s u-turn manually programmed into the plane's computer from the cockpit was transmitted via the acars data system to the ground at 1:07 a.m. that means the u-turn was premeditated. programmed before acars went down and executed only after the last radio call and after the transponders went dead. if the pilot entered that turn, why? >> some pilots will program in an alternate flight plan in the event of an emergency. we don't know what the reason was for this particular flight plan, whether to go back to kuala lumpur or take the airplane somewhere away from beijing. >> coming up. >> flight deck flight simulator in anaheim, this retired american captain helped recreate in a 737 what we know. someone turned off the transponder with the flip of a switch. >> you can see i can press the button, acars and that would bring it up. >> they switched off, then disabled the acars data system possibly by pulling the circuit breaker. >> circuit breaker would be on one of these back panels behind the pilots. >> easy steps for a pilot. total time, 20 seconds. then making a u-turn back to kuala lumpur. >> w

france 447 that the acars data cut off abruptly. so we knew the plane was airborne four minutes. that gave us 4 minutes at full speed and altitude 40 miles. the x on the surface. the 40 mimes radius of a search area, and that's a big haystack, but the way you go about looking for an aircraft in that needle in that hay stastack a slow and methodic's search. >> that seems to be whan happening. thank you have. appreciate that from woods hole in massachusetts. >>> and we'll be right back. le. and we own the paper cottage. it's a stationery and gifts store. anything we purchase for the paper cottage goes on our ink card. so you can manage your business expenses and access them online instantly with the game changing app from ink. we didn't get into business to spend time managing receipts, that's why we have ink. we like being in business because we like being creative, we like interacting with people. so you have time to focus on the things you love. ink from chase. so you can. ♪ they lived. ♪ they lived. ♪ they lived. ♪ (dad) we lived.

we talked about the acars data. that is the data burst that comes from the plane. it's transmitted every 30 minutes or something in it and really updates what is happening with the plane's systems. the last acars ka da that burst we said before was a 1:07 a.m. malaysian authorities today came out and contradicted something. u.s. authorities said last week that the last acars data burst suggested that the pilot, somebody in the cockpit had preprogrammed in a u-turn. authorities today said there is no such preprogram in the acars data burst so this is yet again a situation where we're dealing with conflicting information from the malaysians, the u.s. authorities, whatever. it is important because it suggests maybe it wasn't preplanned as the data burst and the information would suggest. again, the malaysians contrad t contradicting that. this is really what we're talking about in terms of all the imagery. this is important. this is the most recently piece of data that we have had coming from the chinese trying to get the telestrator to work there and said to be about

the acars data, the plane's automated data reporting system stopped transmitting data at 1:07 p.m. the pings. the plane did continue to send automated pings once an hour to an oshl orbiting satellite. they were received in london that said in a statement routine automated signals were received during its flight from kuala lumpur. now investigators hope to use those pings to calculate where the plane might have flown in four to five hours. >> and hopefully with more work on the data and more refinement if you will, they can get a very good idea where the aircraft went. >> reporter: the new massive search zone now stretches from the strait of malacca to the bay of bengal where the u.s. navy is searching. the uss kidd is now in the area as well. an anti-submarine plane loaded with underwater search technology should start working tomorrow. we talk to commander william marks. >> there is no way you can search the entire indian ocean. a ship is an amazing platform, but it can't be done with ships alone. and even our p3 and p 8 with a range of a thousand or so miles, they'll have to retu

but the acars data is stored on the acars system and transmitted through the s.a.t. com so it's possible there is a separate way to turn off the acars without disarming s.a.t.come, the way i interpret this data, two different things going on here. the fact that the acars stopped transmitting between 1:07 and 1:37 is not uncommon. but the fact this that it didn't report when it was supposed to concerns me a great deal. what i'm confused about is whether or not and what i don't know is whether the s.a.t. com tried to communicate at 1:37. if it did and no data came through, that's one scenario. if it didn't, then that's something else, meaning the s.a.t. com had been turned off at that point and was turned on again later on seven or eight hours later. >> what so many people agree, it is highly unlikely this is just a big coincidence. david souci, thank you for your insight. john lucic, as well. richard quest, stick around if you will. more questions than answers for pretty much anyone involved in this now mystery. how did both communication systems on board that plane g

