Searchers discount ‘ping’ area as missing plane’s final resting place
Print Edition
INVESTIGATORS searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet have concluded that an area where acoustic signals were detected is not the final resting place of the plane after an unmanned submersible found no trace of it.
The US Navy’s Bluefin 21 finished its final underwater mission in the southern Indian Ocean on Wednesday after scouring 850 square kilometers, the Joint Agency Coordination Center said yesterday.
“The area can now be discounted as the final resting place” of the plane, the Australia-based center said in a statement.
The underwater search for the airliner, which vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, will be suspended for a couple months while more powerful sonar equipment is brought in to search an area of 56,000 square kilometers, based on analysis of satellite data, the center said.
That analysis led authorities to believe that flight 370 diverted sharply and flew south to the Indian Ocean. But no trace of the Boeing 777 has been found.
The news comes after the United States Navy dismissed a US expert’s reported comments that acoustic “pings” heard in April did not come from the jet’s black boxes.
CNN reported that the navy’s civilian deputy director of ocean engineering, Michael Dean, said most countries agree that the sounds detected by the Navy’s Towed Pinger Locator came from a man-made source unrelated to the jet.
“Mike Dean’s comments today were speculative and premature, as we work with our partners to more thoroughly understand the data,” US Navy spokesman Chris Johnson said, referring to Australia and Malaysia.
The joint coordination agency said it was still examining the signals, but acknowledged: “We may never know the origin of the acoustic detections.”
The agency declined to reveal the next most likely crash site, saying it “will be made public in due course.”
Transport Minister Warren Truss said authorities will continue to analyze the sounds that led to the initial search area.
“We concentrated the search in that area because the pings, the information we received, was the best information available at the time,” he said.
“We’re still very confident that the resting place of the aircraft is in the southern ocean.”
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