Page 24 - Turn Back News Today

Anderson -- >> jim, when you this i abonk a, really, for the first five days, the focus was on the gulf of thailand. some of you, a little less than 300 feet deep. thats where all the resources were going for the search. we now know that was a complete waste. >> reporter: four days afterwards, cnn here in kuala lumpur announced the news ta the plane had diverted, it had turned around. malaysian officials had referred to a possible turnback. military sources told us not only did it turn back, it ...

>> reporter: theyre looking at all of the theories. theres no doubt about that. because look, they as early as 48 hours after this plane went missing, we had authorities right here in kuala lumpur telling us they looked at the data and they saw what they thought was a turnback. maybe the pilot was trying to return to kuala lumpur. thats how sharp the turn was. it was almost, almost 180 degrees, but it doesnt explain a lot of things. we dont know what it means, what was going on in the cockpit. w...

Systems. they had nothing to do with it. we do know that shortly after that the pilot made a very sharp turn, it was called a turnback, actually, by malaysian officials a couple of days after the plane went missing. that was all the way -- a week ago saturday and when we looked at that situation, a lot of people at that time thought the pilot was trying to make it home to kuala lumpur because they had a problem. if it wasnt the pilots, if it was a mechanical failure the question is this -- how c...

The original turn-back was towards the closest available airport, so that makes sense. so the initial part actually makes sense, some sort of catastrophic problem. >> when you say catastrophic, you dont mean instantaneous, you mean mechanical issues on board that the pilot had time to try to make that turn to try to find the closest airport. >> sure. yeah, some sort of progressive problem like smoke in the cockpit if you had an electrical fire in the avionics bay or something like that, he would...

Possibility of something other than a terrorist act, a catastrophic occurrence in the airplane that would take out the initial communication system, which would explain the turn back, and the garbled communication that one of the other pilots, i guess it was a japan pilot reported. and then the spooling down of the systems. one by one losing the systems. so we cant say right now that they were turned off. we can say that they stopped transmitting data. and i think that in terms of evidentiary pu...

Deliberate act. adding to all of this confusion, reuters now reporting this morning that radar data shows the plane may have been flown intentionally towards the andaman islands. now a u.s. navy destroyer is joining the search, with officials saying there is now a significant likelihood that the plane could be at the bottom of the indian ocean. jim clancy has the very latest for us. he is in kuala lumpur. jim, what do you know? >> reporter: well, there is no doubt whatsoever that about an hour a...

Circuit breaker so you can disable the system. if you knew what you were doing you could pull the circuit breaker on that. youd have to have a fairly sophisticated understanding of the airplane to do that. >> mary, at this point you like everybody else is not ruling anything out. what at this point are kind of the data points that youre really focusing on? >> well, i think for me and looking at it from an investigators eye, you want to look at what makes sense, what fits together the pieces of e...

Again, this is not our data, this is coming from a reuters report point, saying that radar shows the plane may have been flown intentionally toward the andaman islands. do we have a sense for how far off they were from when the plane was turned, if it would be safe to land there? do we know what that scenario would entail? >> reporter: look, reuters doesnt have to tell us that. cnn can tell you, here from kuala lumpur, what the malaysian officials told us -- they came out on sunday with this -- ...

Course and an area with no significant land masses. >> so the focus is still on finding that aircraft. we have just learned that that search is expanding. its pushing further east and further west. the u.s. is also trying to help. they are sending in the uss kidd to the indian ocean. and also activity on the sea floor hours after the plane went missing nearly one week ago. we are turning to our reporters all around the world. we will start with jim clancy in kuala lumpur. >> reporter: let me giv...

Jim clancy has the latest live from kuala lumpur. jim, what can you tell us this morning? >> reporter: all right, lets go back. as we look at all of those reports, this is a quickly developing story. last sunday we had the military here, the malaysians telling us that they believe that the pilot may have attempted a turnback. remember, off went the switch to the transponder that sends out the name of the aircraft. that can happen sometimes. the reason they have that manual switch is, if the pilo...