From the islands of Indonesia to the steppe of Kazakhstan: Hunt for missing flight MH370 switches to land and covers ELEVEN countries

By

Richard Shears

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Australia has taken the lead in the hunt for the missing Boeing 777 over the southern Indian Ocean today.

The move came as Malaysia appealed for radar data and search planes to help in the unprecedented hunt through a vast swath of Asia stretching north-west into Kazakhstan.

The Malaysian government has revealed an investigation indicates the jet was deliberately diverted and flew for several hours after leaving its scheduled flight path – either north towards Central Asia, or towards the southern Indian Ocean.

Investigators say Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was deliberately diverted and its communications equipment switched off shortly after take-off during an overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8.

Suspicion has fallen on anyone on board the plane with aviation experience, in particular the pilot and co-pilot.

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A huge area spanning the rainforests of South East Asia and the landscapes of former Soviet Union republics is now part of the investigation into the fate of Flight MH370

Malaysian

police confiscated a flight simulator from the home of the pilot on

Saturday and also visited the home of the co-pilot, in what Malaysia’s

police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said was the first visit to their homes.

The

government issued a statement today contradicting that account by

saying that police first visited the pilots’ homes on March 9, the day

after the flight.

Australian

Prime Minister Tony Abbott told parliament that he agreed to take the

lead in scouring the southern Indian Ocean for the ‘ill-fated aircraft’

during a conversation today with Malaysia’s leader Najib Razak.

Abbott, who earlier Monday told journalists he had no information that the flight may have come close to Australia, said he was responding to a request from Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak.

‘He asked that Australia take responsibility for the search on the southern vector, which the Malaysian authorities now think was one possible flight path for this ill-fated aircraft,’ Abbott told parliament.

‘I agreed that we would do so. I offered the Malaysian prime minister additional maritime surveillance resources which he gratefully accepted.’

Captured: Airport security CCTV of Zaharie Ahmad Shah, pilot of Malaysia Boeing 777 Airlines flight

CCTV footage captures Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, pilot of the Boeing 777 flight, being frisked while walking through security at Kuala Lumpar International Airport

Abbott said the defence chiefs of Australia and Malaysia were discussing how to implement the arrangement.

‘Australia

will do its duty in this matter. It will do our duty to ensure that our

search and rescue responsibilities are maintained and upheld,’ he said.

‘And

we will do our duty to the families of the 230 people on that aircraft

who are still absolutely devastated by their absence and who are still

profoundly, profoundly saddened by this as yet unfathomed mystery.’

Asked

earlier whether Australian agencies had detected the plane close to

Australia, given its western coast borders the Indian Ocean, Abbott

said: ‘I don’t have any information to that effect.

‘But

all of our agencies that could possibly help in this area are scouring

their data to see if there’s anything that they can add to the

understanding of this mystery,’ he told reporters.

Australia

has two Orion surveillance aircraft assisting with the search for the

plane, which was en route to Beijing when it disappeared. Abbott said

one of those had now been redeployed to the Indian Ocean.

Footage: Co-pilot Fariq Hamid who was also searched before the pair walked onto the plane

Co-pilot Fariq Hamid is frisked by security at Kuala Lumpar International Airport before the flight took off

Six

Australians were on board the commercial flight carrying 239 passengers

and crew which vanished on March 8 in a busy Southeast Asian sky, and

relatives have clung to hope that their loved ones may still be alive.

‘I

haven’t got a clue what is going on, but maybe they have been hijacked

and that gives me hope,’ David Lawton, whose brother Bob was aboard

MH370, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Monday.

‘In this day and age and the technology we have you would think they would be able to find it, but no, apparently they can’t.

‘I don’t blame anybody for it, I just want to know what their fate was,’ he added.

Abbott said the incident could lead to changes in how aircraft are tracked.

‘I

think that there will be a lot of analysis done of this particular

event which thus far remains deeply, deeply mysterious,’ he said.

‘And I think there will be a lot of lessons learnt, and I dare say some of those lessons will involve the tracking of aircraft.’

Australia already had two AP-3C Orion aircraft involved in the search,

one of them looking north and west of the remote Cocos Islands.

