Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Update: Australia Checking Two Objects Found in Water

March 20,2014

 

 

 

 

Australian authorities announced they may have had a breakthrough in the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Thursday when a pair of foreign objects showed up in satellite imagery just west of Australia.
Four search planes were sent to the area to check for signs of debris, but nothing was found during the initial search, according to the Associated Press. Only three of those four planes continued to search after that, with the fourth citing wind and rain as hindrances to the search.
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One of the objects spotted by satellite imagery was 24 meters (almost 80 feet) in length and the other was 5 meters (15 feet). There could be other objects in the area, a four-hour flight from Australia's southwestern coast, 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.
Military planes from Australia, the U.S. and New Zealand have been searching in a region over the southern Indian Ocean that was narrowed down from 600,000 square kilometers (232,000 square miles) to 305,000 square kilometers (117,000 square miles).
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Young said the depth of the ocean in the latest area, which is south from where the search had been focused since Monday, is several thousand meters (yards). He said commercial satellites had been redirected in the hope of getting higher resolution images. He did not say when that would happen. The current images are not sharp enough to determine any markings.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority released two images of the whitish objects floating on or just under the surface. The images were taken March 16, but Australian Air Commodore John McGarry said it took time to analyze them.
"The task of analyzing imagery is quite difficult, it requires drawing down frames and going through frame by frame. The moment this imagery was discovered to reveal a possible object that might indicate a debris field, we have passed the information from defense across to AMSA for their action," he said.
It has been 12 days since the jet, carrying 239 passengers and crew, departed from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and vanished shortly after.
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report

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A woman reads messages for passengers aboard a missing Malaysia Airlines plane at a shopping mall in Petaling Jaya, near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Tuesday, March 18, 2014. (AP Photo/Lai Seng Sin)