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THE IMPACT: Malaysia gripped by the mystery of lost flight
11:55pm: The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) says search operations in the Southern Indian Ocean for the missing Malaysia Airlines aircraft have been completed for the day in the Australian Search and Rescue Region.
So far there has been no sign of the possible debris identified on satellite images provided to AMSA by the Australian Geospatial Intelligence Organisation.
Four aircraft were tasked by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority on Thursday to a 23,000 square kilometre area about 2500 kilometres south-west of Perth.
The aircraft covered an area of 23000 square kilometres in their search however were hampered by bad weather conditions.
A merchant ship arrived in the search area on Thursday evening. Another merchant ship is en route to the area.
You can read the full statement here.
11:47pm: Norwegian car carrier Höegh St Petersburg has reached the Indian Ocean area where possible debris of the missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 plane was spotted, shipping company Hoeeg Autoliners said.
"The ship has arrived at the site to take part in the search," said Cecilie Moe, spokeswoman for the Norwegian company.
According to another Hooeg Autoliners spokesperson, Christian Dahll, the search window for Thursday was limited by sunset.
The "St. Petersburg" vessel, a vehicles carrier, was on its way from Port Louis in Mauritius to Melbourne, when it was requested by the Australian authorities to reroute in order to identify the debris spotted by satellite in the southern Indian Ocean.
10:32pm: Photographers have captured the emotional reaction to the potential discovery of MH370.
The most striking pictures have been collated in a gallery here.
9:26pm: Lindsay Murdoch: Malaysia Airlines plans to fly relatives of the passengers and crew to Perth if the objects are confirmed to be from MH370, the company's chief executive Ahmad Jauhar Yahya has said.
He said the company would help families if they wanted to be close as close as possible to the plane when it is found.
Malaysian officials were last night briefing families on the Australian search operation.
Malaysia's Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussien said he "feels" for what relatives and friends are going through.
"I would tell them my sympathy, my heart goes out to them all the time," he said.
Mr Hishammuddin said that for the first time in 12 days there is a "credible" lead in the search.
"As long as there is hope we will continue. To be fair to the families we will never, never give up," he said.
9:06pm: Fairfax Radio federal political reporter Frank Keany says the search will continue for another three hours:
8:54pm: The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) has just issued this update:
8:40pm: Here's a Google map of the location of the two objects located by the Australia Maritime Safety Authority.
7.22pm: Philip Wen: As family members of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight filed through the familiar double doors of the conference room in Beijing's Lido Hotel, they must have felt they were living a recurring nightmare.
Squeezing through a gauntlet of photographers, reporters and television cameras has become a daily reality for many of them, but the intensity of global media interest today was arguably at its highest since the plane first went missing.
On Thursday, news spread quickly that Australian authorities had detected two large floating objects in waters west of Perth.
About 100 people watched intently as a live broadcast of the press conference in Australia was beamed into the room.
A sad, collective sigh went up in the room when an Australian official said the first thing to do would be to check for survivors. Mostly they sat silently, hanging on every word.
Police and medical personnel stood by at the back.
But by the end of the press conference, families still did not have the definitive information they have been waiting for. Nothing had been confirmed. Some stayed on to watch the rolling news broadcast for any updates, but most filed out, knowing not much more than they did two weeks ago.
Despite the strongest physical evidence yet that the plane may have crashed, many relatives at the hotel were fighting to remain positive, and said they were still holding out hope.
One woman who said her husband was on the flight told Fairfax Media through tears that she hoped the floating objects would not prove to be wreckage of the plane.
"I hope it's not the truth," she said.
7.04pm: The Queensland Police Service has issued the following statement on behalf of the family of Rod and Mary Burrows, two Australians on board the missing jet:
The family members of Rod and Mary Burrows are requesting the media continue to respect their privacy, particularly in the vicinity of their family home in Sinnamon Park.
They ask that media provide space for themselves and other visitors to come and go. They understand the recent attention follows the news of possible debris found in the Indian Ocean.
There are no further statements planned at this stage.
6.55pm: Saffron Howden: Tania Ireton, a birdwatcher, has spent weeks traversing the vast and lonely southern Indian Ocean on an expedition.
In late 2012, she and around 40 others boarded a small Russian research vessel and set course for Heard Island, an Australian territory in Antarctic waters.
They did not see land for eight days after setting out from Fremantle.
"It's one of the stretches of ocean that has very few islands," she said. "There was little to see except for birds and the occasional whale and dolphins."
Ms Ireton said they saw very little debris in the ocean on their 25 day journey and most was sighted closer to the coast of Australia.
