Malaysian prime minister says Flight MH370 ‘ended in the southern Indian Ocean’
Malaysian prime minister says Flight MH370 ‘ended in the southern Indian Ocean’
(about 5 hours later)
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Monday that missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went down in the southern Indian Ocean, effectively dashing hopes that the plane might have survived a still unexplained diversion from its flight path more than two weeks ago.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak confirmed Monday that the plane that has been missing for 16 days went down in a remote corner of the Indian Ocean, ending hope for survivors among the 239 people on board.
Reading from a prepared statement, Najib said new information from satellite data showed that the plane’s last location was “in the middle of the Indian Ocean west of Perth,” a city on Australia’s west coast.
The conclusion was based on satellite data rather than the discovery of any wreckage in the massive search area, located more than 1,500 miles west of Australia.
“This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites,” Najib said solemnly. “It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, Flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean.”
Najib said new information on the fate of the aircraft came from Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch and the British Inmarsat satellite communications company, which previously had provided data indicating that Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 took either a northern or southern route after diverting from its flight path.
He said the families of those on board have been informed of this “heartbreaking” news about the ill-fated Boeing 777 that vanished March 8 with 239 passengers and crew on board. He did not take questions from reporters after delivering his remarks.
The Malaysian leader said that after making further calculations and “using a type of analysis never before used in an investigation of this sort,” Inmarsat had essentially eliminated the northern route and “concluded that Flight 370 flew along the southern corridor.”
In a text message to family members, Malaysia Airlines said: “We deeply regret that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board have survived.” It added that “we must now accept all evidence suggests the plane went down in the Southern Indian Ocean.”
“It is, therefore, with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, Flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean,” Najib said.
In Beijing, Chinese relatives of the missing passengers were called to the second floor of the Lido Hotel for an emergency meeting to receive the news. Paramedics equipped with at least five stretchers attended the meeting in the hotel’s main ballroom, and wailing was heard from behind closed doors.
His announcement touched off grief and anger among passengers’ families gathered in Kuala Lumpur and in Beijing, where the plane was headed March 8.
Some relatives fainted or were overcome with grief after Najib’s statement and simply lay on the floor. Others sat quietly weeping in the corners. Roughly 30 police stood in the room. At least one relative took out his anger on police and was subdued after lashing out.
China, which had 150 passengers on the flight, demanded that Malaysia “provide all data and information that points to this conclusion.”
Najib said the new information on the fate of the aircraft came from Britain’s Air Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB) and the British Inmarsat satellite communications company, which previously had provided data indicating that Flight MH370 took either a northern or southern route after diverting from its flight path.
“China’s search will continue,” said Hong Lei, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry. “We hope the Malaysian side and other countries will continue to search.”
Najib said that after making further calculations and “using a type of analysis never before used in an investigation of this sort,” Inmarsat had essentially eliminated the northern route and “concluded that MH370 flew along the southern corridor.”
On Tuesday morning, the Australian-led search team said it was suspending its operations for the day because of rough weather. The sole ship in the search left the area in the morning and was headed south for the time being. The weather in this part of the southern Indian Ocean can be extreme. Winds on Tuesday are expected to be as high as 50 mph and will be accompanied by heavy rain. There also will be a low cloud cover with a ceiling of 200 to 500 feet.
In a statement Monday night following the Malaysian prime minister’s statement, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei demanded that Malaysia “provide all data and information that points to this conclusion” that the plane crashed into the Indian Ocean.
Meteorologists expect the weather to improve in the evening and over the next few days, according to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA). The agency said search operations should pick up Wednesday, so long as the weather cooperates.
“We are highly concerned,” he said. “China’s search will continue. We hope the Malaysian side and other countries will continue to search.”
So far, reports of floating objects have proved inconclusive.
Najib’s announcement raised the question of why British, American or Malaysian authorities could not have reached the same conclusion more quickly from the Inmarsat data — a succession of hourly electronic “handshakes” between the plane and a satellite — which the company began analyzing within a day or two of the plane’s disappearance.
“Unfortunately, there’s a lot of debris in the ocean all the time, and it ranges from really teeny-tiny pieces of plastic, up to fishing gear. It can be boats, it can be shipping containers,” said Nancy Wallace, director of the marine debris program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Vanita Supaya, a former Malaysia Airlines flight attendant who knew some of the crew on board, said the Malaysians should have solicited help from experts in the West much earlier. “It shouldn’t have taken them 17 days to tell us what happened to the aircraft,” she told BBC World News. “This is really very, very sad for the families.”
