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As Clues to Jet’s Flight Emerge, Hunt Shifts Into Vast Ocean
Satellite Firm Says Its Data From Jet Could Offer Location
(about 1 hour later)
SEPANG, Malaysia — Almost a week after a Malaysia Airlines jet disappeared with 239 passengers and crew members on board, the Malaysian government said on Friday that the area of the search was advancing westward, but a minister overseeing the hunt denied having any firm evidence of where or how far the plane had flown.
SEPANG, Malaysia — As the hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet expanded into the daunting vastness of the Indian Ocean, a satellite communications company confirmed on Friday that it had recorded electronic “keep alive” ping signals from the plane after it disappeared, and said those signals could be analyzed to help estimate its location.
News reports that Malaysian military radar may have tracked the Boeing 777 turning back from its original route to cut across the Malaysian peninsula and head toward the Indian Ocean before it vanished last Saturday have drawn growing ire from China, where nearly two-thirds of the passengers came from.
The information from the company, Inmarsat, could prove to be the first big break in helping narrow the frustrating search for the plane with 239 people aboard that mysteriously disappeared from radar screens a week ago, now hunted by a multinational array of ships and planes that have fanned out for thousands of square miles.
Hishammuddin Hussein, the Malaysian defense minister and acting transport minister, told a news conference in Sepang, near the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, that the search ships and aircraft were going further into both the Andaman Sea to the west of Malaysia and the South China Sea to the east. But he maintained that the search was being expanded because other possibilities were being exhausted, not because of definitive new information culled from radar or satellite data.
Inmarsat, a Britain-based satellite communications provider of systems to ships and airplanes, had equipment aboard the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 jetliner, said David Coiley, the vice president of the company in charge of the aviation business. The equipment automatically communicates with satellites, much as a mobile phone would automatically connect to a network after passing through a mountain tunnel, he said.
“When I alluded to the search being expanded, it is basically because we have not found anything in the areas that we have searched,” Mr. Hishammuddin said.
“It does allow us to determine where the airplane is relative to the satellite,” he said of the signal, which he likened to the “noises you might hear when you when you put your cellphone next to a radio or a television speaker.” He said: “It does allow us to narrow down the position of the aircraft.”
“A normal investigation becomes narrower with time, I understand, as new information focuses on the search,” he said. “But this is not a normal investigation. In this case, the information we have forces us to look further and further afield.”
Because the pings go over a measurable distance at a specific angle to one of the company’s satellites, the information can be used to help calculate the trajectory and location of an aircraft, he said.
A report from Reuters on Friday said that information from military radar records indicated that the plane may have been deliberately flown far off its intended route, from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and that when last recorded it was flying toward the Andaman Islands, which belong to India.
“Communications systems are part of the mandatory requirement for operating any flight, and we are comfortable that it would have been operating accordingly,” Mr. Coiley said. He said Inmarsat was sharing information with the airline and investigators, but would not comment further on that information.
Mr. Hishammuddin said that the radar data was still being analyzed and that it was too early to confirm new reports or to abandon the search on the eastern side of Malaysia. “We need to get verification, and we are working very closely with the experts,” he said of the data.
The Inmarsat disclosure came amid other signs that the aircraft may have turned sharply west from its intended northward route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and traveled far from the initial focus of the search.
Investigators are examining data that appears to show that the jetliner was still in automated communication with satellite systems, and may therefore still have been airborne, or at least functional, for hours after ground controllers last heard from it, a well-placed official involved in the investigation said on Thursday.
The jet disappeared from the flight control radar an hour into its nighttime flight, leading the Malaysian government and others during the first 72 hours of the search-and-rescue operation to concentrate ships and aircraft in the Gulf of Thailand and nearby waters to the east of Malaysia.
The information added to a growing belief that the jet turned off course after contact was lost and could have traveled hundreds of miles west, across the Malaysian peninsula and out into the Indian Ocean. Some search efforts were redirected to those waters on Thursday, with the redeployment of American naval aircraft and an American destroyer, the Kidd.
