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False Leads Set Back Hunt for Missing Malaysian Jet False Leads Set Back Hunt for Missing Malaysian Jet
(about 7 hours later)
SEPANG, Malaysia — The search for the missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner was set back on Monday by a number of false leads that seemed to underline how little investigators knew about the whereabouts of the plane, which vanished on Saturday. SEPANG, Malaysia — The mystery of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 deepened on Monday when a sweeping search failed to find any sign of the jetliner near its last known location, leaving experts to puzzle over how a Boeing 777 with 239 people aboard could have vanished without a trace.
A suspected life raft bobbing in the Gulf of Thailand turned out to be the lid of a large box, Vietnamese authorities said. An oil slick in Malaysian waters was found not to contain jet fuel. And what was initially thought to be an aircraft tail floating in the Gulf of Thailand was actually “logs tied together,” according to a Malaysian official. The search was set back by a number of false leads that seemed to underline how little investigators have been able to pin down about the progress of the flight.
The failure so far to locate any trace of the aircraft raised questions about whether the ships, planes and helicopters searching the waters south of Vietnam, some of them using highly sophisticated equipment, were looking in the right place. With so little concrete to go on so far, aviation experts explored a number of plausible scenarios to explain the loss of the plane, and investigators said they could not yet conclusively rule out almost any potential cause, including terrorism, hijacking, crew malfeasance, pilot error or mechanical failure.
Malaysian officials said late on Monday that they were expanding the search to a much wider area, including waters north of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, hundreds of miles from the aircraft’s last reported position. An object bobbing in the Gulf of Thailand that from a distance looked like a life raft turned out to be the lid of a large box, Vietnamese authorities said. An oil slick in Malaysian waters was found not to contain any jet fuel. And what was initially thought to be an aircraft tail floating in the sea was actually “logs tied together,” according to a Malaysian official.
The aircraft, a Boeing 777 operating as Flight MH370, took off from Kuala Lumpur in the early hours of Saturday bound for Beijing. It lost contact with ground controllers less than an hour into the flight, when the aircraft was over the Gulf of Thailand on its way to Vietnamese airspace. Boeing officials and investigators from the United States National Transportation Safety Board began conferring with Malaysian officials Monday, American and Malaysian officials said. The total lack of results so far raised questions about whether the ships, planes and helicopters from nine nations that are scouring the waters near the aircraft’s last reported location, some of them using highly sophisticated equipment, were looking in the right place.
The Malaysian government distributed photos to foreign intelligence agencies showing two men who boarded the plane using one-way tickets and stolen passports from Italy and Austria. It was not clear whether the two men, whom Malaysian officials described only as “not Asian,” had anything to do with the plane’s disappearance. Arnie Reiner, a retired captain with US Airways and the former chief accident investigator at Pan Am, noted, “If they somehow got turned around or went off course when the thing was going down, it could be 90 or 100 miles away from where the flight data disappeared.”
The men were scheduled to connect in Beijing for flights to Europe. The police in the Thai resort city of Pattaya, where the men’s tickets were issued, said they were bought not by the passengers themselves but by an Iranian man known to the police only as Mr. Ali. It is not yet known whether the Malaysian plane deviated from its planned flight path, or how long the pilots could still fly the aircraft after the last reported contact. After more than two days of fruitless search, Malaysian officials said on Monday that they were expanding the search area.
Supachai Phuikaewkhum, the chief of police in Pattaya, said in an interview late on Monday that Mr. Ali, who formerly lived in Pattaya and operated a restaurant there but now appears to have moved back to Iran, was a regular customer of the travel agency. Mr. Supachai said Mr. Ali called the agency from an Iranian telephone number and asked for the cheapest fares available from Kuala Lumpur to two separate destinations in Europe. This much seemed clear: the aircraft took off from Kuala Lumpur after midnight Saturday bound for Beijing, and lost contact with ground controllers when it was over the Gulf of Thailand, making its way toward Vietnamese airspace in good weather under a moonless sky. The airline said there was no distress call.
“The staff suggested that a flight with several stops would be cheaper, so he picked that route,” Mr. Supachai said. Transponders on commercial airliners autromatically report their location, altitude, speed and other data by radio. The last two readings from the devices on Flight MH370 were recorded at 1:21 a.m. local time, some 40 minutes after takeoff, and they did not include altitude, according to Mikael Robertsson of Flightradar24, the Stockholm-based organization that tracks aircraft around the world. Mr. Robertsson said that might be coincidence: readings are often incomplete because of transient interference from other aircraft.
He said the tickets were paid for in cash by another Iranian man whose name Mr. Supachai pronounced as “Asay.” That man was questioned on Monday by the police, he said. Boeing officials and investigators from the United States National Transportation Safety Board began conferring with Malaysian officials about the Flight MH370 mystery on Monday, American and Malaysian officials said. The F.B.I. has also offered to send agents and forensic specialists to Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand, but so far those countries have declined the assistance, American law enforcement officials said.
Malaysian officials said a parallel investigation had been opened into a possible passport smuggling ring. One locus of speculation on Monday was the report from the Malaysian government that two men had boarded the plane using stolen passports from Italy and Austria. It was not clear whether the two men, whom Malaysian officials described only as “not Asian,” had anything to do with the plane’s disappearance.
The Malaysia Airlines plane is not the first modern jet to vanish mysteriously. Searchers sometimes take months to locate crash debris in remote areas with difficult weather conditions. But in the case of MH370, the weather has been good since the aircraft disappeared, and the waters near the aircraft’s last reported position are fairly shallow. The men, who were scheduled to connect in Beijing for flights to two different European cities, used one-way tickets issued by a travel agent in the Thai resort city of Pattaya. The police there said they were booked not by the passengers themselves but by an Iranian man known to the police only as Mr. Ali, who ordered them by telephone. Another Iranian man paid for the tickets in cash, and the police questioned that man on Monday, according to Supachai Phuikaewkhum, the chief of police in Pattaya.
