Transponder might have been turned off by ‘pilot’
Print Edition
INVESTIGATORS are increasingly certain the missing Malaysia Airlines jet turned back across the country after its last radio contact with air traffic controllers, and that someone with aviation skills was responsible for the change in course, a Malaysian official said yesterday.
A US official said in Washington that investigators are examining the possibility of “human intervention” in the plane’s disappearance, adding it might have been “an act of piracy.”
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said it also was possible the plane might have landed somewhere.
While other theories are still being examined, the official said key evidence for the human intervention is that contact with the Boeing 777’s transponder stopped about a dozen minutes before a messaging system on the jet quit.
The Malaysian official, who also declined to be named, said only a skilled person could navigate the plane the way it was flown after its last confirmed location over the South China Sea.
Earlier, acting Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said the country had yet to determine what happened to the plane after it dropped off civilian radar and ceased communicating with the ground about 40 minutes into the flight to Beijing last Saturday.
He said investigators were still trying to establish with certainty that military radar records of a blip moving west across the Malay Peninsula into the Strait of Malacca showed flight MH370.
“I will be the happiest person if we can actually confirm that it is the MH370, then we can move all (search) assets from the South China Sea to the Strait of Malacca,” he said.
Until then, he said, the international search effort will continue expanding east and west from the plane’s last confirmed location.
Malaysian officials refused to say if they had information about signals to satellites, saying they would release details only when verified. Hishammuddin said local investigators have worked with US colleagues since Sunday.
“I hope within a couple of days to have something conclusive,” he told a press conference.
If the plane had disintegrated during flight or had suffered some other catastrophic failure, all signals would be expected to stop at the same time.
Experts say a pilot or passengers with technical expertise might have switched off the transponder in the hope of flying undetected. But no theory has been ruled out in one of aviation history’s most puzzling mysteries.
The Beijing-bound Boeing 777-200 last communicated with air traffic base stations east of Malaysia in the South China Sea, which for several days has been the main focus of the search.
Planes and ships also have been searching the Strait of Malacca west of Malaysia because of a blip on military radar suggested the plane might have turned in that direction after the last confirmed contact.
If the plane flew another four hours, it could be much farther away.
Indian ships and planes have been searching northwest of Malaysia in the eastern Andaman Sea, and yesterday expanded their search to areas west of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands chain, said V.S.R. Murty, an Indian Coast Guard inspector-general.
The White House said the US might be drawn into a new phase of the search in the vast Indian Ocean but did not offer details.
Hishamuddin said the search would also be expanded to more remote parts of the South China Sea.
However, Vietnam, which has been heavily involved in the search from the start, downgraded its hunt in the South China Sea to regular from emergency yesterday by reducing the frequency of aircraft flights and cruises by ships involved, Lieutenant-General Vo Van Tuan, deputy chief of staff of the Vietnamese People’s Army, said.
The US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the plane wasn’t transmitting data to the satellite but was sending a signal to establish contact.
Boeing offers a satellite service that can receive a stream of data during flight on how the aircraft is functioning and relay the information to the plane’s home base. The idea is to provide information before the plane lands on whether maintenance work or repairs are needed.
Malaysia Airlines didn’t subscribe to that service, but the plane still had the capability to connect with the satellite and was automatically sending pings, the official said.
Boeing has not commented.
Messages involving a different, more rudimentary data service also were received from the airliner for a short time after the plane’s transponder went silent, the US official said.
Hishammuddin said Malaysia was asking for radar data from India and other neighboring countries to see if they can trace it flying northwest. There was no word yesterday that any other country had such details on the plane, and they might not exist.
The possibility that the plane flew long after its last confirmed contact opens the possibility that one of the pilots, or someone with flying experience, wanted to hijack the plane for some later purpose, kidnap the passengers or commit suicide by plunging into the sea.
Mike Glynn, a committee member of the Australian and International Pilots Association, said he considers pilot suicide to be the most likely explanation for the disappearance, as was suspected in a SilkAir crash during a flight from Singapore to Jakarta in 1997 and an EgyptAir flight from Los Angeles to Cairo in 1999.
“A pilot rather than a hijacker is more likely to be able to switch off the communications equipment,” Glynn said. “The last thing that I, as a pilot, want is suspicion to fall on the crew, but it’s happened twice before.”
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