– 14-minute gap –
US newspapers and major networks all cited unidentified officials as saying the plane continued to emit signals via satellite “pings” for several hours after it lost contact.
The last such signal was sent four hours after the last radar contact, from over water, at a normal cruising altitude, the Wall Street Journal cited investigators as saying.
Gerry Soejatman, an independent aviation analyst based in Jakarta, was sceptical that the plane could have flown undetected to the Indian Ocean given the number of military radars operated in the region by Malaysia, India, Thailand and Indonesia.
“How could it get past all of that?” said Soejatman. “And if it did, how many people in the military are going to lose their jobs?”
ABC news said US investigators believe the aircraft’s data reporting system and its transponder – which reports its position in flight to ground-based radar – shut down separately.
The 14-minute interval suggests they may have been deliberately disabled or at any rate did not fail as a result of a catastrophic airframe incident, the US network said.
Coupled with Malaysian radar data indicating that the plane may have inexplicably started to turn back, the sequential shutdown could lend credence to the theory of a cockpit takeover. READ: Malaysia launches terror probe over vanished jet.
But Soejatman said the time lag could have been the result of a fire, “and then the systems go down one by one”.
“It doesn’t necessarily have to be deliberate,” he said.
The plane lost radar contact at around 1:30am, less than an hour after take-off, according to Malaysian officials.
They have confirmed that the last words heard from the cockpit were a relaxed “Alright, good night” as the plane was due to pass from Malaysian to Vietnamese air traffic control.
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