Potential leads on the missing Malaysia Airlines jet turned out to be a cluster of orange fishing equipment objects, officials said Monday.
Continuing the three week hunt of the Malaysian Airline Flight 370, Australia's prime minister said the search will go on indefinitely even as nothing related to the missing jet, with 239 passengers on board, has been discovered, CNN reported.
Objects which had been described as promising by search aircraft turned out to be old fishing gear, Australian officials confirmed after Monday's search mission.
After an analysis, Australian Maritime Safety Authority spokesman Jesse Platts said the objects "have nothing to do with the missing flight," according to the Associated Press.
"Underscoring the difficulty of the search, U.S. Navy officials loaded underwater locating gear aboard an Australian naval support vessel and set out to sea Monday evening, but won't be able to make use of the equipment until searchers narrow the search zone," CNN reported.
In order to narrow down the search before positioning the equipment, the teams needs a precise piece of debris, U.S. Navy Cmdr. William Marks told CNN's "State of the Union."
"We have to be careful not to send it in the wrong place," he said. "But we also wanted to get it out there as close as we can to what we believe is the right place."
"We are searching a vast area of ocean, and we are working on quite limited information," Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott told reporters Monday. "Nevertheless, the best brains in the world are applying themselves to this task. ... If this mystery is solvable, we will solve it."
Abbott added, "The intensity of our search and the magnitude of our operations is increasing, not decreasing."
The missing MH370 has been the subject of constant speculation since its disappearance. Headed to Beijing, Flight 370 was on its way from Kuala Lumpur when it suddenly vanished over Southeast Asia.
On March 24, the missing Malaysia Airlines plane was announced to have plunged into a remote corner of the Indian Ocean by the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak after new indications of satellite data analysis, the Associated Press reported.
