Aircrew with latest gear trusts its eyes to find Malaysian jet

Aboard rescue flight 74, over the Indian Ocean:  As the U.S. Navy surveillance plane veered sharply back toward white objects floating in the ocean below, an automated voice warned, "Banking! Banking!" The console settings in the cockpit showed the plane at merely 500 feet above the sapphire seas glowing under unobstructed sunshine. Lt. Cmdr. Clayton Hunt was at the controls of the Poseidon P-8A, the most advanced aircraft taking part in the multinational effort to find wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. "The sea state has been awesome; visibility has been awesome," Hunt said during a search mission Friday. "If it's down there, we will find it." The Poseidon P-8A, which the Navy began using two years ago, is brimming with electronic equipment: radar screens, sonar buoy launchers and a high-definition camera that protrudes from a turret under the fuselage and is directed by joystick from one of the five workstations in the cabin. The aircraft specializes in tracking and destroying submarines. Yet it is a measure of the limits of the state-of-the-art technology on board that in the search for Flight 370 the crew says it relies mainly on two petty officers sitting at rectangular windows on either side of the aircraft to spot signs of wreckage. "The human eye is the best way to search," said Petty Officer 2nd Class Mike Burnett, one of the spotters, who sat on a swivel chair in front of a window. Outside was a monotonous seascape that resembled a looping film reel of identical patches of ocean. Crew members took turns staring into the hypnotic void, carefully scanning up and down, right and left, while keeping a finger on a button connected to their headsets that allows them to alert the crew to any sightings. From the main airport in Perth in Western Australia, Rescue Flight 74 reached the search zone in two hours Friday afternoon and inspected 18,000 square nautical miles by flying back and forth like a 300-mph lawn mower across an area assigned to the crew by the Australian authorities. The U.S. Navy allowed three reporters in the plane Friday on the condition they not carry any electronic equipment. The cockpit door was open for the most of the flight, and the reporters were allowed to move freely in the aircraft, except for two occasions when the crew shielded them from seeing what were described as operations that might reveal the plane's technological capabilities. Rescue Flight 74 was one of 10 aircraft taking part in the search Friday, nearly three weeks after the Malaysian airliner went off course during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and vanished. No confirmed wreckage has been found from Flight 370. Experts are basing their calculations on where the plane went down on signals picked up by a satellite while the jetliner, a Boeing 777-200, was still in the air. Friday was the first day that aircraft searched a newly defined search zone based on a new analysis of satellite data that concluded that the plane probably went down farther north than previously thought. This new search zone is in warmer waters about 1,000 miles west of Perth, 500 miles closer to the Australian mainland than the previous zone, giving the aircraft more time to scour the area. Fueled by junk food and soft drinks on the 8 1/2 hour mission, the crew of Rescue Flight 74 spotted only what appeared to be unrelated flotsam: a white ball, orange rope and blue-green plastic. On its seven sorties off the Australian coast, the crew has been repeatedly diverted by false leads. The plane has spotted at least one whale and many clumps of seaweed. Petty Officer Chris Walsh, a radar specialist who sits at one of the consoles in the cabin, has earned the nickname dolphin hunter because at least six times he has directed the plane to what appeared to be debris but turned out to be a pod of dolphins. The radar specialist is now referred to as "a marine mammal specialist," Hunt said. It was a rare moment of levity. As the plane flew low over the search zone, a studied silence descended. The Australian military has provided the search teams with a very generic list of items to watch for: "debris, distress beacon, fire, flares, life jackets, life raft/dinghy, marker dye, mirror signals, movements, oil slick, person in water, smoke, wreckage." There is relatively little commercial shipping in the seas directly west of Perth, and the crew members described the waters they have searched over the past two weeks as unusually pristine and devoid of trash - and altogether very empty. After sunset Friday the plane continued the last leg of its search, still flying under 1,000 feet. Two spotters stared out into the dark gray outlines of the ocean as operators activated an infrared camera. The crew was nearing the end of another painstaking, methodical but fruitless day. Other planes, from the Australian and New Zealand air forces, did spot objects, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said in a statement released late Friday. A Chinese patrol ship was expected to be in position Saturday to locate the objects, the authority said, adding, "The objects cannot be verified or discounted as being from" Flight 370. On Flight 74, Petty Officer 1st Class Robert Pillars, who had spent hours Friday methodically scanning the waters, said searching the ocean required unbroken, practiced concentration. "It's what we are trained to do," he said. "The hope of finding something is what keeps you going."