Official: MH370 co-pilot's phone was on
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Cell phone tower detected co-pilot's phone around time of disappearance, official says
- Underwater probe deployed in search for missing jetliner
- An oil slick has been found 5.5 kilometers (3.4 miles) from where pings were detected
- Search official: There's no guarantee the underwater vehicle will find wreckage
(CNN) -- The phone of the co-pilot of Malaysia
Airlines Flight 370 was on and made contact with a cell tower in
Malaysia about the time the plane disappeared from radar, a U.S.
official told CNN on Monday.
However, the U.S.
official -- who cited information shared by Malaysian investigators --
said there was no evidence the co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, had tried to
make a call.
The official told CNN's
Pamela Brown on Monday that a cell-phone tower in Penang, Malaysia --
about 250 miles from where the flight's transponder last sent a signal
-- detected the co-pilot's phone searching for service around the time
the plane vanished from radar.
The details do appear to
reaffirm suggestions based on radar and satellite data that the plane
was off course and was probably flying low enough to obtain a signal
from a cell tower, the official said.
The revelation follows
reporting over the weekend in a Malaysian newspaper that the co-pilot
had tried to make a telephone call while the plane was in flight.
Asked Sunday by CNN about
the newspaper report about a purported effort to make a call by the
co-pilot, Malaysia's acting transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein
said, "As far as I know, no, but as I said that would be in the realm of
the police and the other international (authorities) and when the time
comes that will be revealed. But I do not want to speculate on that at
the moment."
Underwater search
Efforts to find the
missing plane and the 239 people aboard focused beneath the choppy
surface of the southern Indian Ocean on Monday as Australian authorities
sent a U.S. Navy submersible diving toward the sea floor.
The decision to put the
Bluefin-21 autonomous underwater vehicle into the water for the first
time in the 38-day search comes nearly a week after listening devices
last heard sounds that could be from locator beacons attached to the
plane's "black boxes."
"We haven't had a single
detection in six days," Australian chief search coordinator Angus
Houston said. "It's time to go underwater."
Photos: The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
New sonar device seeks plane underwater
Search for MH370 goes underwater
Underwater vehicle to search for MH370
The probe is equipped
with side-scan sonar -- acoustic technology that creates pictures from
the reflections of sound. Such technology is routinely used to find
sunken ships and was crucial in finding Air France Flight 447, which
crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.
Houston cautioned
against hopes that the underwater vehicle will find wreckage of the
plane, which disappeared on March 8 on a flight between Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia, and Beijing that should have taken about six hours.
"It may not," he said. "This will be a slow and painstaking process."
It will take the probe
and its operators 24 hours to map each portion of the search area -- two
hours to descend, 16 hours to map, another two hours to rise to the
surface and four hours for operators to download and analyze the
information.
The first mission will
cover an area 5 kilometers by 8 kilometers (3.1 miles by 4.9 miles). It
will take up to two months to scan the entire search area.
The bottom of the search
area is not sharply mountainous -- it's more flat and almost rolling,
Houston said. But he said the area probably has a lot of silt, which can
"complicate" the search.
New clue on the surface of the water?
Another possible clue into the plane's disappearance emerged Monday.
Australian officials
announced the Australian ship Ocean Shield had detected an oil slick
Sunday evening. It is unclear where the oil came from. A 2-liter sample
has been collected for examination, but it will take a few days to
analyze.
"I stress the source of
the oil has yet to be determined, but the oil slick is approximately
5,500 meters (3.4 miles) downwind ... from the vicinity of the
detections of the TPL on Ocean Shield," Houston said, referring to the
pings detected by a towed pinger locator, a wing-shaped listening device
connected to the ship by a cable.
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Finding Flight 370 in the deep sea
It's not the first oil
slick detected as part of the search. A similar find in the first days
of the search was determined to be fuel oil from a freighter.
Surface search nearing end
Twelve aircraft and 15
ships participated in Monday's search efforts on the surface, covering
an 18,400-square-mile (47,600-square-kilomter) area. The surface search
was among the last, Houston said.
"The air and surface
search for floating material will be completed in the next two to three
days in the area where the aircraft most likely entered the water,"
Houston said.
That search was
energized last week when searchers using the Navy-owned pinger locator
and sonobuoys detected sounds that could have been from the plane's
black boxes, or data and voice recorders.
But after a week of
silence, the batteries powering the locator beacons are probably dead, a
top official from the company that manufactures the beacons told CNN on
Sunday. They were certified to last 30 days, a deadline that's already
passed.
That means searchers may not be able to detect any more pings to help lead them to those pieces of the missing plane.
"More than likely they
are reaching end of life or already have. If (a beacon) is still going,
it is very, very quiet at this point," Jeff Densmore told CNN's "State
of the Union with Candy Crowley" on Sunday.
The time is ripe to move on to other search techniques.
"Every good effort has
been expended, but it's now looking like the batteries are failing, and
it's time to start mowing the lawn, as we say, time to start scanning
the sea floor," said Rob McCollum, a CNN analyst and ocean search
specialist.
Catherine Tamoh Lion,
the mother of the missing plane's chief steward Andrew Nari, said the
news that no more pings have been heard is upsetting.
"Our sadness is now just prolonged," she told CNN.
"I feel like they are somewhere," she said of the passengers. "I don't know where. Just praying to God. Miracles can happen. "
:Curled from CNN
