Announcing the shift to a criminal investigation, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said investigators now "can say with a high degree of certainty" that one or more of the 239 people on board the Boeing Co. 777 jet deliberately turned off two aircraft signaling systems within 40 minutes after takeoff from Kuala Lumpur.
The plane made a sharp turn westward, away from its authorized route to Beijing, and from then on the flight path was "consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane," Mr. Najib told a packed news conference.
Malaysia also announced that the high-priority, international search would move to two huge new areas spanning the Bay of Bengal and reaching deep into the southern Indian Ocean, dwarfing sections that previously were searched in the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand without finding anything related to the aircraft.
If searchers fail to find debris or retrieve the jetliner's flight-data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, aviation experts say, the fate of Flight 370 could well remain a mystery.
The massive water and sea search initially seems to be targeting at least several hundred thousand square miles of water — an area potentially much larger than Texas — in a region that includes some of the world's deepest and most impenetrable underwater topography.
The search areas may be refined, as investigators continue to analyze radar and satellite data to better understand the flight path of the plane after it vanished from civilian air-traffic control radars a week ago.
The plane flew some 6½ hours past that point, while continuing to transmit limited location information to communication satellites owned by Inmarsat PLC. Once the final transmission from the plane was received, according to people familiar with the matter, investigators suspect it had enough fuel in its tanks to fly hundreds of additional miles while avoiding any satellite tracking.
But as an armada of more than 40 ships, 58 planes and search teams from 14 countries confront the imposing task, the most common description of the job ahead is unprecedented.
The earlier efforts were in a "very defined search area with clearly defined borders," Commander William Marks, spokesman for the U.S. Navy's 7th fleet, said on Fox News. The new areas are "completely different," he said, because there are "almost no boundaries there" and the extent of the search area "is really unprecedented" for the Navy or other organizations.
Navy brass ordered the USS Kidd, a guided-missile destroyer and its helicopters, to help with the latest search, along with a pair of advanced, long-range reconnaissance aircraft.
But aviation experts believe it could be a long, uphill struggle. "This is undoubtedly going to take a while," said Mark Rosenker, a former vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.
"It could take months or longer," he said Saturday, adding "we have no crime scene and we have no debris field." Without locating the so-called "black box," he added, it will be "comparable to investigating a murder without a body" for a long time.
"The task is tremendous," said safety consultant Curt Lewis. Mr. Lewis said the search for the remnants of Air France Flight 447, which crashed in the Atlantic in 2009, is the most comparable investigation, but in that case investigators had a stream of data about operation of the plane's systems before it went down. And they had a rough idea where it crashed.
"In this case, they have no idea where the flight ended," he said.
The high-profile underwater search for the Air France Airbus A330 lasted about two years but eventually succeeded in retrieving the so-called "black box" from the wreckage.
That search, however, which consisted of several phases, never exceeded thousands of square miles.
This search for the Malaysian jet is more daunting and the stakes are greater, largely because a suspected hijacking or terrorist act may be to blame.
Notwithstanding the scope of the current search, the areas to be covered don't extend close to the Australian city of Perth as some earlier media reports suggested. Depending on altitude, speed and the amount of fuel at takeoff, the Boeing 777-200 model's range could take it all the way from Malaysia to the vicinity of the Australian coast.
The northern portions of the projected searches pose particular challenges, encompassing land areas of Pakistan, Afghanistan and neighboring countries. Outsiders are highly unlikely to try to conduct searches in those areas. With high mountains and lots of snow, the likelihood of finding a downed jet is small until the springtime, according to Michael Barr, an aviation safety expert affiliated with the University of Southern California.
Even over the Indian Ocean, Mr. Barr said, the extent of the search is unparalleled and the distances to be covered daunting. The most capable U.S. reconnaissance plane participating in the search can only cross about half of the Indian Ocean before having to turn back to refuel.
"I hope they find" wreckage from the jet, Mr. Barr said. "But I wouldn't put any money on it."
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