Final words from missing aircraft are revealed as search continues
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THE last conversation between the air traffic controller and the cockpit of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was at 1:19am and the last words were “Good night Malaysian three seven zero,” the Malaysian Transport Ministry confirmed yesterday.
It said the authorities were still doing forensic investigation to determine whether those last words from the cockpit were spoken by the pilot or co-pilot.
The ministry instructed the investigating team to release the full transcript which would be made available during a briefing to the next of kin.
Earlier reports said the last words from the cockpit were “All right, goodnight,” and Malaysia Airlines had said the initial investigation indicated the voice was from co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid.
Meanwhile, Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak is to visit Australia to witness the race-against-time bid to locate the crash site.
Ships and planes from seven nations scanned a vast zone far off western Australia for yet another day, but the hunt for debris that would prove the jet crashed in the Indian Ocean more than three weeks ago turned up nothing yesterday.
“The prime minister, who is going to Perth on Wednesday, will be briefed fully on how things have been conducted, and probably will be discussing what are the chances ahead,” Malaysia’s Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters in Kuala Lumpur.
Experts warn debris must be found within days to nail down a crash site in order for any use of a US-supplied black box detector — known as a towed pinger locator — to be feasible.
The US Navy, which has supplied the detection device, said yesterday: “Without confirmation of debris it will be virtually impossible to effectively employ the TPL since the range on the black-box pinger is only about a mile.”
But Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said earlier that no time limit would be imposed on the search for clues as to what happened.
“We owe it to the families, we owe it to everyone that travels by air, we owe it to the anxious governments of the countries who had people on that aircraft. We owe it to the wider world which has been transfixed by this mystery for three weeks now,” Abbott said in Perth.
The Boeing 777 carrying 239 people vanished without a trace on March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Families of Chinese passengers have angrily attacked Malaysia, alleging incompetence and deceit in what even Malaysian officials call the “unprecedented” loss of a jumbo jet.
More than a dozen Chinese relatives — part of a group of nearly 30 who arrived at the weekend to press for answers — kept up the pressure after a prayer session at a Buddhist temple near Kuala Lumpur.
“We will never forgive those who hurt our families and don’t tell the truth and delay the rescue mission,” a spokesman for the group, Jiang Hui, told reporters, reiterating suspicions toward Malaysia voiced by many relatives.
China has called for more transparency in the investigation.
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