Search for missing Malaysia Airlines plane suspended for bad weather

Perth, Australia: The search for the missing Malaysian airliner was suspended Thursday, the second time this week that severe weather in the southern Indian Ocean had made flying to the possible wreckage zone too risky for search crews.

Lt. Cmdr. Adam Schantz, the head of a U.S. team flying a Navy surveillance plane, said the search zone was afflicted by "severe turbulence, severe icing and basically zero visibility."

"Anyone who is out there is coming home," he said at the Perth airport. "And all additional sorties are cancelled."

There were hopes that search flights Thursday would scour the area where European satellite images made public Wednesday showed 122 floating objects. If confirmed as wreckage from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the search could have been considerably narrowed.

A Thai government agency said Thursday that it, too, had spotted from one of its satellites what appeared to be a relatively compact field of debris near the search zone. The images were taken on Monday, one day after the European satellite pictures.

The head of the Thai agency, the Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency, told reporters in Bangkok that the images showed around 300 objects over an area of 450 square kilometres. The agency said it was confident that the images showed floating objects but cautioned that it could not describe them in detail because the images were of a relatively low resolution.

Anond Snidvongs, the agency's executive director, said the objects seen by the Thai satellite were 200 kilometres southwest of the objects in the European satellite images.

After two and a half weeks of searches, there have been multiple sightings of possible debris, but no wreckage has been retrieved. Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8 and veered southward into the Indian Ocean for unknown reasons.

The probable area of impact of the aircraft, calculated from satellite pings emitted by the plane before it went down, is more than 620,000 square miles, or roughly three times the size of mainland France.

Search aircraft have only been able to search roughly 5 percent of that area each day.

Six military and five civilian aircraft had been due to search in the area Thursday, according to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.

Five ships, including four Chinese vessels, are also in the vicinity, but it seems unlikely they would be able to search Thursday because of the poor conditions.

Schantz said clouds were down to the surface of the water and visibility was so bad that aircraft would have trouble seeing their wingtips.

The search area is known as the "roaring forties" - a reference to the latitude and notoriously fierce weather conditions.

Roger Badham, a meteorologist based near Sydney, said there might be a break in the weather Friday but that more rain was forecast for Sunday, with low clouds likely to again reduce visibility from aircraft.

But the weather in the search zone is unpredictable and difficult to forecast, especially because the nearest climate monitoring stations are on the Australian mainland and in Antarctica, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

Badham and other experts say search efforts will be increasingly challenging as winter approaches.

"The storms build more frequently and with greater intensity in the winter," Badham said. "It is not always blowing like hell but you can get some doozy fronts coming through."

Will Oxley, a professional sailor who has twice sailed through the search area, called it "one of the very rough parts of the world."

"It can be a pretty wild place," he said. "Historically, in around-the-world yacht races, more accidents have happened in the southern Indian Ocean than elsewhere."

Shorter days could also hamper the search effort. Oxley said on December 31, the search area gets around 15.5 hours of daylight. But by the end of June there would be just 9 hours of daylight.