Final 54 minutes of talks with MH370

The communications record is yet to be confirmed by Malaysian Airlines, Malaysia’s Civil Aviation Authority and the office of Prime Minister Najib Razak
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The final 54 minutes of cockpit communication aboard the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 can be disclosed by The Telegraph.

A transcript of conversations between the co-pilot and the control tower, and other air traffic controllers, runs from the time the Boeing 777 was taxiing to its last known position thousands of feet above the South China Sea.

It includes exchanges from a point at which investigators believe the plane had already been sabotaged, as well as the last words of Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, the co-pilot: “All right, good night.”

Analysts said the sequence of messages appeared “perfectly routine”. However two features, they said, stood out as potentially odd.

The first was a message from the cockpit at 1.07am, saying the plane was flying at 35,000ft. This was unnecessary as it repeated a message delivered six minutes earlier.

But it occurred at a crucial moment: it was at 1.07am that the plane’s Acars signalling device sent its last message before being disabled some time in the next 30 minutes, apparently deliberately. A separate transponder was disabled at 1.21am but investigators believe the Acars was shut down before Hamid’s final, 1.19am farewell.

The other odd feature, one reason for suspicions that the plane’s disappearance was no accident, was that its loss of communication and subsequent sharp turn west occurred at the handover from air traffic controllers in Kuala Lumpur to those in Ho Chi Minh City.

The Telegraph has repeatedly asked Malaysia Airlines, Malaysia’s Civil Aviation Authority and the office of Najib Razak, the Malaysian prime minister, to confirm the communications record. Only the prime minister’s office responded, saying that it would not release this data.

Source: Dhaka Tribune