Malaysia releases satellite data used in hunt for missing aircraft
Print Edition
ALMOST three months after the disappearance of a Malaysian passenger jet, the government released reams of raw satellite data it used to determine that the flight ended in the southern Indian Ocean, a step long demanded by the families of some of the passengers on board.
But while the 45 pages of information released in Kuala Lumpur may help satisfy a desire for more transparency, experts say it’s unlikely to solve the mystery of flight MH370 — or give much comfort to relatives stuck between grieving and the faintest hope their loved ones might still be alive.
“It’s a whole lot of stuff that is not very important to know,” said Michael Exner, a satellite engineer who has been researching the calculations. “There are probably two or three pages of important stuff, the rest is just noise. It doesn’t add any value to our understanding.”
He and others said the needed assumptions, algorithms and metadata to validate the investigators’ conclusions were not there.
The release of the information came as the underwater hunt for the jet is poised to pause until later in the summer while new, powerful sonar equipment is obtained, a sign of just how difficult it will be to locate the jet and finally get some answers on how it went missing with 239 people on board, mostly Chinese.
Air traffic controllers lost contact with the Boeing 777 soon after it took off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8 on a night flight to Beijing over waters between Malaysia and Vietnam.
The families — many of whom have been highly critical of the Malaysian government and, in the absence of wreckage, unwilling to accept their loved ones are dead — had been asking for the raw satellite data for many weeks so it could be examined by independent experts.
Steve Wang, whose mother was on the plane, said he was disappointed the release did not contain an account of exactly what investigators did to conclude the plane had taken the southern route.
“We are not experts and we cannot analyze the raw data, but we need to see the deduction process and judge by ourselves if every step was solid,” he said. “We still need to know where the plane is and what is the truth. We know the likelihood that our beloved ones have survived is slim, but it is not zero.”
Sarah Bajc, whose husband was on the flight, has been at the forefront of a campaign to press for more transparency. She said “a half dozen very qualified people were looking” at the information and hoped to have their conclusions soon.
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