Abbott hopeful new clues will emerge ‘soon’
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AUSTRALIA’S prime minister says he is hopeful clues will emerge soon to help find Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 even though searchers have still not managed to find any debris.
An increasing number of ships are scouring an area of the Indian Ocean off western Australia after a new search zone was identified last Friday, but the only objects scooped up by the vessels so far have been “fishing equipment and other flotsam” not connected to the plane that disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said yesterday.
Australian Navy Commodore Peter Leavy told reporters “there has been no discrete debris associated with the flight.”
In Sydney, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott insisted the “intensifying search effort” was positive because objects “have been recovered from the ocean” in the zone after a weeklong search in another area spotted items from planes that ships never managed to find.
The maritime safety authority said nine planes took part in the search yesterday, leaving in staggered times from a military base near the western city of Perth. Eight ships were at the scene, including the Australian navy supply ship HMAS Success, which was designated as the vessel that will store any wreckage found.
Leavy said the operation in the new search zone is complicated because it lies in a shipping lane where sea trash is common.
Searchers were hampered by rain and low clouds, but were still able to look for signs of plane debris with visibility of about 10 kilometers. It takes planes between two and three hours to get to the area, giving them five hours of search time before returning to base.
Objects spotted so far include three with white, red and orange colors by a Chinese Ilyushin IL-76 plane, Xinhua news agency said. The missing Boeing 777’s exterior was red, white, blue and gray.
For a week, searchers relied on satellite data from various countries as they tried to find the plane in a different zone to the south of the current area, but abruptly shifted course on Friday after authorities concluded the plane could not have traveled as far as they had thought based on its estimated speed and fuel consumption.
Black box detector
That prompted the change in the hunt for the plane’s likely entry point into the sea and its black boxes, which should contain clues as to what caused the aircraft to be so far off-course.
An Australian warship with an American black box detector on board was due to leave from a port near Perth yesterday to join the search. It will still take three to four days for the ship, the Ocean Shield, to reach the search zone about 1,850 kilometers west of Australia.
“The ship will take part in the surface search until the debris is positively identified and an underwater search area is then predicted,” US Navy Captain Mark Matthews told reporters.
In addition to the US Navy’s Towed Pinger Locator used to hear pings from the black boxes, the ship will also have an unmanned underwater vehicle and other acoustic detection equipment to try to find wreckage on the seabed.
But the search area is so huge that investigators are first hoping to find floating wreckage of the plane so they could set a smaller zone using sophisticated analysis to determine a location from where the debris drifted. Even if they do that, recovery of the jet’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders could be complicated. One advantage is that the seabed in the search zone is generally flat.
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