Missing MH370: No 'suspicious' debris found up to Aceh coast

JAKARTA: The Indonesian Air Force’s Boeing B737-2x9 Surveiller finished its search for the missing Malaysian Airlines aircraft along the Northeastern coast of Sumatra on Wednesday afternoon but no debris was found, Air Force spokesman Air Commodore Hadi Tjahjanto said.

The B737 surveillance aircraft had been combing from northern Medan, the capital of the North Sumatra province, up to the waters north of Lhokseumawe in the northern provincial neighbor of Aceh since this morning, Hadi told The Jakarta Post.

“We just landed back [at air force base] in Medan. We didn’t find any suspicious objects in the waters,” he said.

The Air Force has been helping in the mission to find the missing Malaysian Airlines Boeing B777-200 since Monday. Flight MH370 was lost early on Saturday, less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and was bound for Beijing, China.

The last known position was in the South China Sea, south of the Vietnamese coast, around the gulf of Thailand.

But a few days later, the Malaysian military indicated that its radar had tracked that the ill-fated plane might have turned back to the west, past the Malaysian Peninsula, and then went out off radar about two hours after departure time.

This revelation led to Kuala Lumpur’s request for assistance from the Indonesian Military (TNI), particularly the Navy and the Air Force, to help search for the missing aircraft in the western waters of the Malaysian Peninsula, or the Malacca Strait, which borders Malaysia and Indonesia. The Jakarta Post/ANN