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Malaysia Turns to F.B.I. for Help in Plane Inquiry Malaysia Asks F.B.I. for Help in Plane Case
(about 9 hours later)
SEPANG, Malaysia — The Malaysian authorities have asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation for help in recovering data that was deleted from a home flight simulator belonging to one of the pilots of the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, in the hope that it will provide some clue to what happened to the plane. SEPANG, Malaysia — The Malaysian authorities have asked the F.B.I. to help retrieve deleted computer data from a homemade flight simulator belonging to the captain of the Malaysia Airlines jet that vanished 11 days ago, their first request for high-level American assistance in solving the mystery of the missing plane.
The expansion of the American role in the investigation came as governments struggled to narrow down the vast search zone for the plane, which stretches across two hemispheres, and as relatives of some of the 227 missing passengers angrily criticized the Malaysian government’s handling of the so-far fruitless hunt. With few other clues, Malaysian and American investigators are homing in on the pilot, Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, and his first officer, Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, though they have not excluded different possibilities.
Investigators have said the plane’s extraordinary diversion from its intended course — it shifted from a northeastward path across the Gulf of Thailand to a westward one across the Malaysian Peninsula — was probably carried out by someone on the plane who had aviation experience. Attention has focused on the two pilots, Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, and his junior officer, Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27. The Malaysian police, who found that Mr. Zaharie had built a flight simulator in his home, said on Wednesday that some data was erased from the simulator on Feb. 3, more than a month before the ill-fated flight. “It’s all focused on the pilots,” said a senior American law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing his access to information about the investigation. “We, and they, have done everything we could on the passengers and haven’t found a thing.”
“The experts are looking at what are the logs, what has been cleared,” Khalid Abu Bakar, inspector general of the Malaysian police, told reporters at a news conference in Sepang, on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, the capital. He declined to comment further. The F.B.I. will relay the contents of the simulator’s hard drive to agents and analysts in the United States who specialize in retrieving deleted computer files.
Because of evidence suggesting that whoever diverted the missing plane, a Boeing 777-200, knew how to disable the plane’s communications systems and make course changes, the data recorded in Mr. Zaharie’s flight simulator may shed light on whether he was involved, and may have rehearsed actions before the flight. But building and using flight simulators at home is a popular hobby among aviation enthusiasts, and the deletion of data from his simulator may have been routine housekeeping with no significance. Mr. Zaharie did not keep his simulator a secret: he posted a video on YouTube more than a year ago showing him sitting in front of it. “Right now, it’s the best chance we have of finding something,” the law enforcement official said. Unless the pilot used very sophisticated technology to erase files, he added, the F.B.I. will most likely be able to recover them.
More than two dozen nations are searching for any trace of the missing airliner, a challenge that has seemed to grow more complicated and more contentious with each passing day.
As the geographic scope of the search has widened, China, India, Australia, France, the United States and other nations have offered naval ships, surveillance planes, satellites and experts to Malaysia, which is leading the effort. The investigators face a formidable set of mechanical, avionic and satellite communication puzzles.
Flight 370 was about 40 minutes into a six-hour red-eye trip to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, early on March 8 when it suddenly stopped communicating with air traffic controllers and turned far off course, cutting back across peninsular Malaysia, over the Strait of Malacca and toward the Indian Ocean. Military radar tracked it for a while, but the operators did not seek to identify the plane or alert anyone. A satellite over the ocean picked up automated signals for several more hours — facts not released publicly for days after the plane vanished.
The satellite “pings” led investigators to conclude that the plane had made its way to some point along one of two long, arcing corridors that together embrace 2.24 million square nautical miles of sea and land, an area the size of Australia.
On Wednesday, protesters who said they represented families of missing Chinese passengers raged against the confusion and missteps that have dogged the search effort. In the same hotel meeting room where Malaysian officials have tried each day to maintain a tone of calm resolve while briefing reporters, several protesters unfurled a banner that read: “We oppose the Malaysian government concealing the truth. Delaying time for saving lives.”
“All our feelings are the same: We demand to know the truth,” said Xu Dengwang, one of the protesters. “It’s not about compensation; it’s about the truth.” Security guards soon ejected them from the room.
Investigators have said the plane’s extraordinary diversion from its intended course was probably carried out by someone who had aviation experience. The Malaysian police, who found that Mr. Zaharie had built a flight simulator at his home, said Wednesday that some data had been erased from the simulator on Feb. 3, more than a month before the ill-fated flight.
