Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (MH370/MAS370)
was a scheduled international passenger Flight from KUALA LUMPUR to BEIJING that disappeared on 8 March 2014 at 01:20 after losing contact with air traffic control less than an hour after takeoff.At 07:24, Malaysia Airlines (MAS) reported the flight missing. The aircraft, a Boking 777-200ER, was carrying 12 Malaysian crew members and 227 passengers from 15 nations
A multinational search effort, which became the largest and most expensive in history, began in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea, where the flight's signal was lost on secondary radar, and was soon extended to the Strait of Malacca and Andaman Sea. On 15 March, based on military radar data and transmissions between the aircraft and an Inmarsat satellite, investigators concluded that the aircraft had diverted from its intended course and headed west across the Malay Peninsula, then continued on a northern or southern track for around seven hours. The focus of the search shifted to the southern part of the Indian Ocean, west of Australia.:1 In the first two weeks of April, aircraft and ships deployed equipment to listen for signals from the underwater locator beacons attached to the aircraft's "black boxes". Four unconfirmed signals were detected between 6 and 8 April near the time the beacons' batteries were likely to have been exhausted. A robotic submarine searched the seabed near the detected pings until 28 May, with no debris being found.
Timeline of disappearance
The Australia-led search teamfor the missing Malaysian flight MH370 has discovered 58 hard objects inconsistent with the Indian Ocean seabed, raising hopes of solving the over six months-long aviation mystery.
Transport
Minister Liow Tiong Lai said the Joint Agency Coordination Centre
(JACC), which is leading the search for the plane is currently in the
midst of retrieving the objects to be analysed.
"We
have only discovered 58 solid objects, but yet to learn if they are
from (Malaysia Airlines) flight MH370. We have to verify whether the
objects are the plane's wreckage or hard rocks before coming to a
conclusion," he said in a press conference on Sunday.
Liow
also said Malaysia's Petronas will be deploying its "Go Phoenix" vessel
to assist in the MH370 search mission at the southern Indian Ocean
floor.
He said the asset, which is commonly used in oil exploration is expected to arrive in Perth on September 21.
"Go
Phoenix will help in the search mission, alongside Australia's Furgo
Discovery ship to map the ocean floor," Liow was quoted as saying by the
New Strait Times.
The Beijing-bound
Boeing 777-200 carrying 239 people, including five Indians, an
Indo-Canadian and 154 Chinese nationals ?- mysteriously vanished on
March 8 en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.
Earlier
this month, the Australian authority leading the search for the plane
said that "hard spots" had been found on the Indian Ocean seabed, but
that most would likely be geological features.
Experts
are conducting a sonar survey of a remote patch of the southern Indian
Ocean, an area never previously explored in such detail, in preparation
for an underwater search for the plane.
The
Australian Transport Safety Bureau had said the sonar search had
provided information on the depth of the water and the composition of
the sea floor in the search zone.
Last
month Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said the ongoing
mapping of the ocean floor had already uncovered "quite remarkable"
geographical features, including the discovery of new volcanoes up to
2,000 metres high.
Six months after
the jet disappeared in the Indian Ocean, aviation experts are still
clueless over the world's greatest aviation mystery.
The
search operation, described by Australian officials as the largest in
history, has so far turned up no debris from the plane.
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