China says can't confirm satellite images connected to missing plane

Tribune staff and wire reports

KUALA LUMPUR— Search planes were
flying on Thursday to an area where a
Chinese satellite has seen objects that could
be debris from the Malaysian airliner
missing for almost six days, but those
waters had been checked before and nothing
found, officials said.
At the same time, China heaped pressure on
Malaysia to improve its coordination over
the search for the Malaysia Airlines plane,
which disappeared early on Saturday on a
flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Of the
239 people on board, up to 154 were
Chinese.
Premier Li Keqiang, speaking at a news
conference in Beijing, demanded that the
"relevant party" step up coordination while
China's civil aviation chief said he wanted a
"smoother" flow of information from
Malaysia, which has come under heavy
criticism for its handling of the disaster.
Vietnamese and Malaysian planes would
scan waters where a Chinese government
agency website said a satellite had
photographed three "suspicious floating
objects" on Sunday. The location was close
to where the plane lost contact with air
traffic control.

"We are aware and we sent planes to cover
that area over the past three days,"
Vietnamese Deputy Transport Minister Pham
Quy Tieu told Reuters. "Today a CASA plane
will search the area again," he said,
referring to a twin-turboprop military
aircraft.
Malaysian Transport Minister
Hishammuddin Hussein said on his Twitter
feed: "Malaysia Maritime Enforcement
Agency Bombardier has already been
dispatched to investigate alleged claims of
debris being found by Chinese satellite
imagery."
China's civil aviation chief, Li Jiaxiang, said
there was no proof that the objects in the
South China Sea were connected to the
missing aircraft.
One U.S. official close to the plane
investigation also said the Chinese satellite
report was a "red herring."
It was the latest in scores of often confusing
leads for a multi-national search team that
has been combing 27,000 square nautical
miles, an area the size of Hungary, for the
Boeing 777-200ER.
On Wednesday, Malaysia's air force chief
said military radar had traced what could
have been the jetliner to an area south of
the Thai holiday island of Phuket, hundreds
of miles to the west of its last known
position.
His statement followed a series of
conflicting accounts of the flight path of the
plane, which left authorities uncertain even
which ocean to search in for Flight MH370.
The last definitive sighting on civilian radar
screens came shortly before 1:30 a.m. on
Saturday, less than an hour after the plane
took off from Kuala Lumpur, as it flew
northeast across the mouth of the Gulf of
Thailand.
What happened next remains one of the
most baffling mysteries in modern aviation
history and the differing accounts put out
by various Malaysian officials have drawn
criticism of their handling of the crisis.
"The Malaysians deserve to be criticized -
their handling of this has been atrocious,"
said Ernest Bower, a Southeast Asia
specialist at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington.
Rodzali Daud, the Malaysian air force chief,
told a news conference on Wednesday that
an aircraft was plotted on military radar at
2:15 a.m., 200 miles northwest of Penang
Island off Malaysia's west coast at the
northern tip of the Strait of Malacca.
But there has been no confirmation that the
unidentified plane was Flight MH370,
Rodzali said, and Malaysia was sharing the
data with international civilian and
military authorities, including those from
the United States.
"We are corroborating this," he added. "We
are still working with the experts."
AGONISING WAIT
According to the data cited by Rodzali, if
the radar had spotted the missing plane, the
aircraft would have flown for 45 minutes
and dropped only about 5,000 feet in
altitude since its sighting on civilian radar
in the Gulf of Thailand.
There was no word on which direction it
was then headed, but if this sighting was
correct, the plane would have turned
sharply west from its original course,
travelling hundreds of miles over the Malay
Peninsula from the Gulf of Thailand to the
Andaman Sea.
-Reuters

Posted via Blogaway

Posted via Blogaway