By Jethro Mullen, CNN
March 13, 2014 -- Updated 0754 GMT (1554 HKT)
(CNN) -- The puzzle over the disappearance of
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 grew even more complex Thursday when a
report emerged suggesting the missing plane may have flown on for about
four hours after its last reported contact.
The report from the Wall Street Journal
said U.S. aviation investigators and national security officials were
basing their belief that the missing plane kept flying on data
automatically transmitted to the ground from the passenger jet's
engines.
The newspaper attributed
the information to two unidentified people who were "familiar with the
details." CNN was not immediately able to confirm the report.
If the plane did indeed
stay in the air for several hours after it lost contact with air traffic
controllers early Saturday, the challenge facing investigators and
search teams becomes immensely more complicated.
Four more hours in the air could put the plane many hundreds of miles beyond the area currently being searched.
And the new report opens
the door to a fresh round of theories about what has become of the
plane, which vanished early Saturday while flying over Southeast Asia on
its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Engine data
The mystery over the fate
of the passenger jet, a Boeing 777-200, and the 239 people it was
carrying has so far left government officials and aviation experts
flummoxed.
Searchers have already
been combing a vast area of sea and land for traces of the plane. But so
far, with the search well into its sixth day, their efforts have been
fruitless.
The Wall Street Journal
report said the plane's engines have an onboard monitoring system
supplied by their manufacturer, Rolls-Royce PLC. The system
"periodically sends bursts of data about engine health, operations and
aircraft movements to facilities on the ground," the newspaper said.
Malaysia Airlines sends
its engine data live to Rolls-Royce for analysis, the report said, and
that data is now being analyzed to figure out the flight path of the
missing plane after contact was lost with its transponder, a radio
transmitter in the cockpit that communicates with ground radar.
Erin Atan, a spokeswoman
for Rolls Royce in Asia, declined to comment on the report Thursday,
telling CNN the matter was "an official air accident investigation."
Azharuddin Abdul Rahman,
the director general of Malaysia's Department of Civil Aviation, said
he was aware of the Wall Street Journal report but couldn't comment
further.
Still no trace
As word of the report
spread, searchers appeared to draw another blank in the so far
frustrating endeavors to find traces of the plane.
A Vietnamese search team
reported seeing no sign of debris when they flew over an area of sea
that Chinese authorities had flagged as the location of possible
remnants of the missing plane.
A plane from Vietnam's
National Committee for Search and Rescue carried out a flight Thursday
morning over the area identified by Chinese satellite imagery, said Doan
Luu Van, International Affairs Coordinator with the Civil Aviation
Administration of Vietnam. He said the committee would send another
scouting mission "early this afternoon" to the same location.
China's State
Administration for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense
said satellite images showed "three suspected floating objects" that it
described as "a suspected crash site."
The images were captured around 11 a.m. Sunday, the day after the plane went missing, but weren't released until Wednesday.
The Chinese agency gave
coordinates of 105.63 east longitude, 6.7 north latitude, which would
put the objects in waters between Malaysia and southern of Vietnam, near
where the plane lost contact with air traffic controllers.
Last known words
Also on Thursday, a
Malaysian aviation official told CNN that the last known words from the
flight crew of the missing plane were "Alright, good night."
Malaysian civil aviation
officer Zulazri Mohd Ahnuar said he couldn't confirm which member of
the flight crew sent the message, which was transmitted from the plane
back to Malaysian flight controllers as the aircraft transferred into
Vietnamese airspace early Saturday.
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