That's a key question
investigators are weighing as they continue the search for Malaysia
Airlines Flight 370, which vanished March 8 on a flight between Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia, and Beijing.
Radar does have some blind spots, and it's possible to fly at lower altitudes to avoid being spotted, analysts told CNN.
But experts are divided over whether that could be what happened to the missing Boeing 777.
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Jeffrey Beatty, a
security consultant and former FBI special agent, says someone could
have planned a route that avoided radar detection.
"It certainly is possible
to fly through the mountains in that part of the world and not be
visible on radar. Also, an experienced pilot, anyone who wanted to go in
that direction, could certainly plot out all the known radar locations,
and you can easily determine, where are the radar blind spots?" he
said. "It's the type of things the Americans did when they went into
Pakistan to go after Osama bin Laden."
On Monday, the Malaysian
newspaper New Straits Times reported that the plane may have flown low
to the ground -- 5,000 feet or less -- and used mountainous terrain as
cover to evade radar detection. The newspaper cited unnamed sources for
its reporting, which CNN could not immediately confirm.
And a senior Indian
military official told CNN on Monday that military radar near the
Andaman and Nicobar Islands isn't as closely watched as other radar
systems. That leaves open the possibility that Indian radar systems may
not have picked up the airplane at the time of its last known Malaysian
radar contact, near the tiny island of Palau Perak in the Strait of
Malacca.
U.S. officials have said
they don't think it's likely the plane flew north over land as it veered
off course. If it had, they've said, radar somewhere would have
detected it. Landing the plane somewhere also seems unlikely, since that
would require a large runway, refueling capability and the ability to
fix the plane, the officials have said.
Malaysian officials said Monday that they were not aware of the Malaysian newspaper's report.
"It does not come from us," said Malaysia Airlines CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya.
Analysts interviewed by
CNN said that it would be extremely difficult to fly such a large
aircraft so close to the ground over a long period of time, and that
it's not even clear that doing so would keep the plane off radar scopes.
"Five-thousand isn't
really low enough to evade the radar, and that's kind of where general
aviation flies all the time anyway, and we're visible to radar," said
Mary Schiavo, a CNN aviation analyst and former inspector general for
the U.S. Department of Transportation.
"It just seems really
highly improbable, unless we've been overestimating a lot of other
countries' radar system capabilities," said Daniel Rose, an aviation and
maritime attorney.
Buck Sexton, a former
CIA officer who's now national security editor for TheBlaze.com, said
radar would have detected the plane if it flew over land.
"This is a bus in the
sky. It's a lot harder to get under the radar with this kind of thing
than I think most people realize," he said. "So really, while the search
I know has extended to this vast area stretching up into (the nations
and central or south Asia), clearly there really should be much more of a
search over open water, because this is not getting past people's
radars."
It wouldn't be easy to avoid radar detection, but it's possible, CNN aviation analyst Jim Tilmon said.
"I think it took a great
deal of skill to do this. I think somebody was at the controls who
understood the value of altitude control to eliminate the possibility of
being spotted and tracked on radar," he said.
Whoever was in control
in the cockpit, he said, "really had the ability to map out a route that
was given the very best chance of not being detected."
One other possibility, he said: the plane could have shadowed another plane so closely that it slipped by radar detection.
Other analysts say that would require so much skill that it would be nearly impossible to pull off without getting caught.
There's another possible wrinkle, experts say. Some countries may be hesitant to reveal what they've seen on radar.
"They want to protect
their own capabilities," Beatty said. "Their intelligence services are
not going to want to publicize exactly what their capabilities are."
Here are other
developments in the search and investigation, as search crews from 26
nations continue scouring vast swaths of ocean and land for any trace of
the airliner:
Timeline clarification
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Tracking Malaysia Air flight 370
Ahmad Jauhari said
Monday that it wasn't clear whether the final words from the cockpit
came before or after the plane's data-reporting system was shut down.
Earlier, Malaysian authorities had said the message "All right, good
night" came after the system had been disabled.
The voice message came
from the plane's copilot at 1:19 a.m. Saturday, March 8, Ahmad Jauhari
said. The data system sent its last transmission at 1:07 a.m. and was
shut down sometime between then and 1:37 a.m. that day, Ahmad Jauhari
said.
Chinese response
China said Monday that it had deployed 10 ships, 21 satellites and multiple aircraft to aid in the search.
Premier Li Keqiang spoke
with Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak to ask for more information
to help speed the search along, according to a statement posted on the
Chinese government website.
A top Malaysian official denied the allegation that his country had held back information about the missing flight.
"Our priority has always
been to find the aircraft. We would not withhold any information that
could help," Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Haishammuddin Tun
Hussein told reporters. "But we also have a responsibility not to
release information until it has been verified by the international
investigations team."
U.S. Navy pulls out destroyer
The USS Kidd and its
helicopters have stopped combing the Andaman Sea and are no longer part
of search efforts for the missing plane, the Navy said.
The move is partially
because Australians are taking over the majority of the searching in
that area, U.S. officials said. A U.S. P-8 aircraft will move to Perth,
Australia, to be based there for searching.
Fewer U.S. assets will
be involved in the search for the missing plane, but U.S. officials said
the P-8 will be able to cover a wider range of ocean more quickly than
the ship could.
"This is actually much
more effective for the overall search," Cmdr. William Marks of the U.S.
7th Fleet told CNN's Wolf Blitzer Monday.
"The real challenge is
this huge expanse of water. I keep saying, if you superimposed a map of
the U.S. on here, it'd be like trying to find someone anywhere between
New York and California. so that's the challenge here," he said. "We
have amazing, dedicated air crews. it's just a matter of how much area
we can search."
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