Update | Chinese plane looking for missing Flight MH370 spots 3 objects in new search area
Chinese military plane spots objects coloured white, red and orange in new search zone but Malaysian minister stresses any floating debris located requires recovery for checking
No debris spotted in an area off the west coast of Australia has been recovered, a Malaysian minister involved in the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 said on Saturday, adding he hoped for some news soon.
The first plane back from the search on Saturday, a Chinese Ilyushin IL-76, spotted three floating objects, China’s official Xinhua News Agency said, a day after several planes and ships combing the newly targeted area closer to mainland Australia saw several other objects, including two rectangular items that were blue and gray.
Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters near Kuala Lumpur after meeting several families of passengers on the plane that there was no new information on the objects, which could just be regular debris, or could be from the missing plane.
“I’ve got to wait to get the reports on whether they have retrieved those objects. ... Those will give us some indication.”
“I’ve got to wait to get the reports on whether they have retrieved those objects. ... Those will give us some indication,” said Hishammuddin, who was accompanied by his wife and children as he visited the relatives at a hotel in Putrajaya, Malaysia.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority said that objects cannot be verified or discounted as being from Flight 370 until they are relocated and recovered by ships. “It is not known how much flotsam, such as from fishing activities, is ordinarily there. At least one distinctive fishing object has been identified,” it said.
The three objects spotted by the Chinese plane on Saturday were white, red and orange in colour, the Xinhua news report said.
Flight 370 disappeared March 8 while bound from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and investigators have been puzzling over what might have happened aboard the plane, with speculation ranging from equipment failure and a botched hijacking to terrorism or an act by one of the pilots.
The latter was fuelled by reports the pilot’s home flight simulator had files deleted from it, but Hishimmuddin said checks, including ones by the FBI, turned up no new information.
“What I know is that there is nothing sinister from the simulators but of course that will have to be confirmed by the chief of police,” he said.
Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology said a cold front would bring rain, low clouds and reduced visibility over the southern part of the search area, with moderate winds and swells of up to 2 metres. Conditions will improve on Sunday, although rain, drizzle and low clouds are still likely.
Newly analysed satellite data shifted the search zone on Friday, raising hopes searchers may be closer to getting physical evidence that that the plane crashed in the Indian Ocean with 239 people aboard.
That would also help narrow the hunt for the wreckage and the plane’s black boxes, which could contain clues to what caused the plane – flying to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur – to be so far off-course.
The US Navy has already sent equipment that can detect pings from the back boxes, and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott told reporters in Sydney that the equipment would be put on an Australian naval ship soon.
“We should not underestimate the difficulty of this work – it is an extraordinarily remote location.”
“It will be taken to the most prospective search area and if there is good reason to deploy it, it will be deployed,” he said, without giving a timeframe. Other officials have said it could take days for the ship – the Ocean Shield – to reach the search area.
The newly targeted zone is nearly 1,130 kilometres northeast of sites the searchers have crisscrossed for the past week. The redeployment came after analysts determined that the Boeing 777 may have been travelling faster than earlier estimates and would therefore have run out of fuel sooner, officials said.
Search planes were sent out on Saturday from Perth, Australia, in a staggered manner, so at least one plane will be over the area for most of the daylight hours. It is also closer than the previous search area, with a flying time of two and a half hours each way, allowing for five hours of search time, according to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.
The Australian statement said five P-3 Orions – three from Australia and one each from Japan and New Zealand – plus a Japanese coast guard jet, the Chinese Ilyushin IL-76, and one civilian jet acting as a communications relay, took part on Saturday.
Abbott said the job of locating the debris was still difficult. “We should not underestimate the difficulty of this work – it is an extraordinarily remote location.”
The area spans about 319,000 square kilometres, roughly the size of Poland. In most places, depths range from about 2,000 metres to 4,000 metres, although the much deeper Diamantina trench edges the search area.
The hunt for the plane focused first on the Gulf of Thailand, along the plane’s planned path. But when radar data showed it had veered sharply west, the search moved to the Andaman Sea, off the western coast of Malaysia, before pivoting to the southern Indian Ocean, southwest of Australia.
That change was based on analysis of satellite data. But officials said a re-examination and refinement of that analysis indicated the aircraft was travelling faster than previously estimated, resulting in increased fuel use and reducing the possible distance it could have flown before going down.
Relatives and friends of the passengers said they were tortured by the uncertainty over the fate of their loved ones, as they wait for hard evidence that the plane had crashed.
“This is the trauma of maybe he’s dead, maybe he’s not. Maybe he’s still alive and we need to find him. Maybe he died within the first hour of the flight, and we don’t know,” Sarah Bajc, the American girlfriend of US passenger Philip Wood, said in an interview in Beijing.
“I mean, there’s absolutely no way for me to reconcile that in my heart,” she said.
If investigators can determine the plane went down in the newly targeted zone, recovery of its flight data and cockpit voice recorders could be complicated.
While investigators appear to be focusing on an area where much of the sea floor is about 2,000 metres below the surface, depths may reach a maximum of about 6,000 metres at its easternmost edge, she said.
