Co-pilot believed to have spoken final ‘good night’
Print Edition
THE co-pilot of the missing Malaysian jetliner spoke the last words heard from the cockpit, the airline’s chief executive said yesterday, as investigators consider suicide by the captain or first officer as one possible explanation for the plane’s disappearance.
No trace of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has been found since it vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board, about two-thirds of them Chinese.
Investigators are increasingly convinced that the plane was diverted perhaps thousands of miles by someone with a deep knowledge of the Boeing 777 and commercial navigation.
Airline chief executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya also told a news conference that it was unclear exactly when one of the plane’s automatic tracking systems had been disabled, appearing to contradict weekend comments by government ministers.
Suspicions of hijacking or sabotage had hardened further when officials said on Sunday that the last radio message from the plane — an informal “All right, good night” — was spoken after the system, known as ACARS, had been shut down.
“Initial investigations indicate it was the co-pilot who basically spoke the last time it was recorded on tape,” Ahmad Jauhari said yesterday when asked who had spoken those words.
That was a sign-off to air traffic controllers at 1:19am as the Beijing-bound plane left Malaysian airspace.
The last transmission from the ACARS system — a maintenance computer that relays data on the plane’s status — was received at 1:07am as the plane crossed Malaysia’s northeast coast and headed out over the Gulf of Thailand.
“We don’t know when the ACARS was switched off after that,” Ahmad Jauhari said. “It was supposed to transmit 30 minutes from there, but that transmission did not come through.”
Police are trawling through the backgrounds of the pilots, flight and ground staff for any clues to a possible motive in what they say is now being treated as a criminal investigation.
Police special branch officers 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.
Police confiscated a flight simulator from the pilot’s home and also visited the home of the co-pilot in what Malaysian police chief Khalid Abu Bakar initially said were the first police visits to those homes.
However, the government issued a statement yesterday contradicting that account by saying police first visited their homes as early as March 9.
A senior police official said the programs on the flight simulator appeared to be normal ones that allow users to practise flying and landing in different conditions.
Another senior police official said they had found no evidence of a link between the pilot and any militant group. “Based on what we have so far, we cannot see the terrorism link here,” he said. “We looked at known terror or extremist groups in Southeast Asia. The links are not there.”
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