Secret Spaceplane, Mystery Mission

1. The X-37B sits on the runway of the Vandenberg Air Force Base on Dec. 3, 2010.

The Air Force’s secret space plane has been up in orbit for nearly 500 days—a space endurance record. But nearly a year and a half into the mission, the Pentagon still won’t say what the X-37B is doing up there, or when it might come back.  

The U.S. Air Force boosted the robotic X-37B atop the nose of an Atlas-5 rocket in December 2012. Since then it’s orbited the Earth thousands of times, overflying such interesting places as North Korea and Iran.  

Similar to the Space Shuttle in appearance, the diminutive X-37B is about a quarter the size of the old shuttles. But there are major differences. Lacking a crew, the spacecraft has no cockpit windows. The X-37B has a payload bay about the size of a pickup truck bed.

And while the original Space Shuttle could stay in orbit for up to 17 days—a limitation largely due to the needs of the crew—the first X-37B mission, OTV-1, spent 225 days in space under the guidance of Air Force space flight controllers at Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado. The second mission, OTV-2, handily doubled that number, clocking 469 days in orbit. OTV-3 is currently at 482 days and counting. 

Eventually—nobody knows when—the pudgy space plane will glide back down to Earth like the Space Shuttle it resembles, rolling to a stop on an Air Force runway in California.   

The X-37B began as a NASA project to build a small, unmanned space plane. NASA handed the project over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 2004, but after budgetary problems the program was transferred to the U.S. Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, which continues to manage the X-37B program. Boeing’s Phantom Works division built two of the X-37B spacecraft.   

The U.S. Air Force will not comment on what kind of missions the X-37B does in space. The service, which doesn’t mind talking about the space drone as a technological achievement, clams up when discussing actual missions.  

Rumors abound. One of the most popular is the X-37B can sneak up and eavesdrop on other satellites. The idea does have appeal, but skeptics point out the U.S. already has other smaller, harder to track satellites to do just that.  

Another rumor is that the X-37B can, like supervillian Ernst Blofeld’s giant clamshell satellite in You Only Live Twice, saddle up to the satellites of other nations and mess with them. Though theoretically possible, the X-37 would have to be launched into an orbit similar to the target’s, and the X-37B’s size makes it easy to track. Even amateur satellite spotters can track the X-37B, and it would be obvious to everyone who had stolen a satellite.   

The most interesting—but least likely—rumor is that the X-37B is some kind of orbital bomber, capable of nailing targets from on high. There’s not a whole lot of evidence to back that theory up.  

Brian Weeden, a former Air Force officer with the Space Command’s Joint Space Operations Center and now at the Secure World Foundation, believes that the X-37B is primarily a test bed for new technologies. “I think it is primarily an ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) platform for testing new sensor technologies or validating new technologies.” Weeden tells The Daily Beast. “The current OTV-3 on orbit has basically been in the same orbit since launch, with only the occasional maneuver to maintain that orbit. That’s consistent with a remote sensing/ISR mission.” 

The X-37B is probably testing technologies that might be incorporated into the spy satellites of the future. New cameras, radars, and other sensors could be tested in space and then brought back to Earth for study. That’s much better than designing them on Earth and then building an enormously expensive spy satellite reliant on untested technology.  

That doesn’t mean that OTV-3 isn’t spying on other countries—it probably is. OTV-3’s orbit takes it over all sorts of interesting places, including North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and China. The space drone’s sensors are likely could well be getting workouts against real-world targets, from North Korean missile facilities to shipyards where China’s next aircraft carriers are being built.  

And although it’s only a guess, one can surmise that, based on the amount of time the X-37B is spending in orbit, those sensors are apparently working pretty well.  

If the X-37B is just a test platform, why won’t the Pentagon open up about it? “I don’t think the secrecy surrounding the X-37B program is an attempt by the U.S. government to hide anything nefarious, but rather that it’s driven by bureaucratic inertia,” Weeden says. Addressing the rumors, Weeden points out, “The secrecy surrounding the program makes it difficult for the U.S. government to respond meaningfully to those claims and debunk them.” 

