Search for MH370 moves to new area

Ships, planes hunt tiny pieces of possible debris

SEARCHERS scoured a new area of the Indian Ocean for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 yesterday, hoping to salvage possible debris from the doomed jet after several hopeful sightings.

But Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the search teams faced a formidable task given the distances involved. “We should not underestimate the difficulty of this work. It is an extraordinarily remote location,” he told reporters.

Aircraft taking part in the multinational operation spotted “multiple objects” floating in the water on Friday after the focus of the search moved to a new zone on the strength of fresh data indicating the missing Boeing 777 had been flying faster than first thought when it disappeared on March 8.

Authorities stressed that the items sighted could not be verified as coming from MH370 until they were physically examined, and ships from China and Australia have been tasked with finding them.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority said a Chinese ship, the Haixun 1, began attempting to locate the objects at first light yesterday.

It was joined by a navy vessel, Jinggangshan, which carries two helicopters, China’s official state news agency Xinhua said.

Six ships were expected to be in place by the end of the day, including the Australian navy’s HMAS Success, to comb an area roughly the size of Norway.

The maritime safety authority has 11 military aircraft from Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and the US at its disposal for the search,

We should not underestimate the difficulty of this work

which is taking place far off Western Australia and about 1 100km northeast of where initial efforts were focused.

Yet the objects they are trying to find are tiny. New Zealand Air Vice-Marshal Kevin Short said items spotted from a New Zealand Orion search aircraft on Friday were mostly rectangular and between 50cm and 1m across.

The new search area was identified following an examination of radar data by experts from Boeing, who have joined an international investigation team in Kuala Lumpur.

If the aircraft had been travelling faster than previously thought, it would have used more fuel and would have crashed sooner.

The new search zone is closer to land, which means planes can spend more time searching before having to return to refuel, and enjoy better weather than seas further south, where the search had been concentrated.

The clock is ticking on the tracking signal emitted by the plane’s “black box” of flight data, which lasts about 30 days.

The US Pacific fleet has moved specialised black box locator equipment to Perth. Abbott said it would be deployed on an Australian navy ship once an approximate crash site had been established.

Malaysia continues to believe the plane was deliberately redirected by someone on board and flown thousands of kilometres southwards, but nothing else is known. More than two-thirds of the 239 people on board MH370 were Chinese. — AFP