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 The HMAS Success should reach two objects spotted by Australian
military aircraft by Tuesday morning at the latest, Malaysia's
government said, offering the first chance of picking up suspected
debris from the plane.
So far, ships in the international search effort have been unable to
locate several "suspicious" objects spotted by satellites in grainy
images or by fast-flying aircraft over a vast search area in the
remote southern Indian Ocean.
"HMAS Success is on scene and is attempting to locate and recover
these objects," Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who called
his Malaysia counterpart Najib Razak to inform him of the sighting,
said in a statement to parliament.
The objects, described as a "grey or green circular object" and an
"orange rectangular object", were spotted about 2,500 km west of
Perth on Monday afternoon, said Abbott, adding that three planes
were also en route to the area.
Neither Malaysia nor Australia gave details on the objects' size.
Flight MH370 vanished from civilian radar screens less than an hour
after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people on
board on March 8. No confirmed sighting of the plane has been made
since and there is no clue what went wrong.
Attention and resources in the search for the Boeing 777 have
shifted from an initial focus north of the Equator to an
increasingly narrowed stretch of rough sea in the southern Indian
Ocean, thousands of miles from the original flight path.
Earlier on Tuesday, Xinhua news agency said a Chinese Ilyushin IL-76
aircraft spotted two "relatively big" floating objects and several
smaller white ones dispersed over several kilometers.
Beijing responded cautiously to the find. "At present, we cannot yet
confirm that the floating objects are connected with the missing
plane," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei told a news briefing in
Beijing.
Australia said that a U.S. Navy plane searching the area on Monday
had been unable to locate the objects.
China has diverted its icebreaker Xuelong, or Snow Dragon, toward
the location where the debris was spotted. A flotilla of other
Chinese ships are also steadily making their way south. The ships
will start to arrive in the area on Tuesday.
Over 150 of the passengers on board the missing plane were Chinese.
The latest sighting followed reports by an Australian crew over the
weekend of a floating wooden pallet and strapping belts in an area
of the icy southern Indian Ocean that was identified after
satellites recorded images of potential debris.
In a further sign the search may be bearing fruit, the U.S. Navy is
flying in its high-tech black box detector to the area.
The so-called black boxes — the cockpit voice recorder and flight
data recorder — record what happens on board planes in flight. At
crash sites, finding the black boxes soon is crucial because the
locator beacons they carry fade out after 30 days.
"If debris is found we will be able to respond as quickly as
possible since the battery life of the black box's pinger is
limited," Commander Chris Budde, U.S. Seventh Fleet Operations
Officer, said in an emailed statement.
Budde stressed that bringing in the black box detector, which is
towed behind a vessel at slow speeds and can pick up "pings" from a
black box to a maximum depth of 20,000 feet, was a precautionary
measure.
The Chinese aircraft that spotted the objects was one of two IL-76s
searching on Monday. Another eight aircraft, from Australia, the
United States and Japan, were scheduled to make flights throughout
the day to the search site, some 2,500 km (1,550 miles) southwest of
Perth.
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"EVERYONE IS QUITE HYPED"
"The flight has been successful in terms of what we were looking for
today. We were looking for debris in the water and we sighted a
number of objects on the surface and beneath the surface visually as
we flew over the top if it," said Flight Lieutenant Josh Williams,
on board a Royal Australian Air Force P-3 Orion. "The first object
was rectangular in shape and slightly below the ocean. The second
object was circular, also slightly below the ocean. We came across a
long cylindrical object that was possibly two meters long, 20 cm
across.
"Everyone is quite hyped."
Australia was also analysing French radar images showing potential
floating debris that were taken some 850 km (530 miles) north of the
current search area.
Australia has used a U.S. satellite image of two floating objects to
frame its search area. A Chinese satellite has also spotted an
object floating in the ocean there, estimated at 22 meters long
(74ft) and 13 meters (43ft) wide.
It could not be determined easily from the blurred images whether
the objects were the same as those detected by the Australian and
Chinese search planes, but the Chinese photograph could depict a
cluster of smaller objects, said a military officer from one of the
26 nations involved in the search.
The wing of a Boeing 777-200ER is approximately 27 meters long and
14 meters wide at its base, according to estimates derived from
publicly available scale drawings. Its fuselage is 63.7 meters long
by 6.2 meters wide.
NASA said it would use high-resolution cameras aboard satellites and
the International Space Station to look for possible crash sites in
the Indian Ocean. The U.S. space agency is also examining archived
images collected by instruments on its Terra and Aqua environmental
satellites.
Investigators believe someone on the flight shut off the plane's
communications systems. Partial military radar tracking showed it
turning west and re-crossing the Malay Peninsula, apparently under
the control of a skilled pilot.
That has led them to focus on hijacking or sabotage, but
investigators have not ruled out technical problems. Faint
electronic "pings" detected by a commercial satellite suggested it
flew for another six hours or so, but could do no better than place
its final signal on one of two vast arcs north and south.
While the southern arc is now the main focus of the search, Malaysia
says efforts will continue in both corridors until confirmed debris
is found.
(Additional reporting by Irene Klotz in New York, Megha Rajagopalan
in Beijing, Michael Martina, A.Ananthalakshmi and Siva Govindasamy
in Kuala Lumpur; writing by Stuart Grudgings; editing by Nick Macfie)
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