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India's role in the search for missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 is growing, with the search expanding across the Bay of Bengal, close to the Chennai coast.
As hope fades, Malaysia is confronting the awful possibility that the airliner might have flown towards India until it ran out of fuel and plunged into the sea. The area that the Indian Navy has been asked to scan on Saturday is the extremity of the search bubble, 2,500 km from Kuala Lumpur. Since Flight MH370 was carrying fuel enough for just 2,500 km, it would have run dry in the area that India will search - a narrow band of sea 900 km west of Port Blair, i.e., about 500 km east of Chennai and Visakhapatnam.
Aircraft and ships from the Andaman & Nicobar Command that searched the South Andaman Sea all of Friday will be joined on Saturday by those of the Visakhapatnam-based Eastern Naval Command.
On Friday, the Ministry of Defence revealed: "The Malaysian authorities have also requested for a search in the Bay of Bengal, expanse of which is approx. 9,000 sq km (15 km x 600 km). This area is approx. 900 km due west of Port Blair. Search in this area would be undertaken by the resources of Eastern Naval Command."
Naval sources told Business Standard that two small Dornier aircraft would conduct this search on Saturday morning. In case nothing is found, the larger, faster, P-8I aircraft will join the search from the Port Blair and Arakonam naval bases.
The navy says two of its warships - INS Saryu and INS Kumbhir - combed the South Andaman Sea on Friday. In the afternoon, INS Kumbhir was replaced by helicopter-carrying INS Kesari, which could scan larger areas. Simultaneously, two Coast Guard vessels are searching close to the coastline.
Malaysian authorities in Kuala Lumpur are allocating search areas to the 10-odd countries that are assisting it. The Indian Navy was coordinating assistance from its Maritime Operations Centre in New Delhi, while the Joint Operations Room at the Andaman & Nicobar Command in Port Blair was monitoring the progress of the search, said the navy.
Flight MH370, a Boeing 777 airliner, took off from Kuala Lumpur soon after midnight on March 8, heading north on a six-hour flight to Beijing. Forty minutes into its flight, at about 1.30 am, it lost communication with air traffic control. While there is no certainty which direction it went thereafter.
Malaysian military radar picked up an unidentified aircraft heading westwards towards the Indian Ocean. Since then, the search has expanded towards the Andaman & Nicobar Islands.