The Gulf of Thailand is busy with fishing boats, commercial vessels and natural gas platforms, and is no deeper than about 260 feet. By contrast, an Air France flight that disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 was recovered at a depth of about 13,000 feet. The Malaysia Airlines plane is not the first modern jet to vanish mysteriously. Searchers sometimes take months to locate crash debris in remote areas, deep water or difficult weather conditions. But the Gulf of Thailand is busy with fishing boats, commercial vessels and natural gas platforms, and is no deeper than about 260 feet. By contrast, an Air France flight that disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 was recovered from a depth of about 13,000 feet.
Aircraft and surface vessels from several countries have joined the search, among them P-3C Orion military planes whose radar systems are capable of locating floating objects as small as a basketball. In a sign of how uncertain officials are of the plane’s whereabouts, an American Orion spent part of Monday searching off the western coast of the peninsula shared by Thailand and Malaysia, several hundred miles from the flight’s last reported location east of the peninsula. Aircraft and surface vessels from several countries have joined the search, among them P-3C Orion military planes whose radar systems are capable of locating floating objects as small as a basketball. In a sign of how uncertain officials are of the plane’s whereabouts, an American Orion spent part of Monday searching off the western coast of Malaysia, several hundred miles from the flight’s last reported location, officials said.
Malaysian authorities said they had ruled nothing out, including terrorism, hijacking, pilot suicide or mechanical failure. Three crashes at sea in recent years, including the Air France crash, involved problems with the airplane’s equipment for measuring airspeed, a crucial parameter for jet flight. If the plane flies too fast, it can break up; too slow, and it does not generate enough lift to stay in the sky. Modern jets have several different systems for measuring airspeed, but when they give conflicting readings, crews sometimes fail to determine correctly which ones to trust.
After more than 60 hours without news about the fate of the plane, relatives of passengers in Beijing were furious at Malaysia Airlines staff on Monday, and one man threw water bottles at an airline executive. In the Air France case, involving an Airbus A330, an airspeed instrument called a Pitot tube clogged with ice during flight, and the crew misunderstood what had gone wrong. Two Boeing 757s crashed in 1996 because of Pitot tubes or related static intakes that became blocked on the ground, in one case by an insect nest and the other by protective tape that workers forgot to remove after washing the plane.
“All Malaysians are liars!” another man shouted in Chinese. “Do you know what ‘liars’ means?” Another subject of speculation was the possibility that the plane might have been crashed deliberately by a member of the crew. Several past crashes, including an EgyptAir 767 flying from New York in 2002 and a SilkAir 737 in Indonesia in 1977, were known or believed to have been pilot suicides, and a PSA flight in Califiornia in 1987 crashed because a disgruntled mechanic entered the cockpit and shot both pilots.
There were conflicting views of how well the crisis was being handled by Malaysia. Chinese media reports have been critical and somewhat dismissive; The Beijing Times newspaper said on Monday that “Malaysia and Vietnam are relatively backward countries, without professional search and rescue teams.” Aircraft have also been known to break up in midair because of undetected cracks in the fuselage, failures of control systems or wiring flaws. But those problems generally affect older aircraft; the Malaysian Airlines 777 was just 11 years old.
But a spokesman for the United States Seventh Fleet, which has sent two warships to assist in the search, said the Malaysian rescue team was doing a “terrific job of organizing” the effort. Cmdr. William Marks, the spokesman, said the Malaysian rescuers were “very efficient, very professional.” Although officials have not ruled out terrorism in the Malaysia Airlines case, no evidence of foul play has yet come to light. No group has claimed responsibility for downing the plane, though as Captain Reiner noted concerning the 747 that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, “when Qaddafi’s guys blew up Pan Am 103, they weren’t talking about it.”
Malaysian authorities and an independent flight-tracking organization offer roughly the same coordinates of the aircraft’s last known location, less than halfway between the Malaysian coast and the southernmost tip of Vietnam. The Malaysian calculation is based on military and civilian radar; Flightradar24, a Stockholm-based aircraft tracking service, uses a separate network of radio receivers. By whatever cause, if the missing Malaysian Airlines plane broke up in the air or plunged headlong into the sea, experts said there ought to be widely strewn debris for searchers to find, but none had yet been spotted by Monday night. That suggested to at least one observer, Mikael Robertsson of Plightradar24, that the pilots may have tried an emergency ditching like the one US Airways Flight 1549 managed in the Hudson River in 2009, only to have their aircraft fill with water and sink swiftly afterward. While Flight 1549 ditched on a smooth river in broad dalyight, though, the Malaysian Airlines pilots would have been making the attempt in the dark in the chop of the sea.
Mikael Robertsson, co-founder of Flightradar24, said that the company’s computers had not recorded any altitude data for the last two reported positions of the aircraft, which were received about 30 seconds apart. He said there were two possible explanations. One was radio interference from a transmission by another aircraft using the same frequency, which he said was a relatively common occurrence. The other was that the aircraft’s transponder stopped receiving altitude data because of some unknown event on the aircraft a minute before it vanished. There were conflicting views of how well the crisis was being handled by Malaysia. News media reports in China, where many of the plane’s passengers were from, have been highly critical. But a spokesman for the United States Seventh Fleet, which has sent two warships to assist in the search, said the Malaysian rescue team was doing a “terrific job of organizing” the effort.