A Chinese plane hunting for wreckage of a missing Malaysian passenger jet spotted unidentified “objects” on Monday in an area of the southern Indian Ocean determined to be the most likely location for debris from flight MH370.
Ten aircraft are patrolling a 59,000-square-kilometre patch of sea between Australia and Antarctica.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority, coordinating the search, said the “reported objects are within today’s search area and attempts will be made to relocate them.” The search area is 2,500 kilometres south-west of Perth, where computer modelling showed the Boeing 777-200 would have gone down if it had continued flying southward until it ran out of fuel.
China’s Xinhua news agency, citing a reporter on board the Chinese Ilyushin-76, reported “two relatively big floating objects with many white smaller ones scattered within a radius of several kilometres.” It said the objects were “white and square” and that the coordinates had been given to the Chinese icebreaker Xue Long, which changed course to investigate.
Images and radar bounces from commercial, Chinese and most recently a French satellite have identified large floating objects but none had been visually sighted since on Thursday.
After early runs using radar failed to come up with anything, the search effort switched to human visual spotting from planes.
Several countries are participating in the labour-intensive search, including two Chinese military aircraft and planes from Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Japan.
Australian Transport Minister Warren Truss said the data from the French satellite indicated a location 850 kilometres north of the current search area.
“That’s not in the area that had been identified as the most likely place where the aircraft may have entered the sea,” Truss told national broadcaster ABC. “But having said all that we’ve got to check out all the options.
“We’re just, I guess, clutching at whatever little piece of information that comes along to try and find a place where we might be able to concentrate the efforts.”