Vietnamese air force planes have spotted two large oil slicks that authorities suspect are from a Malaysian jetliner that went missing early Saturday. A Vietnamese government statement says the slicks were spotted off the southern tip of Vietnam. The slicks were each between 10 kilometers (6 miles) and 15 kilometers (9 miles) long. The statement said the slicks were consistent with the kinds that would be left by fuel from a crashed jetliner. The oil slicks spotted between Malaysia and Vietnam Saturday afternoon are thought to be the first sign that a missing Malaysia Airlines flight with 239 people aboard went down in the waters between southernmost Vietnam and northern Malaysia, according to Vietnam’s director of civil aviation.
“An AN26 aircraft of the Vietnam Navy has discovered an oil slick about 20 kilometers in the search area, which is suspected of being a crashed Boeing aircraft -- we have announced that information to Singapore and Malaysia and we continue the search,” Lai Xuan Thanh, the director of the Civil Aviation Administration of Vietnam said in reporting the sighting of the slick.
He said he did not know whether the slick was closer to the Malaysian or Vietnam side of the entrance to the Gulf of Thailand. The last coordinates automatically transmitted by the aircraft were from near the midpoint between the two countries, when the plane appeared to be in stable flight at 35,000 feet.
The discovery came as Vietnam, Malaysia, China, Singapore and the Philippines staged an intensive search for the missing aircraft, a redeye flight that vanished after taking off from Kuala Lumpur’s airport early Saturday morning, bound for Beijing, where it was to arrive at 6:30 a.m.
Fredrik Lindahl, the chief executive of Flightradar24, an online aircraft tracking service, said that the missing plane, a Boeing 777-200, had been equipped with a transponder that regularly transmitted its position, as calculated from the global positioning system of satellites. The last recorded position of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 was 150 kilometers, or 93 miles, northeast of Kuala Terengganu, a port on the northeast coast of peninsular Malaysia, he wrote in an email.
That position is a little less than halfway across the entrance of the Gulf of Thailand from northern Malaysia toward southernmost Vietnam.
Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, the chief executive of Malaysia Airlines, noted in a statement that there had been speculation that the plane might have landed safely somewhere along the route to Beijing, and said that the airline was checking on this. But in a telephone interview before reporting the sighting of the slick, Mr. Lai expressed concern about the aircraft’s fate even while saying that his country was committed to the rescue effort.
“Vietnam has ordered airplanes and military ships for the work, " he said, adding, “"the possibility of an accident is high.”
Lt. Col. Pham Hong Soi, the head of the propaganda department of the Vietnam Navy for the region near the crash site, said that one rescue vessel had already been ordered to sea and two more had been made ready for departure.
China Central Television said that according to Chinese air traffic control officials, the aircraft never entered Chinese airspace.
Malaysia Airlines said that the plane had 227 passengers aboard, including two infants, and an all-Malaysian crew of 12. The passengers included 154 citizens from China or Taiwan, 38 Malaysians, seven Indonesians, six Australians, five Indians, four French and three Americans, as well as two citizens each from New Zealand, Ukraine and Canada and one each from Russia, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria.
The airline said that it was notifying the next of kin of the passengers and crew that the plane was missing. Hundreds of family members gathered in rooms set aside for them at a Beijing hotel, and at least two medical personnel went in to monitor them.
Boeing said in a statement that it was assembling a team of technical experts to advise the national authorities investigating the disappearance of the aircraft.
One uncertainty about the flight involved when it disappeared from radar and how quickly the search began in the Gulf of Thailand. Malaysia Airlines said that the plane took off at 12:41 a.m. Malaysia time, and that the plane disappeared from air traffic control radar in Subang, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, at 2:40 a.m.
That timeline seemed to suggest that the plane stayed in the air for two hours — long enough to fly not only across the Gulf of Thailand but also far north across Vietnam. But Mr. Lindahl of Flightradar 24 said that the last radar contact had been at 1:19 a.m., less than 40 minutes after the flight began.
A Malaysia Airlines spokesman said on Saturday evening that the last conversation between the flight crew and air traffic control in Malaysia had been around 1:30 a.m., but he reiterated that the plane had not disappeared from air traffic control systems in Subang until 2:40 a.m.
Arnold Barnett, a longtime Massachusetts Institute of Technology specialist in aviation safety statistics, said that prior to the disappearance of Saturday’s flight, Malaysia Airlines had suffered two fatal crashes, in 1977 and 1995. Based on his estimate that Malaysia Airlines operates roughly 120,000 flights a year, he calculated that the airline’s safety record was consistent with other fairly prosperous, middle-income countries but had not yet reached the better safety record of airlines based in the world’s richest countries.
Malaysia, located near the Equator, is a popular winter vacation destination for affluent residents of chilly, smoggy Beijing, and the large number of Chinese nationals aboard the plane prompted strong concern in China. President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Li Keqiang ordered “all-out efforts” to search for the aircraft and prepare to help those who were aboard and their families.
As the day wore on with no new information about the missing plane, China’s civil aviation authority urged the Malaysian government to be more forthcoming. “The Civil Aviation Administration of China has urged the Malaysian civil aviation authority to clarify the situation of Flight MH370 as quickly as possible, and to brief the Chinese side as quickly as possible,” the Chinese state-run news agency Xinhua reported, citing an unnamed Chinese aviation official. “It also urged Malaysia Airlines to provide active assistance to families of passengers in accordance with the regulations in international civil aviation covenants.”
Saturday 08 March 2014
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