By Steve Almasy, Chelsea J. Carter and Jim Clancy, CNN

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (CNN) — Where do you even begin to look, when the search area covers vast swaths of land and water, stretching thousands of miles, from Kazakhstan to the Indian Ocean?

That’s the question for Malaysian officials and authorities from 24 other nations as people search for a ninth day, trying to find Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and the 239 people on board.

As the search area grows bigger, authorities are also increasing their scrutiny of the pilots, searching their homes in the quest for clues. That included a flight simulator from the captain’s home.

“Police are still working on it. … Nothing conclusive yet,” a senior police official who has direct knowledge of the investigation told CNN on Sunday night, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak to the press.

MH370’s altitude change Malaysian PM points to deliberate action

With news that the Boeing 777-200ER may have flown for more than seven hours after its transponder stopped sending signals March 8, officials said the expanding search area extends over land in southern Asia as far north as Kazakhstan.

“This is a significant recalibration of the search,” Malaysia’s acting Transportation Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said Sunday.

The plane disappeared on March 8, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The airline’s CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said Sunday the missing passenger jet took off with its normal amount of fuel needed for the route, and did not have extra fuel on board that could have extended its range.

One of the nations involved in the search, Pakistan, said Sunday that the plane never showed up on its civilian radars and would have been treated as a threat if it had.

The Times of India reported that India’s military also said there was no way the plane could have flown over India without being picked up on radar.

A study of the flight’s cargo manifest showed there were no dangerous materials on board that concerned investigators, he told reporters.

Investigators are still looking into the backgrounds of the passengers to see if any of them were trained pilots.

“There are still a few countries who have yet to respond to our request for a background check,” said Khalid Abu Bakar, inspector general of the Royal Malaysian Police Force. “But there are a few … foreign intelligence agencies who have cleared all the(ir) passengers.”

U.S. intelligence officials are leaning toward the theory that “those in the cockpit” — the captain and co-pilot — were responsible for the mysterious disappearance, a U.S. official with direct knowledge of the latest thinking told CNN.

What we know about the cockpit crew

The official emphasized no final conclusions have been drawn and all the internal intelligence discussions are based on preliminary assessments of what is known to date.

Other scenarios could still emerge. The notion of a hijacking has not been ruled out, the official said Saturday.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak told reporters on Saturday that the plane veered off course due to apparent deliberate action taken by somebody on board.

‘Someone acting deliberately’

The first clue that the captain or co-pilot may have been involved stems from when the plane made a sharp, deliberate turn just after it last communicated with Kuala Lumpur air traffic controllers, and before it would have to communicate with Vietnamese controllers, according to the U.S. official with knowledge of the latest intelligence thinking.

“This is the perfect place to start to disappear,” the official said.

Adding to the intrigue, ABC News reported that the dramatic left turn was preprogrammed into the plane’s navigation computer. It’s a task that would have required extensive piloting experience.

Two senior law enforcement officials also told ABC that new information revealed the plane performed “tactical evasion maneuvers” after it disappeared from radar. CNN was unable to confirm these reports.

Military radar showed the jetliner flew in a westerly direction back over the Malaysian peninsula, Najib said. It is then believed to have either turned northwest toward the Bay of Bengal or southwest elsewhere in the Indian Ocean, he said.

Flight 370 search expands to Indian Ocean Focus on ‘two corridors’ in plane search WSJ: Plane probe focuses on sabotage

Andaman and Nicobar Islands

“Evidence is consistent with someone acting deliberately from inside the plane,” the Prime Minister said, officially confirming the plane’s disappearance was not caused by an accident. “Despite media reports that the plane was hijacked, we are investigating all major possibilities on what caused MH370 to deviate.”

Kazakhstan to Indian Ocean

As the focus of the investigation has shifted, so, too, has the focus of the search.

Information from international and Malaysian officials indicates that the jet may have flown for more than seven hours after the last contact with the pilots.

Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur at 12:41 a.m. on March 8. The last satellite communication from the plane occurred at 8:11 a.m., Najib said, well past the scheduled arrival time in Beijing. It is possible this contact could have been made from the ground, as long as the airplane still had electrical power, Malaysia’s civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman said Sunday.

That last communication, Najib said, was in one of two possible traffic corridors shown on a map released to the press. A northern arc stretches from the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to northern Thailand, and a southern arc spans from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean.