The X-37B is a relatively bright spot during a fallow period for the U.S. space program, and Boeing and the Air Force are capitalizing on the program’s success. Boeing is converting the former Orbiter Processing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center, where Space Shuttles were maintained in-between spaceflights, to a one-stop facility designed to refurbish landed X-37Bs and prepare them for spaceflight again. 

Boeing has also proposed a larger X-37C, which would be capable of carrying up to six astronauts to and from orbit. This project is likely to get a second look as relations with Russia, the only country currently capable of sending astronauts into space, sour over the situation in the Ukraine.  

In the meantime OTV-3 continues to drift overhead, silently orbiting the Earth, doing whatever it does. It’s anyone’s guess when it will be coming back.

@Thedailybeast

MH370: Diego Garcia and what happen to MH370

 It sounds like an expensive cigar, but Diego Garcia is actually a United States military base that we technically rent from the United Kingdom. At 967 nautical miles south-southwest from the southern tip of India, it is more or less midway between Indonesia and the African continent. The US Navy operates its Naval Support Facility (NSF) there, which is a naval ship and submarine support base, military air base, as well as a communications and space-tracking facility.

It also includes a base of operations for the CIA. You’ll note there is no question mark at the end of this article’s title.

Why so few have postulated that this facility may have played a part in the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 may or may not seem odd at first blush given the circumstances: I mean, it’s not a secret base, though clandestine activities conducted there certainly would be. At any rate, I am told Diego Garcia is the location to which Flight 370 was diverted. My source has actually been to Diego Garcia, and assures me that you can land a Lockheed C-5 Galaxy there. Those are the military transport planes they load tanks aboard, and they’re just about the size of a Boeing 777.

At Diego Garcia, some 20 civilian technical personnel were removed from the aircraft for interrogation. On March 8, Reuters reported that 20 employees of U.S. chipmaker Freescale Semiconductor were passengers

Jumpa rakit getah di Selat Melaka

Oleh Mohd Helmi Irwadi Mohd Nor

Port Dickson: Satu objek dipercayai rakit getah keselamatan kapal terbang dengan tulisan 'boarding' ditemui sekumpulan empat nelayan kira-kira 10 batu nautika dari pantai di sini, semalam.

Penemuan kira-kira jam 12 tengah hari itu dipercayai dapat memberi petunjuk dalam usaha pihak berkuasa mengesan pesawat MH370 milik Penerbangan Malaysia (MAS) yang dilaporkan hilang dan terputus hubungan dengan menara kawalan sejak awal Sabtu lalu.

Nelayan Azman Mohamad, 40 berkata, mereka sedang menangkap ikan di perairan terbabit sebelum sebelum terpandang objek berkenaan tenggelam timbul dipukul ombak.


Katanya, dia bersama tiga rakan yang mengikuti perkembangan kes kehilangan pesawat MH370 melalui media, tertarik untuk melihat objek itu dengan lebih dekat.

"Saya dan rakan sedaya upaya cuba mengambil objek itu dan berjaya sebelum menambatnya pada bot kerana bimbang ia tenggelam dalam laut.

"Objek itu mungkin tidak mampu terapung lama kerana koyak atau bocor," katanya, ketika dihubungi semalam.
Azman yang sudah 20 tahun menjadi nelayan berkata, mereka keluar menangkap ikan pada jam 8 pagi dan pulang kira-kira jam 8 malam.

"Sebaik menemui objek itu, saya terus menghubungi Agensi Penguatkuasaan Maritim Malaysia (APMM) di Kuala Linggi, Melaka, untuk mendapatkan bantuan selepas gagal menaikkan objek itu yang terlalu berat.

"Saya yakin penemuan objek itu penting kerana mungkin boleh menjadi petunjuk kepada usaha mencari pesawat MH370 kerana terdapat tulisan ‘boarding’ pada permukaan objek itu.

"Ia mungkin adalah rakit getah penyelamat yang dibekalkan kepada penumpang pesawat untuk menyelamatkan diri di laut," katanya.

