Malaysia Airlines Flight: Timing Of Communications Shutdown Disputed By Officials

When Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 shout down a key communications system now appears to be a source of disagreement between the airline’s own officials and the Malaysian government. Did it happen before, or after the final verbal message — the words “All right, good night,” spoken by someone in the cockpit believed to be co-pilot Fariq Ab Hamid — were transmitted from the Malaysia Airlines flight cockpit?

On Sunday, Malaysia Transportation Minister Hishammuddin Hussein issued a bombshell revelation. One of the Flight 370 main communications systems, known as the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, was shut down before the words “all right, good night,” were spoken by someone in the cockpit to ground controllers.

But on Monday, the CEO of Malaysia Airlines openly contradicted Hussein’s timeline, at a press conference with the transport minister standing right beside him.

“We don’t know when the ACARS was switched off,” said Malaysia Airlines chief Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

The ACARS was designed to send a signal every half hour, basically indicating that the plane was still flying and in good shape. The last signal received from the ACARS on the Malaysia Airline flight, which has now been missing for more than nine days, came in at 1:07 am local time.

Hamid, or someone, said the words, “all right, good night” at 1:19 am. After that, the next scheduled transmission from the ACARS never arrived.

The Malaysia Airline CEO said that the ACARS could have been disabled “at any time” between the 1:07 signal and the next scheduled transmission around 1:37, which never came.

Though Hussein said nothing at the Monday press briefing, his office confirmed that he stands by his earlier timeline, in which the ACARS had already been turned off by the time those final words came over the radio.

Either way, however, officials said that the timing still points to a deliberate shutdown of the Flight 370 communications systems, rendering it effectively invisible to ground trackers. But what the circumstances of the shutdown were and who might carried it out, already a puzzle, became even murkier with the disputed timeline.

But the transponder, allowing the Malaysia Airlines flight to be tracked by radar, was turned off two minutes after the “all right, good night” message, and to switch off a transponder could only be accomplished by someone with a high level of training, experts say.

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