Now 10 days after the transponder from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 stopped transmitting over the South China Sea, the search for the missing Boeing 777 has expanded to involve 25 countries and cover an area spanning a million square miles. The expansion of the search came in reaction to evidence that the airplane’s satcom system continued to transmit for several hours after Malaysian military radar lost contact with the airplane some 200 miles northwest of the island of Panang off the Western coast of the Malay peninsula. During a Saturday press conference, Malaysian officials finally identified the object military radar had detected at points across peninsular Malaysia into the northern part of the Strait of Malacca as an object that “could have been a 777.” Based on the satellite information, they also plotted two separate “corridors” from where the satcom system sent its last “ping” at 8:11 a.m., one extending north from northern Thailand to the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, the other extending from Indonesia south into the far reaches of the southern Indian Ocean.