Katanya, sebaik bot APMM tiba di lokasi, tugas mengangkat objek itu diserahkan kepada pasukan berkenaan, manakala mereka kemudian menyambung kerja menangkap ikan.

Sementara itu, jurucakap APMM Kuala Linggi ketika dihubungi mengesahkan sepasukan anggotanya dihantar ke tempat kejadian untuk menyiasat penemuan itu.

Bagaimanapun, katanya objek itu terus tenggelam dalam laut dan tidak sempat diselamatkan.

Artikel ini disiarkan pada : 2014/03/12@Harian Metro

‘Impossible’ that MH370 skipped all radars, expert says

@Reuter's Photo

KUALA LUMPUR, March 11 — It is “impossible” for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 to have escaped all radar detection in the area where it was travelling, unless it entered remote territories, an aviation analyst has said, as the mysterious disappearance of the large aircraft continues to baffle experts around the world.

Frost and Sullivan Asia Pacific aerospace and defence consultant Ravi Madavaram listed areas like Alaska or the Atlantic Ocean as among the few remote areas where airships could possibly fall off the radar, but stressed that it would only be for “brief moments”.

“With so many borders and countries around the sea, it is impossible to skip all the radars,” he told The Malay Mail Online in an email interview.

The search for MH370 entered is fourth day today after more than 80 hours since the large aircraft carrying 239 people mysteriously vanished from sight at 1.30am on Saturday morning.

Experts and investigators have been thrown off by how the numbers have not added up over MH370’s disappearance, and despite intensive search efforts, the aircraft has remained missing, leaving behind not a shred of evidence.

The Boeing B777-200 aircraft was hovering somewhere 120 nautical miles off the coast of Kota Baru when it was last seen on radar.

A large battalion of military aircraft and sea vessels from at least nine nations have been circling the areas where MH370 was last seen — covering a wider expanse of 100 nautical miles today in the waters of the South China Sea, the Straits of Malaccca and Penang — but still, to no avail.

Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) director-general Datuk Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, in hours after the aircraft went missing on Saturday, has said none of the control rooms in neighbouring countries found the jetliner on their radar.

Azharuddin said that the controllers had crossed checked with counterparts in Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam before informing MAS of its missing flight.

With no sign of the aircraft on radar, experts are now toying with the possibility of a mid-air explosion or a major malfunction onboard the aircraft, caused by electrical or technical failures.

But Ravi discounted the likelihood of a total power cut onboard, saying that while it could be possible, it is very rare and has never happened before.

He pointed out that Boeing aircrafts are supported by three electrical power sources — two generators, one in each engine, an auxiliary power unit (APU) and a ram air turbine (RAT).

“For the aircraft to have total electrical failure, all three systems should have failed at the same time.

“This is pretty rare and has not happened,” said Ravi.

Asked if an electrical failure would affect distress signals, the expert pointed out that such malfunctions are typically reported by pilots to the Air Traffic Control (ATC).

At the time of the incident, however, the Subang ATC had not received any distress signals, even though military radar had detected the possibility that the aircraft might have made a turnaround in mid-flight.

“Total electrical failure all of sudden is remotely possible but with redundancy in the current aircraft’s, can be ruled out,” Ravi insisted.

The sudden disappearance of MH370 from radar in the early hours of March 8 and without any distress signal sent has continued to fuel widespread speculation on what happened inside the plane to cause it to disappear from sight.

Malaysian authorities say they cannot rule out terrorism as a cause for the airliner’s disappearance, especially after two passengers were found to have used stolen identities to board the aircraft.

The Boeing 777-200 aircraft left Kuala Lumpur and was about 40 minutes into its journey to Beijing when it vanished from the skies with 239 people on board.

@ Malay mails online

Malaysian ships to investigate possible life raft

A photo made available by The Straits Times on March 10, 2014 shows personnel from the Republic of Singapore Air Force (RSAF) scanning the seas north-east of Kota Baru, Malaysia for any signs of the Malaysia Airlines plane which went missing

Malaysia has dispatched ships to investigate the sighting of a floating object that could be a life raft, as it continues to hunt for a missing airliner, an official said Monday.

