Daily Commentary – Wednesday, March 19, 2014 – The Missing Malaysian Airlines Mystery Deepens

• The search area grows as pilots homes are searched and evidence leads more to an intentional plane diversion

Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Data Was Deleted From Flight Simulator of Pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah

It is looking more and more like a planned event by the pilot of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 …

Authorities in the investigation into the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 are saying that some data files from the flight simulator taken from the home of pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah. The flight simulator was taken from pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s home over the weekend as part of police investigation. How on Earth are we just learning about this now? What files were deleted from this pilot’s flight simulator, maybe how to fly at low levels across the ocean to avoid radar and land on an undisclosed island?

What good reason would one have to delete data files? Obviously a good forensic computer individual should be able to retrieve such data. Maybe this will hold the important clues as to where this missing Malaysia plane is or at least the general direction it flew to. Officials have determined that a deliberate action was to blame for the disappearance of Flight 370 as the police escalate their investigations of Capt. Zaharie, 52 years old, and his 26-year-old co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid.

Malaysian investigators have found that some data from a flight simulator taken from the home of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370′s pilot was deleted.

“Some data has been deleted from the simulator. Forensic efforts are on to retrieve the data,” Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia’s acting transport minister told reporters on Wednesday.

The flight simulator was taken from pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s home over the weekend as part of police investigation. All crew and ground staff who were involved with Flight 370 are currently being investigated, Mr. Hishammuddin said. He added that all crew and personnel are currently being treated as innocent.

The data log of the games on the simulator was cleared on Feb. 3 and experts are looking at what logs were deleted, Malaysian Inspector General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar said at the same news conference. He declined to comment if the experts thought the erasing of the data was unusual.

Malaysia Officials Now Say Missing Airline Flight 370 Was Deliberately Diverted … Missing Plane May Have Flown on for 7 Hours

Malaysia officials are now saying that Malaysia Flight 370 was ‘deliberately diverted’ and then flown for as long as seven hours toward an unknown destination. Satellites tracked the flight for over 7 hours after the plane lost contact. The planes communications and data systems were intentionally and purposely turned off. However, part of the data system could not be turned off and continued to send pinging to satellites.  But for what purpose and who was involved in this hijacking is still unknown. The search continues, now toward the Indian Ocean … Indian aircraft and ships began fanning out a day ago around the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a distant Indian territory toward the coast of Myanmar, and across more than 13,000 square miles of open sea.

The mystery of missing Malaysia flight 370 continues.

The search for Flight 370 turned into a criminal investigation on Saturday, after Malaysia declared that the plane had been deliberately diverted and then flown for as long as seven hours toward an unknown point far from its scheduled route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia said on Saturday afternoon that he would seek the help of governments across a large swath of Asia in the search for the plane, which has been missing for a week and had 239 people on board. The Malaysian authorities released a map showing that the last satellite signal received from the plane had been sent from a point somewhere along one of two arcs spanning large distances across Asia.

Missing airliner may have flown on for 7 hours.

In the most comprehensive account to date of the plane’s fate, Najib drew an ominous picture of what happened aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, saying investigators had determined there was “deliberate action by someone on the plane.”

Najib said the investigation had “refocused” to look at the crew and passengers. A Malaysia Airlines representative, speaking to relatives of passengers in Beijing, said the Malaysian government had opened a criminal investigation into the plane’s disappearance.

The plane’s whereabouts remain unknown one week after it disappeared from civilian radar shortly after takeoff from Kuala Lumpur. But Najib, citing newly analyzed satellite data, said the plane could have last made contact anywhere along one of two corridors: one stretching from northern Thailand toward the Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan border, the other, more southern path stretching from Indonesia to the remote Indian Ocean.

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

Officials Identify Plane Passenger Who Used Stolen Passport … ‘Identity of One of the Two Suspects has Been Confirmed, He is not a Malaysian’

There is so little news as to where Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is and what happened to the missing plane that has seemed to have all but disappeared.

However, one of the few pieces of information that came out early into the airliner investigation was the disturbing news that two individuals aboard the plane had boarded it with stolen passports. In a post-911 world, how is something so simple to check on happen? Interpol is now not only reviewing those individuals with the stolen passports, they are probing more suspect passports from individuals used to board the plane.

Authorities later confirmed the two men – Austrian Christian Kozel and Italian Luigi Maraldi – were not on the plane, and their passports had been stolen in Thailand within the last two years.

An Interpol spokeswoman said a check of all documents used to board the plane had revealed more “suspect passports” that were being further investigated.

She was unable to give further information on the number of documents or the country they related to.

ABC News 3 WEAR is now reporting that that Malaysia officials state, the identity of one of the two suspects has been confirmed. Malaysia’s Inspector General of Police said, that the identity of one of the two suspects has been confirmed, “He is not a Malaysian, but I cannot divulge which country he is from yet.”

ABC Entertainment News | ABC Business News

Two suspects on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 who used stolen passports had no record of entering Malaysia legally, officials say.

Malaysia’s Inspector General of Police, Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar, said Monday that the identity of one of the two suspects has been confirmed.

“He is not a Malaysian, but I cannot divulge which country he is from yet,” he said.

Two passengers managed to board the ill-fated aircraft using passports reported stolen in Thailand in recent years, booking their tickets at the same time. The passports belonged to Italian and Austrian residents.