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Search for Missing Jet Is Moved Nearly 700 Miles, Based on Radar Analysis
Aircrew With Latest Gear Trusts Its Eyes to Find Jet
(about 11 hours later)
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — The Australian authorities announced on Friday that they 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 regarding where they think the plane might have disappeared.
ABOARD RESCUE FLIGHT 74, over the Indian Ocean — As the American Navy surveillance plane veered sharply back toward white objects floating in the ocean below, an automated voice warned, “Banking! Banking!” The console settings in the cockpit showed the plane at merely 500 feet above the sapphire seas glowing under unobstructed sunshine.
The decision followed new analysis of radar data captured early in the morning of March 8 as the plane, which was supposed to be flying from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, instead turned west above the South China Sea and flew back over Peninsular Malaysia, according to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is overseeing the search.
Lt. Cmdr. Clayton Hunt was at the controls of the P-8A Poseidon, the most advanced aircraft taking part in the multinational effort to find the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
The analysis showed that the Boeing 777-200 aircraft was moving faster than investigators had previously estimated and therefore could have run out of fuel sooner as it flew out over the southern Indian Ocean, officials said.
“The sea state has been awesome; visibility has been awesome,” Commander Hunt said during a search mission on Friday. “If it’s down there, we will find it.”
“This is a credible new lead and will be thoroughly investigated today,” Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia said in a statement on Friday, adding that 10 aircraft, six vessels and various satellites would focus on the new search area.
The P-8A Poseidon, which the Navy began using two years ago, is brimming with electronic equipment: radar screens, sonar buoy launchers and a high-definition camera that protrudes from a turret under the fuselage and is directed by joystick from one of the five workstations in the cabin.
The revision of the search area — which Malaysian officials said was based on work done by analysts from Boeing, part of an international team of experts collaborating with Malaysian investigators — means that Australia is redirecting the search far from the floating objects seen in satellite images released in recent days by Australia, China, Thailand, Japan and the European satellite launch company Airbus Defense and Space.
The aircraft specializes in tracking and destroying submarines. Yet it is a measure of the limits of the state-of-the-art technology on board that in the search for Flight 370 the crew says it relies mainly on two petty officers sitting at rectangular windows on either side of the aircraft to spot signs of wreckage.
Those objects were in or very near the previous search area.
“The human eye is the best way to search,” said Petty Officer Second Class Mike Burnett, one of the spotters, who sat on a swivel chair in front of a window.
But at a press briefing here on Friday, Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia’s defense minister, said that considering the currents in that part of the Indian Ocean, the objects seen in the satellite images could have drifted from the new search area to the locations where they were seen.
Outside was a monotonous seascape that resembled a looping film reel of identical patches of ocean.
Late Friday, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said that five aircraft flying over the new search area during the day “spotted multiple objects of various colors” floating in the water. The agency said that it would analyze images of the objects overnight and that a Chinese patrol ship would be in the area on Saturday and would inspect the items up close, if not recover them for evaluation.
Crew members took turns staring into the hypnotic void, carefully scanning up and down, right and left, while keeping a finger on a button connected to their headsets that allows them to alert the crew to any sightings.
At 123,000 square miles, or 319,000 square kilometers, the new area is about the size of New Mexico and is one-fifth the size of the previous search area. John Young, an official from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, said at a news conference in Canberra, Australia, on Friday that the ocean is 2,000 to 4,000 meters deep in the new search area, or about 6,500 to 13,000 feet, making it shallower in some places than the previous search area.
From the main airport in Perth in Western Australia, Rescue Flight 74 reached the search zone in two hours on Friday afternoon and inspected 18,000 square nautical miles by flying back and forth like a 300-mile-per-hour lawn mower across an area assigned to the crew by the Australian authorities.
Mr. Young also said that the weather in the new search area should be considerably better than in the zone previously searched.
The United States Navy allowed three reporters in the plane on Friday on the condition they not carry any electronic equipment. The cockpit door was open for the most of the flight, and the reporters were allowed to move freely in the aircraft, except for two occasions when the crew shielded them from seeing what were described as operations that might reveal the plane’s technological capabilities.
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.
Rescue Flight 74 was one of 10 aircraft on Friday taking part in the search nearly three weeks after the Malaysian airliner went off course during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and vanished. No confirmed wreckage has been found from Flight 370. Experts are basing their calculations on where the plane went down on signals picked up by a satellite while the jetliner, a Boeing 777-200, was still in the air.
“It is a different ballpark,” said Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer at the University of New South Wales, 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.”
