Officials now believe Flight 370 was flying under its own control when it vanished [EPA/AP]After analysing data between the plane and a satellite, officials now believe Flight MH370 was flying under its own control when it vanished in March with 239 passengers and crew on board.
Investigators also today announced details of the latest search area for the missing jet.
Australian Transport Safety Bureau chief commissioner Martin Dolan said: "Certainly for its path across the Indian Ocean, we are confident that the aircraft was operating on autopilot until it ran out of fuel."
Asked whether the autopilot would have to be manually switched on, or whether it could have been activated automatically under a default setting, Mr Dolan added: "The basic assumption would be that if the autopilot is operational it's because it's been switched on."
But exactly when the Boeing 777 began running on autopilot is still not known, Transport Minister Warren Truss said.
He said: "We couldn't accurately, nor have we attempted to, fix the moment when it was put on autopilot.
"It will be a matter for the Malaysian-based investigation to look at precisely when it may have been put on autopilot."
The development came as officials announced yet another change in the search area for the wreckage of the plane.
The new search area is located several hundred miles southwest of the most recent suspected crash site, about 1,100 miles off Australia's west coast.
Powerful sonar equipment will scour the seabed for wreckage in the new search zone, which officials calculated by reanalysing the existing satellite data.
The shift was expected, with Mr Dolan saying last week the new zone would be south of an area where a remote-controlled underwater drone spent weeks fruitlessly combing 330 square miles of seabed.
That search area was determined by a series of underwater sounds initially thought to have come from the plane's black boxes.
But those signals are now widely believed to have come from some other source.
The new 23,000 square mile search area falls within a vast expanse of ocean that air crews have already scoured for floating debris.
Officials have since called off the air search, since any debris would likely have sunk long ago.
Map showing the new search area in the Indian ocean [EPA]The hunt is now focused underwater.
Beginning in August, private contractors will use powerful side-scan sonar equipment capable of probing ocean depths of 4.3 miles to comb the ocean floor in the new search zone.
The job is expected to take 12 months to complete.
Meanwhile, two survey ships are mapping uncharted expanses of seabed in the search zone before the sonar scanning starts.
The search area has changed multiple times in the months since Flight MH370 vanished, as officials struggled to make sense of the limited data the flight left in its wake after it dropped off radar.
The new search zone was largely identified by an analysis of hourly transmissions, or "handshakes," between the plane and a satellite.
Mr Truss said he was optimistic that the latest search zone is, indeed, the most likely crash site. But he warned that finding the plane would be a huge task.
"The search will still be painstaking," he said.
"Of course, we could be fortunate and find it in the first hour or the first day - but it could take another 12 months."
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