News: MH370 search looks for debris breakthrough in new area

A Chinese military plane scanning part of a search zone the size of Poland for signs of debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 spotted several objects floating in the sea on Saturday, including two bearing colours of the missing jet.

But it was not immediately clear whether the objects were related to the three-week-old investigation, and the second day of searching in the area ended with no evidence found of the jet, officials said.

The Chinese Ilyushin IL-76 spotted three floating objects, China's official

“The objects cannot be verified or discounted as being from MH370 until they are relocated and recovered by ships,” the authority said in a statement. “It is not known how much flotsam, such as from fishing activities, is ordinarily there. At least one distinctive fishing object has been identified.”

2 colours match plane's exterior: Chinese medi

The three objects spotted by the Chinese plane Saturday were white, red and orange in colour, the Xinhua report said. The missing Boeing 777's exterior was red, white, blue and grey.

An Australian PC3 Orion search plane also sighted objects in a different part of the search area, but the maritime safety authority did not describe those objects in greater detail.

Flight 370 disappeared March 8 while bound from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and investigators have been puzzled over what happened aboard the plane, with speculation ranging from equipment failure and a botched hijacking to terrorism or an act by one of the pilots.

The latter was fuelled by reports that the pilot's home flight simulator had files deleted from it, but Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said checks, including one by the FBI, had turned up no new information.

"What I know is that there is nothing sinister from the simulators, but of course that will have to be confirmed by the chief of police," he said.

Newly analyzed satellite data shifted the search zone on Friday, raising expectations that searchers may be closer to getting physical evidence that the plane crashed in the Indian Ocean with 239 people aboard.

That would also help narrow the hunt for the wreckage and the plane's black boxes, which could contain clues to what caused the plane to be so far off-course.

The U.S. Navy has already sent equipment that can detect pings from the back boxes, and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott told reporters in Sydney that the equipment would be put on an Australian naval ship soon.

"It will be taken to the most prospective search area and if there is good reason to deploy it, it will be deployed," he said, without giving a time frame. Other officials have said it could take days for the ship — the Ocean Shield — to reach the search area.

The newly targeted zone is nearly 1,130 kilometres northeast of sites the searchers have crisscrossed for the past week. The redeployment came after analysts determined that the Boeing 777 may have been travelling faster than earlier estimates and would therefore have run out of fuel sooner.

Some family members in Beijing said they want to fly to Kuala Lumpur to seek more answers from the government, but an airline representative said it may have to wait a day because of a lack of hotel space this weekend because of the Formula One Malaysian Grand Prix race on Sunday.

Steve Wang, a representative of some of the Chinese families in Beijing, said about 50 relatives wanted to go to Malaysia because they were not happy with the responses given by Malaysian government representatives in China.

"Because they sent a so-called high-level group to meet us, but they have not been able to answer all our questions," he said. "It's either they are not in charge of a certain aspect of work or that it's still being investigated, or it's not convenient for them to comment."

Malaysia Airlines' commercial director, Hugh Dunleavy, said on Saturday in Beijing that the airline was trying to facilitate the relatives' travel to Kuala Lumpur, but that plans had not been confirmed because of the difficulties in booking hotels this weekend.

If investigators can determine that the plane went down in the newly targeted zone – which spans about 319,000 sq km (123,000 square miles) – recovery of its flight data and cockpit voice recorders could be complicated.

Much of the sea floor in the area is about 2,000 metres (6,600 feet) below the surface, but depths may reach a maximum of about 6,000 metres (19,700 feet) at its easternmost edge.

The hunt for the plane focused first on the Gulf of Thailand, along the plane's planned path. But when radar data showed it had veered sharply west, the search moved to the Andaman Sea, off the western coast of Malaysia, before pivoting to the southern Indian Ocean, south-west of Australia.