Critical 4 Hours Were Wasted By Authorities Before ‘Activating’ Rescue Protocol For MH370, Reveals Report

The report released by the Malaysian Government late last night has revealed some very startling facts about the way protocols were initiated and rescue processes handled for the missing Malaysian flight MH370.

Malaysian Government has released a summary 5–page report about the rescue operation that has been going on for more than 50 days now for the missing MH370 airplane. The leaked report is currently available on Social Media portal Facebook and merely chronicles the events, in brief, that followed after MH370’s last confirmed contact with the Air Traffic Controller (ATC) and the time after which the plane simply vanished from the radar.

As reported by The Inquisitr, the ATC noticed the plane missing from the radar, more than 17 minutes after it happened. With sophisticated tracking instruments including the radar, all planes are tracked in real time and their relative position is relayed to the ATC personnel for easier control, monitoring and redirection of traffic if needed.

While the equipment should have raised an alarm when such an anomaly occurs, the report does not shed any light about the exact happenings, or if such a warning was simply turned down. For a plane traveling at an altitude of 30,000 feet at a cruising speed of over 460 knots (852 Km/hr.), even such a small time–frame can mean a lot of distance that was simply left uncharted.

If that’s not bad enough, the timings mentioned in the report also suggests, it took the ATC more than four hours after the last conversation with the cockpit, to activate rescuers. In other words, more than 4 hours were somehow simply whiled away discussing multiple hypothesis and possibilities including a simple glitch, without immediately triggering an emergency response maneuver assuming MH370 to be in mortal danger, reported CNN.

On a more specific note, the report simply skips on the details about what exactly the Malaysian authorities did during that four-hour period, except that they contacted Singapore, Hong Kong and Cambodia regarding MH370.

While the possibilities of finding the crew and passengers totaling 239 aboard the MH370 alive appear to be slim, the plane is now assumed to have run out of fuel about 7½ hours into the flight. Even if the report’s sparse data is to be believed, the MH370 had just 2½ hours of fuel left when the rescuers actually initiated a Search And Rescue (SAR) operation.

In what is definitely one of the largest and longest SAR operations of all times, the missing Malaysian Flight MH370 is proving to be highly elusive, but the report somehow manages to be even more secretive.

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