Three months after Malaysian Airlines Plane MH370 veered off course during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, the search is now moving south, it has been reported.
The next phase of the underwater search for the missing Malaysian passenger jet will focus on an area of the Indian Ocean hundreds of miles south of the first suspected crash site, the Australian Transportation Safety Bureau has announced.
Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the ATSB, said an announcement would be made next week on the focus of a 23,000 square mile (60,000 sq km) search of the ocean floor for wreckage using powerful sonar equipment.
Associated Press quoted Dolan as saying he expected the probable crash site would be hundreds of kilometres south of where a remote-controlled underwater drone scoured 330 square miles of seabed in the first fruitless search that ended in May. That search area was defined by acoustic signals suspected to have come from the missing plane's black boxes, which promised to be the best clue to finding Malaysia Airlines flight 370. But those signals are now thought to have been from another source, possibly the search vessels themselves. The new search area will not be based on new data, but on refined analysis of existing satellite information from the doomed Boeing 777 after it veered off course during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on 8 March. "All the trends of this analysis will move the search area south of where it was," Dolan said. "Just how much south is something that we're still working on. "There was a very complex analysis and there were several different ways of looking at it. Specialists have used several different methodologies and bringing all of that work together to get a consensus view is what we're finalising at the moment." Private contractors are expected to start the new search far off the west Australian coast in August using powerful side-scan sonar equipment capable of probing ocean depths of seven kilometers (4.3 miles). The job is expected to take up to 12 months to complete. Two survey ships are mapping uncharted expanses of seabed in the search zone before the sonar scanning starts. The search area is in a vast expanse of ocean that was thoroughly swept for floating debris by search aircraft in the weeks after the plane disappeared with 239 passengers and crew aboard. No trace of the plane has been found. Dolan said the new search area would not be as far south-west of the coastal city of Perth as the initial air search had focused.
The next phase of the underwater search for the missing Malaysian passenger jet will focus on an area of the Indian Ocean hundreds of miles south of the first suspected crash site, the Australian Transportation Safety Bureau has announced.
Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the ATSB, said an announcement would be made next week on the focus of a 23,000 square mile (60,000 sq km) search of the ocean floor for wreckage using powerful sonar equipment.
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| In this June 15, 2014 photo, relatives of Chinese passengers on board the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 cry as they burn incense to pray for their loved ones, on the 100th day after the flight went missing, at the Lama Temple in Beijing. Chinese characters on their T-shirts read: |
