The search for the missing Malaysian airliner was suspended on Thursday, the second time this week that severe weather in the southern Indian Ocean had made flying to the possible wreckage zone too risky for search crews.
Lt. Cmdr. Adam Schantz, the head of an American team flying a Navy surveillance plane, said the search zone was afflicted by “severe turbulence, severe icing and basically zero visibility.”
“Anyone who is out there is coming home,” he said at the Perth airport. “And all additional sorties are canceled.”
There were hopes that search flights on Thursday would scour the area where European satellite images made public Wednesday showed 122 floating objects. If confirmed as wreckage from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the search could have been considerably narrowed.
After two and a half weeks of searches, no debris has been found from the aircraft, which took off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on March 8 and veered southward into the Indian Ocean for unknown reasons.
The probable area of impact of the aircraft, calculated from satellite pings emitted by the plane before it went down, is more than 620,000 square miles, or roughly three times the size of mainland France.
Search aircraft have only been able to search roughly 5 percent of that area each day.
Six military and five civilian aircraft had been due to search in the area Thursday, according to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.
Five ships, including four Chinese vessels, are also in the vicinity, but it seems unlikely they would be able to search on Thursday because of the poor conditions.
Commander Schantz said clouds were down to the surface of the water and visibility was so bad that aircraft would have trouble seeing their wingtips.
The search area is known as the “roaring forties” — a reference to the latitude and notoriously fierce weather conditions.
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