Missing Malaysian jet ends in Indian Ocean, no survivors: PM

PanARMENIAN.Net - A new analysis of electronic data shows that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 with 239 people aboard "ended" in a remote area of the Indian Ocean, Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak said Monday, March 24, USA Today reported.

Though no wreckage has been found, Najib said the finding means there could not possibly have been any survivors.

The prime minister said the new information, based on an unprecedented analysis of satellite data from Inmarsat and by British accident investigators, shows that the plane went down in the southern Indian Ocean west of Perth, Australia.

There are no islands nearby where the plane could've landed nearby, and if it went that far from its intended flight path the jet would have run out of fuel.

"This is a remote location, far from any possible landing site," Najib said in a brief, televised statement. "It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that according to this new data Flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean."

The Boeing 777 had left Kuala Lumpur on March 8 bound for Beijing. The last word from the plane came only minutes before it made a mysterious left turn that sent it toward the Indian Ocean.

Inmarsat, which provided the electronic data, owns and operates a global satellite network. An initial analysis of the information had indicated several possible flight paths for the airliner, including a northern route.

Inmarsat senior vice president Chris McLaughlin told Sky News that the company used the "doppler effect" of electronic pings to find the area where plane crashed.

Although the plane's main tracking devices had been switched off, its onboard equipment continued to respond to a ping relayed through a satellite 22,000 miles above the Earth by generating and returning an automatic ping of its own, he explained.

The company then compared the time for all this pinging with data from other flights and were able to spot a pattern, then narrow down the possible path of Flight 370 to the remote Indian Ocean location.

A Chinese plane had already reporting spotting "suspicious objects" in that area during its search for the missing aircraft and an Australian search plane also spotted potential debris, said to be "circular" and "rectangular."

The crew of the Chinese Ilyushin IL-76 plane saw the objects in an area that had been identified by satellite imagery as containing possible debris from the missing plane, China's state news agency Xinhua reported. The crew relayed the coordinates of the objects to the Australian command center and to a Chinese ship, the icebreaker Xuelong, which is on its way to the location.

China earlier released a satellite image captured Tuesday depicting an object located about 75 miles south of where an Australian satellite picked up an image of two objects a week ago.