France on Sunday provided new satellite images of possible debris of the Malaysian airliner deep in the south Indian Ocean, even as search for the jet which mysteriously disappeared 16 days ago intensified with India, China and Japan deploying surveillance aircraft.
In another possible lead, Australia said it has spotted a wooden cargo pallet in the southern Indian Ocean, expressing ‘increasing hope’ of a breakthrough in locating the jet missing since March 8.
The pallet along with belts or straps was spotted by one of the Australian aircraft deployed to hunt for the Beijing-bound Flight MH370 that disappeared from radar screen, one hour after taking off from Kuala lumpur.
“This (Sunday) morning, Malaysia received new satellite images from the French authorities showing potential objects in the vicinity of the southern corridor. Malaysia immediately relayed these images to the Australian rescue co-ordination centre,” Malaysia Transport Ministry said in a statement.
A Malaysian official involved in the search operations said the images provided by France were captured on Friday and spotted objects about 930 kilometers north of the location where the objects in the images released by Australia and China were found.
According to France, the debris was floating around 2,300 kilometres from Perth and it would increase its satellite coverage to continue the search in the zone.
This is the third set of images in a week of possible debris of the Malaysia Airlines plane in the area.It has not yet been established whether the French satellite images zeroed in the area where Chinese imageries spotted some floating objects.
Earlier Australia and China also provided satellite images showing possible wreckage in a remote area of the Indian Ocean, however nothing concrete has been found by aircraft hovering over the area.
Though there is little doubt that the Boeing 777-200 has plunged deep in the remote parts of the ocean off Australia, what has baffled aviation authorities is that no trace of the plane has been found despite putting into use hi-tech surveillance systems.
More planes joined the hunt in the desolate area in the Indian Ocean on Sunday, about 2,500 kilometres southwest of Perth, where three days of scouring yielded little results.The Australian rescue co-ordination centre deployed eight aircraft — four military and four civilian — to the southern corridor on Sunday.
“New Chinese satellite imagery does seem to suggest at least one large object down there, consistent with the object that earlier satellite imagery discovered,” Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said.
“Yesterday one of our civilian search aircraft got visuals on a number of objects in the Australia search zone. (There were) a number of small objects, fairly close together within the Australian search zone, including as I understand it a wooden pallet. Before we can be too specific about what it might be we need to recover some of this material.