New data: Plane met end in Indian Ocean

A relative of one of the Chinese passengers aboard the Malaysia Airlines, MH370 grieves after being told of the latest news in Beijing, China, Monday, March 24, 2014. A new analysis of satellite data indicates the missing Malaysia Airlines plane crashed into a remote corner of the Indian Ocean, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Monday. Malaysia Airlines said in a statement to the families that "our prayers go out to all the loved ones of the 226 passengers and of our 13 friends and colleagues at this enormously painful time." (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
A relative of one of the Chinese passengers aboard the Malaysia Airlines, MH370 grieves after being told of the latest news in Beijing, China, Monday, March 24, 2014. A new analysis of satellite data indicates the missing Malaysia Airlines plane crashed into a remote corner of the Indian Ocean, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Monday. Malaysia Airlines said in a statement to the families that "our prayers go out to all the loved ones of the 226 passengers and of our 13 friends and colleagues at this enormously painful time." (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

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 with its passengers and crew.

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 Prime Minister Najib Razak.

Najib appeared eager to give some finality 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 March 8.

The aircraft’s last known position, according to the analysis, “is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites,” 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 about the conclusion. Most were told in person or by telephone, the airline said, and some were sent a text message: “Malaysia Airlines deeply regrets that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board survived. As you will hear in the next hour from Malaysia’s Prime Minister, we must now accept all evidence suggests the plane went down in the Southern Indian Ocean.”

Relatives of passengers in Beijing were called to a hotel near the airport to hear the news, and some 50 of them gathered there. Afterward, they filed out of a conference room in heart-wrenching grief.

One woman collapsed and fell on her knees, crying “My son! My son!”

Medical teams arrived at the Lido hotel with several stretchers, and one elderly man was carried out of the conference room on one of them, his face covered by a jacket. Minutes later, a middle-aged woman was taken out on another stretcher, her face ashen and her blank eyes seemingly staring off into the distance.

Most of the relatives refused to speak to the reporters gathered, and some lashed out in anger, urging journalists not to film the scene. Security guards restrained a man with close-cropped hair as he kicked a TV cameraman and shouted, “Don’t film. I’ll beat you to death!”

In Kuala Lumpur, screaming could be heard from inside the Hotel Bangi Putrajaya, where some of the families of passengers have been given rooms.

About 2 a.m. today, a group of family members read out a statement condemning Malaysia Airlines and the Malaysian government and military and vowing to hold them responsible for the deaths of their loved ones.

Relatives planned to stage a further protest outside the Malaysian Embassy in Beijing.

In a statement after the Monday announcement, the airline said that the families “have been at the heart of every action the company has taken since the flight disappeared,” and that when it “receives approval from the investigating authorities, arrangements will be made to bring the families to the recovery area.”

Najib said the Malaysian authorities would hold a news conference today to give further details about the satellite data analysis and other developments in the search.

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement demanding to see the analysis that led to Najib’s announcement.

“We have already asked that the Malaysian side go further in providing all the information and evidence used to reach this conclusion,” said the statement from Hong Lei, a spokesman for the ministry.

“China’s search work is still continuing,” the statement said. “We hope that the Malaysian side and other countries will also be able to continue their search work.”

The hunt for the missing plane has focused on a section of the southern Indian Ocean in recent days, and an Australian naval vessel searched there Monday after a military surveillance aircraft spotted what was described as possible debris from the missing jetliner.

But the waters off western Australia pose formidable challenges for the hunt. After a number of false sightings during 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 had 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,” Abbott said. The objects in the water “could be flotsam,” he said.

Even so, the tenuous lead was treated in Australia as a significant development.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority said a naval survey ship, the Success, was on the scene and the crew was looking for the objects. Andrew Thomas, a journalist with the Al-Jazeera television news network who was aboard the Orion aircraft, said the crew spotted four confirmed objects, that flares were dropped and that the Success was nearby.

This morning, the Australian-led search team said it was suspending its operations for the day because of rough weather. The sole ship in the search left the area in the morning and was headed south for the time being. The weather in this part of the southern Indian Ocean can be extreme. Winds today are expected to be as high as 50 mph and will be accompanied by heavy rain. There also will be a low cloud cover with a ceiling of 200 to 500 feet.

