'Good night Malaysian three-seven-zero': New version of final message
The Malaysian government has changed its account of the final voice transmission from the missing jetliner.
It came as Australia deployed a modified Boeing 737 to act as a flying air traffic controller over the Indian Ocean to prevent a mid-air collision among the large number of aircraft searching for Flight 370.
Malaysia has been criticised for its handling of the search, particularly its communications to the media and the relatives of the passengers.
In a development likely to fuel those concerns, the government gave a new account of the final voice transmission from the cockpit.
In a statement, it said the final words received by ground controllers at 1.19am local time on March 8 were: “Good night Malaysian three-seven-zero.”
Earlier the government had said the final words were: “All right, good night.” The statement also said investigators were still trying to determine whether the pilot or co-pilot spoke the words.
Meanwhile the Australian air force is sending an E-7A Wedgetail equipped with advanced radar to start monitoring the search zone today.
Ten planes and nine ships were taking part in the search for Flight 370, which vanished on March 8 with 239 people bound for Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.
The search area has evolved as experts analysed Flight 370’s limited radar and satellite data, moving from the seas off Vietnam, to the waters west of Malaysia and Indonesia, and then to several areas west of Australia.
The search zone is now 98,000 square miles, about a two-and-a-half-hour flight from Perth.
Items recovered so far were discovered to be flotsam unrelated to the Malaysian plane.
Those leading the effort remain undaunted, with Australia prime minister Tony Abbott saying yesterday that officials are “well, well short” of any point where they would scale back the hunt.
In fact, he said the intensity and magnitude of operations “is increasing, not decreasing”.
Mr Abbott said: “I’m certainly not putting a time limit on it. ... We can keep searching for quite some time to come.
“We owe it to the families, we owe it to everyone that travels by air. We owe it to the anxious governments of the countries who had people on that aircraft. We owe it to the wider world which has been transfixed by this mystery for three weeks now.
“If this mystery is solvable, we will solve it.”
Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak plans to travel to Perth tomorrow to see the search operations first-hand.
