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Search For Malaysia Airlines Jet Expands Across Asia

Search For Malaysia Airlines Jet Expands Across Asia

By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — The search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has expanded to cover an impossibly vast swath of Asia extending from Kazakhstan to Australia, with Malaysia appealing for as many airplanes and ships as the world can provide.

The countries where the Boeing 777 and the 239 people aboard could have gone, based on a signal picked up by a satellite, stretch north and west from the plane’s last known location and include Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, China, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand. Another arc stretches south and west between Indonesia and Australia and well into the Indian Ocean.

“We are looking at large tracts of land … as well as deep and remote oceans,” Malaysia’s acting transportation minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, said Sunday at a news conference in Kuala Lumpur, the capital.

Earlier search efforts focused on the flight path between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, over the relatively shallow Gulf of Thailand, but investigators now think it is more likely the plane headed over the Indian Ocean, with an average depth of 13,000 feet.

Family members are holding out hope that the flight was hijacked and landed in some obscure location where the passengers are being held for ransom.

“My gut feeling is that it landed. I still feel his spirit. I don’t feel he is dead,” said Sarah Bajc, a 48-year-old American teacher living in Beijing whose partner, Philip Wood, a 50-year-old IBM executive, was a passenger on the flight.

Malaysian officials said they are not yet classifying the incident as a hijacking and are considering a suicide mission by one of the passengers or crew. The pilot and copilot are high on the list of potential suspects, because of the expertise required to divert the plane. Both the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, and transponder were disabled shortly after takeoff.

The final, reassuring words from the cockpit — “All right, good night” — were spoken to air traffic controllers after the system had already been disabled, and whoever was speaking from the cockpit did not mention any trouble aboard.

Malaysian officials said they did not know whether it was the pilot or copilot who had spoken, but both are under investigation. Malaysian officials said police had searched the home of 53-year-old pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah and removed a flight simulator he kept there, and had also searched the home of the copilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27.

Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul, said on Sunday in an interview with Fox News that the investigation was increasingly looking at the cockpit.

“Something was going on with the pilot,” the Texas Republican said. “I think this all leads towards the cockpit, with the pilot and copilot.”

Despite speculation about Islamic terrorism, neither pilot had ties to militant groups. Malaysian officials said Sunday that the two had not requested to fly together on Flight 370.

The officials also said they had reinvestigated two Iranian men on the flight who were traveling on stolen passports and were sticking with their original determination: that the two were trying to sneak into Europe as economic migrants and had no terrorist links.

The flight departed Kuala Lumpur for Beijing at 12:41 a.m. March 8 and disappeared from civilian radar within 50 minutes. However, Inmarsat satellites picked up tracking information suggesting it remained in flight until at least 8:11 a.m. The satellite was only able to report the distances of the plane, not its exact position, so the search is following the two long arcs _ one extending north toward Kazakhstan and the other southwest over the Indian Ocean.

Aviation geeks using airport data from X-Plane, a flight simulator website, have identified more than 600 runways within range of the nearly 3,000 miles that the plane could have traveled from Kuala Lumpur.

The flight carried 227 passengers, 159 of them Chinese citizens.

“There’s still hope for my daughter and her husband to be alive,” the parents of one young woman told the Beijing News.

The problem with the hijacking theory is that no group has come forward to take credit for the airplane’s disappearance or to make demands.

“That makes it very difficult for us to verify if it is a hijacking or a terrorist act,” Hishammuddin said.

Anyone who commandeered Flight 370 would have had to take extraordinary measures. Those would have included manually disabling the ACARS and transponder and then executing a sharp westward turn during a 10-minute leg of the flight between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace, where there is little primary radar coverage.

Data show that as the aircraft zigzagged off course, it also rose to 45,000 feet, well above the approved altitude for a Boeing 777. Some experts believe that series of changes could have been a deliberate attempt to ensure that passengers could not use their cellphones or to incapacitate them by causing a shortage of oxygen.

