Aircraft and ships comb area after satellite images find
suspect items potentially related to missing Malaysia Airlines
plane.
A crew member of Chinese icebreaker Xuelong searches for missing Flight MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean. Photograph: Xinhua/Landov/Barcroft Media
A Chinese plane has spotted objects that could be connected to the missing Malaysia Airlines plane in an area that satellite pictures suggest may contain debris, state media reported, as the search continued into its third week.
Ten aircraft are combing a huge area of the southern Indian Ocean – with two Chinese military planes joining Australian, US, New Zealand and Japanese aircraft – in addition to several ships. The US is also dispatching a specialised device that can locate aircraft flight data and cockpit voice recorders.
China's official news agency Xinhua said a Chinese plane reported the co-ordinates of its sighting to the Australian command centre and the Chinese icebreaker Xuelong, or Snow Dragon, which has changed course and is heading towards the area. Six more Chinese ships are on their way to the wider search location, around 2,500km south-west of Perth.
Xinhua described the suspect items as two larger floating objects and some smaller, white debris scattered over several square kilometres.
The Chinese foreign ministry told a daily news briefing that it could not confirm the items were linked to MH370, which disappeared in the early hours of 8 March with 239 people – two-thirds of whom were Chinese – on board.
Analysis of satellite data placed the plane's last known position somewhere along two vast arcs from Kazakhstan down to the southern Indian Ocean, but the latter area has become the focus of the search.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority said attempts would be made to relocate the items spotted by the Chinese plane.
But forecasters warned that bad weather was threatening the search, with increased winds, low cloud and a reduction in visibility. A cold front is expected to move through the area on Tuesday, bringing rain, more low cloud and less visibility, although a tropical cyclone is thought to be too far north to affect the area.
On Sunday, a French satellite detected items potentially related to the flight, one of which appeared to be about the same size as an object captured earlier by a Chinese satellite, a Malaysian official said. But he noted that the French data placed the objects about 930km north of where Chinese and Australian images had seen items.
Australian authorities are still trying to locate a wooden pallet that was spotted on Saturday from a search plane. Pallets are often used in the cargo holds of aircrafts as well as on ships.
"It's a lot of water to look [at] for just perhaps a tiny object," Australia'sdeputy prime minister, Warren Truss, told Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio.
"Today we expect the weather to deteriorate and the forecast ahead is not that good, so it's going to be a challenge, but we will stick at it," he said.
He added: "We still don't even know for certain if the aircraft is in this area.
"We're just clutching at whatever little piece of information that comes along to try to find the place we can concentrate the efforts."
Nasa has said it will use high-resolution cameras on board satellites and the International Space Station to look for possible crash sites. It is also looking at archived images collected on its Terra and Aqua environmental satellites.
The US Pacific Command has said it is sending a black box locator to the area in case a debris field is found. The towed pinger locator is pulled behind a vessel at slow speeds and can hear the signals emitted by the electronic beacon on the flight data recorders to a depth of 6,100 metres (20,000ft).
Commander Chris Budde, a US Seventh Fleet operations officer, said in a statement: "This movement is simply a prudent effort to preposition equipment and trained personnel closer to the search area so that 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." The beacons usually emit signals for around 30 days.
Investigators have indicated that the Beijing-bound flight was deliberately diverted just as it prepared to leave Malaysian airspace, turning west and recrossing the Malay peninsula. Communications systems were disabled or stopped working at around the same time.
But they say they have not ruled out any possible cause of the Boeing-777's mysterious disappearance.
Tony Blinken, President Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser, told CNN: "There is no prevailing theory." He added: "Publicly or privately, we don't know … We're chasing down every theory."
Earlier on Monday, a Malaysia Airlines from Kuala Lumpur to Seoul had to divert to Hong Kong due to electrical problems, the carrier announced. It said that the generator on an Airbus A330-300 did not work but that an auxiliary power unit continued to supply power, allowing the flight to land and passengers to be transferred to other carriers.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com
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