Evidence suggests that whoever diverted the plane knew how to disable its communications systems and program course changes, and the data recorded in the pilot’s flight simulator may shed light on whether he was involved. But building and using flight simulators at home is a popular hobby among aviation enthusiasts, and the deletion of data from Mr. Zaharie’s simulator may have been routine housekeeping. Mr. Zaharie did not keep his simulator a secret: He posted a video on YouTube more than a year ago showing him sitting in front of it.
Mr. Zaharie appears to have completed the first stage of building in the fall of 2012, when he joined an online forum for simulator enthusiasts and described his newly completed setup, which included six high-definition video monitors, a center pedestal and an overhead panel, all running on a popular Microsoft program called FSX.
He said he was looking to take his system to “the next level of simulation: Motion!” Installing a motion platform to enhance the physical realism of the cockpit simulator could have added thousands of dollars to an already sophisticated amateur project, according to hobbyists.
Ian Hopper, who sells motion equipment for flight simulators at his store in Glasgow, Scotland, said Mr. Zaharie had contacted him online with questions about adding a so-called six-degrees-of-freedom platform. Such a system could mimic just about any gyration experienced in flight.
In an email, Mr. Hopper said that while it was not unusual for professional pilots to have simulators at home, Mr. Zaharie’s plans to build a motion platform “would add nothing to the cockpit systems replication already there in his static cockpit, and do it in a fairly expensive manner.”
“A home-built sim, with or without a motion platform, would have taught him very little he didn’t already know,” he said.
Mr. Zaharie occasionally posted photographs of his simulator on his Facebook page, one of which showed a fellow pilot trying it out. He also posted pictures of upgraded computer hardware called Rampage Extreme, joking that he risked becoming a “sim extremist.”
By December, he had evidently tired of software that replicated the controls of a Boeing 777. In a profile he created for another online forum, he said he was “fed up” with the company that made the software. “They are thieves,” he wrote.
The computer search could reveal impulses or plans linked to the plane’s disappearance. But the investigators could also conclude that Mr. Zaharie deleted files just as the average person does to clean out a computer. Scott Phillips, head of marketing for Just Flight, a publisher of flight simulation software based in Britain, said the significance of the deletions was “impossible to know without knowing more about the logs, and even then it could simply come down to guesswork.”
“Flight simulation enthusiasts are renowned for tinkering with their settings, including all associated files and folders that get generated whilst they are flying ‘virtually,’ ” Mr. Phillips said in an email. “So there’s every chance this could have no significance whatsoever.”
Hishammuddin Hussein, the Malaysian defense minister and acting transportation minister, emphasized that “the passengers, the pilots and the crew remain innocent until proven otherwise.”Hishammuddin Hussein, the Malaysian defense minister and acting transportation minister, emphasized that “the passengers, the pilots and the crew remain innocent until proven otherwise.”
He said the authorities had received background-check information from the home countries of all the passengers on the plane except Ukraine and Russia. “So far, no information of significance on any passengers has been found,” he said. Mr. Hishammuddin said the authorities had received background-check information from the home countries of all the passengers except Ukraine and Russia. “So far, no information of significance on any passengers has been found,” he said.
To speed its efforts, the F.B.I. will probably make copies of the simulator’s hard drive and have its contents digitally relayed back to agents and analysts in the United States who specialize in retrieving deleted computer files. “Right now, it’s the best chance we have of finding something,” said a senior law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation. Unless the pilot used extremely sophisticated technology to erase files, the F.B.I. is likely to be able to retrieve them.
It was not clear whether the Malaysians have asked American law enforcement officials for help with any other parts of their inquiry. The Malaysians have kept American investigators at a distance since the plane vanished in the early hours of March 8, angering some lawmakers in Washington who believe that the F.B.I. should have been playing a larger role in the investigation from the beginning. A small team of F.B.I. agents in Malaysia has received briefings on the investigation, but has not been asked to help with the inquiry.
Despite this, American law enforcement officials and intelligence analysts in Washington checked the names of the passengers on the plane to determine whether any of them had known links to terrorists, but that yielded no connections. As part of the American efforts, F.B.I. agents interviewed family members of the passengers in the United States and Europe, and conducted link analysis — a computer-based investigative technique that tries to discern connections between individuals based on extensive government and airline databases — on the pilots and on two Iranian passengers who were traveling on stolen passports.
