Three weeks into the mystery of Flight 370, investigators relying on newly analyzed satellite data shifted the search zone yet again Friday, focusing on a swath of Indian Ocean where better conditions could help speed a hunt that is now concentrated thousands of miles from where it began.
Planes combing the newly targeted area off the west coast of Australia spotted several objects, including two rectangular items that were blue and gray, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said. Although those are among the colors in the paint scheme of the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, it was not clear if they were from the plane.
The newly targeted zone is nearly 700 miles northeast of sites the searchers have crisscrossed for the past week. The redeployment came after analysts determined that the jet may have been traveling faster than earlier estimates and would therefore have run out of fuel sooner, officials said.
“This is a credible new lead and will be thoroughly investigated,” Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said.
The Australian maritime agency will analyze photos of the objects seen in the area, and a Chinese patrol ship will try to locate them today, officials said.
During the search, hundreds of objects have been seen in the water by satellites, but so far not a single one has been confirmed as being from the missing Boeing 777.
New Zealand Air Vice-Marshal Kevin Short said a search plane had spotted 11 objects Friday clustered in a small area about 1,000 miles west of Perth.
One appeared to be a fishing buoy but the others were white, rectangular in shape and floating just below the surface, he said early today. Each was no larger than a 3 feet in length.
“Our crew couldn’t identify anything that would say it was definitely from the Malaysian aircraft,” Short said. “I think the main issue is that those objects will have to be picked up by a ship so they can physically examine them.”
The shift to the new zone could be a break for searchers because it is a shorter flight from land and has much calmer weather than the remote stretch previously targeted.
“Where they are searching now is more like a subtropical ocean,” said Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer at New South Wales University. “It is not nearly as bad as the southern Indian Ocean, which should make the search easier.”
But in Malaysia, Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein cautioned that while the conditions had improved, they remained challenging, and that the area, “although more focused than before, remains considerable.”
The new search area is about 80 percent smaller than the old one, but still spans about 123,000 square miles, roughly the size of New Mexico. In most places, depths range from about 6,560 feet to 13,120 feet, although the much deeper Diamantina trench edges the search area.
Flight 370 disappeared March 8 while bound from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The hunt focused first on the Gulf of Thailand, along the plane’s planned path. But when radar data showed it had veered sharply west, the search moved to the Andaman Sea, off the western coast of Malaysia, before pivoting to the southern Indian Ocean, southwest of Australia.
That change was based on analysis of satellite data. But officials said a reexamination and refinement of that analysis indicated 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.
Malaysia’s civil aviation chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, said personnel at Boeing Co. in Seattle had helped with the analysis.
“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 … and that gives a distance from a satellite to the aircraft to within a reasonable approximation,” he said, adding that the information was coupled with various projections of aircraft performance and the plane’s distance from the satellites at given times.
In Beijing, some relatives of the 153 Chinese passengers on the plane said the shift in the search area added to their confusion and frustration.
“What on earth is the Malaysian government doing?” said Wang Chunjiang, whose brother was a passenger. “Is there anything more that they are hiding from us?”
Jason Middleton, aviation professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, said it’s tough to judge the decision to shift the search because Malaysia has not released any of the actual data underlying its analysis.
“People can interpret the same set of data in different ways, sometimes, depending on how they look at it and how they analyze it,” Middleton said. “And that’s part of the problem here — we’re only being given the interpretation and not the actual data.”
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