'A positive development' in the hunt for MH370

After 12 days, the first sign of a breakthrough in finding the missing Malaysian Airways plane.

Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott made the announcement that an Australian satellite had sighted two objects in the sea, but cautioned that “it may turn out that they are not related to the search”.

Above: Australian satellite imagery of possible object relating to missing flight MH370

About an hour later, officials briefed the press in Canberra that the objects had been spotted in the Southern Indian Ocean, some 1550 miles south west of Perth –  in the same corridor that the very last Inmarsat satellite tracking of the plane had reckoned it might be.

That corridor covers 2.24 square million miles, so now at last resources can be devoted to a much smaller search area. As I write, four aircraft are being deployed to gather more information.

A short time ago I saw Malaysia’s transport minister arrive in our hotel at Kuala Lumpur airport with what looked like a spring in his step. He called the latest news  a “positive development”, but there have been so many false leads and so much misinformation since this saga began that caution is now very much the watchword here as well. Not least because the hopes and prayers of the relatives of 239 missing people are at stake.

One Australian air commodore said the finding was “promising”. Another official said one piece of debris was reckoned to be 24 metres long, and that scientific marker buoys would be dropped to work out the ocean’s drift.

At the risk of getting ahead of myself, presumably these buoys will then be used to locate the bodies of the missing and flight 370’s black box flight recorder, which should still be transmitting a signal, even if it is buried in thousands of metres of water. Though I should caution that it took two years to find the black box of the Air France plane which crashed off Brazil in 2009.

Still, it is about time we had a day with more answers than questions, and – who knows? – today might be it.

Follow @jrug on Twitter.