(CNN) -- Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went down
over the southern Indian Ocean, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said
Monday, citing a new analysis of satellite data by a British satellite company
and accident investigators, and apparently ending hopes that anyone survived.
A relative of a missing passenger briefed by the airline in
Beijing said, "They have told us all lives are lost."
The Prime Minister based his announcement on what he
described as unprecedented analysis of satellite data sent by the plane by
British satellite provider Inmarsat and the British Air Accidents Investigation
Branch. He didn't describe the nature of the analysis.
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Angry relatives of those aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
react in Beijing on Monday, March 24, after hearing that the plane went down
over the southern Indian Ocean, according to a new analysis of satellite data.
The plane has been missing since March 8.
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He begged reporters to respect the privacy of relatives.
"For them, the past few weeks have been
heartbreaking," he said. "I know this news must be harder
still."
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Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, center, delivers a
statement about the flight Monday, March 24, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Razak's
announcement came after the airline sent a text message to relatives saying it
"deeply regrets that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH
370 has been lost and that none of those onboard survived."
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The Prime Minister's statement came after the
airline sent a text message to relatives saying it "deeply regrets that we
have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that
none of those onboard survived."
Reporters could hear wailing from a briefing for relatives
of missing passengers in Beijing. Some relatives were wheeled from the
conference room on stretchers, and one group of relatives smashed the lens of a
reporter's camera. A woman walked out of a briefing for relatives near Kuala
Lumpur crying.
A Facebook page dedicated to the only American aboard the
flight, Philip Wood, said of relatives that "our collective hearts are
hurting now."
"Please lift all the loved ones of MH370 with your good
thoughts and prayers," a post on the page said.
Sarah Bajc, Wood's partner, canceled all media interviews
after the announcement.
"I need closure to be certain, but cannot keep on with
public efforts against all odds," she wrote. "I still feel his
presence, so perhaps it was his soul all along."
Debris spotted in Indian Ocean
The announcement came the same day as Australian officials
said they had spotted two objects in the southern Indian Ocean that could be
related to the flight, which has been missing since March 8 with 239 people
aboard.
One object is "a grey or green circular object,"
and the other is "an orange rectangular object," the Australian
Maritime Safety Authority said.
The objects are the latest in a series of sightings,
including "suspicious objects" reported earlier Monday by a Chinese
military plane that was involved in search efforts in the same region,
authorities said.
So far, nothing has been definitively linked to Flight 370. Earlier,
Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia's acting transportation minister, said only that
"at the moment, there are new leads but nothing conclusive."
A reporter on board the Chinese plane for China's official
Xinhua news agency said the search team saw "two relatively big floating
objects with many white smaller ones scattered within a radius of several
kilometers," the agency reported Monday.
The Chinese plane was flying at 33,000 feet on its way back
to Australia's west coast when it made the sighting, the Australian Maritime
Safety Authority said.
But a U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon aircraft, one of the military's
most sophisticated reconnaissance planes, that was tasked to investigate the
objects was unable to find them, the authority said.
With the search in its third week, authorities have so far
been unable to establish where exactly the missing plane is or why it flew off
course from its planned journey from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
China has a particularly large stake in the search: Its
citizens made up about two-thirds of the 227 passengers on the missing Boeing
777. Beijing has repeatedly called on Malaysian authorities, who are in charge
of the overall search, to step up efforts to find the plane.
Malaysian and Australian authorities appeared to be more
interested Monday in the two objects spotted by a Royal Australian Air Force
P-3 Orion aircraft.
The Australian's navy's HMAS Success "is on scene and
is attempting to locate the objects," the Australian maritime authority
said.
Hishammuddin said Australian authorities had said the
objects could be retrieved "within the next few hours, or by tomorrow
morning at the latest."
Satellites focus search
Recent information from satellites identifying objects in
the water that could be related to the plane has focused search efforts on an
area roughly 1,500 miles southwest of the Australian city of Perth.
A total of 10 aircraft -- from Australia, China the United
States and Japan -- were tasked with combing the search area Monday.
The aerial searches have been trained on the isolated part
of ocean since last week, when Australia first announced that satellite imagery
had detected possible objects that could be connected to the search.