Increasingly, however, the search has encompassed seas to the west of Peninsular Malaysia, stretching from the Strait of Malacca to the Bay of Bengal, where the United States and India sent military planes and ships. The move came in tandem with an increasing amount of evidence that the aircraft flew for as long as four hours after it disappeared from air traffic control radar after 1 a.m. last Saturday.
Revelations that the aircraft continued to communicate with satellites long after contact with air traffic controllers ceased added to a swirl of new information and speculation about its fate. ABC News reported on Thursday evening that American officials said they believed that two communications systems aboard the aircraft shut down at separate times, suggesting they were turned off deliberately rather than as a result of a catastrophic failure. The ABC report, which quoted two unidentified officials, could not be immediately corroborated.
Even with the help of the Inmarsat data, the new focus on the open ocean shows illustrates the difficulty for the multinational search force, which now must scan thousands of miles of the world’s third-largest ocean. The initial search area was in the relatively confined and shallow waters of the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand, which are among the world’s busiest maritime routes. If the plane ended up in the ocean depths, it will be far harder to find and recover.
Data captured before the aircraft’s communications systems ceased to function appeared to reflect regular attempts by equipment on the plane to establish a link with a satellite. Such a link would be used to transmit routine maintenance data about the plane, if the airline operating it subscribed to that service.
At a news conference, the Malaysian defense minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, who has been the chief public face of his government’s search effort, said that searching seas both to the east and west of his country was a logical next step after days of fruitless searching and false starts. But he also acknowledged that, seven days after it vanished, an aircraft with 239 passengers and crew onboard remains unaccounted for, leaving family members in tormented wait.
The attempts continued periodically for a considerable time after the plane’s transponder, which identifies it to ground control radar, stopped functioning 40 minutes into the flight, the investigator said, but electronics experts have not yet established exactly how long. It was not clear how much information could be gleaned from the satellite communications, beyond the length of time the contacts persisted.
“A normal investigation becomes narrower with time, I understand, as new information focuses on the search,” said Mr. Hussein, who is also acting transport minister. “But this is not a normal investigation.”
The new evidence suggesting that the plane kept flying for hours was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Malaysian officials denied on Thursday that any data was received from the aircraft after contact with ground controllers was lost.
He said the multinational search had expanded on both sides of Malaysia, into the South China Sea, and increasingly into the Indian Ocean. “It is basically because we have not found anything in the areas that we have searched,” he said.
Radar blips detected by the Malaysian military also strongly suggest that an unidentified aircraft — most likely the missing jet — remained airborne after Flight 370 ceased communications with air traffic controllers. The radar showed the aircraft crossing the peninsula from east to west near the Malaysia-Thailand border and flying out over the Strait of Malacca.
But aviation experts, news reports and some American officials have also pointed to military radar and signals collected by satellites as furnishing stronger evidence that the Boeing 777 plane turned sharply from its planned course, flew over the Malaysian peninsula and then headed west toward the Andaman Sea and the the Indian Ocean.
Military radar last recorded the plane 200 miles northwest of Penang, Malaysia, flying at 29,500 feet, officials said. They said the data was being shared with the United States and China to help determine whether the aircraft was Flight 370.
A report from Reuters news agency on Friday said that information culled from military radar records indicated that the plane may have been deliberately flown far off its intended route, from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and when last recorded was heading toward the Andaman Islands, which belong to India.
The search area being combed by dozens of ships and planes was expanded Thursday to take in parts of the Andaman Sea, the arm of the Indian Ocean northwest of the strait, and may grow further. Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said on Thursday, “Based on some new information that’s not necessarily conclusive, but new information, an additional search area may be opened in the Indian Ocean, and we are consulting with international partners about the appropriate assets to deploy.”
If the aircraft did divert so drastically from its planned route, then any clues left by electronic signals captured by satellite and radar will become far more important.
