The
recommendation came in a report by the country’s chief inspector of air
accidents on the search for the missing jet, which left only
tantalizing clues to its likely whereabouts that were not recognized or
understood for days after it disappeared on March 8 with 239 people
aboard. Investigators eventually concluded that the plane must have
fallen into the southern Indian Ocean off the coast of Western
Australia, thousands of miles from its planned course over the Gulf of
Thailand, where searchers initially wasted crucial days hunting
fruitlessly.
No debris from the plane has been found, and the location of its flight
recorders has not been pinpointed. With the abandonment this week of
efforts to spot debris on the surface and the search focus shifted
to slowly combing the ocean floor with submersible craft, Malaysia
Airlines said on Thursday that it would start paying compensation to the
families of missing passengers. It also said it would stop
accommodating them in “family assistance centers” in hotels, including
one in Beijing where anguished relatives have staged angry protests and
accused the company of misleading or confusing them.
The
chief inspector’s report related what is known about Flight 370 after
it stopped communicating with ground controllers about 40 minutes into a
routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Once the plane was out
over the Indian Ocean, the only indications of its location came from
widely separated “pings” from an automated satellite communications
system meant to transmit maintenance data; analysis of those pings took a
week, and yielded only a broad idea of where the plane fell into the
sea.
The
Malaysian government report said that the location and status of
commercial planes should be tracked continuously, even when they are far
out of range of ground radar, so that no flight can vanish, even if its
onboard transponders stop working, as Flight 370’s did.
“While
commercial air transport aircraft spend considerable amounts of time
operating over remote areas, there is currently no requirement for
real-time tracking of these aircraft,” the report noted. “It is
recommended that the International Civil Aviation Organization examine
the safety benefits of introducing a standard for real- time tracking.”
Malaysian officials said the public report issued on Thursday was
similar to one they had already submitted to the organization.
Firm
conclusions about the specific causes of Flight 370’s disappearance are
likely to elude investigators unless the plane’s flight recorders can
be recovered and analyzed. They are believed to be lie somewhere on the
floor of the southern Indian Ocean, beneath 15,000 feet of water or
more.
Searchers have been using the Bluefin-21,
a submersible vehicle with sonar, to hunt in an area about 1,000 miles
northwest of Perth, Western Australia, where acoustic signals were
detected that were believed to have come from beacons attached to the
two flight recorders. Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia said on
Monday that the deep-sea search would be intensified and expanded to cover a “probable impact zone” 435 miles long and 50 miles wide, a task he said could take 6 to 8 months to complete.
The
search has been punctuated by false sightings of wreckage and rumors
about the plane’s fate. Mostly recently, an Australian company,
GeoResonance, said it had detected what might be signs of the fuselage
at the bottom of the Bay of Bengal, far north of the waters where the
search has concentrated.
But
the Australian agency that is coordinating the search, the Joint Agency
Coordination Center, was dismissive of the company’s claim, saying in
an emailed statement that the international team hunting for Flight 370
was “satisfied that the final resting place of the missing aircraft is
in the southerly portion of the search arc,” and not in the Bay of
Bengal.
Malaysia
Airlines said on its website that it would begin making compensation
payments to passengers’ next of kin as soon as possible “in order to
meet their immediate economic needs.” Accepting the payments now, it
said, would not “affect the rights of the next-of-kin to claim
compensation according to the law at a later stage.”
The
airline, which is controlled and part-owned by the national government,
said that it would “keep in close touch with the families on news
updates through telephone calls, messages, the Internet, and
face-to-face meetings,” and that it would open offices in Beijing and
Kuala Lumpur to provide support for the families of missing passengers,
most of whom were Chinese citizens.
Source: The NY Times
