The first plane sent today to fly over a remote section of the southern Indian Ocean returned empty handed from its hunt for objects possibly connected to the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, Australian officials said.
Four other planes are also searching there today, scouring rough seas for objects detected on satellite images. The search area is so remote that it takes aircraft longer to fly there –- four hours -– than it allows for the search.
Meanwhile, Malaysian officials gave a blunt assessment of where the investigation stood, despite the glimmer of hope offered Thursday by the tantalizing satellite images of possible debris in the Indian Ocean.
Asked during a daily news briefing in Kuala Lumpur whether they had any strong lead or any idea what happened to missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Malaysia's Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein simply replied "No."
“This is going to be a long haul," Hishammuddin said of the investigation.
While Thursday’s search was thwarted by clouds and fog, visibility is improving today, Australian officials said. John Young, manager of the Australian maritime Safety Authority’s emergency response division, said today's search was re-planned to be more visual because previous radar efforts were unsuccessful. That means the aircraft will be spaced more closely together and flying lower, scanning a smaller region.
"Although this search area is much smaller than we started with, it nonetheless is a big area when you're looking out the window and trying to see something by eye," Young said in a video statement. "We may have to do this a few times to be confident about the coverage of that search area."
Australian officials stressed the difficulty of the search. Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the search location, about 1,400 miles southwest of Perth, is extremely remote, “about the most inaccessible spot that you could imagine on the face of the earth,” he said at a news conference today in Papua New Guinea.
“But if there is anything down there we will find it. We owe it to the families of those people to do no less," he said.
Abbott spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping, whom he described as “devastated.” Of the 227 passengers on the missing flight, 154 were from China.
Flight 370 disappeared March 8 above the Gulf of Thailand en route to Beijing. The search for the plane has involved 26 countries.
Satellite images showing two objects led officials to re-focus efforts in the southern Indian Ocean. The largest object is about 80 feet long, officials said. Until the objects are recovered and studied, officials won’t be sure that they are connected to the lost plane. Abbott said the objects could simply be a container that fell off a ship.
“We just don’t know,” he said.
Young has called the satellite images “a lead, it’s probably the best lead we have right now.”
Multiple countries are contributing to the re-focused search. Australia’s efforts involve two Royal Australian Air Force P-3 Orion planes and an ultra-long-range Bombardier Global Express. A U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon is also involved with the search, along with a New Zealand P-3 Orion. China is sending three warships and an icebreaker, as well as three military planes.
Hishammuddin spoke with U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel today at about 10 a.m. ET about the deploying additional resources. Chief among them will be hydroponic sonar-buoys to detect the “ping” of the black box -- the flight data recorder.
But before those sonar-buoys can be used, the search areas will have to be narrowed, Hishammuddin said.
However, when it was pointed out during the news conference that the search area does not seem to be narrowing, Hishammuddin listed the countries taking part in the search with the most sophisticated equipment in the world.
"If we as an international community can’t narrow the area, I don’t know who can,” he said.
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