KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia -- The missing Boeing
777 jetliner changed course over the sea, crossed Malaysia and reached
the Strait of Malacca - hundreds of miles from its last position
recorded by civilian authorities, Malaysian military officials said
Tuesday, citing military radar data.
Many experts have been working on the assumption
there was a catastrophic event on the flight - such as an explosion,
engine failure, terrorist attack, extreme turbulence, pilot error or
even suicide. The director of the CIA said in Washington that he still
would not rule out terrorism.
Flight MH370, carrying 239
people, took off from Kuala Lumpur at 12:41 a.m. Saturday, bound for
Beijing. Authorities initially said its last contact with ground controllers
was less than an hour into the flight at a height of 35,000 feet, when
the plane was somewhere between the east coast of Malaysia and Vietnam.
But
local newspaper Berita Harian quoted Malaysia's air force chief, Gen.
Rodzali Daud, as saying that radar at a military base had tracked the
jet as it changed its course, with the final signal at 2:40 a.m. showing
the plane to be near Pulau Perak at the northern approach to the Strait
of Malacca, a busy waterway that separates the western coast of
Malaysia and Indonesia's Sumatra island. It was flying slightly lower,
at around 29,528 feet, he said.
"After that, the signal from the plane was lost," he was quoted as saying.
A
high-ranking military official involved in the investigation confirmed
the report. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was
not authorized to disclose sensitive information.
However, the
Malaysian government disputed the military's claim. Tengku Sariffuddin
Tengku Ahmad, a spokesman for the prime minister's office, told the New York Times
that senior military officials told him there was no evidence that the
plane had made it to the the Malacca Strait. He said the reported
comments by the military were "not true."
Authorities had said
earlier the plane may have tried to turn back to Kuala Lumpur, but they
expressed surprise it would do so without informing ground control.
The search was initially focused hundreds of miles
to the east, in waters off Vietnam, with more than 40 planes and ships
from at least 10 nations searching the area without finding a trace of
the missing aircraft. CBS News correspondent Chip Reid reports
that the waters between Malaysia and Vietnam are relatively shallow.
But shallow water presents its own problems - tides and currents are
stronger, scattering debris more quickly. Shallow water can also confuse
sonar, sound waves used to locate objects on the ocean floor.
Oceanographer David Gallo led the 2009 search for Air France Flight 447,
which went down in deep water in a remote section of the Atlantic
Ocean. Search teams located the wreckage within five days but it took
another two years to the flight data recorders in an underwater mountain
range,
"I always like to think that we need to start by finding
the haystack, and then we can look for the bits of the needle in that
haystack and in this case the haystack is huge because we just don't
have the clues," Gallo told CBS News. Earlier
Tuesday, Malaysia Airlines said in a statement that search-and-rescue
teams had expanded their scope to the Strait of Malacca. An earlier
statement said the western coast of Malaysia was "now the focus," but
the airline subsequently said that phrase was an oversight. It didn't
elaborate. Civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman said the search remained "on both sides" of Malaysia.
Attention
will now likely focus on the condition of the Boeing 777's electronic
systems as it charted its new course back toward and then across
Malaysia.
A radar antenna on the ground sends electromagnetic
waves that reflect from the surface of an aircraft and almost instantly
return, allowing controllers to calculate how far away a plane is. The
antenna is mounted on a rotating platform, sending and receiving signals
360 degrees across the sky, enabling the plane's direction to be
tracked by constant sweeps.
The system has limitations:
Military and civilian air traffic controllers know something is moving
through the air but might not know what it is. So planes were outfitted
with transponders that can send a unique signal back to the radar
station, which can differentiate them from other aircraft. From this
signal, controllers can tell the flight number, heading, speed and
altitude.
Radar stations at airports are designed to track
planes up to about 60 miles. They are used to help sequence and space
landing aircraft. Another series of stations called air route
surveillance radar can track planes 200-250 miles away, depending on
weather and the age of the technology. Station locations are selected to
allow for a slight overlap so planes in heavy-traffic areas are never
out of reach of radar.
While radar black spots can exist,
experts said the plane's transponders normally would have been emitting
signals that would have been picked up by civilian radar. The fact that
it apparently wasn't detected suggests they were either disabled or
switched off. Planes with no transponders can still be tracked by radar.
Low-flying
planes can sometimes avoid radar detection. There is no set height they
must be under, but the farther away they are from a radar station, the
higher they can be because of the angle of the radar antenna and the
curvature of the Earth.
Malaysian police chief Khalid Abu
Bakar, who has been ordered to look at possible criminal aspects in the
disappearance of Flight MH370, said hijacking, sabotage and issues
related to the pilots' psychological health were all being considered.
An Australian TV station reported that the first officer on the missing plane, Fariq Abdul Hamid, had invited two women into the cockpit during a flight two years ago. One of the women, Jonti Roos, described the encounter on Australia's "A Current Affair."
Roos
said she and a friend were allowed to stay in the cockpit during the
entire one-hour flight on Dec. 14, 2011, from Phuket, Thailand, to Kuala
Lumpur. She said the arrangement did not seem unusual to the plane's
crew.
"Throughout the entire flight, they were talking to us
and they were actually smoking throughout the flight," said Roos, who
didn't immediately reply to a message sent to her via Facebook. The
second pilot on the 2011 flight was not identified
Malaysia
Airlines said it took the allegations very seriously, which it said it
was not able to confirm, adding: "We are in the midst of a crisis, and
we do not want our attention to be diverted."
Also Tuesday, Malaysian and international police
authorities said two people who boarded Flight MH370 with stolen
passports were Iranians who had bought tickets to Europe, where they
planning to migrate. Their presence on the flight had raised speculation of a possible terrorist link.
Malaysian
police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said investigators had determined one was
a 19-year-old Iranian, Pouria Nourmohammadi Mehrdad. "We believe he is
not likely to be a member of any terrorist group," Khalid said.
Interpol
identified the second man as Seyed Mohammed Reza Delavar, a 29-year-old
Iranian, and released an image of the two boarding at the same time.
Interpol Secretary General Ronald K. Noble said the two men traveled to
Malaysia on their Iranian passports, then apparently switched to their
stolen Austrian and Italian documents.
CIA Director John
Brennan said in Washington that Malaysian authorities "are looking very
carefully at what went wrong; you know, if these individuals got onto
the plane with these stolen passports, why they were not aware of it."
He
also said there has been "a lot of speculation right now - some claims
of responsibility that have not been, you know, confirmed or
corroborated at all. We are looking at it very carefully."
Asked if terrorism could be ruled out, Brennan replied, "No, I wouldn't rule it out. Not at all."
The
United States has sent two Navy ships, at least one of which is
equipped with helicopters, and a Navy P-3C Orion plane that can detect
small debris in the water. It said the Malaysian government had done a
"tremendous job" organizing the land and sea effort.
Vietnamese planes and ships also are a major component of the effort.
Lt.
Gen. Vo Van Tuan, deputy chief of staff of Vietnamese People's Army,
said authorities on land had also been ordered to search for the plane,
which could have crashed into mountains or jungle. He said military
units near the border with Laos and Cambodia had been instructed to
search their regions.
"So far we have found no signs ... so we must widen our search on land," he said.
