CANBERRA, Australia—Australian authorities said they were looking for objects sighted by Chinese military planes in the southern Indian Ocean, despite worsening weather conditions that are hampering the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Authorities said the objects were within a search area spanning nearly 26,500 square miles that was being scoured by 10 aircraft, including two Chinese Ilyushin IL-76 planes, which have joined the operation for the first time. The debris sightings were the latest leads in an eight-day search of the southern Indian Ocean for Flight 370, which disappeared carrying 239 people en route from Malaysia to Beijing on March 8.
"The Australian Maritime Safety Authority was advised about the reported objects sighted by a Chinese aircraft," an AMSA spokeswoman said on Monday. "Attempts will be made to relocate them."
The sightings followed an earlier report by China's official Xinhua news agency that crew on one of the IL-76 planes in the area spotted two large, white items and several smaller objects floating several kilometers away from them. Xinhua said the Chinese search plane was returning to base to refuel.
However, the search for Flight 370 in waters some 1,550 miles from the Western Australian city of Perth was being hindered by a sudden downturn in weather conditions on Monday, with a band of rain bringing high winds and low cloud cover. The outlook was also poor, with a cold front forecast to move through the search area from the west on Tuesday, also bringing showers and poorer visibility.
"It is a very difficult task," Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said in Canberra. "The search area is very large today, around 68,000 square kilometers (26,000 square miles). That's a lot of water to look for a tiny object."
Mr. Truss said aircrews may have to suspend visual searches—aircrews scanning the ocean's surface with binoculars from low-flying planes—and rely more on radar if the weather deteriorates substantially. That would be significant as they consider radar to be less effective in finding objects in satellite images released by China and the U.S., and more recently by France, which appeared to be submerged.
"If you can't see, then of course we've got to rely on instruments and radar," Mr. Truss said. "That's helpful, but it can't pick up some of the things that we might be looking for."
Ocean conditions in the search area are already some of the world's roughest, making it a challenge to find floating debris. Sailors have dubbed the area "the roaring 40s"—a stretch around 40 degrees latitude in the southern hemisphere where strong winds can roar like a lion. Ships involved in the search face the problem of looking for debris that may be partly submerged amid continuously rolling waves up to several meters high, according to some ocean experts and past members of the Australian military.
In a fillip for search crews, however, the government's Bureau of Meteorology said in a statement that a distant but major cyclonic storm off the northwest coast of Western Australia wasn't expected to affect the search area because it was expected to weaken while moving southward.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on Sunday that authorities have a number of credible leads. They include satellite images of objects in the southern Indian Ocean captured by DigitalGlobe Inc. —a provider of imagery to the Pentagon's geospatial agency—and Chinese images that, at first blush, appeared to be consistent with the earlier satellite photos. The commercial images showed two pieces of debris, the largest of which was around 79 feet (24 meters) long, while Chinese military discovered a large object measuring 72 feet long and 42 feet wide.
"It is still too early to be definite, but 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 happened to this ill-fated aircraft," Mr. Abbott told reporters in some of the most upbeat remarks since his country assumed the lead of the international search almost a week ago.
The chief of Malaysia's civil-aviation authority said Sunday authorities had received new satellite images from French authorities of possible debris roughly 370 miles west of the area where the search is now focused. Mr. Truss said the latest images were outside the zone identified as the most likely area to search for the missing jet.
"Having said that, we've got to check out all the options. We still don't know for certain that the aircraft is even in this area," he said. "We are, I guess, clutching at whatever little piece of information comes along, to try and find a place where we might be able to try and concentrate the efforts."
On Monday, a spokesman for the Pacific-based U.S. Seventh Fleet said the Navy was bringing a black-box locator to the region. The system could help locate Flight 370's flight recorders, containing digital flight information and the final two hours of cockpit voice recordings, if the plane crashed into the ocean where depths can reach 13,000 feet.
The TPL-25 Towed Pinger Locator System has been able to locate black boxes on downed Navy and commercial aircraft down to a maximum depth of 20,000 feet anywhere in the world, the Navy said. Commercial aircraft pingers are mounted directly on to the flight recorder, the recovery of which is critical to an accident investigation.
"Australia has black box detectors, but they cannot operate at the sort of depths that may be required if we find debris," said a spokesman for the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which governs aircraft safety in the country.
One significant discovery by searchers on Saturday was a number of small items, including a wooden pallet surrounded by strapping belts. Australia's maritime authority said wooden pallets were commonly used on commercial aircraft. However, efforts to confirm the initial sighting—made by a civilian plane—were fruitless.
Sunday's search found "nothing of note," according to Mr. Truss. Asked whether there was a timeline on when the multinational search could be abandoned, he said the 30-day operating life of the black box data recorder would be a natural point for reassessment.
"The black box recorder will emit signals for about a month, so that's obviously the first critical point," he said.
Civil and military aircraft from Australia, New Zealand, the U.S., China and Japan are assisting in Monday's search. The broader search operation in the southern Indian Ocean has covered nearly 200,000 square miles (518,000 square kilometers) since it began March 17, nine days after the plane vanished.
Source: Wall Street Journal by Rob Taylor
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