Over the weekend, the focus of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 mystery shifted again, this time onto the pilots, as the country’s defense minister said the communication system on the plane was “disabled” at 1:07 a.m., before someone in the cockpit signed off (“All right, good night”) to air-traffic control. But today, the tenth day of searching, the head of Malaysian Airlines says never mind, they’re actually not sure. “We don’t know when the Acars [Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System] system was switched off,” he said, according to the New York Times.
At the same news conference, defense minister (and transportation minister) Hishammuddin Hussein insisted, “What I said yesterday was based on fact, corroborated and verified.” But apparently not anymore. The uncertainty means they really need to find the plane to sort it out, he added, which is only more frustrating. Here’s what they know about that crucial half-hour on March 8, as of now:
1:07 a.m.: Regularly scheduled Acars update sent normally
1:19 a.m.: Verbal sign-off by the plane’s first officer
1:21 a.m.: Transponder with ground radar, a second communication system, stops working
1:37 a.m.: Regularly scheduled Acars update fails to send
But as we’ve seen, that could all change.
