New lead, new hope

The sighting of a wooden pallet and other debris that may be linked to a Malaysian passenger jet raised hopes of a breakthrough yesterday in the international search for the missing plane.
The sense that the hunt was finally on the right track after more than two weeks of false leads and dead ends was reinforced by new French satellite data indicating floating objects in the southern search area.
Australian officials said the pallet, along with belts or straps, was spotted Saturday in a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean that has become the focus of the search -- around 2,500 kilometres southwest of Perth.
"It's still too early to be definite," Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott told reporters during a visit to Papua New Guinea.
"But obviously we have now had a number of very credible leads and there is increasing hope -- no more than hope, no more than hope -- that we might be on the road to discovering what did happen to this ill-fated aircraft."
Australian and Chinese satellite images have picked up large objects floating in the inhospitable region, and Malaysia's transport ministry said yesterday that France had provided similar data "in the vicinity of the southern corridor".
The Malaysian statement gave no details of the French satellite data.
Wooden pallets are quite common in aircraft and ship cargo holds. The objects were spotted by observers on one of the civilian aircraft taking part in the search.
Yesterday's search involving four military and four civilian aircraft plus an Australian warship ended with "no sightings of significance" but would resume today, AMSA said. The search covered 59,000 square km. AMSA said Chinese and Japanese planes would join today's operation.
If the plane did crash in the ocean, investigators are hoping to identify the impact site before the plane's black box stops emitting tracking signals -- usually after 30 days.
The flight recorder will be crucial in solving the mystery of what caused the Boeing 777 with 239 passengers and crew aboard suddenly to veer off course over the South China Sea en route to Beijing. Satellite and military radar data suggest the plane backtracked over the Malaysian peninsula and then flew on -- possibly for hours -- either north into South and Central Asia, or south over the Indian Ocean.
The question of what happened on board has become a topic of unbridled speculation, with Malaysian investigators standing by their assessment that the plane was deliberately diverted by someone on board.
Three scenarios have gained particular traction: hijacking, pilot sabotage, or a sudden mid-air crisis that incapacitated the flight crew and left the plane to fly on auto-pilot for several hours until it ran out of fuel and crashed.