FOCUS TURNS TO DELETED FILES,
‘I ... feel he’s still alive,’ father says; probe to look at pilot’s files
KELLER, TEXAS Aubrey Wood hasn’t given up hope that his eldest son, Philip Wood, is still alive, along with the other 238 people on board missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
“We’re putting it in God’s hands,” Wood, 76, said in an interview with USA TODAY. “I personally feel he’s still alive. … We believe they’re somewhere on land. And we’re going to find him.”
The disappearance of Flight 370 has ignited a raft of conspiracy theories, baffled investigators and thrust families and friends of Philip Wood, an IBM employee from Texas on that flight, onto a roller coaster ride of emotions — from initially believing the plane had crashed to kindling hope it had been hijacked and the 239 people aboard are still alive.
Less than an hour into its fivehour flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, the Boeing 777’s transponder stopped signaling its location to air-traffic controllers, sparking speculation that the plane was overtaken by hijackers. In the final radio contact from the plane, the co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, said, “All right, good night.” Later, Malaysian military radar tracked the plane banking a steep left turn and heading hun- dreds of miles off course.
In Malaysia, investigators said Wednesday that they are trying to restore files deleted last month from the home flight simulator of the pilot of the missing plane, but the wait for answers was too much for some relatives who disrupted a news conference.
Malaysia’s Defense Minister and Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein cautioned that the deletion of the files of the pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, may have nothing to do with the circumstances of the jet’s disappearance 12 days ago.
Files containing records of simulations carried out on the program were deleted Feb. 3, Malaysian Police Chief Khalid Abu said. He said the files may have been deleted merely to free up memory space.
Investigators wanted to check the files for signs of unusual flight paths of Flight 370, which appears to have veered hundreds of miles from its intended flight path after vanishing from civilian radar.
At least two relatives of passengers aboard the flight were forcibly removed Wednesday from the news conference, at a hotel near Kuala Lumpur. Footage broadcast by the BBC showed a woman thought to be a Chinese relative of a missing passenger being knocked to the ground and then dragged away from journalists ahead of the daily news briefing by Malaysian officials.