The Malaysian authorities denied on Thursday a widely circulated report that a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner had transmitted technical data after contact with the cockpit was lost.

The head of Malaysia Airlines said the last technical data received from Flight 370 was less than half an hour after takeoff and indicated no trouble with the plane.

“That was the last transmission,” Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, the chief executive of Malaysia Airlines, said at a news conference in Sepang, the location of Kuala Lumpur International Airport. “It did not run beyond that.”

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Rolls-Royce, the maker of the aircraft’s engines, had received data transmissions from those engines under a routine maintenance schedule, suggesting that the plane was aloft for several hours after contact was lost.

The plane’s Trent 800 engines were manufactured at the Rolls-Royce plant at Derby, in central England, according to Richard Wray, the company’s director of external communications. But the company had no immediate comment on the Wall Street Journal report.

If confirmed, the report could mean that the plane flew more than 2,000 miles beyond the point at which it was last tracked by the civil aviation authorities.

Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia’s defense minister, said on Thursday at a news conference that the report was inaccurate.

While the company had been cooperating with the Malaysian authorities since the plane disappeared, Rolls-Royce said, international aviation rules left it to investigators to determine what information was released about their findings.

An aviation official, speaking on the condition of anonymity as the investigation is continuing, said the engines do not usually transmit a continuous stream of data to the manufacturers. The data is usually transmitted on takeoff and landing, and possibly when an airplane settles at its cruising speed and altitude, the official said.

The Malaysian authorities also said that debris Chinese satellites were said to have spotted in the South China Sea was not found by vessels dispatched to the area.

Mr. Hishammuddin, who is also the country’s acting transport minister, said officials had contacted counterparts in the Chinese government who told them, “The images were released by mistake and did not show any debris.”

On Wednesday, after four days of reticence and evasive answers, the Malaysian military acknowledged that it had recorded, but initially ignored, radar signals that could have prompted a mission to intercept and track the missing jetliner. The radar data vastly expanded the area where the plane, which took off early Saturday from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing, might have traveled.

Radar signals from the location where the missing aircraft was last contacted by ground controllers suggested that the plane may have turned away from its northeastward course toward Beijing, officials said. Military radar then detected an unidentified aircraft at several points, apparently headed west across the Malaysian Peninsula and out into the Indian Ocean, the head of the country’s air force told reporters. That last detected location was hundreds of miles to the west of where search and rescue efforts were initially focused.

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