26 Mar 2014

Ocean search for MH370 to resume

8:23 pm on 26 March 2014

The air and sea search for the missing Malaysian airliner has resumed after an improvement in the weather in the southern Indian Ocean.

Flight MH370 vanished on 8 March taking off from Kuala Lumpur, bound for Beijing, with 239 people aboard.

US Navy personnel monitoring search data aboard a P-8A Poseidon over the Indian Ocean.

US Navy personnel monitoring search data aboard a P-8A Poseidon over the Indian Ocean. Photo: AFP / US Navy / MC2 Eric A. Pastor

Gale force winds and heavy swells disrupted search and recovery efforts on Tuesday but the search is to resume after conditions eased.

The Australian authorities co-ordinating the operation say 12 planes - seven military and five civilian - will take part, scouring 80,000 square kilometres of the southern Indian Ocean about 2500km southwest of Perth.

Chinese vessel Xue Long (Snow Dragon), a China polar supply ship, is also due to join Australian warship HMAS Success to help locate several objects of potential interest

Australia, New Zealand, United States, Japan, China and South Korea are involved in the search, and India has offered to join the efforts.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott said there was a lot of debris in the area, and Australia would keep searching until there was no hope of finding anything.

"We are just going to keep on looking because we owe it to people to do everything we can to resolve this riddle," he told the Nine Network.

"It is not absolutely open-ended but it is not something we will lightly abandon."

AAP reports equipment to recover the aircraft's black box flight recorder is on the way from the United States.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said on Monday night that based on fresh analysis of satellite data, it had to be assumed the plane went down in the Indian Ocean west of Australia.

However, some relatives of the passengers are refusing to accept their deaths, saying no wreckage has been found.

Daniel Tan's brother was a passenger on the flight and said he was refusing to give up hope.

"We don't know what to do. We don't know what to believe. Even the government ... when they say something, what they say is not backed up by proof, it is based on satellite data," he said.

"They say that no one survived as a result. I think that is a terrible thing to say without any proof."