KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia -- It may mean little to investigators
that the last words air traffic controllers heard from the lost jetliner
were "Good night, Malaysian three-seven-zero," rather than "All right,
good night." But to Malaysian officials whose credibility has been
questioned almost from the beginning, it means a great deal.
Malaysian officials said more than two weeks ago that "All right, good
night," were the last words, and that the co-pilot uttered them. They
changed the account late Monday and said they are still investigating
who it was that spoke.
The discrepancy added to the confusion and frustration families of the missing already felt more than three weeks after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared, and as of Tuesday officials had not explained how they got it wrong.
"This sort of mistake hits at the heart of trust in their
communications. If Malaysia is changing what the pilot said, people
start thinking, 'What are they going to change next?" said Hamish
McLean, an expert in risk and crisis communication at Griffith
University in Brisbane, Australia.
"Information in a crisis is absolutely critical. When we are dealing
with such a small amount of information its needs to be handled very
carefully," he said.
Authorities have been forced on the defensive by the criticism, the most forceful of which has come from a group of Chinese relatives who accuse them of lying
about - or even involvement in - the plane's disappearance. In part
responding to domestic political criticism, defense minister
Hishammuddin Hussein has taken to retweeting supportive comments on
Twitter. He has twice in recent days proclaimed that "history would
judge us well" over the handling of the crisis.
"There are some things that I can tell you and some things that I
can't," Malaysia's civil aviation chief said cryptically in the early
days of the search.
"That was a terrible, terrible response," said Lyall Mercer, the
principal of Australian-based Mercer PR, a public relations company. "It
says to the families that 'we know things that we are not going to
share' and that 'something else is more important than you'."
The piece of information that families most want to hear - whether their
relatives are alive or dead - has remained impossible to say with
finality, creating a dilemma for the government.
On March 24, it tried to address that. Malaysia Airlines officials met
families in Kuala Lumpur and Beijing and sent a text message to others
saying "we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has
been lost and that none of those on board survived."
Sarah Bacj, a 48-year-old American expatriate teacher whose boyfriend, Philip Wood, was on the flight, said the decision by Malaysia Airlines to inject some certainty into
the fate of the passengers was a mistake. Until then, she said she
thought the Malaysian government had acted responsibly, but the text
message "totally violated my trust."
"I fell off the cliff," Bacj said. "The way the text message came, I
expected proof. That they had found the bodies, or that they had found
confirmed wreckage, or something ... but they didn't actually tell us
anything at all. The only thing they did was make a judgment statement
about evidence - unconfirmed evidence, mind you."
The final words from the cockpit, and who said them, are of interest not
only because there are few other clues to the disappearance, but
because the communication occurred just a minute before the plane's
transponders were shut off. The words were in English, as aviation
communications are around the world.
The above article was extracted from CBS News
International Business Times: Blessing in Disguise Tweet lands Hishammuddin in hot water
CNN: Malaysia's preliminary report on MH370 (55 days later)
CNN: Richard Quest analyzes the report (4 hours gap where no one took any action)
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