Malaysia’s Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein during a news conference at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, yesterday. Also pictured is Malaysia’s Foreign Minister Anifah Aman. Photo: Edgar Su/ReutersAn international land and sea search for a missing Malaysian jetliner is covering an area the size of Australia, authorities said yesterday, but police and intelligence agencies have yet to establish a clear motive to explain its disappearance.
Investigators are convinced that someone with deep knowledge of the Boeing 777-200ER and commercial navigation diverted Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, carrying 12 crew and 227 mainly Chinese passengers, perhaps thousands of miles off its scheduled course from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
But intensive background checks of everyone aboard have so far failed to find anyone with a known political or criminal motive to hijack or deliberately crash the plane, Western security sources and Chinese authorities said.
Malaysian Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a news conference the “unique, unprecedented” search covered a total area of 7.68 million square kilometres from central Asia to the southern Indian Ocean.
Flight MH370 vanished from civilian air traffic control screens off Malaysia’s east coast less than an hour after take-off early on March 8.
Investigators piecing together patchy data from military radar and satellites believe that someone turned off the aircraft’s identifying transponder and ACARS system, which transmits maintenance data, and turned west, re-crossing the Malay Peninsula and following a commercial aviation route towards India.
The New York Times cited senior US officials as saying that the first turn back to the west was likely programmed into the aircraft’s flight computer, rather than being executed manually, by someone knowledgeable about aircraft systems.
Malaysia Airlines Chief Executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya told yesterday’s daily news conference that that was “speculation.”
Malaysian officials said on Monday that suicide by the pilot or co-pilot was a line of inquiry, although they stressed that it was only one of the possibilities under investigation. Police have searched their homes in middle-class suburbs of Kuala Lumpur close to the airport.
Among the items taken for examination was a flight simulator Zaharie had built in his home.
A senior police officer with direct knowledge of the investigation said the programs from the pilot’s simulator included Indian Ocean runways in the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Diego Garcia and southern India, although he added that US and European runways also featured.
“Generally these flight simulators show hundreds or even thousands of runways,” the officer said. “What we are trying to see is what were the runways that were frequently used.”
Thailand said yesterday a re-examination of its military radar data had picked up the plane retracing its route across Peninsular Malaysia.
What happened next is less certain. The plane may have flown for another six hours or more after dropping off Malaysian military radar about 200 miles northwest of Penang Island.
But the satellite signals that provide the only clues were not intended to work as locators. The best they can do is place the plane in one of two broad arcs – one stretching from Laos up to the Caspian, the other from west of Indonesia down to the Indian Ocean off Australia – when the last signal was picked up.
China, which, with Kazakhstan, is leading the search in the northern corridor, said yesterday it had deployed 21 satellites to scour its territory. Australia, which is leading the southernmost leg of the search, said it had shrunk its search field based on satellite tracking data and analysis of weather and currents, but that it still covered 600,000 square kilometres
“A needle in a haystack remains a good analogy,” John Young, general manager of the emergency response division of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA), told reporters.