‘Only 1 of 6 emergency locators activated’
KUALA LUMPUR: Investigations revealed that only one of six emergency transmitters aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 may have been working following the disappearance of the aircraft on March 8, 2014.
Based on the aircraft’s maintenance records, the Boeing 777200ER had four Emergency Location Transmitters (ELTs).
One was on the ceiling of the cabin near the tail of the aircraft, with a switch located in the cockpit that was always in the “armed” or “on” position.
The pilot or co-pilot could activate the ELTs to send out an emergency satellite signal at 406MHz, besides two additional signals at 121.5MHz and 243MHz, which could be traced by transponders in the air, at sea or on land.
The batteries on the device were installed by Malaysia Airlines between December 2004 and July 2005, with an expiry date of November 2014.
The three other ELTs were in the cabin crew storage area and emergency slides, and their expiry dates were November 2014, August 2016 and May 2017.
Malaysian International Civil Aviation Organisation (Annex 13) Safety Investigation Team head Datuk Kok Soo Chon, however, said the ELTs would not work in water and could be damaged as a result of a crash.
“On the date of the incident, there was no ELT signal detected. But there is no guarantee that an ELT will be activated as ICAO records show that of 170 crashes over the past 30 years, only 39 had their ELTs activated.
“This 22 per cent success rate shows that the ELT is not the main focus when it comes to air crashes,” he said when releasing the report on Monday.
The report also highlighted the batteries on the aircraft’s Underwater Locator Beacon (ULB) attached to its Flight Data Recorder (FDR), or black box, which had expired in December 2012.
Therefore, the only “hope” for MH370, once it crashed into the southern Indian Ocean, was the ULB attached to the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR).
Records showed that the batteries for the ULB attached to the CVR were set to expire in June 2014. The ULB was capable of broadcasting a signal at 37.5KHz from a depth of 6,096m.
The revelations regarding the safety aspects of the aircraft raised questions about the slim hopes of the search mission for MH370, which took 1,046 days between March 8, 2014 and Jan 17 last year.
Touching on this, Kok said the ULBs attached to the FDR and CVR were supposed to function upon impact on water. And despite the expired ULB batteries on the FDR, there was no certainty that the unit did not work.
“We believe it still would have worked, even though the batteries had expired, but there is no guarantee. In fact, it could have worked just for a few days,” he said.