MH 370- The story of flight MH370, from boarding to the still unsolved mystery As Day 16 of searching for Malaysia Airlines (MAS) flight MH370 draws to an end, The New York Times (NYT) offered the world a glimpse into what would have started as nothing more than another routine flight until the Boeing 777 aircraft disappeared. In a detailed story earlier today, NYT re-enacted the flight, beginning from the 227 passengers from over two dozen countries arriving at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) and boarding the plane manned by a crew of 12. MAS flies from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing twice daily non-stop. MH370 departed at 12.35am and was expected to land at 6.30am. Beijing and Kuala Lumpur are in the same timezone of GMT+8. Onboard were a hodgepodge of travelers: vacationing Malaysian families, European businessmen pursuing deals, Chinese tourists returning home after visiting relatives and shopping. On March 7, a delegation of 34 Chinese artists, relatives and organisers, who had participated in an art exhibition in Kuala Lumpur, arrived at KLIA at about 8pm. The NYT report described the flights oldest passenger Liu Rusheng, 77, as perhaps the most prominent of the artists. The calligrapher had published an essay about how much he treasures life because he had “cheated death” six times. It started when he was a baby after he was temporarily abandoned by his parents, who were fleeing invading Japanese soldiers. The NYT quoted the delegations host Daniel Liau, who said Liu had “the energy of a young man. Liau accompanied the delegation to the airport, helped them check-in their luggage and stayed to chat with them for 90 minutes. Liau called the delegation one last time after they had cleared security to take the monorail to the satellite terminal. He said one of the organisers Hou Bo replied that they had reached the gate and everyone is okay. Boarding started at about midnight and Liu, his wife Bao Yuanhua, 73, the other senior citizens and the families traveling with the two infants settled in first. Passengers with passes for the 35 seats in business class were next to board. The IBM executive from Texas, Philip Wood, 50, a platinum frequent-flyer cardholder who was relocating from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur, was in coach. NYT said Wood and his partner Sarah Bajc, 48, exchanged a dozen text messages before his flight about the movers that were arriving at their Beijing home the next morning. “We discussed the state of packing, what still needed to be done,” Bajc said. His last message came just before he left for the airport. Others on the flight were just passing through Kuala Lumpur, including Shi Xianwen, 26, a new father returning to China from a business trip to Australia. At the airport in Perth, he spent 40 minutes picking out a bracelet watch for his wife, whose birthday was approaching, an employee at the duty-free shop said. There were two Iranian passengers who boarded using stolen Austrian and Italian passports - Pouria Nourmohammadi Mehrdad, 19, and Seyed Mohammed Reza Delavar, 29 - who have been described by Interpol as migrants trying to smuggle into Europe. Information technology student Mohammad Mallaeibasir, 18, said the pair stayed in his apartment in Kuala Lumpur the night before they left. Mehrdad was his friend from high school in Teheran and he knew his buddy was starting a new life in Germany, where his mother was waiting. He remembered that Mehrdad was quite nervous, NYT reported. Mallaeibasir said he drove them to KLIA on March 7, where Delavar got out and went into the airport first. When Mehrdad got out to leave some 10 minutes later, Mallaeibasir gave him a hug and wished him a safe flight. As the 227 passengers stepped into MH370, they were greeted by the flight attendants - four women in kebayas and six men in gray three-piece suits. Hand towels, refreshments and newspapers were distributed in business class as economy class flyers found their seats. Outside, ground crews loaded the passengers luggage into the jet’s cargo hold, which can carry up to six pallets and 14 shipping containers. Among the cargo was a “significant” number of lithium batteries, which can be flammable. After the doors closed, the chief steward Andrew Nari, would have welcomed the passengers via the loudspeaker and reminded them to turn off their cellphones. Before shutting off his own, he sent a message to his mother. “It was just a normal SMS telling me that his plane would fly off soon,” she later told local newspaper The Star. In the cockpit were the pilots - the captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, who joined the airline in 1981 and had 18,365 hours of flying experience, and his first officer Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, who was transitioning to the Boeing 777 from the airline’s narrow-body fleet. After nudging away from the gate, the plane taxied to runway 32R. The cabin lights would have dimmed before one of the pilots asked the crew to be seated for take-off. With two Rolls-Royce Trent engines, each capable of generating 92,000 pounds of thrust, the jet raced down the 2.5-mile-long runway and lifted off at 