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Missing Malaysian Plane Could It Have Landed
Missing Malaysian Plane Could It Have Landed
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CNN.com
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http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/14/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/index.html
"You draw that arc, and you look at countries like Pakistan, you know, and you get into your 'Superman'
novels, and you see the plane landing somewhere and (people) repurposing it for some dastardly deed
down the road," he told CNN's Jake Tapper on Thursday.
Aviation experts say it's possible, if highly unlikely, that someone could have hijacked and landed the giant
Boeing 777 undetected.
The international airport in Port Blair, the regional capital of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, has a
runway that is long enough to accommodate a 777, according to publicly available data.
But the region is highly militarized because of its strategic importance to India, Indian officials with
knowledge of the operation tell CNN, making it an unlikely target for pirates trying to sneak in an
enormous airplane with a wingspan of more than 200 feet.
Denis Giles, editor of the Andaman Chronicle newspaper, says there's just nowhere to land such a big
plane in his archipelago without attracting notice.
"There is no chance, no such chance, that any aircraft of this size can come towards Andaman and
Nicobar Islands and land," he said.
The Malaysian government said Friday that it can't confirm the report.
And a senior U.S. official offered a conflicting account Thursday, telling CNN that "there is probably a
significant likelihood" the plane is on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
The jetliner, with 239 people on board, disappeared nearly a week ago as it flew between Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia, and Beijing. The flight has turned into one of the biggest mysteries in aviation history, befuddling
industry experts and government officials. Authorities still don't know where the plane is or what caused it
to vanish.
Suggestions of what happened have ranged from a catastrophic explosion to hijacking to pilot suicide.
Details of the search
Malaysian officials, who are coordinating the search, said Friday that the hunt for the plane was spreading
deeper into both the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
India has deployed assets from its navy, coast guard and air force to the south Andaman Sea to take part
the search, the country's Ministry of Defense said Friday.
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Indian search teams are combing large areas of the archipelago. Two aircraft are searching land and
coastal areas of the island chain from north to south, an Indian military spokesman said Friday, and two
coast guard ships have been diverted to search along the islands' east coast. Indian officials are also
including part of the Bay of Bengal in their search, officials said.
As of Friday, 57 ships and 48 aircraft from 13 countries were involved in the search, Hussein said.
China, which said it would be extending its search, said crews have searched more than 27,000 square
miles (about 70,000 square kilometers) of the South China Sea without finding anything.
On Friday, the United States sent the destroyer USS Kidd to scout the Indian Ocean as the search
expands into that body of water.
"I, like most of the world, really have never seen anything like this," Cmdr. William Marks of the U.S. 7th
Fleet said of the scale of the search. "It's pretty incredible."
"It's a completely new game now," he said. "We went from a chess board to a football field."
Other developments
"Seafloor event": Chinese researchers say they recorded a "seafloor event" in waters around Malaysia
and Vietnam about an hour and a half after the missing plane's last known contact. The event was
recorded in a non-seismic region about 116 kilometers (72 miles) northeast of the plane's last confirmed
location, the University of Science and Technology of China said.
"Judging from the time and location of the two events, the seafloor event may have been caused by
MH370 crashing into the sea," said a statement posted on the university's website.
However, U.S. Geological Survey earthquake scientist Harley Benz said Friday that the event appeared to
be consistent with a naturally occurring 2.7-magnitude earthquake.
Malaysian response: Authorities continued to defend their response to the crash. "A normal
investigation becomes narrower with time, I understand, as new information focuses the search,"
Hishammuddin Hussein, the minister in charge of defense and transportation, said at a news briefing. "But
this is not a normal investigation. In this case, the information we have forces us to look further and further
afield."
However, Bob Francis, a former National Transportation Safety Board official, is one of several experts
who have questioned how Malaysian authorities have handled the situation.
"The Malaysians are not doing a superb job of running this investigation," he said. "And they apparently
give you some information, and then they withhold information. How much are they relying on and
listening to the Europeans and the NTSB who are there with more expertise? I don't know, but I think you
know we've got a mixture of a very strange situation that happens to be in an environment, a regulatory
environment, that really isn't capable or isn't running an investigation the way it should be run."
Malaysia Airlines: The pilots of the missing plane
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