welcome back. a lot of the focus of the investigation of flight 370 is on the crew and passengers. authorities have searched both pilots' homes. they're scouring their backgrounds for clues that might suggest a problem or an issue. a flight simulator in the captain's home is being searched for any red flags. kyung lah has the latest tonight from kuala lumpur. >> reporter: the investigation continues to zero in on the two men in the cockpit. in particular, the most skilled pilot, the captain. zaharie shah. so passionate about flying that he's what's known as a home simmer. he built his own flight simulator, as seen in this youtube video. and he talked about it online, writing on a flight simulator chat site, looking for buddies to share this passion. curiously the captain also posted a series of do-it-yourself videos like how to repair an ice maker.

malaysian investigators are now combing through every part of the pilot's home and his life. this youtube video shows him as a loving father of three. he was also active in malaysia's volatile politics. the captain was a public supporter of opposition party leader and a thorn in the ruling party's side. a political party in control for over 50 years. he attended anwar's pro democracy rallies and meetings, even wore a "democracy is dead" t-shirt denouncing the one-party rule in malaysia. for the first time anwar says that he did know the pilot of the missing plane. >> can you describe how you know the pilot? >> he has attended some of the party meetings, and i confirm only afterwards whether he is a member of the party. >> reporter: why is that important? because just hours before

malaysia airlines flight 370 took off, a court of appeals ordered anwar to prison on charges of sodomy, reversing the not guilty decision of a lower court. anwar says the sentence is a political vendetta. local press now asking did zaharie purposely down the plane to make a political statement? >> is it possible that a supporter of yours would be willing to take this step in order to make a political statement on the global stage? >> it cannot be conjecture. it's grossly unfair to him and his family. i'm open to a full investigation. they can investigate. there was nothing of that sort. >> reporter: anwar says his political opponents are feeding that narrative to reporters. >> in order to deflect their own failure, their own incompetence, they now choose to attack me. >> just to throw off the scent? >> yes. i think there's a desperation of the government, of the ruling

leadership, for the manner they managed the whole crisis, clearly incompetent, contradictory statements, poor management of the crisis. >> reporter: but so far there is no evidence to tie the plane's disappearance to the pilot or his politics. we could not reach the malaysian government for comment on this. >> the fact that no distress signals, no ransom notes, there are no parties claiming to be responsible, there's always hope. >> reporter: the transport minister did acknowledge that the captain and co-pilot did not ask to fly together, and that investigators are looking into pilot suicide as a possible cause. officials also say it was the co-pilot, not the captain, who gave the plane's last verbal message, "all right, good night." >> kyung lah joins us now from kuala lumpur. it's not just the pilot and co-pilot, there's a passenger that's also getting some attention, right?

>> reporter: the person you're talking about is 29-year-old aviation engineer. he is someone that they are taking a keen interest on, but they say come on, he is not involved. open the doors, investigate. he is confident his son had nothing to do with this, his father telling us his son was heading to beijing, anderson, because he works for a private jet company and was going to repair a plane there and bring it back to malaysia. >> i've seen a lot of reports about the pilot's family left the day before. i don't know if that's been confirmed. has it? and do we know if police have talked to the family? >> reporter: we do know that the police have talked to the family. we know that the pilot's family has not been at the house recently. we don't -- we're not really able to confirm whether or not they left the day before this flight happened. those little details, there's a lot of inconsistent reporting in the press. as you know from watching what's

happened this last week, the authorities have also not really been consistent in exactly the whereabouts of the pilot's family. >> appreciate you looking into that and also there has been a lot of -- today there was another report, local media report we are not even mentioning because it's been knocked down. so there's a lot of misreporting, particularly in local papers that we're avoiding. i want to bring in jim tilmon. thanks for being with us. this idea about pilot suicide, does that make any sense to you? it's what you're trying to do -- if that's what you're trying to do, why try to hide the plane? why turn off the data system, the transponder, why fly around for however long it flew around for. >> if that's what you're going to do, you might as well right after takeoff hit the drink, there's no big deal. just dive right into the water. i think that's a far-fetched idea, way off the mark. >> the flight simulator at the pilot's home, does that raise any red flags for you as an experienced pilot? >> normally it wouldn't, because

