Malaysian Prime Minister, Najib Razak, said on Saturday that a missing passenger jet was steered off course after its communications systems were deliberately dismantled and then flew for nearly seven additional hours.
That new information about the plane’s flight time has quickly transformed the multi-nation search. Based on satellite data, Najib said, the plane could have traveled along one of two corridors: from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan border to northern Thailand, or from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean.
Najib said that countries involved in searching near the Gulf of Thailand – where the Malaysia Airlines flight disappeared from civilian radar – will end their operations and redeploy their assets elsewhere.
In the most detailed comments to date by any Malaysian authority, Najib drew a new and disturbing picture of the plane’s final hours – one that involved “deliberate action by someone on the plane.”
Malaysian investigators now believe that Malaysia Airlines Fight MH370, bound for Beijing, veered west after and crossed the Malaysian peninsula after cutting contact with the ground. Contact with the plane was lost just as it passed from Malaysian into Vietnamese airspace.
Though previously U.S. officials believed the flight could have remained in the air for several extra hours, Najib said Saturday that the flight was still communicating with satellites until 8:11 a.m. — seven and a half hours after take-off from Kuala Lumpur.
“Due to the type of satellite data,” Najib said, “we are unable to confirm the precise location of the plane when it last made contact with the satellite.”
The plane could have flown on shortly beyond that last contact point, but it would have been on the verge of running out of fuel.
In previous days U.S. officials noted that the plane’s main communications systems were switched off separately, an indicator of a manual attempt to evade contact.
Many questions remain about the fate of the plane and the nature of the takeover in the cockpit. Searchers have failed to find any evidence of the plane, which disappeared from civilian radar last week less than an hour after takeoff. Malaysian officials had said earlier that they were investigating all crew members, as well as the plane’s 227 passengers.
Malaysian military radar data suggests the plane may have been steered west, in the direction of the Indian Ocean, after cutting contact with the ground. That possibility has opened up an enormous search field in the Indian Ocean, even as other search teams remain in waters to the east.
Suspicions of a hijacking hinged on the erratic behavior of the plane after it stopped sending radar signals and an indisputable fact: Despite an exhaustive search of the waters that straddle Malaysia and farther into the Indian Ocean, no trace of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 has been found.
“It’s looking less and less like an accident,” said a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly. “It’s looking more like a criminal event.”
If the flight continued after the transponder fell silent, officials and experts said, it must have been turned off in the cockpit.
“You’ve got an airplane that’s continuing to fly; you’ve got systems that are becoming non-operational. It had to be a deliberate action to turn them off,” said Ron Carr, who spent 39 years flying for the U.S. Air Force and American Airlines before becoming a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. “Somebody’s clearly operating the aircraft. I have a hunch it was hijacked.”
A second U.S. official said the jet’s path was unusual after it disappeared from radar. The senior official said that the plane reached an altitude of about 45,000 feet and “jumped around a lot.”
U.S. officials provided new details Friday about how they knew that the plane continued to fly well after its transponder stopped transmitting.
They said that an automatic stream of data from the plane ended at about the same time the transponder stopped. But a satellite that had been receiving the data continued to reach out to the plane on an hourly basis, and received confirmation that the plane still was flying.
“It is telling us the airplane continued to operate” for several hours, said a third U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so that he could speak candidly about a politically sensitive investigation.
Significantly, the transponder and the data flow did not stop at the same time, as they would if the plane had exploded or crashed into the ocean.
“They both did stop, and they did not stop simultaneously,” the official said. “A simultaneous stopping is something that we have seen before in in-flight breakups, airplanes that have exploded or come apart in the air.”
The data stream that was interrupted shortly after 1 a.m. on March 8 flows through a two-way onboard computer system known as ACARS, the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System.
“It is very possible for you as a pilot in the cockpit to turn off the ACARS system,” the official said. “If you knew what you were doing in the cockpit, you could shut off ACARS transmission.”