"There was a report today that we just received that an aircraft had seen something like an inverted life raft," said Malaysia's head of civil aviation, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman.

"So we are contacting our counterparts, we are sending ships there to verify the object, the parts."

"At the moment we have not received any report on the matter. So we are still waiting for the report," he said.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared early Saturday morning with 239 people aboard. No distress signal was ever sent, baffled authorities have said.

The plane's disappearance has led to an international search and rescue effort involving several countries and dozens of planes and ships, but so far no firm evidence of wreckage from the plane has been found.

@AFP

Still no sign of Malaysian jet lost in "unprecedented mystery"

By Eveline Danubrata and Nguyen Phuong Linh

KUALA LUMPUR/PHU QUOC ISLAND, Vietnam (Reuters) - T he disappearance of a Malaysian jetliner is an "unprecedented aviation mystery", a senior official said on Monday, with a massive air and sea search now in its third day failing to find any confirmed trace of the plane or the 239 people aboard.

Vietnam scrambled helicopters to check reports of a floating "yellow object" that rescue teams suspected could be a life raft from the plane, but it was unclear whether the sighting would prove to be the first big breakthrough or merely the latest in a series of false alarms.

The head of Malaysia's Civil Aviation Authority, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, said a hijacking attempt could not be ruled out as investigators explore all theories for the loss of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 en route to Beijing.

"Unfortunately we have not found anything that appears to be objects from the aircraft, let alone the aircraft," he told a news conference before the Vietnamese helicopter scramble.

"As far as we are concerned, we have to find the aircraft, we have to find a piece of the aircraft if possible."

As dozens of ships and aircraft from seven countries scour the seas around Malaysia and south of Vietnam, questions mounted over possible security lapses and whether a bomb or hijacking attempt could have brought down the Boeing 777-200ER airliner.

A Vietnamese jet spotted what could be a life raft floating off Vietnam's southern coast, but was unable to get close enough to determine what it was, Pham Quy Tieu, vice transport minister and deputy head of the country's rescue committee, told Reuters, prompting the despatch of helicopters to investigate.

Interpol confirmed on Sunday at least two passengers used stolen passports and said it was checking whether others aboard had used false identity documents.

Flight MH370 disappeared from radar screens in the early hours of Saturday, about an hour into its flight from Kuala Lumpur, after climbing to a cruising altitude of 35,000 ft (10,670 metres).

Underlining the lack of hard information about the plane's fate, a U.S. Navy P-3 aircraft capable of covering 1,500 sq miles every hour was sweeping the northern part of the Strait of Malacca, on the other side of the Malaysian peninsula from where the last contact with MH370 was made.

"Our aircraft are able to clearly detect small debris in the water, but so far it has all been trash or wood," said U.S. 7th Fleet spokesman Commander William Marks in an emailed statement.

Shares in Malaysia Airlines fell as much as 18 percent to a record low on Monday morning and were down 4 percent near the close.

NO DISTRESS SIGNAL

No distress signal was sent from the lost plane, which experts said suggested a sudden catastrophic failure or explosion, but Malaysia's air force chief said radar tracking showed it may have turned back from its scheduled route before it disappeared.

A senior source involved in preliminary investigations in Malaysia said the failure to quickly find any debris indicated the plane may have broken up mid-flight, which could disperse wreckage over a very wide area.

"The fact that we are unable to find any debris so far appears to indicate that the aircraft is likely to have disintegrated at around 35,000 feet," said the source.

Asked about the possibility of an explosion, such as a bomb, the source said there was no evidence yet of foul play and that the aircraft could have broken up due to mechanical causes.

Still, the source said the closest parallels were the explosion on board an Air India jetliner in 1985 when it was over the Atlantic Ocean and the Lockerbie air disaster in 1988. Both planes were cruising at around 31,000 feet when bombs exploded on board.

The United States extensively reviewed imagery taken by American spy satellites for evidence of a mid-air explosion, but saw none, a U.S. government source said. The source described U.S. satellite coverage of the region as thorough.

