Malaysia Says Flight Ended in Ocean
The path of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean, Prime Minister Najib Razak said at a news conference in Kuala Lumpur.
PEARCE AIR FORCE BASE, Australia — Malaysia’s prime minister said Monday that further analysis of satellite data confirmed that the missing Malaysian airliner went down in the southern Indian Ocean. The announcement narrowed the search area but left many questions unanswered about why it flew to such a remote part of the world.
Experts had previously held out the possibility that the jet could have flown north instead, toward Central Asia, but the new data showed that it could have gone only south, said the prime minister, Najib Razak.
Mr. Najib appeared eager to bring closure to the families of the passengers on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, two-thirds of whom are Chinese. The families have grown increasingly angry about the lack of clear information about the plane’s fate. The Boeing 777, with 227 passengers and 12 crew members onboard, was headed from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it disappeared on March 8.
The aircraft’s last known position, according to the analysis, “is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites,” Mr. Najib said. “It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, Flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean.”
The new analysis of the flight path, the prime minister said, came from Inmarsat, the British company that provided the satellite data, and from Britain’s air safety agency. The company had “used a type of analysis never before used in an investigation of this sort,” he said.
Shortly before the prime minister spoke at 10 p.m. local time, Malaysia Airlines officials informed relatives of the missing passengers and crew gathered at a hotel near Kuala Lumpur, and sent text messages to those elsewhere.
The hunt for the missing plane has focused on the southern Indian Ocean area in recent days, and an Australian naval vessel searched there on Monday after a military surveillance aircraft spotted what was described as possible debris from the missing jetliner.
Mr. Najibsaid the Malaysian authorities would hold a news conference on Tuesday to give further details about the satellite data analysis and other developments in the search.
After a number of false sightings over more than two weeks of search efforts, Australian officials were cautious about what the crew members of a Royal Australian Air Force P-3 Orion aircraft spotted as they combed the search area Monday.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott told Parliament that the crew reported seeing two objects, “a gray or green circular object” and “an orange rectangular object,” in the ocean about 1,550 miles southwest of Perth, in western Australia.
“We don’t know whether any of these objects are from MH370,” Mr. Abbott said. The objects in the water “could be flotsam,” he said.
Even so, he tenuous lead was treated in Australia as a significant development.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority said that a naval survey ship, the Success, was on the scene and that the entire crew was looking for the objects. Andrew Thomas, a journalist with the Al Jazeera television news network who was aboard the Orion aircraft, said that the crew spotted four confirmed objects, that flares were dropped and that the Success was nearby.
Later on Monday, Australian authorities said all search aircraft had finished their missions for the day without making any further sightings.
The objects spotted by the Australian plane were different from the possible debris reportedly seen during the first search flights by two Chinese Air Force Ilyushin IL-76 aircraft on Monday.
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