Malaysian authorities appealed to 15 countries to aid in finding a missing passenger jet as they prepared to extend the search as far north as Kazakhstan and as far south as the Indian Ocean off Australia.
Police searched the homes of the pilot and co-pilot yesterday and were interviewing family members after Prime Minister Najib Razak said that the plane was deliberately flown off its course. Authorities are also investigating ground staff, the Transport Ministry said in an e-mailed statement.
“As per normal procedure, the Royal Malaysia Police are investigating all crew and passengers on board MH370, as well as engineers who may have had contact with the aircraft before take-off,” according to the statement.
Satellite transmissions that weren’t turned off along with other communications systems showed Malaysian Airline Flight 370 operated for almost seven hours after last making contact with air traffic controllers, Najibsaid yesterday. That may have taken the Boeing Co. 777-200 near the limits of its fuel load if it was airborne the whole period.
Malaysia said its officials discussed with all partnering countries how best to deploy assets along the two corridors after Najib said that satellite data indicated two new zones of interest. Malaysia called off the search in the South China Sea along the plane’s intended flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Indian Search
India said it was awaiting new instructions after spending almost a week looking in the Andaman Sea after Malaysian military radar indicated that the plane had turned back and crossed the Malay peninsula heading west.
Najib said yesterday that new satellite transmission data indicated the plane was last spotted in an arc of radar that reached as far as Kazakhstan in the north to a spot in the Indian Ocean off Australia in the south. Among the countries Malaysia is now asking for assistance are Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, China, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia and France, the Transport Ministry said in the statement.
Malaysian investigators are treating both the northern and southern search zones with equal importance, though U.S. investigators are growing more convinced that the Malaysian Airline (MAS) System Bhd. jetliner’s most likely last-known position was in the zone about 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) west of Perth, Australia, said two people in the U.S. government who are familiar with the readings. Najib was told that is the most promising lead on locating the plane, one of the people said.
Australian Radar
Australia’s radar network includes a long-range system capable of detecting air targets as small as the BAE Systems Hawk, a single-engine, two-seater jet. A base station in Laverton, Western Australia state has a range of about 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) covering most of the ocean south of Java and west from Perth, according to the Defense Ministry’s website.
Asked whether Australia had picked up any signals consistent with the aircraft on its Jindalee Operational Radar Network, which covers large swathes of the southern Indian Ocean, Leonie Kolmar, a spokeswoman for the Australian Defence Department, said the department “won’t be providing comment” on the military surveillance system.
Indian Ocean
It’s hard to see how a passenger aircraft could get through the radar undetected, said Clive Williams, a former military intelligence officer and visiting professor at Australian National University.
“You would think anything like a 777 would get picked up for sure,” he said. “Like with any system, you get aberrations. It’s not 100 percent accurate.”
Expanding the search into the Indian Ocean, the third-largest body of water in the world after the Pacific and Atlantic, greatly increases the complexity of the search while potentially diminishing the chances of finding the plane.
The southern Indian Ocean includes some of the world’s most forbidding underwater areas, said Dave Gallo, director of special projects for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, in an interview. Gallo helped lead the search for Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 in 2 1/2 miles of water and wasn’t found for almost two years.
Rugged Terrain
“The further south you come from Malaysia, the more complicated, deeper and rugged the terrain gets,” Gallo said. “We could be talking about 3 miles, 4 miles, easily, of depth. Possibly deeper than Air France 447.”
A possible if less likely track goes toward Kazakhstan from northern Thailand, which would force the airliner to fly through Chinese and possibly Indian air space.
Nations along the northern track such as India and Pakistan have robust air-defense radar systems, and no evidence has turned up that the rogue plane flew into that airspace, according to a person familiar with the probe who spoke on condition of not being named because of the sensitivity of the information.
Kazakhstan hasn’t been approached for help in the mission, Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Zhanbolat Usenov said.
“I can’t believe a plane could fly into Indian airspace undetected,” said Paul Hayes, director of aviation security in London at Ascend Worldwide, which collects and analyzes aviation data.
‘New Phase’
The jet was carrying 239 passengers and crew when it went missing, with the last satellite contact at 8:11 a.m., according to the Malaysian prime minister. Malaysian officials previously said the plane was last tracked by its transponder, a device that helps radar find its location more precisely, at 1:30 a.m.
“Clearly, the search for MH370 has entered a new phase,” the prime minister said yesterday at a briefing in Kuala Lumpur. Investigators were unable to plot the “precise location” of the plane, Najib said.
Najib was briefed on the new data by investigators from two U.S. agencies, the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board. It showed with a “great degree of certainty” that its system known as Acars, which sends data and text messages to and from the ground, was turned off just before the plane passed Malaysia’s east coast, he said.
Transponder Disabled
A short time later, when the jet reached the area where air traffic control passes from Malaysia to Vietnam, its transponder was also disabled, he said. Without a transponder, radar can’t identify a plane and has difficulty locating it precisely.
Whoever was piloting the plane also commanded its flight-management system to make a turn to the west. That turn was reported to the airline by some of the final data sent by the Acars system, the person familiar with the investigation said.
Disabling Acars transmissions is a multi-step process that can require even an experienced aviator to consult flight manuals, said Kenneth Musser, a retired Delta Air Lines Inc. 777 pilot who later flew and helped train crews at Asiana Airlines Inc.
That move, combined with the disabling of Flight 370’s transponder, indicates intervention by “someone who knows the system on the airplane,” said Bill Waldock, professor of safety science who teaches accident investigations at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona. “That has to be the crew or someone who’s intimately familiar with how a 777 operates,” Waldock said.
Flight Simulator
Beyond an expanding search area, the investigation has also turned toward the pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah and Fariq Abdul Hamid, the first officer. Fariq, 27, joined the airline in 2007, while Zaharie had worked at the carrier since 1981 and logged 18,365 flying hours.
Zaharie displayed a deep passion for the Boeing jetliner that included construction of his own flight simulator using a computer program, according to an online post on a community of simulator enthusiasts. Experts are studying the flight simulator for possible clues, the Transport Ministry said.
Najib defended Malaysia’s handling of the search after a week of false leads and at times contradictory communication from authorities that has prompted criticism from China, where most of the passengers are from.
“We understand the desperate need for information on behalf of the families and those watching around the world,” he said. “But we have a responsibility to the investigation and the families to only release information that has been corroborated. And our primary motivation has always been to find the plane.”
By Andrew Davis, Alan Levin and Shamim Adam
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