1 of 12. Lieutenant Clayton Hunt and Lieutenant (junior grade) Nicholas Horton, naval aviators assigned to Patrol Squadron (VP) 16, pilot a P-8A Poseidon during a mission to assist in search and rescue operations for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in this March 24, 2014 handout photo. 
 
 PERTH (Reuters) - An air search of the remote southern Indian Ocean resumed on Friday, seeking to confirm if hundreds of objects spotted by satellites are debris from a Malaysian jetliner presumed to have crashed almost three weeks ago with the loss of all on board. 
 
 A Chinese Ilyushin IL-76 took off from Perth before dawn, heading 2,500 km (1,550 miles) southwest into the search area where high winds and icy weather had halted flights on Thursday. 
 
 The disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines jet, which vanished from civilian radar screens less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur on a routine flight to Beijing on March 8, has gripped the world and baffled investigators. 
 
 Officials believe someone on board Flight MH370 may have shut off the plane's communications systems before flying it thousands of miles off course where it crashed into the ocean in one of the most isolated and foreboding regions on the planet. 
 
 Theories range from a hijacking to sabotage or a possible suicide by one of the pilots, but investigators have not ruled out technical problems. 
 
 The search zone centers on the latest sightings of possible wreckage that were captured by Thai and Japanese satellites in roughly the same frigid expanse of sea as earlier images reported by France, Australia and China. 
 
 "We detected floating objects, perhaps more than 300," Anond Snidvongs, the head of Thailand's space technology development agency, told Reuters. "We have never said that the pieces are part of MH370 but have so far identified them only as floating objects." 
 
 The U.S. Navy said it was sending a second P8 Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft to help in the search for the missing Boeing 777. 
 
 "It's critical to continue searching for debris so we can reverse-forecast the wind, current and sea state since March 8th to recreate the position where MH370 possibly went into the water," said Commander Tom Moneymaker, a U.S. 7th Fleet oceanographer. 
 
 The United States has also sent a device that can be towed behind a ship to pick up faint pings from the plane's black box voice and data recorders, but time is running out. 
 
 "We've got to get this initial position right prior to deploying the Towed Pinger Locator since the MH370's black box has a limited battery life and we can't afford to lose time searching in the wrong area," Moneymaker said. 
 
 NEW IMAGES 
 
 The Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is coordinating the effort, said it would give details later on the search after flights were halted on Thursday. 
 
 "It's the nature of search and rescue. It's a fickle beast," Flying Officer Peter Moore, the captain of an Australian AP-3C Orion, told Reuters aboard the plane after it turned around 1,000 km (600 miles) from the search zone. 
 
 "This is incredibly important to us. The reality is we have 239 people whose families want some information and closure." 
 
 The objects spotted by the Thai satellite on Monday were between 2 meters (6.5 ft) and 16 meters (52 ft) in size and were in an area around 2,700 km (1,680 miles) southwest of Perth, Snidvongs said. 
 
 The prolonged and so far fruitless search and investigation have taken a toll, with dozens of distraught relatives of 150 Chinese passengers clashing with police and accusing Malaysia of "delays and deception". 
 
 China has repeatedly voiced its frustration with the efforts of Malaysia to find the plane. China's special envoy to Malaysia said on Thursday that Beijing was doing its best to push the Southeast Asian nation to coordinate the international search effort, state news agency Xinhua said. 
 
 Chinese insurance companies have started paying compensation to the families of passengers, Xinhua reported separately. 
 
 A U.S.-based law firm has said it expects to represent families of more than half of the passengers in a lawsuit against the carrier and Boeing, alleging the plane had crashed due to mechanical failure. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Suilee Wee in Beijing, Niluksi Koswanage in Kuala Lumpur, Stanley White in Tokyo and Amy Sawitta Lefevre in Bangkok; Writing by Lincoln Feast and Alex Richardson; Editing by Dean Yates) ||||| 1 of 7. A fast response craft from Australian Defence Vessel Ocean Shield tows Able Seaman Clearance Diver Michael Arnold as he searches the ocean for debris in the search zone in the southern Indian Ocean for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 in this picture released by the Australian Defence Force April 8, 2014. 
 
