MH370: satellite phone call revealed as Australia gives update

Malaysia Airlines staff tried to contact the crew of missing flight MH370 by satellite phone after it disappeared from radar, Australian authorities have announced, with details about the failed call now being used to refine the suspected final path of the plane. Australia’s deputy prime minister, Warren Truss, said analysis of the failed call to the plane, which disappeared on 8 March, ‘suggests to us that the aircraft might have turned south a little earlier than we had previously expected’. The airliner disappeared with 239 people aboard after flying far off its original course from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Based on a series of satellite signals from its automated systems, it is believed to have gone down in the southern Indian Ocean off Western Australia. The satellite phone call is a new and separate detail. ‘After MH370 disappeared from the radar, Malaysia Airlines ground staff sought to make contact using a satellite phone. That was unsuccessful,’ Truss said. ‘But the detailed research that’s being done now has been able to … trace that phone call and help position the aircraft and the direction it was travelling.’  The minister said investigators still believed MH370 was somewhere on the search zone’s seventh arc, where its flight data communication systems emitted a final satellite ‘handshake’, according to theGuardian.com