Investigators are becoming increasingly certain the missing Malaysian Airlines jet turned back across the country after it made its last radio contact with air traffic controllers, and they believe that someone with aviation skills was responsible for changing the airplanes course, according to a Malaysian government official today.
A possibility of “human intervention” is being examined by investigators according to a U.S. official in Washington in the disappearance of the plane and adding it may have been “an act of piracy;” and the official also included he was not authorized to talk with the media and he was speaking on a condition of anonymity; and he also added, it’s also possible the plane may have landed somewhere.
The official indicated a key evidence for a human intervention is because the contact with the Boeing 777’s transponder quit about 12-minutes before the jets messaging system actually stopped? There are other theories that are still being examined too.
A Malaysian official who refused to identify himself because he was not authorized to brief the media has stated that only a skilled person could have navigated the plane the way it was flown after its last confirmed location over the South China Sea.
The acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein stated Friday the country has yet to determine what actually happened to the plane once it dropped off civilian radar and stopped communicating with the ground around 40 minutes into the flight to Beijing on March 8.
Hussein stated investigators are yet trying to establish with certainty the military records of a blip moving west across the Malay Peninsula into the Strait of Malacca shows it is Flight MH370.
Hussein told reporters, “I will be the happiest person if we can actually confirm that it’s the MH370, and we can then move all (search) assets from the South China Sea to the Strait of Malacca.” He also included but until then, the international search effort will continue to expand east and west from the plane’s last confirmed location.
It has been established with a “more than 50 percent” degree of certainty the military radar has picked up the missing plane the Malaysian official said.
A U.S. official cited on Thursday that the airplane remained airborne after it lost contact with air traffic control, sending a signal to establish contact with a satellite; and a Malaysian official confirmed this and referred to it as a process by its technical term of a “handshake.”
Boeing offers a satellite service capable of receiving a stream of data on how an aircraft is functioning during its flight and relays the information to the plane’s home base. The plane had the capability to connect with the satellite and it was automatically sending signals, or pings, even though Malaysia Airlines had not subscribed to this service, a U.S. official stated and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the situation by name.
Hishammuddin said the government only releases information about the signals if they were verified; and he also told a news conference, “I hope within a few days to have something conclusive.”
Malaysia has been faced with accusations that it has not shared all the pertinent information or suspicions about the aircraft’s final movements; but, they insist they’re being open, and they say it would be irresponsible to narrow the focus of the search until there’s undeniable evidence of the aircraft’s flight path.
This is one of modern aviation’s most puzzling mysteries and “no” theory has been ruled out as yet.
It appears almost certain that the plane didn’t experience a catastrophic incident over the South China Seas as it was first seen as being the most likely scenario. Some experts think there’s a possibility that one of the pilots, or someone who has flying experience, hijacked the plane for some future purpose or committed suicide by plunging the aircraft into the sea.
A committee member of the Australian and International Pilots Association, Mike Glynn, stated he considered pilot suicide to be the most likely explanation for the disappearance, this was suspected in a Silk Air crash during a flight from Singapore to Jakarta in 1997 and an Egypt Air flight in 1999.
Glynn said, “A pilot rather than a hijacker was more likely to be able to switch off the communications equipment; and he also said, “The last thing that I, as a pilot, want is suspicion to fall on the crew of the aircraft, but it has happened two times before.”
He also 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.”
There are scores of aircraft and ships from 12 countries who are involved in the search, and it 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 the Indian Ocean.
Heat sensors on flights over hundreds of uninhabited Andaman Sea Islands are being used India said and it 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 Co. Harmit Singh of India’s Tri-Services Command also 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 with the investigation.
Barbara Kasey Smith wrote this article based on an AOL.Com report from contributed information provided by a Lowy report from Washington. Associated Press writers Ashok Sharma in New Delhi, Jim Gomez in Kuala Lumpur, Tran V. Minh in Hanoi, Vietnam, Thanyarat Doksone in Bangkok, and Rod McGuirk in Canberra, Australia, all contributed to this report.
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