Boeing declined to comment and referred to its brief earlier statement that said it was monitoring the situation.

The Boeing 777 has one of the best safety records of any commercial aircraft in service. Its only previous fatal crash came on July 6 last year when Asiana Airlines flight 214 struck a seawall on landing in San Francisco, killing three people.

MASSIVE SEARCH

About two-thirds of the 227 passengers and 12 crew now presumed to have died aboard the plane were Chinese. The airline said other nationalities included 38 Malaysians, seven Indonesians, six Australians, five Indians, four French and three Americans.

The passenger manifest issued by the airline included the names of two Europeans - Austrian Christian Kozel and Italian Luigi Maraldi - who were not on the plane. Their passports had been stolen in Thailand during the past two years.

An Interpol spokeswoman said a check of all documents used to board the plane had revealed more "suspect passports", which were being investigated.

"Whilst it is too soon to speculate about any connection between these stolen passports and the missing plane, it is clearly of great concern that any passenger was able to board an international flight using a stolen passport listed in Interpol's databases," Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said.

Malaysia's state news agency quoted Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi as saying the two passengers using the stolen European passports were of Asian appearance, and criticised the border officials who let them through.

"I am still perturbed. Can't these immigration officials think? Italian and Austrian but with Asian faces," he was quoted as saying late on Sunday.

A European diplomat in Kuala Lumpur cautioned that the Malaysian capital was an Asian hub for illegal migrants, many of whom used false documents and complex routes including via Beijing or West Africa to reach a final destination in Europe.

"You shouldn't automatically think that the fact there were two people on the plane with false passports had anything to do with the disappearance of the plane," the diplomat said.

"The more you know about the role of Kuala Lumpur in this chain, the more doubtful you are of the chances of a linkage."

@Reuters

Investigators chasing 'every angle' on missing jet

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) -- Dozens of ships and aircraft have failed to find any piece of the missing Boeing 777 jet that vanished more than two days ago above waters south of Vietnam as investigators pursued "every angle" to explain its disappearance, including hijacking, Malaysia's civil aviation chief said Monday.

Malaysian maritime officials found some oil slicks in the South China Sea and sent a sample to a lab to see if it came from the plane, the Department of Civil Aviation chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, told a news conference.

Hundreds of distraught relatives were gathered in a hotel in Beijing, waiting to be flown to Malaysia. Of the 227 passengers, two-thirds were Chinese. There were also 38 passengers and 12 crew members from Malaysia, and others from elsewhere in Asia, Europe and North America, including three Americans.

"We accept God's will. Whether he is found alive or dead, we surrender to Allah," said Selamat Omar, a Malaysian whose 29-year-old son Mohamad Khairul Amri Selamat was heading to Beijing for a business trip. He said he was expecting a call from his son after the flight's scheduled arrival time at 6:30 a.m. Saturday. Instead he got a call from the airline to say the plane was missing.

Vietnamese ships working throughout the night could not find a rectangular object spotted Sunday afternoon that was thought to be one of the doors of a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet.

"We have not found anything that appears to be objects from the aircraft," Azharuddin said, adding that the search operation has involved 34 aircraft and 40 ships covering a 50-nautical mile radius from the point the plane vanished from radar screens early Saturday about one hour into a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

He said officials from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. National Safety Transportation Board have arrived to help in the investigation.

As hope faded for relatives of the 239 people who were aboard Flight MH370, attention focused on how two passengers managed to board the ill-fated aircraft using stolen passports. Interpol confirmed it knew about the stolen passports but said no authorities checked its vast databases on stolen documents before the jet departed

Warning that "only a handful of countries" routinely make such checks, Interpol secretary general Ronald Noble chided authorities for "waiting for a tragedy to put prudent security measures in place at borders and boarding gates."

Still, there was no indication that the two men had anything to do with the tragedy.

Possible causes of the apparent crash include an explosion, catastrophic engine failure, extreme turbulence, or pilot error or even suicide.

Azharuddin acknowledged many theories about the plane's disappearance, including hijacking.

"We are not discounting this. We are looking at every angle but again, we have to find concrete evidence," he said.

