17 minutes before it was noticed jet had gone missing
Print Edition
AIR traffic controllers did not realize that Malaysia Airline flight MH370 was missing until 17 minutes after it disappeared from civilian radar, according to the preliminary report on the plane’s disappearance released by Malaysia’s government yesterday.
In addition to the five-page report, dated April 9, the government also released other information from the investigation into the flight, including audio recordings of conversations between the cockpit and air traffic control, the plane’s cargo manifest and its seating plan.
Malaysia also released a map showing the plane’s deducted flight path as well as a document detailing actions taken by authorities in the hours after the Boeing 777 disappeared from radar. The reports were mostly information that has been released since the jet disappeared while flying near the border separating Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace.
The plane went off Malaysian radar at 1:21am on March 8, but Vietnamese air traffic controllers only asked about it at 1:38am, according to the report, which was sent to the International Civil Aviation Organization last month.
The report also said Malaysian authorities did not launch an official search and rescue operation until four hours later, at 5:30am, after efforts to locate the plane failed.
A separate report listing the actions taken by air traffic controllers showed Vietnamese controllers contacted Kuala Lumpur after they failed to establish verbal contact with the pilots and the plane didn’t show up on their radar.
That report also showed that Malaysia Airlines at one point thought the plane may have entered Cambodian airspace.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak last week appointed a team of experts to review all the information the government had regarding the missing plane, and to decide which information should be made public.
“The prime minister set, as a guiding principle, the rule that as long as the release of a particular piece of information does not hamper the investigation or the search operation, in the interests of openness and transparency, the information should be made public,” Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said.
Malaysia Airlines said yesterday it would soon make advanced compensation payments to relatives.
The plane vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and most of the 227 passengers were Chinese.
No wreckage from the plane has been found, and an aerial search for surface debris ended on Monday after six weeks of fruitless hunting.
An unmanned sub is continuing to search underwater in an area of the southern Indian Ocean where sounds consistent with a plane’s black box were detected in early April. The head of the search effort has said that the search could drag on for as long as a year.
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