2 objects in sea: ‘best lead’ in search for plane

Associated Press

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia

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 nearly 2-week-old aviation mystery, a satellite detected two large objects floating about 1,000 miles off the southwestern coast of Australia and halfway to the desolate islands of the Antarctic. The area is so remote it takes aircraft longer to fly there — four hours — than it does for the search.

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 were resuming 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 about 4 p.m., but like the other planes, it will have enough fuel for only a few hours before returning to Perth.

“It is a very long journey to the site, and unfortunately, aircraft can only have one or two hours over the search area before they need to return to the mainland for fuel,” Warren Truss, who is currently Australia’s acting prime minister while Tony Abbott is overseas, told Australian Broadcasting Corp. He said that weather conditions in the area were poor and may get worse.

“And so, clearly, this is a very, very difficult and challenging search. Weather conditions are not particularly good and risk that they may deteriorate,” Truss said.

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, a four-hour flight from 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.

Truss said officials were working to get more satellite images and stronger resolution to help searchers get a better sense of where the objects are and how far they’ve shifted since the initial images were captured. “They will have moved because of tides and wind and the like, so the search area is quite broad,” Truss said, adding that marker buoys were dropped to help get a better understanding of what drift is likely to have occurred.

The Norwegian cargo vessel Hoegh St. Petersburg, with a Filipino crew of 20, arrived in the area and used searchlights after dark 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 also were en route to the search area.

Three Chinese naval ships were heading to the area. China’s search-and-rescue agency also said it had asked the country’s Oceanic Administration to dispatch the icebreaker Xue Long (the Snow Dragon), which was in Perth after a voyage to the Antarctica in January, to take part in the search.

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, and one analyst cautioned against rising hopes the objects are from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

“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 also marked a new phase for the anguished relatives of the passengers, who have been critical of Malaysian officials for what the relatives say has been the slow release of timely information. Though 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.

But he cautioned that relatives still “do not yet know for sure whether this is indeed MH370 or something else. Therefore, we are still waiting for further notice from the Australian government.”