commandeering and hijacking, hijacking is for a political purpose. before 9/11 commandeering a plane was not all that uncommon. a fedex plane in 94, southwest airlines, alaska airlines in 2000 and one before 9/11. that s much harder to do in the united states now. we continue to see commandeering. sometimes people seeking political asylum, sometimes people are suicidal. so you can t rule any of those things out. right now. we spoke to andy pasztor the wall street journal reporter a little while ago. and he s reporting we re not reporting it. he s reporting based on information he has that u.s. investigators are looking at the possibility that this plane actually may have landed somewhere as opposed to crash landing into the water. think about that for a second and what it would take to land a plane unknown to any authority on a runway anywhere in the world, a plane of that size, how it would go undetected.
i want our panel to weigh in here. they may have follow-up questions. fran, i ll start with you, first of all. because if in fact u.s. authorities are now investigating as andy is reporting from the wall street journal that they re looking at the possibility the plane didn t crash but it actually landed somewhere, this takes this whole investigation to a whole different area. that s exactly right, wolf. so you look at the area of the search and you say where would that be possible? this is not a small plane. you didn t land this on some remote island in the middle of the south pacific. so it needed it would have needed a large runway and you just look at the grid area. it seems unlikely to me. is it possible? look, with as many twist and turns as this investigation is taking, you can t eliminate anything. i think it s unlikely but they ll look at this search area. jim sciutto, have you heard from any of your sources that they re investigating the possibility of the plane yes,
andy pasztor of the wall street journal is joining us. you broke a major story on the front page of the wall street journal today on this investigation. and you re suggesting that it s even taking some more shall we say intriguing twists right now. what s the latest information, andy, that you re learning? well, if it weren t such a serious business and taking place in a big swath of asia, it would be almost like fiction. so what we have in addition to an aircraft that reportedly crashed into the water and there s no debris whatsoever from that accident, we now have increasing indications that investigators strongly suspect that this aircraft had its engines running and was flying around for up to four hours after its last transponder transmission to civil air control, air traffic control. so go ahead. what was that last point? i missed it.
question? please. andy, it s richard quest here. this, the strength of data upon which the authorities are working on, never mind the landing aspect of it, just the strength of data that they believe proves this plane continued flying around, is it pings, is it hard satellite data? what s your understanding? my understanding at this point is that it s actually these pings that you refer to, which means that the system on board the aircraft is trying to get in contact with the satellite. it would have transmitted some data, but it doesn t transmit any data for some reason, it s not quite certain, not clear why. these repetitive attempts to reach a satellite and investigators believe that only an intact plane would do that. i want to add they re not suggesting this is the central theme of this investigation but the bottom line after almost a week of intensive searches is
there s actually nobody to lead the investigation. so we keep talking about an investigation as though it were a vibrant living thing, but in fact until the wreckage is found in some country jurisdictionally according to international treaties takes control as the former chairman of the national transportation safety board jim hall told me at this point literally nobody is in control. there s no real investigative work. there s searches for wreckage, but in terms of really trying to understand what happened aboard this plane, that can t begin until some country establishes its authority and begins to collect evidence talk to witnesses and look at the technical data. and that just complicates things even more because the longer that gets delayed i believe the harder it might be to really find the truth. i want to stress this is reporting from andy pasztor of the wall street journal and cnn has not confirmed this. i want to go to kuala lumpur. andrea steve andrew stevens i