Jet had flown faster, run out of fuel, shows data

Perth: The search area  for the missing flight MH370 has changed several times since the plane vanished as experts analysed a frustratingly small amount of data from the aircraft, including the radar signals and “pings” that a satellite picked up for several hours after radar contact was lost.

The latest analysis indicated the aircraft was traveling faster than previously estimated, resulting in increased fuel use and reducing the possible distance the aircraft could have flown before going down in the Indian Ocean.

Just as a car loses gas efficiency when driving at high speeds, a plane will get less out of a tank of fuel when it flies faster.

Malaysia’s civil aviation chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, said that analysts at Boeing Co in Seattle had helped with the analysis of the flight. He said a wide range of scenarios went into the calculation. “We’re looking at the data from the so-called pinging of the satellite, the polling of the satellites, and that gives a distance from a satellite to the aircraft to within a reasonable approximation,” he said.

John Young, manager of AMSA’s emergency response division indicated that the hundreds of floating objects detected over the last week by satellites, previously considered possible wreckage, weren’t from the plane after all.

“In regards to the old areas, we have not seen any debris and I would not wish to classify any of the satellite imagery as debris,” he said.