From BBC

The US has sent surveillance teams to the Indian Ocean to help search for the missing Malaysian plane, after claims emerged that it may have flown for longer than investigators had thought.

Unnamed officials said the plane sent signals to satellites for up to five hours after its apparent disappearance.

However, investigators said the data were not conclusive and Malaysia refused to comment on the claims.

Flight MH370 vanished last Saturday with 239 people on board.

The plane, which was flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, last made contact with air traffic control over the South China Sea to the east of Malaysia.

But several US media reports on Thursday cited unnamed officials as saying that the Boeing 777 was “pinging” satellites for hours after its last contact with air-traffic controllers.

That led searchers to believe the plane could have flown more than 1,600 km (1,000 miles) beyond its last confirmed radar sighting.

The US, which is one of a number of countries helping in the search for the plane, has now sent a navy destroyer and a sophisticated surveillance aircraft to the Indian Ocean, hundreds of miles west of Malaysia.

The Indian navy, air force and coast guard are also now assisting after a request for help from the Malaysian government.

The BBC’s Jonathan Head in Kuala Lumpur says there have already been a number of false leads in the search for the missing plane.

However, he says the latest claims are being taken seriously by the US.

Reuters news agency later quoted unnamed sources close to the Malaysian investigation as saying that an unidentified aircraft had been tracked by radar flying north-west of Malaysia on Saturday.

The sources said investigators now suspected it was the missing plane.

White House spokesman Jay Carney confirmed that US teams were shifting their focus to the Indian Ocean because of “new information”, but he gave no further details.

Malaysia’s acting transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein said in a news conference that the search area was expanding both east and west of the Malaysian peninsula.

He said he was aware of the claims about satellite data, but he would not comment on any claims unless the information had been “corroborated by the relevant authorities”.

India has military radar installations in the Andaman Islands with a range stretching well beyond the area where some believe the jet may have come down.

It is thought that they would have picked up anything the size of a commercial jet.

Some 153 of the passengers on board the Malaysia Airlines plane were Chinese, and Beijing has been putting pressure on Malaysia to intensify its search.

Earlier this week, Chinese officials released satellite pictures of debris in the South China Sea.

Hishammuddin Hussein said the images were not connected to Flight MH370’s disappearance.

He said the Chinese embassy in Kuala Lumpur had told Malaysian authorities that the release of the pictures was a “mistake”.

But Chinese state TV said a warship was continuing to search for the debris and suggested that Malaysia had been unable to analyse the pictures properly.

Meanwhile, a Chinese research institute on Friday said it had found evidence of a “sea floor event” some 90 minutes after the plane disappeared.

The seismology research group at the University of Science and Technology of China said it happened 116 km north-east of the last point of contact of the plane, in an area not known for seismic activity, according to state media.

The research group said the vibrations could have been caused by the plane plunging into the sea.

Marine geologist Dave Long from the British Geological Survey told the BBC that the energy released by a plane hitting the ocean would be rapidly dissipated in the water.

He said any device picking up such small movements would have to be very sensitive and incredibly close to the impact, meaning that search teams would now know exactly where to look for the debris.

Agence France Presse From Business Insider

US spy satellites detected no sign of a mid-air explosion when a Malaysian airliner lost contact with air traffic controllers, American officials said Wednesday.

The US government in the past has used its satellite network to identify heat signatures linked to exploding aircraft but in this case, nothing was found, according to US officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The absence of evidence of any mid-air explosion has added to the mystery surrounding the fate of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared at about 1730 GMT Friday after taking off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing.

NBC News first reported the lack of satellite results.

With no specific area identified by satellites, US naval ships that joined the search effort in the South China Sea were not sent to a particular location to look for debris, officials said.

“If they had picked up something (by satellite), our ships would have been sent to that spot,”one official told AFP.

The hunt for the missing Boeing 777 now covers a vast area of nearly 27,000 nautical miles (over 90,000 square kilometers).

Organizers said Wednesday an international pool of satellites from different countries has joined the search effort for the missing airliner, with plans to share images from orbiting satellites.

According to author and intelligence historian Jeffrey Richelson, the US government’s space infrared satellite system detected the blast that brought down TWA Flight 800 in 1996 in the Atlantic Ocean, shortly after take-off from JFK airport in New York City.

In his book “America’s Space Sentinels,” Richelson describes the satellite network that was initially set up to relay instant warning of an imminent Soviet missile launch.

Although the “Defense Support Network” satellite system was created to detect the infrared signals from missile launches, it “proved to be valuable in a number of other ways — such as detecting aircraft flying on afterburner, spacecraft in orbit, and terrestrial/atmospheric explosions, if of sufficient intensity,” Richelson said by email.

