Malaysia Airlines jet: Search planes checking China satellite report
Kuala Lumpur/Phu Quoc, Vietnam: Search planes were
flying on Thursday to an area where a Chinese satellite has seen
objects that could be debris from the Malaysia Airlines jet missing for
almost six days, but those waters had been checked before and nothing
found, officials said.
At the same time, China heaped pressure on Malaysia to improve its
coordination over the search for the Malaysia Airlines plane, which
disappeared early on Saturday on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Of the 239 people on board, up to 154 were Chinese.
Premier Li Keqiang,
speaking at a news conference in Beijing, demanded that the “relevant
party” step up coordination while China’s civil aviation chief said he
wanted a “smoother” flow of information from Malaysia, which has come
under heavy criticism for its handling of the disaster.
Vietnamese and Malaysian planes would scan waters where a
Chinese government agency website said a satellite had photographed
three “suspicious floating objects” on Sunday. The location was close to
where the plane lost contact with air traffic control.
We are aware and we sent planes to cover that area over
the past three days,” Vietnamese deputy transport minister Pham Quy Tieu
told Reuters. “Today (Thursday) a CASA plane will search the area again,” he said, referring to a twin-turboprop military aircraft.
Malaysian transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein said on
his Twitter feed: “Malaysia Maritime Enforcement Agency Bombardier has
already been dispatched to investigate alleged claims of debris being
found by Chinese satellite imagery.”
China’s civil aviation chief, Li Jiaxiang, said there was
no proof that the objects in the South China Sea were connected to the
missing aircraft.
One US official close to the plane investigation also said the Chinese satellite report was a “red herring”.
It was the latest in scores of often confusing leads for a
multi-national search team that has been combing 27,000 square nautical
miles (93,000 sq. km), an area the size of Hungary, for the Boeing
777-200ER.
On Wednesday, Malaysia’s air force chief said military
radar had traced what could have been the jetliner to an area south of
the Thai holiday island of Phuket, hundreds of miles to the west of its
last known position.
His statement followed a series of conflicting accounts
of the flight path of the plane, which left authorities uncertain even
which ocean to search in for Flight MH370.
The last definitive sighting on civilian radar screens
came shortly before 1:30am on Saturday, less than an hour after the
plane took off from Kuala Lumpur, as it flew northeast across the mouth
of the Gulf of Thailand.
What happened next remains one of the most baffling
mysteries in modern aviation history and the differing accounts put out
by various Malaysian officials have drawn criticism of their handling of
the crisis.
“The Malaysians deserve to be criticized—their handling
of this has been atrocious,” said Ernest Bower, a Southeast Asia
specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in
Washington.
Rodzali Daud, the Malaysian air force chief, told a news
conference on Wednesday that an aircraft was plotted on military radar
at 2:15am, 320km northwest of Penang Island off Malaysia’s west coast at
the northern tip of the Strait of Malacca.
But there has been no confirmation that the unidentified
plane was Flight MH370, Rodzali said, and Malaysia was sharing the data
with international civilian and military authorities, including those
from the US.
“We are corroborating this,” he added. “We are still working with the experts.”
Agonising wait
According to the data cited by Rodzali, if the radar had
spotted the missing plane, the aircraft would have flown for 45 minutes
and dropped only about 5,000 feet (1,500 metres) in altitude since its
sighting on civilian radar in the Gulf of Thailand.
There was no word on which direction it was then headed,
but if this sighting was correct, the plane would have turned sharply
west from its original course, travelling hundreds of miles over the
Malay Peninsula from the Gulf of Thailand to the Andaman Sea.
This would put it about 200 miles northwest of Penang, in
the northern part of the Strait of Malacca, roughly south of Phuket and
east of the tip of Indonesia’s Aceh province and India’s Nicobar island
chain.
Indonesia and Thailand have said their militaries
detected no sign of any unusual aircraft in their airspace. Malaysia has
asked India for help in tracing the aircraft and New Delhi’s coast
guard planes have joined the search.
The US National Transportation Safety Board said in a
statement that its experts in air traffic control and radar who
travelled to Kuala Lumpur over the weekend were giving the Malaysians
technical help in the search.
A US official in Washington said the experts were shown
two sets of radar records, military and civilian, and they both appeared
to show the plane turning to the west and across the Malay peninsula.
But the official stressed the records were raw data returns that were not definitive.
A dozen countries are taking part in the search, with 42 ships and 39 aircraft involved.
Authorities have not ruled out any possible cause for the
plane’s disappearance. Malaysian police have
said they were
investigating whether any passengers or crew on the plane had personal
or psychological problems that might shed light on the mystery, along
with the possibility of a hijacking, sabotage or mechanical failure.
Two men on board were discovered by investigators to have
false passports, but they were apparently seeking to emigrate illegally
to the West.
The Boeing 777 has one of the best safety records of any
commercial aircraft in service. Its only previous fatal crash came on 6
July last year when Asiana Airlines Flight 214 struck a seawall with its
undercarriage on landing in San Francisco, killing three people.
Boeing Co.,
the US aircraft company that makes the 777, has declined to comment
beyond a brief statement saying it was monitoring the situation. 
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