That pretty well
puts it to bed and it also strengthens the argument that the crew was overwhelmed
by smoke within minutes. Otherwise an attempt
to at least turn it around would have occurred.
All other theories can be assigned to a very low likelihood as
well. We still have to collect the black
boxes but I am now pretty sure that we will discover last minutes with the crew
fighting the consequences of a fire and likely a tire fire.
What this has
made abundantly clear is that aviation fires are a major treat and we need to
engineer protocols that allow the pilot to survive and operate whatever systems
are available. Simple smoke sensors throughout
the craft in the obvious enclosed spaces would also be extremely helpful.
Onboard fires are
becoming a primary cause of airline accident and it is the one problem that new
technology can address and potentially manage.
It may not be able to stop the fire but it surely is possible to prioritize
survivability so that the plane has a maximum chance to get on the ground.
Malaysian prime
minister says Flight MH370 ‘ended in the southern Indian Ocean’
Video: Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak
said Monday that new information from satellite data showed missing Malaysia
Airlines Flight MH370 "ended in the southern Indian Ocean.”
By Jia
Lynn Yang and William
Wan, Monday, March 24, 9:44 AM E-mail
the writers
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Malaysian Prime Minister
Najib Razak said Monday that the missing Malaysia Airlines plane went down in
the southern Indian Ocean, effectively removing all hope that it might have
survived the still unexplained diversion from its flight path more than two
weeks ago.
Reading from a prepared
statement, Najib said new information from satellite data showed that the
plane’s last location was “in the middle of the Indian Ocean west of Perth,” a
city on Australia’s west coast.
“This is a
remote location, far from any possible landing sites,” Najib said solemnly. “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.”
He said the families of those on board have been
informed of this “heartbreaking” news about the ill-fated Boeing
777 that vanished March 8 with 239 passengers and crew on board. He
did not take questions from reporters after delivering his remarks.
In a text
message to family members, Malaysia Airlines said: “We deeply regret that
we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that
none of those on board have survived.” It added that “we must now accept all
evidence suggests the plane went down in the Southern Indian Ocean.”
In Beijing, Chinese relatives of the missing passengers
were called to the second floor of the Lido Hotel for an emergency meeting to
receive the news. Paramedics attended the meeting, and wailing was heard from
behind closed doors.
Najib said the new information on the fate of the
aircraft came from Britain’s Air Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB) and the
British Inmarsat satellite communications company, which previously had
provided data indicating that Flight MH370 took either a northern or southern
route after diverting from its flight path.
Najib said that after making further calculations
and “using a type of analysis never before used in an investigation of this
sort,” Inmarsat had essentially eliminated the northern route and “concluded
that MH370 flew along the southern corridor.”
The announcement raised the question of why British,
American or Malaysian authorities could not have reached the same conclusion
more quickly from the Inmarsat data — a succession of hourly electronic
“handshakes” between the plane and a satellite — which the company began
analyzing within a day or two of the plane’s disappearance.
Vanita Supaya, a former Malaysia Airlines flight
attendant who knew some of the crew on board, said the Malaysians should have
solicited help from experts in the West much earlier. “It shouldn’t have taken
them 17 days to tell us what happened to the aircraft,” she told BBC World
News. “This is really very, very sad for the families.”
On March 18, Australia announced that analysis of
the satellite data, carried out by the U.S. National Transportation Safety
Board, had allowed investigators to narrow the search area to just 3 percent of
the “southern corridor” suggested by Malaysia. The area being searched by the
Australians is around 1,500 miles from land, precluding any safe landing for
the plane.
The statements from Najib and the airline came after
observers on a Chinese search plane on Monday spotted some “suspicious objects”
in the southern Indian Ocean — two large floating objects and many smaller
white ones.
With the search now
in its third week, crew members on an Australian plane separately were able
to see two objects, one gray or green and circular and one an orange rectangle,
in another section of the 42,500-square-mile stretch of the southern Indian
Ocean where observers have tried for days to find some sign of the missing
airliner.
Until now, the sighting of possible plane debris has
largely been confined to satellite images, making Monday’s visual sighting by
human spotters aboard planes a potentially significant breakthrough for the
massive search-and-rescue operation, one of the largest in aviation history.
According to a Malaysia Airlines, Flight MH370 took
off from Kuala Lumpur with 12 crew members on board, all Malaysians, and 227
passengers from 14 countries. Of the passengers on the Beijing-bound red-eye
flight, nearly two-thirds were from China. Five of the passengers — three
Chinese and two Americans — were children under 5 years old, the airline’s flight manifest said. There were a total of 38
Malaysian passengers on the plane and three Americans.
