authority but not the responsibility. ultimately he is going to be responsible for everything that happens on the ship. and we know now that some of the decisions that the captain made we know this wasn t the normal captain on the ship. he was standing in for the regular ship s captain. he made some critical errors that were compounded over time. we know that this boat was a combined use, ferry and cargo ship. we keep hearing about possible causes, the route change, the sudden turn, cargo not tied down. how could some of that come into play in terms of sinking a ship? in fact, this is a multiuse ship. it s a ropax, a roll-on passenger ferry. it has passengers, vehicles and containers. the large teus that you see on a container ship. if you look to similar incidents in the past, in 1987, we had the herald of free enterprise, which
we have hijacking, we have terrorism, mechanical failure. you have some sort of suicide mission by somebody. i will say this as simply as i can. i agree with john. i think the key to this case lies in the 12 minutes between the 1:07 time when reported everything okay and the 12 minutes later at 1:19 where the plane, last communication, all right, good night. in that 12 minutes what do we know? the pilot never reported a problem, no fire, no decompression, no smoke, nothing. and the pilot never whoever the pilot was, whoever was in there never asked for a route change. they never said we are going to make a left turn. they never asked for altitude change. that turn was pre-programmed. we don t know if that was programmed or not.
malaysian officials said today the last data transmission from the plane did not show a route change, contradicting earlier indication someone may have preprogrammed a route change in that cob pim before the last communication before the cockpit. now with no continue crease evidence in hand, theories on what happened to flight 370 continue to live on. and one of them is the so-called shadow plane theory, that flight 370 was obscured by another aircraft on radar. chad myers from atlanta joins me now. he s been looking into this theory and is explaining why it still has some traction. chad, walk us through it and why this theory still appeals plausible to some. it still has traction because immarsat still hasn t given us all the pings. as soon as we know where all the pings are from all the hours we can maybe throw this theory away but this is not disproven just yet. here s what the shadow theory says. heath ledgewood is on twitter with, this basically came up with this. he said 370 to
you re in the situation room. in just the last few hours we ve learned of some significant new developments in the search for malaysia flight 370. a federal official has just told cnn new clues suggest the dramatic route change that sent the plane heading west toward the indian ocean may have been programmed into the plane s computer to be executed automatically. also, malaysian officials now say they ve received new radar data from another country, but they won t reveal who provided the data or what they show. and the fbi is now looking at the flight simulator seizeded from the pilot s home. experts are trying to recover some deleted files that could potentially contain some critical clues. our correspondents and analysts are working all angle of this story using cnn s unparalleled global resources. let s start with cnn pentagon correspondent barbara starr. she has breaking news on the
there s some speculation there, you re wright. the skies are crowded. there was only one of the reasons we have a problem here that we haven t got a better direction in this area that is 3 million miles is because there was only one satellite at that point, we didn t triangulate, but this is a plane that was well outside the flight path, that wasn t matching any other of the transponders, if you will, and they isolated this plane basically in the middle of the indian ocean. that s the best they ve got at this point, bob. okay. hey, william, it s andrea. these pilots had to be going somewhere specifically for them to change the waypoints, right inthey couldn t have not just flown the plane without any kind of numbers directing them or any kind of flight plan because it was dark, it was in the evening. my question is, and i asked katherine, how do we know who has told us the information about the route change that we got from acars, and did they see that the route was actually chan