LATEST UPDATE: The United Arab Emirates Armed Forces is taking part in the search operations for the Malaysian Airlines passenger plane, which went missing10 days ago, a source at the General Headquarters of the Armed Forces has said.

The source added that the UAE Armed Forces is using two search and rescue aircraft in the search operations, which cover a zone stretching south over the Indian Ocean to Australia and north over an area extending to the south and central Asia. There are 26 countries currently involved in the search operations.

The Malaysia Airlines plane went missing on March 8 while flying over the South East Asia and the Indian Ocean with 239 passengers onboard, leading to a massive international search operation.

Malaysia Airlines flight diverted by person with deep knowledge of plane, commercial navigation

Investigators believe it was diverted by someone with deep knowledge of the plane and commercial navigation.

Malaysia must "immediately" expand and clarify the scope of the search for a Malaysia Airlines jetliner that disappeared with 239 people on board, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Monday in a statement posted on its website.

Meanwhile, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said at a regular briefing in Beijing that China's ambassador to Malaysia met Malaysia's foreign minister on Monday.

Engineer suspect

Malaysian police are investigating a flight engineer who was among the passengers on the missing Malaysia Airlines plane as they focus on the pilots and anyone else on board who had technical flying knowledge, a senior police official said.

The aviation engineer is Mohd Khairul Amri Selamat, 29, a Malaysian who has said on social media he had worked for a private jet charter company.

Historic satellite search

Finding a missing Malaysia Airlines plane may hinge on whether searchers can narrow down where they need to look using satellite data that is inexact and has never been used for that purpose before, search and rescue experts say.

Authorities now believe someone on board the Boeing 777 shut down part of the aircraft's messaging system about the same time the plane with 239 people on board disappeared from civilian radar.

But an Inmarsat satellite was able to automatically connect with a portion of the messaging system that remained in operation, similar to a phone call that just rings because no one is on the other end to pick it up and provide information.

No location information was exchanged, but the satellite continued to identify the plane once an hour for four to five hours after it disappeared from radar screens.

Based on the hourly connections with the plane, described by a US official as a "handshake," the satellite knows at what angle to tilt its antenna to be ready to receive a message from the plane should one be sent.

Using that antenna angle, along with radar data, investigators have been able to draw two vast arcs, or "corridors" — a northern one from northern Thailand through to the border of the Central Asian countries Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, and a southern one from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean.

The plane is believed to be somewhere along those arcs.

Air crash investigators have never used this kind of satellite data before to try to find a missing plane, but after pursing other leads it's the best clue left.

"The people that are doing this are thinking outside the box. They're using something that wasn't designed to be used this way, and it seems to be working," said William Waldock, who teaches accident investigation at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona.

"In terms of search and rescue, they're probably going to have rewrite the book after this."

25 countries, 43 ships, 58 aircraft

Authorities generally believe the plane crashed into the ocean, although they can't rule out the possibility that it may be on land somewhere.
Twenty-five countries are involved in the search for the plane, using at least 43 ships and 58 aircraft.

"If it really is out there in the Indian Ocean, they're going to need a lot more than that," Waldock said.
"It's immense. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of people, a lot of ships and airplanes."

In order to narrow down the location, low-flying planes are searching broad swathes of water for any sign of debris.

The search is complicated by the vast amount of trash floating in the world's oceans.

If the airliner did crash into the ocean, some lighter-weight items such as insulation, seat cushions, and life jackets, as well as bodies not strapped to seats, are likely to be floating on the surface, Waldock said.

The heavier parts of the plane would sink, with depths in some parts of the Indian Ocean at over 15,000 feet(4,570 meters), he said.

When suspected debris of a plane is found, the nearest ship — whether it's a search ship or a commercial vessel that happens to be in the area — is sent to the site.

A small boat or life raft usually has to be lowered into the water for a closer look at the debris to judge whether it might have come from the missing plane.

If searchers find airplane debris, ocean currents will have already moved away from where the plane went into the water.
Searchers will then have to use their knowledge of currents in the region to estimate how far and from what direction the debris came, and work backward to that location.

