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Aboard a U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon, the U.S. military's most advanced maritime surveillance aircraft, the nine-man crew scoured a swath of sea some 7,500 square miles—an area bigger than New Jersey—in the hopes of finding Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

From the window, the sea and sky smudged together in an indistinguishable gray blur, and every white wave-top appeared momentarily to the untrained eye to be something important. But the crew found no evidence of the missing plane on Sunday, having covered only a fraction of the Bay of Bengal and the vast Indian Ocean to the south.

The P-8A is the most sophisticated aircraft available to help find the Malaysia Airlines flight that vanished more than a week ago. It can fly 575 miles an hour and is equipped with sensors and imaging devices strong enough to spot submarines.

Acting on intelligence of a possible debris field to the north of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the P-8A—designated Rescue 74—departed Kuala Lumpur late Sunday morning, heading 900 miles northwest. The aircraft had only joined the search effort the day before.

Five crewmen monitoring consoles on the P-8A's port side used radar and both optical and infrared cameras to sweep the ocean's surface, while spotters also visually scanned the water. Dashes on the radar scope appeared sporadically, only to be dismissed as small fishing boats.

http://online.wsj.com/news/article_e...MDEwNjExNDYyWj