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More from the WSJ, today

By JOANNA SUGDEN And SANTANU CHOUDHURY
Updated March 14, 2014 11:16 p.m. ET
NEW DELHI—The international search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 widened and moved drastically farther west into the Indian Ocean as new information showed the plane likely remained airborne for hours after it blinked off radar screens last weekend.

Indian aircraft and ships began fanning out a day ago around the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a distant Indian territory toward the coast of Myanmar, and across more than 13,000 square miles of open sea.

Cmdr. William Marks, a spokesman for the U.S. Navy's Seventh Fleet, confirmed the U.S. has begun searching the Indian Ocean at the request of the Malaysian government, flying a night mission out 1,000 miles west of the Malaysian capital. That was much farther west than the multinational search effort has reached previously. He said all U.S. search efforts would concentrate on the Indian Ocean.

Flight 370 was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and went missing with 239 people aboard, and has defied efforts of a dozen nations to find it despite nearly a week of intensifying searching. Its disappearance ranks among modern aviation's most bewildering mysteries.

The missing jet transmitted its location repeatedly to satellites over the course of five hours after it disappeared from radar, people briefed on the matter said. The final ping was sent from over water, at what one of these people called a normal cruising altitude. They added that it was unclear why the pings stopped.

If the plane remained airborne for the entire five hours, it could have flown more than 2,200 nautical miles from its last confirmed position over the Gulf of Thailand, the people said

The Indian naval search would continue into Friday night, said Col. Harmit Singh, spokesman for India's tri-services command. The 572 islands of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago stretch nearly 450 miles north-to-south. Only 37 islands are inhabited. "The rest are dense tropical jungle," Col. Singh said. The archipelago is so remote that it remains home to a tiny community of people barely touched by modernity.

Indian forces began searching in the area after Malaysian authorities provided a set of coordinates and asked India to look for debris. The Indian Navy said it has sent two warships to search to the southeast of the islands in the direction of the Strait of Malacca. The Indian Coast Guard deployed aircraft and patrol boats in the area.

"We're looking everywhere; on the western and eastern coast of Andaman," said V.S.R. Murthy, inspector general of the coast guard on the islands. "Right now, it's just a blind hunt."

India's Defense ministry said late on Friday that, at Malaysia's request, it will search 3,500 square miles off India's eastern coast. It cited the fact that there was "no headway so far" in searches elsewhere.

India was preparing to use its most advanced surveillance aircraft, the P-8 Poseidon, a state-of-the-art plane built by Boeing. The U.S. Navy has also sent a P-8, which it said would start searching on Saturday.

The U.S., Australia, and New Zealand have sent aircraft, and Japan said on Wednesday that it would send a further two planes. Bangladesh is also joining the search, with two light patrol aircraft and two frigates that will scour the coastal waters of the Bay of Bengal on Saturday.

The search over land in the archipelago was made difficult because so much of it is uninhabited, said Col. Singh: If there were a crash, there is nobody to report it. He noted that the uninhabited areas don't include any airstrips.

C. Uday Bhaskar, a retired Indian Navy commodore and former director of the National Maritime Foundation, said that although India's navy and coast guard have considerable maritime surveillance capabilities, "they are not specifically designed for this type of operation." He described the process as akin to "searching for a needle in a haystack, but 1,000 times larger and the haystack is moving."