Earlier this year a four year search for missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 was called off as 125,000sq km of the Indian Ocean was explored with no findings.
The Malaysia Airlines plane was travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it disappeared in March 2014, with 239 people – mostly from China – on board.
There have been only three confirmed fragments of MH370 found, all of them on western Indian Ocean shores.
The parts included a two-metre wing part known as a flaperon.
When asked why it has taken so long for the report into the disappearance to be published Kok Soo Chon said: “This is a very difficult question so far, it is maybe the most difficult.”
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He told the press conference that a 600-page report was published one year after the plane vanished, however this underwent checks and verifications.
“After that we are able to come up with findings and analysis and conclusion.”
There were multiple reasons for the delay in publication, one of which being that as new information was found the report had to change.
“It’s a dynamic document,” he says.
He added: “We cannot release our document, no matter how ready we are, when the search is still going on.”
“It won’t be satisfactory to everybody,” says Kok, but seven countries have endorsed the report.
There had been some upset about the fact that families of passengers on board MH370 had only found out 48hours prior to the report conference that it was going to go ahead.
This has meant that some famiiies were unable to make it to Malaysia.
One revelation that came out of today’s report was that MH370’s emergency locator transmitters (ELT) all malfunctioned.
ELTs are designed to transmit distress signals, which could have been an aid in locating the plane, however all four ELT devices on board MH370 failed.
The report shows that all of the batteries in the ELTs were well within their expiry dates, however it also revealed that a landing in water could have caused the malfunction:
“There have been reported difficulties with ELT signals if an aircraft enters the water … In these instances, the ELT does not activate, or the transmission is ineffective as a result of being submerged.”
Also mentioned in the conference was the fact that MH370 was carrying 4,566 kg of mangosteens and 221 kg of lithium-ion batteries.
These were being transported in the cargo hold, and have been speculated that this could have caused a fire that led to the crash.
However, today’s report rejects this theory – but the only analysis has been based on previous battery and mangosteen shipments.
Looking at details show that the shipment of batteries did not pass through an x-ray, as “there were no available x-ray machines large enough”.