KUALA LUMPUR, March 20 — Surveillance aircraft sent to the location of possible MH370 debris spotted by satellites are reporting poor visibility, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said today.

The conditions in the area could slow efforts to locate the debris — some as large as 24m — that was already “very difficult,” AMSA Emergency Response Division general manager John Young said in a press conference in Canberra today.

“The weather in the area is moderate, but visibility is poor, and could hamper search efforts,” Young said when stressing that the challenge to locate the items in waters that were several thousand metres deep.

An Australian Lockheed Orion P3 maritime surveillance plane was already on the site some 2,500km west of Perth, and had reported the limited visibility on site.

Although the items were “relatively indistinct”, Young said experts have decided that the sightings were credible and that the objects were of reasonable size.

If the surveillance aircraft found any objects, it would report back an accurate global positioning system (GPS) and AMSA would then take further action based on that information, he added.

“We have been in this business doing search and rescue and using satellite images they do not always turn out to be related to the search,” he repeatedly cautioned in response to a question from a reporter.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was headed to Beijing with 239 people when it lost contact with ground control shortly after take-off on the morning of March 8.

The wide-body Boeing 777 aircraft was at the time said to have disappeared from civilian radar at 1.30am when it was facing northeast to Vietnam, less than an hour after it left the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) at 12.41am.

At 7.24am that morning, one hour after MH370 was due to arrive at the Beijing airport and over six hours after last contact, MAS issued a press statement to confirm the plane’s disappearance.

Malaysia has now become the target of criticisms from the world over as the search for MH370 continues to wield no answers, irking the Chinese especially, who have 153 of their own on board the missing aircraft.

China’s Premier Li Keqiang had asked Malaysia’s Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak to provide details about the missing flight “in a timely, accurate and comprehensive manner”

Some desperate relatives have threatened to go on hunger strike in an attempt to get answers about the missing aircraft from Malaysian officials.