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Australia: Search with Plane in New Area

Australia: Search with Plane in New Area
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The search area for the lost Malaysian jetliner moved 1,100 kilometers to the northeast on Friday, as Australian officials said a new analysis of radar data suggests the plane had flown faster and therefore ran out of fuel more quickly than previously estimated.

Australia: Search with Plane in New AreaThat means searchers have concluded that hundreds of floating objects detected over the last week by satellite, previously considered possible wreckage, weren't from the plane after all. But there are advantages to the new search area: It's closer to land and has calmer weather than the old one.

Nine planes were to fly over the new search area Friday and six ships were headed there, said John Young, manager of Australian Maritime Safety Authority emergency response division. "We have moved on" from the previous search area, he said.

AMSA said the change in search areas came from new information based on continuing analysis of the radar data received soon after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 lost communications and veered from its scheduled path March 8. The Beijing-bound flight carrying 239 people turned around soon after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, flew west toward the Malacca Strait and disappeared from radar.
The search area has changed several times since the plane vanished as experts analyzed a frustratingly small amount of data from the aircraft, including the radar signals and "pings" that a satellite picked up for several hours after radar contact was lost.

The latest analysis indicated the aircraft was traveling faster than previously estimated, resulting in increased fuel use and reducing the possible distance the aircraft could have flown before going down in the Indian Ocean. Just as a car loses gas efficiency when driving at high speeds, a plane will get less out of a tank of fuel when it flies faster.

"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.
The new area also has better weather conditions than the old one, where searches were regularly scrapped because of storms, high winds and low visibility.
"The search area has moved out of the 'roaring 40s,' which creates very adverse weather," Young said, referring to the latitude of the previous search area. "I'm not sure that we'll get perfect weather out there, but it's likely to be better than we saw in the past."

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Friday that the latest information was "a credible new lead."
"This is an extraordinarily difficult search, and an agonizing wait for family and friends of the passengers and crew," he said. "We owe it to them to follow every credible lead and to keep the public informed of significant new developments. That is what we are doing."

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team