New radar data could offer clues on airliner

Search crews from 26 countries including Thailand are looking for the plane that vanished early on March 8 with 239 people aboard en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Frustration is growing among relatives of those on the plane at the lack of progress in the search.

Investigators have identified two giant arcs of territory spanning the possible positions of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 about seven-and-a-half hours after take-off, based on its last faint signal to a satellite.

Commander William Marks, a spokesman for the US Navy’s 7th Fleet, said finding the plane was like trying to locate a few people somewhere between New York and California.

Aircraft from Australia, the US and New Zealand scoured an area stretching across 117,000 square miles of the Indian Ocean, about 1,600 miles south west of Perth, on Australia’s west coast.

Merchant ships were also asked to look for any trace of the plane. Nothing has been found, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said.

Early in the search, Malaysian officials said they suspected the plane backtracked toward the Strait of Malacca, off western Malaysia. But it took a week for them to confirm Malaysian military radar data suggesting that route.

Thai military officials said their own radar showed an unidentified plane, possibly Flight 370, flying toward the strait minutes after the Malaysian jet’s transponder signal was lost. Air force spokesman Air Vice Marshal Montol Suchookorn said the Thai military does not know if the plane it detected was Flight 370.

Thailand’s failure to quickly share that information may not substantially change what Malaysian officials now know, but it raises questions about the degree to which some countries are sharing their defence data.

The jet took off from Kuala Lumpur at 12.40am on March 8 and its transponder, which allows air traffic controllers to identify and track it, ceased communicating at 1.20am.

Mr Montol said that at 1.28am Thai military radar “was able to detect a signal, which was not a normal signal, of a plane flying in the direction opposite from the MH370 plane,” back toward Kuala Lumpur. The plane later turned right, toward Butterworth, a Malaysian city along the Strait of Malacca. The radar signal was infrequent and did not include data such as the flight number.

When asked why it took so long to release the information, Mr Montol said it did not raise any alarms at the time because the signal was not of something heading toward Thailand.