The baggage of five passengers who had checked in to the flight but did not board the plane were removed before it departed, he said. Airport security was strict according to international standards, surveillance has been done and the airport has been audited, he said.

On Saturday, the foreign ministries in Italy and Austria said the names of two citizens listed on the flight's manifest matched the names on two passports reported stolen in Thailand.

"I can confirm that we have the visuals of these two people on CCTV," Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said at a news conference late Sunday, adding that the footage was being examined. "We have intelligence agencies, both local and international, on board."

The thefts of the two passports — one belonging to Austrian Christian Kozel and the other to Luigi Maraldi of Italy — were entered into Interpol's database after they were stolen in Thailand in 2012 and last year, the police body said.

Electronic booking records show that one-way tickets with those names were issued Thursday from a travel agency in the beach resort of Pattaya in eastern Thailand. A person who answered the phone at the agency said she could not comment.

But no authorities in Malaysia or elsewhere checked the passports against the database of 40 million stolen or lost travel documents before the Malaysia Airlines plane took off.

A telephone operator on a China-based KLM hotline confirmed Sunday that passengers named Maraldi and Kozel had been booked on one-way tickets on the same KLM flight, flying from Beijing to Amsterdam on Saturday. Maraldi was to fly on to Copenhagen, Denmark, and Kozel to Frankfurt, Germany. She said the pair booked the tickets through China Southern Airlines.

As holders of EU passports with onward flights to Europe, the passengers would not have needed visas for China.

The Thai national police chief on Monday set up a task force to investigate the issue of the stolen passports.

Interpol said it and national investigators were working to determine the true identities of those who used the stolen passports to board the flight. White House Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken said the U.S. was looking into the stolen passports, but that investigators had reached no conclusions.

Interpol has long sounded the alarm that growing international travel has underpinned a new market for identity theft: Bogus passports are mostly used by illegal immigrants, but also pretty much anyone looking to travel unnoticed such as drug runners or terrorists. More than 1 billion times last year, travelers boarded planes without their passports being checked against Interpol's database of 40 million stolen or lost travel documents, the police agency said.

Finding traces of an aircraft that disappears over sea can take days or longer, even with a sustained search effort. Depending on the circumstances of the crash, wreckage can be scattered over a large area. If the plane enters the water before breaking up, there can be relatively little debris.

__

Associated Press writers Chris Brummitt in Hanoi, Rod McGuirk in Canberra, Australia, Didi Tang, Gillian Wong and Louise Watt in Beijing, Joan Lowy in Washington and Scott Mayerowitz in New York contributed this report.

@AP

Vietnam says it may have found missing jet's door

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Vietnamese aircraft spotted what they suspected was one of the doors of a missing Boeing 777 on Sunday, while troubling questions emerged about how two passengers managed to board the ill-fated aircraft using stolen passports.

Interpol confirmed it knew about the stolen passports but said no authorities checked its vast databases on stolen documents before the Boeing jetliner departed Saturday from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing with 239 people on board.

Warning "only a handful of countries" routinely make such checks, Interpol secretary general Ronald Noble chided authorities for "waiting for a tragedy to put prudent security measures in place at borders and boarding gates."

More than two days after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went missing, the final minutes before its disappearance remained a mystery. The plane lost contact with ground controllers somewhere between Malaysia and Vietnam.

However, searchers in a low-flying plane spotted an object that appeared to be one of the plane's doors, the state-run Thanh Nien newspaper said, citing the deputy chief of staff of Vietnam's army, Lt. Gen. Vo Van Tuan.

Two ships from the maritime police were headed to the site about 60 miles (90 kilometers) south of Tho Chu island in the Gulf of Thailand, the same area where oil slicks were spotted Saturday.

"From this object, hopefully (we) will find the missing plane," Tuan said.

The missing jetliner apparently fell from the sky at cruising altitude in fine weather, and the pilots were either unable or had no time to send a distress signal — unusual circumstances under which a modern jetliner operated by a professional airline would crash.