12.41am. At 1.07am, as the jet approached the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia, ground crew received what the authorities have described as a routine text message from the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which sends regular updates on the condition of the plane by radio or satellite. By then, the passengers were having their first beverage service. Air traffic control in Subang followed MH370 by tracking its transponder, a device that “squawks” or emits an identifying signal in response to a signal from radar. The plane squawked code 2157 and reported altitude, speed and bearing. As the plane approached Vietnamese airspace, cruising 35,000 feet over the Gulf of Thailand, Subang informed the pilots that they were being transferred to radar control in Ho Chi Minh City. At 1.19am, a voice identified by the authorities as that of Fariq, replied, “All right, good night. MH370s transponder stopped responding 20 minutes later. NYT said it is unclear whether someone turned a dial on an instrument panel between the pilot and co-pilot and put the transponder in standby mode, or whether a malfunction caused it to go quiet. One moment, radar showed the plane traveling northwest at 542 miles per hour. The next, it was gone. The military in Vietnam marked the time at 43 seconds past 1.20am. Vietnamese and Malaysian air traffic controllers failed to contact MH370 and asked one aircraft after another to radio the jet in the early morning hours of March 8. The pilots listened as one plane after another tried to contact MH370 and heard only static. Those familiar with the calls said they were calm and even laconic, and pilots trying to reach MH370 had no reason to believe it had suffered anything more than an ordinary radio malfunction. The loss of contact with the plane soon turned into an urgent multinational search operation in the South China Sea, the Straits of Malacca and then across land and sea in two hemispheres. As air traffic controllers tried to re-establish contact with MH370 in the early hours of March 8, military radar at the Butterworth air force base on Malaysia’s west coast picked up an unidentified aircraft near where the plane disappeared. However, no immediate action was taken. At a briefing on the base the next night, about 80 air force personnel were told there was “no proof” the unidentified signal showed the missing plane making a sharp turn, flying back across Peninsular Malaysia and then turning again and heading northwest over the Strait of Malacca, a person familiar with the situation said. Investigators now believe that was exactly what happened, and the failure to recognise MH370 in the radar data or refusal to do so, to avoid the embarrassment of admitting an unidentified plane had breached air defence meant the Malaysian authorities continued to search the South China Sea instead of the Strait of Malacca. The authorities also failed to move quickly on data that showed the plane had continued to fly nearly seven more hours. The data was a series of regular handshake signals from the plane to a satellite seeking to determine if the aircraft was still in range. Chris McLaughlin, a vice president at satellite communications firm Inmarsat, said technicians pulled the logs of all transmissions from the plane within four hours of its disappearance, and after a day without sign of MH370, they began scouring the company’s databases for any trace of the plane. Inmarsat technicians identified what appeared to be a series of fleeting “pings” between MH370, a satellite over the Indian Ocean and a ground station in Perth, Australia. But while they carried a unique code identifying the aircraft as MH370, the signals contained no positioning or other data that could indicate where the plane was when it sent them. By Sunday afternoon, a team of Inmarsat engineers set to work using the principles of trigonometry to determine the distance between the satellite and the plane at the time of each ping, and then to calculate two rough flight paths. The plane, they concluded, could have gone north over countries likely to have picked it up on radar, or south toward the Indian Ocean and Antarctica. The Malaysian government said it received Inmarsat’s data on March 12 and spent three days analysing and vetting it with American investigators before redirecting the search on March 15. That was more than a week after the last ping was recorded at 8.11am on March 8 from over the southern Indian Ocean, halfway around the world from where the plane should have been, on a tarmac in Beijing. Unbridled speculation of the planes disappearance has surrounded the unfolding global drama, as experts try to determine if the plane, which had seen more than 7,500 flights and clocked over 53,400 hours in the air since 2002, disappeared due to malfunction or defect related to its design, build or engineering. The NYT described MH370s disappearance as perhaps the most perplexing case in modern aviation - one that investigators say may take years to solve, or could remain a mystery forever. – March 23, 2014.
Posted on: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 14:36:30 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015