Military aircraft from Australia, New Zealand and the United States rushed to search the remote stretch of the southern Indian Ocean on Thursday after satellite photographs showed glimpses of two large floating objects that officials said might be pieces of the jetliner, which has been missing for almost two weeks.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority said in an email Friday morning that one P-3 Orion had already returned to the area. The search was to be joined later in the day by two more of the Australian Air Force's Orion aircraft, as well as by an ultra-long-range Bombardier Global Express jet, it said.
"Due to the distance to and from the search area, the aircraft involved have an endurance of approximately two hours of search time," it said.
Separately, a U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon search plane that spent about three hours over the area Thursday was to make a similar flight Friday, Cmdr. William J. Marks, spokesman for the Navy's 7th Fleet, said by email.
The Australian government's announcement of the satellite findings Thursday ignited intense media interest. But the search for the objects seen in the images could be time-consuming, with no guarantee that they can be found and even less certainty that they are indeed from the Boeing 777-200 that disappeared March 8, after departing from Kuala Lumpur for a routine night flight to Beijing.
Both the Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, and the organizer of the search operation, John Young, general manager of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority's emergency response division, sought Thursday to temper any hopes that parts of the jet might finally have been found.
"We must keep in mind the task of locating these objects will be extremely difficult and it may turn out that they are not related," Abbott said.
One of the floating objects appeared to be around 24 meters (79 feet) long, Young said, but he could not say what shape it was or whether it had markings that would identify it. The other appeared to be about 5 meters (16 feet) long, he said.
"The fact there are a number located in the same area makes it worth looking at," Young said at a news conference in Canberra, calling the sighting "probably the best lead we have right now."
The first searchers on the scene Thursday returned to base that same day with nothing significant to report. A P-3 Orion dispatched by the Australian Air Force was "unable to locate debris - cloud and rain limited visibility," according to a Twitter message posted by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority. The American P-8A Poseidon returned to a base near Perth, Australia, with "nothing of significance to report," according to a message from the 7th Fleet, which is overseeing the U.S. military contribution to the search.
The search planes must fly 2,500 kilometers, or 1,500 miles, southwest of Perth, the capital of Western Australia, meaning that fuel capacity and safety considerations limit the time that can be spent scanning the waters with electronic equipment and spotters peering through binoculars.
The stretch of ocean where the objects were spotted sees relatively little traffic. But a cargo ship that happened to be somewhat close, bound for Melbourne, Australia, from the island of Mauritius, was diverted south from its usual route two days ago at the request of the Australian authorities. It reached the area of the satellite sighting late Wednesday, the first ship to arrive there, but it, too, saw nothing Thursday. An Australian naval vessel, the Success, was dispatched to the area, but it was still several days away.
Executives of Hoegh Autoliners, the Norwegian owners of the cargo ship, said at a news conference in Oslo on Thursday that the ship and its crew of 19 were at the authorities' disposal and would remain in the area as long as needed. Ingar Skiaker, the company's chief executive, and Sebjorn Dahl, its head of human resources, said the vessel, a car carrier named the St. Petersburg, had radar equipment and powerful searchlights that would be used to scan the ocean surface around the clock.
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology said Friday that drizzle and low cloud would continue to hinder visibility in the search area. The ocean swell would ease to around 2 meters, or 6.5 feet, it said.
David Griffin, an oceanographer who is working with the Australian Maritime Safety Authority to study currents in the southern Indian Ocean, said that satellite monitoring and computer models of currents and other conditions could help predict where the objects might drift. But he also said there was a real risk that they could sink before anyone found them.
"Assuming they stay floating, we can say to some extent where they are going in the future and where they came from in the past," said Griffin, who works for Australia's chief scientific research institute, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.
The southern Indian Ocean does not usually harbor large amounts of flotsam and jetsam, such as shipping containers from merchant vessels, he said.
"The main thing is the draft and how far it hangs down into the water," Griffin said.
He said a piece of debris with a 1- or 2-meter draft, or depth below the surface, would drift in an ocean current in a way that is different from, for example, a fishing net hanging 50 meters into the water. The ocean depth is a fairly constant 3,000 meters (9,840 feet) in the search area, he said.
The plane, Flight 370, with 227 passengers and a crew of 12, took off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, early on March 8 and stopped communicating with ground controllers about 40 minutes later. For more than an hour, military radar tracked a plane that was probably Flight 370, veering sharply off the original course and flying west toward the Indian Ocean; automatic satellite signals emitted by the plane indicated that it kept flying for hours after that, with the last signal detected about a half-hour before it would have exhausted its fuel. By that point, the signals indicated, the plane was probably somewhere along a broad arc sweeping from Central Asia through Southeast Asia and out into the ocean; officials are concentrating on the southern portion of the arc as the most likely area, and that is roughly where the floating objects were seen.
The satellite images, which were released to the public, were dated March 16.
"The imagery has been progressively captured by satellites passing over various areas," John McGarry, air commodore of the Royal Australian Air Force, said Thursday. "The task of analyzing the imagery is quite difficult. It requires drawing down frames and going through it frame by frame."
He added that the images were passed to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority as soon the signs of floating debris were discovered.
A senior U.S. investigator said he was "highly skeptical" that the debris spotted on satellite came from an airplane.
"I've seen the pictures," he said. "Those pieces are pretty damned big."
In a crash, he said, the airplane usually breaks up into smaller pieces.
If the investigator is correct, it would be the second large piece of debris that was initially identified as possibly being part of the plane and turned out to be something else. A few days after the plane disappeared, the Chinese released a satellite picture of something they said might be wreckage from a Boeing 777. It proved to be too big.
The investigator also said that a review of the cargo manifest showed that the plane was carrying lithium batteries but that this was not unusual, and that the plane's pattern of movements, as recorded by radar, "wouldn't fit with any known in-flight fire we've had to date."
Hishammuddin Hussein, the defense minister of Malaysia, which is in overall charge of the search, said at a news conference near Kuala Lumpur later Thursday that the information from Australia had been "actually corroborated to a certain extent from other satellites." He did not elaborate.
The Success, the Australian naval vessel on its way to the area, "is well equipped to recover any objects located and proven to be from MH370," the Australian maritime authority said in a statement.
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