[A satellite orbiting
22,250 miles over the middle of the Indian Ocean received the transmission
that, based on the angle from which the plane sent it, came from somewhere
along one of the two arcs. One arc runs from the southern border of Kazakhstan
in Central Asia to northern Thailand, passing over some hot spots of global
insurgency and highly militarized areas. The other arc runs from near Jakarta
to the Indian Ocean, roughly 1,000 miles off the west coast of Australia.]
 |
By
Sergio Peçanha, Archie Tse and Tim Wallace
Source:
Malaysian government
|
Prime Minister Najib
Razak of Malaysia said Saturday afternoon that he would seek the help of
governments across a large expanse of Asia in the search for the Boeing 777,
which has been missing for a week and had 239 people on board. The Malaysian
authorities released a map showing that the last satellite signal received from
the plane had been sent from a point somewhere along one of two arcs spanning
large distances across Asia.
As part of the investigation, police officers
were seen Saturday going to the home of the flight’s pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah,
in a gated compound, and the Malaysian news media reported that a search had
taken place. A spokeswoman for the Royal Malaysia Police would neither confirm
nor deny the reports but said there would be a news conference on Sunday.
A satellite orbiting
22,250 miles over the middle of the Indian Ocean received the transmission
that, based on the angle from which the plane sent it, came from somewhere
along one of the two arcs. One arc runs from the southern border of Kazakhstan
in Central Asia to northern Thailand, passing over some hot spots of global
insurgency and highly militarized areas. The other arc runs from near Jakarta
to the Indian Ocean, roughly 1,000 miles off the west coast of Australia.
The plane changed
course after it took off. “These movements are consistent with deliberate
action by someone on the plane,” Mr. Najib said.
He said one
communications system had been disabled as the plane flew over the northeast
coast of Malaysia. A second system, a transponder aboard the craft, abruptly
stopped broadcasting its location, altitude, speed and other information at
1:21 a.m., while the plane was a third of the way across the Gulf of Thailand
from Malaysia to Vietnam.
Military radar data
subsequently showed that the plane turned and flew west across northern
Malaysia before arcing out over the wide northern end of the Strait of Malacca,
headed at cruising altitude for the Indian Ocean.
The flight had been
scheduled to land at 6:30 a.m. in Beijing, so when its last signal was
received, at 8:11 a.m., Mr. Najib said, it could have been nearly out of fuel.
“The investigation team is making further calculations, which will indicate how
far the aircraft may have flown after the last point of contact,” Mr. Najib
said, reading a statement in English. “Due to the type of satellite data, we
are unable to confirm the precise location of the plane when it last made
contact with a satellite.”
The northern arc Mr.
Najib described passes near some of the world’s most volatile countries that
are home to insurgent groups, but also over areas with a strong military
presence and robust air defense networks, some run by the American military.
The arc passes close
to northern Iran, through Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, and through
northern India and the Himalayas and Myanmar. An aircraft flying on that arc
would have to pass through air defense networks in India and Pakistan, whose
mutual border is heavily militarized, as well as through Afghanistan, where the
United States and other NATO countries have operated air bases for more than a
decade.
Air bases near that
arc include Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, where the United States Air Force’s
455th Air Expeditionary Wing is based, and an Indian air base, Hindon Air Force
Station.
The southern arc, from
Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean, travels over open water with few
islands. If the aircraft took that path, it might have passed near the Cocos
(Keeling) Islands. These remote Australian islands, with a population of fewer
than 1,000 people, have a small airport.
After Mr. Najib’s
statement on Saturday, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanded to know
more, and said China was sending technical experts to Malaysia. Two-thirds of
the people on the jet were Chinese citizens.
A ministry spokesman,
Qin Gang, said China would shift its search planes and ships to areas west of
Malaysia. That region includes countries that have tensions with China,
including India. Mr. Qin said China would seek the cooperation of any countries
affected by the redeployment.
China’s foreign
minister, Wang Yi, convened ministries and agencies on Saturday to discuss the
developments. Even with a vastly larger area to search, the officials insisted
that the effort must continue with increased vigor.
“The search remains
the most pressing and No. 1. task for now,” said an the account of the meeting
on the ministry website. The officials said the broader search would cover land
as well as sea.
In Washington, the
Malaysian announcement did little to change American investigators’
perspectives on what happened to the plane.
“It doesn’t mean
anything; all it is is a theory,” one senior American official said. “Find the
plane, find the black boxes and then we can figure out what happened. It has to
be based on something, and until they have something more to go on it’s all
just theories.” The investigator spoke on the condition of anonymity because of
the sensitivity of the inquiry.
American investigators
have been provided with much of the flight data obtained from radar and
satellites, but they say they have far less information about what the
Malaysian government has uncovered about the pilots and passengers or the
Malaysian inquiry. Soon after the plane disappeared, F.B.I. agents and other
American investigators “scrubbed” the names of the pilots and passengers —
including two Iranian men who traveled on stolen passports — to determine
whether they had any connection to terrorists and found none, according to the
officials.
