How did MAS track MH370? There’s an app for that

KUALA LUMPUR, May 2 — Malaysia Airlines (MAS) had believed Flight MH370 was over Cambodia hours after it turned around and flew west across peninsular Malaysia because it uses a common flight tracker programme similar to those available for smartphones.
MAS CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said the flight tracker only used secondary data and projections, and had not been able to reliably determine the exact location of the MAS jetliner.
“It’s something that many of you have on your iPads and iPhones,” Ahmad Jauhari told a press conference on the missing plane here today.
Putrajaya yesterday issued the preliminary report on Flight MH370 that Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak pledged last week to release, along with other information regarding the missing flight.
But the release has renewed scrutiny over Malaysia’s response to the flight that disappeared in the early hours of March 8 while on its way to Beijing, China with 239 people on board.
Among others, it revealed that MAS’s operations centre told Kuala Lumpur air traffic controllers that it believed the plane to be in Cambodian airspace after it disappeared from civilian radar.
When Malaysian authorities brought this information to their Vietnamese counterparts, however, the latter pointed out that MH370’s plotted route would not have brought into Cambodian territory.
MAS operations also subsequently provided coordinates of where it believed the plane to be, and only conceded later on that the flight tracker it used was not reliable for aircraft positioning.
Searchers scouring the vast swathes of the remote Indian Ocean off the coast of Perth in Australia have yet to find any evidence of MH370, and have begun scaling back the search for the plane that has been missing for nearly two months.