KUALA LUMPUR, March 20 — A US$10 (RM33) addition to Malaysia Airlines flight MH370’s computers would have given investigators vital clues to locate the missing plane, said a satellite industry expert.
Speaking to the Washington Post, the unnamed expert said the upgrade would have allowed the Boeing 777-200ER to include directional information in its electronic handshakes with satellites orbiting the Earth.
“If you configure Swift to track engine data, that data will be streamed off the plane. It continues to be powered up while the aircraft is powered up,” the expert said.
One expert who was part of the search team for Air France flight AF477 that crashed while flying from Brazil to France in 2009 said such data had aided efforts to locate the plane then.
“We had a last-known position, and we knew that after the last-known position there were four bursts of ACARS transmissions, and then they stopped abruptly,” Gallo said in the report.
“So the decision was made that the plane was down four minutes after the initial event.”
Swift is one of satellite communications systems on board MH370. It was the series of six electronic handshakes — pings, as they are called — received by a commercial satellite firm Inmarsat that allowed investigators to approximate the location of the plane.
The geostationary satellite orbiting the Earth at an altitude of 35,800km was pinged continually by MH370 after the last radar contact in the Straits of Malacca, which gave investigators a reference point to deduce the plane’s location.
On Saturday, Malaysia revealed that satellite data has allowed investigators to arrive at two “corridors” where the plane could possibly be located: a northern arc from northern Thailand to the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in central Asia, or a southern one from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean.
One industry official explained that in the absence of critical directional data, investigators were forced to extrapolate the possible location of MH370 using the Inmarsat satellite as a fixed reference point and the plane’s speed as the variable to arrive at the two corridors.
The US$10-per-flight upgrade would have given investigators the necessary information to eliminate one of the two corridors.
Yesterday, Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein said both corridors remain equally important as there was no way to conclusively rule out one or the other.
But he also said “some priority” will be given to the southern arc as the area was more challenging for search teams.
The Beijing-bound MH370 has now been missing for 12 days after it disappeared with 239 onboard due to what authorities believe to be “deliberate action”.
