The murkiness surrounding the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 may have become more sinister.  Two US officials told an American news network that that the shutdown of two communication systems happened separately on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

And one of them tells ABC News that this indicates the plane did not come out of the sky because of a catastrophic failure, human involvement was a factor.

Modern passenger jets are equipped with a myriad of communications systems.  The data reporting system, they believe, was shut down at 1:07 AM last Saturday morning when the flight and its 239 passengers including six Australians seemingly vanished.  The transponder, which transmits location and altitude, was shut down nearly 15 minutes later at 1:21 AM. 

And US officials told the Wall Street Journal that the ACARS system, which broadcasts the phases of flight information (out of the gate, off the ground, on the ground, et cetera) kept going for 4 hours after the plane was last detected over the South China Sea, meaning that it could have been aloft that entire time – increasingly the search area from the waters off Malaysia to a massive circle reaching from China’s vast deserts to the north of Western Australia.

Yesterday’s potential break turned out to be a bust.  China had released satellite imagery of huge pieces of debris floating in the South China Sea, but a second search of that area turned out nothing.