Australia spots objects possibly tied to Malaysia jet; U.S. expands role in search
Australia spots objects possibly tied to Malaysia jet; U.S. expands role in search
(about 2 hours later)
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Australia’s prime minister said Thursday that objects related to a missing Malaysia Airlines passenger jet have been possibly spotted in the southern Indian Ocean as a U.S. Navy plane that can search under water was shifted to remote waters 1,800 miles west of that country.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Australia’s prime minister said Thursday that two objects that may be related to a missing Malaysia Airlines passenger jet have been spotted in the southern Indian Ocean.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott told the Australian Parliament in Canberra that the objects were spotted on satellite imagery, in what could be a potential break in the 13-day search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. An Australian air force surveillance plane has been diverted to that area in an attempt to locate the objects, the Associated Press reported.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott told the Australian Parliament in Canberra that “new and credible information has come to light” on the search for Malaysia Airlines flight 370, with images of two objects gleaned from satellite imagery.
Abbott said that “new and credible information has come to light” in relation to the search for the plane in the southern Indian Ocean and after specialist analysis of satellite imagery, “two possible objects related to the search have been identified.”
“The task of locating these objects will be extremely difficult and it may turn out they are not related to the search for MH370,” he cautioned.
But the prime minister added: “The task of locating these objects will be extremely difficult and it may turn out they are not related to the search for MH370.”
Australia’s maritime security agency said one Australian and one American surveillance planes had already arrived in the area where the objects were spotted, with two more planes expected to reach the area later in the early evening.
Meanwhile the FBI stepped in to retrieve files deleted from a pilot’s flight simulator Wednesday, as the U.S. role expanded in the effort to find the plane.
“Poor visibility has been reported, and this will hamper the search and recovery effort,” John Young of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority told a news conference in Canberra.
The focus of a search that covers 2.24 million square miles of ocean turned to an empty expanse far off the Australian coast, based on a projection provided by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, which dispatched a team to Kuala Lumpur 48 hours after the plane’s March 8 disappearance.
One object was roughly 80 feet long, while there was another smaller object, and “a number of other images in the general area of the biggest one,” he said.
“The sheer size of the search area poses a huge challenge,” said John Young of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority. He said it covered more than 372,000 square miles of the southern Indian Ocean and would take “at least a few weeks to search the area thoroughly.’’
“The indication to me is of objects that are a reasonable size and probably awash with water, bobbing up and down on the surface,” he said.
President Obama, in his first comments on the disappearance of the plane, said the United States will continue to work in close cooperation with the Malaysian government. “We have put every resource that we have available at the disposal of the search process,” he told the Dallas-Fort Worth television station KDFW on Wednesday.
But he described the satellite images as “indistinct,” and warned that other maritime searches had yielded false leads in the past.
Malaysian investigators worked to recover data erased from a flight simulator that the plane’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, used in his home. A U.S. law enforcement official said the FBI had been asked to provide technical help in examining the flight simulator.
Nevertheless, Air Commodore John McGarry, director general of Australia’s military strategic commitments, said all available resources in the search effort were being relocated to the area.
Malaysian authorities have emphasized that both Zaharie and the co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, should be considered innocent unless proven otherwise. Police visits to their homes have caused suspicion that one or both of them might have had a hand in the plane’s disappearance.
“Quite simply, it is credible enough to divert the search to the area, on the basis that it provides a promising lead that might lead to a debris field,” he said.
Shortly after the simulator was taken by police from the family home, it was discovered that some material had been deleted.
Malaysia’s Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said he had been informed of the sightings and expressed hope they would prove to have been from the plane.
Forensic experts want to recover that information to determine whether it has any relevance to the investigation. FBI specialists often can retrieve data from computers that has been damaged or erased.
“As I’ve been doing from day one, I’ve followed every single lead,” he told reporters, according to the Associated Press. “And this time, I just hope it is positive.”
“The goal is to find any indication that the flight simulator had been used to reproduce flight conditions or circumstances that are now the subject of potential theories,” said Weysan Dunn, a retired senior FBI agent who has dealt with many sophisticated cyber-investigations.
Australian officials said a nearby merchant ship had been sent to the area, while an Australian warship was also on its way, but could take several days to arrive.
People familiar with flight simulators said it was common practice to erase data.
Adding to the credibility of the sighting, the objects were found within a search area, roughly amounting to 230,000 square miles, that Australia had identified in collaboration with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.
The disclosure about deleted data underscores the delicate job facing Malaysian authorities, who have selectively disclosed details of their investigation to a public hungry for any hint of guilt or innocence.
After being given a huge area of the southern Indian Ocean to search by the Malaysian authorities, Australia and the NTSB had narrowed that search area dramatically earlier this week, after analyzing satellite data collected from the plane, and making certain assumptions about its likely speed.
Frustration over the trickle of information boiled over Wednesday when relatives of Chinese passengers on the missing plane burst into the news media auditorium in the Malaysian capital, wailing with grief and anger, and unfurled a banner demanding that the government “tell the truth.”
The objects were found in a remote area of ocean around 1,550 miles southwest of the Australian western coast city of Perth.
