Malaysia releases satellite data on MH370

The Malaysian government and the British satellite firm Inmarsat on Tuesday released the data used to determine the apparent path of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. The data’s release had become a rallying cry for many of the passengers’ family members, who have accused the Malaysian government of holding back information about the flight.

However, analysts said the data is highly technical and will be difficult to decode.

The plane’s satellite communications data, which runs to 47 pages in a report prepared by Inmarsat, features hourly network log-on confirmations, or “handshakes,” with satellites after the aircraft disappeared from civilian radar screens on March 8.

Passengers’ families have been hoping that opening up the data to analysis by a wider range of experts could help reveal the plane's location, nearly three months after the Boeing 777 with 239 passengers and crew disappeared. 

"When we first asked for the data, it was more than two months ago. I never dreamed it would be such an obstacle to overcome," Sarah Bajc, the American partner of one passenger, told Reuters from Beijing. 

On the basis of Inmarsat's and other investigators' analysis of the data, the aircraft is believed to have gone down in the Indian Ocean off western Australia. 

The data include a final transmission from the plane eight seconds later, after which there was no further communication. The data also feature two telephone calls initiated from the ground that went unanswered by the plane. Malaysian officials were not immediately available to answer questions on the data. 

Bajc said experts on flight tracking who have been advising the families would now be able to analyze the data to see if the search area could be refined and to determine if Inmarsat and other officials had missed anything. 

But Bajc complained that the report released on Tuesday was missing data removed to improve readability, as well as comparable records from previous flights on MH370's route that the families had requested. 

"Why couldn't they have submitted that?" she said. "It only makes sense if they are hiding something." 

Shukor Yusof, an aviation analyst with Malaysia-based Endau Analytics, told Agence France-Presse that the satellite data is "highly technical" and requires 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.

Calculations based on the pings and the plane's speed showed the jetliner likely went down in the remote ocean seven to eight hours after its normal communications were apparently cut off as it headed to Beijing on an otherwise routine flight. 

The time of the last satellite contact was consistent with the plane's fuel capacity. The search in an area about 960 miles northwest of Perth was further narrowed on the basis of acoustic signals believed to have come from the aircraft's black box data recorders before their batteries ran out. 

The most extensive search in aviation history has failed to turn up any trace of the plane, however, and officials have said it could take a year to search a 23,000-square-mile area where it could have gone down. 

Malaysia, China and Australia said in mid-May they agreed to re-examine all data related to the missing plane to better determine the search area as the hunt enters a new, deep-sea phase. Malaysia is leading an official international investigation under United Nations rules to probe the causes of the baffling incident.

Wire services