More than a week later, what happened inside MH370 around 1:21 a.m. local time on March 8 remains unknown — but investigators now believe it was not an accident.
Satellite information indicates that the plane flew for another seven hours, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Saturday, and he said the movements of the plane as tracked by military radar were “consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane.” He said there is renewed focus on the people onboard, including the cockpit crew.
If the plane stayed airborne for seven hours, that would suggest that it flew until it ran out of fuel, or close to the limit of its range. That’s about how long a plane with fuel for a six-hour flight to Beijing can fly.
No longer is the search focused on the waters between Malaysia and Vietnam. A multinational fleet of ships and planes is scouring vast stretches of the Indian Ocean and much of mainland Asia. In a typical aviation disaster the search narrows with time, but this one has expanded to cover immense areas of the world’s third-largest ocean and its largest continent.
By the prime minister’s count, 14 countries, 43 ships and 58 aircraft are looking for the plane. Many of the countries that have joined forces have been at each others’ throats in recent years in territorial disputes over the South China Sea.
The investigation of Flight MH370 has drawn an improvised team of aviation agencies from Malaysia, China, the United States and Britain. American officials from the FBI, the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board have converged on Kuala Lumpur.
So far no one has a solid “theory of the case,” as lawyers say. Mechanical malfunction — say, a sudden decompression that renders everyone onboard unconscious but lets the plane continue to fly — is still possible. A fire, perhaps from lithium batteries in the cargo hold, is another possibility.
16/03/14 Joel Achenbach, Chico Harlan and Ashley Halsey III/Washington Post
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Satellite information indicates that the plane flew for another seven hours, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Saturday, and he said the movements of the plane as tracked by military radar were “consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane.” He said there is renewed focus on the people onboard, including the cockpit crew.
If the plane stayed airborne for seven hours, that would suggest that it flew until it ran out of fuel, or close to the limit of its range. That’s about how long a plane with fuel for a six-hour flight to Beijing can fly.
No longer is the search focused on the waters between Malaysia and Vietnam. A multinational fleet of ships and planes is scouring vast stretches of the Indian Ocean and much of mainland Asia. In a typical aviation disaster the search narrows with time, but this one has expanded to cover immense areas of the world’s third-largest ocean and its largest continent.
By the prime minister’s count, 14 countries, 43 ships and 58 aircraft are looking for the plane. Many of the countries that have joined forces have been at each others’ throats in recent years in territorial disputes over the South China Sea.
The investigation of Flight MH370 has drawn an improvised team of aviation agencies from Malaysia, China, the United States and Britain. American officials from the FBI, the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board have converged on Kuala Lumpur.
So far no one has a solid “theory of the case,” as lawyers say. Mechanical malfunction — say, a sudden decompression that renders everyone onboard unconscious but lets the plane continue to fly — is still possible. A fire, perhaps from lithium batteries in the cargo hold, is another possibility.
16/03/14 Joel Achenbach, Chico Harlan and Ashley Halsey III/Washington Post