Officials in
Washington say they are frustrated because they believe that the F.B.I. could
be of substantial assistance.
The Malaysian
government has said that analyzing this data is a slow and painstaking process.
David Learmount,
operations and safety editor for Flightglobal, a news and data service for the
aviation sector, said that the Malaysian government could have acted far sooner
on the information pointing to someone’s seizing control of the plane.
Mikael Robertsson, a
co-founder of Flightradar24, a global aviation tracking service, said the way
the plane’s communications had been shut down pointed to the involvement of
someone with considerable aviation expertise and knowledge of the air route,
possibly a crew member, willing or unwilling.
The Boeing’s
transponder was switched off just as the plane passed from Malaysian to
Vietnamese air traffic control space, thus making it more likely that the
plane’s absence from communications would not arouse attention, Mr. Robertsson
said by telephone from Sweden.
“Always when you fly,
you are in contact with air traffic control in some country,” he said. “Instead
of contacting the Vietnam air traffic control, the transponder signal was
turned off, so I think the timing of turning off the signal just after you have
left Malaysian air traffic control indicates someone did this on purpose, and
he found the perfect moment when he wasn’t in control by Malaysia or Vietnam.
He was like in no-man’s country.”
The signs thus
indicated involvement of the crew, Mr. Robertsson said, but he emphasized that
those signs were not definitive, nor did they prove whether any involvement was
willing or coerced.
Xu Ke, a former
commercial pilot who has advised the Chinese government on aviation security,
said the details suggested that at least one crew member, most likely one of
the pilots, was involved in seizing control of the aircraft, either willingly
or under coercion.
“The timing of turning
off the transponder suggests that this involved someone with knowledge of how
to avoid air traffic control without attracting attention,” Mr. Xu said in a
telephone interview. “You needed to know this plane, and you also needed to
know this route.”
Especially since the
terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Mr. Xu said, security on cockpit doors has been
reinforced so that forced entry would be difficult without the pilots’ having
ample time to send a warning signal.
“We have to be careful
about our words and conclusions, and examine all the possibilities, but the
likelihood that a pilot was involved appears very likely,” Mr. Xu said. “The
Boeing 777 is a relatively new and big plane, so it wouldn’t be anyone who could
do this, not even someone who has flown smaller passenger planes, even smaller
Boeings.”
The possible northern
corridor Mr. Najib described bristles with military radar, making it more
likely that the plane either went south or, if it did fly north, did not make
it far, Mr. Robertsson said.
“I don’t really think
that the aircraft could have flown so far over the land, because it would need
to pass over so many countries that someone should have picked it up,” he said.
“If they had taken the northern corridor, they could have gone down before they
reached land, so it’s also possible.”
Huang Huikang, China’s
ambassador to Malaysia, sat impassively in a light gray suit in the front row
of Mr. Najib’s news conference, at an airport hotel here on the outskirts of
Kuala Lumpur.
On Saturday, the
announcement from Malaysia brought dismay in Beijing among family members and
friends of the many Chinese who were on the missing plane. For a week, the
families and friends have gathered at a hotel, receiving updates from Malaysia
Airlines employees and waiting for news. Several managed to find some relief in
the announcement that at least one person had apparently seized control of the
plane, because that still left a faint hope that the passengers were somehow
alive somewhere.
On Saturday, James
Wood, the brother of Philip Wood, an American passenger on the flight, said the
wait had been difficult.
“The days sometimes
drag by,” he said, “and we’re trying to turn off the TV because it’s just a
little too hard to handle on a constant basis.” He said the news that the
search had turned into a criminal investigation was difficult. But the family
is still hoping that Mr. Wood is alive.
“We have to. We just
have to,” the brother said.
According to a person
who has been briefed on the progress of the investigation, the two “corridors”
were derived from calculations by engineers from the satellite communications
company Inmarsat, which were provided to investigators. The person spoke on the
condition of anonymity because details of the search remain confidential.
The older satellite
communications box fitted on the plane has no global positioning system, the
person said. But investigators have managed to calculate the distance between
the “ping” from the plane and a stationary Inmarsat-3 satellite. The satellite
can “see” in an arc that stretches to the north and south of its fixed
position, but without GPS it can say only how far away the ping is, not where
it is coming from, the person said.
But based on what is
known about the flight’s trajectory, investigators are strongly favoring the
southern corridor as the likely flight path, the person said.
Reporting was contributed by Nicola
Clark from Paris; Michael Forsythe and Kirk Semple from Kuala Lumpur; Edward
Wong from Beijing; Michael S. Schmidt from Washington; and Emma G. Fitzsimmons
from New York. Mia Li contributed research from Beijing.
