Flight MH370 ‘has been lost and none of those on board survived,’ officials confirm

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 crashed into Indian Ocean: officials

Officials have confirmed that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 crashed into the Indian Ocean and there are no survivors among the 239 people on board.

Malaysia Airlines sent the following text to family members of passengers Monday, two weeks after the plane went missing.

“Malaysia Airlines deeply regrets that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board survived. As you will hear in the next hour from Malaysia’s Prime Minister, we must now accept all evidence suggests the plane went down in the Southern Indian Ocean.”

Malaysian prime minster Najib Razak held a press conference Monday and said that it was with “great sadness” that new data had shown the plane’s last location was in the Southern Indian Ocean, southwest of Perth, Australia.

“This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites,” he said.

Razak’s statement came on information from British satellite company Inmarsat and the U.K’s Air Accident Investigation Branch. It did not make any mention to the discovery of several objects spotted in the area believed to be where the plane went down.

Inmarsat had data triangulating possible positions for the aircraft one day after it went missing, one route to the north and another to the south, but that data was not properly used in the search until a week later.
Malaysia did not receive the data until March 12, and it then took another three days until the data was released, the Washington Post reports. 

Razak did not give any indication on why the plane was so far off course.

The families’ grief came pouring out after 17 days of waiting for some definitive word on the fate of their relatives aboard the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Women shrieked and sobbed uncontrollably. Men and women held up their loved ones who were nearly collapsing.

Malaysia’s prime minister gave that word in a televised news conference from Kuala Lumpur, saying there was no longer any reasonable doubt that the aircraft ended up in the southern Indian Ocean far from any possible landing site.

Relatives of passengers in Beijing had been called to a hotel near the airport to hear the announcement. Afterward, they filed out of a conference room in heart-wrenching grief.

One woman collapsed and fell on her knees, crying “My son! My son!”

Selamat Omar, the father of a 29-year-old aviation engineer who was on the flight, said some members of families of other passengers broke down in tears at the news.

“We accept the news of the tragedy. It is fate,” Selamat told The Associated Press in Kuala Lumpur.
Chinese and Australian planes on Monday spotted several objects in an area identified by multiple satellite images as containing possible debris from the missing Malaysian airliner, boosting hopes the frustrating search in the southern Indian Ocean could turn up more clues to the jet’s fate.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the crew on board an Australian P3 Orion had located two objects in the search zone — the first grey or green and circular, the second orange and rectangular.

An Australian navy supply ship, the HMAS Success, was on the scene Monday night trying to locate and recover the objects, and Malaysia’s Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said the vessel could locate the objects within a few hours or by Tuesday morning.

Monday’s sightings hold particular promise because they are in real time. Previous sightings by satellite had occurred a few days before they were confirmed and searchers found nothing when they reached the co-ordinates.

Separately, the crew aboard one of two Chinese IL-76 aircraft combing the search zone observed two large objects and several smaller ones spread across several square kilometres, Xinhua News Agency reported. At least one of the items — a white, square-shaped object — was captured on a camera aboard the plane, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said.

“We are still racing against time,” Hong said at a ministry briefing. “As long as there is a glimmer of hope, our search efforts will carry on.”