Malaysia Airlines plane was going faster than previously thought, meaning its tanks would have run dry sooner, say authorities.
An Australian air force crew in the cockpit of an Orion plane searching
for flight MH370 in the Indian Ocean.
The Australian-led search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370
has shifted 1,100km to the north-east after investigators calculated
the plane was going faster and using more fuel when it disappeared than
previously thought.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority
(Amsa) said the analysis was based on the plane's final radar contacts
between the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca, and suggested the
plane would have burned more fuel in the opening stages of its flight.
It therefore would not have made it as far into the Indian Ocean before
running out of fuel and crashing.
The new target location means
planes are able to spend longer over the search area, and with the
prospect of much better weather because it is away the notoriously foul
conditions of the "roaring forties"between the latitudes of 40 and 50
degrees south. Previously aircraft had been consuming much of their fuel
and their time just getting out to sea and returning. This left limited
capacity to remain "on-scene", said John Young, general manager of the
Amsa emergency response division.
"We will certainly get
better time on scene. We started nearly
3,000km from Perth so we've taken quite a lot off that. You might
recall we were talking in terms of one to two hours on-scene. We're now
doing much better than that.
"The other benefit we get from the north is the search area
has moved out of the roaring forties, which creates very adverse weather
frequently. I'm not sure we'll get perfect weather out there but it's
likely to be better more often than we've seen in the past."
Australia's Geospatial Intelligence Organisation is reprogramming
satellites to image the new area. "We will see what that does in terms
of satellite imagery when
the retasking of satellite starts to produce new material as well,"
Young said.
Tony Abbott, the Australian prime minister, said the
"new and credible lead" had resulted in the search area being shifted to
an area of about 319,000 square kilometres centred on a point 1,850km
west of Perth.
The US has sent another search plane to join the hunt
after Thailand became the latest country to announce satellite imagery
showing hundreds of pieces of possible debris in the Indian Ocean west
of Australia.
The United States said it was sending a second
P-8 Poseidon aircraft to Perth but would not be sending a warship. "We
believe – and just as importantly, the Malaysian government believes –
that the most important asset that we have that we can help them with
are these long-range maritime patrol aircraft," said Rear Admiral John
Kirby.
The commanding officer of Australia's HMAS Success, Captain
Allison Norris, said she had instituted hourly shift changes to make
sure crews' attention did not stray from scanning the vast and remote
stretch of ocean notorious for its rapidly changing weather conditions.
The warship is leading the seaborne search in a multinational effort
that on Friday resumed with 10 aircraft setting out to join the five
ships already at sea.
Norris told the Sydney Morning Herald that
supervisors on the Success were constantly reminding crew "what they're
there for and keeping them focused".
"Morale remains good despite the cold conditions," she said.
Amsa
said that as well as the planes already involved, the Australian air
force was putting another P3 Orion on standby in case of a debris
sighting.
Thailand's Geo-Informatics and Space Technology
Development Agency has said images taken on Monday showed about 300
objects ranging in size from two to 15 metres. The information was
passed to Malaysian authorities. Thai satellite images taken as part of the plane search Photograph: Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency
It said the objects were scattered over an area about 2,700km (1,680
miles) south-west of Perth and about 200km from an area pinpointed
earlier in French satellite photos. "But we cannot – dare not – confirm
they are debris from the plane," said Anond Snidvongs, the executive
director of the Thai space agency.
Japan also announced a
satellite analysis indicated about 10 square floating objects in a
similar area, the Kyodo news agency said. Japanese authorities said the
objects were up to eight metres in length and four metres wide, with
Jiji Press citing an official at the office as saying they were "highly
likely" to be from the plane.
Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transportation Safety
Bureau, said the original search zone had a range of possible
assumptions about aircraft speed that had now been refined.
"It
is an iterative process and is being refined over time but what we
have at the moment is the most credible location of the entry to the
water and therefore the place to search," he said.
Sorties
being flown by planes from Australia, China, Japan and the United States
were forced back to Perth on Thursday as thunderstorms and gale force
winds swept through the southern Indian Ocean, although the five ships
stayed put. Amsa said the air search was able to start again on Friday.
The
Malaysia Airlines jet vanished on 8 March with 239 people on board
after taking off from Kuala Lumpur and then inexplicably turning off its
China-bound course. All contact was lost except for a series of "pings"
from a transmitter on the plane to a satellite that were used to plot
its probable course into the deep south of the Indian Ocean.
The
arrival of sensitive tracking equipment to help locate the plane's
"black boxes" offers a glimmer of hope for a breakthrough in what has
become the biggest mystery in commercial aviation history.
An
Australian naval vessel ship will sweep the seabed by towing an
underwater listening device deep below the surface in the hope of
picking up an ultrasonic signal from one or both of the plane's black
box recorders, while a small submersible drone will be used to scan the
sea floor for signs of wreckage.
Search teams are hoping that the detection equipment will be able to
pick up acoustic pings emitted every second from the plane's black box
flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder.
Each of the two
recorders has a beacon, attached to the outside of the black box, which
once activated by contact with water makes a sound every second. The
beacons have a battery life of 30 days, sometimes longer, before the
pings begin to fade. Assuming the plane crashed on 8 March, as Malaysian
officials insist, that means the beacons aboard MH370 will begin to
fade about 7 April and could go silent about 12 April.
Theories
about the plane's fate include a hijacking, pilot sabotage or a crisis
that incapacitated the crew and left the plane to fly on autopilot until
it ran out of fuel.
The focus has been on the pilot, Captain
Zaharie Ahmad Shah, with the FBI analysing data from a flight simulator
taken from his home. So far no information implicating the captain or
anyone else has emerged and his youngest son, Ahmad Seth, on Thursday
dismissed speculation his father may have crashed the plane
intentionally.
Agence France-Presse and AAP contributed to this report to the http://www.theguardian.com
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