the malaysian border as it was departing. but we re still trying to unravel a mystery more than 11 days into this flight and the focus is on the cockpit crew as you mentioned because it did take expertise to turn the plane around. did they turn it around because there was an on-board emergency and they needed to get back to malaysia. we don t know the answers to any of those questions. it did seem, michael goldfarb, they made this decision that the turn took place right at the point they were leaving malaysian air traffic control and entering vietnamese air traffic control. they say good-bye to malaysian, don t know they connected or changed over to the vietnamese silen silent, perhaps because they were switching over. first of all, i think of world is flum exed by this, with everything that we re we like answers. we re exposing old
cockpit overwhelms the cockpit and shorts out the plane s communications system. with the pilots in kpas stated or worse, it flies past any airports and eventually runs out of fuel and crashes somewhere in the indian ocean. swiss air 111. heavy is declaring pan pan pan. we have smoke in the cockpit. reporter: like the 1998 flight of swiss air 111. i think it s a very plausible idea. reporter: our thanks to athena jones for that report. there are problems with the smoke-filled cockpit. there was to distressed call from the cockpit crew. now for a little more on some of the passengers. we know there were three americans on board. we have heard a bit about philip 50, a 50-year-old texas man and
just two minutes after that very standard conversation, at 1:21 a.m., someone in the cockpit turned off the transponders that send speed, location, altitude, and heading information. soon after that the plane turned around. at 2:15 a.m. the last radar contact in the strait of malacca headed north. over the next six hours the plane transmitted one ping an hour to an orbiting satellite until 8:11 a.m. when the last ping was received. that puts the plane somewhere along these two arcs as far north as kazakhstan, as far south as the deep indian ocean. australia is now taking over that search zone. we will do our duty to the families of the 230 people on that aircraft who are still absolutely devastated. reporter: experts say turning off acars then the transponders then flying the 777 for hours requires expertise, which is why there s intense focus on the cockpit crew. what is a potential motive and what can be learned from looking deeply into the
but, of course, none of this has been confirmed. nbc s tom costello has been covering every angle of this story, joins us now. okay, tom, let s talk about the manual controls, that the flight path was made using that. how does that work? take us inside something like that. all right, sources are confirming to us, to nbc news, that whoever was flying the plane used the onboard computer systems to help make the turn, the u-turn back, and to bank right up the straight of mallika. that made it a very smooth turn. and that s what you would expect from a professional pilot, who has intimate knowledge of how the some works. if somebody had, in fact, been manually turning this plane, it would have been very difficult to maintain a steady altitude, and we re told this plane was very much on a steady altitude. so, we still cannot necessarily say that this was done for any, you know, nefarious reason. there could be legitimate reasons that this plane turned around. that the cockpit crew decided
standard conversation, at 1:21 a.m., someone in the cockpit turned off the transponders that send speed, location, altitude, and heading information. soon after that the plane turned around. at 2:15 a.m. the last radar contact in the strait of malacca headed north. over the next six hours the plane transmitted one ping an hour to an orbiting satellite until 8:11 a.m. when the last ping was received. that puts the plane somewhere along these two arcs as far north as kazakhstan, as far south as the deep indian ocean. australia is now taking over that search zone. we will do our duty to the families of the 230 people on that aircraft who are still absolutely devastated. reporter: experts say turning off acars then the transponders then flying the 777 for hours requires expertise, which is why there s intense focus on the cockpit crew. what is a potential motive and what can be learned from looking deeply into the background of the pilot, the