THE underwater search area in the hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 will be massively expanded to include an area that could take an extra eight months to scour.
The underwater search is said to be entering a new phase[EPA]The American Navy's Bluefin 21 robotic submarine has already spent weeks combing the initial search area for wreckage in the remote Indian Ocean far off Australia's west coast, but has so far found no trace of the missing aircraft.
Now officials are looking to bring in new equipment that can search a larger patch of seabed, Australia's prime minister Tony Abbott announced today.
He said: "It is highly unlikely at this stage that we will find any aircraft debris on the ocean surface.
"By this stage, 52 days into the search, most material would have become waterlogged and sunk
"Therefore, we are moving from the current phase to a phase which is focused on searching the ocean floor over a much larger area."
An aerial search for the plane that has dragged on for six weeks will officially end on Monday, the search coordination centre later confirmed.
Radar and satellite data show the jet, which was carrying 239 passengers and crew, veered off course on March 8 for unknown reasons during a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing in China.
Analysis indicates it would have run out of fuel in the remote section of ocean where the search has been focused. But not a single piece of debris has been recovered since the massive multinational hunt began.
The unmanned Bluefin sub has been creating a three-dimensional sonar map of the ocean floor for more than two weeks near where signals consistent with airplane black boxes were heard on April 8.
The sub has searched a 150 square mile area.
Crews will now begin searching the plane's entire probable impact zone, an area 430 miles long and 50 miles wide, Mr Abbott said.
Angus Houston, head of the search effort, warned it was a monumental search and likely to take considerable time.
He said: "If everything goes perfectly, I would say we'll be doing well if we do it in eight months."
He added that weather and technical issues could prolong the search well beyond that estimate.
Australian officials will be contacting private companies to bring in additional sonar mapping equipment that can be towed behind boats to search the expanded area at an estimated cost of $60 million (£33 million).
It could take officials several weeks to organise contracts for the new equipment and the Bluefin will continue to scour the seabed in the meantime.
So far, each country involved in the search has been bearing its own costs.
But Mr Abbott said Australia would now seek contributions from other countries to help pay for the new equipment.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston [EPA]Two weeks ago, Mr Abbott said officials were "very confident" that a series of underwater signals picked up by sound-detecting equipment came from Flight MH370's black boxes.
Today, he maintained that he still had a "considerable degree of confidence" - but opened up the possibility that the signals were yet another dead end in a search that has been peppered by them.
He said: "We're still baffled and disappointed that we haven't been able to find undersea wreckage based on those detections, and this is one of the reasons why we are continuing to deploy the Bluefin 21 submersible - because this is the best information that we've got.
"It may turn out to be a false lead, but nevertheless it's the best lead we've got."
He also acknowledged it was possible that no debris from the plane would ever be found.
"Of course it's possible, but that would be a terrible outcome because it would leave families with a baffling uncertainty forever," he said.
"The aircraft plainly cannot disappear - it must be somewhere - and we are going to do everything we reasonably can, even to the point of conducting the most intensive undersea search which human ingenuity currently makes possible of some 60,000 square kilometers under the sea."
"We are going to do all these things because we do not want this crippling cloud of uncertainty to hang over these families and the wider traveling public," he added.
No comments:
Post a Comment