Yet another theory is taking shape
about what might have happened to missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Maybe
it landed in a remote Indian Ocean island chain.
The suggestion -- and it's only that
at this point -- is based on analysis of radar data revealed Friday by Reuters
suggesting that the plane wasn't just blindly flying northwest from Malaysia.
And it's just one of untold theories floating around about what might have
happened to the airliner, which disappeared a week ago Friday without leaving
much of a trace of where it had gone or why.
Reuters, citing unidentified sources
familiar with the investigation, reported that whoever was piloting the
vanished jet was following navigational waypoints that would have taken the
plane over the Andaman Islands.
The radar data don't show the plane
over the Andaman Islands but only on a known route that would take it there,
Reuters cited its sources as saying.
The theory builds on earlier
revelations by U.S. officials that an automated reporting system on the
airliner was pinging satellites for hours after its last reported contact with
air traffic controllers. U.S. investigators concluded that the pings didn't
come from other planes, leading some investigators to think the plane flew on
for hours before truly disappearing.
Taken together, the data point
toward speculation in a dark scenario in which someone took the plane for some
unknown purpose, perhaps terrorism.
The movie-plot theory seems more
complicated and unlikely than one in which the plane -- its flight crew perhaps
incapacitated -- simply flew on until it ran out of fuel or faced some other
problem. But it's one that law enforcement has to check out, former FBI
Assistant Director James Kallstrom said.
"You draw that arc, and you
look at countries like Pakistan, you know, and you get into your 'Superman'
novels, and you see the plane landing somewhere and (people) repurposing it for
some dastardly deed down the road," he told CNN's Jake Tapper on Thursday.
Aviation experts say it's possible,
if highly unlikely, that someone could have hijacked and landed the giant
Boeing 777 undetected.
The international airport in Port
Blair, the regional capital of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, has a runway
that is long enough to accommodate a 777, according to publicly available data.
But the region is highly militarized
because of its strategic importance to India, Indian officials with knowledge
of the operation tell CNN, making it an unlikely target for pirates trying to
sneak in an enormous airplane with a wingspan of more than 200 feet.
Denis Giles, editor of the Andaman
Chronicle newspaper, says there's just nowhere to land such a big plane in his
archipelago without attracting notice.
"There is no chance, no such
chance, that any aircraft of this size can come towards Andaman and Nicobar
Islands and land," he said.
The Malaysian government said Friday
that it can't confirm the report.
And a senior U.S. official offered a
conflicting account Thursday, telling CNN that "there is probably a
significant likelihood" the plane is on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
The jetliner, with 239 people on
board, disappeared nearly a week ago as it flew between Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,
and Beijing. The flight has turned into one of the biggest mysteries in
aviation history, befuddling industry experts and government officials.
Authorities still don't know where the plane is or what caused it to vanish.
Suggestions of what happened have
ranged from a catastrophic explosion to hijacking to pilot suicide.
Details of the search
Malaysian officials, who are
coordinating the search, said Friday that the hunt for the plane was spreading
deeper into both the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
India has deployed assets from its
navy, coast guard and air force to the south Andaman Sea to take part the
search, the country's Ministry of Defense said Friday.
Indian search teams are combing
large areas of the archipelago. Two aircraft are searching land and coastal
areas of the island chain from north to south, an Indian military spokesman
said Friday, and two coast guard ships have been diverted to search along the
islands' east coast. Indian officials are also including part of the Bay of
Bengal in their search, officials said.
As of Friday, 57 ships and 48
aircraft from 13 countries were involved in the search, Hussein said.
China, which said it would be
extending its search, said crews have searched more than 27,000 square miles
(about 70,000 square kilometers) of the South China Sea without finding
anything.
On Friday, the United States sent
the destroyer USS Kidd to scout the Indian Ocean as the search expands into
that body of water.
"I, like most of the world,
really have never seen anything like this," Cmdr. William Marks of the
U.S. 7th Fleet said of the scale of the search. "It's pretty incredible."
"It's a completely new game
now," he said. "We went from a chess board to a football field."
Other developments
• "Seafloor event": Chinese researchers say they recorded a "seafloor
event" in waters around Malaysia and Vietnam about an hour and a half after
the missing plane's last known contact. The event was recorded in a non-seismic
region about 116 kilometers (72 miles) northeast of the plane's last confirmed
location, the University of Science and Technology of China said.
"Judging from the time and
location of the two events, the seafloor event may have been caused by MH370
crashing into the sea," said a statement posted on the university's
website.
However, U.S. Geological Survey
earthquake scientist Harley Benz said Friday that the event appeared to be
consistent with a naturally occurring 2.7-magnitude earthquake.
• Malaysian response: Authorities continued to defend their response to the crash.
"A normal investigation becomes narrower with time, I understand, as new
information focuses the search," Hishammuddin Hussein, the minister in
charge of defense and transportation, said at a news briefing. "But this
is not a normal investigation. In this case, the information we have forces us
to look further and further afield."
However, Bob Francis, a former
National Transportation Safety Board official, is one of several experts who
have questioned how Malaysian authorities have handled the situation.
Source:CNN
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