Those details -- told to
CNN by a senior Malaysian air force official, who declined to be named
because he is not authorized to speak to the media -- shed more light on
what happened to the aircraft that mysteriously went missing early
Saturday.
But many big questions
remain. Why were the communications lost? Why was the Boeing 777 going
the direction it was? And where did it end up?
"Something happened to
that airplane, that was obviously out of the norm, that caused it to
depart from its normal flight path," said Mark Weiss, a former 777 pilot
now with the Washington-based Spectrum Group consulting firm. "... It's
difficult not to speculate."Take a virtual look inside a Boeing 777
Peter Goelz, former
managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board, thinks
all this information -- if correct -- ominously suggests that someone
purposefully cut off the transponder and steered the plane from its
intended investigation.
"This kind of deviation in course is simply inexplicable," said Goelz.
Other experts aren't
convinced that there were bad actors -- be they hijackers or an
ill-intentioned crew member. They say there could have been some sort of
sudden catastrophic electronic failure or more that spurred the crew to
try to turn around, with no luck.
"Perhaps there was a
power problem," said veteran pilot Kit Darby, former president of
Aviation Information Resources, adding that backup power systems would
only last about an hour. "(It is) natural for the pilot, in my view, to
return to where he knows the airports."
Still, while they have
theories, even those who have piloted massive commercial airliners like
this one admit that they can't conclude anything until the plane is
found. For now, the massive multinational search has yielded no
breakthrough -- which has only added to the heartache for the friends
and family of the 239 passengers and crew on board.
The Malaysian air force official's revelations may provide more direction, though clarity and closure are still elusive.
"There are still as many
possibilities out there, maybe more, now that we know about the
transponders being off and the length of time that plane flew in the air
without them," said CNN law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes. "It still
leaves mechanical, terrorism (and) other issues as much in the air as
they were before."
Intentional or catastrophic mechanical failure?
According to the
Malaysian air force official, the plane's transponder apparently stopped
working at about the time flight controllers lost contact with it, near
the coast of Vietnam.
The air force eventually
and totally lost track of the plane over Pulau Perak, a tiny island in
the Strait of Malacca -- many hundreds of miles from the usual flight
path for aircraft traveling between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, the
official said.
If the data cited by the
source is correct, the aircraft was flying away from Beijing and on the
opposite side of the Malay Peninsula from its scheduled route.
Why would the
transponder -- an electrical instrument in commercial airline cockpits
that continuously transmits information such as altitude, location,
direction and speed -- have gone off?
Goelz, the former NTSB
managing director, and others point out the only reason for someone to
intentionally turn off the transponder is to conceal the plane's
location and direction. Someone with nefarious intentions of taking over
an aircraft and steering it to where it wasn't supposed to be -- or
perhaps planning on crashing it -- might do just that.
"You have to have a very
deliberate process to turn the transponder off," he said. "... There
might still be mechanical explanations on what was going on, but those
mechanical explanations are narrowing quickly."
Anthony Roman, a trained
pilot and consultant, said that a fast-moving fire might have moved
through the cockpit and rendered everything, including the crew,
effectively powerless to do much more than turn the plane around.
"Fires are insidious," Roman told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "They can happen quickly and knock out multiple systems quickly."
Darby, for one, believes
purely mechanical issues remain the most valid possibility now. His
main point is: "Everything is electrical." In other words, if there's
some sort of "catastrophic failure" for whatever reason, that could
knock out systems like the transponder.
If that would happen,
the plane could fly for some time without electricity but not
indefinitely. Any attempts to steer it would be harder in the dark
without functioning flight instruments said Darby, a retired United
captain.
Terrorism a possibility
Authorities have said they're looking at all possibilities to explain what happened to the Malaysia Airlines aircraft.
Earlier Tuesday, the
head of the international police organization Interpol said that his
agency increasingly believed the incident was not related to terrorism.
"The more information we
get, the more we're inclined to conclude that it was not a terrorist
incident," Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said at a news
conference in Lyon, France.
Yet -- speaking Tuesday
about what he called a "very disturbing mystery" -- CIA Director John
Brennan insisted, "We're not ruling it out. Not at all."The two passengers who have dominated headlines the last two days
entered Malaysia using valid Iranian passports, Noble said. But they
used stolen Austrian and Italian passports to board the missing
Malaysian plane, he said.
Noble gave their names and ages as Pouri Nourmohammadi, 18, and Delavar Seyed Mohammad Reza, 29.
Malaysian police had
earlier identified Nourmohammadi, using a slightly different name and
age, and said they believed he was trying to migrate to Germany.
Inspector General Khalid Abu Bakar of the Royal Malaysian Police said it doesn't appear the younger Iranian posed a threat.
"We have been checking
his background," Khalid said, noting "other police organizations" have
been consulted. "And we believe that he is not likely to be a member of
any terrorist group," Khalid said.
After he failed to
arrive in Frankfurt, the final destination of his ticket, his mother
contacted authorities, Khalid said. According to ticketing records, the
ticket to Frankfurt was booked under the stolen Austrian passport.
Extensive search for plane
No one knows where these
two men and the other 237 people on the plane ended up. Every lead that
has raised hopes of tracing the commercial jet has so far petered out.
Over the past few days,
search teams have been scouring tens of thousands of square miles of
ocean off the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, in the Strait of
Malacca, and north into the Andaman Sea.
The search also encompasses the land in between the two areas of sea.
But it could be days,
weeks or even months before the searchers find anything that begins to
explain what happened to the plane, which disappeared early Saturday en
route to Beijing.
In the case of Air
France Flight 447, which disappeared over the Atlantic in 2009, it took
five days just to find the first floating wreckage.
And it was nearly two
years before investigators found the bulk of the French plane's wreckage
and the majority of the bodies of the 228 people on board, about 12,000
feet below the surface of the ocean.
The Gulf of Thailand,
the area where the missing Malaysian plane was last detected, is much
shallower, with a maximum depth of only 260 feet and an average depth of
about 150 feet.
Still, they have to find
it first. The newly disclosed revelation about the plane's direction
doesn't help, as it means less certainty and more time for currents to
move the wreckage around.
"Crucial time is
passing," David Gallo, with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution,
told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Monday. "That search area -- that haystack --
is getting bigger and bigger and bigger."
Thailand, Singapore,
Indonesia, Vietnam, Australia, the United States, China and Malaysia are
all taking part in the search, White House spokesman Jay Carney said.
That helps takes all
forms, such as many as 10 Chinese satellites monitoring the area to the
helicopters ready-to-dispatch off of U.S. warships.
CNN aviation
correspondent Richard Quest described the search as "extremely
painstaking work," suggesting a grid would have been drawn over the
ocean for teams to comb, bit by bit.
Quest said that the
expanding search area shows how little idea rescue officials have of
where the plane might be. But he's still confident they'll find it
eventually.
"It's not hopeless, by any means. They will find it," he said. "They have to. They have to know what happened."
Until they do, patience is growing thin for friends and family members of those aboard Flight 370.
As a middle-aged man --
the father of one such passenger -- shouted Tuesday at an airline agent
in Beijing: "Time is passing by."
Link to source: http://edition.cnn.com
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