Commercial operators will be hired to search for missing jet
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Aviation experts, investigators will meet tomorrow to draw up proposals
Commercial operators would take over the search for a Malaysia Airlines plane thought to have come down in the Indian Ocean, officials from Australia, Malaysia and China said yesterday.
Flight MH370 vanished on March 8 an hour into a night flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, most of them Chinese citizens.
“We’re looking at calling tenders for a single operator to maintain and lead in the new elements of this search,” Australian TransportMinister Warren Truss told reporters after the tripartite meeting in Canberra.
One of the biggest searches in aviation history has yet to come up with a trace of the missing Boeing 777.
In the last tally, there had been 334 search flights and 4.5 million square kilometres of ocean scoured. More than 400 square kilometres of ocean floor had been gone over.
Aviation experts and crash investigators will meet in the Australian capital tomorrow to draw up proposals for commercial operators.
Search leader Angus Houston said a “who’s who of experts in the aviation world” would comprise the panel meeting in Canberra later this week.
The US Navy has committed a submersible sonar scanner, the Bluefin-21, for another month of searching in an area around 1,584 kilometres north-west of Perth.
The patch was a circular area with a radius of 10 kilometres from the point where the last acoustic signal was picked up on April 8 by a ship towing an emergency beacon locator listening for black-box pings.
Houston, who is shifting the headquarters of the search from Perth to Canberra, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur on Friday that the hunt for MH370 could take up to 12 months.
A new undersea search area, 700 kilometres long and 80 kilometres wide, has been defined for commercial operators, who will bring in a submersible able to go down deeper than the Bluefin-21.
The US Navy underwater drone, which is limited to a depth of 4,500 metres and had to resurface to download sonar readings every 16 hours, trawled over 400 square kilometres of ocean floor without success.
It is likely to be replaced with a submersible that can dive to 6,000 metres and stream data live to the ship towing it.
Last month Prime Minister Tony Abbott said that bringing in commercial operators would cost A$60 million (Bt1.8 billion) and that Australia would be “seeking some appropriate contribution from other nations involved, but we’ll ensure that this search goes ahead”.