i do know that there are guys that like to have a simulator so that if they're going to fly into an unfamiliar airport, they can practice and be very, very comfortable when they do fly in there. but i am a little bit concerned about the sophistication of the one he had and that sort of thing. you know, had this incident not taken place, it probably wouldn't have meant anything but it does mean something now because whoever it is that is flying this airplane through all these machinations is a skilled pilot, very, very skilled, very, very experienced, and you've got to wonder if it's very, very practiced. >> obviously that's something investigators have now in their possession and are going to be looking at to see what they can learn from that flight simulator. jim, stay with us, we're going to stake a short break and have more on how the flight could have flown for so many hours undetected. how is that possible. plus how the families of the missing are coping. we'll talk to a grief counselor who spent time with some of them. we'll be right back.

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captain tilmon, jim tilmon alluded to it before the break, if anyone took over the plane, what was or still is their end game and how, if it was a hijacking, did they evade detection. tom foreman has several leading scenarios investigators are looking at and he joins us now. >> reporter: they're leading scenarios and they're all bad. let's bring in the map. points of reference here. we know a week and a half ago the plane took off from kuala

lumpur, flew less than an hour and vanished off the coast here headed toward vietnam. and everything else since then has been conjecture. all of these search areas, everything based on just ideas of what might have happened, including the latest idea from that satellite suggesting that maybe there's an arc to the north or an arc to the south upon which signals were received from this plane. so how could it have landed if it headed to the south? where could it have gone? are there possibilities out there? yeah, there are airports at banda aceh or western australia or christmas island out there. it's not easily done, though, and partially because of the requirements of this airplane. it's got to have 4,000 feet of runway minimum if it's going to land safely somewhere. 6,000 to take off. it's got to have some kind of support services. any place out here that has an airport to handle it in all this water is also going to have people. maybe only a couple of hundred, but those people all would have to be part of this or be quiet

or else somebody hears about it. so the southern route is not very promising. so let's talk about the idea of northern route and what may or may not be involved with that. if you look at the idea that it flew north somehow off this line or along this line, look at the places it's passing. cambodia, myanmar, china, could there be holes in radar there and incomplete coverage, people not paying a lot of attention? sure there could be. could there be countries that don't want to tell much about what they know because of their own national security? absolutely. but all of them? would all of them do that and could it get out that way? it doesn't look that likely. so then you're left with even more surprising ideas or confusing ideas. one of which is very popular for people to talk about right now which is the idea that this plane managed to essentially go into a stealth mode, by flying in the shadow, the radar shadow of another jet.

so some jet out here is flying with all of its systems turned on, normal commercial flight, and it's flying on radar fully watched by everyone. this one has nothing turned on so it can't be seen by radar and also can't be seen by this plane, because it's flying slightly behind it. it's not tracked in any way, shape or form. and together they come together and form like one dot on the radar signal. officials have been asked about this possibility and they have said, yeah, i guess it's possible. you need an incredibly skilled pilot to pull it off. even then, the dot would probably be bigger or more intense than usual and could attract the attention of a radar operator somewhere. anderson, when people try to figure out beyond what we know that initial flight into all this conjecture how it could have happened, theories like this have to be considered, no matter how outlandish, simply because here we are a week and a half later and we just don't know. >> and these are certainly things that investigators from

every country who's involved in this are certainly looking at and trying to play out the many steps of what it would entail. tom, appreciate it. i want to bring in john hansman a professor of aeronautics. also back with us is jim tilmon. professor hanson, about all the theories out there about what happened, at this point which seem most plausible to you? >> well, we've got to keep everything on the table but a couple days ago everybody rejected the catastrophic failure idea and now it's pack on the table and that's credible. the original turn-back was towards the closest available airport, so that makes sense. so the initial part actually makes sense, some sort of catastrophic problem. >> when you say catastrophic, you don't mean instantaneous, you mean mechanical issues on board that the pilot had time to try to make that turn to try to find the closest airport. >> sure. yeah, some sort of progressive

