SYDNEY, Australia - The Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, said on Thursday that satellite imagery had detected floating objects in the southern Indian Ocean that might be parts of the missing Malaysia Airlines jet that vanished on March 8. But he and an Australian rescue organizer both counseled caution about the sighting.
'The Australian Maritime Safety Authority has received information based on satellite information of objects possibly related to the search,' Mr. Abbott told Australia's Parliament in Canberra, the national capital. 'Following specialist analysis of this satellite imagery, two possible objects related to the search have been identified.'
Mr. Abbott said an Australian Air Force Orion surveillance plane would fly to the area off the coast of Western Australia and arrive later Thursday. Three more aircraft would follow, he said. Mr. Abbott said he had told Malaysia's prime minister, Najib Razak, of the developments.
Yet Mr. Abbott also cautioned that 'we must keep in mind the task of locating these objects will be extremely difficult, and it may turn out that they are not related to the search' for Flight 370 and its 239 passengers and crew, whose routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing disappeared, sparking a search lasting nearly two weeks that has brought almost daily reports of apparent sightings that have later been discredited.
Position of satellite that received last known signal from plane.
Red line represents possible positions of the plane when it transmitted its last signal to the satellite.
Satellite photos located floating objects near Australia's search areas. The largest object is about 79 feet.
Planned search
area for March 20
French Southern
and Antarctic Lands
Satellite photos located floating objects near Australia's search areas. The largest object is about 79 feet.
Planned search
area for March 20
John Young, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority's emergency response division general manager, who is overseeing the ocean search off Australia, sought to calibrate any hopes that parts of the plane might have been found. One object, he said, appeared to be around 24 meters long, but he could not describe the shape of the object, nor whether it had markings on it that would identify it.
'On this occasion, the size and the fact there are a number located in the same area makes it worth looking at,' Mr. Young said at a news conference in Canberra, adding that other search resources would be sent to the site.
'This is a lead, it is probably the best lead we have right now,' he said, 'They are credible sightings. The indications to me are of objects that are of reasonable size and awash with water.'
He said that part of the south Indian Ocean is liable to contain some large debris, such as containers lost overboard from merchant vessels. An Australian Air Force plane has been asked to drop marker buoys near the objects, which searchers can keep in sight to track the pieces as currents move them. Four other aircraft and several ships were rerouted to the area, Mr. Young said.
The area is four hours' flying time from Perth for the RAAF Orion P-3, which allows the surveillance aircraft to spend two hours of search time at the site. The Royal Australian Navy ship Success was en route to the area but was some days away. 'She is well equipped to recover any objects located and proven to be from MH370,' the maritime authority said in a statement.
A merchant ship that responded to a call to examine the objects was expected to arrive in the area around 6 p.m. Sydney time, Mr. Young said.
After Mr. Abbott made his statement in Parliament, Mr. Najib also issued a statement, saying that the two leaders had spoken about the sighting. But after nearly two weeks of almost daily hopes that brightened and then dimmed, Mr. Najib urged caution.
'Australian officials have yet to establish whether these objects are indeed related' to the missing plane, he said in the emailed statement.
An Australian official said the objects were about 2,500 kilometers, or 1,550 miles, southwest of Perth, the capital of Western Australia.
In an email to reporters, Cmdr. William J. Marks, the spokesman for the U.S. Navy Seventh Fleet, which has coordinated the U.S. military contribution to the search, said he had 'no information at this time about the Australian prime minister's announcement.' A U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon, a long-range aircraft used for surveillance and anti-submarine warfare, has been flying out from a base in Western Australia to scan the broad ocean area designated by search organizers.
On Wednesday, Commander Marks had said, 'If suspect debris were spotted, the aircraft would more than likely use the EO/IR camera at close range to identify exactly what was detected.' He was referring to a camera with electro-optical and infrared functions that can discern objects much more sharply than a naked human eye. The aircraft, he added, 'could provide the necessary information to lead salvage ships to the wreckage.'
As the possible break in what had been a fruitless search was being pursued, the Malaysian authorities were seeking help from the F.B.I. to help retrieve deleted computer data from a homemade flight simulator belonging to the captain of the Malaysia Airlines jet that vanished 11 days ago, their first request for high-level American assistance in solving the mystery of the missing plane.
Malaysian and American investigators are homing in on the pilot, Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, and his first officer, Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, though they have not excluded different possibilities.
'It's all focused on the pilots,' said a senior American law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing his access to information about the investigation. 'We, and they, have done everything we could on the passengers and haven't found a thing.'
