Search for Missing Jet Is Moved Nearly 700 Miles, Based on Radar Analysis

By KEITH BRADSHER and MICHELLE INNIS

An analysis showed that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was moving faster than investigators had previously estimated and therefore could have run out of fuel sooner, officials said.

Asia Pacific

Search for Missing Jet Is Moved Nearly 700 Miles, Based on Radar Analysis

By KEITH BRADSHER and MICHELLE INNISMARCH 27, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Australia announced on Friday that it had moved the search area for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 nearly 700 miles to the northeast, the latest in a long series of changes by the authorities on where they think the plane might have disappeared.

The authority said it was acting after further analysis of radar data from when the plane, which was supposed to be flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, instead turned over the South China Sea and flew back over Peninsular Malaysia. The analysis showed that the aircraft was moving faster than previously estimated and so would have used more fuel.

That in turn would mean that the aircraft could have run out of fuel sooner as it flew out over the southern Indian Ocean, according to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.

“This is a credible new lead and will be thoroughly investigated today,” Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia said in a statement on Friday morning, adding that 10 aircraft, six vessels and various satellites would focus on the new search area.

The Search Moves North

Friday’s search area is about 700 miles to the northeast of the areas previously searched, where objects have been spotted in aerial and satellite imagery. Full Graphic »

Mikael Robertsson, a co-founder of Flightradar24, an aviation tracking firm based in Stockholm, said that the unusual speed of the aircraft over peninsular Malaysia following its turnaround over the South China Sea could be explained either as an attempt by pilots to race to a runway to land the plane in response to an aircraft malfunction or else as part of an effort to hide from the authorities.

“Either they wanted to land very fast or they wanted to escape radar coverage as soon as possible,” he said. “You burn a lot more fuel when you fly very fast, so normally you try to avoid it.”

The revision of the search area, based on further analysis by an international team of experts working with Malaysian officials, means that Australia is redirecting the search far from the floating objects seen in the previous search area in satellite images released by Australia, China and the European satellite launch company Airbus Defense and Space.

Those objects were in or very near the previous search area, as satellite operators had trained their cameras there.

At 123,000 square miles, or 319,000 square kilometers, the new area is about the size of New Mexico and is only one-fifth of the size of the previous search area. John Young, the director general of the Maritime Safety Authority, said at a news conference near Canberra on Friday that the ocean is 2,000 to 4,000 meters deep in the new search area, or 6,500 to 13,000 feet, making it shallower in some places than the previous search area.

Mr. Young also said at the news conference that the weather in the new search area should be considerably better than that of the zone previously searched.

The new zone is 1,150 miles west-southwest of Perth, Australia, closer to Perth than the previous zone, shortening the flight for surveillance aircraft by up to an hour in each direction and allowing aircrews to spend more time actually looking for debris from Flight 370.

“It is a different ballpark,” said Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer of New South Wales University, of the new search area. “Where they are searching now is more like a subtropical ocean. It is not nearly as bad as the southern Indian Ocean, which should make the search easier.”

“The water in this area is more like the oceans around the Bahamas,” Dr. van Sebille added. But he also warned that the seabed in the area is marked by a steep ridge and that prevailing currents drag in more debris from other parts of the ocean.

“It may be harder to spot from the air the debris related to the plane because there is more garbage floating in this area,” he said.

The new zone also creates a further challenge in finding the data recorders from the missing Boeing 777-200, which are believed to have sunk to the ocean floor wherever the aircraft first hit the surface of the sea. Aircraft and ships have dropped buoys and tracked them for the past week in the previous search area in an attempt to document sea currents and figure out how far floating debris might have drifted from the original point of impact.

The new search area is farther north, in an area where currents tend to be less strong, but also may not have been tracked in as much detail in the past week. The currents to the northeast of the search area are more likely to move north or east, possibly toward Australia, oceanographers said earlier this week.

Asked whether the search over the past week had been a waste of time, Mr. Young replied that big changes like this were not unusual in searches. “This actually happens to us all the time, that new information that is out of sequence with the operation at the time,” he added.

Martin Dolan, the chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, cautioned at the same news conference that the search area was still large, and that further analyses could yet result in another change in the search area.

“This has a long way to go yet,” Mr. Dolan said.

Mr. Dolan did take a strong position on one issue that international aviation experts have described as unclear: who should have legal control over floating debris or any wreckage that may be found on the sea floor.

China has sent a small flotilla of ships to the search area, which lies in international waters, although closer to Australia than the previous search area. While past practice has been for the country of the missing aircraft’s jurisdiction to oversee an investigation, which is Malaysia in this case, international aviation experts have said that it is legally possible that China could try to conduct its own retrieval operation to analyze possible causes of the crash.

Malaysia has authorized Australia to conduct search and rescue efforts on its behalf in the southern Indian Ocean. Mr. Dolan emphatically said that any wreckage that is found should be held on behalf of Malaysia, although he did not specifically mention the possibility of a Malaysian salvage effort.

As the search in the Indian Ocean continued, the flight simulator and hard drives that the pilots of Flight 370 had at their homes appeared to be a dead end, yielding few clues that shed any light on whether they deliberately diverted the missing jet, according to two people briefed on the investigation. They spoke on the condition on anonymity because they did not want to jeopardize their access to secret information.

Malaysian authorities seized the devices early in their inquiry and, after initially keeping American officials at a distance, turned to the F.B.I. last week for help in analyzing them. The Malaysians were particularly interested in learning what it was that the captain of the flight apparently deleted from the simulator.

The F.B.I.'s spokesman, Michael Kortan, said the bureau would not discuss what it had found on the hard drives because the investigation was continuing.

Though investigators are still focusing on the pilots’ role in the plane’s disappearance on March 8, no concrete evidence has come to light to indicate that they sabotaged the flight.

James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, testified in Washington on Wednesday before the House Appropriations Committee that the bureau was close to completing its analysis of the pilots’ simulator and hard drives.

A review of shipping in the southeastern Indian Ocean on the morning that Flight 370 disappeared and in the subsequent days shows few ships that might have seen the plane come down or any debris.

One of the few ships happens to be the Xue Long, China’s only icebreaker. It was steaming northeast across the southeastern Indian Ocean through early and mid-March, although it was nearly 1,000 miles to the southwest of the new search area when the plane came down on March 8, according to an analysis of satellite ship-tracking data by IHS Maritime, a global shipping consulting firm.

The Xue Long kept going northeast for the next week, past the northern fringe of the new search area, to Fremantle, a port close to Perth. A Beijing official involved in Xue Long’s polar research said that no one aboard the icebreaker had seen any aircraft debris as it sailed toward Fremantle, and that the ship had only been ordered on March 21 to turn around and go back to the southeastern Indian Ocean to join search operations.

Keith Bradsher reported from Kuala Lumpur and Michelle Innis from Sydney, Australia. Reporting was contributed by Michael S. Schmidt from Washington, Thomas Fuller from Perth, Australia, Poypiti Amatatham from Bangkok, and Bree Feng from Beijing.

A version of this article appears in print on March 28, 2014, on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Search for Missing Jet Is Moved Nearly 700 Miles, Based on Radar Analysis.

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