 SYDNEY/PERTH, Australia (Reuters) - An Australian ship which picked up possible "pings" from the black box recorders of a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner has been unable to detect any further signals and time is running out to narrow the massive search, officials said on Tuesday. 
 
 Angus Houston, head of the Australian agency coordinating the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, said the month-long hunt in the Indian Ocean was at a critical stage given the batteries in the black box beacons had already reached the end of their 30-day expected life. 
 
 A U.S. Navy "towed pinger locator" onboard Australia's Ocean Shield picked up two signals consistent with black box locator beacons over the weekend - the first for more than two hours and the second for about 13 minutes. 
 
 Houston said the signals represented the best lead in the search yet, but efforts to pick up the pings again had so far been unsuccessful. 
 
 "If we don't get any further transmissions, we have a reasonably large search area of the bottom of the ocean to prosecute and that will take a long, long time. It's very slow, painstaking work," said Houston. 
 
 The black boxes record cockpit data and may provide answers about what happened to the plane, which was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew when it vanished on March 8 and flew thousands of kilometers off its Kuala Lumpur-to-Beijing route. 
 
 Authorities say evidence, including the loss of communications, suggests the plane was deliberately diverted by someone familiar with the aircraft, but have not ruled out mechanical problems. 
 
 Analysis of satellite data led investigators to conclude the Boeing 777 came down in an area some 1,680 km (1,040 miles) northwest of Perth, near where possible pings were picked up and the search is now focused. 
 
 BLUEFIN ON HOLD 
 
 An autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) named Bluefin-21 is onboard the Ocean Shield and could be sent to look for wreckage on the sea floor, but narrowing the search zone first was critical, Houston said. 
 
 "It is a large area for a small submersible that has a very narrow field of search, and of course, it is literally crawling along the bottom of the ocean," he said. 
 
 "That's why it's so important to get another transmission and we need to continue until there's absolutely no chance the (black box) device is still transmitting." 
 
 The Bluefin will scour the ocean floor in 20-hour missions using sonar in an attempt to find the aircraft, before its findings are downloaded and analyzed on board the Ocean Shield. 
 
 If anything unusual is spotted, the sonar on board the robotic vehicle will be replaced with a camera to take a closer look. The potential search area is about 4.5 km (2.8 miles) deep, the outer reach of the Bluefin's range. 
 
 Some 133 missions have been completed so far in the multinational aerial hunt for debris in the southern Indian Ocean and would continue, officials said. 
 
 Up to 11 military planes, three civilian planes and 14 ships planned to take part in the search on Tuesday, with good weather in the search area. But so far, searchers have only turned up fishing gear and other detritus. 
 
 "Even after the black box is found, the surface search will continue because they're looking for evidence to investigate why the aircraft went down," Lieutenant Commander Adam Schantz, the officer in charge of U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon search unit, told Reuters. 
 
 "So, we'll continue for a while trying to find anything on the surface that might give a reasoning behind the accident." 
 
 (Additional reporting by Jane Wardell in Sydney and Anuradha Raghu in Kuala Lumpur; Editing by Dean Yates and Michael Perry) ||||| KUALA LUMPUR, March 21 (Reuters) - If two blurred objects photographed from space are confirmed as debris from Flight MH370, scientists will still face a daunting task to find and recover the sensitive recorders containing clues to the Malaysian jet's disappearance. 
 
 With so little known about why the Beijing-bound Malaysia Airlines flight changed course and disappeared after leaving Kuala Lumpur on March 8, finding the 'black boxes' is seen as the only real hope of understanding what happened to the plane and the 239 people on board. 
 
 Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Thursday said objects possibly belonging to the plane had been discovered in the Indian Ocean. The area is around 2,500 km (1,500 miles) southwest of Perth, above a volcanic ridge in waters estimated to be 2,500 to 4,000 metres (8,200 to 13,120 feet) deep. 
 
 It roughly corresponds to the far end of a southern track the aircraft could have taken after investigators suspect it was deliberately diverted. 
 
