What's new

Malaysian officials are asking more than a dozen nations to help find the jetliner that went missing last weekend. The search area for the Boeing 777 was widely expanded Saturday; investigators are now looking for potential motives among the plane's crew and passengers to disrupt the flight.

The new call for help comes after ships and planes spent days looking for signs of the plane in the South China Sea. New radar and satellite data has led investigators to conclude the plane took a westerly turn from that area, likely after someone intentionally disabled its transponders and other equipment.

The new data shows that the plane flew for more than six and a half hours after it ceased communicating with air traffic control.

"The search was already a highly complex, multinational effort. It has now become even more difficult," Malaysia's Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said Sunday, discussing the status of the search for the Malaysia Airlines flight that had been scheduled to travel from Kuala Lampur to Beijing with 239 people aboard.

Officials now believe "the plane may have either flown northwest towards Central Asia or southwest towards the southern Indian Ocean," NPR's Anthony Kuhn reports from Beijing.

"From focusing on shallow seas, we are now looking at large tracts of land, crossing 11 countries, as well as deep and remote oceans," Hussein said. He added that Malaysia is asking those countries for satellite and radar data that might show signs of the plane's flight path.

From The Wall Street Journal:

"Officials in government and industry have regarded the southern corridor into the Indian Ocean as the more likely path of the 777, but haven't ruled out the northern arc.

"The track from northern Thailand to Kazakhstan crosses some of the most heavily militarized airspace in the world, including western China. According to [an] industry official, many of those nations "would have MiGs up in the sky before you even knew it" to intercept any unidentified flying object."