Suspense over missing Malaysian plane lingers
26 March 2014 6:24 AM IST
Malaysia said on Tuesday that it has narrowed the search for a downed jetliner to an area the size of Texas and Oklahoma in the southern Indian Ocean, while Australia said improved weather would allow the hunt for possible debris from the plane to resume.
The comments from Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein came a day after the country’s prime minister announced that a new analysis of satellite data confirmed the plane had crashed in a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean, killing all 239 aboard.
But the searchers will face a daunting task of combing a vast expanse of choppy seas for suspected remnants of the aircraft sighted earlier. ‘We’re not searching for a needle in a haystack - we’re still trying to define where the haystack is,’ Australia’s deputy defense chief, Air Marshal Mark Binskin, told reporters at a military base in Perth, Australia, as idled planes stood behind him.
There had been two corridors, based on rough satellite data, for the search. Hishammuddin said operations had been halted in the northern corridor that swept up from Malaysia toward Central Asia, as well as in the northern section of the southern corridor that arches down from Malaysia toward Antarctica.
That still leaves a large area of 1.6 million square kilometers, but just 20 per cent of the area that was previously being searched.
In remarks to the Malaysian Parliament on Tuesday, Prime Minister Najib Razak cautioned that the search will take a long time and ‘we will have to face unexpected and extraordinary challenges.’
Late on Monday, Najib announced that the Boeing 777 had gone down in the sea with no survivors. That’s all that investigators and the Malaysian government have been able to say with certainty about Flight 370’s fate since it disappeared on 8 March shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing.
Left unanswered are many troubling questions about why it was so far off course. Experts piecing together radar and satellite data believe the plane back-tracked over Malaysia and then traveled in the opposite direction to the Indian Ocean.
Investigators will be looking at various possibilities including mechanical or electrical failure, hijacking, sabotage, terrorism or issues related to the mental health of the pilots or someone else on board.
‘We do not know why. We do not know how. We do not know how the terrible tragedy happened,’ the airline’s chief executive, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, told reporters.
Najib’s announcement set off a storm of anguish and anger among the families of the passengers and crew - two-thirds of them Chinese.
Nearly 100 relatives and their supporters marched to the Malaysian Embassy in Beijing, where they threw plastic water bottles, tried to rush the gate and chanted, ‘Liars!’
Many wore white T-shirts that read ‘Let’s pray for MH370’ as they held banners and shouted, ‘Tell the truth! Return our relatives!’
President Xi Jinping ordered a special envoy, Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Yesui, to Kuala Lumpur to deal with the case, and Deputy Foreign Minister Xie Hangsheng told Malaysia’s ambassador that China wanted to know exactly what led Najib to announce that the plane had been lost, a statement on the ministry’s website said.
Malaysia Airlines Chairman Mohammed Nor Mohammed Yusof said at a news conference on Tuesday that it may take time for further answers to become clear.
‘This has been an unprecedented event requiring an unprecedented response,’ he said. ‘The investigation still underway may yet prove to be even longer and more complex than it has been since 8 March.’
He added that even though no wreckage has been found, there was no doubt it had crashed. ‘This by the evidence given to us, and by rational deduction, we could only arrive at that conclusion: That is, for Malaysia Airlines to declare that it has lost its plane, and by extension, the people in the plane,’ he said. The conclusions were based on a thorough analysis of the brief signals the plane sent every hour to a satellite belonging to Inmarsat, a British company, even after other communication systems on the jetliner shut down for unknown reasons.
The latest satellite information does not provide an exact location but just a rough estimate of where the jet crashed into the sea. Hishammuddin said the data is still being analyzed ‘to attempt to determine the final position of the aircraft’ and that an international working group of satellite and aircraft performance experts had been set up. He did not give any details.
Although there have been an increasing number of apparent leads, there has been no confirmed identification of any debris. ‘A visual search will resume tomorrow when the weather is expected to improve after gale force winds and heavy swells resulted in the suspension of the search operation on Tuesday,’ said the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is overseeing the search out of Perth, Australia.
There is a race against the clock to find any trace of the plane that could lead searchers to the black boxes, whose battery-powered ‘pinger’ could stop sending signals within two more weeks. Several countries have begun moving specialized equipment into the area to prepare for a search for the plane and its black boxes, the common name for the cockpit voice and data recorders, needed to help determine what happened to the jetliner.
Newspapers go black to pay tribute to victims
KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysian newspapers ran striking black front pages on Tuesday in tribute to the victims of Flight MH370, which crashed in the southern Indian Ocean with 239 people aboard.
Malaysia’s biggest English-language daily, The Star, ran a stark wrap-around cover emblazoned with the words ‘MH370 R.I.P.’ The names of the victims, rendered in small print, made up the letters of the headline.
The New Straits Times’ darkened front page showed an aircraft above the words ‘Goodnight, MH370’, a reference to the last message from the cockpit, ‘All right, good night’, before the Malaysia Airlines jet lost contact on 8 March.
Malay- and Chinese-language papers also ran front pages with black backgrounds, while The Sun, an English-language daily, changed its masthead to black.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced on Monday that latest analysis of satellite data showed that the flight, which went missing en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, had ended in the southern Indian Ocean. Bad weather hampered the search for debris off the coast of Australia on Tuesday, and it remains a mystery why the plane diverted from its original route.
The Star said in an editorial that the relatives’ ‘long wait for some form of closure has finally arrived’. But it called for unsparing efforts to establish the reasons for the crash.
