WSJ: Missing Plane Continued Flying for 4 Hours After Losing Radar Contact

The missing Malaysia Airlines plane reportedly flew on for four hours after it lost contact with radar and vanished early Saturday morning.

Flight MH370 carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members has now been missing for 6 days. 12 countries are involved in the massive search efforts.

A Wall Street Journal aviation reporter, quoting a source at Rolls Royce (the maker of the plane’s engines), says flight MH370’s engines continued to send data long after the transponder turned off.

But Malaysia officials — who have been less than forthcoming — denied the Wall Street Journal report.

Malaysia aviation experts also dismissed satellite images released by China yesterday, saying there was no debris found floating at that location in the waters south of Vietnam.

The report from The Wall Street Journal said U.S. aviation investigators and national security officials were basing their belief that the missing plane kept flying on data automatically transmitted to the ground from the passenger jet’s engines.
But Malaysia’s acting Transportation Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said at a news conference that the report, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter, was “inaccurate.”

The Wall Street Journal report said the plane’s engines have an onboard monitoring system supplied by their manufacturer, Rolls-Royce PLC. The system “periodically sends bursts of data about engine health, operations and aircraft movements to facilities on the ground,” the newspaper said.

If the WSJ report is accurate — and the plane flew on for 4 hours, that would put the aircraft over the middle of the Indian Ocean. Many believe the captain or co-captain committed suicide after manually decompressing the plane’s cabin at 35,000 feet, killing everyone on board except the person at the plane’s controls who was wearing an oxygen mask.

The Indian Ocean at its deepest point is 23,000 square feet. That would make the search for the plane nearly impossible.

No submarine on earth can dive that far down without being crushed by the weight of the water at that depth. And only China has submersibles with the technology to dive that far down.

The Titanic, which sank in 1912, was located in 1985 at 12,500 feet in the North Atlantic Ocean by a Franco-American expedition using a submersible. The Titanic remains at the sea bottom. No country or nation has the technology or equipment to raise it from its watery grave.

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