MH370: Bad weather suspends search as new objects spotted

Planes and ships searching for debris suspected of being from the missing Malaysian jetliner failed to find any Thursday before bad weather cut their hunt short, as Thailand said one of its satellites had spotted hundreds of objects in the area.

The Thai satellite spotted the objects floating in the southern Indian Ocean near an area where planes and ships have been hunting unsuccessfully for a week for any sign of debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared March 8 with 239 people aboard.

The images from the Thai satellite showed "300 objects of various sizes" in the ocean, about 1,675 miles southwest of Perth, Australia, said Anond Snidvongs, director of Thailand's space technology development agency.

He said the images, taken Monday by the Thaichote satellite, took two days to process and were relayed to Malaysian authorities on Wednesday.

The objects were about 125 miles from the area where a French satellite on Sunday spotted 122 objects, and ranged in size from 6 feet to 53 feet long, Anond said.

The announcement came after the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said it had to pull back all 11 planes scheduled to take part in the search Thursday because of heavy rain, wind and low clouds. Five ships continued the hunt.

All but three of the planes — a U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon, a Japanese P-3 Orion and a Japanese Gulfstream jet — reached the search zone, about 1,550 miles southwest of Perth, before the air search was suspended, AMSA spokesman Sam Cardwell said.

They were there "maybe two hours" and did not find anything, Cardwell said.

"They got a bit of time in, but it was not useful because there was no visibility," he said.

In a message on its Twitter account, AMSA said the bad weather was expected to last 24 hours.

Planes have been flying out of Perth for a week, looking without any success for objects spotted in vague satellite images, including the French one.

Finding them would give physical confirmation that Flight 370, which was scheduled to fly from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, crashed.

That would allow searchers to narrow the hunt for the wreckage of the Boeing 777 and its black boxes, which could solve the mystery of why the jet was so far off course.

Malaysian officials said earlier this week that satellite data confirmed that the plane crashed into the southern Indian Ocean. On Thursday, Malaysia Airlines ran a full-page condolence advertisement with a black background in a major newspaper.

"Our sincerest condolences go out to the loved ones of the 239 passengers, friends and colleagues. Words alone cannot express our enormous sorrow and pain," read the advertisement in the New Straits Times.

The 122 objects captured by the French satellite ranged in size from 3 feet to 75 feet long, but the search for them and the objects observed from the Thai satellite will have to wait until the weather in the search area improves. The situation echoes the frustration of earlier sweeps that failed to zero in on three objects spotted by satellites.

Experts cautioned that the area's frequent high seas and bad weather and its distance from land were complicating an already trying search.

"This is a really rough piece of ocean," said Kerry Sieh, director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore. "I worry that people carrying out the rescue mission are going to get into trouble."

Malaysia has been criticized over its handling of one of the most perplexing mysteries in aviation history. Much of the most strident criticism has come from relatives of the Chinese passengers, some of whom expressed outrage that Malaysia essentially declared their loved ones dead without recovering a single piece of wreckage.

China dispatched a special envoy to Kuala Lumpur, Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Yesui, to deal with the crisis. Zhang met with acting Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein on Wednesday and received a briefing on the satellite data that "led to the conclusion that MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean," Malaysia's Ministry of Transport said in a statement.

The Associated Press