SYDNEY - China, Japan and Britain are joining the search for signs of a missing Malaysia Airlines plane far off Australia’s west coast, where Australian aircraft used human spotters Friday to scan a remote expanse of ocean for floating debris that might be wreckage from the airliner. They found none.
The expansion of the multinational operation in the southern Indian Ocean illustrated how the search for the missing jet has partly dampened regional tensions. China and Japan are locked in a dispute over islands in the East China Sea but their forces will work in coordination with a U.S. Navy surveillance plane and Australian military P-3 Orion planes and vessels.
Two days of searching the ocean 1,500 miles southwest of Perth, the capital of Western Australia, have yielded no sightings of possible debris from the plane.
Almost two weeks after the plane vanished, Hishammuddin Hussein, the defense minister of Malaysia, which is in charge of the overall search, said it was “very, very” difficult to talk with waiting families about the possibility that the 227 passengers and 12 crew members had died.
Their most important question, “where are their loved ones,” cannot be answered, he said at a news conference Friday near Kuala Lumpur International Airport, where the plane left March 8 for a flight toBeijing
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott kindled hope Thursday that the waters off Western Australia might hold clues to the plane’s fate. He said a satellite had photographed two large objects floating inthe southern Indian Ocean that might be debris from the Boeing 777.
Australian aircraft failed Friday to find anything resembling the objects in the remote expanse of ocean nearly 10,000 feet deep, said the country’s maritime safety authority.
But Hishammuddin, who also is Malaysia’s acting transport minister, called the indistinct satellite images of the objects the best lead available and announced that more ships and surveillance planes would head to the area to help.
Japan will send two P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft to join the search, and Britain has agreed to send a naval ship, the H.M.S. Echo, Hishammuddin said. Separately, the Chinese government announced it would send three military aircraft to Australia for the search, joining a Chinese polar exploration vessel and merchant ships.
“This crisis has put a heavy burden on Asian countries to cooperate,” said Bridget Welsh, a political scientist at Singapore Management University.
“But there’s still the issues of wariness and lack of trust between them and some other partners.”
She continued: “We see this affecting the questions of sharing data from satellite technology, working together, especially between China andthe United States.”
Hishammuddin said he planned to call the U.S. defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, to seek more “help with the search-and-rescue efforts, including remotely operated vehicles for deep-ocean salvage.”
But the search for signs of Flight 370 is not all high-tech. John Young, the Australian official directing the search in the southern Indian Ocean, said the Australian planes would, for now at least, abandon radar scanning and rely on human spotters.
Young said that using human spotters might be slower, but that it was more promising than radar.
The search planes flying out to sea from a base near Perth have included four of the Royal Australian Air Force’s Orion P-3 surveillance aircraft. An ultralong-range Bombardier Global Express jet hired by the Australian search operation is also involved. And the hunt has been joined by New Zealand, which has sent a P-3 Orion surveillance plane, and the United States, which has sent a Navy P-8A Poseidon search plane.
Cmdr. William Marks, thespokesman for the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet, said in an email that the Poseidon would probably spend three hours over the search area Friday, as it had Thursday. He said the plane would continue to use radar and other electronic sensing devices for the search.
“Even when the weather is bad we don’t give up the radar search and exclusively switch to visual,” he said by email. “The radar is pretty amazing in that you can adjust for sea clutter to optimize the search.” Information for this article was contributed by Michael Forsythe, Kirk Semple, Michael S. Schmidt, Eric Schmitt, Matthew L. Wald and Mike McIntire of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/22/2014