a.m., with the plane over the gulf of thailand, the final stream of information from the 777's acars data recording system is received on the ground. from that last transmission, investigators determined that someone has programmed in a change into the plane's navigational computer. then at 1:19 with the airliner at cruising altitude the first officers utters four word leaving malaysia air space telling controllers all right good night. two minutes later the transponder cuts out or is turned off make it hard for ground radar to track the plane. thai military radar is following it. somewhere around 1:28 a.m. detects that left turn toward the malay peninsula to the west and south. at 1:30 a.m. air traffic controllers lose contact with the plane. a scheduled 1:37 acars transmission does not happen. they detect what they believe to be 370 miles northwest of penang. according to a satellite ping received at 8:11 in the morning investigators say the jet either turned north or south and flew into those two huge, an of territory into open ocean. investigators are focusing closer on that southern

today malaysian authorities said they've looked at the acars data and that's not true.hey contradicted what u.s. authorities said in terms of whether this u-turn coming back over the strait of malacca and malaysia, whether that was, in fact, preprogrammed. the malaysian authorities say there's no evidence to suggest that whatsoever. so this is the search zone. we've talked about that a lot. and specifically, they've now narrowed this down to about 20,000 square miles based on the satellite photographs from the chinese and the satellite photograph from the australians showing debris that should be, they think, relatively large. here's what we're talking about. this is specifically -- i need to do this, then this. this is the debris they're talking about from the chinese. this piece is 73 feet long. the piece from the australians that they had spotted was, we believe, somewhere in the neighborhood of 79 feet long. so when you look at a 777, the question becomes, what piece of debris from a 777 could be that big? let's go over here and take a quick look at the 777. pardon

. >> reporter: they switched off, then disabled the acars data system, possibly by pulling the circuit breaker. >> the circuit breaker would be on one of these pack panels, behind the pilots. >> reporter: easy steps for a pilot. total time, 20 seconds. then making a you-turn back to kuala lumpur. >> all i have to do is spin this knob around and the aircraft will turn around. >> reporter: sources tell nbc news whoever turned the plane programmed the flight management system and knew what they were doing. >> this would be a very elaborate scheme. they would have had very, very extensive training to pull this off. >> reporter: meanwhile, the most intense search remains focused on the rough waters over the southern indian ocean. 1,500 miles southwest of perth, where a massive 370,000 square mile area simply too big for an underwater sonar search. malaysian authorities say searches of the homes and even a flight simulator turned up nothing suspicious. tonight with the flight crew under the microscope, the family of the captain released these images showing the man they love. and there's thi

sources say the plane's u-turn manually programmed into the computer was transmitted by the acars data system to ground at 1:07 a.m. that indicates the u-turn was premeditated, programs before acars went down and before the trans ponders went dead. the question is, why would they do that? some pilots would do that in event of an emergency. the searches at the homes of the plane's captain and co-pilot have not turned up anything suspicious. 11 days since 370 went missing and a search continues across an area roughly two-thirds the size of the united states. >>> it is quite the mystery. thank you for that. also overseas, more tough talk from vladimir putin. and the mood in moscow is both celebratory and defiant. thousands gathered in red square to welcome crimea back to russia and president putin was right there calling the u.s. unprofessional and irresponsible. tracie potts is talking about it this morning. >> reporter: how do you figure out what putin is going to do? is he going beyond crimea? account u.s. stop him? it's no game. we are seeing deadly violence and our allies in that reg

. >> acars was set up so the information from the aircraft, maintenance information about engines, to position aircraft, anything about position of the aircraft, anything going wrong, there's data points per second sent through acars through a company called arink and they dribt that to the faa or whoever is using that data. the reason we're calling them pings and not data links is because the ping is saying, i have some data. the aircraft does this, when it loses communication or can't reach anyone, it sends out a ping. it says where are we and i need to connect with you. so it sends out basically a telephone call waiting for someone to answer. and that's what we're receiving. >> so first of all, the fact that there are these pings leads me to think that whole notion of a catastrophic disaster in which every single system was destroyed and that's why this thing disappeared isn't quite the case because if there are pings why are there not transponder information available? >> exactly. now there are things that could cause that. i'm not ruling it out. because if the buses are all lost and the other thing connected to the buses that transmit, which is incredibly unlikely. so i wo