But the ability of the satellite to locate the plane — which he referred to as a “handshake” in which no information is exchanged — cannot be terminated from the cockpit.
“There’s no push button,” he said. “There’s no circuit breaker that would allow you to shut off the handshake.”
That satellite handshake took place on a system operated by Inmarsat, a British satellite company that provides global mobile telecommunications services.
U.S. officials declined to say how closely that handshake allowed them to track the path of the missing plane.
The search spread late this week from the relatively shallow waters around Malaysia to the much deeper Indian Ocean after Malaysia’s military reported that its radar showed that the plane veered sharply off course after its transponder stopped working and its radio went silent.
The plane continued to maneuver as if under control from the cockpit and changed altitude serval times, the New York Times reported Friday.
The newspaper said that Malaysian military radar showed it climbing to 45,000 feet and then dropping to 23,000 feet as it approached the Malaysian island of Penang.
The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 now involves 13 countries and more than 100 ships and aircraft. Malaysia’s acting transport minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, emphasized Friday that the search was expanding not because of any particular leads but because the initial search had turned up no evidence or debris.
“A normal investigation becomes narrower with time,” Hishammuddin said. “But this is not a normal investigation. We are looking further and further afield.”
The FBI is working with the Malaysian government and has sent more personnel to Malaysia to complement agents posted there. So far, the Malaysian government has not officially accepted any operational assistance, officials said.
Captain D.K. Sharma, an Indian navy spokesman, said Malaysia has given India a massive search grid of about 13,500 square miles, an area about the size of Maryland.
In India, Adm. Arun Prakash, a retired naval chief of staff who was posted in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, said that 1,000 Indian seamen, five vessels and four aircraft were involved in the search.
“We are looking for little pieces that can float, pieces of human body, life jackets, seat cushions in that vast stretch. It is very difficult,” Prakash said.
“So far, the information that has been made available to us is quite vague, even though the direction in which they say it flew falls within our jurisdiction,” Prakash said. “It is inadequate. We can keep searching till next year. It is like looking for a needle in the haystack.”
When communications ceased, the airliner was flying at 35,000 feet on a course for Beijing.
“At 1:21 a.m. we lost the signal from the transponder off the Malaysian coast,” said Mikael Robertsson of FlightRadar24, a Stockholm-based flight service that sells its tracking data to airports and airlines.
The company uses a system that captures GPS signals with land-based receivers located around the world. The signals are received once each second, but the Malaysia Airlines flight dropped its signal when the transponder went dead.
“Up until then the flight looked completely normal. There was nothing strange, nothing suspicious,” Robertsson said, adding that his company normally tracks that flight until it gets north of Vietnam. “We have never lost a signal because there has been an accident or a hijacking. This is the first time we see such a thing.”
Robertsson said the aircraft was not carrying a full load of fuel.
“The B777-200ER can fly up to about 16 to 18 hours,” he said. “This flight was six hours, so it was probably fueled for about seven or eight hours of flying time.”
That gave it the capacity to have landed or crashed anywhere between Mongolia in the north to Australia to the south, or from the west coast of India to hundreds of miles east of the Philippines.
Carr, the Florida professor, held out the slender hope that hijackers had landed the aircraft on a remote island.
“There’s a lot of World War II airfields left over,” he said. “They might want to hold the plane for ransom or hold the passengers for ransom, or they might want load the airplane up with high explosives and fly the airplane into a target someplace.”
It’s also possible that the passengers revolted against a hijacking like those aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into a farm field in Shanksville, Pa., on September 11, 2001.
If the plane crashed into the Indian Ocean or other waters which were not searched immediately after the plane disappeared, he said, it could take a longer time to locate it.
“They shouldn’t be missing for a week,” Carr said. “But then again, Amelia Earhart has been missing for many, many years. That ocean’s big, and it can swallow things up rather quickly and rather completely and hardly leave a trace at times.”
Washington Post.
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