Chinese plane spots 'suspicious objects' in search for Flight 370

The crew of a Chinese plane searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 spotted "suspicious objects" in the southern Indian Ocean on Monday, the latest lead in a long and often frustrating investigation.

A reporter on board the plane for China's official news agency Xinhua said the search team saw "two relatively big floating objects with many white smaller ones scattered within a radius of several kilometers," the agency reported.

The Chinese plane has passed on the coordinates of the objects to Australian authorities, which are overseeing search efforts in the area, as well as to a Chinese icebreaker in the region, Xinhua said. The icebreaker, the Xuelong, has changed course and is headed toward the area where the objects were seen, the agency said.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority said on Twitter that the reported objects are in the relevant search area and that attempts will be made to relocate them. It didn't say whether it considered them likely to be related to the missing Malaysian jetliner.

The IL-76 plane is one of two Chinese military aircraft helping scour a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean on Monday for traces of the passenger jet, which disappeared over Southeast Asia on March 8 with 239 people on board.

With the search in its third week, authorities have so far been unable to establish where exactly the plane is or why it flew off course from its planned journey from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Satellites focus search

Recent information from satellites identifying objects in the water that could be related to the plane has focused the search efforts on an area roughly 1,500 miles southwest of the Australian city of Perth.

Eight other aircraft -- from Australia, the United States and Japan -- are also tasked with combing the search area over the course of Monday.

The two Chinese aircraft are now heading back to base, Xinhua reported. The crew that spotted the objects has asked Australia authorities to send other planes to the area of interest, it said.

The aerial searches have been trained on the isolated part of ocean since last week, when Australia first announced that satellite imagery had detected possible objects that could be connected to the search.

Since then, China and France have said they also have satellite information pointing to floating debris in a similar area. The Chinese information came from images, and the French data came from satellite radar...

Source: Latest News in Hindi

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