but it was located about 600 miles north of where the chinese sighting was. and that was the chinese sighting that was just three days earlier. so that seems an awful long way to drift in that short amount of time. but nevertheless, it gives them an extra piece of information to work with when this search resumes in just a few hours time, alex. it sure does, but again, there s an expanded area apparently. ian williams, thank you for that. let s go to nbc s tom costello in washington. what s the latest that you re hearing? specifically about these new french satellite images and why haven t they released it, by the way? we don t have the dimensions yet. that s what s critical. we do know that the chinese satellite image allegedly showed something about maybe 73 feet. in fact, let me get over there. well, here, let me go out of order. here s why i want to do this. what speed have this plane been coming in at? about, we believe, about 300 miles per hour if it was still
we owe it to their grieving families. we owe it to the governments of the countries concerned to do everything we can to discover as much as we can about the fate of mh-370. reporter: today, as it is now monday already in australia, the search will be enhanced by aircraft from china and japan. so a lot of aircraft going out there today, looking for this debris. they will have at their disposal now three sets of satellite images. the latest, of course, coming from the french. now, this image is not yet officially been released, but ap a short while ago said they had spoken to an unknown malaysian official in kuala lumpur who described the french picture as being fuzzy, but said it appeared to be about the same size as a piece of debris shown in a chinese image.
few hours ago and the marine authority that s overseeing this search in australia said they saw nothing of significance out there today. there were eight aircraft in total as well as a number of ships on location. scouring an area of about 30,000 square miles. interesting, they had onboard teams of spotters for all the advanced technology, these aircraft are carrying, they relying today on people looking through the window, eyeballs. because this is perhaps the best way of spotting some of these bigger pieces of potential debris. also today s search hampered by the weather again. cloud and fog first thing. although it did improve later. of course, tony abbott, the australian prime minister sounding reasonably up beat. he also said there was almost a moral imperative behind this search. this is what he had to say. we owe it to the almost 240 people onboard the plane.
coming in at its full fuel before it exhausted all fuel, and at full speed at about 30,000 feet. so by the time it hit the water, we believe somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 miles per hour. why is that relevant? because not a lot would survive at a crash at 300 miles per hour. okay, so now let s go to these images and let s talk more about this. because if we re trying to figure out what this is right here, this right here is the chinese image and we re told it s about 73 feet, right? that s a big chunk trying to figure out what this is. this is over here, this is the australian image from a couple of days ago. this is about 79 feet. is that the same image? we re not sure if the chinese image and the australian image is the same thing. we just don t know. it s similar size. 73 feet. that s about the length of a tennis court. that s a big chunk of something out there. and if you consider that most experts believe that by now most of the plane would have already sunk, it s hard to