The final words from the missing Malaysian jetliners cockpit gave no indication anything was wrong even though one of the planes communications systems had already been disabled, officials said Sunday, adding to suspicions that one or both of the pilots were involved in the disappearance. As authorities examined a flight simulator that was confiscated from the home of one of the pilots and dug through the background of all 239 people on board and the ground crew that serviced the plane, they also were grappling with the enormity of the search ahead of them, warning they needed more data to narrow down the hunt for the aircraft. The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 took off from Kuala Lumpur at around 12:40 a.m. on March 8, headed to Beijing. On Saturday, Malaysias government confirmed that the plane was deliberately diverted and may have flown as far north as Central Asia, or south into the vast reaches of the Indian Ocean. Authorities have said someone on board the plane first disabled one of its communications systems - the Aircraft and Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS - at 1:07 a.m. Around 14 minutes later, the transponder, which identifies the plane to commercial radar systems, was also shut down. The fact that they went dark separately is strong evidence that the planes disappearance was deliberate. On Sunday, Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said at a news conference that that the final, reassuring words from the cockpit - All right, good night - were spoken to air traffic controllers after the ACARS system was shut down. Whoever spoke did not mention any trouble on board, seemingly misleading ground control. Air force Maj. Gen. Affendi Buang told reporters he did not know whether it was the pilot or co-pilot who spoke to air traffic controllers. Given the expanse of land and water that might need to be searched, the wreckage of the plane might take months - or longer - to find, or might never be located. Establishing what happened with any degree of certainty will likely need key information, including cockpit voice recordings, from the planes flight data recorders. Associated Press 9:52 pm: Hunt for missing Malaysian jet widens to 11 nations, pilots role probed Malaysian investigators on Sunday examined a flight simulator found at the home of the pilot of the missing jetliner while probing hijacking, sabotage and terrorism angles as search operations expanded to large tracts of land and sea covering 11 countries, including India. The mystery of the missing Flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing since March 8 continued to baffle aviation and security authorities who have not succeeded in tracking the aircraft despite deploying hi-tech radar and other gadgets. Malaysian police said they are refocusing the probe on the crew, passengers and ground staff based on new leads that the aircraft was deliberately disabled and its transponder switched off before the plane veered from its path. Police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said they have dismantled the simulator found at pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shahs residence and reassembled it in their office to examine it. Investigations include possibility of hijack, sabotage and terrorism, he added. Defence and acting Transport Minister Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said, The search area has been significantly expanded. The nature of the search has changed. From focusing mainly on shallow sea we are now looking at large tracts of land, crossing 11 countries, as well as deep and remote oceans. Malaysia got in touch with countries along the northern and southern corridors about the flight. These countries include: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, China, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia and France. PTI 7:10 pm: Malaysian PM calls up Manmohan Singh for help Malaysias Premier Najib Razak on Sunday spoke to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seeking Indias help in the massive search for the Malaysian jet that went missing with 239 people aboard over a week ago. Razak spoke to Singh a day after he said Malaysian investigators suspect that the communication system in the missing Boeing 777-200 aircraft was deliberately disabled and its transponder switched off before it veered from its path and flew for more than seven hours. India had put on hold its search operations for the missing airliner as it said it was awaiting fresh instructions from Malaysian authorities who are likely to look into new areas for locating the plane. India had deployed five warships and six surveillance aircraft for the search operation. Earlier in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein today said the number of countries involved in search mission for Flight MH370 had nearly doubled to 25. The number of countries involved in the search and rescue operation has increased from 14 to 25, Hussein told a press conference here. Hussein also confirmed Premier Razak spoke to his counterparts in India, Bangladesh, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Besides, he said Malaysian Foreign Ministry officials today briefed representatives from at least 22 countries, including India, and sought their help in the search, whose entered a new phase as its nature has changed. The help includes satellite and primary radar data and requesting deployment of sea search assets, the minister said. The Beijing-bound jetliner carrying 227 passengers, including five Indians and one Indian-Canadian, and 12 crew members mysteriously vanished from radar screens