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| Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, center, Malaysia's Minister for Transport Hishamuddin Hussein, left, and director general of the Malaysian Department of Civil Aviation, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, delivers a statement to the media regarding the missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner MH370, Saturday, March 15, 2014 in Sepang, Malaysia. Najib said Saturday that investigators believe the missing Malaysian airliner's communications were deliberately disabled, that it turned back from its flight to Beijing and flew for more than seven hours. |
KUALA LUMPUR,
Malaysia (AP) -- Someone deliberately diverted Malaysia Airlines
Flight 370 and shut down communications with the ground, and the
jetliner continued flying for six hours, Malaysia's prime minister said
Saturday. The announcement shifted the focus of the investigation to the
crew and passengers on the plane, which has now been missing for more
than a week.
Prime Minister Najib Razak's
statement also meant the flight path of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 to
Beijing could have strayed as far as the southern Indian Ocean or
northwest to Kazakhstan, complicating the work of search crews who
already have been scouring vast stretches of ocean seeking the plane's
12-person crew and 227 passengers.
"Clearly
the search for MH370 has entered a new phase," Najib said at a televised
news conference. "It is widely understood that this has been a
situation without precedent."
Experts have
previously said that whoever disabled the plane's communication systems
and then flew the jet must have had a high degree of technical knowledge
and flying experience. One possibility they have raised was that one of
the pilots wanted to commit suicide.
Najib
stressed that investigators were looking into all possibilities as to
why the Boeing 777 deviated so drastically from its original flight
path, saying authorities could not confirm whether it was a hijacking.
Earlier Saturday, a Malaysian official said the plane had been hijacked,
though he added that no motive had been established and no demands had
been made known.
"In view of this latest
development, the Malaysian authorities have refocused their
investigation into the crew and passengers on board," Najib told
reporters, reading from a written statement but not taking any
questions.
Police on Saturday went to the
Kuala Lumpur homes of both the pilot and co-pilot of the missing plane,
according to a guard and several local reporters. Authorities have said
they will investigate the pilots as part of their probe, but have
released no information about how they are progressing.
The
plane departed for an overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing at
12:40 a.m. on March 8. Its communications with civilian air controllers
were severed at about 1:20 a.m., and the jet went missing - heralding
one of the most puzzling mysteries in modern aviation history.
China,
where the bulk of the passengers were from, expressed irritation over
what it described as Malaysia's foot-dragging in releasing information
about the search.
Investigators now have a
high degree of certainty that one of the plane's communications systems -
the Aircraft and Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS)
- was partially disabled before the aircraft reached the east coast of
Malaysia, Najib said. Shortly afterward, someone on board switched off
the aircraft's transponder, which communicates with civilian air traffic
controllers.
Najib confirmed that Malaysian
air force defense radar picked up traces of the plane turning back
westward, crossing over Peninsular Malaysia into the northern stretches
of the Strait of Malacca. Authorities previously had said this radar
data could not be verified.
"These movements are consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane," Najib said.
Although
the aircraft was flying virtually blind to air traffic controllers at
this point, onboard equipment continued to send "pings" to satellites.
U.S.
aviation safety experts say the shutdown of communications systems
makes it clear the missing Malaysia Airlines jet was taken over by
someone who knew how the plane worked.
To turn
off the transponder, someone in the cockpit would have to turn a knob
with multiple selections to the "off" position while pressing down at
the same time, said John Goglia, a former member of the U.S. National
Transportation Safety Board. That's something a pilot would know, but it
could also be learned by someone who researched the plane on the
Internet, he said.
The Aircraft Communications
Addressing and Reporting System has two aspects, Goglia said. The
information part of the system was shut down, but not the transmission
part. In most planes, the information section can be shut down by
hitting cockpit switches in sequence in order to get to a computer
screen where an option must be selected using a keypad, said Goglia, an
expert on aircraft maintenance.
That's also something a pilot would know how to do, but that could also be discovered through research, he said.
But
to turn off the other transmission portion of the ACARS, it would be
necessary to go to an electronics bay beneath the cockpit. That's
something a pilot wouldn't normally know how to do, Goglia said. The
Malaysia plane's ACARS transmitter continued to send out blips that were
recorded by satellite once an hour for four to five hours after the
transponder was turned off. The blips don't contain any messages or
data, but the satellite can tell in a very broad way what region the
blips are coming from.
