Search area goes from 'chessboard to football field'
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.
Malaysian officials, who
are coordinating the search, said Friday that the hunt for the plane was
spreading deeper into both the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
-- Was it hijacked?:
The plane may have been taken over or hijacked by someone with
knowledge of flying planes and was being taken toward the Andaman
Islands, according to a report by Reuters. The news agency bases its
information on military radar data -- but the article doesn't address
key facts such as which nation's military radar information they are
basing their deductions on. Also, the story is based on unidentified
sources.
The Malaysian government
said Friday it can't confirm the report. The possibility that one of
the plane's pilots was involved in the disappearance is one of the many
possibilities investigators are considering, Hishammuddin said.
-- 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.
-- 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.
CNN
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