Australia drafting agreement in MH370 probe

PERTH: Australia said today it is drafting a comprehensive agreement to serve as an 'accredited representative' in the investigation into a missing Malaysia Airlines (MAS) flight.

Angus Houston, the chief co-ordinator of the Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre (JACC) based here, said the agreement would enable the country to support Malaysia in the investigation into Flight MH370 in accordance with international law.

'Other than Australia, the United Kingdom, United States and China are accredited representatives in the investigation,' he told a press conference here Friday.

Houston said Malaysia had requested Australia to assist in the probe. The search for missing Boeing 777-200ER aircraft in the southern Indian Ocean is being conducted out of Perth.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced Thursday at a joint press conference with visiting Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Abdul Razak that his country had accepted Malaysia's invitation to become an accredited representative.

Najib had come to Perth on a two-day visit beginning Wednesday to thank Abbott and to have a first-hand look at the search being conducted out of this western Australian city.

Flight MH370, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew, left the KL International Airport at 12.41am on March 8 and disappeared from radar screens about an hour later while over the South China Sea. It was to have landed in Beijing at 6.30am on the same day.

A multinational search was mounted for the aircraft, first in the South China Sea and then, after it was learned that the plane had veered off course, along two corridors - the northern corridor stretching from the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to northern Thailand and the southern corridor, from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean.

Following an unprecedented type of analysis of satellite data, United Kingdom satellite telecommunications company Inmarsat and the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) concluded that Flight MH370 flew along the southern corridor and that its last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth.

Najib then announced on March 24, seventeen days after the disappearance of the aircraft, that Flight MH370 'ended in the southern Indian Ocean'.

On the search operation, Houston said numerous flight simulations had been conducted by aviation experts to determine the flight path of MH370 before it was narrowed down to the search area.

He said the simulations were based on data analysis of the hourly ping signal transmitted from the aircraft to the Inmarsat satellite for six hours. He said every communication signal was turned off except for the ping signal before the aircraft vanished and the ping signal did not indicate latitude or the speed of the aircraft.

The data analysis was still ongoing, he said. 'Hopefully, the calculation would put us in the area where the plane is,' he said. - Bernama