Search for missing Malaysian plane gets potential boost from satellite firm
Search for missing Malaysian plane expands into Indian Ocean
(about 7 hours later)
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — A search for a missing Malaysian airliner with 239 people on board is getting a potential boost from a satellite communications company, which announced Friday that it had registered signals from the plane after it took off from the Malaysian capital six days ago.
A week into the fruitless search for a missing Malaysian airliner, the focus returned to the possibility that a rogue pilot or hijackers took command of the plane as it flew north over the sea toward Beijing.
With the mystery of the plane’s disappearance continuing to baffle and frustrate a growing corps of search teams, investigators and outside aviation experts, inquiries increasingly are focusing on the prospect of foul play.
That fear 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.
“The facts are all over the place,” a U.S. official told The Washington Post. “It’s looking less and less like an accident. It’s looking more like a criminal event.” The official asked not to be identified because he is not authorized to speak publicly.
“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.”
Reuters news agency reported Friday that investigators now suspect the flight was following a commonly used route between navigational waypoints when it was last spotted by military radar off Malaysia’s northwestern coast early Saturday — a course heading toward India over the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal that indicated the plane was being flown by someone with aviation training.
Investigators are considering whether the plane was hijacked or sabotaged after receiving information that the plane continued to fly for at least four hours after its transponder stopped sending signals to civilian radar in Malaysia.
“What we can say is we are looking at sabotage, with hijack still on the cards,” the agency quoted an unidentified senior Malaysian police official as saying.
If the flight continued after the transponder fell silent, officials and experts said, it must have been turned off in the cockpit.
Inmarsat, a British company that provides global mobile satellite telecommunications services, said in a statement Friday: “Routine, automated signals were registered on the Inmarsat network from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 during its flight from Kuala Lumpur.” It said the information was provided to its partner, SITA, a European information technology company that serves the air transport industry, and that SITA “in turn has shared it with Malaysia Airlines.”
“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 cryptic announcement did not provide any clues on where the missing Boeing 777 might have gone or how long it might have flown. But the New York Times quoted an Inmarsat vice president, David Coiley, as saying the company had recording electronic “keep alive” ping signals that could be analyzed to help estimate the plane’s location.
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.”
Word of the signal transmissions came as the search was rapidly 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 early Saturday.
The official said the United States was starting to get a lot of information about the plane’s movements but added there was no indication of terrorism or evidence to substantiate air piracy. “We won’t know until we have the black box,” the official said, referring to the plane’s flight recorder.
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.
U.S. officials provided new details Friday about how they knew that the plane continued to fly well after its transponder stopped transmitting.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
[Read: What are the different types of signals a plane gives off?]
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.
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 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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.”
“A normal investigation becomes narrower with time,” Hishammuddin said. “But this is not a normal investigation. We are looking further and further afield.”
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 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.
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,” Levy 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.
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 satellite-based communication stopped functioning some 40 minutes after takeoff, U.S. officials say some form of signaling continued for at least several additional hours, an indication that the plane remained in the air during that time.
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.
Airlines are equipped with several reporting systems, including one known as the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which helps planes maintain contact with ground stations using radio or satellite signals. In Washington, one senior administration official said Thursday that the signals came from that system. But other media reports said it was a separate data system operated by Boeing that continued to send “pings” — the result of trying to establish a satellite connection — well after traditional contact was lost.
“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.
According to the Associated Press, Malaysia Airlines did not subscribe to the Boeing-based service, but the plane continued to send standby signals.
“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.”
Malaysia Airlines chief executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said Thursday that the last ACARS data were sent at 1:07 a.m., 14 minutes before the transponder signal was lost.
When communications ceased, the airliner was flying at 35,000 feet on a course for Beijing.
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.
“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.
“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.”
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.
In India, Adm. Arun Prakash, a retired naval chief of staff who was posted in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, said it was unlikely that military radar at two locations in the island chain would have yielded any valuable data. They are the only two radar stations in a chain of 576 islands, and they take in data on Indian airspace, not Strait of Malacca.
“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.”
“We are assuming that the radars were on 24 hours,” Prakash said. “These things cost money. They are machines. They rotate all day. This was in the middle of the night. If we had prior information, then maybe. It is unlikely that it was on for 24 hours.”
Robertsson said the aircraft was not carrying a full load of fuel.
He said it was “unlikely that the aircraft overflew Andaman and Nicobar.”
“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.”
The admiral said the Indian military was likely struggling with the sprawling search area, which may expand north into the Bay of Bengal at the request of the Malaysian navy. So far five Indian vessels and four aircraft have been deployed, with a fifth ship arriving Saturday.
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.
“We need some definite location, a starting point to undertake the search of this nature,” 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. It is inadequate. We can keep searching till next year. It is like looking for a needle in the haystack. The plane is supposed to have flown for two to three hours. For all you know it could have reached Sri Lanka. It is a hit-and-miss situation for us.”
Carr, the Florida professor, held out the slender hope that hijackers had landed the aircraft on a remote island.
The admiral said 1,000 Indian seamen were now taking part in the search.
“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.”
“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,” he said. And there is a limit on how much manpower and money the Indian government will be able to expend, he said.
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.
“All we have from Malaysia is ‘we think we saw the aircraft heading in that general direction.’ This by itself may not be worth searching for too long,” Prakash said.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.”
Harlan reported from Kuala Lumpur, and Gowen reported from New Delhi. Adam Goldman and Sari Horwitz contributed to this report from Washington..
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 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 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.
Halsey and Wilson reported from Washington. 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.
