New phase if sub fails to find MH370
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Australia says search will be completed in a week or so
The hunt by a mini-submarine for a Malaysian airliner in the uncharted depths of the Indian Ocean – the latest phase in a huge international search – will end in about a week, Australia says.
If the best leads now being pursued to locate wreckage from the Boeing 777 prove fruitless, said Prime Minister Tony Abbott, the search would not be abandoned but enter a new phase.
The US Navy’s Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Bluefin-21 is the newest tool deployed in the hunt, after satellite data and electronic signals from the plane’s black box helped narrow the search area.
But the unmanned torpedo-shaped sonar-mapping device is operating at the extreme limit of its range, and has twice had to cut short its mission.
“We believe that [sub] search will be completed within a week or so,” Abbott told the Wall Street Journal in an interview yesterday as the device mapped the seabed 2,000 kilometres off the western Australian city of Perth.
“If we don’t find wreckage, we stop, we regroup, we reconsider.”
The AUV completed its first full mission yesterday at the third attempt, officials said, and was getting ready to dive again. Data it retrieved is being analysed.
The first two partially completed missions failed to produce any results.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished on March 8 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.
The cause of its disappearance, after being diverted hundreds of kilometres off course, remains a mystery. No debris has been found despite an enormous search involving ships and planes from several nations.
“My determination for Australia is that we will do whatever we reasonably can to resolve the mystery,” Abbott said.
“If the current search turns up nothing, we won’t abandon it, we will simply move to a different phase,” he was quoted by the Journal as saying, reiterating his confidence that searchers were looking in the right place.
After more than three weeks of listening for signals from the black box flight recorder, the sub was deployed for the first time on Monday night but aborted the mission after breaching its 4,500 metre operating limit.
An unexplained technical problem cut short the second mission, raising questions about the whole search, which is expected to be further complicated by thick silt on the seabed.
The Bluefin is being deployed from the deck of the Australian vessel Ocean Shield, which has led the search.
Before Abbott’s comments the US Navy estimated it would take the Bluefin-21 “anywhere from six weeks to two months to scan the entire search area”.
Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) has repeatedly called for patience and warned the search will be a long, laborious process.
“Bluefin-21 has searched approximately 90 square kilometres to date and the data from its latest mission is being analysed,” JACC said.
JACC chief Angus Houston has stressed that the mini-sub cannot operate below 4,500m and that other vehicles would have to be brought in to cope with greater depths.
Experts have said these could include remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) that can go as deep as 6km.
An ROV was used to pluck the flight data recorders of Air France 447 from the bottom of the Atlantic in 2011.
Houston had announced on Monday the end of listening for electronic pulse signals from the black box and the launch of the submarine operation.
The mini-sub is supposed to conduct a sonar survey of the ocean floor for 16 hours at a time. The dive itself takes two hours as does re-surfacing.
Houston has described the detection of the electronic pulses, last heard more than a week ago, as the best lead in the hunt for the plane.
An oil slick had also been sighted in the search area, he said on Monday, and was taken ashore by sea for testing to see whether it came from the plane.
