The Malaysian government on Thursday declared that the loss of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in March last year was an accident according to the terms of an international air agreement, and that the 239 passengers and crew members on the plane were presumed dead.
While Malaysian officials said last spring that the plane appeared to have been lost with all aboard, the step on Thursday cleared the way for death certificates to be issued. It also makes it quicker and easier for Malaysia Airlines and its insurers to compensate the next of kin — although litigation over the amount could continue for years.
However, the official declaration did nothing to clear up the mystery of what happened to the plane. The Australian government, which is coordinating a search of the sea floor in the southern Indian Ocean, said efforts to find debris from the crash would continue.
Photo: Reuters
“Australia, Malaysia and China remain committed to the search,” the Australian government said in a statement. “We remain cautiously optimistic the aircraft will be found.”
Speculation about the cause of the aircraft’s disappearance has included the possibilities that a rogue pilot diverted the flight, that it was hijacked or that there was a fire on board.
Malaysian Department of Civil Aviation Director-General Azharuddin Abdul Rahman cautioned that without the flight recorders, “there is no evidence to substantiate any speculations.”
Flight MH370 disappeared on March 8 last year en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. The plane, a Boeing Co 777-200ER, mysteriously did a U-turn, and its main communications systems were disabled, as it reached an area over the Gulf of Thailand where the pilots should have been changing from Malaysian to Vietnamese air traffic control.
Malaysian radar subsequently tracked the aircraft as it flew west across northern Peninsular Malaysia, making a couple of turns before disappearing toward the northern end of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
Automatic pings transmitted by the plane’s engines to a satellite over the Indian Ocean showed that the engines operated for six more hours; analyses by aerospace and telecommunications companies later suggested that the plane had turned roughly south after passing the north end of Sumatra and continued flying until it ran out of fuel.
Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation declared the loss of the plane to have been an accident under the rules of an agreement known as the Chicago Convention.
“We have concluded that the aircraft exhausted its fuel over a defined area of the southern Indian Ocean and that the aircraft is located on the sea floor close to that defined area,” Rahman said.
Liu Jiani, a woman from Nanjing who lost grandparents on the flight, said Malaysia was hiding information about the disaster.
“This announcement is meaningless,” Liu said in a telephone interview. “It will only make the families angry. It won’t make us sit down and talk about compensation.”
“We don’t believe we should be discussing compensation if you don’t first reveal the truth,” she added.
Malaysian officials strenuously deny hiding any information.
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