The manifest also listed two passengers — one
Austrian and one Italian — who turned out to be Iranian
men traveling on stolen passports. No links to terrorism have been found;
the two were apparently trying to migrate to Europe.
Sarah Bajc, the fiancée of missing American
passenger Philip Wood, said in an e-mail message that she was still processing
the new information even as she grieved over it. Wood, 50, of Texas, was the
lone American adult passenger on Flight MH370, according to the manifest. Bajc
had been finishing up preparations to move to Kuala Lumpur with Wood when the
plane disappeared.
Since then, Bajc has conducted a flurry of
interviews, speaking eloquently of her love and plans for a future with Wood.
She launched a Facebook page and Twitter accounts devoted to “FindPhilipWood.”
She has said she hoped to sustain public attention and support for the ongoing
search. But on Monday night, she said she was putting all of it on hold in
light of the devastating new information.
“The announcement is on data only, no confirmed
wreckage so no real closure,” she wrote in the e-mail. “I need closure to be
certain but cannot keep on with public efforts against all odds. I STILL feel
his presence, so perhaps it was his soul all along.”
At the Beijing hotel where families have awaited
word of the plane’s fate for more than two weeks, the news was greeted by
sporadic wailing as some passengers’ relatives sobbed loudly. Some clung to
each other. A few sat silently, apparently in shock. Chinese authorities had
paramedics and ambulances on the scene, and some relatives were brought out on
stretchers from the ballroom where families have been briefed. A few relatives
turned their anger toward journalists waiting with cameras outside the briefing
area.
Some family members made the point that their lost
relative was the only child in the family — their grief compounded by China’s
one-child policy.
Many had held out hope up until Monday night that
passengers might still be alive as hostages of a hijacking. And even now, from
overheard comments, a few appeared to still harbor hope that survivors, against
tough odds, may still be clinging to debris or wreckage in the ocean.
In recent days, anger among many Chinese families
had turned into distrust and disbelief in Malaysia Airlines and Malaysian
officials. One relative, who did not want to be identified, said this weekend
that he believed Malaysia Airlines was lying about various aspects of the
search and that Malaysian authorities would not tell passengers’ families even
if the plane had landed somewhere safely.
Even before Monday’s announcements, search efforts
had been focusing on a vast, remote area of the southern Indian Ocean.
The mission has been daunting. On Monday, just as
soon as objects were spotted by the Chinese, they disappeared again. A U.S.
Navy plane sent to investigate the spot 1,353 miles southwest of Perth was
unable to relocate the debris.
A Chinese ship is also en route to the spot where
the debris was seen, according to state news agency Xinhua.
The Chinese have also asked the Australians to send more planes to the area.
A separate Australian ship was dispatched to follow
up on the other sighting.
It was unclear Monday whether any of the objects
spotted by observers were the same as those picked up by various satellite
images, including one from the Chinese over the weekend showing a grainy image of
a “suspicious floating object” 74 feet long and 43 feet wide. Large shipping
containers are also often found drifting in the same waters, a part of the
world where strong currents constantly move objects around with changing speeds
and directions. Those leading the search hope to get close enough to the items
and dredge them out to inspect further.
Finding the debris field is critical for locating
the missing aircraft’s cockpit
recorders, which will emit tracking signals for 30 days. Since Flight MH370
was lost 16 days ago, time is running out to find the black box containing two
recorders: one with the last two hours of audio from the cockpit and the other
with detailed flight data.
On Monday, the U.S. Navy ordered a black box locator
to be moved into the area being searched. The Navy’s technology can locate
black boxes to a maximum depth of 20,000 feet. The Indian Ocean’s depth ranges
between 3,770 feet and 23,000 feet.
The underwater emergency beacon on a black box is
designed to send a signal with a reach of two nautical miles. Its pings
generally have a range of one to three miles, depending on ocean conditions and
the terrain of the ocean floor.
“The more noise there is, the harder it is for the
signal to be picked up,” said a U.S. official familiar with the devices. “There
are a variety of noises in the ocean, and the range of the pinger also is
affected by thermal layers.”
Activated when it comes in contact with water, the
beacon has a battery life of 30 days.
“It might go longer,” said the official, who was not
authorized to speak publicly about the investigation. “But it’s not going to go
two or three months. It might go 35 days.”
“The signal doesn’t gradually get weaker. It just
goes dead,” the official said.
If the beacon pings are to be useful, the search
must home in on a compact area before the signals stop. Devices such as the
U.S. Navy’s black box locater that was dispatched to the Indian Ocean are of
little value until the search is dramatically narrowed.
