Crew members prepared a Malaysian Air Force aircraft before a search flight over the Straits of Malacca on Thursday. Reuters
SEPANG, Malaysia — The focus of the search for a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner shifted westward on 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 that 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.
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Even so, American naval aircraft were redeployed to the Strait of Malacca, west of Malaysia, one of several indications that the search 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, and The Associated Press reported that India planned to send ships and aircraft to help search those waters.
In a news briefing that was more structured and organized than those of earlier days, the 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 morning, 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 came 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.
“That was the last transmission,” Mr. Ahmad Jauhari said at a news conference at the international airport serving Kuala Lumpur, in Sepang. “It did not run beyond that.”
The authorities said separately that nothing had come of images recorded by Chinese satellites on Sunday and posted online on Wednesday, which appeared to show large objects floating in the South China Sea. Aircraft and ships dispatched to the area found nothing, they said, and Mr. Hishammuddin said he was told by Chinese officials that “the images were released by mistake and did not show any debris.”
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Detecting a Plane
Two kinds of radar are used to keep track of air traffic from the ground.
Primary radar
Sends out radio signals and listens for echoes that bounce back from objects in the sky.
TRANSPONDER
Secondary radar
Sends signals that request information from the plane’s transponder. The plane sends back information including its identification and altitude. The radar repeatedly sweeps the sky and interrogates the transponder. Other planes in flight can also receive the transponder signals.
-THE NEW YORK TIMES