New analysis of an attempted phone call made by Malaysian airline officials to their missing Flight 370 may alter the search area being scoured for any sign of the missing place, officials say.
Airline officials had used a satellite phone to try and reach the missing Boeing 777 shortly after it disappeared off radar screens.
Investigators have used the attempted call and other data to determine a likely area to look for the airliner than went missing March 8 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8.
However, a more recent analysis of the call, suggesting the airliner may have turned south some time earlier than had been thought, means the search area in the southern Indian Ocean may be extended further in that direction, Australian Depute Prime Minister Warren Truss said Thursday.
Although the attempted calls have been examined since the airliner went missing, a new method used to analyze them may have yielded clues about the airplane's final hours, Australian officials said.
Ground staff at the airline made two attempts to reach the aircraft by satellite phone; the newly reported analysis applied to the first of the calls suggests the aircraft had already turned south only 20 minutes after it dropped off Malaysian military radar.
"We're now more confident that it turned comparatively early," said Australian Transport Safety Bureau Chief Commissioner Martin Dolan. "That does make a difference to how we prioritize the search along the seventh arc."
Dolan was referring to a broad region where it is believed the flight would have run out of fuel and then crashed, based on the last signals received from transmitters sending engine data.
The search area on the arc is currently around 430 miles long by 50 miles wide.
The arc will remain the focus of the search as MH370 was still somewhere on it when a satellite "handshake" from the attempted phone call was emitted, officials said.
However, the new analysis may extend that arc further south, Truss said.
"The search area remains the same but some of the areas, some of the information we now have suggests to us that areas a little further to the south ... within the search area, but a little further to the south may be of particular interest and priority," he said.
In Canberra on Thursday, Truss and Malaysia's Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai signed an agreement for their two countries to equally shoulder ongoing costs of the search.
"We need to find the plane," the minister said. "We need to find the black box in the plane so that we can have a conclusion in the investigation."
