ABOVE: Crews off the coast of Australia have another lead to chase in the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. A French satellite has captured images of a large debris field in the same area that authorities believe the Boeing 777-200 went down. Eric Sorensen reports.
LATEST UPDATES:
- The search for the missing plane with 239 passengers on board, including 2 Canadians, enters its 19th day
- Searchers race against time to find the black boxes
- Insurance market says it’s too early to estimate total cost of disaster
- Chinese warships in search area, country demands information on how Malaysia concluded jet went down
- On Monday, investigators said data shows Malaysian plane went down in remote waters of Indian Ocean
- A U.S. law firm has taken the first step toward suing Boeing Co. over the missing plane
TORONTO – New satellite images captured over the Indian Ocean showed over 100 potential objects that could be from Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, said Malaysia’s acting transport minister Wednesday.
Hishammuddin Hussein said the images were taken on Sunday and were provided by French-based Airbus Defence and Space.
READ MORE: Hunt for downed jet resumes in calmer seas
The objects were said to be between one and 23 metres (3.3-75.5 feet) in length, and were located approximately 2,500 kilometres (1,553 miles) from Perth, Australia.
Various pieces of floating objects have been spotted by planes and satellites, but none have been retrieved or identified.
Malaysia announced earlier this week that a mathematical analysis of the final known satellite signals from the plane showed that it had crashed in the sea, taking the lives of all 239 people on board. The new data greatly reduced the search zone, but it remains huge – an area estimated at 1.6 million square kilometres, about the size of Alaska.
The desperate, multinational hunt resumed across a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean after fierce winds and high waves that had forced a daylong halt eased considerably Tuesday.
A total of 11 planes and five ships from the United States, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand are participating in the search, hoping to find even a single piece of the Malaysia Airlines jet that could offer tangible evidence of a crash. But the Australian Maritime Safety Authority cautioned that weather was expected to deteriorate later Thursday.
READ MORE: U.S. law firm takes first step toward suing Boeing Co. over missing plane
The plane’s bizarre disappearance March 8 shortly after it took off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing has proven to be one of the biggest mysteries in aviation.
Searchers race against time to find the black boxes
Australian authorities in charge of the search did not say when the locator would be deployed, but there is a race against the clock to find Flight 370’s black boxes, whose battery-powered “pinger” could stop sending signals within two weeks.
READ MORE: What is a black box and how does it work?
The batteries are designed to last at least a month.
It took two years to find the black box from an Air France jet that went down in the Atlantic Ocean on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009, and searchers knew within days where the crash site was located.
Insurance market won’t yet estimate final cost
Lloyd’s of London insurance market says it’s already started paying out claims for the loss of the flight, but that it’s far too early to speculate about the total cost.
Chairman John Nelson said it took two to three years to sort out the cause of the 2009 Air France crash, for example.
Chinese warships in search area, country demands information on how Malaysia concluded jet went down
Three Chinese vessels joined in the ongoing hunt for the missing flight after it resumed again on Wednesday, according to Chinese media.
State broadcaster CCTV aired footage of the ships taking part in the search 2,000 kilometres (1,240 miles) southwest of Perth.
WATCH: Malaysian officials show new satellite images that they call “the most credible lead yet”
The commander of the Chinese search, Dong Yan, told CCTV their focus was on searching for “floating objects, oil slicks, floating parts of the external layer of the plane and people that may have fallen into the water.”
READ MORE: How knowledge of physics and a UK satellite helped narrow Malaysian jet search
On Wednesday, Chinese vice foreign minister, Zhang Yesui met with Malaysian officials and was dispatched as a special envoy to Kuala Lumpur.
About two-thirds of the missing on the plane are Chinese, and their relatives have lashed out at Malaysia for essentially declaring their family members dead without any physical evidence of the plane’s remains.
China has been intent on supporting the interests of the Chinese relatives of passengers, backing their demands for detailed information on how Malaysia concluded the jet went down in the southern Indian Ocean.
– With files from The Associated Press
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