Pat Dollard(Reuters) – Investigators believe someone aboard a missing Malaysian airliner deliberately shut off its communications and tracking systems, turned the plane around and flew for nearly seven hours after it vanished, Prime Minister Najib Razak said on Saturday.
As the unprecedented search for Flight MH370 and its 239 passengers and crew entered its second week, Najib told a news conference that the hunt for wreckage around the scheduled flight path to the east of Malaysia was being called off.
“Despite media reports the plane was hijacked, I wish to be very clear, we are still investigating all possibilities as to what caused MH370 to deviate,” Najib said.
The fate the of the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 has been shrouded in mystery since it disappeared off Malaysia’s east coast less than an hour into a March 8 scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
But investigators have increasing focused on the possibility that it was flown off-course by the one of the pilots or someone else on board with detailed knowledge of how to fly and navigate a large commercial aircraft.
Najib said new data showed the last communication between the missing plane and satellites at 8:11 a.m. Malaysian time.
That is almost seven hours after it dropped off civilian air traffic control screens at 1:22 a.m. last Saturday, less than an hour after take-off. It was flying across the mouth of the Gulf of Thailand on the eastern side of Malaysia towards Vietnam.
Najib said satellite data confirmed that an unidentified aircraft that later appeared on military radar off Malaysia’s west coast before going out of range at 2:15 a.m. was flight MH370.
“Up until the point at which it left military primary radar coverage, these movements are consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane,” he said.
He said analysis of the plane’s last communication with satellites placed it in one of two corridors: a northern corridor stretching from northern Thailand to the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, or a southern corridor stretching from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean.
TWO ROUTES
Earlier, a source familiar with official U.S. assessments of electronic signals sent to satellites said it appeared most likely the plane turned south over the Indian Ocean, where it would presumably have run out of fuel and crashed into the sea.
The other interpretation was that Flight MH370 continued to fly to the northwest and headed over Indian territory.
The source added that it was believed unlikely the plane flew for any length of time over India because that country has strong air defense and radar coverage and that should have allowed authorities there to see the plane and intercept it.
Two sources familiar with the investigation in Malaysia told Reuters on Friday that military radar data showed the aircraft following a commonly used commercial, navigational route towards the Middle East and Europe.
That course – headed into the Andaman Sea and towards the Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean – could only have been set deliberately, either by flying the jet manually or by programming the auto-pilot.
The disappearance of the Boeing 777 – one of the safest commercial jets in service – is shaping into one of the most baffling mysteries in aviation history.
It is extremely rare for a modern passenger aircraft to disappear once it has reached cruising altitude, as MH370 had. When that does happen, the debris from a crash is usually found close to its last known position relatively quickly.
In this case, there has been no trace of the plane, nor any sign of wreckage, as the navies and military aircraft of more than a dozen countries scour the seas on both sides of peninsular Malaysia.
The maximum range of the Boeing 777 is 7,725 nautical miles or 14,305 km. It is not clear how much fuel the aircraft was carrying though it would have been enough to reach its scheduled destination, Beijing, a flight of five hours and 50 minutes.
Read more at http://patdollard.com/2014/03/investigators-presume-mh370-ran-out-of-gas-crashed-into-indian-ocean/#se90Iyxf6eSyIXsI.99
In the same area as Coco island, there is Diego Garcia a strategic US Air Force Base. The US knows exactly what the Chinese know and they know we know that as well
This island is loaded with EW systems and other receiver stations of Satcom & GPS
This little island is 17-square-mile of coral and sand in the middle of the Indian Ocean one of the most valuable pieces of real estate on Earth to the Pentagon and the Brits
Some one Que up L. Cohen’s: EVERYBODY KNOWS
More BS. We’re getting it from all sides today.
First of all, Reuters is owned by the Rothschilds, and have been since they tried to do a story on the Rothschild family decades ago.
No one inside the plane could have “deliberately shut off its communications and tracking systems” in midair, anymore than they could have given Christmas presents in the black boxes, and this latest lame excuse that they simply “ran out of gas” sounds to me like a desperate attempt to equate this action with kids stealing a car for a joy-ride.
So now we’re expected to believe that highly sophisticated hijackers never considered the plane’s fuel consumption.
If this plane were hijacked in mid-air by people on board, there would have been fighter jets on it within minutes of it leaving its scheduled route, or communications being severed. That’s standard operating procedure, and we learned that a decade ago when they tried to make similar excuses for the 9-11 planes.
Of course it’s b.s., JR. There’s a half dozen more half-baked notions floating around that are just as lame, then maybe 2 or 3 that are entirely possible. But I find it fascinating that the so-called ‘government’ seems to have changed tactics somewhat on this one (imo). I believe they’re the ones tossing out most of the red herrings, at least insofar as the ‘alternative’ media is concerned.
I could be wrong, but…….