“Thus, DSP data was examined after a number of air crashes,” he said.

The satellites have detected a mid-air collision over the Grand Canyon, the crash of a stealth fighter jet, the crash of an A-10 aircraft and the collision of US and German military planes off the coast of Africa in 1997, he said.

Investigators examined DSP satellite data after the disappearance of Air France Flight 447 in 2009, which went missing after taking off from Rio de Janeiro en route to Paris, he said. But it’s not clear any clues were found, he added.

The spy satellites also have been used to track forest fires and detect meteorites, according to the book.

PHOTO: vietnamese air force looks for malaysia 370 REUTERS/Nguyen Huy Kham

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Related story:

Why Malaysia will say almost nothing about the missing plane

By Joshua Kurlantzick From Bloomberg

With an international team of investigators still seemingly baffled about what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which disappeared over the weekend, relatives of the passengers and diplomats from countries touched by the mishap have vented their frustration with the Malaysian government. For days, it seems, Malaysian officials and the state-owned carrier have released almost no information about the flight or working theories of why it vanished. Malaysia Airlines did not even inform relatives for 15 hours that the plane had disappeared, sending the distraught families to a hotel in Beijing to wait, and Kuala Lumpur’s envoys still have mostly kept the relatives in the dark days later.

More than 100 friends and relatives of the vanished passengers signed a petition on Monday calling on the Malaysian government to be more transparent and answer questions. Several of the relatives threw bottles at Malaysia Airlines employees who came to speak with them in Beijing, where the missing plane had been headed, but mostly the officials maintained their tight-lipped approach.

The frustration felt by families of the missing is understandable and reasonable, but no one should have expected much better from the Malaysian government. Although theoretically a democracy with regular, contested elections, Malaysia has been ruled since independence by the same governing coalition that has become known for its lack of transparency and disinterest—even outright hostility—toward the press and inquiring citizens. For a relatively wealthy country, Malaysia is also unusually prone to corruption. Since the Sept. 11 attacks and the revelations that al-Qaeda members had convened planning meetings in Malaysia, the government has become intensely controlling of any information about potential terror threats while maintaining a liberal visa policy for arrivals.

STORY: Why Do Airlines Keep ‘Black Box’ Flight Data Trapped on Planes?

Malaysia’s actual air safety record is, according to aviation experts, relatively strong. That achievement is unsurprising for a country with a per capita gross domestic product of about $10,400, which has become a global hub for electronics production and other high-tech manufacturing. Before the disappearance of Flight MH370, Malaysia Airlines had not suffered a fatal crash since 1995. Kuala Lumpur, where the plane originated, has an even higher GDP per capita than the rest of the country—about $18,000—and boasts a vast, modern skyline, efficient transport, and gleaming new suburbs.

But Malaysia’s politics have not kept pace with its economic expansion. The long-ruling Barisan Nasional coalition has continued to win elections through massive gerrymandering, outright thuggery, and opposition parties’ inability to stop squabbling and make connections with rural voters.

In the most recent national elections, held in May 2013, the Barisan Nasional coalition won the largest number of seats in parliament, although the opposition actually won the popular vote; only gerrymandering, massive handouts to voters, and many election irregularities ensured the Barisan Nasional’s victory. In addition, the ruling party squeaked home by appealing primarily to the most hardline elements within its coalition, politicians and voters disdainful of the country’s multiethnic identity and the incremental freedoms of expression and social life that have developed in the past 20 years.

So even though Malaysia is far richer than neighboring Indonesia or the Philippines, those countries’ histories of democratic politics have made their politicians more accountable and more attuned to public expectations. Since independence in 1957, Malaysia has had only six prime ministers and the senior ranks of the ruling coalition have gained little fresh blood. In the current crisis, Prime Minister Najib Razak has made few substantive comments on the plane, while Malaysia’s major state-controlled media outlets, which in theory could have been ahead of the plane investigation story, have been very timid in their reporting.

This lack of accountability filters down, especially at state-owned enterprises such as Malaysia Airlines, which are notorious in Malaysia for insider dealing, corruption, and lack of transparency. Even before the crash, Malaysia Airlines’ parent company had lost money the last three years, including a huge loss of more than $350 million in 2013, in part because of its terrible management. One comprehensive study of government-linked companies, conducted by a group of economists in Australia and Malaysia, found that Malaysia state-run firms had worse corporate governance than publicly traded Malaysian companies not controlled by the state. Partly because investors understood that state-run companies were so poorly managed, the study found lower overall valuations on the Malaysian stock market. In other words, these state companies traded at a discount because of their mismanagement.

PHOTO: Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation Director General Azharuddin Abdul Rahman speaks during a press conference on March 10

Photograph by Daniel Chan/AP Photo

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