About two-thirds of the 227 passengers onboard the flight, which vanished on March 8 after leaving Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing, were Chinese nationals, and the Chinese government has been particularly vocal in demanding an intense hunt for any signs of the missing Boeing 777-200. No definitive evidence has been found so far.
A brief bulletin from a Chinese Air Force IL-76 plane that has joined the search off western Australia appeared to bolster hopes that traces of the plane might yet be found. But the description of the sighting Monday was vague, and it seemed entirely possible that it could prove to be another in a long list of false leads.
"The crew of a Chinese IL-76 plane spotted some suspicious objects in the southern Indian Ocean on Monday," said a report from Xinhua, the Chinese state-run news agency, which had a reporter on the plane.
The plane spotted a number of objects, including two large pieces, Xinhua reported. "From a height of 1,000 meters, there were two quite large objects, and some small, white fragments scattered within a radius of several kilometers," the report said.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is coordinating the search off western Australia, said in a statement that it had been "advised about the reported objects sighted by a Chinese aircraft." It said the "reported objects are within today's search area and attempts will be made to relocate them."
Earlier, the Xinhua reporter onboard the Chinese search plane had said that visibility was "quite poor" because of low-hanging clouds.
The Chinese government has directed a polar exploration vessel, Xuelong, to the search area in the southern Indian Ocean. Xinhua said the ship was heading to the vicinity of the latest sighting of unusual objects, but would not get there before Tuesday morning.
Australia and China have already released blurry satellite images of objects floating in the search area, and officials said those might be wreckage from the Boeing 777-200. On Sunday, a French satellite was also reported to have detected objects in the southern Indian Ocean that might be related to Flight 370. France's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the possible debris was spotted using satellite-based radar, but gave no other details about the image or the objects' precise location.
The recent announcements appeared likely to reinforce a belief that the plane fell into the ocean far off western Australia after veering sharply from its planned route. Investigators say they believe military radar and satellite signals indicate the plane cut across mainland Malaysia, headed west over the Indian Ocean and then possibly south, toward the area where Australia has now organized a search involving New Zealand and the United States. Britain, China and Japan have also sent military planes and ships to aid the hunt.
Flight Lt. Russell Adams, the pilot of an Australian P-3 military aircraft that spent more than 10 hours on Sunday searching for debris, said weather conditions had deteriorated in parts of the search zone.
"There was cloud down to the surface," he told reporters Sunday, minutes after landing at the base here, which is about 30 miles north of the western Australian city of Perth.
The search is focused on an area about 1,550 miles southwest of Perth. On Monday, Australian authorities said 10 aircraft would be involved in the search, including a U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon, two Chinese transport aircraft and two Japanese patrol planes, all departing from the Air Force base here.
China has described the "unusual object" sighted by one of its satellites Tuesday as measuring about 74 feet by 43 feet. It was observed about 65 nautical miles southwest of the spot where, two days earlier, another satellite had captured similar images of floating objects, which the Australian government said might be wreckage from Flight 370.
Experts on satellite imagery and open-ocean recovery said those two sightings might be of the same object or objects, and that might give the search teams more information with which to calculate ocean currents and drift speeds, turn back the clock and estimate where the plane might have struck the ocean sometime after 8 a.m. Malaysia time on March 8.
So far, however, there is no evidence that the debris in any of the Indian Ocean sightings is from the missing airliner. On Saturday, a New Zealand P-3 Orion patrol plane flew over the area and reported sighting only "clumps of seaweed," the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said. Early search efforts, including in the South China Sea, were plagued by sightings of debris that turned out to be false leads.
As searching resumed Monday, the U.S. Pacific Command said it would move into the region a Towed Pinger Locator System, capable of locating a flight information recorder - the so-called black box - down to a depth of 20,000 feet. But an officer of the Navy 7th Fleet stressed that the move was a precaution, in case wreckage from the missing plane is found.
"This movement is simply a prudent effort to pre-position equipment and trained personnel closer to the search area so that if debris is found, we will be able to respond as quickly as possible, since the battery life of the black box's pinger is limited," Cmdr. Chris Budde, an operations officer, said in an email issued by the fleet's public affairs office.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia said Sunday that the Chinese satellite images were consistent with the images he announced in Parliament on Thursday. "Obviously we have now had a number of very credible leads and there is increasing hope, no more than hope, that we might be on the road to discovering what did happen," Abbott was quoted by the Australian Broadcasting Corp. as saying.
Flight 370 was about 40 minutes into a six-hour flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it stopped communicating with air traffic controllers and changed course. On board were 239 people, including two infants.
Signals that the plane transmitted to a satellite - the last one at 8:11 a.m., more than seven hours after the jet took off - allowed investigators to say that the plane took one of two broad paths, one south to the current focus of search operations and the other north across the Asian continent.
On Saturday, Hishammuddin Hussein, the defense minister of Malaysia, said that seven countries - China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Myanmar and Pakistan - had seen nothing to suggest the plane took the north route.
More than two dozen countries are on the hunt from land, air, space and sea for any visible sign of the plane. Investigators from law enforcement and aviation safety agencies around the globe have combed through the backgrounds of all the passengers, and so far have revealed no potential suspects. The Malaysian police are investigating the backgrounds of the plane's pilot and first officer. So far, there is no proof that the plane's disappearance was caused by human intervention, nor is there any conclusive evidence that it was caused by a mechanical malfunction or an onboard accident, such as an electrical fire.
Locating the wreckage of the missing aircraft and, most important, the black box that recorded information about its operations during its final hours, would be crucial to determining what happened on Flight 370, said Simon Bennett, director of the Civil Safety and Security Unit at the University of Leicester in Britain.
"In all likelihood, we may never ascertain what happened to MH370, which is a real shame, because then the speculation will simply accelerate and mount up," he said. "What actually needs to happen is that we need to find the hull, find the flight recorders, and then carefully deconstruct what happened. But in the middle of all that is this blizzard of insane conjecture."
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