AN Australian aircraft has spotted four orange-coloured objects in the ocean off Western Australia as the search intensifies for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370.
The four objects were more than two metres in size and sighted by the crew of an Australian P3 Orion search plane, said the pilot, Flight Lt Russell Adams, after returning to base.
“I must stress that we can’t confirm the origin of these objects,’’ he said, adding that images of the items have yet to be verified, and a GPS buoy was dropped and ships must still investigate.
Flt Lt Adams said it was “the most visibility we had of any objects in the water and gave us the most promising leads.’’
The sightings are just the latest in a number of leads that have so far produced no confirmed debris from the Boeing 777, which went missing on March 8 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard, including six Australians.
The search for clues will go more hi-tech today when an Australian navy vessel heads out into the Indian Ocean from Perth with special equipment able to detect signals from the black box flight recorders on the missing flight.
HUNT: Goes hi-tech
The Ocean Shield was due within the Indian Ocean search zone early today to join an international array of ships and aircraft scouring the seas for any sign of the lost plane.
The specialist US Navy technology on board the Ocean Shield will not be able to detect the “pinger’’ within the plane’s flight recorders until a more confined search area is identified.
It had been feared the 30-day life of the black boxes could expire before the equipment arrives.
But Captain Mark Matthews, the US Navy supervisor of salvage and diving, says the recorders are certified for 30 days but could last up to 15 days longer than that.
Australian Navy Commodore Peter Leavy said the focus was still to find debris and confirm it was from flight MH370, then work backwards to a possible crash site.
“The search area remains vast and this equipment can only be effectively employed when there is a high probability that the final location of Flight MH370 is better known,’’ he said.
The Ocean Shield is also carrying an unmanned submersible vehicle which can be used to sonar map and photograph debris on the sea floor if the black box signal is located.
Although a number of satellite cameras and aircraft crews have spotted objects in the water, no confirmed debris from the Boeing 777 has been picked up by surface vessels.
Officials yesterday said the first debris picked up by ships combing an updated search area about 1850km west of Perth was not from the stricken plane.
“It appeared to be fishing equipment and just rubbish on the (ocean’s) surface,’’ said a spokesman for the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is in charge of the operation.
For a full week, searchers relied on satellite imagery from various countries as they tried to find the plane in a zone to the south of the current area. They abruptly shifted the site on Friday after authorities concluded the plane could not have travelled as far as they had thought based on its estimated speed and fuel consumption.
The search area is so big that investigators are first hoping to find floating debris so they could set a smaller zone using sophisticated analysis to determine a location from where the pieces drifted. Even if they do that, recovering the flight recorders could be complicated.
Despite the huge area, one advantage is the seabed of the search zone is generally flat, with the exception of a steep slope and a deep trench near its southern end.
The area is dominated by a muddy ocean floor known as Broken Ridge, which is actually a plateau where depths range from as shallow as about 800 metres to about 3000 metres.
At the edge of the plateau closest to Antarctica is the Diamantina trench, which has been found to be as deep as 5800 metres within the confines of the search zone, although it could be deeper in places that have not been measured.
Captain Matthews said the Navy’s ping locator has the “capability to do search-and-recovery operations down to a depth of 20,000 feet.’’
Information on the flight data and cockpit voice recorders may help investigators resolve what happened on Flight 370. Speculation includes equipment failure, a botched hijacking, terrorism or an act by one of the pilots.
AAP/AP
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