Authorities were checking on the identities of the two passengers who boarded the plane with stolen passports. On Saturday, the foreign ministries in Italy and Austria said the names of two citizens listed on the flight's manifest matched the names on two passports reported stolen in Thailand.

"I can confirm that we have the visuals of these two people on CCTV," Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said at a news conference late Sunday, adding that the footage was being examined. "We have intelligence agencies, both local and international, on board."

The thefts of the two passports — one belonging to Austrian Christian Kozel and the other to Luigi Maraldi of Italy — were entered into Interpol's database after they were stolen in Thailand in 2012 and last year, the police body said. But no authorities in Malaysia or elsewhere checked the passports against the database of 40 million stolen or lost travel documents before the Malaysian Airlines plane took off.

In a forceful statement, the Interpol chief, who has called passport fraud one of the world's greatest threats, said he hoped "that governments and airlines worldwide will learn from the tragedy."

"Now, we have a real case where the world is speculating whether the stolen passport holders were terrorists," Noble said. "Interpol is asking why only a handful of countries worldwide are taking care to make sure that persons possessing stolen passports are not boarding international flights."

Troubling details also emerged Sunday about the itineraries of the two passengers traveling on the stolen passports.

A telephone operator on a China-based KLM hotline confirmed Sunday that passengers named Maraldi and Kozel had been booked on one-way tickets on the same KLM flight, flying from Beijing to Amsterdam on Saturday. Maraldi was to fly on to Copenhagen, Denmark, and Kozel to Frankfurt, Germany.

She said the pair booked the tickets through China Southern Airlines, but she had no information on where they bought them.

As holders of EU passports with onward flights to Europe, the passengers would not have needed visas for China.

Interpol said it and national investigators were working to determine the true identities of those who used the stolen passports to board the Malaysia Airlines flight. White House Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken said the U.S. was looking into the stolen passports, but that investigators had reached no conclusions.

Interpol has long sounded the alarm that growing international travel has underpinned a new market for identity theft: Bogus passports have lured illegal immigrants, terrorists, drug runners, pretty much anyone looking to travel unnoticed. More than 1 billion times last year, travelers boarded planes without their passports being checked against Interpol's database of 40 million stolen or lost travel documents, the police agency said.

In addition to the plane's sudden disappearance, which experts said was consistent with a possible onboard explosion, the stolen passports strengthened concerns about terrorism as a possible cause. Al-Qaida militants have used similar tactics to try to disguise their identities.

Still, other possible causes included a catastrophic failure of the plane's engines, extreme turbulence, or pilot error or even suicide. Establishing what happened with any certainty will need data from flight recorders and a detailed examination of any debris, something that will take months if not years.

Malaysia's air force chief, Rodzali Daud, said radar indicated that before it disappeared, the plane may have turned back, but there were no further details on which direction it went or how far it veered off course.

"We are trying to make sense of this," Daud said at a news conference. "The military radar indicated that the aircraft may have made a turn back, and in some parts this was corroborated by civilian radar."

Malaysia Airlines Chief Executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said pilots are supposed to inform the airline and traffic control authorities if the plane does a U-turn. "From what we have, there was no such distress signal or distress call per se, so we are equally puzzled," he said.

A total of 34 aircraft and 40 ships from Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, China and the United States were deployed to the area where ground controllers lost contact with the plane, the maritime border between Malaysia and Vietnam.

Of the 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board, two-thirds were Chinese, while the rest were from elsewhere in Asia, Europe and North America, including three Americans.

Family members of Philip Wood, a 50-year-old IBM executive who was on board the plane, said they saw him a week ago when he visited them in Texas after relocating to Kuala Lumpur from Beijing, where he had worked for two years.

"There is a shock, a very surreal moment in your life," said Wood's brother, James Wood. "With a situation like this, when a plane just disappears ... it leaves you with a lot of questions."

The other two Americans were identified on the passenger manifest as 4-year-old Nicole Meng and 2-year-old Yan Zhang. It was not known with whom they were traveling.

After more than 30 hours without contact with the aircraft, Malaysia Airlines told family members they should "prepare themselves for the worst," Hugh Dunleavy, the commercial director for the airline, told reporters.

