Hunt for missing plane focuses on satellite image

SEPANG, Malaysia - A Chinese satellite has spotted an object in the southern Indian Ocean in an area that is the focus of a multinational effort to find a Malaysia Airlines airliner that disappeared March 8, the Chinese authorities said Saturday.

The object is about 74 feet long and 43 feet wide, China’s State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense said on its website. The object was spotted Tuesday about 75 miles to the south and west of objects seen two days earlier by a commercial satellite. Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein of Malaysia told reporters that the Chinese “will be sending ships to verify.” The object is in the area of one of two possible routesthat investigators say they think Flight 370 took.

There have been other sightings of debris during two-week-long search for the missing Boeing 777-200 that later proved not to belong to the aircraft, including an earlier Chinese satellite image that didn’t pan out.

The hunt for any traces of the missing plane has been most intense in a section of the southern Indian Ocean about 1,500 miles off the coast southwest of Perth, the capital of Western Australia. On Thursday, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said a commercial satellite hadspotted two large, indistinct objects floating in the area that might be wreckage from the aircraft. But searches by planes and ships combing the waters have failed to find the objects.

A second ultralong-range commercial jet, a Gulfstream G5, joined the search off Western Australia. The two commercial jets now hired for the search would be able to spend more time at the search site than Australia’s military aircraft, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said in an emailed statement Saturday.

The long-range commercial jets can provide about five hours of search time, the authority said. The Royal Australian Air Force P-3 Orion aircraft can spend just two hours over the site before they must return to their onshore base, the authority has said.

The Gulfstream G5 jet, a Bombardier Global Expressjet and a Royal Australian Air Force P3 Orion have been flying out from the Royal Australian air force base, Pearce, 22 miles north of Perth, said Sam Cardwell, a spokesman for the Australian Maritime Safety Authority. Another three aircraft left for the search area later Saturday.

A total of seven aircraft have become involved in the search: three Royal Australian air Fforce P-3 Orion planes, a New Zealand P-3 Orion, a U.S. Navy Poseidon P-8 surveillance plane, and the two commercial aircraft. At least two merchant ships are also in the area, and the Australian navy’s Success was expected to arrive late Saturday afternoon, according to the Australian maritime safety authority, which is based in Canberra, the national capital.

Also Saturday, two Chinese Il-76 Ilyushin transport aircraft left an air base near the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, en route to Australia to take part in the search, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Britain is dispatching a naval hydrographic survey ship, the Echo, and Japan is sending two P-3 Orion aircraft.

The authority said Saturday’s search would cover 13,900 square miles, and 10 trained volunteers from Western Australia’s State Emergency Services would join air force aircrew as spotters on the commercial jets. Cardwell said the volunteers were trained in search techniques including judging distances and spotting debris.

In a separate, northern corridor that the missing plane may have traveled, which stretches from Thailand to the shores of the Caspian Sea in Central Asia, countries have been searching radar records for any sign that theplane crossed their airspace. On Saturday, Hishammuddin said that seven countries - China, Laos, India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan - had not seen anything.

“Based on preliminary analysis, there have been no sightings of the aircraft on their radars,” he said at a news conference in a hotel at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Information for this article was contributed by Michelle Innis of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 7 on 03/23/2014

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