Avião desaparecido: Passaram já 11 dias

Eleven days have passed since Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went missing, and 26 nations are struggling to search for the airliner over an area more than two-thirds the size of the continental United States. Malaysian and US officials believe the aircraft was deliberately diverted but an exhaustive background search of the 239 passengers and crew aboard has not yielded any possible motive or link to terrorism. Malaysia’s top official in charge of the operation said it was vital to reduce the scale of the search and renewed appeals for sensitive military data from its neighbours that Malaysia believes may shed light on where the airliner flew. The U.S. Navy said it had switched mainly to using P-8A Poseidon and P-3 Orion aircraft to search for the missing plane instead of ships and helicopters. Investigators piecing together patchy data from military radar and satellites believe that someone turned off vital datalinks and turned west, re-crossing the Malay Peninsula and following a commercial route towards India. After that, ephemeral pings picked up by one commercial satellite suggest the aircraft flew on for at least six hours, but investigators have very little idea whether it turned north or south, triggering a search expanding across two hemispheres. Police in the Indian Ocean island chain of the Maldives said they were investigating reports that people on one of its outer islands had seen a low-flying aeroplane there early on March 8. The police gave no further details. The search covers a total area of 2.24 million nautical miles (7.68 million sq km), from central Asia to the southern Indian Ocean. The Telegraph