>> well, i don't think the movements we seen are from the acars data.malaysian government said this morning is based on information from looking at the primary radar they are now expanding the search area. i think the team has gotten together, they've gotten all of the radar data from both the military and from the civilian side, they've broken the code on it and they can finally look at the primary data and they've come out with a plot that is starting to make sense. that's why they are moving assets to the area. acars says you've been up for hours, not where you are s they've picked p something from the radar information to give them a better idea. >> so let me bring bill into this conversation. what do you think this new information that we're getting that the plane may have flown for several hours after the transponders failed? does it point more to mechanical failure, pilot suicide, hijacking? what's your sense? >> it's hard to speculate. i mean, we have so few data points to go by that you can draw the lines of possibilities in just about any dire

the idea no indication from the acars data, wireless transmission of data from the plane that the plane was preprogrammed. i have clive next to me. you're experienced in these issues. as tom reminded, it wasn't just acars transmission that turned out to be false that gave an indication, it's that the plane flew steady by way points, less likely for you or me if we were experienced pilots to handle than an autopilot. aren't there ways for the pilot without preprogramming, turning the dial, the heading. >> i think this underlines something, this plane does not disappear. what disappeared was our ability to see it. this shows shortcomings in the way of acars. they were dispatched every 30 minutes. between those messages there's this yawning gap. this is a quite considerable change they have come up with again today, which is confusion. in one senseette takes out the sinister implication, something sinister about preprogramming before it disappeared. now we're left with trying to conjecture whether it was a flown turn or computerized turn. before or after, it was deliberate and carefully fl

. >> the prime minister says the acars data transmission system is switched off or disabled, as the phrase he used, as the plane goes out over the east of malaysia wp. >> just as it crosses the land area. >> the last known point of contact is in the china sea, there's either by transponder or the handoff between malaysia and vietnam. >> we also know those words were spoeken at that point. >> we know that because the authorities person said that. would i be surprised if tomorrow we're told that that never happened, i wouldn't be surprised. but on tuesday or wednesday of this week, that's what we were told. and once those words are out there, it was probably a longer senten sentence. it was probably malaysia acknowledging and saying "all right, good night." >> granted, so many things have changed. we remember the excitement over the satellite photos. but potential significance of this separation of things, it indicates that there was some control or decision making s that your view? >> it indicates, it suggests that at the moment when that last voice transmission was being made there was the

we had four minutes of acars data that stopped abruptly. that four minutes was translated to 40 miles that the plane may have traveled. that gave us a search radius 80 miles in diameter, which is big. the floating debris told us we're in there, so we began looking. we were in the big haystack so, we began looking for the pieces of the needle. and the first round of searches, we spent two months in the wrong part of that haystack. then went back again about a year later. and then within a week's time we were onto the wreck. so it was two years, but it was not two years on the water. and then for the second phase we had one ship, the aleutia, and we had three very sophisticated underwater robots, these underwater drones that gave us more firepower on one ship than i think has ever occurred even to this day. it was a very effective way to locate the wreckage. >> david soucie, given the fact this is 400 miles southwest of perth, in terms of again, if this debris is from a plane, if it's in an area where the plane went down, in terms of finding

flight 370 leaves kuala lumpur at 12:41 am. 1:07 am last acars data transmission. the next transmission scheduled for 30 minutes later never comes. at 1:19 am the co-pilot radios all right. good night asthma lash malaysi controllers hand him over to vietnamese air traffic controllers. at 2:15 am, the last military radar contact. all that's left are those six pings being transmitted somewhere along two very long arcs to the north and south. the last one at 8:11 am. meanwhile the families of the missing can only wait. >> the first couple of days all i could do was replay memories and, you know, see him and, you know, open his closet and smell the clothes. >> reporter: in beijing, philip woods' girlfriend believes he is still alive and has started a facebook campaign for flight 370. in texas, woods' brother waits for the phone to ring. >> how are you doing, brother, you know? you can survive this. he can. he is surviving this. >> that was tom costello reporting there. >>> new this morning, china claims it's looked into the background of the chinese nationals on board

