Investigation Finds 17

HONG KONG - The Malaysian government said on Thursday that it would push for international standards requiring that commercial aircraft be tracked in real time throughout their flights, to prevent any more disappearances like that of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

The recommendation came in a report by the country's chief inspector of air accidents on the search for the missing jet, which left only tantalizing clues to its likely whereabouts that were not recognized or understood for days after it disappeared on March 8 with 239 people aboard. Investigators eventually concluded that the plane must have fallen into the southern Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia, thousands of miles from its planned course over the Gulf of Thailand, where searchers initially wasted crucial days hunting fruitlessly.

No debris from the plane has been found, and the location of its flight recorders has not been pinpointed. With the abandonment this week of efforts to spot debris on the surface and the search focus shifted to slowly combing the ocean floor with submersible craft, Malaysia Airlines said on Thursday that it would start paying compensation to the families of missing passengers. It also said it would stop accommodating them in 'family assistance centers' in hotels, including one in Beijing where anguished relatives have staged angry protests and accused the company of misleading or confusing them.

The chief inspector's report related what is known about Flight 370 after it stopped communicating with ground controllers about 40 minutes into a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Once the plane was out over the Indian Ocean, the only indications of its location came from widely separated 'pings' from an automated satellite communications system meant to transmit maintenance data; analysis of those pings took a week, and yielded only a broad idea of where the plane fell into the sea.

The Malaysian government report said that the location and status of commercial planes should be tracked continuously, even when they are far out of range of ground radar, so that no flight can vanish, even if its onboard transponders stop working, as Flight 370's did.

'While commercial air transport aircraft spend considerable amounts of time operating over remote areas, there is currently no requirement for real-time tracking of these aircraft,' the report noted. 'It is recommended that the International Civil Aviation Organization examine the safety benefits of introducing a standard for real- time tracking.' Malaysian officials said the public report issued on Thursday was similar to one they had already submitted to the organization.

Firm conclusions about the specific causes of Flight 370's disappearance are likely to elude investigators unless the plane's flight recorders can be recovered and analyzed. They are believed to be lie somewhere on the floor of the southern Indian Ocean, beneath 15,000 feet of water or more.

Searchers have been using the Bluefin-21, a submersible vehicle with sonar, to hunt in an area about 1,000 miles northwest of Perth, Western Australia, where acoustic signals were detected that were believed to have come from beacons attached to the two flight recorders. Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia said on Monday that the deep-sea search would be intensified and expanded to cover a 'probable impact zone' 435 miles long and 50 miles wide, a task he said could take 6 to 8 months to complete.

The search has been punctuated by false sightings of wreckage and rumors about the plane's fate. Mostly recently, an Australian company, GeoResonance, said it had detected what might be signs of the fuselage at the bottom of the Bay of Bengal, far north of the waters where the search has concentrated.

But the Australian agency that is coordinating the search, the Joint Agency Coordination Center, was dismissive of the company's claim, saying in an emailed statement that the international team hunting for Flight 370 was 'satisfied that the final resting place of the missing aircraft is in the southerly portion of the search arc,' and not in the Bay of Bengal.

Malaysia Airlines said on its website that it would begin making compensation payments to passengers' next of kin as soon as possible 'in order to meet their immediate economic needs.' Accepting the payments now, it said, would not 'affect the rights of the next-of-kin to claim compensation according to the law at a later stage.'

The airline, which is controlled and part-owned by the national government, said that it would 'keep in close touch with the families on news updates through telephone calls, messages, the Internet, and face-to-face meetings,' and that it would open offices in Beijing and Kuala Lumpur to provide support for the families of missing passengers, most of whom were Chinese citizens.

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