On social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, many Malaysians turned their profile backgrounds black or displayed a plane icon in tribute to the victims.
The comments from Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein came a day after the country’s prime minister announced that a new analysis of satellite data confirmed the plane had crashed in a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean, killing all 239 aboard.
But the searchers will face a daunting task of combing a vast expanse of choppy seas for suspected remnants of the aircraft sighted earlier. ‘We’re not searching for a needle in a haystack - we’re still trying to define where the haystack is,’ Australia’s deputy defense chief, Air Marshal Mark Binskin, told reporters at a military base in Perth, Australia, as idled planes stood behind him.
There had been two corridors, based on rough satellite data, for the search. Hishammuddin said operations had been halted in the northern corridor that swept up from Malaysia toward Central Asia, as well as in the northern section of the southern corridor that arches down from Malaysia toward Antarctica.
That still leaves a large area of 1.6 million square kilometers, but just 20 per cent of the area that was previously being searched.
In remarks to the Malaysian Parliament on Tuesday, Prime Minister Najib Razak cautioned that the search will take a long time and ‘we will have to face unexpected and extraordinary challenges.’
Late on Monday, Najib announced that the Boeing 777 had gone down in the sea with no survivors. That’s all that investigators and the Malaysian government have been able to say with certainty about Flight 370’s fate since it disappeared on 8 March shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing.
Left unanswered are many troubling questions about why it was so far off course. Experts piecing together radar and satellite data believe the plane back-tracked over Malaysia and then traveled in the opposite direction to the Indian Ocean.
Investigators will be looking at various possibilities including mechanical or electrical failure, hijacking, sabotage, terrorism or issues related to the mental health of the pilots or someone else on board.
‘We do not know why. We do not know how. We do not know how the terrible tragedy happened,’ the airline’s chief executive, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, told reporters.
Najib’s announcement set off a storm of anguish and anger among the families of the passengers and crew - two-thirds of them Chinese.
Nearly 100 relatives and their supporters marched to the Malaysian Embassy in Beijing, where they threw plastic water bottles, tried to rush the gate and chanted, ‘Liars!’
Many wore white T-shirts that read ‘Let’s pray for MH370’ as they held banners and shouted, ‘Tell the truth! Return our relatives!’
President Xi Jinping ordered a special envoy, Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Yesui, to Kuala Lumpur to deal with the case, and Deputy Foreign Minister Xie Hangsheng told Malaysia’s ambassador that China wanted to know exactly what led Najib to announce that the plane had been lost, a statement on the ministry’s website said.
Malaysia Airlines Chairman Mohammed Nor Mohammed Yusof said at a news conference on Tuesday that it may take time for further answers to become clear.
‘This has been an unprecedented event requiring an unprecedented response,’ he said. ‘The investigation still underway may yet prove to be even longer and more complex than it has been since 8 March.’
He added that even though no wreckage has been found, there was no doubt it had crashed. ‘This by the evidence given to us, and by rational deduction, we could only arrive at that conclusion: That is, for Malaysia Airlines to declare that it has lost its plane, and by extension, the people in the plane,’ he said. The conclusions were based on a thorough analysis of the brief signals the plane sent every hour to a satellite belonging to Inmarsat, a British company, even after other communication systems on the jetliner shut down for unknown reasons.
The latest satellite information does not provide an exact location but just a rough estimate of where the jet crashed into the sea. Hishammuddin said the data is still being analyzed ‘to attempt to determine the final position of the aircraft’ and that an international working group of satellite and aircraft performance experts had been set up. He did not give any details.
Although there have been an increasing number of apparent leads, there has been no confirmed identification of any debris. ‘A visual search will resume tomorrow when the weather is expected to improve after gale force winds and heavy swells resulted in the suspension of the search operation on Tuesday,’ said the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is overseeing the search out of Perth, Australia.
There is a race against the clock to find any trace of the plane that could lead searchers to the black boxes, whose battery-powered ‘pinger’ could stop sending signals within two more weeks. Several countries have begun moving specialized equipment into the area to prepare for a search for the plane and its black boxes, the common name for the cockpit voice and data recorders, needed to help determine what happened to the jetliner.
Newspapers go black to pay tribute to victims
KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysian newspapers ran striking black front pages on Tuesday in tribute to the victims of Flight MH370, which crashed in the southern Indian Ocean with 239 people aboard.
Malaysia’s biggest English-language daily, The Star, ran a stark wrap-around cover emblazoned with the words ‘MH370 R.I.P.’ The names of the victims, rendered in small print, made up the letters of the headline.
The New Straits Times’ darkened front page showed an aircraft above the words ‘Goodnight, MH370’, a reference to the last message from the cockpit, ‘All right, good night’, before the Malaysia Airlines jet lost contact on 8 March.
Malay- and Chinese-language papers also ran front pages with black backgrounds, while The Sun, an English-language daily, changed its masthead to black.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced on Monday that latest analysis of satellite data showed that the flight, which went missing en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, had ended in the southern Indian Ocean. Bad weather hampered the search for debris off the coast of Australia on Tuesday, and it remains a mystery why the plane diverted from its original route.
The Star said in an editorial that the relatives’ ‘long wait for some form of closure has finally arrived’. But it called for unsparing efforts to establish the reasons for the crash.
On social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, many Malaysians turned their profile backgrounds black or displayed a plane icon in tribute to the victims.
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