The airliner is equipped with two "black boxes" — a flight data recorder that contains hundreds of types of information on how the plane was functioning, and cockpit voice recorder that contains pilots' conversations and noise in the cockpit. Both are equipped with underwater locator beacons, sometimes called "pingers," that emit a sonic signal that can only be heard underwater. Sonar on ships can sometimes pick up the pings, but they are best heard using a special pinger locator device that is lowered into the water.

The US Navy in the Indian Ocean region has a pinger locator. "It's boxed up, it's ready to be sent somewhere," said a US official. "Right now, there just isn't enough evidence to tell us where to send it."

The official agreed to speak only on condition anonymity because he wasn't authorised to speak publicly.

Global call

Malaysia has appealed for help and international coordination in a search for its missing passenger jet that stretches across two corridors from the Caspian Sea to the southern Indian Ocean, diplomats said on Sunday.

Malaysian officials briefed envoys from 22 countries on the progress of the investigation after calling off a search in the South China Sea for the jet that vanished from radar screens more than a week ago, with 239 people on board.

Although countries have been coordinating individually, the broad formal request at a meeting of ambassadors marked a new diplomatic phase in a search operation thought increasingly likely to rely on the sharing of sensitive material such as military radar data.

"The meeting was for us to know exactly what is happening and what sort of help they need. It is more for them to tell us, 'please put in all your resources'," T.S. Tirumurti, India's high commissioner to Malaysia, told Reuters.

The diplomatic initiative could become significant as nations ponder whether to share any military data on the Boeing 777's fate, and fills a void left by the failure of Southeast Asian nations to work as a bloc on the crisis, a diplomat said.

"There are clearly limits to military data," the diplomat said, adding that nations were nonetheless aware of the strong public interest in cooperation on a civilian issue.

Malaysian Defence Minister and Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said Malaysia had itself fed the findings of its own military radar tracks into what is now a domestic criminal enquiry into suspected hijacking or sabotage.

He declined to say whether Kuala Lumpur had asked others to open up their military radar tracks, but told a news conference that it had asked for both primary and secondary radar data.

Experts say military forces mainly use primary or classic radar, which works by listening for its own echo bouncing back off a potentially unfriendly object.

Civil air traffic control mostly uses secondary radar, which relies on hearing a signal sent back from the aircraft's transponder along with data designed to identify the plane.

It was the apparently deliberate decision to turn the jet's transponder off that left Malaysian authorities relying on the blips picked up by primary military radar to form the theory that the aircraft - on a flight to Beijing - had turned back west before disappearing.

Underscoring the caution surrounding the request for deeper co-operation, at least one country represented at Sunday's ambassadorial meeting asked Malaysia to supply its request in writing, a diplomat present at the talks said.

Southeast Asia has been at the centre of a regional arms race for several years amid tensions in the South China Sea, with maritime surveillance and air defences high on the list of hardware laid out at last month's Singapore Airshow.

The search for the missing jet is focusing on a wide stripe of territory either side of two arcs formed by satellite plots of the aircraft's last known possible position.

The northernmost of these stretches runs north through Thailand and China and bends towards India, Pakistan and then Central Asia, over some of the world's most strongly guarded defences.

If the jet did stray into those areas, sensitivities over whether and how such sensitive data could be shared could be further complicated by potential embarrassment over how such a large unidentified aircraft could have continued unchallenged.

Defense analysts said on Saturday that the jet's disappearance raised awkward questions about the strength of regional or even global air defences.

Pilot's home flight simulator examined

Malaysia said on Sunday that police had searched the homes of the pilots of a missing jet and examined a home flight simulator after revelations that the flight was deliberately diverted triggered a full-scale criminal probe.

Malaysian police say they are investigating engineers who might have had contact with plane.

Investigators probing the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines MH370 piloted an identical Boeing 777-200 on the missing plane's suspected flight path, in a re-enactment confirming their belief that it banked west, a senior Malaysian military official said Sunday. 

Police are combing through the personal, political and religious backgrounds of pilots and crew of a missing Malaysian jetliner, a senior officer said on Sunday, trying to work out why someone aboard flew the plane hundreds of miles off course.

No trace of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER has been found since it vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board, but investigators believe it was diverted by someone who knew how to switch off its communications and tracking systems.

"We are not ruling out any sort of motivation at the moment," a senior police official with knowledge of the investigation told Reuters.

