Chinese Plane Spots Suspicious Objects in Search of Malaysian Flight 370

The crew of a Chinese plane searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 spotted “suspicious objects” in the southern Indian Ocean on Monday, March 24. This is the latest lead in the long and frustrating investigation.

A reporter from China’s official news agency Xinhua reported after the investigation flight that the search team saw “two relatively big floating objects with many white smaller ones scattered within several kilometers.”

According to Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s Twitter feed, the spotted objects are said to be within the search area and that attempts will be made to relocate them by sea. Whether those objects are relevant to the missing Malaysian flight has not been announced. When the investigation was previously focused on the South China Sea, near where the plane had dropped off radar, a number of debris sightings were proved to be unrelated to the missing flight.

With the search in its third week, authorities have so far been unable to figure out where exactly the plane is, or why it flew off course from its flight plan; the plane was departing from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Over the weekend, however, Malaysian authorities announced that the last transmission from the missing flight showed that it was properly heading to Beijing. This invalidated the theory that someone might have reprogrammed the plane’s flight path. The new findings gave more insight about what may have happened to the plane, but still cannot explain why the flight went missing or where it could possibly be.