Flight 370 Deliberately Flew Hundreds of Miles Off Course: Report
Source told Reuters on Friday that the Malaysian military has radar data indicating that Flight 370 may have deliberately flown hundreds of miles off course, raising the possibility of sabotage or hijacking.
"What we can say is we are looking at sabotage, with hijack still on the cards," a senior Malaysian police official told Reuters.
The data reportedly shows that Flight 370 abandoned its scheduled Beijing-bound course and instead headed west, towards India's Andaman Islands.
Two sources said an unidentified aircraft that investigators believe was Flight MH370 was following a route between navigational waypoints when it was last plotted on military radar off the country's northwest coast.
This indicates that it was either being flown by the pilots or someone with knowledge of those waypoints, the sources said.
The Reuters report seems to correspond with a story in Friday's Wall Street Journal, which cited sources saying the plane flew for more than five hours after vanishing from radar.
According to the Journal's report, Flight 370 repeatedly "pinged" its location to satellites that transmitted data to Boeing. Malaysia Airlines didn't purchase a package that would have allowed them access to the satellite system's data, according to Boeing.
The Journal's sources said that, if the plane stayed in the air for the full five hours, it could have traveled more than 2,200 nautical miles.
[Image via Getty]