Malaysian

authorities have said the satellite signal or ‘ping’ received from the

jet carrying 239 people more than seven hours after it took off shows

that it also may have entered a northern corridor stretching over land

from south-east Asia north-west into central Asia.

Twenty-six countries are involved in the search, the government said in a statement today.

Probe: Police in Malaysia have searched the home of pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah (left) and Fariq Abdul Hamid after officials confirmed the plane was taken over by a ‘deliberate act’

Peter Chong (left) with best friend Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, pilot of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane. He is pictured in a T-shirt with a Democracy is Dead slogan as police investigate claims he could have hijacked the plane as an anti-government protest

Meanwhile, India has rejected suggestions that it could have been the intended target of a 9/11-style attack by the missing jet.

As

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh promised maximum assistance in the

massive hunt for Flight 370, India’s foreign minister said it was vital

that the mystery over its fate was cleared up.

But

asked by the CNN-IBN network about suggestions that the plane was

hijacked with the aim of flying it into an Indian city, Foreign Minister

Salman Khurshid replied: ‘I don’t think we have gone that far.’

The

speculation was fuelled by former U.S. deputy secretary of state Strobe

Talbott who tweeted that the ‘direction, fuel load and range now lead

some to suspect hijackers planned a 9/11-type attack on an Indian city’.

His comments over the

weekend have been widely picked up by the Indian media and Khurshid said

people needed answers to allay their fears.

‘We hope to come to some conclusion that is both credible and reassuring,’ he said.

The

Times of India said security sources had ‘rubbished’ the idea that the

plane could have got anywhere close to an urban centre and insisted it

would have been detected by a naval base on the Andaman islands, more

than 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) off the Indian mainland.

‘There

is no way our military radars would have missed the airliner as it flew

over Andaman Sea, as there is high traffic around that time,’ one

military intelligence source told the paper.

The

US-led NATO mission in Afghanistan meanwhile said it was not looking

for the missing plane there, and Islamabad’s Civil Aviation Authority

said the flight never appeared on Pakistani radar.

Indian

ships and planes scoured the seas off the sprawling Andamans

archipelago last week but they suspended their search on Sunday as they

awaited fresh instructions from Malaysian authorities.

‘Operations are suspended as of now, everything is grounded,’ Indian Navy spokesman D.K. Sharma said.

‘Malaysian

authorities will now decide and tell us where to go. They have asked us

to be on standby for now. We are awaiting further instructions. Once we

have them, we will move.’

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak confirmed that the plane could have travelled, undetected, for a further seven hours

The final picture: The missing jet is pictured here in February this year above Polish airspace

Prime

Minister Singh’s office said that his Malaysian counterpart Najib

Razak, in a phone call late Sunday, had requested ‘technical assistance

from Indian authorities in corroborating the possible paths that the

missing Malaysian airliner might have taken’.

Singh ‘assured all possible assistance from concerned Indian authorities’, the office said in a statement.

A

huge area spanning the rainforests of South East Asia and the

landscapes of former Soviet Union republics is now part of the

investigation into the fate of Flight MH370, which set out nine days ago

on a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Excruciatingly

for the families of the 239 people on board, searchers from 25 nations

still have no idea whether the aircraft has come down on land or sea.

But

experts have concluded that it was hijacked or sabotaged by someone

with knowledge of the controls – and from the moment it swerved away

from its path could have headed south into the southern Indian Ocean or

north in a gentle curve to Central Asia.

The

plane’s last signal, which was picked up by a satellite orbiting more

than 22,000 miles above the Indian Ocean, placed it along one of two

arcs – referred to as air corridors.

One runs from the southern border of Kazakhstan in Central Asia to northern Thailand.

The other runs from near Jakarta, Indonesia, to the Indian Ocean, some 1,000 miles off Australia’s west coast.

The

authorities believe the last signals picked up by satellite could

possibly have been transmitted when the plane was on land – and

yesterday, after a fruitless hunt of oceans to the east and west of

Malaysia, authorities in Kuala Lumpur announced that searches have begun

across 11 different countries.