Friday was the first day that aircraft searched a newly defined search zone based on a new analysis of satellite data that concluded that the plane probably went down farther north than previously thought. This new search zone is in warmer waters about 1,000 miles west of Perth, 500 miles closer to the Australian mainland than the previous zone, giving the aircraft more time to scour the area.
“The water in this area is more like the oceans around the Bahamas,” Mr. 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.
Fueled by junk food and soft drinks on the eight-and-a-half-hour mission, the crew of Rescue Flight 74 spotted only what appeared to be unrelated flotsam: a white ball, orange rope and blue-green plastic.
“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.
On its seven sorties off the Australian coast, the crew has been repeatedly diverted by false leads. The plane has spotted at least one whale and many clumps of seaweed.
The new zone also creates a further challenge in finding the missing plane’s data recorders, which are believed to have sunk to the ocean floor wherever the aircraft first hit the ocean. Aircraft and ships dropped buoys in the previous search area and tracked them for the past week in an attempt to document sea currents and figure out how far floating debris might have drifted from the point of impact.
Petty Officer Chris Walsh, a radar specialist who sits at one of the consoles in the cabin, has earned the nickname dolphin hunter because at least six times he has directed the plane to what appeared to be debris but turned out to be a pod of dolphins.
Currents in the new search area tend to be weaker, but they also might 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.
The radar specialist is now referred to as “a marine mammal specialist,” Commander Hunt said. It was a rare moment of levity. As the plane flew low over the search zone, a studied silence descended.
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 said.
The Australian military has provided the search teams with a very generic list of items to watch for: “debris, distress beacon, fire, flares, life jackets, life raft/dinghy, marker dye, mirror signals, movements, oil slick, person in water, smoke, wreckage.”
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.
There is relatively little commercial shipping in the seas directly west of Perth, and the crew members described the waters they have searched over the past two weeks as unusually pristine and devoid of trash — and altogether very empty.
“This has a long way to go yet,” Mr. Dolan said.
After sunset Friday the plane continued the last leg of its search, still flying under 1,000 feet. Two spotters stared out into the dark gray outlines of the ocean as operators activated an infrared camera.
In his news conference in Kuala Lumpur, Mr. Hishammuddin struck a similar note of caution, saying that the search zone, “although more focused than before, remains considerable.” He continued, “the search conditions, though easier than before, remain challenging.”
The crew was nearing the end of another painstaking, methodical but fruitless day.
Mr. Dolan took 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 seabed.
Other planes, from the Australian and New Zealand air forces, did spot objects, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said in a statement released late Friday. A Chinese patrol ship was expected to be in position on Saturday to locate the objects, the authority said, adding, “The objects cannot be verified or discounted as being from” Flight 370.
China has sent a small flotilla of ships to the search area, which lies in international waters. While past practice has been for the country of the missing aircraft’s jurisdiction to oversee an investigation — 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.
On Flight 74, Petty Officer First Class Robert Pillars, who had spent hours on Friday methodically scanning the waters, said searching the ocean required unbroken, practiced concentration.
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.
“It’s what we are trained to do,” he said. “The hope of finding something is what keeps you going.”
As the search in the Indian Ocean continued on Friday, Malaysian officials remained silent about the continuing criminal investigation into possible reasons for Flight 370’s sudden detour from its scheduled flight path on March 8.
Mikael Robertsson, a co-founder of Flightradar24, an aviation tracking firm based in Stockholm, said that the new revelations about the plane’s speed over Peninsular Malaysia could indicate that the pilots were in a rush to find a runway to land the plane in response to an aircraft malfunction, or that it was 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.”
Two people briefed on the investigation said that a flight simulator and hard drives belonging to the pilots appeared to be a dead end, yielding few clues that shed any light on whether they deliberately diverted the missing jet. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to jeopardize their access to secret information.
The 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 the captain of the flight had apparently deleted from the simulator.
The F.B.I.'s spokesman, Michael P. 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, 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 simulator and hard drives.
A review of shipping in the southeastern Indian Ocean on the morning Flight 370 disappeared and during the subsequent days shows only a few ships that might have seen the plane come down or passed any debris.
One of those ships was the Xue Long, China’s only icebreaker. It was heading 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 is believed to have come down, according to an analysis of ship-tracking satellite data by IHS Maritime, a global shipping consulting firm.
The Xue Long continued moving northeast for the next week, past the northern fringe of the new search area and to Fremantle, a port close to Perth. A Beijing official involved in Xue Long’s polar research work said that no one aboard the icebreaker had seen any aircraft debris as the ship sailed toward Fremantle. The ship was ordered on March 21 to turn around and go back to the southeastern Indian Ocean to join search operations, the official said.
