you see there. everybody is wondering, but who was it? why was it? where was it going? joining us now pilot and aviation attorney arthur rosenberg. arthur, good to have you this morning. you know, we heard from the malaysian prime minister saying again someone deliberately acted in this case. but stopped short of calling it a hijacking. why? well, first of all, i think you have to take a look at what we know. we know that the airplane was en route to beijing. 45 minutes out, voice communication was terminated after the captain or the co-pilot said essentially, good night. minutes later, the transponder was turned off. primary radar has the plane turning around towards the southwest. and then what i talked about a little bit yesterday, what was the primary radar hits, without the transponder on, was still
was it sabotage, was it some kind of hijacking? we do not know the answer to that. nobody at the moment really knows the answer to that. because they have no definitive intelligence or information that leads them to believe it was an act of terrorism, sabotage, a deliberate act, pilot suicide, any of the theories we ve all heard for the last several days. what they do have is data, information now, technical, highly technical data that tells them the likely path of the plane. in other words where it is not why and how it exactly got there. there is also a very key radar blip if you will from the malaysians that show the plane turning around. instead of heading to china, it s heading off the west coast of the malai peninsula. that was one of their first indications. now they have the correlating other satellite data. so they re beginning to put the clues together, beginning to put the pieces together. all of this leaving them now to turn their attention to the indian ocean.
because they have no definitive intelligence or information that leads them to believe it was an act of terrorism, sabotage, a deliberate act, pilot suicide, any of the theories we ve all heard for the last several days. what they do have is data, information now, technical, highly technical data that tells them the likely path of the plane. in other words where it is not why and how it exactly got there. there is also a very key radar blip if you will from the malaysians that show the plane turning around. instead of heading to china, it s heading off the west coast of the malai peninsula. that was one of their first indications. now they have the correlating other satellite data. so they re beginning to put the clues together, beginning to put the pieces together. all of this leaving them now to turn their attention to the indian ocean. barbara starr, thank you very much indeed for that report. joining me now on the phone with more on the trail of the plane
joining me now is james cavanaugh, an msnbc law enforcement analyst. james, what do you make of this new information? well, it goes back to things we talked about last night, lawrence. a human hand involved, i still feel and the evidence suggests there must be some human involvement in that plane turning and the transponder being turned off. because there seems to be many redundant systems in those planes according to the airline pilots and ntsb experts. why would the it seems like there s more to hear from the military. why would they stop tracking the plane especially when the transponder was turned off? yeah. it just doesn t make sense. and it seems to be ripping these families apart. they come out with this information one way, went over the straits, didn t go over the straits, five people tried to board, that wasn t right. they need to give the families a straight story, but it also
waters to the north of the indonesian island of sumatra, perhaps even in the bay of bengal or in the indian ocean. you can see here that the defined search area is now 25,000 nautical square miles. 25,000. that is massive. if you then expand into the indian ocean, it s boy, the math would just be incalculable. greg, how reliable is the information that we are getting from the malaysian military, and what is the conceivable explanation for a plane turning that way? it could not turn. the big problem right now is the inconsistency of information. they ve been filtering some of that information that they ve put out. and right now, it s proven that