Australia immediately dispatched four long-range surveillance planes to look into the find in the southern Indian Ocean.
Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Tun Hussein said the latest lead to come out of Australia during the Search and Rescue (SAR) mission for the missing plane, is “slightly different” from previous leads obtained.
He said it is because the information of the two objects detected by satellites was corroborated “to a certain extent” with other satellites.
Satellite images showing two objects in the southern Indian Ocean.
The most notable lead was of ‘three floating objects’ detected by satellites on March 9 in the South China Sea.
This lead was however clarified by both Malaysian and Chinese officials as information that was “wrongly leaked”.
Satellite images released by China on March 13.
As new information surfaced on Thursday, the search for the missing aircraft intensified further but efforts were hampered by bad weather and the operation was halted at nightfall.
At dawn on Friday five aircraft had been sent by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) to focus on a 23,000 square kilometre area about 2,500 kilometres southwest of Perth.
The United States Navy P8 Poseidon aircraft is also set to join the SAR operations.
Planned search area for March 21, 2014.
The race is on to find those objects which experts cautioned could just as well be lost shipping containers, a piece of the fuselage or wing.
According to John Blaxland, senior fellow at the Australian National University and expert on Australia’s radar system, finding the aircraft is just the beginning.
Speaking to CNN, he said assuming that the plane crashed and that it’s on the bottom of the ocean, search crews would face a myriad of obstacles in recovering parts of the plane and piecing together what happened.
He added the treacherous waters of the southern Indian Ocean would only add to the challenge.
“The problem is that flotsam and jetsam are not where it was when the photograph was taken four days ago. The currents have taken it a long way eastwards.
“So the aircraft are looking, in poor visibility, and this is the area that we used to call ‘Roaring Forties’; this is in the 19th century the kind of waters that ships got wrecked in. So this is really treacherous stretches of water, not easy to work in, very hard to detect things in,” he said.
Comparing to the recovery efforts of previous disasters Tom Haueter, former director of the National Transportation Safety Board’s Office of Aviation Safety in the US said, the whole process may take a very long time.
He said the case of TWA Flight 800 demonstrates how tedious reconstruction work is and how important that work is to explaining exactly what went wrong.
The case of Air France Flight 447 meanwhile shows just how long an ocean recovery can take.
“First thing to do is get those recorders because there’s a huge amount of data in the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder. Get those back and then we can see what we need to do next. But you know, time is of the essence,” he said.
Blaxand agreed with Haueter on the challenges of even finding the two objects picked up by satellites in the southern Indian Ocean.
“Even with the help of the ‘best surveillance technology on the planet’ on the P-3 and P-8 maritime surveillance aircraft, it’s still really hard in this kind of environment to pick up these little, semi-submerged blips.
“You’re looking for something that potentially isn’t even there anymore,” he said.
Location of possible debris in the southern Indian Ocean.