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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 unprecedented 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.
"All the efforts must be used to actually narrow the corridors that we have announced - I think that is the best approach to do it. Otherwise we are in the realm of speculation again," Malaysia's Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters late on Tuesday.
The US 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.
"The maritime patrol aircraft are much more suited for this type of operation since the search field is growing," said Navy Lieutenant David Levy, who is on board the USS Blue Ridge, the US Navy ship that is coordinating the search effort.
"It's just a much more efficient way to search," he said.
Flight MH370 vanished from civilian air traffic control screens off Malaysia's east coast at 1:21 a.m. local time on March 8 (1721 GMT March 7), less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing.
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.
In the latest of a series of possible sightings of the plane, 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 airplane there early on March 8. The police gave no further details.
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