If one stops working, you go to the second one. so to have a redundant system and both of them not operating, that means it was done by some human being. john, you also think if this new information pans out that human intervention is involved here. certainly the sequence of events leads one to believe that there was somebody sequentially turning things off in that airplane. i mean, there s just no other conclusion. i agree with several of the previous witnesses saying that. john is there an explanation of why a human doing that that is not malicious, concern about some sort of a short? is there reason why somebody on board that aircraft wouldn t turn off that transponder, shut down the circuit breaker for the other means of communication? the only reason i can think of that anybody would do that would be if there was smoke in the cockpit and it was suspected to be an electrical fire. they wouldn t make an
And if that last scenario seems unlikely, you should know that tonight it is possible. that s because according to investigators, everything is on the table. in fact, officials now believe the plane might have been sending out electronic signals or pings four to five hours after its radar beacons stops transmitting. tonight we ve just learned that u.s. officials fwlooefr ray dan beacon or transrespoponder was down separately from the system that continued sending out the pings 14 minutes apart that. could be extremely significant. american investigators telling abc news that the two modes of communication were quote systematically shut down, which makes for a very big hour ahead starting with our jim clancy. reporter: 2200 nautical miles. that s how much farther u.s. officials say malaysia airlines flight 370 might have flown after losing contact early saturday morning. investigators now believe flight information from the boeing
Off. and you say you can know that definitively why? well, because you have two transponders. if one stops working, you go to the second one. so to have a redundant system and both of them not operating, that means it was done by some human being. john, you also think if this new information pans out that human intervention is involved here. certainly the sequence of events leads one to believe that there was somebody sequentially turning things off in that airplane. i mean, there s just no other conclusion. i agree with several of the previous witnesses saying that. john is there an explanation of why a human doing that that is not malicious, concern about some sort of a short? is there reason why somebody on board that aircraft wouldn t turn off that transponder, shut down the circuit breaker for the
That s because according to investigators, everything is on the table. in fact, officials now believe the plane might have been sending out electronic signals or pings four to five hours after its radar beacons stops transmitting. tonight we ve just learned that u.s. officials believe the radar beacon or transponder was shut down separately from the system that continued sending out the empty pings 14 minutes apart. that could be extremely significant. american investigators telling abc news that the two modes of communication were quote systematically shut down, which makes for a very big hour ahead starting with our jim clancy. reporter: 2200 nautical miles. that s how much farther u.s. officials say malaysia airlines flight 370 might have flown after losing contact early saturday morning. investigators now believe flight information from the boeing 777 s engines continued to broadcast automatically for as
Though about these new developments. potentially very significant that the systems were shut down or shut off separately, which makes it it makes it more likely from a lot of people who have spoken on this that the plane was affected by some kind of human action. you ve been checking with intelligence sources. what are officials saying about that possibility that they were intentionally shut down, and are they still holding out the possibility that those were just mechanical shut down automatically somehow? reporter: they re holding out every possibility at this point. because they have to, right? they haven t determined anything definitively. they re still gathering the clues. from the beginning i ve had a consistent view read from intelligence officials when it comes to the terror angle them saying we have nothing to indicate terrorism but we haven t ruled it out. but that s just one explanation, of course. mechanical failure or something, a plane suicide a pilot suicide rath