“Due to the type of satellite data, we are unable to confirm the precise location of the plane when it last made contact with the satellite,” Najib said.

Because the northern parts of the traffic corridor include some tightly guarded airspace over India, Pakistan, and even some U.S. installations in Afghanistan, U.S. authorities believe it more likely the aircraft crashed into waters outside of the reach of radar south of India, a U.S. official told CNN. If it had flown farther north, it’s likely it would have been detected by radar.

The pilots

On Saturday, Malaysian police searched the home of pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53. Shah lives in an upscale gated community in Shah Alam, outside Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur.

The Ministry of Transport said Sunday that police were examining a flight simulator found at the pilot’s house a day earlier.

Two vans were loaded with small bags, similar to shopping bags, at the home of the co-pilot, 27-year-old Fariq Ab Hamid, according to a CNN crew who observed activities at the residence. It was unclear whether the bags were taken from the home, and police made no comment about their activities there.

Najib made clear in a press conference that in light of the latest developments, authorities have refocused their investigation to the crew, ground staff and passengers on board.

Hussein, the transportation minister, told reporters the pilots didn’t request to work together.

Peter Chong, a friend of Shah’s, said he had been in the pilot’s house and tried the simulator.

“It’s a reflection of his love for people — because he wants to share the joy of flying with his friends,” Chong said.

He was bothered by speculation about the captain’s credibility and questions about possible ties to terrorism.

“I think it is a little bit insensitive and unfair to the family,” he said, adding he thought there was no evidence to suggest any ulterior motives on Shah’s part.

Undoubtedly, authorities will scour through the flight manifest and look further to see whether any of the passengers on board had flight training or connections to terror groups.

According to The New York Times, one of the passengers was an aviation engineer on his way to Beijing to work for a private-jet company.

A senior U.S. law enforcement official told CNN that investigators are carefully reviewing the information so far collected on the pilots to determine whether there is something to indicate a plan or a motive.

That would seem supported by preliminary U.S. intelligence reports, which the U.S. official said show the jetliner was in some form of controlled flight at a relatively stable altitude and path when it changed

The search

Malaysia’s Ministry of Transport said Sunday that both the northern and southern corridors are being treated with equal importance. Malaysian officials are working with 25 countries, many of them along the corridors. They include Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, China, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, France, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Afghanistan’s Ministry of Transport said it has joined the search, but said there is no evidence the plane flew over Afghan soil.

Separately, India has “temporarily halted” its search for the missing plane while Malaysian authorities reassess the situation, according to a top military official.

“We are conserving our assets for now,” Rear Adm. Sudhir Pillai, the chief of staff of India’s joint Andaman and Nicobar command, said Sunday. “We are on a standby.”

He said the Malaysians are reviewing India’s deployment.

Meanwhile, according to Najib, new satellite information leads authorities to be fairly certain that someone disabled the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, just before the aircraft reached the east coast of peninsular Malaysia.

ACARS is the system that routinely transmits information like turbulence and fuel load back to the airline.

“Shortly afterward, near the border between Malaysian and Vietnamese air traffic control,” Najib said, “the aircraft’s transponder was switched off.”

A transponder is a system controlled from the cockpit that transmits data about the plane via radio signals to air traffic controllers. It combines with ground radar to provide air traffic controllers with details about the plane, including its identification, speed, position and altitude.

The last voice communication from the cockpit more than a week ago was these words: “All right, good night.”

They were uttered at the Vietnam air traffic control border at about the same time the transponder was shut off, Najib said. That suggests the incident on the plane began sooner than initially thought.

But some have questioned the Prime Minister’s account, given the dearth of information available.

Malaysia investigation criticized

In the days since the flight disappeared, the Malaysian government has been under intense scrutiny for its handling of the investigation. The government has been criticized by some U.S. officials for not sharing information or accepting more offers of help.

Shortly after Najib delivered his remarks, China demanded Malaysia provide more information on the investigation. Of the 239 people aboard the plane, 154 were Chinese.

“Today is the 8th day of the missing MH370, and the plane is still yet to be found,” said a statement from the Foreign Ministry. “Time is life.”

The criticism was more pointed in an editorial published by China’s state-run news agency Xinhua.

“And due to the absence — or at least lack — of timely authoritative information, massive efforts have been squandered, and numerous rumors have been spawned, repeatedly racking the nerves of the awaiting families,” the editorial said.

