Malaysia Airlines Flygning MH370 saknas (2014-03-08)

Transponder may have been shut down deliberately, say experts
KUALA LUMPUR: New evidence has suggested that communication from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have been deliberately cut off.

ABC news said US investigators now believe the aircraft's data reporting system and its transponder - which reports its position in flight to ground-based radar - shut down separately.

The fact that the devices appear to have been shut off at a 14-minute interval from one another suggests that they may have been deliberately disabled or at any rate did not fail as a result of a catastrophic airframe incident, the US network said.

The transponder was switched off 30 minutes after the final voice communication from the cockpit, around the same time that Malaysia believes the plane may have inexplicably started to turn back, the Washington Post said.

Taken together, that "suggests that someone unauthorised took control of that airplane, like an intruder or one of the pilots", the Post quoted one US flight crash expert as saying.

Seismic activity detected after plane went off radar
A research team from China's University of Science and Technology detected tremors in the sea near the Malaysia Vietnam border on March 8 hours after MH370 disappeared from the radar screen.

In a report published on its website, the Wen Lianxing Research Team said it suspected the tremor to relate to the missing MAS plane because the area "is not within seismic zone."

"The incident happened at 2.55am on March 8, about one-and-a-half hours after MH370 lost contact at 1.30am.

"One of the two possible locations is (an area) about 116km to the northeast of MH370's last confirmed location," it said.
/.../
"If this tremor was indeed caused by the plane crashing into the sea, the intensity of the seismicity indicated that the crashing process was disastrous," the report said.