an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8. There has been no trace of the plane nor any sign of wreckage despite a search by the navies and military aircraft of several countries across Southeast Asia. PTI 3.25 pm: Malaysia civil aviation chief says it is possible aircraft was on the ground when some satellite signals sent -Reuters 3.15 pm: Malaysia police chief says they are investigating ground staff as well as passengers and crew - Reuters 3.11 pm: Malaysia transport minister says pilot, co-pilot had not asked to fly together on flight MH 370- Reuters 3.10 pm: Investigators look for motive in plane disappearance Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian police are investigating the personal, political and religious backgrounds of the pilots and crew of a missing jetliner, a senior officer said on Sunday, as they try to work out why someone aboard flew the plane hundreds of miles off course. The government also appealed for international help in the search for the Malaysia Airlines plane across two corridors stretching from the Caspian Sea to the southern Indian Ocean, diplomats said. No trace of the Boeing 777-200ER has been found since it vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board, but investigators believe it was diverted by someone who knew how to switch off its communications and tracking systems. We are not ruling out any sort of motivation at the moment, a senior police official with knowledge of the investigation told Reuters. 3 pm: Malaysian police examine pilots flight simulator Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian police on Sunday were examining a flight simulator belonging to one of the pilots of the missing jetliner and investigating engineers who worked on the plane, sharpening the probe into the jets disappearance after authorities revealed it was a deliberate act. The government said police searched the homes of both of the planes pilots on Saturday, but did not say whether it was the first time officers had done so since the flight went missing more than a week ago with 239 people aboard en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. Authorities were trying to narrow down the search for the plane, which satellite data shows could have kept flying as far north as Central Asia or far into the southern Indian Ocean, posing awesome challenges for efforts to recover the aircraft and flight data recorders vital to solving the mystery of what happened on board. - Associated Press 2 pm: India suspends search for missing Malaysian plane Massive Indian Navy and air search operations for the missing Malaysian aircraft were suspended on Sunday until fresh search areas are identified by the Malaysian government, an official said. Col. Harmit Singh, spokesman for Indias tri-services command, said coast guard ships have reverted to routine surveillance in the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal. Air and sea operations for today have been put on hold, Singh said. The Indian navy and air forces coordinated search for the last three days has so far covered more than 250,000 square kilometers in the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal without any sighting of the Boeing 777 and 239 people aboard. It disappeared more than a week ago after takeoff from Kuala Lumpur on the way to Beijing. Another government official said that Indian and Malaysian officials were scheduled to meet in Kuala Lumpur later Sunday to refine search coordinates. The future course of search efforts is expected to be worked out at this meeting, the official said on condition of anonymity as he was not authorised to talk to reporters. Nearly a dozen Indian ships, patrol vessels, surveillance aircraft and helicopters had scoured the region. India intensified the search on Saturday by deploying two recently acquired P8i long- range maritime patrol and one C- 130J Hercules aircraft. A short-range maritime reconnaissance Dornier aircraft was also deployed. Vinod Patney, a retired air force officer, said it was unlikely - but not impossible - for an aircraft to intrude a countrys airspace undetected. Officials said there was an effective radar coverage in the region as a large number of flights between Europe and Southeast Asian use this route. Also, India has tightened security in the area as it is a strategic shipping lane for oil tankers. - Associated Press Investigators look for motive in Malaysia plane disappearance Police are combing through the personal, political and religious backgrounds of pilots and crew of a missing Malaysian jetliner, a senior officer said on Sunday, trying to work out why someone aboard flew the plane hundreds of miles off course. No trace of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER has been found since it vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board, but investigators believe it was diverted by someone who knew how to switch off its communications and tracking systems. We are not ruling out any sort of motivation at the moment, a senior police official with knowledge of the investigation told Reuters. Satellite data revealed by Malaysias prime minister on Saturday suggests the plane could be anywhere in either of two arcs: one stretching from northern Thailand to the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, or a southern arc heading from Indonesia to the vast southern Indian Ocean. A source familiar with official U.S. assessments said it was thought most likely the plane had headed south into the Indian Ocean, where it would presumably have run out of fuel and crashed. Air space to the north is much busier, and the plane would likely have