MH370 disappeared over six years ago, and for a short time it was believed it might have flown off course over Cambodia, according to an expert.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing on March 8, 2014, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board. The Boeing 777-200ER first disappeared from air traffic control radar after it passed waypoint IGARI in the South China Sea. A couple of minutes before, it had said “goodbye” to Lumpur Radar and was instructed to contact air traffic controllers in Ho Chi Minh City ‒ but it never did.
At 1:39am, local time, a controller in Ho Chi Minh City called Kuala Lumpur to report that they had not heard from MH370 and for the next few hours they both called the plane, each other and other air traffic controllers in the area trying to find the plane.
In the 2019 book ‘The Taking of MH370’ aviation expert Jeff Wise explained how Malaysia Airlines’ own operations centre thought the plane was in Cambodia.
However, it turned out there had been an error with their software and they actually had no idea where it was.
Mr Wise wrote: “At first, the airlines’ operation centre reported that their tracking system showed the plane was over Cambodia.
“After some confused calls to Phnom Penh, the airline realised that its software was wrong. The plane wasn’t there either.”
It was then, at 5:20am, that a Malaysia Airlines employee asked Kuala Lumpur whether the plane had successfully handed off to Ho Chi Minh City.
The controller woke up his supervisor to ask and ten minutes later a search-and-rescue response was activated.
At first, search efforts were focused on the South China sea and Gulf of Thailand.
Each time new clues were discovered, the focus for the rescue mission changed.
For example, when the authorities realised that the plane had continued to be displayed on primary radar owned by the military, they discovered that it had in fact done a 180 after passing IGARI and flown back towards the Malay Peninsula, and then up the Malacca Strait.
They then shifted their search missions to near the Andaman Islands.
Then, data collected by 3F1, a satellite belonging to British satellite telecommunications company Inmarsat, revealed that the plane had been communicating for several hours after it disappeared from primary radar too.
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Analysis of the Burst Timing Offset (BTO) and Burst Frequency Offset (BFO) values indicated that the plane then flew south over the Southern Indian Ocean.
The last pingring is believed to have been sent from an area of ocean west of Perth, Australia.
It was then that it was concluded that the plane came to grief here, and the search efforts for the next two years were focused on this area of sea.
However, some MH370 enthusiasts have not taken their eye off Cambodia.
Andre Milne of Unicorn Aerospace claimed it could have landed at an abandoned airport in the country known as Kampong Chhnang.
He told Express.co.uk that both he and an ameuter investigator named Daniel Boyer received information about this alleged landing in Cambodia.
He said: “Both Mr Boyer and myself received separate raw intelligence disclosures that provided details of a secret MH370 landing that allowed us to calculate and identify the exact location of an abandoned airport that is perfectly aligned directly upon a flight axis as used by the hijackers of MH370.”
Meanwhile, Mr Boyer himself believes he has found satellite images of the plane wreckage deep in the Cambodian jungle.
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He said: “From what I have collected in data from the commissioned search team, satellite images and historical records of Cambodian known cashes, this is 99 percent likely to be an unidentified plane crash site too remote to walk to.
“Cambodia’ slast plane crash was in 2007, while the satellite images of this exact spot in 2008 show undisturbed forest.
“This points to it being a plane crash between 2009 and 2015.”
Sourse: www.express.co.uk
