Bluefin-21 being lowered for search After 52 days and searching more than 4.5 million square kilometres of ocean, the whereabouts of the ...
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| Bluefin-21 being lowered for search |
The US Navy supplied Bluefin-21 unmanned underwater sub yesterday completed its focused underwater search of the 10km radius circular area where the second ping was recorded on 8 April. Bluefin has searched in total, close to 400 square kilometres undersea.
It has been a big disappointment for the search team that the undersea search has been unable to find evidence of wreckage on the ocean floor.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot said the search is in a new phase focused on the ocean floor over a much larger area using specialised side scan sonar equipment towed behind ships to scan the seabed for evidence of aircraft wreckage.
Bluefin has already expanded its underwater search into the adjacent areas.
So far the most reliable information about MH370 was detected from the aircraft's engines before they ceased to operate and the detections that the black box detector deployed from Australian Navy Ship Ocean Shield has picked up in the Indian Ocean.
The searching of the entire probable impact zone of 700km by 80km is now estimated to take eight months. The depth of ocean in the search area range between 4000 and 4500 metres.
Australia is coordinating the search operations. Up to 14 ships from Australia, China and United Kingdom have been used to cover the search areas during the search period.
There have been 10 civil aircraft and 19 military aircraft involved, seven Royal Australian Air Force aircraft, one Royal New Zealand Air Force aircraft, two US Navy aircraft, two People's Liberation Army Air
Force aircraft, three Defence Force and Coast Guard aircraft from Japan, two aircraft from the Republic of Korea and two aircraft of the Royal Malaysian Air Force.
There have been 334 search flights conducted – an average of eight a day for a total of over 3,000 hours.
Air Chief Marshal (retd) Angus Houston who is coordinating the search, clarified that Prime Minister Abbot's earlier comment that "we are confident that we know the position of the black box flight recorder to within some kilometres" was based on a analysis done by the Australian Joint Acoustic Centre which deals in acoustic sounds.
Their direct comparison between one of the detections and an emergency locator beacon, found the characteristics of the pulsing identical.
