Page 20 - Target Zone News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Remoteness part of the southern indian ocean. it's an area where the weather changes quickly and violently. that's what these pilots and crews have been dealing with, deb, and it looks like they're going to have to deal with that for at least another 24 to 48 hours. what they need, obviously, are more ships in that area. there's only one ship in the area at the moment, an australian naval vessel. it is in the target zone. it is not near where the debris was reported. more naval vessels are heading there, particularly chinese naval vessels, plus a chinese icebreaker, would you believe, been div...

It left perth about 1,000 hours ago. it has to sail out to that area. there is an australian warship, "the success," is on-target, in that target zone. it's still a big area. we're talking about 56,000 square kilometers, john. at this stage, we don't know how far the australians are away from that area where the debris was spotted by the plane. we don't know how far the chinese are away. there's a lot of vessels in the search for that area. there are three other chinese vessels. the british are coming out with a special underwater sonar detection equipment. this is a race against time. the fli...

Agency. and the crews reported seeing two relatively big objects with smaller ones around in a radius of several kilometers. that would be a big debris field. objects of great interest at the moment. that plane, that chinese water plane is heading back to perth. controlling that target zone. and for more planes to go back where it was. trying to verify what is in the water there. this is the second eyes-on report, if you'd like, we've had in the last two or three days. we had a corporate jet, with debris, including a wooden pallet, that hasn't been identified since. now, the chinese, they're s...

An idea. now, if you are getting bad weather, visibility is absolutely critical here. and what we're hearing from the planes coming back over the past 24 hours is visibility in some areas in that target zone, christine, virtually down to not quite zero, but very, very limited because the cloud, this low cloud that has been hanging around in some places is now down to sea level. it's patchy. some areas are clearer. but the weather picture is for worse to come, so that is just making everything more and more difficult. at this stage, though, ten flights in the air today. that is the biggest sear...

But also by the drift patterns that you were talking about earlier? >> reporter: yeah, that's right, the drift patterns are incredibly important in this. again, such a remote area. it's out of range of shipping lanes, for example. so, you're not going to see passing traffic, not going to see things like this. and remember, we are going 17 days now. this debris, whatever debris it is, will have drifted a significant distance. they can model drift patterns, looking at wind speeds, looking at the time of the year, looking at water temperatures, and they've put data buoys, they're called noorks th...