After completing just six
hours of its mission of searching for underwater debris from Malaysia
Airlines Flight 370, the autonomous underwater vehicle Bluefin-21 has
returned to the surface, according to the Joint Agency Coordination
Centre in Perth, Australia. Data gathered by the sidescan radar is being
extracted and analyzed, the JACC said in a statement.
[Original story, published 7:03 p.m. ET]
The phone of the co-pilot
of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was on and made contact with a cell
tower in Malaysia about the time the plane disappeared from radar, a
U.S. official told CNN on Monday.
However, the U.S.
official -- who cited information shared by Malaysian investigators --
said there was no evidence the co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, had tried to
make a call.
The official told CNN's
Pamela Brown on Monday that a cell-phone tower in Penang, Malaysia --
about 250 miles from where the flight's transponder last sent a signal
-- detected the co-pilot's phone searching for service roughly 30
minutes after authorities believe the plane made a sharp turn westward.
The details do appear to
reaffirm suggestions based on radar and satellite data that the plane
was off course and was probably flying low enough to obtain a signal
from a cell tower, the U.S. official said.
The revelation follows
reporting over the weekend in a Malaysian newspaper that the co-pilot
had tried to make a telephone call while the plane was in flight.
Asked Sunday by CNN about
the newspaper report about a purported effort to make a call by the
co-pilot, Malaysia's acting transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein
said, "As far as I know, no, but as I said that would be in the realm of
the police and the other international (authorities) and when the time
comes that will be revealed. But I do not want to speculate on that at
the moment."
U.S. officials familiar
with the investigation told CNN they have been told that no other cell
phones were picked up by the Penang tower.
Pilots are supposed to turn off their cell phones before pushing back from the gate.
"It would be very rare
in my opinion to have someone with a cell phone on in the cockpit,"
safety analyst David Soucie said. "It's never supposed to be on at all.
It's part of every check list of every airline I am familiar with."
When the plane first
went missing authorities said millions of cell phone records were
searched, looking for evidence that calls had been made from the plane
after it took off, but the search turned up nothing.
Underwater search
Efforts to find the
missing plane and the 239 people aboard focused beneath the choppy
surface of the southern Indian Ocean on Monday as Australian authorities
sent a U.S. Navy-contracted submersible diving toward the sea floor.
The decision to put the
Bluefin-21 autonomous underwater vehicle into the water for the first
time in the 38-day search comes nearly a week after listening devices
last heard sounds that could be from locator beacons attached to the
plane's "black boxes."
"We haven't had a single
detection in six days," Australian chief search coordinator Angus
Houston said. "It's time to go underwater."
New sonar device seeks plane underwater
Search for MH370 goes underwater
Underwater vehicle to search for MH370
The probe is equipped
with side-scan sonar -- acoustic technology that creates pictures from
the reflections of sound. Such technology is routinely used to find
sunken ships and was crucial in finding Air France Flight 447, which
crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.
Houston cautioned
against hopes that the underwater vehicle will find wreckage of the
plane, which disappeared on March 8 on a flight between Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia, and Beijing that should have taken about six hours.
"It may not," he said. "This will be a slow and painstaking process."
It will take the probe
and its operators 24 hours to map each portion of the search area -- two
hours to descend, 16 hours to map, another two hours to rise to the
surface and four hours for operators to download and analyze the
information.
The first mission will
cover an area 5 kilometers by 8 kilometers (3.1 miles by 4.9 miles). It
will take up to two months to scan the entire search area.
The bottom of the search
area is not sharply mountainous -- it's more flat and almost rolling,
Houston said. But he said the area probably has a lot of silt, which can
"complicate" the search.
New clue on the surface of the water?