Missing Malaysian plane may have flown up to four hours, U.S. officials say
Search for missing Malaysian plane expands into Indian Ocean
(35 minutes later)
The search for a missing Malaysian jetliner with 239 people on board could expand westward into the Indian Ocean based on information that the plane may have flown for at least four hours after it dropped from civilian radar, U.S. officials said Thursday.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — A search for a missing Malaysian airliner with 239 people on board is fast expanding from the relatively shallow waters around Malaysia into the much deeper Indian Ocean based on signs that the plane flew westward well after disappearing from civilian radar.
A senior U.S. official said the information came from data sent via a satellite communications system by Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. Those signals have convinced U.S. officials that the plane’s engines continued to run for at least four hours after all other communication was lost.
Malaysian authorities said Friday that the search has no clear leads, but they said U.S. investigators were trying to determine the plane’s whereabouts from potential communication with a satellite. Senior U.S. officials said earlier that an onboard communication system sent signals for at least four hours after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 lost other forms of contact, an indication that the jet might have stayed in the air for that time.
If the plane flew on for hours, it raises the likelihood of foul play. U.S. officials said someone in the cockpit could have turned off the transponder and radio before flying on.
If the plane followed a westward course after losing contact, it could have traveled toward India, the latest country to take a major role in the multi-nation search. A senior Indian official said Friday that a search team is focusing its efforts in the waters west of Malaysia based on coordinates provided by the Malaysian government. But he said he was not sure what data the Malaysians had that led them to target those areas.
(Read: What are the different types of signals a plane gives off?)
Military radar-tracking evidence suggests that the plane was deliberately flown across the Malay Peninsula toward India’s Andaman Islands, a sliver of isles south of Burma and hundreds of miles east of the Indian mainland, Reuters news agency reported Friday.
“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 condition of anonymity on grounds of not being directly involved in the investigation.
The fate of the plane remains unknown six days after it vanished less than an hour into its flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. But aviation experts and U.S. officials increasingly suspect that the disappearance involved foul play — either sabotage or hijacking by crew members or a passenger with aviation training. Malaysia’s acting transport minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, said an investigation into the passengers and pilots was “ongoing,” although the pilots’ homes had not yet been searched.
All other communication with the plane ended by 1:30 a.m. Saturday. Around that point, the pilot signed off with Malaysian air-traffic controllers with a casual, “All right, good night,” according to news reports. Then the transponder signal that the plane was sending to ground-based radar stations went silent.
Citing sources familiar with the investigation, Reuters reported that the plane was following a route between navigational waypoints — indicating it was being flown by someone with aviation training — when it was last plotted on military radar off Malaysia’s northwest coast. There was no indication, however, that the plane might have landed in the Andaman Islands.
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.
Officials in Port Blair, the capital of India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, said they have told local fishermen and authorities to report any unusual finds. India’s role, though, goes well beyond the islands. Captain D.K. Sharma, an Indian navy spokesman, said Malaysia has given India a massive search grid — some 13,500 square miles, an area about the size of Maryland.
Malaysian authorities said they would not release any information until it had been corroborated and verified. “We have nothing to confirm at this moment,” acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a news conference Friday in Kuala Lumpur.
The red-eye flight to Beijing lost contact early Saturday over the Gulf of Thailand — northeast of the Malay Peninsula. But a growing number of indicators, including a Malaysian military radar reading of an unidentified aircraft, suggest the plane might have veered west after cutting its transponders.
Malaysian civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman said satellites did not receive any “distress signal” from the plane, but when asked whether it could have sent “pings,” he said: “What the U.S. team are doing, they are trying their best to get whatever sources they can from the satellite system, to come up with possibilities of where the aircraft should be.”
The search for the aircraft now involves 13 countries and more than 100 ships and aircraft. Hishammuddin emphasized Friday that the search was expanding not because of any particular leads, but rather because the initial, more targeted search had turned up no evidence or debris.
Malaysian authorities have said they are investigating all passengers and crew aboard, but they denied local media reports Thursday that they searched a home of one of the pilots.
“A normal investigation becomes narrower with time,” Hishammuddin said. “But this is not a normal investigation. We are looking further and further afield.”
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.
In a signal that U.S. officials believe the plane likely veered west, the U.S. Navy said Friday that one of its ships involved in the hunt, the destroyer USS Kidd, arrived in the northwestern section of the Strait of Malacca, on the western side of the Malay Peninsula, from the Gulf of Thailand to the northeast. A maritime surveillance aircraft, the P-8A Poseidon, is scheduled to arrive in the region Saturday, Lt. David Levy, a U.S. Navy spokesman, said in an e-mail.