In a text message to relatives of the passengers, Malaysia Airlines said: “We deeply regret that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board have survived.”
On March 18, Australia announced that analysis of the satellite data, carried out by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, had allowed investigators to narrow the search area to just 3 percent of the “southern corridor” suggested by Malaysia. The area being searched by the Australians is around 1,500 miles from land, precluding any safe landing for the plane.
In Beijing, family members of passengers were called to the second floor of the Lido hotel to receive the news. Some relatives fainted or were overcome with grief and simply lay on the ground. Others sat quietly in the corners, red-eyed and sniffling.
In an interview on CNN, Chris McLaughlin, a senior vice president of Inmarsat, said it appears “inevitable” that the plane went down in the southern Indian Ocean although he could not conclude that “definitively.” The new information provided to the Malaysians is based on “very limited data,” he said.
One woman cried loudly and said her only son, his wife and their 2-year-old daughter were on the plane.
“We are able to say over a number of hours that the plane was at a fairly constant altitude,” McLaughlin said. “We have assumed, with guidance from Boeing, a speed of about 350 knots, which would be the automatic pilot speed. And we have assumed the range based on what Malaysians say the plane was fueled up for, plus a safety margin.” He said he could not tell whether the plane varied its speed or altitude during its flight, but he expressed confidence that ships and aircraft involved in the search are now “looking in the right area.”
“Come home, my son! Please. Your mother is still waiting for you!” she wailed inconsolably.
The statements from Najib and the airline came after observers on a Chinese search plane on Monday spotted some “suspicious objects” in the southern Indian Ocean — two large floating objects and many smaller white ones.
Elsewhere in the room, some responded in anger, throwing chairs and getting into scuffles. Some were angry that they received the news from a Malaysian briefing. Some were angry that they received the news via text message. Some accused the Chinese government of being too weak and not being more forceful with Malaysian officials.
With the search now in its third week, crew members on an Australian plane separately were able to see two objects, one gray or green and circular and one an orange rectangle, in another section of the 42,500-square-mile stretch of the southern Indian Ocean where observers have tried for days to find some sign of the missing airliner.
Many had grown to thoroughly distrust the Malaysian authorities
Until now, the sighting of possible plane debris has largely been confined to satellite images, making Monday’s visual sighting by human spotters aboard planes a potentially significant breakthrough for the massive search-and-rescue operation, one of the largest in aviation history.
“They are using a bigger lie to cover their previous lies,” one man insisted.
According to a Malaysia Airlines, Flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur with 12 crew members on board, all Malaysians, and 227 passengers from 14 countries. Of the passengers on the Beijing-bound red-eye flight, nearly two-thirds were from China. Five of the passengers — three Chinese and two Americans — were children under 5 years old, the airline’s flight manifest said. There were a total of 38 Malaysian passengers on the plane and three Americans.
Data from enigmatic signals
The manifest also listed two passengers — one Austrian and one Italian — who turned out to be Iranian men traveling on stolen passports. No links to terrorism have been found; the two were apparently trying to migrate to Europe.
The announcement Monday came after a weekend breakthrough in the analysis of the plane’s most likely flight path.
Sarah Bajc, the fiancée of missing American passenger Philip Wood, said in an e-mail message that she was still processing the new information even as she grieved over it. Wood, 50, of Texas, was the lone American adult passenger on Flight MH370, according to the manifest. Bajc had been finishing up preparations to move to Kuala Lumpur with Wood when the plane disappeared.
For six hours after all communication from the airplane ceased March 8, it continued to engage in a computer “handshake” with a satellite that orbits the Earth 22,000 miles above the surface. The satellite always remains above the same point on the Equator in the Indian Ocean. Inmarsat, the satellite company, examined the “pings” transmitted from the airplane every hour and, according to the company’s senior vice president, Christopher McLaughlin, detected a Doppler shift in the radio waves. (A Doppler shift is what causes the perceived change in the sound of, say, a passing train or ambulance.)
Since then, Bajc has conducted a flurry of interviews, speaking eloquently of her love and plans for a future with Wood. She launched a Facebook page and Twitter accounts devoted to “FindPhilipWood.” She has said she hoped to sustain public attention and support for the ongoing search. But on Monday night, she said she was putting all of it on hold in light of the devastating new information.
