Chinese military plane starts MH370 search

A Chinese IL-76 aircraft flew into position off Australia on Monday morning and has started searching for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.

Chinese aircrafts land on a tarmac in Perth, Australia, on March 22, 2014. Two Ilyushin Il-76 aircraft from Chinese Air Force left Malaysia on Saturday for Australia to join the search for a missing Malaysian plane in the southern Indian Ocean. [Photo/Xinhua]

Ten intenational aircraft including two Chinese military planes are involved in Monday's search for flight MH370, said the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) in the latest statement.

This is the first Chinese air search operation in the southern Indian Ocean for the missing plane since two Chinese military aircraft arrived in Perth on Saturday.

The search operation will last for one hour, covering an area of 400 km long and 30 km wide, where satellite imagery earlier spotted suspicious objects possibly related to the missing plane.

A Xinhua correspondent on board the military plane reported that the sea area, some 2,500 km west of Perth, is cloudy, with the bottom of the cloud merely 300 meters above water. Weather forecast suggests there may be rain.

At the request of the Australian air force, one Australian pilot was on board the Chinese plane to join the search.

The Chinese air force welcomed the move, saying it is ready to strengthen communication with air forces of other countries in order to locate the missing plane as early as possible.

According to Commander Liu Dianjun, the Chinese aircraft will make a roughly eight-hour round-trip flight during the mission, with the furthest point 2,700 km away from Perth. 

"The Chinese military will continue to do its best in the search and rescue work by sending aircraft and ships to search the area for possible debris," Fang Fenghui, People's Liberation Army chief of general staff, said on Sunday morning during a phone conversation with David Hurley, chief of the Australian Defense Force.

The focus of the multinational search has shifted to the southern Indian Ocean after Australia said Thursday that satellite imagery identified suspicious debris that might be linked to the missing plane in waters some 2,400 km from Perth.

China and France, on Saturday and Sunday respectively, also spotted suspicious objects possibly linked to the missing plane in the southern Indian Ocean through satellite imagery.

Their findings appeared to have validated the Australian lead and raised the possibility of finally locating the missing plane more than two weeks after it mysteriously vanished from radar en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, with 239 people on board.

Initial search efforts were once concentrated in the South China Sea where the plane last contacted with air traffic control.

But satellite and radar data later indicated the plane had made a turn to the west and was probably somewhere in the so-called two corridors -- the northern one stretching approximately from the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to northern Thailand, and the southern one stretching from Indonesia to the southern India Ocean.

Even if the international search locates the plane, analysts believe it could still take months or even years to unravel the mystery why such a high-tech aircraft deviated from its planned path and landed somewhere thousands of kilometers away from its original destination.

(Xinhua contributed to the story)