The
search for the aircraft’s fuselage and other bulky parts of the jet
that probably sank to the bottom of the ocean is likely to be focused
within a limited distance from the suspected flight path. But the search
for floating debris, which investigators say will offer proof that the
jet hit the water, is likely to be increasingly widespread.
Dr.
van Sebille described the conditions of the southern Indian Ocean as
“extremely hostile,” with large waves, swirling currents and winds that
are among the strongest on the planet.
“The longer it takes, the harder it will be to backtrack those pieces of debris,” he said.
Finding
the plane’s flight recorders, or black boxes, will be crucial to
determining what may have caused the plane’s disappearance. The devices
are designed to transmit signals to help searchers locate them, but
searchers have only about two weeks left to find them before the
devices’ batteries run out.
The
United States Pacific Command said on Monday that it would move a Towed
Pinger Locator System, capable of locating a black box to a depth of
20,000 feet, into the region. “This movement is simply a prudent effort
to pre-position equipment and trained personnel closer to the search
area, so that if debris is found, we will be able to respond as quickly
as possible, since the battery life of the black box’s pinger is
limited,” Cmdr. Chris Budde, a Seventh Fleet operations officer, said in
an email statement.
The
reasons for Flight 370’s radical departure from its intended flight
path remain mysterious. The Malaysian government has offered few
findings from the police inquiry into the people on the missing plane,
including the captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, and the junior pilot in the
cockpit, Fariq Abdul Hamid. Investigators and officials have said that
the plane’s extraordinary trajectory, veering far off course just after
its last radio contact with the ground, and the fact that its
transponders stopped working at about the same time appeared to involve
actions by someone experienced in aviation.
Hishammuddin
Hussein, the Malaysian defense minister and acting transport minister,
said on Monday that the police had interviewed more than a hundred
people, including relatives of each pilot. He said a committee was
considering whether to make public the transcript of the pilots’
communications with air controllers before the plane disappeared.
Mr.
Hishammuddin also confirmed that the plane was carrying wooden shipping
pallets. One of the objects reportedly sighted in the Indian Ocean was
such a pallet, but they are commonly used and one in the ocean could
have come from a ship.
The
chief executive of Malaysia Airlines, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, said on
Monday that that the plane was also carrying about 440 pounds of lithium
batteries, which can be a fire hazard n certain circumstances. But he
said the batteries had been handled and packaged so that they were were
deemed “non-hazardous” under civil aviation standards. The cargo also
included some fruit and radio equipment, he added.
Mr.
Ahmad Jauhari did not directly answer a question about whether the full
cargo manifest had been given to Australian investigators, saying that
was a matter for the investigation team. “If the Australians request
this, they have to go and request it from the investigating team,” he
said.
Separately
on Monday, a Malaysia Airlines Airbus A330-300 that was headed
overnight to Seoul, South Korea, from Kuala Lumpur was diverted to Hong
Kong because of a generator failure, the airline announced. The carrier
said that an auxiliary generator continued to supply power to Flight 66,
which was carrying 271 passengers. A spokeswoman for the Hong Kong
airport authority said the flight had landed without incident shortly
before 3 a.m.
Mohd
Taufik Atman, a spokesman for the airline, said the plane was under
repair and would resume service once a technical crew gave the go-ahead.
He said that the airline had no plans to investigate the incident
further. “This was a mechanical issue,” he said.
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