 "It can be incredibly rough and difficult. It can be very windy with strong currents, though it can equally be calm," said David Gallo, director of special projects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Falmouth, Massachusetts, referring to the general area where the objects were seen. 
 
 Flight MH370's disappearance has been compared to the 2009 Air France jet disaster, which puzzled investigators until a mission led by WHOI found the black boxes in 3,900 metres (12,800 feet) of water. 
 
 But whereas investigators knew roughly where Flight AF447 had hit the Atlantic Ocean on a stormy night in June 2009, search crews know much less about where the Malaysian jet ended up, including whether or where it ran out of fuel. 
 
 "If it is confirmed as debris, then the first priority is to recover and record each piece and see how high or low it is sitting in the water. This may help indicate how it has been moved by currents and winds," said Gallo, who took part in the Air France search. 
 
 DEBRIS COULD HAVE MOVED 
 
 The immediate problem will be to find the debris, which may have moved since the satellite images were taken on March 16. 
 
 It could take several days to verify the satellite lead, a source close to the investigation said. Military aircraft from Australia, the United States and New Zealand have so far found nothing during a search hampered by strong winds and rain. Neither has a merchant ship in the area. 
 
 If the objects - the biggest measures up to 24 metres (79 feet) - are from the Boeing 777, recovery teams will work as quickly as possible to locate the rest of the wreckage in the hope it leads them to the data and cockpit voice recorders. 
 
 To do this, scientists have developed computer models to effectively play waves and winds backwards, allowing rescue workers to retrace the movements of debris to the site of a crash. 
 
 "There are sophisticated models that allow you to work backwards from the current position of each piece of debris, after considering the currents and the winds and so on," said Gallo. 
 
 "That enables you to say X marks the spot on the surface." 
 
 Investigators hope such recent developments in oceanography will help shed light on the baffling disappearance of Flight MH370. 
 
 But not all experts agree computer simulations will easily replace the gruelling routine of searching from the air and the sea. 
 
 Although research has continued since the Air France jet ploughed into the Atlantic, a detailed annex to the report on that disaster, which was blamed mainly on pilot error, raised questions in 2012 over the consistency of such "retro-drift" calculations. 
 
 For example, when the French Navy dropped special buoys at the same spot a year after the crash they scattered hundreds of miles apart, highlighting the turbulence of ocean currents. 
 
 RACE AGAINST TIME 
 
 If the report of suspected debris is confirmed, naval vessels will also drag a sonar through the water to seek the black boxes through radio beacons, but time for this is running out. 
 
 The black boxes are designed to have a battery life of at least 30 days, leaving possibly only 17 days to locate them before the signals die. 
 
 But for every knot, or nautical mile per hour, of current in the rough waters of the southern Indian Ocean, an object could theoretically float for 312 miles (500 km) in 13 days, the time the Malaysian plane has been missing. 
 
 That could present investigators with a much larger potential search area than the 40-mile radius for AF447. 
 
 In 2012, France's BEA air crash investigation agency recommended in its report on the Air France disaster that the battery life on locator beacons be increased to 90 days. 
 
 Although this has been backed by global regulators, it will not become mandatory until towards the end of the decade. 
 
 Other proposals that could potentially make it easier to find MH370 remain bogged down in talks between regulators and the aviation industry, with no timetable for putting them into effect, Reuters reported last week. 
 
 These include adding a new frequency for the beacons so that their signals travel further and can more easily be heard by military ships lacking specialist air crash recovery equipment. 
 
 Existing signals travel about 2,000 to 3,000 metres (6,560 to 9,840 feet) under water, according to the French sea search annex, whereas the area now being combed for debris is up to 4,000 metres deep. 
 
 To close this gap, search teams would bring in boats capable of carrying several miles of cables to drag sonars at lower depths, but experts note moving them into place can take time. 
 
 If by the end of 30 days nothing is found, the search could rely on remote underwater vehicles to scour the seabed. 
 
 To find the Air France wreckage, WHOI used remote-operated REMUS underwater vehicles developed by the U.S. Navy. 
 
 "It was the biggest use of deep-ocean firepower in one spot," Gallo said. (Editing by Dean Yates) ||||| The crucial moments of doomed Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may never be discovered experts have warned as the 'black box’ which records details of the flight may have over written key data. 
 