Malaysia's prime
minister said the last confirmed signal between the plane and a
satellite came at 8:11 a.m. - 7 hours and 31 minutes after takeoff. This
was more than five hours later than the previous time given by
Malaysian authorities as the possible last contact.
Airline officials have said the plane had enough fuel to fly for up to about eight hours.
"The
investigations team is making further calculations which will indicate
how far the aircraft may have flown after this last point of contact,"
Najib said.
He said authorities had determined
that the plane's last communication with a satellite was in one of two
possible arcs, or "corridors" - a northern one from northern Thailand
through to the border of the Central Asian countries Kazakhstan and
Turkmenistan, and a southern one from Indonesia to the southern Indian
Ocean.
The northern route might theoretically
have taken the plane through China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan - which
hosts U.S. military bases - and Central Asia, and it is unclear how it
might have gone undetected. The region is also home to extremist
Islamist groups, unstable governments and remote, sparsely populated
areas.
Flying south would have put the plane
over the Indian Ocean, with an average depth of 3,890 meters (12,762
feet) and thousands of kilometers (miles) from the nearest land mass.
Goglia
said that if Malaysian military radar tracked the plane turning west,
it then followed a standard route across the peninsula until it was
several hundred miles (kilometers) offshore and beyond military radar
range.
Airliners generally keep to such highways in the sky to avoid
colliding with other planes, but the routes are not straight lines, he
said. That means it's likely someone was still guiding the plane, Goglia
said.
Britain-based aviation security
consultant Chris Yates thought it was highly unlikely the plane would
have taken the northern route across land in Asia.
"In
theory, any country that sees a strange blip is going to get fighter
planes up to have a look," he said. "And if those fighter planes can't
make head or tail of what it is, they will shoot it down."
Najib said search efforts in the South China Sea, where the plane first lost contact, had ended.
Indian
officials said navy ships supported by long-range surveillance planes
and helicopters scoured Andaman Sea islands for a third day Saturday
without any success in finding evidence of the missing jet.
Two-thirds
of the plane's passengers were Chinese, and China's government has been
under pressure to give relatives firm news of the aircraft's fate.
In
a stinging commentary on Saturday, the Chinese government's Xinhua News
Agency said the Malaysian information was "painfully belated,"
resulting in wasted efforts and straining the nerves of relatives.
"Given
today's technology, the delay smacks of either dereliction of duty or
reluctance to share information in a full and timely manner," Xinhua
said. "That would be intolerable."
Najib said
he understood the need for families to receive information, but that his
government wanted to release only fully corroborated reports. He said
his country has been sharing information with international
investigators, even when it meant placing "national security concerns"
second to the search. U.S., British and Malaysian air safety
investigators have been on the ground in Malaysia to assist with the
investigation.
In the Chinese capital,
relatives of passengers who have anxiously awaited news at a hotel near
Beijing's airport said they felt deceived at not being told earlier
about the plane's last signal. "We are going through a roller coaster,
and we feel helpless and powerless," said a woman, who declined to give
her name.
At least one of the relatives saw a
glimmer of hope in word that the plane's disappearance was a deliberate
act, rather than a crash. "It's very good," said a woman, who gave only
her surname, Wen.
Malaysian police have
already said they are looking at the psychological state, family life
and connections of pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, and co-pilot Fariq
Abdul Hamid, 27. Both have been described as respectable,
community-minded men.
Zaharie joined Malaysia
Airlines in 1981 and had more than 18,000 hours of flying experience.
His Facebook page showed an aviation enthusiast who flew
remote-controlled aircraft, posting pictures of his collection, which
included a lightweight twin-engine helicopter and an amphibious
aircraft.
Fariq was contemplating marriage
after having just graduated to the cockpit of a Boeing 777. He has drawn
scrutiny after the revelation that in 2011, he and another pilot
invited two women aboard their aircraft to sit in the cockpit for a
flight from Phuket, Thailand, to Kuala Lumpur.
Fourteen countries are involved in the search for the plane, using 43 ships and 58 aircraft.
A
U.S. P-8A Poseidon, the most advanced long-range anti-submarine and
anti-surface warfare aircraft in the world, was to arrive over the
weekend and sweep parts of the Indian Ocean, the U.S. Defense Department
said in a statement.