about this turn was under control as opposed to reacting to something was based not just on the acars data but also on the information that when the plane took that turn it followed very closely waypoints, radar points used for navigation by airplanes, and it followed them so perfectly that it was an indication to investigators that this was not under the control of the pilot when it wouldn't be 100% perfect but more likely under the control of auto pilot or of the computer of the airplane. i wonder what kind of indication that gives you, particularly for someone who's trying to track where disappearing planes ended up. >> it's incredible to me to see how everyone in this case is acting just like people acted in 1937 with the earhart loss. the assumption that something happened so quickly that there was no time for a distress call. the last communication from earhart indicated that she knew she was having trouble finding the island she was looking for, there was no mayday, no "we're going down," anything like that, just as in this case. i'm going to argue for an open mind here. everybody i

perhaps the transponder, followed by the data part of the acars data link. we know the plane talked to the satellite for several hours. this - we can't eliminate this problem. by the way, it happened before in this identical airplane, cairo, 2011, 777 sitting on a ramp, a fire in the cockpit. everybody, of course jumped out, they were on the ground. they never quite figured out what caused the fire. we can't discount anything. we have to keep our minds open. there was another accident involving a 737 in 2005 where it wasn't a fire, but a greek airline, he'llios, and a flight attendanteneded up in the cockpit trying to fly the plane. he had a flight attendant action system separate from the airplane, he couldn't recover the plane, it flue until it ran out of gas and crashed. again, i don't know that that happened here, but i can envision scenarios outside of the hijacking terrorist line of thinking we are going down. we don't know and we need to look at previous problems. >> some can envision the possibility of the jet landing at an old world war ii airfield.

since last saturday morning "wall street journal" reports suggesting that perhaps there was some acars data transmitting for up to four or five hours. the ma laze said today that was inaccurate. i will tell you the "wall street journal" reporter on this is generally very good. so where does this leave us? it leaves us still with the same number of questions we had nearly a week ago. >> and you've covered the aviation industry for so long, tom. at the beginning we described this as an unprecedented mystery. what do we -- it's been close to one week and still no answers. >> if you take the proposition that this plane did a u-turn, and the faa and ntsb are looking at the piece of radar to try to determine was this the flight that banked and did a u-turn. if that happened and the range on this plane was somewhere in the neighborhood of 2500 miles it could fly, potential this plane could have ended up way out over the indian ocean. that's clearly one very real possibility at this point. it's unlikely, according to most experts it continued on its trajectory toward beijing. somebody would have sp

so what puzzles me is that the engine data also comes down the same pipe as the acars data we're familiar it was turned off, how is it feasible that engine data could also be coming down? there is one element which i'm not sure about yet and bear with me if you will on this, there's three types of data i know that the engine uses or that comes through this engine health monitoring system. one is the snapshots which the engine provides on takeoff and at climb and in the cruise. the second is if something's exceeded or gone wrong essentially during the flight, it triggers an immediate sort of temperatures too high or oil pressure's too low. that would also trigger a second set of messages. the third one is a summary of the entire flight. and obviously that takes place at the end of the flight when it's back on the ground. and if you imagine that this system transmits via satellite or via vhf radio and it was disabled for some reason, then is it possible at the end of a flight, say for example the aircraft actually did land somewhere and whoever was commandeering it decided to transmit via v

at 1:07 the last ought mated acars data transmission. next transmission never comes. at 1:19 a.m. the co-pilot radios already, good night as air traffic controllers hand him over to vietnam controllers. someone in the cockpit turns off the transponders and the plane turns around. at 2:15 a.m., the last military radar contact of the all that's left are six pings being transmitted along two very long arcs to the north and south, the last one at 8:11 a.m. >> tom costello joins me along with michael gold farb here with me. that time line only confirms there was so much we don't know and those two arcs indicate the broad area, not flight path. so the amount of territory that is now being searched is enormous. and some of these countries are budget conscious and beginning to scale back the search. >> including the united states which may not be doing it for budget reasons because the uss kidd was in the bay of ben gal and there's no reason to believe the plane is up there. they are scaling back. we've got only two planes, p3 and p 8. you talked about the arcs. these arcs are not necessa

it transmitted its last automatic data burst, called acars. the next acars transmission was scheduled for 30 minutes later. it never came. 1:19 a.m. the copilot radioed "all right, good night" as malaysian air traffic controllers handed the plane over to vietnamese controllers. just two minutes after the very standard conversation, 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 malaga, headed north. over the next six hours the plane transmitted one ping per hour to an orbiting satellite until 8:11 a.m. when the last ping was received. that puts it 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 and the transponders, then flying

