Thailand saw ‘plane’ radar blips 10 days ago

Investigators trying to find the missing Malaysian jetliner have received belated help from Thailand, whose military said it took 10 days to report radar blips that might have been the plane “because we did not pay attention to it”.

A coalition of 26 countries, including Thailand, is looking for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which vanished on March 8 with 239 people aboard a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Search crews are scouring two giant arcs of territory amounting to the size of Australia — half of it in the remote seas of the southern Indian Ocean.

Malaysian officials said early in the search that they suspected the plane backtracked and flew towards the Strait of Malacca, just west of Malaysia, but it took a week for them to confirm Malaysian military radar data that suggested that route.

Yesterday, Thai military officials said their own radar showed an unidentified plane, possibly Flight 370, flying towards the strait beginning minutes after the Malaysian jet’s transponder signal was lost.

Thailand’s failure to quickly share possible information about the plane may not substantially change what Malaysian officials now know, but it raises questions about the degree to which some countries are sharing their defence data.

Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur at 12.40am Malaysian time on March 8 and its transponder, which allows air traffic controllers to identify and track the plane, ceased communicating at 1.20am.

Montol said that at 1.28am, Thai military radar “was able to detect a signal, which was not a normal signal, of a plane flying in the direction opposite from the MH370 plane”, back towards Kuala Lumpur.

The plane later turned right, towards Butterworth, a Malaysian city along the Malacca strait. The radar signal was infrequent and did not include any data such as the flight number.

When asked why it took so long to release the radar information, Montol said: “Because we did not pay any attention to it. The Royal Thai Air Force only looks after any threats against our country.”