March 12, 2014 -- Updated 0545 GMT (1345 HKT)
Virtual look at Flight 370's route
(CNN) -- The puzzling scraps of information that have come to light about the Malaysian airliner that disappeared more than four days ago are generating a lot of bafflement and an increasing amount of frustration.
Amid continued confusion
about where the plane with 239 people on board might have ended up,
Vietnam said Wednesday it is pulling back its search efforts until
Malaysian authorities come up with better information on where to look.
"We have scaled down the
searches for today and are still waiting for the response from Malaysian
authorities," Phan Quy Tieu, Vietnam's vice minister of transportation,
told reporters.
He described as
"insufficient" the information provided so far on Malaysia Airlines
Flight 370, which vanished early Saturday over Southeast Asia.
The apparent cause of the
veiled irritation on the Vietnamese side concerns the deepening mystery
over the path the plane may have taken after it lost contact with air
traffic control on its scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
A senior Malaysian air
force official on Tuesday told CNN that after the plane lost all
communications around 1:30 a.m. Saturday, it still showed up on radar
for more than an hour longer. Before it vanished altogether, the plane
apparently turned away from its intended destination and traveled
hundreds of miles off course, the official said.
It was last detected,
according to the official, near Pulau Perak, a very small island in the
Straits of Malacca, the body of water between the Malay Peninsula and
the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
Those assertions,
reported by CNN and other new organizations, have fueled surprise among
aviation analysts and a fresh burst of theories about what might have
happened to the plane. They also appear to have created tensions between
some of the different countries involved in the search efforts.
Uncertainty over exact path
But some Malaysian officials have reportedly cast doubt on the details of the change in direction.
The New York Times cited
Tengku Sariffuddin Tengku Ahmad, spokesman for the Prime Minister's
office, as saying that he had checked with senior military officials,
who told him there was no evidence that the plane had flown back over
the Malay Peninsula to the Straits of Malacca, only that it may have
attempted to turn back.
The Prime Minister's office didn't immediately return calls from CNN seeking comment Wednesday.
But the air force chief Gen. Rodzali Daud didn't go as far as denying that the plane had traveled hundreds of miles off course.
The air force is still
"examining and analyzing all possibilities as regards to the airliner's
flight paths subsequent to its disappearance," he said in a statement
Wednesday.
Daud said it "would not
be appropriate" for the air force to "issue any official conclusions as
to the aircraft's flight path until a high amount of certainty and
verification is achieved."
He denied, though, that
he had made statements to a Malaysian newspaper similar to those that
the senior air force official made to CNN.
Searchers find no trace
The reported change of
course would fit in with some of the areas that search and rescue teams
have been combing over the past several days.
Dozens of ships and
planes from various countries have been searching the sea between the
northeast coast of Malaysia and southwest Vietnam, the area where the
plane lost contact with air traffic controllers.
But they have also been
looking off the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, in the Straits of
Malacca, and north into the Andaman Sea -- areas that would tally with a
change of direction by the plane.
They are also searching the land surface in between those areas.
So far, though, searchers have found no confirmed trace of the plane anywhere.
Vietnam scales back searches
Vietnamese authorities,
who have been heavily involved in the search, appeared to be showing
increasing frustration Wednesday with the information coming from the
Malaysian side.
"Up until now we only
had one meeting with a Malaysian military attache," Phan, the vice
transportation minister, said. "However, the information they have
provided is insufficient."
Vietnam informed
Malaysian authorities that the plane was turning westward at the time it
disappeared but didn't hear anything back, Phan said.
For the moment,
Vietnamese teams will stop searching the sea south of Ca Mau province,
the southern tip of Vietnam, and shift the focus to areas east of Ca
Mau, said Doan Luu, the director of international affairs at the
Vietnamese Civil Aviation Authority.
Doan also told CNN that
Vietnam has asked Malaysian authorities to clarify which location is the
focus of their search, but that it has yet to hear back.
Families' frustration
Families of those on board the plane also want to know more, and some have vented their anger.
"Time is passing by, the
priority should be to search for the living!" a middle-aged man shouted
at meeting with airline officials in Beijing on Tuesday before breaking
into sobs. His son, he said, was one of the passengers aboard the
plane.
Other people at the meeting also voiced their frustration at the lack of information.
Most of those on the flight were Chinese. And for their family members, the wait has been long and anguished.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak on Wednesday appealed to families of the people on board to be patient.
"What we want to tell
them is that we must, indeed, consider their feelings," Najib said. "The
families involved have to understand that this is something unexpected.
The families must understand more efforts have been made with all our
capabilities."
The Chinese government had on Monday urged Malaysia to speed up the investigation into what happened to the plane.
Analysts puzzled
The possibility that the plane changed direction and flew over the Straits of Malacca has perplexed aviation experts.
Peter Goelz, former
managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board, said he
thinks the information, if correct, ominously suggests that someone
purposefully cut off the transponder -- which sends data on altitude,
direction and speed -- and steered the plane from its intended
destination.
"This kind of deviation in course is simply inexplicable," Goelz said.
Other experts aren't
convinced that there was necessarily foul play involved. They say there
could have been some sort of sudden catastrophic electronic failure that
spurred the crew to try to turn around, with no luck.
"Perhaps there was a
power problem," said veteran pilot Kit Darby, former president of
Aviation Information Resources, adding that backup power systems would
only last about an hour. "(It is) natural for the pilot, in my view, to
return to where he knows the airports."
Still, while they have
theories, even those who have piloted massive commercial airliners like
this one admit that they can't conclude anything until the plane is
found.
Authorities have said they're not so far ruling out any possibilities in their investigations.
For now, the massive
multinational search has yielded no breakthrough -- which has only added
to the heartache for the friends and family of the 239 passengers and
crew on board.
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