"I can't recall seeing anything except the occasional plank, or something," the member of BirdLife Australia, from Melbourne, said. "It's a very, very big ocean."
The first sighting of dry land was more than 3,500km from Perth, at Amsterdam Island, or Ile Amsterdam, a French territory with just 30 residents, none of whom live there permanently, involved in various types of research.
It is considered one of the most remote islands in the world.
6:40pm: Weather conditions at the search area aren't idea but are set to improve, according to Weatherzone:
6.28pm: Science Editor Nicky Phillips has more on the likely difficulties of recovering a black box from the depths of the Indian Ocean:
Oceanographer Chari Pattiaratch said any attempt to recover the wreckage or black box would be extremely difficult.
''You can't go in an aircraft and have a look, you have to send ships and underwater vehicles to recover [the wreckage], he said.
In March 2007, the Australian Defence Force recovered the wreckage of a Black Hawk helicopter that crashed into the sea near Fiji, killing two soldiers. A Navy survey ship was used to pinpoint the exact location of the chopper before a remotely operated vehicle, similar to the one used to find the Titanic, was deployed to travel almost 3000 metres to the sea floor.
6.22pm: Tom Allard: If the debris field in the Indian Ocean proves to be the remnants of MH370, it will be a major breakthrough in the investigation. But the question of what exactly happened to the aircraft could still take years to ascertain, if it is revealed at all.
Hampering investigators are the depths of the Indian Ocean; the strong and unpredictable currents in the expanse of water and the failure to find any physical sign of location of the plane for 12 days.
Over that period, says University of NSW oceanographer Erik van Sebille, the debris from any crashed plane would have likely moved at least 100km. The only problem is that it could have gone in any direction from the crash site.
All these factors make finding the all-important flight data recorder - the black box - all the more difficult. It would have likely sunk to the ocean floor quickly if the plane ditched into water.
It took two years, a search involving French nuclear submarines, three robo-subs and at least $50 million to find the black box from Air France Flight 447, which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 in deep waters.
6:04pm: The Department of Defence has released the satellite imagery. One image shows a 24 metre piece of debris, the second shows a smaller section.
You can see the photos in our gallery above.
6:04pm: Lindsay Murdoch: Malaysia's leaders have reacted cautiously to the sighting after days of false leads.
"With every lead there is hope," said Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, who had been in charge of the largest search for an aircraft on record. We will need to wait for the Australian aircrafts to go to the area...we need to verify," he said.
Mr Hishammuddin said he had not being told what kind of debris had been sighted.
Earlier a senior Australian navy officer left search headquarters at a Kuala Lumpur hotel.
"I can't comment," the officer said.
Prime Minister Najib Razak received a call from Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott informing him that "two possible objects had been identified the southern Indian Ocean," Mr Hishammuddin said.
The Australian High Commission in Kuala Lumpur has also briefed Malaysian authorities.
5:48pm: Interesting reaction from Indonesia to Prime Minister Tony Abbott's announcement:
5:44pm: Nicky Phillips: If the debris spotted off the coast of Perth is part of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 it is floating in the roughest part of the world, said an Australian oceanographer.
Chari Pattiaratchi, from the University of Western Australia, said the debris had been located close to the 'Roaring Forties', where the wind created giant swells and waves.
''You may have debris at the surface but the bulk of the aircraft would be at the bottom of the ocean,'' he said. ''It's very deep down there, about five kilometres,'' said Professor Pattiaratchi.
''Trying to get something out from five kilometres in the roughest part of the world is going to be extreme,'' he said. "The currents in the area move from west to east.
''So if it has been in the water for about 10 days it would have drifted about 300 to 400 kilometres to the east toward Perth," said Professor Pattiaratchi.
The debris would likely have been travelling about one nautical mile per hour, or one knot.
''If it keeps going it'll go to the south of Perth or south of Australia,'' he said.
The roaring forties are located forty degrees south, where there was almost no land to slow down the winds. These create strong, high waves and swell, he said. The currents extend right through the water column because the area is so deep.
5:37pm: Marissa Calligeros: The family of missing Queensland couple Bob and Cathy Lawton huddled around a television on Thursday afternoon fearing authorities would confirm the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 had been found.
News that satellite images had detected possible debris from the plane, all but dashed their hopes their loved ones would be found alive.
Mr Lawton’s brother David Lawton declined to comment when contacted by Fairfax Media, saying only that he was at home with his extended family, having just watched a televised press conference about the discovery of two objects bobbing in waters off the Australian coast.
