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Co-pilot’s phone made contact with Penang telecoms tower, but no phone call, says US official

A US official said the mobile phone of missing flight MH370's co-pilot had been switched on and made contact with a telecommunications tower in Penang, but there was nothing to show a call was made, CNN reported.

This followed investigators checking millions of mobile phone records for evidence of calls from the plane after it went missing, it said.

The claim partly reaffirms a report by the New Straits Times over the weekend, which quoted Malaysian investigators as saying that Fariq Abdul Hamid had attempted to make a phone call from his mobile phone while the aircraft was flying over Penang, about the time it was reported missing.

Speaking to CNN, the US official cited information from Malaysian investigators who said the co-pilot's phone had searched for service some 30 minutes after authorities believed the plane made a sharp turn-back to the Malaysian peninsula.

Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein earlier questioned the claim, saying he had not been informed of it.

"I cannot comment (on the newspaper report) because if it is true, we would have known about it much earlier," Hishammuddin said.

A safety analyst who spoke to CNN questioned the missing flight’s on-board safety procedures, if it was true that Fariq's mobile phone was on. Mobile phones are to be switched off during a flight as part of aviation safety requirements.

"It would be very rare in my opinion to have someone with a cell phone on in the cockpit," 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."

Search for the missing plane has gone underwater since yesterday, with the use of the sophisticated Bluefin-21, a robotic underwater vehicle which could travel up to 5km deep in the ocean.

The Perth-based Joint Agency Coordination Centre today said the Bluefin-21 completed six hours of its mission and returned to surface for its data to be extracted and analysed.

The drone will be redeployed later today, it added, subject to favourable weather conditions. – April 15, 2014.

Fact file on the Bluefin-21 undersea search vehicle. – AFP infographic, April 15, 2014.
Fact file on the Bluefin-21 undersea search vehicle. – AFP infographic, April 15, 2014.