Search for missing plane moving nearly 700 miles, based on radar analysis

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - : Australia announced Friday morning that it had moved the search area for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 nearly 700 miles to the northeast, the latest in a long series of changes by the authorities on where they think the plane might have disappeared. (Search area for lost Malaysia jet shifts on new radar data: Australia)

The authority said it was acting after further analysis of radar data from when the plane turned over the South China Sea and flew back over Peninsular Malaysia showed that the aircraft was moving faster than previously estimated and so would have used more fuel. (Malaysian jet search resumes, US sends second Poseidon plane )

That in turn would mean that the aircraft could have run out of fuel sooner as it flew out over the southern Indian Ocean, according to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.

"This is a credible new lead and will be thoroughly investigated today," Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia said in a statement Friday morning, adding that 10 aircraft, six vessels and various satellites would focus on the new search area.

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The revision of the search area, based on further analysis by an international team of experts working with Malaysian officials, means that Australia is redirecting the search far from the floating objects seen in the previous search area in satellite images released by Australia, China and the European satellite launch company Airbus Defense and Space. (MH370 mystery complicates last rites for the missing)

At 123,000 square miles, or 319,000 square kilometers, the new area is about the size of New Mexico and is only one-fifth of the size of the previous search area. John Young, the director general of the Maritime Safety Authority, said at a news conference near Canberra on Friday that the ocean was 2,000 to 4,000 meters deep in the new search area, or 6,500 to 13,000 feet, making it shallower in some places than the previous search area.

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Young also said that the new search area took into account the likely drifting of any floating debris in the nearly three weeks since the plane vanished. (Search for jet is complicated by geopolitics and rivalries)

Those objects were in or very near the previous search area, as satellite operators had trained their cameras there.

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The new search area may make the job a little easier for maritime surveillance crews aboard aircraft and ships. The new zone is closer to Perth, Australia, than the previous zone, shortening the flight by up to an hour in each direction and so allowing air crews to spend more time actually looking for debris from Flight 370.

But the new zone creates a further challenge in finding the data recorders from the missing Boeing 777-200, which are believed to have sunk to the ocean floor wherever the aircraft hit the surface of the sea. Aircraft and ships have dropped buoys and tracked them for the past week in the previous search area in an attempt to document sea currents and figure out how far floating debris might have drifted from the original point of impact.

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The new search area is farther north, in an area where currents tend to be less strong, but also may not have been tracked in as much detail in the past week. The currents to the northeast of the search area are more likely to move north or east, possibly toward Australia, oceanographers said this week.

The currents in the previous search area, particularly the southern part of the previous search area, would have been more likely to carry debris past the southern coast of Australia and possibly into the southern Pacific Ocean, said Jianping Gan, an oceanographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

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As the search in the Indian Ocean continued, the flight simulator and hard drives that the pilots of Flight 370 had at their homes appeared to be a dead end, yielding few clues that shed any light on whether they deliberately diverted the missing jet, according to two people briefed on the investigation.

The Malaysian authorities seized the devices early in their inquiry and, after initially keeping U.S. officials at a distance, turned to the FBI last week for help in analyzing them. The Malaysians were particularly interested in learning what it was that the captain of the flight apparently deleted from the simulator in the days before the plane disappeared; the FBI has extensive expertise in recovering deleted computer files.

The FBI's spokesman, Michael Kortan, said the bureau would not discuss what it had found on the hard drives because the investigation was continuing.

Though investigators are still focusing on the pilots' role in the plane's disappearance on March 8, no concrete evidence has come to light to indicate that they sabotaged the flight.

James B. Comey, the FBI director, testified in Washington on Wednesday before the House Appropriations Committee that the bureau was close to completing its analysis of the pilots' simulator and hard drives. "I have teams working really around the clock to exploit that," Comey said. "I don't want to say more about that in an open setting, but I expect it to be done fairly shortly. Within a day or two we will finish that work."

One former senior law enforcement official briefed on the investigation cautioned that although the FBI had found little on the pilots' hard drives and simulator, there could be information on them that would be helpful to the Malaysians.

"Something on the drive which does not seem important today could be, when viewed with additional data obtained from the background of the individual, his other activity, interviews and data from the flight recorded," the former official said. "Then, something that seemed like nothing may be something."

The official and the two people briefed on the investigation spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to jeopardize their access to secret information.

Little progress could be made in the search Thursday because storms made flying to the area too risky for search crews.