A Japanese patrol plane sits on the tarmac after arriving at Pearce Air Force Base to help with search operations for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, in Perth, Australia
Kuala Lumpur:
Malaysia's defense minister announced Wednesday evening that Airbus Defense and Space, Europe's main commercial satellite company, had forwarded images taken on Sunday of 122 objects floating southwest of Australia and said that his country had asked Australia to check if they were debris from the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. (Planes, ships chase new leads in search for Malaysian jet)
While the objects might turn out to be unrelated to the aircraft, Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said, "This is still the most credible lead that we have."
The objects are up to 23 meters (75 feet) in length, and are visible through gaps in clouds over an area of 400 square kilometers (154 square miles), he said. Some of the objects are bright, he noted without elaboration. Metal objects that had recently entered the ocean might be reflective. (Read)
Malaysia forwarded the information to Australia on Wednesday. It is unclear if the floating objects can be checked before dark or if an inspection check may need to wait until Thursday, Hishammuddin added.
The floating objects are 2,557 kilometers (1,589 miles) southwest of Perth. (Satellite images show 122 potential objects in jet search: Malaysia)
If the debris turns out to be from the missing plane, the next step would be to figure out how far it might have drifted from where the aircraft might have splashed down, so as to begin an undersea search, Hishammuddin said.
The U.S. Navy has sent an undersea listening device and a sonar device. But each needs to be towed far underwater behind a ship traveling scarcely faster than a person walking on land.
The listening device can pick up the data recorders' signals if it comes within a mile of them but the signals will go silent within a couple weeks anyway. The sonar will work even after the data recorders go silent, but needs to be even closer to detect wreckage on the seabed.
Finding floating debris would help provide closure for the families and friends of the passengers and crew, but may prove of limited use in locating the data recorders on the bottom of the ocean, oceanographers cautioned. Debris could have drifted hundreds of miles in the 18 days since the plane disappeared, said Jianping Gan, an oceanographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who has done research aboard a Chinese icebreaker in the waters around Antarctica. (New satellite images said to be 'credible lead' in jet search)
"Even if you've got floating material, if it has been floating for two and a half weeks, it's not going to have much relation to the wreckage" on the seabed, said Jason Ali, an earth sciences professor at Hong Kong University who has studied currents in the Indian Ocean.
Michael Purcell, a senior engineer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who led two underwater search expeditions for the wreck of Air France Flight 447 in 2010 and 2011, said the current search zone for Flight 370 was far more remote than the location of the Air France wreckage and that the seas and weather conditions were known to be considerably rougher.
"That can slow down your progress considerably, because it makes it more difficult to operate, to get the vehicles in and out of the water," and bad weather can mean days of waiting to resume the search, Purcell said. (Undersea volcanoes, huge seas complicate MH370 search)
Purcell estimated that there were fewer than a dozen underwater search vehicles in the world equipped with the sonar and imaging technology required for a deep water search of this scale. These are operated by a handful of private companies and oceanographic institutes as well as by the U.S. Navy, he said.
Purcell said one advantage was that the sea floor in the southern Indian Ocean was relatively flat compared with the highly varied terrain of the mid-Atlantic. The depth of the water is comparable, however, at more than 10,000 feet.
Military submarines have sophisticated equipment for listening for ships or other submarines. But unlike towed sonar like the Bluefin-21, which the U.S. Navy is sending and which can descend to 14,700 feet, or a towed pinger detector, which can plunge 20,000 feet, military submarines are designed to operate within a few hundred feet of the surface.
That limits their ability to detect pings from far below the surface in water of different densities, moving at different speeds and at different temperatures.
For now, aircraft from Australia and other countries have been looking in an area the size of the western and southwestern United States where the plane is believed to have disappeared after its last signals to a satellite. They have not extended the search to all the places where debris might have drifted. But because the area of the aircraft's disappearance is so far from land, roughly a four-hour flight in each direction, planes can only spend a couple of hours searching.
Because of the distance, only about 4 percent of the probable impact area was searched by aircraft on Monday, for example, and no searching was possible on Tuesday because of bad weather. The search resumed Wednesday.
Making matters worse, oceanographers said, is that currents in the southern Indian Ocean are less well understood than in more heavily trafficked seas. A violent storm on Tuesday, one of many in the region as the southern hemisphere's winter approaches and days become shorter, has further churned the waters. Any debris that stuck up out of the water will have been pushed by the wind in directions that may be different from prevailing currents.
"With any wind, it'll act like a sail," Ali said.
Waves may also have pushed objects in unpredictable directions, making it hard to calculate the movements of any debris that might be found based on prevailing ocean currents.
Even finding the data recorders, although extremely difficult, may not be enough. The cockpit voice recorder only stores the two most recent hours of sounds in the cockpit before the aircraft ceases operating. Investigators have been most interested in why the plane turned around over the Gulf of Thailand roughly seven hours before it is believed to have run out of fuel over the southern Indian Ocean.
The separate data recorder for various aircraft instruments and controls would have saved information from the plane's sharp turn, but might not reveal the intent of whoever was in the cockpit if the turn was deliberate, as the Malaysian authorities have suggested.
