Brealking!!French satellite picks up new images of potential debris in search for Flight 370

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia —

 Malaysia said it had received fresh satellite images from France of potential debris from missing flight MH370 Sunday, as Australia’s prime minister said that recent sightings had brought fresh hope for a breakthrough in the hunt for the missing jetliner.

The French images are the third set of pictures that could show debris from the plane. They showed “potential objects” in the vicinity of the so-called “southern corridor,” a large stretch of Indian Ocean where Malaysian authorities believe the plane might have crashed, the Malaysian government said in a statement.

Here’s how international officials used space-based cameras to locate what may be debris.

What you should know about Malaysia

Adam Taylor MAR 21

A brief roundup of the facts.

But the statement did not specify if the objects were close to other potential chunks of debris spotted on satellite images released by China and Australia, or when the images were taken. Malaysia said it had passed on the image to the Australian authorities who are coordinating the search in a remote stretch of the southern Indian Ocean.

The latest clues in the investigation of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane include a satellite image released by the Chinese government on Saturday of a large floating object, not far from two other objects spotted in the water and announced by the Australian government a few days before.

A civilian plane operating as part of the search effort also reported seeing a number of other smaller floating objects in the same general area of ocean on Saturday, including a wooden pallet and some “strapping belts” of different colors and lengths, according to the Australian search team.

“New Chinese satellite imagery does seem to suggest at least one large object down there, consistent with the object that earlier satellite imagery discovered,” Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott told reporters in Papua New Guinea, where he is on a visit.

“It’s still too early to be definite, but obviously we have now had a number of very credible leads and there is increasing hope — no more than hope, no more than hope — that we might be on the road to discovering what happened to this ill-fated aircraft.”

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) expanded the search effort again on Sunday in the light of the most recent sightings, with four military aircraft and four civilian jets scouring two areas of ocean of around 22,800 square miles in total.

Low fog hampered the search in the early hours, but John Young, general manager of AMSA’s emergency response division, said weather conditions in this remote part of the Indian Ocean appeared to be improving.

Some planes will be looking for the large object spotted by the Chinese satellite, others for the smaller debris seen from a commercial jet involved in the search on Saturday, or for the two objects seen in earlier satellite images.

The grainy satellite photograph of a “suspicious floating object” issued by the Chinese was about 75 miles southwest of the debris sighting announced by Australia last week. The photograph was dated March 18, two days after the images released by Australia.

AMSA said the Chinese image was “consistent” in size and location with the other images. It said its planes had passed over the area identified in the Chinese image on Saturday without spotting anything, but would look again on Sunday, using “drift modelling” to work out where it might have floated in the past five days.

The object spotted by the Chinese was 74 feet long by 43 feet wide. That is too wide to have come from a plane “unless it is the root of wing,” said Peter Marosszeky, an aviation expert at the University of New South Wales in Australia. “It is a possibility, though unlikely.”

A Boeing 777-200 is 209 feet long, with a wingspan of 199 feet and a tail height of 60 feet above the ground. Its body is 20 feet in diameter.

Even if empty fuel tanks inside the wing were filled with air, some experts also doubted a fragment of that size could stay afloat for 10 days after the Malaysia Airlines plane vanished March 8, especially in rough seas.

The P3 Orion used by the Australian and New Zealand air forces typically take four hours just to reach the search area, which begins some 1,250 miles southwest of the western Australian city of Perth, and can only spend a couple hours on site before returning to base.

Nor was it proving easy, even for trained observers, to scan the vast expanse of ocean for a few scattered pieces of debris, some of which may be semi-submerged.

“Looking straight down from above from a satellite is showing a floating object of some description, but actually determining what it is, from an aircraft at a lot lower altitude, looking into the sun, with haze and all the rest of it, is proving difficult,” Barton said.

