Citing Bad Weather, Australia Suspends Search for Flight
By KEITH BRADSHER, EDWARD WONG and THOMAS FULLER
“Horrendous” conditions delayed the search Tuesday, as airline officials
said the passengers’ relatives must accept that their loved ones had
almost certainly died.
KUALA
LUMPUR, Malaysia — The Malaysian authorities released new details on
Tuesday of the last satellite communications by Malaysia Airlines Flight
370, even as furious family members and friends of the plane’s
passengers broke through police lines in Beijing and marched to the
Malaysian Embassy.
Hishammuddin
Hussein, the defense minister and acting transport minister, said that
the plane appeared to have sent a last, partial satellite signal eight
minutes after a previously disclosed electronic “handshake” between the
plane and a satellite at 8:11 a.m. on March 8. The incomplete signal
represented a “partial handshake,” he said.
“At this time, this transmission is not understood and is subject to further ongoing work,” Mr. Hishammuddin said.
The
next signal from the aircraft was due at 9:15 a.m. but never came. Mr.
Hishammuddin referred delicately to the likelihood that the cessation of
signals was caused by the plane running out of fuel while far from
land, saying that the timing of the end to transmissions, “is consistent
with the maximum endurance of the aircraft.”
On
Tuesday morning, relatives and friends of many of the 153 Chinese
passengers on Flight 370 gathered outside the Malaysian Embassy in
Beijing to demand that Malaysian officials tell them the truth about the
fate of the flight. They went there despite assurances from the police
that the Malaysian ambassador would come to their hotel to talk to them,
an apparent effort to dissuade them from going to the embassy,
according to people on the scene.
The
group shoved past police officers as they left their hotel, arriving on
foot at the embassy about 40 minutes later. The street was crowded with
journalists, police officers and people trying to get past police
roadblocks to reach some of the other embassies on the block, including
the American, Israeli and French embassies. A line of paramilitary
police officers then blocked the road and prevented journalists from
following the marchers.
One
diplomat came out to talk to the protesters, who presented the embassy
with a scathing collective statement saying the families wanted answers
and would consider Malaysian officials and the airline to be “murderers”
if the families find that missteps had led to the deaths of their loved
ones.
In
the midafternoon, a man who said his surname was Wang spoke at the
hotel where the families were staying, saying he represented them. He
said the Malaysian government had so far failed to provide any evidence
for its conclusion that the plane had ended up crashing in the Indian
Ocean, killing everyone on board. He said most of the families did not
believe the Malaysian government’s narrative about the loss of the
plane.
“I
just want the truth to come out with evidence,” Mr. Wang said, adding
that he believed hijackers who harbored ill will toward Malaysia had
taken the plane.
After
3 p.m., the Malaysian ambassador to China arrived to talk privately to
the relatives and friends gathered in the hotel’s ballroom. A palpable
feeling of anger and frustration hung over the conversation, people in
the room said.
The
Chinese government continued to make skeptical remarks over the
announcement by the Malaysians. In the afternoon, a Foreign Ministry
spokesman, Hong Lei, said at a regularly scheduled news conference: “We
are highly concerned with Malaysia’s conclusion, and have demanded full
information and the evidence that supports the conclusion.”
But
in Kuala Lumpur, Mr. Hishammuddin bristled at a news conference when a
succession of Chinese journalists asked him about delays in finding the
missing plane. “Can I also remind you that we received satellite data
from China, regarding sightings in the South China Sea, which made us
distract ourselves from the search and rescue, to search areas that had
already been searched?” he said.
Mr.
Hishammuddin’s office subsequently released calculations from Inmarsat
showing a wide swath of sea in the southern Indian Ocean where the plane
could have ended up, depending on whether its ground speed was 400
knots or 450 knots or somewhere in between.
The
area of ocean to be searched measures 469,407 square nautical miles —
equivalent to 621,600 square miles or 1.61 million square kilometers.
That is a fifth of the combined area of the northern and southern
corridors that were initially disclosed for searches on March 18.
Where Objects Have Been Found
In the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
5,000 FT.
Possible flight paths
AUSTRALIA
INDIAN OCEAN
WATER DEPTH
10,000 FT.