The analysts concluded that the airplane was moving away from the satellite. That, by itself, did not reveal whether the plane was flying north to Asia or south to the Indian Ocean. But, with help from an unnamed European aerospace expert and from Boeing, Inmarsat scrutinized the pings from other Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777s flying to the north and to the south.
“The announcement is on data only, no confirmed wreckage so no real closure,” she wrote in the e-mail. “I need closure to be certain but cannot keep on with public efforts against all odds. I STILL feel his presence, so perhaps it was his soul all along.”
“In looking at the two plots, the correlation between the pings that we found and the southern route plot is absolutely the most compelling. The northern route has no correlation,” McLaughlin said.
At the Beijing hotel where families have awaited word of the plane’s fate for more than two weeks, the news was greeted by sporadic wailing. Some of the passengers’ relatives clung to each other. A few sat silently, apparently in shock. Chinese authorities had paramedics and ambulances on the scene, and some relatives were brought out on stretchers from the ballroom where families have been briefed. A few relatives turned their anger toward journalists waiting with cameras outside the briefing area.
“No one at Inmarsat has ever tried to do this or ever had a need to do this, but they intelligently scratched their head and interpreted this tiny bit of data and they were able to measure this signal,” said Scott Madry, an expert on satellite telemetry and a faculty member at the International Space University in Strasbourg, France.
Some family members made the point that their lost relative was the only child in the family — their grief compounded by China’s one-child policy.
And there was more information squeezed from those enigmatic signals: The pings indicated that the plane was flying at a constant altitude and speed, which McLaughlin said “sort of points to it being on autopilot.”
Many had held out hope up until Monday night that passengers might still be alive as hostages of a hijacking. And even now, from overheard comments, a few appeared to still harbor hope that survivors, against tough odds, may still be clinging to debris or wreckage in the ocean.
The plane typically flies on autopilot at 450 nautical mph, he said. That gave authorities a rough idea of how far the jet is likely to have flown. There were six hourly pings after the plane disappeared, but not a seventh because the aircraft presumably ran out of fuel.
One woman who was crying loudly said in a cracked voice that her only son, her son’s wife and their 2-year-old daughter were all on the plane.
McLaughlin noted that there were operational phones in the jet’s business class. None was used.
“Come home, my son! Please. You mother is still waiting for you!” she wailed.
“They were either turned off or the passengers were incapacitated,” he said.
Beside her, another woman tried to comfort her, saying, “It’s not over yet. What they are giving us is just based on basic data. There is no real evidence yet, no sign of the plane.”
Reports of floating objects
Elsewhere in the ballroom, some relatives responded in anger, throwing chairs and getting into scuffles.
The statements from Najib and the airline came after observers on a Chinese search plane on Monday spotted some “suspicious objects” in the southern Indian Ocean — two large objects and many smaller white ones.
Some were angry that they received the news via text message. Some discussed going to the Malaysian Embassy to protest.
With the search now in its third week, crew members on an Australian plane separately were able to see two objects, one gray or green and circular and the other an orange rectangle, in another section of the 42,500-square-mile stretch of the southern Indian Ocean where observers have tried for days to find some sign of the missing airliner.
Some men in the room who appeared to be undercover police in plain clothes were overheard discussing how to subdue particularly angry relatives and how to turn their anger away from the Chinese government and toward other targets such as the Malaysian Embassy.
Until those observations, the sighting of possible plane debris has largely been confined to satellite images, making Monday’s visual sighting by human spotters aboard planes a potentially significant breakthrough in the massive search, one of the largest in aviation history.
In recent days, anger among many Chinese families had turned into distrust and disbelief in Malaysia Airlines and Malaysian officials. One relative, who did not want to be identified, said this weekend that he believed Malaysia Airlines was lying about various aspects of the search and that Malaysian authorities would not tell passengers’ families even if the plane had landed somewhere safely.
The mission has been daunting. On Monday, just as soon as objects were spotted by the Chinese, they disappeared again. A U.S. Navy plane sent to investigate the spot 1,353 miles southwest of Perth, Australia, was unable to relocate the debris.
Paul Yin, a mental health counselor who has been comforting family members at the hotel, said he hoped that the relatives of the missing “can have the final result soon, for better or worse, despite how bad their reaction may become.” Then, he said, “we can start to work on helping them to recover. Now we are just waiting for the volcano to erupt.”
It was unclear whether any of the objects spotted by observers were the same as those recorded in various satellite images, including a grainy one from the Chinese over the weekend showing a “suspicious floating object” 74 feet long and 43 feet wide.
