Crisis exposes lack of failsafe tracking of planes
Print Edition
INVESTIGATORS are trying to restore files deleted last month from the home flight simulator of the pilot aboard the missing Malaysian plane to see if they shed any light on the disappearance, Malaysia’s defense minister said yesterday.
Hishammuddin Hussein told a news conference that the pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, is considered innocent until proven guilty of any wrongdoing, and that members of his family are cooperating in the investigation. Files containing records of simulations carried out on the program were deleted on February 3, Malaysian police chief Khalid Abu said.
Deleting files would not necessarily represent anything unusual, especially if it were to free up memory space, but investigators would want to check the files for any signs of unusual flight paths that could help explain where the plane went when it disappeared on March 8.
There were 239 people on board Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, 154 of them Chinese, when it disappeared on a night flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Malaysian authorities have not ruled out any possible explanations, but have said the evidence so far suggests that the flight was deliberately turned back across Malaysia to the Strait of Malacca, with its communications systems disabled.
They are unsure about what happened next.
Investigators have identified two giant arcs of territory spanning the possible positions of the plane around seven hours after takeoff, based on its last faint signal to a satellite — an hourly “handshake” signal that continues even when communications are switched off.
The arcs stretch up as far as Kazakhstan in central Asia and down deep into the southern Indian Ocean.
Police are considering the possibility of hijacking, sabotage, terrorism or issues related to the mental health of the pilots or anyone else on board, and have asked for background checks from abroad on all foreign passengers.
Hishammuddin said such checks have been received for all the foreigners except those from Ukraine and Russia — which account for three passengers — and that nothing suspicious had turned up.
“So far, no information of significance on any passenger has been found,” Hishammuddin told reporters.
The crisis has exposed the lack of a failsafe way of tracking modern passenger planes on which data transmission systems and transponders — which make them visible to civilian radar — have been severed.
Aircraft from Australia, the US and New Zealand scoured a search area stretching across 305,000 square kilometers of the Indian Ocean yesterday, about 2,600 kilometers southwest of Perth, on Australia’s west coast.
Merchant ships were also asked to look out for any trace of the plane.
Nothing has been found so far, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said.
China has said it was reviewing radar data and has deployed 21 satellites to search the northern corridor of the search area stretching as far as Kazakhstan, although it is considered less likely that the plane could have taken that route without being detected by the military radar systems of countries in the region.
Those searches so far have turned up no trace of the plane, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said yesterday.
Indonesian Defense Minister Purnomo Yusgiantoro said that Indonesia’s military radar didn’t pick up any signs of flight MH370 on the day the plane went missing.
He said Malaysia had asked Indonesia to intensify the search in its assigned zone in the Indian Ocean west of Sumatra, but said his air force was strained in the task.
“We will do our utmost. We will do our best. But you do have to understand our limitations,” Purnomo said.
Hismammuddin said both the southern and the northern sections of the search area were important, but that “some priority was being given to that (southern) area.” He didn’t elaborate.
Malaysian investigators say the plane departed 12:41am on March 8 and headed northeast toward Beijing over the Gulf of Thailand, but that it turned back after the final words — “All right, good night” — were heard from the cockpit.
Malaysian military radar data places the plane west of Malaysia in the Strait of Malacca at 2:14am.
Thailand divulged new radar data on Tuesday that appeared to corroborate Malaysian data showing the plane crossing back across Peninsular Malaysia.
The military in the Maldives, a remote Indian Ocean island nation, confirmed to Malaysia that reports of a sighting of the plane by villagers there were “not true,” the Malaysian defense minister said.
German insurance company Allianz said yesterday it had made initial payments in connection with the plane.
Spokesman Hugo Kidston declined to say how much had been paid, but said it was in line with contractual obligations when an aircraft is reported as missing.
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