been detected. As authorities desperately try to re-focus the multinational search, India said it was suspending operations around island chains northwest of the Malay Peninsula, at the request of Malaysian officials. Indian defence officials said Malaysia wanted to reassess priorities. Malaysian officials coordinating the search could not be reached for comment. The disappearance of Flight MH370 has baffled investigators, aviation experts and internet sleuths since the plane vanished from civilian air traffic control screens off Malaysias east coast less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing. For relatives of those missing, the wait for any firm news has been agonising. At a news conference on Saturday, Prime Minister Najib Razak said investigators believed somebody cut off the planes communications reporting system, switched off its transponder and steered it west, far from its scheduled route. Electronic signals it continued to exchange periodically with satellites suggest it could have continued flying for nearly seven hours after being last spotted by Malaysian military radar off the countrys northwest coast. DELIBERATELY DIVERTED Najib said that in light of the mounting evidence that the plane was deliberately diverted, the investigation into the aircrafts crew and passengers would be stepped up. Within hours, special branch officers had searched the homes of the captain, 53-year- old Zaharie Ahmad Shah, and first officer, 27-year-old Fariq Abdul Hamid, in middle class suburbs of Kuala Lumpur close to the international airport. An experienced pilot, Zaharie, has been described by current and former co-workers as a flying enthusiast who spent his off days operating a life-sized flight simulator he had set up at home. With Zaharie, the flight simulator games were looked at closely, the senior police official said, adding that they appeared to be normal programmes that allow players to practice flying and landing in different conditions. Postings on his Facebook page suggest the pilot was a politically active opponent of the coalition that has ruled Malaysia for the 57 years since independence. A day before the plane vanished, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim was convicted of sodomy and sentenced to five years in prison, in a ruling his supporters and international human rights groups say was politically influenced. Asked if Zaharies background as an opposition supporter was being examined, the senior police officer would say only: We need to cover all our bases. Malaysia Airlines has said it did not believe Zaharie would have sabotaged the plane, and colleagues were incredulous. Please, let them find the aircraft first. Zaharie is not suicidal, not a political fanatic as some foreign media are saying, a Malaysia Airlines pilot who is close to Zaharie told Reuters. Is it wrong for anyone to have an opinion about politics? Co-pilot Fariq was religious and serious about his career, family and friends said, countering news reports suggesting he was a cockpit Romeo who was reckless on the job. DAUNTING TASK Malaysia said the latest analysis of satellite data showed the last signal from the missing plane at 8:11 a.m. local time, almost seven hours after it turned back over the Gulf of Thailand and re-crossed the Malay peninsula. The data did not show whether the plane was still flying or pinpoint its location at that time, presenting searchers with a daunting task. Seven hours more flying time would likely have taken it to the limit of its fuel load. Experts from the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority and National Transportation Safety Board have been working with Malaysian authorities to analyse the data from geostationary satellites operated by Britains Inmarsat. India had been searching in two areas, one around the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and a second further west in the Bay of Bengal, both in the direction the plane was heading when it dropped off Malaysias military radar at 2:15 a.m. local time. Both searches have been suspended, but may resume, defence officials said on Sunday. The Indian Ocean is one of the most remote places in the world and also one of the deepest, posing potentially enormous challenges for efforts to find wreckage or the flight voice and data recorders that are the key to solving the puzzle. Niluksi Koswanage/Reuters Indian Ocean poses tough challenge in search for missing plane The southern Indian Ocean, where investigators suspect missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 may have come down, is one place where a commercial airliner can crash without a ship spotting it, a radar plotting it or even a satellite picking it up. The empty expanse of water is one of the most remote places in the world and also one of the deepest, posing potentially enormous challenges for the international search effort now refocusing on the area, one of several possible crash sites. Even Australia, which has island territories in the Indian Ocean and sends rescue planes to pluck stricken yachtsmen from the cold, mountainous seas in the south from time to time, has no radar coverage much beyond its Indian Ocean coast. In most of Western Australia and almost all of the Indian Ocean, there is almost no radar coverage, an Australian civil aviation authority source said, requesting anonymity as he was not authorised to speak on the record. If anything is more than 100 kilometres offshore, you dont see it. The Indian Ocean, the worlds third largest, has an average depth of more than 12,000 feet, or two miles. Thats deeper than the Atlantic where it took two years to find wreckage on