Malaysia Airlines immediately came under criticism for telling families the news via text message. The company defended itself in a statement Monday night, saying that it informed most of the families ahead of the prime minister’s announcement in person and over the phone. Text messages “were used only as an additional means of communicating with the families,” the airline said.
A race against time
Even before Monday’s announcements, search efforts had been focusing on a vast, remote area of the southern Indian Ocean.
Finding the debris field is critical for locating the aircraft’s cockpit recorders.
The mission has been daunting. On Monday, just as soon as objects were spotted by the Chinese, they disappeared again. A U.S. Navy plane sent to investigate the spot 1,353 miles southwest of Perth was unable to relocate the debris.
An underwater emergency beacon on a black box is designed to send a signal with a reach of two nautical miles. Its pings generally have a range of one to three miles, depending on ocean conditions and the terrain of the ocean floor.
A Chinese ship is also en route to the spot where the debris was seen, according to state news agency Xinhua. The Chinese have also asked the Australians to send more planes to the area.
“The more noise there is, the harder it is for the signal to be picked up,” said a U.S. official familiar with the operation. “There are a variety of noises in the ocean, and the range of the pinger also is affected by thermal layers.”
A separate Australian ship was dispatched to follow up on the other sighting.
The beacon, activated when it comes in contact with water, has a battery life of 30 days.
It was unclear Monday whether any of the objects spotted by observers were the same as those picked up by various satellite images, including one from the Chinese over the weekend showing a grainy image of a “suspicious floating object” 74 feet long and 43 feet wide. Large shipping containers are also often found drifting in the same waters, a part of the world where strong currents constantly move objects around with changing speeds and directions. Those leading the search hope to get close enough to the items and dredge them out to inspect further.
Finding the debris field is critical for locating the missing aircraft’s cockpit recorders, which will emit tracking signals for 30 days. Since Flight MH370 was lost 16 days ago, time is running out to find the black box containing two recorders: one with the last two hours of audio from the cockpit and the other with detailed flight data.
On Monday, the U.S. Navy ordered a black box locator to be moved into the area being searched. The Navy’s technology can locate black boxes to a maximum depth of 20,000 feet. The Indian Ocean’s depth ranges between 3,770 feet and 23,000 feet.
The underwater emergency beacon on a black box is designed to send a signal with a reach of two nautical miles. Its pings generally have a range of one to three miles, depending on ocean conditions and the terrain of the ocean floor.
“The more noise there is, the harder it is for the signal to be picked up,” said a U.S. official familiar with the devices. “There are a variety of noises in the ocean, and the range of the pinger also is affected by thermal layers.”
Activated when it comes in contact with water, the beacon has a battery life of 30 days.
“It might go longer,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the investigation. “But it’s not going to go two or three months. It might go 35 days.”
“It might go longer,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the investigation. “But it’s not going to go two or three months. It might go 35 days.”
With 16 days gone since the plane disappeared, the pings are expected to end within two weeks.
“The signal doesn’t gradually get weaker. It just goes dead,” the official said.
“The signal doesn’t gradually get weaker. It just goes dead,” the official said.
If the beacon pings are to be useful, the search must home in on a compact area before the signals stop. Devices such as the U.S. Navy’s black box locator that was dispatched to the Indian Ocean are of little value until the search is dramatically narrowed.
If the beacon pings are to be useful, the search must home in on a compact area before the signals stop.
“The classical way to search deep water is to lower behind a boat and tow a sonar system,” said Dave Gallo, who directed the search for the black box that went down in the Atlantic on Air France Flight 447 in 2009. “It’s a sled carrying sonars, normally in about 4,000 meters of water, so you’d have miles of cable behind the boat, and at the end of it, this instrument.”
“The classical way to search deep water is to lower behind a boat and tow a sonar system,” said Dave Gallo, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who directed the search for the black box on Air France Flight 447, which went down in the Atlantic in 2009. “It’s a sled carrying sonars, normally in about 4,000 meters of water, so you’d have miles of cable behind the boat. You can tow probably at two miles an hour or less because of the strain on the cable.”
That severely restricts the underwater territory the boat can cover.
The search is being conducted over a vast amount of very deep ocean with a mountainous floor. Swirling currents and winds may have carried any debris hundreds of miles from the spot where the rest of the plane lies on the ocean floor.
“You can tow probably at 2 miles an hour or less because of the strain on the cable,” said Gallo, who works at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. “If you’re towing over mountain ranges, you have to be incredibly careful, lowering and raising it.”
