Must have been a glitch.
Related: Malaysian Airliner Slips From Sight
The debris turned out to be “fishing equipment and other flotsam.”
"Jetliner search gets more help; 10 planes, 10 ships join undertaking to scour new zone" by Kirk Semple | New York Times March 31, 2014
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Information on the flight data and cockpit voice recorders may help investigators resolve what happened on Flight 370. Possible theories include equipment failure, a botched hijacking, terrorism, or an act by one of the pilots.
In Malaysia, more than two dozen relatives of Chinese passengers on Flight 370 arrived from China on Sunday to press Malaysian officials for more answers about the investigation.
The Malaysian government has endured withering criticism from the relatives and friends of Chinese passengers, both in Malaysia and in China, who have accused officials of withholding information about the disappearance of the plane and not doing enough to find it.
The group protested at a hotel near Kuala Lumpur and demanded an apology from the Malaysian government for declaring last week that the plane had crashed into the Indian Ocean, saying there was insufficient evidence to support that conclusion.
Government officials said later that they planned to hold a briefing for the family members that would include “high-level representatives of the Malaysian government.”
The Ocean Shield, the Australian offshore support vessel that will be carrying the ping-detecting devices, was supposed to leave Perth on Sunday, but its departure was rescheduled for Monday, officials said. The ship will also be carrying an unmanned underwater vehicle....
The value of the ping detector, in the absence of more specific information about the location of the wreckage, is questionable.
The device will be towed behind the ship at no more than about 6 miles per hour and has to be within about a mile of the black boxes to pick up the signal reliably, making for a slow and painstaking process....
They don't want to find this thing because there is nothing to be found.
Searchers, however, say there is no time to waste: The device will be ineffective once the batteries powering the black boxes die, which is expected to happen next week.
The recovery of debris from Flight 370 might not necessarily pinpoint the location of the wreckage. When debris is found quickly enough after a crash into the sea, investigators can trace its drift back to the impact site and conduct an underwater search for the black boxes. But in the case of Flight 370, any debris, if found, might well have drifted hundreds of miles since the plane’s disappearance and be of limited use in finding the crash site.
The search area was shifted after new analysis of radar data from the morning of March 8 — when Flight 370 apparently veered off its intended route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing — determined that the plane was traveling faster than previously thought and therefore would have burned fuel more quickly and possibly fallen into the Indian Ocean farther north than previously believed.
I'm sorry; I took my eyes of the screen for a second.
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"Largely flat seafloor could aid hunt for black boxes of flight" by Nick Perry | Associated Press March 31, 2014
WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Searchers will be hoping that if the latest area turns out to be where the plane crashed, the fuselage did not go down on the southern edge of Broken Ridge. That’s where the ocean floor drops precipitously — more than 2½ miles in places, according to Robin Beaman, a marine geologist at Australia’s James Cook University. It’s not a sheer cliff, more like a very steep hill that a car would struggle to drive up.
The trench’s rocky crags and crannies would make it difficult for ships using instruments such as side-scanning sonar or multibeam echo sounders to distinguish any debris from the crevices.
Searchers will especially be hoping to locate the jet’s two ‘‘black boxes,’’ which recorded sounds in the cockpit and data on the plane’s performance and flight path that could help reconstruct why it diverted sharply west from its overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing on March 8.
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So what hangar is this thing hiding in, and where?
