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Missing Malaysian plane may have flown up to five hours, U.S. officials say | Missing Malaysian plane may have flown up to five hours, U.S. officials say |
(about 2 hours later) | |
The search for a missing Malaysian jetliner with 239 people onboard could expand westward into the Indian Ocean based on information that the plane may have flown for four hours after it dropped from radar, U.S. officials said Thursday. | |
A senior U.S. official said the information came from a stream of signals sent by Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. If the two engines on the Boeing 777 functioned for up to four additional hours, that would strengthen concern that a rogue pilot or a hijacker took control of the plane early Saturday over the Gulf of Thailand. | |
All other communication with the plane ended after 1 a.m. Saturday. At that point, the pilot signed off with Malaysian air-traffic controllers with a casual “All right, good night,” according to news reports. Within 30 minutes, the transponder signal that the plane was sending to ground-based radar stations went silent. | |
If the plane flew on for hours, it’s likely that someone in the cockpit turned off the transponder and the radio. | |
“The fact that a modern airplane with a huge amount of redundancy appeared to change course at the same time that the transponder was turned off, that suggests that someone unauthorized took control of that airplane, like an intruder or one of the pilots,” said a U.S. air-crash expert who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the expert is not directly involved in the investigation. | |
Other U.S. officials said their information did not reveal what direction the plane flew — or whether it simply circled — during those four hours. That much additional flight time could have put the plane somewhere over the Indian Ocean, far from its Beijing destination, prompting officials to consider whether the search area should be expanded. | |
A modern airplane sends information in a steady stream to its owner, the company that built it or the firm that built its engines. In the final minutes before Air France Flight 477 plunged into the Atlantic almost five years ago, it sent 29 automatic error messages to the airline’s home base in France. | |
The Wall Street Journal first reported that U.S. investigators suspect that the engines on the Malaysia Airlines flight kept running for up to four hours after the plane reached its last known location. The newspaper later corrected its report to say that this belief was based on data “pings” designed to report to a satellite on the status of onboard systems, not specifically data from the plane’s Rolls-Royce engines sent back to the manufacturer. The Malaysian government denied the initial report. | |
In Washington, one senior administration official said the signals came from the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, with which planes maintain contact with ground stations using radio or satellite signals. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation, said Malaysian authorities shared the flight data with the administration. The fact that the signals did not reveal the plane’s location suggested that it came from the engine. | |
Malaysian authorities said earlier that engine data was unavailable after the plane disappeared from civilian radar at 1:30 a.m. Saturday. The last transmission from the engines came 26 minutes after its takeoff from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Airlines chief executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said. | |
“The last transmission was received at 1:07,” Ahmad told reporters. “It said everything is operating normally.” | “The last transmission was received at 1:07,” Ahmad told reporters. “It said everything is operating normally.” |
Representatives of both Boeing and Rolls-Royce have been in Kuala Lumpur working with the airline, and neither received data after 1:07 a.m., Ahmad said. A Rolls-Royce spokeswoman refused to comment on the reports. | |
The search for Flight MH370 has at times appeared chaotic and baffling — a mix of rumors, confusion and false leads. The government in Kuala Lumpur acknowledged Thursday that it had made little progress in solving the mystery of the vanished plane. | |
“We have looked at every lead. In many cases, in fact all the cases, we have not found anything positive.” said Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia’s defense minister and acting transport minister. | “We have looked at every lead. In many cases, in fact all the cases, we have not found anything positive.” said Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia’s defense minister and acting transport minister. |
“This just might be something we have never seen before,” Steven B. Wallace, a former director of the Federal Aviation Administration’s accident investigation office, said in an interview Thursday. | |
Wallace said progress may be hampered because Malaysia lacks an investigative branch like the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. | Wallace said progress may be hampered because Malaysia lacks an investigative branch like the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. |
“The pattern here is that the best information is not being immediately presented to the smartest people around who could look at it,” Wallace said. He noted that Malaysian authorities revealed only after several days that their military radar had picked up signs of a plane flying off Malaysia’s western coast after the passenger jet had disappeared much farther east. | |
Then, China disclosed three days after the disappearance that its satellites had picked up images of what appeared to be debris in the area where the plane vanished. No signs of wreckage were found there. | |
“And then we have this new business about the engines sending [signals] automatically, also several days old,” said Wallace. | “And then we have this new business about the engines sending [signals] automatically, also several days old,” said Wallace. |
The information about those engine signals is fraught with contradictions as well. | |
“Between Rolls-Royce and Malaysia Air, they know whether they have that technology in place, yet we get conflicting reports,” Wallace said. | |
In Washington, White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters that the United States is not in a position to draw any conclusions. He said, “It’s my understanding that based on some new information that’s not necessarily conclusive — but new information — an additional search area may be opened in the Indian Ocean.” | |
Search operations in the Indian Ocean, the world’s third-largest ocean with an average depth of nearly 12,800 feet, would present significant challenges. | Search operations in the Indian Ocean, the world’s third-largest ocean with an average depth of nearly 12,800 feet, would present significant challenges. |
The United States is “consulting with international partners about the appropriate assets to deploy,” Carney said. | |
As the search area continued to widen, with nearly a dozen countries involved, the U.S. Navy said Thursday it was shifting one of its ships involved in the hunt, the destroyer USS Kidd, from the Gulf of Thailand to the Malacca Strait on the western side of the Malay Peninsula. | |
The U.S. military also announced that it would add a P-8A Poseidon aircraft to the search Friday. The plane will join a Navy P-3C Orion surveillance aircraft already patrolling in the area. | |
India’s Defense Ministry said Thursday that the Indian navy has launched its own search mission, sending two ships — the INS Kumbhir, an amphibious warfare ship, and the INS Saryu, a patrol vessel — into the Andaman Sea near the Malacca Strait. Indian coast guard and navy aircraft were also pressed into service. | India’s Defense Ministry said Thursday that the Indian navy has launched its own search mission, sending two ships — the INS Kumbhir, an amphibious warfare ship, and the INS Saryu, a patrol vessel — into the Andaman Sea near the Malacca Strait. Indian coast guard and navy aircraft were also pressed into service. |
Burma, also known as Myanmar, said it would open its airspace to planes looking for the missing airliner and was prepared to join the search if asked, the BBC reported. | |
Simon Denyer and William Wan in Beijing, Karla Adams in London, and William Branigin and Ernesto Londoño in Washington contributed to this report. | Simon Denyer and William Wan in Beijing, Karla Adams in London, and William Branigin and Ernesto Londoño in Washington contributed to this report. |