It was 1:30 a.m. when Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 lost all communications, including important transponder signals that send data on altitude, direction and speed. Still, it showed up on radar for about 1 hour, 10 minutes longer — until it vanished, having apparently moved away from its intended destination, hundreds of miles off course.
Those details — told to CNN by a senior Malaysian air force official, who declined to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media — seemingly shed more light on what happened to the aircraft that mysteriously went missing early Saturday.
But if these assertions are true — and other reports, citing a different Malaysian official, cast doubt on them — many big questions remain. Why were the communications lost? Why was the Boeing 777 going the direction it was? And where did it end up?
“Something happened to that airplane, that was obviously out of the norm, that caused it to depart from its normal flight path,” said Mark Weiss, a former 777 pilot now with the Washington-based Spectrum Group consulting firm. “… It’s difficult not to speculate.”
Peter Goelz, former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board, thinks all this information — if correct — ominously suggests that someone purposefully cut off the transponder and steered the plane from its intended destination.
“This kind of deviation in course is simply inexplicable,” said Goelz.
Other experts aren’t convinced that there were bad actors — be they hijackers or an ill-intentioned crew member. They say there could have been some sort of sudden catastrophic electronic failure or more that spurred the crew to try to turn around, with no luck.
“Perhaps there was a power problem,” said veteran pilot Kit Darby, former president of Aviation Information Resources, adding that backup power systems would only last about an hour. “(It is) natural for the pilot, in my view, to return to where he knows the airports.”
Still, while they have theories, even those who have piloted massive commercial airliners like this one admit that they can’t conclude anything until the plane is found. For now, the massive multinational search has yielded no breakthrough — which has only added to the heartache for the friends and family of the 239 passengers and crew on board.
The Malaysian air force official’s revelations may provide more direction, though clarity and closure are still elusive.
“There are still as many possibilities out there, maybe more, now that we know about the transponders being off and the length of time that plane flew in the air without them,” said CNN law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes. “It still leaves mechanical, terrorism (and) other issues as much in the air as they were before.”
