(Reuters) - Faint electronic signals sent to satellites from a
missing Malaysian jetliner show it may have been flown thousands of
miles off course before running out of fuel over the Indian Ocean, a
source familiar with official U.S. assessments said.
Analysis in Malaysia and the United States of military radar tracking
and pulses detected by satellites are starting to piece together an
extraordinary picture of what may have happened to the plane after it
lost contact with civilian air traffic.
The fate of Malaysian
Airlines Flight MH370, and the 239 passengers and crew aboard, has been
shrouded in mystery since it vanished off Malaysia's east coast less
than an hour into a March 8 scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to
Beijing.
Investigators are focusing increasingly on foul play, as
evidence suggests the plane turned sharply west after its disappearance
and - with its communications systems deliberately switched off -
continued to fly for perhaps several hours.
"What we can say is we
are looking at sabotage, with hijack still on the cards," said the
source, a senior Malaysian police official.
A U.S. source familiar
with the investigation said there was also discussion within the U.S.
government that the plane's disappearance might have involved an act of
piracy.
SATELLITE PULSES
A source familiar with data the
U.S. government is receiving from the investigation said the pulses sent
to satellites were ambiguous and had been interpreted to provide two
different analyses.
The electronic signals were believed to have
been transmitted for several hours after the plane flew out of radar
range, said the source familiar with the data.
The most likely
possibility is that, after travelling northwest, the Boeing 777-200ER
made a sharp turn to the south, over the Indian Ocean where officials
think, based on the available data, it flew until it ran out of fuel and
crashed into the sea, added the source.
The other interpretation is 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.
Either way, the analysis of satellite
data appears to support the radar evidence outlined by sources familiar
with the investigation in Malaysia.
Two sources told Reuters that
military radar data showed an unidentified aircraft that investigators
suspect was Flight MH370 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 Boeing 777-200ER jet manually or by programming the auto-pilot.
"NOT A NORMAL INVESTIGATION"
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.
"A normal investigation becomes
narrower with time ... as new information focuses the search, but this
is not a normal investigation," Malaysian Transport Minister
Hishammuddin Hussein told a news conference on Friday. "In this case,
the information has forced us to look further and further afield."
India
has deployed ships, planes and helicopters from the remote, forested
and mostly uninhabited Andaman and Nicobar Islands, at the juncture of
the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. "This operation is like finding a
needle in a haystack," said Harmeet Singh, spokesman for the armed
forces in the islands.
VAST INDIAN OCEAN
Britain's Inmarsat
said "routine, automated signals" from MH370 were seen on its satellite
network during the plane's flight from Kuala Lumpur and had been shared
with authorities, but gave no other details.
If the jetliner did
fly into the Indian Ocean, a vast expanse with depths of more than 7,000
meters (23,000 feet), the task faced by searchers would become
dramatically more difficult. Winds and currents could shift any surface
debris tens of nautical miles within hours.
"Ships alone are not
going to get you that coverage, helicopters are barely going to make a
dent in it and only a few countries fly P-3s (long-range search
aircraft)," William Marks, spokesman for the U.S. Seventh Fleet, told
Reuters.
The U.S. Navy was sending an advanced P-8A Poseidon plane
to help search the Strait of Malacca, a busy sealane separating the
Malay peninsula from the Indonesian island of Sumatra. It had already
deployed a Navy P-3 Orion aircraft to those waters.
The last
sighting of the aircraft on civilian radar screens came shortly before
1:30 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.
Malaysia's air force chief said on
Wednesday that an aircraft that could have been the missing plane was
plotted on military radar at 2:15 a.m., 200 miles northwest of Penang
Island off Malaysia's west coast.
This position marks the limit of
Malaysia's military radar in that part of the country, another source
familiar with the investigation told Reuters.
(Additional reporting by Siva Govindasamy,
Anshuman Daga, Yantoultra Ngui, Al-Zaquan Amer Hamzah and
Stuart Grudgings in Kuala Lumpur, Greg Torode in Hong Kong,
Tim Hepher in Paris,
Paul Sandle in London, Mark Hosenball, Andrea Shalal,
Will Dunham,
Phil Stewart and
Roberta Rampton in Washington and Sanjib Kumar Roy in Port Blair, India; Writing by
Alex Richardson and
Dean Yates; Editing by
Mark Bendeich)
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