Search planes scoured a remote part of the Indian Ocean Thursday for debris spotted by satellites that could be the missing Malaysian jetliner – but all they found so far was a freighter and two pods of dolphins.
But officials – who broke off the search for the day – insisted the debris sightings were “probably the best lead” yet in the mystery.
One of the objects spotted by satellite imagery was almost 80 feet in length and the other was about 15 feet.
There could be other objects in the area, a four-hour flight from Australia’s southwestern coast, said John Young, of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.
“This is a lead, it’s probably the best lead we have right now,” Young said, though he cautioned that the objects could be seaborne debris along a shipping route where containers can fall off cargo vessels Young told a news conference in Canberra, Australia’s capital, that planes had been sent to the area about 1,500 miles southwest of Perth to check on the objects.
He said satellite images “do not always turn out to be related to the search even if they look good, so we will hold our views on that until they are sighted close-up.”
ABC had a reporter aboard one of the search planes, a US Navy P-8 Poseidon, described as the world’s most sophisticated search plane.
But after a nine-hour search, the plane failed to locate the objects and only spotted a freighter and the two pods of dolphins, the network reported.
Another expert, however, remained optimistic, telling CNN the larger piece of debris could be the tail section of the missing flight, which vanished without a trace on March 8 with 239 passengers and crew aboard.
“If that piece of the plane is that big maybe it’s the tail section,” said David Gallo, who helped lead the search for Air France Flight 447, which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.
https://twitter.com/LMartinezABC/statuses/446600119740559360/
Meanwhile, Malaysian authorities are investigating a last-minute phone call pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah made from the cockpit of the missing plane shortly before takeoff Investigators want to know whom he spoke to, according to the Daily Mail, hoping for clues to the plane’s disappearance.
Military planes from Australia, the US and New Zealand have been searching in a region over the southern Indian Ocean that was narrowed down from 232,000 square miles to 117,000 square miles.
Young said the depth of the ocean in the latest area, which is south from where the search had been focused since Monday, is several thousand yards.
He said commercial satellites had been redirected in the hope of getting higher resolution images. He did not say when that would happen. The current images are not sharp enough to determine any markings.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority released two images of the whitish objects floating on or just under the surface. The images were taken March 16, but Australian Air Commodore John McGarry said it took time to analyze them.
“The task of analyzing imagery is quite difficult, it requires drawing down frames and going through frame by frame. The moment this imagery was discovered to reveal a possible object that might indicate a debris field, we have passed the information from defense across to AMSA for their action,” he said.
The AMSA said on their official Twitter account that the crew of a P3 Orion plane was not able to spot the objects Thursday through limited visibility but that the search would continue.
Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a news conference Thursday that the satellite images, “while credible, still must be confirmed.”
But some analysts said the debris is most likely not pieces of Flight 370. “The chances of it being debris from the airplane are probably small, and the chances of it being debris from other shipping are probably large,” said Jason Middleton, an aviation professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
The area where the debris was spotted is about halfway between Australia and desolate islands off the Antarctic.
The hunt for the Boeing 777 has been punctuated by several false leads since it disappeared above the Gulf of Thailand.
Oil slicks that were spotted did not contain jet fuel. A yellow object thought to be from the plane turned out to be a piece of sea trash. Chinese satellite images showed possible plane debris, but nothing was found.
Flight 370 disappeared on a night flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Malaysian authorities have not ruled out any possible explanation, but have said the evidence so far suggests the plane was deliberately turned back across Malaysia to the Strait of Malacca, with its communications systems disabled.
They are unsure what happened next.
Police are considering the possibility of hijacking, sabotage, terrorism or issues related to the mental health of the pilots or anyone else on board.
Malaysian authorities have said that files were deleted Feb. 3 from the home flight simulator of Capt. Shah, and Hishammuddin said he had no new information on efforts to recover those files.
The FBI has joined forces with Malaysian authorities in analyzing deleted data on the simulator. It was not clear whether investigators thought that deleting the files was unusual.
They might hold hints of unusual flight paths that could help explain where the missing plane went, or the files could have been deleted simply to clear memory for other material.