The F.B.I. will relay the contents of the simulator's hard drive to agents and analysts in the United States who specialize in retrieving deleted computer files.
'Right now, it's the best chance we have of finding something,' the law enforcement official said. Unless the pilot used very sophisticated technology to erase files, he added, the F.B.I. will most likely be able to recover them.
Mar. 8, 2014 00:41 AMA Boeing 777-200 operated by Malaysia Airlines leaves Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing with 227 passengers, of which two-thirds are Chinese, and a Malaysian crew of 12.
Mar. 8, 2014 01:07 AM
The airplane's Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or Acars, which transmits data about the plane's performance, sends a transmission. It is not due to transmit again for a half-hour.
Mar. 8, 2014 01:19 AM
The cockpit crew acknowledges a message from ground control, saying, 'All right, good night.' The Malaysian authorities say the voice belonged to the co-pilot. No further voice messages are received from the plane.
Mar. 8, 2014 01:21 AM
Two minutes after the last voice transmission, the plane's transponder, which signals its identity, altitude and speed to other aircraft and to monitors on the ground, is shut off or fails.
Mar. 8, 2014 01:37 AM
The Acars system fails to send its scheduled signal, indicating that it has been shut off or has failed sometime in the past half-hour.
Mar. 8, 2014 02:15 AM
An unidentified plane flying westward is detected by military radar. It ascends to 45,000 feet, above the approved limit for a Boeing 777, then descends unevenly to 23,000 feet and eventually flies out over the Indian Ocean. Investigators later conclude that it was Flight 370. It was last plotted 200 miles northwest of Panang.
Mar. 8, 2014 06:30 AM
By now Flight 370 was scheduled to have landed in Beijing.
Mar. 8, 2014 07:24 AM
Malaysia Airlines announces that it has lost contact with the aircraft.
Mar. 8, 2014 08:11 AM
The last signal is received from an automated satellite system on the plane, suggesting that it was still intact and flying. The signal implies that the jet is somewhere in one of two areas, one stretching north between Laos and Kazakhstan and the other south from Indonesia into the Indian Ocean. The Malaysian authorities say it had enough fuel to keep flying for perhaps a half-hour after this.
Mar. 15, 2014 00:00 AM
The Malaysian authorities say the investigation has become a criminal matter because the jet appears to have been deliberately diverted. The plane's first turn off course, to the west, was executed using an onboard computer, probably programmed by someone with knowledge of aircraft systems. The authorities say two passengers were Iranians who boarded using stolen European passports, but no links to terrorist groups are found.
More than two dozen nations are searching for any trace of the missing airliner, a challenge that has seemed to grow more complicated and more contentious with each passing day.
As the geographic scope of the search has widened, Australia as well as China, India, France, the United States and other nations have offered naval ships, surveillance planes, satellites and experts to Malaysia, which is leading the effort. The investigators face a formidable set of mechanical, avionic and satellite communication puzzles.
Flight 370 was about 40 minutes into a six-hour trip to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, early on March 8 when it suddenly stopped communicating with air traffic controllers and turned far off course, cutting back across Peninsular Malaysia, over the Strait of Malacca and toward the Indian Ocean. Military radar tracked it for a while, but the operators did not seek to identify the plane or alert anyone. A satellite over the ocean picked up automated signals for several more hours - facts not released publicly for days after the plane vanished.
The satellite 'pings' led investigators to conclude that the plane had made its way to some point along one of two long, arcing corridors that together embrace 2.24 million square nautical miles of sea and land.
Investigators have said the plane's extraordinary diversion from its intended course was probably carried out by someone who had aviation experience. The Malaysian police, who found that Mr. Zaharie had built a flight simulator at his home, said Wednesday that some data had been erased from the simulator on Feb. 3, more than a month before the ill-fated flight.
Evidence suggests that whoever diverted the plane knew how to disable its communications systems and program course changes, and the data recorded in the pilot's flight simulator may shed light on whether he was involved. But building and using flight simulators at home is a popular hobby among aviation enthusiasts, and the deletion of data from Mr. Zaharie's simulator may have been routine housekeeping. Mr. Zaharie did not keep his simulator a secret: He posted a video on YouTube more than a year ago showing him sitting in front of it.
The computer search could reveal impulses or plans linked to the plane's disappearance. But the investigators could also conclude that Mr. Zaharie deleted files just as the average person does to clean out a computer.
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, March 19, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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