Objects observed at new search site

PERTH, Australia - Planes involved in the search for a lost Malaysian jetliner spotted multiple objects in the Indian Ocean on Friday after Australian officials moved the search area 680 miles to the northeast after a new analysis of radar data.

Five out of 10 aircraft hunting for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 found objects of various colors Friday, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said. It said it was not clear whether the objects were from the plane, and photos of them would be analyzed overnight.

The authority said the items included two rectangular objects that were blue and gray - among the colors of the missing plane. A Chinese patrol ship in the area will attempt to locate the objects today, it said.

The three-week hunt for the jet has been filled with possible sightings, with hundreds of objects identified by satellite and others by plane, but so far not a single piece of debris has been confirmed.

Australian officials said they turned away from the old search area, which they had combed for a week, because a new analysis of radar data suggested the plane had flown faster and therefore ran out of fuel more quickly than previously estimated. The new area is closer to land and has calmer weather than the old one, which will make searching easier.

The re-analyzed radar data were received soon after Flight 370 lost communications and veered from its scheduled path March 8. The Beijing-bound flight carrying 239 people turned around soon after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, flew west toward the Strait of Malacca and disappeared from radar.

The search area has changed several times since the plane vanished as experts analyzed a frustratingly small amount of data from the aircraft, including the radar signals and “pings” that a satellite picked up for several hours after radar and voice contact was lost.

The latest analysis indicated that the aircraft was traveling faster than previously estimated, resulting in increased fuel use and reducing the possible distance it could have flown before going down in the Indian Ocean.

Malaysia’s civil aviation chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, said in Kuala Lumpur that personnel at Boeing Co. in Seattle had helped with the analysis of the flight.

Planes and ships were searching Thursday about 1,550 miles southwest of Perth, Australia, the base for the search. Now they are searching about 1,150 miles west of the city.

“This is our best estimate of the area in which the aircraft is likely to have crashed into the ocean,” Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, said at a news conference in Canberra.

He said a wide range of scenarios went into the calculation. “We’re looking at the data from the so-called pinging of the satellite, the polling of the satellites, and that gives a distance from a satellite to the aircraft to within a reasonable approximation,” he said. He said that information was coupled with various projections of aircraft performance and the plane’s distance from the satellites at given times.

John Young, manager of the Maritime Safety Authority’s emergency response division, said the hundreds of floating objects detected over the past week by satellites in the former search area, previously considered possible wreckage, “may or may not actually be objects.”

But in Malaysia, Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said at a news conference that because of ocean drifts, “this new search area could still be consistent with the potential objects identified by various satellite images over the past week.”

The new search area is about 80 percent smaller than the old one, but it remains large: about 123,000 square miles, about the size of Poland or New Mexico.

Sea depths in the new area range from 6,560 feet to 13,120 feet, Young said. There are trenches in the area that go even deeper, Australia’s national science agency said in a statement. The Diamantina trench, reaches depths of up to 24,000 feet deep, but it was unclear whether the deepest parts of the trench are in the search area.

If the wreckage is especially deep, that will complicate search efforts. The U.S. Navy is sending equipment that can hear pings from a plane’s flight data and voice recorders up to about 20,000 feet deep, and an unmanned underwater vehicle that operates at depths up to 14,800 feet.

Information for this article was contributed by Scott McDonald, Eileen Ng, Kristen Gelineau, Rod McGuirk and Nick Perry of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 8 on 03/29/2014

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