Page 47 - Turn Back News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

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. that's 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 went stray across the maylay peninsula, turned and went on through the straits of malacca and throu...

>> reporter: they're looking at all of the theories. there's 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. that's how sharp the turn was. it was almost, almost 180 degrees, but it doesn't explain a lot of things. we don't know what it means, what was going on in the cockpit. what andrew stevens is reporting, trying to find this plane, that's going to get us an idea of 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 wasn't the pilots, if it was a mechanical failure the question is this -- how could that plane continue to fly for six or seven hours? what about the flight crew? what about the ...

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 don't 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 have turned to the nearest airport which would have made sense. under that hypothesis if they beca...

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 can't say right now that they were turned off. we can say that they stopped transmitting data. and i think that in terms of evidentiary purposes is what we can say. and so in this case it might actually be better to hope for a hijacking ...