India suspends search

India on Sunday suspended its search for Malaysia Airlines flight 370 around the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands and in the Bay of Bengal and are awaiting fresh instructions from Malaysia, a defence official said.

"The entire operation is on hold for now. We are awaiting fresh instructions from Malaysia. Nothing came out of the search in designated areas on Saturday," said Colonel Harmit Singh, spokesman for India's army, navy and airforce command in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Indian radar may have been turned off at night.

Whatever truly happened to missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, its apparently unchallenged wanderings through Asian skies point to major gaps in regional - and perhaps wider - air defences.

More than a decade after Al Qaeda hijackers turned airliners into weapons on Sept 11, 2001, a large commercial aircraft completely devoid of stealth features appeared to vanish with relative ease.

On Saturday, Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak said authorities now believed the Boeing 777 flew for nearly seven hours after disappearing early on March 8. Either its crew or someone else on the plane disabled the on-board transponder civilian air traffic radar used to track it, investigators believe.

It appears to have first flown back across the South China Sea - an area of considerable geopolitical tension and military activity - before overflying northern Malaysia and then heading out towards India without any alarm being raised.

The reality, analysts and officials say, is that much of the airspace over water - and in many cases over land - lacks sophisticated or properly monitored radar coverage.

Analysts say the gaps in Southeast Asia's air defences are likely to be mirrored in other parts of the developing world, and may be much greater in areas with considerably lower geopolitical tensions.

"Several nations will be embarrassed by how easy it is to trespass their airspace," said Air Vice Marshal Michael Harwood, a retired British Royal Air Force pilot and ex-defence attache to Washington DC. "Too many movies and Predator (unmanned military drone) feeds from Afghanistan have suckered people into thinking we know everything and see everything. You get what you pay for. And the world, by and large, does not pay."

NOTHING MUCH HAPPENS AT NIGHT

Investigators now say they believe MH370 may have turned either towards India and Central Asia or - perhaps more likely, given the lack of detection - taken a southern course towards the Antarctic. That would have been an effectively suicidal flight, the aircraft eventually running out of fuel and crashing.

The waters of the southern Indian Ocean and northern Southern Ocean are among the most remote on the planet, used by few ships and overflown by few aircraft.

Australian civilian radar extends only some 200 km (125 miles) from its coast, an Australian official said on condition of anonymity, although its air defence radar extends much further. Australia's military could not be reached for comment on Saturday and if it did detect a transponder-less aircraft heading south, there is no suggestion any alarm was raised.

US military satellites monitor much of the globe, including some of the remotest oceans, looking primarily for early warning of any ballistic missile launch from a submarine or other vessel.

After the aircraft's initial disappearance a week ago, US officials said their satellites had detected no signs of a mid-air explosion. It is unclear if such systems would have detected a crash landing in the southern Indian Ocean.

On India's Andaman Islands, a defence official told reporters he saw nothing unusual or out of place in the lack of permanent radar coverage. The threat in the area, he said, was much lower than on India's border with Pakistan where sophisticated radars are manned and online continuously.

At night in particular, he said, "nothing much happens".

"We have our radars, we use them, we train with them, but it's not a place where we have (much) to watch out for," he said. "My take is that this is a pretty peaceful place."

Pilot's home searched

Police began searching the home of the pilot of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight on Saturday, after the country's prime minister confirmed the plane was suspected to have been deliberately diverted, a senior police official told Reuters.

Prime Minister Najib Razak's statement confirmed days of mounting speculation that the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 was not accidental, and underlines the massive task for searchers who have been scouring vast areas of ocean.

"In view of this latest development, the Malaysian authorities have refocused their investigation into the crew and passengers on board," Najib said, stressing they were still investigating all possibilities as to why the plane deviated so drastically from its original flight path.

Malaysia's leader Saturday said communications aboard a missing jet were switched off and its course deliberately changed by someone on board before the aircraft disappeared a week ago, but stopped short of saying it had been hijacked.

Final satellite communication with the Boeing 777 flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing came more than six-and-a-half hours after it vanished from civilian radar at 1:30am on March 8, Prime Minister Najib Razak told a nationally televised press conference.

The movement of the plane in the interim period, during which it changed direction and passed back over the Malaysian peninsula towards the Indian Ocean, was "consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane," Najib said.