5:22pm: From Fairfax's China correspondent Philip Wen:
5:17pm: ABC News in the US is reporting that a US flight crew searching in the southern Indian Ocean has told one of their journalists they're receiving radar hits of a ''significant size''.
The radar hits indicate something may be beneath the ocean's surface.
US ABC News foreign editor Jon Williams reported that the flight crew had given the information to his ABC colleague, David Wright:
5:15pm: Could the potential debris spotted via satellite in the Southern Indian Ocean be a wing?
Reuters is reporting that the size of a wing of Boeing 777 is about 27 metres.
Officials earlier said two objects up to 24 metres have been spotted by satellite, providing a lead in the search for the missing Malaysian jetliner.
The following are the basic dimensions of the Boeing 777-200ER which was used on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, according to Boeing's website:
wing span 60.9 metres; overall length 63.7 metres, tail height 18.5 metres, fuselage diameter 6.19 metres
The length of each wing was not immediately available but the published data implies that each wing is about 27.4 metres long, after adjusting for the width of the fuselage.
5:01pm: Lindsay Murdoch, Kuala Lumpur: If there is confirmation the plane has crashed into the sea, authorities in Kuala Lumpur would refocus investigations into how one of the world's most sophisticated airliners could inexplicably lose communications, turn around from its scheduled flight path and fly for hours into the vast expanses of the Indian Ocean.
Authorities have assessed as a "high degree of certainty" there was a deliberate act by someone on board to change the plane's course of direction.
But after 12 days of investigations police have failed to establish any strong leads.
They have concentrated their inquiries on sabotage or hijacking, checking the backgrounds of all those on board but so far have not found anything suspicious.
Authorities also have not ruled out a catastrophic event on board that holed the fuselage.
Under this scenario, the pilots typed keys into a computer to turn the plane around but lost consciousness as the cabin depressurise, and the plane flew on until running out of fuel.
4:44pm: From Philip Wen, Fairfax's China correspondent, with families of missing MH370 passengers in Beijing:
4:31pm: There has been a lot of talk since the press conference of the possibility the debris spotted in the ocean could have been a shipping container.
John Young from AMSA's Emergency Response Division raised the possibility in the press conference.
The largest piece of debris spotted in the ocean has been revealed to be 24 metres.
Standard shipping containers come in different sizes, ranging from roughly 2.4 metres to 12.2 metres in length.
Their heights vary from 2.3 metres to almost 2.6 metres.
4:27pm: Some information from the RAAF on the Orion aircraft which is currently searching the area for debris that is potentially the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.
The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Orion is capable of maritime surveillance, anti-submarine and anti-ship warfare, naval fleet support and search and rescue supply.
The planes each carry two pilots, two flight engineers, a tactical coordinator, a navigator, a sensor employment manager, and six airborne electronic analysts.
They are 35.6 metres long and 10.44 metres high, with a wingspan of 30.8 metres. They weigh 61,200kg and can travel up to 750 km/hr for up to 15 hours.
The aircraft are fitted with a variety of sensors, including digital multi-mode radar, electronic support measures, electro-optics detectors (infra-red and visual), magnetic anomaly detectors, identification friend or foe systems and acoustic detectors.
4:18pm: Philip Wen, Beijing: At the Lido Hotel in Beijing, grim-faced relatives filed into a hotel conference room to watch a live broadcast of the Australian press conference.
About 100 people in the room watched silently and intently, with police and medical personnel standing by.
A sad, collective sigh went up in the room when the Australian official said the first thing to do would be to check for survivors.
One woman in a blue jumper, who said her husband was on the Malaysia Airlines flight, told Fairfax Media through tears that she hoped the Australian government was wrong and that the objects would not prove to be wreckage of the plane.
"I hope it's not the truth," she said.
4:11pm: If the debris field - including one piece of material reportedly 24 metres in length - is Flight MH370, the plane's black box will provide the key to finding out why it disappeared.
The black box would be unaffected by the shutdown of the plane's transponders.
It records extensive data from the plane's flight system, including data from engines, changes to plane's controls, altitude and oxygen levels.
Most critically, it records cockpit conversations.
But the depth of the Indian Ocean - at some 3000-4000 metres - will prove a huge obstacle to locating the black box, as will the 12 days it took to find the debris.
Debris from the crash of an Air France jet in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 was sighted within two days of it going down and positively identified in five days. But it took two years, the deployment of French nuclear submarines and at least $50 million to locate the black box.
The black box should emit a signal but at such depths, it may only have a range of as little as 10 nautical miles. Its signal will stop in about 20 days, when the black box's batteries run out.
