A warship with an aircraft black box detector along with nine other planes left Australia Sunday morning to search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, two days after ships plucked objects from the Indian Ocean to determine whether they were related to the missing plane. None were confirmed to be from MH370, leaving searchers with no sign of the jet, three weeks after it disappeared.
The objects, spotted 1,150 miles west of Perth, included three that were white, red and orange, the colors of the missing plane, but it wasn't clear if they were from the plane.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority said it was not known how much flotsam, such as from fishing activities, is ordinarily floating in the ocean. "At least one distinctive fishing object has been identified," it said.
Malaysia's Defense and Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters near Kuala Lumpur, where the flight departed from on March 8, that he's hoping for some news soon.
Australian authorities coordinating the operation moved the search 685 miles north on Friday after new analysis of radar and satellite data concluded the plane traveled faster and for a shorter distance after vanishing from civilian radar screens than previously estimated.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the job of locating the debris was still difficult. "We should not underestimate the difficulty of this work — it is an extraordinarily remote location,” he said.
The area spans about 123,000 square miles, roughly the size of Poland or New Mexico. In most places, ocean depths range from about 6,560 feet to 13,120 feet, although the much deeper Diamantina trench -- at over 26,000 feet deep -- edges the search area.
An image captured on Friday by a New Zealand plane showed a white rectangular object floating in the sea, but it was not clear whether it was related to the missing jet or was just sea trash.
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Relatives and friends of the passengers said they were tortured by the uncertainty over the fate of their loved ones, as they wait for hard evidence that the plane had crashed.
"This is the trauma of maybe he's dead, maybe he's not. Maybe he's still alive and we need to find him. Maybe he died within the first hour of the flight, and we don't know," Sarah Bajc, the girlfriend of American passenger Philip Wood, told the AP in an interview in Beijing. "I mean, there's absolutely no way for me to reconcile that in my heart."
The Malaysian government has come under strong criticism from China, home to more than 150 of the passengers, where relatives of the missing have accused the government of "delays and deception."
More than 20 Chinese relatives staged a brief protest on Saturday outside the Lido hotel in Beijing, where families have been staying for the past three weeks, demanding evidence of the plane's fate.
The peaceful protest came just days after dozens of angry relatives clashed with police after trying to storm the Malaysian embassy.
Many of Saturday's protesters carried slogans demanding the "truth" about their lost loved ones.
"They don't have any direct evidence," said Steve Wang, who had a relative on the flight. "(Their conclusion) is only based on mathematical (analysis) and they used an uncertain mathematical model. Then they come to the conclusion that our relatives are all gone."
Hishammuddin said his country was committed to seeing the investigation through to its final conclusion.
"What they want from us is a commitment to continue the search, and that I have given, not only on behalf of the Malaysian government but the so many nations involved," he told reporters in Kuala Lumpur after speaking with families on Saturday.
Wire services
Bayes' Theorem helped researchers locate Air France Flight 447's black box in 2011
Map-timeline shows what we know about when and where the missing Boeing 777 aircraft deviated from its route to Beijing
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