KUALA LUMPUR, March 13 — A Chinese satellite hunting for the missing Malaysian Airline System Bhd. jetliner found three floating objects at sea along the plane’s intended route, the government said.
Images from the Gaofen-1 showed the pieces were as large as 24m by 22m, the state Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense said on its website. The pictures were snapped on March 9, the day after Flight 370 vanished while flying to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.
China’s report, which placed the location near the confluence of the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand, follows other leads that haven’t panned out in searches entering a sixth day today.
A dozen nations have been scouring the ocean and land with 42 ships and 39 aircraft for the Boeing Co. 777-200 carrying 239 passengers and crew.
China will keep working to “optimise the image areas, analyze data and continue to search for the missing Malaysian Airline flight according to the developments,” the administration said on its website.
The smaller “suspected floating objects” measured 13m by 18m and 14m by 19m, according to the website.
The satellite found the items in a radius of 20km around a point of 105.63º east latitude, 6.7º north longitude, according to the site.
Air Patrols
Air patrols are resuming at daybreak today after a multinational flotilla kept searching overnight, and China’s satellite photos put the waters north and east of Malaysia back as a central focus of the hunt for the missing Boeing Co. 777-200 wide-body jet.
Flight 370’s route took it over the Gulf of Thailand, where the plane was approaching Vietnamese airspace when controllers lost contact. Signals from the jet’s transponder, a beacon that helps increase the plane’s visibility on radar screens, also ended then.
A Vietnamese search crew came up empty yesterday after searching the Vung Tau area in the southeast in response to a tip from an oil-rig worker who reported what looked to be a plane on fire. That was the area where a plane reported metal debris earlier this week, according to Vietnam’s Civil Aviation Authority.
Theories Alive
T
he absence of wreckage has kept alive various theories about the plane’s disappearance, from an accident to hijacking to sabotage. A dozen nations have been participating in the search, deploying 42 ships and 39 aircraft in waters on both sides of Peninsular Malaysia.
“This is unprecedented, what we are going through,” Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters yesterday in Kuala Lumpur.
“Coordinating so many countries together is not something that is easy.”
While the Gulf of Thailand initially took primacy in the hunt because of Flight 370’s last known position, Malaysia expanded the search this week to the Malacca Strait.
Yesterday, Malaysia sought help from US investigators in interpreting an unexplained radar blip detected over the strait, far from the jet’s route.
China, whose 153 citizens were the most of any nationality on the plane, prodded Malaysia to conduct an immediate investigation into whether Flight 370 changed course, Qin Gang, a foreign ministry spokesman, said yesterday in a statement.
Earth orbit became a vantage point in the hunt for Flight 370 earlier this week when Vietnam said one of its satellites would take photos over the region and China’s Xinhua news agency reported that the country would search from space as well. — Bloomberg
