An Australian aircraft scouring the southern Indian Ocean for signs of a Malaysia Airlines jet missing for more than two weeks has spotted two new objects, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on Monday.

Abbott told parliament an Australian naval vessel was near where the objects, one circular and greenish grey in colour and the second orange and rectangular, had been seen and hoped to be able to recover them soon.

A Chinese search aircraft earlier reported seeing several different objects but a US navy aircraft failed to find them.

Flight MH370 vanished from civilian radar screens less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people on board on March 8. No confirmed sighting of the plane has been made since and there is no clue what went wrong.

Attention and resources in the search for the Boeing 777 have shifted from an initial focus north of the equator to an increasingly narrowed stretch of rough sea in the southern Indian Ocean, thousands of miles from the plane's original flight path. - Reuters