Weather cuts short seach for missing jet’s debris

The delay came as Thailand said one of its satellites had spotted hundreds of objects in the area.

The Thai satellite spotted the objects floating in the southern Indian Ocean near an area where planes and ships have been hunting unsuccessfully for a week for any sign of debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared on March 8 with 239 people aboard.

The images from the Thai satellite showed “300 objects of various sizes” in the ocean, about 2,700 kilometres (1,675 miles) south west of Perth. He said the images, taken on Monday by the Thaichote satellite, took two days to process and were relayed to Malaysian authoritie.

The objects were about 200 kilometres (125 miles) from the area where a French satellite on Sunday spotted 122 objects, and ranged in size from two metres (six feet) to 16 metres (53 feet) long.

The announcement came after the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said it had to pull back all 11 planes scheduled to take part in the search today because of heavy rain, winds and low clouds. Five ships continued the hunt.

All but three of the planes - a US Navy P-8 Poseidon, a Japanese P-3 Orion and a Japanese Gulfstream jet - reached the search zone, about 2,500 kilometres (1,550 miles) south west of Perth, before the air search was suspended, AMSA spokesman Sam Cardwell said.

They were there “maybe two hours” and they did not find anything, Mr Cardwell said.

“They got a bit of time in, but it was not useful because there was no visibility,” he said.

In a message on its Twitter 
account, AMSA said the bad weather was expected to last 24 hours.