Malaysia investigates lost opportunities in plane search

Malaysia’s government has begun investigating civil aviation and military authorities to determine why opportunities to identify and track Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 were missed in the chaotic hours after it vanished, two officials said.

The preliminary internal inquiries come as tensions mount between civilian and military authorities over who bears most responsibility for the initial confusion and any mistakes that led to a week-long search in the wrong ocean.

“What happened at that time is being investigated and I can’t say any more than that because it involves the military and the government,” a senior government official said.

Malaysia’s opposition coalition has demanded a parliamentary inquiry into what happened on the ground in those first few hours. Government officials have said any formal inquiry should not begin until the flight’s black box recorders are found.

Meanwhile, search and rescue officials in Australia are confident they know the approximate position of the black box recorders from the missing flight, Australian prime minister Tony Abbott said.

At the same time, however, the head of the agency co-ordinating the search said that the latest “ping” signal, which was captured by a listening device buoy on Thursday, was not related to the plane.

“We are confident that we know the position of the black box flight recorder to within some kilometres,” Abbott said in a speech in the Chinese commercial capital Shanghai. “Still, confidence in the approximate position of the black box is not the same as recovering wreckage from almost four and a half kilometres beneath the sea or finally determining all that happened on the flight.”

The search was focusing on a small patch of the Indian Ocean, after the latest “ping” seemed to lend credence to four previous “pings” detected by a US Navy “Towed Pinger Locator” (TPL) towed by Australia’s Ocean Shield vessel.

All five acoustic signals were detected in this small area. But Angus Houston, head of the Australian agency supervising the search effort, said analysis of acoustic data confirmed the latest signal was unlikely to be related to the plane’s black boxes.

“On the information I have available to me, there has been no major breakthrough in the search for MH370. I will provide a further update if, and when, further information becomes available.”