Australia says search for MH370 can 'drag on'

The three-week hunt for Flight 370 has turned up no sign of the jetliner, which vanished March 8 with 239 people on board bound for Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.

The search zone area has shifted as experts analyzed the plane's limited radar and satellite data, moving from the seas off Vietnam to the waters west of Malaysia and Indonesia, and then to several areas west of Australia. The current search zone is a remote 254,000 square kilometer (98,000 square mile) that is a roughly 2 ½-hour flight from Perth.

On Tuesday, Australia said it had deployed an airborne traffic controller over the Indian Ocean to prevent a mid-air collision among the many aircraft searching for the jetliner.

An Australian air force E-7A Wedgetail equipped with advanced radar “is on its first operational” task in the search area in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said in a tweet.

Earlier, Angus Houston, who heads the joint agency coordinating the multinational search effort, said the modified Boeing 737 will monitor the increasingly crowded skies over the remote search zone.

On Tuesday, 11 planes and nine ships were focusing on less than half of the search zone, some 120,000 square kilometers (46,000 square miles) of ocean west of Perth, with poor weather and low visibility forecast, according to the new Joint Agency Coordination Center. A map from the center showed that the search area was about 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) west of Perth.