As the public clamours for explanation of what happened on the plane that went missing with 239 people on board, Malaysian investigators have stood by the four offered possibilities for the plane’s disappearance: hijack, sabotage, personal problems, and psychological issues with the 227 passengers and 12 crew members.
Beyond that, they refuse to say.
“They are totally committed to the idea that the black box will explain everything,” an unnamed official told the WSJ.
In recent press conferences, Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein stressed the importance of locating the two so-called “black boxes” — a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder — before authorities could answer the question of “What happened on board flight MH370?”
This was in addition to the more pressing question of where the Boeing 777-200ER was located.
“It is a very, very difficult situation because the one question they want to know is the answer to which we do not have, which is where are their loved ones and where is the aeroplane,” Hishammuddin said on Friday.
With so much riding on the discovery of the “black boxes” from MH370, investigators are racing against the clock to find these before time runs out.
The recorders are equipped with emergency locator beacons but these only have enough power to transmit for 30 days. Flight MH370 has been missing since March 8, leaving searchers just two weeks before the beacons go silent.
In lieu of the information from the plane, investigators are discovering few leads to help explain what caused the plane to fly off course before disappearing.
Initial suspicion of terrorism following the discovery of two passengers who boarded the flight using stolen passports has receded, with US and international law enforcement agencies discounting the possibility.
“No group operating in the region has the capacity to pull something like this off; no one has ever been interested in targeting Malaysia; nothing in the pilots’ backgrounds suggests any connection with radical groups; no one picked up any chatter on all the fancy equipment deployed around the world to monitor terrorist conversations; none of the passengers had terrorist connections,” Sidney Jones, director of the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, told the WSJ.
Mechanical or structural failure also appears only a remote possibility, given the plane’s six hours of flight after it diverted from its original flight path.
With the 227 passengers cleared by the intelligence agencies of all countries whose nationals were on board save for Russia, attention has shifted towards the crew members of the plane.
Malaysian investigators searched the homes of pilots Zaharie Ahmad Shah and Fariq Ab Hamid on March 15, taking a flight simulator belonging to the former for further examination.
Three commercially-available simulators were found to be installed, while the data logs were deleted on February 3. The machine is now on its way to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the US for data retrieval.
But beyond circumstance, there is little to point investigators towards a conclusive and plausible hypothesis in the mystery of MH370 in the absence on information from plane’s recorders.
With only indistinct satellite images providing the “best lead” so far in locating the plane that vanished seemingly without trace, investigators face the possibility of a long wait before they get their hands on the crucial “black boxes” — if ever.
MH370 and the 239 people on board disappeared less than an hour after the Beijing-bound flight left Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 12.41am on March 8. The plane and its passengers remain missing despite over two weeks of intensive searching by a multinational effort.
