Australia spots objects possibly tied to missing Malaysia Airlines plane
Possible airline debris spotted as Australia culls satellite images
(about 9 hours later)
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Australia’s prime minister said Thursday that two objects that may be pieces of a missing Malaysia Airlines passenger jet have been spotted in the southern Indian Ocean.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — The search for a missing Malaysia Airlines flight intensified Thursday in the remote waters of the southern Indian Ocean after a Colorado company discovered that its satellite had captured images of two whitish objects floating in the ocean.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott told the Australian Parliament in Canberra that “new and credible information has come to light” in the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, with images of two objects gleaned from satellite imagery.
The photos of what officials say may be airplane debris surfaced when DigitalGlobe reviewed grainy images that its commercial satellite had collected in the days after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared. That heightened scrutiny came when the United Nations called on an international consortium of space agencies and satellite companies to scan the oceans for clues to the whereabouts of the missing Boeing 777.
The images released Thursday showed grainy whitish fragments in the black-blue ocean, thousands of miles from the northern flight path the plane took March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew on board. The images were taken by a commercial satellite, according to Australian authorities, and date-stamped March 16.
Dozens of ships and aircraft have been dispatched to an area about 1,500 miles southwest of Perth, Australia. A Norwegian cargo vessel that was already in the vicinity arrived at the location and used its searchlights to scan the waters before dawn. Four military airplanes, including a U.S. surveillance aircraft, also searched the area amid poor visibility and were to resume their hunt at daybreak Friday.
The images were provided by a Colorado-based company, DigitalGlobe, that describes itself as a leading vendor of high-resolution satellite images, aerial photos and geospatial content.
The search has failed to find any other possible signs of the downed airplane, which vanished March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew on board. Locating those pieces in the 230,000-square-mile search area will be challenging, and if they are parts of the plane, finding the rest of it may be even more difficult.
Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said the images need to be assessed by experts, while Australian Air Commodore John McGarry said further information is being continuously collected as other satellites pass over the area.
“If they are plane parts, they are probably several hundred miles away by now from the impact site,” said Robert Benzon, who spent 27 years as a National Transportation Safety Board lead crash investigator. “Trying to trace back the currents to a specific location after all this time is going to be very, very difficult.”
The images taken by Digital Globe’s WorldView-2 satellite were taken Sunday. They show one object that is about 80 feet long and another one that measures 15 feet.
The satellite collects images that go beyond what the human eye can see from space, and the company sells them commercially and under contract with government agencies.
WorldView-2 was launched in 2009 on a polar orbit. As the satellite goes around the planet, pole to pole, every 100 minutes, the planet turns beneath it. Over the course of a day, the spacecraft will pass over most of the Earth’s surface.
“The search area expanded to the southern Indian Ocean region and waters near Australia only in the last few days, at which time the Australian government started combing through imagery of this extremely large area,” DigitalGlobe said in a statement. “No conclusions have been reached about the origins of the debris or objects shown in the imagery.”
The company said it took four days to comb through all the data before information could be released by the Australians. DigitalGlobe said its five satellites capture more than 1.1 million square miles of Earth images every day, too much material to review in real time without clues of where to look.
To help find Flight MH370, the United Nations activated the international consortium. The Space-based Information for Disaster Management and Emergency Response, known as UN-SPIDER, is a collection of space agencies and commercial satellite companies, including the one that spotted the objects off the coast of Australia.
Normally, UN-SPIDER is activated following floods, earthquakes, volcano eruptions and other natural disasters. This is the first time since UN-SPIDER was formed in 2012 that its members have been mobilized to find a missing airplane, according to the UN-SPIDER Web site.
Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said the images need to be assessed by experts. Australian Air Commodore John McGarry said further information is being continuously collected as other satellites pass over the area.
“The task of analyzing imagery is quite difficult; it requires drawing down frames and going through frame by frame,” McGarry said. “The moment this imagery was discovered to reveal a possible object that might indicate a debris field, we have passed the information” for action by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.
“The task of analyzing imagery is quite difficult; it requires drawing down frames and going through frame by frame,” McGarry said. “The moment this imagery was discovered to reveal a possible object that might indicate a debris field, we have passed the information” for action by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.
The AMSA said one Australian and one American surveillance plane had already arrived in the area where the objects were spotted, with two more planes expected to reach the area later. However, poor visibility was hampering the air and satellite effort, and nothing had been spotted by the planes by early evening.
