SEPANG, May 26 — Minister Datuk Seri Hishamuddin Hussein is optimistic that the Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) will be able to make public the raw data on the missing Flight MH370 by tomorrow.
Frustrated by the authorities’ failure to locate the vanished Malaysia Airlines plane, the families of the 227 passengers on board have been demanding the release of the raw satellite data from British firm Inmarsat that had tracked its flight path to the southern waters of the Indian Ocean and where the jetliner is believed to have crashed.
“Hopefully, [we can] get it tomorrow, because this is what they told me,” the acting transport minister told reporters at the newly opened KLIA2 airport.
He added that the decision to release the BrItish satellite communications firm’s data was not up to him but a multinational panel, including the International Civil Aviation Organization, the US National Transportation Safety Board, and the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch.
“They are working together to release tomorrow, and that is their decision,” Hishammuddin said.
The Boeing 777 jetliner has been missing for almost three months since March 8 when it left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people on board.
Initial search efforts were concentrated on the waters between Malaysia and Vietnam where MH370 was last heard from before it lost contact with the Subang Air Traffic Control.
But Inmarsat later confirmed more than a week later that satellites picked up electronic signals or “handshakes” from the aircraft well after it disappeared from sight, and that these signals had likely come from somewhere over the southern Indian Ocean.
The international hunt for MH370 then moved entirely to the large ocean swathe somewhere off the coast of Perth in Australia, despite doubts raised by experts over the aircraft’s drastic change of direction.
But until today, there has still been no sign of the missing aircraft. The hunt has now gone underwater, after experts confirmed that the aircraft’s black boxes have completely run out of batteries and would no longer be releasing signals.
Some 350 family members of passengers aboard the jetliner have been demanding that raw data be released for independent analysis, preferably to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), the non-profit research facility responsible for finding the remains of missing Air France Flight 447 in 2009, almost two years after it crashed into the Atlantic Ocean.
