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lost communications and veered from its scheduled path March 8. The Beijing-bound flight carrying 239 people turned around soon after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, flew west toward the Malacca Strait and disappeared from radar.
• The search area has changed several times since the plane vanished as experts analyzed a frustratingly small amount of data from the aircraft, including the radar signals and "pings" that a satellite picked up for several hours after radar contact was lost.
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• Australia announced Friday that the search area for the Malaysia Airlines jet that disappeared March 8 has shifted to a new Indian Ocean region, 1,100 kilometers (680 miles) to the northeast of where planes and ships had been trying to find any sign of it.
• WHY THE SHIFT?
• Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, says a new credible lead has come to light based on continuing analysis of radar data of the aircraft's movement between the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca before it disappeared. It indicates the plane was traveling faster than was previously thought, resulting in increased fuel usage and reducing the possible distance it traveled south.
• Two sets of data were compared: the "pinging" from a satellite to the aircraft, which gives the approximate location of the plane within the "arc" stretching from Malaysia to the southern Indian Oean, and the various projections of aircraft performance, in particular speed and fuel consumption. That resulted in the "best assessment of the area where it entered the water," Dolan said.
• Dolan said that he previous analysis had a range of possible assumptions about aircraft speed, and those assumptions have now been refined. Dolan could not say exactly how much faster the plane is believed to have been traveling, compared to earlier estimates.
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• WASHINGTON (AP) -- Investigators dubbed them "the librarians," four Air Force

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