The floating 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 the same day. Later Monday, Australian authorities said all search aircraft had finished their missions for the day and had reported no further sightings.

The crew of one of the Chinese planes spotted “suspicious objects,” according to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, which had a reporter on the search plane. But the description was vague, and the observation was made during poor weather conditions. A Chinese diplomat in Australia, Qu Boxun, told reporters that the plane was at “a very high altitude when the objects were spotted.”

Chris McLaughlin, a vice president at Inmarsat, the British satellite operator, said the company had spent the past six days reviewing data about Flight 370 in close consultation with Boeing and others involved in the investigation and came to the conclusion that the plane must have flown to the south.

“Our measured series of signals very much mirror the predicted southern track after the last possible turn,” McLaughlin said, adding that they were consistent with previous indications that the plane continued on at more or less the same speed and in the same direction for the last hours of flight.

He said Inmarsat was confident enough in the new analysis, which it reviewed with Boeing and with a number of independent aviation experts, that it submitted its findings Sunday to the Malaysians by way of the British safety agency, the Air Accidents Investigation Branch.

“What we still can’t say is what happened at the end, when the plane ran out of fuel,” McLaughlin said. “We have no way of knowing if it dropped from the sky or glided.”

The search for the aircraft’s fuselage and other bulky parts of the jet that probably sank to the bottom of the ocean is likely to be focused within a limited distance from the suspected flight path. But the search for floating debris, which investigators say will offer proof that the jet hit the water,is likely to be increasingly widespread.

Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer at the University of New South Wales who studies and has conducted experiments on the flow of water around Australia, said currents in the southern Indian Ocean could scatter floating debris in very different directions.

Finding the plane’s flight recorders, or black boxes, will be crucial to determining what may have caused the plane’s disappearance. The devices are designed to transmit signals to help searchers locate them, but searchers have only about two weeks left to find them before the devices’ batteries run out.

The U.S. Pacific Command said Monday that it would move a Towed Pinger Locator System, capable of locating a black box to a depth of 20,000 feet, into the region.

“This movement is simply a prudent effort to pre-position equipment and trained personnel closer to the search area, so that if debris is found, we will be able to respond as quickly as possible, since the battery life of the black box’s pinger is limited,” Cmdr. Chris Budde, a 7th Fleet operations officer, said in an email statement.

The reasons for Flight 370’s radical departure from its intended flight path remain mysterious.

The Malaysian government has offered few findings from the police inquiry into the people on the missing plane, including the captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, and the junior pilot in the cockpit, Fariq Abdul Hamid. Investigators and officials have said the plane’s extraordinary trajectory, veering far off course just after its last radio contact with the ground, and the fact that its transponders stopped working at about the same time, appeared to involve actions by someone experienced in aviation.

Hishammuddin Hussein, the Malaysian defense minister and acting transport minister, said Monday that the police had interviewed more than a hundred people, including relatives of each pilot. He said a committee was considering whether to make public the transcript of the pilots’ communications with air controllers before the plane disappeared.

Hishammuddin also confirmed that the plane was carrying wooden shipping pallets. One of the objects reportedly sighted in the Indian Ocean was such a pallet, but they are commonly used, and one in the ocean could have come from a ship.

The chief executive of Malaysia Airlines, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, said Monday that the plane was also carrying about 440 pounds of lithium batteries, which can be a fire hazard in certain circumstances. But he said the batteries had been handled and packaged so that they were deemed “nonhazardous” under civil aviation standards. The cargo also included some fruit and radio equipment, he added.

Ahmad Jauhari did not directly answer a question about whether the full cargo manifest had been given to Australian investigators, saying that was a matter for the investigation team.

“If the Australians request this, they have to go and request it from the investigating team,” he said.

Information for this article was contributed by Thomas Fuller and Chris Buckley of The New York Times; by Aritz Parra, Christopher Bodeen, Didi Tang, Ian Mader, Todd Pitman and Eileen Ng of The Associated Press; and by Jia Lynn Yang, William Wan, Ashley Halsey III, Joel Achenbach, Scott Higham, William Branigin and Simon Denyer of The Washington Post.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/25/2014

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