(Reuters) — Search planes left Perth on Friday (March 28) as the search of the remote southern Indian Ocean for a Malaysian jetliner resumed looking for floating debris that satellite images appear to show in the area.
Ten aircraft are scheduled to take part in the search on Friday including a Chinese Ilyushin IL-76that took off from Perth Airport before dawn, heading 2,500 km (1,550 miles) southwest into the search area where high winds and icy weather had halted flights on Thursday (March 27).
The search zone centres on the latest sightings of possible wreckage that were captured by Thai and Japanese satellites in roughly the same frigid expanse of sea as earlier images reported byFrance, Australia and China.
The objects spotted by the Thai satellite on Monday (March 24) were between 2 metres (6.5 ft) and 16 metres (52 ft) in size, Thailand’s space technology development agency said.
The disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines jet, which vanished from civilian radar screens less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur on a routine flight to Beijing on March 8, has gripped the world and baffled investigators.
Officials believe someone on board Flight MH370 may have shut off the plane’s communications systems before flying it thousands of miles off course where it crashed into the ocean in one of the most isolated and foreboding regions on the planet.