A day after getting the world’s hopes up with satellite imagery that may have shown debris from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in isolated areas in the Indian Ocean, Australia’s deputy prime minister said that the search turned up empty on Friday. In fact, the debris spotted in the images may have sunk.
Australian officials said on Thursday that the images spotted objects 1,400 miles west of Australia. Search planes and ships, including U.S. Navy aircraft, went to search the area, but could not find anything. Although the satellite images were taken five days ago, there was still hope that it might shine a light on where the flight went.
“Something that was floating on the sea that long ago may no longer be floating,” Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said Friday in Perth, reports Reuters. “It may have slipped to the bottom.”
Still, they are going to keep searching for these two objects. According to The Associated Press, Truss confirmed that two Chinese aircraft will join the search Saturday. Two more aircraft from Japan will join on Sunday.
“We are doing all that we can, devoting all the resources we can and we will not give up until all of the options have been exhausted,” Truss assured the media. “We can’t be certain that the sightings are in fact debris from the aircraft (but) it is about the only lead that is around at the present time.”
The issue is that the area is so isolated that it takes four hours just for a flight from Perth to get there. That means that the planes only have two hours to search before they have to go back or the planes run out of fuel.
The Boeing 777 has been missing since March 8 and has 239 people on board.