United States investigators suspect that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 stayed in the air for about four hours past the time it reached its last confirmed location, according to two people familiar with the details, raising the possibility that the plane could have flown on for hundreds of additional miles under conditions that remain murky.
The speculation could scotch the latest hopes of finding the plane after Chinese satellites spotted three bits of flotsam in the South China Sea and Malaysian Air Force planes were despatched to establish whether it is wreckage.
A total flight time of five hours after departing Kuala Lumpur means the Boeing 777 could have continued for an additional distance of about 2200 nautical miles, reaching points as far as the Indian Ocean, the border of Pakistan or even the Arabian Sea, based on the jet’s cruising speed.
It could also have reached North Korea.
Aviation investigators and national security officials believe the plane flew for a total of five hours based on data automatically downloaded and sent to the ground from the Boeing 777’s engines as part of a routine maintenance and monitoring program according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
That raises a host of new questions and possibilities about what happened aboard the widebody jet carrying 239 people, which vanished from civilian air-traffic control radar over the weekend, about one hour into a flight to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.
Six days after the mysterious disappearance prompted a massive international air and water search that so far hasn’t produced any results, the investigation appears to be broadening in scope.
US counterterrorism officials are pursuing the possibility that a pilot or someone else on board the plane may have diverted it toward an undisclosed location after intentionally turning off the jetliner’s transponders to avoid radar detection, according to one person tracking the probe.
The investigation remains fluid, and it isn’t clear whether investigators have evidence indicating possible terrorism or espionage. So far, US national security officials have said that nothing specifically points toward terrorism, though they haven’t ruled it out.
But the huge uncertainty about where the plane was headed, and why it continued flying so long without working transponders, has raised theories among investigators that the aircraft may have been commandeered for a reason that appears unclear to US authorities. Some of those theories have been laid out to national security officials and senior personnel from various US agencies, according to one person familiar with the matter.
At one briefing, according to this person, officials were told investigators are actively pursuing the notion that the plane was diverted “with the intention of using it later for another purpose.”
