Plane’s last signal said incomplete

Passengers’ families gather at embassy, demand answers

Relatives of Chinese passengers aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 protest outside the Malaysian Embassy in Beijing on Tuesday.

Relatives of Chinese passengers aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 protest outside the Malaysian Embassy in Beijing on Tuesday.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Malaysian authorities released new details Tuesday of the last satellite communications by Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, and furious family members and friends of the plane’s

passengers broke through police lines in Beijing and marched to the Malaysian Embassy.

Hishammuddin Hussein, the defense minister and acting transport minister, said the plane appeared to have sent a last, partial satellite signal eight minutes after a previously disclosed “handshake,” or electronic connection, between the plane and a satellite at 8:11 a.m. March 8. The incomplete signal represented a “partial handshake,” he said.

“At this time, this transmission is not understood and is subject to further ongoing work,” Hishammuddin said.

The next signal from the aircraft was due at 9:15 a.m. but never came. Hishammuddin referred delicately to the likelihood that the cessation of signals came after the plane ran out of fuel, saying the timing “is consistent with the maximum endurance of the aircraft.”

The plane took off from Kuala Lumpur at 12:41 a.m. March 8.

On Tuesday, relatives and friends of many of the 153 Chinese passengers on Flight 370 gathered outside the Malaysian Embassy in Beijing to demand that Malaysian officials tell them the truth about the fate of the flight. They went there despite assurances from police that the Malaysian ambassador would go to their hotel to talk to them, an apparent effort to dissuade them from going to the embassy, people at the scene said.

One diplomat went out to talk to the protesters, who presented the embassy with a collective statement saying the families wanted answers and would consider Malaysian officials and the airline to be “murderers” if the families found that missteps had led to the deaths of their loved ones.

In the midafternoon, a man who said his surname was Wang spoke at the hotel where the families were staying, saying he represented them.

Wang said the Malaysian government has so far failed to provide any evidence for its conclusion that the plane crashed in the Indian Ocean,killing everyone on board. He said most of the families did not believe the Malaysian government’s narrative about the loss of the plane.

“I just want the truth to come out with evidence,” Wang said, adding that he believed hijackers who harbored ill will toward Malaysia had taken the plane.

After 3 p.m., the Malaysian ambassador to China arrived to talk privately to the relatives and friends gathered in the hotel’s ballroom. A feeling of anger and frustration hung over the conversation, people in the room said.

The Chinese government continued to make skeptical remarks about the announcement by the Malaysians.

“We are highly concerned with Malaysia’s conclusion, and have demanded full information and the evidence that supports the conclusion,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said.

In Kuala Lumpur, Hishammuddin bristled at a news conference when a succession of Chinese journalists asked him about delays in finding the missing plane. “Can I also remind you that we received satellite data from China, regarding sightings in the South China Sea, which made us distract ourselves from the search and rescue to search areas that had already been searched?” he said.

Hishammuddin’s office subsequently released calculations from Inmarsat, a British satellite company, showing a wide area in the southern Indian Ocean where the plane could have ended up, depending on whether its ground speed was between 460 and 517 miles per hour. The area to be searched measures 469,407 square nautical miles - equivalent to 621,600 square miles.

That is a fifth of the combined area of the northern and southern arcs that were identified as search areas March 18. But it is still greater in size than California, Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington state combined.

Aircraft operating out of Perth, Australia, have been trying to conduct sweeps of about 20,000 square nautical miles a day. An underwater search for pings from the aircraft’s black box would be much slower. The U.S. Navy is sending an undersea listening device that is designed to be towed behind a slow-moving ship.

Hishammuddin said at a news conference Tuesday that all further search for the aircraft had been canceled in the so-called northern corridor, from Kazakhstan across China to northern Laos, and had also been suspended in the east-central Indian Ocean near Indonesia.

The deputy chief of Australia’s Defense Force, Air Marshal Mark Binskin, underlined the vastness of the search area.

“We are not searching for a needle in a haystack - we are still trying to define where the haystack is,” he said.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 03/26/2014