Mike Barton, the rescue coordination chief at the AMSA, said the biggest challenge is the search area’s “remoteness from anywhere.” That means search planes are operating at the limits of their fuel supply, he said.
The search is being conducted over a vast area of deep ocean with a mountainous ocean floor.
If planes can find any of the floating objects or any new ones of interest, the next step will be to get a ship to the area and fish them out of the water.
“The Towed Pinger Locator has some highly sensitive listening capability so that if the wreck site is located, we can hear the black box pinger down to a depth of about 20,000 feet,” said Navy Cmdr. Chris Budde, U.S. 7th Fleet operations officer. “Basically, this super-sensitive hydrophone gets towed behind a commercial vessel very slowly and listens for black box pings.”
“Until we find them and have a good look at them, it’s hard to say if they have anything to do with the aircraft,” Barton said at a news conference in Canberra, the Australian capital.
After more than a week of dead ends spanning from Kyrgyzstan to the South China Sea, authorities have steadily zeroed in on a desolate area in the southern Indian Ocean. Five aircraft were scouring the area, with two more planes on the way Monday morning, according to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.
Wan reported from Beijing, and Halsey reported from Washington. Joel Achenbach, Scott Higham and William Branigin in Washington and Simon Denyer in Kuala Lumpur contributed to this report.
Monday’s search was meant to build on the most recent available satellite data — information provided by the French on Sunday. France on Monday also gave the Malaysians images taken by camera showing potential plane debris, Malaysia’s acting transportation minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, said at a news conference.
The object seen by a French satellite was 528 miles north of where planes and ships had been looking over the weekend, Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said in an interview with ABC Radio, Australia’s national public broadcaster.
The French Foreign Ministry said radar echoes from a satellite had indicated the presence of debris in the ocean about 1,400 miles from Perth, but gave no direction or date.
“We still don’t know for certain that the aircraft is even in this area,” Truss said in the interview. “We are just clutching at whatever little piece of information comes along to try and find a place where we might be able to concentrate the efforts.”
To make the search even more difficult, the weather in this area of the ocean can also be extreme. There were fears recently that a cyclone that hit Christmas Island over the weekend would be headed toward the search parties. AMSA said Monday, though, that the search area should not be affected.
Mike Barton, the rescue coordination chief at the Australian maritime agency, said the biggest challenge was the search area’s “remoteness from anywhere.” That meant search planes were operating at the limits of their fuel supply, prolonging the search, he said.
Satellites have the advantage of passing directly over an object, “but actually determining what it is from an aircraft at a lot lower altitude, looking into the sun, with haze and all the rest of it, is proving difficult,” Barton said.
If planes can find any of the floating objects or any new ones of interest, the next step will be to get a ship to the area and fish them out of the water. “Until we find them and have a good look at them, it’s hard to say if they have anything to do with the aircraft,” Barton said at a news conference in Canberra, the capital.
Meanwhile, there is still the mystery of what caused the plane to divert from its flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in the first place.
The Malaysian government said Monday it had interviewed 100 people, including members of the pilots’ families, as part of its investigation.
So far, there has been no indication that the pilots deliberately sabotaged the flight. Malaysian officials on Sunday rejected recent U.S. media reports that the passenger jet had been pre-programmed to turn sharply westward before it vanished from radar. Those reports, citing unidentified U.S. officials, said the plane’s last transmission through the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, at 1:07 a.m. on March 8, indicated the shift in route, casting suspicion on the two pilots.
This was not true, Malaysia’s Ministry of Transport said in a statement. “The last ACARS transmission, sent at 1:07 a.m., showed nothing unusual,” it said.
Authorities are still looking into whether the plane experienced some mechanical failure or accident.
The cargo included fruit, about 441 pounds of lithium batteries and Malaysian-manufactured radios, according to Malaysia Airlines. The airline has repeatedly said that the batteries, which are known to be flammable, were packed properly.
The spotlight is especially harsh on the state-owned company at the moment, with its every move being scrutinized. Around 3 a.m. Monday, a Malaysia Airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur to the Incheon Airport in Seoul had to make an emergency landing in Hong Kong when an electricity generator failed.
When asked about this during a regular news conference on the missing plane Monday afternoon, Malaysia Airlines chief executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said, “It’s not a safety issue per se. It’s a technical issue.”
Wan reported from Beijing. William Branigin and Ashley Halsey III in Washington and Simon Denyer in Kuala Lumpur contributed to this report.