Photo: Shyb via Flickr

Malaysia Under Fire Over ‘Chaotic’ Search For Jet

Malaysia Under Fire Over ‘Chaotic’ Search For Jet

Kuala Lumpur (AFP) – Malaysia denied that the hunt for a missing jet was in disarray after the search veered far from the plane’s planned route and China said that conflicting information about its course was “pretty chaotic.”

Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said Wednesday that Malaysia would “never give up hope” of finding the plane’s 239 passengers and crew, dismissing allegations that efforts were mired in confusion after a series of false alarms, rumours and contradictory statements.

“I don’t think so. It’s far from it. It’s only confusion if you want it to be seen as confusion,” he said at a press conference where military and civilian officials faced a grilling from a combative crowd of journalists.

“I think it’s not a matter of chaos. There are a lot of speculations [sic] that we have answered in the last few days,” he said.

The hunt for Malaysia Airlines flight 370 now encompasses nearly 27,000 nautical miles — roughly the size of Portugal — and involves the navies and air forces of multiple nations.

The search focus had been on an area off Vietnam’s South China Sea coast, where the Boeing 777 last made contact Saturday on a journey from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

But Malaysian authorities said they were expanding it to the Andaman Sea, north of Indonesia, hundreds of miles away.

“So right now there is a lot of information, and it’s pretty chaotic, so up to this point we too have had difficulty confirming whether it is accurate or not,” China’s foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said of accounts of the jet’s course.

There were 153 Chinese nationals on the flight.

India’s coastguard joined the aerial search off the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands Wednesday and the Indian Air Force was put on standby.

Malaysian air force chief General Rodzali Daud attempted to explain why the search zone had been expanded, telling the press conference that military radar detected an unidentified object early Saturday north of the Malacca Strait off Malaysia’s west coast.

He said that the reading, taken less than an hour after the plane lost contact over the South China Sea, was still being investigated and they were not able to confirm it was MH370.

The confusion has fueled perceptions that Malaysian authorities are unable to handle a crisis on this scale, and infuriated relatives.

Analysts said there were burning questions over what information — if any — Malaysia has gleaned from both military and civilian radar, and the plane’s transponders, and over discounted reports it was later detected near Indonesia.

“There are so many information sources that do not appear to have been used effectively in this case. As a result, the families of the missing passengers and crew are being kept in the dark,” said David Learmount, operations and safety editor at industry magazine Flightglobal.

One new detail did emerge: the words of MH370’s final radio transmission.

Malaysia’s ambassador to China, Iskandar Sarudin, said one of the pilots said “alright, good night” as the flight switched from Malaysian to Vietnamese airspace, according to Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper.

Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, Malaysia’s civil aviation chief, later confirmed to AFP that those were the last words from the cockpit.

Months before the Malaysia Airlines jet vanished, U.S. regulators had warned of a “cracking and corrosion” problem on Boeing 777s that could lead to a mid-air breakup and drastic drop in cabin pressure.

“We are issuing this AD (Airworthiness Directive) to detect and correct cracking and corrosion in the fuselage skin, which could lead to rapid decompression and loss of structural integrity of the airplane,” the Federal Aviation Administration said.

It had circulated a draft of the warning in September, issuing a final directive on March 5, three days before MH370 disappeared.

In Malaysia, frustrations were boiling over with the country’s active social media and some press outlets turning from sympathy for the families of relatives to anger over the fruitless search.

“The mood among Malaysians now is moving from patience… to embarrassment and anger over discrepancies about passengers, offloaded baggage and concealed information about its last known position,” Malaysian Insider, a leading news portal, said in a commentary.

Twitter users took aim at the web of contradictory information that has fueled conspiracy theories.

“If the Malaysian military did not see MH370 turn toward the Malacca Strait, then why the search? Who decided to look there and why?” one comment said.

The anger was compounded by a report aired on Australian television of a past cockpit security breach involving the co-pilot of the missing jet.

Malaysia Airlines said it was “shocked” over allegations that First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, along with a fellow pilot, violated airline rules in 2011 by allowing two young South African women into their cockpit during a flight.

AFP Photo/Chaideer Mahyuddin