>> no radio transmission, no acars data transmission, no transponder information, all of that went blank. and investigators do believe this plane was flying on autopilot, at least all the way down here. why do they believe that? because they believe that the speed was consistent, the heading was consistent, and the altitude was consistent. and so when you put all that together, that suggests autopilot. so did we have a scenario where the people in the cockpit are dead are, incapacitated? did something catastrophic happen and they're unable to perform their functions? most investigators now think it's unlikely that somebody wasn't doing this on purpose. why? we have no idea. and investigators are now trying to really get into the backgrounds for both the pilot and the copilot. was there any possible motive for either one of these two guys to have acted this way? we don't know. >> just to get through your negative there's, in other words, it's likely, it's likely that somebody was flying that plane all the way down? >> somebody made a decision to execute the turns that caused this plane to

the final stream from the acars data reporting system is received on the ground at 1:07. then at 1:19, the first officer utters first round, leaving malaysian air space, telling controllers, good night. two minutes later, the radar transponder cuts out or is turned off. thai military radar is following it and between 1:21 and 1:28 a.m. detects that left turn back toward the west and south. at 1:30 a.m., air traffic controllers lose contact with the plane. acars transmission does not happen. this what is believed to be flight 370 is tracked way off course. from there there's no solid information. we only know according to a satellite ping received at 8:11 in the morning, investigators say the jet turned north or south and flew into those two huge arcs of territory in open ocean. investigators now are focusing closer on that southern route. we'll talk to a u.s. navy commander involved in that. a major development, one that everyone hopes will bring badly needed answers. more now from kuala lumpur. [ speaking foreign language ] >> reporter: a mother's grief and frustration f

in theory, you could have communicated with air traffic controllers, transponder was off, the acar's data was no longer transmitting. there was a lot here to suggest this was intentional. >> all right. tom costello, thank you very much for that. let's bring in a physical oceanographer at air and space research. she's been analyzing surface currents to determine where the debris might be now. kathleen, we have a break in the case. a little daylight, it seems like, but does this actually put us any closer to where we might be -- need to be to actually find the plane? >> i think it's a great break in the case. because if you know more information, any information -- because right now, we've been going on hypotheses and trying to guess where things went. but if you can know where to start from, at least roughly and where a piece of debris is now or has been spotted, then you can get a better handle on what parameters are at play. with respect to the wind versus currents. if it's just currents carrying it along, that gives us more information if it's wind pushing on the surface and blowing it

and to make a modification to it so it cannot be disabled and this airplane was capable with acars and data link and of course, it knows the position to absolute certainty level of precision. so you could modify the onboard systems on the airplane currently so it could not be disabled. i mean, a backpack er can go bu a satellite system for $150 and of course, as i think that richard quest may have described earlier, getting anything on an airplane approved is extremely costly, and they focus very much on the noninterference with other systems or that it cannot pose a risk to the airplane, and certainly, i think that you could have new technology or utilize the existing technology to solve that problem. >> well, is ate good poiit is a because it is not complicated information, and the location, and that is not complicated technology, but the other is data like speed and direction and that kind of thing. so it seems as you say very much within reach. >> right. i think that ultimate ly, telemetry of all of the flight data is where we will end up. it is just that it is costly. there are bandwid

