Weeks ago, Malaysian authorities said the last message from the airplane cockpit was, "All right, good night."
The sign-off to air traffic controllers, which investigators said was
spoken by the plane's copilot, was among the few concrete details
officials released in a mystery that's baffled investigators and drawn
global attention since the Boeing 777 disappeared with 239 people aboard
mid-flight on March 8.
There's only one problem. It turns out, it wasn't true.
On Monday, Malaysia's
Transport Ministry said the final voice transmission from the cockpit of
Flight 370 was actually "Good night Malaysian three seven zero."
Malaysian authorities
gave no explanation for the discrepancy between the two quotes. And
authorities are still trying to determine whether it was the plane's
pilot or copilot who said them.
The new language is
routine and is not a sign that anything untoward occurred aboard the
flight, said CNN aviation analyst Mary Schiavo.
But the change in wording
weeks into the search for the missing plane raises questions about how
Malaysian officials have handled the investigation.
"It speaks to credibility issues, unfortunately," Schiavo said.
"We haven't had a
straight, clear word that we can have a lot of fidelity in," said
Michael Goldfarb, former chief of staff at the U.S. Federal Aviation
Administration. "We have the tragedy of the crash, we have the tragedy
of an investigation gone awry and then we have questions about where we
go from here."
No matter what the
pilots' last words were, it's hard to understand what they mean without
more details from authorities about what they said and how they said it,
CNN aviation analyst Miles O'Brien told "The Lead with Jake Tapper" on
Monday.
"Without the preceding
information ... either the transcript or the recordings themselves, it's
difficult to know what any of that really means," he said. "And that's
the problem with this investigation, which has been so opaque."
Malaysian authorities have defended their handling of the situation.
Acting Transportation
Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said Monday that authorities were not
hiding anything by declining to release some details of the missing
flight. Some details are part of ongoing investigations into what
happened to the plane, he said.
"We are not hiding anything," he said. "We are just following the procedure that is being set."
Source: Plane's turn considered 'criminal act'
A Malaysian government
source told CNN Monday that the airliner's turn off course is being
considered a "criminal act," either by one of the pilots or someone else
onboard the missing airliner.
And in a background
briefing given to CNN, Malaysian investigators said they believed the
plane was "flown by someone with good flying knowledge of the aircraft."
Several friends of Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah said they refuse to believe he could have been the "criminal" controlling the plane.
Rallying to his defense, they showed CNN's Nic Robertson pictures of him at flight school.
"I think finally it will
come to a stage where people think of him as a hero when things come
out," friend Jason Lee said. "I think he is a hero."
A senior Malaysian
government official last week told CNN law enforcement analyst Tom
Fuentes that authorities have found nothing in days of investigating the
two pilots that leads them to any motive, be it political, suicidal or
extremist.
And an ongoing FBI
review of the two pilots' hard drives, including one in a flight
simulator Zaharie had built at his home, has not turned up a "smoking
gun," a U.S. official with knowledge of the investigation told CNN last
week.
In a Facebook post, the captain's daughter lashed out at a British tabloid that claimed to quote her criticizing her father.
"You should consider
making movies since you are so good at making up stories and scripts out
of thin air," Aishah Zaharie wrote. "May God have mercy on your souls."
Several leads dry up as search ramps up
Potential leads on the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 keep coming. So do the setbacks and frustrations.
Ten military planes, a
civilian jet and nine ships are part of Tuesday's Indian Ocean search,
which spans a swath west of Perth that's 120,000 square kilometers
(46,300 square miles), the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said.
Monday's search ended
without finding anything significant, Australian officials said. Four
orange objects spotted by search aircraft and earlier described as
promising turned out be nothing more than old fishing gear, they said.
Finding possible leads
that turn out to be trash, fishing gear or jellyfish isn't easy for
search teams, U.S. Navy Cmdr. William Marks told CNN's "AC360."