The 12 days since the plane, operating as Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 bound for Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, disappeared from air controllers’ screens have been troubled by confusion that has compounded the anguish of family members waiting for news.
The frustrations felt by family members and friends of the missing Chinese passengers erupted before a briefing by Malaysian officials Wednesday in a hotel conference room in Sepang. As reporters waited for the news conference to start, several protesters who said they represented families of the passengers unfurled a banner that read: “We oppose the Malaysian government concealing the truth. Delaying time for saving lives.”
“All our feelings are the same: we demand to know the truth,” said Xu Dengwang, one of the protesters. “It’s not about compensation, it’s about the truth.”
“We’ve waited, and waited, and waited, and Malaysia Airlines says kind words, but the Malaysian government hasn’t told us anything,” said Mr. Xu, a middle-aged man from Beijing who said a relative of his had been on Flight 370.
After a scuffle, the police eventually pulled down the banner and forced the protesters out of the room.
About two-thirds of the 227 passengers on the plane were Chinese citizens. Some of their family members have come to Malaysia, hoping for word that the plane has been found. Those hopes appear increasingly bleak, and the protesters said that until now they had been prevented from telling reporters about their mounting frustration with the Malaysian government’s erratic response.
“We need to know the truth,” said one member of the group, a middled-aged woman who declined to give her name or the name of her missing kin. “The Malaysian government is a bunch of cheats. All the governments of the world must join together to pressure the Malaysian government to give an explanation.”
Mr. Hishammuddin, the government minister who has overseen the Malaysian search effort, said he would investigate the protest. “One can only imagine the anguish they are going through,” he said in an emailed statement.
While investigators grapple with the minutiae of machines and people on the missing plane, searchers are confronted with sobering limits on their reach across huge areas of sea and land. The plane’s whereabouts remain little more than a matter of educated guesswork, based on satellite signals and other data gleaned by analysts.
The United States has employed its constellation of spy satellites in the search since its earliest stages, and is now using the satellites’ ability to capture high-resolution images to help narrow down the search area, a senior American military official said.
Officials are using imagery taken during the satellites’ regular orbits, and have not yet instructed the American government’s National Reconnaissance Office, which operates the satellites, to redirect any specific satellite to focus solely on the search, the American official said. The satellite imagery would be most useful in detecting any debris floating on the ocean; it would probably not spot an airliner in flight at cruising altitude. “The satellites are being used, but so far they haven’t found anything,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation.
On Monday, after consultations with the Malaysian government, the United States said it would soon withdraw a Navy destroyer, the Kidd, from the search effort and rely instead on two Navy surveillance aircraft — a P-3 Orion based for now in Kuala Lumpur, and a newer, more advanced P-8 Poseidon, based in Perth, Australia.
Designed to hunt enemy submarines, the P-3 and P-8 aircraft are equipped with sophisticated electronics and advanced sensors that would be used to try to spot any debris from a possible crash. With the search now focusing on the southern Indian Ocean west of Australia, the aircraft can hunt in that area more quickly and efficiently than a surface ship, military officials said.
The senior military official said the Malaysians were now focusing more on the southernmost of the two possible regions where the airplane could be because of a lack of evidence that it had flown over land toward the northern region.
Malaysian officials said on Monday that the southern search would be coordinated by the Australian and Indonesia governments. On Wednesday, Australian organizers said they had narrowed down their search area by half, though it was still huge — an expanse of deep ocean the size of Italy.
John Young, general manager for the Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s emergency response division, said the focus had been narrowed using new data analysis of the plane’s likely fuel consumption.
The new area of focus in the Australian-led part of the search covers 89,000 square nautical miles, and is roughly 1,200 nautical miles southwest of Perth, Mr. Young said, adding that nothing had been found in the areas covered so far. The searchers have a good view of the water and have been able to spot marine life, “so we know we can make sightings, but there were no results relevant to the search,” Mr. Young said.
Like other officials involved in the multinational search, Mr. Young stressed the sheer difficulty of finding the plane, let alone possible survivors, more than a week and a half after the jet disappeared.
“We still have grave fears for the safety of anyone that may have managed to escape the aircraft in the southern ocean,” Mr. Young said. “It remains a big area. There is a lot of work to be done yet.”