Indonesia alerted to look out for washed-up MH370 wreckage, officials say

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 23 — Indonesia has been put on alert for possible signs of wreckage from the missing Malaysia Airlines (MAS) Flight MH370 that may have washed up on its shores, the lead search coordinator for the plane said.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said it has continued to carefully go through alerts from the public who sighted what they believed was debris from the plane on Australian shores, but said that it was likely that some floating wreckage parts have drifted further west away from the country to Indonesia.

“The ATSB reviews all of this correspondence carefully, but drift modelling undertaken by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) has suggested that if there were any floating debris, it is far more likely to have travelled west, away from the coastline of Australia.

“It is possible that some materials may have drifted to the coastline of Indonesia, and an alert has been issued in that country, requesting that the authorities be alerted to any possible debris from the aircraft,” it said in an operational update yesterday on the on-going search efforts off the shores of Australia.

Since the Malaysia Airlines (MAS) Flight MH370 disappeared on March 8 and plunged the families of the 239 people on board into anxious despair, search teams have failed to find any signs of the plane in the southern Indian Ocean where it is thought to have crashed.

With the search now focused on the underwater phase, ATSB said yesterday that over 140,000 square kilometres of the seafloor has been analysed and mapped.

It added that vessels jointly funded by Malaysia and Australia – Fugro Discovery, Fugro Equator and Go Phoenix – are involved in the search, with over 1,200 square kilometres of the search area already scoured for the plane.

ATSB highlighted yesterday the challenge and impossibility of determining the exact spot where MH370 “entered the water”, and said the available data point to a “long but narrow arc of the southern Indian Ocean” as lying close to the most highly probable search area.

It said this location is where the plane last communicated through satellite signals and is believed to have run out of fuel.