#MalaysiaAirlines, #MH370, #PrayForMH370
'We Will Carry On': Day Three of Search for Flight 370 Debris
A fleet of planes and ships set out
Saturday on the third day of what has so far been a fruitless search
for two mysterious objects that might help explain what happened to
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Three
Australian air force P3 Orion aircraft, a New Zealand P3 Orion and two
ultra-long-range commercial jets began taking off at 9 a.m. (6 p.m. ET
Friday) to continue scouring a 22,300-square-mile area in the remotest
reaches of the southern Indian Ocean — a choppy and windy seascape about
1,400 miles southwest of the Australian coast.
Two merchant ships are
already in the vast search area, and they'll be joined later in the day
by an Australian navy ship, the HMAS Success, the Australian Maritime
Safety Authority said Saturday morning — all of them looking for two
"indistinct" objects that were spotted in satellite imagery this week
that might be related to the mysterious disappearance of the
Beijing-bound jetliner two weeks ago.
The objects still haven't been
found. Hishamuddin Hussein, Malaysia's acting transportation minister,
said the goal now is to narrow the search area to something more
manageable.
"This is going to be
a long haul, and the focus is to reduce the area of search and possible
rescue," Hishammuddin said late Friday at a news conference in Sepang.
The search has — temporarily, at least — united nations across ideological and cultural borders.
U.S. jets flew over the area Thursday and Friday, and a U.S. P-8 will resume flying after a maintenance day Saturday,
the Pentagon said. When they do, they'll be flying alongside two
Chinese planes that are expected to arrive in Perth on Saturday and two
Japanese P-3 Orions scheduled to arrive Sunday.
Malaysia's handling of the
investigation into Flight 370's disappearance has strained relations
between it and China, and the differences between Washington and Beijing
are widely known. Meanwhile, Japan and China are fighting a diplomatic
war of words over disputed islands in the East China Sea.
The U.S. said it has already spent more than $2.5 million on its part of the search effort, and NASA said Friday that it was joining the team, telling NBC News that "plans are underway" to target NASA satellites at the Indian Ocean search area.
The cooperative effort should help lessen the extreme difficulty of the
search in what Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has called one of
the most inhospitable locations on Earth.
Radar has been mostly useless, the Australian maritime agency said, so now the teams are relying on human spotters.
"We've
got no radar detections," John Young, general manager of the agency's
emergency response division, said in a video statement.
"We
have re-planned the search to be visual, so aircraft are flying
relatively low with very highly skilled and trained observers looking
out of the aircraft windows and looking to see objects," Young said.
Flying Officer Benjamin Hepworth searches from a Royal Australian Air Force P3 Orion during a search mission Friday in the southern Indian Ocean. |
Ten State Emergency Service volunteers were aboard the long-range commercial jets dispatched Saturday, the agency said.
"We
are doing all that we can, devoting all the resources we can, and we
will not give up until all of the options have been exhausted," Warren
Truss, who is acting as Australia's prime minister while Abbott is out
of the country. told reporters.
Truss noted that the satellite images were five days old and said the objects could have sunk since then.
"It's
also certain that any debris or other material would have moved a
significant distance over that time, potentially hundreds of
kilometers," he said.
The
batteries of the jet's data-recording "black boxes" (which are actually
orange) are expected to exhaust themselves in a little more than two
weeks, but Hishamuddin, the Malaysian transportation chief, said the
search would continue as long as was necessary.
"We will carry on until MH370 is found," he promised.
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