Malaysian police search homes of missing flight’s pilots as focus turns to foul play
(6 months later)
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Malaysian authorities have concluded that a passenger jet missing since last week was hijacked and deliberately steered off course, a government official involved in the investigation told The Associated Press.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Police on Saturday searched the homes of the pilots who were in control of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 shortly before it disappeared more than a week ago as investigators sharpened their focus on the possibility that the plane fell victim to foul play.
“It’s conclusive,” the official told The AP.
The plane captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, has been a Malaysia Airlines pilot for more than three decades, logging 18,000 hours in the air. There was no indication Saturday that he or co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, had been targeted by investigators.
According to the report, investigators have determined that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 was diverted from its intended destination of Beijing by one or more people with significant flying experience.
The search came the same day that Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said the plane’s disappearance was “deliberate” and evidence emerged that it appeared to have flown for seven hours after its radar transponder and satellite uplink went dead, apparently turned off by someone in the cockpit.
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.
“Clearly, the search for MH370 has entered a new phase,” Najib said.
Even with a determination of hijacking, 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.
But there was no explanation of who — crew members, hijackers or terrorists — might have commandeered the Boeing 777. And while the investigation tilted toward what one U.S. official called “a criminal event,” there were cautions that until the plane is found, all possibilities remain on the table.
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.
In the most comprehensive account to date of the plane’s fate, Najib said the investigation had “refocused” to look at the crew and passengers. He said satellite data showed that the plane could have last made contact anywhere along one of two corridors: one stretching from northern Thailand toward the Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan border, the other, more southern corridor stretching from Indonesia to the remote Indian Ocean.
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.
Najib said Saturday that the flight was still being contacted by satellites until 8:11 a.m. — 7½ hours after takeoff, and more than 90 minutes after it was due in Beijing. If the plane was still in the air, it would have been nearing its fuel limit.
“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.”
“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.”
If the flight continued after the transponder fell silent, officials and experts said, it must have been turned off in the cockpit.
A U.S. official with knowledge of the investigation said that even after the flow of data from the plane ended — about the same time the plane’s radar transponder went dead — the satellite kept trying to contact the plane and could determine that it still was in flight. Though that contact effort provided no specific information on position or direction, it did tell about how far the plane was from the last location when its digital datalink system was actually sending data up to the satellite.
“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.”
The new leads about the plane’s endpoint, although ambiguous, have drastically changed a search operation involving more than a dozen nations.
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.”
On Sunday, India put its search for the plane on hold at the request of the government in Kuala Lumpur. India had been searching around the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and in the Bay of Bengal. Defense officials said both the searches have been suspended but may resume.
U.S. officials provided new details Friday about how they knew that the plane continued to fly well after its transponder stopped transmitting.
“There is a very high level coordination meeting take place taking place in Malaysia, so it is too premature to say that everything has been stopped. There is a temporary pause in operation waiting the joint coordination meeting in Malaysia. Beyond this I have no inputs,” said Capt. D.K. Sharma, Navy spokesman.
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 for at least four hours it received confirmation that the plane still was flying.
Malaysia said Saturday that efforts would be terminated in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea, where the plane first disappeared from civilian radar.
“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.
The plane, based on one potential endpoint, could have spent nearly all its flight time over the Indian Ocean as it headed toward an area west of Australia. But if the plane traveled in the direction of Kazakhstan or Turkmenistan, it would present a more perplexing scenario in which the aircraft would have evaded detection for hours while flying through a volatile region where airspace is heavily monitored: Burma, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and western China are all in the neighborhood of that path, as is the United States’ Bagram air base in Afghanistan.
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.
Malaysia has confirmed that a previously unknown radar trail picked up by its military was indeed MH370. That blip suggests the plane had cut west, across the Malaysian Peninsula, after severing contact with the ground. Malaysia received help in analyzing that radar data from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Aviation Administration and Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch.
“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.”
U.S. officials have said that the plane, shortly after being diverted, reached an altitude of 45,000 feet and “jumped around a lot.” But the airplane otherwise appeared to operate normally. Significantly, the transponder and a satellite-based communication system did not stop at the same time, as they would if the plane had exploded, disintegrated or crashed into the ocean.
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.
Najib said the plane’s Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, was disabled just as MH370 reached the eastern coast of Malaysia. The transponder was then switched off, Najib said, as the aircraft neared the border between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace.
“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.”
Halsey reported from Washington, and Gowen reported from New Delhi. Liu Liu in Beijing; Tim Craig in Islamabad, Pakistan; Rama Lakshmi in New Delhi; and Joel Achenbach, Adam Goldman and Sari Horwitz in Washington contributed to this report.
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 7 to 8 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 Sept. 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.”
Harlan reported from Kuala Lumpur, and Gowen reported from New Delhi. Adam Goldman and Sari Horwitz contributed to this report from Washington and Rama Lakshmi contributed from New Delhi.
