Poor visibility hampers search
Print Edition
AN air search in the southern Indian Ocean for possible objects from the missing Malaysia Airlines plane described as the “best lead” so far ended for the day without success yesterday but will resume this morning, Australian rescue officials said.
Four military planes had been checking to see if two large objects spotted in satellite imagery bobbing in the remote ocean were debris from the plane that disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board.
One of the objects was 24 meters long and the other was 5 meters.
There could be other objects in the area, which is a four-hour flight from Australia’s southwestern coast, said John Young, general 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.
Although 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.
The authority said the four planes had searched an area of 23,000 square kilometers about 2,500 kilometers southwest of Perth and about halfway between Australia and islands off the Antarctic.
Young said satellite images “do not always turn out to be related to the search even if they look good, so we will hold our views on that until they are sighted close-up.”
News that possible plane parts had been found marked a new phase in the emotional roller coaster for distraught relatives of the passengers.
While they still hope their loved ones will be found, they acknowledged news of the find could mean the plane plunged into the ocean.
“If it turns out that it is truly MH370 then we will accept that fate,” said Selamat Bin Omar, the father of a Malaysian passenger on the jet, which carried mostly Chinese and Malaysian nationals.
But he said relatives still “do not yet know for sure whether this is indeed MH370 or something else. Therefore we are still waiting for further notice from the Australian government.”
Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a news conference that “for all the families around the world, the one piece of information that they want most is the information we just don’t have — the location of MH370.”
Young said visibility yesterday was poor and hampered efforts to find the objects.
He said they “are relatively indistinct on the imagery ... but those who are experts indicate they are credible sightings. The indication to me is of objects that are a reasonable size and probably awash with water, moving up and down over the surface.”
Military planes from Australia, the US and New Zealand have been searching in a region over the southern Indian Ocean that was narrowed down from 600,000 square kilometers to 305,000 square kilometers.
Young said the depth of the ocean in the area, which is south from where the search had been focused since Monday, is several thousand meters. He said commercial satellites had been redirected in the hope of getting higher resolution images. The current images are not sharp enough to determine any markings.
Some analysts said the debris is most likely not pieces of the plane. “The chances of it being debris from the airplane are probably small, and the chances of it being debris from other shipping are probably large,” said Jason Middleton, an aviation professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
Meanwhile, Malaysian authorities said there was no new information on efforts to recover files deleted from the home flight simulator of the missing plane’s pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah.
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