the seabed from an Air France plane that vanished in 2009 even though floating debris quickly pointed to the crash site. So far, search operations by navies and aircraft from more than a dozen nations have failed to find even a trace of Flight MH370, which went missing a week ago after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing and diverting from its intended flight path. The search effort has focused mainly on the South China Sea but is now switching to the Indian Ocean after investigators, having pieced together radar and satellite tracking data, began to suspect the Boeing 777-200ER had been deliberately flown hundreds or possibly thousands of miles off course. Searchers still face a daunting array of possible last locations for the plane, including the northern end of the Indian Ocean as well as central Asia, though investigators say it is more likely to have flown to the south than through busier airspace to the north where it would likely have been detected. With an estimated four hours fuel left when last spotted by radar off Malaysias northwest coast, the plane could have flown a further 2,200 miles (3,500 km) or so, assuming normal cruising speed and altitude. Officials think, based on the available data, the aircraft flew south until it ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea, according to a source familiar with data the U.S. government is receiving from the investigation. In the south, any debris from MH370 would have been widely dispersed by Indian Ocean currents in the week since it disappeared. SCATTERING OF ISLANDS The southern Indian Ocean, between Indonesia and Australia, is broken up only by the Australian territories of Christmas Island, home to asylum seeker detention facilities, and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands some 2,000 km (1,240 miles) northwest of Perth. The Cocos Islands have a small airport to serve the islands combined population of just 3,000 people. Further south, the only habitation is the handful of research stations on the scattering of tiny French-run islands including Kerguelen - a group of volcanic outcrops between Africa, Australia and Antarctica. While home to several powerful astronomical scanners and radar, there is no airport and it is seen extremely unlikely the aircraft could have made it that far. The shipping route from Western Australia north to Asia and Europe is considered relatively quiet in global shipping terms, despite the large amount of iron ore and other resources that are shipped from Australias northwest ports. Ships track north staying close in to the West Australian coastline and then head north through Indonesian waters into the South China Sea or northwest toward the Red Sea. Australias civil aviation radar extends a maximum of just 200 nautical miles (410 km) off the coast, the civil aviation authority source said, and was used only for monitoring scheduled aircraft on approach into the country and subsequent landings. There are just two primary radars on the west Australian coast, one in Perth and one further north in Paraburdoo, which has even less range and is used to monitor mining traffic heading to the nearby Pilbara region. Australias Civil Aviation Authority relies on aircraft ADSB (automatic dependent surveillance broadcast) to ping information to commercial satellites, such as telecoms firm Optus four telecommunications satellites, and back to ground control. The source said that this was the case with flights by Emirates Airlines, which all fly over the Indian Ocean to Australia, but it did not provide a specific radar plot. Australia does not have any government satellites. The Australian military has an over-the-horizon radar network that allows it to observe all air and sea activity north of Australia for up to 3,000 km (1,860 miles). This encompasses all of Java, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. While the Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN) extends part-way across the northern Indian Ocean, government papers online describe it as a tripwire in Australias northern surveillance system, helping underpin the defense of the country from any attack originating from the north. Local media have said its main use recently has been to track illegal immigrants approaching Australia by boat through the regions largely unguarded northern waters. The Australian Defence Force was not available for comment on Sunday. A potential crash site around 1,600 km (1,000 miles) northwest or west of the Australian coast would be well within the search and rescue area of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA), one of the largest in the world. An AMSA spokesman said no request for assistance had been received from Malaysia as of Sunday. Morag Mackinnon/Reuters India puts on hold search for missing plane, say officials India on Sunday put on hold its search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, at the request of the government in Kuala Lumpur, which wants to reassess the week-old hunt for the Boeing 777 that is now suspected of being hijacked. India had been searching in two areas, one around the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and a second further west in the Bay of Bengal. Both searches have been suspended, but may resume, defence officials said. Its more of a pause, said Commander Babu, a spokesman for the countrys Eastern Naval Command. The Malaysian authorities are reassessing the situation. They will figure whether they need to shift the area of search. - Reuters
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 22:49:30 +0000
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