SYDNEY, Australia - Australian organizers of one part of the vast search for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet said Wednesday that they had narrowed their focus to an expanse of deep ocean the size of Italy.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority is coordinating just one portion of the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, in the southern Indian Ocean off Australia's west coast. The initial search area that Australian officials announced Tuesday has been reduced by half, using new data analysis of the plane's likely fuel consumption, John Young, general manager for the agency's emergency response division, said Wednesday.
The new area of focus in the Australian-led part of the search covers 89,000 square nautical miles, roughly 1,200 nautical miles southwest of Perth, Mr. Young said. He said the airborne searchers had found no traces of debris that could be from the jet, which disappeared on March 8 with 239 people onboard. The searchers' view of the water was good and they were able to spot marine life, 'so we know we can make sightings, but there were no results relevant to the search,' Mr. Young said.
Mar. 8, 2014 00:41 AMA Boeing 777-200 operated by Malaysia Airlines leaves Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing with 227 passengers, of which two-thirds are Chinese, and a Malaysian crew of 12.
Mar. 8, 2014 01:07 AM
The airplane's Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or Acars, which transmits data about the plane's performance, sends a transmission. It is not due to transmit again for a half-hour.
Mar. 8, 2014 01:19 AM
The cockpit crew acknowledges a message from ground control, saying, 'All right, good night.' The Malaysian authorities say the voice belonged to the co-pilot. No further voice messages are received from the plane.
Mar. 8, 2014 01:21 AM
Two minutes after the last voice transmission, the plane's transponder, which signals its identity, altitude and speed to other aircraft and to monitors on the ground, is shut off or fails.
Mar. 8, 2014 01:37 AM
The Acars system fails to send its scheduled signal, indicating that it has been shut off or has failed sometime in the past half-hour.
Mar. 8, 2014 02:15 AM
An unidentified plane flying westward is detected by military radar. It ascends to 45,000 feet, above the approved limit for a Boeing 777, then descends unevenly to 23,000 feet and eventually flies out over the Indian Ocean. Investigators later conclude that it was Flight 370. It was last plotted 200 miles northwest of Panang.
Mar. 8, 2014 06:30 AM
By now Flight 370 was scheduled to have landed in Beijing.
Mar. 8, 2014 07:24 AM
Malaysia Airlines announces that it has lost contact with the aircraft.
Mar. 8, 2014 08:11 AM
The last signal is received from an automated satellite system on the plane, suggesting that it was still intact and flying. The signal implies that the jet is somewhere in one of two areas, one stretching north between Laos and Kazakhstan and the other south from Indonesia into the Indian Ocean. The Malaysian authorities say it had enough fuel to keep flying for perhaps a half-hour after this.
Mar. 15, 2014 00:00 AM
The Malaysian authorities say the investigation has become a criminal matter because the jet appears to have been deliberately diverted. The plane's first turn off course, to the west, was executed using an onboard computer, probably programmed by someone with knowledge of aircraft systems. The authorities say two passengers were Iranians who boarded using stolen European passports, but no links to terrorist groups are found.
The frustrations felt by family members and friends of the missing passengers, who have waited for 11 days for some indication of what happened to them, erupted Wednesday in the hotel conference room in Sepang, Malaysia, where the Malaysian government has held daily briefings for the news media. As reporters waited for the briefing to begin, several protesters who said they represented families of the passengers unfurled a banner that read, 'We oppose the Malaysian government concealing the truth. Delaying time for saving lives.'
'We've waited, and waited, and waited, and Malaysia Airlines says kind words, but the Malaysian government hasn't told us anything,' said one of the protesters, Xu Dengwang, a middle-aged man from Beijing who said a relative was on Flight 370. After a struggle, the police eventually removed the banner and forced the protesters from the room.
About two-thirds of the missing passengers are Chinese citizens, and some of their family members have come to Malaysia, hoping for word that the plane has been found. Such hopes appear increasingly bleak, and the protesters said that until now they had been prevented from telling the press of their mounting frustration with the Malaysian government's erratic response.
Like other officials involved in the multinational search, Mr. Young of Australia on Wednesday stressed the sheer difficulty of finding the plane, let alone possible survivors, more than a week and a half after the jet disappeared after veering off its scheduled flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
'We still have grave fears for the safety of anyone that may have managed to escape the aircraft in the southern ocean. It remains a big area,' Mr. Young said. 'There is a lot of work to be done yet.'
Mr. Young said four military aircraft used for surveillance had been assigned to the search area for Wednesday: two long-range Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orions, one P-3K Orion from New Zealand and a P-8 Poseidon from the United States.
'We are getting some reasonable coverage of the area,' he said. 'We have also had three ships in the area.'
But searchers are confronted with sobering limits on their reach across the seas. The plane's whereabouts remain little more than a matter of educated guesswork, based on satellite signals and other data gleaned by analysts.
'A needle in a haystack remains a good analogy,' Mr. Young said Tuesday.
A satellite over the Indian Ocean received a final transmission from an automatic data system on Flight 370 hours after the last radio or radar contact, leading investigators to deduce that the plane had sent it from somewhere along one of two long, arcing corridors that together encompass 2.24 million square nautical miles, Hishammuddin Hussein, the Malaysian defense minister and acting transportation minister, said at a news briefing on Tuesday. That is an area the size of the continental United States, excluding California.
The jet, which had been headed to Beijing, abruptly turned back over the Gulf of Thailand early on March 8. Around that time, its communication links were severed, and it cut across Peninsular Malaysia and out over the Strait of Malacca. The plane's final blips to a satellite indicate it headed west towards the Indian Ocean and then turned to take one of two possible corridors, either north or south.
One of the two arcs reaches from northern Laos to Central Asia. At the time of the last satellite contact, the plane would be at the Laotian end of the arc if it traveled at the slow end of its possible speed, or in Kazakhstan near the Caspian Sea if it traveled at top speed. Any speed in between would have put the plane somewhere in western or southwestern China, including remote, mountainous terrain in Tibet. By then, more than seven hours after it took off, the plane was likely running low on fuel.
If the plane had instead traveled on the southern arc, it may have been anywhere from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean, west of Australia, when it was last in contact with a satellite.
Officials have said that the plane's abrupt deviation from its normal flight path most likely involved deliberate intervention by an experienced aviator, making the two men assigned to the cockpit - Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, and his junior officer, Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27 - focal points of attention.
American officials have said that the sharp turn to the west that took the plane from its planned flight path was achieved using a computer system on the plane, and that the turn was most likely programmed into it by someone in the cockpit who was knowledgeable about airplane systems.
Malaysian officials have not publicly confirmed that information, but they have revised their account of events around the time the plane vanished from air traffic control communications.
Mr. Hishammuddin, the Malaysian defense minister and acting transportation minister, said on Tuesday that despite the revisions to the details of the chronology, investigators continued to think that the plane probably went off course because of something someone did intentionally, rather than mechanical failure or an accident.
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, March 19, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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