Thailand,

Burma, China, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan,

Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have been included with Indonesia in the

investigation.

The total

area now being examined amounts to 28million square miles, equivalent to

twice the size of Africa or a tenth of the planet.

The

‘straight line’ distance from the most southerly point of the search,

in the southern Indian Ocean, to the most northerly area in Central Asia

is an enormous 6,000 miles.

And

in a remarkable development, Indian officials have suggested that the

jet could have ‘slipped through’ radar gaps on its way over the ocean.

Rear Admiral Sudhir Pillai explained: ‘We have many radar systems

operating in this area. Nothing was picked up, but it’s possible that

the military radars were switched off as we operate on an “as required”

basis.’

And senior Indian

Air Force and Navy officers have admitted there are a ‘few gaps’ in the

country’s civil and military radar networks, a measure which keeps costs

down – although they stressed that it would be ‘virtually impossible’

for it to have crossed into Indian air space and remain undetected.

The

same applies to Pakistan, which has led some to believe that the jet

did not get as far as the subcontinent.

If it did not plunge into the

Indian Ocean, the plane could have landed on an airstrip long enough to

accommodate a Boeing 777 – a required distance of 5,000ft, or almost a

mile.

US radio station WNYC

has put together a list of 634 runways that meet this criteria in the

flying range from Kuala Lumpur of the missing jet – with some located in

far-flung destinations such as Mongolia and Yap in Micronesia.

Malaysian

transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein said yesterday that the search

had become ‘even more difficult’.

He added: ‘This is a significant

recalibration. What we’re doing here may change aviation history.’

Hishammuddin Hussain added that the number of countries involved in the operation had increased from 14 to 25.

Comments (27)

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The comments below have been moderated in advance.

Malcolm Freeman,

Melbourne, Australia,

2 hours ago

They are looking towards Australia also. The Australian government has taken over the search area towards Coco Islands which are part of Australia.

Dan de Lion,

Nottingham,

3 hours ago

Was just one signal picked up by the satellite? Or was it a series of signals? It is not clear from reports I see in the press, something which I think shows a great inadequacy in the reporting of this incident, does anyone even ask these basic questions? I find it hard to believe they have not been asked.

All we seem to get is half baked in adequate reporting.

Just who is in charge of this search operation, they don’t seem to be doing a very good job.

Here are a few points, it is reasonable to assume that the plane flew in a straight line to it’s destination if it was going anywhere. So……. given it was supposedly flying for 7 1/2 hours it would have been a long long way from where they have been searching, so why were they searching days in areas if could not have been?

If it went north surely it would have been picked up by other radar as it is mainly land to the north?

And why did it stop transmitting? Would it stop transmitting if it landed? Or do we have to assume it crashed?

ROCKINGHAMTEAPOT,

perth, United Kingdom,

3 hours ago

It’s in Iran I’ll bet

Charlie,

Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam,

3 hours ago

It is astonishing just how inept the authorities are at locating an aircraft.

algerialynx,

Algeria,

3 hours ago

Now is the time for 007 to step in.

clara,

London,

3 hours ago

How are they even sure that the plane has come down, it may not even be a wreckage they are looking for. Best case scenario the plane is being hidden somewhere and the passengers are all ok, we can only remain positive and hopeful. Because when that runs out there’s nothing else to grasp onto.

brando27,

Manchester, United Kingdom,

3 hours ago

It’s unbelievable in this day and age that a plane and over 200 people can simply vanish off the face of the earth?!! This story is very suspicious..

a_three,

London, United Kingdom,

4 hours ago

This is a crazy story. It gets stranger scarier with each passing day that an object as big as this plane cannot be found.

Green Arrow,

Starling City,

4 hours ago

Those countries Military Radars would have spotted the plane and it would have been intercepted by their air forces. Ridiculous to think it would have gone all that way without being seen. The US forces are operating out of Kazakhstan too.

EastLondon84,

London, United Kingdom,

4 hours ago

Two words. Diego Garcia!

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From the islands of Indonesia to the steppe of Kazakhstan: Hunt for missing flight MH370 switches to land and covers ELEVEN countries