Malaysia backtracks on when airliner's communications were disabled

Sepang, Malaysia: As the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 stretched into a 10th day, the Malaysian authorities on Monday identified the plane's first officer as the last person in the cockpit to speak to ground control. (Read more) But the government added to the confusion about what happened during those key minutes by withdrawing its assertion that the radio signoff had come after a crucial communications system was disabled.

Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, who is also Malaysia's acting minister of transportation, appeared to give a crucial clue pointing to the possible complicity of the pilots when he said at a news conference on Sunday that the communications system had been "disabled" at 1:07 a.m. on March 8, before someone in the cockpit gave a verbal signoff to air traffic controllers here on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. (Timeline: Last known moments of missing Malaysia Airlines plane MH370)

But Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, the chief executive of Malaysia Airlines, clarified at a news conference Monday that the communications system, known as an Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, had worked normally at 1:07 but then failed to send its next regularly scheduled update at 1:37 a.m.

"We don't know when the Acars system was switched off," he said.

It was between the two scheduled transmission times for the Acars system, he said, that the verbal signoff was given by radio at 1:19 a.m. A second communications system, a transponder that communicates with ground-based radar, then ceased working at 1:21 a.m.

The new description of what happened to the Acars system appeared to reopen the possibility that the aircraft was operating normally until the transponder ceased sending signals two minutes after the last radio message. The new uncertainty could raise additional questions about whether the plane was deliberately diverted or whether it suffered mechanical or electrical difficulties that crippled its communications and resulted in its flying an aberrant course that involved turning around, heading back over peninsular Malaysia while rising and falling rapidly again, and finally flying out over the Strait of Malacca to an unknown location. (Read: Missing Malaysia Airlines plane flew low to avoid radar detection, says report)

Standing next to Ahmad Jauhari, Hishammuddin waved off numerous questions about why he had said a day earlier that Acars had been disabled at 1:07 a.m. "What I said yesterday was based on fact, corroborated and verified," he said. In response to another question, he said that uncertainty about the chronology underlined the importance of finding the aircraft and its data recorders.

The last satellite transmission from the Boeing 777-200 on March 8 may have come from over Indonesia or the southern Indian Ocean, Malaysian officials said. The alternative is that the transmission came from western or southwestern China, or from nearby areas of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan or northern Laos.

Australia announced Monday that it would search the vast expanse of the southern Indian Ocean for the missing jetliner.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia spoke with Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia on Monday afternoon and offered extra resources for the search, which now involves 26 nations.

"We are currently working on a defined search zone," the spokesman said, adding that Abbott was expected to release a more detailed statement Monday evening.

Police have been investigating the pilot, co-pilot and other crew members of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight since the day of its disappearance, Malaysia's Transport Ministry said in a statement Monday. The statement highlighted growing interest by law enforcement authorities into whether any of the airline employees might have been complicit in the plane's disappearance. (Read: Malaysia Airlines' disappearance probe spotlights DIY politico, and groom-to-be)

Adam Dolnik, a professor at the University of Wollongong in Australia who has studied terrorism in Southeast Asia and other parts of the world, said that, judging from the information disclosed so far, there was no evidence to suggest involvement by a terrorist organization, although there was the possibility of a "lone wolf" acting, at least partly, in the name of extremist beliefs.

Dolnik voiced skepticism that the two Iranians on board the plane with stolen passports had played a role in diverting it.

"For groups like al-Qaida, which tried to take airliners down in midcourse flight by a suicide bomber since the mid-1990s, this is their fantasy target and what they keep going for, but repeatedly they are unable to keep doing it," he said. "But for a group like this to grow an entire plan - which would have to be quite sophisticated for them to be able to actually get the operational capabilities through the secure perimeter and onboard an airplane - and to blow it on something like a stolen passport, it just doesn't make any sense. What they would do is send operatives who have clean passports, to make sure they actually make it through immigration."

Dolnik added: "If you're a militant jihadist group, why would you ever go for Malaysia Airlines? If you have a predominantly Muslim country, one of the biggest Muslim countries, hitting the national carrier of that country really would be very risky in terms of constituency support or how people are going to view you."

Malaysia's Transport Ministry also said that three civil aviation security officials had arrived from France to share expertise gained from the search for Air France Flight 447, which disappeared nearly five years ago off the coast of Brazil. Searchers there needed almost two years to find the Air France jet, an Airbus A330, on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

Investigators had an advantage then because they had found more than 3,000 pieces of floating debris and 50 bodies in the ocean in the days and weeks after the crash, giving them a rough sense of where the plane had entered the water. By contrast, there are still few clues regarding where Malaysia Airlines' Boeing 777 finally came down after someone diverted it 40 minutes into what was supposed to be a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

The United States' search effort is still focused on the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal, in the northeast corner of the Indian Ocean, where the U.S. destroyer Kidd and a P3 surveillance plane are patrolling. But the last satellite transmission received from the missing plane came either from deep in the interior of Asia or from somewhere along an arc across Indonesia and the southern Indian Ocean.

In a relatively confined area such as the Gulf of Thailand, the initial focus of the search effort after the plane disappeared on March 8, ships and their helicopters were appropriate assets to use, Cmdr. William Marks, the spokesman for the U.S. Navy 7th Fleet, said in an interview.
But helicopters can only sweep a small fraction of the area each day that an aircraft can cover.

Australia is a world leader in over-the-horizon radar technology, with the Jindalee Operational Radar Network covering around 37,000 square kilometers (14,285 square miles) across Australia's northern and western boundaries and out into the Indian Ocean. Andrew Davies, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said that conventional radar requires a line of sight to an aircraft, but that over-the-horizon radar bounces high-frequency radio waves off the atmosphere.

Davies, who also worked at Australia's Department of Defense as a capabilities and intelligence analyst, said that the JORN system has the capacity to monitor flights into the Indian Ocean.

"But a lot depends on the atmosphere at the time," he said, adding that a satellite may also have been overhead, but that satellites must be "tasked to look down" on a specific area.

"It is entirely possible nothing was tasked to look at this part of the world," Davies said. "The over-the-horizon radar might not have been effective because the aircraft was out of range, or the atmospheric conditions were not right."

Satellites cannot be active for their entire orbit, Davies added, as they must shut down to recharge batteries. "If there is no reason to look at a box of ocean, it is entirely plausible that no one is looking."

The JORN radar system has receivers in remote parts of Australia. Its scanning range spans outward across the top of the Northern Territory, possibly as far north as the Malay Peninsula; westward across Western Australia; and into the Indian Ocean. The JORN radar stations are in central western Queensland at Longreach; a second is at Leonora, in southeast Western Australia; and a third is in Australia's northern territory at Alice Springs, close to the geographical center of Australia.

(Michael Forsythe contributed reporting from Hong Kong, Kirk Semple from Kuala Lumpur and Michelle Innis from Sydney.)