New search zone marked off for Malaysia Airlines jet

http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-malaysia-jet-search-20140626-story.html



Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss shows the new search area in the Indian Ocean for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet. Truss spoke at the Parliament House in Canberra.

New search zone marked off for Malaysia Airlines jet
Julie Makinen
6.26.2014

Australian authorities said Thursday that a 23,000-square-mile area in the southern Indian Ocean had been designated as a new focus zone where searchers will look for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Analysts who helped define the area said in a report the crew was probably deprived of oxygen and unresponsive in the final hours of the flight.

Experts from Boeing and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board were among the specialists who helped define the zone, based on satellite data and analysis of previous similar incidents.

The new zone, about 1,100 miles west of Perth, Australia, is farther south than where previous intensive search efforts were carried out this spring after the plane vanished March 8 with 239 people aboard. The flight was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it went missing.

Intensive searching involving aircraft, ships and a robotic submarine in March, April and May yielded no wreckage or other conclusive signs of the Boeing 777. The cause of the plane’s disappearance remains undetermined, although investigators have said they believe that it was the result of deliberate action of someone aboard the jet.