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THE MINI-SUB searching for missing flight MH370 has reached record depths well beyond its normal operating limits, officials said today as it dived on its fifth seabed mission.
With no results to show since the Boeing 777 carrying 239 people disappeared on March 8, Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott has set a one-week deadline to locate the plane which is believed to have crashed in a remote area of the Indian Ocean west of Perth.
Searchers have extended the hunt beyond the normal 4,500 metre (15,000 feet) depth range of the US Navy’s Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) called Bluefin-21.
“The AUV reached a record depth of 4,695 metres during mission four,” the US Navy said. “This is the first time the Bluefin-21 has descended to this depth.
Diving to such depths does carry with it some residual risk to the equipment and this is being carefully monitored.
Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) announced that the mini-sub had been deployed on a new mission as operations run round the clock.
“Data analysis from the fourth mission did not provide any contacts of interest,” it added.
The unmanned Bluefin-21 which maps the seafloor by sonar, has searched 110 square kilometres (43 square miles) to date, JACC said.
The UAV, which hit a technical snag on Tuesday had also re-surfaced Monday after breaching a pre-programmed maximum depth of 4.5 kilometres (2.8 miles).
JACC said Thursday night that the US manufacturer of the UAV, Phoenix International, had advised the risk was “acceptable”.
“This expansion of the operating parameters allows the Bluefin-21 to search the sea floor within the predicted limits of the current search area,” it said.
Malaysia Airlines
The Malaysia Airlines jet is believed to have crashed in the ocean after mysteriously vanishing while en route between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing.
Hopes for finding the plane have focused on the Bluefin-21 after signals believed to be from the plane’s flight data recorders on the seabed fell silent in recent days.
The submersible is being deployed from an Australian vessel to scan an uncharted seafloor at extreme depths, but Abbott said the Bluefin-21 would be given about a week as questions are asked about the massive costs.
“If we don’t find wreckage, we stop, we regroup, we reconsider,” Abbott told the Wall Street Journal.
Both Abbott and Malaysia’s Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein vowed not to give up looking for the plane.
Huge costs building up
However suggestions have emerged that more sophisticated – and highly expensive – deep-diving equipment may be needed for the search.
“We have to look at contractors, and the cost of that will be huge,” Hishammuddin told reporters in Kuala Lumpur, though he indicated that such concerns were not yet testing the resolve of multinational search partners.
“But in any event, the search will always continue. It’s just a matter of approach.”
Analysts have told AFP the search will be the most expensive in aviation history, with Ravikumar Madavaram, an aviation expert at Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific, estimating the bill at $100 million so far.
Visual searches of the ocean surface have failed to find any floating debris, and the JACC said Thursday an analysis of samples from an oil slick found at the weekend had determined it was not from MH370.
“If the current search turns up nothing, we won’t abandon it, we will simply move to a different phase,” Abbott said.
JACC chief Angus Houston said earlier this week that alternatives, including devices that can go deeper than the Bluefin-21, were “being looked at”, but he gave no specifics.
Houston has repeatedly warned the search will be protracted and demand patience, particularly from distraught families of passengers, who still have no confirmation of what happened to their loved ones.
MH370 has drawn increasing comparisons to the effort to locate the underwater resting place of Air France flight 447, which crashed in the Atlantic in 2009.
It took nearly two years for AF447′s flight data recorders to be recovered.
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this flight MH370 thing is so strange. obviously terrible and tragic but so strange.
Pardon the pun,but the mystery deepens. Technology is so advanced we can find an Earth like planet 500 million light years away,but can’t find or track a massive aircraft. Just doesn’t seem right to me and the longer it goes on the more its beginning to look like a massive cover up of sorts. Someone knows why it happened,someone knows where it is,the question is why the families and public aren’t being informed.
Actually, the planet was 500 light years away. 500 million would put it well outside the Milky Way.
The problem with finding the plane is the fact that it went into an area where there is literally zero radar coverage. Ground-based radar has a limited range, usually around 300 miles. If you go far enough out into the ocean with no land nearby you basically vanish. Even aircraft crossing the Atlantic have periods where there is no ground-based radar capable of tracking them.
So Stephen, because you don’t grasp the complexities involved it must be some big conspiracy!? Unfortunately an attitude that’s all too prevalent.
To assume that the families and public are not being told everything does not make it a conspiracy . However I do believe that there are so many holes in the stories being fed to the media that officials somewhere know more than they are saying. I may be wrong,but it just doesn’t sit right with me. And yes 500 not 500 million light years away :) Still a hell of a long way tho :)
I’ll tell you who’ll find that wreckage, the travellers!!! Tell them there’s a load of scrap metal under water and they’ll find it.
I have noticed that there appears to be certain group covering all the international papers who are trying to bring this search to an end, I wonder why?
@BrianClarkeNUJ
“I have noticed that there appears to be certain group covering all the international papers who are trying to bring this search to an end, I wonder why?”
What evidence do you have to support that allegation?
No evidence of that.
It will end in time because searching for a plane in that part of the world does not make sense after a while.
@Seanie Ryan
The fact that the searchers picked up on the ping from the black box means that the possible location of the plane has been narrowed down to a particular area of the Indian Ocean. If every inch of the seabed of that area is searched then they will find it.
Whatever about the main body of wreckage, and I appreciate the vast area involved, but not to have found a single item traceable to the aircraft is mystifying .
This story has gone way passed its shelf life.
Wow Frank if it was your loved ones missing I think you would want it in the headlines till you found out what happened to them.
At this stage I doubt the credibility of the whole incident, conflicting reports, inconsistencies etc 2+2=5 and all that…
was it just me or did anyone read it as SEABED…? Not sea bed? I got very confused.
Go back to bed
They need to put this story to bed for once and for all.
Frank, stop trolling.
I know it’s really important to find out what actually happened this plane, but who exactly is paying the $100M costs estimated in this article, the airline, insurance, various governments?
have your say