Fresh clues in Malaysia Airlines plane search

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority said all planes heading for the search area in the southern Indian Ocean were returning to Perth and ships were also leaving.

Heavy rain, strong winds, low clouds and reduced visibility are expected in the search zone, about 1,550 miles south west of Perth.

Eleven planes and five ships were set to scour the area for Flight 370, which vanished early on March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard.

Nearly two thirds of the 239 people who died on the doomed Boeing 777 were from China and the first search plane in the air was a Chinese Ilyushin IL-76 aircraft.

Nineteen days into the mystery of Flight 370, the discovery of the objects that ranged in size from three to 75 feet offered “the most credible lead that we have”, a top Malaysian official said.

A search for the objects – seen by a French satellite – was unsuccessful, echoing the frustration of earlier sweeps that failed to zero in on three objects seen by satellites in recent days.

When the search resumed, Malaysia again sought to placate angry relatives of the flight’s 153 Chinese passengers. But defence minister Hishammuddin Hussein also expressed exasperation, pointedly saying Chinese families “must also understand that we in Malaysia also lost our loved ones” as did “so many other nations”.

The latest satellite images, captured on Sunday and relayed by French-based Airbus Defence and Space, are the first to suggest a debris field from the plane, rather than just isolated objects. The items were spotted in roughly the same area as other objects previously seen by Australian and Chinese satellites.

Mr Hishammuddin said some of them “appeared to be bright, possibly indicating solid materials”.

But experts warned that the area’s frequent high seas and bad weather and its distance from land complicated an already-trying search.

“This is a really rough piece of ocean which is going to be a terrific issue,” said Kerry Sieh, director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore. “I worry that people carrying out the rescue mission are going to get into trouble.”

The latest search was split into two areas totalling 30,000 square miles.

Planes and ships from the US, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand are involved in the hunt, hoping to find even a single piece of the jet that could offer tangible evidence of a crash and provide clues to the location of the wreckage.

Malaysia said on Monday that an analysis of the final known satellite signals from the plane showed that it had gone down in the sea with no survivors. That data greatly reduced the search zone to an area estimated at 622,000 square miles, about the size of Alaska.

“We’re throwing everything we have at this search,” Australian prime minister Tony Abbott said. “This is about the most inaccessible spot imaginable. It’s thousands of kilometres from anywhere.”

Malaysia has been criticised over its handling of one of the most perplexing mysteries in aviation history. Much of the most strident criticism has come from relatives of the Chinese passengers, some of whom expressed outrage that Malaysia essentially declared their loved ones dead without recovering a single piece of wreckage.

At a hotel banquet room in Beijing yesterday, a delegation of Malaysian government and airline officials explained what they knew to the relatives and were met with scepticism and even ridicule by some of the 100 people in the audience.

Relatives questioned how investigators could have concluded the direction and speed of the plane and one man later said he wanted to pummel everyone in the Malaysian delegation.

“We still have hope, but it is tiny, tiny,” said Ma Xuemei, whose niece was on the flight. “All the information has been confusing and unreliable.”

China dispatched a special envoy to Kuala Lumpur, vice foreign minister Zhang Yesui, who met prime minister Najib Razak.

Meanwhile, a US-based law firm filed court documents that often precede a lawsuit on behalf of a relative of an Indonesian-born passenger.

The filing in Chicago asked a judge to order Malaysia Airlines and Chicago-based Boeingto turn over documents related to the possibility that “negligence” caused the plane to crash, including any documentation about the chances of “fatal depressurisation” in the cockpit.

Though officials believe they know roughly where the plane is, they do not know why it disappeared shortly after take-off. Investigators have ruled out nothing - including mechanical or electrical failure, hijacking, sabotage, terrorism or issues related to the mental health of the pilots or someone else on board.

Finding the wreckage and the plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders is also a major challenge. It took two years to find the black box from Air France Flight 447, which went down in the Atlantic Ocean on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009, even though searchers knew within days where the crash site was.