By Chelsea J. Carter, Kyung Lah and
Mike Pearson, CNN
Perth, Australia (CNN) -- The search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 resumed Friday in the southern Indian Ocean with long-range reconnaissance aircraft looking for possible debris from the jetliner in one of the most remote locations on Earth.
Aircraft from Australia,
New Zealand and the United States have staggered departures to an area
roughly 1,500 miles southwest of Perth, where two objects were captured
on satellite and described as possible pieces of the commercial
jetliner, according to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.
Given the distance from
Australia to where the objects were spotted by a commercial satellite,
the aircraft will only have between two and three hours to traverse the
search area before having to start the return journey, the maritime
authority said.
Along with the aircraft, a
motley collection of merchant ships are heading to the search area,
where they will join a massive Norwegian cargo ship diverted to the area
Thursday at the request of Australia.
The sailors aboard the
Norwegian ship worked throughout the night looking for the objects, said
Erik Gierchsky, a spokesman for the Norwegian Shipowners Association.
"All men are on deck to continue the search," he told CNN. "They are using lights and binoculars."
Authorities were hoping
for better results after poor weather hindered Thursday's search for the
debris photographed Sunday by a commercial satellite.
Even before suspending the search Thursday night, authorities
cautioned the objects could be something other than plane wreckage,
such as shipping containers that had fallen off a passing vessel.
But they said they
represent the best lead so far in the search for the airliner that
vanished 13 days ago with 239 passengers and crew en route from
Malaysia's capital city of Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
"At least there is a
credible lead," Malaysia's interim Transportation Secretary Hishammuddin
Hussein told reporters. "That gives us hope. As long as there's hope,
we will continue."
Australian officials
first announced the news to the world in a briefing closely watched by
relatives of some of the missing at the Lido hotel in Beijing. They
gathered around a large-screen television to watch the Australian news
conference, leaning forward in their chairs, hanging on every word. Some
sighed loudly.
Wen Wancheng, 63, of Jinan, China, said he has not given up hope that his son is still alive.
"I firmly believe that my son, together with everyone on board, will all survive," he told CNN.
While Hishammuddin said
efforts are intensifying around the site of the Australian discovery, he
said the search will continue across the massive search zone until
authorities can give the families answers.
"For 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," he said.
The objects
Satellites captured
images of the objects about 14 miles (23 kilometers) from each other and
about 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) southwest of Australia's west
coast. The area is a remote, rarely traveled expanse of ocean far from
commercial shipping lanes.
The commercial satellite
images, taken Sunday, show two indistinct objects of "reasonable size,"
with the largest about 24 meters (79 feet) across, said John Young,
general manager of emergency response for the Australian maritime
agency.
They appear to be "awash with water and bobbing up and down," Young said.
The objects could be
from the plane, but they could be also something else -- like a shipping
container -- caught in swirling currents known for creating garbage
patches in the open ocean, he said.
"It is probably the best
lead we have right now," Young said. "But we need to get there, find
them, see them, assess them to know whether it's really meaningful or
not."
It took four days for
the images to reach the authority "due to the volume of imagery being
searched, and the detailed process of analysis that followed," the
agency said in a prepared statement.
The size of the objects
concerned David Gallo, one of the leaders of the search for Air France
Flight 447, which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.
"It's a big piece of
aircraft to have survived something like this," he said, adding that if
it is from the aircraft, it could be part of the tail.
The tail height of a Boeing 777, the model of the missing Malaysian plane, is 60 feet.
Mary Schiavo, a CNN
aviation analyst and former inspector general for the U.S. Department of
Transportation, said she believes Australian officials would not have
announced the find if they weren't fairly sure of what they had
discovered.
"There have been so many
false leads and so many starts and changes and then backtracking in the
investigation," she said. "He wouldn't have come forward and said if
they weren't fairly certain."
Although the overall
search area spans a huge expanse of 3 million square miles, U.S.
officials have been insistent in recent days that the aircraft is likely
to be found somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean.
Wide search continues
Until searchers make a
confirmed find of debris from the aircraft, the search and rescue
operation will continue throughout the search zone, Hishammuddin said.
Even as the focus
shifted to the southern Indian Ocean, Hishammuddin said Malaysia was
sending two aircraft to search Kazakhstan in central Asia. That's one of
the locations along a northern corridor described as a possible
location for the aircraft based on satellite pings sent by the plane
after air traffic controllers lost contact with it in the early hours of
March 8.
Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and China were searching their territories, Hishammuddin said.
India said Thursday it
is searching in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, sending four
warships and three aircraft to scour the region. That area is far north
of the region where Australian forces were leading the search for the
photographed objects, but in an area previously identified as a possible
crash site for the plane.
Meanwhile, 18 ships, 29
aircraft and six helicopters were taking part in the search in the
southern corridor, where search efforts were intensifying in the area
around the Australian satellite find.
Following the Australian
announcement, China said it had redirected some of its ships to the
southern Indian Ocean. The closest of the ships was 2,300 nautical miles
from the search area, Navy spokesman Liang Yang said in a statement on
the Chinese navy's website.
In addition to the
Australian and U.S. surveillance planes that flew over the area Thursday
afternoon, two other planes were being dispatched to the region,
including a New Zealand Air Force Orion and an Australian C-130
Hercules. That aircraft was tasked by Australian authorities to drop
marker buoys in the area, Young said.
"The first thing they
need to do is put eyes on the debris from one of the aircraft," said
aviation expert Bill Waddock. The buoys will mark the place and transmit
location data.
In addition to the
Norwegian vehicle carrier Höegh St. Petersburg, which arrived Thursday
afternoon, a second merchant ship and the Australian naval vessel HMAS
Success were steaming to the site. The Success was "some days away,"
Hishammuddin said.
The Malaysian navy has
six ships with three helicopters heading to the southern Indian Ocean to
take part in the search, a Malaysian government source said.
"Verification might take
some time. It is very far, and it will take some time to locate and
verify the objects," the source said.
Other angles
Although much attention
was focused on the ocean search, investigators continue to follow other
leads in the plane's disappearance.
Among the many theories
put forth since the plane's disappearance is that one or both of the
pilots were responsible in some way for the aircraft's disappearance,
especially in light of revelations that appear to show that a sharp,
unplanned turn in the flight path had been programmed into the plane's
flight management system before one of the pilots gave a routine
sign-off to Malaysian air traffic controllers.
On Thursday, a U.S.
official familiar with the investigation told CNN that an FBI team is
confident that it will be able to retrieve at least some files deleted
from the hard drive of a flight simulator owned by Flight 370 Capt.
Zaharie Ahmad Shah.
Investigators will also
analyze websites that Zaharie and co-pilot Fariq Ab Hamid may have
visited recently, the official said on the condition of anonymity.
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