Last updated 23:06 24/03/2014
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SEARCH: The Indian Ocean part of the search operations has been going for four days
An Australian navy vessel and Australian, US and Japanese aircraft are scrambling to assist in the location and recovery of two new objects that may hold clues to the fate of the missing Malaysian airlines flight off the south-west coast of Perth.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott told the Australian parliament on Monday night that a RAAF P-3 Orion aircraft had located two new objects at about 2.45pm local time on Monday.
Abbott said the Australian Maritime Safety Authority had advised him the Orion crew had seen a grey or green circular object as well as an orange rectangular object, both of which are separate to the objects spotted by a Chinese aircraft, in the Indian Ocean.
Abbott said he did not know if the objects were from the Malaysian Airlines MH370 flight, but recovery efforts continued.
HMAS Success is on the scene and is trying to recover the objects, while a US navy Poseidon aircraft, as well as a second Australian Orion and a Japanese Orion aircraft were en route to the area.
"We don't know whether any of these objects are from MH370, they could be flotsam, nevertheless we are hopeful we can recover these objects and that will take us a step closer to resolving this tragic mystery,'' he said.
Malaysia’s Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said the vessel could reach them within a few hours or by Tuesday morning.
Abbott said the fate of the missing aircraft was an "extraordinary" and "baffling" mystery and added that Australia owed it to the people on board and their families to do "whatever we reasonably can to find anything that is out there, to see what we can learn about what is so far one of the great mysteries of our time.’’
Labor Leader Bill Shorten said that the people who had disappeared on the flight "could be any of us" and offered his support for the search efforts.
An Australian Air Force pilot was rushed off the tarmac for an urgent briefing after landing a P-3 Orion at RAAF Pearce in Perth just moments before Abbott made the announcement.
The pilot, whose identity has yet to be confirmed, was meant to give a brief statement to the media after landing as has been the routine at the air force base since it became the rallying point for the international air search efforts.
The objects identified by the RAAF P-3 Orion are different to the objects reported by the Chinese Ilyushin IL-76 to AMSA earlier today.
Earlier tonight, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority had tweeted that a US Navy aircraft did not manage to spot objects first seen by the crew of the Chinese search plane looking for flight MH370.
The Chinese crew had spotted "suspicious objects" floating in the southern Indian Ocean as they headed back to Perth from the search area, according to official news agency Xinhua.
However, a US Navy P8 Poseidon was unable to find it again, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority tweeted tonight.
The Chinese crew has reported the co-ordinates to the Australian command centre as well as Chinese icebreaker Xuelong, which is en route to the sea area. Reports indicate the floating objects include "white and rectangular" items.
The Chinese Air Force Ilyushin Il-76 plane took off on Monday morning from RAAF Base Pearce, in the first Chinese air search operation since two of its military aircraft arrived in Perth on Saturday.
At the request of the Australian air force, one Australian pilot was on board the Chinese plane to join the search, Xinhua reported.
The focus of the multinational search has shifted to the southern Indian Ocean after Australia said that satellite imagery identified suspicious debris that might be linked to the missing plane in waters some 2400 km from Perth.
China and France have since released further satellite imagery over the weekend showing suspicious objects in the same region which could be linked to the missing Malaysia Airlines flight.
It is understood a Xinhua reporter is abroad one of the two Chinese military aircraft searching a remote area of the ocean southwest of Perth.
At a regular news briefing on Monday, foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei said the Chinese government could not yet confirm whether the objects spotted by the military aircraft earlier in the day were connected with the missing Malaysia Airlines jet.
The Indian Ocean search is now in its fourth day.
The Royal New Zealand Air Force would re-join the search at first light tomorrow, flying officer Deborah Haines told Seven Sharp on Monday evening.
They were flying about 10-and-a-half to 11 hours each day, she said.
"We're confident that whatever area we search, if there's something, our aircraft will find it," she said.
"As a crew we just want to do the best we can to get to a conclusion."
WEATHER CHANGE
Rain was expected to hamper the search operation as a cyclone bears down on the area.
Australian Maritime Safety Authority's rescue coordination centre said the search area was expanded from 59,000 to 68,500 square kilometres including a new separate area because of data provided by France on Sunday.
"AMSA was advised about the reported objects sighted by a Chinese aircraft," AMSA said in a statement.
"The reported objects area within today's search area and attempts will be made to relocate them."
The US Pacific command said it was sending a black box locator to the region in case a debris field is located. The Towed Pinger Locator has highly sensitive listening capability so that if the wreck site is located, it can hear the black box pinger down to a depth of about 6100 metres, Commander Chris Budde, a US Seventh Fleet operations officer, said in a statement.
Flight 370 vanished March 8 with 239 people, including two New Zealanders, aboard while en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, setting off a multinational search that has turned up no confirmed pieces and nothing conclusive on what happened to the jet.
Malaysian authorities have not ruled out any possible explanation for what happened to the jet, but have said the evidence so far suggests it was deliberately turned back across Malaysia to the Strait of Malacca, with its communications systems disabled. They are unsure what happened next.
A source close to the search for MH370 told CNN that military radar picked up the plane changing altitude after it made a sharp turn just after losing all communications.
The unidentified source said the plane appeared to intentionally drop down to 12,000 feet at some point after making a turn over the South China Sea and toward the Strait of Malacca.
The turn would have taken the plane into a heavily trafficked air corridor and the jet's lower altitude would have kept it out of the way of any other flights in its path, the source told CNN.
The revelation adds another detail to the mystery of what happened in the cockpit of MH370.
ANALYSING DATA
The latest French satellite data came to light on Sunday as Australian authorities coordinating the search sent planes and a ship to try to locate a wooden pallet that appeared to be surrounded by straps of different lengths and colours.
The pallet was spotted on Saturday from a search plane, but the spotters were unable to take photos of it.
Wooden pallets are most commonly used by ships but are also used airplane cargo holds, and an official with Malaysia Airlines said Sunday night that the flight was, in fact, carrying wooden pallets. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with company policy.
AMSA said it has requested a cargo manifest from Malaysia Airlines.
In Paris, French Foreign Ministry spokesman Romain Nadal said in an interview with The Associated Press that the satellite radar echoes "identified some debris that could be from the Malaysian Airlines plane."
The spokesman said that these echoes "are not images with a definition like a photograph, but they do allow us to identify the nature of an object and to localize it."
"The French government has decided to increase its satellite monitoring of this zone and try to obtain precise images and locations," Nadal said.
Gathering satellite echo data involves sending a beam of energy to the Earth and then analysing it when it bounces back, according to Joseph Bermudez Jr, chief analytics officer at AllSource Analysis, a commercial satellite intelligence firm.
Satellite radar echoes can be converted into an image that would look similar to a black-and-white photo, though not as clear, he said. "You'd have to know what you're looking at," Bermudez said.
A Malaysian official involved in the search said the French data located objects about 930 kilometres north of the spots where the objects in the images released by Australia and China were located.
One of the objects located was estimated to be about the same size as an object captured on Tuesday by the Chinese satellite that appeared to be 22 metres by 13 metres, said the official, who declined to be identified because he wasn't authorized to speak to the media. It was not possible to determine precise dimensions from the French data, the official said.
- Fairfax and AP
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