Malaysia Airjet News Update: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 co-pilot's cellular phone was on and made contact with a cell tower in Malaysia about the time the plane vanished from radar, a U.S. official told CNN on Monday.
CNN's Pamela Brown was told by the official on Monday that a cell-phone tower in Penang, Malaysia which was about 250 miles from where the flight's transponder last sent a signal, detected the co-pilot's phone searching for service roughly 30 minutes after authorities believe the plane made a sharp turn westward.
As quoted from the report, 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.
Malaysia's acting transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein said when asked last Sunday by CNN about the newspaper report about a alleged effort to make a call by the co-pilot, "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."
Safety analyst David Soucie said, "It would be very rare in my opinion to have someone with a cell phone on in the cockpit. It's never supposed to be on at all. It's part of every check list of every airline I am familiar with."
According to CNN, efforts to find the missing plane and the 239 people aboard focused underneath the rough surface of the southern Indian Ocean on Monday as Australian authorities sent a U.S. Navy-contracted 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," report says.
Australian chief search coordinator Angus Houston said, "We haven't had a single detection in six days. It's time to go underwater."
The probe is equipped with side-scan sonar. It is an acoustic technology that creates pictures from the reflections of sound. This kind of equipment is routinely used to find sunken ships. CNN said that it 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.
"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," CNN reported.
