Search resumes for possible debris from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (CNN) -- A day that began with high hopes ended with uncertainty late Thursday as darkness ended the search for two objects in the Indian Ocean captured on satellite and described as possible debris from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Aircraft from Australia, New Zealand and the United States will resume the search Friday, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said.

Sailors aboard a massive Norwegian cargo ship summoned to join the search will continue to work throughout the night, said Erik Gierchsky, a spokesman for the Norwegian Shipowners Association.

'All men are on deck to continue the search,' he told CNN. 'They are using lights and binoculars.'

Hindered by poor weather in a wild, remote area of the southern Indian Ocean, neither the surveillance planes nor the Norwegian ship had managed to spot the debris photographed Sunday by a commercial satellite.

Flight 370: 'New and credible information' 'Credible' debris found in Indian Ocean Data deleted from pilot's simulator? Satellite imagery provided by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority on Thursday, March 20, shows debris in the southern Indian Ocean that could be from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The Boeing 777-200ER disappeared during a March 8 flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Searchers from 26 countries are trying to pinpoint its location somewhere along two vast arcs, one stretching deep into the Asian landmass, the other far out into the Indian Ocean.Photos: The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Even before suspending the search for the day, authorities cautioned the objects could be something other than plane wreckage, such as shipping containers that fell off a passing vessel.

But they said they represent the best lead so far in the search for the airliner that vanished 13 days ago with 239 passengers and crew en route from Malaysia's capital city of Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

'At least there is a credible lead,' Malaysia's interim Transportation Secretary Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters. 'That gives us hope. As long as there's hope, we will continue.'

Australian officials first announced the news to the world in a briefing closely watched by relatives of some of the missing at the Lido hotel in Beijing. They gathered around a large-screen television to watch the Australian news conference, leaning forward in their chairs, hanging on every word. Some sighed loudly.

Wen Wancheng, 63, of Jinan, China, said he has not given up hope that his son is still alive.

'I firmly believe that my son, together with everyone on board, will all survive,' he told CNN.

While Hishammuddin said efforts are intensifying around the site of the Australian discovery, he said the search will continue across the massive search zone until authorities can give the families answers.

'For the families around the world, the one piece of information that they want most is the information we just don't have: the location of MH370,' he said.

New theories about disappearanceThe objects

Satellites captured images of the objects about 14 miles (23 kilometers) from each other and about 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) southwest of Australia's west coast. The area is a remote, rarely traveled expanse of ocean far from commercial shipping lanes.

The commercial satellite images, taken Sunday, show two indistinct objects of 'reasonable size,' with the largest about 24 meters (79 feet) across, said John Young, general manager of emergency response for the Australian maritime agency.

They appear to be 'awash with water and bobbing up and down,' Young said.

The objects could be from the plane, but they could be also something else -- like a shipping container -- caught in swirling currents known for creating garbage patches in the open ocean, he said.

'It is probably the best lead we have right now,' Young said. 'But we need to get there, find them, see them, assess them to know whether it's really meaningful or not.'

It took four days for the images to reach the authority 'due to the volume of imagery being searched, and the detailed process of analysis that followed,' the agency said in a prepared statement.

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The size of the objects concerned David Gallo, one of the leaders of the search for Air France Flight 447, which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.

'It's a big piece of aircraft to have survived something like this,' he said, adding that if it is from the aircraft, it could be part of the tail.

The tail height of a Boeing 777, the model of the missing Malaysian plane, is 60 feet.

Mary Schiavo, a CNN aviation analyst and former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation, said she believes Australian officials would not have announced the find if they weren't fairly sure of what they had discovered.

'There have been so many false leads and so many starts and changes and then backtracking in the investigation,' she said. 'He wouldn't have come forward and said if they weren't fairly certain.'

Although the overall search area spans a huge expanse of 3 million square miles, U.S. officials have been insistent in recent days that the aircraft is likely to be found somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean.

If this is debris, what happens next?Wide search continues

Until searchers make a confirmed find of debris from the aircraft, the search and rescue operation will continue throughout the search zone, Hishammuddin said.

Even as the focus shifted to the southern Indian Ocean, Hishammuddin said Malaysia was sending two aircraft to search Kazakhstan in central Asia. That's one of the locations along a northern corridor described as a possible location for the aircraft based on satellite pings sent by the plane after air traffic controllers lost contact with it in the early hours of March 8.

Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and China were searching their territories, Hishammuddin said.

India said Thursday it is searching in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, sending four warships and three aircraft to scour the region. That area is far north of the region where Australian forces were leading the search for the photographed objects, but in an area previously identified as a possible crash site for the plane.

Meanwhile, 18 ships, 29 aircraft and six helicopters were taking part in the search in the southern corridor, where search efforts were intensifying in the area around the Australian satellite find.

Following the Australian announcement, China said it had redirected some of its ships to the southern Indian Ocean. The closest of the ships was 2,300 nautical miles from the search area, Navy spokesman Liang Yang said in a statement on the Chinese navy's website.

In addition to the Australian and U.S. surveillance planes that flew over the area Thursday afternoon, two other planes were being dispatched to the region, including a New Zealand Air Force Orion and an Australian C-130 Hercules. That aircraft was tasked by Australian authorities to drop marker buoys in the area, Young said.

'The first thing they need to do is put eyes on the debris from one of the aircraft,' said aviation expert Bill Waddock. The buoys will mark the place and transmit location data.

In addition to the Norwegian vehicle carrier Höegh St. Petersburg, which arrived Thursday afternoon, a second merchant ship and the Australian naval vessel HMAS Success were steaming to the site. The Success was 'some days away,' Hishammuddin said.

The Malaysian navy has six ships with three helicopters heading to the southern Indian Ocean to take part in the search, a Malaysian government source said.

'Verification might take some time. It is very far and it will take some time to locate and verify the objects,' the source said.

Other angles

Although much attention was focused on the ocean search, investigators continue to follow other leads in the plane's disappearance.

Among the many theories put forth since the plane's disappearance is that one or both of the pilots were responsible in some way for the aircraft's disappearance, especially in light of revelations that appear to show that a sharp, unplanned turn in the flight path had been programmed into the plane's flight management system before one of the pilots gave a routine sign-off to Malaysian air traffic controllers.

On Thursday, a U.S. official familiar with the investigation told CNN that an FBI team is confident that it will be able to retrieve at least some files deleted from the hard drive of a flight simulator owned by Flight 370 Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

Investigators will also analyze websites that Zaharie and co-pilot Fariq Ab Hamid may have visited recently, the official said on the condition of anonymity.

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Mitra Mobasherat reported from Kuala Lumpur. Jethro Mullen wrote and reported from Hong Kong. Michael Pearson reported and wrote from Atlanta. CNN's Chelsea J. Carter, Ben Brumfield, Pamela Brown, Pedram Jahaveri, Pauline Chiou, Yuli Yang, Jim Clancy, David Fitzpatrick, Kyung Lah, Atika Shubert, Evan Perez and Shimon Prokupecz contributed to this report.

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