SYDNEY – Investigators seeking the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean are broadening their search area in case the aircraft fell from the sky at a shallower angle.
It's possible that "the descent wasn't in quite such a tight circle as we are assessing," Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transportation Safety Bureau, said. That could put the Boeing 777-200 on the sea floor as far as 50 nautical miles from the seventh arc, a line drawn over the ocean where satellite communications suggest its fuel ran out.
An extra 15,500 square miles have been scanned by ship-based sonars over the past three weeks, adding about 25 percent to a high-priority search zone previously declared complete Oct. 26. That indicates the level of uncertainty still remaining in the hunt for the aircraft, which disappeared March 8 with 239 people on board.
"There's a possibility that it could have gone a bit further" in the few minutes between the engines stalling and the aircraft hitting the sea, Dolan said. "A few minutes can make quite a difference."
The nine-month search for the plane, which vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, remains the longest such hunt in modern history.
The best evidence of the plane's location comes from eight failed connections with an Inmarsat orbiter over the Indian Ocean, showing the plane probably traveled south from the Bay of Bengal before ditching somewhere along an arc to the west of the Australian city of Perth.
The aircraft probably spiraled counterclockwise into the sea after its right and then its left engines ran out of fuel, the bureau wrote in an update on the search process Oct. 8.
"Going into an increasingly tight spiral is the most likely behavior," Dolan said. Even that isn't guaranteed, he said.
The latest scans, using sonars mounted on the search ship Fugro Equator, have widened the high-priority search area to stretch 50 nautical miles rather than 30 nautical miles from the seventh arc. They've also extended the zone to the very farthest south that the aircraft could have come to rest, Dolan said.
"All the evidence says the most likely behavior of the aircraft will mean it will be found within 10 nautical miles of the arc," he said.
The ship-based scan is the first part of the search process. Side-scan sonar submersibles will carry out the second stage.
