Malaysian government have suspected a possible hijack of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Investigations reveals that the radar system of the plane was intentional disabled.
Here is the news from CNN:
Two objects spotted by satellite in the southern Indian Ocean may be debris from the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Australian authorities said Thursday, fueling cautious hopes of a breakthrough in an international search of unprecedented scale.
A Royal Australian Air Force search plane dispatched to the remote spot was unable to find either object amid rain, clouds and limited visibility Thursday afternoon, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said on Twitter.
Three more planes, a merchant ship and an Australian naval ship were on their way to the scene, officials said.
Authorities cautioned the objects could be something else -- shipping containers that fell off a vessel, for instance. But they said they represent the best lead so far in the search for the missing airliner, which vanished 13 days ago with 239 passengers and crew aboard.
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"At least there is a credible lead," Malaysia's interim Transportation Secretary Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters. "That gives us hope. As long as there's hope, we will continue."
Australian officials first announced the news to the world in a briefing closely watched by relatives of some of the missing at the Lido hotel in Beijing. They gathered around a large-screen television to watch the Australian news conference, leaning forward in their chairs, hanging on every word. Some sighed loudly.
While Hishammuddin said efforts are intensifying around the site of the Australian discovery, he said the search will continue across the massive search zone until authorities can give the families answers.
"For the families around the world, the one piece of information that they want most is the information we just don't have: the location of MH370," he said.
The objects
Satellites captured images of the objects about 14 miles (23 kilometers) from each other and about 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) southwest of Australia's west coast. The area is a remote, rarely traveled expanse of ocean far from commercial shipping lanes.
They are indistinct but of "reasonable size," with the largest about 24 meters (79 feet) across, said John Young, general manager of emergency response for the Australian maritime agency.
They appear to be "awash with water and bobbing up and down," Young said.
The objects could be from the plane, but they could be also something else -- like a shipping container -- caught in swirling currents known for creating garbage patches in the open ocean, he said.
"It is probably the best lead we have right now," Young said. "But we need to get there, find them, see them, assess them to know whether it's really meaningful or not."
The size of the objects concerned David Gallo, one of the leaders of the search for Air France Flight 447, which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.
"It's a big piece of aircraft to have survived something like this," he said, adding that if it is from the aircraft, it could be part of the tail.
The tail height of a Boeing 777, the model of the missing Malaysian plane, is 60 feet.
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Photos: The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Photos: The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
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Mary Schiavo, a CNN aviation analyst and former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation, said she believes Australian officials would not have announced the find if they weren't fairly sure of what they had discovered.
"There have been so many false leads and so many starts and changes and then backtracking in the investigation," she said. "He wouldn't have come forward and said if they weren't fairly certain."
Although the overall search area spans a huge expanse of 3 million square miles, U.S. officials have been insistent in recent days that the aircraft is likely to be found somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean.
If this is the debris of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, what happens next?
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