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Area where 'pings' heard ruled out as resting place of missing Malaysian jet, searchers say
• CANBERRA, Australia (AP) -- Investigators searching for the missing Malaysian jet have concluded an area where acoustic signals were detected is not the final resting place of the plane after an unmanned submersible found no trace of it, the search coordinator said Thursday.
• The U.S. Navy's Bluefin 21 finished its final underwater mission in the southern Indian Ocean on Wednesday after scouring 850 square kilometers (330 square miles), the Joint Agency Coordination Center said.
• "The area can now be discounted as the final resting place" of the missing plane, the Australia-based center said in a statement.
• The underwater search for the airliner, which vanished March 8 with 239 people on board en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, will be suspended for a couple months while more powerful sonar equipment is brought in to search a much wider area of 56,000 square kilometers (21,600 square miles), based on analysis of satellite data of the plane's most likely course, the center said.
• That analysis has led authorities to believe that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 diverted sharply from its flight path and flew south to the Indian Ocean. But not a single piece of the missing Boeing 777 has been found in one of aviation's most baffling mysteries.
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With officials failing to find Flight 370 in most likely crash zone, what happens next?
• SYDNEY (AP) -- Thursday marked a bleak moment for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. For the first time since it disappeared March 8 with 239 people on board, no one is looking for it.
• An unmanned sub that spent weeks scouring the area of the Indian Ocean where searchers had detected acoustic signals they hoped were from the aircraft finished its work Wednesday, after finding nothing. Australian officials leading the search acknowledged that the area can be ruled out as the aircraft's final resting place.
• A civilian expert with the U.S. Navy told CNN that the "pings," detected about a month after Flight 370 disappeared, probably were not from the jet. A Navy spokesman later said the comments were premature, but now that 850 square kilometers (330 square miles) of ocean floor have been thoroughly searched, the point may be (Continued on page 23)
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