About 10 planes and nine ships will search a swathe of the southern Indian Ocean west of Perth on Wednesday in a consistent effort to find the trace of the vanished Malaysian flight MH370.

The first aircraft, a Chinese Ilyushin IL-76 plane, departed for the search area at 6 a.m. local time Wednesday, the Joint Agency Coordination Center (JACC) said.

An Australian E-7A Wedgetail airborne early warning and control aircraft will also assist in Wednesday's mission which has dragged on for more than three weeks but yielded no results.

The Wedgetail spy plane, capable of deconflicting air space in the search area, will act as an air traffic controller.

The Australian defense vessel Ocean Shield has a black-box detector on board and is on its way to the region.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) has determined a search zone of about 221,000 square kilometers, 1,504 km northwest of Perth.

Areas of broken cloud, sea fog and isolated thunderstorms have been forecast for the day which may reduce visibility in the search zone.

The task to find the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 will take time and may not be resolved in the near future, Australia's former defense chief Angus Houston, who heads the newly established Joint Agency Coordination Center (JACC) has said.

If wreckage can not be found on the surface, "we are eventually going to have to, probably, in consultation with everybody who has a stake in this, review what we do next, " he told the press on Tuesday.

Hopes of a breakthrough had been raised after the AMSA revealed a new search area about 1,100 km northeast of the previous zones on Friday based on analysis that the plane had been traveling faster than previously thought.

But Houston disclosed that since it was not known that altitude and speed the plane was traveling, the analysis was a "very inexact science."