Australia yesterday took charge of scouring the southern Indian Ocean for a missing passenger jet, while Malaysia requested radar data from countries stretching as far as central Asia, amid mounting evidence the plane’s disappearance was meticulously planned.
No trace of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has been found since it vanished on March 8 with 239 people aboard. Investigators are increasingly convinced it was diverted perhaps thousands of miles off course by someone with deep knowledge of the Boeing 777-200ER and commercial navigation.
Suspicions of hijacking or sabotage hardened further after it was confirmed the last radio message from the cockpit - an informal “all right, good night” - was spoken after someone had begun disabling one of the plane’s automatic tracking systems.
“Initial investigations indicate it was the co-pilot who basically spoke,” Malaysia Airlines CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya told a news briefing yesterday.
Satellite data suggests the plane could be anywhere in either of two vast arcs: one stretching from northern Thailand to the borders of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, or a southern arc from Indonesia into the Indian Ocean west of Australia. Kazakhstan has joined the hunt for the missing jet. Authorities are not ruling out the northern corridor that crosses through China, India and Pakistan - all of which have indicated they have seen no sign of the plane so far.
China, which has been vocal in its impatience with Malaysian efforts to find the plane, called on its smaller neighbour to “immediately” expand and clarify the scope of the search. About two-thirds of the passengers aboard MH370 were Chinese.
Malaysia’s transport ministry said in a statement yesterday it had sent diplomatic notes to all countries along the northern and southern search corridors, requesting radar and satellite information as well as land, sea and air search operations.
Meanwhile, central Asian neighbours Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan yesterday said no unidentified planes had crossed their air space on March 8.
In a detailed statement, the Kazakh Civil Aviation Committee said even if the airliner had reached Kazakhstan’s air space, it would have been detected there.
Meanwhile, Kyrgyz civil aviation authorities had ruled out any possibility of the airliner disappearing in or near Kyrgyzstan. “No, this plane did not fly over Kyrgyzstan’s territory,” Dair Tokobayev, vice-president of Kyrgyzstan’s main civilian airport Manas near the capital Bishkek, told the news agency.
