SEPANG, Malaysia – The focus of the search for a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner shifted westward Thursday, toward the vastness of the Indian Ocean, as Malaysian authorities denied a variety of reports related to the jet’s disappearance, and experts pored over military radar data that seemed to indicate the flight had turned west and remained airborne long after its last contact with ground controllers.
Yet in a measure of the continued caution and bafflement among the authorities here, Malaysia’s defense minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, said the main search effort continued to be east of the Malaysian peninsula, in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea.
Even so, a U.S. destroyer, the Kidd, was redeploying to the Strait of Malacca west of Malaysia, the 7th Fleet and Pentagon officials said – one of several indications that the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was turning away from the eastern waters that have been combed by dozens of ships and airplanes for days.
Malaysian officials said they had expanded the search into the Andaman Sea, the part of the Indian Ocean northwest of the strait. The Pentagon said the Kidd would be searching there, and that a P-3 surveillance plane had already flown over the area. Syed Akbaruddin, the spokesman for India’s Ministry of External Affairs, said India had also sent ships and aircraft to search intensively in that area.
A senior Pentagon official said the Malaysian authorities were “looking pretty closely” at the possibility that the plane went down in the Indian Ocean, but had not reached any conclusions.
In a news briefing, Malaysian authorities denied a widely circulated report that the jetliner, a Boeing 777, had transmitted technical data after contact with the cockpit was lost around 1:30 a.m. Saturday, when the airplane was on course toward Beijing, its scheduled destination.
The report, by The Wall Street Journal, asserted that Rolls-Royce, the maker of the aircraft’s engines, had received routine data transmissions from those engines on schedule after contact with the cockpit was lost, suggesting that the plane remained aloft for several more hours.
But the chief executive of Malaysia Airlines, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, said that the last technical data received from Flight 370 had come at 1:07 a.m. Saturday, when the aircraft was still in touch with ground controllers, and there was no indication of trouble with the plane.
