KUALA LUMPUR: Data logs in the final report on the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 issued in July are incomplete and modified, according to experts investigating the incident.
The West Australian reported that experts from an independent group investigating the aviation mystery, Victor Iannello, Don Thompson and Richard Godfrey, “found some anomalies in the message logs that were included in factual information released by Malaysia on March 8, 2014, and the Safety Investigation Report released by Malaysia on July 30”.
The group, led by Iannello, brings together experts from scientific disciplines and has worked extensively with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau on the flight’s disappearance.
The logs from the two reports document the communication between MAS Operations Dispatch Centre (ODC) and service providers that route messages over Satcom and VHF (Very High Frequency) paths as part of the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS). The ACARS then prints a message in the cockpit.
“The anomalies suggest the traffic logs appearing in the reports are not complete and what appears in the reports has been modified,” Iannello said.
He specifically drew on an urgent message from MAS ODC that was submitted at 18.03 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), which was then retransmitted multiple times but the last message sent to the aircraft had the wrong time, suggesting either the explanatory text in the final report is wrong or the traffic logs do not contain all the message traffic.
Iannello said the facts surrounding the ACARS traffic log “are more suspicious, with the filter parameters used to generate the remaining pages (after page one) of the report changed so that VHF messages, if any occurred, were excluded”.
“The change in filter parameters and the repeated messages are clear evidence that the traffic log in the Safety and Investigation Report (SIR) is actually two reports that were pieced together and presented as a single report,” Iannello said.
He also added that “in the ACARS traffic log in the SIR, the last line of the text message that was sent by MAS ODC at 18.03.23 appears to have been edited”.
“It is disappointing that more than four years after MH370’s disappearance, we are still asking Malaysia to release withheld data,” he said.
“The military radar data is another example of a dataset that has never been released in full, despite its significance in providing information about how the aircraft was flown after the diversion from the flight plan.
“It is important that Malaysia provide a complete, unmodified log of all ACARS communications on Satcom (satellite communications), VHF and HF (high frequency) paths. This is significant in light of questions surrounding the delayed response of Malaysian authorities after MH370 went missing.”
The former chairman of the Malaysia’s Civil Aviation Authority Datuk Seri Azharuddin Abd Rahman resigned from leading the body on July 31, citing that he was assuming responsibility for the disappeared vessel which vanished four years ago with 239 people on board, a day after the report’s release.
He said that even though the report did not blame the then Civil Aviation Department but there were apparent findings with regards to the operations of the Kuala Lumpur Air Traffic Control Centre.
The report that was made public late last month highlighted that the Malaysian air traffic control authorities should have issued a distress phase earlier when they failed to make contact with MH370 on March 8, 2014.
The exhaustive 495-page report also detailed that the Malaysian air traffic controllers did not initiate the three emergency phases in accordance with the standard operating procedures (SOP) in a timely manner.
The Kuala Lumpur Air Traffic Control lost contact with the flight at 1.19am Malaysia time. Following that, the Air Traffic Controllers in Vietnam under the Ho Chi Minh Area Control Command (HCM ACC) was unable to establish two-way radio communications with MH370 at 1:39am, by which time, Malaysian traffic controllers did not follow the SOP to initiate emergency phases.
The report said that the distress phase should have been declared by the Malaysian ARCC by 2:27am. However, it was only issued at 6:32am, nearly four hours later.
The report also detailed that the Air Traffic Control Officer (ATCO) on duty that night did not continuously monitor the progress of MH370, as he had to focus on another area with four other flights that required his attention.
Although investigators confirmed the presence of the other flights, they found that the Malaysian ATCO was still supposed to monitor MH370 as it was still flying under his area of responsibility (AOR).