Military tracked missing plane for at least 100 miles after it vanished from civilian radar – and are sure it made it to Malacca Strait, Malaysian source reveals

Daily Mail – by James Rush

Missing flight MH370 made a u-turn near where it was last logged by air traffic controllers and was then tracked for an hour by military radar, a Malaysian air force general has revealed.

The aircraft was last detected by military technology near Pulau Perak, at the northern approach to the strait of Malacca – where the search for the Boeing 777 is now concentrating.  

It was spotted around 2.45am – an hour later than the last time it showed up on civilian radar screens.

General Rodzali Daud said that a military radar installation at a base in Pulau Perak had detected the plane. A separate military source said it was flying low at the time.

Malaysia’s military believes the airliner missing for almost four days with 239 people on board flew for more than an hour after vanishing from air traffic control.

The disclosure raises key questions over the search for the plane, which had initially concentrated on the area where it was last plotted by civilian air traffic control.

The location plotted by civilian authorities and initially named as the last known sighting was roughly midway between Malaysia’s east coast town of Kota Bharu and the southern tip of Vietnam, flying at 35,000 ft (10,670 metres).

Today however, Malaysia’s Berita Harian newspaper quoted air force chief Daud as saying the Malaysia Airlines plane was last detected by military radar at 2:40am on Saturday, near the island of Pulau Perak at the northern end of the Strait of Malacca.

It was flying at a height of about 9,000 metres (29,500 ft), he was quoted as saying.

‘The last time the flight was detected close to Pulau Perak, in the Melaka Straits, at 2.40am by the control tower before the signal was lost,’ the paper quoted Rodzali as saying.

‘This report is being investigated by the DCA (Department of Civil Aviation) and the search and rescue team,’ a civilian source said. ‘There are a lot of such reports.’

However, a military official, who has been briefed on investigations, told Reuters: ‘It changed course after Kota Bharu and took a lower altitude. It made it into the Malacca Strait.’

The time given by Rodzali was an hour and 10 minutes after the plane vanished from air traffic control screens over Igari waypoint, midway between Malaysia and Vietnam.

If the reports from the military are verified, it would mean the plane was able to maintain a cruising altitude and flew for about 500 km (350 miles) with its transponder and other tracking systems apparently switched off.

The Strait of Malacca, one of the world’s busiest shipping channels, runs along Malaysia’s west coast.

The massive search for the plane has drawn in navies, military aircraft, coastguard and civilian vessels from 10 nations.

The search was widened today to cover a larger swathe of the shallow waters of the Gulf of Thailand and South China Sea around the last known position of the plane.

But searches were also being conducted on the western coast of Malaysia and northwest towards the much deeper Andaman Sea – based on a theory that the plane may have flown on for some time after deviating from its flight path.

‘This will be a long search. We need a long-term search plan,’ Do Ba Ty, Vietnam’s army chief of staff and deputy defence minister, told reporters.

‘We will expand search to the east in the sea and to the west on land and ask for Cambodia help…we will go where our friends go and make sure we inform our citizens and fishermen to request their help in the search.’

The plane took off from Kuala Lumpur, on the western coast of Malaysia, early Saturday en route to Beijing. It flew overland across Malaysia and crossed the eastern coast into the Gulf of Thailand at 35,000 feet (11,000 meters).

There it disappeared from radar screens. The airline says the pilots did not send any distress signals, suggesting a sudden and possibly catastrophic incident.

In a statement, Malaysia Airlines said search and rescue teams ‘have expanded the scope beyond the flight path to the West Peninsula of Malaysia at the Straits of Malacca’.

An earlier statement had said the western coast of Malaysia was ‘now the focus’, but the airline subsequently said that phrase was an oversight.

‘The search is on both sides,’ Civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman said, adding that the previous statement didn’t mean that the plane was more likely to be off the western coast.

At the same time, the biggest ever Chinese naval deployment outside its waters is en route to seas around Vietnam to help in the search for the plane.

The new statement said authorities are looking at a possibility that MH370 attempted to turn back toward Kuala Lumpur.

If it did indeed retrace its path, the plane could conceivably have crashed into the sea on the western coast, the other side of Malaysia from where it was reported missing.

But this does not explain why it did not continue to show on radar while flying back toward Kuala Lumpur, and Malaysia Airlines or other authorities have not addressed that question.

‘All angles are being looked at. We are not ruling out any possibilities,’ is all that the Malaysia Airlines statement said.

Malaysia’s air force chief also said Sunday there were indications on military radar that the jet may have done a U-turn.

