Vietnamese searchers looking for a
missing Malaysian Boeing Co. (BA) 777-200 said they found a suspected
window fragment from an aircraft as efforts to learn the plane’s
fate extended to scrutiny of closed-circuit television images of
two passengers using stolen passports.
Dinh Viet Thang, head of Vietnam’s search-and-rescue
steering committee, didn’t give further details on the discovery
of the debris when contacted late yesterday by phone. Malaysian Airline System Bhd. (MAS)’s Flight 370 vanished two
days ago with 239 people on board. An air search resumed
yesterday after Vietnam’s military found two oil slicks as long
as 15 kilometers (9 miles) off its south coast. The prospect of
terrorism arose after Austria and Italy said passports used by
two male passengers were stolen from their citizens.
“There’s no sign of the aircraft,” Azharuddin Abdul
Rahman, director-general of Malaysia’s Department of Civil
Aviation, said yesterday at a news conference. “Although we
have confirmed reports of oil spills, that has not been
confirmed by the authorities.”
Interpol said in a statement at least two passports
recorded in its database, one Austrian and one Italian, were
used by passengers on the flight after being reported stolen in
Thailand. Two people using stolen Italian and Austrian passports
had consecutive ticket numbers, suggesting the tickets were
issued together, Cable News Network reported, citing the Chinese
e-ticket verification system Travelsky.
Photographer: Hoang Dinh Nam/AFP via Getty Images
Vietnamese Air Force personnel look for missing Malaysian Airline System Bhd.’s flight... Read More
Under Investigation
All the passengers on the flight to Beijing from Kuala
Lumpur are being investigated, with a specific focus on four
names, Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said
separately yesterday without elaborating.
“I’m in touch with the international intelligence
agencies” concerning the passports, he said at a briefing.
The airline’s policy states that cockpit doors must be
electronically locked and can be opened only from the inside.
All of its planes have cameras to identify people outside the
cockpit, according to the carrier’s media center.
The search radius was expanded to 50 nautical miles from 20
nautical miles, with ships continuing the effort after dark,
Azarhuddin said.
FAA, Boeing
A team from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board
was heading to Malaysia to be in place once the wreckage of the
plane is located. The team was being joined by experts from the
Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing, Kelly Nantel, a
spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.
Photographer: Goh Seng Chong/Bloomberg
Malaysian Airline System Bhd.’s Flight 370 disappeared early yesterday with 239 people on board.
Closed-circuit television footage exists of the two people
who used the false passports, said Azharuddin.
“There are only two passengers on record that flew on this
aircraft that have false passports,” he said before the press
conference. “We have the CCTV recordings of those passengers
from check-in right through the departure point. These records
of CCTV are now being used for investigation of this matter.”
The aircraft may have made an “air turn-back,” according
to Hishammuddin. That means the plane may have deviated from its
planned route, said Malaysian Air Chief Executive Officer Ahmad Jauhari Yahya.
There is no indication of terrorism at this point, said a
U.S. official following the case, asking not to be identified
because the investigation is still in its early stages. The U.S.
is working with authorities in the region to explore all
possible causes, the official said.
Theft Reported
The Austrian passport used to board the flight belonged to
a 30-year-old who reported the theft in 2012 in Thailand, while
the Italian was Luigi Maraldi, who disclosed the theft of his
documents in August, according to the countries’ foreign
ministries. Neither man was on the Malaysian aircraft, their
governments said.
The missing plane was a code-share service with China
Southern Airlines Co. (1055), which said it sold seven tickets on the
flight, including to people of Austrian and Italian nationality,
according to the company’s microblog. When asked about the
passengers who boarded with stolen passports, Chairman Si
Xianmin told reporters in Beijing, “The key is with border
control and immigration departments on the ground.”
An over-water disappearance and stolen passports “raised
huge red flags,” said John Magaw, a former top U.S. law-enforcement and transportation-security official who now works
as a consultant. “Those two things right there are highly,
highly, highly suspicious.”
Security Screening
Flight 370 departed the Malaysian capital at about 12:41
a.m. local time March 8 and was scheduled to land in Beijing at
6:30 a.m. Security screening was performed as usual at Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd. (MAHB) said.
The twin-engine, wide-body plane carried 227 passengers and
12 crew members, with Chinese travelers accounting for the
largest group by nationality at 153, including an infant, the
airline said. Also aboard were three U.S. citizens, according to
the U.S. State Department. The U.S. Federal Bureau of
Investigation is monitoring the situation. China and the U.S. are assisting efforts, with the
destroyer USS Pinckney from the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet among
vessels in the search. President Barack Obama was briefed while
on a weekend family vacation in Key Largo, Florida, said Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman.
