Hunt for jet lacks concrete leads

Agencies expand search area, say no cause can be ruled out

CEO of Malaysia Airlines Ignatius Ong, center, gestures as he prepares to speak to the media outside a hotel room for relatives or friends of passengers aboard a missing Malaysia Airlines airplane in Beijing, China Monday, March 10, 2014. Vietnamese aircraft spotted what they suspected was one of the doors of the missing Boeing 777 on Sunday, while questions emerged about how two passengers managed to board the ill-fated aircraft using stolen passports. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)
CEO of Malaysia Airlines Ignatius Ong, center, gestures as he prepares to speak to the media outside a hotel room for relatives or friends of passengers aboard a missing Malaysia Airlines airplane in Beijing, China Monday, March 10, 2014. Vietnamese aircraft spotted what they suspected was one of the doors of the missing Boeing 777 on Sunday, while questions emerged about how two passengers managed to board the ill-fated aircraft using stolen passports. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

SEPANG, Malaysia - The mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 deepened Monday when a sweeping search failed to find any sign of the jetliner near its last known location, leaving experts to puzzle over how a Boeing 777 with 239 people aboard could have vanished without a trace.

The search was set back by a number of false leads that seemed to underline how little investigators have been able to pin down about the progress of the flight.

With so little concrete to go on so far, aviation experts explored a number of plausible scenarios to explain the loss of the plane, and investigators said they could not yet conclusively rule out almost any potential cause, including terrorism, hijacking, crew malfeasance, pilot error or mechanical failure.

An object bobbing in the Gulf of Thailand that from a distance looked like a life raft turned out to be the lid of a large box, Vietnamese authorities said. An oil slick in Malaysian waters was found not to contain any jet fuel. And what was initially thought to be an aircraft tail floating in the sea was actually “logs tied together,” a Malaysian official said.

The lack of results so far raised questions about whether the ships, planes and helicopters from nine nations that were scouring the waters near the aircraft’s last reported location, some of them using highly sophisticated equipment, were looking in the right place.

Arnie Reiner, a retired captain with US Airways and the former chief accident investigator at Pan Am, noted, “If they somehow got turned around or went off course when the thing was going down, it could be 90 or 100 miles away from where the flight data disappeared.”

It was not yet known whether the Malaysian plane deviated from its planned flight path or how long the pilots could still fly the aircraft after the last reported contact.

The search for the airliner has expanded. Malaysia Airlines today said the western coast of the country is now the focus of the hunt, which is the other side of Malaysia from where the flight was reported missing.

In a statement today, the airline said the hunt had expanded beyond the flight path, and the “focus is on the West Peninsula of Malaysia at the Strait of Malacca.”

Amid the confusion, this much seemed clear: The aircraft took off from Kuala Lumpur after midnight Saturday bound for Beijing and lost contact with ground controllers when it was over the Gulf of Thailand, making its way toward Vietnamese airspace in good weather under a moonless sky. The airline said there was no distress call.

Transponders on commercial airliners automatically report their location, altitude, speed and other data by radio. The last two readings from the devices on Flight MH370 were recorded at 1:21 a.m. local time, some 40 minutes after takeoff, and they did not include altitude, said Mikael Robertsson of Flightradar24, a Stockholm-based organization that tracks aircraft around the world. Robertsson said that might be coincidence: Readings are often incomplete because of transient interference from other aircraft.

Boeing officials and investigators from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board began conferring with Malaysian officials about Flight MH370 on Monday, U.S. and Malaysian officials said. The FBI has offered to send agents and forensic specialists to Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand, but so far those countries have declined the assistance, U.S. law enforcement officials said.

One locus of speculation Monday was the report from the Malaysian government that two men had boarded the plane using stolen passports from Italy and Austria. It was not clear whether the two men, whom Malaysian officials described only as “not Asian,” had anything to do with the plane’s disappearance.

The men, who were scheduled to connect in Beijing for flights to two different European cities, used one-way tickets issued by a travel agent in the Thai resort city of Pattaya.The police there said they were booked not by the passengers themselves but by an Iranian man known to the police only as Ali, who ordered them by telephone. Another Iranian man paid for the tickets in cash, and the police questioned that man Monday, according to Supachai Phuikaewkhum, the chief of police in Pattaya.

The Malaysia Airlines plane is not the first modern jet to vanish mysteriously. Searchers sometimes take months to locate crash debris in remote areas, deep water or difficult weather conditions. But the Gulf of Thailand is busy with fishing boats, commercial vessels and natural-gas platforms and is no deeper than about 260 feet. By contrast, an Air France flight that disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 was recovered from a depth of about 13,000 feet.

Aircraft and surface vessels from several countries have joined the search, among them P-3C Orion military planes which have radar systems capable of locating floating objects as small as a basketball. In a sign of how uncertain officials are of the plane’s whereabouts, a U.S. Orion spent part of Monday searching off the western coast of Malaysia, several hundred miles from the flight’s last reported location, officials said.

Although officials have not ruled out terrorism in the Malaysia Airlines case, no evidence of foul play has yet come to light.

By whatever cause, if the missing Malaysia Airlines plane broke up in the air or plunged headlong into the sea, experts said, there ought to be widely strewn debris for searchers to find, but none had yet been spotted by Monday night. That suggested to at least one observer, Robertsson of Flightradar24, that the pilots may have tried an emergency ditching like the one US Airways Flight 1549 managed in the Hudson River in 2009, only to have their aircraft fill with water and sink swiftly afterward. While Flight 1549 ditched on a smooth river in broad daylight, the Malaysia Airlines pilots would have been making the attempt in the dark in the chop of the sea.

Information for this article was contributed by Eric Schmitt of The New York Times and by staff members of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 03/11/2014

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