4:09pm: A bit more about those aircraft en route to the potential debris.
- a RAAF Orion aircraft first arrived on the scene at 1.50pm AEDT;
- this was followed by a US Navy P8 Poseidon aircraft at 3pm;
- a second RAAF Orion is expected to depart RAAF Base Pearce, north of Perth, at 6pm;
- a New Zealand Air Force Orion, is due to depart at 8pm.
While US Navy surveillance planes are equipped with radar, cameras and electro-optical sensors, searching for objects on open water is an arduous task, with sailors at every window looking with binoculars and the plane diving to identify targets visually, said Michael Boston, a retired US Navy chief petty officer who's served as an electronic warfare specialist on P3-C Orion surveillance plane.
3:53pm: The AMSA press conference has now wrapped up. Here's a few of the key points to emerge.
Commercial satellites have captured images of several large objects in the ocean off Western Australia.
The images were analysed this morning and thought to be credible enough to warrant a full-scale search by aircraft and ships for the objects in the belief they may be debris from missing flight MH370.
The objects are around 2500km south-west of Perth.
The largest of the objects is up to 24 metres long.
One RAAF aircraft is already at the location. A further three aircraft have been sent to the area, including a New Zealand Air Force Orion and a US Navy P8 Poseidon aircraft.
It is not unusual to see debris floating in the ocean. Containers are sometimes adrift after falling overboard, for instance.
There is no guarantee the objects are from the missing flight, but this is the best lead search authorities have had so far.
It is not known when the objects will be physically located.
3:50pm: From Fairfax's China correspondent Philip Wen, from the Lido Hotel in Beijing where families of passengers on the missing plane have been gathering for news updates:
3:39pm: The satellite images are credible enough to divert the search to this area, authorities have said.
However, they have reminded reporters that this is still no guarantee the objects in question are the plane.
"Satellite images do not always turn out to be related to the search even if they look good," John Young says.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/missing-malaysia-airlines-plane-debris-found-in-search-for-mh370-says-australian-prime-minister-tony-abbott-20140320-354xz.html#ixzz2wTvCGJlU
3:36pm: The largest piece of debris spotted is up to 24 metres long.
John Young from AMSA's Emergency Response Division said the images were captured by satellite. They may not be related to the missing aircraft.
"The indication are of objects that are a reasonable size and are possibly awash, with water going up and down over the surface," he said.
This is "a lead", he says; it is probably the "best lead" we have right now.
3:28pm: AMSA says in its latest statement that the Australian Geospatial Intelligence Organisation - Defence's satellite experts - have assessed the satellite images as "a possible indication of debris".
The debris has been spotted approximately 2500 kilometres south-west of Perth, according to AMSA.
A RAAF Orion first arrived on the scene of the potential debris at 1.50pm AEDT, AMSA says.
3:25pm: From Fairfax's China correspondent Philip Wen:
3:12pm: Australia took over the search in the Indian Ocean on Monday.
The Indian Ocean lies on one of two ''vectors'' that authorities have identified as paths the mystery flight might have taken.
If flight MH370 did indeed take a south-west path, then it would have most likely have gone into Australia's search and rescue zone, which stretches thousands of kilometres into the Indian Ocean, extending about halfway to southern Africa.
3:12pm: Fairfax's correspondent in China, Philip Wen, is watching the reaction on Chinese social media:
3:04pm: The Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is co-ordinating the search, has called a news conference for 3.30pm when they will be announcing more details about the objects spotted in the ocean off Perth.
2:59am: The Australian-led search for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight has had an apparent breakthrough, with satellite images showing two objects in waters off Perth.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott told Parliament on Thursday afternoon that an Australian P-3 Orion aircraft had been diverted to check out the objects and would be followed by other planes.
The first Orion was due to arrive on the scene about 2pm, he said. Mr Abbott stressed it was not yet clear whether they were parts of the plane.
But Mr Abbott described the breakthrough as "new and credible information"
"The Australian maritime safety authority has received information based on satellite imagery of objects possibly related to the search," Mr Abbott said. "Following specialist analysis of this satellite imagery, two possible objects related to the search have been identified."
"I should tell the House - and we must keep this in mind - the task of locating these objects will be extremely difficult and it may turn out that they are not related to the search for flight MH370," Mr Abbott said.
"Nevertheless, I did want to update the House on this potentially important development.’’
Mr Abbott said he had informed his Malaysian counterpart, Prime Minister Najib Razak, and promised to keep him updated.