Malaysia Airlines defended its actions, saying there has never been a case where information gleaned from satellite signals alone could potentially be used to find the location of a missing airliner.

“Given the nature of the situation and its extreme sensitivity, it was critical that the raw satellite signals were verified and analyzed by the relevant authorities so that their significance could be properly understood,” the airline said in a statement. “This naturally took some time, during which we were unable to publicly confirm their existence.”

Transcript: Malaysian Prime Minister’s statement on Flight 370

Families at boiling point

For the families and loved ones of those aboard Flight 370, tensions boiled over Sunday in Beijing at the daily briefing by Malaysia Airlines.

Nine days after the plane went missing, patience is running thin with officials.

Before a packed room, one man told them that the families have already lost faith.

“A liar can lie once, twice or three times, but what’s the point (to) keep lying?” he said. “What we ask for is the truth. Don’t hide things from us.”

A majority of the people in the room stood up when the man asked how many had lost trust in the airline and the Malaysian government.

Another man rushed the front of the room and tried to throw a punch, but was stopped.

The airline has been picking up the tab for families of the Chinese passengers to stay in Beijing during the ordeal.

China is sending technical experts to join the investigation, and two Chinese search vessels headed for the Strait of Malacca, according to Xinhua.

People are across the world have shown their support for those involved.

During his weekly Sunday message following prayers at the Vatican, Pope Francis asked the crowd to pray for the crew members and passengers of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane and their families. “We are close to them in this difficult moment,” Pope Francis said.

For more on this story go to:

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/16/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/

See also:

Malaysia Prime Minister: ‘Deliberate action’ caused jet to disappear

By Cathy Burke From Newsmax

Investigators searched the home of the pilot of the missing Malaysia Airlines jet Saturday as the probe focused on possible sabotage.

Officials now believe someone on board deliberately shut off its communications and tracking systems, turned the plane around, and flew for nearly seven hours after it vanished from radar, Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak said Saturday.

“These movements are consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane,” Razak said.

A Malaysian official, who was not named because he was not authorized to brief the press, went further, telling The Associated Press that hijacking was no longer a theory. ”

“It is conclusive,” the official said.

The move on the pilot’s home came in after analysis of data indicating the plane made erratic changes in altitude and course — and that manual changes attempted to mask the jet’s location.

“Increasingly, it seems to be heading into the criminal arena,” Richard Healing, a former member of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, told the Wall Street Journal Friday.

The latest bits of information from the probe “indicate the emphasis is on determining if a hijacker or crew member diverted the plane,” he said.

A U.S. official told the Associated Press investigators are now examining whether the baffling disappearance may have been ‘‘an act of piracy.’’

The New York Times reported radar signals recorded by the Malaysian military show Flight 370 — which took off from Kuala Lumpur last Saturday with 279 people aboard — climbed to 45,000 feet soon after it disappeared from civilian radar, then made a sharp turn to the west.

The radar track showed the plane then dropping to just 23,000 feet as it approached the island of Penang, one of the country’s largest.

Military radar last recorded the plane flying at 29,500 feet some 200 miles northwest of Penang and headed toward India’s Andaman Islands, the Times reported.

An unidentified Malaysian official told The Associated Press only a skilled aviator could navigate the plane the way it was flown after its last confirmed location over the South China Sea.

An Asia-based Boeing pilot told the Times flying above the plane’s service limit of 43,100 feet, along with a depressurized cabin, could have knocked out passengers and crew — and could have been a deliberate maneuver by a pilot or hijacker.

The Journal reported investigators suspect two systems were shut off after the Beijing-bound plane took off: First, the plane’s transponders stopped functioning about an hour into the flight, making it difficult for air-traffic controllers to track the craft on radar.

Then, a second system sent a routine aircraft-monitoring message to a satellite indicating someone made a manual change in the plane’s heading that turned it sharply to the west, The Journal said.

The plane is now also believed to have continued flying for more than four hours after diverting its course — based on automated “pings” sent by onboard systems that try to connect with satellites.

One of the most chilling findings came from investigators examining data transmitted from the plane’s Rolls-Royce engines, showing the aircraft descending 40,000 feet in the space of a minute, the Times reported.

Investigators don’t believe it.

