(Transcript from World News Radio)
The first comprehensive report into Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has been released, one year after the plane vanished with 239 passengers and crew on board.
Apart from a few anomalies, the detailed report describes the complete normality of the flight, shedding little light on aviation's biggest mystery.
Brianna Roberts reports.
"Malaysian 370, contact with (unintelligible), goodnight." (Air traffic control:) "Goodnight, Malaysia 370." (Sound of plane fade under ...)
This generic sign-off is the last anyone heard from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
A year after the plane vanished from radar, not a single trace of wreckage has been found.
The Boeing 777 was on a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board when contact was lost.
Military radar tracked it turning back and crossing Malaysia again before disappearing over the Indian Ocean.
An interim report almost 600 pages long has been compiled by investigators from countries including Australia, Britain, Singapore and China.
The chief investigator, Kok Soo Chon, has released it publicly.
"The sole objective of the investigation of an accident or incident shall be prevention of future accidents or incidents. It is not the purpose of this activity to apportion blame or liability."
The report goes into minute details of the crew's lives, including their medical and financial records and training.
It mentions no findings that cast suspicion on them.
It only finds a few anomalies, none which go any way towards explaining what caused the plane to dramatically veer off course.
The report notes the plane's underwater locator beacon on the aircraft's flight data recorder had expired in December 2012.
However, the cockpit voice recorder's underwater locator beacon should have been operational.
The report also found more than 200 kilograms of lithium batteries did not go through security screening but were not considered dangerous.
Aviation expert Neil Hansford, from Strategic Aviation Solutions, says he does not believe the lithium batteries contributed to the plane's disappearance.
"If they'd created a fire, we would have an aircraft exploding, and we'd have debris. It's just bad practice. These were consigned at Penang. It's too much on one consignment. As to being a contributor to the accident, probably not."
The report has angered some relatives of the passengers, with some describing it as useless.
Sarah Bajc, whose husband Philip Wood was on the plane, says she does not believe the plane is at the bottom of the Southern Indian Ocean, as authorities claim.
"If so many errors and misstatements have been made, whether they were intentional or unintentional, it makes it very difficult to trust anything that they say at all. They have cried wolf* so many times at this point that I no longer believe a thing they say."
The report reiterates that military and civilian satellite data show the aircraft's last position was in the south-eastern Indian Ocean.
It also notes it took five hours and 13 minutes before Malaysia began an air search, following the last contact between the plane's crew and air-traffic control.
Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss has told the ABC the area being searched is vast but investigators are confident they are looking in the right place.
"There's been an international panel that's gone over the evidence time and time again. Everything supports the area that we're searching in. But the total area that's been identified by that group is over a million square kilometres. We've narrowed it down to the most prospective 60,000 to begin the search."
Australian authorities say the four ships scouring the seabed for the plane have now covered 40 per cent of the area where they believe the plane is most likely to be.
They are due to complete the search of the priority area by May.
But the underwater terrain of such a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean poses significant challenges for the search team.
There are underwater volcanoes and trenches more than a thousand metres deep.
The search is already the most expensive in history, with the Australian and Malaysian governments contributing $60 million each.
The Australian government has committed to almost $90 million in total but has refused to say how long the search will continue.
The unidentified brother of a man who was on the plane says the search should go on until they have answers.
"It's basically a closure that we need. And I don't know how long you can actually continue to miss the person or still continue to look for a person who is missing. It could take years, or it could even be after my life as well."
Share
