Search For Missing Flight Shifts To India

(Before It's News)

Last night The Wall Street Journal reported that the missing Malaysian Airlines flight that disappeared almost a week ago sent out “pings” for several hours after it disappeared. The data suggests that the plane continued to fly. This morning Fox News has the latest on the investigation:

The Wall Street Journal reported that aviation investigators were looking into the possible disabling of the jetliner’s transponder, which transmits information on the plane’s identity, location and altitude, and another system that collects and transmits data about the plane’s key systems.

ABC News quoted two unidentified American officials as saying the U.S. believes the plane’s data reporting system and transponder were shut down separately, at 1:07 a.m. and 1:21 a.m. Such a scenario would indicate the plane did not disappear due to some kind of catastrophic failure.

A source familiar with the investigation but not authorized to speak on the record told Fox News that flight 370 continued to send “periodic pushes” of data after the transponder went dark, suggesting the jet continued to fly. This was described to Fox News as signals data that, in isolation, would not provide location data.

If the plane had disintegrated during flight or had suffered some other catastrophic failure, all signals — the pings to the satellite, the data messages and the transponder — would be expected to stop at the same time.

Six days after the plane with 239 people aboard disappeared, Malaysian authorities expanded their search westward toward India, saying the aircraft may have flown for several hours after its last contact with the ground shortly after takeoff from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing.

Read the whole thing. Sources say the evidence suggests that the plane may have deliberately been flown to the Andaman Islands. They believe it’s possible someone who knew how to fly diverted the plane. It’s unknown whether it could have landed in those islands. India is now doing a land search of the islands, and the United States is sending the USS Kidd to the Indian Ocean to assist with the search.

Here’s the WSJ’s Andy Pasztor explaining how a plane’s transponder can continue sending signals after the communications systems are shut down.

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