What's Known about the Missing Airliner
The search and inconclusiveness of what occurred aboard Malaysian Airlines flight 370 as it made an intended voyage from the airport in the capital city of Kuala Lampur to Beijing, China remains painstakingly difficult. The hard facts of intelligence information that could have potentially pointed to helpful clues were from the beginning rather obtuse and non forthcoming. The first of what was known is that several of the onboard communication systems between the jetliner and air traffic controllers within a given airspace appear to have been disabled at ominous points early in the Boeing 777’s flight.
Shortly after the aircraft left the communication zone with Malaysian air controllers at a location just past the northeastern rim of the country, is when one of the two radars stopped transmitting. At that point, forty minutes after departure, the plane entered Thailand’s airspace. From there it had become too far to continue it’s communication of flight data with the Malaysian controllers. Thus, appropriately timed, a disabled primary system kept the plane largely undetected by Thailand’s primary civilian radar system at the moment it flew into the foreign surveillance area.
A secondary radar system was also equipped on board, which rather than emitting a signal, listens for incoming queries and responds with identifying a location and flight number of the plane. The Thai authority’s communication with that system was lost about ten minutes after the first system’s last correspondence with Kuala Lampur. Based upon what was received by the secondary system, Thai radar pinned the jet’s location at about one third the way across the Gulf of Thailand that separates Malaysia from Vietnam. Then that device abruptly stopped providing it’s tracking data. This was at 1:18am with another five hours remaining before the scheduled arrival in Beijing at 6:20am.
As has been speculated by the multitude of investigators handling the tragic disappearance early on, the notion of a deliberate disabling of the plane’s two radars seems almost certain.
Of the 239 passengers on board, two thirds were of Chinese citizenship. Many were business workers from the country’s rapidly growing middle class economy. Some were tourists returning home as was the case for a group of retirees who boarded the flight as a connection after having taken a trip to the Himalayas. A group of Chinese artists were expecting to make their way home after spending nearly two weeks in Kuala Lampur as hosts to a gallery show that was presenting their work.
Who may have been responsible for the lost aircraft has surely been the focus of all those involved with understanding the plane’s disappearance. The flight was being piloted by two men. The captain was Zaharid Ahmad Shah, 53, married and an experienced flight veteran who first began with the airlines in 1981. According to pictures posted in online news sources, the Zaharid residence just outside of Kuala Lampur is rather exquisite with two stories, a large automated front gate and a garage equipped with a self constructed flight simulator that the pilot regularly devoted many hours a week to working on. The much younger co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27 who began with the airline in 2007 was reported to have been engaged to marry and according to relatives, was responsible and a well respected young man.
Given the nefarious timing of when the two radar systems appear to have been dismantled, leads authorities to believe that whomever was involved in severing the communications system was highly aware of the 777’s functionality. The question of whether it was orchestrated maliciously be either of the two in the cockpit or ordered by any one of the others onboard in a high jacking situation will most likely remain uncertain unless and even if the plane’s black box voice recorders are found. These devices capture the last two hours of conversation but their discovery is so uncertain given the enormity of sea space that the ongoing search efforts are confronted with while producing empty handed results thus far. Battery life on those devices is approximately 30 days after which point the signal emitted from them becomes much weaker, significantly hindering their chances of being located.
The greatest hope for the 27 surveillance planes, 51 sea vessels and team of 14 cooperating nations being utilized in this effort is in finding some actual debris from this wreckage in the very near future.
Days after the disappearance, intelligence was provided by the Malaysian military whose radar is monitored separately from the two onboard civilian communication systems that were disabled shortly after take off. The release of this data came from the national airforce unit that operates a base near the northwest Malaysian coast in what was at one time a British command center built in 1941. What was observed by four Malaysian military personnel assigned to that radar control room at the time was believed to have been a non threatening aircraft moving westward across the north of the country. Their failure to react was apparently based upon reasoning at the time that their was nothing to be concerned with as it was not yet known that flight 370 had gone missing. It wasn’t until hours later, once word had spread that a plane was missing that the military personnel informed a superior.
It would be days later though that Malaysia’s military would reveal this evidence that the plane had reentered the country’s airspace after making a drastic redirection of it‘s flight pattern. About an hour into flight, the plane must have made a large U turn and subsequently began flying in a due west direction over the north of Malaysia.
Suspicions for why such critical information wasn’t provided immediately is viewed as a reluctance of Malaysia’s military to confess their fault in not reacting to an unauthorized aircraft flying over the border. Additionally, the information being offered by military departments of other countries including China and India were from the beginning thought to have been intentionally toned down as to not disclose the capability or lack there of for those nation’s security defense systems.
The other source of information that came days later was that of satellite data from an area of orbit far above the center of the Indian Ocean. It reasoned given various distances from a series of responses that the satellite was able to receive, that the plane must have been along one of two trajectory paths but with a certainty of exactly where remaining highly speculative. The conclusions to be drawn from these readings are based upon tracking the aircraft’s distance following it’s intermittent points of satellite contact.
It stands to suggest that one of two trajectories in which that flight may have traveled was along a north westerly route that would have taken the plane back over it’s originally planned path but then steering in a far westward course across China. This trajectory was largely dismissed by investigators due to the unlikelihood of the plane going undetected into the Chinese military airspace. So although the civilian air traffic communication system was inoperable, a military radar sighting would have prompted some response from either China, India or another nation that their airspace was being occupied by an unauthorized jet.
The other more credible assumption of trajectory given the satellite communication conveys an opposite course was taken where the jet turned southward and headed somewhere off of the western coast of Australia.
Critical in assessing this information is the time at which the military satellite communication was last recorded with the aircraft. That was rather astoundingly at 8:22am, more than six hours after the Malaysian military personnel overlooked the aircraft upon their radar screen. Thus it is known that the plane was still flying such a long time after departure. Based upon the two viable flight trajectories with an estimated distance for where the flight may have reached by that hour stands as being either in the Kazakhstan area or completely in the opposite southerly direction of the Indian Ocean.
All indications of the experts handling the search have focused attention towards about 1200 miles off the western coast of Australia in the Indian Ocean. It is a place where currents are very fast but water transparency is rather clear. Given the vast ambiguousness of a more specific starting point has made the efforts of trying to locate some of the wreckage nearly impossible. It’s believed also that by the time of the last recognition by satellite at around 8:22am, that the plane would have been at a perilous level of fuel.
Now three weeks after the August 8th departure, the search locations have been adjusted several times. The imagery taken from various satellite photographs over the targeted location have only offered speculation. Upon simply observing apparent floating objects from those images, deploying vessels and aircraft to those exact spots often takes hours and is seemingly a case of finding a needle in a haystack. But efforts continue with much desired answers from family's of the victims and hope amongst the international community that something will soon be found to bring a bit of closure to the tragic loss of those on board.
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