DEVELOPMENTS
• One object spotted by a satellite is almost 80 feet long; the other is 15 feet. Both have an indistinct, whitish appearance and are floating or just underneath the water surface.
• The search area is about 1,550 miles southwest of Perth, Australia.
• Four military search planes flew over the area Thursday, but weather hampered visibility. Another plane is dropping buoys so the currents can be monitored. India will have two planes involved in the search today.
• A Norwegian merchant ship’s crew will use binoculars and their own eyesight to scan the waters today, after using radar to search the area overnight. Australia’s HMAS Success and a second merchant ship are en route.
• Fabrice Bregier, the head of European jet maker Airbus, called for improving the systems used to track and locate aircraft and their data recorder. He said Airbus is working to develop deployable black boxes or other systems that could help investigators find the recorders following an accident or disappearance.
— Associated Press
Search planes joined a freighter early today to scan rough seas in one of the remotest places on Earth after satellite images detected possible pieces from the missing Malaysia Airlines plane in the southern Indian Ocean.
In what officials called the “best lead” of the investigation, a satellite detected two objects floating about 1,000 miles off the coast of Australia and halfway to the desolate islands of the Antarctic.
The development raised new hope of finding the vanished jet and sent another emotional jolt to the families of the 239 people aboard.
Australian authorities said in a statement early today that the search had turned up nothing so far. Efforts resumed with the first of five aircraft — a Royal Australian Air Force P3 Orion — leaving the base in Western Australia for the search around dawn. A civilian Gulfstream jet and a second Orion were expected to depart later this morning, and a third Orion was due to fly out in the early afternoon to scour more than 13,000 square miles of ocean.
A U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon aircraft was scheduled to leave the base at about 4 p.m., but like the other planes, it will have enough fuel for only a few hours before returning to Perth.
One of the objects on the satellite image was almost 80 feet long and the other was 15 feet. There could be other objects in the area, which is a four-hour flight from southwestern Australia, said John Young, manager of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s emergency response division.
“This is a lead, it’s probably the best lead we have right now,” Young said. He cautioned that the objects could be seaborne debris along a shipping route where containers can fall off cargo vessels, although the larger object is longer than a container.
Four military planes searched the area Thursday without success and planned to resume this morning, Australian officials said.
The Norwegian cargo vessel Hoegh St. Petersburg, with a Filipino crew of 20, arrived in the area and used searchlights after dark Thursday to look for debris. It will continue the search today, said Ingar Skiaker of Hoegh Autoliners, speaking to reporters in Oslo.
The Norwegian ship, which transports cars, was on its way from South Africa to Australia, he said. The Australian Maritime Safety Authority said another commercial ship and an Australian navy vessel were also en route to the search area.
Satellite imagery experts said the lead is worth investigating.
“It would be very nice if you could see a whole wing floating there, then you could say, ‘OK that’s an airplane.’ When you’re looking at something like this, you can’t tell what it is,” said Sean O’Connor, an imagery analyst with IHS Janes.
But another analyst said the debris is most likely not pieces of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. There have been several false leads since the Boeing 777 disappeared March 8 above the Gulf of Thailand en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
“The chances of it being debris from the airplane are probably small, and the chances of it being debris from other shipping are probably large,” said Jason Middleton, an aviation professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
The development marked a new phase for the anguished relatives of the passengers, who have been critical of Malaysian officials for not releasing timely information about the plane. While they still hope their loved ones will somehow be found, they acknowledged that news of the satellite images could mean the plane fell into the sea.
“If it turns out that it is truly MH370, then we will accept that fate,” said Selamat Bin Omar, the father of a Malaysian passenger. The jet carried mostly Chinese and Malaysian nationals.
DigitalGlobe, a Longmont, Colo.-based company, said it provided the images to Australian officials. The Australian Maritime Safety Authority released two images of the whitish objects. They were taken March 16, but Australian Air Commodore John McGarry said it took time to analyze them.
“The task of analyzing imagery is quite difficult. It requires drawing down frames and going through frame by frame,” he said.
The hunt has encountered other false leads. Oil slicks that were seen did not contain jet fuel. A yellow object thought to be from the plane turned out to be sea trash. Chinese satellite images showed possible debris, but nothing was found.
But this is the first time that possible objects have been spotted since the search area was massively expanded into two corridors, one stretching from northern Thailand into Central Asia and the other from the Strait of Malacca to the southern Indian Ocean.
Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein made it clear Thursday that although international search efforts are continuing both on land and in sea in the northern and southern hemispheres, the effort is mostly concentrated south of the equator over the vast Indian Ocean.
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