Satellite firm says its data from jet could offer location

Sepang: As the hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet expanded into the vastness of the Indian Ocean, a satellite communications company confirmed Friday that it had recorded electronic "keep alive" ping signals from the plane after it disappeared, and said those signals could be analyzed to help estimate its location.

The information from the company, Inmarsat, could prove to be the first big break in helping narrow the frustrating search for the plane with 239 people aboard that mysteriously disappeared from radar screens a week ago, now hunted by a multinational array of ships and planes that have fanned out for thousands of square miles.

Up till now, that search has turned up false leads: oil slicks, chunks of foam, life vests and other debris unconnected to the vanished plane. (Piracy theory gains more credence)

But a series of electronic pings sent by the aircraft could help the search, which is shifting focus from the relative confines of the Gulf of Thailand and nearby waters to include the Indian Ocean on the other, western side of Malaysia.

News reports that Malaysian military radar may have tracked the plane, a Boeing 777, turning back from its original route to cut across the Malaysian peninsula and head west toward the Indian Ocean before vanishing last Saturday have drawn growing anger from China, where nearly two-thirds of the passengers came from. (MalaysiaAirlines plane apparently flown deliberately toward Andamans, sources tellReuters)

If the aircraft did divert so drastically from its planned route, any traces of it captured by satellites and military radar will become all the more important.

David Coiley, a vice president of Inmarsat, a British satellite telecommunications provider, said the missing plane had been equipped with a signaling system from the company that sends out a "keep-alive message" to establish that the plane's communications system is still switched on.

The plane sent out a series of such messages after radar contact was lost, he said. Those messages later stopped, but he declined to specify precisely when or how many messages had been received. Coiley said Inmarsat was sharing the information with the airline and investigators.

"It does allow us to determine where the airplane is relative to the satellite," he said of the signal, which he likened to the "noises you might hear when you when a cellphone sits next to a radio or a television speaker." He said: "It does allow us to narrow down the position of the aircraft" - at the moment when the signal was sent.

Such equipment automatically checks in to satellites, much as a mobile phone would check in to a network after passing through a mountain tunnel, he said. Because the pings go over a measurable distance at a specific angle to one of the company's satellites, the information can be used to help calculate the trajectory of an aircraft and narrow down its approximate location - though not necessarily its resting point.

"Communications systems are part of the mandatory requirement for operating any flight, and we are comfortable that it would have been operating accordingly," Coiley said.

Increasingly, the search has encompassed seas to the west of the Malaysian peninsula, stretching from the Strait of Malacca to the Bay of Bengal, where the United States and India sent military planes and ships. The move came in tandem with an increasing amount of evidence that the aircraft flew for four hours after it disappeared from air traffic control radar after 1 a.m. last Saturday. (India scours the Andamans for lost Malaysian jet)

Even with the help of the Inmarsat data, the new focus on the open ocean illustrates the difficulty for the multinational search force, which now must scan thousands of miles of the world's third-largest ocean. The initial search area was in the relatively confined and shallow waters of the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand, which are among the world's busiest maritime routes. If the plane ended up in the ocean depths, it will be far harder to find and recover.

At a news conference, the Malaysian defense minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, who has been the chief public face of his government's search effort, said that searching seas both to the east and west of his country was a logical next step after days of fruitless searching and false starts. But he also acknowledged that, seven days after it vanished, an aircraft with 239 passengers and crew aboard remains unaccounted for, leaving family members in tormented wait.

"A normal investigation becomes narrower with time, I understand, as new information focuses on the search," said Hussein, who is also acting transport minister. "But this is not a normal investigation."

He said the multinational search had expanded on both sides of Malaysia, into the South China Sea, and increasingly into the Indian Ocean. "It is basically because we have not found anything in the areas that we have searched," he said.

But aviation experts, news reports and some U.S. officials have also pointed to military radar and signals collected by satellites as furnishing stronger evidence that the Boeing 777 plane turned sharply from its planned course, flew over the Malaysian peninsula and then headed west toward the Andaman Sea and the Indian Ocean.

A report from the Reuters news agency on Friday said that information culled from military radar records indicated that the plane may have been deliberately flown far off its intended route, from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and when last recorded was heading toward the Andaman Islands, which belong to India. The report added weight to some theories that the aircraft may have been hijacked. (Investigatorsfocus on foul play behind missing Malaysia Airlines plane: report)

Other information, however, has suggested nothing suspicious. A U.S. counterterrorism official said Friday that U.S. authorities had gone through each of the passengers and crew members on the manifest - including the two Iranians with stolen passports - and none had any known links to terrorist or other extremist groups.

The multinational effort was scattered across the northern reaches of the Indian Ocean. Indian military forces continued their efforts Friday to find traces of the airplane in the Andaman Sea, to the west of Thailand, and expanded the search to the area west of Nicobar Island in the Bay of Bengal. The search in the Indian Ocean includes ships, planes and nearly 1,000 personnel from India's navy, coast guard and air force. (Whatcould have happened to Malaysia Airlines flight MH370?)

A spokesman for the Indian navy refused on Friday to offer an estimate of how long the search might take. "How can you ask such a question?" said the spokesman, Capt. D.K. Sharma. "This is like looking for a needle in that vast expanse of sea."

The Chinese government announced that the Haixun 31, a civilian patrol ship that has been the command vessel for China's contingent in the search, would move from the Gulf of Thailand to the Strait of Malacca, on the other side of the peninsula. A report on Chinese state television news said a group of experts had advised the Chinese Maritime Search and Rescue Center to "expand the scope of the search."

On Friday the U.S. Navy continued its maritime aircraft patrols, focusing on the area to the west of Malaysia, said Cmdr. William Marks, spokesman for the 7th Fleet. The Navy's new P-8A Poseidon patrol craft arrived on Friday, he said. The aircraft, built with the airframe of a Boeing 737, has a range of more than 1,300 miles and can search vast swathes of ocean. India on Thursday said it was also deploying its own variant of the aircraft, the P-8i, as well as the C-130J Hercules and other aircraft.

The difficulty, Marks said in an interview, was that given the vastness of the Indian Ocean, the area is best patrolled by aircraft, but ships and helicopters are capable of more thorough and intense searches.

"Everything is a trade-off. I think the challenge is the sheer size of the area," Marks said.

(Chris Buckley reported from Sepang, Malaysia, and Nicola Clark from Paris. Reporting was contributed by Michael Forsythe from Penang, Malaysia; Keith Bradsher from Sepang; Gardiner Harris from New Delhi, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.)