US Officials Now Say Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight #MH370 Communication System/Transponders Shut Down Manually & Not Because of Catastrophic Failure … Believe Missing Plane Flew for 5 Hours … Possibly Diverted to a Secret Location

The WSJ is reporting, U.S. investigators suspect the missing Malaysia Airlines plane flew on for hours after contact was lost. The mystery continues as to what happened to this missing plane and where it is. The scope of the search continues to get larger and larger.  Did the plane crash, was it a terror attack or was it hijacked? Signs are now starting to look like maybe it was hijacked and diverted to an undisclosed location. Did the pilot go rogue? And if so, for what reason. The mystery continues.

U.S. investigators suspect that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 stayed in the air for up to four hours past the time it reached its last confirmed location, according to two people familiar with the details, raising the possibility that the plane could have flown on for hundreds of additional miles under conditions that remain murky.

The investigators believe the plane flew for a total of up to five hours, according to these people, based on analysis of signals sent by the Boeing 777′s satellite-communication link designed to automatically transmit the status of certain onboard systems to the ground.

Throughout the roughly four hours after the jet dropped from civilian radar screens, these people said, the link operated in a kind of standby mode and sought to establish contact with a satellite or satellites. These transmissions did not include data, they said, but the periodic contacts indicate to investigators that the plane was still intact and believed to be flying.

U.S. counterterrorism officials are pursuing the possibility that a pilot or someone else on board the plane may have diverted it toward an undisclosed location after intentionally turning off the jetliner’s transponders to avoid radar detection, according to one person tracking the probe.

Video Hat Tip – The Gateway Pundit