Moments before Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 went off the radar, its co-pilot allegedly made one last call for help.
Fariq Abdul Hamid tried making a call from his cell phone as the doomed Boeing 777 flew low over the Malaysian city of Penang, the New Straits Times reports.
His phone reportedly connected with a telecommunications tower in the city before it was cut off.
The aircraft carrying 239 people then traveled about 200 miles northwest of Penang before it vanished forever.
Satellite data suggests the Beijing-bound plane flew off course on March 8 and crashed into the southern Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia. More than a month later, international search teams are investigating pings that may have come from the flight’s black box. Still, they have yet to find wreckage from the plane.
Officials in Malaysia are still conducting investigations into the backgrounds of the 12 crew members and 227 passengers who were on board.
Pool/Getty Images Trent Wyatt, a crew member of a Royal New Zealand Air Force P-3 Orion, on lookout during the search to locate the plane. Hamid would have turned 28 on April 1. Relatives say the young pilot was very close to his mom.
“If Fariq could make one call before the plane disappeared, it would have been to her,” said 18-year-old cousin Nursyafiqah Kamarudin.
Malaysian officials have not divulged details about who Hamid may have been trying to contact.
“The telco’s [telecommunications company's] tower established the call that he was trying to make. On why the call was cut off, it was likely because the aircraft was fast moving away from the tower and had not come under the coverage of the next one,” sources told NST.
The evening before his flight departed from Kuala Lumpur, Hamid reportedly sent a text message through the WhatsApp Messenger.
RICHARD WAINWRIGHT / POOL/EPA A Royal New Zealand Air Force P-3 Orion taking part in the search trying to locate missing Malaysia Airways Flight MH370 in the Indian Ocean, 11 April 2014. The extensive search has pooled together resources from 26 countries. His phone was then “detached.”
“This is usually the result of the phone being switched off. At one point, however, when the airplane was airborne, between waypoint Igari and the spot near Penang (just before it went missing from radar), the line was ‘reattached,’” sources told NST.
The paper cautioned that a “reattachment” doesn’t necessarily signal that a call was made. It could also mean that Hamid just tried switching his phone on again.
Telecommunications experts have said that it is possible for phones to connect at an altitude of 7,000 feet.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Saturday that the massive search for the missing Malaysian jet would likely continue some time. He said that he was “very confident” signals heard by an Australian ship towing a U.S. Navy device that detects flight recorder pings were coming from the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777′s black boxes.
We have “very considerably narrowed down the search area, but trying to locate anything 4.5 kilometers (2.8 miles) beneath the surface of the ocean about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from land is a massive, massive task, and it is likely to continue for a long time to come,” Abbott said.
Search crews are scrambling because the batteries powering the recorders’ locator beacons last only about a month, and that window has already passed. Finding the devices after the batteries die will be extremely difficult due to the extreme depth of the water in the search area.
The underwater search zone is currently a 1,300-square-kilometer (500-square-mile) patch of the seabed, about the size of Los Angeles.
The searchers want to pinpoint the exact location of the source of the sounds — or as close as they can get — and then send down a robotic submersible to look for wreckage. But the sub will not be deployed until officials are confident that no other electronic signals are present.
Up to 10 planes and 14 ships were searching Saturday.
http://ift.tt/1nkSkmd
via Great Local News: New York http://ift.tt/1iZiLP1
No comments:
Post a Comment