problem like smoke in the cockpit if you had an electrical fire in the avionics bay or something like that, he would have turned to the nearest airport which would have made sense. under that hypothesis if they became incapacitated or if there was a flight control problem. if there was a flight control problem, they still would have had the radio, so it's hard to figure out. what really doesn't make sense on that, though, was if they did become incapacitated and the airplane was flying along, it would normally continue in the direction it was going because it would have been programmed either in the flight management computer or just in heading hold mode to track that heading. so the fact that it appears that it turned either to the north or to the south doesn't really jive with that theory. there is still the idea of a hijack of some sort, either an intruder or the crew. you know, that's sort of where we are. we're looking for enough data to make a reasonable conclusion.

>> jim tilmon, how accurate do you think this radar information is that has been released? do you believe -- because a lot of it is not clear-cut this was information that they were g getting. >> well, i don't mean to say bad things about people, but i really don't trust any of that. i mean i keep getting all of these crazy stories about what the radar was picking up and what it wasn't picking up. hey, do you have radar contact or not? and i also wonder -- you know, i've been critical of air traffic control since this thing started. where were they? why aren't they asking this airplane to squawk i.d. so we can identify them. why aren't they asking what are your intentions? why aren't they creating the conversation? >> an airline flying over land you would think would raise those types of communications from air traffic controllers.

we've got to leave it there, jim, john, thank you very much. i'm going to talk to a grief counselor who has been talking to the families of the missing. imagine, as closely as people have been following this, what it is like for them with this constantly shifting information from malaysian authorities. we'll hear from him ahead. [ male announcer ] research suggests cell health

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so many people have personal links to flight 370 and for them the past ten days have been excruciating. grief counselor paul yin joins us from beijing. you've been talking to some of the families that have loved ones aboard this flight. the not knowing and the conflicting information for them must be just devastating. >> absolutely. i think it's the most unusual situation here. i worked with the families and victim of the asiana crash last year in san francisco and that was difficult. but the experience i got from that is really of very little use today because grief counseling or any kind of recovery from this has to have a starting point. and the starting point is knowing -- having a verdict of what happened. and without a starting point, every day people's emotion go up and down from hope to despair.

basically they're going hour by hour, not day by day. >> sometimes minute by minute, i imagine. what -- are many of the families that you've talked to -- >> absolutely. >> -- holding on to hope that their loved ones are still alive? that's clearly got to be -- given all the conflicting information, that has to be something that they are very seriously considering. >> well, actually perhaps more so than you think. because when they -- when the word came out that we're basically considering hijacking as the most possible scenario, there was many of the families almost euphoria because that means they could still be alive. and i heard cheers. and their response is so, i think, out of what we consider to be the normal response because they are trying to hold on to any little bit of hope, and they are enlarging it in

their mind. and i even have someone say to me, say, when my son come home, i'll take you out to dinner. >> paul, i appreciate you being on. again, thank you for what you are doing in all of this and all the counselors who are working with these families. again, it's an unthinkable situation. up next tonight, the latest from crimea where people are celebrating and the rest of the world is having cold war flashbacks. we'll take a look at what's happening ahead.

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quick check of some headlines, poppy harlow is here360 bulletin. >> russian president vladimir putin has signed a decree recognizing crimea as a sovereign state after its vote over the weekend to break away from ukraine.

pro-russian demonstrators have taken to the streets in celebration. the united states and the e.u. have denounced the vote and slapped sanctions on several officials from russia and ukraine. a putin aide calls the sanctions a, quote, great honor. at the oscar pistorius murder trial, a gun dealer told the court today the olympian knew south african gun safety laws restricting the use of force. pistorius said he accidentally killed his girlfriend, reeva steenkamp, after mistaking her for an intruder. prosecutors believe he intentionally killed her after an argument. meantime a law enforcement official says it appears that l'wren scott committed suicide at her new york apartment this morning. the 49-year-old as mick jagger's girlfriend for more than a decade. also this morning anchors at ktla took cover under their desks when a 4.4 magnitude earthquake shook the los angeles area this morning. no reports of major injuries or

damage, but quite a scare there, anderson. they recovered, though, quite well. >> poppy, thanks very much.