Since then, China and France have said they also have
satellite information pointing to floating debris in a similar area. The
Chinese information came from images, and the French data came from satellite
radar.
But Australian officials have repeatedly warned that the
objects detected in satellite images may not turn out to be from the missing
plane -- they could be containers that have fallen off cargo ships, for
example.
On Saturday, searchers found a wooden pallet as well as
strapping belts, Australian authorities said. The use of wooden pallets is
common in the airline industry, but also in the shipping industry.
Hishammuddin said Monday that Flight 370 was carrying wooden
pallets, but that there was so far no evidence they are related to the ones
sighted in the search area.
The investigation into the passenger jet's disappearance has
already produced a wealth of false leads and speculative theories. Previously,
when the hunt was focused on the South China Sea near where the plane dropped
off civilian radar, a number of sightings of debris proved to be unrelated to
the search.
Plane said to have flown low
The sighting of the objects of interest by the Chinese plane
came after a weekend during which other nuggets of information emerged about
the movements of the errant jetliner on the night it vanished.
Military radar tracking shows that after making a sharp turn
over the South China Sea, the plane changed altitude as it headed toward the
Strait of Malacca, an official close to the investigation into the missing
flight told CNN.
The plane flew as low as 12,000 feet at some point before it disappeared from radar, according to the official. It had reportedly been flying at a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet when contact was lost with air traffic control.
The sharp turn seemed to be intentional, the official said,
because executing it would have taken the Boeing 777 two minutes -- a time
period during which the pilot or co-pilot could have sent an emergency signal
if there had been a fire or other emergency on board.
Authorities say the plane didn't send any emergency signals,
though some analysts say it's still unclear whether the pilots tried but
weren't able to communicate because of a catastrophic failure of the aircraft's
systems.
The official, who is not authorized to speak to the media,
told CNN that the area the plane flew in after the turn is a heavily trafficked
air corridor and that flying at 12,000 feet would have kept the jet well out of
the way of that traffic.
Malaysia disputes reprogramming
Also over the weekend, Malaysian authorities said the last
transmission from the missing aircraft's reporting system showed it heading to
Beijing -- a revelation that appears to undercut the theory that someone
reprogrammed the plane's flight path before the co-pilot signed off with air
traffic controllers for the last time.
That reduces, but doesn't rule out, suspicions about foul
play in the cockpit.
Last week, CNN and other news organizations, citing unnamed
sources, reported that authorities believed someone had reprogrammed the
aircraft's flight computer before the sign-off.
CNN cited sources who believed the plane's flight computer
must have been reprogrammed because it flew directly over navigational way
points. A plane controlled by a human probably would not have been so precise,
the sources said.
Malaysian authorities never confirmed that account, saying
last week that the plane's "documented flight path" had not been
altered.
On Sunday, they clarified that statement further, saying the
plane's automated data reporting system included no route changes in its last
burst, sent at 1:07 a.m. -- 12 minutes before the last voice communication with
flight controllers.
Analysts are divided about what the latest information could mean. Some argue it's a sign that mechanical failure sent the plane suddenly off course. Others say there are still too many unknowns to eliminate any possibilities.
CNN aviation analyst Miles O'Brien called the fresh details
about the flight a "game changer."
"Now we have no evidence the crew did anything
wrong," he said. "And in fact, now, we should be operating with the
primary assumption being that something bad happened to that plane shortly
after they said good night."
If a crisis on board caused the plane to lose pressure, he
said, pilots could have chosen to deliberately fly lower to save passengers.
"You want to get down to 10,000 feet, because that is
when you don't have to worry about pressurization. You have enough air in the
atmosphere naturally to keep everybody alive," he said. "So part of
the procedure for a rapid decompression ... it's called a high dive, and you go
as quickly as you can down that to that altitude."
Authorities have said pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah was highly
experienced. On Monday, Malaysian authorities said Flight 370 was co-pilot
Fariq Abdul Hamid's sixth flight in a Boeing 777, and the first time when he
was not traveling with an instructor pilot shadowing him.
"We do not see any problem with him," said
Malaysia Airlines CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya.