Over the last three days the search mission has grown to include nine aircraft and 24 ships from nine countries, which have been scouring the Gulf of Thailand on the eastern side of Malaysia.

Apart from the sea, land areas are also being searched.

China, where two-thirds of the passengers were from, has urged Malaysian authorities to ‘speed up the efforts’ while also contributing ships and helicopters to the search.

In the absence of any sign that the plane was in trouble before it vanished, speculation has ranged widely, including pilot error, plane malfunction, hijacking and terrorism.

The terrorism theory has weakened after Malaysian authorities determined that one of the two men was an Iranian asylum seeker.

Malaysian police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said the possibility that the plane had been attacked by a terrorist group was ‘fading’ – adding that ‘terrorism is less likely’ – but then he revealed that an illegal act could not be ruled out.

He said: ‘We are looking into four areas  – one hi-jacking, two sabotage, three a psychotic problem of passengers or crew, four personal problem among the passengers and crew.

‘We have been going through passenger manifests and we have communicated with our counterparts in at least 14 countries and also from other parts of the world and we have been exchanging information and intelligence.’

How legal black hole is holding back investigation into what happened to Flight MH370

Investigators looking into the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines jetliner face an extremely rare challenge that could hinder their efforts: they lack the powers of a formal air safety investigation.

Four days after Flight MH370 went missing in mid-air with 239 people on board, no nation has stepped forward to initiate and lead an official probe, leaving a formal leadership vacuum that industry experts say appears unprecedented.

Malaysian officials are conducting their own informal investigations, in cooperation with other governments and foreign agencies, but they lack the legal powers that would come with a formal international probe under U.N.-sanctioned rules.

Those powers include the legal rights to take testimony from all witnesses and other parties, the right to have exclusive control over the release of information and the ability to centralise a vast amount of fragmentary evidence.

A senior official familiar with the preliminary Malaysian probe told Reuters that Malaysian authorities could not yet convene a formal investigation due to a lack of evidence on where – namely, in which national jurisdiction – the Boeing 777-200ER jet crashed.

He said this was not hampering their work, that preliminary investigations had begun and that they were working with their neighbours, U.S. officials and the jet’s maker, Boeing.

The Malaysians have begun collecting information from neighbouring countries without any problems, including air-traffic control communications and radar data, he said.

But Southeast Asian waters are rife with territorial disputes, and any decision by Malaysia to unilaterally open a formal investigation under U.N. rules could be seen as a subtle assertion of sovereignty if the crash site turns out to be inside another country’s territory.

Without a formal investigative process being convened quickly under rules set out by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a U.N. agency, there is a risk that crucial early detective work could be hampered, and potential clues and records lost, air accident experts said.

Witnesses such as cargo handlers, mechanics and company officials might be reluctant to speak to Malaysian investigators who were operating outside a formal ICAO-sanctioned probe which could offer them some protection from law suits, experts said.

‘The sole objective of an accident investigation is to prevent future accidents and not to apportion blame or liability,’ said aviation lawyer Simon Phippard of international legal firm Bird & Bird.

‘The international standards attempt to provide a degree of protection, for example from criminal prosecution, for individuals who give statements to the enquiry.’

The lack of a formal investigation also means Malaysia does not have exclusive control over the release of information or the ability to centralize fragmentary evidence such as wreckage parts and witness accounts, effectively relying for cooperation on other parties’ good-will, the experts said.

U.S. investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), FAA and Boeing arrived in Kuala Lumpur on Monday and, according to the official familiar with the Malaysian probe, have been talking with the Malaysian investigators.

An NTSB-led team, including the FAA and Boeing officials, is ‘standing by for when the aircraft is located and they are in touch with Malaysian officials and have offered our assistance and support for anything they may need,’ NTSB spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said.

Boeing and FAA declined to comment.

The official familiar with the preliminary Malaysian investigation said the Malaysian government could not launch a formal probe until the crash site had been found, and that it planned to work closely with U.S. authorities and Australia.

Under U.N. rules, if a plane crashes in international waters, the country where the aircraft is registered – in this case, Malaysia – is in charge of the investigation.

So, for example, Air France quickly took control of the official investigation when its passenger jet crashed in waters far out into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, even though no wreckage had yet been found.

Vietnam would have jurisdiction if the plane crashed in its territory, but it does not have the resources to lead an investigation and would likely have to get outside help, two regional aviation officials said.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2578199/Military-tracked-missing-plane-100-miles-vanished-civilian-radar-sure-Malacca-Strait-Malaysian-source-reveals.html#ixzz2vg7b7DbF
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