UPDATE ON #MH370: Australia Says No Possible Debris From Missing Plane Found Yet

The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is set to enter its third week after Australian authorities said planes sent to locate two pieces of possible wreckage in the remote southern Indian Ocean had failed to spot the objects.

As more countries prepared to join the international effort to locate the plane over the weekend, Australia's deputy prime minister warned that the debris, which was spotted by a satellite five days ago, may have sunk or drifted for hundreds of miles. 

The Boeing 777 disappeared off the coast of Malaysia almost two weeks ago with 239 people – 153 of them Chinese – on board, sparking a multinational search encompassing millions of square miles, with the focus now on a 23,000 sq kilometre zone in the Indian Ocean.
Friday's sweep of the area, located about 1,500 miles south-west of Perth, involved three Australian P-3 Orion and a US navy P-8 Poseidon (both types of maritime surveillance aeroplane), a commercial jet and a Norwegian merchant ship. Continue afterthe cut...

In a statement released on Friday, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said the search had ended for the day without any sightings.
It added that the focus would remain on "locating any survivors on board the flight and searching for possible objects that could be connected to the missing aircraft or discounting them". The satellite images gave no indication that the objects belong to the missing aircraft. 

"Something that was floating on the sea that long ago may no longer be floating," Australia's deputy prime minister, Warren Truss, told reporters in Perth. "It may have slipped to the bottom. It's also certain that any debris or other material would have moved a significant distance over that time, potentially hundreds of kilometres."
The Malaysian defence minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, confirmed there had been no new developments, in another blow to anxious relatives who have been critical of Malaysian authorities for delays in releasing information. 

"This is going to be a long haul," he told reporters. "But the focus has always been to find the airplane, and the focus is to reduce the area of search and possible rescue."
On Friday a delegation of Malaysian government and military officials flew to Beijing to meet relatives, who berated them for the way the search has been conducted. 

"We wanted to see you in the first 24 and 48 hours, so that we wouldn't have had to bear the suffering of the last 13 days," shouted one relative. "The plane turned around, but you denied this, and because of this you have wasted so much time."
On Friday it emerged that, according to the MH370 cargo manifest, the plane was carrying lithium-ion batteries. These are categorised as "dangerous cargo" as they can be unstable at altitude and can catch fire if not transported correctly.

An accidental fire caused by cargo is just one of several theories behind the plane's disappearance after it took off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing just after midnight on 8 March.

Investigators suspect that the plane was deliberately diverted thousands of miles from its scheduled path. They have given more credence to the possibility that the aircraft was hijacked or sabotaged, but have not ruled out technical problems.

Sources at the Ministry of Defence in London confirmed reports that a survey ship, HMS Echo, had been deployed to aid the search effort in the southern Indian Ocean. In addition, China and Japan are to send planes to the area over the weekend.

"It's about the most inaccessible spot that you can imagine on the face of the Earth, but if there is anything down there, we will find it," the Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, told reporters in Papua New Guinea, where he is on a visit. 

"Now it could just be a container that's fallen off a ship. We just don't know, but we owe it to the families, and the friends and the loved ones to do everything we can to try to resolve what is as yet an extraordinary riddle." 

Australia dispatched aircraft to the area earlier this week after satellite images showed two floating objects that officials hoped would provide the first physical clue as to the plane's fate since it disappeared off Malaysia's coast less than an hour into its flight.

In an incident that has quickly turned into the biggest mystery in commercial aviation history, attempts to locate the aircraft have been hampered by the sheer scale of the search area and the complexity of the operation, which now involves more than 20 countries.

Using data from military radar and satellites, officials believe MH370's transponder was deliberately switched off as it crossed the Gulf of Thailand. The aircraft then made a sharp turn west, re-crossing the Malay peninsula before settling into an established route towards India.

Electronic pings picked up by commercial satellites suggest the plane flew on for at least another six hours.

The international effort to locate the plane is expected to expand over the weekend. India said it was sending two aircraft, a Poseidon P-8I maritime surveillance aircraft and a C-130 Hercules transporter, to the area.

China's Antarctic research icebreaker, Snow Dragon, will set off from Perth to join the operation, Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported maritime authorities as saying. As many as five more Chinese ships were en route to the search zone from across the Indian Ocean, Xinhua said.

India is also sending another P-8I and four warships to the Andaman Sea – where the plane was last seen on military radar on 8 March – even though the area has already been swept.