‘Extraordinary riddle’ of lost jet now two weeks old
International searchers have no success finding clues or debris
PERTH, Austra lia — It’s been two full weeks now. There’ve been sightings of large objects in an infinitely larger ocean of debris that may have come from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. And there’s been an international search effort. But the searchers have come back emptyhanded and the sightings have been disappointing.
It’s an “extraordinary riddle,” Australian officials said Friday as they promised their best efforts in the search of the desolate southern Indian Ocean, where aircraft and ships from China searched on Friday.
A satellite spotted two large objects in the area this week, raising hopes of finding the Boeing 777 that disappeared March 8 with 239 people on board. Surveillance planes scoured the region — about 2,500 kilometres southwest of Perth — for a second day on Friday but returned after a 10-hour mission.
Australian officials pledged to continue the effort. even as they tried to tamp down expectations.
“It’s about the most inaccessible spot that you could imagine on the face of the Earth, but if there is anything down there, we will find it,” Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said in Papua New Guinea.
“We owe it to the families and the friends and the loved ones of the almost 240 people on Flight 370 to do everything we can to try to resolve what is as yet an extraordinary riddle,” he added.
Two Chinese aircraft are expected to arrive in Perth on Saturday to join the search, and two Japanese aircraft will arrive Sunday. A small flotilla of ships from China is still several days away.
Abbott spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping, describing him as “devastated.” The passengers included 154 Chinese.
In Kuala Lumpur, where the plane took off for Beijing, Malaysian Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein thanked the more than two dozen countries involved in the overall search that stretches from Kazakhstan in Central Asia to the southern Indian Ocean. He called the whole process “a long haul.”
The search area indicated by the satellite images in the southern Indian Ocean is a four-hour round-trip flight from western Australia, leaving planes with only enough fuel to search for about two hours. The images were taken March 16, but the search in the area did not start until Thursday because it took time to analyze them.
Five planes, including three P-3 Orions, made the trip Friday. While search conditions had improved from a day earlier, with much better visibility, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said there were no sightings of plane debris.
Searchers relied mostly on trained spotters aboard the planes rather than radar, which found nothing Thursday, Australian officials said. The search will focus more on visual sightings because civilian aircraft are being brought in. The military planes will continue to use both radar and spotters.
“Noting that we got no radar detections yesterday, we have replanned the search to be visual. So aircraft flying relatively low, very highly skilled and trained observers looking out of the aircraft windows and looking to see objects,” said John Young, manager of the maritime safety authority’s emergency response division.
Malaysia asked the U.S. for undersea surveillance equipment to help in the search, said Rear Adm. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman. Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel promised to assess the availability of the technology and its usefulness in the search, Kirby said.