The search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 was delayed five days as authorities in Malaysia rejected critical satellite information that could have aided in locating the plane, a new report has found.
For more than nine months, crews have searched the Indian Ocean for the missing airplane, which disappeared from radar during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. But a new reports suggests that Malaysian officials may have lost critical time by ignoring data from the British satellite company Inmarsat for the first five days of the frantic search.
A source told the West Australian that Inmarsat officials found data suggesting that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 was in the southern Indian Ocean. The officials tried to share their data with officials in Malaysia in the first day that the flight went missing, but were reportedly rebuffed.
“They didn’t want to know,” the source said.
As the report indicated, critical time may have been lost in the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370:
Inmarsat was asked to provide a satellite data link to the Malaysia Airlines fleet and continued to get a signal every hour from MH370 until 8:19 am, WA time.
Those signals were picked up from its satellite 38,000km above the Indian Ocean and relayed via a ground station in Perth.
The Malaysian authorities were forced to take the findings seriously when the AAIB teamed with Inmarsat to re-present the MH370 data five days after the Boeing 777 disappeared.
It was not until 10 days after the flight went missing that the search shifted to the southern Indian Ocean, but by that point all traces of the wreckage were gone.
The search area has now stretched to hundreds of thousands of square miles, but so far there have been no signs of the plane. Earlier this month, officials added another 15,400 square miles to the search area , with evidence that the plane may have spiraled into the ocean at a slower speed than initially thought.
Officials said the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 could now be winding down, with work in the “priority zone” expected to be completed by May.