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发帖数: 1563 | 1 KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysian investigators are increasingly certain that the
missing jetliner turned back across the country after losing communications,
and that someone with aviation skills was responsible for the unexplained
change in course, according to a government official involved in the probe.
The official, who declined to be identified because he is not authorized to
brief the media, said only a skilled person could navigate the Boeing 777
the way it was flown after its last confirmed location over the South China
Sea.
Speaking earlier, 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.
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 Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
“I will be the most happiest person if we can actually confirm that it is
the MH370, then we can move all (search) assets from the South China Sea to
the Strait of Malacca,” he told reporters.
Until then, he said, the international search effort would continue
expanding east and west from the plane’s last confirmed location.
The Malaysian official said it had now been established with a “more than
50 percent” degree of certainty that military radar had picked up the
missing plane.
On Thursday, an American official said the plane remained airborne after
losing contact with air traffic controllers because it was 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 during 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 U.S. official, who spoke
on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the
situation by name.
Hishammuddin said the government would only release information about the
signals when they were verified.
“I hope within a couple of days to have something conclusive,” he told a
news conference.
Malaysia has faced accusations it isn’t sharing all its information or
suspicions about the plane’s final movements. It insists it is being open,
and says it would be irresponsible to narrow the focus of the search until
there is undeniable evidence of the plane’s flight path.
No theory has been ruled out in one of modern aviation’s most puzzling
mysteries.
But it now appears increasingly certain that 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
from Los Angeles to Cairo 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.”
Glynn said a pilot may have sought to fly the plane into the Indian Ocean to
reduce the chances of recovering data recorders, and to conceal the cause
of the disaster.
Scores of plane and aircraft from 12 countries are currently involved in the
search, which currently reaches into the eastern stretches of the South
China Sea and on the western side of the Malay Peninsula, northwest into the
Andaman Sea and further into the India Ocean.
India said it was using heat sensors on flights over hundreds of uninhabited
Andaman Sea islands Friday and would expand the search for the missing jet
farther west into the Bay of Bengal, more than 1,600 kilometers (100 miles)
to the west of the plane’s last known position.
Spokesman Col. Harmit Singh of India’s Tri-Services Command said it began
land searches after sweeping seas to the north, east and south of the
Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
A team of five U.S. officials with air traffic control and radar expertise
— three from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and two from the
Federal Aviation Administration — has been in Kuala Lumpur since Monday to
assist Malaysia with the investigation.--AP
Read more: MISSING MH370: Missing plane flew over Malaysia: Investigator -
Latest - New Straits Times http://www.nst.com.my/latest/font-color-red-missing-mh370-font-missing-plane-flew-over-malaysia-investigator-1.513440#ixzz2vxGFeh9V |
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