Published: 6:52AM Saturday March 15, 2014 Source: AP
Watch Video RelatedInvestigators are increasingly certain the missing Malaysia Airlines jet turned back across the country after its last radio contact with air traffic controllers, and that someone with aviation skills was responsible for the change in course, a Malaysian government official said today.
A US official said in Washington that investigators are examining the possibility of 'human intervention' in the plane's disappearance, adding it may have been 'an act of piracy.' The official, who wasn't authorised to talk to the media and spoke on condition of anonymity, said it also was possible the plane may have landed somewhere.
While other theories are still being examined, the official said key evidence for the human intervention is that contact with the Boeing 777's transponder stopped about a dozen minutes before a messaging system on the jet quit.
The Malaysian official, who also declined to be identified because he is not authorised to brief the media, said only a skilled person could navigate the plane the way it was flown after its last confirmed location over the South China Sea.
Earlier today, acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said the country had yet to determine what happened to the plane after it dropped off civilian radar and ceased communicating with the ground around 40 minutes into the flight to Beijing on March 8.
He said investigators were still trying to establish with certainty that military radar records of a blip moving west across the Malay Peninsula into the Strait of Malacca showed Flight MH370.
On Friday, a US official said the plane remained airborne after losing contact with air traffic control, sending a signal to establish contact with a satellite. The Malaysian official confirmed this, referring to the process by its technical term of a 'handshake.'
Boeing offers a satellite service that can receive a stream of data on how an aircraft is functioning in flight and relay the information to the plane's home base. Malaysia Airlines didn't subscribe to that service, but the plane still had the capability to connect with the satellite and was automatically sending signals, or pings, said the US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorised to discuss the situation by name.
Hishammuddin said the government would only release information about the signals when they were verified.
But it now appears increasingly certain the plane didn't experience a catastrophic incident over the South China Sea as was initially seen as the most likely scenario. Some experts believe it is possible that one of the pilots, or someone with flying experience, hijacked the plane for some later purpose or committed suicide by plunging the aircraft into the sea.
Mike Glynn, a committee member of the Australian and International Pilots Association, said he considers pilot suicide to be the most likely explanation for the disappearance, as was suspected in a SilkAir crash during a flight from Singapore to Jakarta in 1997 and an EgyptAir flight in 1999.
'A pilot rather than a hijacker is more likely to be able to switch off the communications equipment,' Glynn said. 'The last thing that I, as a pilot, want is suspicion to fall on the crew, but it's happened twice before.'
Posted by Unknown on Friday, March 14, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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