Nevertheless, hopes have also been raised by the first sighting from the air, when a civilian plane reported seeing a “number of small objects” floating in the water on Saturday within a radius of three miles, including a wooden pallet and some strapping belts of different lengths and colors, according to Barton.

However, when a New Zealand air force P-3 Orion surveillance plane “with specialist electro-optic observation equipment” went to the area later on Saturday, it found only clumps of seaweed — illustrating just how challenging this search has become.

“That’s the nature of it, you only have to be off by a few hundred meters in a fast-flying aircraft,” Barton said.

Barton said the use of wooden pallets was “quite common” in the airline industry, but said they were also used by shipping, describing the sighting as a “possible lead.”

If planes can find them again, the next step will be to get a ship to the area and fish them out of the water. “Until we find them and have a good look at them, it’s hard to say if they have anything to do with the aircraft,” said Barton at a news conference in the Australian capital Canberra.

An Australian naval vessel is now in the area, while a small flotilla of Chinese ships are heading to the search zone in the coming days. Merchant ships that had been involved in the search had been released, AMSA said on Sunday.

Japan and India were also sending more planes, while two Chinese Ilyushin aircraft had arrived in Perth and were due to join the search Monday, AMSA said.

Young called Sunday’s search a “logical continuation” of previous searches, and said efforts were constantly being made to refine the search area to make it as accurate as possible.

However, the search for debris from the plane has been complicated by strong and unpredictable currents in that part of the Indian Ocean.

Experts say currents in the area are generally moving in a northeasterly direction, at around 24 knots a day, but different objects can drift at different speeds, and eddies make drift modelling unpredictable.

Charitha Pattiaratchi, a professor of coastal oceanography at the University of Western Australia, said the new debris spotted by the Chinese satellite could not have been the same as the larger object spotted by Australia — it was too far away and in the wrong direction. But it could easily have come from the same crash site as the previous objects, but be drifting more slowly, he said.

“The bigger it is, the harder it is to move,” he said. “It is totally consistent with what we know.”

The search has also become a race against time — before the objects spotted by satellite drift too far, break up or sink in heavy ocean swells — and because bad weather was expected to set in later this week.

Meteorologists say worse weather is expected to set in next week, threatening rain, huge swells and wind-driven whitecaps in an inhospitable part of the Indian Ocean below latitude 40 degrees south, known as the Roaring Forties because of its frequent fierce westerly winds.

A Category One cyclone struck Australia’s Christmas Island on Saturday, 1,600 miles northwest of Perth, and could bring further bad weather to the search area.

Time pressure is heightened by the fact that the location beacon built into the plane’s flight recorder, or “black box,” is likely to keep transmitting for only another two weeks before its batteries run out.

If debris from the airliner is found, complex and uncertain mathematical modeling will have to be employed to track back and find out where the plane might have come down, and naval vessels equipped with sonar technology will have to sweep the area, listening for beeps from the black box.

Then, it will be a case of searching the deep ocean floor, roughly two miles beneath the surface, with undersea drones to look for the main wreckage.

When an Air France plane crashed into the Atlantic in 2009, the first debris and bodies were pulled from the sea after five days, but it took more than two years to find the main wreckage on the ocean floor. That was partly because mathematical models of ocean currents initially sent investigators to the wrong place.

Meanwhile, the search for the Malaysia Airlines plane is continuing in other parts of the world, both over land across vast expanses of central and southeast Asia and over other parts of the Indian Ocean where the plane’s final satellite transmissions suggested it might have been at 8:11 a.m. on March 8.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished from civilian radar at 1:21 a.m. on March 8, not long after setting off from Kuala Lumpur on its way to Beijing. It then did a U-turn and headed west back across the Malaysian peninsula before vanishing from Malaysian military radar at 2:11 a.m. in the northern end of the 

Strait of Malacca.

The Malaysians running the investigations say they believe the flight must have been deliberately flown off course, either by one of its pilots or by hijackers, but have not ruled out catastrophic mechanic failure