"You have that
excitement, and then when it is garbage or seaweed or something like
that, it's hard, it's hard to realize you didn't find anything," he
said. "But you just keep at it and you keep at it. And this is what we
do. This is what we train for."
U.S. Navy officials
loaded underwater locating gear aboard an Australian naval ship and set
out to sea Monday evening, but won't be able to use the equipment until
investigators narrow the search zone.
The gear includes a
pinger locator that's towed behind a ship and scans for the sound of the
locator beacon attached to the plane's flight data recorder. Also
onboard is an underwater drone that can scan the ocean floor for debris.
It will take the ship,
the Ocean Shield, three days just to get to the search zone, leaving
precious little time to locate the plane's flight data recorders before
the batteries on its locator beacon run out. The batteries are designed
to last 30 days; the plane has been missing for 24 days.
Under favorable sea
conditions, the pingers can be heard 2 nautical miles away. But high
seas, background noise, wreckage or silt can all make pingers harder to
detect.
In this case, searchers barely know where to look at all.
"We are searching a vast
area of ocean, and we are working on quite limited information,"
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott told reporters Monday.
"Nevertheless, the best brains in the world are applying themselves to
this task. ... If this mystery is solvable, we will solve it."
Late last week, the search area shifted more than 600 miles after what authorities described as "a new credible lead." But a Wall Street Journal report Monday night,
citing anonymous people familiar with the matter, said before that
crews had searched for three days in the wrong location due to "lapses
in coordination among countries and companies" trying to find the
missing jet.
What happened? Andy
Pasztor, one of the reporters who wrote the story, said it boiled down
to poor coordination between two parts of the investigation: one dealing
with satellite data, and the other one dealing with fuel consumption
and aircraft performance.
"And so what we're left
with is sort of a three-day gap where it's clear that folks were
definitely looking in the wrong place," he said.
Despite false leads and other setbacks that have plagued the search, officials have vowed to keep looking.
"The effort is ramping up, not winding down," Abbott told CNN on Monday.
Malaysia will ask the United States about the possibility of deploying more military assets, Hishammuddin said Monday.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said Monday that he will consider any additional requests from Hishammuddin.
"I don't know what
additional requests he will make of me," he said. "I certainly will
listen carefully to whatever those are. ... We're providing everything
that we can provide, as are other countries."
Relatives' demands
Family members of people
onboard Flight 370 have accused Malaysian officials of giving them
confusing, conflicting information since the plane vanished more than
three weeks ago.
On Monday, dozens of Chinese family members visited a Kuala Lumpur temple. They chanted, lit candles and meditated.
"Chinese are kindhearted
people," said Jiang Hui, the families' designated representative. "But
we can clearly distinguish between the good and evil. We will never
forgive for covering the truth from us and the criminal who delayed the
rescue mission."
Jiang asked Malaysia to apologize for announcing March 24 that the plane had crashed, despite the lack of any "direct evidence."
At the daily press
briefing, Hishammuddin responded, saying Malaysian Prime Minister Najib
Razak had not used the word "crash" or mentioned a lack of survivors in
his announcement that the plane's flight had "ended" in the southern
Indian Ocean.
He described a meeting
Saturday between Malaysian authorities and Flight 370 relatives as "the
most difficult meeting I've ever attended."
"The families are heartbroken. For many, the strain of the past few weeks has been unbearable," he said.
He said Malaysia will
hold a high-level briefing for families where experts will explain some
of the data and methodology used to guide the search.
He also said authorities
have discussed with the families what happens if they are unable to
find debris from the missing plane. But he declined to discuss it with
reporters Monday, saying "to be fair to the families, that is something I
would not want to share with the public at the moment."
Beijing has also
publicly slammed Malaysia's efforts to find the Boeing 777. Of the 239
people aboard the jetliner, 154 were Chinese. But Malaysia says it's
done its best with what it has.
"History will judge us as a country that has been very responsible," Hishammuddin said.
Link to source: http://edition.cnn.com
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