 As the search for wreckage of MH370 was bolstered on Wednesday by the detection of 122 “credible” floating objects in the Indian Ocean experts said the black box anyway may be “impossible” to find. 
 
 A United States black box detector being towed to the area is due to arrive on April 5, 28 days after the crash and just two days before the data recorder’s pinger is due to run out of battery life. 
 
 David Barry, an aviation specialist at Cranfield University, said the pings may continue for an extra ten days but the signal will weaken. He said the effort to find the box could take years. 
 
 “Given the remoteness of the site and the depth of the water and the weather down there, the black box will be almost impossible to find,” he told The Telegraph. “It will then be a case of digging through the wreckage field, possibly for a couple of years.” 
 
 A further difficulty for the crash investigators is that the crucial moment for understanding the unusual flight revolves around the period during which its communications systems were disabled and it took a sharp turn westward before flying silently for about seven hours. This occurred during the first hour of the flight, but the black box records cockpit communication on a two hour loop and deletes all but the final two hours. 
 
 Though the flight data will have survived, Mr Barry said, “the bit we are interested in – where they lost contact with air traffic control – would have been overridden unless power to the recorder was lost.” 
 
 On Wednesday Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia’s acting transport minister, said new satellite images had found objects ranging from 3 to 75 feet across an area of 154 square miles in the southern Indian Ocean. 
 
 He described the sighting of an apparent debris field as “the most credible lead we have so far”. 
 
 The images, captured through clouds by Airbus Defence and Space in France four days ago, were about 1,589 miles southwest of Perth in a remote stretch of the southern Indian Ocean. The zone tallies with previous images captured by United States and Chinese satellites. 
 
 “We cannot tell whether the potential objects are from MH370,” Mr Hishammuddin said. “Nevertheless, this is another new lead that will help direct the search operation.” 
 
 Twelve aircraft flew over the search area on Wednesday but spotted only three objects, including two items believed to be rope and a blue piece of flotsam. No wreckage has been found, nor any confirmed sign of the missing Malaysia Airlines aircraft, since it disappeared with 239 passengers and crew aboard after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8. 
 
 Mr Hishammuddin said authorities have begun looking at the steps that will need to be taken after the crash site and wreckage are found. The top priority is to locate the black box which will help to explain the cause of the crash. 
 
 As the search continued, a multimillion-dollar lawsuit was initiated in the United States against Malaysia Airlines and Boeing. A firm representing families of the passengers filed a petition of discovery in Illinois, requiring the companies to produce evidence of possible flaws in the crashed Boeing 777. “We believe that both defendants named are responsible for the disaster of Flight MH370,” said Monica Kelly, the lead lawyer.
– Another big lead, but yet more frustration in the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Officials say a Thai satellite has detected "300 objects of various sizes" floating near the search area in the Indian Ocean, reports the AP. Another set of satellite images released yesterday showed 122 "potential objects"—but severe weather prevented planes from searching the area today, Reuters reports. Some 11 military and civilian aircraft had been on the way to the area, but the forecast "was calling for severe icing, severe turbulence, and near-zero visibility," a US Navy spokesman says. "Anybody who's out there is coming home and all additional sorties from here are canceled." The latest images, together with the possible debris field spotted by a French satellite, add to what the BBC calls "a growing body of circumstantial evidence" suggesting the flight came down in a remote part of the Indian Ocean—though the Boeing 777's black boxes could now be hundreds of miles away from any floating debris. The son of pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah, meanwhile, has rejected claims his father may have been on a "suicide mission," reports the Sydney Morning Herald. "I've read everything online," says the 26-year-old, the first family member to speak out publicly. "But I've ignored all the speculation. I know my father better." A US Navy black box detector is on the way to the area, but experts fear the pinging will soon be too weak to detect, meaning it could be years before the mystery of the plane's disappearance can be solved. "Given the remoteness of the site and the depth of the water and the weather down there, the black box will be almost impossible to find," an aviation expert tells the Telegraph. "It will then be a case of digging through the wreckage field, possibly for a couple of years."