A Chinese satellite searching for missing Malaysian Airlines flight 370 has found what it is calling a 'suspected crash area at sea' – with officials releasing images of what they describe as three 'large, floating, objects' in the South China Sea.
The potentially crucial development comes on the fifth day of the search for the Boeing 777 seems to corroborate the testimony of a New Zealand oil worker who claims to have witnessed the crash of the missing airplane early on Saturday morning.
It is also in the original search area under the flight’s original search path and appears to discount the theory that the aircraft turned back towards Malaysia and crashed hundreds of miles away on the other side of the Malaysian peninsula.
'It's where it's supposed to be,' Peter Goelz, a former National Transportation Safety Board managing director, told CNN remarking on the 'great skepticism' about reports the aircraft carrying 239 passengers had turned around to go back over Malaysia.
'I think they've got to get vessels and aircraft there as quickly as humanly possible.'
The new suspect crash site is about 140 miles from the flight’s last radar contact as broadcast by its transponder.
The site is also near where South China Sea oil rig worker Michael Jerome McKay today described seeing what he believes to be the plane burning - in one piece - flying at a high altitude slightly off from the standard route of planes that cross the sea shortly after the plane vanished.
China's State Administration for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense announced the discovery of the images in the area where rescuers first started looking on Saturday - along with other images of what appear to show an oil slick tracing the surrounding area.
The images were captured on March 9 - the day after the plane went missing, but were somehow not released until Wednesday. There were 153 Chinese nationals on board the flight.
There has been speculation that the secretive communist country's armed forces would have been reluctant to immediately reveal their technological capabilities to other nations involved in the search.
CNN are reporting the Chinese satellite images reveal three pieces of debris, the biggest 78-feet by 72-feet and the distance between the last known location of MH370 and new Chinese satellite image is 141 miles eastwards
The location of the suspected debris is half way between Malaysia and Vietnam close to the expected flight path of the aircraft which mysteriously disappeared at 1.30 am on Saturday morning.
However, despite the potentially pivotal release of the images, this is not the first time that authorities have announced they were examining an oil slick or floating objects that could be linked to the missing airliner.
The Chinese science agency provided coordinates of 105.63 east longitude, 6.7 north latitude, which would put the unidentified debris in waters just northeast of where it took off in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
One former US aviation official said that the images represent the first and only solid lead that matches the Boeing 777's original flight path.
'These images are the first solid piece of evidence we have that they were on the correct flight path,' said Peter Goelz, the former managing director of the US federal National Transportation Safety Board to CNN.
The US Navy will be deploying two navy vessels to the area, Commander William Marks told the cable news network.
'I think the size of the pieces ... everything we've heard... gives good cause to believe that we've now (refocused) the area,' former Federal Aviation Administration official Michael Goldfarb told CNN.
'And that's a huge relief to everybody ... I think it's a high chance that they're going to confirm that these (are) pieces of the wreckage.'
U.S. officials have been made aware of the satellite pictures and now will go back through its own stored satellite images to see if their satellites captured the same or similar images.
The search for the missing plane, which left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing, has encompassed 35,800 square miles (92,600 square kilometers) of Southeast Asia and on Wednesday expanded toward India.
Two-thirds of the passengers on the flight were Chinese, and the Chinese government has put increasing pressure on Malaysian officials to find solve the mystery of the plane's disappearance.
Also, Wednesday, it was revealed that the last message from the cockpit of the missing flight was routine. 'All right, good night,' was the signoff transmitted to air traffic controllers five days ago.
Then the Boeing 777 vanished as it cruised over the South China Sea toward Vietnam, and nothing has been seen or heard of the jetliner since.
Those final words were picked up by controllers and relayed Wednesday in Beijing to anguished relatives of some of the 239 people aboard Flight MH370.
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