"Despite media reports that the plane was hijacked, I wish to be very clear: we are still investigating all possibilities as to what caused MH370 to deviate from its original flight path," he added.

Najib said his announcement was based on new information from satellite contact with the plane and military radar data.

The combined data suggested "with a high degree of certainty" that the plane's two automated communications systems -- Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) and its transponder -- were "switched off" one after the other before it reached the point over the South China Sea where it dropped out of civilian radar contact.

It then turned back and flew in a westerly direction back over peninsular Malaysia before turning northwest.

The last confirmed communication between the plane and satellite was at 8:11 am, Najib said, adding that investigators were calculating how far the aircraft may have flown afterwards.

So far, experts had located the last point of communication as being inside one of two large geographical corridors: a northern corridor stretching from the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to northern Thailand, and a southern corridor stretching from Indonesia to the southern Indian ocean.

"This new satellite information has a significant impact on the nature and scope of the search operation," the prime minister said.
"We are ending our operations in the South China Sea and reassessing the redeployment of our assets. We are working with the relevant countries to request all information relevant to the search, including radar data," he added.

Indian Navy finds nothing... yet

Indian Navy ships supported by surveillance planes and helicopters are scouring Andaman Sea islands for a third day without any success in finding evidence of a missing Malaysia Airlines jet.

VSR Murthy, a top Indian coast guard official, says the search has been expanded farther west into the Bay of Bengal on Saturday. Nearly a dozen ships, patrol vessels, surveillance aircraft and helicopters have been deployed but Murthy says, "We have got nothing so far."

Seeing no headway, Malaysian authorities suggested Friday a new search area of 9,000 square kilometers (3,474 square miles) to India along the Chennai coast in the Bay of Bengal, India's Defence Ministry said in a statement.

Analysis of electronic pulses picked up from a missing Malaysian airliner shows it could have run out of fuel and crashed into the Indian Ocean after it flew hundreds of miles off course, a source familiar with official US assessments said on Friday.

The source, who is familiar with data the US government is receiving from the investigation into the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines plane, said the other, less likely possibility was that it flew on towards India.

The data obtained from pulses the plane sent to satellites had been interpreted to provide two different analyses because it was ambiguous, said the source, who declined to be identified because the investigation was continuing.

But it offers the first real clues as to the fate of Flight MH370, which officials increasingly believe was deliberately diverted off its scheduled course from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The Boeing 777-200ER was carrying 239 people.

Two sources familiar with the probe earlier said Malaysian military radar data showed a plane that investigators suspect was Flight MH370 following a commonly used navigational route toward the Middle East and Europe when it was last spotted by radar early on March 8, northwest of Malaysia.

The electronic pulses were believed to have been transmitted for several hours after the plane flew out of radar range, said the source familiar with the data.

The most likely possibility is that after travelling northwest, the airliner did a sharp turn to the south, into the Indian Ocean where officials think, based on the available data, it flew until it ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea, added the source.

The other interpretation from the pulses is that Flight MH370 continued to fly to the northwest and headed over Indian territory, said the source.

Pilot turned plane

Speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, the official cited Malaysian military radar data that investigators believe indicate the Boeing 777 may have radically changed course and headed northwest towards the Indian Ocean.

"It has to be a skilled, competent and a current pilot," the official said.

"He knew how to avoid the civilian radar. He appears to have studied how to avoid it."

The intended flight path for the Kuala Lumpur-Beijing flight was to be north over the South China Sea and Vietnam.

The new information, coupled with multiple corroborative but unconfirmed reports, suggests the investigation into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was increasingly focusing on something going wrong in the cockpit.

Analysts have said that could include a sudden loss of cabin pressure or other mechanical event that incapacitated the pilots, catastrophic pilot error, or more sinister possibilities such as the plane being commandeered by a hijacker or rogue member of the flight crew, or pilot suicide.

All signs so far point to a "controlled, deliberate act, not a mechanical failure", said Scott Hamilton, managing director of US-based aviation consultancy Leeham Co.

The mounting reports of an unexplained banking to the west have coincided with a shift of search and rescue resources toward the Indian Ocean.
 

For complete coverage click below

7 days in the life of Missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH 370

Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: 12 key clues to world's most baffling aviation mystery