“The classical way to search deep water is to lower
behind a boat and tow a sonar system,” said Dave Gallo, who directed the search
for the black box that went down in the Atlantic on Air France Flight 447 in
2009. “It’s a sled carrying sonars, normally in about 4,000 meters of water, so
you’d have miles of cable behind the boat, and at the end of it, this
instrument.”
That severely restricts the underwater territory the
boat can cover.
“You can tow probably at 2 miles an hour or less
because of the strain on the cable,” said Gallo, who works at the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. “If you’re towing over mountain
ranges, you have to be incredibly careful, lowering and raising it.”
The search is being conducted over a vast area of
deep ocean with a mountainous ocean floor.
“The Towed Pinger Locator has some highly sensitive
listening capability so that if the wreck site is located, we can hear the
black box pinger down to a depth of about 20,000 feet,” said Navy Cmdr. Chris
Budde, U.S. 7th Fleet operations officer. “Basically, this super-sensitive
hydrophone gets towed behind a commercial vessel very slowly and listens for
black box pings.”
After more than a week of dead ends spanning from
Kyrgyzstan to the South China Sea, authorities have steadily zeroed in on a
desolate area in the southern Indian Ocean. Five aircraft were scouring the
area, with two more planes on the way Monday morning, according to the
Australian Maritime Safety Authority.
Monday’s search was meant to build on the most
recent available satellite data — information provided by the French on Sunday.
France on Monday also gave the Malaysians images taken by camera showing
potential plane debris, Malaysia’s acting transportation minister, Hishammuddin
Hussein, said at a news conference.
The object seen by a French satellite was 528 miles
north of where planes and ships had been looking over the weekend, Australian
Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said in an interview with ABC Radio, Australia’s
national public broadcaster.
The French Foreign Ministry said radar echoes from a
satellite had indicated the presence of debris in the ocean about 1,400 miles
from Perth, but gave no direction or date.
“We still don’t know for certain that the aircraft
is even in this area,” Truss said in the interview. “We are just clutching at
whatever little piece of information comes along to try and find a place where
we might be able to concentrate the efforts.”
To make the search even more difficult, the weather
in this area of the ocean can also be extreme. There were fears recently that a
cyclone that hit Christmas Island over the weekend would be headed toward the
search parties. AMSA said Monday, though, that the search area should not be
affected.
Mike Barton, the rescue coordination chief at the
Australian maritime agency, said the biggest challenge was the search area’s
“remoteness from anywhere.” That meant search planes were operating at the
limits of their fuel supply, prolonging the search, he said.
Satellites have the advantage of passing directly
over an object, “but actually determining what it is from an aircraft at a lot
lower altitude, looking into the sun, with haze and all the rest of it, is
proving difficult,” Barton said.
If planes can find any of the floating objects or
any new ones of interest, the next step will be to get a ship to the area and
fish them out of the water. “Until we find them and have a good look at them,
it’s hard to say if they have anything to do with the aircraft,” Barton said at
a news conference in Canberra, the capital.
Meanwhile, there is still the mystery of what caused
the plane to divert from its flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in the
first place.
The Malaysian government said Monday it had
interviewed 100 people, including members of the pilots’ families, as part of
its investigation.
So far, there has been no indication that the pilots
deliberately sabotaged the flight. Malaysian officials on Sunday rejected
recent U.S. media reports that the passenger jet had been pre-programmed to
turn sharply westward before it vanished from radar. Those reports, citing
unidentified U.S. officials, said the plane’s last transmission through the
Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, at 1:07 a.m.
on March 8, indicated the shift in route, casting suspicion on the two pilots.
This was not true, Malaysia’s Ministry of Transport
said in a statement. “The last ACARS transmission, sent at 1:07 a.m., showed
nothing unusual,” it said.
Authorities are still looking into whether the plane
experienced some mechanical failure or accident.
The cargo included fruit, about 441 pounds of
lithium batteries and Malaysian-manufactured radios, according to Malaysia
Airlines. The airline has repeatedly said that the batteries, which are known
to be flammable, were packed properly.
The spotlight is especially harsh on the state-owned
company at the moment, with its every move being scrutinized. Around 3 a.m.
Monday, a Malaysia Airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur to the Incheon Airport in
Seoul had to make an emergency landing in Hong Kong when an electricity
generator failed.
When asked about this during a regular news
conference on the missing plane Monday afternoon, Malaysia Airlines chief
executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said, “It’s not a safety issue per se. It’s a
technical issue.”
Wan reported from Beijing. William Branigin and
Ashley Halsey III in Washington and Simon Denyer in Kuala Lumpur contributed to
this report.
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