The more time that passes, the wider the search area for the
missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 becomes.After starting in the sea between Malaysia and Vietnam, the
plane's last confirmed location, efforts are now expanding west into the
vastness of the Indian Ocean.
"It's a completely new game now," Cmdr. William
Marks of the U.S. 7th Fleet, which is helping in the search, told CNN,
describing the situation. "We went from a chess board to a football
field."
USS Kidd, a destroyer from the U.S. Pacific Fleet, is being
moved into the Indian Ocean to begin searching that area at the request of the
Malaysian government, Marks said.
The broadening scale of the search comes amid disclosures of
information indicating that the missing airplane could have flown for several
hours after the last reading from its transponder,
a radio transmitter in the cockpit that communicates with ground radar. That
raises the possibility that the plane could have ended up thousands of miles
from its last confirmed contact over Southeast Asia.
The disappearance of the jetliner and the 239 people on
board nearly a week ago has turned into one of the biggest mysteries in
aviation history, befuddling industry experts and government officials.
Authorities still don't know where the plane is or what caused it to vanish.
"I, like most of the world, really have never seen
anything like this," Marks said of the scale of the search, which involves
dozens of ships and planes from a range of countries. "It's pretty
incredible."
On the seventh day of efforts to locate the missing Boeing
777-200, here are the latest main developments:
-- Tracking the pings: Malaysian
authorities believe they have several "pings" from the airliner's
service data system, known as ACARS, transmitted to satellites in the four to
five hours after the last transponder signal, suggesting the plane flew to the
Indian Ocean, a senior U.S. official told CNN.
That information combined with known radar data and
knowledge of fuel range leads officials to believe the plane may have made as
far as the Indian ocean, which is in the opposite direction of the plane's
original route, from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
-- Why Indian Ocean?: Analysts from U.S.
intelligence, the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation
Safety Board have been scouring satellite feeds and, after ascertaining no
other flights' transponder data corresponded to the pings, came to the
conclusion that they were likely to have come from the missing Malaysian plane,
the senior U.S. official said.
"There is probably a significant likelihood" that
the aircraft is now on the bottom of the Indian Ocean, the official said,
citing information Malaysia has shared with the United States.
Indian search teams are combing large areas of the Andaman
and Nicobar Islands, a remote archipelago in the northeast Indian Ocean. Two
aircraft are searching land and coastal areas of the island chain from north to
south, an Indian military spokesman said Friday, and two coastguard ships have
been diverted to search along the islands east coast.
-- Malaysian response: In a statement
Friday, Malaysia's Ministry of Transport neither confirmed nor denied the
latest reports on the plane's possible path, saying that "the
investigation team will not publicly release information until it has been
properly verified and corroborated." The ministry said it was continuing
to "work closely with the U.S. team, whose officials have been on the
ground in Kuala Lumpur to help with the investigation since Sunday
On Thursday, Malaysia Airlines Chief Executive Ahmad Jauhari
Yahya said that Rolls-Royce, the maker of the plane's engines, and Boeing had
reported that they hadn't received any data transmissions from the plane after
1:07 a.m. Saturday, 14 minutes before the transponder stopped sending
information. He was responding to a Wall Street Journal report suggesting the
missing plane's engines continued to send data to the ground for hours after
contact with the transponder was lost.
The Wall Street Journal subsequently changed its reporting
to say that signals from the plane -- giving its location, speed and altitude
-- were picked up by communications satellites for at least five hours after it
disappeared. The last "ping" came from over water, the newspaper
reported, citing unidentified people briefed on the investigation.
-- Another lead: Chinese researchers say
they recorded a "seafloor event" in waters around Malaysia and
Vietnam about an hour and a half after the missing plane's last known contact.
The event was recorded in a non-seismic region situated 116 kilometers (72 miles)
northeast of the plane's last confirmed location, the University of Science and
Technology of China said.
"Judging from the time and location of the two events,
the seafloor event may have been caused by MH370 crashing into the sea,"
said a statement posted on the university's website.