Investigators have not publicly suggested that either Zaharie or Fariq had a motive or mind-set to sabotage a plane with227 passengers and 12 crew members aboard. But they have said that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 was almost surely diverted by somebody with aviation experience.
Young said it was not unusual to find debris in the ocean, including containers from ships, for example, that had fallen overboard, but said these images were “probably the best lead we have.”
Scrutiny has fallen on Zaharie and Fariq amid reports that the plane’s westward turn from Beijing, the intended destination, was programmed into the flight computer even while other communications systems remained working and before the co-pilot’s last radio contact with the ground.
“The objects are relatively indistinct on the imagery,” he said. “I don’t profess to be an expert. Those who are experts indicate they’re credible sightings.”
The change in direction was entered into the system before the final burst of automatic data sent from the plane via satellite at 1:07 a.m. and several minutes before Fariq said “good night” to Malaysian air-traffic control. Two minutes after that, the plane’s transponder went dark and the airliner disappeared from civilian radar.
But he emphasized that it was too early to draw any conclusions from the images, and it could take considerable time to even relocate the objects.
The sequence of events seemed to indicate that the westward turn was not a spur-of-the-moment decision, but some experts said that path could have been pre-programmed as an alternative in case of emergency.
“The weather is not playing the game for us. We may get a sighting, we may not,” he added. “But we’ll continue to do this until we find the objects, or we are convinced that we cannot.”
Determining what happened in the plane’s cockpit in the 40 minutes between its takeoff and disappearance is crucial for investigators as they try to narrow a continent-sized search field and ease the grief of despondent relatives.
The Malaysia Airlines plane vanished in the early hours of March 8 in what has become one of the biggest aviation mysteries in history. Investigators believe it was deliberately flown off course.
It’s possible that Zaharie or Fariq, separately or together, cut off the plane’s multiple communications systems and steered it away from Beijing. It’s also possible that one or both were acting under duress. Officials in Malaysia also have not ruled out mechanical failure, although they say it’s unlikely.
A U.S. Navy’s P-8 Poseidon aircraft should already be on the scene, along with an Australian Orion. Another Australian Orion and a New Zealand Orion were expected there later in the day, Young said.
The hunt for the missing Boeing 777 now involves 26 countries looking across a vast section of the Indian Ocean and huge tracts of central and southeastern Asia. That search area is split into curving northern and southern corridors — the best guess where the plane might have ended up.
An Australian C-130 Hercules will also drop marker buoys in the area so that searchers can model the drift of water, to keep track of where the objects might go.
Investigators now believe that the missing plane most likely flew far into the southern corridor, over the remote waters of the Indian Ocean west of Australia, the Reuters news agency reported Wednesday, citing a source close to the investigation.
The U.S. Poseidon plane can stay aloft for up to nine hours and can drop and monitor sonar buoys that listen for sounds beneath the ocean surface. Even if the plane crashed into the sea, its emergency beacon will send audible signals for about a month before the battery dies.
The view is based on the lack of any evidence from countries along the northern corridor that the plane crossed their airspace and the failure to find any trace of wreckage in searches in the northern part of the southern corridor.
The Navy sent a P-8 Poseidon aircraft that had been searching off India in the Bay of Bengal to aid in the effort west of Australia. The plane can stay aloft for up to nine hours and can drop and monitor buoys that listen for sounds beneath the ocean surface. Even if the plane crashed into the sea, its emergency beacon will send audible signals for about a month before the battery dies.
The protracted and painfully inconclusive investigation has taken its toll on the families of passengers on the missing Malaysia Airlines flight.
Chaos ensued in the Malaysian media center as the passengers’ relatives were surrounded by dozens of television camera operators, photographers and correspondents jostling for position in a narrow space at the back of the hall. A Malaysian government official appealed in vain for the relatives to leave before they were finally bundled out the door by police in an unseemly melee.
One woman collapsed to the floor and had to be virtually carried out as she cried, “Where are they? Where are they?”
After the family members were removed, only their banner was left behind on the floor. A government spokesman ordered it to be rolled up, saying it was not “appropriate.”
More than 150 Chinese were listed among the passengers aboard the missing plane. Some relatives, angry almost from the outset with the scant information, have been flown to Malaysia to wait for news, while most have elected to stay behind in China.
Many grieving families in Beijing are staying at the Lido Hotel, their lives spent watching television, talking to counselors and waiting for updates from Malaysian officials. Daily sessions with representatives from Malaysia Airlines often turn into shouting matches during which the airline officials explain again that they have no information.
The spirits of some relatives had perked up a bit last weekend when Malaysia seemed to raise the possibility of a hijacking, a scenario that would increase the odds of the passengers’ survival.
“That night, many finally got out for once and got a good night’s sleep,” said Lu Kaisheng, a volunteer from Shenzhen, who is part of group providing counseling for families at the hotel. “But since then, you can feel anger start to rise again.”
Halsey reported from Washington. Tim Craig in Islamabad, Pakistan; Annie Gowen in New Delhi; William Wan in Beijing; and Ernesto Londoño, Adam Goldman, Scott Higham and David Nakamura in Washington contributed to this report.
