SEPANG, Malaysia — The investigation into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took another confusing turn on Monday, as the authorities here reversed themselves and offered yet another version of the sequence of events in the crucial minutes before ground controllers lost contact with the jet early on March 8.
As the search for the missing Boeing 777 jet stretched into a 10th day, two of the nations helping in the hunt, Australia and Indonesia, agreed to divide between them a vast area of the southeastern Indian Ocean, with Indonesia focusing on equatorial waters and Australia beginning to search farther south for traces of the aircraft. To the north, China and Kazakhstan checked their radar records and tried to figure out whether the jet could have landed somewhere on their soil.
The Malaysian authorities said on Monday that the plane’s first officer — the co-pilot — was the last person in the cockpit to speak to ground control. But the government added to the confusion about what had happened on the plane by that time, withdrawing its assertion that a crucial communications system had already been disabled when the co-pilot spoke.
Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia’s defense minister and acting transportation minister, had made that assertion on Sunday, saying that the aircraft’s Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or Acars, was disabled at 1:07 a.m. Saturday, well before the co-pilot’s verbal signoff. That appeared to point to possible complicity of the pilots in the plane’s disappearance.
But Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, the chief executive of Malaysia Airlines, said at a news conference early Monday evening that the Acars system had worked normally at 1:07 but then failed to send its next regularly scheduled update at 1:37 a.m., and could have been disabled at any point between those two times. “We don’t know when the Acars system was switched off,” he said.
Mr. Ahmad Jauhari said the co-pilot’s verbal signoff was given by radio at 1:19 a.m., and the aircraft’s transponder, which communicates with ground-based radar, ceased working about two minutes later.
The new account appeared to reopen the possibility that the aircraft was operating normally until 1:21 a.m., and that the two communications systems failed or were deactivated at the same time, not at separate points. That could raise additional questions about whether the plane was deliberately diverted, or experienced mechanical or electrical difficulties that crippled its communications and resulted in its flying an erratic course.
Though the possibility of an accident has not been excluded, the strong consensus among Malaysian and foreign experts involved in the investigation remains that deliberate action by someone on board was the most likely explanation for the disappearance, according to a person involved in the investigation. This person, who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss publicly a matter that has become a criminal case, said investigators believed there were too many suspicious coincidences for the disappearance to have been entirely due to an accident.
Standing next to Mr. Ahmad Jauhari at the news conference, Mr. Hishammuddin waved off numerous questions about why he had said a day earlier that Acars had been disabled at 1:07 a.m. “What I said yesterday was based on fact, corroborated and verified,” he said. In response to another question, he said that uncertainty about the chronology underlined the importance of finding the aircraft and its data recorders.
After the last voice contact with the ground, radar data indicates that the aircraft turned off its planned flight path northeastward toward Beijing, and had headed west, back across the Malay Peninsula while rising in altitude and falling rapidly again, and then flew out over the Strait of Malacca and beyond, out of radar range, to an unknown location.
After the Acars system, the transponder and voice radio contact had all ceased, one device on the plane kept trying to communicate, a satellite transmission device usually used for sending maintenance data. That device kept sending occasional brief signals for several hours after all other contact was lost, Malaysian authorities say; the last signal received from that device indicated that the plane was on or near one of two broad arcs of the earth’s surface. One extends over Indonesia and remote areas of the southern Indian Ocean, the other over the Asian land mass, through western and southwestern China, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and northern Laos.
By Monday, 26 nations were involved in searching those two arcs.
In the southern hemisphere, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority will lead the search through its Rescue Coordination Center, supported by the Australian Defense Force. “Australia is preparing to work with assets from a number of other countries, including surveillance aircraft from New Zealand and the United States,” Prime Minister Tony Abbott said in a statement on Monday.
He said two Orion aircraft from the Royal Australian Air Force that have been involved in the search since March 9 would be “re-tasked to search in the southern Indian Ocean” and that two more would join the search within the next 24 hours.
The police have been investigating the pilot, co-pilot and other crew members of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight since the day of its disappearance, Malaysia’s Transport Ministry said in a statement on Monday. The statement highlighted growing interest by the law enforcement authorities into whether any of the airline employees might have been complicit in the plane’s disappearance.
Adam Dolnik, a professor at the University of Wollongong in Australia who has studied terrorism in Southeast Asia and other parts of the world, said that, judging from the information disclosed so far, there was nothing to suggest any involvement by a terrorist organization. He said, though, that there was the possibility of a “lone wolf” acting at least partly in the name of extremist beliefs.
Mr. Dolnik voiced skepticism that the two Iranian passengers who boarded the plane with stolen passports had played a role in diverting it. “For groups like Al Qaeda, which tried to take airliners down in midcourse flight by a suicide bomber since the mid-1990s, this is their fantasy target, and what they keep going for, but repeatedly they are unable to keep doing it,” he said. “But for a group like this to grow an entire plan — which would have to be quite sophisticated for them to be able to actually get the operational capabilities through the secure perimeter and on board an airplane — and to blow it on something like a stolen passport, it just doesn’t make any sense. What they would do is send operatives who have clean passports, to make sure they actually make it through immigration.”
Mr. Dolnik added: “If you’re a militant jihadist group, why would you ever go for Malaysia Airlines? If you have a predominantly Muslim country, one of the biggest Muslim countries, hitting the national carrier of that country really would be very risky in terms of constituency support or how people are going to view you.”
Malaysia’s Transport Ministry also said that three civil aviation investigators had arrived from France to share expertise gained from the search for Air France Flight 447, which disappeared nearly five years ago off the coast of Brazil. Searchers needed almost two years to find the Air France jet, an Airbus A330, on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.
Investigators had an advantage in that case, because they had found more than 3,000 pieces of debris and 50 bodies floating in the ocean in the days and weeks immediately after the crash, giving them a rough sense of where the plane had entered the water. By contrast, there are still few clues to where the Malaysia Airlines jetliner finally came down.
The United States search effort is still focused on the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal, in the northeast corner of the Indian Ocean, where the American destroyer Kidd and a surveillance plane are patrolling. In the vast, empty expanses of the southern oceans, however, aircraft can cover a very large area more quickly than ships and ship-based helicopters could.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-flight.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/B/Bradsher,%20Keith?ref=keithbradsher&pagewanted=print