Perth
10,000 FT.
Areas previously
searched
Albany
15,000 FT.
10,000 FT.
OBJECTS SPOTTED
March 16 (satellite image)
Monday’s
planned
search areas
March 18 (satellite image)
March 24 (by a Chinese plane)
But it is still an enormous area, greater in size than California, Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington State combined.
By
comparison, aircraft operating out of Perth, Australia, have been
trying to do sweeps of about 20,000 square nautical miles a day. An
underwater search for pings from the aircraft’s black box would be much
slower, with the United States Navy now sending to Perth from New York
an undersea listening device that is designed to be towed behind a
slow-moving ship.
Mr.
Hishammuddin said at a news conference on Tuesday evening that all
further search for the aircraft had been canceled in the so-called
northern corridor, from Kazakhstan across China to northern Laos, and
had also been suspended in the east-central Indian Ocean near Indonesia.
The deputy chief of Australia’s Defense Force, Air Marshal Mark Binskin, underlined the vastness of the search area.
“We
are not searching for a needle in a haystack — we are still trying to
define where the haystack is,” he told reporters at Pearce Air Force
Base, near Perth.
David
Johnston, Australia’s defense minister, described the search as taking
place in “probably one of the most remote parts of the planet” and one
that “has shipwrecked many sailors.” He said an Australian vessel, which
on Monday was scouring for possible debris spotted by an aircraft, was
forced to deploy 75 miles to the south because of weather conditions.
Ahmad
Jauhari Yahya, the chief executive of Malaysia Airlines, repeated the
assessment of the authorities here that those aboard the aircraft all
appear to have perished when the plane ran out of fuel, particularly
given that it has been 17 days since the plane disappeared. “For anyone
to survive that long is extremely, extremely remote,” he said.
Khalid
bin Abu Bakar, the inspector general of the Malaysian police, declined
to discuss details of police inquiries after the disappearance of the
plane, saying “That would jeopardize the ongoing investigations.”
Mr.
Johnston, speaking to reporters at Pearce Air Force Base, said that
despite several reports of possible debris from the plane having being
spotted in the southern Indian Ocean, none had thus far been recovered,
suggesting that any wreckage could be in an altogether different area.
Describing a multinational search effort that included ships and
aircraft from nations including China, Australia, South Korea, Japan,
the United States, and New Zealand, he called it “one of the largest
efforts you’ll ever see” in terms of maritime surveillance.
As
part of an ambitious multinational effort to find any debris from the
plane, the United States military said Monday it was sending an unmanned
submersible craft capable of searching for wreckage using sonar
systems. Known as the Bluefin-21 autonomous underwater vehicle, it was
sent by air from New York and was expected to arrive in Perth on
Tuesday.Rear
Admiral John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters that the
submersible, which is shaped like a torpedo, would only be useful once
the location of the wreckage is known.
“It’s
being sent there to be ready should there be a need,” he said. “And
right now, there’s no need. We do not have a debris field.”
The
United States Navy has also dispatched a pinger locater, which is
designed to be towed behind a vessel and listens for the signals emitted
by the aircraft’s voice and data recorders, known as black boxes.
The
pinger locater, which will be towed behind an Australian commercial
vessel, was used in the search for Air France Flight 447, which crashed
into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to
Paris.
The
Australian government suspended search operations Tuesday for the
wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, citing “horrendous” weather
conditions in the southern Indian Ocean, the remote and treacherous seas
where authorities believe the plane crashed.
In
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, officials with Malaysia Airlines stressed that
despite the lack of details about the plane’s fate, the relatives of the
passengers and crew must accept that their loved ones had almost
certainly died. Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak, announced Monday that new data left no doubt that the plane had gone down in the ocean.
“We
must accept the painful reality that the aircraft is now lost, and that
none of the passengers or crew on board survived,” said Mohamed Nor
Yusof, the chairman of Malaysia Airlines. He stressed that the airline’s
primary responsibility now was caring for the grieving families.
He also said, “The investigation still underway may yet prove to be even longer and complex than it has been since March 8th.”
The Australian government said the search for the plane would resume on Wednesday, with 12 aircraft taking part.
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