High winds and icy weather halted the air search yesterday for a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet presumed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, just as new satellite images emerged showing what could be a large debris field from the plane.
The latest possible sightings of wreckage from Flight MH370, which went missing 19 days ago, were captured by Thai and Japanese satellites in roughly the same remote expanse of sea as earlier images reported by France, Australia and China.
“We detected floating objects, perhaps more than 300,” Anond Snidvongs, the head of Thailand’s space technology development agency, told Reuters. “We have never said that the pieces are part of MH370 but have so far identified them only as floating objects.”
Thai satellite spots 300 objects floating in ocean
A Japanese satellite also captured images of 10 objects which could be part of the plane, Kyodo news agency quoted the government as saying yesterday.
An international search team of 11 military and civilian aircraft and five ships had been heading for an area where more than 100 objects that could be from the Boeing 777 had been identified by French satellite pictures earlier this week, but severe weather forced the planes to turn back.
“The forecast in the area was calling for severe icing, severe turbulence and near-zero visibility,” said Lieutenant Commander Adam Schantz, the officer in charge of the US Navy Poseidon P8 maritime surveillance aircraft detachment.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is coordinating the effort, confirmed flights had been called off but said ships continued to search despite battering waves.
“It’s the nature of search and rescue. It’s a fickle beast,” Flying Officer Peter Moore, the captain of an Australian AP-3C Orion, told Reuters aboard the plane after it turned around 600 miles from the search zone.
“This is incredibly important to us. The reality is we have 239 people whose families want some information and closure.”
The Malaysian airliner, on a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, is thought to have crashed with the loss of all 239 people aboard after flying thousands of miles off course.
The objects spotted by the Thai satellite were between 2 metres and 16 metres in size and were in an area around 2,700 km southwest of Perth, Snidvongs said.
The pictures were taken on Monday, a day after a satellite operated by France-based Airbus Defence & Space spotted 122 potential objects in a 400 square kilometre-area of ocean around 2,500 km southwest of the Western Australian city.
The pictures by the Japanese satellite showed debris about 2,500 km southwest of Perth, the biggest measuring four by eight metres.
MH370 vanished from civilian radar screens less than an hour after take-off and investigators believe someone on board may have shut off the plane’s communications systems.