Items resembling an emergency slide, plane door and other objects were spotted during a aerial search on Tuesday for the missing AirAsia plane, according to information from the flight.
"We spotted about 10 big objects and many more small white-coloured objects which we could not photograph," Indonesian air force official Agus Dwi Putranto told a news conference.
Dozens of ships and planes earlier today joined a widening international effort now covering huge swaths of Indonesian sea and land.
The United States announced it was sending the USS Sampson destroyer, joining at least 30 ships, 15 aircraft and seven helicopters in the search for the jet carrying 162 people, said Indonesia's Search and Rescue Agency chief Henry Bambang Soelistyo.
A Chinese frigate was also on the way, while Singapore said it was sending two underwater beacon detectors to try to detect pings from the plane's all-important cockpit voice and flight data recorders. Malaysia, Australia and Thailand also are involved in the search.
The plane vanished on Sunday halfway into what should have been a two-hour hop from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore. Officials saw little reason to believe the flight met anything but a grim fate.
Based on the plane's last known coordinates, the aircraft probably crashed into the water and "is at the bottom of the sea," Soelistyo said on Monday.
It is believed to have crashed into Indonesia's Java Sea, a busy shipping lane where water on average is only 45 meters (150 feet) deep, but broad aerial surveys so far have turned up no firm evidence of the missing Airbus A320-200.
