Malaysia's
civil aviation authority releases raw satellite logs to public following calls
from relatives of those on board
theguardian.com,
Matthew Weaver and agencies, Tuesday 27 May 2014
 |
| Malaysian authorities have released the data 80 days after the plane vanished with 239 people on board. Photograph: Greg Wood/Pool/EPA |
Satellite
data used to narrow down the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane,
MH370, has been released after demands from relatives of the passengers.
The data [pdf], which was drawn up by the British company Inmarsat, was released 80 days
after the Boeing vanished with 239 people on board.
It consists
of a 47-page table of satellite logs from 4pm on 7 March when the plane took
off from Kuala Lumpur until its last known contact of this type early the next
day. Malaysia's civil aviation authority said the raw data was being released
for "public consumption".
The data
was used by Inmarsat to calculate that the Beijing-bound plane changed course
and was likely to have gone down in the southern Indian Ocean. No trace of the
plane has yet been found despite an extensive search in the area led by
Australia, first on the surface by air and boat, and then underwater using
specialist submarines.
Explanatory
notes to the newly released data point out that the ping signals were used to
estimate the distance between the satellite and the aircraft, but that they do
not pinpoint its exact location.
Family
members of the missing passengers have called for the data to be made public
for independent analysis. They have criticised the Malaysian authorities for
the way information about the search has been released and claimed they were
wrong to give up hope by concluding that the plane went missing in the southern
Indian Ocean.
Last week
in a report to the governments of Malaysia and Australia they said: "There
is no mention on why they are so sure the Inmarsat data is highly accurate and
reliable."
Inmarsat's
interpretation of the data has been verified by the international investigation
team, which includes Malaysia's Department for Civil Aviation, the US National
Transport Safety Board, Britain's Air Accidents Investigations Branch, and
China's Aircraft Accident Investigation Department.
Analysts
said it would take time to draw any conclusions from the new technical data.
Shukor
Yusof, an aviation analyst with Malaysia-based Endau Analytics, said the
satellite data was "highly technical" and required an expert to
decode.
"There
are very few people who can make head or tail as to what the numbers indicate.
To me as a layman, it looks like a sequence of signals that were given out by
the aircraft possibly indicating its flight path," he said.
Greg
Waldron, Singapore-based managing editor with aviation publication group
Flightglobal, said the satellite data was consistent with what Inmarsat had
previously revealed.
"Basically
it shows the timings of the handshakes of the plane with the satellite over the
Indian Ocean," he said.
"But I
would not dare to guess if they are searching in the right place. The fact that
they are using this type of data shows how desperate the search for the plane
is."
Malaysia's
civil aviation authority previously stressed that satellite data was just one
of several elements being examined by investigators.
Australia
has committed up to £50m towards the search operation over two years.
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