Thai military radar detected jetliner’s change of course
Print Edition
THAILAND’S military said yesterday its radar detected a plane that may have been Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 just minutes after the aircraft’s communications went down, and that it didn’t share the information with Malaysia earlier because it wasn’t specifically asked for it.
A twisting flight path described by Thai air force spokesman Air Vice Marshal Montol Suchookorn took the plane to the Strait of Malacca, which is where Malaysian radar tracked the flight early on March 8. But Montol said the Thai military didn’t know whether it detected the same plane.
With only its own radar to go on, it took Malaysia a week to confirm that flight MH370 had entered the strait, an important detail that led it to change its search strategy.
When asked why it took so long to release the information, Montol said: “Because we did not pay any attention to it. The Royal Thai Air Force only looks after any threats against our country, so anything that did not look like a threat to us, we simply look at it without taking action.”
He said the plane never entered Thai airspace and that Malaysia’s initial request for information in the early days of the search was not specific.
“When they asked again and there was new information and assumptions from (Malaysian) Prime Minister Najib Razak, we took a look at our information again,” Montol said.
Flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur at 12:40am Malaysian time and its transponder, which allows air traffic controllers to identify and track the airplane, ceased communicating at 1:20am.
Montol said that at 1:28am Thai military radar “was able to detect a signal, which was not a normal signal, of a plane flying in the direction opposite from the MH370 plane,” back toward Kuala Lumpur. The plane later turned right, toward Butterworth, a Malaysian city along the Strait of Malacca.
He didn’t know exactly when Thai radar last detected the plane. Malaysian officials have said it was last detected by their own military radar at 2:14am.
The search area initially focused on the South China Sea, where ships and planes spent a week searching. Pings that a satellite detected from the plane hours after its communications went down have led authorities to concentrate instead on two vast arcs — one into central Asia and the other into the Indian Ocean.
Thai officials said radar equipment in southern Thailand detected the plane. Malaysian officials said the plane might have passed through northern Thailand, but Thai Air Chief Marshal Prajin Juntong said yesterday that the country’s northern radar did not detect it.
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