KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 29 — Inmarsat, the British satellite communications firm that helped provide key information in the hunt for Flight MH370, said its location equipment was not installed in the Indonesia AirAsia jetliner that went missing yesterday.
The firm reportedly confirmed this with UK daily The Guardian earlier today when the search for AirAsia Flight QZ8501 was underway. Search has since been called off.
When MH370 went missing on March 8 this year, it was data from the satellite communications firm released on March 14 that helped pinpoint the possible location that the Malaysia Airlines (MAS) aircraft had likely crashed.
According to Inmarsat, its satellite had registered “routine, automated signals” during the Boeing 777 jetliner’s journey en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.
After MH370 was reported missing, initial search efforts were concentrated on the waters between Malaysia and Vietnam where the aircraft was last heard from before it lost contact with the Subang Air Traffic Control.
But Inmarsat’s data said electronic signals or “handshakes” were picked up 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.
Despite the data, however, there still remains no sign of the missing aircraft today, nine months on.
Indonesia AirAsia’s Flight QZ8501 disappeared from Jakarta’s radar at 6.18am local time yesterday amid stormy weather enroute to Singapore from Surabaya.
On board the Airbus A320 jet were 155 Indonesians, three South Koreans, one Malaysian, one Singaporean, one Frenchman and one Briton, comprising 155 passengers and seven crew members.
The plane’s last known position was between the Indonesian port of Tanjung Pandan and the town of Pontianak in West Kalimantan on Borneo Island.