“A lot of stock cannot be put in the altitude data” sent from the engines, the Times quoted one unnamed official saying. “A lot of this doesn’t make sense.”

Aviation lecturer Cengiz Turkoglu of City University London said dramatic changes in altitude can happen because of a deliberate act in the cockpit, but that “it is extremely difficult for an aircraft to physically, however heavy it might be, to free fall,” the Times reported.

Initial fears, later discounted, were that terrorists might have brought the plane down after it disappeared.

Investigators also considered, but dismissed, the possibility that hijackers landed the plane somewhere for later use in a terrorist attack, the Times reported.

But one official told the Times that current information “leads them to believe that it either ran out of fuel or crashed right before it ran out of fuel.”

Meanwhile, CNN reported a classified analysis by the United States and Malaysian governments calculates the flight likely crashed into the Indian Ocean on one of two possible flight paths.

In one flight path scenario, the plane went down in the Bay of Bengal off the coast of India; another scenario has the plane traveling southeast and crashing into the Indian Ocean.

Still another theory being considered has the plane coming down in the remote Andaman Islands.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

For more on this story go to: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/missing-plane-Indian-Ocean-Malaysia-Airlines/2014/03/14/id/559706#ixzz2w2fch4G2

Related story:

Politician slammed for linking lost Malaysian plane to Bermuda Triangle

From Caribbean360

The Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party member sparked outrage with a tweet in which he said Flight MH370 had gone missing in “a new Bermuda Triangle” off Vietnam.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Friday March 14, 2014 – As search teams from several countries scour land, sea and air for the mysteriously missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, and families of the 239 people aboard continue to endure an agonizing wait, a Malaysian politician is up to the neck in hot water for an insensitive – and some say insane – tweet evoking images of the Twilight Zone.

Opposition politician Mohammad Nizar Jamaluddin sparked outrage with a tweet in which he said the Malaysian 777 had gone missing in a “new Bermuda Triangle” off Vietnam.

Jamaluddin, former Menteri Besar of Perak, was responding to a tweet by TV host Piers Morgan in which the CNN anchor commented that it was incredible in this modern age that an aeroplane could just disappear.

Tagging Morgan, the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party member responded: “New Bermuda Triangle detected in Vietnam waters, well-equipped sophisticated devices are of no use!”

Jamaluddin was referring to the triangular region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean surrounded by Bermuda, Florida and Puerto Rico. It has also been dubbed the Devil’s Triangle on account of the unsolved mysteries that have allegedly hounded the area, with ships and planes reportedly vanishing without a trace.

Meanwhile, the Malaysian politician probably wished he could do a disappearing act of his own as Twitter users lost no time in slamming him for his comment.

“You think that’s funny?” tweeted @Adrian-NCF. Added @imNicL: “Thanks for being inconsiderate when Malaysians are united in solidarity.”

Yet as all the angry responses poured in, perhaps none was as eloquent as the simple words of a Malaysian teenager.

“im a 16 yearold kid can think rationally and sadden with the news while you as a leader is making fun of it. May you step on legos,” tweeted @Marrsyaaa.

Jamaluddin later apologised, calling what he did “commenting beyond the norms and slightly outside the box.”

“I tweeted prayers for the MH370’s passengers’ safety before that,” he said. “If, at all, my comments did cause unnecessary disturbance and disheartened feelings, my greatest apologies — I seek forgiveness.”

Amidst a wash of conflicting reports about MH370’s possible fate, as well as a seemingly haphazard investigation sufficiently bizarre to scream everything from “incompetence” to “cover-up,” it’s hardly surprising that the disappearance has evoked images of the infamous Triangle with its fabled force fields, time portals, extra-terrestrials and underwater alien bases.

Some punters have even pointed out that the Malaysia Airlines plane vanished over an area of the ocean that is on the exact opposite part of the globe from the Bermuda Triangle.

Checking a map or globe will nevertheless prove them wrong.

The search area is roughly on the opposite side of the world not of the Devil’s Triangle in the North Atlantic, but instead further to the south in the Caribbean Sea

For more on this story go to: http://www.caribbean360.com/index.php/travel/1107277.html?utm_source=Caribbean360+Newsletters&utm_campaign=e0613d70a0-Vol_9_Issue_053_News3_14_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_350247989a-e0613d70a0-39393477#ixzz2w2PfPhR1