Nearly three months after Malaysia Airlines flight 370 vanished from the skies, a collection of satellite data on the flight's last moments has been released.
The long-anticipated data, collected during a government-led investigation, determined that the 239- passenger and crew flight was diverted from its original destination to Beijing and continued on towards Australia where it crashed into the Indian Ocean, according to the information obtained by the Associated Press.
But experts and family members of the passengers say the 45 pages of data doesn't shed any light on what happened to the Boeing 777 after it took off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8.
"It's a whole lot of stuff that is not very important to know," Michael Exner, a satellite engineer who has examined the government's data on his own, told the AP. "There are probably two or three pages of important stuff, the rest is just noise. It doesn't add any value to our understanding."
Flight MH 370 was last known to be flying between Malaysia and south Vietnam. Raw satellite data analyzed during the investigation concluded the plane continued south until it crashed into the southern Indian Ocean off western Australia, the AP reported.
The information was based mostly on hourly communications between the plane and a satellite owned by the UK-based telecommunications company Inmarsat.
However, without the actual plane, the investigation was unable to determine what exactly happened.
Family members of the passengers, who have long criticized the Malaysian government's handling of the investigation, were disappointed the calculation methods used to arrive at its conclusion were not more transparent. The next step is to have the data analyzed by non-government experts.
"We are not experts and we cannot analyze the raw data, but we need to see the deduction process and judge by ourselves if every step was solid," Steve Wang, whose mother was on flight MH 370, told the AP. "We still need to know where the plane is and what is the truth. We know the likelihood that our beloved ones have survived is slim, but it is not zero."