Finding traces of an aircraft that disappears over sea can take days or longer, even with a sustained search effort. Depending on the circumstances of the crash, wreckage can be scattered over many square kilometers (miles). If the plane enters the water before breaking up, there can be relatively little debris.

A team of American experts was en route to Asia to be ready to assist in the investigation into the crash. The team includes accident investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board, as well as technical experts from the Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing, the safety board said in a statement.

Malaysia Airlines has a good safety record, as does the 777, which had not had a fatal crash in its 19-year history until an Asiana Airlines plane crashed last July in San Francisco, killing three passengers, all Chinese teenagers.

___

Brummitt reported from Hanoi, Vietnam. Associated Press writers Rod McGuirk in Canberra, Australia; Didi Tang, Gillian Wong and Louise Watt in Beijing; Joan Lowy in Washington; and Scott Mayerowitz in New York contributed this report.

Malaysia Airlines disappearance: the possible explanations

A technical fault, disintegration, or terrorism are among possibilities under scrutiny as search for wreckage continues

If a technical fault or pilot error is behind the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, any answers are unlikely until the plane is found – and even then, previous incidents suggest that a definitive explanation could be some time away, with first wreckage and then a flight recorder needing to be located, potentially deep beneath the sea.

For now, all theories are highly speculative – but possible explanations include:

Midair disintegration

While the search for wreckage continues in the seas between Malaysia and Vietnam, terrorism is the possibility with at least one line of inquiry for investigators to pursue, with suspicions raised by two passengers travelling on fake passports (although both had booked onward flights) and the shadow of recent, if radically different, outrages in China, home to the majority of the 227 passengers who are presumed dead.

According to some aviation experts, the disappearance of the plane from radar screens just 40 minutes into its flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in the early hours of Saturday morning, with the extraordinary lack of any warning or communication from the flight deck, suggests a sudden, catastrophic incident – although there is no other evidence to back up the idea a bomb was aboard. Some suggest the fact that widespread searches have yet to make any confirmed discovery of wreckage makes it more likely that the aircraft disintegrated high in the air, rather than breaking up on impact with water.

Technical failure

At cruising altitude in good weather, even total loss of engines would have given time for pilots to make an emergency call. This particular aircraft had flown more than 53,000 hours without problem – bar a collision on the ground in 2012 that damaged a wingtip – and had its last maintenance check within the last fortnight, on 23 February, a routine appointment that showed nothing unusual.

In one obvious respect, technical failures are likely to appear implausible or inexplicable until discovered: issues with potential to bring down a plane are by definition not envisaged. But the model, the Boeing 777-200, has had an impressive safety record for long-haul aircraft over almost two decades in service: the first fatal crash was only eight months ago when an Asiana Airlines plane missed the runway in San Francisco. A British Airways 777 also landed short of the runway at Heathrow in 2008.

Take off and landing remain easily the biggest sites of aircraft incidents. Safety standards for leading airlines are ever increasing and fatalities for scheduled international air travel are at record lows, according to air transport authorities.

Intentional ditching

A further theory is that the plane was deliberately steered into the sea, under duress by a hijacking of the kind seen in the 9/11 attacks, or by the pilot committing suicide. The latter factor has never been formally acknowledged in a major incident, but was widely believed to have been behind the 1999 EgyptAir crash which killed 217 people and a SilkAir crash in Indonesia that claimed 104 lives two years earlier.

A combination of events

The nature of the incident as understood so far has for many evoked the crash of Air France's flight 447, which similarly disappeared in the seas, out of radar contact and in the middle of the night, in June 2009. It took days for authorities to locate the wreckage and almost two years before the flight recorder was retrieved, finally allowing investigators to piece together what had happened. On that occasion, the black box evidence showed a combination of unusual circumstances – affected instruments, faulty readings and, largely, human error on the part of the pilots. In the small hours of the morning, experienced pilots became sufficiently disoriented to make decisions that stalled the plane and sent it on its way down, only realising in the very last moments how serious the problems were.