Malaysia Airliner Communications Shut Down Separately: US Officials Say

[Princess Turandot]

34. "missing jet transmitted its location repeatedly to satellites over the course of five hours..."

Malaysia Airlines missing jet transmitted its location repeatedly to satellites over the course of five hours after it disappeared from radar, people briefed on the matter said, as searchers zeroed in on new target areas hundreds of miles west of the plane's original course.

The satellites also received speed and altitude information about the plane from its intermittent "pings," the people said. The final ping was sent from over water, at what one of these people called a normal cruising altitude. They added that it was unclear why the pings stopped. One of the people, an industry official, said it was possible that the system sending them had been disabled by someone on board.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304185104579437573396580350?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702304185104579437573396580350.html

The data referred to in the latest WSJ article (March 13, 2014 8:43 p.m. ET) is from a Boeing monitoring system which sends data via satellite to the plane owner if they purchased the system. Malaysia Airlines didn't purchase that service but the system still kept pinging the satellite with basic info indicating location, speed and altitude information.

The article from very early today incorrectly described the information as coming from a Rolls Royce engine monitoring system: that was the reason that the airline and Rolls Royce said that they had not received reports from the RR system for the next 5 hours. The data came from a different Boeing system and it did not go directly to Malaysia Air.

What's not clear from the article is when Boeing (or whoever) learned about this data.