How Malaysia Airlines lost MH370

CNN's Richard Quest dissects Malaysia's preliminary report:-

Controllers told the airliner to check in with their counterparts in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. "Good night, Malaysian Three Seven Zero," someone in the cockpit answered.

That check-in never happened, but something else did. The plane dropped off radar, and the clock ticked.

"Control of the aircraft had left Malaysia to Vietnam. Even so, for 17 minutes, neither Kuala Lumpur nor Ho Chi Minh noticed nor acted," Quest said.

Then at 1:38 a.m., Ho Chi Minh contacted Kuala Lumpur to let the controllers know that it had not heard a word from the plane. "Verbal contact was not established," the transcript said.

The two control centers began a conversation about communications attempts with Flight 370 and previous radar blips along its path.

Then two messages came from Malaysia Airlines which is BEWILDERING:

At 2:03 a.m. came the first seemingly reassuring message from the airline. The plane was in Cambodian airspace,the airline told Kuala Lumpur air traffic control.
The Malaysians passed the message on to Vietnamese controllers. They then tried to confirm Malaysia Airlines' news with Cambodian air traffic controllers.

The airline later confirmed its reassuring message. It had been able to "exchange signals with the flight," which was in Cambodian airspace, the transcript read.
But an hour after Flight 370 signed off, Vietnamese air controllers poked holes in Malaysia Airlines' message. The flight had not been scheduled to fly over Cambodia, and officials there had no information on the plane -- nor contact with it.

Malaysian air traffic controllers kept in communication with the airline, which gave them yet another seemingly reassuring message at 2:35 a.m.

The airliner was "in normal condition based on signal download," which placed it off the coast of Vietnam.

At 5:20 a.m., a Malaysian official pronounced, based on what was then known, "MH370 never left Malaysian airspace."

Where was the military?

The Malaysian Prime Minister has said the military tracked the plane as it headed back across Malaysia.

According to the report, a playback of a recording from military primary radar revealed that an aircraft that may have been Flight 370 had made a westerly turn, crossing Peninsular Malaysia. The search area was then extended to the Strait of Malacca.

But it's unclear WHEN that happened. The report makes no mention of the military's role the night of the disappearance.

CNN: MH370 lost due to incompetence

CNN: Why did Malaysia Airlines say the plane was in Cambodia?

Watch the video: Richard Quest on Malaysia's anaemic and "disgraceful" report

Malaysia Chronicle: Is the search conducted at the wrong area "on purpose"?

William Pesek: Malaysian government intent on ensuring nothing changes as a result of this tragedy

MH370: A PR Disaster for Malaysia

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)

Bloomberg: Malaysia gets a D, South Korea an A-