Malaysian investigators have said it is likely that the plane was deliberately steered off its course toward Beijing by somebody, which has led to scrutiny of the plane’s pilot and co-pilot.
“The task of locating these objects will be extremely difficult, and it may turn out they are not related to the search for MH370,” Abbott cautioned in his comments to parliament.
The southern Indian Ocean would be a bewildering destination for a hijacker. It also seemed an unlikely destination for a pilot bent on suicide, as others have suggested.
Malaysian investigators continue to say the plane was likely deliberately steered off course by somebody, raising scrutiny of the plane’s pilot and co-pilot. The southern Indian Ocean would be a bewildering destination for a hijacker. But it could point to a senseless sabotageor a deadly event that left the plane running unpiloted. Authorities have not ruled out the possibility of mechanical failure.
But the suspicion that the plane flew into that remote area of the ocean renewed the possibility that it was operating on autopilot after the crew and passengers were incapacitated by a system failure, a fire or a hijacking gone awry, U.S. experts said. They said it is possible that the plane continued on autopilot for hours with its crew and passengers no longer alive.
Malaysian officials did not provide new information Thursday about their criminal investigation, which is looking at crew, passengers and ground employees who dealt with the plane before its departure.
Benzon, who has investigated crashes in Borneo, Afghanistan, Honduras, China, Russia and Scotland, said the a fire or depressurization might explain the plane’s abrupt deviation from its scheduled route.
John Young, general manager of the AMSA, said one object was roughly 80 feet long. There was another smaller object and “a number of other images in the general area of the biggest one,” he said.
“It seems like most of the world thinks that there’s something nefarious going on, and in the end it could very well be,” Benzon said, “but I haven’t heard a lot of conversation about a bona fide in-flight emergency that might have partially incapacitated the crew, and then the crew initiates this grand turn to the left to try to get back to land.”
The tail of a Boeing 777-200 is 60 feet high, the plane is 209 feet long, and the wing span is 199 feet.
Benzon, who has had a hand in every major crash investigation worldwide for more than two decades, pointed to two instances that he investigated in which planes that experienced depressurization flew until they ran out of fuel and then crashed.
“The indication to me is of objects that are a reasonable size and probably awash with water, bobbing up and down on the surface,” Young told a news conference in Canberra.
In 1999, professional golfer Payne Stewart took off from Florida aboard a Learjet bound for Dallas. When the crew failed to respond to radio calls, Air Force fighter jets went up to meet it and reported that the windshield was frosted, a sign of depressurization. The plane later ran out of fuel and crashed in South Dakota.
But he described the satellite images as “indistinct” and warned that other maritime searches had yielded false leads in the past.
Almost six years later, 121 people on a Cypriot airliner operated by Helios Airways suffered the same fate.
Nevertheless, McGarry, director general of Australia’s military strategic commitments, said all available resources in the search effort were being relocated to the area.
“The crew was trying to trouble-shoot a known pressurization problem and everybody passed out,” Benzon said. “The airplane went on its way on autopilot, ran out of gas and crashed outside of Athens.”
“Quite simply, it is credible enough to divert the research to the area, on the basis that it provides a promising lead to what might be wreckage from the debris field,” he said.
Investigators say that shortly after the Malaysia Air flight signed off with ground control, the plane soared to 45,000 feet, then swooped down and continued to fly for another seven hours. If depressurization occurred at 45,000 feet, the cockpit crew or any hijackers would have three to five seconds to put oxygen masks on before they became incapacitated.
Abbott called his Malaysian counterpart, Najib Razak, on Thursday to relay the news, Hishammuddin told a news conference in Kuala Lumpur.
Ron Carr, a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida who was an Air Force and airline pilot for 39 years, said it is possible that once taken off the Beijing course, the airplane flew to a designated waypoint and, absent further instruction, may have continued onward.
“We now have a credible lead. There remains much work to deploy these assets, and this work will continue overnight,” he said, adding: “It must be stressed that these sightings, while credible, remain to be confirmed.”
“Probably at that point it would fly the last heading that it was on,” he said.
Australian officials said a nearby merchant ship was sent to the area, while an Australian warship was also on its way but could take several days to arrive.
Benzon said the Helios flight had a pre-programmed flight plan that was activated when the crew and passengers lost consciousness.
AMSA, the Australian maritime group, later said on its Twitter feed that the first Australian plane was unable to locate the debris because of rain and limited visibility.
“So it climbed, it turned, it leveled off, and got to the last point on the flight plan,” he said. “Not knowing what to do next, it entered an orbit at its last waypoint and [circled until it] ran out of gas.”