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 more hours after the plane reached its last known location. The newspaper later corrected its report to say that this belief was based on satellite data that was designed to report on the status of some onboard systems, not signals from monitoring systems embedded in the plane’s Rolls-Royce engines. The Malaysian government denied the initial report.
One of the most important clues for investigators could come from messages sent by the plane and picked up by satellites. Though Malaysia Airlines says this communication system stopped functioning some 40 minutes after takeoff, U.S. officials say some form of signaling continued for at least four additional hours, an indication that the plane remained in the air during that time.
In Washington, one senior administration official said the signals came from the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), 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 communication system, known as the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), helps planes maintain contact with ground stations using radio or satellite signals. The system uploads data in occasional bursts, relaying information about the engines or other parts of the plane. It remains unclear if the system was fully or partly operational after the plane dropped from civilian radar.
On Thursday, Malaysia Airlines CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya strongly denied that the ACARS system continued to function after the plane disappeared from civilian radar at 1:30 a.m. Saturday. The last transmission came 26 minutes after its takeoff from Kuala Lumpur, he said.
Several media reports Friday said that the ACARS system was not sending data, but rather “pings” — the result of trying to establish satellite contact. Malaysia Airlines’ chief executive said Thursday that the last ACARS data were sent at 1:07 a.m., 14 minutes before the transponder signal was lost.
“The last transmission was received at 1:07,” Ahmad told reporters. “It said everything is operating normally. . . . As far as the ACARS data, that was the last transmission.”
If the plane had suffered a catastrophic mechanical failure, the various signals and communication links would have been severed simultaneously. Some experts say a pilot could have tampered with the transponder deliberately to avoid detection while rerouting the plane.
Several media reports Friday said that the ACARS system was not sending data, but rather “pings” — the result of trying to establish satellite contact. Reuters news agency reported that these pings were transmitted by MH370 once every hour five or six times.
“There was a human intervention of some sort,” said Bill Waldock, an air crash investigator and a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. “Now, why is the real question.”
Representatives of both Boeing and Rolls-Royce have been in Kuala Lumpur working with the airline, and neither company received data after 1:07 a.m., Ahmad said. A Rolls-Royce spokeswoman refused to comment on the reports.
Simon Denyer and William Wan in Beijing, Karla Adams in London, Annie Gowen and Rama Lakshmi in New Delhi, and William Branigin and Ernesto Londoño in Washington contributed to this report.
If the plane continued flying westward, it would have traveled toward the Indian Ocean. In a signal that the United States believed the plane had likely veered off course, 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 Kidd reached the northwestern part of the strait late Friday afternoon local time, the Pentagon said.
The U.S. military also announced that a P-8A Poseidon aircraft would arrive in the area Saturday to join the search. A Navy P-3C Orion surveillance aircraft already in the area completed a search Friday of the northwestern section of the Malacca Strait, “where it flew approximately 1,000 miles west with nothing significant to report,” the Pentagon said.
India’s Defense Ministry said Friday that a third coast guard vessel, the CGS Sagar, is en route from Singapore to join a widening search effort already underway in the Andaman Sea near the Malacca Strait. The ship, when it arrives, will join the INS Kumbhir, an amphibious warfare ship, and the INS Saryu, a patrol vessel, along with a host of military aircraft searching the waters west of Malaysia.
A senior Indian official said Friday that the search team is focusing its efforts in the waters west of Malaysia based on a series of coordinates provided by the Malaysian government. But he said he was not sure what data the Malaysians had that led them to target those specific areas.
On Friday, Reuters said military radar-tracking evidence suggested that the plane was deliberately flown across the Malay Peninsula toward India’s Andaman Islands.
Citing sources familiar with the investigation, the agency reported that the plane was following a route between navigational waypoints — indicating it was being flown by someone with aviation training — when it was last plotted on military radar off Malaysia’s northwest coast.
Meanwhile, officials in Port Blair, the capital of India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, said they have been in contact with local fishermen in hopes they will report any unusual finds.
“We have conveyed to the local people and the fishermen-watch groups there that if they see something, they should report,” said Sudhir Yadav, a senior police officer in Port Blair. “But the places where they are looking for the plane near Malacca Strait, we don’t have heavy habitation, a few sparsely populated islands. But we have alerted communities and officers there to report.”
Burma 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.
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.
The United States is “consulting with international partners about the appropriate assets to deploy,” Carney said.
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, the Malaysian 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.
“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 four 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.
Simon Denyer and William Wan in Beijing, Karla Adams in London, Annie Gowen and Rama Lakshimi in New Delhi, and William Branigin and Ernesto Londoño in Washington contributed to this report.
