Search Crews Scour 'Most Inaccessible Spot' for Signs of Plane March 21, 2014

By DAN GOOD and REBECCA LEE via GOOD MORNING AMERICA

10:39 AM 3/21/2014

The first plane sent today to fly over a remote section of the southern Indian Ocean returned empty handed from its hunt for objects possibly connected to the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, Australian officials said. Four other planes are also searching there today, scouring rough seas for objects detected on satellite images. The search area is so remote that it takes aircraft longer to fly there – four hours – than it allows for the search.

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As aircraft and naval ships resume their efforts, Australia’s prime minister is stressing the difficulty of the search. Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the search location, about 1,400 miles southwest of Perth, is extremely remote, “about the most inaccessible spot that you could imagine on the face of the earth,” he said at a press conference Friday in Papua New Guinea.

But if there is anything down there we will find it. We owe it to the families of those people to do no less.” Abbott spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping, whom he described as “devastated.” Of the 227 passengers on the missing flight, 154 were from China.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared March 8 above the Gulf of Thailand en route to Beijing. The search for the plane has involved 26 countries.

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Satellite images showing two objects led officials to re-focus efforts in the southern Indian Ocean. The largest object is about 80 feet long, officials said. Until the objects are recovered and studied, officials won’t be sure that they are connected to the lost plane. Abbott said the objects could simply be a container that’s fallen off a ship.