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Search for Missing Plane Faces Steep New Challenges - New York Times

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Asia Pacific |Search for Missing Plane Faces Steep New Challenges



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A Malaysian soldier patrolled an area of the airport in Kuala Lumpur where passengers have written messages for the people aboard the missing plane and their loved ones. Wong Maye-E/Associated Press








SEPANG, Malaysia — Malaysian authorities trying to locate Flight 370 said Sunday that they would examine the backgrounds of all 239 passengers and crew onboard the Boeing 777 jet that vanished over a week ago as well as engineers who worked on the aircraft, and they appealed to countries from Central Asia to Australia for help in the search.


Malaysia’s Ministry of Transport laid out the daunting next steps in the search a day after the country’s prime minister, Najib Razak, ended days of hesitant, sometimes contradictory government statements about the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines plane. He acknowledged on Saturday that military radar and satellite data showed it had probably been deliberately diverted by at least one person onboard and flown far off its intended course.



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The plane was passing over the Gulf of Thailand between northern Malaysia and southern Vietnam, on the way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, when its communications were severed and the plane reversed direction, flying across the Malaysian peninsula and out over the Strait of Malacca. Given the complexity of that feat, experts and American government officials have said that experienced aviators, possibly one or both of the pilots on the plane, were likely to be involved, willingly or under compulsion.



Map of Plane’s Last Contact With Satellite


The missing Malaysian Airlines plane may have been over China or west of Australia when it last made contact with a satellite.


The Ministry of Transport confirmed that Malaysian police had searched the Kuala Lumpur homes of the flight’s captain, or chief pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, and his junior co-pilot, or first officer, Fariq Abdul Hamid, on Saturday. The police questioned the family of the captain and were examining a flight simulator he kept at his home, the ministry said Sunday. But it stressed that the investigators must now look at everyone who took the flight, which took off at 12:41 a.m. local time on March 8.


“As per normal procedure, the Royal Malaysia Police are investigating all crew and passengers on board MH370, as well as engineers who may have had contact with the aircraft before takeoff,” the statement said. “We appeal to the public not to jump to conclusions regarding the police investigation.”


The search for the missing plane now confronts the formidable twin tasks of diving into the minutiae of each passenger and crew member’s background, while also expanding a search that potentially stretches from Central Asia to empty oceans west of Australia. Malaysian officials said that they would appeal to countries for help along the two corridors north and south where, satellite data indicate, the plane may have wound up after six hours of flying following its disappearance beyond the range of military radar in western Malaysia. The countries include Australia, India, Pakistan and four Central Asian states.


Even knowing where to restart the search appears to be a problem. Until Mr. Najib’s dramatic announcement about the likely course of the plane, many planes and ships were devoted to scanning the seas off Malaysia’s east coast – precisely the opposite direction from the new focus of the hunt.


“Malaysian officials are currently discussing with all partners how best to deploy assets along the two corridors,” the ministry said. “Both the northern and southern corridors are being treated with equal importance.”


Although the weight of suspicion would inevitably fall on the pilots and other crew members, investigators were following established procedure by examining everyone on the missing plane, said Rohan Gunaratna, a professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore who studies security and terrorism in Asia.



“You can’t rule anything out, so everyone on the plane must be treated as a potential suspect,” Professor Gunaratna said in a telephone interview. He said he had heard no credible information of any militant group claiming responsibility for seizing the plane. “That does not mean the possibility does not exist, but at this stage of the investigation it’s important to be open to all the possibilities,” he said.


A satellite orbiting 22,250 miles over the middle of the Indian Ocean received the final transmission that, based on the angle from which the plane sent it, came from somewhere along one of the two corridors that investigators are exploring.


The northern corridor 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.


It 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 corridor, 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.


In Washington, the Malaysian announcement Saturday did little to change American investigators’ perspectives on what happened to the plane.


“It doesn’t mean anything; all it 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.



Reconstructing the Plane’s Path


The main communications systems of the Malaysia Airlines plane were turned off about 40 minutes into the flight, forcing investigators to try to piece together the plane’s location from other systems.





Secondary Radar and Text Updates


Air traffic controllers typically know a plane’s location based on what is called secondary radar, which requests information from the plane’s transponder. A plane also uses radio or satellite signals to send regular updates through ACARS, the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System. Both of those systems were turned off.




Primary Radar


Two Malaysian military radar stations tracked a plane using primary radar, which sends out radio signals and listens for echoes that bounce off objects in the sky. Primary radar does not require a plane to have a working transponder.




Satellite Communications


If ACARS updates are turned off, the plane still sends a “keep-alive” signal, that can be received by satellites. The signal does not indicate location, but it can help to narrow down the plane’s position. A satellite picked up four or five signals from the airliner, about one per hour, after it left the range of military radar.





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 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.”


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 Michael Forsythe from Sepang; Kirk Semple from Kuala Lumpur; Nicola Clark from Paris; and Michael S. Schmidt from Washington.




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