A Malaysian paper reports that the co-pilot of the missing Malaysian plane’s mobile phone was switched on as plane vanished from radar screens near Penang island.
The call is believed to have ended abruptly possibly “because the aircraft was fast moving away from the [telecommunications] tower,” the New Straits Times quoted a source as saying.
The Malaysian daily also quoted another source saying that while Fariq Abdul Hamid’s “line was reattached”, there was no certainty that a call was made from the Boeing 777 which vanished on 8 March.
It is still not clear who the co pilot was trying to ring.
Fariq and Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah have come under intense scrutiny after the plane mysteriously vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.
A criminal investigation was triggered following the disappearance of the plane when investigators indicated the plane may have been deliberately diverted and has the communication systems manually switched off.
The NST report states that after turning off course MH370 is believed to have flown low enough near Penang island on Malaysia’s west coast for a telecom tower to pick up the co-pilot’s phone signal.
The phone line was “reattached” between the time the plane veered off course and blipped off the radar, the government-controlled paper quoted the second source as saying.
“A ‘reattachment’ does not necessarily mean that a call was made. It can also be the result of the phone being switched on again.”
The NST report is currently being examined by Malaysian transport ministry who are expected to issue a statement soon.
According to the Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, said signals picked up during the search in the remote southern Indian Ocean, believed to be “pings” from the black box recorders, were “rapidly fading”.
“While we do have a high degree of confidence that the transmissions that we’ve been picking up are from flight MH370’s black box recorder, no one would underestimate the difficulties of the task still ahead of us,” Abbott told a news conference in Beijing.
Batteries in the black box recorder have already exceeded their normal 30-day life, making the search to find it on the murky seabed all the more urgent. Once they are confident they have located it, searchers then plan to deploy a small unmanned “robot”, known as an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle.
“Work continues in an effort to narrow the underwater search area for when the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle is deployed,” the Australian agency co-ordinating the search said on Saturday. “There have been no confirmed acoustic detections over the past 24 hours,” it said in a statement.
The Malaysian government is investigating civil aviation and military authorities to determine why opportunities to identify and track the flight were missed in the chaotic hours after it vanished.
Satellite data analysis led investigators to conclude the Boeing 777 crashed into the ocean somewhere west of Perth. So far, four “ping” signals, which could be from the plane’s black box recorders, have been detected in the search area in recent days by a US Navy “Towed Pinger Locator”.
“We are now getting to the stage where the signal, from what we are very confident is the black box, is starting to fade and we are hoping to get as much information as we can before the signal finally expires,” Abbott said on Friday.
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