The search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 will shift south along a narrow arc identified as the most likely resting place of the plane, the Australia's deputy prime minister said on Thursday, according to The Associated Press.
"The new priority area is still focused on the seventh arc, where the aircraft last communicated with satellite. We are now shifting our attention to an area further south along the arc based on these calculations," Warren Truss said, the AP reported.
The Boeing 777, carrying 239 passengers and crew, disappeared on March 8 shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing, according to the AP.
After analyzing data between the plane and a satellite, officials believe Flight 370 was on autopilot the entire time it was flying across a vast expanse of the southern Indian Ocean, Australian Transport Safety Bureau chief commissioner Martin Dolan said, the AP reported.
"Certainly for its path across the Indian Ocean, we are confident that the aircraft was operating on autopilot until it ran out of fuel," Dolan told reporters in Canberra, according to the AP.
The latest nugget of information from the investigation into Flight 370 came as officials announced yet another change in the search area for the wreckage of the plane that vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8 with 239 passengers and crew on board, the AP reported.
The new search area is located several hundred miles southwest of the most recent suspected crash site, about 1,100 miles off Australia's west coast, Dolan said, according to the AP. Powerful sonar equipment will scour the seabed for wreckage in the new search zone, which officials calculated by reanalyzing the existing satellite data.
