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| Relatives of passengers who were traveling on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 watched a news conference at a hotel in Beijing on Monday. Credit Feng Li/Getty Images |
NY. TIMES
The
radar blip that was Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 did a wide U-turn over
the Gulf of Thailand and then began moving inexorably past at least
three military radar arrays as it traversed northern Malaysia, even flying high over one of the country’s biggest cities before heading out over the Strait of Malacca.
Yet
inside a Malaysian Air Force control room on the country’s west coast,
where American-made F-18s and F-5 fighters stood at a high level of
readiness for emergencies exactly like the one unfolding in the early
morning of March 8, a four-person air defense radar crew did nothing
about the unauthorized flight. “The watch team never noticed the blip,”
said a person with detailed knowledge of the investigation into Flight
370. “It was as though the airspace was his.”
It
was not the first and certainly not the last in a long series of errors
by the Malaysian government that has made the geographically vast and
technologically complex task of finding the $50 million Malaysia
Airlines jet far more difficult. A week after the plane disappeared, the
trail is even colder as the search now sprawls from the snowy peaks of
the Himalayas to the empty expanses of the southern Indian Ocean. Nobody
knows yet whether the delays cost the lives of any of the 239 people
who boarded the flight to Beijing at Kuala Lumpur’s ultramodern airport
here. But the mistakes have accumulated at a remarkable pace.
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| A Royal Malaysian Air Force aircraft participated in the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet over the Strait of Malacca on Friday. Credit Mohd Rasfan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
“The
fact that it flew straight over Malaysia, without the Malaysian
military identifying it, is just plain weird — not just weird, but also
very damning and tragic,” said David Learmount, the operations and
safety editor for Flightglobal, a news and data service for the aviation sector.
Senior
Malaysian military officers became aware within hours of the radar data
once word spread that a civilian airliner had vanished. The Malaysian
government nonetheless organized and oversaw an expensive and complex
international search effort in the Gulf of Thailand that lasted for a
full week. Only on Saturday morning did Prime Minister Najib Razak
finally shut it down after admitting what had already been widely
reported in the news media: Satellite data showed that the engines on
the missing plane had continued to run for nearly six more hours after
it left Malaysian airspace.
Finding
the plane and figuring out what happened to it is now a far more
daunting task than if the plane had been intercepted. If the aircraft
ended up in the southern Indian Ocean, as some aviation experts now
suggest, then floating debris could have subsequently drifted hundreds
of miles, making it extremely hard to figure out where the cockpit voice
and data recorders sank.
And
because the recorders keep only the last two hours of cockpit
conversation, even the aircraft’s recorders may hold few secrets.
With
so much uncertainty about the flight, it is not yet possible to know
whether any actions by the Malaysian government or military could have
altered its fate. Responding to a storm of criticism, particularly from
China, whose citizens made up two-thirds of the passengers, Mr. Najib
took pains in a statement early Saturday afternoon to say that Malaysia
had not concealed information, including military data.
Malaysian authorities said Sunday that they would examine the backgrounds of everyone on Flight 370, and they appealed to countries from Central Asia to Australia for help.