the update of the acars data, does that have any significant meaning to you? >> it's a big deal for us on the outside of the investigation. we've been operating under the assumption for quite some time based on obviously some bad information that there was this other path that was programmed into the flight management system. and it had several waypoints that would send it off into the direction generally where the search is occurring right now. now we're told that was not the case at all. this plane was, in fact, headed to beijing. that was like the prime piece o think somehow that the crew might have been involved or maybe they were -- maybe they were hijackers who were forcing this. most likely the crew. take that away and we really don't have any evidence the crew was doing anything nefarious. there might have been something catastrophic that occurred that might have put them in a scenario, excuse me, where they were trying to keep the plane flying. trying to get it to a lower altitude. and a decompression situation. and perhaps in the confusion of all tha

what we do know is with another uplink data link system known as acars that the data stopped but the device continued to talk to the network, the satellites. and that takes somebody with a deep level of knowledge to be able to stop the data. it says that the components still worked, it says that there was still electrical power. so respectfully, i think that we do know more than we did. we're out of square one. we do have evidence. it's not as strong as we'd like. it's not compelling or conclusive but we do have evidence. it says that something went on in that airplane. they did not or could not communicate via voice but it was electrically powered. it says it went to given points in space known as waypoints. that says the likelihood was that they used the flight management computer. somebody had to know how to program that. now, that's about as hard evidence as we have. >> what does that hard evidence tell us, to me, to everybody watching right now? what does it say could have happened? >> you know, there's so many speculations. i've been an accident investigator for 30 years and it

you can pull that actually, to disconnect the voice recorder but as far as the flight data recorder no. >> and the acarwhich submit data to that, is there anyplace in the cockpit that the pilot can interface to that? >> we have a keyboard and we can transmit data into the acars. >> can they from the cockpit tell that system to stop or tell that system to continue operating? >> you'd have to totally turn off your whole eight of i don't. you would totally blank them out and that would totally render the acars inoperative. >> very complicated set of systems we're seeing, very interesting cockpit tour for you john and i'm not sure whether it sheds much light on the continuing mystery. but that's a little bit of the environment that the pilots with have been up here in front on flight 370. >> we lope to learn more about that in the coming days. allen schauffler, thank you. coming up. intriare desperate timescall f. >>> and hazing, what triggered the move, why organizations claim it could be a game changer. 11:00 eastern, 8:00 pacific time. >> happy birthday scotty. >> is today your birthday? >> it might as

i haven't been told who received this acars data. i am not convinced that the best experts have seen it yet. >> so it is still a confusing bit of information that we just can't puzzle together. i'm just going to go through a lift of things we think we know. i'll put it that way. that's the best way i can put it. if you put this all together, the on board computer was reprogrammed, right? the transponder was turned ought. the radar shows that that plane made a sharp turn west. the thai military said that. a fisherman on an island in the general area said they saw a very low-flying plane. they never see that. they think it was that flight. if you put all of these things together, does it tell us -- tuz it make the picture any clearer. >> my side of the business is kind of the civilian investigation. there is very much a parallel civilian technical kind of investigation going on in parallel with the criminal investigation. all of the things that you just described pretty well tend to push things in the criminal direction. first of all,

the other thing we had was acars data that cut off roughly after four minutes.knew that plane was probably airborne for four minutes and we could draw a circle. it's a big area but nothing compared to what we're looking at here. >> that's a huge, huge difference, four minutes compared to four or five hours. >> wolf, when you mentioned the pentagon report, you used the word crashed into the indian ocean. do we have any idea that that plane -- it makes me suspicious that someone thinks they saw the plane go down. because otherwise, if it's five hours, that's actually not the bay of bengal. that could take it out past india into the arabian sea. are they saying now that they think the plane crashed? >> they are saying likely, according to this one classified analysis that our barbara starr got ahold of. but they are still not ruling anything out by any means. they are not ruling out the possibility that it could have landed somewhere, could have crash landed. >> right. >> they simply don't know. this is an analysis basically that we're been reporting. >> five hours

at 1:07 a.m., the plane's data communication system the acars system, sent out its last automated message, they are programmed to fire off every 30 minutes, what we did not know until moments ago is at that time the plane had already changed course, heading west away from the intended destination of beijing, all without a word from the co pilot to control. he spoke with them at 1:19 said nothing about it. again, this is a full 12 minutes before the person sent out the last calm message. all right, good night. . scott brenner is a former faa senior official now with gephardt government affairs, if this is the case, that in fact at 1:07 a.m., the acars communication system was transmitting data that this plane had already made its turn, is that our information? >> that's what i understand as well, megyn. >> had already made its turn then that would suggest that this co pilot knew a lot more than he was communicating to ground control and places a whole new spotlight on him. >> no, absolutely. this was programmed, in we don't know when it was programmed in, if it was before the flight took o

