Search to continue in area the size of Alaska
Print Edition
MALAYSIA said yesterday that it had narrowed the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 to an area the size of Alaska in the southern Indian Ocean.
The comments from Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein came a day after the country’s prime minister announced that a new analysis of satellite data confirmed the plane had crashed in a remote part of the ocean, killing all 239 people, many of them Chinese, on board.
But searchers face a daunting task of combing a vast expanse of choppy seas for suspected remnants of the aircraft sighted earlier.
There is a race against time to find any trace of the plane that could lead to the black boxes, whose battery-powered “pinger” could stop sending signals in two more weeks.
Weather conditions are expected to improve today to allow a visual search, suspended yesterday, to continue.
“We’re not searching for a needle in a haystack — we’re still trying to define where the haystack is,” Australia’s deputy defense chief, Air Marshal Mark Binskin, told reporters at a military base in Perth, Australia.
There had been two corridors — based on rough satellite data — for the search. Hishammuddin said operations had been halted in the northern corridor that swept up from Malaysia toward Central Asia, as well as in the northern section of the southern corridor that arches down from Malaysia toward Antarctica.
That still leaves a large area of 1.6 million square kilometers, but just 20 percent of the area that was previously being searched.
In remarks to the Malaysian Parliament, Prime Minister Najib Razak cautioned that the search will take a long time and “we will have to face unexpected and extraordinary challenges.”
That the Boeing 777 had gone down in the sea with no survivors was all investigators and the Malaysian government have been able to say with certainty about the aircraft’s fate since it disappeared on March 8 shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing.
Left unanswered are many troubling questions about why it was so far off course. Experts piecing together radar and satellite data believe the plane back-tracked over Malaysia and then traveled in the opposite direction to the Indian Ocean.
Investigators will be looking at various possibilities including mechanical or electrical failure, hijacking, sabotage, terrorism or issues related to the pilots or anyone else on board.
“We do not know why. We do not know how. We do not know how the terrible tragedy happened,” the airline’s Chief Executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya told reporters.
Malaysia Airlines Chairman Mohammed Nor Mohammed Yusof said: “This has been an unprecedented event requiring an unprecedented response. The investigation still under way may yet prove to be even longer and more complex than it has been since March 8.”
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