MH370: China satellites identify "large objects"

THURSDAY: Malaysia said on Thursday it dispatched an aircraft to investigate the site where Chinese satellites photographed three "suspected floating objects", near an area where several nations have been hunting for wreckage from a missing passenger plane.

"Bombardier has already been dispatched to investigate alleged claims of debris being found by Chinese satellite imagery," Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said on his Twitter feed, on the sixth day of the search for Malaysia Airlines flight 370 and the 239 people on board.

China said its satellites have detected three large floating objects in a suspected crash site near where a missing Malaysian jet lost contact, the latest twist in a hunt which entered its sixth day.

China's state science and technology administration said late Wednesday that a Chinese satellite had seen the objects in a "suspected crash sea area" in the South China Sea on March 9, and that the images were being analysed.

The search for Malaysia Airlines flight 370 now encompasses nearly 27,000 nautical miles (over 90,000 square kilometres) -- roughly the size of Portugal -- and involves the navies and air forces of multiple nations.

The hunt originally focused on an area off Vietnam's South China Sea coast, where the Boeing 777 last made contact Saturday on a journey from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

But Malaysian authorities later expanded it to the Andaman Sea, north of Indonesia, hundreds of miles away.

The suspected objects detected by the Chinese satellite were found at 105.63 degrees longitude East and 6.7 degrees latitude North, the administration said on its website.

AFP