the other one disabled a data link system known as acars but only the data stopped flowing. e acars system continued to talk to the satellite network. >> right. i've had some pilots say well, you know, a fire could have broken out and that could have disabled the transponders but if a fire broke out, it wouldn't be delivering signals the next eight hours, right? so we can rule out a fire on the plane? >> well, let's not rule anything out. let's do this. let's say that the likelihood of fire is low because when you look at statistically inflight fires in the fleet history it's usually from a major fire to loss of the airplane is about 17 minutes. for this airplane to fly eight hours would make it such an outlier in the statistically probability that it is not very likely. >> it's not likely that it's a fire. let's also talk about how there -- how we had a payne stewart type situation where everybody lost oxygen, the pilots didn't have time to put on the mask and it just kept going and they kept flying. this is not a private plane that is 25 years old. this is a boeing 777. wha

the only way you really could know that outside of the airplane is to have a data link of some sort. acarsht management system, communicates across to data link when you're near the ground. unnorth natalie when you go over the ocean, those lings fall away and you use the at light system. in this case there's two brands you can use. it happened to be turned off or at least the acar system was turned off so there was only handshaking going across. frankly, i don't really know -- >> would the acar system have been able to transmit that information? >> it would if it were turned on. but if you turn the system off, then really there isn't anything to be sent through the data link. so at that point i don't know how they would know that it was preprogrammed somehow into the a contraction ar system unless they know the data link was still active and there was information going back and forth. >> a quick question. could that computer in the cockpit which adjusts the autopilot, if you will, could that be hacked from the ground? >> it's not very likely. i've certainly talked to many experts who don't

hours after the plane's radar transponder signal vanished, hours after acars stopped sending data, hours after it possibly soared to high altitude and then plunged 20,000 feet and then climbed again. we learned today that in all those hours authorities say there is no evidence, none at all, of anyone trying to make any cell phone calls or send any texts or make transmissions at all from the airliner. the question is why not? is it simply the plane was too high? we also learned that other countries are planning for the possibility this plane landed somewhere and is being somehow being prepared to be used as a weapon. israeli air traffic control went on higher alert today as a precaution which redoubles the scrutiny on who took control of the airliner. was the crew up to no good? they were seen in a widely circulated youtube video, the first officer and captain going through security. new attention as well on who, if anyone, had access to the plane's below decks electronics bay. that's what it looks like. the panoramic view shows row after row of navigation and communication equipment incl

then at 1:37, they are supposed to be another burst of data from acars. that burst go but there's no data. authorities put this together and looks like human intervention, not an aircraft falling apart in the air. >> thank you very much, kerry sanders. we want to dig down more into this question of whether this was deliberate and if so, who was responsible. to join me to do exactly that is nbc news veteran anchor, lester holt, also a self-confessed plane geek and someone who extensively covered our airline disasters over the years. they've taken it flight simulator out of the home of the pilot and poring over it for details. what do you think they might be able to learn? >> he was a flight simulator enthusiast, when i found a little odd. i'm a flight simulator enthusiast but that's because i'm a frustrated pilot. he's a professional pilot with 20,000 hours, thought it was strange he would enjoy doing this. he spent a lot of money and created a lot of monitors. >> took it a step farther -- >> i brought my setup here we can walk across the studio. this is ba

the data system was disabled, but the acar, what they call ping, was still enabled because it can't be switched off. the knowledge of how to shut that data stream off, that tells the investigators that there is someone with knowledge and it's a deliberate act because the electrical power and the acar system continued to work, but the data was shut off. so that's the most revealing single piece of evidence that we have so far. >> okay. john, what about the chance that the pilots might have been forced to change course? is there a way to get evidence for investigators to determine that they were forced to do it? >> well, i remain confidence that we're going to find the airplane. i believe that we will locate a debris field that will lead us to a wreckage and that we will have the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder. >> so john, you're telling me that your sense is that that plane landed somewhere either in the ocean or elsewhere and that it crashed? you don't believe that it is sitting on the ground intact and that passengers may have been let off that plane? >> unfortunately