The Pentagon said that the Kidd would search in the Andaman Sea at the request of the Malaysian government, and that a P-3 surveillance plane had already flown over the area. The Kidd was expected to expand its search area into the Indian Ocean after arriving in the area on Friday. Syed Akbaruddin, the spokesman for the Indian External Affairs Ministry, said that India had also sent three ships, two airplanes and a helicopter to search in that area.
It was not clear if the calculations were underway or had been completed, but ships were headed toward the Indian Ocean.
The plane was bound for Beijing and had fuel on board to fly at least 2,500 miles. Contact was lost 40 minutes into the flight, when the plane was on course, heading northeast from Kuala Lumpur over the Gulf of Thailand toward Vietnamese airspace, and the hunt initially concentrated on those waters to the east of the Malaysian peninsula.
The multinational effort was scattered across the northern reaches of the Indian Ocean. Indian military forces continued their efforts Friday to find traces of the airplane in the Andaman Sea, to the west of Thailand, and expanded the search to the area west of Nicobar Island in the Bay of Bengal. The search in the Indian Ocean includes ships, planes and nearly 1,000 personnel from India’s navy, coast guard and air force.
Days of intensive searching there produced nothing but false leads and floating debris that turned out to be unrelated to the aircraft. Still, Mr. Hishammuddin said on Thursday that the main search effort would continue in that area.
A spokesman for the Indian Navy refused on Friday to offer an estimate of how long the search might take. “How can you ask such a question?” said the spokesman, Capt. D.K. Sharma. “This is like looking for a needle in that vast expanse of sea.”
Pentagon officials said that several American agencies were reviewing the radar blips recorded by the Malaysian military, but had not yet found anything that would indicate specifically where the missing plane might have gone. A senior Pentagon official said that the Malaysian and American authorities were “looking pretty closely” at the possibility that the plane went down in the Indian Ocean, but had not reached any conclusions.
The Chinese government announced that the Haixun 31, a civilian patrol ship that has been the command vessel for China’s contingent in the search, would move from the Gulf of Thailand to the Strait of Malacca, on the other side of the peninsula. A report on Chinese state television news said a group of experts had advised the Chinese Maritime Search and Rescue Center to “expand the scope of the search.”
Malaysian officials who briefed reporters on Thursday denied the initial report from The Wall Street Journal that the aircraft had continued to transmit technical data about the status of its engines after 1:30 a.m. on Saturday, the approximate time when the pilots last spoke to ground controllers by radio.
On Friday the United States Navy continued its maritime aircraft patrols, focusing on the area to the west of Malaysia, said Cmdr. William Marks, spokesman for the Seventh Fleet. The Navy’s new P-8A Poseidon patrol craft arrived on Friday, he said. The aircraft, built with the airframe of a Boeing 737, has a range of more than 1,300 miles and can search vast swathes of ocean. India on Thursday said it was also deploying its own variant of the aircraft, the P-8i, as well as the C-130J Hercules and other aircraft.
The chief executive of Malaysia Airlines, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, said the last data received from Flight 370 came at 1:07 a.m. on Saturday and gave no indication of trouble with the plane.
The difficulty, Commander Marks said in an interview, was that given the vastness of the Indian Ocean, the area is best patrolled by aircraft, but ships and helicopters are capable of more thorough and intense searches.
“That was the last transmission,” Mr. Ahmad Jauhari said at the news conference, held in Sepang, where the international airport serving Kuala Lumpur is. “It did not run beyond that.”
“Everything is a trade-off. I think the challenge is the sheer size of the area,” Commander Marks said.
The Journal later corrected its report to say satellite contacts, not transmission of technical data, had continued for hours.
“The positive takeaway is that the system had to be powered to try to establish the connection,” Robert W. Mann Jr., an aviation consultant in Port Washington, N.Y., said in an interview.
The fact that satellite contacts continued does not necessarily mean that the plane continued to fly, Mr. Mann said. If the system had a backup battery, he said, it could have kept trying to transmit after the jet had landed somewhere, and in certain circumstances even after a crash.
