Authorities expand search for missing plane to Indian Ocean

Vietnam said Friday it had downgraded but not stopped its search for a Malaysia Airlines plane that went missing en route to Beijing with 239 people aboard.

The status of the hunt has changed from "emergency to regular," said the country's search spokesman, Lt. Col. Nguyen Ngoc Son.

Its statement on Friday also said Malaysian authorities asked it to consider sending planes and ships to the Strait to Malacca — another signal that the focus of the search effort is switching to the west of Malaysia, to the strait and farther west into the Indian Ocean.

Authorities expanded their search westward toward India on Thursday, citing evidence that the aircraft may have flown for several hours after its last contact with the ground, shortly after takeoff from Kuala Lumpur.

Flight MH370 sent signals to a satellite for four hours after it went missing, an indication that it was still flying for hundreds of miles or more, said a U.S. official briefed on the search.

A string of possible clues about the missing plane turned up no results.

"MH370 went completely silent over the open ocean," said Malaysia's acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein. "This is a crisis situation. It is a very complex operation, and it is not obviously easy. We are devoting all our energies to the task at hand."

The U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the situation, said the Boeing 777-200 was not transmitting data to the satellite but was sending a signal to establish contact.

Boeing offers a satellite service that can receive a stream of data during flight on how the aircraft is functioning and relay the information to the plane's home base. The goal is to provide information before the plane lands on whether maintenance work or repairs are needed.

Malaysia Airlines did not subscribe to that service, but the plane had the capability to connect with the satellite and was automatically sending pings, the official said.

"It's like when your cellphone is off but it still sends out a little 'I'm here' message to the cellphone network," the official said. "That's how sometimes they can triangulate your position even though you're not calling, because the phone every so often sends out a little bleep. That's sort of what this thing was doing."

The plane had enough fuel to fly about four more hours after its last contact with the ground, the U.S. official said.

Boeing did not comment.

Messages involving a different, more rudimentary data service also were received from the airliner for a short time after the plane's transponder — a device used to identify the plane to radar — went silent, the official said.

If the plane had disintegrated during flight or had suffered some other catastrophic failure, all signals — the pings to the satellite, the data messages and the transponder — would have stopped at the same time.

One part of the hunt is in the South China Sea, where the aircraft was last seen on civilian radar flying northeast before vanishing without any indication of technical problems. A similar-size search is also being conducted in the Strait of Malacca because of military radar sightings that might indicate the plane turned in that direction after its last contact, passing over the Malay Peninsula.

The total search area being covered is about 35,800 square miles — roughly the size of Portugal.

Asked if it was possible that the plane kept flying for several hours, Hishammuddin said, "Of course. We can't rule anything out. This is why we have extended the search. We are expanding our search into the Andaman Sea," northwest of the Malay Peninsula.

He said Malaysia was asking for radar data from India and other neighboring countries to see if they could trace the plane flying northwest. India has said its navy, air force and coast guard will search for the plane in the southern Andaman Sea.

"Because of new information, we may be part of an effort to open a new search area in the Indian Ocean," White House spokesman Jay Carney said earlier Thursday, declining to offer additional details about that information or the new area.

The U.S. Navy 7th Fleet said it was moving one of its ships, the USS Kidd, into the Strait of Malacca, west of Malaysia.

In the latest disappointment, search planes failed to find any debris from the plane after they were sent Thursday to an area of the South China Sea off the southern tip of Vietnam, where satellite images published on a Chinese government website reportedly showed three suspected floating objects.

"There is nothing. We went there. There is nothing," Hishammuddin said.

More than two-thirds of the people on Flight MH370 were from China, which has expressed impatience over the absence of results in the search. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said Thursday in Beijing he would like to see better coordination among the countries involved.

The passengers' "families and friends are burning with anxiety. The Chinese government and Chinese people are all deeply concerned about their safety," he said at the close of the annual session of the country's legislature. "As long as there is a glimmer of hope, we will not stop searching for the plane."

He said China had launched eight ships and was using 10 satellites to search for the plane.

Malaysia has been criticized for its handling of the search, in part because it took several days to fully explain why it could not say whether the plane had turned back. Officials say they are not hiding anything and are searching areas where the plane is most likely to be.

The Associated Press