>> so it's not entirely clear to me but it's my understanding that the acars, the data went off 14 to 24 minutes before the transponder was shut off. my understanding is that these are sort of like blank pings and how the conditions were derived from that, i'm not sure. i would point out here that in this modern age, waypoints are just everywhere. so this airplane, it's not clear whether it flew directly over the waypoints or it just got near them. >> right. is this consistent -- i can actually draw on here. so if the activity was this way and goes this way and changes or regardless of that, does that indicate that somebody is punching those coordinates into the cockpit somehow or that they are coming close to the waypoints that that's the reference that we know roughly where they were? >> well, that's an excellent question. if this airplane were flying on a flight management come cuter system and the waypoints were put in, the airplane would hit them right on the button. and if someone was flying the plane manually and this is obviously not a direct flight path to anywhere -- >> righ

go to another air traffic controller, we believe that comment "good night" came after the acars, automated data transmitting system, came after it sent its last message off the satellite and then it was disabled but before the transponders were turned off. at some point somebody had turned off the acars system, the co-pilot said to controllers, good night" and then the transponders went out. we don't know if necessarily the co-pilot was aware that the acars system was turned off or not. let's show you what they're working on in terms of the search zone. it's a matter of trying to ping exactly where this plane may have been. they're looking at the search grid in this direction but more than likely in this direction because all of the consistents up here in the north have said so far they have not seen any evidence of this plane on their radar, as they have gone back and looked at radar tapes from that early saturday morning. and u.s. sources all believe the plane most likely headed deep into the southern indiana ocean. what does that mean? if i had a wider map, i would show you. australia is add

and what is the most compelling piece of evidence so far that we have got is one of the data systems called the acar system, it sends out data on a regular basis, it had been doing that up to nearly this last known points. it stopped transmitting the data but it continued to talk to the network. that means it had electrical power and the component was functioning. for that to occur in all likelihood required human intervention. that's one of the strongest physical pieces of evidence that we have so far. >> so many of us think we know what's going on, i think i've heard from everybody in the world that everybody knows what happens here. but to underscore this point is it possible that someone in the cockpit whether it's a pilot or somebody else could have turned off all the switches by hand? >> it is conceivable that that would have occurred. could have occurred. the -- one of the things that i think it's very, very important after being an accident investigator for something over three decades. we must keep an open mind here. there's nothing off the table. so we know that we don't know a whole lot.

there's 10,000 data points a second that are being sent through that acars system. so i find it difficult to believe that those pings contain data. i do believe that those pings do exist and that the united states satellites have been picking up those pings and maybe the malaysians as well. those pings are simply a phone call that's waiting for an answer. it doesn't mean that there's any data in it at all until the answer comes in that says yeah, we're speaking the same language. now that we are i'm going to upload all the data that i've been storing out of my acars system, the aircraft tracking and reporting system, communication reporting system excuse me which is sending all that information up. so it's designed that when it's connected to a satellite it's constantly sending that information back to boeing and well send it back to air inc. which is a company that disperses the information. but that information then goes to rolls royce, it goes to boeing, it goes to the manufacturer from there. so to me the pings are very viable. it's what should be happening. what

what the ping is, it coming off the acar system, there are two parts, you have the information, the datais september back. how it is transmitted is the radios, if the sat com is not available. it makes that connection and sends it forward. you get the batch of information. and if the acar is absent the data, then the sat com will still try to connect. >> are you talking about the sat com as it relates to mechanical performance at any information? >> no, i'm talking about the data -- it does transmit. >> the mechanical data, which i think is brilliant, they're monitoring the mechanical performance at any given moment. >> so when the aircraft lands, they can get the parts ready, have all that kind of information. >> but i also want to make the point we don't know that the plane flew off the intended course. we don't know that for sure now. there is a lot of information out there, one thing that could have happened is the plane could have crashed. >> we have to also go to the time line, the plane takes off, the last communication is 40-some odd minutes. they go through the 90 minute period