KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — The search for Flight 370 turned into a ... of governments across a large expanse of Asia in the search for the Boeing 777, ... One arc runs from the southern border of Kazakhstan in Central Asia to ... Officials in Washington say they are frustrated because they believe that the ...
KUALA
LUMPUR, Malaysia — The search for Flight 370 turned into a criminal
investigation on Saturday, after Malaysia declared that the plane had
been deliberately diverted and then flown for as long as seven hours
toward an unknown point far from its scheduled route of Kuala Lumpur to
Beijing.
Prime
Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia said Saturday afternoon that he would
seek the help of governments across a large expanse of Asia in the
search for the Boeing 777, which has been missing for a week and had 239
people on board. The Malaysian authorities released a map showing that
the last satellite signal received from the plane had been sent from a
point somewhere along one of two arcs spanning large distances across
Asia.
As
part of the investigation, police officers were seen Saturday going to
the home of the flight’s pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, in a gated compound,
and the Malaysian news media reported that a search had taken place. A
spokeswoman for the Royal Malaysia Police would neither confirm nor deny
the reports but said there would be a news conference on Sunday.
+7.5 hours Red lines represent possible positions of plane when it transmitted last signal to satellite.
Afghan.
Nepal
Pakistan
Bangladesh
Myanmar
India
Laos
Thailand
+40 min. Last contact with civilian radar.
Vietnam
First week
search area
+1 hour 34 min. Last contact with military radar.
Malaysia
Kuala Lumpur airport
Indonesia
Position of satellite that received last known signal
from plane.
+7.5 hours Red lines represent possible positions of plane when it transmitted last signal to satellite.
INDIAN OCEAN
Plane may have flown up to another hour after its last satellite transmission.
Australia
1,000 MILES
A
satellite orbiting 22,250 miles over the middle of the Indian Ocean
received the transmission that, based on the angle from which the plane
sent it, came from somewhere along one of the two arcs. One arc runs
from the southern border of Kazakhstan in Central Asia to northern
Thailand, passing over some hot spots of global insurgency and highly
militarized areas. The other arc runs from near Jakarta to the Indian
Ocean, roughly 1,000 miles off the west coast of Australia.
The
plane changed course after it took off. “These movements are consistent
with deliberate action by someone on the plane,” Mr. Najib said.
He
said one communications system had been disabled as the plane flew over
the northeast coast of Malaysia. A second system, a transponder aboard
the craft, abruptly stopped broadcasting its location, altitude, speed
and other information at 1:21 a.m., while the plane was a third of the
way across the Gulf of Thailand from Malaysia to Vietnam.
Military
radar data subsequently showed that the plane turned and flew west
across northern Malaysia before arcing out over the wide northern end of
the Strait of Malacca, headed at cruising altitude for the Indian
Ocean.
The
flight had been scheduled to land at 6:30 a.m. in Beijing, so when its
last signal was received, at 8:11 a.m., Mr. Najib said, it could have
been nearly out of fuel. “The investigation team is making further
calculations, which will indicate how far the aircraft may have flown
after the last point of contact,” Mr. Najib said, reading a statement in
English. “Due to the type of satellite data, we are unable to confirm
the precise location of the plane when it last made contact with a
satellite.”
The
northern arc Mr. Najib described passes near some of the world’s most
volatile countries that are home to insurgent groups, but also over
areas with a strong military presence and robust air defense networks,
some run by the American military.
The
arc passes close to northern Iran, through Afghanistan and northern
Pakistan, and through northern India and the Himalayas and Myanmar. An
aircraft flying on that arc would have to pass through air defense
networks in India and Pakistan, whose mutual border is heavily
militarized, as well as through Afghanistan, where the United States and
other NATO countries have operated air bases for more than a decade.
Photo
Malaysian and Japanese crews searched for the missing Malaysian flight over the waters of the South China Sea on Saturday.Credit
Edgar Su/Reuters
Air
bases near that arc include Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, where the
United States Air Force’s 455th Air Expeditionary Wing is based, and an
Indian air base, Hindon Air Force Station.
The
southern arc, from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean, travels over
open water with few islands. If the aircraft took that path, it might
have passed near the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. These remote Australian
islands, with a population of fewer than 1,000 people, have a small
airport.
After
Mr. Najib’s statement on Saturday, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign
Affairs demanded to know more, and said China was sending technical
experts to Malaysia. Two-thirds of the people on the jet were Chinese
citizens.
A
ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, said China would shift its search planes
and ships to areas west of Malaysia. That region includes countries that
have tensions with China, including India. Mr. Qin said China would
seek the cooperation of any countries affected by the redeployment.
China’s
foreign minister, Wang Yi, convened ministries and agencies on Saturday
to discuss the developments. Even with a vastly larger area to search,
the officials insisted that the effort must continue with increased
vigor.
“The
search remains the most pressing and No. 1. task for now,” said an the
account of the meeting on the ministry website. The officials said the
broader search would cover land as well as sea.
In
Washington, the Malaysian announcement did little to change American
investigators’ perspectives on what happened to the plane.
Photo
An Indonesian rescue crew searched in the Andaman Sea on Saturday.Credit
Chaideer Mahyuddin/Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images
“It
doesn’t mean anything; all it is is a theory,” one senior American
official said. “Find the plane, find the black boxes and then we can
figure out what happened. It has to be based on something, and until
they have something more to go on it’s all just theories.” The
investigator spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the
sensitivity of the inquiry.
American
investigators have been provided with much of the flight data obtained
from radar and satellites, but they say they have far less information
about what the Malaysian government has uncovered about the pilots and
passengers or the Malaysian inquiry. Soon after the plane disappeared,
F.B.I. agents and other American investigators “scrubbed” the names of
the pilots and passengers — including two Iranian men who traveled on
stolen passports — to determine whether they had any connection to
terrorists and found none, according to the officials.
