Frustration in hunt for aircraft debris
Print Edition
A FRENCH satellite scanning the Indian Ocean for remnants of the missing Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 found a possible debris field containing 122 objects, a Malaysian official said yesterday, calling it “the most credible lead that we have.”
Eighteen days into the search for flight MH370, the latest satellite images are the first to suggest that a debris field from the plane — rather than just a few objects — may be floating in the southern Indian Ocean, though no wreckage has been confirmed.
Previously, an Australian satellite detected two large objects and a Chinese satellite detected one. All three finds were in roughly the same area, far southwest of Australia.
Clouds obscured the latest images, but dozens of objects could be seen in the gaps, ranging in length from 1 meter to 23 meters. At a news conference in Kuala Lumpur, Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said some “appeared to be bright, possibly indicating solid materials.”
The images were taken on Sunday and relayed by French-based Airbus Defence and Space. Its businesses include the operation of satellites and satellite communications.
The company said it has mobilized five observation satellites, including two that can produce very high resolution images, to help locate the plane.
Various floating objects have been spotted in the area by planes over the past week, including yesterday, when the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said three more objects were seen. The authority said two objects seen from a civil aircraft appeared to be rope, and that a New Zealand military plane spotted a blue object.
None of the objects was seen on a second pass, a frustration that has been repeated several times in the hunt for the aircraft which went missing on March 8 with 239 people on board.
It remains uncertain whether any of the objects seen came from the plane; they could have come from a cargo ship or something else.
The search resumed yesterday after fierce winds and high waves forced crews to take a break on Tuesday.
Twelve planes and five ships from the United States, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand are taking part in the search, hoping to find even a single piece of the jet that could offer tangible evidence of a crash and provide clues to find the rest of the wreckage.
Kerry Sieh, director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore, said the seafloor in the search area is relatively flat.
He believes any large pieces of the plane would likely stay put once they had sunk. But recovering any part of the plane would be tough because of ocean depths in the search area of up to 4,500 meters.
Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology warned that the weather was due to deteriorate again, with thunderstorms, low clouds and strong winds on the way.
The search for the wreckage and the plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders will be a major challenge. It took two years to find the black box from an Air France plane which went down in the Atlantic Ocean on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009, though searchers knew within days where that crash site was.
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