(Keith Bradsher reported from Kuala Lumpur, and Nicola Clark reported from Paris. Michelle Innis contributed reporting from Sydney, Australia.)
While the objects might turn out to be unrelated to the aircraft, Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said, "This is still the most credible lead that we have."
The objects are up to 23 meters (75 feet) in length, and are visible through gaps in clouds over an area of 400 square kilometers (154 square miles), he said. Some of the objects are bright, he noted without elaboration. Metal objects that had recently entered the ocean might be reflective. (Read)
Malaysia forwarded the information to Australia on Wednesday. It is unclear if the floating objects can be checked before dark or if an inspection check may need to wait until Thursday, Hishammuddin added.
The floating objects are 2,557 kilometers (1,589 miles) southwest of Perth. (Satellite images show 122 potential objects in jet search: Malaysia)
If the debris turns out to be from the missing plane, the next step would be to figure out how far it might have drifted from where the aircraft might have splashed down, so as to begin an undersea search, Hishammuddin said.
The U.S. Navy has sent an undersea listening device and a sonar device. But each needs to be towed far underwater behind a ship traveling scarcely faster than a person walking on land.
The listening device can pick up the data recorders' signals if it comes within a mile of them but the signals will go silent within a couple weeks anyway. The sonar will work even after the data recorders go silent, but needs to be even closer to detect wreckage on the seabed.
Finding floating debris would help provide closure for the families and friends of the passengers and crew, but may prove of limited use in locating the data recorders on the bottom of the ocean, oceanographers cautioned. Debris could have drifted hundreds of miles in the 18 days since the plane disappeared, said Jianping Gan, an oceanographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who has done research aboard a Chinese icebreaker in the waters around Antarctica. (New satellite images said to be 'credible lead' in jet search)
"Even if you've got floating material, if it has been floating for two and a half weeks, it's not going to have much relation to the wreckage" on the seabed, said Jason Ali, an earth sciences professor at Hong Kong University who has studied currents in the Indian Ocean.
Michael Purcell, a senior engineer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who led two underwater search expeditions for the wreck of Air France Flight 447 in 2010 and 2011, said the current search zone for Flight 370 was far more remote than the location of the Air France wreckage and that the seas and weather conditions were known to be considerably rougher.
"That can slow down your progress considerably, because it makes it more difficult to operate, to get the vehicles in and out of the water," and bad weather can mean days of waiting to resume the search, Purcell said. (Undersea volcanoes, huge seas complicate MH370 search)
Purcell estimated that there were fewer than a dozen underwater search vehicles in the world equipped with the sonar and imaging technology required for a deep water search of this scale. These are operated by a handful of private companies and oceanographic institutes as well as by the U.S. Navy, he said.
Purcell said one advantage was that the sea floor in the southern Indian Ocean was relatively flat compared with the highly varied terrain of the mid-Atlantic. The depth of the water is comparable, however, at more than 10,000 feet.
Military submarines have sophisticated equipment for listening for ships or other submarines. But unlike towed sonar like the Bluefin-21, which the U.S. Navy is sending and which can descend to 14,700 feet, or a towed pinger detector, which can plunge 20,000 feet, military submarines are designed to operate within a few hundred feet of the surface.
That limits their ability to detect pings from far below the surface in water of different densities, moving at different speeds and at different temperatures.
For now, aircraft from Australia and other countries have been looking in an area the size of the western and southwestern United States where the plane is believed to have disappeared after its last signals to a satellite. They have not extended the search to all the places where debris might have drifted. But because the area of the aircraft's disappearance is so far from land, roughly a four-hour flight in each direction, planes can only spend a couple of hours searching.
Because of the distance, only about 4 percent of the probable impact area was searched by aircraft on Monday, for example, and no searching was possible on Tuesday because of bad weather. The search resumed Wednesday.
Making matters worse, oceanographers said, is that currents in the southern Indian Ocean are less well understood than in more heavily trafficked seas. A violent storm on Tuesday, one of many in the region as the southern hemisphere's winter approaches and days become shorter, has further churned the waters. Any debris that stuck up out of the water will have been pushed by the wind in directions that may be different from prevailing currents.
"With any wind, it'll act like a sail," Ali said.
Waves may also have pushed objects in unpredictable directions, making it hard to calculate the movements of any debris that might be found based on prevailing ocean currents.
Even finding the data recorders, although extremely difficult, may not be enough. The cockpit voice recorder only stores the two most recent hours of sounds in the cockpit before the aircraft ceases operating. Investigators have been most interested in why the plane turned around over the Gulf of Thailand roughly seven hours before it is believed to have run out of fuel over the southern Indian Ocean.
The separate data recorder for various aircraft instruments and controls would have saved information from the plane's sharp turn, but might not reveal the intent of whoever was in the cockpit if the turn was deliberate, as the Malaysian authorities have suggested.
(Keith Bradsher reported from Kuala Lumpur, and Nicola Clark reported from Paris. Michelle Innis contributed reporting from Sydney, Australia.)
© 2014, The New York Times News Service
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