US black box detector arrives in Australia

[PERTH] US equipment designed to detect black box signals arrived in Australia yesterday, as searchers stepped up efforts to find some trace of a Malaysian airliner thought to have crashed 18 days ago thousands of kilometres off course in the Indian Ocean.

A dozen aircraft from Australia, the United States, New Zealand, China, Japan and South Korea were once more scouring the seas some 2,500km south-west of Perth in the hunt for wreckage, after bad weather on Tuesday forced the suspension of the search.

"The crash zone is as close to nowhere as it's possible to be but it's closer to Australia than anywhere else," Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said, before leading the country's Parliament in a moment's silence. "A considerable amount of debris has been sighted in the area where the flight was last recorded. Bad weather and inaccessibility has so far prevented any of it from being recovered. But we are confident that it will be."