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KUALA LUMPUR. — Malaysia said yesterday it was dramatically expanding the already vast scope of its search for a missing passenger plane, admitting it was no closer to solving the agonising aviation mystery a week after the jet vanished.
“The aircraft is still missing, and the search area is expanding,” said Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein.
“Together with our international partners, we are pushing further east into the South China Sea and further into the Indian Ocean.”
Meanwhile, China again urged Malaysia to take the lead in coordinating international search efforts for missing flight MH370.
“We hope Malaysia can enhance collection and analysis of information and help all forces search more efficiently,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said at a regular news briefing.
Hong said Malaysia had responded to China’s request to verify rumours that the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 turned back from its scheduled course before vanishing.
Hishammuddin also said he could offer no new information on the fate of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared from radar screens over Southeast Asia last Saturday, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 227 passengers and 12 crew on board.
He also refused to be drawn on US media reports in which unidentified American officials said the Boeing 777 may have flown for an additional four or five hours after vanishing from civilian radar.
They said a satellite had continued to detect the plane’s communication system long after it vanished from radar between Malaysia and Vietnam, fuelling speculation that the plane might have banked west off its intended path and headed out over the Indian Ocean.
A US Navy official told AFP the destroyer USS Kidd had been sent towards the Indian Ocean to investigate the latest in a series of tantalising leads that have pulled the search in multiple directions and deepened one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history.
“A normal investigation becomes narrower with time, as new information focuses the search,” said Hishammuddin.
“But this is not a normal investigation,” he said, lamenting that the lack of success in the search so far “forces us to look further and further afield.”
A total of 57 ships and 48 aircraft from 13 countries are now deployed across the entire search zone, he added.
The Indian Ocean is the world’s third largest with an average depth of nearly 3 900 metres .
It is like going “from a chessboard to a football field”, Commander William Marks of the US 7th Fleet told CNN.
White House spokesman Jay Carney had appeared to support the US media reports of a potential Indian Ocean breakthrough, citing “new information” while adding that it was “not necessarily conclusive.” Hishammuddin refused to comment on the host of theories swirling around the plane’s fate.
“Anything is possible” he said, stressing that he would confirm only what could be verified.
The lack of results from the investigation has created a volatile mix of grief, anger, frustration and speculation that the Malaysian authorities have struggled to control. The government has stressed the “unprecedented” nature of the challenge, with the search parameters expanding daily and the focus swinging wildly from the east to the west of the Malaysian peninsula.
“It’s almost got to the point where it gets more confusing with each day that goes by. That’s really atypical of an investigation,” said Anthony Brickhouse, a member of the International Society of Air Safety Investigators.
“There are so many stories swirling around. This morning one man told me the plane had landed in Africa,” said Subramaniam Gurusamy, a 60-year-old Malaysian security guard whose son was on the flight. Gerry Soejatman, an independent aviation analyst based in Jakarta, was sceptical that the plane could have flown undetected to the Indian Ocean given the number of military radars operated in the region by Malaysia, India, Thailand and Indonesia.
“How could it get past all of that?” said Soejatman. “And if it did, how many people in the military are going to lose their jobs?” ABC news said US investigators believe the aircraft’s data reporting system and its transponder — which reports its position in flight to ground-based radar — shut down separately.
The 14-minute interval suggests they may have been deliberately disabled or at any rate did not fail as a result of a sudden catastrophic airframe incident, the US network said.
Coupled with radar data that Malaysia said indicates a “possibility” that the plane may have inexplicably started to turn back, the sequential shutdown could lend credence to the theory of a cockpit takeover. — AFP/Xinhua.
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