Malaysian authorities said yesterday there was no evidence that a jetliner missing for almost six days flew for hours after losing contact with air traffic controllers and continued to transmit technical data.
The Wall Street Journal said that US aviation investigators and national security officials believed the Boeing 777 flew for a total of five hours, based on data automatically downloaded and sent to the ground from its Rolls-Royce Trent engines as part of a standard monitoring programme.
“Those reports are inaccurate,” Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a news conference. “As far as both Rolls-Royce and Boeing are concerned, those reports are inaccurate. The last (data) transmission from the aircraft was at 1.07am which indicated that everything was normal.”
Boeing and Rolls-Royce have yet to comment.
Reuters had previously reported that the plane’s transmission of the Acars technical data ceased after it lost contact with air traffic control.
Area being searched the size of Hungary
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, with 239 people on board, dropped off air traffic control screens at about 1.30am on Saturday, less than an hour into a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. There were no reports of bad weather or mechanical problems.
It is one of the most baffling mysteries in the history of modern aviation – there has been no trace of the plane since nor any sign of wreckage despite a search by the navies and military aircraft of over a dozen countries across Southeast Asia.
“It’s extraordinary that with all the (satellite and telecommunication) technology that we’ve got that an aircraft can disappear like this,” Tony Tyler, the head of the International Air Transport Association that links over 90 per cent of the world’s airlines, told reporters in London.
“It will trigger a desire to see how can we avoid this from happening again... I wouldn’t be surprised that the technology didn’t exist already but is not being used.”
The last definitive sighting of MH370 on civilian radar screens came as the plane flew northeast across the mouth of the Gulf of Thailand.
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 in the Malacca Strait, hundreds of miles to the west of its last known position. However, he stressed the plotting had not been corroborated.
The multi-national search team is combing both bodies of water, which total 93,000 square kilometres, an area the size of Hungary.
Hishammuddin, however, said the focus was on the Gulf of Thailand and the nearby South China Sea, where the plane lost contact. The US will send the world’s most advanced maritime surveillance aircraft, the P-8A Poseidon, to join the search later this week.
On the sixth day of the search, planes scanned an area of sea where Chinese satellite images had shown what could be debris, but found no sign of the airliner.