The oil slicks discovered by Vietnamese military aircraft
were about 140 kilometers south of Tho Chu Island in a body of
water known as the Gulf of Thailand, off the South China Sea.
Planning Hub
While Muslim-majority Malaysia hasn’t seen any recent major
terrorist attacks on home soil, it has been used as a transit
and planning hub, according to a 2012 report by the U.S. State
Department. China, the plane’s destination, has occasionally
suffered what it calls terrorist attacks by Uighurs, a mainly
Muslim ethnic group from the nation’s northwest Xinjiang region.
If terrorism was involved, the flight’s disappearance over
water may not be a coincidence, said consultant Magaw, who
formerly was director of the U.S. Secret Service and led the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as well as
the Transportation Security Administration. Bringing down an
airliner at sea helps obscure any evidence, he said.
The presence of two passengers with stolen passports
signals possible terrorism, said Magaw, citing intelligence
warnings that multiple attackers might seek to elude detection
by smuggling different parts of bombs onto planes and then
assembling the pieces in restrooms.
Atlantic Ocean
In the case of Air France Flight 447, which disappeared en
route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro on June 1, 2009, Brazilian
search teams began finding pieces within a day. The wreckage was
discovered 3,900 meters (12,800 feet) deep in the Atlantic
Ocean.
Malaysian immigration officers check foreign passports with
biometric features by swiping outbound travelers’ documents to
see details of their histories and compare thumbprints and faces
to on-screen photo identifications, said an immigration official
at Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
When the Malaysian system isn’t working, slows or freezes,
officers enter passport details manually without taking
thumbprints, said the official, who asked not to be identified
because of a lack of authorization to speak publicly.
Information is keyed in manually for passports without
biometric enhancements, the official said. Outbound travelers’
passports also are checked to ensure that they show stamps
proving entry into Malaysia, said the official, who was
commenting on procedures in general rather than Flight 370.
The stolen Austrian passport had biometric features, said
Thomas Weiss, a spokesman for the nation’s Foreign Ministry.
Inquiry Starts
Malaysia began an internal investigation of its
Immmigration Department, the Malaysian National News Agency
reported. The inquiry will focus on operations at Kuala Lumpur
International Airport, it said.
U.S. officials will work closely with counterparts in China
and Malaysia, with a focus on how airport checkpoints worked and
whether passengers’ shoes were scanned properly for explosives,
said Kip Hawley, a former chief of the U.S. Transportation
Security Administration who is now a consultant.
Malaysia’s last communication with the plane, just before a
handoff to Vietnamese authorities, was “normal,” according to
Azharuddin. Contact was lost a minute before the aircraft
entered Vietnam’s airspace, its government said on its website.
The plane disappeared from Malaysian radar at 1:30 a.m. The
carrier said the last radar contact with the plane was about 120
nautical miles east of Kota Bahru, near the South China Sea.
FlightAware, a Houston-based compiler of global air-traffic
information, gave the jet’s last known altitude as 35,000 feet
as it flew a northeasterly course at 539 mph.
Structural Failure
The evidence so far is contradictory and doesn’t point to
any specific possible cause, said John Cox, an accident
investigator and chief executive officer at Safety Operating
Systems in Washington.
One possibility for the sudden loss of a plane is a mid-air
breakup, which could be caused by a structural failure or an
explosion, including one triggered by a bomb, Cox said. Such a
case would produce a wide field of debris and that hasn’t been
found, he said.
A plane may also descend intact after an inflight
emergency, whether caused by mechanical failure or pilot error,
he said. In those cases, the crew typically would have time to
radio a distress call, which also didn’t occur, he said.
Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, and First Officer Fariq Ab.
Hamid, 27, were the pilots, according to an airline statement.
The captain had 18,365 flying hours and joined the company in
1981, while his first officer had 2,763 hours of flying. The
first officer joined the Subang Jaya-based airline in 2007.
The 777 has been involved in only three accidents serious
enough to destroy a plane. The only fatalities occurred in last
year’s Asiana Airlines Inc. crash in San Francisco, where
investigators have focused on pilot error. The Chicago-based
company is assembling a team to provide technical aid.
To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story:
K. Oanh Ha in Hanoi at +84-4-3938-8940 or
oha3@bloomberg.net;
Chong Pooi Koon in Kuala Lumpur at +60-3-2302-7854 or
pchong17@bloomberg.net;
Ranjeetha Pakiam in Kuala Lumpur at +60-3-2302-7856 or
rpakiam@bloomberg.net
To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story:
K. Oanh Ha in Hanoi at
oha3@bloomberg.net;
Chong Pooi Koon in Kuala Lumpur at
pchong17@bloomberg.net;
Ranjeetha Pakiam in Kuala Lumpur at
rpakiam@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Heather Langan at
hlangan@bloomberg.net
Dan Weeks
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