Power outage: MH370 attempted a number of log-ons during the doomed flight

Flight MH370: Experts fear missing Malaysian Airlines plane had 'vital equipment tampered with mid-flight'

Report by Australian air crash investigators shows the Boeing 777 suffered a power outage just 90 minutes after taking off from Kuala Lumpur

The missing Malaysian Airlines plane may have had vital equipment tampered with mid-flight in an attempt to avoid radar, it has been claimed.

Experts examining a report by Australian air crash investigators have suggested that a mysterious power outage could have been part of an attempt to sabotage tragic flight MH370.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has confirmed that missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is not in the search zone where acoustic pings were detected. The pings, originally believed to be coming from the missing jet, now thought to have been coming from a 'man-made source', such as a searching ship or equipment used to detect pings. MARCH 2014: A graphic illustrating 4 scenarios that could have happened to flight MH370.

In the report, released on Thursday, investigators revealed that the plane’s satellite data unit attempted to log-on to a satellite just 90 minutes after take off.

This attempt, the report says, was likely to have been the result of a power outage on the plane.

The report says: “A log-on request in the middle of a flight is not common and can occur for only a few reasons.

“These include a power interruption to the aircraft satellite data unit (SDU), a software failure, loss of critical systems providing input to the SDU or a loss of the link due to aircraft attitude.

“An analysis was performed which determined that the characteristics and timing of the log-on requests were best matched as resulting from power interruption to the SDU.”

Experts agreed the log-on request was peculiar and could be the result of someone trying to turn the plane’s communication systems off in a bid to avoid radar detection.

Aviation expert Peter Marosszeky, from the University of New South Wales, told the Daily Telegraph: “It would have to be a deliberate act of turning power off on certain systems on the aeroplane.

“The aircraft has so many backup systems. Any form of power interruption is always backed up by another system.

“The person doing it would have to know what they are doing. It would have to be a deliberate act to hijack or sabotage the aircraft.”

Satellite telecommunications company Inmarsat, confirmed the power outage took place but was at a loss to explain why this occurred.

The report also revealed that the Boeing 777 tried to log-on to satellites a further six times – including one attempt just three minutes after it was detected by Malaysian military radar.

The final log-on request is thought to have been caused by the plane running out of fuel and ultimately plunging into the Indian Ocean.

It was previously revealed how investigators believe all crew and 239 passengers on board the flight suffocated after the plane went missing on March 8.

A search is currently taking place with two vessels mapping the sea floor.

The next phase of the search mission is expected to take a year, covering some 60,000 sq kilometres of ocean at a cost of $56 million or more.