Malaysia's civil aviation chief said there were no signs of the missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner at the location where China's satellite spotted "three floating objects" that were thought to be debris of the airline.

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"There is nothing. We went there, there is nothing," Datuk Azharuddin Abdul Rahman told reporters in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday.

Reports said the images appear to show "three suspected floating objects" of varying sizes in a 20-kilometer radius, the largest about 24 by 22 meters or 79 by 72 feet.

The images were originally posted on the website of China's State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense.

That site showed coordinates of a location in the sea off the southern tip of Vietnam and east of Malaysia.

Half of the passengers of Flight MH370 were Chinese. The Chinese government has been pressuring Malaysian officials to solve the mystery of the plane's disappearance.

"We will be searching as long as there is a glimmer of hope for 154 Chinese passengers of the airline," Premier Li Keqiang said at a press conference after the conclusion of the parliament's annual session in Beijing on Thursday.

Rahman said he has yet to receive word from China about the satellite images. He said if Beijing informs them of the new development, Malaysia will dispatch vessels and planes immediately.

In Washington, aviation experts were looking into reports that the Boeing 777 aircraft remained flying for four hours after its last contact with air traffic controllers.

The new lead on the search for the missing plane, as reported by the Wall Street Journal,  was "based on data automatically downloaded and sent from the plane's engine to its manufacturer as part of a routine maintenance agreement."

The multi-nation search for the missing plane, now on its sixth day, has left investigators even more clueless than they were on Saturday when the plane vanished from radar screens an hour into its flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.