Officials in Washington say they are frustrated because they believe that the F.B.I. could be of substantial assistance.
The Malaysian government has said that analyzing this data is a slow and painstaking process.
David
Learmount, operations and safety editor for Flightglobal, a news and
data service for the aviation sector, said that the Malaysian government
could have acted far sooner on the information pointing to someone’s
seizing control of the plane.
Mikael
Robertsson, a co-founder of Flightradar24, a global aviation tracking
service, said the way the plane’s communications had been shut down
pointed to the involvement of someone with considerable aviation
expertise and knowledge of the air route, possibly a crew member,
willing or unwilling.
The
Boeing’s transponder was switched off just as the plane passed from
Malaysian to Vietnamese air traffic control space, thus making it more
likely that the plane’s absence from communications would not arouse
attention, Mr. Robertsson said by telephone from Sweden.
The main communications systems of the Malaysia Airlines
plane were turned off about 40 minutes into the flight, forcing
investigators to try to piece together the plane’s location from other
systems.
Transponder
Secondary Radar and Text Updates
Air traffic controllers typically know a
plane’s location based on what is called secondary radar, which requests
information from the plane’s transponder. A plane also uses radio or
satellite signals to send regular updates through ACARS, the Aircraft
Communications Addressing and Reporting System. Both of those systems
were turned off.
Primary Radar
Two Malaysian military radar stations tracked a
plane using primary radar, which sends out radio signals and listens
for echoes that bounce off objects in the sky. Primary radar does not
require a plane to have a working transponder.
SATELLITE
Satellite Communications
If ACARS updates are turned off, the plane
still sends a “keep-alive” signal, that can be received by satellites.
The signal does not indicate location, but it can help to narrow down
the plane’s position. A satellite picked up four or five signals from
the airliner, about one per hour, after it left the range of military
radar.
“Always
when you fly, you are in contact with air traffic control in some
country,” he said. “Instead of contacting the Vietnam air traffic
control, the transponder signal was turned off, so I think the timing of
turning off the signal just after you have left Malaysian air traffic
control indicates someone did this on purpose, and he found the perfect
moment when he wasn’t in control by Malaysia or Vietnam. He was like in
no-man’s country.”
The
signs thus indicated involvement of the crew, Mr. Robertsson said, but
he emphasized that those signs were not definitive, nor did they prove
whether any involvement was willing or coerced.
Xu
Ke, a former commercial pilot who has advised the Chinese government on
aviation security, said the details suggested that at least one crew
member, most likely one of the pilots, was involved in seizing control
of the aircraft, either willingly or under coercion.
“The
timing of turning off the transponder suggests that this involved
someone with knowledge of how to avoid air traffic control without
attracting attention,” Mr. Xu said in a telephone interview. “You needed
to know this plane, and you also needed to know this route.”
Especially
since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Mr. Xu said, security on
cockpit doors has been reinforced so that forced entry would be
difficult without the pilots’ having ample time to send a warning
signal.
“We
have to be careful about our words and conclusions, and examine all the
possibilities, but the likelihood that a pilot was involved appears
very likely,” Mr. Xu said. “The Boeing 777 is a relatively new and big
plane, so it wouldn’t be anyone who could do this, not even someone who
has flown smaller passenger planes, even smaller Boeings.”
The
possible northern corridor Mr. Najib described bristles with military
radar, making it more likely that the plane either went south or, if it
did fly north, did not make it far, Mr. Robertsson said.
Photo
An Indonesian rescue team assisted in the search for the missing plane in the Indian Ocean near Sumatra Island.Credit
European Pressphoto Agency
“I
don’t really think that the aircraft could have flown so far over the
land, because it would need to pass over so many countries that someone
should have picked it up,” he said. “If they had taken the northern
corridor, they could have gone down before they reached land, so it’s
also possible.”
Huang
Huikang, China’s ambassador to Malaysia, sat impassively in a light
gray suit in the front row of Mr. Najib’s news conference, at an airport
hotel here on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur.
On
Saturday, the announcement from Malaysia brought dismay in Beijing
among family members and friends of the many Chinese who were on the
missing plane. For a week, the families and friends have gathered at a
hotel, receiving updates from Malaysia Airlines employees and waiting
for news. Several managed to find some relief in the announcement that
at least one person had apparently seized control of the plane, because
that still left a faint hope that the passengers were somehow alive
somewhere.
On Saturday, James Wood, the brother of Philip Wood, an American passenger on the flight, said the wait had been difficult.
“The
days sometimes drag by,” he said, “and we’re trying to turn off the TV
because it’s just a little too hard to handle on a constant basis.” He
said the news that the search had turned into a criminal investigation
was difficult. But the family is still hoping that Mr. Wood is alive.
“We have to. We just have to,” the brother said.
According
to a person who has been briefed on the progress of the investigation,
the two “corridors” were derived from calculations by engineers from the
satellite communications company Inmarsat, which were provided to
investigators. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because
details of the search remain confidential.
The
older satellite communications box fitted on the plane has no global
positioning system, the person said. But investigators have managed to
calculate the distance between the “ping” from the plane and a
stationary Inmarsat-3 satellite. The satellite can “see” in an arc that
stretches to the north and south of its fixed position, but without GPS
it can say only how far away the ping is, not where it is coming from,
the person said.
But
based on what is known about the flight’s trajectory, investigators are
strongly favoring the southern corridor as the likely flight path, the
person said.
Correction: March 15, 2014
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article
misstated the number of Chinese citizens on Flight 370. About
two-thirds of those aboard, and not 227, were Chinese.
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