The Real Final Words from Flight 370 Cockpit Revealed
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Rob Griffith – Pool/Getty Images(PERTH, Australia) — As the search for a missing Malaysia Airlines plane stretches into a fourth week, authorities clarified the final recorded words spoken by the plane’s pilots.
Malaysia’s transport ministry released a transcript Monday of voice transmission from the cockpit of Flight 370, with the final words, “Good night Malaysian three-seven-zero.” Earlier, the government said the final words were “All right, good night.”
There’s no explanation for the discrepancy, and authorities are still trying to determine whether the voice belongs to the pilot or co-pilot.
In a statement released with the communications transcript, Malaysia’s acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein stressed that the transcript doesn’t indicate anything abnormal, and investigators still believe the flight’s movements are “consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane.”
Monday’s search for the jetliner includes 10 planes and nine ships and continues amid poor weather conditions. At a press conference Monday, retired Australia Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston said Australia will soon be deploying an E-7A Wedgetail to act as a flying air traffic controller over the Indian Ocean.
Houston said the search area is roughly the size of Ireland.
“This search and recovery mission is the most challenging I’ve ever seen,” Houston said. “If we don’t find wreckage on the surface, we are eventually going to have to probably, in consultation with everybody who has a stake in this, review what we do next.”
The missing plane is a key focus of the International Air Transport Association’s yearly operations conference, which began Monday in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Officials are considering ways to better track aircraft to ensure that a situation similar to Flight 370 never occurs.
“The best way for all of us involved in aviation to honor the memory of those on board is to learn from what happened to improve safety in the future,” said IATA Director General Tony Tyler.
The search area for the doomed plane has been refined due to data from the satellite company Inmarsat, which tracked the jet on a southern route off the western coast of Australia. But even knowing the plane did crash-land in the Indian Ocean, the exact location remains a mystery, said Chris McLaughlin, Inmarsat’s Senior Vice President.
“We can’t give you a definitive ‘X marks the spot,’ we can give you a range area in which to look, which is what the world’s navys and aircraft are now doing,” McLaughlin told ABC News.
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