Aircraft scouring the Indian Ocean for signs of the plane, which vanished March 8, continued to spot a number of objects floating in the water Sunday. But determining whether the debris is related to the plane will have to wait until ships locate the items and dredge them up to examine more closely. Two ships did retrieve objects Saturday, but they were described Sunday by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) as fishing equipment and “other flotsam.”
On Friday, the operation effectively started from scratch again in a completely different section of the southern Indian Ocean from where it had been looking. Before Friday the team spent more than a week looking much farther south. The search was moved 680 miles northeast after new analysis by investigators indicated that the aircraft was traveling faster than previously thought — and therefore ran out of fuel much sooner. Still, the new search area is 198,200 square miles.
[READ: Flight 370, a mysterious “one-off,” spurs calls to modernize tracking technology]
The search team is hopeful, however, given that sightings of debris over the weekend mark the first time the Australian-led search has seen promising items in the water.
On Saturday, observers on a Chinese plane spotted three suspicious floating items that were white, red and orange, according to Chinese state-run media and AMSA. A marker was dropped so that ships can try to locate the items and confirm whether they are related to the plane that went mysteriously missing three weeks ago with 239 people on board. In another part of the ocean, searchers on an Australian plane also saw multiple objects in the water.
Time is running out for the search team to locate the critical black box containing cockpit audio and flight data from Flight 370. The black box will emit signals for about 30 days, which gives the operation only about one more week to find it before it goes silent.
An Australian navy support vessel, which will tow U.S. Navy equipment listening for “pings” from the black box, is scheduled to depart the city of Perth on Monday. But authorities still aren’t sure exactly where the plane’s flight ended.
Earlier search operations have been hindered by bad weather, but the new search area is clear of storms and operations should be able to continue Monday, according to AMSA.
Families demand answers
On Sunday, 29 Chinese family members seeking answers from Malaysia’s government about what happened to their loved ones arrived in Kuala Lumpur, said Malaysia Airlines commercial director Hugh Dunleavy, according to the Associated Press. Two-thirds of the 227 passengers aboard Flight 370 were Chinese, and their relatives have expressed deep frustration with Malaysian authorities since the plane went missing.
Family members wore matching T-shirts and held banners with messages such as, “Hand us the murderer. Tell us the truth.”
[READ: Flight 370 families in China boil in anger, march on Malaysian Embassy]
Steve Wang, a representative of some of the Chinese families in Beijing, said the relatives are demanding more answers because they were not satisfied by the responses Malaysian government representatives gave them in China, AP reported.
“We have demanded that we meet with the prime minister and the transportation minister,” said Wang Chunjiang, whose younger brother, Wang Chunyong, was on Flight 370, according to AP. “We have questions that we would like to ask them in person.”
New search area
After a week when the search for the aircraft seemed to be making progress, with satellite images showing hundreds of objects floating in the water, the sudden shift of the search area to the northeast Friday essentially put the massive effort back at square one, experts said.
“We are starting on a blank page,” said Charitha Pattiaratchi, a professor of coastal oceanography at the University of Western Australia who studies this corner of the Indian Ocean. “We are in exactly the same situation we were in one week ago.”
The redirection of the search comes as a result of analysis of radar data collected as the plane traveled between the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca, before contact was lost, AMSA said. The data show that the aircraft traveled faster than investigators thought, burned its fuel more quickly and therefore traveled a shorter distance, according to the Australians.
The plane was supposed to fly north from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing but abruptly turned sharply westward an hour into the journey, then headed south with its communications systems offline, a sequence of events that investigators are trying to unravel.
The new area, though, is much closer to Perth, which will give planes more time to search, Australian officials said. And it moves the operation away from the turbulent part of the ocean known as the “Roaring Forties” to a region where Pattiaratchi said winds and currents are much calmer.
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