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 In a far more detailed description of military radar plotting than
has been publicly revealed, two sources told Reuters an unidentified
aircraft that investigators suspect was missing Flight MH370
appeared to be following a commonly used navigational route when it
was last spotted early on Saturday, northwest of Malaysia.
That course — headed into the Andaman Sea and towards the Bay of
Bengal in the Indian Ocean — could only have been set deliberately,
either by flying the Boeing 777-200ER jet manually or by programming
the auto-pilot.
A third investigative source said inquiries were focusing more on
the theory that someone who knew how to fly a plane deliberately
diverted the flight hundreds of miles off its scheduled course from
Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
"What we can say is we are looking at sabotage, with hijack still on
the cards," said the source, a senior Malaysian police official.
One of the most baffling mysteries in the history of modern aviation
remains unsolved after nearly a week.
The latest radar evidence is consistent with the expansion of the
search for the aircraft to the west of Malaysia, possibly as far as
the Indian Ocean.
There has been no trace of the plane nor any sign of wreckage as the
navies and military aircraft of more than a dozen countries scour
the seas across Southeast Asia.
Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said he could not
confirm the last heading of the plane or if investigators were
focusing on sabotage.
"A normal investigation becomes narrower with time ... as new
information focuses the search, but this is not a normal
investigation," he told a news conference. "In this case, the
information has forced us to look further and further afield."
Investigators were still looking at "four or five" possibilities,
including a diversion that was intentional or under duress, or an
explosion, he said. Police would search the pilot's home if
necessary and were still investigating all 239 passengers and crew
on the plane, he added.
INDIAN OCEAN "BIGGEST CHALLENGE"
If the jetliner did stray into the Indian Ocean, a vast expanse with
depths of more than 7,000 meters (23,000 feet), the task faced by
searchers would become dramatically more difficult. Winds and
currents could shift any surface debris tens of nautical miles
within hours, dramatically widening the search area with each
passing day.
"Ships alone are not going to get you that coverage, helicopters are
barely going to make a dent in it and only a few countries fly P-3s
(long-range search aircraft)," William Marks, spokesman for the U.S.
Seventh Fleet, told Reuters.
"So this massive expanse of water space will be the biggest
challenge."
The U.S. Navy was sending an advanced P-8A Poseidon plane to help
search the Strait of Malacca, a busy sealane separating the Malay
Peninsula from the Indonesian island of Sumatra. It had already
deployed a Navy P-3 Orion aircraft to those waters.
U.S. defense officials told Reuters that the U.S. Navy
guided-missile destroyer, USS Kidd, was heading to the Strait of
Malacca, answering a request from the Malaysian government. The Kidd
had been searching the areas south of the Gulf of Thailand, along
with the destroyer USS Pinckney.
"It's my understanding that based on some new information that's not
necessarily conclusive — but new information — an additional search
area may be opened in the Indian Ocean," White House spokesman Jay
Carney told reporters in Washington.
Carney did not specify the nature of the new information.
Satellites picked up faint electronic pulses from the aircraft after
it went missing on Saturday, but the signals gave no immediate
information about where the jet was heading and little else about
its fate, two sources close to the investigation said on Thursday.
U.S. experts are still examining the data to see if any information
about its last location could be extracted, a source close to the
investigation told Reuters. Malaysia's civil aviation chief
confirmed on Friday the government was working with U.S.
investigators to establish if there was any satellite information
that could help locate the airliner.
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LAST RADAR SIGHTING
The last sighting of the aircraft on civilian radar screens came
shortly before 1:30 a.m. on Saturday, less than an hour after
take-off. It was flying as scheduled across the mouth of the Gulf of
Thailand on the eastern side of peninsular Malaysia, heading towards
Beijing.
However, Malaysia's air force chief said on Wednesday that an
aircraft that could have been the missing plane was plotted on
military radar at 2:15 a.m., 200 miles northwest of Penang Island
off Malaysia's west coast.
This position marks the limit of Malaysia's military radar in that
part of the country, a fourth source familiar with the investigation
told Reuters.
Malaysia says it has asked neighboring countries for their radar
data, but has not confirmed receiving the information. Indonesian
and Thai authorities said on Friday they had not received an
official request for such data from Malaysia.
The fact that the plane — if it was MH370 — had lost contact with
air traffic control and was invisible to civilian radar suggested
someone on board had turned off its communication systems, the first
two sources said.
They also gave new details on the direction in which the
unidentified aircraft was heading — following aviation corridors
identified on maps used by pilots as N571 and P628 — routes taken by
commercial planes flying from Southeast Asia to the Middle East or
Europe.
Hishammuddin said it remained unclear if that aircraft was MH370.
"We need to get verification and we are working very closely with
the experts," he said.
MILITARY DEPLOYMENT GROWS
Ships and aircraft are now combing a vast area that had already been
widened to cover both sides of the Malay Peninsula and the Andaman
Sea.
An already difficult search task has been complicated in some areas
by a choking haze caused by burning forest and farmland that has
enveloped much of Malaysia and spilled into the Strait of Malacca.
The haze, exacerbated by a prolonged dry spell, has reached
hazardous levels in several spots.
"The haze will affect the search and rescue operations for sure. The
visibility at the ground level has dropped to less than 3 km (1.9
miles)," Amirzudi Hashim, a senior meteorologist at the National
Weather Center, told Reuters.
India had deployed ships, planes and helicopters from the remote
Andaman and Nicobar Islands, at the juncture of the Bay of Bengal
and the Andaman Sea, an Indian military spokesman, Harmeet Singh,
said on Friday.
Two Dornier aircraft were searching the land mass of the Andaman and
Nicobar islands, a total area of 720 km by 52 km, Singh said.
China, which had more than 150 citizens on board the missing plane,
has deployed four warships, four coastguard vessels, eight aircraft
and trained 10 satellites on a wide search area. Chinese media have
described the ship deployment as the largest Chinese rescue fleet
ever assembled.
The Boeing 777 has one of the best safety records of any commercial
aircraft in service. Its only previous fatal crash came on July 6
last year when Asiana Airlines Flight 214 struck a seawall with its
undercarriage on landing in San Francisco. Three people died.
(Additional reporting by Anshuman Daga, Yantoultra Ngui and
Al-Zaquan Amer Hamzah in Kuala Lumpur, Tim Hepher in Paris, Mark
Hosenball, Andrea Shalal, Will Dunham, Phil Stewart and Roberta
Rampton in Washington; Ben Blanchard in Beijing; Amy Sawitta Lefevre
in Bangkok; writing by Stuart Grudgings and Alex Richardson; editing
by Nick Macfie)
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