#MalaysiaAirlines, #MH370, #PrayForMH370
China has new images showing object in southern Indian Ocean, Malaysia says
China has new satellite images showing a large object floating in the
southern Indian Ocean and will be sending ships to verify, the
Malaysian transport minister said Saturday.
The object is 22.5 meters
long and 13 meters wide (74 feet by 43 feet), Hishammuddin Hussein
announced. He told reporters he'd just gotten the information, and China
will release more details in the "coming hours."
China later said the satellite images showing the "suspected floating object" were captured four days ago, on March 18.
The floating object was about 77 miles from where earlier satellite images spotted floating debris.
The search for the
missing Malaysian jetliner expanded Saturday as various countries
dispatched additional aircraft and ships to scan the choppy waters of
the southern Indian Ocean.
A satellite image released by China shows an object in the southern Indian Ocean. |
At least six search flights were involved Saturday, including two private jets.
Though the two civilian jets did not have radar, their role was crucial, authorities said.
"It is more likely that a
pair of eyes are going to identify something floating in the ocean,"
Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said.
The first two planes to sweep the southern Indian Ocean on Saturday found no wreckage or debris, its pilots said.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished on March 8 with 239 people aboard destined for Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.
Intensified, expanded search
The search area expanded by 50% on Saturday.
"Operations continue,
and today they plan to search an area of approximately 10,500 square
nautical miles," Hishammuddin said Saturday.
In addition to two
Chinese planes that arrived in Australia, Beijing is sending two more
ships to join five already in the southern corridor.
"Two Indian aircraft, a P-8 Poseidon and a C-130 Hercules, arrived in Malaysia last night to assist with the search," he said.
Seven countries --
China, India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Laos, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan --
informed investigators that based on preliminary information, their
nations had no radar sightings of missing jetliner.
Clues, but no proof
An exhaustive search
covering 2.97 million square miles -- nearly the size of the continental
United States -- has yielded some clues, but no proof of where the
Boeing 777 is or what happened to it.
One of the most notable
leads revolved around two large objects detected by satellite a week ago
floating on waters over 1,400 miles off Australia's west coast.
"The fact that it's six
days ago that this imagery was captured does mean that clearly what
objects were there, are likely to have moved a significant different
distance as a result of currents and winds," Truss said.
"It's also possible that
they've just drifted to the bottom of the ocean bed, and the ocean in
this area is between 3 and 5 kilometers deep. So it's a very, very deep
part of the ocean, very remote. And all that makes it particularly
difficult."
Debris is a common sight in the waters in that part of the ocean, he said, and includes containers that fall off ships.
Australian Prime
Minister Tony Abbott on Friday defended the decision to announce the
find, saying Australia owes it to families of those missing "to give
them information as soon as it's to hand."
But he didn't make any promises.
"It could just be a container that has fallen off a ship," Abbott said during a visit to Papua New Guinea. "We just don't know."
Malaysia's interim
transportation minister tried to reset expectations for a quick
resolution to the mystery after the satellite discovery.
"This is going to be a long haul," Hishammuddin Hussein said.
Search intensifies
U.S. Defense Secretary
Chuck Hagel ordered the Navy and policy experts to look at the
availability and usefulness of U.S. military undersea technology to try
to find the plane's wreckage and its data recorders, a U.S. military
official said.
The United States, which
has had a P-8 aircraft working out of Perth, Australia, and Navy ships
involved in the search, has spent $2.5 million so far on the entire
effort, Pentagon spokesman Col. Steven Warren said Friday.
NASA Administrator
Charles Bolden said Friday that the U.S. space agency will mine its
existing satellite data and try to capture fresh images that might aid
in the search. Its satellites can detect objects as small as 30 feet (98
meters).
First lady Michelle
Obama, while on a trip to Beijing, said the United States is keeping the
families of the missing passengers in its thoughts.
"As my husband has said, (the) United States (is) offering as many resources as possible to assist in the search," she said.
Global search
Countries from central
Asia to Australia are also engaged in the search along an arc drawn by
authorities based on satellite pings received from the plane hours after
it vanished. One arc tracks the southern Indian Ocean zone that's the
focus of current attention.
"We intend to continue
the search until we are absolutely satisfied that further searching
would be futile, and that day is not in sight," the deputy prime
minister said. "We will continue the effort, we'll continue to liaise
with our international allies in this search."
The other tracks over parts of Cambodia, Laos, China and into Kazakhstan.
Malaysian authorities
were awaiting permission from Kazakhstan's government to use the country
as a staging area for the northern corridor search, Hishammuddin said.
Details emerge
Malaysia Airlines CEO
Ahmad Jauhari Yahya told reporters Saturday that a transcript obtained
by The Telegraph newspaper is "inaccurate," but did not provide
additional details.
The Telegraph reported
Friday it had a transcript documenting 54 minutes of back-and-forth
between the cockpit and ground control from taxiing in Kuala Lumpur to
the final message of "All right, good night."
Unexplained element
The alleged transcript
reported by the Telegraph contains seemingly routine conversations about
which runway to use and what altitude to fly at.
One unexplained element,
according to the British newspaper, is a call, in which someone in the
cockpit stated that the aircraft was at a cruising altitude of 35,000
feet -- something that had been done just six minutes earlier. Twelve
minutes after that comes the "good night" message, at around the time
Flight 370 was being transferred to Vietnam's control.
Another wrinkle:
Malaysia Airlines chief executive officer Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said the
plane was carrying a cargo of lithium-ion batteries, although he didn't
specify the volume of the shipment.
Lithium-ion batteries are commonly used in laptops and cell phones, and have been known to explode, although that occurs rarely.
They were implicated in
the fatal crash of a UPS cargo plane in Dubai in 2010, and lithium-ion
batteries used to power components on Boeing 787s were blamed for fires
in those planes.
There's no evidence the
batteries played a role in the plane's disappearance, and Ahmad said
they are routine cargo aboard aircraft.
"They are not declared dangerous goods" he said, adding that they were "some small batteries, not big batteries."
Malaysian authorities
say they believe the missing plane was deliberately flown off course on
its scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
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