Cmdr. William Marks, a spokesman for the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet, also said the U.S. plane had found nothing yet. “We have no indication of debris from the MH370 wreckage,” he wrote in an e-mailed statement.
Benzon said he had scrutinized the satellite images that officials say may show debris from Flight MH370.
Adding to the significance of the sighting, the objects were found “in the vicinity” of a search area, roughly amounting to 230,000 square miles, that Australia had identified in collaboration with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.
“They’re not very clear, but it seems to me that anything as large as they claim these two dots are has to be part of a wing,” he said.
Earlier this week, after analyzing satellite signals transmitted by the plane and making certain assumptions about its likely speed, Australia and the NTSB were able to dramatically narrow a huge search area that Malaysian authorities gave them in the southern Indian Ocean.
The tail of a Boeing 777-200 is 60 feet high; the plane is 209 feet long; and the wing span is 199 feet.
The objects were found in a remote area of ocean around 1,500 miles southwest of Perth on Australia’s western coast.
“The indication to me is of objects that are a reasonable size and probably awash with water, bobbing up and down on the surface,” John Young, general manager of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, said at a news conference in Canberra.
In Beijing, several families of passengers gathered at a hotel to watch the Australian news conference live.
William Wan in Beijing and Scott Higham, Joel Achenbach, Julie Tate and Alice Crites in Washington contributed to this report.
When they heard the news of debris southwest of Perth, many relatives were so upset that they left the room, not waiting to hear the rest of the news conference. A few were seen leaving the room in tears.
One younger woman coming out the briefing held her hands up to her chest and bent over as though about to throw up. An older woman rushed to her side to help her get up and back to her room.
With so little known about the fate of the plane, some relatives have held out hope that the jet could be intact, perhaps hijacked and diverted to a remote location.
A relative, who asked to speak anonymously, urged a reporter to tell Australian authorities to send ships with rescue equipment in addition to search vessels. The passengers, he insisted, could still somehow be alive, and he was not ready to give up hope.
Young said it was not unusual to find debris in the ocean, including containers from ships, for example, that had fallen overboard. But he said these images were “probably the best lead we have.”
“On this occasion, the size and the fact that there are a number of objects located in the same area really makes it worth looking at,” he said. “The objects are relatively indistinct on the imagery. I don’t profess to be an expert in assessing the imagery. Those who are experts indicate they’re credible sightings.”
But he emphasized that it was too early to draw any conclusions from the images, and it could take considerable time even to locate the objects again.
“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.”
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.
The objects spotted by Australia lie at the far southern end of a sweeping arc in which authorities estimated the plane might have made its last satellite transmission. If the objects prove to be from the plane, it will mean that MH370 took a route nearly opposite that of its intended flight path — rather than flying to Beijing, it cut west across Malaysia and then turned south toward the remoteness of the Indian Ocean. The plane likely would have cruised south until running out of fuel.
Even if the first pieces of the plane are found, answers may be slow to come. In the 2009 case of Air France Flight 447, the first evidence of a crash was spotted five days after the plane disappearance over the southern Atlantic Ocean. But searchers still needed two more years to locate the black box in a deep-sea trawl that cost tens of millions of dollars.
Young said the water in the area was several thousand yards deep, while Hishammuddin warned that even if the debris was found to be from the Malaysia Airlines plane, finding the wreckage would not be easy. He said he had talked on Thursday with French investigators involved in the effort to find the Air France plane.
“Conditions in the Indian Ocean are very similar to the Atlantic,” he said. “We are now going into the realm of trying to find the black box. Sonar technology, different assets will have to be deployed. We will address that when the time comes.”
Earlier potential sightings in the search, now in its 13th day, have proven to be false leads, including debris spotted by Vietnam and large objects discovered by Chinese satellites. In both of those cases, the objects were in waters much closer to Malaysia — in areas that officials here now say the plane was unlikely to have gone.
Around 26 countries have been involved in a search effort that has spanned vast tracts of central and southeast Asia, as well as huge swaths of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea.
Even as the search gathered pace in the southern Indian Ocean, Hishammuddin said it was continuing over land in Asia, from Vietnam and Laos through China to Kazakhstan. Over the sea, 25 aircraft from 10 countries, 18 ships from four countries and six ship-borne helicopters were involved, he said.
The search Thursday for the new debris involved a U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon plane, along with two Australian Orions and a New Zealand Orion.
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.
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.
William Wan in Beijing contributed to this report.
