Malaysia Airlines flight MH370: Indian Ocean search for missing jet extended

Search planes joined a freighter to scan one of the remotest places on Earth after satellite images detected possible pieces from the missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 jet.

An Australian official said the hunt for the missing jet would be extended again for another day after satellites uncovered two large objects floating in the southern Indian Ocean.

The pieces are located 1,000 miles off the south-western coast of Australia and halfway to the desolate islands of the Antarctic.

The area in the southern Indian Ocean is so remote is takes aircraft four hours to fly there and four hours back, leaving them only about two hours to search.

It raised new hope of finding the vanished jet and sent another emotional jolt to the families of the 239 people aboard, but bad weather hampered Thursdays search.

Young, manager of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority's emergency response division, said so far the efforts have been fruitless.

He said: "Although this search area is much smaller than we started with, it nonetheless is a big area when you're looking out the window and trying to see something by eye.

"So we may have to do this a few times to be confident about the coverage of that search area.”

Young said although the weather improved from Thursday, there was still some low cloud cover over the search area 2,300km from Western Australia.

Searchers were using their eyes instead of equipment to try and spot the objects, forcing the planes to fly very low over the water.