Malaysian Flight 370 Disappearing Act

Little Progress Made Into Fate of 239 Missing Passengers

VIDEO

Skippy Massey
Humboldt Sentinel

It is still a mystery as to what happened to the large Boeing
777 plane and its 239 passengers aboard that disappeared
altogether off the face of the earth.

Investigators are looking at the flight simulator taken from the home of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah. They have discovered that some data had been erased from it, Malaysia’s acting transportation minister said Wednesday.

The investigators didn’t say what had been deleted. They also did not say who might have deleted the data.

“It would be suspicious to me, because there’s no need to do it,” said Jay Leboff, owner of HotSeat, a simulator manufacturer.

The revelation came as the search for the missing airliner neared its 13th day. No distress signals were made. No cell phone communications sent by passengers have been uncovered. No terrorist links have been discovered nor have any organizations claimed responsibility for foul play. The Boeing plane disappeared without a trace or explanation.

After veering off course, the pilot relayed a simple message: ”Everything all right. Good night.”

Although the search area spans a vast area of nearly 3 million square miles between Australia and Indonesia, a U.S. government official familiar with the investigation said the plane is most likely somewhere on the southern end of the search area.

“This is an area out of normal shipping lanes, out of any commercial flight patterns, with few fishing boats, and there are no islands,” the official said, warning that the search could well last “weeks and not days.”

The lack of progress has angered and frustrated families, who have accused Malaysian officials of withholding information. Some family members staged a protest at the hotel where media covering the search are staying.

“We have been here for 10 days, no single piece of information,” one woman said. “We need media from the entire world to help us find our lost families, and find the Malaysian 370 plane.”

Malaysian authorities appeared to hustle the women away.

The plane’s disappearance continues to intrigue the public and frustrate officials, who have turned up no sign of the plane despite the involvement of teams from 26 nations.

On Tuesday, a law enforcement official said that the aircraft’s first major change of course — an abrupt westward turn that took the plane off its route to China and back across the Malay Peninsula — was almost certainly programmed by somebody in the cockpit.

Malaysian authorities, who are coordinating the search, say the available evidence suggests the missing plane flew off course in a deliberate act by someone who knew what they were doing.

Particular attention has focused on the pilot and first officer on Flight 370, but authorities are yet to come up with any evidence explaining why either of them would have taken the jetliner off course.

Investigators are looking into the background of all 239 passengers and crew members on board the plane, as well as its ground crew, Malaysian officials have said. They’ve received background checks on all nations with passengers on board with the exception of Russia and Ukraine.

Searchers are racing the clock in their efforts to find the plane and its flight-data and cockpit-voice recorders. The devices have batteries designed to send out pings for 30 days. That leaves 18 days until the batteries are expected to run out.

U.S. military and intelligence officials emphasize that while no one knows what happened to the plane, it is more logical to conclude it crashed into the Indian Ocean.

Malaysia’s public face of the search efforts, has repeatedly said that little is likely to be established about the mysterious flight until the plane is found.

But in the Indian Ocean, where Australia and Indonesia have taken the lead in the hunt, some of the depths that searchers are dealing with are significant.

The Bay of Bengal, for example, has depths of between about 13,000 feet and 23,000 feet. Wreckage and bodies of 228 passengers from Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, were found at depths of around 12,000 feet by unmanned submarines.

It took four searches over the course of nearly two years to locate the bulk of the wreckage and the majority of the bodies. It took even longer to establish the cause of the disaster.