Searchers expanded their hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet west toward India Thursday — meaning they might have been on a wild-goose chase in the six days since it vanished.
The shift followed reports that officials had information indicating Flight MH370 flew for several hours after its last contact with ground control.
The jet had continued to transmit satellite-communication signals — or “pings” — even after it lost radar contact, said sources close to the probe.
Boeing 777 jets are equipped to give off a satellite ping every hour they are aloft, although the signal wouldn’t give a location.
US officials have reportedly dispatched the destroyer USS Kidd to the Indian Ocean to assist the search.
“We have an indication the plane went down in the Indian Ocean,” a senior Pentagon official told ABC News.
Searchers have been looking elsewhere for the jet and its 239 passengers and crew since it disappeared early Saturday on the way to Beijing.
In the latest in a series of false leads, planes were sent Thursday to search off the southern tip of Vietnam, where satellite images on a Chinese government Web site were reported to show three floating objects.
“We went there. There is nothing,” said acting Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein.
The Chinese Embassy admitted the images were released by mistake and did not show debris from Flight 370.
The jet had left Kuala Lumpur and was flying northeast across the Gulf of Thailand and over the South China Sea when it dropped off civilian radar.
Despite the new focus on the Indian Ocean, an international search effort is still sweeping parts of the South China Sea.
Another hunt is under way to the west in the Strait of Malacca after military radar blips indicated the jet might have flown that way after its last contact.
The total search area is 35,800 square miles, about the size of Portugal.