Missing Malaysian jet update
Australia was Monday deploying a
mini-sub to scour the Indian Ocean seabed for
missing Malaysian jet MH370 at the daunting depth
of 4,500 metres (15,000 feet), abandoning the
search for black-box transmissions six days after
the last ping was heard.
Angus Houston, the former air marshal who heads
the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, revealed also
that an oil slick had been sighted in the area of the
search led by the Australian navy vessel Ocean
Shield far off Perth.
“Ocean Shield will cease searching with the towed
pinger locator later today and deploy the
autonomous underwater vehicle Bluefin-21 as soon
as possible,” Houston said, adding it could enter the
water Friday evening.
“We haven’t had a single detection in six days so I
guess it’s time to go underwater,” he told a news
conference in Perth.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went missing on
March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with
239 people on board, and how the plane may have
come to crash in the southern Indian Ocean
remains a mystery.
So far no debris has been found despite an
enormous search involving ships and planes from
several nations. But Houston said about two litres
of the newly spotted oil slick had been collected for
testing.
“I stress the source of the oil is yet to be
determined but the oil slick is approximately 5,500
metres downwind… from the vicinity of the
detections picked up by the towed pinger locator on
Ocean Shield,” he said.
It would be a number of days before the oil could be
conclusively tested ashore, but Houston said he did
not think it was from one of the many ships
involved in the search.
“It’s very close to where the transmissions are
coming from and we’ll investigate it and that will
take a little bit of time given that we’re in the middle
of the Indian Ocean.
“We don’t think it’s from the ships, so where is it
from? So it’s another lead to pursue.”
- ‘Slow and painstaking’ -
Houston emphasised that it was 38 days since the
Boeing 777 vanished and the batteries powering the
black box tracker beacons had a shelf life of only
30 days.
Ocean Shield has detected four signals linked to
aircraft black boxes, helping to narrow down the
vast search zone, but the last confirmed ping came
on Tuesday last week and officials suspect the
batteries are now dead.
The Bluefin-21 is equipped with side-scanning
sonar and will initially focus on 40 square
kilometres (15 square miles) of sea floor in the
vicinity of the detected signals.
But Houston explained that the US-made vessel
operates slowly, with each mission taking a
minimum of 24 hours to complete.
The device needs two hours to reach the bottom
where it will work for 16 hours producing a high-
resolution 3D map before surfacing in another two
hours.
Downloading and analysing data requires a further
four hours.
But while the mini-sub could take the search a step
closer towards visually identifying any wreckage,
Houston repeated his long-standing note of caution
that nothing was guaranteed.
He noted that after Air France Flight AF447 crashed
in the Atlantic Ocean in June 2009, it took nearly
two years to retrieve the black boxes from a depth
of 3,900 metres.
“However, this is the best lead we have and it must
be pursued vigorously. Again I emphasise that this
will be a slow and painstaking process.”
The Bluefin-21, a 4.93-metre long sonar device,
weighs 750 kilograms and can operate down to
4,500 metres — roughly the depth of the ocean floor
where the pings were detected.
Houston also said the search for floating material
from the plane would be concluded in the coming
days.
“The chances of any floating material being
recovered have greatly diminished and it will be
appropriate to consult with Australia’s partners to
decide the way ahead later this week,” he added.
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