I think terrypinder's
synopsis of the news cycle surrounding the mystery of what happened to Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 is basically right, so take this with a grain of salt,
but:
Two U.S. officials tell ABC News the U.S. believes that the shutdown of two communication systems happened separately on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. One source said this indicates the plane did not come out of the sky because of a catastrophic failure.
The data reporting system, they believe, was shut down at 1:07 a.m. The transponder -- which transmits location and altitude -- shut down at 1:21 a.m.
This indicates it may well have been a deliberate act, ABC News aviation consultant John Nance said.
U.S. investigators told ABC News that the two modes of communication were "systematically shut down."
That means the U.S. team "is convinced that there was manual intervention," a source said, which means it was likely not an accident or catastrophic malfunction that took the plane out of the sky.
Earlier today, the
Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. officials believed the flight flew four hours after it disappeared from radar, but the
Journal's explanation for why officials believed that to be the case was wrong. However, the
Journal stuck by the essential story, offering a
different explanation for why they believed the plane kept on flying. The plane had enough fuel to travel 2,500 miles. Although the whereabouts of the plane remain completely unknown, the U.S. is
redeploying a naval destroyer, the U.S.S. Kidd, to the Andaman Sea as the search for the missing craft looks west.